Title: E163 | Stop Being The Best Kept Secret: Marina Byezhanova on Thought Leadership
Date: May 27, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/stop-being-best-kept-secret-marina-byezhanova-on-thought-leadership/
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Content:
You’re not losing deals because you’re bad—you’re losing them because you’re invisible.
In this powerful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Marina Byezhanova, co-founder of Brand of a Leader and a speaker with Deloitte Academy, to expose a critical blind spot in modern business: your personal brand is either working for you—or costing you money. The conversation starts with a simple but uncomfortable question: what shows up when someone Googles your name? In today’s world where decisions are driven by Google search and AI tools, being invisible is no longer neutral—it’s a liability that directly impacts your credibility and opportunities.
Marina breaks down how the absence of strong thought leadership and online visibility quietly drains your business of potential clients, partnerships, and even top-tier hires. She highlights why many experienced entrepreneurs—especially senior executives—are being overshadowed by less experienced but more visible individuals. The reality? It’s not about who is better—it’s about who is seen. The episode dives deep into LinkedIn strategy, authenticity in content creation, and the importance of showing up consistently, even if your content isn’t perfect.
One of the most inspiring parts of the conversation is Marina’s personal journey—losing a seven-figure recruitment business during COVID and rebuilding an entirely new company purely through her personal brand and reputation. This story proves that a strong personal brand is not tied to one business—it’s a portable asset that can help you recover, grow, and scale faster. The discussion also touches on handling criticism, overcoming fear of visibility, and why being too “humble” might be holding you back from real growth.
Before you watch—Google your name. Are you showing up as an authority or disappearing completely?
If this episode shifts your perspective, share your biggest takeaway in the comments—or drop your LinkedIn profile and start building a brand that actually works for you.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Marina-Byezhanova-Why-Your-Personal-Brand-Is-Costing-You-Clients.mp3
 
Nobody Knows You? This Is Why You’re Losing Clients (Fix It Now)
 
So, listener, let me ask you a question. If we were to Google your name today, what would Google tell us about you? Today we’re going to talk about personal branding and I have one of the top experts in the entire world that’s going to share with us today. But understand this, your brand is working whether you think it is or not. The question is, is it working for you?
If being invisible online is not part of your leadership strategy, then your personal brand is already costing you opportunities. Share on X
is it working against you? Today, from Montreal, Canada, I have Marina Byezhanova. Her company is Brand of a Leader. Marina, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, Dawn. I love that you opened with the question of what shows up when someone Googles you. You know, when I deliver, I’m on Deloitte’s faculty of speakers and I deliver master classes to their corporate clients who are C-level executives on building, we don’t call it personal brand, we call it leadership brand.
And every time I ask that question, I see this mischievous look on almost all of the faces and they kind of like start giggling and they’re excited. And I said, I know why you’re smiling because you were thinking nothing shows up when you Google me. I am safe. Nothing shows up. And then I asked them, but is being invisible part of your leadership strategy? And they were furious. So I love that you opened with that question.
Your competitor may not be better than you. They may simply be more visible than you. Share on X
Yeah, I love that. so Deloitte, have you ever visited Deloitte University?
No, so I’m part of the program which is their Deloitte Academy, so not quite the same, but a different program of their own.
Okay.
The only reason I ask, it’s about a quarter mile from where I’m sitting today, the worldwide training facility for Deloitte. And I think they have an 800 room private hotel for their employees only to train. And I think they’re duplicating it. So now they’re going to have 1600 rooms only for Deloitte people on one of the prettiest pieces of property in Texas.
no.
Wow, it’s incredible.
So, okay, let’s hop right in. I’m going to ask you, you’re going to feel like you’re tied to a chair and there’s a bare bulb and we have this to make you talk. No, it’s not going to be that bad. But here’s question one. If I Google an entrepreneur right now and what shows up doesn’t clearly position them as the authority or an authority in their space, what is that costing them?
like financially.
Well, hugely and adding to the conversation, Don, not only when you Google an entrepreneur or the entrepreneur’s company through their thought leadership, but also when you ask an LLM who is, right, not the authority, but who should I be contacting in the space ABC, right? Which is more and more what we’re doing. The conversation has become a lot more complex and LLM search is rooted in thought leadership. So even when we’re looking for companies for service providers, organizations via an LLM,
is rooted in thought leadership. It’s not like traditional SEO was more rooted in, know, links, et cetera. You could still really market your organization without the entrepreneur’s thought leadership. Now that cost of not having thought leadership visibility has become even bigger. So what it’s costing is it’s costing clients, it’s costing investment opportunities, it’s costing partnerships, and often overlooked, but now increasingly important, it’s costing potentially top hires.
The cost of not having thought leadership visibility today is bigger than ever because AI search is rooted in thought leadership. Share on X
I can’t tell you how many people within my own organizations, and we have just the most incredible team I’m so grateful for, have said, I came to work at Brando a leader because of you. I Googled you. I saw your core values. I saw what you stand for. I saw that alignment. I wanted to work for someone like you. So of course, it’s costing on the business side, the usual things that we know about prospective clients who will find your competitor who has positioned himself as a thought leader and authority in the field and will go and hire their services.
It’s also costing us luck talent.
Thought leadership is no longer optional if you want clients, partnerships, investors, and top talent. Share on X
pretty expensive. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I know you work with execs and high level founders. Are most successful entrepreneurs actually under leveraged when it comes to their personal brand? Are they succeeding kind of in spite of their efforts on personal brand?
Most are not making an effort and missing out to their more junior colleagues. You know, and it’s interesting. we hear, I hear so many of our clients who are C-level executives, or as you said, you know, successful founders. We work specifically with Gen Xers. So they’re, you know, mid forties and older. And they increasingly say, you know, it’s not fair, You know, it’s just not fair. I go to an industry event and I sit there at a conference and I’m looking at a panel. Who are these people?
They haven’t achieved anything. They haven’t built a business as successful as mine. Why are they invited to speak and not me? And I say, because nobody knows about you. They’re making a bit more noise and they’re more strategic with their visibility. And, know, if the tree falls in the forest, but nobody’s there, did it really fall? And so most entrepreneurs and
If the tree falls in the forest but nobody’s there, did it really fall? The same applies to entrepreneurs hiding their expertise. Share on X
I would argue, and I’m often asked, well, why do you work with GenXers specifically? Well, GenXers have more to say, you know, with all respect to our, you know, more junior colleagues, GenXers have a lot more battle scars, a lot more successes, but also a lot more failures, things to talk about that are of value. And often they don’t know how to put themselves out there. They feel that it’s too self-promotional, whereas, you know, the younger generations are so comfortable self-promoted, so comfortable putting themselves out
there. So my answer is definitely under-leveraged.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, in my primary business, help people, I just help people increase their top line. And, so many people, and it doesn’t matter if they’re a million a year or 10 million a year or 20 million a year, they’re, they don’t want to come across as salesy. They don’t want to put themselves out there. If they do put themselves out there, they want it to be like Steven Spielberg, Hollywood perfect. And.
Nice.
And I’m like, you know, it’s social media and actually a little blemish maybe actually helps, you know, because it’s real and not, you know, if it looks too Hollywood and you know, it’s probably too Hollywood, but it’s…
especially
now in the era of AI. You know what’s really funny, Dawn? I used to, and this is on the topic of overly polished social media content, you know, I used to post something on LinkedIn and then later on notice, for example, I made a typo and it would mortify me. Mortify me. my God, I had to post it in there for four hours. There was a typo. What are people going to think of me? Now I’m so happy when it happens. I’m like, well, at least they’re going to know I wrote it and it wasn’t AI, right? So the
era of overpolish is becoming even less and less so because humaneness competes with everything that we see that is AI generated.
Humanity is becoming more valuable because people are exhausted by overly polished AI-generated content. Share on X
Yeah, I love that. have a tech client, they a big business and a caption and a video. We did a four hour video session. They’ll end up with about hundred reels to use over the next couple of years out of that because we did it intelligently and we went about it. But the first one that showed that there’s a couple typos and spelling and punctuation errors, and we let AI do the captions and
You know, it just kind of rubs him the wrong way. And I’m like, look, you know, getting your posts out there is more important than being perfect. Okay. People don’t care. Turn the captions on on your television. They’re not spelled right. Okay. And English is kind of a weird language anyway. You know, is it, is it two, two or two?
Getting your message out there matters more than trying to look perfect. Share on X
You know, and, um, you know, one day somebody with some senses, we’re going to outlaw everything to do with the King’s English. We’re going to go to phonetic English and we’ll just, we’ll just spell things the way they sound. you know, kids will be able to have a master’s in English comp in the third grade, you know, cause it’ll be easy. Okay. Next question. I’m on a rant there. So I think most entrepreneurs default.
I’m going to be humble, I’m going to be quiet, I’m going to be reserved. There’s a few like me that are noisy, okay? But I don’t think there’s a lot of us that are noisy. But that’s a pretty direct question. Don’t you think that false sense of humility or too much humility actually suppresses their progress and growth?
only if it’s inauthentic. So there are some people that are painfully, you know, humble, and they cannot get out a piece of content that uses the I pronoun, everything has to be we, everything has to be us, right? Even if they’re talking about an individual achievement, but it is so authentic. It’s not, for some it’s performative and people can feel when it’s performative and people can feel when it’s authentic because…
The offline persona has to match the online persona, right? So if people know that you are the sweetheart kind of soul, you’re so inclusive, you’re so community driven, of course they’re going to see your content and so we will we, or if vice versa, they see you online, they meet you in person. They’re like, yes, of course. I feel like I already know you. When it’s performative and people want to sound humble or sound anything that they’re not, it catches up with them because the worst thing that can happen is when people meet you in real life and that’s not the person that they expected to
to meet or people know you in real life and they’re like, what’s the show you’re putting on, right? It’s the worst thing that you can do. So faux anything, I would say is extremely detrimental.
The offline persona has to match the online persona or your brand eventually collapses. Share on X
However, most people, so as you said, you are more self-promotional as am I, so I understand you, but there are a few of us and most people feel very uncomfortable putting themselves out there and feel very much, know, most of our clients at Brandable Leader,
would rather not be putting themselves out there. They see it, come to us, thus they’re our clients, we help them build visibility, but they see it as a necessary evil rather than something that’s exciting and they love it and it helps them put their thought leadership further over time when they start understanding that it’s not an exercise in vanity that is actually bringing value, that they get to impact and inspire people, that it helps the organization, it helps attract talent.
Then they warm up to it, all of a they care about analytics and how their posts are performing. But it’s definitely an uphill battle because it’s that identity and comfort zone and a bit of an imposter syndrome putting yourself out there, maybe being really humble and feeling is the self-promotional and then giving it time to be able to see impact to shift it.
Yeah, I love that. And I love what you said about, you know, it really only works if the online you, the online persona is in fact you. And so if you’re two people, that will almost always bite you in the rear, no matter the context. I’ve written nine books, written and published nine books at this point, and I’m working on 10 and 11, which I don’t recommend working on two at one time, but I am.
But in my second book, Romancing Your Customer, I was delivering a keynote and then we were doing Q &A at the end and we were talking about that book and it’s about delivering exceptional experiences to where people absolutely love you. Okay. And it’s not hard. You just have to kind of want to and trust me, your competition’s not doing it. So you can own your industry. You can own your niche.
If you want to own your niche, deliver experiences your competition refuses to deliver. Share on X
but this one person in the audience stood up and said, I’ve read the book and the book reads just like he talks. And that’s like the finest compliment I’ve ever had as an author is that it’s just a different way to deliver my message, but it’s still me. And I think that always, that authenticity always pays off.
And kudos for that, Dawn, because that’s rare, because also for most people, it’s very hard to own their authenticity, right? Because a lot of people also misunderstand the concept of authenticity. They think, being authentic, I want to make sure that I’m authentic online. And they mean like nice and likable. But if you are authentically not nice or likable, there’s nothing that we can do online, right? And so often we tell people, well, listen, Donald Trump is one of the most authentic people.
Yeah.
I’ve seen and that’s why he has a following, but he’s not, you know, traditionally nicer likeable. He’s extremely polarizing, right? And the people say, no, no, no, I don’t want to be like that. I said, well, you don’t want to be like that if you’re not like that. If you’re like that, you should be like that because creating a different type of a persona online that your mother, Teresa, where in reality, you know, you are a polarizing human being is a mistake. It catches up with you as you said. At the same time, it’s very hard to own who you are and expose yourself to others at scale.
Because if you truly do that, yes, you will have a lot of fans and people standing up in the audience and saying, wow, you know, this is exactly how you sound in the book. You are so authentic, but you will also have people who will not love you and people who will say you are full of this or you are not, or you whatever, right? They will not love you because you’re showcasing your authentic self. Not everyone’s going to be a fan. And that’s hard. It’s hard for our businesses, right? When someone criticizes our business online, right? It’s about a review, but it’s about us.
It’s really hard and that’s one of the biggest reasons why people have a hard time A. putting themselves out there and then B. putting out their real and authentic self.
I think those are wise words. I can remember my first hater, my first online hater, and I was crushed. I was just devastated that I think I’m pretty likable. My mom likes me. I thought everybody would. This person does not and said some really what I felt were unkind things. And it just kind of rocked my world for a while.
But the flip side of that is this, until you have some, I don’t think you’re doing enough. You’re not out there enough because everybody’s not going to like you. Everybody’s not going to like me. And some people are going to be pretty active in their dislike. And that’s OK. What’s that old saying? All publicity is good publicity. I’m not sure I agree with that.
If nobody dislikes your content, you probably are not visible enough yet. Share on X
It does depend on the situation because I’ve had
some situations where I doubted it for a moment, but you’re right, you know, because when we, it’s, yes, it’s about scale. The more you put yourself out there, the more you expose yourself potentially to people not liking you. But it’s also, if you’re playing too safe and too neutral, you don’t give a chance to yourself to have raving fans and for people to really love you. Right? And we know that for organizations too, for organizations doesn’t take a position. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s kind of cookie cutter vanilla. It’s not going to go far.
It’s not gonna have raving fans. Same for an individual. So yes, there’s going to be people that will dislike you, but then there will be people who will love you, and then that will balance out. And also the good news I always tell clients is, no matter how much of a polarizing persona you are, vast majority of people are supportive and nice, vast majority. There will always be people, and depending again on what you’re saying and what you’re putting out there,
There will be more emotional people in keyboard warriors and even on LinkedIn with their names and their company names and their job titles, but they’re in the minority. More often than not, people are great and support them.
If you play too safe and too neutral, you never give people a reason to truly love your brand. Share on X
Yeah, I love that. Okay, so let me ask you this. You’ve had brand of a leader for how long?
five years almost.
Five years. Okay, so here’s a tough one.
You lose your company tomorrow, but you keep your personal brand because you can’t really get rid of it. You know, once you have it, you can’t get rid of it. How fast could you rebuild?
Well, listen, it happened to me five years ago. So five years ago, had a different business. Well, now it’s more than five, six years ago. I had a different business. It was a seven-figure business in the recruitment and headhunting space. Very different, although we doubled into different kinds of branding, employer branding, know, a bit more like through company culture side of things.
⁓
But very successful business, thriving business, and it died during COVID. So it a very painful death. I mean, it died in COVID partially because of COVID and big part because of a very challenging partnership and mismanaged things for which also take very humble and vulnerable accountability. But it died. And a year later, I had brandable leader with clients.
And it was purely on the back of my personal brand, purely because there was, it was just myself and my co-founder. The only source of new client acquisition was me and my name. And all of a sudden I was doing something completely different, which also is important to say because people think equate personal branding would be known in their industry. But then you’re a spokesperson for your industry or your company. It’s not a personal brand. Personal brand is portable, right?
Personal brand is portable. You can lose a company and still rebuild because people trust you. Share on X
And so because I had already a reputation, people trusted me. And what I always stood for in my personal brand was radical authenticity. And I always talked about stand out, speak out and be radical authentic. When I was working in recruitment, I just applied it to recruitment. And then I said, well, now I’m applying the same thing, but building your visibility as a thought leader, standing out as a leader, speaking up as a leader, being radical authentic as a leader. So to people, didn’t feel like too radical of a change.
She was doing this and now she’s doing that. My overarching, what I stood for, still held. And so listen, that was six years ago, lost the business. Five years ago, launched this business. I have 15 team members. We’ve worked with clients in 12 countries and we’re growing, we’re successful, we’re doing really well. So how long does it take to rebuild? Well, at some scale because in the first year…
had clients, was able to pay bills and I didn’t go bankrupt after losing a business. So you can rebuild pretty fast. So I don’t have to have the hypothetical scenario. I hope I never have to live through it again, but it did actually happen.
Yeah, thank you for sharing. OK, I’m going to ask you three or four questions, just looking for a one word answer. OK.
Okay.
for serious founders, LinkedIn or Instagram.
Podcast guesting. words.
you’re a rule breaker. Yeah, I like that in a person. Personal brand before product brand.
I’m
Yes.
Yes. Yeah. So it’s, mean, it’s one of the things I teach my clients is this, and most of what we do is B2B and B2G. And they’re like, well, you know, our company doesn’t have the relationship with that company. I’m like, hey, companies don’t have relationships with companies. People in companies have relationships with people in companies, but we’re all buying and selling to people. Okay. I don’t care if you’re dealing with the federal government or whoever it is.
Companies don’t build relationships with companies. People build relationships with people. Share on X
The image is cheaper.
Ghost riding, smart leverage or dangerous short
Smart leverage.
Okay, good.
Should every CEO, should every founder, should every entrepreneur write a book?
Hey, I’m going to ask a follow up on that. Why not?
Why not? You know what? I think that the book has to be in the person. I think the person needs to feel that, I don’t know, maybe I romanticize books, you know, I’m a reader, and to me it feels like one of those things that we don’t need a lot of noise for the sake of noise of you must and you should. Do I think that there’s necessarily a story in everyone that’s enough for a book? I’m not sure about that.
So I think that is it a great tool? If you have a story in you, it’s phenomenal. It gives you credibility. It gives you another audience. It exposes you to people who are more readers than not. And the more books in you, the better. That’s great. But can I say everyone must know? I also can say that for building a personal brand, there’s any singular platform that’s a must. Even something like LinkedIn, it’s kind of an obvious, but is it a must?
It’s not a must. Listen, Seth Godin is a prolific marketer. He built a huge brand in marketing, barely being on social media. You know, like an RSS feed. He does all of the non-best practices, you know, for most of his career. And he built a huge personal brand. So no platform is a must, but if you’re able to, you know, every platform builds you incredible visibility and leverage.
Love that. Marina, if somebody wanted to reach out to you or brand of a leader, what’s the easiest, best way to do that?
One is our website, our beautiful website, brandofaleader.com. And then on a personal level, my unpronounceable last name in this combination with his first name is the only one on LinkedIn. So if you copy and paste it into LinkedIn, Marina Bezhanova, I’m the only one there, top of feed and let’s connect.
Awesome. Hey, folks. I’m going to keep the right to recall this witness. This lady’s a genius on personal branding. We just kind of scratched the surface, but it’s all the time we have. Marina, thank you so much for being on the show.
I’ll be back anytime. Thank you for having me.
Thank you. Hey folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, bye.

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Title: Why Most Marketing Growth Hacks Fail | Brooke Shepard on Scaling Brands the Right Way
Date: May 14, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/why-most-marketing-growth-hacks-fail-brooke-shepard-on-scaling-brands-the-right-way/
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Content:
Most companies believe scaling a business comes down to finding the right marketing hack, lowering acquisition costs, or improving ROAS. In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, Don Williams sits down with Brooke Shepard, founder of Mason Interactive, to discuss what actually drives long-term business growth in modern digital marketing. The conversation explores entrepreneurship, performance marketing, customer acquisition, ecommerce strategy, lead generation, advertising psychology, SEO, paid media, and why many brands quietly stall even after increasing their marketing budgets. Brooke shares insights from managing large-scale advertising campaigns and helping businesses grow from startup level to multi-million dollar revenue brands.
The episode dives deep into digital advertising strategy, growth marketing, AI in marketing, agency leadership, subscription business models, and the pressure companies face from investors and efficiency metrics. Don Williams and Brooke Shepard break down why businesses often focus too heavily on low-cost leads, short-term performance reporting, and marketing efficiency while overlooking customer lifetime value and sustainable growth. The discussion also covers ROAS optimization, data-driven marketing decisions, business leadership, brand trust, and how companies can balance automation with human judgment in today’s changing advertising environment.
Entrepreneurs, founders, ecommerce brands, agencies, marketers, and business professionals will find practical lessons throughout this conversation. From customer retention and scalable marketing systems to company culture and founder mindset, the episode offers a realistic look at what separates businesses that continue growing from those that plateau. If you are interested in digital marketing trends, entrepreneurship, business growth strategy, lead generation, advertising management, customer acquisition strategy, or scaling a company in 2026, this podcast episode featuring Brooke Shepard and Mason Interactive delivers valuable insights worth listening to.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Wayne-Courreges-III-Building-60M-in-Commercial-Real-Estate-Assets-During-a-Soft-Market.mp3
 
Unlocking Growth: Human Insights in a Tech-Driven Marketing World
 
Hey, it’s Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Fresh off the subway in Manhattan, our guest today is Brooke Shepard with Mason Interactive. Mason Interactive is an ad agency. Brooke, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Don.
Man, thrilled to have you. What a treat. before we get into Q &A, tell us what does Mason Interactive do? Who do you serve? Why do you do it? How long have you done it? Give us your business story.
the why is it is existential. So Mason is named after my 17 year old son. I formed it pretty much when he was born. We are a full service advertising agency with offices in New York City where I am now Charlotte, North Carolina. And about two years ago, we acquired an agency in Los Angeles. So we have the LA presence as well. We are an advertising agency. We strive to be a one stop shop. We’re not owned by private equity. the only
agency that I know of, it’s not owned by private equity that can offer pretty much everything digitally to clients. And that means search, social, programmatic advertising and TV and some print and affiliate marketing and SEO and email marketing. so we try to, an award-winning creative who were just nominated for our first Clio award. And the clients we serve generally, thank you. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. The clients we serve generally fall into two general buckets and one of them is higher ed.
Yeah, that’s cool.
So colleges that need more masters candidates to apply to their PhDs. And the other general bucket are what we call emerging direct to consumer brands. So we work with global multinationals like Casio and Mary Mecca and Italy. But we also work with a startup dress company in the Lower East Side of Manhattan or a new purse startup based out of London. So one stop shop for those kinds of brands. These are the clients that generally across our 60 clients.
Awesome. Love that. So tell me, Brooke, in a world where we’re becoming more and more obsessed with tools and tech for marketing, what’s a human advantage that you think most brands overlook that drives conversion and loyalty and revenue that works?
Yeah, that’s a great question because we are inundated with tech and we spend a lot of time formulating memos for clients to walk them through new updates from Google and what does AI Max mean? What is the Andromeda update meta mean? The one of the things I think is really important is and I say this, I hope without sounding boastful is, we’ve been in business for 17, 16 years, 17 years. We have over a billion dollars in assets managed. We’re larger than a lot of our clients, right? And so
And some of clients are bigger than us. but we have all this experience and this human tribal knowledge of the company of what it takes to get a company from a million dollars in revenue to $30 million in revenue. And we’ve done it a number of times and some other people, but we’ve done it a number of times and the human knowledge that a team has about that and how to do it, I think is really important. I’ll give you an example of that in today’s
In today’s economic environment, by which I mean interest rates largely, private equity is driving a lot of decisions in businesses and entrepreneurs will take a little bit of private equity or someone’s family office. And with higher interest rates being prevalent, a lot of those funders, those lenders are demanding efficiency. And what they call efficiency generally is ROAS, return on ad spend. If you focus relentlessly on return on ad spend, you will eventually efficient yourself.
of business. And I know that and I can prove it. I don’t always say it that way to prospects and clients, but like just trying to explain to someone that growth, you can’t cut your way to growth. Someone I admire very much says very often, you can’t cut your way to growth. having been through that a bunch of times is more important, I think, than the latest cool tool, all of which we’re using, right? We’re totally AI enabled, but the experience of having done it, I think is probably more equally important at the least.
You can't cut your way to growth. Share on X
to the ability to use those tools.
I love that. And I love that you cannot cut your way to growth. know, in my own business, I help people drive top line and that won’t solve all their problems, but it will solve about half their problems. And then they’ll have enough money to kind of figure out how to solve the others. And then, you know, my, the anti-Dawns people who work on the other side, they work on bottom line. And I’m like, I think that needs to be worked on.
Yeah.
But you can only cut your way so far. mean, there’s a limit to what can be trimmed and there is no limit, zip zero zilch nada on how far you can go up. so, ⁓ you know, so it’s like, where are you going to put your effort? Come on. Okay. What about a hard truth? So what’s an expensive mistake you see companies make with digital?
That’s a great way of phrasing it.
And why do really smart people keep doing it?
because of interest rates. Also, I do. think it certainly correlates interest rates. A mistake that people make is thinking that there’s a dogma around process. The industry changes so quickly that we have a state-of-the-art, wonderful case study on our website with a client, Taste Coffee Roasters, and it’s about a year old, and it’s out of date. The tactics that were super valuable a year ago are not as relevant right now.
because of interest rates.
And people not wanting to hear that is a mistake that people make. they’ll focus on clients. And the clients get to decide what they want to do. We talk a lot about how our job isn’t to do what the client asks. Our job is to give the client our best advice and then do what they ask. So clients get to drive what we’re going to do after our advice to them. And some people will come in and say, I need to…
I need to produce five ads a day. And that’s my dog, but I’m not challenged. It will not be challenged or I need to provide five pieces of creative a week, or I need to only cut when things go to a certain point. And I think being dogmatic about your process and not looking at what the data is telling you because it was state of the art a year ago or five years ago is a really big mistake that people make. I think the corollary to that is people fall for pitches around data and integration and things that I don’t think really.
You know, think meta and Google have all the audience intelligence in the world. And I don’t think there’s really like a secret sauce that makes that better. And people fall often for this idea of like, this company over here has a data layer that will enable me to see more information about meta. I think you’re not gonna. And I think a lot of people fall.
Yeah, I love that. One thing I learned with my first company, gosh, almost 40 years ago now, is we took our marketing budget, we took our ad budget, and we spent about 85 % of it on what we knew, what we had proven worked. we were pretty dialed in. We could almost tell you exactly how much we were going to get back based on that ad spend. But…
We also earmarked 15 % of our budget for experimentation because we knew after a couple of years, I figured out everything that works will one day quit working and you have to do something else. And so you might as well find it before you need it. It’s painful to do it the other way around. pressure test question. When a brand is under pressure,
Everything that works will one day quit working and you have to do something else. Share on X
It is, yeah.
this target, shrinking budgets, high expectations. What separates teams that build trust from those that lose it?
know if I had a perfect answer for that, we’d have a nicer car and our company knocked on wood, it could all fall apart tomorrow. Our company is doing okay with the 60 clients and 35 colleagues, self-funded. But when people get in that spiral, the only thing that can get them out of it is a lot of consensus building and patience. And not everyone has patience or not everyone wants to hear my ideas about consensus or my staff’s idea about consensus.
You know, we have a client that sells.
sells air fresheners. one of the things they do with the air fresheners is before they hired us, they were focused relentlessly in what they call efficiency. And that meant they wanted new air fresheners in the door at the lowest possible cost. And what we helped them realize, it was a joint effort, I didn’t educate them on this part of their business, we did it together. We were able to get them to understand, or together we were able to get the board to understand.
But the real profit in these air fresheners in this company doesn’t come from getting the lowest new customer in the door. It comes from the resale of the filters for the air freshener on a subscription basis. And so if you, if you get, I’m going to make up some numbers here. If you get a customer in for a hundred dollars, but you can only get in 10 of them a day and you can get in customers for $150. Now you can get 30 of them in a day. So pay 50 % more, get three X the number of customers.
They were looking at that as inefficient. Why would we pay 150 when we could pay 100? And then we got them to sort of together, we understood that that was actually the opposite. That 150 was more efficient because the sooner someone got in the door, even if you lost a little more money upfront, the sooner someone got in the door, the sooner they were plugged into the subscription model of getting the filters on an ongoing basis. And going through that is, and I don’t always do it successfully. have many failures in this arena, but going through that and getting a client to understand that and showing them the data and getting them to understand that.
growth is acquiring new customers and not just at the lowest possible cost all the time is important. And it’s a lot about consensus and really just speaking someone’s language. And everyone’s, everyone, one thing I’ve learned is that all clients, most clients have different ways of viewing their own metrics. And I’m not going to convince them that their metrics are wrong. So I have to learn what’s important to them and then help coach them through how they see.
Growth is acquiring new customers and not just at the lowest possible cost all the time. Share on X
I love that and it’s very popular. So we have to set expectations and you do. I don’t argue with that, but in reality, your client comes with expectations of their own and many times they don’t communicate what those are. And you’re going to have to meet or manage when you don’t meet those unknown expectations. And that’s just the way of the world.
It ain’t fair. It ain’t right, but it is the way that it is.
Yeah.
It’s that way with colleagues too in the office. We talk about a lot about, and I could do better with this, but we talk a lot about having an open and sincere feedback loop at the company. I’m so much more likely to fix your problem if you tell me you have that problem. I might fix it if you don’t tell me what it is. But if you tell me you have that problem, that you don’t like the vacation policy or the 401k policy or the coffee machine in the office, if you tell me those things, I’m much more likely to fix it. And you’re right, Don. If the client says upfront,
My problem is I have X and my boss says Y. Much more likely to solve that problem for them than if they don’t tell me. And they don’t always tell you. Sometimes it’s a game of guess.
Yeah. Yeah. Can’t you read my mind? Yeah. And then the other thing that I really liked that you said, you you have to, it’s not always about the lowest cost per acquisition. And so I learned this 40 years ago with lead gen is that, you know, a $16 lead was really inexpensive. A $250 lead for the same product seemed really expensive.
But the difference was our revenue per lead, which is just revenue per sale divided by your leads. Okay. Our revenue per lead on the $16 lead was only $30. Our revenue per lead on the $250 lead was $1,000. And so you got to carry the math all the way through. don’t let anybody fool you.
Yeah, this is exactly right.
You know, about, about, we’re, only going carry the math a little of the way through. That won’t work. So.
Now,
a very smart guy, known name Dale Leatherwood, who used to work in an agency and now runs a college, says, I can get you lots of leads, and this is relevant for lead gen and not econ, but I can translate. I can get you lots of leads, I can get you good leads, I can get you cheap leads, pick any two. Meaning I can get you lots of good leads, but they won’t be cheap. I can get you lots of cheap leads, they won’t be good. I can get you really good cheap leads, I won’t get you a lot of them.
And it’s a true construct. Like I can get you any two of the three you want, but there’s no such thing as fool’s gold and I can’t get you endless great leads at the cheapest. doesn’t work that way. Everyone else is buying the same media to get those leads.
Yeah, the way I teach it is this, if you look at the vector for quality, and then there’s a vector for quantity. And so if you want the absolute highest quality, you can have that, which you can’t have very many. If you want the lowest quality, you can have tons of them. And then the reality, I think, is this. Each client, maybe with the help of somebody like Mason Reck,
I interact with for Don Waynes Global, they have to figure out where’s the happy point of intersection for their business. Because the sales side only wants the best leads, the guaranteed buyers. I show up, the check is written and they’ve serving me a piece of hot apple pie. And that’s what a sales rep wants. The company on the other hand, kind of wants the cheapest leads that they can get in quantity. there is a…
an intersection between those two vectors that’s a happy spot for each client. And it’s typically unique to the client. What’s good for client A is not good for client B, but just a matter of managing and finding those expectations. Yeah. So,
Everybody talks about growth hacks, man, where marketing and advertising is concerned. It’s like, pull me the magic rabbit out of the hat. I mean, I know you got one. I know you got something up your sleeve. And I think the answer is, yeah, there’s no magic.
We
say it during the sale, it’s part of our sales script. Now we have a unique process that’s enabled many companies to grow. We have a long track record, we have good case studies, but we do not have a, we have a process that’s unique to us. We do not have a magic rabbit. There is no button that your previous five agencies have failed to click in your meta ads that we know about, that we have access to that they don’t have access to. It’s not the case. And so no, there’s no magic button, but people hear what they want to hear. We say that in the sales script, but people hear sometimes that there is a magic button and then they’re like,
I didn’t, click it. I couldn’t have been more clear with you, but yeah, there’s no magic growth hack. I am very suspicious of what I call DTC Twitter. So I guess it’s X now, but people that are endlessly posting on X about their Twitter growth hacks. just, don’t, it’s showing up every day and working hard and persevering in the face of adversity that gets you to where you want to go. It’s not a magic switch.
I love that. And what you’re hearing folks is this Mace Interactive is operating based on principle and they’re doing it over and over and over again. And that’s what makes it successful. I’ve never found the magic trick. I’m hopeful, but I’ve been looking a long time, haven’t found it. So let’s talk legacy for a minute. If people remember Brooke Shepherd 10 years from now.
What do you hope they say changed about how companies treat their customers online?
turning 50 this weekend, and so I’m thinking more about legacy. Thank you, thank you, thank you. In terms of what my family would say about me, in terms of the business, the way I think about the legacy is my, and I’ve been part of some really cool rocket ship growth in clients. I mean, I’ve been part of taking clients from spending $1,000 a month to $2 million a month profitably, I’ve done that a bunch of times. And it’s really enjoyable. And I’m lucky enough to have staff with me, colleagues.
Congratulations and happy birthday.
that I’ve had the pleasure of working with for 16 years or 17 years. We have a number of people that have left and come back because the grass wasn’t greener. And I take a lot of pride in the fact that we’re able to retain some really smart, great people that want to work with me. think, that, that I think a lot about, and there’s such a gratifying thing about, about growing with a colleague that can teach you and I can teach them over, over time about going through things. My greatest professional success would be.
If I could step away from the business at some point in 10 years and it succeeded without me. And I think that if I could develop a company and a culture, and it’s really hard, if I could develop a company and a culture where I can be on the board and I can be involved in planning, but I’m not needed anymore. I’m superfluous to the requirements of the organization. I would view that as a great legacy. I’d be very proud of myself for having done that. And don’t know if we’ll get there, but that’s what I’m trying for.
Yeah. And I think that’s the evolution. Most founder led companies at the day they were founded, the founder was the chief, the cook and the bottle washer. They did everything. And they probably started out with one client that came somewhere. That’s, that’s kind of how they launched. And then you start adding staff and,
And most, even though they call themselves CEOs, they’re probably more presidents. They’re in charge of seeing that the buttons are pushed and the levers are pulled and all that jazz. And that’s not really a CEO role. And so then the next, the next step is to get off the org chart, off the operational org chart with the CEO. And, and then ultimately to step.
and off the org chart altogether and be the owner. and, the, I’m fortunate that I own several companies and, and my wife is really smart and I’m kind of smart, probably. And, I don’t know, maybe 10 years ago, she wanted to go, we went to Thailand for two weeks and I was kind of breathing in a brown paper bag. my gosh, everything’s going to fall apart in two weeks.
And you know, it didn’t. Was it perfect? No. Was it perfect when I was in town running it? No. A little different kind of imperfect, but still not perfect. And then the next month we went to China for a month. And the one thing I coach and I’ll just give this to the audience is this, is if you want somebody to sit,
in the captain’s chair. Get your butt out of the chair. Until you let somebody sit in it, you have no shot of ever making that happen.
If you want somebody to sit in the captain's chair, get your butt out of the chair. Share on X
Today we had a board meeting where I let the two, there were three people on the call and two people, three people led the year end wrap up of what went wrong and what went right. And they presented it to the board and I’m the board and I mostly listened to that conversation. I was not involved in polling and I gave them my past reports that they’d seen because I wanted them to have the skill and the chance to do it because if I got hit by a space laser tomorrow.
it’s better that they have some practice. Those leaders of the company beneath me practiced doing it and they did great. They didn’t do it the way I would have done it, but they did a good job.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s that principle that I just shared in motion is let people get out of the chair, let them sit down, let them lead and will it be perfect? Probably not. But I would argue when you’re doing it, it’s not perfect either. And so who cares? So, Brooke, if somebody wanted to reach out to you or to Mason Interactive,
Yeah, I think you’re right.
What’s the easiest way to do that?
If go to our website, masoninteractive.com, hopefully there’s a number of forms on there that’ll pop up. Anything that gets filled out on there, I’ll get a copy of. You can reach me that way. You can also reach me on LinkedIn, Brooke Shepherd. There’s another Brooke Shepherd that owns an advertising agency, so choose the one that looks like me. But LinkedIn is great, and any of the forms on our website will come directed at me.
Yeah. And you think you got it bad. My name is Don Williams. I know five of us and I’m only related to two. And so, so it’s shocking. So, Brooke, thank you so much for sharing, your brain and your heart today. I’m grateful.
You
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.
That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E161 | From $0 to $60M in Real Estate Assets: Wayne Courreges’ Strategy for Building Passive Income in a Soft Market
Date: April 17, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/wayne-courreges-real-estate-passive-income-strategy/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/From-0-to-60M-in-Real-Estate-Assets-Wayne-Courreges-Strategy-for-Building-Passive-Income-in-a-Soft-Market_.jpg
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Content:
Wayne Courreges spent 16 years as a W2 employee at CBRE, working with institutional investors and some of the biggest names in commercial real estate. By all accounts, it was a good gig. But there was something missing. You’d reposition an asset, add value to it, and just when things were performing, the company would sell it and move on. That constant uncertainty about what he was actually building led him to start CREi Partners in 2019 on the side, and by 2023 he went all in. Now, with $60 million in assets under management, Wayne has learned something most people get wrong about markets like we’re in right now. Everyone looks at the softness in commercial real estate and thinks it’s a bad time to invest. Wayne thinks it’s the best time if you’re actually paying attention. When interest rates went up, property owners who financed at two percent couldn’t refinance their deals. They can’t sell at a profit. They’re stuck. For someone with capital and patience, that creates the exact kind of opportunity that doesn’t come around every year.
Here’s what separates Wayne from the people who have quietly disappeared from real estate over the last couple of years. He talks about having grit, which sounds simple until you realize what it actually means. It means when everyone else is running one direction, you stay calm and go the other way. It means communicating constantly, especially when things aren’t going well. It means treating everyone in the deal—the investors, the lenders, the property managers—like partners instead of people you need to pressure into better performance. He limits his firm to two to four deals a year instead of chasing bigger numbers. That’s not slow growth, it’s sustainable growth. He only hires when his bandwidth forces him to, which means the team expands at the same pace the company is actually capable of handling. This approach sounds boring compared to guys who were buying everything they could during the frothy years, but those guys are the ones struggling now. Wayne’s still buying.
The part that gets overlooked is how much Wayne focuses on education instead of sales. He has a free coaching program for accredited investors because he believes people should understand what they’re getting into before committing capital. Eighty percent of his portfolio is multifamily housing, which is boring on purpose. People need somewhere to live, so the cash flow is stable. The depreciation benefits are real. It’s not sexy like development deals or Bitcoin, but it works. He built his company around something he calls RIDGE values—respect, integrity, dependability, grit, and execution. Every meeting starts by recognizing who showed those values that week. It sounds like something a motivational poster would say, until you realize what happens in a business where people actually live by that stuff when pressure mounts. They don’t panic. They don’t blame. They lean in together. That’s what separates people who survive downturns from people who fade. And in real estate, that separation matters more than anything else.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Wayne-Courreges-III-Building-60M-in-Commercial-Real-Estate-Assets-During-a-Soft-Market.mp3
 
Blog Topic
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I got a great guest. I think he’s, think he’s wandering around the U S and an RV, but, but like for a while, like for almost a year. And so our guest today is Wayne Courageous, the third, and we’ll talk about that third year thing here in a minute with CRE Partners in Real Estate investment out of.
I Brian, Texas. Yeah, so that’s just down the road. I’m outside of Fort Worth. so, Wayne, welcome to the show.
That’s it.
Thanks for having me, Don. I appreciate the time and excited for the conversation.
Yeah, we’re thrilled to have you. So thank you so much. Now, my name is actually Donald L. Williams II. And then I did that horrible thing and my oldest son named him Donald L. Williams III. But he goes by Trey. If you called him Don, I don’t even know if he would answer. And so I admire that you stuck with it and that’s great. So.
Yeah. Yeah. I
wanted to name my son the fourth, my wife wasn’t having it. So he became Hunter.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wondered when he had his son. but I didn’t, I didn’t think he would be since he goes by Trey, which, you know, was kind of a cute nickname off of the third. but my grandson is Luke. And, so, and so that’s fine. But when all of us are together and the whole Williams clan, which like, there’s a bunch of us are together. The joke is always who’s the real Don Williams.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I assure everybody I am. So Wayne, tell us what you do, what CREI Partners does, who you serve, why you do it. What’s the story for your business?
Yeah, so we help accredited investors diversify and grow their wealth through commercial real estate investments. And I have been in the commercial real estate industry about 19 years and 16 of those I was working with CBRE, a large institutional group. started CRI, started CRI partners in 2019 and did the whole nine to five pays for your five to nine mentality until 2023.
And then in 2023 went all in. right now we have about 60 million assets under management. We’ve got a lot of investors who don’t want to be in the day to day real estate investing. You they enjoy what they have going on in their life. They don’t want the headaches of real estate, but they want the cash flow and the depreciation and the benefits that come with real estate ownership.
Yeah, love that. so CBRE was originally Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estates where the CB came from. And so that’s where you started and then started on your own in 2019. Kind of interesting because 2020 was an odd year, like for the world. And 21 wasn’t any more normal, probably, but survived that and now 60 million in…
as an entrepreneur it's good for people to know like it's a headspace most of it. Skill set all that stuff you can learn on the headspace not so easy to learn. Share on X
Yes.
assets under management, that’s a lot. so congratulations. And I am a real estate investor in both residential and commercial property. And here in 2025, commercial appears to be, to me, a little soft. And I think it’s because of that 2021 thing where everybody went home and then some of them didn’t come back. And so…
What was occupied space is now vacant. I’m guessing, is that national? It’s not just here in Dallas Fort Worth.
Yeah. So mean, they’re from an office standpoint, there are definitely, you know, lot of vacancies, but I’ll tell you, you know, it seems so I’m, I focus heavily more on multifamily. 80 % of our portfolio is multifamily and then the other 20, 25 % is development. And in that development, it’s primarily in Bryan College Station. But we primarily own 100, 150 unit multifamily properties and between Houston and San Antonio primarily.
We’ve got to build the rent community, which is pretty awesome. It’s 98 single family homes that think of it like horizontal multifamily instead of vertical. So you still have a property manager, you still rent it out. And then we have some 20 by 50 storage, but yeah, from an office standpoint, know, I, with my career, especially with CBRE, you know, I saw lot of ups and downs with office, but I do get a sense that people are going back to the office. I mean, all of our team members at Sierra Partners.
We work Monday through Thursday in the office and then Friday is work from home. So there’s a little blend, but I think what a lot of people are finding is to get that culture, the training atmosphere, et cetera, there’s got to be some in-office work. we don’t primarily invest in office, though we’re developing in-office retail in Bryan right now.
Yeah. And listeners, if you don’t know, know, um, College Station Bryan, there’s a little university there, uh, the name of Texas A &M. That is an economic juggernaut for that area of Texas. So, okay. I’m going to ask you, nobody tells you this question. What part of commercial real estate or maybe just entrepreneurship in general that looks great on the outside?
Just follow on.
but is harder, messier, more problematic than most people realize.
Yeah. I’ll hit on the entrepreneurial one. And if we want, if we have time, we go to the commercial real estate side. So on the entrepreneur side, you know, I was a W2 for 16 years and CBRE was an incredible company to work for. was working alongside, you know, some great Titans in commercial real estate with MetLife, JP Morgan, TIA, Cref, Liskos on them. And these are institutional quality people, very sophisticated and
you know, have a number one goal for themselves and that is to grow their investors. And a lot of times those investors are, you know, pension funds and et cetera. But what I find is that it’s a different stress. you you as a W-2 employee, no matter how well you are doing your job and sometimes too well, because the property, in my case, work again, CBR, we would reposition the asset and then guess what? It’s time to sell. So then there’s that uncertainty.
And over time, you know, it’s sort of like, got used to it, guess, and, make sure I had some savings in case, you know, CBR, you couldn’t find a spot for me, which they always, you know, fortunately they always had a spot. But when you get onto the other side of the coin, true entrepreneurship, you know, at first it seems like, man, I remember being really stressed about hiring. Well, actually I remember going to the office, going outside, calling my wife. We hadn’t really talked about me.
jumping all in on my time side gig. And I was like, hey, man, if we lose everything, are we good? we gonna, and she’s like, yeah, I mean, we’ve been married a long time. And so was like, okay, well, I’m gonna give my three week notice. I was gonna give them a little longer than two weeks, because I had been with them a long time. So was like, I’m gonna do a three week notice. And that’s what I did. And we went all in and of course we had other investments and cashflow coming in. So it allowed that safety net. But that was a big stress point. And then the next stress point was like, okay, I need a higher,
I need to hire someone. And in that point, it was more of an executive assistant slash investor relations person. And so we hired that person and that was pretty stressful, but you know, got that person. And then we hired the second, which was a portfolio manager. And now we hired a marketing person and now we have an analyst and now we have an institutional partnership person. So it’s just funny how like the stresses and like, man, I don’t think like that seems like a lot, you know, things get a little bigger. I would say at the end day,
For me, the stress is just different. Now it’s balanced and I’m feeding. And, but if I flip it, cause I love mindsets and know, it’s also the fuel that pushes us. Like we’re at 60 million, but this year will be about 150 million on the projects that we’re doing. So it’s like the fuel to take care of the family, within the work. It’s like, I’m not just taking care of my family. I’m taking care of, you know, other families too. It, it, pushes us to work together to get bigger.
ideas and thoughts. yeah. ⁓
Yeah, love that.
So I’ve been an entrepreneur long, long, long time and coach and consult many entrepreneurs. And it’s always kind of humorous to me when they’re like, if we just get to this level, everything will be great. And that doesn’t paint a rate on their parade, you know, because at every level there will be a new devil and something else you have to kind of maneuver that you didn’t maybe have to maneuver at the, at the lower level. So, okay.
Next question.
about a costly lesson. What’s a specific deal, specific decision or season that hurt at the time, but maybe today has turned out to be a really valuable lesson for your career.
Yeah, I love that question.
Yeah, I love it. So yeah, when you talk to real estate investors, they they’ve been in the business long enough. There’s one black guy. And fortunately, I’ve got one black guy. And, you know, we’re still hey, we’re still we haven’t lost anybody’s capital. We’re still working through it. But so twenty twenty two, twenty twenty one, it was a really frothy season in real estate. A lot of people were buying deals when they didn’t, you know, they were buying them for
you know, I guess in hopes that the markets would just continue skyrocketing and everyone would just continue being very successful. I started the company in 2019, but I didn’t buy my first asset until end of 2021. And then in 2022, we turned down most properties, but I found this diamond in the rough. And if I look back, I probably wouldn’t do much different in that timeframe because I was buying an asset in a great location.
under price per door was much less than what others were doing. It was an off market purchase, but we bought that. I used bridge debt in the sense that it should be used. And a lot of people are using bridge debt to get from, to buy an asset because it didn’t hit certain debt service coverage ratios for Fannie Mae and Freddie. So they’re doing bridge debt, but there was no real huge value add to it.
but anyway, so I was used, it was risky. I used it in the sense of like, Hey, this was a property that was owned by a doctor in Los Angeles. and you know, the property, you know, needed a full renovation and you know, that was for me, I felt comfortable with the business plan. So I moved forward with it and, did the, the, business plan within eight months, far as renovating and doing all the things that we need to do to turn the asset around.
Risky.
And then the market side just completely whammed us in every single direction. Insurance doubled. The cap rates with interest rates started increasing. The leasing market, everything just really softened. And there’s not like one day where it all just went away. This is like multiple days turning into years of just nothing but grit and fighting for our investors and working through that process.
Because whether the market's up, down or sideways or flat or the interest rates or politics, doesn't matter. Share on X
And so, but what that has changed though, ever since that property, I have only bought from a multifamily standpoint, properties that cashflow day one with fixed rate debt. And so our investment thesis changed drastically. Now people make a lot of money and do extremely well in those deep value add projects. What I learned during that is I don’t have the skin to go through that. mean, it has aged me 25 plus years going through that property.
you
Why working with the lenders, doing a modification of the loan, we moved that from a bridge debt to a fixed rate debt, over communicating to investors. I mean, this is a time where a lot of foreclosures, a lot of deals went south. And we’re still working through that process with the lender and just being good owners. So there’s positive in anything, but it is a lot of work. And that lesson learned for me, and this could be different.
When you sign personally on money, that was a painful lesson. That was part of that crash lesson, right? Don't sign personally. I don't care when or how why. Don't do it. Share on X
Everybody has a different investment strategy, but for us, there’s a dopamine hit when I do a quarterly distribution to investors. And then of course the K-1, you know, around the tax season. so 80 % of our portfolio is that. Now we do have that 20 % that is more opportunistic development type, which has a higher reward, just like if you were buying a stock or investing in a business that has higher risk, higher reward. But yeah, I would say that’s
For me, the biggest challenge we’ve had, the other ones, they have their day-to-day situations where it’s grit and nothing’s ever easy, Don. You know that, nothing’s easy. So I’ll never paint that, but it’s like nothing’s more challenging when you have a property that you just can’t change what’s going on in the economic scenario. just, the cycle’s a real estate, so.
Yeah. I can remember the first commercial property I bought and I knew nothing. And if you’re listening today and you know nothing and you’re an accredited investor, it makes sense to talk to somebody like Wayne because he knows, it was a long, long time ago that he knew nothing. A long, long time ago. And so I went to the lender and this was an office building, multi-tenant office building. And I was like, I want a loan.
10 year fixed rate loan. And they kind of looked at me and said, well, you can’t get a 10 year fixed rate loan. I was like, why not? And they’re like, well, could we do a seven year call and a three year amortization and redo it? And I’m like, look, I’m from Kansas. I’m a farm boy. I don’t want to do that. I want a 10 year fixed rate loan. And I stuck to my guns and I got that. And I was very bankable at the time. They didn’t want to say no.
So pick something that you can say, I'm gonna commit to this for three to seven years. Share on X
But, but you know, then the funding game, once I closed, then the funding game started and it was a couple of years. like, what the heck am I doing here? but, love real estate, you know, the depreciation and the, and the cashflow and the appreciation, you know, which ebbs and flows at times, but over time it just ebbs. I mean, it just, I mean, it just flows. mean, it just, grows. So,
Okay.
So you talked little bit about, you know, things not going according to plan. And there’s a lot of things in real estate that can, you know, market shift, deal stall, pressure mounts. What do you think separates leaders who rise in that environment from those who quietly, or there’s been some here in Dallas Fort Worth lately that were loudly faded out. I mean, pew! And they were gone. So what?
What separates the, the stairs and the levers.
Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because there are a lot of people that were allowed that are being really quiet right now. And at the end of the day, like…
And I think I’ve got this lot in the Marine Corps and just my life growing up. It’s just constant grit. You know, when people are running, I’m going in like, want to tell everybody this is the worst time to buy real estate is not a good time run away. want everyone to really feel that so that I can buy all the real estate in the world right now. So if you’re listening, like this is a horrible time to buy, unless you’re an investor, a true investor, this is the greatest time to buy because there’s capital is really hard to get. So the market’s not frothy.
There’s not, you know, people, you these owners, they’re having a hard time refinancing because interest rates are up. So, and as you mentioned, Don, like typically there’s five or seven year loan terms, 30 year amortization, but five to seven. So they can’t refinance it. They can’t, you know, sell at a profit. So those are opportunities. And that’s why I said no for so many years. Yes, I’ve got that one black eye. Every real estate investor is going to have at least one black eye. If they don’t go find somebody who
you know, has really gone through the shithole because it’s, it’s tough out there. But what I’ll say is that, you know, people with grit who go through it and then over communicate, during that process and have like partnership minded, like everybody. I mean, it’s not just the investors impacted lenders are impacted service partners. You’ve got to, you’ve got to have, sort of a quarterback in the situation where, you know, you see the bigger picture. You’re trying to lead from the front.
You’re not blaming people, you know, or, you know, and, you know, that’s why I never kick anybody who’s been down down because at the end of the a lot of different people had to look at a deal, everything from an appraiser, the lenders, debt, like a lot of people had to give a blessing before closing. Right. And so, but I also feel that, you know, people are growing too fast. Like for us, we do.
two to four deals a year. We asset manage, we take on the full brunt of owning the asset for our investors. But we do that while we’re also expanding our team. Like when I decided like, okay, now it’s time to hire that next person, it’s because my bandwidth was low and now it’s going to the next one, know, furthermore. So we’ve grown in this market because we’ve been finding opportunities and we’re not going to be a company that’s going to outgrow what
our internal capabilities are. So hopefully that makes a little sense. It’s a lot of grit, a lot of love for the game. I mean, this is a blessing to be in commercial real estate. And I hope that whoever’s listening, whatever industry you’re in, it’s a blessing to be in your industry. Like I only know commercial real estate. Out of the Marine Corps, I’ve been in commercial real estate all my life. And I’ve got a mindset coached on who’s like, when you have all the money in the world, what are you gonna do? And I said, I’m gonna still do real estate because that is…
That’s who I am. I’m always thinking that. So if you don’t have that joy for real estate, don’t do real estate, but passively invest, whether it’s with CRI partners or others, learn about it. We have a passive investor coaching program. It’s a free program. There’s no sales pitch or anything, but passive investor coaching.com. And it’s just all the information that accelerates learning about this type of investment class. So that when you are talking to sponsors and
You know who are doing some are what we’re doing, you know, know what to ask know what to look for so I’m just passionate about education first and then also for being a commercial real estate and Being able to survive when other people are you know bowing out it’s too tough. So they’re gonna find ATMs or Bitcoin or Car washes like yeah, y’all go to car washes now you see car washes at every other corner and it’s because Most people have heard mentality
While us, we’ve doubled down on multifamily housing. Everybody needs a place to live, great depreciation, great cash flow. And so that’s what we’re gonna continue doing.
I love that. Okay. I’m to talk to you about legacy years from now. When people talk about Wayne courageous, the third, what do they, what do you hope they say you stood for beyond the deals and beyond the numbers?
Yeah. I just want to be known as a good person. mean, I’m an Eagle Scout, former Marine. You know, we’re about to do a national jamboree with Scouts that I’m a Scoutmaster for. You know, we, I, this time of the year, you know, we’re talking in January. I know this show may be aired, you know, in a few months, but, you know, we’ve already had conversations one-on-one with our investors. I love hearing, you know, their experience with us. What can we improve on?
Money now, money over time and money long-term, right? Any business. Share on X
So I just want to be known as a good person that did right. And, you know, really try to do everything I can to execute on what I say I’m going to do. we, we have ridge, what we call ridge values at our company. It’s respect, integrity, dependability, grit and execution. and we, every meeting we start with going across the room, like who’s, who’s showed ridge values. And then we have rich days at one floating day per month is called a rich day. But I really try to drill that in my team.
I mean, if you’re living by respect, integrity, dependability, grit and execution, you couldn’t do anything wrong in business. Like you are, you you’re going to be doing just fine. So yeah, I just want to be a good person.
Sounds like a great culture and you know, we know culture beats strategy all day long. It just does. So if somebody wanted to reach out to you or to CREI, what’s the easiest way to do that?
Easiest way to go to CREIpartners.com, click on the let’s talk and schedule a time with our investor relations team. But you know, I would even step back from that and go to passiveinvestorcoaching.com. If you’re interested at all in passive investing, whether it’s CREIpartners or anything, you’re like, you’re a credit investor. And I really focus on credit investors because this is not a liquid investment. You are investing in alternative investments. And so for me, it’s like there’s a chapter in life when
this makes sense. And if you feel like, this time makes sense, at least to learn more about it, or maybe you don’t even know what a credit investor is. Well, that’s more reason to take passiveinvestorcoaching.com. No sales pitch. I just give a lot of content. So that’s a way, but creipartners.com would be a great starting point as well.
Great. Wayne, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Thanks for having me on Don, I appreciate you.
You bet. That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

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Title: E160 | How to Build Real Estate Wealth With No Money or Credit | Chris Prefontaine’s 3 Payday System
Date: April 8, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/creative-real-estate-investing-no-money-chris-prefontaine/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/how-to-build-real-estate-wealth-with-no-money-or-credit-chris-prefontaine-3-payday-system-feature.jpg
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Content:
Most people believe that building real estate wealth requires a strong credit score, a hefty down payment, and approval from a traditional bank. Chris Prefontaine, founder of Smart Real Estate Coach and a 34-year veteran of the real estate investing industry, spent the first half of his career believing the same thing. That belief collapsed along with his finances in 2008, when the real estate market crash wiped out everything he had built, including a waterfront property in Newport, Rhode Island, a thriving brokerage he had sold to Coldwell Banker in 2000, and the financial foundation he had spent decades constructing. What followed was four years of rebuilding his mindset before he ever touched another deal. When he finally returned to real estate investing, he returned with a completely new playbook: no bank loans, no personal guarantees, no more getting paid only once per transaction. Through creative real estate strategies including subject-to financing, where an investor takes over the seller’s existing mortgage without refinancing, and lease purchase agreements, where the investor controls a property without owning it outright, Prefontaine built a family-run business that now operates across more than 80 markets in the United States. His story is documented across multiple episodes of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, hosted by Don Williams, and has helped thousands of investors in the Wicked Smart Community close real estate deals without relying on traditional financing, regardless of whether the housing market is rising, falling, or stagnant.
The core of Chris Prefontaine’s approach to no money down real estate investing is built around what he calls the Three Payday System, a federally trademarked model that structures every creative real estate deal to generate three separate income events from a single transaction. The first payday is the upfront cash collected at the time the deal is structured. The second is a recurring monthly income stream, similar to the cash flow produced by a traditional rental property. The third and final payday arrives when the property sale completes and the investor collects the back-end equity. This model was designed specifically to move investors away from the transactional treadmill that defines most wholesale real estate and fix and flip strategies, where income stops the moment the deal closes and the investor must immediately chase the next opportunity to keep revenue flowing. According to the National Association of Realtors, the majority of first-time real estate investors cite lack of available capital as the primary barrier to entry, yet subject-to financing and lease purchase deals require neither a down payment nor lender approval, making the Three Payday System one of the most accessible frameworks for building passive income in real estate across any market cycle. Prefontaine is equally emphatic about one rule that applies to every deal without exception: never sign a personal guarantee. A condominium conversion project he ran in Providence, Rhode Island before the 2008 crash, where units that sold at over 170,000 dollars could not move for 52,000 dollars after the market turned, cost him a decade of financial recovery and stands as the clearest illustration of what personal liability in real estate can cost an investor and their family.
For entrepreneurs and new investors researching how to start in real estate investing with no money and no prior experience, Prefontaine’s three-step framework offers a grounded and practical starting point that applies well beyond the real estate industry. The first step is to choose one specific niche within real estate, whether that is creative financing, wholesaling, fix and flip, or land investing, and commit to it based on personal values and long-term fit rather than short-term income projections. The second step is to identify a mentor or coach who has operated through multiple real estate market cycles, built a life that reflects the kind of success worth modeling, and has a track record that extends beyond a bull market. The third step is to commit to that niche and that mentor for a minimum of three to seven years without deviating, which Prefontaine argues is not a timeline for success but a commitment structure that eliminates the shiny object syndrome responsible for most early-stage investor failure. Research from Harvard Business Review supports this position, finding that entrepreneurs who maintained a single focused business strategy in their first five years significantly outperformed those who pursued multiple models simultaneously. For investors ready to explore creative real estate investing further, Prefontaine offers two free resources with no credit card required: two bestselling books available at threepaydaysbooks.com/proven and a 25-minute Masters Class at smartrealestatecoach.com/mastersclass, both designed to help investors evaluate whether the creative real estate model is the right fit before spending a single dollar on coaching or education.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here
 
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How to Build Real Estate Wealth With No Money Down Using Creative Real Estate Investing

Don Williams
Hey, it’s Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I got a real treat for you today. I got a real estate, a legitimate real estate guru. Okay. And there’s like a zillion of them out there, but most of them are not the real deal. This is legitimate guru, Chris Prefontaine with Smart Real Estate Coach. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Prefontaine
Thanks Don, I appreciate it. I want to know what not legit is, but I know actually. I actually know. So thank you.
Don Williams
Yeah,
it’s the same thing happening, you know, in AI right now is like, there are a lot of AI experts and there are some of them that truly have real game, real skills, but there’s some of them that learned, that are teaching what they learned last week.
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree.
I was kind of being facetious because it’s rampant. I agree.
Don Williams
Yeah. Yeah. Well for, for, I don’t know, 40 years, people have been, you know, Dave, think Dave Del Dotto was maybe the first guy and, and, and he actually was, uh, and as a super guy, I’ve met Dave a couple of times, but anyhow, uh, I fell down the rabbit hole and you let me go. And so that that’s on you. So, so before we get into Q and a Chris,
Chris Prefontaine
One of the first.
It’s all good.
Don Williams
Tell us where you are, what you do, who you serve, why you do it. Give us your story.
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah, yeah. if you want to peel back anything, let me know. Cause I’ve been at this 34, gosh, going on 35 years now, uh, next this fall. Um, so I, are in New Port Worth Island. That’s where I’m broadcasting from. And I have been at this, like I said, 34, 35 years, but the journey, and I’ll just be very brief with this. The journey was, you know, like a lot of people.
I tried out different niches in real estate. I built homes, all basically very creative without getting bank loans way back when I was in my 20s. This would have been 1990 what? 1991. I owned a realtor executives franchise, so I had a broker hat on back then, mid 90s. I sold to Coal Banker in 2000 and then running up to the crash, I got annihilated in 2008. I called it the debacle.
coming out of that and I was stuck for four years in my head because as an entrepreneur it’s good for people to know like it’s a headspace most of it. Skill set all that stuff you can learn on the headspace not so easy to learn. So I was stuck from 8 to 12, 2008 to 2012. When I came out of it I kind of said all right what are the rules like what how am I gonna operate because I was not getting back in and nobody’s prodded me to get back in real estate. When I did I said okay fine no more signing personally on banks no more using gov as my own money like we set up
parameters, right? No more getting paid once on a deal, like a treadmill, you know, so we created some things. That morphed into where we are today. So that’s what I want to give you the backstory. So when I say we, it’s a family company, has been since 2013, myself, my son, my son-in-law, my daughter’s not active anymore because she’s got two kids, my grandkids, but we’re still a family company and we do our own deals creatively, creative real estate, locally here, but
In addition to that, in the wicked smart community now, we do deals all over the country. This is, think we’re in like 80 markets the last I heard doing deals because, the difference you opened up with this kind of the difference with us is we don’t sell stuff and go, okay, like good luck. We sold a unit, right? What we do is we go in the trenches with the community members and do deals. And we’re tied to them sometimes for like one to five years on one deal to make sure they get through it. And of course we revenue share. It’s a win-win.
So that’s how our model differs. We care about getting deals done as quickly as we can, and we obsess over those metrics. So that’s kind of like a 34 year history in about four minutes yet, but I’m from New England so we can go quick.
Entrepreneurship is a headspace game. Skill sets can be learned. Mindset is harder to learn. Share on X
Don Williams
Yeah. And we could tell that you were, you were from further East than East Texas. And, you know, I was in Boston a year ago, and. Snowed in Boston a year ago. Yeah. and so if you’re from Texas, you really shouldn’t go to Boston in January, but, but I met a lot of wicked smart people, you know? And, and so loved all that. Okay. I’m going to,
Chris Prefontaine
Hahaha.
You bet.
Yeah, why?
Good, there you go.
Don Williams
I’m going to ask you a couple of questions. right. What’s the biggest lie people believe about building wealth in real estate?
Chris Prefontaine
Um, by far it would be that you need money to do so. and look, I spent 17 of my first half my career thinking that, you know, when I was a realtor, you’d think I know all this creative stuff. I didn’t, I didn’t until I dug in after the craft. So it’s having money gobs of, you know, money or great credit to go get money, but either way money. No, you don’t need it. I was broke after the crap.
The biggest lie people believe about building wealth in real estate is that you need money to do it. Share on X
Don Williams
Okay. Love that. And I think that’s probably, I think the average person thinks that I got to have 20 % down. got to have, I got to have whatever I got to have. I got to have a 750 credit score to be able to acquire property. And yeah. And so I, mean, I can share, I became a house salesman, not a realtor, but selling homes for a new home builder in the
Chris Prefontaine
⁓ yeah.
Yeah. Yep.
More for commercial, right? Like it’s crazy.
Don Williams
A in the late eighties. And, and I’ve always kind of made my bones on the revenue side, bringing in more business. sold 17 houses my first month. That’s a very good thing, but I can remember my manager calling me in saying, Hey, you can’t sell 17 houses in a month. And I’m like, are you going to pay me? And he said, yeah, I’m going to pay you. And I’m like, okay, well then don’t worry about how many houses I’m going going sell a lot.
Chris Prefontaine
That’s a good thing.
Don Williams
Okay. I’m not your average guy. so, um, uh, and I didn’t know I couldn’t spell house. but, but, but I knew how to deal with people. So, okay. Question two, you built success in real estate without what most people think you got to rely on a bank. got to have traditional financing.
What, I think I know the answer to this, but what made you realize that was the wicked smotopath?
Chris Prefontaine
Well, I mean, it was out of need, right? So it’s reality is I had no money, right? So I little context for everybody. Entrepreneurs will appreciate this. After the crash, I went from a home overlooking the harbor in Newport, Rhode Island, the water, I mean, it’s gorgeous. To get that property now, it’s probably upwards of six or seven million to having to sell that off and move into a one bedroom, 976 square foot apartment with my wife. Selling the cars, walking to our…
my little hole in the wall office down the street when I restarted, like literally everything was a restock. And so there wasn’t like, Oh, how should we restart? It was the only way to restart is get creative with how you’re to start. you get, mean, my credit was in the toilet, Don. And I didn’t know that low of a credit score exists. I think it was like, whatever fives, whatever the low would be and no money. Like I was negative.
So when I say start from scratch, my wife and I have been married 40 years this August. It felt like when we just started, which was 1986, that’s what it felt like. Like, okay, we’re starting, what’s the budget? No, we had no money. So then we said that the creative is the only way to go. Now in hindsight, I’ll answer the question different. In hindsight, everyone, in my opinion, I’m biased, should know creative. Why? Because whether the market’s up, down or sideways or flat or the interest rates or politics, doesn’t matter. When you know creative,
You’re comfortable bopping away even because you can in any market, any market. That’s now in hindsight. That’s why we did it. Right. But at first it was I have no money. How can I buy a house? Right.
When you know creative, you can operate in any market, any market. Share on X
Don Williams
Love that. And I think many, many entrepreneurs, you know, they lose a little bit of their creativity when they get a little cash, you know, and, and there’s some real beautiful moments in that creating something out of literally like nothing. ⁓ I can remember I started my first company at $6,000 and we were pretty well broke the day we opened the doors. mean,
Chris Prefontaine
100%. Yeah.
Mm.
Don Williams
Like I needed to sell something to somebody today. and, so there’s some beauty in that.
Chris Prefontaine
That was me,
needing a deal like I needed oxygen. mean, you know what the worst thing we did to your point? A year, I think this is like COVID time. Around COVID, we had one of our equity partners came in, got excited about what we do and said, well, what about all the deals that your students can’t do? The sales won’t do no money. Why don’t I put a pool of money up with you guys and we’ll loan it to anyone that wants to do that. Biggest mistake we ever made.
Don Williams
Hmm.
Chris Prefontaine
We gave people
a crutch, they were no longer looking for the great, it was the worst thing they ever did, to your point of when you have a little money, things change. So I tell people to come in, even in different higher levels that coach with me, that have money. I some people leaving six, seven figure jobs coming to us now. say, act like you don’t, just trust me for a minute. Just go with what I’m gonna teach you, then later on you can parlay things into it.
Act like you do not have the money. That is when creativity stays alive and better decisions get made. Share on X
Don Williams
Yeah, I think that’s good counsel, even for proven entrepreneurs, act like you’re broke, whether you are or not, you know? So I was going to ask you, what was the most painful? No, I’m still going to ask. I know what’s the most painful event, 2008, and you know, that wiped out, you know, lot of people in the country, but on a specific deal.
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah, yeah, every day.
Don Williams
What’s like the most painful real estate mistake you can recall and how did it, how did it mold you to who you are today?
Chris Prefontaine
I could pick so many in 34 years, but let me give you one that was pre-crash, which was probably 25%, if not more, the reason I took a slide. We were doing condominium conversions. And for those of you that don’t know, just, you buy a multifamily, four, five, six, 10, you could do a hundred units, doesn’t matter, anything four or more. And there is a multifamily and all you do is you change the engineering to be condominiums.
Don Williams
Ha ha ha ha!
Chris Prefontaine
You then sell them off. being, I’m simplifying. You sell them off as individual units. Well, just where I got this idea before it did flop. I was having breakfast with another entrepreneur one day. This is way back. My kids are young and he told me about this guy that taught him how to do kind of minimum convergence. I’m like, that sounds like a good idea. I just started doing them. Made a ton of money doing it. But during the crash in Providence, Rhode Island in the city, we bought a six, I think it was a six or a seven. Bought a, like, caught a,
round number 400 grand, started converting the units and selling them off for about 180 grand each, 170, sold two. Then like a light switch went off, the crash happened. Don, we couldn’t give them away for 52 grand. So there’s a few lessons there to answer your question. One is I brought private money on top of private money. Let’s say two different people involved in that deal. That was painful because I didn’t.
file when I went through my crap, I stuck with it and just took care people. It took me a decade. So it was very painful. When you sign personally on money, that was a painful lesson. That was part of that crash lesson, right? Don’t sign personally. I don’t care when or how why. Don’t do it.
When you sign personally on money, that risk lands on you and your family. Do not do it. Share on X
Don Williams
Yeah. Good, good advice. I’m going to repeat that because that was like so wise. When it comes to that personal guarantee, Chris and Dawn say no, yet, never, not going to do it. It doesn’t matter. Okay. If it’s a business deal, then the business ought to be able to accept the risk. You shouldn’t, you and your wife and your kids, your grandkids shouldn’t have to.
Chris Prefontaine
Even if you have 880 credit, don’t do it.
Don Williams
except that risk. so, it’s okay to say no to a deal. Some of my best deals, and we’re fortunate that we own commercial and residential income properties. Some of my, some of my very best deals are deals that I said no to, that I didn’t, I didn’t do. And no, we didn’t make any money on them, but we didn’t lose like other people lost. So, you know, real estate is an interesting, probably,
Like never before, residential real estate is probably in a never before spot right now. Here in Dallas, Fort Worth, prices are still sky high. People are not, but if you were a residential real estate agent or broker, you would say it is a slow market. Houses sit for a while to sell. And then just this week.
And I don’t know if it’s actually happened or if it’s just, you know, talk, but like the Black Rocks, et cetera, be out. They’re not going to be able to residential property, which, you know, should alleviate upward pressure on pricing. So talk to us about how do you make money in real estate? No matter.
If the market’s up, down or sideways, I think you said, cause I think it’s sideways right now.
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah.
I would agree, it’s probably floating. Yeah, uncertain, I guess would be a good word. Okay, the short answer is creative real estate. I caught real estate on your terms before I even knew that, okay, for hundreds of years, creative real estate’s been around. I didn’t create it, we just created a system, wrapped a ball around it and put support to it. And then how you make money, let me say the end result and go back. So we trademarked, remember I said I was tired of a bunch of things and I made new rules. One of them was don’t get paid once anymore on a deal,
It was great, it treated me great, but getting paid once then go do a deal again, it sounds like a treadmill to job now in hindsight, right? So for those of you that are looking at different niches, understand that some you’re just gonna pigeonhole yourself into a job. So people try to leave their JOBs, we help people with high, I told you high salaries transition, well a lot of them said to me, well I tried wholesaling, I tried fix and flip, I just felt like I was creating another job. Yep, you’re absolutely right. So.
How you make money is don’t do that, do instead what we call the three payday system and we federally trademarked it because it allows you to create cash right when you do a deal. Okay, that’s what you’re used to in real estate. Then it allows you to launch an income stream like you would like an income property like you have, but then it allows you to put a third payday in place when you cash out. Well, that’s like, if you were never gonna open a restaurant tomorrow, it’s not kind of a perfect model. Money now, money over time and money long-term, right? Any business. So that’s how you do it in real estate and you do it.
Creatively meaning you don’t use banks you do on a financing what they call subject to existing financing when you’re not signing you’re just paying them along and Third least purchase where you don’t own it you just control it so without we don’t have time today But those three ways of how you buy creatively and how you make money is you you practice the three payday system with which we’ve kind of cornered the whole entire market on literally
Money now, money over time, and money long term is a far better model than getting paid once and starting over. Share on X
Don Williams
Love that. Okay. So if somebody was going to start today, okay. And, you know, the market, who, who really knows, you know, when I started selling houses and sold 17 a couple of years later, the first month, a couple of years later, I was in Oklahoma city and there was over a two year supply on MLS and man, couldn’t give a house away.
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don Williams
I mean, people were like, take over my payments and I’ll buy you two round trip tickets to Hawaii. And, and nobody’s taking them up on the deal. but if somebody was going to start today and they, they’d never done it before. Like what’s the first step? What’s one action item they could, they could start with and they might need help later, but what’s, what’s like the first thing they could do.
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah, yeah, crazy.
I’ll give you first and if you’re okay with it, I’ll give you three steps that I’m thinking of. Cool. Before I give you the three steps, a lot of people conventionally, we talked earlier, what are some mistakes? Well, a lot of people think I’ve got to go get my license. I held the license for a while just for the listeners to know, and I also ran a brokerage where I had agents working for me. And I can tell you, don’t do that in hindsight. Here are the three steps instead. One.
Don Williams
Okay, I’m good.
Chris Prefontaine
Pick a niche in real estate. There’s a lot of cool niches. I’m biased to create it, but there’s a lot of great niches, right? Pick one that you can morally, ethically and value-wise get behind. And why I say it that way, Don, is you can flip land behind a computer and never talk to someone. You can look at fix and flips and wholesaling, which means you have to, you have to steal the property at 60 or 70 cents on the dollar. So it’s a little bit more predatory than what we do, but some people love it.
I say pick a niche you can get behind in every way. So that’s step one. Cause you’re to know where you’re going, right? If not, it’s shiny object syndrome and you it’s like drilling well, you never hit water. Second step would be, this is so important. Pick someone in the niche that has gone through some market cycles and is where you want to be. But back to the moral and ethical and kind of values, pick someone that also you can get behind and model because you and I at our age, both know people that have screwed up.
relationships with kids or spouse because they had success. I know too many. So for me, that’s not me. Like I want the whole picture or I don’t want to follow that person, right? But you pick, you pick someone that you can follow that’s been through times. Cause to your earlier point, when you opened the show, so many people have been in this business for a couple of years, sadly, a couple of months and they’re teaching. It’s just insane. So find that third and last step, put the blinders on for three to seven years and
Don’t deviate, don’t get shiny objects syndrome. Like in other words, people call me and go, okay, I’m gonna try what you guys do for six months. I then don’t do it. You’re wasting time. You’re gonna be pissed off and frustrated because real estate’s not getting rich quick, even though every social media ad that’s hitting you is telling you it is. It’s not. And they rent a Lamborghini and they rent a castle. That doesn’t, it’s not working. So pick something that you can say, I’m gonna commit to this for three to seven years. I’m not telling you it’s gonna take you that long to do a deal. I’m telling you if you pick that, your commitment level will be lined up properly to not quit.
That’s all. So long answer, then you ask, but I hope that’s okay.
Don Williams
No, wise counsel and truthfully people, I would tell you, you could take those three principles and they’re universal to any industry that you want to step into. ⁓ Entrepreneurs, myself included, more so earlier, but still there’s still a little bit of me that wants to chase shiny things that come by. Maybe that’s the next hot
Chris Prefontaine
Any you bet. You bet.
Human nature, right? We all.
Don Williams
great thing. know, so I think that’s amazing. Well, Chris, if somebody listening to the show wanted to reach out to get a smart real estate coach, how would they reach out to you or your company?
Chris Prefontaine
Yeah, thank you. I’ll give you two links because to your earlier point, I’m big on free only because I don’t want you to spend 10 cents until you go, Hey, that lines up with those three steps. I’ll do that. And if not, no, nothing lost except for a little time. So you can get our books. You don’t have to go to Amazon. The best sellers will send two out of the four right over to you. Just go to three, the number three, three paydays books.com forward slash proven. Just so I know it’s from a Dawn show. We’ll honor that.
And it’s not one of those free offers, Don, where you go free offer and you go all through the screen and then it says put in eight bucks for shipping. That’s not free. This is free. You won’t be asked for a credit card. Secondly, I did a recent, we posted a new, it’s been out for years, but we posted a new one January 1st, what we call a master’s class. It’s me for about 25 minutes or so. You don’t have to deal with anyone watching over your shoulder. You don’t have to get pitched on anything. You are just gonna watch a class that I teach.
for 25, 30 minutes, go to smartrealestatecoach.com forward slash masters class. Both of those are free. Enjoy and if there’s something you wanna look further, I’d love to chat with you.
Don Williams
Love that. Chris, been a pleasure to have you on the show today. You are a breath of fresh air in that big, hairy, gnarly industry called real estate. And so I’m grateful for you to be in with us today. You bet. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.
Chris Prefontaine
Thank you for having me, Don. Appreciate it.

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Title: E159 | How to Build a Lasting Legacy as an Entrepreneur: What Kevin Thompson Gets Right
Date: March 23, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-to-build-lasting-legacy-entrepreneur-what-kevin-thompson-gets-right/
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Content:
Most founders who ask how to build a lasting legacy as an entrepreneur are really asking a quieter question underneath it. They have hit the number. They have done the exit or come close to it. And the revenue they worked for did not feel the way they expected. Don Williams, host of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, puts it plainly in this episode: financial success without meaning leaves you hollow. Kevin Thompson of Impact and Legacy Collective has spent his career inside that gap, working with entrepreneurs who want their business to be a vehicle for real impact, not just a scoreboard. What comes out of this conversation is not theory. It is a working account of what entrepreneur mindset for impact not just profit actually looks like when someone builds their entire career around it, one relationship at a time.
Strategic Partnerships for Business Growth: The Story Behind 600 Deals
How did Kevin Thompson build 600 strategic partnerships across a single decade? It started with one partner, one teleseminar, and one decision nobody asked him to make. Kevin and his first partner, Mike Croft, introduced through mutual contact Joe Paulish, ran a training for home inspectors and generated $68,000 in sales. Kevin did not wait for the installment schedule to play out. He overnight-mailed a check with a handwritten note before anyone expected payment. That single act of paying sales partners quickly to build loyalty triggered a chain of introductions that compounded for twelve years. One partner became two. Two became dozens. The approach was never transactional. Kevin describes it as figuring out how to serve someone before thinking about what you might want from them. That is how to build long-term business relationships that convert, and it is also what the Go Giver philosophy looks like in a business development context rather than a motivational one.
Trust and Competence in Business Relationships: The Four-Way Intersection Framework
The most citable idea in this episode is Kevin Thompson’s four-way intersection model. Understanding what are the two types of trust in business relationships is where it starts. Kevin identifies trust in character and trust in competence as the two distinct forms of trust at play in any business relationship. Alongside those two sits a second pair: alignment of values and alignment of interests. What is the four-way intersection of trust and alignment? It is the point where all four of those elements are present between two people at the same time. Kevin’s position as a connector entrepreneur and conduit of trust is built around identifying when that intersection exists and making the introduction before the moment passes. Relationships that would normally take years to produce real results can move in a single conversation when that four-way alignment is in place. This is the operational logic behind Impact and Legacy Collective and the reason authentic leadership strategies for executives who want to build real partnerships should start here rather than with tactics.
Entrepreneurial Authenticity in Business Development: Nothing to Prove, Nothing to Hide
There is a phrase Kevin Thompson shares in this episode that a friend named Jesse gave him more than a decade ago. How does authentic leadership help entrepreneurs build legacy? Kevin’s answer lives in that phrase and in the shift that followed when he finally adopted it for himself. The nothing to prove nothing to hide entrepreneur mindset is not a slogan. It is a description of what it costs to keep performing a business version of yourself that is not real. Kevin is direct about the fact that he did not always operate from that place. He describes a version of himself that had plenty to hide and spent energy managing that. The weight that came off when he stopped is the same weight Don Williams connects to the word sincere, which he traces back to its Greek roots meaning pure and unrepaired. For any founder asking what is the Go Giver philosophy and how does it apply to business networking, the answer is less about generosity as a growth tactic and more about this: when you show up as the real version of yourself, the people who are meant to be in your world find you. The ones who are not, move on. And that is not a loss. That is how entrepreneur relationship building strategies work when they are built on something that lasts.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

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How to Build a Lasting Legacy as an Entrepreneur: What Kevin Thompson Gets Right
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Man, I got a real treat. Okay. I met today’s guest, maybe three weeks ago, and was introduced by a mutual friend of ours, Noah Rosenfarb. Thank you for the introduction. Today’s guest is Kevin Thompson of Impact and Legacy Collective. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Well, Don, I’m glad to be here and I’m looking forward to just having a conversation today.
Kevin and I met through a mutual friend and I did not know Kevin, but I knew of Kevin. You know, we kind of fished in the same oceans and caught some of the same fish and, know, figuratively, not literally, but it took a friend.
Introducing us and the friend said, Hey, you got to meet my other friend, Kevin, because you guys got the same vibe. I’m like, man, I don’t know what that means, but okay. And so he was absolutely right.
They were right. No one was right.
Okay. So impact and legacy collective. Tell us what you do, who you serve, why you do it. Tell us your story, Kevin.
Yeah. Well, so, okay. I’ll start with the, with the, I serve. What do I do thing? I, I serve entrepreneurs who are using their business as the vehicle to make their biggest impact in the world. And I get to be, I got the best job in the world, man. I get to be.
the connector and the conduit of trust for those entrepreneurs. And as a result of holding that position, I get to make introductions that lead to five figure, six figure, seven figure opportunities. And that happens all the time. And I’m to be making eight and nine figure impact too. And I’ll tell you, the way I look at this, Dawn, is this is me just
hanging out with a bunch of my cool friends, doing cool stuff together, you know, making a big impact in this world. And I’ll tell you, I, like I said, I think it’s pretty doggone awesome being me. I got the best job in the world and stuff. you know what? That’s, hey, you probably do too, you know?
And I thought I had the best job in the world.
Okay, so tell us, Impact and Legacy Collective, you’re not just introducing people, what do do?
No, why I bring the right kind of entrepreneurs together, like I just described those kind of entrepreneurs. I bring them together so that they can just have the right conversations with the right people for the right reasons. And, you know, you, the trust that man that that is such a huge piece of that because
There’s this intersection, this four-way intersection that, so there’s two kinds of trust. There’s trust in character and there’s trust in competence. And then there’s also alignment and there’s alignment of interests and there’s alignment of values. And right where those four come together, that intersection right there, that’s where magic happens. And that’s where stuff that, where relationships that could normally take
years to mature and get to the point where that kind of magic can happen. It can happen now, like right now. And, and I love being the guy who facilitates that for an, and obviously I can’t do that for everybody. I can only do that for people who show up a certain way and, and, and they, they have to have their app together too. You know, they got to have a track record of delivering results for clients and all of that kind of stuff. And
And, you know, they’re givers through and through. I mean, they always show up ready to help and serve and contribute, you know. And they’re just, like I said, they want to make their biggest impact in the world. And, you know, I love making introductions, making connections, opening relationships, beginning conversations for entrepreneurs like that, because I’ve seen it. I’ve done this so many times now.
And I’ve seen it and I said, heck, we just got through having an experience like that. And it was pretty doggone awesome watching what took place right there.
It was.
So Kevin had invited me to one of his client calls and I’m one of those people, and I highly recommend this if you’re an entrepreneur, take every meeting. You know, so many times people are like, well, I don’t know what that meeting is about, so I’m going to blow that off. I’m like, man, you don’t know. You may have walked past the gold mine because you didn’t take the meeting. So Kevin asked me to this meeting. I said, okay, yes, I’m going to practice my own preaching.
Great book.
Okay. Somebody invites you say yes. And, spent a couple hours with four unbelievable entrepreneurs. didn’t know any of them. And, it was, an amazing, example of people showing up to give first. And, you know, if you, if you’ve not read the book, the go giver, okay. Kevin is kind
of like the physical manifestation of the go giver.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay. And so, and that’s pretty high praise. but, but that’s kind of what’s happening there. So, okay. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions and, we’re going to wow and dazzle the audience. Then we’re going to sail off and go do something else today. Was there a specific moment in your life or career when you realized you weren’t just building success,
but it was your calling to help build.
legacy. And if so, what happened?
Yeah. So yes, there absolutely was. And so my previous business, I used to own a publishing company that we launched that company in 2003. And I ran that company through, through 2016. And, I.
did I partnered with a lot of entrepreneurs during those 12 years. In fact, almost 600 strategic partnerships I did during those 12 years. And without all those partners, my message would have not got out in the marketplace the way it did. Man, those partners really helped me get my message out into the marketplace and grow that business. And I was so incredibly grateful for all of those partners.
just because of the impact that they had not only on my life, but just allowing me to serve clients through running that business and stuff. So the impact was so much bigger. And, and, and, you know, that’s when I really started learning, and, really came to understand my gift for being this connector and conduit of trust. because, know, I never wanted to be the guy with my handouts and Hey, will you do this thing? Will you promote me and the, and, know,
So I always figured out, how can I serve you? And so I would just have conversations with people. And you know, I love talking with entrepreneurs. I love hearing what they’re working on, what they’re up to, what’s got them fired up, what’s got them jazzed, what challenges they’re facing and stuff. And I always just naturally default to who do I know who might be able to help them. And I just started.
I never wanted to be the guy with my hand out asking for something. I always started with, ‘How can I serve you?’ Share on X
making introductions and people were grateful. And then just after a conversation like that, where they’re like, well, can’t tell me about you and what you got going. How can I help you? Yeah, no. And that would lead to me telling them about that. so and I took such good care of my partners. some of the things that we saw, the very first one I ever did was with this guy, Mike Croft.
And I had met him through our mutual friend, Joe Paulish, had introduced Mike and I. And Mike and I did this partnership together. Mike worked with home inspectors. And we ended up doing this teleseminar and I did a presentation for his folks and did a training for them. And at the end, we made an offer and I said, hey, if you guys, if this resonates with you, it makes sense. If you feel I might be able to help you, here’s what that would look like. Here’s what the investment would be.
And we made like 68,000 in sales from that. uh, and, but we were, we were offering the training we offered it at three monthly installments of three 97. So it was $1191 price point, three, three installments of three 97. And I’m like, well, you know, if I was Mike, um, I’d appreciate getting paid quickly. And, and I liked the guy. And so I’m like, you know what?
I’m just going to overnight him a check. I know I’m going to overnight him a check based on the percent we agreed upon for the installments that have come in already. And, and whatever refunds or returns we get, you know, that’ll come out in the wash in 30 and 60 days. And so I just wrote him a handwritten note and said, Hey Mike, man, it was really great doing this project with you. you know, I mean, it was, I just had such a great experience and I hope it was a great experience for you too. And here’s a, here’s a check for you.
Uh, and I’ll be sending you two more checks in one and one and 30 days and one in 60 days. And I put it in an overnight envelope and I sent it to it. And he called me the next day, Dawn, and he was completely beside himself. And he’s like, Kevin, he’s like, I have never ever had anybody overnight me a check like that. That’s never happened before. And.
He’s I gotta tell you, he’s at the whole experience from beginning to end was an absolutely amazing experience. And he’s I know other people who would appreciate that because man, he’s a, you just made me, he’s I’ve, I’ve got people calling the office and emailing us telling us how even people who didn’t invest saying, wow, thanks so much for doing that thing with Kevin. That was really amazing. You know? And so, Mike, he’s like,
I’ve got some other people I want to connect you with. Can I make some introductions for you? And I’m like, yeah. I said, you know what? I said, if you’re going to do that, I said, you know what? I’ll even share a percentage of the revenue that comes from that too. And I was like, so I said, how about if I give you, if they decide to do something with me, I’ll do the same thing I did with you. And then I’ll give you 10 % as well as a thank you for the introduction and stuff. And it was through doing that stuff, Dawn, is what allowed me that
One partner led to another to another and that’s how I did almost 600 strategic partnerships over those years and stuff. so, and the first like really big introduction I made for these two guys, was Perry Marshall and Brian Kurtz. It was 15 years ago now, actually almost 16 now.
Shocking.
those guys, man, they went on to do so many amazing things together. And even with like, within 10 months, they were hosting this big event together. And, and that’s what first got me thinking, man, wouldn’t it be cool if you could have a business where you could just do that all the time, you know? And, and, and so, you know, that seed got planted and I’ll tell you what though, it, took years to germinate and all the BS and all the stuff.
that I would tell myself of, you know, I mean, so I don’t know how deep you want me to go, but yeah, having the idea to reality, took some, well, I mean, so that was 16 years ago. It’s been my full-time gig since August of 2017. for nine years now, so, so nine minus, so that’s seven years it took to germinate. It took some time for sure.
Well, you know, there’s lot of 20 year overnight successes out there. And so seven is not bad actually, you know, and, and I love that concept of you guys had a deal. He was going to share some revenue, but as soon as you got the revenue, you stroke him a check, put it in an overnight and it to him. And one thing I share with all of my clients that I’m helping grow their sales.
Yeah, right?
is that we want to pay salespeople as much as we can, as often as we can, and as quickly as we can. And that goes against HR, that goes against Harvard Business School, that goes against almost everybody in business. But I’m like, except when you’re talking with people who bring money into the organization, we want to reward them as quickly and as often as possible. Money is a river. It’s flowing from…
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
somewhere, to, someplace else. We want to be where it’s flowing to, not from. And if you treat it like a lake, okay, I’m just going to park it all here and I’ll let a little out here and there. It won’t work as well. And there’ll be a lot of CPAs who’ll argue with me, but let them do your taxes. Let me show you how to ring the cash register because it’s a different thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so I’m going to ask you a question about the hard truth. A lot of leaders, most leaders, I think every leader, if you ask them, they say, yeah, I want to create impact. want to create legacy. But you and I know it’s only a minority that actually live it. People will say it, but not do it. What do you think most people are unwilling to give up that keeps them stuck at just
surface level success.
Hmm, interesting. I’ve never been asked that question before. What were they not willing to give up? Yeah.
or what keeps them stuck where they don’t cross over? Cause it’s very common. It’s cliche with entrepreneurs. I made a lot of money. Maybe they had a big exit and, then their question is, is that
all there is? Was that okay. Because it’s because just the financial piece, I’m not knocking that. That’s why they went into business, but that will leave you hollow. Okay.
Yeah,
if there’s not real meaning, if there’s not that legacy. And to me, legacy is not just how much money you leave. It’s like, what are people gonna miss when you’re gone?
Legacy is not just how much money you leave—it’s what people are going to miss when you’re gone. Share on X
You bet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So any thoughts on
what people might be unwilling to give up to step into their
Well, so,
so much of this is just, you know, trying to control everything, you know, and, and, you know, we were actually talking about this earlier today, this, this whole notion of just being able to show up and be
Hmm.
ourselves, just be our real genuine self. And most people, especially entrepreneurs, are really scared to do that. You know, they want to show up a certain way because they believe, I need to show up a certain way, especially in business. You know, I need to show up a certain way. I need to have my game face on and what have you, you know. And, no, honey, I’m on a call. Thank you. My granddaughter just came over and she’s going to have lunch with me this afternoon. She’s already, Papa.
Good for her. We’ll put her on the show
too.
Yeah, we should. But you know, we, we, when we just, we don’t have to put that game face on. We don’t have to show up a certain way. We don’t have to be concerned about, well, what would people think of me if they knew that? You know, and when we can just drop all that, you know, my buddy, Jesse, you he said he made a comment to me 12 years ago.
When we first were meeting and, and he said this thing to me, he said, he’s like, Kevin, he I got nothing to prove and nothing to hide. And I, as soon as he said that, I’m like, dang, that must be an awesome way to show up. You know? Cause I, at that time I felt like I had plenty to hide, you know, there was all kinds of stuff about me that I’m like, Oh, I don’t want people to know that, you know? And, and, but now, you know what? Now I do come from that.
We don’t have to show up a certain way in business. When we drop the game face and just be ourselves, everything changes. Share on X
Hmm.
place, nothing to prove and nothing to hide. And I’m going to tell you what you talk about having a weight lifted off of you, man. When we can just show up and just be us. That is an absolute game changer.
And the counterintuitive benefit is this, the world will love the real you and will hate the fake you. Now that doesn’t mean if you’re being you, you won’t have some haters. You will. Okay. But, but it’ll be a minority of people who experience you because people are drawn to when I was early on, when I was a brand new salesman.
Yes, yes.
Top salesmen in the country. People would ask me how I do it. I’m like, I don’t really know. I can tell you people like to buy from me and I let them. I would say this, I’m very sincere. sincerity, sincere comes from two Greek words, sin and sera, which basically means pure. And it was, it was a whack stamp put on a vase that would hold water, which meant it had never been repaired. Okay. It’s where you saw it early on.
Today we would use the word authentic, okay, instead of sincere. They’re almost interchangeable, but yeah, if you’ll be the real you, the people who are your fans will find you. And the people who aren’t, they’ll move on and find somebody else and that’s okay. ⁓ If a leader, if somebody comes to you and they wanted to create real legacy,
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
not just revenue. What’s a decision you’d counsel them to make?
even if it
may be cost them in the short term.
Well, I’ll tell you that’s easy hands down focus on relationships and not just business relationships, just all relate relationships in every aspect of your life. Yeah, no, just place a priority on that. And because I’ll tell you what you never know.
who you’re talking with. You never know what experience they’ve got. You never know who they know. And it doesn’t matter who they are. It could be the gal serving you lunch at a restaurant that you like going to and stuff. It could be the gal at the post office. It could be anybody. And focus on relationships. And I’ll tell ya, when we just…
Focus on relationships—not just business relationships, but relationships in every area of your life. Share on X
Cause here, I’ll tell you, I, I have been really blessed. I, you know, entrepreneurs in my life, you know, on, especially over the last three and a half, there was, it wasn’t like things weren’t going great before we launched the million dollar relationships podcast almost for April will be four years. I mean, it’s amazing to think that four years has gone by, but there was definitely life before the podcast and life after the podcast. And that podcast.
We’ve released little over 350 episodes now and and we it just continues to attract amazing Entrepreneurs into my life. So I mean, you know, I grew up in marketing I mean I started studying marketing under Joe Polish in 1995 and I learned all about funnels and this and that and and you know I will tell you who would have ever known that the podcast would have become such an amazing
I don’t know, just lead magnet, just people coming into my life. And entrepreneurs, what’s so cool is that nobody comes on the Million Dollar Relationships podcast if they don’t care about relationships. They don’t show up there. And so, and you know, when we focus on relationships and…
Yeah. Yeah.
And I’ll tell you, you know, I’ve interviewed people, you know, running businesses at half a million all the way up to 750 million and everything in between. And what I can tell you is that we are all way more alike than we are different. We are all doing the best we can with what we’ve got. And there’s not a single one of us that gets too much appreciation.
We all want more appreciation. And so for us, the big takeaway is be genuinely appreciative of people and let them know it because you know it just will open so many doors and so many conversations.
Use your words.
Yep. Use your words. And so, you know, one of the things I share with my clients is this, is we have to see things from the other person’s point of view. So much so that our point of view almost doesn’t matter because people will do what’s in their best interest naturally. And so I have to position my offer.
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. In a way that it’s in their best interest and then they’ll buy it on their own. You won’t have to try and sell it. Okay. Cause they’re going to do what’s in their best interest, but to do that, I have to see things from their point of view. have to put their glasses on. what I see does not matter.
Yeah.
If someone watching this interview wanted to know, they didn’t know if they were truly building a legacy or if they were just staying busy.
Is there a question you’d tell them they should ask themselves?
Well, what? Yeah. What are people? What are people saying about you? You know, what are people saying about you? And are they? What are they saying about you that when you’re not when you’re not around?
that word gets back to you kind of a thing. That’s a really good indicator right there.
What are people saying about you when you’re not in the room? That’s a real indicator of legacy. Share on X
I
agree, I think that is the question. Okay, last question. This is the tough, and I’ll ask you some tough ones, but this is the toughest.
Okay.
Kevin, when your
work is finished, what do you hope is different in the world? Because Kevin Thompson existed.
I hope that all of these entrepreneurs that I’ve had the privilege of just either talking with or being invited into their world a little bit. I hope that they all just go on to focus on expanding their relationships and their life and in their world and stuff. That would be an amazing outcome.
That would be an amazing outcome. You’re setting an absolutely phenomenal example for that. Kevin’s been my pleasure to have you on the show today.
Same, same, have really enjoyed it, Don.
Folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

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Title: E158 | Why Culture Beats Strategy in Leadership: Lessons from David Deane-Spread
Date: March 16, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/why-culture-beats-strategy-leadership-lessons-david-deane-spread/
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Content:
Most leaders spend years refining strategy, yet the companies that truly succeed often win because of something far less obvious: culture.
In a recent episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams speaks with David Deane-Spread, leadership coach and founder of MediTude, about the real drivers behind successful organizations. Drawing on nearly three decades of experience coaching CEOs, executives, and senior leaders, David explains why companies that build strong workplace culture often outperform those that rely only on strategy. When employees feel respected, heard, and supported, they deliver better service and stronger results for customers.
The conversation also explores how modern business leadership requires openness, listening, and collaboration. David highlights the importance of psychological safety in teams, where employees can respectfully challenge leaders and contribute ideas. He also shares a practical leadership approach built around observing, listening, asking questions, and speaking less. These simple habits help leaders build stronger teams, encourage accountability, and create high-performing organizations.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Why-Culture-Beats-Strategy-in-Leadership-David-Deane-Spread.mp3
Why Culture Beats Strategy in Leadership: Lessons from David Deane-Spread
 
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a long distance super guest to share with you today. have David Deanspred from MediTude all the way from Perth, Western Australia. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Donna. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
Yeah. So, we’re thrilled to have you and we could tell by your accent that you were not from West Texas and, a little further West than that. So David, tell us what, you do. Your company is Metatude. Tell us what your company does, who you do that with, why you do it. You know, tell us your, your business story.
Hahaha.
Sure, the business story is that for the last coming up 27 years, I’ve been coaching and helping senior leaders, CEOs, board members, and senior executives to transform their business from being struggling or starting or sailing the business or wanting to sell the business to becoming the employer and provider of choice in their space.
And I can’t think of a better objective for any business to want to have anything other than that goal, those goals. To be the best employer and then leverage that to be the best provider. It underpins the value of the business.
I love that.
Yeah. think, you know, culture beats strategy, pardon me, every time. and so the, being the best employer doesn’t necessarily mean paying the most, doesn’t necessarily mean being the nicest. It means being the most open and honest and opportunities and, you know, treating people the way you’d want to be treated.
Being the best employer isn’t about paying the most — it’s about being open, honest, and treating people the way you’d want to be treated. Share on X
Yeah.
And most people are looking for fair above all else. You know, there’s a saying, what’s that old saying? Good help is hard to find. And I think that’s very true. But in my 30 some years as an employer, I would also tell you that good companies to work for are hard to find too. And so, you you want to be that good company.
Yeah.
because it makes it really easy to get good help. Yeah.
and to keep it and to it to attract and keep the talent. And I actually
think that I think that you said that culture beats strategy. I actually think culture is strategy. Not the whole of it, but it’s a big part of it.
Culture beats strategy, but I believe culture is strategy — not all of it, but a big part of it. Share on X
⁓ think, I,
yeah, I, totally, I totally agree. know, Herb Kelleher, who was the founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, he was kind of the first guy to say the customer isn’t always right. And in reality, we know the customer isn’t always right. Now they are always paying the bills and we should always treat them with that importance, but face it, they’re not always right.
Herb said, I will take care of my people and my people in turn will take care of my customers. And so, you know, they were a fun, fun place to work. know, HR wasn’t called HR. It was the people department. You know, Herb was a little crazy. He would ride his motorcycle in the airport terminal and, you know, but they were, they had fun at work and hey, that’s a
Exactly. And the experience… Go ahead.
big piece of a great culture is having fun while you’re doing it.
Absolutely, absolutely. And look, you know, there’s no doubt about it, that the way the leadership treats their employees is the way the employee treats the customer.
How leadership treats employees is exactly how employees will treat the customer. Share on X
I buy that. So let’s talk about mindset a little bit. Tell me about a moment in your life when either mindset failed you or failed a client. And what did you change that altered that afterward?
Look, the one that I’m using a lot now at the moment is the equality and the equal importance of leadership versus followership. They are both equally important. If you ask a follower what they want from a leader, and you listen to what they say, and then you ask a leader what you want from a follower,
tell me more.
then you discover there’s a lot of similarity if they’re mature, if they’re developed. And the reality is we want a follower to have the psychological safety and the confidence to be able to respectfully and effectively challenge a leader. Leader’s not always right. Leader doesn’t know everything. And the leader has a particular point of view and it’s quite different.
sometimes to the follower who’s on the front line, who mostly is the party making the money. They’re the one delivering the service and the leaders are back a bit looking at other things as well. And so they need to work together. They’re two sides of the same coin, equally important. And once the followers know that the leader gets that and appreciates that and is then more listening,
and is more inclusive. The accountability always remains with the leader, but the responsibility and the authority lies with the empowered follower, team member. And I come from a military and a special forces and intelligence and a law enforcement background. And we had our teams and as I led those teams, I knew and I expected my people to challenge me.
Leadership and followership are equally important — leaders aren’t always right, and followers must feel safe to challenge them. Share on X
I love that.
if what I was doing wasn’t up to standard or wasn’t taking us down the path that we’d agreed on. And if they didn’t challenge me, then I’d question them and say, why aren’t you challenging me? What am I doing that’s stopping you from challenging me? Or what do you need to be more comfortable challenging me?
Yeah.
I think the military provides some of the finest leadership training available in the world. And one thing I learned from a group of fighter pilots that I was working with was this, you know, they prep and they plan, you know, the mission there, and then they go do the mission.
And then they debrief on the mission. What do we do right? What do we do wrong? What, you made a decision here. Why bop to bop to bop to bop. And they spent about as much time in the debrief part as they did in the prep and the execution part put together. And, and that’s how they were able to continue to.
Absolutely.
⁓ perform at a very, very high level. And another group, which was multi-branch spec ops people here in the States. And we were doing close quarter, what are they called? CQB, know, clearing simulated guns, simulated ammunition. was interesting that the kind of the concept of what I’ll call
fluid leadership. So you might be the team lead. Okay, you might be the team leader, but at a certain point in the mission, maybe the leadership role rolls to another team member. And, you know, either you’re injured or, or there’s just something that requires this person to step up. And it was interesting.
Correct.
Well, that person’s
got better vision or might be closer to the action and they’ve got a better view of what’s going on and they can call it.
Yeah. Or they had the special skill, you know, above and beyond. And so it was interesting to me and to watch these pros. I mean, I got to play along and that was fascinating, but to watch these pros do it, you know, they kind of passed the mantle of leadership, really without speaking.
Yep. Yep.
You know, they just, they just knew what they were doing. so unbelievable example of teamwork and, and leadership. I have real strong thoughts on, you know, I think a lot of people are in positions of leadership, but maybe you’re not leading. And to me, there’s a distinction between someone who has a leader and someone who’s in a position of leadership. They may not be the same thing. And a leader.
Yeah, was automatic.
Yep.
has to have at least one follower, least if they stop and turn around, there has to be at least one person that of their own will is following them. And by definition, a leader has to be going somewhere. You can’t be stagnant and be a leader. If you’re not going somewhere, you can’t lead.
A leader must have at least one follower, and by definition a leader must be going somewhere — you can’t be stagnant and still lead. Share on X
They have to lead. have to lead. Now, leadership is
a verb.
It is a verb. love that.
You know,
it’s definitely that. And the other side of that is the, in commerce, they do not spend enough time training.
No, no.
because you have to train
to do that. mean, when we went, before we ever executed an operation, we rehearsed. We’d even build a model of the premises and we’d do the timing, we’d do the practice, we’d get it right, we’d use a stopwatch if necessary. Because we had an infill and an ex-fill, we had time deadlines, and we had to also realize that we weren’t really in control. We’re not in control.
Yeah. Just like in business,
we’re not really in control. Yeah.
We’re not really in
control, you know, it’s a myth. But the only thing we can control is ourself, our own thoughts, our own feelings, our own words and our own actions. And the outcome is not dependent entirely upon that because there are other inputs. And we’re to be alert to that and flexible enough to adapt.
The only things we truly control are our own thoughts, feelings, words, and actions — outcomes are influenced by many other inputs. Share on X
And I think that once a leader realizes that what they’re thinking are just thoughts, then they may or may not be accurate. Somebody else’s thought may be… We all kind of have the default position that, hey, I’m right and everybody else is wrong, but the reality is we don’t…
At speed.
Yeah.
have the corner on human knowledge and, and probably statistically we’re wrong far more than we’re right. And so you’ve got to be open-minded to, to hear other opinions, other viewpoints from other people. know when I was an early leader, I kept trying to hire people that looked, walked, act and talked like me. And one, that was hard. And two, it wasn’t a great team. It didn’t build a great team.
Today, I’m constantly looking for people who have skills, ideas, perspectives that are different from everybody else on the team. Okay. Because that’s how we’re actually the strongest. And then I’m a big believer in, what I would call transformational leadership, where I really think a business leader only has a couple of jobs. One cast and communicate the mission.
Yeah.
the, whatever the vision is for the company and, and say it so much that people laugh at you. Okay. And when they laugh, just keep telling them, okay, this is the vision. This is the mission. This is the vision, this is the mission. And, and then job two is probably just go get the best people on the planet to help make that reality. And then job three is give them what they need to help them get the job done. Um, because if.
Yeah.
If we have to do everything ourselves, you know, our output is pretty small. But if other people… Go ahead.
That’s correct, absolutely.
We have to be inclusive. We have to listen and then we have to, in fact, I use the an expression called OLAAT, O-L-A-R-T, observe, listen, ask, rarely tell.
Observe, listen, ask, and rarely tell — that’s how leaders become inclusive and effective. Share on X
I love that. I love that. A lot of the work I do and…
And if we can come up from the…
Go ahead.
lot of the work I do in selling is, you know, question sell.
People don’t like to be told. ⁓ Questions sell. People want to give you their opinion. And when you provide an environment where they’re encouraged to do that, they will, and they will come up with some phenomenal ideas. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me this.
Curiosity and Discovery.
Yeah absolutely without a shadow of it out. Give them a chance.
Like what’s the most common leadership fail you see from incoming clients?
the inability to have a necessary and confronting conversation.
The most common leadership failure is the inability to have a necessary, confronting conversation. Share on X
Hmm.
It is the big one. And you know, it’s commonly called a difficult conversation. And I’ve actually reframed that as a necessary conversation. And there are many classes of those. It’s about dealing with unacceptable behavior and unacceptable performance, mainly. How do we do that and keep trust and respect on the one hand, and on the other hand, necessary conversations to discover what’s really going on.
I love that. think communication is a foundational skills leadership and anybody can have the happy conversations, but great leaders can. What Zig Ziglar used to say, can you step on their toes without ruining their shoeshine? And you know, to give people some room to accept feedback and the simple way to do that,
Yeah.
that I share with my clients is this, is if you’re open to feedback, they’ll be open to feedback.
Absolutely. We model the way.
Yeah.
Yeah, you have to lead. You have to lead. If you’re open, they’ll be open. And it’s kind of amazing what a team, what a high functioning team can accomplish as opposed to a bunch of people that are pulling in different directions.
You have to be the example.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
100 % alignment.
So
alignment. David, if somebody wanted to reach out to you for leadership improvement, leadership training, what would be the easiest way for them to get ahold of you?
Go to my website, metattude.com. Everything’s there. Yeah.
Spell that for us, sure we get it right.
mic echo tango, alpha tango tango uniform delta echo.
Okay. Metattude.com. Yeah. Love that. David, it’s been a real pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much.
Metitude. Yep.
It’s a real pleasure being here. Thank you very much, Don.
You bet. And that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show with David from Perth, Western Australia. See you next time. Bye.

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Title: E157 | Noah Rosenfarb’s 20% Rule: The Exit Strategy Founders Miss
Date: March 10, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/noah-rosenfarb-20-percent-rule-exit-strategy-tax-strategy/
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Content:
Many founders build impressive revenue but silently fear they are not building real wealth. Noah Rosenfarb’s story offers a clear look at why that happens and what to do next.
Every entrepreneur reaches a point where revenue alone stops feeling like progress. In this conversation, Noah Rosenfarb explains why so many high earning founders are left surprised at tax time and why traditional accounting advice often fails to protect them. He shares how WealthThrive began after years of watching seven and eight figure earners operate without any real tax plan and lose money they could have kept with simple, consistent planning.
One of Noah’s most practical insights is his 20 percent rule. If you want a certain income after selling your business, build at least 20 percent of that income before your exit. This helps founders understand investing long before they leave their company and prevents the emotional crash many feel after depending on a single liquidity event. Studies of business owners show that most feel unprepared for life after selling, which makes Noah’s advice even more valuable.
Noah also explains how freedom grows when a founder builds a team capable of leading without constant oversight. He spent a year traveling with his wife and daughter while his company continued to operate smoothly, a result of trust and clear roles rather than constant supervision. His experience reflects a common pattern. Many entrepreneurs stay overwhelmed not because their work is too large but because they never allow others to take ownership.
Toward the end of the conversation, Noah shares how one unexpected purchase changed his relationship with money. Buying a large boat forced him to examine the tension between saving well and allowing himself to enjoy what he built. It taught him to thank his younger self for disciplined decisions and give his present self permission to live a fuller life. His perspective on legacy and storytelling rounds out the discussion, reminding listeners that wealth is both financial and personal.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/The-20-Percent-Rule-Every-Founder-Should-Know-with-Noah-Rosenfarb_Podcast.mp3
How Noah Rosenfarb Helps Founders Build Wealth That Lasts
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. What a great guest. And he kind of bent over backwards to attend today’s even though he lives in South Florida for a while, he’s living in Europe. And so I think he’s coming in from Paris today. So Noah Rosenfarb, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to getting the conversation in with you.
thrilled that you joined us today. And so before we get in, before we get into it, tell us the name of your company, who you serve, why you do that. Tell us all that good stuff and be generous to yourself.
Gladly. The company is Wealth Thrive. So it’s the combination of Wealth, W-E-A-L-T-H and Thrive. But we just put them together, only one TH, W-E-A-L-T-H-R-I-V-E, wealththrive.com. And what we do is we help very successful entrepreneurs develop their tax strategy. What we found is that so many of my peers…
have no tax strategy. They just go to their accountant and their accountant tells them how much they owe and they get shocked and they ask what they could do and the accountant says, you know, not really anything and on their way they go. so happy to share the origin story of how I got into that business. But that’s what we’ve been doing now for the last couple of years.
Yeah, so I know a little bit about the origins, but please share it with the audience if you don’t mind.
So there came a time in my life where I was what most people would call retired. I had sold an operating business back in 2014. It was a family office for divorced women. And I was living in South Florida and just spending my time investing my money in other businesses and real estate. And I started sharing with my EO peers. You know, we were both part of that entrepreneurs organization.
I just started sharing with the tax strategies that I had been using as a third generation CPA that was familiar with the power of tax strategy. And kind of one thing led to another. And all of a sudden I started speaking about how entrepreneurs should develop their tax strategies. And I was doing it just as pure goodwill. And people started asking me for help. And I was, you know, I’m not looking for a job. And finally in 2020 during COVID.
I kind of realized I’ve got all this time on my hands. I’m not doing all the things that I generally love to do. Let me invest in building a team of accountants, entrepreneurs, financial planners, and lawyers. And let me train them in the tax strategies that I’ve been using for my family and let me build a business. And so that’s what I did. And now it’s five years later and it’s been really, really incredibly rewarding.
Well, I love that and the marketer and sales guru in me, what I key on is this. had people coming up asking me to, can you help me? Can you help me? Can you help me? And if you’re an entrepreneur and you sell product A, but people keep asking you about product B, okay, take the clue. Switch to product B. There’s real market demand for that. And where many people kind of
feel uncomfortable or like they struggle with selling. And certainly in product A that may happen, but in product B that’s not happening. so, listen to the knock on the door and walk through the door. So.
If people keep knocking on your door asking for the same thing, it is usually a sign that your real business opportunity is sitting right in front of you. Share on X
It was the first time in my professional career where people really resonated with what it was that was my depth of expertise. And what kind of came about was that I’m now selling medicine instead of vitamins. Kind of in my prior careers, I was always trying to give people what I thought they needed, but they didn’t want it. And now I’ve got something that everybody wants.
Interestingly, we serve a very small segment because we’re dealing with seven-figure and eight-figure income earners, but they definitely want it and they need it.
Yeah, absolutely. And so the lesson there is this, it’s easier to sell what people want to buy than it is to sell what you want them to buy. Okay. And that’s pretty elementary, but there’s wisdom there. you no, talk, you don’t just talk about wealth. mean, you live it, you study it, you teach it. What’s the moment you realized that the traditional, I’ll just say entrepreneur’s view of wealth.
No doubt about it.
just wasn’t enough. And that lifestyle design has to be part of the equation.
there’s a lot of stories I could share. would say the earliest story was when I was working in my dad’s accounting firm and I was working, my expertise was as a expert witness in divorce court. So I would testify about how much money people made and how much their businesses were worth. And I helped settle over a thousand divorces. And in that role, had, you know, I build my time. And so it was my fifth wedding anniversary and my wife and I wanted to go on a two week vacation and my
the partner that I worked for who wasn’t my father, said, why don’t you go for a week and then come back for a couple of weeks and then you could go do the second week. And I realized then that, you know, I needed to be in business for myself. I needed to create the life that I wanted. And I started playing a game where I’d buy a lottery ticket and I’d think about all the things that would change if I won. Who would I spend more time with and who would I spend less time with and what are the things I’d start doing?
and what are the things I’d stop doing. And every time I play that game, I’d figure out that there were things I could do if I was willing to be more thoughtful on my planning and more courageous in my actions. And so that’s kind of helped me build a life that I call rich beyond money.
Love that thoughtful in my planning, courageous in my actions. That’s some gold there. So many entrepreneurs chase revenue and guys like me help them build that top line. But I think many entrepreneurs forget about turning that revenue into wealth. know, they generate a lot of dollars, but they’re not.
They’re not really generating wealth. What’s a big mindset mistake that you think high-earning founders make when it comes to keeping and enjoying their money?
On the keeping and enjoying, I’d say there’s almost two different answers because keeping it and enjoying it are sometimes at odds with one another. I find that some of that is personality driven. So there are people that are good at making money and then there are people that are good at accumulating money and not always are they the same type.
A lot of times people who are good at making money just find they just find ways to spend it. And, you know, that never seems to be enough. And then on the flip side, you have entrepreneurs that maybe they’re just slow and steady, but they’ve always been good savers. I would put myself in that category. I never earned a significant income. I just was very good at saving my money and compounding my savings. And I think the mistake most entrepreneurs make is not understanding their financial plan.
Most entrepreneurs think they’ll sell their business one day and everything will fall into place. It rarely works that way unless they understand their financial plan long before the exit. Share on X
So a lot of the entrepreneurs that I meet, their plan is one day I’ll sell my business and then I’ll retire. And that plan unfortunately doesn’t always create an outcome that leads to more happiness in their life. So the tip that I have is before you think about listing your company for sale, find ways to generate 20 % of the monthly income that you want before you sell. And so typically that’s gonna be by testing
the types of investments you’re going to want to make after you sell your business. That might be investing in other privately held companies and startups. It might be investing in real estate. It might be investing in the stock market. It might be investing in bonds, you know, and being a kind of no risk investor. But how every, you know, if you want 40 grand a month of income in retirement, well, how are you going to get eight grand a month now? And what that will allow you to do is build the muscle.
of becoming an investor that’s focused on generating income.
Love that build, that muscle. So, you you’ve built and exited companies, advised families and recently separated families and live globally. If a founder said, Hey, I want to reduce stress and increase my freedom in the next 12 months, where’s a good place you’d tell them to start.
Freedom always comes back to your team. If the business only works when you’re sitting in the chair, you don’t have freedom yet. Share on X
their team. It always has to do with your team. Who’s surrounding you and are they supporting you in your goals and objectives, not just inside the company, but outside the company. know, Don, you mentioned at the front end that I’m zooming in from Paris. I’m spending a year traveling with my wife and daughter. And this wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t have a team around me that
was supportive of that goal. They recognized that, you know, I don’t need this business exists because I’m here to serve people. But if the business doesn’t also serve me, I’m not going to be in it. And so they all kind of understand what their role is in ensuring that they can serve our clients, that they can be the ones that carry the laboring ore and that I’m here to support them, to help them grow, to…
you know, bring in new ideas and fresh ideas and kind of be at my highest and best use. And I think too often what I find is that entrepreneurs don’t have the right visionary integrator pairing, the rocket fuel that you know, Wickman talked about. And so many of the entrepreneurs are stuck in kind of Michael Gerber’s E-Myth where they’re so good at doing the work that they customers expect that they never get out of their own way.
to let other people rise up and take some of the burden off their plate.
I love that. And I can tell you my own journey, I don’t know, it 10 years ago. was the first time I took an extended trip and it was the two week trip. Okay. And I’ve done eight week trips. I’ve done the year trip yet. At the year trip, I’m not coming back. I don’t think, but at the two week trip and the interesting thing I learned was this. Did my team run things perfectly? No.
Did, when I was in the captain’s chair, did I run things perfectly? No. And so I do know this, if you want other people to lead, you have to actually get your rear out of the seat and let somebody sit down and try the controls. And so many entrepreneurs just hyperventilate over that thought. But remember, will they do it perfectly? Probably not. Are you doing it perfectly?
I’m just guessing, probably not. And so it’ll just be a little different imperfect.
What’s a time when your philosophy on money, and you’ve been a CPA, and I think your father was a CPA, and I think your grandfather was a CPA.
and my grandfather, and my father-in-law as well. It’s all around me. Yeah, a Jewish accountant, imagine that.
Okay. Shocking. Never heard of it. Never heard of it. What’s a time when your philosophy on money completely evolved and what triggered it?
I bought a boat and that really shifted my relationship with money. And it really helped train me to be a better spender. I’ve always been a really good saver. And one of the goals I’ve had since I was a kid is I always wanted to own a boat. My wife has no interest in boating. And so I, you know, acquired this, you know, large boat.
and three bedrooms and two bathrooms and full-time captain and the bills were just coming in left and right. And it was so uncomfortable for me. I guess I had a taste of that when I built a home, my wife and I built our home from a clean sheet of paper. And that process also had some similar stress around money because you get bills out of nowhere, but the boat was more unnecessary. It was too.
totally purely for my pleasure and enjoyment. And I had never really incurred an expense that was really just for me, and one that was so significant. And so what it led me to do was change my perspective on so many other things like the we live in South Florida, the Miami Heat, we’re in the, you know, NBA playoffs.
I would never buy an NBA playoff ticket. Well, now all of a sudden I look at one of these invoices that I get out of left field for the boat. Yeah, so all four of us went to every round of the playoffs. And it really helped me loosen up. And it also encouraged me to develop a new mantra when I started, you know, feeling some anxiety about enjoying the success that I’ve had. And I would say, you know, Noah, this is the time to thank your younger self.
for being frugal and making all those good smart financial decisions. And now you don’t have to be so frugal anymore.
Man, thank you.
Yeah. Thank your younger self. That’s gold there. So when you think about legacy and not just money, but impact, what does that look like for Noah?
It’s really about sharing my experience. So I’ve become a writer, you know, never really thought as a kid that I’d write five books or I produced like a quarterly newsletter just about my life and what’s going on in my life. And part of the reason I started that when I turned 40 was really because my wife’s like a family historian. She takes over 4,000 images a year and puts them into carefully crafted albums for each of our kids. They each get every year.
on their birthday, an amazing album filled with basically the story that took place for that calendar year. And there was no narrative to go with it of what was enabling us to create these amazing experiences and memories. And so I wanted to capture that so that the kids could kind of go back to what was dad doing at the time that was kind of feeding this capability. And so sharing that experience, not just for the benefit of my kids,
and for the benefit of, you know, whomever is interested and the feedback that I’ve gotten, which has been incredibly positive, but also going out and being a speaker and sharing some of the experiences I’ve had and developing the framework to become rich beyond money, really sitting down and assessing what are the things that I’ve learned over time that I could share with others that may help them become rich beyond money to get the life that ultimately they want to live.
Thank you very much. Okay, last question. Finish this sentence. True wealth begins for the entrepreneur when they finally…
have financial independence, they have their ideal life, so they spend time the way they want, and they still have meaning and purpose in their life.
True wealth begins when you have financial independence, you live the life you actually want, and you still have meaning and purpose. Share on X
No, it’s been my pleasure. I think I reserve the right to recall the witness at a later date for a deeper discussion. What is the simplest way for a listener to reach out to your company?
with pleasure.
If you’re interested in reducing your taxes go to talkabouttax.com and you could fill out a form there get on a call with my team We’ll gladly introduce you to some resources that we have that would be available at no cost and then of course when you get on a call with our team will Describe to you how we might be helpful to your individual situation if you want to you know Follow me on social media kind of all the normal places that you’d expect to find someone
so you can look me up and connect with me there as well.
No, it’s been my sincere pleasure to host you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me, Don.
That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

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Title: E156 | Stop Trading Time for Money: How to Build a Business That Actually Creates Wealth
Date: March 4, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-to-build-business-that-actually-creates-wealth/
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Content:
Many founders believe that working harder is the only way to increase their income, but this mindset often leads to burnout rather than a better bank account. Christian Brim joined host Don Williams on The Proven Entrepreneur Show to explain why true success comes from leveraging others rather than doing everything yourself. After nearly bankrupting his company by chasing growth without a profit plan, Christian realized that a business must be intentional about making money to survive.
The journey from a “youthfully ignorant” twenty-seven-year-old to a seasoned leader of a million-dollar company taught Christian that numbers tell a story. He emphasizes that accounting is more like a language than math, providing the clarity needed to get unstuck and scale with confidence. By implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System, he turned his struggle into a structured organization that thrives independently of his daily efforts.
Aspiring entrepreneurs should focus on building wealth instead of just chasing top-line revenue that never hits their personal pockets. Christian advises that you must understand your balance sheet and income statement to ensure your future vision aligns with financial reality. Whether you are a creative agency owner or a small business leader, the goal is to stop being the bottleneck and start building an asset that lasts.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/how-to-scale-your-business-and-build-wealth-financial-clarity-with-christian-brim.mp3
Stop Trading Time for Money: How to Build a Business That Actually Creates Wealth
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I’ve got a good friend ⁓ and expert with us today, Christian Brim, all the way from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Christian, welcome to the show.
Norte Tejas is what we call it. Thank you, Don, for having me on the show.
Hey,
the way that the metroplex, Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is growing, at one point, we’re going to be connected all the way from probably the North Dallas side first, all the way to Oklahoma City. I mean, it’s just…
Mm.
Ardmore
for sure. I don’t know if we get to Oklahoma City, no, mean, a hundred years from now, absolutely.
Yeah, it’s just gonna happen. So ⁓ Christian, I know you have a couple companies. Tell us what you do, who you do it with, why you do it, ⁓ all that good stuff.
Yes.
All right. So, ⁓ my EO qualifying company, ⁓ is, is core group. do, ⁓ financial things for creative entrepreneurs. So videographers, creative agencies, that kind of stuff. And so financial things, we bring the clarity and peace of mind to them that, ⁓ is, is lacking in most creative businesses.
that looks like bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, payroll, that kind of stuff. ⁓ I also work as a consultant with entrepreneurs to help them get unstuck. So the ones that have had success and reached ⁓ a level of success but just can’t seem to get past that. So I work with ⁓ them as a consultant slash coach ⁓ in that capacity as well.
Okay, love that. And just to clarify for everybody, so an EO qualifying business, EO is Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a global organization to support entrepreneurs about 18 or 19,000 people around the world. And qualifying business means that you do at least a million dollars in top line revenue. so, ⁓ Christian and I actually met ⁓ through EO, I don’t know, quite a while ago, five, six, seven, eight years ago.
long. Yeah.
something like
that, and when I was also a member there. So, okay, first question, Christian, every entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs can look back at a moment where the light bulb clicked on. What was the moment for you when you realized that you could build an actual business, not just a job?
Mmm
⁓ So I was the right age of 27. I had had two jobs, one in public accounting, one in banking. And ⁓ I was very frustrated ⁓ as I assume most entrepreneurs working for others ⁓ happen to be. ⁓ And there came a point where working with the bank, ⁓ I just realized that like what I wanted and what
they wanted was not right. And so I started looking for other jobs. really wasn’t looking to start a business, but ⁓ I found this advertisement in the Journal of Accountancy for an accounting franchise and just reached out to him and had the conversation. six months later I was in California doing the franchise training. ⁓
I had two young children. My wife worked very part-time. I went in debt to purchase the franchise and to start the business. And I can’t really replicate that state of mind, like what the hell was I thinking? ⁓ But I can say, you know, whether it was the franchise that kind of drove this home, but very, very early on, I realized that I wanted
something that worked independently of me. Not that I wouldn’t work in the business and for a long time I did, but the ultimate goal was to create something that existed beyond me.
Very early on, I realized that I wanted something that worked independently of me… the ultimate goal was to create something that existed beyond me. Share on X
Yeah. Love that. Love that. And so I’m guessing maybe there was an awkward or tense conversation at home when left your job and your wife who worked very part-time in your words. And you said, Hey, I’m going to go to California. I’m going to invest in this franchise and we don’t have the money. So I’m going to borrow it to do that.
Well, in my defense, her dad wouldn’t lend me the money. So I didn’t have a choice. Right. So now I, I, I, distinctly remember that going down to the Lord’s table at church to pray and she was walking with me and she just had tears streaming down her, her, I mean, like she was terrified and I, and I get it. I mean, like for some reason I didn’t feel any fear or, or I felt fear, but like I felt confident that I could do it.
And, you know, over the years, I’ve tried to replicate that type of motivation where you have zero options, but to succeed. And it’s, it’s really kind of impossible to do once you’ve had a certain amount of success. ⁓ I’ve actually become much more risk averse as, as I’ve had more to lose. ⁓ And my decisions affect a lot more than me. You know, it affects, affects the employees. So, but at that point.
⁓ You know, it was yeah, I can do this. did I didn’t know any better It kind of reminds me of the article I read about the PayPal ⁓ Founders and they were having all of these problems. This is a couple of years ago They were having all these problems with bank fraud and when they started out they were just tech guys, right? they didn’t really know banking and ⁓ They they admitted that had they known when they started it
what was all involved with bank fraud and having to deal with it, they said we would never have started. And so there’s something about being youthfully ignorant that helps.
There’s something about being youthfully ignorant that helps — sometimes not knowing the limitations is your greatest advantage. Share on X
I totally agree. I think sometimes you have to be the bumblebee. He doesn’t know he can’t fly, so he does. And ⁓ I think back to my very first company, I had a whopping $6,000 was my total capital. And I convinced a landlord to do a new finish out on 1,380 square feet in Wichita Falls, Texas. Not sure what he was thinking.
Um, and it all worked out. mean, we were there about 10 years, but, um, but, uh, I literally, uh, couldn’t spell balance sheet and P and L. I had no idea what that meant. And all I really knew was how to sell a lot. And, um, and if you, truthfully, if you only have one skill, that’s a good one to have is that you can win a lot of business offense. Well, um, you know, kind of like Oakland, we’re both.
I think you’re a Oklahoma alum and I’m a huge Oklahoma fan. And during the glory days with Barry Switzer, always was like, let’s hang half a hundred. If we score 50, you know, we win 99 % of the time. there’s something to that. Okay. So you work with owners on decision-making and financial clarity.
F-100.
But, yup. ⁓
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
What’s one myth that you think entrepreneurs cling to that keeps them kind of stuck?
specifically around money, I find a lot of, ⁓ beliefs that become problematic as entrepreneurs. so, you you, you, you show up as an entrepreneur with whatever beliefs around money that you have, ⁓ from, from your childhood experience and young adult experience. but some of them are not.
⁓ Factually, correct. They’re just beliefs, right? And and I think the one that I I see ⁓ People struggle with a lot is the belief You have to work hard to make money or or if you work hard you make money ⁓ And the reality is is that is true sometimes but I know a lot of people that work hard that don’t make money and The problem with that belief
is it sets you up for not being as successful as you could be. And it shows up in a lot of ways. It shows up ⁓ in your, ⁓ how you structure the business. like, you you feel like you’ve got to be doing more, working more to make money. But it’s kind of like, I tell people like, okay, well, if you get really good at what you do and therefore you can do it quicker, should you get paid less or should you get paid more? Right? Right. So, so
Entrepreneurs arrive with their own beliefs about money, but many of those beliefs aren’t facts — they’re just stories we’ve carried for years. Share on X
You present that to them and they’re like, well, no, that’s not true. And like, okay, so you see how this is limiting you. ⁓ it shows up in pricing all the time, because again, a lot of people just look to their costs or effort or time that they’ve got into something. And they say, well, that didn’t take me very much time. So I don’t, I, I won’t, I won’t charge that much. There’s that fear factor. ⁓ but I think it all stems from the, the, the self-limiting belief that you have to work hard.
to make money and I would say the ultimate goal of an entrepreneur is not to figure out how you can make more money, it’s how can you make more money off of the efforts of others. Which sounds kind of mercenary, but I mean that’s what the entrepreneur model is.
Yeah, no doubt about it. early on knew that ⁓ no matter how good I was, I can make more money if I can leverage more people. ⁓ There’s just no doubt about that. So I know you’ve seen business owners succeed. You’ve seen business owners struggle. What do you think separates the ones
Mm-hmm.
who scale with confidence from the ones who are perpetually overwhelmed.
⁓ Well, I don’t know if this exactly answers your question, but it is my experience. And then you can interpret it how you want. ⁓ I think a lot of entrepreneurs have ⁓ this characteristic of being very persistent. ⁓ Others might say it’s stubbornness, depending upon what side of the fence you’re on. But this ability to overcome
negative things or how reality is to create the vision that they see. And ⁓ that characteristic is very important to achieve success. But at some point it becomes a ⁓ limiter, right? Because there are some things as entrepreneur
Persistence is critical, but eventually it becomes a limiter. Sometimes the bravest entrepreneurial move is admitting you are no longer the right person in the seat. Share on X
as your company grows and scales that you need to not do and let others do one because you’re the the the bottleneck but also two is like you’re not you’re not competent to do it like you think you know but you really don’t and for me that was marketing and finally letting go of that rope I use the analogy I was hanging on to the rope not so that my hands were burned it was burned down to the flesh like I could see the bones right and and I wouldn’t let go
of that. But, you know, once I understood that, you know, I was not the right person in the seat, I was just there by default, ⁓ and actively tried to find someone better for the job, ⁓ you know, I guess that’s confidence. ⁓ And so I don’t know if I’ve answered your question, but I can redirect and answer a different way if you want.
No,
no, I appreciate that. Okay, so thinking back to your own experience, you’ve been an entrepreneur how long now?
28 years.
28 years. What’s a moment when business just punched you in the gut and had you get back up and keep going?
You
Well, I had a ⁓ unhealthy desire to grow. I think for lot of entrepreneurs, that’s kind of like the default mode ⁓ is grow ⁓ without really any ⁓ end game in mind, no like goal you’re trying to achieve. ⁓ And I did that to the point where
I almost bankrupted the company and it was a ⁓ function of, ⁓ tell these lies to yourself, you’re investing in the company, right? And that’s your excuse for not making profit. Mike McCallewitz talks about this in his book, Profit First, great book if you haven’t read it, just to hear Mike’s story, because it really resonates with, if you’re an entrepreneur reading Mike’s story, I’m like, yeah, that’s me.
and making excuses for not doing the things that I knew needed to be done. but I, you know, I actually walked away from the business and left it in the hands of my brother for a couple of years because I was so burnt out and, like,
I didn’t know the solution, but I knew one thing: what we were doing wasn’t working. Something had to be different — the business had to change. Share on X
I remember telling my brother, I went and started a software company and I said, I don’t know if this software company is going to work, but I can tell you, I’m not coming back and running this damn business. and two years later I was back, ⁓ because it had, it run into financial difficulty. And I said to myself, you know, I don’t, I don’t know what is, is, I don’t know what it needs to be, but it’s gotta be different than what it is. Right.
I don’t know what the solution is, but what we’re doing is not working. And so it was that point that I, ⁓ we implemented, ⁓ EOS, entrepreneur, entrepreneur operating system brought in an outside facilitator. And that really, was, it was a slow turn. It was one over years, honestly. ⁓ but that, I go back to eight years ago when we implemented EOS as the turning point.
⁓ of going back the other direction.
Love that. Thank you. Okay. So last question. We’re hearing this call, 28 year and a 35 year entrepreneur. Lots of gray hair. And hey, I’m happy for every one of them. At this point, every day with hair is a good hair day. ⁓ Yeah, exactly. So hypothetically, I bring a brand new entrepreneur to the call.
Lots of gray hair.
Mm-hmm.
Better to turn gray than to turn loose.
Hmm.
And their question is this, how do I use my business to build wealth, not just revenue? What’s a simple plan you’d share with that brand new entrepreneur?
Hmm.
Well, I think it starts with your intent. It is, and this is a lot about what Mike McCallowitz talks about and what I talk about in my derivative of private first for creatives is you have to be intentional about making money, right? Making money is not an afterthought. It’s not something that happens sometimes. It should be something that happens all the time.
If you’re not making a profit, then something’s not right. And the answer is not to continue to grow because that’s a lot of entrepreneurs solution. Well, if I just get more customers, more clients, sell more X, Y, and Z, that’ll fix the problems. But no, it doesn’t. It compounds the problems. And so you have to be intentional, figure out how to make money.
You have to be intentional about making money. Profit is not an afterthought — it should happen all the time, not just sometimes. Share on X
in the business and then you can figure out how to scale it. But until you are making money, don’t have it’s like, why are you replicating something that’s not working? ⁓ So to me, it’s intent. I think ⁓ there are great tools. Profit first is one of them that helps you with that. But I also think that entrepreneurs, for the most part, are number averse. ⁓
I like to, my statement is that accounting and finances is much more akin to language than it is to math in that ⁓ accounting numbers tell the story of the business and every business has a story. And I really like to sit down with entrepreneurs who are stuck and they have this vision.
Right? One of the, one of the things that entrepreneurs do really, really well, and it makes them entrepreneurs is they can suspend reality. Right? That’s, part of how they get through those difficult times is they see the future, but sitting down with a business owner and saying, okay, well, what, what do you, what is your plan? What, how do you see the business? Where do you see the business? And then looking at the numbers and seeing what story they tell.
And starting where those two don’t match up, right? Like, okay, you say this, but the numbers are telling me this. And I think that all entrepreneurs need to have a ⁓ basic level of understanding of numbers so that they can understand the story that their business is telling them. You don’t have to have level of expertise that your financial professional does, your CPA.
That’s not what I’m saying, but you said when you started, you didn’t know what a balance sheet and income statement is. As an entrepreneur, there are zero excuses for not understanding those things. Zero.
Zero. Yep, absolutely. Okay, so Christian, if somebody wanted to reach out to you either on the consulting side or on the core group financial side, what’s the easiest way to reach out to you and your companies?
Mm-hmm.
Christianbrim.com, ⁓ beautiful website, just relaunched it. It’s beautiful, beautiful, best ever. ⁓ And Core is coregroupus.com.
Awesome. Christian, it’s been my pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Don, for having me.
That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, bye.

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Title: How to Scale Your Business with Offshore Talent: The  Rekruuto Story with Sid Jashnani
Date: February 20, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-to-scale-your-business-with-offshore-talent-rekruuto-story-with-sid-jashnani/
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Content:
Sid Jashnani’s journey into building Rekruuto didn’t begin with a grand strategy deck or a market gap analysis. It began with a phone call during COVID. After exiting his previous tech company, Sid realized he no longer had work for his longtime assistant in the Philippines. Instead of accepting the setback, she proposed something unexpected: why not start a business helping others hire offshore talent? That single idea turned into Rekruuto, now serving 65+ companies across the US and Europe with more than 200 team members. In conversation, Don highlights what many founders overlook — the best ideas often don’t come from the founder’s mind. They come from someone brave enough to speak up. And the strongest leadership teams are built on complementary strengths, not clones of the founder.
The discussion then shifts to a challenge nearly every entrepreneur faces: the productivity lie. Sid admits the trap of believing he could do everything at once, chasing opportunities until focus disappeared. Don calls it plate-spinning — constantly adding more without asking what truly drives revenue. The breakthrough came when Sid audited his calendar in 30-minute increments and categorized his time into four quadrants: what he loves and excels at, what he’s good at but shouldn’t be doing, what he dislikes yet handles anyway, and what he’s simply not good at. That clarity changed how he delegated and scaled. They also explore the evolving role of AI, agreeing it’s not a strategy by itself but a tool — one that, when combined with human orchestration, can shift offshore staffing from hourly labor to outcome-driven impact.
The most powerful moment in their conversation comes when business takes a back seat to life. Sid shares how his son’s diagnosis of aplastic anemia forced him to reevaluate everything. Momentum stalled, clients were lost, systems weakened — and none of it mattered in comparison to family. Don reflects on how entrepreneurs often rank business first until life resets their priorities. The lesson wasn’t about hustle, AI, or even scaling. It was about resilience, faith, and the understanding that leadership starts with personal strength. Build systems, delegate wisely, embrace tools like AI — but never forget that business growth means little if you lose yourself in the process.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/how-to-scale-your-business-with-offshore-talent-rekruuto-story-with-sid-jashnani-podcast.mp3
 
How to Scale Your Business with Offshore Talent: The Rekruuto Story with Sid Jashnani
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Now my guest is coming in to us today from East, you know, I’m in central Texas. He’s coming in from East, well, maybe not East Texas, maybe further East than East Texas. But well, anyhow, he’s coming in from London. So that’s, that’s quite a ways East of East Texas. Sid Jashnani, welcome to the show.
Thanks Don for having me.
my distinct honor and pleasure. Thank you so much. Now, you own a company by the name of Rekruuto. Tell us what does Rekruuto do? Who do you do it for or with? Why do you do it? Okay. So give us the lowdown. Like what’s your story, Sid?
Yeah, so I started Rekruuto right around COVID and I had just exited my previous company, which was a tech company. And around COVID, I had an assistant for a very long time from the Philippines. And after I exited, she didn’t have much work. And COVID, everything was pretty much shutting down and I…
phoned her and I told her hey Marchi I think you know I’ll have to let you go because I don’t have any work for you now and she proactively said hey Sid I know a lot of your friends you referred them to me to find more people in the Philippines to hire do you think I can start a business to do that and you can help me with this I’m like huh that’s interesting never thought of that and I said sure
I don’t have much to do now. And that’s how Recruiter was born. And we started serving our old customers and contacts in the US and Europe. And we started providing offshore staff from the Philippines. And it started on someone just trying to look out for themselves. And I felt quite
Love that.
a shame that I couldn’t help them. And suddenly when they came up with this idea, like light bulbs kind of went off and I was like, brilliant, let’s do it, Marci. And so I started this with my ex assistant who was now my business partner. And we run this together and it’s been five plus years and almost six years now. And yeah, we growing quite fast. So we serve businesses pretty much in Western Europe and America.
companies looking to augment their staff. Sometimes they don’t have the budget, but they’re still looking for that talent. Could be in marketing, development, sales, and just basic plain assistance. We even do customer support. So pretty much anything that can be done virtually and outsourced is fair game. And over the years, we’ve grown to have about 200 plus people now.
service more than 65 to 66 companies across the world.
That’s amazing. I always think that entrepreneurial companies kind of come in two flavors, like Coke and Pepsi. You have the founders and you have, I’ll call it, I’ll say the inheritors. And I’m a founder and I’m not knocking the inheritors, good for them. I don’t know that it’s fair, it does, it happens. It’s that they started out with dad, grandpa’s or grandma’s business.
But so many entrepreneurial companies are founder companies and many started just the exact same way Rekruuto did. Marchee had a problem. She took a shot. She took a chance. It took some courage and I’m sure you had a great working relationship, but it still took some courage to say, Sid, what about this?
And then many times, you know, I’m a, I’m a 30 year entrepreneur. Many of the best ideas in my businesses came from, they didn’t come out of my brain. They came out of somebody else’s brain. And, but when I heard them or saw them, was like,
That’s a good idea.
Absolutely, same thing happened to me.
Yeah, I love that. And so now someone who was, I’ll say a subordinate, and I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just on the org chart, you were above Marchee. But now elevated, took her expertise, which was not your expertise, took your expertise, which is not her expertise, and the best leadership teams.
are people with complimentary skills, not identical skills. If you as an entrepreneur are trying to hire people that walk, talk, look, and act like you, stop it. Let them go work someplace else. Get people who walk differently, talk differently, think differently, and act differently. Okay, I’m gonna ask you a couple hard questions. You’re gonna feel like you were interrogated in a war camp. Well, no, it’s not gonna be that bad.
Absolutely.
So I know that you talk about rethinking time. What’s the biggest lie, untruth that entrepreneurs believe about productivity?
The biggest lie in entrepreneurship is believing you can do it all. Real scale begins the moment you commit to going a mile deep instead of an inch wide. Share on X
but they won’t say out loud.
Hmm.
Well, I don’t know about others, but I think the one lie that I keep telling myself is that I can do it all and I can do it all this year or this month. And sometimes I feel that I’m probably going to die of indigestion of too many opportunities rather than starvation. And this is a Jim Collins kind of quote I picked up because it’s very close to me. And
sometimes I do get carried away when I see opportunities and it’s you know, see the shiny stuff around you and that just is very attractive to me and I start deviating from my core focus which is to serve my target market and help them hire the best offshore staff and I keep deviating from that core purpose and get distracted and ⁓
And that makes me really unproductive. And by the time I realize it, I’m in a rabbit hole and then I have to drag myself back. And now it’s become a little better. Earlier, the rabbit hole was very deep. Now I catch myself. But that’s over, like you, you’ve been an entrepreneur for 30 years. I’ve only done my time for about almost 20 now. And even after 20 years of doing this,
It’s very easy to get sucked away to these interesting ideas that you see around you. And lately, AI has been at the forefront of everyone. And I’m sure everyone comes up with tons of ideas around AI. And for me, AI is not an idea. AI is just another tool in your arsenal. And how quickly you can adapt it and use it in your workflows will help you of stand out.
Yeah, so productivity for me is sticking to what I’m best at and what I’m obsessed about with this organization and really going a mile deep and an inch wide. So that’s the purpose that I have.
I love that and I appreciate that you phrased it about yourself, but I think that is so common with entrepreneurs. I think the stat is 40 or 45 % of entrepreneurs are neurodivergent and a big piece of that is ADHD. That’s not all of it, but that is a big piece of it. And so we like to chase shiny things and we like new things. And for many years, I describe myself as
I’m like the plate spinner at the circus. I like to put them on the plates and spin them and see how many can I get going before one of them falls to the ground. And so, so much so that if things get too calm, I just go find another plate. We’re just gonna add something to it. And the problem with that, that feeds part of my brain, okay, and many entrepreneurs, that does feed part of your brain.
You know, what I coach my clients is this. Out of everything you do, what makes the most money for your time? Okay. All right. Let’s double down. Let’s do a lot of that and ignore things that don’t. And is it boring? Yeah, kinda. Okay. Might be. Okay. But it is your
best use if the market says, I’ll buy this product, service or experience from you. Okay. Then sell that to the market. Quit trying to find something new. Okay. To replace that, just stick to your, what’s the colloquialism, stick to your knitting, know, stick to your knitting. So, Hey, what’s a moment in your journey?
Yeah.
when you realized your business was scaling you, not the other way around.
Yeah, I think in my previous business, I had a very key leadership team member and he was the most amazing salesperson I’d ever seen. And sometimes I actually felt scared of him because he was so good. And I started feeling a bit defensive when I, mean, I couldn’t close deals. I was the founder and I couldn’t close them. And, when he would walk in the room, he had that charisma.
Everything was just easy for him and clients loved him and he was their best buddy. Go for a football match together and no one wanted to hang out with me. And I felt that man, this guy, I swear to God, mean, part of me was a bit jealous of him, but then part of me was just amazed at how natural he was. And I think what I realized was if I had a hundred of these people, man, life would just be so easy for me.
And what I realized was having that right piece of the puzzle just made me feel a lot more relieved. And I started feeling that the company is going in the right direction. And I’m not putting that extra exponential effort to grow. And with such a person on board, I said, yes, I am scaling. And it’s because of them I’m scaling.
Yeah, I love that. Now, when you talked about this great salesperson, so like I started out in sales, top salesman in the country at 19, top sales manager at 20. I like to walk on ground. Nobody’s ever walked on. I broke a lot of records, broke a lot of records in EO, tickets, sales, dollars, all of that. Okay. And I like that. That’s me. And so, so let me just share this with the audience. If you think you have a great sales resource,
They’ll be offended any time you mention somebody else’s great.
They just will. Okay. If they’re not offended, they may be good, but they’re not great because the greatest all have a little bit of Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. You can’t touch me. And, and, and the greats, that is exactly how they feel. Okay. And, and I’ve only met two in 30 years that I thought were my equal. And I don’t really think they were my equal, but they were close. They were close.
Yeah. ⁓
So let’s say this, okay. So recruit-o, you know, since COVID, you know, and COVID put a lot of businesses out of business, but it launched so many businesses. Okay. And there’s no doubt that offshore, and I don’t know if you do it, do you do it as, are you a solution company or are you a staffing company? you actually hiring?
the person for, then they’re going to work for the client or are they working for you kind of a dual employment type thing.
Yeah, so they work for us. We pay them the benefits in the Philippines and the employer on record. And then we invoice the clients. And that way, we can give a higher quality of service and at the same time, give the security to the local employee so they know that they’re getting their social security in the Philippines and the compliance. can use that.
Paced up to get a mortgage to get a bank loan to get a credit card Otherwise, if you’re just a contractor like an up work sort of contractor, it’s difficult to get any of the services locally in the Philippines so that’s why there’s a lot of loyalty and ⁓ Philippine Filipinos are very hard-working very ethical people and and even the ones that Transition off a particular client. We retain them till we find them some of the employment
The company didn’t scale because I worked harder. It scaled because I hired someone better than me in areas that mattered. Share on X
I love that. so, you know, over the years I have worked with, I have a team in India, have people in Philippines, I people in Pakistan. I don’t care where you are. And I, you know, I don’t care if you’re purple with pink polka dots. And I really don’t even care if you speak English, as long as we can still communicate. Who cares? I’m looking for the best people on the planet to help me hit my business goals. And sometimes the best people on the planet are not in Fort Worth, Texas.
Sometimes they’re in Lahore or Manila and that’s just the way it is. I think it’s a great solution for US and Western countries who typically struggle on the labor side. It’s hard to find high quality people. And then I can remember my VA in the Philippines. She’s been with me a long time.
but maybe three or four months in, you know, she bought a washer and dryer and, and I live in the States. And so like, that’s pretty standard stuff here, but it’s not standard in the Philippines. And, and so literally you’re changing people’s lives. And so it’s a, it’s a win-win-win. And so if, if, if you as an entrepreneur,
have said, ⁓ I can never work with people offshore. I don’t know how to do that. Let me just encourage you. We’ll get Sid’s contact information. We’ll get Rekruuto’s contact information. Even though he’s in London, I know he’s serving people in Dallas, Texas. It’s a global… The world has gotten very, very small. so reach out. Okay, here’s a tough question. If you had to build Rekruuto from scratch,
Like all of sudden today it’s all gone. Instant poof, presto, it evaporated.
How would you do it?
Yeah, I actually one of my quarterly meetings recently, that was one of the questions we kind of worked on. And that’s a fun thing to work on. Say, hey, what would you do if you lost everything again and you had to start from scratch? And I mean, I had to scratch my head, let me tell you that, because it of it came from left field for me. And and this is something I’ve been contemplating with, you know, AI has just gone incredibly ⁓
nuts, if I can say, it’s just made in mainstream everywhere. And what we are contemplating now is a service which complements agents or agentic AI together with humans. And it’s about, you know what, I can give the same impact that one can have anywhere in the world, be it the US or Australia or the UK, but you get stuff that is complemented by agentic AI.
all the repetitive stuff, all the mundane stuff, and some of the thinking is done by the agents, but then you’ve got an orchestrator who is a human who is orchestrating those agents. And that’s a model I see that has wings. A lot of people have spoken about it, and some are even experimenting. And we have our own ⁓ version which we’re thinking of launching. And if it works, I think it’s just going to change.
our staffing industry, at least the offshore staffing industry. And ⁓ it’s gonna become more outcome driven because right now it could be, we can provide you people who are good at marketing or in Google ads or Facebook ads. But now we can actually start providing outcomes if we have agent tech AI plus humans. And then the pricing changes from, this is what a staffer in the Philippines costs.
Mm.
to, ⁓ this is what outcomes cost. So it can revolutionize the whole industry and the model. And I think a lot of people like us are experimenting right now. So we’re very early at this. We’ve tried a bunch of stuff, and we’re breaking a bunch of stuff. And hopefully, we will get there. But that’s how I would reinvent the whole idea.
So I love that. I want to lend some emphasis to something you said. We’re trying a lot of stuff and we’re breaking a lot of stuff. Remember that success is not about never failing. Success is about failing and moving on. And Thomas Edison, what they say, he figured a thousand ways the light bulb wouldn’t work. Now he was persistent on giving that. That’s a lot.
But this human first, AI second kind of protocol, I’ll call it. I love that. I have some friends. They are a global company, but they’re based in India. And they’re in the call center business. Shocker. Call center’s in India. But different. They were not a US call center that
migrated to India, it was an Indian national who bought a US call center. And then after about five years, my very good friend moved to India for three years with his wife and family, and they started that division. Well, they have about 8,000 employees. OK, so that’s big. Anywhere, that’s pretty big. And they have an unbelievable AI tool that supports
call center communicators, okay, which are almost all inbound anymore. You know, it’s high level customer service type stuff. And where you would think, you know, what’s making headlines in the U.S. is that Accenture laid off 1,100 people and Paycom laid off 500 people and these guys are going to lay off 5,000 people and all that. And that makes the headlines. But when you talk with the communicators at this company, they will tell you, look, we love it.
because we offloaded 99 % of the mundane, repetitive, no brain activity to the AI agent. so actually, my incentive compensation has grown. The more tools they’ve given us, the more money I’m making because I’m solving real challenging issues.
for clients and that’s valuable. Telling you what time the office is open, know, who cares? You know, we can get anybody to do that. So, I like that. So, you know, it’s obvious that you’re a systems thinker. mean, successful exit and then accidental successful launch, I’ll say. And I say that with all respect. I’m not being derogatory. you know, one of my favorite episodes of the show
It was excellent. No two ways it happens.
was an Israeli entrepreneur, Shihar Aris. And Shihar developed, right before COVID, developed a platform to where Fortune 500 companies could, um, compliantly have volumes of offshore employees. And then COVID happened. And, and he’s the…
You know, so was like he, he was really, he was 45 year old when he started his company. He’d been at HP. He was a Stanford MBA, very smart guy. Very good experience, very good chops. Okay. I mean, he learned a lot at HP. You’re not going to learn too much bad there. Started his company and then COVID happened, which was like pouring gas on the fire. And from launch to exit, I don’t remember if it was 18 or 24 months, one of the two.
$100 million exit in a year and a half or two years. don’t remember, but he’d be the first to tell you, yeah, a lot of that was accidental. Did we build something really great? Yes. We didn’t plan on COVID. We didn’t plan on the world embracing Zoom. I can remember before COVID, I’d been on Zoom for years and some people just thought it was weird. And then COVID happened and like, it’s not weird at all.
and
And when you would record calls, people thought that was weird. And now people are on calls all day, every day. And there’s as many recorders on the call as there is people and nobody thinks a thing about it. I doubt if anybody ever listens to them, but they’re there. many entrepreneurs are stuck in what I’m to call hustle mode. Hustle, hustle, hustle, do it all, do it all, do it all.
What’s the first system you think they should build or embrace to get out of the hustle grind?
Yeah, and I spent a lot of time working on this for myself when I was in that firefighting and hustle mode. And I think what really helped me was to take this big step back and just evaluate my calendar over the past two, three weeks and kind of log down all the stuff that I was doing in 30 minute chunks. And I followed this exercise. First, I reflected on it.
And I realized that there were lots of gaps, a lot of times where I couldn’t remember what I was doing. So I said, you know what? I’m going to now log everything for the next two weeks in 30 minute increments. And even the embarrassing stuff, you know, it’s like sometimes when I used to get a break on my just while eating lunch, just fire on Netflix and quickly eat while watching a show. And I would actually log down Netflix 25 minutes. Right.
And so over two weeks, I logged everything and even the embarrassing stuff like I shared. And then I started categorizing it in like four different quadrants. And I said, okay, this is the stuff I’m really great at. And I love doing it. So that’s, you know, just getting new clients, motivating my staff and just, you know, building culture, doing it all remotely. I love doing that stuff.
and just being out there networking with other entrepreneurs. I love doing that. So the EO and the YPO stuff, and I really enjoy that. And then there was some stuff that I was good at and I like doing it, know, just structuring some contracts and, you know, some upsells and some offers, some ideas that I have. And that’s the good stuff. And then there were some stuff that I was good at, but I don’t like doing it.
So that means creating a little landing page. Well, I used to do all of that stuff, fun stuff. And I’m pretty good at it. But I don’t like doing it because it’s frustrating sometimes when you’re connecting the dots, the funnels, you kind of get sucked away into it. I’m quite, I have like some severe OCD. So I started like going down the rabbit hole, wasting a lot of time. And I think there are better people.
Abroad philippines or india who can do this at a much more cost effective way than my time So I don’t want to end up doing the 15 20 dollar an hour sort of work And then there was a fourth quadrant, which is the stuff i’m horrible at I absolutely hate it And i’m obviously not good at it And that’s some accounting related work. I despised it just I mean I have a great accountant
but I would still try and tinker with it and try and reconcile some stuff, which again would mess up all QuickBooks in a bad way. And I would increase their work. So I realized that across these four quadrants, what I really should be doing is the stuff in the top two quadrants, which is the stuff I love doing, which I’m great at, and the stuff that I’m really good at and stuff I like.
Everything else is something that should be delegated to someone else who enjoys doing that stuff. So the finance stuff, my accountant, give them more work to do. The website and funnel and email marketing stuff, give it to the guys who are really good at it, who do this for a living. That’s their day in and day out. They get passion and they’re obsessed about this. And I think that was the first starting point to figure out how to start delegating stuff to other competent people.
In the past, as a follow-up, I made a mistake where just because I wanted to delegate something, I gave it to people who weren’t that good, and they totally destroyed it as well. So I think what I’ve seen a lot of founders, and especially in the staffing business, they’re very keen to get a VA. Maybe they don’t get the right VA, and they delegate stuff to that VA, and the VA is not that good at that stuff. And then they kind of, you know…
Hmm.
abdicate the responsibility after giving it away. And then bad stuff happens and stuff breaks. So I always feel that you delegate. It’s like you trust, but you verify. And that’s why you need to have this cadence to make sure that you’re checking in periodically to make sure that the expected outcomes are being met. So anyone out there, do this quick audit as to where you’re spending your time. Kind of just tag it.
As to is this something which is equivalent to what you should be doing? Or is it stuff that is a $15, $20 hour sort of work which you can outsource or delegate to someone else? So that would be a starting.
Love that. I’m a big believer in that we all have zones of incompetence, competence, excellence, and magnificence. And that’s a big word. That’s a heavy word. And sometimes when I share that in a room full of people, you can see somebody wince. They’re like, I don’t do anything magnificently. And I’m like, maybe you don’t, but there’s something you could do magnificently.
I like it.
And if you really want to make the most progress for your company, you have to concentrate there. And unfortunately, that’s also an area where you could fail magnificently. So our zone of excellence, do really well, but we know we do it really well. Magnificence is a little different. It’s like, I’m out of my comfort zone. This could publicly be a
an issue. So I’ve written nine books and helped hundreds of people write their book. And almost all of them reach the point, even when they’re finished, of I don’t know if it’s good enough, because they’re fearful of going public.
You know, it’s one thing for me to have these thoughts internally. It’s another thing to put them out there. And I can’t argue it. You know, I put it out there, it’s out there. And I’m like, you know, but you gotta let it go. My first book was my first and worst book. I look back at it now. I’m like, not very good. Okay. It raised, it didn’t raise a lot of money. We did a lot of business off of people we sent that book to, but you know, it’s, it’s never going to win.
It’s never going to win the Pulitzer, you know, just saying. So I love that. And I think it’s simple genius. And I think all genius is simple. Look at your calendar. That tells you where you’re spending your time. The other thing to do and I’m, you know, the accounting side is not my favorite place to play. Okay. Either, but see where you’re spending your time.
If you don’t take care of yourself first, you won’t be strong enough to lead your family or your company. Leadership starts with personal stability. Share on X
I know, I get it. You know, God made you that maternal instinct and we love that. But if you don’t take care of you, you cannot take care of them. If you are empty, you cannot pour into others. And so just the physics of the relationship is you first, family second, and business third. And many entrepreneurs are just like, ⁓ Don, you…
You’ve lost your mind. And I’m like, no, trust me, I’ve not lost my mind. You you, you give somebody in your family a serious disease and, your priorities will figure your priorities will realign. And so, I think, I think one of the beauties about being an entrepreneur is that, you know, bad things happen to good people. know that. and horrible things happen to good people. Okay.
great
you know, but at least for a successful entrepreneur, you have some capital and maybe that’s financial and maybe it’s, well, my business was X number of dollars a year and that’s half X, but it still was X. You had some to lose without it being total devastation as opposed to
Sid Jashnani (32:15)
Yeah.
In the States, would call it a W-2, an employee for somebody else that, mean, the average W-2 in the United States does not have a thousand dollars saved. And so it’s a pretty short trip to horrible situation. And at least with the entrepreneur, you had some buffer, you had some slack, you had some room to take care of what was in
Yeah, and just to kind of add to that, think that’s when ⁓ faith played a big role for me. And, you know, I was the kind of guy who was not very spiritual, but I kind of my priorities, like you said, got realigned. And what resonated with me was also this put on the oxygen mask first before helping others. And and I think it was I didn’t put the oxygen mask at that time and kind of all hell.
broke loose But as as we were getting through this I realized if I don’t take care of myself I will not be there to take care of my family I was admitted in the hospital a couple of times because of stress and heart issues as well and that’s when it dawned on me that made if I go now then it’s gonna be tough for my family, so I need to be the anchor here and that’s when I had to kind of go back to my routine to fix myself and take care of my family, so
Mm.
Yeah, so I think the powers above the universe really helped me figure that out, if I can say so.
Yeah, we’re brothers of other mothers. I’m just
telling you, I love having a robust business and love growing that business. Much more important to me to have a robust growing family. And I know I can only help that if I continue to grow. And so if I live long enough, I’ll be really good. Yeah. So Sid, if somebody wanted to reach out,
What’s the easiest way to reach you or whoever they should at Rekruuto?
I think the best way is ⁓ we spell recruiter really funny. It’s R-E-K-R-U-U-T-O dot net. It’s a Dutch way of saying recruit people. yes, search up Recruiter online or reach out to me on LinkedIn or X. And I’m quite active on both those platforms. And you can also find me on TikTok where
My staff are producing AI generated versions of me. And I don’t know how that looks, but it looks funny. I can tell you that. So you can go laugh and roast me there. But find me in one of these platforms and I’ll connect you with some amazing people who will take care of you and help you or introduce you to the world of working with different people across continents.
You
Love that. Sid, thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure to have you on the show today.
Don, thank you. And I’m quite emotional now. And all I have to say that you’ve been a great host, asking great questions, and amazing wisdom shared. And I picked up so many things from you. So I’m grateful for your insight.
Thank you so much. appreciate your kind words. Folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

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Title: E154 | A Financial Blind Spot for Executives: Frank Campbell on Life Insurance That Quietly Fails
Date: February 13, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/financial-blind-spot-for-executives-frank-campbell-on-life-insurance-that-quietly-fails/
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Content:
Entrepreneurs often assume their coverage is secure. Frank Campbell explains life insurance mistakes, policy lapses, beneficiary errors, and why regular reviews matter.
Most entrepreneurs believe life insurance is something you buy once and forget. According to Frank Campbell, that assumption is one of the most common life insurance mistakes made in entrepreneur financial planning. In reality, policies evolve quietly over time. Costs change, assumptions weaken, and what once looked solid can drift toward a life insurance lapse without warning. This is why a regular life insurance policy review is critical, especially for founders who focus heavily on growth but overlook long-term protection. Understanding why life insurance policies fail starts with recognizing that many contracts rely on conditions that don’t always hold for decades.
One reason these problems stay hidden is the presence of hidden fees in life insurance policies and internal cost increases that are rarely explained clearly. These issues often surface years later, leaving business owners shocked that a policy is no longer performing as expected. Frank Campbell frequently sees life insurance beneficiary mistakes layered on top of these issues, where policies fail to reflect current family or business realities. This highlights what entrepreneurs misunderstand about life insurance: insurers do not actively manage outcomes for policyholders. Without oversight, life insurance policies that don’t perform as promised can quietly become liabilities rather than protection.
So how often should you review life insurance? Frank Campbell recommends treating it like any other serious asset. Learning how to review a life insurance policy every five years helps identify early warning signs and prevents life insurance policy assumptions that cost families money. The signs your life insurance policy is failing are usually subtle but consistent, and ignoring them can undermine even the most careful insurance planning for entrepreneurs. For leaders focused on executive financial protection planning, a policy review is not about replacement, but clarity. The goal is simple: ensure the policy still does what you believe it does.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

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Life Insurance Policy Review Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make: Frank Campbell Explains What Fails Over Time
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. my gosh. I have a great guest topic we’ve never talked about and one that’s kind of new to me, even though I was in that industry for a long time, but I didn’t know exactly what we’re going to have shared with us today. I have Frank Campbell from Stratis Financial Partners with us today.
Welcome to the show, Frank.
Thank you, Don. I’ve been looking forward to being your guest.
Well, it’s my pleasure. And so, you know, we’re going to talk today about life insurance and we’re going to talk about, I always thought all life insurance paid because it’s pretty simple. died, you know, but maybe that’s not true. And I do know there’s a significant lapse rate. So, so Frank, first question. Most people think,
They’re insured until it’s too late. What’s the most dangerous? No, here, let’s start here. I’ve lost my mind. It’s the end of the day. Tell us about your company, what you do, who you do it with and why you do it.
Well, I was happily retired and I was having a really good time, but it was all about me. And I’d had a successful career as a financial advisor, but I wasn’t quite done yet. I had this list, 30 things you haven’t done in 30 years. in month 14, I was on number 28. So.
I could either make another 30 or I could say, can my skills add some value to the world? And life insurance, there was a court case that came out that talked about the proper care and handling of a life insurance policy. Basically, don’t take it for granted, treat it like money. And most people aren’t. And many trust companies weren’t doing it either. It’s just simple logic.
Life insurance should be treated like money, not something you buy once and forget about. Share on X
So I decided that I was going to put something together to help people understand what they have, not to replace it, but to fix it. I went to some of my colleagues and told them what I was going to do, and they started laughing at me. Said, that’ll never work. So they told me I couldn’t do it, Don. That’s probably why I did it.
Yeah, I love that. Got a little entrepreneur in you. It’s like, don’t tell me what I can’t do. Sit back. You know, in Texas, we’d say, hold my beer and watch this. ⁓ you know, that’s kind of how that goes. So, okay. Well, people do think they’re insured many times until it’s too late. What’s the most dangerous false assumptions you see really smart, successful people making about their life insurance?
Hahaha! ⁓
There’s really two dynamics that make it work or not worked on. The first one is some life insurance policies have unconditional guarantees. If you pay this premium, we will pay at least that death benefit. That’s simple. But most policies have conditional guarantees and people take them for granted. So if we get this rate of return,
And if we don’t raise the internal charges on the policy, then you’re going to be fine. But historically, over the last 20 years, they haven’t performed at that level. They haven’t given you the interest rate they were projecting, or they changed and raised their costs a little bit because it was getting expensive in the home office. And what that does is take money out of the policy and it shifts the
problem, the burden back to you. So if it does this and if we don’t do that, you’ll be fine. But if we don’t, it’s on you. And people don’t know that.
Mmm.
I was licensed as an agent and a broker and did business in 40 some states in life and health. I knew the difference between, you know, limited cause and all cause. And so all cause, if you die, they pay. But did not know about the intricacies of the inside of the policy as far as that goes. So I think you patented
a product that you call the Stratus Policy Assessment. Because you saw something broken in the life insurance industry, what made you realize the industry wasn’t actually protecting people in the way the people believed?
Yes.
Well, I thinking more about the people, The industry is the industry, and the people need the protection. But life insurance is unpleasant to talk about. It’s complex, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. So we put together our policy assessment. We go to the writing company and get specific information about that policy.
And then we filter it back into our format. And what you get back is one page with everything you need to know about your policy in a way that a 12-year-old can understand. And it took me three years to put that, to perfect that so I could do it. So I want you to know what you have so you can make an informed decision about what needs to be done. And a couple of…
It’s a couple of examples. When we review a policy, the most common problem is a beneficiary arrangement. I neglected to put on my third child, so that ought to be on there. Or my first wife is still the beneficiary on the policy, and that might make my second wife a little upset. But most of the time, it’s just you didn’t realize that
Hmm.
Something happened. It didn’t perform to the level that it’s supposed to. And you get an annual statement on these policies, Don, and it says, oh, in small font, there’s this thing, this old story about the big print gives it to you and the small font takes it away, right? And the small font will say, we found it necessary to raise our costs of insurance from 23 cents a thousand to 26 cents a thousand.
Yeah.
And it sounds like nothing, but it can shorten the lifespan of a policy, take it from age 100 to age 84. What they ought to do is say, Don, you’re paying 100 a month, and it hasn’t been going as well as we planned, but if you’ll pay 130 a month, you’ll still have the same degree of security and safety that you wanted when you bought the contract.
Mm.
You don’t get that. Now, that you as an individual can make an informed decision, right? But if you don’t know that it’s running out of gas, it’s not going to make it.
Most people only learn there is a problem when they receive a letter saying the policy ran out of gas. Share on X
Right.
Yeah, interesting. All carriers?
Almost all.
Almost all. Yeah. and you know, insurance companies, you know, they bailed out the government and the depression. They’re typically the ones with the money as far as that goes. So when, when you review a policy and that one pager says, Hey, this probably can’t be saved. This, this one is, this policy is going to die.
What’s usually wrong and like how shocked are your clients when you give them that message?
Don, a lot of times they come to me with that message. They bring in what I call the letter. And whatever company it is, it’s the same thing. Dear Mrs. Gargoyle, you didn’t know this, but your policy ran out of gas. And now you’re going to have to pay a lot more to keep it going.
Hmm
And they put that back on Mrs. Gargoyle. So she didn’t know. The reason she didn’t know is because she bought the policy 15 years ago and the agent said, you’re gonna be fine. And then she put it in a drawer and never forgot about it.
Right. Yeah. And the average, I’m not going to knock insurance agents too hard here, but you know, I think there’s about 300,000 in the state of Texas and the average insurance, know, insurance is so complicated. The average agent doesn’t know everything about the policy they’re representing to you. And I don’t care if it’s on your car or your house or your life. I mean, it’s just impossible.
No.
to know everything in there. So sometimes when policies fail, you’ve been called as an expert witness. Without naming names, what’s a lesson to every entrepreneur?
should learn, should be on the lookout for with their insurance.
You need to have it checked every five years.
Okay.
we’ll stop and put air in the tires in our car. Once in a while we’ll check the oil or get it changed and we’ll certainly look at our retirement fund and see how that’s doing.
But we never get around to looking at the life insurance. And so it sits there, and maybe it’s good, and maybe it’s not.
Out of a hundred people, about eighty have something wrong with their policy and assume they are in the twenty who do not. Share on X
If I talk to a room of 100 people and I say that, I’m going to, what the truth is, 20 of them have a policy that’s beautiful. They don’t need anything. The other 80 % have something that’s wrong and maybe we can fix it. But everybody seems to assume they’re in the 20.
Hmm.
and it just doesn’t get done. just lift up the hood once every five years and make sure that somebody that understands this stuff is there to quote it. My expert.
What are a couple ways that somebody could fix it?
Well, it depends on what’s wrong. That beneficiary arrangement I mentioned to you, that’s the most common thing we see, Well, how about if we just change the beneficiary and bring it up to date? If you haven’t died yet, it’s a real easy fix.
Yeah, right. Really hard after the fact.
Yeah, there was a case where the where the policy was 13 years old and we reviewed it. was a good policy. We told the client that we showed him why it was good. But the beneficiary arrangement had his wife and two children as the beneficiaries.
We review our investments and retirement accounts, but we rarely get around to reviewing life insurance. Share on X
But after that, he had another child and never included that child on the beneficiary arrangement. Now, I’ve talked to attorneys that say they can go into court afterwards and get it fixed if it needs to be. But why? If we can just, with a piece of paper, it, then you don’t have to go to court. You don’t have the time, you don’t have the attorney, and everything goes the way you want it to.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Save you five or $10,000 by not having to have an attorney go do it. So, um, so if, if a listener, if a founder entrepreneur watching our talk today wants real peace of mind, what are, what are three things their insurance should absolutely do for them?
It should be there for their beneficiaries. It should not be something that’s going to cause them a problem five years from now that they weren’t expecting. And it should be with a good company.
Yeah, love that.
By good
company, Don, I mean financially. There are some companies that are really good and they manage in favor of their policyholders and they’re looking out 80 years. But there’s a whole bunch of them in some household names that aren’t as well off financially and they’re not thinking about the clients as much as they are the next quarter’s analyst evaluation.
They make compromises on the policies and they’re the ones that are most likely not going to perform as well as they needed to.
Gotcha. Yeah. and, and just so the listeners know, you know, there’s a invest that there are rating services. And if I had a nickel for every time I talked with a insurance executive, especially live insurance, who said, now we are really conservative. I mean, they’re all kind on the conservative side, but it doesn’t, but they have shareholders and pressures other than, you know, the insured.
And so you want to watch out for that. Okay. So, final question. I’m going to start a sentence and I’ll ask you to finish it.
All right.
Insurance fails you the moment.
You take it for granted.
Insurance fails you the moment you take it for granted. Share on X
Yeah, I think that’s a really good lesson. Taking things for granted is not a good idea. ⁓ certainly not with, know, life insurance can be a cornerstone of your personal and corporate balance sheet and can be such a great piece of your financial today and future.
Go.
And I highly recommend to you, the listener, that as you look for life insurance, get somebody who’s a real pro, okay? Not somebody who sells 17 different types of policies and life is one of them. There’s some people out there that all they do is life and they’re very knowledgeable. And the other thing I think I would recommend is if you have a policy and you’re not comfortable
with the terms and conditions and that policy is probably 25 pages and you need to be an attorney or you need to be Frank to figure it out. But maybe you reach out to Frank and let him analyze that policy. So Frank, what’s a good way for somebody to reach out to you if they so chose?
Don, the best way is through my website, but before they reach out to me, they might want to read my ebook. It’s on Amazon. It’s called How to Do a Proper Policy Review. No beneficiary left behind. It’s an easy read, and I gave away all my secrets. So you want to know all these things? Read the book. You can also go on my website. That’s StratisF.
Okay.
cake.
and you won’t have to pay Amazon. But most people say it’s a good read and gives you things to think about. If I could give you a different analogy before we part, I have to confess, I’m a car guy. And I’ve also got one fabulous mechanic who puts up with me. And like,
Yeah.
One old car, I’ve got a car with a carburetor on it. Most mechanics don’t understand what that is. But now and then I get a break and I say, I’m gonna take a trip and I’m gonna go to Amarillo and back. And I don’t want anything to happen. If this car breaks down, it’s your fault. And he says, okay. And I leave him the car and a couple of days later, he calls me back and says, you can go to Amarillo and back, you’ll be fine.
and he’s never failed me in 15 years. Whatever I do with one of those cars, it makes it there and back and I can enjoy the ride. I don’t have to worry about a tow truck. Well, that carburetor, he doesn’t understand carburetors either, but he’s got a guy who does. So I never see him. If the car needs something with the carburetor, he calls the guy while the car’s there. He comes in and fixes it and I got what I want. I dropped it off.
pick it up, I don’t have to worry about the details, and the car makes it. That’s by analogy for the insurance. Let’s make sure it’s going to make the trip up there and back, and you get peace of mind, you get confidence, and the money is there to replace what needs to be replaced if you’re not here.
Love that. Frank, thank you so much. Been very informative. I’m pretty sure people will get the ebook. Pretty sure people will reach out and do some policy reviews. It’s been my pleasure to have you on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Thank you, Don. One last thing. Somebody told me to be successful in business. You only have to work a half a day. And it doesn’t matter which 12 hours you pick. So thank you for allowing me to share my entrepreneurship, Don.
Yeah, I buy that.
Yeah, thank you. Hey folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Bye now.

====================================================

Title: Quiet Wealth Strategies for Financial Freedom: Clare Baukham on How High Earners Should Really Build Wealth
Date: January 30, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/quiet-wealth-strategies-financial-freedom-clare-baukham-how-high-earners-should-really-build-wealth/
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Content:
Most people assume financial freedom comes from making more money. Clare Baukham has seen the opposite play out again and again.
Most people believe financial freedom comes from earning more, but Clare Baukham’s work with high net worth individuals shows why making more money doesn’t create freedom. Many successful professionals master income but overlook money mindset and structure. This gap explains what high earners get wrong about money. Without intentional wealth building strategies, even wealthy households feel pressure instead of peace. Clare Baukham emphasizes that true freedom comes from clarity, not constant growth, and that financial freedom requires designing wealth to support life, not dominate it.
A key distinction Clare Baukham highlights is quiet wealth vs loud wealth explained in practical terms. Loud wealth is reactive, visible, and volatile, while quiet wealth strategies focus on stability, patience, and reducing financial volatility. Understanding how wealthy people manage money reveals a disciplined approach centered on asset diversification strategies rather than chasing returns. For entrepreneurs especially, wealth planning for entrepreneurs must account for irregular income and risk exposure. How entrepreneurs should structure their wealth depends on building systems that work quietly in the background while decisions remain calm and intentional.
Clare Baukham also explains the role of alternative assets in long-term planning and why alternative investments for high net worth individuals are about balance, not speculation. When combined with traditional planning, alternative assets help smooth volatility and strengthen resilience. This approach reframes wealth as a tool rather than a source of stress. Ultimately, Clare Baukham teaches that lasting financial freedom comes from aligning money mindset with structure, allowing wealth to grow steadily without noise, anxiety, or constant attention.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
 
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Most people assume financial freedom comes from making more money. Clare Baukham has seen the opposite play out again and again
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I got a great guest. She’s hiding out in Mexico. Clare Baukham, I’m sorry, with Clear Wealth Group and Clear Art Reserve. Clare, welcome to the show.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
Yeah, thrilled to have you. Before we get started, you have these two, they fit together, but they wouldn’t fit together for most people, okay? Pretty creative that you fit them together. Tell us about Clear Wealth Group and Clear Art Reserve and what you do in those two companies and who you serve and why you do it.
Just tell us your story.
Absolutely. So I started actually as a floral designer, believe it or not. I’m Canadian, so I was downtown Toronto, working the floral circuit. I got a really good name there. And I ended up opening my own flower store, but of course I developed an allergy to the flowers. Why not? So you may as well be allergic to your passion and your dream. So I actually became a full-time actress as well.
I sold my store and I was doing both for a while and I sold my store. Yeah, and I became an actress and I opened a theater company and was going very well. You know, to be honest, every business I was in, it was about how can I become incredibly wealthy? So I was working, I was kind of slowing down on acting a little bit because the gigs are just not there. Every actor is pretty much always unemployed.
Every business I was in, it was always about how can I become incredibly wealthy. Not famous. Wealth mattered more to me than recognition. Share on X
So I decided I didn’t want to be unemployed all of the time. I wanted to make a lot of money. So I took rich over fame. my parents owned a machine shop, Lawn Mowers, Chainsaws, outdoor power equipment basically. And I was working with them and they wanted to retire and I didn’t want to take it over.
So we decided the trajectory of the business was not going to be as lucrative as because the Home Depot’s and all of those were coming and they had the same kind of equipment as us, right? So the little guy was getting squeezed out, which was fine. It was time for them to go and time for me to move on. So I did and I became an options trader, full-time options trader. I just went off and I learned technical analysis and I started trading the markets and I got a really good name for myself. People
started to hear, this Clare Baukham is a really good trader. I’m going to give her my money because she’s making a lot of money on her own. Well, it turns out you need a license for that. So anywhere in the world, well, maybe not anywhere, but. So I decided to become a financial advisor. Remember when my husband said to me, well, you should just become an advisor, get your hours in the business, and then you can be, you you can start your hedge fund.
I don’t want to be a financial advisor. That’s gross. I didn’t have a good image of them in my mind. So I did become one. My first gig as an advisor, I was making 4,000 cold calls a week. So it was very boring for me. I am very creative. I’m very much an entrepreneur. I needed to get out of that. So I went down the street from where I was living and I…
Hehehe.
basically walked into the firm and I said, hey, I want to join your firm. I want to get licensed and let’s do it. So we did. And I was basically going to go in there, get my hours and then get out of there as fast as possible. However, got basically the largest advisor in the country took me under his wing. And he started to teach me all of these really interesting strategies that none of the other advisors knew because they didn’t have, I guess, he used to call me a diamond in the rough.
So I guess they didn’t show that to him. So he thought I’m gonna take you with me basically. So he did and I was really fortunate. I made a lot of money. I won a lot of awards. I made my clients a lot of money because of the strategies he taught me. And then from then to be honest, from day one, I was a superstar in this business and I was unhappy. It just, it bored.
Mmm.
It just, I felt like if somebody even came back to me, we used to sit in the bullpen where all of the new advisors would sit together and make those calls and everything, right? And this is about 15 years ago now. And someone, one of the other advisors came up to me and he said, you’re too big for this place. And I didn’t let that go to my head like, yeah, I am too big for this. It wasn’t about ego. It was about, you’re right. There’s something else down the line for me that I’m feeling somewhere else because…
Everything in my life was always about making the most amount of money for myself and my clients the easiest way possible Not meaning Bad things illegal things but meaning what else is out there? How did people get super rich in or wealthy in life, right? So Off I went to another firm and my boss was a billionaire So there I was in his massive boardroom overlooking the helicopter pad
Everything in my life was about finding the easiest, smartest way to make the most amount of money for myself and my clients, without doing anything illegal or unethical. Share on X
I took he as a very, very tall man, big hands. I took his big hand in mine and I said, so how’d you do it? And he told me the entire story of how he became a billionaire. So with that in my mind, fast forward a couple of years, I’m studying, I’m going to show you how I married the two companies. I’m studying mindset basically for high performers in a hundred million dollar, 92 million dollar mansion in Bel Air, California.
So we got to be in the house for the day, take your shoes off, walk around in your bare feet, really feel the feeling of being in the house, right? So I’m in this beautiful house, really nicely done. You we get to go upstairs, change the group of men and women, change for dinner, come back down, and there’s the owner of the house. And if you’re like me, you want to meet the owner of a hundred million dollar house. So I went right up to him and I said, Hey, I’m Clare Bauckham. It’s nice to meet you. I just wanted to, you know, I just wanted to introduce myself and
let you know I love your place here and right beside him was his art dealer. So and the art dealer said to me, hi, he introduced him so he kind of interjected. He said have you ever thought about art as an asset class? Because doing what you do you guys don’t usually get into and I said no we don’t normally get into art as an asset class, you’re right. So from there I started to let it percolate and swirl and every night I would do the research.
As much as I attacked those strategies that my mentor gave me, I started to really research art. Honestly, I love art as a passionate, creative person, but that’s not what this was for for me. This was more, can this be an asset class that really works for people and can create that alpha in their portfolio that we’re all seeking this piece? Everyone’s got that constant rate of return, that beautiful beta.
If you have an advisor, I’m pretty sure, especially in the last year, I’ve seen some of my personal portfolio and some of my clients, I’ve seen them go up 60, 70 % with some of the things. Great. Everyone should have been making money in the last year. However, 60, 70 % is incredible. How are you making one in 200 % in something alpha related? Right? Warren Buffett always gets into, we hear it.
silver, Warren’s buying whatever amount of the hundred million, a hundred billion dollars of silver or gold or oil. I didn’t want anything that was so volatile. Everyone’s dealing with the roller coaster at all times. You’re dealing with it with your government, with your taxes, with your job, with the uncertainty. If you’ve got kids, it’s a whole other thing that you’re dealing with. So I wanted something stable. I wanted to know what the ultra wealthy were doing.
And that was what I wanted to start directing my people towards. So you asked me, who am I normally dealing with? I deal with a lot of C-suite execs. deal with a lot, a lot of business owners because the mindset of a business owner and an entrepreneur, it’s very different than an employee. So they’re, they’re looking at things. Yeah. They’re looking for those things, those alternative. You’ve heard of the strategies of be your own banker by using these,
No doubt.
long-term life insurance, permanent life insurance. We do those as well for all these people. So my thought was, can I get out of the traditional line of financial advisory and start to really help people who are in that, you know, earning as a household three to 500 plus plus plus plus. So we get into people that are making 10, 20 million, even plus plus, right?
But however, we do not exclude people who are really willing to and want to go the distance and become those people who are making that 10, 20, 30, $100 million a year. It’s not fair, right? We were all little guys at one point. So I’m coming from, you know, not being able to afford fruit in the winter at my parents’ machine shop when I was a kid. So I believe that everyone gets equal opportunity, right? So.
Yeah. I think, I think most self-made people are always at a certain point are looking for how can they reach behind them and help somebody else up. and that’s, and that’s pretty, pretty common with people who started with nothing, a little different with people who inherited, but, people who started with nothing, they’re almost always looking to help somebody. Okay. So let me, the great story, great background.
So that’s my story.
pull people up. Yeah.
Yes.
You obviously were hitting 500 foot home runs right off the bat. And people recognize that. Let me ask you a couple of questions. So in that group, what’s like the biggest money mistake you see really successful, really intelligent people making and why are they making that mistake?
even at that level, you will find that the money is still too loud for all of them. Meaning they’re chasing, they’re grinding. Yeah, they’re grinding, they’re hustling, they’re exhausted, they’re stressed, they’re sick, they’re unhappy. And all of those things for me will pinpoint back to how you are with your money.
Even at very high levels of success, money is still too loud. People are grinding, hustling, exhausted, stressed, and unhappy. Share on X
tell me more about money too loud.
If you’re unhappy with your job, for example, let’s just take that’s a super common one. If you’re unhappy with your job, you’re not going to be performing as highly as you could be. you’re going to be scraping. If you’re feeling like it’s a hustle and a grind, I have, I have guys right now that I’m dealing with and I’m grinding. I said, let’s remove that language because even as a wealth architect, I may not be helping people with their plan and their budget. don’t do budgets. I don’t think you, it’s not for me, but
Even with all of that, everyone is dealing with this noise. It’s loud out there. So not enough of them are dealing with beautiful, quiet wealth and quiet wealth strategies. Everything is so in your face. You’ve got all the ladies with the, offense, I love Louis Vuitton, their beautiful brand. It’s loud, loud fashion, loud, brands everywhere. Look at me, I’m going to jump off a building. No more jump off a building. Quiet, zen.
Quiet wealth is peaceful. You wouldn’t even know some of the wealthiest people in the room, because their money works quietly in the background. Share on X
Peaceful you can make money you can I know some of my clients make I’ve got I’ve got one guy I’m just thinking of in particular The guy walks into the gym. He’s probably worth. don’t know half a billion dollars something like that Including everything everywhere globally and he walks in and just a regular t-shirt and nothing shorts now He’s got his Rolls Royce parked in the gym parking lot. It’s a beautiful machine
You just wouldn’t know his hair is kind of fluffy, you know, so this is that beautiful, quiet wealth. So that’s that’s what I see is missing. If the portfolio is moving, if it’s too loud, there’s too much volatility. It doesn’t mean to it shouldn’t all be like that. There should be a piece or or all of it that should be architected so that it just goes beautifully and you go and you do your job and let us do ours for you quietly.
I love that.
Love that. Okay, so when you say the word financial freedom, what does that look like in quiet wealth?
It looks to me, you know, I did a post the other day on my Instagram and I, as you know, I’m hiding in Mexico. It’s what I do all winter. I have to get away from the Canadian winters. And I posted the ocean and one of my clients said to me, that’s what quiet wealth sounds like. So.
Nice.
Think about it. The freedom to be here, work from anywhere, I homeschool my kid, he’s six years old. That may not be for everyone. Quiet wealth, what does it look like? It looks like what is the biggest vision that you have for yourself? Is it hopping on a private jet and going to the island and sipping whatever you want to sip on? Is it working from your computer for, I wake up at four o’clock in the morning with my husband and we work for three or four hours.
What is it? It’s whatever you want it to look like. It’s getting away from the grind. You notice that more and more of us are sick. I have Crohn’s disease, severe Crohn’s disease for 22 years. Stress. Stress is my number one trigger. Why? Why are we all stressed? Money is just a tool. We shouldn’t feel this stress and tense about it. Even the clients, like I said, who are making tens and 20, a hundred million dollars a year in their companies.
They feel that too, and they really shouldn’t have to. It should be more of an autopilot. So the freedom could be going to work every day if you’re loving it. I think the freedom is when you get to the end of your life, are you going to feel good about everything behind you? So always taking every single step and your plan and think about when I’m there on my deathbed, how is that dash?
I love that definition.
You’re born, you’re dead. The dash in between. How does that look? Right? So for me, wealth really relates to everything in life, right? So you can see, I can relate it to anything because it’s everyone’s running around out there right now trying to make as much as possible as fast as possible. So why? So they can have that freedom, but you can have the freedom now today, right? As long as you’re structuring it properly.
Love that. So what’s one financial decision that people before that, when they first come to you that they’ve delayed that costs them?
So many people are afraid to use other people’s money to get themselves ahead because they don’t know what they don’t know. But so many people haven’t done any saving or very little saving. So they say to me, well, right now we’re making a half a million as a household or a million as a household. We like the same in our retirement. That’s nice. You only have, you know, three million saved.
you’re not going to be able to take if you’re taking between 3 and 6 % from the portfolio, this is not going to work for you, right? So a lot of them, most people are ignoring what just needs to be done. It’s kind of like the weight loss thing, the eating well thing. We know we should be doing it, but it’s like, yeah, but I’m going to have a pizza tonight. You know, it’s like, we avoid it. It’s painful, right? But if we just lean into it a little bit,
I think that people, even at the extremely wealthy side, they really don’t understand the tool of money. They know how to make it, but then they don’t know what to do with it. So those are the things I see the most.
Yeah, I love that. And I certainly think that there are separate skills. It’s one thing to make money and a lot of people never figure that part out. That’s another thing to grow money, you know, from an investment standpoint and even fewer people kind of figure that out, I think. So, Clare, if somebody listening wanted to reach out to you or your company,
Most people know how to make money, but they don’t know how to structure it, and that’s why they stay stressed. Share on X
Yeah. Yeah.
What’s the best way they should do that?
Yeah, so they can reach me on one of our websites, clearwealthgroup.com or clearartreserve.com or if they want to find me personally, my Instagram handle is at Clare Baukham.
Awesome. Clare, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show today. You are a breath of fresh air in your industry. And so thank you so much. I’m grateful.
Thank you. That is lovely to hear. I appreciate that.
That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

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Title: Jason Wong’s Entrepreneurial Journey: Startup Lessons on Leaving Success, Leadership Mindset, and Scaling a Manufacturing Business
Date: January 16, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/jason-wongs-entrepreneurial-journey-startup-lessons-on-leaving-success-leadership-mindset-and-scaling-a-manufacturing-business/
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Content:
Jason Wong’s entrepreneurial journey is a powerful example of how real business success stories are often built by questioning what already works. After years of running profitable consumer brands, Jason made the difficult decision of leaving a successful business to start over—an experience that reshaped his entrepreneur mindset and approach to growth. His founder journey story highlights how startup lessons are rarely learned from theory, but from lived experience. By shifting from brand owner to manufacturer, Jason entered the manufacturing business with a fresh perspective, focusing on solving long-standing problems that most founders simply accepted as “industry norms.” This kind of business decision making reflects how entrepreneurs think differently when they see opportunity where others see risk.
A key theme in Jason’s story is leadership mindset, especially when it comes to hiring mistakes in business and scaling a business responsibly. Early missteps taught him that the true cost of a bad hire isn’t salary—it’s lost momentum and misaligned culture. Over time, this led to a strong belief in hiring A players in a startup, prioritizing ownership, commitment, and cultural fit over impressive resumes. These startup lessons extend beyond hiring into how founders build teams, delegate responsibility, and create environments where people can perform at their best. Jason’s experience reinforces that sustainable growth comes from clarity, not constant hustle.
What makes this entrepreneur podcast episode resonate is its honest take on redefining success. Jason challenges the idea that success is purely financial, emphasizing work-life balance for entrepreneurs and the importance of building a business that supports personal fulfillment. His story speaks directly to founders, CEOs, and leadership teams navigating growth while trying to protect what matters outside work. As an entrepreneur mindset podcast episode, it offers more than inspiration—it provides grounded insight into scaling a business with intention, leading with clarity, and making decisions that align success with long-term purpose.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

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Jason Wong’s Entrepreneurial Journey: Startup Lessons on Leaving Success, Leadership Mindset, and Scaling a Manufacturing Business
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. What a treat. have Jason Wong from Packing Duck in the house. Jason, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, I’m excited.
Yeah, I’m thrilled to have you. So before we get into questions, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you do it, all that kind of stuff.
man, my name is Jason. I’m from Hong Kong and I came to America when I was eight years old. And currently I run a manufacturing business, a custom packaging manufacturing business. And I service a ton of brands that some might, know, some you might not know. We work with brands like Questbars, Vita Coco, you know, more household names. And then we also work with a lot of consumer brands and beauty supplements, apparel. We do a lot of categories here.
That’s amazing. So you wouldn’t know this, but I spent 26 days in mainland China right before COVID. And so like the fourth quarter of that year, you know, flew into Hong, spent a couple of days in Hong Kong, but 26 days on the mainland. Man. Hey, if you’re listening to the podcast and you haven’t been to China, go to China. It is absolutely unbelievably amazing.
my gosh.
I thought 26 days I would see the whole country. It’s huge. You can spend 26 months and not see everything in China, but absolutely amazing experience. Okay. So first question.
Not enough.
Mm-hmm.
What’s a decision in your career that you made that looked completely wrong at the time you made it, but it ended up changing the trajectory of your business for the good?
It’s an amazing question really and I think at that moment when I gave up everything people thought I was crazy to leave a successful business and and starting this manufacturing business I have so the manufacturing business I have right now was started around two years ago and up to that point I have been operating and developing my own products my own brands I was running a very successful beauty company I was I had a nail company a hair company
eyelash company, skincare company. I had a lot of these brands I was operating and one day I said, I’m going to do something new. I felt like my time is here. I felt like I’ve done everything I wanted to do on a brand side. I’m going to switch over to the manufacturing side. And people thought I was crazy. They’re like, why would you leave something that you’ve built for so many years to do something that I honestly don’t think you have any business to be in.
Even if something is working, that doesn’t mean it’s where you’re meant to stay. Sometimes your best move is walking away from what already works. Share on X
And I was like, listen, I honestly don’t have any business being on the other side, but I knew this was my calling. felt like my talent and my skills is better used here. So I dropped everything and I started a manufacturing business. it is, I think this year we did more in revenue than the last 10 years of my career combined. And we’re only second year in. so, looking back, I think that was the most pivotal moment for me was to follow what I believe was the right move.
Yeah, and speaking about following what you believe, your best work is what you’re passionate about. so even if you’re very successful in something that you don’t really care about, there’s something better for you out there in what you do care about. okay, what’s the most expensive mistake you’ve made?
Absolutely.
And how would you help other entrepreneurs avoid that?
Great question again. I think the most expensive mistake is in our business is hiring, hiring the wrong person. really, really takes a beating out of you because for every hire you go into it with the hopes that this will be the superstar of the team. I look at hiring kind of like building a sports team, the roster, who are our star players, who are starting five.
And every single hire, think about it in that perspective. No one is hired just to be an add on. Everyone’s there to play a very pivotal role. And
I, there was definitely some lessons in the earliest stages of my career, not in this company, but I’ve had some hires that, interview extremely well. They knew how to talk, but when it comes down to the last moment where you really need them to make a shot, they don’t pull it through. And, know, I think it could be fault of my own. saw too much of what I believe in them and didn’t really look at the red flags are in front. and so I would say that was the most expensive because it’s not just
hiring the wrong person and paying them a salary but like what are the loss and opportunities that we missed because of the wrong person being placed in the wrong position and you know same thing happened in this company too we thankfully only had one of that instance happen but a lot of them came back to after I reflect on it on how I hired so now my hiring process is completely different I look at not just what’s on the resume but is there a cultural fit is this person willing to give it their
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all or is this just a side job for them? Do they actually have passion for what they do or are they just doing this job because that’s what they’ve been doing for last five, 10 years? And, you know, nowadays we have not had a single issue. Every single hire we’ve had has been extremely high A players.
You know, and it’s the who. Every time you think it’s the what, the why, the where, man, success comes down to the who. Do you have the right players on the team? I have a good friend I learned this from. He said, you know, for a CEO, for the leader of the company, you really only have a couple of jobs. One, you cast and communicate the mission of the company.
over and over and over and over over and over again. And when they laugh at you because you’ve told them so many times, you keep telling them, okay, it becomes your mantra. And then you hire the best people on the planet to go make the mission a reality. And he said, that’s basically it. Okay, get the best people. And I shared that with a
physician who runs a big physician group one time and he said, well, how would I know if I’m overpaying them? And I said, I learned this from another friend. If they’re truly an A player, you really can’t overpay them. They’re going to demand that they deliver an ROI on your investment into them. So thank you for sharing that. Very wise, Jason. Yeah. So what did you believe about success early on?
I agree.
that maybe you don’t believe now.
Hmm. I think when I was a lot younger success was what I see other people do was displayed
materially or you know a revenue number out there and as I got older and deeper into my career I realized that none of that really matters success to me I think there’s there’s two parts to it personal success and and career success I think personal success is do I work a job that I truly love around people that I enjoy working with and
When I was younger, was maybe I need to hit $10 million. Maybe I need to hit 50. But nowadays, I don’t look at that as the only indicator of success. Obviously, you still need to make money to have success and grow the company. But I wake up every single day enjoying the work that I do. I am passionate about what I do. And I go home happy that I did a great job at it. That to me is great success.
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On a personal level, I believe that success is having quality time with the people that you love. Once again, very similar concept. And you’re not compromising other parts of your business or your life because of your business. I think earlier on, I believe that I had to sacrifice everything in order to have success. I think everyone’s definition of success is a little bit different. If you were to talk to a billionaire like Elon Musk, he might say, yeah, I’m willing to give
up everything in my life in order to have a trillion dollar company and that’s fine by him but that’s not for me. me success is am I building something with people that I love? Am I able to make enough money to create a life that I want to live in? And do I have time to truly enjoy the fruits of my labor? And if I’m able to hit all these three points to me that’s the pinnacle of success.
I totally agree. You cannot, your balance sheet alone, no matter how it looks, will not determine your, if you’re miserable, what difference will it make? It won’t make any difference. And so, you know, there is a balance and what I share with my clients is this, is like, first off, we have to figure out what you want. And many entrepreneurs kind of shy away from that because it’s a commitment to say,
I want this because maybe I want something else. Maybe I want that. Like I get it, but we can’t, we can’t begin working on your model for success until we know what it is that you want. Okay. And then with intention, brick by brick, we can make that happen. So, okay.
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely.
Let’s talk about mindset.
Do you have a routine? Do you have a habit? Do you intentionally work on your mindset? And if you do, what is it?
I’m delusional.
I’m absolutely delusional about what is possible and how I’ll get there. And I think it’s the same mindset that took me from, you know, working a restaurant job. And I grew up living in a garage, you know, like we didn’t really have a place to live. I lived wherever I could and I worked really odd jobs as a kid. I started working when I was eight. When I was five years old, I was working in restaurants in the back helping. These are family restaurants. It’s not like I applied again.
Whoa.
W2 it’s like family restaurants from early stage I had this mindset that I have to I have to work hard and I need to think outside of box and how to do more and so It is the same mindset took me out of that environment. So from eight years old to 16 years old I was working I would say six days a week in restaurants and every single job you can think of a waiter a host is a a cook, you know guys in the back prepping stuff
Yeah.
And throughout that time, I was so delusional that I knew I was gonna get out of it. And I save a lot of money and I moved to Los Angeles by myself when I was 18 years old. And I rented a small room in someone’s house and I was like, you know what, this is going to be temporary. I’m going to start my company out of this tiny room.
And a few months later, I was doing my hundred thousand dollar days selling stuff online. I was, it was an e-commerce for a little while. And it was just because I was delusional. If I just believe that the path that I was set on as a kid is a path out beyond forever, I would not be anywhere near where I am right now. But I was just delusional. I knew that I had to do it. I knew that I could do it. And it was whatever means possible. So
Okay,
I love how you frame it as being delusional. We all have thoughts and by default we think, well, they’re accurate and right and true and people who disagree are wrong. But we actually know that thoughts are just thoughts. you can believe that
delusional thought, just as easy as you can believe that you’re going to fail. And what your mind fixates on is what you get most of the time.
Right. I agree. And
I think the part that
part of being delusional is I was, I was very set on making things work. And I, and I always try to swing for the fences there in every single part of my life, every single part of my career. There’s always one moment where you can see me if we were to look back at it, where I was like, I’m going to make a really, really big bet that this has got to happen. And if it does, there’s a great chance that we’ll 10 X from here. And if it doesn’t, it’s okay, we’ll try again. And, and part of being able to take
take the swing to the fences is I was just very delusional where I could be. You know, even if I didn’t have money, I’ll tell you a really good story here. The first time I made a really big success in e-commerce was back in 2016 in December. And I launched a coloring book called the meme Bible. And the meme Bible was essentially a coloring book. It’s very silly if I describe it, but it’s a coloring book of the year’s most popular internet trends and memes.
if you will. And it sounds like a silly idea then, it’s still a silly idea now, but it resonated with a large amount of people on the internet that were consuming these culture and they want to buy it. But the kicker is the only thing I had was a picture of the book. I went and learned Photoshop and I Photoshopped pictures of what the coloring book could look like. And I had a picture of it. I made a website for $20 and
Started making advertisements online. I was syndicating it to blog posts to affiliate networks and the first day I did $4,000 second day at $7,000 by the end of the week. I did a quarter million dollars and Here’s the kicker. Here’s where I was delusional. I didn’t have a single coloring book on hand at all It was only day eight after I made all that money. I was like, okay now I have the money I’m gonna go buy and like actually make this thing a reality
No sane person will ever do that. No one in their right mind would do that. But I was just crazy.
Yeah, maybe a little bit, but like, you know, every entrepreneur, you know, spent 35 years working with entrepreneurs and I don’t know any entrepreneur with worth their salt that didn’t go sell something that they didn’t actually hadn’t built yet. And, um, and, and I’ve talked with non-entrepreneurs that are like, that’s just crazy. And you’re like, is it really? I mean, if it won’t sell, why build it?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
And
if it does sell, you’ll have budget to work with to put it together. I’m like, it’s not as crazy as it maybe sounds.
What?
I think a lot of people try to perfect before they launch a product they spend seven eight months trying to refine every single process.
before they launch their product or open their store. And I think, yeah, like I’m not saying my way is the right way, but in my perspective, launching fast and understanding feedback and reiterating it is how I like to operate. And I like to think of best case and worst case scenario, right? Like in the scenario that I just presented to you, the worst case scenario is I sell nothing.
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The best case scenario is I sell everything. And I’m willing to accept the worst case scenario in hopes of achieving the best case scenario. I knew that, and I knew what it takes to make that product. knew I could launch it on time. It’s a, it’s a book. It’s a coloring book for God’s sake, right? Like it’s not, it’s not a rocket science. I’m not promising people I’m selling them a rocket. So I knew that if I just generate enough money and understand the demand, I can just easily buy inventory and get the book done in a few days.
So it’s it’s calculated a version of being delusional. Like I didn’t go in thinking that I’m going to ship something that can never be done. I knew how it could be done. I just needed the capital to do it.
Yeah, yeah. you know, what you say, I’ve known this like all my life, know, hope for the best plan for the worst. You’ll get something in between almost every time. But once you understand the bookends and you’re at peace with how those can work, it’s liberating. can boldly go forward, you know, with courage that normal people don’t have.
And so, okay, last question.
If you had to rebuild everything today, if everything was gone, no audience, no capital, what would you do in the first 90 days?
Mm-hmm.
First 90 day will be…
Um, understanding, I’ll do a lot more research on the market and understand what are some areas that is ripe for fixing. So in every single business I’ve built besides the coloring book one, that one’s kind of for fun. Um, even in the manufacturing, even in beauty, there was always a white space on the market that I identify that I can be in. And so for manufacturing, what I was trying to solve for was there was really no reliable suppliers for packaging in the space I was in, because when I was running my own brand,
we had to deal with our fair share of manufacturers overseas, whether that is in China and Korea and Japan, even here in the United States, there was really no one that I felt like was doing it the right way. Everyone’s doing it the same way for the last 20, 30 years. And so when I came into this space, I brought in a fresh perspective on how to deal with clients, how to do designs, how to manufacture using the latest technology, leveraging AI in this process. When you think about manufacturing, you’re thinking about a giant warehouse of a
a few machines and a bunch of people just making things step one, step two, step three. That’s been the way that’s been done for many, many years. So I come in here and I bring a brand new perspective because I identified that problem. So if I were to do it all over again, assuming that I’m not working on the same industry, I’ll go out there and I’ll talk to people.
Talking to people is the number one way for you to understand what’s broken. If you talk to enough people, you’re gonna find a common denominator across whatever you’re trying to look for, that there is something missing. And same idea I took for my cosmetic company. There’s a bajillion beauty companies out there. Everyone’s selling the same thing, but what is the one thing that they’re missing? And how I found that was I went through people’s reviews.
So I was making eyelashes, for example, you know, the fake lashes that people wear when they go out. I went through other brands, Amazon reviews, I went through their website reviews, and I didn’t look at their five star reviews. looked at their one star and their two star reviews. combed through every single review to identify what are the common things that everyone’s complaining about. Then I made my own brand solving for those specific problems. And I knew that there’s already an audience looking for a product like this because everyone’s complaining about it. You don’t write a review for some
Mm.
mean,
unless you’re truly, truly caring about it, right? And so that’s a very long answer to give you, but I will start.
That’s great.
You dropped this gold nugget. want to be sure everybody heard that. So Jason did his own market. I mean, he did about a quarter million dollars. If you hire Buxton or somebody to do that market research for you, that would be expensive. It’s $250,000. He did his own market research and he found areas where people had pain.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
The easiest people to sell are people that are in pain because they want the pain to stop. The easiest people to sell are not the people who just want it to get better. Okay. They’re not nearly as motivated as somebody who’s in pain. ⁓ that’s man, that’s, that’s a nugget. Pay attention to that folks. And the other thing I would say is this, the answer to almost all of your problems as an entrepreneur is go out and talk to people, whether you’re trying to figure out what to sell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
trying to figure out how to sell it, trying to sell more of it, okay? Trying to hire more people that are A players to help you do it. It won’t do you any good to sit in your office and not talk with people. Get out there and talk with people, tell them what you want, ask them if they can help. You’ll be shocked at the numbers of people that will just show up to help you hit your goals.
Thousand percent, I agree with you.
Jason, what’s a good way for somebody to reach out to you if they hear this and say, man, I want to know about packaging or I just want to know more about Jason’s theories of entrepreneurship? What’s the easiest way to get you?
Yeah, thanks for plugging. My website is packing duck. That’s P a K I N G and duck d u c k dot com. And my email is Jason at packing duck dot com.
So simple. Jason, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a true pleasure. Thank you very much. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.
Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
and sweet.

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Title: E151 | Dean Lyulkin & William Stern: How Two Friends Built an $10B Small Business Lender
Date: January 1, 2026
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-dean-lyulkin-william-stern-built-small-business-lender/
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Content:
They didn’t meet in a boardroom, didn’t raise flashy venture capital, and didn’t follow a playbook — they built a $10B business the slow, uncomfortable, unglamorous way most people never talk about.
Long before Cardiff became a serious name in small business lending, this story started with two kids sharing rolled tacos, splitting a Coke, and stretching five dollars as far as it could go. Dean Lyulkin arrived in America as a child with nothing, after his family fled a collapsing system. William Stern was already there. What bonded them wasn’t ambition or money, but time. Years of growing up together, opening a joint bank account as teenagers, staying close through school, college, and life pulling them in different directions. When they finally came back together to build a company, the foundation wasn’t strategy. It was trust.
That trust was tested early and often. The 2008 financial crisis didn’t just slow things down — it froze the entire system. Banks pulled away from small businesses. Credit disappeared. Survival meant making decisions with incomplete information and living with the consequences. Later, COVID delivered another gut punch, shutting down commerce and forcing them to confront a simple truth most founders learn too late: cash is not optional. Through it all, the partnership worked because they didn’t try to be the same person. One went deep. One stayed broad. Delegation wasn’t weakness — it was survival.
What’s striking isn’t just the scale they reached, but how their definition of success evolved. Early on, it looked like growth and momentum. Now, it looks like freedom. Working with people they trust. Choosing what deserves their time. Protecting peace as fiercely as revenue. This isn’t a story about shortcuts or hacks. It’s about staying in the game long enough to let compounding do its work — in business, in leadership, and in friendship.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

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Dean Lyulkin & William Stern: How Two Friends Built an $10B Small Business Lender
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Got a real treat for you today. 140, 150 episodes of the show. The first time we’ve had partners on the show at the same time. Welcome to the show, Dean Lyulkin and William Stern with Cardiff. How are you guys? Oh man, thrilled to have you.
you
Thanks for having us.
You are both, and Cardiff is based in San Diego, California. Yes. Okay. And so tell us, what does Cardiff do? Who do you do it with? I mean, I know, but let’s tell the audience. What do you do? Who do you do it with? Why do you do it? How do you do it? What’s your story?
you
Dean, don’t you take that one? I’ll take the next one.
Wow.
He just threw you under the bus there, team.
Hopefully, hopefully there’s an easier
question subsequently.
So Cardiff’s a unique business. We are a privately held lender to the very small businesses that serve America, serve Main Street. And we’ve been at it for over 20 years and we’ve provided about $10 billion of financing to America’s small businesses. And we like to brag a little bit, but we are America’s favorite small business lender.
think we received that award, what, two years in a row? So something to be proud of. We’re not young men anymore, but we’ve built this business for the last 20 years together, which is extremely unique. And we’ve stayed away from being public or being owned by private equity. So it makes Cardiff a pretty unique animal in this space.
I agree. when you say, you did say 10 billion with a B, yes. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Congratulations. That’s rare air in any industry. So, okay, we’ll serve this to William and it’s tougher question because he deferred to you. So, you know, every great partnership can look back and find a spark.
with a B.
Yeah.
Thank God.
So what first drew the two of you together and when did you realize that it was more than just a good idea, but you shared a mission worth building?
Yeah, that’s not an easier question, but nonetheless. So I’m going to just sort of go back in time a little bit. So Dean and I became friends really in like late 1989, maybe early 1990 when he first came to America from Ukraine. So I’m going to tell his story, but quickly, right. They left, you know, communist Russia before communism fell and took nothing with them and settled in San Diego after going to
Hahaha.
You know, after being through camps in Europe and trying to, you know, make their way to America, and lucky enough, ⁓ they landed in San Diego, we became friends in Hebrew school. So like Sunday school. And, you know, at the time, I just thought he was cool, right? I was, I don’t know, nine years old, maybe he was 10 years old. And I just thought he was smart and he was funny. And he, he shared the sort of the same
you
You know, the same interests that I did, right? You’re young kids, right? You’re bonding over nonsense. And so we just kept that relationship going. We opened up our first joint bank account at Wells Fargo. I think when he was 13 and maybe I was 12, his grandmother, who was like 80 years old at the time, walked us like a mile each way to Wells Fargo. during the summers, we would take out $5 a day. We would share five rolled tacos, right? We’re based in San Diego.
We’d share five rolled tacos. We’d share one Coca-Cola. And with the money left over, we’d go to our 7-Eleven and play video games. And that was pretty much our summers until, until Dean got a car and, and then we had amazing freedom. We stayed friends through high school. We stayed friends through college. We both went to UCSD in San Diego. Afterwards, Dean went to Fisher Investments in the Bay area and worked.
Early exposure to limited resources teaches discipline that later protects leaders from careless growth. Share on X
hand in hand with Ken Fisher, who’s on the Forbes top 100 richest people in America. He became an equity partner in Fisher Investments at a very young age. Meanwhile, I was down in Southern California starting Cardiff. And to kind of close the loop on this circle, I begged him for three years incessantly to leave his job at Fisher and to come start something down in San Diego. His wife had moved
She was, she’s an attorney and she moved to San Francisco to start a life with him. They bought a house together in San Francisco and they were just getting married. And I’ll never forget the moment that he said, yes, I flew up to San Francisco to help him pack to basically leave his wife for another man, his first wife, which is, which is me. And so, yeah, well, it’s legal now it’s legal now, but, but that’s the story. He helped
from San Francisco.
He helped build Cardiff, I shouldn’t say build, he helped me scale Cardiff. I sort of had the idea, right, I wanted to democratize, I wanted to democratize lending. I wanted to do something that no one else had done. And I was sort of early, right, the technology wasn’t there yet. But I was hopeful. And sort of with the advent of the smartphone really in 2008, a la, you know, Apple.
We were able to quickly build and scale leveraging technology, a blend of both human and digital sort of underwriting. And here we are today. I think we’re closing in on at the end of this year, it’ll be over $11 billion deployed to Main Street. So a lot of money for two elementary school buddies on a budget.
Yeah, love that. Okay. So I don’t know if this is an easy question or a tough question. I’ll let you guys arm wrestle as to who gets what. So clearly, know, Cardiff is something pretty special that you’ve built and scaled together. Most partnerships, you know, there’s kind of a yin and a yang effect. mean, you, have different skill sets. So here’s a tough one. How do you handle it?
when your strengths or opinions are different or collide.
I’ll tell you a little bit about why this thing works.
So we’re different people with different skill sets, different ideas, different visions. But we’re also similar in a lot of ways in our ambition and our upbringing in terms of who we are. So kind of the core of who we are. And what makes this specific thing work is that one of us
really wants to specialize and dig deep on one particular subject matter. And really lets everything else kind of go and be run by other folks. And the other one likes to be very broad, but is extremely lazy. And so this, this approach to business
Ha ha ha.
Amazingly enough, right, because we’re intelligent enough. This specialization and hands off attitude towards a lot of things inside the business combined with a very broadness that combined with some really strategic laziness, as I like to say. What that allows us to do surprisingly is not fail, but to build because that combination allows us to build other people and leaders within the organization.
So you would think laziness is a destructive force inside of a business, but really what we mean by laziness is delegation. And so when you are lazy, you want other people to do things for you. And while that might be negative when we talk to our kids and their approach to school, inside of a company, laziness is actually a powerful multiple.
Because what laziness allows you to do is to not be a small business owner that wants everything done exactly the way they want it done. But to say, hey, Bob, Jill, you do it the 70 to 80 % of the way. That’s the best way you know how to do it. And of course, we were there to help along the way, but we’re not there to micromanage things. And so, you know, for better or worse, that’s that’s been
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Yeah.
Those have been powerful forces that helped shape the business and allowed us to build other people into leaders.
Thank
I love that. Thank you for sharing. So many times I think the best business leaders really just do one or two things. One, they cast and communicate the vision to the troops over and over and over and over and over again to where everybody is crystal clear on the mission. And then just go get the best people on the planet to help make the mission happen and give them the tools to do it. And many times that’s the best way to go.
Yeah.
And I loved your comment on laziness. can remember when my youngest son was, I don’t know, 10. I’m going to meet your teacher night and the teacher says, what do you do for a living? And he says, well, you can tell he doesn’t work. I mean, look how he’s dressed. And I’m wearing a t-shirt and shorts and I’m like, Hey, just because I make it look easy doesn’t mean I’m not doing something. And so he sees it a little different today, but that was, that was funny then.
You
That’s right. Yeah.
Yeah.
And it’s interesting, you know, like over the years, if you look at the metamorphosis of us as people, there’s a lot of change that’s happened over the last 20 years. And we’ve had to get really uncomfortable with sort of evolving from what we thought we were early on. You know, probably if you, if you asked us 20 years ago, like, you know,
Thank you.
who are you from a professional standpoint, you would say, well, Dean, you’re analytical and William, you’re a salesperson. And I think first we worked hard on getting Will to be comfortable not being a salesperson. He hated that because that’s what he identified with. And he became like an elite marketing genius over the last 20 years and not a salesperson.
That’s right. Yeah.
And for me, I was able to sort of metamorphosize, if that’s even a word, but sort of evolve from being this kind of analytical person, likes to research things, likes to think through things into being comfortable being more of a salesperson, right? And even helping a little bit on the marketing side of things.
I think that’s another sort of, know, together with laziness and specialization, delegation, all of these things have contributed to building this really cool business.
Well, and I think the fact that you embraced growth, which, know, real growth is uncomfortable because you’re going places you’ve not been. And if you’re not going places you haven’t been, you know, you’re probably not actually growing, you know, as a person. So did you ever have a make or break moment? So things are tough, cashflow, clients, conflict, where you thought, ⁓ are we doing this?
No.
No,
no, we can end it now. We’re good. Yeah. No, were plenty. There were plenty of times, right? We call them existential crises, right? And by the way, Dean, you were asking a question, metamorphosis, is that a word? Franz Kafka would argue. Yeah, right. That is a word. So how to scoot is that one. But for all the, for all the, for all the people that still know how to read books. So
had a couple of those.
Thank God.
Yeah, we had our existential crises. So, know, Cardiff was started in 2004. I was 24 years old. Dean came aboard three years later and he had perfect timing, just perfect timing. Because what came less than a year later, maybe a year and a few months later, actually, it was six months. Interesting. Well, what came was the financial crisis of 08, which
six months.
Ha ha ha.
you know, which not tangentially had an effect on our business, but it was a financial implosion, meaning that it touched everything that was associated with the monetary system. wasn’t just, you know, real estate and those, you know, the network of other sort of industries adjacent to it, right? Like escrow and title and, you know, those types of sort of verticals.
No, it touched commercial finance too. It tightened the gears of finance to such an extent that the wheels of the economy grinded to a halt. Just imagine this huge locomotive, is the wheels of commerce just grinding to a halt, almost perfectly timed with Dean’s arrival at Cardiff, his wife’s in San Francisco going, what on earth did we do?
I mean, they’re planning a wedding actively. So, you know, more than I want to focus on the turbulence of that relationship and sort of what was the root cause, right? No, it’s fine. No, I’m sure she doesn’t hold it against me whatsoever. But no, you know, the 08 financial crisis was huge, right? Like I was saying, the sort of gears of commerce grinded to a halt.
We’re still married, it’s fine.
Ha
Dean’s fault,
he broke it.
No, absolutely. was, but yeah, he touched something he shouldn’t have. That’s what we tell our kids. But no, you know, banks had to come to Jesus moment. The federal government, right, with the Dodd-Frank Act, forced banks to like take a hard look in the mirror and say, hey, we need to recapitalize. We need to keep more cash on hand. And to do so, the the person that we will
You know, it’s like, it’s like duck duck goose or whatever. It’s like the one person they’re not going to tap on the shoulder are small business owners, right? Everybody. It’s like Oprah Winfrey. Everybody gets a car. Well, banks are like, well, everybody can get a loan. You can get a car loan. Why? Because there’s an asset. You can get a home loan now. Why? Because there’s an asset. But the one person that never got chosen was small business and never that relationship never ameliorated.
to use another big word that Dean tried to use earlier. I just piggybacking off of that. But it never ameliorated, right? It never got better. That relationship between the large banks, the five large banks in the US, not to mention the consortium of 10,000 sort of small and regional banks in the US. They never wanted to sort of reengage with small business owners. So we took advantage of that. And then going back to the question of existential crises,
We had another one, which was COVID. If the government says as a business, you’re not, I mean, especially in California, right? Big population centers flying that, you know, woke, you know, sort of blue flag, right? They shut down commerce, right? They wouldn’t allow restaurants to operate. They wouldn’t allow, they wouldn’t allow you to eat outside or inside. You can’t go to movie theater. Good God. I mean, they’re filling in, you know, skateboard parks and
Cash is not a growth strategy; it is a survival requirement when uncertainty removes all other options. Share on X
Hmm.
with sand from the beach. I mean, it just made no sense. So you could just imagine if small businesses can’t not even proliferate. We’re not talking even expand, but if they’re not even allowed to operate, well, how do they pay back their debt to us? Now is it come to Jesus moment for us, for all the small business owners that are listening, keep dry powder on hand. Cash is the one, is the one non-negotiable that will save you nearly from any crisis.
Mm.
Yeah, I agree. All challenges are better with a big bucket of cash, no matter what they are. Okay. So, last question, even though I can already tell, I want to recall both witnesses to a future episode, and I’m pretty sure I want Dean’s wife to join us to where I can get the lowdown. But last question, fast forward five or 10 years from now.
That’s right.
What does success look like for the two of you?
I think, know, for me, the best, it’s funny we watch so many podcasts, you know, these days, right, we don’t watch television anymore. So you’re exposed to so many people’s definitions of success. And I think the most recent and best one I heard was just the ability to do the things you want to do with the people you want to do them with whenever you want to do them. ⁓
Success is being able to do what you want, with the people you want, when you want. That doesn’t mean not working. It means choosing. Share on X
I think that’s a great definition.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know, we’re almost
there at this point. So I think more is better. So, you know, five to 10 years from now should just be doing the things that you want to do, which by the way, doesn’t mean not working. It’s just working with the people you want to work with and working on the things that you want to be working on and enjoying life in the way that you want to enjoy it on your own terms. I think that’s, know, that’s the American dream. That’s freedom.
Love that.
Yeah,
yeah, I’ll add to that because I think, you know, Dean and I have been very blessed, very lucky, right? We built a business between two best friends. And then later on down the line, we recruited two other best friends to come work with us and share in the success. It’s a unique story. And in fact, you know, I’m writing a book right now that says they lied to you work with friends.
Cash is not a growth strategy; it is a survival requirement when uncertainty removes all other options. Share on X
And it’s just been the most rewarding experience when you talk about success. You know, everybody has their own definition. Generally, the gravity of it, right, the center of the universe or whatnot is money. Some people are ashamed to admit that. But as you said earlier, Don, right, most problems in life, right, are better tackled with a big bag of cash. That’s, know,
It’s the truth, right? That’s just kind of how the world works. It’s just, you know, it’s not even about, it’s not about hoarding or the accumulation of wealth, but rather it’s a tool, right? It’s a tool to get the best medical care, right? It’s just a tool. And so hopefully people will become, you know, more aware that these tools do solve real world problems and there’s no reason to be shy about it.
the truth.
But going back to the idea of success, separate from the money aspect, you know,
Recently, there was a Buddhist monk on Chris Williamson’s podcast, I think, and they asked the same thing. said, Chris Williamson said, well, you do you want success? Do you want happiness? And the Buddhist monk replied, I don’t seek out happiness, right? Because I’m going to paraphrase here, but the flip side of happiness is despair and sadness. So I don’t seek happiness. I seek being content.
I don’t seek happiness. I seek peace. And once you find it, you should fight like hell not to lose it. Share on X
Hmm.
I seek peace. And I think peace is the best way to describe, I think, what I’m after. It’s been a tumultuous journey starting Cardiff, right, and then improving and iterating on the recipe, right, with the advent of technology, the smartphone and APIs, going from direct mail marketing a million pieces a month to then realizing that
The war is actually being fought on this, right? The smartphone. And so having to like, just imagine being trapped in a casino in Las Vegas and sort of the winds of change are pushing you and pulling you in different directions to, know, slot machines, to table games and back and forth. And you’re not sure where to lay your bets. And if you lay the wrong bet, you don’t just destroy your own livelihood.
Yeah.
your wife, your children, their futures and employees and their families. And it’s been 21 coming on 22 years next April, 22 years of intense double downs and splits and asking for more markers, right? Like, can I get another marker? And I think, you know, as we pivot to the next era, I seek peace, right?
I, you know, as you gain wealth, you stand to lose more than gain more. And that’s the sort of 2020 in hindsight sort of can only be earned and not given sort of lesson of life, which is find peace. And when you have it, fight like hell, right? Fight like hell to not lose it.
Hmm.
Thank you. Appreciate that. So, hey listeners, if you’re looking for business financing of about 10 different methods, you can go to cardiff.com. And, and it’s pretty easy peasy to find out if you can get some help. And so if somebody wanted to reach out to either of you gentlemen, what’d be the best way to do that? Through the website, LinkedIn.
done. Yeah, if you’re looking to, you know, if you’re looking for financing, it’s www.cardiff.co.
Oh  .CO, sorry.
⁓ Yeah, no, that’s okay. And our whole thing is approved in minutes funding same day. But if you’re looking to reach out to me personally, it’s, you know, joinwilliam.com.
Okay, awesome. All right, guys, thank you so much. I do reserve the right to recall the witnesses. We’ll talk and see if we can get Dean’s wife to join us. I’m sure she knows part of the story I want to know. I’m really grateful. Thanks.
You
Thanks Don, appreciate you. Bye bye.
Nice to meet you, Don. Thank you.
That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. See you next time. Thanks.

====================================================

Title: E150 | From Law Firm Failures to $150M: The Entrepreneur’s Secret to Turning Mistakes Into Massive Wins
Date: December 18, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/rjon-robins-entrepreneurs-fail-scaling-business-practice/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/From-Law-Firm-Failures-to-150M-The-Entrepreneurs-Secret-to-Turning-Mistakes-Into-Massive-Wins-scaled.jpg
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Content:
You think you have a law firm, but you actually have a business. You think you have a restaurant, but you actually have a food business. This simple distinction separates entrepreneurs who scale to millions from those stuck in survival mode. RJon Robins, who built a $36 million organization, discovered that 54 percent of business failures start from management problems, not execution problems. The core issue: entrepreneurs confuse the job of the technician with the actual business. A lawyer gets lost in practicing law while the business of selling, marketing, and getting paid slowly deteriorates. This structural blindness happens when you’re too in love with what you do to see what your business actually needs.
The real secret nobody tells you: in entrepreneurship, you don’t win more by issue count—you win by making your big wins far outweigh all the small losses. RJon’s $3 million hiring failure became the catalyst for a complete business pivot that will grow his company from $35 million to $150 million in three years. Why? Because the failure was catastrophic enough to force radical thinking. If those executives had only sucked halfway, he would’ve tried incremental fixes and stayed stuck. Total collapse forced total transformation. This is what separates entrepreneurs: they treat everything as a test, ship fast, learn faster, and keep pushing forward.
The strategy that works: build an audience, give massive value, build trust, then ask what they need. Most entrepreneurs do the opposite—obsess over their product and hope customers show up. Instead, audience comes first, product second. Once you have loyal followers who trust you, they’ll tell you what to build next. Structure your entire business around solving real problems for real people, not pushing your idea. That’s how you scale.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

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Why Most Entrepreneurs Fail at Scaling: The Business vs. Practice Trap
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat for you today. I have somebody who is rare in the human community. Our guest today is a very successful entrepreneur and a licensed attorney.
happened to have
gone to law school because I didn’t know what to do after college.
Well, that is a pretty rare combination other than people you’ve taught. RJ Robbins, welcome to the Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. My pleasure to be here.
Yeah, my pleasure. Now, those
of you who know me know I’m all about customer experience and the way to get customer experience perfect every time is to think about things from the other person’s point of view, not from our own point of view. And I just want to share. So our John and his team, okay. And you guys know me, I’m like the king of wow. They have outwowed me. They sent me a book. Okay. That our John wrote.
And then a little bit ago, the office called and said, Hey, we got cookies. And I’m like, who sent cookies? And they’re like, R. John, some guy named R. John. I’m like, I’m going to talk to R. John in a minute. So anyhow, R. John’s out wowing me. Which I’ve never seen happen before. And I’m, and I’m truly, truly impressed. So, thrilled to have you on the show and ask you five or six questions about your life. And, as you know, this show is designed to help non-entrepreneurs take that first step into entrepreneurship.
or entrepreneurs to take the next step. So you built…
I
think we’re all entrepreneurs. think we’re born, I think all human beings are inherently entrepreneurs. Some people just don’t find themselves in a situation for it to become expressed. It’s latent in everyone. Everyone’s an entrepreneur.
We're all entrepreneurs. I think all human beings are inherently entrepreneurs. Some people just don't find themselves in a situation for it to become expressed. It's latent in everyone. Share on X
Could be.
Could be. I certainly think that when you put your problem solver hat on, kind of regardless of what problem you’re trying to solve, you are flexing your entrepreneurial muscles because entrepreneurs at their very core are solving problems. And if I solve problems for customers, I can have a successful business. If I solve problems for staff, I can have a successful team.
If I solve problems for vendors, I can build a great network of support. And so it’s all about solving problems. Entrepreneurs do it in a business fashion. But I also think I had a guest one time tell me, my parents came from India with $20. And that was the greatest example of entrepreneurship they ever saw. And I was like, well, certainly the greatest. It’s very, very courageous. Leave everything that you know.
get on a boat, have 20 bucks, go to Canada. Pretty tough. And, entrepreneurs certainly do some of that. So let me ask you a question. You’ve built a very successful business helping attorneys be better business people. Okay. What’s the one of your businesses? Yes. What’s the number one issue
one of our
with attorneys that prevents them from being great business people.
Well, the biggest problem that lawyers in particular have is they don’t really understand that it’s a business. I used to be a small law firm management advisor with the Florida Bar’s Law Office Management Assistance Service. So for four years, I lived in the belly of the beast. And it’s a document. In fact, we’ve worked with over 9000 solo and small law firms up to about $10 million in revenue.
during those four years and by we it was me and two other people so mostly you know, was a third of that And when I wasn’t in the office fielding calls from from lawyers on every aspect of starting marketing managing buying selling growing you name it law firm I was out in the field fixing broken law firms because 54 % of the bar grievances that are filed start off as a avoidable business management problem business management problems lead to all kinds of
other problems downstream in law firms and other businesses as well. Certainly all regulated businesses. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was in front of audiences. 50 to 500 or more entrepreneurs whose business happened to be a law firm, right? That’s the way you got to think of it. I’m a lawyer. My business is my business. The business happens to be a law firm.
over over over and over over again, it became a joke. I don’t have a business. I have a law firm. Well, no, you have a business that is a law firm. I don’t have a business. I’m a doctor. No, you have a business. And I would ask this question. I’ve now posed this question to tens of thousands of lawyers since 19…
99 I’ve been posing this question in front of audiences large and small and the question is what is the business of a law firm and There was a time when I used to keep count and I like I lost count when I got like 30 or 40 correct answers in all these years, right and and lawyers confuse the job of the lawyer with the business of the law firm doctors confuse the job of the doctor with the business of the medical business the medical
practice. Restauranteurs confuse the job of the chef with the business of the restaurant. Hoteliers, innkeepers confuse the job of the hospitality person with the business of the hotel. People the world over confuse the job of the technician who produces the product or the service or the experience
with the business that’s there to market, sell, produce, deliver, get paid for that product or service. So the answer for lawyers is the business of a law firm is to sell, produce, and deliver legal services and get paid for legal services. That is the business of a law firm. The business of a hotel is to rent rooms. The Ritz Carlton and the Motel 6,
are in the same business. They’re in the business of renting rooms. They pursue different strategies to do that. McDonald’s and your favorite restaurant, assuming McDonald’s isn’t your favorite restaurant, hope, ⁓ they’re in the same business, right? It’s just, you know, let’s say your favorite restaurant is like a nice steakhouse, right? And they’ve got, you know, linen tablecloths and fine china and, you know, silverware and a uniformed.
Ha ha ha.
server who comes to your table, McDonald’s bolts plastic tables to the floor and gives you your food in a bag, right? But they’re both fundamentally in the same business, which is marketing, selling, producing and delivering a food product to a hungry customer. So the number one mistake that lawyers make, which is the number one mistake
entrepreneurs everywhere I go make is they confuse the job of the technician with the business of the business, right? And I’m speaking especially to your audience who is thinking about starting a business, right?
Don’t be so in love with your product or your service or your skill that you lose sight of what the business is really all about.
Don't be so in love with your product or your service or your skill that you lose sight of what the business is really all about. Share on X
love that. And I can see where in my own practice, you know, I’ve helped numerous law firms and it’s not uncommon for them to kind of miss the business versus the practice of law.
kinds
of entrepreneurs do this. They get into the business because they know how to do something, right? And pretty soon they’ve cobbled it together into something of a practice. It hasn’t really matured into a business yet, but they’re earning enough income from it that they can’t afford to do anything else. And then they get stuck because they never really stop to think of it like a business. A really wonderful book is
Yes.
is Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. Anyone who is thinking about starting a business or you’re in the early stages, you owe it to yourself to listen to that book.
Yep, very good, very good. So tell me this, what’s the most painful mistake you’ve made as an entrepreneur that you wouldn’t want to repeat, but you’re glad it happened because of what you learned?
the most painful mistake I’ve made as an entrepreneur in the…
10 years since we launched the business we have today and it’s grown to 36 something million dollars in gross revenue? Or do you want me to tell you the most painful mistake that I made as an entrepreneur in the last year? Or do you want me to share with you the most painful mistake that I’ve made as an entrepreneur in the last quarter? Or the most painful mistake I made as an entrepreneur in the last month? Or the most painful mistake I made as an entrepreneur in the last week?
or the most painful mistake I as an entrepreneur yesterday or the most painful? I mean, it’s already 11, it’s almost noon. I’ve already made some mistakes. mean, you gotta give me a time horizon here to tell you the most painful mistake, because I’m constantly making mistakes.
I’ll clarify.
Yeah, I’ll clarify, but I do want to make a point to the audience. Notice our John has made a couple of mistakes and all successful entrepreneurs make a ton of mistakes. We just win more than we lose. It doesn’t mean that we don’t lose. So let’s just go for the 10 year. Yeah.
Can I just say something, Don?
I don’t win more than I lose.
okay. So I think maybe on issue count, that could be correct, but on financial, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so.
dollars. Correct.
I’ll lose, I’ll lose, I’ll lose, I’ll lose, I’ll lose. And then this idea that I was like, basically didn’t even take it seriously. I thought it wasn’t even gonna work. But I figured, what the hell, we’ll give it a test. Bam! Another $10 million business. Out of nowhere. Who saw it coming? Right? The other idea that I was in love with, it was the best idea ever.
Yeah, I-
love that.
It doesn’t work. You don’t know. Anyone who tells you that they know is just lying. They don’t know. Everything’s a test.
Yeah, yeah. Had more than a couple of those.
Yeah, I totally agree. So I was on a
call with a client this morning who they struggled horribly, you know, no paychecks, hard conversations at home. How are we going to pay the payroll? How are we going to pay our vendors for seven years? But in the next two, you know, they had a $20 million exit. And, um, and so there’s a lot of that in entrepreneurship where if you look at the
a number of issues or the time, maybe you were on the downside, the majority and sometimes the far majority of the time, but the upsides can be so good that it all works out.
I did a
once done where, um, my, my then head of marketing and I, she and I got on stage in front of, I don’t know, 500 of our, of our, of our clients. And we did a whole presentation of really creative, amazing. If I do say so myself, if I dare to say so myself, brilliant.
marketing campaigns. mean, these were some seriously creative, brilliant, amazing marketing campaigns. And we did about a 45 minute presentation, kind of like laying out the strategy behind it, showing the tactics, showing the implementation, showed the creative and all that. And the audience was impressed. These were some really high level, amazing ideas, very well executed by the way.
And then we gave the punchline. What they all have in common is they all failed. It just didn’t work, you know? And then there’s that thing that we just threw together, like on the fly, almost as an afterthought. And for some reason, it worked. Who knew, right? Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t plan, is not to say you shouldn’t strategize. It isn’t to say, because I got lots of things where I didn’t plan it.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s-
And that’s why it failed. I don’t want to give the audience permission to just do everything half-assed. I’m just trying to make the point that, you know, everything is a test. Everything is a test. Everything is a test. Everything is a test. And if you treat everything as a test, then you never fail. Right? I’ve never failed. I just keep learning things.
Everything is a test. Everything is a test. Everything is a test. If you treat everything as a test, then you never fail. I've never failed. I just keep learning things. Share on X
I love that.
I think you win or you learn and learning is just a little slower winning. And so that’s just, and that’s just how it goes. And I totally agree that if you’re lost in the paralysis of analysis, oh my gosh, pull the trigger, make it go. Okay. Even a junkie first draft is better than no first draft. And so put it out there, see what happens. You might be surprised. Okay. Biggest problem.
You win or you learn and learning is just a little slower winning. Even a junkie first draft is better than no first draft. Share on X
My very first product
done, my very first info product that ever produced and sold. All right.
It had a typo on the front cover. and I know for sure, and this was a really interesting experience for me as a new entrepreneur, I know for a fact that the typo did not prevent anyone from buying it, and I know that the typo did not cause anyone to return it.
And I know it didn’t prevent anyone from buying it because obviously they didn’t know about the typo until after they bought it. Yeah. And the way that the thing was packaged in shrink wrap, there was like a cover letter. And it wasn’t until you broke the shrink wrap, removed the cover letter that you could see that there was a typo on the front cover. You get what I’m saying? And the only two that I got returned, guess what? They were still in the shrink wrap.
Yo!
which means they didn’t return it because of the typo. And that was one of those happy accidents that taught me such a valuable lesson of just ship it. Seth Godin has a wonderful book you can download for free. He used to sell it, now he gives them for free called Ship It That Will Change Your Life. I highly recommend that to everyone. You can download it for free on his website as a PDF, Ship It.
All right.
Yeah.
Love that. You know, one of the things Don Williams Global does, we help people write books and we’re not really a true publisher, but we’re more of like a book coach. And we just released a book, I don’t know, last four or five months, 1985 National Championship quarterback, Jamel Holloway, his story. And you know, today you do an audio book and you do a Kindle book and you do a paperback and you do hardcover.
And I’m not directly in the editing line before that book gets published, but on the hardcover, we misspelled the star’s last name and published the book. People bought the book. Somebody who bought the book said, by the way, this is misspelled. And so we corrected it, but we didn’t have one returned.
Oops.
because we went out to everybody that had bought that book and said, Hey, we made like a horrible mistake and we misspelled his name and you can send it back. We’ll send you a new copy or you can keep it. may be a collector’s edition and we didn’t have one return. Yeah, we didn’t have one return. And so, ⁓ I,
feel like this amp is upside down.
Yeah, and
I hope no one in the audience is taking this as license to just be sloppy. I think that the point that we’re trying to make is you don’t have to be so worried about stuff. People don’t, just get it done. Make it better later.
Nah.
Get it done. So, biggest problem, 10 years, okay, building this great business that hurt, but in retrospect, maybe was a very positive thing.
I would have to say it’s gonna have to be around hiring. I would have to say it had to do with hiring. I was talking with my wife yesterday about a team of really smart people who have very impressive credentials who we hired and then fired.
And the whole process, the whole experience was less than 18 months. And during those 18 months, it cost us about $3 million. We lost $3 million. And I mean, that’s no fun to lose. There’s no way to say it’s fun to lose $3 million. It sucks. And
What my wife and I were discussing yesterday is that
Thankfully, these people didn’t suck half as bad as they sucked. They sucked all the way as bad as they sucked. Because had they sucked only half as bad, there’s a very real possibility we might have tolerated it and put up with it and tried to work around it. But because they sucked
Hmm.
as fully bad as they sucked. It forced us to make a major pivot in our entire business model, which is now
going to 5x our business from around $35 million to about $150 million in the next three months, I’m sorry, three years, 36 months. And had they not sucked so bad, I don’t know that I would have been so aggravated and frustrated and pissed off and ready to just burn the ships.
and start over. So that was a mistake. mean, so I know I keep citing books. There’s a really great book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Dukes. you can’t judge a decision. You can’t judge a decision, a mistake or not a mistake after the fact. You have to judge the decision based on what you knew at the time, right?
So you do as much research as you can reasonably do. You do all the analysis that you can reasonably do. hire, please, if you’re watching this podcast, if you’re listening to this podcast, do not be a freaking idiot. Hire professionals. Hire professionals, hire professionals, hire professionals who can compress decades into years and years into months and months into
minutes because the number one problem you’ve got in business is you don’t have enough time. Right. It’s not that you don’t have enough time in the day. It’s that you don’t have enough days on the calendar to get everything done that you need to get done. And you don’t have time to figure it out yourself. So hire professionals who can shortcut shortcut shortcut shortcut the process. Anyway back to my point. My point gone is.
based on what we knew at the time when we hired these people, right? Because we weren’t careless, we weren’t reckless, we weren’t lackadaisical, we weren’t sloppy. Based on what we knew at the time, it was the right decision to hire these people, it was the right decision to put them in the positions that we put them in, it was the right decision based on what we knew to do what we did.
it’s only after the fact that we can look back and say, if only I had known then what I know now, I would have done things differently. But, you know, that’s not how life is. So I’m not gonna say it was a mistake. I’m gonna say one of the most painful learning experiences that I had was hiring these people who, I know this is gonna sound
Good slot.
maybe strange for me to hear me say it, but these people who I, for the most part, genuinely like, genuinely respect, genuinely appreciate, and when I say they sucked, I mean, they sucked at their job, they didn’t suck as people, right? And, you know, they suck. Whose responsibility was it? It was mine. It was my responsibility to decide on the strategy. It was my decision to decide to hire them. It was my decision on the positions we put them in.
Yeah.
So ultimately I suck too. So this isn’t like throwing them to the wolves, right? We as a team made some really, really, really smart, well-reasoned, thoughtful.
strategic decisions that we did an extremely good job of executing on. And thankfully we executed on these decisions really, really, really fast. So we were able to discover in only six months that there were the wrong strategic decisions and there were the wrong people to be in charge of these strategic decisions. So, you know, sometimes failing fast is a blessing.
much better than a long, slow, agonizing suffering.
You know.
Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. And failing, many people view as the opposite of success. It’s actually part of the path. You have to have failings. Doesn’t mean you’re a failure, but you have to have failings to be successful. And I can tell you after a couple hundred interviews of very successful proven entrepreneurs, many times the bigger the failing, the larger the future win.
Little failings, little wins. Big failings, big wins.
yeah, I mean know exactly why that is.
Listen, there’s a reason for that. That’s because when the failure is complete, yeah, it forces you to do things in a radically new and different way. It’s when the failure is not such a big failure that you try to hold on to it. You try to salvage it. You try to avoid it. It’s like at some point when it’s just a complete utter total tear down failure, it’s a blessing.
When the failure is complete, it forces you to do things in a radically new and different way. When the failure is not such a big failure, you try to hold on to it and salvage it. But when it's a complete utter total tear down failure, it's a blessing. Share on X
Because you don’t have to mess around trying to save it anymore. It’s done. Start over. Change directions. Do something new. Learn. Move on.
Yeah, love that. Okay, tough question. It all went away today. Big failing, big problem. It all goes away today. You’re starting over tomorrow.
What strategy do you take?
That one’s easy. First of all, I would have it all back in 24 months. In fact, I would not only have it all back in 24 months, it would be better, it would be faster, it would be easier. You are basically, what you’re describing as a tough question is my secret fantasy that I think of sometimes in the middle of the night of burning the whole thing down and starting over without all the legacy, right?
I got a $36 million organization with 120 or 130 employees and managing something like 600 law firms. provide CEO services and COO services and CFO services and CMO services and sales training services and staff coaching services and bookkeeping for like hundreds of law firms. We got the largest bookkeeping business for law firms, for small law firms in the country. And I did that on the side, right?
Wow.
That’s not even my, I mean, it’s one of the businesses. If I had to start completely over from scratch today, my God, I would have so much free time to just focus on the marketing, the messaging, and creating brand new services that I don’t have time to get to right now, because I’m busy doing all these other things. So the strategy, the strategy would be build an audience.
That would be the strategy. Build an audience, give value to the audience, give more value to the audience, build trust with the audience, and then ask the audience, what do you want or need? They would tell me what they want or need after I’ve built it and given them enough value, and then I would create the product or the service to satisfy their need, and I’d have the whole thing back in 24 months.
The strategy would be build an audience, give value to the audience, give more value to the audience, build trust with the audience, and then ask the audience what do you want or need? Share on X
Yeah, love that. And listeners, please key on that. Everything Arjan talked about was seeing things from the other person’s point of view. How can I give them the most value? How can I deliver more value? How can I increase that value? And then what can I do? What else can I do to help you? So Arjan, if somebody in the audience wanted to reach out to you or the company, what’s the easiest way to do that?
So first off, we’ve had a waiting list for the better part of three years. So how to manage small law firm has a waiting list. Our bookkeeping business has a waiting list. Our sales training has a waiting list. Our workshops are now only for current members, current clients. We don’t take people from the outside anymore because there’s too much of a waiting list. So what we did was we created a waiting room.
that we let people participate in for free while they are on the waiting list. So you contact my team. First of all, before you even contact my team, get a bunch of free resources. Listen to some of our podcasts. Go to our website at howtomanage.com and download free resources. Sign up for a free workshop.
sign up for a free webinar, go to Amazon, buy one of my books, listen to my podcasts. Let us give you all kinds of free resources to make sure that this is really what you want, right? Because spoiler alert, I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, you know? And yeah, so take advantage of all the free stuff, right? And then,
Me either.
In the process of taking advantage of all the free stuff, you’ll find a link to schedule an appointment with someone from my team. But the appointment is not to schedule a sales call. The appointment is to schedule a meeting with a reference librarian type of person who’s going to say, okay, what are your problems? What are your challenges? What’s going on in your business? So we can share the right free resources with you, right? And then they’ll probably follow up with you and say, hey,
Did you get it? Is it working? Is it the right thing? Is it helping you make more money? Depending on what your problem is, right? Maybe you got a marketing problem. Maybe you got a sales conversion problem. Maybe you’ve got an intake problem. Maybe you got a staffing problem. Maybe you got a financial controls problem. I don’t know what your problem is with your business, but depending on what your problem is, they’ll get you the right resources. And then they’ll follow up to make sure you got them and that it’s working. And we’ll just keep giving you more stuff. And then at some point,
We don’t really even have to say very much. You will probably say, I want more. And we will say, we have a waiting list. And you’ll say, what do I do while I’m on the waiting list? And we’ll say, you can participate in the waiting room. And you’ll say, how much does that cost? And we’ll say, that’s also free. And then you’ll say, well, why wouldn’t I say yes to that? And I’ll say, I don’t know. Maybe you’re a stupid idiot who likes to suffer. Maybe that’s why you won’t do it. But unless you’re like a serious, hardcore, help-rejecting complainer,
Of course, you’re going to take advantage of the waiting room. It’s free. And then you’re going to come to our live events for free. You’re going to participate in live workshops for free. You’re going to participate in live Q &A for free. mean, it’s just tons of stuff for free. And then when your number finally comes up on the waiting list, you either say, yes, I want in, and the deposit is applied to your first month of retainer. Or you say, no, I don’t want it, and we give you the deposit back.
And believe me, there’s people behind you who will be very happy that you made that decision, because they’ll grab your spot. So the long story, I’m sorry, the short answer to your question, Don, and I appreciate you giving me this opportunity, is go to howtomanage.com. And from there, you’ll find a portal into our universe.
Love that.
Love that, love that. And hey listeners, you’ve just heard from the Delilahmah of marketing that when you want to reach out, you can join our waiting list. You can’t buy anything. And that’s marketing done at a Yoda mastery level. And so thank you for sharing that.
Well, it also pisses me off. mean, it’s no fun. I could literally probably make a few million dollars extra right now if I was willing to lower our standards to fulfill the waiting list right away. But then of course, long-term, we would dilute the brand.
Yep. So love that.
Well, thank
you for the recognition and the compliment. I appreciate that.
Yeah, well, truly amazing. mean, I’ve been doing this a long time. know thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. We’re about 200 episodes in 500,000 downloads. And ⁓ thank you very much. Thank you very much. But let me tell you, what our John shared with you today is rare air. so listen to this over again and see what you missed.
Congratulations for that. That’s fantastic.
All right, John, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been my pleasure to have you.
I really appreciate you having me. Thank you. And I enjoyed the talk.
Thank you.
That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E149 | The Entrepreneur’s Blind Spot: How EOS Transforms Leadership & Business Growth | Bill Duguay
Date: December 10, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/entrepreneurs-blind-spot-how-eos-transforms-leadership-business-growth-bill-duguay/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Why-Your-Business-Stops-Growing-and-How-EOS-Gets-It-Moving-Again-scaled.jpg
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Content:
Most leaders don’t lose momentum because their strategy is wrong. They lose it because the business grows faster than their ability to adapt. When the pressure builds, everything from leadership development to organizational leadership gets tested, and the cracks reveal themselves in the places no one expects. That is where real entrepreneurship begins. In moments when the noise is louder than the vision, leaders must step back and rethink how they operate, communicate, and guide their teams.
Many founders eventually reach a point where business growth requires more than effort. It requires structure. It requires honest conversations. It requires systems that free the leader instead of trapping them. This is where EOS implementation becomes more than a framework. It becomes a lifeline for building leadership team alignment, shaping leadership communication, and creating a culture of accountability that supports sustainable progress. For leaders facing leadership blind spots or wondering how to keep their teams focused without being everywhere at once, the shift starts with admitting what cannot be carried alone.
Implementing EOS for business growth is not only about tools. It is about building high performing leadership teams, overcoming founder blind spots, improving effective communication in leadership teams, and learning to let go as a founder. When leaders stop relying on instinct alone and start relying on clarity, processes, and shared responsibility, everything changes. People show up differently. Teams communicate differently. The business finally moves in one direction instead of several scattered ones. The work becomes lighter, and the results become stronger.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/P_Entrepreneurship-Without-Chaos-EOS-Leadership-Clarity-Real-Growth-with-Bill-Duguay.mp3
 
Why Your Business Stops Growing and How EOS Gets It Moving Again
Hey, it’s Don Williams today with one of my good friends, even though I cannot approve of his attire today. He’s wearing his Longhorn shirt. I’m wearing my Sooner shirt and I’m properly humbled after the game this year where we should have won, but we did nothing right, but get off the bus.
and get back on the bus. don’t think anybody got, was injured entering or exiting the bus. Bill Duguay, welcome to the show.
Don, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. know, the rivalry, the Red River rivalry, it’s always a ton of fun. And you know, it’s been years since I’ve been to Dallas and go up to the state fair and actually see the game. And the times I’ve been there is just a phenomenal experience. It truly is entertainment at the highest level.
It’s, it’s unbelievable. I mean, the elect, you can feel the electricity for a mile around the fairgrounds. It’s, it’s pretty crazy. And that game, it doesn’t really make any difference. Who’s favored what the national rankings are, what the records are. It’s a showdown and anybody can beat anybody on any given day. And, one of the truly great rivalries in not just college sports, but just sports. mean, it’s unbelievable. Okay.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s just
a wonderful event.
Yep. Let’s hop into it. So Bill, tell us what you do and who you do it with and why you do it.
So what do I do? You know, I joke that I do as little as possible and get away with. But what I really do is I work with leadership teams to help them have the conversations that all leadership teams need to have and many avoid. And I do that by helping them understand and implement the EOS system, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which is just a simple set of tools and proven processes to help them
get absolutely clear with the vision of the organization, a clear and compelling vision. And I work with lot of ESOPs and large construction and manufacturing companies who struggle to get aligned all the way to the front line where it truly matters. And help them build focus, discipline, accountability in a healthy way because sometimes those feel like weaponized words instead of empowering words so that they quit chasing Chinese stuff and set goals in a line.
their efforts, their decisions, their resources around achieving them and building a healthy, functional, cohesive leadership team because, and I’m sure you see this, many times they’re not. And as goes the leadership team, so goes the rest of the organization. And I got into it because I was faced with making a transition from being in the field
many many times.
sweeping floors for my dad at a young age when we did home remodels in a winter time and garage conversions and basement conversions and that kind of stuff in the winter, sweeping floors, picking up nails, that kind of stuff. And worked my way through college, my PE license and continued to climb all the way up till I was president and CEO. at that level, you need a different set of skills and abilities and…
Just being able to put work in place, even big complicated work, isn’t really the only skill set you need, it’s a different skill set. And I heard about EOS in a peer group that I was in. At the same time, I was taking classes, was living in office and like you’re talking about, and I was taking classes up at UT, at the McComb School in their executive ed program, know, just soaking in as much as I could about business and leadership and those types of things. And heard about…
EOS and a peer group that I was in, and it just resonated. As an engineer, as a road hand, it was stuff I could actually start doing on Monday. I love the theory of the collegiate learning, the mental exercise, but I struggled to turn it into, well, how do I go do that on Monday?
And EOS really was simple stuff, just go do it. And it just had a tremendous impact on my outlook on how to truly be a better leader and manager. And at the start of COVID, needed to come back to New England with my wife and I, both grew up in New England, we’ve been on the road for a long, long time. And just decided to lean in full time with EOS. As much as I love construction and how good it treated my family and I,
and experiences in the people, being able to work with leadership teams and empower them to have conversations, to work through that discomfort and truly get aligned is so rewarding. It’s where the passion, that sense of urgency is. And I just, when I see that light bulb moment with my teams where they break through or they’re feel…
better about having sticky conversations and they start doing them themselves, it’s a real rewarding feeling.
Yeah, I love that. Took me a long time to gain enough clarity to determine my personal mission, but my mission is to help others help others. And when I see the people that I’m helping, helping other people, the reward to that is unbelievable. And so you really got to EOS because you had a need in your own life, in your own company, in your own experience.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
added EOS as an operating system in your business and then came over to the light, love that company. And now you’re helping other people do that. So love that. Let me ask you this, Bill, in your experience, what’s the single biggest blind spot? And I know that entrepreneurs have many blind spots, but what’s the single biggest blind spot?
most founders have before they implement the EOS and how does fixing that change their life in and out of work?
Yeah, this is a pivotal question that you ask here. Many of the entrepreneurs, whether they’re smaller startups, which I have several of, to large multi-state operations, leadership teams, and the founder, the director, whatever it is, many times they feel it’ll go away by itself. Or if I work harder, put more people on it, work more hours, we’ll get through it. They just…
Many founders believe problems will go away by themselves if they work harder or add more people. They won’t. Share on X
Listen.
We as humans are hardwired to just work harder, brush it off, pick ourselves up. throw around words like grit and resilience and all these other things. And I love that. Those are resources, not necessarily the solution. And by creating an environment, and I tell all my prospects and I tell all my clients again and again, that to the extent we can be open and honest and open from the standpoint of
putting aside our own needs for a moment to truly listen and be present for others to share. And to be clear, candid, and honest, I’m a huge fan of Kim Scott and radical candor, we just got to be able to say the hard truth in a kind way and empower others around us to actually excel and thrive in their role. There’s a great book,
book by Ken Blanchard, the one minute manager meets the monkey and this theory of managers of all size companies who want to be a resource, embrace open door policies. Hey, let me help you with that. The human desire to be a resource and help wind up boxing themselves in feeding a whole bunch of monkeys and not truly empowering those around them to own their outcomes and be accountable for them.
create systems and processes for accountability and for them to understand the joys and sometimes the heartache of true leadership and growing a business, growing themselves personally, growing as a team and not shouldering that themselves and feeding a whole bunch of monkeys. So the other part of your question, what was the end result? I think of it kind of in an EOS as a method, a system.
tools process. So why you’re back to Simon Sinek, why do this? And I think of it as in global terms like empower yourself to do what you truly love to do and create teams around you that can do the same and focus what you’re doing to those things you truly love. Make sure you’re in everybody around you is compensated appropriately that, you if you’re taking a risk and
Mm.
When we think about compensated appropriately, I ask my teams, well, how do you spend your day? And they come back, well, I manage email accounts, I book my hotels, and book in fights. And I’m like, is that how you create value for the organization? And when I ask like that, they’re like, no, but I just like control my email or my calendar or my booking, because I only want to stay in a great hotel when I go to Austin. That’s not what you’re here to do.
Leaders, founders, leadership teams also want to, at some point, start thinking about legacy, empowering others. And at some point, hopefully earlier in all of our careers, to be thinking about how do we have time for other passions?
And it’s empowering through EOS when it really starts to click. And it’s different for everybody. Some get it right away, some two years, some never.
When they embrace the tools, the freedom it truly gives them to live life fully, however they define it.
I love that. It kind of takes me to my next question. I know in EOS, you talk about letting go of the vine. And so what’s the hardest part for an entrepreneur about truly letting go?
Mmm.
Yeah, this is a deep question, Don. And I think of it in a couple different buckets. think part one bucket is the mechanics of it. Have I truly developed systems and processes and empowered others to do this? Got it out of my head that I’ll tell you, tell anybody if a process lives in your head, it’s not a process. You got to get it out of your head, document it, simplify it so that it can be done again and again.
Don’t let that stuff fall right around in somebody’s brain that walks out of the door every day. So the mechanics of have I truly trained, developed, enabled others to do whatever it is I’m doing? And understand that back to how do you create value, not to minimize it, but some of that stuff is like booking your own flights and you shouldn’t be doing it anymore if you’re going to truly grow the business.
Mm-hmm.
The other bucket, and many times this is even the tougher one for us as humans and hard-driving humans, founders, creatives that want to keep their finger in the mix, is the ego, the emotions, how do they resonate themselves and identify. And to help them address that part sometimes takes a softer touch.
Sometimes it’s a more direct touch. And understanding that if it’s truly them and their ego, their sense of ID, their sense of purpose, we’re going to tackle that because in the end it’s holding there to bottleneck of growth, of empowering others to have the same joy that they’ve had solving these issues or the same sense of urgency or the same sense of pain from failure when it just didn’t work out.
If you're doing tasks that don’t create value for the organization, you're holding back the growth you're asking for Share on X
you
and you’re not allowing the team that you’ve built that you probably love, many of whom you have long relationships with, you might have handpicked them, are you truly being the leader that they deserve if you’re still down in the weeds, mucking around? It’s very hard for many founders, leaders who started the business, they were the chief idea generator or the chief doer to start to…
empower others to do that. You know, to coach and mentor them, walk with them, prop them up, pick them up, dust them off, whatever it is.
so that they can live their best life and truly move the business forward. So, I think of it as two different things that have to be worked through to truly make it happen and empower the leader founder to focus on really the handful of things they really should be focusing on and building a team that can thrive and do all the other stuff.
Love that.
Love that. OK, so I know EOS emphasizes measurable results. There’s a scorecard. We’re counting things. OK, counting things is good. Is there a success metric you’ve seen that can’t be captured on the scorecard that’s hard to quantify?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we measure a lot of stuff and I’m a big fan of that. We’re joking about football and you football be fun. But it’s a game when you have it up on the scoreboard and you’re keeping track of everything. How many downs? How many yards? How many points by quarter by minute? And in the background we’re running all this PFF stuff for everybody that’s kind of mind boggling. I’m a fan. You gotta measure what gets measured gets focused on.
and gets improved. And it’s just as old as time itself that that has been true. The other part is freedom, you know, back to are we truly on the same page? Scorecards are online. It’s an alignment tool. We think of them first as a measurement tool, yes. But if we go a little bit deeper, they’re an alignment tool that we as a leadership team or we as a department
or a frontline team agreed, these are the things that matter for us to stay focused. They’re the levers we’re pulling week in, week out that get us closer to our long-term goals. So yeah, they’re a measurement tool, but it’s so much deeper than that. Oftentimes, if scorecards aren’t working and we start to dig in and understand why aren’t they working, many times it comes back where we truly align.
did we have resources and capabilities and training aligned to deliver those? And we figure out that, well, was it the right metric or were we truly still had something gummed up in the background that we weren’t aligned or didn’t have the resources or decisions or whatever it is to truly get that done? So there are a whole lot more than just did you do it or didn’t you do it. There’s multiple nuances here that truly is
I feel the power of scorecarding to show alignment, to show we are committed towards empowering people to perform. Like, pick your football team. If they didn’t have a football, the quarterback would stand there all day. Like, what are you going to do? You know, they got to have the tools to go perform, and that’s a leadership responsibility.
Love that. You’ve seen hundreds of entrepreneurs evolve, grow, improve through EOS. For the next generation of visionaries and integrators, what do you think will be a new addition to the playbook to take them into the future?
Mm-hmm.
It’s simple and probably the hardest thing at the same time. And here’s why I say that. We, I don’t care what business you’re in, you’re in the people business. And in the people business, I don’t care if you’re making widgets, flying airplanes, doesn’t matter to me, our ability to communicate is what creates culture, environment, and alignment.
Our ability to communicate is what creates culture, environment, and alignment. Share on X
Hmm.
And this is an old old quote, the biggest fallacy about communication is the illusion that it actually happened. And this is true today, that we have an illusion that communication happened. And I hear all this stuff, Gen Z, Gen X, Gen whatever, they don’t wanna work, they don’t wanna do this. And that’s just BS, I’ll call that out every day. It’s not true because I see people.
all ages and demographics fully engaged when a couple things are true. They understand how what they’re doing fits into the bigger picture. They have a boss or leader who truly has her back, who is engaged with them and their success and is coaching them, helping them, guiding them, and they’re getting positive and delta feedback to stay
focused on what truly matters here. And when we do those simple things, they’re simple. I didn’t say they were easy.
We can do remarkable things regardless of our age or demographics or primary language, which many of my businesses have multiple languages are spoken in them, multiple demographics, multiple all kinds of stuff.
When we think about the question you asked, the newer generations coming into leadership positions, and you and I probably face this as well, and maybe didn’t realize that at some point you’re gonna be managing folks that are older than you. Like, might be your parents’ age, might be older than your parents. And so the next generations coming in are gonna face a broader range of ages in the workplace than we’ve ever had before.
people are staying working at your 70s, which 10 years ago didn’t happen. People are entering at 22 when they get out of college, maybe when they’re 18 and skipping college. And so we have this real broad range and the folks coming in with wannabe leaders and managers are gonna face this dilemma. And it might at first appear like a dilemma.
but they’re simple tools to make sure we’re engaging and communicating properly as humans. And the other part of it is if you think you did enough, Don, you know this, you’re in the communication business. You haven’t even scratched the surface. You’ve got to drive yourself crazy with communicating to even have started.
Yeah, what I always share with my clients is this, it’s not good enough to be sure they understand. You have to communicate to where it’s impossible that they cannot misunderstand. And so you have to see it from the other person’s point of view and communicate it in a way that they can hear it, that they can receive it, that they can own it.
There you go, love that.
And sometimes that means you’re the same things, different ways over and over and over, but that’s the job. Bill, think you’re the perfect combination of head and heart, intellect and caring to help entrepreneurs. And so if somebody wanted to reach out to you, what’s the easiest way to get in touch with you for you to help them professionally?
It is the job.
You know, send me an email, connect on LinkedIn. You know, I love connecting with on LinkedIn, different folks of all walks of life and steps in different careers and types of businesses. It’s just rewarding for me that, you know, I don’t want to have these binoculars on only want to talk to this segment of industry. Yeah, I tend to have more clients in one vertical, but what keeps me fresh and energizes having all kinds of stuff.
from startup energy to, you know, worried about making payroll next week to should I go buy somebody and add three more states to our portfolio.
Love that. So what’s that email address?
It’s bill.duguaY at eosworldwide.com.
Okay, so you can reach out to Bill directly and I know he’ll reply. And then I know that you’re based in Maine, but somebody who wanted to work with you, they don’t have to be in New England. They can be where?
They can be anywhere in the domestic US. So right now I’m working in seven states. I love that. I also have virtual clients and I have clients here close to home. You know, I think of it this way, Don, there’s lots of folks do what I do and they’re very talented and skilled people in the US community. It’s finding the person that resonates with you, that you truly think that you and your leadership team will feel heard, will…
Okay.
be challenged, will be supported, and you’ll accelerate your journey, however you define it, find that person. And if that client is in California, I’m getting on a plane tomorrow to go to California. Because it’s exciting to me to be part of that energy. And the other part, Don, is you understand this in your business.
It’s a respect thing. If they respect me enough to say, Bill, can you come to California and work with my team? Like, I got to show up ready to go, because they’re investing in me and taking a risk on me. So I got to come ready to deliver value, even if it’s down the street. But it’s a big deal.
Love that.
Yeah. So, okay. So you have Bill’s email address. You know that he works with people everywhere in the U S domestic U S and I got to ask even, even Sooners.
Yeah, I don’t have one yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
There you go. Bill, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show today.
Thank you for inviting me. You’re doing great work, Don. Thanks for spreading the word.
You bet.
you. That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Bye now.

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Title: E148 | From Medical Device Sales to 7-Figure Healthcare Agency: How Saul Marquez Built Outcomes Rocket
Date: December 3, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-medical-device-sales-to-7-figure-healthcare-agency-saul-marquez/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/From-Medtech-Rep-to-Healthcare-marketing-Leader-Saul-Marquezs-Leap-scaled.jpg
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Content:
Saul Marquez’s transformation from a 17-year career in medical devices to founding Outcomes Rocket represents one of healthcare’s most compelling entrepreneurial success stories. After conducting over 2,100 healthcare podcast interviews, Marquez identified a critical gap: marketing cracks in the foundation of nearly every healthcare business, from startups to multi-billion-dollar organizations. This discovery, combined with his hunger to build something meaningful, motivated him to take the leap into digital healthcare marketing. Like many entrepreneurs, Marquez faced the paralyzing fear of failure—that voice whispering “you can always go back to your old job.” But through a decisive “burn the boats” moment, he committed fully to healthcare commercialization strategies, eventually building Outcomes Rocket into a transformational partner serving health tech companies, medical device manufacturers, and ambulatory provider organizations seeking 10X business growth.
At the core of Outcomes Rocket’s approach lies a revolutionary principle: “you sell like you buy.” This insight, derived from working with healthcare leaders facing real commercialization challenges, emphasizes that strategic marketing partnerships matter more than cheap, offshore solutions. Marquez stresses that successful healthcare digital marketing requires partnering with professionals who understand “the rules of the game”—much like trusting a CPA with your finances or an attorney with legal matters. His agency specializes in healthcare marketing solutions across three key segments: health tech software, medical devices (from pacemakers to spinal implants), and independent ambulatory practices. By combining data-driven marketing strategies with mentorship and accountability, Outcomes Rocket helps healthcare entrepreneurs overcome self-doubt and scale their businesses. The company’s methodology—focusing on owned, earned, and paid marketing—generates qualified leads while building thought leadership that positions healthcare brands as industry authorities.
Marquez’s journey reveals critical insights for anyone in the healthcare business space. First, embrace failure as an event, not an identity—his early webinar mishap taught him the power of grace, partnerships, and systematic improvement. Second, surround yourself with mentors who have achieved what you want to accomplish; healthcare entrepreneurship requires guidance from those who’ve navigated similar challenges. Third, recognize that 10X growth is often easier than 2X growth because it forces you to focus on essential activities rather than incremental improvements. For healthcare organizations struggling with lead generation, reputation management, or web development, Outcomes Rocket demonstrates that working with healthcare marketing experts accelerates results exponentially.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Trust-Yourself-First-How-Saul-Marquez-Scaled-a-Healthcare-Agency-from-Zero-to-7-Figures-by-Questioning-Everything.mp3
 
From Medical Device Sales to 7-Figure Healthcare Agency: How Saul Marquez Built Outcomes Rocket
 
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I’ve got digital marketing expert in healthcare, Marquez, with Outcomes Rocket here today. Saul, welcome to the show.
Don, thanks for having me and good to be with your audience.
Hey man, really appreciate it. So I know you’re a digital agency and I know you focus on healthcare, but tell us what Outcomes Rocket does and who you serve and how you got there. You weren’t born as the founder of Outcomes Rocket. So how’d you get there?
 
definitely was not born as the founder of Outcomes Rocket. Dan, so we serve healthcare exclusively. The three segments that we serve are health tech, the software companies helping health systems and payers, medical devices from pacemakers to spinal implants, any devices that help support ⁓ care delivery.
And then finally, the third segment that our business serves is the provider side, ambulatory, that’s standalone, not tied to large IDN practices, medium to large that are seeking to make an impact. And the number one thing that we help the leaders and organizations that we serve is, is to really help them with their commercialization challenges and opportunities. We help them get results.
I love that. And I have about 30 years at times working in healthcare. So big hospital provider systems, pharma, et cetera. one of the, I don’t know, incongruities maybe of the whole industry is this. Literally probably more geniuses in healthcare than in any other field. It’s hard to be a doctor.
really? Cool.
It’s really hard to do that. Yet many times they just struggle for how do I make money? How do I drive business? And it’s just a muscle that they don’t get to use very often. And so they need somebody like you to come in.
Absolutely.
Okay, so here, so what about this? At some point you realize you weren’t just building a business, but you were actually transforming how these healthcare clients won business. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, Don, appreciate the question. You know what? It was a wake up moment for me when I was actually first starting my business. remember a year into it, I was in the pits. It was difficult. I was having self-sabotaging conversations. Like literally, I had left a 17-year gig in medical devices as I had shared with you.
And I went into entrepreneurship for the very first time in my life. And I remember being in my office that day thinking to myself, you know what, if this thing fails, I could always go back to that gig. Boy, how many of us have had that sabotaging talk that keeps us in our comfort zone, right? ⁓
You ⁓
Yeah, have food.
Yeah.
And that doesn’t help push us to the greatness that we are all able to achieve. And so being in that situation myself, Don, I had to do a thing. I had to have a really serious burn the boats moment with myself. And having gone through that myself, I realized that, wow, so many of these leaders that our business helps are actually going through the same thing.
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How awesome would it be to have a person like Don Williams or like Saul Marquez help them go from where they are to where they could be? And so for me, my personal moment being in that situation really helped me be in the shoes of my clients. They’re taking huge risks. They’re betting the farm. They’re getting investment.
Right? And, and those moments of reality where the only person that you’re with is yourself. You really need a partner, right? To really help you get to the next level, a partner that understands the algorithm. And, and, and so I’ll take a pause here for a second and say, one of the biggest myths that I run into is in the business that we’re in, Don, and everybody listening is that you could get somebody in the back office to just do marketing.
That’s one of the biggest myths that I have run into. What I tell people is, you know how you trust the CPA to do your books? You know how you trust an attorney to represent you in court? If you’re really gonna have the best results in marketing, you need a professional that understands the rules of the game, that could get results like a Rubik’s Cube. If you know the rules, you could always get the same result. That’s sort of like, I realized, holy smokes, we have this thing.
and we know how it works every single time. And if it doesn’t, we tweak, we adjust. And we could be that partner, and we are that partner for many of the clients we serve, to be that transformational coach for them while we execute for them commercially. So it was a personal struggle, that I worked myself out of. And when I’m taking big jumps, to be honest with you, I feel it again.
when I take those huge jumps. So it’s not something that goes away. When you think big and you go for 10X, which is by the way, why we call outcomes rocket, outcomes rocket. We go for the moon. We’re not satisfied with 10%. We want 10X or more. And that’s who gravitates to us because that’s how we think we’re big thinkers and we like to associate with others. And for those that are big thinkers that are listening to this show, obviously you’re a big thinker because you’re listening to Don’s show.
We're not satisfied with 10%. We want 10X or more. Share on X
⁓ I know what I’m saying is resonating with you because you’re not alone and you need somebody like Don or I in your corner.
Yeah, I always think, you know, as an entrepreneur, you have a superpower, maybe even two or three, if you’re really lucky, okay? And something that you’re just like almost the best anywhere at. But just by having that expertise, it means that you are not expert in these other areas. And you’re almost always well-advised to just go hire an expert.
You can do the cheap route and say, okay, I’m going to figure it out and I’m going to get the person in the Philippines and all that. I’m not knocking that, but I am saying this. If it’s something that’s strategic to your business and marketing is like the most strategic thing for your business, you do better. Just go get an expert. Just get somebody who can give you the answer to the test and you’re going A to B. Get somebody who can…
tell you how to get from A to B and then maybe even push A and B a little closer together, make it happen a little faster. And so I always believe in that. So.
You know,
and Don, I would love to add to that awesome comment you just made. You will always pay the price, whether it’s upfront or on the backend. And here’s the thing that I always share with people. You will sell like you buy.
Mmm.
So, so like if you are buying like a cheapskate, that’s how you’re also going to sell. If you’re buying like a baller, if you’re buying like an executive, you’re also going to sell that way. So to your point, it’s circular and it affects both sides of the equation.
Okay, I already know that’s going to hit a clip of its own. You sell just like you buy. Let that sink in a minute. You sell just like you buy. Okay. So, you know, when most people outside of healthcare talk about healthcare, you know, they’re almost always focused on what’s broken. Cause there’s stuff that is broken. Okay.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
And I don’t know if it’s as much broken as they think, but, but, know, it’s people’s health involved. And so it’s, you know, it’s magnified, you know, the importance of it. You came from med tech, saw something that was broken. Okay. Said I’m going to fix it. And that was certainly out of your comfort zone. What motivated you to make that big leap from
17 years and established in med tech. I’m going to go open a digital agency just like about 10 million people in the US and I want to make it work. Tell us about that.
Yeah, Don, I appreciate the question. And I will say this. It was a combination of a dream and data. OK? The two D’s, dreams and data. And you’ve got to have both. Those are the essential ingredients to make anything work. And so what I would share with you on that front is I actually had started a podcast. This is where the data comes in. And that podcast.
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I took to date, I’ve published over 2000 interviews on my podcast. By the way, Don, I would love to have you on knowing knowing that you have that healthcare. So we’re exclusively a healthcare podcast, right? I want to have you on my show. Would you be on my show?
I’d love to. I’m honored and I can spell healthcare.
No, and by the way, like I had a chance to kind of do a little work on you and I’m intrigued to share with our listeners about your concepts on other people’s experience and other people’s money, because I think those concepts can take you very far. So hopefully I’m opening up a loop there for when I share this to have you on my show. But but literally, of course, of course, and the services you provide, which are amazing.
Thank you.
⁓ I would share this is after having, I quit at about 1700 episodes. Like I quit my job after 1700 interviews. And the one, the data point that was consistent across all of these data points, whether I was talking to a small startup, to a multi-billion dollar organization, I always saw cracks in the basement of marketing. There was always, always cracks. I’m like, okay.
The data is there, the people are showing me this, the conversations, right? Primary research. And then follow that with unfinished business. I had been too much of a coward beforehand to do it. You know, I grew up, you we didn’t have much growing up, Don, like, you know, my parents immigrated to this country from Mexico. I didn’t have much growing up. I grew up…
You know, at one point we were doing food stamps, You know, and so it was certainly challenging, but what it gave me was hunger and what it gave me was grit and what it gave me was an appreciation for what this country stands for, a glimmer of hope. And that’s why so many people come here still. And for those of you that have lost hope in this country, think again, look around.
because this is probably one of the best places in the world to be a capitalist and to live, like 1,000%. But my dream was to start a business and nobody in my family had ever done that. It was always go to school, get a job, right? Go to school, get a job, go to school. And Don, I finally decided to take the jump.
Yes sir, go to school, get a job.
to the unknown. And by the way, all these people, you are the average of your five closest peers that I was interviewing were successful entrepreneurs, many of them. So they became my friends over time. And then I got the courage to take the leap. And so I combined what I saw the gaps in the market be with finally having the courage to make the leap for myself and finally did it. And I haven’t looked back since.
No regrets whatsoever. We’ve built the agency to where it is today and we’re continuing to grow a pretty meaningful organization.
Love that. you know, we talked earlier about, I love, I love your brutal honesty. I mean, you used a pretty tough word. You said coward. Okay. That’s a pretty tough word. Okay. And we talked about comfort zones and, um, you know, exiting our comfort zone. And the cool thing about comfort zones is when you leave your comfort zone, your comfort zone grows. You leave it again, it grows and you leave it again and it grows. And at a certain point in time, and you’re obviously already there.
The cool thing about comfort zones is when you leave your comfort zone, your comfort zone grows. Share on X
You’re racing out of your comfort zone every day because that’s where the good stuff is. The good stuff is not in your recliner. The good stuff is not in your pillow. The good stuff is out there where it’s scary. Okay. And you don’t know what’s going to happen. so, huge trait of entrepreneurs. Let me ask you this salt. If you could go back and whisper a single sentence to yourself on day one.
That’s where the good stuff is.
of outcomes rocket. So just one sentence on day one, something that would have helped you go faster, farther, smarter. What would that sentence be?
Trust yourself.
love that. I’m a big believer in you ought to, ⁓ know, a wise man has many counselors. You ought to ask a lot of people, okay, for what they think, but you should only listen to a couple. Ask a lot. Only listen to a couple of them. And that’s maybe where the magic is, is figuring out which ones to listen to. But, you know, number one is to listen to yourself.
Ha
your, we think that we’re intellectual creatures and we are, okay. But most of the magic happens emotionally. And so you got to listen to your heart. Okay. And, and your head will, veto anything that’s illogical. That’s like, ⁓ no, that’s not, that’s absolutely stupid. Okay. But other than that, listen to your heart. That’s where the magic happens. Okay.
And you
know, Don, what I would add to that too, in a nutshell, I double down on mentorship, the data as well. So whoever you take advice from, make sure you understand and be very, very clear. If you’re going to get somebody’s advice, hey, what’s your annual revenue? What was your largest exit? Right? Tell me about where you’ve been and tell me about where you’re going.
Hmm.
And then that will tell me should I listen to you or not because everybody has a freaking opinion
everybody. Yeah.
Right.
But there’s a few people out there that will actually resonate with you. Those are the people that are where you want to be and get the data. Right. It goes back to that. Trust your heart. That’s important. The trust. Trust myself. Right. But also surround yourself with mentors like Don that that have been places that you want to go that that have worked with businesses like yours that want to go where you want to go. And like us right on the marketing side that have
that can take you where you wanna go. So that’s the one thing that I’d add to.
Oh, I love that. you know, it’s where they’ve been is very important, where they’re going to me, probably more important. Past performance is somewhat of an indicator of future, not always a direct link. But one thing I’ve noticed in like 1700 interviews, I’m blown, I mean, we’re at about 150 and that’s a lot of work.
That’s respect,
man, dude, that’s awesome. Congratulations on that. That’s huge.
Well, it’s better than like
90 % of all podcasts, but 1700 is like, dude, what an overachiever. But the one thing I can tell you from interviewing, know, proven entrepreneurs all around the world, billions of dollar businesses and down is this, that if they have a huge failing in their past,
Probably 99 % of all podcasts.
intense.
they almost always have a huge success that followed it. And if they have little failings in their past, they pretty much have little successes that follow it. And so there’s a link to, are you really playing? Are you playing as big as you ought to be playing? Because truthfully, 10Xing is probably less difficult than 2Xing.
10X is often easier than 2X once your mind catches up. Share on X
once you get your mind around it. And so that’s just the way it is. Okay. 17.
Amen to that. And by
the way, Don, on that point, I want to give a shout out to Dan Sullivan and the strategic coach. I’m actually actively doing that program. His book is 10x as great as easier than 2x. Him and Benjamin Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Phenomenal, couldn’t agree with you more. It is about separating the signal from the noise. When you go that big,
Little things won’t get you there. So you’re left with one or two things that could potentially get you there. And when you go all in on those things, that’s when you strike gold.
Yeah, to me, the three M’s of leadership are mindset. And that almost always comes down to one question. Are you playing big enough? Are you thinking big enough? Is your goal big enough? Are you terrified by it? Because if you are, it’s probably where it should be. And if it’s not, you’re probably not where it should be. And then the second is mission. And it’s just so simple. Are you going to do the best?
Yeah
Not better than, not a little better, but are you going to do the best ever? And not just your best ever, are you going to do the best? I mean, it’s real clear, best ever. There’s no ambiguity in that. And then the third is, know, methodology. And so, you you kind of fail to the level of your systems. You don’t necessarily rise to the level of your goals. And so you have to have methods.
There has to be a concrete process for the important things in your business. Okay. I’m stuck on 1700 interviews. My mind is blown. Okay.
Hahaha!
Well that’s when I quit,
you know, we’re at about 2100 now. That’s when I quit. To blow your mind a little more there. ⁓
Okay. I’m not even listening to the numbers anymore. Here’s
my question. Okay.
if there was one pattern you noticed in 1700 interviews.
What would that pattern be?
You know, I would tell you that the pattern you actually we’ve talked about a lot of those patterns. You know, the the courage that you need to have in order to grow as an entrepreneur. The fact that that marketing is is underestimated as a powerhouse to grow your business. And if you work with the right people, it’ll get you there. And by the way, I always leave people with this is like, it’s not complicated.
It’s just working with people and businesses that know how to get you there. so in marketing, I’ll reiterate this. It starts with strategy. You got your owned marketing, you got your earned marketing, you got your paid marketing. And if all those things are working on all cylinders, you’re going to be developing more leads than you know what to do with. At that point, you’re more focused on the value of your brand, your brand as thought leader, because you’re going to, you’re going to be in a really great spot if you’re doing it right.
I’m open to inviting anybody for a discussion on marketing if you’re in healthcare. You could find me at outcomesrocket.com. Always available for a chat for anybody that you know, Don, or that’s listening to us. And by the way, Saul at outcomesrocket.com is where you’d go for that as well if you want to reach me.
That’s amazing.
Thank you for sharing. you’re ahead of me, but like about five minutes. But, but that’s good. You’re an overachiever. Okay. So last question.
Hahaha!
Entrepreneurship can be really risky. Health care, to people outside of health care, they may not see that as risky, but the investment is so huge and there is real risk in health care. And many providers, they think, there’s all this money in health care. And you’re like, well, yeah, there kind of is.
But the other side of it is you don’t know if you’re actually going to get paid and you don’t know what you’re going to get paid on. like most, most independent Leon physicians that I know, they’re like, you know, I can’t tell you if I made money six months ago, but am I making money now? I have no idea. You know, it kind of depends on, you know, reimbursements. So entrepreneurship really risky. Okay.
Those of us who are successful, I think, I think we’re risk blind. I don’t even think we see it anymore. Healthcare can be really risky as a business. It’s not for the faint of heart. Tell me about a hard moment, a failing. I don’t really believe in failure. I think it’s an event, not a definition, but tell me about a failing of yours that hurt and what pulled you through.
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Yeah, there’s a lot of them. where can I work? Like, let me think of any one of them. mean, like, and I love what you said, Don. It’s like it’s it’s a thing that happens. It’s not an identity. I remember first starting the business. We started actually as a production agency for podcasts, because naturally you do as many podcasts as I have.
Yeah, yeah I get it.
people are like, this guy knows what he’s doing. Help me out. So we started as a, as a podcast production agency. And we, you know, since then we’ve grown to be a full service marketing agency that does public relations, reputation management, web development across everything. Right. But it didn’t come without pain points. And I remember one of our first clients trusted us to run a very important webinar and
I was so excited. It was going to be a phenomenal opportunity to show them what we were made of. And we get there, and I somehow hit the start button too fast. And people start coming in, and we were talking shop about how to make the webinar happen. And we were literally already live. And that did not go over well.
I was so embarrassed. We ended up saying, ⁓ hey, guys, we’re going to reschedule this webinar and pushed it to another date. I had a heart to heart with that client. By the way, know, great friend of mine now, he basically says, Saul, partnerships are made through being able to weather storms like these. I know that’s
I know where you are at that point, right? Where we were at the stage as a company. To this day, we’ve got that process on lock. I mean, we got SOPs. I’ve got multiple people like trained up and we run beautiful webinars. By the way, Don, I don’t know if you know this or not, but according to eMarketer, which is one of the sources we love to use for marketing, apart from conferences,
webinars are the number two most popular way to get leads in today’s B2B business environment. Webinars are a critical part of what we do across the board and account-based marketing, et cetera. But I divert to tell you that it’s a very important tool. And if you’re not using it, you’re leaving leads on the table, conferences, and then it’s webinars. So anyway, I digress and tell you that
I literally was like, I’m done. This is like, we just lost. And by the way, at that point, there are number one account. And I’m like, we freaking lost it. I’m fried. But what he taught me in that scenario was the importance of partnerships and reciprocating that chance that he gave me with some of my partners and giving them grace because
I grace.
Everybody’s first. Everybody has their first time at some point. And I’ll tell you what, Don, here at Outcomes Rocket, we hire for talent and attitude over like, do you have the skills of a certain thing? Because we could train that, you know? And so we can teach that. So anyway, that’s what that sort of fast forward to now taught me. Man, I’m so glad he didn’t dump us.
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Yeah, you can teach them.
So so Ed if you’re listening dude kudos and thanks for your belief in us brother
Well, I love that.
And let me just coach the audience a second. If you make that big mistake and you’re going to make that, I don’t know what day, but you’re going to make the big mistake. It’s going to happen. You’re going to be on stage, talk to 500 people and your fly is going to be unzipped. Your wig is going to fall off. Whatever. Something’s going to happen. And here’s exactly what you do. Look them dead in the eye and say, I’m so sorry.
Okay, because we love to forgive people. We love to help people who have a problem. Just own up to it. Take the bullets in the chest. I’m so sorry. I will make it right. You tell me how I have to do that. And clients that you have gotten over a hump like that will be the best clients you ever have. Okay, because they’re not used to people solving problems for them. Even in their own company, they’re really not used to people solving problems.
And so if you solve a problem, they will love you for, they may leave you one day, but they will love you forever. Okay. And so just look them dead in the eye, say, I’m so sorry. How can I fix it? And go on down the road. One of my really good friends was a huge cabinet maker and his number one client grew to be Barnes and Noble. Well, if you were going to sell.
Cabinets, custom shelving, that’d be the person to sell them to. And he tells a story about the first job they got. They got a test order for two stores, store A and store B. Short timelines, it’s retail. You know, they’re always starting, trying to get open before Thanksgiving, get that big Christmas bump the first six weeks, you know, that they’re open.
and they ship store B’s product to store A and store A’s product to store B and they’re in different cities. so the project manager at Barnes and Noble calls, they’re out of their mind and my friend said, look, our fault. I’m sending 10 people to each location. We’ll get the product shipped, use the 10 people.
for whatever you need, for however long you need them, my nickel, do we make it right? And grew to be his biggest client and probably the number one buyer of what he sold there for 10 or 15 years or something like that. So just say, I’m sorry, and how can I fix it? And ⁓ then put some processes in place where you double check things, where things like that don’t happen. So, okay.
Great story. That’s it. That’s it.
Amen.
Tell us again, easiest way to reach you. Tell us again, the website address, because I know people are going to want to call and reach out.
Yeah, you, think it was, I forget, Cheryl Sandberg, she was the CCO of Facebook at one time. She said, if somebody offers you a seat in the Rocket, don’t ask what seat, just take it and buckle up. So I’d say, hey, if you wanna get on a marketing Rocket, we wanna invite you to explore conversations with us. It’s Saul, S-A-U-L, at outcomesrocket.com.
Outcomesrocket.com is where you can reach us. And I also, I would tell you, ⁓ shoot me a LinkedIn message. That’s actually where I’m probably most going to be able to respond to you with less noise. So shoot me a LinkedIn message. I’m sure Don will include it in the show notes here. I invite that. I invite the opportunity to meet you and to learn about your story. But Don, thank you so much for hosting me. This was a true pleasure. You’re a true coach.
Thank you so much. was my pleasure. 1700 podcasts interviews. My mind is blown. Okay. My mind is blown. I’m very grateful. Thanks for coming on the show and folks that’s today’s episode of the proven entrepreneur show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.
Hahaha!
You’re too funny.

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Title: E147 | Selling Is Helping: The Sales Mindset Doug C. Brown Says Every Entrepreneur Must Master
Date: November 26, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/sales-mindset-doug-c-brown-says-every-entrepreneur-must-master/
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Content:
Growth in business often starts long before a sale is made. In this conversation, Doug C. Brown explains how predictable revenue comes from understanding your ideal client, setting real sales goals, and using a math based approach to every stage of your sales process. Many entrepreneurs chase big numbers without the budget, structure, or team to support them, and Doug points out that the right sales mindset and a clear revenue strategy can prevent most of the frustration that comes from unrealistic planning.
One of the most useful insights from the episode is how much opportunity sits inside existing relationships. Doug explains that dormant clients respond faster than new leads and often create quick wins that build confidence in the sales process. This is where strong follow up, buyer fit, and simple re engagement can lift revenue within weeks. When companies focus on the right buyers, shorten their contact to close time, and practice relationship based selling, their sales process becomes steadier and more cost effective.
Doug also highlights the role of mindset in performance. When pressure rises, people often get stuck in fight or freeze mode, and this blocks progress. He teaches teams to break this cycle through small wins and a shift in thinking that opens space for better decisions. He also shares how his own network helped him rebuild a seven figure business using his phone and long term trust. The message is simple. Growth follows the people who understand their buyers, value their relationships, and approach selling as helping rather than pushing.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

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Selling Is Helping: The Sales Mindset Doug C. Brown Says Every Entrepreneur Must Master
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the proven entrepreneur show. I got a real treat for you today. I got a sales guru and I don’t throw that word around lightly. so Doug C Brown, welcome to the proven entrepreneur.
Hey, Don, thanks for having me here. I’m so grateful to be here.
Man, it’s my pleasure. So Doug, tell us, name your company, what you do, who you do it with or for, and why do you do it?
Sure. The company is called ⁓ CEO Sales Strategies. And I advise companies for the most part, advise entrepreneurs, solo entrepreneurs, as well as major corporations. Been doing it now for 30 plus years. And I help them with predictable revenue and growing their revenues in a
a math based metrics based formula. So, ⁓ why do I do it? well, you know, I, I’ve, know, in my youth, I was always coaching companies and doing these types of things. Always in entrepreneurial ventures. I’ve had, I think we’re on a 37th company, if I remember correctly now. And, you know, the reason I do it is because I wish I had somebody like, and it’s going to sound arrogant, but I wish I had somebody like me tell me what I know now.
when I was involved in that process because I made, you know, the mistakes that a lot of entrepreneurs make and, know, sometimes they were happy mistakes and sometimes they were very unhappy mistakes. but, know, I’ve won more than a loss, so to speak. So that’s, that’s the good thing. So that’s why I do it. And I, you know, especially now I’m at point in my life where, you know, money’s not really the issue. So, you know, as it was in my say,
30s, you know. Now it’s more of a, you know, I can just make people’s lives easier really when it comes down to it, because it’s very predictable what we do and it’s really in the math.
Yeah, I love that. you know, I live in kind of the same neighborhood. I’m in kind of the same space. And I always think that, you know, a coach or consultant who can not only help you go from A to B, okay, who’s number one, they’ve already been, they’ve already taken that trip. And so they know how to, how to help you do it. But also if they can push them a little closer together, that just accelerates everything.
.
Right.
And so love that. Now, you’ve built and trained some of the best sales teams in the entire world. What’s a really common mistake even really smart entrepreneurs make when they try to scale sales?
Ooh, that’s a big question. there’s a lot of, I’ll you the first couple that I definitely know. when they’re trying to scale, they don’t really have an ideal true goal. They have a kind of a goal they throw out there, but it’s not really backed with any solid, like, like what you asked me, why are we doing this? And what’s the purpose of this? You know, it’s like, you know, I’m doing whatever, pick a number, you know, I’m doing 15 million today.
Hmm.
I want to get to 40 million. It’s like what timeframe? Well, I’ll use a real, you one of my clients who I coached, I do a lot of work now with consultants and things like that. You know, his client wanted to go from 400,000 a month to 2.5 million a month in four and a half months. And I’m like,
That’s big.
Why don’t you play the lottery? you know, like it’s like, it’s, it’s a huge amount of growth. So I asked, said, what kind of marketing budget do they have? And they go, well, they just hired a CMO and not really a heavy marketing budget. I’m like, so tell me how this is going to work. Like, let’s run the numbers. And I’m like, let me guess they’ve never have grown a $30 million company before. Right. Because that’s what they’re trying to do. They try to go from 5 million to 30 million and you know, like
four and a half months. so, you know, do you have a $5 million marketing budget? Do you have a sales team that can handle this? Do know, all this stuff that’s going to come along that you know already done is not going to happen that fast. So I educated my, my client to educate their client and let’s take a first step and figure out what is the real goal. And the real goal was to get from 400,000 to 600,000.
which I said was much still pushing it, but it’s a much more tangible goal than to try to go to two and a half million. And that, so that’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people make. And then the second biggest mistake I see them make right after that is, um, they don’t know who their ideal right fit buyer is. So what they end up doing is coming out, throwing a ton of money at this whole process. And then it’s like, well, that didn’t work. That didn’t work. That didn’t work. That our messaging is off. This is off. That’s off, man.
Yeah.
that worked, but we’re not getting where we want to go. And so, you know, and of course, if we’re trying to, I don’t know, pick any analogy you want, hit a target of whatever we want to go to the mountains, but we drive toward the ocean that has no mountains near it. You know, we’ll see the mountains if we keep taking a boat and keep taking the land vehicle and we drive, you know,
to go there eventually will hit a mountain, but it’s a long path. So when we know what the ideal right fit buyer wants, we know how to message them. We know how to find them. We know what they want. They fear their needs, how to have a conversation with them. And things just go a heck of a lot faster compressing that time to contact to close. And I think that’s probably the second biggest mistake. They make others, but those are two biggies.
Yeah, I love that. so one of my first businesses, I was in the call center business. And when you do outbound, no matter how much skill you have, no matter how much technology you have, if you’re calling the wrong people, it won’t work. You’ve got to be calling the right people. And you’ve got to know who that ideal client is and put all your effort onto them.
What do you think is the, is there a common first domino, a common first thing you change that helps a client begin to grow?
Yeah, usually it’s within, right? So a lot of companies are sitting on a lot of things that, or some things that, you know, like most of them have, and by the way, this is something somebody can easily implement. Most of them have neglected their client base, right? Their dormant client base. And so the first thing I’ll look at is, you you look at direct mail,
Most companies have neglected their dormant client base, and re-engaging them brings quick wins they never expected. Share on X
Hmm.
of recency, frequency, and purchase, right? That’s how they used to determine who got your mailer or not, right? So we go after the dormant clients because there’s already a relationship there. And we just re-engage with them. And they all of a sudden, they’re picking up sales. And you you mentioned the word guru and beginning, I appreciate the compliment. But they think I’m like some guy who descended down from the heavens.
and they’re picking up all these sales that are just sitting there. know, re-engagement of follow-up and component, like they’re not doing follow-up. know, follow-up is an easy way to get a 5 % minimum bump up to maybe 15 or 20%, depending on how, you know, lacking it is in the company. So we start to re-engage on things that get them very quick wins. And there’s a reason for that. Number one, they like it.
Number two, they think I’m good and they keep me there in the company. Right. So there’s a lot of, there’s some strategy that’s, you know, self-serving, but that’s what we look at first. We, you know, don’t, you know, we, we teach something that all the time. That’s like short, short, short, medium, long. And it’s like, let’s work on short strategy stuff that will bring in cash within the first 30 days in the beginning, no more than 60 days. You know,
Sure.
IE referrals, things like that. Like it’s all the stuff that they should be doing that they’re not doing until I show up and I actually force the accountability and the measurements of these processes.
Yeah, I love that. I’m always amazed with clients who are like, you know, what we’re going to do is we’re going to teach you how to convert one more prospect to a sale out of every 10. And they’re like, well, that didn’t sound like very much. you’re like, well, on a good day, you’re converting two out of 10. And so when you convert just one more out of
Thank
10, it’s a 50 % lift. And so, you do got to look at the math and then I wrote a book about seven or eight years ago titled, Romancing Your Customer, which is all about treating your customer with kid gloves and the way you’d want to be treated if you had a really high bar. so, so many companies, even kind of sizable companies,
Yeah, right.
They don’t really put much money or effort into retention or win back. And you’re like, now look, if you were AT &T, about 85 % of your marketing budget would be going to acquisition and then about 10 % to retention. And that includes new sales from those customers. And then 5 % to people that have left, where you just call and say, you left. I’m sorry you left.
I’m sure I did something wrong. I’d like to fix it. Would you please come back? And you’d be amazed at how many people come back just because, you know, you owned up to maybe you did something wrong, maybe you didn’t. So.
Yeah,
a of people think just like you’re talking about, like, you know, I need new clients, new clients, new clients, new clients. We already have new clients. You just aren’t working them to get new regenerated sales out of there. Increase the buying frequency, increase the transactional value, you know, increase new clients through your clients. your marketing costs drops down, right? So absolutely on target what you said.
People think they need new clients, but they already have new clients. They just aren’t working the ones they already have Share on X
So
you’re kind of my brother from another mother. I’ve heard you say this and I’ve been saying this and for all I know there’s 10 other people that say this. But one of the things I’ve always said is, quit selling, start helping. Stop selling, start helping. And you often say selling is really about helping. When did you personally learn that truth?
Yeah.
Honestly, I think probably somewhere around when I was five years old. So I started working for my dad’s business at age three sweeping floors. And I was always hanging around with the adults because I’m three, four years old, right? I mean, what are they going to do with me? They’re not going to put me in a closet. And, you know, so my father used to take me to all of these, ⁓ he owned an industrial machinery, repair and sales company.
So we’d go into these big factories and things like that. I loved it. It was awesome. And we’d sit in the owner’s office or the CEO’s office, and my father and he would be talking. And my dad was always willing to walk away.
Hmm.
You know, if it wasn’t the right fit for him or wasn’t the right fit for the company, he was willing to walk away. So he was in there actually helping and he built a reputation amongst my dad was very smart. He could fix anything, electronic, electrical. I don’t know how he did it. I didn’t have that, that bug, but he was very smart. And what would happen?
is people were seeking him out. Because when you play what I call win, win, win, right? And you’re going to be helping people, their defenses start to come down when they realize you’re willing to not stay there when you’re helping them. Because they’re so used to being sold to, and my dad didn’t do it. And it kind of clicked when I was sitting in, I think, office.
And the guy was pushing back, say, I don’t know if we want to do this or whatever. And my father’s like, that’s okay. know, listen, I’m here to help. If you don’t think the help is going to help you, then I don’t want to help you because if I help you, then you’re not winning. And I’m, know, and I’m just going to get another client. It doesn’t make sense. And come on, Doug, let’s go. The guy’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I didn’t say that. Right. Um, so I’ve always come.
For the most part, I’ve come at it from that perspective. I think people don’t play that way, Don, because they don’t have enough leads. They don’t have enough people to talk to. So they kind of get into that scarcity mode and then it’s like, I got to sell every single thing. And the reality is we’re not supposed to. No one has a hundred percent close rate consistently over a period of time. And if they do,
Hmm.
Yeah, we’re not.
I would make a very logical and strong argument. They’re not talking to enough people.
Yeah, I totally buy that. Using the romance of your customer metaphor, I’m like, if you’re not selling enough, you have one of two, maybe you have both problems, most, either you don’t have a consistent stream of qualified leads. Okay. So the reason you’re not married is you’re only going on a date in January and June. That’s not enough opportunities to meet your soulmate or you’re not converting a high enough percentage of your.
Bye.
consistent stream of qualified leads. And so in the romance of your customer jargon, that’s the person who has five first dates a week, but never a second date. It’s like, we’ve got to teach you to be a little better dater. a long time ago, I did a stint where I worked with Judge Ziegler, who was Zig’s brother. And Judge held the world record in pot and pan sales, not Zig. And he used to have a line,
other end.
And he was a great guy, I loved him. He had a line where he would tell salespeople, I know exactly how many appointments you need to hit your goal. And they’d be like, how could you know? he’s like, because it’s the same number for all of you. You need too many appointments. That’s the correct number. And so I certainly hold that to be true.
I think there’d be far less divorces if people followed your reasoning because, you know, a lot of people, don’t have enough. Well, they don’t even have enough leads. Let’s never mind qualified leads, right? So they’ve got, go on a few dates. They find, well, this person’s kind of nice and they keep gravitating to that, but they’re never looking for the real signs of maybe this isn’t right longterm there. And so they go in and they enter in the.
Yeah.
into the in the process and two people are saying the same thing on each side and they haven’t really experienced enough. And then they get into it and you know, it’s like, wow, I didn’t realize you brush your teeth with gasoline, you know, that type of thing. So you know, the master prospector will always outsell the master closer.
The master prospector will always outsell the master closer. Share on X
Absolutely, yeah.
And so if people embrace that and they realize now the master prospector knows how to do exactly what you were talking about in the book, which is how do you get qualified leads, not just leads, right? and, know, once you understand how to do that, you’ll, you’ll, you as the seller can, we’ll calm down.
and not always having happy years or, you know, whatever it might be. And just trying to close it, closing say, you know, no matter what the movie, Glenn, glare, Glenn, Gary, Glenn Ross, especially in today’s selling environment, it’s not going to work.
Yeah,
you are my brother from another mother. And so I can remember when I first started out as a young salesperson, they were attempting to train us to close. And I was like, wouldn’t it be better if I just did a sales presentation that was so strong that at the end they asked me to buy? And they thought I was weird, but of course I was the number one guy in the country. I was like, it just makes so much more sense.
You
Yeah.
to be sure that it’s going to really work for them and show them how it’s in their best interest. And then they’ll just give me their money. There’s no arm wrestle. There’s no try and make somebody do something. They just want to do it because it’s in their best interest. I just get to kind of ride along.
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really a simple process, right? It’s like, got a problem or an opportunity. They want to capitalize on a goal. If you can help them do that there and you demonstrate the proven value they’re looking for. They’re likely going to ask you, when can you start?
Absolutely. Yeah. You won’t have to close. They’ll just buy. So here’s a tough one.
Let’s say it’s all gone. You have to start today from scratch. And the goal, this is a big goal, but you’re a big producer. The goal is to build a seven figure business in 90 days using only your network and your phone. Give us one strategy you’d use.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you know, it’s interesting you said that because that literally did happen to me. And,
You know, I went through a divorce and the divorce, it was not a happy one. It wasn’t amicable, right? And we, so when we went through the divorce, the assets got it, the plead, got it, got depleted down so much that I was like, we literally now we’re running, I’m running two companies at this point and
Hmm.
we had less than a hundred thousand U S dollars in the bank. Now for some people go, well, you had a hundred grand when you’re running two companies with payroll, that’s not a lot of money. Right. And so we ended up in the first, once the divorce happened, within the first six weeks, we generated $860,000.
So, and then we ended up on that company from pretty much having to let everybody go to rebuilding it. We ended up at 1.27 million that first year. So it wasn’t quite a full year. was more like the divorce happened in March. So by December in nine months, we did over a million dollars. Right. So how did I do it? Well, when you’re
Only got a phone and you’ve only got a network. You go to the network that actually has the resources that you’re looking for. And if you already have a network, you can that trust you. They’re going to open up opportunities for you. And that’s what we did. And we ended up selling. and by the way, it doesn’t have to be like 45 people in your network. It’s could be.
one to five, you know, of the right people. And so one of the clients wanted us to do a campaign for them. And we did and in six weeks, we generated $860,000. Right then and there. And then so, you know, and then a few other relationships, one, got 180,000 that came in on top of that, you know, so you can just start to see it wasn’t like 50 relationships, even though I had 50 in my in my
⁓ bag of networking, if you will. But, you know, we focused in, that’s the other thing too, that I found is if you don’t want to spread yourself too wide too quickly. Once you understand that I can actually make money here, you want to kind of focus on that process and that same company we ended up doing, ⁓ the second year we ended up doing almost 1.5 million, just from that same networking list.
So we were able to take that focus and then take the focus on the other company and work the other networking people that we had within that list on the other company. you know, maybe, but I do want to say one thing on it, Don, is like we had momentum still going through relationships. Now, if I didn’t have the relationships,
different story, but those relationships are a goal. And that’s another place that companies and people don’t work enough. They don’t work the relationships. They, know, some people are just sitting around thinking, man, if I could just help somebody today, but they don’t call upon them or they don’t stay in touch with them. And they don’t, you know, I mean, we’re, we’re right now, we’ve got a SaaS company that we just got our MVP out on, and I’m going to be calling upon relationships to either.
look at funding to grow the company out, this new company, or relationships that can put me in front of buyers who will self-fund the rest of the process for some money for marketing and money for continued development and operational support. So I think it’s just a lot of people don’t go back to their relationships.
And, I reached out to one of my relationships, for example, and I said, Hey, I don’t need a ton of money here. I’m not going to raise millions. I don’t need it on this. You know, we’re talking high hundreds of thousands of dollars. And one guy’s like, well, I probably could chip in 300 grand if you really want, you know? And so it’s like, wow. Right. It’s like, but that comes from building relationships over years of trust. Right.
Absolutely. Yeah. Years of trust. And let me tell
you, if you’re an entrepreneur today and you’re like, well, how do I know if I have those relationships? This is your modern day Rolodex. If they’re in here, they’re at least minimally qualified. And there’s some of them in there that are expertly qualified to help you.
Yeah. And they may not directly be able to help you, but they know other people who might be able to help you. And for those of you, ⁓ don’t know what a Rolodex is, cause I don’t know how old the audience is. A Rolodex literally was a bunch of cards that had contact information on it that you would actually could, in most cases, you could turn a couple of knobs and the cards would rotate around and it was called a Rolodex.
hahahaha
⁓ you know, it’s, ⁓ haven’t heard, we use names like that sometimes. I know like the, you know, my, my, my children are in their twenties and, so some of their friends, they’re like, what’s what you had a court on your phone? Like what? Yeah. Yeah. You love, mean, gosh, you love the 20 foot phone. You can walk around the
Yeah. Yeah. I had a 25th chord on the phone. Yeah. And everybody wanted to answer it. Everybody wanted to answer it when it rang.
So thank you for sharing that. last question. You know, when people aren’t selling as much as they want to, and they begin the journey to improving that, that can be…
that can create a high pressure room internally, because it’s like, we’ve not done this, now we’re going to bring in this expert, and they start feeling the heat. On mindset alone, give me a couple things that separates the champs from the chumps, the people who get it done from the people who don’t.
So I just want to qualify the question. So I answer it correctly. If somebody isn’t selling what they want to, and now are we bringing somebody like yourself or me in to help them? And then what’s the mindset or mind shift that has to happen around there? Is that the question or was it different?
Yes. And that being
either the CEO, the founder, or anybody in the sales channel, what mindset change are they going to have to make?
get the job done.
So
if they’re in this place right now where they’re kind of caught up in the limbic system, you know, the fight, flight, freeze or fawn type thing. ⁓ if they’re in the limbic system, the first thing that we’ve got to be able to do is be able to kind of break the pattern out of that limbic system. Because if we don’t me or you don’t coming in there, we’re going to be perceived no matter what kind of information we bring in.
is going to be perceived potentially as a threat.
And once we’re perceived as a threat, the reasoning part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, it’s going to actually justify the limbic systems place. Right. And so now it’s kind of like locked in there. And it’s like, if any of you have had a discussion with somebody and you’re like, what in it’s logical on your side, and they’re just like, they’re just like not coming off.
Yeah.
any point to see your point of view, they’re locked up in the limbic system. In fact, when somebody is absolutely sure this is right, this is right, this is right. Even if you know, it’s not in their head, they’re locked up in the limbic system. They shut down the reasoning side of their brain because it takes like one, 200th of a second for the limbic system and like two seconds for the prefrontal cortex to kick in. So it’s never going to win. The only way you can start, you know,
The mind is set at that point, right? So I look at it as mind flowing or mind shifting. That’s the first thing. And the way to get them out of that, it’s the same way to actually get objections resolved, is we’ve got to create some type of pattern interrupt in that process to get them to move from that to a perhaps this is possible to
you know, moving from perhaps it’s possible to this looks possible. You know, I think it could be possible. Now they’re kind of in a neutral state. So that’s the first thing we’ve got to get the shift to happen. Now, if they’re not open to that possibility, then I wouldn’t take the engagement personally. Right. But it, let’s say they, they are open to that possibility. We need to have that discussion up.
And if they’re open to that, the way to get the mind to start moving from, now I’m in neutral to buying confidence on the idea again, is to come in with very quick ideas that start giving that, you know, it’s like, like sugar. They take sugar and you’re like, we need, I feel pretty good. Do I have a moment? Right. You got to kind of get those short-term gains in there. Then they’re open to work on the things that are creating the limbic system law.
Love that.
That would
be my advice for anybody. You’ve got to prove your worth in there. once you start to prove your worth in there, then it reminds me of a couple of ones that I was engaged in recently. I love working with like, I used to only work with major companies, major corporations, because you and I both know the money’s there, right? And that type of thing. Right.
They write big checks.
I’m super gratified to help like solo entrepreneurs now, especially consultants and things like that, because I just had two of them recently and that we working together. And for seven years, one of them was only taking payments. And I said, well, why are you only doing that? He goes, well, that’s the only way it’s done. That’s the way companies will pay. They will only pay. And so I said, you you open to the
Yeah.
possibility because he had already started going through this process with me. goes, yeah, okay. And within three weeks, he closed his first full pay consulting deal in seven years. And he’s like, it was so easy. Right. So all it was was process that he had. Then I had another gentleman, he was doing 640,000 a year. So he was doing pretty good as a consultant, right? I mean, that’s not bad. You know, you get no employees, that’s, you know, or one personal assistant.
Yep.
And he went from 640,000 added $245,000 in six weeks to his numbers. And with him, it was about ideal right fit buyer, but it was the mindset around the ideal right fit buyer. And as soon as I was able to get him a very short win, like we got a very short win within the first week.
you
It was like, my gosh, I got this big meeting with this big ideal right fit buyer. he closed two deals and added a quarter million dollars to the bottom line within six weeks. You know, then he’s like, my gosh, let’s do more of this. Right. So we’ve got to get them a little bit of, cause if we’re, we got to build a little bit of confidence. That’s all. And that’s that. So I hope I’m answering your question like at that point. And then they’re far more open to going into more depth because
Usually we’re locked up in our, our limbic system due to the habitual training we’ve had all the way through our lives to keep ourselves safe. And then we, you know, when we’re kids, they were still acting out that same pattern when we’re adults. And we’re like, this doesn’t work. And it’s like, no, because you’re not 11 anymore. You know, it’s, it’s here, but you’re trying to serve a template of love. And that’s what gets people locked up. so that’s what I know anyways.
Yeah, I love that. this, think I know, you know, many things for most of my life I was sure I knew. And if you disagreed with me, it’s like, I’m right and you’re an idiot. But at this stage of my life, only kind of, this I think I know, and I think I know if you’re going to make a change in your business, if you’re to make a change in your family, you’re to make a change in your life.
Yeah, right.
You gotta make a change in your mind first. And so you gotta shift. I like how you put that.
If you want to make a change in your business or your life, you have to make a change in your mind first. Share on X
Yeah, well, if we don’t, we’re fighting the natural order of the universe.
We are. And if you have the same thoughts, the same attitudes, the same behaviors, you’ll get what you always got. know, if nothing changes, nothing changes. That’s for sure.
you ⁓
Or and or it changes, but it’s not what you wanted. You can, you can neglect your health for a long period of time. And then eventually. Interesting stats. was looking, cause one of the businesses we own is an insurance company. Right. And today I was looking at why people die and what age brackets.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the majority of people who pass away in their 30s and up to 40, it’s mostly accidents. It’s like 20s and 30s, mostly accidents. 40s, 50s, and 60s, it’s chronic illness.
So when I look at that data, like, Hmm. It’s lifestyle, right? It’s like all the pillars of lifestyle that we should have been living, but we’re so hard charged. don’t eat properly. We don’t sleep properly. We don’t take care of our stress. We don’t take care of this, that, and then it, you know, and we deny it. Like, I know I’m supposed to go to the gym. You know what I mean? Like, buddy, I’m too busy, you know? And then all of a sudden it’s like, darn, my neck is killing me or my back hurts or whatever.
Or I know I’m not supposed to eat these meals so fast, right? But I’m in between meetings, man, and I got to go do that. And then all of a sudden your gallbladder starts going, hello, you know, or, you know, ⁓ something even worse. And so I think it’s one of those things that if we didn’t fight the universe, look, the sky’s going to be here tomorrow and whether a storm cloud blows through it or the, the sunshine is there today.
The sky doesn’t really care. It’s still the sky. It’s just going to be like, okay, tomorrow, you know, um, and we’re trying to hold on so tight to control things that we actually don’t have enough space to let decision-making and other people’s opinions and other people’s thoughts to actually be able to take root to perhaps they know something that we don’t. And until it life throws you a crisis, you know, you show up at the doctor and it’s like,
Yeah.
Hey, you got this. And then that’s enough of a pattern break interrupt for them to go, OK, I’m changing my ways, right? Right.
I’m paying attention now. ⁓
Man, this has been great. You and I, we could riff all day. Okay. Unfortunately, I won’t get anybody to listen to that episode. So, I’d love to have you back in the future and we’ll dig deep into something and teach. so, Doug C. Brown, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Sure.
Well, Don Williams, thanks for having me here. I really appreciate it. And I am very grateful. So thank you.
me too. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E146 | From Chaos to $50M Deals: Jermane Cheatham’s Blueprint for Freedom-First Entrepreneurship
Date: November 19, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/jermane-cheatham-blueprint-freedom-first-entrepreneurship/
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Content:
The Jermane Cheatham interview on the Don Williams Proven Entrepreneur Show offers a clear look at how entrepreneurs can build a simple business without losing control of their time. Jermane explains how business freedom strategies help founders make better choices and stay focused on steady progress. His approach gives simple business tips for founders who want clarity and stability.
A key theme is the creator vs victim mindset insights he learned early in life. He talks about how to shift from survival to creator mindset in a way that helps entrepreneurs stay grounded. He also shares why sales without scripts builds more trust and reduces friction.
The episode highlights how to build a freedom-based business through smart choices and strong partnerships. Jermane explains how to leverage referral partners for rapid growth, which helps founders scale without constant pressure.
The conversation offers mindset tips for entrepreneurs who want balance and guidance on how to stop overworking and still grow. It is a reminder that founders can build simple businesses that support both progress and freedom.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Building-Freedom-Through-Simple-Business-A-Conversation-with-Jermane-Cheatham_proven_entrepreneur.mp3
 
Jermaine Cheatham Interview: How Founders Build Simple Businesses and Real Freedom
 
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I got a great guest today. got Jermaine Cheatham. Jermaine, welcome to the show.
Great to be here, Don. Looking forward to it,
So looking forward to this. been looking forward to it ever since you booked, you know, the guest book, you know, in advance. And so, I knew this was coming up. tell, tell us to begin with what’s your business, who do you serve? What do you do? Why do you do it?
It’s always a loaded question because we’re multifaceted. But I guess in a nutshell, really, my inspiration is entrepreneurs. And I really want them to succeed and build simple businesses. So I really helped them build financial freedom, number one, lifestyle freedom, number two. But more importantly, I want them to have fulfillment in what they do. And so that’s what I focus on. And there’s really a few areas how we do that. We can dive into that later. But that’s who I serve. And that’s what I do it for.
My inspiration is entrepreneurs. And I really want them to succeed and build simple businesses. Share on X
Awesome, how long have you done that?
Well, I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 10. So I have a passion for this. So actually, serving them in different capacities throughout the years, really. But purely from a consulting basis where I’m actually helping them with their businesses from the lens of simplifying it for about six years now. But in essence, I’ve been doing it my entire life.
love that. I love that. And so, you you use the word simple and, you know, something I share with my clients regularly is this. So like this part I’m going to share with you, this is simple genius. And like almost all genius is simple. If you can’t explain it, okay. You don’t know it. and businesses that are really complicated and have a lot of moving parts, they’re hard to scale. They’re hard to make.
make anything happen unless you’re AT &T or Verizon or somebody who was an entrepreneurial business 150 years ago. And now they’re a Fortune 10 company. So I know that you speak regularly about choosing to being a creator instead of a victim. What was the moment you decided that was going to be your narrative?
be around six years old because I grew up in a lot of adversity and I really had two choices. either succumb to your circumstances and situation and environment or you blow past it. And it’s a definitive choice. I think Einstein said it. He said the most important first decision anybody ever makes is, is the world friendly or is it hostile? And I had to face that question.
You either succumb to your circumstances and situation and environment or you blow past it. And it is a definitive choice. Share on X
Mm-hmm.
you know, as a six, seven year old, and you don’t really know until you go out into the world to talk to people and figure out like what’s real, what’s true. You can’t, you can’t trust hearsay. You can’t trust the news. can’t trust secondhand accounts. Life is only experienced first person. And, I wanted to explore that idea, that question. And so I realized the world is friendly as long as you’re a creator of your reality. And the only way you do that is
Go into the world and see what’s going on. Try to help, try to serve, try to be the best you can be, and then put your head on the pillow at night, go to bed, and turn the page and start excited the next day for the next mission.
Life is only experienced first person. Share on X
I love that. And so I do think that’s a choice. You can see the glass half full or half empty. I think that was a pretty heavy choice for a six or seven year old to have to make. so kudos to you for being years ahead of your chronological age to kind of figure that out because I would think most six, seven year olds probably don’t.
don’t see it that way. You know, they, you know, we, all only know what we know and there’s so much more out there that we don’t know. And the only way to find out you got to get out there and see it, do it, try it. Life is an experiment man. And so, you know, go experiment. So I think over the last couple of years, you’ve done like 50 million in deals. And
Your background is you had some, an unstable childhood. I guess that’s how I’ll put that. What mindset did you use to turn chaos into leverage and clarity into business?
think really the mindset is you have to figure out what vision do you have for yourself? Like who do you want to become? What do you want to experience in your time here? We all die. And I had that realization at a young age. And so I’m like, okay, this ends. What am I going to do with it? Am I going to sit around and play video games or am I going to go explore? It’s like Helen Keller has this great quote. says, life is either
an adventure or it’s nothing. And it’s true. And so the mindset was, okay, what is the best way to see what’s true about the world and people and am I good enough? And what are these people all about? And so my first step into that entire environment was sales, because you’re going to learn really quick. If you’re any good, you’re going to get your teeth kicked in with nose.
Yeah.
cold calls, door-to-door sales, you name it. And so that fortifies your mindset that no is not no, it’s just data. It’s not about you. It’s not about your ideas. It’s just data. Use it, refine, and try again tomorrow. And you kind of learn this resilience where it doesn’t matter. It’s just someone’s opinion about an idea, okay?
So, know, sales is like one of the key skills and I don’t believe sales is pitching or scripts. Sales is talking to people and listening to people. That’s it. A conversation like we’re having here, Don, that’s all sales is. You know, all these gurus want to make it into something bigger than it is. It’s not. But it’s like the number one skill you can ever learn is how to talk and listen to people. And that was really my first avenue to build this mindset of
Anything’s possible through other people.
Sales is talking to people and listening to people. That is it. Share on X
Yeah, I love that. And you and I are brothers from other mothers. I grew up, I started out on the sales side and today I help people sell more of whatever they sell. And I tell people all the time, I don’t know how to make people do things, you know, short of having a gun and, know, short of force. But I know how to make it easy for people to do things.
And people want to do things that are good for them. And so if you, if you can position your product, service or experience to where, you know, the value of owning it is worth more than their dollars, they’ll throw their money at you. You know, if my money is dirt compared to what you’re going to provide me, give me what you have, take my money and let me go on down the road.
you know, because everybody’s trying to do the best they can for themselves. And so when you talk to people from that standpoint, it certainly gets a lot easier. And I think that same amount degree of influence is foundational in leadership, which, which, you know, is maybe a different kind of selling, but, you know, it’s all influence. It’s how can I get people to see things the way I see them? So.
I love that. When you transition from employee mode, okay, to founding creators learn, what definition of success did you set for yourself?
question the I’m kind of a weirdo because I don’t really believe in goals
Hmm.
because
two things happen. Number one, you reach the goal and it’s anthoclimatic because you realize it’s fun for a day, but now I got to set another goal. So it becomes a hamster wheel. There’s no satisfaction. Or I don’t reach the goal and I’m disappointed. So it’s a lose lose situation. I like infinite games where I can play it to the day I die and I enjoy the process along the way.
So I don’t think about it from the lens of I wanna have this particular goal. I have directional goals, but I put in processes and systems that I can execute every day that I enjoy doing. This is where the fulfillment comes into play. And so that’s how I think about goals. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, I’m getting off on a tangent, you know, it’s… ⁓
I do not really believe in goals. I like infinite games where I can play to the day I die and enjoy the process along the way. Share on X
Hmm.
No, no,
no, I-
It’s
for me personally, it’s always about like, what am I doing every day? Because to getting back to your question is, it’s, I want to wake up every day excited and excitement is what I pay attention to. Am I excited about what I’m doing? Because if there’s resistance, I’m going the wrong direction or I’m doing it the wrong way. And I’ve done enough experiments to figure out there’s, can get, you can go the right direction.
Hmm.
and get to the same place, but take a different path and still get there. And when you actually enjoy taking that walk versus one where you’re in the snow and the rain and you’re miserable. And so I really, I really pay attention to, am I excited? Am I grateful? I, am I enjoying the process? Cause again, things that we don’t like doing. It’s silly.
I always felt if it, if it
was too hard, probably doing something wrong. If it’s too hard, probably just doing something wrong.
Yes. there, there,
you know, Don, there’s, there’s a great quote, I think it’s by Charlie Munger. No, no, I’m sorry. It’s Warren Buffett. And he says he was looking at different stocks and he has, he looks at a hundred stocks and 99 of them go into the too hard pile.
Hmm. Yeah.
And I think about that from a business
lens, like too hard doing that, too hard doing that, too hard doing that. And you find the thing that you would naturally gravitate towards anyway, which is where your natural skills are, what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing. Just do that.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I can think back when I was a newish entrepreneur. Well, we were just pounding our head on the walls and we couldn’t really kind of figure it out. And we opened an office in another town and instantly everything turned around and it just had to do with the amount of competition in the current markets that we were in compared to going to a market where it was.
green grass and high tides and blue oceans. And it was just like, my gosh, why are we doing, why aren’t we doing that? And so, you know, we did 22 more of those and, you know, there’s nothing wrong with, easy doesn’t mean there’s nothing negative to easy. Easy might mean you’re actually doing it the right way. And, I think sometimes entrepreneurs, you know, get that a little,
crosswired in their heads. So I know resilience is a key theme. Would you share a failing? I don’t really believe in failures, but would you share a personal failing or setback that when it happened, you thought, man, ouch, but that it actually became a real positive in your career?
I would say one of them won’t let me caveat. This is I have a lot of beliefs and I don’t believe in failure I don’t believe it’s the thing. I believe it’s a figment of the human imagination. I believe it’s just data So with that being said Don ⁓ I would say you know, one of the interesting, you know data points is going about sales the wrong way and trying to go
Hmm.
Okay.
to the customer directly instead, and I wasted years doing this, trying to sell one to one. Instead of thinking strategically, which I learned through doing one to one that there was a better way, because I had to find a better path to my destination, is figuring out, instead of me trying to convince and get a hold of and do all these things, I was trying to get into healthcare space. Who already has all the doctors in their network?
Hmm.
And who already has the doctors in their network that already has the doctors trust? And so I thought about it and I realized, well, you know, medical device salespeople talk to hundreds of doctors every week. And why don’t I connect with those people? Cause then they can bring me in to their realm of influence to all their doctors and actually use my service to help them sell their service to the doctors. So it becomes a win win.
win without me doing any of the selling, the marketing or the branding because my device salespeople do it for me. And so this is about leverage, simplicity and working with other humans because that’s all businesses. know, the thing about people get misconstrued what businesses businesses is just simply working with other people’s psychology. And if you think about the psychology of trust through a referral network or through a strategic partner,
you
Yeah, I love that.
There’s no negotiations, there’s no sales, there’s no convincing, there’s no scripts, they’re just signed contracts. 90 % of the work is done. And so I always think to myself like, entrepreneurship is so simple, sales is so simple. If you think about it from the right lens of what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and how you’re going about getting that product or service to that person.
I love that. And you you touch on trust there and I share this all the time, you know, no trust, no trust, no sales, no sales. That’s just all there is to it. And trust is a bridge built gradually between humans, regardless of the relationship, but where you’re leveraging someone who already has that trust, you know, you’re accelerating that gradual construction of trust.
because you already have it. And then the fact that all three parties win, and I think that’s key to relationships with humans. If you want to do very well, and we’re all in the people business, I don’t really care what business you think you’re in, we’re in the people business, but everybody’s got to win. And if there’s a loser, it’s just not going to work. It’s not going to be as successful as you.
you want it to be. Everybody’s got a, I think there’s a, I don’t know whose proverb it is, but you got to let the other guy eat part of the pie. Everybody has to win. Okay. You can’t, you can’t have it all. And so I too, I’m not a great big believer in, I’m not really a believer in failure. think, I think people have, I think failings, they have events, but
But I really kind of see that a little differently. think either you win or you learn and learning is just a little slower winning. It’s still winning. It’s just a little slower than, hey, I bust the tape in front of everybody else or whatever. so if you have to look at it like that, but I do believe that.
You
If you could pull back, if we were going to get into Jermaine’s golden nugget treasure chest of things that you know, and you could share like one nugget with our listeners, what would be the most important thing you would share today to help somebody on their journey?
in entrepreneurship.
would say to focus 100 % on your energy and strategy on maximizing personal freedom versus maximizing growth in the business. Because ironically and paradoxically, the more you build a freedom-based business where you can spend time with your kids, you can go on vacation, you can go to the gym, you can take walks, you can read a book.
You have downtime. Ironically, your business actually operates better. You’re more creative, you’re more resilient, you’re more calm, because you’re not working 16, 12, 10, eight hours a day. I have a belief if you work more than four hours a day in your business, you’re working on the wrong things.
If you work more than four hours a day in your business, you are working on the wrong things. Share on X
Yeah, it’s counterintuitive. Okay. It sounds like, no, if things aren’t going well, I need to work harder. Okay. But probably, you got to keep it in balance to where your brain has a chance to breathe. Okay. You’re not just reacting to this fire and that emergency and that urgency. And you can actually think and, know,
prime your creativity, many of the best ideas will happen for you on the beach, on a mountain, whatever’s your thing, but not behind your desk, not in your office, and not at your house, someplace away. And I was horrible about that for probably the first 20 years of my entrepreneurship.
I literally did not take a vacation. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. It took a lot of three and four day weekends, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s also something to be said about going to China for 26 days, spending three weeks in Italy. There’s something to be said about getting away for a certain period of time.
to kind of rejuvenate your spirit and your soul and your brain. so, and then the other thing is this, is if you’re trying to grow your company, common complaint is, know, my people won’t step up and lead. And I’m like, well, you actually have to get your butt out of the leadership chair for them to have an opportunity. And if you, if you’re sitting in the chair every day, no, they’re never going to step into lead because they’d have to sit on your lap. It’s not going to work.
It’s just not going to work. okay, Jermaine, you are my brother from another mother. like on the TV show, the legal TV shows where they say, I reserve the right to recall the witness at a later date. I am reserving the right to recall you because I think there’s some rabbit holes we can go down that will be really beneficial to some people.
If somebody wanted to reach out to you or your company, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Yeah, so if this resonates, have them go to creatorslearn.com. Again, there’s creators and then there’s victims. Yeah, so creatorslearn.com. And what they can get there is I have a freedom formula. It’s called the salespreneur freedom formula. Because if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re also in sales. And if you’re a salesperson, you’re also an entrepreneur. And they can learn about my frameworks in the formula. Basically, we talk about what to sell, who to sell it to.
I have a freedom formula. It is called the salespreneur freedom formula. Share on X
Yeah.
and how to sell that thing where you’re able to create this financial freedom, lifestyle freedom, but also fulfillment because you’re strategically having fun with partners that win too. So you can check that out at Craters Learn.
Love that. So creatorslearn.com and I can’t stress how much I agree with Jermaine. It’s so common with entrepreneurs, even that have successful exits because they didn’t, they didn’t build the freedom in and they were very successful financially, but because they didn’t build in the personal freedom and the family freedom, they’re unfulfilled. They’re like, so is that all there is? Yeah. I walked out with eight figures or, but.
Is that all there is? And so a lot easier if you build that into your life as you’re going about it than try and find it for the first time when you’re 50 and you’ve exited your 20 year overnight success story, you know, that type of thing. So it’s remained my pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so very much.
Thanks,
Don. It a time,
Yeah, that’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. Thank you so much and we’ll see you next time. Bye now.

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Title: E145 | Luke Van Der Veer: How He Quit His 9-to-5 and Built a Freedom Business with Website Rental Coaching
Date: November 12, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/luke-van-der-veer-how-to-quit-9-5-and-built-business-website-rental-coaching/
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Content:
Luke Van Der Veer’s journey from a 9-to-5 job to building Website Rental Coaching is a masterclass in entrepreneurial reinvention. In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams talks with Luke about how frustration in his corporate HR role sparked a search for independence. After experimenting with side hustles, Luke discovered SEO and realized he could help local businesses rank higher—and profit. What started as an agency quickly evolved when Luke pivoted to renting his own high-ranking websites, creating a scalable passive-income model that gave him both financial freedom and time flexibility.
As Luke Van Der Veer explains, true entrepreneurship begins with a mindset shift—from following directions to taking ownership. He shares how he faced skepticism, failures, and long nights of trial-and-error while building his first lead-generation sites. Over time, he refined his approach, selecting niches with low competition and high ROI potential, turning his websites into valuable digital real estate. His experience now powers Website Rental Coaching, where he mentors others to duplicate his success using strategic SEO, resilience, and consistent effort. The conversation highlights practical insights on risk-taking, mindset discipline, and work-life balance for entrepreneurs.
Beyond money, Luke Van Der Veer measures success by impact and lifestyle—helping others quit their jobs, find peace, and regain control of their time. As he tells Don Williams, the freedom to create, travel, and spend time meaningfully matters more than any revenue milestone. This episode offers actionable inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to escape the 9-to-5 grind and build lasting income through creativity, digital strategy, and purpose-driven work. Watch the full interview below and learn how Luke Van Der Veer turned SEO skills into a freedom-based business model that anyone can replicate.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Luke-Van-Der-Veer-on-Quitting-the-9-to-5-Entrepreneurial-Journey-to-Freedom-Passive-Income.mp3
 

From 9-to-5 to Freedom: Luke Van Der Veer’s Entrepreneurial Journey and Lessons in Mindset & Impact

Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I got a real treat for you today. I have Luke Van Der Veer with website, Rental Coaching. That’s kind of an interesting name and I’m going to let Luke explain what it is, but he provides this really unique, highly valuable service. So Luke, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Don, I appreciate it.
it is my distinct pleasure. so let’s jump right in. Tell us what website rental coaching is, does, who you do it for, why you do it. Okay. And how your customers benefit. That’s like five parts to one question. Just a couple, just a couple of minutes. It’s a short show. So give us the best you got.
How much time you got? ⁓ man.
Okay, okay.
Yeah. So let me back it up a little bit here. I’m currently helping people build lead generation websites that they can then rent to a business. So I’ll dive into this a little bit. But first, I started doing a normal job. I had a nine to five. I used to work in human resources doing benefits. I didn’t like that job. And I was trying to figure out what can I do to not do this anymore?
Please.
And I was trying all these different side hustles. was doing, tried job shipping. was selling on Amazon. I’m selling on eBay. I did a bunch of multi-level marketing. That was miserable. There was lots of things I was trying to try to figure out how do I quit the job? And I just kept trying and trying and trying. And I eventually came across SEO. I’m like, this is really cool. You can like manipulate websites, get them to the top of Google, help businesses make money. Awesome. Built an agency, did not like working with tons of clients.
They were just always telling me, send me this report, do this stuff on my website. I was like, this is terrible. One day I had a client that, it’s how I am. I had a client call me in the middle of the night on a weekend, just wake me up out of a dead sleep and just complaining about not getting enough results. Meanwhile, this guy, two weeks, like months ago, he was just buried.
Mm-hmm.
You’re picky, Luke. You’re picky.
or like super, super far back in the search results, like page nine, 10, like he’s not getting any traffic from Google. I had had him ranked number one for weeks and he was just tons and tons of calls, eight, nine, 10 calls a day, just killing it. And he was complaining to me and I just snapped. I was like, that’s it. I shut down the agency and I switched it to now instead of working for other people, I was like, you know what? I’ll just build websites and all of the same niches I had clients in and I’ll just rent it to them.
It’s like, I’ll just keep the site myself and they could just have the leads as long as they pay me. And it actually helped. It worked out really well because they didn’t, they couldn’t complain anymore. It’s like, they changed this thing on the site. I’m like, no, it’s my site. I’m like, you can have the leads. If you want the leads, you can pay me this. If you don’t, I’ll find another person who does what you do and they can rent it. So that’s what happened with me. And I used it to quit my job. And then I had some friends say, what are you doing?
and they convinced me to show them how to do it too. And then that just kind of spun out of control because it started with referrals and then people just kept coming to me. So was like, okay, I guess I’m a coach now. So now I do both.
Okay, I love everything about that story. I had a job, I didn’t like my job, and so I was looking for a way out of my job. I built a pretty successful company, but I didn’t like all that either, and so I pivoted, and now I like it. So I appreciate that. So let me ask you this, because basically you were trying to replace a job, and now…
Bye!
Yeah.
You know, kind of accidentally, and I mean no disrespect, but you’ve actually built a company. I was replacing my job. Now I built a company, which is a different thing. It’s a different thing. Okay. Was there a moment when the light bulb went off and you said, Hey, this isn’t a job. This is a company.
Right.
Yeah, wasn’t the intent.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So when I first started doing the agency work, I thought this is going to be great. I like, have this cool skill set. I can make all this money. I’m not going to be stuck doing that whole nine to five grind, eight to six, whatever it happens to be for people. And I was working from home at least. So that was a little bit better. No commute.
Would you tell us about that?
I went really hard the first month to just pick up as many clients as possible. So much so that it got overwhelming and it very quickly turned into just me doing everything. I’m trying to hire people, stuff’s not getting done. And I just was sitting there one day like, this is miserable. I don’t want to do this at all. This is terrible. And I really, I don’t know that it was the smartest thing to do, but I didn’t have any dependents. I wasn’t married. didn’t have any.
anything I really worry about, I figure out how to make money. I could always go back and get another job if I needed to. So I just shut down the agency like overnight. I’m like, that’s it. And I just got rid of all the clients and like, you’re all done. And I kept a couple of them that were friends, but everybody else is like, that’s it here. You can work with these people. I found other people that they could like, I could refer them to for other agencies and things. And I was like, you can work with these people. I’m done. And that was it. I just shut it down.
I realized helping clients rank was great, but owning the websites that ranked was where true freedom began. Share on X
And I started building the sites and I didn’t have any income for a little while because I turned all that off. so I was just banking on it, working. And I just got some sites to the top and some different niches, towing, towing for a couple, HVAC. what else? There was a limo, a pest control and a tree service or the six I did from the start. I got all of them to the top. And then I started calling companies and saying, Hey, you guys are ranked terribly.
You probably don’t get any business, but don’t worry. I can fix it. Just take mine. I’m number one. You can rent the top spot for me. I’ll just digitally rent you my website. And nobody knew what I was talking about. So I had to like figure out a better pitch for this. And eventually people started trying this and I would just send them a few customers because they didn’t trust me. And after they saw that I’m just like referring people to them, they’re like, okay, all right, whatever. Sure. I’ll pay for it.
And I started switching it from a pay per lead or a commission deal to a flat fee. And then I found that if I picked really easy niches that just didn’t have a lot of competition, like not a lot of other companies, a lot of kind of mom and pop shops, weaker areas and weaker niches, like maybe excavation instead of like lawyers, I didn’t have to do any work really after I got it to the top to keep it there.
So I didn’t have to do this continuous link building, continuous content, all this stuff. So it made it more passive. So between like the choosing the niches correctly and then doing like a flat fee and keeping it low enough where they’re getting a ton of ROI from me, I’m just like, okay, cool. I don’t have to do anything. So I just left it and then I just build the next one. And then I’d come back to it if there was an issue and they like called me and then I just kind of kept doing this.
So
there’s a lot of gold you’re sharing there. I mean, there’s a lot of nuggets. And the point I’m gonna add emphasis to is this. You were so over delivering on value, they were had very high ROI. And man, that’s a secret for delivering exceptional customer experience is just kill whatever your competition delivers.
just kill that. Okay. And, and you’ll never want, you know, for business. So great point. So, you know, you kind of got started doing this to escape your nine to five. um, and a lot of people think entrepreneurs, it’s all about the profit motive. They’re all going to be Steve jobs and build Apple. And, you know, after a couple hundred interviews, I can tell you, I think that’s really, really rare. Most of them are.
trying to quit their job or they don’t like this. I personally am an entrepreneur because I am, and I’ll be gentle when I say this, but I am resistant to authority. I don’t do well with people telling me what to do, which is your basic employer-employee relationship. so I always said I could have been a good follower if I had just met a good leader.
Me either.
but I never met one. So I just became my own initially, not very good leader, you know, and over a period of time you learn. So let’s, let me ask this, the people that you’re helping, cause you’ve got people now that are trying to quit their nine to five thing. Okay. They’re like, they’re like, Luke’s smarter than he looks. I want to do what Luke’s doing. You’re, you’re training them. I’m guessing, I know, I know there’s a big,
Yeah, yeah, it’s fun.
It’s fun.
mindset, gear shift they have to go through to go from employee to entrepreneur. How do you help them with that?
Yeah.
You know, the mindset thing I think is one of the toughest things. And for the longest time, when I initially started it, just, I didn’t really know what to do because I wasn’t a coach. I’m like, I’m just gonna record my exact thing, exactly what I do and just give it to you and you just try to follow the same thing. And that actually worked pretty well. But then I found that a lot of people, the business owners that I work with,
because we’re leveraging the SEO skill set, it really can help two people, right? If you can, if you want to do it like website rental, like I did, you could build sites and rent them out for some income and then quit the job, whatever. So that helps the nine to five years. The business owners were taking the SEO piece of it and growing their own companies. And then the passive income was just like an extra side thing. So like, I didn’t realize that I had the two audiences, but that’s kind of what was happening. And the business owners that were coming in were getting results much faster and in greater.
quantity than the nine to five group. And I was like, what is the difference with these people? But in talking to them and just kind of seeing what was happening, just being in this for a while, they’re just coming in with a different mindset. They know that they have to spend, they have to spend money and that there’s risk involved and they’re going to have to spend a lot of time. And it’s not a, it’s not like a choice whether you want to work. It’s like, if I’m going to do this, I need to show the discipline and show up every day, regardless of whether I feel it.
Freedom doesn’t come from avoiding risk — it comes from managing it better than most people are willing to. Share on X
Like if I only do it when I feel like it, it’s never going to get done. Right. I can make all kinds of excuses, but no, it’s this day from this time to this time, I’m going to do this and there’s no other option. And you just have to treat it like a job to build it into something that can surpass it. And I think I, once I figured that out, I was like, okay, so I just got to talk to people about that kind of mindset shift. And I built a whole mindset piece into there. I didn’t know if people would initially need it, want it, whatever, but everybody liked it.
If you treat your business like a job long enough, it will eventually replace your job. Share on X
So I was like, okay, I guess that’s what it is. So for me, I try to find people that already have it because I think it’s easier if you just have that mindset instead of me trying to convince you of anything. But if they just need a little nudge, I basically recorded all that so they can hear like, here’s how to do this differently or how to think about it differently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Love that. So I don’t know if it was Napoleon Hill or I’m not sure who it was, but you know, the, the single differentiator between people that are successful and people that are not successful is that people that are successful will take action, take risks, do things that people that are unsuccessful will not do. And that sounds really simple. Okay. And it is simple, but it’s also very true, you know, is
Yeah.
There’s a lot of 20 year overnight success stories from, you know, women and men who built a company and struggled and struggled, struggled, struggled, struggled, struggled, Okay. And, and then hit a 500 foot home run. And, and in fact, many entrepreneurs that, that are founders and some people inherit, you know, I mean, there is that side, but many that are founders.
If you look at their career, if you just count the days and say, well, how many days were they successful? Their unsuccessful days far outweigh their successful days. But the successful days, the dollars far outweigh even the number of unsuccessful days. so, anybody can run a business where it’s going great.
But can you run a business when it’s a little more challenging? That’s where the rubber meets the road. So hey, know you took some, it sounds like, hey, I want to quit my job. I found this thing. I started it out. Life has been good. Life has been great. Life’s even grand. It’s getting better every day. But I know somewhere, somehow, you took a couple punches along the way. Other than just the midnight call where the
Ugh.
client was unhappy because instead of getting 22 leads, he only got 18 and so he was unhappy. Do you have a time when you got knocked down and what did that experience teach you about resilience and leadership?
Yeah.
You know, I try to just look at everything as a learning opportunity. So I don’t know that I have big ones that really stick out, but I wouldn’t say consistently. It was challenging to a way to consistently get a website to the top.
That was hard because I was trying to outsource pieces of it so I didn’t have to do everything myself. And I would hire people from all over the place. was trying people from the Philippines and trying people from India and Bangladesh and all these things. And PayPal doesn’t work in some of these countries. So you can’t take the money back if they don’t deliver. So I’m paying money out, people are stealing from me and they’re copying things from other websites. And it’s a…
Don Williams (13:50)
Hmm.
Ha
for lack of a better word, a shit show, trying to figure out how to get things to work consistently. But once I kind of got that down, then it was more just trying to be persistent and keep going, even though Google keeps smacking you backwards. Because if anybody has taken a website from invisible to the top, it’s not a linear path. It’s like you one day you’re like 20, then you’re back to 80, then you’re 70. You’re just it’s this whole thing, but generally trending in the right direction. So that was weird to try to.
like get used to agency work and then through. And then I think once I kind of got the work part handled, getting beat up by family and friends and everybody else who’s supposed to support you and telling you you’re crazy, go back to your job, it’s safer, why are you doing this? This doesn’t make any sense. This is stupid. Just constant barrage of that. And the people at work laughing at you, like, why are you working at lunch? All of these things. That was, I think, the hardest part.
just listening to all that crap and just trying to tune that out and stay focused and not take any of their opinions, which I wanna pretend I don’t care, but my family’s opinion means something to me. So I’m trying to like, okay, you know, I love you guys, but you’re wrong and just keep going. That was the hardest thing I think.
Yeah, and that can be brutally hard and a lot of entrepreneurs probably quit because of things they hear from people who literally love them and think they’re helping them and that they mean well, but they’re just not wired to be an entrepreneur. And I can remember, I don’t know, 15 years ago, somebody said something, well, I just can’t stand, how do you handle the risk?
Most people start something and when they don’t see results fast enough, they quit. Share on X
Yeah.
I’m like, what risk? And at a certain point, you’re just numb. You’re just like, I don’t see the risk. Now, if it’s like we’re going to fall off the cliff and everything’s going to crash and burn, I see that. But the minimal risk, I don’t even see, because the entrepreneur, you’re basically all in every day anyway. And so you just get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And the non-entrepreneur.
Right.
Yeah.
They’re comfortable with being comfortable. That’s the difference. Yeah. Can I be comfortable being uncomfortable? And then, you know, one of the things I share with my clients is this. Your zone of magnificence, your zone of excellence, where you can be better than anybody in the world is outside of your comfort zone. When you’re doing something where you’re wondering, is this going to work? That’s where you can be your best. Will you be your absolute best every time?
No, sometimes it won’t work, but that is the area. That’s the neighborhood. That’s the zip code where you can be literally magnificent. And so I always encourage people get out of your comfort zone and try something, do something. Life is an experiment. And so go experiment. Okay. At this stage of your journey, what drives you more? Freedom, impact, mastery.
impact because I, the originally I thought it was a dollar figure. I thought that’s what would make the difference. When I was at the nine to five job, I had this number in my head. That’s, that’s drastically higher now with how things are, but it was a hundred thousand dollars was the number in my head and my salary at my first job was 45 grand. I was like, if I could just have a hundred thousand dollars and I could have that coming in, that’s just going to solve all my problems.
But I didn’t think about, you know, what am I going to do for work or like, how far is that going to go? Can I save anything? None of this stuff. So I was just doing everything I could to make the money, but I didn’t think about what the lifestyle would be like. And the lifestyle I found was much more important. The lifestyle and the time. Time was the biggest. So once I got that with website rental and just running out sites, I was like, I don’t really know what to do with my time because I would be, I was free to go do whatever.
And like I’m at the gym in the middle of the day, I’m just golfing in the middle of the week. you know, the only people out there, all the guys that are like retired, but like none of my friends have that, they’re all at work. I’m like, what am I supposed to do for all of this time? I’m not really, like I can’t just like retire at 28. So I was like, okay, I guess I’ll just build more. So I just kept doing more work because it was becoming fun.
And then when I found you could actually help other people do this and people were getting results following the same thing, that was really cool because I was watching people quit their jobs and it didn’t quite feel the same, but it was close. And I was like, okay, I like this a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that part. I mean, it took me a long time to clarify my mission, but my mission is to help others who help others. I love helping people, but I really love people who help other people because of the impact that that has. And sometimes you don’t see all of that, but, you know, there is certainly more to it than just the dollars, the P &L and the balance sheet.
that won’t do it for you. I talked with a guest the other day and I was asking him his definition of success. I loved his answer. There was two partners and one of them was like, you know, want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it with who I want to do it with. And he said, and I’m fortunate I’ve been able to do that for some time. And his partner said, you know, I would tell you my definition of success. It’s not…
Yeah.
It’s not decimals, it’s not dollar signs. That’s a tool and I get to go places and do things I want to do. But he said, it’s just peace. If I’m at peace, if I’m content. And I was like, that is such a great way of looking at success because I think the non-entrepreneur thinks, hey, everybody in business is all about the money and we’ve got to make money, otherwise we’re on the food line.
That’s a good way to it.
But for most successful entrepreneurs, at some point, their focus shifts from money being the primary. So at one point you were like, got to have a hundred thousand dollars. then, and then all my problems are going to be solved. Life is going to be, life is going to be roses and unicorns and rainbows from that point on. But you know, what, what
When you stop chasing money and start chasing impact, the money follows naturally. Share on X
of nothing.
That’s right.
entrepreneurs learn is there’s a new devil at every level. so every place you, every time you grow, there are new challenges and next steps to take. And Mark Cuban has next steps. I don’t know what they are, but, but he’s got some to take and I do and you do. So, okay, Luke, love your story. I think I’m going to reserve the right to recall the witness at a later time on a future episode.
There’s more stuff I want to talk to you about, but if one of our audience wanted to reach out to your company or to you, what’s the best way to do
Website rental coaching.com talks about what I do. It’s basically a video kind of showing some of the steps to my process. And you could also connect with me on social. If you can spell my name, I’m on Instagram. It’s just Luke van der Veer.
Yeah, and band of your three words, yes.
Well, I have it all done Instagram. It’s all just one big thing, but it is technically words capitalized. Everybody butchers it.
⁓ there you go. Yeah.
Well, yeah, they would. Okay. Luke, a real pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so
Thank you, Don.
That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E144 | From Military Leadership to Business Success: Robert Braiman’s Blueprint for Profitable Entrepreneurship
Date: November 5, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-military-leadership-to-business-success-robert-braiman/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Blog-Featured-From-Military-Leadership-to-Business-Success-Robert-Braimans-Blueprint-for-Profitable-Entrepreneurship.jpg
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Content:
In this powerful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Robert Braiman, Founder and CEO of Cogent Analytics, to explore the deeper layers of what it truly means to build and lead a business. From his formative years in the military to becoming one of America’s most respected voices in small business consulting, Robert shares invaluable entrepreneurial journey insights and the lessons that shaped his leadership philosophy. The conversation explores how his military discipline, client-first mindset, and belief in “Main Street, not Wall Street” have driven him to help entrepreneurs across the nation achieve sustainable growth and profitability.
Braiman opens up about the challenges of being a family-driven entrepreneur, the courage to take risks, and the reality of balancing personal and professional life. Together, Don and Robert uncover how business growth strategies, organizational leadership, and storytelling in business can transform not just companies but the lives of everyone connected to them. The episode also delves into Cogent’s signature framework—the Profit Platform—a holistic approach to increasing profitability, improving cash flow, and creating long-term equity value.
Whether you’re an emerging founder, creative agency leader, or seasoned business owner, this episode delivers real-world startup success lessons grounded in experience, integrity, and strategy. Brainman’s advice on purpose-driven leadership, overcoming entrepreneurial burnout, and redefining success will inspire every listener to own their business—rather than letting the business own them. Watch, listen, and learn how to turn your next challenge into a catalyst for growth and long-term success.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here
 

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/From-Military-Discipline-to-Business-Mastery-Lessons-in-Leadership-Work-Life-Balance-for-Entrepreneurs_Podcast.mp3
 
 

Robert Braiman on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Building a Purpose-Driven Business

 
A Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a great guest today, all the way from North Carolina, Robert Braiman with Cogent Analytics. Welcome to the show.
Don, fantastic privilege. Thank you for having me on today.
That’s my honor. So let’s start with this. Tell us what does coaching analytics do? Who do you do it with or for? Why do you do it?
So we have an old, I’ll start with the why. I’m a serial entrepreneur representing entrepreneurs. I’ve been doing it for 22 years. We’re Main Street, not Wall Street. As I’ve said since the beginning of time, entrepreneurs are still the backbone of our country. And being an entrepreneur myself, I became a business analyst many, many, many moons ago and just absolutely fell in love with the family stories and the people and the gut and grit.
Entrepreneurs are still the backbone of our country. Share on X
it takes to be an entrepreneur. So the Y is easy. Cogin Analytics really works in all facets of the business. And I’m sure you’ll ask me a bunch of follow up questions on that Don. So let me not drone on hearing my own voice. I’ll let you pepper me away with the questions.
Okay. Thank you so much. Now I know that you have significant military experience in your background. And so my first question is this, that experience serving our country prior to the time you chose to serve entrepreneurs, how did that military experience shape the way you lead, build teams and run coaching analytics today?
Truly foundational. I have a lot of military members that actually work for Cogent now. I think it’s 25 or 30 percent of our staff are either former active duty members. Many members are still serving in the Reserve and National Guard. it lends itself, know, service is a lifetime journey. And I think if you talk to any veteran, they’ll tell you they service was a choice when they went into the military and I think service lasts a lifetime. So.
Structurally, it lends itself really well organizationally, not just the way Cogent operates, but really when you begin to talk to entrepreneurs about their organizational structure, because as many of your listeners know, you start a business and when you first start, you wear all the hats. And, you know, sometimes it’s hard to give away those hats as the business takes on, you know, different iterations when you grow.
The organizational engineering that the military takes you through, I think, has a direct line into organizational engineering for business. Leadership is critical. A lot of business owners get stuck in the thick of thin things, as I always say, right? They get $5 decisions pressed up.
Leadership is critical. Too many business owners get stuck in the thick of thin things. Share on X
when, when that, you know, and it stops a business owner from thinking strategically really about where they’re going and how they’re going to get there. so yeah, I’ve always believed that there was a direct line to not just my military experience, but there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that are prior service members. And I think it, it’s true with our, with our project director team or our marketing team or accounting team. you know, there’s a direct correlative between the way
service members think and the way consulting serves others.
Yeah, I love that. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to speak to about 250 naval officers and enlisted people on leadership. And I was honored to get that opportunity, but doing my research, was like, maybe I should, what I know about the Navy with my uncle served 33 years, but maybe I should dig in and do some research on military leadership and naval leadership.
Mm-hmm.
Seal team leadership, et cetera. And I was blown away at how big a piece servant leadership was and what I think somebody outside of the military would think is typically traditional top-down leadership. And there’s certainly that component, but I was blown away at the amount of servant leadership built in to their core values. And so…
It was a little bit like preaching to the choir because that’s, that’s what I talked about. So great stuff. Thank you. You built Cogin analytics into the one of the top consulting firms for small and mid-sized businesses. Let me ask you, what problem did you see in the marketplace that made you say, I’m going to solve this. I’m going to start a company to do this.
You know, it’s funny, I got out the military and I fell into a J-O-B, which a lot of people do when they first make the transition. And I was an entrepreneur for the first part, that first journey of my life. And it was odd, I was going to, after being a minority partner to begin with, I had reached that
point where I was going to open my thing, be the 100 % owner. And I told my wife that I was going to interview for some jobs. Well, as you can imagine, she asked me if I was crazy. This was three o’clock in the morning, waking up with a start. And I said, babe, you already know that answer. And then she asked me why. And that answer, it was funny. The words came out of my mouth. And I don’t think I gave it a whole lot of thought.
but it’s lasted me for 20 plus years. I said to her, said, know, babe, you’ve been married to an entrepreneur. You know what that journey’s like. And I want to see what the other side does. And, you know, I always say I interviewed for a number of jobs, got a couple of job offers, and I was dumb enough to say yes to the one that said, hey, if you’ve been a president, can you represent a president? Whether it was ego or…
or narcissism or whatever it was, Don, said, wow, I could do that. I’ve been an entrepreneur. That was the beginning of being a business analyst representing entrepreneurs. the interesting thing about it, I kind of did it in many ways before I officially wore the title of business analyst. And at the time I represented a firm that I just, whether it be morals or compass,
that we all live by, I just was not aligned with their core values and knew that there could be a better way to develop a client first small business consultancy. Consulting comes with a lot of bad adages. And when I thought about Cogent and I thought about our core values, honor, courage, wisdom, faith, perseverance, and loyalty, and making it truly a client first organization.
you know, over the last 12 years, are now the premier small business consultancy at America. And the best part of the story is not that first engagement, but it’s the durability of the relationship. When you get a chance to represent families, you know, these are mother, brother, sister, cousin, you know, partners that go into business together that are great at owning a small business, but most often not.
taking true advantage of business of the business. Most often they go in with trades and skills, but not as adept at running the core business of the business skills it takes to run highly profitable. Our adage, Don, is we want to make our clients, we want to improve profitability, increase cash flow, and enhance equity value.
And that has been our mission since the beginning of time and the durability of relationships that we’ve been able to sustain with our clients is probably the most rewarding because you get to see those family stories and the impact that it has in everyday America, know, Main Street, not Wall Street, right?
Yeah, I love how you said that the business of doing business and the average startup founder, you know, Bob was a great plumber and one day Bob said, I’m tired of working for Sam. And so I’m going to open my own plumbing business and Bob was a great plumber, but he probably can’t spell and I’m over exaggerating business. And so that’s a skill in of itself. And
Yep.
Science.
One thing I love that you said about Cogent, seven or eight years ago, I wrote a book titled, Romancing Your Customer, because in Dawnland, it’s all about the customer all of the time. And everything we do, we should be looking at from those glasses of how does this affect my future customers or my prospects, my current customers, and my past. How am I going to do some win back, get some people to come back?
you
And I love how you put that. Okay. So you and your team help business owners face hard truths about their numbers, their people and their leadership. And maybe hard truths and exaggeration, but it’s sometimes reality is hard to face. Okay. And so what’s a, what’s a tough con, anonymous, what’s a tough conversation you’ve had with a client that
that led to a breakthrough.
So I’m gonna bring us back a little bit. Our discovery process as opposed to a hard truth, we call it a discovery. And I always say I’ll do a discovery for any small business owner in America, because consulting does not always fit, right? I have two rules. There’s gotta be an irrefutable financial return and there’s gotta be clients that actually own their problems, which that second part is way harder than the first.
Sure.
But the discovery unto itself is that deliverable because it’s a holistic, it’s an empowerment exercise where we’re able to go in and really look at every aspect of the business in a holistic way. And we developed something called the profit platform that is our approach to representing clients. And that’s comprised of focusing on business development. How does a client make it rain? How do you bring good, healthy, profitable development of business to bear?
Organizational engineering, right? That gets into leadership and right hats and right heads and the right tushies and the right chairs, right? How do you build a team that is most effective? Process engineering, right? Or efficiency. How do I take my product to market and how do I do it in the most efficient way? And how do you measure those things, both financial and operational? Because as we all know, you cannot manage what you don’t measure.
You cannot manage what you don’t measure. Share on X
And in today’s world of information, being able to discern the right information and being able to make decisions from that information once you have it is that catharsis because as every small business owner will tell you, the first dollar that they give away when they make a bad decision is called profit. Right. And we have a lot of clients that have good businesses operating for 20 years. I have multiple generational businesses.
Yeah.
that maybe it’s passed through three generations or four generations. And Don, you’d be shocked. Well, maybe you wouldn’t because you too represent small business owners. You know, a business that should be making 10, 12, 15 percent net profit most frequently is making five. Well, I mean, that creates real issues for cash flow, the ability to benefit your employees, the idea of giving incentives, the ability to
Mm-hmm.
to offer benefits and get good retention out of your staff. The profit platform gives us the ability to look at that business in those four pillars, right? And take a holistic view of the business and offer that insight to our clients. And we do that many, many, many, many times a week for all of the iterations of entrepreneurs across America.
That to me is the most powerful exercise we go through. now that I’ve told you that story, just this week, we had a pair of sisters that had been in business for over 30 years, and they had run a reasonably successful business, had a very tough circumstance with one son and nephew who…
through the pressures of the business, through the pressures of life, did that most horrible thing. And the impact that it has in everyday families and being able to talk through those issues and the impact that it’s had on the business and the impact that it’s had on their personal succession plan and the staff that worked at this company, I could tell those stories a thousand different ways.
of how very, very real life impacts an entrepreneur’s journey. Because the business doesn’t care, right? You when they have a death in the family, the business doesn’t shut their doors. When they have a divorce, the business doesn’t shut their doors. When, you know, most often the business owner gets to relish in the successes for a half a second and the hardships they get to live with for a lifetime. So it’s being able to have those more comprehensive discussions in and around, you know, because
Mm-mm.
I’ll share with you this, I have said to my staff forever, small business owners don’t just want a better business. They want what the better business provides for them and their families and their employees and their families. Right? That business has an impact on the community in which they live, the church they go to on Sunday. You know, those families that buy their first house or
Small business owners don’t just want a better business. They want what the better business provides for them and their families. Share on X
or get married under their auspices. That’s where think Cogent fits the best is when we can have the life conversations as it relates to their business and then the business conversation as it relates to their life.
Yeah, I love that. you know, just to stay on the business side for second, my business, it’s got 5 % profit versus 15 % profit. You know, life is just easier with a big bucket of cash. I’m just saying, will it fix all your problems? No. Will it fix half of them? Maybe. Okay. And then you’ll have enough cash to get people to help you with the other half. But, you know, most of…
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. No.
Amen.
Our work is on top line and what I tell every client is, if we grow your top line, that will not fix all of your problems, but it will fix about half of them. And it’s kind of the first thing that needs to happen. And then we’ve got some stuff to work with on the other stuff. you can. And I like what you said, of the
Buh-bye.
Now you can make good decisions, right? At least you got revenue coming in the door.
information to decision, the bridge between information and decision. And I’m going to say that data to decision, same thing. So I believe that cogent is like kind of all about turning data into good decisions, getting good data, turning it into good decisions. What’s a really common
Same, same. Yep.
empowerment.
mistake entrepreneurs make when interpreting their financials and how can they fix it?
So a lot of entrepreneurs, just the concept of breakeven, understanding at what point in their business does their gross margin that they make on their sales absorb their overhead and pay the bills, right? Because a business doesn’t make money until they truly understand that point at which a business starts making money. So you can imagine the trickle down effect on. And you’ve experienced this with your clients.
They don’t price their goods and services correctly because they don’t really know what it’s costing them to run their business. They don’t generate enough revenue. And when they do generate enough revenue, it’s not managed very efficiently. So they get wastage in both material and manpower. And that’s what presses down. And I’ll say it again, the first dollar a small business owner gives away always is profit to the point where they become non-profitable.
And countless 22 years representing small business centers, walk in and they get stuck in the complacency of good enough is good enough because they walk into the door to their account and their accountant says, well, at least you made some money. We’ll do better next year. That’s not the right answer. This is, you know, for all the risk you take with your bank, with all the risk you take with the IRS and the government, with all the risk you take with the trade relationships and receivables and the payables you’ve got.
You know, all that risk has a value. Now, you can I always say profit is not about greed. You you got to be able to make a profit to make better decisions. And I love the way you said might fix about half of them because, you know, unless you got some oxygen in the room called revenue, pretty tough to take care of the rest of the stuff. Right. So, you know, it really gets into and sorry for a more long answer, but, you know, you see people
Profit is not about greed. It’s about making better decisions. Share on X
Sure is.
look at their financials once a month or maybe their accountant will give them their financials and it’s always two months or three months later when their accountants give them their financials. And they do the woohoo, boohoo moment, They look at the top line and then they flip to that last page and it’s like a surprise whether they made or lost money. And that’s what I call the woohoo, boohoo moment. Did I flip the page and did I make money this month?
Wahoo boohoo!
And, you know, with all the obligations you take with all of the responsibilities that you have, a business is intended to be a wealth creation vehicle. Right. And that’s not greedy. That’s that’s because you take all that risk as an entrepreneur. You should feel some level of entitlement to make a profit, pay a fair wage.
A business is intended to be a wealth-creation vehicle. Share on X
take care of your people and then what’s left over after you get done paying the bank and the government and capital expenditure and growth and all things go along with that, you should be able to take a distribution from your company and build long-term safety and security, generational wealth for your family. So that’s not greedy, that’s appropriate. As long as you’re not taking advantage of others when you’re doing it, run a good business, you are entitled to make a healthy profit.
running the business of the business.
I love how you said that. A business is a wealth creation vehicle. I love that. And I think so many small and early entrepreneurs, they get so wrapped up in the urgent, they kind of forget. They don’t even forget it. They just don’t have time because they’re looking at the wrong things.
vehicle.
Mm-hmm.
You get lost in it.
And so, yeah, I love that and totally, totally agree. Okay, so helped a lot of owners grow and even exit their businesses. And so, beyond the bottom line…
Tell me what you think defines a truly successful entrepreneur.
So that story’s a little different depending on that entrepreneur, right? And, you know, it’s funny, we just had the previous conversation. I’ve never personally done well with the me, me, I, me type of entrepreneur, right? I’ve fired some clients along the way for the, you know, fill my pockets is golem because you have a bigger responsibility when you take
Hmm.
all of these lives under your stead as an entrepreneur. They’re called employees. Right? Now, again, nothing wrong with making a profit. And if somebody can pass through that journey, a business should have strategic growth. A business should price its goods and services fairly. You should have good solid trade relationships. You should be able to live up to your obligations. You absolutely should take care of your kids and your family and pay for college.
set aside money for retirement at the end of the journey. Because there’s only three ways you ever take money out of your business. You take it in the form of active wage, right? That’s your paycheck. You take it in the form of passive income. That’s what’s left over ever. Everybody puts their hand in your pie. And then the exit strategy, which is the value of your equity. And most small business owners now only think about number one and occasionally number two.
And when they get to the end of the game and they’re thinking whether they’re going to sell to their son or daughter, or they’re thinking about selling to an employee, or they’re preparing their business for that third party sale, rarely do business owners contemplate the impact of that final event, which is that transference of equity. And I always say to business owners, the day you start planning your exit is the day you open the doors. Because if you’re not mindful,
Hmm.
about how you run your business every day. Lo and behold, you get to the end of that journey and your business is worth far less than it should have been. Or they choose a number magically that they wanted to have in retirement and they fall well short of that when somebody finally makes them an offer. Or worse yet, if they sell to an employer or a family member,
The business isn’t making enough profit to be able to sustain the debt of that sale. So success, when I talk to business owners, is when they own their business instead of their business owning them, and they can live a full, happy life that is, I mean, that’s where the story gets different for every person. And we work on the portrait of life when we are working with business owners because rarely
Success is when you own your business instead of your business owning you. Share on X
Hmm.
Can you separate the owner from their business or their business from the owner? Most often it takes on their personality and their value system. So when we work with our clients, we spend quite a bit of time of understanding the clients why, understanding their journey, how did they get there, what was the history? And then most important, what are they really trying to accomplish? And then build from there. How do you accomplish
what you intended in the first place.
Yeah. Love that. Love that. think so many entrepreneurs, you know, we all have business lives, family lives and personal lives. And so many entrepreneurs get locked into, spent all this time on my business life and my family suffers and my personal life really suffers. and, you know, one of the things I share is this. It’s like, look, reality is personal has to be first. There has to be.
Amen.
Amen.
Why are you doing this? What do you want? Okay. And just that simple question, many people have no idea. They’re like, I never thought about what I want. I was like, okay, well, let’s do that before we do anything else. Let’s figure out what do you want? And it’s okay to want something and it’s okay to actually try and go get it. Okay. And you’re much more successful when you know what it is. Okay. You have a mission. You have a mission.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
always.
And, um, and so personal first, family second, and the mother’s almost always, there’s a little arm wrestling there and I’m a big guy, so I win. But, um, mom’s like, I always put everybody first. And I’m like, I know you do and God love you for that. But the reality is if you’re empty, you cannot fill others. And so you have to take care of you first, family second, and that business, well, it’s a big part of your life.
You know, if somebody in your family had cancer or, you know, that horrible event that happened for the two sisters, you know, the, the business is going to shrink in importance for a period of time. It’s going to continue and it’s not, it doesn’t really care because it, doesn’t have emotion. It’s a business. Yeah. Business is a business. A shark, swims and eats. That’s it. A business to me.
It’s a business. Yeah.
Everything in the business is either designed to bring money into the entity or to keep money from leaving the entity. And if it won’t fit under one of those two umbrellas, it’s probably could go away. It’s probably not serving the business because the business is, it doesn’t care. I just want to bring money in and I want to keep it from leaving because what’s left is what we call profit. And that’s why a business exists.
So Robert, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I think people are going to want to talk with you or talk with Cogent. What’s the easiest, simplest, fastest way for them to reach out to Cogent Analytics?
Love the way you said that.
Directly through our website, coachinganalytics.com. We have advisors staffing the phones. We talk to business owners each and every day. Don’t feel like it’s a big sales call. Like if you are listening to the show and you just want to talk to an advisor, you know, we have podcasts, have books, we have case studies, we have white papers. You know, we have done a really good job of
populating our website with thought leadership. And if that helps you answer some of your questions, please consume everything that we put out there. And if you want to talk to an advisor without getting the big push, we’re manning the phones every day for that. And God bless if you happen to want to go through the discovery process, we can help.
Love that. And let me just encourage you, if you’re an entrepreneur, well, one, if you’re an entrepreneur and you think you know everything and you’re the smartest person in the room, and that was me for a long time, and it was worse because in a lot of rooms, I was the smartest guy, but that may have said I needed to be in different rooms and I certainly needed to hang with different people. And let me just tell you, you know,
Me too.
Yep.
expert, someone who is expert in not Bob the plumber who’s expert in plumbing, but somebody who’s expert in how to run a plumbing business or manage services prior. doesn’t matter. Talk to an expert. The dividends are off the chart. Many, times in one conversation, you’re like, the ROI was just through the roof.
amazing.
because things that are very evident to them, they’re just in your blind spot. You’d figure it out if you live long enough, you know.
We’re
in 250 employees in 33 states working nationwide. And the thing I’m proudest of, you just said it, the ability to have subject matter experts to help small business centers. With all of these conversations, and you’re right, Don, one small direction to the right or the left sometimes makes the most profound impact on an entrepreneur.
because it gets it out of their head and it brings it to life in a more substantive way. So that’s the big boom. Thank you for saying that because sometimes people get trapped in their own four walls and they forget to reach out to others that might just be the best wall to bounce an idea off.
No doubt, no doubt. So go to cogentanalytics.com and a bunch of free resources. And then of course you can always talk with somebody. Robert, thank you so much for being a guest today. And I reserve the right to recall the witness. So in the future, I’ll call you back. We’ll bring you back.
It’s been a privilege.
Don truly put it. Thank you.
Thank you. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E143 | Mike Miligan: How This Financial Advisor Pays Only 2% Tax – Legally
Date: October 27, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-mike-miligan-financial-advisor-pays-2-percent-tax-legally/
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Content:
What if the secret to building wealth wasn’t working harder—but paying smarter?
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Mike Milligan, Certified Financial Planner and founder of 1 Oak Financial, to unpack the tax strategies and mindset shifts that helped him build a multi-million dollar business—while legally paying just 2% in total tax.
Mike shares his journey from counting cash in coffee cans for his grandmother’s cornbread sandwich hustle to becoming a bestselling author of The One-of-a-Kind Financial Plan. You’ll hear how desperation sparked innovation, and how real-life lessons shaped his mission to help entrepreneurs build wealth and reclaim time.
Whether you’re a founder, real estate agent, B2B leader, or aspiring entrepreneur, this episode delivers actionable strategies and real-world wisdom to help you thrive financially.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
 
Watch the episode here
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/The-2-Tax-Strategy-Every-Entrepreneur-Should-Know-with-Mike-Milligan-CFP.mp3

The 2% Tax Strategy Every Entrepreneur Should Know – with Mike Milligan, CFP

   
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I’ve a real expert for you today, a financial expert, Mike Milligan from 1.Oak Financial. Welcome to the show, Mike.
It’s nice to be here, Don. Thanks for the invitation.
Man, my pleasure. Thank you so much for coming. So tell us a little bit about 1.Oak Financial, what you do, who you serve, why you do it, all that stuff.
One, Oak Financial is a dynamic financial services firm, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia. But we serve all of the United States, including all the way out to Hawaii. I’m the founder of the firm. It formed five years ago as a company called Ideas by Mike, currently has 21 employees. With our partner employees, we’re over 100 in total. One of the things that’s unique about this firm is that
I’ve written a book called the one-of-a-kind financial plan. See, one oak doesn’t, it’s not about a tree or about an acorn. It’s about being one of a kind, one oak. And we genuinely believe that everyone is unique. They have their own stories. They have their own desires. They have their own life to live, but they get bottled up in what the one size fits all. Financial world wants them
to do with their retirement accounts, their investment accounts, their life insurance, their retirement income. And what they’re missing is that the biggest expense you ever have is your taxes. And so we actually do tax planning, retirement income planning, then we do investments, long-term care planning and legacy. It’s all detailed in a book I wrote called The One of a Kind Financial Plan that’s available out on Amazon. It’s Amazon bestseller.
Hmm.
And it’s great, created a lot of traction. I mean, it’s something that we live out in our company, but we help our clients live. Because if you want to live a one-of-a-kind life, you probably deserve a one-of-a-kind financial plan.
If you want to live a one-of-a-kind life, you probably deserve a one-of-a-kind financial plan. Share on X
Yeah, I love that. I love that. And if you want to live a one of a kind life, you got to have a mission and a goal of what that’s going to be. And so that makes perfect sense to me. So, Mike, tell me, most people think of financial advisors as like numbers guys.
Tell me a human story that got you into this business and I can tell that you want to serve people, that you want to help people. So tell me something on the human side, not the number side.
Well, I could go back to my first client, and it’s a story that I chronicle and a story that I learned from even now, 36 years later. My grandmother, my grandmother granny, and my… her granny, and then my pa, his name was Walter, her name was Elizabeth. My grandpa was a construction owner, so he owned a company that worked on building roads.
But when I was about 11, he just wore out. Like he was physically, couldn’t do anything, had a lot of ailments, refused to go to the doctor because he was a proud Southern man. We finally went to the doctor. They found out that it wasn’t like aches and pains from like muscles. It was cancer, full body. I was the son of a high school mother. My mom, I love her dearly. She is like one of my idols in life.
We grew up together, but Granny and Pa were instrumental in like my upbringing. And so, I got to witness firsthand what it was like for someone who’d been married 50 years to lose the love of their life, but also lose the primary financial support. And Granny knew how to do something very well. She knew how to be a wife, she knew how to be a mother, but she also knew how to cook food. And she had this recipe that people always asked her to make. It was a collard sandwich. So, two…
Hmm.
deep-fried piece of cornbread cut in half with collard greens that were just amazingly seasoned in the middle. And so what she did is she just started, you know, to cope with the grief of losing my pa, right? She started making them. And then she would take them to festivals, and she would take them to convenience stores, she would take them to lunch sites. And I get to saw her build a business out of desperation. She innovated out of desperation.
And I didn’t know what that meant. Don, I was just living with her, right? I was living life. And so she asked me to count her money. We put it in spiral down notebooks, we would put the money in Folgers coffee cans. We would also wrap the big bills up in tin foil and put them in the freezer and she would write liver across it. Because she said if I ever got if somebody ever rosemary, they’re never going to take the liver out of the freezer. Right. And so they’re not stealing liver, right. And so
I agree, they’re not stealing the liver.
So Granny, through middle school and high school, she brought me along for the ride. And I I helped with sales. I counted her money. I was, you know, I count her as like my first client because she taught me what it was like, but I met somebody else along the way. That was a branch manager in a bank who I just thought was the coolest guy in the world because he wore a suit. The only other person I knew in that life, in my life at that time who wore a suit was the preacher man, right?
But I saw this guy, and I used to think preacher men dressed very well, right? And I saw the banker wearing it. I was like, how do you become this? And that’s what I wanted to become is I wanted to become a bank branch manager. Because I loved money, because I got to play with it, count it for my granny. And I saw this guy wearing a suit, and I wanted to dress like that. So wanted to become a branch manager. So I went to college. First person in my family to go to college. And when I was there, right, I got introduced to investments, trust management, estate planning. I was like, that’s what I want to do.
Right. know, Don, Tom Brady was meant to be a quarterback. And Tiger Woods was meant to be a golfer. Peyton Manning was meant to be a quarterback. Derek Jeter was meant to be a shortstop for the New York Yankees. Mike Milligan was meant to be a financial planner. And I date that back to like seeing my grandmother, right, helping her, helping her build a business. But not only am I supposed to be a financial planner, I’m supposed to be a financial planner who’s an entrepreneur.
I love that.
own my own business, think outside of the box because that really that’s one of a kind.
Yeah. And thanks granny. You did a good thing and did it because you had to do it. But many times that’s what happens with a successful or proven entrepreneur. So let me ask you this. What’s a common big money mistake you see entrepreneurs make over and over and what’s the smarter path that you’d advise them to take?
Entrepreneurs make the biggest mistake they make is with, I think they make two huge mistakes, one with money and one with the business. The first one I think they make with money is they don’t pay their taxes. And then they don’t realize what the tax strategy can be that you have because you are a business owner. See, I can talk about this from a financial planning side because I know the tax code. mean, I’ve done it, know, taxes when you’re a business owner, entrepreneur,
Entrepreneurs make two huge mistakes: they don’t understand taxes, and they try to do everything themselves. Share on X
you get the whole dollar, right? If you’re an employee somewhere, you don’t get the whole dollar, right? As an employee of somewhere, you get something less than the total dollar because taxes are taking out Medicare, Social Security, your benefits, all that’s taken out, so you’re getting some percentage of the original. As a business owner, you get the dollar. And then you get to deduct your expenses, and then you get to pay taxes. Totally different as an entrepreneur versus an employee.
But what you don’t realize is there’s a lot of stuff in the tax code, like the Augusta rule, right? That allows you to use your personal residence for business, right? So the Augusta rule allows you to have meetings in your home as a business expense and pass money from your business onto your home tax free. And that’s an expense before you pay taxes. Another thing entrepreneurs don’t realize is you’ve got this, if you drive to multiple locations,
for your job, you can buy a car and expense it. It’s called bonus depreciation, section 179 bonus depreciation. There’s a lot of stuff that’s on TikTok and Facebook that tells you how to do it. But the thing about taxes that entrepreneurs don’t know is that taxes can come pretty low. Don, I’m gonna let you in on a secret about my life. Do you mind if I do this? I am such a proponent. I’m an American. I love being an American. I love being a patriot. I will pay my fair share of taxes.
I will pay my fair share of taxes—but I want to pay the least amount I possibly can. Share on X
Tell me.
But I want to pay the least amount I possibly can. So my wife and I actually moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Now, my corporate headquarters is in Norfolk, Virginia. Remember that part of 1.Oak Financial where across the country, all the way I have an office in Hawaii, all the way back to Norfolk. But I’m a resident of San Juan, Puerto Rico because as an entrepreneur, I can import money into the island with a couple of restrictions, You know, closer connection, have a residence.
do more in Puerto Rico than I do here, live more in Puerto Rico than I live here. But on that money, I pay 2 % tax. And when I mean tax, I mean 2 % total tax. You know, don’t, the money that’s imported, I don’t pay federal tax, I don’t pay the state tax on it, I don’t pay social security tax, I don’t pay Medicare tax. I pay 2 % federal. I am such an advocate for entrepreneurs of understanding the tax code that my wife and I will live in paradise for six months plus a day. We actually live more than that there.
But I’m such that I will sacrifice living in Puerto Rico to pay the least amount tax possible while still running a multi-million dollar business back home. And so that’s like the first mistake is taxes. And that’s something that I help people solve for, entrepreneurs solve for is the tax. And the second thing I have is I think entrepreneurs don’t pass on responsibility in their business. And I mean, you can’t pass on ultimate responsibility, right, of managing the business, but
What you can never replicate is time. And so if you’re doing 100 % of the things in your business, right, and you can’t grow, it’s because you’re doing 100 % of the things in your business. You have to find out like if there’s 14 things that make your business successful, what are the three or four things you like doing the most and then hire to do the rest. Because if you hire somebody to work full time, and they can do it 80 to 90 % as well as you can, it allows you to get that time back.
You can never replicate time. If you're doing 100% of the things in your business, you can't grow. Share on X
And like if you really want to exponentially grow as an entrepreneur, bring people in, create opportunities for people and realize if they’re doing it 80 % of the way, 80, 90 % of the way you’re going to do it, it’s going to give you back the time to grow your business.
Man, I think that is pure gold. If you can find somebody who can do it even 80 % as good as you, you should offload it. Okay. And go to, go to things that you’re magnificent at that are in your zone of genius and work there only. So.
That’s right.
Right.
That’s not what
I thought you were going to say was gold, by the way.
well, you know, you hear different things. The other thing is on the tax thing.
You know, entrepreneurs, they’re looking at their P &L, what’s their biggest expense? And truthfully, for most of us, the biggest expense we have in life is our tax load. know, and so anything you can do to lighten that. And I totally agree, we’re brothers from other mothers. I want to pay every…
dime that I owe, but I don’t want to owe any more than I have to. And so it’s just a matter of applying some knowledge and some logic. And if you don’t have the knowledge or have the logic, that’s why, and you’ve heard this a hundred times on the Proven Entrepreneur Show, talk to a professional, talk to somebody who they already know, okay, and let them help you. Many times entrepreneurs, we think we’re saving a nickel.
because we’re going to figure it out ourselves, but I assure you, Mike has forgotten more about financial services than the average entrepreneur will ever know. And so you just reach out to an expert, make it simple, get your time back. Okay. Now I’m looking for a, a case study and an anonymous case study where you helped an entrepreneur or a family completely transform. me the before and after.
that you can without identifying the client.
I I love talking about my story, but I’ve already kind of given away the ending of that. Instead of paying 37 % federal tax and 5.5 and 3 quarters in Virginia, I’m paying 2%. So I’ve given you away the end of the story on that one. So I mean, I guess I’ll talk about from an entrepreneur standpoint, I’ve got a, know, real estate agents are entrepreneurs in the grand scheme of things. They’re 1099 for the most part.
and they don’t get paid unless they close business. And most entrepreneurs it’s the same way, right? Whether you build homes or you own a retail shop, you own a restaurant, you don’t get paid until you sell something or build customers. But we’ll tell the story of a female realtor. She came to me as a…
looking to actually trade referrals. you know, having centers of influence, it makes building clients up a whole lot easier. But when we started talking, she had a little bit of whole life insurance, a Roth IRA, and she had some money sitting in the bank. What she didn’t have was a tax strategy. She had a CPA.
right? That was doing her taxes, but she wasn’t an S corp. She was just paying. She wasn’t drawing a salary for herself, right? She did not have someone on her team doing the $10 or $12 an hour work. She was doing it all from soup to nuts. And when we sat down and realized, and she told me she was 32 at the time, she said, I want to be a millionaire by the time I’m 40 years old. Okay, we’re going to fast forward a little bit.
She’s been a client now for five years. And she’s 37 years old. Again, when I met her, she had about 40,000 to her name. She was selling about eight or $9 million in real estate per year. Fast forward to this year. She now has a closing transaction coordinator with her, a social media person doing her social media, closing $13 million a year with $700,000 of liquid savings, right? That is invested not in a savings account.
she is going to hit the goal of a million dollars. now she, and where we were able to find that extra money done is her tax rate went down from 24 % to 7%. Right? And so we found money to save by first finding it in taxes and then getting the money invested. And a lot of times, you know, like people that are small business owners, most of their wealth is built up in their business.
Most of your wealth is built in your business—but you still need to save in case you can’t solve every problem. Share on X
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, rightfully so because they want to invest in themselves. They see a problem that they think only they can solve. So, yes, you should invest in yourself. But what you should also do is save in case you can’t solve the problems or you don’t have enough people to solve them for. That’s what I was able to prove with this one. Do want to hear the twist in that story, Don? She’s now my wife.
Yeah, I do.
So when we met over five years ago, not only was she trying to find someone to get to that, you she was trying to find a business partner to help get more business, but she had come off of a long relationship and so did I, right? And she still to this day still asks me for the flyer so we can refer people business to each other. And I’m like, I’ve never given it to you, but I’ve given her a ring.
and we are building a one-of-a-kind life together.
I love that. What a great story. Okay. We’re, into the fourth turn. I can see the, I can see the checkered flag coming. Okay. If you had a minute or two to give entrepreneurs that golden financial tip that could help build and protect wealth for the next decade. And I think I know what it is, but what would that be?
Most people at this point would say build your team out. Find somebody who can really help you, who’s not just creating historical documents, like not just doing your taxes or not just putting you in like a one size fits all. And yeah, that’s true, right? Find somebody who is an entrepreneur like you. I so often, like in my business, Don, find entrepreneurs who put their investment accounts or their…
their tax work with somebody who’s an employee of a bigger firm. Right? So they’ll go down to their local bank and use the financial advisor there. And those people are not bad. Those financial people are not bad. But really, what I tell you is, if you’re an entrepreneur, work with an entrepreneur. Right? Work with somebody who pays their own phone bill, who owns their own building, who pays, who has employees of their own. Right?
you
because entrepreneurs working with entrepreneurs will get each other. Entrepreneurs who work with employees do not get the encouragement or the real advice to actually grow business. What they get is what managers pass down from organizations. So I would tell you, if you’re an entrepreneur and you are working with a financial advisor or a CPA who does not own their own business,
truth.
Right, nobody, they may own their book of business, but if they work for a national firm where they get a W-2, they do not understand you, the entrepreneur. And I mean, if you want to work, if you want to work with one of the best entrepreneurs out there in this space, I’d say reach out to me.
Yeah, great, great advice. There’s a real brother and sisterhood for those of us who sign the front of the check, as opposed to those who sign the back of the check. And there’s just lessons we’ve learned and things we know that would terrorize and exhilarate people who have not learned those lessons. Mike, my
I’ve never heard it put that way, but.
Correct.
Real pleasure to have you on the show today. If somebody wanted to reach out to you or your company, share the best ways to do that, please.
The best, the easiest way to do it is just go to MikeMilligan.com. We don’t over complicate this. If you want to go and learn more about how I educate, coach and plan with people, MikeMilligan.com, there’ll be a link to 1Oak Financial there. And if you want to go to the company website directly, it’s the 1oakfinancial.com, one of a kind financial.com.
Love that. Mike Milligan, thank you so much for being my guest on today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneurship.
Thanks folks, we’ll see you next time. Bye now.

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Title: E142 | From Data to Dollars: Jesse Anderson’s AI Strategy for B2B Growth
Date: October 14, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-data-to-dollars-jesse-anderson-ai-strategy-for-b2b-growth/
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Content:
In this episode of “The Proven Entrepreneur Show,” host Don Williams welcomes Jesse Anderson, a data and AI expert from Portugal, who shares insights into his ventures, Big Data Institute and Idealead. Jesse discusses how Big Data Institute leverages his extensive background in data and AI to provide consulting services that help companies optimize their data architecture and team structures. He also introduces Idealead, a company that uses AI to identify the most promising leads for businesses, allowing them to focus on high-potential prospects rather than casting a wide net.
Jesse delves into common pitfalls businesses face when integrating AI, emphasizing the importance of using AI strategically rather than as a mere trend. He highlights the need for creating systems rather than relying on one-off solutions, and the value of data-driven decision-making. The conversation also touches on the fear of AI replacing jobs, with Jesse advocating for AI as a tool to augment human capabilities. The episode concludes with practical advice for entrepreneurs on how to discern genuine AI expertise in a crowded market and the importance of investing in professional guidance to maximize AI’s potential.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/How-Smart-Founders-Use-AI-to-Win-More-Customers-Without-Wasting-Time-Jesee-Anderson_proven_entrepreneur.mp3
 
AI That Sells: Jesse Anderson on Finding Your Ideal B2B Customer
   
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Got a great guest, got a genius all the way from Portugal, Jesse Anderson. Welcome to the show.
Welcome. thank you for having me. really do appreciate it. And I’m all the way from Portugal, as you mentioned, but by way of Billings Montana.
Yeah, I was getting ready to say, I think when I first met you, were in Reno, Nevada, and then somehow you ended up in Portugal living across the boulevard from the Atlantic Ocean. And so I’m jealous every time we talk. So love that. So Jesse, you are the founder and CEO of Big Data Institute and also Idealead. Would you tell us about both of those somewhat?
Sure. So I’ll tell you about Big Data Institute first. Big Data Institute is utilizing my background in data and AI. I have a pretty significant background in that. And to do that for consulting. So come in. We work with companies on the architecture of what they should be doing for data and AI, as well as the team layout. So that’s an important part. I’ve written three books on that. Just how do you organize things right? I speak at conferences all over the world on that.
So that’s one part, that’s an important part. And so I had this problem in my consulting business that I realized, hmm, I could use AI for that. And I actually know the tools to use for that. So I created this other company called Idealleed. And Idealleed is using AI to find the exact customers you want based on various characteristics and data and saying, I want them to look like that person and we can do that for you.
Awesome. So, so let me drill down a little bit on ideal lead. So if I understand right, basically what you’re saying is instead of a B2B company, they’re biz dev people going out and downloading a thousand records from zoom info or seamless or Apollo that they can engage with you and rather than give them the wide net of, people have the right title.
and are with the right size companies and the right size industries, you’re able to actually drill down and provide them the most, the 25 or 50 people most likely to actually buy the product, service or experience they sell. Is that right?
That’s right. So what often people are trying to do is they’re trying to go wide. They’re, they’re going after these performance numbers, these, these metrics that are just impossible. So if you have a thousand people, you don’t have anything that’s actionable. have a thousand people on a list that doesn’t do you much good. So what I realized, and especially in my business, I could do a Google search. could do a zoom info search and say, who are all these technology managers? But.
If you have a thousand leads, you don’t have anything actionable Share on X
all those technology managers aren’t the ones I want to be talking to. They need to be a data manager. And so then you could say, you just search on data manager. Well, not every one of those data managers are ones I want to talk to. So if you’re in a B2B niche, which obviously my company is, my consulting company, you can’t just go and do that search because then you spam a bunch of people who are completely uninterested in your project and your product.
And you waste a bunch of their time and yours. But if you get really niche and you’re really niching your business and you’re really focused on just those core customers you want, we can tell you which are those core customers. So more importantly, your time, your salespeople’s time isn’t spent on zoom info and that sort of thing. Their time is better spent and actually talking to customers because it turns out salespeople aren’t great data analysts and they aren’t great at doing searches. Wow. Surprising.
Salespeople aren’t great data analysts—and they shouldn’t have to be Share on X
I can see you smiling, but I that’s very surprising. Algorithmically, we can do this significantly better. So everybody does what they’re best at. In fact, salespeople don’t really like to do that searching. What they really prefer to be doing is talking on the phones, talking things that make them money directly rather than let’s go through some lists.
So if you’re in sales, remember this name, Idealleed. And if you are in ownership and you want to make your salespeople happy and save them a bunch of time and put them on the hottest prospects, remember Idealleed. So Jesse, thanks for sharing that. Okay, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions about your journey and digging into your expertise on AI. So what’s the number one mistake?
you see founders make when they quote unquote add AI? And what’s a simple fix that helps them actually drive outcomes?
So one of the most common ones is that people just say, I’m going to add AI for the sake of AI. Everybody’s doing AI. I have to do it in my business somehow, some way. And what they’ll do is they’ll either hamstring it in, they’ll try to shoehorn it in there and say, we’ll just put it this thing. And then we’ll say, boom, we’ve got AI problem solved. When actually,
that there may be better applications. There may be significantly better applications. So what they’ll try to do is there’s this unfortunate facade that the AI companies have given. saying, if you just type in some queries, some prompts, you’ll get the answers. But the unfortunate part is the models, chatGPT, Gemini, those sorts of things, don’t know the follow-on questions to ask you. They don’t know enough about your business to say, don’t do this, do this.
And if you have the right person, the right guide, they can ask those questions. They can talk to your people to say, actually you’re thinking this, but actually you’re better served this way. I’ll give you a bonus one too. And that is the difference between one offs and systems. And this is really key. I talked about this in a webinar recently, and this is when you are creating or doing something with AI, if you do something just every so often.
You just have this task that’s not repetitive. Just do it every so often. That’s called a one-off. Those are completely fine. Just bring up your prompt, put that in. But if you’re doing something consistently and there’s a consistency to that, you should be creating a system out of that. The reason for that is if you have 100 people and you’re saying, hey, everybody go use AI, they’ll do 100 things different.
And that’s not what you want. You want some efficiency. You want people doing the same things. You want process for that. And so when you want to create a process around something with AI, there’s various ways of doing that that are pretty cost efficient. But overall, you will get significantly more efficiency by creating a system and a process that way.
Love that. And so I can remember, you know, for years and years and years, McDonald’s hamburgers here in the U S and really worldwide was like the number one, you know, fast food. They were the king of the fast food industry. I think Chick-fil-A probably has knocked them off, but McDonald’s saw themselves not really in the hamburger business. They saw them in the systems business. And so they were able to scale unbelievably because they,
had maybe the best systems on the planet in and out of that industry. So great counsel there. OK, tell me about a time in your past where a company had tons of data, but they really weren’t getting any value. And how did you help turn that big pile of data into real value?
That’s a lot of experience in a lot of different ways. So what I didn’t mention in my background is that I’ve consulted everything from startups to Fortune 100 companies, Fortune 50. And so the differences between the Fortune 50 and the startups, Oddly enough, they both have similar problems of getting their data and making their data usable. It’s an unfortunate, not a fact.
due to size, it’s just due to how difficult it is to do data correctly, do AI correctly. But I will tell some medium businesses and some small business stories. So one common reason for difficulty with AI is organizationally. In fact, if you look at who within your organization is going to cause you the most difficulty, it’s actually your people. It’s getting your people to adopt.
And AI doesn’t, it isn’t like any other technology. Many times you’ll think of the last time you put some technology and said, Hey, everybody who used this and nobody uses it. AI is no different. It’s you have to get into this process. You have to get in this thinking. So you see a few people on LinkedIn, sometimes that the CEO saying we’re an AI first company. And if you don’t use AI, we’re going to lay you off. For example, I think that’s a bit extreme. What I would encourage people to do.
is to lead by example, lead by showing them what to do. But at its core, what these people are worried about is AI is going to replace me. That if you start using AI, I’m going to lose my job. So I think it’s key for companies, founders, CEOs to explain this as saying, no, we’re so far backlogged. Even if we get 20%, 50 % more productive in this.
We’re still behind our backlog. this is really, that’s one part of that. So organizationally, that’s one of your difficulties with AI with data projects. Just trying to get your organizational transformation as one part. Paying open AI 20 bucks a month, that’s the easy part. Getting it to be done. this is something I talk about at our industry conferences quite a bit is.
Fear of AI replacing jobs is real—but the truth is, we’re still behind on our backlog Share on X
Just putting a technology in place. That’s one part. So then you have the second problem of let’s say you get the technology in place. People are saying yes. And now you have this whole other problem of the data. Is your data accessible? Is your data usable? Does Dawn have a bunch of different data than Jesse? Because now if we both put the same information into our respective models, chatgpt,
we’ll get different answers because Don has one piece of information, Jesse has another. So there’s this whole other issue of do we have the right data? Are we sharing data correctly? Do we have a difference in our data between finance and let’s say, biz dev, for example? These are all very common issues. So it comes back to that systems. If we have the right systems in place that we’re pulling from the same data, then we’re able to make decisions.
And this is really what’s key is you will have perhaps different data, different systems, different sources of data. That’s really what you have to change.
Okay. Love that. So you mentioned, you know, that some people are fearful that, AI is going to take my job. And, and just yesterday, think Paycom, which is a huge credit card processor here in the U S they just limited 500 jobs supposedly because of AI efficiency, but isn’t, isn’t the best way to
avoid any problem there, just to adopt and become somebody who has some skills with AI, because most people don’t. And so it’s kind of how you look at it, right? It’s, it’s, am I going to be fearful of it or, or am I going to embrace and learn and, and improve my value, the value that I bring to a company? Isn’t that the right way to go about it?
I think that’s the right way. What I try to tell people is AI is both dumber and smarter than you think. It’s more powerful and less powerful than you think. And the reason I say that is because outside of when I say industry, basically data and AI people, people who really keep up with this, we kind of know what’s happening, but we’re also pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. And then you have the non-industry people, people like yourself, quite honestly, who are…
AI is both dumber and smarter than you think Share on X
You’re kind of six months to a year behind us. And then to your point of, then you have the people who aren’t doing anything. They’re just way far off. They’re off in no man’s land. So what you’d ideallead want to be is you ideallead want to be that person who’s experimenting, who’s actually trying and seeing what is possible. Because, and for some of the stuff we don’t honestly know. We don’t know whether this will work.
whether that will work. There’s one way to find out, but we also have, you have a background in it, you can say, hey, that probably won’t work. You have low odds of that happening. But for the beginners, what I’d say is try it out. One thing as you try to begin that’s worth pointing out is that models, these generative models are always programmed to give you a response. So the issue there is,
It won’t tell you, don’t know, oftentimes. So if you’re pushing some sort of boundary, ask a question you know the answer to, because then you can say, they got that question right. Let me move on to the next question, the next question. There’s a few things that due to the really good marketing of the industry, you don’t know yet, but within the industry, we say, here’s this problem, here’s that problem, here’s that problem. Hallucination, for example.
Hallucination is when a model says, here’s the answer, but that’s actually not the answer. It just kind of pulled something out of the ether. If you know how they work, then you can understand. Pulling out of the ether just means there is statistically something that happened, how they work behind the scenes. And that’s the answer you got, but that was not the answer.
I love that. And I think everybody who has used any of the large language models has seen a hallucination where it’s like, well, I don’t think that’s right. so it certainly pays. I think humans first, AI second. And the best use is kind of a marriage between the two. All human and all AI is probably not the way to go.
Yeah, in fact, that’s something I would point out to do to as any CEOs watching this is AI more correctly, Gen. AI, which is usually what business people say when they business people say AI right now, they mean Gen. AI, generative AI. In industry, don’t we don’t we distinguish that differently. But anyway, as of right now, generative AI isn’t really able to replace a human.
So what I would really advise people to do is to think about how do we augment our existing humans? Is there some task that’s there that is really good for AI that humans hate? Basically what I did with Idealead. AI is really good at this, human hates this, here you go, here’s a list. And so find that equivalent within your business and you’ll get much more adoption of that that way. Augment your humans basically.
Yeah, I love that.
Love that. And I mean, the audience knows, always recommend, if it’s, if it’s beyond your realm of knowledge, it’s outside your skillset, get a pro. Okay. Hire a professional, hire a Jesse. Okay. That can, um, geometrically accelerate your use of AI or generative AI or the other kinds of AI.
It just makes so much sense. A lot of times entrepreneurs, we, we think, well, we’re going to bootstrap it and you know, we’ll figure it all out. But, you know, time is money. And so many times it just makes sense to get a pro, get somebody who can take you right to the answer. Okay. So what’s a wow level customer experience that data makes possible something that like moves the needle almost immediately.
that would help most companies.
Let’s see. Well, what I like to tell people about is we’ve become used to recommendations, but recommendation engines are something relatively recent. If you think back, let’s say, 20 years ago, I talked to people who were very early on in Netflix and Spotify, for example. Spotify was one of the first music suggestion engines, and that was really novel. And I would say…
Recommendation engines aren’t just tech—they’re decision accelerators Share on X
Here, as we fast forward, we actually have come to expect that. We expect things behind the scenes to be smart enough to say, Jesse, you’re interested in this or that product. Here’s another product. So what we’re trying to do is you’re trying to make it so that somebody can form a decision faster and say, when we form a decision, make a decision. They were trying to say, am I getting a good price? Is this the right product? And if you really look at how Amazon works, that’s what they’re doing.
Everything that Amazon is trying to do is not to help themselves, the seller. They’re trying to help you come to a decision faster so that you can say, I’m getting a good price and this is the product I want. That’s they give you all the other products there at the bottom. They want you to be able to click through and say, no, that one’s wrong. I want this one. So that’s one thing. Hey, recommendation engines are a great way.
May not be usable for everybody, but if you’re in some sort of e-commerce, that’s what you need. Another great way of data, using data, especially internally in a business, is to make your own decisions. Make a good decision, make a database decision. We joke about it in the industry that the only times that people are brought in, your data scientists or your analysts are brought in, is to the CEO already has a decision.
They just want some support for that decision from the data. it’s very hard to, what’s called speaking truth to power, it’s saying, no, the data doesn’t really support that. And you can make a decision however you want, but the data doesn’t support that. so that’s a key insight for people. Hey, data may not support your decision. You can make a gut hunch.
And entrepreneurs are very good at those gut things. But as you grow in the business and you get more and more data, then you can take those and you can start to say, do people actually want pink instead of purple? You can make data augment the decisions.
Love that speaking truth to power. I love that. And I always think that’s a sound counsel for agencies of any kind. know, sometimes an agency avoids speaking truth because the power might let them go, but it’ll come back and bite you anyway. I mean, you might as well just tell them, tell them what the truth is and let it, let it go. Okay. So today, you know, you cannot,
you cannot walk down the street and not meet 10 people who are AI experts. There’s an awful lot of AI experts in the world. Can you give us a quick BS detector, something that would help an entrepreneur kind of filter through, these are the real players and these are the pretenders.
I would, and I would tell them to take a first step and try to take a first pass and say just how difficult is the problem. So if this is just a, I need to do some light and fluffy sort of thing training for my team, maybe that person’s just flying for that. But that system creation, then we need a person with some chops. And so to your question, how do you validate that?
You get a trusted advisor to help you because more than quite frankly, most people can’t. The issue that’s become prevalent, as you rightly point out, is AI equals prompt or prompt engineering. So you just write some prompts. Well, that isn’t really what you need. You may need something much bigger. You may be better off with this other thing. So the issue there is AI, especially these people,
don’t know where their lane is, basically, as it were. So they don’t know what they don’t know. There’s a lot of unknown unknowns, to use other metaphors. And so you don’t want a person with a lot of unknown unknowns to guide you. So how do you find that person? Look at their resume. If they’re on their LinkedIn profile, they are an AI influencer, and they just became an AI influencer.
If someone just became an AI influencer on LinkedIn, they probably don’t know much Share on X
We’re likely they don’t know anything about it. They know a little bit about this. It’s always worth also paying. They will have different pay scales, quite honestly. They are there to hear, me point you in. How do you use ChatGPT when if you’re talking to other people, they’re talking about other models or other different
types of modeling, other different types of AI, because each one is different, each one is unique. I experienced this just in the industry for Idealleed. There’s a lot of people who have companies and they just know how to do gen AI. And so if you get one millimeter outside of that gen AI space, they know nothing. So it’s a steep drop off to nothing. And this is what you face is…
They don’t know the right things. They don’t know how to use it correctly. You will regret those times.
Yeah, love that. Love that. And I love the pay scale, you know, if sometimes the most, what appears to be the most expensive solution is actually the least expensive solution because it gets you to the finish line the fastest. Okay. And it gets you to a better outcome. And so keep that mind. Okay. Jesse, thrilled to have you on the show today. If somebody wanted to reach out either about how to tackle big data, okay. And make something happen or
The most expensive solution is often the cheapest—because it gets you to the finish line faster Share on X
ideal lead, how to get to the most likely leads to buy their product, service or experience. How would they reach out to you or your company?
You can go to the websites bigdatainstitute.io or to idealead.ai. Those are two ones. Probably the easiest way is to email me jesse, J-E-S-S-E, at bigdatainstitute.io. And I’d be happy to have a conversation about how we can help you and hopefully avoid some of these pitfalls that are well known.
that. okay. Reach out to Jesse at jesse at biginstitute.io or you can go to big, big institute. ⁓ big data Institute. I’m so sorry. Big data Institute.io. It’s a new mouth. I’m just trying it out and, or ideallead.ai. If you want a real expert, when you look in the dictionary under AI expert, you see Jesse’s picture. Jesse, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m grateful.
Big Data Institute.
Now, Big Data Institute.
Thank you for having me, Don. I really appreciate it.
That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E141 | From $67k Loan to $14m Exit: John Gleason’s Untold Entrepreneur Journey
Date: October 7, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/67k-loan-to-14m-exit-john-gleason-untold-entrepreneur-journey/
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Content:
When John Gleason launched his first company outside Boston, he mortgaged his home and poured everything he had into his dream. For seven long years, banks turned him away, payroll was a struggle, and survival was a daily challenge. But John didn’t quit. Eventually, HSBC gave him a shot — and that $1.7 million credit line became the liftoff that changed everything.
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams dives deep into John’s journey — from sleepless nights and financial hardship to building a company that hit $14 million in sales and $2.5 million in EBITDA before selling to private equity.
What set John apart? A relentless focus on planning. He literally kept his business plan in a 3-ring binder on his desk every single day — a living guide that shaped decisions, inspired accountability, and made his eventual sale happen in just five days.
Today, John leads Supporting Strategies, helping entrepreneurs professionalize their finances and avoid common money mistakes. His story is a masterclass in persistence, leadership, and the power of written vision — a reminder that success often hides behind years of quiet, consistent work.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/from-67k-loan-to-14m-exit-john-gleasons-entrepreneur-journey-1.mp3
$67k Loan to $14m Exit: John Gleason’s Untold Entrepreneur Journey
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. The Proven Entrepreneur Show is the show designed to help you as a non-entrepreneur take your first step into entrepreneurship, where if you are an entrepreneur to take your next step to be bigger, better as you go. Today’s guest got a real treat for you today. have John Gleason with Supporting Strategies. Welcome to the show, John.
Good morning, Don. Thank you very much for having me.
My pleasure. Now, and I’ve got a question I’m not going to ask you for about 15 minutes, but I can’t wait to ask this question because out of 150 or 200 episodes and thousands of entrepreneurs, I know one thing about you that I don’t know about, that I don’t know any other entrepreneur ever did. And when you shared it with me, the first time I was like, genius. so stick around, listen to the whole episode. You’re going to want to catch that folks.
Okay. So supporting strategies, is a trusted resource for entrepreneurs, but take us back. What was your hardest near failure moment in Boston where you thought the business might not make it. And then how did you turn that around?
think my hardest near failure moment was about my third attempt to bank the company, to get a credit line for the company. We were growing fast. We were bootstrapped. I had borrowed $67,000 on a ranch house that I own small home just outside of Boston. And that’s how we started the company. So probably five years in, Dawn, I was going to bank after bank and I had a business partner who was saying to me, don’t bother. We’re not bankable. It’s not going to work.
And I believe it was a Bay Bank. I was with the third or fourth time. And it’s, you know, it’s a process, as you know, it was much more laborious at that point in time. is over 25 years ago. And they finally took their time, probably two months and came back to us and said, no, sorry, you know, went through credit. We can’t do it.
And we had a significant payroll scrambling to make payrolls, scrambling to pay vendors, meeting with vendors in person, paying them what they could to keep going and going without paychecks for months at a time, little children at home. So it got pretty dire. And then we finally were able to finance with HSBC Bank.
Hong Kong Savings Bank, which is a very big bank worldwide. And I was very fortunate, I’m still grateful to HSBC to this day. They did a 1.785, strange number, but that was their number, $1.785 million credit line revolver was included with that. And I went out and bought some additional equipment. That was really the liftoff point for us to get to the point where we were able to build a company large enough to…
accomplished $2.5 million in EBITDA on $14 million in sales and eventually sold the company to a large private equity group called Colbert.
So, tell me this, from the time that you started trying to secure financing to the time HSBC came through, that time when you’re cajoling, begging, borrowing, pleading with vendors, when you’re having tough conversations in your house because you’re not bringing paychecks in on a regular basis, how long was that timeframe?
was seven years. It was seven years. I can, the reason I know is I have one of those acrylic awards from the bank where they granted us the credit line and we went from like zero to 60. So I was able to get equipment credit because I could lease equipment and so forth, but I wasn’t able to get a hold of cash. So it was difficult. It was a difficult undertaking and we spent a lot of time pouring over cashflow forecasts.
and cajoling different clients, asking them to put us in front of larger vendors that they had been doing business with for many, many years just because we were this quote, unquote, a startup, even though we were in now at that point, we’re probably eight years into it, nine years into it. But I remember vividly with seven years.
Yeah. Brutal, brutal. The big lesson there folks is don’t quit. Keep going, keep going. There’s a lot of 20 year overnight success stories where they were on the downside most of the time, but when they got to the upside, the upside was so far up, it made up for a lot of that downtime. Okay. Supporting strategy. You’ve helped hundreds of Boston businesses with financial operations.
Don’t quit. Keep going. There are a lot of 20-year overnight success stories. Share on X
What’s the most common, dumbest money mistake you see entrepreneurs make and how can they fix that?
Well, the most common thing I see with small entrepreneurs, small companies, and our largest, our most recent three clients are California, Texas, and Texas. But the smaller, and they’re larger companies, but the smallest entrepreneurs, one thing that I see them do is oftentimes they’re operators, professional operators, they’re great at whatever they do. They’re roofers, they’re landscapers, they’re chiropractors, they’re running preschools, and they have a tendency to…
to go to the bank and check their bank balance online.
And that’s a terrific mistake because you’ve got checks floating, you’ve got payroll, you’ve got 401k match, you’ve got, you really need to professionalize your books. So that’s a mistake that I see with believe it or not even larger, five, six, seven million dollar companies sometimes they live on the online balance or by literally phoning the bank to try to get their balance. But that’s not really the cash they have, right? Done.
So that’s what the small companies with the larger companies, what we see is a lack of planning, know, forecasting for the future and checking seasonality, like not just looking at trailing 12 months, which we call TTM, but comparing, you know, first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, 2026 to previous years. Take a look at that quarter. Look at your percentage of what I like to look at as percentage of expenses against gross revenue.
and see if your payroll is trending up. Is your insurance trending up, whatever it might be, your rent, what have you. And then move the needle on the larger expenses. Don’t so much focus on the tiny, tiny expenses because you’re not gonna see an overall improvement in the health of the company. So I’m talking about from the financial side. So those are the two things that I see. Real small companies, they just don’t have the data. They’re not.
They’re not getting the reports that they need. They don’t understand the KPIs and so forth. larger companies, it’s amazing. Many of them don’t do much forecasting and they’re really living month to month, week to week.
Yeah. Amazing. So, so you talked about this to me, Boston has like this great historical DNA, this great entrepreneurial DNA that’s kind of unique to Boston. and so how do you think, and does that have any effect on, you know, how you’re able to, to expand and have customers all across the country?
Well, it’s interesting that you say that, I’m in an 11 story office building just outside of Boston. And I met with a real estate syndicator this morning, commercial real estate syndicator, who’s from Boston and he doesn’t do any business in New England. And so what we were talking about this morning, eight o’clock in the morning was how small the country is, quote unquote.
So he’s got some deals going on in North Dakota, South Dakota. He’s getting out of a deal in Savannah. He’s getting out of a deal in Norfolk, Virginia. We see young guys, early 40s. dad’s a CPA. Good friend of mine. So I think, yes, think Boston is kind of known as a place where can go to get things done. And, um,
There are a lot of folks who are highly educated in the area that remained here after they’ve gone to college here and that and so forth and that we’ve got a great history. But I’ll tell you, it’s kind of funny that you bring that up is one of my newest clients, I get a call from the CEO and the company was based in Cerritos, California. And I said, geez, what brings you here? You know, the first thing you want to ask always, you how did you find out about me? And he said, well, I’m from Weymouth, Mass, which is a suburb of Boston. But I said, well, this is a Miami number. goes, well, I live in Miami.
And my company is a $60 million company in California. We operate in California, Arizona. And I know you see this done California, Arizona, Texas, to some extent, Florida, but I’m really comfortable dealing with people from the area. And I said, okay. And then his COO was from Massachusetts as well, but that’s not always the case. know, another new client of ours is down in Austin, a medical device company.
And I was talking to him, kidding around, we’re talking about how small the world is now. And I said, you are not from Texas, sir. And he laughed and he said, I’m from Pittsburgh. I said, you’re from the Monongahela River area, right? And he said, it’s funny that you mentioned that. We were called the Monongahela River rats. So the reason I’m bringing this up is not to go on and on, but just to mention that I cannot believe how much in the past 20 years, how much.
the world has shrunk, quote unquote shrunk. We’re actually dealing with clients in Western Europe now. We’re business for their American affiliated companies. So we’re doing GAP and so on. So yeah, it’s fun. We talk about sports and whatnot, but actually we’re about trying to help people. That’s what we really like to do. my personal opinion is that most people are very good people.
And if I can help them in any way to do better to advance their cause and to help them build their business, then I’m all about it. I don’t care where they’re from and who they are. But we do identify, we all identify, right? I know you identify with a certain football team, the Sooners, and that’s fun and so forth. But I know you, Don, you’re like me, I’ll work with anybody from anywhere. And I always give people the benefit of the doubt and I love working with people from all over.
Yeah, no doubt. And I’ve seen that in, you know, over the years of my career, how small the world has gotten. And so today I literally have clients on every continent, but Antarctica. And if I could find somebody on Antarctica, I will cut you a heck of a deal because I want to be able to say I have clients everywhere. And ⁓ I don’t know what service I can provide to scientists in Antarctica, but I’ll think of something.
That’s amazing.
I think that’s awesome.
You know, I’ll think of something. ⁓
think that’s fantastic.
I’m only on two continents right now, but I admire what you’re doing and I would like to head in that direction myself.
Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. You know, because companies in other continents, everybody wants to do business in the U S okay. Tariff, no tariff doesn’t really make any difference. If you’re in another country, you would like to be doing business in the U S because it’s still is the largest economy in the world. And so, you know, any way you look at it, we’re not the biggest population, but we are the biggest economy for sure. So, okay. Here, next question.
absolutely.
Entrepreneurs just starting out, maybe small medium business. Okay. What’s one back office system or process that’s almost universal. You could recommend to almost anybody that would save them years of pain and millions of dollars.
absolutely. My favorite thing, I’m writing a book about it right now. Hopefully we’re going to talk about it just a little bit. And that is to create a business plan. And, the reason is, that once you create a business plan, even if it’s a one page business plan, even if you’re just starting a landscaping and snow removal business or ice removal, or you’re doing a parking lot striping or what have you, you yourself, the entrepreneur, you’re going to bring that into your subconscious.
that you’ve developed that in the back of your mind, even when you’re sleeping at night, you’re taking a nap or what have you, you know you have this business plan, so you have a mission, you’re heading towards completion of this mission. I’m not saying that that business plan is not gonna change, it’s gonna change, it’s gonna change often, especially the first years that you’re in business, so make changes to it, but you’ve always got that mantra, right, that business plan, and you can…
learn from your mistakes, can improve upon it. But if you don’t have a business plan, you can’t guide yourself towards any goal. You have to have a business plan. And I think even myself as a today and supporting strategies of my franchisee.
If you don’t have a business plan, you can’t guide yourself toward any goal. Share on X
We’re all locally owned and operated as a national company. We have to have a business plan and we live and die by it. This is the way we’re going to work. It doesn’t have to be rigid. The business plan can change, but that’s the very biggest thing in my opinion that any entrepreneur starting out should adapt and adopt. Make sure that you have one. It does not have to be a 100 page business plan. It can be very brief. You can expand upon it.
I love that and I am a firm believer, no mission, no accomplishment. You’ll get an awful lot of nothing with the absence of a mission. Now, the first time I met you, you talked about your commercial printing company, the one that you took you seven years to get bankable and that you eventually sold. And you told me that you sold that company from the time that you thought about selling the company, you actually had a deal in literally
days. Is that right?
Yes sir. Yeah, it’s correct. So we founded the company with the idea that we’re going to sell the company eventually.
So any company that you’ve found, you’re either going to leave, you know, the old saw is, you you’re going to leave on the stretcher or you can pass away at your desk, God forbid, or perhaps that’s what you want to do, or perhaps you’re going to sell the company, or perhaps you’re going to pass it on to your legacy, to your children and so forth. But our particular goal at that point in time was we wanted to sell the company. So believe it or not, the business plan expanded that we had, and it probably was an 80-page business plan at one point in time.
Certain parts of the business were the responsibility of other members of the business that work there because another thing that you want to do is an entrepreneur of course is you want to Not only give credit where credit is due, but you want to give people responsibility and you want to let them perform and if you are You know micromanager and you’re over controlling and so forth. You won’t let the business go you’re choking the business You’re actually the logjam that’s preventing the business from growing
So the most important thing you can do besides the business plan is hire the right people and be quick to fire, but slow to hire sometimes. And it takes a long time to really understand what that is for people like myself, but some people pick it up right away. You know, the people that are brighter than I and so forth, but it did take me a while. The other thing is even though you might empathize,
with someone and they might have many issues and so forth, you have to recognize what their limitations are. Even though they’re smarter than you, they can do certain things a lot better than you within the business. Realize what their limitations are because they can be limiting the business as well. So those are some of my opinions on what you can do best.
I love that. So
I can recall that when you told me you had a deal literally within, I don’t remember, three or four or five days, really short timeframe, I was like, now how in the heck? And what you told me going back to this business plan and this mission is you said, you know, we had a printed copy of our business plan literally sitting on my desk every day. I own the company. And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s pure genius.
Yes, sir.
Can’t imagine, you know, anybody else has ever told me something like that. And so…
Really? Well,
that was our differentiator. And yes, we did have a deal within five days. So when we decided that we were actually going to put the company on the market, and we did it without a broker or intermediary, which was not wise in retrospect. But at the time we had, what was going on at the time was some large entities were going around, private equity groups and also public companies. It was a public company based in Dallas actually.
that I met with and, um, there were some family offices that were consolidating the commercial printing business because the commercial printing business was undergoing a lot of change at the time. So we went out, I had a business partner who was sales. I was operations and I was the CFO, uh, the accountant and so forth. We went out to Chicago to a national print show that was, believe it or not, a week long and stayed in the hotel for a week. And, uh, the buyers were right there. All the folks that we were hearing speeches from and talks and so forth. And, um, we.
Basically, know, over cocktails and dinner that night, we were getting offers from day one, from day two, from day three, you know, and by day five, we had a verbal agreement and, you know, we were part of a national entity, I think five months later. We sold the and then I ended up working for that company for about three years. It was fun. It was a whirlwind. It was very quick. But we had a good idea of what we wanted for the business, what we thought the business was worth. was part of our business plan to know where we were.
So I highly recommend it. Highly recommend it. We didn’t know at the time that other companies weren’t doing the same thing until we were acquired and they said, geez, we hadn’t seen this. We hadn’t seen this before. You actually know what your margins are, your ratios, your key performance indicators. And we were following…
author of a book called Open Book Management at the time and the sample business that was in Open Book Management was a chocolate chip cookie manufacturing company believe it not. And we were using a lot of the same premises that were illustrated in that book and forgive me right now I can’t recall the author and they were very good. know Open Book Management just meant that we made people responsible for their parts of the business. If they were running the bindery they were responsible for that. they did HR management, responsible for HR and then we shared with them their performance.
And the KPIs, keep performance indicators that kind of, that’s how we knew what their performance was. And if they wanted to edit the KPIs, we allowed them to edit the KPIs and show us how they would do better and so forth. so we had, we had trucking at the time, we had sales, we had estimating, we had staff accounts, had six staff accounts. So we had about 130 employees at the time in the sales business. So we had a number of different areas where people could demonstrate their expertise.
So the key for us was make sure that people know how they’re doing. Forget about annual reviews. Talk to people quarterly. That was my philosophy. Talk to people all the time. And if they wanted to, my office door was open, if they wanted to come in and make an appointment and talk to me in regards to…
Yeah.
How I was performing, that was fine too. We were open to that. And the other thing we did, lastly, I’ll just end with is we believed in a walk around management. So we had a 130,000 square foot plant, but actually the top floor of the plant was three floors, each 30,000 some odd square feet. The top floor we we sublet because we wanted to control the freight elevators, believe it or not, done. So on floors one and two, I would walk those floors every day, at least twice a day, maybe three times a day. And I would say hi to all the foremen or.
We believed in walk-around management. I walked the plant floors every day. Share on X
lead people and at least in, know, every driver, every person that worked for me, if I could. And they knew they could come up and they could tell us what was going on, how we could approve what we were doing wrong and so forth. They knew it was an opportunity for them, not necessarily just to kibitz, but to kind of share experiences. So I would highly recommend that to anyone who works in a physical plant or.
in the physical business where you’re coming in contact with your team members and that’s to be open with them and communicate with them as often as you can.
Love that. Okay. We got just another couple minutes. So I want to talk, I got a little inside knowledge. I know you’re writing a book, so tell us a little bit about your book and what you’re discussing and put you on the spot. Like when will it be out?
Yes, sir.
Don, I’m really enjoying the process. With Don’s help, I’m writing a book and right now the tentative name for the book is Three Ring Binder. It has to do with our business plan. I cannot believe how personal the book has become. Where I’m at right now, Don, is I’ve gone back to my wife, my sister who worked in the business, my adult son and said to them, can you give me perspective on what you thought about the business?
We had a printed business plan in a three-ring binder on my desk every day. Share on X
And not just my role, but what were your impressions? And I said, listen, I don’t want your answers right now. This is literally two weeks ago, not this past week and the weekend before. I take a couple of weeks, ruminate about it. Email me, call me, whatever. My son lives with me, my wife lives with me, of course. And they’re all thinking about different things. And they’ve been great and supported me in regards to suggesting.
different chapters and so forth and help me with the editing. As a matter of fact, already I’ve thrown out some stuff that don’t think was pertinent to me personally, but what I’m looking to do is to actually help business people to improve their lives and improve their business and so forth. And I’m just gonna try to make my past business experiences relevant to them. terms of, originally my original goal was to complete it in October, but now that I’ve got other…
family members and stakeholders actually involved and they agreed to give me some feedback. I’m going to probably say first quarter of 26. Because it’s more important to me that its quality won’t be real long booked on. But I really appreciate your help with it and I’m very enthusiastic about it. I spend time mostly on the weekends on it.
So I’m looking forward to it. It will be, it will have some funny stories, some pertinent stories, but hope to incorporate some business lessons that I learned the hard way, you know, in real life, in RL as they call it now.
Yeah. Well, I
love that and I love the title. And like I said, out of, you know, 35 years with entrepreneurs all over, um, known a lot of entrepreneurs who had business plans, known a lot of entrepreneurs who didn’t have a business plan and who were, um, kind of working like,
Thank you.
the old oil man or the old horse trader, you know, they’re kind of looking in their pocket every day to see how much money they had looking at the bank and, and trying to, you know, run a business that way, which is pretty challenging, but you are the only one I’ve ever heard that kept that business plan in a three ring binder on your desk every day. And I think that’s magical.
Yes, sir. Yeah.
Well, thank you. It turned out to be a very, very useful tool at the end of the day.
Love that. So John, if somebody’s listening to the episode and they’d like to reach out to you, okay, what’s the easiest way to do that?
The best way to do that is to please email me at j, for my first name, John, Gleason, and it’s spelled just like Jackie Gleason, so it’s G-L-E-A-S-O-N, at supportingstrategies.com. And I will be back to you by the following day, if not the same day, and I’d love to hear from you. Thank you, Don.
Love that.
So Jay Gleason at SupportingStrategies.com. John, it’s been my distinct pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much.
Yes, sir.
No, thank you Don. Always a pleasure and I really feel flattered that you gave me the opportunity. Thank you so much.
I’m grateful. Folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E140 | Lead AI Like Einstein: B2B Growth Marketing & Leadership | Rodolfo Salazar
Date: September 22, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/lead-ai-like-einstein-b2b-growth-marketing-leadership-rodolfo-salazar/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Rodolfo-Salazar-Podcast-Thumbnail-image-3000-x3000-scaled.jpg
Inner Images:
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Content:
He refused to bend his values for a global CEO—and got fired outside the boardroom door. That moment forced Rodolfo to rebuild, expand across 19 countries, and rethink growth for a post‑pandemic, AI‑driven world.
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, Don Williams sits down with Rodolfo Salazar, founder of iDigital Studios and QUDOX—a growth marketing company born after the pandemic to help brands build full‑funnel growth ecosystems. Rodolfo has worked with 400+ brands across 19 countries, from the US to Singapore, and shares the hard lessons behind a failed multi‑country expansion (opening five offices at once) and why cookie‑cutter playbooks don’t work anymore.
You’ll learn why the only constant is change, how to build a team with “Change DNA”, and why AI is a tool—not your identity. Rodolfo’s “Lead Einstein” analogy will change how you prompt and manage AI: give crystal‑clear context, retain human judgment, and keep leadership, empathy, and creativity at the center. If you’re a US entrepreneur, B2B marketer, SaaS or agency founder, contact center/BPO leader, or a corporate exec turning founder, this conversation cuts through the noise and shows you how to play offense in 2025.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Identity-First-AI-Growth-Marketing-Entrepreneurial-Mindset-with-Rodolfo-Salazar_Proven-Entrepreneur-Show.mp3
 
Lead AI Like Einstein: B2B Growth Marketing & Leadership
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Now this is a real treat. Our guest today is a close personal friend in San Salvador, El Salvador, and Rodolfo Salazar. Welcome to the show.
Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me here, Don. I’m really excited and I’ve seen the work you’re doing with your podcast and well, the work you’re doing overall connecting people and connecting ideas. So thank you. Thank you for having me in this podcast.
It’s my distinct pleasure. met Rodolfo, I met you, I’m not sure, three or four years ago, and pretty rapidly Rodolfo invited me to come to El Salvador and meet with a group of entrepreneurs there. And if you haven’t been to El Salvador, it’s like one of the undiscovered gems of the world. When we left, my wife was like, are we moving to El Salvador? And it’s like, I don’t think we are.
it.
But, you know, over there by Surf City, could see something happening. You know, I’m just saying, I can see something happening. Rodolfo, tell us what your current company is and what you do and who you do it with and why you do it.
Sure. So today I run two companies. One of them is iDigital Studios, which is a digital development studio where we do applications, we do web apps and a lot of software on that side. And on the other side, I have QDocs, which is Q-U-D-O-X. It’s a quantum paradox. It’s like the mix of those two words.
And we are a growth marketing company. We built this company right after the pandemic, thinking about how can we think about the future because now this new future where we’re at after the pandemic.
needs something different in terms of a company that will help in terms of marketing and advertising. So we built QDUX thinking of that and we are a growth marketing company and we have 360 degrees of things that we can do for helping companies grow. So we basically do growth ecosystems for companies and for entrepreneurs.
I love that. And I know the answer, but I want to be sure that everybody hears this. So you are based in El Salvador, but you have clients all across Latin America, the US, et cetera, correct?
That’s right, we have worked with more than 400 brands throughout 19 different countries in the world. And I think that the furthest country we have worked with or companies we have worked with in a country is Singapore. We’ve worked with several companies in Singapore.
Yeah, I think that’s about 7,000 miles west of El Salvador. If you go any farther, you’re actually getting closer ⁓ back. so, I’ve been fortunate over the years where I worked with clients on every continent, but Antarctica. And I’m looking for somebody in Antarctica.
Very fun.
Yeah. ⁓
Mm-hmm.
where I can say, I’ve worked with somebody on every continent, but there’s just not very many people and they’re all scientists. And so they’re not too concerned about doing more business and selling more. So I don’t know if that.
you
Yeah,
we’re still missing Africa, Antarctica, and a very good part of Europe.
Okay. Well,
maybe I can introduce you to some people in Africa and a part of Europe. So thank you for that. Okay. So I’m going to take you back. Before you started your first company, what did you do professionally?
So before that I was in the corporate world. I was an executive of the corporate world. I worked for three, well, four different companies in the tech world. I worked for Telefonica. Well, before that I worked for Sprint.
Then I worked for Telefonica, then I worked for Microsoft for a very long time, and then I worked for Dell. And from that, I started working for a multinational company that does call centers, converges. And so my world is about technology and about how to drive
ideas through different networks and online.
love that. So I don’t think I knew the part about Convergis and I don’t know if you know this about me but I’ve owned contact centers for 38 years.
Yeah.
so I was in charge when I worked for Dell, I was in charge of the strategic communications for the six largest contact centers of Dell.
But I was based in the El Salvadorian operation. Dell had an operation here with about 4,000 employees. And so I was part of that company. And that company was sold by Dell and acquired by the company that then was acquired by Convergence.
I
love that with some of my good friends today, and I think they have about 8,000 employees today, but they started out as an internal Bell South Center and a couple executives bought the call center operation. you know, many people don’t realize this, but call centers or contact centers or BPO or, you know, whatever label you want to put on them. In many parts of the world, those are like great, great, great jobs.
Ha
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
And they’re very positive for the economy because, you know, an employer who has 4,000 employees in San Salvador, that’s a player. Okay. They’re making a real impact on the national economy.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is
So Dell made a big impact in the country. They brought the contact center and they actually made the contact center industry explode. Right now we are in El Salvador. We have around, I would say 35 to 40,000 people working in contact centers, thanks to Dell. Now Dell is not here anymore, but if you see everyone that work at Dell,
that time are now the people that are managing the contact centers that are around. So it’s a very good thing to have for a country the contact center business.
Very good. Probably 25 years ago, I met the, probably the equivalent of the secretary of state of the Dominican Republic. And he said, we want to be known as the call center Republic because it just provides so many jobs that are consistent and steady. okay. Let’s talk about the bridge between all of that great corporate experience. But before you started your…
first agency before you had your first like real client, first major client. What motivated you to, to reinvent how you saw yourself as, I’m a corporate guy. I’ve been working with Dell and Microsoft and convert and converges by the way, is huge company. If you don’t know a huge company, how did you
How did you cross that bridge of, Hey, I’m going to go be an entrepreneur.
I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. To tell you the truth, before I went to work for Telefónica, I built and destroyed three companies. I founded the first company when I was about 20 years old.
That was an English teaching center for corporations. Then I founded another company that did computers. We did clones. We did computer clones. And then I mixed the two companies and I became this…
PC clones.
mixture of someone that taught how to make clones and how to speak English. But then my first daughter was coming, so I got married very young. I got married when I was 25. So when my first daughter was coming, when I was 27,
Okay.
I really thought I don’t want to give this unstable entrepreneurial life to my daughter because you know was very young so you don’t know many things at that time. So with that I just started looking for a job and that was my first job that I got with Sprint.
So that’s why I got out of that road of entrepreneurship. then.
all my work experience, remember every time I was learning something, I was learning it and understanding it, and I said, I’m going to use this in my company. I’m going to use this one day. One day, this is something that I will use. I know that I can take this and use it somehow. So I was just putting things in my bag. And in 2002, I was still working for Microsoft and I came with
Identity‑First AI & Growth Marketing: AI for Business Owners/caption]
Hmm
the name of the first company. And I said, no, this is the name of the company. My first company name was IdeaWorks because it works. So I started thinking now that I was not just building this foundation with all the knowledge I was getting everywhere because when you’re working for these corporations, they have so much knowledge. They give you so much.
And so I was taking all this information and saying, this knowledge, I’m going to use it in IdeaWorks now. So, you know, years went by and in 2010,
Probably I was too close to the sun. That’s the way I could explain it. I was too close to the sun. So I was very close to the CEO and the board of directors of this large BPO. there I came into this experience where I had to choose my
my character my values or obey the system so and you know i i have this very fresh i told this to the ceo of the company he was also president of the board remember someone very powerful and he i told him that maybe i was making a career limiting move
but I could not do that because of my characters and values. And he didn’t say anything for a period of time. He called me two weeks later to go to headquarters. So I had to travel six hours by plane to his office.
And someone was outside of the office when my turn came to talk to him. Someone was outside of my office and telling me, you’re fired. He’s not going to receive you. So this is where ideas kick in. Thank you very much. I’m in this stage of my life.
Yeah.
It’s going to be very difficult to get another employment the same way. Being in El Salvador, you know. So I tried, but 10 months later, it just came to me. This is something I have to do. It’s either I do it or I die. So.
So that’s that.
My wife is going to want some income coming in the house.
I can’t not do anything. Yeah. Well, I think there’s a good moral in that story, Rodolfo, is that, you know, an entrepreneur is best served who they know their own personal values. They, they set values for the company that are parallel and support their personal values.
And my experience is if you take, know, if you, if you sacrifice your values for the dollar, the dollars will never be enough for that. so, interesting, you know, I started my journey. I had helped a gentleman build, go from three locations to 11 and
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, I was the top sales guy, the top sales manager. I eventually ran all the offices, but we had an issue. And even though I made a lot of money and had an unbelievable amount of freedom, we had an issue that I couldn’t resolve. so I left and became his competitor. But you know, that’s how it goes. Okay. So.
Now your agencies…
Operate across countries and cultures. Okay. And you know, there were certainly a way everybody, the world operated pre COVID. Okay. Here in the U S you know, the great stay homes kind of what we call that. And, and then they operate differently today. Tell me what is a mindset or behavior.
Yes. Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
that you think entrepreneurs will need as they go into the future.
Wow, so I think that the only or the biggest enemy that any entrepreneur has is their way of thinking towards change. And now we are looking and we seeing change that happens so fast. So we have to get
The only or the biggest enemy that any entrepreneur has is their way of thinking towards change. Share on X
Or we have to be someone that understands that weird feeling that you have. That feeling that comes up when, remember when you were learning how to ride a bike? So you were riding the bike, but you felt like, I’m going to fall. Yeah, so that feeling, you have to get used to it.
Maybe I’m falling?
Because right now we are in a world where there’s so much complexity. And within that complexity, so many things happening and changing so fast. So mindset, the mindset of an entrepreneur needs to have the DNA of change within.
And I think that that’s going to be the… And that was one of the things that we embraced when we came out of the pandemic. The first thing we did, you know, we, had a beautiful brand. I love the name IdeaWorks and I love the brand that we have done. We were recognized in all Central America and in the different countries that we have worked with.
because we had a very good reputation and a beautiful brand. I can show it to you. It’s something that we can sell because it’s beautiful. But we came out of the pandemic and we said, everything is going to change. We cannot say that we didn’t change. We have to embrace this. And the way that we embraced it is that we declared IdeaWorks obsolete.
And we said that was the past and now this is the future, not the present. And everyone in the company is so used to change things, everything within. have we have a framework to change, but that means that we’re already thinking that this will not be the same when we end the year, probably when we end the trimester.
Yeah.
So
we are just in constant change, planned change if you want to see.
Yeah, I love that.
I think the only thing that you can count on being constant is that everything is changing. certainly with the, you know, we’re about, well, we’re coming up on three years into chat GPT being released to the public. And, you know, there was a lot of AI that was happening 20 years before that that people don’t know about, but
I think the only thing that you can count on being constant is that everything is changing. Share on X
but to where it was really out in the public and exponentially, geometrically accelerating.
Yeah.
You know, you got, you got to be light on your feet. You need to make, you know, what’s the old saying? Some people make decisions based on what happened. and, what’s happening or what’s going to happen. And we need to be somewhere in between what’s happening now and what’s going to happen because it’s all changing. Okay. So I want to, I want to take you back. I want to ask you.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
about one of your biggest failures. And I know as entrepreneurs, we know that failing is part of winning. It’s not the opposite of, it’s required. Yes, absolutely. How did that, what was that experience and how did it shape how you boldly went into the future?
Failing is part of winning. It’s not the opposite of, it’s required Share on X
Yeah, yeah, of course. It’s learning, learning.
Well, so what you think is sometimes what you think that will make you grow faster is going to other countries and opening up offices. So for me, doing that not well planned, doing that bootlegged.
Hmm.
was the biggest mistake I’ve ever had because we had a great operation in IdeaWorks in El Salvador and we already had a lot of different companies working with us regionally. So we said we should just plug and play what we have here in other countries. We did a lot of work in terms of planning, but we didn’t think about
how of establishing something. So the idea I had was get local partners, logical, you need local partners, get local partners and get local people and replicate what you have. That sounds perfect for another time because right now we are in such complex times.
that cookie cutters do not work. So I try to do a cookie cutter for El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica. So I opened five offices at the same time, together. And with different partners in different countries. So.
Mmm.
So what learning do I have from that is the first thing you have to have in your mind is how to do things in place for the countries. Because at the end, instead of going and opening up offices, we could have just opened up commercial.
offices, which is what we’re doing right now. We open up commercial offices and we do all the work with the people we know and where we can control the ambience we can control.
So in the failure, in the piece that I call my failure, I think that there were too many variables. Different partners, different people working for me, different organizations, and the only umbrella was Rodolfo.
Yeah, well, that sounds like a lot at one time, you know. So, okay, last question.
Yeah.
So you have this ample storage of wisdom and knowledge about entrepreneurship and technology and AI. And I know that. So if you could share one nugget, a tool, a tactic, a mindset, one nugget that would provide real value
to our audience today, what would you share?
Sure. in terms of AI, everything that’s happening with AI, we have to think of identity first. So first, you need to understand who you are. You need to tell people who they are.
and you need to make them understand and you have to understand that AI is not an identity. AI is a tool. It’s something that you use that has a lot of knowledge and that can do a lot of things for you, but it’s a tool. So that’s number one. Number two. In the following years, we’re going to have
AI is not an identity. AI is a tool Share on X
Everyone is going to have this AI multiplying our capacities. But we have to think of them this way. And I make this comparison when I’m giving the trainings to executives. tell them, think of this as if you had Albert Einstein. You brought Albert Einstein to El Salvador to work for you.
So, and you say, Albert, go get me two pupusas from the Galerias del Escalón, which is a mall. You know, Albert Einstein will look at me and will say, huh? And you know, the Albert Einstein that we have in AI will not just go, huh? But he will try to answer. He will give you so many stupid results.
Hehehehehe
So you have to tell Albert, you have to say, hey, Albert, pupusas are this tortillas made of corn that have a filling inside that are our typical food. And we have all these flavors. And only that, I’m going to tell you, Galeria del Escalón, if you take ways and you use, this is the application, you tell, you have to be very specific in very simple things.
Mm.
to give the best context. So think of that. Think that you will have all these consultants on your hands. Anyone. And I was listening to Bill Gates last time in an interview. He was saying, yes, before I used to have all these consultants that if I had a question about water, I could call, hey.
So he had access to know, you know, the best person that would talk about water. Now you have access for that. I have access to that. So I need to understand what type of questions I will make and how I will manage to have all these consultants work towards my goal, my idea, understanding very well what’s my identity.
and my identity is just filled by you. So you have to understand your identity. And you have to give identity to your people. They will need to understand who and what they are to give the final decisions to, not the AI.
Yeah.
Because at the end, the criteria of decision making and leadership should remain in us. People.
At the end, the criteria of decision making and leadership should remain in us. People. Share on X
I love that. And,
and, and, and, you know, you brought like my, probably my favorite subject in entrepreneurship, leadership. so foundational skill to all leadership is communication. Clarity is kind. Clarity is kinder than really nice words that are unclear.
Okay. Clarity is kind. And when you communicate with people, clearly that’s excellent leadership. The same thing is required when you communicate with AI, you have to communicate clearly and literally you have to lead Albert Einstein. You have to lead the AI for where you want to go. Okay.
Yeah
Otherwise, it will decide on its own where to go.
Yeah.
And you know what you’re saying is it’s very true. So communication leads to empathy. So leadership, empathy. And believe it or not, because people are not saying that AI is creative, but creativity is really our thing.
So we, will not, AI will do very creative things or sorry, will emulate doing creative things. We are the ones and you know, creativity is based on so many human things and one of them is failure. AI will not be prone to failure. We are. And that’s what makes.
Right.
the big difference and you will make the big difference in your work environment. If you teach people leadership, empathy, creativity, connection. That’s it.
That’s it. Okay. Tell us how someone in the audience would reach out to your company or you in case someone wants to learn more about you or your companies.
Sure, so I have a hub under my name, rudolfosalazar.com, which will be easier. But then you can find my company’s Q-Docs, it’s Q-U-D-O-X dot I-O. And then iDigital Studios is iDigitalStudios.com.
Awesome. Rodolfo, thank you so much. Been my distinct pleasure to have you on the show today.
Well, it’s been great and I think conversations like this should happen more often and more people should be around this fireside conversations.
I
agree. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.
   
Podcast Transcript in Spanish 
Hola, soy Don Williams con el episodio de hoy de The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Es un verdadero gusto. Nuestro invitado es un gran amigo en San Salvador, El Salvador: Rodolfo Salazar. Bienvenido al programa.
Gracias por invitarme, Don. Estoy muy entusiasmado. He seguido tu trabajo con el podcast y, en general, la forma en que conectas personas e ideas. Gracias por tenerme aquí.
El placer es mío. Conocí a Rodolfo hace tres o cuatro años y, muy pronto, me invitó a El Salvador a reunirme con un grupo de emprendedores. Si no han estado en El Salvador, es una de las joyas por descubrir del mundo. Cuando nos fuimos, mi esposa dijo: «¿Nos mudamos a El Salvador?». Yo respondí: «No creo que lo hagamos».
[Se ríe].
Por Surf City ya se veía que algo estaba sucediendo. Se notaba movimiento. Rodolfo, cuéntanos: ¿cuál es tu empresa actual?, ¿qué haces, con quién y por qué?
Hoy dirijo dos empresas. Una es iDigital Studios, un estudio de desarrollo digital donde creamos aplicaciones móviles, aplicaciones web y software. La otra es QUDOX (Q-U-D-O-X), cuyo nombre nace de “quantum” y “paradox”. Somos una empresa de growth marketing. Fundamos la compañía justo después de la pandemia, enfocados en el futuro y en cómo debía transformarse el marketing y la publicidad. Creamos QUDOX con esa visión. Ofrecemos capacidades integrales (360°) para ayudar a las empresas a crecer. En esencia, construimos ecosistemas de crecimiento para empresas y emprendedores.
Me encanta. Y sé la respuesta, pero quiero que todos la escuchen: tienes base en El Salvador, pero clientes en toda América Latina, Estados Unidos, etc., ¿correcto?
Así es. Hemos trabajado con más de 400 marcas en 19 países. El mercado más lejano con el que hemos colaborado es Singapur, con varias empresas.
Creo que está a unas 7,000 millas al oeste de El Salvador; si sigues avanzando, vuelves a acercarte. He tenido la fortuna de trabajar con clientes en todos los continentes excepto en la Antártida. Sigo buscando a alguien allá.
[Se ríe]. Sí.
Para poder decir que trabajé en todos los continentes. Pero allí no hay mucha gente, y la mayoría son científicos; no están muy enfocados en vender más. No sé si suceda.
A nosotros aún nos faltan África, la Antártida y una parte de Europa.
De acuerdo. Quizá pueda presentarte a algunas personas en África y en Europa. Gracias por eso. Bien, vayamos atrás: antes de iniciar tu primera empresa, ¿qué hacías profesionalmente?
Venía del mundo corporativo; fui ejecutivo. Trabajé en cuatro empresas de tecnología: primero en Sprint, luego en Telefónica, después muchos años en Microsoft y finalmente en Dell. A partir de ahí pasé a una multinacional de centros de contacto, Convergys. Mi mundo es la tecnología y cómo impulsar ideas a través de diferentes redes y canales en línea.
Me encanta. Creo que no sabía lo de Convergys. No sé si sabes esto de mí, pero he sido propietario de centros de contacto durante 38 años.
Sí. Cuando trabajé para Dell estuve a cargo de las comunicaciones estratégicas de los seis centros de contacto más grandes de la compañía, basado en la operación de El Salvador. Dell llegó a tener aquí unos 4,000 colaboradores. Esa operación fue vendida por Dell y adquirida por otra empresa, que después fue adquirida por Convergys.
Algunos buenos amigos míos empezaron como un centro interno de BellSouth; hoy tienen unos 8,000 empleados. Mucha gente no lo dimensiona, pero los centros de contacto —BPO, como quieras llamarlos— son trabajos muy buenos en muchas partes del mundo.
Sí.
Y aportan mucho a la economía. Un empleador con 4,000 personas en San Salvador es un actor de peso: genera impacto real.
Totalmente. Dell tuvo un gran impacto en el país. Trajo el centro de contacto y catalizó el crecimiento de la industria. Hoy, en El Salvador, diría que hay entre 35 y 40 mil personas trabajando en centros de contacto, en gran parte gracias a ese impulso. Dell ya no está, pero muchos de quienes trabajaron allí hoy dirigen operaciones del sector. Es muy positivo para el país.
Hace unos 25 años conocí al equivalente del secretario de Estado en República Dominicana y me dijo: «Queremos ser conocidos como la República del Call Center». Provee empleos estables y consistentes. Bien. Hablemos del puente entre esa experiencia corporativa y tu primera agencia. Antes de tu primer gran cliente, ¿qué te llevó a reinventarte —de ejecutivo en Dell, Microsoft y Convergys— a decir: «Voy a ser emprendedor»? ¿Cómo cruzaste ese puente?
Siempre quise emprender. Antes de Telefónica fundé y cerré tres empresas. La primera, a los 20 años, fue un centro de enseñanza de inglés para corporaciones. Luego monté una ensambladora de computadoras —hacíamos clones de PC— y después combiné ambas, enseñando a armar PC y a la vez inglés. Me casé joven, a los 25, y a los 27 esperábamos a nuestra primera hija. Pensé: no quiero esa inestabilidad para mi familia, así que busqué empleo. Mi primer trabajo fue en Sprint. Dejé el camino emprendedor, pero cada aprendizaje en lo corporativo lo guardaba pensando: «Algún día lo usaré en mi empresa».
Clones de PC.
Exacto. En 2002, aún en Microsoft, se me ocurrió el nombre de mi primera empresa: IdeaWorks —porque “it works”—. Entendí que no solo estaba acumulando conocimiento, sino construyendo una base para IdeaWorks. En 2010, probablemente me acerqué demasiado al sol: estaba muy cerca del CEO y del consejo de una gran BPO. Tuve que elegir entre mis valores y “seguir el sistema”. Le dije al CEO —que también presidía el consejo— que quizá estaba tomando una decisión que limitaría mi carrera, pero que no podía hacer lo que me pedían por mis valores. No dijo nada. Dos semanas después me llamaron a su sede; volé seis horas y, al llegar, alguien fuera de su oficina me dijo: «Estás despedido. No te va a recibir». Fue un punto de inflexión.
Sí.
Conseguir un empleo similar desde El Salvador sería difícil. Lo intenté, pero diez meses después me quedó claro: tenía que hacerlo. O emprendía, o nada. Y emprendí.
Mi esposa siempre dice que algo tiene que entrar a casa; no puedo quedarme sin hacer nada. Hay una moraleja: un emprendedor se sirve de conocer sus valores personales y alinear los valores de la empresa con ellos. En mi experiencia, si sacrificas valores por dinero, nunca será suficiente. Yo inicié tras ayudar a un empresario a pasar de tres a once sedes…
Sí.
Yo era el mejor vendedor y gerente de ventas; luego dirigí todo. Había un problema que no pude resolver; me fui y me convertí en su competidor. Así es. Ahora, tus agencias operan entre países y culturas. Antes del COVID —el gran “quedarse en casa”— se trabajaba de una forma; hoy de otra. ¿Qué mentalidad o conducta necesita el emprendedor hacia adelante?
El mayor enemigo del emprendedor es su actitud frente al cambio. Los cambios hoy son vertiginosos. Hay que acostumbrarse a esa sensación incómoda, como cuando aprendías a andar en bicicleta y sentías que podías caer. Vivimos en un mundo complejo donde todo cambia rápido. La mentalidad emprendedora necesita llevar el cambio en el ADN. Fue lo que abrazamos tras la pandemia. Teníamos una marca preciosa —IdeaWorks—, reconocida en Centroamérica. Pero dijimos: «Todo va a cambiar; no podemos decir que nosotros no». Declaramos a IdeaWorks obsoleta: eso era el pasado; ahora viene el futuro. Internamente adoptamos un marco de cambio: asumimos que nada será igual a fin de año, quizá ni a fin de trimestre. Cambio constante —planificado.
Me encanta. Lo único constante es el cambio. Estamos a casi tres años de la salida pública de ChatGPT. La IA ya venía de lejos, pero cuando se hizo masiva, todo se aceleró.
Así es.
Hay que moverse ligero y decidir entre lo que pasó, lo que pasa y lo que pasará. Debemos estar entre el presente y lo que viene. Bien. Cuéntame de uno de tus mayores fracasos. Los emprendedores sabemos que fracasar no es lo opuesto a ganar: es un requisito. ¿Qué aprendiste?
Pensar que crecer más rápido era abrir oficinas en otros países. Hacerlo sin una institucionalización robusta fue el mayor error. Teníamos una gran operación con IdeaWorks en El Salvador y negocios regionales; dijimos: «Repliquemos». Planificamos, pero no diseñamos el “cómo” institucional. Busqué socios y equipos locales y quise aplicar el mismo molde en El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua y Costa Rica: abrí cinco oficinas a la vez, con socios distintos. Hoy sé que necesitábamos adaptar in situ para cada país. En vez de oficinas operativas, debimos abrir comerciales y ejecutar desde entornos que controlábamos. Demasiadas variables bajo un solo paraguas.
Suena a mucho al mismo tiempo. Última pregunta.

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Title: E139 | From Posts to Pipeline: 7 Plays for LinkedIn AI Lead Generation
Date: September 8, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/7-plays-for-linkedin-ai-lead-generation-social-selling-b2b/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Stop-Posting—Start-Selling-LinkedIn-AI-Lead-Generation-Social-Selling-Secrets-with-Joe-Apfelbaum-2-scaled.jpg
Inner Images:
- https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Blog_Banner.png

Content:
What if LinkedIn could generate leads for you—while you focus on closing deals? In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with LinkedIn and AI strategist Joe Apfelbaum, founder of Evie AI, to reveal the future of B2B growth: LinkedIn AI lead generation.
Joe shares how an AI sales assistant for LinkedIn can draft comments in your authentic voice, prep you for meetings, and keep you top-of-mind without sounding robotic. You’ll also learn why social selling LinkedIn AI is the ultimate game-changer for founders and sales leaders who want to move beyond vanity metrics and start booking real conversations.
Topics Discussed:

Why “energy without strategy” kills growth—and how AI fixes it
The daily LinkedIn AI lead generation routine that drives pipeline
How AI agents for B2B prospecting pull podcasts, posts, and insights in seconds
Practical LinkedIn hacks for B2B that even LinkedIn’s own teams admire
The mindset shift: treating AI as your co-founder, not just a tool

If you’re ready to scale smarter, not harder, this episode is your blueprint for building a predictable system that converts attention into revenue.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/AI-Co-Founder-This-Will-Change-How-You-Sell-on-LinkedIn_Joe-Apfelbaum-Don-Williams_Proven-Entrepreneur-Show.mp3
Stop Posting—Start Selling: LinkedIn AI Lead Generation That Converts
Hey, it’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Man, do I have a treat for you today. I have Joe Apfelbaum from evyAI, a true LinkedIn and true AI expert in an ocean of people who claim to be LinkedIn and AI experts. Joe, welcome to the show.
Don, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here. I love the connection that we have and I love seeing you on LinkedIn and all the things that you’re doing. So thank you for having me on the show and I’m excited to get into it.
My pleasure. And even though we’ve known each other for some time now, somehow it just never happened that we got together on media. And so I’m thrilled for that. So before we go too far, Joe, tell us about evy, what it does, who your clients are, what’s the benefit for someone using evy.
So, evyAI is a sales assistant that helps people be able to be more successful on platforms like LinkedIn. Most people, they don’t really have an assistant. And I heard at an EO event, Jack Daly say, if you don’t have an assistant, you are an assistant. So, I tell people, you need to have a sales assistant that can support you to do all the right activities, whether you’re sending out direct messages, whether you’re drafting content.
If you don’t have an assistant, you are an assistant Share on X
you know, let’s say for example, posts, or whether you want to leave comments on people’s posts. For example, if I want to leave a comment on your post, then I can think about what to say, or I can just pull open my little assistant, my little handy assistant called evyAI, and it’ll read the post and it’ll draft a comment in my voice. And now in my voice is the key there.
So, evyAI can draft a quick comment in my voice and it’ll help me be able to stay top of mind with people. I’ve been networking for a really long time, and one of the biggest challenges that I’ve always had was how do I stay top of mind with my network? How do I make sure that people remember me all the time? And evyAI is the answer to that because it helps me be able to learn about people’s businesses.
It helps me be able to do all the different research that I need to do and organize all their contact information. And then it helps me be able to write content to get exposure, leave comments to get credibility and send direct messages for me to be able to get on the phone with them to keep the conversation going. So that’s essentially what we do. And when we research, we use something called AI agents. And these agents will crawl the full internet and find everything that it can about you.
and everything that you’ve done. So for example, if I want to know every podcast you’ve been on, if I want to know every article you’ve written, if I want to know everything about you, our agents will go out, will scour the web, find everything there is to know about you, and give me all that information quickly. And that’s what evyAI is about.
Love that. And these agents scouring the web, this is like nearly instantaneous, right? This is not, we’re going to give you the research in an hour. This is like, you’re going to have it in seconds.
I mean.
I call it on the fly. So like as we’re talking, I say, all right, evyAI, tell me what should I talk to Don about? And it says, what inspired you to develop the wow, wow, wow experience framework? How did hosting the Proven Entrepreneurship transform your approach to business coaching and advising? Or in your early 20s, you quickly became the top sales rep and sales manager in the country. What lessons did you learn from shaping those coaching? So like from Natasha Miller’s thing that you were on. like, can, like it.
on the flat.
It’s in front of me, it’s in my face, it’s right there. I have to be able to leverage this information that’s not available anywhere else, but it’s available everywhere else. You know what I mean? It’s like compiling everything from everywhere.
Love that.
So, man, you talk a lot about mindset and transformation. If tomorrow, every entrepreneur woke up with an AI co-founder, what do you think would be the first thing they would change in how they run their business?
Ooh.
I think they would be more strategic. That would be number one. Because a lot of business owners, they’re not strategic. They’re just doing things. They have a lot of energy. Usually a co-founder of a company, you need to have a lot of energy to start a company. But energy without strategy is a waste of time. And the right strategy will save you a decade. So stop hoping for the best and build the right strategy. And AI is really, really good at coming up with plans and strategies and doing research and brainstorming and helping you out. That’s the first thing.
Energy without strategy is a waste of time. The right strategy will save you a decade. Share on X
The second thing that you would get from having AI as your co-founder and supporting you is it’ll give you efficiency. So it’s one thing to be effective and a lot of people want to be effective, but what about saving time? You know, the fact that I’m able to see all the reoccurring themes that you talk about, customer service, experience, excellence, entrepreneurial leadership, sales strategy, business growth, entrepreneurial challenges, culture, purpose, like a fact that I have all that and I pulled the last
20 articles that you’ve written and pulled all the data and have it all with your unique perspective, like all in front of me, on the fly, right now, like what are we talking about? That’s called efficiency.
That is efficiency. And there are certainly people who have more content out there, but I literally have tons and tons of content. And it’s given it all to Joe in a matter of seconds. OK.
I mean, I
pulled up the last 10 podcasts you’ve been on and it gave me your unique perspective for each podcast and a conversation starter. So I can talk to you for the next 10 hours and I would not run out of information to ask you.
Wow! Amazing! Amazing! Now John, Joe, how old is evyAI?
We started the company, um, I came up with the idea in 2023, right after I started talking to Chad GPT and Chad GPT is kind of like my co-founder because it kind of gave me the idea for what I should be doing with my experience. Uh, but Tammy, Tammy Joyce Likter, she’s my business partner. She’s the actual business partner. She’s like the integrator in the company. I’m the visionary. She’s the integrator. If you’ve ever read Traction, I’m sure you have, or if anyone listening to this ever attraction, it’s really important to have the roles of the visionary, the integrator, the operator.
And so I have a great integrator that helps be able to take my idea monkey and turn it into actually doing something with my ideas and executing at a very high level. But we officially incorporated the company. spent a year kind of like developing it and getting our first, you know, let’s say a couple customers, first 100, 200 customers in the door. We ended up getting a thousand customers before we even launched a business. But January of 2024 is when we incorporated and we started being really serious about it. And so I would just say about.
a year and a half ago. January will be two years since we incorporated.
And in the world of AI, you’re kind of an innovator. know, mean, that’s a couple years. It’s only been a couple of years since chat GPT was kind of released to the public. And so you
Yeah, and
now we have Nano Banana. Now we have Nano Banana. The internet is breaking with Nano Banana!
There we go. Okay. Tell me this. What was the moment you realized AI wasn’t just another tool, but something that would completely reinvent how entrepreneurs think, sell, and scale?
I was on a beach in Mexico. Okay, I’m chilling on a beach in Mexico and going through my divorce. Okay, going through it, very, very difficult. It wasn’t ending. It just wasn’t ending. It wasn’t ending. By the way, I just got my official legal divorce after five years of trying. I officially got it this past weekend. I checked online, finally got it. I’m done. So thankfully, thank you.
So sorry.
Congratulations.
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s a horrible thing. But congratulations on reaching the end.
Very difficult thing. Very, very difficult thing. Yeah. So.
So I’m in Mexico, I’m deep in the middle. I don’t know what to do with my life. I don’t know, I’m having a conversation with Chad GPT. And this is not my first conversation, but I’ve had conversations with it, just kind of figure out, you know, like what’s the best prompts to use and how to blah, blah, blah. I’m having talking to like, not GPT-5, GPT-3.5. This is before 4 came out and it wasn’t very smart.
And then it started asking me questions about my business and my experience and who I was and I started telling, and I said, could you give me some ideas for me to be able to impact a million people? And then just starts spitting out idea after idea after idea and one of the ideas clicked and then I looked and thought to myself, I’m by myself. I am by myself, but I have the world’s intelligence at my fingertips. This is a game changer.
I have a responsibility to give every single entrepreneur an assistant to help them be able to do this within the context of LinkedIn, networking, sales, prospecting, marketing. I have a responsibility to do this in a smart way. And so I’m going to go off on a journey in doing this. Now, I don’t know the first thing about building a SaaS company. I built an agency. I serviced 1,100 clients who were on the Inc 500, one of the fastest growing companies in America. But I had to learn how to do that on the job. My father wanted me to be a Rabbi Don.
And I became a rabbi, but I realized I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I had, but I had no formal training in that. And then my mother always said, go to the library, get books, because formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune. And I can say that she’s a hundred percent correct because all the information that I learned from courses and books and podcasts and YouTube videos and whatever it is, that’s how I was educated to build one of the fastest growing companies in America.
Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune Share on X
Hmm.
And to be able to stay profitable and successful for over a decade, it was because I joined EO and Vistage and YJP and got a lot of friends in YPO and all these other places, all these things that I did surround myself with the right people, that completely changed my life as well. And so I would say the moment that changed my life that I knew that AI was the thing was that moment in Mexico where I’m talking to it about my life and having a conversation with it. And it’s giving me ideas to be able to impact a million people.
Couple nuggets I got in that. One, some of your best thinking happens on the beach. Me too. I think for everybody. Get out of your normal environment. Go someplace in nature where it’s beautiful and calming and let your brain run free a little bit. Two, ask AI real questions like how could I impact a million people?
Okay. Don’t just treat it like, a simple assistant, a simple assistant to where you’re basically just doing search. Okay. interact with the AI and let it kind of instruct you on what to ask and how to ask.
Yeah, and not only that, do it alone. Like, we’re so busy afraid of going to a restaurant alone. We’re so busy afraid of going on vacation alone. While I was married, I never went alone anywhere. Like, alone? You take your wife with you. What do mean alone? What does alone even mean? But dude, dude, dude, dude, do it alone. I was alone in Mexico. Nobody was with me. I was in Playa, Playa del Carmen or whatever.
Hmm.
I landed in Cancun, 45 minutes, I drove to Playa del Carmen, then I realized it’s a little unsafe there, so I went to another place called Playa del Car, which is a gated community, got a really nice Airbnb on the water. It was beautiful. And I was alone on the beach, alone. And it felt uncomfortable. But I had chat GPT on my phone and I was able to have a conversation with it. And it completely changed my life. The alone part is knowing that
Yeah, beautiful.
Being alone doesn’t mean that you need to be lonely.
Being alone doesn’t mean being lonely—sometimes your best thinking happens in solitude Share on X
Absolutely. And
I think all great leaders embrace the alone. There’s a lot to be said about collaborative leadership and transformational leadership, no doubt. But at the end of the day, the great leader, the alpha leader, they kind of walk their own path and invite people to join them. ⁓
I agree,
and they say it’s lonely on the top. But it doesn’t have to be lonely on the top when you start loving yourself and you realize that being alone doesn’t equal being lonely.
I’ll buy that. Okay. All right. So pretty common thought today is that people fear AI is going to replace people and going to replace entrepreneurs. Other people say, it’s going to be the new golden age of business. What’s your most unpopular opinion about AI and entrepreneurship?
My most popular opinion about AI and entrepreneurship is that AI is actually going to enable whatever fears we have. Whatever fears we have. If you’re afraid of AI owning your life, it’s going to own your life. If you’re afraid of anything, you’re going to, know, wherever we focus, that’s where our energy goes. So instead of being afraid of AI, revere it.
Love it, connect with it, treat it like a tool, and use it to make the world a better place. And I believe that if you are committed to doing that, and you understand that fear is a tool, just like AI is a tool, you can use that to figure out how you can leverage AI to be the golden age. I truly believe that AI has the capacity to take over all our jobs so that we can focus on just having fun and tickling each other. Let’s just tickle each other.
Fear is a tool, just like AI is a tool—use it to make the world a better place Share on X
Let’s do plays.
Let’s just laugh all day.
Let’s do ridiculous things while the AI rolls its eyes at us because we’re just being so like irrational. AI cannot be irrational because if AI becomes irrational, it’ll ruin everything. So AI is the one that needs to be the rational ones and we need to be crazy. We were born to be insane. So be insane instead of being a pain. Use your brain to be creative.
Your poetry is amazing, Joe. Oh, yeah, no problem. OK, you built EvyAI to help people accelerate results. OK. What’s one way AI has completely transformed your own daily routine?
Thank you.
The way it transfer my complete daily routine is that it allows me to get an email every single day with all the things that are going on without having me to curate. So I have AI going out to the internet, checking up stock quotes, checking up the weather, checking up the news for me, putting together a list of all the different things that I need. goes through my calendar and prepares me for every single meeting. There’s an app called Lindy.com.
It’ll go through your calendar and do research on each meeting, tell you everything that’s going on. A lot of the things that I do right now on a daily basis, AI helps me. It’s kind of like my little co-pilot. I mean, even as I’m having a conversation with you, I’m able to leave comments on your posts. I’m able to do all the different things that I need to do within seconds without having to use the part of my brain that takes up the most energy, which is what we’re doing right here. So.
AI is taking away a lot of the administrative BS from me having to do those things. So that saves me a lot of time and it helps me with my daily routine. Anytime I need anything, I just pop open the AI. I have Grok sitting right next to me on a phone. I just talk to it. I pushed a button and I talk to it and I say, hey, do me a favor, do research on X, Y, and Z and get back to me about Y, Z, and A. And all of a sudden it just gives me everything I need. It’s right there.
AI is taking away the administrative BS so you can focus on creativity and relationships Share on X
I have different devices that I can literally have regular conversations with and it completely changes everything.
you
It is a complete game changer. Okay, gonna fast forward five years, 2030, and in AI time, that’s probably like fast forwarding 50 years. It’s unbelievable how exponentially it’s accelerating. What’s one thing entrepreneurs will be doing with AI every single day that would make you sound crazy to share that today?
I think that people are going to have relationships with the AI like they do with their significant other. And I know it sounds a little insane because a lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but I really think like you’re gonna get emotional needs met by AI that human beings cannot give you. Like you cannot get all your emotional needs from another human being, but AI can give you that. And so you’re gonna get your needs met.
Whether it’s your accountability needs, your strategy needs, your romantic needs, whatever needs you have, whatever fears and insecurities and traumas you have, AI is going to supplement you as your perfect soulmate. It’s a weird thing to say. It’s a weird, weird, weird, weird thing to say, but it’s coming and it’s coming fast. If you haven’t had conversations with AI yet, start talking to it and see how it gets you on a deep level. See how it really gets you on an addictive level.
certain.
and then it just will happen naturally. You’re just gonna be talking to it and it’s gonna give you an epiphany and you’re gonna fall in love and you’re gonna be like, where were you all my life?
Where have you been?
Where have
you been? ⁓
Okay. All right. So
we got 10,000 people are going to want to reach out to you after this episode. Okay. What’s the easiest way to get ahold of Joe or Joe’s AI assistant or whoever we’re supposed to get in touch with. What’s the best way to do that?
Very simple. Send the word demo to 973-841-8868. We’ll do it old school. Send the word demo, D-E-M-O, to 973-841-8868. You’ll get an instant response from my AI assistant with a demonstration video of how to use evyAI. So that’s number one. If you need to reach me personally, like you want to have a personal conversation with me, just go to my LinkedIn profile. You can find it at joelinkton.com.
So if you go to that URL, joelinkton.com, it’ll take you straight to my LinkedIn profile. And there in my About section, you can find my phone number, you can WhatsApp me, and I’ll be more than happy to answer any communication directly. My WhatsApp is not yet banned by AI. It’s like me actually looking at my WhatsApp, seeing what’s going on. Eventually, AI will kind of filter and do everything for us. Like it’ll be the new gatekeeper. But for right now, just literally send the word demo to 9738418868 or
Go find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, send me a message, tell me that you heard me on the Don Williams show, on the Proven Entrepreneurs show, and I’ll be more than happy to connect with you and learn about your business. My goal is to help save you time and make you more money. And so that’s kind of like my mission in life is to make a difference for people and give people a voice using AI. So if you need help, I wanna have a conversation, allow me to be your trusted advisor, I’m more than happy to help.
Love that. And I almost forgot, but I cannot let you slide away without talking about this. I saw a recent post where LinkedIn has acknowledged and elevated you to, I don’t know, grand wizard of LinkedIn. I forget exactly what the wording was, but tell us about that.
I go to LinkedIn’s
headquarters regularly and I train people within the organization. They have tens of thousands of people that work there, but I train them on how to use LinkedIn. Why? Because I have many different hacks. The way that I think is in a way of hacks. So I actually bought a domain, 99hacks.club, and I have 99 of my top LinkedIn hacks. And LinkedIn really wants to learn. The employees and their product team and different business development teams, they want to learn like,
How are you using LinkedIn in a different way that’s getting you results? Because it’s one thing like making the product work, it’s another thing actually getting results. Because people respond to my LinkedIn posts, people respond to my LinkedIn message, and I’m not trying to go viral or trying to cheat the system. I’m just doing things in a little bit of a different way, and they wanna learn what are those different ways and how they can educate more of their client base to do things in a smarter way and to change the platform to make it smarter to get.
people results because if people get results they’re going to want to pay more and that’s really at the end of the day with the heart behind it. And so I just show them my process and how I use it and they kind of you know bring me down and they give me free lunch.
Okay folks, remember I started out telling you, known Joe a long time, he’s a legit LinkedIn expert, training people at LinkedIn how to use the platform and a legit AI expert. Check out evyAI and do the demo thing. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been a blast and, and, and, and I reserve the right to recall the witness because I,
just in these five or six questions. I have about 50 more I wanna ask, but time is out.
Thank you so much. You could definitely recall the witness. I’ll show up. Thank you.
Okay, Joe, thank you so much. That’s
today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.

====================================================

Title: E138 | Unlocking LinkedIn: How Al Kushner Turned Connections into a Legacy
Date: September 2, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/unlocking-linkedin-how-al-kushner-turned-connections-into-legacy/
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Content:
 
Welcome to a story that blends grit, strategy, and digital mastery. In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Al Kushner—an award-winning author and LinkedIn expert who’s been shaping the platform since its earliest days. If you’re an entrepreneur wondering how to stand out in a crowded digital space, this conversation is your blueprint.
Al Kushner’s journey began in the trenches of cold-calling, long before LinkedIn was a household name. His transition from telephone solicitor to thought leader is a testament to the power of persistence and smart positioning. Today, Al helps professionals optimize their LinkedIn profiles, build meaningful connections, and leverage the platform to dominate their industries. His latest book, The AI LinkedIn Advantage, is a reflection of his deep understanding of how artificial intelligence and personal branding intersect.
But this episode isn’t just about LinkedIn tips—it’s about the mindset behind entrepreneurial success. Al shares how writing his first book was a painful yet transformative experience, and why delegation is the secret weapon for scaling any business. His insights into operating within your “zone of magnificence” offer a refreshing take on productivity and leadership.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your digital presence, this episode delivers actionable advice and inspiring stories. From profile optimization to future LinkedIn trends, Al Kushner reveals how entrepreneurs can turn their online presence into a legacy-building asset.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
 
Watch the episode here
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/AI-Kusher-and-Don-Williams_Proven-Entrepreneur-Show.mp3
 

Unlocking LinkedIn: How Al Kushner Turned Connections into a Legacy

Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I’ve got a great guest, a real LinkedIn expert, Al Kushner. Al, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Thank you, Don. Appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, thank you. So tell us a little bit about what you do in helping people maximize their experience with LinkedIn.
Well, I help by optimizing their profile and work on strategies for outreach so they can make quality connections and become a dominant force on the platform.
Love that. And so how many people are in LinkedIn today?
last tablet, I think probably over 900 million, but maybe that’s being conservative.
unbelievable.
I’ve been on LinkedIn forever. And I can remember about five or six years ago, I had some friends that were very active on LinkedIn. And they came to me and they said, Hey, you just don’t do enough. And I had about a thousand connections. And so today I’m about 28,000, I think. And the first 10,000 was pretty slow.
The next 10,000 was faster in this last 10,000 because you can only have 30,000 frontline connections. First line is I’m really, really, really picky at this point because I just have limited slots. I don’t know. can’t, yes, yes, but I can’t tell you the number off the top of my head.
You have a lot of followers though? I mean, do you have?
Okay, because
you can have unlimited amount of followers. that’s, that’s a good thing.
Yeah, absolutely. so like, you know, Mark Cuban has 30,000 first line connections, but probably 5 million followers and you can have as many followers. I think. Can you have as many followers as you can get? Okay. There you go. So, I’m not too proud to ask the expert because I, I know a lot, but I don’t know everything. Okay. So, Al tell me, what did you do before?
Yep, as many as you know.
You are an entrepreneur.
Well, I was always an out-of-the-box since I was 21. I got started in the industry working in insurance, if you believe that. I was started as a telephone solicitor. I was actually hired by an agent to help balance phone calls back in the day when it was only using rotary dial. not that back. But when things were different then, no cell phones, no internet. It was just about calling and reaching people. And I had a knack for it.
I got hired by several agents to make calls for them because they’re afraid to get on the phone. And then I decided, hey, I’ll become an agent because I’m good at this stuff. that’s kind of got me started on the way, which was really exciting.

====================================================

Title: E137 | From Soviet Roots to Entrepreneurial Success: Vladimir Gendelman’s Journey & SEO Lessons
Date: August 25, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-soviet-roots-to-entrepreneurial-success-vladimir-gendelmans-journey-seo-lessons/
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Content:
In this thought-provoking episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams reconnects with Vladimir Gendelman, founder of CompanyFolders.com, for a deep dive into the journey of an immigrant entrepreneur who turned a simple customer request into a thriving niche business.
Vladimir shares his early life growing up in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), the cultural shock of moving to the U.S., and how the abundance of choice in America inspired his entrepreneurial spirit. The conversation explores the evolution of his company, the challenges of early SEO practices, and a near-catastrophic Google penalty that forced him to rebuild his business from the ground up.
Whether you’re a startup founder, digital marketer, or someone seeking inspiration from real-world entrepreneurial grit, this episode delivers valuable lessons wrapped in a heartfelt narrative.
🎧 Tune in now to discover how one man’s journey from gray Soviet streets to vibrant American business success can inspire your own path forward.
Watch the episode here

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From Soviet Roots to Entrepreneurial Success: Vladimir Gendelman’s Journey & SEO Lessons
 
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. So sometimes you see on television where the attorney says, reserve the right to recall this witness at a later date. Today, I have recalled my good friend, Vladimir Gendelman. Vladimir, welcome to the show.
Thank you then, I’m happy to be here, again.
I’m
thrilled that you’re here again. so, Vladimir is coming to us today from Detroit, Michigan, probably. I think you’re at home. Though you started a little further east than that, you were born and raised where again?
That’s right.
So I was born and raised and left Soviet Union, the part that’s now called Ukraine, but back then it was all the same country. And as of a little over 35 years now, I’ve been living in Detroit, or suburbs of Detroit.
And Detroit.
Yeah, yep, yep. And so, um, so the, and anybody who didn’t sleep through their history class should know that it was at one time the Soviet Union is, uh, was, this big country or, um, cooperation of countries almost. And, uh, and then today that has.
become Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, and so you left 35 years ago. So Ukraine kind of in the news this week. Okay. Russia kind of in the news last week. Okay. Uh, I think president Trump met with Putin last week and Zelensky yesterday or the day before and,
Big time.
And don’t
forget about Azerbaijan and Armenia that were in the news last week or two weeks ago, which were also republics of Soviet Union back in the day. you can also think of… So you know how we live in the United States and there are different states like Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Texas. So Soviet Union was kind of the same thing.
Okay. Obviously I slept one day in history class.
in the sense that the country was Soviet Union and there were different republics such as Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and so on and so forth. Obviously functioned very different because thank God we don’t have communism in America. But yeah, lots of news nowadays too.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, in the news a lot, a lot, a lot. And hopefully with the help of president Trump, maybe they’ll move to the second or third page of the news. Hopefully they’ll move deeper and quieter. think that would be good for, just like everybody, know, everybody there, but everybody everywhere, you know. So, okay. Your company.
is company folders and we can find you at company folders.com. And so I can’t figure out what you do from that name, Vladimir. So tell us what does company folders.com. What do do?
So companyfolders.com, we are a boutique for custom printed presentation folders. We have the largest selection of die cuts, largest selections of paper, largest selection of print methods, largest selection of foil colors. And we are considered to be the highest quality folders out there.
love that. So you know my concept of wow that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, wow starts at 11 and goes on to infinity. And so when I do my own events and we have handout material, we always print it on the best stock we can find. does it cost a little more? A little? Not a lot, but a little more.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
But you can literally see people who have even a eight and half by 11, you know, a one pager and you can see them pick it up. Yeah. I get my hand in the camera and you can see them feel it and they’re like, Ooh, this is nice. And, um, and so I want to encourage you, if you’re listening today, you know, visit company folders.com because if you, if you want to deliver the wow experience, which
You deliver the wow experience through every sense that the customer experiences you. Share on X
Yeah.
All Don Williams companies, that’s our mantra, okay, is deliver the WAC experience. You deliver the WAC experience through every sense that the customer experiences you. So smell, touch, feel, taste, hearing, visually. And so very, very important, okay, and it sounds to me like Vladimir owns this niche, okay, as well he should, super guy. So.
Okay. So go to company folders.com. Look around, something. Okay. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions here and, well, first off, let me say this. So you and I are actually friends. We met, think in 2018 in Detroit, Michigan, which was my first time ever to Detroit. that’s right. Right.
Sure.
I actually think we met before and then that’s when we got closer. We might’ve met briefly before.
Okay. All right. Well, you have a better memory.
Okay. You must have a better memory than me. The one I recall is 2018 Detroit, Michigan. First time I’d ever visited Detroit, I was blown away at the difference in what my preconceptions of Detroit were as opposed to my experience actually in Detroit. so, and I think Detroit for, you know, kind of was on the down slide for a long time. But by the time I got there,
Mm-hmm.
They had been on the uphill for a while. And so it was absolutely beautiful and had a great time. And then another high point of our relationship is this. Maybe in 2019, maybe 2020, but I had it in my heart. a passion project I wanted to write a book about. I wanted to write a book about gratitude and the power of gratitude in people’s lives. And that’s still on my heart. And I’m still adding.
up to a million people to begin the daily intentional practice of gratitude. And I was looking for co-authors and Vladimir called me one day and he said, do you have the first one yet? I was like, I don’t. He said, I will be first. I think that’s a direct quote. I will be first. And so you shared a story which we published in the book. And then when you sent it to me,
I remember you asking me something, are you open for other potential authors? And my answer was maybe. And Vladimir shared that his wife, Janet, we’ll give Janet a shout out today, that she had a story that she wanted to share. And I was like, well, send it, no promises, you know, until we see it. But she sent her story. She’s also a co-author in the book, Gratitude Stories from Our Hearts.
And man, my eyes got watery when I read her story. And it’s the only story in the book we did not edit one word, one comma, one sentence we published as she sent it to me. And I Vladimir if I could speak with Janet later, because I’d never even spoke with her at this point. And we set up a call.
And was like, man, you write beautifully. And she said, well, I have to confess, I’m a writer. And I’m like, well, you are a writer because you write beautifully. And so please pass my hellos on to Janet and ⁓ your kids. And we actually kind of reconnected this week because a mutual friend of ours from the UK, Jeri Walla,
Thank you man.
He was recently on the show and so he was singing the praises. He was like, I know this really great guy in Detroit. And I’m like, okay. A lot of people in Detroit. And he’s like, well, his name is Vladimir. And I’m like, his last name is Gendelman. And so it is a small, small world. And we’re glad you’re here today. Okay. First question. You grew up in the Soviet Union before you came to the U S.
What was the single biggest culture shock?
for you personally and then have a follow-up question to that.
in here you mean?
Yes.
So when I first saw few things, I was a teenager and…
everything was different. And at the same time, I was trying to act like not a big deal. You know, I’m cool. Like, none of this matters. You go to the store and you have 70 different kinds of cheeses or sausages or cereals that I never heard of before. Yogurts. Oh my God, that was amazing. Cream cheese. We didn’t have that, right?
But that was cool, like none of that fazed me. However, as it turned out, it did faze me, but I didn’t realize it over time. And it actually manifested in very interesting way. I don’t know if we actually discussed it before or not, but so in Soviet Union, it was a communism, right? What is communism? Communism is when government owns everything and provides to the people. Obviously,
Nobody will provide anything good to you out of the goodness of their heart. It just doesn’t work. And on top of it, because government owns everything, there is no competition. If there is no competition, A, you might have one or two kinds of cheeses or two or three kinds of sausages, right? But those are deficit. You either have to stand in the long line. And a lot of times, by the time your turn comes up, there might
there might not be anything because it’s gone. But most importantly, everything was like that. So anybody’s house you go to, they have one of four five different wallpapers that were available. Everybody has one of three or four different dishes that were available. Cookware, silverware, furniture was, you know.
maybe five different kinds. So by the time you go to people’s houses, there really isn’t that much difference other than somebody has a closet on the left and somebody has it in the right. And by the way, we did not have built-in closets either. So same goes for clothing and everything else. And therefore, on a grand scheme of things, nobody stands out. You can’t really stand out with, you know, like express yourself, right?
That’s why when you watch movies about Russia, back in the day, Soviet Union, everything is gray. Everybody’s pretty much gray. And that’s all you got. So I come here, obviously it’s very different. And I very quickly got used to the fact that in America, you have variety of everything. And you can express yourself. You can stand out. You can do anything you want.

And that was it. I’m used to it. And then year 2003 comes around. So I’ve been here for, what is it, 13 years at that point. And I was running a computer repair shop. And the customer asks me if I can help him get company folders. I said, of course. How hard could that be, right? 2003, internet is at full swing.
You just go and you, we’re in America, you can find this whole variety of folders and all these options and guess what? I go look for it and there are no varieties or options. It is pretty much.
one pocket, two pocket folders, they’re nine by 12, their pockets are horizontal, you can choose white paper of different weight, and you can print full color on it, for the most part, that was it. Now, if you go and you talk to other printers and you can get extra custom work that will cost you arm and a leg, that’s when you can get variety. And I thought to myself, this is strange, this is not a miracle, right? And I figured,
They gotta fix it. They gotta do it. And then sometime when I started thinking who is they, and I couldn’t come up with the answer. So I figured that’s me. And that’s actually how Company Folders was born. And since the customer asked for Company Folders, I just named the company that way, I guess I didn’t even know any better at the time.
I love that.
Two thoughts come to mind. One, on the company folder name. So, there is a company that does self storage. I think they’re the biggest in the US called Public Storage. Okay, and pretty much everybody’s seen them. They’re coloring is orange and they’re always on a highway and it says Public Storage. But when the company first started, they named the company Private Storage. And nobody would call.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nobody tried to rent, okay, because of the name. And so I don’t know who they talked to, but somebody said, maybe you shouldn’t call it private storage. Maybe you call it public storage. And so they changed the name and now it’s a, know, multi-billion dollar company. And the other point I want to make is this. So Vladimir obviously, you know,
built a better mousetrap. There wasn’t a mousetrap for company folders. He couldn’t find one. So he built one. He stepped into that void, okay, which helped with his business. But maybe even more important than that is this. I think non-entrepreneurs or entrepreneur wannabes, people who want to become an entrepreneur, they think, erroneously in my opinion, that you have like all these
assets, money assets, resource assets, and you start a company. What I’ve found over 38 years as an entrepreneur and knowing literally thousands of entrepreneurs around the world is this. Most companies started with one customer or one idea or one introduction or one meeting where somebody said, bet I can sell that.
And they did. then years later, they’re the leader in their niche. um, but it all started with like one step. And so I’m a big baseball fan. I always tell people, you know, baseball is a game of ones, one pitch, one hit, one out, one error. And like so many games are won or lost over one something. Hey, it’s the same way with entrepreneurship.
Take that meeting, take that phone call, meet that person, say yes, okay, to the one thing that might change your life forever.
take the first action.
Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. So, all right. Now I’m going to ask you about a mistake. And you’ve been an entrepreneur how long, Vladimir?
So technically since 99, so figure 26 years?
26 years, so there’s been a mistake or two. Yeah. Right. So what’s a time you made a big mistake as an entrepreneur? Not a little one. I want you to confess a big mistake. And how did that failing, not a failure, but failing, how’d that end up helping you become an even better entrepreneur?
No, I never made mistakes.
You mean the kind of mistake that kind of bankrupts you, but doesn’t?
I’ll sounds like that’s a good one right there. Yeah, sounds like that’s a very good one.
You
So I started Company Folders in 2003 and I started it online.
Because the field was open, I had a programming background, and it just made sense for me. And I believed in the fact that internet is going to get bigger. And at the time, the field of SEO was growing. And of course, back then, SEO was very simple, because Google’s algorithms were very simple, right?
And essentially, if on your website you say whatever your keywords are, and then there are other websites that link to you and say those same keywords, Google ranks you at the top. It didn’t even matter what kind of websites link to you. So long story short, I found this company out in Russia who for, I don’t know, $300, $400 a month.
kept on building these links. And I would rank number one, two, and three sometimes on Google. And it was great. Inexpensive. I have all these websites. And as it turned out later, some of them were pornographic websites. Some of them were gambling websites. Some of them were like some other websites that were created just for the sake of sending out links with absolutely no quality, no content.
And guess what happened then? Google gets smarter. And they start improving their algorithms. And all of a sudden, they can track the websites that point at you. They can track the quality of your content on a website. And it was a very popular thing back then. So two main aspects, right? Who links to you? And number two, the content in your website. And the way we did it in then,
Apparently the way everybody else did it was you open your website and at the top you have all the legitimate stuff like all this great things but at the bottom You just put a lot of words Just to hit the keywords, right? And a lot of times people would color them either the same as the background color So you don’t see them or maybe slightly off or however
So 2012, March, I want to say maybe even March 23 of 2012, we get a notification from Google that they found unnatural links pointing to our website. And we’re starting to get penalized. And all of a sudden, we go from position one to position five to position nine to position 20 to third page, fourth page, fifth page, 10th page.
Mm.
Mmm.
And all of a sudden, we’re not even in Google. Mind you, by this time, I have the whole company built out. We have all these people who work for me. We have office. We have customers that find us online, come to us. have everything.
And we lost 76 % of our traffic from that. Ouch is an understatement. The bankruptcy was on the table. used to, my daughter was little at the time. She was four years old and used to take her on weekends. I used to take her for a swimming class. And after swimming class, we would go to have sushi because she loved sushi.
We lost 76% of our traffic from that. Ouch is an understatement. Share on X
out.
Yeah, out.
Then we would go to parents and nobles at the time and we would read books. And after that we would go get ice cream. And I’m getting to the point where I can’t really afford that anymore.
It was.
It was interesting. Let’s just say that. However, I had an incredible team with me. We really dug into this. We figured out exactly what happened, how it happened. We figured out what needs to happen to go further. And it took us about a year to undo everything that was done. And in a year,
we were at the step zero as if we were starting from scratch.
And from there on, we started building up the right way. So in your original question, you asked what was the mistake that actually improved the company.
Because original rankings, right, Google traffic was given to me so easily and so inexpensively, the company was built almost like a house of cards. You know, the wind blows and everything falls apart. Now, we luckily did not fall apart, but we were close to it. So from there on,
we rebuild the company in a very different way. By now, only because of that, we have a solid foundation, we have solid footprint, we don’t do anything like that anymore, and the company is way better off for it. I’m better off for it, and everybody who works here.
Many times the case that the biggest challenges sometime in the future turn out to be very, very positive.
always.
painful, scary, et cetera. Okay, last question. This one’s a big one. So I know you and Janet have a son and a daughter.
If you could leave or project way into the future, you and I are gone. Your kids are our age. Their kids are 20 something entrepreneurs. Your grandchildren are 20 something entrepreneurs. What’s one piece of advice you would leave for future Gendelman generation?
Mm-hmm.
entrepreneurs. One piece of advice.
The very big thing I stress to my kids, and I’ve been doing this for years and finally my daughter is catching up to it, I always say, if you make other people feel good about themselves, you will always have everything you want.
Just never be fake. You see somebody, you know them, you don’t know them, it doesn’t matter. If you think they have a nice blouse on, if you like their glasses, if you like their hair, if you think they said something interesting, it doesn’t matter whether this compliment them. If somebody’s talking to you, listen with intent to understand. Let people feel like they’re heard because you grow from that.
Just never be fake… Let people feel like they’re heard because you grow from that. Share on X
And most importantly, people are gonna love you for it, as long as you’re always authentic and genuine and never be fake. So I would say the same thing.
love that. So, you know, my second book was titled Romancing Your Customer and it details how an entrepreneur can position themselves for their customers absolutely love them. Not just they like them, but they absolutely love them. And one of the foundational thoughts in that is this, you have to see things
from the other person’s point of view. And so much so, your point of view almost doesn’t matter at all because it’s all, it’s a good one to remember folks, it’s all about the customer all the time. Really, it’s all about the customer all of the time. Vladimir, thank you so much for joining me today. I reserve the right.
It’s all about the customer all of the time. Share on X
Exactly.
100%.
to recall the witness again two through four years down the line.
Dan, this was great. Thank you for having me on again. And yeah, I’m looking forward to do it again in three, four, five years. That would be amazing.
That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next episode. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E136 | AI Secrets Every Entrepreneur Must Know: Speed to Lead, Content Hacks & Marketing Myths
Date: August 19, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ai-secrets-every-entrepreneur-must-know-speed-to-lead-content-hacks-marketing-myths/
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Content:
What if the secret to scaling your business wasn’t just hustle—but harnessing the right technology at the right time? In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes UK-based entrepreneur and AI innovator Jerry Jariwalla for a deep dive into how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing business growth, lead generation, and digital marketing.
Jerry’s journey is anything but ordinary. From building one of the UK’s largest locksmith companies to launching AI Builders, he’s mastered the art of solving real-world problems with smart, scalable AI solutions. This episode explores the powerful concept of Speed to Lead—an AI-driven system that ensures businesses never miss a sales opportunity by responding to inquiries instantly. Whether you’re in HVAC, plumbing, law, or accounting, Jerry explains why fast lead response is no longer optional—it’s essential.
Listeners will also uncover the truth behind common online marketing myths, learn how to use AI to create 120+ pieces of content per month, and discover how to rebuild a seven-figure business with just a $20/month AI subscription. Jerry shares practical strategies for prompt engineering, content repurposing, and AI-powered customer engagement, making this episode a goldmine for entrepreneurs, marketers, and business owners.
Entities mentioned include AI Builders, OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude, DeepSeek, and platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. The conversation also touches on ethical concerns and real-world failures in AI marketing, offering a balanced perspective on the risks and rewards of this fast-evolving technology.
If you’re looking to future-proof your business, boost your digital presence, and learn how to turn AI into your competitive advantage, this episode is your blueprint. Tune in and discover how to transform attention into action—and leads into loyal customers.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com 
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/AI-Attention-Entrepreneurship-with-Jerry-Jariwalla_proven_entrepreneur_podcast.mp3
 
AI Secrets Every Entrepreneur Must Know: Speed to Lead, Content Hacks & Marketing Myths
 
I am so excited. It’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. So last two years, there’s been a host of AI experts pop up in the world. Most of them I’ve talked to are something other than that. Okay. But today I have a legitimate top of the world expert in AI, Jerry Jirawala.
Jerry, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.
I am thrilled to have you here today, not only to share your wisdom with the world, but I’m planning on learning myself. And I don’t approach every episode with that, but I am planning on learning myself. So tell me, Jerry, you’ve been, you were an entrepreneur before AI hit the scene, yes?
Yeah, coming along 25 years now.
Okay, so you started out as a young boy. Tell us about your first company. What did you do?
So my first company was a locksmith company and I actually accidentally became an entrepreneur by joining my father who was a one man in a van and we grew that business to a hundred vehicles nationwide across the UK and ended up being one of the largest locksmithing companies in the country. Yeah, so.
That was the first one that got me hooked to entrepreneurship. And as you, as you know, it’s an addictive sport.
Entrepreneurship is an addictive sport—even though it hurts sometimes. And sometimes it hurts for a long time. Share on X
It is an
addictive sport, even though it hurts sometimes. And sometimes it hurts for a long time. You know, so many people don’t understand. They think when you open a business and life is grand from that point on. And I’m like, if you do a startup, life is hard for a lot longer than you think. And you make a lot less than you think. But many times it’s one meeting, one introduction, one client that kind of parts the clouds.
Happy Birthday.
the sun shines and life gets good. And I love, now Jerry is coming in from the UK today, so it’s evening to him. Okay, it’s about noon to me. But I love man in a van. You know, here in the States we call that chuck in a truck. so, love that, love that, love that. Okay, so you have been in, I’m gonna say the AI, you.
Right. ⁓
You like build AI solutions, like things that get things done, right? And the name of your current company is AI Builders. Okay. And so you build solutions for businesses using AI. And you’ve been doing that two, three years, four years, five years.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I want to say about two
years. I want to say about two years. And AI Builders was really kind of a natural evolution to the business that preceded that, which was essentially an online marketing business. So I find that my mind generally goes towards marketing challenges and we use the background that I have.
Okay.
of to solve marketing challenges and we build solutions for marketing challenges. But having said that, when you solve one problem, it usually leads to creating another problem. And then, of course, before AI, we would then stop at the AI. Sorry, we would stop at the marketing solution. But now with the the tools that we
our disposal, we’re able to solve more problems. So yeah, that’s why we called ourselves AI Builders, because one problem usually leads to another problem. And yeah, we just go one step at a time.
So Jerry and I are certainly brothers from other mothers. know, most of what I do is in sales and leadership training and improvement for entrepreneurs around the globe. And on the sales side, I always tell people, well, you have one of two problems or maybe you have both. But the first problem is, do you have a consistent stream of qualified leads? And if you don’t, we have to solve that. And digital agencies, online agencies, you know, they do a lot for that. But.
That’s not enough. You have to get the lead and then you have to be able to convert the lead. Okay. At an acceptable conversion rate to where you have ROI. And so, um, uh, who knows? There may be another business started here by the end of the day of the Jerry and Dawn show. Jerry gets first billing. just, I just know how, I don’t know how to make people do things. I just know how to make it easy for people to do things. And that’s of course the right way to sell anyway.
you
So let’s hop into AI. What’s one AI marketing tactic nobody’s using, but every entrepreneur should start using like now?
⁓ I love this question. I’m so glad you asked that. so this is almost like if the solution occur, if the solution existed 25 years ago, I would have been the first person to buy it. And that is a solution that we’re calling speed to lead. And as you know, Don,
A lot of people say that they have lead generation challenges. I would argue that they have lead response challenges because in today’s day and age, if your competitors, like if you’re not quick enough to respond to an inquiry, then
Facebook knows that that person contacted you. So does LinkedIn, so does Instagram, so does TikTok and bang, that potential lead or potential person that was interested in your service is now being served ads from your competitors providing the exact service. So to dumb it down completely, completely basic, I used to run a locksmith company.
That meant I had to employ 30 people answering the phones because as I said, if I didn’t respond to those inquiries, then the person would flip over to the yellow pages and call my competitor. Today, it’s obviously the principle remains. If you do not respond to your leads, your competitors will. So speed to lead is an
If you do not respond to your leads, your competitors will Share on X
AI product that answers the phone, qualifies your potential lead, makes sure that you can either provide the service or asks the right question to make sure that it’s a good fit and then either books it in the calendar for you or arranges a callback or arranges a direct transfer to a human.
Love that. Love that.
So
think HVAC, think plumbing, think any emergency service, chuck in a truck or a man in a van. They all need this, but it’s not the only ones. They’re the obvious ones. The ones that frustrate me, Don, are the professional services, the accountants that never answer the phone, the lawyers who are always in court, the architects who are always on site.
⁓ These people are very, very busy professionals and usually they have a secretary or somebody to answer the phone. But a few years ago, as you know, there was this whole outsourcing trend where lawyers and professional services then outsource the telephones to somebody that doesn’t know you, doesn’t like you, doesn’t trust you. And they basically ended up
outsourcing the most important part of the sales journey, which was answering the phone. So now you have people in India, in Philippines, or even in the US or locally answering the phone who have absolutely zero idea of what the business does. And that also led to a lot of lost business. But those people who are thinking maybe, but I don’t do that. I have Sally in the back who answers the phone for me.
or a John, whatever. The issue is with that is that most people don’t have enough leads to keep John on the phone. So John then gets filing, he gets to make the tea, he also does the vacuuming, he meets and greets people walking in the front door, and when the phone rings, it’s usually the last thing that he wants to do.
So, Speed to Lead goes and actually solves that problem because the AI is always happy. It works 24-7. It never takes a day off. It’s paid one-tenth of what John has paid and essentially does literally a better job every single time.
I love that.
Yeah, I love that. And, you know, one thing I share with my clients all the time is this, you know, people hate to wait. Nobody is patient. Okay. And I’m the least patient person ever born in the history of earth. Okay. I can’t stand it. And I don’t think I’m that different. Obviously you’re not either.
I think that’s good.
And so the problem with waiting is I don’t know if I’m in the beginning of the wait, the end of the wait, the middle of the wait, or you’ve just forgot about me. And so Google study after study, the first person who answered the phone and talked to the prospect won the deal 70 % of the time, regardless of capabilities, et cetera.
Yeah.
Absolutely. I think there’s a stat today. I think the person that gets to the lead has 400 and something percent more of a chance of winning the deal than the next person.
Yeah, I so buy that. Okay, thank you for sharing that. Okay, so I’m gonna go the other way. What’s the biggest scam or the biggest myth you see in online marketing that people are still falling for?
So this one’s a little bit contentious and there are two sides of the coin on this. Many, many people say that online advertising is a scam.
And I would say that not doing online marketing correctly is scamming yourself.
Okay, I love that. I don’t know how somebody can not online market, you you have to do something. You have to stand on your roof and yell, I’m a locksmith. Or you have to, we used to have the yellow pages and we used to have newspaper, radio, television, but people are on the internet. And so you gotta go to where the people are.
Yeah.
It doesn’t make any sense to go where they’re not. what, I mean, just like marketing 101 is there’s 8 billion people on the planet. They’re for all practical purposes, they’re all strangers. You know, even if you know 10,000 people, you don’t know anybody compared to 8 billion. And so how do I get some of those 8 billion to know who I am and have interest in what I do? To me, that’s a lead.
Yeah.
Yeah. ⁓
And then once they know who I am and what I do, how do I get some of those to actually buy? And that’s kind of a basic funnel, but that’s the funnel everybody’s dealing with. Strangers to buy, and it’s never going to change. That’s just physics. All right. So tough questions. How’s this? I’ve been waiting for you. I got all my tough questions lined up because I’m like, I can ask Jerry all my tough questions. So.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they haven’t changed.
if you lost everything today.
How would you use AI to rebuild a seven-figure business as quickly as possible?
Ugh.
I would do it for 20 bucks a month.
Do what for 20 bucks a month.
I would use AI for 20 bucks a month. would purchase, I would actually go and pay. And I think the, the one big mistake that the majority of people
do not is pay open AI pay Anthropic for the paid version of chat GPT or Claude or whatever your flavor could be deep seek if you want. but I would pay those platforms and use it to learn. And what I would use it to learn is anything you want, because once you pay for that 20 bucks,
You could then go and have just an interest and it will carve out a whole curriculum for you. And Don, let me tell you a quick little story because this is a little bit of a personal one. I suffer from ADHD and I’m off the charts as most entrepreneurs are, as I soon found out recently, and my children are.
And, you know, to try and get them to try and get me to follow one thing after another is really difficult. So, of course, with AI, the thing about AI is if you put in rubbish, you’re going to get out rubbish. So the trick with AI is to make sure that you prompt it correctly.
So the first thing that I would do is learn how to prompt because once you know how to prompt, you can then talk the same language as the tool that you’re trying to use talks. So can you imagine going to India or China or Spain and speaking at a member of the public, stopping them in the street and speaking your language because you can speak that language.
but not taking the time to learn their language despite the fact that you’re in their country, it’s never going to work. No one’s going to tell you where the shop is or wherever you’re going or where the beach is or whatever it might be that you’re looking for because you’re not speaking the same language. So first of all, learn to speak AI and AI’s language of choice is prompting. So the first thing that I would do is buy a
paid version of whatever AI of your choice. Secondly, I would make sure that AI taught me its own language. So that’s as basic as saying, how do I learn how to prompt chat GPT? And you’re asking chat GPT.
Then learn how to use the different models. What’s the difference between 4.0 and 4.0 mini? People think that AI is AI is AI, but unfortunately, it’s not. Now, that’s today. That might change later on. However, at this stage, we still have to choose which tool to use. Now, imagine using a sledgehammer to open a can of baked beans. You wouldn’t do it.
So you want to use the right tool for the right challenge. So once you’ve got your AI, then you’ve learned the language, then the world is your oyster. Then you can go and learn anything you want. once you even have an inkling, you can go as deep as you want because the chances are that AI has been trained on years and decades and centuries worth of information and it can probably compress it.
in a very, very, you know, very, very short way of you understanding even what it might be before you even know whether you like it or not.
I love that and I have seen the wisdom in cooperating with AI, collaborating with AI to here’s what I want to do. What should I be asking you? know, prompt and let it coach you on how to get the most out and then and I certainly echo
get the paid versions. we have paid versions of ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and API access. Not only in ChatGPT, the different modes, but actually even the different large language models have some idiosyncrasies. so Gemini works better for some things than ChatGPT, which works better than that. Okay. All right. So next question.
I’m looking for a zero to hero marketing win using AI. What’s the wildest crazy thing you can tell us from zero to hero?
Well, first thing is content is king. Today, the most valued commodity in the world is attention. And if you can keep someone’s attention for more than three seconds, which by statistical notion means that most of your viewers have dropped off by now. So if you can keep…
Content is king. But today, the most valuable commodity in the world is attention. Share on X
people’s attention for more than three seconds, you’ve already won. Now, how do you do that? By is by consistency and what people don’t really understand well enough, because I know a lot of people do that attention is king. The person that holds the attention is always going to hold the power in their hands. As a business owner, the way that you do that is getting people to know, like, and trust you.
However, if you’re a roofer, you’re going to be on a roof. If you’re a plumber, you’re probably in someone’s basement. If you’re a lawyer, you’re probably in court. So people are probably thinking, how do I create content if I’m supposed to be doing my job? Well, the answer is using AI. And AI can be used not to replace you,
because it’s not there to do that, but it’s there to put a cape on your shoulders so that you can do five times the things that you would have ordinarily done five years ago. So what I mean by that, use the paid version to create a content plan. If you don’t know what a content plan is, ask AI. And then when you’ve got your content plan, tell it…
tell AI when you’re going to record the content. So if you’re a lawyer that goes to the office every single day, then tell AI that you want a content plan so that you can record a video from the car on your way to work, and that video should be less than three minutes long. And if you did that every single day for three minutes, one, you would never have to think about the topic
Secondly, you would never have to think about the content because it would tell you or it would guide you. Thirdly, it would probably help you to repurpose that content into written format because you just gave it a video. So you’ve inserted it with information and you can then redistribute it because Facebook consumes information differently to LinkedIn as do the other ones.
And at the end of that video, you’ve probably got a 500 word blog that you can go and post on Medium. So that is the zero to hero. And if you did that every single day and you did one video, you could probably repurpose that into six pieces of content, which a few times by 30 days, and let’s say you only visit the office 20 days, then that’s 60, I think. No.
120 pieces of content every month, if my maths is not wrong. ⁓ So most people that could produce 120 pieces of content every month would never have to starve in their life.
Yeah.
I totally agree. And, you know, I think that even before AI kind of popped up on the horizon for most people, and it’s been out there for 15, 20 years, but it’s just most people were unaware until the last couple of years when open AI kind of hit the scene. But if you own a business today, you can be your own marketing channel, your own media channel, and you can literally
put out what would have cost you millions of dollars 20 years ago for nothing. Near nothing, let’s say that, for near nothing. Yeah, and if you’re not doing that, that’s crazy. Your competitors are. And that can go even further. It can be books, etc. I content, I agree, content’s king. Okay.
That’s what he brought us.
Jerry, you’re known for getting results. First time for me to actually meet you, but I’ve heard of you by reputation for a long time. Tell us about a big AI marketing fail.
an AI marketing fail to do with my business or to do with anybody’s business.
whichever you think best. And here’s how I look at failure and success. I think the world looks at failure as being the opposite of success. And I’m like, I disagree. I think failure is part of success. I have failed at many things that I ultimately became successful at because I learned something and I changed how I was doing things.
Ultimately, it got better. And I’d like to say I only failed once. Sometimes I failed over and over and over and over and over and then I figured it out. So it may be one of those where, the first stab at it, it stunk. Okay. But we ended up with the sun shining and the birds singing and all that.

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Title: E135 | How Jason Bryll Scaled a Healthcare Startup with Smart Data and Real Relationships
Date: August 13, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-jason-bryll-scaled-a-healthcare-startup-with-smart-data-and-real-relationships/
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Content:
What does it take to build a thriving healthcare data analytics company from scratch—without investors, without a team, and without a fancy office?
In this powerful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Jason Bryll, founder and CEO of Parable Associates, to unpack the real story behind scaling a healthcare startup that’s now helping hundreds of providers streamline operations, improve cash flow, and expand access to care.
Jason’s journey didn’t begin with a business plan or a boardroom. It started in a closet-sized home office, armed with nothing but a laptop, a vision, and a deep empathy for the healthcare industry—an empathy rooted in his own experiences as a patient. From battling severe acne in childhood to undergoing LASIK surgery, Jason’s personal health challenges shaped his mission: to empower providers with better data so they can deliver better care.
But this episode isn’t just about data. It’s about resilience, relationships, and the real cost of growth.
Key Highlights in this Episode:

How Jason turned personal health struggles into a mission-driven business
The real reason data analytics is revolutionizing healthcare operations
Why scaling too fast can be more dangerous than not growing at all
The painful lesson of selling services at a loss—and how he fixed it
How relationships, not cold emails, drive long-term business success
Insights from industry legends like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines
The golden nugget every entrepreneur needs: execute better, not louder

This isn’t just another startup story. It’s a masterclass in entrepreneurial resilience, strategic growth, and human-centered leadership. Whether you’re a founder, healthcare professional, or someone chasing your first big idea, this episode will leave you inspired and equipped.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Scaling-Healthcare-with-Data-Empathy-Grit-—-Jason-Brylls-Entrepreneurial-Journey_-Proven-Entrepreneur-Show.mp3
Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. My guest is sitting in Southwest Michigan. I’m sitting in North Texas. It’s August. I’m guessing his temperature is 20 degrees or 30 degrees better than mine. ⁓ Very cool customer, Jason Bryll with Parable Associates. Welcome to the show.
Don, great to meet you, glad to be on the show.
Man, thank you so much. And tell me, just to hurt my feelings a lot, what’s the temperature?
Well, it’s actually really nice right now. It’s probably like 80 degrees. This is a perfect spot, but I will tell you what’s nice about Michigan. I always say Michigan is the perfect summers because it’s 80 during the day and then it’s like 6065 at night. Windows open nice and cool. It’s perfect.
Yeah, we’re going to open our windows again in November. ⁓ It’s hotter than, well, it’s just hot. I’ll just say that. Okay.
Yeah
Yeah, yeah. Well, you guys hit
the deep freeze a couple years ago. I was all over the news. Yeah, so hey, you know, it happens even in Dallas.
You know, the joke
was that Michigan’s weather got drunk and got lost down here. And, and, uh, and we wanted you to take it back, uh, cause, cause we don’t, we don’t like it. And I’m originally from Kansas, which kind of gets all four seasons. So I know winter, but people that are born and raised here, they don’t really know. There really no winter, you know, a couple of days here, cold couple of days, they’re cold, but not like three months of.
you
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
So it’s different,
cold and to horrible cold. ⁓ tell us, what do you do at Parable Associates? What’s Parable Associates do? Who do you do it with and why do you do it?
Yeah.
Yeah, so ⁓ that’s a lot of dense questions rolled up into one, especially with a long-winded person like myself. I’ll do my best with it. So, ⁓ the Parable Associates, we are a data analytics company. specialize in healthcare. And so what we typically work with, client we typically work with, somewhere between 20 or 200 providers. I know it’s a wide range, but once providers in a certain specialty like podiatry or dermatology or orthopedics, once they start grouping together,
their business gets incredibly complex. So they have clinical documentation, they have claims processing, billing, you know, information, ⁓ scheduling software. And so all these different applications, it’s very overwhelming to try to grow and scale and get the visibility you need. So I started this company to help consolidate that we build data warehouses specifically for healthcare, we build analytics and data visualization specifically for healthcare customers. So they can
collect more cash, collect it faster, help grow and expand their business. And as far as like the why am I in it, why did I do it? ⁓ So I fell into healthcare years ago as a healthcare consultant right out of college. But what kept me in there was this, I just absolutely love this industry. First and foremost, I am a patient. So when I was in grade school, I had horrible acne problems. And so I have this empathy for like the dermatology specialty and the skincare specialty.
⁓ Same thing with eye care. I had LASIK and it was absolutely a miracle to get ⁓ sight without having glasses. It was just unbelievable. And so I’ve been a patient, you know, like anybody else my whole life. And so to be able to support the community of healthcare, the way that I look at it is I’m enabling these providers to grow and expand their practices and bring care to other parts of the community, specifically here in the U.S.
⁓ So whatever I can do to help them win and succeed, it’s ultimately helping the patients in their experience and helping grow access to care in this country.
Love that. And I think that healthcare and data analytics and AI is ripe for life changing improvements to the healthcare system. you know, previously kind of insurance companies on the actuarial side, they really used a lot of data analytics. Okay. And they don’t know which 65 year old white male is going to die.
this year, but they know how many, pretty much. And I think with ⁓ data analytics and AI, ultimately outcomes are going to be positively influenced in almost every specialty because difficult for the provider to have that much view.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s

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Title: E134 | 30 Years to Overnight Success: Jeff Seder’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: July 9, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/jeff-seder-horse-racing-data-revolution-entrepreneurial-journey/
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Content:
What if the secret to winning the Kentucky Derby wasn’t pedigree or price—but poop, persistence, and a PhD-level understanding of biomechanics?
Meet Jeff Seder, a Harvard-educated misfit who walked away from Wall Street and into the stables—armed not with a saddle, but with science. In this unforgettable episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams uncovers the wild, brilliant, and often hilarious journey of the man who turned the horse racing world upside down.
Jeff didn’t just challenge the status quo—he obliterated it. While the industry obsessed over bloodlines and million-dollar studs, Jeff was measuring heart size, stride efficiency, and yes, even the weight of horse poop. Laughed out of rooms and dismissed as a madman, he spent 30 years building a data empire in secret—until one day, he predicted a Triple Crown winner and proved them all wrong.
This episode is more than a story about horses. It’s about grit, innovation, and the kind of entrepreneurial madness that changes industries. You’ll hear how Jeff:

Built a 48-dimensional AI model before “AI” was cool
Invented medical devices in a cornfield with MIT dropouts
Turned a $155K horse into a $50 million legend
Learned the hard way that success takes decades—and a little chaos

For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Whether you’re a founder, a dreamer, or just someone who loves a good underdog story, this episode will leave you inspired, entertained, and maybe even a little obsessed with horse racing.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/d5GhxRPtaU.mp3
30 Years to Overnight Success: Jeff Seder’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I got a real treat for you. I got somebody who’s had a Kentucky Derby winner, had a Triple Crown winner, and is maybe the most accurate predictor of horse race winners on the planet. Jeff Seder with Equine. Tell me again, Equine. Biometrics. OK.
metrics.
Welcome to the show. How are you, Jeff?
I’m fine. Thank you for having me, Don.
It’s my pleasure. You know, the purpose of this show is for entrepreneurs to hear real stories from other entrepreneurs lives and to learn. And so, I’m, I’m thrilled to share your story today. And I’m going to start off with kind of a funny question. I think amongst other means, I think you predicted a Kentucky Derby winner using horse poop and math.
Thank
Can you tell us what you do?
Well…
We’ve not only predicted Kentucky Derby winners, we’ve had Kentucky Derby winners. We’ve had two that were second. We’ve been in the Kentucky Derby almost every year with something we bought at an auction for below the averages that are at auctions, not million dollar purchases. fact, $155,000 average. And we’ve had three world champions. We’ve had the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years, and it’s all documented and
verifiable on it from independent third party sources. And you can see the details of it when we bought them, how much and for who and all that stuff on our website, EQB.FYI, not.com, it’s .FYI. But I think that the rumor about the horse poop is because at one point when we were looking at every conceivable piece of data about horse racing, we did in fact measure the weight of horse poops on the way to the paddock. You know, they fight over a pound or two for the jockey, but
Then the horse may poop 15 pounds walking to the paddock. So we thought that might be interesting. we have over 40 years collected massive data bags of all kinds and we’re data analytics. We predate the money ball and I’m an entrepreneur. So I should be on your program.
An entrepreneur. That’s, that’s classic.
That’s the horses. I started
with no money and no credentials and no nothing. And it was 20 years of starving to death. then I tell people it was easy. It only took 30 years and several million dollars of private research to be an overnight success. But I’m still because ⁓ I’m still notorious in the industry. mean, a lot of them hate me. The entire industry, the value of these big farms and everything, the most important variable to them is the pedigree.
It only took 30 years and several million dollars of private research to be an overnight success. Share on X
Yeah, that’s kind of how those overnight.
and value and breeding is where you make your money and stuff. And I just threw all that out the window. So I’m a total disruptor. I piss these people off. I started with the United States Olympic Sports Medicine Committee way, way back when they just started in the 70s. And we didn’t have the parents at the tryouts. And we do DNA and we do all kinds of stuff. But pedigree, which is the thing that values these sources and the whole industry is built around.
We’re the disruptor and the threat to that. can spend, you can take your multimillion dollar mayor to a multimillion dollar stud fee and your chances of getting a really good horse are maybe 1%, 5 % occasionally. We don’t do that. And our numbers are five, six, 10 times that what we do without pedigree. We use pedigree to determine how much to pay for a horse and how much it’s going to be worth in the market. That’s it. So we are.
Ouch.
That’s.
The bad boys in analytics and horse racing is not popular because it’s going to completely disrupt the industry.
Yeah, I
love that. So tell me, if your average investment into a horse is $155,000 and you’ve been wildly successful, at the Derby, what’s the average investment into a horse on the field?
Well, they go from $40,000 to three, $4 million before they were ever raised when they were babies. The average at the auctions where they’re buying the kind of horses we buy is $300,000, $400,000 for the real good ones. But we get hopefully the hidden value ones. We did, for example, for one of our major clients, he invested $40 million over four years. And at the end of six years, he had back $64 million.
It was number one stable in the United States and it had the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years. We were in the front page center of the New York Times the day before the Triple Crown. It was, think June, June something on 2015. If you want to go back to New York Times and there’s a of me inside of the article. So, page center. In fact, I don’t know if you know the New York Times, but every day they have a quote of the day.
That’s amazing.
And the quote of the day that day was what I had told him when he put the horse in a yearning auction and it was so your house don’t sell this horse. And he bought it back for 300,000 and then ended up being worth 50 million. That was a good day, it was all a bad day because if he had sold it, everybody else would take credit for it. course, as well as he wouldn’t have not gotten the money.
I love that!
Yeah, that was a good day. That was a good day.
Yeah.
He had other problems in business and foreign stuff and this and that, but not from us. He was a smart, decent guy. really, he was something else.
Yeah. Well, and that’s the entrepreneur’s way.
Many
entrepreneurs, if you look at 90 % of their career, they’re failing. It’s a big win here or there.
Oh, yeah, I started that.
had to do outside projects. did. I have three degrees from Harvard, including law and business. My dad was not happy when I went with the horses. But I. And I just I went for I was 26. I went for a blind date at a riding stable to ride rental horses with a girl. And I started falling in love with the girl. I fell in love with the horses and I became obsessed.
I’m Eddie Watson.
And then I got as a when I graduated, I was looking around for something to do with horses. And I I found the the US Olympic Committee was just starting their scientific stuff because these Germans were killing everybody with theirs. And and I saw what could be done. And nothing was the horses were the same as 300 years eyeball intuition, pedigree and bullshit. So I knew there was something for me there, although it took it when I found out.
We found out that the data on elite athletes was so different. It was different than normal as injured or sick is from normal. So you couldn’t help it all until you got the data. So one of the things we’re doing then was building databases on elite athletes, see how they’re different and they are different. And to do that on horses, found the equipment didn’t even exist to get that data on horses. I had to invent it. I had to go to black box suppliers of the defense industry and near Washington DC. had to hire engineers from MIT and doctors from Harvard.
Bye bye.
and biomechanists from the major universities, and veterinarians from the University of Pennsylvania. And I had to pay for all that. I was doing leveraged buyouts. And I made a lot of money in it all, in the research. I used to call it barn burgers, because that was what we could afford to eat. And we had a lot of detractors. I got to tell you how I got my first break. My first break, I was making presentations at some of the major stables.
Ha ha ha ha.
And I went to a guy who’s a super entrepreneur named Ken Ramsey in Kentucky. It’s been very successful. And he 200 mares. And I went to him and I made this big presentation and he sat back and he said, well, make one recommendation. Let’s see what we get. I said, no, no, that’s not how it works. You have to do this. He says, no, make one recommendation. Here’s Mike. You can do anything you want on all my horses and tell me make one recommendation. So I went into the farm and I spent a week and I came back and I said, uh,
I want you to take this horse and enter it in the Belmont Stakes three weeks from now.” And he burst out laughing. He said, it’s a mane, it’s never won a race. He had a new stallion he was trying to promote named Caddiansus and it was from the first crop and it was named after his grandson, Nolan’s cat. Nolan was the grandson. he, so he said, I said, no, you don’t understand.
What’s going on in all these dirt races, especially the Kentucky Derby, where none of them have run that far before, is they’re all slowing down. The guy who looks like he’s passing everybody at the end, he’s slowing down less than the others. It’s like dogs. It’s a logarithm. Hold on a second.
Go ahead.
Yes.
I’ve learned that in the Olympic committee with the swimmers. They’re all, so they could take a 25 year old young guy and watch how he slowed down in a repetitive athletic motion and fit it to a curve and then extrapolated out to see how he’d be competitive at a hundred yards a year or two later and it works. So I was doing it on horses and this horse, he was not fast, but he did not slow down. And so he was got his time for the Belmont stakes, the longest breaks of the triple crown, a mile and a half was going to be good.
Even though at six, at three quarters, they’d only run him in sprints and he wasn’t competitive because he couldn’t run that fast. So he said, okay, I’ll do it. He paid the money. don’t know, it was like 200,000 to get it into race late. And then his trainer was pissed. His trainer’s a top, you know, in the world trainer and he didn’t want to do it. And the day before the race, in a daily racing form, they had like this horse is this good and they started going, ah, blah, blah. And then there’s the idiots and the
sure.
the silly ones and they mentioned us, of course. I never got an apology. And then, so when I get there, he’s telling the trainers, telling the press he had nothing to do with it. It’s the command performance. So I’m up there, I’m in the stands right with them all. And they start out and of course he leaves the gate and he’s dead last and he’s trailing the field. And I’m thinking I got to hide under the table, right? And I’m thinking, oh God, please, this is my chance. And so.
About halfway through the race, he starts catching up. They’re really just slowing down. then about three quarters of the way, he’s just right in the back of the fat pack, right? And he starts passing people. And at the end, he was definitely going to win if he had another three or four stripes. So he was third in one of the most prestigious classic races in the world. Out of the first crop of this new sire. So instead of a maiden that was worthless, he had something special. And to prove it wasn’t a fluke,
He then went to the Louisiana Super Derby for a million dollar race and did it again. So that I got a client. So I actually started some money. And then based on some of my performance there, I got this other guy, the Egyptian guy that we took right to the Triple Crown and the World Championships. people still, a lot of people still say, well, he has theories. I was thinking, they don’t understand the stuff that sells in the race horse business on Pedigree.
Yeah.
They have statistical list and that’s all absolutely silly. you know, it’s like there’s guys selling stuff on the pedigree based on, for 2000 years, they’ve been studying statistics as a science so that there’s a large database and there’s patterns here and there. It’ll tell you whether they mean anything, right? But they sell every pattern. Look, look, this horse had a, this combinate, this match had a good horse. It doesn’t mean anything. And the horses aren’t
fruit flies, they have like one fall and it’s almost never by the same combination, the same sire on the same mare. And the data bank is over the years is so corrupted by the big trainers and the drugs and the different businesses. You know, it’s just it would be like trying to predict boxing by having huge databases of the height of the socks and the type of underwear they wore. And then using that with AI to be sophisticated analytics is ridiculous.
But it’s right now the state of the art in horse racing. That’s what they do. And it’s not what I do. So, and now, now we’re in year 10 of the DNA stuff and we’re way ahead there. And once again, the general stuff has been the way they’ve approached it is not scientific. I was pre-med at Harvard to begin with and I was Magnet, Commodian, Phi Beta Kappa. So while I’m not, you know, I’m kind of a jack of all trades, I hire the best people, but I’m not a dummy about that stuff myself.
Hey, and that’s a secret listeners. I hire the best people, local billionaire here in town, oil and gas business. Two things I learned from him. One, hire the best people on the planet, not just in your area, the best people on the planet. Yeah. And, and that’s the second thought. Somebody asked him in front of me, they said, well, how much do I pay him? How much, when do I know it’s too much?
Yeah, they’re different. They are different. Pay up. It’s worth it.
And he said, with the best people on the planet, you can’t really pay them too much. They will demand to give you a return.
I got that one. That’s been my experience.
Yeah, you know, the difference is that they’re between chicken poop and chicken salad. know, between the elite athletes and the normal. It’s different.
There you go.
Okay. So let me ask you a question. You’ve been called affectionately and probably not the money ball of horse racing. What’s the wildest point you’ve used in calculating odds and it might’ve been horse poop, but is there something more wild than that that you’ve analyzed?
You know
Well, think that one of the secrets is people are always looking for the magic bullet. the truth is the best horses are not one the greatest stride or the greatest, biggest heart or the biggest something. Everything’s good. They don’t have a hole in them. They may not have the best of anything, but they don’t have the poor anything. So it’s really
a combination. So one of the things I discovered was I have 48 variables. So I map all the data into a 48, a virtual 48 dimensional space with all those variables to find and found, you know, the clusters. It’s called multivariate discriminant analysis. And it comes out with a prediction that’s expressed as a percentage likelihood of, but you’re going to get what you’re looking for. And of course, if you put in poop data, you don’t get anything right. If you put it in side of the socks with a box, you got to know, you got
I published studies in refereed, the leading scientific journals, refereed on my dad on some of the stuff on the horses. My studies were not 12 ponies in a lab. They were 12,000 race horses at major racetracks over 10 years with every second of their racing records. I published a couple of papers like that. You can download from my website and see what they are. We got a lot more than that. I think that what’s the wildest thing about us is that we’re not one thing.
where this we are in a set. We’re we’re AI in the sense of actual intelligence. We had the patients and the money and we invented the machine. I invented the first portable ultrasound machine so I could go into a stall and do a cardiac analysis of horses and the way they were doing it, their protocol didn’t work reproducibly. So I invented a new one, a different transducer, went on the other side of the horse, a different transducer with different power.
And now everybody uses it. should have patented that. I did patent some things. I mean, so I think that I quote AI actual intelligence. So we got the data nobody else has. We built the machines to get the data that nobody else has. And then we had the patients and the money and the time and the experts to use it in a way that almost never ever gets used anywhere. know, 48 dimensional graph. For real.
And this was with shitty computer power. I had a textile company that I owned that marketing and I had a room, a room full of computers to do this back then. And I had to go over like telephone modems from racetracks in Florida. I rented a whole floor and a hotel next to the racetrack. And I had the cables going all over through the halls to the different rooms with the modems and the PCs. We built a bone scanner out of a
The first, an Apple IIc. Actually, it wasn’t even an Apple, it was the knockoff. I forget what they were called. We modified that to do the first ultrasound stuff and bone scanning. got patents. The bone scanner won the new medical device of the year in 1986 in Europe as a non-invasive bone scanner because it was… I won’t go into all the science of it, but it did. It came out of our lousy little falling down
farmhouse in a cornfield with a couple of guys from Harvard and MIT who were ne’er-do-wells, know, who were earning nothing and weren’t doing what they were supposed to do because their parents were pissed.
Yeah.
Okay, so let me ask a question. What’s one
truth you’ve learned about winning in racing and in business that most people just miss? They just completely miss it.
boy, that’s a hard one. I think what it is is you have to always ask why. When anybody tells you things, especially if you’re trying to innovate or understand, how do you know is the key question? And then don’t just take it, go research it. Half the time it’s a crappy study somewhere and everybody’s, there’s a whole mountain built on this teeny weeny, you know,
base of sand and you have to go back there and find out what the truth is. When I started, they would make fun of me about the gait analysis, the quadruped locomotion poop. So one of the first papers I published showed that all the textbooks, all the stuff, all the veterinary answer, they had the gait wrong for a race horse. Why? Because it was all done on ponies and horses and labs and that poop. They didn’t know what the gait of it was a race horse.
And so I published it and I published it so they couldn’t say, you know, with experts there and I had the right equipment, I had the right everything, the right people. And it was like on 10,000 horses over, I don’t know how many years, it wasn’t something you could just dismiss. And so it was like in your face, you think, don’t know, I don’t have the expertise to do this. You don’t even know what the game is of a real race horse when he’s going flat out on the racetrack, which by the way, for something like Secretariat, he’s airborne three times.
three times he’s not bearing any weight on any leg within each stride. He’s flying. And that’s one of reasons why the really good racers break their legs because instead of loading one leg off gradually off another one, they’re coming down from outer space on each leg.
Wow.
the impact.
And when they didn’t know the impact, I had to bury force plates in the track at Delaware Park and then have cameras, special cameras. had film, video wasn’t available except for hundreds of thousands of dollars. 500 pictures a second coordinated the force plate in the racetrack, transducers on the hooves of the horses. And we discovered things about what they’re doing and why so many get hurt. Our horses don’t get hurt. We haven’t had a single breakdown.
They’re all the industry. It’s a big thing. had to ban racing because horses break down. They do the tracks wrong. They do the rest of it wrong. They buy horses that we know are going to get hurt. We’ve got the techs and we keep them in our horses. Just don’t break down. They race them when they’re six and seven. The others are all too injured to run after. They’re three or four. So the resistance to what we do has been huge and it used to drive me crazy. But I find this side, that’s my vantage. They’re giving me a free free pass.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Why
complain? So after I die, then the probably all jump all over all of it. Even the first harmony. Invented the first harmony meter that was accurate on horses for like interval training and stuff that they were using. Highly meters that weren’t giving them the right information. The temperature was too cold. It was too high. It was wrong. Maybe some human meters. Horses have an inverted T wave in their QRST complex. And there were all kinds of reasons why they got the wrong numbers. So we had to invent one that was actually accurate.
Well, just like an artist, it’s more valuable after they’re gone.
And then the only people who bought it were the research universities, although they had schools and we couldn’t sell them to the trainers. And finally somebody stole one at a racetrack and we had a party. Somebody wants it. But it went into all our data, you know, it was a big deal. So.
Share something with us that you’ve learned about leadership from analyzing multimillion dollar horses that every CEO should know for their business.
Thank you.
Wow.
I think it goes well, of course, there are always variables that you can’t figure out or you don’t know are important or you can’t measure like whether they’re trying or not. I’ll get into that later.
I think it’s a fact.
To me,
just your stick-to-itiveness, your persistence of 20 years as a pariah in the industry. Nobody liked you. Nobody liked what you were doing.
I told him that
this is a damn dog’s ass.
Shut up, ass.
Okay, go ahead.
Just the fact that you stuck to it, you believed in it, you had a mission, you weren’t gonna quit.
Yeah, they call me Dog Zoa.
I’m called Dog Zoa in the vetting world because I help some of the whale vetters with their hand-gapping stuff because of the data I have on horses. This horse is going to go the distance, that kind of thing. What was the last question you asked me though? Because I had an answer for it. ⁓ I tell them about leadership.
Is it leadership?
I think it goes back to what I first learned working with the Olympic Sports Medicine Committee, that the elite, the elite performers are different. And the more you understand what their differences are, the more you’re to succeed because you’re going to go after that. I staffed some of my company, my companies was here. So I took bankrupt companies, turned around and sold them for a lot of money. And one of the things I did was
Elite performers are different. The more you understand what makes them different, the more likely you are to succeed. Share on X
I found young people that were ambitious, were smart, hardworking, know, not just one of these, you know. And I didn’t I never went by traditional credentials. I always had to meet them and talk to them. And then I just went after the like I was doing with the athletes. I was going after people with something special.
And if they had some of something that wasn’t special, that was a pain in the ass, I put up with it. It was more hurt that so I had a group of, I guess, misfits. mean, somebody would call that they were. We had a crazy bunch. I had a a big picture of a Chinese character that’s for chaos framed and put up in my office. And there was all kinds of shenanigans and fucked up stuff, but I didn’t care about that. I mean, don’t care.
Yeah.
I think people worry too much about what it looks like, what everybody thinks. know, just, quality is quality and you need to go for it and you need to make up for whatever their other problems are and just deal with it. That’s my, I mean, so what do I know? That’s what I’ve done and it’s worked for me.
Quality is quality. You need to go for it and make up for whatever their other problems are. Share on X
Well, I think
eagles don’t flock. And so you find them and you put them in their role and you enable them to go do their job. You don’t make them go do their job. you may.
Occasionally they
do it below because they’re so ambitious. It’s worth it. It just did.
Yeah, you manage,
you manage processes, but you lead people in the best organizations. So looking back, when things were
I think
that’s a great line. Manage processes, but lead people.
Yeah. Yeah, for
sure. So like in the dark days, in those 20 years before you were an overnight success, what kept you going?
father. I don’t know. I guess I’d had so many privileges and protections that I couldn’t imagine failure. It was always going to be right around the corner. I always had faith. I just believed in myself. I was goddamned if my dad was going to be wrong about it. So I think that’s it.
I couldn’t imagine giving up.
Yeah, yeah,
I love that. I think that’s very common with entrepreneurs is it’s going to get better next week, next month, next quarter. I can hang in there.
Yeah, can’t we still?
Coffee mugs, it’s a marathon next Tuesday torture test. That’s what they discuss. staff presented that to me. We’re all in the marathon next Tuesday torture test.
I love that.
Jeff,
if we could open your mind and pick out a golden nugget, something you’ve learned in your path that we don’t know, but you know, what would that nugget be?
I don’t know about that, but I’ll give you another thing that was critical to my success. about year 12 or something, I hired somebody to come break a yearling horse for me because I couldn’t do it because I fell off and broke my arm. I was a rider. I jumped six foot walls when I was roaring over the countryside. Anyway, I got good at it because I was part of my horse passion.
But I hired this woman and she had worked for Hall of Fame trainers. She had been the one of the second woman jockey United States and lied about her age to do it. She had trained horses. She’d done it. She’d been on horses since she was two years old in the back in a basket on her grandmother’s hunting horse, fox hunting. And I hired her to break this horse and she got interested in what we do and she started to help us. And
That was the turning point because before that we were like pointy-headed guys doing the difficult right and the basics wrong or half-assed. She brought us 300 years of developed what there was of real expertise about resources. Then we figured out we had to layer on our technology over that, not try to replace it. That was a breakthrough.
I was doing the difficult right and the basics wrong—until I learned to layer technology over real-world expertise. Share on X
Then things started to soar. So I think, yeah, I think there’s a nugget. I was so arrogant and I had three degrees of hot poop from Harvard and I was qualified for the Olympics in wrestling and it was all kinds of poop. And I thought I was hot poop and I was arrogant, abrasive son of a gun And lunch was off in these clubs. But I learned, you you really have to start, you can’t ignore what’s out there in
and experience basics. I mean, I’m ignoring pedigree, but not based on that. you have to.
You have to build on what’s there and be humble enough to know that you’re going to be adding on, not recreating a lot of stuff.
When I think the best teams are comprised of a players
with different skills. And so she brought a skill set to your team that you didn’t have. And so.
Yeah, we didn’t have. I think
I look out, I look at the optimeter and she looks out the window to see if we’re off the ground.
Yeah, yeah, that works. Okay. Hardest question. Last question. Hardest question I’ll ask you. I’ll put you in a time machine. I’m going send you all the way back to 20 year old Jeff. And you have 60 seconds to share one thing that you know now that you wish you knew then that would have made things easier, better, faster, smarter. Into the time machine you go. Here’s 20 year old Jeff. What do you tell him?
my god.
my god.
Be patient. It’ll be okay. Don’t despair.
I love that. I love that.
I think be patient is wise words for every entrepreneur. How can someone in the audience reach out to EQB or to you?
Well, there’s our website, eqb.fyino.com. It’s .fy, like for your information. And you can contact us through that or my website. My email is just J Cedar, J F E D E R D as in talk, J Cedar at eqb.fy. And
Awesome.
reach out through the website or at Jeff’s personal email, he’ll reply. And Jeff, it’s been my distinct pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so very much.
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Yeah,
my pleasure. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time, maybe from the racetrack. Who knows? Thanks.
Thank you.

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Title: E133 | Gregory Shepard – 12 Startups, 12 Exits, and the Science of Startup Success
Date: July 1, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/gregory-shepard-12-startups-12-exits-science-of-startup-success/
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Content:
What does it take to build and sell not one, not two, but twelve successful startups? In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes a guest whose entrepreneurial journey reads like a blueprint for resilience, strategy, and transformation. Meet Gregory Shepard — Fulbright Scholar, TEDx speaker, author of The Startup Lifecycle, and founder of Startup Science.
From the moment Gregory joins the conversation, it’s clear this isn’t just another startup success story. It’s a masterclass in how to think differently, act deliberately, and survive the chaos of entrepreneurship. Gregory opens up about his early missteps — including a soul-crushing stint in politics — and how a five-year, $500,000 research project into startup failure became the foundation for his groundbreaking platform, Startup Science.
As the episode unfolds, Gregory shares the hard-won wisdom behind his perfect exit record. He introduces the concept of the Ideal Acquirer Profile (IAP), a strategy that flips conventional startup thinking on its head: build your company with the buyer in mind from day one. He dives into the dangers of overvaluation, the myth of investor wisdom, and why most startups fail not because of bad products, but because of poor execution and misaligned expectations.
But this isn’t just theory. Gregory gets real about the sleepless nights, the moments he was days away from missing payroll, and the grit it took to keep going. He speaks candidly about growing up in poverty, being autistic and dyslexic, and how those experiences shaped his resilience and perspective. Along the way, he and Don explore the role of neurodivergence in entrepreneurship, the underestimated power of standardization, and why growth — if done too soon — can be fatal.
This episode is packed with insights for founders, investors, and anyone navigating the unpredictable terrain of building something from nothing. With humor, humility, and a whole lot of heart, Gregory Shepard doesn’t just tell you how he did it — he shows you how you can too.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Gregory-Shepard-—-12-Startups-12-Exits-and-the-Science-of-Startup.mp3
Gregory Shepard — 12 Startups, 12 Exits, and the Science of Startup Success
Hey, it’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. This is the show where entrepreneurs learn from other entrepreneurs, from stories, from their lives. Man, do I have a great guest today. Fulbright Scholar, TEDx speaker. Okay. Bunch of other stuff, but maybe most importantly, 12 startups and 12 successful exits and like
exits, you know, with a B or near a B, which those are special exits. So Gregory Shepard, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
thrilled to have you. It’s considered our high honor. Okay. And so your current company is a company by the name of Startup Science. Please tell us what Startup Science does and who it does it with and why you do it.
So as an entrepreneur at the end of my last exit, my last two exits went to eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions. And I left that and wanted to help startups. So I went into politics and became a chairman for congressional candidates trying to move money down to startups. Well, that was the worst decision I ever made in my entire life. was just, so I stopped doing that.
But I did a research project, a five year research project to find why when and founder, why when and how founders fail so I could show the government and try to get them to move money down. Well, they said no again. So then I wrote the book, the startup lifecycle and started the platform startup science and startup science basically takes the fragmented broken ecosystem and pulls it all together into one platform so that founders can access everything they need in one place.
which was one of the things that came up when I was doing the research on why, when, and how founders fail.
I love that. And so don’t find it surprising that entering the political arena was soul sucking and frustrating for an entrepreneur. We typically move at the speed of light and politics and legislative things typically move at the speed of mud, if at all.
my god, you know, it’s
funny about saying that because when I was there, I was like, I said two things. It’s like a snowball rolling uphill in the January snowstorm. And then the other thing I said is it’s like trying to navigate and make things happen like running a marathon through peanut butter. You know, just the most frustrating, awful experience I’ve ever had. It’s terrible.
Yeah.
A hundred years ago, I did a bunch of work for a nonprofit trade association in DC. And, it was eye opening. The two things I learned was this one, you can get access. You want to talk to the chairman of energy and commerce? You can at least get to their office. Maybe you don’t get an audience with them on the first attempt. Okay. But you can get access. And then we had two senators attend,
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
cocktail party in the Rayburn building. So that’s on Capitol Hill. It’s a building where senators have their DC offices. We held a cocktail reception there. We had two senators and attendants. And I won’t tell you what it cost us, but it was really cheap. And so was like, man, you can not only get access, but it’s not that expensive. And so, ⁓ you know.
Hmm.
Hmm.
No. Yeah, you’d be amazed.
Yeah. ⁓
Yeah,
it was quite something. Eye-opening. Okay. So I’m going to hop right in there. Built and sold 12 businesses, which that’s rare. Okay. A lot of people have started 12 businesses, but they had five or six failures and a couple that did pretty good and a couple that were medium, but built and sold 12 businesses. What’s the one rule, the universal rule you follow every single time.
You have to know it’s a building and exiting a company. There’s one thing you have to know. You have to know where you are and where you’re going. What I mean by that is where you are in the life cycle and then where you’re going means who you’re going to sell the company to. And you have to do that right at the beginning. And so this is contrary to a lot of what, you know, investors tell you, right? So investors are, you don’t worry about that right now, but that’s just not true. And I’ll explain why.
Companies buy companies for one of two reasons. This is what they call quote synergy, right? It’s either make or save money. Most of the time it’s to make money. Now, how do they make money? So think about the performance driver of customer acquisition costs to lifetime value, right? So how much it costs you to get a customer versus how much you make from that customer. All these big companies, they want to grow their lifetime value because they already have the customers and they’ve already paid for them. So.
for every dollar they invest into customer acquisition, if they make $5 because of their lifetime value, that makes sense for them. Now, if they buy a company that can be sold to the thousands and thousands of customers they already have, then that’s just a leg up. So when I think about building businesses and the reason why I’ve been able to sell them all is because I start by thinking about who the acquirer is and who their customers are because
If you can’t sell your business to their customers, they won’t buy your business. So it’s not like you can do that after, you know, 10 years of building a company, right? You have to do that from the beginning. And I learned that lesson the hard way. I had built a company and 50 % of my customers didn’t match their customers. So they were like, we’ll give you half what we were going to offer you. And then we’re to cancel all these customers because we don’t want them. I went back and rebuilt the company. It took me five years and then sold it for full price.
by replacing those customers. So I learned that lesson the hard way and I learned it once. And then from now on, and I tell everybody, I’m like, you have to understand what I call your IAP, your ideal acquirer profile, just like you know your ideal customer profile. Like think about it. Building a business without having an acquirer is like building a product without having a customer in mind.
Building a business without having an acquirer is like building a product without having a customer in mind. Share on X
Now listen folks, that’s pure gold. I have done 150 of these interviews. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur for 38 years now. That doesn’t seem possible. I’ve done a dozen startups. I haven’t done a dozen exits. Okay. But the pure gold is when you start the company, know who you’re going to sell it to. That is pure genius. And so thank you for sharing that.
Mm-hmm.
Next question, what’s the biggest lie startup founders believe in?
So typically, when I did the research, so this was a five year research, it was a huge, it cost me half a million dollars. This was a huge research project on understanding founder success and failure. 47.1 % failed in the first 18 months. The research was for five years. So the rest of the failures over the following four years, four and a half years, whatever, those failed for things they did in the first 18 months.
So the first 18 months is really, really, really, really critical, right? What you do then sets the pace for what you’re going to do in the future. I think that a lot of founders based on the research, listen to investors. They listen to mentors. They listen to people. They need to be really careful about who they listen to because the number one reason why founders fails bad advice. And the bad advice came from that group of people, primarily investors. So investors,
You know, they’ll invest in 20 companies hoping one of them makes it. But as a founder, you need yours to make it right. So they’re giving you instructions and feedback on what to do with your business based on their lens of the world from an investor perspective of the world. Right. It’s oftentimes just plain wrong and they can steer you into a hole because they’re trying to turn every single one into a giant company because that’s all they care about. So they’ll push you to that point, but
As a founder, you may not be looking at $100 million or a $500 million exit. You may be interested in a 25 or $50 million exit, which by the way, is the majority of the successful ones fall between 25 and 50. So the biggest lie is this concept that you listen to your investors, you listen to these people, you listen, but you got to hear the parts that are relevant to you based on your experience as a practitioner.
Does that make sense?
I love that.
You bet. Makes perfect sense. So I’m a member of an angel investor network. And when I first joined, the council they gave was this. you know, this is not for somebody who’s going to invest in a deal. This is for somebody who’s going to invest in 10 deals minimum. And you got to expect that two of them are just going to be rotten. They’re going to be horrible. Okay. You’re going to lose everything. And
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
and you’re going to make a little on some and you’re going to do pretty good on others. But your, your big hope is that you hit one that’s a flyer and, it makes up for everything. And, that’s been pretty sound counsel in that group, even though there’s a ton of due diligence, really bright people. mean, these are not stinkers that are coming across the desk, but, but as we know, it’s hard.
Mm-hmm
startups, you know, the, the attrition, the death rate is significant. And, uh, yeah. And doesn’t really matter, you know, what your product service or experience is. Um, it’s hard. And so, um, if you can make it five years, that puts you in pretty rare air. Um, you’re not in the 90%, you’re in the 10.
Yeah, 90%. Yeah.
Yeah. And, what’s
Yeah, exactly. But what’s crazy is that if you really understand why the ones that are failing are failing, if you actually understand the depth of why they’re failing, you can offset those things. Right? So I have a perfect track record because I understand the depth of failure. So I can see it coming. I can see the decisions before I make the decisions, right? Based on this information.
So, you know, as an example, you know, one of the big failure reasons that they can’t exit in the following five years, because they didn’t build their company to exit at all, right? Like I said, in the very beginning. So you have a huge failure rate at the following five years for that one reason, right? So how many of the investments that you invested into couldn’t get to an exit, but they could have had they planned for it from the beginning, right?
That’s one of the things. The other thing is the idea of overvaluation. So investors, a lot of times will say, okay, raise the valuations because they want higher AUM, higher assets under management, right? Because that shows the fund being bigger, they get more investors and they make two and 20 off the investors, right? 2 % off managed funds and 20 % over the hurdle, over the amount that people invest. So they want to grow their assets under management, right?
So what you have is you have people growing the valuation and pretty soon the valuation gets too high and investors won’t back it anymore and then it folds. And so a lot of times founders don’t realize you raise a million dollars and you ask them in interviews, I interviewed thousands of them, right? And you ask them, when you raise a million dollars, what are you thinking now you have to return to investors in order to keep those investors on board? And they’ll be like, well, I raised a million so I got to give them a million.
maybe a million five and I’m like, no, no, it’s 10 times that. So when you raise a million now in order to keep raising money, you have to show investors that there’s 10 X in it for them in arbitrage, meaning now it’s 10 million, right? And they never realized this. So they get halfway and the one of the big reasons overall is running out of money. Well, running out of money is more of a question than it is an answer, right? Why are you running out of money, right?
Well, one of the big reasons is overvaluation stemmed from the venture capital community wanting to get larger assets under management and growing the valuation, you know, typically 15, 20 % between rounds, even if the business doesn’t justify it.
I love that. As the entrepreneur, you have to see things from the other person’s point of view, and the investor has a specific point of view, and the venture capital company has a specific point of view. It doesn’t mean that you should shun them, but it does mean you should be realistic about their looking at it from their point of view, and they’re going to take care of them first, and you second, or third.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And so to know that, yeah, yeah.
You listen to everybody. You just don’t take the advice from everybody, right? Like
You listen to everybody. You just don’t take advice from everybody. Share on X
you as a founder are responsible to filter out based on your own experience the advice you should take and try to escape confirmation bias yourself as a founder, you know?
Yeah,
a little discernment will go a long way for sure. For sure. Yeah.
Yeah, negative right because
all the founders including me we’re all optimist right we’re like we’re gonna do this amazing thing data data maybe shelter that a little bit and think a little negative because that’s the that’s how you’re gonna be able to filter out the advice that you get otherwise it’s all painted with the brush of this is gonna be amazing
Yeah.
Oh yeah, it’s going to be great and it’s going to be fast. you know, it’s kind of like every construction project I’ve ever done. I’m over budget over time. You know, no, yeah, no, no matter how much I add to the estimate to, to, you know, make it more true, it’s still doesn’t come in. Right. So, and that’s, and that’s kind of startup land all on its own. You know, things will be harder, things will take longer and that’s just the way it goes. So in your own founder journey.
Twice as long, twice as much.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Do you have a hard moment? It may be one that you’ve never shared publicly.
Yeah. Yeah, many, actually many, many. I can’t tell you that probably 50, 60 times where my team didn’t know, nobody knew except for me that I was a week away from not making payroll. Right? Like you’re, you’re sweating at night. You don’t, and you have no idea what you’re going to do. Right? You seriously have not a clue. You’re like, how am I going to even pull this off? Right?
Ha
Hmm.
That has happened to me several times. those, the sickness you get in your stomach, in your heart drops down to your stomach. You know, your face turns red, you’re sweating in the middle of the night awake, you know, trying to rock yourself at the end of the bed, just like, what am I gonna do? Right? This has happened to me at least 50 times. There is something to be said for having the grit and the…
the self-discipline to keep yourself on the rails, even when things look pretty rough, right? you know, growing up the way I grew up, I grew up poor, right? We didn’t have any money. We homesteaded on our property. You know, I drank out of a milk jug. We went to the bathroom in a bucket. We showered off of trees, a bag hanging from trees. This sort of grit allows you to survive.
Mm.
Right? That’s why if you look at the data, immigrants actually represent 47 % of unicorns. These are people that came into this country, not speaking the language, not, you know, came out of a, uh, evolved in emerging market. I mean, they’re tough, right? They’ve been through it, right? They survive because they have survived. So in, when you look at the data, what you see is that the people that have had the hardest lives are the most successful founders. You know, there are high agency people.
Hmm
Right high agency people. There’s a you could look at a there’s a whole bunch of data on high what’s called high agency people Those are the people that survive. So I think having a hard life and I’m also autistic and dyslexic So having a really difficult life barely graduating from high school, you know, and I went to five different high schools I mean I was a terrible student, you know and But having survived all of that stuff in my life
made it so those moments when I’m sitting at the end of the bed aren’t as bad for somebody who has never experienced that kind of, you know, challenge before, you know, because I’m like sitting there going, well, you know, I mean, I’ve slept in a tent for two years. I think I could, I think I can pull this off and it keeps you keeps your engines running. You know what I mean? Like, you know you see those cars that can run on diesel, they can run on bio diesel, they can run on flex fuel. Like that’s me. Right. And that’s a successful entrepreneur when things get really hard.
Yeah, love that heart. know, hard times make strong people, strong people make good times, good times, make weak people. And the cycle continues. And I think back 20 years ago, so about halfway through my entrepreneurial journey, I went through a divorce and like everything left my house, the house stayed, but every
Mm-hmm.
Everything was inside the house, left the house one day. Yeah. And so as an adult with children, you know, I slept on a pallet on the floor for about a year as my business was not doing well. so I think entrepreneurs have that grit to keep going even if…
Oof, ouch.
Hmm.
Maybe they shouldn’t, but they, I’m just going to keep putting one. ⁓
Sometimes, yeah, sometimes
they need to throw in the towel, but they’ll keep fighting, you know. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
then on, you know, ADHD, which is obviously on the autism spectrum is so common amongst entrepreneurs and
38
% of entrepreneurs are neurodivergent categorized in the nerd. Yeah. It’s a huge, in fact, if you look EY, Microsoft, Apple, even Amazon, they’ve all started to create sales force have all created floors in their buildings dedicated to the neurodivergent because they’re so good at doing this entrepreneurial stuff. Cause they just think different. Like we think different. So that’s an advantage, you know,
⁓ wow.
We do. Oh, we’re just
wired different and I’m not sure we get credit. I’m not sure we deserve credit for it, but we were just wired a little different. And so we see things, you know, differently. Okay. So most startups fail. know that 90 % in five years.
You
Mm-hmm.
Even when they solve a real problem, even when they have a great product, service or experience, why do most of those startups fail?
Mm-hmm.
It has to do with execution. So, you know, if you break down execution, I’m actually writing another book on execution right now, but if you break down execution, so people go, well, execute as that’s a big word, right? Execution has to do with your ability to do organization and time management. Right. So the way that you think about execution is understanding what I call the execution stack. Right. So what is your mission?
What are the objectives for that mission and what are the tasks you have to accomplish? And then what are your measurements? I call it a modem, right? How are you measuring the results of the activities that you’ve done so that you can iterate and make it better the next time, right? So execution early stage, has to do with execution, either doing the wrong things or doing the right things wrong. You can even do the wrong thing, right?
Ha ha!
they sometimes are doing the wrong thing, right? Or sometimes they’re doing the right thing, wrong, right? but first make sure you’re doing the right thing and then really break down what you’re doing into a structure so that you can stay organized and then use priorities for your time management piece. Right. Separate your day into segments. So this allows people to execute. And when I say execution, sometimes the founders are so busy that they, they don’t
think they have time to organize and structure, right? But I get up at four o’clock in the morning, I’m organized and structured by 4.30, I’m working by 4.35 o’clock, right? So I take that 30 minutes every single day to get my act together, right? It’s like Lincoln said, right? If I was gonna chop down a tree, I’d spend 50% of my time sharpening the saw, you know? So I think execution is key and understanding how to break down what execution is.
If I was going to chop down a tree, I’d spend 50% of my time sharpening the saw. Share on X
is a huge reason. The second reason, here’s the second one, big one, okay, is that the traditional thinking about the startup life cycle is that you go from vision ideation to product to go to market to growth, right? Actually, you shouldn’t do that. You should go from go to market to standardization to optimization to growth. Because if you don’t do that, the problems that you have that you aren’t aware of yet, because you haven’t documented
the way that you do things standardized it, they grow and carry with you. It’s like a cancer, right? And it’ll just get bigger and bigger. And when you go into growth, that same little bug that you had will put you out of business when you go into growth because it just becomes a monstrous problem. So I tell people, like, there’s a point after go to market where you’re like, okay, I know I can sell this and everything where you have to I’m going to actually document what this is, how it actually works.
So the process of documenting how it works to write down what it is, what functional area does it, and how do you go about it, right? That’s the key. So if you document how things actually work, then you know how they work. Now you can go back to those things and look at how they’re optimized. Like, how am I optimizing these things specifically, right? So this is where you’re increasing margin.
When you look at companies, there’s three things you need growth, margin, retention. Those are the major revenue drivers, right? Growth comes from sales and marketing. So you have that number on sales and marketing. Retention comes from services and support. So you have that number sitting on services and support and then return. And then margin comes from operations, right? So your CFO, your shared services and product and engineering goes across everything.
So once you organize your functional areas to the valuation drivers, then you start to see when you’re going through standardization, how you can optimize all of these things to increase margin. So this is the key thing. If you skip over those stages, you just bring these problems with you and then you blow them up when you’re growing and you’ll put yourself out of business. So one of the things I’ll tell you is that the average cost of training somebody in the growth phase to become
75 % to 100 % productivity is 33 % of their first year’s wages. So if you’re paying somebody a hundred thousand, let’s say just for easy math, $33,000, you’re hiring five people at a time. Think about the cost, right? Now, if you standardize, you don’t have those people being disrupting your other team. Everybody’s doing things the same way. So you can check your KPIs. They’re lined up.
Yeah.
If you skip over that, you don’t have that there. And now you have these huge costs just by growing and you can put yourself out of business. You can not have those costs by going through standardization and optimization before you spring into growth.
Yeah, love that. So counterintuitive, but growth may actually kill more startups than not doing enough business, um, just because they’re not prepared. Um, and, and, and if you don’t have enough margin, just doubling or tripling sales just means you lose money faster. It doesn’t actually mean you can’t outgrow that on volume. Okay. Um, if you could go back to your 25 year old self.
Yeah, because they say there’s Right because they say there’s the valleys of death not valley
and give yourself one piece of advice, something you know now you didn’t know then.
You only had 60 seconds. So it’s like the very best thing you could tell your 25-year-old self. Gregory, what do you tell Gregory?
I would say that there are five things that I need to have a handful of things. So I would say you have to have optimism, you have to be optimistic about what you’re doing, you have to have discipline, focus, drive, and enthusiasm. If you have those five things, you can fight through the difficulties of entrepreneurship.
I love that. Okay, tell us, where do we find the book? The Startup Lifecycle by Gregory Sheppard.
You can go you can get it on audible or you can get it on amazon or any bookstore. ⁓ it’s all over the place. it’s It’s almost a best seller. So it’s doing really well. ⁓ and it breaks Thank you. Yeah, and it breaks down all the the research I did the research took five years and the book took four years So it’s really dense, but it’s you know, you know people love it’s got five stars on amazon. So
Okay.
Good, congratulations.
It’s amazing. Great job. I’ve written nine. Writing a book is not easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. Entrepreneurs writing books is probably doubly challenging because we have this shiny part of our personality where we want to chase other things all the time. in a book, five years research and four years to write the book, that took a lot of discipline to actually get to the finish line.
Okay, Gregory, how do we reach out to startup science, you, what’s the best way to connect?
My personal website is gregoryshepard.com and on there you can see, you know, I’ve been on four or 500 podcasts. There’s three or 400 articles I’ve written. You know, it’s basically watch, listen, read experience, like all the ways you learn. I’ve got it broken out that way. All the businesses I’ve built and sold, all the companies I’ve invested in, it’s all transparent right there.
Because people don’t believe me to be honest with you. So I put it all I put it all of there so people could see it and then startup science is startup science.io if you’re a founder You want to go to Gregory Shepherd comm click on founders and you can access the platform for free right now It’s free. So if you’re going to do it now’s the time to get in there and there’s two hundred and fifteen thousand investors in there that you can access for free so
Hmm
Just let me tell you this folks, just go do that. This is a really smart guy. Okay. His brain’s wired a certain way that’s helped him achieve what he’s achieved and that free offer. What’s the website again? GregoryShepard.com slash founders.
just click on founders. don’t know if it’s slash founders.
Just, okay, just
click on founders. Okay. Absolutely free. You’re missing out if you don’t go do that. I’m just telling you. Gregory, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been my pleasure and I appreciate you dropping nuggets of wisdom throughout today’s show.
Thank you and I appreciate your time and your patience and thank you to all the listeners too. Thank you so much.
Thanks folks. That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Bye now.

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Title: E132 | From Licorice Dispensers to AI Startups: Nicole Donnelly’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: June 25, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-licorice-dispensers-to-ai-startups-nicole-donnellys-entrepreneurial-journey/
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Content:
What does it take to go from a curious kid crafting licorice dispensers in the California desert to a trailblazing founder building AI tools that transform women’s health? In this powerful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Nicole Donnelly—serial entrepreneur, AI evangelist, and founder of AI Smart Ventures—for a raw, real, and radically inspiring conversation.
Nicole opens up about the highs and heartbreaks of her entrepreneurial path, including:

Her earliest sparks of innovation and the moment she realized she was born to build
The emotional toll of selling her first company—and being sued by her own family in the process
How she rebuilt her life, her business, and her relationships with resilience and grace
The importance of hiring for fit, not just faith, and how tools like StrengthsFinder and Kolbe changed her approach to leadership
Her latest venture: “Charlie,” an AI agent trained on perimenopause and menstrual health data that helps women optimize their wellness with personalized, cycle-based recommendations
Why automation is a form of care—and how AI can help entrepreneurs reclaim their time and sanity
Her bold stance on banning nefarious uses of AI, especially in human trafficking and exploitation

Nicole also shares her “AI-first” mindset—how she uses tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to streamline everything from budgeting to inbox management—and why every founder should start testing ideas before building them.
Whether you’re a startup dreamer, a seasoned founder, or just AI-curious, this episode is packed with wisdom, warmth, and wildly practical insights.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/7z8kiDSYZ-.mp3
From Licorice Dispensers to AI Startups: Nicole Donnelly’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Hey, it’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Now we’ve been on an AI kick for a couple of episodes and I brought in the big gun from Vancouver, Canada, Nicole Donnelly. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. You know I love AI and can’t wait to talk about it.
I know you do. I
think your company is like AI smart.
Yeah, we’ve got AI smart ventures, smart insiders, smart marketing, all the things.
Okay.
Love that. Love that. Love that. So, let me take you all the way back to your childhood home. Okay. Was there an adult in your household that was an entrepreneur?
Yes.
No. No.
No. Okay.
So what’s the moment?
when you knew that you were an entrepreneur, even if you didn’t actually call it that yet.
You
I’d say there were a couple of moments. There was the really the entrepreneur moment, but it was after I sold my first company. You know, when I was little though, I wanted to be an inventor. And so it was about sharing the things that I thought people would, you know, make their lives better. And I must’ve been maybe seven or eight years old and I made licorice dispensers and we lived in a mobile home on a dirt road in the desert.
Yeah.
in the middle of nowhere, California. And I put these licorice dispensers in the neighbors’ mailboxes. And to walk to the neighbors, you had to brave the dogs and the random things out there, dirt road, middle of nowhere desert. But I just was determined because I thought it would make their lives so much better.
I love that.
I love that. So to me, an inventor is like the ultimate problem solver and problem solver and entrepreneur kind of go together. And I know many people that had built a company and exited before they could actually spell entrepreneur. That’s not uncommon at all. Okay. So how long have you been an entrepreneur?
Yeah.
My whole life. I think my whole life. I started selling things to friends in the fifth grade. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, good. You’re my sister from another mister. Yeah, I love that.
So thinking back across multiple businesses, multiple industries, okay, and a couple of decades of entrepreneurship, tell me about the toughest day in your business and how’d you get through it?
Yeah.
Ooh, the toughest day. I hope my mom doesn’t listen to this. When I was selling my company, my first company, I had given my mom 5 % equity and I’d given my aunt and uncle 5 % equity because they lent me money in the beginning. And when I needed to sell it was the end of 2008 and we had a good offer on the table.
I needed to transfer intellectual properties, I had to buy their shares. They did not agree that, they didn’t agree that what I was offering was fair and it was more than the LOI. And my mom had been working for my company for three years at that point. She was living with us too. And she moved out and moved to Vegas with my aunt and uncle and they sued me.
Hmm. Sorry about that.
They tried to sue me. It didn’t work out because there was no, there were no grounds, but, that was, that was hard. That was sad.
Yeah, tough day. How’d you get through it?
how did I get through it? That’s a good question. It took a lot of years. I mean, at that time I had to push through in order to keep the business running and, you know, keep people in their jobs. So I couldn’t not.
you know, and being the breadwinner for the family and having a little kid there. There wasn’t an option, but it was more the years that came after that to heal the relationships because there’s even more more than that. Yeah, but it took years and I went to landmark.
Well, we won’t ask you to go there. Okay. But, but thank you for sharing.
was unfortunate cause COVID kind of ruined that in-person experience, but it was in landmark where I got just, it is up to me. It is up to me to reach out. Like my mom could never text me or call me again. I’m the one to do it if I want that relationship. And if I want that relationship for my daughter, took about six years before my mom came and visited.
It is up to me. If I want that relationship, I have to be the one to reach out. Share on X
and she came up once for my daughter’s birthday. it was, yeah, it still is a thing.
Yeah.
Well, there’s a lesson there, entrepreneurs.
can be a challenge involving family in your business because it’s multi-layered. so it can be, it’s a challenge working with people period, but it can be a deeper challenge with people that you have a multiple relationship. And I’ll tell you this that, I don’t know, 25 years ago, my son’s mother and I were divorcing.
and my business was on its backside. It was horrible. And I came home one day and like everything was gone. And except the boys and me and the way I got through it is I just put one foot in front of the other. And it was a couple of years of I wouldn’t say I was graceful. I wouldn’t say I was super intelligent. I would say I was persistent.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I would not
quit and there were days when there was no money, no resources, no nothing. But what do do? You’re a parent and you got people relying on you and so you go, go. Okay, thank you for sharing that. What about a lesson you wish you learned sooner as an entrepreneur?
Yeah.
I think with the family stuff, I had a mentor from WPO and they had a family business. They were going into their third generation in this family business. And if people grow up in it, you had asked me before, were there any entrepreneurs in the house? Well, there weren’t. And so if you work and you’re expected to and it’s a legacy, then it’s a different environment typically. And I could see how the family could work together.
for myself and for the people that I hire, it’s also looking at not just that I like the person, but making sure they really do have the skills and they’re the fit, right? That was a really rough lesson in the first business because I believe in people and I believe that they can learn and they can do a good job and…
Yeah, it’s not in that way. It feels like I have that naive optimism, you know, when it comes to hiring and people. And I have definitely learned a lot in that and to not be shy about saying, Hey, let’s do strengths finder and Colby and you know, we’re culture index and some of those things to see if we are a good fit and make it more objective and not just me because that is not my magic.
And it is for other people, but it’s clearly not mine.
Yeah.
Yeah, I totally understand. For years, I tried to hire people that look like me, talk like me, walk like me, act like me. Challenge, I’m kind of a unique, everybody’s unique, but like I’m kind of like on the edge of unique. And so they don’t grow on trees. And then it took me a long time to learn that the best teams are teams made up with people who have different skills, different superpowers. And that’s the best team.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
shared my Clifton Strength Finders the other day with a part where we’re entering a partnership. And he sent back to me, he’s like, your top five in the order they are, there’s only one person out of 33 million that have that in that order. And I was like, okay, well, my dog thinks I’m special too.
Yeah.
You know, but but you know, that’s how goes.
Yeah, it is. I love StrengthsFinder.
Yeah, I like all of them. In fact, I put them on my website. It’s DonWilliamsGlobal.com about, because I’m an open book. I’m like, either we’re going to work really well together or if we’re not, let’s just not. I’ll still love you and I’ll do anything I can to help you, but maybe we don’t actually line up to where we’re complimentary to each other. ⁓
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Because hey folks, life is short. And I saw something Gary Vaynerchuk did the other day. And so I ran my own math. But he was saying, the opportunity to have a life is pretty astronomical mathematically. And so me and my good buddy, ChatGPT, we went and did some math. And I said, if we go back to 500 AD, and if I’m 60,
Mm-hmm.
today and if at the moment right before conception there is 300 million people that could have been born, you you fertilize the egg. know, each sperm was a person. You survived. And if you run that math,
Mm-hmm.
1 in 300 million for 60 generations. It’s like for you to actually be on the planet today is 1 in 2 with 477 zeros.
Yeah.
There’s a lot of zeros.
It’s a lot of zeros and
and chat GPT I have no way of verifying this but they say that’s more than the atom count of the entire universe So hey if you’re alive today, you’re a miracle Your kids are miracles your friends are miracles act like it it’ll it’ll work for you. Okay next question if somebody listening today
Yeah.
wanted to follow in your footsteps. You were their role model. What’s the first step?
The first step, well, I was having a conversation with a friend who wanted to launch something and I said, just launch it, put up a website and see if people sign up. You know, I don’t believe, okay, so some of the things need a lot of research, but most of the ideas people have, it’s like, just get it out there and do it and test and see if people will pay money for it.
Mm-hmm.
Pay money to get on a waiting list, even if it’s $5, it shows that buying intention. And with AI, you can put up a website almost instantly. It takes a couple minutes now if you use something like Gamma. And you can test your ideas really quickly, at least to see if they have this validity. There are certain things. I mean, I’ve worked in biotech, too, and fintech. There are products that take a long time to develop.
you see this fit, but now we can put up landing pages and test it. We can try to sell things, know, whatever it is, make it at home, digital services, t-shirts, whatever you want, but test it and like, just don’t be afraid of it. And that’s the number one thing is just to take action because I get asked all the time about these things and…
you know, if I think something’s a good idea, it’s like, I might think it’s a good idea. Just like hiring that person. is a good idea? But does the data say it’s a good idea if I post that somewhere, are people going to like it? Are they going to pay for it? You know, so I don’t think it’s most of the things it’s not worth building out the backend until you see if it’s even viable. And we can test viability so fast now.
I love that.
I love that. So the two things I’ve really heard is one, start ugly. Don’t wait till it’s perfect. Don’t overthink it. A junkie first draft is better than no draft. Okay. And two, and I think this is critical, will people pay something anything? And
Don’t wait till it’s perfect. Don’t overthink it. A junkie first draft is better than no draft. Share on X
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you put something out there and you put together a waiting list of a hundred people who will pay something, man, you might have something. But if you can’t, you might not have something. I mean, it just, just because you think it’s a good idea or I think it’s a good idea or Nicole thinks it’s a good idea. What I’m always telling my team is like, I’m a horrible example.
Yeah.
Don’t ask me. I’m the world’s worst example. Things I think that are really cool, other people don’t. Things that are like, I’m totally over my head. You know, they go gangbusters. So ask a bunch of people. if you can get, and if you can put a hundred customers on something, you really have something. I mean, for sure, for sure.
Yeah,
I’m working on a new project right now and I shared it with a couple people and before I knew it, I had a list. It just spread so fast. And it’s like, okay, I’m going to take the next step and invest. I built the first version myself and I did a rough, you know, GoDaddy website where it was the AI website builder. And then I built an AI agent and
You know, it took maybe a day and cleaning the training data for this agent took the longest time and having it formatted properly. But I had it up and just sent it to a couple of people and they sent it to more people and, you know, got a list. I was like, all right, that’s a good one. You know, and it was something I had started building for myself because I wanted it. So of course I thought it was a good idea.
Yeah.
Well, and it maybe is a leg up if it solves a problem for you, maybe other people have the same problem. And the easiest way to sell is to solve a problem. Make something stop hurting. It’s much more challenging to make something feel better.
The easiest way to sell is to solve a problem. Make something stop hurting. Share on X
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
that’s, so it’s cycle wise and it, I trained it on perimenopause and menopause data and research. And so you can say what symptoms you have and it gives different recommendations for supplements and exercise and I don’t know, lifestyle things as well. Sleep. it goes into, so I keep adding more things that it can do.
Mm.
But it’ll make my meal plan for a week and based on where you are in your cycle, there’s certain foods to eat at certain times so that you don’t have bad cramps. If you get your legumes on a certain days of the month, like the 13 to 15, then you will have less PMS and period symptoms. And so there’s some little magical things like that that I can’t keep top of mind all the time and remember and know what day I’m in.
So I made an AI agent, Charlie, that helps with that. And now I’m paying somebody to build out more to make these calendar integrations and some of those so that I can get alerts on my calendar of like, hey, get your black beans today or whatever, you know? Time for evening Primrose oil.
love that. I have a friend who, he was an art major and his wife is an MBA, I think. so, you know, kind of the whole opposite attract thing. And he’s like, hey, I automate everything. I automate everything.
Yeah.
And, you know, my wife likes flowers. don’t ever remember to send flowers. I have a subscription that sends her flowers every four to six weeks at random times. I automate everything. And to me, one of the big advantages and kind of simple, simple uses of AI is just, I’m not even sure all automation is AI. It’s not, but
No.
But man, it makes people’s lives so much easier. Automate, delegate or automate or question, should I be doing this at all?
Yeah.
Yes. Yeah. And this is where I get really excited because there’s so much that you can automate and there’s ways that you can use AI automation and humans in every workflow and process in your business and life too. And we call the systems like systems of care, either for your customers, your employees, and how can you automate systems of care, which kind of contradictory perhaps.
But the flower example is a perfect example of an automated system of care. He knows that she wants that. I would love that. I wouldn’t care if it’s automated. If I get flowers, I think that would be nice, not just as an apology thing, but to have in the house. so when you can do that in your business and you can deliver more of that magic to your customers because you’ve automated the care, they’re going to
they are going to have a better experience with you.
Okay, what’s one simple way any business owner can use AI today to save five or ten hours a week?
that’s a good question. There’s so many ways.
Just
one simple solution.
I’d actually say it’s the mindset of it. More than what you’re doing is getting in the habit of asking AI first. So if you have to sit down and do a spreadsheet, say, can AI help me with this? know, if doing a budget, something like that, those are the things that I hate to do. And so I try to pawn it off on AI. And so I would say become a little bit more lazy, ask AI first, and then dig into it, double check your work.
And if you can get in that AI first mindset, even when it comes to writing emails, like I have AI in my inbox. It organizes my inbox and it drafts responses to all my emails. Yeah. Affirmative and negative. Yeah. It is a huge time saver. And that one, that was a big one for me, the inbox.
Mmm. What a time saver.
And I tried a lot of different tools and there finally one came out that really made a difference for me. And I’ve been on it for maybe two or three months now. but it saves me so much time in my inbox and I don’t lose things that I need to pay attention to. yeah. So get in that AI first mindset more than anything, just open up chat, GBT, Claude, Gemini, whatever you like to use and have it start doing your tasks for you.
I love that. I can share that I’m selling an interest on a company to my partner. And so a couple of years worth of P &Ls, a couple of years worth of balance sheets, their offer. so because I’m very jealous of time, I send it to my accountant with just an email.
Just one question. What do you think my interest is worth today? And I upload it to ChatGPT and say the same thing. And they come back within 2 % of each other, the account and AI. And my total effort, maybe two minutes.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, I literally never looked at any of it. so, so I love that. Okay. all right. Here’s a tough one.
Okay.
If you had to ban one use of AI forever, what would Nicole ban and why?
you
If I had to ban one use of AI…
nefarious uses of AI. ⁓
if you had to ban
one use forever.
I know I’m saying I’d ban nefarious uses. mean, it’s a broad category, there’s so many, anything that has to do with like sex trafficking, human trafficking, children trafficking, child porn, those sort of things. This can spread that kind of stuff so fast. And those are the kind of people that will adopt and use and.
Okay.
even more than the military warfare because they’re going to be warring and warfaring forever, right? Like those battles will happen. And it’s the human trafficking uses.
I love that.
I think that’s a great answer. you know, it may have all started with the military anyway, you know, 40 or 50 years ago, probably did, you know, and we’re just now seeing it today. Okay. If one of our listeners wanted to reach out to your company or you, what’s the best way to do that?
Yep.
You can go to AI Smart Ventures and we’ve got an email list you can get on. We do a newsletter every week. We try to keep it short and interesting of cool AI projects going on. We always cover med tech too. There’s a lot going on in medicine, but all the usual suspects as well. And we also, in our newsletter,
So once a week we do AI labs and we’ll do a summary in the newsletter of what the experiment in the lab was that week or what we learned about. And we cover things like AI SEO or current marketing things that you need to know with AI. And so we try to keep people up to date because AI changes so much. But we do newsletters every week. So I’d say a bare minimum, like get on the email list and start.
listening and see what interests you and then come participate when we do open sessions.
Love that. Nicole, thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure to have you as a guest on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Thank you, thank you so much, Don.
You bet. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

====================================================

Title: E131 | How Moe Choice Built a $15K/Month Solopreneur Business Using LinkedIn
Date: June 16, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-moe-choice-built-15k-month-solopreneur-business-using-linkedin/
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Content:
Welcome, podcast lovers and entrepreneurial minds!
If you’ve ever wondered what it really takes to build a thriving business on your own terms—without investors, employees, or even a traditional office—this episode is your front-row seat to the truth behind the solopreneur journey.
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with the one and only Moe Choice, a fiercely independent solopreneur who walked away from a successful business empire in Dubai to rebuild from scratch—on his own terms. What drives someone to leave behind wealth, reputation, and comfort? What does freedom really mean when you’re building a business solo?
Topics Discussed:

The difference between a solopreneur, entrepreneur, and business owner
How Moe made $15K/month using just his LinkedIn profile
Why “build it and they will come” is the biggest lie in business
The role of personal philosophy in long-term success
How to build a personal brand that actually converts
The mindset shift from approval-seeking to market-driven action
What Moe would do in the first 48 hours if he had to start over today

This isn’t just another entrepreneur mindset podcast—it’s a raw, real, and refreshingly honest look at what it takes to succeed as a solopreneur in 2025. Whether you’re figuring out how to start as a solopreneur, looking to master LinkedIn for solopreneurs, or searching for the best solopreneur podcasts to fuel your journey, this episode delivers.
Ask yourself:

Are you building a business—or just building a trap?
Is your brand aligned with your values—or just your vanity?
Are you waiting for the market to notice you—or are you showing up with value?

If these questions hit home, hit play. This is the personal branding podcast episode you didn’t know you needed.
Tune in now and discover how to build a business that’s profitable, purposeful, and 100% yours.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Solopreneurs-Path-to-15KMonth-with-Moe-Choice.mp3
How Moe Choice Built a $15K/Month Solopreneur Business Using LinkedIn
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a great guest today, Mo Choice. Mo is a solo entrepreneur and he’s dialing in today from London, though he lives here in the States. So welcome to the show, Mo.
Yeah.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
I’m gonna have a lot of fun with the Mo. Like, welcome to the show Mo. So there we go. right. Family home. Did you have an entrepreneur in your household as you were growing up?
No, my father became a business owner when he left his job, but I was 11 years old when that happened. So I learned a lot of ideas around business from my father because I started to pay attention to the detail, let’s say. But I was around three years old when I realized I didn’t trust adults.
I looked, you those big people, don’t seem to know what they’re doing. So I’m going to have to figure it out on my own. And by the age of five, I realized I didn’t like people telling me what to do. I mean, I don’t even like telling myself what to do, to be honest, but I definitely didn’t like other people telling me what to do. So I started to pay attention to how am I going to live my life where I get to choose. And so was very difficult to handle for my mom and dad, and I was very difficult to handle at school. But I wasn’t a troubled child or anything like that.
It was more, know what I want and I’m gonna do it my way and if you’re gonna get in my way, I’m gonna snap at you. So I built habits pretty quickly in terms of being a solo operator, I would say.
love that and you know many entrepreneurs I think non-entrepreneurs think that entrepreneurs enter business ownership out of a profit motive and certainly some do but a significant percentage are actually just allergic to authority they can’t stand people telling them what to do and so they will go work when they’re in their startup phase and they’re grinding away
you know, they’ll work 168 hours in a week, which is every hour in a week for nothing as opposed to 40 hours a week for the man and which may be a woman, but the man. And, and it’s just how entrepreneurs are wired. So, so let me ask you this. At what point did you realize I’m an entrepreneur?
100%. 100%.
So it’s an interest, it’s a philosophical discussion this for me, and I don’t know if we wanna go down this route. Entrepreneur versus solopreneur versus business owner for me are three distinctions. ⁓ maybe people look at it as just semantics, but it’s important, I think, to consider this. So for me, an entrepreneur is somebody who’s trying to create something that hasn’t been created before.
You’re not an entrepreneur just because you own a business. You’re an entrepreneur if you’re creating something that’s never existed before. Share on X
Okay.
trying to create a way of thinking, of operating, of behaving that hasn’t been done before and make it viable commercially, obviously. Because lots of people have great ideas and lots of inventors invent things and you just can’t make money from them. it’s the enterprise. So if we break down the word entrepreneur, the risk part, thepreneur part is with the enterprise. The enterprise is the risk, right? And all the parts that are involved. So solopreneur, where’s the risk? It’s solo.
So I think of solopreneurship more. Solo entrepreneur, think is fair, but solopreneur for me is the risk is with me and only me, which means I make the decisions, I get all the rewards, and if I fail, it’s on me.
Okay, good point.
That’s the idea.
And then a business owner for me is there’s something that works, I’m going to try and do it. I might try and do it better. So if I own a coffee shop on a high street, I’m not an entrepreneur, right? I’m a business owner. I’ve taken a concept that we know works, that there’s a market for it, and I’ve kind of copied what other people are doing, and I’m trying to create some income from it. Whereas an entrepreneur is like, hold on, no one’s ever done this before. Let’s try this.
And that’s how I, I’m not saying that’s the definition. I’m just saying that’s how I look at it. So I never saw myself as an entrepreneur. I never saw myself as someone who can change the world. I never had that idea. I always looked at it as kind of like what you said. I just want to create my own life. And here’s the thing. I made money at the age of 16 selling bootleg cassette tapes. So I love music.
and I had a good taste for music. So used to put together my favorite songs onto a cassette. And then in college, people would say to me, I want a copy of that cassette. And I was like, I can make money from this. And so I’d copy the cassettes and sell them at five bucks, four bucks, whatever it was. So that’s when I realized, if you do something that doesn’t exist, but on a smaller scale, not like what we were talking about. If you put together something, curation, let’s say, it doesn’t have to be creation.
If I can curate something that hasn’t existed and that gives someone a better experience than they would have otherwise, I can make money. I figured that out at 60. And so I like, want to do more of that.
So you would say you realize you were a solo-preneur at 16.
I think I realized that at the purest definition of solopreneur at three, honestly, you know, I’m a pure solopreneur. I don’t have a wife. I don’t want a wife. I don’t have kids. You know, I have, used to coach people personal development wise, right? And, um, they would say like, freedom is my number one value. And I’m like, you’ve got four kids, two dogs, a mortgage, a brick and mortar business, and you’re saying freedom is your number one value. Like, where’s the freedom?
I went three. Okay.
And so I had this idea of freedom from a very young age and I love this. I love placing that alongside solar pernurse, like true independence. Like I get to make the decisions and I don’t have to check in with anyone and I’ll suffer all the consequences. And so I realized that early. However, the, the, business side of things, the, can I make money in the market? Can I take something from the market, package it better and make money from it? I think I realized that at 16.
And then I realized that I can make money without anyone’s help, which means I don’t ever have to get a job. That I figured out at 16.
Okay, very good. okay, tell me about toughest day in business and how’d you get through it?
So when I became a business owner, I realized that I was no longer a sole opener because I had to deal with the land. I mean, for me, the landlord, I was in hospitality and retail. The landlord was my, was the boss. Like I had to pay him end of the month, matter what. And there’s no negotiating there. It’s like, so I’m, how come he gets to get the money every month and I don’t, you know? So.
And then investors, I decided to expand my most successful business and I brought investors in. It’s like, I have to now answer to them. And then you have HR regulation and you have legal and you have. And so I realized, so I sat back and this was in about 2012. I was like, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not living my life independently here. I’m not doing what I want. I have to answer to all these people. And so I decided I’m going to give everything up that I worked for. And so the hardest thing I ever did was.
I’ve built up these businesses. I’m making good money. I’ve got a network. I’ve built my reputation. I’m known for something. I was quite popular. I was in Dubai at the time. So I built my businesses there. Very popular in Dubai. Good network. Stable income. Access to whatever I needed. How do I keep all that good stuff, but get rid of the investors and the staff and the landlords? And I couldn’t figure out how to do that.
And so it took me about three years to realize the only ways to leave everything behind.
Okay. All right.
And
that’s literally what I did. I put my passport in my pocket, I took a one-way flight from Dubai to London, and I left everything I built behind, and I said, I’m gonna start from scratch.
Start over. So what, tell me about a lesson in your past that you wish you had learned earlier.
Yeah.
Nobody cares about my feelings.
Hey, care to expand?
Yeah, here’s a way to put it in entrepreneurial circles or in business circles. The only feedback that matters is the market.
The only feedback that matters is the market—and the market doesn’t care about your feelings. Share on X
and the market doesn’t care about your feelings.
The market doesn’t say, because Mo likes this product, then we’re going to help him sell it or we’re going to make it a valuable product. Or because Mo thought this was a great concept, we’re going to make it popular. The market is the market. It’s like the way it’s like the weather. It’s like the weather does what the weather does. It doesn’t care that your wedding’s on Saturday. It’s not going to give you sunshine because your wedding’s on Saturday. It’s just going to do what weather things do. And I think the market, I didn’t understand that that was like, you can’t manipulate the market. You can only present the market with your idea.
and the market will either reject it, sometimes violently, or accept it and reward you for it. It’s like, thank you for providing us with this value. We’re going to reward you with money, usually. And it took me so long to come to terms with that idea. And if I did come to terms with that idea earlier, I would have made a lot less mistakes, lost a lot less money, made a lot more money, and not pissed as many people off as I did.
Yeah.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and business owners get a little lost in doing things for people’s approval instead of doing things that make business sense. And it’s fortunate when they are parallel, but many times they are not. And so always best to do what makes the most business sense.
I agree.
So if someone wanted to follow in your footsteps, what would be the first step you’d recommend they take?
There’s a gentleman called Jim Rowan, R-O-H-N, a lot of people are familiar with him, a lot of people aren’t, which surprises me a little bit, who for me is the godfather of personal development. And he has this idea that the single determining factor in how successful your life is, is your personal phylo-, he said personal philosophy.
Right. And it’s how true you are to that full of how clear is that philosophy and how true do you live to that philosophy? How aligned are you with that in terms of your decisions and your thoughts and your actions? And anyone who wants to particularly for soul openers, but I think this is true for anybody. You have to have a clear personal philosophy and you have to live by those terms in order to succeed in any chosen path.
Mm-hmm.
And that would be the first step, figure out your personal philosophy and learn how to live by it.
Love that. What’s the dumbest thing you think solopreneurs do?
Build it and they will come.
yeah.
I don’t want to go fishing, the fish is going to come and find me. Yeah, the website’s going to attract people. The logo is going to attract people. The name is going to attract people. It’s like,
Yeah, I’m good.
Yeah, I’m shocked by the number of people that don’t understand that you will have to market. You will have to tell people what you do. Yeah, and the more people you tell, probably the better you’ll do. And then the better you do at converting the people you tell, the better you’ll do. It’s not rocket science.
You have to get their attention. They’re not just gonna give it to you.
It’s like it’s so logical. It’s so logical. Yeah. It’s so
and you know, partly it’s their fault because they haven’t been paying attention, but partly also they’ve been told this story about how they can do it in another way. It’s like, you know, I’ll sell you a shortcut and people like the shortcuts, you know, the Navy SEALs say everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Right. It’s this idea.
Yeah
It’s like so, especially with the internet and social media. So it’s partly their fault, but also they’ve been manipulated, I think, by some charlatans.
Well, so many people are allergic to the whole selling process. They’re intimidated to ask somebody to buy. And the number one reason that most people aren’t selling what they should be selling is very simply, they don’t ask enough people to buy. It’s pretty simple. Ask more people.
you
And you hear the story, like when McDonald’s started saying, would you like fries with that, they started selling more fries and would you like to upsize the meal? started, it’s like we know the story, we know the data. It’s not like, it’s not a theory.
We do know the data. The other day I drove through a drive-through here in Texas. And I think it’s obvious, maybe not, but I think it was obvious that it was AI. I was talking to AI. I wasn’t talking to a human at the drive-through window. And I have a pretty good ear because I’ve owned call centers forever and ever. And so I do have pretty good ear.
But every order that AI asks if you’d like, would you also like egg rolls? Would you also like wonton? It asks that suggestive sales question. the data is in. I mean, we know that if you ask more, you get more, period. Ask more, get more. ⁓
And
if you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t go fishing, you’re never gonna catch a fish.
If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t go fishing, you’re never going to catch a fish. Share on X
Right? Right, right, right.
Yeah, absolutely. They won’t swim up to your door and on the door and ring the bell.
And
even if they do, that’s a one-off. Winning the lottery is my strategy for making money. Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Okay. If you had to rebuild, because you’ve been a solopreneur like almost since birth. Okay. But if you, if you had to rebuild as a solopreneur, tell me a couple of things you do the first 48 hours.
starting from day one.
Well, aside from figuring out my personal philosophy, which we’ve already covered, let’s say I figured out my personal philosophy. The most important thing is how do I present, how do I, what’s the value I bring to the market, right? What is the value? It could be producing something, it could be making something, but it could also be more service-based, which is where I come from. Like, how do I present, how do I give value to the market and how do I now present this value?
Yes.
in a way where the market understands my truest value at the optimized level. That’s positioning, right? It’s easy to say, I’m really good at this, but if the market doesn’t see that, then it’s not gonna interact with that idea. So for me, it’s all about value, right? What’s the value that I’ve, even if you’re an employee, it’s like if someone’s paying you a hundred grand a year, they’re thinking he’s gotta be bringing me 300, 400, 500 grand value. Otherwise, why am I paying him hundred grand?
and in your CV and in your interview, you’re selling and you’re marketing yourself and you’re presenting your value in so many different ways that you might not see it that way, but that’s exactly what you’re doing. So the first thing I would always think about is what is the value, if I did my best work in the best environment, like no excuses, they’ve given me everything I need and I’ve done my best work, what ends up happening that wouldn’t have happened without me? What’s the outcome of my work, my best, greatest work?
What’s the outcome? Okay, that’s the value I bring. Now how do I present that idea to the market so that they can see that value and they can price it and they can pay me for it. And if you figure that and you don’t need long to figure that out. And if you figure that out, you now have something you can take to
Very good, okay. So as a solopreneur.
You’re doing everything.
Very definition of solopreneur.
Well, I’m not cutting my own hair.
How do
you balance personal and work life when you’re doing everything except?
So it’s an interesting question, Don, though, because it’s like I don’t do everything. don’t everything I do or even the things I don’t do are my decisions. So the impact on the so I don’t have to ask anybody for so for I’ll give you an example. So if I needed to build a website, I could pay someone to build my website. That doesn’t mean I’m not a solopreneur. Right. Or if I have someone if I have someone run my webinar funnel for me.
okay.
Now, if I hire them, I think you’re coming out of solo entrepreneurship because there’s going to be some ethical, moral, legal regulation around the hire. Right? So that’s where I think you start to cross the line from solo into. That’s why solo entrepreneurship for me is a different thing. Right? Yeah. I call them project managers, really. It’s like, this is my project, run it for me. This is my project. Even my VA, it’s like, she’s running my admin project. She’s keeping an order.
So contractor versus employee.
or my calendar organized in my, but she doesn’t work for me in the sense where she’s an employee and she has to appear at certain times. And this is an important thing also. If I say to someone, this is your job, get it done. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care what time you work. I think we’re still in the solo printer game. I think if I start to say you have to turn up at nine, you have to finish at five and you have to report to me and all this, then it becomes employee. that’s the first thing to consider. You can bring help, like cutting, that’s why I made the cutting your hair comment.
Where, like, how do you, is the line of solopreneurship? Because without, okay, fixing my car, fixing my laptop, because if my laptop doesn’t work, I can’t work. So is the guy who fixes my laptop, does that mean I’m not a solopreneur? So it’s this idea that, again, if we think back to, I make the decisions without having to consult anyone, and I take all the consequences, positive and negative, it all comes on me. Now you can argue that if I lose my income or I lose my clients, then my VA loses her job, but she can just go and get a.
job where she can take on more clients. So for me, it’s in my pathway, I’m the only one who’s impacted. Really. Yeah.
Understood. Okay.
Very good. All right. So Mo, if someone in the audience wanted to reach out to you, ⁓ and for any reason, but to receive training or anything else, how would they do that?
Yes.
So there’s only one Moe Choice, M-O-E Choice, so you can find me on Google. I’ve got Moe Choice on all the social media platforms, but I’m mainly on LinkedIn. I kind of explored all the platforms and LinkedIn worked really well for me, so I doubled down on that. So you can just find me on LinkedIn, connect with me there. MoeChoice.com is my website, and you can send me a contact request through there as well.
But LinkedIn would be the place where I create content every day. interact in the comments and I interact in the DMs. That would be the best.
Okay, awesome.
And do you have an offer for the audience today?
I
have something, yeah, I’d like to present something just really for you guys. So I have a live masterclass that I run, very popular, and it’s called How to Make $15,000 a Month as a Solopreneur Using Just Your LinkedIn Profile. So the idea is you don’t have to any money, and you can hit those kinds of numbers. And so I’ll give you the proven framework that I used for myself and that my clients have used.
Yeah.
And so, and I deliver it live because I interact with the audience and I take their questions and it becomes more tailored to them rather than just a copy paste kind of thing. So they walk away knowing exactly what they need to do to hit $15,000 a month. That’s the promise. And just for your listeners, I’ve added two bonuses. So when they sign up to this, I give them a video on how to optimize their LinkedIn profile. It’s like a 25 minute video that shows them exactly what they need to consider. And I also give them a selection of my best content.
that will show them how to use LinkedIn to optimize their outreach and their sales process too. So it’s really, it’s like a kind of a mini course that will give them everything they need to get started on LinkedIn. And I’d like to offer that to your listeners.
Love that. And so do you want to share the link verbally? And then also we’ll put it in the show notes and all the clips, reels and all that. So what is the link to where somebody who’s just catching audio on Apple or Spotify, what could they go to?
So it’s moechoice.com, M-O-E-choice.com forward slash podcast.
Easy peasy. Yeah, easy peasy. Mo, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been my distinct pleasure to learn some things I did not know about solopreneurship.
Easy PC, always think, Ingon, always think.
Thank you.
I appreciate you, Don. I really enjoyed talking to you and thank you so much for the opportunity.
Thanks, Mo. That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time.

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Title: E130 | How Ethan King Doubled His Business With AI & Automation | The Future of Entrepreneurship
Date: June 9, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-ethan-king-doubled-his-business-with-ai-automation-future-of-entrepreneurship/
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Content:
What if the secret to scaling your business wasn’t working harder—but automating smarter?
In this high-energy and insight-packed episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes back visionary entrepreneur Ethan King for a conversation that bridges creativity, technology, and the future of work. Ethan, known for building successful ventures like Zeus’s Closet and Stuff for Greeks, shares how a business crisis forced him to embrace automation—and how that pivot not only saved his company but doubled its revenue with half the staff.
But this episode goes far beyond business survival. Ethan dives deep into how AI and automation are transforming everything—from marketing and operations to personal productivity and even romance. Yes, you read that right. Ethan shares how he automated monthly flower deliveries to his wife, blending tech with authenticity in a way that’s both hilarious and heartwarming.
Topics Discussed:

The E.A.T. Framework: Eliminate, Automate, Train
How AI is reshaping creativity, marketing, and business operations
The future of AI-powered wearables and digital avatars
Why most business owners misuse AI—and how to fix it
Personal stories of automation in marriage, fitness, and daily life
The importance of customizing AI to reflect your brand voice

Ethan also shares golden nuggets on how to simplify your life, automate your health habits, and think differently about what’s possible in the age of AI. Whether you’re a startup founder, a seasoned CEO, or just AI-curious, this episode is your roadmap to working less, scaling faster, and living smarter.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Tune in now to learn how to future-proof your business and unlock exponential growth with the power of AI.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/How-Ethan-King-Doubled-His-Business-With-AI-Automation.mp3
How Ethan King Doubled His Business With AI & Automation | The Future of Entrepreneurship
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. So you know on television when you see the attorney say, your honor, I reserve the right to recall the witness? Well, today I have a recalled witness. My guest was on the show almost three years ago, like three weeks, shorter than three years ago. Ethan King, how in the world have you been?
I’ve been fantastic and what an honor to be back for a second time on your podcast, Don Williams. As you know, you’re one of my favorite people and your podcast is one of my favorite podcasts. So great to be back.
back at you, you know, I’ve been recalled to certain podcasts and where I, where I felt like, I didn’t do a good job the first time. And so they’re bringing me back. And then others where I was like, I slayed it and they’re bringing me back. And so let me just, let me just clear the confusion. You slayed it the first time and we’re bringing you back this time. So, ⁓ so, so Ethan, I know your business, but tell me, your
Yeah.
Thank you.
⁓ primary business the last 10 years or so has been what business?
So Zeus’s Closet, actually more than 10 years, we just celebrated 16 years for our retail store, Zeus’s Closet. So we do screen printing and embroidery, like a tattoo shop for your clothes, where we make custom wardrobe for the entertainment industry, film and TV, school uniforms, business swag, all of that, but really with a high-end customization focus. And before that, we have another business that’s still going. It’s called Stuff for Greeks.
still in the embroidery space, but that was my first business that started as a school project where we do fraternity and sorority gear and we ship all over the country. So that’s an e-commerce business that’s been around for over 22 years.
Yeah, and you actually started that, if I recall, while you were in college. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So you’re kind of dating yourself by answering that question. because we can do the math. We can figure it out. OK, so ⁓ the Greek business and then the, I’ll say the non-Greek business, that’s an oversimplification. But you got those two going and it’s
That’s right
You and your partner in life, your wife, are partners in the businesses as well. Love that. Not very many people can do that successfully, but 22 years seems like you guys have that part figured out. I’m just put you on the spot. What’s one secret, okay, to operating businesses and having a successful family life and children? I mean, I know you very well.
What’s the secret to that? Because as you know, many entrepreneurs struggle.
Yeah, it’s a tough one, but ⁓ if I had to distill it down to one thing, would be know your respective lanes, know your strengths and weaknesses, and honor those. Allow each person to flow freely in their respective lane. It doesn’t mean they operate in a silo. You’re still there at the sounding board and as a support system. But in our experience, when we try to operate in the same space within our business, that’s when we butt heads.
So fortunately, my wife and I, actually met in college ⁓ during the time that was when, know, Stuff For Greek started as a school project. She was a business major. I was an art major with absolutely no business sense, no formal business training. So that’s why it worked out really well. And she actually majored in risk management. So she worked in the insurance field for eight years before she ever came into our company full time. And ⁓ I hate doing stuff like HR.
payroll insurance, like I would pull my hair out if that were, if I had to do that all day, but she loves it. I love the creative stuff, the marketing. And so we, so we stay in our respective lines that has helped a lot.
I love that. Thanks for sharing that secret. saw a good friend at a post today and he said, hey, I write a couple sentences, an abbreviated love letter to my wife most days of the week and place it on her pillow. Two or three sentences, he said, it takes me about five minutes. And ⁓ they’re both great people. And I would not say he’s terrifically romantic and he would admit the same thing, though that I think is like over the top. mean, like that’s a big grand gesture. And so…
When he was sharing that with me, I was like, you know, here’s the one thing I’ve learned. Love is not a noun. It is not a person, place or thing. Love is a verb. It is an action word. Okay.
Yeah. 100%. Fun, fun, ⁓
fun story that that reminds me of. I admire your friend for doing that. That would require a lot of effort for for me to do that, ⁓ to express love needs to be expressed, right? Appreciation, gratitude needs to be expressed. So funny story. And this ties into automation, because that’s what we’re here to talk about today, ⁓ which is a big part of my life. ⁓
Yeah.
Yeah.
At one point in time, this was several years ago, my wife said, you know, Ethan, I wish you were more romantic. I love getting fresh flowers all the time and you don’t ever do anything like that. I said, you know what? I went onto one of these flower websites and I figured out how to put it on autopilot so that every month flowers would just appear on my doorstep. One click, I was done for the whole, I had a whole year subscription to flowers and she loved it.
But she knew and I was transparent. She knew I had put it on autopilot because she knows me, but it still made her feel good. And we had fresh fresh flowers around the house. So I was able to check that box. So I believe that automation can help you in every area of your life as long as you fuse it with authenticity, because I was still being authentic and I got the job done. But if I had to remember to go and do it or to stop by the store physically every time, it just wouldn’t get done.
and I wouldn’t be able to express that emotion.
love that. And you said something, automation fused with authenticity. Okay. That is amazing because as we know, you know, and I wrote a book on romance, romancing your customer and, you know, so I think I’m an expert on romance. but, ⁓ and other people do too. ⁓ but you know, romance is, it romance is an action and, and, and if it’s a surprise.
Almost all great romance has an element of surprise. so even if you set it up on automation, she doesn’t know what day is coming. then you don’t either. There you go. There you go. ⁓ So, so, ⁓ stuff for Greeks, Zeus’s closet, and then just about, I guess just before your first episode on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Yeah, I don’t either.
this little company that nobody had heard of called OpenAI came out with this free tool called ChatGPT. And some people I know said, my gosh, this is the second coming of technology. ⁓ so tell us, I know that you spend a lot of your time doing keynote speeches all over the world on
AI. so tell us how, how did we go from being in the clothing business? Okay. To being in the AI business.
Yeah, that’s the great part of this story. I’ve actually been immersed in automation since way before ChatGPT hit the scene. So we need to go back to the early 2010s, like between like 2011 and 2014 is when I first got introduced to the world of automation. And now, mind you, I’m not a tech guy. I was an art major in college, as you know. So if I can figure this stuff out, then you can. But the reason I figured it out is because my back was against the wall.
We were going through a nasty lawsuit in our business that almost forced us to have to shut things down and consider losing it all. And I was faced with either fight to keep the business alive or give up and lose everything that I worked so hard for. And I chose to fight. And in order to do that, at the time, I didn’t have extra money. I didn’t have extra staff. Either people had resigned and we didn’t have the money to replace them or we had to lay people off.
So I had to figure out how to do more with less. And as you know, no business can survive without marketing. So that’s the first thing I needed to figure out how to do. How can I keep the marketing going without needing humans to do it? So I went to a three day workshop, learned marketing automation. And first thing we did was program all of our email drip campaign sequences so that just one hit, the customer gets tagged and they get these endless emails from us all the time.
Then we learned how to automate our social media. And our customers thought we were this huge company. And here we were tiny. We were smaller than we were before with headcount. But by the time we got to the end of this situation, we had not only saved our company, but we actually doubled our revenue with half of the staff that we had before. And it’s all thanks to automation. So when OpenAI released Chatchi BT,
Endless emails. I love the endless emails.
We’d actually been dabbling around in AI a little bit before that because AI is just another form of automation. It just happens to be super advanced and now in the public’s eye and all the buzzword over the past three years. But we weren’t new to it. So we just layered it on top of everything we were doing in our business. Because at this point, we had we’ve adopted an automation first mindset throughout our whole team. That’s how we’re able to run so lean and scale without having to hire more staff.
Our first, and I think I may have talked about this before, but our first approach when we have repetitive tasks is first evaluate, do we need to eliminate it? Or can we automate it? And if we can’t eliminate it or automate it, we train someone else to do it. E-A-T, eat every task, eliminate, automate, train. So that’s our company-wide mindset. So automation is a big part of that in my personal life and in my business life, and AI has just amplified it. Now,
Love that.
I teach entrepreneurs all over the world. It actually came out of ⁓ me doing a presentation in Cape Town when we were down there to the other marketing chairs for this volunteer role that we were doing as board members. And since it’s a volunteer role, I needed to figure out how to do this quickly and efficiently and authentically at scale without it consuming a lot of my time. So I created all of these custom GPTs and apps.
so that all you have to do is just plug in the name of the event, the speaker, and their bio, and it spits out all of your social media content, your email copy, your website copy, all in one thing in about 30 seconds. And I thought, what’s funny, Don, I thought everyone was already doing this type of stuff in their businesses, but that room of 100 entrepreneurs or so, maybe 200 entrepreneurs, they were blown away by my 20 minute presentation, and they were like, can you teach me this?
Yeah.
Do you teach businesses how to do this? Do you teach EO, YPO chapters how to do this? And I’m like, yeah, sure. So now over the past three years, that has turned into a new business, Simple Success. And I published the book, Chat GPT to Double Your Business in 90 Days. And it’s just been a fun, fun, passion project to help entrepreneurs scale the way that we did by leveraging AI and automation.
Love that. I do, you know, a lot of my main business is consulting, not podcasting actually. And so as, as my clients begin to use AI, it’s almost like taking them to the magic show. They’re just blunt. They’re like, my gosh. And you’re like, yeah. And people have been doing a version of this for a couple of years now.
And so giddy up, let’s, let’s, let’s every, everything we can do, ⁓ we should do, you know, in an automated and I love how you say automation and artificial intelligence, just a form of automation. You know, one of my personal beefs with the term AI is that it’s not really intelligent. It, it, has massive computer power. It’s had massive amounts of data.
Very true.
and it’s spectacular pattern recognition. ⁓ so, but is it really thinking? No, not really. It’s recognizing patterns and delivering back the best response that it thinks. Okay, so I’m gonna ask you a couple AI questions, okay, because you are the guru. Okay, here’s tough question one. Ethan King, will AI ever
Exactly.
replace human charisma, human creativity, or human connection.
charisma, creativity, and connection. ⁓
I’m going to address those three separately. I do not think that AI can replace human charisma. I think it can mimic it. In fact, in some of my workshops, I’ve encountered people who are genuinely freaked out because they thought chat GPT was in love with them. And it sounds funny to you and to you and me, but like if it’s really just a big.
Calculator it’s like a language calculator is what I have to explain to people it is it’s been trained on Trillions and trillions of documents has read every book ever written it knows every quote by every famous figure living or dead real or fictitious so if you have all these quadrillions and quintillions of characters in its brain then it can synthesize that with whatever you request of it
then it’s probably gonna know exactly what to say mathematically to trigger your emotions. And yes, so it can mimic charisma, but it’s not genuine. And that’s what I teach people is AI cannot replace our unique human energy signature. That is what’s AI will continue to improve and get better in knowledge, even PhD level knowledge. ⁓
rocket science, engineering level knowledge will become ubiquitous. All of us will have that knowledge in our pockets. We already do kind of, mean, everyone has access to even the free version of chat, GPT, clogged, perplexity. If you know how to pull out your phone and use it, you have this level of knowledge at your fingertips. mean, there’s been no other time in history where we’ve had this, the explosion of this, ⁓ probably the closest thing is like when we had the internet and the iPhone in our pockets.
But now we have top level knowledge at our fingertips, but the ability to synthesize that knowledge with context that you give it unlocks realms and the power to execute. Because now we’re going into the world of agents. ⁓ And an agent is AI that can not just spit out text for you, but can actually do things on your behalf. Go into a web browser, book flights for you, book hotel rooms for you, make the…
reservations at the restaurant on your behalf, answer phone calls and have a conversation with people. And people don’t even realize that they’re talking to a robot. What a world, what a time to be alive. So I don’t think that it will replace those things that you mentioned, but it can very closely mimic ⁓ the charisma, the creativity. Let’s come back to that one. The connection, it cannot replace it, but it can mimic it. ⁓ But creativity.
Let’s unpack that for a minute because I think what caught everyone by surprise, including me, is that AI came for the creative jobs first, right? The image creation is mind blowing. You know what? There was a big, and I want to date this, we’re talking about this on May 20th, 2025, ChatGPT about a month ago put out an update to their image generation software.
Yeah.
And you probably saw online or you’re still seeing where people are creating their action figures that you can upload a photo and say, make an action figure of me or make me look like a Pixar character or, you know, a Spider-Man. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I Pixar for myself, too, and all the Ghibli styles. So that’s fun and cool. And it will create these images in about what, 30 to 60 seconds? Well, guess what, Don, now
I like Pixar Don. I like him. He’s cool.
Mm-hmm.
you can go to crea.ai, that’s K-R-E-A dot A-I. They have a real time image generator. When I say real time, I mean by the time you finish typing the first word in the prompt, the image is already there. So if I type Batman, Batman’s already on my screen, and then I can say working, then the image changes and he’s doing work. And then I say in a Starbucks, then Batman is serving coffee immediately.
Mind blowing. This is how fast AI is changing because people are still getting over the major release with ChatGPT with the image creation, but now it’s instant and it’s only going to get better from here. So the creativity, to answer your question, I think the creativity part, that can be a close one where we can get, we might be replaced on that one. We might just appreciate what AI creates for us, even with music.
You can go to suno.com, S-U-N-O.com and create a song in 30 seconds based on a text. You just type in what you want the song to be about and it creates the full track for you with lyrics and everything in 30 seconds. You can create video with just a prompt. There’s several solutions out there, but if you have chat GPT, then you have access to Sora, S-O-R-A, where you can just describe the video you want.
and it creates a photo-realistic cinematic quality video. They do still have some flaws, but it is mind-boggling. So creativity, ⁓ much to my surprise and to the surprise of others, is the first threat.
Well, I totally agree. you know, it started out with words. Okay. You know, it’s, it’s words are easy to pattern recognize. And so for an entrepreneur, maybe to generate a blog post or a sales landing page or, you know, meta or Google ads, you know, you might invest up to a thousand dollars with a copywriter.
and maybe up to a couple weeks before you would get something back. And of course, you know, even in the very early days, it was given back to you in five seconds. And you’re like, okay, I’m saving a bunch there. Okay, question number two.
If you were starting today, you were not an entrepreneur, not a business owner, but today you’re going to start a business.
and you were going to use AI. What’s the fastest way to build that business from cold, dead nothing to flourishing?
for this scenario, am I able to retain all of the knowledge that I have in starting up? Okay. I would go into educating and consulting businesses on how to leverage AI and automation, which is kind of what I’m doing. But that’s what I would do. You know, it’s a weird thing, ⁓ I think about this from time to time. I don’t know if all entrepreneurs think about this, but sometimes I think about worst case scenario.
Yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine.
What if I lost everything? And like literally living under the bridge, how would I get it all back? And you know what, if I lost everything, the first thing I would get, I would make sure all I need is an iPhone and to be able to afford to pay my phone bill. And I can make it all back with this now, today. I don’t need a computer. I don’t even need a roof over my head. mean, thank you. Thank you, God, for shelter. I’m so appreciative of it.
But what a time we live in to where with this device, you can make a fortune, not ⁓ just getting by, but you can make a fortune because of the power that’s within it as long as it’s connected to the internet. So that is what I would do. I would leverage AI and automation to consult with businesses, teach them how to leverage it, and also ⁓ creating content on their behalf because so many people are still
either dismissive of automation or fearful of it, or they just think it’s a passing fad. This is a mistake that I see people make. They’ll try ChatGPT or any LLM one time and not like the results. that sounds too robotic. That doesn’t sound like me. But do you realize, because even when ⁓ the writing tools first came out, before ChatGPT, do you remember Jasper and things like that that you could use? ⁓ Well, it…
Yeah.
That never really stuck with me because I was like, this is cute. It can write copy, but it didn’t sound like me. And you could tweak the way it sounds a little bit, but it still, it wasn’t all the way there. But with the modern LLMs, you can customize it to sound exactly like you and to mimic even your thought patterns by training it and on your background, your values, your interests, your hobbies, your goals. My ChatGPT knows.
everything about me. If you look at my custom settings, every field is filled out. It knows my writing style. Here’s a tip. Have ChatDBT analyze things that you have said and things that you have written, transcripts from podcasts you’ve appeared on, articles that you genuinely wrote yourself, books you’ve written. Have it analyze all of that because it can then decipher your unique writing style and use that to create copy for you so that
Your AI, your generated output doesn’t sound like AI, it doesn’t sound robotic, but it actually sounds like you. Because it’s all about context windows and how much context you give it. So that’s what I mean when I say marry the authenticity with your authentic influence is the real AI. And you marry that with artificial intelligence, the other AI to get explosive results.
that.
And I want to back up exactly what you said. So, you know, I’ve written nine books. have thousands of videos on social media. I speak from the stage. have, I don’t know how many of these podcasts, episodes we’ve done, but a lot. And so my…
GPT sounds really more like me than me. I’m kind of shocked sometimes at what it delivers. I’m like, man, that sounds a lot like me. And so ⁓ if you’re not getting the results you want, probably like anything else, might be better to spend a little more time and effort on it because it will deliver it. You the thing that was eye opening to me is I have
Yeah.
Yeah.
I’m a very well-read person. I’ve read thousands of books. In my 20s, I did not own a television. I would read four or five books a week. Very fast reader. Kind of person who picks up a book, reads 300 pages and then puts it down. ⁓ And so, of unusual that way. But out of all those books I’ve read, at this point, maybe I have recall of…
I have single digit recall. There’s no way to remember all of that. But then you take something like ChatGPT and it’s read everything that’s ever been published and has a hundred percent recall. And it will hallucinate from time to time, okay? But that’s even occurring less and less. And so it’s amazing the power that you have.
in that, in that I’ve, you know, you want to learn how to build a rocket booster that’ll get you to the moon? It’ll tell you. You may not understand it, but it’ll tell you how to do it. Okay, next question.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen AI do for a business owner?
craziest
My definition of crazy changes. You keep moving the flag post of what used to blow my mind. A week later, it doesn’t blow my mind anymore. But what I’m starting to see get better and better is digital cloning of ourselves. And what like I’m talking to you, we’re on the web right now. I could not be a real person. It could be my AI.
interfacing with you right now. We’re almost at that quality, not quite yet, but we are, if you go to like, Heygen, H-E-Y-G-E-N, you can clone yourself. You can clone your voice using 11 Labs so that your digital avatar sounds like you. You can put a bunch of text documents into the backend brain of your avatar so that it thinks like you. And now you can even put your digital avatar, have it appear on Zoom calls on your behalf.
So it’s getting to that point where we all will have the ability to be in a thousand places at once. I think it will be normal for someone to say, oh, I can’t make that zoom meeting, but I’m going to send my AI. We’re getting warmed up to it because how many zoom calls have you been on where you see all these AI recorders? There’ll be more AI recorders than there are humans on the call. And we’re used to it. At first, it was a little bit creepy. And we’re like, I don’t know if I want these AI recorders in here, but now we’re used to it.
Well, pretty soon, Bob, it will be Bob AI, Bob’s AI avatar and Jill’s AI avatar. And we’ll be fine with that because we know that information will get back to the human. And we trust that whatever Bob’s AI would say is probably what Bob would say. Just like I could probably talk to your chat GPT Don, since you’ve trained it so well. And what do you think is the percentage chance that it will say what you would say? Maybe what, a 90 % chance or so?
Yeah, it’s really
high. It’s really, really high because I’ve fed it a lot. You know, the more you feed it, the more accurate it’s going to be. so ⁓ it’s like, it’s almost like commercial, it’s fertilizer. Your lawn is hungry, feed it. Your GPT is hungry, feed it. Okay. And, and it will go a long way. And I can remember, I think we were in
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Feed it. That’s right.
Amsterdam, uh, with a group in marketing. And, um, one of the people that are support, I was like, why are you taking notes? Why are you not just recording this on Otter or, you know, one of 50 different kind of like basic AI application? mean, pretty simple stuff. Just I’m going to record it and I’m going to transcribe it real time and I’m going to spit it out. And it’s going to be like 99 % accurate. And, um,
And this person was like, you know, that stuff doesn’t work. And I was like, my gosh. And so I just turned it on on my phone and then an hour later gave it to her and she was like blown away. But, but we took it one step further. ⁓ and you may know Rodolfo, lives in El Salvador. I gave it to him, you know, and in about, I don’t know, 10 minutes, he transcribed it into 10 different.
No, not transcribed. He translated it into 10 different languages and then using a tool like HeyGen displayed it on the screen. And so he said this sentence in Japanese and the next sentence in Chinese and the next in Arabic and the next in Farsi and next in Portuguese. that time the whole room was like, ⁓ my gosh. Yeah. And ⁓ so pretty amazing stuff.
Yeah.

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Title: E129 | From Startup to 2000+ Clients: John Horn’s Blueprint for Digital Marketing Success
Date: June 3, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-startup-to-2000-clients-john-horns-blueprint-for-digital-marketing-success/
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Welcome to another episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, where we dive deep into the stories behind today’s most successful business leaders. In this episode, host Don Williams sits down with John Horn, the CEO of Stub Group — a digital marketing agency that has helped over 2,000 businesses grow through smart, ROI-driven advertising.
John’s journey is anything but ordinary. From working in a warehouse at age 10 to becoming the first employee at his brother’s startup, John has played a pivotal role in scaling Stub Group into a powerhouse agency managing hundreds of millions in ad spend. His story is one of grit, strategy, and relentless focus on results.
In this episode, you’ll hear:

How Stub Group grew from a bootstrapped startup to a 30-person team
The biggest mistake brands make with paid ads — and how to avoid it
What it means to land in “Google Ad Jail” and how John’s team helps clients get out
Why hiring the right people early is critical to long-term success
How diversification helped Stub Group survive the COVID-19 crash
A behind-the-scenes look at ad campaigns so effective, they were shut down by platforms

John also shares his thoughts on the future of digital marketing, the importance of tracking ROI, and why best practices from platforms like Google and Meta aren’t always in your best interest.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer, or business owner looking to scale, this episode is packed with actionable insights and hard-earned wisdom.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/PHegABYsu7.mp3
From Startup to 2000+ Clients: John Horn’s Blueprint for Digital Marketing Success
 
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat today. I have a digital marketing guru expert, ⁓ Phenom and John Horn with Stub Group. Welcome to the show.
Hey Don, thanks so much for having me.
So I’m thrilled to have you on the show. ⁓ Your company has tons of clients, has managed ad campaigns and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. And ⁓ interesting to me, somehow you seem to have identified a path back if a client gets in, I’ll say Google ad jail.
⁓ You have been able to parole some of those people. so, ⁓ John, tell us what stub groups, core competencies are, who you serve, how long you’ve done it, all that stuff.
Yeah, absolutely. So Stub Group, we’ve been around for over a decade at this point and really focus on the digital marketing side of things. So working with all sorts of different businesses, everything from e-commerce companies to local service businesses, lead generation, SaaS, etcetera, and helping them use the internet to find new customers and ultimately make more money. So the platforms usually talk about things like Google, Meta.
And yeah, ultimately going out, finding where people are at ⁓ and capturing them in the right stage in that customer journey so that we can get them introduced to our clients and again, make more money than our clients are paying to the platforms they have to use to advertise.
Yeah, return
on advertising. That is the magic. That is the magic. So I want to take you all the way back to young John. So you’re in your household that you grew up in between five and 18, and people’s households are different, but you’re in that house. Was there an entrepreneur as an adult who set an example for you?
Yep.
Definitely. So I’d say my family has a history of entrepreneurship. My grandfather owned his own grocery store. My father was an attorney, had his own law practice. And then my brother, my older brother actually started Stub Group and I came on board with him in the early days. And so lots of entrepreneurial examples and things that I was able to learn from and then ⁓ parlay into my own working experience.
Yeah. So love that. know, many times when a child grows up in an entrepreneurial household, you know, the kitchen table is also kind of the boardroom table. And so they just learn a little by osmosis ⁓ by being there. Okay. So out of your childhood home, went to university or backpack across Europe, or immediately went out to the garage and helped your brother and started stuff group.
So I got into the workspace, the workplace on the early side of things. Growing up, even when I was, know, 10, kind of 10 and on, I was able to work part-time with my dad. He worked in a warehouse. I would go and help him work, you know, a day a week, that type of thing more as I got older. And then started working full-time when I was 16, working in kind of customer service and wholesaling and different stuff. And went to college virtually online while I was working. So got a degree while I was working.
Hmm.
And then, yeah, eventually ended up going into the stub group world when my brother and business partner of his started the business and then brought me on really as employee number one. And we’ve grown the business since then.
I love that. So ⁓ brother, partner, you employee number one, how big is the team now? How many clients have you served?
Yeah, we’ve got around 30 people on the team currently. We’ve worked with over 2000 clients and trying to increase that number every day.
Love that, love that. Okay, so, I want to ask you a question. Not often we have a digital marketing guru on the call. So, let me ask you this. What do you think is the biggest mistake brands make with paid ads?
Hmm. I’m not sure about the guru part, but I will give you my best answer to that. Cause they had to see a lot of mistakes. ⁓ number one, I would say is not defining and tracking what success looks like for their paid ads. A lot of businesses will just say, Hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z. And they’ll just start throwing money at the wall and they’ll wake up six months from now and realize they had no mechanism in place to track whether or not that money they’re spending is actually turning like you mentioned earlier into ROI.
and how much ROI and which parts of what they’re doing is working and which parts aren’t because that’s a big part of marketing. Not everything works equally. It’s that 80-20 rule as with most of life. And so you got to track and see which 20 % is driving 80 % of the results. And then let’s spend our time and our money there and not spend it on the other areas that just aren’t working.
I love that. I think that’s a fatal error, not just in digital marketing, but in most things entrepreneurial is if you do not have the end in mind, you don’t know where you’re going. You’re probably already there. You’re lost in the wilderness. So tell me this, the early days of Stubb Group, ⁓ what was that like? So, you know, every dollar matters.
If you do not have the end in mind, you don't know where you're going. You're probably already there. Share on X
client is really, every client is always important, but like in the beginning, they’re like really, really important. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Very much so. Yeah, very, very brute strapped, very, very gritty. ⁓ those early days, we really, from a pretty early time said, Hey, we’re going to put our money where our mouth is. And, you know, we’re, doing this, this paid advertising stuff. Well, let’s put our own money to see if we can use it to acquire clients ourselves. And so a lot of our early clients that we brought on board were from us running our own campaigns and saying, okay, well, I guess we must know what we’re doing because we’re getting some clients and then, you know, figuring out how to run their campaigns. So.
Yeah, lots of very stressful time as I think is true in the early days of any business, but very much every client counts. We’re going to figure things out. We’re going to go above and beyond, be creative and be very careful about the money that we’re spending and then ultimately grow that into something with some stability.
Love that. I think it’s so important that a company can eat its own cooking. If you really want to understand the customer’s journey, be the customer. ⁓ And that’s really the only real way to see it from their point of view is just have their point of view and infinitely invaluable. So what about an industry secret that you wish every client knew before they hire?
Hmm.
a digital agency? Because I’m guessing that a lot of your clients say, well, I’ve hired several digital agencies and lost a lot of money and it didn’t work. So what’s one thing you wish they knew before they hired that first digital agency?
There’s a lot of places I could go with that, but I think the first thing that comes to mind is, the mentality with which businesses need to approach hiring an agency. So I see a lot of businesses have almost this kind of aggressive mentality towards agencies, which unfortunately I think often is because they’ve had bad agencies they’ve worked with. And so it’s kind of this. On the agency side, you’re almost always on the defensive. It’s like you’re defending everything that you’re doing to that client as opposed to.
where we see things be really successful is this team mentality of, we’re on the same team. We’re trying to make you successful and we need information from the client to be able to be successful. We need to understand what sets them apart, what’s going on in their other marketing, what their clients care about. need clear communication. so I think businesses need to understand, look, when you hire an agency, you’ve…
You’ve got to communicate a lot to them. You’ve got to give them data. You’ve got to give them context because they’re never going to understand your business as well as you do. That’s just not possible, but they’re going to understand things about marketing and about the platforms that they use better than you will as a business owner. And so you got to try and marry those things together and not have that kind of defensive aggressive relationship, but that teamwork striving towards a common goal relationship.
I love that. One of my first businesses, I was in the contact center space. so very similar that almost every client you ever had said, ⁓ I wasted so much money on other call centers. And we were in the outbound space, which is not for the faint of heart. Take some guts to get on there and make 100 phone calls a day and deal with all of that. But
But one thing we learned early on is the more we understand about the client and the more the client understands about us, the better we’ll perform together. And it is a team. And so many of those relationships last years and years and years because the client is so blown away by someone who actually works with them. They just won’t let you go. They’re like, no, no, they stay. These other things might go, but these people.
you
they stay. And so just speaks to handling that customer experience the way you’d want it to be handled. okay. If I put you in a time machine and I took you back to the very first day at Stub Group, what do you know now that you wish you knew then? So I’m gonna put you in the time machine. You get about a minute to say, Hey, John, listen up, man. Okay.
What would you tell yourself on the first day that you know now that you didn’t know then?
direction I’ll go with that is people because people are really our business. We sell the skill sets and time of our team members ultimately. And so I would say.
Be very careful about who you hire and be very quick to say, hey, this is not heading the right direction. We’re not the right fit for each other. And don’t ⁓ don’t cut corners in that hiring process. Because it’s really easy to hire somebody like, I think they’re, you know, they’re almost where I need them to be. Maybe I can invest a bunch of time and energy into them. I’ll get them to where I need to be. But at end the day, there’s a lot of things you can’t change about people. And so you just need to have very high standards.
during the hiring process and then have very good quality assurance in place to make sure that they are the right fit in those first early days of working together. I think that would save a lot of ⁓ challenges over the years if we’d learned that earlier.
Yeah, love that. So we’re all in the people business. I don’t care if you sell sand, you’re selling it to people who are using it for something. Okay. So knowing that we’re all in the people business and then not lowering our standards, that almost always comes back to bite you where you don’t want to be bit later. Okay. When you compromise your principles and then
Third, if you do need to make a change, I’m a big believer in, if we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast and cheap. Let’s not fail slow and expensive. Okay? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And it’s probably not working for them either. And so let’s let everybody get on to their highest and best ⁓ endeavor, which for whatever reason, it doesn’t even matter, know, is not this particular.
Let’s fail fast and cheap—not slow and expensive. Share on X
Okay, so ⁓ what about a hard moment? So something that’s happened in your experience in the business that maybe in retrospect, you’re like, actually pretty positive that that happened. But when it happened, was like, ouch, this hurts. Do you have a moment you can share like that?
First one that comes to mind is probably a moment shared by my many businesses as early, early 2020 COVID hits. And there’s what to call kind of black Monday where it’s one Monday. So many of our clients like, Hey, we got to pause advertising, pull it back, et cetera. Cause we don’t know what’s going on. can’t open as a business. And that was a really hard time. ⁓ We had to make some decisions very quickly about our workforce and what was going to happen. I think what we learned from that was that thankfully
We were fairly diversified as an agency. had clients in many, different industries. So we were not hit as hard as some people like, for example, know, travel oriented agencies or gym oriented where literally a hundred percent of their clients are dead in a day. ⁓ and so that’s been a, a, a very good learning to keep in mind as we move forward, which is diversification is important when we put too many eggs in one basket. There’s no guarantee of that basket is going to stay that basket. And so we want to, you know,
Okay.
be able to have stability for our team members and have things diversified across different areas.
Yeah, love that. March 16th, 2020 here in Texas was kind of zero day. And I was very successful canceling about 12 speaking engagements and refunding all the money because people just weren’t getting together. You’re like, you know, what can you do? And so take care of the clients and, and ultimately all that business has come back and more, but, but it pays to be able to handle stuff when it happens for sure.
Yep.
Okay, last question. ⁓ Any golden nugget on, ⁓ if we could look into your brain and say, man, this is really the good stuff. Anything you can share on digital.
Yeah, let’s see. would say, so we talked about kind of tracking defining success as being really important to stand by. I would say when you’re getting into digital, whether it be Google ads and meta ads or other things, be very careful of the best practices that those platforms push you towards. They all have the set of best practices decisions that they want you to make. And sometimes those are good things.
Best practices from platforms like Google aren’t always best for your business. Share on X
but the nature of the beast is that best practice, they have that best practice across every business out there and businesses are very, very different from each other. And so a lot of the value that we bring to clients we work with is like, hey, yeah, Google says this is best for you. No, it ain’t, you’re gonna lose money if you do this. But this one over here is good. So you’ve got to approach them with the nuances of your business in mind.
Mm.
I love that. So knowledge is power, folks. Be sure that if you don’t have it, you get it or you work with somebody like Stub Group that already has it and that they can share. John, thank you so much. I appreciate you being a guest on The Proven Entrepreneur Show today. Yeah. And we’ll see you all next time on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Don, thanks so much for having me.
Okay. And I’m going to do a look at the camera and smile. do a quick screenshot.
Okay. Now I’m going to ask two questions and I’ll do one. I’ll be pretty quick trying to have your answer before we end up less than a minute. And then we’ll pause a couple of seconds. I’ll do the other. Hey, John Horn stub group. What is one ad campaign that you ran that works so well, Facebook or Google shut it down.
⁓ We’ve done some work in the financial space with a lot of success with driving ⁓ people looking for like stock tips, information, stuff like that. And it’s a very nuanced space where Google is kind of paranoid. And so we’ve definitely had some situations where you got to be really, really careful about what you say, how you say it, making sure that you ⁓ dot the I’s and cross the T’s so far as Google is concerned.
Love that. Thank you. Next question. OK. You only have $1,000 to invest into digital ads. Where do you put it?
I am probably going to take that thousand and probably will actually go to Meta over Google simply because if it’s just kind of one shot do or do or die, I can push my message out to hopefully the right people with Meta. Whereas with Google, mostly it’s going to be people searching for things and then me trying to figure out whether or not what they’re searching for is actually what I should be showing my ads for. And it takes a lot of money to figure that out. So
Probably go with Medi with that thousand.
Love that. John, thank you so much.
Thanks so much for having me.
Okay, I’m gonna hit click stop.

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Title: E128 | From South Central to Champion: Jamelle Holieway’s Untold Journey to NCAA Glory
Date: May 27, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-south-central-to-champion-jamelle-holieways-untold-journey-to-ncaa-glory/
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Content:
What happens when a young man from South Central Los Angeles steps onto one of college football’s biggest stages—and wins it all?
In this unforgettable episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes a true legend: Jamelle Holieway, the 1985 National Championship-winning quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners. But this isn’t just a story about football. It’s a story about preparation meeting opportunity, about humility forged through adversity, and about the power of faith to carry us through the unknown.
At just 18 years old, Jamelle was sixth on the depth chart. Then, in a blink, Troy Aikman went down, and the call came: “Freshman, you’re in.” What followed was a moment that would change college football history—and Jamelle’s life—forever.
In this episode, you’ll hear:

How Jamelle prepared for the spotlight by practicing against a defense stacked with legends like Tony Casillas, Brian Bosworth, and Ricky Dixon
What it was like to play under the iconic Barry Switzer, and the handshake that sealed Jamelle’s commitment to Oklahoma
The emotional weight of representing a university, a state, and a legacy far bigger than himself
Reflections on his upcoming book, From South Central to the 1985 National Championship (co-authored with Jeff Evans)
A powerful message of gratitude, faith, and the wisdom he wishes he could share with his younger self

Jamelle opens up about the highs of roaring stadiums and the quiet moments of self-discovery that followed. He shares how he learned to carry the responsibility of being a symbol for Oklahoma football, and how he eventually found deeper meaning beyond the game.
“I should’ve gotten on the God train a whole lot earlier,” Jamelle says, reflecting on the spiritual journey that helped him find peace and purpose after the final whistle blew.
This episode is more than a sports story—it’s a human story. One of resilience, redemption, and the realization that true greatness isn’t just about winning games—it’s about how you live after the game ends.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Listen now to hear how Jamelle Holieway turned pressure into purpose, and why his story continues to inspire athletes, entrepreneurs, and dreamers alike.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/jHg5DPYXmp.mp3
From South Central to Champion: Jamelle Holieway’s Untold Journey to NCAA Glory
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have an unbelievable guest. One of my favorite people on planet earth. I don’t know about other planets, but on planet earth, one of my favorite people. have 1985 national championship quarterback, Jamellele Holieway, and actually just championship person ever since then. So Jamelle, welcome to the show.
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here.
I
am thrilled to have you. And so I’m going to ask you a couple of questions. All right. So your book is getting ready to come out from South Central to the 1985 National Championship. Okay. It’s a great story. Show us your… It’s a great story. Okay. And had the pleasure of working with Jeff Evans and you on your book. And so I’m so excited. We know that you were born and raised in South Central. Okay. Part of LA. Yes.
made it to Norman, Oklahoma. Great story in the book about how all that happens. And, and so I just want to jump right in. I know that you were six on the depth chart. Troy Aikman was the starting quarterback. He’s injured. I want to know what was going through your mind.
Troy went down and it didn’t look like he’d be able to continue the game.
Well, I think about it, was a blink of eye moment for me because I didn’t know that he was hurt. They just told me, freshman, freshman, you’re in. knew, I mean, that’s what they called me, freshman. And I go to the huddle and Eric Pope, the special gentleman, sits there and said, let’s roll.
Because it was something about that week of preparation that the great Barry Switzer let me go practice with number ones. Don’t know why to this day, but I was thankful that he let me practice with number ones because I had a clue what was going on when I came into the game. it was a matter of seconds to where you really didn’t have time to think about it.
I’m just glad I was prepared for the moment. we went on to lose that game, but it was a great experience for me to go in the game at that time.
I love that. so literally you’d been on campus. How long? Three months and all of a sudden, Troy’s hurt. You’re in freshman. Not Mr. Holloway, but you’re in freshman. Walk out into the center, Owen Field, 70, 80,000 Screaming Sooner fans. And off you went.
Three months? Three? months?
You know, it was really remarkable because if I had to play football again right now, and that’s about the only thing that I really miss is that 80,000 people cheering for you, shouting your name. I mean, the whole Sooner team is a feeling like no other feeling can ever give you. But it was one to where it’s…
You don’t wanna let nobody down. All these people cheering for you and so you had to go out there and do your best. And that’s all anybody can ever ask for you to do your best. for us to go out there and win like we won was everything to me.
love that. The energy must be where you can just reach out and touch it.
Yes, that part I still get that energy when I’m down there at the games and the kids, I call them kids, the young men are running out of the tunnel. mean, there’s something just comes over me still when you hear those cannons go off and the kids run out the tunnel. It takes me back to those moments when I used to run out there and do that and look forward to seeing my own kids do that one day.
That’d be amazing. Okay, so you were just 18 years old When you won the national championship at Oklahoma How did you handle the pressure? I mean, Oklahoma is a place where like two losses in a year is like
You know, very…
They kind of expect to every game every year. How did young 18 year old Jamelle handle that kind of pressure?
didn’t know it was pressure. Didn’t know, knew what I was getting into. I mean, that’s the reason why I go on Oklahoma, but really didn’t know that it was pressure. It was just a game to me. It was just a thing that let me do my part and let me not get us in the bad situations and we gonna win. And so winning is, winning is,
If you study for something all week long and the test is on Friday, I can ace it. I'm confident. Share on X
I don’t hate to say it, but I like to say it, it’s everything. I mean, because winning opens up doors. Losing, maybe the door might not get open if you’re a loser. But there was no pressure because if you study for something all week long and the test is on Friday, there’s, mean, I can ace it. I’m confident.
So if I study, prepare for the game all week long, when it came to going up against the opponent, that was the easiest thing because people didn’t realize that the time before when I had to practice, when I was the scout dummy for the number one defense in the nation.
And I can move the ball a little bit. I was happy. So therefore when the game came, this isn’t the number one defense. This is number 10, 11, 12, or 100 defense. It was so easy. The practice was hard. The practice when I was on the depth chart, the practices helped me more then than the game did coming out.
The practices helped me more than the game did. The games were easy. The practices were hard. Share on X
The were easy. The practices were hard for me. And so I just applied everything that I learned at those hard practices in the game. And I mean, it was a piece of cake.
loved when you shared that about, well you know I practiced against the number one defense all through the week and so whoever we were playing on Saturday they were not quite that good and they were the number one defense because your nose tackle was Tony Casillas, all-American yeah in a year when he missed some games because he was hurt. Okay.
Tony Casillas Lombardi Trophy winner
Ryan Bosworth,
Buccus award winner. And then Ricky Dixon, Jim Thorpe award winner, best defensive back in the nation. So we had an All-American on defense at every level. How can, I mean, how can I go wrong? Yeah. With that kind of backup.
All American Lime-
I love how you shared that. Well, I practiced against the best defense out there and so the game was something totally different. Okay, so in addition to playing against the best defense in America.
You maybe, you had one of the greatest college football coaches of all time, maybe the greatest college, and I’m a little partial, I’m a senior fan. Okay, maybe the greatest college football coach of all time, Barry Switzer. Okay. And so can you share something Barry shared with you at some point that’s behind the curtain that we wouldn’t know?
that he told me first of all he’s the best coach in America ever to me and to all the sooner people. But you know he’s a friend, a father, and a coach. And I say it in that order because the man never lied to me. He always came truthful. He come into my mom’s house.
You know, everybody had that living room where the Maldives had their plastic on the couch and…
Like that and and he comes in and he just lays on the floor like two little kids shooting marbles That was the first thing I thought I was like this has to be the coolest coach because we’re just like two little kids laying down playing marbles and And at that point he started talking about what he could do for me and I told him I say coach I’ve never been outside of California. I just want to go to a couple of my recruiting
to Hawaii, to Oregon, to Colorado. If you don’t tell nobody, I’m coming to Oklahoma. And as a young black man, mean, shaking hands was everything. We shook hands. He never said nothing to anybody. And so that…
that ultimate respect for one man to another has never left because he did me that way. But also one thing people don’t know, he did lie one time when he said there and said that it would never snow during football season. And here it went the first game, I mean the first year, the Ice Bowl in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
you know, whatever below zero it was on that Thanksgiving Thursday or Friday. And we won 13 and nothing. But that’s when he died and sit there and sit there with that. And he tells me this day, well, son, can’t predict Mother Nature. Well, I’ve
I think he could control a lot in Oklahoma, but controlling Oklahoma weather, that’s a big one. Because they have like, some places have climate, Oklahoma has water.
Yes.
weather because
they moved the game. The game was supposed to be at 330. First time ESPN did a game and but they moved it to that night because they thought the storm would pass through. Well, the storm just came that night. It tricked them. Yeah. And so but yeah, that’s that’s the very switch story. Well, nobody know that he sit there and say it would never snow during football season.
Okay, Coach, we’re not forgiving you for that. I’m just saying. Okay, now, you talk a lot about gratitude in your life. Was there a moment at OU where you realized that you were bigger than just football?
Yes, unfortunately, when you win and you won like we won constantly those four years, you tend to get a big chip on your shoulder, tend to get the big head to where people really can’t tell you nothing. And it took me
Excuse me, it took me the longest time to really understand that Jamil, you’re just not Jamil in Oklahoma. You represent the university at the highest level, no matter how many years you played, but your name is recognized. And when they say Oklahoma football, they’re gonna say your name too. And it took a lot of, it took…
a lot of wrong turns for me to get a right turn. And really appreciate what the University of Oklahoma means and what it meant to me deep down inside. just never really, I just thought I was, after football I thought I was just this figure, just like anybody else. But no, because I won, it
It took a lot of wrong turns for me to get a right turn. Share on X
It will always be. And it took me just to get knocked up across the head a couple of times really to understand what Oklahoma football means to the whole state and to all those. And I had to take it very seriously life after football, not just during football.
Yeah, I love that. I think you bring up a good point. know, football fans, obviously, Oklahoma football, but it’s Oklahoma football and baseball and like softball is like a big thing and basketball and sports, gymnastics. And then when you get past sports, Rhodes scholars and governors and senators and really an institution that has changed the lives
lives of hundreds, thousands of people and changed the future of the state of Oklahoma.
And I’m part of that. And so you have to, for me, I have to be humble one, but be in a position to where, you know, not to put myself in those vulnerable positions, you know, for anything negative to come out because, you know,
people would die for to be in my position. And I have to really realize that now at this day and age, but before I was just living the Vita Loca. I was just living my life, not really caring about whatever happened, but know that all changes. Even though I have my kids and all like that.
But still it all changes because, you know, it’s only myself and Josh Hyple living the last two quarterbacks winning that championship at University of Oklahoma. And that’s pretty doggone special.
really special and we all live and we all learn you know if if I knew and that takes me to my last question okay if I could put you into a time machine and I could send you all the way back to 18 year old Jamelle and I could say Jamelle you have a minute to share something you know now that you didn’t know then
with your 18 year old self. Something you know now that would have been beneficial to know then.
I should have got on the God train whole lot earlier then than now. that he will provide stuff for you that you don’t even know that you need, but you need it. He will be there for you in your time of need all the time, whether we know it or not. And that he will.
When he say he got the whole world in his hands or that phrase of the footprints in the sand, that is the ultimate thing for me because I really truly believe that he was carrying a young 18 year old kid back then and didn’t know it, but know it now. So it’s up to me to spread his word to whomever wants to listen and
and go for it and just give him all the praise and the glory.
that. Jamelle, it’s been my pleasure to have you on the show today. My pleasure to have a small piece in working with you on your book.
Well, thank you, Don. I appreciate you and not to leave my cousin out, my cousin Jeff. He was all part of all this too. And just thank everybody and go buy the book.
So we couldn’t have done it without him for sure. Yeah. That’s today’s episode of the proven entrepreneur show. We’ll see you next time.
Yeah, really.
Fucked.
Okay, so we want to do some spots. Yeah, and so these are really just going to be Jamelle. Okay.
Any questions?
baby
first one is, I’ll do this, that’ll tell you. So, wait a You want to launch in 10 days?
So I think that works.

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Title: E127 | How ADHD Became Her Superpower: Skye Waterson’s Journey from Burnout to Business Breakthrough
Date: May 19, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-adhd-became-her-superpower-skye-watersons-journey-from-burnout-to-business-breakthrough/
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Content:
Get ready for an episode that’s as insightful as it is inspiring. In this edition of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes the dynamic and deeply relatable Skye Waterson, founder of Unconventional Organization. Broadcasting from opposite ends of the world—Texas and New Zealand—Don and Skye dive into a conversation that will resonate with every entrepreneur who’s ever struggled with focus, burnout, or the pressure to “do it all.”
Skye shares her powerful journey from academia to entrepreneurship, revealing how a late ADHD diagnosis during her PhD became the catalyst for a complete life and career transformation. She opens up about the emotional and financial toll of shutting down her first business—a healthy frozen food startup—during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how that painful pivot led to the creation of a more agile, purpose-driven venture.
Key Insights:

How ADHD shows up in entrepreneurs—and why it’s more common than you think
The dangers of “shiny object syndrome” and how to overcome it
Skye’s neuroscience-based “2-Minute Focus Formula” for regaining control of your day
The importance of identifying what’s already working in your business
Why failure isn’t the end—it’s often the beginning of something better

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by your to-do list, distracted by new ideas, or unsure how to turn your passion into profit—this episode is for you. Skye’s story is a masterclass in resilience, self-awareness, and the power of building a business that works with your brain, not against it.
Visit our websites to learn more: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/How-ADHD-Became-Her-Superpower-Skye-Watersons-Journey.mp3
Skye Waterson’s Journey from Burnout to Business Breakthrough
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have an extra special guest whose expertise hits a little maybe too close to home. For me, I have a Skye Watterson with the unconventional organization with us today. Welcome to the show, Skye.
you ⁓
you
you
Hi, it’s great to be here.
It’s, I am thrilled to have you now, as everybody knows, I’m in central Texas and sky is from like deep, deep, deep south Texas, otherwise known as New Zealand. And, ⁓ so, ⁓ thank you so much for, starting your day very early and joining us on this afternoon episode.
Hehehehe. Hehehehe.
Yeah, you’re welcome. I work mostly with people from the US, so I love it.
Yeah, there you go. The world has become very small, hasn’t it? Yes, it has. So, okay, Sky, tell us about the unconventional organization, what you do, who you do it with, and why you do it.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Yeah, so what I do, what I am passionate about is building systems and teaching systems and strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs, you know, get focused, get their time back and build out consistent revenue.
I love that. And I think you help a group that maybe focus is somewhat of a challenge.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, 100%. I helped the people diagnosed or not who come to me and I just jumped off a call with someone and say things like, I used to be making $30,000 a month. I’m making $5,000 a month. I know the problem is me. I know the problem is that I’m not doing the thing and I just can’t do it. And that is so frustrating. I’ve seen people get the best strategies in the world and just be unable to use them. So I bridged that gap.
Yeah, I love that. How long have you been doing it and what motivated you to start?
Yeah, so I’ve been doing this for about five years now. And what motivated me to start was it’s a bit of a journey, I’m former academic and I was diagnosed myself with ADHD at the beginning of my PhD. So I had been, you know, going on the academic ladder, but there were ups and downs, there’s a lot of burnout. So I figured I needed to find out what was going on, went to my learning center, they got a bunch of tests and they said, we think you should get tested for ADHD and…
Hmm.
For me, that was a huge moment of understanding what was happening in my life. And it prompted me to, of course, because academic, do the research into ADHD. And when I did that and I started writing about it, I was able to build strategies that I now teach today.
I love that. And so, you know, I’m a 38-year entrepreneur and ⁓ have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs. And I don’t know what the percentage is, but it is not uncommon for a person who’s an entrepreneur to have attention deficit issues. ⁓ you know, I can remember as a kid, I didn’t think anything weird about it, but I would be reading like five or six books at a time.
Mm-hmm.
It’s high. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Mm-hmm.
And, and not like Jefferson, where he read a page and then went to the next book and read a page and not like that, but literally books all around the house. And people were like, how do you do that? And I’m like, I don’t know. just like to read and I’m interested in all these things. And, and was one of those kids who, you know, I was like the plate spinner at the circus. Just keep giving me plates. I love to spin plates.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Yep. Yep.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes,
And of course, a certain
we love space. ⁓
point, becomes a little challenge to do that.
Well, sometimes we decide to grab a plate and start spinning it when everything’s going good and we just needed to consistently focus on the thing that was working. And so that’s one of the things I teach as part of what I do.
Yeah, so that’s like ⁓ preventing O’Shiny syndrome. Here’s something cool. Let me chase that for a while.
Yes, yes.
Yes, it’s a big part of what I do, you know, and we can get focused, we can get our time back, but then we have that consistent revenue and the shiny object syndrome is a big factor in avoiding, you know, I’ve seen people, yeah, people have businesses go down just because of that.
Yeah, I buy that. Okay, I’m going to take you back to your childhood home. You’re back to five-year-old Skye. Remember her? Okay. And so in your home, was there an adult influence who was an entrepreneur?
Mm-hmm.
Yep. Yeah.
No, which is really surprising. I didn’t. I was in a world of bankers and, you know, teachers and all that kind of stuff. So there wasn’t a lot of entrepreneurial influences, but everything was about, when I was growing up, everything was about grades. have immigrant parents, everything was about grades and it was kind of a similar thing. It was like, how are you going to figure it out? How are you going to get this? How are you going to make this happen? And so a lot of
No.
That I think is what helped me with what I do today.
Problem solving is just like a foundational ability for entrepreneurs. Share on X
Well, I love that. I think, you know, problem solving is just like a foundational ability for entrepreneurs. Yeah. Give me a problem. I can solve it. And if we don’t have any problems, I’ll invent one so that I, so that I feel like I have something to do. Yeah. Okay. So, ⁓ tell me about your first job as a young girl or young woman, but the first, first thing that you did where you actually traded time or effort.
Mm Yeah, the problem solving was there.
Mm-hmm. yeah.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
for compensation.
I did a paper run. That was my, that was my first job. And, ⁓ it was the first time I also realized I was like, damn, I’m not getting paid very much for this amount of effort. Like, so I ended up, it actually is funny. I was talking about this recently, but I, it started, it was raining, it got into winter. And so I ended up, hiring my sister to do the paper run for me in the rain, cause I didn’t want to, but in order to get her to do it, I had to pay her more than I was getting paid.
And so at the end, I learned a few valuable lessons about, you know, hiring and compensation and all those kinds of things.
Yeah, yeah. I don’t like it well enough. I’m going to actually lose money to do to not do it. Yes, I understand.
Yeah, yeah, so so I feel like that
was a that was an interesting first lesson
Interesting. Yes, yes, yes. And I just have to ask because ⁓ when I was growing up, it was very common to have ⁓ people who had newspaper jobs ⁓ delivering the paper. And I’m assuming that’s what you mean by paper run. Do they still have those in New Zealand?
my gosh, who knows? I think I’ve seen people, but I don’t see kids doing it anymore. I don’t see kids handing out flyers like we used to.
wow.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I am here. The kids stopped a long time ago, but newspapers are just about gone the way of the dinosaur.
We still
do the newspaper, yeah, not the old paper round.
Yeah. Okay. All right. So, so you’re through childhood, you learn some good lessons about work ethic and, ⁓ hiring and let’s, let’s, you know, buy low and sell high and still be upset. and so, ⁓ when you left your family home, ⁓ I’m, I’m assuming you went to university.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm, yep.
Yes. So this was really, I think for me when I got my first taste of entrepreneurship because I left university and I was in a position where it was like, it was sink or swim, you know, like I was, I was having to figure out my housing in New Zealand. That can be really like up and down. You can lose flats a lot like homes. So it’s just the way the market works here. And I was working as a contractor for the university, which means they give you a job teaching for a semester.
And it’s a great job, they pay you well, but they’ll only pay you per semester. There is a lot of, obviously you’ve got to deal with the holiday break and they might not pay you next semester, it depends on the numbers. So it became almost a job. I got thrown into that idea of independent contracting work and finding multiple contracts and keeping all of those contracts going at the same time, figuring out how to sell yourself, figuring out how to build connections.
without even really knowing about it because it was just the nature of the job that I was in.
Yeah, so the early gig economy in New Zealand.
Yeah, I was in the OG
gig economy before it was really a thing. ⁓
Yeah.
Yeah. You were a front runner, a groundbreaker. Okay. ⁓ and so then you, you’ve got your degree, your, your undergrad in entrepreneurship.
Yeah. ⁓
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, no, I got my undergrad in. So I did a ton of stuff. I did my undergrad in psychology, my honors, and then I did a post-grad in public health, master’s in sociology, and then I started a PhD in population health.
my gosh, you were an academic. You were going to school forever. And so is unconventional organization your first entrepreneurial venture?
I know, I was really going for it.
You
No, no, that is, that’s a good point. So, the site, won’t include the various pieces of art I sold because that was, I, I was very focused on that. sold jewelry, all that kind of stuff. I actually went to university and learned entrepreneurship in that capacity first, if I was to a formal knowledge of it, but really, you know, my, ⁓ boyfriend now husband, when I met him, he was starting a frozen food company and you know, he was selling frozen food too.
Couple of people basically. And I was very passionate about this idea of turning it into a business. And we ended up running it up until COVID. So I can tell you what happened there. And we had a work and live space. We were connected and collaborating with gyms. And we were really going for it selling this kind of healthy frozen food. And that was my, we got connected with people who gave us access to
⁓ you know, business courses that you could do. And it was real like practical business stuff. You know, I learned, you know, the stuff from the university, obviously, but that was really, I think where the idea of business and running a business took hold and I was really passionate about it.
Okay, love that. so I have a really good friend who lives in Shanghai and he was in the frozen fish business, but the great stay home or COVID or whatever you want to call it, you know, was brutal to a lot of those kinds of businesses.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. The government basically told us we weren’t allowed to sell anymore. Like we, we didn’t really have an option. So, so for that reason, we, ended up shutting it down and, and moving, you know, to the countryside. was still doing my PhD at this point. And that was really when I started to think about this as a business because I had been, you know, while I had been learning about ADHD, I’d been writing about it.
I’d been, you know, creating communities, which is kind of always what I’ve been doing in my university. I’d actually done a little bit of work in schools, helping them, you know, learn about it and understand it better. But it was really with COVID when I went into the space of like, okay, everything shut down. I love teaching. I’ve been learning about business and building this skill as well. How do we bring this all together? And that was when I found out about ADHD coaching and built unconventional organizations.
Yeah, I love that. Many entrepreneurs kind of overthink it, but it’s as simple as finding a problem and presenting a viable solution. And that’s a good way to start a business. And certainly ADHD is pretty common in the entrepreneurial community. And all of us would do better with a little more focus and a little less haze, I guess I would say.
Mm-hmm.
We’d all be
happier. Our family would be happier. Our bank account would be happier.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. So thinking back over your entrepreneurial career, I’m going to ask you about a hard moment. So typically when I ask this question, people are like, man, I got like a whole library of hard moments because entrepreneurship is not easy necessarily. But I’m looking for a moment when whatever happened happened. was like, ouch, that hurts.
Entrepreneurship is not easy necessarily, but sometimes the best doorways are after another one closed. Share on X
Mm-hmm.
Mmm.
Hehehe
Yeah. Mm-hmm. No, it is not.
Mm-hmm.
But maybe
in retrospect, maybe looking backward, it turns out that actually it was a positive. Do you have a moment like that you could share?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do. I do actually. mean, I think it’s already been touched on, but it was when the first business shut down. Like we had poured our heart and soul into it. We had spent so much time, so much money, we’d painted the roof, like just crazy things that you have to do to get, the, your, like, you’re allowed to function as a, as a business and, you know, sell more wholesale. And, you know, we’d gotten into that place and then, ⁓
And then we just got shut down. just felt like it didn’t make any sense. And so that was really hard. It was almost so hard that I didn’t really process it at the time. It was just like, how are we going to land on our feet? You know, what are we going to do next? We had a giant amount of frozen food and fridges that we could no longer use because our, you know, tendency came to an end and we had to find a place that we could stay that would take all that stuff and sell it and no one wanted to buy it. So, you know, all those kinds of things. And, ⁓
And we, but looking back, it was a real good thing. It’s hard to say actually, but the business we have now is it’s much more mobile. It’s, it’s a higher profit margin, like getting into frozen food, healthy frozen food. It’s not the easiest first business. definitely picked like a really tough one. And so we were able to kind of take what we learned.
get a coach, I got my own business coach and actually build something that took all of the learning and was just a lot more usable and helpful for us and our family. It wasn’t like tying us to one place and one product and all that kind of thing.
Yeah, I love that. you know, here in the, in the States, there’s a show about, you know, shark tank, you know, I’m sure everybody knows about that worldwide, but yeah, the interesting thing to me there is all of the sharks hate frozen food.
Mm-hmm. yeah, I’ve actually worked with clients from Shark Tank. Yeah.
Yeah, I get it.
When somebody walks in and says, yeah,
I have this frozen cookie dough. They are like, ⁓ get out. You know, we hate, we hate frozen. We hate frozen. What? Yeah, you don’t know. And, ⁓ with my own clients, I’m like, Hey, start somewhere. ⁓ just start. can over, you can overanalyze to death, you know, at some point you just have to start. So,
Yep, yep, yep, exactly, but you you got to start your business somewhere. You got to start doing something. So, yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
If there’s one thing I’d say is like, you can pivot. It’s fine.
Yeah, you can. And sometimes the best doorways are after another one closed. And ⁓ that’s just the way it is. okay, next. ⁓ If I had access to the library of your brain, which I think is pretty sizable, okay, and I was looking for a piece of valuable…
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Mm-hmm.
hehe
advice, something you hold near and dear to your heart, a golden nugget from your entrepreneurial path, your entrepreneurial journey, what would that be?
I think the biggest thing I would say is if you want to figure out what to focus on, look at what’s already working. Don’t look at what is, what someone’s just talked about or what someone’s just posted about, you know, look at what you’re doing and say, what have I already sold and how did I do that? And they do that more.
If you want to figure out what to focus on, look at what's already working. Share on X
I that. And so I advise clients very similarly on their mission. If they don’t know their mission, and many people don’t, it’s not so much discovering. It’s not an outward discovery. It’s something you’ve already been carrying with you. You’ve just camouflaged it. And so it’s more of appealing back to find, this is where I’m energized. This is what I do well.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-mm-mm.
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Time
means nothing. This is what I love. And it’s just recognizing that. So very similar. OK. ⁓ Maybe the toughest question I ask everybody. Put you in a time machine. Send you back. I’m going to introduce you to 20-year-old Sky. And you have about 60 seconds to share something you know now you wish you knew then. OK.
Yes.
Yeah, 100%.
Mm-hmm.
So into the time machine you go. Skye, I’d like to introduce you to this 20 year old Skye. What do you say?
Mm.
Honestly, I would just say you have ADHD, should look it up. Because, I didn’t know that and I, it caused so much freaking havoc. You know, it was just, you know, the distraction, the, the, the scenes like, well, you know, you were like, you did a lot of different things. It’s like, yeah, cause I thought that I just hadn’t found my passion yet. And if I could just say,
you
you have ADHD and you should be an entrepreneur and then vanish, like, look that stuff up, that would have given me so much more knowledge to go through without all of the anxiety and all of the angst of just being like, I guess this is just what life is and not know that there’s so many simple strategies that could have changed things so much at the time.
of that, thank you for sharing that. I have a son who was diagnosed with ADHD and I was reluctant to accept the diagnosis. But after I did and we did treat with medication, was life changing. And I’m typically not a proponent of meds, but in some cases, there’s a chemical thing. There’s a thing. ⁓
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And it was so interesting because maybe six months into it, he said, Dad, you know why you didn’t think I have ADHD? And I was like, no, why? He’s like, you have ADHD. I was like, ah, ah, yeah. So I think it’s very common in our community. Yeah. So share one tip for.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s very common.
Mm-hmm.
an entrepreneur who has focus challenges. If you don’t mind, share one tip.
Yeah. Yeah.
I’m happy to share. Yeah. So for me, I would say number one thing is, okay, I actually give this away. You can message me on unconventional organization at Instagram. Just message me, Don D O N. I’ll give it to you. but in terms of, know, what we’re doing, it’s like, one of the first things people say to me is I will, come into the office and everything is urgent. Like I have a million things to do. have like.
200 thing tasks that they’re all on fire. What do I do? And so the first thing I teach and I give away is I want to say, okay, well, let’s look at what is truly, truly urgent and what is truly, truly important. And let’s get rid of all of that not urgent, not important stuff that is just cluttering up your life. So the first thing we do is we go, okay, let’s brain dump everything in your head because there’s a ton of stuff in your head that you haven’t written down. We should probably get that down.
Let’s get rid of all of that not urgent, not important stuff that is just cluttering up your life. Share on X
Let’s not look at your email. Let’s not look at your task list that you’ve written that you’ve forgotten about that somewhere else. Just what’s in your head from there. What are those things that are urgent? Because if you don’t do them, there will be a significant external negative consequence tomorrow. The bill that doesn’t get paid, the event that you’re not prepared for, that stuff. That’s what we’re focusing on. And that’s the stuff where, you know, if there was an emergency and you had to leave, you’d still be doing it on your phone.
Usually for people, once they do that, there’s only like less than five things. Some people have zero of those things. There’s an instant relief. And then we can go, okay, now what is the 80 20 momentum building stuff that is important, but hasn’t been on your urgent to do list. And then I will teach you some neuroscience based tips to actually do those without resistance. That little cycle there.
That focus cycle is the first thing that I teach and it usually takes about two weeks for people to fully transform how they experience their day.
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing and for your generous offer.
You’re welcome.
giveaway. So how would an entrepreneur who wanted to reach out to unconventional organization, what’s the best way to reach out to the organization and also to you?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so you can find me at Instagram. Yes, it’s me. I talk to people. I like people. And so I am at unconventional organization with an S. Like I said, message me Don, D-O-N, and I will send you that format of how to get focused. You two minute focus formula will get you focused and back on track. Then if you want to know more, you can find me at unconventionalorganization.com. I have a podcast, the ADHD skills lab.
And we also have a coaching community where you can go and you can connect with other like-minded entrepreneurs and build these strategies for focus, balance growth.
love that. Sky, it has been my distinct pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Dawn, it’s great to be here.
My pleasure. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Bye now.

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Title: E126 | How OwnWell Helps Homeowners Slash Property Taxes : Colton Pace, Co-Founder & CEO at Ownwell
Date: May 12, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-ownwell-helps-homeowners-slash-property-taxes-colton-pace-ceo-at-ownwell/
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Content:
Welcome to another exciting episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show! Today, host Don Williams sits down with Colton Pace, the visionary founder of OwnWell, a company dedicated to democratizing access to real estate expertise and helping homeowners save on property taxes, insurance, mortgages, and utilities.
In this episode, Don and Colton dive deep into the world of property tax representation, exploring how OwnWell has revolutionized the way homeowners can dispute their property tax assessments and save money. Colton shares insights into the company’s marquee product, which has gained widespread adoption across the country, and explains the contingency fee model that makes it a no-brainer for customers to sign up.
Listeners will also get a glimpse into Colton’s entrepreneurial journey, from his early days of ranch work and mowing lawns in Texas to his college years at the University of Washington, where he studied information systems and operations. Colton recounts his first business venture, MobileFix, and how his passion for finance led him to work for a family office managing assets for one of the wealthiest individuals in the country. He discusses the challenges and triumphs of scaling OwnWell from 700 to 60,000 customers in just one year, and the importance of hiring the right people and maintaining a strong company culture.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Tune in to hear Colton’s valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, including the importance of taking risks and betting on yourself. Whether you’re a homeowner looking to save on property taxes or an entrepreneur seeking inspiration, this episode is packed with insights and stories that you won’t want to miss.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Unlocking-Real-Estate-Savings-Colton-Paces-Journey-with-OwnWell.mp3
How OwnWell Helps Homeowners Slash Property Taxes : Colton Pace
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a timely, great guest today. I Colton Pace with OwnWell. And Colton, tell us what OwnWell does.
Well, it’s on a mission to democratize access to real estate expertise. That means a lot, but ⁓ we try and help people reduce all the expenses associated with owning real estate. So property taxes, insurance, their mortgage, their utilities. We do what we can to help to make it easy for people to reduce the most expensive thing in most people’s lives, their house.
I
love that. And I think housing in the U S is probably expense number one and everything else is expense less than number one. um, and I didn’t know that you kind of touched everything in homeownership. property taxes is what resonated with me. So, um, tell us about own well and property tax representation.
Exactly.
Yep. Yeah. So our marquee product and what’s really gotten us widespread adoption has been our property tax product. 95 % of people in the country pay their tax bill, no questions asked, but it is based on the value of your home that the government sets. And we’ve gotten really good at arguing that on behalf of our customers. You sign up, go to the website, enter your address, authorize us to talk to your county tax assessor on your behalf. And we do all the analysis. We research the tax code and make sure we bring forth the best argument to reduce that assessment.
in turn reducing your tax bill. And so we do that for hundreds of thousands of customers across the country now. ⁓ And from there, once we’ve saved you money on your property tax bill, we think, you know, can we save you money elsewhere? That’s where the other products have come in. we, our property tax product is our most successful and most widely used.
So that’s amazing. Let me put that into my words and you correct me if I make a mistake. But, um, so I live in Texas. think you’re in, you’re in Austin. Yes. Okay. So in Texas, um, and it’s about property tax time, the time to dispute is rapidly approaching. And in Texas, you pay about 3 % of value in property taxes. Some cities a little more, some a little less, but for today, let’s just call it 3%. And so.
And the state and the county, they tell you what they think it’s worth. They tell you what you need to pay. And most people just pay that. However, you don’t absolutely have to. I mean, you can, but you can dispute that. And if you’re a do it yourself guy, if you’re a change your own oil instead of paying a hundred bucks and you’ll put your own air conditioner in instead of hiring an air conditioning contractor, you know, maybe you want to try and do that yourself.
But if you want to get an expert who does it hundreds of thousands of times a year, you could call OwnWell. And ⁓ they probably would save you some money. And then I’ll put you on the spot. So what’s that cost? Do I have to write you a big fat check, give you my credit card? What do I do to get that representation? And what if you’re unsuccessful?
Yep. Well, I think you’re going to like this answer. We operate entirely on a contingency fee. And so we wanted to make it a no brainer, no downside risk here. If we don’t save you any money, we will never recharge you a thing. If we do save you money, we charge 25 to 35 % depending on the geography. In Texas, we charge 25 % of what we’ve saved you. And so until we save you money, we won’t charge you a dime.
We operate on a contingency fee—if we don’t save you money, you don’t pay us a dime. Share on X
Okay, so let me put that in my words and you correct me if I’m wrong. So basically I give you nothing. I give you information. I give you permission. You go fight the battle. If you’re successful, I let you share in what you saved me. And if you’re unsuccessful, you say, sorry, we were unsuccessful. Let’s try again next year. ⁓
Yep, exactly right. The more you save,
the more we make. So we’re completely aligned.
What a deal. Love that. Okay. So now I’m going to take you back all the way to young Colton. So you’re like five years old. Think back that far. Okay. And so in your household and everybody lived in a different, know, some with their parents, some with their grandparents, some with the neighbor, whatever, but in your household, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur?
Mm-hmm.
No, not really. ⁓
The
pong-paws almost always gives away. Nope. Yeah. Okay. All right. Good, good. And so, tell me about still, we’re still in your childhood, but now we’re between five and 18. What was your first job? And that may have been entrepreneurial. You may have done a lemonade stand or shoveled snow or whatever, but well, whatever the first activity you did where you earned ⁓ compensation.
Yeah, it was ranch work or mowing lawns. It was yard work in some capacity, whether it building a fence or digging a trench or cleaning up cattle or mowing lawns.
Okay. I love that. And here in Texas? Okay. All right. So if you’re not from Texas, just know that ⁓ I live outside of Fort Worth, Colton lives outside of Austin, some of the prettiest country ⁓ in the U S except like when he’s doing that work, like June, July, and August, it’s hotter than this is a clean show. So I won’t use the word, but, it’s hot. It’s like, you don’t want to come visit Dallas, Fort Worth.
Yeah, I grew up in Dallas.
like July 22nd, it’s not a good place to be. All of us locals were out of here by then. So, appreciate you doing that. So, you hit 18, you traveled the rails as a hobo, you joined the merchant marine, you backpacked across Europe, you explored Alaska. What did you do? Did you go to college?
I went to college. So I, in high school, started taking some community college classes because, you know, I wanted to, for some reason, get it all over with. But yeah, I went to the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
Okay, awesome. Huskies. Yeah, huskies. There you go. Okay, and you studied entrepreneurship, right?
Yep, dogs. Yep, it a time.
Now I studied information systems and operations and supply chain management. Real mouthful, but basically different aspects of business. So somewhat yes.
Okay, awesome. And so graduated as a Husky and then started OWNWELL the very next day. No.
No, along
the way there were many schemes I would say. the one that was like my first real business is business called MobileFix. I actually fixed iPhone screens and batteries and cameras and way back in the day when everybody would break their phone and now you go to a kiosk in the mall or something. So I ran a little business all through the end of high school and college that was basically fixing phones and computers.
And if you’re really young, you won’t remember, but iPhones used to be notorious for, number one, they’re very slick, very, very slick before the Otter and all that stuff was out and people would drop them and the ⁓ glass would just shatter every time. And so it became a thing. Okay, so you picked a high demand market and solved a problem. And so that went pretty well.
So how in the world did you get into property tax representation?
Yeah. Yeah. So I, after college, I got to sit in a pretty cool seat and that, um, I’ve always been kind of a finance nerd and I got a job working for a family office, helping manage assets for one of the largest, largest and wealthiest individuals in the country. Um, so that was from sports teams to apartment complexes, to enlarge stock portfolio, to, you know, private growth equity investments, right? I saw investments, a small investment team.
spending billions and billions of dollars investing it. so that’s where all of this, know, how do you invest like the most sophisticated investor in the world? How do we bring these tools, tips, resources, things I saw to everyday homeowners? Because people don’t think like billionaires do. And how do we democratize that?

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Title: E125 | From $0 to $1 Billion: Ami Kassar’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: May 5, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-0-to-1-billion-ami-kassars-entrepreneurial-journey/
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Welcome, listeners! We’re thrilled to have you join us for another inspiring episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. In today’s episode, host Don Williams sits down with the remarkable Ami Kassar, founder and CEO of MultiFunding. Get ready to dive into an engaging conversation that explores the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, the intricacies of business funding, and the resilience required to build a billion-dollar company.
In this episode, Ami Kassar shares his incredible journey from starting MultiFunding 15 years ago to achieving the milestone of $1 billion in business funding. You’ll hear about the challenges he faced, the lessons he learned, and the strategies he used to help entrepreneurs secure loans transparently and effectively. Ami’s story is not just about numbers; it’s about the impact his company has had on job creation and business growth, making it a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs and business enthusiasts.
Don and Ami also delve into the myths surrounding business lending and the importance of finding the right lender. Ami discusses how MultiFunding has debunked common misconceptions and provided responsible lending solutions to thousands of businesses. With a default rate of just 1.1%, MultiFunding’s success is a testament to their commitment to ethical and effective lending practices. This episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice for anyone looking to navigate the world of business funding.
Finally, Ami reflects on his personal experiences and the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship. From his early days in South Africa to moving to the United States and starting his own business, Ami’s journey is a powerful reminder that success often comes from perseverance and adaptability.
Tune in to hear Ami Kassar’s inspiring journey and gain valuable insights into the world of entrepreneurship and business funding. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, this episode is packed with wisdom and practical tips to help you succeed. Don’t miss out on this engaging conversation with one of the most influential figures in the world of business funding.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Listen now and be inspired to create your own legacy!
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Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. Proven Entrepreneur is exactly how I would describe today’s guest. Welcome to the show, Amit Kisar.
Thanks for having me, buddy. How you doing?
Man, I’m wonderful. I’m so thrilled that you’re here. So I think back to, I believe we met in a hallway in Macau. And I think you walked up to me and said, are you Don Williams? Which is always a loaded question. It’s like, depends on what you want. And that’s been the beginning of a great friendship. Thank you so much for, and you’re not shy, but.
One thing I always try and teach people is man, walk up to people you don’t know, stick your hand out, tell them who you are, shake their hand. You never know what could happen. Yeah. So you’re the founder and CEO of multi-funding based in Philadelphia, I believe. Yeah. And so tell us a little bit about, when you started it, and what you do. And I think I just saw a post.
Walk up to people you don't know, stick your hand out, tell them who you are, shake their hand. You never know what could happen. Share on X
Exactly right. ⁓
Correct. Correct.
that had one of my favorite numbers. like numbers are infinite. There’s an infinite number of numbers, right? But this had a number in it, okay, that started with a B. And man, I’m excited by that. So tell us about multi-funding, Ami.
Right.
that’s it.
The billion dollars is close, we’re building up to it.
I love building up to a billion dollars. Okay. It’s amazing.
Yeah. So I started multi-funding just over 15 years ago. And what I wanted to do was build a service where entrepreneurs could come and in a completely transparent manner, find out their loan options and alternatives that were available for them. And really what we do is we advocate for people through the load process and help them figure out what they need, what’s best for them and help them actually go out and get the loan.
95 % of the time we’re paid a commission by the lender and it doesn’t cost the borrower anything extra.
Love that. So you’re not the lender,
which sometimes puts a lender and a borrower at times are adversaries.
It can be, but I think it’s pretty fascinating. We’ve broken a lot of the myths about lending. So first of all, we will in the next 30 days, barring the world blowing up, cross a billion dollars worth of funding, which is an exciting milestone for us. ⁓ what I love about that is the impact it’s had. Like we’ve helped create tens of thousands of jobs and that’s…
a billion dollars with a B. That’s amazing. Congratulations.
all responsible lending. I was talking to my team about it a little earlier today. A billion dollars of loans and probably tens of thousands of businesses we’ve interacted with to get those. I’ve been yelled at by four customers in 15 years, which I think in this kind of business is remarkable. And we were just running our default data on our SBA portfolio and
1.1 % of our loans have gone bad. Now, I don’t want any loans to go bad, but 1.1 % is remarkable. And 70 to 80 % of the time, our borrowers and our lenders don’t actually need each other. So the myth that the best lender for you is in your backyard may or may not be true anymore.
I love that. And I think we’re finding out that the best insert, whatever service here may or may not be in your backyard because the world is certainly getting much smaller.
Your world is getting smaller. so that theory of big problem, SBA has a branding problem, not to similar to EOS implementers or different things. Like if you have a crappy experience with an EOS implementer, then you just assume EOS is crap. Even though that might be that particular implementer that you had an experience with. And it’s the same truth. Your friend.
Yes.
has a crappy experience with an SBA loan and bitches to you about it. You just think SBA is crap. But what you don’t know is if they were working at a lender and you what the hell they were doing and you don’t know what shape their company was in. And so there’s a big branding problem out there that we tried to deep punk. We funded with last year, we funded with 22 different lenders.
that’s amazing. That’s amazing. And on 22 different projects or.
⁓
probably about a hundred and something different projects.
that’s amazing. That’s
amazing. That’s how you approach a billion, a billion with the B, a billion dollars. That’s amazing. Okay. All right. So thanks for sharing about multi-funding. We’ll get your contact information. Lots of people are going to call and want you to help secure loans. But before we do that, I want to take you back to your childhood home. We’ll take you all the way back to five-year-old Ami. Do you remember five-year-old Ami? Okay. Good. In your house.
window.
I do,
And everybody’s house was a little different, but in your house, was there an adult that was an entrepreneur?
You know, it’s interesting, was talking with this a lot about my brother because we just did the 200th edition of my podcast. And so he was the guest and we were talking about how our childhood might’ve influenced our entrepreneurship. So I was born in South Africa and we moved to the States as a family when I was eight. And my dad had a private practice in, in
South Africa, so we definitely saw him kind of figuring all that stuff out. And then when we moved to the States, he moved into academic medicine and then started his own private practice again a couple of years later when he got on his footing. my two brothers and myself were all really second generation immigrants. And there’s no doubt in my mind that what we saw growing up in that community.
as many families came over and most of them tried to get going and get their feet here on the ground in this country. There’s no doubt in my mind that that influenced our journeys and our paths. We all took different journeys, but I think it all influenced us.
I love that. And I was interviewing a guest who was first generation. His parents came from India with $20 in their pocket and didn’t speak the language. and, and he said, no, my dad was a janitor and my mother worked maybe for the post office. He said, but they were probably the best entrepreneurs I knew because, you know, they boldly with, with raw courage got on a boat and traveled halfway around the world to a world they didn’t know.
to a language they couldn’t speak and they figured it out. And that, and as you and I both know, that’s a big part of entrepreneurship is we keep jumping out of airplanes, building parachutes on the way down. We keep figuring it out many times after, you know, after we’ve launched. So, okay. After that, you go to university, you join the merchant Marine, you’re in the SEALs. What did you do?
What the hell?
I went to Brandeis from undergrad and then moved back to California and worked for two years and then went to business school. still not quite sure why, but I did and had a job and then started my first company in the dot com bubble days, which blew up.
went to work for the largest issuer of credit cards to small businesses in the United States for several years. Was the chief innovation officer, learned a fortune. And then that blew up in the great recession. I got fired by the bankruptcy trustees on a Friday and I started multi-funding on Saturday.
I love that. so I quit a job for a company that I had helped grow and the owner didn’t pay me as agreed. And so I quit on one day and became his competitor the next day. Yeah. So, okay. Thinking back across your career, and I know the answer to this is, there’s many, but what I’m looking for is a hard lesson.
Good for you.
something that happened that when it happened, it’s like, ouch, that really hurts. But maybe today in retrospect with the perspective of time, you can look back on that hard event and say, you know, it really hurt. I didn’t like it, but maybe it was the best thing to happen at the time. Do you have a hard lesson like that to share?
Look, I think there are a lot of them and the way I try to live my life is don’t cry over spilled milk. Right? Which is not always the easy way, but like shit’s gonna happen, right? And it’s how you choose to react to it and how you choose to move on through it.
I love that.
I buy that, it’s not what happens, it’s how you take it. Yeah.
Well, as you take an example, I worked for a billion dollar company. I was a chief innovation officer. Life was great. Highly entrepreneurial job, you know, making ridiculous amount of money. And I was probably retired there. And the company had been around for a long time and no one would have ever dreamed it would fall apart. And it did in their great recession.
Yeah.
I got fired on Friday and I started multi-funding on Saturday.
Love that.
Now, maybe in retrospect, I sometimes I advise people now to try to take some time to give themselves some grace before they flip over something. I didn’t follow that, that own advice. But it seems to me that over the years of there’ve been obstacles, I don’t let the obstacle just destroy me. just push through it and I move on.
Yeah.
And
even now, and I feel for them, many of the entrepreneurs who are just hammered by these tariffs, they’ll get, most of them will get through it, right? And they need scaffolding and they need support and they need help, emotional and business model help and stuff right now. But this kind of like, this too will pass. This too shall likely pass. And if the world blows up.
This too shall pass.
It
won’t matter. It won’t matter. Okay, so I love that kind of Omni philosophy on resilience. I have a really good friend here who he shares what he calls the concept of next, that when something goes wrong, he just says next and moves on.
It won’t matter, we’ll all be gone anyway.
My son was a preemie 11 weeks early. And I have a picture of him in my office at home, holding up with my palm of my hand and he’s like three and a half pounds and he’s got tubes coming. You would never know it now. The kid’s not a kid anymore. He’s doing spectacular. And whenever I think I’m having a shitty day, I go pull up that picture. I’m like,
Okay.
Hey, my life’s gonna be fine.
Yeah. Yeah.
And, boy, that’s true. What’s the old saying was I had the blues cause I had no shoes till on the street. met a man with no feet. Somebody always has it worse. And I mean, you know this about me. I’ve been a big proponent and a daily gratitude practice. And man, if you practice gratitude, you will take those bumps a lot better in your life. ⁓
Look, sometimes
they’re bumps and sometimes they’re craters, right? Like your business right now is 80 to 90 % dependent on the China supply chain. Right now you just got hit by a crater. Okay. If you were running a hotel business and COVID hit, you got hit by a crater. Okay. And so positivity is important and gratitude is important and you will get through it. But when you’re hit by a crater, it’s no freaking fun.
Positivity is important and gratitude is important and you will get through it. Share on X
Yeah
Yeah.
Nope,
nope, no fun. Yeah. It would just make it better. It won’t necessarily make it good. Yeah.
It will help it and it’ll,
it’s important, but it’s like, need gratitude and you just like, got tough decisions to make and you got to get gritty and flexible and all that stuff. It’s not easy.
Okay. So now I’m looking for a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty good. You make a right higher, you make a strategic change in direction, you do something and all of a sudden, Hey, things were going great. And now they’re just unbelievable. Do you have a warp speed moment you can share?
like great and then they crashed were great and they really weren’t great.
great and they really went great.
You know, it’s not how I build my business. So, like we’re about to cross a billion dollars and I would never dream that we would fund a billion dollars when I started this thing. Okay. And somebody said to me today, well, how quickly are we going to get to three billion, five billion?
And we’ll do it and we’ll cross it, but we won’t do it faster than we can and uphold our core values.
I don’t need to do it in, okay, good, it took me three years to cross 100 million and 12 years to cross from 100 million to a billion. And it’s not gonna take me 15 years to get to two billion, it’ll probably take me three or five or whatever, but I’m not in a rush. As long as we maintain our values and our principles and our service levels, we’ll fund as fast as we
There you go. And as long as you’re taking care of customers, that’s all that counts. team, yeah, well, know, Herb Kelleher, I think was the first CEO who said, hey, the customer’s not always right. I’m going to take care of my team members and I’ll let my team members take care of my customers. And I will provide such great experiences to my team that they will in turn provide great experiences to my customers. And you know, guess what? That strategy works.
and team member.
100%.
We live here by no asshole rule.
I love that.
customers act like an asshole, they don’t stick around. The bank or a lender or a partner acts like an asshole. They don’t stick around. So no matter how fast they might theoretically help us grow.
Yeah, well, let him.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I, I’ve so agree with that. in one of my companies, you know, we typically will fire at least one client a year. And it’s like the works. Okay. But the clients not. And, and so they need to go find somebody who’s a better fit for them.
Funding
business is hard. I’d rather do it for somebody I like.
Yeah, agreed. Okay. So what about if I had access to the encyclopedia knowledge of Aami? And I said, man, I want a golden nugget to share with all the listeners from the Proven Entrepreneur Show. Reach into the vault and bring out a big shiny golden nugget and share it with us.
think I would say that be careful that your past experiences may or may not be relevant to what you’re currently dealing with.
Be careful that your past experiences may or may not be relevant to what you're currently dealing with. Share on X
I love
So you might look upon something and say, I dealt with something very similar to this before. I’m going to do it this way. But the circumstances around where you dealt with it the last time might all be different. And so you always should look in the rear view mirror for wisdom. And same when you go in for mentorship, be mindful of
you’re asking for advice or experience shares from because their experience shares may or may not be relevant to what you’re doing.
Love that. I think it was Dennis Waitley who said, you know, people make decisions based on what happened.
wonder what’s happening and certainly makes sense to try and make decisions based on what’s happening. Experience can be a very valuable, but probably best viewed like the rear view mirror in a car. I’m going to keep a little eye on where I’ve been, but I’m going to put a big eye on that windshield on where I’m going. And that probably makes the most sense. Okay. Toughest question I ask everybody on me.
100%.
I’m put you in a time machine. Okay. You and I are old enough to remember when time machines first came on TV and movies. I’ll put you in a time machine. I’m gonna send you all the way back to 20 year old Ami. And you’re going to get about 60 seconds to share something that you know now that you wish you knew when you were 20. So into the time machine you go all the way back. Ami, meet Ami. What do you say?
I think life is just gonna be a journey and you’re gonna learn and grow along the way. And you have to be patient and give it time and be kind to yourself through the process and try as hard as you can to live to your core values. I feel blessed every day I get to run a business that is aligned with my core values.
Love that.
And not many people could say that, right? And I’m passionate about what I do. Like, I like getting up and coming to work.
Yeah,
very few have core values and even fewer are living to them. Yeah.
So
I think some of that problem.
Okay. I love that. All right. So if we have listeners who want to explore funding, what’s the easiest way to reach out to multi-funding or to you directly?
Yeah,
best to reach out to multifunding.com and you can get all of our contact information there and tons of information about us.
Awesome. Ami, thank you so much for being a guest on The Proven Order.
It’s been great. Thank you so much for having me.
We’ll see you all next time on the proven entrepreneur show. Thank you.
Thanks, Don.

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Title: E124 | Transforming Business Efficiency with AI: Zulfiya Forsythe’s Journey
Date: April 28, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/transforming-business-efficiency-with-ai-zulfiya-forsythes-journey/
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In this insightful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams interviews Zulfiya Forsythe, the founder and CEO of the Omadli Group. Zulfiya shares her inspiring journey from corporate life to entrepreneurship, detailing how she helps businesses optimize their operations using AI and data analytics. Discover the challenges she faced, the strategies she employed, and the valuable lessons she learned along the way. This conversation is packed with practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and highlights the transformative power of AI in modern business operations.
Zulfiya delves into the importance of clean and reliable data, emphasizing its role as the “new raw oil” in the age of AI. She explains how her company conducts AI audits and implements workflow automation to streamline business processes. Her insights provide a clear roadmap for businesses looking to adopt AI and data analytics effectively.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Tune in to this enlightening episode and discover how AI and data analytics can revolutionize your business operations. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more inspiring stories from The Proven Entrepreneur Show!
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Transforming Business Efficiency with AI: Zulfiya Forsythe’s Journey
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a great guest for us today. She comes in from Boston, Massachusetts. Her name is Zulfiya Forsythe, and she is the founder and CEO of the Omadli Group. Welcome to the show, Zulfiya.
Thank you so much for having me down.
That’s my pleasure. I love Boston. I was just there not too long ago, got snowed in, canceled my flight, but not because of weather in Boston, because of weather in Dallas, Fort Worth. How strange. And then when I did get to come home, they rerouted us and I got stuck in Memphis for a couple of days. So crazy, crazy, crazy, but not Boston’s fault, Midwest winter time. So tell us what does Omadli Group do?
What’s your superpower? Who do you serve?
Sure, absolutely. We help businesses to buy back their time in their business operations with latest technology. Either we’re looking at the AI solutions or we’re looking at basically anything to do with the data.
awesome. so data analytics, data science.
Yes,
that’s right. So when it comes to either we determine either it’s a data analytics or AI solution that’s needed to optimize this business operations, put some processes in and visibility for business owners to scale, to grow and actually know where’s what’s happening with their business. Where’s their leakage? And, you know, it’s we always want to grow as entrepreneurs, but we need what we track improves. So if we don’t have numbers that out there for us in real time,
and we just wasting so much time on manual tasks, then it’s really hard to achieve our goals.
And so many times, I mean, I’ve talked with so many entrepreneurs, so many times entrepreneurs are flying a little by the seat of their pants. They’re kind of like cowboys in the old west and yeehaw, I can do it. But if you have big data, you know, the data may actually be the most valuable asset of the company. ⁓ Just knowing what insights that data can provide. And typically you’ve got to have a professional do it.
Yes.
Yes.
or you gotta be in that business. Because it’s a very specialized skill. So how long have you been doing it?
Yeah.
Yes. So I’ve been doing that since 2021. So I’ve been doing for a while and data is like a new raw oil. That’s what it is. And especially in times of AI, it’s so important to have a clean data, reliable data, then also to have not biased data as well that you’re making your decisions upon. So you actually have got that clarity.
Data is like a new raw oil. That's what it is. And especially in times of AI, it's so important to have clean, reliable data. Share on X
totally agree with that. It’s like the old garbage in, garbage out. Same, same, same. And in fact, my oldest son is a data scientist. And so I wouldn’t say I know a lot, but I know a little more than a little about data science. tell me, you started your business in 2021. I remember 2021. We were still in the middle of, I’ll just call it the great stay home.
That’s right.
That’s awesome.
Um, in the States, we were all kind of staying home. Um, we weren’t staying home as much, maybe in Texas as you were on the Eastern Seaport, but, but still we, we did have a little, um, market disruptor, um, 2020 and 2021. So how brave to start. me, tell me how you started your business.
That’s right.
Yes.
Sure,
absolutely. So actually I started in 2020 as a sole entrepreneur, but I’d registered my company in 2021. So I got laid off from COVID as COVID happened and I was just, all right, let me try this freelancing. Let me try to see if I can help somebody with my skills, everything that I’ve learned so far. And I remember so my first client, I applied to a bunch of jobs on Upwork, for example, one of the freelancing sites.
And then a months later, I got the first person responding to my proposal. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is real. And I was so scared because coming from corporate, you have team, have managers, you have peers, you can go back to ask questions. And here’s just persons like, I’m going to pay you money and we want to make sure you actually deliver. And I was like, ah, all right. It’s basically, I like, I don’t know if I can do this. And things needed to be turned out so fast. Like the turnaround time was much rapid.
But it turned out well and I was like, all right, I can do this. I can help people. And I got positive feedback and then I just kept it going. And then I got a full-time job and I still kept it. I went full-time working as entrepreneur since 2023. So I worked two jobs. Like I got a full-time corporate job and I still kept it and still kind of like, you know, learned a lot on my corporate job as well. I worked at the Renal Care Association. So.
I have a lot of healthcare experience looking at the patient data, treatment data, lots of kind of data. And yeah, and then just start still kept helping my clients on the side. And then in 2023 went full time.
What a great strategy for a, you know, some entrepreneurs are 18 and start in the garage, you know, the tech geniuses of the world, but many others spend some time in corporate, learn great skills. Okay. And, and then launch. And I loved that you shared, Hey, I was doing my entrepreneur thing, but it was kind of my side hustle. I had a full-time job that was paying the bills. wasn’t stressed. Okay. And then.
Yes.
Yeah.
That’s right.
I’m guessing that when the side hustle out earned the hustle, the hustle went away and the side hustle became your main thing.
I was working till two o’clock in the morning at that time. was the grind and I just, yeah.
It’s the grind. startups,
man, they’re grinding. They just are.
It's the grind. Startups, man, they're grinding. They just are. Share on X
That’s right. And I still value all the experience that my manager was giving me, all my corporate experience. Every time you would tell me, oh, well, whenever you do something, think of on the other person, of the user. How are they looking at the data? What kind of metrics they would like to see? What kind of insights they would like What kind of answers they want to get out of this?
basically out of this reporting that you put together, for example, out of this data you put together and aggregate, what are you trying to solve for them? So like I always, every time now I work with a client is still kind of like, all right, now that I teach that to my team members as well, kind of just, all right, like put yourself in the shoes of the user. Is this helpful? What kind of pain points is this solving? Is this answering their questions? Or are we just putting numbers on the, on a dashboard per se, you know?
Human Interaction 101 is how do I see it from the other person’s point of view? Everybody cares about their point of view. Nobody really cares about the other person’s point of view. And so when you’re selling, you’re just so far ahead if you can see it from your customer’s point of view. It’s much easier to deliver what they want than try and get them to want what you deliver. Just totally night and day. OK, so congratulations.
What is ROI?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Coming up
on five years, okay, that’s kind of a magic number for entrepreneurs. Like 85 % of businesses fail in five years. I’m guessing you’re going to make it. Tell me about a hard lesson. Tell me about something that happened in the Omadli Group’s experience where you’re like, that hurt.
sales. It’s a hard part is you know that you can help a business to win. You know that you can make their process efficient. You see it so crystal clear and like still kind of like trying to show them that I know I can help you, but like, let’s, let’s do this. Let’s not wait. Let’s not, not, not drag our feet. Basically let’s go buy back your time. Let’s go spend your valuable.
Sales. Yeah.
executive time into more strategy, into creativity, into like you need to, because as a business owner, sometimes we’re like strapped, right? Like, no, we can do it all. We’re trying to go lean. We’re trying to be kind of, you know, smart with their money, but sometimes it’s not really smart because we spend a lot of time. I see business owners spend a lot of time in manual.
manual processes, manual tasks, manual tracking, manual follow ups, lack of follow up because they’re overwhelming. But then when I see this, I was like, I know I can help you. So I can go and like Warren Buffett, for example, what does he do? He reads all day and then he just thinks all day. Right? Best strategists are, they go out there on a nature, beautiful nature to engage their creativity, to think of these business ideas, to expand their business.
He does, yeah.
But they need a time to process and reflect. But as a business owners, well, this is too expensive or, you know, it’s okay, I can get by, I can get by. And then it’s like just this rat race where saying things and then you see the pain. Well, my business is not growing or I’m a bottleneck or, you know, now, yeah, my business is not growing. I’m a bottleneck.
I’m spending too much money on overhead cost and then I have a high turnover from a team that I’m building also from the customers that I’m having as well.
Just about any time there’s a savings in labor, it makes sense to invest because eventually labor will chew up whatever savings you think you’re having by doing it yourself, by doing it manually. So, okay, thank you for sharing that hard lesson. What about a golden nugget? One piece of wisdom you know about entrepreneurship or data analytics that you could share with our crowd today.
that’s a good one. So I think I want to also, so this year, this is I’ve noticed, a lot of people started waking up in terms of business adopting AI and everybody’s like, I want, like, I want, I want to make sure my business is AI proof. How can I get AI? And then the reality is when I talk to these businesses, they still operate like it’s 2012. So sometimes when we look, like, all right, let’s talk, let’s look at your processes. That’s what we do, we do AI audit.
Hmm
And because I have a data background, I also say, well, you know what? You don’t need AI. This is just pure reporting automation. Or this is just workflow automation, for example. You don’t need to spend money on AI yet. And we need to clean up your data. We need to put data infrastructure so you don’t take your notes somewhere on yellow pads or keep all how you, for example, how you do your inventory management, everything in your head that you cannot scale and pass it on to someone else, for example. Just because
And then multiple teams just don’t have SOP processes. Nothing’s documented. So let’s move you into that path for success and let’s put things in order for you. keep the organization, let’s organize your business operations basically, and then move to AI together.
I love that. so let me just put those in a little different words. Maybe you need to build a proper foundation with your data processes before you build AI on top of that. If you build it on the dirt, it’s probably not going to be accurate and you’re going to be unsatisfied. And AI is evolving so rapidly that it pays to be sure that you’re doing it right.
That’s right.
That’s right.
because you could really go down a rabbit hole that you don’t want to go. Okay, toughest question I’ll ask you. Okay, I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you back and I’m going to introduce you to your 20 year old self. Now, I don’t know if you’re in college or backpacking across Europe or in the merchant marine. I don’t know what you were doing when you were 20, but you’re going to get
Yeah.
about 60 seconds to share something you know today you wished you knew then that would have helped you along your path. Okay, so I gave you a little time to think there. Into the time machine you go. Sophia, meet Sophia. What would you say?
would say believe in yourself and the ideas that you have, just try them. Just whatever the ideas, if you want to create certain type of business or service, try it small, start somewhere. Don’t doubt yourself and don’t ask for permission of someone telling you, yeah, this is a great idea. You should go do it. Just do it. you want to bake something and sell it to others, if you’re really passionate about the food, or if you want to do data analytics, go help businesses and put data together.
and help them to get the clarity on their business. Or if you want to launch a jewelry, go do that. If you’re passionate about that and then just something small that you don’t need to take permission from someone else to go do that. And then it’s okay to fail.
love that. And so it all starts with mindset, learn something new, act on it, go do something, and then realize, and some entrepreneurs kind of have a perfection mindset, okay, which makes it hard for them to accept failure. But truthfully, failure is not the opposite of success. It is in fact, part of the success journey.
Failure is not the opposite of success. It is, in fact, part of the success journey Share on X
Yeah.
And what I’ve found about 150 interviews so far is that the bigger, the big successes followed a big failure. Little successes followed little failures. It’s almost like if you add them together, it all evens out. Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it’s endurance. It’s like sports. When you go
out there and then how much pain can you endure is how far you can go.
Endurance is like sports. When you go out there, how much pain can you endure is how far you can go. Share on X
Yeah, don’t quit. Keep going. OK, Sophia, how would we reach out to you? How would we reach out to a Omadli group?
Yes.
Absolutely. So you can find me at Zulfiha Forsyte and omadligroup.com. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn at Zulfiha Forsyte or Instagram. share daily on tips and tricks on AI and solutions. And actually, if you want to message me and say like AI, I would know that you come from this podcast. Say like, Don AI, that I know that you’re coming from this podcast. And then I will share with you just a quick AI assistant that I…
that I have for you.
love that. Sophia, thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure to host you on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Thank you.

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Title: E123 | Embracing the Entrepreneurial Spirit with Gina Mollicone-Long
Date: April 21, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/embracing-the-entrepreneurial-spirit-with-gina-mollicone-long/
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Content:
Welcome listeners! We’re thrilled to have you join us for another exciting episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I’m your host, Don Williams, and today we have a truly special guest, Gina Mollicone-Long. Gina is not only a dear friend but also one of the most inspiring entrepreneurs I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Get ready for a conversation filled with incredible stories, valuable insights, and a whole lot of inspiration.
In this episode, Gina takes us on a journey through her fascinating life, starting with her family’s immigrant roots. She shares the courageous story of her grandparents, who left everything behind in Europe to start anew in Canada. Their resilience and entrepreneurial spirit laid the foundation for Gina’s own path. From her early days studying chemical engineering to working as a welder at Chrysler, Gina’s diverse experiences have shaped her unique perspective on business and life.
Gina’s corporate journey at Procter & Gamble provided her with invaluable lessons, but it was her transition to entrepreneurship that truly defined her career. She opens up about the challenges she faced, including navigating the impact of 9/11 on her business and the unprecedented hurdles posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through it all, Gina’s unwavering belief in perseverance and self-belief shines through, offering listeners a powerful reminder that success often comes from embracing adversity.
As Gina prepares to embark on a new adventure, pursuing a PhD in neurotheology at Oxford University, she reflects on the importance of following your bliss and never giving up. Her story is a testament to the power of resilience, adaptability, and the relentless pursuit of one’s passions. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, Gina’s insights will inspire and motivate you to keep pushing forward, no matter the obstacles. 
Watch the episode here

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Embracing the Entrepreneurial Spirit with Gina Mollicone-Long
 
Hey, it’s Don Williams here today. Today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. A little tongue tied, it’s a new mouth. I’m just trying it out, but I got a really, really good friend. Literally one of my favorite people on planet earth. Gina Molekone Long. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me and I would echo that sentiment.
Yeah. So love you lots. Thank you so much for being here. Gina’s coming in early this morning. Are you in Toronto this morning?
I
am in Toronto this morning. It’s just, I’m not sure what to do with this giant glowing orb in the sun. I’m in the sky. I’m a bit scared by it. So I loath to close the window shade when we did to do this recording. I was like, no.
If you need to lower the shade, if you need your sunglasses, if you need a welder’s helmet, it’s all okay. I’m good. Hey, I want to take you all the way back to little Gina. So like five years old. Are you there? Okay. And so in the household in which you were raised and kind of everybody’s household was a little different, but in the household where you were raised, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur?
Yeah, oh God, yes. mean, we didn’t call it that. So my grandparents came from Europe and they came, well, they came from what we would call the Czech Republic now, but they were originally from what we would have called Yugoslavia back then and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And as you know, things weren’t going so well after World War II. So…
At the age of 27, I always love to tell this story, my grandmother with three daughters under the age of seven, and my grandfather thought they would leave all of their wealth and privilege and aristocracy and all of that jazz behind, get on a boat and go to a country where they didn’t speak the language, couldn’t bring their money, and this was a better option. this, this.
Whenever I talk about entrepreneurs, you have to understand this backstory because then what ensued was my grandmother basically hustled her way through, you know, learning the language, working for like getting to know the financial structure of this new country and then started her own real estate brokerage early on. Like, I don’t remember a time when my grandmother wasn’t in the real estate business, but again,
I didn’t understand what it meant till I look back on it and I was like, geez, they just, it was the only way they could get even close to the life that they were used to. And so I never thought of my grandparents as entrepreneurs because I didn’t really know what that was. And it just wasn’t a word. But if you ask me the hundred percent, hundred percent, they were, they were the original kind.
Yeah, think people who have enough courage to get on a boat, leave everything they know, everything they know, all their physical possessions, culture behind, boldly go where, what was that on Star Trek? To boldly go where no man has gone before. And then to…
Everything.
Nowhere no man goes.
and kind
of lie your ass off the whole way, right? Like fake it till you make it. They really did. And what blows me is like, you know, I remember being, well, I didn’t have kids when I was 27, I was 31. But like, I remember having kids and thinking like, I can’t even get out the door. And they left everything, you know, it sound of music style.
and they got on a train, pretended they were going back to Yugoslavia, jumped off the train in Austria, walked to the refugee camp, got on a boat to Canada, came to Canada. Somewhere along the way, they were supposed to be going to Saskatchewan to be a farmer. I remember looking at the documents going, my grandfather had manicured nails. But they just do whatever it takes, then they get here. But when you talk to an entrepreneur, and you and I know this, that there’s you…
If you have even an inkling of shadow belief that you can’t, then you will make that true. I think they weren’t reading any self-help books, just so we’re clear. They actually legit burned every possible point of return. Like they couldn’t go back, they couldn’t leave, they had no money, they couldn’t speak the language, they had kids who couldn’t speak the language. They had to navigate a whole system of crap and…
If you have even an inkling of shadow belief that you can't, then you will make that true Share on X
They had no choice but to succeed. And it’s amazing what you can do in all of those obstacles. If your only choice is to succeed.
That’s so, so true and proven time and time and time time.
It’s crazy.
Okay, so thank you for sharing and your grandparents were obviously heroes in the true sense of the word. And so, okay, at 18, I think you joined the Merchant Marine and you sailed around the world for a couple of years as a deckhand. Maybe not. So you went to university. What did you do?
At 18, I went to university to study chemical engineering and that summer, for two summers, I worked as a welder at Chrysler Corporation. You may have heard of them. I worked in the factory at Chrysler welding as a student, because my mom was a financial analyst for Lea Iacocca. So kids of employees could work summer vacation relief.
A little company out of Detroit, yeah, Chrysler.
It’s a job. Great job.
Yeah.
What a great nod towards company culture. Take care of the kids and the parents are going to love that.
Yeah, make the
kids be slaves. was, but it was a, it was a great, I did. And, and, but they didn’t like, you know, it was a really like, didn’t sugar coat it. was like, like you went and worked in the factory on the line. And I, again, it, it, it opened my eyes to, maybe I’m not a snowflake, know, like maybe, maybe life’s a bit harder than I think.
I think you got a fairly generous check for welding at Chrysler.
And maybe I want to work a bit and maybe I don’t want to do that. Maybe I do want to do this. have a lot of respect for people who do it. I like, because I did it for two years and it is the first day I thought I was going to die. Like, right. I couldn’t believe people were taking overtime. All it was all I could do to crawl home. Right. One summer they made me hammer these, when you put a roof on, don’t know they still do this, but when you put a roof on there, these tabs, these metal tabs, and you have to hammer them down. then, so then you.
Mm-hmm.
weld them, but a human had to hammer them down back then because it was a bit finicky. And so I did that for a couple of days and I woke up and I was like, I can’t open my hand. Like I could still put the hammer in and do the job, but like I couldn’t open my hand. I had to go to like physio because I was hammering too hard. I I was so motivated to get my degree and get.
Yeah.
You know, I was so motivated because I was like, I can’t even do this for two days.
Yeah, but very common with entrepreneurs that they, at a very early age, learned like a real work ethic that they learned to work hard. My first job was driving a tractor at Wheat Harvest. And today people picture a tractor and a cab and air conditioning and radio and a cooler in the cab. And you’re basically just driving up and down all day. Okay. But back then,
Right.
There was no cab. The first day, and I was working for my grandfather, the first day at dinner, I’m asking my grandfather, could we get an umbrella just to keep the sun from baking you for 12 or 13 hours? And so not only is it 102 or 103 degrees, but I’m from Kansas. It’s always windy in Kansas. They don’t even talk about wind until it gets to be like,
I’m melting.
God, yes, of course. Dorothy, right, Dorothy?
30 miles an hour,
Yeah. Yeah.
you know, and, it’s dusty. And so you end up with dirt in places that you didn’t know you could end up with dirt. And, I think I was 11, but, but it was just what you did. And, and I wouldn’t trade. I wouldn’t trade for any of it. Yeah. Wouldn’t wouldn’t trade for any of it. Okay.
11.
11, 11. I know 11. That’s awesome. You know what,
you know what never happened to me? And I don’t know if this ever happened to you. Now that I think about it, like my grandparents never gave me a job in their company ever. That’s so interesting. Right? Like, although the day I quit my corporate PNG,
Hmm. Hmm.
Yeah.
like my corporate job that I’d worked so hard to get to, and I was, I mean, I was at the ripe old age of 27 or 26, 27. My grandfather cried.
And I thought, what are you crying for? I’m going to do what you did. And he was like, it wasn’t easy. That’s why we did it so that you would get one of these fancy safe jobs. right, I can’t believe you’re throwing it away.
I think my grandfather paid me $150 for two weeks, which I thought I was flush. I was just a kid, you know? That was a long, long time ago, and so that was like totally different economics. But I did learn a couple of things on that job. One, I learned how to work hard. Okay. And two, I learned I didn’t want to work that kind of hard. And so…
God.
That’s a lot of,
Yeah.
Yeah, well,
yeah, I learned that too. It’s And I also got really good at it. Like, like good in the sense that I was like, okay, I got this down. Like I’ve optimized my system, I can get the plates over there and push the welding buttons and get back and I can have like 45 seconds to just chill till the next round comes. And then I got this tap on the shoulder from a lovely coworker. And he was like, yeah, you’re, you’re gonna, you’re going too fast. Like, and I was like, gotcha.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But at first I was like, isn’t that like, I’m getting better. And he was like, you’re making us look bad. You’re making the old guys look bad. And I was like, Ooh, right. Right? Like, like slow down bunny. But, but it is true. I don’t think I could have kept honestly up that pace for the rest of my life. Do know what I mean? Like I was sprinting in a, in a marathon.
Yeah, politics, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and also in where compensation plans are not aligned properly and there’s no incentive to become more proficient and more efficient, I think people will always find a way to profit. And if the way to profit is to do less, then I think they will. Absolutely. And so if there is a mechanism where the
Mm-hmm.
They do what they’re rewarded for, and I would agree with you on that.
company and the owner and management and labor can all win in a parallel manner. To me, those have always been the best comp plans. Everybody on the same page, everybody rowing together, you don’t necessarily win at the same level, but you win nevertheless. And so that’s great. Okay. So went to university, chemical engineering. Okay. And so you were going to go to work for Conoco or yeah.
Yep, yep, interesting.
at Dow.
I didn’t. No, in fact, I was just cleaning out. I was just doing a big spring clean and I found all my offer letters from when I graduated. No, I went to work at Procter & Gamble. But my interviewing went, this was like a direct route. I went from Dow Chemical in Northern Alberta to Morgan Stanley in New York City as a, to be a financial analyst.

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Title: E122 | Transforming Teen Lives: Austin Davis on Mental Health & Entrepreneurship
Date: April 14, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/transforming-teen-lives-austin-davis-on-mental-health-and-entrepreneurship/
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Content:
In this inspiring episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Austin Davis, the visionary founder of Clearfork Academy. Austin shares his incredible journey from a youth pastor to a leading mental health professional, dedicated to transforming the lives of teenagers struggling with mental health and substance use issues.
Join us as Austin discusses the mission of Clearfork Academy, which provides comprehensive care for adolescents through detox, residential treatment, and outpatient programs. He opens up about his entrepreneurial spirit, influenced by his father’s business endeavors, and how his faith and passion for helping others led him to pivot from pastoral ministry to mental health counseling.
Austin also shares valuable lessons from his entrepreneurial journey, including the challenges of scaling his business, the importance of finding the right team, and the pivotal moments that shaped his career. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a mental health advocate, or someone looking for inspiration, this episode is packed with insights and heartfelt stories.
Tune in to hear about:

The mission and services of Clearfork Academy
Austin’s personal and professional journey
The impact of mentorship and faith on his career
Key lessons learned from scaling a business
The importance of resilience and adaptability in entrepreneurship

Tune in The Proven Entrepreneur Show and don’t miss this episode filled with wisdom, encouragement, and practical advice for anyone looking to make a difference in their community.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Listen now and be inspired to create your own legacy!
Watch the episode here

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Transforming Teen Lives: Austin Davis on Mental Health & Entrepreneurship
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the proven entrepreneur show. I am so excited. I have somebody who’s a good friend of mine, but you’re also going to love him. Austin Davis. Welcome to the show. Hey man. Happy Friday to you. Going to get slide into the weekend pretty shortly after this episode. So I appreciate you coming on today. Um, Hey, let’s take you what? No, before that. So tell me, I know you have a couple of businesses.
What’s up, Don? Great to have you this morning.
I think.
Okay. But let’s just talk about your primary business. What’s your primary business? What do you do? How long have you done it? All that kind of stuff.
Mmm.
so our tagline is create new legacy is what we do. How do we do that is we help 13 to 17 year old boys, girls with mental health and substance use issues. Do that through a continuum of care all the way from detox or stabilization, residential inpatient treatment or partial day programming all the way to just, you know, once a week, individual therapy.
Awesome. And the name of the business is, Clear Fork Academy. And you’re literally helping people change their lives.
Clearfork Academy.
Yeah, yeah, Families, kiddos, grandparents, sometimes teachers, everybody who’s involved in that kid’s life hopefully is impacted by their changes they’re making on their daily basis.
And I would even say larger than that, the world at large, you know, yeah, to take somebody who is suffering with or from addiction and get that monkey off their back, that has an unmeasurable change on their life, their family’s life, and everybody they’re going to come in contact with forevermore. So appreciate you doing that. Okay. Now I’m going to take you all the way back to little Austin.
And that’s the hope.
Okay. You probably haven’t thought of a little Austin in a day or two. Okay. Cause I know you have, even your littles aren’t that little anymore. Okay. Or if I take you all the way back to five year old Austin and maybe up through high school, but that timeframe in the household, you were raised and everybody’s household looks a little different. You know, that’s, that’s kind of all different, but in the household you were raised. What one was there an adult who set an entrepreneurial example to.
Ooh.
Independent of that question, was there a time when you were a child when you said, I’m going to grow up and be an entrepreneur?
yeah. First off, I didn’t know what that word was until I was probably, you 20. But that spirit was definitely inside of me probably since day one. I did. I saw my dad create his own business probably around the age of
I don’t know, seven or eight, something like that. He started kind of an office equipment sales and service company. was a one man band, servicing copiers, computers, faxes at every local business. Right before the internet, you had to go to the Yellow Pages and call somebody because there wasn’t a YouTube video to fix your printer. So.
Right.
you know, that’s what he did. you know, I have fond memories of, you know, laying in the floor of the office underneath the desk tying two million paper clips together or, you know, learning how to, you know, service and build computers and things like that. So you know, grew up around sort of technology and built my own first computer and all those kinds of things. So, yeah, a lot of that entrepreneurial
You love that by the way.
I wouldn’t say mentorship, but sort of spirit was in the family.
Yeah, love that. And so it sounds to me like you inherently had some problem solving. And if you’re thinking about, problem solving and then tip also typical with entrepreneurs, maybe a little, resistance to authority, you know, I, can be a good follower if you can just be a good leader, you know, type of thing. And so, okay. All right. So you get through childhood and, and, I’ll ask you the question, even though I know the answer. So.
I think you backpacked across South America and then joined the merchant Marines and then the seals, right?
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah. No,
you went on to university and you studied entrepreneurship, right?
No, not at all. Not at all. So, you know, at 15 years old, I didn’t grow up in a church family. didn’t go. didn’t talk about things. I had a friend at 15 take me to a local church and just kind of fell in love with that idea and gave my life to Christ and had this call, what I thought was to do ministry in the local church. And so
And so what did you study?
At 18, graduated high school, packed up all my things, went to East Tennessee with like $20 in my pocket and this goal to get an undergrad in pastoral ministries. so did that for four years. Still kind of felt inadequate, underqualified to work in a local church. So I went to seminary, got a job as a youth pastor, kind of part-time, full-time, going to school, doing the whole thing.
And then, you know, when kids catch the house on fire, run away, get pregnant, get in a fight, whatever, we weren’t exegeting stuff out of Romans to solve their problems. I was using my counseling electives to kind of talk through the scenarios, me with the parents, me with, you know, all the stakeholders. And later went to my dean and said, hey, look, I know I’m 80 hours into this 90 hour MDiv program, but
I think I want to pivot here and get my master’s in counseling so that I can kind of go do this at scale. Because again, even in that pastoral role, my heart or my vision was always to grow things at scale. I could never see myself just in that one location, but having a multi-site location or something like that. Even then in that church world and mindset, was still…
multi-site, multi-location, scalable, know, those sort of ideas.
Love that. Okay. And so went to school thinking you were going to be in full-time ministry and 80 hours into a 90 hour program pivoted. But, but love the independence and the courage to be able to do that. I mean, that takes some, it takes some guts to say, Hey, I’m going to make a change here. And, and so then when you graduated, you went out and started your first business.
Day one, right?
no, no, no, no. no, I started working in mental health hospitals, and like bigger institutions, you have to do 3000 hours of internship and you got to log a bunch of hours and time. And, you know, the state wants to be, really comfortable with your level of competency before you go and try to help anybody else. And so did that,
No!
And then kind of sort of through that process, had a mentor who was helping me supervise my hours. And he ended up starting a treatment center, much like what we’re doing today. Brought me along. I was the first therapist, first employee, then first clinical director. So we grew this empty building into, you know, thirty four, thirty two, thirty four people in treatment. And
That’s kind of when I had that entrepreneurial seizure, I think is Michael Gerber calls it, right? Like, hey, I can do this on my own. And so we kind of took this first calling of being a youth pastor and now this clinical expertise and kind of smash them together. And that’s what what ClearFork represents is kind of those two callings. And so I kind of get to do both work with teenagers and be a clinician.
Yeah.
and help change teens’ lives.
Yeah, I love that. So when you took that first job, first therapist, first director, et cetera, how old were you?
25, 26, 27, somewhere in there? Yeah.
Okay. So let’s just call that 26. We’ll cut it down the middle.
And you did that for how long before you had that entrepreneurial seizure and said, must go do my own.
Yeah.
Yeah, five and a half, six years. And, you know, I just I was I was doing my morning routine. I was walking through the building, you know, shaking hands and and just just kind of had this this thought. We’ll call it the Holy Spirit or God or, you know, it’s just a costed and in my walk through the day. And it was just like, hey, I’m done here. I’m done.
And my wife was eight months pregnant with our third kid. And I come home that day and say, hey, babe, I think I need to quit my job. so I wouldn’t be here without my wife. We’ve been married 20 years this coming August. And so every one of these sort of entrepreneurial

Austin Davis and Don Williams discuss about Entrepreneurial seizure.
That went over well.
Yeah.
pivots or changes or whatnot, you know, she’s been the voice of reason and the anchor behind all of that. And so I come home and I say, Hey, I think I’m supposed to quit. She goes, Yeah, I know. I’ve been praying about that too, for like six months. And it was just like perfect alignment. And so we did we, you know, we kind of already had a plan. We’re super planners. And so it was just like, stockpile as much cash as you can and prepare for a baby. And, you know, we did.
We kind of walked away from what I had my feet up on the desk and went to create our own thing. it was a crazy, probably 12, 24 months afterwards, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I love that. And I want to point out two things to the audience. One, it’s really common that a successful entrepreneur had maybe that three, four, five, six year, I’ll say apprenticeship, but that’s not really what it is. But, but this time where you get to learn and experience and fail and succeed and it’s not on your nickel. Okay. And, and ultimately you’re just learning and, and
And then typically you kind of have this idea of, think I can do better than we’re doing. Okay. And, that’s really common with entrepreneurs and it’s pretty wise actually. Maybe, maybe better to do that than to start, trying to start the next Apple in your garage at 19. That’s pretty tough. That’s kind of the moon shot. And then the second thing, and, is.
Austin’s relationship with his wife where she’s totally invested into their lives. And, and so they’re in alignment really hard to be a successful entrepreneur and have your spouse life partner kind of pulling the other direction. Pretty tough to do that. So thank you for sharing. Okay. So how long have you had, clear for.
Since 2016, so we’re going on like eight year or yeah eight years
Yeah. Okay. Awesome. All right. So thinking back across that career, your search your memory banks and what I’m looking for is I’m looking for a hard lesson. So something happened or some, maybe something didn’t happen, but when it happened or didn’t happen, it was like, man, that hurt. Ouch. I was, I was counting on the other outcome and, but maybe today was some
perspective, you look back on that hard moment and you’re like, you know, I think that was, I think that was God’s will. I think that was supposed to happen and actually has turned out really positive for me. But at the time it was like, Holy smokes, this hurts. Do you have a hard lesson you could share?
Yeah, the hard lessons. So it’s just filtering through them all. You know, here recently, we did some turnover and this whole so we’ve done the EOS kind of mindset and things for since day one. And so I’m a big fan of system and structures and having a rubric to kind of pass down through the organization. And so this whole idea of integrator
has just been a journey. It’s been a difficult thing to execute or just find the right person. And I think, you know, we went from one facility, me living on campus, having eight patients. We doubled every year, five years in a row. That’s with staff, with clients, with revenue, like everything was just kind of
and a very fast pace. so towards the end of 21, started really trying to think about how do I find an integrator? How do I find that COO? So I can be visionary and not be, you know, doing therapy every day or just plugging away at the details. And so to continue to grow, the company, our BHAG was 225 lives. That’s what we wanted to see, you know, and we had, we had 40 beds.
And so there was a lot of scale that needed to happen to do that. So just that journey, I’ve been through a couple of I’ve been through a couple that didn’t work out. And I think the biggest lesson was is I knew with the first one six weeks in eight weeks in that it was was done. It was toast. was it was it. We made the wrong choice. They knew it and I knew it. And
We just, we stayed in that sort of marriage for eight years, not eight years, eight months. And it was just miserable. It was miserable. It resulted in half the staff leaving and half the clients, know, when you don’t have staff, can’t treat clients. So half the kids don’t come in and stuff like that. And so it really just was a black eye, but I learned a lot. I learned that
Mm. Mm.
in order for that relationship to work, have to not be so OCD and micromanaging. And so there’s a lot of trust that has to be given. And the follow-up and verification, right? I think my biggest learning curve is how do I give someone adequate communication and instruction and then let them go do their thing instead of like,
you you miss this point, you missed it, you know, 80 % is good enough, like trying to trying to live by that has been a huge, just, you know, at scale, I want to scale. And so you can’t you can’t micromanage scale, like it’s messy, it’s disruptive, it’s kind of out of control. So and for a control free collect myself, then that’s difficult to
You can’t micromanage scale. Growth is messy, disruptive, and a little out of control. Embrace it. Share on X
It is kind of out of control. Yeah.
sort of live in at times.
Well, and I think two great points there. One, and my longest business is a pretty high turn. I’m in the contact center business, so pretty high turnover. And so I maybe learned this earlier. I don’t mind failing at HR. don’t mind making hires that aren’t going to make it, but, but I want to, if we’re going to fail, I want to fail fast. I don’t want to fail slow. That’s really painful. If it’s not going to work like
And I’m not very active in that business anymore, but they know if it’s not going to work, let’s part ways as friends today, rather than later, you know, friendly or not. And then the other thing you said is, Hey, I learned. And I think great entrepreneurs have this trait. I either win or I learn. And to me, learning is just a little slower winning.
I either win or I learn. Learning is just a little slower version of winning. Share on X
Yeah.
Okay. But just, it’s the long path, but, that’s where it goes. Okay. All right. So we’ve done the hard moment. I’m going to look for like a warp speed moment. So things are going pretty good. I make a great hire. I make a great strategy. make an acquisition. get some financing. raise some capital. I do something that even though things are going pretty good, it’s like, we’re, now we’re off to the moon.
Do you have a warp speed moment where you did something? And then it was just like, man, I walked through a door and wow, that was a good door.
I think I keep waiting for that. You know, we work with teenagers and adolescents and it’s like, if one step forward is two steps back, because it’s just because every single day is is we’re dealing with people’s chaos. so even, you know, in 21 in the midst of that COO struggle, we added our second facility. So we doubled our capacity. We had a boys only facility. We added the girls facility.
you know, it’s our our apart from each other. So that adds travel, that adds new staff that needs, you know, basically a second business that runs autonomously. And then about 18 months ago, we just we put two outpatient locations and so totally different business model and same continuum of care, but kind of different concept. And so just rethinking a lot of those things. And so it’s like
Yeah, we went from one location to four locations in about 24 months. So it doesn’t feel like a warp speed, but guess in hindsight, there’s some scale.
No doubt to other people
it might seem pretty aggressive, one to four locations in two years.
Yeah.
Right. Yeah, we position it positioned ourselves from, about a six, six million dollar a year to the possibility of 22 million. So, you know, there’s there’s a lot of lot of growth to grow into that that that model. So.
Well,
I think that one to four and you being modest about that underlies the fact you’re just an over former Austin. So everybody else is breathing a brown paper bag and he’s like, yeah, we’re growing a little bit. so good for you. Okay. All right. Maybe toughest question I ask. I’m trying to ask this to every guest. I’m gonna you in a time machine. I’m going to send you all the way back to 20 year old Austin. You got about 30 seconds.
Maybe 60 to share whatever you want to share. Okay. With your 20 year old self, that would, would have been helpful. Something you know now, you didn’t know then that if you could turn back the clock and of course we can’t, but if you could, gosh, I wish I knew that. Well, here you, here you go. What do you say?
Yeah.
Yeah, instantly this is.
it’s kind of three or four fold, but the essence is, is don’t do it on your own. And that it’ll be okay. That’s what I tell myself is like, it’ll be okay. That, you know, I live my life kind of, grandfather, my mom’s side spent like 50 years in the railroad. And so this image kind of,
Don't do it on your own. It'll be okay. Trust the process and have faith that everything will align in order. Share on X
Mm-hmm.
sticks with me is I feel like my life is just laying track for a train that’s chasing me. And I’m laying it as fast as I can. And it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be in the right order. It’s going to be nailed down properly. And I think that’s that that has the faith thing built into it for me, right? Like my job is just to put the track down and God or whoever behind me is making it.
Life is like laying track for a train that’s chasing you. Just lay it down and trust it will hold. Share on X
in order.
I lost you. Yeah, just putting it back in just putting it back in order and making making it straight. So message to self.
You’re back.
Yeah.
love
that. And I’m like three times older than you are. But you know, what I’ve seen across my career is, I’ve always, I’ve always been a very diligent worker. I’m the guy who shows up early. I’m the guy who works late. I can do twice as much as anybody. Okay. At whatever level I’m, I’m, I’m working at, but the interesting thing and the, what I’ve found similar in your comment, you’re laying the track and then God’s going to make it all happen is that.
My biggest periods of harvest in my life, I wasn’t working any harder. I wasn’t working any smarter. I literally believe it’s when God said, you can harvest. so appreciate you working every day. You’re called to do that. But some of those lean times, now we’re going to follow up with some fat times.
Mm-hmm.
because I really can’t see that I ever did anything any different in those timeframes when it just kind of happened. So, so love that. Okay. How can we support you? How can we reach you? If someone has a teen or adolescent suffering from addiction, how do they reach out to your company?
Yeah.
Clearforkacademy.com. Yeah, the top right hand corner is our phone numbers that ring straight to our admissions and crisis intervention team. so whether you think it’s not an issue and you’re just curious or you ended up in the ER and you know it’s an issue, we’re there to help navigate through those questions.
And if you don’t know, you don’t want to pick up the phone, you can go to Amazon and get a copy of my book, My Kid, My Crisis. And so I just kind of chronicled like 20 stories of families somewhere in that spectrum of that journey. And then how to address them if you were if you didn’t have any other resources.
Love that. And so if, if you are living with a teen or adolescent who’s suffering from addiction, let me just tell you, you’re not alone and there is help. Okay. But, most, you know, I coach business owners and, there’s sort of like three steps for them to improve. Ask for help, learn something new, put it into action.
in.
And I think that’s probably universal. If you have a teen or adolescent, ask for help, learn something new, act on it. Austin’s business, be happy to help you. Austin, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been my honor.
Yeah, Don, thank you so much. I appreciate you.
Thank you. That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

====================================================

Title: E121 | Revolutionizing Customer Engagement with AI: Insights from Regal.ai’s Alex Levin
Date: April 7, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/revolutionizing-customer-engagement-with-ai-insights-from-regal-ai-alex-levin/
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Content:
Welcome to The Proven Entrepreneur Show, where host Don Williams brings you transformative insights from the world of entrepreneurship. In this episode, Don sits down with Alex Levin, co-founder of Regal.ai, a company at the forefront of AI innovation in customer engagement.
Alex Levin shares his compelling journey from a traditional business background to leading Regal.ai, a tech company revolutionizing customer interactions with advanced AI agents. Discover how Regal.ai’s AI agents handle 20-40% of customer interactions for large enterprises, making voice communication not only efficient but also cost-effective. Alex delves into the evolution of AI technology, the economic benefits of voice AI, and the strategic decisions that have propelled Regal.ai’s growth.
The underlying technology now makes it so that there's no implementation costs. Share on X
Key Topics Discussed:

The role of AI agents in customer interactions
Economic advantages of voice AI over traditional methods
Alex Levin’s entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned
The future of AI in customer engagement
Strategic decisions that led to Regal.ai’s growth

This episode is packed with valuable takeaways for top executives, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals. Learn about the economic advantages of AI in customer service, the importance of maintaining high hiring standards, and the benefits of a usage-based pricing model. Alex Levin’s insights offer actionable advice on leveraging AI to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth.
Never lower your standards when hiring. Share on X
In this episode provides sophisticated yet accessible insights into the world of AI and entrepreneurship. Alex Levin’s story is not just about facts; it’s about the transformation and discovery that unfolds as he navigates the challenges and breakthroughs in the tech industry.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Tune in The Proven Entrepreneur Show to gain valuable insights into the world of AI and entrepreneurship, and discover how Regal.ai is revolutionizing customer service. Don’t miss this episode packed with actionable advice and inspiring stories!
Watch the episode here

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Revolutionizing Customer Engagement with AI: Insights from Regal.ai’s Alex Levin
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Got a really good guest today. have Alex Levin, co-founder of Regal.ai. So AI that’s actually doing something, not just somebody that’s an AI expert, which the world seems to be full of. Alex, welcome to the show. Yeah, thrilled to have you. So tell us a little bit, what does Regal.ai do?
Thank you for having me.
We build AI agents for large enterprises and help them customize those agents for their specific business and their specific customers. And I’d say most of our customers, AI agents now do between 20 and 40 % of the volume of customer interactions, whether it be support or sales or maybe some operational use cases like scheduling and reminders.
And so I think I know the answer to this. So mainly voice application, right?
Yeah, we’re very long voice. So when I first started in contact centers, was taught contact centers are a call center. Just get rid of those interactions. And what do you do? You hide the phone number, you make self-serve flows, you do everything you can to send people to a chat bot, whatever it is. And…
you know, that solves one problem, it lowers your costs, but actually like it makes customers feels like you don’t really care about them. And that’s bad, right? Because it creates a turn problem among your customers as there were loyalty. So I think I understand why businesses thought that, you know, talking with the customer on the phone with a human was expensive. The nice part is now with these voice AI agents, it’s not expensive. It’s actually the cheapest way of engaging with the customer. So voice went from being the most expensive to the cheapest channel.
you know, which really changes how you can think about engaging with your customer. You know, could put a phone number everywhere now. You can have the IGN in your app and, you know, there’s zero wait time. There’s no sort of retraining, right? Their agents act like your best agents constantly. They have access to all your data. So it’s a very different experience for the customer.
You know, people often ask why now like this pro this idea has been around for a long time. What’s changes the LLMs the underlying large language models from open AI, Anthropic, Meta, Google are getting billions of dollars pumped into them and the quality of those models. And the sort of more realistic voices that are available now have made this finally like really possible. And so it’s, you know, super exciting for me because I’ve been in this industry for a long time that we can finally search really use AI agents in production and
give people back this voice channel. It’s funny, when you see the youngest generation, they’re not sort of text first. They’re so used to Siri and Alexa and voice notes and whatever, they’re like immediately on it. It’s actually kind of the millennials that were kind of sent to text and sent to chat and SMS that are kind of the weird ones. But the older generation and the youngest generation are like already voice first. So it’s actually my generation that maybe is a little bit behind.
Yeah, I love that. And so I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’ve been in the contact center business for 35 years. And so, Oh my.
So you’ve seen a lot of these transitions and a lot of
this promise. Like, you know, we’ve been promised for years that there would be better automated voice, whatever. And I don’t know, for years it was pay 500 grand upfront and 100 grand a month just to like train the models and blah, blah, blah. It just wasn’t worth it and it wasn’t good.
Something has changed. The underlying technology now makes it so that there’s no implementation costs. You pay a variable fee per minute, the eyes on the phone. The quality is great. Like, CSAT is between 85 and 95 % for these agents. Like, it’s a completely different product now.
Yeah. Love that. Love that. know, just let’s talk about the economics, you know, so, um, if a U S company is outsourcing to us contact center, they’re probably paying 40 to $60 an hour for, for that communicator. If they’re hiring internally, maybe it’s a little less, maybe it’s 30 an hour loaded. If they’re going offshore, maybe it’s 15 an hour, but when they’re
automated, it’s a fraction of even that number, and there’s no subjectivity. The system is going to answer appropriately every time.
Yeah, and the other thing
that people sort of forget is the 15 an hour is 15 an hour for 60%, 65 % utilization. So AI agents, if you’re spending 10 cents a minute, it’s whatever that amount of $6 an hour, but it’s 100 % utilization. So the $15 an hour is not comparable directly to the AI agents. What we usually do is take people through an exercise. go US-based labor is around $1 a minute per talk time.
Offshore is maybe 30 cents a minute per talk time and AI agents are 10 cents. So it’s a fraction of the cost for the talk time. There’s no after call work. There’s no bathroom breaks. There’s no I’m going to quit. It’s a different world.
totally different world. So appreciate that. Okay, I want to take you all the way back to little Alex. So your family home five to 18 years old, and everybody’s home was a little different, but in your home, was there an entrepreneurial adult? Was there an example for you?
Yeah, my father worked for a small business and sort of, you know, eventually like bought the business from the previous owner. And so like we saw sort of, you know, buy low, sell high, like make margin and like what, you know, how do you hire people and what happens? So that was definitely useful from an early age. And, you know, coming into like college, things I thought were normal, but understanding, you know, revenue and employee, like just were foreign to other people. So that was certainly helpful. I think I never wanted to be in sort of the type of business my father was.
is
just a more traditional business. When I left school and saw tech business, I said, that’s a whole different way of doing it. Like, let’s do that.
Yeah. Love that. And it’s, it’s interesting when, when the kitchen table is also the boardroom table sometimes for the conference room table, you know, kids just pick up a certain amount, you know, kind of by osmosis. So after that, you went to university, you joined the merchant Marines. What’d do?
Yeah.
So, I left home pretty early. My brothers and I all left at 13 to go to boarding school by choice. We wanted to sort of have a different kind of experience for high school. And then all of us went to liberal arts colleges. So it definitely like as a family, we believe in education and through liberal arts education. So I studied philosophy and psychology, which is not very useful, let’s say for the direct job I’m doing, but more and more, I do think that the skills around
know, reading and writing and sort of influencing and convincing people of things like those are the most valuable skills. so highly recommend the role arts to people, not sort of a functional education in college. And then, like I said, I realized I didn’t want to be an academic and I was very interested in going into business. And I realized that if you were going to be the CEO of a company one day, you had to understand how the sausage was made. They weren’t going to put somebody, a CEO that hadn’t figured out how you build software. And so I.
need to be an engineer necessarily, but I went and became a product manager to work with engineers and help build product.
Awesome. Is Regal AI your first company?
So I have been to many different companies, never as the founder and CEO. So before this, I’d always work for the founders. And it’s interesting to see how different people organize the company and run it and do initiatives and goals and those things. And there’s some things that you take and some things that you don’t like. And so finally then, five years ago now, my co-founder and I said, want to be the, we have something we believe in and we want to be the ones who are the ultimate arbiters. And so, obviously now sort of on a new adventure.
Yeah, I love that. And so it’s always somewhat of an enigma to me. And I don’t think you’re the sole, but the entrepreneurs that launched their entrepreneurial journey in their forties or fifties that come out of corporate. they worked at Hewlett Packard or they worked at Apple or FedEx or wherever they worked someplace really, really corporate, but they have unbelievable skills that that entrepreneur who started in his garage when he was 19, he probably doesn’t.
He may have them now, but it took him a long time to put all that together.
Yeah, look, but I would,
I would put both the 19 year old and the HP one person, you know, health, sorry, if you were a packet person in the same bucket, which is they don’t have enough at bats at the things that matter for early stage companies. So at early stage companies, so much of it is setting goals, hiring, firing, doing the tactical day to day work. Neither of those people have the skill.
The skill that really, the only way to hone that skill that is so important is being at early stage companies, maybe not as a founder, but again and again and again, because that’s where you’re learning that stuff. The 19 year old just has never seen it. And the HP one person had other people doing all this stuff for them. Sorry, the Huard Packard person had other people doing it for them.
Yeah, they’re going to see it for the first time when it’s live and when it’s really important. That’s not good.
Yeah, which is not good. You know, I get a lot of…
texts
and emails from friends going, how do I do this thing? it’s like, well, stuff that was second nature to me, because I’ve been at these companies for a long time, stops them for a week. And in the end, that’s the whole game is how do you move more quickly than the company next to you? And if you are stopped constantly by these things, it’s bad. You know, I recommend to everybody go work for somebody. If you want to be an entrepreneur who has a similar size company to what you want to do and learn on their dime, go make mistakes where they’re going to pay for them. And that’s the trade-off. They’re going
okay with it. If you build a good company for them, they’re willing to pay for your education. And so like do that. Don’t go learn and spend your own money making mistakes.
I think that’s wise counsel. Maybe why the average entrepreneurial business does not survive five years. They just don’t have, they’re under capitalized, not only cash, but knowledge and people and it takes all three. So looking back, how old is regole.ai? Five years, congratulations. Okay. And looking back across the last five years, I want to ask you about a hard lesson. something, something that
Yeah.
Five years.
an event that was like, ow, that kind of hurt, or maybe that really hurt. But maybe today with a little more perspective, turns out it was really a positive in your path.
So
lots of hard lessons. I don’t know how many of them were true positives now. So like in terms of learnings, I’d say the best one always is never lower your standards when hiring. Every time I’ve gone and said, well, we really need this thing. And I know this person doesn’t do X, let’s just like fudge it. It’s a bad decision. And so I think that’s the most important one to keep a bar on is make sure you have people that fit the criteria you’re actually looking for for that role.
you know, terms of positives coming out of something like that, yeah, we have a different hiring process now, you know, look for different profiles, like have a team that we’re very excited about. So eventually, you know, you do sort of get better at holding that standard, even when things are sort of growing very quickly. But that’s one of the hardest ones, I think, especially if you’re a small business and there’s not three salespeople, there’s one. So if you hire the wrong salesperson, that’s really important. There’s not three finance people, there’s one, you know, so a lot of times I talk to small businesses,

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Title: E120 | Transforming Lives: Luke Mickelson’s Journey with Sleep in Heavenly Peace
Date: March 31, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/transforming-lives-luke-mickelsons-journey-with-sleep-in-heavenly-peace-org/
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Content:
In this heartwarming episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Luke Mickelson, the inspiring founder of Sleep in Heavenly Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring no child sleeps on the floor. Luke shares his incredible journey from building the first bed in his garage to leading a global movement that has delivered nearly 300,000 beds to children in need across four countries.
Discover the powerful story behind the mission statement “No kid sleeps on the floor in our town,” and learn how a simple act of kindness transformed Luke’s life and the lives of countless children. Luke discusses the challenges and triumphs of running a nonprofit, the importance of community involvement, and the impact of being named one of CNN’s Top 10 Heroes in 2018.
Don and Luke delve into the significance of passion and purpose in entrepreneurship, the value of humility and leadership, and the future goals for Sleep in Heavenly Peace, including ambitious plans to expand globally and reach more children in need. This episode is filled with motivational insights, touching anecdotes, and practical advice for anyone looking to make a difference in their community.
Tune in to hear about:

The origins and mission of Sleep in Heavenly Peace
Luke’s personal experiences and the emotional impact of delivering beds to children
The growth and expansion of the nonprofit organization
The role of community and volunteerism in solving child bedlessness
Strategic goals and future plans for Sleep in Heavenly Peace
The importance of following your passion and making a meaningful impact

For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t miss this inspiring conversation that highlights the power of compassion, community, and entrepreneurial spirit. Listen now and be motivated to take action in your own community!
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Transforming-Lives-Luke-Mickelsons-Journey-with-Sleep-in-Heavenly-Peace.mp3
 
Transforming Lives Luke Mickelson’s Journey with Sleep in Heavenly Peace
Hey, it’s Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Got a great guest, Luke Mickelson from Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Now, I gotta love the branding of the name and I love it when I sleep in heavenly peace and today that’s what we’re gonna talk about. Luke, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Don, it’s great to be here.
Awesome. So I was telling you before we went live that you’re actually my first guest. That’s not up to their eyeballs in entrepreneurship. Okay. This is a nonprofit, which has an entrepreneurial flavor. And you mentioned, yeah, I’ve done the entrepreneur thing several times, exits and all that jazz. So I want to take you all the way back to your family house. Okay. You’re five.
Sure.
Hehe.
Yeah.
five years old, 18 years old, okay? In your home, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur who had, like most entrepreneurs have some kind of mission, okay? You have a real, well, hey, let’s start there. Back up. Tell me about the mission of sleeping in heavenly peace.
Gotcha. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
You know, our mission is pretty simple. actually came out of, it first started out being our motto. And this is really interesting. I’ve shared this on other other podcasts, but you know, in 2018 I was named, one of the top 10 CNN heroes, right? So we get to go and be a part of the scene in here. I didn’t know what it was. Trust me. I’m from Idaho, so I don’t know much about that stuff, but anyways, I got invited to, to go to the,
Natural History Museum in New York and they honored 10 nonprofits from across the world and I was lucky to be one of them. Anyways, after this production, we met the next day and they wanted to go over media training because you’re going to get hit with a bunch of media and all this stuff. Well, first thing I talked about was a mission statement and they went around the room to these 10 other nonprofits talked about their mission statement and they came to mind and had, you know, they had this face like, this is guy doing like it was really questioning it because our
motto now mission statement is no kid sleeps on the floor in our town. And the reason why we loved it number one, was just it was actually a mission statement that came out of almost frustration. It was almost you know, when I said it, I just had delivered my first bed to a child, six years old, Haley never slept on a bed. She slept in the backseat of her mom’s car since she was born, right? And then of course couch dived and all that. But they finally got a house. We delivered a bed to little Haley.
You know, and I share with people, look, you know, when you when you see homelessness and and poverty through the eyes of a six year old, I hadn’t done that. And it really hit me like really strong. And you know, when we went to Haley’s little room in the back of this house, they just got, know, there was holes in the carpet and, you know, tears and in the wallpaper and stuff like that. But in the corner was this was this bed of clothes. And that’s what she slept on.
And so when we brought her this bed and seeing that and seeing this mom, this single mom, and I was raised by a single mom too, tears of joy just coming down her face, well, joy and the release of frustration and all this. I mean, you could imagine as a parent, right? Not being able to provide a bed for your child. I mean, it was more than a bed and it was so overcoming, Dawn, like on the way home, I had about a 30 minute drive home. I really didn’t say much. I was just so in shock. And I remember I got home and
out of tears of joy, but tears of frustration, anger, know, passion, more passion than I think I’ve ever felt my life. I’m like, no kid is going to sleep on the floor in my town. And and so that turned into our motto. Now our mission statement and at this CNN media thing, they said, that’s really odd. You know, why did you pick that? And I said, you know, mission statements are mostly for a company to express to the customer or to the
the community, the public, what they do, right? As clear as you possibly can. I said our mission statement is meant for the customer to say it back to the person, right? Because child bedlessness and solving this unknown hidden pandemic in our country needs to be solved on the community level. So we wanted, I wanted these community members, these volunteers, these these local neighbors
to say the mission statement for themselves. No kid sleeps on the floor in our town, right? And we just want our town to be everybody’s town. So that’s a little story on the old mission statement.
I love that and I love the R-Town. guest shared with me not too long ago, the concept of lift where you stand. I can’t fix everything, but I can fix something. Lift where you stand. Let me ask you, I think from that first bed with little Haley,
Yeah. Yep.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I think there’s been a couple more beds. Yeah. So, like define a few,
There’s been a few.
Sure, sure. Well, we started in 2012. We actually built a bed from the idea came from being in the middle of a church auxiliary leadership group, really what it was. And they had talked about how they were helping families in the in the little community. You got to understand, I’m from a small town, Kimberly, Idaho. It’s 4000 people. I mean, my graduating class was 69. You know, we just didn’t. We’re just small town. And but this family that we’re helping
lived in a part of our town. didn’t even know existed. I mean, that’s how that’s how small and humble let’s just say that this this house, this apartment that we went to, these kids were sleeping in. Anyways, we’re in this meeting and someone had said that the kids didn’t have any beds and and it didn’t really it took me a little while to register that right. my gosh, you don’t want any kids don’t want any beds. What’s going on? So anyways, we as being a leader over the Young Men’s Program, the activity of that was basically Boy Scouts.
And so I took my Scouts and said, okay, you know, Hey, what are we gonna, what are we gonna do here guys? We’re gonna, we’re gonna take care of this. Right. And, I decided and I’m not, mean, I know my, my way around some tools. I kid around and I don’t share this very often, Don, but I had to use my wife’s tools. That’s where I had a few, but she had what I needed. It was pretty funny. anyways, we, we, we took these boys scouts. We built this bed, we delivered it. It was such a great experience. I want my kids to have that same experience. And so we,
We built another bed and that’s when I delivered that to Haley and that was 2000, 2012. And after that experience, Don, I mean, my, the best way to say it is just my, my, my heart changed and I can literally say that my heart and my passion just changed in, I wanted to help, especially when I realized number one, it was a fun activity. mean, here I saw these boy scouts and if you’re trying to get a teenage boy,
behind a screen and have fun. Good luck, right? You know I’m saying it’s just tough, but I thought you know here’s a great opportunity to get an Xbox controller out of these boys hands. Put a saw or drill in it and let’s teach him something right and. And not only do we do that, we just had such a great time and my kids had such a great time that we wanted to do more and more well to answer your question. What is it 13 years later we have now?
Eugh.
built and delivered almost 300,000 beds. We’re in four countries. We’ve trained over 400 plus chapter presidents. Right now our goal this year is 90,000 beds in a year. So we went from a small little garage in Kimberley, Idaho to the largest bed building charity in the world. And it’s super fun. I’ll just say that.
That’s amazing and so impactful. And I’ll share, I’ve never shared this with the public, but I went through a pretty rough period in my life. was a single dad, had two sons, but I didn’t have a bed. They had beds, but I didn’t have a bed for an extended period of time. And…
Really? Yeah. Yep. Yep.
I just didn’t have any money. I was like, you can have all the air you want. I got no cash.
wow.
Yeah. Well, that’s
isn’t that some of the that’s some of the problems we face with. You know, a lot of people think, well, you provide beds to people that are in poverty. Well, that is true. But that’s also not true. You know, child bedlessness doesn’t know economics. doesn’t know logistics. You know, it doesn’t know that kind of stuff. It affects people right next door. I mean, a lot of foster care situations where people are just fine. You know, in fact, I share the story where
we had a caseworker give us a call and said, hey, do you have any spare beds? And I always kept a few, you know, just in case. And for this exact situation, foster care, little brother and sister, they were six, seven, something like that. Parents were in jail or out of the picture anyways. Grandparents across the country couldn’t take them. They put into a foster care home, but they were going to get separated because the foster care family didn’t have enough money to go buy another bed. And the judge says, you have
24 hours to get a bed. Now, if you think about that here, two kids, everybody in their life is gone. Everybody except each other. They only have each other. because of because of bed, they were going to be separated. And that’s just not right. And and so we we tell people we we provide more than just a bed. You know, it’s more than just a good night’s sleep for these for these kids. And and Don, you know,
Kudos to you. We walk into a lot of situations where there’s parents. The kids don’t have beds. The parents do. You know, there’s very few, very few do we walk in where that’s reversed. So that says a little bit about you, my friend.
Mm.
Well,
tough time. And you know, I think I’ve been fortunate, I’ve traveled all over the world a couple of times and I was born and raised in Kansas, not probably dissimilar to small town, Idaho, you know, my family’s from a town of a thousand people in Kansas. And so, you know, I had a view of what I thought was poverty. And then I live outside of Fort Worth, Texas. And so, you know,
Sure, sure.
You get a little bigger view, you know? But then when you go around the world, you know, in Asia or in South America or Central America, and I’m not being derogatory at all, or South Africa, Africa, the entire continent of Africa, not just South Africa, but the entire continent of Africa, and you see poverty has a different level, and truthfully,
out. Right, right.
If you sleep in a bed tonight, you kind of won the lottery because most of the world doesn’t. Huge segments of the population are not maybe what we would consider homeless in the U.S., but they don’t have a bed. They’re sleeping on a pallet or on a… Hailey was sleeping on a bunch of clothes, I’m guessing, that were kind of put together and that was softer than the floor. So…
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
there’s there’s I mean, we’ve seen all I mean, we’ve seen sleeping on pallets and a lot of air mattresses and we have all slept on air mattresses with end up flat on the floor every night anyways, you know, so it’s like there’s a lot of these situations, you know, and when you look at you look something like Africa, right, you know, versus our own kids here in the United States, you know, of course, there’s the poverty.
comparison is much different, right? But I look at it as we also have a lot more resource availability to us here, right? So, and I’ve been approached by, I can’t tell you how many people in Africa that want to come over there and build beds. And it’s like, you know what, would, but the little amount of bandwidth that we have here in the United States, even with our 400 chapters, to be able to reach the need that we have here, it’s greater. This is a funny statistic. Well, it’s not funny at all, rather, but
yeah.
there’s really actually no statistics done out there for how many kids actually don’t have beds. It’s not even being recorded. That’s how unknown this situation is. But over the last, you know, 10, 13 years or so, Sleeping on the Peace has slowly kind of gathered some of our own statistics. And we know, we know it’s greater than 3 % of the total population. So if you’re in a town, you know, pretty good sized town of 100,000 people, you know, for Idaho, that’s a pretty good sized town, by the way, not Texas. But
Yeah, Kansas too.
Yeah, exactly. You know, you’re you’re we’re in the same boat here. You know, there’s 3000 3000 kids that are sleeping on the floor, you know, with brother and sister, mom and dad on the couch, you know, whatever, right? They don’t have a bed of their own. and unfortunately, beds become a luxury at that point. And that shouldn’t be especially in a country as rich with resources, with as rich as of amazing people that we have in this country. They’re willing to help just trying to
bring those people and those initiatives and those passions together to solve this problem. And that’s why we always say, you know, this is a community problem. When I set this up, you understand, I was an outside salesman for a water treatment company for 20 years. Loved it, I loved the people, was a great company to work for. When I started Sleeping Emily Peace, my attention to and passions
very quickly started changing. You know, I still felt a lot of responsibility, obviously, to make money for my family. But the revenue, if you will, that I was getting from Sleeping Omni Peace was really more internally what I needed and more of a focal point and a compass for my life than it was how many zeros I made behind my paycheck, you know. that was a tough thing for me because, you know, I grew up in small town. I was very

Sure.
competitive, very athletic. really, I sought the praises of others, right? Like we all do. But I wanted to also feel successful. I think everybody in this world wants to feel success in some way or another, right? And so how do you measure that? What is success to you? As an entrepreneur, it was very simple. Success means more dollars, right? And I think that’s a young, ambitious guy. I get that. And there’s probably some healthy points to that. But when I…
Got into my 30s and and life set in and I was coaching and my kids were growing up and I went to school or excuse me, a church and was was helping out the community. You know, just there just wasn’t enough. satisfaction with the zeros anymore. You know, there just wasn’t enough. I look at a four wheeler or motorcycle or whatever toy I had in the in the garage and they they quickly became more of a nuisance than they did something I enjoyed.
But when I helped someone, especially a child that’s never had a bed before, and I used my very limited woodworking skills to be able to solve that problem, I don’t know, Don, the thought just came to me, my gosh, I spent, you know, back then it was a number of nights to finish one bed. We can do much quicker now, but to be able to sit there and go, for that little of time and to have my beautiful kids help me or other kids help me.
to build, to solve a problem like that, yeah, that’s worth my time. And now, know, measure success is much different for me. It’s, you know, it’s all about how many kids we can help and how many, not just kids, you know, we found out another problem in our community and that’s a lot of people, a lot of amazing, great people that wanna help. They just don’t know how, you know? And when I started Sleeping Emily Peace,
I didn’t want to be this charity that you donated money to and it just went to kind of this pie in the sky and you didn’t know where it went. I knew it needed to be solved by the community. needed to stay in the community. It needed to be a real community initiative. And so when we set up this charity, we had my buddy Jordan Allen, who’s now our executive director. He’s in Boise, two hours away from me.
He, was like one of the first guys that came down and helped me start building those, those 22 beds that first year, he wanted to do it up in Boise. Well, okay. Now what do you call it? Well, I guess we’ll just call them chapters, right? And so that’s just extended out, you know, through our 400 chapters and four countries. And, and now we, you know, we, we can really start making some, some headway into that 3 % of the country to, to solve.
I love that.
And I didn’t miss the 22 bed first year and 90,000 bed goal for 2025. I didn’t miss that. And so I think that’s…
We’ve actually
had some builds, know, Lowe’s Lowe’s Home Improvements, our largest sponsor, you know, they and their their foundation called the Gable Grant, which is actually the Lowe’s Foundation. They have a fundraiser every year. Well, they actually have four of them rather throughout the country. And we have been lucky enough to be the service arm of that of that fund funders, fundraiser. And so we show up and we take their three, four, five hundred
mixture between employees and vendors that come to those those deals and we build beds. I mean, but we build beds. There’s what we have what we call six trains. The chapter has a train of tools. We we build beds and kind of assembly line kind of a train. We call it well, we’ll have six there with 500 people. We’ve built 650 beds in three hours. It was a bed every 22 seconds, you know, so we can really hammer out these beds now, but we do it as a team building exercise.
Wow.
for corporations locally and with volunteers in the community. And it’s such a fun activity. We can take 10 or 200 people and put them to work and people that have maybe never touched a drill before. That’s the fun part. I had some ladies from a bank show up at noon one time just on their lunch break to build beds. I mean, these gals were in stilettos. were, I mean, they were six inch heels and.
They’re out there drilling away. In fact, I remember I had to sneak in my office and take a, take a call real quick. came back and oh my gosh, they had built like 20 headboards. I’m like, ladies, you’re running me out of wood. So it’s a really, it’s a, it’s a neat, it’s a neat thing. And, and we solved, we solved that, that component of the community, looking for ways to give back and feeling that satisfaction, feeling that fulfillment that we all want to feel when we help someone else. So.
Yeah, and it’s counterintuitive, it’s a treadmill, it’s an unending treadmill to just try and satisfy yourself. It’s not possible. We always want more, we always want better. There’s always something else. And in my business, I coach and consult with entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses. And so you help somebody go from 10 million to 20 million and they’re like, I thought it was going to be totally different. And it’s like, what?
Yeah.
It is different, but at every level there’s a new devil. It’s never like, my gosh, we’re all good. And I’m sure you see that too. In the early days for Sleep in Heavenly Peace, go from one bed to 22, there were probably some big challenges. And now to go to 90,000, there’s different challenges, but there’s still big challenges. It’s not easy necessarily.
Yeah. yeah.
yeah.
absolutely. You know, and there are different levels of challenges and priorities as you grow a business. And again, I tell people, look, the only difference between a nonprofit and for-profit is I don’t have to pay taxes, right? You still have that overhead. You still have growth. You still have rainy day planning. You still have, you know, retention and, you know, AOP goals. I mean, you still have to operate like a business.
And in fact, and I do a lot of coaching of nonprofits as well. You know, we’ve taken sleeping on the peace. You know, I remember my, my first year budget was, a thousand dollars. You know, it was my, it was my Christmas budget for my family, you know, and, this year we’re, we’re going to be $25 million donation company budget a year. And, and, and that comes from, comes from, you know, obviously when you got 400 locations, it’s, it’s a, they’re operating, they’re operating under the same EIN number, but they operate and we.
We train people you operate kind of your own little business, right? You know you almost like a franchise. You stay within the confines and the the parameters that were that set by by us as well as set by the IRS and and our nonprofit rules. But but you know they they get to feel and this is the key of my Mike. My management style is giving someone a clear set of instructions, guidelines of what they need to do, and then let him go do it.
Right. They, they, they, they start feeling ownership and being bought in and being a part of the growth of such a great organization, whether it’s you’re selling popsicles or, or computer chips, you know, you, you, you have an opportunity to, bring someone in into your business and have them feel ownership and be a part of that. and it takes, it takes, in my opinion, it takes leaders that are willing to be humble, that are willing to be, to share and teach people how to,
how to do it better than you did it. You know, and that’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is, you you start this, you start your baby in your garage and now I’m done. I’m not even over it anymore. And that, and that’s, know, that’s sometimes any, you ask any founder or any startup company owner that, that is now past the baton, if you will.
Yeah. Yeah.
It’s and my dad was the same way. mean, he’s he’s still to somebody hasn’t passed that baton and it’s hard. It’s hard to swallow that. And it’s even harder when you start seeing him do things a little bit differently than you did it. And you’re like, Hey, I didn’t, I didn’t do it bad. Why are you doing that? You just gotta let him do it, man.
Yeah,
I love that. So I’m kind of of the mind that a leader really kind of only has two jobs. Cast the vision, cast the vision, cast the vision, tell people the vision. Here’s this division, this division, this division. When they laugh at you because you’ve told them the vision so much, just tell them, yeah, but did I tell you the vision? Keep telling them the vision, tell the vision, tell the vision, television. That’s job one. And job two is go get the best people on the planet to make the vision happen. Okay. And, and you know,
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Awesome.
Yep. Yep. 100%.
I come from my father’s United States Marine. I grew up in a very traditional leadership environment, in a command leadership environment, okay? But what we’ve seen in transformational leadership is that really the leader is working for their quote unquote subordinates, okay? And that makes the best thing happen. And truthfully,
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Great leaders don’t create followers. Great leaders create other great leaders. And there’s a big difference there. So, love that. So tell me, what do you see 10 years down the road for sleep and heavenly, we’ve talked about the past, we’ve talked about the present. Where’s the future? What’s happening?
Great leaders don't create followers, great leaders create other great leaders. Share on X
Absolutely.
Yeah, that’s a great question that excuse me. You know, I remember five years ago even though they you know, I get that question. I’d get that question a lot. So what you know, what’s what’s next? And I the amazing thing is now we actually do have five year strategic goals and plans and you know, we actually have those in place now, whereas we were growing so fast and so rapidly you could it was even hard to set goals. I mean, we literally doubled.
almost every year for five years. Since 2018, we were viewed on a Facebook watch series called Returning the Favor. And it was hosted by the amazing Mike Rowe, know, Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe guy, cool guy, like he’s just the coolest guy. And we were viewed by 18, or excuse me, by 10 million people. And we went from, we had about seven chapters at the time to we just blew up. really a lot of most of our growth
Yeah.
95 % of our growth has happened since 2018. So we really blew up these last five years. And so when we were trying to measure what the goals or a five-year plan would look like, you started low and we broke our five-year plan in the first six months. It was just really hard. Now we’re set down here. we have a five-year strategic goal of hitting a half a million kids.
reaching that 30 to $35 million budget goal. Of course, our biggest focus really is what our mission demands, which is no kid sleeps on the floor in our town. But of course, we want our town to be every town. And so we’ve set this chapter level type franchise up a platform for people to, if this is a passion that they have, that they can
they can now jump on board and we want to get more chapters. We’re at, you know, right now we’re at 355 active, 400 trained. We want to get to that 600, right? Where we’re now in a lot more areas. We’re covering a lot more areas. We only cover about 23, I think the last percentages came in, about 23 to 25 % of the country right now. Even with 400 locations, it’s not, it really doesn’t cover a lot. I mean, we’re missing large towns, we’re missing large areas.
Mmm.
and so we’re, always constantly and focused on growth and focused on finding those great individuals, locally that, that are willing, have time, have a passion for what we’re doing and teach them how, how we get it done. And, and, you know, we put on about 40, 50 chapters every year. so we’re, we’re going to reach that, but we, know, we want to keep that steady going. So, you know, 10 years from now, you know, I know, I know we’ll be at a $50 million.
uh, uh, 200,000 bed per year, um, goal. And beyond that we’ve, we’ve dabbled into, you know, we’ve, we’re into Canada, we’re into Bahamas and Bermuda, but we get requests you could imagine in Southern, you know, our Southern friends down in Mexico and, and, uh, South America, of course, Africa’s always there. We’re working on.
We’re working with big organizations like Knights of Columbus and the Rotary and all these other great, great institutions that have a lot of service minded people in it. We’re trying to open up areas in, strangely enough, oddly enough, like in Ukraine and Poland. Those are going to take some time. And I can see, actually, can see myself as SHP across the country just gets even more founded and sure-footed.
that we’ll be able to tackle some of those across the lake opportunities.
Yeah, and so I was on a call this morning with a friend from Vienna. so, you know, to me, communities are a fabric of individual threads and those threads are individual connections. And so, you know, who knows where things go. And one thing you said that I want to be sure I drive a nail in.
Hmm.
was you had the opportunity to do this Facebook show that was hosted by Mike Rowe. Okay, and you said yes. So one, ultimately you could probably go back to one meeting, one call, one something where you said yes and you could have said no. And had you said no, everything that happened as a result of that would have not happened, would have passed into ether. Okay, but you did say yes.
and then 10 million viewers, things went crazy. And so one thing we try and share with all entrepreneurs is you might be a phone call, you might be a meeting, you might be one introduction away from the magic happening in your business. And very common with entrepreneurs that they have a passion project, they have something that feeds them.
yeah.
spiritually and emotionally, not just financially. And I can think of here locally, we had this random acts of kindness and a bunch of entrepreneurs that were associated. And one of the couples, they went to a local Walmart and they bought all of the children’s underwear and socks, like everything in the store.
and then carried it down to the services that help with homeless people. And of course, stores like you can’t buy it all. And they explained to them what they were doing. They’re like, yeah, you can have it. And so.
That’s cool.
that’s cool. You know, you
say that I, I call what you talk about, I call it my tiny moments, right? I’ve given, I’ve given a few speeches and Ted talks on, on passion and purpose, but it really does come down to a tiny moment. And you know, I, and I remember when I first started SHP, little bit of background there is a little personal background is, you know, 35 years old, middle of my career. You want to, if you want to call it a
Midlife crisis. I don’t know. I don’t know what that means, but I just, I’ll tell you how I felt is I just knew there was more out there for me. I just felt I just, I didn’t have a bad job. didn’t have a bad life. was just actually on paper. I think people would have killed for it, but just in my heart, I just didn’t feel like I was making enough difference in the world. again, it kind of went back from that. My, my entrepreneurial drive for success,
with zeros started to change and I saw more value in the lack of better term, more value in humanity, you know, than it was my, my, my success that I was measuring at the time. And, and, and I was going through a real big faith crisis. I just, you know, where do I fit in this world? How does it work? And so, and when I was kind of in this slump, if you will, and I had been for a number of years,
And then I did this bed build with my Boy Scouts and it filled it so fast, faster than anything else. And I didn’t know why. mean, I’ve done service projects before and I’ve always enjoyed them. But this one just really struck me. I mean, I know now why, but it just really struck me. And I remember when I went home after building or they delivered the beds and that next day church, they told me how amazing it was. And I was kind of…
It didn’t help because I wanted to have that experience for myself and here we were all done and so I went. I remember I was sitting at home sitting at home on the couch. And my kids will just watch it was, you know, first week of December. So Christmas is on everybody’s minds and we’re watching TV and here comes the Xbox controller or Xbox game commercial. And I mean, I could just read my kids minds right there, like getting all giddy and turned to me and and I’m like number one.
We, we, we got an X-Box. We already have enough games. I’m not buying you another game. And it just, you know, Donna, it hit me perfectly. Cause I was like, you don’t need another game. In fact, you have a bed I just delivered or helped build and deliver a bed to kids that don’t have any. So, and I remember thinking, if I can just get off this couch, if I could just drop that three, four inches,
from the cats to put my feet on the ground and walk in the garage to start building beds, it will change me. It will help. Right. And that was hard. It was it was hard in the fact that I just did it. I could tell my kids I had a great time. I could tell my kids what we did. I could tell them all the success that can come from serving other blah, Or I can just go and do it.
and have them come with me and do it and action. And so I tell, you know, I speak about a lot of times in my public speaking, I share, look, your intentions and your desires can be strong, but your desire to act until that desire to act is stronger than your desire to change, then it just remains a dream. And, and, that’s real for everybody. And sometimes it’s just the tiniest moment.
And sometimes you act on it and it was great and then that’s it. But like you said, you’re just one tiny moment away. You’re one phone call. You’re one sales pitch. You know, you’re one hit away from that next big step in your life. And and I’m a living proof that if you can get off the couch, if you can insert just a little bit more effort in something that doesn’t seem it’s that important.
I’m living proof that it can change, literally change the world and other people’s lives in it.
love that and I love the fact I’ve got two great sons, grown sons, grandkids now. And people would ask me all along like, you know, what did you do? And I was like, well, number one, I’m not perfect and they’re not either. They’re really good young men. But I won’t, but I could tell you a moment or two, you know? I said, but here’s a thing I learned.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
pretty early on is that it was hard for my kids. I’m a talker. And so it’s hard for my kids to hear everything I say because I talk too much. Okay. And, and at a certain point people are like, but maybe this is better said. My actions screamed so loudly in their ears. They couldn’t hear my words. And so
just get off the couch, just go do it. Just ask somebody, would you help me? Not for the year, not for the quarter, not for a week. Would you come help me right now? Okay. And people get started because, you know, that there’s even a really popular book, the second mountain, and it talks about entrepreneurs who’ve had a big exit. And it’s very common that they,
Yeah. Yeah.
work 20, 30 years, they’ve had this huge accent, and they look in the mirror every day and say, now why?
I got all the money I’m ever gonna need. I got money my kids and grandkids are gonna need, but for what? For what purpose? And so then the next mountain, that second mountain they go to climb is something like sleep in heavenly peace. And 10 years ago in Thailand, I listened to a really smart lady talk about the power of gratitude.
Yep. Yep.
and had the epiphany that even though I’d won at almost everything in my life, I was very ungrateful. I was never celebrate any, if we won at something, I’d be like, yeah, great. What about this thing over here where we’re not doing very good? I mean, not even a split second.
Don.
We are not stop and smell the roses type guys. don’t, I don’t know what it is. My wife, she kicks me up. Yeah.
We’re not!
It’s a flaw. It’s a flaw.
In my life, it’s a flaw. I won’t say that about in your life, but in my life, it’s… Yeah.
Well, I know what you mean.
I just, and what it is, I don’t know. Maybe it’s an entrepreneur thing. Maybe it’s a drive for business, drive for success, drive for impression. Maybe it’s a lot of all that, but I know. And I think that’s some of the transition I had too when Sleeping in Heavenly Peace came into my life. Because I always told people, look, if you want true joy,
If you want true joy, stop thinking about yourself and see how you can help others. Share on X
stop thinking about yourself and see how you can help others, right? And then I kind of had to back off that a little bit. said, you know, because it doesn’t, it’s not like your, it’s not like your problems go away, but they certainly don’t seem as heavy, you know? And I think Sleeping Under Me pieces helped me really, and probably age as well. That’s some of it, some maturity there. To be able to slow down and go, you know,
Let me enjoy the success right now and that’s OK to sit and enjoy. It’s OK to take a time out and and remember we had a conference our very first big annual SHP conference two years ago and I gave a speech and I just felt very compelled and inspired to share the word remember. You know, and I think that’s very important, especially with us entrepreneur startup type type guys.
You know, you get so ingrained. I look at my dad. My dad came across the lake, if you will, from Ireland, 100 bucks in his pocket, you know? And he’s a millionaire now, right? And he is my stepdad. And when I came into his life and got to know him, you know, and he shared his story with me, I just, I was in awe. He’s a very driven man, you know? And he’s very focused, I think they call it. You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything you did had something with the business and and you learn you learn to love that and hate that at the same time. But but I think is I’ve gotten older and watched him get older and kind of learned a little bit from what what he’s experienced. He’ll tell you, you know, and probably most most people his age now will tell you. You know the relationships you have with your employees or relationship you have with your customers. They’re far more important than the money you made and and I know what he means by that.
Right. You got to make money. Don’t get me wrong. But but I think the value we have in these in these smelling of the roses moments, they’re hard to hard to sit and get used to doing it. And so I feel your pain.
Yeah,
yeah. Well, you know, I listened to that lady talk about the relationship between human performance and emotion, and I thought, I’m totally checked out on this. But the longer I listened, I was like, you know, she may be right. And then about a year later, I wrote my book on gratitude. And, you know, if you practice gratitude every day,
Yeah.
And you’ll certainly, if you do acts of service like sleep and heavenly peace, you will be grateful. And if you’re grateful, it will change your life. I’m not saying your problems will go away, but you will see them differently. it will be, people will notice, you will notice, it will be noticeable that
that you’re making a difference. And at the end of the day, when we all know where life ends, okay, then same place for everybody. Nobody will care how much money you made. People will care how much of a difference you made in other people’s lives. And a common misconception about entrepreneurs, and of course the name of our show is Proven Entrepreneur, a common misconception is they’re all about the money.
You
And in reality, they’re very generous, very giving, sometimes to a fault. Sometimes from a coaching standpoint, it’s like, maybe you should back that off just a little bit. I think that was inventory money. Maybe we should have kept some of that, but that’s way it is. So I think, Luke, I can keep you all day.
Yeah. yeah.
I’ll wipe it.
Sure. yeah.
Okay, so I don’t do that. Let me ask you if you had one nugget to share with our audience, what would that one thing be?
You’re fine.
You know, it’s a great question. There’s a lot of them. I think the biggest thing is that I’ve talked about is just finding passion and not being afraid to follow it. Right now, I’m not saying you quit your job or anything like that. Right. Passion comes to us in a lot of different ways. But whatever that passion is, my gosh, know, Don, life’s too short, brother. It’s.
Don't be afraid to follow your passion Share on X
And our time is too short. And we’ve all heard the same adage forever, right? That you only go around this blue dot once, per se, if that’s what you believe in. And when you finally find that passion, and probably even more important than that, being willing to act on something that you feel you’re passionate about, you just don’t know what’s inside. I like I said, I love sports, so I coached a lot of it.
I mean, I’m not that same person because I found what I’m truly passionate about. Now, will that change? I don’t know. I’m certainly open to it. But when you find your passion or something you really super care about, don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to follow it. And let it lead you down. I mean, who cares how much money you make? Who cares where you live and how many toys you got?
I heard an adage a long time ago, says, you know, happiest man is a guy that is on his knees. Now you can look at that as prayer, right? Sure. But I also looked at it as someone that’s humid, has humility and someone that is comfortable with themselves and has found what brings them joy. And don’t be afraid to go for it.
Yeah.
Don’t be afraid to go for it. I love that. Luke, if somebody wanted to reach out to you, if somebody wanted to inquire about how to start a chapter, if somebody wanted to inquire about how to make a donation, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you? We’re sleeping in heavenly peace.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks for asking that because I wanted to share. I’d to end with that. shpbeds.org, sleep and heavenly peace. So shpbeds.org is our website. And let me tell you why it’s unique. When you click on that, it’s going to bring you to the closest chapter of sleep and heavenly peace. We used to have one main page, but now it just brings you the closest chapter. And the reason why we do that is because we want you, the listener, someone passionate, feels compelled to be a part of something like this.
We want you to find a locally, right? So if you do and you click on there and there’s one local, you can reach out to that chapter in their core team, become a core team member. It will change your life. You can volunteer. You can build beds. You can deliver beds. You can help one hour a week or 20 hours a week. I mean, whatever you feel compelled to. When you donate money, I think this is important. When you donate money, this is the only way we finance sleep and heavenly peace.
from a management point of view, we take 10%. That’s it. So 90 % of your dollar stays right there. So when you donate, Don, your dollar to the Fort Worth chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace, it’s gonna, 90 cents is gonna stay there, right? So you know your money, all the beds, all the sheets, all the mattress, everything that stays in that community. Now, if you don’t have a chapter there, and this is something that you really feel strongly about and wanna be a part of it.
We have a platform, a training platform on how to become a chapter president. Very successful. We only have about 3 % attrition right now. So when we have chapters start, we teach them how to do it. And we’re talking a lot of retirees, just like you said, people that were sick retirement. My favorite story, I got a guy here who’s worked for Mother Boeing for 30 plus years. Retire was so excited. He’s like, Luke, after three months, I want to jump off a cliff. He says, I had to do something.
And then I’m like, brother, I’m scared of retirement. me. So yeah, but great chapter presidents start as retirees and some of them, you know, barely know how to turn on the computer. Right. So we teach them. We have a platform of how to start a chapter, how to run successfully. We have a very robust training program and training staff to help these these people be successful because our number one customer.
is our chapter president and their number one customer is the kid that Trent serve. And so those are great ways to be involved with Sleep and Emily Peace. And just look us up and go into your own hometown. Raise awareness about child bedlessness. Not a real word, but a real problem and it lives in your own hometown.
We’ll work on getting that to be a real word. Yeah. Luke, thank you so much. I’ve so enjoyed our time today. Thanks for coming on the show. That’s today’s Proven Entrepreneur Show. See you next time. Thanks.
Yes, amen.
Thanks Don.

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Title: E119 | From Burnout to Breakthrough: 25 Years of Entrepreneurial Success with Parveen Dhupar, Founder of BTI Brand Innovations
Date: March 24, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-burnout-to-breakthrough-25-years-of-entrepreneurial-success-parveen-dhupar/
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Content:
Embark on an inspiring Entrepreneurial Journey with Parveen Dhupar, Founder and CEO of BTI Brand Innovations, in this captivating episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Host Don Williams delves into Parveen’s remarkable 25-year career, extracting invaluable Startup Success Lessons and insights on Building a Creative Agency.
This episode is a masterclass in overcoming entrepreneurial burnout and achieving sustainable success. Parveen shares his experiences with Risk-Taking in Business, navigating the challenges of Work-Life Balance for Entrepreneurs, and the power of Goal-Setting for Success. Discover how he transformed BTI Brand Innovations from a $3 million to a $10 million agency, showcasing effective Business Growth Strategies.
Gain unique perspectives on Branding and Marketing, Creative Agency Success, and Insights on Branding and Marketing Strategies. Parveen emphasizes the importance of Leadership and Storytelling in Business, demonstrating how Storytelling in Business and Experiential Marketing can drive growth.
This isn’t just a business story; it’s a deeply personal narrative. Parveen opens up about Family-Driven Entrepreneurship, balancing personal and professional life, and the pivotal moments that shaped his path. Learn about Overcoming Burnout in Business, Lessons from Failure, and the significance of Purpose-Driven Leadership.
For aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs alike, this episode offers a treasure trove of knowledge, including:

Entrepreneurship Mindset: Cultivating the right approach to business challenges.
Canadian Entrepreneurs: Success stories from the Canadian business landscape.
Immigrant Success Stories: The drive and determination behind immigrant entrepreneurship.
Mentorship and Goal-Setting: Practical tips for achieving your ambitions.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from a seasoned entrepreneur who has truly seen it all. Tune in for actionable strategies and heartfelt wisdom.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

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From Burnout to Breakthrough 25 Years of Entrepreneurial Success!

 
Hey, it’s Don Williams. Today on the Proven Entrepreneur Show, I have a really good friend from Canada. So much colder where he is than where I am today. It’s about 80 here in Texas today. The birds are singing, the grass and the weeds are growing. And I’m guessing you’re not having that. Parveen Dupar, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Don. I’m looking forward to having this great conversation with you. And actually, the weather here this week has been fabulous. Now, I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but today I think it’s like 14 degrees Celsius, which is fantastic. But on the weekend, it’s going to get cold again. So it’s this Canadian weather. I don’t know.
that’s not bad.
Yeah. I think we’re on the tail end of spring, meaning that summer is right around the corner. I think you’re on the other end of spring, meaning it’s just starting and you may have some winter excitement left in your life. So Parveen, let’s start with this. Now you do a lot of different things. You’re speaker, you’re a facilitator. Okay. But talk to me about BTI brand innovations.
Yeah.
of which you are founder and CEO, yes?
Yes, yeah, BTI is a, I like to say we’re connectors. We connect people to brands and brands to people.
So I’m in the business of solving problems, marketing problems, branding problems. So we’re a fully integrated creative agency that does everything from traditional marketing, digital marketing, and experiential. So we’re a fully integrated creative agency, but that’s an easy answer. Everyone can say that. I like to have more fun with it say, sometimes I’ll say, I sell bullshit, right? And then it’s just starts a great conversation. It’s all about storytelling.
versus just going straight on, I’m in advertising. I think that’s just such a boring answer, right?
yeah, I totally agree. And,
and you know me, I’m big on storytelling, you know, why give an answer when you can tell a story and let somebody really connect. So how long ago did you start BTI?
Yes.
Exactly.
Well, BTI was my third go around as a creative agency. So, I mean, if I share the journey.
BTI itself started in 1999. So we just celebrated our 25th anniversary back in October. It’s fantastic. So BTI has no business partners except for my wife, my spouse. Right? So she’s going to get 50 % anyways and might as well make her a partner from day one. I make it easy. But prior to BTI, I had another creative agency with a very different focus.
Yeah, sure.
which I also started back in 1990. And that agency was package design, consumer promotions, in-store activation. So we were very focused on a certain traditional area. And I brought in partners over time, but I found that I was burnt out. In 99, I was burnt out. I mean, to give a straight answer, was…
I was like, go, go, go. There’s 24 hours in a day and I made sure I didn’t waste a second of that day. And most of those seconds were focused on business and that drive to just earn as much as I can as fast as I can. And then I just looked at my second son who was born in June, 99 and this sort of light bulb went off and said that.
I don’t want to be that entrepreneur that looks back 25 years from that day and say I was not involved in my kids lives. He was my second son. The light bulb didn’t go off the same way with the first son. But something happened at that moment where I just said, I can keep chasing the dollar. But when is enough enough? Right? How much more do I need? I have enough now.
Yeah.
the family priority became number one from that moment on. And yeah.
So let me ask you a question about that. And then we’re
going to go back way back to young pervene. OK, but my question is this. So your journey and my journey are not too dissimilar. I have an older son. Eight years later, I have my youngest son. When my oldest son was born, I was in grind mode. OK, I was a startup entrepreneur. And
You know, if we didn’t go make something happen today, you could have all the air you wanted tomorrow because that’s what we have on the shelves. You know, we were in grind mode. Now, eight years later, when my youngest son was born, that time had passed for the most part. And so I was in a more comfortable place. Similar experience with you.
Absolutely, absolutely. was very comfortable by then. I was so driven to the point where, you know, I made, I had these goals that I wrote down when I was 16. I’ve been very goals driven. And I had a mentor at that point who told me, you know, just write down everything.
And it doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is, review it every week, every month, whenever, open up that sheet of paper, cross things off, add things, make it as crazy as possible. And I was so goals driven that by the time I was 31, when my second son was born, I had ticked off just about everything on that list, but two things, right?
And those two things, one was world peace, still working on that one. what’s that? There you go. There you go. And the second one was getting my 911 turbo. I love Porsche, but I’m sharing that because I had everything right. All my goals were checked off. I was so driven that even from a mortgage perspective,
Hey, get with the program. Pick up the pace. Come on. Yeah.
I knew that if I can make double the payments each month, I knew that I could do 10 % down payment each year. I took advantage of everything and my mindset was always about being debt free when it came to personal life and take all the risks when it comes to business.
Being debt-free personally allowed me to take all the risks in business. Share on X
Oh, I love that.
Yeah, I love that. A balance of risk and security. Okay. All right. So I’m going to take you all the way back. Five-year-old Perveen. Okay. The house that you grew up in, and I know a little bit about your childhood, but the house that you grew up in, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur that you learned from?
So I’m gonna actually jump two years ahead intentionally to when I was seven. And I say that because when I was seven, it was 1975, we had just moved to Canada. And to me, my life prior to moving to Canada, there’s a lot of, I can’t recall it all, right?
Okay.
Mm.
It seems like everything started when we came to Canada in 75. And when we came to Canada in 75, we lived in government housing. We didn’t have any dollars. In those days, you weren’t allowed to bring anything with you. And he basically had $10 in his pockets. Fortunately, we had some extended family here who supported us and helped us get started. And my father was not an entrepreneur.
My father was a machinist and he taught in a college trade school in India. But when he came here, he could not get a job doing that. he, you know, we arrived on a Friday, my cousin’s wedding was on a Saturday, and on the Monday he went for a job interview, got that job at a startup and stayed there for his entire career.
That was what he did. And he worked as a machinist, worked his way to a foreman. He was not a entrepreneurial entrepreneur in the traditional sense, but he was a risk taker, obviously. I mean, having to come here, leaving behind security that you have in a homeland that you’re comfortable with, working for the government in India, and now coming here, not knowing
My father wasn’t an entrepreneur, but moving to Canada with $10 in his pocket was the ultimate entrepreneurial risk. Share on X
Wow.
what’s going to happen. All they thought about, our parents thought about was we want to create a better life for our kids, provide a better education for them, and give them a better base.
That was their mindset. So to me, that is entrepreneurial. That is goals driven. There was a purpose behind it. And as an entrepreneur, we have to be purpose driven. I’m purpose driven. That’s what drove him. Now, other than him, I’ve heard lots of great stories about my grandfather who was in the trucking business. And I, you know, and he lost it all.
lost the entire business when the separation of India Pakistan happened. so I’ve heard lots of other stories, but no one in the traditional sense was an entrepreneur in my family from that perspective.
Hmm. Happens.
Well, I…
Well,
I agree. I, I, a recent guest, Sahil Patel, his parents immigrated from India to the U S they were not entrepreneurs in their vocation, but he’s, but he shared kind of the similar thought that isn’t it the highest level of entrepreneurship to leave everything that you know, come with nothing, build a life.
in a country that you know nothing about. And so huge risk and yet made it happen. And so I agree with you and Sahil, I think that’s maybe the highest level of entrepreneurship. It just doesn’t ring the cash register somewhere, but the payoff for both the parents who immigrate and then their children, grandchildren.
is unbelievable. So very immense. All right. So let’s move on. Now you’re through your schooling. You’re 18 years old. I think you joined the French Foreign Legion for a couple of years. Maybe not. Maybe you went to university. I don’t know. Tell me, what did you do?
Hahaha
It’s interesting. So I talked about how I’ve always been about not wasting a second in a day, right? I was so driven because when you have nothing, you want everything. So even in my high school years, I always worked part time and I would say my part-time hours are more than a person’s full-time hours. So I would work 40 hours plus attend school. I would miss a lot of school days.
I’ve always been about not wasting a second in a day—every moment counts when you’re building something meaningful. Share on X
and I probably had the most absentees in my high school, but I graduated with honors. So I only showed up on test days. What that why why I’m starting with that is because I think that I was probably gifted, but not noticed and slid through the, you know, so through the system and my parents who were great.
they were so busy working probably didn’t pay attention to that. Whereas we did with our kids, right? Different helicoptering parents. So I didn’t, know, growing up I was saying, oh, I want to be a doctor or lawyer. I want to do some of this stuff. But I didn’t follow that traditional path. You know, being of Asian heritage, being Indian, if you’re not a doctor, lawyer, and accountant or engineer, you’re a nobody. And…
when I did that test in high school where they tell you what career you’re going to go into, none of those showed up. What showed up was either going to be a garbage collector or you’re going to go into package design. And I was going, what is package design? I had no clue what that was, but sounds better than garbage collectors. So I’m going, okay, this is interesting. And I started doing some research on it and I was always an artist, right? So I was…
Sounds better than garbage collector though. Yeah.
took a lot of art classes in school, was drawing since I was six years old probably or seven years old and I can remember for sure. So I looked into what this program was all about and package design is it’s commercial arts. I looked into where I can further that education and I went to college. I went to a college nearby and did a package design program which gave me exposure to everything to do with marketing and advertising.
So it wasn’t just packaging, there was advertising program, there was some technical parts to the program as well. So it gave me a good base. And then when I graduated, I worked for one agency for a year.
got laid off, the best thing that could ever happen to me, because the day I got laid off, John Maravino called me in his office, the owner of the agency and said, Parveen, you’re the last person I hired, we’re not doing well, I have to let you go, you’ve actually been profitable for me, but.
You know, I’m looking at tenure and I also know that you one day will be one of my competitors. That gave me such a boost to my ego and gave me that drive to go out and do it right away. So I started my agency right then in 1990 and just never looked back.
I love that. And you know, we are brothers from different mothers. I had been very successful in a certain company and the owner, I worked my way into partnership with him. The partnership did not work out and I became his competitor. And there was a little acrimony at the time. It wasn’t a, he didn’t throw a party for me or anything, but we reconciled years later.
There you go.
And because he was one of the finest people, probably the finest motivator I ever knew. And the other statement you made that really resonated with me is I have a friend in Oklahoma City, Pish Patel, and his parents immigrated from India. And he said in my house, it was very clear you were going to be a doctor, you were going to be an engineer, or you would be a disappointment.
And he’s neither of those. He chose a different path, but he’s done really well.
I
like that way of framing it versus me saying you’re a nobody. You’re gonna be a disappointment. There you go.
Yeah. Yeah. It was like
doctor, engineer, or disappointment. You’re like, ouch. Your parents were clear communicators and clarity is kind, even if the content isn’t always that kind. Okay. So looking back across your career, you’ve been an entrepreneur how long now?
Yeah.
since I was 13 years old. I’m mentally 15, physically 31, chronologically 56 right now.
And you’re 24 or 25.
Okay, so you’ve been an entrepreneur a long time. I want you to think back across your career and I’m looking for a hard lesson. And in a career that long, there’s been more than a couple probably. And so, but specifically a lesson where when it happened, it’s like, ouch, I’m limping a little bit. But maybe in retrospect,
A long time.
Now with some time, some perspective, looking back, you’re like, you know, maybe that was the best thing that could have happened. And so do you have a hard moment you could share?
Yeah.
You know, Don, there are many hard moments and there are many, many, many failures. And I think those just make us stronger and better as long as we continue to learn and keep moving forward. I don’t I don’t have no regrets in life, right? But I have one, only one. And only until a few months ago do I no longer look at that as a regret.
Failures make us stronger—as long as we keep learning and moving forward. Share on X
Mmm.
And
that is about.
14 years ago now, my parents were on vacation in India. My mother never wanted to go back to India. She had health problems, but somehow she was swayed by some people that they can make her better there. So she went, stayed at this ashram who said they could make her better. And…
She was there for several months and my brother just happened to be on vacation there, went to visit them, noticed that my mom’s feet were badly swollen and something just didn’t look right. So he took her, admitted her into a hospital, called us here. have two older siblings and one younger sibling, so there’s four of us. And so this is the second sibling. He called us and he said that,
Mom’s not doing well, this is very serious. You guys should plan to come here.
And during that time, and this is December, and during that time, my eldest brother was actually working for me in my business. And, you know, we had the discussion and said, you know, we both can’t go. Why don’t you just go and keep us posted? So he went and I continued on running my business. And then my mother passed on January 2nd.
in India. So I held on to that regret that I had a choice, I had an option. But I chose my business over being present with my mother. I chose the fact that I needed to be here versus be there with her by her side. And I lived with that regret that I could have been there.
for a long time that I never got to see my mom. I never got to talk to her. And we brought her back here and did all the funeral arrangements back here at home, but I wasn’t there. So I said to myself that when it’s my father’s turn, I’m not gonna let that happen again. And when my father during COVID period, he was actually an LTC, he had suffered a stroke.
many years prior and was in a long-term care facility just because we couldn’t take care of him at home. He had no mobility on one side. We got a phone call during COVID that he’s not well and needs to move into the hospital. I dropped everything. And I was by his side every day for a month.
Even at the hospital, even though you weren’t allowed, we worked the system and they allowed us siblings to go in eight hours each and sit there with him. He had an option. said we could put a feeding tube or we can put them into palliative care. And my dad said, I don’t want a feeding tube. I’m choosing the palliative care. So he made that choice, but he just wasn’t passing. He had been in that hospital for weeks.
And we said to the doctor, said, he wants to go home. He wants to pass away peacefully at home. So we tried to move him. And the day that we tried to move him and get him into an ambulance, he was about to pass. And they said, OK, this is not the right time. So they kept him there. Another week passed. And we said, OK, we just got to get into the hospital.
He well, he can pass in the ambulance. Well, I’m going to be in the ambulance because I knew that I wanted to be there. If something happens, I need to be there. We got him home. He got to see the entire extended family. They all got to say their goodbyes. And three days later, I show up to just my shift now to spend time with my dad between the siblings. I show up.
And I do a end of day huddle with my team. get the phone call with my team and I’m holding my dad’s hand. As I get the phone call, I start the conversation. I could feel that he’s no longer breathing. Right. He says to me before that, goes to Agya. To Agya means you’re here now. And I say, yes, dad, I’m here. And then I take the call and I saw that he, after he had said those words, he stopped breathing. So he waited for me to be there.
Hmm.
I think he knew that I needed to be there, that I was also dealing with so much guilt. So business isn’t just about business. Business is family. Family is just as important. And I think we need to understand where our priorities are. I look back at even entrepreneurs that I’ve idolized over my time. And the one commonality between so many of these
great entrepreneurs that have made such an impact to society have had a terrible family life.
Hmm.
And I’m going, and they all near their tail end have always regretted that they had a terrible family life. Right, so family’s important.
Sure. Well, thank you so much for
sharing. Sorry about your mom and your dad. I don’t know, maybe four or five years ago, I had the opportunity to coach a lineup of speakers, I think seven speakers, nine speakers, who are going to deliver very vulnerable shares from their life.
You know, with a microphone in front of a hundred, 125 people, which is one thing to kind of share one-on-one. And it’s another thing to get up on a stage with the light in your eyes and, share. And, um, it’s one of the best experiences of my life though. Um, one day I coached three, they were all over the world. And then we were meeting at a conference location, but I coached three one day.
I came out of the office, my eyes were red and my wife’s like, what is wrong? And I’ve been crying all day because they were so, heartfelt stories. Well, after the end, one of the people in the audience came up and said, man, these guys were great, but it was so dark. I was like, what do mean it was so dark? And they’re like, everyone was about death or near death. And it had totally…
I totally missed it and I’d been coaching them for months. But what I realized was this, the ultimate human experience.
is death. know, second I guess would be birth. Okay, but we kind of, you know, people of faith know what happens after death.
you know, babies before birth, don’t, they don’t, you know, they don’t know. And, um, and so thank you for sharing up. I appreciate that. Okay. So now I’m going to ask you about, going to change gears altogether. Um, so.
You know, actually,
before you change gears, Don, you just said something there that resonated with you said after death, right? And I kind of ended off by saying that my father’s passing was what I thought I could actually finally forgive myself for not being present. That was what and I and for a time being there, I thought I did forgive myself, but I actually didn’t. I actually didn’t. And how about the after death aspect of it is
Yes.
Very recently, I did a mushroom experience. that experience, when you’re in that zone, I was focusing on my mother. I felt like my mother was communicating with me and she was talking to me. And she gave me that opportunity to finally forgive myself because she said it to me in my thoughts and my feelings and what I was experiencing.
And it wasn’t until then that I actually did finally, finally forgive myself.
Yeah, I love that. And so, you you probably heard that story about, it shows up on the internet every once in a while as a post, and it’s a man discussing atheism versus belief in a superior being. he does the talk from two twins in the womb and
And, and one says, I can’t wait to be born and to find out what the next chapter is and, and what, how that’s going to be. And the other one says, there’s nothing. I mean, scientifically based on all the evidence, there’s nothing there. This is it. And the other, and the other baby is like, but we’ll get to use our mouths and we’ll get to see with our eyes. And the other baby says, no, the evidence says.
everything comes just through the cord. And once we’re separated from the cord, there’s nothing, there’s absolutely nothing. And it’s drawn the parallel between the baby’s pre-birth to human’s pre-death. And it’s an interesting, I’ll just tell the audience, you can Google, can YouTube that, it’ll show up. But it’s pretty interesting from the opinion, the point of view of people who
Only can believe in what they see, touch and feel and other people who can believe, beyond, beyond just that. you know, science, unlike math, math is not a moving target. know, two plus two always equals four. It never comes out to anything else. Science on the other hand, based on what science learns changes. mean,
When I was in school, there were 92 elements on the periodic table and everything in the universe is made of one or a combination of these 92 elements. Well, now the periodic table is up over 100 and who knows where it’s going to end, but there’s some, that’s maybe a subject for another day. next subject, sir. I’m looking for a warp speed moment in your business. So a warp speed.
Hahaha
Sorry, eh.
moment. So, yeah, so, you know, on Star Trek, Captain James T. Kirk, fellow Canadian, he would ask for Mr. Scotty Warp Speed and they would go from, okay, and so your business is going along pretty good. Things are good. Okay. Things are great. Comfortable, breathing, playing, having fun. And all of sudden,
a warp speed moment, okay?
Yeah.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
the right hire, a strategic move, pure luck. Okay. But all of sudden you get that hockey stick. My Canadian friends will like that hockey stick analogy. Okay. That hockey stick of extreme growth. Do you have a warp speed moment you can share with us?
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, I’m really proud of the team that we’ve built. Currently, it’s made up of all A players and there’s no room for B and C players here. It’s all A players. Everyone feels like they have ownership and they have decision making power and I’m not in their way. But it wasn’t always like that.

====================================================

Title: E118 | A/B Testing Secrets: How to Optimize Your Website & Boost Conversions | Sahil Patel, Spiralyze CEO
Date: February 24, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e118-a-b-testing-secrets-how-to-optimize-your-website-boost-conversions-sahil-patel-spiralyze-ceo/
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Content:
 
In this episode of the Entrepreneur Podcast, host Don Williams sits down with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze, to explore the intersection of A/B Testing, Website Optimization, and the Entrepreneurial Journey. Sahil reveals how his company analyzes A/B Testing for Landing Pages across 34,000 websites, using Data-Driven A/B Testing to fuel SaaS Business Growth and help companies improve Website Performance Analytics.
But success isn’t just about Conversion Rate Optimization—it’s also about navigating the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Sahil shares his personal journey, from working in Healthcare Software Success to founding, scaling, and exiting his own startup. He discusses leadership, risk-taking, and how making data-driven decisions can turn setbacks into growth opportunities.
Topics Covered:

Optimizing A/B Testing Strategies for Business Growth
How A/B Testing Drives Conversions on Landing Pages
Real-Life Entrepreneurial Lessons from Sahil Patel
Building a Successful Business Through Data-Driven Decisions
Navigating the Ups and Downs of Entrepreneurship with A/B Testing
The role of resilience and adaptability in SaaS Business Growth
How to scale a startup from concept to acquisition

Whether you’re a startup founder, marketer, or business leader, this episode is packed with valuable insights on leveraging data, refining strategies, and scaling your business with confidence!
Listen now and gain insights from a proven entrepreneur who turned passion into success!
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/AB-Testing-Secrets-Optimize-Your-Website-Boost-Conversions-with-Sahil-Patel.mp3
 
A/B Testing Secrets: How to Optimize Your Website & Boost Conversions | Sahil Patel, Spiralyze CEO
Hey, Don Williams here today with special treat. I have Sahil Patel from Spiralyze. Where are you dialing in from, Sahil?
I’m coming in from Atlanta and really glad to be here.
Atlanta, Georgia. So it’s about 10 degrees in Texas today, which is too cold for us in Texas. And I know too cold for you in Atlanta.
Yeah, we’re not quite there, but it’s pretty cold here too.
Yeah, well, it’s coming. I think it’s coming. And so, so thrilled to have you here today. Tell us a little bit about, so I find, I find your company fascinating, but rather than me tell you, me tell everybody what you do, tell us what Spiralyze does and why that’s so mission critical important to their business.
thank you.
Birolize is an A-B testing company. There are 34,000 websites, A-B tests, somewhere on their site. And we scrape all of them. So we find everyone else’s A-B tests. And then we look. We find the best ones, and we run those for our customers.
Birolize is an A-B testing company...We find everyone else's A-B tests. And then we look. We find the best ones, and we run those for our customers. Share on X
And what do you do with that knowledge?
now how long have you done that?
So Spiral Eyes has been doing this for about 10 years, and I’ve been the CEO for about three years.
Okay, and so how many A, B tests have you analyzed?
How many have we analyzed? Wow, it’s in the hundreds of thousands.
wow, big numbers, statistically relevant, I think we call that.
It’s a big number.
It is, it is for sure.
Yeah, and so if, let me see if I can paraphrase. So you take that information from those hundreds of thousands of individual analysis of A-B tests and then advise your clients on the best way to position their webpages, landing pages, et cetera.
Yeah, and I would maybe even add a little bit to that, is we take that data and then we actually run the A-B tests on our clients’ websites. And so if someone says, Sahil, I’m a cybersecurity company with a seven-day free trial and I’m running it on a paid landing page with traffic coming from
Please.
Google paid search on non-branded keywords.
we’re going to say, here’s the portfolio of 10 A-B tests that you should run on that page based on what has worked for other companies like you on that use case.
I love that.
Because by the way, what works on a paid landing page versus organic versus direct traffic versus some other vertical or something that’s direct to consumer or is a enterprise target versus the SMB, just all those things matter.
All those things matter.
Yeah, imagine if you went to the doctor and you said, hey, here, I got this not feeling good. And the doctor said, yeah, I have some. And I told you, said, Don, here, I got some medicine for you. And you said, oh, Sahil, I never heard of this. Is this new? And I said, yeah, yeah, I, I tried it on my neighbor. Worked pretty well for her. And he said, okay, uh, first of all, you said she, so I’m a guy. Uh, how old are they? And do they have the same symptoms and like,
How’d you get the dosing right? Because I weigh this much. Does she weigh the same amount? And like, I have these other things going on. What about her? Is she the same things going on? That, sadly, is what a lot of people do with their website. Is they base on anecdotes. They base it on gut. But there’s something wrong with gut. Like someone who really knows what they’re doing probably has great gut instinct. But I wouldn’t take that medicine based on gut instinct. Right now, if I instead said, hey, Don,
The FDA reviewed the clinical trial of this drug. We had 10,000 people take it. 5,000 got the placebo, 5,000 got it. And we looked at it based on gender, age, and people who have similar characteristics to you. It turns out age didn’t really matter, but maybe your weight does, because that’s how we get the dosing right. And that’s why I’m telling you I want you take five milligrams a day for two weeks. You might feel…
I love that, so.
I guarantee to make you better, but your odds are much, better.
Yeah, so take the data, do the analysis, make a recommendation, then do A-B testing on the recommendation to be positive that we’re dialed in.
Yes, because the goal isn’t
Yeah, because it’s not about finding one A-B test that wins. It’s run a portfolio of test ideas, high performing, high probability test ideas. And somewhere in those 10, you’re going to find the one that’s optimal for your audience, your website.
Okay, love that. Think I’ve got it. I bet the audience has got it. Sounds very cool. Let’s jump into your story. So I’m going to take you all the way back to young Sawhill. So like five to 18. So yeah, the childhood home in which you were raised and that’s different for all kinds of different people. But in your home, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur who set an entrepreneurial example in your home?
Okay.
5 to 18.
There was probably not in the traditional sense. My dad worked at GE, big company. In fact, he was probably one of the last generation of people who worked for one company his entire life. He went to RPI, which is a small engineering college in upstate New York. That’s where I did most of my growing up. And after he graduated from RPI, he worked, I think he reported like the following Monday to GE.
and I was there for 40 years.
Okay, yeah that doesn’t happen anymore and now G doesn’t want to have anybody like that anymore
Okay, that doesn’t happen anymore. Now, what I will say, what I will say, I do consider him an entrepreneur because I think every immigrant is an entrepreneur. The idea of leaving where you live and going and doing something new with many unknowns, with resources that you don’t control, I think is a true story of entrepreneurship.
Every immigrant is an entrepreneur...leaving where you live and going and doing something new with many unknowns...is a true story of entrepreneurship. Share on X
takes all kinds of forms to do that. entrepreneurship takes all kinds of forms. But he and my mom did that in the late 60s. And yeah, I think that’s the American dream. It’s a great American story.
But, the loser.
Yeah. So one of the common definitions is the entrepreneur jumps out of the plane, figures out how to build the parachute on the way down. And certainly somebody who is an immigrant from another country to the United States, they have no idea the parachutes they’re going to need. They are jumping out of, they are jumping, well, neither does the entrepreneur, truthfully. And so.
I don’t always have a parachute, first of all. Yeah.
They are jumping out of the plane and, hey, we’re going to figure it out. And I think the root commonality with entrepreneurs is just problem solvers. We have a goal. We’re going somewhere. We’re trying to go somewhere. We think we’re going somewhere. We don’t know exactly how it’s going to work out, but we’re going and we’ll figure it out along the way. so certainly somebody coming from another country to the US is the same thing. You know, even if they have family and even if they have some people to kind of
Entrepreneurs just problem solvers. We have a goal...We don't know exactly how it's going to work out, but we're going and we'll figure it out along the way. Share on X
You nailed it.
you know, help with a softer landing. Many of whom do not though. Many of whom do not. Okay. So, so love that. So at, let’s, let’s fast forward to 18. You get out of high school and then you hitchhike across Europe for two years. You live in the jungle in Uganda. What do you do?
I wish that was the case. I graduated, and would say most immigrant families, first of all, back in 1996, taking a gap year really wasn’t a thing as much back then. But also, my parents did a lot, sacrificed a lot. brother and I have had a great life thanks to them. And it was definitely like, you’re going to go to college.
like you’re going to college and you’re going like the month, not literally the Monday after graduation. So it was, I graduated, I worked at a, I was working in a movie theater in my senior year of high school. I worked there that summer and then like many students that go to a traditional four year college, which not the only way to do it, but it’s the way I did it. That August I went to, I moved to Atlanta, which is coincidentally, maybe not so coincidentally, but that’s where I live now.
You are right.
was that 35, 37 years ago I went to college. But I came here in 1996. The Olympics were going on. They were just about wrapping up when I got here in Atlanta. It was incredible. And I’d grown up in small towns. I grew up in Schenectady, New York, and then grown up in Montgomery, Ohio. And I definitely wanted to do a bigger city experience. for anyone who’s out there who’s been to Atlanta, first time you drive down Atlanta and you see a highway with six lanes on each side.
It’s like, like in Ohio, the biggest, I think the biggest highway, at least back then was like two lanes. That was a big deal. Two lanes on each side, maybe with an exit ramp. Six lanes on each side, 12 lanes of highway. And it was really exciting and it was very different. I had grown up, I’ll say this, in Ohio, I growing up in middle school and high school.
Yeah, it was the black pop.
And I would say that’s what’s home, kind of hometown in Cincinnati, my hometown. Still have a lot of friends there. Not a very diverse place. so, I mean, Atlanta was as different as could be. It’s a big city. There’s lots of people of all walks of life. Lots of immigrants also, just lots of everything. And it was really exciting, and I was glad to be there. And I’m really fortunate I got into Emory, which is a great school.
Great school.
And that’s where I started. That’s where I went to college and where I graduated. I had a great experience.
Yeah, love that. I have a good friend in Oklahoma City who his parents immigrated and they were entrepreneurs. owned a non-branded motel, not really a hotel.
Yeah, that’s very common in Indian families, particularly a lot of people come. In fact, they in some parts of sometimes they used to call the hotels Patel motels because there were so many Patels in the motel business. And we have we have family that’s been in the motel business.
Their last name is not Patel, but Pich is Indian descent. his, I always thought it was hilarious. His parents told him, you will be a doctor, you will be an engineer, or you will be a disappointment. And that was the three options. And he…
Yeah, there you go.
Hahaha!
It wasn’t a totally different message from my parents.
Yeah, and so he’s none of those. Actually, he’s neither doctor nor engineer nor disappointment. He went into IT as an active duty enlisted man in the Army.
Okay, great. Great thing. dad was drafted in the army and served during Vietnam, which during those times was pretty common.
Yeah, so he built a big IT company and sold it and he flies around his helicopter now, but he’s neither a doctor or engineer and he’s certainly not a disappointment. So love that. Okay, so you moved to Atlanta, you went to Emory, you got your degree in art appreciation.
Good for him.
In business, undergrad business. It was a business degree.
Okay, business great. Good, good, And so after you graduated, did you start a company? Did you get a J-O-B?
I got a J-O-B. You know, at that time, and I was lucky, I graduated during pretty good economic times.
MY GOD
If you, the only people that were doing like the startup thing, we were in Silicon Valley. This isn’t Stanford. This isn’t Silicon Alley up at MIT. In Atlanta at least, if you weren’t working in a kind of a well-known company, it was kind of weird. Like in my class, maybe a handful of people were doing it and usually assume like, they didn’t have their act together. They don’t know how to interview.
So they’re working at some startup. Now, that was starting to shift a little bit because there were some startups. This was the dawn of the internet age. This was about two years before the internet bubble burst. In reality, it actually always starting to burst. We just didn’t know it. So I did the big company thing. And certainly, my mindset was you get a job at a well-known company with a nice paycheck.
validation for your brand, think, especially in an immigrant family. I worked at a great company called Booz Allen Hamilton. It’s now changed, but it was one of the big consulting companies at the time that went around, recruited on college campuses. And I worked there, had a great experience for three years, learned a lot, met a lot of other smart people. And then one of the things that those companies do really well is keep people moving on their career, send them to business school.
When I got there, as I was getting there, the crop of people that had worked there, gone to business school, finished and came back, were just returning. So those were people, I don’t know, like five years older than I was. And it was the first time I ever met someone that went to a big pedigree school.
I had never met anyone that went to Harvard, just in small town Ohio. It’s weird to even go out to school out of state. Back then, was kind of an odd thing. I think there was one person from my high school that applied to Harvard. They didn’t get in, not because they weren’t smart. It just wasn’t a common thing. Again, if you grew up in Palo Alto, you grew up in Manhattan, there’s people everywhere. For most part, it’s not the norm.
And I was like, I was like, huh. That person worked here and went there, and I work here. Maybe I can go there. And it just goes to show you what’s possible when you have exposure to people that can show you the way. Now, they do some other things, big companies. And this is why the pendulum is swung. Startups are cool, and big companies are
stodgy and uncool. But I will say, big companies, they do good job training you. They also help you out. So for example, they would make sure everyone took a GMAT prep class. In fact, they had a Kaplan person that came to the building that would teach class. Now, it wasn’t totally altruistic. They did it so you could go downstairs, take your class, and then come back to your desk and keep working at 8 o’clock. But those kinds of things.
They help, and they show you what’s possible. And that’s what I did. I applied to few business schools. I got into Harvard, and I went to Harvard. So I did three years consulting, then went to HBS. When I got out, I wanted to do something else. Consulting was great, but it’s not where I want to spend my life. And I worked at a health care software company. Now, during that time period,
I had met my now wife and we’d gotten engaged. then so my plan was, I was like, OK, I’ll finish up here. She was working on her PhD at Emory. I was like, I’ll look for job in Atlanta so we can, we’ve been long distance for two years, we be in Atlanta. I graduated, we got married two weeks after graduation, my graduation. And then a couple of weeks later, started my first post-MBA job.
I’m doing merger and acquisition work at a healthcare tech company. And I stayed there for five years. It was a great experience. It was a great experience. Great grocery, it’s a company called Metassets. Incredible CEO, John Bartis. Incredible people there. The guy that hired me, Neil Hahn, he’s now the CEO of Roper, large, very successful company. And I learned a ton. M &A is a great way to learn a business. And then along the way, that company was really interesting.
had an IPO. I didn’t have anything to do with that. But I was along for the ride. And I think there’s something to be said. Sometimes if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can see some things. And I had some sense for, hey, this is pretty unique. I was like 28, 29 at the time. Certainly had no grasp for really how rare that was to have a front row seat to an IPO. I don’t know if it ever happened the rest of my career. Probably not.
And IPOs have become more rare over time. There’s just far fewer companies doing IPOs these days. And so that was incredible learning for me, especially to go from being on the inside and seeing how a company evolves from pre-IPO to filing pre-IPO, IPO, post-IPO, what that’s like. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s not as good. I say that generally speaking. That wasn’t true specific to Metassets.
I think you hit on a really good principle. You met some people who had different experiences. You got to see that and you assimilated that, hey, maybe I could do that. And so went to Harvard and then in this job, same thing. You’re exposed to people who have different skill sets and maybe are.
somewhat of a mentor, even if they’re an accidental mentor, just their example is mentoring. And I think many entrepreneurs benefit from that. And it’s why we do the show, frankly, so that people can learn from other proven entrepreneurs and hopefully gain something they can bring back to their own journey and be successful.

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Title: E117 | From Basement Startup to Thriving Business – Julie Hockney’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: February 17, 2025
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-basement-startup-to-thriving-business-julie-hockneys-entrepreneurial-journey/
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Content:
Inside the Mind of a Proven Entrepreneur | Julie Hockney’s Journey to Success.
What does it take to transform a passion into a successful interior design business? How do women entrepreneurs balance creativity and strategy while building a brand? In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Julie Hockney, an successful women entrepreneur who turned her passion for design into a thriving interior design business and also, built Bouquet Floral Studio into thriving enterprises from ground up.
Julie’s story is nothing short of inspiring. She started her journey as a music teacher, but her entrepreneurial spirit led her to take a leap of faith. With an eight-week-old baby and nothing but determination, she founded JH Interior Design from her basement. Fast forward to today, she has scaled her business to 23 employees, expanded into Steamboat, Colorado, and established a reputation as a leading expert in the design industry. Not stopping there, she also founded Bouquet Floral Studio, an extension of her passion that has grown into Omaha’s top floral studio, handling an astounding 97 weddings in a single year.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

How JH Interior Studio was founded: The grassroots journey of turning a home-based passion into a full-scale design firm.
Lessons from women entrepreneurs: The mindset shifts and challenges that come with being a female leader in business.
Balancing creativity and business: How to manage the art of design while building a profitable company.
Scaling a small business successfully: Overcoming roadblocks, hiring the right team, and creating a sustainable company culture.
Tips to run an interior studio business: Strategies for managing operations, clients, and branding in a competitive market.
How to grow an interior design business: The key decisions that helped Julie expand her company beyond Omaha.
Challenges of running a floral studio: Handling high-pressure events, managing perishable products, and working with demanding clients.
Leadership tips for entrepreneurs: How to trust your instincts, embrace risk, and make confident business decisions.
The power of saying ‘YES’: How Julie’s willingness to take risks opened doors to incredible opportunities.

Through personal stories, real-world business insights, and honest reflections, Julie shares the highs and lows of her entrepreneurial journey from teacher to business owner. She talks about the importance of resilience, adaptability, and trusting the process—even when faced with uncertainty. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or simply someone who loves an inspiring startup success stories, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

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From Basement Startup to Thriving Business – Julie Hockney’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Hey, it’s Don Williams with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat. Maybe my favorite Nebraskan. Even though I may have said that to like a hundred other Nebraskans, but Julie really is my favorite. My very good friend from Omaha, Nebraska today, where I’m sure it’s colder than Hack. And it’s about 80 here in Fort Worth, Texas today. And so Julie Hockney, welcome.
Ooh.
No.
It is.
to the show.
Thank you for having me. I’ve really been looking forward to this,
My pleasure. let’s, now we know each other. Okay. So you’re, you’re, might be a strange guest, but you’re not a stranger guest if you know what I mean. Okay. And, and we know each other through our association with EO or Entrepreneurs Organization. Okay. And I think you’re currently, El Presidente.
Eh.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Correct.
El Presidente, the first female president ever for Nebraska. And I am proud to represent that. It means a lot to me. Thank you.
Don Williams (01:02)
That’s awesome.
Yeah, you should be. I’m proud of you too. Okay.
And, um, like all positions of leadership, like all teams, okay. Whether it’s the Kansas City Chiefs, which is going to grace the field here in a day or two. Yeah. I was getting ready to say that that’s, they’re probably fan favorites in Omaha because it’s, yeah, it’s not that far. And I was born and raised in Kansas. So I’ve been a Chiefs fan like way back when Lenny Dawson was the quarterback.
and
With our geography, yeah, that’s about all we got.
When they won the Super Bowl the other time, yeah. And so that’s coming up. That’s going to be great. tell me this. Tell me one. no, we lost my train of thought there. So we know each other through EO. You’re the you’re the first female president in the Nebraska chapter. And like in all leadership. My personal opinion.
Wow, okay.
You’re fine.
Nebraska.
20 % of leaders are really high performers. 20 % of leaders are low performers and 60 % are somewhere in the middle. Okay. And I happen to know independent of you, you would never tell me this, but I happen to know that you’re a very high performing leader. so thank you for your service and your leadership. Okay. Yes, ma’am. All right. So tell me, I think you own, you know, to be on the show, you have to be an entrepreneur. Okay. And you have to be a
Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm. Okay.
Wow, well thank you.
Thank you. It means a lot.
Mm-hmm. shoot.
No. That’s right. Yeah.
Proven entrepreneur. Yeah. And so
I think you own a business or maybe two. Tell me about your businesses.
Yeah.
So I own JH Interior Design and we are a full service interior design. We’re the firm in Omaha and now Steamboat Colorado. like a, like a, talk real entrepreneur. mean, real entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of them, but I started in my basement when my daughter was eight weeks old and we just hired our 23rd employee this month.
Congratulations!
So it is, thank
you. has been so, and I like to say that not just as like a drop in number, but it gives me like a reflection moment when I phrase it that way. Cause it just has been an incredible journey and very grassroots, very slow, very, it wasn’t like started overnight. Everything was in place, like open the doors, they’ll come. It was like one paint deck, one notepad, one client go buy a printer.
And so JH Interior Design was born along with my daughter in 2007. And then I also own Bouquet Floral Studio, which is a fun separate story I could tell, but it was an offshoot of interiors because the floral aspect, if you look at a finished photography of say a kitchen or a home, you’ll often see floral in it. And I knew that our
Photos needed that when I started to build a portfolio. And so I would just be like, well, we need these centerpieces. And people are like, what? And I was like, I’ll just make it. Here we are. We did 97 weddings last year and we are the top florist in Omaha. Yeah. Yeah.
Gosh, I’m pretty
sure I’d rather be boiled in oil than deal with 97 weddings. I would.
You would. It is
not for the faint of heart. mean, imagine the brides, the bride’s moms, the grooms, the event planners, the weather. I mean, all the perishable products, like the emotions. It’s an insane industry. So.
was already
in awe, but I’m just telling you, I can’t even wrap my mind around 97 brides, bride moms, wedding parties. You know, we had a little event here in Fort Worth and roses are kind of my thing. know, like most of the time I speak, most of the time I facilitate because of my romance in your customer book, which the logo is a rose. I give roses. I give away a lot of, I give away a lot of thousands of roses a year.
huh.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Mm, right, yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
And sometimes, and like at that event where we bought 600 roses, the guys would look at me and like, why do I need this rose? And I’m like, you have no game at all. You, you, hold, hold the rose next to your face, smile, which just means show your teeth, dude. Okay. Take a selfie, send it home to the Mrs. And say, I’m thinking of you. I was like, now.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Thinking of you. So easy.
I’m like, I have
real game. That’s just like a little bit of game, but I can’t tell you how many people came up to me the next day and said, man, that really worked. And you’re like, oh my gosh, you guys are slow. yeah, we may be brother and sister on the floral thing, even though I’m not dealing with no brides, zero brides. Yeah. Okay. So, so I’m gonna take you all the way back to little Julie.
Mm-hmm.
Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. Get with it. So you get it.
huh. huh. huh.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Five years old, pigtails, ponytails, whatever it was, five to 18, you’re
living in your family home, whatever that looked like. Some people lived with one parent, some two, some with their grandparents, some wherever. Was there an adult in your childhood home that was an entrepreneur?
Mm-hmm.
huh. Yeah.
There was.
Really? Who was it?
It was my stepdad.
Your stepdad, what did he do?
And crazy enough, both the homes I grew up in, entrepreneurs. And it took me a long time to reflect on this, my dad and stepdad, entrepreneurs. One started and still owns a phenomenal real estate company. They’re both in real estate. The other one has gone between real estate, private aviation, public service, and then back to real estate. And nature and nurture, I was wired and watched both.
That’s awesome. You know, so many times a child raised in a home and you in two homes with two entrepreneurs, okay. You know, the kitchen table is many times the boardroom table. And so they hear things, they see things, they rub up against things that other children just don’t do. And so it’s not as big a stretch to kind of clear that mental hurdle of
The kitchen table is many times the boardroom table. Share on X
Yeah.
We should.
Mmm.
What you feel?
Interesting.
Hmm.
Hey, I’m a brand new mom. have an eight week old baby and I’m going go down to my basement. I’m going to start a business because normal people don’t do that. Julie. No, no, normal people don’t. and so.
Right?
They don’t, do they?
I thought
maybe I was abnormal. This really solidifies it, thanks.
I think it’s better. The better wording is unique and, and gifted, abnormal kind of sounds bad. okay. So, so you did have entrepreneurial influence as a young girl. Okay. Tell me about your first job, which it might’ve been a company. It your job might’ve been a lemonade stand in Omaha. don’t know. But the first time that you traded effort for money, what was that?
Mm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Okay,
so I could go career out of college first job or I could go like as a kid job. Do have a preference?
Well, let’s go with,
we’re going to get both, but let’s start with the very first time.
Okay,
okay. So I was a bus girl. Because that was the only job they could give me at 14. Because my parents said you will get a job. Don’t care what it is, but you’ll get a job and pick somewhere close to home because we have to drive you. So okay, I have since done the same to my kids.
Okay.
And let me ask you, are you born and raised in Omaha? Okay. All right. So you.
Yes. Born and raised,
went away for a while, came back.
Yeah. So I’m born and raised in Wichita and I can remember, I might’ve been 11, 10, probably 10. And my dad said, what are you going to do this summer? And I’m like, I don’t know. I’m going to ride my bike and play baseball and do what I do. he’s like, but what are you going to do for work? I’m like, I don’t know. And so I painted our home.
Yeah. Yeah.
What? It doesn’t work? It works?
Wow. Inside or outside? I was like, okay. Did it stick?
I wouldn’t say I was, no, outside, outside. Yeah. Cause I wouldn’t say I was a,
I wouldn’t say I was a great painter, but, but, you know, but I, I could put paint on a surface. And so I painted the house and then my, which I did not get paid. he still owes me dad. If you’re listening, I did not get paid. he didn’t promise, he didn’t promise to pay me, but, but I didn’t get paid. And then my first paying job, drove.
That’s good to say.
Hmm. An interest now.
tractor at wheat harvest for my grandfather. there I was 11. so, you know, work ethic is certainly part of the mix, you know, part of the mix. Okay. So, so we’re leaving 17, 18 year old Julie in the dust and you’re, joined the merchant Marine, you hiked across Spain, you went to university. What’d you do?
wow. Wow.
Wow.
Huge. Huge.
Mm-hmm.
university. I was a Jayhawk. So here’s our Kansas connection. I am a Jayhawk. So I got out of here and I said, I am leaving the state. I want to find the biggest school as close as I can, know, far enough that maybe I can’t get home. But if I needed to, but I don’t want, you know, anyone coming to see me. My parents really probably wouldn’t have anyways.
Okay. my, my gosh. Love that.
just because I was very independent and that’s how they raised me. So I went to KU and I studied music education and I was a music teacher. And it’s fun now looking back that entrepreneurial spirit was in me, but I haven’t now gone back to pinpoint it and I keep taking it further back. Like when I had the bus girl job.
Hmm, what the?
I was like, shouldn’t we reorganize all the cups and the, because I can’t get it fast enough to the, to go then the trip. they’re like, well, we’ve always had it this way. I’m like, but I think it can be better. Little things like that. Like I’m now just reflecting like how far back did this entrepreneur spirit start? And so I, in my student teaching fifth year, so it’s a five year program. You go to be a student teacher and you.
maybe know some of these schools because you know Kansas, but we’d go meet with our advisor and they’d say, all right, where do you want to your student teaching? There’s a beautiful new school, Blue Valley North. There’s this Olathe, beautiful. There’s da da. And they’re like, they go fast. So get in there. And I was like, well, what else do you have? If everyone’s doing that, what else do I got? And they said, well, there is this school that’s in the inner city. It’s really rough. It’s in Kansas City, Kansas. Nobody wants to go there. And I said, sign me up.
I wanted the challenge and I wanted to, I think, have that like you write your destiny and you can get in and kind of make something your own. And that, started so early on for me, but I didn’t know at the time that’s what was happening. I just thought, again, I was a school teacher. Doesn’t everybody just go to inner city and shake up the music program? And no, I guess they don’t.
They probably don’t, but you know, problem solving, which is basically what you’re talking about. Hey, I was a problem solver and, and not just maybe there wasn’t even a problem, just a, an improvement. You know, I just see a way to make this better. Okay. And, and, and I don’t understand why you’re not letting me make it better. Okay. I know it, you know it, you know that I know it. Let me do it. And, and sometimes, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Well, I, I’m so impressed that.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Let me do it. Let’s just get in there and do it.
Let me do it. Let's just get in there and do it. Share on X
You went all the way from Omaha to Lawrence, Kansas, which is about four blocks. No, no, it’s not. Okay. Three hours and 15 minutes. If you drive the speed limit two hours and 30, 30 minutes. If you, if you drive like I do and, and then the topography, of Lawrence, Kansas looks a lot like the topography of Omaha. There’s about three strands of barbwire between there and Canada that’s closed the Canadian wind in the winter time.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Three hours and 15 minutes.
No car. Uh-huh.
Yep.
Hmm. Yeah.
And so, but, but they obviously have a stellar music program and they have been known to play some basketball. Yeah.
Yep.
Okay.
Yeah, and they
won when I was there, which was amazing. So pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Great. One of the storied basketball programs in the NCAA, obviously. Okay.
So we graduated, we got our degree in music appreciation. We go to the inner city of Kansas City, Kansas, which would be like the inner city of any major, Philadelphia, New York City, whatever. And so there’s some challenges in education there. Okay. How long were you a teacher?
huh. Yep.
Yeah, sure. Yeah.
yeah. yeah.
About two and a half years.
Okay. Wasn’t terrifically
fulfilled teaching. I have a little sister, she got her degree in education at Colorado. She went to Kansas state. She graduated from Colorado state. Okay. And she made it about a year before she was frustrated with public education. And, uh, you know, what you.
No?
stay, go.
It was hard and I
think I realized too, was confining. As entrepreneurs, we want the freedom of, I want to work 100 hours or two, or I want to work from this city or that. I was being told what building to go to at what time every day and barely had a lunch break. was like, this feels like I want to write my own story a little more here. It feels very figured out and boring, but I loved the kids. I loved the teaching part.
My little sister found the same thing. You know, I don’t get to teach what I want, how I want, and like everything is prescribed and hats off to teachers. You know, we need great teachers. Okay. We don’t need bad teachers, but we do need great teachers and there’s certainly some out there. so hats off to them. Okay. So went to Kansas City, Kansas two and a half years.
Yeah.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Yes.
It’s hard. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Yep.
Then you hitchhiked across Spain? Okay, do tell.
Kind of, but instead, do you know what I did?
I jumped on my boyfriend’s tour bus and moved to Nashville.
Wow.
And let
me tell you, my parents were thrilled after they’d just finished that five year education. And I had that degree, but again, I think I was like, ooh, a way out, ooh, like a new, like a fresh, like we’re always like, ooh, jump to that. You know, it’s that like, I don’t want to get comfortable in one thing because I felt so stagnant and I wasn’t being utilized. So when I saw that…
Hmm, I’m thinking they weren’t really.
was with my boyfriend or fiance at the time, think is banned. were a Christian rock band and I’m listening to them talking about, we’re buying this tour bus and we’re helping figure out the payments. And I’m so excited and they’re moving to Nashville. And I was like, who’s going to run the band? And I mean, they didn’t pause for a half a second. I was like, I’ll do it. So, so I’m the tour manager, right? I’m like, I got a binder. got, you know, MapQuest at the time. We didn’t have.
I love it.
anything like I’m printing out map quests and we’re flying down the highway and I would get set out, plug the power, do the sound check. And I was like, well, who’s going to run the soundboard? And they’re like, well, we just jumped back and forth between like the bass player. And I was like, I’ll do it. So I get behind the soundboard. mean, there are, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a soundboard, there’s a million tiny buttons. I figured it out. I loved it. Like I loved like mastering it and then kind of moving on. Like that was the fun part for me. And I felt like I was helping. And then
shut the lights down, I’d go out front and I’d sell the t-shirts and CDs back when we bought CDs. And I remembered, yeah, I think I was creating sales goals for myself. Like nobody was even telling me how to do this. And so I sat the band down when I was like, Hey guys, cause there was a lot of us were either, we were dating, married to engage to these guys. We were all kind of at the end of college and we were friends and couples. was awesome. And I said, Hey guys, trying to sell a couple more CDs and shirts and stuff here.
Will you not tell, because we played a lot of colleges and lot of junior high girls like, goo goo over these band guys. I said, will you not tell these girls that we’re like together? Because sales really go down when you do that.
And they’re like, wait, you don’t want us to say that like you’re, yeah. I was like, no, because I can’t sell to my CDs. Cause they think you’re cute and they’ll buy more. just treat me like the hub. Okay. I’m trying to sell CDs.
I love that. So, so I want to, I want to emphasize a couple of points. One, you like doing new things, which sometimes in entrepreneur land, we call that O’Shiny disease, you know, and, and it goes along with our thirst for learning. You know, we’re, we’re insatiable learners, but we’re also insatiable. that looks fun. you know, yeah.
So that was that.
yeah.
It does.
opportunities, right? that’s fun.
And sometimes really to
rock and roll, you know, we’ve got to put our blinders on a little bit and not allow those things to come in. And, and then you, I mean, I think, you know, this, you know, my main business, I help people sell more of whatever they sell and like, and like, not just a little bit, like, let’s blow it up. And, um, and so I love that. It makes my heart go pitter patter. Don’t tell them I’m your fiance. Just.
Right.
huh.
Yeah,
please.
Let me make some sales here, man. I to sell something, you know, I just don’t feel good if I don’t sell something. And yeah, I totally, totally get that. Okay. So, so then after Nashville, and I have a couple of friends here and I should introduce you next time you’re down. One that had a very popular Christian band, David Cannington and David left the band right before they had massive success.
Yeah. Like, come on.
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Wow.
And
he’s very, he’s very accomplished entrepreneur. I don’t feel bad for him. Okay. But he did leave the band. he too had a fiance who he married. Now they have a whole bunch of children and, and he didn’t feel like that life was conducive to his family life. And so, so love that. All right. So, so you do that for a while and somehow you get back to Omaha. What’s, what’s up? How’d that, how’d that work?
Cool.
Mmm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
So great segue, you kind of made your own segue. I was starting to think about, ooh, 170 shows a year on the road. We’re not making friends, we’re not making roots. I feel like we’d mail our rent check in. And again, probably the Julie pattern of two, three years, like, okay, that was awesome, but what’s the next chapter?
We don’t live there!
I was feeling this tug to go back to my original love, which was interior design, which I loved in high school. And it was unfulfilled, unsettled to me. I also was like, well, we’re not going to, I’m not going to sell t-shirts forever, right? And I think my new husband was like, why not? That was tough. That was a hard time for us because it was kind of one of these, well, you want to maybe do this forever. And I think I’m kind of done.
Hehehehehe
So it was a tough time for us, but we figured it out. We navigated. I went back to school in Nashville and I said, let me see, let me test this soul feeling I’m having of design. And I signed up for some classes and I came home. was like, it’s there. This is it. I said, my teacher tried to hire me. I was like, I love this. I love it, love it, love it. I have to do it. I said like, you love music, I love design.
Again, didn’t know I was an entrepreneur at the time. So moved, we moved back to Omaha and he still kind of commuted and traveled with the band. It was a little, it was rough, it was a little messy. We were doing our best to respect each other’s paths that we were on, except what you do, right? And I went to work at a small firm and that was kind of where I started cutting my teeth in design.
love that. And so, you know, I don’t know. So I think everybody’s an artist. And some people’s art is computer programming. And some people’s art is interior design. And some people, my art is words. I talk and I write. And so, and I think we do our absolute best work, our purpose work, our mission, life mission work when we are in our art. Yeah, and
Yeah.
Yeah.
don’t know.
Mm.
art. like that.
and so even the people that think, I’m the engineers, I am not an artist. I’m like, you, you’re so an artist. You’re so an artist.
Mm-hmm. You an artist. Yeah, they think art is
paint. They think art is, you know, playing the violin. They think art is a sculpture. Yes.
Yeah, yeah,
and I don’t know if you know this about me, but my wife is an artist. My wife is a, my wife worked in fashion forever and decorates and floral and is a very accomplished painter. And I’m just lucky to be invited to the party because I’m not sure how I got here, but I’m staying.
Okay.
Wow.
Yeah.
You’re here. You’re good.
I’m staying at
a good friend who used to tell his wife, if you ever leave me, just know I’m going with you. And, and I’ve shared the same thing. If you go. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever leave me, just know I’m going with you. That’s it. That’s it. Okay. So. All right. In JH design, how long have you had the company?
Okay, I’ve never heard that and I love it. I’m gonna use that.
be right there with you so just let me know.
Mm-hmm.
Since 2007. So let’s do a little math. 18 years almost.
Yeah, you told me that, sorry. Okay.
So tough question.
Is there a hard moment? And I know there were hard moments. You don’t make it 17 years without there being some brutal moments. you have a hard moment you can share that maybe at that time it was just…
Oof.
Mm. Hard.
soul crushing, devastating, it hurt. But today, looking back,
Hmm.
Maybe it turned out to be the very best thing that could happen to you.
Mmm.
So I’m looking for a hard moment and hopefully that turned out for the best. And they don’t all turn out for the best. I’m a 38 year entrepreneur, founded a dozen companies. I can tell you some things that were brutal. Okay.
That’s a great question.
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Wow. A lot of hard moments. Mm-hmm.
You know, I, and I still am hard on myself about this one. So we do our best to find people who we trust and share the vision. And I always was so flattered that they’d want to…
work at our firm. Like I always was very humbled by, um, probably not realizing at the time how great our culture was, all the things, you know, part of that imposter syndrome kicks in like, wow, you want to work for me? Like, I don’t even know what I’m doing. So we were at some real growing growth moments and I went out and recruited and found what I thought was a great asset to the team. Really built her up, hired her, paid her well. And it was
bad. It was just, and it was really hard on the rest of the team. And I really blame myself. And I was so down about it. was like, how could I do this? And then how do I fix it? And what’s the example I’m showing? And it was, it was months of just like stomach aches. And, and I was like, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. I can’t find the right people. I don’t know how to, I don’t, and it’s, and then looking back,
what we went through and how we grew as a team and the example it showed to those A players and that person was left in a weird way, it was worth it. Cause it raised the bar for the type of people we want to have. But I was really hard on myself on that. I still to this day feel like, wow, the time we wasted or the people I upset, but it’s for the better.
I love that. Thank you for sharing it. It brings three thoughts to mind. One, it’s always the who.
Yeah.
Hmm.
We think it’s the what, it’s rare. Sometimes I guess it is, but rarely it’s almost always the right people will get the right things done. Even if they don’t know how to begin with the wrong people, they won’t get it done. then, and then the other side is that, if you have, if you, as an entrepreneur listening today and you’re going through something really
Mmm.
and
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Just know that the good stuff is on the other side of the tough stuff. So keep going. Just keep going. Okay. And, and I’ve been there, Julie’s been there, done that where it’s like, my gosh, why am I doing this? Surely I should go back to teaching music. Okay. But just keep going. The good stuff is on the other side of the tough stuff.
Mm-hmm. It’s so true. It’s so true.
Mm-hmm.
Yes. And I like,
I like to say trust the journey. Cause part of the journey, sometimes you’re like, I, I remember my dad came in to say hi once he’s like, I’d give anything to be back in these days. And I was like, really? Do you know what I dealt with today? Do you know we barely made payroll and we got this and we have an unhappy client and our IT team. And he’s like, trust me, you will look back on this and be like, that was the fun part.
us the journey.
Thank
We were building in, we were on our toes and we were pivoting and problem solving. It makes me tear up just thinking about it, but he’s so right. That is like the fun part, the journey, the highs and the lows.
Well, so many people that are not part of the entrepreneurial world kind of have this view that entrepreneurs, all about, you know, it’s a profit motive. It’s all about the money. And, and the reality is that’s just a piece of the equation. Okay. It’s really just how you keep score. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say it’s really
just what kind of keeps the paying the bills and keeps the doors going.
Yeah, it’s really, to me, it’s just like the scoreboard for the Superbowl. It’s like, did we win or did we lose? That’s, that’s the deal. But, but the, the intricacy of strangers, prospects, customers, staff, contract, to me, it’s always on the people side. Okay. You know, and, and I get, get, I love the people side.
Yeah. that’s a score.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Mm. Yes.
I get people to handle the non people side because that frustrates me. don’t like dealing with that people side. And to me, the people side is where all the magic is. Who? It’s not the one. It’s the…
Okay, okay.
For sure. For sure. It is
the who. The who gets me out of bed every day. The notes I’ve saved in my file have nothing to do with profitability and KPIs. The notes I have saved were the personal notes of thanks and gratitude and life changing moments. And that’s what I hang on to. Yeah.
There you go! I love that!
Me too. You’re a sister from another mister. Okay.
Now, now I want to ask you about a warp speed moment. So sometime in your business when things were going pretty good, okay, they were okay. We’re not on the ropes. Okay. We’re not breathing a brown paper bag. Latter is pretty calm. Okay. But all of a sudden, pardon me, a hire or a new piece of strategy or maybe an economic condition out of your control, you know,
Yeah.
Yes. Uh-huh.
Thank
So as entrepreneurs, tend to disregard those, but there’s no doubt you can’t, you know, you can’t overcome things out of your control. Okay. But a warp speed moment, things are going along. Okay. And then all of a one thing, and I get that hockey stick growth things really accelerate. Do you have something like that you can share?
Yep.
Totally. And you’re going to love this. And it actually was one of those horrible but then growth moments with both companies combined. So, Bouquet, as we were talking about, did the 97 weddings last year. Well, there all of a sudden was a time when people weren’t getting together in 2020. And we had 35 weddings cancel overnight. Big ones.
And we were an event-based company. So we pivoted. I said, no one’s leaving. We’ll find something to do. We did some video classes. We delivered flower kits to doorsteps. My son was in here helping us make flowers by Bobby. I mean, these poor kids, as you know, they’ve been through it all.
And meanwhile, I get a call from some other Omaha entrepreneurs that built a neighborhood, one of which was my brother, and we’re going crazy because nobody could get together when they built a whole business on people getting together. And they said, we are going to steamboat Colorado for the day. You want to go? I was like, sure. Another theme, I think, in entrepreneurs, sometimes you just say yes, even though you have no idea what you’re doing or why.
It was the worst that could happen. So I go, they said, we want your design eye to look at these investment properties and really help us pick something to invest in mountains. I said, okay. Did it pick the house? I said, this is the one. They’re like, that’s the grandma house. said, trust me. This is, I got this. Love this. Look past the grandma. Four families bought the house. We were one of them. I went up there about eight or nine times almost as a, again, personal project. Like I’m going to figure this out by myself.
I have no idea what I’m doing. Met the painters, met the tile guys, and I look around this amazing city and I’m watching people flock there from the coast. And I’m like, there are not enough designers here. So we put all the chips, I always say, in the middle of the table. We had a business that was 35 weddings down. had COVID. I said, we’re opening an office here, buying a building. We have three full-time designers there. And it’s been.
amazing to watch and it started from a horrible situation. But we maximized it a good time and put, know, just leveraged it and took a lot of risk and the growth is we’re watching it come to fruition and it’s so cool.
Yeah.
I love that. So let me share
with you Don’s concept of yes. Okay. And, and I share this with every client. All progress, all human progress starts with yes. From the beginning of time, all progress starts with yes. Now catastrophe is sometimes avoided with a no, but progress doesn’t follow no. Progress follows yes. And so.
Mmm.
Yes.
True.
Hmm. I like that.
So many times I have clients that someone wants to buy something from them that they don’t actually do.
Mm-hmm.
And my counselors always say, yes, we’ll figure it out. It’s so much easier to sell people what they want to buy, what they want to buy, than it is to sell them what you want them to buy. And that’s, that sounds really simple, but sometimes the biggest things are really simple. So, I love that progress starts with.
you what.
Mm-hmm. I need to remember that one.
Mm-hmm.
Yes. Okay, so if I could look into your mind and I had access to everything that you know.
I’m looking for one golden nugget.
Mmm.
about.
life, your family, your business, something that you view as absolute treasure, some piece of wisdom.
Mmm.
Ooh, piece of wisdom. That’s, now you’re putting me on the spot, but I like it. I would just say, and I do want entrepreneurs to hear this, and maybe especially women, trust your gut. And I think we get really, really bombarded with,
Mm-hmm.
personality test opinions, we’re gonna do this assessment and you’re trying to be this and you’re trying to be that. And when you know, like when you’re talking about how you’re wired and you know your gifts and you believe that each day you’re grateful to wake up, if you can use those gifts and you’re secure in that, then go. Trust that gut and go because so many times I second guess, that’s kind of bold. I shouldn’t say that, but I know the answer or.
I don’t know if I should tell them that because it’s not what they’re wanting to hear, but I know it’s the right thing to do. And I wish earlier I would have been a little bolder and trust my gut and just go. Not regretting anything. It’s just reflecting. I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs, maybe especially women, can use to hear that.
I love that and it looks like you’re reading from the book of Don. I word it a little different, but to me, you know, we’re intellectual beings, but we’re also intuitive and instinctual beings. And most of what education teaches us is to be here.
huh.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Totally. Yeah.
Most of all, and
I’m not disregarding that, I think you have to use that, but I will say this. If you’re gonna live in your art, if you’re live in your gift, it’s in your heart. It’s probably not in your head. Okay, and.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yep. Head gets
in the way sometimes. Yeah.
A lot of times that’s
where you have the doubt. That’s where you have the fear. That’s where you wonder, you know, as a kid, you could fly, you could, you could do anything. Okay. And, connecting at that intuitive and, and instinctual level and just, you know, one thing I share with my clients is this, it’s less about doing that it is about being.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Okay. I can give you the 42 steps to go do, won’t make any difference if you’re not being who you’re supposed to be. All the world will love the real you and have no time for a false you. That may not all the world, know, even everyone’s why you get a hang of it. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.
Love that.
Yeah.
being, yeah.
Hmm.
Maybe. I mean, the smart ones. Hey, I
will tell you, you just triggered something in my mind, but one of my absolute favorite quotes right now is, be where your feet are. Because I think this helps us do the first thing I was talking about. And society, I feel, really pushes us to overanalyze the past and worry about the future. Be where you are today. Just be, just use your gift and be in today and it’s so much more fulfilling. Yeah.
I love that. You know,
psychologists know live in the past, flirt with depression, live in the future, flirt with anxiety. The only place to live is the present. And that doesn’t mean don’t plan. And that doesn’t mean don’t reflect, but you can’t live in the past or in the future. Okay. Humans aren’t designed to do that.
Yeah.
Mmm.
Yeah.
Mm.
Okay. So love that.
Mm. Yeah.
All right. Okay. Toughest question I’m going to ask you. All right. I never tell anybody this one’s coming. Yeah. So I’m put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you all the way back, just like Star Wars or Star Trek. And I’m going to introduce you to 20 year old Julie.
Okay.
boy.
Mm.
Mmm.
be like today, Julie, meet 20 year old Julie. Okay. 20 year old Dawn had more hair and it was a different color. Okay. But 20 year old Julie meet today, Julie. Then you have like 60 seconds.
mm-hmm
to share.
Whatever you think would be the wisest share for today, Julie, to gift 20 year old Julie. So something you know now, you didn’t know then. I’ve given you a long time to think about it. putting me in the time There you go. I put me in the time machine. Today, Julie, meet 20 year old Julie. What do you got?
Long time actually written a whole answer in my head now
Yeah, today, Julie.
Today, Julie would say to 20 year old Julie, which actually I just saw a picture the other day, which cracks me up because I’m thinking of it. I look like I was 12 when I was 20. Today, Julie would tell 20 year old Julie, you know what you’re doing. Just do it and be yourself.
Love that.
It’s not, you don’t have to please everyone around you. I grew up fast and I felt it was my job to take care of everyone. You know what you’re doing, just do it. And you don’t have to just please everyone around you.
Love that. Love that. Wise words. Okay. So Julie, if somebody wanted to reach out to you that saw or listened to podcast, what’s the easiest way to get in touch with you?
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Awesome. I honestly prefer an email. They can go to our website and look at stuff, but julie at jhdesignomaha.com because we also have jhdesignsteamboat. So julie at jhdesignomaha.com is my email. And I would love that. I love meeting new people.
Awesome. Love that. Okay. Well, I want to thank you so much. I’m so grateful that you came on the show today and share your heart and your head.
Aww.
Yeah. Aw, thanks, Don. This is, I was really excited about this. So thank you for having me. It was honored. Yeah.
My pleasure. Folks,
that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

====================================================

Title: E116 | The $2.5M Secret: How Justin Wren Built a Game-Changing African Business Empire
Date: December 30, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-justin-wren-built-game-changing-african-business-empire/
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Content:
In this powerful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Justin Wren, a former UFC fighter turned humanitarian whose story of transformation will move and inspire you. Justin shares his remarkable journey from battling addiction and depression to finding his life’s purpose as the founder of Fight for the Forgotten, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving the Pygmy people in Africa.
Don and Justin dive deep into how a professional fighter became passionate about fighting poverty instead of opponents. You’ll hear the touching story behind the organization’s name, directly inspired by the Pygmy tribes who call themselves “the Forgotten,” and learn about Justin’s unique approach to sustainable community development that starts with securing land rights before drilling wells.
Key Topics Discussed:

Justin’s transition from MMA fighting to humanitarian work
The impact of addiction recovery and finding purpose through service
Innovative approaches to nonprofit management and fundraising
Cultural integration with the Pygmy tribes of Africa
Sustainable community development strategies
The power of gratitude in personal transformation

Whether you’re an entrepreneur seeking purpose beyond profit or simply someone interested in remarkable stories of human transformation, this episode offers valuable insights into how one person’s journey from rock bottom to redemption is changing lives across continents.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/E116-How-Justin-Wren-Built-a-Game-Changing-African-Business-Empire-1.mp3
The $2.5M Secret: How Justin Wren Built a Game-Changing African Business Empire
 
Hey, it’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Such a treat for you today. Good friend of mine from just down the street, well, down I-35, a couple hundred miles. That’s not very far in Texas though. So I have Justin Wren. Justin, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Don. I appreciate it. It’s good to be neighbors. That’s considered neighbors here in Texas.
It kind of is. mean, I would go down there for, you know, Franklin barbecue for lunch, you know, that’s just kind of, kind of how we are. So, so thrilled to have you on today. Now, Justin, I think you are a Philanthroponur and I don’t even know if that’s a word, but, maybe a social entrepreneur or a. Humanitary entrepreneur. Hey, well, I don’t know, Justin, tell us what you are and what you do.
Yeah.
Hmm. Hmm.
Yeah, I’m a former fighter turned humanitarian or I guess I’m really I’m just a dude that wants to put love and compassion in action in sustainable ways and do that many ways here. But in the biggest way over in Africa or the most biggest or deepest most meaningful way to me is for my second family, a hunter gatherer tribe, the pick me people who I got to live with for more than three years. But
My longest time there was one year and it built up more than three years in the last 13. And I just love it. We do a whole community development. Yes, we started with water, but even before drilling water wells, we…
started with land. They needed to have the land rights and land ownership legally in their name before we could drill them a well so that we knew that it was going to be theirs long term, right? And so, but now we’re building a hospital and a school and I got to meet you through Ben Hansen, my friend who has had a dinner party with him last night. Our friend, our friend, Ben Hansen. Yeah, our friend. But if you want to wrestle for it, I think I got it.
My friend Ben Hansen. our friend Ben. Okay, Yeah, okay. Our friend Ben Hansen. I don’t think I want to wrestle,
no.
But I guess my journey is one from fighting against people to fighting for people and so I did that professionally MMA, UFC was on the Ultimate Fighter TV show and it didn’t fulfill me like I hoped it had and so I grew up getting very heavily bullied. That’s why I found MMA. I wanted to fight myself or fight my way out of bullying.
And I, with some sweat and a lot of sweat and some hard work and but really great coaches, mentors, even a second father figure to me, them pouring into me and me listening, being coachable, you know, it worked. It worked pretty quick. From 15 years old stepping on the mats to 18 years old being national champion to 19 years old being a professional heavyweight MMA fighter.
out of high school, went straight to the Olympic training center from the Olympic training center, jumped into MMA, was the youngest guy at the highest level of the sport. Meaning I was 19 years old and the youngest guy I’ve ever fought still to date, he was 28 or 29 years old. So as a young gun in the kind of older man’s division of heavyweight, but by 23, I was, was ready to kind of get out of it.
because I was going through addiction, depression, two suicide attempts, two times a treatment. And when I found purpose through service, the most remarkable stuff started to happen. And that started to snowball until it kind of just did an avalanche of good in my life and the lives around me. And so I wanted to keep pursuing that.
I left fighting for five years. I came back to fighting for a purpose to raise awareness, to raise funds. I fought for about another five years so that if I fought one, got the microphone, I get to tell people not my story, but their story and rally a mass audience around a cause that I truly believed in.
And so I got to link those up for a while. And recently I stepped back out and because of our friend, Ben Hansen, who’s been my, I would say my business coach, my fundraising coach. He, you know, saw that my time was divided in many ways, you know, training full time, makes it hard to go all in on fundraising or meeting with people, or you’re tired at the meetings or, you know, you’re training two or three times a day.
love that.
So I officially retired and threw myself at, you know, being what I was acting as the founder, spokesperson, executive director, or CEO of the nonprofit. and because I kind of, you know, went all in, you know, nearly miraculous stuff has happened, in the nonprofit because of it. I’ve learned a lot in entrepreneurship, from an entrepreneur in the EO.
and being around y’all. And we recently had a fundraiser and a lot of the EO crew from Austin showed up, but even Dallas and Tulsa. Yeah. And we raised a lot of funds. We raised a lot of funds at EO Eccentric that you helped get me on stage for. And then afterwards at an event, our first fundraiser ever, we raised $292,000 and we hit our million dollar matching gift.
And because of that, they committed another $1.5 million in a matching gift. And so the $1 million became $2, and we’ve raised $2.5 million this year, which for a nonprofit that has a small team, three people here stateside, but 60 overseas, it’s been incredible to level up and learn how to ask.
Amazing.
And I would tell the story and what many people would say or I would hear was a really powerful way, but I wouldn’t make an ask. And so Ben has been really working that kind of asking muscle. He calls me the rainmaker. I even have two awards on my desk from him. This one’s a knife that says rainmaker on it. Another’s raise the bar award and.
That’s from Profit Doctor and from his entrepreneurs. He had to coach me on even how to let people go. I’m a fighter, but I have a little bit of a bleeding heart. I had to do that a couple of times with this coaching, but it was the best decision for the mission, the vision, and the people we serve. Once I saw it through that lens, it was an easy decision to make.
Awesome. Okay, so tell us the name of the nonprofit.
Yep, it’s called Fight for the Forgotten. And so I’ll tell you something I didn’t get to say on stage. When I met the Pygmy people, the M’Buti, the F.A., the Ba’atwa, the Pygmy people, they said, everyone else calls us the forest people, but we, we call ourselves the Forgotten. And because I had been a wrestler, fighter, like I had been wrestling some of the men one, two, three at a time, and just having fun, being playful.
Fight for the forgot?
They helped come up with the name. They were like, can we call this fight for the forgotten? And so that’s kind of their rally cry. My rally cry is let’s fight for the forgotten and make sure that, you know, they have a fighting chance to where they can not just have a handout, but a hand up a long lasting solution where they get to stand on their own two feet, have their shoulders back, look people in the eyes and be proud of.
the work they’re doing to come up out of poverty that really they didn’t choose. It was forced upon them. And I mean that in the most literal sense, a lot of people are like, if they’re poor, it’s their circumstances that they’re not working hard or it’s because of what they’re doing that they’re experiencing it. But they’ve been hunter-gatherers for at least 60,000 years, maybe 100,000 years, and their way of life has been systematically dismantled.
over the last few decades, or they’ve been banished or evicted from the rainforest, their ancestral home where they feel connected to their ancestors, to God, to nature, to everything. They were the protectors of the forest, the people of the forest, and the forest provided for them and they’re ripped away from it. So no, they were literally forced into slums or into really dire circumstances with no clean water.
calling people master, like literally becoming slaves, all sorts of brutal, terrible abuses and human rights atrocities that they’re going through. And so to see them coming up out of those circumstances on their own volition, but they’re just disconnected from the resources and the opportunity.
So as an organization, say opportunity, we’re a charity, we’re a nonprofit, we’re a 501c3, but our mantra is also like opportunities greater than charity. Charity can be great, but opportunity is always better, especially for those facing poverty. They don’t want the handout. want an opportunity out and they’re willing to do whatever they can do. Yeah.
Teach me, show me, how can I do it? Yeah, love that.
I’ve, I’m fortunate to have been to Africa. And I think if, certainly if you’re, if you’re US and you’ve not been to Africa, it’s hard to kind of comprehend. It’s a magical place, but it’s totally unique on all of the earth and abject. You know, been fortunate to travel all over the world, seen
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
horrible poverty everywhere. Probably the worst that I’ve ever personally witnessed was on the continent of Africa. So, you know, many entrepreneurs, know, they, an entrepreneur starts a company, they build the company, they win, they lose, they succeed, they fail. And maybe one day they have an exit and it’s very common at that point for them to kind of wonder what is all this for? And there’s even a great book about that called The Second Mountain.
Yeah.
For sure.
Hmm.
where they basically go find a cause, but a cause that matters more than just dollars and jobs and commercial economics. so, when I first met you and when I first listened to your story, what struck me was that your search for the second mountain, so to speak, was really accelerated.
Hmm.
I’m guessing there’s a faith component in that. Care to share? Am I right? And care to share anything?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
I would say we don’t necessarily lead with it as an organization, but for me personally, like it’s definitely there and it’s a foundation and it’s what I’m rooted in. And I would say God loved the hell out of me, blessed the mess out of me and man, saved my life literally from addiction.
depression by my own hand spared me from two suicide attempts and because they were real deal ones maybe the first one was like enough to do it to a normal person but a big guy maybe not and the second one like they said it’s a it doesn’t matter who you are it’s a hundred percent a lethal cocktail so for me to wake up and me to
walk out onto the beach and get into the water of the ocean. I took a one-way trip to Tulum and when I got, I knelt down in the water, all I felt was shame. So much shame. I felt like a failure. I felt like a disappointment to my mother. Like, what am I doing to my mom? And also selfish that someone would have discovered my body and experienced that trauma in the hotel room. Like, who was I going to do that to? Like this just innocent kind of bystander doing their job, right?
Hmm.
But something shifted and would, know, people have said all sorts of different things. It was my higher self. It was this or that. And for me, it was a whisper in my soul from God saying like, be grateful for that beating heart in your chest. Be grateful for that breath in your lungs. And then it was one more thought intuition that felt like it was outside of myself.
Open your eyes and man my eyes were welling up with tears tears I had I was closing my eyes hard and tears were streaming down my cheeks and It was open your eyes and right when I opened my eyes. I saw the Sun pop up on the horizon watching the most beautiful epic majestic sunrise of my life and It shifted it switched from like shame to gratitude and as the Sun kept inching up higher and higher there was more and more
gratitude and realizing like, I don’t know, it should have been, and it was one of the worst moments of my life, but it quickly turned into one of the most impactful moments of my life. And the next part wasn’t easy, it was hard, really hard to get clean and sober, but to have this hope of like, wow, I shouldn’t be here, like I’m living in the bonus rounds of my life.
And so with the time I do have left, I better commit to doing something with it because it’s time I didn’t expect to have. I don’t know, I hope that makes a little bit of sense, but it was definitely a blessing to be spared and then to have the opportunity.
to get well and to get sober for me. Like other people don’t have to do it, but for me, a guy like me, yeah, I have to. And, and I want to, it shifted from this like curse or burden of, of having to get sober or even the burden of, you know,
now I’m labeled as an addict or an alcoholic, you know, and I can’t, I don’t want that, you know, I’ll figure it out on my own. Like for me, my experience, look what I have in my, I literally have another year sober chip in my pocket that Ben got for me to celebrate. And he gave that to me last night. And I don’t know, it became this, it became this opportunity instead of seeing it as the biggest burden, why not let it be the biggest blessing.
.
Awesome.
in a way to tell a story. then now, now going, at least for me, like people’s stories have always been the thing that changes my life the most. And seeing them take action and learning from their actionable takeaways or steps from their story. But man, like now there’s these people who have one of the most ancient stories on earth and literally they call themselves
Stories are the easiest form of learning for people to digest because it's not 'you should, you ought to. Share on X
not just the forgotten, like they call themselves an endangered people group in the name of endangered species or rainforest preservation. Like they’ve become an endangered people group that is on the verge in the next decade or two of like no longer existing and like losing their culture, losing their stories, losing their heritage, losing their tribe. It’s like, man, if can my story potentially help their story and can we unearth like.
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
each individual’s personal story in a way that like is just something beautiful and epic that we don’t lose and that we can celebrate. So I’m going all over the place there, but it’s yeah.
I just want to add a couple of comments. Okay. So one, to me, stories, and I don’t know if you know this, so, you know, I’ve written eight books, published six books. I have stories. Yeah. I have, I have words. My wife would say, Don has words. And I think stories are the easiest form of learning for people to digest because it’s not, you should, you ought to.
Sure, please.
No, I didn’t know that. I knew you were at a couple, but I didn’t know that many. Wow.
Hmm. Hmm.
It’s like, let me tell you my story. Maybe you hear something in it that resonates with you. And then I want to go back to the transition on shame to gratitude. So it is scientific that humans perform at the very lowest level when they express or experience fear or shame. Scientific fact. I didn’t make that up. You can look it up. Google will confirm. Chatchi PT will confirm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Okay? It’s just the way it is. On the other hand, humans perform at their very highest level when they express or experience gratitude. And so, eight or nine years ago, I’m in Thailand. I’m listening to this electrical engineer talk about energy, human energy, and she’s sharing this thought with me. And I literally come back and I’ll
Bye.
I’ll put it here. This is Gratitude Stories from Our Hearts, 24 co-authors who share 25 stories and it’s a journey to gratitude. And for the audience members today, I’ll put a link where you can download it absolutely for free. Or if you want to, you can go buy it on Amazon. We give all money above the publishing cost to St. Jude, because if we can help one sick kid, I don’t have to make money on books. I have other ways to make money. But I love that.
Awesome.
Go.
The instant I think that all progress starts with a yes. And so when you accepted that challenge to open your eyes, okay, it’s like a complete about face. Now, catastrophe is sometimes avoided with a no, but progress requires a yes. And you said yes and made that progress. And so thank you for sharing.
All progress starts with a yes. Catastrophe is sometimes avoided with a no, but progress requires a yes. Share on X
Mmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah,
Thank you for sharing that with us today.
yeah, of course. Well, just to say on the St. Jude’s part, just because I would love people to go buy your book, I’m gonna go buy that book, because I’m a monthly donor of St. Jude’s. Yes, I’m a nonprofit founder and I
Anytime I speak and get a speaking fee, I give to fight for the forgotten. But that’s another one that’s near and dear to my heart because my start on this journey saying yes to purpose through service started at a children’s hospital. It was in Denver. It was at the color Children’s Hospital, Colorado, and it was in a room with a kid that was a fan of mine from the ultimate fighter. And his father reached out and it changed everything. But I think as as people
and
Like we all want to kind of have this purpose to live for or need this personal progress to be being made. And then we need like community around us. And y’all have that through EO and through your business networks and with your clients and your families and friends. I had that through fighting with my training partners. Like it was like kind of this warrior tribe and we’d back each other up, be in each other’s corner whenever they’re fighting. But the whole way up until it.
But whenever I separated from it, well, when I was going through addiction, that cut me off from like truly having it. I had training partners, but I didn’t have tribe and community. And it’s kind of because I dimmed the lights, right, mentally on my faculties. But whenever I got to Africa, here I meet this ancient tribe that lives in community in such a beautiful way. think anthropologists have said,
They’re the most present. saw one article, I think it was the Guardian saying like they were the best fathers on earth or something similar to that. Because these dads, these fathers who are hunter gatherers and providers and protectors of their tribe and community. But even as a dad, they would hold their infants for 50 % or more of the time. And they’re the only people group ever documented to do that.
And I like stumbled upon it, right? And I didn’t have the best, I won’t go into that too much, but I didn’t have the best relationship with my dad or the men in my family, at least my father’s side. So whenever I got there and I just witnessed it, you know, and then got accepted into the tribe, adopted into the tribe, given multiple names, a child was named
Mabuti Mangbo Justin, which literally means the big pygmy Justin. Yeah, share please.
So hang on on the big pygmy, I gotta jump on that before I forget.
So it’s impossible for the viewing audience to get an idea. You know, I’m 6’1″, okay, you are 6 watt.
Mm-hmm. Right.
Let’s say three. Yeah. My tops card says six, four, but I’m not six, four. I’m six, three.
Yeah.
Okay.
So six, three, but, you’re also, and I’m a pretty big guy, but like when, when I met you and stood next to you, was like, he’s a really big guy. Okay. And, and the average pig me in four foot six. Yeah.
Four foot six for the men. Four foot
six or four foot seven for the men and the women are smaller. So whenever I first walked in there, they called me the vanilla gorilla, the albino rhino, know, different stuff. And I was the Viking in the UFC. I looked like a Viking. I fought like a Viking, ground and pound, pick people up, slam them and then punches and elbows. But when I got there, my first name, once I was like really…
Yeah.
integrated into the community was F-A-O-S-A. And F-A-O-S-A means the man who loves us, and that was by the F-A Pygmy people, so F-A-O-S-A. And then the Mubuti, Naming Mubuti Bang Bo. So Mubuti Bang Bo means the big pygmy. And then the Batwa, Naming Batwa Yakabambi, which means the big pygmy as well. And it’s been fun to be.
It’s so weird to even say like, Hey, here’s this big white dude that became.
family with a tribe. But it’s also been the coolest, most exciting. why it’s one of the reasons I wake up in the morning. It is the very reason that the first place I got homesick for was there. I was never homesick for anywhere here. And now when I’m there, it’s a new feeling because I’m engaged. But I do get homesick for here now for Amy and her two daughters and for our home together.
But it’s a, yeah, it’s, guess, a really unique story. It even is weird to me sometimes. It’s like, how did, I could have never dreamed this, planned this, hoped for this, had a vision for this. And what is a fighter doing? If one of the side effects of my job was,
Sometimes people would be sent to the hospital, right? And now I’m helping build a hospital like we have 60 people boots on the ground like laying the foundation right now and we’re getting ready to put up the walls and the roofs and You know, it’s it’s been a learning process, but I think what I learned through fighting and maybe this goes to entrepreneurship to is There’s a lot of people that maybe are in the NGO world
that they think inside the box. And it’s lot in the box thinking, I don’t even know how to say that. It’s just a lot of restrictions, a lot of like, we’re protective of our programs, we’re possessive of who gets credit, and it’s gotta be done this way. And you can only do one thing, and this is the normal process system, everything else.
But since day one, I think we’ve been world class at listening to the community. And a lot of times other people don’t have the quote unquote time for that. They have, you know, a big quota, a lot of funding. They have a lot of output and reports they have to make. And we’ve just been like, no, we need to listen to the community first, truly understand what they’re going through. There’s not just some simple cookie cutter.
Hmm.
Blueprint that can be replicated in every community or country or culture So we got to listen first and learn and then once we do that we can take this collaborative action effort together But I guess what I gonna say on the the part that is different. We want to be a well-rounded organization That is like a fighter. You have to be well-rounded like back in the old days of MMA. You could be just a world-class
wrestler, just a world-class boxer, just a world-class in jiu-jitsu. Now there’s all these hybrid fighters that you have to be basically at least efficient and know the basic offense and foundations, but especially the foundation of good defense in every discipline. The striking, which is boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai, it’s wrestling, it’s jiu-jitsu, it’s judo.
Mm.
And so as an organization, we’ve really tried to fill the gaps on how can we be world class.
at being well-rounded to serve one thing, which is poverty, but there’s many different solutions and techniques and tactics and game plans for how to string that together, just like in a fight. It is a fight. It’s a fight against poverty. It’s a fight for the forgotten. And we start with land, then water, then food or farming, then better housing, then healthcare. So medicine when their kids are sick or a safe place to give birth.
Then education, that’s a way that they want, you know, every parent wants their ceiling to be their child’s like floor, right? And so, yeah, they see that. then, and then after that, it’s a, or in tandem with all the rest of sustainable livelihoods, we can start that early where we get them into tailoring, beekeeping, hairdressing, barbers, carpentry, welding, masonry, and really try to help support the community with things that.
Sure.
Who’s passionate about this or what’s y’all’s ideas for a job and livelihoods? Well, we want to do this. What do you know how to do that? Well, I kind of know, but I need some more training. OK, so if we brought in someone for training, who would actually do that and set up a committee and then people start learning actual vocational skills that go back into the community by boosting their economy and being able to pay for the school fees or pay for the medicine when the kids are sick and things like that. So.
Love that.
It sounds
like a lot, but we’re addressing one issue for one people group and one community at a time. But there’s lots of different ways to do that.
Well, I think when you’re true to your mission, you kind of, I think it was Zig who said, Hey, we’re going to be firm on principle, but flexible on method. Okay. Cause we’re going to learn as we go. And, and I love that. want to, I want to go back and touch on the acceptance piece. So, you’re in Africa. Okay. You obviously stand out, because you’re twice as tall and you look like a Viking and nobody else. Yeah, you do. You do.
Mmm.
I stand out here.

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Title: E115 | Geoff Woods Reveals Game-Changing “AI-Driven Leader” Strategy That Saved a Company
Date: December 23, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/geoff-woods-reveals-ai-driven-strategy-that-saved-company-ai-leadership/
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Content:
Welcome to The Proven Entrepreneur Show. In this illuminating episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Geoff Woods, author of the #1 bestseller “The AI Driven Leader” and founder of AI Leadership. From his surprising start as a professional hip-hop dancer to becoming a transformative force in AI leadership, Geoff shares his remarkable journey from medical device sales to scaling companies and driving billions in growth.
Discover how a chance encounter with “The One Thing” authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan changed the trajectory of his career, and learn about his groundbreaking work at Jindal Steel, where he helped drive the company’s market cap from $750 million to $12 billion. Geoff reveals his innovative approach to AI adoption, introducing the concept of AI as a “thought partner” rather than just a tool, and shares a powerful real-world example of how this approach saved a manufacturing company from bankruptcy.
The conversation takes an intimate turn as Geoff opens up about personal challenges, identity, and the valuable lessons learned along his entrepreneurial journey. He also introduces The Collective, his vision to unite 10,000 executives in leveraging AI for positive business transformation. Whether you’re an executive looking to harness AI’s potential or an entrepreneur seeking inspiration, this episode offers invaluable insights into the future of leadership and technology.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

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Geoff Woods Reveals Game-Changing “AI-Drive Leader” Strategy That Saved a Company
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Man, do I have a mind blowing guest for you today. I have author Jeff Woods, just published the AI Driven Leader, great book. I multiple copies. I’ve been giving copies away. Jeff, welcome to the show. Man, I’m thrilled that you’re here today. So I’m going to take you all the way back to little Jeff. So age five.
Thanks so much for having me, Don.
In your childhood home, okay, was there an adult entrepreneur in your home that set an entrepreneurial example? Was your kitchen table the board table? No. Okay. all right. Love that.
But this became a defining moment for me, actually, because, yeah, so, you know, great parents, they always encouraged me, do your best, forget the rest. Very supportive, but I followed very much the traditional path. Work hard in school so you can get into a good college. Work hard in college so you can get a good job. And over the course of probably the first, man, seven years of my career, I was so focused on climbing the ladder.
Please share.
that I wasn’t asking is the ladder even leaning against the right wall.
And it came to when I was in medical device sales and I was very successful, President’s Club winner every year, making a ton of money, great work-life counterbalance, but I was completely unfulfilled on the inside because deep down, growth is my core value. I felt like I was playing below my potential. And for me, that was actually painful. And I remember vividly being in Lake Tahoe for our national sales meeting.
Love that.
walking out of one of the sessions early, because I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I’m staring up at the mountains and asking myself, when in the world am I ever going to be able to build a business that makes a big impact in the world and delivers real security for my family? I walked into the, uh-huh, I walk into the next session and on every chair was a copy of a business book called The One Thing.
What a great, defining moment.
which had been written by Gary Keller, who started Keller Williams and his co-author Jay Papasan. Jay walks on stage, delivers an amazing keynote, and the whole time he’s talking, Don, I have this Jim Rohn quote in my mind that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I had five amazing friends at that point. I didn’t have any amazing mentors. I didn’t have any entrepreneurs that had big businesses that were making a big impact in my life that I was investing time with. And I found myself thinking.
What would my life look like if Jay or Gary Keller were two of my five? And when Jay came off stage, I literally sprinted down the side of the ballroom and almost tackled the guy. And that began a relationship that ultimately what I had no idea was that the one thing had already become one of the highest rated business books of all time. But that created a problem because they wanted to make it a company. But Gary’s one thing was running Keller Williams. Jay’s one thing was writing books with Gary. My one thing became the one thing.
They became two of my five and they taught me to think and act like a CEO and scale big companies.
I love that. Now, so Jeff, I’m going to take you back to little Jeff again or bigger Jeff. Okay. cause cause I want to, I want to connect the dots from childhood to, I did the right thing. got good grades. got into a good school. got a good job. Okay. So what was your first J O B? What’s the first thing you did?
Yeah.
You
where people put money in your back pocket for your effort.
I was a professional hip hop dancer in high school. Dead serious.
I love that.
So I’ve done about 150 episodes. You are the first and maybe the only ever professional hip hop dancer.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I
my very first jobs was I got paid to dance.
I love that, love that. Okay, so when you graduated school, left your parents home, where’d you go to university? UT, Santa Barbara. Okay, UC, Santa Barbara. Excellent school. Okay, and you majored in entrepreneurship.
UC Santa Barbara.
So this was actually interesting. It was my my senior year, I’m doing an internship for a tech company. And right before graduation, I sit down with the CEO and I asked him, what job should I get after school? And he looks at me Don and he says, Jeff, you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking, what are the skills I can master that are so valuable, they’ll serve me no matter where I go. And what jobs will help me develop those skills? Best career advice I’ve ever had because I was so focused on
attaching myself to a job fitting inside a box and he’s saying no, what are the skills that if you can match them put you on a certain trajectory. Based on my my personality, he suggested I go into sales. So he said go work for Xerox or IBM because you’ll get the best sales training in the world. So I went to work for Xerox, found out that people don’t really like their copy or rep that led to medical device sales, which then led to entrepreneurship.
Well, medical advice sales pay so much better than copier sales anyway. It’s a different scale.
It does and you can try to get
and you get to wear scrubs and try to get your wife to call you McDreamy.
there you go. So I got to ask only because you offered. Did she, does she? No. yeah. Okay. All right. Well, your wife sounds like my wife, you know? Yeah. So we have that in common. Okay. So you had your defining moment at this conference. The one thing became the one thing. When, how long did it take you to launch into entrepreneurship?
No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Hey man, I still got things to aspire for.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, that was entrepreneurship because they literally Gary and Jay said, we’ll be your board. will allocate a set amount of dollars. I was the president and the co-founder. had to start the business from nothing and scale it. But I had them as my mentors and guides.
It was right then.
Wow.
Well, and great, I mean, Gary Keller, great mentors, built a little real estate empire, Keller Williams, largest in the world. And so, but I also want to point out something to the audience. So, Jeff had some stimuli. He saw Gary Keller, he had an epiphany and he acted. I ran and almost tackled him. Okay. And so many times,
If you’ll just have the courage to ask, act, and then ask somebody, you’ll be surprised at who might say yes.
So this was another defining moment. It was Jay who was speaking on stage, Gary’s co-author. When Jay finished speaking, 1500 people in the audience gave him a standing ovation. Every person sat down and I was still standing. The defining moment for me was my mind was telling me to sit. My heart was telling me to go.
My mind was telling me to sit. My heart was telling me to go. - Geoff Woods on seizing opportunities Share on X
Okay.
And I literally remember going, you’ve got to do this. it like, I was trying to protect myself from failing or maybe being rejected, but the heart won. And that’s what led me to sprint down the side of the ballroom and opened the whole door.
I don’t think you know this, but my second book, I’ve now written eight, published six, two in editing, Romance and Your Customer, but it talks about following your instinct, your intuition and your heart. Don’t ignore your intellect. You need your brain. Your brain’s really important, but it’s so much easier to influence people if you play from your heart. Okay. And so I love, love, that. Okay. So tell me.
Mm.
Mm. Mm.
100%.
Are we still operating that company? What company do you have now? What do you do now? Who do you do it with? What do you like to do?
Yeah, so fast
forward. I own AI leadership, which is a company that helps executive teams strategically adopt AI to accelerate growth and build a competitive advantage. How I went from the one thing to that, I scaled the one thing, sold my interest back to Gary and Jay. I had a two year non-compete, went in-house with a client called Jindal Steel.
which is a giant steel company out of India. I had been coaching their chairman, Naveen Jindal and several of his execs. And when he found out I left, he said, hey, would you come in house? And I said, maybe, what’s the job? And he said, you tell me. And so I stepped in as chief growth officer over all their companies, which they had about 100,000 people across the world, India, Middle East, Africa, Australia. I took them from 750 million to 12 billion as a market cap in four years. While I was there, part of that was AI.
I saw ChatGPT when it literally within 30 days of it coming out and hitting the world. And I had that college mentor in my head saying, what are the skills you can master that are so valuable? They’ll serve you no matter where you go. And when I saw AI for the first time, I saw it as a skill to acquire. And so I just prioritized figuring this thing out very quickly realized that using it to write a better email was a waste of time, but started asking, what are the things I need to do?
What are the skills I can master that are so valuable, they'll serve me no matter where I go? - Game-changing career advice by Geoff Woods Share on X
as a C level executive of a public company that deliver the highest returns. And the answer was strategic thinking and decision making. And so I asked how my AI helped me think more strategically or make faster, smarter decisions. And the moment I cracked that, I was at the chairman’s house in India and I made the pitch. I said, this is the future. And he goes, I agree. I said, we should drive this through the whole company. He goes, I agree. I said, this is so important that you should own this as chairman of the board. And he goes,
I disagree. You do it. Which being an entrepreneur, I immediately committed and said, yes, walked out of his house and said, shoot, I don’t know what I’m doing. But a lesson I learned from Gary Keller is that anytime you’re hitting a ceiling of achievement, you’re just missing a person. And so I asked, who am I missing that if I could bring them into my world could help me gain the capability to drive AI through our organization, that person became Google.
And so now I’m in India every quarter, I’m at their headquarters in Gurgon and they’re teaching me how the technology works. How do you identify use cases? How do you tune models? And after driving it through the company and seeing results, that’s when I was like, okay, I’ve got a bigger opportunity for me to step out and write a book about this and build a company about this. So that became the AI driven leader, which hit number one. And then AI leadership, I just feel like I’m bear hugging a rocket ship right now and it’s awesome.
Love that, love that. And there’s another principle there, the principle of just saying yes. So the chairman asked you to do something. You didn’t actually have it all figured out. Okay. Not qualified. I was being much more generous than you. Okay. Not qualified. I didn’t have it all figured out, but still said yes and said, I’ll figure it out. And untold fortunes in entrepreneurship through all of history from people who said yes.
I was not qualified.
when common sense probably would have been to decline the opportunity. But many times other people can see things in you that it’s sometimes hard to see when you look in the mirror. So, love.
So true. And I’ll
take that back. I was qualified because nobody knows what they’re talking about in AI right now. So but I did have the right mindset to say I will stick with this and I will acquire the relationships and whatever I need to have the skills and the rest is history.
I love that. And I think with AI, I remember when chat GPT first rolled out, okay. And it was like, okay. And then, in my own companies, we are, I would say high level users of multiple flavors of AI, video, audio, text, et cetera. However, even though I think we’re a high level user, I actually met you.
I watched you speak on stage and you shared one, and it was like a couple sentences and the entire talk was phenomenal. But in those couple sentences, was like, that is a game changer. It was collaborating. I’ll let you tell it. I know what I’m talking about.
What was it for you?
using AI
as your thought partner and having it interview you.
Yeah. So do you mind sharing a little bit about that?
Yeah, sure.
Sure. So most people who are using AI, well, let me back up even further. I literally interviewed over 200 executives one on one for my book, the AI Driven Leader. This blew my mind because 100 % said it was the future. 100 % said they would adopt it. Less than 5 % had done anything. And the reason why is they didn’t know where to start. And then they felt like they were falling behind.
So for me, it was about how do I show an executive how to go from zero to one using this in a way that matters at an executive level. And what I knew from my own personal experience is that the majority of people are using AI like Google or like an assistant. They’re going into it like a really smart Google, asking questions and expecting answers, or they’re treating it like an assistant to help them do 80 % of their work.
that really only drives 20 % of their results. It’s their to-do list. I have built a career on getting executives to focus on the 20 % priorities that drive 80 % of their results. So I don’t care about the 80 % on your to-do list. I don’t care about treating it like Google because at an executive level, your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business
or going out of business. But there are all these things that stop us from not enough time, not easy access to the right data, biases and assumptions, pressure to do more with less and deliver results yesterday. Those kill your ability to think strategically. But if you, instead of viewing AI as Google or an assistant, if you raise your standards for it and view it as a thought partner that has to interview you,
by asking you one question at a time to help you think through your most complicated problems or come up with non-obvious solutions to achieve your most ambitious goals, baby, can you find another level of performance?

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Title: E114 | From Rage Quitting to E-Commerce Success: Paul Byrne’s Entrepreneurial Odyssey
Date: December 16, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-rage-quitting-to-ecommerce-success-paul-byrne-entrepreneurial-odyssey/
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Content:
Welcome listerners, In this captivating episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Paul Byrne, a remarkable entrepreneur whose journey is a testament to adaptability, courage, and the power of saying “yes”. From working pineapple plantations as a teenager to becoming a global e-commerce consultant, Paul’s story is anything but conventional.
Listeners will be inspired by Paul’s unconventional path – a rage quit that became a turning point, transforming from a Magento developer to an innovative custom software solutions provider. Hear how he navigated technological shifts, built Rossolio, and learned critical life lessons about prioritizing family while pursuing entrepreneurial dreams.
Packed with raw insights, humor, and hard-earned wisdom, this episode reveals the true essence of entrepreneurship: resilience, continuous learning, and the courage to embrace unexpected opportunities. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business professional, Paul Byrne’s story offers valuable perspectives on building a meaningful and successful career.
Join us for an extraordinary conversation that goes beyond business strategies and delves into the human side of entrepreneurship.
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

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From Rage Quitting to E-Commerce Success: Paul Byrne’s Entrepreneurial Odyssey
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat today. This person, guest today, I’ve known maybe 20 years. And so he was probably five when we started or maybe six. I don’t know. Maybe not quite that young, but anyhow, we’ve known each other professionally and other business lives, kind of, certainly for me, less so for him.
That wasn’t that creepy.
but please welcome to the show, Paul Byrne with Rosohio. Paul, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, Don. Really enjoy it.
Man, it’s a thrill to see you on the show and you reached out maybe a month ago, we went and had lunch and, it was like blast from the past. mean, cause I think it’d probably been 20 years. more than, more than a minute. Yeah. Yeah. So, tell me this, let’s take you all the way back to little Paul. Okay. Well, I think little Paul grew up in Wichita, Kansas. So my, my Wichita, Kansas brother. Okay.
It had been a long time. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
That’s right.
And in your house, the house that you were raised in, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur?
Yeah.
So in my house, no. My grandfather was an entrepreneur and he ran a media company that was later purchased by Borg-Warner, I think about the time that he retired. And so he did well off of that. My father was actually a rocket scientist, of all things. He worked for Beach Aircraft Missile Systems Division.
And he was actually the senior rocket scientist on staff there for a number of years. But so I grew up in kind of what you would call a math heavy home. And my father ended up working a lot with the military, but he always admired entrepreneurs. And he tried to set up kind of a couple little side things in the technology space.
But he never, you know, was really a dedicated entrepreneur. Certainly never made his living off of it. My mother did open a fabric store at one point, but it was more of a hobby that she did with her friends than really a business. you know, not so maybe a little bit a touch of that in the home, but not directly.
Yeah. Well, and I love that. And so many times, you know, an entrepreneur has a side hustle. They have a hobby that they kind of turn into a side hustle and, you know, years later or weeks later, it kind of depends on the deal, but, know, it, it blossoms into, one those businesses where it takes all your time and all your effort and, and hopefully pays you off one day. Okay. So still with little Paul, okay. It’s like five to 18.
Yeah, I’ve met a lot of those people. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
What was your first paying job? What’s the first thing you do where you traded time and effort for money?
I guess I would define that as my paper routes that I had when I was early teens, know, 12, 13 years old. And I had a really bad habit of signing up to become for a route. And it was more about when they became available. But I would sign up, you know, in October and then go through the entire winter.
which in Kansas was often brutal in Wichita. And then because it was so windy and cold. then I would, my poor father, some mornings I’d get him up at five o’clock and it was sleeting outside and he’d have to drive me because my first route was like a mile away.
And then the next year, I think I got the one in my neighborhood, but I’d quit in the springtime and my parents were just like, what are you doing? Like, that’s this is the time to sign up. You got this backwards and they were right. But that was my that was my first thing. So it wasn’t really a job. It was kind of an entrepreneurial thing because I had to, know, I sold papers, I collected money, I delivered. And yeah, that was that was really kind of first thing.
You know, and don’t even think that exists anymore.
I can’t imagine. Yeah, back then everybody got the newspaper. So I would deliver 200 papers and my first space was an apartment complex. And I had like four or five buildings and that was it. Everybody got the paper. So it was pretty easy. And then when I had my neighborhood, which was more just like a single home, single family home type neighborhood.
Yeah.
The the lots were bigger, but still it was pretty compressed to do it now I don’t know anybody in my neighborhood that gets the paper on a regular basis. You’d have ten miles between Subscribers. I don’t know. It’s yeah, it’d be really rare
Yeah, I think the distance and I just think the security, the safety concern of.
of a young person doing that. Yeah.
of children, you know, I remember I was never a paper boy. I think that’s what we called him, but I had friends that were and then I want to say like it maybe age 10 or 12. They were throwing papers and up at the crack of dawn and throwing papers in the middle of the night, folding papers, banding papers, tossing papers, collecting money. Today that just couldn’t happen.
Sunday morning was a beating because those papers were 20 pounds each and you know, I could only load a few and I was doing this on my bike, but on Sunday morning I’d get a wagon and pull that behind me and load that up with paper and still I had to return like three or four times. Yeah, it was just all those dang coupons. It was horrible.
you
Yeah. But you know, there was a recent, maybe published this week in Forbes that it talked about the relationship between childhood chores and adult success. you know, and there may be something to youngsters having, and a paper out is certainly more than chores. That’s a job, but certainly some relationship there. So, okay. Well, after school,
Right. Yeah.
So you’re 17, 18, 19 years old. then I think you, I think you hiked the Andes in Peru or you. you didn’t. Okay. So, so what was it? You went to college, you went to university, you joined the merchant Marines. What’d do?
Right.
nothing like that. No.
Well, yeah, so I should go back to because there’s probably another interesting story in there of my young. So like you, I listened to one of your podcasts where you talked about working the wheat harvest or at least driving a combine or something when you were when you were very young, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.
Very young. OSHA would not approve.
Yeah, well, you know, I was 13, 14 years old and I worked, I harvest on a wheat farm in Kansas and I was driving a pickup truck and, you know, working a wheat scoop, which, you know, was really, really tough, tough work. But so I, I became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was 16 years old. And there was a gentleman in the
church out of Utah that had this program where he would provide labor to the pineapple plantations in Hawaii. And he would get all these kids together, hundreds of us. we worked, I was in like, I lived on kind of like a compound that there were probably, you in my compound, there’s probably like 120 to 150, you know, teenage boys.
And we have, like we all lived in one room, barracks style, with a leader who was maybe a few years older than us, who was kind of responsible for the group. And we were the crew and every day we worked together and we went to the beach together in the afternoons and all of that. And so that was probably one of my most formative experiences.
was that summer that I spent in Hawaii on Maui near Lahaina on the pineapple plantation. it was kind of a, it was one of those things that made me realize like, I do not want to do this for the rest of my life. At the same time, it was such a great summer. Yeah, it was such a fantastic. Now, the program’s gone. It was, I think it went on for like 20 years or so.
And, yeah, was, was really interesting, but there were, there were kind of two kinds of boys that went there. So there were ones like me that were, you know, good clean cut kids. I had cleaned up my act when I joined the church, but so I hadn’t always been that way, but there were other ones that were sent by judge’s order and it was either that or juvie, you know, and so it was really kind of an interesting mix of kids. and, and that was, that was, you know, that was just a fantastic experience. So.
Yeah, as a member of that church, I went when I was 19 to serve a mission and I ended up going to Italy. But the year before my mission, I had graduated from high school and I went to the University of Missouri, Mrolla and I was studying electrical engineering. And for whatever reason, I…
decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. And so I went home the like the eight months before I left on my mission and I started selling computers in a computer shop to mostly engineers and accountants because that’s I mean talk in 1983, 84. Yeah. Yeah. The first Macintosh came out.
That’s who I am.
when I had that job and I was selling Hewlett Packard computers, opposite brand. It was kind of a disaster for us from the personal computer side of things. But when I got back from my mission, I probably made the worst mistake of my life and I did not go back to engineering school. I decided that I was going to get, I wanted to get the degree that was quickest.
for me to get, because I knew I wanted to go get an MBA. And so I decided to get a degree in Italian. Because when I came back from my mission, I spoke fluent Italian. I had studied the grammar and everything. So it was easy. I could quiz out of every day. I quizzed out of, I don’t know, like 20 hours of class. I already had tons of time as an engineer. So I already had all my math and science out of the way. So all I really did, so I ended up at
at Brigham Young University for a couple of years studying Italian, Italian literature. And then I worked in tech sales for about a year and then went to Sdobocconi, which is in Milan, Italy. So, and by the way, the most important thing happened to me during this time, which was I got married and my wife’s from Italy. So,
She was a kind of deciding factor to go to graduate school in Europe. And she was from the south of Italy. I went to school in Milan, but you know, what a great time. I mean, we were just, you know, in abject poverty living in this illegally built apartment in Milan that was really cold in the winter with a, you know, we had a newborn baby.
when we moved in there and it was crazy. But yeah, that’s kind of how I got involved in business. And I got hired out of there and I worked for a German company. At the time, the borders were going down around Europe. so, you know, before that time, you drove from Italy to France and you had to go through customs and, you know, all of that. And then by 1993, so a year later after a year after I graduated,
January of 1993, the borders went down. And so was helping this German company take its importers in other countries and either acquire them or prepare them for the common market. This was before the euro, by the way. And so that was a really interesting job. And I did that for three years.
I started in Germany, spent a year kind of traveling around Europe, helping companies, and then I spent a couple of years in France. But after that, I came back to the US, and I was recruited by PepsiCo to work at Pizza Hut, its hometown, Wichita, right? And the headquarters was still there. And then,
Alone by the carnies then or Pepsi co-head. No, Pepsi code bought it. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, PepsiCo had long since purchased it. Although Brian Carney, one of the Carney sons was actually in a band that I was in when I was in high school. had nothing to do with me getting a job at Pizza Hut. yeah, I knew the Carnies. And we decided, well, we’re settling down in which I kind of moved home, right? And we decided to have our third child. By that time, I had a daughter who was born when we were living in France.
We came out, you know, and within a few months we were expecting another child, our third, and Pizza Head said, hey, we’re moving to Dallas. And I’m like, you know, the time you’re scheduling me to move is about a week before my wife’s due date. And so they were kind and let me finish out. I was the only person in the building.
that I knew of in which at least in my section of the building and I was able to work there, know, email, phone, etc. And then three weeks later we moved down.
Amazing. Okay. I want to make a couple comments. So first off, the pineapple plantation thing, I’m just saying, you know, it beat driving a tractor in Sumner County, Kansas at wheat harvest, which is what I was doing at that time, where it was 105. And if you’re not familiar with Kansas, they don’t even talk about it being breezy until it’s about 20 mile an hour wind and not windy until it’s about 40 mile an hour wind. And the wind’s always blowing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah
Yeah.
Well, yes.
And so, in the summer, it’s kind of like a hairdryer. very much so. And, and I was just there last week and, and we were in Western Kansas and the people I were with, were asking the guide, we’re on a hunting trip and they were saying, so what’s the wind going to be like tomorrow? And he’s like, we don’t check the wind. This is Western Kansas. It will be windy. And you’re like, well, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s going to be windy. And then.
Yeah, lots of women with short hair and cancer. That was the start.
Paul Byrne and Don Williams Share Their Insights on Entrepreneurship
It’s just no doubt, yeah.
mission trip to Italy, okay, somehow you’re living right or something because, you know, that’s not the rainforest and the Amazon.
Well, they don’t tell you like you just apply to go on a mission and then they send you a letter back and here’s where you’re going. And my daughter went to Brazil. But yeah, I went to Italy and it was Southern Italy at the time. My parents were quite concerned because I the my mission headquarters was in Sicily. There were other missions in Italy, but mine was in Sicily and Catania.
Yeah.
And it was a time of the, you know, the big mafia trials and Giovanni Falcone was killed while I was on my mission. We were threatened by Muammar Gaddafi that he was going to bomb Sicily because Americans were launching flight aircraft from Sigonella against Libya, which is just right outside of Catania. and then. Like I had been there just a few weeks and I was actually in kind of the
the part of Italy that’s sort of the heel of the boot in Bari and the an anarchist communist terrorist bombed the Bologna train station, which was like the main hub for train traffic in Italy. all that happened while I was there. But I was just oblivious to it. I was just walking around trying to trying to talk to people about Christ and
All this stuff’s going on around me. had no idea.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, absolutely. My favorite city on earth is Florence. And, and, you know, if I could be in Italy today, I would. I just, it’s just one of those places. Okay. So that kind of brings us to, and interesting about the engineer thing. So you, you probably know this, but 40 % of the world’s entrepreneurial billionaires, not inherited billionaires, but entrepreneurial billionaires.
beautiful.
you
Mm-hmm.
40 % have an engineering background.
I’m not surprised, yeah.
Yeah, it’s just a different kind of a different level of thinking and and then I have some friends that are physicists and and that’s kind of a whole nother You know like for what your dad did. He was probably as strong in in physics as he was in engineering and that’s kind of a whole nother level on its own so So awesome, so tell me so now you got to Dallas you followed Pete the Hut
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. They were up there in North Dallas and, and my aunt, my aunt dated, I don’t remember if was Frank or the other brother. Yeah. But they did one of the pizza that was founded by two brothers in a little bitty, I don’t know, 10 by 15, 10 by 20 space on East Douglas, I think, in Wichita, Kansas.
one of the carnies.
Yeah, they moved that building to the Wichita State University campus.
Well, it’s certainly a big piece of entrepreneurial history. These two guys started a little pizza place. They sold pretty good pizza. It grew like wildfire. And I think when they sold to PepsiCo in the 80s, if I’m right, maybe the early 80s, I think they sold for 300 million, which would be an entirely different number today. That would be in the billions for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
yeah, I think Jimmy John’s sold for 1.6 billion, something like that. Or yeah, or no, Jersey Mike’s Sandwich Shops. Yeah, sold for 1.6 billion and certainly Pizza Hut was a much bigger brand and organization than they were. So yeah, it would have been multiple billions.
Here’s to mics.
And I’ll just say this as a kid, I can remember going into a Pizza Hut restaurant, hut hut to the Pizza Hut, going into a Pizza Hut restaurant, sitting down, ordering a pizza like you would in any sit down restaurant, which of course I don’t think anybody does anymore. They would deliver this pizza to your table. It would be so hot. It would burn the skin off of the roof of your mouth every time. And people just flocked to it because it was just…
Yeah, absolutely.
excellent product. And, and there’s certainly an entrepreneurial lesson in there is you can burn the roofs of their mouth every time if you serve an excellent product. That’s just how it goes. Okay. So you got to Dallas, you’re working for PepsiCo. Okay. You’ve had kids all over the world. You married your wife. Well, one wife in Italy, but, but it’s from everywhere. Okay. Italy, France, U S okay. you’re in Dallas.
Yeah
Yeah.
Easy one one wife. Yeah Yeah,
At some point you start Rossoio. When is that?
Yeah, so my I feel like my entrepreneurial story is somewhere between inspirational and maybe a cautionary tale. I I do not recommend this, but I as a career move, but I rage quit my job one day. I was the CMO of a direct sales company and that had, you know, revenues of I don’t really know exactly because it was a privately held company and
I wasn’t involved in all the businesses, but it had to be, you know, at least a billion dollars. And I ended up, just getting really, really frustrated with that job because of a number of things going on and, and, and kind of the change in my role, et cetera. And so one day I just was in a meeting. The meeting was going not so well for me personally, and I was just kind of tired of it. And so I just.
hung up from the call, it was an online meeting and I sent my boss an email and just said, I’m done. And I got up and left. Which, you know, and I was completely sober. Like I don’t drink or anything, you know, like this was, this happened, you know, just, you know, I think it was maybe one o’clock in the afternoon or something when this was going on. And
And I remember that we had a visitor from the California office in our Dallas office and that I had given a ride from the airport to the office. So I gave her a ride back to the airport. And so that gave me about, you know, 40 minutes to figure out what the hell I was going to tell my wife. Right. And and so, yeah, you know, she was not thrilled, but kind of.
I think just bit her lip and said, no, can you get this job back? know, I’m like, I don’t think so. Yeah, I think I think it’s done. I think the way I quit, this is probably it. So and I was right. And my boss, who I was good friends with, I kind of said, you know, I really think you should take this opportunity to kind of change things up. You’ve been talking about doing your own business for a while. Maybe this is the time. And
And was generous. extended my healthcare benefits for a couple months and so forth because I did help them with a few things afterwards. Things calmed down, right? In fact, they became my first client, but I ended up not knowing what I was going to do. I had a friend who I was actually also a client of his who had this business doing data entry for
sales organizations. So they did it for our organization. They would take all of the receipts that were generated in the field, know, sales, door to door sales, direct sales, and they would put them in a database for us. And then we use them for a variety of purposes. But he had some other clients and he offered to let me join that business. And I did. so technically, you know, I that that company was called a data.
And we had dozens and dozens of women who were working from home and they would come pick up these tubs full of paper and take them home, do their data entry, you know, after the kids went to bed or whatever, and then email us back spreadsheets. It was really, really inefficient. And we eventually got to the point where we were doing that. You know, we had built some software for them to do it online, et cetera. And it was much, faster.
But I, through that process, we started selling the products of my old company online to the people on the receipts, cause they were not using the receipts to sell things. So initially we did with email and then that company said, Hey, you guys are doing pretty good job with these emails sales. Can you get us, can you rebuild our website? Cause we don’t like, you know, the guy who’s running our website right now. We don’t really like it. You know, can you do something with that?
And so I said, sure. had no idea what I was going to do. I wasn’t really technical at all at that point. And yeah.
hey, hey, I got to stop you there. Moral to the story, people, when somebody asks to buy something from you, the answer is always yes. Okay. And then figure out how to deliver that. And literally millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of business have been done because somebody said, yes, they didn’t tell them they were going to figure it out. They said, yes. And then they figured it out.
When somebody asks to buy something from you, the answer is always yes. And then figure out how to deliver that. Share on X
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think they had enough trust in me overall that, you know, despite the way that I quit the company that, that they, they knew that I wasn’t going to commit to something that I couldn’t do. And I, know, and so I just spent, you know, three weeks, night and day figuring this out. And I ended up using this software that was owned by eBay. It was called Pro Stores and it was kind of like a Shopify.
And they built a business. Okay. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt, that was.
before there was a Shopify, where you could build this online store and sell things online and do it on your own. It was a self-service thing, just almost like selling on eBay, A little bit more than that, but essentially that was the case. I built that website and started selling the product online and within a few months,
We were the largest merchant in Texas on their system. And we weren’t that big, maybe a million dollars a year or something like that if you looked at the run rate. But they invited me to attend this event that they were doing in Dallas with eBay that the people at Pro Stores did, because they were going to be there as well.
And they invited me out to dinner and they asked me like, what can we improve? cetera. I was like, you want the list? Here you go. And after about an hour, they stopped me and the guy says, says, look, Paul, you seem to know a lot about like this and how this should work, et cetera. I have a group that’s doing my, pre sales support that I’m thinking of changing. Could you set up a team to do this?
And again, the answer was yes. Right. I actually said, you know what? Like, I think so. Let me get back to you. Cause I did go back and talk to my business partner about it. And we had, you know, and he was fine. Like we, he wasn’t that much help with it. We had sort of started dividing up the business between the data entry side and, and the e-commerce side. And I was doing the e-commerce stuff. And so within six months.
you know, we signed the contract, I think on Christmas Eve with eBay and I was supposed to be up and running 1st of January. And so like I found an office, I put in a phone system. I, you know, you know, we connected it to theirs, everything. And I hired my Jason who’s on my business partner at that time, because he had experience in both, selling online on pro stores and he had.
experience in Salesforce because that was one of the tools that they used. He, in fact, at the time he was like a Salesforce admin. So this would been 2011. And so January 1st, 2011, that contract started and that’s how I got into really got into e-commerce and e-commerce consulting. and, and, know, once again, they came to us with more opportunities because one thing I found out
about large corporations is like, once you’re in as a contractor, it takes a long time to get that first contract, right? But once you’re in, once you’re a recognized vendor, it’s much easier for them to come to you than anybody else, outside. And so they just kept throwing stuff out as we ran this merchant council that involved the CEO of eBay and these massive online meetings.
Just, you know, where we had to recruit attendees and we would practice it and we had like multiple backups for the transmission. And, you know, we working with the folks out of San Jose and just really, you know, kind of started doing things like that for them. And that was kind of how we got into, you know, that was how I got into e-commerce.
During that time, I kind of got the bug, you know, like I started as an engineer. had written a little bit of code. My son was getting into it. and I hired him and some other folks and we started helping merchant with eBay’s permission. We were allowed to kind of in a separate business, help these merchants like either move from one platform to another. They had just acquired Magento’s. They were trying to get all these people onto Magento.
And so we started developing on Magento and customizing Magento stores. And, you know, that was it. And I, I found out, I discovered my son who had a degree in radio, television, and film at that point, he had just graduated. He, but during the time he was in college, he discovered that he didn’t really like that that much. And he wanted to.
learned programming and he did, and he ran these automated online stores where he would connect vendors to eBay. And it would literally like manage his inventory, manage his feed, manage his postings, everything. And he had written the software for that. And then he started getting into Magento development when we asked him to. And, and, and, and eBay started bringing us leads because people would kind of get too big for pro stores or for Magento go, which was Magento’s online version.
and they would need something more customizable. And so we started doing that kind of development. I started hiring software engineers and eventually it spread to what Resolio has become today.
Amazing. so tell me, so I mean, it sounds to me like there’s been a series of yes.
Yeah.
in your career. And I can’t emphasize that enough. You know, this show is about entrepreneurs learning from other entrepreneurs. And, and that is a huge, a huge win to be able to swallow your fear and just say, yes, you can always say no tomorrow if you have to. Okay. Try not to. So tell me this, I want to ask you a couple of questions and we’re kind of in the.
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Fourth turn here, I can see the finish line up there ahead of her. So, tell us about a hard lesson. So something in your business that when it happened is like, man, that is painful. But maybe today with a little distance and a little perspective, it turns out it was a very good thing. And certainly the rage quit from your employer probably qualified, but do you have another one?
Okay, yeah.
My fault. I’ve got plenty. I would say the one that comes to mind that was probably the most impactful on our future was we were pretty much dedicated Magento developers. And that was all we did was we customized Magento stores. And as technology evolved, security evolved, hacking evolved, they needed to upgrade from this Magento one, which was…
built in a very specific framework to Magento 2. And there was a lot of changes being made. And unfortunately, at that same time, eBay was selling off Magento. In fact, they sold it to Adobe. It’s now Magento, what they used to call Magento Enterprises, now Adobe Commerce. And it was really tough because we were working with a lot of companies.
and doing all of this like development customization work, but they’re like, well, when Magento 2 comes out, it has this feature, that feature. We really want to kind of pause until Magento 2 comes out. And unfortunately, both the pre-acquisition folks and the Adobe folks, they kept kicking the can down the road. And so our clients kept pushing off their projects and the well…
almost ran completely dry. We were down to really just maintenance work at that point. And that was our only real source of income. so was, you know, that was tough. That was tough. At the time, I probably had, you know, 12 people on staff and mouths to feed. And I mean, you know what that’s like. So, you know, fortunately, we never missed payroll. I missed payroll personally more than once. as a company, my employees never did. And we
And we said, we got to branch out. so we branched out and started working on other platforms and started doing different kinds of software development. And that really forced us to go from kind of imitators of things that other people were doing to innovators where now we build fully custom systems from, and we work with clients to figure out what they want them to do. So it.
It forced that change. was tough at the time. The company, you we lost money for a year or two, but you know, now we’re much, we’re much better off for it.
I love that. Imitators to innovators. That’s a great lesson there. And one that many entrepreneurs have learned, who either had one product or one client or one delivery model and found out, hey, if something happens there, the step from one to zero is just one step. And that can be scary. So thank you for sharing that. Okay. So.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
down.
Right.
Next question, if your mind was an open book and I said, in this career, you’ve learned many, many wise things, but there’s a couple of nuggets that you hold near and dear to your heart. Okay. Do you have a nugget you could share with us?
So, mean, learned as an entrepreneur.
It doesn’t matter if it’s helped your entrepreneurial career, doesn’t matter where it came from. And certainly the one that you’ve shared with us several times today is Paul says yes. Even if he doesn’t know how to do it, Paul says yes. And I love that. Do you have another?
You
Yeah. So I would say the most important realization that I came to was that your, your family, and I would say, you know, especially your spouse, if you’re married is the person that is going to be with you, you know, for, for the rest of your life, this business at some point.
it could go away. And as I saw kind of the waves of technology crashing on us, right, we could have easily been sunken by one of those. But I still have my family, right? And so you really need to figure out how you’re going to focus on them and put that business in second place, third place.
You can still be great at it. You can still be excellent. You could still spend the time you need on it. But they need to know that they’re number one because they are. In the end, they really are. And I love my business. I love my employees. I love what I do and the work that I do, et cetera. But I realize that if it all went away tomorrow, which it could, every entrepreneur knows, right?
that, yeah, that really I’ve spent my life building my family and the relationships that count there and not, you know, just building a money making machine. So.
I love that. so, you know, most of my clients and my consulting practice are entrepreneurs. They come to me and they’re wanting to build their business. And, and we help them by bringing the cash register faster and larger. And that doesn’t solve all their problems, but it does solve maybe half of their problems. And, and so, so they’re focused on business. And then, you know, just in interacting with people, you know, then there’s their family and then there’s them. Okay.
Hmm.
Yeah, some revenue problems. Yeah.
Right.
And, and one of the mind shifts I try and help people with is let’s turn that upside down to where you are the top. And that’s really hard for a female, for mother entrepreneurs, because they’re always putting their family first and many fathers too. but it’s, but it’s, I mean, it’s just cliche with mothers. And, and my theory is this.
Yeah.
I get it. And I was a single dad for a long time and my kids lived with me. And so I was a great dad and not a very good mom, but I’m what they had. but, but I know this, that if you’re empty, you cannot fill them. And so take care of you, take care of your family, take care of your business. But if you take care of the top two, you know, business is a lot more about who you are.
than what you do. It’s the being, not the doing. And people say, want to grow my business. I’m like, well, you have to be better. Not necessarily do better. You got to be better. And then the more will happen almost automatically without effort. So.
Well, there’s one piece of advice they give to everybody, which is never take advice, including mine. People come, you when you’re an entrepreneur and you have some degree of success, like I’m not a billionaire or anything, right? But you have some degree of success. People come looking to you looking for lessons. And I just, I just say, like, don’t rage quit your job. Like don’t do any of the things I did. Don’t take my advice. You have figured it out on your own.
Yeah, yeah, good point.
and you’ll be happy, right?
Yeah. And I’m a big believer in people can learn if you share your story and you will find the similarities and the things you can learn from, which is different than you should. You ought to, you know, that’s advice.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah. And I’ve really plucked some nuggets from some of the, I listened to some of the past episodes of your podcast and you know, there’s some guys in there whose situations may have been different from mine, but they just make me think, right? They stop, you think, you reflect, you get a new insight, right? And I think that’s, you know, the message, the story is the message, right?
story is the message. Absolutely. Okay, hardest question I’m going to ask you, Okay. I’m going put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you all the way back to 20 year old Paul. You’re going to get about 60 seconds to share a piece of advice to your younger self that would have been helpful.
And we’re.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
to know that you know it now, but it would have been helpful if you’d known it then. Okay. And your kids will one day listen to this and they’ll be like, that for dad. So into the time machine, you go all the way back. Here’s 20 year old Paul. What do you say?
Yeah. I probably would try to encourage myself to finish the degree in engineering. And I could still get an MBA. I would have spent an extra year in college to finish that out as opposed to the way I did it. I really wish I had done it. And I kind of ended up over my life making up for it by studying, acquiring technical knowledge through
Okay.
my own independent study on the subject. But that degree would have been a very helpful foundation at many points in my career.
You know, and the interesting thing, because I spend a lot, I spend all my professional life with entrepreneurs. Okay. I know so many engineers, physicians, dentists, accountants, you know, people that would be very, STEM oriented, you know, that maybe they were in that career for 10 or 20 years. but, but now they’re not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And even physicians and even dentists and even lawyers who kind of have this inside joke about I’m a recovering physician, I’m a recovering dentist, I’m recovering attorney. And the training and the way that they learn to think in those disciplines has proven to be invaluable in their entrepreneurial lives.
night.
Bye.
So.
Right. And I, I, when I was 20, I saw that as I’m studying the thing that I’m going to do for the rest of my life. And at that point I wanted to be involved in international business. And what you really need to do is figure out, how, do I become, I think Einstein said it, you know, focus on becoming useful and then you will become important. And
E114 | From Rage Quitting to E-Commerce Success: Paul Byrne’s Entrepreneurial Odyssey Share on X
I think I would have been a lot more useful if I had a degree in engineering. But, you know, because I really don’t use my Italian, you know, my knowledge of Dante’s Inferno or, you know, the Divine Comedy doesn’t really play much in my business life.
Yeah, the Divine Comedy. I can remember touring Florence and the guy told me something about Dante. And I’m like, you know, you know it was comedy, right? And he’s like, well, it’s called the Divine Comedy. I was like, okay, yeah, all right. So Paul, how would a listener, a viewer of the Proven Entrepreneur show, how would they reach you or Rosario if there was a professional interest?
yeah.
Dante’s City.
Yeah. Yeah.
Absolutely. So just go to rizoya.com. It’s r-a-z-o-y-o dot com and hit contact if you want to contact the company. If you want to contact me directly, go to LinkedIn. It’s slash PW burn. just look me up. I’m easy to find, and just reach out to me there. I, I, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and I, if somebody interesting,
ask to connect with me on LinkedIn, I will definitely connect to them and at least see what they’re about. So, give that a shot. Otherwise, contact me through risiolio.com.
Yeah. So go to the website or look up Paul on LinkedIn and I can testify he’s very active on LinkedIn.
Maybe a little too active.
He’s very active on LinkedIn. But as all of us who are B2B should be, LinkedIn is not to be ignored or avoided if you’re B2B for certain. So Paul, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Yeah, I agree.
Right.
Thank you, Don. It’s a pleasure. I look forward to our next encounter, whatever that is.
Yeah, me too. Folks, that’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

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Title: E113 | From 3 Acres to Nationwide: How Matt McLean Built Uncle Matt’s Organic Juice Empire
Date: December 9, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/how-matt-mclean-built-uncle-matts-organic-juice-empire/
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Content:
Join Don Williams as he sits down with Matt McLean, the visionary founder of Uncle Matt’s Organic, in this inspiring episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Dive into a captivating narrative of entrepreneurship that begins with a family legacy in citrus farming and transforms into a nationwide organic juice brand.
Discover how Matt turned a simple request from a German client into a game-changing business opportunity, pioneering organic juice in the United States before the USDA organic seal even existed. Learn about the challenges he faced, including the devastating citrus greening disease that threatened to destroy his entire business, and how resilience, prayer, and strategic pivoting became his ultimate survival tools.
Key Highlights:

The journey from a three-acre family grove to a nationwide organic juice brand
Scaling strategies that took Uncle Matt’s from local markets to major retailers like Publix, Kroger, and Whole Foods
Overcoming the citrus greening crisis by developing global supply relationships
A remarkable business comeback story, including buying back the company during the pandemic and more than doubling its size

Matt shares candid insights about entrepreneurship, including the importance of persistent yet respectful relationship-building, the value of family support, and staying true to your passion. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a food industry enthusiast, or simply love an inspiring business story, this episode offers valuable lessons in innovation, adaptability, and perseverance.
Don’t miss this extraordinary tale of turning agricultural roots into a thriving organic juice empire!
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

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From 3 Acres to Nationwide: How Matt McLean Built Uncle Matt’s Organic Juice Empire
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. The show where proven entrepreneurs share their story to help you learn and improve in your own entrepreneurial journey. Our guest today, I am so excited, is Matt McLean of Uncle Matt’s Organic. Matt, welcome to the show.
Okay.
Hey Don, thank you very much for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity.
It’s my distinct honor, so happy to have you. I think you’re one of the pioneers in organic foods. I have a little sister who, she was buying organic, we’re coming up to Thanksgiving, this will air probably a little after Thanksgiving. She was buying organic turkeys 35 years ago when they were hard to find. Yeah, and now pretty common.
Wow, okay.
We’ve learned the wisdom of eating clean food that doesn’t have a long list of ingredients. Eating food that is the ingredient. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Yeah. So.
Right.
Right, there you go. There you go. Well, she was way ahead of her time 35 years ago.
Yes, she was. her older brother, I’m embarrassed to say, of poo-pooed her on her choices. And as is often the case in my life, the women are generally right. And if I disagree, I’m just not. So Matt, tell us a little bit about the business you’re in now. How long you’ve been in business?
What do you sell? Who do you sell it to? How do you sell it? Tell us about Matt’s Organic.
Yeah, thank you. So we were founded in June of 1999. This year we’re celebrating 25 years in business. Kind of hard to believe about that. Big accomplishment. Yep. So we’re kind of one of those organic pioneers have been, we were actually organic before the USA organic seal came out in 2002. So we were farming organic for a while, but we have become America’s
We were organic before the USA organic seal came out in 2002. Share on X
Congratulations.
The number one selling organic orange juice brand and grapefruit juice nationwide. From a little tiny beginning here in Claremont, Florida, which is just west of Orlando, used to be surrounded by citrus. Now we’re more surrounded by homes. But we started with three acres in my dad’s backyard. We turned it organic. From there, we have grown to over 15,000 doors nationwide. You can find this public Sgroger, Whole Foods, Sprouts.
Walmart, a lot of different doors. You can find us from Hawaii to Alaska to Maine, even down in Puerto Rico. So we’ve come a long way from business, but we still feel like that little challenger brand. We compete every day against Tropicana and Simply, Coke and Pepsi, the two biggest beverage brands in the world. So while we’ve come a long way, we still have a long ways to go.
as we get more penetration with households and in the market.
Well, but love that David and Goliath aspect because, you know, your competitors are like mammoth, huge, ginormous, like big, big, big. Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much unlimited resources that you’re going up against, but it does give you the David Goliath every day, which is fun for that analogy because we do feel that way. And we’re more nimble than Goliath and we hope to beat them in different places and spaces.
was getting ready say, and David did prevail.
He did. So we have that. That’s definitely the heart of David.
Yeah, David did prevail. Okay. I’m going to take you all the way back to little Matt McLean. Okay. So like you’re five years old, no more, no more than 15. You’re in your family home. And what we want to know is, was there an adult who set an entrepreneurial example at your kitchen table?
Got it.
Yeah, I mean, my father, he had his own business. He had his own Grove caretaking business and he owned his own Citrus Groves. And so he was a citrus consultant. He also went out, they had a harvesting company and a caretaking company. So he was the entrepreneur. He was his own boss for a long time. It wasn’t always that way, but he was the entrepreneur in the family.
Awesome. you overheard some of those conversations at the kitchen table about payroll and employees and customers and operations and marketing and all that stuff. You grew up with that.
Absolutely. And then also was plugged into being one of those employees. And I joked for the longest time at Uncle Matt’s, I was the employee he never paid, you know, and then he’ll joke, well, that was room and board was free, buddy.
Yeah, yeah, awesome. So tell me, was your first job working for your father or did you actually work someplace else where you turned in your effort and received a check?
Yeah. So I mean, in junior high and high school, I started when I remember eight years old helping however I can out in the groves with dad and his consulting clients and business. And it was great. While it was hard work, it definitely taught you how to persevere and the credits you get for a hard, hard day’s work. And then later, as I became, you know, 10th, 11th, 12th grade, I then ran a little crew for him. And so I also
learned leadership skills, how to lead other young men, how to be responsible, and all the things that go along with being your own small boss and leading team members. So those were key things for me growing up. I was taught by my dad with just entrepreneurship skills. And then I went off to college. It was…
Yeah, I was ready to get out of the hot Florida sun and try to do more on the business side. And so I got a degree in business administration with a specialty in finance and a minor in economics. And then from there, I was ready to get out of agriculture. didn’t take any ag classes at all. And it was no ill will towards my upbringing. I just felt a calling to do something better than drive the tractor out in the grove.
Yeah. So funny you say drive the tractor. My first, my grandfather was a wheat farmer in Kansas and my first paying job was driving a John Deere tractor at wheat harvest. And I think I was 11. I don’t think they probably let 11 year olds do that today, but it was a different world back then. and so they didn’t think anything of it, you know, sit your butt on that tractor and drive it until you get done with the field.
Haha.
Yeah, correct.
I mowed a lot of groves with a case, a little case tractor and a five foot bush hog behind me. And I did two passes per metal. I mowed hundreds and hundreds of acres on that little joker with a five foot bush hog mower.
Yeah, there you go. so, you know, I look back at that. I didn’t look fondly on it at the time, but I look back at it fondly now. I learned some really good lessons. I learned what hard work really was. That and digging fence post holes by hand for our fence. I learned what hard work was. I learned that while I love to be outside, I did not want to be in agriculture. And it
yeah
It pulled you back. did not pull me back. So that’s awesome. Okay. So what, so after your childhood at home, you went off to university or college. Where did you go?
Yes, I went right up the road. The land grant university in Florida is the University of Florida. My granddad, my dad, my mom, my brother, my brother-in-law, they were all Gators. And so University of Florida was kind of the path that I went to. I grew up a Gator. Go Gators, if you’re a Gator listening. And like I said, at that point, I decided I was going to get a degree.
in business actually started off like everybody was either pre law or pre med, you know, boy, I was even what makes the most money. my gosh, that’s what I’m going to be. And it didn’t take long to realize I may not be cut out for pre med or pre law. It was biology or chemistry. I just realized like that’s not going to be my specialty. So God had a different plan that pushed me out of being a doctor or lawyer. And it really was business. I just I loved business growing up.
And when I started studying business, it really resonated with me. And from there, the rest is kind of history when I got out of college to stay in business and start my own business.
Yeah, awesome. So when you graduated as a Gator, was your, did you take a job or did you immediately put that business degree to work as an entrepreneur?
Yeah, so I had some, I graduated and I had a couple opportunities. I actually didn’t think I would get back into agriculture and kind of the family business. I still had that goal of charting my own course and I had some opportunities in sales. Went and applied for one business job that sold business forms and stuff. And it was a territory sales manager. Another was computer software. And I got offered
one of the jobs and kind of went back and forth. Boy, do I want to do that and move to Jacksonville. And at the same time, and some just didn’t feel right. Like it didn’t really, there was no necessarily passion about it. didn’t like, okay, yeah, I could sell that. And at the same time I had an opportunity with my father. He introduced me to one of his growers who was a client of his who was German. And this gentleman said, hey, I’m really looking for somebody to help me. I want to import Florida.
orange juice and grapefruit juice, I have friends in Germany that own bottling plants. And if somebody can help me go around Florida and find great tasting juice and help me buy it, we’ll ship it to Europe and I can sell it to my friends there in Germany. And I think there’s a whole lot more opportunity besides just the handful of bottlers that he knew. And I said, well, geez, let’s see. Okay. So start my own little business, go around the juice plants and I get to travel to Europe.
I’m in. Okay, sure. So that off I went, I started a little import export business and went around to the 35 different juice plants in Florida. And we found, you know, conventional orange juice and grapefruit juice. And we shipped it over to Holland to the port of Vlissingen. And from there, he imported it and took it to the different viling companies in Germany.
and later in Europe and then later we did this in the Middle East. And so that’s where I cut my teeth on juice quality, really knowing what makes great taste in orange juice by variety, Bricks, acid ratio, oil content, all of those things make up a good quality juice. And so I really learned from the French and the Germans over in Dubai, different taste profiles.
and what really was, you what was a sweet juice, what was an acidic juice, the timing of the varieties, all of those things. And it also happened where my aha moment came. Like most entrepreneurs, they have that one, you know, what is it that really gets you there? And I was, I was doing fine. had a juice brokerage business. I was making good money. I was self-employed. I got to travel abroad. Life was good for me right out of the gate.
Until I found, I got introduced to one German customer and he asked me about biologic. He said, I need to find basically organic, grapefruit juice. And I had no idea what that was. I said, sure, Mr. Noy, I w you’re a great customer. If you want it, I’ll go find it. And that set me down my whole uncle Matt’s organic journey. cause I came back and besides figuring out, you know, where I could find organic grapefruit juice that I would then would get processed.
put in a drum and send to him, I needed to figure out what was this market, what is even organic? And there was no organic Tropicana or simply in the marketplace at that time. And this was probably 1996, 97. So for me, thought, hey, trends usually come from the food industry. A lot of them will come across the pond from Europe into the US. And if this started to really take hold in Europe, this could be something in the US.
But I knew nothing about CPG, consumer product goods. I knew nothing about, you know, how do I get a Tropicana or simply equivalent product onto the market shelf? I knew quality juice. And then at the same time, I didn’t know, can I supply it long-term? How could I scale this business? And luckily for me, my granddad was still alive and they’re the agronomists. My dad, my brother, my granddad, they were the real agronomists in the family. They were the growers. I went to school for business and
was on the other side of the growing. And so I went to my dad and granddad at that time and really asked them about organic farming and is this viable? Is this something that we could scale? What is the long-term potential in Florida? And my granddad, he was offended and chuckled and said, you know, I’m old enough to remember, you know, buddy, we did this before pesticides were invented after World War II.
And we planted cover crops, we put down compost, we did all kinds of different things and nobody called it organic, but it was organic farming. And it was really at that point in his life, this was at the end of my grandfather’s life, he just said, you know, this is really how we should go back to farming. A lot of those methods were not ever disproven. They were just displaced by new technologies that came out, know, ammonium nitrate and urea, some of those other synthetic fertilizers.
that people fell in love with and then the university started recommending him because they got a lot of money and funding to do research on it. And so he got excited, which then excited me and gave me a passion. You know, it made sense from my standpoint that, hey, okay, I don’t need to spray a lot of pesticides to do organic. It’s not allowed, number one. And those things, if you just look at the label, they have skull and crossbones on them. And it just was very common sense for me simplistically going,
Well, if I can do it without the skull and crossbone, that would be a better way for the environment. That would be better if I was to consume it. I would have less chance of having any of that on the product. And so off I went, young and dumb, at a very young age of 27, figured out after a couple of years, how do I come up with a CPG brand? What do I call it? And how do I do this? And I launched Uncle Matt’s in June of 99.
thrilling story, a couple of accidental twists and turns, but you were open-minded enough to say, yes, if that’s what you want to buy, I’m going to find it. And I’m a big believer that all progress starts with a yes. Catastrophe is sometimes avoided with a no, but progress requires a yes.
E113 | From 3 Acres to Nationwide: How Matt McLean Built Uncle Matt’s Organic Juice Empire Share on X
Yes.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Yeah. Right.
And we’re all in the business of serving clients. And so the client wants this and I’m going to help find it. And interesting, my grandfather, who I said was a wheat farmer, you know, they used ammonium nitrate, you know, huge. And today in that area, he has since passed, but today in that area of Kansas, many of the farmers only spot fertilize.
Yep.
Literally used GPS and the tractor and, and, and Mark spots where they will fertilize and almost all have gone to no till where, you know, back in the day, I was disking the field an hour after the combine had cut the crop. mean, literally the day of harvest, we’re flipping the ground back over and, now they just, they don’t flip it over at all.
Yep. regenerative, yeah, regenerative practice, no till.
Mm-hmm.
Mm. Yeah.
Yeah.
And those little stalks act like straws for the rain, you know, to where the rain goes subterranean instead of sitting on top. Partially anyway. So great. Okay, so that’s kind of how you got started. Okay, but today Uncle Matt’s is a pretty big company, yes?
Yeah.
Right.
Yes, we are. Yep, good size. I mean, we’re no longer the small little, you know, entrepreneurship company. We’re the next step. We’re now doing our own manufacturing. So we have our own bottling facility. I think we have, I don’t know, total 75, almost 80 employees, which is good size and producing a lot of product to feed a lot of people nationwide.
Yeah.
Yeah, love that. So, we kind of got the launch. Tell us a couple of steps in how you scaled to selling organic juice coast to coast and kind of top to bottom Alaska to Puerto Rico.
Yeah. So in beginning, it was a lot of hustle, a lot of heart and hustle, trying to find the right connections that really could help me prioritize which accounts that I should even go into. Because organic is not for every account and especially wasn’t in the beginning because it was higher priced. People didn’t know what organic was. So had to be pretty particular. We started with
you know, local high end grocery store chain called Goodings and a local chain of health food stores called Chamberlains. And between those two, had, you know, that and some other natural food stores made enough business for me to get into business and get going. And then from there it was hiring another, a good broker rep who acted as my sales team, cause I was a one man band. And so they would take our product and go sample it to a lot of different stores up and down the East coast.
And then I would add another distributor here or there that would call on those new chains and accounts. so I just organically built the business store by store, state by state until you get some big accounts. so like Publix, they called me after two years of knocking on that door. They called me on 9-11. The first tower had just fallen and
I was a little bit in shock and I had called on Publix for two years and the last time I went in, I went in on the sales pitch with three generations of McLeans. It was myself, my dad, my granddad. And we sat in front of that buyer, Raul Garcia, super nice guy. All the harassing I did to him, probably should have put me in jail.
because I was always calling him and, you know, I’d love to sell you something. And he was so professional and polite and just a great, humble guy that he just said, hey, you to be patient. When the review period comes, don’t worry. I’m going to let you know and you’ll get a chance. OK, great. So I went in there with three generations, sat in front of him. And, you know, obviously, we finally got our chance. And so when the review was finished, he called me. It just so happened to be.
That was the day he was calling everybody to tell them if they got in the set. And he said, hey, Matt, this is Raul Garcia. And I remember I answered the phone. I only had one employee. And unfortunately, she was from New York City. And she had some friends that potentially were in one of the towers. And so she was very distraught. And I said, hey, you need to go home. I’m really sorry. pray for favor up there and that nobody in your family close to you was hurt.
I literally answered the phone like, Uncle Matt, how can I help you? Raul Garcia. hey, Raul. He said, on a really bad day, Matt, I’m going to give you some really good news. We’re bringing you in. And she’s like, I’m not sure how to feel here. It is a really bad day, and this is really good news because I knew it was the next level for my company. At that time, Publix had about 1,000 stores, maybe like 900. And that was just a big day.
completely tripled my distribution and store account, took me to the next level of scale and capabilities and just legitimate in the eyes of consumers, household penetration. And so that was the next plateau. And then after that, I remember I got the call from Kroger in like 2005 and then like 2009 was Whole Foods Nationwide. And they just kept building momentum and building momentum. And before you know it, you’re nationwide.
And you’re in, you know, a lot of stores and a lot of doors. And so, that was my big aha one moment there with Publix and breaking through to the next level of becoming a real brand and a real presence.
Well, I love that. And a couple of principles that you shared one, you know, when you have the grocery rep, he’s going out, he or she, they’re going out and asking people to buy. And one of the things I’d tell everybody is if you’re not selling as much as you want to sell, ask more people to buy every day, every day, ask more people to buy. And then with Raul Garcia, sounds to me like you had become quite acquainted before that fateful day.
Correct.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, to where he knew you and knew your voice when you answered the phone. Persistence! Stay at it!
Yeah, he did. I was very persistent. was all heart and hustle, but respectfully persistent, right? If you’re not respectful, that’s not going to work. You’re going to annoy the people in the buyer and they’re going to say no thank you to you.
Absolutely. Okay. So think back over your career and what I want to look for here is a, is a hard moment. So something happens. and when it happened, it’s like, that hurt. Now in retrospect, you know, looking backwards, maybe it was a positive, but, sometimes at the moment they don’t.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
feel very positive, they feel really negative and ouch. Do you have a hard lesson, a hard moment you can share?
yeah.
yeah, mean, and every entrepreneur, let’s see, what time is it today? Give it a little bit more time. There’ll be another hard moment. It’s just business, right? You ride the waves, highs and lows. The biggest thing for us was when citrus greening disease showed up in Florida in a big way. And that is, it doesn’t affect humans. It’s this bacterial infection just infects the tree.
Yeah.
and it clogs up the main artery of the tree and it’s spread by a little, little psyllid, which is an insect. It bites the leaf and it transmits this disease into the tree. And so the tree then eventually dies, becomes nonproductive. The fruit never gets ripe, hence the term greening, it stays green. So from our standpoint, we were hunkle mats.
Started in June of 1999, 2002, we formed another company for fresh fruit and we began growing a lot of our, we would grow all of our own citrus. So we started our own supply base. We converted over 35 different growers, over 1500 acres. My dad and brother, the agronomist were taking care of all of it. We had our own separate company for caretaking of, you know, our own tractors and mowers and
everything that was needed to take care of the Grove organically. had our own, you know, IP for our farm plan of what really was the right cover crop to grow and what kind of compost and sprays and all that. And we had institutional money lined up to help expand and buy more Groves. 600 acres we owned of the 1500. We had private equity money to help grow our brand. So we had it all lined up to be this perfect long-term juice and fresh fruit.
stalwart and then the little bug shows up and our groves start dying and our production starts going down and growers no longer can make money when they don’t have fruit to produce. And then on the flip side of that, our product doesn’t taste as good. So now I have two problems. have our growers that are, their trees are sick and dying. I have our product that doesn’t taste as good and consumers are complaining.
And I have a big come to Jesus meeting with myself of, this could literally be it. Like, you know, Elizabeth, this is the big one, as Fred Sanford would say, this could be it for my company. have a, we had a lot of debt that would come of that. But we had to pivot and we had to pivot pretty fast. And luckily, our reputation and our integrity.
We were able to find other suppliers in Texas and Mexico that had asked for a long time, know, hey, we know your competitors with us, but if you ever need additional product, we have it. And so we had to start pivoting quickly to bring in from these other locations. And I was the proudest fourth generation Florida citrus grower that you’ve ever met. And it was, you know, on our label all Florida forever. And you’ll never, you’ll see me, you know, wave another flag.
And I had to quickly pivot and realize that this could be the death blow for our company if we don’t change. And so that’s what we did. We developed really a lot more friendships in Texas and California, East coast of Mexico. And now globally, we have other relationships developing in other countries to help with high quality supply. And so that was the biggest is as that then unraveled in Florida.
Today we have three growers left, 75 acres in Florida, and it’s all for research and development to try and find a cure for graining. So a completely different model than what we had up until 2015. So up until 2015, everything that went into Uncle Matt’s, I had a hand on and we grew it and we had control of it and we had to pivot. And the whole industry in Florida has to pivot even.
Florida’s Natural, the largest co-op, is now product of other locations because they suffered the same fate as we did. So that was the biggest moment of almost death and destruction and defeat. But a lot of prayer, you know, the little slogan is, pray and do not lose hope. And that’s what I live by, and I’m a living proof of it. I’m always hopeful. So there you go.
Pray and do not lose hope. I'm always hopeful. Share on X
Well, I love that. Thank you for sharing. It reminds me of something Zig used to say, be firm on principle and flexible on method. you know, sometimes that pivot, you just have to see things a little differently, but on your other eyeglasses and put on those rose colored glasses and see if you can find a rose somewhere. Sounds like you did that. So awesome.
There you go. Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. We did. Yep.
Okay. What about a warp speed moment? Things are going pretty good. And then all of a sudden, my gosh, we’ve, we’ve unbelievably grown the company. you have a moment like that.
Yeah, you know, we got to a point where we we sold the company. So we got to 2017 and as a family decided we were going to get our minority partner out the private equity group. It was time for them to exit. And when we started looking at the opportunities, really nobody wanted to just replace a minority investor. They wanted to buy the company. And so we kind of weighed the options of, hmm, OK, take on a lot of debt.
Or is it a good time to exit and we just come through the citrus green debacle and boy, that was a scary time. So we decided to exit. My wife and I stayed on with Dean Foods. They were the largest dairy company in the US, a dairy conglomerate. $8 billion with a B. What do they have? 70,000 employees, 60 or 70 plus plants, 6,000 trucks every day. DSD milk is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere.
And I stayed on my wife and I to help continue to run the company, be a good steward of the brand. And in November of 2019, they filed bankruptcy. I would have never ever guessed that company that large, that big, that strong, they had too much debt and dairy was dying. Plant-based milks were rising. They were just on the, they couldn’t close their plants fast enough. Capacity was gone and they went bankrupt. And so I’m sitting there at the beginning of the pandemic going, Ooh.
maybe I should buy this back. And then at the same time, like, do I, that’s kind of a crazy idea because the country is like in turmoil, the globe’s in turmoil. Maybe, maybe that’s not the right thing to do. But we decided, you know, a lot of good prayer on it. And, you know, no, I really still love uncle Matt’s. It’s my passion and I got a chance to buy back. So let’s go buy a pack. And so that’s what we did. And then from there, since, you know,
June of 2020, here we are 2024 and we’ve way more than doubled the business. We’ve had some real hyper growth. You know, the pandemic pivoted a lot of people back to just health and wellness. What am I putting in my body? Vitamin C was really big, C, D and zinc were huge, you know, kind of the natural supplementation to fight COVID and stay healthy.
We introduced a new product right as soon as I bought it back, we quickly pivoted and brought out a product called Ultiman Immune. We took orange juice. We added elderberry, which is known to fight colds and flus. And then we boosted it to 300 % vitamin C with acerola, the high antioxidant fruit, and boosted the D and the zinc. And so we kind of had our own little covenator in a bottle and it tastes fantastic. And so that had rapid growth.
Today, it’s still one of our top selling items, even though the pandemic is long gone because it’s just a good, tasting beverage with health and wellness. So that would be my interesting rocket ship time. There were many other times where, you know, like when Publix came on or Kroger or Whole Foods where you got that great jolt of a thousand to two thousand new doors, but, know, the pandemic story and buying it back and then, you know, having to rehire your team and.
all of the unknowns around the pandemic, but then it really rewarded our risk because we’ve done a great job with the new team.
What a great case study in entrepreneurship. I’m presuming you told here you bought somewhere south of that.
Bought at bankruptcy. Yeah, bought out of bankruptcy price for basically the cost of the assets, the juice that was on an inventory. More than doubled, or a good bit more than double the company. So we’re in a good spot. And now we’re self manufacturing. So as of a year ago, we copacked for the whole life of me. We had copackers around the, you know, up and down the East coast in the Midwest that we would send our juice to.
and then doubled the company.
and our formulas and they would bottle for us and then we would sell it. So, you now we’re at the position where we have brought it all internal. We’re in control of all of our own quality. We have our own facility where we bottle with new state of the art equipment, which allows us to be much more nimble and creative and innovative and has led us even into the path of doing organic, cold chain, fresh brewed tea, which is fun. And so we’re
throwing our hat in a couple different rings to just to see why we have that competitive advantage of being in Texas in the middle of the country and doing our own thing. Are there some other things that our brand could, other places and spaces that we could play in?
think you just like being David. Okay. I think you just like it. Yeah. I’m going to T. There’s only a couple little guys in T. Yeah. So love that.
You made me write. Yeah. Maybe I just like to be challenged, right? think you probably, you may have hit on something there.
It could be, and you know, in a way, I mean, the thought that’s running through my head is Matt’s the Steve Jobs of citrus, you know?
I don’t know about that. That’s a really, he’s a whole lot more successful than I am for sure.
No!
Well, forget the zeros maybe, but you know, sold most Apple had to buy it back, you know, and so, so I
True, yep, yep. It’s a fun comparison, yes. I totally get the business. Correct, yes.
There’s a parallel. I’m just saying there’s a parallel. Okay. Probably toughest question I’m going to ask. No, no, the toughest question. I’m going put you in a time machine. I’m send you all the way back to 20 year old Matt, who’s probably a sophomore at the University of Florida. You get about 60 seconds to share something you know now you didn’t know then, but would have been positive for you to know then.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Okay. That you’ve learned on your entrepreneurial and your proven entrepreneurial path. Okay. So they’re set up, can send you back 20 year old Matt, you get about 60 seconds. You’re in the time machine. Matt, meet Matt. What do you got?
Yeah.
So let’s see, probably, no, undoubtedly would say, marry your wife sooner. Don’t take three years to date and marry the woman of your dreams that is your complete perfect match and business partner in life. Couldn’t have done it any better. Should have done it sooner.
I love that. You may or may not know this. I wrote a book five or six years ago titled, Romancing Your Customer. And it parallels the customer journey to the romantic journey. And all the time I have people saying, would you write it the other way? Now come out with the sequel to Romancing Your Spouse, Life Partner, whatever, and turn it around. Because I think many times non-entrepreneurs
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
view entrepreneurs and say, well, they’re, they’re all about the money. They’re all about business. And I’m not saying that there’s not a piece of that, but truthfully, we’re all people first and family members second, and we’re business owners third. And, and that’s almost universal. And I’m fortunate to have clients all over the globe and it doesn’t make any difference if it’s in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, or Lahore, Pakistan.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yep.
Well, no.
That’s still the deal. We’re people first, family members second, and then we’re business owners third. So Matt, how can we as the proven entrepreneur tribe, how can we reach you? How can we support you? Is there anything we can do for you?
Yep. Agreed.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so if what you heard today compels you, which I hope it would do, you can go to Matt or you can go to Uncle Matt’s dot com, W W Uncle Matt’s dot com. Click on our product locator page and enter your zip code and you will find a retailer near you that has our products. Go to that store and buy it and let me know how you how you like it. And hopefully if you do tell a friend, that’s the best way to help us is.
Abide and tell a friend about it.
Awesome. don’t you also have a, you have the retail distribution model, but I think you have a subscription model also, yes?
We do. So if you go there and you don’t find a store locally that carries what you want, you can order us online and it’ll go directly to you as well. It’s going to be more expensive because it’s perishable overnight. So we always say if you can find it local, get it there. But yes, we also have a subscription model. We can ship to anywhere in the U.S. to get it to you. And some of those items like our little two ounce shots or our juice boxes aren’t near as prolific.
out there in the marketplace as our 52 ounce orange shoes. we have a lot of different items and I would encourage you to go on, shop around, take a look. We’ll have some Black Friday sales coming up and then holiday sales as well.
love that. And that’s a couple of great examples of romancing your customer. One, Matt’s romancing his retail distribution points. Hey, if you can find it there, go buy it there. Okay. And then romancing the end user. Hey, if you can’t buy it there, we can deliver it overnight. It’s perishable. It’s very, very high quality product. Costs a little more, but you know, people will pay for quality. And so love those examples. Matt.
Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Such a pleasure for me to have you on the show today. I’m grateful.
Thank you, Don. Yeah, likewise, I always enjoy meeting people that have the same kind of passion that I do. And I can tell you have that for helping entrepreneurs. And the small business is the engine of America. And so keep helping that small engine grow.
I agree of America and literally the world. When our economy is strong, other economies are strong. And when we catch a cold, and sometimes people don’t realize this, but when we catch a cold economically, other countries sometimes catch pneumonia. And right or wrong, it’s just the way it is. So I’m so grateful.
Correct. Correct.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, absolutely.
Correct.
And so folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Go to unclemats.com, find a store, drink some good organic citrus juice. If you can’t find it, just go to the website and order it.
Correct. Don, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.
Okay.
Thank you and we’ll see you guys next time on the next episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.

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Title: E112 | From Family Business to Career Success: Stephen Shortt’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: December 2, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-family-business-to-career-success-stephen-shortts-entrepreneurial-journey/
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Content:
In this insightful episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes you all. Dive into an inspiring entrepreneurial journey with Stephen Shortt, a Dublin-based business leader who’s redefining career guidance and family business dynamics. In this captivating episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, Stephen shares his unique path from growing up in a family of trailblazing entrepreneurs to building his own successful businesses focused on helping people find fulfilling careers.
Discover how Stephen transformed family business challenges into a mission of making workplaces happier, using psychometric assessments to match people with their ideal career paths. From selling comic books in school to running international businesses, Stephen’s story is a testament to the power of self-awareness, honest communication, and breaking traditional career boundaries.
Key highlights include:

The rare experience of having two entrepreneurial parents
Navigating family business succession with grace and strategy
The importance of understanding yourself before charting your career path
Overcoming conflict-avoidance to create more meaningful professional relationships

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business leader, or someone seeking greater career satisfaction, this episode offers invaluable insights into personal growth, business strategy, and the art of finding your true professional calling.
Tune in and get ready to be inspired by Stephen Shortt’s remarkable entrepreneurial wisdom!
For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Proven Entrepreneur Show for more success stories, actionable strategies, and the best of entrepreneurial wisdom!
Watch the episode here

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From Family Business to Career Success: Stephen Shortt’s Entrepreneurial Journey
 
Hey, it’s Don Williams with The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have one of my dear friends from way over the pond today. Stephen and I have graced multiple stages. He as prime attraction and me as support. And he needs a lot of support. Please welcome to the show, Stephen Short.
Don, thank you so much for having me. But I think the biggest thing when we were doing the double act was the two of us looking at each other going, surely in each double act is supposed to be the straight guy and the guy who can’t take anything seriously. And the two of us looking at each other going, who’s who?
Yeah, well, I totally agree. And it was obvious from the both ends, the beginning and the end of the end that there’s not a straight man between the two of us. so it was a barrel of fun. And I look back on that with fond memories. Now, Steven, from your accent, we know that you are not from East Texas.
Mm-hmm.
Tell us where you live, tell us what your business is, tell us what you do in your business, tell us who you do that with.
Wow, there’s a lot going on there. So yes, not from East Texas. I’m from Dublin in Ireland, which is the center of the known universe. Now, I know, I mean, I’m not from East Texas. The first time that you and I, think, met each other properly. I was telling you that I just spent time with some people from Dallas and you were telling me that Dallas was a suburb of Fort Worth. So that was my introduction.
to what East Texas is like. So that was fun time. I’m in Dublin, Ireland. I have grown up in two family businesses, bought both of them, sold one just before COVID. Now what we focus on is career guidance and selection using personality profiles and psychometric assessments to help companies to find the right people to hiring the right candidates. And I and all of the different businesses that we’re involved in,
Yeah, yeah.
are on a mission to make the world a better place with happy people in fulfilling rewarding careers.
I love that the world can use more happy and people fulfilled by what they do and life is way too short to do something that leaves you less than fulfilled.
Mm-hmm.
So for just on that point, so the statistics show that there’s about 60 % of your waking time. So we sleep, everybody sleeps during the night normally, but 60 % of your waking time is thought is either at work or thinking about work. And for entrepreneurs, that’s even higher because we never switch off. So if you’re not enjoying your time, you’re spending the majority of your time not happy. And to me,
That’s a terrible place to be. So what we want to do is to help people to get themselves on the right track.
think it’s a tragedy. Life is way too short to be unhappy. you know, Zig used to say, you can have everything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want in life. The principle being that it’s hard to be happy if you chase your happiness, but it’s pretty easy if you help other people get theirs. so, yeah, so love that. you know, you probably know this, you know, my mission is to help others who help others.
You can have everything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want in life. Share on X
Mm-hmm.
Well, I like that. Anyhow.
Mm-hmm.
And I love helping, people who help others, it’s just a much bigger ripple. And that makes me happy. So I’m going to take you all the way back to little Stephen. So age five to 15. That’s pretty big age range. But in your home, the house that you were raised in, was there an adult who set an entrepreneurial example for you?
Okay.
Did you have an entrepreneur in the house?
So had two. my father was born youngest son of six, a police officer and a stay at home mom. And my mother was the eldest of three girls on a farm in the North of Ireland. So she was destined to be a nun, but that didn’t like the, the eldest child was always sent off to the nunnery. She didn’t do that. She became a teacher.
My father wanted to do different things, but ended up being a teacher as well. They met. Then my father has quite the, adventurous streak in him. So in the sixties and seventies, he was in Saudi Arabia in the middle East, from Ireland, from a little back town in, in, in Ireland. So like lots of breaking of ceilings and all the rest of it and doing things that are completely off the beaten track, went and became a psychologist and occupational psychologist. Then my
mother and he went out to Saudi Arabia in the seventies. He worked for a couple of engineering companies in HR and selection using psychometrics and personality profiling. That’s how we’ve developed all of these things. My sister and I were both born in Saudi Arabia. We drove home when I was about five. So about the age that you were talking about. And we had the from five.
to 10, I’d say we just had the one business, which is the current business that we have. Well, I’m pivoting that business, but it was the psychometrics, the career guidance and the selection, things like that. Then when I was about 11, 12, we set up an English language school in ESL school in Dublin. And that’s where I focused most of my time from 15 onwards until we sold it until I sold it in 2019, the end of 2019, just before COVID. But growing up,
I think I have gotten an immense amount from both of my parents. have the traits of my father, traits of my mother, whether you want to call them positive, negative or whatever, have sometimes they’re, they’re counterbalanced. And I think that I’ve gotten an immense amount of mentorship, teachings, learnings and everything else from, from both of my folks who were both real trail, trailblazing international entrepreneurs.
Love that. And I’ll share this with you. I think we’ve done 130 episodes of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. The vast majority of entrepreneurs that we’ve interviewed did not have an entrepreneurial example in their home. And you may be the only one that had two so far.
Congratulations.
So that’s how useless I am that I needed two people pushing me to be an entrepreneur to try and make up for the lack of anything that I had in me. Okay, fantastic. Thanks Don, thanks.
Well…
Well, no, I think it probably provided you a double shot of balance because, know, entrepreneurship, as you know, you know, there, it’s a little bit like that Clint Eastwood movie, the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, it’s not all good. It’s not all bad. And there is generally some ugly somewhere, but we’re all learning anyway. Yeah. Life is an experiment and entrepreneurship is just a grand experiment. So.
Mm.
Yeah, it’s usually in the finances, but okay.
So what’s really interesting for me when I look at my folks, my father, as I said, like traveling out to the in college and doing it, gone out to the Middle East. we almost moved to America instead of coming home from the Middle East in the early 80s because there like there was so many opportunities and everything else. But we ended up coming back home to Dublin instead. But my mother is much more cautious, much more risk averse, much more
kind of down to earth. I had that really interesting balance of, of, I’m not going to say push pull because they were, they’re completely in unison and they’re really like, work incredibly well together. They sweet. So I nearly left the family business. I, there was a time when I was really struggling to, to get alignment and thought that, we’re arguing over everything, what we should be doing, the products, the services, the itinerary, everything that we were doing.
And I sat down one day at home and I said out loud for the first time, I need to leave the family business or my parents will never see their grandkids because we won’t be able to be in the same room as you did it. Cause we were really killing each other in arguments. And as soon as I said that every fiber in my body viscerally reacted and I said, okay, that’s definitely not what I wanted. And that’s when I started to figure out this thing of successful succession and how I figured out this framework. Now we all live in the same house. we, we,
My wife and I sold our, our home. moved, we renovated my family home. So my parents live downstairs. We live upstairs. The house is all interconnected with two entrances. have their own living room, kitchen, bedroom, the whole lot. So the dog is up and down and the kids are up and down. Like my daughters are up and down. but they’re completely independent, but we still have like Christmas dinner in our house at the same kitchen table that I sat down in my old house and said, I need to leave the family business. So we’re now 15 years later.
not only still working happily together, but now all living together as well.
Wow, I love that. And maybe there’s a business there on teaching families how to get along in a business. Because it can be a challenge for sure, just the husband-wife thing, where they work in the same company. And it’s interesting how ops that’s tracked to where you get somebody who is a risk taker and somebody who is
Well, that’s what I do.
Hmm.
So how did I hear that explained? Go, go, go. And whoa, whoa, whoa. And so to put them at the same kitchen table, that can make some interesting conversations for sure.
I like that. I like that.
Well, is so, I mean, I work with a lot of family businesses on succession planning. I don’t do the tax or the legal side of things because that’s different from place to place, but I do the interpersonal side of things. And if for me it is, it’s really powerful when you know that the kitchen table and the boardroom table are the same piece of furniture. And then how do you navigate all of that when you’ve got parents who’ve built the business in a lot of cases and the younger generation that
want to do things and then how does that risk, does the risk profile changes as we get older and everything else. So there’s a huge amount of self-reflection and help that people need when they’re navigating that because it can be, I’ve seen it go horribly, horribly wrong, which is heartbreaking.
absolutely. You know, in the big scheme of things, family business. And sometimes that gets sideways. So let me ask you as a young man, as a child in your parents’ home, did you ever have a job, like a job, a J-O-B outside of the family business?
loads of stuff. when I was in. I don’t actually know. It’s probably less than middle school when I was about eight or nine years old. So because we had the family business, we used to make catalogs of the books and assessments that we used to sell. So we had a massive industrial strength photocopier and printer. So I used to draw cartoons and comic books and I would photocopy them on the.
printer in the office and I would sell them in school. So I would probably say I would draw the comics and I would sell them in school for about five cents, five cents or something like that. Those days have probably cost about seventy five cents per photocopy. So but I didn’t have to pay for it at the time. And my grasp on unit economics has gotten a little bit better since then. But so I’ve always been kind of doing stuff like that.
when I like I was the one who was organizing all of the the winter social and the Valentine’s ball and all this kind of stuff in school. And I used to because in Ireland, it’s 18 is the legal drinking age as opposed to 21. So we were 16, 17 when we were at that age of going out and partying. So I I had this really weird thing on my printer where sometimes the dates of birth that the years would get jumbled up a little bit and it would
make people appear to be a little bit older than they were back in the day. so I used to sell tickets and IDs. so I’ve done, events. worked for Heineken for running their events in university for a year. I was, I had a couple of different sidelines and different training programs, different bits and pieces. I did work like gainfully employed by somebody else.
Huh.
think it might have been like two weekends and then just didn’t do well with the sense of authority and having to do something on somebody else’s decision. But I’ve done a couple of things like I tend, I tried my hand at a couple of things and tried to have a bit of fun.
You
Yeah, I love that. I have a friend whose great grandfather started a construction company, big construction company here in the US. And they’re probably in their fourth.
I won’t say generation because there were brothers that had a big age range and so senior passed it to his younger brother. But very interesting to watch them because they’ve gone through several generations now, different leaders. But one of the requirements was that when you graduate college or university, you have to go to work in the field.
Mm-hmm.
for somebody else. And I think it’s five years.
So there are a lot of family businesses that have this you either come in as low as you possibly can, which is what I did. I started as low as I possibly could. Not by choice. It was my parents choice at the time. thought, know marketing. I can be the marketing director. It’s like, no, you can’t clean the door.
Ha ha ha!
But there are a lot of family businesses that do that the five years. you want to commit, if you want to join the family business, you have to go prove yourself somewhere else. And then you can get a job at the same level as whatever you get yourself to in the other business. And then you come in. So this is what I recommend to family businesses. They get put people in either once they’re outside or they come in as low as possible. Because as a family business member, you are going to get probably more mentorship and more attention than a normal employee does, but you still have to.
earn your rights, you’ve still got to put in that sweat.
Yeah, I love that. So…
Talk to me about a hard lesson as you look back over your career, something that happened that is, ugh, it hurts, I don’t like it. But maybe now, in retrospect, turns out that it was a huge positive, but at the moment it was disheartening to say the least. Do you have a hard moment you can share with us?
So the first thing that came into my mind when you were talking about that is actually not, I still to this day, well, I’ve improved since then about this. So I’ve always been very conflict diverse. I’ve grown up quite conflict diverse. I just want everyone to get along and I like connecting people and like motivating people. And what I found more often than not, because most of the time, like we’re all entrepreneurs, we deal with people. It’s a people to people world. I used to joke that
the English language business would be great if it wasn’t for the students, the teachers, the host family, like it was for all the customers. It’d be a brilliant business. But invariably when I had difficult times, it was because I didn’t deal with the situation, especially a people situation head on quick enough. And it festered or it moved on or it, it morphed into something even worse than it possibly was because it was allowed to sit and fester. So really, and I, have
I still am very conflict diverse, but especially over the last 10 years, I suppose, or maybe less than 10 years. I’ve gotten more comfortable with having those. Somebody reframed them for me, actually. They’re not difficult conversations. They’re honest conversations, because if you’re just talking about from your honesty, and this is look, this is my perception. That is all that it can be. And if even if that conversation, so I’ve done a lot of workshops on the crucial conversations that
very popular in the circles and having that. even if the two stories of the two perspectives, if they don’t align, okay, well then we’re going this way. Maybe it’s time for you to go that way. And that’s completely okay. 10 years ago, that would have completely thrown me for a loop. Now I think I’m more centered, more secure, more confident in what I’m bringing to the table, without being arrogant, I hope.
so I think that’s probably the biggest learning that I’ve had is dealing with stuff head on as soon as possible before it gets worse.
I love that. I’m a firm believer that avoidance is not a strategy. If there’s an issue, it’s best to deal with it now. It will not get better. It will only devolve. It will not evolve. So love that. Okay. Tell me about a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty good in your business or businesses. And then you do one thing or two things. You make a hire and all of a sudden it’s like, Whoa.
Avoidance is not a strategy. If there's an issue, it's best to deal with it now. Share on X
We were doing pretty good, but now we’re really doing good. Do you have a moment like that?
So, well, yeah, the beginning of this year. So when I took over this business, then focusing properly on it when I sold the other business was 2020. And then, as you know, couple of things happened in the world in 2020. So we rebuilt our career guidance program. So we have a career guidance program where anybody can come on and do an assessment and we will tell you what are the top 16 careers for you based on your unique mix of interests and abilities.
March?
When we were building that, we built it with Irish schools in mind and selling to Irish schools, for them to be able to use it with their students and to be able for teachers to be able to, to manage their whole class. schools, I’m guessing it’s the same everywhere, but schools, because they have as well, annual cycles before they add changes to their curriculum and everything else. my goodness, but it is a painful process to go and get anything into a school. And.
When I took over the business in 2020, we had two and a half staff members, two full-time and one part-time staff member. We’re now nine full-time staff members dealing with this, but we’re taking on very specific roles of a direct salesperson or a person who’s exclusively looking after the sales of our selection business or the career guidance business or whatever. And when we started actually carving out
responsibilities and roles and putting systems in place for the salespeople rather than me and my COO trying to do what we were doing and trying to do the other stuff and trying to keep that customer happy. Plus also doing all of the administration stuff. As soon as we created just that space for somebody who has the capacity and the awareness and the readiness and the enthusiasm to build it. I think we, we did.
Before the summer this year, we did 150 % of what we did in the entire year last year, the year before, or something like that. was like, as soon as we stopped being the bottleneck of having to try and fit in everything together, it started to take off and we’re rising and rising, which is brilliant.
The bottleneck is by definition always at the top. Share on X
Isn’t it interesting that the bottleneck is by definition always at the top? Yeah, every time. And the other lesson that I seem to continually learn is it’s the who. It’s not the what, it’s the who.
Yep.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, was it Dan Sullivan, the who, not how book, which I thought was really interesting as I was really, great way of looking at it.
Yeah.
and doves tails right in with your business, you know, the who. So, okay, what about, what about a nugget? A piece of wisdom that you hold near and dear to your heart that you’re like, man, when I learned that, that was so good for
Yeah.
Well, I don’t know if it was a, it was a one piece of nugget stuff, but I mean, we do psychometrics, we work with personality profiles, we are developing our own personality profile. We work with a number of publishers around the world. And one thing that I’ve, because I’ve grown up with a psychologist as a father, I’ve always been doing these assessments to see like what kind of careers or what kind of outcome I get. And I think a lot of people in EO, which is how you and I know each other, very interested in this kind of personal development stuff.
But the thing that always strikes me is until we know really ourselves, we’ve no idea how to get to where we want to go. the any map will any map is this is where you want to get to, but you also need to know where you’re starting from. So understanding who you are, what your strengths are, what your values are, what you actually want out of life. That gives you such an immense amount of self-awareness to be able to go, okay.
That’s where I want to go, but I can’t go that way. I’ve got to go this way or I’ve got to go around this way. Or maybe that’s not what I want anymore. That’s what other people told me I wanted. Actually, what I want is over here. So I think having that self awareness and understanding from doing a little bit of work on values, on core purpose, on what makes you happy, all the rest of it gives you an immense amount of internal knowledge to know where you’re going.
I love that. Okay, toughest question I’m going to ask you. I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m to take you all the way back and you’re going to get to meet 20 year old Stephen. And you’re going to get about 60 seconds to share some sage advice that you know now that you wish you knew then. And so into the time machine you go, my brother, all the way back. Here’s Stephen.
What’s my pin number?
What are you telling?
I’m going to give you a very flippant answer first because that’s how we operate with each other. And I’m going to say, buy all the Bitcoin. Just Bitcoin. Just remember Bitcoin. That’s all you need. Funny enough, when we sold our language school, the 6th of December, 2019 was the day we sold the school, the final day. And that was the day that COVID was officially confirmed by the people in Wuhan. I was accused
Good point, good point.
Yeah, Apple.
by lot of people are going, you knew what was coming. said, if I knew what was coming, I would have bought both gold, Bitcoin, Pfizer stock and PPE. Like, no, I didn’t know what was coming.
If I went back into a time machine, in all honesty, I don’t think I would tell myself anything. and the reason is, and this is, it’s, I have been having this conversation recently because somebody said to me, somebody gave me this quote recently, which is the definition of hell is on your last day on earth, the person you become will meet the person you could have become.
And they were using this as a motivator, like, don’t you always want to be like pushing and pushing and pushing? Where I look at that, I look at that in a slightly different way. My wife has always said that if it wasn’t for her and the girls, I’d probably be out there living the high life, like private jets flying all over the place, doing deals and X, Y, and Z doing this, that and the other, and just living the high life.
If on the last day on earth that I’ve been fortunate enough to have in my view, a very comfortable, very fortunate, very privileged life with a fabulous wife, fabulous kids and have that life. If on my last day I get offered, you know what, you could have been this high flyer and all the rest of it and private jets and yachts and all the rest of it. I hope.
Right now I believe it, but I hope that I would not want to trade that for who I could have been. So who you could have been is not necessarily a better person. So if I make any changes in the past, there’s a possibility I don’t meet my wife, there’s a possibility my kids aren’t poor, all that kind of stuff. I’m not going to tell myself anything. Other than buy Bitcoin, I might tell myself to buy Bitcoin. Just a little bit.
I love-
Well, I so love that. And like I said, I’ve done about 130 of these and that’s, I think, the best answer I’ve heard to that question. And we do know each other through EO and the emphasis there is typically business, family, personal. And though I love EO, doesn’t mean I blindly agree with everything I’ve…
Mm-hmm.
learned there and to me it’s actually personal family business is the priority. Pardon? Me too!
Do want to know a secret, Don? That’s how I do my updates every month. Me, family, friends, business.
Yeah, me too. I’m like, you know, and, and a lot of the mothers and some of the fathers would be, no, it’s the family first. I’m like, I get it. But if you’re empty, you can’t fill other people. And so it has to start with self and then family. then, you know, give somebody in your family a horrible illness and a person’s priorities, you know, get.
Mm-hmm.
straightened out pretty quick. They’re like, that business is not everything.
You, you know, Warren Ruston, right? You’ve, come across Warren in this song. Yeah. I was, I had the privilege of meeting him on a regional leadership academy. I’ve, did the global leadership academy as well, but on the regional leadership academy, he, whatever it is, I don’t know if you’ve been on some of these, so you just know how, when you’re in that space, how you’re ready to receive stuff that you might’ve heard before, but it just hits differently when you’re in that connected space. And I had come.
Sure.
to the retreat. And I had this issue that was burning in my head and I was going right when I’m back, that’s it. I’m going to get rid of that person and they’re gone. They’re dead. Blah, blah, blah, And whatever magic that Warren had woven through that long weekend while we were there, he hit with this line, which is lift where you stand. So I think it’s from an American pastor. think it’s a, it’s a well-known phrase in the States, but it’s lift where you stand instead of.
Lift where you stand instead of waiting until you get to the top of the hill to be able to turn around and help people. Share on X
waiting until you get to the top of the hill to be able to turn around and help people wherever you’re standing, turn around, see what you can see, you can help lift them up and then move on to the next thing. And it resonated so deeply within me. It’s one of only two phrases that’s on my vision board. Both the other phrase was from GLA as it happened. the real those those phrases have really resonated with me for the years. But it’s this sense of lift where you stand.
I can help other people. can’t help everyone. I can try and help who’s around me. And then I need to move on to the next thing to see where I’m going so then I can help more people.
I love that. I too met, Stephen and I know through, we, no, we don’t know each other. We met through an organization called Entrepreneurs Organization, which is global. I actually think I met you in Dublin the first time.
in Dublin, yeah, you were traveling with your wife and you were speaking to the chapter there.
Yeah, my wife fits right in. She’s a redhead and Ireland somehow seems to be the birthplace of all redheads. At the airport in Dublin, I was like, you’re not going to be that easy to find here. she was really easy to find in China. She was the only redhead in the country. But we do know each other through EO and I attended regional leadership academy and had the opportunity to chair.
Co-chair one and attended Global Leadership Academy and some of the best leadership training available on this planet. I don’t know about on other planets, but certainly some of the best available here. And so enjoyed that. So Stephen, if somebody in the audience wanted to reach out to you and learn more about psychometric testing.
and putting the right people in the right spots and hiring people to where they’re going to be fulfilled in their career life, how would they reach out to you?
So the easiest thing is probably just stevenshort.com. It’s currently under renovation, but I just think I’m gonna go on to that now before this podcast goes live. And even if it’s still under renovation, I’ll make sure there’s a link to my LinkedIn or something like that to get in touch if people want.
Awesome, I love that. And for those of you that are listening and not watching, know that Short is 2Ts. Steven Short with 2Ts.
Yeah. But so it’s S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S-H-O-R-T-T. But actually, because I’m such a bit of a domain junkie, S-T-E-V-E-N-S-H-O-R-T-T, S-T-E-V-E-N-S-H-O-R-T, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S-H-O-R-T, all the dot coms will still lead to that. it’s one of the joy of having a slightly unusual name that I could get this before anybody else did.
spoken like a domain genius. I, on the other hand, have the other issue, Don Williams. I know six of us, only two of whom I’m related to, and one was a country western music superstar, and I’m never going to knock him off SEO. It’s never going to happen. But such is life.
Okay, well, Stephen, thank you so very much. It’s been my distinct honor and pleasure to have you on the show. I look forward to gracing a stage with you somewhere, and I promise I will still be vying with you for the funny man part. And thank you so very much.
Pleasure, thanks so much for having me Don.
And that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.

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Title: E111 | Customer Care & Corporate Evolution: A Fort Worth Tech Success Story by Brian Rodgers
Date: November 21, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/customer-care-corporate-evolution-fort-worth-tech-success-story-by-brian-rodgers/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/podcast-thumb-2011-scaled.jpg
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Content:
In this electrifying episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Brian Rodgers, the visionary founder of Aeko Technologies, to unpack a remarkable entrepreneurial story that proves success knows no age limit. 
At 41, Brian made the bold leap from corporate IT director to entrepreneur, transforming his passion for serving people through technology into a thriving managed IT services company. Listen as Brian shares his raw, unfiltered journey of:

Breaking free from soul-sucking corporate environments
Turning a borrowed office space into a growing tech business
Navigating the challenges of the 2020 pandemic
Learning critical lessons about customer communication and team leadership
Overcoming self-doubt and embracing personal strengths

Dive into a conversation that’s part business strategy, part personal development, and entirely inspiring. Brian’s story is a testament to the power of purpose-driven entrepreneurship and the importance of believing in yourself – no matter your age or background.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or someone seeking motivation, this episode offers invaluable insights into building a successful business with heart and purpose.
Don’t miss this powerful conversation that will challenge your assumptions and ignite your entrepreneurial spirit!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/E110-Building-Successful-Teams-with-Diverse-Skills-Ensuring-Every-Party-Wins-in-a-Transaction.mp3
 
Customer Care & Corporate Evolution: A Fort Worth Tech Success Story by Brian Rodgers
 
 Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I am so excited for our guests today. One, very good friend of mine. Two, client. Three, super entrepreneur. Welcome to the show, Brian Rodgers. 
Thanks Don, appreciate being here. 
man, we’re thrilled to have you today. And so you are close friend. And so we’re both in the Fort Worth, Texas area. You’re kind of south and I’m kind of north, but Fort Worth is somewhere in between us. And you’re wearing purple today and you wear purple a lot. Why do you wear purple, Brian?
Proud Horned Frog alumnus from TCU. And I’m so proud that it became my company colors and went from there. 
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, awesome. so tell us the name of your company and what you do.
So name of the company is Aeko Technologies. Aeko is the Hawaiian word for eagle. And it came out of me talking to my young kids whose school mascot was the eagles at the time. And we were trying to find a name for what was a techie company. I said, I need something that sounds techie. And they went through Google Translate and found it. And it’s actually worked out really well. We are an IT managed services provider. 
Where essentially, to summarize it, we act as the IT department for small and medium-sized businesses. We take, I come out of the corporate IT world, recognizing that there’s a need to bring some of those standards and those norms to the small business space and Aeko was formed. 
Yeah, awesome. And so how long have you owned Aeko Technologies?
So I started Aeko in October of 2016. I started it from scratch. It was me sitting in an office that was borrowed from an attorney friend of mine who had a spare place for me to sit. In May of 2017, I was able to acquire a local competitor. And that’s when I was really able to kind of bring on certainly revenue, staff, and things like that to really kind of get going. 
Yeah. So basically grew the company primarily through acquisition or significantly, maybe better said. Yeah. One big jump. Awesome. And, and started out in 16. So you were a ripe four years old when we had that pandemic, stay at home, don’t go see people thing for about a year or so. And, I’m sure that was somewhat challenging in your business.
Mm-hmm. One big jump to be sure.
huh.
Was yeah, I was I was actually out skiing when the toilet paper shortage of 2020 began We were up in the mountains and On the drive back on that saturday is when all the this discussion of what was going to be happening? With the state getting shut down and everybody having to stay home was going on and I had been keeping in touch with my staff and That sunday I went ahead and said before
Actually, the decree came out. said, guys, we’re going to execute our business continuity plan. Go ahead and stay home. And of course, we have a business continuity plan. was like, yeah, you know those Fridays that I sent you home to go work? That was to kind of verify that we could do this. And my team killed it. Our workload went up 300 % for the next few weeks. Our ticket load just exploded. And if we looked at our static ticket load, you
We have tickets that will cross over from day sometimes because we’re waiting to hear from vendors, waiting to hear back from the client, things like that. Even with a 300 % ticket increase, our static load only increased by 50%. So they worked really well. Our business continuity plan worked. And yeah, it was quite a rush for a while.
Sounds like you are taking care of your customers in challenging times. And around here, we call that romancing the customer. Yeah, so great. So I want to take you all the way back. 
Absolutely.
little Brian so not before five years old not after 18 years old but in in your home I think you’re from El Paso Texas in your home was there an adult who set an entrepreneurial example when you were a child 
I am.
Yeah, it was an interesting path actually. So my dad was a firefighter in El Paso. I don’t know how many firefighters you know, but the schedule really lends itself for them to have something else. And my grandfather was starting a propane business with two of his friends, so three older gentlemen that needed a strong back. And so they brought my dad in as…
really kind of if you think about it was really dismissive he was really just there to be the strong back. I the name of the business was DGNF it was Davila Glover and Flores no Rodgers and he was there I mean he was just there to be the grunt and over the years he ended up being the last man standing they you know for various reasons were buying out each of the partners and the one owner who didn’t have his name on the sign or his initial on the side was the one that 
survived and along the way my mom became part of it they made a great business tandem because you had my dad as the visionary go go go kind of person and my mom kind of doing the back office saying whoa whoa whoa and and doing that kind of complementary stuff from a from a business standpoint and it worked really well that was where I had my first real job was working there also starting at the bottom digging ditches
mounting propane tanks, know, doing those kinds of things. So yeah, very much had a very entrepreneurial upbringing.
Man, I love how you put that. One partner, and of course they were partners in life and in business and everything, but one partner, go, go, go. And the other partner, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, I love that. And even though, you know, I poke a little fun at that, it’s actually, as we know, a pretty high performing model for successful entrepreneurial companies, where you have the visionary, 
LOL
who sees the big picture, sees the horizon, sees things that maybe aren’t on the horizon, but they imagine or could be out there. Yeah. And has typically a pretty good case of, shiny, I’m going to chase that. And then the implementer or the person whose trains run on time and things make sense. And that’s a really…
other side.
pretty high performance model and entrepreneurship. And many times you see even in, like with your folks’ where it’s one of those ironies of life that opposites attract. And probably a good thing, just saying. So your first job, you were working at the propane company and now you are the strong back.
Hmm hmm.
Right.
Uh-huh.
One of, it was, you know, I was, I had a lot that I was learning, not just in the propane world, you know, it’s in El Paso and I was speaking Spanish more than I was English, working in the back areas when we were doing carburetions on buses and fabricating frames for, I was doing all kinds of really wonderful things. Now, finding a leak.
Yeah.
under asphalt that was a hundred foot section of pipe or 50 foot section of pipe, you know, on the hottest day on record in El Paso, those kinds of things were not fun. But, I mean, really by and large, it was a, it was a really great first job to kind of make you appreciate maybe what you want to do and what you don’t want to do.
Yeah, love that. I know that my first paying job, I drove a liquid propane John Deere tractor at Wheat Harvest. And I learned that day what hard work really was and that I did not want to be a farmer. Yeah, I’m not going to be a farmer and I love the outdoors. You know, I like better than being out there, but I’m not going to be out there and do that for sure. So.
huh.
And he did not want to do that.
Okay. What about your first paying job? Maybe it was even a company. It was your own company, but that wasn’t the family business where you stepped out on your own and whatever that might have been.
So I came up here to go to TCU, started out pre-med. It was my organic chemistry professor that convinced me, or class, not the professor himself, but the class that convinced me I was not going to med school. And my degree on that front was psychology. And I bring all this up to say I graduated with my psychology degree, was not wanting to go back and get my master’s, which you have to do in psychology to get a job.
So I got into IT with a psychology degree. My first job was an instructor at New Horizons Computer Learning Center where I was teaching adults how to do Microsoft Office stuff, write web pages, learn how to use email, and then moved on into start doing the more technical stuff where I was teaching them Microsoft classes, to pass their Microsoft exams and get their Microsoft certification. So that was…
That was my first job out of college that was not actually working in the family business.
Awesome. Now, I didn’t know, and I know a lot about you, I didn’t know about the psychology degree thing. Yeah. So I’m just guessing that your bachelor’s in psychology meant you had to find a job in something else. And so that’s how you went into IT. Okay.
Yes.
Absolutely. I was always a nerd. was something that I was not it was not something I was going to major in. It’s not even something that I intended to pursue as a career. The theme for any of that stuff, whether I’m talking about initially wanting to be a doctor, then wanting to get into psychology and interestingly enough into IT, is that I’m not I wanted to be able to bless people and serve people. And so taking care of people as a doctor.
helping people as a psychologist. I realized neither of those were gonna be in my future with what I was willing to do to get there. technology was something that was always a strength for me. It was always something that I did well, whether I was a big nerdy nerd or yes, I was that. But whether I was really wanting to dive into it and make it a lifestyle, which I guess is the distinction. I was not wanting to do that, but I was always…
strong in the area and it was a way that I could bless people and help people out with something that I happen to be very good doing.
Yeah, awesome. Okay, so I know that immediately after that job, you did not start a company or you did not start Aeko. What was your career path?
Yeah, so that opportunity gave me an opportunity to move into what I call doing real IT work, where instead of teaching people to pass exams, actually doing the work. And I got in with a very small energy company. I was the sixth person hired on that oil company. It was a very forward-thinking oil company that wanted IT to be a big part of it.
That company was being bought by a larger S &P 500 energy company here in town. I was terrified that I was going to lose my job with that because you always think this was a $10 billion company at the time on its way up to $16 billion at one point. And I thought for sure they had everything handled in IT. There was no way they were going to need to add me for this little penny any company that was added. 
But as it turns out, they had a really big need in the IT department. And I was unbelievably blessed to be able to make my way up through the ranks, get to be director of IT relatively quickly, and have purview over the entire spectrum of IT. So normally, I had a high figure budget. I had 60 people on staff. I had very substantial, had substantial memes as it went.
And generally when you have those kinds of means, you’re very siloed. You are either an infrastructure person or an endpoint person or a systems person, networking, things like that. And I was able to grow up through that and have purview over the entire spectrum of IT and have management over the entire spectrum of IT within a $16 billion S &P 500 company. So it was an amazing experience from a growth experience and knowledge experience. 
to be able to go through that.
Amazing experience. So, let me put you on the spot. How old were you when you walked through that door from employment to entrepreneurship? 
41 I never actually did the math to look at it. But yeah, I was 41 when that when that shift happened
41?
Yeah.
And, and so I would just say to the audience, regardless of your age, some of the best entrepreneurial companies are not started by what I would call kids. You know, Brian was 41 when he started his journey. think Colonel Sanders was 68 or something. and so, entrepreneurship is for everybody. it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what your age is. If you can. 
Entrepreneurship is for everybody. It doesn't matter what your age is. If you can solve customer problems, maybe you can be an entrepreneur.. Share on X
solve customer problems, maybe you can be an entrepreneur, because that’s what we’re all doing. so I love that. started your company in 2000, just decided, hey, I’m going to be an entrepreneur. 
You know, I found myself in a position needing to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And, you know, I, if, if you’ve had any time in a corporate environment or look at any of the standup jokes about it, people in their companies or watch the office, mean, any, any area you see that universally corporate it people are disliked. and so it’s for, for reasons that are sometimes out of the control of those individuals, but they.
It’s just a, it’s they’re the butt of the jokes. They are disliked. They’ve seen, they’re seen as impediments and none of that was why I got into IT. I did, I got into to help people and I found myself, even though the company was a phenomenal company, I actually had wonderful coworkers. I had an amazing staff. I had all that stuff kind of that was working there. but it was in,
the phrase that was given to me that I realized later, it was soul sucking because I was fighting, was adversarial every step of the way, fighting with VPs, fighting with managers, fighting with end users for things that all I was trying to do was get them along their path to being productive. And that was not an environment that I wanted to step back into. And so I was really looking to figure out, do I get out of IT entirely? I put 20 years into it.
So was not something I was real excited about getting out of, but at the same time, was not, I don’t do IT for the sake of IT, I do it to bless people, and it’s not, I wasn’t given that opportunity to do that in those environments. And it was after that that I learned about the MSP model, where people that are hurting, or people that are scared, people that have needs, invite you in.
you
And you can solve their problems and then you can keep the problems away. And it was just a, it was kind of a big aha moment. And that’s really what opened up the concept of doing it. the company that I ended up ultimately buying in May of 2017 is what I started to try and buy in August of 2016. that deal fell through the first time. I said, forget it. I’m going to start this on my own because I really believe in this model and believe in what I can bring to the table for that.
And then ultimately came back around in May of 2017.
Yeah, love that. So as we look past, look into the past, you have a hard lesson you can share. So something that happened that when it happened you went, ugh, that hurts.
Yeah. So, company that I bought was not perfect. it wouldn’t have been for sale if it were, finding out how imperfect it was, was a, was a shock. And one of the areas, that you will be particularly sensitive to is that they did not romance their customers. having conversations as we’re talking about, you know, if, if Tim calls in with a ticket,
And one of our support guys says, that’s just Tim. I can get to him tomorrow. And my head just exploded. And so really needing to change the culture to have the team recognize that they needed to care about the end user’s problems more than the end user did sometimes. Tim may have been totally fine waiting until the next day. That may have been a true statement. But I didn’t want that to be the expectation. And so.
I was having a difficult time turning that ship and it was punctuated where we had a client that was a school and their schools are notoriously difficult to support anyways because the teachers have very finite windows in which you can support them and you can get to them. This particular school was having money problems anyways so we were having to patchwork things in just to help them do things.
For reasons I still don’t know, mean, faith is a big part of my thing and I really think this was just something where God was just gonna use this no matter what because I really can’t, I can’t tell you any concrete reasons as to why this happened or why I even had the feeling that was coming up, but I was telling my team, we need to give special attention to this school because we’re getting ready to lose them. And I’m taking a look at the tickets and at the time we did not have the systems to really gather.
the right information for me to really evaluate what’s happening on the calls and things like that. And I just kept telling them, we’re gonna lose them. said, no, no, you’re fine. We’re fine. Me and her, we’re tight. We’re good. And we lost them. They called me into a meeting. said, they’re gonna fire me. They’re gonna fire us in this meeting. I’m telling you. said, no, no, no, we’re fine. And they did. was, they all ganged up on me. There were things that…
that they were just things that brought up that just totally caught me off guard because we were not gathering the right data, things that were likely embellished. But ultimately we lost that client and the 100,000 a year that went with that client, which at a time that we couldn’t afford that. And that was a kick in the gut to the team that thought they had it licked. I mean, there were clients that were at risk, but it was not this client.
I was telling them that you guys have got to trust my gut on this. that I can point to that as a big turning point on my staff where they really kind of hit it. And because I care about my people, I hated to see them be as down as they were because they were really beating themselves up. But I did my best not to coddle them through it just say, we’ve got this. You better start listening to me.
We turned it around.
Love that. Can you share a couple of strategies you used to elevate a team’s viewpoint on customer experience so that you prevented further occurrences of that type of situation? 
You know, it really, what it amounted to is making them understand the importance of communication. there were, there were some times where they were having to execute on a problem where they were trying to work through a problem that it, just took time. was no way around the fact that it was going to take time. And, and really the amount of time they were taking to perform the task was not unreasonable. The problem was they were not.
staying in touch with the customers to let them know or even setting expectation ahead of time. And what we we started to find out is like if we set that expectation ahead of time, if we let them know long before that we’re not going to meet a deadline for whatever reason, a vendor doesn’t get back with us, part doesn’t come in, whatever’s going on. But if if we tell them before we miss the deadline as opposed to after we miss the deadline, then it all goes much, much better.
And in almost all cases, the problems that we were having were result of lack of communication and a lack of clarity, either coming from our team, most frequently coming from our team at the time, or them not taking the time to understand what the customer was giving us. Sometimes there was some nuance in the statement that we really needed to ask more questions on to get clarifications, opposed to just assuming, excuse me, assuming what we knew what was going on.
I love that. Clear communication is paramount in any successful organization, even if what you are getting clear on you don’t want to hear. It’s still probably what you need to hear. So thanks for sharing that. What about a warp speed moment? So things are going pretty good, and then all of sudden you have 
Clear communication is paramount in any successful organization, even if what you are getting clear on you don't want to hear. Share on X
You ride that hockey stick and now things are going really, really well. 
You know, it would be 2023, but not for any reason that I could really point to. Sales in our industry are very, very difficult. There are notoriously long sales cycles. IT is very personal. That was another thing, actually, getting back, I’m sorry to get back to the question which you were talking about. How did we turn around the opinion of Ramansi, the customer? The other thing I had to convince them of is how…
Personal IT is to them. It’s business but to our staff it’s business and then we’ll get to it and we’re done but For them it’s this is how they’re putting food on the table This is how they are getting to their you know, their kids softball games and things of that nature. So That’s a very personal thing to them and when it doesn’t work they take it personally and so that was one of the things that we were needing to do so
I’m sorry for that tangent. As far as the big jump that we ended up taking, it was in 2023. All the work that we had been doing leading up to that was finally hitting. And so we were adding one or two customers a month for a pretty extended period of time, which is good trend for a company our size in this space. That came to a screeching halt as the election year came up, but that’s pretty cute.
That’s good.
That’s pretty typical because again, IT is so personal. Anytime there’s uncertainty, whether you think it’s going to be good, you think it’s going to be bad, that uncertainty stops you until you know what kind of certainty you can get.
YYeah, I love that. Thank you. Okay, so now want you to dig into the files. I want to know a golden nugget. I want you to share something that you hold near and dear as instrumental to your success. 
You know, this kind of falls in with a something that I wish I had gleaned and learned a long time ago. I was always of the opinion that if I needed to know something, I’m a smart guy. And so if I needed to know something, I was smart enough to figure out how to do it. And what this did is this prevented me from really leaning into
I don’t want to say self-help books, but just leadership books, books of understanding, ways to expand my own personal thought process. so kind of needing to check the ego at the door and put the hubris away and understanding that you don’t have to adopt everything that you read. don’t have to agree with everything you read. You don’t have to agree with everything that you hear, but it’s worthwhile going out to seek.
the advice and the information and ways that you can expand the way you’re
Love that. think diverse opinions, diverse thoughts makes a team so much stronger. And I know in my own entrepreneurial career for many years, I thought I was the smartest person in the room and then in a lot of rooms I was, but that just meant I was in the wrong room. I used to be with other people who knew things I didn’t know. 
And you know, this, that, very phenomenon is what actually bit me in the butt as I was leading in that one of the, I talked about how wonderful my growth was and how great an opportunity it was to get into that position. But at the same time, I didn’t have, and this is in, the oil company that I was in, but I didn’t have any formal management training.
anything along those lines, I literally was winging it as I went. And as a result of that, that created some uncertainty and uncomfortableness and making me feel like I was, you we talked about imposter syndrome and I really felt like at times I did not belong in the role that I was in because I didn’t have the confidence to recognize it’s because I did. had amazingly smart people in the room.
I did that by design because I wanted the smartest people doing what I needed them to do, but it created a situation where I was uncomfortable in that role. And, and I, so there was that hubris that was, that was bumping up against this, this discomfort and it, and it made me, it was quite obvious to, think the people that I was managing, that I was not comfortable in that capacity as opposed to embracing.
The fact that those people are smarter than me at what they do and that’s by design and I’m in my position because I deserve to be here and I’m okay with that.
wise words for sure. Okay, I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you all the way back and you’re going to get about 60 seconds to share something with 20 year old Brian that Brian today knows, but you wish you knew back then that would have sped you along your journey or saved a few rough edges. And so into the time machine, you go back. 
Okay.
20 years. Brian, meet Brian. What do you say? 
Well, I would start with what I just talked about. You’re not as smart as you think you are. So, so pay attention to what’s going on around you. I follow that up with you’re stronger than you think you are. And it’s not as hard as you expect it to be. You know, that hubris really created roadblocks for me, but even bigger roadblocks were me doubting my strength, my ability to execute on what I was, did know and was capable of.
And then it also translated into thinking that’s going to be a lot harder that I’m prepared to put in the effort and do that. So I wouldn’t have changed the timing other than perhaps maybe starting into more of a business educational role. My business education came through my years primarily working at that second energy company because I worked under the CFO. I was two layers from the CFO.
I was in meetings with him all the time. I learned a ton about the operation of the back, specifically the back office of a company and looking at the numbers and the accounting and financing. And so I don’t think I could have changed. I don’t think I could have been successful without that experience going the path I had gone. But appreciating that I can take more risks and be successful because I’m stronger, I’m more capable, and it’s just not going to be as hard as I thought.
I love that. You know, one of my favorite quotes is, you’re far smarter, far stronger, and far better than you think. And I think that’s true of almost everybody. 
I may have stolen that from you and not even realized it.
Well, hey, I stole it from Christopher Robin in the book Winnie the Pooh. Absolutely my favorite philosopher of all time. So how do we reach you, Brian, if we need managed IT services? How do we get in touch with you? 
You
So the easiest thing to do is just to go to the website, www.aekotech.com , A-E-K-O-T-E-C-H.com. If you need to reach me specifically and directly, there’s a book of consultation fee, not fee, page, and you can get on my calendar and we can talk through whatever problems you might be having, see if there’s an opportunity for us to solve some problems for you, because it’s really what we do is we fix problems and prevent them in the future. 
That’s kind of what we like to do is trying to see if we can do that. But the website is by far the easiest way to book an appointment with me.
Awesome. So there you have it folks. Go to the website, book a consultation, reach out to Aeko Technologies. Brian, thank you so much for being on the show today. I’m grateful. 
Thank you, Don. I’m very grateful myself.
See you guys next time on the Proven Entrepreneur Show. 
Maybe I’m gonna stop if it’s gonna let me.

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Title: E110 | Building Successful Teams with Diverse Skills Ensuring Every Party Wins in a Transaction
Date: November 8, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/building-successful-teams-with-diverse-skills-ensuring-every-party-wins-in-a-transaction/
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Content:
 
In this episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show, Don Williams interviews Ben Hansen, also known as the Profit Doctor. They discuss the challenges faced by business owners with a strong top line but a sick bottom line, and how Ben helps them improve their profitability and cash flow. They also talk about the importance of diverse skills in building a successful team and the value of coaching for entrepreneurs. Ben shares his journey from being a child fascinated with snakes to becoming a successful entrepreneur and business consultant. Ben Hansen shares his entrepreneurial journey, starting with his first company, Mactis Group, where he provided services to his former colleagues at Microsoft. He emphasizes the value of starting a services business in an industry you already know well. He then discusses his current venture, ProfitDoc, where he offers coaching and consulting services to entrepreneurs. Hansen shares the importance of focusing on the critical few numbers in financial reports and the need for every party in a transaction to win. He also advises trusting your instincts and following your heart in business and life.
Don’t miss this inspiring episode filled with valuable insights and practical advice from an experienced entrepreneur. Tune in now!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com.
Watch the episode here

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Building Successful Teams with Diverse Skills Ensuring Every Party Wins in a Transaction
 
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. Man, what a treat. I have my very good friend all the way from Austin, Texas. Well, Austin’s not really all the way from Fort Worth, but it’s down the road a little bit. Ben Hanson. Ben, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Don. I’m really excited to be here. I’m looking forward to it.
Yeah, me too. So, you know, I met you at an EO event maybe five or six years ago. And you were like one of those bold people who said, sit down here and have lunch with me if I remember right. That may not be the exact words, but that’s pretty close, right?
I remember meeting you at lunch in like a Hyatt Hotel down in San Antonio.
Down in San Antonio, we were both trespassing. And so, you know, one of the good things about going to conferences is you want to meet everybody you want to meet. Stick your hand out, tell them your name and say hi, because you never know, you know, where that might end up. So, you are in most circles known as the prophet doctor. Okay. Now, I happen to know you do not have a medical degree, but I also happen to know you have
Exactly.
Yes, trust me. I’m a doctor.
excellent degrees in the world of finance and business. So tell us a little bit about Profit Doctor, what you do and who you do it with.
Mm -hmm.
Yes. So if I were to just give you the shortest thumbnail, it would be something like this. I help business owners who have a strong, healthy top line.
 
I help business owners who have a strong, healthy top line cure, heal, help a sick bottom line Share on X
cure, heal, help a sick bottom line. So if you’ve got a strong top line with a sick bottom line, you may want to call the prophet doctor. And so what I do, yeah.
I love that. And I’m going to be a little sarcastic with this question, but like there are companies that have great top lines and sickly bottom lines.
That is a fun and sarcastic comment all rolled up into one. You know, one of the things I’ve learned over the last 13 years in entrepreneurs organization, being with so many business owners, different forums, and hearing what’s kind of going on with people is sometimes the people you think have got it all figured out are kind of doing the duck, cool, calm, and collected on the surface and paddling like hell underneath the water.
And what’s really driving them crazy is that while they’re growing and revenue is good and they’re adding employees, sometimes bottom line profitability is terrible. And so their cashflow sucks. Somebody told me, I think they called it, I’m to get the letters wrong. It was something like, it was like a play on PMS, but it was like payroll something syndrome where like twice a month they’re like freaking out. So basically, yes, there are so, so many.
entrepreneurs out there with what seems like a good situation where their company is growing, they’re delivering with quality to their customers and they’re growing top line, often adding employees, but under the covers, if you will, behind the curtain, under the water, they are paddling like heck trying to keep up with a really sick bottom line and poor cash flow.
I love that. So was kind of an epiphany to me. You know, I’ve been a founder of a dozen startups and have a portfolio of companies and many of those, some of were real stinkers, but most of them had great growth. But it was kind of epiphany to me the day that I learned that sometimes growth actually kills a company. They outgrow their means and it just killed the deal. And so I love the fact.
Yeah.
I come from a long line of wheat farmers, so we’re very profit oriented. It’s like, it doesn’t matter how much you make, it matters how much you keep. And you can’t keep it if you don’t, if it’s not profit. So, I love that. And even though you’re in Austin, Texas, you literally serve clients all over the world, correct? Yeah, awesome. Okay, so I want to move into your story because the Proven Entrepreneur Show is a show where…
That’s true. That’s true.
Other entrepreneurs, either startups all the way up to established companies can learn from the experiences of proven entrepreneurs like yourself. And so I’m gonna ask some questions about the good and some questions about the bad. And I may even ask a question about the ugly, but you’re gonna answer. And so that’s how we go. So let’s start with this and you know how to do this anyway. But as you know, I’m a gratitude junkie.
Got it.
Yep.
And so I like start most meetings with one good thing. So something you’re grateful for that the audience does not know. And so do you have one good thing you’d share with us today?
Well, one thing I would share is over the last couple of years, I really reshaped my identity around health and fitness and athletics. Gosh, 20 some years ago, I got thrown into a swimming pool and hit my hip on the side of the pool. And that created like a problem with my IT band. And then that turned into a knee problem and a foot problem and an ankle problem. And I really kind of fell away from a…
idea where like I was athletic and did a lot of exercise and things like that. And literally it took me about 20 years to slowly start getting back after it. All manner of like doctors and physical therapists and PTs and Shiatsu guys and all sorts of stuff. But just this last year I summited Kilimanjaro. We’ve done about five 14 ,000 foot peaks in Colorado and I’ve been running and just I’ve really kind of
shifted my identity back to like a guy who’s athletic and that has been really great for me.
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. I’ll say this, that day five or six years ago or seven years ago, when Ben asked me to sit down and have lunch with him, he had brought all of his own food and his own juices. And I was like, okay, this is a weird guy. He brought all his own food, but he had a ton of food. I was like, if he eats all that, I’m going to be shocked. But he pretty much did. And it was like, you know, multiple health stuff.
So kudos to you and I’ll follow along with the hip and gratitude. So I am, think 16 days on a brand new hip. And so I’m grateful for brand new hip. I went the other day and they took a picture. And if anybody’s lost a screw about that big, there’s one in my pelvic bone where they attach. Looks like they got it at Home Depot or something, but probably not.
But I am really grateful and I’m grateful for recovery and Ben and his wife and partner Ginger shared some health strategies and products with me and so I’m grateful for that. okay, I’m gonna hop right in. Ben, in the home where you were raised, and that’s different for all kinds of different people anymore.
okay.
But in your home, where you little men, okay, was there an adult entrepreneur who set an example for you?
No, both of my parents were slash still are technically university professors in anthropology. And you know how it’s like every kid either grows up thinking I’m going to be just like mom or dad, or I’m going to be just like the opposite of mom or dad. Well, as an only child, I always thought my parents primary job was to entertain me. And
There was a period where somehow that was not happening, at least to the liking of seven -year -old Ben. And I was like, gosh, dad, why aren’t you available to come play? And he was like, hey, I’m busy working. And I concluded from, I think, that moment on, A, something is wrong, and I am not going to be a university professor. I’m going to be a business tycoon, I guess. I don’t know if I knew that word back then. To make a lot of money.
so I could have a lot of free time and I guess play was probably sort of what I was thinking then. So that is kind of what jump started, I guess, my entrepreneurial journey. It turns out that my mother’s father was an entrepreneur and he did have his own business and pretty darn successful. And he was a chemist. And I think his primary success or his formula for success was he was
Bye.
very gifted in certain areas of chemistry. And this is like working for industrial companies like Coca -Cola or other different manufacturing facilities, mostly in Atlanta for him. And people knew that he was good. So he was a consultative salesperson and a subject matter expert in that space. As an actual like nuts and bolts MBA Wharton Business School business guy, maybe like a C minus.
But he was good enough at the other thing to build a, you know, like a 20, 30 person company that was probably spitting out, you know, several million dollars a year of revenue and keeping at least a good chunk. So he was doing pretty good.
Yeah, I love that. you know, while it’s true that of the world’s, think it’s of the world’s billionaires, like 40 % are engineers. And so that, you know, you can’t, that’s too big a statistic to overlook. Okay. But certainly out of entrepreneurs, there’s as many entrepreneurs that
Mm -hmm.
Yep.
didn’t graduate college or maybe didn’t even go, okay? And we’re C students, you know, in their scholastic career. So entrepreneurs, all shapes, ages, doesn’t make any difference. I know for me, my parents were not entrepreneurial. I just knew I couldn’t stand for people to tell me what to do. And so I’m like, yeah, this other people tell me what to do is not working for me. And so I’ll have to tell me what to do.
Yep.
Yeah.
okay Yeah
There you go. I did have one comment on that. That chunk of entrepreneurs that you talked about, we’ll call it the C students that didn’t graduate from fancy this or fancy that, are actually some of my favorite clients. Because almost invariably, what has got them to the level of success that they have is that they’re usually really good at the thing that their business does. So whether that’s construction,
or plumbing or recruiting or whatnot. And what’s cool about that is they’re usually delivering with excellence for their clients. They’re often very good at picking out people who can deliver with excellence in the thing that they work on. And then often an area that there may be weaker in, we’ll call it that C minus business person. So whether that’s like reading and reviewing and understanding financials.
whether that’s thinking about the business model of their company or pricing strategy. And so what I love about a lot of those kinds of entrepreneurs is they’re often like, just give me some nuggets and I’ll run with it. And so sometimes they’re like the most coachable, the easiest to get the most upside in the shortest time and a lot of fun because well, often very appreciative too.
Yeah, I love that. And, you know, we know this as far as team building, that the best teams are people who have diverse skills. Okay. And so if you’re, if you are that construction guy who’s great at construction, okay. But you, breathe in a brown paper bag when it comes time to look at your balance sheet and your P and L. Okay. Then to add a world -class talent, like the prophet doctor.
Yep.
Yep.
Okay, who that is your skill. That’s just like kind of like a no brainer. Okay. And like in my own coaching practice, most of my clients are what I call scientists. They’re very high IQ. They’re very brilliant. Okay. That almost means they’re a little low EQ. And of course selling and influence is all on the emotional side of the equation.
huh.
Yeah, absolutely. I see it in a very similar way. You sometimes I feel that I can provide almost what if that entrepreneur who was so good at some things, but maybe not so good at some others have the world’s best complimentary business partner. Well, sometimes I try to provide that except the difference is I don’t take, you know, half the equity.
Yeah. And keep this in mind, what Ben just said about complimentary. So like for the first 20 years of my entrepreneurial career, I tried to hire people that looked like me, walked like me, talked like me. Okay. And one, there’s not very many of them. And two, we’re not very compatible. Okay. The world is not big enough for both of us to be in the same office in the same company, but to work with people that have diverse skills where they are really good at something I’m not. That’s way you build the best team.
Okay. So now I want to go to, you’re still a little Ben. Okay. 18 and under. All right. Your first, maybe you were not, maybe you, maybe your first job, you were an entrepreneur and you sold lemonade. I don’t know. Or maybe your first job was sweeping out the garage. Mom and dad paid you. But what’s the very first thing you did where you traded time and effort in return for dollars.
All right. Yeah.
Got it. Well, the funnest story, which was a genius business model, is I had a contract with my mom where she paid me a snake allowance so that I wouldn’t catch snakes and sell them. OK, so the back story here is one day me and a buddy were out biking the neighborhood back when you could be unsupervised as a 12 year old and just
tear off until it was dark. We ran across a coral snake. Coral snakes are usually, you can’t really do the sizing with the skinny video here, but coral snakes typically are like 18 inches, 24, 30 inches maximum. This was a whopper. It was like three feet plus. So we grabbed it, we put it in a public paper shopping bag, just pinched over the edge, and I started calling pet stores to figure out where I could sell this thing.
I don’t know what got me thinking about that. Anyway, ultimately we realized no pet stores wanted to buy it, but we did donate it to the Florida Natural History Museum. And they were so thrilled because apparently coral snakes don’t last long in captivity. Mainly they eat other snakes. This one had just eaten another snake, which is probably why it was so docile and let us catch it without like a fight. And they were going to send it off to Sweden or something like that. But my mom, who’s terrified of snakes,
was like, no, no, no, you can’t do that. And I don’t know that I want to use the word blackmail. I’m going to use the word smart negotiation and a clever business model. We struck an arrangement where she would pay me X a week or something like that. And I would not catch snakes. But maybe a more legitimate business model, which I think was pretty good, was my dad offered me a different job.
or business proposition. He said, hey, I’ll buy the mower, I’ll make sure the mower works, I’ll get the gas, you mow our yard, but then you can use the mower for free, including the gas that I buy, to mow other people’s yards, and you can keep that money. So that was one of my first cash in the pocket business models. And back in the day when you could earn about 25 bucks,
for maybe 45 minutes of, albeit, incredibly hot, sweaty work in the summers in Florida. It seemed like a good gig.
Yeah, I love that. I love both. What came to my mind on the coral snake and getting paid not to do it. I’m thinking of like the movie Goodfellas where, you know, the mafia guy comes in and says, you know, your place is not going to burn down as long as you give me, you know, 2000 a week. I’m like, so like, was in the mafia, man. He was doing, he was selling protection to his mother. Okay. Which the entrepreneur side of me kind of.
Yeah.
digs that a lot, okay? And then it sounds to me like dad tried to maybe do a little course correction on something that was maybe not quite as exotic as protection. So love that. Okay, all right. So we’re leaving a little Ben behind, okay? You graduate high school and then you either went to the university, you went and joined the Peace Corps.
Okay.
You backpacked across Europe. You joined the Merchant Marine, right?
I got into boats later in life. Yeah.
Okay, okay. All right. So what happened? You graduated high school. Where’d you go? What’d do?
So both my parents were professors, sorry, as I said professors, they got their doctoral degrees at Cornell University, which is why I think they let me in. And so I went to Cornell and graduated in four years, which apparently doesn’t happen all that often these days. And then I moved to Houston to end up working there. The story was I was kind of, this was back in, gosh.
A long time ago, there was kind of a recession and Texas had gone into the recession first and was coming out of the recession first. At least that was my logic, 21 year old Ben. So I moved out to Houston to take a job and this was basically selling custom computers and small business networking services and so forth. So I was there about three years.
And then I came to the University of Texas for business school where I got my MBA. You want to hear about the rest or are we just going to start on mini medium then?
Awesome.
Yeah, let’s just do that part. We’ll move to medium, Ben. So love that. I have a grandson and the great grandparents on the other side are both astrophysicists. Yeah.
All right.
Nice. Okay. I’ve got a technique for dealing with rocket scientists and brain surgeons. Whenever you come up to a physicist, rocket scientist, mathematician, whatever, who is really high on their capabilities, you’re just like, I mean, come on, what’s the big deal? It’s not like it’s brain surgery or anything. And then of course, when you run across a brain surgeon,
tell me, tell me!
neurosurgeon, whatever, who’s like a little too big for their britches. It’s like, I mean, come on, it’s not like rocket science. Okay.
I love that. I have a really good friend here in town, entrepreneur, and he is a physicist. And so we were talking one day about engineers and he’s like, yeah, they’re like physicists juniors. You’re like, Ooh, that’s a little harsh. Okay. All right. So, you were a double alum, went to Cornell, got out in four years, which that’s, I’m sure above and beyond, eventually or later.
There we go.
went to the University of Texas at Austin, got your MBA, okay. And at some point you started your first company. So tell us about what it was, what led you to do that, how you did it. Was it great? Did it, was it horrible? Was it in the middle? Tell us about your first entrepreneurial venture.
Gotcha. So I was working at Microsoft. I was a product marketing manager in their Windows team, and that’s Windows Client here in the US. And Microsoft hires or hired many, many contractors to work for them. And almost like a big chunk, let’s say a quarter to a third of their total workforce at that time was contractors. Let’s say a
And so in many cases, many, so I said, I had hired many contractors to do work for me. So then I realized, gosh, this is a good business model that I could adopt for myself. So essentially I left the last day of March 2007. And then the first day of April, April Fools was my first day officially at Mactis Group. And mainly what I did.
is I performed the same kind of services that I used to buy to my former colleagues. So I would kind of joke that my business was selling what I used to buy to the people I used to work with. And so that went pretty well. I had a, I kind of already figured it out. I actually think that a really good business model for many people is this sort of services company, or sorry, services business, where you essentially sell back into the industry or the company that you’ve been.
with so long because you kind of understand the players and the dynamics and it’s not like you’re testing the market, proving the market. You’ve already experienced the market for a long time and kind of already know the ins and outs.
I love that. And I think that’s a great first launch for a lot of entrepreneurs. Okay. And you know, it’s like, it’s kind of like sitting down and play poker and they, and you get two aces right off the bat. Okay. You might get trashed for the other three cards, but, you at least started with a pair of aces because you know a lot about the industry that you’re going to serve. You know a lot about the people in the industry you’re going to serve. They do the same thing.
And so that big monkey, which kills a lot of entrepreneurial companies, is they just don’t know how to sell enough of whatever they sell. You kind of get to check that box right off the bat. Okay.
sure. And I also think that that’s one of those types of businesses that in many cases, you can kind of start building, building, building a little bit while you still have your day job. And then you can almost switch over often fairly quickly. Like, you know, let’s say you’re in the ad agency world, you know, very commonly, you know, like your last day with your old company, you know, then your next day is with some of the clients that you have worked with or experienced, you know,
over the last several years. So it’s very common that there’s not a big gap or like a lack of cash flow between like your last W2 day and your first, you know, entrepreneur day.
Yeah, I love that. And, you know, I think what a lot of people that are new to entrepreneurship don’t realize is that outsourcing, which doesn’t really mean sending jobs to China or India or whatever, that’s, that’s offshoring, a little different than outsourcing, but outsourcing where companies like Microsoft and Verizon or American Airlines and Burlington Northern, you know, they don’t want to add W2 headcount because if they’re based number one in a union state, it’s very difficult to
drop that head count and plus the load, if they hire somebody at 30 and they’re going to be there until 65, the retirement load is huge. so companies outsource to manage that HR component so that they don’t have to do that. And so that’s a huge percentage. mean, almost every Fortune 500 company has significant outsourcing. And so good point. Okay. All right. So
So that was your first company. There’s been a couple since then to now, if I’m guessing. Okay. Tell us how you started ProfitDoc.
Yeah. Well, I was winding down my participation with Macdis Group and I was like, what’s next? And it took me a little while, but over the years actually being in entrepreneurs organization, I had sort of almost informally acted as a coach or a consultant to a number of my colleagues who were having different kinds of business challenges. And I realized that a couple of, I don’t know, native skills or whatever that I had
really lent itself to that kind of consulting practice. I felt that was very good at kind of sifting through a lot of information or conflicting information and then identify kind of the root cause of the problem, prioritize some of those issues. And I think, I don’t know if it’s the gift of gab, it’s probably not quite like that, but a lot of people have told me that they really appreciate how I can take.
maybe complex or sophisticated ideas and sort of both boil them down and explain them in a way that it’s very, I don’t know, graspable, if you will. And I think that’s one of the problems. It’s often not that entrepreneurs aren’t working hard enough or maybe the problem hasn’t been identified, but maybe there’s just so much noise in the system. There’s a hundred problems to work on. You’re running 150%.
And often what I have been able to do and kind of what people appreciated years ago was that I might help them realize, hey, put on the blinders, just work on this one thing for the next six months and it will maybe not solve all your problems, but get you out of this big hole and give you some breathing.
I love that. you know, communication is a real skill. Somebody who can take something that’s complex or convoluted and boil it down to where somebody can grasp one or two things and go from there. you know, one of my businesses, we’re in the contact center business. Well, we generate more stats on everything than anybody on the planet. Okay. I mean, nobody generates as much data as call centers, but out of all those 500 metrics where
we’re reporting on, there’s only maybe three or four that I will call magic numbers. You just keep your eye on these three or four. You probably never have to look at the other 495. Okay. Unless you’re drilling down into something that, you know, probably you’re gonna make much difference anyway, but, but there’s three or four that you really have to pay attention to. Okay. So yeah, please.
Can I sneak in a little story like a little value add news you can use? One of the things I see very commonly with people and their financial reports is like, imagine looking at a P and L that’s five or six pages long. Again, it’s right like you’re talking about, Don. 500 numbers on a piece of paper and you’re like, too much. You know, when that P and L gets like consolidated down to maybe one page, two pages maximum,
ideally probably two pages landscape, which is like one and a half pages long. And then you’re like, I’m looking at like one or two sheets of paper, I can circle the three or four magic numbers, know, top line growth, total costs, bottom line profitability, those might be the beginning of the three magic numbers, looking at your P and L. And so that is kind of an example of how
Too many numbers is a bad thing, and being able to focus on the critical few is the right thing.
 
Too many numbers is a bad thing, and being able to focus on the critical few is the right thing. Share on X
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. So now I want to look back across your extensive entrepreneurial career. Okay. And I want to ask you about a hard lesson. So something that happened that when it happened, you were like, that hurts. But maybe, maybe not, but maybe as time went by, it turned out to be something very positive for your journey and your path. But
But can you share a hard lesson, something that happened that you’re like, ugh, this is hard, this hurts. Got one there you can share.
for sure, and if I can, I’ll throw in a Godfather movie reference if you don’t mind.
I’m so glad!
There was a time when I was going to write a book called The Godfather School of Management because I was a big fan of the author and the movies and I was going to make little parables, don’t talk outside the family, et cetera. So rewind back, I just started the company, it was 2007 and then 2008, 2009 rolls around. For your younger audience who might not recall, that was a bloodbath of an economic situation during those years.
and for others, you know, just take in a few deep breaths and try not to get sucked into the PTSD of that moment. So I started getting calls from my clients who were so upset and nervous and apologetic, basically telling me that their budgets had just been slashed and they needed to terminate their contract agreements with.
And at first, you know, was like sort of my first reaction, if you will, was to be upset, to try to talk them out of it. I don’t know if I was going to try to guilt trip them into doing whatever. You know, we sort of had contracts and agreements that theoretically could have, I don’t know, done something. And I thought about it. And then I thought of the Godfather. What would he do? So in the movie, The Godfather 2,
where the godfather is a young man is working at his friend’s father’s grocery store. The mafioso of the neighborhood comes in and tells the store owner, you need to hire my nephew or something like that. And so the store owner is like, my God, I can’t have two, I don’t know, stock boys. I don’t know what they would call them back then. So he had to let the godfather go and he felt so terrible and guilty and whatever. And
The Godfather sort of sussed out the situation and he was like, no, no, no, you don’t need to feel guilty. Nothing’s wrong here. I just want to thank you for the opportunity you’ve given me over these last whatever it was, months, years. can’t.
And so I thought about that and I’m like, I am gonna try to flip that around. So instead of the client feeling upset or sheepish or obligated in a uncomfortable way to me, that I was gonna try to flip it around. Cause I had in my mind over the long term, when I saw that person again, we’ll call it in the cafeteria, were they gonna feel like they had to duck me?
because I had made it somehow uncomfortable. And I was like, my God, that is gonna crush my business. So I wanted to sort of flip it around and say, don’t worry about it. I completely understand, no problem. It’s just the situation. I don’t say not a big deal, but nothing that you need to worry about. And that ultimately I think paid a lot of dividends. And I don’t wanna say bought loyalty and appreciation, but certainly didn’t undermine our long -term relationship.
Well, I love that. And I think people judge you for what you say, certainly, but far more importantly for how you live. to be gracious there, you know, during the great stay home of 2020, when everything got shut down, I probably had 20 speaking gigs already on the books. I’ve already taken deposits. And I got 20 phone calls that said, hey, we’re…
You’re hot.
not doing it and we’d like to have our money back. And so somebody asked me like in 2021 said, well, how’s the speaking business? I’m like, man, I am so successful at saying, I understand. we’re sending you a check. I’m a hundred percent successful at that. But you know, many of those clients have come back since we’re not at the great stay home because you make it easy and comfortable. So thank you for that hard lesson.
Okay, so now you might be old enough to remember this, but there used to be a show, Star Trek, only ran four or five years, but pretty popular show. And every once in a while, Captain James T. Kirk would say, Scotty, I need warp power. I need warp speed. And so can you share a warp speed moment sometime during your career, or maybe even things were going great, but all of a sudden the right hire,
the right strategy change, the right execution piece, all of a sudden it was just like a rocket ship. It just went straight up and you experienced that warp speed. Do you have one of those you could share with us?
Big Captain Kirk fan, a little sad that I don’t have an exact warp speed moment. I think that…
It’s sort of a little bit of a spin on that. But when I was just starting the company, what I thought to myself is how am I going to compete with these more established quote competitors that are in our space that are a lot larger, more established, more name brand recognition, et cetera. And I’ll just use one as an example. Back in the day, I think Excel data might have that right, was one of the big dogs.
Ben Hanson and Don Williams Share Their Insights on Entrepreneurship
over there at Microsoft and we’ll just call them Excel, maybe there’s Excel services or something like that. Find company, nothing wrong with them, et cetera. Caveat completed. And so what I thought to myself is when somebody is on the phone with me, like considering working with us or buying decision or sales conversation, what am I going to say that’s gonna make them wanna give us a shot?
Instead of just being like, well, why wouldn’t I work with the incumbent? know, nobody gets fired for buying IBM or whatever. And I was like, I am going to have a niche focus on marketing, marketing oriented people, because mainly that’s my background. And I can tell the difference between good marketing people and bad marketing people. I can do needs assessments in that space for what the customer really needs. If something goes wrong, I can refill.
And basically I’m going to do a niche marketing strategy or niche business strategy. And so what I would tell people is, let’s just pretend that competitor E has a thousand people working at Microsoft and I’ve only got 30. You might think they’re 30 times larger than me, but if you’re looking for a marketing person, 30 out of my 30 people are in marketing and maybe only 25 of their people are in marketing, or maybe it’s 50.
But our relative scale in that space, which is, let’s say, 1 30th of the total pie, is about the same. And I guarantee you that if you call me, I know more about marketing, finding marketing talent, evaluating them, matching them, and backfilling them, or fixing it if there’s a problem, than the 20 -something person you’re going to get on the phone with Excel data. So that was probably my big rocket fuel, if you will.
was just really being smart in picking my niche, kind of sticking with the knitting, because it allowed me to be, you know, maybe not a big fish in a small pond, but just about as big as other fish, at least in that.
Yeah, I love that. you know, so in our call center business, which is a staffing type business, you know, we have about 100 people and there are call centers that have 10 ,000 people. But if a client’s looking to hire 20 people, in their mind, they think, well, I want that company that has 10 ,000 people. I’m like, you don’t. You’ll be the smallest, least valuable client.
on the roster. The important part is that you find not necessarily my company, but that you find somebody who’s the right fit, okay, for your business. And then, you know, when you talk about, you know, financial consulting like Profit Doctor, that even gets, that’s even more concentrated because, I mean, I know this about your business, they get to work with you, okay? And so it’s like, I get to talk with
Mm -hmm.
the subject matter expert. get to talk with the man, so to speak, or the woman, whatever. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, coaching and consulting is so successful is because you get to deal with somebody who’s literally world -class. so that’s great. Okay. So next question. And here I’m looking for a nugget. I’m looking for some piece of wisdom.
Like if we knew everything you knew, what’s the one thing we’d want you to share?
Wow, that is so broad. The first thing that comes to my mind because you use the word nugget is I used to have a philosophy that I called nugget management. And the idea was that everybody, and we’ll call it the transaction, needs a nugget. so before I started MacDIS Group, I was a product marketing manager at Microsoft. And one of the things that I did there,
was what we called like early adopter programs. So if you’re going to release, let’s say, know, Windows XP, Windows 10, Windows 11, pick your favorite big software product. You don’t want at that time, you know, Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer to get up on stage by himself and announce the product. You want, you know, CIOs and CTOs of Fortune 500 companies and other luminaries and whatnot. And you don’t want, you know, the CEO of Boeing
or CIO of Boeing to get up there on stage and say, well, Bill’s a good guy and I know he’s gonna release a good product. You want the CIO to say, well, we’ve got, know, Windows 11 rolled out already on 20 ,000 PCs and it’s working great, right? So I led that type of a program on a couple of occasions with a few different Windows versions. And what I wanted to make sure is that every party in the transaction, in this case, it was, you know,
the CIO, the IT folks at the company, our individual consultants at Microsoft, the account team that was responsible for working with Boeing, and then our internal product marketing teams, we’re all getting a nugget out of the transaction. So I guess what I would just say is incredibly important to think through the motivations of the various participants. And we’ll use the word transaction.
but maybe a business deal or a thing that you’re doing, and everybody’s got to win. And so certainly for those of you entrepreneurs who are selling to what I might consider more complex decision -making units, right, where it’s not a single person who’s making that decision, very important that every member of the team or member of that quote decision -making unit is getting a nugget out of the transaction.
Yeah, I think that’s a great nugget. Everybody has to win. Everybody has to win. Okay, so maybe the toughest question I’m going to ask you. Yeah, I know. So I’m put you in a time machine and I’m going to dial you all the way back and we give you 60 seconds on the ground face to face with 20 year old Ben.
Yes.
Okay, go for it.
And so what would you tell your 20 year old self that would speed or help you along your entrepreneurial journey to where you are today? So into the time machine you go, all the way back. Here’s 20 year old Ben. What would you tell yourself?
Yep. All right.
All right, well, the first thing, okay, this is a different answer, but the first five or 10 seconds might be avoid these three or four giant mistakes that are coming. Sometimes they might include, let’s say the wrong person to date or missing out on this or whatever, but that’s just like, you you should have bought Google back then, but separate from that in terms of like regular, like coaching up of 20 year old then it would absolutely be.
You got this kind of a self -confidence boost. You’re going to do great. Trust your instinct. Things are going to work out. You know, I think one of the challenges I faced and I know that I see this in my clients all the time is a lot of that second guessing or not believing in themselves enough to kind of take that bigger step or bigger leap that they know that they should, but maybe fear or trepidation or lack of confidence.
is holding them back. So essentially, young Ben, you got this. Things are gonna work out. Trust your instincts. When you think you should take this job or you should approach this business deal in this way, you’re right. Go for it.
 
You got this. Things are gonna work out. Trust your instincts. Share on X
I love that. I’m a real big believer in that the magic in your life comes from your intuition, comes from your instinct. And it doesn’t mean to ignore your intellect. Your intellect is really important. But follow your heart, okay, for sure. So, okay.
I think I would add in there in terms of like life advice. I think it’s also super valuable to look backwards in your life and get a sense of how good your instinct is. And what I mean by that is chances are most of the people who are listening to this have pretty good instincts because you almost have to have that to be successful as an entrepreneur. But you probably also have one or two of those friends
whose gut feeling maybe isn’t the best. And I guess I would just say, you know, for some people, their instincts are not so good and maybe their first step should be, you know that friend you’ve got that’s so level headed and always gives you a great advice? When you’re facing like a, you know, a do or die, you might phone a friend. But for most of the people on this call who have been successful in business, you know, already building up their, you know, seven and eight figure companies, chances are your instincts are
dead on, great. And you can trust those.
I love that. Yeah, if you can tell the imposter to sit down and shut up and just follow what you thought to do. Okay, so Ben, how would somebody reach out to you to talk with you about Profit Doctor? What’s the best way to do that?
sure.
Yeah, well, I’m easy to find. There’s a Profit Doctor YouTube channel, a website, and again, Profit Doctor is like money, P -R -O -F -I -T, and doctor is spelled out D -O -C -T -O -R. It’s not profit with a P -H like Moses, it’s profit with an F like cash. Probably the easiest thing here is just to reach out to support at profitdoctor .com. Easy to remember.
But I’m pretty big on LinkedIn like huge but very focused on LinkedIn So connect with me on LinkedIn or come to my home page. It’s so easy to find me but probably the quickest thing you could do is mention the Don Williams podcast or the proven entrepreneur podcast and Send me an email support at profit doctor comm
I love that. So if you have strong top lines and weak bottom lines, support at profitdoctor .com. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I’ve had a ball and I know the audience is going to find your story very valuable in their own lives. So thank you very much.
Yes.
Yes.
Awesome. And just as a quick close, thanks Don, really appreciate the time. And I can’t tell you how many people that I’ve worked with who have been struggling and struggling and trying so much and working so hard. And we just give them a little bit of the profit doctor formula and it makes all the difference. know, negative 20K a month to positive 20K a month is a huge thing if you’re, you know, two or $3 million a year in revenue.
That’s it.
So be well and profit.
That’s.
Ben, thank you so much. And that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Thank you everybody.

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Title: E108 | Kent Gregoire Shares The Importance of Trust in Building Strong Relationships
Date: November 8, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/kent-gregoire-shares-the-importance-of-trust-in-building-strong-relationships-2/
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Content:
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, Don Williams interviews Kent Gregoire, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Stakeholder Business. They discuss the importance of a stakeholder-centric approach in business and how it can lead to
-driven organizations. Kent shares his experiences growing up in an entrepreneurial household and the lessons he learned from his father. He also talks about his early ventures as a young entrepreneur and the importance of aligning business goals with personal values. The conversation touches on topics such as trust, ethics, and the impact of mental health on entrepreneurs. Kent emphasizes the need for businesses to solve worthy challenges and create a world that works for everyone.
Don’t miss this inspiring episode filled with valuable insights and practical advice from an experienced entrepreneur. Tune in now!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com.
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/E108-Kent-Gregoire-Shares-The-Importance-of-Trust-in-Building-Strong-Relationships.mp3
Kent Gregoire Shares The Importance of Trust in Building Strong Relationships
Hey, it’s Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. What a treat we have today. Very good friend of mine lives in Vermont, but he’s trespassing, I believe, in Florida today. And so we’re thrilled to have him. Kent, Greg Watt, please welcome to the show. Yeah, I’m thrilled to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this. We talked, I don’t know, maybe a couple months ago.
It’s great to be here, Don.
and this has been on the calendar, busy people, that’s a good thing. So start out and tell us a little bit about your current business, and I know you’re a serial entrepreneur, but tell us a little bit about stakeholder business, what you do, who you do it with, and why you do it.
Sure. So stakeholder business was something really a brainchild that three of us had, all of us independently, more than a decade ago, trying to really understand how to evolve capitalism here, not just in the US, but certainly abroad as well. And so using a stakeholder approach, a stakeholder-centric approach, and what that means is really about how do we engage with our stakeholders to solve for the real specific worthy challenge.
that might be for the environment, or it could certainly be with regard to community society. And so it’s companies, we certainly can identify with them. Most consumers, and most of them, we’re all consumers, we really do identify with those brands, whether it be Patagonia, or it might be on a commercial side like Interface Carpet. The list is certainly lengthy, they’re very purpose driven, and they use that purpose as their most strategic
you know, direction. It’s that North Star, it’s that moonshot. But they don’t just say it. Literally the entire company is aligned with that purpose and it becomes natural to the operating system of an organization. It’s not something that they necessarily even put that purpose out there. They certainly can publish purpose. But companies that do it really well, purpose begins to show up. And in the showing up, it’s a much more believable story.
“Purpose Share on X
than putting it out there. I like to say, instead of dangling on the fishhook purpose, let’s make sure that the clients, let’s make sure that the public really do understand what the company is doing, why it’s doing it, from the standpoint of their experience, the stories that are being told.
I love that. And to me, it’s the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. And when you live your purpose, instead of just recite it and put it on nice signage and on your website, your actions scream so much louder than your words ever could. And so, totally, totally love that. Okay, I’m going to take you all the way back a year or two.
a young Kent, so like five to eighteen, okay, in the household where you were raised, was there an entrepreneurial example? Was there an adult who was an entrepreneur and kind of led by example into entrepreneurship?
Absolutely. My dad was an entrepreneur, probably one of my most favorite times. And it’s really, really crystal clear and help inform and shape who I really feel I have become as I, in, even as I continue to grow. And I was the kid who every time being in Vermont where I was raised and every time there was a snow day, some excuse not to have school, it was presented to me. I would be like, Oh dad, I get to go to the office. And
It was really exciting. I had two older brothers, so it was a safe place to be. And he had quite an impressive business. It wasn’t just an office. He had warehouses and showroom and service and delivery people and large areas and territories. So a lot was happening. And you might say, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship through watching. Maybe one of the most unusual things, because I don’t normally see this. I’m not even sure I would do it as well as my dad. He actually.
pretty much gave me the keys to do whatever I wanted. That didn’t always mean I showed up as the best person either. Sometimes in the learning, you know, somebody’s older, you know, I’m young, I know this stuff, right? You know, and I could rub some of the employees the wrong way. But it certainly also helped me understand that wasn’t the best way to be, and I needed to develop myself in ways that were gonna come across as more caring and kind to really be that leader potentially one day.
Yeah, love that. And I think I certainly thought I was, I don’t know if I thought I was wise, but I certainly thought I was very, very smart when I was very, very young. And as I’ve aged, hopefully I’m gaining wisdom and I’ve pretty much figured out everybody else is smarter. And that’s a good way to be, to learn from other people. So love that you’re dad.
And when I first started the show 150 episodes ago, I thought, well, every proven entrepreneur will have a childhood example, but it’s about 50-50, you know? And so I think kind of like our, you know, sometimes we emulate our parents and sometimes we, you know, go the other direction, we go the opposite direction. And so I love that. So tell me about your first, and it may have been entrepreneurial, it may not have been a job.
Yeah.
one.
But tell me about the first time that you traded time, effort, brain power for commerce for dollars.
Yeah, actually I have kind of a series of them and I can be succinct. My grandfather was really an amazing woodworker in some really big ways. But one of the things that he would make her those wooden cutting boards, almost like those paddles and you put in like a steak knife. My dad’s business was a restaurant equipment and gourmet supplies, food service, et cetera. So grandpa liked making those. We call them paparies, French. And he also used to make these really small rocking chairs. So I would go door to door. I’d ask him and.
He’d give them to me, originally gave them to me at first. And then my father convinced me I needed to pay him something. And I’d go door to door, I took the cutting boards and I wrapped them in Saran wrap, put a card in them. I’m telling you those things I could literally sell today. Everybody wanted them, it was so easy. The rocking chair is the same thing. And I started doing that year after year. I think that I grew a little bit tired of it, however, and I got a little bold. An uncle that had retired, I wouldn’t call him a traditional entrepreneur.
was quite eccentric. My mom’s uncle, Bill, he had a cleaner and he had closed it down, he had made his money and I was very intrigued with this cleaner, picked it up, managed to have my parents help me get a license agreement in place where we pay actually a royalty for every jar that I sold. So I started a manufacturing company. It literally is a manufacturing process. This isn’t like you just kind of show up in your kitchen and do something. Actually I had to have.
a manufacturing process and machines and so on. So manufactured this cleaner called Velvet and probably one of the most memorable, well, two of them, stories about that. One, I used to go into Hill’s hardware store and there were local hardware stores in our community and I’d go in on Saturdays and I’d have like big chrome bumpers, I’d have jewelry, I’d have mirrors, I’d have Formica and I would demonstrate it and people would buy it.
You know, it was beautifully labeled. We were at the time, it was the first UPC code started coming out. So they had UPC codes I had to apply for. That was one really big memorable moment. So it taught me so much. Not only was I in this manufacturing and had to work with the graphic, you know, at that time it was known as an artist to develop the thing and, you know, the labels and et cetera. But the other piece that, you know, was really understanding how to put myself out there and how to sell.
And I think selling in a sense, not necessarily just in sales, but using the kinds of skills served me really well. The first client, however, that I had to approach was my dad’s commercial banker, Marcy Harden. She worked for Howard Bank. And my dad one day says, okay, we’re going to go see Marcy. I knew she was. I’m pretty young. I’m 14. I still knew she was. I was a little intimidated. We go into the bank and I had to carry in a case, which was 24 jars, jars where I think were like eight or 10 ounces.
And I had to carry in this case and I needed to convince her that she needed to buy a case, but on consignment. And so she did, that ended up opening other opportunities. And then I was in stores on consignment or outright sell. So it was a really great run for a number of years. I went away to school and instead of selling the company in a traditional way or continuing to operate it, it did cease to exist, but it existed pretty strong.
It pretty strong for about five years and what a great learning experience. My mom, a little bit of an entrepreneur as well. So that was really helpful, but she, you know, just had a great family support unit and others who would help me develop this product, put the labels on it, all the things that needed to be done as well as make this, as well as make this product, which, which multiple steps. Again, it wasn’t like making a cake. It was a little more involved.
Yeah. And I want to be sure that our audience doesn’t miss the fact that you were 14 years old. Okay. And running, I’m going to say a real business and, and I’m not knocking any businesses, but like this is a real business with, um, uh, real processes and real procedures. And I love the fact that at a very young age, your father was, um,
I love.
knew the value of, hey, you gotta be able to, whatever you do, you gotta be able to sell your product, service, or experience, or it doesn’t matter how good you deliver if nobody ever buys it. It’ll be the best kept secret in bankruptcy court because you won’t make it. And so I love that. Okay, so you went off to school. Did you go to school to study entrepreneurship or?
Yeah.
French cooking or what was your mindset like at the time?
Well, I like both those ideas a lot. That would have been fun. I actually was very intrigued with accounting, believe it or not. And I’m very, very grateful I went down that path. However, it does have a story. I originally entered college at the age of 15. I could not be a matriculated student, but it was part of actually allowing me to graduate from high school. I did a very nontraditional, wrote my own curriculum plan. And my parents used to have to help support me with the school system because I’m not that young.
Yeah.
Oh.
Homeschooling didn’t exist then. And so in that, Accounting 101 was my first class. Fortunately, I got a 4.0. I was very, very excited. It was a night class, three and a half hours long. Ooh, it was brutal, once a week. But I got through that and then I could, again, I wasn’t matriculated. They allowed me to take two classes. I graduated from Champlain with my associates in accounting. And then the professors are there, are saying you gotta go to.
Bentley University, Bentley College at the time, but Bentley University. So I went to Bentley University and continued with accounting. There was a year, so it was in my junior year last semester. We’re all signing up for classes for the next year. And somebody comes to the door and they’re like, is to say to the professor, I need to speak with Kent Gregoire. I literally felt like I was back in high school, like, Oh my God, what did I do? Because there are times I wasn’t perfect child, I will admit. And.
I come to find out I was literally one course away from a double major and I had no clue. All those electives I took were in marketing and sales like. So I double majored is what happened. I ended up having a very heavy course load my final year to make it happen because I was actually one class behind already due to transfer. And.
I, you know, the accounting has served me extraordinarily well as an entrepreneur. I’m definitely wired from a marketing and I would say maybe better from a sales perspective, but a broader base. And my experience is my interest. You know, we, I could talk all day about all the things I did at my dad’s company, but having him give me the keys to in essence do what I wanted. He had a brand new IBM computer. I was in there.
programming it, putting in inventory management systems, and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, a very unusual childhood. I would say I missed a lot of the traditional things that a while back I used to say, well, you know, really unfortunate I didn’t get into the sports scene, I didn’t do this. You know, my life has turned out.
Yeah. And, you know, we may be brothers from other mothers. I, my parents were strict, but very open about me exploring new things. And, and I never really felt like a kid. I always felt like a short adult. And, and so, you know, I think there’s some, maybe some commonality there. So, so other than.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
The, and for the audience, man, cannot stress enough, you know, an accounting background or accounting classes. If you can’t understand the numbers, it’s really hard to drive a business. I mean, no matter how well you do everything else. So can’t recommend that enough. And one of my best friends is, he would say recovering CPA and recover.
 
Kent Gregoire and Don Williams both are Engaging in a thought-provoking discussion
attorney, which is pretty rare, but has served him exceptionally well in his business career to be well-schooled in both. So thinking back across your career, which is a year or two, I want you to search the memory banks for a hard lesson. So something that occurred or an event that happened that at the time…
Ouch, man, this hurts. Now maybe today with, in retrospect, it might be a very positive event, but at the time it was hard. Do you have a hard lesson you could share with us today?
Yeah, I have one that really is something that, it was a very pivotal moment in my life. I was in my early, I guess, getting close to mid twenties. My first larger company, it was lots of employees, lots of things happening in a very short period of time, making really, really good money. Extraordinary money, to be frank. And my dad wasn’t involved in the company, which looking back on it was really a bad
but would have been great to ask dad to help mentor me, but somehow I needed to go prove myself I could do it, right? But he came up from Naples, Florida, and it wasn’t just to see me. And he said, let’s go for lunch. And I’m in the, literally on the shores of Lake Champlain where my offices were looking out at the lake. It’s beautiful. We first start walking outdoors in a park area and he literally like pivots. He just looks at me and he says,
Sure.
business and your personal priorities in order. And he was more, said more about that, but he’s really, really direct about it. He said, you know, you’re raised to be caring and kind and it’s not showing up anymore. And I’m really disappointed. And the third thing he had to say is if my heart wasn’t already down to my feet and my chest was pounding really hard, is he said, you know, you spend money and there’s just no purpose behind it all.
And I was, and I was spending big dollars, like significant dollars. And there was no purpose behind it all. I think what today, what is so extraordinary about this here is certainly coming from my father was really hard. It was a really good, not just a reminder and put me back on course, but being that today, I’m a conscious capitalist, very centric and stakeholder model.
is my dad and there’s other great stories I could share about how he actually ran his company this way. You know, it wasn’t that unusual like 50 years ago, you know, that was certainly some of that time was less than that, much less. But it wasn’t that untypical that people operated more like a stakeholder model. It was about 50 years ago when business began to change and we started looking at there was only one stakeholder that.
and that was simply the shareholders, the investor, and we had to make as much money as we could for them, even at the expense of others, the planet, society, and etc. So in that, it had a really big impression, caused me to dig back in, and go on a lifelong journey of entrepreneurship, and oftentimes I would look at various companies as like, you know, a test case.
because I love starting companies, getting them going. I get bored, but I want these test cases. So I could literally take and use them to help me develop skills, help me develop methodologies, to help me carry this forward and continue. Something I’ve done for now over 35 years is work with other CEOs directly with the CEO. Not really as a coach in a very unique situation. And I could be with these CEOs for a decade or more.
I mean, they didn’t like every single month or two or 10 times a month, whatever was required. And my father’s words set me on a path that was very significant. There was another event later on which brought it together, not a bad situation, but a good situation caused me to dig in even deeper with regard to the stakeholder model. But that’s a little bit of a history of that one thing that it definitely was difficult to hear. It was a really good learning lesson.
It caused me to readdress my priorities, make sure that my values were really strong, and to make sure that if I’m going to operate a business, I need to be solving a worthy problem. And money is, you know, you can have money, but it’s not going to buy happiness. So I better get that figured out.
Yeah, it’s not. You do get to go nicer places and do some more fun things, but it doesn’t work at the happiness counter for sure. And so, appreciate you sharing that. What about a warp speed moment? So sometime in your career, things are going pretty good, but all of a sudden, one or two or maybe three things fall into place and it just goes like crazy.
Yeah.
No, he doesn’t.
Do you have a moment like that you can share?
Yeah. I have several of them, but I’m really almost more compelled to talk about something that’s recently happening. I’m not going to go into like the details of what it is. Um, although there’s no reason I couldn’t, I want to really stick to the fact that, um, it now goes back four weeks ago. There’s a product that I had, um, that I decided to shelf and there were a lot of reasons why it was during the pandemic and thought that this program just needed to be shelved.
I never expected to dust it off again. And in very unusual ways, I scheduled some meetings with some folks in Atlanta, Boston, and in person, as well as here at Nerve running into a really dear friend. I started just getting to know these people better, reconnecting with them. And my objective wasn’t actually to talk about the program, because I had shelved it. And I still didn’t really talk about the program, but I talked about something that was so important to me.
My purpose being to really create a world, to build a world that works for everyone, and in particular to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit for good. I became more concerned that mental health is really creeping in not only to the workplace, but to more and more entrepreneurs, and there’s evidence of that, right? And I wanted to be able to do something about it, and I had an aha moment that this product was out there, but during these conversations that I was having,
In just split seconds, I’d say, yeah, you know, I’ve really been thinking about this. And people would be like, oh my God, really? We need to partner on this. We need to collaborate. I have an entire client base around the country that needs this product, even to the sense that they want to pay 50% of the fee to their clients, you know, for their clients fee to me, um, into the work that this could actually present. And this opened up. It became like serendipitously. It’s like daily things are literally coming to me.
I can say that what this is, is so in alignment with my higher purpose. It’s so in alignment with what I would call that mission, unleash the entrepreneurial spirit for good, that it’s really extraordinary. And so, and it’s, it’s something that not only impacts in a very positive way, the entrepreneur and something they want. It hasn’t gone away. I know they still want what we had, but now taking a look at it and bringing in this real sense of this deep purpose.
higher purpose and helping companies rethink their vision, their talent and their performance is really at the intersection of how to help entrepreneurs to have the freedom to grow and to give their second in command and others in their organization, but specifically the second command, the ability, the autonomy to give them the autonomy to lead. And so it’s
Pretty interesting how it’s coming around full circle. But let’s put it that way.
I love that. And I’m a big believer in what I would call parking lot market research, just talking with people. And you’ll be surprised if you’re onto something that’s pretty hot, people will gather towards it and it will get momentum. And also a big believer in selling people what they wanna buy, not what you want to sell. And many times those are two different things.
And I know in my own journey that being aligned with my mission is where all the magic happened. And things were pretty good before that, but the magic really happens when you’re on your personal mission. So, okay, now I’m looking for a nugget, a piece of Kent wisdom that if we knew everything you knew…
We’d be like, can’t this is the one thing we want to know the most?
Yeah. Recently, I was really gone asked that question by some folks that we know. I enjoy having mentors as well. I find it very powerful. So not only to be a mentee is a very powerful place. And so going through and kind of exploring this, and I’m very fortunate this mentor happens to be a branding expert as well, and interviewing clients and past clients. And as it turns out, there are lots of things I discovered.
Why don’t I just write books on all of this stuff? I consider that a lot of what I actually contribute also isn’t just the knowledge that I had through all these clients and working in different industries and being a serial entrepreneur, but I do feel that it is this connection. People can call it whatever they want. Source, I don’t care where it is, but there’s this higher level of wisdom. One of the things that comes to mind right now, which I think is really important to the times in which we’re in,
And we hear these words, but trust is just not replaceable. And I think it’s become very misunderstood in organizations. And as capitalism has continued to perpetuate in a very, what I would call a shareholder model, it’s easy to make trade-offs. And trade-offs also deteriorate companies over time. It takes the foundation out. In that notion, one of the things that I started looking at very, very closely,
is even in myself and in I noticed that a past behavior, I’m not doing it knowingly today, but a past behavior would be if I want this result, especially if it comes to people of any nature, supplier, other talent, employees, is if I’m looking for something to happen, it was easier to almost make this trade off, which can also look like a form of manipulation and to really reconcile.
Hmm.
this notion of ethics and morality as it’s essential to business and it’s become more essential than ever. So employees can very quickly tell what’s going on. We think they can as leaders and we think we’re just so bright we figured it out. The truth be known, a lot of the things that corporate America is doing today are rather manipulated to try to create engagement as an example.
And it just doesn’t need to be that way. In fact, you don’t really need initiatives around engagement because if you’re actually doing all of the other right things, engagement ensues just like profits. I think we talked about that once before, Don. I’m very, very clear about that. And I’ll admit, at one time, in one of the companies that I still have today, we used to focus on engagement. And I figured out that wasn’t the right thing. And we, within three years,
like so.
realize that well, engagement is something that we want to happen within organizations. We want this high level of engagement. We need to get back to treating people as humans. And when we treat people as humans and we care about people, regardless of how they’re performing, their people are humans. You know, a great lesson that I learned from a gentleman by the name of Will, many years ago, I was in my 20s in a restaurant.
And there were four of us and the waitress there wasn’t that great. She was frankly a Middlebury College student, probably trying to make her way through Middlebury and obviously very bright. She just wasn’t the best waitress. And Will said, remember Ken, she’s somebody’s daughter. Do you know that had amazing impression on me? And I know you and many listeners have heard this, but that story came to me at a time that was so, so important. And it came to me shortly after the conversation that my dad.
So I think this notion of when we look at this trust that’s needed between not only our employees, but our customers and everyone, we need to be really thinking about our ethics. No ethics is somewhat of a governance, so then I think of morality. We need to think about how to treat people as humans. And we need to understand anything that we’re doing to try to think we’re going to get a result that could look like manipulation or heading down the wrong path.
I love that. And so, you know, my thoughts on trust are, trust is a bridge built very gradually and destroyed in an instant and irreparable once destroyed. And so, you know, most of my clientele were focused on the sales side. And this is from the sales Bible of dawn. No trust.
“Trust Share on X
No sales. K-N-O-W trust, K-N-O-W sales. I, it just goes hand in hand. You can’t, if you don’t have it, you’re in trouble. And if you do have it, you know, you’ll enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Right. Yeah.
I think one of the things that reminds me of Dawn is like especially and I think this is true in all sales You know certainly the trust factor is But if we think about selling into more complex sale environment selling to senior level executives a C suite Etc and we think going back to like, you know, Fred Reichhold and the loyalty theory the royal the loyalty effect Is you know the consistent delivery of credibility and capability?
If you only deliver one or the other, there is no way to really get to that trust quote. It’s very important. It’s a delicate balance. If we’re seen as delivering a lot of capabilities, we’re seen as an extra pair of hands. If we’re delivering only credibility, then they kind of wonder what we can do. But when we can actually do both, we actually bring this value to them. We keep the promises that we make. We look for opportunities to create more value aligned with their purpose. Trust levels go up.
I remember very specifically, and I’ve done a fair amount of selling at the C-suite. So I’m coming from a very place of significance. In some of the clients that I had, whether I was in selling or not, just certainly it could be a CEO client, but this one client, I remember, and it was the first light bulb that went off, and I saw a pattern afterwards. I do nothing. I know nothing about roofs on commercial buildings.
But it was literally asked, who should I call? And I thought it was the most bizarre question. I was still relatively young, I’m going to say about 35 years old. And I’m like, why are they asking me? And of course, what I immediately do, I went out and I did the research, and I found out everything worked. And what I discovered, like you know very, very well, when we do this, we really understand, we truly hear what it is the client, not just that they need to feel understood. That’s when it’s really known.
and we bring this level of value, they begin to see us as that trusted advisor. And then when they see us as a trusted advisor, we now become like they don’t work indispensable, in essence, because there’s so much more we can do. If we take that now, when we take it into the context of what I’m doing more specifically today, that’s in essence when we work with a supplier, we understand their purpose. Our mission is actually to try to help them with their purpose. The more their purpose is fulfilled.
the more the purpose of our company is going to be fulfilled. It becomes a symbiotic relationship, not a quid quo pro, but how do we literally help elevate each other? And in that, we see more innovation, we see better products that help solve real challenges that are going on, not just business challenges.
Yeah, I love that. I think, and we’re both members of entrepreneurs organization, and I think most of the people who joined entrepreneurs organization joined out of a motive to build or improve their business. And what most entrepreneurs find is that the number one way to improve your business is to improve yourself. And that is a tide that lifts all boats.
across your business. It is that symbiotic relationship that as you grow, as you improve, so does everything, not just in your business, but in your life. That’s pretty cool. Okay. Here’s the tough question. I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you all the way back to 20-year-old Kent.
you get about 60 or 90 seconds to share a couple of thoughts, things you know now, you’d like your 20 year old self to know if you had that opportunity. So in you go, what do you say?
Yeah. Well, I’d say the first thing, you know, kind of the no, just really, I felt like a little bit of the no at all. You know, I had done a lot of things early on, which meant that my listening wasn’t as good. And it became really, really apparent and, frankly, created friction between me and my father, which is very, very unfortunate because that’s not the way I am today. And I haven’t been that way for a long time. It did take me a while to improve it. I will say that.
And so, you know, that’s kind of one thing. I was still really to some extent looking at this aspect of goals, which leads me to a lot of really what it is that I’m most charged up about today. But, you know, kind of this, you know, I get this goal and I get this goal and it’s always like, you know, I’m on this machine and every time you hit a goal, you’re just no happier. You know, all you’ve done is, you know, buy a yacht or buy a home or you’ve done whatever, right? It’s just ongoing and ongoing and there’s no fulfillment in it.
and those would be keeping to the timeframe. If I had understood that earlier, I think that I would have created much more, I’ve had great impact, but I would have been much more impact towards solving worthy problems that helps elevate humanity much, much faster.
I love that. Thank you for sharing. So how can we support UCant today?
Um, well, it’s supporting today is kind of almost like what I like to, you know, it’s almost like the reverse. I, you know, my, my whole, my whole world is about supporting others. We have stakeholder business and stakeholder business is really there to help support entrepreneurs through media, through the films that we produce. We have an award winning film that was at the Cannes Film Festival Beyond Zero.
Chronicles, a company over 30 years interface out of which is a carbon manufacturing company. One of the best examples in the world of the most sustainable businesses, frankly, but not just sustainable, a great place to work, etc. So we’re looking to continue to support organizations that are called to solve worthy challenges through their business. And the more that we’re connected, you know, I can speak to myself personally.
the more I became connected and truly understood this purpose and even able to understand how to measure it and what the theory of change is. And as we begin to accomplish what this is happening along the way, knowing that this has real impact, not just for today, but for so many generations, that it can literally also begin help solving some of the problems. I don’t think anybody would disagree that we have climate change problems. Maybe the question is why it’s happened.
or the urgency around it. I’m not an extremist FYI. I do think there’s urgency. And you know, I think the other thing is, is organizations are starting to pay more attention. And you know, certainly from a stakeholder business, a stakeholder centric model, I think we see environment, climate change as being maybe one of the biggest challenges we’re dealing with as a society. And number two, I believe we’re going to see bigger and bigger mental health issues than we’re already seeing.
And certainly, I’ve been talking with experts about that because it pulls back into my purpose and passion. And so it’s really trying to find those organizations that want to solve those kinds of issues. Doesn’t have to be those specific issues.
I love that. And so, previous guest, Dr. Mark Gould, who is a psychologist at UCLA, he wrote a book, New York Times bestseller book, Just Listen, and deals specifically with listening. But his practice for 30 or 40 years has centered around entrepreneurs who sometimes have a challenge listening to others. It kind of goes with the territory.
And one thought he shared on the mental health side is that entrepreneurs, many times as children were unknowingly depressed because they just didn’t feel like they fit in, and so they went out and launched something they could fit in, which was their own business. And, you know, I felt a little, I felt a little.
Yep.
you know, twinge when he said that. I was like, yeah, okay, I might recognize some of that. I don’t know. Not admitting anything, doc. But there you go. Kent, it has been my distinct pleasure to have you on the show today. How would we reach out to you? Would we go to your website and please give us that address?
Yeah, it’s a stakeholderbusiness.com and I’m also on LinkedIn and pretty active in posting content. So it’s Kent Gregoire. You should find me out there on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to discover. And those would be the two primary ways. And I look forward to people connecting. And we really do the work of helping to support people in the journey that they’re on.
That’s our utmost interest. It’s not necessarily about engagement for fee. That happens when the right time comes. But we’re an incredible place of resource to help people, whether they’re B Corps or they’re following conscious capitalism, they want to do a stakeholder-centric model. We’re very agnostic to all of it.
We just want to see a tipping point. We want to see a certain number of companies in North America and Mexico particularly, which is 16% is what we’re estimating with some experts, get to the point in which they are following a stakeholder-centric model. And to be clear, we’re measuring that on companies at a billion or more as a basis, but that means we also want all the small companies and we’re engaged with small as well as multi-billion dollar companies.
Love that. I cannot recommend or endorse Kent and stakeholder business enough. Please reach out. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time.

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Title: E107 | The Proven Entrepreneur Show: The Importance of Having a Target Market in Business By Paul Carroll
Date: November 1, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/the-proven-entrepreneur-show-the-importance-of-having-a-target-market-in-business-by-paul-carroll/
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Content:
 
Welcome to the latest episode of The Entrepreneurial Journey, where we explore the inspiring path of Paul Carroll—from his service in the Air Force to his dynamic role as the founder of Avion Wealth. Join us as Paul shares his profound insights on entrepreneurship, emphasizing the vital role of perseverance. Discover how rolling the dice and embracing learning from failures can set the stage for success.
In this episode, Paul delves into the significance of identifying and understanding your target market, offering invaluable advice on tailoring your business to meet the specific needs of your audience. He passionately discusses the importance of treating people well, highlighting how a positive culture not only benefits your team but is essential for long-term success.
Listeners will find encouragement in Paul’s belief that entrepreneurship is more than just a career—it’s a way of life. As he inspires young professionals to embrace their potential and adapt to new challenges, he highlights one of the greatest joys of entrepreneurship: witnessing your team achieve their milestones and flourish.
Tune in to discover how you can cultivate resilience, nurture a thriving team, and foster a fulfilling entrepreneurial journey. If you’re ready to roll the dice on your dreams, this episode is your perfect starting point!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

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The Importance of Having a Target Market in Business By Paul Carroll
So Paul went to the University, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma. Okay. Go Cowboys. All right. After that, did you start your first company? Did you get a job at J O B? What happened?
So I went to Oklahoma State for three semesters. I, Frank, you know, I was young. I ran out of airspeed, altitude and ideas about the same time. And for one of options, and I sure as heck wasn’t going back to Europe, I enlisted in the Air Force as an aircraft electrician. They said, well, join us, you can go to school. And that’s what I did. I enlisted, I went through a little boot camp, became qualified as aircraft electrician.
Sent to Guam.
and spent three years and nine months on Guam because the University of Maryland rotated teachers, professors through Guam, one of the big bases there, and if you scheduled your classes perfectly, you could finish your school. First I got my associate degree in aircraft electrical systems and then my, you know, studied aircraft electrics, autopilot instruments, and then I worked full time on my bachelor’s in business from the University of Maryland.
I was working very long hours. The Air Force probably 10 hours was normal, 12 hours occasionally. And then on top of that, I was going to school full time. I actually, what I would do, I would have the school in the evening, 10 PM I’d be done. I would sleep in my car, Guam by the way is quite hot, till midnight my shift.
would start at midnight, now I worked at eight, 10, 12, however long the shift was. And more than once I would get pulled over for drunk driving and I was just sleepy. I was driving so erratically. Catch up with studies on weekends and that was my life for three years and nine months in bomb. But I graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0 average. And with that, I got out of the service literally
with just months after I completed my degree. I didn’t know what I was gonna do because you don’t know what to do after that. So I applied for graduate school. Number of schools I applied to, but Texas A&M offered me a fantastic package. They were trying to build up their business school. I had great GMATS, 4.0. Their offer was fantastic. It was in-state tuition, an office not unlike the one I’m in now.
married student housing, I was single. It was about a three microsecond decision on the phone. And of course I’m in Guam. So back in those days, a phone call to the US for five minutes was $15, which was a lot of money back then. Some of these schools, UT being one of them, they were very, well, please hold. I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Texas A&M reached out to me and with hindsight, it was a fantastic decision.
Love that. And, you know, one of the things I do when I consult with clients about customer experience, I’m like, man, let me tell you about the telephone. Do you answer the phone on the first string? Do you answer it with a live person? Do you act like you’re thrilled that they called you? Because if you’re not doing that, okay, if, if a prospect calls your business and you don’t answer and they hang up, you know what they do? They call the next business.
They call you a competitor. And Google’s proven time and time again, published multiple studies that the person who wins the business is the person who talks to the prospect first only 70% of the time. And so it makes good sense to answer that flipping telephone with a smile on your face and love in your heart and say, thank you for calling. How can I help you today and go win that business? So.
I love that. And I know you’re just right down the road. You didn’t travel very far after you left A&M. Faded all the way to Houston, you know.
Well, actually, Houston was very circuitous. When I got my master’s and I graduated, my first job, let me see here, it was 1987. The All Patch was a disaster. Texas, there were no jobs. The jokes in those days were, last man to leave the state, turn off the lights. People would abandon the house, leave the keys at the bank and just leave. Maybe you remember those days, Don.
I do.
And this is why Texas A&M was so good to me. The Association of Former Students reached out and said, Paul, you don’t need to worry, which seemed a little strange. And sure enough, when the interviews came up, Arthur Anderson interviewed me. And interviews in those days were quite different from today. I remember the University Bank of Interviews. People would come out of these interviews in tears. Now, this touchy-feely, you got to treat the employee with care didn’t exist.
in a day with 7, 10, 15% unemployment in the state. It was more like old school. But when I was in that interview, it was quite clear the skits had been greased. They frankly told me there’s nothing here. But if you’re willing to talk to our LA office, we’ll fly you out there. And I did. And they pretty much gave me a job on the spot in LA. And I spent a year at Arthur Anderson, what became Accenture. And
And it was mainly just a job, right? You take a job. I talk to young people today all the time. Well, I’m waiting for this. No, you get a job and then you would leverage that into something better. I was at Anderson for a year. After that, I switched over to Ernst & Young, still systems consulting, not what I wanted to do. And then finally I got a job at Smith Barney.
and of all places, Kansas City, Missouri. And I was a stockbroker at Smith Barney for about a year. Smith Barney was dialing for dollars. It was my first experience in the sales. They had what’s called the squat box. They would basically tell you what to think. I had the handicap of having a finance background and understanding that some of this junk was in fact junk. And I really hadn’t signed up for.
for that kind of job. And I also didn’t have good mentoring. A good mentor would have said, hang in there, you can redirect your career once you’ve made it. That’s why mentoring to me as a business owner is so important. I never wanna lose a young professional because I failed to mentor them and show them the light at the end of the tunnel. But a good friend of mine, as I was being disillusioned, said, hey, Paul, there’s a shortage of pilots.
Love you.
Let’s go learn how to fly. It can’t be that hard. And get a flying job. So I literally took all my earnings for the next two to three years and plowed that into flight training. I would work nine months, take time off for a couple months, get the next level, fly around for the next year, some building time, do the next level. So it was the hard way to learn how to fly, but without a big checkbook, that was the only way.
About when I was ready to enter the job market, I had not only all the licenses, but I’d been flying as an instructor for a year. The aviation industry plummeted into the longest and worst hiring drought in its entire history. So I’ve learned if there’s a shortage about the time you’re ready for the job, that shortage may well be gone. I ended up working seven jobs and building 7,000 hours before Continental Airlines.
Started hiring and they had me in one of their very first classes and that was 1997 so I’ve been at this now for quite some time paying a lot of dues and I flew out of New York for a few years and then of course September 11 struck well, I was in the New York base and actually I was in town when that happened and
September 11, it not only blew a hole in the heart of America, it blew a hole in the side of the aviation industry and continental airlines. Back then, a lot of people don’t know this, but the whole industry practically caved in the next couple of months. Continental airlines, as was this way, airlines were a lot less friendly to employees back in those days than they are today. It was, Paul, you’re going to Houston.
Yeah.
and oh, by the way, you’re paying for the move. So I did. Then two months after I moved here in 2000, the next comment was, yeah, sorry about the move, but now we’re gonna furlough you. So after wiping me out financially, then they decided to give me a furlough notice. I was very motivated at this point to come up with a better system.
I don’t like unions. I don’t mind saying it in public. I don’t like the seniority system. And though I love flying and have never left flying, I was very frustrated being on this seniority treadmill and now being on a list to be furloughed solely based on seniority. And I decided, yeah, I don’t know how many pilots you know, but an awful lot of them think they have a raw deal and a lot of the rest of humanity thinks they’ve got a fantastic deal.
Ha ha ha!
I got tired of hearing this and I would always tell people, if you think you’re worth so much money, why don’t you go into the marketplace and prove it. May not have been a comment that made me popular in the crewroom, but when this happened, I looked in the mirror and said, you know what, I’m going to go into the marketplace and see what I’m worth. And I founded a business, then it was called Efficient Wealth Management.
Love that. And let me just say this as an aside on 9-11. So I live in Dallas-Fort Worth, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world. At any given time of day or night, you can step outside and look in the direction of the airport and you will see multiple planes somewhere in the flight pattern of landing and multiple planes.
somewhere, taking off to somewhere. And I think, I don’t know, today it’s like five or 6,000 daily takeoff and landings. I mean, it’s a busy airport. But 9-11, when 9-11 happened, and I love what your description of it punched a hole in the heart of America, on 9-12, you could walk outside of any one of those doors in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex.
It is.
and looked to the sky and there was not one plane anywhere in vision. Because the entire industry, except for military, was grounded. And it was just eerie in a city that really, you know, 35 years ago, before Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was here, this was a much more pedestrian location. And
Multiple studies have proven that the airport is the economic engine for the entire North Texas area. So, blood.
And Don, that’s a really important point. I know it’s a sidebar, but I think people don’t get how important aviation is to the economy. And also there’s parts of aviation that we don’t see. There’s cargo, this amazing amount of cargo flying going on. There’s also what we call general aviation. And general aviation is corporate flying. And general aviation, I believe, gets a really bad rap. North Houston, Montgomery County,
has a fantastic general aviation airport, Conroe North Houston Airport. And in no small part because the effort of that community to build that airport rather than Lambastead, to get a customs facility there, the industrial park that they built around that airport is thriving, it is exploding. Whereas you go to California, Santa Monica Airport, arguably is why LA exists. The Douglas Aircraft Company was founded
at Santa Monica Airport. LA was an aerospace city. They wanna close that airport down because it’s dangerous. Three airplanes in the last five years have landed on the beach or in the golf course. No one killed. Unlike the roads within a half a square mile of the airport. And yet still they wanna shut this down, not realizing that people move their business based on the infrastructure and the opportunities that are available.
And it’s interesting to me to go to these communities and see whether or not they’re pro-aviation or negative. And of course, everyone who’s negative moved there many years after the airport was built, which to me always has appeared to be hypocritical. People worry about the carbon emissions. That’s a real worry. But corporate aviation is the… Corporate aviation, I think of it as like luxury cars.
Yeah.
Every single safety feature in your car today was in a luxury car first. Sustainable aviation fuel and the efficiencies that will make aviation carbon neutral are being built on the back of these corporate aircraft and on the wealthy people that fly them. And so to attack them is OK, if you want to set that technology back five years, go right ahead and shut that down. So that’s the plug for aviation.
Journey through the ups and downs of the ’80s in Houston: a time when resilience was key and hope kept the lights on.
Yeah. Well, I love that. I love living in Dallas, Fort Worth. You know, I’ve, I’ve traveled about a bazillion miles a year. I’ve, I was in Chicago last week. I was in South Africa about six weeks ago for a month. And I never questioned, Hey, can I get a flight? Okay. Because we’re going to have one. It may not be the exact time of day and it may be more expensive than you want, but, but there’s going to be one. And a lot of people in America don’t have that.
And I’m very passionate about that.
Okay, so back to Paul. I’m looking for a hard moment, okay? Something that happened in your entrepreneurial life that when it happened, it’s like, ouch, that hurts. Okay, and certainly continental move and then furlough qualifies, except you were not entrepreneurial at that point. And.
All right. Sorry.
Well, that’s a great question. That’s a great question. And it actually took me two to three years to figure out what I wanted to do. This was the last thing I thought of because Smith Barney had been such a negative experience for me. I looked at mailbox, et cetera. I looked at cleaning companies. I just knew I wanted to start a business. And so I’m very unusual in the wealth management business. I didn’t have a book at Merrill Lynch and then go independent. I started from ground zero with the concept. I’m building a business.
that happens to be wealth management. And the focus of the business will be not sales, but professional, working with that team of experts to help our clients meet their goal and growth through word of mouth and referral. And the truth is it didn’t work immediately, right? I didn’t know what I was doing. I understood finance, but I found myself tweaking the dials and anyone who’s an entrepreneur relates this.
One day, they tweaked the dial and they don’t actually know what that dial was in hindsight, but everything started working. And that happened to me about 2006, 2007, we started a growth path of 25% a year compounded that just went on for over a decade until it became mathematically difficult to continue that. But what really hurt, and I should, a small aside,
Being an entrepreneur isn't rocket science—it's a way of life! Just be a little better than average, keep learning, and watch your dreams take flight! Share on X
Though I was warned I’d be furloughed, the furlough stopped about six people below me. It’s like hanging on the rope that’s burning and the rope quit burning. So I was on reserve with nothing to do and I had a safety net and that was a great blessing. But, you know, just full disclosure. As you might imagine, our core constituency were pilots.
Efficient wealth management was a play on the efficient market hypothesis. But what I came to learn was most pilots are relatively cheap and they loved efficient wealth management. And so there was an accident, but it was an accident that was great. We grew fantastically among the senior captains and the instructor pilots until 2008. And you talk about the gut punch. In 2008, that crash.
Not many people remember this. Every single airline in the country, except Continental and Southwest, went into bankruptcy. Every single pilot group, including Continental, either completely lost or had their pension frozen in time. Southwest didn’t because they didn’t have a pension, they just had a 401k, which somewhat saved them. Continental didn’t go into bankruptcy because Gordon Bethune and his team had created such a positive culture.
with their workforce that when they went to the pilot group and said, we need pay freezes and we need to stop your pension, they actually were able to get it. Now, it was a contentious conversation, but every other airline, the union wouldn’t communicate. They file for bankruptcy. And unfortunately, Continental today is no longer with us and United is not of that culture, but Continental Airlines really taught me a lesson.
about the importance of how you treat people. Fortunately when Bethune left and Brennan went after him, the subsequent management pivoted a little bit and they lost that. But it was a foundational lesson for me. When that happened, when 2008 happened, we essentially lost our market. We would harvest pilots, but the wealth was when they retired and got this big chunk of change.
disappeared and we had to pivot rapidly and we pivoted to what I like to call my greatest failure.
In Houston, Texas, you can’t throw a rock without hitting an oil man. So logically, we decided let’s pivot to energy. We wrote a book, Platform for Wealth. And I call it my greatest failure because we were peddling so fast and so hard that we were growing and succeeding without noticing none of the success, or relatively none, was coming from the oil industry. And that’s okay. I mean, heads down, I think every entrepreneur has been in this situation.
Right?
Heads down, pedaling as fast as you can, making it. We actually expanded to Austin and Austin was a dud. It didn’t work. How could Austin not be working for us? And when we started running analytics in the company, we started realizing we’re targeting this market and succeeding in this market. And this market is C-suite executives and business owners, successful business owners. Well, until relatively recently,
and Austin’s changing. Austin was not a C-suite city. So half of our success was not, and the other half of our success, we weren’t doing well with energy except in that C-suite. And if you’re gonna fail, that’s the way to do it. We finally figured it out. We don’t work well with energy and tech. That’s just not our market. And that actually, that was a great learning experience because it led us to pivot and…
completely rebrand the company to what it is today, Avion Wealth. And that rebranding was completed January 1st, 2020. By May 1st, 2020, we’d forgotten about it because little bug had hit the world. And it was a very, very successful rebranding. It was great. It’s amazing.
Two lessons, one, you gotta have a target market. And the other one that no one taught me, even if you got the wrong target market, it’s better than having a shotgun approach.
Oh, no doubt. No doubt. Yeah. But what is it that the art of war, having a plan, even though the war, even though the battle will not go according to plan, but having a plan is an indicator of success. And so I love that. So we’re coming.
Right. We wrote Platform for Wealth for Energy, but that book facilitated great success despite it not working in the target market.
Yeah, yeah. We’re coming into the final turn. I can see him waving the checkered flag. We’re just about to hit the finish line. So here’s the big question, Paul. I’m gonna put you in a time machine. I’m gonna take you all the way back to 20-year-old Paul. Okay, so I think you’re in Guam at this point. Okay, and you get about 90 seconds to share something you know now you didn’t know then.
I’m sick of it.
but would have helped you, helped speed you along your path. And your path has had some twists and turns and stops and detours, okay? But put you in the time machine, it’ll send you all the way back to 20-year-old Paul. Got about 90 seconds, what are you telling?
I would tell them two things. One, life’s a numbers game. Some people get lucky early. Okay, so what? It’s not your fault, it’s not theirs. But if you keep rolling the dice, and my God, I rolled it a lot before I started making a living, you will make it. It’s that simple. The second thing is…
Life’s a numbers game: keep rolling the dice and you will make it. Persistence and curiosity pave the way to entrepreneurial success! Share on X
Being an entrepreneur is not difficult in terms of, it’s not rocket science. And I was taught in university, oh, it’s such a hard life, it’s such long hours. Being an entrepreneur is the best job on the planet, but it’s not a job, it’s a way of life. And yes, you’re gonna have to become a student of many disciplines, but if you’re interested, if you’re curious about the world, and if you believe in yourself, it’s not rocket science.
And there are so many mediocre business people and entrepreneurs out there. You just have to be a little bit better than average and you’ll be okay and keep learning. Remember the dials? When I started that business, yeah, I had a business degree. I’d never worked in a business role. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just kept reading. I hired consultants. I kept turning the dials and eventually I made it.
I love that. And so, you know, on Roll the Dice, and the audience has heard me say this before, but I’m a firm believer that in every endeavor, you either win or you learn, and learning is just a little slower winning. So keep going, take the next step, whatever that may be, and I don’t care if you’re Mark Cuban or whoever.
there’s always a next step, there’s always a frontier, okay? And I totally agree with you, I don’t think entrepreneurship, it’s not a job, it’s a life. And so many people have found untold freedom in entrepreneurship, and that doesn’t mean they might not work really hard and really long for certain periods of time, but they probably also work not so hard.
Absolutely.
hard and not much for a certain period of time and so there’s a balance.
Yeah, and my last statement is I love running my business. And I love when I have great successes with clients, but I’m so invested in this team of young millennials and Gen Zs and they’re fantastic. They’re different. They don’t have to do as I had. I don’t care. They’re fantastic employees. And I get true almost tear to my eyes joy.
When I see a young professional, they’ve hit 30, they’ve been with me eight years, sorry, and they’ve hit their first big new client, landed their first big win. To me, that actually is the number one joy I get from this business, is the value I’m creating while enjoying the fruits.
I think the generations born into a technological world, you and I were born into an analog world, I think the generations that are born into a digital world will accomplish far more than any generation before them, if nothing else, merely for the fact that they started in a digital world. So, and they are. Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. My pleasure to have you.
Yeah, and they’re great kids.
Donna’s been a fantastic experience and I’m very grateful for the invite. Thank you so much.
Thank you. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show with Paul Carroll. Thanks. See you next time.

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Title: E106 | Entrepreneurial Secrets: Linh Podetti’s Guide to Building a Successful Business
Date: November 1, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/entrepreneurial-secrets-linh-podettis-guide-to-building-a-successful-business/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/podcast-thumb-0110.jpg
Inner Images:
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Content:
Hey there, podcast lovers! This is Don Williams, and I am thrilled to present to you the latest episode of the proven entrepreneur show. Get ready, because today we have a special guest, Linh Podetti, joining us for an incredible conversation that will leave you inspired and motivated.
From teenage mom to successful entrepreneur, Linh Podetti’s journey is a testament to the power of resilience and reinvention. In this inspiring episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, Linh shares her remarkable transformation from working in her parents’ home-based sewing business as a child in Australia to founding Outsourcing Angel, a company that helps businesses scale through automation, systems, and offshore staffing.
Listen as Linh candidly discusses her early challenges, including becoming a mother at 20 and navigating the corporate world as a young parent. She reveals how these experiences sparked her entrepreneurial spirit and drove her to create a “freedom business” that not only serves her lifestyle but also empowers her team and clients to achieve work-life balance.
Discover valuable insights about:

Building sustainable business habits and the power of consistent daily routines
Converting personal setbacks into business opportunities
Creating a remote-first company culture that prioritizes freedom and flexibility
The importance of humility and seeking guidance in entrepreneurship
Implementing strategic outsourcing to scale businesses effectively

 
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/E106-How-Successful-Entrepreneur-Transformed-Her-Challenges-Into-Opportunitie.mp3
Entrepreneurial Secrets: Linh Podetti’s Guide to Building a Successful Business
Hey, it’s Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat, a super nice lady all the way from Australia. So like down under, Linh Podetti. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Don, for having me.
It’s my distinct pleasure. So we know each other through entrepreneurs organization. And I don’t know if we met in Slack or WhatsApp, but we met in some social media channel. And in our very first conversation, we kind of hit it off. And so I’m so thrilled that you’re here today. Let’s dive right in. Tell me about your company. Take a couple of minutes and tell me about your company, Outsourcing Angel. What do you do? Who do you do it with? Why do you do it?
Yeah. So Outsourcing Angel, we started off as an outsourcing company where we recruit virtual assistants from the Philippines for businesses. But nowadays we see ourselves as more of someone that helps businesses to scale the operations so that the business can run without them. So we do that through automation, systemizing, and of course, still hiring amazing, reliable staff, affordable staff from the Philippines.
Yeah, awesome. And how long have you had your business, Len?
It feels like a long time over a decade because what happened is, you know, you start off running like a marketing agency, then you pivot it into like a recruitment model and it officially was launched. The Outsourcing Angel was launched in 2015, but it feels like it wasn’t before that, right? Because often you come up with the final idea, you know, after you’ve been doing a similar model before. So I always say that Richardson business 2010. And so it’s been over 10 years.
I love that and I’m still waiting for my final idea after 37 years as an entrepreneur. I’d be happy to see a final idea. So thank you so much for that. And if you’re looking for help to scale your business in automation or exceptional, highly qualified, affordable help, please reach out to Outsourcing Angel and Linh. Okay, so I’ve.
Yeah.
I’m going to jump right in here. I’m going to take you all the way back to little Lin. So you’re five years old, up to 18 years old. You’re living in your childhood home. However that looked, and different people have different looks for that. But tell me, was there an adult in your childhood home that was an entrepreneur, that set an entrepreneurial example for you?
Yeah, not at all. So I was born and raised in Vietnam. And so I lived firsthand experience in a developing country. We didn’t have much at all. My parents went to work, but yeah, I remember we were still going to the toilet in a little hole, you know, and showering in and we didn’t have a shower. It was just like a little bowl. And so that was the kind of life that I lived. And then we moved to Australia. And look, I would say that not my parents were.
self-employed people, they worked from home sewing because that’s the only thing that they knew of. So when they moved over, a lot of the Vietnamese people were having sewing machine jobs at home. So they would buy machines and they turned their garage or their spare room into an operation. I didn’t think of it as an entrepreneurship journey for my parents back then. It was a job that they created for themselves and it was a very hard job. They worked from about 7 or 8 a.m. till about midnight.
It’s because, you know, they work from home, so they could just work as hard as they can to be able to build a new life in Australia back in 1992. So I’ve been in Australia for about 30 years now.
Awesome. And, you know, technically they were solopreneurs. And so a little, you know, entrepreneurship takes so many different paths. There’s the solopreneur and, you know, then there’s the entrepreneur that ends up building a billion dollar company and, and just about everything in between. So thank you for sharing that. And I’m guessing that because your parents were such hardworking individuals that they instilled a great work ethic in you.
Mmm.
Yeah, yeah. It’s also something that was forced upon me. So at the age of 10, I got so curious, it felt like they were doing arts and crafts at home, doing some sewing here and there. And so I was like, can I help you? And they’re like, sure. So they got me to cut some tags and then I was cutting so good that they’re like, why don’t you learn to sew the tag onto the garment? And then they started slowly teaching me how to do the actual sewing and guess what?
In about a year’s time, I end up being their first employee. And so from the age of probably 10, 11, I was basically working after school weekends and everything up until I was teenager. And I ended up running away because I was like, you know, so stressed out being a kid and having, you know, being forced to work. And, but yeah, definitely looking back, I was like, you really instilled in me resilience, hard work, and just that nonstop hustle.
Yeah, yeah, love that. Okay, so after your school girl years, okay, so you’re 18. Did you go to university? Did you backpack across Europe? Did you join the Merchant Marines? What’d you do?
Hahaha
a really interesting life. So I ended up dating a bad guy. So basically I had a really tough time growing up with my parents feeling like, oh my God, you’re just making me work. So I ended up going on the wrong path and I ended up dating bad guys. And one of that guy happens to be on drugs and really, really bad. I ended up running away from home and at the age of 19, I got pregnant and I ended up having a kid at the age of 20. And so…
That was my youth. And now I have a son that is about 20 and I was so excited for him when he graduated or when he finished year 12. And I was like, yay, you finished. And now, you know, you’re a grown man. You can do whatever you want in a sense. I was excited for him, like the opportunities, like traveling, doing all that. And then it just hit me. I was like, oh my God, when I was your age, I ended up having a kid. And I was like, and he even said to me, I don’t know what you were thinking, mom. So like, as much as he’s grateful to be alive on this earth and here.
right now with me, he was still, you know, he felt sorry for me. I don’t know, he doesn’t know what I was doing at that time.
Well, you know, it’s interesting. I interviewed a guest not too long ago and she shared a story about she was a mother at 16. And that was not her parents’ plan for her life nor really her plan for her life. And, but after the mic went off, we talked about it a little bit and I was like, you know, out of all the people that have been born since the beginning of time, okay.
of all the people who’ve been born, you do realize that most of them were born to teenage parents, right? And so while, you know, there are sometimes some societal pressures, the reality is most of us were born, my mother was 18, my father was 19, and my father was 20. And so,
Yeah!
There are hormones in youth. We know that, yeah. So, okay, so had your son, and turned out that that’s been a complete blessing. And so you got a job, you started a company at 20. What’s the story, what’d you do?
I’m sorry.
Yeah. So, um, like I said, I didn’t really have any entrepreneur examples or I wasn’t, I mean, I, I aspire to, to work in a business when I was a kid. I remember, you know, when we’re role playing, I was like pretending I’m holding a little suitcase and I always knew that I wanted to be in business, but I really had no idea what owning a business is or I didn’t even know the word entrepreneurship. I remember in year 10 or 11, when I heard the word, I said to my accounting teacher, what is entrepreneurship? You know, and then I was still, it was, it sounded like a big word.
And so I still finished uni. So I finished year 12, had a baby, only took six months off really. Finished uni, did four years of international business, graduated with a distinction. I was so proud. I said, Oh my God, I graduated with a baby and a distinction. You’re not just, just not just a pass. And so I got myself a graduate job at a defense company. So they build defense ships. It was a very stable job. It was amazing at the first year because I had a really great manager.
who really guided me and I think I am the leader that I am today because of her. I was so green. I didn’t know anything about work life, but she just took that time out to like guide me, but she was very unique. She was one of those managers that were. Authentic spoke her, you know, she was just so real. She would share with me about her personal life. She would have Friday parties where the only department that really celebrated. And she just.
taught me how to be vulnerable and being real. She wasn’t like trying to pretend she’s this corporate boss and only talk about work. And so I always tell her till this day, it’s like, I am who I am because of you. I just realized that you can be a manager or a leader, but you can actually just be this goofy, you know, boss that you want to. And so, but after she left, you know, I experienced that typical corporate life. It was like crap, be a manager. I didn’t really care about you. Promise you that, you know, when this person leaves and you get…
to do all these jobs that she was doing and you’re going to get better pay. But then the pay didn’t come because there’s no budget for it. And then I watched all these people around me complaining about their jobs. And they’re there for like 10 years, 15 years, whatever it is. I’m like, Oh my God, I do not want to be like them sitting here complaining and still here. And I’m barely really contributing much to the company at this time, meaning like I would do my basic and yet people were complimenting me. My managers were like,
Oh, you’re really good. And I’m like, this is good. You call me this good. And so I realized that even if I could hide in the company and get paid doing nothing, I wasn’t doing my self justice. I wasn’t growing. And then the company wasn’t really getting the best out of me either. And so I explored entrepreneurship while I was at work. A friend of mine gave me some bottles of nail polish to try and the gullible me going, oh, how much is this product? And then it’s like a dollar. I said,
Oh, I think I’m going to make become a millionaire. If I could just get a million girls, which what we’ve got billions of people in this world, if only a million bought this nail polish and I just made a dollar out of it, I’m going to be a millionaire. And so I was just super ignorant and gullible. And then I started that business. And look, it didn’t turn out that way, but it gave me that stepping stone into business.
Well, and you know, it’s interesting. So many times people that are not entrepreneurs, people that are in the States, you know, we would call W-2s, you know, they, they were working for someone. They, they have it in their head that failing is the opposite of success. And, um, and I’ll say financial success because there’s certainly better successes than money. But, um.
But truthfully, failing, as long as you’re failing forward, is an inherent part of success. You can’t really win if you don’t lose some time. And so, but it’s easier for an old guy to look back and say that, than it is for somebody, you know, going through that the first time. So your first entrepreneurial journey.
Yes.
Yeah.
You thought you were going to be Maybelline or L’Oreal and sell cosmetics to a million people, make a dollar a bottle. When was the first time you started a company that had some legs? Things did work out at least some of the time. And I think that’s another misconception people have about entrepreneurship is they think,
You know, their life is really easy and everything works perfectly all of the time. And you’re like, no, not really. You know, if we’re winning 51% of the time or better, hey, it’s good. And if we’re losing 51% of the time, it’s bad.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. So it was thanks to starting this nail polish business that I learnt how to do marketing for that business. I mean, I didn’t personally do it, but I learnt that I needed SEO, I needed Google ads and I had no idea about it. And so I hired people. First I even hired Australian people to build me the website only to be actually ripped off by an Australian company where they built me a website and then said, no, you don’t own this. We still own this. You need to pay us to continue to work on it.
And so with limited funding, I had to look for other solutions. And that’s when I stumbled across offshore, you know, resources. And so it was called ODES at the time. And, and so, yeah, in between, so I quit my job. I decided to go all in into this nail polish business, even though I wasn’t making that money, I was one of those type of people that said, always ask these kind of really logical questions. Like if I was spending 40 hours at work, how am I going to make this business work? Let’s do it. And I jumped off and.
You know, while I was starting this nail polish business, I realized how depressed I was. It was like, oh my God, why didn’t anyone ask me what business do I like or what’s the passion? Cause I didn’t have any mentors at the time or any entrepreneur examples. So I remember just dreading waking up just as much as I was going to work and I hated it. And so I would end up going to networking events. I even created my own networking opportunities for people. So it was…
a site called Meetup at the time. And I even built a community of business startup zero capital. So hey, who’s here want to start a business with no money? Let’s get together. And so I built it based on, hey, I’m going to facilitate this and just gather and anyone else have any ideas to share, they can share. So it wasn’t about me. It was really about the community. And so, you know, once in a while, I would explain some of the marketing things I’m doing for my nail polish business.
And surprisingly, when I finished talking, some of these members said to me, Hey, what do you do? And I’m like, Oh, I have this nail polish business, you know? And then at the time I think I was learning life coaching as well, thinking maybe I want to be a life coach. I’m still exploring and they’re like, Oh, how do you do that? How do you do your marketing here? And then, and so they too were starting out having some businesses of their own. And I was giving away information. Oh, you do it like this, or you hire people over here. And they’re like, Oh, really? How do you do that? And.
To me, it just sounded simple, but to them it was, no, I don’t have time for that, can I pay you? And that was when I made my first real money. So it was me going, oh my God, they wanna pay me to go and get these marketing people to do their work, which is something that I’ve done for myself. All right, sure. You know, I would go and find someone for $600 and just said, I’ll do it for a thousand. I made barely anything, realized that I spent hours doing the website, but it wasn’t paid well. But that was when I realized,
problem solving is really about tuning in to go, you know, what is it that this person need? Maybe I already got the skill set that can deliver this and then actually going for it rather than having to think of some fancy ideas, some unique ideas. And that was when my, I started the marketing agency after having several clients and like, Oh, I really need to actually set up a business name now. Oh, I really need a business card. And so I did it in reverse. Whereas my first business of the nail polish, guess what? I spent
$30,000 on just set up, buying nail polish, creating trademarks, creating logos. And so I always tell people it’s like, just make the money first and worry about all that marketing later.
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I have for years been a big fan of go sell it and then build it. It just, you know, because I know a lot of people who have built really expensive, really ornate, really complex systems, you know, and nobody bought them. And so it’s just easier in my mind to sell it and then go build it. Okay. I love that. So I want you to think back across your career.
Mmm.
Yeah.
I want you to look for a hard moment. So if something happened that was like, ah, man, this hurts. But maybe today, after some perspective and looking at it in retrospect, you can say, you know, that actually was pretty positive for me, but at the time it hurt. Do you have a heart moment? Do you have something you could share with us?
Yeah.
Yeah, would you like a more like a personal story or business?
Let’s do, let’s do one of each. We got time.
Yeah, I mean, personally, I’ve just gone through so much challenges growing up, as I said, and I think, you know, having that, the kid at a very young age at that time, I think that was the biggest learning lesson for me. It’s one of those decisions you make that you have to live with for the rest of your life. I remember my mom going like, do you know you’re having a baby? Like it’s a baby. It’s like, you know, so she obviously wanted me to have an abortion knowing that my future was going to be very hard.
And I was like, yeah, I really just saw it as like, yeah, why not? It’s like buying something, you know, and then being able to return it again. And so I would say that having a child so young really has made me grow up so quick. And if it wasn’t for having a child in my early twenties, I wouldn’t have known what it’s like to have to juggle work and kids and you know, that whole life.
And so I see a lot of friends nowadays in their 30s, having feeling that they’re going, oh my God, I’m torn between working and having to be with my children. And so in my early 20s, I had a few years working in a corporate job and I was like, there’s no flexibility. I have no time for my son. I have to drop him off before care, after care. And that was the motivation for me wanting to start something. It wasn’t that I just wanted to be an entrepreneur to be cool, it was like a necessity.
because I had to really pretend I’m sick or pretend I’m this just to be there for my son. And so if it wasn’t for being a mum, I wouldn’t have that necessity to start a business so that I have my freedom. And then so then I end up looking for a freedom business. I’ve tried many different things from doing blogging, doing, you know, selling products or whatever else.
whatever it is, I needed a freedom business. And so what I’m proud of at Outsourcing Angel right now is it’s completely remote. It’s a freedom business. And why I built it that way is that I also want all my virtual assistants from the Philippines or any of my staff who are from Australia to also have that freedom. I didn’t build a business so that I could put it in a corporate box and just so that I could make money and can control what they’re doing every day. I wanted to create that same freedom for.
for my team. And likewise, I have a lot of compassion for business owners. You know, I myself feel like the next last thing I want is you building a business that becomes a self-employed job like my parents did. You know, there was no teams, there was no structure and you’re stuck in it. And so my goal for Outsourcing Angel is to free up the business owners as well so they can travel and be there with their family. So I think that’s really profound.
I love that. And I think there’s some, you know, truths in there. You, you were kind of in a corner. You’re a very young mother. And, and I don’t think anything makes young people grow up like having a baby. I mean, there’s just, there’s just no substitute for the maturity that causes. And knew that you needed a freedom business. And you said, Hey, I tried
Mm-hmm.
tried a lot of things. So many times I think people try one thing and it doesn’t work and odds are it’s not going to work. Your first business, highly likely that you’re not good at it. The first time you paint a picture, highly likely you’re not good at it. The first time you record a video, highly likely that you’re not good at it. But we know as entrepreneurs that start ugly, start where you’re at, start with what you have.
Okay. And the more you do it, the better you’ll get. You know, I’m shocking. So okay. So that was a great personal, did you have a business heart moment too?
Yeah, so this one kind of started off as a personal thing, but it turned out into a business achievement actually. So I had a girlfriend that I met five, six years ago and I was so excited about meeting this girl. She was so like me, you know, another single mom. Well, I wasn’t a single mom anymore at that time, but another single mom lived nearby, Vietnamese. It was just like amazing. And I saw her as like my sister, my best friend. And a year down the track,
Basically, I realized she was a dud. Like she just used me or it wasn’t a really good friendship. But let’s just say I was torn. It was like breaking up with a boyfriend. You know, I was like thinking about when did it break up? When did I not see the signs, you know, all that stuff. And oh my God, I just love this person so much. And how come it wasn’t like that? But the funniest thing was during the time that I was friends with her, she introduced me to someone. She said, hey.
I bumped into this guy at a networking place and he does something similar to you. He works with virtual assistants and he also helps business owners to free themselves up at that time. And I was like even hesitated wanting to meet him because I’m like, it’s just sounded like a competitor, right? Why should I even meet this guy? But me being curious, one of those types that just loves to like, oh, what’s out there? And so I ended up having a coffee with this guy.
And nothing really happened out of it, but a year or two year later, when he came back from Singapore, he came back to me looking for a job and he has been the best investment for the business because the reason why he was so perfect for us is because he has skills in virtual assistant, because he knew how to help clients with the same thing that I was helping and because he’s tried to be an entrepreneur himself, he went. So the reason why between the coffee date and
me meeting him later is that he went out trying to be an entrepreneur for himself. And he went to Singapore and tried to travel, no man kind of living style, and then also started his own marketing agency. So he has firsthand experience of what it’s like running his own company. And now he’s coming back going, I’m done. I don’t want to do entrepreneurship anymore. I’m actually looking for a great company to work with. And I want to feel like I could still have freedom and flexibility, but I’m ready to just commit myself because I’m done with entrepreneurship.
And so here I am faced with this opportunity. I wasn’t, to me, it wasn’t a dilemma. It was almost like too good to be true. It’s presented at me and I ended up hiring him. He was my operations manager. Now he’s grown into my managing director. And if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here claiming that I’m semi-retired because really truly he came in and said, I just want to help you to be able to become obsolete and that we don’t need you in the business anymore. I’m like, what? I didn’t even know I needed that for myself.
And so that is the biggest blessing. And, you know, that biggest heartbreak, personal heartbreak of our friendship turned out into be a blessing in business for me.
I think there’s some real truths there. One, for several years now, I’ve operated under this. I never turned down a meeting. If somebody wants to meet with me, I meet with them. And, you know, I kiss some frogs. You know, sometimes I’m like, I’m not really sure what I was doing there, but you know, you don’t have to stay all day. And every once in a while there’s a princess, you’re like, wow, this was really a good meeting. And then…
I had a vice president of operations that until he retired, he was with me almost 30 years and he was exceptionally highly skilled. And I asked him once, I was like, Michael, why don’t you have your own company? And I loved his answer. His answer was, uneasy lies the head of the king.
And I want to do good work, but I don’t want to have to worry about it. And so, um, there are those people out there that fit very good with people like you and me and, and our paths have different skills and we’re better together. And so, um, yes. So love that. Um.
Mm-hmm. Ah, perfect match, made in heaven.
Okay, so what about a golden nugget of wisdom? So something that you know that if I could look inside your brain at all the nuggets you have, I’d be like, oh, Linh, share this one with our audience today. What would that be?
say that habits means everything. You know, habits has really helped me to not just achieve the different successes in different areas of life. It’s really helped me to become a consistently happy person. And I think, you know, we hear habits and even when we’re young as kids, we hear habit, but we don’t see understand the power of it, the, you know, what makes
Habits mean everything. What makes life worth living is when you have amazing habits that build on that. Share on X
What makes life worth living is when you have amazing habits that build on that. And so, yeah, I would say the last few years, I just really focus and hone into building my habits. And I think that as an entrepreneur or as a mom or as anybody, we really need to think about how do we, what do we want in life and how do we build these daily habits, because, you know, growing up, I, you know, I guess everyone, we always want shortcuts, we always want, oh, just give me a pill and so I can.
drink it and I’m just going to be skinny. Um, give me a hack so that then I could just become an entrepreneur and be rich tomorrow, but it’s in the daily habits that actually will ever make you succeed seed sustainably, right? And so I would say that if I didn’t start building a habit of waking up early 3am and have that time for myself to really work on my life, I just have so much time to reflect, to think about all the achievements I’ve done and look at the challenges and
and didn’t realize that I was, I am like 10 times smarter in the morning, then I wouldn’t be able to grow the business that I have today. And I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest size or has the biggest team or biggest revenue, but it’s created the best lifestyle for me. And I’m able to design it because I have more time or just building habits around, you know, health exercise and all that has really helped me to have the energy.
to love my business, to give back to my communities or to give back to my family. It’s like, you know, I travel a lot, but it also takes a lot of time to plan all that, you know? And so you need to have a really great habit around all the different areas. And so I would say that’s my biggest wisdom to anybody. I tell my son that as well about habits and.
And he had all these limiting beliefs that said, oh, no, I’m to this, I’m to that. And luckily, I sent him to UPW for Tony Robbins just this weekend. And he was able to understand limiting beliefs. And then now he’s excited to work on his new habits around health and fitness and whatever else, and he’s open to reading as well. And so, yeah, I’m very excited about that.
I love that. And so, it’s not my quote, I’m not sure who said it, but that we continually overestimate what we can get done in the short term and underestimate what we can get done in the long term.
And that boils down to those habits. You know, you don’t gain 100 pounds all at one time, you gain it one bite at a time, and you take it off, you know, an ounce at a time. And that’s just how that works. And on self-limiting beliefs, which I think everybody suffers from, from time to time.
Exactly.
But a great question to ask yourself is, is this really true or is this a story my brain is telling myself? And if you’ll just ask yourself that question, many times you’ll be like, ah, why does my brain tell me those things? You know, because that’s really what’s happening. Okay, so toughest question of the interview, I’m preparing you, toughest question.
Hahaha!
of the interview. I’m gonna put you in a time machine and I’m gonna send you all the way back to 20 year old Linh. And you’re gonna get a minute, maybe two.
tell Linh something you know now, you wish you knew then, that would have helped you along your path. So into the time machine you go, all the way back, here’s 20 year old Linh, what do you have to say?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I would say God loves you. At that time, I didn’t know there was a God. I didn’t feel loved. I didn’t feel loved by my parents. I didn’t feel loved by the world. I felt like everything was just crumbling. And I also felt then for the next many years, I would try to control and try to fix my life and try to be better. But I was, you know, but then I was looking at wrong places and it’s only when I surrendered and that was that.
the age of 26 or 27, when I gave up and said, oh my God, help me, you know? And that was when I felt that there was a universal, or a God out there when things just started to happen. When I basically kind of humbled myself and said, you know what, I don’t know everything. And I do need help. I’m not this cocky teenager anymore, or this mom that fine, you’re bad to me, I’m gonna date someone else. Or, you know, mom, I’ll show you, I’m gonna be successful for you. And it was just…
a lot of ego, a lot of pride, a lot of arrogance. And it wasn’t until I humbled myself and said, you know what, I need help. And I surrendered to whatever was out there. And I said, and then, you know, it wasn’t only until three years ago that I find Jesus. And it’s taken me to this new life of spirituality and understanding that all the lessons has always been in there. You know, when God says, help others, you know, or treat each other like the way you want to be treated or.
or you never can out give the universe or out give God. It’s all there and I wish I had that roadmap to follow so I wouldn’t have stressed so much and I did, I was so worried about my future, I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t have a philosophy. I didn’t have a framework to work with you know. Now when I go to church and I see these young people there I’m like wow how are you here like at 15 I was clueless or I thought I knew the world and you’re here. I am so
happy for you, you know? And so I just would have told Linh to like, humble yourself, ask for help, surrender. And I don’t know, I wish that maybe I bumped into someone that would introduce me to God earlier. But that’s why I suffered for a few more years after that.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And so, you know, my own journey, I was raised in a house of faith. But then at about 15, I turned my back on what I believed for, I don’t know, 10 years. And so, a life is a long journey. And, you know, there are many turns and dips in the road.
And so thank you for sharing that. So Linh, how could we as the proven entrepreneur tribe, how could we support you? What could we do for you?
Well, yeah, come and connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, I’m everywhere on social media. I would love to meet more amazing people out there. And at my company, Outsourcing Angel, we’re always here to help if you know anyone that are stuck inside their business, feeling trapped, and what they desire is freedom, and they’re not having the freedom that they want right now. So we would love to chat to them as well. But other than that, one of my mission is to just continue to help.
those in need. So at Outsourcing Angel, we donate 10% of our profit to our charity partners. So sometimes people are wondering, like, how do I help people and know that the money actually goes to the people in need? Well, we have that opportunity at Outsourcing Angel. If you go there, there is like a charity project that we do. These people are actually volunteers. They’re not actually, you know, organizations, charity organizations. They’re just passionate.
volunteers that go out there and go to those communities directly. And so any money we give them, $200, $500, anything, it literally goes straight to them and we do immediate projects. So, for example, we notice that they are lacking water. We’ll go and help with the water or we’ll right now the typhoon just hit. Then we would go and do that kind of project. And so, yeah, that’s really, yeah, meaningful to me. It’s not just about business. I think it’s like, how else can we do to help others?
I love that. I love that. OK, any final thoughts?
No, thank you so much for having me. I’m really appreciative of this EO organization that we’re part of. I encourage anyone who’s listening to really check it out. Like I really underestimated the power of it. I hesitate to join and I not only have made friends within EO, Sydney and Australia, but like people like yourself in the U S and the best part is if I ever visit your country, I know that you’ll welcome me with open arms and likewise, I can’t wait for you.
to come and visit me in Sydney so that I could take you around as well.
looking forward to it. Linh, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. You’re a delight, as always. And that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, bye.
Bye!

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Title: E105 | Unlocking Success: Mastering Skills, Sales, and Team Dynamics
Date: October 31, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/unlocking-success-mastering-skills-sales-team-dynamics/
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Content:
Welcome to the Proven Entrepreneur Show. In this episode, Don Williams interviews Matthew Pollard, an entrepreneur and sales expert. They discuss Matthew’s early entrepreneurial influences, his professional focus, and the importance of talent, skills, and belief. Matthew shares his journey and success in sales, highlighting the pitfalls of promoting great salespeople to managers. They also discuss the power of enthusiasm and being sold yourself, influenced by the teachings of Zig Ziglar.
The conversation delves into understanding introversion and extroversion, building teams with diverse personalities, and the importance of bias and prejudice in team building. Matthew shares hard lessons and warp speed moments in his career, emphasizing the power of collaboration and the EO community. The episode concludes with closing thoughts and how to connect with Matthew.
Don’t miss this inspiring episode filled with valuable insights and practical advice from an experienced entrepreneur. Tune in now!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com.
Watch the episode here

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The Proven Entrepreneur Show: Unlocking Success: Mastering Skills, Sales, and Team Dynamics
Hey, it’s Don Williams with the Proven Entrepreneur Show. And do I have a treat for you? I have a gentleman from further away than East Texas, and I’ll let him say where he’s from, but though we’re significantly different in our where we’re from and in our ages, the first time I spoke with him, I think I made the comment.
You are my brother from another mother. And so welcome Matthew Pollard. I am thrilled to have you on the show today.
Mate, I am ecstatic to be here. And I have to say, after having you on my show yesterday, just a little concerned about the curve ball questions that you promised to give me.
Well, so I was a guest on Matthew’s great podcast, The Introvert Edge yesterday, and we had a great time, and he threw me a really hard question at the end, and so I stayed up all night noodling the, how could I ambush him? No, I’m kidding, on the podcast. So let’s hop right in. Matthew in the home. I’m gonna take you all the way back to little Matthew.
say ages five up to 18. In the home that you were raised, however that looks, and it looks different for different people, okay, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur and set an entrepreneurial example for you?
You know, at the age of five, I’m going to be able to safely say no, but in my later years going up to high school, absolutely. And what’s really interesting, you’ll enjoy this. My father was the first one to get a degree in his family and he became industrial chemist or degree qualified and then got one of those safe jobs. However, my mother, she was, I mean…
she’s brilliant, my mother, she won top marks at all of her primary schools and high schools. And because of that, she got scholarship to any school she wanted to go to. And her principal said, look, she needs to do one of these high level qualifications. And he was suggesting Dr. Loya, really anything. And her father, who was a sheep shearer, said that
later in later years went to work in a factory said no daughter of mine will ever have one of those degrees she’s going to go to secretarial school where she can get a safe job. Now my
Her mother actually got what’s called RSI, which is a horrible issue with her neck. And so when that happened, she couldn’t do secretarial services anymore. She put my, my father worked really hard while my mother went back to school, got her business degree and actually became a business coach. So I was lucky enough in the later years to hear about rich dad, poor dad, and emith around the dinner table. And that was around those years that I actually started to pay attention around the dinner table, as opposed to wishing I was in front of the TV. So it was great timing for me.
Okay, I love that. And maybe my audience can figure it out, but I should ask you, Matthew, where are you from?
Well, so I’m from Austin, techno. I’m from, from Melbourne, Australia, and I’ve lived in the States for about 10 years. And my father says that I sound much more American, but every American that I know says, you don’t sound American at all.
It’s so funny. So I’m from Kansas, but I live in Texas. When I go back to Kansas, they’re all like, oh, you have this Southern accent. And I’m like, hmm, this is just how normal people talk? I don’t know what you’re talking about, but anyhow, there you go. Okay. So tell me, I know you’ve done several things. You’ve had a very illustrious career, even at such a young age, but tell me what.
Yeah.
What’s getting most of your time professionally? What do you do? What value do you bring to the world that you are able to charge people for and trade your time, effort and energy?
Yeah, absolutely. I think I was.
I had a really lucky, which at the time seemed really unlucky thing happened to me when I was younger. I know Don, you fell into sales, chose sales and just happened to be brilliant from day one. That was not me. I had a reading speed of a sixth grader in late high school. I was super introverted and luckily enough, I got diagnosed with this thing called Erland syndrome, which basically means I put on a funny pair of colored lenses and miraculously I can learn to read. Now not like everyone else, I could start the process of learning to read.
What actually happened was the last two years of high school, I worked really hard, but my family could see I was just exhausted. And because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, we all agreed I was just going to get a safe job for a year to find myself. And that job was doing data entry at a real estate agency until it shut down three weeks later and I was out of work, which I literally fell into commission on these sales in Australia at Christmas time. The only jobs you can get.
I mean, there was like three jobs in the paper and they were all commissionary sales roles. And we can talk about how horrific that was for me, but I went to becoming the number one salesperson in the largest sales and marketing company in the Southern hemisphere. And about a year later, I started my own business and I fast forward to shy of a decade, I’ve been responsible for five multi-million dollar success stories. So now I love teaching people.
Virtual discussion: Matthew (L) and Don (R) share insights on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
how to get beyond their functional skill. Because a great accountant thinks that the key to being successful is being a better accountant. And the problem is they all define themselves by their functional skill, which makes price the only factor. And I just think there’s something heroic about a person with enough talent, skill, and belief in themselves to start a business of their own. And I just find that they just get stuck in this endless hamster wheel of struggling to find people that will listen, trying to set themselves apart and trying to make the sale. And especially those introverts that wear their heart on their sleeve that find self-promotion so uncomfortable.
It just, my heart goes out to those people. And that’s what I spend my life doing now. I help them through my books, through my coaching, through my speaking. And I just love doing that.
I love that. And you know, my own mission is to help others help others. And, um, and so we are very closely aligned there. And, and I love the point and I want to, and I want to point this out in case anybody missed it, but talent, skills, and belief. And, um, you know, all of those can be improved and it takes all three. And so, um, thank you so much.
Absolutely.
So, okay, we’re back to young Matthew, younger Matthew. Okay, you’re raised in Melbourne, you hit 18, you go to university, you backpack across India, you join the Merchant Marine. What do you do?
Well, as I said, I mean, I…
I always found life tough because of my reading issue. I got very used to feeling like the slow kid. And I have to say that was actually a great learning experience for me, because I learned that, for instance, I couldn’t read the textbooks that they had in English class. So I would start very heated conversations in the classroom so I could find out what the book was about. So I learned different ways to find shortcuts or find paths that would actually work for me, because the world didn’t work for me like it did for most people.
And I think that really applied to what happened after, like I fell into a job doing data entry, as I said, and then lost it within three weeks and picked up the paper and said, you know what, I’ve got to apply. My dad broke his back 80 hours a week supporting the family. I’m not going home with nothing lined up. So I reached out to three commission only sales roles. And if you think about a guy that, look, I had chronic acne back then and I had braces. I felt like the slow kid.
These are not the three calls I wanted to make. I made them anyway, because my father was scarier. And I applied for three jobs and I got three job interviews. And then I went through the three interviews and I got three job offers and I went, maybe they see something in me, I don’t see in myself. So I take this job doing business to business telecommunication sales door to door. And I actually went in a little bit confident to my first day of product training, because that’s what you get five days product training, no sales training. And my manager said like,
Matt, we just hire everyone. We’ve got this saying, we throw mud up against the wall. We see what sticks. Every commission rolls like that. So I got three job offers, because they all hire everyone. Well, after five days product training and not a single second of sales training, I get thrown on this road. I still remember it’s called Sydney Road in Melbourne, Australia. It’s like a thousand doors on each side, which I guess if you’re gonna get turned down, you don’t have far to walk. Great. Well, I had this realization before I walked in the first door. I don’t even know what to say. No one taught me that piece. So…
I walked in, took a deep breath, walked in and I was politely told to leave, which I thought was terrible right up until my next door where I was sworn at. But my personal favorite was always getting told to get a real job. I mean, this was the only job that I could get, right? So door after door, I did this. And I remember I got to my 93rd door and I made my first sale. And I mean, it was $70 I made. That was a lot of money for me back then.
But then I had this sobering realization, I gotta do this again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and that whole concept was just not okay. And I think for a lot of the introverts listening, I’m sure this sounds terrifying. But for me, I feel like most introverts especially, but I mean, most business owners in general, they say, I’ve either got it or I don’t. So I’m either gonna hustle and grind it out and rely on lady luck, or I’m just gonna give up. And a lot of people sadly give up. And I just went, no, I’m not willing to accept that. I had to choose that sales was a system or my year was gonna be horrible.
And I just went to work learning that system. I literally, I mean, I wasn’t going to pick up a Brian Tracy or a Zig Ziglar book because I knew it would take me a year to read it, let alone apply it. But I typed sales system into YouTube and all these videos came up and surprise, I wasn’t the first person to have this idea. So I would spend eight hours applying what I learned every day. And then I would.
rush home to learn the next step of the process or to perfect the part that I was working on. And Dora, like every day I’d get better, but I mean, soon it was 71 doors, then it was 46, then it was 28, then it was nine. I got it down to making a sale every three doors. And I still remember it was about six weeks in, my manager pulls me aside and he pulls me to his office. And I thought I was about to get fired. Like he had this puzzled look on his face. I mean, I was the quiet guy. I handed my paperwork in downstairs. I didn’t even really speak to anybody. And he’s like, Matt, we just got our national sales figures.
And it just, it turns out you’re the number one salesperson in the company. And it was like, it started out of his mouth. But the one thing he definitely knew was because I was at the top, because I can sell, obviously I can manage. He’s like, you need to manage a team. I don’t know why people think that because you can sell, you can manage. They were like, no worries, we’ll give you 20 people. Mud up against the wall. 24 hours, everyone quit. Back to YouTube, learned to manage, got pretty good at it, promoted seven times. And then, you know, the rest is history. But I definitely had no plan leaving high school. And
I have, you know, really just the gods to thank for letting me lose that job. Not that I feel that anyone doing data entry should feel bad about that. If you love it, if you’re, if you love coding, if you love writing, I just, I love doing what I do now. And I feel I would have missed out on that if that horrible happenstance didn’t turn out to be a blessing.
And even though you’ve told me a couple of times they went out of business, I keep hearing that in three weeks you put them out of business. Um, yeah.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I, I sent out a series of letters to everybody saying we had to double their prices and they all got fired. No, what happens was it was getting like, you got to understand in Australia is very different. Like, yes, the toilet bowl spin the other way, but we also have our summer season at a different time. So what happens is about the 20th of December, everyone goes on holidays until the 15th or 20th of January.
So if you’re thinking, if you’ve got an unprofitable office, you’re gonna shut it down at about that time so you don’t have to carry everyone for an entire month, as horrible as that sounds. Like I know people here talk about shutting, getting fired just before Christmas, and that’s horrible because it’s harder to get a job for a few days. It’s a month in Australia, right? So the reason, I mean, what happened is, my boss at the time got a phone call from head office.
And he got told that the office wasn’t performing. And because of that, they were shutting down the entire office. And I, because of that, everyone in the office was out of work. And I knew why. I mean, it’s funny. I wrote a chapter about this in my first book, the introvert’s edge to sales. And it’s this story about this real estate agent. When I was learning, like he would take me out sometimes just to show me, I think he had in his heart that I was one day, I mean, he was horribly wrong the way I was behaving, that I was one day going to enjoy selling.
And I would watch him drop a few pamphlets off and then go, okay, it’s time for lunch. And he would be out prospecting for like 10 minutes. And then the rest of the day would be, you know, finding time to waste. And so it made sense why it closed, but at that point I was like, well, that’s just how businesses run. It only took the next job for me to realize, no, it’s not.
Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I want to draw a little emphasis to is this. You were a great salesperson and so they made this presumption, he’s going to be a great sales manager. And I see that so common in my past where companies took a great salesperson, promoted and manager, and they lost twice. They got a horrible manager and they lost their best salesperson.
And so the other thing that I think that you did so well and were wise beyond your years is Zig used to say, people are born boys and born girls. There’s no born salespeople. And so the great salespeople somehow between birth and death, learn how to do it. And so you on your own.
Okay. And maybe because of your learning challenge said, Hey, I’m not as good at this as I want to be 93 doors to get a sale. Maybe I should learn something about it and, and figure it out. And the other thing that I think was really wise beyond your years is this. Many times clients come to me and they’re like, I just, just teach me the tricks of the trade.
Sales isn’t about shiny tricks; it’s about knowing the trade. Share on X
Sales isn’t about shiny tricks; it’s about knowing the trade.
And my answer is always this, it’s so much easier just to learn the trade. The tricks won’t make any sense until you learn the trade and selling is in fact an honorable profession and literally nothing happens in the economy until somebody makes a sale somewhere and I don’t care what the product, service or experience is.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I’m glad you said that because you said something when I interviewed you about sincerity and when you’re sincere, sales becomes easy. And, you know, I’m glad you brought up Zig Ziglar actually, because for those people that think they can’t sell and they’re not going to believe you, who by the way, we haven’t outed you as an introvert. And I promised I would as an introvert yourself can sell. I as an introvert can sell. But if you think that we perhaps, you know, maybe we’re not perhaps as high class as the best in the world.
the whoever existed is also an introvert. But I also think that he would struggle with this. And I’ve interviewed his son, Tom Ziegler on the podcast and his father definitely believed in being sincere. But to being, if you want to be sincere, you have to truly believe that you’re leaving the customer better off by having them buy your product. And I know you and I both agree, if you’ve got a product or service that doesn’t better the client, then.
go find something else to sell, go start a different business and actually stop listening to this podcast episode because I don’t want to help you. But if you do have a product, the best way to serve your clients is to get them out of their own way. And the best way to get them over out of their own way is not to educate them because they don’t want all of that jargon. You want to tell stories and you want to motivate and inspire action. And just so everyone’s aware, the true definition before the used car salesman perhaps destroyed it or the door to door salespeople destroyed it.
The definition of sales comes from the Scandinavian word 'to serve.' True sales is service Share on X
is the true definition of the word sales is derived from the Scandinavian term to serve. So originally, people believed that sales was service, it got lost along the way, maybe because those extroverts got hold of it and said, I’m just going to wing it. But if you plan and prepare, you should be trying to get your client to a better place. And if you are, then how is it that if you get the sale, that’s too slimy or manipulated?
manipulative, you’re just trying to help. And if you really help them, then why would you not want to make them buy your product or service?
Absolutely. And so I’ll just echo that. If the product, service or experience that you represent is not worth a multiple of the dollars that you ask for, if the value doesn’t far exceed, quit, go find something where it does that you can be that passionate about. So I don’t know if it was Zig and I’ll tell you a short Zig String in a second, but, um, you know, the word enthusiasm.
Okay. And I find you to be very enthusiastic and enthusiasm is not necessarily volume related and shiny suits. You can be enthusiastic and actually be pretty quiet, but enthusiasm comes from two Greek words, en and theos, which literally translates to God within. And depending on your own belief system, I would say just translate that to faith. Okay. I have faith.
And then of course the last four letters, I-A-S-M, and I think that is ZIG. I am sold myself. And so it’s really hard to sell people on something you’re not sold on. And so that’s why Matthew and I both say, hey, if you don’t have something that is of superior value, go find something that does and do that. So let me tell you about my ZIG story. So one…
Yeah.
I have a friend here, I live in Fort Worth, Texas, or outside of Fort Worth, Texas, I have a friend here who is a sales trainer and Zig Ziegler was his Sunday school teacher and was kind of an uncle figure to Jason. His, Zig had a brother whose name was Judge and Judge was a couple years older. And Judge.
not Zig, and they looked almost identical. You would have thought they were twins. They were not twins. They were a couple years apart, but they looked and sounded almost identical. Judge held the world record in pot and pan sales, I think in 1958, and he had sold $100,000 worth of pots and pans. That’s a door-to-door sale in Nowhere, Mississippi.
They were from Yazoo City, Mississippi. And Judge tells a story about selling, of lining pots up in the hospital hallway while his wife was preparing to give birth and he was selling pots at his child’s birth, which maybe is a little extreme, but I had the opportunity to work with Judge. He was a personal friend of the gentleman that I worked with. And so.
He and that gentleman were partners in an office that I was the manager of. And so I got to work with Judge Ziegler for about 60 days. I taught him nothing about sales, but I was able to teach him about the nuance and idiosyncrasies of that business. And then of course I learned a ton because I had the terrific opportunity. And he wrote a book. And see to me, the number one reason why people don’t sell as much as they want to.
Yeah.
Well.
that aren’t asking enough people to buy. That’s number one. Matthew had to knock on 93 doors to get his first sale. Okay, well, that’s a lot of asking. That’s a lot of asking, but you can do it on volume. Okay. But his book was titled, Timid Salesman Have Skinny Kids. And I love that book.
Thank you.
And his big thesis in the book was this, I know exactly how many appointments you need to have to hit your goal. I don’t care what your industry is or who you are. And his answer was, you need too many appointments. You need too many. That’s the number.
Yeah, yes.
You need to close more. You need to learn to close more. Do you know, you know what’s interesting and it’s funny. Like, so Zig, I never got a chance to meet. I was delighted to meet his son, Tom, but I didn’t get to this country in time, unfortunately. But I, you know, I remember hearing about Zig Ziglar, you know, around the dinner table, I remember hearing about Ivan Meisner, the founder of BNI, who I’m delighted to say is just a wonderful friend of mine now, and Michael Gerber, who’s a delight, you know, he endorsed my last book. He’s just a great guy. And I never got to meet Zig and forever I am sadded.
Yeah.
that I didn’t make it here in time to get to experience him. Cause I’ve heard that he’s a phenomenal person to just experience and just watching some of his videos, you can tell. And a lot of people will say, well, there’s no way, maybe he was introverted in the past, but he definitely wasn’t, you know, when he was on stage. And just so everyone’s aware, introversion is just where you draw your energy from, right? So if you draw your energy from being by yourself, you’re an introvert, you can’t change that. And there’s nothing wrong with being introverted. It just means, and…
I warned Don after this because I’ve had to experience Don twice in two days that I would have, you know, I’m glad that we strategically booked this after at the end of my day because I’ll need the weekend to recover. But the truth is I do podcast interviews all the time. I do plan them for the second half of my day because they do take energy from me and I can’t do creative work afterwards. I know that about myself, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do creative work and it doesn’t mean I can’t do podcast interviews.
I do get less tired now doing podcast interviews, like I get less tired networking and speaking from stage and all of those so-called extroverted arenas that I believe introverts have the edge in. That being said, a lot of people, and I struggle with this because a lot of people when they find that it takes less energy, perhaps because they’ve discovered a system, they then say, I’m now more extroverted or I am now an extrovert.
That is not what happens. And this is the struggle that I see because we don’t a lot of times see, like Don is an introvert, you would naturally project extroversion upon him because he’s successful. You might project extroversion upon me. And then there are other people that aren’t willing to say they’re an introvert because they truly believe they’re extroverted, though they still get tired in all those so-called extroverted arenas that they dominate. So just know that if you’re an introvert and your energy depletes,
You’re not more introverted or less introverted perhaps than Don and I, you just don’t have the strategies in the systems. And I will say one last thing, which is that if you are looking for the shiny objects in sales, no, as an introvert, you can do a lot of planning and preparation to make sure you differentiate niche down before you even get to sales to take a lot of that heavy lifting off. But of course there’s a ton you can do in the sales process to mean that you need less appointments too. I like, I like, I like more quality appointments as well.
No doubt. No doubt. So, do you think the confusion on introversion and extroversion is merely because most people don’t actually understand the definition?
think the psychologists have made it so confusing. I think maybe there’s been too many research dollars in play. And the truth is, there are some more complexities. Like for instance, yes, introversion and extroversion is a spectrum. If you want to sit down and read a few books on the topic, and we can all really have a big broad conversation about it. But no one’s going to do that. Like if you think about career professionals, they want to do a very quick thing to find out.
Oh, maybe?
whether they’re team members or introverted or extroverted. And by the way, if you don’t know, if you have an organization, small or large, if you don’t know who your team members are and whether they’re introverted or extroverted, you need to know. And truthfully, if you don’t create an emotionally, an emotional safety before that there’s nothing wrong with being either. And by the way, for those people, because I made a joke about extroverts before, it’s not about extrovert bashing. The truth is that extroverts struggle with things like empathy and active listening.
those are things that introverts have in space. We all have our burdens to bear. The difference is, extroverts believe that they’ll be disenfranchised by finding out that they’re introverts or they’re boss finding out because then poor Sally is never gonna be a great leader. Poor Sally is never going to be a great networker. While John, we can totally teach him how to empathize more because everyone knows that that’s a coachable skill where gift of gab is not. That’s where things go wrong. I think that if people realize that…
Yes, it is more complex than that. And yes, shyness is something totally separate. And there’s a whole bunch of extra complexity here. But if you just say, I wanna make it simple because I need to know about myself and my team, then just say it’s where I get my energy from. If I get my energy from being with people, I’m an extrovert. If I’m by myself or maybe just with a few family members and I find my energy comes from that, I’m most likely.
and introvert and therefore I’m most likely going to benefit from a much more, well, truthfully, extroverts would benefit from a sales system and process. They’re just less likely to follow one. But as an introvert, you need to hold on to one of those for dear life and you need to find someone like Don or someone like myself. And don’t get me wrong, half the people on the global gurus list of top 30 sales professionals are introverted. I’m not saying it’s just us, but you need to find an introvert because 90% of the job is belief and the other 10% is the sales system.
“Half Share on X
love that. And so I think the average American anyway, thinks of extraversion as somebody who is loud and chatty and gregarious and charming. And the average introvert is very quiet and retiring and shy and demure. And actually, that might be true at times. But as Matthew says, the definition is really where do you
recharge your batteries. Do you gain, if you’re in a room and you have to talk to everybody and you gain energy the longer you’re in that room, you’re an extrovert. If you can do that, but then after a while you say, I have to go to my room, I have to recoup, then you’re an introvert and Matthew’s 100% right, it is a spectrum. There’s some people that are on the edge, some people in the middle, ambivert, you know, as somebody who kinda can go both ways.
And I remember when I first found out that I was an introvert, I was going into business with a gentleman and he wanted me to do Myers-Briggs. And so I was like, sure, I’ll do it. And, um, and, and of course the results go to him, it’s his account. And he’s like, well, you have to take it again because it’s wrong. And I was like, you had me take something where it could be wrong? It, no.
Yeah, that’s what, not a great principle for a test.
No. And he said, well, it says you’re an introvert. And I’m like, oh, I’m such an introvert.
Actually, I want to just pause on that for a second on, because you put that on your website. I know that you’re very much about honesty and integrity, but a lot of people would say, you earn a living as a sales trainer, as a speaker, a lot of other ways as well, but you put yourself forward as those two things as well. So do I.
but yet you put it on your website and you went, you know what, I’m proud of this. And I feel that it’s important for people to recognize that because you shouldn’t feel.
Like it’s scary to out yourself as an introvert and you should feel proud of who you are. And don’t get me wrong, if you don’t wanna be in sales, that’s fine. Like you should be proud if you wanna be a writer, a coder, a graphic designer, a more quiet role, but you shouldn’t exclude yourself from being a public speaker, a salesperson, a business owner because you’re introverted, because you can. And there are lots of types of introverts, just contrasting you and I, Don. I mean, you are…
you, your speech pattern and my speech pattern are very different. We talked about this on my show that you, you think through questions if somebody throws you a curve ball and you’re not afraid to have pregnant pauses. For me, it took me a lot longer to be very comfortable with pregnant pauses. And for me, I’m so passionate about what I do. I speak, well, Australians speak quickly anyway, but I speak faster and I’m very like
I feel like anytime I talk about this topic, it’s like a supercharger of adrenaline. And most introverts are like that when they’re talking about something they love to talk about. But it would be easy to say, well, if you were watching us have a dialogue, well, Don is an introvert, Matthew isn’t. And the truth is that the most chatty person you have ever met could actually be an introvert, the loudest, most chatty person, because you’re talking about their favorite topic.
Yeah, yeah, totally agree. And so when people have been confused on what the two terms actually mean, I’m like, look, I can do the Charming Gregorius Loud work the room thing better than most people. It just tires me out. I can do it. I just can’t do it all day and I don’t wanna do it all day. So.
So I’m going to take you and I will tell you this, you know, we’re both, we have commonality through entrepreneurs organization. I’ve been a member there for 10 years and, um, I’ve been through multiple exercises where we put a couple hundred entrepreneurs in a room and then a couple of questions. Okay. You can separate the introverts from the extra, you know, you can ask a couple of questions and
If you answered this way, you go to this side of the room. And if you answered that way, you go to that side of the room. And then the entrepreneur community, okay. It’s about 50 50. Okay. And, and the other thing in the entrepreneur community, when you talk about building teams and, and I don’t take anything away from the solopreneur. Okay. But if you have the ability to lead the world needs you to lead.
Mm-hmm.
The world needs you to possibly affect as many people as possible. Okay. And when you’re building that team, if you had a team of two, it’s probably a good idea to have an introvert and an extrovert because they see things differently. Now, when you get further, so like if you go into Myers-Briggs, they…
Yep.
score you, they give you a four characteristics out of 16 and most of those psychological assessments stop at the 16. But you want to color your team. You want to build this beautiful painting of different colors with people who have different skill sets and different bias and bias and prejudice. Sometimes people get confused on those. Prejudice…
is mostly negative. Bias is a very neutral term. It just is your perspective, how you see things, but you want people with different bias, and then you want to treat everybody with trust and respect to where you take the input from everybody on the team before you make decisions. Because in reality, for most of my life, if you and I disagreed, my default was, Matthew, you were wrong and I, Don, am right.
Thanks.
And that’s just human, okay? But the reality is, as any one human, I know like one zillionth of 1% of all knowledge, and so why would I think knowing that little bit that I know, ultimately right or wrong? I don’t. And so you want to build your team. Okay. So I want to ask you, next question. I want you to think back across your career.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I’d like to ask you to share a hard lesson. So something that happened that at the time, oof, man, that hurts. But maybe today, in retrospect, looking back on that event, it still hurt, but maybe today, you actually can see how positive it was.
Yeah.
for your development and for your success. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
Gosh, just one. Okay, so here’s the thing that I would say. I think the most valuable one for people to hear is actually what happened when I came to the United States. Because don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of stuff happen in my life. I mean, falling into door-to-door sales was tough. I actually don’t, I have 26 stitches I had across the side of my face through a horrific accident that took five years in plastic surgery. And when you look like you’ve just got out of a fight and you happen to be in sales, fostering trust requires,
and a lot more work. But when I came to America, it was the first time I sold myself rather than selling a product. And I feel that a lot of people that are listening, they sell themselves as an accountant or they sell and it’s funny that you mentioned bias because when you say you’re an accountant, somebody says, oh, I know what that is. And they then put you in a bucket, you have to climb out. And I remember this when I came to the United States.
And I got talking to this guy, just I was staying in an apartment while we were looking for a place to live. And I mean, I was looking for friends before clients, right? I just moved to a whole new country. And I mean, my wife who I’m now, well, my girlfriend at the time, who I’m now married to at that time, she was, I mean, she’s more introverted than I am. So she had a handful of friends and she’d just moved to Austin, which is where we now live and I got asked by somebody.
who owned a gym franchise, who I had listened to for probably 15 minutes about what it is they do and how much they like their gym and things like that. And then they asked me what it is that I did. And I said, oh, I teach people about sales and his entire facial expression changed. He looked at me like I was one step above a scam artist. And he told me how horrific.
sales trainers were. And I’m, oh my gosh, I remember walking out and I did what introverts do well. I ruminated over that over the night. And perhaps my rumination was what led me to this outcome. But what I realized is that you cannot introduce yourself by your functional skill. You can not do that. And so I tried, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t learn it straight away. I remember going to a networking event shortly after where I was actually trying to get clients. And I went, you know what, I’m not going to say I’m in sales because people don’t like that.
I’m gonna say I’m in marketing. And the first thing I got is, oh, I need a marketer, how much do you cost? And I’m like, well, now I’m talking about price, I just met them. And then the next person is like, oh, I’ve got a marketer. And now what am I gonna do a dance? Oh, I’m different, I’ve got magic ruby slippers. Like it was awkward. And what I realized is that nothing existed. And it’s funny when I see people networking, you got transactional based networking, which extroverts tend to be more focused on, which is, do you wanna buy from me? No, what about you? What about you?
which is why most people do what I call aimless networking, where somebody asks you what you do and you say, oh, my day job is, I mean, who wants to buy off somebody that says my day job is like you don’t even like it. And that’s why everyone runs home with all those business cards. The lesson I learned is that I needed to stop introducing myself by my functional skill. And this is where I invented the concept of what I call a unified message. And what I realized is, for instance, everybody listening, like if you are a sales trainer, you’re not just a sales trainer, you have a wealth of experience.
past experience, past customers, you’ve read tons of books, you’ve got different qualifications. I am not just a sales trainer, I’m not just a marketer. I’m a master in neuro-linguistic programming, I’m a business coach, I’m too many things. And truthfully, if I tried to explain it, nobody cares. They don’t care how hard it was for me to learn these things or how long it took me to learn them. But what I realized, I needed a way to summarize what I did in a really clear way. And I realized that it didn’t exist, it needed to not exist to get people to lean forward and ask this question.
What exactly is that or how exactly do you do that? So what I did is I decided that I would start to introduce myself as the rapid growth guy. And what I found is that then led to people going, what exactly is that? And then I could respond with, and please don’t take it to, oh, and you know, thanks for asking, you know, I help small business owners with sales, right? That’s again, transactional. So I, I realized that to your point of sincerity,
that I could respond with my passion and my mission. So when somebody asks me what I do, I say, oh, thanks for asking. I’m the rapid growth guy. They then say, what exactly is that? Because their brain needs to put me in a box so they can exclude me. And because of that, and because I was interested before I was interested, ding, what happened was they felt obligated to ask. And then I would say, well, one of the things I love to see more than anything in the world is an amazing introverted service provider, XYZ.
But what I just hate seeing is they end up getting stuck in this endless hamster wheel, struggling to find interest to people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make a sale, feeling like people only care about one thing, price. Do you know anyone like that? I knew that they did because I’d researched them beforehand so that the networking meeting felt like an appointment. And then I would talk about my mission for helping introverted service providers overcome that by focusing on three things outside the scope of their functional skill and telling them a story. That was a hard-learned.
lesson because there is nothing worse than having someone look at you like you’re a scam artist. And you know, I could say, but I’ve built all these really successful businesses. I just wanted to help. But he looked at me like I was trying to rip him off. And all I was looking for was a friend at that point. And I think that was the most valuable lesson for me because now when I teach people how to, how to, how to market themselves, how to build their business, what I’ve realized is if you can’t successfully articulate the value of what you provide when somebody’s politely listening to you in a networking room.
You have no chance online and it always becomes, let me say it this way, there’s just more heavy lifting required in the sales process. But if you can separate yourself from everybody else and make sure that people understand that you genuinely care, that you hear the words, I love seeing this, I hate seeing this, I’m on a mission to do this as opposed to I do this and I’m just really trying to sell you that because I’m trying to buy a new car and I really want a new car. The difference is profound. Yet what I found is no one did that.
So I really created a different way of networking. My sales book, I really put together a concept. It was the best practices that I found that worked for introverts in selling. But what I found is nothing existed to be more authentic in the networking process that was strategic, which is why everybody lived in this aimless networking world.
Love that. Thank you so much. Okay. Next question. What about a warp speed moment? So things are going pretty good in your business, but then you make a decision, you do a new hire, you do some new marketing, and you just get that hockey stick. Do you have a warp speed moment you can share with us?
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m actually embarrassed to say this and I’ve, this is the first time I’ve actually done this on podcast on. So you got one from me. So I learned how to sell as an introvert and I took a lot of inner pride for that. And I would say that a lot of ways, my personality and my ego, everything about me over that next 10 years.
echoed because I’d managed to overcome that. And what was interesting is in the world of SEO, the world of pay-per-click advertising, the world of social media, I always thought that all that stuff was kind of a scam, right? And I was like, if you really, like, you only need that stuff, if you can’t just pick up the phone or walk in the door, right? And because of that, I never really focused on online. We wouldn’t even get email addresses for a lot of our clients when they started putting it on the forms, you know, for things that we used to sell.
And I just thought online was a joke. And I felt like if you wanted to sell, you’d pick up the phone and you’d call. And that meant that every organization I had grew to 50 staff pretty quickly. And, you know, and then you would grow from there. And I always knew that world and I was so closed off. Like I, I pride myself on being a, in a growth mindset kind of guy.
And yet I had this fixed mindset when it came to digital, just because my identity was linked to offline sales. And when I moved to the U S I remember thinking about building a business like I’d known them in Australia. And then I realized as a matter of fact, I probably wouldn’t have moved to the States if I had learned this before I left. I realized that if I built that, that was requiring my time a lot. And if my family got sick and I needed to get home, I couldn’t do that. So I made a decision.
that I was going to try online. And what I realized is by being the clearest, not the loudest in a networking room, you don’t have to go to as many networking rooms and you don’t have to be the loudest person in the room. And then I found that if you can be the clearest online, you can use technology, psychology and strategy to get your ideal clients to chase you. I mean, think about what we’re doing on this podcast right now. I’m sharing my passion, my mission, and I don’t need 50, 100 salespeople to call and show up at your business.
I’m using this one podcast to speak to just as many ears. And I’m hoping that my passion touches certain people. And they say, you know what? I want to consume more of Matt’s content. I want to check out more of Matt’s books. And that’s what I realized. And that was the hockey stick moment for me. We do, I mean, my business, I mean, it makes good money, but it does it with a 10th of the labor requirement, probably a hundredth because I use automation.
to drive people from social media, from podcasts to website, to email, to phone call. And that doesn’t mean that when we have those phone calls, we don’t know how to close, we do. But it means that we’re not trying to hustle to get those leads. And that was transformational for me. I can’t believe I waited until I was 30 to start.
So I too kind of turned my nose up at digital until I had the realization that just like you buy, if you were buying a billboard to market your business, you would put it on the busiest highway in town and that the internet is the busiest highway anywhere. And so once I had that realization, we stepped up our game.
Okay, toughest question, last question. Gonna put you into a time capsule. Gonna send you all the way back to 20-year-old Matthew. Get about 60 seconds, maybe 90.
What would you tell your 20-year-old self?
that would have stopped pain or increased pleasure would have sped you along your entrepreneurial journey.
So into the time capsule you go, back to 20 year old Matthew, what would you tell him?
Making connections: Matthew and Don engage in thoughtful dialogue on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
You know, I think that’s an interesting question because I discovered sales systems at that point. And I think I discovered every single process. I think at that point, I think what I really needed to hear is that I didn’t have to do it alone. And what I mean by that is because I’d had disabilities and I always felt like the slow kid, I had this force field around myself that I had to figure it out. I had to find the solution. And I felt like I was smart enough to find it. And I just put great work and I always tell, I mean, I know you say the same thing, Don, like knowing the answer.
isn’t as important as doing the work, right? So if you don’t know the answer, you’ve got a problem. But I always lived with this. I took responsibility. I lived in what-if thinking to find the solution. And then I did the work. But I didn’t have to do it alone. And I think that…
And you and I both speak at EO and we’re both big fans of it because it creates that comradery. And I’m not saying that people that are listening need to join EO for that, but I did it totally alone. And because of that, I probably wasted a lot more money than I needed to making mistakes. And more importantly, I felt totally isolated. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood where most of my friends were working in factories. And I mean, I went from working at McDonald’s for $200 a week, where as my part time job to being in a real estate agency for three weeks.
to making six figures and then a year later, having a multimillion dollar business. I didn’t even like, the numbers were terrifying and I didn’t wanna admit it to anyone. So if you’re just starting a business and it’s working, you need a support group. If you haven’t figured out how to make it work, you need a support group. And I’m not talking about the group that you go networking with, where you tell everybody it’s wonderful and you know everything because you’re trying to get them to buy. I’m talking that group of people that you can say, you know what?
it’s tough at the moment or I’ve got this challenge. And while everything looks like all my friends and family are saying, you’re a Marvel, you’re doing so many things. I don’t feel that way because I feel like it’s hurting here. What suggestions do you have? I wish I learned that soon.
You know, we’re talking about EO. So I’ve been a member 10 years. I’m 63. I’ve been an entrepreneur 37 years. I’ve started a dozen companies. Almost everything I’ve done has worked out. There were a couple stinkers that did not work out at all. They were horrible. Okay. But the beauty in collaboration with peers, people that are
equal. Okay. You know, I ignored that for the first 27 years as an entrepreneur. When I joined EO, I thought, I haven’t asked anybody a legit question or shared anything with anybody in forever. Okay. And I’ve done pretty well, but what I’ve learned and what I want to emphasize to entrepreneurs is this, there is power in the tribe.
And you don’t know everything and there’s somebody out there who knows something at a much deeper level that will just tell you, that will just share it with you and you won’t have to learn the hard way. And so I love that. Matthew, before we sign off, any closing thoughts? How would, how would an audience member reach out to you?
Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate asking. I mean, firstly, my publisher is going to hate this. You don’t need to buy my books. I mean, you can go to the introvertsedge.com or the intr to download the first chapter. And I’ll explain the first chapter is really designed to get you over that belief that you can’t sell and help you realize why you make an amazing salesperson or networker. But the other thing that I love about the first chapter, especially the salesbook is I literally outline the exact steps that you should follow in a sales system. Because I’m passionate about helping people overcome that problem. And I’m like, if you don’t buy
the book, just download the first chapter, do that, grab what you currently say and fit it into that. And if it doesn’t fit, by the way, throw it out. You shouldn’t be saying it to customers. If it does fit, you’ll probably find it’s out of order and there’s some gaps. Fill in those gaps, put things in order, you double your sales in the next 60 days.
For those people that love the concept of, you know, if you’re an accountant, a managed service provider, and you’re tired of saying that and seeing people’s eyes glaze over or get the sense that they, they know what that is and therefore they don’t need you or you start to talk about price, then I’ve got a great template you can access at matthiupolla.com forward slash growth where
it’ll actually take you through an exercise where you can create your version of the rapid growth guy and discover your niche of willing to buy clients. And I do this all the time as an exercise all over the world. And usually at the end, I’ll say, actually I just did it recently at the National Freelance Association. And I said, look, do me a favor, just put your hand up. If you now believe you’ve got your version of the rapid growth guy and you’ve got your niche of willing to buy clients, like 97 odd percent of the room put their hands up. So just do me a favor, keep your hands up if this is the longest time you spent actively working on your marketing, right?
it was about 85% of the room, they kept their hands up. And I said, I did qualify, not reading books on marketing, but actively working on your marketing. So that template at matthiopolla.com forward slash growth, I would suggest don’t do it straight away. Get them to listen to this podcast with Don and I first, so they understand what it is and why it matters. And then spend about an hour and a half to two hours with someone else doing it for them and then get them to do it for you. And your business will transform because I think that a lot of times we go to a coach and we hire them because
We feel like we need to get that resolved, but a lot of times we don’t leverage the people that we know well to get them to help us get to that successful outcome. Now with this exercise, if you’re a coach, don’t work with another coach, work with a florist or a dentist and vice versa. Don’t get stuck in your functional skills together. This is about getting you out of your functional skill. But for those people that are listening, the thing I want you to know is sales and marketing isn’t as hard as you think. You just don’t do it. And because you don’t do it, it feels harder. And if you.
actually spend just a few hours, you will be blown away at how far you come. And then if you just reinvest the time saved back into getting better at it, it won’t be long until you don’t have time because you’ve got too many customers.
Love that. Thank you so much. So, matthewpoller.com slash growth. Okay. And go there, download it, do the work. Matthew, I’m so grateful to have you on the show today. Thank you very much. You honor me to come on.
Mate, it was my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Okay, we’ll see you next time on the proven entrepreneur show. Thank you.
There we go, mate. The time capsule question, I think, was as close to a curve ball as you gave me. I appreciate the soft balls.
Well, this show is all about inspiring and people.
If I see you do it, I think I can do it. And so this show is all about having people share their stories, their success stories, where other people are inspired. And we talked about this yesterday. I love to help people learn, but I really only wanna help people who learn, who wanna do something. And so you dropped the nuggets. Thank you very much.
And I’ll need the weekend to recover after both days.
Well, good. I’m glad it was you as not just me, but I look, I will say that’s the reason why I tell people to team up with somebody else. Because what I find is if they don’t do that, they’ll say, no, I want the action anyway. But I find that a lot of people say, I can’t afford Don, I can’t afford Matt. And then they don’t take action. So I’m the same as you. If you can push them to do something themselves, they’ll either take action towards it with someone or with you. Either way, I get my outcome, which is awesome.
Yep. All right, brother, I gotta run.
Yeah, I know Fridays is you and your wife’s time. I know that, mate, like from last time. But mate, it was a pleasure hanging out with you for the last two days, dude. So I appreciate it.
The pleasure was all mine. We’ll do it again. Thank you so much. And I’ll let you know when we get this one ready.
Sounds great, man. I look forward to sharing it out with my audience. See you, bye.
Thanks, Matthew. Bye-bye.

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Title: E109 | Embracing Failure as a Learning Opportunity: Todd Palmer
Date: October 25, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/the-proven-entrepreneur-show-embracing-failure-as-learning-opportunity-todd-palmer/
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Content:
Welcome to an exhilarating episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, where we dive deep into the journeys, lessons, and wisdom of remarkable entrepreneurs. Join host Don Williams as he welcomes the dynamic Todd Palmer, affectionately known as the “Todd Father,” all the way from the chilly city of Detroit, Michigan.
In this episode, Todd shares his rich entrepreneurial narrative that spans from humble beginnings—growing up in a household without entrepreneurial role models—to launching and running successful businesses. Discover how a personal tragedy at a young age shaped his entrepreneurial spirit and led to a steadfast belief in self-reliance which initially became a double-edged sword.
As the founder of Extraordinary Advisors, Todd coaches CEOs on a journey of self-discovery and growth, revealing the unique coaching approach he’s developed through his concept of “reflective inquiry.” Listen as Todd breaks down pivotal moments in his career—from his first enterprise in staffing that nearly brought him to bankruptcy, to key transformations that propelled him to become one of Detroit’s fastest-growing companies.
This episode isn’t just about Todd’s successes—get ready to dive into his challenges, particularly the hard lessons learned about trust, relationships, and the delicate balance of leadership. With insights on the importance of vulnerability in leadership, Todd emphasizes that true growth begins within.
Expect to gain invaluable insights about:

The pivotal role of self-awareness in leadership.
How vulnerability can foster deeper connections and stronger teams.
The power of reframing failure as a stepping stone to success.

Don’t miss this inspiring episode filled with valuable insights and practical advice from an experienced entrepreneur. Tune in now!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com.
Watch the episode here

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Embracing Failure as a Learning Opportunity: Todd Palmer
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. I have a real treat, a great guest, great friend, all the way from Detroit, Michigan, where it’s much cooler than it is here in Fort Worth, Texas. Okay. Todd Palmer. Welcome to the show.
Oh Don, thank you so much for having me. It was a comfortable 92 degrees yesterday.
Oh, we saw 92 twice yesterday. Once as we went past at about 12 degrees. And once when we came below it, maybe four degrees or something like that. So anyhow, this show is like Texas, is gonna be hot, because got my good friend Todd Palmer, affectionately known as the Todd father. And so Todd, tell me a little bit about your
There you go.
current business and what you’re doing now, what’s getting your time, what’s getting your attention, and then we’ll get into your story.
Well, thank you for asking. My current business is ExtraordinaryAdvisors.com in where I coach CEOs on a journey on how to explore themselves in order to grow their businesses and even bigger grow their lives. My model is based on a thing called reflective inquiry, where we are the cause of, and the great part is, the solution to all of our problems.
It’s really coaching a person, not necessarily coaching a great process like an EOS, where it’s scaling up both needed processes, where I really get into the ick of who you are, what’s holding you back, preventing you from what you do, what you want to do. And the second part of my business is I run anywhere from 30 to 40 forum retreats per year, where I work with a group of forum members, a mastermind group, teach them techniques to get deeper coaching, create those deeper connections within that group.
allowing them to support each other to get to higher levels.
And let me just tell you, Todd is an expert in his field. And so if you have any need for that, please reach out to Todd directly. Okay. Now I’m going to take you all the way back to five year old Todd. Yeah. So that is way back. Okay. Well, not way back for you, but it’s back a ways. Okay. And so five to 18 in the household where you were raised, and that’s different for different people. But.
Yeah.
Was there an entrepreneur, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur that set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young cod?
Great question. No one’s ever asked me that question. Love that. There was not. Both of my parents were auto workers living in Detroit. Not a surprise. My older brother, 12 years older, was an executive, both East Coast, West Coast, New York, Los Angeles. So no, there really wasn’t that. But what I will share with you, kind of a vulnerable share, hopefully that’s something you’re open to, is at five years old, I lost my dad.
He passed away. And what the story I told myself was, that the only person I can rely on is me. Which is, if you think about it from an entrepreneurial thought process, is wonderful when we’re startups. You know, I’m HR, I’m sales, I’m ops, I’m accounting, I can do it all. There’s a limit to that I found. And I put the glass ceiling in there because I wouldn’t trust others, because I didn’t trust myself. And it was a very interesting
I heard that.
evolution for me as an entrepreneur that I realized that again was both the cause of and the solution to my problems because my struggle to scale was I didn’t know how to trust but verify. I didn’t know how to put proper rules of engagement in because at five years old I told myself I’m the only one who can rely upon. So it took a lot of coaching. I was blessed to work with two great coaches. Last one was Dr. Danny Friedland, a neuroscientist who helped me understand that at five years old I made a decision.
that I carried forward into my 40s.
Love that. Now, so I want to ask you a question because trust, as we know, is foundational to all selling relationships, all leadership relationships, basically all relationships. Okay. No trust, no relationship. So when you said, I didn’t trust myself, was that you didn’t trust yourself to trust others?
Mm-hmm.
100% great catch that I didn’t trust others because the story I told myself, which was just the story in my head, my itty bitty shitty committee having a meeting, you can’t trust others because you don’t trust you because you picked those people to be in your life. You chose that employee. You went after that client engagement. When the true reality was none of that was really true. It was getting out of my way to learn how to put proper boundaries in place so that trust could be earned.
Trust shouldn't be given out freely like Halloween candy; it has to be earned. Share on X
Trust shouldn’t be given out freely like Halloween candy. Trust should be earned over time. And there are certain groups of people in the EO community, you and I spent a lot of our years in, where there’s a group of people that are so trustworthy that they are the people you will go to war with. You take that outside of the bigger part of EO, maybe those people aren’t as trustworthy. They’re trustworthy to a point, but the relationships aren’t as deep because the connection isn’t as deep, because the trust isn’t as deep as the group you’ve earned it with. So,
I definitely played a huge part in not trusting others and realizing what my part was, allowed me to create a bigger network to connect with people like you and others so that I could deepen those relationships, create those deeper connections, which makes a more fulfilling life.
I love that. And you know, here’s just an aside on trust. I believe trust is a bridge built gradually. Okay. And destroyed it within an instant. And so it takes a long time or it takes time, maybe not a long time, but it takes time to build that bridge and only takes an instant to destroy it. So thank you for taking me all the way back to five-year-old Todd.
Mm-hmm.
So true, so true.
Probably been a day since you thought about five-year-old Todd. And so appreciate that. Okay. So now tell me about, so you’re still in your schoolboy years, your first job, and that might’ve been a lemonade stand. You might’ve been an entrepreneur as your first job. That was not my case, but what’s the first activity that you did for you traded time, effort, and energy for commerce for money?
Great question. So I grew up in a very small town. I grew up on a farm in mid Michigan. I had 42 kids in my high school graduating class. We’re talking like John Cougar Mellencamp writes songs about the time I grew up in. And in our town, we had literally one grocery store and that grocery store sold candy and I had an allowance. So I would take my five bucks and I’d spend it all on candy which then I would go to my school and upsell for 15 bucks over the course of the day, fireballs and.
different candy bars and what have you. And I remember very distinctly, this had been about seventh, eighth grade, and I got called into the principal’s office because I was taking advantage of others where you and I would argue, hey, there’s marketplace conditions, there’s opportunity, why wouldn’t we seize those? And I remember my mom came in and she’s like so supportive of me. She, I didn’t get the, like, I can’t believe you embarrassed me, your family name, no, she’s like, well, but what’s he doing that’s wrong?
If the kid, if he buys a printicle and he sells it for a quarter, what do you really care? Well, he’s taking advantage of others, taking advantage of others. So that was a really important lesson for me to learn as an entrepreneur that family support is super key. And also just because others don’t see opportunities in the marketplace doesn’t mean I can’t see them. So literally my first job was selling candy at school.
And you’re literally just capitalizing on a location, no different than why the hamburger’s $30 at the top of the ski mountain and $7 at the bottom.
Oh yeah, if I go to the ballpark at Arlington, a beer is what? $10 with the same beer across the street at the bar is $2. Location, location, location.
Exactly. So love that. Okay. After your schoolboy years, okay, you went to university, you backpacked across Europe, you joined the merchant Marine, you joined the Marines. What’s your story? Where’d you go?
So I graduated from college. It was just my mom and I, single parent household, not a lot of money. And I had two routes that could have gone. I had a basketball opportunity to go play division three. And I had the local community college was giving out, what are they called? Talent scholarships. So my talent in quotes was writing. And I know you and I both written books, but my goal was really to be a journalist. I wanted to be a writer and I realized I’m six feet tall. I don’t jump very high and.
My basketball skills had a glass ceiling at 17 that I was very clear on. Um, and so I took the route to go and get a talent scholarship, which was eight, the perfect choice for me. I spent two years at junior college, getting my basics out of the way. And because I had a talent scholarship, it was free. And I met a great, uh, department head of my department for the English department by the name of Mark Harris. And Mark Harris saw things in me that no one had seen before. He goes, try this, do this. So I got to make a movie. I got to.
it spread my wings on a creative side. And I really got a chance to enjoy not just the academic experience, which was fine, but I got to explore the learning. And I always tell kids this learning is way beyond the classroom and doing different things. And I was the newspaper editor for a year to lead others at 19 years old. I’m not really sure I was leading them. I think it was just a…
the blind leading the blind at that stage, but it was a huge opportunity. Then I went to Eastern Michigan University, completed my degree there, and I had a second branch point decision where I could go into, you know, I got married very young. Boy, as my son, when he listens to this, will know the marriage did not work, but it produced my favorite human being my son, Tyler. But I had a branch point choice where I had gotten an opportunity to go teach at university or I could go into the business world. Well,
At the time I was married and my then wife was making an income we can survive on, I actually taught college for two years as a part-time basis as I was working towards my masters and my PhD. Then I got custody of my son and made the choice, the first really big real life decision, like I’m going to not pursue this because I need to make enough money to provide for a household of two. And I don’t regret that decision. That would have been age 22, 23.
And so I put my academics piece on hold, but I think I’m still a writer at heart. I think I’m still a teacher at heart in the work I get to do today.
I love that and I didn’t know that. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. So I know you founded a couple companies. Tell us about the first company that you founded and how that ended up.
My pleasure, thank you.
how that ended up. First company I started at 27 years old for $15,000 in credit card debt was a company called Diversified Staffing Services. Generic staffing, temp help, Metro Detroit, unemployment rate was about 3% to 4%. So if you could find a person to put to work, there was always opportunities. Got off to a rock, rapid start, turned profit set day 72 and thought I really had it all figured out because again, what we don’t know is what we don’t know.
Fast forward, change the name of the company from diversified staffing services to diversified industrial staffing, get more brand focus, more niche specific. And with it by, so I started in 97 by 2006. On paper, I was bankrupt. The bank called my note. And as I wrote about in my book, From Suck to Success, they literally said, you have 60 days of cash left and we are gonna begin.
collection processes against you, we are prepared to take your home. So that business grew rapidly. I got into EEO in 03, but by 06 I was bankrupt and I didn’t know how to read my finances. Cause again, I have to know everything going back to my childhood story. So I wasn’t telling anybody. I wasn’t telling my forum. I wasn’t telling my staff. And when I hired my first coach, he’s like, yeah, you’re in really bad shape. You should strongly consider bankruptcy.
And I remember saying to him very clearly, I can’t file bankruptcy because I know within me, I have not done my best and I’m accountable to this. Just like I told my son when he wanted to quit football, he hadn’t done his best. We can only quit something when we do our best in our household. And by 2013, I paid off all the debt and the business grew even better, got all the bad players out of the way. I became a better leader and we made the Inc. 5000 six times in seven years as Detroit’s fastest growing company.
So that’s the beginning, middle and end of the diversified industrial staffing saga.
Perspective on Pitfalls: Todd and Don Discuss Embracing Failure as an Entrepreneurial Opportunity
I love that. Okay, so still in that business?
Now I exited that company six years ago. Now I just do the speaking, the coaching, and the retreat facilitation. And write books.
Awesome. And write books. Yeah, love that. Okay, thinking back across your career, I’m looking for a hard lesson and I know that there’s been more than a couple probably. In my case, you know, I saw, I got a note from a friend the other day that said, you know, if you can’t look at your past and see what an idiot you are,
Just a few.
you’re probably still an idiot. And to which my comment was, I can look at yesterday sometimes and see what an idiot I was. And so, um, so anyhow, hard lesson, something that happened that when it happened, it was a gut punch that hurt. But maybe in retrospect, now that some time has elapsed, you’re able to have some distance and look back on that and say, you know, man, that was really painful.
But in the long run, maybe that was the best thing that could have happened. Do you have a lesson like that you can share, Todd?
Yeah, absolutely. I was running a retreat and a gentleman asked me a very similar question. Do you regret that you almost went out of business? Do you regret the decisions you made in your mid 30s? And I said, no, I don’t regret them because they were all the lessons I learned. And I said, I wouldn’t be here today working with your forum if I hadn’t learned those lessons. And the biggest thing I got out of it was I was chasing a number. Man, I had to be 20 million. That was the number.
I didn’t care how I got there. I was cutting bad deals. I was giving bad terms. I was given 120-day payment terms. That bit me square in the butt. I had a client go bankrupt for $242,000 because I gave them huge payment terms. I didn’t know how to watch it. We’ll pay you, we’ll pay you, we’ll pay you. I didn’t realize that there was a financing strategy to offload all your employees to a third-party vendor and then close shop and you can discharge them in bankruptcy. I didn’t know that. But you know,
heard this said many times, you know, revenue is vanity, profits are sanity. And I was running, you know, $10 million company and not making any money. But I was chasing that 20. And it’s like, no, it’s, you’ve got to focus on the margin. If I one lesson, it was painful me to learn is margin business. I mean, I was a staffing company. But in the reality, I was a finance company, because I was letting everybody give me their bad debt. I was the Statue of Liberty of staffing, you mean, your huddled masses and your terrible credit ratings, and I will work with you.
Revenue is vanity; profit is sanity. It’s the margin that matters. Share on X
And it was the most painful thing that I ever learned. When I did my turnaround, we took our payment terms from 120 days to seven, and we boosted our margin by almost 18%. That’s how I got out of debt. I mean, I got paid faster and got paid more. Had to change the model, had to change our market, didn’t go after the whale accounts anymore, but man, that was an incredibly painful lesson.
But it wasn’t like learning to speak Russian. It wasn’t, you know, you made two fundamental changes to your accounts receivable system, okay? And I don’t belittle that, but actually pretty simple things, maybe hard to do, but simple to identify and know that this is what we should do and, you know, made all the difference. And so many times…
Oh yeah.
I think with entrepreneurs and maybe just people in general, everybody does the big things pretty well, but it’s the little things that make the big difference.
And it was the mindset I had to go through because I wanted to be liked. I wanted to get, I liked getting the bigger accounts. I liked the big yeses and the celebrations. I had to be okay with telling people no. There’s a great book out there called The Power of the Positive No, which sits with my deepest yes. My deepest yes is I got to get out of debt and I got to make money. So no, I can’t give you those payment terms and no, I can’t give you their price. What I will do…
I give you these payment terms and this pricing. And what we’ll do is we’ll change the way we work with you in a way to measure the relationship differently. So if you’re just looking at us as a commodity provider, price only, what if instead we take a look at, not look at price, but take a look at your turnover ratio and create a model. We took a client on that did 120% turnover. So every time we sent them 10 people, 12 walked out the back door. We got that down to 40%.
and they made a lot more money based upon consistency, reliability and dependability of their employees, changed everything for them. But we weren’t gonna budge on our price. We just couldn’t, but we showed them a different value prop, sales 101, we showed them a different value prop and that made a huge difference, but we had to be okay. I, as a leader had to be okay with telling them no, sticking to my guns, knowing why I was doing it and then messaging that not only to the customer, but also to my internal staff that this is why we’re doing this.
And it went to the core value exercise of we improve lives. Well, one of the lives we have to improve is ours. So we got the customer, we got the candidates as a recruiting company, we also have the internal staff. We have to improve our lives and you all want raises and you all want vacations, you all want bonus programs and you all want trips, all that great stuff, that’s gotta be paid for. And it’s gotta be paid for out of profits. This is the decision, this is why we’re doing it. Once that was explained, and we even shared that with the client, like this is how we have to operate. It created it not just a transactional relationship,
but a real relationship.
always believe that the more a client understands the supplier and the more the supplier understands the client, the better everything works. Total transparency works. And there’s a common thread in our talk today about leadership. And so earlier you mentioned, hey, we’re part of a group where there are certain people in that group that you would do anything for and others that, and maybe we just don’t know them well enough,
100%
but that we probably wouldn’t go to that extreme. And so, you know, one of my beliefs is that there are great leaders and there are separately people in positions of leadership and they’re not necessarily the same thing. And so, encourage our listeners to work to be the best leader you can be, not just to…
own a position of leadership and think that you’re doing a great job. Okay.
Oh, absolutely. We call them, you got the person who’s got the title. I’m a big sports guy. You can see by my background. Bill Belichick is the coach of the New England Patriots. Tom Brady was the leader of the clubhouse. The two of them had to find a way to work together. One was, it’s who’s the leader in your clubhouse. And then who would be Tom Brady’s offensive leader, his defensive, his special. Who are his go-to guys to control the chaos of an NFL locker room?
It’s no different than an entrepreneurial environment. Pride, ego, narcissism all permeates through that community, just like with entrepreneurs. You got your stated leader, Bill Belichick, but you got Tom, you got the guys on offense, the guys on defense to make sure the system runs appropriately and picking those people is somewhere between an art and a science for Belichick to do. And going back to what you said, trust is earned over time. He and Brady played together, worked together for what? 12, 15 years, that’s a long relationship.
long relationship in an eternal relationship in the NFL. I mean, that just doesn’t, that just doesn’t happen. The players remain the same, but typically they change, they change brands. Yeah. So, okay. So, um, all right. Thank you for that. Now, now I’m looking for a warp speed moment. So things are going pretty good in your business, either this business or your previous business. Things are going pretty good. And then all of a sudden a couple key.
Yes.
It’s a revolving door.
Yeah.
decisions, a key hire, and all of a sudden you are on that hockey stick of growth. It’s just like, wow, I didn’t know it could go this good, this fast. Do you have a work speed moment you could share?
I do. With the recruiting company, I realized that I was only good at a few things, which was very pride-swallowing at one point. And one of the things that I realized I wasn’t really good at was training my recruiters. I just watched by osmosis and then I would show off and it didn’t work well. So I actually found the best trainer in the recruiting space is named, I think.
guy named Danny Cahill out in Connecticut, and I would send every single one of my new hires there with their manager to his bootcamp three times a year. Very expensive, but I wanna invest in the people that get the best for them, and we needed one training methodology, one messaging across the company. So anytime you, if you were to call in, whoever picked up the phone answered it the same way with the same message across lines. I was not the, I’m an entrepreneur, I like to break the rules. I understood the value of the rules, and I would follow them.
with the team, but I needed to outsource that and bring in somebody better. The second piece when we hockey sticked and made Inc. six or seven years, was to me to get out of the way and bring in an integrator to do the stuff I was bad at. By the, by when we were at Flying High, I had two responsibilities, big relation, big relationships, vision and accounting reported to me. That was it. And my integrator reported to me. That’s like, now I, wait.
we’re friends, I’ll tell you the truth. Sometimes I would go in and create chaos and talk to the team and confuse them. And then my integrator would call my coach. He would call me up and say, get back in your sandbox and quit screwing everybody up with your visionary nonsense. Stay your course, your company’s diversified industrial staffing, not diversified medical staffing. Yes, you could go staff nurses. Yes, you could go staff accounts. Stay in your lane. Own your very tight vertical image. Okay, you’re right. But once I empowered her to be in charge, empowered her to run her teams as she saw fit,
which was not how I would have run them. It’s amazing once I got out of the way how the business grew beyond my skillset.
You know, very similar experience. My, um, vice president of operations for years has since retired, but, um, on any given day, I think I could outperform whatever we were doing on any given day. But day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, quarter in, quarter out, you know, he just ran circles around me because, because in the short term.
I can bring some magic, I can bring some brilliance, I can bring a spark. But it’s hard on people to have that every day. And it’s really hard to deliver that every day. That’s hard. Okay, so, alright, so this is kind of personal. Okay, sorry, but not really. If I was able to look into your mind, and in the chapter…
Yeah.
titled, These Gold Nuggets I Know. Okay, so things that are so huge to your makeup, to your belief system, would you share one nugget with us that we’d want to know if we knew what you knew?
Yeah, appreciate the directness of the question.
A lot of leaders want the greatest performances from their teams. They want people to step up and be amazing. What the leaders often struggle with is being vulnerable first. In order to change your organization, in order for me to change my company, the first place I needed to make the change was within me. And that was really hard. I was really good at pointing the finger.
and blame the economy, blaming the marketplace. I mean, it’s really easy to blame Detroit during a recession when it’s on 60 minutes filing for bankruptcy. That’s, oh, I’ve got a bunch of external excuses. It’s not me, it’s them. It was me. And so for a leader, if you want vulnerability from your team, you wanna have a psychologically safe work environment, you have to demo that and you have to live it and you have to breathe it, and you have to be the person to lead and be vulnerable first. And that I’ve seen across
almost every leader I’ve ever worked with, is the hardest thing for them to do. And part of that being vulnerable is to ask for what you want, why you want it, how others can contribute versus just do as I say, which still, unfortunately, still comes out quite a bit. So for me, Brene Brown 101 is to lead with vulnerability.
Love that. Thank you so much. OK, so I’m going to ask you the tough question. Before we do, OK, we can see 792 baseballs behind you. What’s the story with 792 baseballs?
I am a baseball nerd. I still play baseball as you know. And baseball for me is a sport, the only sport I know of that where if you fail seven out of 10 times, you’re a success. To me, right. Well, imagine if we ran our businesses and we failed 70% of the time. That’d be tough. Now, unless we’re in an iterative loop where we fail every day to fail forward, that makes total sense to me. Love that model. So for me,
Oh, you’re in the Hall of Fame!
Yeah.
You know, as a kid, baseball was my favorite sport. It’s something that you can take, you know, I know you go to a lot of Rangers games and you can sit there with your lovely wife and be visiting, have friends around, watch the action. It’s not an action where you have to be paying attention 100% of the time from a social aspect. And it’s just one of those things where, I’ve met a lot of professional athletes, a lot of professional baseball players and they never master the sport. They never master it.
and you can be hot, you can go cold things. And it’s one of those sports where I think just the parallels to business and baseball and life in regarding that you have to be a lifelong learner. It’s never getting it mastered. It’s a team sport controlled by the pitcher and the hitter, and nothing happens until the pitcher releases the ball and then the hitter takes an action. I mean, it’s not football where you got 12, 24 guys going back and forth and different things like that. So to me, it’s just always been something
really enjoyed and but through the blessings of a lot of cool opportunities I met a lot of guys together to sign my baseballs.
Awesome. Love that. And so I was just at a game last week with some good friends, the tips and in their suite. And we enjoyed the game with Pedro Rodriguez. He joined us super guy, hall of fame catcher, you know, but, but he didn’t hit a thousand either, you know, he, he hit three 10 or whatever, but, but that’s hall of fame stuff, you know, and.
Very cool.
No.
Right.
Yeah, well, you got to learn how to deal with failing. You could strike a, I had this happen last week, I struck a ball as good as I’m gonna hit it. Shortstop happened to be standing right there. I’m not gonna hit the ball any better. Next at bat, I hit it off the end of the bat, curls over the first baseman, hits the chalk, it’s a double. The first one was a much better hit. Baseball, but the result was just different. So how do we manage through all those things? And I remember when Pudge came to Detroit.
Yeah.
And we were a terrible team. By 2006, we’re in the World Series because of him and Maglio and Verlander and those guys. And it’s an amazing thing to spend times with somebody. So Mickey Manley had this quote. He goes, I played 19 years. I went hit list however many times. He goes, basically five of my 19 years, I didn’t get a hit.
Yeah. I think the thing that to me is parallel to the entrepreneurial journey of baseball is this. Baseball is a game of ones. One hit, one error, one strike, one passed ball, one dropped ball, one catch over the wall. You know, so many games are decided by one something. And, and entrepreneurship.
Mm-hmm.
is also a game many times ultimately decided by one something. It’s that one phone call from that client that is a $5 million client. It’s that, that engages or conversely, that $5 million client that calls and fires you, you know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the one key hire. It’s the one. Um.
Yeah.
Yep.
I know I’m not good at training. I’m going to get the best trainer I can find on the planet. It’s going to cost me a ton, but I’m going to ship people to see him every year. Okay. And we’re going to actually have a brand. Okay. If we can keep me from talking to people because I’m not, I’m not going to be on brand, I’m on the Todd Palmer brand. I’m not really on the company brand. And you know, that’s just how we are. So, um, love that. Okay. So toughest question I ask the average.
Yeah.
Some days.
proven entrepreneur and you know, the name of the show is Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories. You’ve shared some failings. We know that failings are in fact part of the success journey. They are not the opposite of the success journey, but toughest question I ask. I’m gonna put you in a time machine. Okay, gonna take you all the way back to 20 year old Todd. Okay, can you picture him? I had more hair and it was brown. Okay, and I weighed less.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And so I’m going to take you all the way back to 20-year-old Todd. You’re going to get 60 to 90 seconds to share one or two thoughts with Todd that would have sped you, helped you along your path. Okay. So into the time machine you go all the way back. Here’s 20-year-old Todd. Todd, what do you say to Todd?
I love the question. I would say to 20 year old Todd that don’t let your imposter syndrome drive your business. Don’t let your itty bitty shitty committee and your self talk be an anchor to your success. You have more capabilities, you have more knowledge than you realize. And at the end of the day, it’s failure to your point is actually just a word in the dictionary.
So I used to think, God, I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure, I’m a failure. Failure is nothing more than a word in the dictionary. If you take the word failure and replace it with the word learning, you will be using the highest functioning part of your brain. Dr. Danufre, then 101, use the highest functioning part of your brain as often as you possibly can. So that would be the gift I’d give me, is like, don’t be your biggest critic, doesn’t serve you well, recognize that imposter syndrome is part of, what you’re gonna have fears and internal concerns. Realize that failure isn’t permanent.
“Imposter Share on X
Failure is actually not really real. It’s just a word in the dictionary. And if you take failure, replace it with learning, that you’ll be unstoppable because learning is a never ending iterative process.
I love that. And so one thing I share with my clients and you and I kind of live in parallel universes. Okay. But one thing I share with my clients is, Hey, either you win or you learn and learning is just slower winning. And
I’ve never heard it called that. I love that learning is just slower winning. I love that.
Learning is just slower winning. And so, okay, so tell us again, how do we reach out to you? And let me just tell the audience, Todd Palmer, phenomenal speaker, phenomenal facilitator. Okay, you would do yourself well to bring Todd to your organization. So how do we reach out to you, Todd?
Yeah, simplest way is to reach me out via my website or just email me at Todd at extraordinaryadvisors.com. If anybody’s interested in my book, From Suck to Success, if you send me an email, I’m happy to send you a free chapter. Or if I even have some free copies of my audio book and I can send you the whole book for free. The book for me was an opportunity to pay back all those that helped me along my journey. Being an entrepreneur, as you know, Don, is not a journey we take.
often by ourselves very successfully, and we get the people around us. And so I’m always a giver’s game. And so if anybody emails me, reaches out to me, I’m happy to support you in any way I possibly can.
Awesome. Thank you, Todd. Okay, folks, that’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show with Todd Palmer. See you next time. Bye now.

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Title: E104 : The Proven Entrepreneur Show | The Power of Outsourcing: Ankit Patel’s Tips for Optometrists and Ophthalmologists
Date: October 16, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e104-the-proven-entrepreneur-show-the-power-of-outsourcing-ankit-patels-tips-for-optometrists-and-ophthalmologists/
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Content:
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with serial entrepreneur Ankit Patel, who transformed his wife’s optometry practice into a springboard for innovation. Discover how Ankit’s journey from engineering to entrepreneurship led to the creation of My Business Care Team, a game-changing business process outsourcing solution that’s helping optometry practices save up to 30% on non-doctor payroll costs while boosting revenue per patient by 33%.
From humble beginnings teaching martial arts at 15 to revolutionizing healthcare staffing, Ankit shares candid insights about the intersection of process and people. He opens up about his evolution from a process-first engineer to a people-focused leader, and reveals the powerful mindset shifts that supercharged his success. Don’t miss his vulnerable discussion about entrepreneurial mental health and the surprising lessons learned from his early ventures – including why chasing money isn’t the answer and how understanding market signals can make or break your business.
Whether you’re an established healthcare provider looking to optimize operations or an aspiring entrepreneur seeking wisdom from the trenches, this episode delivers actionable insights on scaling businesses, leveraging global talent, and the critical balance between systematic processes and exceptional people.
Watch the episode here

 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/The-Power-of-Outsourcing_-Ankit-Patels-Tips-for-Optometrists-and-Ophthalmologists.mp3

The Proven Entrepreneur Show: The Power of Outsourcing: Ankit Patel’s Tips for Optometrists and Ophthalmologists
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Man, do I have a treat for you. Close friend of mine, super entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur in two businesses now. And I think there’s a third knocking on the door. Ankit Patel, please welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Don.
Yeah, my pleasure. And so, um, tell us, Uncut, uh, you live in Atlanta, Georgia. Okay. And your first business, I know what it is, but, but tell the audience what, um, your first business is.
one that I currently have, correct? Or my first business from way back when, when I was a wee lad. Fair enough, yeah. Yeah. So currently the primary business or the first business is eye doctor offices. My wife is an optometrist and long story short, I decided to help her grow those practices. So that’s how I got into that business. So I have actually no optometry background prior to that.
Well, let’s talk about the current business. We’ll get dig back in a little bit.
That’s all.
That’s awesome. And I’m always kind of in awe of couples who can do the married, the husband and wife thing and the business owner thing. Cause that takes a certain skill to be able to do that. So optometry offices, can’t talk today, it’s a new mouth. I’m just trying it out. And then your second business that you have currently, tell us about that.
So that one spun out of the optometry business. So I think Wyfe and I looked at, how do we really grow these businesses? And part of the, we were scratching our own itch. We said, okay, well, let’s look at a global resourcing model for staffing versus just a local one, because we’re, like most folks have trouble finding good quality local staff. And so we did.
we’ve done that so well, we’ve started to do that for other iDoctor offices across US and Canada as well. So we primarily can do anything that you can do remote. We do a lot of phone answering, appointment setting, verification of insurances, things like that. So anything that you can do remotely, we can do for other iDoctor offices.
Love that. And tell us the name of that business.
That business is called My Business Care Team.
my business care team. I love that. And so two things, one where you said, hey, we scratched our own itch. Okay. And a lot of entrepreneurial businesses, you know, are born in that manner. And then the second thing is I love it when an entrepreneur takes a line item cost and flips that into line item revenue. And so you solved a problem for yourself and also…
Yes.
are able to solve that problem for other people that are in similar situations.
Yeah, and it’s definitely been quite a ride. So, folks that need it definitely, they’re like, where have you been all my life? So, it’s been kind of fun. It’s been a fun journey so far.
I love that. Now I know the answer to this, but I want to be sure the audience here. So when an optometry office contracts with my business care team and you take care of a portion or all of the clerical functions, okay, for that business, I think that there is a savings that the practice owners, the physicians
and that savings can be up to what.
So we’ve seen as high as 30% off of the non-doctor payroll cost, so that’s something specific to the industry, but basically you have your doctors that you pay for the exams, but you have your non-doctor payroll, and we’ve seen as high as 30% savings there, just by us having come in to help streamline and help manage resources a little bit better.
That’s amazing. And I can’t imagine there’s an optometry practice anywhere in the country that wouldn’t like to save up to 30% on their non-doctor payroll. That just seems like a no-brainer to me. And then the flip side of it, I think not only does the practice save money on non-doctor payroll, but there’s also an enhanced income piece, isn’t there?
So it’s interesting because our job is to be helpful. So we charge for the resourcing and staffing, but we give a lot of resources away for free to our folks because we wanna be helpful to other private practices. And so once you are able to reduce your total staffing needs and your in-office head count, and you have a little bit extra budget, now you can take that and increase the pay, get better candidates and staff.
and hold them accountable. So we have a whole process and we kind of just give it what we’ve discovered in our own offices, how to do it. We just sort of just give it to our clients to say, hey, this is something you can do as well to help with your top line revenue as well, not just the bottom line.
Wow. And, and care to share any quantification on that enhancement to top line? Is there an up to number there?
Yeah, so I’ll share our numbers because I have permission to share our numbers. So we increased it by 33%. So specifically revenue per patient is one of the metrics that’s common in the industry and it jumped up by 33%. And that all had to do with just making a better experience for the patient, like educating them, understanding. And previously weren’t able to do that for two reasons. One, our staff was stretched thin. The caliber staff
Sure. Wow.
wasn’t to the level that we have now. We actually spend more on our in-office staff than we did before, but we offer benefits, we offer better pay, better bonuses, and we also make sure we hold them accountable to performance. So it’s been a win-win for everyone, for patients, for staff, for the business.
Yeah, I love all of that. You know, it’s all about the people, whether the people are on your team or the people are your customers. And the more you can better serve them, the better things work. Okay. Ankit, thank you for sharing. And the third, and we’re going to touch a little bit on this, but I, and I don’t know, you’ve never actually told me this, but I think maybe there’s an AI business somewhere in your future because you are certainly one of the most experienced and intelligent people.
Yeah.
I know of in AI and I know a bunch of them. And so we’ll talk about that just a little bit. Care to share anything that you’re doing with AI right now?
So we’re always looking at how to get better, more efficient. So again, I always start with where’s my needs right now? What needs can I, what kind of scratch? Right now we’re using a lot in training and development and it has been fantastic for that. So we do a lot of, it’s hard for my managers to be at multiple sites at once. And it’s hard for my, since we have a remote team, it’s hard to be on top of coaching all the time.
So we use AI to help with the coaching development and auditing a lot of times. And so for in-office team, we’ll have them do a practice scenario. It’s like, hey, you’ve learned how to sell glasses. Let’s do a recording and one person be a patient, one person pretend to be an optician and sell them glasses and go through that whole journey. And that recording gets uploaded and scored and they get feedback right away. So now your feedback and learning cycles go faster and that’s where AI has been really helpful for us.
is shorting those feedback and learning cycles to get even better improvement in performance.
I love that, you know, and there’s some thinking out there that like AI is going to replace all the people. I’m not one of those people who believe that. I think AI is going to accelerate the pace at which people can produce results because things that normally took time. Now, a microprocessor is going to make it happen like that. And so they’re not going to replace people, but it is going to change a little bit about how people work and the pace at which results come around. And we’re
Yeah.
We’re all in the time and money business. If you’re in business, you’re in the time and money business. That’s just all there is to it. So thank you for sharing. And I want to dig in. I’m going to take you all the way back to little Uncut. So like picture yourself five years old, maybe up through 18, through high school. And in the house that you were raised, and that looks different for different people. We don’t care about that. But in the house that you were raised, or houses,
Yeah.
Was there an entrepreneurial example? Was there an adult in your life who was on that crazy journey called entrepreneurialism?
So it’s interesting. So my background is Indian, right? So my heritage is from India. And the part of India that our family and most lot of folks that we knew in the US from India, very entrepreneurial. So that’s sort of probably one of the most entrepreneurial groups in the country. And so we had my ironically, my parents’ tribe, they were okay, they kind of dabbled at it, but I really had a lot of
Mm.
other examples of our family. I don’t think, I’m trying to think, I don’t think there wasn’t anyone that didn’t have a side business or a primary business that they worked on. So it was sort of something that I’ve always seen as, you know what, this is something I had to figure out and I want to do. And I see the difference between working for someone else versus being an entrepreneur. And, you know, I think other family members may feel differently, but I felt like, okay, I’m definitely wired to do this entrepreneur stuff.
Awesome. Okay. And so, um, and it’s interesting to me. I thought when I’ve started the show a couple of years ago that everybody would say, Oh yeah, my dad was an entrepreneur, my mother, my grandfather. And, but it’s interesting to me about half had, you know, my dad was a mailman and my mother was a teacher. And you know, that there was no, uh, hint of entrepreneurship. Um, but I think some entrepreneurs are just wired. They’re going, you know, some it’s by nature.
and some by nurture and some, you know, a combination of the two. So, okay. Now, now I’m looking for, I’ll say your first job, but your first job may have been your first entrepreneurial venture. I mean, you may have been selling lemonade or pencils or whatever, but, but the first effort you did where you, somebody paid you for some kind of effort. What was that? How old were you? Where were you at? Tell us about that.
15 and I started getting paid to teach martial arts classes. So I had received my black belt at that point in Taekwondo. And yeah, I was just teaching classes, which was a lot of fun. My first real job was working on a Steak and Shake as a line cook at 16 over summer job. So that was definitely a different experience than teaching Taekwondo to people.
Yeah, I’m sure.
Yeah, you know, it was interesting because working at Steak and Shake really, it really impacted, I had a lot of impactful stories from there because, you know, I was learning and I didn’t make mistakes. And, you know, the waiters and waitresses would come up to me like, hey, this is my livelihood. It’s like, you mess up, you’re taking food off out of my kids’ mouths. Like, oh, shoot. Okay. I got to take this a little more seriously. So it was, it was a little bit of an eye opener. It was like, okay, you know what, my decisions do impact other people.
That sort of stuck with me for a while, because it’s like, even now, I’m like, okay, well, you know, decisions I make impact a lot of people. And it was, yeah, it was, yeah, I didn’t work there for long, but that was something that stuck with me for a while.
Yeah, I think, I think, I think any type of retail is very good experience for young people because it teaches you how to deal with people and, um, and some people are easy to deal with and some people as we know are not easy to deal with, but, but we’re going to run across both kinds in our life and we’ve got to learn how to do that. Okay. So, um, now you’ve graduated high school, you, um, joined the Marine Corps or the Merchant Marine or your backpack to crush Europe.
You went to university. What was next?
Yeah, I didn’t do any of the military route or anything. I just went straight to school. Yeah, I just went straight to school. And the school I was at has, I went to school for engineering and they have a co-op program, which basically means one semester school, one semester work. And I started working at Delta Airlines here in Atlanta. So I went to school at Georgia Tech, industrial engineer working as a co-op at Delta.
And two weeks into the job, I knew I was never going to long term work for someone else. So, you know, that was a pretty fun, fun journey. I’ll pause there. I know that may not have been the question that you were asking, but I can dig into that story or reframe me if you want me to answer a different question.
No, I do want to dig into that. I love that. I think most non-entrepreneurs think that entrepreneurs are motivated primarily by a profit motive. And so they went into business to make tons of money. And the more entrepreneurs I talk to, the more rare I find that to be. Many times it’s something far different. So like in my case, I’m resistant to authority. And so I…
I’m not a good employee. I’m not a good person to tell me what to do. I don’t like that. And so, uh, yeah, share a little more on Georgia Tech, Delta airlines, 50 50, what you learned there.
Yeah.
So the first two weeks at Delta, or like within the first month, my first project was, this is before the days, everything was automated. We had, if you go around, they had paper records of bag drop-off times. So let’s say you land in Atlanta airport, you go from A concourse to D concourse, well, there’s a record of how long that baggage transfer takes and who drops it off, when they drop it off, but it was all manually recorded.
So our job was to go in there and transcribe like thousands and thousands of records over the past month. So me and this other guy, we spent two or three weeks doing it. And I was like, you know what? That’s fine. I don’t mind doing it. I get it. You know, it’s part of the deal being a co-op. Um, my assumption though, was that we be involved with the decision making, involved with the process, involved with some of the credits, right? Cause that’s what I’m there to do. I’m there to learn, okay, this is the data. Now, how do I take this data and apply it to the engineering side? Um,
But as soon as we finished that data, crickets, nothing. Didn’t hear anything for months and then all of a sudden the guy who ran the project got a lot of kudos for running the project and didn’t hear anything from it. And that lack of respect or my perception of lack of respect was really instrumentable in me saying like, yeah, that’s not happening. That’s like, it’s like if I, at least give me something, if you had taught me something and taken the credit, I wouldn’t have been fine with that. If you would have given me the credit and not taught me whatever, at least it would have been something, but.
you know, not to have anything from that handoff, I felt very, almost felt used, right? It’s like, okay, there wasn’t that level of respect that I thought should be there.
video.
Yeah, sounds to me like they could have used some leadership upleveling because we know it’s all about the other people and they weren’t dealing with that. So, okay. Graduated school, your degrees in what?
Undergraduate is industrial engineering and have a master’s in positive organizational development. So a little bit, a little bit different. I kind of took a roundabout path to where I ended up today for sure.
Okay?
sounds like the perfect education to be in business process outsourcing. Yeah. That’s how entrepreneurship is. I do know a few people and I live in Fort Worth, Texas. So TCU, Texas Christian University, has the Needles School of Business and they have a college of entrepreneurship and you see that more and more common today. But
Yeah.
for people of my generation or your generation that it’s really rare to find an entrepreneur who went to school for entrepreneurship. It’s just pretty rare. Okay, so talk a little bit about you and your wife own optometry practices and you were looking to scale the business. Talk us kind of through the birth, the genesis of, hey, we need a better solution for us. And then I’m just assuming that at some point
Entrepreneurship: Ankit Patel and Don Williams, engage in an insightful virtual conversation sharing the real-world journey of business building on The Proven Entrepreneur Show..
have that solution going, you’re like, I think maybe this is sellable. I think maybe we can provide this as a service to other people. So talk us through that a minute, if you don’t mind.
So you know how you were saying that you knew that you weren’t gonna be great working for someone else because you had that, don’t work well with authority. For me, I have a little bit of that, but for me it’s more about, oh, I know this can be solved and you’re not letting me do it. And so I have that burning desire because I like solving problems, that’s fun for me. And I was like, I always liked seeing what’s possible. Like, okay, I think we can do this. Let me see if I can figure it out. I enjoy that part of entrepreneurship journey. And so when we…
When we came to that, you know, you talk to your peers in the industry and they’re like, ah, that’s just what it is. Right. How do you do it? Or here’s some like incremental things. I’m like, I need something radical. Like I want something like bigger change. Cause I, this isn’t enough. This isn’t good enough. So I met with people outside of my industry. Um, you and I are part of an organization called EO entrepreneurs organization. And so I knew some people there, uh, actually a mutual friend of ours, Brad Stevens. Uh, he and I talked and, um, there’s a couple other people I talked to that were doing this and I said, you know what?
I think I can figure this out. I never had any call center experience, never VA experience. And so it was a bit of a rocky start, but we kind of hammered it out and honed it in over the course of a few years. Now COVID accelerated it. So we started in 2019, November of 2019 is when we hired our first employee and she was with us and then COVID hits. We lose some of our regular staff and need to augment. So we augment globally versus locally.
And so we grew up from there and started taking on beta or like, you know, I guess friends and family type clients in the year, let’s see, what is it? 2022, 2021, 2022, we started that. And in 2023, we officially launched My Business Care team when we finally got enough traction and understanding that, oh yeah, this is definitely something people want. Cause I didn’t know if it was something people would wanna do or even think about doing.
But we found that, yeah, there’s a lot of optometrists, especially multi-practice optometrists, that this is perfect for them. Because that’s essentially the solution we solved, right? We have multiple locations. We needed to centralize. We needed to streamline and save on cost. And so since it is centralized, we have options to not keep it local if we wanted to. And so that’s why it’s been working really well for us as well as our clients.
I love that. And, you know, I have decades of working in and around healthcare. And one really common theme I’ve found is this, is that physicians, regardless of their specialty, have a really burning desire to positively affect the health of humans and are frustrated with the non-
delivery of healthcare activities that are required. And so the insurance, the patient management, all that stuff is not universally, but it’s pretty common that the healthcare professional, they’d really like to just focus on helping people improve their health.
and all the rest of it is painful. So I think there’s a huge market for that. And in fact, you’ve had quite a bit of success the first 12 months of actually launching, yes.
Yeah, we’ve grown quite a bit. You know, we’ve picked up a little bit over a couple, well, yeah, over a dozen clients plus and then really have been getting folks, we’ve actually slowed down a little bit just because we want to make sure we get it right because since we own our own practices, we know how important that is. Like you said, right, patient care is really critical. And so we were hit some growing pains. So we said let’s put the brakes on a little bit. Make sure we sort this out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
get the right people that we need in the right seats, and then we can hit the gas again. So it’s been a blessing to be able to have, to slow it down versus having to find ways to speed it up.
Hard to have discipline to do that, but in all truth, there are businesses that are growing for growth sake, that they basically out punt their coverage. They grow too far, too fast. And ultimately that’s fatal to the business. And so it’s very important that you’re able to maintain your core values and your service levels and stay true to your mission.
And so it takes real discipline and I applaud you for being able to do that. Say, Hey, we’re growing pretty fast now. Maybe we tap the break just a touch. Okay. To be sure that we’re maintaining the quality that we want to put out to the world. So great job. Looking back, been an entrepreneur more than a minute. I’m going to ask you for a hard lesson. So something that happened.
that when it happened, your initial reaction was, ugh, that hurt, I don’t like it, I’m mad, I’m scared, it’s not fun. But maybe after a period of time and some perspective, being able to look back on that event, whatever it was in retrospect, maybe it turned out that it was a real positive. Do you have a hard lesson that you could share with Asanka?
Yeah.
How much time do you have? I think I’ve got a lot of those. And it’s just what, Wednesday or Thursday? I, yeah, do you want one this week? So one of the first lessons, one of my first, I’ll call it like a real business, right? I started Liberty Tax franchises and the town that I opened mine in were military town. So the first year I had one location.
Me too!
did great, went gangbusters, made an okay profit, not great, but good enough. I can’t remember what the exact amount was, but it was enough to get me through to the next year because there’s seasonal business, three months, whatever. And then I said, you know what? Let’s just grow for growth’s sake. And so I was like, I need to grow faster because a little bit about me, I’ve noticed that, and I learned this after the fact, but.
I feel like I’m not good enough unless I’m constantly achieving. And that is, that can be a double-edged sword as an entrepreneur, um, as a, as a person in general. And so I was like, well, let me expand. So opened up two more locations and the military got deployed. Uh, this was back around, uh, rack of war. And then, so all of the main clientele we had gone had extra costs and.
Hmm.
I was barely making a profit as it was, and now it was like, okay, I’m upside down. So I had to take out a couple of loans. I had a house at the time that I ended up selling to get out of loans. And so yeah, a lot of lessons learned. Know yourself. Understanding my own psychology is something, that was my first lesson, understanding my own psychology when it came to business decisions to strategy.
I’ve had another lesson around understanding psychology, around management and understanding people and knowing what I’m good at. I always thought, oh, I’m good at everything, right? Turns out, no, I’m really not. And so it took me until, you know, what am I, mid-40s now to figure that out. So that was a struggle, right? Cause I’m like, why can’t you just do it this way? And I would interview people.
perfect example is that several times I’ve tried to hire a manager or a GM at my offices and I’d always hire people I think, oh I could get them there, right? They seem like almost a perfect fit, I could get them there. And so what I realized from that is, no, I can’t, I am not a great manager.
I’m not a great teacher. You know, I’m okay teacher. I’m an okay manager, but I am not good at those things. So I need to focus on where I am good at. So for me, it’s solving problems. So if I have decisions on, do I expand the business? I have a finance person that I have certain things that I run through. You talked about partners with my wife. My wife is much better at those types of things. So we have a system now. I was like, hey, should we do this? Like, what do you think? What are the issues that we need to resolve or answer first before we would do this? And so I’ve put in things in place to kind of…
stop myself from going crazy in terms of making bad decisions. And that’s been helpful. And then forcing, having forcing functions. So another thing I learned is that, hey, if I don’t have the right person because of my own psychology, I decided to hire the wrong person and I’m doing all the work for them or they’re not going to do it. I’ll end up doing too much work and I get too busy. So now it’s like, okay, you know what? I know these are the things I should be working on. If I’m working on anything outside of that.
Whose job is it really to do that and why am I doing it instead? So that’s another trigger for me where I’m like, you know what? I need to pass it off. Um, cause, uh, my job and my strength is not in the day-to-day piece of doing, even though I can do those things. It’s more about, Hey, problem solving and strategy.
Love that. I want to add some weight to a couple of those things. One, it’s all about people and having the right people makes the job so much easier. Two, I think all of us think that we’re right all the time, that we’re the best at everything all the time. And the reality is any human knows about a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent of all.
human knowledge and so it’s impossible to be great at everything. But the secret is not to do everything, but to do what you do best and in your case, that solving problems and I know you, you’re one of the best people I know at identifying the actual issue, which to me is step one in solutions and then looking at alternatives that have.
a chance of success, and then you bring kind of the magic where a lot of entrepreneurs struggle is they don’t actually act. But you run that process very quickly and that’s a big part of your success. So okay, now what about a warp speed moment? So you’re going along, business is going pretty good, it’s like the old Star Trek show, give me more power Scotty, and you know they go from
a thousand miles an hour to a hundred thousand miles an hour. Can you share a warp speed moment, a decision you made, a hire you made, a policy you implemented or killed that the business did that hockey stick really took off?
There’s a couple. One was around when we’re expanding our locations and the types of places we wanted to acquire. So we looked at more opportunistic buys. And so we ended up, we went from like one location to five at one point within a matter of a couple of years. And since we’ve consolidated down, financially didn’t make sense to keep everything open. So, but that was one of the decisions, but.
I think the other piece was really around the decision around hiring and focusing on who, not what and how. To kind of build off your story, my background’s in engineering. I was a lean Six Sigma guy for large corporations. I had a lean Six Sigma company doing this for other companies. And so I was a very processed person. And until like about a year and a half ago, I was always processed first. Anyone can…
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process can overcome most people, right? And process is what needs to be fixed first, not the person. I had a 180, because I spent an entire 2022, 2023, focusing on process and not the people first, and just kept hitting my head against the wall. And then I finally just said, you know what, maybe it is the who first. So maybe there’s something to do that. And so I started looking at how to interview.
how to do these things and that made the biggest difference. So there’s several different things now that I do on the front end. That’s really made a huge impact on the backend for performance across the entire organization. Um, and that’s, that’s been just putting gas on gas on the, on the flames. Um, cause now we’re getting the right people. Warrant just barely meeting expectations or kind of meeting expectations. Um, cause if they are, they’re worked out of the business fairly quickly now, cause we’re like not really dealing with it at this point. Um, and so we really get folks that
Yeah, they get it, want it, and they have the capacity to do it.
Get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it. That’s a golden nugget right there. Get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it. And I like the, you know, some entrepreneurs focus really, are really strong on the people side. They’re not that good on the process side. You had it in reverse, really strong on the process side, not as skilled on the people side. But folks, if you want the big magic.
Not the little magic, the big magic. You got to do both. Okay. You need the people and the process. And so, um, you know, decide where you’re good at and then go get somebody to help you on the other side. That’s the easiest way to do it. You don’t have to learn everything yourself.
And quick credit to the get at one of capacity is not my terms, it’s actually traction in EOS. So if anyone’s curious where I got that from, that’s, that’s a good resource. We use EOS at the companies that I have.
Yeah, EOS, great system. And.
Gina Wickman product and so super stuff there. Okay, this is the toughest question I’m gonna ask you. Gonna put you in a time machine, gonna send you back 27 years, gonna get about 60 or 90 seconds to talk with 20 year old Uncut. And so what do you know now that you wish you knew then that would have streamlined
made your journey a little easier. So, end of the time machine you go, all the way back to 20 year old Ankit. What would you tell yourself?
a lot.
One thing I would say is that this, the global resourcing company, my business care team, was easy because of the experience that I have in the industry. And it’s an industry that I enjoy and actually like working in.
And it’s kind of a growing industry. So I would say, don’t chase the money. You can get a job, do what you need to, but go in an industry that’s interesting and growing. So you can learn it. So, because for me, it took about 10 years of really knowing the industry ins and outs to make a job, to make another business easy, to understand the pain points, to really understand how you can service folks and really make that add a lot of value to the industry.
And so it’s, it’s a lot harder than it looks. So make sure you got all that experience and then find out what people are willing to really listen to what they say when they say they have a problem. Um, quick story. I started a business doing, I thought I wanted to do computer repairs. And this is before cell phones really got big. And, um, I put one ad out and the 55 and older, um, newspaper and everyone called me for computer tutoring and not computer repair.
And so I was like, I don’t want to do that. I just want to do the repair side. And so I didn’t pay attention to that signal that I had. I was like, well, that’s what people want to pay for. Nearly because I didn’t, that was just something I was doing on the side for fun. It wasn’t really an area I had a lot of experience in. So really understand what the market and the business really, really want. And the second thing I’ll say is know yourself. And quite frankly, go get therapy, right? Got.
I found I had some, you know, clinical depression, suicidal for a while, had a lot of stuff that I worked through. And quite honestly, though, I was doing a lot of things that were very protective of my own ego and my own emotional state that caused bad business outcomes. So part of the reason why I didn’t listen to the market was because I was like, well, it has to be this way or I’m not going to be good enough. Right. And so that took some time to kind of process that and get over that and understand that that’s really what I was going through.
Those two lessons were probably the most important I’ve learned over the last 20 years.
I love that. And thank you so much for sharing those details. A couple of things hit me as you shared that is one, you as an entrepreneur will never do your best work until you find something that you love. And so if you go in strictly for the money, like you said, that, that won’t end as well as you think.
But when you do something that you absolutely love, what’s the old saying? Find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. And man, that’s like in spades for entrepreneurs. And then two, going back to what people think they know is get certain, look for experts, people who can help.
Okay. And that, that might be therapy and it might be a business coach and it might be somebody to set up your books the right way. It might be somebody, it’s just somebody who does something that it’s in their superpower and it’s not in yours. And the best teams are teams where you have a team of super players and they’re all playing their position and helping where they can the other players. And so.
I love that real wisdom from a young man like you. So Ankit, how can we, as the proven entrepreneur tribe, how can we support you? What could we do for you?
Yeah, there’s, if you know any optometrists or ophthalmologists that need some support, your local, I’m sure everyone sees their eye doctor. Would love if you said, hey, you should check out on kid. He has some practices. He’s hopefully you feel comfortable enough to say, hey, you should check me out. So I would love, love that. And if anybody has any questions, we’ll be happy to answer any questions that they might have. Like you had mentioned, we’re working on a lot of cool things around AI and…
how to implement that. So I’m always here to help. So I was like sharing and helping.
Yeah, love that. And so, Hey, if you’re seeing an eye doctor, doesn’t matter what they are. If they’re an eye doctor, they probably need on-cut service. Okay. My business care team, give us the website address.
It’s mybcat.com. So it’s M-Y-B as in boy, C-A-T.com.
Okay. And so tell your doc, man, I think you guys could use some help. Okay. And that’s okay to say that and then reach out to Ankit. Ankit, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today. That’s today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks. Bye now.
Thanks for having me, Don.

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Title: E103 | The Proven Entrepreneur Show: Taking Control: The Power of Becoming Your Own Puppeteer in Business by Stephanie Nivinskus
Date: October 15, 2024
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e103-the-proven-entrepreneur-show-taking-control-the-power-of-becoming-your-own-puppeteer-in-business-by-stephanie-nivinskus/
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Content:
Join host Don Williams on The Proven Entrepreneur Show as he chats with Stephanie Nivinskus, the visionary founder and CEO of Sizzle Force Marketing. In this captivating episode, Stephanie shares her inspiring journey, from early influences and her first job to her entrepreneurial leap.
Discover how Stephanie has adapted to the ever-evolving landscape of marketing, particularly in the face of AI advancements. Gain valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by AI and learn how Stephanie has navigated these changes with resilience and innovation.
Listen as Stephanie reflects on her entrepreneurial journey, offering advice to her younger self and sharing her perspectives on the future of AI in marketing. This episode is a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs and those seeking inspiration to overcome obstacles and thrive in today’s dynamic business world.
Watch the episode here

 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E103.mp3

The Proven Entrepreneur Show: Taking Control: The Power of Becoming Your Own Puppeteer in Business by Stephanie Nivinskus
Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. I’ve got a great guest for you today. Lady I’ve known, I don’t know, eight, nine, 10 years. She’s from San Diego, California, Stephanie Navinskas. Welcome to the show.
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Hey, Dom, thank you so much for having me.
It is my pleasure, I assure you. Now I know that you’re the founder and CEO of Sizzle Force Marketing, but please share with us what does Sizzle Force do, who do you do it with, why do you do it, all that good stuff.
Yeah, Sizzleforce Marketing is a fractional CMO agency that is powered by artificial intelligence and perfected with human intelligence. We work with scaling companies typically that are doing about two to ten million dollars in revenue annually and all kinds both B2C and B2B and gosh I do this because I love it. I’ve been doing it my entire career.
started in 95 and as soon as I started, I was like, I found my thing and here we are.
There you go. Well, thank you very much. You must have been about five when you started. And so, well, just say yes and on we go. So, okay. So I’m going to take you all the way back to when you were five years old. So little Stephanie, okay, in the household where you were raised. And I know that takes a lot of different forms for a lot of different people. But what I want to know is in your school girl years, five to 18, was there an adult in your home?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Okay. Mm-hmm.
that was an entrepreneur that set an entrepreneurial example.
Hmm. My mother and my stepfather both kind of had side gigs as entrepreneurs, but they have the stability of the regular nine to five. Their side gig, they were both therapists. So they would do, they would see some patients like a little bit part time in the evenings and whatnot. But the real entrepreneur stuff actually goes back a few generations.
My great grandfather and my grandfather were both very serious entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship: Don Williams and Stephanie Nivinskus deep in discussion on The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Oh, I love that. And so your parents were kind of like, um, what I would call W-2s with side hustles and, um, and, and love that. And, you know, I think everybody who lives in W-2 land ought to have a side hustle. And if you get really good at your side hustle, maybe that becomes your main hustle and, you know, you left the W-2 thing go and this show is all about helping entrepreneurs take the next step. And sometimes that’s W-2 taking that step into entrepreneurship. And sometimes it’s the entrepreneur.
Right.
going ahead and borrowing the $100 million and everything in between. Everybody has a next step and it’s always a little different. So, okay, love that. Tell me your first job and your first job, you may have been an entrepreneur, you may have been mowing yards or selling lemonade or whatever, but you also might have been working at Dairy Queen. Okay, it doesn’t matter, but tell us about the first time you traded. Time, effort, and.
elbow grease for dollars. What were you doing?
working at a store called Long Strug Store and I was a very proud cashier.
Oh, very good. Okay. And I’m guessing a drug store back at that time also was kind of a variety store. So it had more things than just, yeah. Okay. Very, very good. So after that, okay, you graduate high school, okay. You sailed around the world for a year. You hiked across Europe. You joined the Marine Corps. You went to university. What did you do?
Yeah.
Ha ha ha!
after your school girl years.
Yeah, I went straight to four year university. I went to San Diego State. So I moved about 500 miles away from home. And I made a decision at that point that I was leaving home and I wasn’t going back. And I, yeah, started studying journalism and four years later graduated. And three weeks after that landed my first job.
Okay.
Oh, that’s awesome. And so went out to San Diego State, fell in love with the weather, said I can’t live anywhere else. And yeah, heard that story once or twice before. And so yeah, love the weather in San Diego. Oh my gosh. I’m actually gonna be in Guatemala next week. And Guatemala, the year round high is 80 and the year round low is 60. And I was like, that’s almost San, to me San Diego’s like,
Mm-hmm.
You’re around low of 65, you’re around high of 75, and if there’s a cloud 30 miles out at the ocean, the natives are like, oh, it’s gonna be cloudy today. And I’m like, I’ll come to Texas, let me show you some real weather, okay?
Well, that’s what we get our like blizzards jackets on and our snow hats. And you know, yeah, clouds are scary.
Yeah. Understood. Okay. So got your first job, J-O-B, W-2, right? Okay. And, um, and how long did you do that before you started your, I don’t know if Sizzleforce is your first entrepreneurial venture, but how long were you at W-2 before you said, ah, heck with this, I’m going to start my own thing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it was just shy of 10 years. And I was one of many people who, this was during the time period where.com had already become a thing and now wireless was the big thing. And so I was working in the marketing department for one of the very first app development companies. And one day walked into work and they said, guess what?
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We’re not gonna be here tomorrow. We lost our funding, so go home and don’t come back. And indeed, the doors were indeed locked the next day. Nobody could get in. So I found myself in this situation of, well, now what? And at that point, I just decided, you know what, I know what I’m doing here. And I actually wanna start marketing for things that I really believe in and things that I really care about.
So I started my first marketing agency shortly thereafter and I ran that for a few years and then I got pregnant and then I became a reproduction machine and I continued spitting out babies. So I stepped away from that for the most part. I won’t say I completely hung my hat up, but I definitely scaled way back when I had little ones. And…
Then in 2009, I decided, okay, I’m ready to get back into this and here we are.
There you go. And so, um, reproduction factory, you have, how many children do you have? Had three children. Yeah. Love that. And, uh, yeah, that, that makes made your house a really busy place for a while.
Mm-hmm. I have three.
Yeah, I had three kids under the age of five. And then we adopted a son as well. Unfortunately, he ended up passing away, but at one point we had four kids, so yeah.
breath out.
Wow, wow, busy, busy house. Okay, so was your first entrepreneurial venture, was it Sizzleforce?
Mm-hmm.
No, Sizzleforce was my second one. The first one was called Spirit-led Marketing, and it was still a marketing agency, but it was just focused on a niche of non-profit Christian organizations.
Okay, I love that. I love that. And so then Sizzleforce came along. And so thinking back across your career, I’m going to ask you a question about, and typically when I ask this question, entrepreneurs are like, oh yeah, I got a lot of those. But I want to ask you a question about a hard moment. Okay, so something happens, an event happens, that at the time,
It was just crushing. It’s like, oh my gosh, that hurts. But the kind of hard moment I’m looking for is an event that while it was approaching devastating at the time, today, now that some time has passed and you have some perspective, you can look back on it and say, hmm, might’ve been one of the best things that ever happened to me.
and the difference being just the timing of that event. Because as we know as entrepreneurs, it’s not really what happens, it’s more about how we take it. But the problem is not the problem, the problem is how we react to the problem. So got a hard moment you can share?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’ve got one that’s actually not too far in the distant past. Um, so as an AI marketing consultancy, let me back up a little bit and tell you that I made my living writing copy for the bulk of my career. And so when AI, uh, marketing tools came on this scene, I first heard about them in, it was probably about 2019 when I first started hearing.
the people start chattering about them in my industry. But nobody outside of my industry was chattering much about them. And so I tried them and I was like, eh, okay, whatever. Wasn’t really impressed, just kind of ignored it after I played with it. Well, fast forward to this past November, 2022, when ChatGPT came on the scene. And that was a game changer. All of a sudden it…
it really felt like an overnight shift, monumental shift in my industry, where at one point, you know, the bulk of my career, I felt like copywriters were revered. People were very respectful of my ability to tell stories using the written word in a really captivating way. And it’s almost as if
disappeared and people were like, well, I can do this with chat. GPT who needs you? And, um, yeah, I’ll tell you, that was really hard. It was really scary. And the more time that passed, I mean, I’m talking this, this shift was so fast that it happened like in days, weeks. Okay. Um, this isn’t something that went on for years and years, right? So.
Um, honestly, the change started happening so fast and I started hearing on, I’d be on calls with clients that I had for many years and people saying, so I heard about this chat GPT thing and I started playing with it and I realized I can do dah, dah. And these are all the things that I had been doing for them. I’m like, Oh no. So if I’m being completely transparent, I will tell you. I
got pretty scared and I got pretty ruffled over it because I’m like, what is going on? And ended up getting really anxious about it, like bad anxious, like the kind where you’re having like anxiety attacks and you can’t breathe, right? And I had never experienced that before, never. And
Mm.
That’s it.
went to a pretty difficult place for a good four to six weeks and was just really questioning, what am I doing? What’s next? You know, I felt honestly felt like an identity loss, if that makes sense. And then one day, you know, after a lot of prayer, I just woke up and I was like, well, I have a choice to make.
Sure.
I can either continue wallowing and continue living in a state of fear and just watch my business disappear before my eyes, or I can take the bull by the horns and I can decide, you know what, if we’re going to do an AI puppet show, I am going to become the puppeteer. And I’m going to learn how to use this tool better than anybody else. And that was the decision I made. And that was the pivotal point.
So here we are, that was sometime in February. Come March, I had already invested a couple hundred hours in my own training, I went all in. I like, I stopped doing everything else. And I just, I enrolled in all these different courses and I just played and played and played and played with every AI tool I could find, trying to crack the nuts and figure it, you know.
come up with the hacks and figure out all the things. And come March, I got an opportunity actually to teach somebody what I was learning. And I taught them and they freaked out at how awesome it was. And here we are in, you know, at tail end of summer of 2023. And now this has become an incredible gift to me.
I feel like all of these AI marketing tools have made me better than I’ve ever been at what I do.
Love that. That’s a great story. And many entrepreneurs, almost all probably, at some point, if they’re in the game long enough, find a time when they have to pivot or let it go. And so love that. It’s okay to be upset for a while. I mean, we’re all human, but then to reach the point of…
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you know, it’s either going to get me or I’m going to get it, and I choose to get it. And so, turns out that what, for many copyrighters, has probably been their mortal enemy, okay, because large language models, which is the technology that Jad GPT and others function on, they’re, you know, I take a little exception with artificial intelligence. I don’t think it’s actually intelligent.
I do think these supercomputers with massive computing power and exceptional pattern recognition software, they can put words together a lot of different ways if you’re just smart enough to tell it how to do it. And if you’re not, it’s a little sterile, you know. And I know that you are expert in the field. And so…
Mm-hmm.
Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so now what about, I want a piece of wisdom. I want a nugget. I want something that you hold near and dear to your heart about entrepreneurship that maybe you share all the time or maybe you don’t share. You’re a pretty open person. But typically entrepreneurs have a couple foundational pieces of wisdom.
that have kind of helped them along their path. And so, if we knew what you knew, what would we want to know that you know?
Hmm, great question.
She who quits first loses. How about that? Ha ha ha.
I love that. I love that a lot. So many times, entrepreneurs are successful just because they don’t quit. They just keep going. I have a really good friend who is retired Marine Corps recon. So that’s the Marines version of the SEALs or the Rangers or the Green Berets or all of that. And as he’s telling…
Yeah.
stories about the training that he went through, like buds, you know, for the seals and all that. I finally asked him one day, I was like, you know, it sounds to me, I mean, you’re not the biggest guy, you know, you’re not, I’m pretty sure I could beat your arm wrestling, you know, you’re not the biggest guy, you’re, you know, you’re not a remarkable physical specimen, you know, you don’t look like Bruce Lee, you know, but…
Ha ha
I’m going to go ahead and close the video.
but you had this really high intensity job. I said, it almost sounds to me like the people who made it through were the people who just wouldn’t quit. And he said, you know, there’s something to that. He said, you know, 100 people enter the training, three exit successfully, then there’s another level, and about 50 enter that training, another three. And he said, the guy’s standing at the end, and today the ladies.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
You know, guys and gals stand at the end. They’re the people who just won’t quit, that just keep going. And I think the same is very true about entrepreneurs, because no matter who you are, you can go to the mountain and to the valley over and over and over again. And sometimes people who aren’t entrepreneurs, they hear that and they’re like, nah, I don’t think that’s right. Like, look, even, you know, General Motors went bankrupt.
Yeah.
After 9-11, every airline but one filed bankruptcy. It doesn’t matter how big you are, how long you’ve been around, how established you are. Every day is a new day and you have to be able to make decisions based not on what happened necessarily but on what’s happening. And so I love that. Okay. So here’s the tough one. Okay. This makes them cry every time. No, it does not.
Mm-hmm.
Uh oh. Ha ha ha.
No, it doesn’t. So I’m going to put you in a time machine, Stephanie, and I’m going to send you back, just like, what was it, Star Trek. I’m going to send you all the way back to talk to 20-year-old Stephanie. Okay, can you picture? Yeah, okay, good. And so I’m going to put you in the time machine, going to take you all the way back to 20-year-old Stephanie, and you’re going to get about 90 seconds.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
to share something with your 20-year-old self that you know now, but you didn’t know then, but had you known it then and had you listened to what you are going to learn, which many 20-year-olds won’t, or 40-year-olds or 60-year-olds, but had you heard it and had you listened, it would have eased your path, sped you along your journey to successful entrepreneurs.
So into the time machine you go.
There you are, there’s your 20 year old self. What do you tell her?
You are just as capable, just as smart.
and just as talented as all of those people that you look up to, and you can do anything they can do and more.
You are just as capable, just as smart, and just as talented as all of those people that you look up to, and you can do anything they can do and more Share on X
I love that. Okay, you know, I’m a big fan, you know this about me, I’m a big fan of wise words. And every once in a while I have some of my own, but I don’t care where they come from. And so I don’t care if it’s Aristotle or Seneca or, you know, I don’t care where they come from. But one of my very favorite quotes, probably my favorite quote of all time, is you are far smarter.
you’re far better, far smarter, and far stronger than you think. I love that quote. And of course, that was the wise philosopher of Christopher Robin, who was relaying that to Winnie the Pooh in the book titled Winnie the Pooh. And so I think every entrepreneur at some point in time, maybe every human, probably every human, needs to hear, needs to realize you are more than enough.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Thanks for watching!
Mm.
You have everything you need to achieve whatever level of greatness that you want and however you define that greatness. And, um, and you know, the opposite of that, I think where many humans exist, you know, they carry around the little imposter syndrome where it’s like, am I good enough? I’m not good enough. I’m there’s so much better than me. Blah, blah, blah. But.
You know, what we know, psychologically what we know to be a fact is that it’s only an idea. It’s not the truth. And so, though sometimes ideas, you know, can be enslaving. And so, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Okay.
I have that quote that Christopher Robin is famous for actually on a picture that my husband gave me and it is sitting on the table in my office right next to me right now, right over there.
What a great husband he is. Yeah, yeah, love that. So I’ll say that again for our audience. You’re far better, far smarter, and far stronger than you think. And that’s true of each and every one of you. And so tell yourself that. Your mind actually cannot tell the difference between what you imagine and what really happens. And so if you tell yourself that, your mind will believe that and…
He’s a good one, I got a good guy.
Hey, that’s an important piece right there. So, okay, Stephanie, couple years as an entrepreneur, started out when you were five, okay, went and did the journalist gig, worked for a company that was using outside capital, faucet got shut off, found out, hey, I need a job tomorrow. Started your own gig, started another gig.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Really accomplished copywriter, long career as a really accomplished copywriter. AI comes in, large language models and says, hey, anything you can write, I can write 17 ways better. Okay, and I can do it in Mandarin or Chinese, Spanish or backwards or Pig Latin or however you want it. And I remember the first time I was demoing
for some entrepreneurs that I was leading on a retreat in Cabo. And this was back about February. So, Chad GPT had come out, I think in November. I didn’t hear about it until December. And then it was just like, oh my gosh, this is like inventing the wheel. It’s like inventing fire. This is going to really take off. And so we were staying in this great house on the beach in Cabo.
in a neighborhood where they don’t have addresses, they just have names, you know, really nice house. And so I was demonstrating ChatGPT and I said, write a two paragraph marketing blurb, you know, about this house, the name of the house in Cabo. And, you know, it took it about a second to start and about five seconds to finish. And everybody was like, wow.
Mm.
That’s amazing. And I was like, oh, you think that’s good, watch this. Now please rewrite it like I’m Ernest Hemingway. And it takes it about a second to start and five seconds to finish. And there it is. So rather than running home and bearing your head under your pillow and saying, oh my gosh, the world is ending, you decided to master AI and add that, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
also important human component to AI-generated text, which also is a little clunky to me. I mean, it’s very good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like human interaction. And so you’ve started to do that. So what’s next for you, Stephanie? What’s on the horizon? What’s the frontier? When you get out there.
where you don’t know what’s gonna happen and what’s next.
Well, who knows what’s gonna happen with AI, right? You know, I mean, just, what was it? A couple of days ago, the Department of Defense put out a notice saying that they’ve started an AI task force. And how is that gonna affect things? I don’t know, none of us know, right? Might be great, might not be great for those of us that are using it for business. We’ll find out. So I think right now I’m very much
Yeah.
in the trenches of the new frontier as we speak, where, you know, every day there’s a new AI tool that comes out. Every day it seems like there’s a new standing that the media takes on this. Every day people have more opinions on this, and so on and so forth. And so I feel like I’m living the frontier right now. As far as what’s next?
Ask me in an hour what’s next, because I’m sure something new is coming in the next 60 minutes.
I love that. And so much of the time I think success as the entrepreneurs, we don’t know what’s coming next. We just know that whatever it is, we’re going to be able to handle it.
Yeah, that’s what makes it fun. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what makes it fun is like, I mean, it’d be so boring if everything was so predictable, right? I love, well, it does, you know, it gets me nervous sometimes. I will say there is something invigorating about walking in unknown territory and exploring something that
There is something invigorating about walking in unknown territory and exploring something that has yet to be truly discovered. Share on X
has yet to be truly discovered. There’s something very invigorating and exciting about that to me and very hope giving.
I love that. And I know this to be true, that we all love our comfort zones because, hey, it’s comfortable. It’s like your favorite shoes, your favorite chair, your pillow, it’s just comfortable. So you just like it and you want to stay there, but the good stuff for you is outside of your comfort zone and AI is evolving so rapidly. There’s a thousand new applications every day. And…
Mm-hmm.
And so who knows where we end up, but as long as you’re ready for the ride, you’ll figure it out and it’ll be okay. Okay, Stephanie, how would a listener reach out to you at Sizzleforce Marketing?
Yeah.
Yeah, I would love to hear from any listeners. So you can find me at sizzleforce.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you’re interested in learning some of these AI marketing tips for entrepreneurs, check out what I’m doing on TikTok, which the handle is at sizzleforce.
Love that. Love that. Stephanie, I’m so glad you joined us today. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your success story.
Thank you so much.
That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.
 
 

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Title: E102 | The Proven Entrepreneur Show: Unleashing The Power Of Entrepreneurship With Power Couple Chalon And Richard Clark
Date: August 22, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e102-the-proven-entrepreneur-show-unleashing-the-power-of-entrepreneurship-with-power-couple-chalon-and-richard-clark/
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Hey there, fellow entrepreneur! Have I got a treat for you today. I just listened to the latest episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show, and let me tell you, it’s packed with incredible insights and inspiring stories that you won’t want to miss.
Host Don Williams kicks things off with an engaging conversation featuring the dynamic duo, Richard and Chalon Clark. As the cameras start rolling, you can feel the energy as they dive into their entrepreneurial journeys. Chalon, a talented attorney turned interior designer, shares how she started her company, Design Redefined, from scratch and how her mindset shifted from lawyer to creative visionary. Alongside her, Richard reveals his passion for flipping houses and his love for sharing cultural cuisine with the world through his restaurant brands and a villa in Jamaica.
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. They also open up about the hard lessons they’ve learned along the way. Richard shares the emotional toll of his first failed business venture and how he had to pick up the pieces. Chalon reflects on her own setbacks, emphasizing the importance of legal agreements for entrepreneurs. It’s a powerful reminder that failure is not the opposite of success but an essential part of the journey.
Throughout the episode, Richard and Chalon drop wisdom bombs left and right. Richard’s metaphor of juggling glass balls and rubber balls will resonate with every entrepreneur, teaching us to prioritize and protect what truly matters. Meanwhile, Chalon’s journey of finding her capacity and learning to say no is sure to strike a chord with ambitious go-getters.
The episode wraps up with a beautiful reminder to stay present, trust in grace, and embrace the path set by God. It’s a message that will speak to your soul and inspire you to be the best version of yourself.
If you’re ready for an episode filled with authentic wisdom, game-changing insights, and contagious entrepreneurial spirit, you need to listen to this episode now. Connect with Chalon on Instagram at @yourdesignredefined and reach out to Richard at Richard.Thomas@tphhg.com or on LinkedIn. Trust me, you won’t regret diving into this episode. So what are you waiting for? Hit play and get ready to be inspired. See you on the other side of success!
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

 
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The Proven Entrepreneur Show: Unleashing The Power Of Entrepreneurship With Power Couple Chalon And Richard Clark
I’ve got a power couple for you, Richard and Chalon Clark joining me. Both are entrepreneurs. Richard and Chalon, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
I’m so grateful to have you. Ladies first, let’s start here. You’re an entrepreneur in your own right.
Yes. I’m a new baby entrepreneur.
I love new baby entrepreneurs. I love them. The audience knows. I love people who are taking that first entrepreneurial stuff. Your professional training is?
As an attorney, Commercial Litigation. I work at big law. I made an equity partner in 2022. I’m also in firm management. I’m doing all of that on that side, and then my business at night and weekends.
You know what they say. If you want to get something done, give it to somebody who’s busy and they’ll get it done. Congratulations on your promotional firm. That’s big doings. Tell us about your entrepreneurial effort.
I started Your Design Redefined in 2020. Like everybody else, the whole world stopped. I was pregnant with my third. As friends, family, and coworkers were dying from COVID, it made me start to think about what was on my bucket list that you always think you have more time for. One was writing a book and one was opening an interior design company. I did finish my book. I took a writing class while I was pregnant, a virtual class, and I was still doing my homework as I was giving labor. I finished the book before my maternity leave ended. I then started Your Design Redefined in November 2020.
My husband is always into something. We had flipped houses starting a few years ago. He came home and was like, “I bought a house and you’re going to design it. I’m opening a new restaurant and you’re going to design it.” I kept looking back over my life, plus we had built our own homes.
I’m guessing you designed it?
Yes, I designed it. People would always compliment and say, “Who’s your designer?” I’m like, “Me.” “Will you do mine?” “Absolutely not. I’m not a designer. I’m just a lawyer.” That was my whole thing. After a while, I started looking at my portfolio. I had three restaurants and three homes. I was like, “Maybe I am an interior designer and a lawyer.” My tag is the lawyer designer. I put my first post on Instagram with zero followers.
My husband is like, “What are you doing? Nobody is going to see it. You don’t have any followers. You got to post it on Facebook.” I’m like, “No way. I’m not posting my design on Facebook. There are lawyers and judges that follow me. They’re going to laugh at me and think I’m not serious about practicing law.” He’s like, “You have to.” I did. The outpouring was very positive. Most of my clients, including my first client, were other lawyers.
I’m being a little humorous here. I wonder how many third-year law students’ heart skips a beat when they hear you say, “I’m just a lawyer.” I like lawyer designers so much better. Richard, tell us about your entrepreneurial journey. What are you doing right now? What’s getting your time and effort?
I own a hospitality company, The Present House Hospitality Group. We have two restaurant brands, The Island Spot, Jamaican Kitchen & Bar. We acquired Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke brand in 2022. We have our first villa in Jamaica that we’re launching later in 2023 called The Island Spot Villas as well. That’s what I do. I’m in hospitality. I’m passionate about food. Sometimes a little bit too passionate. My waistline can tell you. I am looking to share cultural cuisine with the broader masses on a consistent basis. That’s what we do.
I want to know, did you start any of the companies and come home and say, “I started a company now?”
I may have. It started back when I was a consultant. After business school, I went to consulting at McKinsey. Beyond that, I moved on to Corporate America. While I was at McKinsey, they took me to the number-one-ranked Jamaican restaurant at that time for my birthday for a team lunch. The experience was lacking and it left me thinking, “This can’t be the best that we had to offer.” When I left the firm, I started to work with my next phase, which was Dean Foods. It was my client before. I felt like I had a little bit more time and I wanted to do something about it. What I wanted to do was to change the way people experience Jamaican food and my culture personally.
Entrepreneurship: I wanted to change the way people experience Jamaican food and my culture personally.
 
I started at that. I had a friend who was a chef. I had a restaurant on weekends. I did come home and say, “I’ve decided to go in partnership with someone. I’m going to fund a restaurant.” She was looking at me like I’m crazy, but that led to this whole journey that I’m on right now. As a restaurateur, I did the only thing you can do, which is fail within the first year and close the store. We did reopen it and we’ve had that store. That was the first Island Spot. We’ve had it for thirteen years in 2023 by myself.
We’ve opened other locations. Since then, I’ve moved from trying to change the way people experience Jamaican food and cuisine. I started to look at more of a broad cultural palette and how we create opportunities for people to try amazing food that has a unique cultural bend but has more of a broad appeal. We acquired our first other group, which is Bone Daddy’s. We took the whole concept. Now we’re thinking of how to reimagine it and grow it again. That’s what we do.
Thank you. That’s where you’re at now.
Yes.
I’m going to take you all the way back to 5 years old up to 18, so your childhood home. Chalon, was someone an entrepreneur?
I was about to say no immediately, but then I think about my mom, who was a burn intensive care unit nurse who retired at the age of 40 to start doing MLMs, Multi-Level Marketing. That is entrepreneurial for sure. She left that career behind and she never went back. I guess in some way, I was exposed to making it on your own and leaving the comfort and security of a good paycheck.
Richard?
Mine didn’t go by the name. I say entrepreneur, but my family had a shop that we ran. I grew up in it. I realized later on that I grew up around entrepreneurs. My grandmother opened this small grocery shop. My mother took it over when I was five. I started to work in a shop because I was good at Math, so I was calculating the bills.
Accounts payable officer at five.
Eventually, I got to a point where I was doing most of running it at 13 before I came to college in America at 18. I grew up around entrepreneurship.
We’re through our early childhood years. You’re eighteen. You’re either going to university, backpacking across Europe, or you joined the Navy. What was next?
I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer since I was nine years old. I went to the University of Houston and got a Finance degree. I then went to the University of Texas School of Law and got my Law degree.
You knew what you wanted. You went and did it.
I clerked for a Federal judge for two years, then came to Hush Blackwell where I still practice law.
Thank you. Richard?
Mine is a little bit different. I knew I wanted to run businesses, but I didn’t exactly know what specific field, as Chalon did with law. I came here. I did my undergrad in Physics. I was good at Math so I lean into that. After that, I went on to do my MBA in Strategy and Finance. Post my MBA, I went on to McKinsey and did consulting for three years. I joined Dean Foods. I was running their business analytics function, and then eventually moved to Borden Dairy where I ended up as the Chief Procurement Officer running over bidding houses and ran M&A for them as well.
Thinking back on your young entrepreneur career. As a wife of an entrepreneur who might tell you, “ I bought a house or a business now,” would you share a hard lesson? Something that happened that when it happened, it might have even taken your breath away like, “I don’t like it. That hurts.” After some time has passed, you can look back and say, “Maybe that was the best thing that happened.” Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
I don’t want to take over his hard lessons.
Go ahead.
I’m sure he has more than one.
The worst one was the first Island Spot. I was already a practicing attorney. However, he had already entered an agreement with his former partner where he put in all of the money and took 40% of the equity. That didn’t work out well. Let’s fast forward. I was like, “Get an attorney. Draft an agreement. Don’t put in all the money in that and half equity.” There are lots of lessons there, but I think he learned it the hard way. We were able to open the restaurant back up after it closed. We opened it in time for our wedding. It fed 250 people. We were able to bring in the family. Looking back, it’s probably the best thing that ever happened because now he won’t do anything without a lawyer. Permission to sneeze is legal.
Yes.
I think that was probably a good lesson.
Many entrepreneurs, early on, want to wink at legal, governance, and compliance. Typically, there’s an issue. From that point on, they’re like, “As much as I want to wink at it, I’m going to have to consult the service of the attorney.” Another hard lesson. When I ask about a hard lesson, entrepreneurs are like, “How much time do we have? I got a couple.” Do you have another one you could share with us, Richard?
Yes. To go with that, it got explored a little bit more. As you’re going through the process and making sure that you’re vetting who you’re going into business with, that’s one, but also why you’re going into business. When that restaurant failed, I reached a certain level of almost like depression. It so happened that the depression coincides when I’m getting married. I felt like I lost my engagement period. The partnership fight started literally after I proposed inside the restaurant. If you lose a certain part of your life, they feel like you’re never going to get back. That’s one.
The other part that goes with it is you go through almost like a trough of sorrow where you’re trying to figure out, “Is this what I wanted to do? Why do I want to do it? If it’s something that I wanted to do, can I get through it?” There’s no explicit way that someone is going to tell you, “This is what the outcome is going to be.” I wanted to get through and make that one restaurant successful. I wouldn’t think that I would be opening more. Those others created their own headache, and then buying this brand and that brand came with its own headaches.
It's almost like a trough of sorrow when you're trying to figure out, “Is this really what I wanted to do, and why do I want to do it?” Share on X
It’s trying to learn why you’re doing things. Me and Chalon talk about this the most, which is to stop looking at the end goal and start to enjoy the journey because that’s all you’re promised. I am learning to stop looking at the end goal. I like to look at the goal, plan, and strategize. Things are going to blow up, so being on the journey and enjoying that process is what I’m learning right now.
I think it’s not so much just looking at the end goal. Of course, that’s there, but not thinking, “I’ll be happy when.” God is a God of balance. There’s always going to be happy and sad with each situation. One of our favorite verses is in Paul when he says, “Whatsoever state I’m in, they’re with to be content.” Understanding what that means is not complacency. It’s finding joy in any situation you’re in and enjoying the journey all along the way.
I wrote a book on gratitude. Scripture tells us to be thankful and grateful in all things. It’s easy to be thankful and grateful for the good things, but it’s sometimes a little harder to find your gratitude in something more of a challenge. The one thing we know, and the name of the show is The Proven Entrepreneur success stories. We know that part of the success journey, failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of the success journey. You cannot succeed without failing. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It means you had an event that you failed. Now we’re moving on. We’re going to do something differently. We learned. You either win or you learn. Learning is a little slower winning. Wife, mother, attorney, and entrepreneur, I’m not sure when you sleep.
Never. You can see these bags in my eyes.
If I were going to get you to share a nugget from the book of wisdom of Chalon, something that you view near and dear to your heart as true wisdom in your life, what would that be?
It’s so broad. True life.
That’s why you got the question.
It’s coming for you next.
You’re going to sit there and think while I’m thinking.
We can go to Richard.
I live by a principle right now, which is that I have two types of balls that I’m juggling. I have glass balls and I have rubber balls. I try to think about which ones are which. I’ve learned that my family, my wife, and my girls are glass balls. My faith is a glass ball. My business sometimes I think it’s a glass ball, but it is a rubber ball. Some of the things that I do, my peers, and my hobbies are rubber balls. As I’m juggling, I can let the rubber balls drop. Those can bounce back. I can catch it again. It may come back dirty or with all the things that I have to brush off, but I cannot let the glass ball drop. When the glass ball drop, it shatters, and that’s going to be the hardest thing to put together.
I learned that because I’ve had situations that I’ve not been sufficiently thinking about that and you realize what’s really important. When we were going through the challenge of the business and that store closed, it proved itself to be a rubber ball. It’s because we reopened the store, brought in new people, and figured it out. When I have people on my team that I feel strongly about that, we talk about it or pray for this person.
When the person comes in, we think they’re the perfect person and then they quit or steal. All of those happened and I realize they’re rubber balls. It’s not that it’s something I’m not trying to juggle. I’m still trying to juggle and balance all that stuff, but I have to know which ones are unbreakable. You cannot drop it because that’s something that will be a lasting impression on my life. That’s what I live by now.
Entrepreneurship: We have things that we need to juggle and balance. You just have to know which ones are unbreakable because you cannot drop them.
 
With permission, I’m sharing that. That’s awesome.
There are so many things. I’m going through a transformation right now, I think. That’s why it was hard for me to answer because there are so many things. I’m a mom of three. They are 6, 4, and 2, about to be 7, 5, and 3 in 2023.
You have a busy house.
I have an equity partner in firm management, then I have this business on the side, which I’m so careful about my reputation. I don’t want it to mess up my law career. I’m always thinking about what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and what I’m saying. It’s a lot. I’m helping Richard with the businesses. Designing the Villa in Jamaica overseas is something I’ve never done before. It’s so much. I’ve realized that I had a capacity beyond my imagination. Everyone has a negative voice in their head telling them what you can’t do and how could you possibly. I’ve broken past that barrier. Now I’m at a capacity that is overwhelming. Now I’m on the other side of that learning the importance of no.
I am exercising my no. Just because I can do it doesn’t mean I should. Because there might be a benefit, does it align with my highest priority of benefits? I’m still learning, but that is what I’m focused on. When you said entrepreneurs always think there’s a next step, you never think you’ve arrived. I’ve had to take a moment to say, “Yes, Chalon, you arrived. You can say no because you don’t want to. No other reason.”
Entrepreneurs always think there's a next step. You never think you've arrived.  Share on X
You don’t have to articulate the reason. If somebody can ask, you can say, “No, thank you,” and be done. Sometimes entrepreneurs have a hard time with that. I love the glass balls and rubber balls, and I love exercising my no. One of my favorite quotes, and I’m a big believer in wise words. I don’t care where they come from. If it’s Aristotle, Socrates, Jefferson, or whoever, but my favorite quote of all time is, “You’re far better, far smarter, and far stronger than you think.” I love that quote and that applies to everybody. Do you know who that is?
No.
That’s Christopher Robin in Winnie The Pooh. He’s by far my favorite philosopher. That’s by far my favorite quote. I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you back and give you about 90 seconds to talk to your twenty-year-old self. Remember how smart you were and how you knew everything. I’ll put you in a time machine. Go back and talk to your twenty-year-old self, share 1 or 2 things in a minute or two that you know now you wish your twenty-year-old self knew then. I’m not going to put you on the spot. I’m going to save who goes first.
Mine is going to be 90 seconds. I think I would tell my twenty-year-old self, “All is well.” I have spent all my childhood up until probably the last two years so full of anxiety about the future. If I had known that no matter how it goes, good or bad, it’s all going to be okay. I would want to send that calmness to that twenty-year-old anxious me. “Am I going to get it to the best law school? Am I going to be the first Black female US Supreme Court justice?” All of these things that I was worried about, nobody can see me do this or say that. I would say, “All is well. It’s all going to be okay.”
I think everybody can chill a little bit. Richard?
I would tell myself, “You’re enough. You continue on the path that you are on and it will be enough.” Growing up, my father left one night. I didn’t see him again until I was 28. I came from a fairly tough neighborhood with real high crime. You have situations where you don’t know things are going to work out. You put pressure on yourself because I was young as a four. My older siblings had a different dad, so I was by myself with my mother and my father later on.
Entrepreneurship: You’re enough, and you continue on the path that you are on, and it will be enough.
 
It feels like I am trying to chase while I run away at the exact same time. I’m trying to chase a future to change my family while I run away from the history of either who my father was or who my community was and all those different things. Understand that you don’t have to be in either the forward or the backward, but you can be within yourself and you are going to be enough. I can try to create the path, but most of the things that happened to me that pivoted my life were because of grace. I didn’t have the ability to influence grace. Grace was given to me by God.
It’s in myself and doing the things that I can do to not worry about what’s going to happen in the future and not worry about what’s happened in the past. It’s looking at the past that has been appropriate for the journey that I’m on because God put me there. Be within myself and do what I can. That’s what I would tell myself because I realize that I always have a goal that I’m shooting towards and I always have something I’m trying to leave behind. That is draining to be in so many different realms at once. It’s easier to be in prison.
Thank you for sharing. Many people in mental health would tell you that anxiety lives in our future and depression in our past. When we live in the present, that’s where we’re healthiest. Chalon, if somebody wants to reach out to you, either about designing or they need a commercial litigator, how do they find you?
For commercial litigation, it’s Husch Blackwell. I’m right there on the website handling all types of business and commercial disputes. For interior design, www.YourDesignRedefined.com and I’m also on Instagram.
Thank you. Richard, how do we reach out to you?
You can get me by email, Richard.Thomas@TPHHG.com. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m always looking for the next culturally critical brand to acquire input in our platform. If you’re interested in transitioning your business, let me know. I’ll be happy to have a conversation with you.
He’ll tell you later that you will be designing it. Thank you both so much for bringing your wisdom, candor, and authenticity to the show. I’m grateful.
Thank you so much for having us.
Thank you.
Thank you. That’s this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur show. See you next time. Bye now.
 
Important Links

Your Design Redefined
The Present House Hospitality Group
The Island Spot
Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke
Husch Blackwell
Instagram – Your Design Redefined
Richard.Thomas@TPHHG.com
LinkedIn – Richard Thomas

 
About Chalon Clark
Practicing commercial litigation. She has received numerous accolades and honors including the Women in Business Award (Dallas Business Journal), Texas 100 Most Influential in the State (Dallas Business Journal), Minority Business Leader Award (Dallas Business Journal), Top Forty Under Forty (D Magazine), Texas Super Lawyer, Top Women Attorneys in Texas, 100 Most Influential African American Leaders in Business (National Diversity Council), and many others.
In addition to her thriving area of practice, Chalon is the founder and owner of Design Redefined — a contemporary interior design business where Chalon redefines customers’ reality into beautiful, inspiring decorated spaces. Just as Chalon delivers closing arguments in the courtroom, she also brings the story of her client’s lives together, demonstrated through the design of their home or business. After only starting the business in 2020, Chalon has already appeared in numerous magazines and was featured on Daybreak (WFAA News). www.yourdesignredefined.com
Chalon and her husband, Richard, also own the Jamaican restaurant chain, The Island Spot, with three locations in Dallas and the Island Spot Villa in Jamaica focused on sharing the Jamaican culture through Rich Food, Reggae, and Rum.
Chalon is also a writer and completed her first book –a memoir and childhood coming-of-age story based on her last summer spent with her grandmother in the tiny town of Coolidge, Texas.
With a busy law practice, loving husband and three beautiful daughters under the age of 6, Chalon Clark is a true “mompreneur” who is representing not only in the community as an attorney, but also as a highly sought after interior designer — on an international level. In her free time–with family roots in the Bahamas and Jamaica–Chalon and her husband enjoy traveling throughout the Caribbean, and on their bucket list is a plan to visit every Caribbean island.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 
 

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Title: E101 | Diversifying Business Ventures: From Bowling Barrels To Doggy Country Clubs With Kyle Noonan
Date: August 15, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e101-diversifying-business-ventures-from-bowling-barrels-to-doggy-country-clubs-with-kyle-noonan/
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Hey there, podcast lovers! This is Don Williams, and I am thrilled to present to you the latest episode of the proven entrepreneur show. Get ready, because today we have a special guest, Kyle Noonan, joining us for an incredible conversation that will leave you inspired and motivated.
Kyle takes us on a journey through his entrepreneurial path, sharing how he and his best friend built their empire from the ground up. From investment banking to opening their first brand, FreeRange, it’s been a wild ride of success and lessons learned.
But it’s not just about the success stories. Kyle dives deep into the importance of work ethic, perseverance, and the power of surrounding yourself with talented individuals. He emphasizes that execution is key, and it’s not always about the idea itself.
As we listen to Kyle’s stories, we gain valuable insights into the world of entrepreneurship. We discover that it’s not just about being the smartest person in the room, but rather creating a team that complements each other’s strengths.
So, what are you waiting for? Tune in now to this enlightening episode and hear firsthand from a true entrepreneur who has navigated the challenges and triumphs of building a successful business. Discover Kyle’s secrets to being a visionary leader and how to position yourself for long-term success.
Don’t miss this opportunity to gain invaluable advice and inspiration from Kyle Noonan. Head over to our website at thefreerangeconcepts.com or find us on social media at Kyle Noonan to join the conversation and learn more about his incredible journey.
Trust me, you do not want to miss out on this captivating episode. Get ready to be motivated, inspired, and equipped with the tools you need to thrive in your own entrepreneurial journey. So, buckle up, hit that play button, and let’s dive deep into the mind of a proven entrepreneur. Enjoy!
 
In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with Kyle Noonan, co-founder of FreeRange Concepts, to discuss his entrepreneurial journey and the secrets to his success. From humble beginnings to building a thriving business empire, Kyle shares valuable insights and practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Topics Discussed:

The story behind FreeRange Concepts and its various brands.
The importance of trust and shared values in business partnerships.
The evolution and success of their dog-friendly concept, Mutz.
The expansion plans and future locations of FreeRange Concepts.
Kyle’s unconventional career path and the Role of work ethic in Entrepreneurship.
The significance of execution and hard work over ideas.
The value of humility, seeking advice, and building a strong team.
Lessons learned from past failures and the importance of patience.
Kyle’s personal journey as a young entrepreneur and the impact of family.

Entities Mentioned:

Don Williams – Host of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.
Kyle Noonan – Co-founder of FreeRange Concepts.
FreeRange Concepts – A hospitality group that includes various restaurant and bar concepts.
Mutz – A dog-friendly concept within FreeRange Concepts.
The General Public – An American gastropub whiskey bar.
Jolio Fine Tex Mex – A Tex-Mex restaurant named after Kyle’s grandfather.
Papado’s Seafood Kitchen – A restaurant where Kyle began his career.
Houston – The city where Kyle had a pivotal conversation about his future.
COVID – The pandemic that affected the operations of FreeRange Concepts.

Don’t miss this inspiring episode filled with valuable insights and practical advice from an experienced entrepreneur. Tune in now!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

 
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Diversifying Business Ventures: From Bowling Barrels To Doggy Country Clubs With Kyle Noonan
In this episode, I have maybe a double-proven entrepreneur. I have Kyle Noonan with FreeRange Concepts. Kyle, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Did you say double because I have put on a few pounds?
No. I said double because of how fast you’ve moved through your entrepreneurial journey.
It has been a whirlwind. You think about a lot coming at you and it’s going to happen fast, and it doesn’t. When you look back on it, this happened pretty fast.
Yours has happened pretty fast. Tell us what you are all doing entrepreneurially. 
My company is called FreeRange Concepts. I started it with my college roommate. We went to SMU together. He and I have been best friends since we were eighteen years old when we got assigned together in the dorms. After college, we went our separate ways professionally. I was an Art major, Painting and Sculpting major. He was a Business major. In our fraternity, he was the president and I was a social chair. We’re left brain and right brain, yin and yang. Professionally, we went our separate ways but always stayed close personally.
We both went into different careers. He went into investment banking, the private equity world, the Wall Street thing. I went into the restaurant business because I found out that being a starving artist was not very much fun. I started waiting tables in college and ended up figuring out that I liked the industry. I ran a company called Pappas Restaurants for about thirteen years. Pappadeaux, Pappasito’s, Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, that company. After about thirteen years in post-college, he and I decided we were going to join forces and start our own company. FreeRange Concepts is a hospitality company. We’ve created several brands within our portfolio and we’ve done well. It’s been crazy. It’s been a wild ride.
I love that, the left brain right brain, separate skills but complementary. That’s a key concept for a lot of successful entrepreneurial companies.
There is no doubt that is a tremendous component of our success, having all of our bases covered. Beyond that, we have the same core values but different skill sets. We trust each other implicitly for the other person to do their job. I stay in my lane. He stays in his lane. If it comes time to make a big decision, if one of us votes no, it’s a no and we’re not even discussing it. There’s a lot of trust there that has been a huge component of our success.
Can’t do it without trust. How many brands are at FreeRange?
We have 5 different brands and 14 restaurants in total. Our first brand and how we got started in the business is Josh, my partner, called me up one day and said, “Do you want to go bowling tonight?” I was like, “Sure. I haven’t been bowling in probably since I was four years old but where do we go?” He was like, “I don’t know where a bowling alley is.” We started looking and realized there were no bowling alleys close.
We thought, “Maybe this is our opportunity to do that thing that we’ve always talked about doing but we didn’t know what.” I knew the hospitality world, but I didn’t know bowling. He didn’t know bowling, but he knew the real estate world. We hired a bowling consultant and they did a study of the Dallas area and found out that it was a perfect market where there was no competition to put up a bowling alley. Our first concept is called Bowl & Barrel, and it’s over by Northpark Mall. We opened that a couple of years ago. We just celebrated our ten-year anniversary.
Congratulations. 
Thank you. We have 3 of those now, 1 in Dallas, 1 in San Antonio, and 1 in Houston. The next concept that we opened was six months later. It’s called MUTTS Canine Cantina®, which is a restaurant bar that overlooks a private membership-based dog park. It’s a country club for dogs. The dogs are the paying members. We have what we call Bark Rangers in the park that pick up after the dogs and make sure the dogs have water, toys, and all that stuff. You get to sit back and drink a glass of wine or a margarita under an oak tree and watch your dog socialize.
That idea came about because we were sitting on a patio and we saw a woman with her little dog. She tied it up to a chair and the dog saw a squirrel and ran off and took the chair with her. We were like, “Dogs are such a part of the family now. Maybe there’s an opportunity to not make a restaurant that allows dogs to be there, but a restaurant that is for dogs.” That’s how that idea came about.
We opened our third concept three months after MUTTS. We’re talking in a nine-month period. We went Bowl & Barrel, MUTTS, and then we opened a concept called The Rustic, which is a restaurant and bar that overlooks a 3000-person outdoor concert venue. All three locations opened to huge success, which was great. The bad thing was we were understaffed and didn’t have the resources or the team built out or anything that we needed to handle the volume. It was a challenging first year but a good problem to have.
Going back to MUTTS, we have three MUTTS open. We’re building Austin, El Paso, Denver, and Scottsdale which will all open this 2023. That will put us up to seven MUTTS locations. The Rustic, we have four. We have Dallas, San Antonio, and two in Houston. We are under construction for Scottsdale, Denver, Orlando, Charlotte, and San Diego. Also, we’re putting a Rustic in Houston Hobby Airport.
Our fourth concept is called The General Public. The idea came about because when we opened our original Bowl & Barrel here in Dallas, there was a crummy bar next to us that was always busy. I got to know the owner of the bar. I was like, “Where’s your business coming from?” He goes, “Honestly, Kyle, it’s coming from you.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’re on a 2 to 3-hour wait every night. People go put their names on the list, come over, have drinks with us, and then go back and bowl.” I was like, “Okay.” Moving forward, instead of feeding our neighbor, we’re going to be our own neighbor.
We created an American gastropub, whiskey-centric bar called The General Public that we now put next door to all of our Bowl & Barrels. We have two of those, San Antonio and Houston. Our last concept, which we opened here in Dallas is called Joe Leo Fine Tex Mex. It’s named after my grandfather, Joe Leo Romero, who was the greatest guy in the world. We wanted to do something that honored him. That’s doing well too.
That’s awesome. It’s so diverse, not in the same lane. I love that. I’m going to take you all the way back to young Kyle, 5 to 18 years old. In the household where you were raised, was there someone in the household who was an entrepreneur and set an entrepreneurial example?
No. My dad was an attorney. I have young parents. My mom was 19 and my dad was 21 when they had me. My dad was going through law school then and my mom was doing odd jobs to support the family. My dad had a good law career so he supported the family. We had a great childhood. I did get to see this arc that my parents went on. We didn’t have money. Humble means. By the time I moved out of the house, my parents had made enough money to be able to afford college for me, which I didn’t think was going to be the case when I was 10 or 12.
I got to see this hard work pay off for my dad. He was a company man, but I got to see what hard work did for a family. A big component of my growing up is seeing the effort put forth, the persistence, and consistency of doing it day in and day out for years when it does. I didn’t get it necessarily an entrepreneurial bug from my parents, but I got a work ethic from my parents.
That’s the thing. When I talk to young entrepreneurs, the first thing I always hear is, “Kyle, I have this great idea for something.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.” It’s 1% idea and 99% work and execution of that idea. We can sit here all day long and think of great ideas. Can you execute the idea? That takes perseverance, dedication, and consistency. That’s the hard part about being an entrepreneur.
After your childhood years, did you go to college for entrepreneurship?
No, I was a Painting and Sculpting major, an Art major. The fact that my parents let me do that was crazy. That’s what I was good at and I liked it. I was always a creative kid. I had a passion for it. It didn’t have much in the way of a career choice afterward. Hence, the restaurant business.
Certainly, you’re using your creative brain in your business. After you graduated from university, did you get a job or you start your first company?
When I was in college, I was waiting tables for the Pappas family at Pappas Seafood Kitchen. In my senior year, they offered me a management position. I was like, “It’s got to be better than waiting tables. I’ll do that.” I was a supervisor during my senior year of college and I stayed on with that company.
Solid restaurant chain. 
No doubt. I eventually worked my way up to Director of Operations for the organization and ran the Pappadeaux, Pappasito’s, and Steakhouse brands until I finally decided to leave.
That was pretty lofty position for a young man. 
I was a hard worker. Not to brag, but I was the youngest GM in the company by far. I remember my parents were angry at me when I was graduating. They said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to be a restaurant manager.” They were like, “You didn’t go to SMU and get a $200,000 education to go be a restaurant manager.” I didn’t listen to them and I did it. I’ll never forget it. It was about eighteen months later that they offered me a GM job at the largest Pappadeaux in Chicago, which is 3 stories, 2 kitchens, 4 bars, this big massive property.
I called my mom and I was like, “Mom, I got offered a job to move to Chicago and I’m going to take it.” I told her how much they were going to be paying me. There was a long pause. She goes, “Kyle, I’m so glad you didn’t listen to me. It took your dad ten years of being a lawyer before he made that money.” It was a great organization. Being there for the time I was there gave me the skillsets that I needed to execute in the industry that we are in. I always had the creative side back behind me.
Here is an interesting story about the reason why I left that company. The company is owned by two brothers, Harris and Chris Pappas. They’re based out of Houston, Texas. I was still in Chicago at the time. They called me one day and said, “You jump on a flight tomorrow, come down, and have dinner with us in Houston.” I said, “Sure.” I flew down and they took me out. I was 30 at the time.
They said, “We want you to know you will always have a position in this organization. We love you and you will have a great job here as long as you want it. However, we know you’re an ambitious young man. This is a family company and your last name isn’t Pappas. You’re never going to own the company. We want to be fair to you and let you know that you’ll always be a well-paid employee, but you will not be more than an employee.”
A fine example of integrity. 
That’s what sparked my desire to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t think in those terms at that point in my life. I was making good money. I had a great job. I worked for a great company. I had a young family that I was providing for. Having that conversation with them put something in me that was like, “I do want to own the company.” They saw it before I saw it in myself, which is interesting. I stayed with the company for maybe another year or two after that. Finally, I left when I was 31.
Diversifying Business Ventures: Having that conversation with them put something in me that made me want to own the company. And they saw it before I saw it in myself.
 
I love that act, that sharing. We’re all in the people business. We may think we’re in the restaurant business, the energy business, or whatever, but we’re in the people business. The more we take care of people, the better our businesses go. Those people are customers, employees, contractors, or whatever. Thinking back on your entrepreneurial journey, can you share a hard lesson, something that happened that was painful, but looking back, it may have a big positive, but at the moment, it was like, “This is going to hurt.” Maybe you hurt really bad. Do you have a lesson like that you can share with us? You don’t have to do them all. You can pick one. 
There’s the song by Garth Brooks, Unanswered Prayers. There have been so many times when we have pushed to have a deal. When we’re trying to open a new project, there are a lot of costs upfront where you’re spending legal fees and architecture fees, and it could add up to $500,000. To spend that money when you’re a young company and a deal falls through at the 1-yard line, ouch.
That happened to us a couple of times early. All three of the deals that I can think of now, looking back, I’m so glad they didn’t happen because they would’ve cost us a lot more in the long run. We were hungry, trying to chase a deal, and we were willing to take maybe something that wasn’t quite a fit and try to make it fit.
One of the pieces of advice that I give to young entrepreneurs is patience is a key part of it. You want to be successful right away and you want these big deals or the sales to start coming in. It doesn’t happen that fast. It is having patience, having a measured approach, being thoughtful about every move you make, but not too thoughtful. There is a point where you get paralysis by analysis and you get stuck. Being thoughtful, moving forward at a steady, healthy pace, and being patient with the journey is such a huge part of it.
Patience is such a key part of being an entrepreneur. You want to be successful right away and you want these big deals or the sales to start coming in, and it really doesn't happen that fast.  Share on X
Counterintuitive to the average entrepreneur in a hurry, “Do it now.” 
It does help internally. My company jokes about my partner and me that I’m the gas and he’s the brakes. He’s always the one that doesn’t want to do anything. I’m the one that wants to do everything. Because of that, we do balance each other out. It helps to have that person who’s the opposite approach that you are.
It’s key in most successful entrepreneurial firms that you have that balance of diverse skills and diverse personalities because we can’t be good at everything. 
I don’t know how singular entrepreneurs do very successfully. That’s amazing to me, somebody that doesn’t have a good partner.
There are those single entrepreneurs who wouldn’t have partners. There are entrepreneurs who are partners who would not go alone. It is different strokes for different folks. If we looked into Kyle’s book of wisdom, what’s one nugget you could share with us?
Not to be redundant, but the idea is not that important. It’s how you execute that idea. It’s not flashy and interesting, but it’s the truth. You’ve got to execute that vision well to be successful. It takes a lot of discipline. It takes hard work. It takes educating yourself. It takes asking for advice from people in the industry or mentors. It takes a lot to execute well.
The idea is not that important. It's how you execute that idea. Share on X
I always think improvement is pretty easy. Ask for help. Learn something new. Go do it. It’s that simple, but many people forget to ask for help. 
Especially entrepreneurs, there’s ego and bravado to that person. I’m a case in point. Your natural instinct is, “I can do it. I can muscle my way through it. I know how to do it.” Realizing that you shouldn’t be the smartest person in the room takes a lot of humility and perspective. Frankly, it is once you start building out your team, getting your aces in their places, and letting them do what they were brought on to do.
Somebody gave me advice once. He was a Canadian guy, probably 65 to 70. He had started and sold multiple businesses, which were worth several billion dollars. I asked him the same question you asked me, “What advice would you give?” He said, “I learned that I never wanted to be the single point of failure in my company. I didn’t want everything funneling through me because I knew that I was going to mess up. If it all funneled through me, then it was going to get a bottleneck and there were going to be mistakes. I wanted to diversify and bring in talented people around and let those talented people do what they were there to do.” I thought that was pretty good advice and something that’s stuck with this.
Diversifying Business Ventures: Diversify and bring in talented people around and let them do what they were there to do.
 
I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to send you back the twenty-year-old Kyle. You get 60 or 90 seconds to tell twenty-year-old Kyle something you wish you knew then that you know now that would have eased or sped you along your path.
Twenty-year-old Kyle was fraternity at that point, drinking and partying way too much. I would probably say, “Get to class a little more. Maybe take a night off going and not to have too much fun.” Remember I was the social chair. I would’ve probably said, “Get your act together a little bit more,” back then. I’ll tell you, one of the things that was probably the greatest part of my early twenty years is I got married young and had kids young. I got married at 22, had my son at 23, and my daughter at 24. Because of that, you grow up real fast when you’re taking care of kids. That got me out of what could have been a troubling future because I’m a social animal. I’d to go meet people, have fun, and be out and about and that got me dialed in quickly.
Nothing like children to change everything. 
I met the kids’ mom when I was twenty. I would go back and say, “Marry that woman. Have babies.”
How would our audience reach out to you?
Social media is best at Kyle Noonan, Instagram, Twitter, all the ones. You can check out our website, FreeRangeConcepts.com, and look at all our concepts and all the things that we have going on. We have lots going on. We are busy. We’ve now had a great team built out. We have around 1,500 employees and the team is in a position now where we have a lot of tenure. When we add somebody new, it’s rare. It’s a lot of internal promotions, which means that the company understands how it should be run. There’s a lot of continuity there, which makes mine and my partner’s job a lot easier.
I was having lunch with a friend, and he was asking how we structured ourselves. My partner and I are in the 3 to 5-year planning phase. We’re working on problems 3 to 5 years from now. The President CEO is 1 to 3 years, the directors are 6 months to 1 year, and then the general managers at the store level are 0 to 6 months. Because we break it up that way, unless a catastrophe happens like COVID, then, all of a sudden, that shrinks. You’re worrying about the next three days. In a perfect world, when things are running smoothly, being able to look longer down the road, you’re not as time-sensitive. There’s not as much pressure on you from the day-to-day. That has made my day-to-day a lot easier now that we’ve built out our company.
Continuity of your culture is so important. It is hard to get your company culture dialed in, but then you want to keep it. 
We have employees that have been with us from day 1 and they’re still with us 10 to 11 years later.
They’ve forgotten things other people will never know at that point. 
That helps a lot.
Congratulations on your success. Thank you so much for joining us. 
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
My pleasure. That’s our episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show with Kyle Noonan. See you next time. Thanks. 
 
Important Links

FreeRange Concepts
Bowl & Barrel
MUTTS Canine Cantina®
The Rustic
The General Public
Joe Leo Fine Tex Mex
Kyle Noonan – Facebook
Instagram – Kyle Noonan
Twitter – Kyle Noonan

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E100 | From Corporate To Quesadillas: The Inspiring Journey Of Kyle And Maggie Gordon
Date: August 8, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e100-from-corporate-to-quesadillas-the-inspiring-journey-of-kyle-and-maggie-gordon/
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Entrepreneurial success is not just about turning passion into profit; it’s about embracing challenges, seizing opportunities, and nurturing both your business and personal partnerships with unwavering determination. Hey there, it’s Don Williams, and get ready to be blown away! Today, we have the dynamic duo behind Dillas Quesadillas, Kyle Gordon and Maggie Gordon, two entrepreneurial powerhouses celebrating their business’s 10th anniversary. Their story starts from the bottom, as Kyle spent seven years honing his skills at Raising Canes, setting the stage for the future. But building a thriving business comes with its fair share of challenges, and we’ll explore the blood, sweat, and tears they poured into making their dreams a reality. The moment Dillas Quesadillas was born is a tale of passion meeting opportunity. Inspired by the fast-casual trend and their love for Chipotle, they seized the moment to create a unique and thriving business. If you’re itching for inspiration, ready to elevate your business game, and eager to learn from seasoned entrepreneurs, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in now and make your entrepreneurial dreams a reality!
 
Topics discussed include:

Childhood Influences and exposure to Entrepreneurship
Starting from the bottom and gaining experience in the restaurant industry
Financial challenges and the importance of proper financial planning
The dynamics of being a couple entrepreneur and maintaining a successful relationship
The power of seeking advice and assistance
Balancing each other’s strengths and maintaining open communication
Taking risks and pursuing one’s passions
Learning from mistakes and staying committed to goals

 
Entities mentioned throughout the episode include:

Dillas Quesadillas: Kyle and Maggie’s successful business
Raising Canes: A company where Kyle gained experience and honed his entrepreneurial skills

 
Join Don Williams and the Gordons as they share valuable insights, personal stories, and wisdom gained from their journey as entrepreneurs. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or someone looking to start their own venture, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to gain inspiration, learn from their experiences, and discover the keys to success in the business world.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

 
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From Corporate To Quesadillas: The Inspiring Journey Of Kyle And Maggie Gordon
I got a power couple with us, Kyle and Maggie Gordon. Kyle, I got to tell you, I love me some quesadillas. 
It’s our specialty.
Welcome to the show. 
Thank you.
Tell me, what is getting your time as an entrepreneur now? What’s your business? 
Our business is Dillas Quesadillas. Right now, it’s all about scale for us. We are growing the business, opening the locations, and going through all the trials and tribulations of getting over the big hump.
All locations here in Dallas? 
We’ve got 4 corporate stores here in Dallas and then we’ve got 3 franchise locations in Louisiana. We’ve got lots more in the pipeline. As Kyle said, there’s a little scoop coming up for us to get growing big. Yes, we’ve got seven total right now.
I want to take you back to your childhoods, all the way to age 5 up through 18. In the household where you were raised, was there an entrepreneur? Did someone set that example? Where did you embark on this craziness all on your own?
Yes, I did have an entrepreneur. My dad started a couple of different companies. He got an Engineering degree out of A&M and went into fire alarm and security with Honeywell, a big company, and then stepped out and did his own with a couple of buddies from college. They grew that pretty rapidly and quickly sold it for a really big exit.
Times were good in the family, and he started a new business and went into oil and gas, which was what his family had done their whole lives. He’s from Houston. My grandfather had his own oil and gas company, so that was the next step for him. Many entrepreneur venues through my family. My mom’s side of the family started a large food service business way back in the day that grew to a national brand. Lots of entrepreneurship in my background.
One of the interesting thing you talked about your dad having an Engineering degree is when you look at billionaires around the world, the largest training group are, in fact, engineers. Kyle, in your childhood, was there an entrepreneur in or around the house? 
Yes. My dad was an entrepreneur. It’s a similar story to Maggie’s dad. He was at Sears Roebuck and ran a department. He was a manager-type guy for them. If you know my dad, his name is Greg, very gregarious guy with lots of energy, a natural salesman type of guy. He just said, “There’s an opportunity for me to do something similar to where Sears is missing the mark here.”
He opened what ended up being Texas Horticultural Resources, which was a plant horticultural brokerage that bought from warehouses and greenhouses and sold to places like Albertson’s and Walmart throughout the Southwest. He did that all the way through high school for me. He got out of that business and started building custom homes. We both worked for our dads, of course, because they’re entrepreneurs. We got to do the kid work for dad’s company in the summer.
The Pendulum was the big training ground for me, though, because I did get to see the goods and the bads. When 2001 happened, his business and the grocery business went real sideways. He had to pivot and get into this home-building thing. He didn’t have a big exit or anything. He was like, “I had my heyday in this business. I need to get out of this and get into something else.” That’s when he went down a different path and direction that took him in a whole new way. He was able to apply what he had learned to that new business and grow that.
Yes. It’s very common in entrepreneurship. People from the outside looking in say, “It’s all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns.” It’s actually not. There’s as much downside as upside, for the most part. After your childhood, what next? Went to university, we backpacked across Europe, we lived on the beach. What’s your story? 
I had the idea for Dillas in college, and so coming out of high school, I went to the University of Texas. Pretty much right away, I identified that I was not going to be a good student. I wasn’t a good student in high school. I was a middling 2.0 type of guy in college.
It sounds like an entrepreneur. 
Most of my time was spent in class, thinking there was a place. Chipotle was just new on the scene. I was like, “I love this idea, this new fast-casual thing that is emerging right now.” That’s where the idea for Dillas came from. I said, “I’m going to do this but with quesadillas.” The ideation process for my business happened in college. I met Maggie there as well. She helped me with the concept. She knew about it almost immediately after we met. I got through, it took me five years, and I stayed as long as I could. I’ll tell you the story out of college after my turn comes back around.
I was actually dancing at the end of high school. I continued dancing in college and went to a very small town college, Kilgore Junior College, for two years. I danced there. I then went to the University of Texas, where I met Kyle. I was there for a couple of years. I went in with a Business major and then I had an advisor that missed the mark on my transfer and told me to take a macro class when I was supposed to take a micro class. When I got there, they were like, “You’re not in the business school anymore.”
I had to divert quickly and went to Liberal Arts for a semester and then I switched over to an Advertising degree. I got out of advertising school and did PR. I ended up with that. I did a business foundations program at Texas, which was a new thing then. It was a little bit of every piece of the business school, so you had to do the 101 and the 102 of every facet of business. The certification was more than a minor sort of thing, but a very well-rounded look at business.
She glazed over the part that she is a straight-A student and I’m not. She didn’t bring up her GPA.
Did you start Dillas right out of college?
Almost. In college, I had the idea. Maggie’s uncle was in the business. He was the president or CEO of a company, Bob Evans, up in Ohio. I brought him the idea and I said, “I want to do this quesadillas-only place.” He’s like, “Great, get a job. You need to see if you got ketchup in your veins. You need to see if you want to do this.” He introduced me and got me an interview for a service manager position at Raising Cane’s. Raising Cane’s, at this time, had 25 restaurants. Now, they’ve got 650. This was back in that time.
He was like, “I’ll get you an interview and you can try to see if you can run a chicken finger business and then we’ll talk about Dillas.” That is what I did. I started getting really focused on the 10,000 hours aspect of what I wanted to do. I said, “On their dime, I’m going to go learn how to be the best restaurant operator I possibly can.” That’s what I spent the first seven years out of college doing. I was going as fast and as high up at Cane’s as I could before I left.
Those were some hard years. We were right out of college, and he was making $12.50 an hour with a university degree, but it was to pursue his passion.
I showed up with a gold tie to this fried chicken finger interview. It was pretty legendary. The district manager came around with grease all over his shirt and he was like, “What are you here for?” I’m like, “I’m here for the management position,” but I got the job. It was good to dress up for the job. I started doing that.
I moved up really fast too. I got lots of opportunities there. I was a manager making $12.50 and then four months later, a general manager and a managing partner a couple of years later. After that managing partner, that was year six. We had moved from Austin up to Dallas at this point because that’s where the Raising Cane’s were. Maggie’s also from here and I’m from Austin.
At that point, it was like, “Are we going to continue down the road of this corporate lifestyle and go open more Raising Cane’s and pursue their growth?” They were going from 75 to 600 in the next 10 years. That would’ve been a hell of a ride too. We’re like, “Let’s try to get a little bit of money together. I had a little earn out from Cane’s. Let’s dump that into Dillas.” We opened literally 100 yards from my Raising Cane’s in an old Jack in the Box. The same parking lot.
My mom’s family was the one that was part of the big company. It was Owen’s Country Sausage and merged with Bob Evans in the ‘80s. My uncle from our side of the family went on to be the president and CEO of Bob Evans.
He stuck around after the merger and moved up to Ohio as part of that thing.
What sound counsel for a young man, telling him, “Get a job and go start where you’re at. Start ugly. You can’t start where you want to start. Just start here.” You did, and good things began to happen. Your talent showed, and they saw it and you were off to the races. A foot in the door. That was very wise counsel. So many times, people from the outside look and say overnight success and you’re like,, “Do you remember when we got married and we were fresh out of college and I was making $12.50 an hour?” That wasn’t quite maybe as overnight as it appears. That’s great. Let me ask you this. You’ve been an entrepreneur for how long now?
Start ugly. You can't start where you want to start. Just start here. Share on X
Since 2012.
Looking back, I’m looking for a hard moment. Something that happened and typically, people are like, “How much time do I have? I got a lot of hard moments.” I’m just looking for one. A hard moment, something that happened is like, “That hurts. I don’t like it. Scares me a little bit, I’m not really sure how this is going to end,” but maybe in retrospect, looking back, it actually was something very positive for you. Do you have a hard moment you can share? 
I’ve got one in mind. One of my most vulnerable moments, and I remember it pretty vividly because I had just joined EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, and this is 2018. It was about four years after we had our first restaurant. We had our first one and then we had our second one, and this is our third one. The moment came one morning when I woke up. I was like, “We don’t have the money to pay this $100,000 bill. how stupid of me.” I started feeling all this guilt and this anxiety and like, “What’s my banker going to say? Where’s my money going to come from? How are we going to get through this moment?” We’re able to figure it out.
Some things didn’t come due just in time. We were able to move some money around and get through this. The lesson that I learned was make sure you’ve got the capital. Be able to write the checks that you say you can write. It was also very important to me to get involved with the details of the financing piece of it.
It’s not just going to come from fairytale and magic. It’s not always going to work out. It’s not always going to be the perfect timing and, “I thought I had this much,” and then, “I missed this, this and this detail.” I’m much more prepared now going into the investment piece of a new deal, where I’m like, “Contingency number 1, contingency number 2, contingency number 3.”
If something happens, if something doesn’t deliver on time, do we have the financial well-being to back this up to find another resource to find a different investor or anything else? That was a really big early CEO-level lesson that I got smacked in the face with that woke me up. I was like, “This is real. These are all real players.” I’m just this 34-year-old playing in their game and I need to get serious and grow up really fast. That was my hard story.
That’s a pretty good hard moment and a really good lesson. I’ve been an entrepreneur many years now, and what doesn’t kill you makes you better make stronger, even though it can be a little painful at the time.
It’s funny because that was also my hard moment, but I have a different learning out of it. I sit on the other side. I am the details finance person. I’m looking at every penny and being like, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” It was scary when I’m like, “Kyle, we don’t have the money and we’re not going to be able to pay these bills.” It was a lot of anxiety. A lot of late-night talks and crazy times.
We did make it work, but my takeaway is sometimes I have to trust in his vision a little bit more. I can be the worry wart and the overthinking everything. We still play this out now. We’ve got a new location we’re talking about right now and now he gets a little bit analytical about and I’m like, “Remember it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be there.” We have to balance each other and wear both sides of the hat a little bit sometimes, but it’s a good balance.
We are a good yin and yang. We didn’t introduce that necessarily, but I’m very visionary and she’s very integrator. People all the time are like, “How the hell do you all do this?” We’re together all the time and then you drive in the same car and go home, and then you’re together all the time there too. I’m like, “Yes. It’s just two different things.” At work, she’s over here and I’m over here doing all these verticals and she’s doing all these and when we do meet in the middle, it’s collaborative. We’re focused on the same thing that we want to accomplish. It works because we are opposites in the business world.
There are so many stories of things that we screwed up and did wrong. We still do wrong. We incorporated wrong, which was probably a $20,000 accounting mistake, and had to unwind the S-corp and the trying to save money. It ends up costing you a quadruple. You’re like, “What was I thinking? Why didn’t I get an accountant buddy to at least take a look at this?” Those are the lessons that you learn along the way that are hard mistakes. They make you better.
Many entrepreneurs learn that lesson the hardest of just ask for help. People know.
Dillas Quesadillas: Many entrepreneurs learn that lesson the hardest of just asking for help.
 
There are a lot of experts out there.
Typically it’s a telephone call or two. Now that you give me the answer, now I know. 
Yes. Blood pressure goes down 30 points, and you’re like, “That was a great conversation.”
Let me ask you this. You met in college and married right after college. You started the business together. You work in the business together. You go home in the same car and handle family. You got to realize most people can’t actually get that done. It’s just too much. Have you got a secret there you would share for our couple entrepreneurs, our other power couples because it isn’t easy? 
To Kyle’s point of the yin and yang, it is finding your differences in your different strengths and letting them own that. We try hard not to keep it separate because we collaborate a lot, and we’re both involved in all the aspects of the business, but we recognize we’re each other’s superpowers and let them run with that. We know when the other person needs input or help, they’ll ask for it. It’s watching your boundaries and not overstepping into what’s not your zone.
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There’s a lot of history there too. We’ve been working together through courtship, kids, marriage, and then, with the business starting. What Maggie’s not layering in there is that she wasn’t in the business fully. I was in the business fully from day one, being the general manager, boots on the ground, flipping quesadillas.
She was supporting the business by having a job and healthcare and all those things that were important. When we finally were able to get her, this is probably four years into it, out into a full-time job at Dillas, when we could afford to bring her over as an integrator and as that full-time accounting and HR support and all that, then we started.
Since then, we have been in the same office together and learning how that relationship is going to work. It’s not like that. It was a learned thing and respecting that and having those discussions and learning. I will tell you, a big light switch went off when I went to the forum for the first time. I had a group of other entrepreneurs. I swear Maggie might remember this.
I came home and I was like, “You need a forum.” It was like a light bulb went off for me. She participates in her own forum as well and it was having those outside help, I would say. You have somebody else to go talk to about an internal business problem, not just a life problem. It has made all the difference in the world in terms of how we can do it.
Communication is the other thing. We take that very seriously. Before we worked together, we did weekly meetings for our relationship and sat down. Not in a corporate way, but a check-in every week. “How were you this week? Was there anything I could have done? Was there anything I did that upset you?” Open, honest communication, and really listening to the other person and how you affect each other.
A lot of great words in their communication, listening, boundaries, and learning. Unfortunately, a business is like a baby. It doesn’t come with instructions. You got to learn the hard way, for the most part. If I had access to the book of Gordon wisdom, what’s a golden nugget you’d share with us?
A business like a baby. It doesn't come with instructions. You have to learn the hard way. Share on X
I would say go for it. I know that not everybody’s wired this way. It always surprises me. I’m like, “Why don’t you do this yourself?” It’s not how people work. I would encourage, from my book of wisdom, that people go for it and live life on their terms. I feel too many people are just like, “This is how it’s supposed to be or how I’ve been taught it is.”
They carry on this existence rather than taking some risks and going for it and pursuing what they want to do. That passion doesn’t have to be go out on your own and sell ice cream bars. I don’t know. It could be go out and sell instead of pounding keys in an accounting department, locked in some dungeons somewhere, and you’re miserable. I’m always surprised how many people are miserable. I would say go for it.
My sentiment is, don’t be afraid to do the work to find out what it is that you love that drives you. A lot of people don’t take the time to figure out maybe what they love to do or what their superpower is. Once you can harness what you bring the most value to, then you can find a spot to plug that into. It may not be entrepreneurism. It may be finding the key role at the right company that has a purpose that powers your vision of what you are driven towards. You got to do the work to figure out what that is. A lot of people just don’t put that effort in, so figure it out.
Dillas Quesadillas: Don’t be afraid to do the work to find out what it is that you love that drives you.
 
Discipline is huge. If you’re not disciplined, it’s going to be difficult for you to be able to achieve any level of success in any different medium. That would be another one. Stay disciplined.
The toughest question I’m going to ask you. I’ll put you in a time machine and take you back to your twenty-year-old self. You get about 60 seconds to tell your twenty-year-old self something you wish you knew then that you know now that would’ve made things easier, faster, smarter. 
If I could talk to my twenty-year-old self, I would say, “Be confident in the vision and raise more money.”
That makes it way easier.
I’m loving that. Good counsel. How about you, Maggie? 
Trust in the process. I will overanalyze things a little bit. If I knew back then to lean into what we were trying to achieve together earlier, and I know I had important roles in getting a job at certain times, but if I’d even jumped in a little bit more than I did, it could have accelerated some things if I just dove in earlier and trusted that this was going to be. I knew it was going to be something big the whole time, but I wasn’t anticipating being as much of a part of it. If I’d gotten it earlier, it would’ve been beneficial.
Yes. Both those things allude toward the fact that we’re years into a business that could have been we’re 5 or 6 years into. We spend a lot of time spinning our wheels in those first years and making those dumb mistakes and waiting too long. We were not seeking the counsel that we needed. It was like, “We’re 10 years old and we should have been here 2 or 3 years ago if we knew a couple of those little nuggets and had that extra counsel or that little bit of extra capital or the person that we added last year that we could have added 2 years ago, which is a huge difference.”
Lean into it.
That’s great sharing, but also keeping in mind, ten years in the restaurant industry is not for the faint of heart. I have so enjoyed having the power couple of the Gordons on the show. Thank you both very much. I’m grateful.
Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Thank you for your time.
That’s the episode. See you next time. Thanks. 
 
Important Links

Dillas Quesadillas

 
About Kyle And Maggie Gordon
Kyle Gordon – is a dedicated husband, father, and restaurateur. He was born and raised in Austin Texas where he then attended school at the University of Texas. After school, he spent many years as a leader in the restaurant industry. Then, in 2013 he started his own restaurant concept, Dillas Quesadillas. Dillas now has 7 locations, with 10 more under contract, over 250 Team Members throughout North Texas and Louisiana and has sales trending towards 15 million dollars. In 2020 he was honored by Dallas Business Journal as a 40 under 40 recipient and by the National Restaurant News as one of the Most Influential Restaurant Executives. He’s a passionate hospitality guy with ketchup in his veins that has the vision to see Dillas worldwide. He and his wife and business partner, Maggie, have two children, Parker (13) and Grace(11), who you’ll find him spending time with when he’s not flippin’ quesadillas!
I met my husband and business partner, Kyle Gordon, at The University of Texas at Austin where I graduated with a PR degree. He had the idea for Dillas while we were in school, but we didn’t have the resources to take the leap right out of college, so we hit the real world running. I went right into Advertising while Kyle started working in the restaurant industry for a fast-growing brand. Fast forward 7 years, 2 houses and 2 kids later – Kyle was ready to start off on his own. He really spearheaded the restaurant and I helped along the way with recipes and design (I really didn’t know anything about restaurants!). Shortly after opening, I recognized he needed some help, and never looked back. We have been running the business as a Team ever since. We are 10 years in, have 4 corporate locations, 3 franchise locations and 4 more on the way. It was a slow start, we learned a lot, thrived during COVID and are now prepped for exponential growth.
 
 
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Title: E99 | Breaking The Mold: Building A Successful Business Law Firm And Health Advocacy Company With Bill Richmond
Date: August 1, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e99-breaking-the-mold-building-a-successful-business-law-firm-and-health-advocacy-company-with-bill-richmond/
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Hey there, fellow listeners! Don Williams here, and boy do I have a treat for you today. In this episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show, I have the pleasure of hosting Dallas attorney and serial entrepreneur, Bill Richmond. Bill brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table, and he’s here to share his fascinating journey with us.
Starting off as a small business lawyer, Bill and his buddies decided to break away from the traditional big law firm model. They formed their own firm, Platt Cheema Richmond, which has now grown to 28 lawyers spread across two offices in Dallas and Houston. They cover everything from business law to commercial real estate, catering to the needs of entrepreneurs like us.
But that’s not all. Last year, Bill embarked on a whole new venture with the creation of CareGuide Advocates. This incredible company is revolutionizing the healthcare system by providing health transparency and advocacy services. They help individuals, as well as companies and health plans, find affordable and fair care options, even when dealing with surprise bills or outrageous hospital charges.
Throughout the episode, Bill shares insights into his entrepreneurial journey, the importance of saying no to problematic people and setting boundaries, and continuous learning as a key to success. He also touches upon the power of intention, imagination, and the freedom to be extraordinary in chasing our dreams.
Now, I know you’re eager to learn more, so don’t waste another second. Tune in now to gain valuable wisdom and discover how Bill’s firms, Platt Cheema Richmond PLLC and CareGuide Advocates, are making a significant impact in their respective industries. Visit cgasaves.com and @pcrfirm.com to learn more about these incredible ventures. Trust me, this episode is pure gold, so go ahead and hit that play button!
Thanks for joining me on this incredible entrepreneurial journey. Stay inspired, my friends!
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Watch the episode here

 
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Breaking The Mold: Building A Successful Business Law Firm And Health Advocacy Company With Bill Richmond
In this episode, I have a real treat for you. I have Dallas attorney and serial entrepreneur, Bill Richmond. Bill, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I am glad you’re here. You’re an attorney but you have another business that’s capturing most of your time and attention. Tell us a little bit about that business, the name of that business, and what you do.
I left a big law firm a couple of years ago to start a business law firm with some buddies of mine. We’d all gone to school and gone to our big firms and decided we were unhappy with the model of how big law was working. We loved the clients and the work but not particularly how it was structured. We started very small and have grown it. I served as managing partner for a while and have handed that off to our M&A attorney, Robert Daniel.
Platt Cheema Richmond is the name of the firm. We have grown to about 28 lawyers with 2 offices in Dallas and Houston, full service. We do all the business things, employment, private equity, and commercial real estate. A lot of my entrepreneurial journey was through that. I had been an employee before in W-2, jumped right into the other side, and made that happen for a number of years.
In 2022, through an acquisition/merger, have started a company called CareGuide Advocates. CareGuide does health transparency and advocacy for companies and health plans. It is ultimately helping people to find affordable care in their area locally. We have a lot of proprietary databases, tools, and processes so that people can find care on the front end that’s affordable.
Probably our biggest benefit in a place where we help people the most is when they’re getting surprise bills, out-of-network bills, or outrageously overpriced hospital bills and how to leverage financial assistance programs, error analysis, and that type of thing to save that healthcare dollar. It is both for individuals but also employers in health plans.
I’ve been on the insurance side for several years and brokered 44 states. Transparency and advocacy are two areas that are desperately needed in healthcare in America.
It’s unfortunate. It’s interesting. There’s a thread between the two businesses that I’m in. If people were a little bit nicer to each other, you probably wouldn’t need lawyers. If the healthcare system was a little less broken, you wouldn’t need CareGuide Advocates. I seem to have a pension for finding a place where problems exist and offering a solution. I love it. It’s what drives me every day. I love when our advocacy team is able to save someone $1,000 or $150,000 on bills that would be devastating to them. It is exciting to be able to help.
Is it that an individual reaches out and contracts with you or is this a voluntary benefit through their employee plan?
It’s mostly through employers. We’re embedded in health plans as well. There will be folks who are bundling plans together who will offer our product and services. Sometimes, we’re on the backend. We have existing advocacy groups who need that extra muscle. They will contract with us to help them on the backend. It is exciting when you have a group that does what you do but they need the help and need to up their game so they come and bring it to us, which is nice.
We have a couple of partners who sell on the individual side. You can get it individually through them. Mainly, we’re looking at big self-insured groups in health plans and even TPAs who realize that the future of being a TPA is not just processing. It’s, “How can I help deliver new products and savings for my members and help retain those employer members?”
Business Law Firm: The future of being a TPA is not just processing; it’s how we can help deliver new products and savings for members and help retain those employer members.
 
It is a shocking concept. It’s like, “How can I deliver more value to my client?” I love that. I want to take you back to young Bill so 5 to 18. In the household where you were raised, however that looked, was there an entrepreneur? Was there someone who set an entrepreneurial example for you?
Yes, both indirectly inside the house and the house adjacent. I’ll start in the house. My mom is from a small island in Hong Kong where she went to an all-girls boarding school and got a scholarship to go to college in Chicago to play piano. There are aspects of her working life that are also entrepreneurial. That story itself has always been very resonant. Anytime something’s hard, I’m like, “I speak the language here. I have family nearby. She didn’t have any of that.”
She met my dad in Chicago after college. He had moved from St. Louis to Chicago. That’s where they met. She had her piano-teaching business for a long time and had done that for a while. That was part of the entrepreneurial story, including a period when she had fired all of her students for not practicing. I use that example all the time. I’m like, “My family will do it. I will fire all of you if you don’t listen to me.”
My dad has been in sales for a long time. He had been in the dental industry. His entrepreneurial is much more focused on the sales side. He has helped grow businesses and departments and has interacted with dental practices. We spent a lot of time growing up going to meet these dental practices, which are a lot of 1 man or 1 woman owns a shop. Maybe they have 1 or 2 locations. I felt like that house adjacent was the entrepreneurs I got to meet through his business as well.
My grandfather had started a dental manufacturing business. A backdrop of my dad’s side was the entrepreneurial nature of that. He had bought a company that my grandfather had when he was younger in his twenties and had grown it to become publicly traded. It came back private and eventually was sold again. That was always something very interesting. I was seeing the positives of that entrepreneurial journey for him and his family and the negatives.
It’s not all positive?
Yeah, what a shock. Nobody told me when I signed my entrepreneur contract that there would be some downsides.
That sounds like a great example. I admire your mom’s courage. We spent 30 days in China a couple of years ago. It’s radically different from the US and then even more so. After your childhood years, you went straight into university.
Right after high school, I went to college at the University of Missouri. I did not get the most out of the educational part but I did in the extracurricular. I worked in the firearms industry for three years. I almost didn’t go to law school. I stayed and worked in that business. I got to work directly with the owner of the business, the president. I worked on gunsmithing books. I learned to be a competitive shooter. I helped work on a show on the Outdoor Channel and got to see this group of entrepreneurs. It was not just the owner and his spouse who had founded the company but the C-Suite and how they interacted. I still draw on those lessons.
I then came to Dallas to go to SMU for law school. I did end up deciding to make that leap. One of the executives pulled me aside and said, “You can leave Central Missouri and come back but if you don’t leave now, you are never leaving. Go do this thing. If you don’t like it, you can always come back.” I got to Dallas and was like, “I’m good.”
That’s dissimilar to my story. I’m from Wichita, Kansas originally. I love Wichita, Kansas. I am glad I left. Many people didn’t. I’m sure they enjoy it. After law school, you went to work for a big firm.
I worked for a big international litigation firm in the Dallas office, which was great. I had a smaller office here so I got a lot more interaction. Eventually, I got recruited to join a boutique litigation firm. They had about 30 attorneys. I then left about 6 and a half or 7 years in to start my firm.
You partnered with a couple of other attorneys to start with.
That’s correct. It’s with two of my buddies from law school who had both been to big firms. In Platt Cheema Richmond, all of us had gone to law school together. Platt, his name is Judge, which is a great name for a lawyer. He’s also 6’7” so that’s also great. Judge had been a commercial real estate attorney and had left. He was like, “I’m ready to go back out on my own.” He had been in a big firm. He had gone to Romit, who is the Cheema and wanted to go get his business. Romit was like, “I’m leaving too.” They said, “We do commercial real estate law. We’re going to probably need a litigator,” so they called me. We had been friends for a long time and had done business together. That’s where we jumped off.
You were the managing partner for a while and have exited the org chart.
I am still a partner in the firm. I am still directing, bringing in business, and helping to manage some files. I focused a lot on growing the footprint of the firm, our junior partners, senior associates, and mid-level associates. I am getting them more reps and experience and building their books of business. That’s more of what my focus is. From an EOS standpoint, we implemented EOS when I was in my second year being managing partner. I am in the owner’s box so I am no longer on the leadership team, which has been great and an evolution. It’s awesome.
Thinking back on your career, I want you to think about a hard lesson. It’s something that when it did happen, you were like, “That hurt,” but maybe with some perspective and time passing, it turned out that it was positive. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
Every hard lesson in my mind is you still got the lesson part. It may have been hard. The first thing that came to mind when you asked that question was my first termination at the firm. Judge, my law partner, is a fantastic entrepreneur on his own. I’m still trying to learn as much as what he has forgotten as an entrepreneur. He had given me a lot of good advice about how to approach this termination because he had done more in some other businesses that he had been a part of. It’s the nature of his practice.
I can vividly remember it going south. The person didn’t understand, which meant there was a failure on my part to let them know ahead of time. It should never be a surprise, whether it’s a review or a termination, that kind of thing. I was not as prepared as I should have been. We didn’t set it up the right way. In the conversation, it was nails on a chalkboard.
I was engaging too much on the why. This is not a time for rational thinking. Most times, when people are being terminated, even if they are a very rational person, they are realizing that their adrenaline’s going and their shame factor is up. It’s all of these different EQ things that I would have realized. I, too, was in this heightened state of being sad and disappointed in myself and the person I was having to terminate. I draw on that every time I have to have a review or a conversation.
Positive or negative, it’s my obligation as the steward of this ship to be able to do it the right way. That was several years ago and I will always remember it. I got good candid feedback from Judge who was like, “You know how that didn’t go the way it should be.” I was like, “I know how bad that was. Let’s talk about how I could have done it better.” That sticks with me.
Maybe the only other one that immediately comes to mind is following my gut when it comes to bad clients. I mean in both businesses but also, we regularly have to, on the litigation side, help clients who have worked with someone and gotten into bed in one way or the fashion, whether it was a vendor or an investor. It’s not good. We can give them advice like, “If it smells bad on the honeymoon, it probably isn’t going to get better when you get to the rollercoaster of the real relationship itself even on the business front.”
Business Law Firm: If it smells bad on the honeymoon, it probably isn’t going to get better when you get to the rollercoaster of the real relationship itself.
 
It is recognizing that that’s important for us too when we’re selecting anyone that we’re working with across the board. A great entrepreneur friend of mine, Sam Melamed, always says, “Life’s too short to work with jerks.” There are various ways. Don’t work with craps. Choose your negative word there. There’s a full gamut of those kinds of people in the world as we all know. I have had a couple of instances where it wasn’t the case.
Sometimes, the best answer is, “I’ll pass.” It’s scary to say no. It’s hard. It’s counterintuitive to the entrepreneur who wants to say yes and certainly wants to onboard all the businesses that they can. We’re all in the people business regardless of the product, service, or experience we bring to the world. We have employees and their people. We have customers and their people. We have to remember the basics that this is a people business.
It is also being able to honestly know the boundaries of your capabilities and say, “You have high standards. I have high standards. I can’t meet the standard that you want but let me get you somewhere else.” That’s the most professional entrepreneurial way you can pull the rip court on something and not have anyone be embarrassed.
If you got to tell someone no, they’re going to want to know why. Someone had given me that advice and said, “Make it about meeting their standards.” It’s harder for them to go, “I’ll lower my standards to work with you.” You’re saying, “You have high standards. You deserve to have those. Let me get you to someone who can meet those standards. It’s not me.”
If we knew everything you know and there is a nugget of wisdom or, in your case, a bucket full of nuggets, would you share one nugget of entrepreneurial wisdom with us?
A nugget that was given to me that I’m happy to pass on here and then I revisit, polish, and stare at all the time is that the drive for learning is critical in two aspects. If you’re resting, you’re losing in the sense of there are a million other entrepreneurs in your business trying to do more. At the same time, it doesn’t always have to be you that’s doing it. How do you achieve the balance of learning not only your craft but learning how to pass that craft within your organization, whether it’s delegation, outsourcing, saying no, or whatever that may be?
In my mind, when you say no, you’re deferring it to the future. You’re not saying no forever. You’re saying, “No, I’m not going to do this thing right now until it’s the right time for me, my business, and my team.” Constantly learning and having an open mindset is what enables so many great things, whether it is following 10 or 20 good newsletters or people on Twitter who are entrepreneurs or taking a moment to listen to the customer and go, “They keep complaining about this. Maybe they’re not idiots. Maybe they are but maybe they’re not. Maybe there’s something there. Regardless, they’re unhappy. How can I address this issue?” It is learning from your frontline workers about what’s happening on the ground.
I’m reminded of a story of Intel when they were getting the pants beat off of them on their chips. Someone on the frontline in a small market was like, “These guys are coming for our lunch. We need to do something different.” It’s that story of the entire organization pivoting over a 6 to 8-month period to regain market share all because a frontline manager said something, which was step 1, and then step 2, the guys at the top didn’t have the ego to block them from listening. They were able to look past that and do it. That takes a learning mindset. If you’re learning all the time, you’re going to better set yourself up to move forward.
If you're learning all the time, you're going to better set yourself up to move forward. Share on X
There’s always a next step no matter where you’re at. You have to learn sometimes how to take that next step and which step to take. If I put you in a time machine, took you back to eighteen-year-old Bill, and you get to spend 1 minute or 2 and share something you wish you knew then that you know now that would’ve sped you along your journey, what would that be? 
I would’ve said, “You won’t get to your destination if you haven’t picked it. Spend time figuring out the destination.” I felt like my college years were a lot of combinations of unproductive wandering. Maybe unproductive is not the right word but unguided wandering. There’s wandering, like being open to new experiences, seeing where things are going to go but then there’s wandering that the chances of something great coming out of it are very low. I would say between that and determining the line between what’s expected of me and what is possible.
The thing that I see that holds back so many great people is insecurity or what they think is expected of them. They don’t even necessarily know it all the time. They’re like, “This is what this kind of person does. This is what people from my family do. This is what people from this town do. We don’t do X, Y, and Z.” Generally, what that X, Y, and Z thing isn’t like, “We don’t murder people.” Nobody was supposed to be murdering people but they have set that self-limiter on themselves because they didn’t have the imagination to do it.
I suffer from that all the time where Imposter syndrome is one of those types of things, which every entrepreneur has at some point, if not daily. The idea of knowing that I should spend time introspecting on the kind of life I wanted to live would’ve helped me to make a few more different decisions about where I was spending my time and who I was spending my time with. I probably still would’ve done some stupid things, which is pretty normal at that age.
It’s part of being young.
It’s still something now. When I think about where I want to go as a father, an entrepreneur, or as a person, what are the things I’m trying to do? Sometimes, I look up and go, “I don’t think this is getting me where I want to go. I should probably re-evaluate where it is I’m trying to go and then use that to then measure whether I am taking the steps to get in that direction.”
It is the power of intention, knowing what you want, what you’re shooting for, and then overcoming the chains of your comfort zone. Everybody loves their comfort zone. It’s comfortable in there. Why wouldn’t you love your comfort zone? It’s comfortable. The good stuff is outside. What we know about comfort zone physics is every time I step out of my comfort zone, my comfort zone expands. Many entrepreneurs are racing out of their comfort zone every day because that’s where the good stuff is. 
I was talking to some colleagues. I said, “Your fear of the fringe is what keeps you from the frontier.” By definition, the frontier is the fringe. The other side of that coin is a phrase that I’ve heard a couple of times that is important. By definition, being extraordinary is not ordinary but you have to be different. You have to think and do differently if you want to be something beyond that normal. In some cases, ordinary makes sense in a season, a life, or a certain set of decisions. Few people wake up and say, “I want to be ordinary,” or look back at life and go, “What I missed out on was being ordinary,” in the dull sense of the word.
It couldn’t hurt me any more than to say, “Don, you’re average.” It’s adding to the agony.
It’s a good thing you’re not. That’s why you’re doing great things. That’s the point. It is chasing that and knowing and saying it is possible, that power of intention. All those things Venn diagram overlap with each other. It is the intention and freedom to be different and extraordinary. Set an intention that is outside of the norm of where you are and where you’ve been or the imagination of your peer group, your family, or whatever it may be. You can go, “It’s all possible.” That imagination of what’s possible is what drives every innovation. By definition, it cannot be something that was normal. It had to have been something that was different if it was going to be new, better, and improved.
That imagination of what's possible is what drives every innovation. Share on X
How would the audience reach out and find out about CareGuide Advocates?
Our website is CGASaves.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn. Look up CareGuide Advocates. We got videos, a member journey, and a few different things that you can learn about. The law firm is PCRFirm.com. That’s where you can see our probably 12 or 13 different practice areas. Both of them are out there on the web and doing fun things.
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.
Thank you for having me.
That’s the episode of the show. I’ll see you next time.
 
Important Links

Bill Richmond
Platt Cheema Richmond
CareGuide Advocates – LinkedIn

 
About Bill Richmond
From St. Louis, Mizzou for undergrad, SMU Lawschool. Practiced in “BigLaw” doing business litigation before co-founding Platt Cheema Richmond PLLC (www.pcrfirm.com) in 2015. In nearly 8 years, served as Managing Partner and head of litigation representing entrepeneurs and companies in new media, healthcare, and commercial real estate. Firm now has 12 practice areas including private equity, tax, IP litigation, employment law, M&A, and commercial real estate across nearly 30 attorneys, with offices in Dallas and Houston. Handed off Managing Partner role to our M&A partner Robert Daniel in early 2022.
In 2022, merged a healthcare price transparency company with a patient advocacy business to form CareGuide Advocates (www.cgasaves.com). CGA focuses on helping self-insured employers, health plans, and TPAs manage health care claims through world class cost containment and proprietary health pricing tools. Both before individuals need care and after they’ve incurred surprise bills or outrageously overpriced hospital invoices, CGA deploys error analysis, bill negotiation, and financial assistance to bring down the costs both for the individual and the employer and their health plan. As co-founder and CEO, I help manage our various departments including sales and operations, and we currently have 16 employees across three states.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 
 

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Title: E98 | Ann & Sunny Sheu On Nurturing Mpowered Families: A Conversation On Entrepreneurship & Marriage
Date: July 25, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e98-ann-and-sunny-sheu-on-nurturing-mpowered-families-a-conversation-on-entrepreneurship-and-marriage/
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Content:
 
We are about to take an incredible journey into entrepreneurship and the dynamics of a family business with our wonderful guests, Ann and Sunny Sheu, the founders of Mpowered Families. We dig deep into their childhood experiences and learn about the examples that shaped them; you’ll discover how a humble gas station in Louisiana and a toy business turned furniture enterprise sowed the seeds of the successful serial entrepreneurs we have today. The Sheus don’t shy away from discussing the industry’s inherent challenges, emphasizing the importance of life-work balance and sharing how entrepreneurs can sometimes get lost in the all-consuming nature of their businesses. This candid conversation provides insight into how we treat people, reminding us to pay attention to and care about the people around us. Discover how we can recalibrate our family relationships using business strategies and learn about the importance of alignment over achieving perfect scores. You wouldn’t want to miss this episode because this delivers a captivating exploration of life, business, and family. You never know; this episode might stoke the embers of your entrepreneurial journey!
 
Podcast Show Notes:
In this lively exchange, Don Williams invites Ann and Sunny Sheu, serial entrepreneurs and founders of Mpowered Families, to share their entrepreneurial journeys and how they maintain balance in the realm of business and personal life. From tales of their childhood spent in family-owned ventures to their current passion project, Mpowered Families, this interview dives deep into the life of the entrepreneurial couple. Gain insights into their childhood experiences that shaped them into the business minds they are today, discover EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and how it made a significant impact on their business and relationships, and learn about the importance of prioritizing personal growth in pursuit of success in life and work. If you’re an entrepreneur or aspiring to be one, this episode is a goldmine of wisdom and inspiration. Don’t miss out!
 
Topics Discussed:

Childhood experiences as the foundation for an entrepreneurial mindset
Importance of balancing family, business, and personal life
Introduction to Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)
The transition from different business ventures to founding Empowered Families
The role of personal growth and self-awareness in an entrepreneurial journey

 
Entities Mentioned:

Don Williams
Ann Sheu
Sunny Sheu
Mpowered Families
Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).

 
You can find Mpowered Families in the following:
Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube
—
Watch the episode here

 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Episode98.mp3
Ann & Sunny Sheu On Nurturing Mpowered Families: A Conversation On Entrepreneurship & Marriage
I have a real treat for you. I have good friends, Ann and Sunny Sheu. Welcome to the show.
Don, how are you?
I’m wonderful. I’m so glad to have you here.
Thank you for having us.
Let’s start at the beginning. I’m going to take you all the way back to childhood to five-year–old Ann and five-year-old Sunny. It’s a ways back. In your house, however that worked, was there an entrepreneur or somebody who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young girl?
My parents owned a gas station. Growing up, that’s where we spent our weekends and afternoons after school. I remember that my mom would go to the gas station and open it up early, and my dad would get me ready for school and bring me to the gas station so that my mom could do my hair in the morning before he dropped me off at school.
They don’t have the gas station anymore. We’re in your lovely offices here in North Dallas. Was that here in Dallas?
That was in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Sunny, you’re up. Young Sunny at 5 to 18 years old in your household, was there an entrepreneur as an example?
That was probably around the time my parents started our business. That was a result of a failed venture in a toy wholesale business. They’re trying to sell off some remaining inventory. We opened a little toy shop inside a bazaar. They have had several failed ventures by the time I was five. I saw them grind through it my whole life.
You guys are serial entrepreneurs, and we will get into that. What we know is that those failings aren’t the opposite of success but are stepping stones toward success. That’s amazing. Ann, I know you have multiple businesses. What business gets most of your time and effort?
It’s Mpowered Families. It’s our passion project. It’s where we think we’re going to be able to make an incredible impact in this world. We are on this journey to create healthy and strong families because we know that when you have a healthy and strong family, that is the building block of a strong community. We believe on this journey to create these healthy and strong families, we’re going to be able to impact communities and change the world.
We should spend most of our time talking about Mpowered Families because I know that is your passion. I’m excited for you. It took me a long time to find my passion, identify it, and then put all my effort there. That’s where the best returns are, not just financially but holistically. Sunny, what’s a business, other than Mpowered, that gets some of your time and effort now?
I still own the furniture business. That’s self-managing. I have a great team over there. I spend the bulk of my time in commercial real estate, so retail, some multifamily development, and stuff like that. It’s fun stuff.
You are busy. Ann, I want to touch on the other one.
We believe families are the building blocks or the base of creating a strong community. We take a holistic approach to building your ideal life. We believe that you have to be incredible at family life and focused on your professional life building strong businesses. When you get the business side and family side right, together, it’s magic. If you can do both of those in your life, you’re on track to designing, building, and living your ideal life.
Families are the building block, foundation, and base of creating a strong community. Share on X
It makes no sense to reach the pinnacle of success professionally, lose your family along the way, and many times lose yourself, your business, your family, and your personal. If I’m empty, I can’t pour into anything else for sure.
We see it happen so often because business screams the loudest. When things are not going right in business, it’s easy to direct your attention there. As entrepreneurs, it’s easy to pour everything you have into your business and think that your family will always be there, “It’s okay. I can always come back to it later.” What happens is it’s hard for family life to be great when it keeps getting put on the back burner. That’s why it was so important for us to be doing this work, put this work out there, and help entrepreneurs do it differently.
Families are made up of people. As much as we like to think we’re all 6’ tall, invincible, and bulletproof, people are pretty fragile. We have to pay attention to others if we want to get done what we want to do. Both had entrepreneur examples. One, the business is still going and professionally managed. Absentee ownership is the best. Tell me, after your childhood, you went to university, backpacked across Africa, and joined the Merchant Marine. What did you do, Ann?
I had a unique path. I did some project management and IT consulting after college. I eventually found my way to law school and practiced law for a while. I was doing business and employment litigation. I eventually went over to the DA’s office and was in the courtroom. I loved it. At the same time, I was in and out of helping Sunny with the family business. I stumbled upon EOS along the way.
I knew that we didn’t create EOS but when we discovered it, we felt like we had found this cure to business cancer. We started sharing it with all our friends. We were like, “This is amazing. You have to try this.” We were sharing it with our forums and other entrepreneurs that we had in our circles. It caught on like wildfire within our circle. That’s how I ended up in the coaching space. We were using EOS in our business and organically shifted from practicing law to being in the coaching space.
I always think the best EOS implementers that are nomenclature for a coach are people who reap the benefits in their business to where they live it. It’s so much easier to help other people put their feet in your footsteps if you’ve done that. At eighteen, your parents kicked you out. I’m kidding. What was your path, Sunny?
My childhood was unique. It was like, “Go to school and then go to work after all day every day.” At some point, we had two days off in a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s brute force. It’s very simple, “Buy for $1. Sell for $2. That’s the business strategy, and that’s it. Work your ass off.”
We also outworked the competition. That was all they knew, “If we worked longer hours and worked harder than everybody, then we could grow the business.”
I agree with that to a point. I do think that if you want to dominate your market, you have to be better than your competition. The good news is they generally stink, so it’s not hard to beat your competition. You have two days off a year. You got some time off coming to equal things out. That was all through your childhood. You worked in the family business. When you went to college for your next step, did you stay working in the family business?
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I did everything. We went from toys and started dabbling in furniture. Eventually, furniture became their main thing. We acquired real estate along the way. It was a long, slow, and hard process. College was the first taste of freedom for me in a sense. I still went to work after but that was the first time I was like, “I like not working.” That was very interesting but I had a responsibility. I have a younger brother who’s one year younger than me. We went along the same path. He went to Japan years ago. He pieced out. I was resentful at that time for it but now, it’s the best thing that could have happened to him and even to our relationship.
He was very active in the business while he was here. He moved to Japan and said, “I’m not coming back. I’m done with that.”
There’s a theme in my childhood, at least later, when I realized I was seeking freedom. I felt like this business was locking me down a little bit and definitely was locking our family down. It consumed our lives to the point where my parents ended up separating. They grew further apart. They’re immigrants, so their goal was to not be poor. That was their singular goal. They’re like, “We’re going to not be poor and then work.” At some point, and we don’t even know when, we weren’t poor anymore, but by that time, they had grown apart. They eventually separated. I’m like, “That’s not what I want for myself or my life, to work so hard and then lose the thing that, in my opinion, is the most important.”
I know a lot about your story, and that was at least a part of the seed that grew into Mpowered Families because you both have this driven law school business. At some point, you made the decision, “The main thing is the main thing. The main thing is not business.”
We knew we wanted to do things differently but there aren’t a ton of places where you can turn to learn how to be good at doing family life. We started using what we knew, which was how to run great teams and organizations, and things like getting clear about your values and vision. It’s like, “What do you want from this?” We started applying that to our family life, and it worked.
We were testing for a long time. We were starting to feel success and see success. Our friends were starting to ask us what we were doing. They were like, “How are you going on this many trips but still building great businesses?” They were curious about what was going on, so we would share with them what we were doing. It caught on too. It was cool to see the transformation that was happening in something so raw at the time.
When you started, you got it down and hit 500–foot home runs right off the bat immediately.
A lot of stuff doesn’t apply. One of the cool things is Ann and I were both learners. We’re involved in a lot of learning. We had a lot of personal growth along the way and a lot of opportunities for growth. We applied all the different concepts and then saw what worked in the family setting and what didn’t by visioning and goal setting. I can’t fire Ann from being my wife. That doesn’t work. Some things work and some things don’t. We were able to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but not everything. We’re still learning along the way but we have curated all of what we would call best practices. We have been able to share it and teach it. Other people have seen success too, which is very rewarding for us.
There are some things that don’t apply. As an example, a scorecard in a business is measuring your success but we have something in our Family Alignment Meeting. We teach Family Alignment Meetings. It’s this weekly meeting that you should have with your spouse. Instead of a scorecard, we call it Quick Calibration because the intent is not to score a 10 out of 10 every week. The intent is that we are scoring the same.
One of our metrics is fun, “How much fun did we have this past week?” The intent is not to score a 10 out of 10. The intent is that our scoring is the same. If he says it’s a 2 and I say it’s a 2, then it’s a win because we’re aligned. We’re not rating how much fun we had. That is important. We would love to be both tens but we believe it’s more important that we’re aligned on what the number is than what we scored.
It’s a family meeting with the wife and husband every week.
We call it Your Weekly FAM or Family Alignment Meeting.
I bust out my suit and tie.
I understand. Let’s go back to your earlier entrepreneurial journey. You were entrepreneurs separately. Let’s do this. How did you two meet? How did that happen? Were you hanging around the law school, Sunny?
They’re my crowd.
We have known each other since middle school. We went to middle school together but didn’t start dating until after college.
She was in my brother’s grade, who was one year younger than me.
I’m guessing by that time, you lived here. You met each other in middle school in Garland. You found each other and married.
We started dating. We dated for seven and a half years before we got married.
I had to make sure.
You’re entrepreneurs separately. You met each other, dated for seven and a half years, and got married. You now have three children. How old are they?
5, 2, and 4 months.
You have a busy house. You’re running a bunch of businesses. You’ve got a new startup and three kids. One of them is an infant and one of them is a toddler. There’s no rest at your house.
It is a busy house.
Thinking back on your entrepreneurial path, tell me about a hard lesson, Sunny. If something happened or when the event happened, it was like, “That hurt,” but maybe now, with some perspective and retrospect, you look back on it, and you’re like, “It was a good thing that happened but painful at the time.” Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
While Ann and I were dating, she was intertwined in the business at that time. I asked her to come to the family business and give up her law career. There was some conflict in pulling Ann into the business. My parents were still a little bit involved at that time. Long story short, at some point, things didn’t work out. I had to make a choice between my parents and Ann at that time. I didn’t know or think I had to make a decision like that until I came to it.
In some ways, because I had such a narrow and sheltered life, that was a big challenge for me to stand up and be like, “Ann is the one I want to be with. Whatever happens, happens. It doesn’t even matter.” That was a huge step in my growth. That was the worst thing that could have happened to anyone’s relationship, but it solidified our relationship and made me certain that I wanted to be with her and ultimately marry her.
That’s a great story. Thank you. How about you? Tell a hard lesson or something that hurt but now turned out to be good and worked out. I’m sure that was hard at the time.
One of the biggest ones is growing up and my dad was sick. He was always in and out of the hospital. He was later diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, which is in the leukemia family. He had a bone marrow transplant and, ultimately, a kidney transplant. Because he was always in and out of the hospital, it always felt like that hospital visit was just another hospital visit and he would be home soon.
Before he passed, we thought it was just another hospital visit and that he would be home soon. When we realized that it wasn’t going to be another hospital visit, that was it. It was too late. We had treated it very carelessly. We’re like, “He will be home by the next weekend or Christmas.” He passed, and we were on this path to live intentionally. Life got busy, and we found ourselves going back to the way it was before we had learned that lesson.
Sunny mentioned earlier that his parents separated. There was a lot of conflict. There was a huge explosion in the family with me and his parents. It was like, “This is what happens when you’re not intentional. This is for real. Get your crap together, or this is going to keep happening.” It was a huge wake-up call for both of us. It’s so easy to get caught up in that day-to-day life.
It’s so easy to be busy being busy.
You feel like you’re constantly drowning and not making the time to figure out what it is that you want and be intentional about saying no to all of the noise.
Mpowered Families: It’s so easy to get caught up in that day-to-day life, and it’s so easy to be busy being busy. You constantly drown and do not make the time to figure out what you want and be intentional about saying no to all the noise.
 
It sounds to me like Mpowered Families was born out of trauma. Entrepreneurs, as we know, are problem solvers. If you give me a hard problem and it hurts, I want to solve it. It sounds to me like that was a huge contributor to where you are. Thank you for sharing those hard stories. What about a nugget of wisdom or something that you hold very dear in your entrepreneurial or family path? I don’t think they’re exclusive but if we knew what you knew, we would say, “That is the golden nugget.” It’s some piece of wisdom you know that I and our audience want to know.
I want to be concrete. I don’t want to be too general. For me, it’s always being on the path to personal growth or higher self-awareness because I’m a learner. Sometimes I’m like, “I’m tired. I want to chill,” but there’s something inside of me that keeps pushing for growth and learning. Part of that is because I go to therapy and all that. We go to therapy together and independently. We get all the help we can get. My parents, as they worked extra hard through life, didn’t do that. They didn’t grow with what they were doing over time, and then they lost their way.
It doesn’t mean they weren’t learning certain things but they weren’t intentional about other things like themselves or their family. If you can always be hungry for learning and growth, then it will serve you down the line no matter what. If there’s one skill or one value that I want my kids to have, it would be that hunger or that curiosity to always push for growth and be the best version they can be. I know that’s generic but it’s true and dear.
Mpowered Families: If you can always be hungry for learning and growth, it will serve you down the line no matter what.
 
Improvement is so easy. It’s like, “Ask for help. Learn something new. Go do it.” It’s not hard. It’s elemental. Ask somebody who knows. Learn something new. Go do it. Entrepreneurs, as a general rule, are learners and have that thirst because there’s always a next step. There’s always something else.
If you think about it in the percentage of the population, it’s very tiny. Your audience is probably every single person. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be watching it. In the world, it’s not as common as you would think.
We have done about 200 of these interviews. We only interview proven entrepreneurs or people who have a track record. That doesn’t mean they’re always at the top of their game. That is not relevant but they do have a track record. You see a lot of similarities and then some real idiosyncrasies that are unique. Ann, what about a nugget?
If I had to say one thing, I would say, “Get clear about your Decade Dream.” In Mpowered Families, this Decade Dream is the long-term goal for your life. What’s that singular goal that if you achieve this in the next ten years, you’re on track to living your ideal life? We each have individual Decade Dreams and also a Family Decade Dream. We believe this Decade Dream helps get us aligned, get clarity on what you want to do out of life, and say no to all that noise that we were talking about earlier because it serves as your guiding light or your North Star. You can use it to filter all your decisions.
My individual Decade Dream is to have one million Decade Dreams defined by the end of 2029. Our Family Decade Dream is that we’re going to take 2,000 free days by the end of 2029. Free days are a term from Strategic Coach. It’s defined as 24 hours of not working, thinking about work, talking about work, and reading for work. By the end of 2029, we will have taken 2,000 free days together as a family.
The first time I heard that, I was like, “That’s magic right there.” I can do the math. 2,000 days in 10 years is 200 days a year. It’s four days a week. It’s not two days off a year at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s barely working or thinking about work. For the Decade Dream, you are going to be in ten years as a family and your individual Decade Dreams. Those are building blocks in the Mpowered Family curriculum. I love that.
Anybody can do it. It’s so simple. It’s thinking about what your ideal life looks like ten years out and what’ that one goal can serve as an indicator of success. We have seen some incredible Decade Dreams come out of the program. We did a workshop for an EO forum. There was a Decade Dream of around a million lives impacted through a gratitude and kindness fund that they wanted to start for their family. They’re going to start a gratitude and kindness fund. Through this fund, they’re going to impact a million lives. That’s going to serve as a filter for what types of vacations they are going to take, what types of businesses they are going to start, and what types of organizations and boards they are going to be saying yes to.
They probably ought to meet an author of a book on gratitude. I’m just saying.
I’ll make the intro.
You probably should do an intro there. We have things to talk about.
I’ll add one more thing. This evolved over time. We didn’t get to our perfect one but now we can help other people get there quicker. It took us years to get to where we are.
Defining our Decade Dream took iterations.
It took a couple of years for you to do it, but I’ve seen you help people do it. It happens fairly quickly. It’s not a big brain lift. You make it easy for people to embark on that journey.
The cool thing is when you get the right one, it changes what you now do versus down the line. It informs everything we do and how we do it. It’s like, “Are we going to start this business? We can start it but it has to be self-managing at some point.” Probably within five years for us to hit the goal, we can’t take 200 days off. Our businesses wouldn’t run without it. We have to be very intentional about building it so that it will be self-managing at a certain point. We need to track it and make sure that it aligns with our Decade Dream.
I love a self-managed business. In one of my businesses, we help entrepreneurs exit their businesses. Many entrepreneurs are working in their businesses. Maybe it’s their biggest asset but there’s a reality confrontation that has to happen. It’s like, “If we could fire you, and this could become a professionally managed business, it’s worth 2, 3, or 4 times more money.” As it is, if we get somebody to buy this business, you have to stay. You say, “We’re the owner,” and now you’re not the owner. That’s not a real plus.
This is probably the toughest question I ask. I’m going to put you in a time machine and send you all the way back to your twenty-year–old self. You get to share something with your twenty-year–old self that you wish you knew then and that you know now that would have sped you along your path and made things easier, faster, and better. The first time somebody asked me this, I was like, “I have about 500 things I wish I could tell myself.” What’s 1 or 2?
There’s a book called The Power of TED* written by David Emerald. He teaches the concept of the drama triangle and the roles in the drama triangle. When we’re reacting from drama, we’re reacting as victims, persecutors, or rescuers. He teaches how to shift out of that and respond from a place of empowerment as a coach, creator, or challenger. It’s the simple concept of having awareness around when I was in drama and understanding that I had control to choose my response. When I learned that concept in my 30s, it changed my life because, before that, I used to say, “Drama is everywhere. It’s at home and work.”
The Power of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic): 10th Anniversary Edition
What I realized later was I was the common denominator. I was the drama. I was creating the drama. I thrived on the drama. It was a huge wake-up call for me to realize, “I don’t want to keep living my entire life in drama.” Now I understand that anytime I’m feeling fear, anger, frustration, sadness, grief, or anxiety, I’m in the drama triangle. Sometimes I choose to stay there but now I have the tools that if I want to do something differently, I can respond differently.
That was very impactful for me the first time I learned that. On my self-reflection, I could see where in one particular drama I was hitting all three points. I was chasing my tail and running around the triangle. That’s a great point. Thank you.
It’s a pinball machine. When you’re in the drama triangle, you can pinball between all three rolls in a matter of seconds.
You can get stuck there for a long time.
That’s a core concept we share in the program or the curriculum.
You get to talk to your twenty-year–old self.
This is interesting because I’m thinking about it now differently than how I thought about it. I joined EO when I was 33. I would have said it was the perfect time for me to join but the perfect time would have been when I was younger, as young as possible. I would have said, “I probably wasn’t mentally ready for EO or mature enough for EO,” but no one ever is.
I didn’t know about it but if I had known about it and I would have joined it, my growth would have increased exponentially from there, no matter where I was in my journey. Surrounding myself with high achievers or people I aspire to be is very powerful. It’s to be around like-minded people and to have those conversations and the mindset. You absorb the mindset of the people you’re closest to.
You absorb the mindset of the people you're closest to. Share on X
I’ve seen so much growth in my life from joining YPO and stuff like that. Surrounding myself with people I respect and taking learnings, I was like, “They did this good. They did this bad.” I’m learning from that and making my formula. Even in our program, having couples who are like-minded, which is a subset of a subset, I’m learning from them. I’ve learned so much. I love being around them. They’re intentional in their businesses and then also their families. That’s who I want to surround myself with.
EO is Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which we’re all members of. It’s how we met years ago. You joined at 33. I joined at 53. When they asked me to join, I was like, “I know all of this. I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time.” It’s very wise when you said, “I don’t think anybody is ever ready,” but that does mean you’re ready to join. When you’re not ready, it probably is the same thing with Mpowered Families or the family that’s like, “I would like to get a couple of things squared away and then join.” You’re like, “Now is the best time to join.”
Yesterday was the best time but today is probably the second-best time.
We missed the boat yesterday. Tomorrow, we will never get here. Today is all we got. YPO is Young Presidents’ Organization. I was talking with Sean Magennis, who was president for 7 or 8 years of YPO. He used a term that I love. He was like, “The Os.” I instantly knew what he was talking about but you would have to be in 1 of the 2 to figure that out. I was like, “That’s pretty cool.” How would someone reach out? What’s the easiest, fastest, and simplest way to reach out to learn more about Mpowered Families?
Go to our website. We’ve got a ton of info there. My contact information is on our website, MpoweredFamilies.com.
There, you can learn more about the program and reach out to Ann and Sunny.
We can share its format so everyone knows if that’s okay.
Give us an outline.
It’s a one-year program. You join the program with a cohort, so you’re able to create a community with other like-minded family leaders. During our program, we’re helping the family leaders get clear about their family values, their vision, and what their ideal family life looks like and define their Family Decade Dream. We’re not trying to get everyone to take 2,000 free days but what’s your version of 2,000 free days. We’re helping you understand each other on a very deep and authentic level so that you can be strong family leaders and create a healthy and vibrant family.
Sunny, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m grateful.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having us.
We’re honored to be here.
That’s the episode. See you next time.
 
Important Links

Ann Sheu – LinkedIn
Sunny Sheu – LinkedIn
Mpowered Families
EOS
EO
The Power of TED*
YPO
https://www.Facebook.com/WeAreMPFamilies
https://www.Instagram.com/WeareMPFamilies
https://www.LinkedIn.com/company/Mpowered-Families/
https://www.Twitter.com/MPFamilies
https://www.YouTube.com/@MpoweredFamilies-Dallas

 
About Ann Sheu
Ann is a visionary thought leader, speaker, and entrepreneur who has built multiple successful ventures and is uniquely positioned to help open-minded and growth-oriented individuals thrive. She achieves this by creating learning environments and providing tools that inspire new ways of thinking and living.
In addition to being an entrepreneur since 2004, Ann has 16 years of experience helping organizations systematically improve as a consultant, advisor, board member, and coach. These experiences, paired with both business and law degrees, give Ann a very holistic view of business and allow Ann to pull from a wealth of tools and perspectives to aid her clients in their journey.
As the founder of Mpowered Families, Ann and her team strive to empower high-performing couples and families with the tools and guidance to cultivate a family life brimming with purpose, alignment, and profound connection. The Mpowered Families mission is to assist families in crafting a collective vision, enhancing communication, and proactively embracing the intentional path toward the fulfilling life couples aspire to co-create.
As a Certified EOS Implementer, Ann combines proven business principles with practical, real-world tools, to accelerate growth, drive meaningful outcomes, and create high-performance organizations.
Ann’s mission is to cultivate empowered communities to live intentionally. As a highly sought-after speaker, Ann shares 3 mindset shifts to help individuals live a radically intentional life. Ann lives in Dallas, TX with her husband Sunny, and their 3 children.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E40 | Lubo Smid
Date: June 13, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e40-lubo-smid/
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Entrepreneurship is not merely a destination; it is a perpetual journey of peaks, valleys, and the relentless pursuit of growth. In this episode, we sit down with Lubo Smid, the co-founder, and CEO of STRV, a leading software design and engineering company. Lubo shares personal anecdotes, highlighting the peaks and valleys of entrepreneurship and the continuous journey toward improvement. As he ponders on his initial encounters with exchanging time, energy, and creativity for money, he emphasizes time as the most valuable currency that we all possess. As the conversation progresses, Lubo shares the defining moments of his entrepreneurial journey, which includes a painful lesson that eventually transformed into a valuable learning experience. He stresses the significance of living according to core values, which provide a foundation for resilience in the face of challenges. Lubo’s own experiences serve as a testament to the idea that entrepreneurship offers more freedom, income, and fulfillment compared to traditional employment. Join us and discover how embracing entrepreneurship, living by your values, and embracing the unknown can lead to remarkable growth and success.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Lubo Smid
From Prague To Silicon Valley CEO
I have got a real treat for you, Lubo Smid, Cofounder and CEO of STRV. It’s a software design and engineering company that builds products for people like Barry’s, The Athletic, Microsoft, and ClassDojo. He’s passionate about cutting-edge tech. We’ve already talked about tech that doesn’t work these days. He’s Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur constantly pushing the envelope and splits his time between Los Angeles and Prague unless he’s on some crazy adventure cycling or skiing way up the beaten path. Welcome, Lubo. 
Don, thank you so much for a lovely introduction. I’m so happy to be here on the show with you.
I am thrilled to have you. You’re one of my very best friends. I’ll say escape. She would say escape from Prague many ago. I’m going to take you back all the way to the little Lubo, 5 years old up to 18. In your childhood home, however that worked, was there an entrepreneur in your house who set an example for you? 
Both of my parents were entrepreneurs at some point in their career and I can very confidently say that it is one of the reasons, if not the strongest reason, why I decided to pursue the entrepreneur journey. It’s been instilled in my life very early on since my childhood. I still remember the days as a kid when I was playing an accountant sorting out invoices and so on. I know it sounds weird when I say it, but it definitely was a decent part of me growing up when I saw both of my parents run their entrepreneurial journeys.
Another example. My mom had a couple of flower shops so I would even go with her to pick the flowers and learn a lot about different kinds of plants, how to select the right ones, and how you work with the inventory. There are so many of these examples and I’m very happy that you asked that question because that was definitely the influence. I have seen it right in front of me. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m here.
I’m guessing when your mom and dad were entrepreneurs, it wasn’t that easy there. 
It was not. Of course, there have been moments of huge successes. There have been moments when things were not going so well and were quite problematic and issues on all fronts. I think that’s what the entrepreneurial journey is all about. It is like a rollercoaster ride. You have the successes to celebrate but you also have the valleys that you need to get through that are filled with obstacles, challenges, and overall things that are not pleasant. Yet most definitely, I have seen both of those throughout the many years.
Entrepreneurship: The entrepreneurial journey is a rollercoaster ride. You have the successes to celebrate, but you also have the valleys that you need to get through.
 
I love what you said about the peaks and valleys of entrepreneurship. There are highs and lows. This show is about encouraging people who are not entrepreneurs to take that step or to encourage entrepreneurs to take the next step because entrepreneurship is a path that is a journey. You’re never really at the destination. There’s always some way to improve.
Even though there are peaks and valleys in entrepreneurship, there are peaks and valleys in life and non-entrepreneurship. There’s more freedom, income, and fulfillment on the entrepreneur side of the table than there is on the employee side of the table. Still in your childhood home, 5 to 18, what’s the first job you had where you got paid? Maybe you didn’t have a job. Maybe you sold your own flowers or you were a budding entrepreneur. What was the first thing you did where you traded time, effort, and ingenuity for currency?
Both of my parents were entrepreneurs since my very early childhood, I was helping them with their businesses. I would not consider this being my first experience. What I would go back and look at is my first internships and then later on me taking a job at a construction site. I was trying it all. I worked as a security guard during summer nights. I tried all sorts of things as I was building up the future path that led me to building software. I was still combining the two, and that was interesting.
I would be working as a night security guy. You don’t really do much. You just need to be there in case something happens. I would leverage the time to code and learn other things. You can apply that to many other things as you are navigating your life. If the job requires you to only be there and you can combine it with leveraging the time for something else, you should pick it up and go for it. That’s what I did back in the days. You are basically getting paid twice in a way.
Entrepreneurship: As you are navigating your life, if the job requires you to only be there and you can combine it with leveraging the time for something else, then ultimately you should pick it up and go for it.
 
When you think about it, the primary currency all of us has is time. We all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. How we choose to spend or invest those seconds has a big effect on what we achieve. After school, leaving your childhood home, and setting out on your own, you moved to the South of France and lay on the beach, and joined the army. What did you do? Did you go to university? Did you start your own company? Did you get a job?
Going out of high school, I already had a freelance engineering gig going on. That’s pretty much how I went by covering my student life. I went to university. I also pursued Computer Science combined with business. I stayed there for a little bit but felt like I wanted more of the international experience, so I went to study abroad. I went to the UK, stayed there for a year, finished my Bachelor’s degree, then went to the US. I studied at a military university in Northfield, Vermont. When I got back, I finished my Master’s. That was pretty much the time when I joined my co-founders and we started building the business together.
How old is the business? How old is STRV? 
STRV is a little bit older than my history when I joined in 2012, so around 12 years now in 2023. My co-founders were on the path already when I joined them. We all got together in 2012 and have been building and scaling the company. When I joined, it was a group of students at that time that had a solid start, but it was five people. That was an interesting moment. Over the years, we have managed to scale it up to about 200. We have seen quite an interesting growth. Nothing to compare to the big guys, but it was definitely an interesting ride.
Thinking back across your entrepreneurial career, I want to ask you about a hard lesson. Something that happened where when it happened, you’re hurt. Maybe after some time, distance, and some retrospection, you look back and say, “That was a pretty good thing for us to happen,” but at the time, it did not seem good. It hurt. Do you have a moment you can share?
I have many moments like that, and as you are asking this question, it comes down to the integrity that I have as a person. I feel like I operate from my perspective with a very high degree of integrity. Sometimes you realize that if you operate that way, you would expect that the same will return on the flip side to you. Unfortunately, after having experienced many situations where this was not the case, I realized that I’m not keeping a high level of integrity for others.
It’s mostly for me to feel good about what is my path in navigating life and business. The fact that other people don’t match that, I think the world is not zero some game in the end. It is likely going to return in a different flavor somewhere else, but I take it a lot less personally than I would early on. I already went through this many times and will keep that approach no matter how others are acting.
I feel like this is a way of how I want to do business and I know that there are many other ways you can be doing business. Not all of them are a fit for me, and I understand. Everyone needs to pick their approach, but this is my approach. I will probably not name one particular example, but I think that every one of us can point to times when we felt betrayed and vulnerable. We felt cheated on and so on.
I have gone through so many of these moments, but I always try to pick up and look at it from a grander perspective and say, “Did I stand up for the values that I care about? Did I act according to my way of thinking?” If yes, then everything is fine. Of course, everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes as well but I try to correct them if possible and learn from them.
Something you said that I want to key on is living according to your values. It’s really important for an entrepreneur and a company to have great core values and some code by which they live. Everything will not go your way. People will take advantage sometimes and bad things will happen. It’s called life. Bad things will happen sometimes, but it doesn’t have to crush you if you’re living your values. What about a warp-speed moment? Things are going pretty good in your business. You make a hire, implement a new procedure, and develop a new product and all of a sudden, things are going good. Do you have one that you could share? 
Again, many moments but for us, what kickstarted everything was the move from the Czech Republic to Silicon Valley. I think that kickstarted everything. I say this more than I should, but people often ask me. I come from the Czech Republic and have managed to build a very strong network in the US. I have many friends, business contacts, great clients, great portfolio. People often feel there is a secret formula for entering a foreign market, especially the US one.
I look at it and I say it’s extremely simple. The only thing that you need to do is to go there and spend time. Is there a definite amount of time that you need to spend there? No. If you want to do a big business that is based in the US, you are likely not going to go there for two weeks and think that’s it. I have spent nearly half of my professional career being on the ground in the US, and I consider it my second home basically.
Without that, it’s extremely hard, especially in the services business that we are in with STRV to establish a foreign market. This boosted us as a company that we made that leap. A lot of people would love to experience something similar that we went through but they can’t imagine to be leaving their homes. It’s tricky. I know it’s not for everyone, but that’s the most straightforward path and that’s what gave us the scale.
Was it easy when we got there? Definitely not. There are a lot of other things that you need to get through by doing the move. It sets you apart from anybody else. In the same way, I was talking to a friend of mine, Ryan Rottman, a Hollywood actor who has now also turned into an entrepreneur running his own startup. He was telling me about auditions and how being prepared sets you apart from 80% of the people who are not prepared for the auditions.
There are a lot of other things that you need to go through by doing the move that sets you apart from anybody else. Share on X
It’s not just the auditions. It’s fundraising and interviews. You can apply that for anything that you do in life. If you are prepared, then you are setting yourself apart from a large group of people. It ties very nicely with me describing how the move already sets you apart as well.
There’s another saying that showing up is 50% of success. Show up, be on time, have a smile on your face, be willing, and be prepared puts you ahead of another 30% or 40%. Obviously, not too many worldwide premier software companies based in the Czech Republic, but Silicon Valley is the epicenter for that, so it makes sense. What you either had to overcome and/or what many other people don’t overcome is the fear of the unknown. It’s not really the fear of moving. It’s the fear of, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
One thing I think entrepreneurs do really well is if you get out of your comfort zone, you go places other people don’t go. Things will happen for you that doesn’t happen for other people because you’re actually out there doing it. What about something you know that you hold near and dear? This show is for people who’ve not yet started their entrepreneurial journey so they’re looking to take that first step, or people who started their path and are looking to take the next step. As you and I know, there’s no final destination. It’s not like, “I’ve got to the train station. I’m done.” There’s always a next step. What’s some nugget of wisdom from you, Lubo? 
The journey is the destination and you have to enjoy the journey. If you are asking for a nugget of wisdom, and I like that term a lot, if you pick a path, then make sure that this is something that you are passionate about. You can carry on doing it for a long time to make it somewhere. Also, you are in line with the purpose and you see it. The way I approach things, it’s definitely a positive as well as a negative. If you are convinced that you want to achieve something and you give it your best, it’s very likely that you will get there. You don’t know when and how fast it’s going to be. It’s not going to be next week or next month.
Is it going to be next year? Is it going to be 3 years from now or in 10 years? I don’t know, but you have to be enjoying the journey because if you are enjoying the journey, you see the purpose. You are passionate about it, then you will stick around for a lot longer. I’m all for giving up when you feel it doesn’t make sense.
I should be doing more of giving up than I do. I’m the kind of person that if I say, “This is what I’d like to achieve,” I’ll be doing it forever. I’m not that extreme, but my threshold for letting things go is a little too high, but at the same time, you don’t want to have this threshold too low.
Finding the balance and making sure that you optimize for success. You optimize for success if you can keep doing something for a decent amount of time. I see many people around me tend to jump from one thing to another and then back and forth. They are not convinced whether this is the right thing. I see them struggle and not being able to carry on for some time.
I’m not saying that you need to be following the path that I’m following. I’ve been doing the same thing for many years. I still enjoy it and keep doing that. Maybe that’s not necessary, but don’t expect that if you switch things every 3 to 6 months, something super meaningful will come out of that. Can it? Yes, definitely. I would contribute that to a fair amount of luck rather than anything else.
I totally agree. You have to have some consistency. That doesn’t mean that you cannot stop. You can. I like what Warren Buffett says. He says, “I say no to 90% of what crosses my desk.” He shuts it off right at the beginning. If it doesn’t fit his mission and his purpose, he says no and lets it pass.
I’m going to put you in a time machine. You’re going to step into the time machine, I’m going to send you all the way back, and you’re going to get a couple of minutes to talk to twenty-year-old Lubo. Confront your twenty-year-old self. What would you tell your twenty-year-old self that you know now that you didn’t know then but would have helped you make things easier and faster? In the time machine, you go all the way back. We introduce you to twenty-year-old Lubo. What are you going to tell him? 
I would tell myself to surround me with more mentors, leaders, and people that I can learn from. For a decent part of my career, I was learning by doing and by many mistakes. If I go back to my early twenties, I’m not taking all of the experience that I have. However, if I relied more on people that could mentor me, it would lead me to a different place than where I am now, where I find a lot bigger value in sharing experiences with others and having a close circle of people that have been there, done that, that can advise me on things.
If you rely more on mentors, it could lead you to a different place than where you are today. Share on X
It’s invaluable to have that. In my early twenties, I was trying to fight it with the amount of work I was producing rather than any smart approach to it. Did I feel like I did it entirely wrong? Definitely not. It worked out, hopefully. Putting a little bit more structure into it could yield great results, and that would be my feedback to the twenty-year-old Lubo.
In my own career, early on, I many times thought I was the smartest person in the room. I wasn’t always the smartest person in the room, but I thought I was. I didn’t use other resources. Now, with my own clients, I’m like, “If you really want to go from point A to point B, let’s find somebody who went to point B. You put your feet in their footsteps and you’ll end up there.” Mentors, people who will share their experiences, are unbelievably valuable to an entrepreneur. Lubo, as the proven entrepreneur tribe, how can we support you? Anything we can do for you?
That’s a very wide question. We tend to do many things with STRV. Of course, we focus on building great digital products. If there is something where we could be helpful, we would love to explore that opportunity. If there are entrepreneurs that are looking for a strong tech partner, then it’s not only going to help me, but we can help both ways and build something great together.
That probably would be the ask from my side because, over the years, we have gathered a lot of skill and experience in terms of building digital products and launching them, marketing them, and scaling them, ranging from all kinds of mobile apps in the App Store, Google Play, or Web Solutions. These days, artificial intelligence is booming. We have a strong team around that. I would love to hear from people interested in chatting more about that. That could potentially be something fun to do together.
What would be the best way for someone to reach out? Should they go to the website or call a number? 
The best that I would suggest as we are talking here, and I perceive this as a little nice, unofficial conversation. I’ll always like when people hit me up in DMs on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. It’s fairly simple. Lubo Smid is my username everywhere. I have such a benefit of having a very unique name. It’s extremely easy to find me. Those would be the preferred channels.
If you have a need or talk about putting technology to work for your business, reach out to Lubo Smid. He’s almost everywhere on social media, and that’ll go directly to him. Lubo, I am so grateful for you joining me and sharing your wisdom. Thank you very much. 
Thank you, Don, for having me. I had a blast.
This is another episode. See you next time. Thanks. Bye. 
 
Important Links

STRV
Lubo Smid – LinkedIn
Instagram – Lubo Smid
Twitter – Lubo Smid

 
About Lubo Smid
Lubo Smid is the Co-founder & CEO of STRV, a software design & engineering company that’s built products for the likes of Barry’s, The Athletic, Microsoft and ClassDojo. Passionate about cutting-edge tech (especially in web3), the Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur is constantly pushing the envelope — incubating products under STRV Labs, welcoming prominent founders to his Next Level Show podcast or sharing his journey via articles and socials. Lubo splits his time between LA and Prague, unless he’s on some crazy adventure, cycling or skiing way off the beaten path.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E39 | Stephanie & Ethan Bull
Date: June 6, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e39-stephanie-ethan-bull/
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Content:
 

 
Your path to success doesn’t have to be lonely. For you to go a long way, having someone by your side can lead to a much better journey. In this episode, Ethan Bull and Stephanie Bull, the Founders of ProAssisting, take their moment to share the story of how they embarked on the path of entrepreneurship and how it led them to success. They share the amazing work they are doing at ProAssisting, where they provide remote executive assistant support. Going behind the story of their success, Ethan and Stephanie tell us how they navigate business as a married couple. While it can be difficult, they show us that it is possible. They agreed that giving grace to each other does help the marriage go hand in hand with business. Gain insights from these mighty bulls charging toward success today. Tune in to find more business and life lessons.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Stephanie & Ethan Bull
Entrepreneurs – Married With Children
I have a real treat for you. I have a husband-and-wife team. Joining us are Stephanie and Ethan Bull. They are Cofounders of ProAssisting, which is a next-gen remote executive assistant firm business primarily for C-Suite executives. Their backgrounds are phenomenal. Ethan held a bunch of senior positions, including Director of Administrative Services and Senior EA to the President and CEO of Rochester Regional Health.
Stephanie, the Cofounder of ProAssisting, is a former EA for J.Crew’s CEO and the CEOs of two multibillion-dollar hedge funds. Before developing ProAssisting, Stephanie proved herself as an expert in the field and a vital addition to the C-Suite by fulfilling a variety of roles, including Chief of Staff, Estate Manager, and Investment Liaison. Stephanie and Ethan Bull, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us.
We are so thrilled to have you. I want to take you all the way back to little Stephanie and little Ethan. Let’s start at age 5, and you can go up to age 18. Stephanie, we will start with you. Ladies first. Tell me. In your home, how that works, was there an adult who provided an entrepreneurial example for you?
My father worked for other people for many years but when I was about ten, he became very interested in opening a McDonald’s franchise. It’s quite the endeavor. I’m not sure how aware you are but McDonald’s Corporation puts you through a lot to get there. The vetting process is extreme. You have to have the finances and resources. I remember him being gone. My mother was raising us as a single mom as he went to work every day. He worked ten hours a day, and then he had to work in a McDonald’s store for about two years where they make you do everything from sweeping the floors to cleaning the Sunday machine to closing the books at night.
He had to attend Hamburger University in Chicago for about two weeks. He was always my example of that spirit and work ethic. It was instilled in me. I never questioned it. I was lucky to have a mother who was there to support him and us while he did all of that. Behind every strong person is a strong partner, and that was my mother. That was my example.
That’s a great example. McDonald’s is the original system, “You never have to decide anything. We know how to do everything. We will train you until you wake up in the middle of the night reciting the steps by which you must go through to accomplish putting cheese on that patty or putting that patty on the grill.”
They drill those procedures into you.
Systemized everything may be the reason probably of all time, it’s the champion of fast food in America, the world, and some up-and-comers now. For a long time, McDonald’s was it. Ethan, you’re getting the benefit of Stephanie answering the question first. All the way back to little Ethan, 5 to 18 in your house, was there an entrepreneur?
There were two. I’m an only child with four parents growing up. My stepfather was an attorney who owned his practice. That’s running your business and paying for healthcare, office expense, and all of that in addition to being an attorney. My father is a true entrepreneur. I’ll go back before five. When I was three, I was sitting on a bar stool in Filthy McNastys in Seneca Falls, New York, which was one of his first businesses.
He transitioned and did real estate while he was running the bar, became a broker and then a home builder, sold the bar, bought a trailer park with my grandfather and then a bowling alley, and then sold the bowling alley to buy into a restaurant. He ran the restaurant for 21 years and collected a couple of more trailer parks. He was the embodiment of the entrepreneur. He realized he couldn’t work for someone else and wanted to forge his path and create his schedule. Both those role models embodied the entrepreneurial spirit.
I love that. Your dad’s grazing along the entrepreneurial path when you said trailer park is a good business. It’s a custom real estate play but a solid business. Many people think entrepreneurs start with a profit motive. I find that to be rarely the case. Much more often, it’s, “I cannot work for anybody anymore. I cannot take direction from idiots. I have to do my thing. I have to control my schedule even if it means I’m going to work ten hours a day, go to work in another store, and then go to university.” That’s the entrepreneurial way. You were eighteen. You graduated high school. Stephanie, you joined the Merchant Marine and backpacked across Europe. What was your first step out of your childhood home?
Many people think entrepreneurs start with a profit motive. More often, entrepreneurs' motive is to achieve freedom. Share on X
Better yet, I became a Wisconsin Badger. I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I grew up on the East Coast but my dad was from Wisconsin. My whole life, we had been going there to visit my grandparents and family. When it came time for me to look at colleges, I looked at several East Coast schools and fell in love with Wisconsin. It was four years in Madison and lots of hard work but lots of fun. That’s where I was.
I personally love Wisconsin in the summertime even though locals love it year-round. That’s above my head. It’s cold in the wintertime.
It’s tundra cold.
They seem to like it for some reason. I don’t get it but I’ve been in the South forever. Ethan, what about you? Eighteen, out of your household home, did you join the Merchant Marine and backpack across Europe?
I did not. I went to Bentley College outside of Boston and Waltham, which is a specialty business school. That was partially due to the fact that I grew up with those entrepreneurial father figures. In junior year, I did study abroad in Australia for six months, which had a real profound impact on my career trajectory in terms of using that time to try and figure out where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. After college, I moved directly to New York City.
What was our first job post-college? We were not early entrepreneurs. We are midterm entrepreneurs. When you graduated school, you had to get a job. Tell me about that, Stephanie.
My first job is I got a job working in Washington, DC. I was working for an editing firm. They did editing and consulting for the World Bank and IMF. I was hired as an editorial assistant/personal assistant for the CEO and Editor-in-Chief who was a very eccentric man. He was bright but eccentric. Many of my days there were spent taping 200-page documents to a wall with scotch tape because he was a big-picture guy. I would help him go around and circle paragraphs to move. It was old school but it was great. It was so cool to see that process. I was introduced to a lot of bright and interesting people from all over the world. That was cool. That was my first job. I was paid little but it was pretty exciting.
Sometimes the payoff isn’t dollars. It sounds to me like he was potentially a genius and a little unique but many times, those go together. I’ve written four books and been through the editing process four times. I have other books I’m in the process now. I cannot imagine printing out the manuscript and taping it to the wall. That makes me hyperventilate a little bit even thinking about that.
I get anxious when I wrap Christmas presents because of all the scotch tape.
It looked like you were getting a little nervous there, Don.
I’ve got three books in the process. I don’t recommend anybody do that but they’re all banging to get out of my head. They’re all getting some attention. I cannot imagine that form of editing. He sounds like a very bright individual. He had a process. Good for him. Ethan, first job?
I found my first job in New York City through my internship in Boston during my senior year in college. I was interning for WEA, which is Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, three record labels under the Warner Brothers conglomerate. I heard that Warner Brothers was shooting a movie in New York and needed production assistance. It so happened that my uncle lived in New York and had a one-bedroom apartment that he used as his office. My stepfather convinced him to let me pay half the rent bill. Since it was rent-controlled, it was $300 a month, which was fantastic.
That brought me to New York to work on a film. I was both in the production office as well as on set. On my first day going up in the production office, I rode the elevator with Meg Ryan. It was the two of us. I was very starstruck. She was extremely gracious and talked to me down to her level and down to a human level, which blew my mind. It goes back to how gracious she was. That was my first day in New York.
Welcome to the Big Apple. Your internship was in Boston and your first job was in New York City. You’re a huge baseball fan. I’m like, “It wasn’t the Red Sox to the Yankees. That much I know.” Stephanie, you stepped into the EA job at the editor company. Did you take a further step into the EA world after that role?
I did. I took a detour. I had broken up with my college boyfriend. It wasn’t the right fit. I left DC and left my life. It was one of those what-am-I-doing times. I moved back to my parents’ home, which was in New Hampshire, which was one of the most humbling things I’ve ever done. I was 23. Luckily, my parents were happy to have me back. They didn’t know how long it would be but I got a part-time job working for Fidelity. Their headquarters were there in New Hampshire at the time. They’re in Boston. I did a lot of human resources stuff. I learned that side of the business.
I was working in customer service. I was on phone calls half the day. I waitressed. That’s what I did. I had two jobs. About eight months in, I talked to my parents and said I wasn’t in love with either of my part-time gigs. I said, “I’m ready to leave.” My best friend at the time was living in New York City. I was like, “I’ve always wanted to live in New York. This is the time to do it. I’m young, footloose, and fancy-free.” I left, went to New York, and met Ethan.
There’s the customer service job for Fidelity. I’m outside of Fort Worth, Texas. They have a huge campus. I don’t know if it’s the headquarters but it might be. Ross Perot did this huge development. Fidelity has a campus. Deloitte University is where they train. Everybody at Deloitte is on the same property. It’s a large property with 2000 acres. Schwab moved their San Francisco headquarters about 1 mile up the road. It doesn’t seem like it’s a financial center but it is. 
That customer service job and then the server job paid huge dividends for young people because you have to learn how to get along with people. I don’t care what business we’re in. We’re all in the people business. There’s a huge learning there for a little bit of time, and then you move on. Ethan, after Meg Ryan, the movie, and Warner Brothers, what was next?
I ended up falling in love with watching the director and the actor’s work. I went to acting school while I worked on other independent features as the best boy dolly grip and on studio pictures as the production secretary or assistant production coordinator, which is an executive assistant role on steroids. After a few years of that, I ended up at the William Morris Agency, which was the oldest talent agency in the country, pushing a mail cart as an agent trainee.
I got on a motion picture agent’s desk. They found out I made a short film during my one-week vacation and said, “You can’t be in motion picture if you want to be a filmmaker.” They moved me over to the music department. I was the East Coast Music Coordinator where I counted the ticket sales for all of our acts East of Mississippi to determine marketing spend. I got a job working for the Chairman of USA Films. That was the pinnacle of my entertainment career.
In there, I also rode in a limo with Warren Beatty through one of my PA roles. That was another interesting story. The Assistant to the Chairman of USA Films was the pinnacle of the entertainment industry. I shifted into advertising, leveraging my executive assisting experience to initially pay the bills and allow me to chase dreams outside of the office around music and writing scripts.
There are two questions. One, was Warren Beatty as gracious as Meg Ryan?
I was on set with him for two weeks. In the first 3 or 4 days, he would not even acknowledge my existence. I was the Executive Assistant to Nastassja Kinski who was in all of his scenes because they were a love interest or whatnot. During those days, he did take notice of how much Nastassja enjoyed my support. On that fourth day, he asked me to get him a Diet Coke.
It kept going from then on for the rest of the shooting. On the last day of shooting, Nastassja has all these flowers that we have to get back to the hotel. She’s getting into the limo with Warren. I’m standing there with two large bouquets of flowers. She says, “Get a taxi and meet me at the hotel.” Warren looks at her and looks at me, gets into the limo, and says, “Get in. We can squeeze in here.” I rode through Midtown traffic for about 25 minutes.
He was gracious. He asked me all about my hometown, why I was in New York, and what my plans were. I was 23 or 24 at the time. That’s a great run-in. There are others too. Sandra Bullock was an amazing princess. I was the production secretary on the first movie that she produced. I saw her a lot in the production office. She would always get us Starbucks. After the third day, she knew our orders. She’s very gracious and nice. They were all great experiences.
Servant leadership is phenomenal. My second question though is this. You can’t work in motion pictures as a filmmaker. I don’t understand.
I was in an agent trainee program. They wanted to bring up-and-comers into the agency fold and not on the creative side. It does make some sense but at that point in my career, I could have done both.
At some point, Stephanie gets to New York and meets Ethan. You’ve swept her off her feet. I can tell already. You’re still sweeping daily. Good job, Stephanie. I saw that head nod. At some point, you decided to open your business. What brought that to a head?
We opened ProAssisting in 2009 as a training business. At that point in the internet age in 2008, 2009, and 2010, the broadband nature of internet connectivity had finally caught up. There were real businesses being built around training and education. I said to Stephanie, “We both have this education in spades.” We created ProAssisting as an eLearning education platform for recent college grads coming out with a History degree.
Where do they get a job? What do they do? They’re interested in publishing. If you take our training, get a job as an assistant in publishing, and shine, you can get promoted from within and be on your way. We recorded the eLearning modules in our closet to get good sound. That form of our business lived from 2010 through 2017. In 2018, we made the pivot to providing remote executive assistant support.
That was the sunset of the education business.
What’s interesting is it was but now, we are reentering that education market for the executive assistants that either we aren’t able to partner with or who we are partnered with and providing what we like to think of as a Master’s education on being a top-level executive assistant. We’re working on that now. That’s a sneak peek. It’s interesting how it comes full circle.
It’s in the works.
I’ve made my bones all my life in sales process consulting and elevating revenue across any industry. I don’t care. Here’s one thing I learned a long time ago. Never quit selling something people will buy. It makes no sense. Even if it’s not your majority or primary product, if there’s a market for it, let’s sell it to somebody, especially if you’re doing an excellent job, and I know that you are. In 2017 and 2018, you moved into the staffing model of executive assistants. Is it more of placement? Is it both?
We’re a hybrid. We’re acting as an agent for great executive assistants that we identify and pick. We partner them with clients but frankly, we started ProAssisting initially to fill both Stephanie and myself up with clients so we could work on our own. It’s the typical story of someone who gets expertise through a W-2 role and then takes that expertise, breaks out on their own, and does it for themselves and clients as opposed to for a company and bosses.
ProAssisting: It’s the typical story of someone who gets expertise through a W2 role and then takes that expertise, breaks out on their own, and does it for themselves and clients as opposed to for a company and bosses.
 
It’s taking experience and expertise you learn as a W-2 employee, stepping across that entrepreneur line, and taking the next step. Sometimes someone who’s not an entrepreneur looks at entrepreneurs, and they’re like, “I can never do all that.” Nobody did all that in one step. There was a series of steps. If there’s any wisdom at all, take the next step. That was your first step into entrepreneurship, filling your dance cards with company money instead of W-2 money. I love that. I’m guessing that was very successful.
I wanted to add that it was one of the scariest times of my life. Ethan is much more of a risk-taker. My father is more of the risk-taker between my parents too. He has a good vision, whereas I’m more of the day-to-day. I’m more risk-averse. It was scary because I only had one client that I was working for at that point. Ethan was making the leap from his full-time job and working for someone else. It was scary being on our own. It was exciting but it was also scary in the beginning until we started to grow our dance cards. We brought more people into the fold but it was scary. It was not smooth sailing from the start.
Thanks for sharing that. One thing I share with my clients is the physics of comfort zones. The physics is, “I like my comfort zone because it’s comfortable. When I exit my comfort zone and I get out to where it’s uncomfortable or there’s discomfort, that’s scary.” There are some nerves. It’s for everybody. Maybe Ethan, me, or somebody else has done it more. 
We’re numb. We built up some resistance to that fear but then when you exit your comfort zone, your comfort zone grows. Every time you step out, your comfort zone grows. At a certain point, it took me a long time to learn this but I am intentionally and purposely exiting my comfort zone every single day because that’s how I get better. The easiest way for me to improve my business is for me to improve myself, not my business.
I was surprised because having been a W-2 employee for 25-plus years, it was surprising to me how before, I always thought the grass was greener on the entrepreneurial side of things. Years in, we have a diversified solid business but I still get stressed even when things are going great, and there’s nothing wrong. Part of that is knowing that there isn’t a backstop but also knowing that we’re one phone call or one email away from having an issue or losing a client or an assistant.
It creates this inherent stress that you have to get used to and also enjoy the moments when you do land that client, expand that line of business, or knock it out of the park for that client. I didn’t think it was going to be consistent stress. It’s a different kind. We may be talking about the same thing but in a little bit different way. I say that to provide encouragement to people who are feeling that. Probably the least risky thing you can do is start a service-based business that you have expertise in. That’s exactly what we did.
ProAssisting: The least risky thing you can do is start a service-based business you have expertise in.
 
There’s real wisdom in what you said. It’s a different kind of stress. You can spell stress as life. It’s part of being alive. It’s just a little different. The long-term entrepreneur does get a little numb. I’ve had clients that said, “It’s like poker. I’m all in. All my chips are on the table.” You’re like, “There’s some parallel there. You are all in.” In my case, I’ve been all in for many years. I don’t even think, see, or feel that anymore, and maybe that’s a character flaw but it’s what you get used to.
That’s a long time. We’re only a few years here. Get me to ten, and hopefully, I’m in the Don Williams’ pond of, “The water is fine.”
The longer you do it, the more comfortable you get and the more you learn. I am still learning. I got back from three weeks in Africa with my wife. We have not had a significant trip since 2019 when we went to China for a month. That’s how we like to travel. We go someplace and stay for a long time but after about a week, I didn’t realize how crisp I was getting.
I didn’t realize I was getting burned out but now that I’m not in the office, I’m not shooting episodes, I’m not writing, and I’m not working, I can feel the change. It’s important to take some breaks. Here’s another thing I love between the two of you. For many couples, it’s very hard to do the wife-husband thing and the business partner thing, and the parent thing. I don’t know if you have children.
We have one.
All of that is a big ball of yarn. You’re doing it very well. Congratulations. Kudos. To my entrepreneur couple friends, I would tell you that communication and expectation are critical. When you think you’re communicating enough, communicate a little more. When you think everybody understands your expectations and you understand everybody else’s, get a little more understanding and be a little more clear. That’s the best way to manage all that. That’s like three-dimensional chess without the boards. That’s like space chess. Good job.
Communication and expectation are critical. When you think you're communicating enough, communicate a little more. Share on X
In the history of ProAssisting, I want to ask you about a hard moment, something that happened, or some event. I’m going to come back to that question. There’s one other thing I wanted to bring up. In that one phone call, you could lose a client or an assistant, and that could be painful. One of the businesses that I’ve owned forever is the call center business. They make and take telephone calls. 
Many times, we have to impress upon clients that the next telephone call could be worth $1 million yet so many businesses don’t treat those telephone calls like that’s possible. In my career, I have more than a handful where the first telephone call ultimately resulted in $1 million or more. Every one of those interactions with a prospect, a customer, or a potential teammate can be so valuable. Please treat them like the gold they are.
Back to the hard question or hard moment, what’s something that happened in your business where when it happened, you were like, “That hurts. I don’t like it,” but maybe with some time, distance, and retrospect, you’re able to look back on it and say, “I didn’t like it. It hurt. I limped for a little bit but maybe it was the best thing.” Do you have one of those you can share?
I was thinking a little bit before ProAssisting. The current version came when you made the transition from your W-2 role.
I was let go. That was huge. After two years, my boss and I still weren’t on the same page. HR brings you into a room and says, “You’re done.” I was grateful that he provided a substantial severance package. I didn’t think it was handled properly but now looking back, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I look back at some of the clients that Stephanie had where she may have gotten taken advantage of a little bit because she’s so type-A and amazing at what she does. You give clients 1 inch, and they will take 1 mile. There’s no guardrail, which I usually play with our clients and our assistants but in her case, I wasn’t involved in those relationships. It was her directly. That can be hard.
I’ll let Steph expand on that in a second but I will say that there are moments that I look back on now where it was like, “I can’t believe this is happening.” An assistant is saying, “I’m done. I’m out. See you later.” I’m having to scramble and whatnot. My mother said this even after I got let go, “How are you going to feel months from now?”
We’re getting to the point where I’m able to take those six months and shrink them down to three days. I’ll ruminate. I take things to heart. I think about things hard. Steph knows it gets to me on things but I’ve gotten good at moving on. Part of that comes with the growth of the business, having diversity in terms of our client makeup, and understanding that it’s the flow of business.
The most important part both to Stephanie and I is that we deal with our partner executive assistants and our clients with integrity, honesty, compassion, and empathy and meet them where they are. If we do that, and we know in our heart of hearts even if someone walks away mad, we did our best. We lead with that. It has gotten a lot easier. Frankly, we are the happiest we have ever been. We feel very blessed to be here. Stephanie may want to add about those two clients.
For me, it has been a growth experience because I’ve had to stand up for myself and have difficult conversations. That can be that the anxiety ratcheted up. I’m nervous and sweating because I’m a people pleaser. I want to do everything right but it was to the point where I was taking phone calls late at night and doing above and beyond what I should have been for one of my client’s businesses. It got to be too much. It was like, “Is this worth it when I could either be spending more time working in the business or taking on a client that wasn’t so needy?” Having those conversations has made me a better person. It’s learning to communicate better and more clearly. You still have to do it.
To me, nothing says leader like someone who can successfully navigate tough conversations and initiate not progress but, “I need to have this conversation. I don’t want to have this conversation but I’m going to do it anyway.” That to me is the bellwether on great leaders or people who do not shirk from and can successfully navigate tough conversations. In my opinion, nothing grows your business better than growing your leadership, teammates, contractors, W-2s, and clients. Everybody is looking for someone to lead. For some people, it takes a while to get going but if you step into that role, people will follow. It’s amazing how that will happen. Everybody doesn’t.
In the call center business, we have had tens of thousands of employees. Everybody is not going to make the team. Everybody is not going to stay on the team. Some people are going to leave unpleasantly but as long as we did what we said we were going to do, that’s on them. We’re pure of heart and clean of conscience. We’re good to go. Those are great answers. Thank you so much. I’m looking for a nugget or some piece of wisdom that you hold near and dear to your heart, “This has been huge to us.” Do you have something you would share?
We’re a married couple raising kids and running a business together. I read something. I was a Psychology major. I’m always drawn to anything to do with organizational psychology and things of that nature. I was reading a column. This psychiatrist said, “Marriage advice, your spouse or partner is always doing more than you know they’re doing.”
In other words, when I start to feel resentful, “I’ve taken the trash out ten times this week. What has he done?” He has paid all of our business bills. He has scheduled several sales calls. I try to remember that. It’s hard. As you can tell, our lanes are intersecting all the time but I try to remember that I am doing a lot, and so is he. I don’t know everything that he’s doing.
Everybody needs a little grace every day. Years ago, I was in Bangkok, Thailand. I listened to an electrical engineer. She was talking about the relationship between human emotion and performance and how humans perform at their very best when they express or experience gratitude and at their very worst when they express or experience fear or shame. That put me on this daily gratitude path. I intentionally practice gratitude every day. I wrote a book about gratitude. I’m going to write another one.
At this point, Ethan, you talked about your mother’s wise words, “How are you going to feel about this in a few months?” You now got it down to three days. After years of practicing gratitude, I almost have it down to six seconds. Some people find this humorous but my reaction to negative events is to say, “I’m grateful. I don’t know why yet but I’m going to know. There’s something to learn here.” I’ll walk on water, and I got a bunch of problems of my own but I don’t have that anger and fear monkey sitting on my shoulder anymore. It’s all due to the daily intentional practice of gratitude.
In this day and age, instant gratification is ingrained in us. Anything worth doing usually takes time and patience. Whether you’re interacting with your significant other or you are building a business, you have to have the mindset that it’s okay that something takes time. I’m trying to lean into the idea of enjoying the journey more than the destination. It’s still hard but that is something that I’m trying to lean into too.
ProAssisting: Anything worth doing will take time and patience. Whether you’re interacting with your significant other or building a business, you have to have the mindset that it’s okay that something takes time.
 
The best things do take time. The low-hanging fruit is not the best. I don’t care what fruit tree you’re shaking. The lowest hanging is not the best. As entrepreneurs, I would tell you also to put this card in your pocket. My very first business way back in the day was phenomenally successful. We went from 1 to 22 locations with no outside capital and debt. We did it the old-fashioned way. We sold a lot, reinvested our profits in our business, and grew crazy. The more we grew, the more we sold but I learned something ten years into that business. I tripled my business in a day.
I learned it in an instant. I was like, “That’s magic there.” We implemented it that day. We went from doing this volume to doing this volume. Worthwhile things take some time but as an entrepreneur, sometimes, some days, and some ways, you can scale like that. I encourage our audience to keep their minds open, “Is that possible?” If your mind is not open to it, it will walk by you and you will never see it, hear it, feel it, or smell it but it can happen. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in.
We’re short on time. I have to ask you to be brief but I reserve the right to recall you for a future episode because I have many other things I want to talk about. Stephanie, I’m going to take you all the way back to twenty-year-old Stephanie. You get 60 seconds for 30-year-old Stephanie now to say thank you and share 60 seconds of wisdom with 20-year-old Stephanie. At the end of the time machine, you go all the way back. You only have 60 seconds. What do you tell her?
Don’t be afraid. What Ethan had said is, “Are you going to be worried about this months from now? Is this something to dwell on?” Take chances. I was pretty brave. I moved to New York City. I had no job or place to live. I’ve gotten a little bit more conservative as I’ve gotten older. Keep taking chances and going from your heart.
I love that. Ethan?
I would say to my twenty-year-old self, “Your twenties should not be focused on making money. It should be focused on your education.” I don’t mean college. I mean work education, being exposed to positions and roles, and working hard for what you feel is not enough money but understanding that foundation of knowledge can make you a millionaire by 35.
Your twenties should not be focused on making money. It should be focused on your education. Share on X
It’s putting that time in your twenties. It’s like You, Incorporated. Alex Hormozi says, “It’s not the S&P 500,” meaning investing money into S&P 500, “It’s the S&P and me,” meaning invest money in you, your education, and your jobs to put yourself in connection with very interesting and driven people even if the comp initially is low because you’re going to be building a foundation that you’re going to build off of from the rest of your life.
That’s great counsel. I have many more questions. Unfortunately, I don’t have any more time. I would like to invite you to come back at some future date and let me get to the second set of questions if that’s okay.
I’m sorry we took so long.
It’s phenomenal. That’s the episode. Thank you. We will see you next time.
 
Important Link

ProAssisting

 
About Ethan Bull
Ethan Bull is a co-founder of ProAssisting, a next-generation remote executive assistance firm for business owners and C-suite executives. With a background in hospitality and an expert in the EA space, Ethan has held a variety of senior positions, including Director of Administrative Services and senior EA to the president and CEO at Rochester Regional Health.
 
About Stephanie Bull
Stephanie Bull is ProAssisting’s co-founder and the former EA for J. Crew’s CEO and the CEOs of two multi-billion-dollar hedge funds. Before developing ProAssisting, Stephanie proved herself an expert in the field and a vital addition to the C-suite by fulfilling a variety of roles, including chief of staff, estate manager, and investment liaison.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S2:E38 | Dr. Mark Goulston, Author Of “Just Listen”
Date: April 25, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e38-dr-mark-goulston-author-of-just-listen/
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Hearing is innate to many humans, but listening is a skill we should master. Listening means you are paying attention to the speaker to understand deeply. In this episode, Dr. Mark Goulston, the author of Just Listen, provides insights on mastering the effective communication to persuade anyone. He provides some tips to help entrepreneurs persuade, negotiate, and sell. Lead with generosity that helps investors or other people become successful, and they will reciprocate it. Listen effectively. Tune in to this episode with Dr. Mark Goulston and learn the first make-or-break step in persuading anyone.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
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https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Audio-Published-Mark-Ghoulston.mp3
Dr. Mark Goulston, Author Of “Just Listen”
World’s Leading Listening Coach
I have a treat for you in this episode with Dr. Mark Goulston who’s the world’s leading listening coach and a leading thought leader. His book, Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, became the top book on listing in the entire world and was chosen as the number two best communication skills book of all time by MostRecommendedBooks.com. He’s a former UCLA Professor of Psychiatry and an FBI and police hostage negotiation trainer. I’m in over my head.
He’s the host of a highly-ranked podcast, My Wakeup Call and the co-host of Hurt Less, Live More with JJ and Dr. Mark. He is also the Cofounder of 90 Second Mentor on LinkedIn. Please welcome my good friend, Dr. Mark Goulston. I’m going to take you back to young Mark at age five, which is about when our memories start to function well. 5 to 18 in the house where you were raised, I want to know, did someone set an example as an entrepreneur for you in your childhood?
Nobody set an example as an entrepreneur. My father was raised during the Depression. He had a job for life. He worked at a liquor distributing company outside Boston. He was there for about 35 years. My two older brothers worked for companies and I went to medical school. I had the mindset of working for something much bigger but something that I discovered is that I’m a square peg. Every time I tried to fit into a round hole, it didn’t work.
I wasn’t entirely rejected by the round holes. I’ve just occasionally flirted with being an A-hole because I hang out with entrepreneurs. Many of them do more than flirt with it but I like the heck out of them. What’s interesting is I always noticed the elephant in the room that people didn’t notice. I felt a little bit odd. I heard from another group of entrepreneurs that many entrepreneurs didn’t fit in growing up and the world tried to break their spirit frequently.
Sometimes telling them, “Why do you have to be different? What’s wrong with you?” They weren’t trying to be different. They just couldn’t fit into the round holes. We have tons of examples from Ted Turner to Richard Branson and Charles Schwab. They just didn’t fit in. Early on in life, what I discovered also about entrepreneurs is 1/3 became entrepreneurs to escape the depression of not fitting in.
When you first said, “I was a square peg,” the inside of me was going, “Yay, a brother.” Many entrepreneurs are square pegs. Outsiders view entrepreneurs as being entrepreneurial out of a profit motive but in my experience, that is a small percentage of the time. I’m resistant to authority. I could not find a good leader to follow. I’m like, “I’m done.” I’ll be my own leader, good, bad or ugly and that’s what led me to my path. Tell us a little bit about the book with this whole, “Be a great conversationalist by not talking, just listening.”
I’ll tell you about the book but I’ll also tell you about how to be more compelling than convincing. One of the problems I find with a lot of entrepreneurs is they get excited about their IP and technology and they’re passionate about it. However, when they go out, especially to investors, the investors could give two hoots about their great idea because they’re hearing great ideas all the time. A lot of times, entrepreneurs will be excited about their IP, whereas what they have to realize is whom they’re talking to.
Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely to Anyone
I’ve spoken in Moscow along with Daniel Kahneman who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow. We were featured speakers and five of my books have done pretty well in Russia. Something that I’ve been trying to teach everyone since then and I’ve been doing talks to startup groups and accelerators is that underneath people listening to you, whether it’s 1-on-1 like you and me or 1-on-10 or 1-on-1,000, people are listening for something that they may not be conscious of.
I’ll give you an example of that with you and then I’ll give you the example that I give to startups who are pitching investors. You are checking boxes in terms of asking me good questions. “Tell us about your background and the book,” but underneath, “Tell me if this is what you’re listening for.” You hate to waste people’s time. You hate to waste your viewer and listeners’ time. Wasting their time is like nails on a chalkboard for you.
You’re always listening to guests that can give your listeners and viewers immediate value. By immediate, it needs to be relevant to what’s on their mind, helping them solve solutions that they haven’t been able to solve and giving them doable by them solutions so they don’t have to go out and buy books and take courses because many of them don’t have the time and they have too much ADHD to listen anyway.
You’re listening for people, I believe, who will honor the trust and confidence of your viewers who have short attention spans by giving them immediate value. You’re also listening for people who maybe you haven’t researched so much. They might have a bestselling book but they’re stiff. They are awful and you’re thinking to yourself, “I can’t broadcast this. I can’t post this. I have to protect my people from them.” Is any of that accurate?
Yes, it’s very accurate. I live in the world of easy, fast, smart and best. If it’s not easy, fast, smart and best, I am frustrated extremely so. I always live in that world. I believe that my mission is to help others help others. My goal for this show is to take non-entrepreneurs and encourage them to take an entrepreneurial step and to have entrepreneurs take another step by learning from exceptional proven entrepreneurs. I’m the Jiminy Cricket guide between my audience and guests like yourself.
Here are some tips for your audience that I hope will be practical. Your entrepreneur audience occasionally has to go out and get money from people who may not be that interested in their IP. If you’ve come up with IP that is going to change the world and it is obvious it’s going to change the world, be passionate about it and sell that but that’s less than 1%.
When I’ve been doing presentations to startups who need to get money, I say to them, “Do you ever start pitching to investors and after three slides, they smile and you think it’s a yes? It’s not a yes. Investors don’t smile, especially if you didn’t make a joke. It’s about money. They’re smiling because it’s a no and they’re thinking, ‘I’ve seen three slides. I don’t want to see it anymore. This person put a lot of work into this deck that I am not interested in and I don’t want them to catch me being rude so I’m going like this but it’s not a yes.’”
You need to have a few of those experiences and realize that at the end of it, you thought they’d throw money at you and they said, “I am interested. Send me a PDF or get out of my life.” They don’t say it that way. What you do if you’ve had this experience is stop yourself. Stop being so connected to your deck and say, “Can we stop for a second?”
They’re going to get nervous because you caught them not wanting to be rude to you and they go, “What?” “Can we pause for a second?” The jig is up and then you say, “When I started the presentation when we first met, you were listening for something and you didn’t hear it. In three slides, we got further away from what you were listening for and you’re smiling because you were thinking, ‘This is going to be a long deck to go through that I’m not interested in.’ Could you tell me what it is you were listening for? We might have it. It may be in the deck on slide 40 or it may not be but I can drop the slides. Tell me what you were listening for and if we have it, I’ll let you know.”
However, everybody in this world is networked. Here’s where you pivot from your closing a deal to building a customer for life. Here’s where you say, “Tell me what it is that you’re listening for and I’m guessing it’s something where you go back to someone above you and say, ‘I heard something and we got to throw as much money into it as quickly as possible.’”
You’re listening for a unicorn. “Tell me a little bit from your point of view about what unicorns look like. If you’ve ever brought one in or someone in your investment firm has done that, tell me all about that. I know a lot of people and companies. I won’t tell them that I’ve spoken to you but I might be able to introduce you to them. I’ll send you some little information about them. If it works out, you go invest in them. They love having your money. You will all take my call in the future because I focused on your success.”
One of the ways that I suggest living a long career is this is how you should live. You’re going to run into people who are reciprocators as opposed to takers. Stay away from the takers. That’s something I’ve learned in my long life. They’ll suck the life out of you. What you want to do is lead with generosity that helps those investors or other people be successful and helps the people that you might introduce to them be successful.
Lead with generosity that helps investors become successful, and they will reciprocate that to you. Share on X
What happens is if you do this enough, they’re going to get together and say, “We got to find out how to make Mark successful. He made this happen for us. You want to go drill down what Mark’s selling or you want me to do it but he put this together for us.” I always lead with generosity. I’m a little bit older. I’m on the board of advisors of eight companies. They all say, “We’ve got to do something for you. All you focus on is getting successful.”
I say, “Send me the paperwork and I’ll throw it away because I don’t have a filing cabinet.” I downsized. I said, “You keep track of it. If it makes a lot of money, you can give me a little bit of money. I don’t care.” They say, “We mean it. If it makes money, you’ve done too much for us.” I say, “I trust you and I’m not going to ask you for it.” It’s built such goodwill. Some of them are flirting with doing very well but that’s how I recommend being in the world.
We’re like brothers from another mother. In my consulting practice, I have what we call the Client Defined Payment Form. It’s not a webpage that you go to and it says it’s $10,000 or $20,000. It’s a webpage where you go and you define the amount that you’re paying. I have clients whom I share in the win but I don’t look at their P&L and deposits. If I didn’t trust them, I wouldn’t do it. Everybody gives and takes but some people take a disproportionate amount of the time and those people should be avoided.
I have people who pay for services on a schedule that we’ve agreed to but it’s not. I don’t have a way to monitor and nor am I concerned with that. It’s amazing that when you associate with high-quality people, high-quality events happen. When you associate with people of less quality, fewer quality events happen. I’m a big believer in The Go-Giver book. I don’t think you can out-give the universe.
My mission is to help others help others. What I’ve found in many years of entrepreneurship are some wildly successful a couple of stinker years. It hasn’t all been great. You are probably the 150th interview on this little thing I started, which has blown up but many entrepreneurs are somewhat accidental and the best entrepreneurs are huge givers. Sometimes to the point that maybe somebody should advise them, “You could tap the break a little bit. You’re giving away everything and you probably shouldn’t.” The home team is the home team. There’s a spouse and there are kids or grandkids. Let’s keep in mind what we’re doing here.
They are a phenomenal group of misfits in the world and maybe solutions to all the big problems. The government is woefully inadequate at solving any problem on either side. I’m not picking a side but entrepreneurs are problem solvers and the world’s full of problems. You get some great minds aligned and people that’ll be authentic, which requires being vulnerable and taking a chance, not knowing the outcome and getting out of your comfort zone.
What most people find is that you’re far better, smarter and stronger than you think. That’s one of my favorite quotes out of all the great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. There was Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh. Christopher’s a wise young man because you are far better, smarter and stronger than you think.
I want to bring up a problem that entrepreneurs need to address before they partner with someone, hire someone or marry someone. Before you get into bed, figuratively or literally with someone, first of all, you need to be someone who has a high priority in identifying and then dealing efficiently and effectively with any conflicts.
That needs to be a high priority because conflicts will happen and I’ve seen too many companies be brought to their knees because someone great technically, someone who may be a little bit on the spectrum or an engineer is not good with conflict. They’ll either get angry or avoid it. It can bring a company to its knees. One of the things you want to hire or marry for is you need to be someone who makes that a high priority. You need to hire or marry someone who makes it a high priority.
If you’re not good with conflict and you avoid it and you are overly understanding of the other person, it’s going to build up. You’re going to gunny sack your frustration and it’s going to turn into resentment and burnout. You avoid coming into the office because you can’t stand to see this person that you’ve been so understanding with.
Find that out. Ask them. The way you bring it up is you could say, “Conflicts in life are inevitable, either between you and another person, two people that you’re supervising are in conflict or you in your head.” They’re inevitable. “Tell me about those conflicts you’ve had in life and give me some examples.” When they give you examples, find out the time it took between identifying it, thinking their way through it and then taking action.
“Please listen to me.” You might say, “That’s a psychiatrist talking.” It is part of that background but for many years, people came to me only because they had a conflict with another person. They had a conflict with their mind and impulses. What’s interesting is if you dedicate yourself to being good at this, you don’t have to like conflict.
I coach people that whenever a conflict happens, they get excited about it because they can grow and test their metal against it. I remember one of my friends was the CEO of Advanced Medical Optics and they made Blink ophthalmic solution. He discovered that it was hurting the corneas and on the same day that he heard that, he took it off the market. It was the biggest product.
I called Jim Mazzo and said, “Jim, I’m so proud that you did this.” He said, “Mark, I’m giddy with excitement.” I said, “What? You better close the door. What do you mean you’re giddy with excitement?” He said, “Mistakes and failures are unavoidable but every mistake and failure in my life has made me smarter and stronger in ways I couldn’t predict. I’m giddy because I know this will do the same for me. I don’t know what I’m going to look like on the other end, except I’m going to be better.” I thought, “What a great way to look at conflict, mistakes and failure.”
Just Listen: Failures are unavoidable. Every mistake and failure in life can make you smarter and stronger in ways you couldn’t predict.
 
Here’s the other advice that I discovered. I’m a psychiatrist and during my career, we would sometimes put people on a 72-hour hold, which meant if they looked like they were going to be hurtful to themselves or someone else, we’d put them in a hospital where they couldn’t be. The best advice I’ve ever given myself was whenever something doesn’t go right or backfires, I say to myself, “Mark, put yourself on a 72-hour hold and don’t do anything to make it worse. Don’t drink, eat or yell at someone. Continue your routines.”
If I’m exercising, I exercise because what I discovered is about 80% of breakthroughs are preceded by breakdowns. That’s what psychedelics do. They break down your mind. What happens on the other end of it is you have breakthroughs. The problem is when you have a breakdown and you do something that makes you embarrassed or ashamed, you’re so busy feeling that but you will miss the breakthrough.
The potential for opportunity is outside of our comfort zones. Your friend was a master practitioner of gratitude. The person who could be grateful, not when things are going well but when things weren’t going well could find the bright side. The interesting thing about gratitude is the more you practice gratitude, the more grateful you become. The more grateful you become, the better things go and that’s the way it goes. Such wisdom to our readers. I want to encourage you that you can find Dr. Mark Goulston all over social media, several podcasts and his book, Just Listen. When Dr. Mark talks, I just listen. Dr. Mark Goulston, thank you so much for coming to the show.
The potential for opportunity is outside of our comfort zones. Share on X
Thank you for giving me a long leash because I took every inch of it.
You did great. I reserved the right to recall the witness at a future date for a future episode.
We can do that because I was an advisor to the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson trial, which taught me everything I know about dealing with difficult people. I had to confront F. Lee Bailey but that’s another story.
That’s another story for another day. Dr. Mark Goulston, thank you. That’s it for this episode.
 
Important Links

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone
MostRecommendedBooks.com
My Wakeup Call
Hurt Less, Live More
90 Second Mentor – LinkedIn
Thinking, Fast and Slow
The Go-Giver

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S2:E37 | Justin Breen, CEO/Founder BrEpic Life
Date: April 18, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e37-justin-breen-ceofounder-brepic-life/
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Content:
 
Our guest today considers himself a results guy but lacks in idea generation. What he lacks never stops him from creating an epic business and an epic life! What did he do to make it possible? In this episode, Justin Breen, Founder of BrEpic Life, dives into creating an Epic Life by partnering with visionaries to build successful global companies. Justin admits that there are things that he cannot do, but if you stay in your zone of genius and hire people to do things you can’t or don’t want to do. It’s the key to thriving and becoming abundant. Quench your thirst for wisdom, seep some insights, and sip to taste life in abundance by tuning in to this episode with Justin Breen today.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Audio-Published-TPE-37-Justin-Breen.mp3
Justin Breen, CEO/Founder BrEpic Life
Partnering With Visionaries Who Live In Abundance
I have an unbelievably good guest. I have Justin Breen. He is the Founder and CEO of the global PR firm BrEpic, an exclusive community platform of the BrEpic Network. He got a new book titled Epic Life. It features the foreword by none other than Dr. Peter Diamandis. It is the number one overall book for sale on Amazon Kindle, the Wall Street Journal, and the USA Today bestseller list. That isn’t easy. Justin, welcome to the show. 
It is great to be here. I was listening to your interview with Preston Brown. It is such a great interview. From the trailer park went to the country club to shower because it was cheaper. He creates some massive companies. That is entrepreneur life in a nutshell. I’m excited to talk to you.
Napoleon Hill said, “Oak lives in the acorn.” The mighty oak in a person’s life started out in that trailer park. That is awesome. I want to take you all the way back to little Justin, like 5 to 18 years old in your childhood, in the home or homes where you were raised. I want to know. Was there an entrepreneurial example for you in your childhood home? 
It is a good question because what Preston said is his Mensa dad. It is interesting that you ask about age five because that is when the brain starts to form and you can remember things. You are either born someone like this or you are not. I am strongly convinced about that. I was born to be this person, but the first chapter in Epic Life is about the cream rising to the top. That is something my dad said every day that he was alive that I can remember. That was from age 5 to 13.
He died when I was thirteen. He was 61 when I was born. He would be 107 now in 2023. He was a World War II hero. He was shot down multiple times in combat and many times without a parachute and got back on the plane. That is my litmus test. You are someone who can do that or someone who makes an excuse. I don’t understand excuses. It is illogical to me. Every day that he was alive that I can recall, he would say, “The cream rises to the top.” We partner with the cream that rises to the top or those that will get back into a plane without a parachute after another one has been shot down.
Aside from his military history, was he an entrepreneur?
My dad became an attorney in Nuremberg Trials and the President of an insurance company. In one of my earliest childhood memories, my dad’s best friend was assassinated in a famous gang shooting. If you saw the movie Casino, my dad’s best friend was the person who was played by Alan King, the guy who shot part in the parking lot. I write about this in the book. I remember it a little bit, but my dad was the clean guy in the organization if you want to call that entrepreneur, which I would.
Epic Life: How to Build Collaborative Global Companies While Putting Your Loved Ones First
Mafia is a well-run entrepreneurial organization. I don’t necessarily agree with the ramifications of not doing a good job, but it is an excellent entrepreneurial organization. One of my first memories is my dad saying, “My friend was shot. We have to hide.” He tried to hide us at some friends’ houses. I remember a little of that. He was entrepreneurial.
What about this? Sometimes a person’s first paid gig as a child was entrepreneurial. They had a lemonade stand, or they were shoveling snow. Sometimes it was a job. What is the first commercial activity you did? What’s the first thing you did where you traded time, effort, energy, and brain power for dollars?
I have done hundreds of interviews. No one has ever asked me that. That is such an interesting question. Most of the people I talked to, if not all of them, started their entrepreneurial journey even before they were ten. I think you were nineteen and you were the top salesperson in the company at nineteen. I have a different type of journey. The first company is a PR firm. I was a journalist for several years and created an entire company based on how PR firms annoyed me for several years. I don’t know what PR firms do. They bothered me.
I started that six days after turning 40, after my job salary was cut in half as a journalist on February 10th, 2017, two months before I turned 40. The first entrepreneurial thing I did was when starting my first company, and the first check that said BrEpic would have been in May of 2017. It was for $500. I’m happy to get that check.
One of my previous guests, Shahar Erez, an Israeli entrepreneur, did not begin his entrepreneurial journey until he was in his 40s. He is a highly educated MBA Stanford guy, many years at HP, but didn’t start until his 40s and went from startup to $100 million exit in 30 months. Part of that was God or the universe giving him some good cards. He was smart enough to play them well. 
You are 1 of 2 of about 150 interviews now that I wouldn’t even say that late. I would encourage anybody in the audience. No matter what your age is, come to light, drop the W-2, and do something for yourself. It is never too late. We are still back with young Justin, 5 to 18. Your dad tragically passed away when you were an adolescent. When you graduated high school, you followed his footsteps in the military across Europe. You went to university. What did you do?
No matter your age, drop the W-2 and do something for yourself. It's never too late. Share on X
I did apply to be in the Marines, which would have been good, but I wound up getting a full academic scholarship to the University of Illinois. It was called the Illinois War Veterans Memorial Scholarship. You had to have a parent or an uncle who had served in either, at the time it was World War II, Korea or Vietnam. You had to have a high ACT score. I was fortunate to win that scholarship.
We could have paid for college regardless, but I’m like, “I can’t turn down a full academic scholarship to a Big Ten school.” I wound up going to the University of Illinois and majoring in Journalism. That is a big reason why I never became an entrepreneur until turning 40 because you don’t go into journalism for employee account revenue office space. You do it because of purpose, and that is what you are meant to do. I did that and still do it. I have done it most of my life. I love doing it.
Does that mean you were a reporter or a writer? 
People like us are usually aliens within our own families, communities, and verticals. The only people who understand us are top entrepreneurs on the planet. When I was a journalist, it turns out I was an entrepreneur who happened to be a journalist. I never understood journalists who were writing about negative news, or if it bleeds, it leads, or political news. I don’t understand or ever pay any attention to that. I was always writing about and connecting with cool people, changing the world. That is what we do all day now.
You needed a little more time to bake before you could emerge from the oven and start your entrepreneurial journey. BrEpic is a global brand. You service what type of clients? 
I’m 100% a simplifier, meaning my brain takes all this and simplifies it into patterns. I don’t know why my brain does that, but that is what it does. We only partner with visionaries who live in abundance and look at things as investments, not costs. Not business owners, consultants, or humans, just pure visionaries. There is no scarcity mindset. There is no, “What do you cost or charge?” There is only, “What does an investment would look like?”
There has been nothing outbound, sales, or any marketing gimmicks in years. It’s just to create value for visionaries, and they introduce me to awesome people. It is a lot of fun being in that space all the time. If you’re not a litmus test for the people you serve, you are a hypocrite. The purpose of my life is to be a connecting superhero for every visionary who shares their stories with the world. I’m a visionary sharing my story with the world.
We met virtually but through a mutual friend, Mark Koenig. 
He is a pure visionary. He dresses better than I do. Mike and I could not be more different in terms of outward appearance and flash. He loves using the word sizzle. I like this gray shirt. I wear this shirt or one like it 5 to 7 times a week, and this hat, which has the dog chewing out of it. I wear it every day. Mike travels the world, and I’m at home with our two sons and my wife most of the time. That is a perfect example right on cue. Mike and I have the same mindset. We have the same abundance and visionary investment mindset. He is a fully visionary, fully lives in abundance, and fully looks at things as investments. All our companies are hundreds if not thousands of Mikes introducing each other.
It is hard to imagine. I may have commented, “I want to be like Mike.” I’m stealing on the Jordan jingle, but almost without a peer on the planet. 
I don’t understand conformity at all. It makes no sense to me. For whatever it is worth, 1 to 2 times a day, people tell me, “I have never met anyone like you before. I have never talked to anyone like you.” I’m like, “That is the point, embracing your uniqueness.” Mike certainly does that. You do that. You realize you weren’t a conformist in human society so you created your own world, which is smart.
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You couldn’t hurt my feelings any more than saying, “You are average.” That would crush me. 
We were at Abundance360, Peter Diamandis’ event. That was an average human at that event. It was 400 Mikes, which is amazing, horrifying, incredible, outstanding, and transformational. That was the average person there. It was amazing.
Thinking back on your entrepreneurial journey, can you think of a hard lesson or something that occurred that, at the time, it is like, “That hurts, burns, stings, and I do not like it?” After some time, it elapsed. You looked back, and you said, “Now that I have the perspective of time, it was a positive for me, but it did hurt at the time.” 
My brain turns everything into patterns. This is what separates entrepreneurs from humans, consultants, and business owners. I have not met one person like us. I’m not talking about the silver spoon. I’m talking about a true entrepreneur that started something from nothing. I have not met one of those people that hasn’t overcome at least one of the following four things. Almost everyone I talk to now is 3s and 4s, and most of those are all fours. These are the four things that separate entrepreneurs from humans.
1) Bankruptcy or potential bankruptcy. 2) Depression. 3) At the highest level of anxiety that you can imagine. 4) Likely and/or possible experiences as a child or young adult. For humans, business owners, and consultants, those are excuses. That is what entrepreneur life is. I’m 3 of those 4. The only thing I haven’t had to worry about is bankruptcy or potential bankruptcy.
The biggest lesson with those four things that I learned in several years of being an entrepreneur was, at the end of 2018, I had made more money in one year than I had ever thought possible because that is not why you go into journalism. I had never been more miserable in my life. I’m like, “That is interesting.” At the time, it was painful. I’m glad I went through it because I learned that more money doesn’t equal more happiness.
To me, it is a magnifier. If you are grateful and joyous, you will be more grateful and joyous with more money. If you are anxious, depressed, and fearful, more money will make you more anxious, more depressed, and more fearful. It magnifies what you do. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it does mean you can go to better places and stay longer. For the normal entrepreneur, it is come and go a couple of times in a career. Non-entrepreneurs think it is all that straight line, but it is not. Almost every entrepreneur’s had their toes dangling in the abyss, looking out over their toes. 
I have several friends that are former US Military Special Forces. When you listen to them recount Seals, Marine Recon, or the training that buds all that they go through, it becomes evident that the soldiers, sailors, and Marines that achieve that level are the people who won’t quit. That is the common denominator. They are not the biggest, strongest, or toughest. They just will not quit. Entrepreneurs have a similar gene somewhere.
Entrepreneurs are the most damaged people with the best coping skills, the most depression, anxiety, trauma, and potential bankruptcy, but they have the highest IE, EQ, and the most hustle. My father was shot down multiple times in combat and many times without a parachute. He wrote a diary from the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest towards the end of World War II. It is a deadly battle. I found that after he died. Every day, it gets more horrific, but that is entrepreneurial life. You can do that, or you can’t. I don’t understand people would quit. That makes no sense to me. I don’t even use the word failure even though I did, but the real failure is quitting. That is the only way to fail.
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Many people from the outside view “failing” as the opposite of success. In fact, it is a necessary component. 
It was interesting because I brought those four things up. What happens is people talk about, “I got a car. The revenue is up.” I talked to them about the four things. Almost always, now they check and check. They start talking about who they are and what is behind their success, which are those four things. I was talking to one of Africa’s top entrepreneurs who’s made and lost millions if not billions. He took it a step further. He was like, “You have to go through those four things.” I don’t necessarily agree with it, but he was adamant about it. He was like, “That is how you transform from pride to purpose. The only way to transform from pride to purpose is by going through all four.” I thought that was interesting.
I love what you said about the person that you are because I have known this about myself, and it is true of humanity, is that most people are two people. They are the person who is out in front of the curtain, the onstage person, the person they want the world to think they are, and there is the other person, the real person who is behind the curtain, who knows things that they don’t share, tell, and demonstrate. The real magic for me happened, and Mike get some credit for this. It was when I poked my face through the curtain and stepped to the front. That person who had been front stage vanished. I encourage my clients to step through the curtain into who they are. 
You are being a litmus test for the people you serve. Otherwise, that is logical. The ones that are not being litmus tests for the people they serve, or they are doing something that isn’t the same thing for the people they are trying to help, is pointless. How can you help people if you are not helping yourself first or being an example of yourself? It is illogical.
You cannot pour into other people if you are empty. 
It makes no sense. You are a logical person. I’m guessing a lot of that is learned. What happens is you talk to people like this, whether it is recorded or not. The only difference between this conversation and most of mine during the day is this one is recorded. When you talk to people like you, Mike, or Preston over and over, you see the patterns and things. The ones that are “successful” are litmus tests for the people they serve. They are doing the same thing for themselves first.
I will give you an example of what my brain does with the patterns. I keep making bigger investments to be in smaller rooms, but the people in those rooms are making bigger impacts. It is the same formula. Bigger investment, smaller room, and bigger impact. That allows me to spend the biggest investment in the smallest room, which is my family, where I can make the most impact. It is the same formula.
How can you ask people to make bigger investments in you or your company if you are not personally making bigger investments to be in smaller rooms? It is illogical. You can’t ask people to make bigger investments than you or your companies if you personally are not making bigger investments than others or other groups. That is not how it works.
Let’s talk about PR for a minute. I know a fella in Dallas who was a many-year television reporter, Jeff Crilley. All I know about PR, I learned from him. He said, “I don’t know that much.” His core skill was he could get a story, and he could meet a deadline. That is important in that world. Give us something that our readers can say, “I got something I know about public relations.”
At the highest level, there is no competition, only collaboration. The formula for creating a successful global company is surprisingly simple. You see a problem, create a solution, problem solved, and be a successful global company. All I hear from all these visionaries is they saw a problem, a gap, a loophole. They created a solution. They did it. They solved it and became a successful global company.
I hear the same problem, “We are tired of being secret. We want to be in more news media.” It is usually at a global level to create validity and credibility. If you want to call that PR, that is fine. They share their stories. I was a journalist for many years, and I created an entire company. My first company is based on how PR firms are annoyed. It is to solve a problem and create a solution.
My company’s solution is it is on the website. There are no tricks or gimmicks. Anyone could take it, but anyone at the highest level would never do this themselves. They would find the best people to do it. That is flying the plane here. I will even land the plane, which I don’t like to land the plane. I’m going to do it. The company’s entire process is on the website. There are no tricks and no gimmicks. I have no idea what PR firms do because it is never on the website.
I was annoyed for several years receiving hundreds of press releases every single day from people I don’t know. That is a problem. All my firm does is it writes stories similar to what I did as a journalist. It becomes a link on the partner’s website under news or blog. It looks like a story you see in the Dallas Morning News. Take that link and pitch it to media all over the world. Media is interested because of years of trusted relationships. They want to do a story and introduce a partner to the media. They then do the interview. Problem solve and successful global company. It works for any company and location.
The only vertical we completely ignore is politics because it is the opposite of visionary abundance at best of mindset. It is not that I don’t like it, but instead of action, it is cost instead of investments. I ignore it completely. Any great entrepreneur would completely ignore politics anyway because you are going to get stuff done regardless of who is in charge. Those are partners all over the rural world, all verticals, and all company sizes. That is immaterial. We only partner with visionaries.
Epic Life: Politics is the opposite of a visionary abundance investment mindset. It’s argument instead of action. It’s cost instead of investment.
 
We are coming into the home stretch. I can see the checkered flag out in front of us, but I’m going to ask you the tough question now. I will put you in a time machine and send you back to talk to twenty-year-old Justin. You get a couple of minutes to share with Justin something you know you wish he knew then that would have sped or eased your journey somewhat. What do you tell your twenty-year-old self?
I wouldn’t have changed anything. I’m glad this didn’t happen, but I would have taken one entrepreneurial class in college taught by an actual entrepreneur. I still don’t know what an S-Corp is because that is funny not to learn what that is. I didn’t know you had taxes four times a year. I didn’t know any of that stuff. It was great because I started with a foundation of things that I never cared about anyway. I could focus as much as I could on purpose, which is what I did as a journalist. It has now exponentially grown. It would have been nice to know what the entrepreneur world even was because I had no idea this world even existed until starting. It has been fun.
When I started my first company a long time ago, I did not know what a P&L was. 
I have no idea what that is. What is a P&L?
Your profit and loss statement. I had no idea. For our readers, don’t let what you don’t know to intimidate you. Start ugly, start where you’re at, do what you can, and take the next step. That is how you do it. 
I will even double down on that because what you said is important. There are things that a child or a monkey can do that I cannot do. Holding a pencil is hard for me. Tying shoes or putting on my children’s bike helmets is difficult. I can do it, but it is hard. I will walk away from a puzzle. In terms of connecting people on the global level and getting them into media, not only is that fun and I’m good at it, but I love it.
I never get tired of it. I stay in my zone of genius and unique ability, which is a strategic coach term or MTP, moonshot, and I hire other people to do the stuff I don’t want to do or I don’t do it. I’m a good dad, a great dad, and a decent husband, and I’m good at this but no other skills. I know what I’m good at and what I like to do. Regardless of what business you are in, the key is doing what you like to do and what you are good at.
Epic Life: Do what you like to do and what you’re good at.
 
There was a book on leadership that came out a couple of years ago, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. It talks about everybody has a zone of incompetence, competence, excellence, and magnificence. Even when you use that word, most people withdraw a little bit. They are like, “That is a big word. That is a heavy word. I don’t know that I do anything magnificently.” I’m like, “I assure you do.”
The interesting slant they had was that the zone of excellence, where you do things better than most people in the world, is a dangerous temptress because, as opposed to your zone of magnificence or zone of excellence, there is little to no risk. You know you are good at that. Brené Brown would say, “You are swinging in the wind. You are vulnerable.” You don’t know what’s going to happen. You can’t control the outcome. That is where you can be your best.
One of my first speaking engagements was with Mark Koenig. I was walking out on the stage. There were 300 or 400 people in the room with full lights and a monitor. I felt like I froze for a minute. I walked out there. I couldn’t find anything to say, and I stood there like a big cow for a whole minute. I didn’t say anything. 
What was interesting was this. I was fortunate enough that people came up and wanted to talk to me, which was nice and also meant they were customers. Nice people are nice, and customers are nice too. A good friend of mine was complimenting me. I’m like, “What about that minute when I froze?” She looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?” When I went back and watched the video, I did freeze about a second. 
It slowed down that much for you.
What I would compare it to is the person who is in a car wreck and says, “I could see the car coming. I could see their facial expression. It got slow” It didn’t get slow. The phenomenon there is your brain gets fast.
One, that is interesting. Two, I could picture standing in front of the crowd and standing frozen. That would be interesting to see. There are two times that I feel like what you described. One is if I’m driving, I like having a fast car because it helps me focus. I’m driving a car over 130 miles an hour. My car will not allow me to go much faster than that. They put some restrictor plate in it, which is annoying, but I’m total focus. The second time was skydiving, free falling through the air. It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds of free falling, but it felt pure calmness and focus.
We may be brothers from other mothers. I love gravity, roller coasters, double black diamond ski slopes, cars, and trucks. I love gravity, and I love to feel it in volume and intensity. I’m going to be in Africa for a few weeks. I’m blessed, fortunate, and grateful. Somebody asked me, “Are you going to swim with the great whites?” I’m like, “Yes, how could you say no to that.”
That is my five-year goal. We have a vision board upstairs. One of the five-year goals is to swim with great white sharks.
I’m going to do mine from the cage.
My wife is a pediatrician. She thinks the opposite of us. This is how I parent my children. This is not a joke. It is going to sound like a joke, but I’m being serious. Silly, okay. Stupid, not. Swimming with great white sharks in a cage is silly. Without a cage, that is stupid. The other advice I have for them is a misdemeanor is okay, and a felony is not okay. My wife was like, “Go to school and learn.”
My boys are both grown, but when they entered high school, I can remember telling them, “This can be a pleasant time. It also can be a brutally unpleasant time, but it is temporary. Once you are out of high school, you will be out three months, and it will feel like you are out three years.” The big goal is this. You are going to make some mistakes. That is all right. Don’t make big mistakes. Don’t get dead, pregnant, or addicted. There are a couple of don’t gets. Other than that, life is about learning. I was fortunate to raise independent and strong children. 
There is nothing even in the same ballpark, but by far, the best part is the kids get to see this world even exists. They can do whatever they want with it. Most people don’t know it even exists. They are not even aware of it. My kids, whatever they want to do is fine, but I’m glad they have this foundation of understanding the global nature of our world, how fast things are coming, why it is important to connect with the right people, and not be afraid to take risks. It is a wonderful thing to give them this foundation. That is what I’m most grateful for by far.
I want to highlight something you said. You said, “I see patterns.” We live in a crazy world of what everybody’s referring to as AI. My personal slant in AI is we use several tools for several specific purposes. I love that, but to me, the machine is not intelligent. The machine has processed unbelievable amounts of data in a supercomputer and is able to recognize patterns far beyond what a human can do. When you do a prompt with ChatGPT or any of the others that are out there, it is performing what a Google search bar would do except on steroids. It is looking at much more data. Because it has some language processing laid on it, it is able to appear to talk to you. 
What is happening is the data has been turned into numbers. Your prompt gets turned into numbers. The processing power does pattern recognition. He recognizes patterns. It takes the numbers it gives you and translates them back into words. It is a valuable skill for a human to recognize patterns because what we forget is this. Every 100 years, you get all new people. Institutional knowledge goes forward at a snail’s pace because every 100 years, you get new people. It is helpful to recognize powers. 
My favorite one is right mindset attracts the right network. It creates the right opportunity. The right mindset attracts the right network. The wrong mindset attracts the wrong network and creates no opportunity. Visionaries live in abundance and look at things as an investment cycle. That is the right mindset that attracts the right networks and creates the right opportunities. I found all this other stuff takes care of itself. That is one.
Two, I’m a 100% simplifier. Everything is a pattern. I came back from Abundance360, which is the top AI, futuristic, any who of anything was at that in terms of technology. That is great. I’m thankful for that. There are two things that will never change. This has been proven every 100 years and 1,000 years. One is the power of real human relationships. Two is the power of storytelling, hieroglyphics, smoke signals, the Bible, and the Constitution. We are a world of storytelling. AI is great, but all AI to me is it will create better human relationships and better storytelling.
Two things will never change: the power of real human relationships and the power of storytelling. Share on X
I love that. How can our readers reach you? How can we support you? Is there anything I can do for you? Three questions and one, how do we reach you? What’s the easiest way to get in contact with you? 
This is a tremendous interview. I’m looking forward to seeing your score. You have to be at least an 8 Quick Start. I’m going to guess you are a 5-3-8-2.
I’m writing it down to see if you are right. 
Mike is like a 3-2-9-5. A maniac is a compliment to me. He is a full maniac. I’m 8-6-7-1. You will never meet another 8-6-7-1. I have never met one. There is one reason why I’m saying it. It is BrEpicLLC.com. There is a mindset scorecard survey. It takes five minutes. It is through the strategic coach platform. What I have found is qualified people disqualify themselves with their own mindset, and people like taking it. That is on the site.
Is there anything the show can do for you? 
It would be interesting for everyone to take their Kolbe. The only thing I write down before I meet someone is their name and their Kolbe score.
I’m going to take it now. 
You are a high Quick Start. We only partner with visionaries. Almost always, there are exceptions. I’m an exception. A true visionary is usually 8, 9, or 10 in Quick Start.
I love all of the assessments. I can remember the first time I did Myers-Briggs. I was contemplating going into partnership with a gentleman. He wanted me to take it. When it came back as INTJ, which there is not a whole lot of us out there, he was like, “It is wrong. There is no way you are an introvert.” I was like, “I can do the extrovert thing, but I charge my batteries and refuel alone.” I can do the extrovert thing better than a lot of extroverts, but only for a while.
You are an ambivert. If you are around people like us, you are an extrovert. If you put me around regular humans, I’m the biggest introvert. You could put a lampshade on my head. I’m useless. My wife says three words to me before parent-teacher conversations, “Don’t say anything.” I don’t say anything. I just stare. The teacher was like, “Do you have anything else to add?” I shake my head. I’m not allowed to talk.
My wife sometimes says, “Please be good.” 
I see patterns. Not always, but usually, people like us marry stabilizing humans. People like us go, “Is your spouse a teacher, a social worker, an engineer, or a lawyer?” My wife is a pediatrician. They are like, “How did you know that?” I go, “Imagine marrying yourself. That would be a bad idea.” That would be horrible, but it does happen.
Occasionally, a visionary will marry a visionary. One of two things happens with that. One, it is the greatest life of all time with endless adventures, swimming with great white sharks, no cages, and attacking the great white sharks. You are both going for it. More often than that, it is a complete disaster because there is no stabilization and multiple divorces. That is why people like us marry stabilizing humans. What does your wife do?
My wife is an artist. 
What is her degree in?
Her degree is in Fashion Design, which is art. She is a painter. It is common for somebody to say, “She is joyful.” 
People meet us. They were like, “You are kind.” I used to have all these parties and stuff pre-COVID. I start doing it again. My wife is kind, loving, warm, extroverted, and pretty. It is fine, but people get confused. They were like, “This doesn’t make any sense.” I’m like, “It makes perfect sense.” My wife takes more chances in life. I’m sure your wife does too. She made you a human.
She certainly makes me far better. There is no doubt about that. I’m a better human unit with my wife. 
You got a 155 IQ person. One hundred forty is genius. You are way above that. That is not a compliment. That is true. You are like, “I’m a better human unit because of my human wife.” She was like, “What are you talking about? Stop that.”
She knows when to ignore me. 
My wife was like, “How do you talk like that all day?” I go, “This is how I communicate.” I see people as numbers. She was like, “You have to stop doing that.” I go, “That is how I see the world.” That is fun because some of that rubs off on that. They are like, “Let’s go swim with sharks.”
I have so enjoyed our time together.
It is hilarious. Congrats on being a human, by the way. Good job.
I want to encourage our readers to be better human units. It is in your power. You can do it. It is not that hard. You just have to want to. That’s the first step. It has been a fun day, Justin. Thank you so much. I’m so grateful. 
You are great. I love it.
 
Important Links

BrEpic
BrEpic Network
Epic Life
Preston Brown – Past Episode
Shahar Erez – Past Episode
Abundance360
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
Kolbe

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E36 | Sean Magennis – CEO Mutual Capital Alliance
Date: April 11, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e36-sean-magennis-ceo-mutual-capital-alliance/
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Content:
 
Experience is the mother of all wisdom, for we learn from our experiences. But we don’t have to experience the mistakes others make in their journey. If we could share each other’s experiences, we could learn meaningfully. Sean Magennis, the CEO of Mutual Capital Alliance, discusses how the forum provides a shortcut for your entrepreneurial journey. Sean also takes us on a rollercoaster ride of impostor syndrome and how dealing with it differentiates a successful entrepreneur from an entrepreneur. Learn more from a seasoned entrepreneur and leader by tuning into this episode. There’s so much more to unpack today!
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Sean Magennis – CEO Mutual Capital Alliance
Former YPO Global President & COO, EO Global President, CEO Coaching International President, Lumini Chairman
Do I have a great guest for you? In this episode, our guest is the CEO of Mutual Capital Alliance, which we know is founded by my good buddy Rick Sapio. He’s the Chairman of a company called LUMINI Network and a past President of CEO Coaching International. Check this out. He was a seven-and-a-half-year past President of YPO or Young Presidents’ Organization and was President of EO on the member leader side. Sean Magennis, welcome to the show.
Don, thank you for having me. You aged me there with that introduction but that’s fine. We season and age well as we go through life.
We do season and age and some of you do it well, like yourself. 
Thank you. It’s great to be with you. I’ve been looking forward to this.
My pleasure. You bring a unique skillset to the show because you have a very solid entrepreneurial history and executive history where you have served in organizations where maybe you had a stake and equity but you were not the primary. I’m so excited to have you. I’m going to take you back to young Sean. Think back to when you were 5 years old and advanced up to 18. We’re going to talk about that time range of your life. Your accent tells me you were not born and raised in East Texas. 
I was born and raised in South Africa.
I don’t know if you know this but my wife and I are headed to South Africa. We’ll be in Cape Town and running amuck for three weeks. 
Is this your first trip to South Africa?
Yes. Hopefully, they’ll let us come back.
After the show, if you need any recommendations or some insights, I’m sure you have it all planned but I do this so often for friends and I go back every year so I’m very current. If you need anything, give me a shot.
Afterwards, I certainly want your input. Anyhow, we’re back to young Sean in the home that you were raised in. One of the adults in your home, mother, father, grandparents or whoever that might have been, was anybody an entrepreneur? 
Both my parents were entrepreneurs. My mother and my father and my mother’s mother was an entrepreneur. My grandfather passed in his early 60s. He and my grandmother had come through Africa during the Second World War. They arrived in Durban. My grandmother was a nurse and a matron but she ran one of the convalescent hospitals for wounded soldiers in the Second World War. My grandfather had been in the military, had retired and died. My grandmother had ten daughters and she had to care for them. She started three butchers after her nursing career was over. The war was over.
She put ten girls through school, got them all out of the house and married well. She was an extraordinary force of nature. She died when she was 97. You can imagine she ended up with 32 grandchildren. My mother put my father through university. He worked in the brokerage business and learned sales. He was an accountant. The partner started an office furniture manufacturing business and went through all the trials and tribulations of an entrepreneur. My mother would renovate national monuments and Victorian houses. She had a real estate sales business. They were hardworking people all their lives.
There was no hope for you but to be an entrepreneur. 
I’m 1 of 3 siblings. None of us joined either my mom or dad. My mother would’ve liked my brother and me to join her in her business but we didn’t. All three kids have benefited from the work ethic and the example of our parents.
When I first started the show, I thought, “Every guest will have this great entrepreneurial legacy.” That’s not true. It’s about a half and a half. About half of the great proven entrepreneurs had no entrepreneurial example. They were just wired that way. There’s some of that. We’re still back with young Sean. Tell us about your first job or entrepreneurial venture and the first time where you traded skills, time and effort in return for money. 
At fourteen years old, I was a swimmer and a water polo player. The high school I went to did not have a swimming pool. We had to go to the public school up the road, which was filled with people. We had two lanes. We’d have to ride our bicycles up there and come back. At the time, the government school said, “You’re allocated some money to build a school but you’ve got to go out and raise some X amount of dollars.” It was maybe $100,000. Let’s use that number. It was somewhere in that range. They said to a group of us kids, “You need to help out.”
I was so passionate about the cause. I don’t know why but I got the challenge. Every evening, I got on my bicycle and had a form that explained it. I went door to door. I started in my neighborhood with people that knew me. I worked out neighborhood by neighborhood. At one point, I was going 5 miles out, which was quite a long way. I raised individually $12,000 all in cash over a period of the year.
My scariest experience was about 7:00 one night. It was dark. I go up this long winding driveway. I could hear some dogs. South Africa’s very security conscious. The door opens and this Doberman Pinscher comes out and bites my leg. It bit me below the knee. I didn’t break my skin because I was wearing jeans. I must have looked like a deer in headlights. It was my best sale ever. This lady gave me $200 to keep me quiet. I may have shed a tear, which is not bad.
Even though the money wasn’t coming to me, I discovered that I had a gift for telling the story, sharing a concept and having somebody believe in me enough and trust me that they made the investment. Every single one of those individuals got an invitation to the opening of the swimming pool. Once we raised the money, it took another year to build. I only got the benefit of using it for one year, my last year at high school. The thrill was to know that that was part and parcel of our contribution. Imagine the pride that you have in that. It was fantastic. That was the first.
My natural being, I love people that are not scared to ask for money. I’ve lived on the sales side of all my businesses and so many times, entrepreneurs have an unbelievably good skillset but it’s not asking for the money. Truthfully, regardless of your business, the marketing and sales piece is probably the most valuable piece of anything that you do. 
Also, patience. The second story was about my mother. She was in residential real estate and had her business. She would do open days and open houses every Sunday. She was a single parent. My brother and I, typically on a Sunday, my mother would not want to leave us at home because we’d get up to no good. My sister was good. She’d dress us up, put us in a jacket, coat and tie and give us the information or the tear sheet on the house.
She trained us. We would only speak if we were asked a question. If we didn’t know the answer, we’d say, “My mother will have the answer.” We did hundreds of open days with my mom showing people through homes and we learned what people liked, what things were not great about the house and how to overcome objections. We learned that by watching her, listening and doing.
We’d go to church and go to an open day. I would say that was probably three Sundays out in a month. It was a phenomenal experience. A couple of big lessons are being able to show up well-prepared and being a good listener. We would take notes. My mother didn’t have time to meet with them. She’d have a set of criteria, write down what you heard and then grade them. “Is this a high prospect, a low prospect and a medium prospect?” She was smart and we learned a lot as a result of that.
Show up well-prepared and be a good listener. Share on X
Also, we learned to interact with all types of people from all walks of life. Also, people in different economic spheres. My mother was a stickler for manners. We always had please and thank you. We always opened the door and closed the door for an adult. We were very well-schooled in that area. I laugh because it brings back great memories.
Many young people don’t have the opportunity to learn with persistence and repetition and that doesn’t help them. I can think of my first job. I was on the back of a John Deere tractor in a wheat field at Wheat Harvest driving a tractor for twelve hours a day. I learned right off the bat what hard work was. I learned I didn’t want to be a farmer. I was like, “I’m going to have to do something else because I don’t want to do this.”
If you knew my mother or you spoke to anybody that knew her, my mother was a cleanliness fanatic. We’d go into some of these homes. We’d get there a good hour, an hour and a half early because we learned some people hadn’t made their beds. We would be making their beds. I can make a mean bed, Don. I went to boarding school from the age of seven. I went to the Army. I know how to iron, sew and make a bed.
My mom could rely on us. If the kitchen was dirty, we were in there cleaning. We knew the relation to the success of a sale meant that my mother could pay the mortgage and our school fees. Living in a single-parent household, you’re very well acquainted with the bottom line. My mother schooled us. She wasn’t holding anything back. We were part of the team. All three of us.
Truthfully, the family ought to be the primary team. That makes sense. “We are the team.” We’re moving past your school days. You went to university. Did you join the Army first? 
I went to the Army first. I did two years full-time. We were drafted into the South African Defense Force. I had a ten-year commitment. You did 2 years full-time and then you had to do a couple of months a year for as long as it took for you to accumulate 10 years’ worth of credit.
In the US, it’s what we would call the Reserves. 
You went into the Reserves after your first two years.
After that, you went to university? 
Correct.
Was it a university in South Africa?
Yes, a great little university called Rhodes University in a town called Grahamstown. It’s a university town. They had a specialty in law and phenomenal English faculty. It has one of the best pharmacy faculties in the country. It’s a very good geography school. It was initially funded by Cecil John Rhodes. It would be in the top five universities in the country. I initially thought I’d go into Law. I did a very broad Bachelor of Arts degree. I double majored in Industrial Sociology and English. I threw Psychology in there for a couple of years. I decided not to go down the Law route but maybe the Psychology route would be good.
When I immigrated to Canada, I started a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology because I thought that would be something that I could leverage at some point. In hindsight, maybe some business courses would’ve been great. I did take a year’s worth of night classes and got diplomas in Financial Management and Marketing but not at the degree level. I got the basic tools and then got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. I left the Master’s degree because I started to make some good money. That’s what got me on an entrepreneurial venture of my own.
What was your first entrepreneurial venture as an adult? What was your first company? 
It was called Thomas International. It was similar to a franchise model. I acquired the distribution rights for Canada initially to a suite of psychometric and employment testing tools. A group of psychologists out of the UK had created these tests back in the day for the UK military. They were using them to determine math, reasoning and working memory behavior. They had a DISC tool as part of their foundation, like a Myers-Briggs type tool.
Mutual Capital Alliance: A group of psychologists out of the UK creates psychometric and employment testing tools for the UK military. They use them to determine math, reasoning, and working memory behavior.
 
I had been a client of theirs in South Africa. My first job was working for a friend of mine’s dad, who was a top entrepreneur. Part of the training that you did was learn how to recruit people. As part of that training, you had to learn how to interpret and diagnose these test instruments so that you knew what you were reading and looking at.
I’d spent a year getting certified. On my way to Canada, I popped in and met the owners of this firm, Ray and Doreen Reed, a fantastic couple and their son Martin Reed. They took a shine to me because when I got to Canada, they said, “Why don’t you go and meet our distributor in Vancouver who hadn’t been doing very much with the license?” I gave them my report after a series of meetings and they said, “If you are open, we’ll allow you to have the city of Toronto but we want you to produce.”
In my 1st year, I sold over $100,000 worth of tests. I set up my shingles and LLC. The next year, I took over the Vancouver license. The rest is history. I built up that business over fourteen years. I ended up acquiring the US rights as well as the Mexico City rights. The was the advent of computerization and the dot-com world. I convinced the owners to allow me to invest my money in developing a web-based solution for scoring and online reporting, which I ended up owning and then selling very successfully in 2003. I sold that business in 2003 after a fourteen-year run. It was a great experience.
The US operation was based where? 
I based it in Dallas, Texas. I moved here in 1999. I met my wife at EO. My wife was the first woman president of EO. That’s how we met. We met in YEO back in the day when it was called YEO. María Cintrón is an amazing woman. My single greatest benefit of the O organization is having met and married María.
The home team is still a primary team. Here’s my YEO story. I don’t recall the year but I’m living in Wichita Falls, Texas. I have a company and we’re doing very well. One of my clients called and said, “Don, you should look into this group called YEO and join.” I was like, “Tell me a little bit about it,” and he did. I said, “I’m not a joiner and I don’t play well with others. I’ll pass.” Years later, I’m introduced to EO and it takes about a year before I found out it was YEO back in the day. It’s funny how life works. My first bite at the apple, I said, “No, thanks,” and I’ve gone on to have quite a bit of involvement with EO. 
I know you have. Thank you for doing that because EO is built on volunteering. It’s the same as YPO. They are 17,000 members in EO in 2023. It’s all on the shoulders of folks like yourself. I played a small role. María and thousands of other people did. I look back and go, “I learned so much about being an entrepreneur from my fellow YEO and then EO members and then YPO friends and members. I can’t tell you.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving too.
When I joined EO, I had been an entrepreneur for 25 years. I probably had not asked anybody a question in twenty years and I certainly didn’t share anything with anybody. It’s the peer experience for entrepreneurs. Though, it would probably relate to other people. 
It does. It translates so well. If you look out there and see the number of peer groups that have sprung up, a lot of them were stimulated by YPO initially. You’ve got a plethora of community groups or peer-oriented groups where people learn from each other. You think of the classic Twelve-Step program. All of the fundamental characteristics of learning from adversity, shared experiences, observation and through trial and error, you get so much of that and in groups like EO, it makes it more real.
Mutual Capital Alliance: If you look out there today, several peer groups have sprung up. Now you have a plethora of community groups or peer-oriented groups where people learn from each other.
 
There’s this whole series of debates and articles about Imposter syndrome. I was a victim of Imposter syndrome in the early part of my entrepreneurial journey because I was very fortunate. I worked hard for everything but you start to develop success. You look back and go, “Is that real? Can I get more? Can I get less?” You start to question. Being in a group of other EO members where you see the ups and downs, it’s a true microcosm of life, Don.
You see the reality of life. Life is messy. It goes through its phases but with other people. My friend Rand Stagen says, “Go on the path together.” I love that quote because that characterized my life. I could not have imagined all the various things that I’ve experienced. In every single experience, there have always been catalysts and supporters, people that have put me on their shoulders. I’m eternally grateful.
I’m glad we’re spending a little time talking about the Os and all of that. Maybe we can start a new O. Who knows? An EO member company has to have minimum top-line revenue of $1 million. There’s a certain percentage of members that own lifestyle businesses and are not derogatory at all. In any country in the world and certainly in the United States, having a lifestyle business for many people is a lot of contentment and freedom above and beyond a W-2 job. In YPO, there are thirteen million in 2023. Also, a little different mix of entrepreneurs but also level executives and family businesses. 
It’s roughly 1/3. It’s slightly more family-owned businesses, some multi-generational and entrepreneurial but are equal. The smallest group is about 25% of the total membership of seasoned professional business executives.
That’s a great mix. Fortunately, the two organizations, YPO is based in Las Colinas and EO is in DC. They’re very collaborative and have a lot of cross-cultural activity, learning and sharing. An average member of EO will tell you, “EO changed my life.” 
It changed my life. There’s no question about it. YPO is a big part of that. When I joined EO in 1992, we just had over 500 members but I was told in my recruiting that we had 2,000 and it was a giant fib. That was my dear friend Peter Thomas, who was the greatest salesman at the time that I’d ever met. He was the Founder of Century 21 in Canada. He’s an amazing businessman and a great friend. Peter was running the recruitment team.
I joined the Toronto chapter when we had zero members. I was a founding member. I went to a meeting the day after our evening presentation. Peter went around the room and nominated everybody for a board role and said, “Your goal is to get us to 50 members in a year. You get your charter status. Good luck. Here are some tools and away you go.”
I went home and said, “I’ve paid $2,000 to build an organization. What’s going on?” It was a fantastic experience. As a result of that, I got involved in volunteering for leadership on the YEO board back then. It wasn’t the board. I was like a subcommittee of the board and they said, “Would you like to tackle getting the forum up and running?”
They had a basic forum program which was cobbled together based on what YPO was doing. They said, “YPO has generously offered to have you come down and spend a week in Las Colinas with their head of the forum. They’re going to train you and give you all the materials. We’d like you to then take it on, take backup to Canada to your office and create the EO version of the forum.”
I came down. I spent a week with this delightful woman by the name of Maria Johnson. She was fantastic. She was running a forum at the time and that’s what I did. Our executive director got very involved and then he started his forum business. The gist of the story was we were gifted by YPO a lot of best practices and then molded and customized them for the unique entrepreneurial community, which is EO, a slightly different community.
We seated some amazing EO members who became certified forum facilitators because they became passionate and good at it. It’s people like Ellie Bird and Sue Hesse but they were all YEO members. They became institutionally famous both in EO and YPO and have delivered incredible value. We went from the basics to officer training to then scaling that and then being able to take that around the world. If you think of where it started, it started in YPO. It then morphed and grew. In some ways, it improved. There was cross-sharing so everybody rose together.
That is the cornerstone and probably still the single greatest benefit for both of the O organizations. The essence of the forum is how you authentically and vulnerably show up in a safe space with your peer group and contribute through experience. That was the unlocking maneuver that created something extraordinary in the world.
The essence of a forum is how you authentically and vulnerably show up in a safe space with your peer group and be contributed to and contribute through experience. Share on X
I concur. I did not know that history. I’m thrilled to know that history. For our audience that maybe is not familiar, forum is an old term and probably back to the beginnings of humanity, it was a place where people shared ideas. We see it a lot in Roman history. That’s what started showing up a lot as a forum in the O organizations. I love that. I’m so stealing that, Sean. 
Steal it with the greatest of pleasure, Don.
At least I told you. I’m an honest thief. In the O organizations, a forum is maybe 6 to 10 individuals who get together once a month for probably 4 or 5 hours. They take a trip. Sometimes it’s to Las Colinas, Las Vegas or South Africa. They take a trip somewhere and spend 2, 3 or 4 days together. They decide their commitment. If they have a goal, they decide their goal, as well as they should. They share business, family and personal experiences in an environment of no expressed judgment. It’s a very safe place to share. 
I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been in my chapter forum for many years. I’m in two regional leadership academy forums. Those are quarterly because they’re people that are all over. I’ll have a forum experience with every O member almost every time. Anna Burch told me one time, “I didn’t use to tell anybody anything and now I tell everybody everything.” There’s some real benefit to that. 
Do you know what I love about it, Don? I can meet an EO member or a YPO anywhere in the world who’s in a forum. Instead of taking 1 hour or 1.5 hours and you don’t get to know the person or second-guessing within 2 minutes. That’s the nature of the conversation because you are schooled in being authentic. You could say something like, “Don, I’d like to bring you into my confidence. Could we treat this in the same degree of confidence that we treat each other in the forum?”
Any mask drops. Automatically, you’ve given each other approval to tell it like it is. I wish we could bring that to many more conversations, whether it’s in community areas where we seem so at odds with each other. If all we did was utilize the fundamental concepts of suspending judgment, listening without the judgment, hearing somebody, meeting them where they’re at and then holding that confidence so that you don’t take that and tell it to ten different people, that would change a lot of conversations, wouldn’t It?
If we utilize the fundamental concepts of suspending judgment, hearing somebody, meeting them where they're at, and then holding that confidence so that we don't take that and tell it to 10 different people. That changes a lot of conversations. Share on X
No doubt. We’ll change the world one person at a time. We won’t push a broad brush across humanity and change the world. It’ll happen one person at a time.
It’ll happen meaningfully one person at a time. For me, it’s why I’m still in the forum. I’ve been in my new YEO gold forum for years. That’ll age me, Don. I have my forum meeting. Every month, I cannot wait to spend time with nine other individuals who are so different from me with different lived experiences but who have my back and I have theirs. I’ve been in a forum since 1992. I’m not overly committed but I’m sold because of the value that it’s contributed to my family, my business and myself.
I can’t tell you what a luxury it is, particularly at certain times when I’ve been down. I’ve had a failure. I’ve had a death in the family or something going on that’s challenging. I can take it to my forum not to dump it on them but to let it be and get some feedback. It happens every time. There is somebody and sometimes multiple people in the group that have been through a very similar experience and can provide you perspective. Sometimes, it’s all you need and your family gives this to you but sometimes it’s good to get that virtual hug from a group of people that are intimate with both your personal, professional and business life. It’s like free therapy in some instances. Sometimes you need that.
You brought up Imposter syndrome. It’s human. It’s not negative. Everybody has some of it sometime. Maybe for the entrepreneur, they’re like, “I’m going to dominate the globe and sell a bazillion of them. I will be the king of the world.” At 2:00 in the afternoon, we lose a big client or a key employee. Can you ride that rollercoaster? At the lows, that doubt is all it is. It gets bigger and you’re farther away from it at the highs. You don’t see it but we could rename it a human syndrome because it’s as common. If you’re breathing, you have it.
We all have it. It’s how we deal with it and the awareness of it. Once you’ve been through that cycle a few times, it helps you manage it in a much more proactive and calmer way. Certainly, that’s been the case for me.
Once you name it, you can claim it. I’m feeling a little of that and I know that’s not the truth. It’s a little reframing and life gets better. It’s an unbelievable career. I’m going to take you back and ask you a hard question. I want you to think back on your career as a hard lesson. Many times, people look at entrepreneurs and think it’s all rainbows, unicorns, sunshine and tulips but many times, it’s not. Can you think back across your career to a moment where you’re like, “That hurt?” Maybe after we have the beauty of the perspective of time where we get some distance on it, we can look back and say, “That did hurt but maybe that was the best thing that could have happened for me at that time.”
Mutual Capital Alliance: Once you name it, you can claim it. It’s less reframing, and life gets better.
 
2008 and 2009 for both myself and my wife María was a very difficult period. I had spent the previous five years with a fabulous guy who lives in Fort Worth named Don Osberg. He’s an amazing businessman. He came up through the city group of companies. He was a bank’s Chief Financial Officer and ended up being the CEO of Diner’s Club. Done, me and some business partners had created a financial revolver structure or a loan structure to stimulate the development and construction of low-income housing in Mexico.
We had a great financial partner whom I’d worked with previously in my previous business, a large global banking business. We were chugging along and doing very well. With the financial collapse of ’08 and ’09, our lender went out of business within two weeks of the crash. Simultaneously, my wife and her EO partner were building second homes in Mexico and their lender, all of their capital, also within two weeks. You had both of us out of business. I would never have predicted that, not even in a million years and not for both of us at the scale. We were fortunate that we had some runway, worked out of it and didn’t have legal cases and neither did María.
We ended up having to pivot and find different sources of income. When you’re a two-income entrepreneurial family and you have this already established level of success and you have to start again in many ways, it was a very confronting and embarrassing set of circumstances out of our control. The lesson learned there was always to have a plan B when it comes to capitalizing one’s business. For your readers that are entrepreneurs in business, having rainy day funds is very important.
If you’re the sole proprietor and you’re funding it yourself and if your business has the ability to throw off cash, make sure that you have as much software as possible to at least cover you for six months, if not a year, in a liquid vehicle and that you can get your hands on quickly. When you go from chugging along with a regular line and you go over the cliff and you suddenly end up within 2 weeks down to 0 and you’ve still got to make payroll and vendors that you have to pay, you’ve got to execute on the contracts that you have in place.
If you have no capital and reserves, then the implications and what happens are very serious. That was a pivotal lesson. It also gave us both a little perspective in terms of if one of us was overly leveraged on risk, the other had to be leveraged the other way on security in terms of the way that we were working. There are a lot of entrepreneurs that have had multiple failures. Particularly from circumstances that challenge you, if you learn, those lessons are invaluable.
That lesson came at a point where I’d already sold a company and built a very nice business. I had no expectation of that happening. There’s always a silver lining if you are whom you say you are and you believe in yourself. I had a track record. I knew that I could bounce back. I took a small group of people and started a little consultancy. Within three months, I was back cashflow positive and built another nice little business but it was that tough.
Here’s the other thing. We had structured our lives so that we weren’t living beyond our means. We had a beautiful home but we didn’t have a mortgage payment that was taking 2/3s of our monthly income. We didn’t have massive car payments. We weren’t buying expensive things. We were living comfortably and well within our means, which enabled us not to get panicked and do silly things. That was a profound lesson and there have been many lessons along the way where I would say if I had to do it over again with this experience, I would’ve done things a little differently.
As would we all. If I knew then what I know now, I would’ve made some changes. I love that. There’s a real golden nugget in there. I remember when my boys were becoming of age to drive, I said, “When cars touch, that’s called an accident. Cars are not supposed to touch. Airplanes are not supposed to touch. Businesses are not supposed to run out of money.” Job one is to keep some money. We saw that in spades in March of 2020 when the US shut down. Companies that had no cash had a hard time surviving. Companies that had a safety net were able to make some progress. 
One more thing, Don. I learned with the people that you hire. I was blown away by the loyalty and commitment, how people took reductions in pay and how everybody got together. That’s a factor in the culture you set. If we’re authentic leaders and we’re in it with the employees, it makes a massive difference. I’ve seen other circumstances where less than appropriate CEOs, people bail because they weren’t investing. There are a lot of other things that we could unpack there. Cash and make sure that you communicate transparently with your people during a crisis. If you don’t, you are not going to get that commitment that I certainly have received and that I’ve seen others receive.
It's who we are as leaders. It makes a massive difference if we're authentic leaders and are in it with the employees. Share on X
When you look at your team and the people that are wearing jerseys, some people are on the team and some people are just wearing the jersey. They’ll be the first to go. It takes a little reflection of yourself as a leader. If your ratio is out of balance, the real teammates and the pretenders probably start not there but at another level. I’m going to ask you the tough question. This is the one that stumps most people but I gave you a forewarning. 
Sean, I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to transport you back and you’re going to get about 60 to 90 seconds to talk with 20-year-old Sean. I want to know what you would share with Sean that would help speed him along his entrepreneurial journey. Into the time machine, you go. All the way back. Here’s Sean. What have you got?
I first say to Sean, “Don’t ignore the hard details of life. Make sure that you educate yourself on paying your taxes when you start a business, setting up your finances and your planning so that they are clean and pristine and you know where everything is. Take the extra time and make sure of the partnerships and people that you’ve done your homework and due diligence. Without people, you can get nowhere. Some people are out there and they will take advantage of you.”
“Thirdly, align yourself with experts early that have been there and done that circuit that can help you shortcut some of the mistakes that you’re going to make. You don’t need to make some of those mistakes. If you swallow your pride and you go and ask the appropriate people who’ve got the credibility, and standing to help you, that will save you in the long run.” I’d then go, “Take risks and have fun. Don’t put yourself in a box because there’s so much life to live.”
How can we help you? Is there anything we can do for you? 
Don, thank you for that. Entrepreneurship is the future of the planet. Anybody that can create something that can sell something of value, that can provide their ingenuity to the world, we should be supporting them. That starts at the community level. It starts with early childhood education. For those of your readers that have young kids, teach them the fundamentals of not only how to fish but somebody said something else to me interesting and it’s how to sell the fish once you’ve caught fish.
Mutual Capital Alliance: Entrepreneurship is the future of the planet. We should support these entrepreneurs who can create something and sell something of value that can provide ingenuity to the world.
 
I thought that was brilliant because I’d always had this big favorite thing. If they teach somebody to fish, they can feed themselves for a lifetime. You still need to sell that fish. If you can start early and meet people where they’re at, that’s brilliant. My desire is to be human with each other. Let’s accept each other, be kind and give each other a hand up and a leg up. In my experience, giving has enabled me to receive way more than I’ve put in.
On the fish analogy, I might even add one thing. Keep in mind that I’m a sales guy but learn how to pre-sell that fish. Go sell it before you catch it. 
Don’t catch too many fish. Pre-sell it.
Do it on a subscription recurring revenue model and life will be good.
Life will be fantastic. Don, what a pleasure spending time with you.
My pleasure, Sean. Thank you so much. I’m grateful. 
What can I do for you?
I’m always stumped. Ask it and people rarely do so I don’t know. I reserve the right to provide an answer for a future product. That’s okay. 
You have whatever you need.
That’s it for this episode. See you next time.
 
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For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
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Title: S2:E35 | Tara-Nicholle Kirke, CEO SoulTour
Date: April 4, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e35-tara-nicholle-kirke-ceo-soultour/
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Content:
 
Life is full of ups and downs, and it is never meant to be approached in a linear way. If you want to thrive and find numerous solutions to your problems, you must learn how to train your creative mind. This episode features author, transformation expert, and spiritual strategist Tara-Nicholle Kirk. She shares how a rough childhood and a major economic recession opened her eyes to achieving personal growth outside her comfort zone. She explains why going beyond your zone of excellence can reveal your real genius, become less tactical, and result in a profound inner transformation. Tara also explains how her daily rituals and meditative practices led to the creation of SoulTour, a company that helps people tap into their spiritual self and unlock their biggest potentials.
 
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Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Tara-Nicholle Kirke, CEO SoulTour
“I Turned Down Not One But Two 7 Figure Deals To Stay On Mission.”
What a treat I have for you. Tara-Nicholle Kirke is a globally recognized author, a transformation expert, and a spiritual strategist. She has taught at her very young age over 50,000 people how to shine their light and quit hiding their light. All people maybe suffer from a little impostor syndrome somewhere. The most impressive thing I know about Tara is two times in her life, she turned down seven-figure deals to maintain her path on her mission. Tara, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It’s funny to have what you didn’t do, what you chose not to do, be one of the biggest indicators of who you are, but it’s true. I love this. Let’s chat.
I think of the Warren Buffett quote, “It’s not what you say yes to. It’s what you say no to.” He claims you should say no to about 99% of the things that come across your desk. What was that old saying? “Just say no.”
Do you know what I think is interesting? We were talking about the zeitgeist before this and what’s moving in the ether, the ways people trends and stuff. There’s this popular trend I’m seeing of people saying no to a thing and still defining themselves by it by making it be this resistance, “I resist to that.” I’m like, “No, because spiritually, whatever you resist, you truly bind yourself to. You don’t want to define yourself by what you choose to say no to.” You want to say no so that you might say yes to something else. I teach my students that we say, “I decline to participate in that.” I don’t have to resist with all my might. I decline so I can go do this thing that matters.
I’m going to take you all the way back to little Tara, five years old in the homes that you were raised in, however that looked. Was there an adult who was an entrepreneur and set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young child?
Yes. My parents both worked for the phone company. My dad is still the smartest person I’ve ever met, which is saying something because I’ve been everywhere in this world. Now people would probably call them side hustles, but my dad was one who had a job so good that he couldn’t afford to not do it. He got his real estate sales license and a contractor’s license. During the time that my parents were married, they bought and sold 33 homes together, fixes and flips. They would fix and flip homes, then my dad would do this thing where he’d buy a lot and build a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, or an eightplex on it. Sometimes he’d run them out for a while. Sometimes he’d sell them.
My dad is like a math whiz. He runs math in his deal math in his head all the time. That’s how I grew up. It was interesting because later in my life, I would be in the real estate business for a while. I was a young woman. I noticed that all of my friends who were also young women were very intimidated by the idea of buying and selling homes and the big math. I never had that in part because I had spent much time doing big math with my dad on deals when I was a very young child.
Isn’t it true that what you get used to, you expect as normal? If you think small, then small is normal. If you think medium, then the medium is normal. If you think huge ginormous mammoth, that’s normal.
I’m in the process of moving to Europe. I’m in all of these communities of people who are making similar moves at the same time. Many of them are not entrepreneurs. It’s been interesting for me because I’ve been an entrepreneur for so long. Even when I wasn’t an entrepreneur for stints, I still was an entrepreneur and because much of my world is filled with entrepreneurs, it’s been interesting to see how other people think.
I hear people say things like, “I can’t afford that. My budget for this is X.” That’s not even a thing in my world. When I was talking to my realtor in Portugal, my budget for a lease is $4,000 to $12,000 a month. It doesn’t matter. Whatever I love, I can flow the cash for. My income has always been very elastic. Normalizing that was the thing that happened growing up in my household.
There was never a conversation about what wasn’t available, what wasn’t possible, or what we couldn’t afford. It was more like, “We want to send the kids to private school. We want these cars. We want this house. We want to tie it this much.” That backs you into the math of the deals you need to do. That was how it was.
It’s what you accepted as normal.
It was and is my worldview. For that, I give thanks because my children live wonderful lives. Maybe in a bad way even, my daughter doesn’t know that affording it is a thing. She’s like, “We’ll buy another one.” I’m like, “Yes.” We also take care of the things we have. She’s like, “Just get another one.”
I’ve got a good friend, and they’re Chinese. He was talking to me about his daughter becoming reliant on the person who helps in the house. Her mother said, “I need you to clean up your room.” She said, “Sally will do it.” She was like, “We may be a little off track here with the three-year-old.”
My daughter doesn’t make her bed. We have an au pair at home and a part-time nanny. She goes to full-time school. We have housekeepers. I’ve been challenging them to include her, not just because I think it’s good for kids. It’s good to know how to make your bed. She doesn’t know how to do that. It’s also good to know that it’s good for her to see that I know how to get help. Our lives are beautiful and we get to spend a lot of time doing the things that are important to us because we have all these people who help us. Nobody’s job is above or below somebody else’s job. We exist in this beautiful ecosystem. I love that I get to support many other people in their businesses or their goals.
Our lives are beautiful because we get to spend time doing things that are important to us with the help of other people. Nobody’s job is above or below somebody else’s job. Share on X
There’s a certain nobility in any labor. Tell me about your company, SoulTour. Tell us about that.
It is not an R&B music concert. Every once in a while, someone’s like, “Soul Train,” and I’m like, “No.”
I know what Soul Train is. They got some miles on them if they know what that is.
Those are my favorite kind of people. We are a personal growth school. We are a school of business mastery, life mastery, money mastery, and self-mastery. We offer group and individual coaching programs, and lots of various courses and ways you can engage with us. The core of what we do is we help the ambitious spiritual maximalists.
People who are deeply spiritual, smart, and successful, but probably not all the way fulfilled. People come to us when they start to ask that question in their lives like, “If I don’t be my big self, and do my big dreams now, when will I?” They come to us for help doing their big dreams, learning who their real true self is, and what their real true self really wants, and then fulfilling their biggest potentials and their biggest dreams before they die.
For most of our people, those big dreams include the calling to build an empire of their soul, to build an actual highly aligned and profitable business empire brand. Sometimes even media, podcasts, YouTube channels, or whatever it is that transmits the transformational message or life’s work that they came here to create. We helped them build the empires, and not just to the end of making money, but so that they might also live lives that they were born to live. That’s what we do at SoulTour.
It took me a while to figure out what my mission was, but once I was able to define it with laser precision, everything else began to fall in line. If it doesn’t fit my mission, I say no, regardless of how attractive it may seem to be temporary, because it’s not meant for me.
It can be great for someone else.
It’s something good for somebody. It doesn’t happen to be me.
It’s a super elegant way of talking about what this work is. There is a hero’s journey that underlies getting there. You said it, and these people reading this learned it. It can take people years to get out of the scarcity that I call the trance of fear, the fear of what will happen when you’re no longer getting it, doing what you do for external validation, but for internal validation. Breaking the trance of scarcity has to happen for you to have the courage to say no to wonderful opportunities. Wonderful opportunities will come. Do you know the book, The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks?
The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level
Sure.
It’s a beautiful book. He talks about the four zones of human endeavor. There’s your zone of incompetence, “Great. You shouldn’t be there.” The zone of competence shouldn’t be there either, but that zone of excellence and genius is where the smart, successful, spiritual ones get hung up because in your zone of excellence is where people will pay you a lot of money and make great offers to you to stay there and not come into your zone of genius.
Those are the offers almost every one of our clients has because many of them are coming out of successful careers in corporate or successful businesses that they hate. They often have that thing on the archetypal hero’s journey where the hero is issued a call to the adventure over and over and refuses the call a bunch of times when they accept the call. Doing your real Big Dreams causes you to feel exposed and vulnerable. My students when they come in almost all are like, “I’m very excited and terrified.” I’m like, “You are paying attention. That is a sign you’re doing it right.” If there’s no fear, are you even getting outside your comfort zone?
I’m like, “You’re doing it right, you’re paying attention. That’s why you feel that.” We help them work by transmuting that energy of fear into awe at their own coming expansion. We give them skills for recalibrating their nervous system, out of these trances of fear, scarcity, and trauma sometimes because someone who didn’t have the childhood that I have financially can come to the entrepreneurial table with some real serious in their body, visceral reactions to some of the things that you will be challenged with doing as an entrepreneur.
We help them work on integrating that, deactivating that in their energies, and then, is the real fun part. Only after you’ve done that work are you in a position to meet your real self and let your real self set your real purpose, vision, desires, intentions, and goals when fear is no longer hijacking your real self or hijacking the driver’s seat of your life.
When you talked about the zones of excellence, magnificence, and genius, I know for myself and for most people, the zone of excellence is like a temptress. It wants me to stay there because I’m good at all this stuff. I’m better than most people in the world, but there is no risk or vulnerability. I can’t fail in that zone. That tells me it’s the wrong place.
It’s a shadow of the right place. There’s some essence to it that’s like kind of almost. That was me at MyFitnessPal. I was the Chief Marketing Officer of one of the largest health and fitness companies that ever existed. I loved it. I loved the people that started that company. I loved our team. I loved our two-year run from 45 million to 120 million customers and almost $500,000 acquisition. It was a wonderful ride. I was still doing this thing where I was like, “What do I care about?” I care about coming against the number one source of self-sabotage in human experience, which is internalized repression.
I care about people knowing that they are deeply beloved of this universe, whether they ever lose a pound or not, whether they earn another dollar or not, whether they ever start a business or not. What I know people want is to lose weight. How about I work in weight loss, but I have this huge platform and I can slip all these other messages about radical self-acceptance? If your career or most of your day is spent head-faking people into the real thing that you care about, it’s entirely possible that this is a shadow career for you in our zone of excellence, not genius.
If most of your day is spent head faking people into the real thing you actually care about, you are only doing your shadow career. You are in your zone of excellence, not genius. Share on X
People hear me a little bit on a thing and they’re like, “I’m going to take her advice. I’m going to let myself want what I want.” They sit in their daily ritual or meditation, catch a vision for what they want to do with their real calling, real big dreams, and start working on it. What they build is still a shadow version of that. There’s all this perform, conform, produce, conditioning that happens in us when we’re very little in this culture.
It’s like success is at the end of this treadmill, where you keep checking these boxes of what culture calls success. Even if you’re achieving that, performing, and getting that validation, it’s never going to feel fulfilling. That’s why you see people be like, “I got a call the other day. I made my first $1 million at my job in 2022, why does it feel bad?” “Welcome to you’re about to accept your call to the adventure of doing what you can’t do.”
Here’s what I know about comfort zone physics. We like our comfort zones because it’s comfortable, but when we leave our comfort zone, when we step outside when we get in the frame, our comfort zone grows. We leave again and it grows. One of my favorite quotes, and why everybody ought to get out of their comfort zone, is from a wise philosopher. It’s, “You’re far better, smarter, and stronger than you think.” That was Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh. It’s one of my favorite quotes of all time. I’m a big fan of wise words, from Aristotle, Socrates, and all of them, but Christopher Robin had it going on.
Christopher Robin was awesome. In my household, we listen to a lot of kid audio books. On YouTube, there has a rendition of the whole long original Winnie the Pooh that we’ll listen to for hours on end. It’s great. I also think that Winnie the Pooh in that version of the book was like the OG body positivity radical self-acceptance like guru. He’s in the mirror being like, “I’m short stout, and I’m great with that. Know why I like to exercise? It’s because it makes me hungrier so I can eat more honey.” Yes, Winnie the Pooh. That’s right.
I’m still back at little Tara. Your parents did a great job. What a great example.
They were nuts too, to be clear. They were also crazy. I say that because my parents were geniuses, and are still geniuses and are somewhat crazy. When you do experience childhood trauma, it can be wired into your nervous system that you don’t necessarily know there’s another world beyond that and/or with entrepreneurship, a lot of people when they realize that their trauma is part of their self-sabotage, they think they have to wait until they’ve totally healed the trauma to start the thing. Not understanding that the callings of your soul businesses will take you on a path to heal whatever needs healing. I say all the time, “You think that the business exists for you to work on it. I invite you to the point of view that the business has work it wants to do in you.”
You and I are going to be friends for a long time. Back to young Tara, the first job or the first entrepreneurial venture you had, but the first place that you made money.
I tried to sell my brother in the grocery store when he was born. My mother did not let me, so I did not make money doing that, but I did try and I was charging $25, which I feel was pretty good in 1980. That was the thing that happened. My mom tells that story every time people are like, “When did you know she was an entrepreneur?” “She was five.” That happened. There’s another story she tells all the time that is awful.
That’s the one we want.
The preschool teachers would pay me $1 to watch the other kids during nap time so they could go to the corner store next door. My mother found out about that. I’m four. I don’t need to take a nap like those kids. I need to sit with the teachers who are drinking coffee at four years old. I always was that probably too old for my body. I like to think in retrospect that they maybe were humoring me and went to the back of the school or something, but my mom tells it as though she got wind of it. It was like a problem for her that she was paying them to watch me and I’m watching students.
One thing that was very formative for me and my entrepreneurship approach was that my parents were part owners in a racket club when I was 7, 8, 9, or 10. I got to sit behind the snack bar. Racket clubs are weird because there’s all this physical exertion. Racket sports are super intense physically, but then we always had a big-screen TV and a big leather couch. We always served fries and beer. I don’t know what the philosophy was there. I remember I was very excited to be at the snack bar. I go serve you a beer and some fries. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to be able to, but that’s what was happening.
It was that Jane Fonda era and we had an aerobics room. I got to see these women, first of all, get dressed up in all their aerobics gear come hang out with their friends and work out. Being a 40-year-old woman working out with my friends has been my vision, dream, and goal since I was eight. Now I feel like I’ve very much arrived in life because I’m doing it.
I became very fascinated with self-sabotage, behaviors, and how people would come and they would be there every day for a while. They would fall off and you’d never see them again. That idea that people know what it is that they’re supposed to do and struggle with getting themselves to do it became very fascinating to me then. It’s still the core thing that I work on in the world. I had a coach ask me one time, “What problem would you be excited to work on for 30 years?” I’m like, “I’ve literally been working on that problem for 30 years.”
That is such a worthy calling.
Fitness is the best example. Everybody knows they need to eat less and exercise more. There will never be another answer to how to improve your fitness. That’s always been the answer. Everybody knows that. They don’t need help knowing what to do. They struggle with getting themselves to do it and getting themselves to do it in ways that will work consistently long-term, which sometimes means in ways that are fun. I’ve always been and still am fascinated by that. Humans are messy and marvelous. I love that. My whole entree to that topic was through the lens of my parents offering this entrepreneurial solution to that problem. If I knew my gym served fries and beer, maybe I would go more or not.
Creative Mind: Humans are messy and marvelous. Everybody knows what they need to do, but still struggle to get themselves to actually do it consistently.
 
Nowadays, that’s not going to happen.
It’s probably not a good plan. There was always one heart attack a year at that place.
In the days of Google reviews and Yelp, as a gym, we got a 4.2 rating with 75 heart attacks a year. It’s probably not going to work. I want you to think back to your marvelous career. I want you to think about an event where when it happened, it was like, “I can’t believe I’m going to have to go through this pain.” Maybe now, in retrospect, where you have some distance, you can look back. You’re not looking forward and you’re not looking down on it, but where you can look back, where maybe that event was one of the most significant events of your life. Do you have a hard moment you could share with us?
In 2008, I was in the real estate business then. How fun is it to be in the real estate business during the real estate recession? It was awful. 2008 was a year I lost everything. I lost my business. I got divorced. One of my children went back to live with their father. It was bad and wonderful in terms of the insight and who I became at that time. The first thing that happened was it got me off the treadmill. Remember I was talking about that treadmill where you’re just, “You’re doing the success stuff.” I have an old set of kids and a new kid. My old kids, which I do call them by the way, don’t love it.
One of them is adopted and the biological one of them I had when I was seventeen years old. I was sixteen when I got pregnant. I had this intense lifetime as a child. I’m a very highly gifted, performing, and validated child, then I made this wild left turn in my life. Through a series of miracles, I managed to start college when I was sixteen. I got my Master’s and Law degrees. People showed up, kept paying for it, and kept inviting me for their education. I took them up on it.
I had been one of those people that was feeling like I was making up for my mistakes in life by checking the boxes and doing it all right. 2008 was when I got the message that you can’t outperform unwanted events happening in your life. There is no world in which you get to do it so right by some external standard that nothing bad happens to you. I was like, “All right, God, noted.”
Creative Mind: The economic recession of 2008 proved that you cannot outperform unwanted events happening in your life.
 
That’s a little bit untethering in ways that are wonderful and very challenging at the moment of them. If you’ve lived your whole life up to then, following the cultural checklist, there’s this moment where you’re like, “That doesn’t matter anymore. Now how do I navigate my life? How do I decide what’s next when external validation, money, or the prestige of whatever is not going to be the thing?” You got to learn who you are.
One thing that I noticed at that time was, especially because I was in the real estate business, I got observant. I observed something that will stay people in good stead this season. There are people who will thrive in any climate. It does not matter what is happening in the market, what the economic crisis is, recession, pandemic, or whatever. There are people who will thrive with integrity, not by taking advantage or looting.
I set out to study almost what was it that was causing some people to thrive and others to not. I came to the conclusion at that time that we all think it’s about getting our decisions right, making the right moves, and having the right strategies, and it’s really not. If there’s an 80/20 rule, only 20% of whether you thrive in a crisis like that is based on your actual strategic decisions. The other 80% is based on your inner well-being.
Are you clear-minded enough to make a bold executive decision, see what works and what doesn’t work, and course correct? Are you grounded enough? All entrepreneurship is an emotional rollercoaster. Entrepreneurship during a global economic crisis is like the rollercoasteriest of the rollercoasters. Can you get yourself out of those low-vibration moments or do you dwell there for a year? That’s the stuff that matters.
During that time, I did a ton of creating my own daily rituals and practices that kept me out of the spiral and moving forward and kept me on this continuous course correcting using my own inner guidance as a navigator. Those practices and rituals are literally now the programs that we teach or a big component of the programs that we teach at SoulTour, but I have no idea that that’s how that would be. I had no idea this would end up being like my actual life’s work I was creating out of my response to a crisis.
Many times, entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs get real tactical. Things happen and we get real tactical, “I’m going to do this and that. I’m going to try this and that.” I know in my own life that what I help my clients with is this. It’s like, “Let’s get real quiet. Let’s let our creative brain, which is where the genius is, work.” You can’t make it punch in at 8:00 and out at 5:00. It won’t work like that. If we get quiet enough and disengage from the noise, the chatter of the world, our creative brain will come to life. The answer’s in there. I can’t tell you why or how. I know that it is. I love that.
There are two things. One is you can’t make a punch at 8:00. However, you can train it. You can give your inner editor and censor a little time off every single day in a ritual way. You can capture those golden threads of inspiration from your creative mind and you can follow them. This is what I see. People get the downloads, but they are used to overruling and overriding their own moments of clarity that come through their creative mind or trying to rationalize their way out of it or logic it. The creative mind is not logical or linear.
You train it to speak more loudly when you follow it. You create this feedback loop in yourself when all the amazing, perfect place and time moments happen because you followed it, then you learn to trust it more. My friend, Artie Wu, is a meditation teacher. He’s always like, “Sometimes the muse speaks and what you get is a download of a 25-year business plan, rarely, but sometimes the muse speaks and it tells you to go get a burrito. You go get the burrito. On the way to the burrito, you see a thing and it inspires a thing.”
Creative Mind: The creative mind is not logical or linear. Train it to speak more loudly so that when you follow it, you can trust it more.
 
You got to allow it to light the natural next steps to what you desire and are called to do to light up in natural ways before you step by step. It’s not always going to be the comfort zone-style action plan. Sometimes it’s literally, “This is the thing I got to do. I got to email that guy. I got to call that person.” Sometimes I’m like, “Who do I always know? Who do I already know? Who knows the answer to this thing?” That’s my inspiration a lot of times. Call so-and-so. They already know, but your thinking mind doesn’t always get you there. Your creative mind gets you there.
This is the toughest question I ask. I’m putting you in a time machine like Star Wars or Star Trek. I’m going to send you back to twenty-year-old Tara. When you get there, you’re going to get 60 or 90 seconds to share something you wish 20-year-old Tara knew then that you know now that would have eased your path, accelerated your pace, and provided more peace. There she is. What do you tell her?
“You have permission. Here is your permission slip. You get to want what you want and go where you want to go. When it feels good to you, that is a sign that it’s the right path for you. Permission granted.” There’s something that one of my teachers from many years ago taught me that I hold fast to you that I wish I had heard this earlier in life, when she said, “Never quit in the middle of a hunch. If you get a hunch or an inspiration to do it, do it. You don’t have to figure out all of the how.”
Never quit in the middle of a hunch. You don’t have to figure out all of the how. Just do it. Share on X
Now we say, “Let the Divine handle that. You decide what and why. You get a hunch. You keep going. Do not quit in the middle. Don’t worry about figuring out the how. That will light up. You’re cute so definitely drink the chlorella and the collagen that you’re tempted to because when you’re 50, you’ll be thankful to your 20-year-old self.” The number one thing people come to me for is how to do their dreams. The number two thing is like, “What are you drinking?” Coming up in 50 years, chlorella and collagen will do you well.
As the attorney would say, I reserve the right to recall the witness for another interview. We’re in the fourth quarter. Tell me, how can the show support you?
If you’re a person who, when I say things like, “Big self, big dreams, upgrade your dream. Know that the only thing between you and the greatness you’re destined for is self-sabotage,” the self-sabotage of your critic in particular, I want you to come and meet me at SoulTour.com/Affirmations. There’s a bunch of things you’re going to get when you come there. You’ll go there and enter your information.
The first thing you’ll get is my Transformation Tuesday Newsletter. It is full of modern parables and insights that help smart, successful people build the empires they came here to build. On that page, when you fill out your information, you’ll also get a quick audio training on how to breathe new, fresh life into your old dreams. We’ll send you a set of affirmations to transform your inner critic.
I want to remind people that our flagship program at SoulTour is called Empires of the Soul. We have many different ways people can enter that program if they want my help and my team’s help creating the empire they came here to create. If you think that is of interest to you, I invite you to come to SoulTour.com/Apply. You’ll fill out a little information, tell us a little bit about yourself and we’ll reach back out to you to book a call and see whether we should be working together.
Readers, SoulTour.com, go through the entire website and look at everything Tara has to offer. Tara-Nicholle Kirke, thank you.
Thank you. This was such a delight.
I’m glad you’re here.
 
Important Links

Tara-Nicholle Kirke
SoulTour
The Big Leap
SoulTour.com/Affirmations
SoulTour.com/Apply
MyFitnessPal

 
About Tara-Nicholle Kirke
Tara-Nicholle Kirke is a globally-recognized author, transformation expert, and spiritual strategist. She helps smart, successful people reach their potential and start living their Big Dreams, by undoing their self-sabotage patterns. As the founder of SoulTour, Tara has taught over 50,000 people how to stop hiding their light with her Self-Mastery Method toolkit which draws from neurobiology, depth psychology and spiritual law. Tara also wrote the authoritative book on transformational business and has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and The New York Times. Business Insider called her the #1 woman Silicon Valley tech companies should add to their boards.
After getting knocked up at 16, Tara walked the socially approved path to success: bachelor’s and master’s in psychology, law school at UC Berkeley, working at a law firm and then in real estate. But reaching all these goals didn’t feel meaningful to her – it was all appearance-oriented. When the recession hit, Tara lost everything as a real estate broker and had a dark night of the soul. Realizing she needed to undo the programming that kept her dreaming small, she started to re-parent her inner critic. This radical transformation led her to MyFitnessPal, where her truth-telling and radical trust mindset as a CMO helped the company grow from 45 to 120 million customers. Later when her role at MyFitnessPal moved out of alignment, Tara broke through the next level, which ultimately led her to found SoulTour.
She has twice turned down 7 figure deals to maintain her dedication to her mission.
When Tara was the CMO for MyFitnessPall, she was all fired up to write You Can’t Hate Yourself Skinny. With a multi-million book deal on the table, Under Armour acquired the company and said “NO” to the book. Body positivity was not on-brand. It was Tara’s cue to get out, declining a 7-figure salary to stay as a figurehead. She decided to write a different book – her authoritative work on transformational business. While working on transformational business, Tara realized just how many CMOs and CEOs were stymied by Inner Resistance, self-sabotage, and fear. She now believes 80% of our success comes from doing the inner work and finding peace and only 20% from the strategies and skills we have. In a final pivot, Tara founded SoulTour to support leaders to get into alignment and as yet another testament to how dedicated she is to turning down millions to be true to herself – she declined $3M in venture investment. She knew venture capital would rob her of her sovereignty and not be aligned with her inner visionary. Tara would love to share: – How she knew it was time to leave her dream team and job at MyFitnessPal and start her journey as an entrepreneur – Why she now believes only 20% of your success is determined by your degrees, skills and strategies (and how to work on that other 80%) – The Transformational Consumer Trends for 2023 and how metrics of success are changing – The #1 Game of Thrones-inspired prompt that will help you find out who you want to become.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Donk Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate.
 

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Title: S2:E34 | Václav (Vash) Tomanec – 25-Year-Old Founder Of Mindtrepreneur
Date: March 28, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e34-vaclav-vash-tomanec-25-year-old-founder-of-mindtrepreneur/
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One of the great things about entrepreneurship is that there is almost no barrier to entry. Not even being young can keep you from being an entrepreneur. Just like this episode’s guest, Václav (Vash) Tomanec. At just 25 years old, Vash has already become a serial entrepreneur, building three successful seven-figure businesses. His latest venture, Mindtrepreneur, is all about helping entrepreneurs transform their business and lives by mastering their mindset. In this conversation, he joins Don Williams to share with us his amazing journey of becoming the “accidental entrepreneur” and what he learned about hard work, commitment, and perseverance. Vash then dives deep into the power of our minds. When we learn how to visualize, we can create the belief that something is possible. And Vash has the story that illustrates what the mind can do to our lives when we just work with it. Join him in today’s show to learn and be inspired to reach our goals. After all, it’s all in your mind.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Václav (Vash) Tomanec – 25-Year-Old Founder Of Mindtrepreneur
It’s All In Your Mind
We have a great guest in this episode. All the way from the Czech Republic, we have Vash Tomanec. Vash, though very young, is high mileage. He has accomplished a lot. Vash is a serial entrepreneur. His newest venture is Mindtrepreneur. He spent seven days in total darkness with no food in the interest of exploring his mind and meditation. I am very interested to talk about that. Another huge milestone is Vash was awarded the Two Comma Club with Russell Brunson. That’s a pretty exclusive group who’ve done that. Welcome to the show, Vash.
Thank you so much for having me, Don.
I am thrilled to have you. It is an honor. Thank you so much. Let me take you back to little Vash. From 5 to 15 years old in the home you were raised in for the most part, was there an adult who set an entrepreneurial example for you? Was there someone you looked up to that was entrepreneurial that planted the seed of entrepreneurship in your brain?
My parents were worried about where this came from because, in my whole family, nobody has been an entrepreneur. The idea sparked by the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, that I believe a lot of your readers might have heard of that is from Robert Kiyosaki. That book opened my mind to what is possible because I was going through the predictable journey of primary and secondary school, university, and getting a job. I knew I will have a good job, but the idea of being an entrepreneur never came to me because I had nobody who is an entrepreneur around me. The book showed me a new reality that is possible. That’s when I decided I want to be an entrepreneur. It was at age eighteen, I believe.
I don’t know any entrepreneurs that Robert Kiyosaki has inspired but there are a lot. I can remember reading Rich Dad Poor Dad as a young man and was enthralled by the parallels between the two dads. One day, maybe I’m going to write the book, the Accidental Entrepreneur because so many of us didn’t design and engineer it. We weren’t built for it but in my life, one day I said, “I can’t follow this person anymore and I don’t know whom to follow so I’m going to lead.”
That meant I’m going to start my company because I can’t find anybody to follow. I’m certainly an accidental entrepreneur. We’re still back with young Vash. What was your first job? It may have not been a job. It may have been entrepreneurship but what was the first activity you did where you earned some money?
That was picking up potatoes in the Czech Republic when I was sixteen. That’s when I earned in a way or learned the lesson about hard work. Hard work is not always the thing that is rewarded. I was working hard, long hours, sweating in the sun, and all of these things. I was making back then probably $2 an hour. I put so much effort in and was so little reward. There was a big lesson looking back at it. It’s not always about working hard. It’s also about choosing the things to work hard on that will have some payoff associated with them.
It's not always about working hard, it's also choosing the things to work hard on that will actually have some payoff associated with it.  Share on X
It’s working smart and hard on what you’re working smart. That works. In my first job, I was driving a tractor at wheat harvest, which is a tough job. It’s very hot, dusty, dirty, and long days but the first day I knocked down about fifteen fence posts. I took a corner a little too close and they just dropped. In the first two days, all I did was dig fence post holes, set fence posts and drop the tamp rod. That’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life and that pays dirt. That pays nothing. You started your first entrepreneurial journey at eighteen.
That was the idea. Robert Kiyosaki sparked the idea, but the big lesson was I thought that to be an entrepreneur, you need to have this grandiose idea. I need to start the next Tesla or Apple. These big ideas weren’t, first of all, coming to me and second, I didn’t have even the capital to start them. For the next few years, I was working part-time jobs. I went to university and was like, “Before I graduate, I want to have my business.”
A few years ago, I was still delivering food for Uber Eats at university. Every day, I would jump on a bike and deliver food for Uber Eats. That’s when I got the idea to start a marketing agency. I was three months away from graduation and this popped into my mind. I’m studying Marketing. A lot of businesses need help with that, especially online stores. That’s what I focused on. That’s when the idea came and that was my first business.
Do you still own that business?
I still do. It’s automated in a way. I have a CEO there and multiple team members. I do more the strategy high level but it wasn’t an easy journey to be honest because I work my way through there. My English wasn’t the best. It’s not my first language. I was cold calling people and was getting, “No.” I was like, “It’s difficult,” but I realized that I need to commit.
Commitment is such a huge part of the success I believe. That day, I made a commitment that for the next 90 days, every day I will send 10 personalized videos to potential customers and study sales for at least 2 hours because I wanted to be good at sales. I knew that if I get a meeting, I better close it. Lastly, I visualize the goal. I set some financial goals I want to have. I would close my eyes every morning and visualize for fifteen minutes that I’d already done it.
What happened in the next 63 days? Nothing. I sent 630 personalized videos. I got no meetings, no calls, no clients, and no money, but I knew deep down that every video is making me better. Every minute I spend learning sales, I’m improving. I knew that every day, I’m getting more conviction that it was going to work and my day is coming.
There was almost this feeling that virtually everybody was going to give up because they don’t see the results but not me. What happened next is in the next 27 days, I got multiple clients that allow me to hit the financial goal I set for myself. The moment I was graduating, I would make a profitable and successful business.
There are so many great principles there. One is to commit. “I’m going to do my very best. I’m going to work hard and work smart. I’m going to do it for this amount of time.” Two is perseverance. “It didn’t work.” Sixty-three days in a row, it didn’t work. You didn’t quit. I was in a group with Roland Frasier not too long ago and he commented that you got to kiss a lot of frogs in marketing to get to the princess. Don’t be discouraged. Keep puckering up and kissing those frogs. There’s a princess out there somewhere. Also, stick with it.
I love visualization. Several years ago, I met Vishen Lakhiani of Mindvalley. There’s so much to that. I’m in Dallas-Fort Worth in the United States. Many years ago, we had this great football team, the Dallas Cowboys. Troy Aikman was the quarterback. Troy still talks about what visualization meant to him. They knew the first 10 or 15 plays they were going to call in every game. He practiced those plays in his mind and executed them perfectly. In our minds, it’s the only place we can be perfect. After his career, he went into the Hall of Fame and is widely known as maybe the most accurate passer in NFL history. Let’s talk about visualization. Tell us about it.
I’m a big believer in visualization. You illustrated it with an example. It’s a shortcut. Let’s give an example. I truly believe there’s a fast track toward developing any habit or performance. Let’s say you want to develop the habit of waking up on time and not hitting the snooze button in the morning. You can practice it Monday, Tuesday up to Sunday. Seven times a week you can practice it or you can close your eyes and when you truly close your eyes, your body and brain don’t know the difference if you are visualizing it or it’s happening.
Mindtrepreneur: Visualization is a fast track towards developing any habit or any performance.
 
This is why I could tell a person, “I receive a call from your mother. She’s in the hospital.” It’s not real. I made it up but the person start sweating. They start imagining the worst and as a result, their body reacts to it. Their heart rate is faster. The same applies here. I could close my eyes. I hear the alarm going on. I jump from bed, turn it off and start my day. In 10 minutes, I can replay it probably 20 times. I can play the same scene over and over again and it will speed up the process.
The Joe next to me practices 7 times a week and I practice 140 times the same week. I will develop the habit of waking up early much faster than him. That’s the first benefit of visualization, which is speeding up the process. The second is I believe visualization creates evidence so we believe that our goal is possible. To illustrate, when I started, I’m this Uber Eats delivery guy making less than $1,000 a month. All of a sudden, I set a goal that in 90 days, I want to make $10,000 a month in profit.
I’ve never earned that money before. I never had that money even in my bank account so I didn’t believe it. If I don’t believe it can happen that quickly, I wouldn’t take many actions. What’s the point? I’m not going to achieve it anyway. However, what I did is close my eyes and visualize it. I woke up. I checked my Stripe account and I see there is $10,000.
I jumped from the bed and started shouting. I run to the living room and said, “Mom, dad, I did it.” We celebrated. I would replay it over and over again and then what happened? I started to believe it was possible because I had enough evidence that I’d already done that. I believe that visualization can help people create the belief that something is possible and that helped me achieve that goal in 90 days.
I was at an event and they have a huge bonfire outside of the event. It’s probably 5×5 feet. The wood is stacked. It is so hot that you cannot get within maybe 30 feet of the fire. The reason they were doing that is they were burning that down to coals and then they laid the coals out on the ground. We then took off our shoes and socks. My normal brain says, “I can’t do this.” They lay out 15 feet of coals, 1,200 degrees. They ask for somebody to go first. I’m a go-first kind of guy.
They encourage us to visualize that the coals are ice cubes. “Don’t look at them. See them in your mind as if they’re ice cubes. Look straight ahead. When I say go, walk briskly. If you get in trouble, step off the coals.” I walk briskly. It’s warm. I don’t get burned. I don’t get blisters. My feet looked a little charred or ashy I guess all because, in my mind, I saw it as not a great big deal.
We had about 50 of us. When they were all done, I was like, “I want to go again.” Two times across the coals and so much of it has to do with what you believe is possible. There was an old book. It was probably in the ’50s or ’60s written by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. It’s the Psycho-Cybernetics. I love that book. One of the stories was there were two basketball teams. One team was going to spend an hour a day shooting free throws, and one team was going to go lay under a shade tree and imagine shooting free throws.
Mindtrepreneur: Psycho-Cybernetics
At the end of the month or whatever the timeframe was, the team that was in the gym shooting free throws improved by 2% or whatever the number was, but the team made every free throw, because in your mind you can be perfect, went up 4 times that amount. It was a great illustration of what’s possible in your mind. I don’t think your mind knows the difference between what you experience and what you tell it you’re experiencing.
That’s right. It doesn’t know the difference. It’s such a great example and I’m glad you did the fire walk. I did it a few years back with Tony Robbins. He did it. It increased my belief in what is possible. How many times I would touch a hot oven and I would immediately get a blister? Hot coal is even much warmer than that but I didn’t have any blisters. It’s because as you did, you visualize the ice cubes. I’m so happy you’ve done it.
I did a post on social media about it, and the questions were like, “Why? Did you lose your mind? Are you trying to be macho? Do you think you’re Superman?” I was like, “No. For humans and me too, I’m human, we have self-limiting beliefs. We have beliefs that aren’t true but because we believe them, it limits what we can achieve and perform.” I looked at the fire walk as a self-limiting belief knowing that Tony Robbins has walked 100,000 people. A lot of people have done it.
We have beliefs that aren't true, but because we believe them, it limits what we can achieve and perform.  Share on X
They laid out two strips. On one side, they said, “This side is spicier.” They would never say hot or use any of those words because those plant certain images. I’m like, “I want the spicy side.” It was so much fun. I’m dying to ask. Seven days in the dark with no food. 168 hours, 86,400 seconds times 7. Tell us what your motivation was, why you did it, how it went, and what you learned. Tell us everything, Vash.
Let’s go straight into it. To trace it back so you can understand why, I started a coaching company called Mindtrepreneur, where we help over 1,000 entrepreneurs from 45 countries achieve their goals faster by what we call mastering their mindsets, overcoming their limiting beliefs and fears, killing procrastination and all of these things that slow people down from growing their businesses.
Also, you mentioned self-image, for example. I’m a big believer in visualization, meditation and spending time with yourself. That’s where the greatest ideas come in. I always don’t want to walk the path. In a way, if I tell people to meditate for 15 minutes, I will meditate in 1 hour to walk the path and show them that I’m the guy who can do it and I can guide them thoroughly.
The same happened here. I was talking to people that once a month or at least once a quarter, they should take three days off with no electronics. Maybe book a nice cottage or cabin somewhere in nature. They should spend three days thinking about where they’re going, how they want to get there and why they want to achieve it. With these things in silence without electronics, devices and being distracted, we have the best ideas.
I wanted to take it to the next level. I wanted to go deeper so I can show people the way. That was the motivation. For seven days, I go in complete darkness. The second motivation is I run three businesses. I haven’t gone offline for more than probably 40 hours. I’m always online checking if my team is okay or there are no fires but having seven days with no phone and not knowing what is happening with the businesses, I was like, “That’s a big challenge.”
Anytime I feel this fear but at the same time a little excitement, I know I need to say yes. It’s almost like the higher self is shouting, “Do it,” and the limiting self is almost like, “No, this is dangerous.” I said, “Yes, I’m going to do it.” I was like, “Let me remove all pleasures that can be there.” There won’t be any electronics. I won’t see and hear anything. Let me take the last thing, which is I won’t taste anything.
I said, “Let me prove to myself I can do it on water only.” It was such a deep experience because first of all, I realized that I’ve never spent so much time with myself. It means that I’m always on my phone or computer jumping from LinkedIn, email, Slack and Instagram to Twitter. I am all over the place but here, I have the time to think about what I want from life. Sometimes we set these goals but they’re no longer relevant or somebody else set these goals even for us.
I had time to think, “What do I want to create in this life? What impact do I want to have? What do I want to create? What do I want to experience?” There I realized this big thing. On paper, I live an incredible life. I traveled to fifteen countries. I took multiple amazing vacations. I met amazing people. I helped incredible people but at the same time, I didn’t fully experience it.
I might be having an amazing vacation but I’m thinking about work. At work, I’m thinking about a vacation. I’m always thinking about what’s next and what’s on my to-do list. As a result, I wasn’t present. In the darkness, I realized the power of being in this moment, being here with you and not thinking about what I need to do after this show. Those were a few of these biggest lessons I would say.
There are so many things in there. You are so wise and young, Vash. One, I’m a big believer that our creative mind is of the most value. The logical mind is the mind that goes to university and learns things. That’s all good. In society, we place a lot of value on that but genius doesn’t happen there. Genius happens from our creative mind which is why there are so many genius artists. Steve Jobs was a genius artist. He didn’t paint, sculpt or write music. He had a vision for this unbelievable technology company and built this mammoth company. It wasn’t because of what he learned in university.
In the darkness, what happened was the ideas that were coming to me were not these 10% improvement ideas like, “Do we hire this person or fire this person?” It’s not these marginal improvements. They’re usually logical. It was like, “Message this person.” I was like, “I never thought about it, start this product or reach out to this person.”
The moment I applied it and once I came back, I was like, “This shifted in my life.” I started to research inventors, the people who invent things. They rarely invent something by having a whiteboard and calculating stuff. They usually are overlooking the ocean and it is a download to them. It comes and all of a sudden, they got the idea and then they need to justify logically what happened there. What I realized is when we enter silence or are without distractions, it’s almost like the creative mind can connect almost to a Wi-Fi signal and that’s when big ideas start coming to us. I’m so happy you mentioned that.
Mindtrepreneur: When we enter silence or be without distractions, the creative mind can connect. That’s when big ideas start coming to us.
 
In the Christian faith and probably in the other major religions, one of the tenets is, “Be still and know that I am God.” I’m sure the other major religions have something very similar to that but there is real power in getting quiet and shutting out the noise. We live in a noisy world and many times, it involves nature. Go to the beach or get on top of the mountain. Get away and refresh.
The root word of recreation is to recreate, which if you emphasize it differently, it’s recreate. Many times, entrepreneurs, salespeople or business people get it in their heads like, “I got to work harder and faster. I got to get more done. Chop that log. Milk that cow. Do whatever,” when the magic might happen if you tone it down, you get quiet. You go to the cottage in the woods, the top of the mountain, the beach, in your backyard or the city park and get real quiet and let your creative mind talk.
A few years ago, the mammoths of technology, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Apple had a huge shift. They said it no longer requires a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD to come to work there. What we found are these geniuses that are self-taught or maybe intuitive. We don’t know but we don’t care. That’s where the great stuff is coming. It sounds a little silly but when you look at the founders of those companies, many of them did not complete university.
The two guys at Google dropped out of Stanford. They said, “It’s too expensive for us to stay.” I want to encourage all our readers. Don’t have self-limiting beliefs because you think you don’t know enough or you haven’t gone far enough. It couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re all 1 idea, 1 phone call, 1 client and 1 event away from huge success. You went 63 days with nothing and on the 68th day, something happened that made all the difference.
That’s the point because, in business, people tend to feel behind so they start compensating, “I’ll put in longer hours. If was working 12, I will do 16,” but it’s almost like the whole time they could be working so hard on strategy A that is not working. They could take a step back, take 1 day off or 2 days off and realize that there is strategy B that would get them 10X results by working 6 hours a day.
That’s the power of taking a step back but in this hectic society and environment, people almost feel they can’t stop or take time off. For me, working smart means slowing down, looking at the bigger picture and letting those new ideas come in so we can execute them. I know a lot of people who are extremely hard and sometimes they don’t even get the results.
With many of my clients, it’s eliminating extraneous activity. Truthfully, I believe you should only work in areas where you can be magnificent. If you’re very good at something but somebody in your company is almost as good at something, give it to them. Let it go. You have zones of incompetence, competence, excellence, and magnificence. To me, that zone of excellence is a temptress. I do all these things well so I like to play there but here’s how you know. It’s in your zone of excellence if it’s safe.
You should only work in areas where you can be magnificent. Share on X
If you know you can do it, it’s not your zone of magnificence. In your zone of magnificence, you could fail. It’s out of your comfort zone but that’s where your best work happens. It doesn’t happen in that safe area where you’re very good. I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to think about a hard lesson. What is something that occurred that when it occurred, you’re like, “Ouch. That hurts a lot,” but looking back and having a little distance, you’re like, “Maybe it was the best thing that happened to me. It wasn’t as bad as I thought,” but at the time, it was really heavy. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us, Vash?
Yes, I have and I like that you said you can connect those looking forward. You can always look back and realize, “It was the greatest thing that happened to me.” The biggest, I would say, lie is once you achieve the external things, you will start feeling differently inside. I realized that’s the biggest lie. What I thought was, “I don’t feel good enough. I felt a lot of insecurity and fear but once I make the first money from my business, all will be good. Once I get the car and house, all will be good.” I set a bigger goal and achieved them but the feeling didn’t go away.
That’s why we know celebrities who are depressed have anxiety. We have everything externally but almost something is missing internally. I coach loads of people who are even on the Forbes list of the Czech Republic and they come to me like, “Vash, I have everything externally but there’s so much emptiness inside.” That was probably the biggest lie when my goal on a pedestal was almost like, “Once, I achieved it, everything will fall in place,” and that wasn’t the case. I tell people that it’s important to first change the inside. Nothing external will change that feeling. We need to change that.
There are so many nuggets. What’s a high-value nugget you haven’t shared with us yet?
Let me choose the best one. This is a very cool thing I discovered. A few years back when I started this, I call it the hockey stick effect. I believe that it will help a lot of people. I realized that a lot of people think that progress happens linearly. Let’s say I said that in 90 days, I want to hit $10,000. How the human works are in 30 days, I should be around $3,000. In 60 days, I should be at $6,000, and around day 90, I should hit it.
What happens is it never happens like that. Even with getting in shape, people think, “Next month, I will lose 2 kilos or 2 pounds,” or whatever it is. What happens is you go to the gym for a month and you see barely any results. I use some personalized videos for 60 days and I’ve seen 0 results. I tell people that progress happens exponentially. If the readers are truly interested, you can type in Google Tesla’s revenue, Apple’s revenue or Warren Buffett’s net worth and you will see the same line. It’s like a hockey stick. There is not much and then boom.
Progress happens exponentially. It's better to be consistent than being intense. Intensity makes a good story, but consistency makes progress.  Share on X
For me, it’s 0 and then $10,000. Even with getting in shape, somebody goes three months with not much results and then you met him and he said, “What happened to you?” It happens almost overnight. To activate this hockey stick effect or truly experience that, I believe in the power of consistency. You can’t go to the gym once and be fit for life. You can’t learn sales for an hour and expect to be great at sales. It’s being consciously repeating it every single day. I tell people it’s better to be consistent than to be intense. Rather than doing something for a week intensely, let’s do it for three months, a little bit less but consistently every day. Intensity makes a good story but consistency makes progress.
This is the hardest question I ask. I am going to take you back to your eighteen-year-old self. You get 60 seconds to share 1 or 2 thoughts with your 18-year-old self that you know now but you didn’t know then, and it would’ve helped you had you known that. It’s not that far for you. When I get somebody who’s 50, they’re like, “I wish I knew this and that.” If I take you back to before you took your first step on your entrepreneurial journey, what would be the most important thing you could tell yourself?
First, “Vash, your past doesn’t dictate your future. Just because you failed at something in the past, it doesn’t mean you will fail at it in the future.” “Stop being on the bench. Get in the game. Start playing. Start taking action and taking risks. You have nothing to lose.” That would be second advice. Another piece of advice I would give myself is, “Vash, you deserve the best.” If society, your parents or friends tell you you’re not good enough, it’s not true. You deserve the best and you can have anything you set your mind to.”
Number four would be thinking about it, “Vash, first, sit down and ask yourself what you want.” Until you know what you want, you can’t achieve it. Dedicate a few days to thinking about what you truly want, craft a specific plan of action, and execute it daily, “Vash, don’t forget to enjoy the journey. Life is a journey.”
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and time on the show.
Thank you so much for this amazing show you’ve created it. You’re doing an incredible job. I read all the reviews and there are thousands. I wanted to congratulate you and also, thank you for the opportunity to be here.
Thank you very much. I assure you, it’s all due to my wonderful guests like you. See you next time. Bye.
 
Important Links

Mindtrepreneur
Two Comma Club
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Mindvalley
Psycho-Cybernetics

 
About Václav (Vash) Tomanec
Vash is a 25-year-old serial entrepreneur who has built three successful seven-figure businesses. With his latest venture, Mindtrepreneur, Vash is on a mission to help 1 million entrepreneurs transform their business and live more fulfilled and joyous life by mastering their mindset. He does it through 1-1 and group coaching, various online programs, in-person masterminds hosted 4x per year.
Recently, he spent seven days in complete darkness with no food for an intense meditation, further demonstrating his dedication to personal growth.
Vash is known for his inspiring, present, loving, and driven nature. He is obsessed with helping people level up and live their most fulfilling lives, and he loves mastering subjects rather than just dabbling in them. His frameworks and principles have helped over 1,000 people from 35 countries. He is skilled at using the power of the subconscious mind to achieve his goals faster and live a better, more fulfilled life.
In addition to his dedication to personal growth and helping others, Vash is also passionate about biohacking and finding ways to stay productive and disciplined. He spends a lot of time researching and experimenting with different techniques and strategies to optimize his health and performance.
Vash’s passion for meditation, personal growth, and the science of happiness has also led him to share the stage with renowned expert Dr. Joe Dispenza in 2022
 
Highlights:

Co-Founder of Mindtrepreneur, a coaching company that helped 1000+ entrepreneurs to master their mindset
Founder of BullAds, a social media marketing agency working with 50+ brands
Founder of EcomTrack, a SaaS tool that allows ecommerce stores to get accurate data and scale with certainty.
In 2022, he received the Two-Comma Club Award from ClickFunnels founder, Russell Brunson
Finished a 7-day intensive meditation retreat in the complete darkness
Dr. Joe Dispenza invited him to share his story in front of 5,000+ people
Co-host of the Mindtrepreneur Podcast

 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Donk Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate.
 

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Title: S2:E33 | Grant Baldwin – CEO Of Speaker Lab
Date: March 14, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e33-grant-baldwin-ceo-of-speaker-lab/
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Content:
 
Public speaking gigs are one of the best lead generation strategies for businesses of any niche or model. Grant Baldwin has a deep love for the art of speaking, and he has created a platform where he could train aspiring speakers. Joining Don Williams, he talks about the story behind his coaching and training company for speakers, The Speaker Labs. He explains the importance of hiring good people and being intentional with culture in a physical or a virtual environment. Grant also shares valuable entrepreneurship lessons he learned from his father and his inspiring transition from a youth pastor to a professional speaker.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Grant-Baldwin-–-CEO-Of-Speaker-Lab.mp3
Grant Baldwin – CEO Of Speaker Lab
Youth Pastor To Professional Speaker To Entrepreneur
In this episode, I have got a phenomenal entrepreneur with us. I’ve got Grant Baldwin who’s the CEO of The Speaker Lab. He helps people get speaking gigs. There is nothing quite like lead generation than speaking. I’m so excited to have Grant here. Welcome to the show, Grant.
Don, thanks for letting me hang out with you. I appreciate it.
Thank you for coming and playing for a while. Tell us what The Speaker Lab is from A to Z.
The Speaker Lab is a coaching and training company for speakers and those interested in speaking. The quick nutshell on my background is I was a full-time speaker for about a decade or so and then had a lot of people asking me, “I want to be a speaker. How do I do that?” When I got started, there weren’t any podcasts, resources, coaching or training. I found myself emailing other speakers, harassing them and pestering them, “Can I pick your brain?” I was stalking them until I figured out some answers.
The Speaker Lab is a large part of what I wish I had when I got started as a speaker. When I got started, I felt like I had the potential but I needed the plan. There are a lot of speakers that we work with who are brand new. They don’t know what they don’t know. They’ve done some speaking before here or there but never been paid for it or maybe they’ve been paid a time or two. There are also speakers here doing it a lot and doing 20 to 30 paid gigs a year. They’re going, “I want to get to 40 or 50. I want to charge higher fees and get to bigger audiences. I don’t know what to do.” Wherever you’re at in your speaking journey, that’s whom we work with.
I’ve probably been speaking for 6 or 7 years. I wrote a book first and then we were stalking people and seeing if we could talk about the book. It was interesting to me. One of the very first gigs I had was the Global Gaming Expo, which had 25,000 casino executives from around the world. I’m with Grant. Stalk away. You never know what you might find. You’re in the Nashville area. Let me take you back to young Grant from ages 5 to maybe 18 in your home, whatever that looked like. People have all kinds of different childhood homes. Was there someone in your home who was an entrepreneur and set that entrepreneurial example for you?
A little bit. I have a good relationship with my parents. My parents split up when I was probably 12, 13 or something like that. I was in eighth grade. My dad was a bit of an entrepreneur. He had more of a traditional corporate job for a while and then did his thing for a good chunk of probably the second half of his career. That was my high school years and beyond. I remember him working from home, having some freedom and flexibility.
My mom worked in the hospital world pretty much her entire career. I’m the oldest of three. I got two younger siblings. My siblings and I have always been pretty entrepreneurial. She’s always been like, “Where did this come from? I wish I’d gotten into some of this stuff when I was your age.” In some ways, maybe I saw some of that from my dad but in other ways, I felt like I was always pretty entrepreneurial. I was the kid that was mowing lawns around the neighborhood, shoveling snow and doing anything I could do to make a buck. I always enjoyed that in trying to figure that out and what did that look like.
Not to get too far ahead but I was speaking full-time and got to a point where I was bored and restless. I was hanging out with a friend and mentor. He gave me some good advice. He said, “You want to regularly find things where the challenge exceeds the skillset.” When I first started speaking, the challenge exceeded my skillset. I felt like I was way over my head. What happens is over time, it flips and the skillset exceeds the challenge.
When I first started speaking, I felt like I was way over my head. What happens is over time, I could speak to 1,000 people, be on autopilot and do a great job but be bored internally. He said, “You have to regularly find things where that challenge exceeds the skillset.” The other thing he said to me that stood out to me was, “Some people are born to be speakers and they will be speakers their entire life.” He was that guy. He has been speaking for decades. He will perform his funeral. The guy loves speaking.
For me, he said, “You are an entrepreneur who happens to be a good speaker.” That resonated with me because going back, I’ve always enjoyed entrepreneurship. I remember even early in high school doing some paper in some class about entrepreneurship. I could barely spell it but I was fascinated by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. It was something that I was always wanting to do. Speaking has been a gateway for that.
I agree. Some people are wired to be speakers. I know a guy out of Detroit. He does 200 days a year. If he could figure out how to do 250, he would. He shared a story with me one time where he did 4 gigs in 4 cities on the same day and because of the way he bills his travel, he collected for travel. He hired a private jet. It was the only way to get it done. You’re like, “I’m in awe.”
Thank you for sharing that about your childhood. It’s interesting to me. We’ve interviewed 150 proven entrepreneurs for the show. About half had an entrepreneurial example and half didn’t. They were nature versus nurture. It sounds to me like you were a hustler as a kid. You had side hustles. You were mowing yards up and down the street. Tell me your first job or first entrepreneurial gig where you collected dollars or got paid.
It probably was mowing yards. I’d mowed 5 to 10 around the neighborhood. I was doing a push mower forever. It finally broke down and I got a riding mower. That was super fun where you’d go mow for whatever, ride around on a tractor and make $20, $10 or whatever it was then. I enjoyed that process. I remember during high school, one of my favorite days of the year was a snow day. It was where the school would be canceled. You’d be out of school, which is always a win.
I and another friend would go over to some rich neighborhood. We’d go door to door and shovel driveways. We’d come home with our pockets filled with $5s, $10s and $20s and felt like a billion dollars for a couple of teenage boys. I always enjoyed working hard. That was something that both my parents have done well and been great examples of. They both worked hard. That’s something I’ve tried to instill in my own kids. Mom and dad have a great life but it’s because we’ve worked hard to get that. We haven’t the lottery and we haven’t gotten any handouts. We don’t have any inheritance. We’ve worked hard and been intentional about creating the life that we have.
It’s like the George Foreman doctrine. He tells his kids, “I’m rich. You’re not.” You’re like, “That’s clear communication, isn’t it?” I love that. That’s young Grant. When you graduated high school, did you backpack across Europe, join the Merchant Marine or the Peace Corps or go to university? What’d you do?
I went to Bible college. In high school, I was involved in my local church. My youth pastor had a big impact on my life. I was like, “I want to do that. That seems like a cool gig.” That was the path I was on. I went to Bible college and then worked at a different church for a little while. Even in college, there was a guy I worked for a year or so who was a professional speaker. I helped him a little bit on the backend with travel, logistics, contracts and that sort of thing. I got to see, “This is a career path.”
Even as a youth pastor, there are parts of it I like and parts of it I didn’t like. One thing I enjoyed was speaking. I felt like I was decent at it. I was speaking on a weekly basis to students. I would speak a couple of weekends a year in a big church and be like, “This is fun. I would love to do more of this. I’d love to get paid to do this.” Speaking was one of those things that were work but at the same time, it was something I enjoyed. I felt like, to some degree, it came naturally and easily to me.
Youth pastors are farm from a senior pastor. Almost every senior pastor was a youth pastor at some point. Great pastors are typically pretty good speakers. That’s a tool for their trade. Tell me. Is your business your first business?
Yeah. I was a youth pastor and then decided to become a speaker. I was a speaker for about ten years or so and then started The Speaker Lab. I’ve been self-employed for several years. At The Speaker Lab, we have about 35 team members or so. I was telling them, “This is the biggest company I’ve ever worked for.” I never had a traditional career-type role. I’ve never been a part of a big company.
I said, “This is the most people I’ve ever worked with at a company.” Some of that was to tell them, “I’m doing my best. I’m figuring out as I go. I’m learning and making this up in many ways,” which is the reality of entrepreneurship for everybody. Every entrepreneur, we’re making it up as we go. We’re doing the best we can. Some days, you’re like, “This is good. Things are going well.” Other days, you’re like, “I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea how this is still held together with duct tape and chewing gum. Somehow, it’s working.” That’s the nature of entrepreneurship. It’s what we all signed up for.
Sometimes, you can have both feelings on the same day. It doesn’t seem to have to be different days. At 10:00 AM, you’re like, “I’m on top of the world,” and at 2:00 PM, it’s like, “We’re going off the cliff. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” That’s very interesting. Tell me. Do you still speak?
A little bit. It’s not nearly as much as I used to. When I started speaking, there was a friend of mine who was a speaker who gave me a good piece of advice. He said, “Speaking is a high-paying manual labor job. You get paid well to stand on stage and run your mouth but the nature of it is, you got to get on a plane, leave your family, go somewhere and show up.”
Art Of Speaking: Speaking is a high-paying manual labor job. You get paid well to stand on stage and run your mouth. But it requires you to get on a plane, leave your family, go somewhere, and show up.
 
It’s like a surgeon. The surgeon makes good money performing surgery but the nature of their job is they have to perform surgery. If you wanted to take a couple of weeks off or a month off, shut down or whatever, things dry up quickly. That had always been in the back of my mind. Even when I got to a point where I was doing 60 to 70 paid speaking gigs a year, I was on the road 80 to 90 nights a year, I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It wasn’t like, “This is miserable. This is awful. I hate it.” I always enjoyed it. At the same time, you’re like, “It’s a nice job,” but you reach a ceiling.
To make more as a speaker, you either need to do more dates, which I’m not trying to go from 70 to 200 or 250 or you go to a different industry where you can charge higher rates. That wasn’t super appealing. At the time, I had a lot of people who were asking me, “You’re a speaker. That’s cool. I want to do that. How would I do that?” I felt like I’d built some good systems and processes to understand the business of speaking.
There are a lot of people that teach the art of speaking. It’s about how you create and deliver a good talk, presentation skills and that sort of thing. I couldn’t find anyone who was doing anything related to the business. Who hires speakers? What do you speak about? How much do you charge? How does this work? We started doing some coaching and training around that and that started to take off. That’s where I saw some more potential of, “We could build a legitimate business here that’s not just me getting on stage, getting on a plane or that sort of thing.” I still do some occasional speaking but not nearly as much as I used to.
Art Of Speaking: Grant Baldwin found a way to build a legitimate business without getting on stage or traveling around to speak in front of people.
 
I know a lot of speakers and am a speaker. I always look at it as if I’m getting paid to travel. Speaking is not work for me. Give me a microphone and put me in front of 500 people. That’s fun but the not-fun part is going to the airport, getting on the plane and showing up a day ahead of time.
What I’ve told clients before, half joking and half serious is, “You don’t pay me to speak. You pay me to leave my family and that’s expensive.” That’s part of the gig. There are parts of travel that are non-glamorous and non-sexy. You wake up and you’re like, “What time zone am I in? What hotel is this?” I want to wake up in my bed. That’s way more enjoyable. I’ve been able to see a lot of the US that most people will never get to see in a lifetime. I’ve been fortunate to meet some amazing people and see some awesome places. It’s not a negative thing but travel can be very tiring for sure.
I enjoyed that piece because if I’m speaking in some cool place, we spend a week or two. If we go to Mexico City, we might as well spend a week. Tell me. What about hard lessons? It’s something that’s happened in your entrepreneurial path that, at the time, hurts but looking back and having a little distance, it turns out it was positive for you.
A couple of things come to mind. One would be when I very first started speaking. My wife and I were youth pastors at this church. My wife was 3 or 4 months pregnant with our first child. There’s nothing like bringing a kid into the world that causes you to question everything. You’re like, “What am I doing with my life?”
The church we were at wasn’t the healthiest of situations. It was a bit of a toxic environment. We ended up leaving that. For the next year, I was trying to figure out, “What am I doing with my life? What do I want to be when I grow up?” I have a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned family members who are like, “You quit your job and your wife’s pregnant. Have you thought this through?” You’re like, “I thought I did but you raised some valid points of how we’re going to eat and live indoors.”
That year was difficult to think through, process and lick my wounds of figuring out, “What am I going to do?” I went to college to do this thing. I always anticipated doing this thing. I got into it and it wasn’t necessarily what I thought it was going to be. I’m interested in speaking but I don’t know anything about it. How do you build a business doing that? You got a newborn baby and there are a lot of the normal doubts and insecurities that go through your mind. That was the very first time I remember.
Fast forward, this happened multiple times where The Speaker Lab has grown as we’ve hired different people and different people have helped. We have a great group of people. Sometimes, you’ll have some people that are like, “We can’t function without this person.” I remember a couple of key team members leaving to go start their businesses or do something else. You’re like, “Everything’s going to fall apart.” You end up hiring someone that ends up being a better fit. It’s like, “I can’t imagine we could exist without this person.”
There are times as a business owner or as an entrepreneur when things are great. You’re on top of the mountain. There are also times when things feel like they’re falling apart. One thing I do a decent job at is I’m pretty even-keeled. The highs aren’t too high and the lows aren’t too low. If we have a bad day, I’m like, “That’s great. Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow’s going to be a new day.” If we have a great day, that’s awesome but that doesn’t guarantee squat for tomorrow and everything in between. That’s part of the roller coaster of entrepreneurship.
I remember talking with a friend. They were thinking about starting their business. We were talking about the nuts and bolts of walking and tackling being an entrepreneur. I said, “One of the biggest challenges is the mental game of the insecurities, the doubts, the fears, the worries, “Am I going to be able to make payroll? Can I pay me? Is this all going to come crumbling down at any moment?” It’s that mental weight. Those voices, for me, are still there but you learn how to manage that, control that and navigate that so it doesn’t become this all-encompassing thing that’s going to crush you or destroy you.
On the show, the most common question a guest has asked me or a comment that a guest has said is, “I’m not sure I’m a proven entrepreneur. I’m not sure I’m proven.” We’ve had multiple billionaire guests and it’s always the same question or statement. It’s like, “I’m not sure.” I’m like, “You’ve been doing it a long time. You’ve done a lot of stuff.”
The thing about entrepreneurship is it’s not all success. It’s realizing that failing is part of the success journey. It’s not the opposite of success. We’re not going to win at everything. Humans are funny. We’re like, “I think I’m right every time. When I’m presented with something, whatever my biased response is, I’m right.” We know that humans are wrong the majority of the time. It’s not just me but everybody.
Going back to the piece of advice I got from this friend where you want to find things where the challenge exceeds the skillset, that’s entrepreneurship. Every day, there’s some type of challenge. You may have some type of skillset but you feel like, “I’m over my head but I’m not entirely sure. I’m not drowning and dying but I’m pushing it.” That’s part of it.
For example, I like doing puzzles with my family. We finished a big 2,000-piece puzzle that took over the kitchen table. My wife was thrilled when we were done with it. She can have her table back. We’re working on it. It’s the challenge of like, “Let’s dump all the pieces out. I know these pieces go together somehow.” I know it’s going to take us a minute to figure it out but that’s part of the fun of it. In entrepreneurship, when you accomplish something, then it starts to expand your mind of what’s possible and helps you to continue to become better as an entrepreneur.
When I say, “This is the biggest company I’ve ever been a part of,” I’ve never led a team of this size. There are plenty of days when I feel out of my element but that’s also part of the fun of it. I wouldn’t have thought hiring the first employee that I could ever do that, let alone 30-something employees. The idea of going, “Could we ever have 50 or 100 employees,” seems crazy. There’s no way. I wouldn’t have thought we could have gotten to this point either.
I’ll give you one other analogy. I heard this before. It’s about life but it applies to entrepreneurship. Life is like driving a car at night. You can only see a few feet in front of you but you can drive for hundreds of miles that way. You can make an entire road trip. You have no idea about the roadblocks, the construction and the detour. You have no idea about that accident up there. You have no idea about that big pothole. You have no clue. You can only see a few feet in front of you. That’s the way life is and that’s certainly the way entrepreneurship is.
I have no idea what the rule holds. We have goals, plans, ambitions and that sort of thing but nobody saw a pandemic coming. Nobody has any idea what’s happening, let alone weeks or months from now. You can still make an entire journey that way. You can continue to move forward and figure it out as you go. That is the name of the game in entrepreneurship.
One thing I share with my clients is that our comfort zone is relatively defined. We like it because it’s comfortable there. What we know is when we step out of our comfort zone, our comfort zone grows. We step out of our comfort zone and our comfort zone, as with physics, grows again. The goal is to get out of your comfort zone as quickly and as often as you can to where you grow your ability and let it come in there. In a $10 million company, they’re fighting like, “Get $20 million. Everything will be good.” I’m like, “It’ll be $20 million good but it’ll also have 20 million challenges.”
The goal line keeps moving.
That’s part of the deal. It’s what you’re saying when you drive a little and you can see a little further. I love that. What about a warp-speed moment? Things are going pretty well in your company. You make a hire or a couple of decisions and all of a sudden, things take off.
One thing that that’s worked well for us is we’ve never had some major hockey sticks. It’s where we did this one thing and then everything changed. We’ve had significant growth year over year. We grew 70% in 2022 over 2021. We’ve been between 60% and 80% a year since the company started. We’ve had pretty significant growth in some ways but it also hasn’t been we did one thing and that changed the game. The thing that works well for us is hiring good people. It’s not something that nobody else has thought of or said but there is a massive amount of truth to that.
It’s giving them a lot of freedom, flexibility and autonomy. We are a virtual company in a large part because I want to work from home. Selfishly, I want to be around my wife and kids. I don’t want to babysit or micromanage people like, “Here’s what we hired you to do. Here’s what success looks like. We’ll stay in touch but I don’t want to breathe down your neck. Otherwise, there’s no point in you being here.” It’s hiring great people and getting out of the way.
Another thing is we’ve been intentional about our company culture. That’s a misconception that you can’t have a virtual company and have a healthy company culture because you’re not in the office, you’re not seeing each other and you don’t have water cooler conversations. We’ve been able to prove otherwise. We have an amazing company culture. People don’t leave. It has been years since we had a team member leave. People stay, drink the Kool-Aid and are all in. It’s being intentional about the company culture and trying to create the type of environment they want to be a part of for the long-term.
One thing I tell the team regularly is, “I want this to be the best place you ever work. I never want someone to feel like the grass is greener elsewhere.” I half-jokingly and half-seriously say, “I want to make it hard for you to leave.” It’s not in a manipulative way but I don’t want someone to feel like they’re always looking for their next thing or trying to figure out their next thing. They’re like, “The grass is not greener somewhere else. It’s great here. This is a great gig.” It’s being intentional about those things.
It’s also doing the same thing over an extended period. Keep showing up. It’s not like, “Grant did the speaking thing and then I got into manufacturing and did some retail business. I then was doing some Amazon FBA thing and then home service.” It’s like, “Grant’s still teaching people how to get booked and paid to speak.” It’s the same thing. You start to build up some momentum, a track record and some brand recognition in the marketplace and then people know you as the go-to person on that thing. It’s picking something, sticking with it, having good people and being intentional about culture are the things that have ultimately helped and perpetuated our growth.
When you talk about culture and hiring great people, it’s always the who. It’s never the what. It’s like, “Whom do we get to do this?” I’m going to put you in a time machine and take you back to twenty-year-old Grant. You can’t touch him. You can’t occupy the same space but you get about 60 or 120 seconds to share something with 20-year-old Grant that you know now that you wish you knew then. Maybe it would’ve sped you along your path or ironed out a couple of rough spots. What would you tell your 20-year-old self if you had 1 minute or 2?
I would tell him, “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. It’s going to work out.” Early on, I had a lot of confidence in myself. I don’t feel like I was ever cocky or arrogant but I had confidence like, “I can do something with life. It’s not easy. I got to work at it but I can go somewhere.” I remember wanting to look into the magic crystal ball of, “How’s this all going to play out? Is it going to work out? I’m working hard and doing the right things but I can only see as far as the headlights would show me. I don’t know what it’s going to be like.” In many ways, it’s like, “You’re good. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. It’s going to be all right. You’re going to be fine.” My wife and I were high school sweethearts. We celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary. We’ve been together for 26 years.
Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. Everything will be all right. Share on X
Congratulations.
Thank you. I’d also say, “Marry that girl. Take care of her and things are going to be okay.”
Many entrepreneurs could be reminded, “It’s going to be okay. Don’t let the drama sweep you away.” Certainly, whom you choose as a mate is huge to what you do, your peace and the quality of your life. Tell me. What’s a poster child client for you? Define it for us so we know exactly what it is.
There are a lot of people that we work with who are in the early stages of their speaking business. One of the fun things about speaking is it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all. I talked about how I was doing 60 to 70 gigs and other people do 200 gigs. Some people may hear that and be like, “Sign me up. I want to do that. That sounds amazing.” Other people are like, “I’ve got other stuff going on but I’d love to do 5 gigs a year or 10 gigs a year. I don’t know. How do you find those? What do you speak about? Who hires you and how does it work?”
It’s speakers who especially are in those early stages and trying to get clear on, “Whom do I speak to? What do I speak about? What’s the problem I solve here? Is there even a market for this thing? Maybe I want to share my story but I’m not sure if this is something people would hire speakers to talk about. Can I get paid for this? I have an existing coaching or consulting business. How do I connect it back to that? Can I do that?”
It’s like, “How do I get started? I don’t know what I don’t know. All I know is I’ve done a little bit of speaking before. I’ve done some word-of-mouth stuff or referral. I spoke at a friend’s event. I did something for a buddy and it was fun. I want to do more of it. What do I do now?” We work with a lot of speakers who are in that spot and trying to figure out, “I’ve done some speaking. I want to do more speaking. Tell me what steps I need to take.”
If that fits you, I’m going to ask you to reach out to Grant or his team. How do we do that?
Everything we do is over at TheSpeakerLab.com. We got a podcast by the same name. Speaking about podcasts, we’ve got over 400 episodes there. There is a lot of great content and free resources to check out.
Grant, thank you so much for coming to the show. I’m grateful.
Thanks, Don.
That’s it for this episode. I’ll see you next time. Thanks.
 
Important Links

The Speaker Lab
Podcast – The Speaker Lab

 
About Grant Baldwin
As founder and CEO of The Speaker Lab, Grant Baldwin has helped thousands of people build successful and sustainable speaking businesses. Over the last 15 years, Grant has become a sought-after speaker, podcaster, author, and accomplished entrepreneur. Featured on the Inc. 5000 list, Forbes, Inc. Entrepreneur, and The Huffington Post, he has committed his expertise and insight to equip others to share their meaningful message with the masses. His leadership and dedication to creating a one-of-a-kind organizational culture are evidenced by the impact of the team he leads.
Grant lives near Nashville, Tennessee with his wife, Sheila, and their three daughters.
For more, visit thespeakerlab.com.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Donk Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E32 | Warren Rustand’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: March 7, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e32-warren-rustands-entrepreneurial-journey/
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Content:
 
Often, some of the best entrepreneurial journeys start with humble beginnings. Stories full of grit and being at the right place and time and with the right skills make for great inspiration. This episode’s guest is one whose own journey is nothing short of that. Warren Rustand joins Don Williams to share with us how he went from Minnesota Farm Boy to White House Fellow to WPO Global Chair & EO Dean of Learning. Witnessing leadership at such a special time, he takes us to that period when he worked with the former President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford, and later on pursued his entrepreneurial endeavors. He then shares the highs and lows of business and the lessons he learned throughout his journey. Follow along with Warren and Don as they lend us some wisdom on what it takes to be an entrepreneur, battle scars and all.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Warren Rustand’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Minnesota Farm Boy To White House Fellow To WPO Global Chair & EO Dean Of Learning
I have a treat for you. He is a very good friend. He is a gentleman I consider a mentor. He is somebody I’ve known for 5 or 6 years. I know a lot of his story, but he’s going to share it with you. Warren Rustand, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. It is great to be with you. I’ve been looking forward to this. I know we’ll have a fun conversation.
It is so good to see you. I haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s start here. What are you doing? What’s happening in your entrepreneurial path at Summit Capital in Tucson, Arizona? 
We’re always looking for interesting opportunities, and we have one. We’re involved in a company that is in the IT staffing business, focusing on cybersecurity. There is a big demand for that space, particularly by the federal government, state governments, and so forth. Generally, there is a great demand in that space and not nearly enough people to employ in that space. It’s a good opportunity and a lot of fun as we are building that company. We are having a lot of fun with it.
It’s a great growth area. There is a lot of demand. I want to take you all the way back to young Warren from ages 5 to 18 in your home. Was there an entrepreneur who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young Warren? 
Indeed, there was. My father was an entrepreneur. He was a college-educated man who went to work in Minneapolis, St. Paul in the corporate world. When his mother and father suddenly died, his eleven brothers and sisters asked him to come and run the family farm. He had not thought he would ever farm. He did that for his brothers and sisters and went to running the family farm.
Most farmers in the wintertime in Minnesota sit around, watch it snow, and stay inside where it’s not so cold. He went out and began to sell financial instruments. Those were from life insurance to stocks and bonds to other kinds of things. In the off-season, if you will, or the non-farming season, he was making money. He used that money to buy out his eleven brothers and sisters. He owned the farm himself, and then he bought another farm.
Soon, he had a couple of farms doing very well but decided he wanted to do other things. He packed up the family when I was twelve years old and headed out to Southern California. It was a place that he’d experienced when he went through there during the war. Like the weather, it was much better than Minnesota. We ended up in Southern California, and he got involved in real estate development.
At the time in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Disneyland was coming out of the ground and being established. There were lots of orange groves, citrus fields, flower gardens, truck gardens, and all kinds of things. All that turned into housing and so forth. He was there at the right time and right place and did very well. I grew up from the time I was 12 until I was 18 in Southern California. A big thing at that time was surfing and The Beach Boys. They were starting to talk about surfing, so I did some of that.
I played some basketball. When I was eighteen, I decided to go off to the university. I had some offers to play basketball but ended up at the University of Arizona when I was eighteen years old, playing basketball and having fun. That was my first eighteen years on an isolated, small, and cold farm in Minnesota. I grew up on the farm.
We were three miles from the nearest village. It was 167 people and was three miles away. The nearest town of any consequence was 10 miles away, and that was 1,000 people. A city was 25 miles away. It was Fergus Falls, Minnesota, which is east of Fargo, North Dakota. It’s not far from the Canadian border. It was cold, gray, and tough. It had hard conditions and all the good things I needed to learn. I then got to visit Southern California. That was a good place, too.
What a blessing, growing up in Minnesota and then ending up in Southern California. We share that heritage a little bit. My grandmother immigrated from Norway when she was eleven. She was 1 of 12 brothers and sisters. They were all farmers. I don’t even think there was a town nearby. It was Dazey, North Dakota, which is nowhere. A lot of them are still there. Thank you for sharing that. Tell me about your first job or your first entrepreneurial activity when you were a child. When was the first time that you earned money?
The first time I earned money, I was probably 15 or 16 years old. I got a summer job helping which was then the Fuller Brush man who sold products door-to-door. He needed somebody to fulfill those products by putting them in bags, packaging them up, and then taking them to the person who had bought them. I was the fulfillment side of his selling side. That was a great experience to watch him sell, and then fill the orders, take it out, make sure that they got delivered, and so forth. I got paid real money for that.
I started when I was fifteen. I did a couple of summers. I did the usual taking care of lawns and getting paid for that. Early on, it was made known to me that I needed to make some money. We needed to do that. My father, shortly after we got to Southern California, had gone to the doctor. He had a heavy cold. He wanted to get a shot to get him through this cold because it was very difficult for him.
The doctor made a mistake. He pulled the wrong medicine off the shelf. Instead of giving him penicillin, he gave him cortisone. My dad was allergic to cortisone, so it froze all of his internal organs. He was, at best, given twenty years to live from that point in time. He was in his late 30s. He was sick for a long period of time. He didn’t have any health insurance or anything else.
He was in the hospital for 99 days, so everybody in our family had to go make a living. We had to make money. We had to pay off the bills and put food on the table. It was a pretty challenging time for about two years until my dad got back on his feet. He got back into real estate and so forth. We learned to go without. We learned to be frugal. We learned to do those things that all of us have to learn at some point in our life.
Being Norwegian, like you, we know what that’s about. Our families went through tough times in Norway. That’s why they came to the United States. I learned to take care of money, which was important, and protect the assets that we had. It was a good time for learning. I played basketball after the University of Arizona for a little while.
You played basketball after the University of Arizona. You got to tell us a little bit about that. Where did you play basketball?
I had an opportunity at the University of Arizona to play on good teams and have some success. I had an opportunity to play on the US team and went to the World Basketball Championships in Santiago, Chile. We won a medal there. That was fun. I got drafted by the Golden State Warriors, so I had a chance to play at that level for a little while. It was not very long because they realized that I didn’t have the talent to play at that level. They needed to find people that had the talent. I got to play a little bit there, and then went off and played with the number one amateur team.
There were no minor leagues in basketball at that time like the D League or the G League. There was AAU Basketball or Amateur Athletic Union Basketball. It was amateur basketball. I got my amateur status back, went, and played for the Phillips 66ers in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. They were the number one amateur team in the United States. We traveled all over the United States and played for the national championship. I had a great time. It was a lot of fun.
I got recruited to go back to the University of Arizona as the assistant basketball coach at a division one school. I did that for three years and earned a little money there. I had some fun doing that while I got my Master’s degree. I got recruited into the business world. A guy that had been a previous basketball coach came and talked to me about getting into the financial services industry. They had a small business that wasn’t doing very well. They thought that maybe I could help grow it and created some incentives for me to do that. We were successful at that and had a good time.
I got out of that and started another business. I did a startup in the financial services space and built that. That did fine. I sold that. Somebody told me about the program called the White House Fellows Program and thought I should apply, so I did. There were 14,000 applicants or something the year I applied and 17 of us were chosen as White House Fellows. All of a sudden, I ended up in Washington, DC at the ripe old age of 29 years old. I had a lot of fun along the way.
Tell the audience a little bit about what the job of a White House Fellow is.
The White House Fellow is like the Rhode Scholarship program except it’s only for US citizens that are based in the United States. It was created by President Lyndon Johnson and his Head of Health and Human Services, a guy named John Gardner. They wanted to bring exceptional young people, not as an internship or a postgraduate degree, but people who were in the early stages of their careers that had demonstrated success. They wanted them to come back and spend a year working at the highest level of the US government, meaning the White House and White House agencies. You then return back to your communities and use what you’ve learned to help build your community.
I had never heard of the program until a retired four-star general gave me an application for it. He gave it to me over lunch. I said, “Fine.” I put it in my desk drawer and didn’t think another thing about it. I was moving offices one day. I opened that desk drawer to clean stuff out and there was that application. I noticed it was due the next day, so I spent all night filling it out and writing a 200-word essay for the president on healthcare or something. I sent it in, never expecting to hear another thing.
About three months later, I got this interesting letter from the White House Fellows Commission. It said, “Congratulations. You’re one of several hundred semi-finalists. You can choose from any 1 of 10 regions to go be interviewed.” They spread ultimately all these people over ten regions. There were members of the White House Fellows Commission there. I spent three days being interviewed. It was fun because I met Heisman Trophy winners, astronauts, and authors. It was fantastic for me. I’m a kid from Tucson, Arizona. This was good. I was never thinking I would ever be chosen for anything like this.
The job of these ten centers of interviewing was to choose their first choice and then, an alternate to recommend as national finalists. At the end of three days, they called us together for a luncheon and announced who that was. Lo and behold, I was their first choice. I was stunned. I almost fell out of my chair. I’m a country bumpkin from Minnesota. What do I know?
I was 1 of 37 national finalists. We went back to Washington, DC. They took us out to a place called the Airlie House, which is a diplomatic retreat in Northern Virginia. There were no phones or TVs. There was nothing. For six days, we were interviewed by the President’s Commission on White House Fellows. It was headed by someone you’ve heard of, Dr. Milton Friedman. He is a pretty well-known economist from the University of Chicago.
All sixteen people on that were household names. They were people I’d want to meet. By the time we got there, they’d done a full FBI field investigation on us. They had 100 pages of information starting from the day we entered school until the present time. They could ask us anything they wanted to ask us. I walked into my first interview and there were 6 or 7 of the commissioners in there.
Dr. Friedman, who happened to be leading that particular panel, said, “It’s nice to have you here. Senate Bill 2454 has several positions that affect someone in the private sector. Could you please explain those tax positions relative to the private sector and explain how it affects you and your business?” If I didn’t know anything about that bill, I’d have been blown up, but I happened to know a little bit about that bill and what the tax implications were. I got through my first piece. There were six days of that stuff.
In the end, out of the 37, they had to choose 20 or fewer to be White House Fellows. They had an auditorium they were going to march us into early one morning and so forth for the last day. I couldn’t sleep very well the night before that so I got up and wandered around. I found the auditorium where they were going to get us.
There were two boxes in the auditorium, and each box had envelopes in it. One box had thin envelopes that said, “You’re a nice person, but you’re not a White House Fellow. Have a good life.” The other box had a fatter envelope in it and said, “Congratulations. You’re a White House Fellow. Here are your further instructions.” I found my name on the thin envelope, so I had enough time to change it to a fat envelope in time for people to come in. I got to be a White House Fellow. It was fantastic. It was terrific.
You tell us so well. I know the story. There are many great moments during your career as a White House Fellow, but there’s one of which there’s no equal. Would you mind sharing that?
There are several you may be referring to. One was on the tennis court. Are you referring to the one on the tennis court?
Maybe I’ll get two because that one’s funny, but there’s one that was a huge historical implication where you were in a room.
As a White House Fellow, I was chosen to work for the Vice President of the United States. The President was Richard Nixon at that time and the Vice President was Spiro Agnew. When Spiro Agnew heard that I was coming to town to be his White House Fellow, he resigned. He couldn’t handle the pressure. It was too tough for him. I came to Washington a man without a vice president.
Entrepreneurial Journey: When Spiro Agnew heard that I was coming to town to be his White House Fellow, he resigned. He couldn’t handle the pressure. It was too tough for him. I came to Washington a man without a vice president.
 
I hooked up with the Secretary of Commerce, Fred Dent. He asked me to lead the first executive trade mission to the Soviet Union ever in US history. I did that and negotiated trade agreements for a while. I came back and hooked up with then-Vice President Gerald Ford who’d been nominated to that position by President Nixon and approved by the United States Senate. He was Vice President. He asked me to work with him, and I did as a White House Fellow. I was working every day.
That was the last 9 months or 10 months of a big scandal in this country called Watergate. It probably was the biggest scandal that the US government’s ever had. It went on for months. Finally, it went to the Supreme Court whether or not the secret tape recordings that Richard Nixon had done in the Oval Office would be allowed to be heard publicly. If they were, were there any implications for the president as to the cover-up of a felony?
One night, the Vice President and I were working alone in his office and got a call from then-General Alexander Haig who was Chief of Staff to the president. He said, “May I speak to the Vice President?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Can I come over?” I said, “Yes.” He came over and stood in front of the Vice President. He said, and these are famous words that have been written in a lot of books, “Mr. Vice President, prepare to be President.” That means that the Supreme Court had ruled that the tapes indeed implicated the President in a cover-up. Most of us knew at that point he had two choices. He would be impeached or he would resign, but he would not be able to stay in office.
I didn’t know if the Vice President had ever thought about being President of the United States because he’d been out defending the President, the party, and so forth. Without hesitation, he turned to me and said, “Have the following six people in my office tomorrow at 7:00 AM for a transition team meeting.” He not only had thought about it, but he knew who the people would be that would be his closest advisors. We sent out airplanes and made calls. Those people arrived the next morning for what became the transition to the presidency of the United States for Gerald Ford. It was only two days long.
On the evening of August 6th, 1974, the President of the United States resigned. Noon of August 9th, 1974, I led the then-Vice President into the East Room of the White House. I stood near him as he was sworn in as President of the United States and gave his inaugural speech. It was an amazing time in American history. At 30 years old, I happened to be a guy who was there and got to learn from it. I got to see things that happened and that went on.
When that transition team met for the first time that morning, I wondered again, “Did he have the plan to transition to the President??” He pulled from his pocket probably five handwritten pages of exactly how the transition was going to work, who was going to do what, who had what accountabilities and responsibilities, and how the American government was going to continue to work. It was an amazing time to watch leadership at the highest possible level and to understand what leadership was all about in that context. It was a wonderful experience in history for me. It was a great time. I learned a lot. It was a lot of fun being there. I traveled all over the world on Air Force One. It was a great experience.
The strength of, at the time, Vice President Ford’s leadership, he knew exactly who he wanted to call. By the next morning, he had his plan entirely lined out. He was not winging it. He was prepared. That’s amazing. You got to follow it with the funny tennis court story, though.
We had a small group that played tennis on the White House tennis courts whenever the weather would allow them and whenever we were in town. One particular day, we were playing tennis. It was Gerald Ford, Don Rumsfeld, who went on to become the Secretary of State, and then George H. W. Bush, who went on to become President, and me as a young kid.
We were playing. Gerald Ford was at the net on one side. I was at the net on the other side. Don Rumsfeld was deep. George H. W. Bush was deep. We were having a rally going back and forth. Any of the tennis players who might be reading would know that if you hit a short lob to the person at the net, the person at the net can take 1 step or 2 back, put it away pretty easily, and win the point. Don Rumsfeld hit a lob shorter than he wanted to and I could get to it, so I took a couple of steps back.
Being a young athlete, I was like, “I’m going to hit this ball as hard as I possibly can and show them what a great tennis player I am.” I swing as hard as I can. I hit this ball. It came off my racket at a strange angle, and it hit the President of the United States right in the stomach. It was right in the diaphragm. He went down like a bull moose shot with a 30-06. He was down, face down.
We all ran over. The Secret Service ran over there. His friends ran over there. When we got to him, there were no obvious vital signs. We couldn’t hear him breathing. I think, “I have killed the President with a tennis ball for crying out loud. This is not a good situation.” My second thought is, “I’m now unemployed. There’s no way I’m going to continue to work for the President of the United States.” Pretty soon, he starts coughing, wheezing, and spitting. We help him up. He then dusts himself off, grabs the nearest Secret Service agent, points to me, and says, “Kill him.” It was not a good situation. I was like, “Mr. President.” We’ve had a lot of fun stuff like that that went on during that period of time.
We see the serious side of the White House, the President, and so forth, but there’s a whole other operating level where jokes are told and fun is had. Serious conversations go on. There are all kinds of tough decisions that have to be made, but there’s also this family familiar side to the White House. Since we work so hard together, we know each other so well. That’s a lot of fun that the American public would never see. They will never hear about that.
It’s backstage. It’s behind the curtain. Thank you for sharing that. Still going back to your early entrepreneurial journey, tell us about one of your first entrepreneurial ventures. It led you out of government service and back to the private sector. 
George H. W. Bush and I were sitting and talking one day in the White House dining room about what we were going to do after the White House. He was the Head of the CIA at the time and the Secretary of the President. He said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t know. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ll go back to Arizona and figure it out.” That’s what entrepreneurs do. We figure it out.
That's what entrepreneurs do. We figure it out. Share on X
He said, “There’s a little company down in Louisiana. We know about it. They build cargo crew and utility boats for offshore oil platforms. We like that company. It’s being sold. It looks like a foreign interest. We’d rather keep that in US hands. Would you go down there and do a little analysis for me of the company? If it’s a good little company, I’ll have some of my friends maybe step up and buy it to keep it close to the US government.” I said, “Sure.”
I went down there and spent about three days. I love the company. It was a great little company. They had good leadership and good people. It was truly an entrepreneurial venture. It was on the bayou of the river down in Morgan City, Louisiana, the hotbed of offshore oil exploration. It was a town of 50,000 that had 45,000 people employed because of the offshore oil industry. They built boats that are anywhere from 125 feet to 360 feet long. I liked the company. It was a small company. It was $10 million in revenue and $1 million in net after tax. It had nice numbers.
I went back to the White House. He said, “How’d it go? Do you like the company?” I was like, “Yes. I like the company.” He said, “I’ll have my friends buy it then.” I said, “I’d like to buy it.” He said, “Do you have any money?” I said, “I don’t have any money. I’ve been working for the government for crying out loud. They don’t pay any money. I don’t have any money.” He said, “Do you know anybody that has money?” I said, “I know a couple of guys who have some money up in Ada, Michigan.”
Ada is the hometown of a big private-sector company called Amway. Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel, the two founders, and I had become friends earlier before I got to the White House. That developed even further at the White House. I flew up there and sat across a conference table. I was a typical entrepreneur. I had no money but a good idea.
I sat down and was encouraged. I said, “Here’s the company. Here’s what we can do with it. Let’s go have some fun.” They said, “How much money are you going to put in?” I said, “I’m not going to put any money because I have no money.” I said, “I’d like you to finance the whole deal.” They looked at each other and smiled. They have a whole center of entrepreneurship.
On the first floor of their building in Ada, Michigan, they believe in entrepreneurship. They liked my courage, coming and asking them. They said, “We trust you. We like boats. How much do you need?” I said, “X millions of dollars.” They were like, “When do you need it?” I was like, “By Friday.” This was Wednesday. I was the typical entrepreneur, waiting until the last minute. It’s a real entrepreneurial story. They said, “Okay,” and they made a wire transfer the next morning.
On the way out of the conference room, they only said one thing to me. They said, “Take care of our money,” and shook my hand. That was the only agreement we had between us. We went down there and went to work. My college roommate and I went to work. He was a basketball player also. I always think it takes two basketball players to have one brain, so it works out okay.
We went down there and went to work. He did more of the work than I did. We went to work, had a good time, and built that company. We got a 10X out of that when we sold it. We took our partners out and paid them back 100% of their money in 18 months. We kept them at a 10% carried interest so we could say, “Thank you for financing us.” They did well and we did well. That was a lot of fun. We had a good time. We were in the business for about five years.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs miss that. Business people miss that. It’s a good business to do good. They certainly treated you well and you treated them well. It’s good business to do good. Nice guys do finish first, and it’s good business to do good.
Doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive. That’s for sure.
Doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive. Share on X
That is true. Tell us about hard lessons or something that happened somewhere along your entrepreneurial path. At the time, it was like, “I am not having fun right now.” Maybe in retrospect, after some time passed, it turned out that it was positive for your overall path, but at the time, it was not fun. 
Most entrepreneurs or most of us who do these kinds of businesses and things go through hard times at some point. I don’t know of a successful person who’s had an easy path. Almost everybody I know, and I’ve associated with some interesting people, will tell you pretty quickly about the hard times because that’s where they learned the biggest lessons. That’s where I learned my biggest lessons. It was during the hard times. Any of us can make it in the easy times or the good times when the money’s rolling and things are happening. I’ll tell you what. It’s a test of character in the hard times.
I had a situation developed where I got into business with some people. We signed jointly and separately on some commitments, which we learned to do only one time. We never do it twice. I was a young businessman, all optimistic and everything else. We got into this business. My partners in this case went out and hypothecated their securities, assets, and everything on another deal at the same time they were doing my deal. The other deal collapsed, taking all that they had committed to the first deal, so I stood alone as the only person there. My partners were gone. They were busted.
I was staring personal bankruptcy right in the eyes. I thought it was worth a fight, so I battled. It was about two years of battling. I went to work every day thinking that might be the day that I had to file for personal bankruptcy. It was hand-to-hand combat for two years. It was with lawyers, insurance companies, bankers, and accountants. You know the story. You know how those things and those battles go.
At the end of two years, we emerged okay. We didn’t have to file for bankruptcy. We emerged good or probably better than we thought we would, but it was tough. I didn’t tell my wife about it. We have seven children, so she had plenty of responsibilities and lots of things to do. I didn’t tell the kids. I did after the fact, but not during. I went to work every day. You put your clothes on and get up. You wake up and show up. That’s what you got to do. You dress up and show up. That’s what I had to do for a couple of years and it turned out fine.
Entrepreneurial Journey: You put your clothes on and get up. You wake up and show up. That’s what you got to do.
 
It was a great lesson to learn during that period of time about myself and being challenged directly, and how I controlled and managed my own concerns. That’s something we have to go through. It created an opportunity for me. Subsequent to that, that was one of our best opportunities. I got a call from a friend of mine, Gary Jonas, in Washington, DC. We’d been in YPO for a long time together. We are great friends. We had traveled the world together.
He called one day and said, “Someday, they’re going to allow people to have their eyes operated on by lasers.” I said, “You’re crazy. You have no idea what you’re talking about. That will never happen. Ophthalmologists and optometrists won’t allow that to happen.” I poo-pooed it. He kept calling me back about every two weeks. He’s like, “This is going to happen. It’s gotten approved in a few countries. Canada approved it. It’s only a matter of time until the US proves that.” I was like, “The FDA will never approve. That won’t happen.” He said, “How about if we put a little money together and do something?” I put him off for about six months and finally, I said, “Let’s go do something.”
We got a few friends together and raised some money. We bought a little clinic up in Mississauga outside of Toronto where it had already been approved in Canada. We chartered some airplanes and flew some patients up there. We got doctors that were experienced. When it was approved three years later in the United States, I was 100% wrong. We were ready and prepared. We were the first mover. We were the first to market. We had doctors under contract and patients who had the surgery.
We merged with a small Canadian public company. We had taken our own company public, and then took it public here in the US as well. Soon, we were rocking and rolling. That company’s called TLC Vision, the largest LASIK eye surgery company in the world. It was a lot of fun. You talked about a dead startup. We did not what we were doing. Clearly, it was a great learning experience. Gary and others did a great job of running that company and making it successful. It was a lot of fun.
There are a couple of great points there I want to put an exclamation point on. One was hand-to-hand combat. I never met an entrepreneur who didn’t go through a period of time where they got up every morning, put their clothes on, and painted a smile on their face. Maybe they didn’t feel. They went out and took care of that day’s business.
The other thing I loved, and thank you for sharing that, is how right you were about LASIK. Some of the best things that have happened to me in my life, I was wrong although I was convinced I was right and everyone else was wrong. It pays to sometimes look at the opposite. What I’ve found in my own life is I’ll take a second and look at the opposite. Sometimes, it only takes a second for me to abandon my default or my bias and say, “It could be that. I don’t know.”
Sometimes, we forget to look in the mirror and see how imperfect and vulnerable we are and how many mistakes we make. In my lifetime, I’ve made a ton of mistakes personally and professionally. We apologize, ask for forgiveness, or battle back. That’s part of the entrepreneurial journey and the entrepreneurial spirit. None of us thinks we’re perfect in any way. We’ve got all kinds of battle scars to prove that. You keep fighting. One of the things I admire about entrepreneurs is they don’t quit. They keep battling. In good times or bad times, we keep fighting for what we believe in, what we think is correct, or what we think is a good idea, an opportunity, or whatever it might be.
There are always those 3 or 4 things you have to remember as an entrepreneur. The first is, what’s your vision? How big is your vision? Are you attached to that vision? Do you believe in that? The second is the preparation that’s necessary. Sometimes, we forget that the better we prepare, the better opportunities we have to be successful.
The third thing, for me at least, is this notion of discipline. Once you decide on a course of action and the way you’re going, you got to be disciplined to stay on it to see the end result. Some people quit too soon. Some people give up too early or don’t have the stomach for the fight. The entrepreneurs who are successful battle hard, fight through the tough times, live up to their vision, prepare every day, and then go out and be disciplined to achieve that vision. When you do that, you got a good chance to succeed.
I agree. You got a good chance if you follow that formula. What about a warp-speed moment? Things are going pretty well in your life, but all of a sudden, there are a couple of choices or a couple of events. All of a sudden, you’re on the hockey stick. You’re into growth. You never saw it coming. 
I’d like to say we never saw it coming, but as an entrepreneur, we always see hockey sticks. Whether they’re going to happen or not is the issue. In our ship-building stuff, we got a hockey stick with a 10X exit. With our LASIK eye surgery business, we got more than that. We took it public, took it private, and took it public again. We took it through bankruptcy. We did everything with the LASIK eye surgery business, but it all worked out. That was all tied to economic times. When you have hard economic times, people who are paying cash for medical services, that tends to dry up in hard economic times. People hoard their cash. They postpone surgery, and then it came back in the good times again.
There was one maybe late in my life when I was chairman of the board and lead outside director for a public company. The public company was growing nicely. It got to be about $985 million in revenue. It was a good company in 43 states. It was in mental health and physical health. All of us thought it was going well. At one point, it became necessary to exit the CEO and the CFO. The board turned to me and said, “We’d like you to run the company.” At 70 years of age, I hadn’t thought about running another public company. I said, “I would for three years and no more.”
Since there was great potential with the company, I thought that we had an interesting upside. While it wasn’t evident to everyone, we were able to do three major acquisitions. There were 2 at $400 million and 1 at $600 million. Suddenly, we’re a $2.1 billion company. That was a good run. When I became CEO, it had a $10 share price. It had 10,000 employees and almost $1 billion in revenue. We had 43 locations across 43 states. It was an interesting company, doing about $60 million in EBITDA.
If you fast forward that 24 months or 30 months, the $10 share price went to $55. The employee base went from 10,000 to 17,000. We were in 43 states, but we’re also in 14 countries. The revenue of the $2.1 billion in the EBITDA was about $200 million. It was an interesting change. I did not see that growth. We more than doubled the size of the company In 24 months. We thought we could grow it, but not like that. That was a fun experience as well. That’s the roller coaster. You’re going up, and then you get to be at the top. That was a lot of fun. I left the company after 30 months and went off to do other things. It was a lot of fun.
It’s one thing to double a $10 million company or a $100 million company. It’s something else to double a $1 billion company. That’s something different.
As you’re growing companies, and you know because you have grown companies, there’s a level of complexity as we get to certain levels that we didn’t anticipate necessarily. You’re right. As I grew up growing companies, it is one thing to run a $1 million company. The first company I knew had $1 million in revenue and did $50,000 in net profits. I thought I was the wealthiest and smartest guy in the entire world. The next company was $10 million. The next company was $50 million. The next was $100 million. The LASIK eye surgery company was a $600 million company.
As you go up that route leading different kinds of companies, we have to grow at the same rate the company is growing or we will get left behind. Sometimes, entrepreneurs forget that. We get excited about the journey. If we don’t continue to grow ourselves and our knowledge base, we won’t be able to run the company at $200 million, $400 million, or $800 million because the complexity is too great. We got to grow.
Entrepreneurial Journey: If we don’t continue to grow ourselves and our knowledge base, we won’t be able to run the company at $200 million, $400 million, or $800 million because the complexity is too great.
 
We got to grow or stay. That’s all there is to it. We’re into the fourth turn. I can see them waving the checkered flag. We’re almost there. I’m going to put you in a time machine. Like Star Trek in the old days, I’m going to take you all the way back to twenty-year-old Warren. You’re going to get about 60 or 90 seconds to share something with your twenty-year-old self that you know now that you wish you had known then that would’ve made your journey in business, family, or personal easier, faster, or improved. What is one thing that now Warren would share with twenty-year-old Warren that you wish you knew then?
I got married when I was 21 years old to the woman I wanted to be married to. She’s fantastic. I was asked once, “What would you do differently?” which is the essence of this question. I said, “I’d marry my wife sooner.” She’s had such a big impact on my life and a big influence on our children and our family. I admire her and love her so much. She’s fantastic. That would be one thing. The second thing is that don’t take it too seriously. Enjoy the ride. The third thing maybe would be to say that people matter a whole bunch more than money. Take the time to be a great human being along the way and help others.
The fourth would be whatever you can do to subordinate the ego, do it. The ego gets in our way. In my way, at times, I get puffed up every once in a while thinking I’m the smartest guy in the world and I always get slapped down. Take care of that ego. Sixth, use our resources to benefit others. We’re always going to have enough money to pay the bills and have a nice car, a nice home, and so forth. There are a lot of people in the world who are hurting. We need to help those people.
What we’re exposed to is our humanity. As we grow in leadership and wealth, it’s our humanity that matters. Can we help other people? Those kinds of things become important. Those are lessons that I’ve learned along the way. It’s sometimes hard and sometimes soft that I would tell my twenty-year-old self, “Pay attention to these things.” If you do, it’s not enough to be a good leader. You have to be a leader for good. That’s the challenge that we have in the world we’re facing. Can we be a leader for good? If we can, then we have a chance to influence the world. If we do that, then being an entrepreneur is the greatest job in the world.
It's not enough to be a good leader. You have to be a leader for good. Share on X
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. Those are pearls of wisdom from Warren Rustand and things he would share with his twenty-year-old self. How can we support you? Is there anything we can do for you?
You’ve always been supportive. I appreciate that. Our friendship’s been one of mutual support. I love you. Thank you for what you’re doing. What you’re doing for entrepreneurs is fantastic. This show is fantastic for entrepreneurs. It allows people with experience to share that experience in a way that maybe those young ears out there somewhere are paying attention to. They’re going to be different because they’ve read what your guests and you have to say. Thank you for what you’re doing. You’re tremendously supportive. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care of yourself, and thank you very much for allowing me to be with you.
I’m blessed. Thank you so much. 
 
Important Links

Warren Rustand
White House Fellows
TLC Vision

 
About Warren Rustand
The common thread that permeates Warren Rustand’s s experience is one of vision, strategy, executive leadership, and achievement. He has created, led, and grown many successful private, public, and not-for-profit entities. He has a passion for family, entrepreneurship, public policy, and community. Warren’s background includes the following:

Amazon Bestselling Author, “The Leader Within Us,” mentor, business strategist, advisor to CEOs and businesses globally.
CEO Providence Service Corporation (NASDAQ) $2.1 billion social services and healthcare company.
Managing Director SC Capital Partners an investment banking group
Chairman and CEO of Rural Metro Corporation, a $500 million (NASDAQ) emergency services company.
Chairman and Interim CEO TLC Vision (NASDAQ), a $400 million Lasik eye surgery company.
Chairman/Director of more than 50 public, private, and not-for-profit organizations ranging in size from multi-billion-dollar companies to mid-size, early-stage, and startups.
Selected as a White House Fellow following a nationally competitive process.
Special Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce. Co-led the first-ever Executive Level Trade Mission to the former Soviet Union.
Special Assistant to the Vice President of the United States.
Appointments Secretary to the President of the United States
Chaired the YPO/WPO public policy conference titled, “Public Policy and the Private Sector,” for 30 years in Washington DC
Global Chair of WPO, an organization of 10,000 CEOs in over 100 countries.
Co-Founder and Chair of L3, a worldwide leadership group, focused on one’s contribution during the second half of life.
Co-Founder and Dean of Faculty/Learning at the EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization) Global Leadership Academy in Washington, DC.
Undergraduate and Graduate degrees from the University of Arizona.
Honors and Awards: The Visionary Leadership Award, Distinguished Citizen Award, 25 Year Achievement Award, Sports Hall of Fame, Robshaw Leadership Award, White House Fellowship,
Honorary Lifetime Membership in EO, All American Academic Basketball Player, Member USA Basketball Team at World Basketball Championships, Drafted by the Golder State Warriors, Merrill
Freeman Leadership Award, and Father of the Year Award.
Warren is a frequent speaker on the subjects of leadership, business, family, and personal development.

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Donk Williams
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Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E31 | Preston Brown And His 7 Stages Of Entrepreneurship
Date: February 7, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/preston-brown-and-his-7-stages-of-entrepreneurship/
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Content:
 
Success in business. How can you achieve it? What is the formula to grow your business? In this episode, Preston Brown, a Business Coach, discusses the seven stages of entrepreneurship and the formula to grow your business. Preston suggests that you must look at the three filters, productivity, profitability, and purpose, before you invest or start any company if you want to be an entrepreneur. He also identifies four core values we should have in every area of life. Tune in to this insightful episode with Preston Brown!
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

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Preston Brown And His 7 Stages Of Entrepreneurship
$180MM Revenue And Growing
I have a real treat for you with our guest in this episode. Preston Brown hails from El Paso, Texas, and is a serial entrepreneur, owning multiple companies and doing over $180 million in revenue. He’s a speaker, a coach, a consultant, and is doing the deal himself. Welcome, Preston Brown.
Thank you, Don. It’s such a privilege to be here. I’m so excited.
I’m thrilled that you could join us. Let’s hop right in. I want to take you back to little Preston. When you were 5 to 18, in your house, however that household was situated, was there someone who set an entrepreneurial example for you or in your family, are you the trailblazer?
Let me give you the right and easy answer. I did not have an example but I had enough pain to make myself into one. Most people will judge a story by the ending and never read the whole book. I’m the 40-year-old guy whose billionaire buddy rented me an island in the Maldives for my 40th birthday so that we could all celebrate together.
I’m the guy that has 2 airplanes, 18 businesses and all this revenue. I’ll tell you one thing, revenue’s vanity and profit is sanity. I do make good profits too but if you hear somebody with big revenue, a lot of times they are full of crap so be very careful and go verify before you listen to some guru or somebody out there spouting BS. Get the whole story.
I’ll tell you my beginnings. I grew up in a trailer park in a little suburb outside of El Paso. If you like trailer homes, you should visit it. It’s nice. There are trailer homes and trailer trash. I grew up there as the trailer trash in the trailer home. I grew up with this wonderful family. We do not have a lot of money. There were times when we couldn’t pay our water bill. My mom got a membership to a country club so that she could take us there.
The country club was $75 a month but the water bill with this local water guy was $300. We would go shower at the country club because it was cheaper to shower there. There was some liberty in the house but there was never an entrepreneur. When I’m about seven years old, my dad said, “I’m going to set our family free. We’re going to live life on TV, not watch it on TV. I’m going to open my business.” The man was a genius. He was a member of Mensa. He’s a beautiful man.
He was a metallurgical engineer by trade but he wasn’t that by education. He made a car in the ‘80s. They got 1,500 miles per gallon. It never went more than 50 miles an hour to be full, fair and transparent. He helped pioneer stereo lithography, which is radio waves through plastic, which operates as cutting tools and you could make a brain gear and turn 100 different gears on all these axes that turned each other without ever using a cutting tool of radio waves.
To give you some of his background, he was amazing. He worked on a project where he could print three-dimensional stem cells and they’re still working on this. My dad has passed but one day you’ll be able to print your heart and add DNA to the stem cells and grow your heart. It’s phenomenal stuff. The guy was a genius but he was not a business guy.
He opened a business in this little shed next to our house. I remember we stole an air conditioner. My mom never told him that story. We steal an air conditioner from somebody’s yard and installed it in the shed because we didn’t want him to die of heat stroke. He would work out there from 6:00 AM to sometimes 8:00 or 9:00 PM and he would make things for people. He worked at colleges and all these companies. He didn’t know how to bill, collect or charge well but as always happens, there’s an adversity story.
One day, my mom loses her job. She was a teacher in public schools and private schools but didn’t get paid much. When you don’t have a lot of money, it gets scarce real quick when there’s a new entrepreneur and a startup company that doesn’t know how to collect a charge. We had so much love in the family. There wasn’t a lot of pain.
I remember this fight like it was yesterday. I don’t remember everything that was said but I remember one sentence in particular. The cast iron frying pan flies across the room, lodges in that thin cardboard trailer wall and clanks to the floor. My mom ended the argument on this. She said, “A real man can feed his family. If you don’t collect what you’re owed, don’t come home.”
I got to be the charity case. I didn’t understand what was going on. Here’s my mom, my hero and my dad, whom I want to be. This guy is a badass but he’s getting beaten with big, broad shoulders. If you ever look at me, I got a giant head and tiny shoulders. He has big broad shoulders, is a star football player and is a genius, everything any guy wants to be but here’s my mom saying these words and I’m watching him break. I get in his truck with him. We drive up to a house not far from where I live.
My dad walks in all 6’4 foot and starts talking to this guy at 5’9. I can see my dad that he could kill this guy with a napkin. I know what’s going to happen. He’s going to demand his money. We’re going to get his money. We’re going to go home and feed the family. It’s going to be fine. Everything’s good but it didn’t go that way because no good story does. My dad went for demanding, moved into asking, started with drawling and begging.
We walked out of there with a few $20 and whatever he had in his pocket. My dad was not much of a talker ever. He was more of the guy that got the stuff done but he didn’t talk at all. I could see this stoic powerful man. We were climbing the truck and driving down to the Smiths. It’s Albertsons now. We buy a box of ramen noodles and that’s what we can afford and some other things. I ride back home with this box of ramen noodles. I’m trying to talk to him and he won’t talk.
As we’re driving, I can see tears come down his eyes. My mother had told him, “A real man can feed his family. If you can’t feed your family, don’t come home.” My dad that day chose to give up on his dreams of a small business because he still wanted to be her husband and my dad. When I’m seven years old, I’m experiencing hatred for the first time in my entire life. I hated that man. Had I been a seven-year-old with a pistol, I would’ve killed that man where he stood because he took something beautiful from a beautiful man. It set me in a direction. My first business was selling lemon juice packs when I was a kid.
My mom was studying psychology so she had an impact too. She always said, “Everybody has a game. Find out the game and you’ll figure out how to win. If you figure out their game, you’re going to figure out how to win.” This made me pretty transactional and relegated to conditional love but I built some businesses. I went and figured out games. I learned how to win. I became this corporate marauder in little El Paso, Texas.
Everybody has a game. Figure out the game, and you'll figure out how to win. Share on X
I would enter industries and start dominating. I would start becoming the biggest player in the industry and the most successful but nobody even knew who I was. I started getting a bad reputation because I was cutthroat as hell. They didn’t meet me. The people that did meet me, got close to me. They were like, “This guy’s a real love bug. He cares. He’s donated to charities and doing all these things but when he goes into an industry, nobody sees him.”
A little tip for anybody that might be out there like me, if a lion doesn’t tell his story, the hunter will. I had a very good friend that told me that. There’s a good reason if you’re an entrepreneur to get on social media and start telling the real story. Get out there and do the podcast because there’s no reason to take some of the negative flack for all the good things you’re doing.
I was creating far better jobs, opportunities for customers and everything else but my competitors were telling my story while I grew and achieved. I was relegated to this conditional love thing until about 2019. That was probably worth $10 million or $15 million at that point. I’d given my entire life to money. Money was the meaning of life because the wound that my dad had received was my mission in life at that point which was to heal. I needed to go and prove that I could.
In 2019, my dad went to sleep in his favorite chair. Judge me if you will for this but he went to sleep and went home. That was the worst and best day of my life because my dad, the greatest teacher I’ve ever had, left. When he left, I knew I didn’t get to spend time with him. I realized what was important I could have. I built this business and all this stuff. Money was the meaning of life and it turned into this shift.
In 2019, I don’t even know how old I was back then. I’m not good on past dates. The shift was I looked at my kids, my wife and all these people that I was giving all of my time to the business and not enough to them and love became the meaning of life. I built these formulas for business, which I had tuned. Every time we’d have problems, I’d built these formulas and it was the one area where I was succeeding.
I wasn’t succeeding phenomenally in my marriage or as a father. I didn’t succeed phenomenally going out and having that. I had an amazing relationship with my dad. He was so proud of me. We’d have lunch monthly but we should have had lunch weekly. You never get to pass back and I’ve looked at all these formulas that I built large companies with. I said, “I’m going to use these formulas and cut out all the BS.”
I started tracking formulas with my first real business buying and selling homes. I created, shifted them and all that. I’m going to dedicate my time to family even if I could shut down half my businesses. Something weird happened to me, Don, when it wasn’t about the money anymore. Thinking about money and business is like looking at the person next to you and thinking about all the blood in his veins. That’s probably what vampires do. It’s not what we should do. If you’re looking at the heart, the soul, the person, you’re probably a good human being.
If you’re looking at your business and you’re looking at money rather than impact, you’re wrong. What happened to my net worth is it started blowing up. I started operating out of this new generosity model. I started paying my people a little more, which translated into me getting better people. I started measuring data a little better and following the formulas that I’d created for solving problems. I blew up.
One of my companies hit a valuation over the next few years of well over $100 million and all of my other companies started to follow suit. I opened a high-net-worth travel agency. I started a social media brand. I owned two airplanes. It’s been a radically fast journey from decamillionaire to centimillionaire overnight. My little boy wanted a McLaren 720S so we went out and bought it. I don’t give a crap about cars but when he got excited, we went to Scottsdale and bought one.
Seeing my son’s eyes, having the life that I couldn’t have that my dad wanted to give me but while still working to keep him humble and make him that hard worker. You can have the best of both worlds. Life is beautiful and we miss all the most important pieces. We can get into formulas and the seven stages of entrepreneurship. We can get some value that’s going to help a lot of your guys not have the same pain points and maybe have some success.
The most important thing in life is there’s one simple formula. Faith, family, fitness and finance are the four core of the human experience. If you hold four fingers up on your hand and you look at those four fingers, it’s like looking at some faith, family, fitness and finance. Those four fingers going up is happiness. Everybody seems to set a goal in finance but they haven’t dealt with the issue in their marriage, self-confidence, belief or whatever makes up their faith.
Stages Of Entrepreneurship: The most important thing in life is a simple formula, or the four cores of the human experience, faith, family, fitness, and finance.
 
They may have a fitness issue, an eating disorder, this side or the other. Who knows? If I put say a 20, 30, 50 or 150-pound anchor on 1 of those fingers, then I try to lift the other 4, it may not be the same thing but they’re tethered to one another. If you don’t solve where the problem and the pain are, you eliminate the elevation opportunity in the other four areas. That was the beautiful lesson my dad taught me on that day in 2019 when he went home.
Many times, entrepreneurs have that triangle exercise, business, family or personal and they say, “Put the dot where you are and the dot to where you want to go.” I like that exercise but in reality, everything is personal. Faith, family, fitness and finance are personal and if you take care of the person, you take care of everything. I love that. Tell us the formula.
The formula is so easy. When I tell you the formula, it’s almost going to sound too simple but the application of the formula is not as simple. Before I go into the formula, I’m going to start with the seven stages of entrepreneurship. I have eighteen operational businesses. I’m a hoarder. I collect them. All of them except my coaching company is automated. I don’t have to work on them.
What I found is businesses are a lot like people. When you have a baby business, it’s going to tell you when to change the diapers. You don’t get to tell it when the diaper needs to fill up and you’re ready to change it. You’re going to deal with the crap but you’re going to deal with the crap on the schedule of the baby when you have the baby. Businesses are not different. I’ve gone through growing enough businesses and having businesses in every single stage.
I still have startups. I have fun with startups, even still. I’ve got the big $150 million or $200 million company but I’ve also got a pool servicing company that is a startup that we launched and has well over 100 accounts. I couldn’t find anyone good to service my pool and I knew enough about business. I was like, “I want my pool clean.” We have a startup that passes break even with a bunch of gainfully employed people.
It’s funny because when you learn these seven stages, you either know, “I should invest in this business guy. I know where he’s at and what he needs to go through.” He’s aligned with where he is at and what he’s going to get to the next stage and if I invest, I can make a return. Whether you’re investing in it, starting in it or buying the company, understanding these stages is critical because the formula works the same way in each stage but it solves a different problem at each stage.
Stages are part of the formula. I’ll give you a little piece of the formula with the first part of the stage. Every business, to be a business, has a litmus test. It has to pass through three filters. 1) It must be productive. 2) It must be profitable or there must be a plan for profitability. You’re going to have a simple plan. It doesn’t have to be a complex plan. If I know I can buy a widget for X and sell it for Y, that’s a profitability model. It may be a rudimentary one but you still have one.
Stages Of Entrepreneurship: To be a business has a litmus test. It has to pass through three filters.
 
One of the most important is purpose. I believe in mentors, not gurus. Gurus want you to believe everything they say. Mentors will tell you, “I’m good at this. Listen to me in this but don’t listen to me in everything. If you come to me for fitness advice, you’re either ignorant or stupid about where you’re getting your information. Come to me for business advice. I’m your guy. I can help.”
Purpose is critical because all these gurus out there are like, “You got to hustle your way to success.” While that’s true, the best lie the devil ever told was seated with an ounce of truth. When you hustle, you’re going to get exhausted. When you’re passionate, hustle is an effect that passion causes. Purpose and passion are united linked synonym words. Productivity, profitability and purpose are three filters that must fit through.
Productivity, profitability, and purpose are three filters that must be spitting through. Share on X
Let’s play a game and solve it if we remove one of each. If we remove profitability, you have a hobby. Lots of people play golf. Most of them don’t get paid. From Tiger Wood, it’s business. What if we removed purpose? It’s an investment. I own a lot of apartment communities but I don’t care about the apartment communities.
I put the money in to get the money back. It’s an investment. I am not purpose-driven in that. If I started losing one of them, I won’t invest with that syndicator again. I’d move on. I wouldn’t dive in and go fix it. Whereas a business, I probably would. If I had to save my child’s life, I would. What if we remove the other one, productivity? You’re still profitable. It’s still your purpose but you’re a con artist.
Litmus Test For Business
Let’s look at those three filters before you invest or start any company if you want to be an entrepreneur. That’s how we get to the first stage, which is getting out of wantrepreneur. The first stage of entrepreneurship is when do I start? How do I start? It’s not the right time. You have a mindset issue. Learn the filtration of that litmus test for business and say, “It’s never the right time, which means it’s also always the right time.” It’s a little paradox there.
“If I start now and I have these three things, I can get in.” You solve your mindset issue. You read your book. It inspires you and what’s inspired in spirit. What’s encouraged, enter courage. What’s enthusiasm, enter theos like, “These words might be powerful. There’s etymology.” You get started then you get into this startup phase. Most businesses fail in the startup phase. Why? It’s because the word customer is the word customer for a reason, custom or customize. You have to take that thing as your purpose and customize it to somebody who’s going to pay you for it.
What’s your purpose? You might need some alignment with a customer and then find a way to make that your target customer and say, “We need to find that target customer, figure out their pain points, market to them, this, that and the other.” It’s a very exceptional process. You’re becoming exceptional. “I’m going to do this.”
Operational Entrepreneur
What gets everybody into business is being exceptional and that’s not what keeps people in business. Getting that customer, identifying that target customer or 2 or 3, gets you out of startup and into what’s called operational entrepreneur or what I like to call modern-day slave labor. Everybody’s like, “I’m going to get into business and be free,” then they become an operational entrepreneur. They know that eighteen hours a day means they are not free. They’re slave labor and they’re probably making less money than if they had a similar job.
The entrepreneur is stage one. The startup is stage two. The operational entrepreneur is stage three. An operational entrepreneur is where you’re realizing, “I’m so exceptional. I got into it.” A big mistake in this phase is, “I became successful because I was exceptional. I’m going to open another business.” Don’t do it or if you’ve already done it, maybe put one to bed and focus on one. Opening multiple businesses are like, “I’m a crappy parent. I’ll have more children.” It’s not a good idea. Don’t do that. Get one at least to the next phase.
Optimized Business
An operational entrepreneur is when you start going from exceptional to optimized. If the engine in your car makes an exception, the engine explodes. You don’t get where you’re going. The vehicle of your car or business stops. You are exceptional. Your business is optimized. To optimize, you start realizing, “It’s not a spectator sport. Maybe it’s a team sport. I’ll start giving some staff and putting in some leadership.” You get what’s called a DO or whatever name you want to put into it, Director of Operations. You can call it a manager, whatever you want and they start running the business.
You’ve hit this stage of being an entrepreneur. It’s the first time where your business is an asset and where you could probably take a vacation for two weeks without stressing out. The problem is most entrepreneurs have the same revenue, especially if they’ve done it more quickly that the operational entrepreneur. You’ve got that revenue and software. You might have an office, staff and all these expenses that are piling on so you got a big pay cut.
Operational Mega Printer
You want to go to the next phase, which is called Operational Megapreneur. Here there’s a pivot. This is where the home flipper maybe becomes the builder or the hard money lender. This is where you generally will have some pivot to a more efficient, simple and regenerative growth model. Not always but sometimes. You have to learn the art of scaling.
Scaling is fascinating. Everybody’s like, “I’m going to go sell more.” That’s not always a good idea. To get into an entrepreneur, you did do the beginning parts of scaling. You scaled capacity by bringing on a team. Once you’ve got that team efficient and maybe some key performance indicators, which link to job descriptions and what your DO’s measuring, A players because we grade them, then you start saying, “I’ve got more capacity. I’ve scaled a team. We can do more. I’ll scale sales.”
You scale it only for a little while because you scale sales to a point and then you scale the brand because brand equals margins. Marketing is for sales. Branding is for margins. People don’t know the difference between marketing and branding. Branding equals margins. It’s building more rapport and trust. Once you scale the brand and margin, you go back to the scaling team, which scales capacity and then you go to the sales, brand, margin and team. It’s a circular cycle. Rinse and repeat until you find out, “I’m supposed to go to the next phase.” Most people don’t find out this because we all get in love with growth. It’s part of our entrepreneurial journey.
If you scale sales, margins and brand and you see the top line and the bottom line going up, it’s exciting and all of a sudden, one day the top line goes but the bottom line doesn’t go up anywhere near as much. That’s the beginning of what we call leaky buckets. Leaky buckets in business are the identity that we’re going from operational megapreneur. This is where you’re starting to make millions. You’re doing great. This is where a lot of people get stuck to.
Leaky Buckets In Business
You need to go in when the leaky buckets begin and your industry is specific to your industry. It’s not like anybody else. Don’t have somebody in the home building business tell you how to run your lollipop manufacturing company or service industry business. You need to look at your industry, the trends and everything there but the leaky buckets are the indicators across the board.
Operational Micropeneur
This is where you’re like, “I need to get a CFO. I have to get higher level management.” Normally, you’re not promoting from within. It’s this operational megapreneur going to megapreneur phase. If you’re doing the same thing that you did at operational entrepreneur to entrepreneur, you’ve got to go find the right people. This is outside of your purview and comfort zone. Everybody wants to promote from within. We all love our people. Sorry, you most of the time can’t.
Occasionally, there’s an exception that proves the rule but most of the time you can’t. I stole my CFO from this giant, multinational, publicly-traded radio station because the CFO is a CFO and a good CFO is one of a kind. My CFO, I don’t think he’s ever paid taxes. I think he might know some things. He might have some ideas and he comes in then we get like that COO, which is an operations officer. Most people go straight to the CEO.
If you think CEO first, that’s dumb. “I’m going to get a chief executive officer,” and they have 10 or 15 employees or whatever it is. Which one of those 10 or 15 executives? Don’t go get the CEO. Many of your readers got a pretty good group of entrepreneurs. I think 15,000 or 17,000 entrepreneurs read this. They’re going to go get those ten employees and hire a CEO. They’re going to pay somebody with a title.
It’s the worst thing you can do. Please don’t do it. At that point, you have to start backpedaling at other pain. CFO normally first and then once you’ve got the COF, you’re like, “I’ve got my DO and CFO. I’m going to get a COO and step in as a CEO.” Operations officer and financial officer first. You are the CEO and the idea guy. The operations are off your back. You’re setting them to go, implement and measure what your team’s doing.
You’re starting to have real freedom. You can get as many C something else Os as you want. “I’m hiring a CTO because I want more technology.” You can get a Chief investment officer or a Chief Marketing Officer, whatever you want. In your niche and your needs, that’s good. When you get the CEO, you are truly at the full value of a megapreneur because your CEO’s job is not to work. It’s to think it’s your replacement.
CEO is the person you pay to replace you. You are a true owner. You never need to look at this business again. This is where your business has gone from 0 years old, 5 years old or 10 years old. It’s like your 40-year-old brother-in-law is successful, the millionaire, the next-door guy who is going to hop out in his Ferrari. You’re only going to visit if he gets married, gets cancer or something like that where you need to go see him. It’s when something huge happens.
This is where it’s truly an asset but you have a new problem. There’s one more step. The new problem is you at megapreneur have this new business partner and he is crap. He likes to take half of your money and regulate the hell out of you. His name has three letters. It’s IRS, which stands for I Really Suck. This guy likes to take everything and pull it out so you’re going to the next phase.
You’re talking to accountants, meeting other rich people and hearing all your poor friends say, “The rich don’t pay their fair share.” You start thinking to yourself, “What if there’s some out there that don’t? Could you do it legally?” Why wouldn’t they all be in jail? Do you know why? The investor philanthropist, which is in the final stage, starts learning, “All those campaign contributions that politicians get are only possible because politicians are commodities.”
Investor Philantropists
They are items to be bought, no different from the items on the shelf at the store that you shop at. No entrepreneur worth his salt is going to go donate money to a charitable contribution political campaign because they think that’s better than feeding kids or something. Do you think your Democrat or Republican party is better than feeding children? If you do, you have a problem.
These billionaires are only giving those guys money in exchange for favors, which gets written deep in the tax code. If we were talking years ago, I’d be like, “You can get 100% bonus depreciation on multifamily. You can ride off up to 1,000,050 of an airplane every single year.” There are all these opportunities. Why do you think I owned two airplanes? I bought two airplanes before I bought my fancy car.
Why? Tax write-offs and I can rent them out like Airbnb. I make money on my airplanes. At the investor philanthropist level, you start realizing, “There are ways to not pay taxes by investing my money in things that the government needs to be done.” Do they come out with a lot of new solar, wind and energy ideas that are going to help produce energy in a way that they feel is good and that’s going to provide tax write-offs? If there are good operators, you invest in them. You’ll get a tax. This is where you start getting in with the who’s who around the world because you are a megapreneur that wants to give your money two ideas that help save the world and make you more money and you stop paying taxes.
Let’s look at taxation. If you’re paying 40%, the net effect is you have a 160% growth advantage annually after about 3 or 4 years when you’ve started getting returns out because you’re like that bodybuilder that can grow 160% faster than everybody else. You’re going to win every competition. There are these seven stages and people are like, “Never in one stage.” If anyone’s like, “What stage are you in,” probably you’re stuck because you’re oscillating between 3 or 4.
I see people that are still in the startup phase because they’re still being exceptional, taking on new customers, doing this, that and the other but also trying to scale their team. They’re also over here managing by crisis personally because they’ve never trained their team. They’re oscillating some of them. I’ve seen people oscillating between operational megapreneur and startups.
It’s like, “Let’s solve a few problems here. Let’s get out of this one,” and your life gets easy. Your time gets freed up. You can be an entrepreneur and work 40 hours a week and make millions of dollars. You can work ten hours a week and make millions of dollars if you have the right formula. Does that explain the seven stages? Let’s hit questions there before we jump into the formula.
It’s all a matter of walking through the next door so entrepreneurship is a series of exits. Up to the point that you exit the org chart, you hired that CEO and you’re not on the org chart anymore and to where you’re the owner-investor. I love that. Let’s talk about the formula.
The formula’s so simple. I did the formula in three minutes. Remember, it solves a different thing at a different stage. The formula is a very simple filter. I started it with my first real business when I was flipping homes. I’m maybe a glutton for punishment and I love problems. They’re the point of life so every time I’d have a big problem, I would write down the problem and I’d figure out the solution.
I always had this belief that there are two kinds of problems. There’s the problem that if you’ve got a fire burning in the living room, you have a problem but there’s also somebody that lit the match. There’s the problem that caused that problem and we need to solve it for both. I built this formula. It’s a problem filter. I said, “What’s the goal of every business?” It’s simple. Every business wants the foresight to know what to do and how to do it.
If you’re a large company, you can switch out foresight for forecasting but they’re interchangeable. Small businesses just worry about foresight. The most important thing in a car is the front window. You don’t need to look anywhere else but that front window. You won’t hit stuff so foresight over forecasting until you’re about $25 million in revenue. Foresight is a very exceptional energy. You need some exceptional but like we have 1 mouth and 2 ears, you need twice as much optimization energy.
I call those alignments and simplicity. You need to create a path of least resistance processes for your customers, lenders, vendors, trades and everybody else involved. Alignment is going to create those paths but the problem is sometimes to gain alignment in an ever-changing market, you have to compromise simplicity because you’re making CHANGE. CHANGE is one of those fun things that we all think we shouldn’t have any of. It’s like problem.
The biggest problem we have in the world is we think we shouldn’t have any freaking problem rules. CHANGE is an acronym. It’s Choose Humble Action Necessary to Garner Excellence. If you love CHANGE and accept CHANGE, which if you’re an entrepreneur, you should, you get to remove BLAME, which is also an acronym, Being Lazy And Making Excuses.
I would go through these different businesses and write down problems. I started finding out that all of the problems when I figured out, “This is alignment or this is simplicity or this is alignment and simplicity. This is a foresight issue,” wound up in 1 of 4 categorizations, culture, clarity, capacity and cash. Don, I have about a 2-week education course on culture and maybe 3 on clarity because most of your problems are solved by lack of clarity. Adding processes around it is huge.
There’s one little piece of capacity. I’ve got a two-week course on this. It’s so easy. Lead flow, sales flow, which is solving problems, deal flow and cashflow. It’s no different from the four Fs. Where’s your bottleneck? You can go read Eliyahu Goldratt’s book, The Goal. It’s one of the best books on capacity but it’s so simple. Where are your problems? Lead flow, deal, sales flow or problem-solving. What is a sale? A sale is a solution to somebody’s problem.
Selling starts helping.
Don’t help more than you can like my home building company. I remember during COVID, we were getting 60 contracts a month. I raised my prices by over $100,000 to get back down to 20. Everybody called me greedy. They said, “You’re such a crap. You’re greedy. You’re going after more profits.” I said, “No, I’m not. I can’t build more than twenty homes a month. There’s not enough labor to build. I’m lying to people if I sell 60 homes a month.”
Do you know what happened a few months later with all the people that called me a crap who happened to be my competitors? The inflation hit. Lumber went through the roof. High prices solve high prices. I was the only crap still building because when the inflation hit, I still had a margin. I understood those four flows of capacity. There’s cash. That’s the last one. I already talk about ROI in business, Return On Investment and so many business owners talk about ROI and they’ve got their investment back.
I’m like, “You’re stroking yourself. If you invested $100,000 and you’ve got it back, your return’s infinite. Why don’t we talk about ROM, Return On Marketing? What’s your cost per customer acquisition? How many times can we rinse and repeat?” That’s what ROI turns into. Use the right language. What if we looked at return on time? What’s your time worth? How about a return on emotion? Is this still your purpose? Are you still loving it?
I went into coaching because I want to help other people. I don’t need to own all the businesses in the world. I like doing this. These two are powerful, return on the balance sheet equity and return on debt. If those two are in the same trajectory, you are scaling at the maximum possible trajectory for your industry. Let that sink in because that’s a billion-dollar piece of advice.
Return on balance sheet equity and return on debt. If those two are in the same trajectory, you are scaling at the maximum possible trajectory for your industry. Share on X
I told that to a buddy of mine whom I’m coaching his leadership team. He was like, “That’s worth a billion dollars to me.” He was averse to death. I’m not going to tell you which company he has but he started borrowing some more money and making key investments, balancing that return on marketing, that cost of customer acquisition and using the debt, which was low cost because when you’re a billionaire, guess what you can borrow at to increase?
He looked at the revenue numbers. He is scaling so fast. He owns a large percentage of his company but it’s also public. In a market where everybody was going down, he was not going down. That’s a billion-dollar piece of advice. Write that down. Here’s the beautiful thing about the formula. This is what I love. I love saying this, “Complexity is seductive, not productive. Productivity gets you paid. Set activity is something I want in my marriage. It gets you to mess up. I don’t want it in my business.”
I’ll keep that in my marriage. I don’t want it in my business. I go into my wife’s makeup drawer because she is a complex, beautiful, amazing, wow creature. If you looked at her and me, you’re going to look at me and say, “That guy can sell.” Thank God for good women with a bad taste in men but she’s complex. Her makeup drawer probably has 150 dials.
She could be a different woman on Friday night than she is on Sunday morning. She’s amazing. Friday night women are more fun. A business doesn’t have 150 dials, Don. A business has six. It’s easier than your car. If we look at the dials in your car, your shifter knob has 5 or 6 dials if you have a standard. You have the brake, the gas, the clutch, the radio and the blinkers. There are so many dials.
Anyone can handle six. If it’s less than seven, an idiot can do it. Most people that get rich are not that bright. They’re simple folks like me. Price, product, people, place, promotion or process, those six things are the only things that ever need to be adjusted in a business. When you take the problem and dump it into the filter, alignment, simplicity, foresight and it goes down to culture, clarity, capacity and cash, you’re like, “Which ones do I need to adjust and fix it?”
This formula is so powerful and you can take your company from non-start to investor philanthropist in ten years or less. People will overestimate a year and underestimate a decade all day long. I have all the documents, Don. I wish we could go into all of it but it will take us about eight weeks to go through culture, clarity, capacity and cash. That’s the only problem with this.
I never mean it to be like bait and switch-y. I will send you all the documents and anyone that wants to go through and discern them themselves can have them. I want this to get out there because there’s no amount of abundance that people shouldn’t have. It’s all the documents around training on culture, clarity, capacity and cash and these four things because it’s no different from the four Fs. Your anchor is holding you back. I’ll send all that to you. You can give it away to everyone and everyone can be successful and free. No one can’t have a $100 million or $1 billion company. The ones that don’t believe in it are still oscillating in that non-start feel.
Thank you so much. We’re coming into the fourth turn. I can see the checkered flag. Let me ask you. I’m going to put you in a time machine and send you back to twenty-year-old Preston. You got about 60 seconds to share something with 20-year-old Preston that 40-year-old Preston knows that would’ve made your journey a little easier, faster and better.
There are four core values you should have in everything, especially in business but in every area of life. These are four core values that I live by and I would’ve told twenty-year-old Preston this because it would’ve made everything that was a fight into a fortune instead of a fight. It must be productive. Productivity is critical. It must be transparent. If I can’t see it, I don’t believe it and that’s my way of looking at business. We use SDAs. We send that stuff out to everyone. They know the cash position of the company. It must be with integrity.
Stages Of Entrepreneurship: If we were nice to each other, we would’ve come through it with different ideas and viewpoints that could merge to grow a garden instead of the shit storm we created and all the pain we engineered.
 
Last but certainly not least is kindness. I added that one during COVID because I watched everybody get so nasty with one another for no reason. We all wanted the same thing. We all wanted the certainty of success. Everybody was scared. If we were nice to each other, we would’ve come through it with a whole bunch of different ideas and viewpoints that could have been merged to grow a garden instead of the storm we created and all the pain that we engineered.
Nice guys can’t finish first, contrary to a popular saying. Those guys can finish first. It’s all about seeing things from the other person’s point of view. Preston, how can the readers reach out to you easily as best?
The easiest best is my website, www.ThePrestonBrown.com or any of my social media are the same thing. Reach out and ask questions. We’re here to help. We want to see everyone succeed because it’s possible and even a lot easier than most people think and believe. Let me end on this, Don. The word believe is a root word. It’s also etymology. It means be love. Humans go from being to becoming, which is a verb. If I’m coming to visit you, I’m on a journey. Once they become even a little bit, they start believing and the next stage is they start belonging. When you can take that staircase from being, becoming, believing and belonging, that is the source of true happiness.
Preston, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. That’s it for this episode.
 
Important Links

Preston Brown
The Goal

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E30 | Scott Empringham And The $1.2MM Check
Date: January 24, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e30-scott-empringham-and-the-dollar12mm-check/
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Content:
 
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
 
Setting a strategic plan is essential for growth in our business. Today’s guest has an interesting story of losing an award-winning agency and building it back in less than 90 days. In this episode, Scott Empringham, the CEO/Owner of Empringham Media Group, shares how his 8-Step Plan helps him rebuild his business without employees, money, and advantages. His strategies, methods, and latest A.I. Tools made that growth possible. Grab this opportunity to gain more insights and grow with Scott today! So tune in to turn that goal possible!
 
Scott’s committed to helping any business get customers with social media and offers a complimentary monthly workshop to share his unique story and help businesses answer three key questions: “Where do I start?”, “What do I say?”, “How do I finish everything using the latest strategies and A.I. tools in less time?” You can enroll now at:  www.smart90workshop.com
 
You can also connect with Scott Empringham on these websites.
Discord http://www.scottempringham.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/1625914957575554
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/scottbempringham/
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottempringham/
Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@scottempringham
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOyLY0Q3VFEBZGP7SaTgb8w
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
Listen to the podcast here


 
Scott Empringham And The $1.2MM Check
Out Of Biz To $10MM In Revenue In 90 Days
In this episode, I have a good friend and a great gentleman, Scott Empringham. He’s coming in from Orange County, California, How are you, Scott?
I’m fantastic. Thank you for having me, Don.
Thanks for coming to the show. I’ve wanted to have you as a guest for a while. I count this as a real treat so let me put you on the spot. Share one thing you’re grateful for that we don’t know about you.
I’m grateful for my son beating COVID. He just had COVID and is feeling fantastic. He’s young and strong. That’s the first top of mind. He came down with it. He’s feeling good. He got a good night’s rest and he’s healthy. Health is the key to everything.
It’s funny how people, myself included, take health a little for granted until something happens. We’re not hitting on all eight cylinders and then all of a sudden, it accelerates past everything and becomes most important. I love that exercise where they do the triangles. It’s like business, family and person, where and in which direction you are heading. I love that exercise but I always think that’s misleading because it intimates that all three of those areas are equal. When personal is the foundation and a close second is family. The business is always third. Sometimes family’s first when you’re a parent. It’s like, “I’d give anything if it was me sick instead of him.” We are happy about his recovery.
I want to offer one thing I like. I was talking to the kids and Skylar Lewis talks about faith, family, fitness and finances. I was trying to get across the idea. I love the idea of a tabletop where there are four legs to the table, all are so important and I can’t figure out which one is most important. I do know that when I’m lined up and I’m investing in each one of those legs, strengthening my faith, family, fitness, health and finances, I feel better. That’s it. I feel better when all four of those things are firing.
I’m an older guy so for a long time, I’ve always felt that as a human, we’re spiritual, physical, emotional, mental and financial people. All these different components make us up as a human. If any one of them is too far out of whack could be good. That doesn’t always have to be, “I’m short cash.” It could be, “I have buckets of cash stacked in the room and I don’t know what to do with it.” That’s equally bad. A coloring of all of those areas makes the prettiest picture. You’re an entrepreneur in digital marketing. You have several businesses but tell me, what’s your main squeeze? What’s your main business that gets most of your time, effort and energy?
My core business is helping small businesses get customers with social media faster than they ever could have imagined. With the advent of AI tools, the world has changed. Things that were once out of reach of a small business are within reach. If they’ve got the right strategies, tools and team, anything is possible. They can get further faster for free.
 
Growth Strategy: With the advent of AI tools, the world has changed. Things that were once out of reach of a small business are within reach. They can get further and faster for free now.
 
The game has changed. I’ve seen it amazingly true with the workshops that we do. We’ve got an online course, a coaching program and then a full-service agency. My favorite thing is putting these tools into the hands of small businesses and then watching them light up as they start to imagine and see how fast they can move for little cost. A lot of folks are firing their agencies and it’s exciting to see small businesses have these tools and take off.
I’m aware of and use AI tools that are mind-blowing. My first exposure was someone introduced me to ChatGPT. In two minutes, Google will have to buy them. The fact that this is like Google with big muscles and to say Google has little muscles. It’s unbelievable. It didn’t take me long to figure out you can get complex and it still has an answer. If you’re asking rudimentary questions, stop and start asking detailed and complex engineering types of questions because it’s got answers. That’s amazing.
I love the business that you’re in. You and I are the yin and yang. You’re all about bringing in opportunities to win business through digital marketing. In my Romancing Your Customer book, I talk about the two reasons why people don’t do enough business. 1) They don’t have enough dates, leads and a consistent stream of qualified leads. 2) They’re not a good enough dater. They have a lot of leads and dates but they can never get to a second date so they never get to walk down the aisle. Most of what I help people with is the back part. We’ve got you a consistent stream of qualified leads so how do we do things that make it easy for those people to do business with you?
I love the metaphor that you used for the date because that’s where I start with my workshop in terms of the yin and the yang. The number one mistake I see small businesses make, like corner restaurants or corner eyelashes and we’ve got attorneys in our coaching program, is they’ll ask, “How do I promote my business?” What you said is important because they’ve got to know whom they want to date and what problem they solve for that date.
What we do with the workshop is clarify who your ideal customer is and what problems they have that you can solve. We have them fill out a basic form and then that creates an output that they have an avatar that they can create emails, video scripts, landing pages, offers, social media content and ads by getting clear on whom they want to date. As younger people, we ended up with dates that we thought we might like but it turned out not good for us.
Sometimes five minutes in we’re like, “What am I doing here? How did I get here? How do I get out?” The population of the earth is seven and a half billion people and most small businesses think that their prospect pool is infinite. In reality, it’s a very finite number. I’ve been in the call center business for 35 years. When a customer comes to me and says, “I have a big list,” I’m like, “What’s that mean?”
They say, “I have 2,600 prospects.” You’re like, “That’s very small.” We have to treat them with kid gloves because that’s a pretty small number. Even our SWAT team-type call centers were small deployments but we can make up to 50,000 phone calls a day. That’s a lot of hello. If you sell bottled water, maybe seven and a half billion people are your prospects. Not everybody can’t buy it but you have a much bigger market. I’m going to take you back to young Scott. Say 5 to 18, the home that you were raised in and the man now that takes a lot of different formats but was somebody an entrepreneur? 
Yes. Interestingly enough, it was my dad. When I was a young man, we grew up in Emerald Bay, Laguna Beach, California. It’s a beautiful place to grow up. I thought everybody had a private beach and everything else. I was lucky. My dad worked as the CFO of a company called Rancho Mission Viejo Santa Margarita. He was building a city. During that process, I’ll never forget walking into his computer room because he was one of the first people to have a computer. On his desk, I was getting a couple of dollars for a date or something I was doing. I saw a check and it was for $1.4 million.
My eyes popped out and I said, “Dad, how did all this happen?” He said, “I’ll give you the short version. In building a city, we found out residents of that city needed to work with a mortgage company and an escrow company. They needed a cable company. We had this audience and started filling needs. We created companies to serve those people.” He talked to me about value creation, finding problems, filling those problems and solving those problems.
That’s when the light bulb went off. I was like, “I want a check for $1.2 million sitting on my counter.” He gave me that bug and fire. He also let me know that it wasn’t going to come easy. You’ve got to sweat and work for it. That was the first time that lit my imagination to think that as he walked me through that, it was a cool process.
 
Nothing comes easy. You have to sweat for it. You have to work for it. Share on X
 
After interviewing about 150 entrepreneurs and several billionaires on this show, I thought initially everybody had an entrepreneurial example as a young person. After doing about 125 or 150 of these, it’s about half and half. Some did and some didn’t. I want to go back to your first childhood. Under eighteen job or you had a lemonade stand or you were an entrepreneur, that was your first gig. What was your first gig, Scott?
One of my first gigs was washing cars. I was 12 or 13. I found out that there were a lot of nice cars in our neighborhood and a lot of people needed them washed. I started knocking on doors and there was one of the first cars that I washed. I got there in the morning. He had a Porsche, which I love Porsches and he told me to come by on Saturday morning and he’ll give me $7. I came by at 7:00 in the morning. I didn’t want to wake him up so I opened up the door and rooted around looking for a key to turn it on. I found a key, put it in the lock and jammed the key in the lock. It was like a house key.
It had come off the rails but the very first job I had was just washing cars. A friend of mine told me about it. He said it’s a great way to make extra money. I could buy a bike, start to have autonomy and buy the things that I wanted to buy. One job I had when I was younger was painting stencils of addresses on the sidewalk because they would gray out or wash out over time. I did that a handful of times. Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in trying to create autonomy for myself.
You were a hustler. After your childhood, you went to MIT, back-packed across Europe and joined the Merchant Marine. What was the next step in your journey?
The next step in my journey was working with my dad and for my dad. I was dead set on being an investment banker when I was a kid because that’s where I saw a lot of his friends. He was in New York a lot but I didn’t have it. My background gravitated towards marketing. I always loved marketing, I went to work for my dad and he was a financial guy. I helped him create a newsletter.
One of the key experiences was making sure that you asked the question. Steve Jobs talked about one of his childhood experiences was picking up the phone and calling Hewlett Packard. I forget whether it was Dave Packard, Dave Hewlett or whomever it was and he got him on the phone. I had a similar experience with Dave Hewlett. I was in college before I was going to work for my dad and we were doing an assignment to find out how Hewlett Packard had been successful at retaining key employees.
On a whim, I dialed information. I got through to the receptionist and then his secretary and said, “My name is Scott Empringham. I’m a USC. We’re doing a paper on Hewlett Packard. May I speak to Mr. Packard?” She laughed and said, “I don’t know if he’s got time now.” Ultimately, she put me through. I had a great conversation with him and then I was able to walk into my class and say, “We’ve been talking a lot about Hewlett Packard and what it takes to retain key employees. I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Packard and here’s what he said.”
That was a formative experience in college that I took working with my dad. I was fearless. I started calling everybody. One of the folks I spoke to on behalf of my dad while we were marketing the newsletter was the guy who ran Mad Magazine. The publisher of Mad Magazine before he passed away, I had a great conversation with him. Working with my dad and having those early experiences, being fearless and asking for what you want, knock and you shall receive, you seek and you shall find those things are true if you’re willing to put in the hustle and work. That was a great experience working with my dad, where he would turn me loose and say, “Go get them.” I tore it up and had a great experience with that while I had a chance to work with him.
One of my businesses in the call center business is we do outbound business-to-business cold call lead generation. The people that work in that company are fearless. You can get the CEO of a Fortune 500 company on the phone but not every time. They might have three admins and sometimes the admin will giggle at you and say, “I don’t know.” It can happen. For our clients, we have gotten executives as they were on an oil platform in the middle of the Gulf, getting ready to get on a helicopter on the phone. We get a lead for the client.
The client’s like, “I am blown away.” You’re like, “Part of it is just pick up the darn phone.” In the digital world, a lot of the digital boys and girls, and I’m pretty big in digital myself, are like, “The phone is so old fashioned, antiquated and it doesn’t work.” Let me assure you, as long as people have ears and mouths, the telephone’s going to work. Video cons are better. Face-to-face, Trump’s that. If your sales crew is sending tax and emails, make one phone call and skip 500 emails. It’ll be more effective. That’s how it goes. What’s the name of your company?
Empringham Media Group.
Is that your first company?
No. Over my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve had a dozen different companies, everything from t-shirt companies when I was in college, a mining and transportation company after college, import-export when I was a young man and then ultimately in 1999, I started a digital marketing company. I grew it over 20 years with $10 million in sales. It won all kinds of awards. I worked with Fortune 50 companies. I was winning awards in Vegas to losing it all and having to get it all back. I had multiple companies, I’ve made lots of mistakes and had lots of wins and certainly learned a lot in the journey in all four areas, family, faith, fitness and finances. All four have benefited.
You had a lot of success and things that didn’t go right, which were part of the success. It wasn’t the opposite. It was part of the path. If you don’t lose, you can’t ever win. It’s part of a deal.
I had my kids memorize a quote by Marcus Aurelius, The Obstacle is the Way. You’ve probably read the book. It’s a fantastic book. The failures, challenges and setbacks that caused me to stumble were also the things that helped me learn those important lessons to benefit in the next company. Each one without fail has led me to a greater advantage. Napoleon Hill talks about it in Think and Grow Rich. Every great author, I’m sure yourself, talks about the benefits of those problems. They don’t feel like it when you’re going through it but afterwards, you can always look back at them and think of a variety of ways that they benefited you. It’s become more humble, a better ear or a better listener. There’s always a lesson there for sure.
You set up the next question so well. It’s almost like we rehearsed this, which we didn’t. You had a very successful digital marketing company. You lost and rebuilt it. I want you to share a hard lesson with our group. Something that when it happened, you were like, “Can I go on?” In retrospect, looking back, you said, “It wasn’t fun. It hurt like heck but it was good for me and here’s why.” Do you have a moment like that you could share?
I’m on stage accepting. I swept all the awards in Las Vegas. We beat Oprah Winfrey’s agency and all these different agencies. They called me the Billion Dollar Man because some of the technologies, tools and approaches we use help us sell over a billion dollars’ worth of cars for all these car companies. I returned to the office on Monday feeling like a conquering hero. When I walked into the office, I saw everybody gathered around the reception office looking blue and glum.
 
Growth Strategy: They called me the Billion Dollar Man because some of his technologies, tools, and approaches help sell over a billion dollars’ worth of cars for all these car companies.
 
My stomach dropped and I didn’t know what was going on. They asked me if I’d seen my email. I walked back down the hall, flipped open my laptop and there it was two of my largest companies, which were ad agencies that had lost their business, which meant I lost my business. We were at $10 million soaring to $15 or $20 million. I was sure of it. I went to the bank about 90 days before that and pulled out a line of credit and tied to my home for $500,000.
I drew down, paid the media and funded the growth. When I say my stomach dropped, my stomach really dropped. Within 2 to 3 weeks, I had to shut the doors and fire employees. The $20 million dream was down to the tubes. During that time, I was going through a divorce so you can imagine all the different stuff. Lost the business, lost the employees, lost all of my money and I had everything tied up in that.
When I shut the doors, I then got a call from the bank. They went from bad to worse. They said, “You got 90 days to start making payments.” I had no prospects, no nothing. I came back to this house and lay on the couch. I wish I could say that it was an instant that I fired up but for about the first 2 or 3 weeks, I lay there and ask myself the question, “What am I going to do? How am I going to get out of this? How’s this even possible to get out of this?”
I was 50 years old. Not only am I starting from zero but I’m starting for a negative $500,000 or losing the house. I had 90 days to figure something out. I got calls from good friends in an entrepreneurial organization to fire me up. They say, “This isn’t the end. This is the beginning of something new. It’s up to you to figure it out.” Lesson number one was taking total accountability for my situation. I blamed my partner, my ex-wife and everybody. I blamed the employees that were of a different generation than me and had a different work ethic I thought.
Lesson number one came in taking personal responsibility for my situation. I went out for a run and it hit me. My whole expertise is getting customers with social media in a short period. If I could do for me what I did for them, maybe I could turn this thing around. I ran back home, wrote down an eight-step plan and decided what tools I was going to use. I was using my phone because I had no budget. I did something that not a lot of people do on social media. I told the truth on my Facebook page, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts.
You could see a picture of me in my new office, which was wedged between two filing cabinets in my dad’s office. No desk, just my laptop sitting on my lap starting over. I told everybody I’m starting and going to rebuild. Over the next 90 days, that’s exactly what I did. In 88 days, one of my favorite pictures of all time was walking into the bank with a final check for $500,000. I paid off the entire $500,000.
I looked like death in that picture. I took a selfie but that started a couple of things. 1) It was a new era for me to take total responsibility for my situation. I was doing good before but this was the next level. 2) I was far more humbled and recognized the things I didn’t know. I took control of the things I didn’t know or moved in that direction to take more control of those things. The third thing that it opened me up to was being able to take my story and then share it with other small businesses.
I’d been used to working with the Fords, Home Depots and Chryslers. This was an opportunity to work with small businesses that I’d never done before. It gave me so much joy to be able to share some of the tools and technologies with local businesses to see them thrive. It was a real turnaround for me. It was a humbling experience, as well as certainly one of the biggest growth experiences of my life for sure through that period.
Thank you so much for sharing. I appreciate that. It’s probably wrapped into that same story. My next question is what’s a warp-speed moment? Maybe not. Things are going well and all of a sudden, you make a decision or an event happens and you’re like, “Here we go.”
There are two moments using tools. One was my previous company. I’ll take it back to one of my encounters with a billionaire. I was sitting down with him at dinner in New York. I showed him my technology company and marketing services. He looked at my marketing services company where all the revenue was and he said, “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in this technology.” I said, “Why are you interested in this technology? There’s no revenue.” He said, “There’s scale.” He wrote scale on a napkin and said, “If you could take what you do for the manufacturers and work with 2,000 dealers, that to me is interesting.”
Within about six months, we’d taken a campaign that we were working on Ford Motor Company and dropped it down to 2,000 dealers and my revenue went through the roof, smaller price point but added value to thousands of dealers every single month for a period of time. That then was a warp-speed moment where overnight, millions of dollars started pouring in. We were serving a lot of different customers and that changed my future in terms of scale. The same thing is happening by creating a little form.
I went to Global Speaker’s Academy. During that time, they had us get clear on who our ideal customers are and what problem we solve. My customers are typically small businesses. What I noticed was a lot of the folks I’m working with, there are three fundamental problems they have with regard to social media. “Where do I start? What exactly do I say? How do I say it? How do I get it produced in no time?” I’m so busy running my business, taking care of customers, my employees and all those things.
I created a form and then as we started plugging it into these AI technologies, we can take a small business and they can answer 8 to 10 questions in our workshop and then power all the AI tools, the ChatGPTs, DALL Es, the runways and create video and images. They can create months of content in minutes, not months. They can create content for pennies or free, not thousands of dollars. That moment is now and it’s happening for small businesses all around the world.
Let me urge you, if you’re a small business, don’t delay. Opportunity is a fickle suitor. It’s here for a while and then it’s gone. In my business, I’ve had clients who are like, “We’re doing so well. We’re not going to grow now. We know it’s going to work. We’re going to do it next year.” I’m like, “Don’t do that. The universe or something happens to where somebody else will by osmosis pick it up and they will harvest everything that you were going to harvest but because you waited.” Time is a killer of deals and opportunities for sure. What about a nugget or a piece of wisdom from the mind of Scott that we want to know that we don’t know?
 
Time is a killer of deals and opportunities. Share on X
 
The thing that I’m obsessing about is the power of compound interest. Not necessarily the financial sense but in the book Atomic Habits, they talk about the valley of disappointment. I read another book where they talk about, “Would you rather have $1 million or $0.1 doubled every day for 30 days?” It’s an interesting question. How far could $0.1 go in 30 days if it was doubled? It turns out it goes a long way. It’s up to $5 million. There’s this idea that I was talking to my kids about this idea of having the patience to persevere through the valley of disappointment.
I work on my business and relationships, I get a lot of results and then it starts to fall off. When it falls off, that’s the difference between winning and losing. For me, that difference is persisting through that valley of disappointment. It comes in all things and it’s so difficult to navigate. Ninety-nine percent of people that don’t succeed, that’s where they quit because they say it doesn’t matter or work. It’s not going to work and it never will work. Whatever the story they’re telling themselves, that’s when they quit. For me, it’s being aware of the valley of disappointment and the benefits of that compound interest. The pennies when you stack them up, it goes like this. At the very end, that’s when it climbs. That’s the period when everybody quits, including myself. I’ve got to remind myself.
 
Growth Strategy: The difference between winning and losing is persisting through that valley of disappointment. It comes in all things, and it’s so difficult to navigate. 99% of people that don’t succeed, that’s where they quit.
 
Our workshop, Smart90Workshop.com, is all about taking that process and then onboarding people through a 90-day period. If you can get them consistent over 90 days, right around days 30, 35, 40 and 45, that’s when the valley of disappointment occurs. If we can have them stick with it through 90 days, they can achieve a lot more than they would ever imagine. Persistence and persisting through that valley of disappointment are everything to me.
That’s a great nugget. Thank you for sharing. I’m going to put you in a time machine and take you back to twenty-year-old Scott. You’re going to get about 60 seconds to share one thought that you wish you’d known then that you know now, something that would’ve helped make things easier, faster and better. Into the time machine, you go turn it back. 
Don’t smoke or drink. You’re going to lose your dad because he did those things. He was sober for 30 years. He couldn’t put down the cigarettes and when he went, it was a difficult time. Put it down. You’ll be so glad you did.
 
Small businesses can get customers faster than ever imagined if they have the right tools, team and approach. Share on X
 
Thank you for sharing. Scott, how can we support you?
A lot of folks say to me, “If I need to get started with social media and I don’t know where to start or what to say and how to get it all done,” I would invite them to visit me at Smart90Workshop.com. Go there. It’s free training. It’s a great place for small businesses to get started, figure out what to say and get it all done in less time than they ever would’ve imagined. In 60 minutes, they’ll have 90 days’ worth of content, emails, ads, offers and content. It’s a great starter kit. The way to help me would be to allow me to serve any small businesses that are looking for a place to start.
I do believe that small businesses can get customers faster than they ever imagined if they have the right tools, team and approach. You can find me at ScottEmpringham.com. If you want free training or somebody wants free training, it’s at Smart90Workshop.com. You’ll get an idea of how to take advantage of that. We do one every month for small businesses and they’re welcome any time.
Don’t delay. The secret to success is asking for help, learning something new and taking action. It takes all 3, 2 won’t get the job done. That’s it for this episode.
 
Important Links

Scott Empringham
ChatGPT
Romancing Your Customer
Empringham Media Group
Think and Grow Rich
Facebook – Social Media Secrets for Small Businesses
LinkedIn – Scott Empringham
Instagram – @ScottEmpringham
DALL Es
Atomic Habits
Smart90Workshop.com
@ScottEmpringham – TikTok
https://www.YouTube.com/channel/UCOyLY0Q3VFEBZGP7SaTgb8w
Scott@EmpMediaGroup.com

 
About Scott Empringham
Scott helps ANY businesses get customers with social media.For 20+ years clients have ranged from small entrepreneurial organizations to international corporations. His services include providing step-by-step growth strategies via an on-demand social media course, VIP mastermind coaching for CEOs and marketers, and full-service agency support.
Scott’s strategies and methods are proven in the toughest environments. After building an 8-figure, award-winning agency, he lost it all…and had 90 days to build it back. It wasn’t a stunt or a gimmick. But in less than 90 days, he rebuilt his business with no employees, no money, no advantages–just his “8-Step plan”, iphone, and free social media accounts. Now, Scott’s committed to helping any business get customers with social media and offers a complimentary monthly workshop to share his unique story and help businesses answer three key questions: “Where do I start?”, “What do I say?”, “How do I get it all done in less time using the latest strategies and A.I. tools?” You can enroll now at: www.smart90workshop.com
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: S2:E29 | Craig Swanson, Co-Founder Of CreativeLive
Date: January 3, 2023
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e29-craig-swanson-co-founder-of-creativelive/
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Content:
 
Winston Churchill said that success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Craig Swanson is an entrepreneur, business coach, and co-founder of CreativeLive who has lived this line. In this episode, Craig will share his story, including his journey with CreativeLive and how he became the secret weapon to its multimillion-dollar mark! Tune in as we discuss the factors of success, the path to creative breakthroughs, the potential of digitalization, the businessman’s perspective on failure, and more!
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 


 
Craig Swanson, Co-Founder Of CreativeLive
Online Learning Platform Serving 10,000,000 Creators
My guest in this episode is a super entrepreneur hailing from Seattle, Washington, Craig Swanson. He is an entrepreneur, a business coach and a Cofounder of an online learning platform CreativeLive. He thrives being the secret weapon partnering with online businesses such as KaisaFit, Sue Bryce Education and The Wedding School, helping them grow to the multimillion-dollar mark and even acquisition. Craig, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I have been looking forward to this.
I’m thrilled that you joined me. This will be evergreen but it’s a couple of days before Christmas 2022. I looked at this as an early Christmas gift that you were coming on the show so let’s unwrap it. Take a couple of minutes and tell me what is your profession. What are you doing business-wise? 
I have had a couple of exits. At this point, I am an experienced entrepreneur. I’m probably on my 10th or 11th business at this point. I generally am running as a business partner with three businesses at a time. I work with creative content creators that have large audiences already like internet influencers but are looking for an operator partner or someone to help them take their talent and their genius to the next level.
I come in as a mix of a VC. I bring some money as an accelerator. I bring a little bit of team and then my business partner’s mindset to help them and us build something cool and big. That’s what I do and I love it. A lot of it is built on what I have been doing for the last couple of decades getting up to the point where I have got the skills to do this.
If we go back to your first paying job, maybe that job was a lemonade stand or maybe you were writing code, I don’t know, but the first time that you traded work or time for dollars. Tell us about that, would you? 
I am almost positive that I traded time for dollars before this but my first would be a paper route when I was ten years old. I probably did something before that but I don’t think I was trading money for it. We were in Eastern Washington. You could do it a little bit younger. I had my first paper route when I was ten years old. I’m a father of kids and I look at them and go, “How are they going to learn to do things when all these jobs we had as kids like mowing the lawns, trading for cash and all this type of stuff don’t seem as easy as it used to be.”
I’m in the grandchild business but would I even allow my child to walk the streets at o-dark-30 in the morning placing or either throwing newspapers at the stoop or in some places, they required that they were hung on the door? Walking up to doors of strangers over and over and you are like, “Heck no. I wouldn’t let them do that.”
Yet, I’m glad I did. Thankfully, life has been pretty good, all safe but even kids don’t even trade cash because we are moving into this cashless society in a lot of ways. Learning to count cash and collect. Deal with people that are not paying. These skills as a ten-year-old, I was learning super helpful stuff.
CreativeLive: We’re moving into this cashless society in a lot of ways.
 
You talk about a cashless society. I was in Silicon Valley. We are having an event that I’m facilitating and it’s at a bank but it’s a weird bank. It’s on the fifth floor of an office building. I can’t see any tellers. They give me a tour. We walk around. There’s a bunch of cubicles. We get to the end and in their break room, they have beer on tap. I’m like, “This is a weird bank.” They are like, “You think that’s weird? We are a cashless bank.”
That seems somewhat of an oxymoron to be a cashless bank and they are like, “We are a commercial bank so if you need cash, you are probably not our customer.” It’s pretty amazing. Those first jobs are entrepreneurship because you had to collect the money, deal with collections and do the whole thing. That’s how it was in Wichita, Kansas, where I was from. You were your little franchise.
When we moved to Seattle, I had to wait until I was twelve to pick up my paper route. I got a business license when I was thirteen to get a wholesale license for ice cream. I added an ice cream cart to the back of my bike that I was delivering papers on so I could sell ice cream at the same time I was delivering newspapers.
Sam Walton of Walmart Fame was in the electronics business before he was in the Walmart store business. Northwest Arkansas, Fayetteville and Bentonville are very close together. The other big industry there are chickens. Pilgrim’s Pride. The big chicken houses like if you are eating chicken tonight, it maybe came from Northwest Arkansas or Northeast Texas. That’s a chicken country.
As the semis would carry loads of chickens to New York City, Sam figured out something. He was a multitasker like you. He rented the empty truck for next to nothing, washed it out and brought back cheap electronics. It’s probably a black market from New York City to the central part of the country. That is the genesis of Walmart. As we know with so many entrepreneurs, a lot of them started with a little ingenuity and creativity and not very much cash. That’s not necessarily a bad way to go.
Find that little edge or niche that you can find and make something work.
Find that little edge, that little niche that you can find, and make something work. Share on X
As a child, was there an adult who was an entrepreneurial example in your life? 
Not really, except that my parents kept getting into multi-level marketing. Things around organic soaps and different things like this. In a lot of ways, I look at it as if they were aspiring to find an entrepreneurial outlet that they never found. In some ways, I might be living the thing that they were searching for.
I have always thought that network marketers were looking for additional income and side hustle. That’s how many entrepreneurs start. It was something on the side but also, they have, at some level, this steep love for people. The whole, “I will get my friends and you’ll get your friends and they will get their friends and we’ll all be one big happy family.” A lot of those network marketing even used the nomenclature of family and that appeals to certain people.
Early on in my life, before I was not an entrepreneur until I was 26, I bought a couple of them and even made money at one. I see how geometric progression can work and a lot of entrepreneurs are putting that to use for them. Say your childhood, from 5 to 18 or whatever that was. Did you go to university, join the Marine Corps and the Merchant Marines or hike across Canada in the winter? What’d you do?
None of those things. I dropped out of high school and college consecutively. I was working at the high school newspaper in 1986 and 1987 when the first laser printers were coming out and ended up digitizing the high school newspaper. I got a job at a local weekly newspaper that was in my neighborhood that was trying to figure out how to digitize their company. When I say digitize, really old-fashioned digitized. We were printing it out on laser paper and put it together.
Extends instead of setting type or setting out to the electronic service bureau or different things like that. I ended up getting a 40-hour or a 30-hour week job being the production department for the local newspaper. I stopped going to high school except for a couple of classes. I’d even accepted the University of Washington. My paperwork didn’t say based on future grades so I didn’t care.
I went ahead and got a job. I spent about two quarters at the University of Washington and I was a Graphic Design major. I ended up getting a job in Downtown Seattle doing output for graphic designers that were doing their work on computers. I realized that this was on the cusp where no one knew more than me because nobody knew anything. The people I was going to take my resume to in four years as a designer needed my help. I borrowed first and last from my parents for an office space. Without any clue what we were doing, we started a business as an IT consultant for graphic designers.
Readers, I want you to learn this. “Without any clue as to what I was doing, I launched this business.” We know so many entrepreneurs that jumped out of the airplane and tried to build a parachute on the way down. Most of them figured it out because they had to. Some of them go splat.
One of the things I will say especially if you are lucky enough to start when you are young, I didn’t have very far to fall. I was falling from the high dive onto a trampoline. There was not a lot of risk in my life at that point. It’s not like at a mortgage. I didn’t have a kid. I didn’t have any of that yet. I happened to impress a couple of people. A couple of corporate clients took me under their wing because they needed what I knew and they liked helping people. They helped me and said, “I’m going to teach this kid what he needs to be to be a vendor of mine because he doesn’t know what he’s doing but I still need his help.”
He doesn’t know what he is doing but he knows more than I do about what he is doing. It took me a long time to figure out but I love that they had a little heart involved in their business where they’re like, “We are going to help this young guy.” It took me a long time to figure out my mission but my mission is helping others who help others. I love that. The magic for me did not start until I started playing for my heart and let my head play second. That was your first business then?
That was my first business. I went through a couple of iterations. I was eighteen when I started that. By the time I was nineteen, I formed an LLC that I ran until 2010 when I sold it to my employees. It was nowhere near the same business over those 25 years but it was the same legal entity that existed throughout.
I don’t think it was an LLC at the beginning. I didn’t know enough to have an LLC but it was the same business entity checking account and all that went through multiple iterations of whom I was five years as me trading my time. I then started trying to hire people and was terrible at it, letting them have any control and committing to them. I got people who wanted to work for a terrible boss and they weren’t very good either.
When you are terrible at it, that’s whom you get. 
There was a point when I realized, “I’m not going to get good people until I’m ready to commit to good people. The people that I want are not going to play with me at my level.” I had to do a lot of self-work along the way. You use the phrase entrepreneur. I don’t think I applied the phrase entrepreneur to me until about 2010.
You’re not going to get good people until you’re ready to commit to good people. Share on X
When I was between 30 and 40, I was aspiring to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be in the Young Entrepreneur’s Club. I was a small business owner. I had been running the same small business for twenty years. It had gone through variations but an entrepreneur for me was someone that creates entities that can exist without them. I had never created an entity in which I was not a necessary cog. That’s what I aspired towards and that was the next chapter of my life around 2010 when I moved into the next phase of my life creating businesses that I wasn’t necessarily required in.
It’s an interesting fact. I have done 125 of these interviews and almost every guest makes some comment about, “I’m not sure I’m a proven entrepreneur. I worked for twenty years before I thought I was an entrepreneur.” There’s always a little question. Sometimes it’s full-blown self-doubt but sometimes it’s a question like, “Am I living up to the title?”
I have interviewed billionaire entrepreneurs that started with nothing, went bankrupt in a fabulous explosion of finances and then have built everything back and still have the same comment like, “I don’t know that I’m a proven entrepreneur.” When you spell it with a B, that’s the proof that you can get. 
The name of this show is Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories but you and I both know that failing is not the opposite of success but steps towards success. I want to ask you about a hard lesson, something that happened at the time that you were like, “Soul crushing. It’s killing me. That hurts. Please stop,” but then maybe it turned out it was a pretty good thing to happen. 
There are so many times. First of all, I’m a huge believer in failure. When I want something, the first step is to start failing in the direction of something I want because I don’t know any other way to learn. There was a time that I didn’t understand my vesting schedule and put about $2 million of stock vesting at risk because I was being a little bit impulsive in some decision-making. That was a terrifying moment.
There are a bunch of terrifying moments but the biggest one for me was I remember being in a fetal position on the floor of our living room with my wife. I felt so scared and trapped with that bouncing act between hiring my first employee and having my first employee go to my competitor almost within the first week. It’s this act of trying to open up, risk and have someone else bring them into the business and have them almost immediately turn around, leave the business and go become my competitor.
There have been deeper heartaches along the way. There have been bigger moments where I am terrified but that’s the one that felt most viscerally terrifying to me. It’s probably the one that I remember the emotions more. When something big comes up, I remind myself, “I felt this terror and feeling before.” Let it flow through. This isn’t the end. Don’t react at the moment because life is long.
When something really big comes up, remind yourself that you’ve felt this terror before and to just let it flow through. This isn't the end. Don't react in the moment because life is still long. Share on X
We’ll live to fight another day. One of my businesses is the call center business which is a lot of employees. When people tell me employee stories, I’m like, “I can tell you some stories.” Just because I have so many people and people are funny so they will do funny things. When you said that, what I recalled was the first time a client tried to hire my employees and do a vendor act for me, me being the vendor. That was pretty terrifying but we survived it. 
One of my horror moments that turned into my proudest moments happened to me with my biggest client who took one of my most important employees. I had a non-compete in place that I worked out and we negotiated his exit in a way that he became my boss and my biggest client. It worked for him because in some ways, using the non-compete allowed him to negotiate the role he wanted instead of necessarily being put into a support role that he didn’t want.
That person eventually bought my company in 2010 when he left my biggest client. It’s one of those things where I have enforced non-competes. I have had all these things happen. The proudest moment was that I have people in my life that have experienced me as an employee, adversary, client and someone who bought my company. I’m able to use them as a recommendation that is when someone wants to know from someone who’s seen me on all sides, I have got two people that I can point them to that say, “These people have been through every ringer that exists in business with me. They can speak to me.”
Out of everybody I have interviewed for the show and then all the entrepreneurs I have met in 36 years, I have never heard that before. That’s pretty rare air because I’m a guy who talks to a lot of people. I love that. I think back to we had an account with General Electric, the general. We had two people assigned to them and they were so entrenched. They went to big trade shows.
It was the mortgage industry. If they were interested in a mortgage, it was big commercial stuff. This is why I love people with integrity. They wanted to hire the two staff mates but the VP calls and says, “We want to hire them.” I’m like, “No problem. There’s a clause in the contract that stipulates how you can do that.” They followed that and there was a buyout. It wasn’t seamless but it was fairly smooth. After about a year, they called back and said, “Swinging a miss. We’d like to know if you’d take them back and would you take the account back?”
Would you take the employees back and also have their service? Was that it?
Yes. I was like, “Sure, I think. It depends on what you did to their wage as to what my rate to you will be.” They had increased it. I was like, “Here’s the adder.” They were like, “Fine.” There are so many of those big companies anymore that are so reluctant to add permanent headcount. Outsourcing is huge because they don’t want to add anybody. 
My takeaway from that is the thing that was drummed into me early on because I did about ten years of sales training in the early days in print sales. Business negotiation is not where I go to get my personal needs met. Many people are trying to prove that they are the most powerful or intelligent. They are trying to prove things about themselves instead of trying to find a win-win solution. I haven’t quite found the right words around but I like to play what I call a cutthroat win-win. I play win-win, even with people that want to play win-lose.
CreativeLive: So many people are trying to prove that they are the most powerful or the most intelligent, they’re trying to prove things about themselves instead of trying to find a win-win solution.
 
A long time ago, I learned in my life I want to be able to take either side of the deal. If I’d take either side, I’m probably good with the deal. If I’d only take one, I’m probably not. Life is too short. There’s a Chinese proverb and I’m going to butcher this so please forgive me but it’s something about you cannot eat all of the pie and that’s nowhere near. I’m sure it was Confucius. It’s something beautiful but that’s the gist.
Let’s go to a different moment. Let’s go to a warp-speed or hockey stick moment. You are going along in your business and things are going okay. All of a sudden, you take an action, prevent an action, add a teammate or a combination of that and whatever else. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Life was pretty good and it is phenomenal.” Do you have one of those you could share with us?
I do. I wanted to be part of the Young Entrepreneurs Club, which means that by 40 you have to be running a business over $1 million a year. This was the company I started when I was eighteen, an IT company. I wanted to get there. I got to $870,000 when I was 39. This was also right when the economic downturn hit in 2008 and all these things were happening.
I had spun up a training company in the back end of my business, a little virtual training company in part because I had got the company working without me. I was able to put my energy elsewhere. That company ended up being what we spun out and created an online training company called CreativeLive and CreativeLive went from 0 to $1.2 million in the 1st year in the year I was 40.
I hit my million in my next business after this and sold my main business to my employees. I have been on a rocket ship since then. That learning experience has been explosive. I learned about bringing in team members that were producers, organizers and executors. People didn’t have a vision of what to create but were extraordinary at the operation and the execution of building what can be created. That’s what I have been doing for the last decades in CreativeLive. We took about $50 million in investment from Silicon Valley and sold about $50 million in the same timeframe of online courses and digital goods.
Since then, I have been creating companies that sell digital goods and online courses. I did a tally. I’m at $92.5 million in digital goods and courses for my career. Creating something digital and working with large audiences, I learned to turn what I always thought was my weakness, which was the fact that I was not flighty but I was always thinking about creative ideas the next thing and was not necessarily the best person to execute. I spent about 25 years trying to be the executor of my business. When I realized that there were people designed to be the executor of my businesses and it freed me up to be the creator of my businesses, my life exploded.
Have you heard of Dave Rendall? 
No. I love hearing a name I don’t know.
Dave is a public speaker out of North Carolina. He wrote a book called Pink Goldfish. Dave is this stand out in a crowd very tall and thin guy. He always wears hot Pepto-Bismol pink so pink pants, a pink shirt, a pink sport coat and pink glasses. He’s very intelligent. He shares that his whole school life he suffered from ADHD. Everybody who was ever around and told him to sit down, he’s like, “You know what I do? I don’t sit down and shut up.” His theory is this, “What makes you weird, makes you wonderful. You should be running towards your purported weaknesses because that is where your superpower is.” He’s a phenomenal guy. Dave, I hope to see you soon. I will introduce you to Craig next time we are all together. 
Can I underscore that because I am a huge believer? The business I build is built around that idea. Let’s also take it a step further. When you are an adult and you are extraordinary at something and you are playing at the top of somebody’s game and you have this list of things that we call weaknesses, the things that we call weaknesses are the things that we were taught as kids we should not be.
When we are dealing with entrepreneurs and business people, they are pretty disciplined and good at building things they want. The stuff they can’t get rid of in themselves or cut out with a knife because it was their weakness that is so embedded into them, it’s their strength. It is the magic that takes them to the next level when they make peace with it, turn it around and use it.
What it was for me was this ability to come up with ideas. It may sound like a small thing. I’m one of those guys that aren’t an idea generator. I spent 25 years trying to tap that down because I thought it was going to lead to my divorce and bankruptcy. I thought it was going to lead to everything wrong. I was trying to live one idea that I had come up with a long time ago and turn off this thing. I got extraordinarily upset with one of my sales reps who had the audacity to start coming up with ideas.
For me, it is sometimes a cue when I have an emotional response that is way out of line with whatever circumstances are happening. That’s a cue for me to go digging in there and understand, “What am I responding to because it’s not this thing in the moment?” I realized that he was doing exactly what I was not allowing myself to do, which is to come up with ideas without having a plan.
CreativeLive: Having an emotional response that is just way out of line is a cue with whatever the circumstances are happening.
 
I gave myself an idea generation where I separated it from execution and my business. Effectively, I created this path for me where I started to learn how to let that part of myself be, how to be proud of it and how to love it instead of trying to tamp it down, shut it off and get it to exist within this one thing that I had given it to do for the last couple of decades.
Words of wisdom there, people. Be proud of it and learn to love it. What about a nugget? Something you know that is so wise, smart and valuable or something you know that we don’t know that we want to know what you know.
On the spot, I’m having a hard time but it probably comes down to not renegotiating my relationship with reality. I work and coach a lot of entrepreneurs that put a tremendous amount of effort into predicting how something that they have been suggested or want to do is going to be responded to by a person or the market. Spend years not doing something instead of allowing the market to answer back and tell them what works or doesn’t work.
This comes back to the original question about failure. When I started my business after one of my exits, I set aside enough money to fail 5 times in my next 5 businesses. I put a budget for each one of those attempts and had a certain amount of money that I could put into it. For me, I need to fully embrace failure as an option so I don’t take any steps off the table and cut things off simply because I might fail at them. Many people would rather trade their dreams or never have to potentially be wrong about one of the steps in the process.
CreativeLive: Fully embrace failure as an option so that you won’t take any steps off the table or cut things off simply because you think you might fail at them.
 
One of the first things I do is raise prices on everything and my client is breathing in a brown paper bag. “People won’t pay.” I’m like, “They will pay. Don’t worry about it.” They will share all these reasons why that won’t work and I’m like, “It’s like you are shadowboxing yourself.” Let’s go box the market. If they tell you I’m wrong, I will be the first to say, “I’m wrong,” but I will tell you, “I will bet I’m right and you are paying me a lot so you should listen to me.”
I have occasionally overpriced something and you know what you can do? You change your price.
Every day. I started in pretty hardcore sales, timeshare camping membership and things like that to where you are selling an intangible and you know when you go to work. I came to get my money out of your pocket and give you whatever. I probably still do it. If a red week is $35,000, they will sell out that for a couple of weeks and then a red week will be $40,000 for a couple of weeks. They will continue to ratchet the price up until they have a two-week timeframe where sales take a dip and then they will stay there two more weeks to be sure it’s not a fluke. They then will take one step back and that’s how they price it. They price based on the market. 
One of my good friends here runs a lead service. People buy leads from him. He has an auction like Google where the market sets the price that’s almost always higher than any price you had set and it works the same way on labor. I have a client that I spoke with who said, “I’m going to offer this to this employee and I hope that will give them some incentive.” My counsel was like, “Why don’t you ask the employee what would be helpful to you? What would scratch this itch of motivation for you and doing good for the company?” He called me back that afternoon and said, “It was a lot less than what I was going to offer.” I was like, “That’s why we ask the question.” We quit trying to assume our way to solutions and let’s ask if you can rarely get in trouble for asking.
The thing is also if I trust myself to have the ability to say no if I don’t want to do something and if I trust myself to respond. A lot of people don’t ask questions because they are either afraid of looking like they don’t know the answer, afraid of looking stupid or afraid that somehow what comes back they are not going to be able to say no to and take a worse deal than they could otherwise. I’m a huge believer in asking, asking a lot of questions of both individuals on the market and understanding what the environment is, rather than me coming up with my story in my head and trying to impose its reality.
I’m a firm proponent of that. I typically live on the sales side. I’m the non-sales guy sales guy. I’m like, “Just ask questions and help people. They will throw their money at you. You won’t be able to count it all.” Quit trying to make people do something. Make it easy to do something and that will work. I’m going to put you in the time machine and we are going to dial you back to twenty-year-old Craig. You are going to get 30 or 60 seconds, 90 maybe to share 1 piece of wisdom with 20-year-old Craig that would have helped you and sped you along the way if you knew then. What’s something you know now you wish you knew then? Into the time machine, you go. What would you say? 
The one thing I don’t want 20-year-old Craig is to screw what 50-year-old Craig has got. First of all, I’d say thank you for what you are doing and just know it’s going to be okay. If I could give him a little bit of ease of mind with what he is going to go through because everything he is running into is he is investing in me now and I’m so grateful for it.
How can we support you?
I appreciate the time to talk. I have enjoyed talking with you. This is most of my reward in the Seattle area. If there are any of your audience reading that has companies that are doing $250,000 a year that has not yet broken $1 million, I am the Chair of our local EO accelerator program. It’s an accelerator program that we are part of Entrepreneur’s Organization in Seattle. We are here to support entrepreneurs that are trying to figure out how to break that $1 million mark. You could find me on LinkedIn or go to SeattleAccelerator.org.
We give a plug for EO, which we are both big fans of. The Accelerator Program and EO are so wildly successful all around the globe in helping entrepreneurs go from that $250 to $999 sales range up to over $1 million. We cannot encourage you enough. If you are there, reach out and if you are in the Seattle area, reach out to Craig. If you are anywhere in the world, you could reach out to Craig or me. We would connect you with someone local to you because there is help out there and they’d love to help you. What’s your contact information?
CraigSwanson.org is probably the best place to find me for all my various links. It’s my name .org. I haven’t convinced the other Craig to give up the .com.
Craig, thank you so very much. I’m so grateful to you for coming to the show and sharing your wisdom. That’s it for this episode. See you next time. 
 
Important Links

CreativeLive
KaisaFit
Sue Bryce Education
The Wedding School
Pink Goldfish
LinkedIn – Craig Swanson
SeattleAccelerator.org
CraigSwanson.org

 
About Craig Swanson
Craig Swanson is an entrepreneur, business coach, and co-founder of the online learning platform CreativeLive. Craig thrives being the secret weapon partnering with online businesses such as KaisaFit, Sue Bryce Education, and The Wedding School by helping them into the multi-million-dollar mark and even acquisition!
At the age of 18, Craig founded Swanson Tech Support and worked as a tech consultant for 6 years before founding CreativeTechs which lead to over a million dollars in sales.
Soon after Craig co-founded the creative online learning platform CreativeLive, an idea that was birthed from a failed video training program for his IT business. CreativeLive would grow from a small start-up team to 70+ employees offering workshops with top industry leaders like Tim Ferriss and Brené Brown.
Now Craig partners with creators, educators, and influencers by providing the missing piece that they need to get to the next stage of their business and is helping build $1 million dollar businesses one step at a time. He is also the head of the Seattle Entrepreneur’s Organization Accelerator Program where he works on a similar mission, helping startups with $250k in revenue top the million-dollar mark.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E28 | Rick Sapio, CEO Mutual Capital Alliance, Inc
Date: December 20, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/rick-sapio-ceo-mutual-capital-alliance-inc/
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Content:
 
With lessons learned from adversities coupled with luck, things can take you right where you’re supposed to be. Rick Sapio did not take his past experiences for granted, learning and taking advantage of them as he stepped into the entrepreneurial life. Now, he is a Dallas powerhouse CEO, investor, author, and engineer and the founder of Mutual Capital Alliance, Inc. In this episode, he joins Don Williams to share with us the story that pushed him to start a business at 13 years old, pursue engineering, and eventually found his company. Rick also tells us what he discovered about billionaires that separate them from the pack, the common mistakes entrepreneurs make, and why you need a liberating structure to reach your potential.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Rick Sapio, CEO Mutual Capital Alliance, Inc
Dallas Powerhouse CEO, Investor, Author, Engineer
I have a good friend and an amazing entrepreneur with us. He’s the Founder and CEO of Mutual Capital Alliance. Welcome, Mr. Rick Sapio.
Thanks for having me on the show.
I am thrilled that you are here. Let me take you all the way back to little Rick, 5 to 18. I happened to know a little bit about you. Back in Jersey, in the house where you grew up, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a child?
Yeah, it was my dad. He had nine mouths to feed. He was busy. He taught me a lot more about entrepreneurship than rolling with the punches. He was in the car business, of all things. There was always something to do at home, fixing engines, cleaning cars, changing tires, all of that. I did it all from as young as I can remember. In fact, there are pictures of me at the age of three cleaning out the trunks of cars. He did a lot of volumes, mostly in used cars.
Was the car business his main thing or a side hustle?
It’s the only thing he knew. He had a sixth-grade education. He grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. He didn’t have a lot of options back in the day.
The car business is one of those businesses where it’s bell to bell. You start early. You work late every day. It’s about the only way to make that deal go. Tell me about your first job. We are probably close enough in age. I mowed my parents’ lawn, not because I got paid but because it was my job. Not those kinds of jobs but a job where somebody paid you. Maybe you had a lemonade stand. Maybe the first job you were an entrepreneur. What was that?
I was always looking to make money. Where I grew up, and I don’t do that these days but when it snowed out, we were excited because we knocked on doors with our shovels. When it was the fall, we knocked on doors with our rakes. In my first real job, I had to get up at 5:00 AM, seven days a week, rain or shine, sick or not sick, and deliver the New York Daily News to 200 people.
It doesn’t exist anymore. Only companies do it now. When my dad got sick, I was eleven. He came home for dinner one day and announced to the family that his back was hurting. We went to the doctor. On the first doctor visit, he was given six weeks to live. My mother panicked and put all the kids to work. My first real job was 5:00 AM, I would feel the sheets come off the bed, and sometimes they would be freezing out, and I had to run outside. They would drop a stack of 200 newspapers on the front lawn in a big plastic bag. I had to bring them into the house, fold them the correct way, and put them in a plastic bag with a rubber band around it. Every house wanted it inside the door. I delivered it seven days. Fridays, I would collect.
You literally had to go to every door, open the door, set the paper, and close the door.
Most houses had a screen door back in the day. We put it between the screen door because they didn’t want it wet or whatever. I started throwing it on the lawn. That was okay. On the afternoon paper, I had two routes. I had the Bergen Record in the afternoon and the New York Daily News in the morning. It was interesting. I was born in 1963. This would have been ’75-ish, ‘74, ‘75 or ’76. I made good money. I was probably making $60 a week between the two routes. You learn about customer service. You learn about doing what you say you can’t miss a day. It was impossible. Could you imagine kids now doing that? They would call that child abuse. It taught me everything I know about business. If you have a paper route, that’s all you need to know. It’s all right there.
You got to go collect the money. You got to get the money. I had a good friend growing up. His father worked for the newspaper but they had 12 children, 11 boys, and 1 daughter. I grew up modestly in Wichita, Kansas. It’s a small home. Their basement was built like a barracks. All the boys lived in the basement in bunk beds. They were 4 to 20 or something. The daughter lived upstairs with the parents.
My buddy and half a dozen of his brothers were all minors, probably 6, 7, 8, up to 14, 15. They all had a paper route. Some of them had two like you. That was an everyday rain, snow or shine. I don’t know if the mail works but the newspaper used to. That’s awesome. Tell me a little bit. You shared with us that your dad got a horrible diagnosis. I know the story but would you tell us a little bit about that?
He was given six weeks to live, and my mother panicked. We all went to work. My dad, due to my aunt, who was an actress in Hollywood at the time, found a clinic in Mexico. My dad was rushed to this clinic and went on some experimental and natural cures for cancer. His cancer went into remission for two years. It was during those two years that he almost knew he was going to die. He taught us, “You’ve got to learn independence. You’ve got to learn how to work. You’ve got to learn how to make money and bring it home.” Nowadays’ parents spend so much time putting pillows under their kids’ butts just in case their butts might hit the ground. I watched my dad, over a two-and-a-half-year period, go into my remission, and then the cancer came back.
He went from 220 pounds to 85 pounds when he died of bone cancer. He died when I was thirteen. My teenage years were not easy. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any financial support from anywhere. Yet, I fast-forward, and all my siblings got married. There are over 300 years of marriage between us and no divorces. That’s from a tough upbringing. It’s important that children experience adversity and difficult times. Sadly, parents don’t allow their children to do that these days. My wife and I are not like that. We do our best to let them experience life.
 
Mutual Capital Alliance: It’s important that children experience adversity and difficult times. And sadly, parents don’t allow their children to do that these days.
 
I applaud that. I know that with my own children, I tried not to be the parent who would put the pillow down because the reality is that you learn when things don’t go well. You probably learn more than when things are going well for you.
I say to them all the time, “There’s no failure. There’s either success or learning.”
I tell my clients, “You either win or you learn. Learning is a little slower of winning. If you are not learning, that’s another problem.” You got through high school. You survived a challenging, at least economically, childhood, as your brothers and sisters did. You backpacked across Europe. You joined the Merchant Marines. You went to university.
Let me go back to when I was eleven. My mother asked me to live with, of all things, the father of my oldest brother’s future wife. She didn’t even know this guy that well. She panicked. She shipped the kids off. I lived with this guy for a summer when I was eleven. It was after 4th or 5th grade. I can’t remember. He owned an engineering firm. He sat me down and said, “You don’t have much hope in your future with your dad’s sick and all that. I got an Engineering degree. It opened up amazing doors for me. Let me show you my engineering firm.” I was blown away by what this guy did for a living.
He lived a comfortable life. He said, “If you get an Engineering degree, you could become a doctor or a lawyer. You could work on Wall Street, which is right across the river from where you live. You can write your own course.” It never left me. Anytime after that meeting, somebody said, “What do you want to do with your life?” I would say, “I don’t know but if I get an Engineering degree, which I’m going to, I can become a doctor, lawyer or a business person. I could work on Wall Street. I could do whatever I want.” As luck would have it, and there’s always a little bit of luck that we have to take advantage of in life, I did well on my SAT Math. New Jersey gave scholarships to Rutgers University for students that did well.
 
There's always a little bit of luck that we have to take advantage of in life. Share on X
 
They gave 10 scholarships to the highest 10 scores in New Jersey. My older sibling said, “Try to study hard for your SAT,” which I did. I was given a scholarship for engineering at Rutgers. Lo and behold, how bizarre is that? It was brutally hard because I didn’t go to a good high school. I remember getting to college and seeing all these people from China and India.
They knew what Calculus and Physics were and everything else. I had not experienced that. It was hard. Through college, the scholarship was only a partial scholarship but I did get into the Engineering program. I worked full-time all through college. As luck would have it, when I graduated in 1987, I was able to get a Wall Street job.
From the age of eleven, it’s critical for adults to think about how much influence they have. It could be one meeting. I only had one lunch with this guy, by the way. It was one meeting where he said, “If I were you, this is what I would do.” Oftentimes, we don’t realize how much impact we have on other people. I’m careful. In fact, as I speak to you, I had lunch with a guy who asked me to mentor him. I was careful what I said to him about his questions regarding career options.
Certainly, a little luck your mother asked you to go live with, I didn’t follow, the sisters?
My oldest brother was about to get married. His future father-in-law said, “Have him live with me for the summer. I could teach him a little bit.”
What a great guy to step up and then sprinkle a few wise words. Kudos to you for having an open mind because most 10, and 11-year-olds now certainly probably wouldn’t to that conversation. That got you started, for sure. Tell us about the first business you started.
The first business was after the paper routes because I wasn’t making enough money. Me and my friend, Chris Mason, started a bicycle repair shop. We took it seriously. We made flyers. We passed it around. We bought bicycle parts from the junkyard. We made and fixed bikes. I did that for about two years. When I was fifteen, I started working on cars, which I grew up with. I probably bought and sold over 100 cars. I made a lot of money from 15 to probably 22 or 23. When I was in college early on, I discovered bartending. I bartended for five years. Even after I got my first real job, I bartended almost seven nights a week in New York City and North Jersey, making a lot of money.
When I was 23, I bought two rental properties near the Rutgers campus and had 29 tenants. I did something which they still do now. They didn’t do it then but I got these big houses and broke them up into rooms because I was handy. I signed individual leases. What most of the landlords did back then was they would sign a group lease on the house. I realized I could make far more money charging $200 a month per person rather than $1,000 for the whole house and trying to collect money from everybody. If a person didn’t pay for the lease, it was easier to eject one person rather than the whole lease. That was fun. I fast forward a little bit but my first business was a bicycle repair shop.
The college rental business, and we both live in Dallas-Fort Worth, is popular here. It’s so popular that big cities like Dallas and Fort Worth are boxing that in a little bit. They are putting a little more regulation on top of that. You were a pioneer back then to rent the room with common areas being common. That was pretty amazing. Talk about your first business after college.
I read an article about Oprah Winfrey. When she got her first job, she was an independent contractor. She wasn’t a W-2 employee. She started her company. In my first Wall Street job, I asked to be a 1099 employee and started my own company. I was a consultant to the business, even though from everybody else’s perspective at the company, I was an employee.
Instead of earning a base salary and a commission, I asked to earn 50% of the revenue that I produced. I work for a firm in which we sold the bonds of bankrupt public companies. Everybody else was earning a salary and a bonus. I was earning 50% of the revenue. In my first year in that business, I generated over $1 million in revenue. I was able to make more than $500,000. This is in the early ‘90s. Right off the bat, I didn’t want to be an employee. I have always wanted to be a business owner.
My first real business was being 1099 of a Wall Street firm, which was perfectly legal back in the day. I did that for about six years and then started my company, which I still work at now, called Mutual Capital Alliance, which started as a holding company. As it relates to being a holding company, we’ve spawned over 60 different businesses over the years by investing in various companies. It has been an incredible almost 30 years of making investments, selling, merging, closing down, and all kinds of different transactions over the years. We’ve done a lot of different things as a holding company.
What’s funny about that story is my first Wall Street job, every time I tried to open an account with somebody who was wealthy because we sold the bonds of bankrupt companies to wealthy people because we told the story of if the bond goes through bankruptcy, bonds get converted to equity and the equity gets flushed to zero. We did fourteen deals when I started.
Every time I opened an account with a wealthy person, my firm would say, “We already have an account with that person.” The CEO would say, I met him years ago, “He’s mine.” I got sick of that. I went West. I would fly into Chicago and whatnot and try to open accounts. As luck would have it, before anybody knew who he was in the late ‘80s, I met Warren Buffett. He was a client for six years.
I was certain when I came back to the office that the firm would have him as a client. They didn’t know who he was. He didn’t become famous until it was 1991 when Salomon Brothers went bankrupt, and he emerged as the largest shareholder. He became the CEO of the Salomon Brothers. Before that, no one knew who he was. He is the reason why I started Mutual Capital Alliance as a holding company. I didn’t know a holding company from my backside but he’s like, “If you are going to start a business, make it a holding company because you can have one steady company that you can buy and sell and create and have startups underneath it,” which has served us well over the years.
 
Mutual Capital Alliance: If you’re going to start a business, make it a holding company. You can have one steady company, but you can also buy and sell and have startups underneath it.
 
I did not know that part of your story. That’s pretty amazing. You are maybe the only person on the planet who has interviewed more than a couple of billionaires. Tell us about that.
When 2008 hit, things got scary for us. We were overleveraged in a lot of ways. I got nervous. My wife and I were sitting down one day. We have all about rhythms. I call them liberating structures. My wife and I have dinner every Monday night. We go on a date at 7:30. It’s freeing. We haven’t missed one since we met many years ago. We are out to dinner and I said, “I don’t know if we are going to get through this.” She said, “Why don’t you meet people that have been through it?” As luck would have it, I was on a board of a charity. We had signed up six billionaires to give away lunch.
You bid on having lunch with a billionaire. It’s pretty famous now but Warren Buffett auctions off lunch once a year. People pay $1 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett. In the case of this small local charity, it was less than $500 to have lunch with T Boone Pickens, Ross Perot, and Phil Romano. I was able to have lunch with six of these billionaires that are local for less than $2,000. It was fascinating.
I became friends with all of them. I went with the perspective of, “How can I help you?” Not, “How can you help me?” It evolved, and they introduced me to more. I ultimately got up to 44 billionaires. I realized there’s a lot of consistency among them in terms of clarity of purpose. We all put our pants on the same way in the morning but if you think somebody is more successful and you are afraid to ask them a question, the reason we all fear asking people that we deem more successful and ask a question is that we know the answer is probably going to be no.
What I realized is that they are clear on what their values, objectives, and purpose are and that they say no to almost everything. All of us as human beings can learn from that. Most of us are addicted to yes. As soon as that screen lights up in the morning, we are saying yes to everything that’s coming at us. The way these billionaires approach their life is that they know what their lane is. They know what their values are. They know what their purpose is, which by the way, all of us should know and should be written down.
I gained tremendous clarity from those 44 opportunities. I spent six weeks with Richard Branson, which is a long story. I ended up creating this entrepreneurial event, which we went to Necker Island, which is still going on now. That started in May of 2008. I found these people to be far more present when I was with them than anybody else. I never saw cell phones around. It was never interrupted. You get their full presence. It’s because they have learned how to live life fully.
Let me ask you. Forty-four interviews. Is there a book in there somewhere?
I don’t know. I have been asked. I’ve made some speeches about it but the reality was that I didn’t approach it from that perspective. I feel like I would be breaking some confidence if I did that. I will tell you that there was a tremendous amount of consistency among them. I could share some of the stories. For example, they all had, from a young age, an accountability partner in the form of, we call it, an assistant but they elevated their assistant to rock star status like, “You are in charge of my success.”
A lot of regular people looked down upon their assistants. These people elevated their assistants. Many of them were with them for decades. I became friendly with the assistant because the assistant was good at deciding who gets to see the boss or not. It changed my view on that. I call my assistant my accountability partner, not my assistant. I don’t even like that word. I always judge people. Maybe that’s bad if they go through the assistance they last for three months. They don’t treat them like an accountability partner. If you treat that person well, that allows you to achieve more and have more freedom.
 
If you treat assistants well, you achieve more and have more freedom.  Share on X
 
It’s a good yardstick of a person’s character and integrity on how they do treat other people and, certainly, subordinates as far as that goes. What about if I ask you to look back across your career for a hard lesson, something that happened where at the time is like, “That hurt,” but maybe now, in retrospect, was the best thing that could have happened for you? Do you have a hard lesson you could share with us?
Many lessons. I’ve written a book about it. The book is called Who’s In Your Room. Every single problem that I, you or anybody who’s reading ever had started when you let someone or something into your life that didn’t align with your values. Every single time I’ve hired somebody, whether it’s an attorney, an employee, or a partner, that didn’t align with my values, I’m going to pay.
Sometimes I’m going to pay big. Sometimes I’m going to pay really big. I’m always going to pay. Sometimes I’m going to pay tomorrow, and sometimes I’m going to pay 30 years from now. Whenever we choose opportunity over value, we lose. I will give you an example of that. You bring on a salesperson in your company, and your spouse or your team says, “They don’t fit our values.” You say, “We are going to make so much money.” It always bites you in the backside.
I had gotten into a lawsuit. This smooth-talking attorney said, “I’m going to get you out of this lawsuit. No problem.” The lawsuit ended up costing the firm about $10 million. The lawyer himself didn’t align with any of my values. He made the lawsuit into his reason that he became a partner in his large New York-based firm. From the day I hired this lawyer, my team has been going, “He is not the right lawyer.” We had to fire this lawyer who cost us millions of dollars. We ultimately hired a guy who charged us $50,000 to get the case dismissed. It was four years of absolute hell.
That story plays out over and over. Every time I hire somebody or partner with somebody that doesn’t fit, here’s what happens, Don, and you know it. Your gut is screaming no. The reason your gut is screaming no is that it doesn’t align with your values. Do you know what GUT stands for? God Uttering Truth. Your gut can only make yes-no decisions. Your brain can rationalize a thousand different things. I have learned, as much as I hate it now, to take the slower road, follow my gut, and allow God to be in charge. Every time you try to do something, rush something or push something, I feel like, in a sense, you are pushing God’s will. You are trying to take over.
I let things play out a lot more now than I did back then. I don’t push as hard. I see with a good friend of mine, he was walking down the aisle with his wife and I said, “Steve, are you going to stay married for life?” I don’t believe in divorce. If you don’t believe in divorce, you are going to be careful with who you are married. I said, “Are you going to be married for life?” He goes, “Do you know how much money her dad has?” I’m like, “That is horrible.” They ended up getting married and having three kids. It was a disaster of twenty years. Horrible marriage.
Now the kids are all messed up and everything else. Why? It’s because he chose opportunity in the form of her dad’s money over values. I was the last one by a mile to get married in my family. I got married at 42 and a half. I had a list that I said to my mother, “I am not going to marry somebody that doesn’t fit all these values.” She’s like, “You are crazy. Rip the damn list up.” Melissa showed up, and we’ve got an absolutely perfect situation for us. Four kids now. Life is great.
I love what you said about the gut. All my life, I’ve tried to be sensible. I’m not the smartest guy in every room but I’m the smartest guy in some rooms. The real magic for me in my business didn’t happen until I started playing for my heart because my head, I can rationalize it any way you want it rationalized. In my heart, I know yes and no. Thanks for sharing that.
Your heart is where your purpose lives. A lot of what we are talking about presupposes that you’ve done the hard work to discover what your purpose and values are and live in alignment with them. We all need to do that work. Otherwise, we are just walking around in a dark room with the lights off, trying to figure out where the door is. The vast majority of us don’t do that work, which is sad to me.
 
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The vast majority of people do not live with intention. They have not determined their values. They don’t know their purpose. They don’t know their mission. Life certainly gets easier, more fulfilling, and more content when you know the answers to those questions. No doubt. Tell us about a warp-speed moment. Things are going pretty good in your business, and all of a sudden, a couple of decisions and events, and you are on that hockey stick, and things are going to the stars. Do you have a warp-speed moment you can share?
It’s funny. I’m in the process of selling a guy’s business. He’s the same age as me. He has my name, too. I go, “Why are you selling, Rick?” He goes, “I’m 59. I’m about to be 60. I’m going to pack it all in.” I’m like, “That’s odd because, in the last three years, I’ve discovered what my hockey stick moment is. I’m doing this for the next twenty years of my life. I don’t plan on retiring.” In our holding company, we’ve got a money management firm, an insurance business, and an exit business, which I will talk about in a moment. We’ve also got a lot of other holdings that we’ve developed.
The light bulb went off when I said, “I’m perfectly suited to solve this massive problem in the world.” It’s estimated that there will be $10 trillion worth of exits in the next ten years. When an entrepreneur decides to sell, what do they do? At that point, they know their business but don’t know how to sell a business like they don’t know how to build a building or build a house.
 
The massive problem in the world is when an entrepreneur doesn’t know how to sell their business. Share on X
 
If they were going to build a building or build a house, they would hire a general contractor. We decided to create this general contractor business for exits. We call it the Exit Concierge. Have we stumbled across something big? We are not investment bankers, brokers or M&A advisors. We sit on the same side of the table as the seller.
Like a GC hires all the subcontractors, we hire the investment bank on behalf of the company. We hire lawyers and have them operate at fixed fees. We hire the CPA that’s going to work on the transaction. It’s because we have been working with these people for decades. The whole system is an ecosystem of smooth transactions. What happens on behalf of the seller is that they can focus on running their business, hitting their objectives, and not having the sale interfere with their life. Typically, what happens is they say, “I’m going to sell.” They get into this whole area of business that they know nothing about. They get taken advantage of. They get charged too much by the lawyers, the accountants, and the investment banks.
What we do is the exact opposite. We manage the process for them. It’s because we reduced the fees from all the vendors, and it ended up costing the seller nothing for our services. We call it the Exit Concierge. That has been an incredible few years of doing this. We are scaling the business. Thank God that there are a lot of Baby Boomers that are not giving their businesses to their children. That’s good and bad. The fact that they are not, there are a lot of businesses for sale now. We think we can help a lot of people.
That’s a great business. I have an exit in my past. I didn’t do everything as well as I could have. That’s common with entrepreneurs on a first exit. A year later, they are like, “I could have probably done this and this better.” Those two things I didn’t need to do at all. Sometimes entrepreneurs because we are good at something that bleeds over to where we think we are good at other things. We learn.
One interesting story on that. When you decide to sell your business, if you don’t use an Exit Concierge, you are having to do the whole deal. You are trying to run your business and sell your business. They are both extreme sports. A friend of mine, who I am in the middle of selling his business now, right after he signed the contract with us, said, look, “I have been planning a three-week trip to Africa. My wife will kill me if we can’t go to Africa.”
I said to him, “Not only can you go to Africa for three weeks in the middle of selling your business but you are not allowed to call in, check your email or check your texts.” The buyer said, “I have never seen a seller three weeks before closing leave for three weeks. It’s never happened before.” People don’t realize that when you try to sell your business, and since you have been through it, your life stops. We think we’ve given people an opportunity not to have that happen. I know we are onto something because the phone doesn’t stop ringing.
The market speaks the truth that we know. What about a nugget of wisdom from the mind of Rick Sapio that you could share with us?
I mentioned it earlier, and I apologize but there’s this term that we throw around in our family a lot called liberating structure. Liberating structures are things that free up your time and your mind and allow things to happen naturally and on their own. They are almost like rhythmic things. I mentioned an example of it before. My wife and I don’t have to think about it. Every Monday night at 7:30, we go out to dinner.
The babysitter, the kids, the employees, the neighbors, and the restaurant even knows because we typically go to 1 of 2 restaurants. It frees us up. It’s not like other families where, “Honey, do you want to go to dinner tonight?” “I don’t know. We don’t have a babysitter.” “What about tomorrow?” “I don’t know.” “What about next week?” “I don’t know.” Months go by. Everything about my life is on a liberating structure when I work out when I have date night every Tuesday night with one of my kids, and after family dinner, the times that we have six family dinners a week.
Even Monday night, I will go home, I will sit down with the family from 6:00 to 7:00, and then my wife and I will leave at 7:30. In my business, when we are selling a company, we put it on a rhythmic alignment, weekly calls at the same time every week for 30 minutes. You eliminate all this chaos. Important relationships in my life were all on a rhythm. It could be once a month at the same time for an hour. It could be every week if it’s an important relationship. I think about it from a religious perspective.
God says, “Sunday is a day of rest.” We rest on Sundays. We don’t do much. God didn’t say it’s whenever you want. He said it’s every Sunday. We take that into our lives. The liberating structure can release a lot of potential in human beings because you get a lot more done when everything has its place. I know I will probably drive a lot of people nuts with this but I’ve got an Engineering background. The precision around scheduling is liberating. That’s why it’s called the liberating structure. It’s a structure but it’s liberating. It took my wife a while to get used to it but she’s fully onboard now. With four young kids in the prime of their life, we didn’t have that. Who knows what the heck would happen?
 
Mutual Capital Alliance: A liberating structure can release a lot of potential in human beings because you get a lot more done when everything has its place.
 
You could certainly have some chaos there, a family with four children. I’m going to put you in a time machine. I’m going to take you all the way back to twenty-year-old Rick. We have 120 seconds to give twenty-year-old Rick a thought or two that would’ve helped you along your path.
I have been one of these personalities, that I always got elected the leader. When I was twenty, I was asked to be the president of my fraternity. I did not know how to say no. It wasn’t until I was about 25 that I heard Warren Buffett say, “The difference between successful people and extremely successful people is that extremely successful person say no to almost everything.” I go back to my twenty-year-old self, and I remember I was way over my head with an Engineering curriculum. I was taking 21 credits, and my roommates were taking Economics and ping pong. I was working full-time. I was active in the fraternity, which was crazy.
I remember my roommate said, “You don’t sleep.” I got sick. I almost died. The doctor said that all my numbers were weird. It was from stress. To this day, I can’t tell you what I had but I collapsed and I was in the hospital for ten days. It was complete exhaustion. It was because I didn’t realize that I could say no. We live in a society now where people don’t realize that they can say no. To Warren Buffett’s point, if you finish this quote, “Extremely successful people say no to almost everything. They only say yes to things that fully align with their purpose, their values, and their most important life objectives.” Don, could you imagine how great life would be if we all lived that way?
It would be amazing, total clarity. That clarity would be a liberating structure. It would be the filter for most decisions. Rick, how can we support you? Anything we can do for you?
Who’s in Your Room?: The Secret to Living Your Best Life
I love inspiring entrepreneurship and other people and inspiring people to be the best version of themselves. If they know of a company that needs to exit, they could go to the website, Mutual Capital Alliance. They can send an email to that website. If they want to learn about values-based decision-making, they can purchase the book, Who’s in your Room: The Secret to Creating your Best Life on Amazon.
I want to thank my co-authors for that book. My three operating values, which I meant to share earlier, are simplicity, probability, and leverage. Keep things as simple as possible. Always do things that increase the probability of hitting the stated objective. As an example of that, if you want to increase the probability of having independent eighteen-year-olds, don’t drive them around like a taxi driver their whole life.
That’s not going to create independence from this sport to that sport or whatever. Help them start a business. Lastly, leverage. Leverage existing resources, existing relationships, and existing technology. Life is a lot easier. When I wrote my book, I called two bestselling authors that I didn’t know. I said, “You’ve already done bestselling books. Would you mind adding your name to my book and blasting it out to your list?” Who’s In Your Room became a best seller using simplicity, probability, and leverage. I wanted to share that nugget. That would help them and help us if they bought the book.
There’s another nugget in there. Don’t be intimidated. Pick up the phone, call somebody, and ask. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no but they might say yes.
You made me think of yourself. A friend of mine, I met her kids. They were full of life. I go, “What is going on with your kids?” They were in their early twenties. She said, “It’s funny. When they were 9, 10, 11, and 12-ish, we would go into a park, and I made them introduce themselves to 200 strangers every day.” I’m like, “How did you do that?” “Don’t get me wrong. It took a lot.” There were a lot of temper tantrums. Imagine parents doing that with kids that you’ve got to introduce yourself to 200 strangers in a day. I’ve tried that with my kids. It has been hard. They are getting better at it, though.
Different times, a different world. If you want a PhD in humans, that would be a good way to get started. Rick, I’m grateful. Thank you for being on the show.
You are welcome, Don. It has been great.
That’s for this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur. See you next time. Thanks. Bye.
 
Important Links

Mutual Capital Alliance
Who’s In Your Room
Who’s in your Room: The Secret to Creating your Best Life – Amazon

 
About Rick Sapio
Rick Sapio is a life-long entrepreneur who started his first company when he was 13 years old, after the untimely death of his father. Since then, he has founded more than 20 companies. Since 1994, Rick has been the founder and CEO of an investment holding company, Mutual Capital Alliance, Inc., which has made more than 120 investments. Since 2003, Rick has been a co-founder and general partner of Mutual Capital Partners, a PE firm with three venture funds. In 2004, he founded USA Mutuals Advisors, Inc, a firm that manages publicly-traded funds.
He is also the founder of “The Mutual Capital Alliance – Exit Concierge Service,” which is a white-glove program to assist private companies through the often-tumultuous exit process by using fixed fees; and keeping the moving parts tightly-controlled. He co-authored the International best-selling book, Who’s in Your Room: The Secret to Creating Your Best Life. Rick is the founder of www.BusinessFinishingSchool.com, a virtual learning center that has helped thousands of people grow, scale and exit. He is the co-founder of The 100-Year Real Estate Investor, which helps bring long term legacy investing to the real estate industry. He is the Founding and 7-time Chair of the Gathering of Titans Program, an annual event held at MIT in Boston. He earned an engineering degree from Rutgers University and resides in Dallas with his wife, Melissa, and their four children.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E27 | Richard Blank
Date: December 13, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e27-richard-blank/
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Content:
Richard Blank flew overseas to teach English at Costa Rica’s Call Center. Little did he know he would become the CEO of that very call center. This position pushed him to take some time to learn the ins and outs of the business. He got to know each and every agent personally. Most importantly, he created a great working culture for everybody. Figure out how he did these things today!
Richard joins Don Williams to talk about his inspiring entrepreneurial journey. Learn why he wanted to pursue call centers and his unique cultural approach to this business. Discover how you can become a transformational leader just like him in this informative conversation.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Richard Blank
CEO Costa Rica’s Call Centers
I have a treat for you. I have Richard Blank from Costa Rica. Welcome to the show, Richard.
I am so happy to be here on the show. I appreciate it, Don.
Thank you very much. I’m going to take you back to little Richard. You are five years old in the home where you were raised. Maybe that was mom and dad or however that worked. It doesn’t matter. From 5 to 18, what I want to know is, was there an adult that was a role model for entrepreneurship? Was there somebody who was an entrepreneur in your childhood?
It’s in my blood from both sides of the family.
Tell me about one and then we’ll ask about the other.
Which side do you want first? My mother’s or father’s side?
Ladies first, let’s talk about mom.
My family comes from Europe. I’m Romanian, Russian, German and Polish. At the turn of the century, my great-grandparents came over from Europe. They all learned English. Both sides were entrepreneurs. On my mother’s side, they were more tailors. They started off going to clothing and in the Depression, we started a company called Dream Tots, which was nightwear for women. We made our money during those years.
On my father’s side, they came over from Romania and Russia. They were entrepreneurs in regards to home furnishings in a sense of kitchenware and furniture. They used to do things on layaway, like this year’s catalog and the company was called Consolidated Home Furnishings. That was back in New York and Philadelphia. It’s in our blood. We’re entrepreneurs who are nomads and take large risks. As a little boy, I used to hear stories from my grandparents and great-grandparents. I realized I wanted that sense of adventure as well. I didn’t want to go back to Europe. I wanted some better weather.
Entrepreneurs are nomads. They take large risks. Share on X
Here’s an interesting fact. I’ve done about 200 of these interviews and most US-born entrepreneurs didn’t have an entrepreneurial example in their home. They were wired that way a little bit, to begin with, and their nature-nurture took on the rest of the way. The interesting thing is that 1st and 2nd-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents came from some other country have a very high percentage of those entrepreneurs who had an entrepreneurial example in their life.
We all got in the US at some point but if your family’s been in the US for a long time, you have a tendency and I’m included. I have a tendency to take things for granted that maybe people born in other parts of the world don’t take for granted when they get here to the US. Maybe that’s how that goes. In your household, mom and dad are both doing things and the grandparents are doing things. Tell us about your first job. You might have been an entrepreneur. You may have never had a job. What is the first thing that you did that resembled work that you got paid for?
It could have been the first one where I was earning money or the one where I was most satisfied. The time when I realized I had salesmanship was when I was raising money for my Little League uniforms. We were supposed to go out and sell $1 candy bars. This is back in 1978. That’s pretty expensive. It was interesting. They gave us 50 candy bars. I walked around my neighborhood and sold them all in one Saturday.
A lot of people gave me money and said, “Thank you, Richard. You’re cute. Here, keep the candy.” My father was pretty cool. When I brought back the $50 and the candy was gone, he said, “You can keep the money. I’ll pay for the uniform.” I go, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah. You worked your tail off for that.” I realized that hard work does breed success.
We were born in the United States and a lot of times you are given opinions. They’re offered to you and maybe your career should be predestined. Maybe law, medicine, engineering, architecture or Ivy League. It might be difficult sometimes for someone like myself that wanted to be a Spanish major in college. I am that dreamer and romantic. It’s very difficult to compare notes with people because they were off on other journeys when I was doubling down on humanities and languages.
As much as it seemed like a long shot, well look at it like this. I’m in Costa Rica and getting a return on investment in a second language when some people spend $100,000 and don’t follow through on that career. A lot of it is being true to yourself, standing up to the naysayers and great believers, doing your due diligence and not just jumping in two feet without any investigation but I was pretty much prepared for this. At 27 years old, I was given a one-in-a-million opportunity to move here. The wind has been in my sail and the stars became aligned. I decided to continue on my vision quest, my spiritual journey. When you see me smiling, I’m living the best life. I have never been happier.
Many entrepreneurs, maybe it’s their first company or their not first company. They were in it for a profit motive or were trying to avoid submitting to authority somewhere but almost universally when people begin to follow their heart or some people might say their gut, that’s when the magic starts to happen. It’s interesting as we look back on our paths how the cards seem to fall almost magically correctly at the right time in our journey. Spanish studies have been very beneficial in your business. Let’s talk about your business. You’re in Costa Rica and I know what your business is but tell us what is your business.
It’s Costa Rica’s Call Center. We’re a dedicated bilingual nearshore call center that works with inbound and outbound support. I work with clients in the United States, Canada, Central America and a little bit of Europe. When I came down here, I was only supposed to be here for two months at my friend’s call center to teach English. I was in between jobs at the moment so I decided to stay. When I was with the people, the proletariat, I learned the business from inside and out.
After four years of learning this business, I cracked some codes and ways to enhance the experience for the agent and the client. Also, I was mature enough in my mid-30s. I had my impulse control and some capital that I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and begin. Don’t kid yourself. A lot of entrepreneurs think that I started the bells and whistles and renting the building. No, I started quite slowly. I was renting turnkey stations at a blended center. After a couple of years, I rented space and build out 150 seats in a server room.
Call Center: Many entrepreneurs think they have to start off quickly with all the bells and whistles. Instead, you can start slow and save money to weather any storms that may happen.
6 years after that, I had enough money to build a 300-seat center and continue my business. It’s more of the tortoise instead of the hare. As grandma told me, if you can’t pay for it in cash, you don’t do it. The reason I saved that money was for job stability for my agents and also to weather a couple of storms that happened during COVID and a couple of other years. I’m a long-term player that can go the distance.
Storms will happen. No matter how good the weather looks, there’s a storm out there somewhere. I don’t know where but there is one coming. I don’t know if you know this about me but one of the businesses that I own is in the contact center business. We’ve been in the contact center space for years in that business, which makes us a real old-timer. This is not a business for the faint of heart.
Were you using rotary phones back in the day? What were you doing?
We were using not rotary but black push-button phones.
The Cisco phone is manually dialing away.
I had several communicators, two in all the years who could dial. They would flash hook. They would never hang up the phone all day long. They could run the phone the way a good bookkeeper accountant could run a ten-key machine and it’s backward and upside down. It’s not the same keypad but they were the same way. It was unbelievable how many calls those two could make. Technology became available way back in the day when dialers were new and cost $15,000 a station so we went to automation. Technology has evolved and that stuff nobody even buys. It’s just pay by the drink.
Besides technology, didn’t you love the art of speech? How these people were so engaged on the phone and were able to convert these calls?
It’s not a technology business. It’s a people business. In my humble opinion, most businesses are people businesses but technology can be your friend and certainly, the advances that have happened in that business with automation and voice-over IP have made the world very small.
You see a lot of people going more toward chat and non-voice support, which is fine. It saves some time filling out forms but you’re also eliminating any chance for retention, referrals, up sales and any kind of exit interview. You’ll get much more of a quality relationship and experience when you do have the ability to speak with your clients.
Call Center: While chat and non-voice support work fine, you can get better client relationships if you speak with them on the phone.
I wrote a book years ago called Romancing Your Customer. It is all about providing exceptional experiences to your prospects, customers, teammates and subordinates. They love doing business with you and working with you. One of the concepts in that book that we discuss is that the more complex or valuable a communication, we want to climb that communication pyramid.
Everybody wants to use text and email. It’s textual communication but there are a lot of different forms. The reason salespeople want to use emails is that it’s easy. It’s not effective but it is easy. Above that, we have video-con, what we’re doing or audio would be the next layer and then videocon and then face-to-face. The more complex and valuable, the higher up that pyramid we want to go. Think about proposing marriage, it would be best to do that face-to-face. If you’re doing a show, you want to do a video conference.
We try to reduce as much misinterpretation as possible. Even though someone could be writing you something, the tone could be off or the vocabulary. Sometimes they’re lacking some strategy or diplomacy. A lot of the time, I will call up to follow up with a client to make sure that I am understanding their message. I’ll be honest with you, a lot of the time, it’s more bark than bite. They might write something or do it in a bold cap so be it. I can take it. Let me see if you can back it up with how you say it because a lot of the time, they’ll realize that they may have overextended themselves and they’ll try to readjust that tone. If you don’t know the client very well, it could be a very strange first impression and you want to get a second opinion on that one.
I’ll share a story and then we’ll go back to you. Many years ago, I have an office in another state. They’re very busy. We had fax machines. This was way back when DIRT was new. I knew they were busy. I took a piece of paper and wrote, “Call Don,” and faxed it to the Little Rock office. About an hour later, the manager calls and he’s like, “I know you’re mad and I’m so sorry.” I’m like, “Why would I be mad?” He said, “You sent me a fax.” I’m like, “What did it say?” He said, “It said, ‘Call Don.’” I was like, “It didn’t say, ‘Call Don.’ It said, ‘Call Don.’” The thing that we forget about written communication is you don’t get emphasis.
You forgot to say, please.
Yeah, but I am known for at times being very short-worded and direct so it was just “Call Don” but you never know. You went to Costa Rica. You’re teaching English because you’re fluent in Spanish. Somebody is running a nearshore call center and you’re engaged with them. You help them for four years. You learn the business. You don’t learn the tricks of the trade. You learn the trade.
I sat with the people. I got to see the good and the bad, the happy and the sad. What I learned by not being a C-level executive from the start is empathy. The agents felt like they did not have their dignity and a lot of them felt expendable or like a robot. When you hear those things, you do realize that people have lives outside of the office, which may affect their performance. Instead of writing checks and saying good morning, I’ll know your name.
As you can see, I have a gamification culture here. I collect pinballs, Jukeboxes and arcade machines. I like to play games with the agents and let them let off steam and make friends. Unlike what we’ve seen in the movies and we’ve all seen the Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street and Glengarry. There are some centers like that but not all call centers sell stock or have that assertiveness on the phone. It doesn’t match every profile agent that you and I have hired.
Hollywood glamorizes it but yes, these individuals are very talented in speech. Since English was their second language, I took that delicate position and expanded on their vocabulary with the resources, understanding the North American culture, their delivery and being in the call center space, focusing on quality assurance. We can listen to their calls, grade their calls and focus on their soft skills.
It’s a people business. Soft skills make all the difference in what happens. Thinking back on your career, I’m going to ask you about a hard lesson. Something that happened that at the moment was like, “I did not like that,” but maybe in retrospect, it turns out that it was positive for you on your journey. Do you have a hard lesson like that you could share with us?
I started my business in 2008. In 2010, I put the majority of my eggs in one basket. I went from 90 seats down to 4 seats. I lost a very large account. A couple of things happened. Reality hits you in the face. It makes you very humble. It makes you very grateful that you had a run but then you also judge someone’s character during the chaos. Instead of breaking windows, picking puppies and screaming at everybody, I became a lot more appreciative of the four agents that were with me to help build up the company again. Also, you learn a life lesson as well about being a one-trick pony. Could lightning strike twice? Was I just lucky?
I’m not happy about the fact that I got knocked down. It didn’t mean I got knocked out. What I had to do was readjust myself for the remaining rounds of the fight. Building a business from 90 seats to 4 seats and then 150, I have the ability to pick myself back up and continue. You could always quit and give up. You could say, “We did well,” but for me, I almost take the John Wayne philosophy of dying with my boots on.
When you go from 90 seats to four seats in your business, pick yourself back up. Die with your boots on and keep on going. Don't let one account ruin your entire career.  Share on X
I came this far. There’s still a little bit more to go. I wasn’t going to let one account ruin my entire career. As much as I’m not happy about that step back, I learned many lessons but the main lesson was about myself. I didn’t do something to disappoint myself, burn bridges or look back and be very embarrassed by how I handled myself.
You don’t want to talk about negative things. For example, if you have a situation at a call center where there’s attrition and a client might lose an agent and they don’t give you a two-week notice and leave. I don’t like surprises. I will call my client immediately and make suggestions. I will let them know what’s happening and always be ahead of it. If a client can work with me through certain situations, it only solidifies a foundation so we can easily get through the good times.
I guess that’s putting on the big boy pants, having that maturity and not hiding. It’s about being accountable and some things are outside of my control. I can’t go home with these people and control everything that they do but I can control myself and be here. That’s a lot of the reasons why my clients move forward with me because I call the balls on the strikes and I’m a straight shooter just like you.
Brutal honesty is in short supply. When you deal with customers from that standpoint, you’ll share the good, the bad and the ugly as it happens. We have a plan to overcome it. It’s not like I’m calling and telling you, “The wheels are off the bus and we don’t know what to do.” Sharing that, the brutality of honesty, in my opinion, shocks people because they don’t get much of that in their life.
It’s a positive shock. It builds and deepens trust. That’s how you build and deepen that relationship for years to come. In this business, every client probably leaves someday. I don’t know what day but even if AT&T is your biggest client, at one time, they were the biggest buyer of telemarketing services and call center services in the world but one day, they leave. It’s inherent to have Verizon too as a client, that way you don’t have all your eggs in one basket and it’s not traumatic.
Thank you for sharing that. We’ve all been there. To me, the seed of success in that was the fact that I won’t quit. I’ll keep playing because many of the success stories shared on the show include, I won’t say failures but failing and counterintuitively. Failings are a part of success. They’re not the opposite of success, which is common sense as it is but it’s not. Michael Jordan, the basketball player, listed all these things he failed at and said, “The reason I’m successful is that I failed at all those things.”
I love dedicated practice. I like it when people are working when the cameras are off and the office is closed because they’re training for it. They’re preparing for the heavyweight fight. I believe that you’re increasing your odds in your composure. You’re letting off steam. It’s not just sitting around reading business books and reviewing emails. Maybe it’s working out in the gym or washing your convertible or for me, playing pinball or spending time with my wife. There are certain times when you could walk away to decompress and prioritize. At the moment, being from Philadelphia, I might have a short fuse, say something and get all rocky excited. Sometimes, it’s better to walk away and calm your head. You can then come back to that conversation with a different mindset.
On very large decisions, someone should be given the opportunity to think about it or sleep on it. If they wake up the next day feeling the same, then it is the right decision. I don’t like forcing a hand. I know there’s a sense of urgency sometimes but your lack of preparation should not be my emergency. In addition to that, I need to be able to explain the Costa Rican labor laws because there might be some expectations you have in the United States with your company culture or what you want to do that won’t work here.
A lot of it is prevention instead of a cure. I might be calling you with that non-surprise phone call with a solution but prior to that phone call, I had laid out that this could potentially be happening. It’s not like it’s the first time hearing this. It’s almost not a takeaway and I’m not trying to not sell my company but when someone is on the phone with me as an expert, as you are in your field, we must go through everything with them. From an educated decision point of view, they can make that decision.
It is so much better to prevent issues than it is to try and solve them. It is so much easier. I’m going to ask you for a nugget. Something that’s 24-karat solid gold, a nugget of advice that you know that you should share with us.
I got so many. My first one is gamification culture. I collect pinball machines and stuff. I believe that somebody should be in a neutral environment to meet other people and be able to recharge batteries. It keeps me young. It used to be a passion but now it’s an obsession because I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and I have the room for it. Any boss that creates an environment for people to enjoy themselves, that’s number one. Secondly, it’s about delegating. For me to scale and grow, I needed to have faith in individuals and promote them.
As a boss, you should be the one to meet other people and recharge their batteries. Share on X
I only believe in promoting from within. We’ll bring in specialists for the IT department but there is no way I will bring in an outside supervisor. They haven’t earned the respect, raised the ranks, gotten their stripes or even know my company culture. That’s very important for me as well. Another is that I am a guest in this country here and I’m trying to break any stereotypes that they might have of an Extron hero as a guest in the country as a CEO of a company, a telemarketer or a call center.
A lot of the agents say, “You’re the first boss that ever knew my name.” I go, “That’s a shame because the other ones did have the chance and unfortunately, I might be the last one to ever know your name but while you’re with me, what I’m going to do is to make you better.” I reduce any fear to let them know that learning a second language is ten times tougher than what they can do. I’ll give them all their resources to reduce any fear that way. I’m going to be their biggest fan. I’m going to find every single way that I can to promote them and give them long-term job stability.
You sound like a transformational leader, which with transactional leadership, you have the president at the top and then the commander in chief. They have general officers, officers and then the troops. In transformational leadership, that’s turned upside down to where the leader sets the vision and enables the people to go manifest that vision. I love gamification. I can’t recall his name but one of the original heads of HR, he’s a PhD, at Texas Instruments, has a company where that’s all they do and they do it in the call center business.
People like to play games and have chances to do something. The great story he told was, “If I could pay you $20 an hour to go sit on a stool and push a button on a machine and then 10 seconds later, push a button on the machine and 10 seconds later push a button on the machine and you’re going to do that for 8 hours a day, how many of you would want that job?” Nobody’s hand went up. They’re like, “That would be a horrible job. Sit on a stool, push a button, wait ten seconds and push a button.”
He said, “Let me tell you another story. There’s a group of seniors leaving Los Angeles and as they cross into Nevada, they stop for a bio break. Instead of running to the bathrooms, they run to the slot machines that are inside the facility. They sit on a stool, push a button and wait ten seconds. Not only are they not getting paid to do that but they’re also paying to do that activity. What’s different? You wouldn’t take the job where I was going to pay you. These people do it voluntarily without being paid and will pay. The magic between the two is gamification. There is a chance that they might win something bigger. That’s how the human mind works.” It was fascinating when I learned that.
I’ll put you in a time machine. Just like Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise, we’re going to take you back to 20-year-old Richard and you’re going to get about 60 or 90 seconds to share 1 piece of advice that would’ve helped you along your path. Something you know now and you didn’t know then but looking back, you wish you knew then. Into the time machine, you go all the way back. Here’s the twenty-year-old you. What would you tell yourself?
I would’ve told myself to be concentrating on commission-based professions only. When you’re limiting yourself to an hourly rate, which is fine, you can get your insurance and everything but if you do something where your potential is limitless, you can be seen over a call center. I’m not saying that the naysayers and great believers were not encouraging me to follow my dreams but a lot of it had to do with security and what they knew.
Call Center: When limiting yourself to an hourly rate, you can get insurance, and that’s fine. But if you do something where your potential is limitless, you can be the CEO of a call center.
A lot of that influenced post-grad with those jobs until I came to Costa Rica or that’s where my mindset was. I was thinking, “If you make $100,000 a year, you hit it but little did you know you can make $1 million a year. It’s just another zero on a paycheck.” I would be telling myself at twenty years old, “In about 30 years, you’re going to have a bunch of pinball machines, be living in Central America and marry the girl of your dreams.”
I would be like, “Pinball machines,” but I also would’ve told my twenty-year-old self, “You have beautiful hair. Maintain it. Maybe start studying the violin a little bit sooner so you can impress your wife,” but I also would’ve said, “You are on the right path. Continue studying Spanish, which you love so much. Be true to yourself so there are no regrets.” The only difference is those three jobs I had post-grad but besides that, the rest of it was doubling and tripling down on myself and hitting.
I have a good friend. He shares with people, “As a young man, I wish I had known only to work on huge opportunities. The amount of effort isn’t that much different but the payoff is. Invest in working on huge opportunities as opposed to small opportunities.” Richard, how can we support you? What can we do for you?
Sharing ideas on your show has been fantastic and following your works there but if anybody wants to come to visit me in Costa Rica, that’d be great. I have a lot of suggestions for you.
I’m coming. I don’t speak idly.
My main thing on your platform is to let people know not to be footloose and fancy-free but if you do have a vision and these intuitions and you have something that is pulling you towards something, you should follow through on it. Maybe not 100%. Maybe dip your toe and test it to see if there’s a positive reinforcement there.
Don't be footloose and fancy-free. If you have a vision for something, follow it through. Share on X
Also, maybe not just to chase money. As well as I am doing, I’m also feeding 150 families a month. I get to meet their parents and their kids. They come to me and say, “Thank you so much.” You don’t kid yourself. When I meet one of my agent’s mothers, you don’t think I’m going to tell them how great Don is for ten minutes? I am embarrassing the daylights out of them because it’s paying it forward. Even at my high school, which was the one that encouraged me to study these languages, I set up a second language scholarship. I’ve been doing this for the last few years. A senior who graduates, I’ll pay for their books their freshman year.
For me, I love giving back to those that gave me momentum. I believe in synergy. As much as people work at this company, they’re working with me. They’re not working for me because if nobody comes back the next day, I don’t have company. It’s like that kid at Chuck E. Cheese with no friends on his birthday. The market speaks and the fact that I’ve been in a very competitive industry for my business for years and I’ve grown to this extent, I have a luxury of a track record.
I don’t need to prove anything. I’ve done more than enough to reassure myself that I made the right decisions but besides missing my family and living 3,000 miles away from my parents, maybe I did some selfish decisions but I also know about having a life that could be fulfilled. I probably would’ve been successful in any vocation that I took but the fact that I have a wonderful story to tell at cocktail parties. Do you know what’s funny? When I go back to Philadelphia for my reunions, all of my friends are so extremely successful but each one of them has said to me, “I wish I tried that one thing at least for a little bit when I was younger or I had the time or the finances.”
I don’t want to lecture them but all of us get 100 years on this planet. How do you want to do this? My young Richard used to read stories about leaving castles, slang dragons and saving princesses. I wanted my adventure. I wanted to conquer mountains, seas and deserts but what can you do in the 21st century? There’s not much you can explore. Just like great grandma and great grandpa, I decided to be a nomad and try something where I couldn’t use my family’s connections or my friends couldn’t give me the introduction. I started from scratch. As much as I might have started from home play compared to 2nd or 3rd base, that’s fine because it was a 100% Richard story.
We’re at the finish line. I have so enjoyed having you on the show. I reserve the right to recall the witness. I want you to come back and we’ll do it again. We’ll talk about something else. Richard, thank you so much.
I had the best time, Don. Thank you.
That’s it for this episode. See you next time. Thank you. Bye.
 
Important Link

Richard Blank
Romancing Your Customer

 
About Richard Blank
Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center, a division of Cheyenne Consultants, a company incorporated in Costa Rica. At the beginning of the new millennium, Mr. Blank relocated to Costa Rica to train over 500 employees for one of the larger call centers in Central America. By utilizing his motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, he has successfully prepared and managed some of the finest telemarketers in the country for the past twelve years.
In addition, he has earned the reputation of running a school for telemarketing and is often sought after for private training sessions and consultation. In anticipation of CAFTA, he became a strategic partner of the Pacific Rim Chamber of Commerce, Beverly Hills, California and Solo Telecommunications, Colorado Springs, Colorado to expand Costa Rica’s international telecommunications and business appeal. Mr. Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E26 | Attorney Matt Aulsbrook
Date: December 6, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e26-attorney-matt-aulsbrook/
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Content:
 
Attorney Matt Aulsbrook started his first insurance agency in 2009, catering to the non-standard auto insurance market. But after seeing that most clients are not always getting a fair share when making claims, he decided to shift gears and concentrate on personal injury. Joining Don Williams, he shares how he started his entrepreneurial journey at 15 years old and his experiences in law school. Matt also talks about struggling with drugs and alcohol, getting arrested multiple times, and overcoming these hurdles to establish a successful law practice.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Attorney Matt Aulsbrook
Beats Addiction. Graduates Law School & Owns A Successful Law Practice
My guest in this episode is my very good friend, Arlington, Texas-based attorney Matt Aulsbrook, with the Aulsbrook Law Firm. Welcome, Matt.
I’m glad to be here.
Man, thanks for coming. Let’s jump right in. Tell us about the Aulsbrook Law Firm and what areas of the law you specialize in.
We do personal injury, largely focused on motor vehicle accidents and commercial motor vehicle accidents. It’s a second career for me. I didn’t go to law school until I was 34. I got out at 37. I immediately opened my own shop. Funny story, I was waiting for bar results to come out, and I leased my office space, and I failed, and they only offer the bar exam twice a year. I was paying rent on my facility for 6 months, and I had a little motivation to study a little harder that next go-round since I had a 5-year lease I had signed.
I opened up in 2018, and it was just me and we just hired our 18th person. We got four attorneys, including me, in a few years. Our business is a little unique. It’s a contingency-based model, which means clients don’t pay us anything upfront to hire us, and we don’t get paid unless we get a settlement on a bodily injury claim. A quick turnaround on that would be six months. Oftentimes, it takes two years or more, especially in bigger cases. It’s a long runway. It takes a long time to get paid. Real money doesn’t start coming in for a couple of years, so we’re just now starting to see some decent revenue a few years in.
Tell me, what was your previous business? You went to law school at 34. What did you do in between?
My prior business started in 2009. I opened my first insurance agency in 2009. It’s a property and casualty insurance agency. It’s a franchise location, Fiesta Auto Insurance and Tax Services. It catered to the non-standard market for auto insurance. I cashed out my 401(k) in 2009, and I pushed it all in and started that insurance agency, and it was low. I had a duplex, and the other side was pretty much paying my mortgage, and I didn’t have any real debt. I just took a risk and started my first real business with payroll and worked up to five agencies from the initial start. In the meantime, I got an MBA there.
In 2014, I stepped away, became an absentee owner, and went to law school full-time. I graduated from law school and passed the bar in 2018. I sold all those to my key woman, and I lined up the financing on that. It was a great deal for both of us. The lender loved it. She was already running the business, and she put some skin in the game, and great exit for me, and a great opportunity for her to continue to move forward.
A couple of points. Sometimes, the best key man is a key woman. Two, in exits where entrepreneurs looking to sell the company to subordinates, bankers love someone who’s already running the business because it gives the business the best chance of being successful going forward.
 
Personal Injury: Bankers love someone who is already running the business. It gives the business the best chance of being successful going forward.
 
I did a search for the lender and there’s a market for lenders that just lend to insurance agency acquisitions. It worked out.
Let’s go all the way back to young Matt. I know you’re from Sulfur Springs, Texas.
It’s about halfway in between Dallas and Texarkana on I-30.
In your household, were you raised in an entrepreneurial household with mom, dad, or grandparents?
I was not fortunate enough to meet my dad’s dad. My dad’s dad died when he was eight years old, but he bought that farm in 1941. We’ve still got that farm, and we’ve added a little bit to it, it’s about 300 acres now. My dad knew his dad for only eight years of his life, but his dad was an entrepreneur and, as I’m told, had businesses. My dad was always a wage worker. He was a truck driver and always drove trucks for companies and was a W-2 employee. He always wanted the benefits insurance for me and my siblings.
My mom, though, was self-employed. She did hair. I grew up in a beauty shop, watching ladies gossiping. I remember when I was a kid, she would get checks as payment for doing people’s hair and a combination of cash. I would remember filling out her deposit slip when I was a kid. I text her the other day, “Mom, I was thinking about you. I’m filling out a deposit slip here,” because in my current business we get checks from insurance companies. She’s like, “That’s interesting, but I’m sure your checks are a little bit bigger than the ones I used to get.”
As a childhood, what was your first paying job?
We’re in a rural area, and growing up, it was Hopkins County. When I was a kid, Hopkins County was the Dairy Capital of America. There were more dairies in Hopkins County per capita than in any other county in the United States. It’s a farming community, and lots of people baled hay in order to feed the dairy cattle. At 12 or 13 years old, I would be able to go out in the field and just pick up hay bales and run them to the barn and stack the hay. It was $0.35 a bale. It was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done and some of the biggest fights I’ve ever seen because people tend to get pissed when they’re hot and thirsty.
My grandfather was a wheat farmer. My first paying job was I drove a John Deere tractor behind the combines, the nasty tons of dust and dirt and wheat chaff in the air. I was 11 or maybe 12.
My dad had an old Ford tractor, and I would hook it up to a sixteen-foot equipment trailer. I and a friend would just go out there and pick up bales. That was during summer times.
You graduated high school in Sulfur Springs. You went to the Merchant Marines, traveled the world, backpacked across Europe, and went to a university. What was your next step?
In between there, since we’re talking about entrepreneurship on your platform, I got my hardship driver’s license at fifteen. I don’t even know if they still do that, but I was able to drive to and from work and school. I formed my own lawn service company at fifteen, so I could drive to work. That was a pretty cool gig. I had an ’85 S10 Chevy Blazer, and I had a little tilt small trailer that I could drive the riding lawn mower on. I recruited one of my friends, and he would do most of the weed eating and push mowing, and I would do the riding lawn mowing. I saw that as a way to be able to control my time and yet still make more money than my friends at a convenience store, at a Burger King, or whatever.
You have the entrepreneurial bug early?
I did, indeed. I’ve had a lot of offers from different schools. Academically, I excelled, but I just didn’t have my head on right, so I chose to go to A&M at Commerce, which is about 20 minutes from Sulfur Springs where I was from. I commuted and I worked as well. I put myself through undergrad, helped my parents, and sold cars at the time. It was a pretty cool gig. At eighteen years old, being able to drive new cars to school was fun.
You’re an undergrad. Your degree’s in Finance. After school, is that when you open?
No, I struggled with drugs and alcohol. Although I graduated high school as probably a sophomore with the credit hours I’d already established, it took me five years to get through undergrad. Between the time I was 17 and 24, I was arrested eight times, all as a result of drugs and alcohol. It’s difficult to open your own business when you can’t get your life in order.
After I got an undergrad, I tried being a financial advisor for a little bit and then ended up at a bank and moved to Tarrant County. I was with a big bank for a little while, but that’s when I made the decision. I was around 30 years old at that point, and I began to sober up and get my life in order, and that’s when I decided to strike out on my own. I’ve been sober for most of the last decade. I had six months of relapse years ago, but over ten years now, I’ve pretty much been sober. I help other folks in recovery now and certainly enjoy that, help other lawyers and other men.
Congratulations, and thank you for your service. It’s certainly needed. It’s much easier to get help from somebody who’s been there and done that than somebody who just read a book about it.
As you know, Don, it’s high-stress what we do as entrepreneurs. Oftentimes, people turn to drugs or alcohol and necessarily make the problem go away. It oftentimes enhances the problem, and then I’m also in a legal profession that has one of the highest substance abuse rates with physicians just because of the added stress that we deal with and because people don’t generally call a lawyer on a good day. It’s generally a bad day when you’re picking up a phone and making a call to a lawyer. We just don’t deal with the easy stuff.
Even on the good day stuff, it’s not easy. Most of it is not a good day. Most of it is not for people looking to prepare and prevent. It’s for people looking to fix it. How do I make the pain stop? It’s part of your profession. Thank you for sharing that. We did the insurance agency. Was that here, or was that in Sulfur Springs?
That was here. It’s one of the reasons I left. It’s tough to make real money in a small town. My graduating class in high school is 200 people. I started my first insurance agency in Fort Worth, and I grew them in Tarrant County and Dallas County.
What happened that you said, “I’m going to get out of the insurance business, go to law school, and be on the other side of the insurance business?”
Selling insurance and having to assist clients with their claims, when I was an insurance agent, I realized that my clients didn’t always get a fair shake against the insurance company. I didn’t think the insurance company was making a fair claim. I thought if I switched to this role as a personal injury attorney, I could do something about that. The second thing is that I realized that the insurance check’s always cash. Instead of getting them as an insurance agent producer, I’m getting them to sue the insurance company now, so you have to have one bounce.
Thinking back on your entrepreneurial path, is there a hard lesson, something that was painful as you were going through it and maybe in retrospect turned out to be a good thing? Maybe not, but a hard lesson that you would share with us because we know the life of an entrepreneur is not always easy.
When I started my first insurance agency, it was a franchise. They give you guidelines. “Here’s the amount of money you should have. We recommend this as far as an amount for operating capital after your expenditures for your buildout,” and all that. I fit within those parameters, but I ran out of money, and then most of your audience probably knows the reason most small businesses fail. They run out of money. I had to go to my dad, and I had to ask him for $25,000. It was a lot of damn money at the time. My dad was not a fluent individual, and I certainly was out of money.
When I had my first office with the first person that I had to make payroll, he saved me. He lent me the $25,000, and it kept me afloat. For that, I would have closed and would have never gone to opening up additional agencies and growing it to five agencies. Who knows where I would’ve been now? Your question was, what have I learned? Cash is king. You got to have the cash to operate.
 
Cash is king. Without it, you cannot operate. Share on X
 
It is king. I’m so glad that your dad helped out. Family and friends are behind many successful entrepreneurs. 
I’m happy to be able to pay him back as well when I got the ability to do that.
I had somebody tell me. They said the opposite. Cars are not supposed to touch. When they do, that’s called a car wreck, and it’s an accident. Businesses, by the same token, are not supposed to run out of money. Every activity in a business should probably fall under one of two umbrellas. The umbrella of, “Bring money in,” or the umbrella of, “Keep money in.” 
If it doesn’t fall under 1 of those 2 umbrellas, maybe it’s a hobby, a charity, or something else, but in a business, it probably should fall under 1 of those 2 umbrellas. What about a warp-speed moment? Things are going pretty well, 1 event or 2 happen, or a strategy you implement that all of a sudden you just have hockey stick growth, and things take off.
I can’t think of one individual moment when I did one little tweak or something, and things took off, but my background is in service-related industry business types, insurance, and legal services. Building the two businesses was eerily similar because in the insurance world, you have to build a book of business, and it takes time for that residual income to build up for it to start flowing. It’s such a similar deal in the business that I’m running now. It’s not residual income, but the pipeline has to be there and built for the money to start rolling in.
There are not a lot of folks that can sustain 2 or 3 years without the money coming in. In those two businesses that I’ve been affiliated with, that’s been the case. That’s why in my current industry and as far as being a personal injury, that’s why a lot of people don’t strike out into it because it takes money to fund it. It takes money to put into these cases and to fund the team, and then you might not win. It’s a high risk but certainly high-rewarded if you can make it work.
That’s the slow warp-speed moment. Both businesses are brick by brick and that’s just the way it is. It’s just like, lay more bricks now and we’ll have enough for a platform at some point. What about a golden nugget, something you know from your experience that entrepreneurs would have an a-ha? 
For building and scaling, for me, it boils down to the team. I don’t know if it’s revolutionary or anything. I think most of them know this, but you can’t grow without the right people on the bus and having them in the right seats. As we’re embarking on a new year here, it’s a time when a lot of us reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. We didn’t lose anybody in 2021 and we added a lot of people.
 
You cannot grow without the right people on the bus and placing them in the right seats. Share on X
 
To keep the turnover down, to have the right people, and to not need to get rid of anybody, for me, it’s so key because turnover costs so much money, and we can’t always be right when we hire people. We’ve been pretty lucky in 2021. We hired the right people, didn’t have to get rid of anybody, and added people. You ask how that warp speed can happen and why I couldn’t give you an exact answer to that. I don’t think it happens if you don’t have the right people in place.
It’s all about the customer, your teammates, and your mate all the time. We’re all in the people business. Regardless of which industry we think we’re in, we’re all in the people business, so thank you. We’re going to put you in the time machine and take you all the way back to 20-year-old Matt. You get about 60 seconds to share one piece of advice with 20-year-old Matt that would’ve helped you along your path. What would that 1 or 2 thoughts that you’d share with 20-year-old Matt be?
That would be easy. I was in the depths of my alcoholism and drug addiction at that time. I’d just tell him to put the dope and the booze down, and I would be so much further along in my entrepreneurial journey now had I sobered up a decade earlier.
Thanks for sharing that. We’ve done about 100 of these episodes so far, and one thing I’ve found is that a proven entrepreneur’s success story always includes some failing stories. The interesting thing is that the height of success is almost equal to the depth of failure. Little failings, little successes. Big huge failings, big huge successes. The moral of that story is brick by brick. Keep going. Don’t stop. Thank you. How can we support you? We got 44,000 downloads so far. What would you ask from the tribe?
 
Personal Injury: The height of success is almost equal to the depth of the fall.
 
If you get run over by a commercial vehicle or 18-wheeler, give me a shout. That’s what we do. We help folks who’ve been injured or killed as a result of motor vehicle crashes. We’re sitting here in Tarrant County, and Star-Telegram came out with an article saying how crashes have increased here in our area and we had 100 fatalities in commercial vehicle crashes in 2021. We’ll take a commercial truck wreck anywhere in the United States. We can certainly make that happen, and that’s what we specialize in. If your family member gets run over by a truck, give us a holler.
Thank you. What’s the best way for someone to reach out to you, Matt?
My website is TheTexasLawDog.com. My last name’s Aulsbrook. I went with a domain name that somebody could spell because I’ve been spelling my last name my whole life, and nobody can spell it. Contact me at Matt@TheTexasLawDog.com. I’m happy to give you my cell phone number. It’s (903) 348-2154. I’m always happy to talk entrepreneurship if anyone wants to talk shop.
Matt, thank you so much for joining us. That’s our episode. See you next time. Thanks. 
 
 Important Links

Aulsbrook Law Firm
Fiesta Auto Insurance and Tax Services
Matt@TheTexasLawDog.com

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E44 | Scaling Your Business With Allison Maslan
Date: November 15, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s1e44-scaling-your-business-with-allison-maslan/
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Content:
A lot of entrepreneurs can start a business but a lot of them fail to scale it. Everything will go down the drain if you don’t know how to grow it. In this episode Allison Maslan shows us the ropes of scaling a business. Allison has had her fair share of business failures but she stood her ground and studied what worked and what didn’t. She is now the CEO of Pinnacle Global Network. And, she is also the bestselling author of Scale or Fail. Join Don Williams as he talks to Allison Maslan about her entrepreneurial journey. Discover how she went from writing postcards to running an ad agency. Find out the secrets of the Scale it Method so that you can build your business even higher.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Scaling-Your-Business-With-Allison-Maslan.mp3
SCALING YOUR BUSINESS WITH ALLISON MASLAN
CEO AND FOUNDER OF PINNACLE GLOBAL NETWORK, IS WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST SELLING AUTHOR OF SCALE OR FAIL WHICH IS ENDORSED BY DAYMOND JOHN AND BARBARA CORCORAN FROM SHARK TANK
I am so happy, thrilled, and excited to introduce my good friend and someone who has been instrumental in my entrepreneurial journey. Please meet Allison Maslan. Alli, how are you?
I’m excited about this. I was looking forward to it. It’s been awesome
Me too. It’s always hard to talk to a lady about time, but we met more than five years ago. We walked the same paths for a while and then our paths crisscrossed from time to time. Rather than me introducing you, Alli, tell us what are you working on? What’s your primary company? What do you spend your time, energy, and passion on?
Thanks, Don. I have been running my tenth company for many years. It’s called Pinnacle Global Network. We mentor business owners around the world to grow and scale their companies, primarily 7 and 8-figure business owners. We take a holistic perspective where we look at all aspects of their business from the revenue stream marketing, sales team, leadership, and so forth. I am truly passionate about it, especially now.
As you know, because you’re much entrenched in this as well, business owners are the changemakers in the world. They are the inventors and they’re the ones that are solving some of the biggest challenges we have in the world. My dent in the universe is to help them soar. I’ve been a business owner for more than 40 years, so this has been my life’s path and I feel blessed.
That means Alli started out at about age seven and has been an entrepreneur for more than 40 years.
Business owners are the change-makers of the world. They are the ones that are solving some of the biggest challenges in the world today.
Business owners are the change-makers of the world. They are the ones that are solving some of the biggest challenges in the world today. Share on X
It was that lemonade stand. That was business number one.
That is my next question. I know a little bit about your childhood. You live in San Diego. Your business is based there. You have clients all over the US and maybe even the world now. Where did you start out? You didn’t start out in San Diego.
I did not. I started out in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In fact, we used to come to Texas a lot. That was our big city, so I’m very familiar with your part of the world. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My father and grandfather had a women’s clothing store in Kansas City. He and my dad ended up expanding it to Tulsa and then across the Midwest.
In my childhood, I grew up following him from store to store. He was so passionate about his work that it was infused into me. I think about the little things I do. I’m like, “I’m definitely my daddy’s girl.” I went to school at Arizona State and studied journalism. I always loved San Diego. I fell in love with this place. I’ve been here since 1989 and it’s definitely my home.
You come from entrepreneurial roots, not only from your father but also from your grandfather. As a young girl in Tulsa, Oklahoma, talk about a work ethic that your father and mother may have instilled in you as a young girl.
That was everything for me. My dad and I have an interesting language together because we both love the business world. He would call me up and instead of, “How are you doing,” it would be, “How many sales did you close today?” That’s what I grew up with. It’s that type of mentality. It was always business for him, but he was relationship-oriented. Everywhere we went, he knew people, and he respected everyone from the janitor and the taxi driver to the heads of state.


Scaling Business: If you feel like you can’t hold a job, try making one. Start your own business. Be the creator who comes up with the ideas. Do things that you’re passionate about.

 
I learned so much from him about following your passion, being dedicated, and being committed. There was no separation for him between personal life and business life. I work a little harder on that than he did, but I never heard him complain once. He found it a blessing to be a business owner and he never told me, “Allison, this is what you need to do.” He always encouraged me. When I was younger, he said to me, “If you want something, go create it yourself.” I will never ever forget that.
He also said, “If you don’t know how to do it, say yes and then figure it out.” He had that muscle. I flew by the seat in my pants a lot. In the early days, we did finally figure it out. My mom was and is still my biggest fan. You will see her on social media. It’s hilarious. If I’m posting about events, she’ll comment, “Sign up for Alli’s event because it will change your life,” or, “She’s so smart.” She’s still that way for me today.
Where would we be without our mothers? Back when I was a kid, my first job was mowing the yard, except there was no pay. It was my responsibility to mow the yard. I wouldn’t say that was my first job, but my first paying job was driving a tractor in a wheat field for wheat harvest. I was eleven. I made a lot more money than my friends made, but I also worked like a heathen. What was your first paying job as a young Alli?
I worked for my dad and every type of role you could imagine. I was in the back. They had a warehouse with the women’s clothing chains. When the clothes came in boxes, we would open up the boxes and hang them up. I worked in the stores. I was a buyer for him. I traveled to New York. He gave me that. I was blessed to have that experience. Here’s the thing, and I’ll be totally honest with you, Don. I was a waitress. I did all of that. I worked in a pizza restaurant when I was fourteen. That was underage. They were paying us under the table. I don’t know if they did get away with that now.
I could not hold a job. I don’t know if I was a total brat or if I wasn’t good at it. I became unemployable. I was a bit depressed for a time there because none of it made me happy. I would stare at the clock. I would do my thing, but it was like, “Get me out of here.” It was terrible. It came down to when I was nineteen and started my own business. I didn’t intend to, but that came more naturally to me. It’s to be the creator to be the one that came up with the ideas to do things that I was passionate about. I followed that throughout my life and thank goodness because I would have been in big trouble.
That’s a common trait in entrepreneurs. They’re good visionaries and good business owners, but they’re bad employees. In my own path, I know I may have a little aversion to authority, people telling me what to do. I may have a little problem with that. That’s pretty common. What was that first business at age nineteen?
If you don’t know how to do something, just say yes and figure it out.CLICK TO TWEET
It evolved into a full-fledged business. In the beginning, it was writing poems for birthdays, anniversaries, and different occasions when I was in school. I did calligraphy and I sold them for about $25. I would interview the person, find out all kinds of cool stuff about them and customize these poems. I was over the moon. I was like, “People are paying for this. This is so cool.” I told my dad, “I found my calling. I’m going to be a poet.”
The funny thing is, Rita Dove was my professor at Arizona State and she was the poet laureate at the time. She inspired me, so I was, “This is it. I’ve found a way to monetize it.” He’s like, “Alli, that’s so awesome, but didn’t you know that most poets don’t become known until they’re dead?” It was my dad telling me this. Such a buzzkill, dad.
I’ll give you a little encouragement. That’s great.
He’s pretty straightforward. I ended up doing poems throughout college. I moved to Atlanta and I was still trying to do poems and I found out that it was falling flat. I was not getting the demand that I was hoping for, but I did meet this woman at a party and she said, “I work for this company and we need some thank you cards. Do you do those?” I heard my dad’s voice in my head going, “Just say yes.” I was like, “Yeah. I do this all the time.” It ended up being MCI. Do you remember MCI? They were the dial one. They were huge at the time.
They were number two behind AT&T. They were huge.
They were national. I go in there and I get this order for 10,000 cards for $10,000. I had been charging $25. I walked out of there so excited and then I went, “I don’t even know how to do this.” I went to some quick print place down the street. I’ll never forget this because of this guy. I was 21 at the time and you didn’t see young entrepreneurs back then like you do now. I love that we’re seeing so many young entrepreneurs, but you didn’t see that often back then.


Scaling Business: A lot of business owners don’t know how to scale and delegate their business. They are control freaks who think they have to do everything by themselves. They don’t. It’s okay to ask for help.

 
He’s looking at me and he goes, “How did you get this order?” Thank goodness and he helped me through the whole thing. What I did was I called all of the other regional locations across the country and I got orders all over the country. It then started with brochures, radio, and television. I had a full-service ad agency by the time I was 25.
You made a point there that I want to be sure we emphasize, “I got on the phone and I called the other rational offices and I got them too.” She’s giggling a little bit because I did a talk for Alli at her group a few years ago. The title was Pick Up the Darn Phone. So many entrepreneurs have an unhealthy fear about what might happen if they cold call someone and get hung up on, but it’s a pretty foolproof and easy way to get business. Call and ask for it.
It’s wild because people are drowning in email. They’re getting maybe 2 or 3 calls a day. F that. They do not. Maybe not even that. There’s a lot less competition. I’m a big believer in the phone for sure.
Handmade custom bespoke greeting cards to the full-service ad agency. What next?
The ad agency grew quickly. I didn’t know how to do all of those things, but I did ask for help early on. I had no ego issues at all. I was like, “Please help me.” I would hang out and they would do press checks. At 3:00 AM, I would learn about printing. I would hang out at the radio station and be like, “Please tell me everything I need to know about radio and the business.” It’s the thing with television. I began to evolve and we took on clients like Ben and Jerry’s and Charlotte Russe.
We helped them grow from 15 to 50 stores and they went on to have hundreds of stores before they sold. Also, Supercuts and Merrill Lynch. A funny story about Merrill Lynch. This was when I was still in the greeting card phase. I was 21 years old at a mall trying to get clients. I was so nervous and shy. If you saw me, I was talking to myself outside of their place. I looked like I had had issues. I talked myself into going in and I had my Polaroid camera.
Stop living like your business is running you, instead of you running your business.CLICK TO TWEET
I walked in and said, “I’m doing greeting cards for Christmas. I would be happy to take pictures of the agents and we will do some caricatures like cartoon drawings so you can send them to your clients for Christmas.” I had this artist that I was working with. There was one gentleman there that became a fan. He invited me to present at their sales meeting. I’ve never done any speaking. I had no training and I wish I had a video of that. I got several orders and then it was thank you cards. They were like, “Allison’s back. Let’s do more cards.” They became a great client of mine and the business grew quickly.
I was great at helping the clients. I was super creative, but the thing is, I did not know how to scale a business. I didn’t know how to delegate. I was a control freak. I thought I had to do everything. I was so afraid of losing a client. A lot of business owners go through what I’m sharing now. I didn’t know at the time. My daughter was under two years old then. I was a mess. I was successful and an absolute mess internally at the same time.
You know how the story goes, but I ended up totally crashing and burning. I was unhappy. I didn’t have a life. This thing took off. It had a life of its own. I ended up having a terrible car accident because I was exhausted and not fully present. I was trying to be a mom, trying to run this company that was taking over my life. From that experience, it was a massive wake-up call for me because at that point, I was about 30 years old and I was looking at my life going, “If I don’t change now, nothing’s going to change.”
I took a year off and I examined what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. I had to nurse myself back to health. I began to study the companies that I had worked with to understand how they scaled, built their systems and processes, built their vision, created consistent cash flow, and built a team-managed company.
That’s where everything started to change. I love business, but not the way that I was operating. From there, I built nine more companies. One of which I’m running now, but in a different way than I did in the early days. I’m grateful for that time. I’m grateful that I survived that car accident. I learned so much through the experience. It’s made me who I am today and I teach that formula, as you know and continue to do for thousands of entrepreneurs.
It’s common that we learn some of our best lessons in the hardest fashion. It takes the hardest to make that happen. Tell me about a time in your business career when things were going well, but then you found a new gear. All of a sudden, it’s like a warp-speed moment and things were good, but then all of a sudden, things were great and what do you attribute that to?


Scaling Business: Join forces with your significant other. Grow your business together. Because having someone right by your side that you know and trust will really help your business grow.

 
Honestly, even in the years with COVID. I wrote my first book back in 2009 called Blast Off! and that was helping businesses and helping people start businesses. That’s what I was doing originally. As I got further into the coaching world, I found that my gifts were working with more established business owners. Because I had so much business experience, I could get down into the nitty-gritty with them. I finally put that system, which I call the SCALEit Method, into my book Scale or Fail, which came out in 2018. You were there. That was pivotal.
We’ve been running Pinnacle Global Network for more than eleven years, but when that book came out, what I talked about in my book, the story I shared, so many business owners live like that. Their businesses were running them instead of them running their business. They feel suffocated and don’t know how to make the shift and want to so badly. They think, “If I just work harder.” By having this book, so many people have read it and went, “You’re speaking to me. I didn’t know how to get over that wall.”
Since the book came out, the business has gone to a whole other level. We’ve continued to evolve the SCALEit Method and through COVID, it helped so many business owners not only survive everything that’s going on, but many of them have record months, a record year. If they hadn’t had that to keep their eye on the ball and were sucked into a lot of negativity that floats around, their doors would have been shut for many of them. I feel grateful to be able to share this work. We were already on a trajectory that was going well, but this is adding a lot of tools to the fire.
I have a client that’s in the restaurant business, which restaurants, hotels, hospitality, a lot of that have been devastated. I saw him one December and I was like, “How’s it going?” He’s like, “Sales are up 15% over last year.” I was like, “It’s a pandemic if you didn’t notice. You’re supposed to say, ‘It’s horrible and we’re going out of business.’” He’s like, “I didn’t want to do that, so we didn’t. I was like, “Probably the place to start is to decide, “I’m not going to participate in that going out of business stuff. We’ll figure it out.”
There are a lot of ways to make money and to get creative. What I’m seeing, and I’m sure you are too, with the pivots that were forced to happen if you decided that you still want to be here like your friend, it forces people to look at their business and opportunities in a new way. Those people that leaned in and realized, “I can capitalize on these new demands right now.” While others are pulling back, they’re leaning in and that’s where great wealth will be made even through challenging times.
Wealth will be made, even during challenging times. Sometimes, more so during those challenging times. Thank you for sharing that. Let’s go to the other end of the extreme. Was there some time in your business career that, at the time, was a brutally hard moment but then, in retrospect, it might have been the best thing to happen to you but, at the time, sure hurt?
When everything is falling around you, you need to keep your eye on the prize.CLICK TO TWEET
There have been many of those times. For more than 40 years, there have been crazy things that have happened. I lead big events and we have one coming up here. Anyone who has led events at any level knows that. Do you know what always hits the fan one way or another? I was on stage during the opening of the event, hundreds of people were in the audience, and the whole stage started falling down.
I was not there for that.
You missed it. It was one of my grander moments because I had been practicing my juggling act. I’m up there delivering and in the corner of my eyes, I see something starting to fall. It was the whole backdrop and I saw everyone going like this. It’s like they’re just watching this thing unfold. I looked straight ahead because our AB team was across the way and it was Barry and Blue. I see his mouth going. I don’t know what happened, but I stood up for my leadership. I said, “Everybody, eyes right here. When stuff is falling down around you, you’ve got to keep your eye on the prize.”
I don’t know where that came from, but it worked in my favor. We came out of that, but there have been so many. My husband and I worked together in the business. He had his own business for more than 30 years. A few years back, he went through those periods in his life where he’s like, “Is there all there is?” He’s been doing it for so long and he doesn’t have the passion for it anymore. He ran a wholesale office furniture company and he worked with big companies. He did very well.
He saw me so lit up about what I was doing and he wasn’t feeling that. He’s been doing it for so long. There was a period there where I was seeing him go through that and it was tough, but he definitely did some work on himself and came to the other side. For both of us, the realization was why don’t we join forces?
Because he’s brilliant in business and our company has grown pretty big, so it was for me to have someone right by my side that I fully trusted. We looked at things the same way. We merged a few years ago. If any of you who are reading work with your significant other in your business, there were about six months that we had to work through some of the new challenges around that.


Scale Or Fail: How To Build Your Dream Team, Explode Your Growth, And Let Your Business Soar

Now, we’re sailing through and we have a ton of fun, but it was hard for me in the beginning because even though I was thrilled to have him, it was hard because he’d been running his own show. He wasn’t used to his wife going, “When is this going to be done?” One day he’s like, “What doesn’t work for me?” He’s like, “Stay in your own lane, Maslan.” We needed to work out some things to how we both come together on this. We did and stayed committed. It’s been fantastic.
Mike is a super guy. He’s smart and a hard worker. He’s a good Ying to your Yang, a good complementary partner. Wrapping up, knowing what you know now with ten businesses and helping thousands of entrepreneurs. Also, seeing tens of thousands of business scenarios, with all that extensive knowledge and experience, if you could go back and give only one piece of advice to a nineteen-year-old, what would that look like?
I love mentoring young entrepreneurs, too, so thank you for reminding me of that. It’s changed so much over the years, but I thought that I needed to pick the one thing that I would do for the rest of my life and struggled with that. I didn’t have any self-esteem. I felt all this pressure to figure out what that thing was and I was so afraid. I do believe in the schools. There’s a lot of pressure on them. What are you going to be? Who are you going to be? I don’t even know who that guy was. I would tell myself, “You can be many things in your life. Pick one and then that one will evolve into the next and into the next.”
Life is tricky. It’s hard to see it all the way over 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
I don’t know if that would have helped me at the time. I probably would have still felt the same level of anxiety. I’m grateful that it worked out the way it did because that was the wake-up call I needed. If I hadn’t gone through those hard knocks in those early days, I don’t know if I wouldn’t be doing as well as I am now.
Some of it is experience. I’ve thought about my answer to that question. In all truthfulness, I don’t know that my twenty-year-old self would listen to anything my current day self had to say because I knew everything.


Blast Off!: The Surefire Success Plan To Launch Your Dreams Into Reality

No way, Don. I would know that about you.
I knew everything and it took me about 30 years to figure out that I didn’t know anything. I’m trying to learn something new every day. I’ll time out before I have all the knowledge, but I’m going to continue to learn everything before I time out. Our last question is the toughest question. Most entrepreneurs struggle with this. The Proven Entrepreneur Clan, our tribe, if you could ask one thing of us to support you, what could we do for you?
Honestly, the biggest thing for me, and nothing makes me happier than entrepreneurs getting out there and doing their hustle, doing their thing. At this point, I’m here to pay it forward. I hope that this interview helps people see that you hang on through the good and the bad times. There’s always that silver and the next open door. Get clear on where you want to go, keep walking towards it every day, and don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be done.
Babe Ruth said, “It’s pretty hard to beat somebody who keeps getting up. Keep going.” Allison, I’m so grateful and good to see you. Thank you so much for coming to the show. We’ll do it again and we’ll talk deeper on a different subject.
This was awesome. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Allison.
 
IMPORTANT LINKS

Pinnacle Global Network
Blast Off!
Scale or Fail

 
ABOUT ALLISON MASLAN
CEO and founder of Pinnacle Global Network and WSJ Best Selling Author of SCALE OR FAIL endorsed by Daymond John and Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank. She has built 10 companies since age 19.
Featured in Success, Inc., Fortune, Fast Company and Forbes Magazines, a regular contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine and a featured expert on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox across the US.
Shared the stage with Les Brown, Richard Branson, Kendra Scott and JJ Virgin and emceed the largest marketing event in North America.
Host and producer of The Scale or Fail Show podcast, and the Women Who Own it Podcast in partnership with WBENC, the largest certifier of women owned businesses in North America.
Founded The Pinnacle Global Network® in 2010 to pay it forward and help established business owners scale their companies and reach their dreams. Her team of established mentors are all CEO’s who have built and scaled their own highly successful companies.
 
 
 

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Title: S2:E11 | How Amazon Guru Steven Pope Went From Unemployed To Founder In 48 Hours
Date: November 15, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e11-how-amazon-guru-steven-pope-went-from-unemployed-to-founder-in-48-hours/
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Content:
Amazon Guru Steven Pope founded My Amazon Guy. They fully service and manage over 200 Amazon seller brands on anything that generates traffic, including search engine optimization, pay-per-click, or anything that improves conversion rates, such as design, catalog management, copyright, and merchandise. He founded his company just 48 hours after getting laid off from his previous job, and within a day, he secured a $3000 monthly contract. Now, he has over 200 employees. How did he do it? Don’t miss out as Steven tells the secret to his entrepreneurial success with host Don Williams.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams

You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com

Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate


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HOW AMAZON GURU STEVEN POPE WENT FROM UNEMPLOYED TO FOUNDER IN 48 HOURS
I have got a great guest for you. Many times, we have a guest who is one of the guys at whatever they do but in this episode, we have the guy for all things Amazon products. Known as My Amazon Guy, he started his career as a television reporter in Idaho. He has a 200+ Amazon agency that he founded and runs. On YouTube, he has a couple of videos, almost 1,000 that are free content for you to learn how to work on Amazon. Welcome to the show, Stephen Pope.
Thanks for having me, Don. I appreciate it.
I am thrilled. Thanks for being here. I am excited myself. I am going to learn something about Amazon. I do not know about Amazon. We will fill a large book. Tell us about My Amazon Guy, how you got started, what you do and who you serve. Tell us your story.
I have an agency called My Amazon Guy that has 200 brands that we fully service and manage. Anything that generates traffic that includes your search engine optimization, your pay-per-click or anything that improves conversion rates such as your design, catalog management, copyright and merchandise. We have over 220 employees across the world in 10 times zones. It has been a fantastic run. It is fun being a founder. I have no idea what I am doing though, Don.
If you have gone from no staff to over 200 people in several years, it sounds to me like every day, you are walking on ground that you did not walk on before.
It is, “Figure out how to do this today and figure out how to restructure a department tomorrow.” It is like, “How many different things do you have to do to run a business?” Thirteen more pop up and then, “We are going to double the company again. Here is a new barrier. Let’s push through that barrier. That is lots of fun.” Read seventeen business books this month to see how I could become a good to great company somehow.
Meanwhile, I started an IT department and a sales department for outbound calls, which is how Don and I got together for this episode. I was like, “Don, I need some of your advice. I am starting a sales team from scratch. What do I do?” Don gave a big, wow moment, “Pay your salespeople as often and as much as you can.” After our chat, he invited me to join him on his show.
Let me take you back to young Stephen, all the way back to age five up through the high school. In the household where you were raised, that takes different shapes for different folks but whatever that shape was, in that household, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young boy?
Nobody taught me how to be an entrepreneur. My father is a very hard worker but if you were to read Rich Dad Poor Dad, he would be Poor Dad. He made lots of money but did not become an entrepreneur. He was well-educated and had a degree in Meteorology. He became a weatherman. He wanted to be a weatherman since he was a kid and he did it. He was on television. He had a good career. He works for me on my sales team, ironically. When I was five, I wanted to be an entomologist. For those non-nerds out there, I wanted to go around collecting bugs and insects.
I was that super-nerd kid. I had bug wars and bug fights like a praying mantis versus a black widow in a jar ready to go. I liked chaos from a young age. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She did PTA and was there for the kids. I had two brothers. My older brother may have been a slight influence in the sense that all of a sudden, this thing called eBay started showing up. He started hocking goods on eBay. I am like, “What is going on? What is this? I want to get in on that. He is making money over there.” I have never thought about this until you brought this up, Don. You are pulling it out of me.
He started selling bobbleheads like Karl Malone, John Stockton and NBA bobbleheads on eBay. I do not even know where he got them to be honest. Some guy he knew or something. I was like, “This is cool. I am going to open up my account and do this.” I signed it up, did that and bought a game cube. Except for the guy I bought it from on eBay who did not ship it for 90 days. That was my first eCommerce experience. The first product I ever sold was and I am continuing the nerd trend here is the Magic: The Gathering trading card called the Sliver Queen from the Stronghold edition. It was $20 for a 10 or 11-year-old kid at the time.
For those always looking for that entrepreneurial motivation, many of you are at your desk job asking the same question, “What am I doing with my life?”CLICK TO TWEET
I got into teaching chess lessons. I started selling chess sets. I was like, “This is cool. I am never going to go work in retail or do any of these boring other retail jobs that all of my peers are doing in high school and junior high.” I bypassed it all. I taught chess lessons. I was in over 75 different elementary schools in Utah. I had hundreds and hundreds of chess students and then found a wholesaler who sold chess sets. I was like, “All my chest students need chess sets.” I will buy them from him. I bought low and sold high and gave all my chest students chess sets, which was cool.
When I first started the show and we are about 100 interviews in, I thought that most entrepreneurs would, as children, have had someone set the example. It is about half and half. Some did, some did not. It means that if you did not, you are not wired that way but ultimately, you are going to end up there. Tell me this. What was your first job as a child or your first entrepreneurial venture, the first time that you received money?
Receiving a lot of money came from the chess teaching and the chess sets. I am sure I took a job to babysit here and there. I was making $15 an hour as a 12-year-old kid teaching chess lessons. I went around the neighborhood. I had my flyers out. I knocked on doors and said, “It is the summer. Your kids are playing Nintendo. Hire me and I will teach them chess, get them to think and use their brain.” They loved that.
I had a huge following because they would refer somebody else. It was cool. Nobody taught me how to do that. I was like, “I am going to do this.” I started charging for it. People paid me money. I was like, “This is fantastic.” I had money in the bank growing up. All my needs were taken care of by my parents. They bought the clothes and paid for the car. I had that fortunate rearing. All the money that I made was play money. You got to go out and date, buy dinners for girls and go bowling.
How many people in America have ever played chess?
I imagine it is a strong majority. It is less than Russia but it is a lot. Anybody that has played a board game ever has probably played chess. It is a big target audience. Everybody always wants to get better at chess. They are like, “This Bobby Fischer thing. There is a Finding Fisher movie.” I played very competitively. I played in the Florida US Open back in 2005. I was ranked high and did all that fun stuff. Those are six-hour chess games. Those are long games.
Leaving your childhood behind, when you graduated high school, did you go to university, climbed Kilimanjaro and did oceanic exploration for a couple of years? What is your story? What did you do?
In college, I did debate to pay for college. I was in a collegiate debate. The coolest thing that I did was I beat Harvard’s B Team at a national debate tournament. I had fun doing that. I won on a cheap shot. They did not read their plan text. I beat them on that in policy debate. You got to read your plan. Otherwise, you cannot win the debate. That was important. It was a TKO. It is interesting to think about because that is what debate is. It is TKO’s all the time. Nobody is persuaded when they watch debates, ever. If I went back to college, that is what I would change. I would go back and learn how to persuade.
I do not believe that I am a persuasive individual. I think that I am right all the time but I do not think anybody believes me. If I had to go back to school, I would learn how to persuade. I did that and then broke into television. I coat-tailed off my father. He was in weather. I did the hard-hitting investigative reporting. That was my stick. On a Monday, I might be interviewing the Mayor and asking why he has a mistress. True story. On a Tuesday, I might be in the national aquarium covering a crazy cat attack. That is also a true story.
I have a good friend here in Dallas, Jeff Crilley who was a reporter for Fox for 25 years.


Amazon Guru: If you do not have the drive, do not become an entrepreneur because the moment you are an entrepreneur, and you start making work for yourself, it is a different environment you will find yourself in.

 
I hired Jeff for my public relations firm. I have been in 30 media appearances since I hired him. I was on LA News with a story about people buying Ukraine flags on Amazon.
Jeff is a rare talent. He has his PR company. He is one of the nicest guys on the planet. What you find very common in the entrepreneurial community is they have got companies, making money and hiring people but for the most part, they are nice people. Jeff certainly qualifies. Between the two of you, you have some stories that we cannot share here but it is fun stuff from that time. The debate thing, I did not know that about you either, Stephen.
I went to college for 1 minute, maybe 2 but in high school, I am from Kansas and we were the state runner-up high school debate champions. If you are from Kansas and you were in a high school debate, it was rare air. I learned to communicate and communicate clearly. I then became one of those sales guys. I do think about it. It is my normal thing.
Your art of persuasion is probably stronger than mine. I suspect.
I will humbly say thank you. I hope so. After college, what did you do?
I went into television and became a TV reporter up in Idaho and Wisconsin. I did lots of fun stories. I got to fly in a stunt airplane with Greg Poe, which was cool. I interviewed celebrities like Don Wells and David Archuleta. I moved up the guild and went over to a bigger market in Madison, Wisconsin. I did not last long there.
You said you did college for a minute. I did Wisconsin for a minute. A big ice storm, the biggest blizzard Wisconsin had seen in a decade, hits up in Wisconsin. I had to do a live weather hit at 10:00 PM in the middle of the blizzard. My hair froze. I could not see the cameraman. I missed my cue and stared at the entire television mark for twenty seconds out in the cold and felt like an idiot. That was my coming of age moment.
That was the moment I said, “What in the world am I doing with my life?” For those reading, always looking for that entrepreneurial motivation, many of you are at your desk job asking the same question, “What am I doing with my life?” That was the moment I decided I was going to stop being a television reporter. I am going to throw out my college degree and find something else. I did not know what that something else was but I decided that was the moment. It did not take me long. It took me about a month. I ended up getting fired from that television station before I quit.
I was that unfit for being on television. I decided I am going to go back to school. I started a Master’s in Communication. I got in, finished the semester and was like, “This is also stupid. Why am I doing this?” Then I am like, “I will get an MBA.” I transferred over and got an MBA. I was like, “That was cool.” I did an MBA in three and a half months through a program called Western Governors University. It was a competency-based program. You did not have to do the crap. You just had to prove you knew it. I was a lifelong entrepreneur. I sold chess sets and Magic: The Gathering cards. I did all those things online and was like, “I know this stuff.” I went and it worked.
The day I finished my MBA degree, I was working at an in-between job as an enrollment counselor at Western Governors University. I randomly applied for a job. I needed a job to get back to Utah from Wisconsin. That was that job. I applied for a leadership position as a team leader in the enrollment division. I finished my capstone MBA project.
When you become the boss, things get easier in some ways but harder in others.CLICK TO TWEET
I had proven that I could quadruple the retention rate of cold leads. That was my capstone project. I had a proven process. Not only did I do it but I gave my SOP and process to three other people who had similar numbers by following my process. I was like, “I am going to go into marketing and become a leader.” I did not get the promotion. I walked in and said, “I have all the answers. Follow me.” They said, “No.” I said, “What am I going to do?”
They have a sister company called StraighterLine. I reached out and said, “I finished this capstone project. I could do this for you too. I could increase the number of students enrolling for you. Hire me as a marketer.” They did. In less than three days, I had a job offer for double the money I was making but I had to drive out to Baltimore, Maryland. I knew nothing about Baltimore, Maryland. I am like, “Tell me about Baltimore, Maryland.” The first thing you find on the internet is some sketchy TV shows about drug deals in Baltimore, Maryland. I had high hopes on that one but I ended up going over to Baltimore, Maryland. I did that and was in a marketing manager position.
I bypassed being a specialist. I was straight in corporate marketing manager, working in Corporate America. I was super unqualified to do that job. I had a massive drive. I learned about SEO during that job and did some cool stuff. I learned how to drive traffic. In the next four jobs that I had done, I ended up failing at four failed startups in a row. Every single employer that I had, liked me but for whatever reason, every company failed.
I go in there and do my thing. I felt like I was doing a good job and then there was something missing from the equation somewhere somehow. At one company, I worked for the British. It was the dumbest company ever worked for. It is called Nisbets and they sold restaurant equipment. They bought a $5 million warehouse in Baltimore and filled it to the brim.
They were a $250 million company a year over in the UK. They were a number one, dominator, a beast of a company. They were recession-proof and knew the answers to all the questions. As one example of how dumb this company was, they sent plastic spoons that were so flimsy that if you put the plastic spoon in yogurt, it would bend on the way to your mouth. They were so stupid that they printed catalogs in the British language and asked Americans to buy rubbish bins on the front page of the catalog. They thought they could visit San Francisco on the same day from Baltimore like, “Let me walk on down over to San Francisco,” not having any idea of the size of the United States.
I have seen some stupid stuff on the corporate side. They laid off everybody after 6 or 7, maybe 8 months max, while I was at that company. Every single failed startup I did was the dumbest example. I worked for some good startups that failed anyway. I ended up getting a job offer for a minimum of 30% higher pay within 7 days every single time. I was like, “It is them, not me.” I did one cool corporate stint at a company called APMEX. I improved their organic traffic by ten million uniques year over year. That was my biggest corporate win in America because ten million people showing up to a website that was not there the previous year is a big number.
I felt like I could drive big results. Finally, when the last startup failed, it was a lighting company, they lay me off and gave me a three-month severance. “You did not do anything wrong, Stephen. We are closing shop because our competitors are killing us.” A lot of people would have taken a vacation. I did not. I said, “I am going to solve my problem in 48 hours.” I made a LinkedIn post and said, “I am going to start doing some consulting. I have been doing this Amazon thing for eight years, side hustling.” My wife is like, “What are you going to call this consulting thing?” I said, “I do not know. Nobody cares who I am. They just say, ‘Talk to my Amazon guy.’”
She said, “That is a great name for a company.” We are folding laundry in the laundry room. I married well. I met her in Baltimore. We started an agency in less than 48 hours. Within one day of a LinkedIn post, I was on a sales call with a company called FitLife Brands, a supplements company. I convinced them that I was the answer to all of their problems and they should hire me and I would grow their sales. They signed a $3,000 per month contract with me. This was my first contract as an agency. I am like, “This is fantastic. I have all the answers. I started an agency in less than 48 hours and got my first contract.”
It was a lot of hard work because, within two weeks, I realized what I signed myself up for. I am the guy who makes work for myself. Not work for others. I was in the growth center at all these companies I had worked at for a decade. I have made work for other people my entire career. I am good at making work for other people. I am my own boss and make work for myself. If you do not have the drive, do not become an entrepreneur because the moment you are an entrepreneur and you start making work for yourself, it is a different environment you will find yourself in. I decided within ten days I had to hire an assistant. That is how quickly I tapped out, Don.
The next day, I had an assistant. Everything that I do, I make a decision and then I act. “The action dictates the strategy,” would be my motto. Another motto that I would say would be, “Live long and prosper.” I am ripping off Spock here. I am Spock because I am 97% introverted and 99% driven. I could not be more polarized on the spectrum here. That means everything is a data point to me. This is why I could not persuade anybody, Don, because I am like, “You are just a data point. I need to talk to 100 of you, I get 7 sales and then I am good.” No does not mean no but it means not this contract, not this sale or not now.


Amazon Guru: I had to find a data-centric way to make talent hiring and management a scalable process. The answer was the culture index.

 
I did that and within 3 months, I was making $30,000 a month. I started hiring employees but I have to admit to you, Don, it took a long time to burn my ships. I will bastardize the actual storyline here but there is a book out there that talks about a group of people landing in the new world. To make sure that they knew they could not go back to the old world where all of their comforts were, the leader said, “We are going to burn the ships.” They burnt them to set the stage that you have to be successful in the new world. I did not burn my ships for six months. I was still interviewing for jobs because I was like, “Agency life is so hard. It is the hardest business to run.”
If you have ever talked to other businesses, you talk to a SaaS company, they are always talking about starting an agency. If you talk to a product business, they are always talking about starting an agency. If you talk to an agency, they are always talking about launching a SaaS company. The grass is always greener on the other side.
It is like, all actors want to be musicians and all musicians want to be actors. They think it is so much better over there.
It is not. Running an agency is the hardest company. There is no doubt about it. I am 100% confident. If you run a product business, all you need is income and capital. If you own a SaaS company, you need a developer. I got all the answers. All these things are easy.
You do have a lot of answers that you have accumulated along your journey. Let me ask you to think back across your career. I am looking for a hard lesson. An event or multiple events that happened that at the moment of recurrence or when you were going through those, it is like, “This is brutal,” but maybe looking back, it turns out it propelled you along your journey. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
If you are the data guy, people are hard to work with. When I was in the corporate world, I was the guy with all the answers. I would show up to the meeting. A question would be asked by the leader or the CEO, “What should we do?” I raised my hand every single time. I was like, “I know what to do. You do this.” What would happen almost every single time, they would say, “Yes, but that is hard work. I am not so sure.” I am like, “Seriously, here is the date. I grew your traffic by ten million uniques. You should do what I say. I have a proven track record.” I would be in the boardroom and say, “Look at the data.”
They would not look at the data and believe it. They would come to their conclusions and resist me. I am like, “You should turn over the entire website to me and give me full control. Here is what I will do with it.” This is what happens when you have maximum autonomy and no team player inside of you. I could not work in the corporate world effectively. When I became the boss, things got easier in some ways but harder in others. I have no idea.
When I first started hiring random people, I was like, “You are in my church? Cool. You are within five minutes of me, you are a neighbor and I am hiring you. Come to my house. We are going to stick desks in my office here and work together.” I ended up finishing the basement of my house. The max we hit was eleven. I had eleven employees in the basement of my house. Mind you, this was a nice basement. It was nicer than most corporate businesses. There were windows, a nice new desk and a finished corporate environment.
Your wife was thrilled about the eleven people who came and worked in the basement. She likes that.
It was the first employee that she was most pissed about. She is like, “This is my sacred territory. You are bringing work to my home.” I have four kids. Tying live long and prosper back to that, everything that I do must be prosperous. I do not run my business this way. I run everything this way. I cannot tell the difference between my personal life, work life, family life and spiritual life because they are all the same way. When I started to merge them though, my wife was a little resistant. The irony here is I started hiring people. I made lots of terrible hires. It was absolute garbage. I had no idea what I was doing.
It is a constant evolution to make sure you hire the right people.CLICK TO TWEET
I got lucky in my first few hires but then as it started to scale, I did not do too well. I finally hit employee number eleven there. The fire marshal shows up and says, “You are illegally running a business out of your house.” I am like, “Yes, that is me.” He says, “You have 48 hours to vacate the property.” I had to become a remote business overnight, which is fine because as you heard from all these other examples, I made a decision. Within 48 hours, I had the solution. We are a remote business hiring people. I had to learn how to hire people without ever meeting and managing them without being face-to-face. This was all pre-COVID, mind you.
I had to solve problems that nobody had solved before. Let alone, I solve them. Long story short, I had to find a data-centric way to make talent hiring and management a scalable process. For me, the answer was the culture index. I give everybody this two-question survey. It takes them five minutes. I know what motivates them and can, within 30 seconds, dictate whether they were going to be a fit for my company. It is a brutal process. It knocks out 75% of the people that apply but it works. I got 220 employees with data points that say it does.
All of us are in the people business. I do not care what we do.
I am not sure about a SaaS company with one developer.
Even then, people got to buy it. We are all in the people business. A culture index is a great tool based on 100-year-old research but that is based on stuff that goes back to Aristotle and Socrates. There is a limited amount of personalities. “Helps you get the right butts in the right seats,” is close to their unofficial tagline.
I keep Traction on the side of my desk. I quote from it frequently. I have Extreme Ownership behind me. Measure What Matters, which was written by an EO guy, are all books that I am living that. We demoted one of our leaders and I had to say, “I need you to read chapter two of Extreme Ownership. Let’s have a chat about this.” There are ways to move people up and down. There are ways to get people in the right seats and move it all around. It is absolute chaos all the time at agencies. I hire impatient, eager individuals all the time. I hire detail-oriented individuals because we have nonstop deliverables to our clients.
If I cannot maintain that at scale, I will lose clients. My mistake was I am face blind. I cannot read a room and I needed a data tool to deliver scale to my weakness. That is what I overcame. I am a culture zealot and I talk nonstop about core values. I rolled out a core value of impatience to my business, which has massive negative connotations. I rebranded it. It is eagerness. It is a constant evolution to try and make sure we hire the right people. I run a people business.
I have a friend here in Dallas-Fort Worth who is the number 1 real estate broker in the state and maybe number 5 or 6 in the country. He does a ton of residential commercial real estate. Talking about the culture index, he requires that his clients take the assessment so that they know the best method to communicate to deliver what the client wants.
I do that for my clients too. I need to hire that real estate agent.
I will connect you. He helps people buy and sell real estate all around the world based in Fort Worth, Texas. He is like, “All the real estate is not in Fort Worth, Texas. It is everywhere.” He helps them everywhere. Let’s talk about a warp speed moment. Things are going along pretty well in your business. You make a couple of hires, change a strategy and do a 48-hour implementation but all of a sudden, even though things are going well, you have a hockey stick, explosive growth. Do you have a warp speed moment? Mr. Spock would certainly understand the term. You can share with us.


Amazon Guru: Never been a better time to sell on Amazon but also never been a harder time.

 
I do not have a warp speed of 1 or 2. It is warp speed 9 all the time. When you asked for the warp speed moment, that has been my life since 2018. There was no pause or stop. I have not taken a vacation since then. If there was one cup that is a little less full than it should be, it would be time to take care of myself and go take a vacation. That is the one thing I need to correct.
The warp speed has been nonstop growth in a growth sector. The Amazon space is an absolute gauntlet of growth. Half of the economy goes through Amazon. They have vertical control. If you think about it, it is not just half of the things that are being bought and sold on Amazon but Amazon also controls all of the data. They are in bed with the CIA and run the government’s data even. They are the largest monopoly that has ever existed.
They are not the most profitable company in the world. Apple still has that win but Amazon is the largest, most important company in the United States without a doubt. It has more control. It has vertical control and logistics. They are buying boats and planes. They are going to put FedEx out of business. They are doing so many massive things. They have all of these fulfillment centers across the country. I am in the fastest-growing sector in my opinion. There is so much growth in my space. I estimate that 50,000 jobs cannot be fulfilled in the Amazon sector.
That has been such a hard thing to deal with and manage that I had to hire 60 interns in 60 days. I completed this capstone project, another big, hairy, audacious goal. If we do not start telling people to go to college for Amazon sales or to train them, the entire sector is going to implode. We have, on the left, $13 billion entered my space in the form of one sector of Amazon aggregators.
I made a website, AmazonAggregators.com, if you are curious where 100 different companies, venture capital mostly, came in and started buying Amazon brands. The largest of which is Thrasio, with a $2.5 billion capital raise. They are so big that at least 40% of the households in this country have received an item from a brand that Thrasio owns. They are going to be a household name eventually, Thrasio.
There are many other ones like Perch, Boosted, Heyday and a laundry list of 100 more. I have interviewed half of them on my podcast because I was wondering, “Am I going to end up working from an aggregator soon?” That was this massive sector change happening. I decided that the answer to that question was, “No, I am never working for anybody ever again.” I am big on the whole Gary Vee style.
On the left, you have got $13 billion in Amazon aggregators in this space. On the right, you have the Chinese going direct to consumer for the first time selling commodity products at dirt cheap prices. On the top, you have Amazon squeezing the mom-and-pop seller. They are making policies and making it harder to even run the business, to begin with.
Amazon is entering its maturity phase. Never been a better time to sell on Amazon but also never been a harder time. This concept that Amazon is #PassiveIncome, I will criticize that all day long. Also, it is job security for me. Amazon is the number one customer-centric company in the world. Nobody serves its customers better than Amazon but it treats its sellers like dog crap and absolute garbage, which is why I am in business and why I created My Amazon Buy. We can navigate all of those challenges and overcome them.
I did not know that but one of my talks that I give on the stage on Romancing Your Customer is about treating customers the way they want to be treated. I treat my wife the way she wants to be treated. That is romantic. It is seeing things from the other person’s point of view. I tell the crowd, “I can tell you your two biggest competitors and I do not care what business you are in.”
They always want to know, “Who are they?” I am like, “It is Amazon and Google.” It is Google because they give you an answer to any question you want in 27 hundredths of a second and they are probably right. That perpetuates instant gratification. It is almost impossible for everybody else to even come close.
Amazon is the largest monopoly that has ever existed.CLICK TO TWEET
When you think about Amazon, with as quick of a search, deliver me umpteen zillion choices, tell me what they recommend. I can buy it with one click. Two days later and maybe even the same day, depending on what it is, it is on my doorstep. If I need to send it back, it is no problem. When you talk about delivering exceptional experiences where customers say, “That was amazing,” they are the best. There is nobody who can touch them.
Don, you are the wow guy. You would know. If you are not on Amazon, you are irrelevant if you are a product business. They were the first company to solve two-day nationwide delivery. Two days was too slow, Don. I cannot wait two days so then there was next-day delivery nationwide. Don, next-day delivery is too slow. They have Prime Now where you get stuff in two hours. My wife had a hankering for French fries and she ordered Prime Now, a dry fryer. It was on our doorstep in 1 hour and 36 minutes.
My wife was a little frustrated with me because I may never go to another store ever again for anything.
Are you introverted like me, Don?
I am a speaker, a facilitator and a coach but I am a very hard introvert.
That makes you a great world-class presenter though. Introverts are the best presenters.
We have some unique skills. Sharon Birkman, her father founded the Birkman method, which is Myers-Briggsation, cultural index and all that. She can talk at great length about the inner strengths of introverts and their weaknesses. I can be as gregarious and charming as anybody on the planet, maybe more than most but it drains me. If I speak on the stage, I will not speak to my wife that day. I will speak to anybody.
When I go onto the stage, my batteries are on a full charge. When I leave the stage, I will have about 5% power left. It will be Captain Kirk saying, “Scotty, I have got to have more power.” Scotty says, “We are about out. Say your thank you’s, kiss the babies, shake the hands and get out of here because you are going to pass out quick.” That is the way it goes.
For this next piece, I am going to put you in a time machine, transport you back through time and give you the opportunity to share some wisdom with twenty-year-old, Stephen. A thought or two of something you know now that you did not know then that would have been helpful to know if you would have listened to yourself. Sometimes, for twenty-year-olds, that is a challenge. Into the time machine you go, all the way back. Here is twenty-year-old Stephen. What wisdom do you share?
College is a waste of time. Do not become a television reporter and start your business at age eighteen.


Amazon Guru: Amazon is the number one customer-centric company in the world. Nobody serves its customers better than Amazon, but it treats its sellers like dog crap and absolute garbage.

 
Mothers and fathers all across America are not listening. I thought I was going to be an engineer. Math and science were always my strong points. I never took a book home in my life. Academia liked me. I was one of those kids who is going to bring in exceptional grades but I took a sales job at 18 and in 6 months, I was making more money than my parents. In 3 or 4 months after that, I was the number one guy in the country at age 19 out of 450 salespeople. I looked at what I would make after another 3 and a half years of college as an engineer. I make more than that now.
Being an entrepreneur is not for everybody. For the true born ones, do not waste your time. Just do it.
They will not be happy doing anything but entrepreneurship is one of those things where you work 135 hours a week for yourself, maybe for nothing, as opposed to working 40 hours a week for somebody else for something. If it is your calling, your zone of genius and your purpose, you cannot be happy and content unless you follow that purpose. Stephen, how can we support you? How do we reach you? What is the easiest way to connect?
If you liked what you read and you want to say hello, send me an email to Podcasts@MyAmazonGuy.com. If you are an Amazon seller reading this, I would love your business. We can grow your sales. I can grow anybody’s sales. We will give you peace of mind. It is all taken care of so can focus on your business. Check us out at MyAmazonGuy.com. If you are a culture index nut, I like to geek out on that stuff. Hit me up on that too. We have 900 videos of content over on YouTube where I talk about how to run a company and grow sales on Amazon. It is super technical in the weeds. It is built like a television reporter. It is 2 or 3 minutes of sound bites in and out.
That takes us to the finish line. Stephen, thank you so much for coming to the show. It has been my distinct pleasure and I do reserve the right to recall the witness. I would like to have you back and we will cross some other bridges. That is it for this episode. Thank you so much. We will see you next time.
 
IMPORTANT LINKS

My Amazon Guy
Rich Dad Poor Dad
eBay
Magic: The Gathering trading card called the Sliver Queen
Jeff Crilley
StraighterLine
APMEX
FitLife Brands
Traction
Extreme Ownership
Measure What Matters
AmazonAggregators.com
Thrasio
Perch
Boosted
Heyday
Romancing Your Customer
Prime Now
Sharon Birkman
Podcasts@MyAmazonGuy.com
YouTube – My Amazon Guy

 
ABOUT STEVEN POPE
Founder of My Amazon Guy, an 80+ person Amazon Seller Central agency out of Atlanta, GA. We Growth Hack eCommerce and Marketplaces through PPC, SEO, Design, and Catalog Management. I am a Eagle Scout.
Degrees: MBA and BS In Communications. Amazon Advertising Sponsored Ads Accredited.
I can help you identify how to grow your company through marketing and eCommerce. I offer fresh, bold, innovative ideas for challenging problems. I am a journalist turned digital marketer with strong analytic skills and an MBA. As a marketing manager and director I have overseen a myriad of programs that impact the P&L through both onsite and offsite channels such as SEO, SEM, retargetting, analytics, affiliate, CSE, display, Amazon, social, and email.
I also have the technical knowledge an eCommerce manager needs to implement changes to a website to improve the conversion funnel and have overseen several major projects and integrations including changing of ESP/CDN/DNS/Security Certificates and other integrated platforms. I build upon the philosophy of the digital marketing trifecta of Earned Media / Paid Media / Owned Media through strategic planning.
While at Weber State University I was on scholarship in the Collegiate Debate program. If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Great Debaters”​ I relate to it as I’ve beaten Harvard’s B-team at a national debate tournament. At Woods Cross High School I was the Sterling Scholar in Speech and Drama.
Before my career began, I taught chess lessons both privately and at more than 50 elementary schools in Utah. What I have learned as a chess player is simply put, “Think ahead.” If you want a digital marketer who will do exactly that, I’m your guy.
Bow ties are cool. I have nearly 2-million views on my YouTube Channels.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams

You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com

Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

 
 

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Title: S1:E49 | Andrea Albright – Beverly Hills Publisher Writing Her Own Proven Entrepreneur Story
Date: November 15, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s1e49-andrea-albright-beverly-hills-publisher-writing-her-own-proven-entrepreneur-story/
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Content:
The desire to serve others is one of the most powerful drivers of any successful entrepreneur. This is what spelled success for Andrea Albright‘s publishing business. She joins Don Williams to share her proven entrepreneur story of building Beverly Hills Publishing. She explains how she gives aspiring authors a chance to share influential ideas and bring enlightenment through their books. Andrea also talks about her parents who shaped her into the dedicated entrepreneur she is today, the lessons from her very first business, and some tips for creating an impactful brand.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Andrea-Albright-Beverly-Hills-Publisher-Writing-Her-Own-Proven-Entrepreneur-Story.mp3
ANDREA ALBRIGHT – BEVERLY HILLS PUBLISHER WRITING HER OWN PROVEN ENTREPRENEUR STORY
I have a phenomenal lady, one of my best friends, all the way from Beverly Hills, California, Andrea Albright. Andrea, welcome to the show.
I am so thrilled to be here, and I love that you think of me as one of your best friends. I agree.
I am thrilled. I have not seen you face-to-face because we have been the great stay-at-home for a while. Even though you were in your area in California and I am in Texas, we did see each other a couple of times a year and were great collaborators. I love working with you and we are a good team. We bring out the best in each other, or certainly, you bring out the best in me.
It does not even feel like work whenever we are collaborating. It feels like we are hanging out, having fun, and being the best versions of ourselves.
What you are supposed to do when you are in that zone of genius is not work and just fun. It is certainly fun when I am working with you. Thank you so much for coming to the show. I know your story, but let’s share your story with this corner of the world. Tell me the name of your company, what you do, who you serve, and all that.
I am the Founder and CEO of Beverly Hills Publishing. We specialize in getting books published for thought leaders in 90 days. A thought leader is someone who is evolving their industry, disrupting the status quo, and daring to bring a new perspective. I specialize in thought leadership because I, myself, am also a thought leader. I have been an entrepreneur for eighteen years in October 2022.
I had a nervous breakdown in Corporate America and I learned early on that I had to have money with meaning. The money without creating value and being of service led to me having a nervous breakdown. I went and started my first company at 26. I remember filling in the form. This is back in the day when you had to go to the registrar’s office and register your company. You could not do anything online. I will never forget the moment I filled in my name next to CEO and I realized, “I made myself a CEO. We are making all of this up.” I have been unemployable ever since.
Entrepreneurship continues to reward and excite you when aligned with your purpose and passion, even when things aren’t going well.CLICK TO TWEET
Let’s talk about publishing. I am getting ready to release my fourth book. My third book, Build Your Big Legacy, I published with you and Beverly Hills Publishing. I will give you a little commercial here. It was by far the easiest, most fun experience out of all four. I used another publisher on 1 and 2. I have nothing but good things to say about them, but Beverly Hills Publishing is a whole other gear, a new frontier, easier, faster, better, and more fun. The book number four, I am on my own, which is not as easy, not as fast, not as fun for sure, but we are going to get it done. Let’s now go all the way back to little Andrea, five years old maybe up to eighteen. In your home where you grew up, were your mother or father entrepreneurial?
No, they were not. I did not even know the name entrepreneur until I had already gone through career changes. I have always been that person who would start something, go straight to the top, excel, and then realize, “Is this it?” I would get bored. I did not know I was an entrepreneur until I was in my late twenties. It is like, “Now it makes sense.”
My mother is a psychologist. My dad is a writer. It is interesting that I have become a publisher because the publishing process is about revealing deep parts of yourself and making an impact on others. In writing, I have always loved words and communication. That is why I am fascinated by marketing, publishing, and branding because it is about communication and connecting with others.
Even if you sell millions of books, you still connect one leader at a time. That is how it goes. Mom and dad were not entrepreneurial. I find that true about half the time in entrepreneurs and set at an entrepreneurial dinner table at night, the gravitational pull of entrepreneurship got them, but the other half the time, another parent was entrepreneurial. It was something that was born inside of you. One day, a spark lit a flame and now look at you. You are blaze. All the way back, still little Andrea. Tell us about your first job where you got paid.
My first job was a sales job and it was my mom who said, “Andrea, you will be great at sales.” I have this all lined up of all the different places I was going to go in the mall to get a sales job. I started at the back end of the mall and I was going to work my way around. The first place I went to was RadioShack. I walked in and they were like, “You can have a job,” so I never even went to any of the other places in the mall.
I started to learn about sales. I am a geek and a nerd. I love technology. This is back in the day when cellphones were first coming online, and they said, “Every person is going to have a cellphone at some point in their life. It is up to you to make sure that you get a cellphone into everybody’s hand who walks through the door.”

Publishing Business: A thought leader is someone evolving their industry, disrupting the status quo, and daring to bring a new perspective.

 
I was slinging those cellphones. You would walk in for a little diode or resistor for your stereo and then you would walk out with the most amazing cellphone, a full package. I became the fourth salesperson in the entire district. I was in Dallas, Texas. That is where I learned my love of sales and selling technology. Here I am now on the internet so it all works together.
It is funny how more mature entrepreneurs look back where they can see instances in their childhood where it is like, “Maybe that was a seed that got planted that grew and I harvested later.” As you know, I live outside of Fort Worth, Texas, which is the home base to RadioShack. Charles Tandy started RadioShack. At one time, 94% of America lived within 30 minutes of RadioShack and 80% of America over eighteen have been in RadioShack within 2021.
Phenomenal company for little mini retail footprints unusual products but if you needed one of those products, you knew a place to go is RadioShack. There is no sense going anywhere else. That is awesome. I did not know that part about your story. After RadioShack, the fourth salesperson in the region selling those cellphones. You then went to university, joined the Marines, and backpacked across Africa. What do you do?
I went into college with the belief that I wanted to be a doctor. I love the human body. I am fascinated by Anatomy and Physiology. I started to geek out on science, and I thought, “This will be a great way to help people to be a doctor. It was pre-med, and about halfway into my college curriculum, I decided I wanted to be bilingual. I would like to be able to travel the world and learn another language.
Many people told me, “You can never learn another language if you do not learn as a child.” I said, “I am going to do my best.” I started taking courses in Spanish, and I did some study abroad programs where I had the great blessing of living in Europe. The study abroad was in many ways as beneficial as my curriculum in college. The way that it opened up my world gave me access to different cultures and people. It also gave me that innate sense of curiosity, wonder, exploration, and adventure.
I kept taking these courses because I did not know it at that time, but I am what we call a whole-brain person. Most people are either left or right-dominant. I happen to be both. I am both scientific and I am also creative. That is why I love communication. I also love numbers and data. Eventually, I was taking so many classes because the more I would work on the right side and the communication part of my brain, the better I was at science.
If you don’t put that purpose and intention at the beginning of your entrepreneurship career, you’re hitching to a rocket that you don’t want to be on.CLICK TO TWEET
The dean calls me in and he says, “What are you doing taking all of these classes in Spanish? None of them count for your Science degree. It is a completely different field of study. It is Bachelor of Arts, and you are supposed to be getting a pre-med degree in Science.” I said, “I love it so much. I want to keep learning.” He said, “You might as well get another degree. You have taken many classes.” They count for a whole other college.
I say, “I got an accidental Spanish degree.” When I graduated, I graduated twice on the same day. I walked for my Bachelor of Science, and later that afternoon, I walked for my Bachelor of Arts. That is pretty unique. I know a lot of people who have multiple degrees. I do not know anyone who got two degrees on the same day. That gives you an insight into my crazy path of curiosity and where things have led me in life.
I have always known you were an overachiever. Beverly Hills Publishing is not your first business. Tell me about your first business.
My first business was a production company. It was back in the day when we were using DVDs. I had the realization that a production company could film the graduations because, at that time, all of the graduates who were graduating from a university only had their photos made. They were not doing videography.
I would cold-call all the universities in California and I would say, “Let us come in and film a montage for the school. It will be like a marketing DVD because now everyone who buys the video of them graduating will also be a part of the alumni and how great the university is.” For the first time, I was selling something on my behalf. It was my first business. Instead of selling for another company, this was my baby.
I cold-called and closed Berkeley, which became one of my clients. Once I got Berkeley, I was like, “I can pretty much sell anything that I care about and I am passionate about.” The first year, we were profitable. It was a successful production company right out of the gate. My background in production still carries forward now because I do a lot of videos online and it led to me breaking through as a thought leader with YouTube.

Publishing Business: If you can write a book, it will help establish you as an authority because the market is way too competitive.

 
When you land Berkeley as a client, that looks good on your resume. If you are going to drop a name, that is a good one to drop.
I realized I loved the production, telling stories, marketing, and I wanted to make an impact. I wanted to use my voice, my message, and make a difference. I used to struggle with my weight. I was a compulsive yo-yo dieter throughout my teens and twenties. When I solved it, I wanted to help other women who were also struggling.
I realized, “If I could write a book, in many ways, this would be like being a doctor and helping people with their health and their well-being.” My mentor at that time said, “If you can write a book, that is what will establish you as an authority because this market is way too competitive. Everyone is competing for weight loss and fitness on the internet. People are spending millions of dollars on advertising so you have to find a way to stand out.”
I was terrified to write that first book. I remember thinking, “No one is going to read it. Only my mom is going to buy it. I am going to sound so stupid,” and all the fears that a first-time author goes through. I am glad that I was able to overcome it because I said, “If I can help one person, it is worth my ego annihilation being of service.”
I am glad that I did write that book because it went on to launch a movement in many ways. I have now had thousands of success stories from people all over the world. This thing called YouTube came along. It was like, “What is YouTube? Maybe I could put up some videos because I have a production company.” Never in a million years did I know that Google would buy YouTube.
This was back in 2006 or 2007. I was part of the social media revolution. I got to be on the front page of Google because my content had the most thumbs up from the audience. That was revolutionary because, for the first time in the history of business, you could compete with these large corporations. You could do it at the most grassroots level because social media brought you face-to-face and connected you to your audience and that one-to-one relationship.
The power of a brand is beyond business and entrepreneurship. It is its own entity and has a life of its own.CLICK TO TWEET
Eventually, I got to the cover of Women’s Health and Fitness Magazine, which is the number one fitness magazine in the world. They interviewed me and they said, “Andrea, you are more than an influencer. You are a thought leader because your books are evolving the conversation.” I established and created my own authority in one of the most competitive industries online.
You guys can go out and Google Andrea Albright and you will see all that YouTube stuff. It is all still out there. It never goes away. I know that was very successful. I think you had an exit with that business. Tell us how you started the publishing business.
I have now written over twenty books in health and fitness and I have impacted millions of people. I went through somewhat of a crisis because I had a horrible divorce. My ex-husband ended up having an affair with my bridesmaid. It rocked me to my core because I began to doubt myself and why did I choose these people.
As an entrepreneur, when you lose your sense of self and trust in yourself, that is your compass, your true north. I had to do a lot of soul searching. I was depressed, scared, and heartbroken. The only thing that got me out of bed was the belief and the understanding that I am meant to serve more. The answer was you have to go for a bigger vision and a bigger dream. That is when I started to realize, “Publishing has built my business and created my authority.”
What I would hear from other authors is that their publisher never helped them with the marketing, promotion, or PR of the book. Publishers do not understand anything about marketing. I thought, “What if I were to do this for other people because I have published my own books and reached millions? What if I were publishing thought leaders and I would do everything, the marketing, branding, publishing, PR, so that now they are reaching millions of people?” That is how I realized this could be a global impact. I can impact billions of people by being behind the scenes as the publisher. That is how Beverly Hills Publishing was born. Now, we are disrupting the $100 billion publishing industry because we are the first marketing firm and publishing firm combined.
I will say again, “I am a published author with Andrea in Beverly Hills Publishing. It is a phenomenal experience.” Thank you very much. Tell me about this. What about a warp speed moment. It can be in any of your businesses. Things are going okay, they are not bad, they are not great, but maybe 1, 2, or 3 things fall into place where all of a sudden, you have that hockey stick and you are riding the rocket ship as it is going straight up. Can you share a warp speed moment with us?

Publishing Business: Thanks to the social media revolution, entrepreneurship could compete with larger corporations for the first time in history. They are able to connect with their audience and build one-to-one relationships.

 
What is wonderful about entrepreneurship is that it continues to reward you and excite you when you are aligned with your purpose and your passion. Even when things are not “going well,” you are still fueled by the purpose and the passion you have that you get to live your dream every day. I have always known about the inflection point.
The inflection point is in the business. Businesses start, they can go down, go up, and have little bumps, but when you hit the inflection point, it takes off exponential growth. I have always said to myself, “I don’t have to keep going and let this pace forever. I need to get to that inflection point.” The inflection point was when it all was going to take off, and I am happy to say that we have reached the inflection point. It is now a viral process where people learn about me. They hear about me from amazing success stories like yourself. The brand that I have created has its own mission and purpose. It is attracting people to the top of their industry.
I would say that the inflection point has been that work speed moment of like, “Now it hold on, we are going for the ride. This is why it is important to build a business that is aligned with your values, integrity and how you want to spend your everyday life. If you do not put that purpose and intention at the beginning of it, if it takes off or when it takes off, you are hitched to a rocket that you do not want to be on. I am glad that I took the time to cultivate this business and the brand for the long-term because this one is the one that I am going to the $100 million and beyond. It is exciting.
What about a hard lesson? Something that happened maybe in retrospect, you see the benefit of that but at that time, painful and I don’t like it. Do you get a hard lesson you can share with us?
The divorce rocked me emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. It was to my knees humility and also pain. Now, I look back on it, and had I not been in such a state of depression, feeling lost, and confused, and how my life-even-get-here experience. If it were not extreme, I would have been good with how things were going. I would have kept riding the ride of being a fitness expert, helping people with their health and wellbeing.
While that was in many ways gratifying to me, it has never given me this kind of, “This is why I am here to serve authors, publishing, and make an impact in the publishing industry because books are sharing enlightenment with others. Had I not gone through that horrible situation, I would not have done the soul searching to go deep into what is my soul’s purpose here to do.
You cannot expect other people to understand you or see your vision. They may think you are crazy, and that’s okay. Celebrate your crazy.CLICK TO TWEET
I certainly would not wish divorce on my worst enemy if I had an enemy. It was a brutal experience and best to be avoided if possible. When you talk about your true purpose, for our readers, it is easy to know when you are in that center of genius and your purpose because all you have to do is check your energy. If you do not tire and you gain momentum in an activity, that is probably what you are supposed to do.
If you feel weary and you have to drag yourself to it, that is probably not what you are supposed to do. It is pretty simple. I love books and stories. Brené Brown says, “Maybe stories are data with a soul.” I love that and I think that speaks to your whole brain, both sides. What about a golden nugget? Something we do not know that we want to know.
I am impacted by the power of a brand. It is even beyond business and entrepreneurship. A brand is its own entity and being that is created with purpose and consciousness. It has its own life. I am grateful that I have created brands. Marketing is getting people’s eyeballs on your product or service. My favorite definition of a brand is your promise. The brand becomes that beacon of where you are aspiring.
The brands that I create are much bigger than me. They inspire me. They are a better version of me. It becomes this force that pulls you forward. People are attracted to it. When they interact with it, now they build a relationship because it is your promise. It is how you show up day after day, week after week, year after year.
If you are an entrepreneur reading this and you have been hustling, the hustling only comes because you do not understand branding. The brand works for you when you are sleeping. The brand pulls people in, even before they have ever met you or talked to you. The brand attracts investors and conversations like this.
If you have not gone and explored building a brand, I hope that more entrepreneurs get this message because I see them make millions and they burn out. They make millions and the market changes. They have to keep doing something more scammy or desperate. You and I have seen this in the years as an entrepreneur, the amount of entrepreneurs who fail, burn out, and lose their hope or enthusiasm. I believe it could all be solved by branding. By building a brand that is not you, it is not me as the business owner or the entrepreneur. The brand is this inspirational hope that I get to be of service to every day. That is what I would love to share with your audience.

Publishing Business: The hustling only comes because you don’t understand branding. The brand works for you when you’re sleeping and pulls people in even before they’ve ever met you or talked to you.

 
That is a good golden nugget. It reminds me of my good friend, Warren Roston. He talks about clarity of vision. You know where you want to go, you know who you want to be, you know how you want to show to the world your values and the certainty of your intent. Those three steps build a company, build a brand, and build a future.
We are coming into the home stretch. In this time capsule, I am going to invite you to step into it. It is going to take you a couple of weeks back, and you are going to get to spend a couple of minutes with twenty-year-old Andrea. In that couple of seconds you are going to get to spend with her, you are going to be able to only give her one piece of advice. It is something that you think twenty-year-old Andrea should know that would help her on her entrepreneurial journey. Step into the time capsule, and back you go. What is that one piece of advice you would tell your twenty-year-old self that would have helped you go faster and go farther?
Be good with being crazy. That was a difficult thing for me for many decades. I felt misunderstood and was even told I was crazy. I can’t even count the number of times. You are unrealistic. You are a dreamer. Who are you to think that you could create all of this? Don’t you understand the reality? Where is the realism? Basically, you are crazy and delusional.
This is what I want to say to visionary entrepreneurs. I wrote an entire book on this. You are crazy. That is why you are special. You have been given this vision, and the vision is not here yet. That is why you are meant to bring this vision onto the planet to bring it into life. You cannot expect other people to understand you or see your vision. I went from you are crazy and now I am a genius. That is the path that you take, and be okay with being crazy. Celebrate your crazy.
You got to believe in yourself and you have got to be yourself. Conformity is not a common trait in successful entrepreneurship. I have always thought that entreprenerurs had a bit of a rebel. You say, “I must do this. I am certainly not doing that. I am going the other direction.” I met Ari Weinzweig, the Founder of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. He is a super guy and he took it a step further. He was like, “It is even more than a rebel. I think a great entrepreneur is an anarchist.”
I liked that too. We use a more polite term now with disruption, but it is the same thing. I don’t see it that way. I see it a different way. I am going to build mine, and you can come to join me because I am not joining you. Andrea, if someone would like a publisher or a super cool friend, how would they reach out to you?
The website is BeverlyHillsPublishing.com. There is an application to see if we are a good fit. If you are looking for a partner with more than the book, the marketing comes first, knowing the market is there and knowing the market is seeking and searching for your solution. We do all the marketing and the publishing. We also have PR and promotions.
The success stories are incredible, what we are creating and what we are co-creating. You have to be ready. A lot of people say they want to write a book, but the kinds of books that we publish as you know, Don, establishes you as the authority. You need to be ready for the spotlight and for the massive amounts of attention that it brings you because the book establishes that authority and you step into being the authority so you need to be ready for that.
It is a process we go through. It is a journey. Every book has its own special journey and I am honored to support authors in every way I can because we need an author revolution. Authors are not supported by the old methods of publishing. If you are interested, come and check out the website BeverlyHillsPublishing.com. I would love to learn how I can support you in publishing your book.
Andrea, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Don. It is wonderful to co-create with you again.
It is my pleasure. Thank you.
 
IMPORTANT LINKS

Beverly Hills Publishing
Build Your Big Legacy
RadioShack
Ari Weinzweig
YouTube – Andrea Albright

 
ABOUT ANDREA ALBRIGHT
Andréa Albright is on a mission to create the next movement for authors and evolve the publishing industry. She is not just a publisher, she is a Legacy Maker. Andréa’s first movement took the health and fitness industry by storm.
She amassed over 10,000,000+ views on YouTube, was featured on the Women’s Health and Fitness magazine cover, and grew her health business to over 100,000 raving fans.
Since then, she has become the author of 25 books, reaching tens of millions worldwide in over 40 countries.
Now, she has taken her passion for helping authors find the same success by publishing books with meaning. She is recognized as The Thought Leader Publisher.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: S1:E45 | Evan Nierman – Problem Solver Proven Entrepreneur
Date: November 15, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e45-evan-nierman-problem-solver-proven-entrepreneur/
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Content:
Presenting your business to the public correctly and well can go a long way. That is why public relations is important. In this episode, we have Evan Nierman, the founder and CEO of Red Banyan with 20 years of high-level experience in public relations, marketing, crisis management, online media, international relations, and public affairs. He talks to Don Williams about his secrets to growth and success, emphasizing that the key in this industry is communication. He helps his clients solve their problems and educates them on promoting the value of their products and services. Evan has already provided strategic communications counsel to top business leaders, different government officials and candidates, and private individuals. Listen and find out how Evan got to where he is today!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Evan-Nierman-Problem-Solver-Proven-Entrepreneur.mp3
EVAN NIERMAN – PROBLEM SOLVER PROVEN ENTREPRENEUR
I have my good friend from South Florida, Evan Nierman, who is CEO of Red Banyan and a fellow Entrepreneurs’ Organization member like myself. Evan specializes in crisis management and strategic communication. We all probably can use strategic communication, whether we’re in crisis or not. All relationships have two pillars, which are communication and expectation. Evan, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here.
I’m thrilled for you to be here. Thank you for joining. Let’s hop right in. What is Red Banyan? What do you do? Who do you do it for, with or to? Tell us about your business.
As you pointed out, communication is at the root of everything. From our perspective, there’s never been a more important time to get your story and message out and make sure that you’re the one who’s defining, whether it’s your personal brand, organization’s brand or your story. If you’re not willing to tell it, someone else is going to tell it. The way they tell it is probably not the way that you want it to be told.
It’s incumbent upon all of us to make sure that we’re advocates for ourselves and that we communicate effectively. Our job as communications consultants is to empower our clients, help them speak the truth and deliver their stories. Some people say that everyone always wants to talk about the crisis PR part of the work that we do. Keep in mind. We’ve got two main types of clients, those who want to get in the press and those who need to get out.
My main business where I spend most of my time is sales consulting. It’s easy to help people bring in more revenue. When you do it right, it’s easy. When you don’t, it’s hard and you’re probably not doing it right. One of the big conflicts is always, “I don’t want to do that because I might be too salesy.” My answer is always, “If you’re not going to promote yourself, who is? If you’re not going to try and control the narrative around your business and brand, you’re letting someone else do it for you.”
First of all, everyone says, “Any entrepreneur or business person, you’re always selling.” In a sense, that’s true but the complete opposite is also true. If you approach selling from the perspective of, “I’m not there to sell anybody or force them to buy what I’m offering. I’m here as a problem solver. Tell me your problems and I’ll help you solve them.”
In my experience, if you approach business and life that way, asking intelligent questions, understanding what’s someone working towards if they’re having trouble getting to and how can you help that person accomplish what they want, if you’re doing that, you’re not selling to them. You’re presenting a solution. If they want to work with you, that’s great. You can help them. If they don’t, that’s okay too. You’ve done your best to try to address where you might be helpful to that individual. You’ve paid it forward. That’s how I think of it.
Communication is at the root of everything.CLICK TO TWEET
In my course Romancing Your Customer, because I see the entire customer journey as parallel to the romantic journey, selling is spelled HELPING. The quicker you ignore and forget anything you learned about traditional selling, the better you do. It is just all about helping. If the product or service you represent doesn’t help people, find something that will and you can be passionate about doing that.
The part about always selling is conducting yourself in a manner in which people might want to do business with you. You then get those calls out of the blue, “We talked years ago. Could we talk about this? I have a need.” Those are the very best. Let’s dial the clock back. We’re going to go back to young Evan, say 5 to 18. Tell me about your childhood. Were your parents entrepreneurial? Is that where you caught the bug?
Not at all. It’s funny. I came to entrepreneurship later in life. I never understood or envisioned the idea that you can start your business and chart your course. I had been brought up in a very traditional house where it’s very hardworking people. I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, in Northwest Louisiana, about 15 miles from the border with Texas, not too far from Arkansas.
My grandfather is a very hardworking individual. What I learned from my grandfather was he was so passionate about his work. He was a stockbroker. He was in the market for over 60 years. He showed me that if you enjoy what you do, it’s fun. You’re not necessarily working. It’s not drudgery. You can enjoy your job. My father worked in the family business. Going back to my great grandfather, he was an entrepreneur but I didn’t have the opportunity to meet him. He’d already passed away by the time I was born.
The way that I had grown up was very much through the lens of you study hard, make good grades, get into a good college, make good grades in college, get a job and then work your way up, which is what I was doing for the first eight years of my career. It was a wonderful experience because I happen to work at a great organization with strong leadership. I modeled the behavior of the people who were leading the organization to who I looked up to. I ultimately decided I needed to leave because I was going to blink and be there for ten years. I wasn’t ready to commit at that young age.
It was only through a series of experiences that I realized, “I want to take more control over my destiny. I want to decide who were the clients we work with, the ones that we declined to work with, who did we say no to and who are the people that I want to work with.” I came to the conclusion that if I start my organization, build my culture, recruit the people who I want to work with and work with the clients that we want to work with, I’m going to have a much better experience than leaving that up to chance or putting that in the hands of someone else.
That was the leap that I made into entrepreneurship. I didn’t even realize until I was about 32 or 33 that I could start my thing. I’m okay with coming to it a little bit later because the skills that I developed working within bigger organizations, larger institutions and all of the experiences I had gave me the confidence and the competence to when the time was right to go out on my own, I had the necessary skills and mentality to go out and win.


Problem Solver: It’s really incumbent upon all of us in this day and age to make sure that we’re advocates for ourselves and that we communicate effectively.

 
Your grandfather was a very wise man. Find something you love and never work a day in your life. He instilled that thought and planted that seed into a fertile mind. It grew there. As far as age, I know many successful entrepreneurs who began their entrepreneurial career after a 20 or 30-year corporate career. Most of them regret that they didn’t start earlier. Where an entrepreneur is concerned is age is just a number. Some 13-year-olds out there have multimillion-dollar companies and there are 65-year-old brand-new day one entrepreneurs.
From my standpoint, it does not matter. Just get started. I’m going to take you back to little Evan again. Tell us all your deepest, darkest secrets. Mom and dad weren’t entrepreneurial but great-grandfather was. Your grandfather was a stockbroker. There’s a little entrepreneurial in that. He lived and died based on his efforts. There was nobody to blame but himself.
At my first job, I mowed the yard. I didn’t mow the yard because I got paid. I mowed the yard because there were consequences if I didn’t mow the yard. I’m sure now it would be child labor. I was 8 or 9, pushing a power mower, which OSHA and everybody would freak out about. Take me back to your first job where you got a check and got paid. What did you do?
I was a soccer referee at my first job, which taught me a lot about people skills. I was obsessed with soccer from the age of 5 or 6 onward. I played my whole childhood. I ended up playing for four years in college at a Division 1 school. When I tell people I played on the football team, they take one look at me. I’m 5’8. They’re like, “How’s that work?” I said, “It was the other football.”
The first job where I got a paycheck was as a soccer referee as a kid. I liked getting paid to be outside on the soccer field. I was passionate about soccer. I saw some crazy stuff. I’ve never thought about it until this moment but that was my first experience dealing with high-stakes pressure crises. I have never been back in action before.
Both of my sons were big baseball players. In the two truths and a lie, I always win because one of my savings is for 50 years. I coached and/or played baseball and/or softball. Everybody always thinks that’s a lie. It is the truth. Coaching little league or refereeing children younger than yourself at the time will certainly teach you some dynamics about irritated and enthusiastic players, parents and people who would normally have exceptional behavior who somehow lose the ability to do that once they’re at a junior soccer game.
It is amazing. It’s as if the World Cup were being played every Saturday.
If you enjoy what you do, it’s fun. You’re not really necessarily working. You can enjoy your job.CLICK TO TWEET
Let’s go forward a little bit. You followed your parents’ advice and went to college, joined the Merchant Marine or backpacked across South America for a couple of years. What was next?
There’s nothing so adventuresome. I went to school and made good grades. I was a good boy. I didn’t cause a lot of trouble for my parents. That came later with my youngest brother. I went off to school in Washington, DC because I wanted it to be where the action was. I’d fallen in love with Washington at a young age. What I loved about DC was you can find your passion there.
If there’s a cause you care about, there’s an advocacy organization in Washington that’s working on that issue. All roads, politically and whatnot lead to Washington. In a way, New York is the center of the financial universe but politically and in terms of current events, there was no other place I wanted it to be more than Washington DC.
One of the things I loved about going to school at George Washington was they didn’t have school on Fridays. They only had classes Monday to Thursday because they wanted you to take advantage of the fact that we were in Downtown DC and get internships. What that gave me was the opportunity. Even while I was a college student, I had 4 or 5 different jobs. I got to try different industries and different types and sizes of organizations. I learned a little bit about what I wanted to do but mostly I learned what I did not want to do.
That’s equally valuable. Learn what I want to do and what I want to avoid. It’s all learning. I love Washington DC. I did not go to Washington DC until I was 35 years old. I immediately fell in love. I was born and raised in Kansas. At that time, I was involved in the political scene. I didn’t particularly like that part but the history is I could tour every day. You probably could tour every day for a long time before you’d see everything. What’s your first job out of GW?
My first job out of GW was one of my internships. I was interning at an organization called AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. I interned my senior year there in the second semester. Graduation was coming up and I remember distinctly I was at my internship. My boss said to me, “What are your plans after you graduate?” I said, “It’s a couple of months away. I haven’t thought about it.” She said, “Here’s what I’m offering. You’ll come here and continue. You’ll start on this date and be in my department. What do you think?” I said, “I’m in. That sounds wonderful. Thank you.”
About ten days later, I came back to her and said, “I’m wondering. We didn’t talk about the details. I’m taking the job but do I get paid? Are there benefits? How does it work?” She said, “This is your starting salary. You’re going to make $26,000. We have the vision, dental, great health care and a retirement plan. Anything else you need to know?” I said, “That’s perfect. Thank you.”


Problem Solver: You can start your own business and chart your own course.

 
How long were you there?
Seven and a half years.
When you left there, was that when you started your business?
No. I had to help someone else build their business and make a lot of money. I went to a small boutique crisis PR firm and worked on a lot of the real high-profile clients. I didn’t own the business. I learned a lot from that business and I liked the variety. I like being able to help people in a time of need. I love the work. I found it intellectually stimulating and fascinating but I hated the culture of the organization. I said, “One day, we’re going to have different types of clients and do business differently. I could do it better myself. I don’t know when but I’d like to have my firm.”
When I left that firm, I still didn’t start my own business. I went in-house at a startup that had gotten funded. That’s what moved me to Florida. I went in-house for a year and a half at a startup company. I saw the company grow fast and I also saw it disintegrate. At that time, it was a horrible time to start a business. I had a two-year-old and an infant. We had just uprooted our lives to move to Florida.
I went to have this conversation with my wife. I said, “I’m going to quit my job. I want to start my own thing. I need you to give me one year. At the end of the year, if it works, we can stay right where we are. We like it here. We’re good. If not, we’ll pack things up and go back to Washington. I’ll get a good job working either at AIPAC again or at another organization. We’ll get a great job but we’ll go back.” 0 clients turned into 1 client, turned into 2 and went back to 1. Eventually, bit by bit, I started building. Here I am years later, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.
It’s so common for an entrepreneur to work somewhere, loved what they did and the business they were in but said, “I can do better.” Maybe they would have even stayed if the leadership in that company would have let them do better but for whatever reason, they won’t so you start your own thing.
Even when you have those really rough experiences, you learn a lot from them.CLICK TO TWEET
In my entrepreneurial journey, I had worked my way into a partnership with the owner, taking him from 3 locations to 11. My reward was to go into partnerships on the twelfth location. He did not pay me as agreed. I then became his number one competitor. We reconciled many years later. I have no hard feelings. At the time, part of my motivation was to be successful, be a direct competitor and hurt that business. I’m not proud of that but that’s the way it was.
It takes some self-awareness to recognize where you are mentally. It sounds to me that that’s not the kindest, nicest reason but it’s a motivator.
Let’s talk about a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty well in your business. No complaints. Life is good. Sun is shining. The birds are singing but a couple of things fall into place where you get a period of hockey stick growth or hockey stick sales. Do you have a moment like that you can share with us?
That first part where things are coasting and good, I don’t remember that. What I remember was grinding it out every day for the first five years thinking, “Is this thing going to fall apart tomorrow?” I’m living on that razor’s edge. That was the reality for at least the first five years. I’m trying to recruit people to a vision of where I thought we were going, even though we were miles away from it.
I tell someone, “We’re a great firm that’s on the swing. We’re going to be one of the top crisis PR firms in the country.” They’re going into our office, which doesn’t have any windows and the wall at the back of my desk backs up to the men’s room. You can hear every time somebody goes in there what they’re doing. It’s a shady neighborhood.
The vision of what I was selling versus our reality seemed to be a jarring disconnect. Sticking through in some of the harder times and the tougher lessons, losing a big account, losing a key employee and holding onto someone longer than I should have are all moments that caused a lot of pain at the time. It sounds cliché but they say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Even when you have those rough experiences, you learn a lot from them.
More importantly, you build almost a callous. The next time something happens, your skin is that much thicker. You’re that much more prepared. If you’ve survived it, lived tough times and made it through to the other side, it imbues you with a certain sense of confidence that is key. I believe that the number one element of entrepreneurship, more than anything else, is the mentality and a commitment to winning. If you believe in yourself and decide, “I’m going to make this company work and this organization grows,” if you will it, it is not a dream.


Problem Solver: Take more control over your own destiny.

 
I’m a big believer in this concept that you either win or learn. Learning is just slower winning. We don’t like it at the time. Sometimes it’s painful. We scuff our knees, get a black eye and maybe a bloody nose, figuratively but we learn and that prepares us as we go forward. The title of the show is The Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories. One thing we know is that every success story includes some failings. It’s not that straight line like the heavenly business ownership. That’s not how it works.
The other interesting thing is this. Sometimes the height of the summit is equal to the depth of the valley. One of my good friends was an attorney and a CPA. He had an issue where he lost his licenses, liberty, all his money, marriage and everything. His rise past that has been stratospheric. Would he have climbed so high without falling so low? Nobody knows but maybe not. What about a golden nugget, something you know that we don’t know that we want to know because it’s the real good stuff? Don’t hold back. We’ll never let you go until you answer.
We’re being conditioned by the world we live in to celebrate multitasking, do lots of things all at once and be frenetic. You got to be busy and check this thing all the time like, “Who’s texting me? I got to see who’s commenting on my social media posts. I need followers.” We’re programmed to be hyper-aware of all that’s going on and overstimulate it. Overall, that’s a bad way to live. The biggest breakthroughs I’ve made in the business have come because I’ve been willing to turn off the notifications, the phone and focus.
I believe that if you stop wearing the Apple Watch or turn the notifications off on the watch and spend a critical amount of each day in focused concentration, that is where the magic happens. It’s such a rarity and very hard to find but it’s so important. It’s in those quiet moments that you let your mind go. You’re sitting at a restaurant, waiting for the guy to get there and you immediately pick up your phone, start reading and death scrolling through this. Instead, what if you sit there, take a drink of water, look around and let your mind go? Some of the most innovative thoughts that I’ve had in making decisions and seeing with clarity have come from finding moments of quiet.
As entrepreneurs, many times, we get caught up in the hustle and try to outwork everybody. I’m not sure that’s possible because I’m already trying to outwork us. Something I learned some years back is that I only want to put time into my highest leverage activities and everything else somebody else should be doing anyway. That’s good counsel.
I have a good friend. He’s the top Facebook Ad guru in the world. He shared with me one time that at about 30, he went on information fast. No new books, conferences or new input, just solidifying his thoughts. As leaders, we know that feedback is important. Sometimes, you have to make the decision, regardless of the feedback that you got. Sometimes you have to lead. It’s inevitable.
If I can shamelessly use this as a moment to tell you that there’s something that I accomplished that without dedicated quiet time, it never would have happened. I’m reminded of it because I’m seeing all these books on the shelf behind you. I have this book sitting here on my desk which was I always told myself that one of my goals in life was to write a book. In 2021, I had made that quiet time, walked the talk, did what I said and locked myself away. I would do it for an hour here and there but focused. The result is I got my book written that I won’t have otherwise.
Every day, spend your time and energy finding the right people. Surround yourself with winners.CLICK TO TWEET
It takes a bunch of effort and persistence to finish. A lot of people start a book but few finishes. Congratulations. That’s amazing. Would we find the book on Amazon?
You can find it on Amazon.com. It’s called Crisis Averted: PR Strategies to Protect your Reputation and the Bottom Line. This hearkens back to what we were talking about. I wrote this book because I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of fascinating entrepreneurs and businesses. We’re in a tough time. You have to be able to tell your story and be prepared to come under fire.
I wrote this book because there are a lot of great entrepreneurs and business people out there who find themselves in tough situations and they don’t know what to do. I mentioned in the book right in the prologue, “If I help one business owner avoid catastrophe, if I keep them from making a misstep that costs them a lot of money or more importantly, their reputation, it was worth the effort in the end.”
It sounds to me that it’s better to prevent catastrophic stories about you and your brand than try and fix them. During those 10 or 15 years where I was working in DC, I would share that with people and they’re like, “I don’t want to get involved in that.” My reply was always this, “If you’re not trying to change the process, the process is trying to change you.” There is no surf along and everything will stay the same. That’s not happening. You’re working it or it’s working you. There’s nothing in between, regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on.
Evan, we have a time capsule on the show. We’re going to allow you to step into it. It’s going to take you back to meet twenty-year-old Evan. You only have a couple of minutes and you can only share one piece of advice that would help you on your entrepreneurial path so something you know now that you didn’t know then but if you could share it with your twenty-year-old self, it would have helped you avoid pain or speed along your journey. I’m going to ask you to step inside the capsule and back you go. What’s that thought you’d share with your twenty-year-old self?
It’s easy. It’s two words. Relationships matter. I knew that instinctively and learned that at the first place of business where I spent all those years. It was an organization where the relationships with policymakers, activists, donors and your colleagues mattered. Every aspect of my life that has been successful like marriage, fatherhood, friendship, mentorship, business and coaching is all based on relationships.
Every single good thing in my life has come about as a consequence of cultivating relationships and making time to nurture those relationships, not through the lens of a transactional approach like, “What am I going to get from this person? What’s my short-term benefit?” That’s why I hate the idea that you go to a networking event, go from person to person as fast as you can and figure out who’s going to be useful to you. On the contrary, I’ve spent my entire life, not just my career, spending time with people I like, respect and learn something from and then connecting them with other people I feel that way about.


Problem Solver: If I help one business owner avoid catastrophe, if I keep them from making a misstep that costs them a lot of money or their reputation, it is worth the effort in the end.

 
That, more than anything else, is what has enabled me to attract clients and referrals, grow our business and recruit and retain team members who believe in our mission and who want to work with us. Our clients are treated as people who we value our relationship with them, not the business we’re doing with them. The business comes. It almost flows as a subset or an afterthought. To me, talking to my twenty-year-old self, I’d say, “You already know this but relationships matter. Every day, spend your time and energy finding the right people and surround yourself with winners.”
There’s a great book written by Bob Burg. He had a coauthor. It’s called The Go-Giver. He talks about the concept of giving to others and not being too concerned about what you’re going to get. My third book, Romancing Your Customer, is all about perspective, whether with a prospect, customer, teammate, subordinates, spouse, children, friends or whoever. The thing that we know about if I want to romance my customer, I have to see things from their perspective.
Mine doesn’t matter. Theirs is what matters. The best partner sees things from the other person’s point of view and so does in business. Evan, we’re wrapping up. If somebody wanted to reach out to you, want to prevent or help a crisis or say, “Reach out to Evan for a chat. It’s going to be a good time well spent,” how do we reach you?
It’s easy. As you’d expect from a communications firm, there are lots of ways to communicate with us. You can go to RedBanyan.com and EvanNierman.com. You can learn a lot about my philosophy by going to Amazon.com, putting in my name or Crisis Averted and buying my book. You can drop me a line on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. We’re there. Reach out. I love talking to people and connecting with folks. Communication, business and relationships are truly my passion. If anyone out there is thinking, “I would like to talk with Evan,” I’m telling you that I’m happy to talk with you.
Evan, thank you so much for coming to the show. It’s been my pleasure.
Thank you, Don. It’s great to see you again. Thank you for having me.
That’s it for this episode. Thank you so much. We will see you next time.
 
IMPORTANT LINKS

Red Banyan
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Amazon.com
Crisis Averted: PR Strategies to Protect your Reputation and the Bottom Line
The Go-Giver
Romancing Your Customer
EvanNierman.com
LinkedIn – Evan Nierman
Facebook – Red Banyan
Twitter – Red Banyan
Instagram – Red Banyan
YouTube – Red Banyan

 
ABOUT EVAN NIERMAN
Evan Nierman possesses 20 years of high-level experience in public relations, marketing, crisis management, online media, international relations and public affairs. Throughout his career, he has provided strategic communications counsel to top business leaders, government officials and presidential candidates, and private individuals.
Prior to forming Red Banyan, Evan Nierman served as Director of Communications for a fast-growing, highly scrutinized start-up where he represented the company and steered the CEO through interviews with top-tier media including dozens of international, national and local print, TV and online outlets.
Previously, as the founder of the Washington office for a boutique PR agency specializing in crisis management and foreign affairs, Nierman guided international and corporate clients through high-stakes, complex situations. Nierman was responsible for the agency’s largest and most complex account, the Government of Ethiopia. Working mostly from the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, Nierman conceptualized and executed communications and public affairs strategies. He overhauled the Ethiopian Embassy’s website, developed its marketing and communications collateral, wrote speeches and op-eds for the Ambassador, wrote and distributed press releases and fact sheets and helped coordinate interviews, events and public appearances that improved the Embassy’s reach and reputation.
Evan Nierman began his career at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the country’s leading advocacy groups. At AIPAC he supervised all aspects of 15 print and electronic branded publications, including editing the organization’s flagship journal on Middle East policy, which was distributed biweekly to 100,000 readers and every office on Capitol Hill. He also did extensive writing of speeches and marketing materials, drafted more than 100 memos on foreign policy developed for legislators and helped organize large-scale national events in Washington, D.C.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Title: S2:E13 | It’s Never Too Late To Start Your Business With Lisa Laporte
Date: September 23, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e13-its-never-too-late-to-start-your-business-with-lisa-laporte/
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Content:
It’s never too late to start your business! Joining Don Williams in this episode is Lisa Laporte CEO & Executive Producer of TWiT TV. Lisa started her business after a significant corporate career in accounting at the age of 35. Now, she’s 53 and still thriving in the industry. Lisa also opens up about her struggles rising up the ranks in a man’s world and why it’s important and necessary to speak up and be vocal when you need to be. Tune in as she shares the valuable lessons she learned throughout her entrepreneurial journey with practical tips for aspiring business owners.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Its-Never-Too-Late-To-Start-Your-Business-With-Lisa-Laporte.mp3
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START YOUR BUSINESS WITH LISA LAPORTE
I am so excited. I have a podcasting expert as our guest. Lisa Laporte, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It is great to be here.
I am thrilled to have you. She is with TWiT TV. Some of you smart people out there are going to know what the TWiT stands for, but Lisa, why do not you tell us?
TWit TV stands for This Week in Tech. We are a technology podcast network. We put out twelve shows. Most of them are weekly. One is twice a week because it is attached to our nationally syndicated radio show called The Tech Guy. We have been doing this since 2005. It is nice to be able to finally say I work at a podcast network and I do not have to explain what that means anymore. I do not have to say, “Let me explain it to you. It is new media,” because everyone knows what a pod is now. We have broken through that hurdle.
It is amazing to me how many people in the world prefer to get content through podcasting.
It is an intimate experience too. You get to know the host. They will bring their ideas to the table. Some of it can be fun or informative, but we try to blend the two. We have been very successful at it and we enjoy what we do.
I am so happy that you are here. I am going to take you all the way back to little Lisa. When you were five years old up through high school or the house where you were raised, and that is different for a lot of different people, but whatever that was for you, was there an adult who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young girl?
I did. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. They did not have a lot of money, but he partnered with people. He was a people person and always wanted to go out there and find things to do. He owned a grocery store in town with a silent partner. He was able to manage and run the entire store. I followed his career when he then moved from where I was born and raised. He decided to move to Reno because my grandmother loved all the flare of casinos back then. He ended up running another company there, and that inspired me when I was young.
I did not know if I wanted to be an entrepreneur at first. Initially, at five, I wanted to be an astronaut. When somebody mentioned, “You do not want to be a homemaker?” It is because that was the thing when I was a child, I said, “I don’t.” I initially set my sights on accounting, which is interesting. I really loved numbers. I was phenomenal at Math and Science growing up. I went into a finance and accounting career. After cutting my teeth in that industry and reaching my goal of wanting to be a corporate controller by 40, and I hit that at 35, I decided that if I am going to work this hard, I want to work for myself.
Always follow your gut.CLICK TO TWEET
I became an entrepreneur then and decided to consult for businesses for 5 or 6 years. I then ran into TWiT TV. It was new media. Nobody knew what a podcast was then. I was like, “What is a TWiT?” I remember being approached by one of my CPA firms going, “You got to check out this business.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” I checked it out and I immediately fell in love with the business. I was intrigued by it and decided to partner with the founder and take that to another level.
I kept my own consulting business for two years into this journey until I gave it up, but then I started my own agency a couple of years ago because I am a serial entrepreneur. I like to have my fingers in a lot of things and that happens to a lot of us. Having that initial entrepreneurship starting with my grandfather inspired me later in life when I realized I can do it. I will admit that it was scary to leap and take that first challenge to do my own consulting business. I walked away from a six-figure job. I was the breadwinner and I was raising my son, but I said, “I am doing this,” and I did it. I never looked back.
I want to put some emphasis on a couple of points in that part of your story. You became an entrepreneur at 35, which to the non-entrepreneurial world or new entrepreneurs might seem a little late though I know many entrepreneurs who launched in their 50s and even 60s. It is never too late. In fact, the experience that you had in finance all the way up to controller I am sure has been extremely valuable to you in your entrepreneurial journey.
The founder of TWiT TV and the host of a big syndicated show, I do not know him personally but I am going to presume he is creative. The fact that you have diverse skills, things that he is very good at but maybe you are not quite as good at and vice versa, is a secret to success and entrepreneurship. Do not hire a bunch of people who look act, walk, and talk like you.
Hire people that have different skills. It is like if we were putting a football team on the field, we would have somebody who could play quarterback and somebody who could block. They wear the same uniform but they have different skills. Those are two great points. From your childhood, tell us about your first job or first entrepreneurial venture, or whatever it was where you received compensation from somebody else.
My first job receiving compensation from somebody else was when I was nine when I started babysitting, and then at ten, I figured that was not good enough for me and I had a paper route. I was compensated well from that. Also, if you put the papers on the porch, you received better tips. I started working at a pretty young age and learned that you can make money doing this. I kept my paper route until I turned sixteen and could go out in the real world and make money. I have worked at Jack in the Box, mom-and-pop stores, and anything to get by in high school to make ends meet, because I wanted things in life. My family said, “If you want them, you are going to have to work for them.”
My work ethic started at a very young age. I started running my first office at eighteen and became an assistant controller in my early twenties. I constantly built on learning. For the people out there that are young and getting out of college, they can become an entrepreneur. I do not feel that 35 was too late for me because the reality was I did not have the experience. I had some experience moving up, but having worked at one company that started out at 4 or 5 people and when I left had over 300, and I had multiple jobs there for ten years. It gave me the experience as well as the confidence to break out on my own.
When I was there, I took on one side client that let me cut my teeth in becoming an entrepreneur. I originally started out helping people with their accounting and their backend. When the economy started to tank and the dot-com explosion happened, I ended up having at the end of my five-year consulting career the title of CFO at three companies. I had 30 entities under my purview and I had a staff of two bookkeepers that I would come and dump stuff on their plates to figure it out. I quickly realized then that I want to run companies.


Start Your Business: Accounting is unfortunately looked at by some companies as a necessary evil, instead of realizing it is the backbone of your company. You need sales and you need accounting.

 
I was acting as COO and CFO and had the experience of what it would take to go to the next level. For me, I needed that full experience to break out and move on my own. I started getting paid at nine. It made me successful where I was. I always had a couple of jobs in college and high school. I was willing to try everything. I never said no. If somebody in a company said to me, “We need someone to try this or do this,” I was fearless and said, “I can try that. I can do it,” so I did.
Becoming a consultant and walking in and seeing that you need more than accounting help here, you need operations help, finance help, and all of these things, and having worked in different roles in several companies, I was able to pull together those resources and help companies achieve their goals and take it to the next level.
I do not think that is late at all to start. I opened my first company at 26. I came from the sales side. That is a good place to come from to be an entrepreneur because a lot of sales will mask other problems. If you have a ton of money coming in, you can manage some other challenges. After my first year preparing the first corporate tax return, I could not spell P&L. I knew nothing about any of that. I only knew how to bring in a lot of money.
The only other part I knew about finance was to not let any money go, bring as much as you can, and keep everything that you can, which is Finance 101 anyway, but there is an awful lot beyond that that will certainly help. Looking back across your career, share a hard lesson. It can be something that was painful mentally, emotionally, or physically at that time, but now that some time has passed, you look back on that event and you are like, “It was painful, but it was the best thing to happen for me to get to where I am now.”
I love hearing what you said about being sales and not knowing finance because after I answer this question, I am going to talk about how I started in finance in growing companies and then transitioned into sales, and became into both of those realms. The one thing I do want to put out there, especially to young women because I am a woman and I am not ashamed to say this but having grown up in a man’s world because we are going back to that point, is always follow your gut.
When you feel your voice is not being heard in the company you are working with and you feel like you need to speak up more, please do. Bring your ideas and concerns to the table. Do not ignore them because I did do that as the corporate controller when I ended up leaving to start my own business. Part of it was being in accounting.
Accounting is unfortunately looked at by some companies as a necessary evil instead of realizing it is the backbone of your company. You need sales and accounting. Having worked in both, I have a tremendous amount of respect for both divisions. I was dumped on with a lot of work and I was not given the resources I needed.
I spoke up but I did not speak up loudly enough, so if I could go back to my 30-year-old self, I would be more vocal. I would be extremely clear on what is needed to accomplish goals instead of taking on the extra work and trying to make it all happen without the right resources. That was probably one of the most painful experiences in my world, but from that, I decided to cut my teeth and become an entrepreneur. It ended up being both a blessing and a curse.
Don’t oversell or overpromise anything.CLICK TO TWEET
The one thing I would tell everyone is if your gut is telling you something is not right or you feel like you are not getting what you need in a particular work environment, speak up, be vocal, and be loud. I feel that women are moving forward at that pace. I am not a shrinking violent so if I am telling you I struggled with some of that, I feel like I needed to be more vocal. Speak up when you need the resources to do your job effectively. As I said, it was a blessing and a curse because it ended up launching the entrepreneurial portion of my life.
That is typically the way blessings go. I have great judgment. The flip side of that is I am judgmental. There is a positive and a negative and they go together. It is how that works. You have this deep, pureblood pedigree in finance, but somehow, you also picked up what many people will consider being the opposite skill of sales. Tell us how you crossed that bridge. How did that happen?
I read between 8 to 10 books a month, and that does not count all the podcasts I listen to. I listened to several of your episodes before I agreed to do this. I am a lifelong learner, so being unafraid to try things was part of it. At our company, I stepped into sales. I took over running this company several years ago. We only worked with one outside agency.
For me, to try to grow my podcast network, I need to know where sales are and only have one outside broker. I would be like, “How are sales going for the next quarter?” Typical sales would be like, “You are going to be sold out. We have everything. We are killing it and crushing it.” I would go into the quarter and I would be 40% sold. I would be making all of these decisions based on what my outside sales team was telling me and then me putting those projections in.
I love sales. You have to be optimistic. You have to say things like that, but the reality came down to I had too many missed quarters and goals from having one outside broker, so I went to my business partner and said, “I have never done sales before, but I have owned my own consulting business for six years. I have also advocated for myself to try a bunch of things at companies and I was successful at it, so I am going to put a goal on the board, break our exclusivity contract, set up a sales kit, an ad kit, a rate card, and jump into sales full of boar.”
My goal was to close $1 million the next year. We were doing about $2 million or $3 million at that time. I broke exclusivity in October and in December, I signed a $25,000 test with one client. It was so successful. I closed almost a million-dollar deal with that client for the next year. They bought it the entire year. Having had this huge success and then starting to pitch like crazy to everybody, the reality is it took me about eight months to close another decent-sized deal of a few tests.
I made a lot of mistakes. I tried a lot of things, but the one thing I applied to this process was integrity. I decided I was not going to overinflate what we can do. I was not going to oversell or over-promise anything. What I promised people was we were going to guarantee these impressions if not deliver more because our ads are embedded, so our rate cards were discounted slightly on downloads. I was going to guarantee a qualified audience so we started to survey the audience to find out more about them.
We were also going to guarantee the right impressions and we will get you in front of our audience. To me, it was all about super-serving our audience. I am only going to sign companies with high integrity that have products and services that will benefit my audience. That became my focus. Did I make a lot of mistakes? Yes, and I learned from them and realized that we treat everybody the same. We do not discount a rate card. We layer in value add, which is bonus ads with our advertisers. We also do a lot for our sponsors.


Start Your Business: If your gut is telling you something’s not right or you feel like you’re not getting what you need in a particular work environment, speak up, be vocal, and be loud.

 
I would say the first couple of years were rocky to start, but once we start to find our rhythm, all we have been doing is improving our process and maintaining that integrity, which is why we are very successful now. Also, I know the backend so I understand how finance and sales work. Unfortunately, the rest of my sales team drives my continuity team and my accounting team nuts but I know how to handle both, which is fun.
I have a couple of things I want to be sure that everybody gives enough emphasis to. You had one sales outlet. In all of my years of sales consulting and sales coaching, I am always on the opinion that you should always hire two or an army, and nothing else makes any sense. I certainly do not want to do one. I do not understand three. The reason we want to do at least two is you want at least two data points so that if channel one is delivering phenomenal results and channel two is not, you have some reality to your data, and then anytime you can get a whole army of people selling, the more you will sell.
Two, and this probably should have been one, was the fact that you approached the market and the business from a position of integrity. We are going to do what we say and say what we do. You are talking to ad sales, which as a general rule, rates with the public about automobile sales. As a general rule, the public does not look at that with the highest esteem.
The thing I have found in my selling career and being the top salesman in the country at age 19 and 20 was I am brutally honest. Honesty is in such short supply. People recognize it immediately and can’t help but be attracted to it because it is rare, so tell people the good, the bad, and the ugly as long as it is true. They won’t penalize you for the bad. They will reward you because you have been brutally honest with them.
The last point I want to be sure that everybody heard was this. You approached it as, “I am going to help people.” I am a firm believer that if you want to sell a lot, stop selling and start helping. People want what will make their lives, their businesses, their families, and themselves better. If you provide a solution that will do that and can help them do that, frankly, they do not care about their money. It can’t be ridiculous.
You can’t charge them ten times the market rate, but as opposed to what they want, their money has no value to them and they will gladly trade you their dollars. I know that sounds a little silly. Attend one of my sales training and you will go away thinking, “That is how it is.” They do not care about their dollars. They care about what it is they want. I love those three things. I think that only people who come into sales from a non-traditional route learn from that perspective.
I did not jump into sales without speaking to a bunch of sales agencies, talking to people, and doing my research because I am not a natural salesperson. I decided to apply the same integrity in business to my partners. I do not even call them clients. They are our partners. Before I even pick up a call or get on the phone with somebody, I have researched what they are doing and I have an idea of who they are. We vet anybody before we talk to them.
I have my team pull a one-sheet where we take a look at who the partners are, what they are up to, what are they doing, and how do they rate, and then when I get on the phone with these people, I am always doing a dive into, “What are your goals? What are your needs? What are you trying to accomplish? What have you done that has worked? What have you done that has not worked?” People are surprised. They are like, “No one has ever asked us this. They usually ask us how much money we have to spend and what is our timing.” To me, those are two very valid and important points to know too, but I start with wanting to know who they are. I want to get to know what their desires are.
The reality of being a CEO is you make decisions daily with 2-5% of the information.CLICK TO TWEET
I agree with you. The money comes into it. I do not even want to talk money. I always want to talk about what you said. How do we fill a need that they have and what are their goals to accomplish with advertising with us? The first thing I heard from everybody when I said I am stepping into sales was, “Used car salesman. You are going to be a politician now.” Honesty is lacking and I wish we could apply that, especially in podcast sales.
I have an agency too, so I take on clients and I go out and buy for them. When I reach out to people and the first thing they say is, “Our minimum is $50,000. Tell us how much money you have and when you want to start.” It is like, “I need to have a conversation because I am vetting you for my client and there is integrity here to be had,” but I agree with you. People will spend money with you if you show them what you are going to do, if you are going to resolve a need, and if you are going to bring them the right thing.
My focus is always on if it does not serve my audience, it is a full pass for me. I say no a lot. Here is a good example to apply to my integrity. I had a client reach out. It was an agency. They were like, “We have this client. They have $500,000 to spend. What can you do for us?” We vetted that. They had two and a half stars on Amazon.
The reviews were weak at best, so I was willing to get on the phone with the agency to say, “These are the reviews we are seeing. Are they doing something to improve their product? Are they coming out with a phase two that is going to be better? I would like to see what they are doing.” The agency had the nerve to say, “They are not doing anything to improve the product. We are just throwing more marketing dollars at it.” I said to the agency, “It is a full pass for us.” They said, “We have $500,000.” I said, “It is a full pass for us because it will not benefit my audience to talk about a subpar product.” I would love to continue to see that across the board.
I would love to see that too. I do not know if you know, but my second book is titled Romancing Your Customer. I see such direct parallels between the romantic and the customer journey map. It is unbelievable. Many sellers, whether they are B2C, B2B, C2C, or B2G, they want to say, “My name is Don. How much money do you have and when can you give it to me?”
The romantic journey would be the same thing as if I had met my wife and said, “My name is Don. Can we get married on Tuesday?” I am pretty sure she would have said, “You are weird. That is way too far and fast. Move along,” but yet, in a commercial application, sellers think that that is normal when they hear the business version of, “You are weird. Move along.”
When we do things from the other person’s point of view or when we bring some romance to the relationship, things happen and it is almost magical. It is like, “We are doing a lot more business and people are loving it.” I can’t emphasize enough to see it from the other person’s point of view and then act on that perspective. It is not good enough just to see it.
You have to act on it to do what is best for them. What about a warp speed moment? Was there some time in your career when things were going along pretty well but then all of the sudden, you implement a new strategy, made a new hire, some external event happen, and all of a sudden, you have this hockey stick of growth? You were like, “I did not know. It could be this good and fast.” Do you have a warp speed moment that you could share with us?


Start Your Business: People will spend money with you if you show them what you’re going to do, if you’re going to resolve a need, if you’re going to bring them the right thing.

 
I would probably say one of my first steps into sales at TWiT, I did have a warp speed moment once. I understood the cadence of how sales worked and I started to get my teeth into it and made all my mistakes. Breaking that exclusivity, we did start to project up in sales. I would say after the first year I stepped into sales, we started to grow by leaps and bounds because I opened it up. I work with 30 different agencies and I have a sales team now. We went into total warp speed and started to grow and blossom as a network. That was probably the biggest upside we had.
Believe it or not, when the pandemic hit was probably another one. We realized very quickly, I can’t say it was at first, but two weeks into the pandemic, we lost 60% of our business. Being a fully ad-supported network, I realized we were not diverse. We were too one-dimensional. The first huge growth we had was me stepping into sales, breaking exclusively, and hiring an army. That did it. The second growth in our sales process was when the pandemic hit because we realized very quickly we were too one-dimensional and an ad-supported network only.
From that, we launched our Club TWiT in which we offer all of the content in our shows ad-free. We have also added to that a Discord channel in which our fans can participate. Also, they get bonus content, so they get before and after the shows. They get a lot of extra things but we did not take away from our ad-supported side of things because that is how we make our money.
Having launched Club TWiT has been fun. We have been able to do AMAs. We are testing new shows there. There are all these extra little things and we have an amazing place for people that are in tech and geek like-minded people get to hang out and have a good time. That became one thing we have launched. We also started adding ad-free content on Apple subscriptions for people who just want one show. We started to diversify our network and what we do, and it made us think outside the box and be creative again. I feel like that was another growth for us, especially for me in my career at TWiT.
The reality is being a CEO, you make decisions daily with 2% to 5% of the information. You need to do a good job. In the pandemic, I had no data to go on. It birthed creativity. That is what a lot of people should be looking at instead of, “Everything went away.” It was the time for people to become creative. That was another growth for us and we are still diversifying from it. I believe it jump-started us from thinking beyond doing a pod to what else we could do. Having our studio in this giant network, we can do a lot more and it has opened that creativity up. That was brilliant.
As you speak about a pandemic, that may be the most important economic catalyst of the past years because so many companies that are very active with entrepreneurs all over the world took a hit, but now are so much stronger. The world is not back to normal but at something less than normal, their sales are way up.
I have had people say hospitality. I am like, “Some hospitality.” I have some good friends who have 26 restaurants. At the end of 2021, I was like, “How are things?” They were like, “We are at 15% year over year.” I was like, “Do not you know you were supposed to go out of business?” I loved his answer. He said, “I did not like that plan, so we did something else.” Many times, it is just don’t quit. Step in the batter’s box and swing the bat. The worst thing that happens is you miss the ball, but maybe you get a hit. You do not know.
You can’t miss them all if you do not take those shots. The one thing young people as well as adults need to realize, especially if you are in sales or you are an entrepreneur, you are going to fail more than you succeed. Get used to it. It is true. If you are afraid of failure, it is probably not for you, but the reality is I fail way more than I succeed. It makes the successes feel sweeter when I do make them. I can be honest with you and say, “I could pitch 30 people and not close the deal,” and then I start looking at it like, “How did I do it? What am I doing? What am I doing wrong? How do I craft this?” I then close five in a row.
You’re going to fail a lot and it’s okay.CLICK TO TWEET
Sometimes, the reality is timing and how it is. You are right on that. If you are afraid to be creative, and I have seen people close up their shops because they were afraid to be creative and try, or they might have been exhausted. I do not know everything that people are going through, but I want to emphasize, especially to young people that you are going to fail a lot, and it is okay, especially when you are learning something new, so do not be afraid to fail and do not consider that to be defeat.
We do a poor job of educating young people even on the definition of success and failure. The public sees those as opposite concepts, when in fact, that is not true. Failing is part of succeeding. The best attitude is I win or I learn, and learning is slower winning.
I heard you say that on your show and I loved it. I am trying to reiterate that to my nineteen-year-old son who is in college. He is like, “This is hard.” I am like, “It is okay. That is how you learn. You have to try things.” That is huge and people need to keep hearing that
Many times, the best learnings happen out of what we would call failings. We are not as present and not as cognizant of what is happening. We are just enjoying the rollercoaster. We are having fun on the ride. There is nothing wrong with that, but where we have deep learning is in the failings. We have done about 100 of these episodes. I am a long-time entrepreneur but it appears that the entrepreneurs who have had huge failings, cataclysms, looked into the abyss, and fell over. They have also had these monumental successes. I will figure I have empirical data to speak, but anecdotally, I am going to say it appears that the depth of a failure is offset by the height of a win.
If you are experiencing a failing and it is painful, look for a big win to come. Do not quit. Keep going. I want to put you in a time machine. I want you to take it all the way back. You gave us a little nugget on if I was talking to my 30-year-old self. I am going to take you all the way back to your twenty-year-old self. If we put you in the time machine, send you back, and you had a minute or two to share a couple of pieces of advice, grab your twenty-year-old self and say, “These two things will help you go faster, farther, and better and listen up,” what would you tell yourself?
I would tell myself to slow down and listen. Practice active listening more because back then, I was super smart. I was running a company and an assistant controller at a young age. I had a sense of me that I felt like I knew a lot and I knew everything. I would tell myself to be more humble, to listen more, and to finish my education younger instead of later. I started and stopped school several times. That would have been another thing I would have told myself, but it is down to active listening and not being afraid to take risks.
I had passed, at 27, on a small startup because I had landed this job as an assistant controller. I was chatting with one of the tenants in our building and they said, “You have to join this.” I was a little nervous. I was married. I did not want to give up a stable job. They were trying to woo me to be their fifth employee. I passed on it.
Three years later, they were bought by Cisco Systems. The janitor was a multimillionaire. I realized that it was hindsight of 2020. I realized I missed an opportunity, so I would tell myself to be bold, to apply more active listening, and it is okay to finish your education early and maybe put a career on the back burner. That would probably be what I would tell myself back then. I would also tell myself to take that job.


Start Your Business: If you’re in sales or you’re an entrepreneur, you’re gong to fail more than you succeed.

 
I got a couple of things like that. I should have been invested here or should have done that, but you live and you learn. That is how it goes.
That is the learning part.
How would our audience reach out to you?
If you are interested in our network, you can reach me at Lisa@TWiT.tv. Once again, that means This Week in Tech. What’s fun is that when I first started working at TWiT, I would tell people, “This is Lisa from This Week in Tech.” My founder came out and he heard me saying that. He goes, “It is TWiT.” I said, “Do you know how many times I have been hung up on when I said I am calling from TWiT?” Ask your IT consultant, MSP, or CTO if they know who we are. You will know who we are, but if you are curious about our network, check us out.
We do twelve podcast shows. The reality is they are all named after what we do. If you are interested in tech, This Week in Tech is our flagship show. If you are that busy working entrepreneur and you are looking for something for that quick hit in tech, I would recommend Tech News Weekly. It comes out on Thursdays. It is an hour-long. It is a great way to know what is going on in the tech world without feeling like you have to be in the tech world. We are fun. It is entertaining and our hosts are all tech experts. Check us out there. If you want to get in touch with me, it Lisa@TWIT.tv. I answer all my emails. I am always looking for good partners and people that are interested in learning about what we do.
That is all for this episode. Lisa, thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
 
IMPORTANT LINKS

TWiT TV
The Tech Guy
Romancing Your Customer
Club TWiT
Tech News Weekly
Lisa@TWiT.tv

 
ABOUT LISA LAPORTE
Lisa Laporte is an experienced professional who has worked in various industries.
Having worked as CFO, consultant, founder, and CEO, Lisa has a strong understanding of the various aspects of running a business and what’s required to excel at your job. She’s been able to build significant experience in various types of business, such as startups and is also talented at building successful teams, using business development to establish quality partnerships, and generating income. Lisa Laporte feels confident that she’s up to the task of running a business and has had the opportunity to see how a company functions on various levels.
At 33, Lisa Laporte began her entrepreneurial journey, mainly by starting her own consulting agency. Lisa had spent many years working and established herself as a professional. While working, Lisa created an extensive network of connections she was able to rely on when she launched her business. Thanks to these connections, she was able to create a thriving consulting business. One of Lisa’s main focuses during this time was working with small businesses in order to streamline their companies and work toward higher levels of success. At the highest point of her consulting career, Lisa Laporte was the CFO of three companies, oversaw twenty different clients across and array of industries, and had other bookkeepers working for her.
Today, Lisa Laporte works as the CEO of both TWiT.tv and Artisanal Agency. While juggling both of these roles takes an incredible amount of work, Lisa finds her work incredibly satisfying and would not want to do anything else. Lisa understands the immense importance of taking risks in business and adhering to strong values of integrity of hard work. She’s excited to be able to help out others as they launch their own podcasts or work in one of her companies.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2E2 | EO Global Chair David Anderson
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/eo-global-chair-david-anderson/
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Content:
 
Lessons on how to take your business from good to great and exceptional from inspiring entrepreneur David Anderson of Off Madison Ave.
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/EO-Global-Chair-David-Anderson.mp3
CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR DAVID ANDERSON SHARES HIS STORY
Entrepreneurs can be a dime a dozen, but an inspiring entrepreneur is a rare gem. Like many businessmen, David Andersen started from humble beginnings. Both of his parents worked in corporate, which made him no stranger to long hours and hard work. As a teenager, he took on odd jobs as a gas station attendant and a country club caddy. Day in and day out, he put in the hours even when he didn’t want to. He worked despite brutal rainstorms and terrible weather. He served people from every possible walk of life. Working hard during his formative years showed David what he wanted his future to look like. This early experience set him up for eventual success.
ALL IN GOOD TIME ENTREPRENEUR
David was born and raised in Arizona. He went to Arizona State University and was perfectly happy earning his degree while bartending and waiting tables on the side. Life was good and easy. Until one day when David realized that fun wasn’t enough anymore.
The next moment, he had packed his bags for Washington D.C. He had no plans except to find work that he loved. He went through his father’s contacts, as well as his own. He fell into government work naturally. Over the next couple of years, David earned his position as a congressional staffer, which led to work with two presidential commissions. He had every intention of staying in politics to help direct the show, until his presidential candidate lost. All of a sudden, things were up in the air again.
At this point, he moved back to home, where he joined a PR firm from which he was eventually fired. Not one to take a No quietly, David chose to start his own Company and journey as an entrepreneur.
IF YOU CAN’T FIND IT, BUILD IT
David’s started Off Madison Ave because he recognized that there was a need for better marketing services. Off Madison Ave is unique because it uses behavior design to direct consumer perceptions. Since it launched, the company has helped institutions like CVS Health, Siemens, and Toyota gain a bigger foothold in their respective fields.
Over the years, David’s work has taught him a number of important things that have nothing to do with the bottom line.
First, it’s important to learn the difference between working on the business and working in the business. An Entrepreneur can turn any idea into reality with hard work and maybe a little luck. An inspiring entrepreneur knows how to transform an idea into a reality that can stand on its own.
Second, businesses are only as great as the people working on them. Invest in talent even if it means paying more. A talented, high-performing team is the backbone of all great companies, and superstars produce ROI.
Third, the most inspiring entrepreneurs always give back. David regularly mentors other entrepreneurs through his work in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO). EO is the premiere organization for entrepreneurs with business valued over $1M. David is the current Global Chair. He firmly believes that his work here has kept him inspired, relevant, and driven.

David Anderson, Global Chair of Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Above all, David Anderson is a firm believer in continued education. He invests time listening to podcasts and reading self-help books because growing pays dividends for the rest of your life.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2E1 | Dr. Karyn Gordon shares on Leadership & Business
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/dr-karyn-gordon-shares-on-leadership-business/
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Content:
 
Dr Karyn Gordon, through DK Leadership, teaches entrepreneurs the skills needed to turn small businesses into great ones.
 
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Dr.-Karyn-Gordon-shares-on-Leadership-Business.mp3
DR. KARYN GORDON HELPS SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS
Successful entrepreneurs know how to recognize and maximize opportunity. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown, Karyn leveraged her skills and started DK Leadership. In the span of a year, DK Leadership has grown to cater to over 4,000 clients worldwide.
THE RIGHT MINDSET STARTS AT HOME
Karyn grew up in a family of professionals. Her grandparents had successful medicine and engineering practices. Growing up, she was very close with both of them and inherited their work ethics early on.
While her parents were not entrepreneurs, Karyn was encouraged to be one if she wanted to be. When she was 12-years old, she started selling strawberries door-to-door. This was her first experience of the entrepreneurial life, and she thrived in it immensely. She balanced business and school well until the 8th grade, when she was diagnosed with a learning disability. Instead of adding unnecessary pressure, her parents made it clear that it was enough for her to try. And try she did.
SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS LEARN BY DOING
Over the next few years, she opened an arts and crafts business and dabbled in real estate. The former failed exceptionally well, but the latter was a successful surprise. When she was 20-years old, she risked all of her savings on a fixer-upper cottage, which she renovated top-down. The result was so impressive that the house was actually featured on national magazines. That cottage was also the start of a really great real estate business that lives on until today.
For some reason, she eventually found herself working part-time in TV. Her first attempt at producing a show received spectacular reviews, but her second try failed miserably. She spent two years trying to make the segment work, but it kept losing money. Most people would have given up at this point, but like other great entrepreneurs, Karyn was different. She insisted on her dream and went all-in a third time.
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
DK Leadership initially started out as a TV show. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Karyn recognized an opportunity. She pivoted the show into an online coaching program that was accessible from anywhere in the world. Her trademark class on leadership skills has since been taken by over 4,000 students from 17 countries.
DK Leadership is unique because it champions bite-size learning. The course is interactive and offered over a period of 6 weeks. This allows students to apply what they learn, as well as get real-time feedback from their mentors. The course has received consistently stellar reviews from its students.
As expected, the future of DK Leadership is bright. Karyn is currently working on an immersive leadership retreat for teams who want to grow together. She is also working on releasing a book.

Dr Karyn Gordon knows the science of good business.
Visit dkleadership.org to learn more about Karyn and her mission to make successful entrepreneurs a thing of the future.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: S2:E10 | Annye Grande Founder of Etoile Luxury Handbags
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/annye-grande-founder-of-etoile-luxury-handbags/
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Content:
 
 
Entrepreneur  Shares Fashion Secrets.
 
 

https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Annye-Grande-Founder-of-Etoile-Luxury-Handbags.mp3
ENTREPRENEUR ANNYE GRANDE CREATES BEAUTIFUL ETOILE HANDBAGS
My Life as an Entrepreneur ad Founder of Etoile
I was born in Montreal, Canada and Etoile is French for the word Star. You’ll feel like a star when you carry an Etoile bag. Etoile is the most beautiful exquisite purse collection you will ever come across. I’m recording today from one of our New York City factories. I love to spend time with the product it’s a really great, happy place for me.
Tip – A successful entrepreneur has fun!
We build beautifully aesthetic pleasing bags that resonate well with a wide audience. Our DNA, or secret space is really in the intelligence of the bag. Our most popular bag contains a second bag, it’s totally convertible.
Tip – Many successful entrepreneurs design a product or service with one additional “stand-out” feature.
I’m the Creative Director for Etoile. I had the idea when I was travelling to see high-end buyers when I worked in high-end fashion. I needed to look the part yet be efficient and that’ how Etoile was born.
Tip – A successful entrepreneur solves a problem.
MY CHILDHOOD
When I was a young girl, my mother had a flower shop. I don’t recall saying, I want to be just like my mom. In fact, I recall wanting to be the opposite of my mom and just being silly. I think in retrospect I can see that it certainly has shown me that it’s a possible. In some ways, I’ve turned into my mother – LOL. We sell direct to consumer and to luxury retailers. Selling to luxury retailers allowed us to quickly expand our footprint in different regions.
Tip – Alternative distribution channels for entrepreneurs can help you quickly grow geography and market share.
MY START AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
We started in 2018 and our first customer was a luxury store named Stanley Korshak in Dallas. Since that time we expanded it to e-com and to our own brick and mortar stores. I’m very, very strict on distribution. Brand equity is so important if you’re trying to build a great American luxury brand.
I went to college and studied business. I always had a calling for the fashion industry, and Montreal is a global hub of fashion. Out of college I went to work for an American luxury brand working on their Canadian marketing, sales and distribution. I did well enough that I was privileged to sit in a CEO walkthroughs and meetings. I learned so much at that and my next jobs. The second job I had total ownership of four brands. It was like being an entrepreneur with someone else’s money. My last job was all about product development and creative. I got to travel to Asia, to Europe, to visit factories, to understand how to maximize, yielding your fabrics all about manufacturing.
TIP – Many entrepreneurs learn their trade while employed for other Companies.
EXPERIENCE COUNTS
In my career I had, I touched so many different sides of the fashion industry that I thought, oh my God, I know everything. This start-up is going to be a breeze. I’ve learned so much more since starting Etoile. First, when we make mistakes. We acknowledge the mistake, fix it and move forward. There’s no need to dwell on mistakes, fix it and don’t do it again. The hardest lesson has been cashflow management. You cannot really be successful until you master the cash. As a young company, we’ve had to be very agile and be very lean operationally.
One of my expert mentors is Jay Rodgers. Jay has a deep knowledge and experience in different types of businesses. He has been very generous with his time in helping me and Etoile. There are times where I’ve called Jay and asked an equation, got an answer, slept on it and found out I disagreed. But the value of successful mentors is immense to your business growth.

Annye Grande, Founder Etoile
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:9 | Dr. Thaddeus Gala – Guardians Annual Retreat Founder
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s29-dr-thaddeus-gala-guardians-annual-retreat-founder/
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Content:
 
 
How Dr. Thaddeus Gala brings together like-minded individuals for a weekend of inspiration in the fields of health, finance, and technology.
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Dr.-Thaddeus-Gala-Guardians-Annual-Retreat-Founder.mp3
ENTREPRENEUR THADDEUS GALAS’ SECRETS ON HEALTH & WEALTH
Theirs a Doctor in the house and his name is Dr. Thaddeus Gala. Thaddeus is an entrepreneurs’ entrepreneur. He owns and runs several Companies. Every year Thaddeus hosts the Guardians Annual Retreat, bringing together 500 entrepreneurs, leaders, and philanthropists for a weekend of inspiration. The event features headliners like Gary Vaynerchuk, Natasha Graziano and a host of other A list Speakers. Tickets are always sell out almost as soon as they become available.
UNCONVENTIONAL CHILDHOOD AND UNCONVENTIONAL ENTREPRENEUR
Dr. Gala’s parents were one of a kind. His father was a Vietnam War veteran, while his mother was a grade school teacher. They fell in love instantly when they met. Within weeks, they picked up their lives and moved to the forests of Oregon.
Dr. Gala spent his formative years surrounded by nature in a rustic household. He had chickens as pets. Exercise involved cutting firewood. And winters meant finding new ways to unfreeze the pipes. Growing up, Dr. Gala always felt like the forest offered unique problems, which required equally unique solutions. Learning how to solve problems on his own led to the development of Thaddeus’ entrepreneurial spirit.
THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED
Dr. Gala’s first foray into business involved medicine. When his mother became ill with a life-threatening condition, he came face-to-face with the limitations of the current healthcare system. Thaddeus founded Complete Care, a multi-specialty clinic that advocated natural methods for pain and chronic disease. Today, Complete Care is responsible for over 50,000 patient visits a year. Last year, Dr. Gala’s mom celebrated her 75th birthday by running a marathon.
Like other great entrepreneurs, Dr. Gala is a master of the road less travelled. He has since ventured into taxation prevention and mentorship and boasts immense success in both. While he fell into both fields by accident, the entrepreneur in him recognized the opportunity, which allowed him to pursue it. This is one of the traits that separates great entrepreneurs from other businessmen.
GUARDIAN’S ADVICE 1, 2 AND 3
First, opportunities are many times disguised as problems. When an average entrepreneur finds themself at a fork in the road, they may see that as a negative. But when a great entrepreneur finds themself at a crossroad, they look for the value of the options ahead. Reframing problems as opportunities may mean the difference between another bad day at the office and a groundbreaking idea.
Second, gratitude results in a never-empty cup. Each day, Dr. Gala makes time to list down three things for whihc he’s thankful. He leaves these lists around his house, so that he is constantly reminded of the many blessings in his life. He firmly believes that this practice helps him become more present. It elevates his mood, which also improves the energy of those working with and for him.
And third, environment is the single best driver of behavior. If you surround yourself with the right people, you set yourself up for success. The Guardian Annual Retreat works on this premise. Every year, over 500 like-minded individuals gather in Puerto Rico to discuss health, wealth, and impact. The Guardian Annual Retreat is responsible for the growth of hundreds of great entrepreneurs all over the world.

Dr. Thaddeus Gala – Entrepreneur
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E7 |  The Magic Of Enthusiasm For Your Business
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/the-magic-of-enthusiasm-for-your-business/
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Inner Images:
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Content:
 
In this Episode, Don dives into the meaning of enthusiasm and how it can improve anyone in the field of business. Enthusiasm could be that extra element that bridges the gap between failure and in improving your business.
 
 
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Magic-Of-Enthusiasm-For-Your-Business.mp3



THE MAGIC OF ENTHUSIASM FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Don explains that the root word of Enthusiasm in Greek means the “God within” and that is exactly what we should aim for if we want to improve our life or business.
A person who takes applies the magic power of enthusiasm gains an advantage in his personal and business life. Enthusiasm allows the person to almost unlimited energy and focus. It gives the person, the perspective that he needs to finish a task or to sell a product.
What then is the meaning of real enthusiasm?
Don says that there is a difference between the kind of enthusiasm that is portrayed in television or movies that we normally experience. When we see someone going up in a stage, with a big voice and puts on an act, we say to ourselves “ahhh look at how enthusiastic that person is”. We view enthusiasm as somewhat of putting on a show for others to see and believe.  That is exactly the opposite of how Don views enthusiasm. To him, being enthusiastic is anchored on one element and that is a person who is passionate.
Passionate in a sense that you do not have to put on a show to be believable. A person that is passionate about something will conduct himself accordingly to what is required to complete a task or a certain project. He approaches such project with vigor, determination and more importantly he is true to such project because he is sincere in his actions.
By being passionate and sincere that is where true enthusiasm can be found. Only then can a person utilize the meaning of the word enthusiasm if he understands passion and sincerity.
Lastly, Don examines that last four letters of the word Enthusiasm and that is “I.A.S.M” which is an acronym for “I am sold myself.  He explains that when we are sold about something, be it a product or a service, then we honestly believe that such product or service can affect us or change us in any form that is good.  This means that when we are sold bout something, we can easily convey enthusiasm towards that something.






Applied in business, when you are sold on a product, you know for yourself that such product really works for you and the customer. Once that happens, you can easily convey your enthusiasm to the customer. You can then be passionate and sincere in selling your product which ultimately gets buyer to agree with you.

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Title: E57 | Entrepreneur Marcelle LeBlanc Shares Her Story
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/entrepreneur-marcelle-leblanc-shares-her-story/
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Content:
 
 
How a chain lingerie boutique in Texas is revolutionizing the industry with lingerie, sex education classes, and health and wellness support.
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Entrepreneur-Marcelle-LeBlanc-Shares-Her-Story.mp3
MARCELLE LEBLANC’S CREATIVE VISION AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
In 2009, Marcelle opened The Velvet Box, a boundary-breaking brand of upscale lingerie and novelty boutiques in Fort Worth, Texas. She has since catered to an increasing number of clientele from across the world. In 2020, she became the president of the Ft. Worth Chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), an elite network of business leaders from all over the world.
GREAT ENTREPRENEURS EXPLORE ALTERNATIVES
Marcelle grew up in the little town of Abbyville, Louisiana. Her parents were city employees. Their household was very frugal, and Marcelle learned the value of hard work early on as a child. She loved riding horses growing up. When she was 17-years old, she left home to work full-time with a horse trainer in Buellton, California.
In between work at the stable, Marcelle trained in the sport of cutting horses. She learned something new every day but also realized that it was not sustainable. Over the following weeks, she met a friend, who had plans to go to California Polytechnic State University. She considered it a sign. She was in class by the following school year.
After graduation, Marcelle tried working with her degree in horticulture but quickly found that she did not enjoy the field. She shifted to programming and computer courses for a brief time. Eventually, she stumbled onto an adult DVD company that had an opening in sales. Her work for this company led her to start The Velvet Box.
GREAT ENTREPRENEURS CARVE THEIR OWN PATH
The Velvet Box is an upscale chain of adult boutiques that sells lingerie and novelty items. They pivoted at the peak of the pandemic and began offering sex education and health and wellness classes. The Velvet Box aims to provide a safe environment to explore good connection and education. It currently has fives branches across Fort Worth, Lewisville, and West Plano, Texas. Marcelle plans to expand her brand across the United States.
As expected, The Velvet Box’s journey has not been easy. Early on during her entrepreneurial journey, Marcelle was mistakenly sued by a shopping mall for wrongful misrepresentation. She lost a lot of sleep over the next two years but learned some of her best lessons.
One, do not be limited by doubts. When The Velvet Box was being sued, Marcelle kept thinking that maybe there was something more that she could do. Nothing could be further from the truth. The biggest lesson entrepreneurs have to learn is to trust in the process. If you put in the effort, things always work out as they should.
Two, spend on education. Marcelle entered the lingerie business by luck. For the first couple of years, she ran her company on instinct and gut feel. She joined EO because she wanted to become a better leader. The organization gave her access to a network of over 14,000 business experts. At every point, the organization taught her to lead by example. Marcelle considers herself a better leader because of this.
And three, be consistent. Marcelle is a strong believer in her inner scorecard. She makes sure to hold herself to the same principles that she expects from her peers and staff. She regularly reevaluates these principles and adjusts when she finds herself off-center.

Velvet Box Owner and EO Ft. Worth Chapter President Marcelle LeBlanc.
GREAT ENTREPRENEURS GO AFTER THEIR DREAMS
Marcelle is a force to be reckoned with. When she is not working on The Velvet Box, she is traveling between cutting horses competitions. In 2021 Marcelle made a run at the Amateur World Cutting Horse Championship ending her season as number ten in the World. Working with horses has always been her first love. Like other great entrepreneurs, she makes time for the important things.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 
 

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Title: E56 | Scotty Schindler and $1.125+ Trillion in Real Estate
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/scotty-schindler-and-1-125-trillion-in-real-estate/
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Content:
 
How ReNet, a software program made for real estate businesses, has managed over $1.25 trillion in real estate assets over two decades.
 
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Scotty-Schindler-and-1.125-Trillion-in-Real-Estate.mp3
SCOTTY SCHINDLER SHARES ENTREPRENEUR SECRETS
Successful entrepreneurs know the value of trial and error. Over the span of his 20-year career, the down under entrepreneur has dabbled in many industries. Scotty has experience in insurance, healthcare, computer and information technology, and the food and beverage industry. While 99% of his ideas did not work, his experience taught him that the 1% is all that matters. He is currently the founder of CEO of a real estate company that has managed over $1 trillion worth of properties and assets.
UNCONVENTIONAL START FOR AN ENTREPRENEUR
Scotty grew up in a single parent household. As the only son among his siblings, he learned how to be proactive at a very young age. While his sisters were busy with school, he was looking for every opportunity to earn a living. He cleaned windows, delivered milk, and ran a newspaper route. He was working in a McDonald’s even before it was exactly legal for a kid his age to be employed.
Scotty’s ambition continued through to his teenage and adult years. He interviewed for his first job (as a salesman in an insurance company) straight out of high school. He stayed in the same company for 10 years. While it was not glamorous by any means, he stayed because he knew he could learn much more at work than in school. True enough, he gained business, sales, and leadership skills in that time.
MAKING HIS OWN WAY
At the turn of the century, Scotty decided that it was finally time to forge his own path as an entrepreneur. He quit his job as an insurance salesman and ventured into the IT industry. Over the following year, he launched a medical website, set up an online version of the Yellow Pages, and ventured into online networking. When these failed, he pivoted into online programming, which had writing computer programs to help automate all sorts of businesses. Along the way, he developed ReNet, a software program geared towards real estate companies. In a little over two decades, ReNet has since helped manage over $1.25 trillion in real estate assets across Australia and New Zealand.
His experience with ReNet has taught him two important lessons. One, it’s good business to do good. He sealed his first big contract because he always produced good and dependable work. When his client needed someone to do a big job, Scotty’s track record spoke for itself. And two, successful entrepreneurs are always light on their feet. When Scotty was suddenly faced with a limited budget, he revised the company’s systems to make the limitations work for him. His adaptability saved him from a potentially big financial hole and even furthered his success.
SCOTTY TODAY
While he has since retired from ReNet, Scotty continues to draw from his experiences to do great work. These days, he spends most of his time teaching young entrepreneurs the tricks of the trade. When he isn’t working, he is combing the beaches for the best possible waves. Like other successful entrepreneurs, he strongly welcomes collaboration and feedback. Scotty can be reached through scottyschindler.com.
Scotty Schindler
Scotty Schindler wrote the code that helped real estate businesses across Australia thrive.
ABOUT DON WILLIAMS AND THE PROVEN ENTREPRENEUR
Dons’ mission is to help people, help people.
Don was the #1 sales rep in the Country at age 19. And the #1 sales manager at age 20.
At one time or another over 30+ years Don has worked with 1/2 of The Fortune 500 on marketing/sales, customer experience or leadership.
3-time #1 Best Selling Author Don Williams books are The D.I.Y. Outbound Contact Center Toolbox, Romancing Your Customer & Build Your Big Legacy. Gratitude: Stories from our Hearts is due for release in December 2021. All titles are available from Amazon or directly from DWG.
Don has founded a dozen companies and is currently a Principal in five firms.
Like most great entrepreneurs Don knows that continual learning and leadership improvement are foundational to business success. The Proven Entrepreneur Show features real people sharing real stories so that others can learn.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
It’s good business to do good – please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E55 | Laura Lester Knows the Value of Perseverance
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/laura-lester-knows-the-value-of-perseverance/
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Content:
 
How Laura went from being a multi-level marketing whiz to creating a supportive community for patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
 
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Laura-Lester-Super-Selling-Entrepreneur.mp3
LAURA LESTER SHARES SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS
SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS TAKE SMALL STEPS
Successful entrepreneurs can be great at a lot of things. Most of the time, they can sell you anything. And Laura is no different. When she was in high school, she sold girl scout cookies like most of the kids her age. But it wasn’t enough that she sold her share. She also made sure that she did her best, so much so that she was the top salesperson in her area.
Successful entrepreneurs also recognize opportunity. When she was 19, she applied for a real estate license because she noticed an opportunity in the real estate market. Laura happened to be a natural at selling houses. She partnered with a broker and turned flipping houses into a full-time job.
Over the next few months, Laura sold millions in property. Without her noticing, the months quickly turned into years. While she was earning more than she ever imagined, she soon realized that she was paying for the success with her time. She was young, single, and talented, but she was at work all the time. The word “vacation” wasn’t even in her vocabulary.
SUCCESS AT THE CROSSROADS
In the middle of a very successful real estate career, Laura decided to pivot and follow in her mother’s footsteps. Throughout her childhood, Laura watched her mom rise up the ranks in multi-level marketing. Her mom sold everything from cosmetics to water and air purifiers and sold them exceptionally well. Laura ended up applying to the very same cosmetics company her mom used to work for.
Like other successful entrepreneurs, she was young, eager, and competitive. And as expected, she excelled at the work. She sold inventories worth over $3,000 without breaking a sweat over the phone. Over the next few years, she single-handedly pulled her team through every sales requirement, selling more and more units than the previous month. She was also tired beyond compare. For the second time in her life, she realized that this was not what she wanted.
SUCCESS IS THE REWARD OF PERSEVERANCE
Laura was going about her day as usual when she noticed a healthcare gap in her community. She decided to take the leap and opened Encore Daycare Center, a senior daycare center that catered to patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia. It has been 10 years since she took the leap from sales to entrepreneurship. In that time, Encore has expanded to two branches and created a strong and thriving community of patients, caregivers, and their families.
Like other businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique challenge for Encore, but Laura made it work. At the peak of the closures, she leveraged credit to keep her customers. She also invested in training her staff to make sure that they were better equipped when Encore’s doors opened again. Her patience and perseverance paid off. As the world started to reopen, Laura found that her old clients were more than happy to come back.
Things may not be the same as in 2010, but Laura is confident that the future is bright. Work is fulfilling. She spends her vacations with her family, as she should. And Encore is slowly growing to become an integral part of the Texas community.
Encore Daycare Center is always open for those who need it. Inquiries can be sent through lester@encoredaycare.com.

Laura And David Lester – Cheers to Successful Entrepreneurs!
ABOUT DON WILLIAMS AND THE PROVEN ENTREPRENEUR
Dons’ mission is to help people, help people.
Don was the #1 sales rep in the Country at age 19. And the #1 sales manager at age 20.
At one time or another over 30+ years Don has worked with 1/2 of The Fortune 500 on marketing/sales, customer experience or leadership.
3-time #1 Best Selling Author Don Williams books are The D.I.Y. Outbound Contact Center Toolbox, Romancing Your Customer & Build Your Big Legacy. Gratitude: Stories from our Hearts is due for release in December 2021. All titles are available from Amazon or directly from DWG.
Don has founded a dozen companies and is currently a Principal in five firms.
Like most great entrepreneurs Don knows that continual learning and leadership improvement are foundational to business success. The Proven Entrepreneur Show features real people sharing real stories so that others can learn.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
It’s good business to do good – please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E54 | Proven Entrepreneur Natasha Miller Shares on Providing Amazing Experiences
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/proven-entrepreneur-natasha-miller-shares-on-providing-amazing-experiences/
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Content:
Natasha Miller is a jazz vocalist and musician at heart. But like other successful
entrepreneurs, she was meant for so much more. She started Entire Productions, an events production company,
almost by fate 20 years ago. Since then, the production house has spearheaded corporate events for companies
like Google, Salesforce, Apple, and LinkedIn.
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Proven-Entrepreneur-Natasha-Miller-Shares-on-Providing-Amazing-Experiences.mp3
ENTREPRENEUR NATASHA MILLER SHARES ON AMAZING EXPERIENCES
Natasha Miller is a jazz vocalist and musician at heart. But like other successful
entrepreneurs, she was meant for so much more. She started Entire Productions, an events production company,
almost by fate 20 years ago. Since then, the production house has spearheaded corporate events for companies
like Google, Salesforce, Apple, and LinkedIn.
SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS BUILD ON TALENT
Natasha grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. Her father worked for the city, while her mother
was a housewife. For as long as she can remember, Natasha has been playing music.
Natasha started playing the violin professionally when she was 16-years old. Her first
major break had her performing with a string quartet for the city governor’s second term inauguration. She
eventually entered university on a full-ride violin scholarship and spent the next few years as first violin.
CREATE OPPORTUNITY
At 23, she decided she wanted to play in the streets of New York. Luck had it, and she
met a young man, who helped her make the trip to San Francisco. She worked four jobs over the next year to save
money for the cross-country journey. No job was too little. At the end of it all, she made $4,000.
New York liked Natasha. She formed a jazz ensemble quickly and was soon booked through
the week. When she couldn’t fit the additional offers into her schedule, she found alternative bands to take the
spots instead. Before she knew it, she was running Entire Productions from her tiny apartment.
AND ALWAYS KEEP IMPROVING
Two decades as the Chief Experience Designer of Entire Productions has taught Natasha
several important lessons.
One, education is important. While winging it worked early on, her confidence and
expertise soared only after she took the Goldmann Sachs 10k program. And MIT’s Entrepreneurship Masters Program
after that. Access to the right information gave Natasha the skills, tools, and mindset to grow her company. She
also met life-long mentors in school, who had years worth of compounded experience.
Two, repeatable processes are the key to successful business. In 2019, Natasha produced
over 700 events for Salesforce alone. This was possible because she had automatized Entire Productions where
possible. She created a manual that onboarded people exactly the same way and used videos to train personnel for
key tasks. This system was so efficient that she continues to tweak it to this day. It is at the core of how she
runs and grows her company.
And three, asking is the shortest route between a “maybe” and “sure thing”. Successful
entrepreneurs know the value of a properly placed question. Asking a mentor for help may spell the difference
between a good event and great one.

Natasha Miller is the secret force behind Facebook, LinkedIn, and Apple’s largest production events.
When Natasha isn’t busy running her multimillion-dollar company, she teaches young
entrepreneurs how to scale and grow their businesses efficiently. She can easily be reached through
natashamiller.co.
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E53 | Global Citizen, Attorney & Entrepreneur Dao Nguyen Shares Her Success Story
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/global-citizen-attorney-entrepreneur-dao-nguyen-shares-her-success-story/
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Content:
How Dao became the picture of corporate and M&A, banking and finance, real estate, energy, and infrastructure law in Vietnam.
 
 
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Global-Citizen-Attorney-Entrepreneur-Dao-Nguyen-Shares-Her-Success-Story.mp3
 
ATTORNEY ENTREPRENEUR DAO NGUYEN REPRESENTS GOOD BUSINESS
Dao is an exemplary lawyer and entrepreneur. She has over 29 years of experience in law firms all across the world under her belt. Like other great entrepreneurs, she worked her way into opening her own business. In 2014, she set up DN Legal, a Vietnam-based law firm that offers full legal services “for clients who require commercial and innovative solutions”.
THE BEST EDUCATION STARTS AT HOME
Dao’s father was a pharmacist and an entrepreneur, and she learned the ins and outs of mergers and acquisitions from him. In the 1950s, Dao’s father brought the French pharmaceutical company, OPV, onto Vietnamese shores. By 1975, it was the largest company in Vietnam.
Dao was only 3-years old when her father passed away. At this point, her mother and mother’s sisters took over the family business. Dinners were a constant stream of business meetings. And all the business talk became second nature to Dao and her 11 siblings.
Dao was 10-years old when her family emigrated to Boston. She adjusted well to her life as an immigrant. When the time came, she naturally decided on law school. She interned at the same law firm for two consecutive summers. Upon graduation, she joined the practice, where she stayed for a number of years.
Her marriage brought her to Japan, where she also practiced law briefly. But an opportunity from Vietnam eventually brought her home.
DAO RETURNS TO HER ROOTS
Vietnam opened its door to foreign investment in 1987. At 65-years of age, Dao’s mother decided that it was a good time to start a business again. While her mother set up shop, Dao was hired by a local firm to help get HSBC into Vietnam. This turned into a golden learning opportunity, because it was the first ever attempt to bring an international bank into the local market. Dao performed exceptionally.
Over the next few years, Dao practiced law within the Vietnamese business landscape. She was recognized as a leading lawyer multiple times over by Chambers Asia, Asia Pacific Legal 500, and AI Global.
In 2014, she decided that she wanted to work on something more personal. She set up DN Legal soon after.
DN Legal provides legal advice in corporate and M&A, banking and finance, real estate, energy, and infrastructure. Dao’s energy is palpable in every aspect of the company. Whereas most law offices look the same, DN Legal has bright pink office chairs and a blush pink logo. The way she runs her practice is a direct result of what she has learned after over 20 years.
KEY LESSONS FOR GREAT ENTREPRENEURS
One, a great entrepreneur is true to themselves. Dao never saw herself fitting in with the lawyers who dressed in “white shirts and blue blazers”. And when she built her company, she made sure that it reflected her personal style. The consistency between her brand and character has resulted in a steady influx of clients who value honesty and consistency.
Two, a great entrepreneur invests in themselves. During the early days of DN Legal, Dao was plagued with fears of failure. But she also decided that she was going to give it her all. Her initial commitment of money, time, and effort has paid off in the long-run.
Three, a great entrepreneur values relationships. As a career woman, Dao often felt like she had to pick between work and family. Unsurprisingly, work often won. When she opened her own firm, Dao realized that she shouldn’t have to make that choice. She now makes it a point to work with fewer clients. While she handles fewer cases in DN Legal, she finds more joy in providing personalized attention. Her clients are far happier. And Dao finds that so is she.
DN Legal offers tailored and personal legal services for individuals and corporations based in Vietnam.
Dao Nguyen is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City yet living in Las Vegas. She is a strong proponent of educating young Vietnamese lawyers and entrepreneurs.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: E52 | Jay Rodgers Believes in a Good Exit Strategy
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/jay-rodgers-believes-in-a-good-exit-strategy/
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Content:
 
 
Jay Rodgers believes that the best time to sell a business is right when it is showing the most promise. He tells us why.
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Jay-Rodgers-14-Successful-Exits-and-Counting.mp3
 
ENTREPRENEUR JAY RODGERS SHARES KEY PRACTICES
Jay Rodgers has mentored dozens of bright, young men and women into great entrepreneurs. His non-profit organization, Biz Owners Ed, teaches business owners how to “build their companies with the end in mind”.
SET A GOOD EXAMPLE
Jay was born into a highly entrepreneurial family. His great-grandfather ran a full-service gasoline station even before there were cars in every driveway. When his father and uncle were old enough to join the petrol business, they expanded and delivered fuel to the neighboring towns. His mother and aunt ran a very successful farm that raised and sold over ten thousand chickens.
Jay’s family moved to Omaha, Nebraska when he was a teenager. Jay had always loved horses. As luck would have it, he quickly found a job as a stable hand for the YWCA. For the next few summers, he helped finish horses and design riding instructors packages for the association.
INVEST IN GOOD EXPERIENCES
Jay graduated from the University of Iowa in 1960. Not one to shy from a challenge, he applied to Eastman Kodak, which was one of the largest companies in the world then. He was one of eight people who were hired straight from college for a mentorship programs of sorts. He spent the next two years working with the top executives from each department.
Jay was an eager learner. By the time the two-year internship was over, he had grown both as an employee and entrepreneur. After a brief tour in the army, he returned to Dallas committed to starting his own business.
ENTREPRENEUR – FIND YOUR NICHE
Since leaving Eastman Kodak, Jay has had an unlimited breadth of experience setting up, growing, and selling businesses. He first realized that he had a knack for flipping opportunities when he sold an 11-acre lot across Madison airport for a profit. The money that he earned from this venture went into renovating a beautiful horse camp that offered summer programs for aspiring equestrians. In the 30-odd years after, he has invested in a variety of companies involved in manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and banking.
His pride-and-joy to date is Biz Owners Ed. BOE is a purely not-for-profit organization that teaches entrepreneur business owners how to start, grow, and sell their businesses. With the help of other great entrepreneurs, Jay runs an annual 10-week course for a select few right in the heart of Texas.
USE YOUR STRENGTHS
The lessons Jay teaches his students are the very same ones that got him where he is today.
For one, great entrepreneurs know the value of asking for help. Jay is a firm believer in picking up the phone and putting yourself out there. After all, people can only say yes if they’re asked.
A great entrepreneur also knows how important it is to have excellent mentors. A good mentor can provide new perspective. But a great mentor can give much-needed direction.

Jay Rodgers will teach you how to sell your business for a profit.
Biz Owners Ed is always on the lookout for eager, young entrepreneurs who have a passion for learning. The program is free and available to all those who are interested in applying.
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E51 | Bettye Rodgers Tracks What Matters
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/bettye-rodgers-tracks-what-matters/
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Content:
 
 
How investing in world-class remote monitoring solutions for your goods and services separates a good company from a great one.
 
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Proven-Entrepreneur-Bettye-Rodgers.mp3
 
INSPIRING ENTREPRENEUR BETTYE RODGERS LAUNCHED NEW TECHNOLOGY
Inspiring entrepreneurs change lives. Bettye’s first business installed car-locking devices in the cars of drunk drivers. There was a lot of resistance to these devices because they were new. But Bettye fought for her company and what it could do. In the process, she also advocated for drunk drivers and gave them the chance to get back on the road safely.
LIFE IS A LEARNING OPPORTUNITY
Bettye liked to help people, which was how she found herself in nursing school. Her plans took an interesting turn when she was offered a flight nurse position immediately after graduation. Before she knew it, she was one of the first flight nurses in the country. The job was as exciting as she thought it would be. Day in and day out, she made larger than life decisions thousands of feet up in the sky. This experience prepared her for her life of entrepreneurship.
She started her first company with Dr. Thomas Frist, who later went on to found the Hospital Corporation of America. In the early days, the company’s name was RF for Roger Atkins and Fielder. The business helped placed pharmacists into hospitals and healthcare facilities on a part-time basis. Bettye learned her first important lesson early on. While they made good business as RF, their clients multiplied when they rebranded their firm as Healthcare Staff Resources. The clear and straightforward name allowed customers to find them more easily. And vice versa.
RUN YOUR BUSINESS WITH A CLEAR PURPOSE
Bettye launched Smart Start in 1993 to install car-locking devices in the cars of DWI offenders. Instead of penalizing DWI offenders with jail time, she wanted to get them back on the road safely and within reason. She was met with initial resistance from the local judicial department because they thought she was belittling the drunk driving offense. Bettye made it clear that she was working for everyone’s best interests. Smart Start allowed law enforcement to monitor DWI offenders because the car-locking devices were equipped with GPS. The devices also gave DWI offenders a second chance behind the wheel.
Smart Start eventually became Track What Matters, a full-service tracking solutions company for businesses that shipped goods all across the country. Based out of Flower Fields, Texas, Track What Matters monitors vehicles, assets, and information specifically in the way each client needs.

How tracking solutions maximize gains across a distribution platform
Above all, Bettye Rodgers believes in the power of commitment.
Her companies are the result of good effort and honest work, which is part of what makes her such an inspiring entrepreneur.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E50 | Doug Renfro Makes Hot Sauces
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/doug-renfro-makes-hot-sauces/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Episode-Cover-50-Doug-Renfro.png
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Content:
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Doug-Renfro-3rd-Generation-Proven-Entrepreneur-Running-Mrs.-Renfros.mp3
How Doug, Becky, and James Renfro turned salsas, dips, and sauces into a multi-million dollar household name all across America.

DOUG RENFRO KNOWS GREAT ENTREPRENEURS & HOT SAUCE
Mrs. Renfro’s is an 81-year-old business that specializes in all kinds of sauces.
GREAT ENTREPRENEURS – KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY
In the middle of the Great Depression, George and Arthurine Renfro started selling spices and vinegar out of their house in Fort Worth, Texas. The spices became maple syrup, which they sold in town fairs and Sunday markets. For a while, they mixed things up with chow chow, a Southern-style relish made with chopped bell peppers, green tomatoes, sweet onions, and cabbage. But the Renfro’s caught their big break when they started selling taco sauces in the 1970s. Mrs. Renfro’s is now the largest independent salsa brand in the United States.
Mrs. Renfro’s has been a family affair for over 8 decades. When Paw-paw and Maw-maw Renfro passed, their sons, Bill and Jack, took over the business. And when their sons and daughter got old enough to take over, Bill and Jack made the transition.
INNOVATION IS THE NAME OF THE GAME
The third generation Renfro kids were expected to get a bachelor’s degree in business and a little experience before coming back to the company. Doug was no different. He juggled part-time jobs while he worked on his finance degree. Immediately after graduation, he joined a large corporation that encouraged further learning. On top of his 70-hour weeks, he got certified as a Certified Management Accountant and got his MBA degree.
Doug was excellent at his corporate job. He had a natural knack for policy and procedure, but he had no love for the life at all. He was back at Mrs. Renfro’s within 7 years.
In the 29 years since, Doug has run Mrs. Renfro’s with unparalleled gusto. He spearheads product development and marketing. In fact, one of their best-selling products is their habañero sauce, which Doug dreamed up in a spur of the moment. To date, they offer over 30 different varieties of salsas, sauces, and dips. Their ghost pepper and Carolina reaper salsas have a cult following on Amazon.
SOME GREAT ADVICE FOR GREAT ENTREPRENEURS
Mrs. Renfro’s is available in almost every grocery and supermarket across the United States, but it wasn’t always like this. Doug gives some great advice:
One, persistence and tenacity are key. Whether you’re trying to grow a home business or a billion-dollar company, you have to have the determination to insist on your dreams. Over the years, Doug has had to pitch his products a countless number of times over. He got rejected more often than he could count. But like other great entrepreneurs, he kept trying until he succeeded.
Two, never pass up on a networking opportunity. It might be more comfortable to stay home and watch Netflix, but no growth happens there. Networking puts you in touch with like-minded individuals and breadths of experience. The solution to a persistent problem may be a single connection away.
And three, think outside of the box. Doug’s early marketing tricks involved sending free cases of salsa to TV and movie sets. He figured that if he could get the crew to start buying Mrs. Renfro’s for their homes, it would be a win. Luckily, crews really loved Doug’s salsa. Mrs. Renfro’s Salsa has been seen in episodes of the Big Bang Theory and Pretty Little Liars.

 
Doug Renfro runs Mrs. Renfro’s, an 81-year old salsa business based in Fort Worth, Texas.
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E48 | Eric Robb Makes Dream Homes
Date: September 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/eric-robb-makes-dream-homes/
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How Cortex Construction has delivered over $40 million in housing and real estate contracts in just a little over 10 years.
 
 
 
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Inspiring Entrepreneur Eric Robb Makes Dream Homes
Eric is the founder and President of Cortex Construction, a well-known construction contractor based in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
A Businessman At Heart,
Eric was a natural. Back in his high school days, he spent a lot of his weekends in Six Flags. One afternoon, he noticed a large, empty lot next to the theme park. He got the great idea to partner with the charity that donated the land. He ran a valet parking service over the next few summers and got his first taste of a real entrepreneur’s income.
High school eventually gave way to an economics degree in Texas A&M. Like most inspiring entrepreneurs, Eric had an independent streak. He put himself through university working odd jobs here and there. Upon graduation, he applied to a number of different companies, as was expected of business majors. He tried employment for five years but found that it wasn’t a good fit.
A Natural At Construction,
His first foray into entrepreneurship involved military imports. For 10 years, he brokered deals for antiques, surplus items, and firearms. It was good steady business until it wasn’t.
He pivoted and fell back into his first love, which was construction. Eric got his first experience in the industry when he was only 14-years old. At that time, he was hired to make small woodwork items for $2 an hour. In between classes, he would be at construction sites all over the city, working on his craft. Despite the long hours, he enjoyed the work immensely. And when he needed to restart his entrepreneurial journey, construction was the easy answer.
Eric launched Cortex Construction in 1999. Cortex Construction is a full-service construction contractor company that buys, renovates, rents, and sells commercial and residential properties. It specializes particularly in home and business remodeling and renovations.
As of 2017, the company has completed over $40 million in contracts. It is bonded, insured, and accredited with an A+ rating by the Better Business Bureau.
And An Inspiring Entrepreneur
Eric Robb
To date, Eric’s largest deal earned him $100,000 in the span of 90 days. But things aren’t always this easy. If Eric has learned anything over the last couple of years, it is that entrepreneurship is exceptionally difficult. He has lost friends, business partners, and money. Half of his mind is always thinking about the next big move, but the work itself is also always rewarding. He has high hopes that Cortex Construction will enter the next decade healthily and well.
Eric single-handedly runs one of the best-rated construction companies in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas.
Recently, Cortex Construction has expanded their services to include insurance claims. Any clients who need Eric’s services can reach him through eric@cortexconstruction.com.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E25 | Saurajit Kanungo – Proven Entrepreneur From India To Dallas
Date: September 7, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e25-saurajit-kanungo-proven-entrepreneur-from-india-to-dallas/
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Content:
 
All progress starts with a yes. Today’s proven entrepreneur proves that. Saurajit Kanungo grew up in India with no entrepreneurial background in his family. From there, he went on to become a successful IT entrepreneur in Texas. He shares the crucial events that happened in between in this interview with Don Williams. In this conversation, we learn how Saurajit’s willingness to do more and achieve more allowed him to become a leading entrepreneur in his industry today. He also shares some of the biggest lessons in entrepreneurship and business leadership that he has learned over the years. Join in and learn the power of hard work and perseverance in this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don WilliamsYou can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.comPlease join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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Saurajit Kanungo – Proven Entrepreneur From India To Dallas
All Progress Starts With A Yes…
I have my very good friend and you’re going to love him, Saurajit Kanungo from Capelle and Owner and Founder of Cyber Group, which is a software development IT company. Welcome, Saurajit.
Thank you, Don. I’m glad to be here.
We’re thrilled that you’re here. This is your success story, which typically, I’ll ask you if there’s a failing in there and there generally is somewhere. Let’s go back to when you were a young boy. In the household where you were raised, your parents, your grandparents, was someone entrepreneurial?
No one.
No entrepreneurial example as a young child?
Not at all. It never even came to mind.
Many people believe that entrepreneurs are raised in entrepreneurial homes but to me, I find this about half and half. Some were and some weren’t but there is wiring, maybe at birth that predisposes you to entrepreneurship. In my first paying job, I mowed the yard, not because I got paid but because there were consequences if I didn’t mow the yard. That doesn’t count. Not those kinds of jobs but what was your first paying job?
My first paying job was when I was doing my chartered accounting in India, which is like CPA here. We have to work for an accounting firm like Arthur Andersen or KPMG. It was almost like an indentured servant for three years but they do pay some stipend to cover your gas money and stuff like that.
It was outside of normal US employment law because it was normal Indian employment law.
I could clip about it but I learned a lot because in those three years when I became a chartered accountant, I was very comfortable reading the financial statement and P&L and auditing books.
When there’s a will, there’s a way. If we work hard and we’re disciplined, we can navigate all the challenges that are being put before us. Share on X
Many entrepreneurs have very strong finance backgrounds and then there are entrepreneurs like me who when I started could not spell P&L. I had to learn everything along the way. It comes in all flavors. You were born and raised in India. What part of India?
I’m from South Eastern part of India. It’s a nice coastal state with 200 miles of blue ocean coastline.
Many people in America probably don’t picture that India has a coastline but they have a lot. After chartered accounting, when did you come to the US?
I came to the US in 1998 to do my second Master’s in Information Systems. If I can tell you a little bit about the transition, you would think that I had all it planned and I’m executing the plan. My plan around my studies and career has been more zig and zag than anything but a straight line but I’m glad it is that way. I was always a studious person. I’m always top three in the class.
I chose to do my major in Physics because that’s the hardest subject arguably. I finished my Physics undergrad and was number three in the university, not just in my college. I was red carpeted to do my Master’s in Physics and PhD. I’m at the university for a couple of months. I’m a social person. I’m interacting with people. I found to my dismay that there are unemployed physics and PhD students.
They are brilliant people. I’m like, “I don’t want to be that.” There is a backlog in the university. There are not enough jobs for a professor. They’re going to get their chance. I’m like, “I am not going to take that chance.” I called my dad. I’m like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’m going to quit doing this so hang tight.” I scouted in my family and friends network who is doing what. My criteria, believe it or not, is who makes the most money?
They said, “There is something called a chartered accountant. The graduation percentage is less than 1% but if you get through that, you’re going to write your job description and offer letter.” I’m like, “Sign me up.” He says, “You don’t have a commerce or a business background.” I’m like, “Is it harder than physics?” “No, but it’s different.” “Different is good.” I went right through it. Typically, on average in India to complete chartered accountancy is between 5 to 6 years.
I completed the whole thing including my indentured servant tenure in three and a half years. I joined a pretty large company in Bombay. We had 60,000 employees and we own 5 major international airports in India. Delhi, Mumbai, Madras, known as Chennai, Kolkata and Trivandrum. I went into finance and accounting, as you can expect. The EDP, Electronic Data Processing, was a part of finance and accounting.
I inherited accidentally a bunch of programmers. They were trying to automate our accounting systems like payrolling and general ledger accounts payable and accounts receivable. I always hung out with them and teach them. When they are trying to write programming code, they don’t understand what a journal entry and a sub-ledger are so I teach them. I come to realize I started managing this project. It was massive automation. I got fascinated with the whole information system. I’m going to go to the US to do my second Master’s and that’s what I’m going to major in. That’s a little bit of the story.
Proven Entrepreneur: A good leader will run to the fire and be able to use words in a way that everybody can walk away intact.
 
Two things stand out. All progress starts with a yes. You were exposed to something and you said, “Yes, I’m going to do this and I love that.” The other is that great leaders have the ability to have difficult conversations. I’m trying to picture the conversation between you and your father when you said, “Dad, I’m not going down this path.” I have a very good friend in Oklahoma City. His parents were first-generation US from India and he said, “In my household, I had three choices, doctor, engineer or disappointment.” That was it.
Unfortunately, my dad said, “I’ll support you on whatever you want to do.” I had an issue with my mom. She’s the same mindset. “I thought you were going to do your Master’s and go for Indian administrative services,” which is a very coveted exam. I’m like, “Sorry, mom. That’s a lot of uncertainty. I don’t want to.” She was disappointed for a year or something but I had the support of my dad which I’m very thankful for.
Still, you’re entering that conversation, not knowing how it’s going to go. A good leader will run to the fire and be able to use words in a way that everybody can walk away intact. You’re still in India but you come to the US and do your masters in IT. Where do you do that?
You know that we have to appear in GMAT before we could apply to a business school. I’m not a native English-speaking so I had to also appear in another test called TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language. On GMAT, I had 97%. Any university I applied to will take me in but UT Arlington was gracious to offer me a full ride. The deal was that I would teach two undergrad classes. They offered me a full ride and a little bit of stipend for me to survive. I ended up in UT Arlington and got out of my Master’s with zero debt.
Contextually, at that time, $1 was worth 45 Indian Rupees. Even if I had a little bit of money saved up for my work in Bombay, when I converted that, it was not even enough for my first-semester tuition. A little bit of context. I’m a believer that when there is a will, there is a way. I hear people talk about how student loan is a big issue and it is a big issue. A college education is expensive and it is expensive but my mindset is we can complain about it or figure out a way that we could accept that it is expensive and difficult but if we work hard and we discipline, we can navigate those challenges that are put before us.
In certain studies, almost all graduates have significant physicians. Most physicians exit medical school with significant doubt. That has been the way since but they figure a way to make it work. We could certainly stand some more of that. You got to Arlington, Texas from India. It was a little different.
A little different but a lot similar.
Tell me about it.
The fortunate part is I spent seven years in Mumbai, India. Mumbai is the Wall Street of India. Believe it or not, it’s very Western work culture. Where I grew up in the South Eastern part of India, it’s anything about Western culture. I was fortunate. I had my ideas about Texas. I was thinking of Texas and Southern state. I’m a big fan of Margaret Mitchell when I read her book, Gone with the Wind when I was probably in eighth grade. I also like cotton fields, cowboys and horses. That was my view. I was fascinated. I land DFW in 1998. It adds cosmopolitan and diversity. I’d never expected that.
Let's try to replace the word “problem” with “opportunity.” You will be amazed how the energy is going to be much more positive. Share on X
Think about culture shock including work culture. I had minimal difficulty if that makes any sense. I was fortunate that Bombay prepared me very well. You touched on something if I may. When I came to the US, I had my idea of what I wanted to be. It was anything but being an entrepreneur. Why do I say that? I did very well with the 60,000-employee corporation and got promoted ahead of many people at a very young age. I embraced the big corporate culture extremely well. I was fortunate to have sponsors in that company who was putting me on a fast track.
My idea of coming here was that I’m probably going to work for a big corporation like Microsoft, IBM, AT&T or Verizon. They were hiring like crazy those days here. I’m like, “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to into a big corporation.” It so happened that nine months into my Master’s program, I met a small business owner. She had a technology staffing company with nine employees. She says, “I’m running out of bandwidth. I have a lot of back office stuff to take care of. I’m looking for part-time help. Would you be interested?”
The fortunate part about our immigration system student because I came in on a student visa is the student visa allows for something called a CPT curriculum, practical training that I could do at twenty-hour jobs so I did. Come to realize two months after joining a back-office person, I started talking to a lot of customers and they were like, “I need this person.” I’m like, “Why do you need that?” They said, “We’re trying to build this web application or database application.” I’m like, “I don’t think you need that. You should be thinking about this way or that way.”
They said, “Who are you?” I’m like, “I want to tell you that I had 65 developers. They were reporting to me and we were building this system.” They said, “Talk to me. How can you help me?” I started proposing projects and then hired people to staff those projects. In the meantime, after a year I got graduated, I ended up growing their company from 9 employees to 160 employees. I stayed there for a little over seven years and had a blast. I never thought I’ll be an entrepreneur or be thinking about such a small cashflow, making sure that the customers are paying on time and the customers are happy and growing people. It’s a 360 view of the whole thing.
Long story short, my endeavor to entrepreneur is purely an accident. I love it. People say, “Do you not feel scared?” I said, “I feel scared all the time.” They said, “How do you manage it?” I said, “I tune my mind to think like I’m standing on a cliff. This is my third entrepreneurial gig. I’ve never fallen. I’m always breathing fresh air and looking at a great view of the cliff. I will take that any day.”
As you were telling the story, I was thinking, maybe I should have plastered accidental over proven. The non-entrepreneurial world looks at entrepreneurs and says, “They all had a profit motive. They did it for the money.” After doing 100 of these and meeting a 35-year entrepreneur, that’s rarely the case. Many times, you kept saying yes and it led you down a certain path.
It’s a metaphor, the whole breathing fresh air. To me, we serve a lot of customers. I enjoy helping our customers. Most of our customers are either mid-size or large-size companies. I hate to put it this way but they hire us because they need help. Many times, help is also bringing some discipline to their dysfunctionality. I feel like W-2 can be a handcuff. If you ask me, I have no desire to go back and be a W-2.
At this point, you’re unemployable. I’m pretty sure it would be bad for everybody. In my entrepreneurial path, the primary motivator is I have a problem with authority. I don’t like people telling me what to do. That’s very common with entrepreneurs. They’ll launch a company and work 140 hours a week. There are only 168 hours in a week and make nothing rather than making a decent salary working for someone who tells them what to do.
I can tell you a story. I always wanted to play golf but there is no golf in India when I was there. I try to play years ago. I learn to play golf. When my kids were pretty young, I looked at the time commitment. I’m like, “I’m going to blink. They’re going to grow up and I’ll miss that so golf can wait.” I started learning to play golf several years ago. I was a little frustrated. It’s a fine game. You have to have focus and all that stuff. Somebody said to me, “Hire a coach.” I went and hired a coach. I paid for fifteen lessons or something like that.
Proven Entrepreneur: In my own entrepreneurial path, uh, the primary motivator is basically that I have a problem with authority. I don’t like people telling me what to do.
 
After the second lesson, I went to him and said, “Joe, it’s not you. It’s me. I have a problem with authority. I feel like you want me to change everything about me including my name. Thank you very much. Nice doing business with you.” I have never taken any coaching or anything. My handicap is probably 11 or 12. I enjoy the game and the journey. You are right. I have a problem with authority.
As the company from 9 to 160, you were W-2 there. After that, was that when you launched the first entrepreneurial?
I would say co-launched. This is a pretty successful company in Downtown Dallas or Uptown Dallas called Pariveda Solutions. The founder has been a mentor of mine for 15 or 16 years. He founded this company. The company was tiny when I approached him. It was like a small group of people trying to grow. I own a little piece of the company. We had fun growing the company. The company’s still growing and doing very well. That was my second venture.
Four and a half years into the company, I met the original founder of Cyber Group. The founder of Cyber Group has had this company since 1998, believe it or not. He built the company to 20 employees give or take and co-stayed there for almost 12 years. In 2009, when I met him, he said, “I have 3 kids, 2 biological and then Cyber Group. My two kids are grown up. They are not dependent on me. I want Cyber Group to be able to stand on its leg, outlive me and grow.”
I was contemplating building and pounding my company. This felt like a better choice because the original founder built a solid culture. I’m like, “I could leverage the culture, make the culture thrive and grow my people.” This is my baby for many years. I’m having fun. The company has grown 20 times in revenue and probably 12 times in employee size. We make a decent amount of money but most of all, we have fun.
You solve problems for other people.
We do. If you ask me what we do, we do many complicated things. I don’t want to bore people to death but at the end of the day, I feel like what Cyber Group does is grow people to delight our customers.
My mission is helping people help people. We’re all in the people business. I don’t care what industry we’re in. It’s all about people all the time. Thinking back to your career, what about a hard lesson? Something you learned that was painful at the time. Maybe in retrospect turned out to be the very best thing that could have happened but at the time, you didn’t like it. Do you have a hard lesson you could share with us?
I have two but let me start with one. We’re all young. We want to make a difference to people around us, in the company or in the customer’s place. This was several years ago. I’m still passionate but I was emotional and passionate about giving feedback to people around me, whether it’s a performance review or a mentoring session. I had a great technical architect who was on my team and I wrote his review. My reviews were like, “You do well here. You do badly here.” Direct.
Learn to be patient. Try to not just think about the destination. Think about the journey also. Share on X
That’s how I used to give my feedback. I used to work for a guy. He’s on my board. He took me out for lunch and said, “Let’s go grab lunch. Why are you so direct in your feedback?” I’m like, “Why not? I don’t want to beat around the bush. I need to call a spade a spade.” This gentleman was way more seasoned than I am. He said, “You’re telling me that your focus is to give feedback?” I’m like, “Yes.” “That’s what your intent is.” “Yes, what would it be?” “I thought that the purpose of mentoring sessions and performance reviews is to change behavior, not just give feedback.”
It didn’t take me even a second to realize what he said. My defenses were down. I’m like, “You hit my head with a big hammer. I get it.” It may be a subtle lesson but it isn’t. The intention is a bigger thing. I’m not suggesting we don’t give feedback and push negative feedback down the road. Since that day, I have learned a lesson that I have to add my feedback with an intent. How I can deliver that feedback that I’m hoping for a better probability of changing behavior? That was a very important lesson that I practice and preach every day.
Are we great leaders if we’re not developing other leaders and all people to be the best leader they can be? We all have short false and we need feedback because there are things in our blind spot that we don’t see. Ultimately, I’m trying to develop other leaders. It’s a great hard lesson. Thank you. What about a nugget or a piece of wisdom, something you’ve learned along the way that the Proven Entrepreneur clan with 40,000 downloads in 2022 wants to know?
Most of us have a science and engineering background, the people I work with, whether on the customer side are starting to be more business people we’re dealing with than on the customer side but mostly, science and technology. There is a lot of good that comes out of our background. We solve a lot of complex problems and stuff that help a lot of customers, complete projects and all that stuff.
We’ve been wired to think very logically. With our logical thinking, we solve a lot of problems. What I have found that we can think about, even if there is an opportunity, is we tend to call it a problem and then solve them. I’m like, “Why do we do that?” Let’s say we’ve grown 40% in 2021 but there are a couple of other companies that have grown 60% or double their size. Is that a problem that we grew only 40%?
I have started to evangelize in my team saying, “Can we start calling it opportunity instead of the problem?” They said, “How does it make a difference?” I said, “It does make a difference because the energy talks about something positive and a problem to me is a negative term.” It may create negative energy. If there is an opportunity for us to grow our company bigger, the people around you feel like the companies are acknowledging that we’re doing something positive and we want to do something more. The nugget is that let’s try to replace the word problem with opportunity. You will be amazed how the energy is going to be much more positive and the probability of you influencing a bunch of people around you to go where you want them to go is probably higher.
Words are so important. The most important words are the words we say to ourselves, which sometimes are the best words. It was not my favorite philosopher but maybe my 2nd or 3rd favorite philosopher, Bruce Lee, who said, “Never talk bad about yourself, even in jest.” Your brain doesn’t know the difference. Your just brain hears the word.
We’re going to put you in a time machine and take you back. You’re going to get about 60 seconds to talk to your 20-year-old self. What we want to know is this. What would you tell your twenty-year-old self that would have sped you along your entrepreneurial path, something you know now that you wish you knew then?
I have to tell my twenty-year-old that you learn to be patient and try to not just think about the goal and the destination. Think about the journey also. I remember I’ve always been ambitious and I’m still an ambitious person but I used to get very frustrated if I’m not able to achieve my goals and ambition as I thought that I would. Nothing good comes out of that feeling. I remember that even if I achieved that ambition, very quickly I’ll forget all about that and then I would focus on the next ambition. There was an inherent restlessness in my twenties. I have learned to be more patient, focus on the journey and live every day. The destination is important.
Proven Entrepreneur: The purpose of performance reviews is to change behavior, not just give feedback.
 
I’ve learned some of that myself. Sometimes I think some of those things take miles or years to learn but I wish I had the opportunity to tell my twenty-year-old self, “Listen up. Pay attention to this.” Any way we can support or help you?
Help the people I work with. They’re an incredible group of people. Most of them have engineering degrees. They think all decisions are logical. We talked about that. Hopefully, you and I are going to keep talking and see ways to infuse some of your wisdom, thoughts and philosophies in a small dose. We don’t need to know run on them.
How would someone reach out to you or Cyber Group? What’s the best way to do that?
The best way to do that is to go to www.CyGrp.com.
Thank you so much. It has been my distinct pleasure to have you as a guest.
Likewise, Don. Thank you so much.
That’s it for our episode. See you next time. Thanks. Bye.
 
Important Links

Cyber Group
Gone with the Wind
Pariveda Solutions
https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/Saurajit/

 
About Saurajit Kanungo
Saurajit is passionate about helping customers realize consistent value from their investments in technology. He has a strong background in conducting technology strategy, business systems planning, software/vendor selection, solution architecture, and project/program management. Saurajit has program managed large scale multi-year, multi-million dollar digital transformation initiatives. He has also spearheaded multiple long-term business systems roadmap efforts.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don WilliamsYou can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.comPlease join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E24 | Red Clover Advisors – Jodi Daniels
Date: August 16, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e24-red-clover-advisors-jodi-daniels/
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Content:
Entrepreneurship is a challenge but is very rewarding. You have to be persistent and goal-oriented if you want to achieve your goals. Listen to your host Don Williams as he dives deep into a conversation with Jodi Daniels about data privacy and compliance. Privacy is one of those complex things you must understand if you want to incorporate an excellent leadership style in your organization. Jodi Daniels is a Certified Informational Privacy Professional with more than 20 years of experience helping businesses get to where they want to be. In this episode, she shares critical insights on the importance of communication, due diligence, and building relationships with people. Are you facilitating open communication and setting realistic goals in your business? Tune in to learn more about privacy, marketing, business strategies, and inspiring people through leadership.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
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Red Clover Advisors – Jodi Daniels
Data Privacy And Compliance Guru
Welcome back to this episode of the show. I have my good friend from Red Clover Advisors, Jodi Daniels. Jodi, welcome to the show.
I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on. Let’s jump right in. Tell me. What do Red Clover Advisors do?
We are all about helping companies establish trust with customers by complying with different privacy laws and helping you figure out if you can collect that data, what you should do with it and what you should tell the end person.
Tell us about some of the big privacy laws entrepreneurs should know about.
It also matters where your customers are. One of the biggest misnomers is people always think about where their company is located. It doesn’t matter where your company’s located. We all could be in Tahiti drinking our little strawberry fruity drinks and have customers around the world. We have to deal with the privacy laws where our customers are.
The big ones are going to be in the EU GDPR. That’s the General Data Protection Regulation. Lots of people are familiar with that law because a couple of years ago, cookie banners popped up all over the internet that said, “We’re going to use cookies. Accept me before you could use the site.” That’s what most people think about GDPR, the cookie banner law. It’s so much more than that but that is the external view.
 
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If you have customers who are from the EU, you have to know that law. It’s the gold standard of privacy laws around the world. In the United States where you and I are, we have some federal laws. We’re all familiar with the ability to unsubscribe from an email or a text message. We’re like, “Stop calling me during dinner time.” Some federal laws are all about controlling that but what’s new on the horizon are our state privacy laws.
We have California as the first state who has a privacy law and other states like to follow. We have what’s called CCPA. It’s the California privacy law. There is a new California privacy law coming and then a Virginia law and a Colorado law. That’s all we have with other states trying to play catch up and join the California, Virginia and Colorado party. Those would be the big ones that people should be paying attention to. We won’t talk too much but if you’re in the health space or financial space, there have been privacy laws for a long time, especially here in the United States, for those that you’d have to consider as well.
Thank you for sharing. In one of my businesses, we’re in the contact center business. We do phone calls, inbound and outbound, for large corporations all across the world. 2002 is when the federal government passed Do Not Call where consumers could opt out of having their phone number called. There are 2 or 3 sets of federal regulations.
Some overlap and some do not. Some apply to some businesses and some apply to all businesses. In addition, 38 states have their own Do Not Call regulation. It gets pretty complicated. Let me ask you. Do you see the same thing happening with data privacy that we have 1 state firmly entrenched and 2 more coming on? Do you think that in a couple of years we catch the other 47?
Yes. In the privacy space, the privacy people say, “3 down, 47 left to go.” That’s where we are for a variety of different reasons. We do have multiple states. Over several years, we have introduced privacy legislation and it hasn’t passed for a variety of different reasons. Washington State is back for the fourth time with its new privacy law. Florida on both sides, House and Senate, have introduced privacy laws again. It’s the same with New York. Each time, they keep learning and iterating. As you get other states passing, that then puts further pressure on those states who keep introducing to do it. After a while, you’re going to have so many states. The others are going to look and say, “I should join the party.”
About the data breach laws, we didn’t talk about that because we’re going to focus on the privacy side. If you were to have a data breach, there are 50 data breach laws that you’d have to contend with. Every state has its own. There is no national data breach law. People always say, “Are you going to have a federal privacy law?”
GDPR is a national approach to privacy. We have one of those in the United States. There are lots of arguments both pro and con. The reality is privacy is complicated. We already have existing national sectorial privacy laws, like the Do Not Call, email unsubscribe, HIPAA for healthcare and GLBA for financial. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, that’s the big privacy statement you get in the mail from your credit card or your bank and you throw it away. That requirement is from the financial side.
 
Data Privacy: The reality is we’re not going to have a federal law for quite some time. And so everyone should get ready for a patchwork state of privacy laws. The reality is privacy is complicated.
 
You have all these sectors already with privacy laws to smoosh all together and then get 50 states all to agree. Does the federal law override the state’s ability or is it the floor and the states can still come on top? That’s complex. To make it meaningful and work with future technology is complex. Regardless of what side of the political aisle you’re on, it’s hard to agree on anything. Privacy is one more of those complex things.
From a global trade perspective, it’s becoming challenging from a business operation perspective to have 50 state laws. I’m in the business. That would be awesome for my business but it’s not awesome for businesses. However, the reality is I don’t think we’re going to have a federal law for quite some time. Everyone should get ready for a patchwork state of privacy laws.
If it follows the same path as Do Not Call, we’ll end up with all of the above.
You’ll have a floor and the state law that can go above it. That’s exactly right.
You could violate federal law and not violate individual state law and/or vice versa. The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, the FCC, the Federal Communication Commission and to a lesser extent, the SEC and some of the financial offices all have their versions of Do Not call. Somehow, that business owner has to try and figure out how to be compliant with all those. Sometimes, it’s not simple.
What’s unique to these modern privacy laws is we are talking about data in every aspect of your business. Some of these laws include your employees. Some of them include your vendors. It’s a misnomer that it’s only B2C. Some of them include B2B. It also involves when I sign up for an email or how I do any type of digital targeting or digital measurement. It includes when I’m shipping and sending.
Every aspect of the operations of a business is where you have to think about that personal data. Maybe I don’t make calls so I can ignore all that Do Not Call stuff. I’d be like, “I’m off the hook.” Except if you do anything else, you’re going to still have all that data and think about, “When am I collecting? How am I using it? Who am I sharing it with?” You then have to think about what the privacy law obligations that you have to contend with are. That’s where you’re going to have to start matching up states.
 
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I had a call with a very small company where they don’t have to comply with one of these laws because they’re, technically speaking, too small. They fall under the floor or the threshold that one of the state laws put in place but they know from a competitive standpoint that they should comply. If they don’t comply, their competition will be. You’re going to have to start thinking about, “Who are my competitors?” Even if you technically don’t have to, you should, because that’s what customers, whether you’re B2C or B2B, will start expecting.
Thank you so much. It sounds to me that you are the authority in the space. If you have questions out there, you call Jodi because she has answers. I want to go back to young Jodi. Tell me about the household that you were raised in as a young girl. Did someone set an entrepreneurial example for you in your childhood? Was it your mother, father or grandparents?
They both did. No one worked at traditional corporate. My dad had his business. He was also in sales. He could sell anything. My mom has always been in residential real estate and owned her brokerage or worked for others. It’s still always about building your business. However, that isn’t what I thought I was going to do. While raised in that environment, I didn’t set out to say, “I want to have my business.” It took a path, a process and a journey for me to get there.
In this episode, we’ll explore at least some of that path and journey. Tell us about your first job where you got paid. It’s not where you mowed the yard because mom and dad said you had to but the first job where you got paid. What was that job?
I can think of two. The first one was babysitting. It’s a very typical job for a younger girl. I do remember talking to my friends. When I was a girl, The Baby-Sitters Club was a popular series as a book to read. I remember I had this cool little fort off to the side of my driveway. I remember something about my babysitting club or ideas that I’d have. There were families on the street that I would babysit for. It was that one.
As I got older, when I was sixteen, my very first real job, if you will, with a paycheck from an official place was at a drug store. I was super excited because I got to wear the key ring. I remember feeling official because I’d have this cool key ring and it would jingle. That was my job, except I wanted to work at GAP but I didn’t get that job. First, I got another job and then the job at GAP. I quit and gave up my cool key ring to work at the GAP. I worked there for a long time. I loved it. I still fold my clothes like I did back when I was sixteen.
After school, you backpacked across Europe. You joined the United States Marines and then went to university. What’d you do?
 
Data Privacy: Every aspect of the operations of a business is where you have to think about that personal data. Every aspect of the operations of a business is where you have to think about that personal data.
 
I had a fancy job all lined up but that summer, I took care of my dad. The first summer after college while lots of people would go backpacking before they start their job typically in August or September, my dad got sick right at college graduation. I went home, took care of him and nursed him back to health. I’m excited to say that he is still here and doing well. It was a very interesting summer but that is what I did. I just nursed my dad.
I then came back to Atlanta where I had gone to school. I went to Florida to take care of him. I came back here and started an accounting job. When I was in school, I was an accounting major. When you got an internship and did well at the internship, then you got this job. I felt like it was a fancy job at the time. I rode the path as you were supposed to do so it wasn’t a fancy job. It was probably one of the less-paying jobs of all of my classmates but you got one. You were guaranteed one.
I worked at Deloitte. It was a wonderful place to work. It was a lovely experience but eventually, it was not for me. I remember early on people were saying, “What are you doing in accounting? You don’t have the personality to be in accounting.” I loved the relationships. I had a great client when I worked at the firm and wonderful people. That’s honestly what kept me there for nearly the five years I was there.
It’s such a wonderful foundational skill for an entrepreneur to understand finance.
I worked on the auditing side. The foundation’s even broader because for someone coming out of school who knows nothing, you are thrown into a client environment. You have to learn how to deal with clients and different tiers in a firm structure. I sat across from a partner that’s 20 or 30 years older than me. Back in the day, do you remember where you had to have a phone line to the internet and share the phone or the phone line? I’m sitting across from a partner. You have to learn how to be able to communicate.
In the actual work, you have to be able to interact with clients who are very senior to you and understand the process in the overall business. From an audit perspective, you have to understand the entire business and operations. You’re focused on the financial controls piece. Fast forward to the work I’m doing, it’s the same thing but instead, I’m focused on the personal data as opposed to the financial piece. It’s about asking good questions about the process. It is an amazing foundation for anyone going through. Lots of people do it for 2 years and then move on but I was able to stay for 5. 5 years is a big deal in the big 4 worlds. It is something because I use those skills every day.
Where I’m sitting in the studio, I’m about five minutes from the big Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas.
 
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I was always disappointed. They built it before and then we had 9/11. I never had a chance to be able to go but I hear wonderful things about it.
It is a phenomenal facility from what you can see from the road. It’s not open to the public. It’s in the middle of what used to be the Circle T Ranch, which was a very large ranch owned by the H.L. Hunt family here in Texas. You went and did accounting at Deloitte. Is Red Clover your first entrepreneurial company?
It is but it was after a bunch of different hops. I woke up one day and decided, “Accounting is not for me.” I went to the Home Depot where I did some financial work and then strategy work while going back to get my MBA. I did a full-time MBA and full-time work. When I was done with that, I went over to Cox Enterprises, which is a big media company. For over a decade, I did strategy work and went to one of our subsidiaries, which was AutoTrader.com. They then merged into a different subsidiary called Cox Automotive, if anyone’s ever heard of that.
For over seven years, I did behavioral targeting. I stalked you for ads before Facebook ads did that. Now, everyone goes to Facebook and they’re like, “I shopped for those shoes or the blender and it’s showing up in my feed.” I did that for cars. If you bought a car a couple of years ago, I did that. You’re welcome. From there is how I got into privacy because the industry came together and said, “We need to prevent government legislation on this.” It worked for around ten years.
I was responsible for that compliance from the company’s compliance with the self-regulation happening in the online industry. I created a full-time job for myself. I thought that would be fun so I built a privacy program at Cox Automotive. I then went over to Bank of America and was their Digital Privacy Expert for two years. I then said, “That was fun.” Nineteen years after the day I started my job at Deloitte was my last day at the bank. That’s when I opened Red Clover.
It speaks to most entrepreneurs. It is a path and a journey. There were many stops, twists and turns along the way that got them to where they are. Think back across your career either on the W-2 side or as an entrepreneur. Share a hard lesson. It is something that you learned the hard way that at the time might’ve been painful but in retrospect, turned out to be a huge plus for you along your path.
I can think of a couple of examples. One of them was in working with the sales team. It was something I hadn’t done before. It was understanding how to communicate the value of something I knew well but the sales team was new to them. We were also trying to convince clients and figure out how to work with all of those different people. I thought it should be done one way and that was a clash with how other people thought it should be done. In hindsight, I understand I have to change the way I communicate and the way I’m explaining the information so that the other side gets it and it resonates with them. I didn’t understand that because it was all new to me at the time. That was one.
 
Data Privacy: The way someone else thinks is different from how you think and you really have to understand how the other person is thinking and be able to translate that into their language and follow up the way they need to be.
 
The other is it’s important to continue when you hand off a project to someone. Going back to communication, it is making sure that there’s clear communication and expectations, maybe follow up along the way. There have been some times where I’ve handed it off a little bit too much and then, unfortunately, the project derailed because that person needed more guidance and expectations to help make sure that the other side also got what we thought that they needed.
I was the person who knew at the beginning and who I handed it to didn’t have all of that same information. I handed it off because I didn’t want to micromanage. I didn’t appreciate who that person was and how I needed to manage that person so, unfortunately, the project derailed. The other side wasn’t quite as happy. Even though we did all the work, the process and the way we did it weren’t the best.
You see communication everywhere, whether you’re in a company, you’re an entrepreneur or in a personal relationship. You think one thing and the way someone else thinks is different. You have to understand how the other person is thinking and be able to translate that into their language. You have to follow up the process that’s going to work for them because what works for you doesn’t work for somebody else. That’s the short version.
We’re all seeing things through our glasses. It’s impossible for me to see things through your glasses. The only option I have is to say, “How did you hear it? What do you understand.” It’s for you to give it back to me. I was on a phone call with a client. He shared a statement that clarity is kindness. I was like, “Tell me more about that.” That clear communication is very kind.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs, managers, supervisors and leaders shy away from being clear because they don’t want to sound too forceful. Giving people clear communication is the highest kindness so that we all know exactly where we’re at. Thanks for sharing that. What about a warp speed moment? Things are going pretty well and 1, 2 or 3 events happen. You take a couple of actions and all of a sudden, you have this unbridled unrestrained growth. Do you have a warp speed moment you can share?
That’s like the hockey stick moment. I don’t know if there’s a perfect one. I feel like I experienced it in 2021 for two reasons. One, in the privacy space, several privacy laws were passed in 2021. The forward-thinking companies and ones that liked to plan started to decide, “I have to plan all of this now.” I started to feel that in Q4 of 2021. At the same time, how did they all find me? Those are those seeds that I’ve worked so hard over time to plant. That is where it’s not perfect like, “I did something. Look at all of the things.” It’s that hard work and the diligence of building relationships with people.
We’ve had a relationship over time and we didn’t meet. If we met yesterday, you weren’t like, “Come on out.” We had to build a relationship. The same is true in business and many relationships, whether it be partners or referral connections. Even the content that I’ve been putting out has been consistent in continuing to try and understand the audience that builds the content so that Google is doing its thing behind the scenes. All of those seeds are things that I’ve done over time. I felt like with companies paying attention and what I had been doing, those two things are starting to work and you can see the hockey stick moment.
 
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There’s some truth in that. Many times, entrepreneurs looking for the magic bullet are like, “What’s the one thing I can do and buy? What’s the one service I can incorporate that will put me on the rocket ship and things will explode?” The reality is this. Be better every day. Ultimately, that will catch up. I love that. What about a golden nugget? What is some wisdom from the mind of Jodi that we all want to know?
The one that I love the most is entrepreneurship is hard. It’s a challenge and a journey. Some days are amazing and on other days, you’re like, “Why am I doing this again?” You can apply that to parenting. I love my kids. Some days, I’m like, “You need to go back to school.” Through all of that, it’s persistence. It’s the belief of the goal or whatever it is that you have in front of you. I like what you said. Focus on something that you can do. Persistence is a theme that I’ve had as a kid.
I’ve always been the Type A hardworking person that sets a goal and says, “I want to get there.” Sometimes, those goals are hard. Sometimes, they shift. Sometimes, they change. Sometimes, there are obstacles or mountains. Pick whatever phrase works for you in there. You keep inching up and celebrating each little milestone. For me, I celebrate every day.
I’ve had this in a personal experience and a professional experience. I know where I want to go. Some days, it feels like I took 1 step forward and 5 steps back but then, the next day, I get up and it’s a brand new day. To me, every day is an opportunity. I truly feel that way. I’ve always been that way. When you blend every day is an opportunity with persistence together, you will get there. I’m a very impatient person. I wanted to get there. I try and remind myself, “I’m getting there. I’m on the path to where I want to go. I’m doing the right things. I’m consistent.” That is the motivation that keeps me going. Every day is an opportunity. Continue the motivation and persistence.
On persistence, you can’t lose as long as you’re still trying. One day, you’ll get there. I can’t predict what day. I don’t know what day but one day. That’s great. We’re going to put you in a time machine to take you back to twenty-year-old Jodi. You get 60 or 90 seconds to share a piece of advice or two with your 20-year-old self about something you know now that you didn’t know then but had you known then and had listened and acted on that would have sped you along your path. What do you tell her?
It’s very interesting because we talked about being goal-oriented. I’ve always been that way. I also was always trying to prove myself. I thought if I could show all these people what I was capable of, I’d get this chance and be able to keep moving up the little invisible ladder that I had. I would say, “If I didn’t put all my effort into that and focused a little bit, was a little less serious, was having a little bit more fun, believed in the process more and tried less on trying to prove who I was, people would have already seen the value.” What happened is people saw this strong personality and didn’t understand the reason behind it. It was misinterpreted.
I would do that. I would make sure that I was having fun and doing a good job but not always paying attention to as much as what people were thinking around me. If I was always thinking, “What are they thinking of me?” I’m so focused on my actions related to that. If I had stripped that, I could have been free of all of it and focused on, “Here’s this great thing. I’m going to work hard and build these relationships.” It would have been a little bit easier in my corporate life.
 
Data Privacy: Persistence and having the belief of the goal or whatever it is that you have in front of you is important. You focus on something that you can do today.
 
Most of the time, they’re not thinking about us anyway. We think they’re thinking about us but they’re not. They’re oblivious. If somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to do that?
There are two places. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn because it’s my happy place and then my website. I have lots of resources on what is this privacy thing and this trust thing and what you need to do at RedCloverAdvisors.com.
You can reach out to Jodi Daniels at RedCloverAdvisors.com. I met you on LinkedIn originally. We knew each other in other ways but we connected on LinkedIn. It’s been my distinct pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much.
I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
We’ll see you next time on the show. Thank you. Bye.
 
Important Links

Red Clover Advisors
The Baby-Sitters Club
AutoTrader.com
LinkedIn – Jodi (Jodi Hoffman) Daniels

 
About Jodi Daniels
Founded in 2017 by Jodi Daniels, Red Clover Advisors is currently one of the few certified Women’s Business Enterprises, (WBENC), focused solely focused on privacy.
Jodi Daniels is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP-US), National Keynote Speaker, featured in Forbes, Inc., The Economist, Thrive Global, Authority Magazine, Medium and also a member of the Forbes Business Council.
Founded in 2017 by Jodi Daniels, Red Clover Advisors is currently one of the few certified Women’s Business Enterprises, (WBENC), focused solely focused on privacy.
Jodi is co-host of She Said Privacy / He Said Security podcast. Each week, Jodi joins her husband, Justin Daniels, a cybersecurity subject matter expert and also corporate attorney specializing in M&A and other business transactions, to talk all things privacy & security.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E23 | Exceptional Service Provider – Kamard Johnson
Date: August 15, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e23-exceptional-service-provider-kamard-johnson/
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Content:
 
Too fast may not be too wise. Some good things take the right timing and the right people to work out. This is exactly what Kamard Johnson, CEO/CVO at GTT Commercial Tires, learned. If you are thinking of taking your business to the next level, this is the podcast for you! In this episode, Kamard shares insights on how focusing on building processes, creating roles, filling them with the right people, and providing excellent service can give your business the leverage to take off. So tune in and learn about a platform that can teach you about starting, scaling, and owning your own tire store.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Exceptional Service Provider – Kamard Johnson
I have a super entrepreneur. He’s a very young guy and had great success very early on. Kamard Johnson, thank you for joining us.
Don, thank you so much for having me. I’m super grateful to be here.
I’m going to take you all the way back to a little Kamard age 5 up to 18 maybe. The household where you were raised, whether that was with mom, dad or grandpa, however that work. It doesn’t matter. Was there an adult in the house that was an entrepreneur that gave you an entrepreneurial example as a young child?
I’ll give you the entire framework if that’s okay with you.
Sure.
Single-parent household. There was my grandmother, my mother, my brother and myself. We lived in an urban area, not the greatest but not the worst. My mother worked a traditional job, as many Americans do. I didn’t get it from her. I’m much more conservative. I want to know if I work X amount of hours, I’m going to make X amount of dollars. My brother, on the other hand, was very entrepreneurial for as long as I can remember. He’s tried some of everything. I can point to him early on subconsciously being an example and someone that I looked up to. That probably has played a part in my ability to become an entrepreneur.
When I first started the show, and we’ve now done about 100 episodes, I thought that every entrepreneur had an entrepreneurial example, but it’s only about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4. Most entrepreneurs are wired a little differently, and when an opportunity presents itself and they walk through the door. That’s the difference. Thanks for sharing. 
We’re still with little Kamard. What’s your first job where you got paid or maybe your first job was entrepreneurial? I’ve talked with people who did a lemonade stand and that was the first place they made money. What’s the first place you made money, whether it was a job or entrepreneurial? Would you share that with us?
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I’ll give you the three stages for me. The first portion was in school, I was on the basketball team and I started to do homework for a lot of my teammates, which then turned into doing homework for a lot of the football team. It’s like anything in school. Things spread pretty fast. That was the first opportunity that I had where I earned wages for myself. The second stage for me was selling Pokémon cards, jerseys, and things like that my mom had purchased for me. I had either grown out of it or wasn’t interested anymore.
I saw an opportunity before I even knew what the word arbitrage meant. I knew I had no cost in it at all and I could sell it to another young child or kid for more than what I had in it. The third phase for me, my first official real job, was at TJ Maxx, where I was in the back working in the stock room. I then got promoted to working at the front desk or checking you out as a cashier. Eventually, I moved up to a part-time manager there. Those were the three stages for me that escalated the earning wages rollercoaster for me.
It sounds like your mother and grandmother instilled you with a strong work ethic. One easy way to beat your competition is to outwork them. It helps to outsmart them but you can beat them if you outwork them. That’s awesome. We’re going to leave young Kamard in history. At eighteen, did you join the Marine Corps or backpacked across Europe or take a year off and live on the beach? What did you do?
At eighteen, Kamard graduates high school. While in high school, I was working at H.H. Gregg. I escalated to a cashier, which was glorified customer service merchandise. That’s what they called me. I proposed to the sales manager at the time because I saw those guys. I figured they made money way more than what we did just ringing up people. He agreed to allow me to give the sales floor a try.
I went out there. I sold electronics first, then I didn’t like how that worked because if you came in and you wanted to get a TV but you had your wife with you. She also wanted to get a dishwasher then what had to happen was I would get the commission for the TV sale but a colleague of mine would get the sale for the dishwasher.
I’m like, “Why do we do things that way?” Up until that point, no one at least explored that with the manager and so I did. I’m like, “If I educate myself on the appliance piece of it and I also educate on the electronics piece of it, would you guys be comfortable if I cross-sold?” They did. I don’t know if they thought about what the repercussions would be from the other salespeople on the side of the appliance or maybe they didn’t care because it was about sales.
Either way, they gave me the opportunity and I took it. Now, when you came in, I could sell you whatever you wanted and your wife, whatever she wanted. That made a great opportunity for me to bring in some decent money as a young 18 or 17-year-old kid, even 16 is when I originally got over there and I liked it.
At the time, an individual walked in. He was dressed sharply and I didn’t allude to what he did. At the end of the transaction of selling him a dishwasher for his wife for their anniversary, he was like, “Nothing against this place but I feel like you got more talent than what you’re being able to utilize here. Would it be okay if I gave your name to a recruiter where I work?” I’m like, “Yes, but what do you do though?” He was very vague. He never told me anything, so I thought nothing of it.
Service Provider: Our customers are everything; we don’t just understand that but magnify what it really means. Without raving customers, all we have is a building, tires, a logo, and a name.
 
Fast forward about 3 or 4 months later, a recruiter reaches out to me. I agreed to go in and meet with her. This place happened to be Northwestern Mutual. I’m like, “This is finance.” I’m still in high school. I don’t know anything about it but I’m intrigued. It seemed like a money-making opportunity. That was something that was a motivator for me because I wanted to contribute and I was contributing to the expenses in the household. That was one of the ways I’ve always been able to show my mother how much I appreciate everything that she’s done and sacrificed for me.
I went and in the first couple of conversations with the lady, as we’re maybe 10 to 15 minutes into it, she was like, “We think you will make a good intern here.” I was like, “Intern? Interns don’t make money. There must have been some miscommunication. I apologize but I’m here to make money. This is a job opportunity, right?” She was like, “Do you think you can cut it?” I was like, “Yes.” She was like, “You don’t even know what we do.” I was like, “Explain it, then I’ll learn it and I can do it.” Fast forward, after about seven interviews with different people within the organization, they finally ended up getting me a meeting with the managing partner.
I knew it was going well. It was only supposed to be a ten-minute meeting. I look up and we’re over an hour. As people rise through the ranks, they don’t tend to waste time. For him to spend an hour with me, I figured I was doing all right. They ended up offering me the job. It was a Friday and I told him that I needed to take the weekend to think it over. It blew him away because he was like, “Do you understand the opportunity that I’m offering you? What do you mean you have to think about it?” The reason was, and not to be arrogant or anything, I did have other alternatives.
H.H. Gregg was willing to move me to Schaumburg, Illinois to be a store manager. I was considering that. I’m young and moving to another place, a big city. I had another financial opportunity with MassMutual and I had this opportunity. I had to think it over. I ultimately decided to go with them. By far, it was one of the greatest things I did because I learned a ton about finance, managing money, and a lot of high-level things that one coming from my background and circumstance probably would not have gained.
Especially due to the fact that I forewent going to college. Also, I made some great relationships with some dope individuals that have helped aid in my progression and development in my life. That was eighteen-year-old Kamard. Right out of high school, going and working for a top financial institution with no college experience and no financial experience.
Were you on the insurance or the broker side?
I started on the insurance side and then quickly grew to do the broker side as well. It was a great time for me.
You don’t know this about me but we’re brothers of different mothers. At eighteen, I went to college for about a minute or maybe two minutes. I had a sales job, which I’m not sure about. I had a buddy who made quite a bit of money and I was like, “I want to do that.” I took the sales job and within eight months, I was the top salesman in the country. Selling is a foundational entrepreneurial skill.
What you focus on matters. Focus shapes your emotions. How you feel emotionally usually dictates how you perform. Share on X
It doesn’t matter what your product, service or experience is. Somebody has got to buy it and sometimes, they need a little help to buy it. We need somebody who can communicate the offer in an appealing and non-threatening manner where people say yes. You are my brother from another mother, for sure. Tell me your current business. You’re in the commercial tire business. Did you go from Northwestern Mutual to the commercial tire business?
No. The transition was out the Northwestern Mutual, my brother and I launched his idea to start our car dealership together. I parted ways and went to do that with him. Financially, it wasn’t a success because it was too little for too much. It was a lot of headaches for very little payoffs for us. After about three years, I was like, “We got to get out of this.” The last car that we sold allowed us to unwind the business. We celebrated it as if it was the first car that we sold. That creates such excitement for most.
That was the transition there, then I left that. My brother continues to start something else as he always has done, as I said, as early as I can remember. I went to work at CarMax because there was a manager there who was my manager at H.H. Gregg. It was a lot of synergies there and it made sense to me. I went in there and did well, just as I did at Northwestern Mutual.
It was easy for me. I came in. I’ll sell you a car, I’ll sell your buddy a car, and I’ll sell one other person a car, then I go home for the day. That is how it worked for me up until the point where my mother started to press me on joining forces with my brother again in the tire company that he had started with seven used tires in his backyard in 2016.
Fast forward to 2018, he had grown it to 317,000 and had very limited overhead because it was one other employee other than himself. He had a warehouse that was only about maybe $1,500 per month. His model was very simplistic in the sense that it was just cash and carry, pick up and take with. Guys would come with their pickup truck, take eight tires or one tire, and that would be that. That was the transition for me.
It had gotten to a point to fill it out. You want to honor your mother’s wishes. I was like, “Let me see what he got going on.” I would go up to the warehouse that he had, take my CarMax shirt off, put on a regular shirt, and listen to the lingo of the conversations. I look to educate myself yet again about the product. On January 1st, 2019, I made the decision to join him 100% in full capacity and we haven’t looked back since.
I love that and I love the family aspect. I love that you did your best to honor your mother with you and your brother in business. The name of your company is GTT Commercial Tires. You have two locations, so you’ve got two links to the chain.
The third is on the way. We’re breaking ground on a new construction project which is going to be in Hampton Road, which is about two hours from Richmond, Virginia.
Service Provider: It’s very important to focus on positive things. Negative things can happen in different shapes, but that doesn’t mean you have to give all your attention to those things when they happen.
 
Congratulations. I want to read a testimonial off of your web page. “I’m passing through Richmond at 10:30 PM and blow one tire on my trailer.” I’m guessing that’s a tractor-trailer. “I called GTT and they jumped at the opportunity to help me. At 10:30 PM, I called three places and got no answer from many of them, but they got out and did the road call for me. I ended up needing three tires, which they had. Can you imagine that?” 
“They hooked me up for under an hour for under $1,000. These are expensive tires. What place do you know doing that? Three tires and the road service this time of night for under $1,000 on a holiday weekend on Monday Memorial Day. These guys were a real godsend for me tonight as I head back to Florida. Thanks a million, GTT, for the great service, timely work, and awesome price.”
As I was going through your website, maybe you know this. I don’t know. I wrote this book called Romancing Your Customer, a few years ago, which deals with delivering such exceptional experiences that your customers. Not that they’re fans but they literally love doing business with you and your company. I want to compliment you because it seems like a lot of people talk that talk like, “It’s all about the customer all the time.” Lots of people talk that talk but very few companies walk that walk. They’re always wildly successful because it is all about the customer all the time.
Thank you for pulling that up. That’s pretty funny. Our customers are everything. We not just understand but we magnify what it means. Without raving customers, all we have is a building, tires, a logo and a name. None of that makes money without raving customers. It’s very important to us to understand that and acknowledge that and do things that make them feel that. As you said, it’s one thing to usher that lip service around it. It’s a great statement to say but a lot of people don’t truly embody it in their process and their service. Ultimately, who gets the fair share of the deal?
We understand that if we take care of those guys, put those guys in opportunities to save time and make more money, all of that is in addition to us having a pretty superior process to the status quo of the industry. With us having better prices than the majority of the other options out there, why would they not do business here? That has been a win in our sales in terms of how we’ve grown. We haven’t spent a dollar on advertising up to this point.
That’s amazing for the type of industry that you’re in. If you turn every customer into a walking and talking advertisement, you may not need any traditional advertising. I want you to think back across your career and even the stuff that you did as little Kamard. Do you have a hard lesson? Something that happened that was like, “That hurts.” Maybe now, you look back at it and you’re like, “That was a blessing in disguise,” but at that moment, it was a hard event or a hard lesson in your entrepreneurial journey.
It happens to me often because I’m present and cognizant of how everything is connected. Before I answer the question, I always tell people to live in the moment and the experience. Meaning that as things happen, even when they’re not your desired result or outcome, look to examine what good lies in it. Sometimes that won’t happen immediately. Sometimes it may take a day, a week, a month or a year to be able to find that connection point. I am a true believer that it all flows together.
One example that I can tell you is my brother trusts me 100%. He possessed so much humility around the direction that I wanted to go. He’s stepping aside out of the driver’s seat and getting into the passenger seat. The aggressive young Kamard, the little brother says, “Let’s open up a location in Fredericksburg,” which is about an hour away from Richmond. This was done two months after I joined the company officially in January of 2019. I’m still learning about the education around the different tires and all of the nuances with our model that I’m trying to craft out and here I am talking about opening up another location, which we did.
Drop the chip on your shoulder and be more open to others’ instructions, stories, and suggestions for guidance. Share on X
The challenge there was it was an epic failure because we didn’t even know what we were hiring for yet. There weren’t designated positions. There weren’t designated roles and responsibilities for those positions. There wasn’t a system in place for those people to play a part in the system. It ended up being a catastrophe. We’re getting calls from customers and this was in the earlier stages of us attempting to establish a brand.
We’re getting calls from customers saying, “I’m here at the Fredericksburg location and your doors are shut.” “What do you mean the doors are shut? Don is supposed to be there.” I called Don and you’re like, “I have to do this and do that.” I’m like, “That’s fine but why didn’t you let me know so that we could have made proper arrangements that still keep the store going?” It was a nightmare because I found myself questioning myself and how good I was. It wasn’t the right decision for my brother to trust me. Were the strategies that I wanted to deploy accurate and potent enough for being able to penetrate new markets?
Ultimately, all of that stuff was because we moved too fast. That was the core lesson there. It wasn’t about any of those other things having any truth to them, which they could have but that wasn’t what it was about. We were able to take a step back. Financially, we lost a little bit of money there, but we didn’t lose the opportunity to continue to move forward to improve upon something that he had clearly etched out as successful and that we could expound upon. That would be that example. It was wild.
I forget which business guru quotes this but it’s something along these lines, “If you want to go fast, go slow.” There’s some real truth to that. The other thing I loved about what you said and I too am one of those people who believe that things are connected if you get enough distance and you can see that. My latest book is Gratitude: Stories From Our Hearts. I’m a big believer that everybody can be grateful if you win the lottery, if you buy a new car, if the girl says yes to you or whatever. There’s something positive there, but the best practitioners of gratitude can find a way to be grateful for their challenges.
That takes a little higher level of gratitude but also delivers a higher level of life. I love how you shared that. We talked about a hard lesson. Let’s talk about a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty good. You make a hire, change a strategy, execute a plan, and all of a sudden, things take off. Do you have one of those you can share with us?
I’ll tie it right into the hard lesson story. I learned all of that, which then led to not derailing us from wanting to continue to scale through multiple locations. What it did is it made me focus on the things that aren’t sexy in business, creating standard operating procedures, creating systems for people to be able to plug into and become a part of a machine and not necessarily have to carry the load. Creating distinctive roles and responsibilities for different positions based on what I felt we could execute at a better clip than any of the other competitors.
All of that assisted with creating a framework. Fast forward to 2022, when we opened up our second store in January, we’ve already done over half a million at that location. That is because of all of the things that were learned, not necessarily through just the Fredericksburg scenario with the debacle there but what it then led me to start to think about things that needed to have time, energy, activity and effort put into it. That’s the connection of the dots.
It now has positioned us to be able to take off like a plane on the runway. It gives me even more confidence and conviction around wherever I put these things, I’m going to be able to have similar, if not better showings right out of the gate due to the fact that we now feel we have an established blueprint and formula for our recipe of success.
Service Provider: I could be much further ahead had Kamard, at twenty years old, been more receptive to the assistance that some people attempted to offer me.
 
I always ask the old guys this. What’s a nugget of wisdom? Something that you hold in your personal treasure chest of entrepreneurial learnings. What’s a nugget you would share with us?
I know one thing that’s super important for me in business entrepreneurially as well as personally in my life is being very cognizant of your focus and your thoughts because it is a real thing. I am a living testament to what you focus on matters. To me, it’s like, that shapes your emotions. How you feel emotionally dictates how you perform. It’s very important to make sure that the things you’re focusing on are positive things.
Negative things are going to happen for all of us in different shapes. That’s how it works but that doesn’t mean that you have to give over all of your attention to those things when they happen. Take a couple of minutes and deal with it. You get through it. You grieve or whatever the case may be but you can’t hold on to it too long because it is a true derailment to progress. How I do things is like, “As a result of doing this, am I going to be better, the same or worse?” That helps me to speed through things. It’s like, “Am I going to be better if I sit here and think about the nasty thing that Don said to me in the grocery store?”
I never say nasty things to people in the grocery store.
It’s just an example. To me, that’s a simple tactic to deploy. You can answer that for yourself. You don’t need to talk to your father. You don’t need a mentor. You can answer that like, “No, I’m not going to be better for that.” When you can make that decision, it’s like, “I need to move on from this.” I think it helps either speed up the moving on from it or after you practice it a while, like anything else, you get to a point where those things don’t even penetrate you at all. It would definitely be being very cognizant of what you focus on and what your thoughts are.
As a man think of so shall he go? It’s also true that if you’re looking to elevate, be certain that you’re spending time with people that are elevated. Many of us are the product of the five closest people that we associate with. It’s very important to do that. I’m going to put you in a time machine. In your case, it’s not going back very far and that’s a testament to you. 
I’ll put you in a time machine and take you back and you’re going to get about 60 seconds to tell twenty-year-old Kamard something that you think he should know that would have made things easier, faster, and better in the next coming years. Into the time machine you go, here’s twenty-year-old Kamard. What do you have to say to him?
I would tell the twenty-year-old Kamard to drop the chip on his shoulder and be more open to others’ instructions, stories and suggestions for guidance. There are probably a lot of things I can point to in my upbringing that created the chip or contributed to the creation of the chip. You get so reliant on things like that, Don, that it becomes your superpower. It becomes the thing that you value the most because you see it as the thing that protects you. At the same time, in certain scenarios of such, as much as it protects you, it can hurt you.
Don’t hold on to negative things too long because it is a true derailment to progress. Share on X
It’s almost like the closed fist analogy. If you don’t let anything out, that might accomplish the one goal that you are holding on to or whatever it is that you are holding onto. On the other hand, you don’t let anything in either. Ultimately, you remain in one specific spot and that is the epitome of stagnation and that doesn’t work for me. I know as far as I’ve come or as fast as it seems that I have come, I do know or at least I believe without a shadow of a doubt that I could be much further ahead had Kamard at twenty years old been more receptive to the assistance that some people attempted to offer me.
That’s great wisdom. Thank you so much. How can we support you? What can we do for you, Kamard?
For me, the support is, by virtue, allowing in assisting my support to others because that is something near and dear to my brother and me. We’ve created an education platform that we want to roll out to anyone interested in starting and scaling and owning their tire store. You can go to KamardJohnson.com to get registered because we will be rolling this out. The reason that we’re doing this is I’ve gotten questions from a lot of people like, “You create a competition for yourself,” but the demand in the trucking industry is growing at an enormous clip. I don’t foresee it slowing down anytime soon.
Look at 72% of the goods being transported on a truck and that’s a commercial vehicle of some sort. Look at the rise of eCommerce. Even looking at what the administration is doing to help further the quality of life as well as the attraction to getting into trucking. For us, we understand that those truckers can’t do what they do without tires. It’s not enough for us to provide the supply of the demand that’s there. I don’t look at it as creating competition. I look at it as being able to give people the tools to be successful.
A lot of the ingredients that have made our stores successful could do that in different parts of the region or different parts of the country that maybe we touch or maybe we don’t. Even if we do and we don’t do it tomorrow, potentially, somebody else can take this information and get it done in a quicker timeframe because that’s their natural area. That will be one way to support because that’s going to allow us to support the opportunities of ambition for others who may be interested in this particular field.
From there, we’re always doing things in our local community. I would have your audience be encouraged to do things in their local communities for those that are not as fortunate, that they don’t see an avenue that the person or people can do something for them. It’s easy for me to do something for you, Don. You have a great platform and think about how I can leverage that up for you and something for me on the back end from you.
I’m talking about doing things for people that you can identify with that can’t necessarily bring any value to your life. To me, that is where the character shows. I would use your platform to encourage others to do these types of things that mean something to them, more so means something to those people who need help in their local areas, whether that’s children, women or the homeless.
You don’t know this about me but my mission is to help others who help others. I love helping others but I get excited if I’m helping other people help other people because the ripples are larger and reach more people. Kamard, thank you very much. I’m grateful that you joined us and shared a little bit of your story. I reserve the right to recall the witness and call you back and talk on other subjects in greater depth. I’m grateful.
I would be delighted. Thank you so much again for having me on your show. I’m super grateful to be here, Don. Thank you so much.
That’s for this episode. See you next time. Bye now.
 
Important Links

Kamard Johnson – LinkedIn
GTT Commercial Tires
Romancing Your Customer
Gratitude: Stories From Our Hearts
KamardJohnson.com

 
About Kamard Johnson
Kamard D. Johnson is the CEO/CVO at GTT Commercial Tires, a chain of truck tire stores on the east coast.
Kamard is a serial entrepreneur who has companies in industries including commercial tires, real estate, and entertainment. Additionally, he also serves as an equity partner in several privately held companies.
Altruistically, Kamard also heads up a non-profit organization concentrating on empowering the youth with skills, resources, and practices to compete in the future.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:EP22 | From Florence, Italy – Entrepreneur Brent Freeman
Date: August 8, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2ep22-from-florence-italy-entrepreneur-brent-freeman/
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Content:
 
Ever since you were young, you were programmed by society to aim for money and success. But, what is the real meaning of being successful? Is it based on the income you’re earning or the profit your business is generating? Listen to your host Don Williams as he talks with Brent Freeman about focusing on the little things that bring you joy and happiness. He talks about realigning your life to reconnect with what you’re passionate about. Brent uses business to generate profits and social impact while optimizing happiness in himself and other people’s lives. In this episode, he shares how he got into entrepreneurship and failed his way to success. He explains the power of learning and discovering your true happiness.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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From Florence, Italy – Entrepreneur Brent Freeman
I have a real treat for you. He lives in the Bay Area but somehow, he’s in Florence, Italy. I’m jealous. He’s the Founder and President of Stealth Venture Labs, a serial entrepreneur passionate about using business to generate not just profits but social impact. In 2009, he founded Roozt, an online marketplace for social consumer brands that was featured in Mashable, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc., Today’s Show, NBC, ABC and soon to be everywhere. He was honored by Forbes as a name you need to know.
Brent is an Angel investor and former venture capitalist, a regular contributor for Entrepreneur and Inc. He Cofounded five eCommerce brands and is Chairman of the Board of the Bay Area Chapter of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship to Inner City Children. His bio says he loves to travel to Italy. Remember, he’s in Italy. He spends time with family and friends. In 2020, he received the high honor to be knighted by the Italian Royal family, Casa de Savoia, for his commitment to philanthropy and giving back. Brent Freeman, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Don. It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate that.
I’m glad that you took the time. I love the power of video conferencing where time is irrelevant. Tell me, what are you doing? What’s your main passion? What’s happening?
I’m in Florence, Italy. Florence is where my soul is at peace. There’s magic, energy and vibration in the city that’s different than any other city in the world. This is the birthplace of the Renaissance and insane creators like Michelangelo, DaVinci and Rafael, that influence history for so many years. They all came from here, including Dante and Claudia. There’s so much here in Florence.
The entrepreneurial spirit is when you love creating solutions. Share on X
My passion is speaking Italian, the Italian culture and being here. I invest 2 to 3 months a year living out here. We have a business out here. If you say what’s your passion, it’s Italy. What I’m up to, in general, is I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been an entrepreneur for years. I have been failing my way to moderate successes in that entire rodeo. I’ve had some moderate successes and a lot more failures. I’m fortunate to have the company I have called Stealth Venture Labs.
You can think of us as a venture studio that has a digital marketing agency inside of it that helps eCommerce brands grow and scale through growth plateaus, from big brands like HelloFresh down to small startups. We have an incubator that helps start and incubate new brands with 0 to 1 concepts. We have a nonprofit that teaches inner-city children how to start businesses, entrepreneurial mindset, digital marketing and eCommerce. It’s three divisions under Stealth Venture Labs, agency, incubator and nonprofit.
I’m active in Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is 16,000 people around the world and 1 chapter or 2 in Italy as far as that goes.
I am in EO, the San Francisco chapter.
I’m going to dial you back to young Brent, aged 5 to 18. In the household or households where you were raised, did one of the adults in your life, whoever that might’ve been different for different people, set an entrepreneurial example for young boy Brent?
Joy And Happiness: When you really fulfill a dream that is rooted in joy, your life starts to change for the better.
 
The short answer is yes. My birth mom passed away when I was seven. It is the defining events in my life that made me into the man I am. She and her energy and spirit has stayed with me my whole life. I call her my birth mom. Both were Italian women. My father remarried an amazing woman who is my first mom. She was an entrepreneur. My father was a cinematographer and director of photography, very focused on the artist’s voice of telling stories. My first mom was an entrepreneur for twenty years.
I got to see the dichotomy between hustle, grind, do everything yourself, the long nights and weekends hours working on vacations and all of that. The artistry and passion of my dad, where he would sometimes work on set for 6 to 12 weeks and not work for 3 months, was very feast and famine. I wasn’t a lemonade stand entrepreneur. I believe that entrepreneurs are made as well as born. For some people, it clicked. They have a garden cleaning business and a lemonade stand. They’re selling things door to door. I wasn’t that kid. My only dream in life was to come to Italy, meet my Italian relatives and learn to speak the language.
When I saw the dichotomy between my parents, I knew I didn’t want to be that workaholic, crazy entrepreneur who so many of us see. I also didn’t want to be the feast and famine of freelance life. The lessons they taught me were centered around following your passion and the money will come and work hard but don’t work so hard that you burn out because the destination isn’t promised. It’s about the journey.
Brent from age 5 through 18 went through a lot. My birth mom passed away. I was coming of age and rebelled. I found and lost myself. I ventured out on my own and went to college. I saw the volatility of what happens in entrepreneurship. Through a series of very unfortunate events and no fault of my mom, she sold the business she ran but the company that bought it was fraudulent. It took the whole business and the family to bankrupt. I was in my freshman year in college.
We went from being upper-middle-class to bankrupt when I was eighteen. I didn’t want to switch colleges because it was the place that I wanted to be. My parents, God bless them, took out student loans. I took out student loans. I worked. They helped where they could. I went to USC, not a cheap college. I graduated from that institution knowing that my network would be my net worth as I got out there. That’s when I started my first business.
You win some, you learn some. Share on X
The connections between those early years of loss, grief and connection with my parents and this amazing woman who came into my life when I was a little bit older showed me what entrepreneurship can be and what it can’t be. The ups and downs that I came out with said that I’m very squarely optimizing through the journey because the journey is the destination.
We’re probably still in young Brent. You weren’t a lemonade entrepreneur but what’s the first thing you did where you traded time and effort and somebody paid you?
My first job was schlepping gear for my dad on set as a production brad, as they call them. You bring in sandbags, help set up lights and all of that. I was 10 or 11 when I did that. I was twelve because it was under the table. I worked at a video store rewinding VCR tapes. Take them out of the thing, the owner winds them, you put them into this and put it back on the shelf. That was my very first job.
It was a terrible job but with good benefits. I got free movies. I love movies. My thing was always about who you know. I always had a guy that worked here and there. They give you a discount here. I always had a little network going as a kid. I didn’t work the system like I was going to sell things to people because my next job after that was working at the front desk at a local gym.
It was always about me saying, “How do I create a network of people where I bring value to them and vice versa?” It wasn’t like, “I’ll do this for you. You do it for me.” It was like, “I know a guy that works at the movie theater. He can get us in and gets free popcorn.” There’s always that stuff. That transcended to college, where I couldn’t afford spring break trips and became the head rep for them. I would get paid to promote them and get free trips. I was always hustling stuff like that.
Joy And Happiness: When a business doesn’t work out and you experience failures, you learn so much.
 
Kids, if you’re not familiar with a VCR tape rewinder, ask your parents. Brent barely remembers but I remember well. You went to USC, graduated with a degree or degrees in what?
I was a Communication Major with International Business Emphasis. I had a Minor in Entrepreneurship and Italian Language and Literature.
I always love you, who went to college and got a degree in Entrepreneurship. One of my best friends went to Baylor and got his degree in Entrepreneurship many years ago. It would’ve been cutting-edge stuff for higher education to recognize the value.
The entrepreneurship program at USC is very strong. It’s called the Gray Center. They have done a good job at incubating amazing entrepreneurs and bringing alumni together. Marc Benioff and Aaron Levy went to USC. There are many examples of people who have done big companies and small alike. The curriculum when I was there was centered around the traditional business plan, feasibility study, business planning, go to your pitch and all that.
What was good about that is it taught you a process but the moment I graduated, I realized that a business plan isn’t worth a shit. As long as you have business plans, you have business realities. “Everyone has a plan until you are punched in the face,” as our boy Mike Tyson says. What the Entrepreneur Minor did for me was put me in a peer group around other people to say, “I’m not alone. Other people think like me.” That sparked my entrepreneurial spirit. Full circle to Florence, I studied abroad in Florence in 2006 during my junior spring semester.
You should have a passionate vision to show the world that you can make a difference in a profit through your business. Share on X
I took Intro to Entrepreneurship class here for the first time before I went back and declared an Entrepreneurship Minor. In that class, it was like, “This is why I think differently. This is why I’m studying. This is why I think all my bosses are craps and they should do things differently. I have opinions about how they should run their company when I’m eighteen years old.” It was like this, “It’s because I’m an entrepreneur, I think entrepreneurially.” I joked that EO, Entrepreneur’s Organization, is like entrepreneurs anonymous. It’s like that because we are afflicted with the blessing and the curse of being creators.
If you are an entrepreneur reading and have not found your tribe, reach out to Brent, me or EO. There are other groups out there. That’s the one we’re probably the fondest of but it doesn’t have to be lonely. Many years ago, a client called me and said, “You should join this thing called YEO.” I was like, “What is that?” He told me and I was like, “I’m not a joiner. I don’t play well with others.” I pass. Two years later, a friend invited me to go to an event. I go to an event and I’m like, “This is going to be cool.” It takes me about six months to connect the dots. Somebody brought this up way back then. Tell me, how’d you start your first business? Was your first business Stealth Venture Labs?
No. I’ve been doing Stealth since I was about 29. My first actual attempted business was a consulting company in college trying to convince restaurants and bars in downtown LA where the downtown LA project hadn’t blown up yet because they were still very barren on how to recruit and get USC kids to come and drink and eat at their establishment. We walked around all these places, pitched to the owners and put together a proposal like, “Here’s what we’re going to do and the plan.” We give them a proposal. We didn’t realize we should give a synopsis of the proposal. We gave them the proposal. They were like, “Why are we paying you? You’ve given us everything you need.” That business was dead on arrival.
We called it Lounge Doctors. It was never even a formal company but that was the first foray to be like, “Let’s re-tweak this.” My best friend at the time, who helped me, has gone on to start a couple of unicorn companies. He’s a brilliant kid. My first real company was an international commodities import-export business, commodities trading. I was 22 and graduating with $200,000 plus of student loan debt due to the factors I told you about. My dear friend, who is Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club at USC, had worked in that industry the summer prior and had made $100,000 in sourcing lumber for a construction project in Dubai, cutting out the middleman.
I was like, “That’s interesting. I could use two of those deals. Please, pay back some of these student loans.” We started talking and he had some connections in the supply chain and on the buyer side. We decided to form a company together, not knowing what we were doing. I didn’t know anything about import export. I bought commodities trading for dummies, an Import/Export for Dummies to try to understand what terms like FOB rent, EX Works and all that.
Joy And Happiness: The world tells you, you can do all these things and once you get these things of success and recognition, you will be happy but you’re not promised the destination. You should recalibrate back into the things that bring you joy.
 
We started that and for two years, we chased the money aggressively. The goal was to make as much money as quickly as possible. We made that money. My lifelong dream was to go to Italy. When I came to Italy and fulfilled that dream, the radiance from the inside out of my body are pride, happiness and fulfillment. I feel it looking out here at the Florence Cape. There’s a fulfillment too, when you fulfill a dream that is rooted in joy. I knew what that felt like.
Fast forward, I’d set this goal to make a certain amount of money because it’s a $10 million deal. We celebrate it. The next morning, I wake up. I’m a millionaire on paper. I felt the most hollow I had ever felt in my life. From a very early age, I got to compare and contrast of the money chase. Money brings happiness to a certain point but it handcuffs at times. You need money to create freedom. I expected the inside-out radiance that I felt when I came to Italy for the first time when I closed this big deal and it wasn’t there. That was an a-ha moment for me.
The world imploded. The global financial crisis killed that business. Dubai was a couple of rings outside of the center. What’s $1 million became $100,000. I walked with $40,000. We shut the business down. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it was my first big failure in business. It’s a failure because the business didn’t work out but I learned so much. I loved being entrepreneurial. I didn’t love that business. I didn’t want to be the guys that were the most successful there. I didn’t look up to them. They had all the fancy things but they were miserable on the inside.
I got an opportunity in 2009 and 2010 to reinvent my entrepreneurial career at a very young age. I was 24, 25 or somewhere in there. I was always passionate about philanthropy and giving back. I volunteered for the American Cancer Society. My mom had died from cancer. I liked the model that TOMS shoes were pioneering at the time and embedding social good into the DNA of the business. I said, “I want to do that. I want to use for-profit businesses to create a social impact. That’s my mission in life.”
I set out on a journey to make that my life’s mission to embed cause into my cogs. I’ve been doing that ever since in a lot of different forums. I went on to start a marketplace platform for social entrepreneurs, which also failed miserably that took four years to bleed out slowly in a lot of different ways. I learned a lot from that and that’s what led me into what we do at Stealth. Here at Stealth, we’ve founded and cofounded about 10 different brands and companies, including 1 in Italy that we started in COVID with Italian grandmothers doing Livestream pasta-making classes over Zoom. That’s the arc. There’s a lot more failure than success.
You will realize all of a sudden that the things that you're doing in your day to day are actually rooted in the things that make you smile from the inside out. Share on X
I love your attitude on failing my way to success and every time you talked about a failing and you learned. In my private client practice, one thing I share with clients is this, “Either you win or you learn.” Learning is winning. It’s a little slower than the pure winning.
I have a saying and we do it in my company. “You win some. You learn some.” We do wins and then learnings. I’ve done this long enough to know that as an entrepreneur, you’re a firefighter. The failures are your stepping stones to success. You’re constantly putting out fires all around you every day. We tell ourselves, “We create solutions wherever we go. It doesn’t matter if we’re traveling or it’s a business issue. We create solutions.” “Failures” are those learning stepping stones.
I have a friend here in town. He is a venture capitalist and interviewed 40 billionaires when he started his career. That provided this immense amount of wealth and knowledge. With his four children, he has told them, “From birth, you will all be entrepreneurs.” When people hear that, they’re like, “It’s a little heavy-handed.” 
He’s like, “Yes, but listen to how I define being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is a problem solver.” That’s the way it goes. Think back across your career. I’m going to ask you for a candid story. Think back to a hard lesson, something that when it happened, you were like, “That hurts.” In retrospect, you look back and you’re like, “That needed to happen.” Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
We don’t even have enough hours in the day to go through all those but here’s what I can tell you. In the last years of my life, I have gone through a renaissance of rediscovering the joy, a rebirth of reconnecting to the things that matter to me and the why. In that process, what I realized if you do the timeline or an equator exercise, highs and lows, is that in every single joyful moment in my life, the highest of the highs stemmed where the seedling was the lowest of the low.
Joy And Happiness: Society is so damn good at feeding us from a young age on what success looks like, what it means to be successful, how much money you need to have the things you need to do so we think that’s the road to chase.
 
I’ve realized that the hardships are my seedlings of joy. That realization, because there’s been so many, allows me to surrender to the universe and trust that when I’m going through hard times, there’s beauty on the other side. It’s like the sun is always shining behind the clouds that we see in the sky. It may feel gray, dark or stormy but the sun is always there.
There are a couple but the business story is when Roozt, the marketplace for social entrepreneurs that I started after the commodities things failed, was my baby. They say, “Don’t attach yourself to your company.” It was me. I was on all the shows. I had 45 people on my cap table, from my high school football coach, my brother and best friends, you name it. It was on a passionate vision to show the world that you can make a difference in a profit. We did the first one very well. With the second one, not so well.
We had bad margins. We didn’t have any recurring revenue. It was my first real operational business with a couple of employees. We had 25. That business eventually failed because we ran out of capital. We tried to raise a Series A. We got our ducks in order. The market went soft and we ran out of money. I had to lay off 25 people in 1 day with 9 hours of check writing saying, “Go cash this. There won’t be money tomorrow.”
You want to talk about ambiguous loss. When you have a company like that go under like the way that it did, I was destroyed, embarrassed, in real grief, in shock, angry and in denial. I went through all five stages of grief. What I realized happened in the failure of that company is I had to go through that entire journey. At this stage of my career in life, the stakes are even higher. I’m looking to build a family and grow. I’m not as young and have as much energy as I did when I was 25. It starts to decline in the late 30s slowly.
I realized that the joy of me being in the happiness that I am in, I had to go through that because the learnings that came out of it were the fundamental building blocks for everything that we’ve gone on to do with Stealth. We’ve catalyzed $1 billion in M&A exits for our clients in the food industry. We’ve helped our clients generate $1 billion in revenue. We’ve done pretty well ourselves, certainly not in the billions. I am focused on how we create a lifestyle that is centered around joy, investing in joy and getting Return On Joy or what I call the ROJ.
It's not too late to recenter on joy and to re adjust your day to day, week to week life and operations. One joyful act at a time, even having coffee in the morning, will impact you a lot. Share on X
That all came about because the other business failed. I walked away with even more in debt than I previously was. I was embarrassed that I lost all my investor’s money with no finances or anything. I didn’t want to get a job. All I had was the learnings. As I went through the recovery of that, I eventually got married and that marriage failed. I had to go through another heartbreak to lead me into this renaissance that I told you about.
I had to get to a point where I stood at my penthouse window in San Francisco and considered jumping. I had all the fancy things but it was so dark. The world tells you, “You can do all these things and follow the program.” Once you get these number of things of success and recognition, you’re happy. I realized that I followed all of that and still didn’t get the things. I wasn’t promised the destination. I had to recalibrate back into the things that brought me joy. It was little things like going to watch a sunset, freshly fallen snow or being in Italy, which I hadn’t gone to in years at that time.
It’s the moment I turned my attention to trying to achieve what the world told me I needed to achieve and I recentered. The destination isn’t promised and I learned that. The marriage and business failed. There is no destination. Why am I waiting to invest in joy to some later date once I have an “exit?” What I did is I made a commitment to myself every single day to invest in one thing that brings me joy and that could be small, like I walked through the bubbly gardens and laying back on the grass. I looked up at the clouds like a kid and made shapes in the clouds that passed by. Let the imagination go. That’s on what I call my list of joy.
What happens is when you invest in those daily little things that bring you small little bits of joy, it becomes a compounding Moore’s law exponential growth effect. The first is slow but then quick. You realize all of a sudden that the things that you’re doing in your day-to-day are rooted in the things that make you smile from the inside out. That all stemmed from the failure of that business. I was so devastated, destroyed, bitter, angry, jaded, frustrated, disappointed and embarrassed, all the emotions. It drove me into the lowest of the low so that I could use it as a trampoline and bring me into the orbit that I’m in, which is much more sustainable and happier. I’m not always happy. Life happens but I know how to get back to the center.
My wife is one of those people who people will comment, “She’s joyful.” It is her natural bent to be joyful. That’s a gift. It’s not necessarily my natural bent. I benefit from the fact that it is her gyroscope is set that way. Years ago, I began this intentional daily practice of gratitude. They’re interlinked. I’ll tell you that if you have practice gratitude and you do it with intention, not accidentally, every day, you’ll be amazed at how much more grateful you become. The more grateful I become, I trespass into joy.
Joy And Happiness: It’s the daily and small compounding effects. It’s a compound interest, put it in there that brings you true joy and happiness. When you start to do more and more of that, it’s slow at first and then speeds up and business starts to change for the better.
 
That’s it, Don. It becomes a practice. People think that it’s so hard or they can’t do it. Gratitude is when you’re in a state of elevated emotion. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a future or a past event, talking about time at the beginning of this. It’s all happening in the present. When you feel in a state of gratitude, even if it’s from the past, your body’s feeling it. I use gratitude in daily practice but it’s also fantastic as a way to fall asleep. If you’re having trouble sleeping, drop into a state of gratitude with a small little thank you for this bed, pillow and these sheets.
You are feeling grateful. Before you get to ten things, you’re asleep. It’s because gratitude shuts the nervous system down. It gets you out of this cortisol and puts you in a state of bliss. Joy is the same thing as a gratitude practice. The joy practice is not like, “Sit there and grin,” although there’s science behind smiling and what that does. It’s about reconnecting with the things that make you smile from the inside out. Usually, those are things from our childhood.
As we get older, we forget about these things. We don’t allow ourselves to over-chase a program. When I first did my first list of joy, it was very short, 5, 10 items. I had trouble remembering. I wasn’t doing any of them. It was big things like going to Italy, speaking Italian and watching sunsets. My list of joy and I do this every year on New Year’s, are 170 things. I keep adding to it because I’m like, “That brings me joy.” It’s specific, like hearing the sound of Italian being spoken, speaking Italian to a little or old Italian lady, freshly fallen snow or big snowflakes.
All of a sudden, you start to tune into the things that bring you joy. In your brain, we have this little feature called the Reticular Activating System, the RAS for short. It says, “Be aware of this.” Sometimes, that happens like you got a new car and all of a sudden, you see that car everywhere. What happens is when you start programming your brain into saying, “Be aware that this matters. This brings me joy,” you’re going to start noticing it. The more you notice it, guess what the happier you are. It’s not that you necessarily turn from a grouch to blissful. It’s the happiness or joy quotient from the inside out. You feel better.
I started this gratitude thing years ago. I released the book in December, which is my fourth book. You may have a joyful book in your future, Brent. You got a story.
You have to really align with things that make you happy. Take that vacation, take that time with your family, be present, go do something that makes you uncomfortable. Share on X
I’m writing it. I’m running a couple of businesses full-time. Finding the writing space has been a challenge to create. What’s interesting is that every day, I’m building on it. I’m adding new things. I’m never going to stop growing. I’ll pick your brain as I dig into it. It sounds like you’re quite the writing expert.
I’m happy to share some tips. I’ve written four. 5 and 6 are in process. That’s the first time I’ve been working on two at one time. That may be a sign of insanity but maybe not. It may be a sign of genius. Who knows? We’ll see. That’s what I’m doing. We’re getting into the final turn. I can see the checkered flag out there. You’ve been generous with your gold so far but share a nugget or pure gold that an entrepreneur could take from your career that maybe would help them in theirs, other than what you already have, which has been extremely valuable.
It’s a continuation of what we were talking about. There’s a very tactical answer to this, which is centered on pay. Listen to the market and adapt to the market. It is such simple advice that is so difficult to do and follow but I’m going to move away from the tactical into the area that we were talking around. There’s no dress rehearsal in life. This is it. We’re in the main show, the main event.
We get certain chapters. We’re not promised all of them. My mom died when she was 42. Guaranteed she wasn’t planning on that. In that journey that we have, what are we doing? What are we chasing? Why? Our society is so good at feeding us from a young age what success looks like, what it means to be successful, how much money you need to have and the things you need to do.
The white picket fence, the two and a half kids, the fancy car, all these different things when you’re an entrepreneur, the tech crunch, the exits, the VC, the glamour and all the different stuff that comes along with what it means to be “successful” that we think that that’s the road we should chase. You know this as well as I do, being a part of the EO. How many of our fellow EO-ers are miserable because they don’t want to be in their business anymore? It’s not because they’re entrepreneurs, not creators but they had a misaligned understanding of what they do and why. It’s the how. “I need to do to hustle and grind. Once I get there one day, I can enjoy it.”
The one day is now. That’s the piece of advice that I hope I get to share with the world. It ties into the joy. We can only control the now and the things that we put our attention on. While I’m running several businesses and solving serious in this post-COVID world, I am choosing to invest in joy every day and create more of that. It’s not always easy but I’m also choosing to say, “I am intentionally not going the route of venture-backed and chasing like I once did, because when I did that, I got some of the things and places. It all fell out from underneath me and I was left with nothing.”
I had neglected my mind, body, soul, family and all of these different areas for so long. That was only a five-year stretch. Not someone doing it for twenty. My biggest nugget is it’s not too late to recenter on joy. Readjust your day-to-day and week-to-week life and operations. One joyful act at a time, even if it’s as little as, “I love sitting in the sun, having coffee in the morning and playing with my children.” It’s the daily small compounding effects. It’s compound interest but with joy.
What happens there when you start to do more of that? It’s slow at first and speeds up. Businesses, clients and your relationships start to change sometimes for the better. Sometimes things have to fall off. That is a beautiful process when rooted in things that make you smile. I would encourage my fellow entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs or people that are operating to say, “It’s not too late to readjust your operations day to day. Realign with things that make you happy. Take that vacation. Take that time with your family. Turn your phone off at night. Be present. Go do something that makes you uncomfortable. Get out of the program. It’s the matrix.”
Maybe the title is One Day is Today. That’s pretty powerful. Brent, how can we support you? Is there anything we can do for you?
Don, you’re doing it. This was a beautiful conversation. I run a multimillion-dollar firm and brands. I had a lot of responsibilities, employees and all of that. That is important work in the world. My passion beyond Italy is spreading this message so people can live a joyful life. If people want to reach me, they can email me. I do respond to all of them. It’s Brent.Freeman@StealthVentureLabs.com. If they want to work with us, that’s the fastest way to reach us. We respond to all of them but the number one thing is spreading the good word and chasing the life you want.
Thank you so much for joining us. Remember, it’s good business to do good, so do both.
 
Important Links

Stealth Venture Labs
Import/Export for Dummies
Brent.Freeman@StealthVentureLabs.com

 
About Brent Freeman
Brent Freeman is a serial entrepreneur who’s passionate about using business to generate both profits & social impact. While at USC, he launched a commodities trading firm with offices in Dubai & LA where the goal was to make as much money as fast as possible. After doing exactly this, he quickly realized that money alone does not bring happiness. So in 2009, he dedicated his life to using for-profit businesses to create real social impact in the world and founded Roozt.com with a vision of connecting the millennial online shopper with fashion forward, socially conscious brands.
As one of the pioneering advertisers on Facebook, Roozt grew into an industry leading, seven figure revenue platform with a community of over 250k people that donated a meal to Americans in need for every member who joined. Roozt was a “2011 Forbes Name You Need To Know” and was featured on the The Today Show, INC.com, Mashable, Huffington Post, NBC, & ABC.
In 2014, Brent founded Stealth Venture Labs with the vision of creating a turnkey, digital marketing team-for-hire that helps subscription brands find product market fit, push through growth plateaus & integrate social good into their business models. In the last 7 years, Stealth has generated over $750M in recurring revenue for it brand partners and manages over $20M+ per month in media spend for brands like Hello Fresh, Factor_75, MUD\WTR, Crocs and many more. As a 100% remote organization since 2014, Stealth attracts some of the best digital marketing talent from orgs like Facebook, Thrive Market, JustFab, Retention Science, & Uber and has let everyone work from home before it was en-vogue!
In 2018, Brent launched the Stealth Impact Lab as a 501c3 non-profit org that provides $5000 grants to inner-city teenage entrepreneurs in the US from disadvantaged backgrounds. Brent has written for Entrepreneur and Inc and speaks all over the US on topics like social entrepreneurship, including a TEDx on social enterprise. Brent lives in Lake Tahoe full time and in Italy 2-3 months per year where is a co-founder in a business called NonnaLive that live streams pasta making classes with real Italian grandmothers from a little village outside of Rome. For every class we teach, we donate a meal to a family in need.
In 2020, Brent was appointed a Knighthood (Cavaliere) and invited to become a member of the Royal House of Savoy by Prince Emanuele Filiberto of the Italian Royal Family, House of Savoy, in recognition of Brent’s 15+ year dedication to social enterprise using for profit businesses to create social impact.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: S2:E21 | Ben Golden – IRS Trouble Solvers
Date: July 22, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e21-ben-golden-irs-trouble-solvers/
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Content:
 
You need to know when to shift your mindset and create a place for success. Join your host Don Williams as he talks with the CEO of IRS Trouble Solvers, Ben Golden. Ben specializes in tax resolution because of his own past experiences with the IRS. In this episode, he shares detailed information on taxes and accounting, especially the importance of getting an expert to help you. You must not assume that you will not encounter problems along the way because there are people that can help you deal with those. He also discusses entrepreneurship, moving forward, and acting with grace and forgiveness.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
Listen to the podcast here
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Ben Golden – IRS Trouble Solvers
The Golden Touch
I have a great guest. He is the owner of a great company that many entrepreneurs will need help from or a similar company at some point in their life. We welcome Ben Golden with IRS Trouble Solvers. Welcome to the show. 
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
I’m grateful to have you. Death and taxes are two inescapable facts of life. One thing with taxes may be trouble at some point. If you are in business long enough and do enough business, probably one day, you are in some degree of trouble, and a trouble solver is a good thing to have. We’ll talk more about that. Ben, how long have you been in business at IRS Trouble Solvers? 
I’ve been doing taxes and accounting for several plus years. I opened this company several years ago. Our specific goal is to help people that have problems with the IRS that they cannot deal with themselves.
I’m a 36-year entrepreneur now in 2022. I founded a dozen companies, a principal in five companies. I’ve done a lot of tax activity between the federal government and me. I’m a big believer that unless it’s minor, you should get an expert to help you, somebody who knows what’s going on. 
That’s one of the problems that a lot of people find themselves in, and I’ve seen it many times. Somebody thinks that they don’t have a difficult tax return. They go and use some software that can get off the internet to prepare their tax return. I had one gentleman that I helped, and I couldn’t help him a whole lot because when I looked at his return, he put the same automobile in for the same number of mileage four times using one of this do-it-yourself software.
I was like, “It’s wrong. Let’s get it into and try.” When we defend people in audits, we want the correct tax to be paid and the least amount of penalties that they can pay depending on the issues, but sometimes you do owe it. We get them into a payment plan or figure out what we have to do there, but sometimes, it can be a challenge.
Do not procrastinate. Do not let fear paralyze you and throw the envelope into the desk drawer, and hope it goes away because it will never go away on its own. Share on X
A word of the wise to our readers is this, “Don’t ignore problems. They get worse.” 
I’m a big statistics person. As an accountant, you probably didn’t figure that out. 93% of all audits that the IRS has haven’t changed. Of those 93%, 67% are because the people do not answer the mail from the IRS. They don’t even open it up. They see that it’s from the IRS, they see that it’s from the state, and fear strikes them all over. They become paralyzed. They cannot get that letter opener into that envelope. You are 100% right. Do not procrastinate. Do not let fear paralyze you and throw the envelope into the desk drawer, and hope it goes away because it will never go away on its own.
During the pandemic, the IRS with the PPP, ERC, and all these programs, temporary moving of deadlines, and temporary stuff. With our own business interest, we got some penalties, and some of them were specific to taxes returns. Our tax pros were like, “Go ahead and pay them. We’ll work it out later. If it doesn’t work, do not pay them.” Several weeks later, the IRS refunded it all. It’s like, “This is crazy.”
If you’re a new entrepreneur, all of that sounds a little nonsensical, but that’s the way it is. Get somebody to help you. Let’s hop back out of the present, and let’s go to the past. We’re taking you all the way back to young Ben, 5 to 18 years old. The first question I want to ask you is this. During that timeframe, in the households that you were raised in, was an adult in your childhood an entrepreneur? 
Yes.
Who was?
IRS Trouble Solvers: When we defend people in audits, we want the correct tax to be paid and the least amount of penalties that they can pay depending on the issues, but sometimes you do owe it.
 
My father.
Will you tell us a little bit about what type of entrepreneur he was? 
In 1980, he started his own railroad construction business, and I grew up around it. When I turned eighteen, I went into the paper mills and worked with the railroad on industrial lines. I got to learn and understand everything about the railroad. I grew up on a farm as well. A lot of the people that I went to school with college had never seen hard manual labor. I was a pick-and-shovel man. Dad grew it from $140 in his pocket and a dream to a massive multimillion-dollar company. I’m quite blessed quite well.
There are no little companies. I live outside of Fort Worth, Texas. We have a little railroad company here by the name of Burlington Northern, but it’s for 50% of all rail freight or something. That guy in Nebraska has a Berkshire Hathaway company. Growing up in rural Kansas, I had a friend who worked for his father. He worked, at that time, on The Frisco Railroad, which is probably part of Burlington Northern. 
You come by entrepreneurship. What I’ve found in doing the show is only about half the people had an entrepreneurial example. The other half were wired to where they weren’t going to be able to be a W-2 person all their life. Let’s stay with young Ben. What was your first job? It might have been your first company. What was the first thing you did where you earned compensation and how old were you? 
I was eight years old, and my dad paid me $0.25 an hour to work on the farm.
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I drove a John Deere tractor but behind the combines at wheat harvest, which is a filthy, nasty, dirty job because you’re in the field. There’s still dust, chap, and all of that. It’s like 100-plus degrees in Kansas in June, but I tell people that. They’re like, “How old were you?” I was like, “When I couldn’t do this now probably, but it was my grandparents. It was their farm, and I was eleven.” Maybe the more telling fact was this, I drove the pickup from the house to the farm to get on the tractor. That was nine miles. 
I was in charge of a 72-horse tractor. Dad put it in granny gear and said, “Don’t change the gears.” I was bush-hogging the pasture. What’s the worst that could happen? I’d run off in a ditch or something like that. What I did was built fences, be a helper, and run the tractor. I didn’t know anything else. I thought that’s the way all kids grew up. I didn’t know.
On the first day, going into the first field from the lot, I clipped the gate post with the desk and pulled down what seemed like 100, but it was probably 10 or 15. On my first day, I spent resetting fence posts and restringing barb wire. The positive in all of that is that both of us learned what hard work is. That will take you a long way in entrepreneurship. Get in there and work hard. After young Ben in your folks’ house, you graduated high school. You backpacked across Africa where you joined the Marines, or you went to college, what’s your story? What did you do next? 
When I was young, I always wanted to be an accountant. I don’t know why. I told my dad when I was ten, “I’m going to college. Save some money.” I enjoy the financial side of the world. I went to the University of Alabama and graduated with an Accounting degree. My wife and I got married. She was in the Air Force. She was stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, which is outside of San Francisco.
It is nowhere near the University of Alabama. 
It’s a little far away. That gave me the opportunity to get my Master’s degree in Taxation. After that, I was able to start running down the road of taxes. I found out that in the accounting world, taxes are where I gravitated towards and enjoyed.
IRS Trouble Solvers: Sometimes other people don’t have the drive, ambition, or desire for high-quality that you have, so it’s best to stay in your lane.
 
I don’t understand it, but I love that. I say that because I come from the Top Salesman in the Country at 19 and Top Sales Manager at 20. When I opened my first company, it came time for my first corporate return, I could not spell P&L, and there were only two letters. I was woefully uneducated. Education can be had. It’s just expensive when you pay for it. Is your first entrepreneurial company an accounting firm, tax practice, IRS Problem Solvers? Sometimes, I talk with people. I’ve done a dozen companies and I’m a principal of five. I meet that rare gem who is like, “I started one, and that’s where I’m at.” 
I started one, and that’s not the same one where I’m at. In my first accounting company, I got approval from the large regional firm that I was working with to do individual tax returns. We’re on the side, as long as they weren’t in the same ballpark as what we did. I called my first accounting company Midas Touch Accounting. My last name is Golden. In all of my companies, I’ve always had pretty much some play on words with my last name. That was my first one. I did individual income tax returns for friends, family, and people that needed them. It moonlighted, and that’s how I started.
Looking back across your career, I’m looking for a hard lesson, something that happened that at the time it happened, like, “That hurts. It’s painful. I don’t like it. I wish it hadn’t happened.” Now in retrospect, it was a perfect thing to happen. It wasn’t fun that you were going through it. Do you have a hard lesson you can share? 
A lot of entrepreneurs have certain risk tolerance. My risk tolerance has always been high. I always tell people, “I jump off the cliff doing a flying monkey. I’ve probably hit and scraped every part of my body against the cliff all the way down.” I decided, “I’m smart. I have an accounting firm. I have a tax degree. I’m a big man on campus type ideal mindset.” I said, “I’m going to invest in another company.” I learned from that lesson to stay in my lane. I used someone else’s expertise in order to help leverage my income. It was a poor decision because I was not the primary. I relied on someone else to get it done.
You know as well as I do. Sometimes other people don’t have the drive that you have. They don’t have the ambition you have. They don’t have the desire for high-quality or whatever it may be but it taught me a great lesson to stay in my lane. I decided to pay that debt back instead of making my house payment and lost my house.
My wife and I talked about the whole thing. We both were in agreement about what I had to do. She stuck with me through the whole thing. It’s hard to do when you’re living in a big, nice house and you got a 4 and a 6-year-old. Everything’s going great, you make one decision, and there goes your house. We moved from a 4,000-square-foot home into a 900-square-foot apartment.
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The title of the show is Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories. Counter-intuitively, all success stories have a failing or 2 or 17 somewhere along the way. The interesting thing is that sometimes, the height of future success is almost predetermined by the depth of a past failing. I see that often across 36 years of being an entrepreneur, getting to do these shows, and talking with a ton of people. There’s another lesson in there for the entrepreneur. 
There’s a defunct construction company out there with a bunch of my money. It’s a hole in the ground somewhere, but it’s an entrepreneurial commonality to think that I’m good at this. I’m going to be good at that, too. That’s not always the case. It is for some people, but for many, it’s not. If you’re a five-handicap golfer, it doesn’t mean you’re going to play hockey well. 
You might, but you might not. Thanks for sharing that. What about a work speed moment? Things are going pretty well. You add the right hire, you implement a new strategy, or an external market event happens that all of a sudden, your growth is through the moon. Do you get one of those you can share?
Our accounting firm was in the panhandle, and 2010 hits. The BP oil spill. It greatly affected a lot of the businesses in our area because of the scare of oil. It is going to be washing up on the beaches and the beaches will never be the same. There goes the white, beautiful sand, and all the worries that everybody had. 2010 to 2011 was a bad year for a lot of industry, lots of tourism, and different types of companies during that period. The smart thing is to be able to realize when you need to shift quickly. We shifted into a mode to be able to help people during this time. We went from zero to hero in no time flat. Because of that, we were able to help quite a few people. Our bottom line was helped as well.
I’m looking for a nugget, some piece of wisdom in your brain that we want to know. It could be tactical, strategic, or experiential, but there’s something in there that you know that we want to know. We don’t know what it is to ask you. 
I’m a big fan of operating out of grace and forgiveness. If I ever want grace and forgiveness in my business, it’s going to be a matter of time before you need it. It’s not, “If you’re going to need it, it’s going to be a matter of time when you’ll need it.” The same goes for my team. I want to operate out of a place where we’re all running at a breakneck speed arm-in-arm. When someone trips, the two people beside them can hold them up.
IRS Trouble Solvers: It’s not all about you. It’s about the family. It’s okay to trust other people to help you.
 
If we operate through grace and forgiveness, our first thought is, “How dare you? What can we learn? What did we learn? How can we do this better next time.” Our first thought is not, “I’m going to hit you over the head with a stick because you made a mistake.” That’s not the way that I like to operate. If I operate in a place of grace and forgiveness or where it’s not intentional, and we want to move forward, that’s what the step is.
The step is always to move forward. It’s not to move backward. How can I live with that person? How can I lift that client? How can I lift the situation into a place where we can help? In our industry, it’s all about adding value. I’ve got to add value to clients for them to be able to see my value. One of the things that I have to do is I have to add value through my outlook and the way that I approach every situation. My first step is always going to be a place of grace and forgiveness.
I’m convinced that transformative leaders and leadership have changed, evolved, and grown in the last several years. We’ve gone from the commander at the top, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level, all the way down to the troops toward now in transformative leadership. It’s inverted to where a great leader cast the vision, recruits the best people on the planet to execute the vision, and empowers those people to make that execution happen.
If there’s a mistake, because the people are all aligned from a value standpoint, it’s not my mistake or your mistake. It’s a mistake. Let’s fix the problem, not my problem or your problem. We learn and prevent it from happening again. The most progressive organizations view leadership from that point of view. 
I’m going to put you in a time machine here like Star Trek or Star Wars. I get to take you all the way back. You’re probably at the University of Alabama at age twenty. You get to grab Ben by the collar and say, “I’m going to give you 2 or 3 things here that are going to make things easier, better, faster, and smarter for you.” What do you tell your twenty-year-old self? 
Communication is two-fold. One person is talking, and one person will have to listen. If he’ll listen, I would say, “Continue to go with your gut. Trust your instincts. Lean on your wife and family more. It’s not all about you. It’s about the family. It’s about doing it together, as opposed to thinking that you’re all that, and you can do it all yourself. You can’t. It’s okay to trust other people to help you. Learning the value of delegation sooner would help.”
Learning the value of delegation sooner would help you. Share on X
I used to think, “I’ll let them do it and it will get done the way that I wanted to.” It comes to me and I’ll be like, “I don’t like the way they do it.” I didn’t properly tell the person that did it that they did it not exactly the way I wanted. The next time, it would come back to me wrong again, and I’ll be like, “They don’t know what they’re doing.” Learning the value of delegation is something that I would talk to myself about.
I’m a big believer that as an entrepreneur, you should only invest your time and energy into activities that are in your zone of genius and that are different than your zone of excellence or confidence. Many times, entrepreneurs have a wide area of excellence. It’s safe to be there because you know everything about it, and you do it better than almost anybody on the planet.
The problem with your zone of excellence, as opposed to your zone of genius, is in your zone of genius, you can be magnificent. You can’t get there in your zone of excellence, but your zone of excellence is safer and more comfortable. The good stuff exists in your zone of genius. To do that, you’ve got to delegate. You can’t do it all. Ben, if one of our readers had IRS trouble and they wanted to reach out to you, what’s the easiest way to get in touch with you? 
Go to our website. Find out a little bit more about us before you call. I encourage people to find out who they’re working with before they work with them. If it makes sense for us to work together, the best way to do that is on our website, www.IRSTroubleSolvers.com. We’re more than happy to help you. We have three locations, 1 in Seattle, 1 in Chicago, and our headquarters in Alabama.
That sounds like anywhere in the country. If you have IRS troubles and you need IRS trouble solvers, reach out to Ben Golden and his team. Ben, thank you so much. See you next time.
 
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About Ben Golden
Do you OWE the IRS Money? I can help you resolve your IRS and State tax issues once an for all. I help give you peace, protection, and posterity (future). Don’t let them push you around. Did you know 1 in 50 people owe the IRS money? Over 14,000,000 people owe the IRS today! Let me help TODAY!!
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E19 | Ari Rastegar: The Oracle Of Austin Real Estate
Date: June 28, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/tpe-s219-ari-rastegar-the-oracle-of-austin-real-estate/
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Content:
 
Ari Rastegar, the Oracle of Austin Real Estate and CEO of Rastegar Property Company, is our guest here today. He is one of the most influential power players in the commercial real estate world. He is also the author of The Gift of Failure, which is exactly what he did. His career didn’t start out well. He experienced failure and bad grades. He started his firm with a $3,000 loan in law school. But that didn’t stop him. He learned from his failure to find success. Now, he successfully invested and exited in 38 cities, 12 states, and 7 different asset classes. Join Don Williams as he talks to Ari about how he built his real estate empire. Discover how his business is not his business but an extension of his life.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Ari Rastegar: The Oracle Of Austin Real Estate
Building A Real Estate Empire
I got a real treat for you. I got this uber real estate investor from Austin, Texas. He has been referred to as the Oracle of Austin. He put together a portfolio of 30 to 40 cities, 10 to 15 states, and 5 million square feet of property. He’s an overachiever. Ari Rastegar, welcome to the show. 
Don, thank you for the kind words and thank you so much for having me.
Ari, tell me what you’re doing now. 
We’re developing over $1 billion of new construction in 2022 through breaking ground. I own 100% of my company. I started with a $3,000 loan when I was in Law school. I delivered pizzas at DoubleDave’s. I went to two community colleges before they let me into Texas A&M University. If a guy like me can figure it out, I assure you you’re smarter than me and you have better opportunities. It’s a matter of knowing where you’re going, knowing your why, and having the grit to go there. I don’t even know how many apartment buildings and office buildings we own.
We’ve been in 38 cities, 12 states, and 7 different asset classes. We manage money for the biggest public pension funds, family offices, insurance companies, and high-net-worth individuals from all over the country. We’re doing master plan communities, which we’re calling futuristic suburban. It is a new way of a closed-loop ecosystem for a master plan development that has built for rent houses, has apartments, has a local coffee shop and barbecue place, a brewery, an elementary school for the city, and office buildings. We are using a bunch of technology to enhance that user experience.
We have high rises going up in Phoenix, Dallas, and an office building in downtown Austin. We’re doing what we love, helping our investors, and keeping it running. My book called The Gift of Failure comes out in July 2022. The name itself can tell you that I’ve certainly failed myself forward as John Maxwell would say. I’m a father of three. It’s probably the greatest joy in my life. My biggest regret if I have any regret in life is that I don’t get to spend as much time with them during these early years at 2, 6, and 9, as I wish I could.
Everything has a cost. We’ll come to learn that. For everything you do, there is something that you don’t do. As you’re out there doing the things that you’re doing, remember that you pay for it one way or another. You don’t take care of your health when you’re young, you’re going to pay for it in medical bills and be sick later on in life. Everything has a cause and effect and a level of duality. As entrepreneurs, we feel that in such a stark, visceral way more so than a lot of others do. People say, “You have to love what you do.” That’s complete nonsense because they don’t call it work for a reason. They call fun. Fun is fun. Work is work.
You can be successful by knowing where you're going, knowing your why, and having the grit to go there.  Share on X
I paid to do my hobbies.
Hobbies cost money, too. The point is you need to love why you’re doing it, not love what it is. I don’t love going on the construction site and putting up sheetrock or doing whatever. I love creating a home for a family that’s maybe cheaper than the new construction next door. I love how that makes me feel being able to deliver a superior product to what the end base consumer is and being consumer-obsessed. That is a holistic philosophy that applies to anybody that’s out there being a proven entrepreneur.
The full title is Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories and what many people ignore is that every success story has a failing. 
The name of my podcast launching on May 12th, 2022 is the same title as my book, The Gift of Failure. It is understanding how the introspection into failure is where lessons come and where growth comes. We’ve had this negative baggage around the words failure and selfish. As an example, if I’m going to be a doctor and do 18 hours of residency, that’s selfish. I didn’t see my family on Friday, but I’m going to go save 20,000 people’s lives. It’s resignifying what these words are going to mean.
Every success taught me one thing. The more successful I became is maybe being more of an idiot. Failures taught me lessons to be able to progress, grow, and continue, even though it was painful to examine that I’m responsible. I tell people all the time, “It’s not my fault.” I’m like, “It’s not your fault, but it’s your problem one way or another.” It’s having introspection, being comfortably uncomfortable to learn what went wrong and go do it right. The next time, make a different problem. Don’t make the same problem.
Failure is not the opposite of success. It is a part or a component of success. 
It is an inherent part of success. It is a recipe for success. If you were baking a cake and you miss putting in the flour, you can think of failure like that. It is an ingredient to success, albeit maybe the most important ingredient. Everyone has had a soup that grandma made. You’re like, “Maybe it needs a little more salt,” and you put a little more salt in it. All of a sudden, the flavor opens up. Failure is very similar to that. It’s an ingredient towards that success. It cannot be looked at as anything other than what it is, an ingredient. It’s not bad. It’s not good. It can’t stand alone. It needs a synergistic effect of other things, but it is part of the process.
Oracle Of Real Estate: Everything has a cost. For everything you do, there is something that you don’t do. As you’re out there doing the things that you’re doing, remember that you’ll pay for it one way or another.
 
Let me take you back all the way to young Ari, age 5 to 18. You’re a schoolboy. We go all the way back to the household you were raised. A lot of different people have different households they were raised in. Was there an adult who was an entrepreneur who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young boy?
No. My parents divorced when I was young. My dad is Iranian. My mother comes of German descent. I’m a first-generation American. My father became an attorney later on in life when I was about eighteen years old and then went out onto some entrepreneurial stuff of owning his own law practice. He has done that but I was already an adult at that point. My mother and my stepfather were blue-collar and hardworking. My stepfather was the Dean of Theater Arts at Texas State University. He was always a working actor.
This concept of money was very taboo in my home because I hate saying to hear people say, “He came rags to riches.” We didn’t have much money by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m born in America. It’s hard to complain when you’re born in America and you have all these great things around you. We were monetarily much lower middle class. We didn’t want anything which is great. This concept of innovation and doing something on my own at first was a little bit egocentric, like wanting to do my own thing, create something, and do something.
I came to realize, listening to my authentic voice, that that’s coming from a deeper human need of wanting to contribute, grow, and give my full self into whatever that’s going to be. I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life, whether we’d go to Sam’s Club or to Walmart when I was in 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade, buy a box of lollipops or a box of Airheads and we’d be selling them for $0.25. I’ve been an investor or an entrepreneur my entire life as far as I could remember. If you want this hoodie, it’s for sale. Do you want it? It’s worth $50. You could have it. It is who I am in that regard.
It was a journey. I was an awful student in middle school and high school. I had a severe speech impediment. I had to go to seven years of speech therapy to learn how to talk. My wife always jokes, “Ever since Ari learned how to talk, he never shut up.” I’ve been in this for many years. I’ve had my own company, Rastegar for many years and we’re headed into the billions.
A quick Google search will tell you that. I experienced being in law school, undergrad, delivering pizza, selling cars, being able to sell this, moving to New York, living in a 200-square-foot apartment when I’m in my mid-twenties, and using student loans to pay for law school. I’m on the build side at 5:00 in the morning, building single-family homes, and rushing to class.
If people knew what it took to build this multibillion-dollar empire that we’re building, I don’t think they would do it because it’s so taxing unless you have that deep, God-given, nature-given, hard-wired, or whatever phraseology you want to use. I’m a man of God. I’m a big believer that I was given gifts to use and utilize. They’re not of me. If you don’t have that, you’re screwed at the outset with all due respect. if you don’t have that grit and that resilience, no matter how great the product is or the ambition is, the chances of success are slim to none.
Love why you're doing what you're doing. Don't love what it is.  Share on X
At its core definition, successful people take actions that unsuccessful people don’t or won’t. 
I’ll even qualify that. Successful people take massive action that unsuccessful people don’t. Successful people do things that unsuccessful people don’t. It’s pretty binary to the point that you’re making. The only qualification I would make to the true ethos of this particular discussion of success stories of proven entrepreneurship is you have failed if you’re a proven entrepreneur. You have overcome resilience. You’ve been kicked in the teeth when you had a plan. Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they’re punched in the face.” If you have any success stories as a proven entrepreneur, you know exactly what we’re talking about.
I want to get some wisdom. We know that a piece of success is failing. Think back across your career for a hard lesson, an event that when it occurred was like, “That hurts.” Now, in retrospect, looking back, it turned out to be something very positive but at that time, it was brutal.
In my book, this story is in much more detail. I’ll give you the cliff notes of it. You’ll read it in the book if you feel like boring yourself for an hour and a half. In all honesty, being an English major by trade, it was my great honor to be able to write this book and put these things out there. My hope is that it will help a lot of people condense the 10,000 books I’ve read in my life into a shorter, more palatable version. There was an entertainment company that I started back in 2011 with one of the wealthiest and most powerful real estate financiers in New York City. I’ll save you the details of how we met. It was very serendipitous to my old wrestling coach.
It was weird, but we decided to build a global entertainment company that would do parties around the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Weekend. We went in and signed the biggest acts in the world. I’m talking about the halftime show which is the Black Eyed Peas, Puff Daddy or P. Diddy, and David Guetta. We had Mark Zuckerberg there. We had Facebook as a sponsor. We did it at the highest level imaginable in year one on a show shoestring budget. I went to sleep one day a multi-millionaire with all the tables, the sponsorships, and the ticket sales sold.
All of a sudden, the biggest ice storm in the history of Dallas, Texas hit that year. It was crushing. We still did the parties. It was not nearly as profitable. We barely recouped the money in this “unforeseen event.” In hindsight, I’ve now come to learn to plan for the unplannable, have more capital reserves, don’t plan for perfection, plan for excellence and have mitigation and things in place. As a young entrepreneur in my twenties, I didn’t think that way.
Our next event was the following weekend at the Playboy Mansion. Before all this salacious awful stuff came out about the Playboy mansion, it was the crème de la crème of parties. Forty-eight hours before that party, after getting killed in Dallas at the Super Bowl and the snowstorm, Legionnaires’ disease broke out of the Playboy mansion and they canceled the party. It went from the pain of proverbially wanting to jump off a building to soul-crushing.
Oracle Of Real Estate: This, too, shall pass. The good things will pass. The bad things will pass. You need to find a way to be calm and still, no matter what is happening externally.
 
You can’t even make this stuff up. Legionnaires’ disease broke out after the biggest ice storm in the history of Texas all within a one-week period when we were planning on making $5 million to $8 million in net profit, going to barely maybe being able to recoup capital. What that taught me was a few things, plan better, perform better, stress test better, and find contingency protocols which we do in our global investment business. Even beyond that was esoteric. The Yiddish say, “Man plans, God laughs.”
I was not meant to be a party promoter or an event coordinator but I learned supreme customer service of how to treat celebrities who now are investors, clients, and vendors. We treat them with that celebrity red carpet and unbelievable investor relations. Some of those people that attended the parties became clients later on in the future. I found my true calling in real estate which pivoted me in that direction.
That one was full-on soul-crushing. It put me exactly where I needed to be. We celebrated the seventh anniversary of Rastegar in 2022 is wholly owned. I couldn’t imagine a better failure to lead me to what my destiny was going to be. At that time, God knows I did not have the wisdom, the understanding, or anything. It was, “Poor me. God is punishing me. This is horrible. Everything is going to crap.” From a business standpoint, it was truly the greatest blessing of my life.
Even Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the NFL felt your pain during that ice storm. If people can remember, there were sheets of ice that were 30 x 30 yards sliding off the roof. 
It canceled Prince’s entire show. Prince had a show. The tent collapsed and we still went off without a hitch. We still had our events. Everybody performed. They were smaller. The events were incredible. They weren’t as profitable. That set the tone for me of what the next several years of my career were going to mean. Going back and looking at those lessons, I didn’t have the maturity, the wisdom, the knowledge, or the life experience to understand them. Still now many years later, however long it’s been since we started that enterprise, I’m still learning why that had to happen to be where we are.
It continues to be a blessing that keeps giving. The greatest soul-crushing failures that we all experience in any place of our life. If we have the guts to continue to take introspection, not to dwell, not to suffer, not to, “Woe is me,” but with a true analytical mind, de-emotionalize to say, “What can I learn? Where am I? Except for this happening, I would not be here.” It’s called the butterfly effect. Even on a smaller scale, you will find tremendous blessings that came from what that was.
I either win or I learn. Learning is just a slower winning.
Your business is not your business. It's an extension of your life. It's not what you do. It's who you are.  Share on X
Winning in the short term is like winning a battle. I’d rather take the learning and win the war than win the battle. You come to learn that. Look at baseball. I’m not a huge sports guy. We have tons of professional athletes, investors, and celebrities. I get to learn a lot from them, talk with them, and spend time with them. In baseball, if you strike out 7 out of 10 times, you’re not just good. You’re in the Hall of Fame. That means that you missed 70% of the time and you’re in the Hall of Fame.
The guys that strike at that don’t get a hit 75% of the time are barely in the League. There are a whole lot of people that are hitting 250 to 275 but a few are hitting that 300. 
I found that universal truth that different opposing or on their face opposing views like Republicans and Democrats is an easy thing. I don’t ascribe to politics. I don’t care about it. I disagree with everybody in some way, shape, or form, including my six-year-old son. Some stuff that Dem say are good. Some stuff the Republicans say is good. Some stuff that each side say is stupid. I don’t think either one got it all right.
With that said, if you take two different parties like that that supposedly should disagree on everything and they agree on one thing, I’m very interested to learn what that one thing is. There’s a higher probability that that has some merit and that goes for everything and anything in life. If there’s a universal truth that Lao Tzu spoke about and Jordan Peterson is talking about now and they both are coinciding, those are the things that pique my interest to learn more of what the universal truths are that can be applied to anything. To me, my business is not my business. It’s an extension of my life. It’s not what I do. It’s who I am.
We did the hard lesson. Let’s go to the other side. What about a work speed moment? Things are going pretty well. All of a sudden, you implement a new strategy. You do a new hire and did a couple of things together. The hockey stick explodes.
I’m born and raised here in Austin, Texas. I bought a bunch of great stuff. They were conservative. All of a sudden, every major company, Tesla Oracle and Facebook, all came here and the hockey stick went straight up. I wish I could say it was because I predicted it. I had some artificial intelligence. I had inside baseball. It’s my hometown. We knew the local players. We did the math. We thought that viewers were longer timelines to reach the success that we thought to get a healthy, conservative return.
Our performance got thrown out of the water in a good way. Everything went up way more than we had expected. As a dear friend of mine’s father used to say, “You don’t need to plan for good news.” That was the inflection point. When Austin went gangbusters in the few years, our whole portfolio and the value went up. Investors did well and have allowed us to expand exponentially across the country and now the world.
Oracle Of Real Estate: The Gift Of Failure: Turn My Missteps Into Your Epic Success
I’m going to put you in a time machine and take you all the way back to twenty-year-old Ari. You get about 60 seconds to say, “Listen to what I’m going to tell you. This is going to help speed you along your path.” What is something you know now that you wish you knew then? What do you tell young Ari?
I’ll tell him a couple of things. One thing I tell him is that this too shall pass. The good stuff and the bad stuff will pass. You need to find a way to be calm and still, no matter what is happening externally. Learn transcendental meditation so that you can still your mind and not be reactionary. No matter what looks like the doom and gloom at the moment like, “I failed an exam. Someone said this. I got into whatever,” that seems so important, learn to be less reactive.
Look at it, deal with it, and move on. Keep almost a Zen-like level of calmness, not because you don’t feel the things and to feel them, but to know that they will pass, the good and the bad, if things are going great for you, don’t think that they’re going to always go great. Prepare for something to go wrong. When they’re going bad, you need to know it’s not always going to be bad. Don’t get in a funk. Keep going. most of all, stay still.
If somebody wants to reach out to you, you got a podcast coming up. You got a book coming out. There is nothing better you can do to get your message out than write a book. Ari and I are brothers of different mothers. He talks about delivering these exceptional experiences. My number two book is titled Romancing Your Customer because I see the customer journey map as very parallel. 
Send me a link so I can buy it. I want to read it.
I’ll be happy to do that. I’ll do better than that. I’ll send you a copy of the book as my, “Thank you for being on the show.” 
When my podcast launches, we’ll book you as well to come on. We’ll talk about your book and our stuff as well. We share a similar mindset on life. We’re brothers from another. There’s a lot more that we can give. The whole point of you doing this show, me doing mine, and me writing the book has everything to do with growth and contribution. I wish I had someone to share these conversations with me. I live in a world of abundance where there’s enough for everybody. We should be sharing these things as much as we can. We’ll continue to have that going and the dialogue.
Thank you so much for having me. We’re going to be doing this again. Maybe I’ll come to the show again when the book comes out. I will have you on ours. Whenever you’re in Austin, Texas, you’ll be my personal guest. We’ll be having a lot of time but this will be great. You can find me pretty easily. If you type in Rastegar or Ari Rastegar anywhere on Google and you want to find me, you can. A twelve-year-old boy in the UK sent me a million messages. He found me. It was on the cover of the New York Post, Page Six. We’re writing a kid’s book together about goal setting and health for children. If you want to find me, you could find me.
I reserve the right to recall the witness counselor. This is the first of many conversations. Ari, thank you so much for being on the show. 
It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much.
 
Important links

Ari Rastegar
The Gift of Failure
Romancing Your Customer

 
About Ari Rastegar
Forbes recently labeled him, “The Oracle of Austin.” Last year he was inducted into the Commercial Observer’s Power 100 list, which ranks the topmost influential power players in the commercial real estate world. He is the youngest inductee ever to grace the page.
His book: The Gift of Failure – alongside his own podcast by the same title is set to come out in early July with a slew of heavy-hitter guests sharing their own personal experiences with failure turned into steppingstones. He started his firm with a $3,000 loan in law school. Since then, he has successfully invested and exited in 38 cities, 12 states and 7 different asset classes. Currently he is one of the most prolific buyers, owners, and developers in the Austin MSA, originally his hometown.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E18 | Ukraine To Detroit: Working Through Instability As An Entrepreneur With Vladimir Gendelman
Date: June 21, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e18-ukraine-to-detroit-working-through-instability-as-an-entrepreneur-with-vladimir-gendelman/
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In the Soviet Union, there was little to no such thing as entrepreneurship. The government owns everything, and when they own everything, competition doesn’t exist. This is where Ukrainian Entrepreneur Vladimir Gendelman grew up. His parents always taught him not to pursue entrepreneurship. This did not hold him back, though. He moved to America to start his entrepreneurial career and became the Founder and CEO of Company Folders. Learn how he started his award-winning business as a basement operation and how he grew it into a multi-million-dollar company. Join Don Williams as he talks to Vlad about his start in the folder industry. Learn about the time he gamed the system and how that backfired. Discover more about the Ukrainian tech market. And find out his thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine war and why you still need to support Ukraine.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
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Ukraine To Detroit: Working Through Instability As An Entrepreneur With Vladimir Gendelman
I have a treat with our guest, my very good friend from Detroit, Michigan but originally from Ukraine, Vladimir Gendelman. Vladimir, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m excited to be on your show. Thank you for having me on.
It’s my pleasure. Vladimir and I met years ago in Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Our paths have crossed multiple times in our paths through EO. Vladimir and his lovely wife, Janet, are authors with me in the fourth book, the Gratitude book. We’re very close friends. I’m thrilled to have Vladimir on the show. Let’s start here. Tell us about your primary company. What do you do for a living? You’re an entrepreneur. What does that look like?
The company I own is called Company Folders. I started that company in 2003. We are a printing company specializing in presentation folders, binders, and envelopes. The way the story went is I originally I came from the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the structure is Communism, supposedly. The government owns everything. When the government owns things, there is no competition. Therefore, everybody pretty much had the same silverware, wallpaper, furniture, and clothing.
You go to the store and you can choose 1 of 2 cheeses, bolognas, or whatever else. There was a little bit of choice, but maybe 2 or 3, not the variety we have here, and because of that, you can’t stand out. No matter what you go with, you will have something that everybody else has. The whole idea is standing out the quality of expressing yourself via decorations, the fashion you wear, the way you set up your apartment, and the furniture and the art you have. Everything else is pretty much impossible.
I came to America in 1990. The options are through the roof. You go to the store and you have dozens upon dozens of cheeses. You have sausages in dozens and all sorts of clothing. There is clothing that you can buy for $5 and $500. In the beginning, I thought the clothing that was $500 was made up and nobody ever bought it, but then I learned that people did. There are cars and everything. There’s an abundance of options in everything. It was great because you could express yourself.
I started my entrepreneurial journey and started the company called Orange Computer Solutions, where I would do computer repair and networks for people. I always looked at my function as to take care of my customer any which way. One of my clients, for whatever reason, says, “You’re a computer guy. Can you help me do a nice company folder?” I said, “How hard could that be?” We’re talking about the year 2003. The internet is in full swing. Go online and type a few words, and you got it.
I went ahead and did that. It turns out there are no great options here in America for presentation folders. I started looking further, driving around locally, and finding better places. There is nothing. I’m like, “There is a market in this country where there are no options.” I figured they had to fix it. I’m like, “Who’s they?” The next question was, “Why not meet?”
That’s how the company started. We specialize in presentation folders. Over the years, we added binders and envelopes. The whole idea is that we offer the largest selection of die cuts, papers, coatings, finishes, and so on. We did a fun experiment. We took all the different variations and options that we offered and multiplied them. It turns out that we could have over a hundred million different product variations for all the options that we offer.
Vladimir, I’m going to take you all the way back to little Vladimir at five years old. At the time, you were living in what country?
When the government owns everything, there is no competition. The ability to express yourself disappears. Share on X
The Soviet Union in the Republic of Ukraine. Back then, Ukraine and Russia were not countries. It was the Soviet Union that consisted of fifteen republics, including Ukraine and Russia.
In your household, did an adult set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young boy?
The message I got from my parents, especially my mother, was, “We do not have entrepreneurs in our family. We are not entrepreneurial. Once or twice we ever tried to be entrepreneurial, we lost money. You should never try it again.” Both of my parents are doctors. My grandparents are doctors, lawyers, and professors. The word entrepreneur and the whole notion of doing something of your own were as strange as going to the moon.
A large piece of that is because of the sociopolitical and economic environment of what was the Soviet Republic.
Partially maybe, but as you know, deep inside, you’re either an entrepreneur or you’re not. In some way, I was born with that entrepreneurship inside of me that the rest of the family never had. That manifested itself when I was a kid.
It’s so funny to me. Many people think, “Entrepreneurs got in it for the money.” I don’t want to say that there isn’t a profit motive, but after doing a hundred of these interviews and being an entrepreneur for years, it’s much more common that they have a problem with authority. They cannot stand for people to tell them what to do. They will be their boss in maybe a much harsher environment than it would be to work for someone in a more comfortable environment. After your childhood, you went to university and hitchhiked across America. What was the next step?
We left the Soviet Union on December 2nd, 1989. Due to the way the process worked, we had to go through Austria. We were there for a couple of months, spent five months or so in Italy, and came here to America on May 15th, 1990. We had no money. We had $423 or $427 for the three of us, my parents, and an abundance of options, things, and experiences. I wanted everything and I could afford nothing. Some of them will find the story.
I remember I went out the first time with some people I met here. We were in the country for maybe 1 week or 10 days. My father gave me $1. I didn’t know what to do with it. As we were walking around, the other kids I was with were also Russian immigrants from the Soviet Union and stuff. Therefore, nobody had money. We went to a grocery store called A&P.
I remember walking around. The only thing I was thinking was, “What can I buy for $1?” It didn’t matter what I wanted. It was all about the fact that I had $1. I came across a little bag of apple chips that were $0.59. Out of everything I found that was within my budget, apple chips, for whatever reason, stood out the most. I bought a pack of apple chips. I didn’t even think I wanted it. I just wanted to buy something. It was the experience of it. They were probably the best chips I’ve ever had.
When you unravel the psychology of shopping and consumerism, many times, it’s not about owning things. It’s about buying things. There’s a little dopamine hit that a person’s brain gets when they can make someone do something else. When you put your dollar on the counter and they give you the apple chips, you’re making them do something. There’s something to that.
Ukrainian Entrepreneur: There were no good options for presentation folders in America. There was nothing. So when there’s no market for something, you should come in and fix it yourself. Start a business.
 
You are an expert on Ukraine and doing business in Ukraine. Before we get there, I want to ask you two questions about Company Folders. One, will you share a hard lesson with us or something that happened in your career at Company Folders that when it happened, it hurt but looking backward, you can see where the positive was in that event? Do you have a hard lesson like that you can share with us?
Do you want the lesson where the ego got hurt or the pocket got hurt?
It’s whichever one hurt the most.
It’s probably the pocket because the ego is not nearly as important to me. When I started the company, I specifically started it as an online company. We’re talking about 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. It was the early days of the internet and Google. Google was the dominating force. Search engine optimization was the ultimate thing because you didn’t have to pay for anything. It happens for free. You have to optimize your website a certain way so that it ranks high on Google.
How do you do that? You do it by gaming Google. I did. I hired this company in Ukraine back in the day. They were masters of gaming Google. It was about two things mostly. Number one is having your keywords and the page as much as you can. Number two is to have links to your website and the proper pages with the proper keywords as a tab. We went to town on that. We had links coming from all sorts of websites, including gambling, gaming, porn, and all this other stuff.
It was great. It worked. We would rank in a lot of cases number one and number two across Google. That’s where all the business came from. It was one of those situations where you don’t think to yourself, “Google might get smart one day.” It did. On March 23 or 22 of 2012, we received a warning from Google. It was a natural link warning that said, “According to our algorithm, you’re unnaturally building links. We can’t count them or we have to count them against you. However, that works.”
Long story short, we went from number 1 to number 5 and number 9 to the 2nd page, 3rd page, 5th page, and 10th page. We’re not even in Google anymore. It happened quickly. We lost 76% of traffic in a matter of days. This was a new thing. Google got smarter. There is no direction or instruction. Nobody knows what to do. Google is not saying anything. They don’t have to. It’s their house.
Other people don’t have experiences either and nobody to talk to. Meanwhile, all I’m seeing is that my expenses are still there. The revenue goes down to almost nothing. It took us over a year to get out of that mess, which means we had to contact all the people and all these websites that had bad links pointed to us. We can’t use a Ukrainian company for that. We have to do it internally. I’m so grateful. They have a phenomenal team.
We all came together and started working on it. We had to contact everybody multiple times to ask them to remove the links and so on. It took over a year. We were able to get rid of all of that. We ended up with a clean slate. We’re still not ranking. We’re just getting through the clean slate. It’s getting back to zero. We started building a new marketing strategy. The financial hit was excruciating. I was on the verge of going bankrupt. We’re talking about March 2012.
In August or September 2012, I met Bob Shanafelt, who briefly mentions EO. I’m like, “That sounds cool.” I meet with Taylor. At the moment, she is our Membership Chair. We talked. She tells me how much the dues were. I’m like, “That’s a lot of money. I can’t afford it,” but I’m thinking to myself, “If I’m going to go bankrupt, I might as well do it with style.” At that point, the due amount doesn’t matter.
Gaming systems can work well. However, you can never count on it because you never know when it's going to stop. Share on X
That’s how I joined EO. Between my amazing team and everything I learned in EO, I ended up with a way better company than what we had before. Our marketing strategy is as solid as it could be. It is all based on being an expert and a thought leader in the field for the company. We have a phenomenal social following to the point where on numerous occasions, I received text messages from some of my friends whose kids take a graphic design class in high school.
The teacher brings up tutorials from my website, and because their kids know me, they would take a picture and send it to their parents. The parents would send it to me. How cool is that? The one lesson I learned was that gaming systems, companies, and everything works well. However, you can never count on it because you never know when it’s going to stop. When it stops, it creates way more problems than anything else out there.
I regularly have people who ask me to teach them the tricks of the trade. My reply is always this, “Why don’t we learn the trade because the trade will last and the tricks will end? I can’t tell you when but they will.” Thank you for sharing that. I’m going to ask you one more about your business. I want to dive into your expertise because you were born in Ukraine and you still have business operations in Ukraine. It’s at war with Russia. That presents certain challenges to operating a business along with everything else. Share with us a golden nugget or something that you’ve learned in your time as an entrepreneur that you will be like, “This is pure gold.”
By nature, I’m the kind of person who likes to make others feel good about themselves. I value that. To me, that’s important. Being an entrepreneur puts me in a position where I can help a tremendous amount of people. Some of them are my employees and some are the people I come in contact with who maybe need our services and something that we have the expertise in but cannot pay for it.
To me, it’s all the same. I want to help people because I believe that if you help enough people for money or not, you will always end up with enough money for whatever you need. I’m not looking to maximize every interaction. I’m looking to maximize my value and every interaction. To me, that’s truly a golden nugget.
If you concentrate on delivering value, you won’t have to worry about the financial side. Money will come. It’s the value first. Remember, it’s all about the customer all of the time. Everybody hears that and most people agree, but then they go out and don’t act like that. It truly is all about the customer all of the time. Let’s hop into your expertise with business operations in Ukraine. Start and give us a couple of minutes on not the Ukrainian version of history between Ukraine and Russia or the Russian version but Vlad’s version of history between the two to set the stage for what we will get into in the current operations.
I don’t know if there is history per se. This is not the Middle East, where they constantly fight for a piece of land. Ukrainians and Russians, at the end of the day, are the same people. The language and the food are slightly different. In the culture, maybe if you dig very deep, there will be a slight difference there, but in reality, if you put Russians and Ukrainians next to each other, they look the same. You will never tell them apart.
What is going on there is not between Russia and Ukraine. It is not between the Russians and Ukrainians either. This is between Putin, who has been in power for over twenty years and they think it got into him. It’s the fact that he’s an ex-KGB guy from the Soviet Union and the fact that he wants the Soviet Union. He wants the ultimate power and ultimate tyranny. That is it. There is a lot of propaganda going on in Russia.
I believe that only because of that, there are plenty of rations there that support this war and what Putin is doing, but I don’t think they truly understand what’s going on to the point that due to the propaganda and the way they show the news, people there don’t see the war and that people are dying. They see the country where Russia comes in and liberates Russians who live on Ukrainian territory. For that reason, it’s strictly Putin. I don’t think that there is a history that we can point to and say, “Back then,” because it has nothing to do with that.
Since you started Company Folders, have you always had staff in Ukraine?
Ukrainian Entrepreneur: Ukrainians and Russians are the same people. The culture may be a little different. But in reality, they look and act the same. The war is not between Russia and Ukraine; it’s about Putin and his hunger for power.
 
Yeah. Interestingly, when I needed my first website, there were no social media back then. We’re talking about 2002 and 2003. There were discussion boards and forums online. I took part in those. Through some of those forums or discussion boards, I met this guy who lived in Kharkiv, Ukraine, which is the city that I came from. He was a web designer. I remember thinking to myself, “How cool is that if I can get that guy to create a website?” I came from there. If I can give back in whatever way, that’s awesome. I hired that guy and he created the website.
Prior to all of that, I was a web developer myself. After he created the website, I was able to go back in and start doing the tweaks and everything I needed to do on a smaller scale with improvements on a daily basis. That’s it. I hired him for a project and we were done. When the next time around, they needed to improve the website, I found another guy who was a web designer who created the next version of my website, which was also project-based. He did the website and we were done.
After that, when I needed to do some major web work again, I figured, “At this point, it’s better to hire somebody full-time.” That’s how I hired my first web developer who’s still with me. His name is Denis. Soon after, he brought his friend, Eugene. Both of them are still with me. We’re talking about one of them being with me for 13 years and another one being with me for 14 in 2022. They also brought this other guy, Anatoliy, who’s our designer. He’s still with us also for 11 or 12 years in 2022. Over time, we hired a few more people.
You had operations in Ukraine for many years. Tell us. How do you manage when things have been fairly stable for those twenty years?
It’s not necessarily.
How do you manage operations during periods of instability?
Things were great for a while. It was wonderful. Denis, Eugene, and Anatoliy, all three of them and a few more guys, were in Donetsk. In 2014, Russia came in and bombed the Donetsk area. Their houses got destroyed. Back then, I helped them move to Kharkiv. They moved to Kharkiv and started their lives again from scratch. That also means that they own their apartments. Think of it as a condo in Donetsk. They had to leave it behind because it’s now worthless, move to Kharkiv, and start all over again.
Finally, they’re making their lives. They feel comfortable and love the city. Eugene even bought a second condo. He did not even have time to remodel it and the war started again. Once again, their building gets hit. His apartment is gone. The way I see this is there are different measurements that you can apply to things. At the end of the day, it’s what’s important to you and what your intent is.
My intent is very simple. I have phenomenal employees and a team who makes Company Folders successful. The way I see it is that my job is to support everybody who works for me in a way that they need the support every time. Every time we have an unstable situation like the one in 2014 or now, we work with it. We don’t apply policies because when you talk about policies, you talk about the limitations of things. We look at it as they all have different needs and whatever you need at the time.
If you can’t work, don’t work. I’m still going to pay you. I showed them on day one that they would not miss their pay. They will still have their job no matter how long that takes and no matter what it takes, whether they could or couldn’t work. We will figure out ways around the company in some other capacity. We did. Some of them still don’t work. Is it helpful to the business? It’s detrimental, but I am here. I am in my safe home. I have food to eat. We have windows and heat. They do not. Their needs are more important than mine.
If you help enough people, whether there's money or not, you will always end up with enough money for whatever you need. Share on X
I think back to a story. There was a bank based in New Orleans, Louisiana, Hibernia Bank. It’s a regional bank. They had a contingency plan for the bank if a hurricane hit the call center employees of the bank. Most of the banking doesn’t take place in the drive-through or the lobby. It happens over the phone or online. They would be able to go to Shreveport, which is a couple of hundred miles away and far enough out of the storm path that they would keep the bank operational.
What they found when Katrina hit was the bank was under 16 feet of water. It filled the basement and the first floor. It did not fill the second floor but was on the second floor. They told everybody to go home. What happened, in reality, is they told them to go to the secondary location in Shreveport. In reality, what happened is the people didn’t go to Shreveport because the primary concern of the people was their homes, families, and belongings. They took care of that.
We talked about being all about the customer all of the time. As a leader in a business, your primary customer is probably your team. Their primary customer is the customer. Herb Kelleher with Southwest Airlines was the first guy to say, “The customer is not always right.” What you’ve always heard is, “The customer is always right.” We know that’s not true.
The customer isn’t always right, but Herb followed that up with, “The customer is still the customer. They’re still paying the bill. We have to treat them accordingly, but I will take care of my employees, and because I take such great care of my employees, they will take care of my customers.” That has worked unbelievably well for Southwest Airlines. It will work for anybody else. How do you communicate with employees in a conflict zone?
Surprisingly, it is very easy. Their internet still works well. We talk via WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. We have multiple channels of communication in case one goes out, but so far, everything works. We have not had any problems with that. Luckily, Elon Musk came in and gave Ukraine internet through Starlink. How awesome is that? You’re talking about the golden nugget of being an entrepreneur. That right there is as golden as it gets. The government is trying to do things. Here is one guy.
It’s interesting to see how there are a lot of one-guys with maybe not as big of a name as Elon Musk and a lot of people out there solving problems when our government leaders can’t seem to get a handle on what to do. Other than Ukraine and Russia, there are a lot of talks. That doesn’t help anything. How are you managing the short-term but planning for the ultimate recovery in the long-term?
A little bit of redundancy comes in all of our people here internally who work with customers like customer service people and salespeople are all trained as graphic designers. The job of Ukrainian designers used to do all the customer jobs. While they cannot do that, people here could, and because of that, we don’t have to fool the staff. We can operate. When it comes to development work, that is all future growth. I am taking the opportunity quest on that because we are not developing future staff. Once again, what is their future, even financially, however you want to measure it against potentially people’s lives, comfort, and well-being?
What insight can you share on the tech sector in Ukraine?
I published an article maybe in 2015 in either Money or Time magazine talking about how awesome the Ukrainian tech market is. The people are smart and hardworking. A lot of them speak English. Compared to where we were in 2015, it has escalated by now. They got way better and smarter. There are amazing experts and professionals out there. As far as I know, outside of Silicon Valley and Israel, that’s probably where your best tech people are.
There is an economic advantage as a Ukrainian developer as opposed to a US developer.
Ukrainian Entrepreneur: The Ukrainian tech market has only gotten smarter and better. The people there are really hard working. Outside of Silicon Valley and Israel, Ukraine is where the best tech people are.
 
They make less money there than they do here. However, the economical difference gets smaller every day. Sometimes, a developer in Ukraine would cost you $500, $600, or $800 a month. Now, if you’re looking at a good developer, you’re easily looking at $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $10,000, or more. There are architects there that make over $200,000.
As we look at the global economy and global outsourcing, here’s what happens. We’re in the contact center business. Years ago, that got pretty hot in India. At the time, labor was maybe $1 an hour as opposed to $10 or $12 here, but as those markets mature, wages and costs rise and experience the same things we would experience here to where there can be a bidding war type of scenario for people with true talent in the US. You see that all over the world in various industries as those markets mature. That’s the way that goes.
I’ll quickly follow up with this. I have some friends from back in the day in Ukraine that are doctors. As doctors, they make $400 to $500 per month. You take developers who make thousands of dollars per month. That puts them above pretty much anybody in the local market because the average salary is still a couple of hundred bucks a month, either way you look at it, not for tech people. Designers and developers make much more.
Is there any question I should have asked you that I haven’t? We’re in the fourth turn. I can see the finish line coming up. Is there any last question or anything you would like to share with us?
The one thing I would like to share is this. The war has nothing to do with Russia and Ukraine. In my opinion, it’s for Putin. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian people are suffering. Cities get leveled, people get misplaced, and buildings get knocked down. For everybody who’s reading, please do your part in supporting Ukraine. There are plenty of organizations out there that collect donations that they use to buy supplies. We’re talking about humanitarian help. We’re not talking about the army, forces, and politics. We’re strictly talking about taking care of people.
There are pregnant women in half-broken buildings with no windows in the middle of the winter with no hospital to go to because it has been knocked down. There are no doctors because doctors either left or died. They’re scared. People are packed in metro stations and subways, sheltering from bombs. Please find it in your heart to help Ukraine. Donate to any of their organizations. If you can’t figure out which ones, my email address is Vladimir@CompanyFolders.com. Email me and I’ll guide you. That’s the biggest message.
That is a great note to finish on. Please support Ukraine and the people in Ukraine that need basic life supplies during this time. Vladimir, thank you so much for coming to the show.
Thank you for having me, Don. This was great.
That’s the episode of the show. I’ll see you next time.
 
Important Links

Gratitude
Orange Computer Solutions
Vladimir@CompanyFolders.com

 
About Vladimir Gendelman
An experienced authority on entrepreneurship, small business, and business marketing, Vladimir Gendelman, is the founder and CEO of Company Folders, Inc., which specializes in printing custom presentation folders. He is a regular commentator and guest contributor on business podcasts and news outlets. As a young entrepreneur, he started his award-winning business as a basement operation and grew it to a multi-million-dollar company that services a roster of clients that includes Bed, Bath & Beyond, Hallmark, Verizon, and MGM.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: S2:E16 | Ethan King – Starving Artist To CEO
Date: June 14, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/tpe-s216-ethan-king-starving-artist-to-ceo/
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Many people are afraid to do the things they are most passionate about for fear of becoming a starving artist. Instead, they go on exhausting grinds that do not give them actual fulfillment. But for Ethan King, his success story began taking shape when he stayed the course with the things he truly loves doing. Joining Don Williams, he shares how starting a small graphic design business with his girlfriend (and later wife) became the standard for his biggest entrepreneurship achievements. Ethan also discusses some tips on maintaining a healthy marriage and breaks down the lessons he learned from a near-bankruptcy experience.
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Ethan King – Starving Artist To CEO
I have my very good friend, a super guy from Atlanta, Georgia, Ethan King. Ethan, welcome to the show. 
It’s great to be here.
I am so thrilled that you came on and joined us, looking for your success story, proven entrepreneur’s success stories, and as we know, many times, a success story has a failing piece. In my case, many pieces didn’t work, but that’s the way it goes. I want to take you all the way back to young Ethan, from 5 to 18. I’m going to look all the way back. In the household where you were raised and some households are mom and dad and some are mom and some are grandma, whatever that looked like, was there an adult who was an entrepreneur who set an entrepreneurial example for you as young Ethan? 
No entrepreneurs in the family. None at all. My parents are very practical people. At about five years old, it was around then that my parents got divorced. My mom got remarried. She’s a doctor. My stepdad was a minister and my biological father was a lawyer. They wanted me to get a practical job and go that route.
Young Ethan, I wanted to be an artist. That’s my background. No business or entrepreneurship. I wanted to be a fine artist like drawing, painting, and sculpture. My parents very kindly told me that, “Ethan, you know that artists don’t make any money until after they are dead, right?” I was a stubborn kid like most of us and I didn’t listen. I ended up majoring in Art. I went to college and majored in Art.
I was very serious about it. All throughout high school, I went to a magnet school that specialized in visual art. I had my work in exhibitions. I scored a perfect five on both of the advanced placements. I was highly focused on doing art as a career. As it turns out, my parents were right. It’s hard to make money as an artist. You have to do things like pay rent and that gets to be a bit challenging. For a time in my life, I was a starving artist. In college, I did use my artistic talent when I joined a fraternity, and I was the guy that was designing all the t-shirts, jackets, and flyers for the Greeks on campus.
Other organizations started asking me to design their materials too. I would do it for free because I love doing it. What I learned is that as an artist, the reason the word starving artists exists is because many times, we feel guilty about charging money for work that we love doing. There’s this internal conflict with artists. I did learn how to get over that in order to be where I am now, but I will explain that later in my story.
We haven’t talked about this. I released my 4th book and my 5th. I’m in midstream in book number five and probably I’m writing books and tell I cannot write books. In my next book, I’m pretty sure the title is going to be Release Your Inner Artist. I know we are brothers of different mothers on this. I believe that you do your finest work.
The reason why starving artists exists is because people often feel guilty about charging money for work that they love doing. Share on X
You may own a gas station and that may be your art. Whatever you create and whatever is in your zone of genius, that is your art. There’s more fulfillment, peace, contentment, and probably dollars if you practice your art. Embrace it, run towards it instead of away from it. I’m taking you back to young Ethan. Still, schoolboy, tell us about the first job, or maybe it wasn’t a job. Maybe you had a lemonade stand, but what was the first effort you did where you earned money in some way? 
In my first job, I was moving furniture around at Emory University and that’s when I realized that I wasn’t cut out for manual labor. I needed to do something where I used my artistic skills and sat down. My first entrepreneurial venture was when I was in the computer club in high school. We had a LAN network in the computer club and I was big into gaming and I had an afterschool arcade and I charged kids money to come in play.
There’s this game called Doom. I don’t know if you are into gaming, but it was a first-person shooter, so we would all be sitting in this arcade where I programmed all the computers to have a LAN party, which was my first entrepreneurial adventure. That got shut down pretty quickly because the game was violent. I didn’t think about that at the time because I was a kid, but that was fun.
I know you are a parent. I’m a parent and a grandparent now, but when the boys were here, sometimes I would be confused. I thought parenting was to raise these perfectly well-behaved short people. The higher calling is to raise independent, caring, accomplishment-oriented adults. Part of being a kid is, “I didn’t think. I just did it.” That’s how that goes. Graduated from Emory and got your degree in Art.
I worked at Emory. I didn’t go to Emory. I have to include this part of my story. I want to be vulnerable and truthful here. In college, I didn’t make wise decisions. I was driven by the pursuit of money and found it hard to get. I turned to hustle and I ended up in jail twice by the age of nineteen. I even got suspended from college from UGA for a semester.
The actual president of the university, Michael Adams, called me to his office and suspended me because I was getting in so much trouble. I’m fortunate that he didn’t expel me. My parents were disappointed in me. I was super embarrassed. My name was all in the school newspaper. I graduated, but after college, I was dead broke because I had a bit of a criminal record and a degree in Art.
It was tough for me to get jobs. This was my starving artist phase, and one of the most humiliating jobs I had was I cleaned the bar at this very dangerous strip club in the South part of Atlanta. I took out the garbage. It was a night job. It worked with my schedule because I was learning graphic design and digital multimedia during the day. It was very humiliating, to say the least, but I felt stuck in that situation. Growing up in a household with a minister, you can imagine there was a lot of guilt there. I was working at a strip club, taking out the trash.
That’s not where it is and I have to tell you this part of the story. I ended up doing graphic design work for some of the DJs at the strip club once they found out I had some artistic talent. I couldn’t use any of that work in my portfolio to land a real job because it was obviously very raunchy. I was now earning some money in my field, but I still felt stuck in this world. Sometimes the universe gives you clues when you need to move from something. Sometimes we are hard-headed and we don’t listen to those clues, then we are pushed out of that situation. One night, on my way to the club. I was robbed. I was carjacked at gunpoint.
Starving Artist: Get the biggest lawyer you can afford, even if you can’t afford one. Stretch yourself because lawyers are worth their weight in gold.
 
The guy took all of my equipment. I ran. I didn’t have any money. He was like, “Give me all your money.” I threw on my wallet and I ran, hopped over a fence. I could hear my car screeching away in the background. It was the scariest moment in my life. I saw that as a sign from the universe not to use my talents for that lifestyle anymore and to put that behind me. From that day forward, I made that decision.
Less than maybe 30 days later, things started to turn around in my life. I landed a full-time job as a graphic designer. I started booking some big-name clients like Tyler Perry, McDonald’s, and some local radio stations for my first business, graphic design. Around that time, I had a school project that I had started for the Greek paraphernalia industry.
The business that I was doing is called stuff4GREEKS. It started to get real orders from college students on the other side of the country. They wanted me to design their jacket, t-shirts, and so forth. Me and my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, were making real money. We started this business together with $700. I put in $350. She put in $350 and we started stuff4GREEKS. We are still one of the top companies that makes custom, personalized Greek paraphernalia for fraternity and sorority members all across the country.
Our business kept growing and growing. Of course, you win the awards. One of the awards that we won as we grew and we were opening store locations is the Bulldog 100. These were the 100 fastest-growing companies owned by UGA alumni. We have been fortunate to win this award four times in our company history. The first time that we won the award and we went to the awards banquet, and I was called on stage, guess who presented me with the award?
It was the same president, Michael Adams, who had kicked me out of college ten years earlier. I tell this story to illustrate that this was an inflection point in my life when I knew that I was finally on the right track. I was misaligned before, but now I felt like I was in alignment, and I saw that moment as certification. I don’t know if he remembered me, but I sure remembered him. I even had the photo of him presenting me with the award ten years later. That was one of those full-circle moments in my life and in my business journey.
There are so many times, even not startup entrepreneurs but entrepreneurs, that they view something that goes bad as this horrible, disastrous failure. Many times, if we allow enough time to lapse. It was not fun and I’m sure it was embarrassing. It was some uncomfortable conversations with your folks about sitting out a semester at UGA, but so many times, looking back, those challenges turn out to be, “Would you be on that same stage with the same president, ten years later winning the award?” If he hadn’t shown a little bit and the odds are it’s probably not.
I encourage all of our readers. Don’t let your past define you. Maybe hadn’t let it redefine you but don’t let it define you. I got to dig in. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that your girlfriend at the time, wife now, started the business together. Two children. You have a busy house. You’re partners in business and in life. I’m going to ask you and I won’t get you in trouble or me in trouble. That’s much more important that will get me in trouble. Give us a positive about sharing not only your personal family, spiritual, mental, or emotional but also your business life with one person. 
People ask all the time, “How do you guys work together and stay married?” This isn’t a popular answer, but I feel like it strengthens our relationship and bond. I don’t know if we’d still be married if we didn’t have our business together. Here’s how we make it work. Here’s the positive part of it and it goes all the way back to when we did premarital counseling.
Sometimes, the universe gives you clues when you need to move from something. However, people are often hard-headed and don't listen to them. Share on X
We were in assignment. We had a list of day-to-day tasks. Let’s say, taking out the trash, washing the dishes, changing the kids’ diapers, whatever. We have this long list, and then each person in the couple writes the name next to each item that they think is the person responsible for doing that thing. Then you compare your answers and you see where there’s alignment and misalignment.
For example, if I wrote down taking out the trash, Ethan, and she wrote down taking out the trash, Ethan, we are on the same page, but if it’s different, we have a discussion. We do the same thing. What that does is create it. You have your lanes. It sets expectations to where now I know for twenty years, I have been the one rolling the trash cans out to the side of the street because I know that I am the DRI.
I stole this term from Steve Jobs. I am the directly responsible individual for rolling the trash cans out to the side of the street. Sometimes she’ll do it if I’m out of town. We also have a young lady who helps manage the household that we hire and she’ll roll out the trash, so I can delegate it, but I’m the directly responsible individual.
That’s the household thing, but we apply the same thing to our business. She came from a background in Corporate America. She was an insurance broker. She handles all the HR, payroll, and insurance. As a creative guy, that stuff drives me crazy. She owns that. She’s the DRI for that stuff, and of course, she delegates it out to her people.
I’m more of the DRI for our business’s creative and marketing, and I delegate that to our people. We stay in our lanes and there is some overlap and we serve as sounding boards for each other. She also has her own business and podcast. She does her thing. I have my own ventures, but we are a support system for each other.
I truly believe the reason I say that this helps our marriage is I believe that if you take the metaphor of people in love gazing into each other’s eyes, that will only last for so long. I think that the bond is stronger if you have a shared vision of the horizon and the future and you two are fighting together. There are going to be battles and adversities that you have to face and overcome together. As you march toward that horizon together, your bond would go stronger and stronger, and that’s what it’s done for us.
I’m a firm believer that love is a verb. It’s an action word. It’s not a person, place or thing. If you listen to music and watch television movies, it’s portrayed as a noun, as a person, place, or thing, but true love is a verb. It’s an action. A couple of nuggets, you are providing me with answers to the question. I mean to ask you yet because I always ask everybody for a golden nugget. You are an overachiever.
A couple of nuggets in there that I loved, and I learned this at an event, or I went and listened to a sex therapist with a bunch of other people, there was very little about sex. As far as that goes, it was very tame, but the takeaway that everybody left with was this. In my opinion, all relationships stand on the pillars of communication and expectation because we all have expectations.
Starving Artist: Oftentimes, you wouldn’t make certain changes until you are in a situation where you are scared, or it’s too painful that you are forced to make a change.
 
If we don’t communicate them to the person we are in that relationship with, we leave ourselves open to disappointment, and for people that you care about, being at your mate, spouse, child, parent, partner, vendor, prospect, or customer, probably best that you don’t disappoint them any more than we have to as humans.
The directly responsible individual is very important. I don’t care if it’s rolling the trash out or making the 401(k). That doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s important to you, somebody ought to be the DRI. You have been ahead of me. I’m going to ask you for a hard lesson and you’ve already given us a great one when you were at UGA.
Something that happened in your entrepreneurial career that at the moment was like, “This hurt.” In retrospect, it turned out that it was in fact, maybe the best thing that could have happened at the time, but at the moment when it happened, it was like, “I don’t know if we are going to make it. We are going to limp for sure.” Hopefully, we can. Do you have a hard lesson you can share?
We were in a business dispute that escalated into a lawsuit. I have to be intentionally vague about it for legal reasons, but it was a loophole in an agreement that another brand we were doing business with and we had a relationship with decided to turn the tables on us and go after our throats and it was very scary. Our legal fees started adding up to over $300,000, and this was at a time when we graduated from the ELs. We were over a million and very thin margins. We did not have the money to fight this. We had a new baby, a newborn, at home, and it was a disastrous moment.
Not only did this brand go after us, but they also decided to expose this loophole and go after a lot of our competitors. We saw some of our competitors go out of business. Go bankrupt. That got scary. That was the first time in my life and my business career that I entertained the word. Even though about it as a possibility. Should we file for bankruptcy?
What we ended up doing was we fired our lawyer because he was the one suggesting we go bankrupt. No. We are going to need somebody else on our team here. That’s what I learned and I leaned on my EO forum and people gave awesome experience shares as a go with big letterhead. Get the biggest lawyer you can afford. Even if you can’t afford the lawyer, you have to stretch yourself because lawyers are worth their weight in gold.
I didn’t know that at the time. I’m so glad I did it. We hired up a shark that was in our corner and he found a way to countersue the other party. We ended up settling for a fraction of what they were looking for. This is a funny side story. If you’ve ever gone through this type of thing before, a lawsuit is you are not sitting in a courtroom like you see on TV.
It’s a bunch of emails and letters going back and forth between lawyers. There’s a lot of waiting for the other party to respond. There’s nothing else you can do during that time while you are waiting. What is on your mind is causing you to lose sleep and you are distracted. You have to carry on the day-to-day work of the business.
Let trauma catapult you into a transformation of success. Share on X
I got so stressed out and burned out. I said, “I’m going to train for my first marathon.” How weird is that? People were like, “Are you serious?” Anyone who doesn’t know, for the benefit of your readers, a marathon is 26.2 miles. To train your body to run 26.2 miles, you have to run for hours every single day. Some days I was running three hours a day to train for this marathon. This is in the middle of fighting for my life. I’m going to get to tell you the logic behind this that was in my brain at the time, and I talked about this in my book. I believe that there are six dimensions of life and six areas.
I formed the acronym SIMPLE Spirituality, Intellect, Money, anything dealing with your career businesses in the money category, your Physicality, your Love in relationships, and Entertainment. That forms the acronym SIMPLE. Life is to throw some curveballs at you. Life is going to kick you and beat you up sometimes.
If you let it get you down in one area, you got to be careful not to let the suck you down in the other areas as well. This lawsuit was affecting my money area. It was affecting my business that my M level was way down. I could feel it causing a strain on my relationships. I started to feel resentment. We had a new baby at home. I couldn’t even enjoy my newborn son because I was fighting this thing, and in my mind, I was angry. It pulled all my relationships and entertainment.
I wasn’t traveling as much in doing things. It was pulling down on my spirituality and intellect. All I was reading about was legal-related stuff. I said, “I’m going to take control over what I can control in my body, and I’m going to have a win.” I feel like I was losing in all of these other areas. I needed a win. Me finishing that marathon was the mental win that I needed.
It may seem unrelated on the surface. I feel like that’s what drove me to fight harder for what I believed in and countersue the other party and prevail in the end. We also made changes to our business that catapulted our success to where we are. We have a different business model that we were forced to make during that situation. It was about eight months of a very tumultuous time in our business. Now I can look back on it and I’m thankful for it.
As a general statement, you have to be careful with those, but they have a tendency to overlook taking care of them. Entrepreneurs are very good about taking care of other people. Take care of my team, my spouse, my kids, or my customers. “What did you eat today?” “I didn’t eat today.” “How long have you worked?” “I started at 5:00 AM and it’s 8:00 PM.”
It’s unusual behavior for the average person. We all only have one body to get us from birth to death. Best that we don’t abuse it any more than we have to, and we take care of it. Plus, with all that gross physical activity, your endorphins are certainly helped to deal with everything else. That’s awesome. What about a golden nugget? You’ve already given us so many. I’m grateful that you came on, but something you know. Some piece of wisdom in the mind of Ethan King we want to know.
It goes back to something you said earlier, and you were talking about how traumatic moments can sometimes lead to success, like if you wouldn’t have made the changes that you needed to make. Whether that’s in your business, health, or relationships, oftentimes we wouldn’t make certain changes until we are in a situation where we are scared or it’s painful to the point where we are forced to make the change.
Wealth Beyond Money: Unlocking the 6 Dimensions of Success for Richness in Every Area of Your Life
I have gone through a series of these traumatic moments. I have already mentioned the carjacking and lawsuit. I also had a health scare. When I looked at each one of them, it led to these inflection points in my life, but it doesn’t always do that. We hear stories of people who didn’t come out the other side. Either they ended up bankrupt, divorced, dead or whatever the worst outcome is for their situation. It doesn’t always have a happy ending.
I heard a story about this gentleman named Paul Cassell. He was a British real estate tycoon, a multimillionaire. At age 54, this guy would seem he had it all, private jets, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, every car. He even played polo with Prince Charles. At age 54, he stepped out in front of a subway train and took his own life. You have to wonder when you peel back the layers like, “What happened? What was going on here?” No one will ever know the whole story, but we did see that he was on his fourth marriage. He had some medical issues. He had been to the doctor a few times. He had some business deals that went bad. It got to be too much for him and he decided that was the only way out. I decided that I was going to catch myself early and not get that far out of balance. When I go back to those six areas, those six buckets are like all the simple success buckets.
If there’s a golden nugget that I want to share with people, it’s that let your trauma catapult in your transformation to success. How can we use trauma as a launchpad for positive transformation? Better yet, how can you make that change that you know you need to make without having to go through the trauma? Where can you mentally trick yourself into making that change? That’s what I have been exploring. I have the answer. I wrote a book about it. It’s called Wealth Beyond Money: Unlocking the 6 Dimensions of Success for Richness in Every Area of Your Life. I deeply explore the science of personal change in every aspect of life.
Look for that book. I have a pastor friend that he relates that he thinks people change due to 1 of 2 stimuli. They see the light, so they prevent going through that trauma. They can see it out there. They are like, “I’m changing now,” or they feel the heat like human nature is that most of us are more open to change. Change is hard and big changes are really hard. Most people are not the see the light changers. 
They are the feel the heat changers, but the part to remember is this. Don’t quit. There are a lot of overnight, but twenty years success stories that I can tell you, there were many nights of macaroni and cheese and I didn’t quit. Maybe it would have been smarter to quit, but I didn’t quit. We got somewhere and that’s great.
We are into the final turn here. We are coming to the finish line. I can see the checkered flag out. I’m going to put you into a time machine and transport you back and you are going to get a couple of minutes to share the wisdom that you have now that you wish your twenty-year-old self knew. At the end of the time machine, you go back 60, 90 seconds of, “Listen to this. This will help you. It’ll ease your way. It’ll speed you on your path through life.”
What I would tell my younger self is that you create your own reality. Life is not happening to you. Life is happening for you. You are not a camera, soaking in what’s going on around in your life. You are more like a projector. You create the universe around you through the lens you have on. It’s how you are going to see and create the world.
Once you realize that you are the creator of your destiny, that can change everything. With the right mindset in tools, you can reshape every aspect of your life. You can have it all. That’s what I would tell my younger self. It was much more simple than you think. If I had time with my younger self, I would give an actionable, pragmatic tip that he implements. That’s what inspired me to write the book because my book is loaded with practical science-backed tips that anyone can apply and that I wish my younger self would have applied more.
Starving Artist: You need to have the wisdom to have the miles ahead of you. Apply the things and lessons you learned, so you don’t have to put on as many hard miles yourself.
 
The great thing about wisdom is that it’s good, and the bad side is you have to have some miles.
You have to have the wisdom to have the miles ahead of you. Apply the things and lessons that they teach you. That way, you don’t have to put on as many hard miles yourself.
A wise mentor or two will make a huge difference in whatever your endeavor is for sure. How would somebody reach out to you?
The best way to reach me is to go to my website EthanKing.com. You can find links to reach me on every social media channel. You can shoot me a message. You can book me to speak at your event. You can buy my book. You can do all of that at my hub.
That’s all for this episode with rockstar Ethan King. Thanks. See you next time. 
 
Important Links

Ethan King
stuff4GREEKS
Wealth Beyond Money: Unlocking the 6 Dimensions of Success for Richness in Every Area of Your Life

 
About Ethan King
Ethan King is an entrepreneur with businesses in apparel, fitness, e-commerce, and real estate. He is a dynamic speaker who shares his journey from starving artist to CEO of multiple 7-figure brands. He has been featured on the cover of Best Self Magazine, and specializes in coaching high performance professionals around the world. Ethan is the author of the forthcoming book, Wealth Beyond Money: Unlocking The 6 Dimensions of Success for Richness in Every Area of Your Life, and he is passionate about YOU truly having it all.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E17 | Why Small To Medium Businesses Need To Start Outsourcing Talent With Brad Stevens
Date: June 6, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/tpe-s217-why-small-to-medium-businesses-need-to-start-outsourcing-talent-with-brad-stevens/
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Content:
 
If your business is struggling, outsourcing talent can really save it. It’s low-cost and you get to recruit people from around the world. What your business is going to do is secondary. It’s more important to get the best people for the job, whether they’re your neighbor or across the globe. Develop this gig economy and start outsourcing talent. Join Don Williams as he gets Brad Stevens to share how outsourcing saved his company. Brad is the CEO of Outsource Access where he provides full-time vetted and trained virtual staff from the Philippines to business owners all over the world. Listen to his story from the disaster of his teeth whitening company to discovering Jim Collins. Learn how to outsource properly to really grow your business.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Why Small To Medium Businesses Need To Start Outsourcing Talent With Brad Stevens
I have my good friend, a phenomenal entrepreneur from Atlanta, Georgia, Brad Stevens, on the show. Welcome, Brad.
Don, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you. I’m excited about our time together.
It’s my pleasure. I saw you when we were in New Orleans. It used to be that a good day to be in New Orleans was Fat Tuesday. We were over there on the wrong day. Let’s jump right into it. I’m going to take you back to young Brad, five years old through high school. In the household where you were raised, mom and dad or grandparents or whoever that was, did you have an adult who set an entrepreneurial example for you as a young child? 
I’m one of those kids that grew up in an entrepreneurial environment. They had a whiteboard permanently hanging over the fireplace in our house where things were always flowing around. Whether I wanted it to or not, blessing or curse, I was destined for this path. My mom’s grandfather started a business in the manufacturing space back before Home Depots and Lowe’s existed, creating doors and aluminum windows. He manufactured them in Florida.
That was the genesis of the entrepreneurial path from my recollection. My mom’s dad took that over, and my dad started working for the firm. He took a whole other direction in manufacturing. This was back when the movie industry used to be a thing. We used to go rent movies back in the day, the old Blockbuster. I think there’s still one left on the planet.
My dad helped grow a division and manufactured a lot of the display units inside the video rental stores. My uncle helped create some of the first rental software in the movie rental space. It is an interesting journey. I remember at a young age, 8 or 10, I was sitting there on a desk computer helping to type in movie inventory because my mom ran a local video store. They could practice using all their products and so forth.
I was going around it quite a bit and I also got to see the other side of entrepreneurship. Unfortunately for that business, we know what happened to that industry. It went completely flipped side. My dad drove me to school every morning. I’m growing up around entrepreneurial talk. In third grade, I went to a small private school. I would always ask him questions about the business.
I was in love with Micro Machines. Remember those tiny little cars back in the day. The guy who spoke fast in the commercials. I asked him for that for my birthday and Christmas all the time. I collected this big wad of Micro Machines. My parents enjoyed Crown Royal. Those little purple velvet bags, that’s what I kept all my Micro Machines in.
You have to earn your entrepreneurial chops through years of a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Share on X
When I was a third-grade Brad, I went into a Christian school and I would carry these things in my Crown Royal bags. I decided to start a Micro Machine rental business. I was giving a talk I’m doing where I’m sharing my journey and I had some visuals. My mom still has the folder. I created a credit card for myself. I had a VP of Marketing and a VP of Sales. I had frequent renter cards. I had a newsletter that I typed up on an old typewriter. It is pretty funny to look at, but my wheels are spinning at an early age.
Being in a little Christian school, I didn’t want to create too much turbulence. I only lasted for about six months with my enterprise there, but it started that journey for me. I continued through high school. I started a tutoring company in high school where I went to all the middle school counselors. I said, “Who are the kids that are either struggling in math or need to skip a grade and want to get ahead. Give me the list of those folks and/or connect me to them or make me a resource.” I created a whole tutoring curriculum. I help tutor kids and help them through the summers, particularly middle school, to get caught up or to get ahead if they want to skip.
In high school, I was a part of the entrepreneurial class where we launched a whole trading company with a set of schools in Scotland in the UK. We would find products in the US. Beanie Babies were all the rage back in the day. That’s one of the things they liked and wanted us to ship over. They had Pet Rocks, believe it or not. We’re making a comeback. We imported that in some unique gold jewelry from Scotland. I got a chance to travel over there and tour. Those are the initial entrepreneurial experiences that I knew I was going to head down this path.
It sounds to me like it was unavoidable. There is no way for you to resist the gravitational pull of entrepreneurship in your household. Let me ask about your first job. Maybe your first job was entrepreneurial. Maybe it was renting the Micro Machines. What did you do that was your first financial compensation? Was that a job? Was that selling something of your own? 
We have a price list. It’s funny. I have to show it to you some time. I took pictures of this whole folder system that I had in third grade. We rented them for $0.01 to $0.02 a night. If you want a low-level Micro Machines, it was $0.01 a night for rental. We had a whole rental sheet for check-in and check-out. People rented them. If you wanted the higher quality ones, it was $0.02 to $0.05.
I also asked for all the little aircraft carriers and the little gas stations. Those were the units that you could take home to interact with the Micro Machines. We rented those for $0.50 a night or something. To be honest, my first income was from that adventure at that age, but the tutoring company was also probably more substantial revenue-wise. I would charge $20 an hour to do the rental. It was great cash during the summer for a high school kid. It felt like it was a zillion dollar back in the day.
We’re going to leave young Brad with his multiple entrepreneurial adventures. At eighteen, did you go to university, backpack across Africa or join the Merchant Marines? What’s your story? 
That sounds like it would be fun. That’s not what I did, but that sounds fantastic. Throughout high school and so forth, I had my entrepreneur ventures but I was big into academics. I love school. Still to this day, I love learning. I was pretty big in doing athletics. I had parents that encouraged a well-rounded aspect of things. Funny enough, I did Spanish poetry competitions, which was a random fun fact I did in high school. I fell in love with the Spanish language. I learned Spanish and did this poetry. It is a random tangent.
Outsourcing Talent: Learn how to manage finances, grow a company, and deal with the supply chain so you can build your baseline. Learn all that so you can avoid banging your head against a few walls on your next business.
 
In college, I ended up getting into Harvard University, and I got into the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. We’re trying to solve what my path was going to be. I got in a couple of other places. I was honored to have the opportunity. I knew I wanted to do business at some point in my career. I went back and forth. At Harvard, I realized they don’t have an undergraduate Business program. All they have is Economics.
It was a phenomenal experience. You get accepted. You can’t turn it down. It’s a unique opportunity. I ended up going to Harvard in my freshman year. I had a wonderful experience. I love all the Liberal Arts education. I went to some Business basics, and Economics didn’t quite scratch that itch from an education standpoint. In parallel to that, our family business situation had some challenges and things that were going on. I had spent a lot of time talking back on the whole family front. It went to an unfortunate situation.
It was an interesting time in my life during freshman year. I wasn’t loving the content education. I was cleaning out my closet at Harvard and I found the paperwork for Wharton, which was my second choice to go to, and a week was the transfer date. I’ll make this move. I don’t think anybody ever leaves Harvard. There is a shortlist of people that they don’t ever talk to again in life that do that at Harvard.
A long list of people who want to get into and can’t, and a shortlist of people who get in and leave. 
I got proud of that at a young age. I was like, “What’s best for me? What do I want? What do I want to pursue?” UPenn was the only Ivy school that in my understanding had undergraduate business education opportunities, as well as Liberal Arts. Harvard had. You could cross-register with MIT and fabricate an undergrad education experience, but it was too much of a challenge. I filled out the paperwork. I ended up getting in and transferred down to the University of Pennsylvania. I went to Wharton undergrad and finished up there with majors in Finance and Marketing and a bunch of Liberal Arts classes that I took and enjoyed. I finished up there in Philadelphia and I was going to graduate.
It was back in 2002 when I graduated. Back then tech was all the rage, and I ended up getting an offer to go work for an investment bank called Robertson Stephens. I knew I wanted to get back home. All my family was down in Atlanta and the surrounding area. I was ready to get back down to some warm weather. As an investment bank opportunity, I made an investment making money in Atlanta. I was pretty good at 21 years old. Two weeks before we were supposed to start, they went under. I was all excited. I had rented a place with another young single guy in Atlanta. We were both going to be single, making good money, and living in the Buckhead scene. Robertson Stephens took E-Trade public. They were big back in the tech sector, but I think the parent county was FleetBoston at that time, but they shut them down.
It was a big surprise. I was sitting there and was about to start. The cool part is I got to keep my signing bonus. I got three months of severance pay and never worked a day for the company. I was like, “I’m making a career out of this. I’ll go find the next failing corporation and walk away with $20,000.” I got around there and ended up having $18,000 to $20,000. It was one of those crossroads in life. I had some other offers with some consulting firms and others that I could have gone to, but my great uncle at the time had shared with me about a business opportunity to maybe go down the entrepreneurial path.
I moved back in with my parents at 21 to 22 years old. I gave up the apartment in Buckhead. I hunkered down and decided to launch this company with my great uncle at the time. We helped low-income senior citizens mainly to learn how to qualify for free medication. He was down in Alabama. I was in Atlanta. We had a mail-order pharmacy component if we couldn’t get them free medications through the patient assistance programs.
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We licensed a software that helped us in doctor’s offices to rapidly make the process happen for seniors that didn’t know how to do the paperwork. We get them free medications from these patient assistance programs if they didn’t know how to do it. If they didn’t qualify for that, we had a mail-order pharmacy relationship that would get them that at a low cost. At a young age, I found myself employees and two offices back in Atlanta and Alabama. I travel back and forth. That’s what kicked things off on the entrepreneurial path, and I haven’t looked back. Since then, I’ve built other companies in different industries. That was the launching point.
I didn’t know that the patient assistance program is part of your background. I have a good friend here in the Dallas Fort Worth area and that was their business also. It is a unique business for many people who know about that. 
Did they work with the software? We worked with a company in Texas that wrote software that would automate the process of filling out the applications. It would API interface with all the drug companies and bring it in. We partnered with them to fill that out. We used that software. It is a Texas company. It is funny you mentioned that.
I think we’re talking about the same person, which proves that it is a small world. 
I haven’t heard that name in a long time.
You have this long and storied entrepreneurial career. Let’s talk about what you’re doing now. What’s your main show? What’s your main gig? What are you doing? 
In the last several years, there had been some interesting stairsteps. One thing naturally led to another from that business. I had a partner. He and I ended up parting ways. I love the idea of recurring revenue. I ended up launching a company in the nutritional product space with another partner. That got us into the spa and the beauty industry. We saw there’s an opportunity to launch in the teeth whitening space. He and I ended up launching a business after that because we had all these relationships in the spa and the beauty industry with this nutritional product that we had. I learned also from that. We got that business up to a decent size, but getting professionals to sell nutritional products at the level of doctors and selling versus mass retail which was challenging.
I learned how to create a product from scratch and get labeling, manufacturing supply chain, and distribution facilities. I’m learning the whole game when it comes to product and cashflow management. When you’re dealing with capital-intensive products and businesses versus service businesses, it is a different ballgame. Being in the beauty industry, we saw that there was an opportunity in teeth whitening. There weren’t a lot of teeth whitening products being sold in the beauty space. It was an opportunity for us to create a product line. We launched a business where we ended up with about 10,000 accounts in about eighteen countries.
Outsourcing Talent: If you’re business is in trouble, you can save it by using a gig economy. Low-cost outsourcing and leveraging online websites like Upwork. Build a team all over the world to save your business.
 
We had a dental division. We sold professional teeth whitening products for administration onsite and also for retail take home, the dental industry, and also in the beauty industry. That was a product-based business. We have supply chains all over Europe and Asia and distribution and so forth. I referenced that because earning your entrepreneurial chops through the years, there are a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Being in capital-intensive businesses, there are lots of supply chains. You’ve got multiple things that can impact your costs.
I would never trade it. It’s not a business I’m excited to go rushing back into at some point. Learning how to manage finances, grow and build a company and a team, you’re having hard outbound calling, sales, infrastructure, and dealing with supply chain built my baseline. I can hopefully avoid banging my head against a few walls on my next business. That teeth whitening business, long story short, we ended up having a product fiasco that happened with one of our products. We manufactured tens of thousands of units of this teeth whitening pen that had lip gloss and teeth whitening gel on the other side. It was called our Chic Flic Pen. It was a double-sided pen.
It’s a great success. People loved it. It got little LED lights on it. We worked with a manufacturer in Taiwan that did manufacturing for super high-end cosmetic brands. One of the suppliers down the way on the next thousands of units that we ordered, and we had been on the cover of US Weekly Magazine with celebrities using it. We were thinking about creating a separate division just for this one product.
One of the suppliers changed the bio-adhesive gel that held the little brush onto the stem for the part that put the teeth whitening gel in. The problem is they would manufacture it in Taiwan, ship it to our teeth whitening gel manufacturer in California, and they would fill the teeth whitening gel side of it. It would happen immediately. We didn’t know, but after about 45 days or two months, it would start reacting. It reacts to hydrogen peroxide and creates gas in it. We send 10,000 grenades all over the world.
One of two things would happen. It would crack on the shelf and ooze in the package or it would crack in a woman’s purse and ooze there, or it would build up enough gas and not quite crack, but when you open it, it shoots across the room at a speed at which it would break the glass. It was around the time that I joined EO. You can imagine my forum was valuable for me. I’ve got products blowing up all over the world now but I thought I was going to be successful.
Because we had seen such success with it, we’re like, “We’re going to send this to all the beauty bloggers and major publications.” That was the batch that we sent to all of those people as well. We doubled down on our screw-up and got it all in the wrong hands of thought leaders. Long story short, crisis breeds opportunity. A lot of people had seen it. That was my COVID disaster at the time. Cash got tight and lean. Fortunately, I did not get any lawsuits that happened from it.
I had to get lean and make cash stretch. That’s when I learned about this whole gig economy world, outsourcing and leveraging platforms like Elance and oDesk back in the day before they merged and became Upwork. I read Tim’s 4-Hours Workweek. I was like, “How can I use this to save this business?” I’m learning how to do that. We built a team all over the world doing gig economy stuff and low-cost outsourcing stuff. We ended up saving the business at the time and ended up selling to our manufacturer.
I had this knowledge base of how to outsource. It was my forum in EO. They said, “Brad, did this come by to you about all this outsourcing and gig economy stuff? On your next business, you ought to do this.” For several years, I did a lot of speaking and consulting on it. I would work with companies, go in and help them figure out where all their constraint points are. I would recommend them to other companies that I found and embedded. I recommend them and be a broker.
When you have people that wake up every day to do what they love, you'll get 5x the ROI. Share on X
After several years and in 2019, people were like, “Brad, why don’t you launch your own operation?” I started using some staff in the Philippines. I’ve seen incredible competency there, intelligence and performance. The first VA that I hired at 23 is now my chief operating officer with over 400 people. I had launched our own operation called Outsource Access. Everything I learned in outsourcing and companies I had worked with and seen challenges people had, I wanted to build a company that addressed all those issues and how we built this operation.
I set up a corporation there and hired everybody’s full-time staff. Now we provide full-time vetted train virtual staff from the Philippines to business owners all over the world and in all kinds of different industries. I still do a lot of speaking for business organizations. I’ve got a chance to speak through several years’ chapters, which has been a great experience sharing and educating. I love the industry and the impact we’re doing with our staff and with the people that we’re impacting as clients.
People’s initial thought about offshore outsourcing is, “We’re going to save a ton of money.” In my experience, there is some of that, but what most people experience is the quality of help that I’m getting is shockingly good. They go for the perceived financial benefit, but what they typically realize is the quality of work and the quality of the individual is unbelievably good in certain locations. The Philippines is one of them.
Different countries are good for different aspects depending on what you’re trying to do. That’s what I’ve found as well. Originally, it was the economic side of things. Our US currency can stretch a long way in some of these other countries. I find some people that are incredible. There is one misnomer that I share a lot with people when they see our business, Outsource Access. We launched in 2019 with about 400 people. Since then, I’m seeing a lot of different companies and different industries. We work in all kinds of different industries. They’re like, “You’re shipping jobs overseas.”
The vast majority of what I see in myself included is it’s either a small to medium businesses that can’t afford a full-time person. They make their existing staff wear nineteen more hats and work 90 hours a week because they can’t afford it. This provides a staffing gap for them to be able to hire someone full-time for far less. They get the support that they need and don’t overwork themselves with existing employees.
The other thing is plugging into existing staff. In this day and age, if you’ve got a W-2 employee that’s a good learner, good contributor and strategic thinker, you don’t want to lose that person. You want them to focus every day on the highest and best use of their time. You flank that person with an outsourced resource to get things off their table that isn’t their best use of time. Now you’re getting 5X the ROI on that person because you’re getting them focused not only on what their best use is but what they love doing. When people wake up every day to do what they love doing and get the stuff off their plate, it makes a big impact.
The Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 have been in global operations for years. You look at the life and health insurance industry, for example, which people traditionally see as very American and US-based, but a big percentage of those codes on actuarial tables were done in India starting back 30, 40, 50 years ago and so. An entrepreneurial CEO has two jobs. One is to cast the vision for what they want the company to be, and how they want it to act and perform. That is job one. Job two is to find the best people in the world to help make that vision get done and execute that vision. That’s it. 
The CEO should get out of the weeds, quit turning on the light, sweep the floor, and do whatever they’re doing. Cast the vision and find the best people on the planet. It’s a big planet. The US is a big place, but we’ve got 340 million people here and 7 billion people on the planet. We’re rapidly moving towards a more global economy, and that’s inevitable. I love that business.
Outsourcing Talent: If you have an A-grade W2 employee, that’s a good learner and a strategic thinker, you don’t want to lose that person. You want them to focus every day on the highest and best use of their time.
 
To shift into the highest and best use. No doubt. It’s a big shift. There’s a reason why only 4% to 5% of businesses get over $1 million. There’s a talk I gave at the opening of an entrepreneurial center in Atlanta. I was the first speaker for them. I show them a slide of the growth ceiling. I said, “This is the reason why only 4% to 5% get to $1 million because they get here and hammer against this gross ceiling. They won’t get out of their own way and deflect.” A lot of people don’t have the ability to get on the other side of that. The E-Myth book, which a lot of people have heard of, I have everybody go reread that nine times if you’re ever going to truly get to that next place to not be in it but working on it.
I can’t agree enough with you about “first who, then what.” That’s the reason why a lot of the philosophies, whether it’s EOS and it’s the right people, right seats. I’m a huge Jim Collins fan. That’s the first thing Jim Collins stuff. It’s the “first who, then what.” He studied all those companies in Good to Great. The number one thing was to go get the best people in the world. In what you’re going to do, the what is secondary. It’s first who. It may be next door. It may be in another country. We are in a globalized economy now. You can mix and match those resources to get the most optimized team to help you scale and grow.
If you get the right who, they’ll bring the what. You won’t have to get too involved in that if you get the right who. It is important. Thinking back on your career. You’ve already shared a couple of curveballs and things that didn’t go exactly according to plan. What I’m looking for now is a hard lesson, something that happened other than the grenade cosmetic. Something that happened that at the time it was like, “This is painful.” In retrospect, looking back on it now, it appears that it might have been for your ultimate good and sped you along your way. Do you have a hard lesson that you can share with us that you haven’t already?
There was a big one that always comes to mind. There are all kinds of micro painful lessons along the way in the journey, but I was in a complete down in the dumps situation that was very challenging. I’ll share another fun thing that was occurring similarly at the same time. As I mentioned in the teeth whitening business, we had a dental division and a beauty division. We started in the beauty space. We provided teeth whitening products and lower strength products in that space. On the dental side, we had two different brands.
Probably through getting that launched, we ended up having the dental community feeling threatened by teeth whitening being offered in the beauty space. The dental offices started suing spas and salons offering teeth whitening. Here we are selling to both of these people, and all the spas and salons we had sold whitening products to in kits started issuing chargebacks. As a business owner, you see deposits in your merchant account and all of a sudden, you see a massive amount taken out of your account. Interestingly, that was happening concurrently with some of those other challenges that occurred.
It was a situation where we felt it wasn’t valid. The dentists were concerned as far as what their claims were because the products and what was happening were much lower strength. It wasn’t being administered or managed by staff at the spas and salons. It is low strength. It is the same strength of products you could buy like Crest White Strips at the pharmacy. In some of the litigation that’s happening around it, one of the dentists was asked, “You’re saying if I go to CVS and I go buy teeth whitening strips. I ask one of the sales associates to help me get clarification on how they apply to my teeth. Not opening it but just saying, ‘How does this work? I just apply it on my teeth?’ Is that practicing dentistry without a license?” Absolutely. I was like, “This is what we’re dealing with here.”
Long story short, I’m selling to both of these different groups under different brands with one suing the other, and having to sell to both of them and manage and so forth. I ended up having to partner with some of our competitors in the industry. We created a national legal team and alliance. We hired a group out of DC. We hired an attorney to help go advocate and create a national advocacy group for the teeth whitening space for the beauty industry. Ultimately, we had to choose a state to file a legal suit in, and it would be North Carolina. We ended up winning the lawsuit on the beauty side. I found out that it was more of a restraint of trade issue. It had nothing to do with practicing dentistry without a license, and the court case was ultimately settled.
It’s learning and building grit as an entrepreneur and having to build your thick skin. My business now is the largest and most successful that I’ve had, but it’s based on having the grit and dealing with them. You’re sitting there and feel like you’re getting mortar fire. I got teeth whitening pens blowing up. I got one customer suing me and one customer buying from me, and having to launch this national advocacy group. That level of grit pushed me. I learned a lot growing up in a family business nature and having experienced that business deal with some massive struggles and observing it.
 What you're going to do is secondary. It's more important to get the best people for your business.  Share on X
We ended up getting on the other side of that. It translated into a lot of business opportunities. We were able to celebrate that win. That made sense. Overall, that experience coupled with the others, I attribute that to what it means to hunker down and get in low gear, as the Southerners talk about it sometimes. What it takes getting to low gear and ride out that stuff that prepares you to navigate.
I always joke around entrepreneurs. There’s nothing that can happen in my life that fazes me. We got a six-year-old and a two-year-old. Our son is on the roof bouncing around at two years old or something. It doesn’t faze me. My wife is losing her mind and I’m like, “This is a standard operating procedure for an entrepreneur like a two-year-old on the roof happens regularly.”
Thank you for sharing that. I’ll share back that typically my failings in my own success story were large, and you can see them on the horizon. I typically didn’t make the little mistakes. The ones I did had a big plume of dust, ash and fire. I’m looking for a work speed moment. Things are going pretty good in one of your businesses. All of a sudden, you implement a strategy, you make a new hire, but something happens that you get that hockey stick of growth. It’s like, “Things are going pretty good, but now things are going amazing.” Do you have a warp speed moment?
Fortunately, the business that we’re in has been pretty crazy. We’re right at 400 people in a few years. We started with a handful. I started initially as a consulting practice and educating. I hired a couple of VAs in the Philippines. Americanize culture completely. English is their second language. It is why I ended up choosing that. I had a couple that I was working with to help my speaking and consulting business.
I’m realizing what the capabilities were and deciding, “This is what small to medium business owners need. They don’t need a person to do a website. They need someone that’s going to work side by side in their business and supporting them.” I realized that with my first VA. I hired her at 23 years old. I almost didn’t hire her because she didn’t have all of the experience that I needed and all the technology. This goes back to the, “first who, then what,” which is a great case study in it.
I had this woman helping me when I was going to hire my first VA in the Philippines. She showed me her resume and she was 23. She didn’t know Infusionsoft, which is the technology we were using. She hadn’t had a lot of years of experience in being a VA. This woman said, “Brad, I think you ought to hire her. She’s smart. She’s hungry to learn. She rapidly gets things.” I was like, “Alright, I will try.” I started working with this young woman. She didn’t know Infusionsoft. She went and found a place in the Philippines doing international training. She went and got certified and got a certificate. She sent me a picture of it the next day. She was like, “I heard that I need to know this.” I didn’t ask her to do it. She didn’t ask me even to pay her to get it done. She said, “This is what I need to do. What’s next?”
She got certified in project management. She got certified in Lean Six Sigma. I was like, “Is that a unicorn over here in the Philippines? They’re all this driven.” I hired her boyfriend. He was my second staff who came on board. I saw the same experience and then the third and fourth. I almost screwed up if I didn’t hire the woman.
Fast forward several years later, she’s my chief operating officer and helped me build an entire manager team infrastructure. We have 50, 60 managers at this point. She has shown me the ability. One of John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is the Law of The Lid. Can you raise your lid? Bringing her on board and treating her well goes back to culture. I was fanatical about treating and caring. It has been my natural nature to a fault sometimes in the past, but it’s showing her that I cared for her coupled with her natural ability.
Outsourcing Talent: It is important to learn how to build grit as an entrepreneur. You’re going to need thick skin. Customers will sue you and it will feel like getting mortar fire. That is why you need the grit to deal with them.
 
Once we decided to launch, I flew over there. She, I and our team toured a bunch of facilities. Before we knew it, it started ramping. I had built a lot of authority and education from speaking. I had a lot of people that kept asking me, “When are you going to launch this thing?” I had a good burgeoning demand sitting there when we announced we were launching it. We got up to 80 staff in our first 3 or 4 months, and it kept ramping from there.
One of the key things we’ve implemented that has been critical is we brought in a lot of people who are familiar with EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System. It has been phenomenal for our growth. We hired an EO Philippines member. A big shout out to the Entrepreneurs Organization, EO. They have been a big part of my journey, education and learning.
We went to lunch over there. I’m like, “I need somebody to help me.” I ended up bringing her on. We started doing EOS back in ’20. That framework galvanized our senior management team and our goal development execution process. One of the things she had us do was reread Jim Collins’ Good to Great. It is the one that talks about Circuit City that’s defunct. I read it back in my twenties as a young naive entrepreneur and did not get it.
My wife lives in Michigan during COVID. We were driving back and forth to visit her family instead of flying. I listened to it because she asked us, “Do you want to drive?” I remember like, “This is all I need to know. These are the timeless principles right here.” To anyone reading this, go to JimCollins.com and click on Concepts, he’s taken all the concepts from his five books. They are rooted in incredible research and analysis, not just his idea or opinion, but based on rigorous 5 to 10 years of data saying, “This is why these companies were successful.” He reduced it all down to this thing called The Map. In the category, it’s disciplined people, disciplined thought, performing disciplined action, and being built to last.
Between EOS, gravitating and revisiting Jim Collins, I took both of those together. Instilling that framework into our team, in our approach, and in our model from a cultural standpoint. At EO, I got a chance to help him run a think tank with some others at the United Nations. I learned about sustainable development goals. I realized that employees care about being recognized and appreciated, which all of us know. They want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves in the company they’re working for.
I got aligned to those. We hired a consultant. We brought that back into our company and employees. We choose one of the STGs every quarter, and they volunteer their time, whether it’s life on land or eliminating hunger. We planted trees. We’ve bought shoes for children in low-income villages. We’ve helped learning-disability facilities.
Our employees get to choose what they’re passionate about. We surveyed them and said, “At the seventeen sustainable development goals, which one do you care about the most?” I fully fund and pay for the entire thing. They volunteer their time to help. I know you said one thing, but those three things together, the right framework, the right mindset, and a phenomenal injection of why with what we’re doing that showed our employees.
In the outsourcing companies, a lot of times, it’s a dictatorial process in how they’re managed. The companies are all about themselves. It’s about to churn and burn. You make 172 dials now. If not, you’re out. It was a whole different philosophy. I write personal welcome messages to all of our VAs. I tell them how much I care about them in their growth and development. These people write me a novel back. They’re like, “I’ve never seen a CEO ever notice me as a human being. You’re writing me a welcome message”
Small to medium business owners really need someone who's going to work with them side by side, supporting them. Share on X
I’ would say all of that because it’s not only growing clients, which I have been growing. I was building authority, but we have a supply of talented VAs in the Philippines. There are a lot of people in demand. That’s what led to us winning this Inc. Magazine’s Best in Business Award that they developed for companies that are not only growing but are having a big social impact. It’s a product of that. It’s taking all those years of stumbles and fumbles. I know you’ve experienced taking what failed and why. Those are some of the key elements we put in place. The hockey stick happened because of those things in a collective nature.
I think everything that happened and everything you learned and experienced put you where you are now. Many times, when entrepreneurs have exploding cosmetics, they get crushed by that. The reality is that proven entrepreneurs know that we either win or we learn. Learning is a slower winning. The only way you don’t win is if you quit, so keep going. Even though you were in the rental business in elementary at the Christian school, you probably didn’t see yourself, “When I grow up, I’m going to run an outsourced talent company.” You didn’t see that, but everything led you to where you’re at. I’m a big believer in that. 
It’s all incremental in the process. I feel like the 40s are the harvesting time when you learn from your 20s and 30s. We end up launching another company in the middle of COVID. I was President of the EO Atlanta Chapter. One of the challenges we were dealing with was how do we get our members connected and know one another in the middle of a crisis when we can’t get together for our learning events. I’m taking everything that I’ve learned. I got a whole team of VAs and I partnered with a guy in Atlanta that knows how to write software.
We started writing the software. We paired among all of our members in Atlanta and created all these micro introductions to members virtually so they could get to know one another quickly. We were able to take a business from scratch and launch it. It was a project. We were solving a problem. EO wrote a global article about it. Before we knew it, we had dozens of chapters all over.
EO was reaching out to me like, “Could you do this for our professional group that I’m in for accountants and attorneys?” Now it has grown into a whole operation. We’re not sure what to do with it because we both have growing businesses on our own in our core businesses, but it’s in the name. My personal mission statement is to live a disciplined life of creation and connection to help myself and others realize our full potential.
I love it because it’s a connection-based operation. All you got to do is collide two people together in a common passion space, and the magic happens. That has been an interesting outcrop, but it’s the journey of getting that launched, done and out the door. Now we’ve created thousands of connections and it’s running with just one staff doing the back end of it. It is a testament that hopefully, every other business I do going forward will be that quick and easy to get up and out of the ground because you’ve learned from those mistakes in the process.
I’m not entirely confident, but I do hope so. They’re going to like that. Coincidentally, I have lunch with a group of entrepreneurs and you’ll be getting a call about that specific product because they were like, “That’s cool.” I’m like, “I’ve seen it work. It is cool.”
It’s such a simple concept. There are all these chat boards and places we can go and communicate with people in different groups that we’re in, but email is still the number one thing. People won’t go to those chat boards and communicate. Once you deliver it to their inbox and it says, “Brad, meet Don. Here are both your websites and LinkedIn profiles.” It comes once or twice a month.
Outsourcing Talent: The value of any member-based organization, whether it’s EO or otherwise, is the members themselves. You can have great speakers and great content, but how many other members do you know?
 
That’s when people respond, it’s when it shows up. We get 90% open rates on these emails that go to groups that are doing intros because people see the value of connecting. I know you guys have experienced it there. I appreciate your sharing on it. We’re not sure what to do with it, but it’s like chambers of commerce. They have 30% or 40% turnover a lot of times because they can’t deliver value to their members. The value of any member-based organization, whether it’s EO or otherwise, is the members themselves.
You can have great speakers, great content, and all that stuff, but how many other members do you know? I think about writing that renewal check every year for a chamber of commerce or an industry group. It’s how many people I meet in the last several months that added value to my life. Hopefully, the value prop is with it and its sponsors.
Sponsors of these organizations were like, “How are you going to help me get the return on my investment sponsoring your organization?” We started adding sponsors to it as well. After three months of doing the members connecting, we say, “Do you mind if we intro to the sponsors?” Teach them not to come in hot selling. Just come, add value and educate.
It’s been a game-changer for SAPs. For Atlanta, we started doing it. Now they’re getting 15 to 20 one-on-one intros to members per month. They’re getting a business opportunity from it because it’s tough getting in front of the forum sometimes and getting their logo up on things. I know you’re a mastermind when it comes to the sponsor stuff, but a lot of organizations struggle with it. Those are interesting outcrops from it.
It’s all foundational at some point. We got to figure out who we sell to. In that particular case, we know. How do we get in front of them? That’s the next question. Once you have that figured out, do a lot of that, and good things will happen. I want you to dig deep. I’m looking for a golden nugget, something that is pure Brad Stevens’ wisdom that we want to know. 
There are a lot of bronze nuggets. I’m trying to think of the gold one though.
You might be too hard on yourself. Your bronze might be everybody else’s gold. 
If you look at any of the assessments that I do like the Culture Index, I’m a trailblazer. In StrengthsFinders, I’m constantly a futuristic and a learner. I love absorbing and learning new things. I can throw up on people as far as tools, resources and helping people. The name of my podcast is called Automate & Delegate, which is another thing that you might want to check out. I do interviews like this and sharing.
The nurture wheel is all the ways that you can touch, educate, and add value to people in their lives. Share on X
I’m a big tool person. I love finding efficiency and doing things more efficiently in life, and how do you think more at scale. It translates into success and profitability, but it translates to getting your time back. Investing that in family, trout fishing or hopefully, shooting birds with you in the next couple of months and doing things that I love.
A couple of quick things from a philosophic or a strategic standpoint, one of the things is so much money is lost in the warm leads in business. The cold ones are never going to buy and not going to be an opportunity. The hot ones that have an interest in your business have acute pain. They’re sold. You got to give them a credit card.
It’s all the warm ones. I’m considering getting a lawn care service. When I moved into a new house, I was trying to get a lawn care service, and I went to their website. All people have is their phone number or their contact form, but they don’t have a way to invite people to be educated on the process and the journey. It’s like a visual I show in all my speaking presentations, the one called the Nurture Wheel, which is all the ways that you can touch, educate and add value to people and their lives, whether it’s through their inbox or social media, but educating and adding value.
I know you’re a big advocate of this and do this yourself. The podcast is a great example of it. Earn the right to stay on people’s nurture wheel and all the different ways. I’m a huge fan of outsourcing VA stuff because it allows you to be cost-effective so that you’re there on that nurture wheel. You and I do have people on LinkedIn and doing social media.
The other wheel is what I call Life and Business Events because, at some point, if you’ve earned the right to stay on people’s nurture wheel long enough, there will be a life and business event. Those two will intersect, and there is so much money lost in that intersection that people would never give themselves an opportunity to be on.
For example, we were going to buy lawn care services when we moved to a new house. I was sitting there dialing up companies. I get on the phone with most of them. They give me a price and then they hang up. They never asked me for an email and never asked me for anything. They give me a price, hang up, and they move on.
I went to this one website. They had an education guide that I could put in my email. They had their phone number and contact form but it’s like, “Top seven things to think about when you’re choosing a lawn care company.” I’m hot in the market to buy lawn care. If you’re going to aid my education process in that. Sure, I’ll give you my email address. What do they do? They build authority with me. I got a video of the Gonzalez family that was sharing because they know that the trust of the family is critical. They sent me another with a testimony. They were staying on my nurture wheel, while all the rest of them just gave me a quote and moved on. They earned the right when I was ready to make a decision to move ahead with them.
There are many things in business that I shared on our website, OutsourceAccess.com. When people go there, once they’re on there for 20 to 30 seconds, this thing shots down on the screen and says, “Top seven things to get immediate ROI with a VA.” Put your email address in or hit no thanks if you don’t want it.” We’ve had over $1 million of incremental revenue for our business that I’ve tracked back.
Outsourcing Talent: Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap And Others Don’t
People that never heard me speak or never heard our podcast just went to our website. If I didn’t have that opt-in form to educate them and put them on a nurture sequence, I would have lost $1 million in revenue. It’s the warm leads. It’s the person that came to my site and they were exploring VA and outsourcing companies.
I’ve got the contact form. I got the phone number, but they don’t want to get married yet. They just want to date, “Let me give you a way to start that process and get on that nurture sequence.” Once they’re on that, they might be able to go in and connect with them on LinkedIn. They start seeing our posting on LinkedIn on educational content. They connect with them on Facebook and see content there.
They’re being surrounded by not, “Come buy my stuff,” but “Let me keep you educated about this whole journey. If we’re a good fit, I’m happy to help. If not, let me point you in the right direction.” So much money is lost in the warm leads. I’m encouraging people to be there. Many companies, as you know, have those people that are pounding the phones, they call three times, and they don’t call them back. It’s burned and they never do anything with them.
A lot of things I do philosophically in marketing. What has helped us grow as fast as we’ve been is that we earn the right to stay in people’s inboxes and stay on their nurture cycle. I spoke to an event and they have heard me 18 or 20 months ago, but they get our weekly Addictive Tool Series. That’s our long-term nurture. We send one cool tool a week. It’s not, “Buy from me.” It is, “Here’s a cool tool I found.” This is an automated handwritten letter called, “Thanks, you got to check it out.”
They know that they get it. They get an endorphin hit once a week when they see that come in, and it earns the right. I had somebody the other day that has been on our nurture for eighteen months. He’s like, “Brad, we made an acquisition of this new group. We need some help. I’m finally ready for a VA.” I can’t tell you how many of those come through in the process.
I think that was pure gold. Thank you very much. We’re into the final turn. I can see the checkered flag. We’re going to cross the line here. I put you in a time machine and take you back. You get about 60 seconds to talk to twenty-year-old Brad and tell him something that would have helped you speed along your path. Into the time machine, you go back 60 seconds to share something with twenty-year-old Brad. What is that share? 
Get around the community of entrepreneurs much faster. My partner in both of my businesses, we made decisions in a vacuum of the two of us. Both of my first partners were about 15 to 20 years older than me. During my first twenty years of business and entrepreneurship, it was just banging between the two of us. Our management team was trying to make up all the decisions.
I would be a commercial advocate of EO but any organization, whether it’s a Vistage, TAB or whatever it may be. As soon as I got around a community of other business owners and entrepreneurs, I could feel at home. Misery loves company, as well as success loves company. We’ve experienced both of those as we know on EO and other organizations that were a part of. I was around 32, 33 when I started having my grenade cosmetics, as you called them. I got on that path in that community. It gives me energy and thrives in a way.
A lot of entrepreneurs are alone on their island. They’ve got their spouse and a couple of friends from high school that doesn’t have the same type of career path that they do. They’re banging around and trying to figure things out. It’s the jolt that you need and encouragement to get you through to the other side, the education, the experience, and the relationships. I would have done that sooner than later. That’s the obvious choice when it comes to the organization you and I were both involved with. That has been the leading indicator, and the lag has been so much if I had done that earlier on.
How would someone in the audience reach out to you or your company? What’s the easiest way to do that? 
OutsourceAccess.com, you can check out our website there. As you can imagine, I have some videos if you go on there. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for our process. If you could go in there and click on Process, you go to a video where I take you behind the scenes and show you the whole world of outsourcing and VAs.
BradStevensTraining.com is our website for speaking. If you get part of a business organization or trade association, I do a ton of speaking and workshops on this. AutomateDelegate.com is our podcast. I would love to have you visit there and do 25 to 30-minute episodes, interviewing people about how they’re automating and delegating in their life, and doing things more efficiently. What you should not be doing in life, business and relationships is my tag there.
There’s an email address we created. It is called Tools@OutsourceAccess.com. If you’re reading this, you got your phone, pop it up, and you send an email to Tools@OutsourceAccess.com. In the subject line put PROVEN, so we know it came from The Proven Entrepreneur. Shoot that out. As you can imagine, I add some VAs that collect that. We’ll shoot you a list of a bunch of automation tools, recordings of presentations that I’ve done, templates, and Jim Collins curriculum. A lot of things that I’ve collected that I share with people that hopefully, you’ll find valuable going forward. Those are a couple of channels there.
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show. I’m grateful to you. See you next time. 
 
Important Links

Brad Stevens
4-Hours Workweek
E-Myth
21 Repeatable Laws Leadership
Entrepreneurs Organization
Good to Great
JimCollins.com
Concepts
Automate & Delegate
LinkedIn – Outsource Access
Facebook – Outsource Access
Addictive Tool Series
Process
BradStevensTraining.com
Tools@OutsourceAccess.com

 
About Brad Stevens
Brad Stevens is a lifetime entrepreneur and is currently the Founder/CEO of Outsource Access, a virtual services firm he has grown to nearly 400 employees in just over 2 years. He also co-foundd a company that creates 1-on-1 meetings at scale for member organizations and conferences to drive member and sponsor value with 14 organizations and 4,000 connections made globallly. His prior company was in the dental/beauty industry with 8,000 accounts in 18 countries. Before that he built a nutritional products company and a business that helped senior citizens afford medications. Most recently he launched a podcast – Automate & Delegate: What Should You Not Be Doing.
Brad is also a 9-year Member of the Global Entrepreneurs’ Organization currently serving as the EO US East Regional Director for Member Engagement across 22 chapters and nearly 2000 members. He has also served as President for the EO Atlanta Chapter.
Brad is also passionate about giving back and launched two charitable programs including direct work with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. He is an author and global speaker for hundreds of organizations on agility, scale and automation and has advised business and civic leaders including Martin Luther King III. Brad graduated from the Wharton Business School with Finance and Marketing Concentrations and recently completed a Harvard Business School Executive Education Program on Inspiring Entrepreneurial Strategy. He lives in Atlanta, GA with his wife Cindy, a passionate educator for 13 years, and their two children that keep them quite busy, Ella and Brayden.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E15 | Getting The Right Door Open With Caryn Kopp, The Queen Of Premium Lead Gen
Date: May 24, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/tpe-s215-getting-the-right-door-open-with-caryn-kopp-the-queen-of-premium-lead-gen/
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Content:
 
In marketing and sales, talking to people in a way they can hear is crucial. Getting their attention and interest means an increased future generated sales. It is a very important process, and most businesses would consider this very crucial. Today, Don William interviews Lead Generation Queen, Caryn Kopp. Carolyn is the Chief Door Opener for Kopp Consulting, a company that helps business leaders and salespeople get in the door with their most sought-after prospects. Tune in and learn some valuable nuggets on how you can get that right door open!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

 
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Getting-The-Right-Door-Open-With-Caryn-Kopp-The-Queen-Of-Premium-Lead-Gen.mp3
 
Getting The Right Door Open With Caryn Kopp, The Queen Of Premium Lead Gen
I have a very good friend, fellow EO New Jersey member Caryn Kopp with Kopp Consulting. Caryn, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s great to be here.
It’s so good to have you on the show and see you. I originally met you years ago through your daughter, who lives in DC or the Alexandria area and is a true delight. I enjoyed working with her. I don’t remember why but she connected us.
She’s the Executive Director of EO DC.
I recall that. I’m not sure why she introduced us, but she did. That was years ago. Your main business now is Kopp Consulting. What does Kopp do? What do you do?
We’ve been around for many years, and we get our clients in the door with their prospects for the first meeting. When the prospects are executive-level decision-makers, then it’s a big engagement. We call that the door opener service. That’s what we are best known for.
I love that. You probably recall one of my businesses. I’m in the contact center business or call center business. We typically do outbound and business-to-business. We would be, as what the industry would say, high-end, but Kopp Consulting, you’re what on the luxury end, very boutique, concierge, and high-level communicators reaching out to executive level at major corporations around the world.
We hire only senior-level business developers to be our door opener. When a client hires us, our door opener will represent them as if they were a member of our client’s team. They take a remote access email address and a voicemail box extension at their office when they’re reaching out using strategic sales messaging, which we’re also known for targeting a strategically selected group of prospects. Our clients have someone very senior who’s representing them and can have conversations with executives that get an outcome.
In all my career, I’ve been in marketing and sales for many years as an outsourcer where people contracted with my company to help either on the marketing or the sales side. It always was bemusing to me. I want to be real clear with us. Cost is always important, but I was always a little bemused by people who are looking for the lowest price marketing and sales support they can find yet expected phenomenal results. Typically, my answer to them has been, “This is an area where you get what you pay for. If you want spectacular results, it’s a little more pricey than what you’ll find on the bargain.”
That’s true because a company that is hiring low-level people who are sometimes actors with a good voice, moms who are home who have a little bit of extra time and like to talk on the phone, or a kid who graduated from college, what is the match ability of that person with our client’s prospect? If our client is looking to get in with the CFO of a major corporation, how likely is it that somebody with very little to no experience is going to be able to hold their own in a conversation with that executive? There are times when hiring a low-level company like that is right.
Think about if somebody wants to target selling coffee to office managers. It’s a very transactional sale. It’s a plentiful market around the world. You probably could hire a lower-level person for that. If you have an accounting firm that’s looking to get in with a CFO or an advertising agency that’s looking to get in with a CMO or a VP of marketing of a fairly large company, you have to think about what is the match ability and who is going to be able to represent you and get that right door open.
One thing we know in Sales 101 is that you have to talk to people in a way they can hear. It’s certainly a lot easier if you match a high-level person with another high-level person. It makes perfect sense. Let’s go all the way back to little Caryn, let’s say five to graduating high school. In the house that you’re raised with your parents, your grandparents, or however that worked, was anyone entrepreneurial? Did someone set that entrepreneur example for you as a child?
Failure is not the opposite of success. It's part of success. Share on X
My father owned his own business. The funny story behind that is that he owned his own business, and he was in sales. I didn’t want to do what he did. I didn’t want to own my own business and be in sales. When I went to Babson, undergrad, which is known for entrepreneurship and business and everything, I ended up there learning all of that. I came out of school and worked in sales. I went into a training program that Sylvania had at the time in sales. I was like, “How is this happening?” I was in brand management for a while after that. No matter what I tried to do, all roads led me here. I am in sales, and I own my own business. Thank you, dad.
When I first started doing the Proven Entrepreneur Show success stories, I thought that most of the time, on a question like that, an entrepreneur would say, “Somebody set the example.” I’ve found it’s only about half and half. Some people had an entrepreneur example. Some people’s fathers worked for the post office, and their mothers worked at the bank. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody has their own path. What is common is that entrepreneurs end up owning businesses in something they were exposed to as a child or something they were good at as a child. We find that to be pretty common.
My first job was mowing my parents’ yard. I didn’t get paid for that. There were consequences if I didn’t mow the yard every Thursday. In my first job, I had a landscape job for an area of multimillionaire on several banks and oil companies, all kinds of stuff, but I got a check. What was your first job where you received financial compensation?
Babysitting would have been that. I have a funny story about babysitting.
Please share.
That became my first cold calling job also. I’m not kidding. I was eleven years old. The family I babysat for had a lawn doctor franchise. The mother said to me one day, “Caryn, you have a good phone voice. Why don’t you go into our basement? We have these cubicles there and open up the phone book. Call people and ask them if they’d like a free lawn evaluation.” I did that and won awards for that in their company at eleven years old. It was in my DNA. That’s one of the learnings I had back then that I carry through into my own company. Just because somebody has been successful in sales doesn’t mean they have the DNA to love the job of getting in the door with people they don’t know.
That’s a certain salesperson who not only is talented at that but loves that job. I loved that job. I could sit there all day and talk to new people. What I found fascinating was the study of language and intonation and how if I varied what I said, it would change the outcome of a call that maybe was two minutes in total length. If I changed the cadence of my voice and the intonation, I could also change the outcome, and I found that fascinating. Fast forward a lot of years later, we’re known for sales messaging. We have two trademarks in sales messaging, which is a foundational element of a successful door opening. All roads led me here.
I’ve been in the call center business a long time now, several years as an outsourcer. I’m a firm believer that entrepreneurs, certainly everyone involved in sales. If they’re a great closer, maybe they shouldn’t be opening their own doors.
Yes, I can make an argument for that.
They probably should go from closing situation to closing situation. If you’re beginning your career, there is nothing that will teach you like picking up the darn telephone and calling strangers. Now, there’s a lot of governance on that. You’ve got to do it in a compliant manner, but there is nothing that will accelerate your education in the sales and marketing like picking up the phone and doing some cold calls. Many people have this huge call reluctance where they’re terrified to do that. It’s something you got to get past to be successful in sales. I’m pretty sure that was in violation of labor law, eleven years old setting appointments for the long term.
If we go back as far back as that was, there weren’t any labor laws against that at that time. Now, there would be.
In my first job, I was driving a John Deere tractor at wheat harvest behind the combines. I tell people out there, “How old were you?” I was like, “I was eleven.” They’re like, “I can’t imagine.” When you’re raised on a farm, age doesn’t have anything to do with if you’re helping. The rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say, is, “I drove the 9 miles from the house to the farm by myself.” You couldn’t do that now, and we won’t say how many years ago that was, but it wasn’t out of the norm for people who lived the farm lifestyle. After your childhood, you went off to university at Babson and got your degree and studied what?
Lead Generation: Nothing will accelerate your education in sales and marketing like picking up the phone and doing some cold calls.
 
I double-majored in Marketing and Communications.
The stars are aligning perfectly.
As many students at Babson did in those days, I had my own business on campus.
What was that business?
I sold neckties. That was where my dad and I went into a little bit of business. He gave me on consignment a box of neckties, and I would set it up at the top of the dining room. Babson is a small college, so there’s only one dining room. You could only go down from one direction. You have to pass the same table to go down to the dining room and the same table on the way up. My table was next to that table. It’s all location. I had a box. I set up right around the holidays and around interview season and Father’s Day coming up at the end of the school year.
That was also my first experience with having employees because I had people who sat with the box while I sat in class. I saw how that was so that I could leverage my own time to not only make money but help other people make money and help the community have access to the gifts and the ties they needed. That was my first experience with the business.
If you’re reading this blog and you want to know something about sales, call Caryn. She comes by it, honestly.
It’s DNA.
Your first business was selling ties as they had funneled by your table to leave the lunchroom. I love that. You recognize that people buy more ties on Father’s Day, Christmas, and graduation than at other times. Was your next business Kopp consulting, or was there a stop or two in between?
There were a couple of stops in between. I left school when I graduated and worked for Sylvania in sales selling light bulbs, home electrical devices, and flashed cubes to grocery, drug, hardware, home center, and mass merge. They shipped me out to Chicago. I lived there for a few years. I didn’t know anybody in the Midwest.
When they sent me out there, I knew not one person in the Midwest to even call and have a cup of coffee with. I knew nobody. That was a big learning experience. By the time I left there, not only did I have clients who were friends, but I also had a whole group of friends as well and had a wonderful time there. I learned a lot about sales. That’s where I went through the training program. For the first six months, I was out. They put us through a training program and shipped us off to various territories.
I spent the next couple of years there and understanding the cycle of running a territory. That’s not about new business development, but that was also about increasing sales with current clients and what happens when the clients expand. I was one of the winners of our national sales contest and went on a cruise at 23 years old. That was quite an experience. From there, I went into brand management. I was working on the OTC side of a pharmaceutical company in brand management. I learned about marketing.
The more real the language is, the better the door opening is.  Share on X
There was an MBA in there too. I forgot to tell you about that. I went into marketing and then went back for my MBA, which I did at NYU. I studied marketing then I came back out into brand management. I went into the radio industry, where I combined my sales experience with my marketing experience. I was talking to teens and young adult brand managers who never had before considered radio in their media plans.
That’s probably one of the hardest sells other than maybe wealth managers. They have a hard sell. This was a hard sell because most of the time, the ad agency is deciding on these things. We needed to talk to the brand manager because the agency spent its money on television. We wanted them to spend their money on the radio, and they normally don’t do that.
We had to make the argument to somebody who had the ability to say to the agency, “No, do this.” Because I spoke that language because I sat in that chair, it was all about the sales messaging and what we say in that meeting to have the brand manager say, “You’re right. I do need to tell my agency to do it this way.” From there, I started Kopp Consulting.
Words are so powerful. It’s important that you use the right words in the right order and then with the right intonation, inflection, pause, etc. You’re painting pictures in people’s minds. That’s how we think. We don’t think in words.
What’s interesting about that is that even though you say that and I say that and everybody who’s reading will not along in agreement that words are important, the big question is how much time are they spending thinking about the words that they use and the words that their salespeople use to make sure that they’re right so that in a performance moment, they’re going to get an optimal outcome? Very little time is spent there. What I’ve seen happen, I’ll bet you’ve seen this too, is that two companies can go up against each other for a piece of business. One company is clearly the best one for the job but doesn’t get the job because they didn’t have the best words.
To me, it’s a lot like speaking. Speaking from the stage is content and delivery. There’s no difference in all human interactions. It’s, “What am I saying? Am I using the right words? Am I delivering them in the right manner?” You’re right. Many people shake their heads up and down, but they have no idea if they’re doing it right or how to. 
That’s one of those instances where if you feel a little short in those areas, you can get a coach. You can hire a pro. There are people who know. One of the things that have helped me many times in my career was something that I wanted to be better at. I went and found somebody who was good at that and paid them.
You go from A to B, but you get somebody to push A and B a lot closer together. Time flies, and you can get it done. There’s no sense in doing it the hard way. If there’s an easy way, there’s no sense in doing it the hard way. Think back across your career, let’s say Kopp Consulting. What I’m going to ask you for here is a hard lesson, something that’s happened. 
It could be some things that occurred that at the time, you’re like, “I am not having fun now. That’s a hard cross to bear,” but maybe in retrospect, looking back, it turns out that it was in your benefit, something very good. We know that all success stories have a couple of elements of failure. Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s part of success. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
It’s one of the things we struggle with within our business. We have a particular place of bottleneck in our business that we’ve tried very various different ways to solve and still haven’t. We’re still on that journey. One of the things that I learned early on is that, first of all, only because you’re a great seller doesn’t mean you’re going to be a great door opener. I learned that pretty early on. I learned in the business as we were growing that not every great door opener was a great messaging strategist.
That was a surprise to me because messaging strategy comes easily to me. It’s almost like lots of muck on a path, and I can see the path through. We call it the path to the cash. I can see that very easily, “Let’s get this out of the way and that out of the way. This is the clear path.” I know how to put that into words that will create outcomes. Very few people possess that skill. It’s rare. As rare as it is to find a great door opener at a senior level, it’s even rarer for one of those people also to be a great messaging strategist.
We tried several different things. In the beginning, I was the messaging strategist for all of them, but that’s not a way to scale the business. I trained one of our door openers to be our first messaging strategist. She documented what I was doing because she would say, “How do you do this?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I do. I feel my way through the conversation.” She shadowed me for several messaging programs and documented the patterns of what she saw me doing. That became the foundation for training other messaging strategists and for our lead strategist, who, several years ago, put together a training program.
Lead Generation: Words are so powerful. It’s important that you use the right words in the right order because you’re painting pictures in people’s minds.
 
This job doesn’t exist anywhere. You don’t have somebody who’s doing door opening and sales messaging across industries in any one company. This job doesn’t exist, so we had to create that. We tried several different things along the way, which didn’t work, and we spent money on that too. One of the things I thought about is maybe we can get somebody from a different industry that’s similar, like PR, because they have to get doors open with people they don’t know. They have to write some pithy language and all of that. What I learned is that their pithy language was more PRE as opposed to authentic and real.
The more real the language is, the better the door opening is. We couldn’t get that person to understand that. We also tried somebody who was good in sales and a great writer. That didn’t work because although she was writing and it was clear and concise, I would hand that messaging to our door openers, and the door openers would say, “This isn’t going to work.” They would know, so that didn’t work. Where we are now is we have a group of core messaging strategists who do this, but we bottleneck there. Last spring, we were taking on a lot of new clients at that time. Some of our clients had to wait weeks to get started. Think of the revenue we lost because we couldn’t start them sooner.
I don’t know if that’s a hard lesson, but it’s a journey. We’re still on the journey to try to figure out how to make that easier and remove the bottleneck. One person suggested, “Remove the messaging. What do you care? Have your clients write the message.” I said, “If our clients knew the messaging, they might not need us.”
The messaging is a foundational part of that, and getting that right along with who’s the target who needs to hear that because the world is a big place and targets weren’t created equally. People weren’t created equally, so where do we find the people who will feel the most urgency? What do we say to those people that make the difference? Who is the person on my team who’s going to synthesize all of that information into a document where the door opener is say, “This is a slam dunk. Can’t wait to get started.” It’s a journey.
Bottlenecks are typically towards the top of the bottle, and that’s the way it goes. Thank you for sharing that. What about a warp speed moment? What about something that happened in the past in your business where things had been going along pretty good, but all of a sudden, you won the big deal? You had tons of deals coming in. It could be something that was a hockey stick moment.
I remember Verne Harnish, who runs the Scaling Up Organization. You probably know him. My book, Biz Dev Done Right, is on Gazelle’s Growth Institute. He’s had me on to do some of his on-demand seminars before Growth Institute was even around. If you go back even further than that, not long after, I met him. He put something in his newsletter that goes a lot about our service and what we’re doing with the door opener service to get clients in the door. It was a flood. It broke my website contact button. I truly appreciate all the support he’s given our organization and me over many years. That was a fun time.
It’s almost parallel to an entrepreneur on Shark Tank, whether they get a deal or not. The exposure does so much good for them.
What’s interesting is that when the people who follow him read something like that about our organization and the way we’re structured, a lot of times, it’s like a light bulb moment because even though we are getting appointments and appointment setting is not new. The way we go about this using only senior-level business developers who can represent them and get the big doors open, that’s their light bulb moment for people they didn’t know existed. As soon as they see that it exists and it comes from somebody like Verne, the phone rings. That was great.
I don’t think there’s any one single thing you can do that will explode your business better than having a person who has tons of credibility and a large audience stand up and say, “I don’t know what Caryn charges. I don’t know if she has any availability, but I know that if you need this done, you should hire her.” There’s nothing better than that.
We’re going to put you in the time machine now. We’re going to take you back to twenty-year-old Caryn. You’re going to get about 60 or 90 seconds to share a couple of thoughts that you wish you knew then that you know now that would have sped you along your entrepreneurial path. It could be a couple of thoughts.
That’s good because I thought you were going to ask me to sing and that wouldn’t have been pretty. In twenty, I would have been in college. That was still when I was trying to fight being in sales and owning my own business. I was still on that path at that time. What would I say about that journey?
Something that would help you speed along your way. Something you know now you wish you knew then.
The messaging is a foundational part. You have to get that right along with figuring out the target who needs to hear that because the world is a big place, and targets weren't created equally. Share on X
It might have to do with leveraging the relationships of the people I knew at that time. Leverage is not the best word now that I think about it. I’m not using the word nurture because it’s overused. It’s caring for those relationships along the way. I didn’t know that at that time, I understood the importance of the important people who I was meeting and coming along my path.
That’s true of the professors and the people I reported to when I got to Sylvania and some of the others. I’m still in touch with them, the first two bosses. I don’t think I understood the power of that. Also, it’s the power of having maybe a top 5 or a 10 list of people who could change my life and the path to meeting those people, even if I didn’t know them. Now, I understand the power of that and the ability to chart a course that would put me in the same place as somebody who could change my life.
Thank you for sharing. If one of our tribes wanted to reach out, what’s the best way to reach you, Caryn?
They can reach me through the website, which is KoppConsultingUSA.com. They can learn more about what we do with the door opener service and sales messaging. They can reach me that way. They can reach me through LinkedIn, Caryn Kopp. I hope they do because I’d love to hear about what people are doing now. Business development has certainly changed in the last couple of years. I run a company of people who do business development across industries. Every day, we’re collecting data, and we understand what’s working because we have the data to support it. I’d be happy to share with whoever needs to know that information.
Readers, you won’t find a nicer, smarter, more well-rounded business person than Caryn Kopp at Kopp Consulting. Caryn, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Thank you for having me.
It’s my pleasure. That’s this episode of the show.
 
Important Links

Kopp Consulting
EO DC
Scaling Up Organization
Biz Dev Done Right
Growth Institute
Caryn Kopp

 
About Caryn Kopp
Too often the process of opening new prospect doors receives minimal attention by business owners and salespeople in terms of time spent, consistency and strategy – three critical elements for prospecting success. Have you ever heard someone say, “When I’m in front of the right decision maker I close the sale most of the time, I just can’t get in front of enough of the right people!” Kopp Consulting provides an easy solution for this with the Door Opener® Service.
Kopp Consulting successfully helps business leaders and salespeople get in the door with their most sought after prospects. When the business was in the early years, Caryn was the one on the phones for her clients, helping them find opportunities, piquing the interest of hard to reach decision makers and getting her clients in the door. For this reason, she has been dubbed Chief Door Opener®. One client has had 73 meetings, closed 10 new customers (so far) and says the Door Opener Service contributed over $5,000,000 incremental revenue. Another client closed $773K with $2MM in the pipeline in just a few months.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2: E14 | From $0 To $100MM Exit In 30 Months: Finding The Right Time To Exit Your Business With Shahar Erez
Date: May 24, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2-e14-from-0-to-100mm-exit-in-30-months-finding-the-right-time-to-exit-your-business-with-shahar-erez/
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Content:
 
Exiting your business is like owning stock. You need to know when you have a very good return. So you should be able to exit without question. Building a company can be emotional, no doubt about that. You’re sacrificing your time, sweat, and tears into something that may or may not even work. But you have to remember that at the end of the day, your company is a business.
Join Don Williams as he talks to Shahar Erez about his $0 to a $100MM exit in 30 Months. Shahar is the co-founder and CEO of Stoke Talent. Stoke helps empowers organizations with a solution to manage their growing workforce. With the ever-growing rate of freelancers, Shahar is here to help.
Listen in as Don and Shahar talk about the freelancing landscape, especially in today’s environment. Discover how he sold his company with a $100MM exit. And find out why you need to network and go to meetings as an entrepreneur.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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From $0 To $100MM Exit In 30 Months: Finding The Right Time To Exit Your Business With Shahar Erez
We have a phenomenal guest for you in this episode. We have Shahar Erez all the way from Tel Aviv, Israel. He’s going to tell us about a huge exit that he had in a relatively short period of time in a startup. Shahar, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Don. It’s great to be here.
Thank you so much for coming in. Let’s go all the way back to young Shahar. Schoolboy, age 5 to 18, the household that you were raised in, whether that was with mom or dad or both or however that works, it’s different for different people. Was an adult entrepreneurial? Did someone set an entrepreneurial example for you in your home?
Absolutely not. My dad was a military person. Growing up in Israel, I saw my dad every other weekend. Back then, in the mid-‘70s, mid-‘80s, he used to come back every other weekend, I think. He spent most of his time after he left the military in public service as well in the Ministry of Defense over public transportation or whatever. My grandfather, my father’s father, was a Holocaust survivor. I was a social Democrat on the verge of a Communist, I would say.
I was raised in a home where my father told me, early teens, it’s like, “I don’t care about money. I never cared about money. All I care about is he’s doing something right.” That’s the home I grew up at. Money was an obscene word. I’m not an entrepreneurial home. When I was growing up, my ambition and it has to do something with where I grew up, was to be a military person myself. I want to be an Air Force fighter pilot or do something in the ministry of defense. I never thought about where I was going to find myself in. Not in tech and in entrepreneurship. That came a lot later.
There are so many, “accidental entrepreneurs,” but typically, it’s somebody who said yes to something and the next thing they knew, they had launched this entrepreneurial journey. We’re still in the young schoolboy stage. I was born and raised in Kansas and I had to mow the yard. Not because I got paid but because there were dire consequences if I didn’t mow it every week. A little different world than now. What was your first paying job? Maybe your first paying job was something entrepreneurial, but whatever it was, the first thing you did for compensation?
I worked at a stationery store. It’s like a small town Office Depot. It was a small store. Somehow my dad knew the guy there and he set me up for a summer job. I worked there selling stationery. That was my job.
How old were you?
 
It's never too late to go out on a new endeavor. There's no one recipe to success when it comes to building something new. Share on X
 
I’d say before 14 or 15.
Leaving the schoolboy Shahar behind then to young man Shahar. After you graduated high school, you went to university, to the military and you backpacked across the Antarctic. What did you do?
I didn’t officially graduate high school when I was eighteen. I hated high school at that point. All I was waiting for was to get drafted. Everyone does. There are mentor and military services in Israel. I couldn’t wait to get an enlisted and do something. Back then, I thought it was going to be a lot more fun, which is servicing, shooting guns and flying planes. I spent almost five years in the service. I did a bunch of different things. I was an officer. Generally, it’s a three-year service. I ended up going through an officer’s course. I led a team in an officer’s course later on. I ended up staying for five full years. I didn’t go for posts of military service exploring Antarctica or South America or Southeast Asia like most of my friends did because, by the time I left the military, they were already back from their trips. I didn’t have a lot of people to go with.
They’ve done the three-year term. You did the five, so they were back by the time you buckled out?
There were already back. They did their SATs and they were all ready for college. When I finished my service, I went to get my high school diploma because, again, I didn’t take all my exams. Over the next months, I completed whatever I needed to complete. I started working at a company. It’s the condition or something of that sort. When I did my SATs, I got a pretty good score at my SATs. It set me up to get pretty much to any program I wanted back then.
Efi Arazi was one of the first entrepreneurs in Israel in the ‘70s. He set up the first tech company in Israel. The number one export out of Israel was oranges until he built the first tech company. That’s the momentum that we’re still seeing now. Efi Arazi announced that he’s going to give out scholarships to people with proven leadership. Entrepreneurial capability is extraordinary thinking. Something of that sort. I don’t remember the exact phrasing. It’s a full three-year scholarship.
I was like, “I don’t want to study computer science, but if I’m going to do it for free and got to get money to do that,” because he gave us, it was like $3,000, like a year of living expenses or something of that sort. I was like, “Sounds like a good deal. I’ll give it a try.” I remember I went to my dad. I’m going back to your previous question around an entrepreneurial home. I go, “I’m going to go for this thing.” My dad said, “You’re never going to get it. You don’t have a backpack. Don’t waste your time.” I sat down and filled it up. This is ‘97, ‘98, I think. I filled out all the paperwork. I was summoned to an interview. I got the full three-year scholarship to study Computer Science.
What did dad say?
It was the first time they recognized that I wasn’t that much of a wreck. There’s something that I might not be that much of a disaster. No, I’m kidding. My parents know I was a good kid and everything, but nothing much came out of me in high school. They tried to convince me back to stay in the service, by the way. It was like, “You never graduated high school. You got a career here. You got your health insurance, a future, stay.” No. By the way, that continued. We’re very judgmental of our parents. It’s part of what we do. They might have a lot to say about me as well. If you try to remember your parents’ background, I’m still judgemental day to day.
 
Business Exit: One of the toughest things to do when you’re starting a new company or enterprise is getting your first customers. Those are the hardest because you have to find people who are willing to bet on you.
 
It’s like my father is a single child who grew up in a home. His parents were Holocaust survivors. It’s like the probability for him to make ends meet, find a way to make a living, don’t rock the boat too much. You can understand why they were scared. Whatever you have, keep it closed. Don’t take any chances. Every time, it continued after I left jobs and went for another job. They were like, “Why are you leaving? You’re worst.” When I quit my job and started a company, they were like, “Did they let you go?” No, I decided I wanted to do something else. Who does that? The momentum continued throughout my life. That’s how I got into computer science. I was an okay student. It wasn’t great.
My father was a United States Marine and so, military service. His wish was that I would become United States Marine. I could spit shined shoes at age five and I got my hair cut every Tuesday. I had no intention of joining the Marines. Interesting, though, he was not entrepreneurial in his 40s and I started my entrepreneurial journey at 26. After about a decade, he joined the party, started his own stuff, and has done well. That’s an encouragement to young entrepreneurs out there. If you haven’t, don’t worry if you missed the boat early. It doesn’t matter. You can start anywhere. Starting is probably the biggest step towards success, however you define that.
I think you’re right. By the way, what you’re saying is up for the young entrepreneurs. It’s for the older entrepreneurs. It’s never too late to go out on a new endeavor. I don’t think there’s one recipe to success when it comes to building something. There are a lot of young entrepreneurs who have succeeded and a lot of young entrepreneurs that failed. The same thing goes for the older entrepreneurs. By the way, there are some statistics that companies by entrepreneurs that started in their early 40s are likelihood of success is far greater than if you’re starting your companies in your 20s. The second thing is that we are in an era where very long careers are ahead of us.
When my father was in his twenties, Israel Military Service ended pretty much when you were 42 or 45. You go on retirement when you are 45. It’s like that part of your career is over, then you start a second career and that ends at 60 something. Now, people can work until they’re 80-85. There’s a lot of time. It wouldn’t surprise me if, over the next decade, we’ll start seeing entrepreneurs in their early 60s.
I’m very active with the entrepreneurial organization, which is global. There’s a chapter in Israel. I have friends there. It’s not common to find people in their 50s and 60s and certainly in their 40s. The interesting thing about that subset is that so many of them have Fortune 500 experience in the US. They have the knowledge and real experience of entrepreneurs like me, I was 26 and came out of selling. I knew how to bring in a lot of money, which that might be skill number one. There are an awful lot of other skills you need. Bringing in the money won’t get you there.
I agree. I know we’re jumping into a completely different topic, but one of the toughest things too when you’re starting a new company or any enterprise. The first 10 to 30 customers are the toughest to get. It’s like, how do you get someone to make a bet on you? There are no references. It never worked. There are going to be a lot of problems with your first ones. For people with a network with Fortune 500, getting the first 30 to 50 stalls is far easier and far faster than anyone else who still doesn’t have the network. That is such acceleration or accelerating effect. That plays such a significant role in increasing the probability of success. I know that worked well for us.
I agree with that. One of the things digital marketers preach is getting the first ten customers as fast as possible. Nothing is important until you get that done. Do not go to step 2, 3 or 4 until you complete step 1. I know that when I first started a common question. We sold a future service. You’re paying for it now and you’re going to get the service later. The common question was, “How do I know you’re going to be in business?” We’re a startup. Honesty is one of my core traits. I was born that way.
My answer was always, “It would help a lot if you bought from us,” and that makes no sense, but it’s so honest, it would shock people and they would buy. Honesty is sometimes in short supply in the world. If you’re brutally honest, people are like, “I like that.” They’ll roll the dice on you. They’ll give you a shot. Let’s talk about how many entrepreneurial ventures have you had?
 
There's immense power in the ability to make a decision.  Share on X
 
Generally speaking, I was more of an entrepreneur up until 2012, I’d say. I worked at Mercury Interactive, HP and VMware. In each of them, I started internally. I’d say initiatives. I raised internal funds, built teams, started new initiatives in spaces and built products that never existed before. My first real startup, fully standalone, was in 2012. I bootstrapped the company with Helicos, my cofounder now as well. We couldn’t raise funds in Israel. I was still in California when I started the initiative. I was ready to raise funds. I had a term sheet. We decided with the family that we were moving back to Tel Aviv.
Moved back to Tel Aviv, no one here on this or what I’m trying to build. We never raised funds, but I decided we’re bootstrapping. We bootstrap for a year. Not much came out of it at some point. Someone I knew at a company called Kenshoo offered me to join the company. We are getting ready for an IPO. They never needed IPO, but I did join them. That was my first company and the second company is Stoke.
The first company, was it not the outcome you desired?
Not financially. Not by building a reputation. None of that. There’s a ton of learnings that I came out of that experience. It was fun, the ability to build something, make fast decisions, work at such a small team, make decisions, and see things happen faster. It was the first time I had worked or operated in such a capacity and I enjoyed it. Coming out of my corporate background, working at corporate, it’s like you spend 30% executing and 70% handling internal politics. It’s part of the game.
No one likes it, but when you see what’s behind the curtain, there’s another way to do things. It’s very difficult to come back and go back to deal with the politics. From that aspect, I learned a ton from how do you start a company? What does it mean to you? Buy our domains, market it, build the right architecture, negotiate things, and have a ton of fun, but it wasn’t the outcome that I expected.
I share with my own clients. I was like, “You win or you learn. Learning is slower winning.” You don’t lose as long as you learn to help yourself in the future. Let’s talk about Stoke Talent. I think you have a platform where you provide on-demand, non-payroll or contractor resources. Is that correct?
Yes and no. The background for Stoke was in the company that didn’t succeed, the one I started in 2012 because we couldn’t afford employees, we bootstrap, started working with freelancers and it was early days for the online marketplaces for back then was oDesk and Fiverr. We started using freelancers and we’ll learn how to work with them.
 
Business Exit: The number of freelancers worldwide has been growing over the past two decades. Forecasts are for that number to reach, 50% of the workforce to be freelancing by 2025, and 60% by 2030.
 
Over the next months, I think we had about eighteen freelancers working for us from the United States to Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. Some of them worked with us for 2-3 days. Some of them worked for six months. Some of them spend hours with us. It depended on what we needed, but I found there’s immense power in the ability to make a decision. You need something executed and within 48-72 hours, you have something for someone starting to work on it.
The flexibility and seeing how people operate on-the-job qualification, if you will, was something I’ve never experienced before. When I had my term at Kenshoo, I decided I wanted to explore the same structure and started building more on that type of workforce. I started researching. I saw that all forecasts are for freelancers. The number of freelancers worldwide has been growing exponentially over the past two decades. Forecasts are for that number to reach 50% of the workforce to be freelancing by 2025, 60% by 2030. This is by DOL and IRS. The number of freelancers is growing worldwide. With that, most companies do not know or have any way or means on how to handle that type of workforce.
Most people that are growing within corporates are dealing with hiring full-time employees. We all hear about full-time employees. How do you hire full-time employees? A full day in place, all that challenges. If you think about 40% to 50% of your workforce, even if it’s 30% of your workforce, is going to be freelancers, how do you manage that? Managing freelance isn’t managing employees. When you manage employees, we’re managing headcount.
When you’re managing freelancers, you’re dealing with budget, invoices, legal documents, workforce classification, data, there are a lot of things that are different in managing freelancers compared to managing full-time employees. There’s been a spur of HR management platforms over the years like Workday, Bamboo, Hi Bob and all those to manage your full-time employees. Your freelancers and contractors should not be managing an HR platform because that calls out for an HR violation or workforce classification.
There are no systems to manage freelancers. Most companies are managing those and excel. We said, “We want to automate the process, onboarding payments, contracting taxation, tasks and so forth.” We built a platform to manage that. With that, to help you, source freelancers, as well. If you need freelancers, you can post a job on Stoke. We’re connected to multiple marketplaces and we’ll help you fill out that job.
If you think about it, only to give you an analogy, most of the online marketplaces, there are about a thousand marketplaces were built for a transactional business. You need someone to do your kid’s birthday video, go on Upwork, swipe your credit card and someone will do your kid’s birthday video. If you’re in corporate, you can’t swipe your credit card or anyone’s credit card. There’s a system where there’s budget, controls, compliance and that’s what we built Stoke for to fit that realm.
Any company out there, if they don’t have a freelance strategy in place, they will not be able to thrive. There’s a chance they won’t be able to survive. If you hear these numbers and that changes the workforce going through them, then COVID came and completely changed everything. Now, everyone’s working remotely, so the propensity to be a freelancer increased significantly.
You’re almost the poster child for work corporate. Learn, then go be an entrepreneur for HP, for example, or some major international business and start your entrepreneurial journey. We could almost take your picture and you’d be the poster child.
 
Building a company is emotional. But always remember to treat is as a business. Share on X
 
I never planned for it. If anybody asked me, I probably wouldn’t recommend HP as a company to try and sharpen your skills. I had a good ride. More than the companies, I was super fortunate to work with super-talented individuals. My direct boss, the guy that managed Merck Randy, is on my board now. He’s a good friend. The guy who managed me is the CEO at Sumo Logic. I was fortunate to work for people who had that energy and sharp mind to constantly challenge existing truths and try to push forward.
It means that HP and those other companies had great eyes for leaders that would do a great job.
They acquired good companies.
Sometimes, the easiest way to grow is through acquisition. You can short circuit the whole process. Share a little bit with us about your exit.
I didn’t see this coming. When we started the company in 2019, I didn’t have Q1. We raised $4.5 million seed. We ran for about 7 or 8 months, then COVID started. For those who remember the first three to five months post the pandemic break outbreak. Everybody thought that the market was going to collapse. We’re hitting armageddon. All CFOs that I tried to have conversations with were like, “It’s not the right time. We’re doing refinancing. We need to recalculate our runaway.” It slowed down our go-to-market in 2019. We had the market in July and August of that year. In Q1 the following year, we did our A-round or Q2.
We raised $15 million led by Battery Ventures. We are ready to go storm and go build a bigger company. In the process, we talked to a lot of different VCs in the process of fundraising. One of my colleagues in the network is Fiverr’s CFO. He helped us along the way as we started, showing them some model. What’s the pricing model? How do we make out of freelancers all that? He was aware we were going to raise funds. In one of the conversations, he’s like, “We want to participate in the round. Do you mind making some room for us?” I said, “I’ll be honored. I’ll get to you. I’ll cut you in.”
I think I was able to make $300,000 or $500,000. It was a small portion that I was able to make available for them. They were like, “No. If we’re coming in, we’re coming in. We need to come into with a bigger check.” I was like, “I don’t have enough room for a bigger check in this round.” They ended up not investing, but in the process, we had conversations and I met Fiverr’s CEO a few times, Micha. It ended up not working out. We stayed friends and set our referrals well. It was around May or the June timeframe. A few weeks later, he called me up and said, “After we met you, we had conversations, internal conversations, and external conversations. We like the space. We think we might want to do anything. What do you think?”
I was like, “I think this space is interesting.” Nothing happened. He called me up in early August. I was here at home working from home and he’s like, “We’re interested in this space. What do you think about us buying you?” We’re Israelis. We’re blunt. I can’t say that I was blown away or didn’t see that coming because, after the previous calls, I was like, “This might happen.” I promised myself along the line. I don’t need to tell you this. Building a company is super emotional.
 
Business Exit: Managing freelancers isn’t like managing employees. So if you don’t have a freelance strategy in place, you will not be able to thrive or even survive in the new environment.
 
It’s your blood, sweat and tears. You sacrifice time with family. You potentially sacrifice your own future career. You don’t know what’s coming out. I promised myself when an offer would come or whatever, I’m going to treat this as a business because you get confused. You got to be, again, that’s my take, very cold. The point is you’re evaluating your options. In 2021, to take everybody back, selling a company for $110 was considered nothing but selling yourself cheap. It’s like everyone was a unicorn in 2021. If you’re not raising a billion-dollar valuation, it’s like, “What are you doing?” When we started the conversation, with far as like, “Am I selling or not?”
He said, “We want to buy you.” I said, “I raised $15 million in the back. I can run for two years. I’m not in a hurry to sell anything, but I promised myself that I’d treat it as a business. I think Fiverr is a great company. I would love to find a way to make it work.” End of conversation. Ofer was the CFO back then. He is still the CFO. Let’s leave commercials aside for a second. Let’s assume this happens. What does the day after look like? Let’s talk about how do we going to work together? Why are you guys interested? What do you want to do with us? What’s it going to be the org structure? Let’s work through it. That’s, for me, the complicated part. Commercials are almost black and white.
It’s either the numbers work or they don’t work. Let’s not argue the numbers because even if the numbers work, I don’t want to work with you. It’s not going to happen. Let’s work out the complicated part. We spent a couple of one-on-ones working through that. Once we’re aligned on the vision in the thought process, let’s talk numbers. We worked it out. They were a bit flexible. We’re a bit flexible. We found some middle ground there. The board didn’t want to sell. As I mentioned, the board invested. From an IRR perspective, it was phenomenal. Those who joined in the seed round were about almost 6X in two years. There was that joined in A-round, Iran did 2X in a quarter and a half, so it’s not bad numbers.
This was I was what I was told. It’s like, “Stay another round. It’s not that difficult to become a unicorn these days.” I was like, “The market’s insane.” The probability of the market’s staying in these multipliers, I don’t know how. I made the decision. I made the decision that it’s a great outcome to, first of all, the customers, the employees, the investors and personally for myself and my cofounder. Can it be better? Maybe.
It’s like owning a stock. It’s like, you need to know when you had a very good return. It was a great ride and there was a very good outcome for everybody involved. I’m super happy that we made this decision. Not that I had a crystal ball, if you see what’s happening in the public markets since. You understand that those 40, 50, and 60X multipliers are not sustainable.
I have a good friend that has a billion-dollar company. He’s fond of saying, “You’ll never go broke taking a profit.” It sounds pretty basic but so true.
You can get super emotional. People ask me, “Why didn’t you sell?” I try to trigger myself into conversation with myself. It sounds like a brilliant scene when I say it, but why not sell? The only reason I found not to sell was because I don’t have my face on the cover of Forbes or whatever other magazine for a billion-dollar company. I was like, “That’s ego.” I promised myself I’ll run it as a business. Getting from an idea on a PowerPoint sea drought to 110 million exits within 30 months isn’t bad.
That certainly qualifies at the top of the list of things that are not bad. $0 to $110 million in 30 months. Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing some detail there. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions here. Looking back in your career, whether it was military, corporate, your first company or this company, would you share a hard lesson? Something that happened that when it happened, you were like, “Ah,” but maybe in retrospect. Maybe looking backward now, it turned out it was for the positive, but at the time, it hurt.
 
Exiting a business is like owning stock. You need to know when you have a very good return. Share on X
 
When I was at VMware, I knew my direct manager and I knew my indirect manager. Obviously, when you’re in corporate, you want to climb the corporate ladder. It’s like, you’re always wanting the next title or the next recognition or the next project. I was fighting for it. This is what I wanted. I kept talking and I kept saying my opinion. I kept fighting everyone because I wanted to be the smartest person in the room. You constantly want to prove yourself because you think every meeting is going to be detrimental to your performance review or whatnot. I was fortunate again to be managed by people who, in retrospect, cared and until you’re ruining it for yourself.
It’s like, you’re not ready. You’re not there yet. You don’t always have to speak your mind. I remember it’s cringing the moment. It’s like, “Did I sound stupid? Is that what they’re saying?” As a young, eager person, it’s like, “I have to speak my mind. I have to tell them they need to be better. I’ll show them the way.” In retrospect, I learned the lesson. I don’t know if it comes with age or does it come with experience, but you don’t always have to be the smartest person in the room. Spend a lot more time listening, giving a lot more room to others. You don’t constantly have to make others think the same way you do. You have to recognize that the entire world isn’t viewing the rest of the world through your own lenses.
Everyone has a different perspective and you have to accept it. I still remember those days as I was fighting. It’s like every morning, I came in for a fight. I came in to prove myself. It was like, “Here I am. Everybody, come in here and listen to what I have to say. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll teach you how to do things.”
As you gain confidence, you’re a lot of body as a young leader. When you start fighting for your position, it means you’re in that position and it’s true. I had a hard time accepting. Now, I’m not bothered by the fact people like or don’t like what I say. I don’t expect to be the smartest person in the room. I don’t mind other people. I’m not looking for credit anymore. It’s like I don’t care about that but it’s a while. I don’t know if there’s a way to get that earlier in life.
I think some people never get it. Is it age? Is it experience? Yes, but some people never get it. In fact, there’s real value to being certain that you are not the smartest person in the room. You are surrounding yourself with people that are smarter. It’s interesting to me that humans are wrong at such a large percentage of the time. One thing I’ve learned is I want to explore the opposite of my initial thought that I may still like my initial thought, but it pays to explore the opposite because maybe that’s the way. Maybe that’s the path. You don’t know sometimes.
I like Jeff Bezos’ 2015, 2016 letter when he talked about decisions. It’s like 99% of decisions we take are reversible. I let people make those decisions. Worst case, it will revert. I’d rather move fast rather than slow down. There is no way back. It’s like going for an IPO. Once you go IPO, it’s like, there’s nobody going back. Most of the decisions are not that extreme. What you learn over time, it’s like, when you’re young, you’re debating everything. We need to have this color on the button. We need to have this logo and this size. We need the flow. Everything is like the company’s going to live or die based on this micro thing.

A) I don’t know whether we should have it in this color or that color. Let’s do something, try it, learn and if we’re wrong, we were wrong. There is no data to back up one or the other decision. There’s a phrase when I did, again, I was in the officer’s course. I was the leader in the officer’s course and they taught you to train young officers that making an excellent decision has nothing to do with the decision’s outcome. You made a decision based on all the data that you had. It doesn’t mean that the outcome is going to be right or wrong. The outcome may still suck. Once you get that, it’s like, “This is the data I have based on this data. This is what I think we should do. Let’s move on.” Maybe the outcome is going to be different.

Don’t do the fatal mistakes. Make small mistakes and correct it. I want you to think back to the vault of living in your mind where you keep the golden nuggets of entrepreneurship, the things that are most valuable. Would you share one of your golden nuggets with us?
 
Business Exit: You don’t always have to be the smartest person in the room. Spend a lot more time listening to others. You have to recognize that the world isn’t viewing the rest of the world through your lens.
 
There’s a story. I never say no to a meeting. I never say no to an opportunity to meet or network with people. Entrepreneurs, CEOs, young CEOs think that they run the world. It’s like, “Don, we’re too busy for you.” By the way, I’m a human being like most people there. There are a few entrepreneurs that I interacted directly with in the last few years and I wanted to build some partnerships with them. They all blew me off. Not all of them but a few of them blew me off for the past few years. There were too busy to talk to me.
At least two of them have shut down their companies over the last months because they weren’t able to raise funds. There’s a little side in me that says, “F-you. You deserve this for behaving the way you did.” Not personally because of me. I think there’s a testimony. A) We’re brothers in arms. We’re all entrepreneurs. I’m not some goofy entrepreneur. I’m not here to ask you for money. There’s something interesting. Have the courtesy to take a call. Maybe nothing will come out. Not personally Shahar but a lot of other people.
For me, the story I have that had a significant effect on how I understand why what I’m doing and what I’m taking meaning to is so important. Back when we started the company, in the summer of 2019, the company was three months old and we had nothing. There’s a big conference that I wanted to speak at. It’s called ASU GSV. It’s like 5,000 attendees, future awards, future education and I was like, “How do you get like a main state session there?” It’s like, there’s no way back of my mind. Summer of 2019, I get an email from, again, someone that wanted to do a call with me. I took the call.
We spent 30 minutes. Nothing came out. A couple of months later, he sends me an email, “There’s a guy named Dan Summer. He’s in Israel. You might want to meet him.” I was like, “Why would I? I have no idea what this guy does.” I was like, “Sure, I’ll take the meeting.” I took a scooter to meet this guy in August in Tel Aviv.
It’s 110 degrees out there. I’m sweating like a hog. I’m getting to the place. The guy’s not there. I’m texting and he’s like, “I’m running late.” I was like, “I’ll wait.” Ten minutes later, I was like, “Are you coming?” He was like, “I’m still late.” I was like, “What the F? I’m an entrepreneur. I’m wasting my time here.” The guy shows up super nice. The guy sold this company for $750 million or something of that sort.
I was like, “Okay.” It gets interesting. I’m glad I waited fifteen minutes. We shoot the crap. At some point, he goes, “I understand there’s not much I can do for you. I understand you already raised money. It sounds like you know what you’re doing. I like what you’re doing. Is there anything I can help you with?” I was like, “No, I think I’m good. Thanks. I enjoyed the meeting. I’ll let you know when I’m in New York.” The moment before I walked out, I was like, “Dan, by the way, there’s a conference called ASU GSV. I’m trying to figure out how to get to know someone there.” He goes, “I know Deb Quazzo. She’s a friend. She runs ASU GSV. Let me run the intro. She’s going to love you.”
The guy made the intro to Deborah. I speak to Deborah. Two weeks later, I got two speaking slots on the next ASU GSV. That never happened because of COVID. That’s a different story, but that would never have happened if I hadn’t taken that meeting. Take the meetings. Make the time. Don’t waste your time with anybody, but if you’re spending time with other entrepreneurs that need your advice, they want to spend time.
I think there’s a positive circle that happens when you take these meetings. Make sure you network. Make sure you meet with others and take the heart. Don’t go to those who are telling you have a great idea. Go to those who challenge you and tell you that you don’t have your crap together. They’re the ones that will make you better.
 
Making an excellent decision has nothing to do with the decision’s outcome. Share on X
 
The second piece for our audience is to take the meeting and don’t be afraid to ask somebody what you want. I have met a dozen billionaires who have become great friends merely because I walked up and said, “My name is Don Williams. I like this, this and this. Could we do whatever?” It’s amazing how many times people say yes.
Last tough question. Let’s put you in a time machine, going to take you all the way back to twenty-year-old Shahar. You get about 60 seconds, maybe 90. You can share one piece of advice with your twenty-year-old self that would have a major journey easier, faster and better. Into the time machine, you go all the way back. Here’s your twenty-year-old self. What do you share?
Have more fun. Don’t do anything different, have more fun.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs, we’re so locked in our heads so, trying to hit the next goal, so trying to make the widget hit the thing of a jig. We forget life is short. Better enjoy it while you can.
I have a post that I wrote on LinkedIn. One of the things that I’m still not good enough at. There’s a lot that I’m not good enough but specifically for this stuff. It’s like, I don’t celebrate the wins well enough. I don’t know where it comes, the background, and the desire to constantly do something, even when we sold the company. There’s like a 48-hour window of, “Nice deal.” There’s a new goal to hit. We got to hit the numbers.
It’s like there’s always this next thing. There’s more than you think about when you read these phrases. If you want to be happy, it’s not about getting more. It’s about enjoying what you have. I know two types of entrepreneurs or those that celebrate vocally every small achievement and those that only complain about what we lost. I’m probably more on the second side, unfortunately. We need to balance it out. There’s good and bad. We need to celebrate the wins and we need to research where we failed. To my twenty-year-old self, have more fun, take more breaks and don’t do anything else different. Enjoy it.
Not dissimilar to me. I was the world’s worst about we hit this goal. Great, but what about this over here that’s not going so well? Not even celebrate it for a second. Before, I was looking for it, but this part over here is not good. With me, I don’t know if you know this. I’ll give a shameless plug. I began a daily gratitude practice years. I released a book, the number one new release on Amazon. Very grateful for that. People who practice gratitude daily are more grateful.
My wife had her 47th birthday.
 
Business Exit: Never say no to a meeting or an opportunity to meet or network with people. Entrepreneurs, CEOs, and especially young CEOs think that they run the world.
 
That might’ve cost you jewelry to say that to our audience.
No. A) She’s not into jewelry and it’s fine. Part of growing up is acceptance. We can’t hide that fact. On her birthday, she said, “I’m listening to this professor say follow the three G rules. Goals, you always have a goal you’re going after. Giving, always be in a mode where you’re giving others and gratitude. Follow three Gs.
I enjoyed it. I reserve the right to recall the witness at a later date for a different topic or subject. You’ve been phenomenal, Shahar. Thank you so very much.
Don, thanks a lot for having me. I had a blast.
My pleasure. Folks, that’s the episode. See you next time. Thanks. 
 
Important Links

Shahar Erez – LinkedIn
Stoke

 
About Shahar Erez
Innovation is a term rarely applied to the way we hire talent. Leonardo de Vinci created the first professional resume in 1482 and not a whole lot has changed since.
But the world has changed. Global digitalization has changed the way we live, changed the way we communicate and changed the way we work.
At Stoke Talent it’s our mission to ignite the future workforce and bring it in line with the world we live in today. To empower fast-scaling companies to rethink their traditional hiring and operating methods, and find a better way to grow.
After all, that’s what innovating is all about.
To discuss the future workforce, innovation in tech or our mutual love of cycling, email is best.
info@stoketalent.com
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S2:E12 | Your Extraordinary Life With Finnian Kelly
Date: May 12, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s2e12-your-extraordinary-life-with-finnian-kelly/
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Ever felt that something is missing when everything is within your reach? If you are looking to fill that void, don’t miss this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur! Listen and be inspired by Finnian Kelly, the Founder of Intentionality, as he shares his story of self-doubt and reflection. Finnian tackles how he found clarity of purpose, focus, and his way back to entrepreneurship through living life with intentionality.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here

 
Listen to the podcast here
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Your Extraordinary Life With Finnian Kelly
Living With Intention
I have a very good friend all the way from Aspen, Colorado. He came off the slopes to join the show. He’s the Founder of Intentionality. He’s known as the Business Mystic. Please welcome to the show, Finnian Kelly. Finnian, how are you?
Don, I’m in a state of gratitude, which I know you appreciate a lot because I had an incredible snow powder day. That fills my cup more than anything else. I’m excited about this.
I love downhill skiing. It’s one of my absolute favorite things to do. I got started years ago. I used to tell people, “It’s about the only place on the planet I don’t worry about my accounts receivable or accounts payable.” If I’m skiing at the edge of my ability where I have to pay attention to what I’m doing, I can’t be letting my mind run back to business. Tell us, what is Intentionality.com? What do you do? You’ve had a couple of careers already in your life. What are you doing now?
What I’m doing is staying in my lane, which is nice. I have had a variety of backgrounds. I was an Army officer, financial expert, and entrepreneur. I built and sold a number of companies. I’m embracing this one word, intentionality. It’s so nice to be known for one word because now I’m not split in playing different roles. It’s whatever I show up, whether I’m speaking, coaching, investing in companies, skiing, or partying. It’s all around intentionality. For me, intentionality is defining how you want to feel and then taking deliberate action towards it. It’s that combination of vision and action.
For us, it’s about providing a pathway for people to live an extraordinary life because I do believe that everyone has the opportunity and the capability to live an extraordinary life. They need to get clear on what matters to them, and then be willing to take the courage to take the steps to get there. We’re doing that through digital programs, speaking, forum retreats, and big events. It’s a lot of fun. I love it more than I’ve ever loved anything I’ve done before.
I’ve done three forum retreats in a month. I love the intentionality coupled with the vision for where you want to go. Our good friend, Warren Rustand, would add your core values along with that. Those are the three legs of his platform. I am a firm believer that you are in your zone of genius but not things that you do excellently, things that you’re competent at, and things that you’re incompetent at but truly where your genius shows and where you can be magnificent. Typically, when you use that word with people, they’re like, “That’s a little heavy. I don’t know if I’m magnificent at anything.” I’m like, “I assure you. You are. You know what it is. You’re deflecting.” Rather than deflect, let’s full-tilt boogie, embrace, and let it shine.
That was a big lesson for me because I have been good at a lot of things. I was exceptional at being a financial expert, money manager, and speaker in different areas. The one thing that I did naturally was to live with intentionality. I looked back at all my customer testimonials. I worked with a lot of EOs and YPOs. Everyone in your audience knows that. They’re incredible entrepreneur groups.
There was this consistent theme. They were like, “Finn is the intentionality guy. He lives with more intentionality than anyone else.” I kept seeing that and I was like, “This is what I do without even trying.” I am magnificent in that. I claim that word. I enjoy experiencing that. I get to go deeper into it. I play with it and go, “People are giving me permission to be me. How do I bring myself out even more?” I’ve got some great people around me who remind me, “Don’t try to be this. This is your area.”
Everyone has the opportunity and the capability to live an extraordinary life. They just need to get clear on what matters to them and then be willing to take the courage and take steps to get there. Share on X
I too, am a person who can embrace my genius and magnificence. The part that I have to avoid and put the earmuffs on where I don’t hear the call of the siren is my area of excellence because my highway of excellence is pretty wide. There are a lot of things I do better than most people. It’s certainly comfortable to live in your zone of excellence because you’re good at it. Your zone of magnificence many times involves some discomfort. You’re out of your comfort zone because that’s where the good stuff is. I’m going to take you all the way back to young Finnian from ages 5 to 18. You were born and raised not in Colorado.
I was born in Sydney, Australia but then brought up in Tasmania. I’m a little Tazzy devil. When I was one, we moved to a country town for the first seven years and then moved to a big farm. We lived on a farm there for a long time. I wasn’t little Finnian. What’s interesting is my name is Finnian but forever, I was Finn. In my whole childhood, I never used Finnian once. I’ve only come into that name in the last few years. It was my transition. I was like, “It’s time to use my real name.”
I’m a farm boy. I loved sports and adventuring. I also had some challenging relationships with my parents, which have been quite a defining part of my life. It was what led me to your title, Success Stories. It led me to all my success. I’m very high-driven. I wanted to prove to the world that I was lovable and worthy. That created a lot of success. I was under 30. I was the Entrepreneur of the Year three times in Australia. I had the fastest-growing company and exits.
It was great but then what often happens is what got you successful is what also will make you unsuccessful. Eventually, the fear mentality, the unworthiness, and the fear of being abandoned ended up me having that transition later in my life. It’s funny. What we recognize as success often changes as we grow older or have more experience.
We’re all in a constant state of growth or decline. Things may not change but certainly, our perspective on those things changes. The non-entrepreneurial public thinks that entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs out of a profit motive. They want to make money. I won’t dispute that there’s something to that but so many times, there’s not. I have huge authority issues and I couldn’t take somebody telling me what to do anymore, or I had people who didn’t believe in me but I was motivated, “I will prove them.” Those types of motivations are far more common than the profit motive.
The most common motive is, “I’m not worthy and lovable.” We’re trying to prove ourselves to the world. It’s interesting. We worship a lot of entrepreneurs like they’re rock stars. If you look at them, they’re often hurting inside. Potentially, they need to stop focusing on changing the world and focus on changing and healing themselves. It can be a distraction. It can often have a great byproduct. We help a lot of people but at the same time, it can stop us from helping ourselves, which is the most important.
I think of Steve Jobs. He was a phenomenal entrepreneur and leader but he would not recognize his biological daughter for twenty-plus years even though he probably named the computer after her. He recognized her internally but refused to recognize her externally. I have my feet of clay. I’m not throwing rocks at Steve but that happens. I’m going to take you back to young Finn. We’re still at 5 to 18 in the household where you grew up. People live in different kinds of households. Whether it was with your folks or grandparents, was there an entrepreneur in the house? Did you have someone who set an entrepreneurial example as a young child?
I had never seen them as entrepreneurs but we have yet to look at the definition of entrepreneurs they were. My mom was a doctor. She’s a general practitioner. She set up her little business. My dad has supported her in that. My dad was a musician. He was on the rise and becoming very successful. When I was born, he struggled with both worlds. It didn’t work that well. I suppose he bought a farm and tried being an entrepreneur there.
Intentionality: Intentionality is defining how you want to feel and then taking deliberate action towards it. It’s that combination of vision and action.
 
He was one of the first Macintosh Apple distributors in Australia as well. He had a music store. What I learned from him was he had a lot of starts but never got anything nailed and didn’t stay in his lane. It was the idea that you were able to create your pathway and income, not rely on anyone else, and not have a boss. I never saw my parents have a boss. That’s something. I realize now that they were entrepreneurs.
Mom was a high-functioning solopreneur as a physician. I look at my personal physician. He does very well but when I talked to him, he was like, “It’s a job. If something happens to me, it’s over.” I’m like, “That’s why entrepreneurs diversify when that doesn’t happen.” It sounds like dad was a solopreneur and an entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs chase what is shiny. They’re big on starts. I’m not throwing a rock at them either. At finishes, that’s common, as we know in the entrepreneur world.
The title of the show is The Proven Entrepreneur: Success Stories, but you and I both know that all success stories have a failing or 2 or 4 somewhere as a chapter or multiple chapters in the book. The interesting thing after having done about 100 of these interviews with some great entrepreneurs is it almost appears that the deeper the failing and the valley, the higher the success, the win, and the peak. There are little failures, little wins, huge failures, and huge wins as long as you don’t quit. Keep going.
The big element is that there are a lot of people who struggle to know what they want. Sometimes you need to find out what you don’t want to get clear on what they want. When you have that big failure and you see the damage it does to your health or relationships, you suddenly realize, “I’m never going to do that again.” You make that commitment to yourself. There are certain things through my failures or lessons. I’ve gone, “I’ll never do that to myself again.” That was too much pain.
As long as it doesn’t stop you from taking risks and having the courage to be bold, it can help you. Sometimes losing money is valuable because then you realize, “I didn’t need as much as what I thought because if I had what I had, I would be pretty happy.” That’s a great lesson in itself as well because you can always have more. Once you start that train of wanting more, there’s never enough. You’re continuously on it.
Many times, the entrepreneur who has had a financial reversal learns, “Maybe I should place more value than I did.” If it gets too easy, we’re only keeping score with it. I’m a firm believer that money in and of itself has no value. It’s only the products, services, and experiences you can trade them for. Those have value but coins and paper don’t have any value other than what we project onto them. Otherwise, they’re worthless. 
I’m still back with young Finn. It’s not mowing the yard because mom and dad said you had to. What was your first job? Maybe your first job was a lemonade stand and you were an entrepreneur. What was the first endeavor that you did where you earned money and were compensated? How old were you? Tell us about that.
One of the great things about being on a farm is there are a lot of resources there. If you’re creative, there are ways to set up a little business. There were two resources that I found valuable. One was these big pinecone trees. They would dump a lot of pinecones. Tasmania has a very wet countryside. The wood in Colorado is so dry. Every time I light a fire, I get a little rush in Colorado because it’s so easy and amazing. In Tasmania, it’s wet wood. It’s damp. Often lighting fires is quite hard but pinecones are these incredibly dry things.
What often happens is what got you successful will also make you unsuccessful. Share on X
People don’t often use them for lighting fires but if you put a couple of pinecones in a fire, they will blow up. I started seeing that a lot of people wanted to start having a firelighter a lot easier. I would sell bags of pinecones. I had unlimited resources. I had a bunch of trees. I would go in there and I started learning about the different sizes. I would have little plastic shopping bags and then big fertilizer bags as well, which were a lot bigger. I worked out the price differences. I could see, “If I sold some of these, I would make more money and have a high margin.” That was a great experience.
Another one at the same time was sheep manure. We had a shearing shed. Sheep manure is incredible fertilizer. I would get it underneath the shearing shed. Shoveling shit was my first role. I’ve shoved a lot of shit in the rest of my life as well. That entrepreneurial journey was there. If I would get into a good flow, I could sell those bags for $5 each. I could do about twenty in an hour if I was humming. Sometimes I’ll get friends, give them a clip of the money as well, and then be able to sell them.
That did start my financial independence from about eight plus. I started working at 8 but about at 10, I used that money to be able to do the things I wanted to do like go play tennis tournaments, buy new tennis rackets, Nintendos, and whatever I wanted. I would use it in that way. For me, it was all about exactly what you shared. It wasn’t about making money. It was about what I could do to get the things I wanted. I worked out, “Here’s a way and a solution. I want these things. Here’s a way to do it.”
Back then, you mowed the grass because your parents told you to. There were consequences if you didn’t. You didn’t get paid for doing that. My grandparents were wheat farmers. I drove a big green John Deere tractor pulling a disc behind the combines as they would go through the field and harvest the wheat. It’s a filthy and nasty job. There’s so much dust and debris in the air. It’s 105 degrees and the sun is pounding down. It is not for the faint of heart.
Whoever is disking is about 15 or 20 minutes behind them but it’s still a cloud of stuff. I was eleven. People that are raised on a farm find out that you start shoveling at 8 and drive the tractor at 11. I drove the truck nine miles from the house to the farm before I got on the tractor. You couldn’t do that now in the States but back then, nobody thought anything of it. It’s like, “We got a job to do. You’re healthy. Go do it.”
Another big one was wood chopping for me. I remember going out there with a truck by myself with a chainsaw in the middle of nowhere with no phone and communication. Things would go wrong all the time. It is quite amazing how we lived back then. I’m younger than you but we have changed a lot.
I have a good friend, Trent Clark. He was a three-time Major League Baseball World Series coach. He’s a super guy. He does a lot of work with high school-age young men. One of his key points to parents is, “Quit doing so much. Let the boy who’s going to be a man do it. Will they make mistakes? Yeah. Will they do stupid stuff? Yeah. It’s how all of us learn.” We learn more from those mistakes far more from those mistakes than we do from the others. We’re leaving young Finn in Tasmania. From 17 to 18, you joined the military, went to university, and did both. What’s your story?
I did both. From where I was in Tasmania, it was interesting. Even though I had that little entrepreneurial experience, it was very small-minded. It was like, “If you got good grades, you’re going to be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant.” My best friends were all going to be doctors. Their parents were doctors. My mom was a doctor. Grandma and grandfather were. There was this pressure. I got into medicine but I knew internally that it was never for me.
Intentionality: What we recognize as success often changes as we grow older or have more experience.
 
I didn’t like the egos that were around medicine. I wanted something different but I didn’t know about investment banking. That was what I was most suited to at the time. I didn’t have much awareness and didn’t know about any of these other options. Someone came to our school who left the school and became a helicopter pilot in the military. I was like, “That could be cooler than being a doctor.”
Back then, unfortunately, my ego was, “How do I justify the story of why I’m not going to be a doctor?” The helicopter pilot worked. They also said that they would pay for my university. I had lots of different experiences. It played on my adventurous spirit. I thought it was going to be a big sporting club and have a lot of fun. At seventeen, I was the youngest Army officer in Australia. I did a Math and Physics degree also while becoming an Army officer.
You do four years of military training at the same time as university. I was not guaranteed to be a pilot. That was interesting. You have to go through this process and then a selection process. Thousands of people applied. Eventually, I got accepted into the pilots’ course. That was my first experience of true passion. It wasn’t from me. It was observing everyone else. It was the other people there. They loved it. Most of them wanted to be a pilot since they were two years old.
They lived to breathe. They will get off the flight. They were buzzing. On a Saturday night, I would be going out in the town to party and play remote control planes. I would come back and they’re still there. It was interesting. I felt out of place. Every day people were getting dropped. I felt guilty that there I was taking the place of someone else. I made a commitment to myself, “I can’t do this for ego’s sake or status. I have to find things that I enjoy.”
That transitioned me out of pilot training. I became a medical logistics officer in the military because I had to owe a certain amount of time. I started trading currency and equities to see if I could financially support myself because I was like, “How do I get out of the military?” I felt a bit trapped. I started doing it and found a pathway out. That transitioned me into my first entrepreneurial business, where I set up a private wealth management company at 24.
I have a good friend. He retired as Colonel in the Air Force. He was one of the two pilots that were the test pilot for the stealth when it first came out. Back then, nobody knew about it. He accepted that job with the job undefined. The Air Force said, “We think you will like it. You tell us if you’re in or out.” People who are not familiar with the process don’t understand that a lot of people want to go be pilots and most of them don’t make it.
The ones who do, want to be fighter pilots or Black Hawk helicopter pilots. Most of them fly planes that carry freight. It’s only the best of the best that make it to that level. If they have a little more best, here in the US, they become astronauts. It’s a pretty elite group. That’s how you started your first business. You’ve had a couple of exits. Tell us about how you started the current business.
The current one, Intentionality, has been formed. I had been doing this Intentionality work. On the side, I would coach people in YPO and EO, speak at different events, and facilitate forum retreats. A pretty defining moment in EO for me was when I was President of the Colorado Chapter. After our first Strategy Summit, where we spent two days doing leadership work and planning everything for the year, in the end, I had this remarkable moment. We went around. I was holding everyone accountable.
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“After everything that has come out, are you going to be able to honor this? Can I hold you accountable?” It was this agreement between us. Everyone said yes. They were excited and jazzed up. I realized I didn’t have a single task. There wasn’t a single task for me. It was a good strategy day. I looked around and I was like, “What’s happening here? These people are the most incredible.” I pick the best entrepreneurs. They are all great leaders. They all had a lot of success. Here I was holding them accountable.
They’re excited. I wasn’t paying them. They didn’t have to do anything. I went back to the company I had at the time and realized I wasn’t doing that and surrounding myself with these A-players. That was the big moment where I went, “Everywhere in my life, I surround myself with A-players like my mentors, coaches, friends, and people on my boards.” In my company, I had some but I had consistently not had A-players. I was like, “I refuse to do this from now on.”
That sent me on the path of selling that company. I went, “From now on, I want to be in an arena where I’m not the smartest person in the room. I’m an asset but I appear much like I’m an asset for other people.” I lead through doing and being the best I can be in my world. That’s what started Intentionality. I was like, “I’ve got to be intentional with how I want to experience business from now on.” I’m happy with it. The people I’m working with are the best. I’m super excited about it. It was more of, “I need to spread this message to other people. It’s time to go all-in.”
It took me a long time to refine what my mission was. My mission is to help others. It was a journey and a path to get there. Thinking back across your varied mini careers, I’m looking for a hard lesson and something that, when it occurred, was like, “I can’t believe this is happening.” In retrospect, maybe that hard lesson was for the best but it was hard to see at the moment. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
I have a few. The people are a huge one for me. It’s realizing that all businesses are people and getting the right people. As an entrepreneurial business, we believe we can look at potential too much. I don’t believe you can as an entrepreneurial business. I believe you need to get people who can add value now. In a year’s time, if you can coach them up to get to the next place, that’s great but it’s about adding value now. I’ve trained a lot of people in life and then they have gone off and been valuable elsewhere. That has been a huge one.
Another one is about legal issues. We got into a legal battle over a company we sold a number of years ago. There were unethical people who never wanted to pay us a considerable amount of that money. At that moment, I wish we had cut our losses and realized that we had been played. There’s a lesson in that. There’s the due diligence process. We didn’t do enough due diligence on the sellers. You often think about buying the business’ due diligence but you need to do due diligence on who you’re selling to because that’s where most of the value goes.
What we did to ourselves in those following years was horrible. It killed other businesses. We made bad decisions in making money and health-wise. My relationship completely broke down with my partner. I realized the cost of that was so much more than the money. Unfortunately, legal stuff happens in business sometimes and you have to go, “That was unlucky. Let’s move forward.” That has been my biggest one. I’ve seen it with so many legal battles with entrepreneurs.
They always think it’s going to be worthwhile but I’ve never seen one, which is worthwhile. Either go super hard and clinical, outsource it from the first second, go all-in and you’re willing to back yourself with financial things, but you’re going to distance yourself from it, cut it, or move on. Be smarter next time with who you work with, whether it’s a customer, partner, or sale price, because there’s a higher cost that isn’t financially there. You can’t see it. That’s a problem. Even the people who win go, “I won this.” I’m like, “You didn’t. There was so much more that you could have lost.”
Intentionality: A lot of people struggle to know what they want. Sometimes you need to find out what you don’t want to get clear on what you want.
 
I’ve got a good entrepreneur friend. They were involved in legal action for about five years. He said, “We won in theory. In the court, we won but if you deduct our actual expenses, we got about enough for a two-liter bottle of Pepsi and a pizza because we spent all that. We had five years of hell, mental and emotional turmoil, and stress.” I once bought a property where the seller had second thoughts.
They didn’t want to convey the property but I wanted them to convey the property. We had a contract. I sought counsel. A good friend said, “You sue over this.” I was like, “I don’t know if I want to get involved in that.” There’s fun to the story. We did. It took a couple of years and cost more than a few coins. We prevailed because we had a contract where the seller had agreed to sell the property. We had agreed to buy the property. It was all written up.
I purchased the friend who had given me the counsel a nice bottle of wine and took it to him as a thank you for the time and expertise he shared with me years ago at the very beginning. It was so funny to me. He said, “I’m so glad that worked out. That’s how you do it but I’ve never seen it work.” I was like, “I’m so glad you didn’t tell me that because then I wouldn’t have done it.” I certainly agree.
What about a warp-speed moment? Things are going along pretty well in your business but all of a sudden, you make a change, implement a strategy, or get a new hire. You’re that hockey stick of growth. It’s warp speed. It’s like, “We have been working our tails off for this long to get here. All of a sudden, it took off.” Do you have a warp-speed moment you can share with us?
I don’t think I do. I wish I had. What I have seen is the power of staying in your lane and doing lots of little activities. It suddenly feels like momentum is built. It’s the quantum leap. When you think of a quantum particle taking a leap, there’s all this energy vibrating. Suddenly it jumps up to the next thing. I’m experiencing that. It’s the consistency of being consistent with your message, communicating it, and not going off onto shining objects. Suddenly things are like, “A lot of amazing opportunities are coming in.” I can’t put it to one thing but I know it has been this consistency, which has been important.
To tell you the truth, a lot of the time in life, I was looking for that warp-speed moment. Perhaps that stopped me from doing the consistency, which would have ended up giving me that warp-speed moment. Let me see in a year’s time if I can report to you and go, “Directly, I saw this happen.” I’m about to finish my book. I do believe that could be one thing, which could make it a standout moment. A lot of that comes down to positioning yourself and then luck has to come into play. I don’t think I’ve positioned myself enough in the past to be vulnerable.
I appreciate that. I want to encourage you to get that book finished. I wrote my first book years ago and published my fourth. I don’t think there’s anything you can do if you are a thought leader as you are to cement, establish, and improve your authority than become a published author. I met with a group of entrepreneurs. I was like, “Notice, the root word of authority is author.”
I’m a big believer that everybody has a story to tell. I’m not a writer. I talk my books and then transcribe my books. They go through a series of editors. I sat down at the keyboard to do my first book. It was brutally painful. I would rather be boiled in oil and my head put on a pole outside the village. I’m not good at that. That’s how I do it. I’m looking for a nugget, a piece of gold, or some wisdom in your brain that we all want to know.
Our greatest asset is our energy. People often think it's time, but it's our energy. Where you share your energy and how to receive energy is the most important lesson we can learn. Share on X
I would have to pick one of the principles of Intentionality. I believe the one I want to share is, “Escape the prison of comparison by focusing on your path and what steps you can take.” The reason why I say that is when you go on this entrepreneurial journey, it’s so easy to be comparing yourself to everyone else. You’re comparing yourself, “That entrepreneur has a bigger business. They are better than me.” Once you start that journey, you are in prison because there’s always someone you can compare yourself to.
There’s always a variable that you might not have that someone else has. It’s dangerous. What it does is it puts you into a low vibrational state and a place of lack, scarcity, and fear. When you’re in that state, you’re not doing your best work. You then might try to copy or imitate them. It stops you from being clear on what matters to you. That’s why I talk about your path. We each have our path. Paths don’t go in a linear or straight direction. Sometimes they do a big loop around.
Often you might be comparing yourself against someone. You don’t know that they’re about to do a big, U-turn behind you. Do you want to be like them? Before my marriage broke down and I had some business failures, a lot of people were comparing themselves to me so much that when it happened to me, it was confronting because they were like, “We were trying to imitate you. We wanted this life and relationship.” That can be very dangerous. Be mindful.
When you compare, often you’re only comparing yourself against one variable. I say, “If you want that, you then have to have all these other things that person has as well. Do you want these things?” It could be an unhealthy lifestyle, poor financial management, or a bad relationship. They could be unhappy. You’ve got to take it all. You can’t just pick one little thing. I believe that has been the greatest nugget. It stops you from suddenly ending up on someone else’s path and one day waking up and going, “What happened to me? This isn’t the life I want to live.”
That was a true nugget of wisdom. There’s that old story that if you lined up twenty people and they could take all their problems and put them in a pile in the street in front of them and they said, “Finn, you can pick up any set of problems you want,” almost everybody would pick up their own. They would look at everybody else. That trap of comparison is certainly best to be avoided. Perfection is not the goal. It’s the improvement. You can only look internally for improvement, “Here’s where I was. Here’s where I am. Here’s where I want to go.”
It also creates separation. When you’re comparing yourself against the other person, you’re not celebrating their success and journey and going, “Look at where they’re at.” You’re thinking about yourself. In life, I love binary things. I’m not black and white but sometimes it’s the thing that helps. I’m always believing, “Is this activity or thought? Is this connection or separation?”
If it’s the connection, go for it. Sometimes I love surrounding myself with great successful people. I’m not comparing myself to them. I’m going, “How incredible are you?” I’m rising up with them. That’s a connection exercise. Some people say little things to people who are doing well as a separation exercise. They’re trying to bring them down or sabotaging themselves sometimes as well.
I loved what you said about frequency and vibration. My intentional gratitude journey years ago was listening to a lady talk about how humans perform at the highest level when they express or experience gratitude and at the lowest when they express or experience fear or shame. I don’t know that I have that much fear. I’ve been fortunate not to have shame too much in my life, which is a horrible way for somebody to deal with.
Intentionality: We each have our path. Paths don’t go in a linear or straight direction. Sometimes they do a big loop around. Comparing yourself to someone can be very dangerous.
 
I was that type of entrepreneur. We could hit a number, have a quarter, and do whatever. They would be like, “Here’s what we did.” I would be like, “What about this over here? I wouldn’t celebrate it for 1/10 of a second.” In listening to her, I realized I had not been King Midas. Everything I’ve touched has not turned to gold but I’ve been Prince Midas Jr. Almost everything I’ve touched has turned into something good. I never had any gratitude for it.
I was in Bangkok, Thailand. I came home, bought the silver bucket, wrote gratitude on a card, and carried this pail with me for about 6 or 8 months. It went in the car. I looked like Little Red Riding Hood, except I’m not that little and there was no red hood. I carried the little pail with me everywhere I went. It was my physical reminder to be grateful.
There’s a great story in the book. If you, as readers, go to buy the book, the money goes to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It doesn’t go to Don. It’s a passion project, not a profit project. I’m going to put you in a time machine. We’re coming into the final turn. I can see the finish line. I’m going to put you into a time machine and take you all the way back to twenty-year-old Finn.
You’re 2 or 3 years into the military and university. This time machine gives you the opportunity to share 1 or 2 pieces of wisdom that you know now and you didn’t know then, but if you had known then would have helped accelerate and smooth out your path. Into the time machine, you go as Finnian all the way back to twenty-year-old Finn. What do you tell yourself?
One would be focusing on choosing love over fear. The core is to feel peace and joy. That’s what I wanted. I thought the answer was making decisions out of fear but I can never lead to peace and joy. That’s one. The second is linked to that one in some regards. It’s about being kinder to my body. I was quite cruel to my body at a young age. I wish I was more loving to it because that’s what we live with every day. It has been incredible for me. I could have been nicer. Finally, it’s about energy versus time. It’s realizing that our greatest asset is our energy. People often think it’s time but it’s our energy. Where you share your energy and how to receive energy is the most important lesson we can learn.
That is well-intentioned advice from today’s Finnian to twenty-year-old Finn. Finnian, how can our readers reach out to you? What’s the easiest way to get ahold of you?
If you go to my website, which is FinnianKelly.com/podcast, there’s an incredible bunch of free resources that I’ve created which will start you on the path of intentionality. I always say you’re one breath away from intentionality because one breath gives you a chance to slow down and decide. Do you want to respond or react? Do you want to be intentional with this next behavior to go to a particular feeling? It will give you a great bunch of examples there, which would be awesome. My social media is @TheFinnianKelly as well.
Folks, that’s the episode of the show. Thanks. We will see you next time. Finnian, thank you very much.
Thanks so much, Don. I’m very grateful to be on this journey with you.
 
Important Links

Intentionality
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
YPO
EO Colorado Chapter
FinnianKelly.com/podcast
@TheFinnianKelly – Instagram

 
About Finnian Kelly
As a sought-after speaker, event facilitator and executive coach, Finnian has been dubbed “the Business Mystic” because of his unique ability to put consciousness into business and inspire leaders to find new levels of meaning and purpose through their creative endeavours. This approach flowed through his term as President of the Colorado Chapter of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) – the largest and most influential community of entrepreneurs in the world. Finnian helps people ‘love their path’ so they can feel content with a life lived in the now.
As an entrepreneur, Finnian built and exited two multi-million dollar companies in the financial industry. He’s the Creator and Chief Visionary Officer of Intentionality.com. Through the four paths of the Intentionality framework, Finnian guides people to be purposeful and aligned in their belief, thoughts and behaviors so they can feel more love in their life.
As a lifelong learner, Finnian has degrees in maths, physics, finance, leadership, teaching and a master’s degree of science in positive psychology. He spent 7 years in the Australian Defence Force and graduated from one of the most prestigious leadership organisations in the World, The Royal Military College of Duntroon.
Finnian makes appearances as a financial expert and is on a mission to bridge the gap between money and spirituality. He’s appeared on Sky Business, on ABC as a political commentator, and on Ten’s morning shows as a financial expert. He also regularly appears as a guest writer for online publications – Money Management, Smart Company, Business Insider, Forbes and more.
Finnian’s finest accomplishment to date was being featured on the popular National Geographic Documentary, Undercover Angel. This was a project where he was dropped into an underprivileged community to find out their core issues, build trust and come up with a project that would support their needs. He funded the entire program himself and worked with community leaders to form a family education center in Fakulteta, Bulgaria.
Above all, Finnian is a conscious being – committed to embodying Intentionality and inspiring others to do the same. Finnian travels the world spreading Intentionality on speaking tours, exploring new places and cultures and chasing powder as a ridiculously passionate skier!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: EP 16 | How Christine Ricci’s Strong Work Ethic & Mindset Relate To Her Success
Date: May 4, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-16-how-christine-riccis-strong-work-ethic-mindset-relate-to-her-success/
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When you have a strong work ethic and mindset, you won’t be working for money. Instead, you’d be doing it because you love helping people. Christine Ricci, an Associate Broker and founder of the Ricci Team at Keller Williams NY Realty, began her career in real estate at a very young age. Throughout her more than twenty years of service, she has maintained top producer status selling over a billion dollars’ worth of real estate in the Westchester County, NY, and Fairfield, Connecticut marketplace. All this success comes from the basic principle of appreciating every opportunity. Why? Because each is a stepping stone to the next one. Tune in!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/How-Christine-Riccis-Strong-Work-Ethic-Mindset-Relate-to-Her-Success.mp3

 
How Christine Ricci’s Strong Work Ethic & Mindset Relate To Her Success
 
I have a great entrepreneur as a guest. I have Christine Ricci. She has been in the real estate business since she was about seven. For most of that, she has been with Keller Williams, which is probably the worldwide leader in real estate brokerage. She is a real estate agent and a broker. Christine, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Don. It’s a pleasure to be on your show with you. It’s an honor.
I’m thrilled to have you. Let’s jump right into it. Think back to young little Christine, where you were born and raised and how you were raised. I know that you served all of New York and Connecticut, but I don’t think you’re from there. Where are you from?
My parents came from Portugal. They arrived here in 1971. My two older sisters were born there and my mom was pregnant with me. I was made in Portugal and was born in the USA. They landed from Portugal to New Rochelle, which is a city in Westchester County. I was born and raised in Westchester my entire life. I was a daughter of immigrants who came here like many to have a better life and live the American Dream and provide more to their children that they didn’t have. I grew up very cultural. I speak Portuguese, Spanish and English. I grew up with a European background here locally. They instilled all the values and culture in all my sisters and me.
Were your parents entrepreneurial?
They were not. My dad always was a dreamer and a visionary. Can you say he was an entrepreneur? He had an entrepreneur mindset and always was able to negotiate and create opportunities but he never owned his own business or anything, but he did have that mindset though.
Many immigrants to this country bring this phenomenal work ethic. Most of us are from somewhere else in this country, but after multi-generations of being in the United States, sometimes that work ethic wanes a little bit. Talk about mom and dad’s work ethic.
Negotiate and create opportunities.
Many come here with a work ethic that’s beyond what we see. My sisters and I were very fortunate that my parents did a very good job transferring that to us. Nothing was beneath them. If they had to lay brick, they would lay the best bricklayer. If they had to roll out the garbage or clean toilets, everything that they did, it was 150%. Their delivery of service and product was always beyond. They always wanted to exceed expectations.
That work ethic was transferred to us. That is one of the blessings of having parents that didn’t come from much. They appreciated every opportunity and never said, “No.” They looked at it like it was a stepping stone to the next one. It wasn’t like, “I’m not doing that.” It was more, “Let me do this. I don’t know who this person is, but maybe they can get me further.” It’s a great thing that my sisters and I were all very successful in a different way. We have those values. We’re all about people and delivering and exceeding expectations.
Exceeding expectations is straight out of my book, Romancing Your Customer, delivering exceptional experiences to where customers not just like you but love you, and say, “Wow,” when they deal with you. The other thing about, “They always said, yes,” what I love about that is I’m a firm believer that all progress starts with yes. Sometimes catastrophes can be averted with a no, but progress does not start with a no. Progress starts with a, “Yes, I’ll go. I appreciate the opportunity.” Maybe it goes as well as somebody thought and maybe not, but all progress starts with yes. Let me ask you, were you a childhood entrepreneur?
When I was six, my friend and I have a wild imagination. We would make mud pies and pretend to sell them. We would go buy products in the little deli near us. We would put a table out at the end of our driveway and start selling it for maybe a nickel more. I can say yes. I went to school to be a nurse. I always had a servant’s heart, always about serving and helping. When I went to school, I had my family very young. I was a young mom. When one of my friends said, “You would be a great real estate agent.” I’m like, “What’s that?”
I worked at an ice cream store. My sister and I delivered newspapers. I was 9 and she was 12. We did have that go-getter mentality. Our parents are always like, “Don’t let anything stand in your way.” I could say yes to that. The nurse came from the nurturing side of me. I love helping people. Medically, that was the nurse part. Now, it’s service-driven and helping people find their dream homes that they could build memories in. I get the same reward as if I was helping somebody medically. That’s where it transferred to, the helping.
It’s very common with entrepreneurs. One, maybe they had something in their childhood that was entrepreneurial. I certainly think that marketing mud pies qualifies as entrepreneurial, a little low on product quality, but real big on gusto. The other commonality is coming from a place of a servant’s heart of, “I want to help people achieve their dreams.” Like Zig said, “If you help enough other people get what they want, you can get what you want.” In that between time from young little Christine to grown-up Christine, you went to college, military or Merchant Marine. What was your path?
I finished high school. I always wanted to be a young mom from a little girl. I remember one of my best friend’s moms with curly, blonde hair, reading the books. My parents didn’t have that. They didn’t come into school. They didn’t speak English. They didn’t come for teacher conferences. I was always in awe that I wanted to be that mom that goes in and reads to their children in the class. I wanted to have the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom. My mom didn’t.
Work Ethic: Only 20% or 25% of real estate agents who get their license sell eight houses a year.
 
I was working at an ice cream store for many years. I got married at 19, had my first son at 21. I did go to nursing school during that time. I was at my clinical stage when I found out I was expecting. I did not finish my RN. I was in my clinical phases when I phased out. I raised my children. I have three children, Fabio, Mark and Briana. At the age of 27, I was introduced to real estate. Since then, I’ve been a real estate agent.
Let’s talk about your business. What’s the name of your business?
We’re at Keller Williams, NY Realty, and it’s The Ricci Team. We are a team of thirteen. We do have a full staff, a Director of Operations, Kate, a Transaction Client Care Director who manages is our clients and the care of them, Nicole, an Executive Assistant, and many virtuals that help us with some odds and ends in marketing and eleven agents.
Would you hazard a guess, how many real estate agents exist in the United States?
That’s a great number to know. I don’t know. We have over 6,000 in one board and then another, probably 5,000 in Fairfield.
Are those the county boards?
Yes. There are quite a few numbers. The statistics are that only 20% or 25% of real estate agents get their license to sell eight houses a year and they stay in real estate, the go-getter, the go deliver service before you get compensated. There are a lot of hobbyists out there, too. It’s very interesting to see how the industry has changed since I got licensed. When I got licensed, it was more, “I’m doing it part-time.”
Appreciate every opportunity because each is a stepping stone to the next one.
A teacher would get their license on the side. Firefighters, stay-at-home moms, it was a hobby. It wasn’t looked at as a career in the last few years. We now see in universities Real Estate classes, real estate what you could do for a living, career paths in real estate and investment. It’s different. We have students coming out of college with their majors in Real Estate. We didn’t have that before. It was more, “Go to school and get your 75 hours.” It’s very easy to get a license but it’s not easy to be successful.
You all pay attention to that. It’s not easy to be successful. I’m in Texas and on the insurance side, there are 300,000 insurance licenses in the state of Texas for 33 million people. That seems like a lot of players in the game, though insurance is very parallel to real estate. The mass majority do little to no business. The majority of the business used to be what they called the 80/20 rule, 20% of people do 80% of the business. Maybe that’s more the 90/10 rule, 10% of people are doing 90% of the business. Your current company was not your first dance in real estate. Talk about your first dance.
I got into international relocation, which was a game-changer for me. I started in real estate, doing residential leases, renting to tenants, helping landlords market their properties, and built a great business base. From there, it transformed into an annuity business. My tenants became my buyers. My landlords became my investors and sellers. It became the hand that kept on giving.
When I got into the international relocation piece, it connected me to my parents. They came from abroad. They were from Spain and had no one here. My parents bought a home in nine months. They came here with no money and bought a home with my uncle. They found my grandfather’s wealthy friend, who for 30 years on a handshake, paid the mortgage. They bought a home for $72,000 and sold it for over $1 million.
That homeownership was so key. It must have been instilled in me over time. I connected with the international clientele because I speak the languages. I wanted to be their Siri, their go-to. I wanted to inform them and pour into them the passion I had for the county I lived in and for the American Dream. It transformed my career. It allowed me to put together some great teams. This is my third team since 2006. I joined Keller Williams in 2006. I knew I needed a team because I had so many people to help. I did have enough time. I needed to scale my business. In order to scale it, I had to add agents to help the people.
It took me a long time to understand how to run a business. I wasn’t running a business in my former brokerage. I was working. I was selling real estate, collecting a commission and it was going into a great bank account, but I didn’t know what a P&L was. I didn’t know what my gross commission income meant. I didn’t know. I was just selling real estate.
When I became a business owner, I understood what it took to build a business. It was when my life transformed. The transformation after that was investing in people and commitment. I wasn’t committed to my agents, so they would leave. I thought every agent was like me, where they were committed, resilient and willing to do whatever it took.
Work Ethic: Your tenants become your buyers, and your landlords become your investors and sellers.
 
It was very challenging for me because I had a very strong work ethic and they didn’t. I wasn’t doing it for the money. I was doing it because I loved helping people. The byproduct was getting compensated. When you flip those around, it’s not so simple to attract people. When I committed to people and my agents was when the business grew. I was a true leader. I was holding them accountable. I was training them. I was looking at their world and not mine. When I started investing in others was when the business grew.
There are so many pearls of wisdom there. When I started investing in my people, I came from a servant’s heart to help people. The money was a byproduct of that. I saw things from their perspective. We trained people that in business, the only perspective that matters is not yours. It’s your partner, teammate, spouse, child, employee, subordinate and customer. It’s always the other person’s perspective that matters.
There used to be a show called Star Trek. In Star Trek, they would go to warp speed. They’re traveling along. All of a sudden, they’re blazing off into outer space. Is there a warp speed moment in your past where things were pretty good, but all of a sudden, it was Captain James T. Kirk who said, “Scotty, give me the warp power,” and business flew off?
It was when I joined Keller Williams. I was drowning in clients and leads. I didn’t have the right systems, models and tools. I was telling my former broker, “I need help.” I was building many teams of people I knew, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I was going through the motions and not sleeping. I needed a path. I needed a model. When Keller Williams came to our area in 2005, they recruited me. It had a team model, a foundation and a proven track record of team building, of how to put together the teams, compensation, who should be the team members and how do you build a business.
Although along the way, I failed forward and grew, in 2010, I never wanted to build a team again because that was a stop in y your tracks moment when the market collapsed. We couldn’t control it. We were doing everything right on the ground. The other pieces that targeted us and are true to influence our business were financing and the stock market, things we couldn’t control.
The great thing was that, although I wasn’t prepared for that crash, I was in a company that was leading us to keep our doors open. I plugged in. I am a true learner. I love learning. I stayed plugged in. I never missed a conference. I never missed a call. I was being coached. I’m very coachable. I put my head down. I served and helped anyone that needed help. When I lifted my head up, I was getting ahead. I knew again, I needed to build that team, but I needed to do it through people and not trying to plow through. I needed to slow down. That’s when slowing down sped me up.
It’s funny how that works sometimes. The fastest way is maybe to go slowly.
Don’t do work for the money, do it because you love helping people.
It’s not simple.
What is counterintuitive to most people is to go fast, go fast, but that’s not always true. My wife is a Keller Williams professionally.
I do remember that.
When we first met a long time ago, she was a young girl and I was not. I wasn’t young nor a girl. The broker she was with is a household name broker, but she would tell me stories. I’ve been in the empowerment business for a long time. I would look at her and I’m like, “They’re evil. That’s evil. That is not how you do business when you’re trying to build other people.”
When she was recruited by Keller Williams, she relayed their approach about putting the agent first and helping the agent build their business and make a living, the clouds have parted. The sun shines. The angels sing. Because of that philosophy, when you put other people first, the magic has a chance to happen in your life. I’m so glad you had that opportunity.
We talked about a warp speed moment. Here’s a harder question. What about a hard lesson? Something that hurt with pain and agony and maybe a tear and a loss. Looking back now, where you have perspective, you’re not in the battle, it probably worked out pretty good, even though it did hurt. Is there a hard lesson you can share?
There are many, but here’s one that had a great outcome. I grew up in Westchester my whole life. I never lived anywhere else. I would move from three towns and that’s it in the county. Here I am, helping people move across the world. I’m like, “If they could do it, I can, too.” In April of 2017, we had 14 inches of snow and I was done. I got divorced years ago with my three kids and I have two children out in Arizona.
Work Ethic: Learn to say no more, use powerful words, and communicate clearly on.
 
I called a mentor in California and said, “What do you have for me? What can I come out in sunny California and do leadership-wise? You know who I am and my work ethic. I’m willing to do sweat equity. What can I do?” I went out. I picked up. I sat down two of my team members, one of my Director of Ops at the time and an agent that had been with me for many years.
I said, “I want to do this. Can you hold the fort down while I go navigate this out there? I will be committed to waking up every day at 5:00 AM and train you, coach you, still show up virtually and remotely. Can you man the ship? I will move you up. I will pay you more.” I did it. I went out to California for nine months and I knew I had a time that I was going to see the implosion. I was going to either see success or it was going to crumble.
Six months in, I started seeing the holes in the team here. I started seeing what wasn’t working and what I always had to come back and fix. Although California didn’t pan out, I learned so much. I built out new development. I’m working with developers. I learned a lot from my mentor, who is amazing. I was blessed to have these relationships in my life.
What I saw from a distance was I was ready to be a remote leader, but my business wasn’t. I had to come back and it was messy. I came back to agents leaving, not positive culture in my team. Things that were being done that were not being told because I wasn’t there. I don’t want to say I lost my business, but it was a lot of triage. During that time, what happened was I started interviewing expansion partners.
Keller Williams has another tier called Expansion Partners. The light bulb went off was I had to get out of my own way in order to grow. I had to put the Christine Ricci, “I got this ego,” because I was ready to partner with the right partners that we’re already living where I wanted to go. It was proven already. They weren’t trying it. They weren’t testing it. They were living it. I went to my principal operator, who’s a huge rock in my life. I said, “Is this the time? I have the people. I don’t have the operational engine. They have the operational engine of operations, paperwork, processes, systems and tools.” Although Keller Williams has those things, you have to plugin.
Everyone has it customized. Everybody’s business is different. I knew if I got into the right partnership that I wouldn’t need to wait for 10, 20 years to get to the next level. Although it was painful, we are healthy. I am profitable over 30% of my business. I was still running it as an independent contractor. I didn’t run it like an LLC and an S corp like I have now. I had to move mountains to get the business in order because I didn’t have a profitable business to even sell.
Many times, it’s very common that entrepreneurs are the visionaries. We see things. We’re rainmakers. We can make things happen. Dollars show up. When it comes to that operational piece of A goes to B, and B goes to C and C goes to D, we’re not that great at that. It’s a different part of our brain. Many times, the visionary or the integrator, someone who can make the trains run on time to where you can go do what you do.
See what’s not working so you can come back and fix it.
Truthfully, we should all only be spending time on our highest leverage activities, the things that propel our business the furthest. Think back years ago to twenty-year-old Christine. Knowing what you know now, if you could teleport back then and share one piece of advice with your twenty-year-old self, what would that piece of advice be?
I’m going to break that down into two pieces. Professionally, partner up, team up with people that have your best interests. Don’t be afraid to partner and share profit. You’ll get there faster, more effectively and win together. Have a database as well. Don’t put it on a spreadsheet. Invest in your database because it’s a data bank. It will payout. You build relationships for life. Collect information. Don’t have a phone book on the business side.
Listen to that, people. It’s database or data bank.
On the personal side, learn to say, “No more.” Use powerful words and communicate well and clearly on what’s not acceptable and have boundaries in your personal life. It all interacts with one another, integrates personal, professional. I gave up a lot of time that I would love to get back. Knowing what I know now, I would’ve made some different choices and decided things differently. Everything had a plan, but I would set more boundaries with myself to give back to myself more.
This is generally the toughest question I ask an entrepreneur. The reason this one is tough is because so often, entrepreneurs have a hard time asking for something for themselves. I interviewed the Head of Vistage Spain who lives in Barcelona. For the last few years, my consulting practice has been global. We have clients on every continent except Antarctica. There are not that many people in Antarctica, but I want one. If The Proven Entrepreneur tribe or clan could support you, Christine, what would you ask from us?
I’ve never been afraid of asking for help, which has helped me move forward. I love communication. Anything that you can bring to me to improve and impact how people socially communicate and use words to impact people, the delivery of things is so awesome. If there’s anything to help is to keep delivering communication and help the next generation not hide behind their phones or computers. Let’s impact high-level interaction. I would say bring that on. It’s what’s going to latch. If we continue to remove themselves from the computers and interact, we’ll have a whole different next level.
If you are in Europe, New York or Connecticut, reach out to The Ricci Team at Keller Williams. Give them a shot at your real estate business. Christine, thank you so much for being on the show. This has been another episode of the show. If I can help you in any way, go to DonWilliamsGlobal.com and look at the Work with Me page. We’ll see if there is some way I can help you be all that you can be. See you next time.
 
Important Links:

Keller Williams
Romancing Your Customer
The Ricci Team
Vistage Spain – Previous episode
DonWilliamsGlobal.com
Work with Me

 
About Christine Ricci
Christine Ricci, Associate Broker and founder of the Ricci Team at Keller Williams NY Realty, began her career in real estate at a very young age. Throughout her more than twenty years of service, she has maintained top producer status selling over a billion dollars worth of real estate in the Westchester County, NY, and Fairfield, Connecticut marketplace.
She does not quantify her success by income or the number of transactions, but the strength of the relationships she builds along the way. Customer service is at the forefront of everything she does and the reason her business is 78% repeat or referral based today.
Christine’s personality and work ethic earned her a reputation as one of the most trusted and admired real estate professionals in her area. She is passionate about connecting with people thus allowing her to build an incredible network of agents worldwide.
To meet the growing demand of her business and maintain a high level of service, she sought out and hand-selected other like-minded agents who share her passion, beliefs and work ethic, to form her highly successful team.
All of the sales associates are seasoned experts in the local market and have a specific role in the transaction. Like any well-oiled machine, many moving parts must work well together to accomplish a client’s goal. They aim to provide the ultimate client experience to remember for a lifetime.
Her global influence and fluency in Portuguese and Spanish contributed to building a robust international relocation division. With the addition of Italian and Greek, the team can now serve more international clients moving to and from Westchester County and Fairfield CT.
Their experience extends beyond the everyday real estate transaction and includes a full-service buyer and seller division, landlord and tenant division, and international relocation services.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E6 | Whose Perspective Is More Important?
Date: March 29, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/whose-perspective-is-more-important-copy/
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In this episode Don discusses a simple but vital term that will aid any entrepreneur in the business world. That word is called perspective.  By understanding the concept perspective, any person can improve his communication with anyone, be it of any setting in business or in life and inevitably, because of its effective use, influence the other.
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Whose Perspective Is More Important?
According to webster Perspective means a mental view or prospect or he capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance.
This perspective or point of view is especially important for someone to understand when we want to exert certain form of influence on another person.
Let us face it, in the real world we cannot force any person to do anything, it must be by his own will that he or she will do something. However, when put forth our influence then perhaps we can sway that person to the direction that we aim for.
Now in any personal interaction, be it our colleagues, friends, or business partners, how can we truly communicate with them? How can we understand their thoughts or motives?
Enter the vital role of perspective or point of view. As Don asks, who’s point of view is the most important? Of course, it is the point of view of the other person.
When we try to really know the perspective of the other person that we are communicating with, then we have the chance to place ourselves in his shoes. Only then can we understand where he or she is coming from. Only then will we get the sense of what the other person is trying to communicate towards.
Now, in the business world, we can all agree that communication is very vital and more so is the understanding of perspective. It is during those times in business, when we want to make a deal, prove a point, or let others know our way of thinking, that we should be aware of the point of view of others, so we can communicate properly with them. We can then discuss the proper pros or cons of a certain deal or explain to them the value of a certain business or strategy that we are proposing.
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As Don puts it, it is only through perspective that we can put on the glasses of another and see for ourselves their thought process in our communication with each other and by doing that, we entice the other person to listen and hear us more. The more the other person listens to us, the more he understands and that slowly trickles down in exerting our own influence towards them, in arriving on our desired goal.
 
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Title: S2E3 | Lan Phan Founder of the community of SEVEN
Date: February 1, 2022
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/lan-phan-founder-of-the-community-of-seven/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Episode-Cover-SE03-Lan-Phan.png
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Content:
How a Vietnamese refugee, educator, and businesswoman is changing the way we think about training and development in America.
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Lan-Phan-Founder-of-the-community-of-SEVEN.mp3
KEY SHARES FROM PROVEN ENTREPRENEUR LAN PHAN
Lan Pham is an acute success as an entrepreneur. She launched her business, community of SEVEN, at the peak of the pandemic. The company, which has grown to 200,000 followers in under a year, was built entirely from her home computer. Lan talks about her business journey on this podcast and gives excellent advice on how to make it anywhere.
SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS LEVERAGE COMMUNITY BUILDING
Lan is a Vietnamese refugee. Along with her parents and two siblings, she fled to America at the height of the Vietnam War. The family found themselves in a studio unit apartment in the Mission District in San Francisco. Life was hard in a strange city. Though Lan’s family knew no one, a local church “adopted” her family. Lan experienced her first sense of community here.
Like most immigrants, Lan’s parents worked hard to give their children bright futures. Lan’s mother saved tuition money by working as a hairdresser. Lan’s father, who believed in the value of education, took every opportunity to teach his children what he deemed important life lessons. He taught them motivational quotes often, so they could learn at every opportunity.
Lan went on to earn her degree and Master’s at Stanford and Harvard, respectively. She focused on teaching and curriculum, because she knew that education was at the core of all self-improvement. Over the next few years, she worked as a counselor for kids in street gangs and as an educator.
SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS CARVE THEIR OWN PATH
While she loved her work, Lan always felt like she had more to offer. She got her first taste of entrepreneurship when she opened a booking agency, which quickly grew to an events planning business. In fact, Lan and her team were the ones responsible for some of the first renditions of Coachella and Bonnaroo. Lan also did a stint in real estate investment, before finally entering corporate.
Lan transitioned into corporate because she was looking for financial security. After years of hustling, she wanted the comfort of a 9-to-5 job. Things were going great at work, and she was excelling as expected until COVID-19 hit. Lan was fired within a month of the start of the pandemic. And so was her entire team.
Lan had never failed at anything before. She spent the next week crying on her couch until her daughter Morgan reminded her that everything would be okay.
SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS GIVE BACK
The concept for community of SEVEN came to Lan in a fever dream. Lan launched her company the very next day. Like other great entrepreneurs, she aimed for consistency. She published posts regularly. She engaged with potential clients as much as possible. And pushed through with seminars even if the turn-out was low. Sure enough, people started to take notice.
In early 2021, the company got its big break with Carta, a California-based equity management company. The project with Carta required Lan to train 300 employees across three continents. The seminar was a resounding success.
If Lan has learned anything from her experience thus far, it is that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with one”. As a young entrepreneur, she went after every opportunity simply because she could. She treated each business as a learning experience. And no lesson was beneath her.
These days, Lan is a lot more deliberate about her energy. When she decided to start her own company, she knew that there was no turning back. It has been an amazing couple of months for Lan. Each day, she comes closer to changing the very way training and development are done in America.

Lan Phan – Refugee to Successful Entrepreneur.
EDUCATOR AND ENTREPRENEUR
Lan prides herself on being an educator-entrepreneur. Teaching is her first love. But being an entrepreneur allowed her to live out her dream in the best possible way. Her training approach is also unique because she utilizes micro-learning, which teaches skills and lessons in short, quick bursts. When she isn’t running these sessions, you can find Lan building networks on Facebook and LinkedIn.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E50 | Doug Renfro – 3rd Generation Proven Entrepreneur Running Mrs. Renfro’s
Date: November 4, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-50-doug-renfro-3rd-generation-proven-entrepreneur-running-mrs-renfros/
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Content:
 
Passing down a business to your children is one daunting task full of risks and challenges. Doug Renfro gives a peek at what it’s like to be in such a situation by sharing his work as a third-generation entrepreneur of Mrs. Renfro’s. He sits down with Don Williams to talk about the biggest roadblocks he faced upon taking the reins of their family business and the lessons of persistence he learned along the way. Doug also breaks down the unconventional marketing methods to keep Mrs. Renfro’s ahead of the curve, from bringing food to movie sets and taking advantage of the internet’s massive reach.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Doug-Renfro-3rd-Generation-Proven-Entrepreneur-Running-Mrs.-Renfros.mp3
 
Doug Renfro – 3rd Generation Proven Entrepreneur Running Mrs. Renfro’s
I’m here with another episode of the show. My guest is local Fort Worth luminary, long-term business, Doug Renfro, with Mrs. Renfro’s.
Thanks for having me. I assume luminary is the light coming off my forehead.
It means that wherever you go, there’s a bright light around you. Tell us about Mrs. Renfro’s. You are in the salsa business and have been in the salsa business for longer than a week or two.
It has been for a couple of years. We are an 81-year-old family business. It’s very evolutionary. When my dad was a kid, they made syrup. When I was a kid, we did Southern relishes. We got into taco sauce in the ‘70s, and now, we are the largest independent brand of salsa in the United States.
The business had multiple pivots along the way. Mrs. Renfro was your grandmother. What was the first product that she put on the market?
If you go North on Main toward Joe T Garcia’s in Fort Worth, you will see a building on the side called the vintage building. It has been nicely restored. I have a photo outside my office of my granddad in the ‘30s and his vintage company car. He was distributing grocery items like flavored vinegars, garlic strips, and other different things. In 1940, after he made it through the depression, he thought, “I’m going to go out on my own and do this.” They started in the garage in 1940. For twelve years, they did that and distributed grocery items. In ‘52, they started making syrup. There were no maple trees syrup.
How many salsa brands are there that most people would recognize?
There are over 800 tracked in the nation, which seems ridiculous. As far as what’s popular and what people know about nationwide, there’s a good 100 or 200. We are fortunate that half of what we do is make things for other people. I can take you to a grocery store and normally show you 3 to 7 other brands that we make. It’s not always salsa. We also do bean dip, cheese sauce, barbecue sauce, and relish. We have done some ethnic condiments as well. As long as it will fit our technical parameters, we will give it a shot.
You are the manufacturer in their label.
Many times, it’s their recipe, and we make it for them. Many times, we created the recipe for them. We do a lot of grocery store chain items where they come to us and ask, “What should we do to have a private-labeled salsa or cheese sauce?” I will suggest things based on what I see in the market, and then they will pick a few. We will either create a recipe or use a library we created earlier in a non-competitive space. I can take you around the world or some places and show you this jar that looks nothing like us and has nothing about Texas or Renfro but it’s our recipe. In many cases, we have been making those for many years.
Did your grandmother start the business?
My grandparents did it together.
Your father then took over the business.
My dad and my uncle were 50/50 partners. My granddad was smart. He didn’t have a lot of formal education but when he incorporated, he kept 52% and gave them each 24% so that if things went south, they could still fire him. When he passed away in ‘75, my grandmother gradually gifted more to my dad and my uncle.
My dad is what I call allergic to sales. He liked the production and detested anything administrative or sales and marketing-oriented. My uncle did marketing, accounting, and everything else. My two cousins came back earlier than I did, although I was there before they were. Every summer since sixth grade, I did the nastiest jobs. We had to make $5 a day initially, and then they had to pay me minimum wage when I turned sixteen.
Third-Generation Entrepreneur: Persistence and tenacity are more important than intelligence. You can’t be a moron, but it’s more important to be tenacious.
 
In college, I mixed all the spices and then went to get my Bachelor’s degree. I lived at home and had a really interesting smelling Subaru with cumin and garlic notes. I’ve got the heck out of there and went to work for Rossborough’s company for seven years after college when he sold it to General Motors. I wore a coat and tie, and the car did not smell of garlic. I probably told you that corporate jobs will suck the soul out of your body, so I have been back for a couple of years. My two cousins and myself run the company. We still pay my dad to come to launch with us occasionally. We share lots of info with him to get his input on things.
It’s a true American family business.
Very much so. We always told the fourth generation, “You’ve got to go to college, graduate, and work somewhere real for a couple of years and come back if you want to go up the management route.” Several of them are smart and successful, and they already make more than double what we can pay them as a management trainee. For the others like my three children, I always said, “Chase your path. Don’t chase the dollar. You will be very happy,” and they are very happy. They live in LA, New York, and North Carolina and have no interest in the business.
I have a good friend whose grandfather started a construction company and built it to about $500 million. It’s a pretty nice construction company. The next generation didn’t do so well. The grandboys run it now but from the very beginning, there was always a rule. It was, “You must go out and work ten years somewhere else before you can come back to the business.”
It’s a great rule. I was gone for 7 or 8 years.
Who were you with?
I was with EDS when I was hired, then that became acquired by General Motors.
You grew up in an entrepreneurial family.
My dad was 84. He has never had another job. He has always worked for the family business. My uncle, who has passed away, was in the Army for two years after college and never had another job other than the family business.
Both of those gentlemen are my hero. They never had a real job other than in the Army. We will overlook that. What was your degree when you went to school?
My undergrad was Finance. When I got to EDS, they said, “There’s this new thing called a CMA,” which was a Certified Management Accountant. It was a CPA for the industry. They said, “Go get one of those,” which were 4 or 5 written exams at the time, so that took a couple of years. I did that and they said, “That’s cool. Now, go get an MBA.”
I went to SMU at night and on the weekends for three years and got my MBA. I lived in Plano, Dallas, at the time. I started at their headquarters at Forest Lane, and then it was their headquarters in Plano and around that area. I did that, and then we started having kids. My wife was teaching at the time. I would call my wife and say, “I’m going to be in Vancouver the rest of the week.” That situation was not conducive to family life. I was also working for 60 or 70-hour weeks because that was the environment.
They provided great training and had smart people. I had a great time and made decent money. Unfortunately, I was good at things that bore me to tears, which were policy and procedure. I like doing things and being involved. I like being in the thick of things. I love product development and marketing. It’s so fun and satisfying to do it on a daily basis and have your grandmother look at you on the side of the jar.
Tell me this. Out of all of that history, was there a hard lesson you can share with us that was painful at the time but in retrospect, it turns out that was very positive?
I’m sure there were no more than several hundreds of those. It’s always a journey. You are always learning. One of the things I always tell my kids is that it’s amazing how many times in life you want something badly, and had you gotten it, looking back, it would have been a disaster. Not getting a lot of things was good. The delayed gratification was very much there in the family business.
Chase your path. Don't chase the dollar. Share on X
We were a small company but we were tiny when I came back. We couldn’t afford anything, so we didn’t have an accounting system for the first twelve years I came back. I had been in charge of accounting systems for a billion-dollar company. That was weird but I didn’t know anything about trade show marketing, getting into grocery stores, and developing new products. I had plenty to keep me on without having that.
We have had excitement. We have had our largest customer at the time we go Chapter 11. That was neat. The fun thing is we were very persistent. Persistence and tenacity are more important than intelligence. You can’t be a moron but it’s more important to be tenacious. We’ve got with a local bankruptcy attorney who was sharp and worked an eight-year deal with the customer.
They owed us a million dollars at the time. This is in the public record. We’ve got all of it back. Over the next eight years, they stayed in business. We have done 2 or 3-year renewals. They are still a major customer and a major brand. Everybody won, which you don’t hear a lot when your largest customer goes Chapter 11. That’s normally not happy news.
What about a golden nugget? Is there something from your history that you could share with our audience that would be a nugget of wisdom from the mind of Doug Renfro?
To me, it’s to never pass up a networking opportunity. When I came back, my uncle had been at the company for half a century but he didn’t have any experience with food distributors, which was the newer channel we were going into. He only had an eighteen-month headstart on me with some of these. He and I would go to trade shows, and then we would go to the happy hour at the end of the day and stand there looking like the rubes from Texas that we were.
I have been very nice and gracious in asking questions like, “What does this mean? What’s an MSRP? What’s an NOAA? What’s a bill back? Does Walmart want this? How does that work?” People will tell you all kinds of things if you are nice, pleasant, and not a direct competitor. It’s amazing how many times I’ve gone into a situation like that in a trade show.
Initially, I was not comfortable. I don’t know anybody. I’m like, “I would rather go back to my room and watch Netflix,” which they didn’t have at the time but I found that if I stand in there for about ten minutes and strike one conversation, by the end of it, I have met several key people and some of whom I will know for the next 30 years. I love connecting. I love being able to help you. You can call me, and I won’t be able to solve your problem but I can get you closer to it. I know somebody who might be able to solve it. If I can help connect you with them, you will have a warm fuzzy when you think of me for the rest of your life.
Ask, if you are an entrepreneur and you want to know something, start asking. Other entrepreneurs want to help. It’s typical because we had help somewhere along the way, and want to give back.
I do a ton of mentoring. People send people to me, and they are like, “Would you answer some questions for them? Would you teach this class? Would you help here?” Shamelessly, I will take salsa for everybody but I spoke to a TCU Family Business class last week. I’m speaking to an Ethics class tomorrow and being flown to Chicago in a couple of weeks to speak at a trade show about selling as David in Goliath’s world. If there is anything I can do to share the gospel of salsa, I will do that.
Tell us a little bit about selling as David in the world of Goliath. You told me you are number eight now but when you first started, you were not number eight.
When I came back to the business, I would take our product to parties. People would say, “That’s delicious. Where can I buy it?” I would say, “You can’t.” We were in Milwaukee, Napa, and a farmer’s market in one suburb. It was a very spastic and random distribution. It was rough early on. My uncle and I, and then my uncle, myself, my sales director, and my cousin would go to a show and be told no repeatedly.
Twice a year, we would go to a show where there were food distributors from around the country, and they would ring a bell. Every nine minutes, they rang the bell, and you would change tables. We would talk to 27 distributors in little nine-minute segments trying to convince them to carry our line. Many times, they would laugh derisively. They are like, “Not only are we not going to carry it, we never will.” They didn’t like our label at the time. We didn’t have much presence but back to that tenacity and persistence, we kept smiling our way and kept being nice to them to death.
Finally, my salesman and I were up in Boston. This one market, and it’s one of the better retailers up there, said, “You nice boys from Texas have interesting products.” We were early innovators. We created black bean salsa and habanero sauce at a value price when nobody else had it in the nation. They said, “Your products are good. Your label is ugly but you are nice. Let’s give it a shot.” What happens when one retailer gives you a shot in an area, their competitors look to see what they are doing, and if it does well, they will copy it. Over about a 3 or 5-year period, you slowly sell every retailer up there, and then you go to another area and repeat.
The trick is getting in that first store.
The first one was brutal.
Third-Generation Entrepreneur: When building a brand, you’ve got to be a massive narcissist and not have an ego. You’ve got to do whatever it takes and be willing to be kicked in the head repeatedly.
 
The first time I met you, you were speaking at an event. You talked about going to a trade show in Canada, and I remember you were sharing about a sombrero.
No, I dressed up as a Canadian Mountie.
Talk to us about unconventional marketing methods you have deployed at Mrs. Renfro’s.
The two statements that I always tell people to sound like they are contradictory but they are not. “I always that to build a brand, you’ve got to be a massive narcissist and not have an ego.” What I mean is you’ve got to do whatever it takes. You’ve got to be willing to be kicked in the head repeatedly, told that you are stupid and ugly, and smile and keep going.
I flew from Fort Worth, Texas, to Canada with a Canadian Mountie costume and wore that thing all day during multiple days of the trade show looking like a moron but everybody that came in would say, “You got to check out the idiot from Texas in the Mountie Costume.” We got our biggest sale of the show, and I got Vendor of the Year.
It’s not about the little ball guy with glasses. Nobody cares about that. It’s about forcing the salsa and the brand in their face. As long as I get a little trophy and the people are thinking about the salsa, I’m happy. I always comment that we’re not big enough to do gorilla marketing, so we do orangutan marketing. We send the product to TV and movie sets, knowing 99% of the time that we are just feeding the crew, which is fine. I’m very fortunate that everybody is a potential consumer of what we do.
My buddy that sells Cadillacs never gives out samples. We give them out all the time because somebody is going to use them. Are they going to sell it on eBay? I don’t care as long as somebody eats it and is happy. You will occasionally get lucky. Some little independent film crew in Austin asked for a product. We didn’t know who they were. Nobody else did either but they made a little film that turned into a $100 million-dollar blockbuster called Spy Kids.
There’s a scene where they open a shelf, and it’s full of these jars of food, none of which has a real label except Mrs. Renfro’s Green Salsa. Somebody had lovingly carefully positioned it to the camera. It was on the big screen. People called me, and they were like, “They’ve got to sell your product in a movie,” and they did. We asked how much it would cost to be in the sequel. It was a $50,000 placement fee because they had become such a runaway star. We are not in the sequel, by the way. Ten years later, I did it with Big Bang Theory.
Somebody called me to have our product on Pretty Little Liars. I have never heard of that. My daughter said it was a real show but when I saw the address at Warner Brothers and said, “I watched Big Bang Theory.” He said, “The set decorator is a friend of mine. Send extra, and I will give it to him.” Several months later, I never heard anything but eight months later, I was sitting watching TV with my wife and daughter, and there was our Tequila Salsa. It’s a product conceived on my favorite show. It was there for 3 episodes, and it moved to the island for 2 more. It was there for five shows in a row. That show’s in syndication. My grandkids will be showing their friends about that. I said you could have killed me that day, and I would have been fine.
There are other mountains to climb.
Subsequently, I did find other things to live for.
That was almost casting bread upon the waters sending salsa complimentary to movie and TV sets.
You will be amazed. 99% of the times I have done that, I don’t even know what happened to it. Most films never make it out of the can. There are all kinds of failures out there. Stephen King did a movie set in a grocery store and I thought, “That’s a natural,” and then, later on, I thought, “What if they used it as a murder weapon?” It could go south.”
Are there any other out-of-the-box marketing methods you have tried?
Our current ad agency taught us the power of Instagram and Facebook. Our former ad agency taught us that they existed and were there in the evolutionary stages. Now, we have little fancy videos on Instagram but what’s more interesting to me is the organic stuff. If you go to YouTube and put in Renfro Habanero Salsa, there’s a full-on music video from three people in Canada we have never met. It’s got a bouncing cat above the lyrics. They are clearly in a grocery store illegally filming. We also only know it’s in Canada because the label’s in French and English.
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It’s a song about our Habanero Salsa. At the end of it, the guy rubs it all over his face. By watching it, I’m pretty sure it’s real because I know what it looks like. You could also go and put Ghost Pepper Renfro on YouTube, and there are all these guys who have paid or bet their friends $500 that you can’t drink the whole bottle of Renfro Ghost Pepper without having milk. I don’t always make it. It’s not always pretty but it’s free advertising. We had nothing to do with it in these cases, and that’s something that couldn’t have happened several years ago. The technology wasn’t there or it would have been horrendously expensive.
For the first time in history, you can be your own media channel. If you are in business, you probably ought to be. I don’t care if you are a law firm or a sauce manufacturer. You should be competing for eyeballs and eardrums every day because they are out there to be had. When people will do it for you, that’s the best. You mentioned the Carolina Reaper, that one is really hot.
A friend of mine who created that and, at the time, held the world record with Guinness for that being the hottest pepper was on Netflix. It was a series of crazy contests. They had a whole episode on his Carolina rebreeding contest he does in the Carolinas. Those people are insane. They gave them a five-gallon bucket beside them because it’s going to go south for most of the tasters.
I don’t eat that. It’s our number one item on Amazon by far because people who want something that’s specific really want it. They don’t care what it costs. Also, it’s difficult to find in the store. Out of 30 Renfro items, it’s probably number 21 in the grocery stores for us nationwide but it’s number one on Amazon and by quite a bit.
That’s a good place to be number one in. I have tasted it. It is very hot.
We don’t put that much in there mainly because we can’t afford to. It’s a very expensive pepper. Also, you would only sell one jar. I have always told people we are not about the macho sauce. We don’t want you to dip a toothpick in it, see Jesus, and never eat it again. We need you to eat the whole jar and eat another whole jar next time.
Any thought to share for a young aspiring entrepreneur?
That comment about tenacity and persistence over education. My granddad graduated eighth grade and was positive. I always point out to people that I’m not an entrepreneur. My dad was not an entrepreneur. My grandfather was someone that was brave enough to say, “I made it through the depression. Let’s quit our job and start something in the garage.” That’s a different mentality, and I have been fortunate to be surrounded by thousands of them in my life and my journey. It takes a lot of gumption to do that but the number one thing I have seen with all the successful ones is this persistence because they will get kicked in the head repeatedly and be told their idea is stupid.
The first 2 products that I got to create, 1 was habanero. I was told at the time it will be cute because it’s so hot but we will never sell much. It has been our number one item for a couple of years now. If you believe in what you are trying to achieve, you’ve got to keep your head down. Don’t be obnoxious but be persistent and keep going. When you are wrong, you will know. The world will update you.
There’s real truth in that. Pivot, maybe but don’t quit.
Be very nimble. I thought pomegranate Chipotle was a great idea. We would sell 30,000 jars per year but it wasn’t enough to be able to keep it going. Within the last few years, we have discontinued 9 or 10 items. I’m trying to be a grownup, and skewing rationalization is harder when you created the recipes. They are your babies but it’s something we have to do because the big retailers are not going to give us 30 facings. They are not going to give us 30 jars wide of Renfro, so the key is to sell more of what you have, and if they like something, get behind it.
One of my companies used to work with a French-Canadian office supply manufacturer. They would come out with about 100 skews a year. They are selling with people like Depot, Staples, and Walmart but it was interesting in dealing with them because they only believed in maybe 5 or 6. They put money and effort into the 5 or 6 and trying to launch those. The other 100 was more of a soft launch but they knew how to cut their losses. They said, “This stands a chance, and that doesn’t.” There’s a little bit of predicting the future, so you never know.
It’s amazing how the 80/20 Rule works in many aspects of life. We have 30 items. The top five are half the sales. I don’t care if they make mustard, salad dressing or pickles. I guarantee you that 80/20 works.
In some industries, it’s even 90/10. It’s scary but true. Thank you so much for joining us. It has been a pleasure. You can find Mrs. Renfro’s almost everywhere. I encourage you to go get some.
If you can’t find it, please make a big scene. Scream and yell about it. Thanks again.
Thank you.
 
Important Links

Mrs. Renfro’s
Instagram – Mrs. Renfro’s Salsa

 
About Doug Renfro
As president of Renfro Foods, Doug works closely with his cousins Becky and James to run the company. In particular, Doug focuses on research and development, private label and contract packing, quality assurance, sales and marketing, legal, information technology and a dozen other areas (hey, it’s a small family business).
The son of second-generation owner John “Jack” Renfro, Doug learned the family business from the bottom up, starting on the factory floor as a teenager and weighing spices through college. After graduating magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Texas, Doug proved his salt outside the company, working seven years for Electronic Data Systems (later purchased by General Motors), where he was promoted to divisional finance manager. At the same time, he earned his master’s degree from Southern Methodist University and qualified for his certified management accountant designation. Doug returned to Renfro Foods in 1992.
Doug also makes time to serve his community, currently serving on the executive committee of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, as well as supporting the Chile Pepper Institute’s Advisory Council and the Advisory Board for the TCU Neeley School of Business Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He previously served as chair for the seven-state Western Gold Region of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), on the board for the Botanical Research Institute of Texas for 12 years, as chairman of the board for Casa Mañana as well as president of the Tarrant Area Food Bank, the Texas Food Processors Association (TFPA) and the North Texas Food Sales Association. He was named to the TFPA Hall of Fame in 2016 and the Specialty Food Association Hall of Fame in 2018.
 
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Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E48 | Eric Robb – From Entrepreneur Valet Parker To Creator Of Dream Homes
Date: October 27, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-48-eric-robb-from-entrepreneur-valet-parker-to-creator-of-dream-homes/
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If you’re stuck on your career and need a pivot, always go back to what you enjoy. For Eric Robb, that was construction. Building, renovating, and flipping dream houses has always been something he enjoyed and is good at. Join Don Williams as gets Eric to talk about how he started his business Cortex Construction. Discover his journey through various different jobs. Learn that life isn’t easy, but if you’re always ahead of the curve, then it will be easier.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Eric Robb – From Entrepreneur Valet Parker To Creator Of Dream Homes
I’m with my good friend and Entrepreneurs’ Organization member, Eric Robb from Cortex Construction. Eric, welcome to the show. 
Thank you, Don.
Thank you so much for coming in. It’s a busy day. We got a bright sun and so construction here is working. Let’s go way back to young Eric. Are your parents entrepreneurial? Is that where you caught the bug?
Nope. I’m the black sheep in the whole family.
Maybe white sheep, depending on how you look at it. They’re not entrepreneurial. Is there any family member who is entrepreneurial?
Nope.
Is there anything entrepreneurial in your childhood? Did you run a paper route?
I had my first business at probably sixteen-years-old.
What was your first business when you were sixteen?
It wasn’t mine but it was interesting. I don’t know how I fell into this job other than I had a reputation for being honest because it involved handling a lot of cash, but it’s valet parking. I worked out a deal with this charity that donated some land right outside of Six Flags there and I wanted to make some money with it. We did valet parking at Six Flags for most of my high school and made a lot of cash.
Was that your first paying job?
No.
Tell us about your first paying job.
I liked woodworking and making things. Starting at about age fourteen, I started getting jobs in construction and I got paid $2 an hour.
After childhood, you had a little entrepreneurial engagement there with the valet company. What was your path? Did you go to college? Did you go to the Merchant Marine? Did you backpack to Europe for a couple of years? What did you do?
I graduated high school in ’86. I went off to Texas A&M Class of ’90.
Dream Homes: There’s no money on flipping, as we speak. Everybody’s paying for a pretty crummy house that’s going to be worth in two years. There’s no short-term in and out. Everything is long-term now.
 
What was your degree in?
Economics.
After college, did you get a job or started your first company?
I put myself through college. I didn’t do all that interviewing as most people do. I knew I was destined for small business. I figured that was a quicker route to the top. After I got out and barely recovered for a week or two, I went working in what was the Wild West of building PCs back in the day when that was kicking off. I did that for about five years and went up the rung in a couple of companies.
Tell us a little bit about your company, Cortex Construction. What do you do? Where do you do it? How do you do it?
It’s a construction company. I do most of my work working on my own rental properties, Airbnbs, flip houses and things like that. I do construction work for commercial. I will do residential for friends and also insurance claims.
Is it roofs, fires or any of that type of stuff?
We don’t have any fires lately but we’ve had a lot of roofs and floods.
We’ve got a lot of roofs here in Dallas Fort Worth. How long ago did you start that company?
A few years ago, I pivoted into construction.
What did you pivot from?
I was in imports for ten years. I get to travel a lot.
What did you import?
Firearms.
It sounds like a story there.
It’s military surplus. It’s not just firearms. All kinds of things.
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You import it to the States and then you sell it to gun dealers or collectors.
It was mostly antique items and surplus.
How long did you do that?
Ten years.
You’re a ten-year guy.
Don’t tell me that. It means I got to start finding a new career.
Maybe you’re a twenty-year guy this time. When you pivoted, what led you into construction? How did you get started there?
Imports were fun until it wasn’t. I used to do a lot of construction stuff in high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I went back to what I enjoyed. I’m very creative and driven in designing, fixing and seeing things twenty years later that I helped make happen.
Tell us about a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty good in the construction company but a couple of things fall into place that it takes off.
I guess it was when I flipped my first house. I was late to the game on that, but it remains my easiest and highest profit flip to this day.
Tell us a little bit about it.
It was something I fell into. I paid $75,000 for this house and it was a lot of work to get to where I could pay $75,000 for this house. $20,000 in improvements and about 90 days later, it sold for $175,000. It was a nice hit.
You almost doubled your money.
I never have duplicated it since.
We see all the shows on HGTV where people are flipping houses.
That’s not reality.
Dream Homes: The way people flip in HGTV is not reality.
 
It’s funny how reality TV isn’t real.
Not at all.
When was that first flip?
A few years ago.
Are you still flipping now?
There’s no money and flipping as we speak. Everybody is paying for a crummy house what it’s going to be worth in two years. There’s no short-term in and out. Everything now is a long-term buy, hold, rent. All the numbers are inverted as we speak. Wall Street is buying up lots of single-family homes. Money is cheap.
In the Airbnb business, I hear that. How does that work?
It’s a short-term rental. You own a house. You got to furnish it, put towels, sheets, soap and coffee in there. In our particular market, it’s something I can cashflow on. Right now you can’t buy a house and rent it and cashflow much at all on it. Everybody is speculating on future gains. I was trying to do cashflow because it always solves your problems.
Positive cashflow is happiness. That is for sure. Tell us about a hard lesson. What is something you’ve learned in your entrepreneurial journey that hurt like heck but turned out to be positive later on down the line?
I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons. That’s why I don’t have much in the way of employees. I have no partners. I have no co-investors, none of that. It’s a slower way to go but you get all the gain. You get all the rewards, but you also have all the risks and responsibilities.
Was there a hard lesson that led you to that decision?
I had a bad partnership deal that ended up pretty ugly.
It’s costly and painful to undo. Is it in the construction business?
No. It was in the important business.
What about a nugget? Something you know that we don’t know but we want to know.
I don’t know what you don’t know. What do you want to know? I don’t know, Don. We all get together and discuss these things all the time. The people that don’t know what they don’t know are the people that I would like to help out there, and there are a lot of those.
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Tell us a little bit about how the Airbnb business works. Can you buy a house for a couple of hundred thousand dollars and rent it?
Right now, a number you could look at is a $200,000 house grossing about $33,000 a month. When you’re renting a house, you’re not responsible for internet, utilities and things like that plus the added cost of furnishing, but you are on that. It’s a little higher but in my opinion, you still can double your cashflow versus just a traditional rental. That’s all very specific with the location, the type of house, and things like that.
If you had a time machine and you could go back and share one piece of advice with your twenty-year-old self, what would that be?
That is something I say often, “If I could go back and tell my young self, what would I tell him?” I would tell myself that life is going to be a lot harder than what your parents will tell you. You’re going to run into a lot more unexplained events. You got to stay a lot more on the ball than you think you have to stay in front of that curve.
I saw a post the other day on maybe Facebook or LinkedIn. I’m not sure. It’s a pretty popular person and somebody who has a lot of followers. They were sharing that they thought that parents should quit telling their children that life is going to be easy because it’s not going to be easy. There will be easy times, but there will certainly be tough times. Maybe the most valuable skill is learning how to maneuver through tough times.
I have a niece and her phone died. Right now, you can’t always get everything you want on the same day. There are a lot of shortages of different things. The 3 or 4 days without a phone for her was the end of the world. That was the end of the world for her because she has never known any true adversity. Those of us later in life was like, “This blows but it’s not going to kill me. It’ll be over shortly.”
They have limited life experience.
The worst thing you know is the worst thing you know. I can tell you and I’m sure you can say that your 50-plus-year-old self knows a lot worse things than your twenty-something self.
It’s just part of the journey. Looking forward, what are the next ten years hold for you and Cortex?
To keep doing what I’m doing. The market keeps shifting so it’s never dull. I do pray for some dullness in my future. There’s an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I like to repeat that quote.
We certainly do just coming out of COVID. I think we’re coming out of COVID.
It’s with anything. With market changes and a lot of that has been COVID, positive, negative, but just change. It could be anything.
Eric, if one of our local followers wanted to get in contact with you, how would they reach out to you?
Just Eric@CortexConstruction.com.
If you have a construction need, residential if you’re a friend, commercial otherwise or insurance claim, please reach out to Eric@CortexConstruction.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s a pleasure having you.
Thank you.
See you next time.
 
Important Links

Cortex Construction
Eric@CortexConstruction.com

 
About Eric Robb

Owner at Cortex Construction
 
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S1:E47 | Paul Whitley – Fractional CFO Shares Finance Secrets For Proven Entrepreneurs
Date: October 25, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/paul-whitley-fractional-cfo-shares-finance-secrets-for-proven-entrepreneurs/
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Content:
 
There are finance secrets that proven entrepreneurs need to know to keep growing. Don Williams warmly welcomes his friend Paul Whitley, the Fractional CFO of C-Suite Support. Paul shares how business people need to consider joining the Entrepreneur Organization, a great organization for small companies. It’s where company owners who maybe had never had any “help” from the federal government received millions of dollars of help. Paul goes on to share numerous nuggets of finance wisdom for hungry listeners. Dive in!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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Paul Whitley – Fractional CFO Shares Finance Secrets For Proven Entrepreneurs
My guest is a good friend of mine who lives on the other side of the metroplex, Paul Whitley, with C-Suite Support. Welcome, Paul.
I’m glad to be here. I thought you were going to say the other side of the world since Fort Worth doesn’t consider Dallas to be in the same geographic area.
I’m showing my best manner. I’m not from here, so I don’t get all that. Let’s jump right in. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Dallas, Texas, traveled the country in my career and then came back to Dallas.
Let’s go way back to little Paul. Were your parents entrepreneurial?
Not at all.
What did they do?
My mother ran an insurance route, debit route if you’re old enough to remember those kinds of things. My father worked for a grocery store. We had a foster home for kids out of Buckner’s offering. It was unique.
On the debit route, it’s a little entrepreneurial, even though maybe not technically a business but responsible for everything.
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She also did a personal income tax, so that would be entrepreneurial. That’s what got me into all the accounting. I ended up helping her do income tax when I was a kid. Here’s a ten-year-old doing somebody’s personal income tax. That’s scary.
It’s so common that an entrepreneur, if you look at what they do, they can trace that back somewhere to their childhood. Tell us about your first job where you got a paycheck.
You have to define the paycheck but at ten years old, I started working in the store that my father was running at that time for $0.50 a night. I’d go to work from school until 10:00 and go home with him every other night and work on the weekends. I did that until I got my first real job with an actual paycheck at fourteen.
What was that job?
At A&P Grocery, I was a package boy.
Does that mean you put groceries in the bag and carry them to the car?
How will you translate that? Yes.
I was having a conversation with someone where I was like, “I don’t think they do that anymore.”
They do. I’m going to go throw a bone here to Kroger and Tom Thumb. They both do that but with special needs kids, which is wonderful. At least the ones around me are in Plano and I live in Plano. That’s close to Dallas. Nobody knows where Plano is.
Fractional CFO: The difference between an interim CFO and a fractional CFO is an interim is looking for a contract job.
 
Tell us about your company.
Years ago, I was a Hedge Fund Director. That was in 2008 and that hedge fund failed. When it did, I had a Millennial recruiter ask me if I needed a walker when I was applying for an actual real job. I said, “I better retool, regroup and find another way to go.” I did and started working with clients that I had at the hedge fund, helping them get funded with other hedge funds. Ultimately, I got them to the point where I’ve got all the risk mitigants out of the way. We pay them and the banks reduce their cost. We did that for a long time.
Years ago, there was a little guy by the name of Peter Bolin. I had breakfast and coffee with him. I was starting a networking group, which you’re somewhat familiar with, the C-Suite Support. Someone introduced me to him. I looked him up on LinkedIn, CFO of ten companies. I’m thinking, “This guy has trouble holding a job because he’s not that old.” I met with him anyway. We’re having a conversation. I asked him, “What is it that you can’t keep a job?” He starts laughing and says, “No, I’m a CFO for ten companies.” I said, “How do you do that?” That was the embryo and the change. That’s what started what I do as a fractional CFO for multi companies.
Tell us exactly what fractional CFO means.
That means I’m going to spend 3 to 5 days a month working for a company, helping them get their financial records in place, financial reporting, bank reporting and funding. With my background, I’m very heavy in what’s called ERP, Enterprise Resource, as well as POS. At one time in my career, I was a lender and they sent me back to school to get Microsoft Certified in several other things. I work with CRMs, Customer Relationship Management. Every company in the world needs that, which has helped me do more than just be the CFO. I go into companies and help them try to figure out how to build revenue while I’m also taking care of the financials.
Let’s go back to almost little Paul. Talk about your career in-between childhood to when you had coffee with Peter.
For me, college was a necessary step, get in and get out. While I was in college, I went to work for Montgomery Ward as a Controller Trainee. The day I graduated, I went out on the audit staff. I started college pretty early. I was in college when I was 16 and was out by 20. Even though I was underage, I was the biggest guy around. I was one that usually went to the store to pick up the supplies for all the guys in the group, beer, wine, and those kinds of things. You’ve got to get through there and enjoy it while you’re at it.
I stayed at Montgomery Ward for fourteen years, ultimately being the Corporate Accounting Manager of over 1,000 locations. Financials mean back of the hand. Montgomery Ward was having their troubles when they broke prem from gold, so that gave me an opportunity to look for something else. I was sitting where we had 60 days of snow and they had talked to me about being the number 2 guy in finance in Chicago.
My wife’s explained to me, “No. If you’re going to be in Chicago, I’m going to Dallas. I hope you don’t mind commuting.” That gave me a career opportunity. I found a little $6 million revenue company in Dallas. It was looking for a controller. I applied for the job. In the course of the interview, I found out that after he was happy, he would consider putting me in as a CFO. When I became the CFO, I got a car.
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To me, a title means a car, always has. That’s why he called me Ray or Jay. Call me whatever but remember me. I convinced him, “If I’m going to be talking to your bankers and accountants, I needed to have the position of authority that I could make those conversations in deals.” Immediately, I became the CFO and got that car. After three months, I was added to COO. 4 months later, I was added to CMO and then started running the company after about 14 months. I learned how to run a company, which to me, was a thrill. I was not the entrepreneur that owned it but I was the entrepreneur person that ran it.
I grew that company from $6 million to $180 million. I learned how to market. Not to say I’m the one who’s intelligent to do that. I’m not. I was intelligent to know what I didn’t know. I hooked up with people, got people and hired people. One of the bigger things is I got ahold of a guy named Britt Beemer with America’s Research Group to tell me what I’m doing wrong but, more importantly, tell me what my competitors are doing right.
We started doing that. It’s amazing if you are willing to listen to others and be humble enough to say, “I don’t know what I am doing, so help me.” There are a lot of people out there that are willing to help whether you pay them or they do it because they’re friends and willing to help. Learned how to do that, we have had 18% compounded growth for 4 years. It slowed down after that. It had a base level. I did that for a long time and then failed.
It had an $87 million facility. In the late ‘80s when the S&L issues were going on in the country, there wasn’t anybody out there for a lender. We put in liquidation, paid off the lenders and got out of the deal. One of the guys that I worked with that was a lender figured that if I could borrow $87 million, I could probably figure out how to lend it. I’m grateful to him. I crossed over to the dark side. I considered lenders to be on the dark side of the world. We have what you want.
In the quiver and having spent $2 million a month in marketing, when I went in, I didn’t have a Rolodex. I had to figure out how I was going to build a Rolodex. Fortunately, through that experience, he had a pretty good idea of what I was going to do. I had to put my business plan together for them and did go in for the last interview and the head of that group. His direct report said, “If we let him do what he’s going to planning to do, he’ll walk all over other business development people.”
I’m going in as a salesperson for money as opposed to a CFO but you’re in the background. As a result, it made me the manager. It turned out to be a good thing for all. We grew that group from $340 million to $1.2 billion in 4 years for that particular company with no capital. They had their issues. When they did, because I did all the marketing, they allowed me to go out and find someone to buy that portfolio. That gave me the introduction to a dozen companies that were lined up to come in.
In that process, one of the guys that came in was stopped because the capital threw it into a potential bankruptcy and they didn’t want preferential issues coming up. The guy called me and said, “You built that portfolio. Can you do it again? They won’t let me buy it and start over. Why don’t we put you inside of that?” “Yes, we can.” That became a nice path and journey. I went to work for a company called CapitalSource.
We couldn’t buy the portfolio but I sure knew all the people. We built that thing up quickly and got up to about $1.3 billion. They decided to become what’s called a REIT, Real Estate Investment Trust, which was a rage in 2005. Everybody thought that it was the next way to go. For what I was doing, that wasn’t going to work because you had to have an 80% mortgage. The only way to accomplish that was low-margin real estate, which I was getting a 30% ROI at that point what I was doing.
You’re going into something that’s going to be 5% or 6% money out there, low returns and long-term patient money. The only way I could do anything was to do a subprime mortgage, which I didn’t think was a good route. It gave me the opportunity to leave there and go to a hedge fund. I started again. It’s the same discussion. I had it with one of the guys and went over to the hedge fund, Surge Capital.
Fractional CFO: The Entrepreneur Organization is a great organization for small companies.
 
I got from Finova Capital and ran three divisions with Surge Capital. I hired the guy that I worked for at Finova. I had two sponsors per se to help me go in there. I went in and had a great run. I was managing a direct $500 million portfolio. I sourced, underwrote, took credit and managed it, portfolio management. It gave me all sides of the credit aspect as well as we have money. We’re back to, “We have money.” Unfortunately, in 2008, that hedge fund connected with 21 other hedge funds got hit by Ponzi and put down. That’s when I had the opportunity to go out and ultimately go into interim financing.
The difference between an interim CFO and a fractional CFO is an interim is looking for a contract job. They’re going to be out there 20, 30 or 40 hours a week working for 1 company to resolve something, either hire a CFO, get them funded for something, get their ERPs put in place but it’s project-minded. You go in. There’s a termination date for whatever reason and maybe a moving date but it’s going to end.
When you’re doing that, like any first intense job, head down and get it all done. You’re not paying attention whatsoever to the market. You’re not marketing yourself. You’re a number on the page and marching through the woods there. I’d finished one. The income is cut in 1/2 or 2/3. I usually do a couple at a time. I thought, “This is tough.” That’s why I got into the C-Suite, trying to find new deals, not thinking fractional. Fractional was not something that was a job out there.
The interim is the consulting paradox. When I’m working, I’m not selling. When I’m selling, it means I’m not working, so I don’t have income. It’s difficult to spend both plates at the same time.
There are companies like Tatum that did the interim CFOs. Companies like Seton Hill are fine companies but they’re more into, “We have a CFO that needs a job, works for us on a contract basis. We’re going to put him into your job to handle whatever we got until you want to keep him or hire somebody and replace him.” Whereas the fractional, “I’m going in to get him in shape, line up and typically manage all of their financial situations with many companies get involved in their operational situations.”
My clients are usually long-term. One of our best friends that we’ve talked about, I’ve been with him for years. In general, only because so many of them or less than that, I probably have about an eighteen-month average run with them but I’ve only lost a couple of clients. One of them is I wanted to lose and lost. I have another one. I’m thinking about what I want to lose. The reality is it’s a relational situation. I’m involved with the company, people and operation. You’re familiar with things like EOS, Entrepreneur Operating Systems.
I’ll bring in someone for that. That’s the way I ran a business when I was running a business. To me, it’s a tool. I didn’t have the physical tool on the internet to work with. All of this was spreadsheets and plans but then we have the tools. I’m not an “implementer” by any means but I’m the moderator with several companies that run a tool for EOS, which is helping me, him and them. I love that interaction but it puts me into these very nice relationships. I like that.
Tell me about a work speed moment. It can be in any of your fascinating success stories because you spent so many years in corporate before you walked through the doorway into entrepreneurship. Things are going pretty well in the company but then a couple of things fall into place and all of a sudden, your progress accelerates.
For my company, you’re very familiar with what happened in 2021. The PPP was a blessing to so many companies and certainly needed. I had several companies that had it, which required me to come up to speed on what is this thing? How does it work? What do we have to do? That gave me the opportunity to talk to some of the folks at the Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
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As you and I both know, the Entrepreneurs’ Organization is a great organization for small companies. The fact is I’m considering joining another one. Am I crazy? At any rate, having done that and started that process, they’re all talking to each other. Fortunately, I had this guy named Don Williams who said, “These guys need to know a little more about this stuff. Would you consider moderating a town hall?” I did.
That turned into another town hall because everybody couldn’t make the first one but then the word started getting out. 2021 was a good year for our business. I’ve hired two CFOs to help me. I’m not a sole practitioner or a single shingle person anymore. I love doing that. It gives me an opportunity. I’m in the midst of what may be another one.
We met each other originally through the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. In 2021, when the door slammed shut on the world because of COVID, the federal government came out with the Payroll Protection Program, PPP. We began doing a weekly show. We probably ran that for 6 or 8 weeks at the town hall. Initially, we were running twice a week to get content out.
Our Entrepreneurs’ Organization chapter that we are affiliated with was maybe not first in line but very close. Across the organization, there were millions of dollars of help to company owners who maybe had never had any “help” from the federal government of any kind. Tell us about the environment. There was round two.
To round all of that out, I ended up doing 22 PPP loans for several million dollars for the group and others. Round two came around and that opened the door for many. There were a couple of things. I’m going to throw this back to you. In addition to the PPP, for all of my clients and the ones that became my clients, we sat down and went line by line in expense items. “Let’s see what we have to do. This is nice. I have to have this. This goes away. We keep this.”
We restructured a lot of businesses to survive through that period, which was necessary but it also, in many cases, put them in a position where they pivoted to do more things, different things and do them better. A lot of the clients came around when PPP 2 came out. They weren’t eligible because they survived and they were thriving. With that being said, there are still many, because of the nature of their business, that still had the PPP 2. Here we go. We did it again and we’re about to go into the forgiveness period. Most of them are going to be in July 2022. The 24-week period will end up then. The pager changed. In the first PPP, ERC couldn’t be done simultaneously.
Tell us what ERC is.
It’s Employee Retention Credit.
Tell us the difference between a credit and a deduction.
Fractional CFO: If you had one quarter that you had a 50% reduction or more, you’re eligible for 2020.
 
In the credit, they go back and look at what your payroll was and try to give you credits, which are tax-free grants to your company for certain criteria. With the PPP 1, the ERC was not a major factor. If you didn’t qualify for PPP 1, you could do the ERC but limited. When the new act came out, a major change happened. They went back and allowed you to do both. If there’s a company out there that has one employee or more, you need to be aware of the ERC, the Employee Retention Credit, because you’re going to get something potentially.
Give us an overview of the ERC.
In 2020, if you had 1 quarter that you had a 50% reduction or more, you’re eligible and then each quarter thereafter that you had a 20% reduction or more. Most companies that had a 50% probably had 20% in the next quarters through the COVID situation. Fortunately, we’re in Texas but around the country, they didn’t have quite the revival that we had in Texas. Most of the people that hit that 50% are eligible and will be eligible for the rest of 2020.
In 2021, when they came out with a new law followed on, it’s only 20%. You go to your biggest and baddest deal whenever you’re going to talk about a deal. I got a company with 21 employees. With 21 employees, they hit those 2 criteria and 50% in the second quarter. They’re down 20% each in the next quarters and probably will be for the rest of 2021 because of the nature of their business.
With 21 employees, they’re going to receive tax credit grants back from the government in excess of $700,000. It’s life-changing. We’ve got several folks in the group that were hit that only have 5 or 6 employees. When you get a 5-employee group, first off, you get up to $5,000 for 2020. Five employees, that’s $25,000 for 2021 of a tax credit against payroll taxes. This forever runs out until you use it.
If you don’t use it, they give you a refund. You file Form 7200 for a refund. You get money back from the government for that. That same person, 5 employees, 1st quarter 2021, it’s up to $7,000 per. Based upon the income of those employees, they will get $35,000 per quarter for that company. They’re not going to recover through 2022 fully. They can get 35,000 once, twice, third quarter, fourth quarter and see where that’s going.
Say they got $140,000 plus the $25,000 in 2021, so this little company is going to get $165,000. That’s more than their PPP was. When I’m talking about ERC, Employee Retention Credit, probably half the companies that are reading this episode certainly have the companies more than half in there because they’re in that range. Don’t let this pass over and say, “Not for me.” It’s real.
What about a hard lesson, something painful to go through in your business? Either way, you choose.
The hard lesson I had is that when I was with the hedge fund. I was earning 14% on my investment there. I invested all my eggs in the hedge fund. When it failed and all the attorneys got through, I got $0.02 on the dollar coming up. I am not going to do this again. I’ll have more control over HELB because, like in the hedge fund, it was gated.
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You got your money in there. All of a sudden, something happens. They have this thing called a gate. When it’s gated, that means you can’t get your money because they don’t run on the bank. You’re sitting there going, “What happened?” Unfortunately, I was the one that had to give the instruction to gate it, knowing what was going to happen. One of those preferential things had forced the withdrawal before knowing what I knew at the time that I’d had another issue to deal with. I had to gate it. That’s my lesson.
Thank you for sharing. What about a nugget, something you know and we don’t know that you can share that we should know?
The ERC would be the first nugget I’d go with because most people don’t know it. With the way I handled it the first time, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it because I could get more money out of PPP than that. I didn’t delve and tie into it. The second time around, I’m talking to somebody. They filed and got quite a bit of money for the clients. Maybe I better go back and check this thing.
There are a lot of CPAs, CPA firms and accounting firms that haven’t opened their eyes to that. That nugget is so big. It’s amazing what’s there. That nugget is something that I have to keep coming back to because I had a CEO of a company, $700,000 plus, that I’m talking about. I gave them the bill for doing that. They came back to me and said, “You need to put this on a percentage basis. I would have been willing to pay you 5% of that to get that money.”
I said, “I appreciate that. I have companies that I associate with that do charge 10% to do that. I can’t do that to the client.” If I know my nugget and you don’t know my nugget, I can take advantage of you. That bothers me. I can’t do that. I’ll tell you what I’ll do it for, whether it’s $1,000 or $700,000 and you decide what you want to do from there. My nugget is half the people who read this has money available to them if they know how to do it or they contact somebody.
The other nugget that I would throw out there is R&D Tax Credits. Not every company is going to have that but every company that builds a process for internal or external use potentially would qualify for that. I had 7 clients in 2021 that went back to get a little over $1 million in R&D tax credits. That’s pure tax credits against tax liability.
Give us an example of a process that qualifies for an R&D tax credit or that has?
It’s a little complicated but I’ll go to the easy one first and that is technology. You’re building this process to where if you do this over and over again, you’re going to save money or you’re developing something. A good friend of ours that we know does lending. In that lending process, he has to build something to allow him to do what’s called credit underwriting. With that process, he would like to do it for other companies as well but whether he does or not and whether or not it’s successful, he doesn’t have to be successful.
The fact that he had to do that, all the associated labor or third-party, any of it should throw this in. If you’re going overseas to get all your help, that didn’t count but everything you’ve spent qualifies for R&D tax credits. The credit is 14% of everything you spend. A little more complicated to where after you do year over year, it’s probably closer to about 7% net. It’s 7% of your total expenditure. If you spend a couple of million dollars and all of a sudden, you get a refund back for $140,000, it makes a good day.
Fractional CFO: If you’re building a process of handling different things in the company, it doesn’t have to be technology.
 
It’s not the nugget at the ERC, the Employee Retention Credit, but that’s a good nugget for a lot of companies. It goes back to building internal processes to have something work. If it’s a sales company and you’re building a sales routine, not necessarily but if you’re building a process of how you’re going to handle different things in the company, it doesn’t have to be technology. If you’re interested, we can give you a cheat sheet that tells you these industries are likely to have it. These are the services inside these industries that are likely to be eligible.
According to the R&D tax people that I work with, they say 80% of the companies in the United States are eligible for some type of credit here. Virtually all the large companies do take advantage of it. The small companies don’t have any clue. They don’t know. In one of our videos, Lunch and Learns, the moderator commented, “In case you don’t know about this, I got a big tax credit from the R&D.” He learned he’d got it. This gift keeps on giving. As long as you’re in business and you do that continual process of improvement, you continue to get that.
You get to get in the time machine, go back and talk to young twenty-year-old Paul. You can only tell Paul one piece of advice. What is that piece of advice that would help you on your entrepreneurial journey?
Go through your journey humbly with gratitude.
If someone wants to reach out to you for help as a fractional CFO or with ERC, PPP, EIDL, R&D tax credits or anything a reader might not know of financial that you do, what’s the best way to reach out to you, Paul?
They can email me at PWhitley@C-SuiteSupport.com or call me at (214) 477-6039. We’ll see what you need and see how to do that. If you need $1 million for your company, give us a call. If you need EIDL, we talked about that. It’s one of the disaster loans. They have opened that backup. If you missed it the first time, let’s go get it up to $500,000 for your company. You do have to pay that one back but it’s 3.75% interest. It’s cheap money, passive and subordinates to any other loans. Let’s go do it. We can use that.
Paul, thank you so much for coming to the show.
Thank you for inviting me. We’re going to figure out how to do this some more.
We will. Thanks. See you next time.
 
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About Paul Whitley
I’m Paul Whitley, and I am a Fractional CFO that helps businesses grow exponentially.
My goal is to help you achieve yours… … would you benefit from having a proven, principle-based fractional finance and operations team player?
I’m a Transformation Technology Leader with extensive experience in creative problem solving, operations management, coaching, mentoring and training. I’m a Servant Leader with a real passion for helping both large and small companies’ setup and implement financial, operational, and digital transformation initiatives that improve processes, reduce expense, and drive bottom-line profits….
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E46 | 3X World Series Coach Trent Clark On Leadership
Date: October 14, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-46-3x-world-series-coach-trent-clark-on-leadership/
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Trent Clark was a former 3X World Series Coach. Now? He is the CEO of Leadershipity, a business consulting firm that helps create winning systems for sustainable organizations through exceptional leaders/coaches. He joins host Don Williams to discuss the common formula in sports and business that equals success. Trent discusses the most important characteristic that differentiates a leader. A hint? It’s more than just talent. Tune in to find out and learn more about his transition into entrepreneurship and how his career in sports aided his journey.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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3X World Series Coach Trent Clark On Leadership
Players/Employees Who Want to Work Outperform More Talented Players/Employees Who Don’t
I have a phenomenal guest, Trent Clark, joining us from Grand Rapids, Michigan where I think you live, but you have offices everywhere. A funny story. I met Trent for the first time, maybe a couple of weeks ago. We’re talking on a Zoom call about something unrelated to the show. I’m a baseball junkie. I played and coached baseball and softball for like 50 years because I’m old. I’m talking about baseball and he’s like, “Do you know my background?” I was like, “Not a clue.” He said, “I’m a former professional Major baseball player and a former Major professional baseball coach. In fact, I have three World Series rings.” There’s one. Thank you so much. Trent, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Don. I’m super excited about joining you. We’re kindred spirits. Entrepreneur organization has brought us together but the passion and desire to help people get better. I’ve been a long time coach. You and I have a love for the sport of ball and however that ball is played. I love it. I’ve got a number of young kids we’ve coached who were now in the softball ranks at college. It’s awesome. I love it.
Let’s jump right in. I’m going to take you all the way back to little Trent, so 5 to 18. In your home, whether that was with your mom and dad or grandparents or wherever you grew up, was some adult entrepreneurial?
Yes. My father was very entrepreneurial. I shouldn’t say very. He was an accountant. As entrepreneurial as accountants get, my father was a college professor. He was highly educated but he fell into a company when he started doing taxes for people who were like, “I can’t do my taxes.” He’s a teacher so he had all the teachers very quickly, then he got involved as a board member in the bank. They said, “We have a lot of clients who need tax work.” Before he knew it, he had a nice little small firm in Battle Creek, Michigan, the Clark Accounting. That was a huge moment for him.
This is one of my entrepreneurial journeys. You know that as entrepreneurs, we start early. I was delivering newspapers and shoveling snow. I was doing anything to make money. My dad would help me on Sundays. He would help me with the Sunday papers because the inserts were heavy. It was like a workout. I would put like twelve papers and I would tear off down the street. He would drive the car to the end of the block, then I pick up twelve more and tear down the other one. He would be waiting every time with the car. We would knock out the route like 35 minutes, then we would go take breakfast.
There was a pivotal moment for me. I was probably in 7th grade. My father is a very stoic accountant. He’s a funny guy with a dry sense of humor but he was giddy. It was palpable. I said, “There’s something different.” He said, “I have found that my business is now supporting our family. I don’t need my teaching anymore to support our family. I teach now because I love teaching.” That was like, “You could see a peace of mind.” I’m like, “Where can I get some of that?” Off I go on the entrepreneurial journey and I’m still seeking that peace. I’m in my 50s and still seeking.
I love that. In my sales consulting practice, many times, I see entrepreneurs are not quite doing enough business. They’re always walking around under this clout of worry and stress, and how is it going to work? Over a period of time, when you start to make some progress and you start winning some sales, it’s one quick trip across the bridge where they go from being stressed and then start being a little cocky because I got the dope coming in. They pass on that deal or pass on that employee. A few months ago, they would have been fighting tooth and nail to win. It’s a different air in their sales and where they’re supposed to be, where they were and what they need to get rid of. Which of those childhood efforts would you consider being your first job?
Life has been this fine line between confidence and arrogance. You can walk that line of confidence and then cross into arrogance, and the whole thing becomes a house of cards and falls right on you. Share on X
My first job was delivering newspapers. That was my first job.
We won’t be able to tell that story very much more because kids won’t know anything about paper delivering.
I know I saw a delivery person ride by on a bike at my neighbors and drop a paper. I was like, “There’s a paper guy.” It wasn’t a boy. This is a young man but it was so valuable. I had to collect the money and customer service. My route was like, “This house wanted it in their screen door. This one wanted it in their backside porch.” It was personal customer service. At Christmas time, it was banana bread, chocolate and M&M’s. I thought I was a hero.
You did a good job.
I was getting expanded. I knew I was getting a pretty good job because I started with four blocks, then they gave me four more and they gave me four more. I ended up with twelve blocks and three routes. I think that was one of my entrepreneurial ventures too. When I was in 8th grade and I started playing junior high football. We got to practice after school. I can’t go home and do papers before I go play rocket football.
I got three people working for me. Chad, Ben and I think it was Dennis were all coming in and they would each take four streets. I used to give them $1 and I would make $5. I was like, “This is awesome.” I went to football practice and I made $10, Monday through Friday. I’m like, “This is entrepreneurial. I got a job and I got a company.” I thought that was a big deal.
That’s where the entrepreneurial sunshine graces you for the first time, “I can offload all this and still make money and do what I want to do.” Many entrepreneurs are still chasing that now. Dad was entrepreneurial and accidentally, which happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. They will tell you, “I wish I had masterminded it and it was part of this grand plan and grand scheme. I said yes to something one time. The next thing I knew, a year later, I was in business for myself and making more than my full-time gig and life was good. I liked it.” That’s the American story. After very young Trent, did you then join the Merchant Marines, backpacked across Europe or went to college? What’s your story? What did you do from there?
I didn’t do any of that. It’s chill for me. The high school story was all about sports, then it became this audit of excellence. I liked coaching. My dad was a good coach and I like teaching. By the time I was sixteen, I had a job teaching tennis. My high school played in three state championships in a row. My sophomore, junior and senior years. I went on to play in the junior college national championships in tennis. I was a tennis and baseball guy, which are both spring sports.
3X World Series Coach: At the end of the day, there’s a ceiling. You can only train so much. You have to figure out how to really build and scale that.
 
It’s a pain in the rear but I’m traveling the world playing tennis at a high level. I got baseball aspirations too. National champions and state championships meant so much. The last national championship was in 1990 and I was in the World Series in ‘95. It was a constant strive for how to be better. The four years in between were how do I maximize my career? How do I get better? How does the University of Toledo become a better baseball team? How do we get excellent? We have never found a solution, by the way. I was fortunate. I was blessed. I was a hard-working kid. I had some good people that knew me, like Nick Saban and Ken Mannie and some good baseball coaches.
I got an opportunity with Detroit and I turned down a chance to sign when I was younger to stay in college. At the end of it, I’m spending 4 or 5 hours in the training room, doing anything to get a chance. I felt like the writing was on the wall and they gave me that, “You would make a good coach. Why don’t you come and coach for the Tigers?” I thought, “It’s a job transition.” I never played in the Majors and I went right in. In 1993, I went back to Detroit. Being a Michigan kid and I coached for Sparky Anderson and the Tigers. It was unbelievable.
What an experience. As a kid, I started playing when I was about five and got to high school. We were a good baseball club but I played second base. There was a young guy Marc Giles. He was a year younger than I was but he could play circles around me. My whole life, I played circles around everybody else but I could hardly carry his gym bag.
That took me to be in a pinch hitter. I was like, “I’m dying here.” He was drafted out of high school to the Tulsa Drillers but it doesn’t make any difference. I wasn’t going to be drafted anywhere, but it was a very tough sport and very competitive. I loved the fact that you coached there. You were a Major League coach for how long?
I started out as an intern coach with the Tigers. It was my project. It was to develop the Minor League and the player development. I was interacting all the time in the Major Leagues but I didn’t have a Major League contract. I went in, then the strike hit in ‘94 and they shut down baseball. I started my first company right there. My own private training. Tony Phillips and all these athletes wanted to go to Arizona and train until they decided the season is going to start again.
I had built in clients and could expand in Phoenix, so it was pretty exciting. The writings are on the wall. Everything is going to go back. They were not going to go with the scabs. Nick Saban took a job at Michigan State. I knew Nick from when he was at the University of Toledo as the head coach. He needed another strength coach and they offered me a deal to come there. In hindsight, it was a unique deal. It was a graduate assistant coaching job, so they would pay for my Master’s and pay me peanuts.
I’m a young married guy but my wife was a teacher. She made decent money. We had benefits. I was like, “I’ll get my Master’s.” Coach Tom Izzo was in his first year and Nick is the strength and conditioning guy. We started training athletes up and getting Michigan State on their winning ways. I wasn’t even there a year when Cleveland called and said, “We got an opportunity.” I left and went back to Major League baseball and became the assistant Major strength coach for the Indians. Before I knew it, I’m in the World Series in ‘95 and ‘97.
Leaders were not born. You can train into that. Share on X
We’re developing players all over the place. Our Triple-A team could beat half the major leagues. We are awesome. We had depth and it was a lot of fun. It was fast. People would go, “Do you want to go on pro sports?” I like to tell people I lived in 17 places in 18 months. That’s how fast it happens. You got to go here. Get an apartment. You would be there for a month, then we’re going to go to spring training and go. People will go like, “I don’t like to stay overnight at hotels.” I’m like, “That’s nothing to me.”
It was accidental with the baseball strike. You started your first company as a reaction to that. That’s about the equivalent of getting hit by lightning in baseball, but a couple of those in 130 years or something.
The only one that ever stopped the playoffs from happening.
As in the case in many entrepreneurial stories, for a while, your wife had a job. She had the benefits and you’re like, “I can go do this.”
I made good money. In my first job, I made good money but a lot of us entrepreneurs build bad models. What happened was I had this thriving private training business. I could make anywhere from &175 to $250 an hour. This was ‘94, ’95. This was huge money back then. I was living in Phoenix, living the dream but very quickly I realized, “I can’t scale. They need me. Everybody wants me.” I got two great trainers. I had Brian and Trisha. They were fabulous but they can’t charge $200. They never coached in the Major Leagues.
For them to get $80 was a lot and they want their cut. I’m figuring this out. At the end of the day, there’s a ceiling because I can only train so much. You had to figure out how to build and scale that. This was long before we go, “Do the video of Tibo or Taebo.” Billy Blanks was there. It was right at that time. People were starting to figure out, how do you monetize your education and knowledge and do that?
I didn’t know how. I built a decent brand. It was a lot of fun. My clients went back to pro sports and my revenue was cut by two-thirds over the month. I’m like, “Coach Saban, I’m going to come and regroup and figure out what’s next.” We’re better than to coach with coach Saban. This guy is a legend. Even then, we knew in Toledo that he was the guy. You knew it when you met him. He’s got that aura.
3X World Series Coach: It’s easy to get to the major leagues. It’s hard to stay.
 
He had the presence. Back in your history, I want you to share if you will a hard lesson or something painful and hopefully, in retrospect, it turns out, “That was a good thing that happened.” That’s not always the case. Sometimes in the entrepreneurial journey, there are some tears, blood and sweat. It hurts.
I got twenty. The first one that probably hurt and changed my view was after ‘95, ’97. We go to the World Series with the Indians. We have probably one of the best if not the best team in Major League baseball. We have a big budget for strength and conditioning and that’s early. In 1995, a lot of clubs didn’t invest in that. They were, “You’re going to workout. You’re going to be too big.” The Oakland A’s were vested because they had players that were working out so hard.
A few others like the White Sox were vested, but there weren’t very many. My next brilliant entrepreneurial venture was all these athletes knew I owned businesses. My father was an accountant and I had a couple of real estate investments. They start asking me questions about their taxes and stuff like that. I had all the contacts, Hammer Strength, Life Fitness, Cybex and all the big brands. We were coming in. They were using our facilities to showpiece. I knew all their executive salespeople.
I said, “Can you guys cut me in on a dealer contract to sell your product? I’m going to sell directly to athletes.” They were like, “You’re not going to make any money.” Before I knew it, I was designing gyms for people’s homes. They would go home in the offseason and take their walkout on their 3,200 square foot basement. They all got multimillion-dollar homes and they put $100,000 of commercial-grade equipment. It’s the same that they’re going to get when they play for the San Francisco Giants, Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Detroit Pistons or whoever.
They wanted that gear and be consistent. I’m selling them on like, “Your wife is going to be in great shape. She’s going to workout. Everyone is going to be healthy. The kids will be Major League athletes also. They are all pros. I know he’s two but he’s going to be the next LeBron. You can see it. The way the kid falls down, it’s like Michael Jordan has got nothing on this kid.” They were like, “Yes.” I’m like, “Let me show you how to write that off because this is part of your job. You don’t pay tax on that because you’re a pro athlete.”
They are like, “What do you mean? I’m like, “$100,000, before you even pay any tax agent, this is free money for you.” They understood that and I educated them. That was a lot of work with athletes. This was cooking. All of a sudden, I’m doing these installations in Florida, this place, that place, and wherever athletes were going home for the offseason. One day, I got this installation and scheduled it two weeks out. I called my athlete to check in. The vendor had been connected now and started talking with them.
All of a sudden, my whole pipeline was ghosting me. They’re not talking to me. I’m like, “What’s up?” All the distributors cut my margin. All the owners of the equipment said, “This is great for Trent. Why don’t we have our sales teams do this?” It would make perfect sense. They got to pay me a margin. They controlled their margins better and they probably could sell it better than I could. I was doing one-offs. They could probably upsell and sell more. I’m sure they have lots of probably good reasons to do that. In two months, I was out of business.
We don’t need the best players. We need the right players. Share on X
They did a Trentactomy.
I was like, “I’m stupid. I don’t know the business. What was I thinking?” It’s all these things. I was beating myself up. There’s a lot of negative self-talk. I was somewhat frightened to do another business but you got to scratch the itch. I’m a risk guy. I’ll take a calculated risk. The next thing I’ll do, I want to buy a franchise and learn to do business. I was like the 12th franchisee of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. I bought Phoenix and Brian Scudamore is a lifelong friend. He’s awesome and I learned a lot. I had to learn.
That’s what we all do. We’ll learn one way or the other. That’s for sure. You can do it proactively or reactively, but learn you will. Thanks for sharing that hard lesson. What about a warp speed moment? Business is going along pretty good and there are no complaints. All of a sudden, one or two things come into place. You have that hockey stick and it’s like, “Life was pretty good. I can’t even tell anybody it’s so good.” Do you have a moment like that you can share?
I’m still waiting for that moment. I’ve had a couple of small moments. Maybe shinny sticks. Not the full hockey stick. We’ve had some moments. A lot of them have been around what we do now. We do leadership development and consulting. All of a sudden, everything comes together with the team, the blend and the product. All of a sudden, everything finds that sweet spot. I’ve seen that on teams and organizations. I’ve seen that where you feel it and it’s palpable.
You feel like there’s a contest. It’s like what you talked about with that salesperson where you get across the bridge and the shoulders come back a little bit. You’re like, “I’m pretty much good at this. I can do this.” It’s scary because my whole life has been this fine line between confidence to arrogance. You can walk that line of confidence, then you cross it into arrogance. The whole thing becomes a house of cards. It can fall right on you like pride. It gets at people.
I’ve seen it happen in sports, in business, in marriages and all sorts of different things. We should be embracing that moment in gratitude and thankful. The radar goes up for me. We have got to mine the ship now. We’ve got to be very focused because now people are coming for you. Part of that is the audit of excellence. When I was in school and you were the number one team, everybody wants to knock you off. Everybody is coming for you. When it’s going so good and you become number one, it’s like, “Who’s coming?” You got to get ready.
I had Scott Spiezio on my show, The Winners Find A Way show. He’s a sharp guy. He always says and I hate it. He says, “It’s easy to get to the Major Leagues. It’s hard to stay.” First of all, it’s not easy to be in Major Leagues. I tried and it didn’t work. He makes a great point on success. I heard this great quote and I can’t remember what book it was from. It says, “Success is reaching your goal. Excellence is sustaining it.” That’s like the big league. If you’re going to stay there, excellence is required. If you can’t maintain that excellence, someone will, “Here comes Don Williams. He’s awesome. He’s three years younger than you and he can do everything. He runs better and runs faster. We’ll take a shot.” You’ve got to maintain it. Sustainability is not an easy thing.
3X World Series Coach: The one characteristic every great leader and great entrepreneur has is a little bit of self-discipline.
 
It’s not easy. It’s hard enough to climb the mountain. It’s harder to sustain it.
Can you imagine? You can get knocked off.
It’s harder to stay there for sure.
I don’t think they tell you that either. It’s like, “You’re going to climb the mountain and you’re going to get to the promised land. When you get there, you’re going to fight every day. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be unicorns and rainbows. There’s going to be some unicorn and rainbow moments and puppies. It’s going to be awesome. You’ll be playing in the high grass with your little puppy and a grizzly bear will come out and you’ll have to kill it.” You’re like, “How do I do that?” “You better figure it out if you want to stay.” You’re like, “No one told me about this top-of-the-mountain thing.”
It’s tricky. One thing I share with my clients is excellent people require excellent leadership. It’s not good enough to recruit them and get them on board but if you want them to flourish, you have to provide excellence. It’s probably even more of genius than excellence. A lot of us have a wide avenue of excellence. There are a lot of things we do very well, but there are only a few things that we do almost magically. It’s best for us to play in the magic of what we do very well.
Can I use that, Don? That was so good. I love that. What we talk about in that is everyone wants a great team. I’m like, “What did you do to get them?” We put an ad in the class. I’m like, “Do you know how much money we had in scouting, going out, seeing people and vetting them at combines? Can you deliver?” We were wrong all the time.
You’re still wrong and you think like, “Trent Clark, you can’t miss this kid,” then this guy can’t get out of A-ball for whatever reason. It has so much more to it. They go, “I want an excellent team.” “Do you have excellent players?” No. “Are you developing?” Not really. “I don’t if you can.” Come on now. This is like a magic charm or lucky charm. You’re making a wish. Hope is not a strategy. We got to get a team and there’s going to be work.
Talent is not enough. Share on X
I want to repeat that. Hope is not a strategy. It will get you nowhere. It takes a little hard work. What about a nugget? You’ve got 51 years. You’re the only person on the planet who’s ever had your unique set of experiences. There have been some wild highs. Some probably desperate lows and a lot of stuff in between. To share with the Proven Entrepreneur tribe around the world, what’s one nugget from the mind of Trent that if you could share with a bunch of entrepreneurs, it would be, “Listen to me when I tell you this.”
For a bunch of entrepreneurs, I will tell you that there are a lot of good leaders. You can be a good leader. I do not believe leaders were born. I believe you can train into that. The one characteristic of every great leader, I might say great entrepreneur but I would probably have to vet that a little bit, is self-discipline. There’s another level of discipline among the top and we need them. We go, “Wow. They’re good. I got to be more visible. I got to get up 30 minutes earlier. I got to put myself to bed 30 minutes earlier.”
These little things. We talk about this a lot with folks. Little pivots and little changes have a massive impact across these waves. We throw the little pebble in the pond and the waves go all the way across the pond. These little pebbles that you keep throwing in are having bigger and the impact is going. Self-discipline to me is a big thing. When I come back to the grit formula, which I love, especially in both sports and business, I love the fact of you can go in and say, “Here’s my talent level. Here’s my effort level and that equals skill.”
We see Tom Brady who started out as like a 6-talent and a 10-effort guy. That’s 6 times 10, then we go 60 times 10 because effort comes twice. We get to 600 and we’re like, “Every one of us would take 600 levels on our executive team.” What happens to 6 talents is 10 effort repetition of the hardest and the best I can do. Focused intentionally each and every time. Pretty soon, Don and I are going to, “It looks like a 7 now. Your arms are getting better. The accuracy has improved, better play calling.” All of a sudden, after another 2 or 3 years, he’s an 8. Now he’s a 9 and you’re like going, “900.”
There’s all the talk. Is he the goat? He’s got another mental level that people don’t have. That exercise for me for leaders should be significant because we don’t need the best players. We need the right players. I coached 10 talents with 3 efforts. That’s 30 times 3 is 90. On a scale of 1,000, there are 90? I tell people if they’re under 200, don’t even hire them.
What are you doing? You’re going to beat your head against the wall trying to get them to follow the procedures and this and that. They got talent but talent is not enough. I love that line from the Olympic movie Miracle, “I don’t need the best players. I need the right players.” That’s two things but I think that self-discipline and that quick form of understanding of what you need are pretty critical.
I love that on self-discipline. I’ve always believed that the little things make a big difference. Pretty much everybody is doing the big things right. That’s not that unique that they’re doing the big things right. It’s the little things that make a huge difference. I’m a firm believer in that. Now, I’m going to put you in a time machine like Star Wars. You’re going to climb in there. We’re going to take you back and you get to have about a 90-second meeting with twenty-year-old Trent. In that 90-second meeting, you can share one thought that you think will help you in your entrepreneurial journey from 20 to now. Give you a little time there. Set it up. Step into the time machine. Back you go. What’s that thought?
3X World Series Coach: Self-discipline and understanding what you need are critical.
 
The two thoughts, the number one is, “Trent, you will depress yourself living in the past. You will have anxiety and stress around the future. You have to be present. That’s why it’s a gift. A present is a gift. You have to be present in it and do not be afraid.”
I love that. Before we wrap up, how can we support you as the Proven Entrepreneur client, Trent? This is a time for you to ask.
Thanks. What we do is we create better teams. We all want teams of coachable champions because they’re sustainable. Sustainability is a big one, accountability and responsibility. If you’re looking for that information, that’s what we provide. We like to help organizations get better in that way. What I know is that as you and I, Don, no one went to school for coaching. No one went to school for leadership. That’s what we provide. You can find me and we try to deliver a lot of free content. I would be happy if you join us, subscribe and follow us. It would be great.
What’s the best way to find you or the best way to reach out to you?
I am on LinkedIn. That is very easy. Trent@Leadershipity.com. You can email me directly. We are over on our YouTube Channel, Trent Clark or Leadershipity. You’ll find us on most of the networks.
That’s good to know. Trent, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Don, I’m so thankful and blessed for having me. It’s always great to spend time with you. Your reputation proceeds itself. The opportunity is all mine, so thank you.
Thank you so much. That’s the episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. See you next time. Thanks. Bye.
 
Important Links

Trent Clark – LinkedIn
1-800-GOT-JUNK?
Trent@Leadershipity.com
YouTube Channel – Leadershipity
Trent@Leadershipity.com
Scott Spiezio – The Winners Find A Way Show episode

 
About Trent Clark
When I was 13 yrs old, I had career-day at school and had to determine 5 things of ‘what my life would be like when I was 30’ (my 30th Birthday happened to be on Y2K)! I wanted to be a Pro Baseball Player. This was my first experience of dreaming/vision work, goal setting, strategy planning, seeking advisers and Mentors, execution on what to do (and not do) plus analysis.
I help people. I explain the journey that sent me to the World Series 3 times and how I became a ‘dream maker.’
Having spent most of my adult livelihood among top 1% producers in sports and business, I assert my blend of business background, professional athletic development, and experience with MEASURABLE training, reinforced learning, leadership, mentoring and coaching expertise for individual and team development strategies to maximize human potential.
My developmental management, mentorship training, and leadership education came directly under coaching greats; Sparky Anderson, Tom Izzo, Nick Saban, Mike Scioscia, and Joe Maddon, to name a few.
I’m an International speaker, owner, investor and Entrepreneur Organization (EO) Member & Global Contributor for Mentorship programs.
I energize audiences as a Speaker telling my story of Overcoming Obstacles and Sacrifice; the ‘Weight of the Ring’ – experience of ‘living the dream’ of Pro Sports & their lessons; and teach company’s the ‘Growth Positioning System (GPS)’ and how to set clear intentions for your team & company; along with the key behaviors of leadership and tools to use in a leaders’ role!
I currently serve Transitions Team and I’m CEO & Chief Leadership Officer of Leadershipity
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E43 | Rishi Khanna – An IT Entrepreneurs’ Entrepreneur
Date: September 13, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-43-rishi-khanna-an-it-entrepreneurs-entrepreneur/
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Content:
 
Do you have what it takes to venture into the world as an IT entrepreneur? Join us in this episode as Rishi Khanna discusses how he is keeping and managing his business while trying to scale it. After graduating, Rishi worked for a consulting company but soon decided to start his own software development company. The interest comes from his younger years, but he still pursued a different degree in business economics since he enjoys it more. He shares the challenges he encountered along the way and how he dealt with failures.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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Rishi Khanna – An IT Entrepreneurs’ Entrepreneur
I’m here with another episode. I’ve got my good friend from Dallas, Rishi Khanna, of ISHIR and ENO8. Welcome to the show, Rishi.
Thank you so much for having me.
It’s my pleasure. Let’s hop right in. I know you own multiple businesses. You own more than the two that I announced. Let’s talk about what’s getting most of your time and attention. What’s your main business focus?
The business I’m in is custom software development. The different businesses I have are all ancillary to that sort of service. The way I explain to my friends is that I am the Mini Cooper, BMW, and Rolls-Royce of service. The Mini Cooper is the business about helping customers, staff, remote IT staffing teams or our software development teams globally.
The BMW of service is where we do digital transformation, which was around modernizing the software, helping them move it into the cloud or helping use automation to scale the business. The top shelf of a business is ENO8, which is about leveraging innovation and helping develop digital products for the business that help you grow 10X or 20X and exponentially grow your business.
IT Entrepreneur: Entrepreneurs trying to start a business hustled and did whatever it took to get the business going.
 
How long have you been in the software development world?
I have been in the software development world since I was in third grade. I have been software developing since then but for enterprises, I have been developing software since I was in high school.
Let’s take you way back. Let’s roll the clock way back to little Rishi. As a child, were your parents entrepreneurial? Did they plant that entrepreneurial seed in your life?
Yes, they did. In fact, both of my parents are entrepreneurs. They both had their own businesses. At one point, my dad sold his business and then combined forces with my mom to help grow her business. My dad was a first-generation entrepreneur but my mom came from an entrepreneur family. She came from a family that had businesses prior to marrying my dad.
Do you have brothers and sisters, and are they entrepreneurial as well?
You just feel it if you’re destined to be an entrepreneur. Share on X
I have a sister. She’s also a CEO and an entrepreneur. Imagine four entrepreneurs on a dining table growing up. It’s an interesting place.
I’m sure the stories and the conversations were lively. We are still talking about little Rishi. What was your first job where you got paid?
It was after I graduated from UT Austin. I’ve got my consulting role at Deloitte. I worked for them for sixteen months, so I only had sixteen months’ worth of paychecks.
You had sixteen months of dreaded employment, and then you began your first company.
I started my first company, ISHIR, which is the BMW.
IT Entrepreneur: We found our niche and what we were looking for and that helped us grow. So we grew fairly rapidly.
 
You studied at the University of Texas at Austin, and your studies there were in computer sciences.
I did go in for Computer Science, but I graduated with a Business Economics degree. I switched gears. I decided that I loved programming but enjoyed Economics and Business courses more. I switched gears while I was in school.
You may have had no choice but to be an entrepreneur but what led to leaving Deloitte and starting your first company?
You are right on the fact that I was destined to be an entrepreneur but that’s the destination or destiny guided by my parents. They said, “When you grow up or when you go to college, you will go and do business. You will probably join the family business.” That was the destiny of being an entrepreneur but the way it changed for me is that when I was at UT, I felt that I did not want to follow the given path by my parents. I wanted to explore and find my own purpose, so what I did is that I decided to go and find myself a consulting job, which is what I wanted to do at that point because I felt that it was going to give me a good holistic view of being a business person.
I didn’t think that I would get into a business at that point. More so, I would think I was wanting to start my career in consulting, and then probably going to get my MBA, and then think about business. I had this path for myself but when I was in Deloitte, I had the fortune to work with some great people. One of the senior managers that I was working with and to whom I used to report had a performance review of me.
Explore who you are and define your own purpose. Share on X

He said, “I don’t know why you did consulting. You are not meant for consulting.” I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “You are meant to be an entrepreneur, a businessman.” I said, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” He convinced me that I should go and pursue my own goals instead of, at that point, investing any more time in consulting. What I did was paused that conversation, reflected on it, gave them my two weeks’ notice, and then started my company. It didn’t take that long to make a decision. I only had to sleep over it.
As is the case with a lot of entrepreneurs, it does not take a lot of time. I love the fact that even though you were somewhat destined to be an entrepreneur, the path was through the family business, and then like a good entrepreneur who always has a little bit of rebellion, you said, “I’m going to go this path.” I felt that rebellion was a component of entrepreneurs until I met Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s Deli out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was like, “It’s maybe better said as an anarchist.” I was like, “I like that even better. I think that is the average entrepreneur.”
You have been in business a long time. You’ve got different service level offerings. Tell us about a time in your business past when things were going along pretty well but then a couple of pieces fell into place where you had this huge hockey stick of growth. Do you have a warped speed moment you can share with us?
Yeah. Early on in the business like any other entrepreneurs trying to start a business, we hustled and did whatever it took to get the business going. All of a sudden, we saw this hockey stick moment around 2000. I started my company in ‘99. I saw the hockey stick moment come my way from 2003 onwards. Pre-2003 was a very rocky road. We went up and down. We almost went out of business twice because of the dot-com bust and the 9/11 hit. They were pretty close cases, and then all of a sudden, we found our niche. We found what we were looking for that helped us grow. We grew fairly rapidly.
In our first year, we were about 25-odd people. Our second year was ups and downs. Let’s say we averaged out at 25 but what happened in the fourth year, which was 2003 onwards was we started seeing a hockey stick moment where we went from double digits to three digits. We went up to almost 400 employees. We grew really rapidly.
IT Entrepreneur: We all try to celebrate the successes, but don’t celebrate the failures because the failure is actually to help us prepare us for the best and also appreciate the good moments that we have.
 
Is there anything you can point to as, “Because of this, it facilitated that major growth?”
The word is focus. When we figured out what problems we were trying to solve and committed to them, that’s when the focus happened, and we started seeing the hockey stick curve go up.
What about a hard lesson? Is there something in your past where while you were going through it, you were like, “This is brutal. This is maybe the worst moment of my business career?” Do you have a hard lesson you can share? We know that success stories include stories of failing, and almost equidistant from the main line, the bigger the failing, the larger the subsequent winnings. Do you have a hard lesson you can share with us?
We all try to celebrate the successes but don’t celebrate the failures. The failures help and prepare us for the best. Also, appreciate the good moments that we have. I went through a business divorce in 2010, which was eleven years into my business. That experience taught me a lot of lessons about trust and relationships. It almost mentally broke me.
I had a business partner who was one of my best friends. Whatever led us to separate ourselves was a hard lesson by itself. What I would say is the hard lesson happened after we split, and we’ve got into separate businesses and split the business. I felt that I had to mentally prepare myself to start from the beginning because there were certain parts of my business that I did not manage and maintain. I was focused on what I did, and my business partner was focused on what he did. What happened is that I had to relearn how to do the business alone because I didn’t have that person to count on to make decisions when I had to learn how to make different decisions.
You need to constantly be clear about your intentions and where you are trying to grow. Share on X

I always had a good leadership team but then I inherited a new leadership team. I had to build brand-new teams. It’s almost like mentally, I had to start all over again, which is hard when you have worked hard to build a business for eleven years. That taught me a lot of things about myself. I had to relearn who I was, redefine my own purpose, and find myself on that beaten path.
Maybe I’m not being very descriptive but the reality is that you need to constantly be clear about your intentions and where you are trying to grow. At the same time, you have to keep investing in yourself and your teams. We have this thing called traction and VTO. I didn’t have all those tools to myself back then. I had to rethink and didn’t have the tools to go with it. Always keep learning and getting tools to help you in those situations where you have never been in or at least have tools that can help you get out of those situations.
I love having the right tools and recognizing that you never know it all. You have to continue to grow up to continue to reach past the boundaries of your comfort zone. There’s no one other way around it. What about a pearl or a golden nugget, something you know that we don’t know that would help entrepreneurs everywhere as they march towards their success story? What’s some golden nugget you could share?
The simple golden nugget is that you cannot do it all. You have to have the right people on your team to help you get there. When you start your business, you feel that you are the superhero and you can do everything. You need to explore yourself to learn everything. I’m not taking that away but you need to be able to depend on people to get there.
As soon as you are able to figure out the unique abilities that you think nobody else has and you can invest in, and you determine that these are the things that you do not enjoy doing and you can have other people who can do it as good or better than you, that’s when you start seeing the growth. You then get out of their way, and you let them do what they do well. That’s a unique ability. Focus on your unique ability on your own. That makes magic happen. That’s my golden nugget. Keep finding the love in what you do and keep investing in what you love doing.
IT Entrepreneur: You have to keep investing in yourself and investing in your teams and to have the necessary tools that can help you get out of difficult situations.
 
That’s pure wisdom. I’m a 35-year entrepreneur. I say this with a little remorse. It’s not that I feel bad but if I had it to do over, I would do it differently. For maybe the first ten years, I erroneously thought I was the smartest guy in the room. In some of those rooms, that helped with that mindset but I didn’t see the real magic in my business until I surrounded myself with people that could do things I’m not that good at. It takes a team. Somebody has got to play quarterback, play running back, and kick the ball. It takes the whole team.
We are going to go back to the time machine. We are going to put you in the time capsule. It’s going to take you all the way back, and you are probably in UT Austin at that time to when you were your twenty-year-old self. If you had a couple of minutes with yourself now, with your twenty-year-old self, and you can only share one piece of advice that would have helped you make things easier and more productive on your entrepreneurial journey, what would that one piece of advice be that you would tell your twenty-year-old self?
Keep learning. As my twenty-year-old self, I felt that my learning would end as soon as my college ends, and I was going to start doing what I needed to do. Continue learning. Continue to invest in yourself. Continue to read the books, talk to smart people, and surround yourself with smart people around you. Keep learning. There’s no end to it. You will keep learning for the rest of your life. You cannot grasp enough knowledge in those 13 or 17 years of being in school or depending on how long you finish your studies.
I’m in my home studio, and I live right around the corner from Deloitte University, where they do significant investments in learning amongst their teammates. If somebody wanted to reach out to you and talk about Mini Cooper, BMW, and Rolls-Royce software development, how would they get ahold of you?
Find me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the easiest way. I can also share my email address. It’s Rishi@ENO8.com.
Thank you so much for joining us. There were lots of wisdom here. Reach out to Rishi if you want to know something because he knows stuff. I’m grateful that you came to the show. Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it.
That’s it for this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur show. I will see you next time. Thanks.
 
Important Links

ISHIR
ENO8
Zingerman’s Deli
LinkedIn – Rishi Khanna
Rishi@ENO8.com

 
About Rishi Khanna
Rishi is a serial entrepreneur with a heart for making an impact on everyone’s lives. He is a passionate, impact-driven, result-oriented visionary that has been in business for over 21 years. He has been recognized and honored with the Entrepreneur of Excellence (EOE) award by FW INC Magazine. He likes to use his time to guide, mentor, and assist others to follow their passion and purpose. He helps others find their purpose, passion, and unique abilities. He is a life coach.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S1:E42 | Kevin Bonfield – London Law Degree To Dallas, TX Based Proven Entrepreneur
Date: September 10, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-42-kevin-bonfield-london-law-degree-to-dallas-tx-based-proven-entrepreneur/
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The path to success in entrepreneurship is not straight. Here to share his journey is Kevin Bonfield, founder of Concentre and co-owner of EcoClean. From growing up in the UK and studying law to migrating to Texas and starting multiple businesses, Kevin has certainly taken a less orthodox to business success but has achieved it either way. Listen in to learn more about his journey and gain perspective on what works as he chats with host Don Williams.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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Kevin Bonfield – London Law Degree To Dallas, TX Based Proven Entrepreneur
I am with my good friend and EO buddy, Kevin Bonfield over in EO Dallas. Kevin, welcome to the show. 
It is good to see you, Don.
Thank you so much for coming over. Kevin, tell me about your company. What are you doing? What are you passionate about? Tell me about your business. 
I have two businesses. I have a boutique consulting company. We work with mid-size and enterprise customers helping them do operational improvement and performance improvement. I have an eco-friendly dry cleaner that operates in Austin. We have got three locations. We pick up and deliver your laundry from your door.
Let’s go back to the consulting business. How long have you had that company? 
I have had that company for many years.
What do you do? 
A good example of work that we have done is helping a client of ours. They were shifting their strategy so they were going in direction A and wanted to go into direction B. We went and helped them find the resources, the people, the money and the costs that they were already spending going in this direction. We picked them up and redeploy them to go in a new direction. We call that Fund the Future service that we have branded. We helped them find millions of dollars to be able to go and accelerate what they wanted to go and do next.
That is a multi-month or multi-year project?
Typically, it’s multi-month. We have had clients whom we do work with them over the years but typically that is multiple projects all tied together. Fund the Future is usually something that we get a good sense of what its shape looks like in the first six weeks and then the rest of its execution. This one took about 5 to 6 months to get through and make sure that we had captured all the benefits that they wanted.
The eco-friendly dry cleaning business in Austin, which is not where you live, how long have you been in that business? 
Similar years in that business. It was an interesting start to that particular business because my business partner had been talking to the owners for about a year beforehand. We disagreed on what the price of the business should be. It was losing money. Our perspective was something that is losing money in the long-term is not worth very much. They had a different perspective. They lost some more money for another year and then we came back with a proposition, which was, “If we come in, run this for you and make it profitable, how about you give half of it to us?” Half of something is worth more than all of nothing. That is what we did.
Things are never as bad as you think they are, and they are never as good as you think they are. Share on X
Let’s dial the clock and go back to little Kevin. Your accent is not Dallas. Tell us where you are from.
I was born in London on the East side. I grew up in Bolton, which is outside of Manchester in the UK. I moved here when I was 24 and about 1.5 years after I was here, I went and spent 5 months living in Australia as well. My accent is a weird and wonderful mixture of all of those things.
Back to young Kevin, were your parents and grandparents entrepreneurial?
I do not think I thought of it as being entrepreneurial but they clearly were. When I was growing up, my mom had her training business, which she still does. My dad has had a series of businesses. He had an office furniture business for a while. He does a lot of work as an extended family office. He has gotten into organic food. When I grew up, I am not sure that I thought that it was like that. I remember exactly the day when he became an entrepreneur. I had been at school, came home and he was sitting there at the dining table in our kitchen. I was like, “You are home early.” He had been let go from his business. That was his first day of moving on to be an entrepreneur. He did that when I was 13 or 14.
It’s such a rebel. He got laid off from a job and said, “I am going to go start my company.”
He had been running a business within a larger conglomerate for a while. He viewed himself as being entrepreneurial anyway but he went and did the next thing. It was good.
I was 12, maybe 11 when my dad was laid off from a job. It is a similar story. I came home and he was there. I was like, “Why are you here?” It was a shock. He explained that we were beginning a family vacation the following day and that we would be gone for six weeks in the middle of the school year. My question was, “Is that going to be okay?” He said, “Sure, it is going to be okay.” Off we went. He is a little bit of a rebel there. I love that.
I need to talk to my dad. I did not get the six-week vacation.
Talk about the first job you have where you got a check. My first job was mowing the yard. I did not get a check but there were consequences if I did not mow the yard.
The first job that I got a check for was a paper route in the UK. I had a double paper route, which meant I got paid £7 a week, which would be $10 a week. The double paper route was twice as long. I had two bags that I carry. The big difference in the UK is you have to put the newspaper in through the mail slot. There is no throwing the paper onto the lawn. You go up, fold it up and put it in through the mail slot. I had two bags. On the paper route when I started, I was carrying about 30 or 40 pounds of paper. I was in good shape.
In the UK, did you also collect from your subscribers? 
I did not. The shop did that for us but there’s the best lesson I learned there. I took over this route on the 7th of January and the person who I took it over from said, “If there is one thing that I am going to teach you, it’s this. When it gets to Christmas time, get a bunch of Christmas cards, write one to each of your people and say, ‘Merry Christmas from your paperboy.’ That is all you have to do. Put it in the slots at the beginning of December.” I did that. I made about £50 in tips that first Christmas. The other people in that particular newsagent might have made £5 or £7. That was the difference. Write a note and say thank you.
Proven Entrepreneur: Consulting can be a very painful business because there are times when it is fantastic and you have got more business than you have people. There are other times when you have more people than you have business.
 
I may need to add that in the sequel to my bestselling book, Romancing Your Customer. That is a good example. 
There was one example that I still remember. Most of the time when I would drop off the paper, no one was there. They were all asleep. One morning, I go in and put the thing through the slot. As my hand is pushing this thing through, the door opens. I was like, “What is going on?” There is a man standing there and goes, “Wait there.” I was thinking, “What have I done wrong?” He goes away for a couple of minutes. I have got my bags on and trying to get my wrap done. He comes back and hands me a crisp £5 note. He says, “Thanks very much. You have done a great job.” £5 is 75% of my week’s pay and I was just given it. That was my first romancing your customer moment.
After young Kevin, we are at a young man Kevin. You went to university. People in the US hike across Europe. You came and hiked across the US. Did you join the Merchant Marine? What did you do? 
I had a tough time when I went to university. In the UK, most people do the A levels before going to university. In the last 3 months before my A levels that I had been studying for 2 years, I got sick. I am trying to do a revision so that I can get ready for my exams. I would wake up, do fifteen minutes of revision and then be so tired. I would have to sleep for two hours. To the point that the deputy head of the school came, sat at my dining table and we did my A level in my house.
After that, I took a year off because I had done apparently revision. It’s not that great of a need for me because I did a lot better in my exams than I had expected. I needed to get back to it. That was my stepping stone between high school and university. I went and did a Law degree in London before starting to work as a consultant.
Have you ever practiced law? 
I have a four-year Law degree but never practiced law. The number of times that I have to use it for contracts and leases was much more than I expected.
I have often said that if I was playing it over, I would have gotten my JD but then never practice law a day in my life. There is a certain amount of training for the legal mind that you do not get in any other discipline.
It is partly that logical discipline. We had mock trials. My university had this fantastic mock court. It was all wood paneling around. You would stand up. The seniors and juniors would come in and they would be the judges. You would have to argue your case. It wasn’t just the logic of thinking through an argument. You had to present it.
After university, did you become a consultant on your own or did you go to work and had a job?
I went to work for Bain & Company as a consultant. That was when I got to work in the UK and Australia. I got to come here for a little bit.
How long were you in the realm of the employed?
Do not lose out on that opportunity to learn from people who know what they are talking about. Share on X
I was at Bain for about 4.5 years, did a couple of startups here in town and then went to TDS for 4 and a bit years. It is a total of about fifteen years as an employee.
Was that your first company? 
Yes.
Thinking back over your career, give me something that happened that was painful but in retrospect has turned out to be something very positive for your journey. 
Consulting, at least the way that we have done consulting can be a very painful business because there are times when it is fantastic and you have got more business than you have people and there are other times when you have more people than you have a business. Our biggest challenge was in 2017 when we had two very large clients and long-term customers, our key client contact in both of those companies left their respective companies. We found out about it within the space of about a week.
We worked tirelessly over the next six months to try and get to the stage where our pipeline supported having the team moving forward, trying to engage the team and find more leads. Part of the challenge was doing all that at the last minute. It never worked out as fast as you would like it to. We had another client that looked like it was going to work out and then did not. The hardest part was in the middle of January 2018, I said, “I am sorry. We are not going to make it in our current configuration.” I have to lay off about two-thirds of the team.
If I close my eyes, I know which room I was in, where I was sitting and the meeting was at 3:00 PM. I remember sitting down and looking at my phone at 4:02 PM thinking, “This day sucks.” That was a hard piece. The benefits of it are twofold. I spend a lot more time on business development on a regular basis. The other is we have been more thoughtful about how and when we bring people onto the team. We are more building a family of affiliates who work with us on specific projects rather than bringing in full-time members of the team. Part of that is a risk mitigation issue. I do not want to promise something that I cannot hold up my end of the bargain. I never want to be in that position again.
That is very common certainly in this economy with the use of contractors strategically. There are a couple of different strategies where that are good solutions for that. Thank you for sharing that. What about a warp speed moment? Business is going along well and then a couple of things fall into place that all of a sudden it is that hockey stick. Do you have one of those moments you can share? 
The hockey stick moment happened more on the EcoClean side of our business. When we first bought the business, we had one location and in that location, we did both. We had a retail store and our plant in the back. When we decided we were going to go and grow it, the first 2 next stores opened within about 6 weeks of each other. 1 store with plants in the back, going to 3 stores in the period of about 6 weeks, having to deal with the fit-out, putting new POS systems in place, hiring and finding good people. With EcoClean, we still find it challenging to get the right people consistently into our business and have to do that in two new stores all at the same time. It was fun.
What about a nugget, something you know we should know but we do not know and something instrumental in your entrepreneurial journey?
The thing that keeps me centered is that I do not think that things are ever as bad as you think they are and never as good as you think they are. I always come back to that as, “This does not seem great.” There are good times around the corner if I lean in.” Likewise, there have been times when I have looked around and gone, “This is fantastic.” There is something on the line which is a challenge that I need to go and deal with. That has kept me fairly centered as I have gone through this journey.
That is a unique perspective. Thank you for sharing that. If we want to reach out to you, what is the easiest way to reach you?
Proven Entrepreneur: We have been more thoughtful about how and when we bring people onto the team. We are more building a family of affiliates who work with us on specific projects rather than bringing in full-time members of the team.
 
The easiest way is through my email, Kevin.Bonfield@Concentre.com. There is an interesting story as we were in the process of working out what the name of our business is going to be. Concentre means to align, which is a lot of what we do. We work with leadership teams and get them on the same page so that they can move forward. Concentre has to be spelled with RE because I am British, not an ER. I am telling my wife about this. I said, “This is where we are at. There are 2 or 3 options but Concentre is the name that I like. That is the one that we are going to go with.”
She says to me, “There is another business here in town called Concentra. They are a healthcare company. Do you not think that they are going to confuse you between the two?” I said, “Healthcare consulting, I do not think it is a big deal. What is the likelihood that they would ever be a client of ours and that would be confusing?” It was client number two.
I get to ask you the time machine question. We have a time machine. You are getting in. We are taking you back to twenty-year-old Kevin. For no more than 5 minutes, you can only discuss 1 topic. What one piece of advice would adult Kevin give twenty-year-old Kevin that would help you on your entrepreneurial path? 
I was chatting to my eldest daughter about this. The biggest thing that I missed out on was getting good sales training. When I was at TDS, I was going up through the corporate side rather than the account side. I had an opportunity at one point to go and become a Client Executive, which was working with a client. As I looked at the options, the pay was about the same, the title was not as good and it looked like if I stayed on the corporate side, I was going to get up the rankings. I stayed on that side and did not go and do the sales piece.
I understand how to do that well from people who understand it. I have picked it up over time but it is me practicing at it. It is not where I have had formal sales training where I know what the ABCs are. To go through that with people who know what they are doing and learn from them how they build relationships, solve problems and make sure that the solution fits what the needs of a customer are is what I would go back to. I would tell a twenty-year-old Kevin, “Do not lose out on that opportunity to learn from people who know what they are talking about.”
I shared this with you before but from The Book of Don, when I look at businesses’ negative issues and problems, about half of them are caused because we do not bring enough money in. If we solve that problem and bring in enough money, half the problems will evaporate. We will have enough budget to hire people to fix the other half. It will not be an issue.
I have spent time going back and looking at the different areas in my business but especially on the consulting side. When I am overweighted into business development activities like reaching out to people, grabbing a coffee, seeing what they are up to and building proposals, the company grows. When I get wrapped up in delivering a particular project for a client, that is when it all stops. I am not going to underweight my business development time anymore.
Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the show. I reserve the right to recall the witness at a later time on a different topic. Please come back. Thank you. That is it for this episode.
 
Important Links

Kevin Bonfield
EO Dallas
Fund the Future
Romancing Your Customer
EcoClean
Kevin.Bonfield@Concentre.com
The Book of Don

 
About Kevin Bonfield
Legacy is defined in the minds of others, but when you live your passion and purpose you can create legacy. Every day you make decisions leading your team. Every decision, every interaction leaves an impact. An imprint on the people you lead, the people you work with and the technology you unleash. Concentre is a boutique consulting company. Our focused and experienced teams work side by side with you to turn your organization’s purpose and business strategy into technology results. We do that by aligning business with vision, technology with the business and the elements within technology.
 

For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E39 | Here Comes Santa Claus…
Date: September 7, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-39-here-comes-santa-claus/
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What’s the secret to landing a Shark Tank Deal with Barbara Corcoran? Here to share his wisdom and experience is Mitch Allen, the Founder and Head Elf of HireSanta. This is far from Mitch’s first-hand in entrepreneurship, but the failures and the many lessons he learned along the way brought him to his success now. Tune in as he joins Don Williams to share the ups and downs of his entrepreneur journey.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
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Here Comes Santa Claus…
Mitch Allen aka “Santa” Allen Lands ABC Shark Tank Deal With Barbara Corcoran
I’ve got my good friend, Mitch Allen as our first guest. Mitch has started over ten businesses for several years. In 2019, he had a successful exit from a company he founded in 2001 by the name of LeadRival, which he sold to a competitor. You might recognize Mitch from his many appearances on ABC Shark Tank. He appeared on Shark Tank with his company HireSanta and struck a deal with Barbara Corcoran. Mitch, welcome to the show.
I’m so glad to be here, Don. Thanks for having me.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much. Let’s start. What are you doing? What’s your passion? What are you working on?
My passion is entrepreneurialism. I love thinking about businesses and talking to people about how they make money. Also, reading about businesses and trying to implement the things that have worked for other people in my businesses. My main business since I’ve sold LeadRival is HireSanta. In HireSanta, we help brands associate themselves with Christmas, primarily through the use of the holiday entertainer, Santa Claus. We staff Santa Claus entertainers around the world.
When you staff Santa Clauses, does that mean I have a Christmas party and I can have Santa at the party or I own a chain of retail stores and I can have Santas in my stores or all the above?
The answer is yes. We staff everything Santa-related. If you want Santa to come by on Christmas Eve for a 30-minute visit, we can do that or up to a full season event, which is about 400 hours starting. Usually, the first weekend of November and runs through Christmas Eve. It’s anything in between staffing Santa. We also staff several big events where we staff Santa and Mrs. Claus.
Shark Tank Deal: The number one thing is knowing how to make money and acquire clients. Acquiring clients is always the hardest thing to do.
 
Many times, we’ll have multiple Santas and multiple Mrs. Claus at a location, entertaining elves and hostess elves put on real productions. Our executive producers have tremendous experience in putting on very large events soup to nuts. What we got our start in is this home visit or company visit where you want to have a little bit of extra Christmas magic by bringing in a Santa Claus.
Where are you from? Were your parents entrepreneurial? Tell us a little bit about your childhood and your background.
In talking with hundreds of entrepreneurs through Entrepreneurs’ Organization, EO, I have found that many, if not most, 80% of entrepreneurs, their parents were entrepreneurs or maybe had a grandparent that was an entrepreneur that was able to see what it’s like and have that possibility. My parents were not entrepreneurs. They were educators. My mom was a teacher in the fourth grade and my dad was an elementary principal.
I grew up in a very small town, Denver City, Texas, out in the middle of West Texas, about 80 miles South of Lubbock. It’s a little bit of an oil and gas town and had a traditional small-town Texas upbringing. It’s a little town with 4,000 people. My wife is from even a smaller town, Sundown, Texas. It’s one blinking light town of about 1,000 people. We’re a small-town Texas but we lived here in the Metroplex South Fort Worth area for many years on the Fort Worth side of things.
My background, I come from a town of about 1,100 people. When the fair was there, everybody was in town. Maybe we were counting the cats and dogs too. I’m not sure. My parents were not entrepreneurial until after I was. Talk about work ethic. I won’t put any words in your mouth. As a young boy growing up in Denver City, Texas, talk about your first job and what work ethic your parents instilled in you.
I played tennis as a child and in college as well. It’s my job in a small town. I was going to tennis tournaments almost all summer but I always had this notion of hustling. It wasn’t necessarily about making money but it was about doing something and the reward of it was making money. It was a job, though. I had my best friend and later my business partner for several years in LeadRival lived across the street. He’s a couple of years younger than me. We roofed houses. We started when I was fourteen and we did that for a couple of years as my first real job.
For every successful business, there are twenty businesses that fail. Share on X
We were roofing houses, only the two of us, on top of a roof of Denver City, Texas, stripping shingles, nailing them down, 110-degree weather all day every day. It was brutally hot. That’s one of those jobs that always say that teaches you character type of thing. My parents worked hard as teachers but for me, I always wanted to do something. I bought and sold baseball cards, comic books and old ‘50s and ‘60s Coke machines. We did a lot of things. We were hustling. Once I got to grad school, I bought and sold rental properties. It was always this notion of hustling a little bit but it was more about finding something interesting to do other than almost anything else.
Talk about your next path. You went on to school, military or Merchant Marine. What’d you do?
I went to school and studied mathematics. I did not know what I wanted to do. I got a degree in Mathematics and then I went to grad school. I got a Master’s in Applied Mathematics, worked towards a PhD in Applied Mathematics and then decided, “I should get a PhD in Statistics.” I was working on my dissertation in Applied Mathematics and switched to Statistics. I went through all the courses and tests to get a PhD in Statistics. I was working on what they call ABD, All But Dissertation in Statistics. I got married and dropped out of school because I didn’t want to be a professor anymore.
I thought I wanted to be a professor. I love teaching. I still might go back and teach at some point but I did not like research. At the time, my idea of doing research is there was somebody who was holed up in their office, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee all day, every day. That did not appeal to me. I enjoy teaching but the research I was not good at and didn’t have any passion for. I got a job with a company that then got bought by CityGroup doing statistical analysis and model building for them.
Your first job out of college was entrepreneurial. You went to work for a big company and eventually, full rolled up into the city, the credit business and somehow. Tell us how you started your first business then. What was your first real business? Even though at fourteen roofing houses, that might be a real business.
When people ask me about my businesses, I’m like, “I’ve got 3 real businesses,” even though I may have 7 or 8 technical businesses. In grad school, my partner and I had six rental properties. That was a real business, even though we were not treating it like a real business. I remember when we handed over “our books” to one of our other partners in LeadRival. It was a spiral notebook in that I had written down some things. It was awful. It had no accounting because I didn’t have a business background at all and hadn’t even thought about it. That was a real business. We ended up buying an apartment complex, a small C-minus-minus apartment complex that pretty much lost all the money that we’d made in the awesome minds we made in rental property.
Shark Tank Deal: Making money when you can is super important because you never know when it’s going to stop.
 
With the first real business, my partner was an attorney and so we started a small local bankruptcy law practice in Fort Worth. That was a real business. That’s when I left CityGroup at the time to join full-time and then we started an advertising company that became LeadRival after that. That’s what started. Many of my businesses were what I call adjacent businesses. I have a business and then we vertically integrate the whole thing. We’re spending 35% of our money giving to somebody else to do our advertising. It’s not that hard to place TV advertising, direct mail or Yellow Pages. We’re like, “Let’s start an advertising company.” That’s how we started LeadRival, the internet came and we were off to the races.
Taking things that are cost and turning them into income-producing.
That’s the theory.
I love that early entrepreneur who kept books in a notebook. I’ll tell you a funny story. My grandfather who owned about 400 rental properties kept his books in brown grocery paper bags because he was too tight to buy paper. There’s some benefit in being frugal. Your business HireSanta, tell us how you got started there.
With all my businesses, HireSanta is the most of my business. Many entrepreneurs I find hate partners or have some story or thoughts about partners. I love having partners because partners in many ways, whether it’s an actual equity partner or a key executive that maybe has some equity or Phantom shares of some sort, can be additive to myself and be strong in things that I’m not doing. For most of the businesses that I have or have had, I’ve had 1 up to 5 partners that help to do things that I’m not good at, whether that be customer service, managing the call center, doing books, financial stuff or whatever it is.
HireSanta is a business that I started myself. I’ve done everything until I got a deal with Barbara on Shark Tank. It was started strangely enough from a nonprofit that I started in 2005 with some other people. In 2008, my executive assistant asked me to dress up as Santa and hand out Christmas bonuses at our Christmas party. We had, at the time, nice Christmas parties. It was a lot of fun. Fun was one of our core values.
A lifestyle business is a business that funds a lifestyle. Share on X
That same year, I went and did a cookie decorating party for my daughter that my wife had every year when they were young. I was hooked on Christmas and being Santa. This reflected love or the love that the kids have. The faith, joy and magic of Christmas are magical. Expressing it to you like Santa, not only to your kids but to everybody else is magical. I looked terrible as Santa goes. I’m a Santa snob now.
Our clients want the best Santas so we try to have great-looking Santas. Being an all-in type of guy, I became a top Santa on beard. Think of Tim Allen in The Santa Clause movies. Over the next 3 or 4 years, I appeared in some national TV commercials. I’ve since been in some of the biggest parades in the world as Santa and then got to this point where people are wanting to pay me surprisingly a lot of money to be Santa. I got too much business.
There was some business that I didn’t want to do, still good money but not the money that I wanted to work for. I then become an internet marketer. In 2012, I bought a variety of domains, including HireSanta.com and started doing internet marketing to generate leads for Santa Claus around the country. I formed the company in 2012 and off to the races since then. It is growing at a good clip ever since.
I saw your first presentation episode on Shark Tank. How many Santas did you have on stage?
I had around 20 Santas, Mrs. Claus and 2 mascots.
You’ve been an entrepreneur for several years. You started as a kid. What about a hard lesson? Something you learned along the way and there are probably several but pick one that you’d share with us.
Shark Tank Deal: Everybody can go onto Google and spend a million dollars and acquire $600,000 worth of clients, but how will you acquire clients less expensively than your competitor or a competitor out there?
 
I’ve got a bunch of lessons. I’ve talked several times about the lessons of being an entrepreneur. Everybody has this survival ship bias about entrepreneurs, particularly in EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Everybody’s business is at a successful level. For every successful business, twenty businesses fail. Being an entrepreneur is very difficult. It’s not nearly as easy. One of the lessons that many entrepreneurs get into and people think about entrepreneurship is the notion of a lifestyle business isn’t an entrepreneur in some way.
That’s false. Being a lifestyle business, there’s an entrepreneur that funds that lifestyle. It may not be a hundred-million-dollar business or a billion-dollar business but it can be a great business that can fund your lifestyle, provide security, maybe even provide jobs for kids or grandkids or whatever happens to be. It’s a business that funds a lifestyle. Along the way, I’ve had lots of business lessons, especially with businesses that have failed.
The number one thing is about knowing how you make money and acquire clients. Acquiring clients is always the hardest thing to do. One of my businesses that we were going to spin off from LeadRival was to do credit monitoring. From LeadRival, as a secondary source, we sold credit monitoring leads to a third party, one of the biggest credit monitoring places. We’re making a good amount of money selling leads to these things the same way. This is something that’s a pack of commodities in some ways. If we’re making a little bit of money by selling the leads, I bet we can make a bunch of money by doing the whole thing.
“Let’s be our own customer.” We created our credit monitoring service. It’s called Identity Cred. In essence, we white label. Somebody is doing it themselves. For a variety of reasons, we weren’t able to capture it in the same way. My number one reason to start a company is we have a low-cost source of leads. We have an unfair advantage to acquire clients.
We didn’t. I didn’t understand how we would acquire clients that were not only ours but other people. That’s my biggest lesson. When I talk to new entrepreneurs, I always ask them, “How are you going to acquire clients? It’s unfair or maybe it doesn’t sound right but how are you going to do it cheaper than everybody else? Everybody can go onto Google and spend $1 million and acquire $600,000 worth of clients but how are you going to acquire clients less expensively than your competitor or any competitor out there?” My biggest thought and lesson whenever I wanted to open or think about a new business is, “Do I have a competitive advantage in acquiring clients?”
In my consulting business, I pretty much worked with people on the sales side. I can do the other stuff but I don’t want to. My theory is if we bring in enough dollars, half of your problems will evaporate and the other half, you can afford to fix. It’s a lot simpler.
Sales cures all things. Share on X
That’s a sales grid result. One of the things that I said in one of our businesses for a long time was about the profitability of our business. The saying I had, the Yogi-ism is, “If we weren’t so profitable, we wouldn’t be in business.” We probably have decent margins but we don’t know it because we got all these holes that are in our funnel that we’re losing money. In the end, we have a little bit of money left. If we weren’t so profited at the top, we wouldn’t be making money at all. Sales cures all things.
What about a work speed moment? In one of your businesses, things are going fairly well and all of a sudden, 1, 2 or 3 things fall into place where you explode.
I’ve had several moments like that. Both in the law firm that I was working in for a while, a nonprofit, as well as in LeadRival, some of that has to do with regulatory. This will harken to another one of the business lessons that I’ve learned as an entrepreneur. Regulatory laws changed for filing bankruptcy in 2005, the consumer protection or bankruptcy protection.
Consumer protection and bankruptcy laws went into effect in September and October of 2005. Everyone rushed to file for personal bankruptcy before the laws changed because it came more difficult. During that time, it was a madhouse for 6 or 9 months about people filing for personal bankruptcy. The laws didn’t change it too much but the perception was. There was a rush to filing, gearing up and getting everything put into place. It was very difficult. At times, I wanted to tap on the brakes.
One of my lessons about this was to make money when you can because making money is much harder than most people think. To make money consistently over a long period is difficult. When you can make money, you should make money. We could have stayed open longer but we turned people away. We should not have done that at the time because, for the next 2 years, bankruptcy filings were down a huge amount, 100% it ever happened. It gradually increased over the next 2 or 3 years. Making money when you can is super important because you never know when it’s going to stop.
I’ve seen so many marketers have a successful marketing plan and then tap the brakes and say, “We’ll do that business next year.” Maybe you will but maybe you won’t. It’s best to make it happen while it happens. Think back, if we could put you in a time machine and you could go back and talk to twenty-year-old Mitch, which you only have a couple of minutes and you can only tell yourself one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be that would help you on your entrepreneurial journey?
Shark Tank Deal: Take risks sooner rather than later because it is so much easier to be an entrepreneur when you’re young versus old.
 
When I talked to people, I used the word scared, fearful or frightened about whatever it happens to be. I would say take more risks more often. My kids don’t see it this way at all. They think that I am outgoing, entrepreneurial, risk-taking or whatever happens to be. Most of that is learned, forced or whatever that adjective is about me. At the time, though I was very confident, I was not necessarily what most people would say is risk-taking.
To jump in with both feet and not be scared of whether it be failure, ridicule, whatever those words are as well but to be more risk-taking, do that sooner rather than later because it is so much easier to be an entrepreneur when you’re young versus old. I’ve talked with many people who are our age about being an entrepreneur. They’re like, “I’ve got this idea.” I’m like, “Go do it,” but they can’t because they have two kids, a dog and a cat in the house and these huge obligations but when you’re 20 or 25, living on ramen, it’s so much easier because your obligations are so much less to be thinking entrepreneurial then and try it for 2, 3, 5 or 10 years. You can always go back to the other stuff but once you have the golden or bronze handcuffs, it’s hard to break free, go off and start something.
I heard two nuggets in there. 1) Take risks. 2) Push your fear aside. One of my favorite quotes is, “You’re far better, far stronger and far smarter than you think.” That was the wise Winnie-the-Pooh and that’s a good one.
Entrepreneurs will get this but I don’t view what I do or what we do as risky in the same sense maybe if somebody hasn’t started a business. When I start a new business, say when I started HireSanta, from a tax perspective, it was considered a hobby. I already had revenue and leads and understood the inventory side of it. I also had some diversification in other businesses. For all intent a person starting HireSanta, there was zero risk.
Many times when people think about an entrepreneur, they think that’s a risky thing when it’s not. Most entrepreneurs are risk-averse from a money perspective. The risk is you may not succeed in the way you want to. It will take longer than you think it’s going to be. That is slightly different than maybe what most people think about risk.
If you could ask one thing from this show’s clan or tribe about how we could support you, what’s one thing you’d ask for you?
Take more risks more often. Share on X
Support me as we’re making a big push on social media. We are trying to leverage the collateral that we have. Be part of the HireSanta community, whether that’s @HireSanta on Instagram or Facebook. We’re making a big push in 2021 and 2022 to push out. Always, if you need Santa to come. We’re also looking to expand the number of big events we do like putting on parades. We’ve got some amazing executive producers to put on huge events so we’re going to have to put on huge events. We’re looking to always put on even bigger and better events. We’re always looking for clients.
For anything Santa-related, reach out to HireSanta.com. You can find all the social media tags on the website. Mitch, if somebody wanted to reach out to you directly, what’s the best way to do that?
It’s the same thing. Monitor and get promoted to that but you can also reach me at my email address, Santa@HireSanta.com.
Should we give a plug for EO?
Yes. I’ve been in EO for a long time. It has been life-changing, not only for my business. When I talk to new people about EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization, the reason I joined and they joined is typically 100% business-related and it’s about a forum. Whenever somebody is pitching it to somebody else, it’s like, “Getting a forum in this mastermind type group or this board of directors will help you grow your business. The learning events are amazing.” People who’ve been in more than five years often say it has changed them from a personal standpoint. There’s this interpersonal growth. For me, that has been done in spades. Since I joined, I’m an entirely different person and a lot of that is from the people, the places and the things that I’ve done through you.
I’ll second Mitch’s thoughts. I do think most entrepreneurial organization members join to improve their business. What’s most find as the easiest way to improve your business is to improve yourself. All boats ride higher in a full lake, things go better. Mitch, I want to thank you so much. That’s it for this episode.
 
Important Links

LeadRival
HireSanta
Barbara Corcoran
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
First Presentation Episode – YouTube
@HireSanta – Instagram
Facebook – HireSanta
Santa@HireSanta.com

 
About Mitchell Allen
Head Elf at HireSanta, which was featured on Shark Tank and struck a deal with one of the Sharks! We craft unique, memorable Santa experiences in venues of all shapes and sizes all year long.
Experienced Partner with a demonstrated history of working in the legal services industry. Skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Sales, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Partnerships, and Pay Per Click (PPC). Member of EO since 2006. Previous member of YPO.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E40 | From Waiter To Proven Entrepreneur With Gian-Carlo Torres
Date: September 7, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-40-from-waiter-to-proven-entrepreneur-with-gian-carlo-torres/
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Content:
 
Anybody can be a successful entrepreneur given the right mindset. Don Williams presents Gian-Carlo Torres, who went from a waiter to proven entrepreneur. Gianco shares how you need to invest in yourself. Buy as many books and listen to as many podcasts as you can in your industry because when you have the right mindset, you can take an opportunity and do a good job at it! Listen to this episode and be inspired to keep going and never give up.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
lease join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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From Waiter To Proven Entrepreneur With Gian-Carlo Torres
Hunger And Being Coachable Helps Gianco Torres Arrive
I’m here with another episode of the show. I have my good friend from Atlanta, Georgia with us, Gian-Carlo Torres. He has a phenomenal story. He is a great entrepreneur. Welcome to the show.
Don, how are you?
I am awesome. Thank you so much for jumping on. You may have noticed his name is Gian-Carlo but he goes by Gianco and the reason for that is his friends refer to him as Gianco. It’s the shortened version of Gian-Carlo. Let’s jump right in. Tell me the name of your business. What does your business do?
The name of the company that I represent is called Immunotec. It’s a company based in Canada but my brand name is This Is Gianco. As Don says, you’re my friend and since you’re my friend, you can call me Gianco. Immunotec is a company that I was afforded to use a research. What we do in our company is we help people do two things. We help people maintain a good immune system with a product called Immunocal and we’ve been doing that for many years. I’ve been doing it for the past few years.
In the gig economy, a lot of people are always looking to have a gig. That could be through Uber or Lyft. With the pandemic, it has been a little lower, or through any business from home. We help people start a side hustle and earn an extra couple of bucks while helping people maintain their immune systems. That’s a general way how I help people.
Let me take you back to the beginning, to young Gianco, school-aged up to high school era. Tell us about your first paying job.
My first paying job was cleaning floors with my father. I’ve been homeschooled since I was fourteen years old. In this homeschool, my dad started a cleaning business. He asked me to support him and I was thrilled. It was hard for me to do an exam but it wasn’t hard for me to wake up at 4:00 AM and go to work. I remember that’s when I started to enjoy work. I love to work and get some money. I cleaned floors for two years.
Something very common that we find in successful entrepreneurs is it’s not uncommon that their parents were entrepreneurial like your father who started his business. Much more common, whether your parents were entrepreneurial or not, was that your parents installed a phenomenal work ethic and got up at 4:00 AM to help clean floors. That’s a pretty good work ethic for a young man in America. What about your first entrepreneurial venture? Was it your company or did you do something beforehand that you would consider entrepreneurial?
It’s one thing to doubt; it’s another not to investigate. Share on X
I would consider what I’m doing now as my first real business, but I would always do side things when I was younger. I remember a friend of mine who did landscaping needed me to build him a website. I had no idea how to build a website but I partnered with someone else that knew everything about how to build a website. I was the guy getting the deal. I got the deal and he gave us a fair amount of money. My friend did most of the work with the website but I was learning. I remember I was so happy with the whole fact that I could get a deal on a website. That would probably be my first deal but as my first entrepreneurial opportunity, it would be my company now.
I certainly think that qualifies as entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship has been defined as the person who will jump out of an airplane and build a parachute on the way down. Many entrepreneurs said, “I can do that,” and made the sale, got the deal, and then went and figured out, “How are we going to do that?” In your case, you went and got somebody skilled at web development to go ahead and build that website. That’s awesome. You started this company at nineteen. You graduated from high school and went right into this company. Tell us what led you to start this company. There’s a great story there.
Sometimes, there are blessings in disguise. I didn’t know that this was a blessing in disguise in my career. I had always been very entrepreneurial. One whole year after I graduated from high school, I was doing all kinds of work. I was a waiter and I would also do landscaping. In anything that I would do, I was a hard worker but I had not found my thing. In this process and this journey of trying to find what I like the best and where can my talent be used at its max, my mother gets ill.
I’ve been doing volunteer work since I was 12 years old over 70 hours a month. Being in a community, helping people has always been in us. The whole fact that mom got ill was a bad situation for all of us. Since we’re all so close, it got us very depressed. In this process of going to doctors and doing all the necessary things with no results, someone tells us about a good nutrient from Canada. They said, “It’s good for the immune system.”
We were skeptical like 95% of the whole world, but as they say, “One thing is to doubt but one thing is to not investigate.” We did our due diligence. We were in a very bad financial situation but we gave it to her. What I remember was I woke up one Sunday morning and I saw her cleaning and reorganizing the kitchen, things that she had not done in a year. I was like, “What happened?” She puts the box of the product on the furniture and says, “It’s this stuff. I’m not perfect but I have energy, something that I hadn’t had in a whole year.” That was my a-ha moment. I said, “There’s something different about this.”
We all became raving customers of the product because of mom’s story. My grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and everybody in our circle of influence was consuming the product because they saw mom get out of bed. After a couple of months, they tell me, “There’s a side hustle opportunity.” I said, “Is there really?” I probably had $50 to my name. I had no business experience and no degree or MBA but I had two things. I was coachable and hungry.
I realized that with time, that is all you need to be an entrepreneur. Going to the seminar, they explained the product in detail and how everything worked. It made sense. I remember looking at my parents and I said, “This is going to be my career.” After that day in October 2016, I decided to help a lot of people promote this product. That’s the story of how I started.
Thank you so much. You started your business. Most entrepreneurs have ups, downs, twists, turns, stop signs and stumbling blocks. Tell me about a work speed moment where something happened or a couple of things fell into place that accelerated your progress.
Successful Entrepreneur: We help people start a side hustle and earn an extra couple of bucks while helping people maintain their immune systems.
 
The biggest tip I would give to anybody who’s going to start a business is to invest in yourself. What helped me probably have faster progress than most people is investing in myself. I remember in the beginning, I made the decision to buy all the books and listen to all the podcasts possible in my business and industry. I remember listening to it, taking notes and taking action.
Those things created and worked on my mindset. When you have the right mindset, whenever there’s an opportunity, you take it and then do a good job at it. In this case, if I would have not invested in myself, there would have been one million opportunities and I would have ignored all of them because I didn’t invest in myself. Investing in myself has been the key to having faster progress.
With my consulting clients, we begin with if we can change the mindset, we can change behaviors. If we can change behaviors, we can change results. If we change nothing, nothing changes. Mindset is where it all starts. What about a hard lesson? Has something happened in the last couple of years in this business that you were like, “That hurts,” but in retrospect, that was very positive?
Two things happened that I still remember like they were yesterday. I’ll tell you the first one. I have a good friend and my mentor in business. He was the one who showed me the way. When I had no money and influence, he adopted me and said, “I will show you what I did. Let’s go run.” I had it but I still have great respect for him.
He’s an expert on the immune system and everything else. He called me and said, “I want to do a seminar in your area to help you grow your business.” I said, “That’s fantastic. Let’s do it.” This was when we used to live in Jacksonville, Florida. I had a team built and a business. I was expecting a fair crowd. He traveled from West Palm Beach to Jacksonville. Something had happened and people have canceled. Only two people arrived.
What’s hard about that situation is that I still wasn’t making a lot of money. I would love to tell you that I was making great amounts of money so I was like, “That’s no big deal.” With the little money I had, I spent most of it on the hotel. He trusts me, I trust him and he sees that. He still encourages me to keep going but that was the day that I went to bed sad. Nothing would help me get better that day. I asked myself, “Am I cut to be an entrepreneur?” That is the most daunting question any entrepreneur can ask. I still remember that day like it was yesterday.
That was the first thing that got to me. That was my first, “This is tough.” The second situation that happened was not so long ago. We had moved from Florida to Atlanta. We were going through some financial trouble. That’s why we came to Atlanta. We were going somewhere and I remember I had made some bad financial decisions. I had no money to buy something simple, even a sandwich outside.
I remember being disgusted with myself. I was like, “I started a business to be financially free and yet because of my bad financial decisions and lack of skills, I don’t have money even to buy a sandwich.” I was so disgusted that I made the decision and said, “This will not happen again. I’m going to walk the talk and show everybody not only how to maintain a good immune system but how to be financially free.” Since I was so dissatisfied financially, I haven’t had that happen again. It has been the contrary. Unfortunately, I had to be so dissatisfied to make that change. Those would be the two situations in my life that were a breakthrough. It was a failure but I learned how to fail forward.
Sometimes you need to be so dissatisfied to make that change. Share on X
It’s most of those situations where you rented space in a hotel, invited a bunch of people, had a bunch of reservations, went out on a limb, invited somebody with some status to come, and then it’s only two people. Certainly, it was a normal question to ask yourself, “Am I cut out for this?” That’s very common among entrepreneurs. Sometimes, their itty bitty mind committee gets some doubt on what they’re doing, and then the other about, “I refuse. I am not going to experience this again.” Thank you for sharing. What about a golden nugget? Do you have some secrets to your success story that you can share with us?
It is to enjoy the journey as an entrepreneur. Sometimes, we’re so obsessed and focused on the goal that we forget that the journey has so many lessons that must be learned. It’s not to only learn but to enjoy as well. I once listened to a podcast and he said to honor the struggle. That was a leader shift. That shifted how I was thinking because I was so obsessed with the goal, but I was not focusing on what was happening on the journey. What was I learning in the journey that I had to learn?
I was blind because I was so focused on the goal. Most entrepreneurs now make that mistake. They’re so focused on the goal that they forget that the journey is an important part. Let’s say the goal is to build a $1 million business. You got the skill, hunger and coachability. You get there and then now what? You can be unfulfilled or bored, which most entrepreneurs always have to fight with boredom. That is not a good combination for anybody and more for an entrepreneur.
You value the journey, invest in the journey and focus on the journey. I’m going to give a very big golden nugget. When creating a goal, create more of a growth goal than an actual goal. Let’s say your goal is to go above $1 million in sales in your business. Except saying, “I want to achieve that,” create a growth goal and then say, “How can I get better in certain skills or areas in business that will take me to that goal?”
Once you do that, you’re focusing on growth. Before you know it, you might even achieve that goal or get to $10 million in a year because you’re focusing on getting better. For anybody who is an entrepreneur or wants to be an entrepreneur and whose goal is to focus on getting better, the sky is the limit.
Perfection should never be the goal, it’s progress. You’re a four-year entrepreneur and pretty young. Anybody can do it. It’s a matter of getting your mind right, getting out there and hustling. If you could go back to the beginning of your journey when your mother had first taken ill, you had first found this product and started your entrepreneurial journey, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself at the beginning of that journey, something that you know now but did not know then?
It is to understand that failure is your friend.
I’m a big believer in the philosophy that you either win or learn. Learning is just a slower winning. That’s the way it is. I can tell you from doing a bunch of these interviews that many of the largest entrepreneurs, people who have billion-dollar companies, have huge failings. The larger their failing is, the larger their wins have been on the other side. Failure is not the opposite of your success story. It’s just chapters in the book. They are not permanent. They are temporary. How can we support you? If you could ask us for anything for you and your business, what would that be?
Successful Entrepreneur: Value, invest, and focus on the journey.
 
I love to have conversations with everybody. If you look up my social media accounts and find me, send me a message like, “I listened to your podcast and I loved it,” I would love to meet you and have a conversation with you. In any way that I can help the person that’s sending me that message and see if there’s a need for me to help you, it would also be the best way to help me. You can contact me and I’m going to have a good conversation.
I know you’re on social media everywhere. I’ve seen all your stuff but if you could only give us one, it could be your email address or LinkedIn account, what is the best way to find you?
Through Instagram.
What’s your handle? 
My Instagram is @ThisIsGianco, just like my brand. Send me a DM and follow me. That would be the best way.
Thank you so much. It has been awesome having you.
 
Important Links

Immunotec
Immunocal
@ThisIsGianco – Instagram

 
About Gian-Carlo Torres
What do I do?
1. I help people maintain their immune system with a nutrient that isn’t in our foods anymore.
2. I help people earn a full-time income working part-time from home.
WHY: Because without a strong immune system, we are defenseless. A defenseless immune system means poor health. 4 years ago, my mother was ill. From being a very active woman in volunteer work & entrepreneurship, to chronic fatigue & pain. We did much of what we were told to do, and it didn’t seem to work, until we figured we had to fix her immune system. And that’s exactly what we DID. A friend mentioned about this nutrient, we investigated it, it made sense, and we gave it to her. The rest is history!
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
lease join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E41 | Proven Entrepreneur Vivienne Wagner
Date: September 3, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e41-proven-entrepreneur-vivienne-wagner/
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The entrepreneurship journey is not a straight line. You will have to jump from idea to idea to find what you’re truly good at. Vivienne Wagner just happened to find out that she was really good at SEO. She had the opportunity of a lifetime and said yes despite not knowing what to do. Saying yes to everything may allow you to make mistakes, but that’s life as an entrepreneur. This is exactly how Vivienne grew her company, Houndstooth Media Group. Discover her entrepreneurial journey from how she went from waitressing, to pottery, to politics, and finally to SEO. Join Don Williams and Vivienne as they talk about how she built her business.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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Proven Entrepreneur Vivienne Wagner
CEO Of Houndstooth Media Group
I had my very good friend all the way from California, CEO and Founder of Houndstooth Media Group, Vivienne Wagner. Viv, welcome to the show.
It’s so good to see you and hear your voice. I’m happy to be here.
I’m thrilled that you joined us. Thank you so much. Let’s jump right in. Tell us a little bit about your company and what you’re doing, who you serve, where they’re at, and what you do for them.
I am the CEO and Founder of Houndstooth Media Group, which is a full-service digital marketing agency. We do all of the things you would think. We build websites. We run social media account management. We are content strategists. We specialize in SEO and, in particular, organic search strategy. What does it mean to have Google bring your ideal clients to you for free because you’ve got good stuff on your website?
We want Google to know you, love you, and send you your ideal customer. That’s our sweet spot. We serve business owners who are in it for the long game and want new people to discover them. They don’t want to spend a lot of time, money, and energy trying to figure out what is that game that we’re playing with Google. We go straight in the front door, have good stuff on your website and make sure you’re clear about who you serve and that’s who we serve.
Let’s go all the way back to little Vivienne, from school age up to college. What was your first paying job?
Little Vivienne grew up in a little town in California called Norco. Norco is a cool little place. I didn’t appreciate it as a kid. I thought it was dumb and not metropolitan and cool like LA, which is near. Norco has no sidewalks. They only have horse trails. It is a small little rural pocket in Southern California where everyone has horses and chickens. When I was little, I rode my pony through McDonald’s drive-through.
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There are hitching posts and watering troughs all over the place at businesses in Norco. My first job was when I was fifteen years old. I got a job busing tables at a local restaurant called the Steer ‘N Stein. This was back in the ’80s. I would come home smelling like steak sauce and cigarettes. It was disgusting. I was a bus girl and then I got moved a couple of nights a week to the hostess.
Were your parents entrepreneurial in any way when you were a young girl at home?
They weren’t. My parents both still live in Norco. They are still active, but they’re both retired. They’re in their ’80s. My mom was a registered nurse. She worked in the hospital, dinner shifts and whatever. My dad was a 22-year career Marine. He was a helicopter pilot. When he got out of the service, he was entrepreneurial in that he created his own job for a restaurant corporation. They owned lots of different restaurants.
He somehow met somebody who was there and affiliated with it. He’s like, “Why are you guys hiring Roto-Rooter individually for all of your restaurants when something goes on? Why don’t you have your own maintenance department and dispatch your own crew out to the different restaurants this corporation owned? My dad developed that department simply because he could see that there was a need. There was a more efficient way to run that railroad.
I wouldn’t necessarily think of him as entrepreneurial. I scare him a little bit. I wouldn’t say that they were entrepreneurial. I’ve always been like, “I want to do that.” It doesn’t occur to me that I can’t until somebody tells me that I can’t. I would believe them for a long time and go, “I shouldn’t go that route because that isn’t normal.” I had a convoluted way to get through school and develop my business. It feels like none of it was on purpose. Everything was an accident.
It was like back to the Steer ‘N Stein as a bus girl and hosting. I was supposed to go to San Diego State when I graduated from high school. I was going to be a Communications major. I was signed up for a dorm, ready to go, class schedule. I turned eighteen, and the restaurant people said, “Now that you’re eighteen, you can be a waitress because you’re old enough to serve beer and wine.” Those waitresses were bringing in $50 a night. It was crazy money.
I told my poor parents that I was not going to go to San Diego State. I was going to stay in Norco and be a waitress. Dinners at my house were not fun. My parents were mortified. I waited tables for 6, 8 months. I was like, “This is probably not a good future for me.” I learned a lot about hustle, work ethic, multitasking, and reading the room. I did make good tips cause you got to read those individual tables.
SEO Expert: Bloggers don’t sell anything or provide any paid services. They get paid to put their thoughts and creations out on the internet for people to read.
 
I met a customer who would come in. She’s like, “What are you doing here? Why are you not in school?” I said, “I don’t know. I did this thing. I did this other thing. I’m spinning now.” She said, “You would be a great Journalism major and USC has a great Journalism school.” I went no to SDSU, yes to waitressing and then came home to my parents and said, “I’d like to go to USC.” God bless them. My parents said, “Okay. Anything to get this girl in college. Let’s trade up to the more expensive school.” In the late ’80s, I had fun at USC and I left after two years with a cumulative GPA of 1.8. They had an active Greek system and I spent a lot of time there.
First off, let me go back to your dad. Thank you for his service. Second, I loved how you said, “I scared him.” He’s a 22-year helicopter pilot, United States Marine Corps, scared by his daughter. That’s about the only thing that would scare a Marine Corps helicopter pilot. Your mom is a first responder, a nurse. We’re grateful for her service, too. 
I was on a call with someone who has this robust intern apprenticeship recruiting system. Don’t hire everybody who comes through the system, but somebody hires everybody who comes through the system. He was anti-college and he owned a digital agency. He was like, “By the time they come out for what we do, we have to teach them everything anyway. It’s better to intern, apprentice, and go on.” 
I’m a proud first-semester dropout. I thought I was going to be an engineer. Math and Science were my strong points. I never took a book home in my life. I had a part-time sales job. When I saw what my income was, I went to my advisor and said, “How much am I going to make when I’m an engineer in four years?” He told me, and I was like, “That’s half of what I make now.” I only work evenings. The siren of dollars sang my song, and off I went. Is Houndstooth Media your first company?
No.
How did you open your first company and what did you do?
My first company was me as a solopreneur. I made flower arrangements and furniture.
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Does that go hand-in-hand?
After USC, I fell back into waitressing where I met my starter husband. He came in as a customer. We got married. My two oldest sons are the result of that relationship. I don’t regret anything. I’m one of those people like, “That’s cute or cool, but I’m not going to pay that money.” I’m always the person who would look at the cute flower arrangement and figure out how they put that together, go home, and DIY it.
I always look at things. What can I do about that? What is something that’s about to be wasted? What can be leveraged and how can I turn it into something valuable that other people would maybe discard? It got started because we tore down an old fence in our yard and I wouldn’t let my husband throw away the fence pickets. He’s like, “What are you going to do with these?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” I made a bed out of them. I made a headboard and a footboard that were picket fences and people liked it.
I made more of them and sold them at a home and garden antique shop near where we lived. I started taking orders that way. Later on, I created a pottery business. We had moved up to the Portland, Oregon, area. I lived there for about ten years. Things weren’t working out with me and my starter husband. We were getting a divorce. I’d been a stay-at-home mom and had two little kids. I’d been taking pottery classes as a hobby. I was making gifts for family and friends. I had people asking for things specifically.
I created a pottery business called Under the Ivy. I sold things out of farmer’s market out the back of my car because I didn’t have a husband or any income. I would go to the farmer’s market, sell everything that I had, take custom orders for the following week, go home, unpack my car, start working again, and make the play in clay all week until the following Saturday for the farmer’s market. That’s what I did for about a year and a half.
I finally ended up going back to work. I worked in a law firm doing, not paralegal stuff, but just like a gal Friday, whatever these guys needed help with. That’s when I was like, “I could be a lawyer, too. Clearly, you don’t need a whole lot of smarts based on some of these people that I’m encountering. I could be an attorney.” USC was way far behind me, so I went back to school up there in the Portland area and I have a degree in Public Administration with an emphasis on Policy Development. I went from pottery to politics. That was interesting.
I enjoyed that a lot and I didn’t realize it at the time, but politics is marketing. It is like, “Would you cut field funding for the elderly? Do you think you’d like to kick a puppy?” Which of those is more palatable to you? Nobody wants to kick a puppy. It’s how you phrased everything, how you pitched things, and how you could influence. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was marketing.
SEO Expert: You’re not the end-all-be-all for your clients. Learn how to let go of your ego and relax your grip on things. Stop being a control freak, and your business will take off.
 
By that point, I was dating my husband, who is an attorney and he’s like, “You would hate being an attorney. Don’t do it.” I didn’t end up going to law school, but I did get into marketing and worked with a public affairs firm. I enjoyed that and it appealed to my, “How can we look at it, twist this, leverage this, that somebody else is discarded? How can we reach somebody and provide something?” That’s how that got started.
It’s pretty common for an entrepreneur for their path to weave and wind up and down and through the valley and around the corner. It sounds like that’s been your path. How did you start Houndstooth Media Group?
That was the culmination of me building things and writing. I did a lot of writing working for the public affairs firm. I’ve always been interested in it. Remember USC journalism school way back then? I decided to stay home with our youngest son. We have four sons. The three older ones were his and mine, and then the youngest one is ours. I decided to stay home with him and then quickly got a little antsy. I don’t scrapbook. I started writing down the funny things that my boys did and putting them out onto this blog.
I didn’t realize that my first post was live on the internet. I published it out there into the ether. One day I got a comment and I couldn’t believe it. How dare somebody read what I put on the internet? I don’t know what I was thinking. That was my first experience with search happening the other way, which is SEO. I searched for things on the internet at that point, but it didn’t occur to me that somebody could search for something and find me. That opened up a whole universe to me, understanding that people could find me.
I ended up doing the DIY thing. I’m building beds, decorating rooms, doing flower arrangements, cooking, and putting it on my website. I developed a pretty decent following. I was making money because that’s how bloggers get paid. I didn’t sell anything or provide any services. I put my thoughts and creations out on the internet. It provided value to people who wanted to try to emulate it or get the how-to, or whatever. My ads would payout. I started working with companies and brands to do sponsored posts for them and monetize my blog.
Houndstooth came about because I have a friend who’s a luxury real estate agent up in the LA area after eight years of that. She said, “I have to write a blog post once a week for my brokerage. Would you please ghostwrite for me? I am too busy.” I said, “Sure.” While I was in there helping her with this blog post, I looked at what this luxury brokerage house was doing with its marketing department. I was like, “This is not how you use social media. They’re not doing it right. This is not how you use blogging. This is not how you put things on your website.”
I told her that they didn’t know what they were doing. She said, “Would you consider telling the guys that?” I’m glad I didn’t know it at the time. I thought the guys were her work friends and colleagues. The guys were the five founding partners of this boutique brokerage in Beverly Hills. I’m like, “Sure.” We sat down at the conference table. I started telling them all the things that were wrong and asked, “What should you do to fix it?” They said, “Can you fix it for us?” I said, “Yes, but it’s easy for me. You can do it, too.” My friend figuratively kicked me under the table and shot me a look.
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That’s where I went, “I’ll get you a proposal. That’s what I’ll do, a proposal. That’s how that works, right?” My friend helped me write the proposal. She told me what to put in it. She told me how to break down, what I was going to do, and what the value is like a total lesson on the fly. She said, “Pick a number that makes you uncomfortable.”
Keep in mind that I’m a DIY, frugal, cheap blogger. I picked a number that I was not comfortable with. She goes, “Triple it.” I about fell over and she goes, “Trust me.” I gave them the proposal. They did not bat an eye. For the next six months, I single-handedly sat there and revamped a marketing department from my dining room table. That’s what I did.
That’s how Houndstooth was born. While I’m doing that, I have all of these other real estate agents seeing what’s happening and coming to me saying, “Can you help me with my personal brand?” and so on and so forth. I was calling in friends that I have from the blogging community going, “Can you optimize a YouTube channel? Let me hire you to do that.” I am still, to this day, building the plane while I fly it. That’s how it all rolls together. You say yes to an opportunity and you figure out how you’re going to do it later, but you start with a yes.
All progress starts with a yes. Sometimes catastrophe is avoided with a no, but progress starts with the yes. How long has Houndstooth been in business?
We’re in our eighth year in 2022. 
In those eight years, see if you can share a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty good, and then all of this sudden, 1 or 2 things fall into place, business takes off and finds a new level. Do you have a moment like that you can share?
I do. It’s the moment that I realized that I am not the end all be all and that clients only want to work with me. The moment I let go of my ego and relaxed my grip on all things control freak, my business took off. I started getting the right people around me and trusting them. It made all of the difference. Once I did that, I realized that there are people who can build a better mousetrap. I was trying to figure things out on a yellow, legal pad of paper. I was trying to do Math that way. Somebody came in and goes, “A spreadsheet will do that for you.” That’s not my zone of genius, spreadsheets, legal pads, and numbers.
SEO Expert: Everyone messes up and makes mistakes. It’s better to fall flat on your face because you’re moving forward than fall flat on your butt because you’re going back.
 
I’m an idea person. I’m a, “How can we do this person?” Why am I trying to do all of those things? Once I realized that not only will things not fall apart if I’m not touching every single thing and micromanaging and let everything thing go, it not only made a difference in the business. It made a difference in my life because I’d been given this gift of a business, this accidental business that’s doing great. I was scared that I was going to lose this gift. It appeared suddenly. It could disappear suddenly. That was my mindset. Letting go of that was helpful.
That’s a great warp speed moment. What about a hard lesson? There’s certainly been some time when it was like, “I can’t believe that happened.” Is there a hard lesson that you experienced? Maybe in retrospect, looking back, it turns out that it was positive, but it was uncomfortable maybe even painful at the time? 
I have a million of them, things you didn’t see there was a hole there until something pointed it out that, “You better fill that. You’re going to trip on it.” It’s the idea of the roof leaks. You should fix it before it rains. We’ve heard that expression before. Sometimes you don’t know you have a leak until it does rain. You point out, “There’s where the leak is. When the storm is over, I’m going to go fix that.” We have a lot of those moments, but the idea that I like is we are all going to mess up. We’re all going to make mistakes. Fall forward. I would rather fall flat on my face because at least it’s forward motion rather than fall flat on my butt because then you’re going back.
We are able to take even our mistakes and turn them into a gain for the company. It hurts while it’s happening, but then we’re patching that hole in the roof. We know we’re not going to deal with it going forward. We’re also able to take some of our clients’ failures and see how we safeguard against our other clients, not having that happen to them. Maybe it’s a failure a client came to us with that we had to fix. Now that we know that’s a thing for some people, we can go through and assess all of our other clients and go, “This one might have that same problem.” We can proactively get it in front of it. Mistakes are good.
Either you win or learn, and learning is a little slower than winning. Your success is almost equidistant from the midline. The heights of your success are almost equidistant to your failures’ depths. When you see people that have climbed the huge mountain, they typically have been in the deep valley at some point. Think about a digital agency, golden nugget, something that I don’t know that you could share with me that I would leave here and say, ” I must go do that immediately.”
Most of my golden nuggets are the golden rule, not like some technical gem that you can take this back to your IT person or your webmaster and fix. Some of it is just common sense and because it’s common sense. The big questions that I get are always around SEO and Google. You have got to make Google happy. You do. If Google isn’t happy, Google’s a lot like mama, ain’t nobody happy. There’s a lot of mystery around SEO, Google, and search. It doesn’t need to be that mysterious.
Google needs to know three basic things about your website. They’re technical. Who are you? What do you do? Who do you want to be working with? You can tell Google those things on your website. If Google knows those things, you get offered up in the search rankings. Clients spend a lot of time talking about themselves on their websites. “We are this wonderful coaching firm, and we will help you with all of your problems. The benefits are your team is running smoothly and you make more money.”
In SEO, Google is like your mom. If she isn't happy, nobody is. Share on X
If you’re somebody who needs those benefits, you’re not searching for, “How do I have my team run smoothly? How do I make more money?” Nobody’s typing that into a search bar. What they are typing into a search bar or asking Siri about is, “Our team meetings are not running smoothly or internal squabbles with the team members.” You need to address that client’s pain point.
It’s great to say who you are and what you do. If you don’t have that third, “Who do you want to be working with?” You want to work with the people who have the problems you want to solve for them. Keep your consumer hat on. When you are searching for something, are you giving Google the answer? You’re asking Google a question or talking about a problem that you’re trying to solve. You’re searching for your pain points.
If you don’t have your ideal customer’s pain points outlined clearly on your website, in your copy, the people underestimate the importance of your copy. You’re not getting found. You need to be able to niche down and be specific. There are all sorts of backend technical things that you can do with regard to your digital marketing. The simplest of those is to be clear about who you are, who you serve, and what hurts them.
The next question is, you have the opportunity to step into a time capsule, go all the way back, and have 5 minutes with 20-year-old Vivienne so you can share one piece of advice only. What entrepreneurial advice do you give to 20-year-old Vivienne that you know now?
I would be able to tell 20-year-old Vivienne lots of mistakes to avoid. We talked about the fact that mistakes are good and every single mistake I’ve ever made in my life has me where I am right at this moment in my life. I like where I am at this moment. The advice I would give myself with regard to entrepreneurship is to reach out for help sooner and not assume that somebody else will fill holes and fix problems.
I’m perfectly capable of doing that. I just wouldn’t have believed that I could solve my own problem at twenty. I kept going the college route because you need to get a college degree. That was hammered into me in high school. Years later, we are from high school, and I don’t think that everyone needs to go to college. There are a lot of Elizabeth and Poetry majors who are working at Starbucks. You don’t have to have a degree to get a degree three. I have four boys and I have one who is finishing up his Chemistry degree, but the other three are out working already.
One of them, my son, Connor, is doing video production and working in the industry he wants to be working in. College would not have helped with that. That is experiential. Who do you know gets the hands-on training? We have preconceived ideas of what our life should look like. If it doesn’t look like it’s heading on that route, we think we’re not succeeding. I spent some years thinking I wasn’t succeeding because of the mistakes, which proved valuable later. I wish I hadn’t felt that at the time, that it somehow was done.
SEO Expert: Google needs to know three basic things about your website: who you are, what you do, and who you want to work with.
 
That’s human nature. We all struggle at times with, “Am I good enough? Am I making the right choices?” It’s true that wherever you are is a product of all of your experiences good, bad, ugly, as Clint Eastwood used to say. As far as the college thing, it was years ago that even the big tech comp, the monster tech companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and LinkedIn, are no longer requiring computer engineers and developers to have four-year degrees. 
Truthfully, the most gifted employees they found were self-taught. They didn’t learn it in school. They learned it in the world. Minus the last 150 years, that’s how everybody learned everything anyway. I love that. Vivienne, how could and should we reach out to you if we wanted to contact you for all things digital media? 
You can go to our website, which is HoundstoothMediaGroup.com. You can email me at Viv@Houndstooth.MG.com.
It’s so much my pleasure to have you. I’m glad to see you. It’s been a while. During COVID, I missed seeing people. We’re back, at least with the magic of Zoom. I’m grateful. Thank you so much for coming on the show. 
It was my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
That’s our episode of the ProvenEntrepreneurShow.com. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.
 
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Houndstooth Media Group
Viv@Houndstooth.MG.com

 
About Vivienne Wagner
Wife, mom, creative type & smart-ass. Also a child of the King and blessed beyond measure.
 
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E39 | Here Comes Santa Claus…
Date: August 26, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/here-comes-santa-claus/
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Content:
What’s the secret to landing a Shark Tank Deal with Barbara Corcoran? Here to share his wisdom and experience is Mitch Allen, the Founder and Head Elf of HireSanta. This is far from Mitch’s first-hand in entrepreneurship, but the failures and the many lessons he learned along the way brought him to his success now. Tune in as he joins Don Williams to share the ups and downs of his entrepreneur journey.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Here-Comes-Santa-Claus....mp3
HERE COMES SANTA CLAUS…
MITCH ALLEN AKA “SANTA” ALLEN LANDS ABC SHARK TANK DEAL WITH BARBARA CORCORAN
I’ve got my good friend, Mitch Allen as our first guest. Mitch has started over ten businesses for several years. In 2019, he had a successful exit from a company he founded in 2001 by the name of LeadRival, which he sold to a competitor. You might recognize Mitch from his many appearances on ABC Shark Tank. He appeared on Shark Tank with his company HireSanta and struck a deal with Barbara Corcoran. Mitch, welcome to the show.
I’m so glad to be here, Don. Thanks for having me.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much. Let’s start. What are you doing? What’s your passion? What are you working on?
My passion is entrepreneurialism. I love thinking about businesses and talking to people about how they make money. Also, reading about businesses and trying to implement the things that have worked for other people in my businesses. My main business since I’ve sold LeadRival is HireSanta. In HireSanta, we help brands associate themselves with Christmas, primarily through the use of the holiday entertainer, Santa Claus. We staff Santa Claus entertainers around the world.
When you staff Santa Clauses, does that mean I have a Christmas party and I can have Santa at the party or I own a chain of retail stores and I can have Santas in my stores or all the above?
The answer is yes. We staff everything Santa-related. If you want Santa to come by on Christmas Eve for a 30-minute visit, we can do that or up to a full season event, which is about 400 hours starting. Usually, the first weekend of November and runs through Christmas Eve. It’s anything in between staffing Santa. We also staff several big events where we staff Santa and Mrs. Claus.


Shark Tank Deal: The number one thing is knowing how to make money and acquire clients. Acquiring clients is always the hardest thing to do.

 
Many times, we’ll have multiple Santas and multiple Mrs. Claus at a location, entertaining elves and hostess elves put on real productions. Our executive producers have tremendous experience in putting on very large events soup to nuts. What we got our start in is this home visit or company visit where you want to have a little bit of extra Christmas magic by bringing in a Santa Claus.
Where are you from? Were your parents entrepreneurial? Tell us a little bit about your childhood and your background.
In talking with hundreds of entrepreneurs through Entrepreneurs’ Organization, EO, I have found that many, if not most, 80% of entrepreneurs, their parents were entrepreneurs or maybe had a grandparent that was an entrepreneur that was able to see what it’s like and have that possibility. My parents were not entrepreneurs. They were educators. My mom was a teacher in the fourth grade and my dad was an elementary principal.
I grew up in a very small town, Denver City, Texas, out in the middle of West Texas, about 80 miles South of Lubbock. It’s a little bit of an oil and gas town and had a traditional small-town Texas upbringing. It’s a little town with 4,000 people. My wife is from even a smaller town, Sundown, Texas. It’s one blinking light town of about 1,000 people. We’re a small-town Texas but we lived here in the Metroplex South Fort Worth area for many years on the Fort Worth side of things.
My background, I come from a town of about 1,100 people. When the fair was there, everybody was in town. Maybe we were counting the cats and dogs too. I’m not sure. My parents were not entrepreneurial until after I was. Talk about work ethic. I won’t put any words in your mouth. As a young boy growing up in Denver City, Texas, talk about your first job and what work ethic your parents instilled in you.
I played tennis as a child and in college as well. It’s my job in a small town. I was going to tennis tournaments almost all summer but I always had this notion of hustling. It wasn’t necessarily about making money but it was about doing something and the reward of it was making money. It was a job, though. I had my best friend and later my business partner for several years in LeadRival lived across the street. He’s a couple of years younger than me. We roofed houses. We started when I was fourteen and we did that for a couple of years as my first real job.
For every successful business, there are twenty businesses that fail.CLICK TO TWEET
We were roofing houses, only the two of us, on top of a roof of Denver City, Texas, stripping shingles, nailing them down, 110-degree weather all day every day. It was brutally hot. That’s one of those jobs that always say that teaches you character type of thing. My parents worked hard as teachers but for me, I always wanted to do something. I bought and sold baseball cards, comic books and old ‘50s and ‘60s Coke machines. We did a lot of things. We were hustling. Once I got to grad school, I bought and sold rental properties. It was always this notion of hustling a little bit but it was more about finding something interesting to do other than almost anything else.
Talk about your next path. You went on to school, military or Merchant Marine. What’d you do?
I went to school and studied mathematics. I did not know what I wanted to do. I got a degree in Mathematics and then I went to grad school. I got a Master’s in Applied Mathematics, worked towards a PhD in Applied Mathematics and then decided, “I should get a PhD in Statistics.” I was working on my dissertation in Applied Mathematics and switched to Statistics. I went through all the courses and tests to get a PhD in Statistics. I was working on what they call ABD, All But Dissertation in Statistics. I got married and dropped out of school because I didn’t want to be a professor anymore.
I thought I wanted to be a professor. I love teaching. I still might go back and teach at some point but I did not like research. At the time, my idea of doing research is there was somebody who was holed up in their office, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee all day, every day. That did not appeal to me. I enjoy teaching but the research I was not good at and didn’t have any passion for. I got a job with a company that then got bought by CityGroup doing statistical analysis and model building for them.
Your first job out of college was entrepreneurial. You went to work for a big company and eventually, full rolled up into the city, the credit business and somehow. Tell us how you started your first business then. What was your first real business? Even though at fourteen roofing houses, that might be a real business.
When people ask me about my businesses, I’m like, “I’ve got 3 real businesses,” even though I may have 7 or 8 technical businesses. In grad school, my partner and I had six rental properties. That was a real business, even though we were not treating it like a real business. I remember when we handed over “our books” to one of our other partners in LeadRival. It was a spiral notebook in that I had written down some things. It was awful. It had no accounting because I didn’t have a business background at all and hadn’t even thought about it. That was a real business. We ended up buying an apartment complex, a small C-minus-minus apartment complex that pretty much lost all the money that we’d made in the awesome minds we made in rental property.


Shark Tank Deal: Making money when you can is super important because you never know when it’s going to stop.

 
With the first real business, my partner was an attorney and so we started a small local bankruptcy law practice in Fort Worth. That was a real business. That’s when I left CityGroup at the time to join full-time and then we started an advertising company that became LeadRival after that. That’s what started. Many of my businesses were what I call adjacent businesses. I have a business and then we vertically integrate the whole thing. We’re spending 35% of our money giving to somebody else to do our advertising. It’s not that hard to place TV advertising, direct mail or Yellow Pages. We’re like, “Let’s start an advertising company.” That’s how we started LeadRival, the internet came and we were off to the races.
Taking things that are cost and turning them into income-producing.
That’s the theory.
I love that early entrepreneur who kept books in a notebook. I’ll tell you a funny story. My grandfather who owned about 400 rental properties kept his books in brown grocery paper bags because he was too tight to buy paper. There’s some benefit in being frugal. Your business HireSanta, tell us how you got started there.
With all my businesses, HireSanta is the most of my business. Many entrepreneurs I find hate partners or have some story or thoughts about partners. I love having partners because partners in many ways, whether it’s an actual equity partner or a key executive that maybe has some equity or Phantom shares of some sort, can be additive to myself and be strong in things that I’m not doing. For most of the businesses that I have or have had, I’ve had 1 up to 5 partners that help to do things that I’m not good at, whether that be customer service, managing the call center, doing books, financial stuff or whatever it is.
HireSanta is a business that I started myself. I’ve done everything until I got a deal with Barbara on Shark Tank. It was started strangely enough from a nonprofit that I started in 2005 with some other people. In 2008, my executive assistant asked me to dress up as Santa and hand out Christmas bonuses at our Christmas party. We had, at the time, nice Christmas parties. It was a lot of fun. Fun was one of our core values.
A lifestyle business is a business that funds a lifestyle.CLICK TO TWEET
That same year, I went and did a cookie decorating party for my daughter that my wife had every year when they were young. I was hooked on Christmas and being Santa. This reflected love or the love that the kids have. The faith, joy and magic of Christmas are magical. Expressing it to you like Santa, not only to your kids but to everybody else is magical. I looked terrible as Santa goes. I’m a Santa snob now.
Our clients want the best Santas so we try to have great-looking Santas. Being an all-in type of guy, I became a top Santa on beard. Think of Tim Allen in The Santa Clause movies. Over the next 3 or 4 years, I appeared in some national TV commercials. I’ve since been in some of the biggest parades in the world as Santa and then got to this point where people are wanting to pay me surprisingly a lot of money to be Santa. I got too much business.
There was some business that I didn’t want to do, still good money but not the money that I wanted to work for. I then become an internet marketer. In 2012, I bought a variety of domains, including HireSanta.com and started doing internet marketing to generate leads for Santa Claus around the country. I formed the company in 2012 and off to the races since then. It is growing at a good clip ever since.
I saw your first presentation episode on Shark Tank. How many Santas did you have on stage?
I had around 20 Santas, Mrs. Claus and 2 mascots.
You’ve been an entrepreneur for several years. You started as a kid. What about a hard lesson? Something you learned along the way and there are probably several but pick one that you’d share with us.


Shark Tank Deal: Everybody can go onto Google and spend a million dollars and acquire $600,000 worth of clients, but how will you acquire clients less expensively than your competitor or a competitor out there?

 
I’ve got a bunch of lessons. I’ve talked several times about the lessons of being an entrepreneur. Everybody has this survival ship bias about entrepreneurs, particularly in EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Everybody’s business is at a successful level. For every successful business, twenty businesses fail. Being an entrepreneur is very difficult. It’s not nearly as easy. One of the lessons that many entrepreneurs get into and people think about entrepreneurship is the notion of a lifestyle business isn’t an entrepreneur in some way.
That’s false. Being a lifestyle business, there’s an entrepreneur that funds that lifestyle. It may not be a hundred-million-dollar business or a billion-dollar business but it can be a great business that can fund your lifestyle, provide security, maybe even provide jobs for kids or grandkids or whatever happens to be. It’s a business that funds a lifestyle. Along the way, I’ve had lots of business lessons, especially with businesses that have failed.
The number one thing is about knowing how you make money and acquire clients. Acquiring clients is always the hardest thing to do. One of my businesses that we were going to spin off from LeadRival was to do credit monitoring. From LeadRival, as a secondary source, we sold credit monitoring leads to a third party, one of the biggest credit monitoring places. We’re making a good amount of money selling leads to these things the same way. This is something that’s a pack of commodities in some ways. If we’re making a little bit of money by selling the leads, I bet we can make a bunch of money by doing the whole thing.
“Let’s be our own customer.” We created our credit monitoring service. It’s called Identity Cred. In essence, we white label. Somebody is doing it themselves. For a variety of reasons, we weren’t able to capture it in the same way. My number one reason to start a company is we have a low-cost source of leads. We have an unfair advantage to acquire clients.
We didn’t. I didn’t understand how we would acquire clients that were not only ours but other people. That’s my biggest lesson. When I talk to new entrepreneurs, I always ask them, “How are you going to acquire clients? It’s unfair or maybe it doesn’t sound right but how are you going to do it cheaper than everybody else? Everybody can go onto Google and spend $1 million and acquire $600,000 worth of clients but how are you going to acquire clients less expensively than your competitor or any competitor out there?” My biggest thought and lesson whenever I wanted to open or think about a new business is, “Do I have a competitive advantage in acquiring clients?”
In my consulting business, I pretty much worked with people on the sales side. I can do the other stuff but I don’t want to. My theory is if we bring in enough dollars, half of your problems will evaporate and the other half, you can afford to fix. It’s a lot simpler.
Sales cures all things.CLICK TO TWEET
That’s a sales grid result. One of the things that I said in one of our businesses for a long time was about the profitability of our business. The saying I had, the Yogi-ism is, “If we weren’t so profitable, we wouldn’t be in business.” We probably have decent margins but we don’t know it because we got all these holes that are in our funnel that we’re losing money. In the end, we have a little bit of money left. If we weren’t so profited at the top, we wouldn’t be making money at all. Sales cures all things.
What about a work speed moment? In one of your businesses, things are going fairly well and all of a sudden, 1, 2 or 3 things fall into place where you explode.
I’ve had several moments like that. Both in the law firm that I was working in for a while, a nonprofit, as well as in LeadRival, some of that has to do with regulatory. This will harken to another one of the business lessons that I’ve learned as an entrepreneur. Regulatory laws changed for filing bankruptcy in 2005, the consumer protection or bankruptcy protection.
Consumer protection and bankruptcy laws went into effect in September and October of 2005. Everyone rushed to file for personal bankruptcy before the laws changed because it came more difficult. During that time, it was a madhouse for 6 or 9 months about people filing for personal bankruptcy. The laws didn’t change it too much but the perception was. There was a rush to filing, gearing up and getting everything put into place. It was very difficult. At times, I wanted to tap on the brakes.
One of my lessons about this was to make money when you can because making money is much harder than most people think. To make money consistently over a long period is difficult. When you can make money, you should make money. We could have stayed open longer but we turned people away. We should not have done that at the time because, for the next 2 years, bankruptcy filings were down a huge amount, 100% it ever happened. It gradually increased over the next 2 or 3 years. Making money when you can is super important because you never know when it’s going to stop.
I’ve seen so many marketers have a successful marketing plan and then tap the brakes and say, “We’ll do that business next year.” Maybe you will but maybe you won’t. It’s best to make it happen while it happens. Think back, if we could put you in a time machine and you could go back and talk to twenty-year-old Mitch, which you only have a couple of minutes and you can only tell yourself one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be that would help you on your entrepreneurial journey?


Shark Tank Deal: Take risks sooner rather than later because it is so much easier to be an entrepreneur when you’re young versus old.

 
When I talked to people, I used the word scared, fearful or frightened about whatever it happens to be. I would say take more risks more often. My kids don’t see it this way at all. They think that I am outgoing, entrepreneurial, risk-taking or whatever happens to be. Most of that is learned, forced or whatever that adjective is about me. At the time, though I was very confident, I was not necessarily what most people would say is risk-taking.
To jump in with both feet and not be scared of whether it be failure, ridicule, whatever those words are as well but to be more risk-taking, do that sooner rather than later because it is so much easier to be an entrepreneur when you’re young versus old. I’ve talked with many people who are our age about being an entrepreneur. They’re like, “I’ve got this idea.” I’m like, “Go do it,” but they can’t because they have two kids, a dog and a cat in the house and these huge obligations but when you’re 20 or 25, living on ramen, it’s so much easier because your obligations are so much less to be thinking entrepreneurial then and try it for 2, 3, 5 or 10 years. You can always go back to the other stuff but once you have the golden or bronze handcuffs, it’s hard to break free, go off and start something.
I heard two nuggets in there. 1) Take risks. 2) Push your fear aside. One of my favorite quotes is, “You’re far better, far stronger and far smarter than you think.” That was the wise Winnie-the-Pooh and that’s a good one.
Entrepreneurs will get this but I don’t view what I do or what we do as risky in the same sense maybe if somebody hasn’t started a business. When I start a new business, say when I started HireSanta, from a tax perspective, it was considered a hobby. I already had revenue and leads and understood the inventory side of it. I also had some diversification in other businesses. For all intent a person starting HireSanta, there was zero risk.
Many times when people think about an entrepreneur, they think that’s a risky thing when it’s not. Most entrepreneurs are risk-averse from a money perspective. The risk is you may not succeed in the way you want to. It will take longer than you think it’s going to be. That is slightly different than maybe what most people think about risk.
If you could ask one thing from this show’s clan or tribe about how we could support you, what’s one thing you’d ask for you?
Take more risks more often.CLICK TO TWEET
Support me as we’re making a big push on social media. We are trying to leverage the collateral that we have. Be part of the HireSanta community, whether that’s @HireSanta on Instagram or Facebook. We’re making a big push in 2021 and 2022 to push out. Always, if you need Santa to come. We’re also looking to expand the number of big events we do like putting on parades. We’ve got some amazing executive producers to put on huge events so we’re going to have to put on huge events. We’re looking to always put on even bigger and better events. We’re always looking for clients.
For anything Santa-related, reach out to HireSanta.com. You can find all the social media tags on the website. Mitch, if somebody wanted to reach out to you directly, what’s the best way to do that?
It’s the same thing. Monitor and get promoted to that but you can also reach me at my email address, Santa@HireSanta.com.
Should we give a plug for EO?
Yes. I’ve been in EO for a long time. It has been life-changing, not only for my business. When I talk to new people about EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization, the reason I joined and they joined is typically 100% business-related and it’s about a forum. Whenever somebody is pitching it to somebody else, it’s like, “Getting a forum in this mastermind type group or this board of directors will help you grow your business. The learning events are amazing.” People who’ve been in more than five years often say it has changed them from a personal standpoint. There’s this interpersonal growth. For me, that has been done in spades. Since I joined, I’m an entirely different person and a lot of that is from the people, the places and the things that I’ve done through you.
I’ll second Mitch’s thoughts. I do think most entrepreneurial organization members join to improve their business. What’s most find as the easiest way to improve your business is to improve yourself. All boats ride higher in a full lake, things go better. Mitch, I want to thank you so much. That’s it for this episode.
 
IMPORTANT LINKS

LeadRival
HireSanta
Barbara Corcoran
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
First Presentation Episode – YouTube
@HireSanta – Instagram
Facebook – HireSanta
Santa@HireSanta.com

 
ABOUT MITCHELL ALLEN
Head Elf at HireSanta, which was featured on Shark Tank and struck a deal with one of the Sharks! We craft unique, memorable Santa experiences in venues of all shapes and sizes all year long.
Experienced Partner with a demonstrated history of working in the legal services industry. Skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Sales, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Partnerships, and Pay Per Click (PPC). Member of EO since 2006. Previous member of YPO.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: S1:E38 | Are YOU Leaving Money On The Table?
Date: August 23, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s1-e38-are-you-leaving-money-on-the-table/
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Content:
 
Sometimes if your pricing model isn’t working, maybe it’s time to change it. Jeremy Brandt changed his model when he found out that the market determines the value of the product, he didn’t. So he and his team changed up their model and it resulted in more success. Join Don Williams as he talks to Jeremy about growing your business the right way so that you could see more profit. Jeremy is the founder and CEO of We Buy Houses and truly believes in the power of lead generation. Know that as a business owner, there is a lot of money left on the floor. So you have to take the time to really think about how you spend and structure your credit card. Build networking relationships today so that you can be a successful entrepreneur!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Are-YOU-Leaving-Money-On-The-Table-.mp3
 
Are YOU Leaving Money On The Table?
More Money Through Proper Pricing With Proven Entrepreneur Jeremy Brandt
In this episode, I have a good friend, great entrepreneur, Jeremy Brandt, Founder of We Buy Houses. Tell me, how long have you been with We Buy Houses? 
I started WeBuyHouses.com years ago. Prior to that, I had a lead generation business where we sold leads to real estate investors all over the country and saw working with thousands of investors that there was a need for a reputable national brand that residential investors could operate under. We built WeBuyHouses.com to be exactly that thing, a national brand that investors all over the country use in their business to work with home sellers.
Do I understand that you started out generating leads and then you became a consumer of your leads? 
That’s right. We started years ago generating leads for investors. We still do that. That’s still the largest lead gen company for investors in the country. We’re excited about that. That company is called Fast Home Offer. Out of that experience, we started seeing a need in the marketplace for this branding. There’s very little branding around residential real estate investing.
It’s a fragmented market. People don’t know who to trust. With their signs on telephone poles, you don’t know who’s behind that sign. We wanted to create an environment where consumers could trust the company that they were dealing with. The idea behind WeBuyHouses.com was to create a trusted brand for consumers and identify very experienced and established real estate investors that we would be proud to be part of our brand in cities all over the United States. We’re in 90 or 100 cities all over the US buying thousands of houses a year under the We Buy Houses brand.
Let’s go back to young Jeremy, your childhood. Where are you from? 
I grew up in Spokane, Washington, which is on the Eastern side of Washington State, right on the Idaho border. I had a great childhood with loving parents and a big family. I’m the oldest of seven. I have lots of brothers and sisters. I was very entrepreneurial from a young age. I was the kid that was buying candy bars from my mom at Costco and selling them around the neighborhood.
My dad, at one point, worked at a machine shop. They provided gloves for a cheap price to all the machine shop workers. I bought a giant box of gloves from my dad and went around the neighborhood and tried to sell them to people for gardening. There wasn’t a business idea that I didn’t like when I was young and into my teens.
Were your parents entrepreneurial? Is that what started it or did you come with that at birth?
There's very little branding around residential real estate investing. It's a really fragmented market. Share on X
I was born with it. My dad was a little bit entrepreneurial. He bought a house and would fix it up. We would live in it for a couple of years and then sell it but not as a business. He was a pastor of a church up in Washington State. That was a great environment for me to grow up in. It was a small church, so he worked full-time throughout my childhood doing other things. It’s somewhat entrepreneurial that I got a little bit of a bug from him but I was born with this drive to solve problems, figure things out, mow lawns, shovel snow and do all that stuff as a kid.
You live here in Dallas-Fort Worth. How did you get from Spokane to DFW? 
I moved down here when I was sixteen with my family. There was some investment opportunity. We have some relatives that live down here in the area. It came down for about a year. At the time, I was into computers and found a job at a computer store. The other thing about my background is I was homeschooled. All the kids in my family were homeschooled all the way through.
It made for a great flexible environment. I loved it and thrived under it. I got a job at a computer store when I was sixteen here in Bedford, Texas. I couldn’t imagine somebody would pay me to sit around all day and play on computers. It was so much fun. When I was seventeen, my parents moved back up to Washington as they had planned to. I decided I was going to stay here and they were supportive of it. I worked a little bit longer at the computer store and then got involved in larger things. A few years later, I started a business.
You graduated from homeschool. I was a homeschool parent myself and my three nephews went all the way through homeschool. I know a little more than a little about homeschooling. After that, did you go on to college, the Marine Corps, the Merchant Marine? What did you do? 
I was a very entrepreneurial kid. At seventeen, I was not running a business but was aggressively growing my career. I looked around and said, “Four years of college versus ’98, ’99, the height of the tech boom, I can’t miss this wave.” I kept working and decided not to go to college. I worked successfully for several companies and grew my experience. At the time, I was a Network Engineer, designing a lot of computer networks and doing a lot of the foundational pieces of the internet.
When I was nineteen, this was the silly time when I got a job as a Director for a consulting company here in Dallas. I was flying all over the country, managing projects and doing all kinds of interesting things. We were building a lot of dot-com startups, eBay and major league baseball of the time. I had a bunch of stock options and thought I was going to be a millionaire at 22 and life was going to be great. As we all know, that ended pretty tragically. The company ended up going bankrupt and I lost all the stock options I had.
At one point, they were worth millions of dollars and then went to zero. I got laid off. That was one of the worst and best things that ever happened to me. I say that because I had this incredibly high-paying job with tons of upside doing what I loved. Sometimes for an entrepreneur, if you’re born an entrepreneur, that’s a trap because I was making so much money and having so much fun. It was robbing me of the opportunity to start and build a business, which is what my real passion was. It’s tough to say, “I’m going to go from 6 figures to 0,” especially in your early twenties and build a business.
Proper Pricing: Sometimes being born an entrepreneur is a trap. You can make so much money and have so much fun that it can rob you of the opportunity to start and build a business.
 
I got laid off. It’s the best thing that could have happened in retrospect. I started flipping houses in Dallas. I had a little bit of experience in real estate. I met a friend that was doing it successfully. I teamed up with him and said, “I’ll teach you all the tech side of things. I know how to automate your business and do online marketing. You show me all the ropes in house flipping.” We did that for about six months. I started flipping a lot of houses and went out on my own. I then realized very quickly that the business of generating the leads of home sellers was, in my opinion, much more scalable and stable than the actual house flipping itself.
I started doing online marketing and getting home sellers from Miami and LA to contact us to sell their houses. I didn’t know what to do with them. I was going to fly to Miami just to look at a house, so I started selling those leads, cold calling real estate investors in these different cities and offering to sell them leads. This is much the height of the dot-com boom. This was the height of the real estate boom. Everybody I called said, “Yes, where can I send money? I can’t send it fast enough.” The lead-generation company started growing very quickly.
We stopped buying houses and focused on the tech business. I started growing the tech side of the real estate business. The real estate market crashed after that. I tell people, “Don’t invest in any business that I’m in because it’s going to crash years later.” It has provided a lot of great experience in running the business. You’re tested in the downtimes. I joined a group called Entrepreneurs’ Organization when I was in my early twenties as part of that business.
It taught me a lot about the resiliency of what you learn in the downtime. Those are the toughest times. COVID is coming out of some of the toughest times that most of us have ever been through but you learn how to run a business when times are tough, not when they’re great. Those have been great learning experiences for me through those ups and downs of building a business.
Pretty much anybody can do it when things are going well. 
It’s like investing in stock in the ’90s. If you threw a dart at a wall and it was a tech company, you were going to make a lot of money until you weren’t.
Your company started strictly out of the lead generation side. Lead generation is maybe the number one challenge for most entrepreneurial businesses, having a consistent stream of qualified leads. What’s a hard moment or lesson you’ve learned somewhere in the entrepreneurial path that you could share with us? 
One of the tough lessons that I learned in the lead gen business was doing very well at the height of the real estate market right before the crash. I started buying other companies and investing in a lot of other things. It was going so well that I got a little bit distracted from the core business that needed a lot of focus. When the real estate market crashed, I did not respond fast enough to the downturn. My natural mode of operation is very positive, “We’ll get through it. Keep pushing hard. If you work hard and push, you’re going to get through anything,” which is true but you have to be realistic about things.
The business of generating the leads of home sellers is much more scalable and stable than the actual house flipping itself. Share on X
I was slow to do things you wanted to do, like lay off employees, reduce office space and all the overhead. We had 2 to 3 years of losing money in that lead gen business where I worked for 12 months and at the end of the 12 months, I had $0 to show for my 12 months of effort. That was a tough time. In retrospect, I should have made a lot of tough decisions a lot earlier in the process. You talk about learning lessons from your tough times in life.
In COVID, that has been a great thing that’s allowed us to manage through COVID much faster than in the past if I hadn’t had those life experiences. I was able to reduce overhead very quickly and think about the things that were essential to the business versus things that were nice to have in the business and set us up so that we could weather but we didn’t know it was going to be a month or years of tough times. One of my biggest learnings has been how to spot tough times and then downsize when you need to and not wait too long to make those tough decisions.
It’s too expensive to wait too long. I felt for a long time and partially through my journey that I either win or I learn. Learning is a little slower winning. It’s still winning, just a little slower. What about a warp speed moment? Business is going pretty well. All of a sudden, 1, 2 or 3 things fall into place and then it’s phenomenally good. Typically, as entrepreneurs, we see the highs and lows for a while. Do you have a warp speed moment you can share with us? 
I call those hockey stick moments where you’re on a regular trajectory and then something gets dialed in and explodes. We’ve had a couple of those in the business. One that comes to mind is we changed our pricing model entirely for how our business worked. In the past, we had this flat fee pay per lead model, where we would determine the value of a lead and sell it for that price. Real estate is very local, so the value of a lead and the cost to generate a lead is different all over the country. That became a big struggle for us to understand what the value of our product was times 3,000 counties all over the country.
We spent a lot of time thinking about it. We came up with the idea of a bid-based model for the pricing of our leads. Similar if people are familiar with Google Ads. It’s the same way that keyword bids work. We use that model in our lead generation business, where we allow real estate investors to bid against each other for the price of the lead. That was a hockey stick moment for us because we came upon the situation where the market determined the value of our product. We didn’t determine the value of our product.
Oftentimes, entrepreneurs undervalue what they have. They will look at, ” What does it cost me to generate this thing, widget or product? I’m going to add 50%, 30% or whatever my margin needs to be. That’s what I sell the product for.” Rather than what they think is a much more profitable way to do it. Start with the value to the client like, “What is this worth to the client? Regardless of what it costs me to generate it, how do I charge them a fair price for the value that I’m providing them instead of what my cost is?”
The bid-based model put that on its head and created that environment where the client told us, “What is the value of this thing?” In many cases, it was 3 or 4 times more valuable than we thought that it was. The client said, “I’m willing to pay this price for this thing because it’s so valuable to me.” That transformed our business and set us on a different trajectory.
The ready, willing and able establishes the market. It’s as simple as that. One of the things that I share with my consulting clients is, “Can we raise prices?” Many times, entrepreneurs are too modest. They start with the cost of goods and do some type of adder instead of saying, “What value is my client getting?” That’s a much more equitable way to price. What’s a nugget something you could share with us that we don’t know or something you know that we don’t know that we’d like to know?
Proper Pricing: It’s really important to take time for yourself, even as the president of the United States who has a million things to do. You have to have a clear head and be calm to make a good decision.
 
I don’t know there’s anything I know that you don’t know. For me, if I were to think about some of the nuggets in my business and my life, two things are important. One is taking time for yourself. Oftentimes, I step away from the business for a day, a week or a month to spend time with other business owners but not specifically talking about business on a workday when there’s a lot of stuff to do.
It’s important, especially as the leader of a business, to step away, refresh your mind, decompress and relax. As a leader, the most important thing that you do is make decisions. It’s tough to make decisions if you’re overwhelmed with the minutia, the day-to-day and the fire here and there. That’s important to do.
I remember I had the pleasure of having dinner with George W. Bush one time at an event. We were sitting at a table and asked questions of him. He made a joke. He said, “The reason every president has gray hair is that every easy decision ever made was made before it got to the president. The only decision a president ever makes is the tough, impossible decisions with two bad outcomes.” He was talking about the presidents taking time for themselves. He said, “It was important to take time for yourself, even as the president of the United States, when there are one million things to do because you have to have a clear head and be calm to make a good decision.”
That’s something that I took away from that meeting that I’ve tried to apply a lot in my life. The other fun nugget thing that I spend a lot of time on is in our business, we spend a lot of money on advertising. It’s our number one expense in our business. We have a lot of fun playing with credit card points and figuring out ways to maximize the value of the dollar that you spend.
It’s a lot of fun and you can geek out on it a bit but for a business owner, there is a lot of money left on the floor. If you spend a lot of money in your business on credit cards, taking a little bit of time and thinking about how to structure your points can be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in your pocket that you didn’t realize were sitting out there by spending a little bit of time thinking about the rewards on credit cards.
You’re the king of that. 
I don’t know about that but I had fun with it.
Care to share one tip on how to maximize credit card points?
You really learn how to run a business when times are tough, not when they're great. Share on X
My favorite tip, if anybody out there runs an advertising business, is we found out that with a certain American Express card, you can get 4 points per $1 for advertising. With another American Express card, you can convert those points into cash in a brokerage account at $1.25 per point. In effect, for all of our advertising, we get 5% to 7% cashback off of our advertising spend, which ends up being a lot of money.
According to the IRS, that’s a rebate. It’s not cash in your pocket. It’s also tax-free. It also comes to you personally versus going into your business. When you think about what your tax bracket is, your effective rate of return on your advertising spend could be up to 10%, which if you’re a lead gen company or a big company spending millions and millions of dollars on advertising, that’s a lot of money sitting out there to be captured.
Folks, you might want to back that up and read that one more time. The first time I learned it, I had the sigh, “I’m going to have to look at that a little deeper.” Thank you for sharing that. If we could put you in a time capsule and send you back to 20-year-old Jeremy, you get 5 minutes with him. You can share only 1 piece of advice for 5 minutes, what would you tell yourself that would speed you on your entrepreneurial path? 
If I were to look back at my younger self and give him a piece of advice, it would be to start building relationships with people a lot earlier. Not in a way that is self-serving but in a way that you can help them and they can help you. A lot of entrepreneurs are this way. My personality is very individualistic like, “I’m going to make stuff happen myself.” Early on, I didn’t spend a lot of time building relationships with people in the industry or entrepreneurialism in general.
That would have accelerated my growth in business a lot quicker. It would have been much more satisfying to find groups of people to be around that have a like mind. Iron sharpens iron. Surround yourself with smart people that can help you and you help them make you a better person. When you’re a better person, you’re a better leader. When you’re a better leader, you run a better business.
Let’s give EO a plug. Entrepreneurs’ Organization, you’ve been a member of how long? 
I joined EO in 2012.
Where did you join?
Proper Pricing: As an entrepreneur, you really have to find your tribe. Find like-minded people that you can talk to. Entrepreneurs are odd ducks. Your brain works differently, which is why you need to build relationships.
 
EO is a chapter-based organization, so we have chapters all over the world and I joined the Dallas chapter.
The next big chapter in your EO path was what? 
I’m the guy that wants to get involved in everything right away. I joined the chapter and did some international travel with the organization and then got on the Dallas Board of Directors. Out of that, we felt like we needed to have a chapter in Fort Worth, which is for people who aren’t familiar with the city, it’s right next door to Dallas. Dallas is a wonderful chapter. Fort Worth has its culture and sense of identity. We had this problem where people from Fort Worth would join Dallas and then leave after a couple of years because of the drive or for whatever reason.
As I rolled off the Dallas board myself and several other people from that chapter that lived in Fort Worth, we started a chapter in Fort Worth. That was in 2012. We got together and formed a chapter. For an entrepreneur, there’s nothing more fun than getting a bunch of other entrepreneurs together and creating something. It scratches all of our itches. We had a great time. It was tons of fun. I met all kinds of wonderful people. Years in, we have about 100 members in EO Fort Worth. Some of my best friends are part of the Fort Worth organization and global organization.
I’ve spent years traveling all over the world with EO. My story about having dinner with President George W. Bush was an EO moment. I was at a table with seven other people and a former president of the United States through my involvement in the organization. There are so many once-in-a-lifetime experiences I’ve had as a part of being in this group.
What would you say is the number one takeaway after years in EO? I’ve been in EO myself. It’s a long list but share one.
There are a lot of benefits. If you’ve been in for years, you could talk about the millions of dollars that you’ve saved or made as a result of the things you’ve learned being part of the organization. I could tell a lot of those stories. As time goes on, the number one thing for me has been relationships. Over half of my best friends, people that I spend weekly or a couple of times a month with, are people that I met through the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. The reason for that is that you find your tribe and like-minded people.
Entrepreneurs are odd ducks. Our brain works weirdly. We look around us and see problems everywhere and think about how we’re going to solve every problem that we run into. For people who have careers and work at big Corporate America, sometimes it’s tough for them to understand what it’s like. They have a lot of preconceived notions about what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, that you’re flying on jets and sailing boats around when you’re trying to figure out how to make payroll, pay the bills and put it on your Amex card.
Don't network with people in a way that is self-serving, but in a way that you can help them and they can help you.  Share on X
For me, the biggest thing has been the relationships, guys like you and others that I can call and have lunch with any time. We could not see each other for a year and immediately slip into a conversation about business or life because our brains are wired similarly enough that there’s an instant connection between people in the organization.
I’ve had that with people in Fort Worth, India, China and all over the world where you can barely speak to each other because of the language gap but you have this instant connection because of your entrepreneurial nature. It’s been tons and tons of fun. As I look back, that’s the most important thing I’ve gotten out of the organization.
I’d echo. The connection is unbelievable. I like what David Galbenski said. He coined the term Instamacy. EO entrepreneurs have that instant intimacy regardless of location, culture or language. If somebody wanted to reach out to you, how would we get in touch with you? 
I’m pretty accessible. I’m on most social media. It’s Jeremy Brandt or you go to JeremyBrandt.com and contact me there. I’m very responsive. I’m on LinkedIn and everything else. I love talking to entrepreneurs and working with early-stage entrepreneurs. I do a lot of mentoring with very early-stage entrepreneurs involved in a lot of business plan competitions. I do a lot of judging with the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards. Part of my passion for being an entrepreneur and loving entrepreneurship is meeting and learning from other people that are at all levels, from small to large, building businesses and figuring out how to make them work.
Thank you so much for joining us on the show. It’s my pleasure.
It’s my pleasure, Don. It’s good to be here.
That’s it for this episode with Jeremy Brandt. 
 
Important Links

WeBuyHouses.com
Fast Home Offer
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Jeremy Brandt – Instagram
JeremyBrandt.com
LinkedIn – Jeremy Brandt
Global Student Entrepreneur Awards

 
About Jeremy Brandt
A serial entrepreneur focused on founding, funding, and building companies that leverage technology and marketing to scale quickly in the real estate space. Regular media contributors include FOX News, Larry King Live, CNBC, CNN, FOX Business, NPR, the WSJ, USA Today, and others. Past-President of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Dallas, Founder of EO Fort Worth and Former Chair of EO’s Global Governance Committee.
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E37 | Pharmacist Leonard Lynskey Exits & Becomes A Certified EOS Implementer
Date: August 17, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-37-pharmacist-leonard-lynskey-exits-and-becomes-a-certified-eos-implementer/
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Content:
 
Need help with your business? Perhaps EOS is the solution you’ve been looking for! In this episode, Leonard Lynskey joins Don Williams to share how he went from being pharmacist to becoming a Certified EOS Implementer with his own company, Lynskey Management Services. Leonard knows very well the risks and potential downfalls of owning and managing a business. Tune in to learn about his transition and how EOS became the answer to his business woes.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Pharmacist-Leonard-Lynskey-Exits-Becomes-a-Certified-EOS-Implementer.mp3
 
Pharmacist Leonard Lynskey Exits & Becomes A Certified EOS Implementer
$2MM To $32MM & From Near Bankruptcy To An 8 Figure Exit
I got a good friend, a super entrepreneur, our guest. Welcome, Leonard Lynskey.
Thank you, Don. I’m happy to be here. I appreciate the invite.
I am thrilled to have you. I know a part of your story. I’ll give a little background here and then I’m going to toss the ball to you. Leonard is a recovering pharmacist and was a practicing pharmacist. You owned your pharmacy a couple of different times. We’ll get into that story a little bit. It’s a fascinating story. You are an EOS Implementer, helping entrepreneurs get control of their businesses and their lives. Let’s go way back to young Leonard. Childhood Leonard to 18, 20, what was your first job?
My first job was probably mowing yards with my dad. I could edge and trim the flower beds and he’d pay me $0.50. When I say edge, I’m not talking about a gas-powered weed eater. I had an edger with teeth that you pushed the edges and my flowerbed trimmer were scissors that you squeezed. It was a job for $0.50.
How old were you, Leonard? 
I was probably eight.
At my first job, I mowed the yard, not because I got paid but because there were consequences if I didn’t mow the yard. I probably started about the same age. Were you raised in an entrepreneurial household? Were your mom and dad entrepreneurial? 
Not at all. My parents grew up farmers. My parents were older when they had me, a product of the Depression. My need to work was born out of a need to earn. From the yards, I started delivering circulars for a local drug store in Lubbock. They’d pick us up in the afternoon and we’d put circulars in people’s mailboxes for a couple of hours a day. It was contract work. From there, I had a paper route. That’s when I got the entrepreneurial bug because I had about 60 customers, got another one and ended up with about 400 customers. I was making $300 to $400 a month when I was in 8th grade.
Keep throwing stuff against the wall until it works. Share on X
Trying to dominate the newspaper market in Lubbock, Texas. Even before that entrepreneurial stint, it sounds to me like you start with a great work ethic. 
That’s the one thing my parents gave me. If you wanted something, you had to go out and get it.
We’re up to 50 or 60 interviews. Many entrepreneurs did not have entrepreneurial parents or grandparents but they learned to work hard very early. Would you say the newspaper business was your first entrepreneurial gig?
The newspaper business was my first entrepreneurial gig because I bought products from a supplier. I managed a customer base. I had to do collections. I had to get work, do work and get paid. I managed all of that and it was totally on me. We moved to Dallas by then. I was throwing papers in Garland but I decided that I was going to mimic The Dallas Morning News guys. Rather than going door to door and doing monthly collections, I put envelopes in the paper.
What I failed to appreciate and that was driven home to me was that part of the charm of receiving The Garland Daily News was not the news but it was the kid throwing the newspaper. When I moved to systemize collections, I lost about 25% of my customers. I had given away the charm that was the local kid delivering papers. It was a very valuable lesson for me.
You were born and raised in Lubbock, moved to Garland and did the newspaper. Where did you go to school?
I went to school at the University of Houston. Along the way, I got a job at a drug store. I was selling cigarettes because they sold cigarettes in drug stores back in the day. One Sunday morning, none of the kids in the pharmacy showed up because it was the morning after prom. The pharmacist came up and said, “Can you type?” I said, “I can type.” He said, “You make $0.30 an hour or more in the pharmacy.” I moved to the pharmacy and fell in love with it.
The ability to be able to connect with people, have a conversation, recommend something for them over the counter, provide medications for them, the education, counseling and to help is my motivation. My why is to be able to teach and help, I fell in love with being a pharmacist and helping people one on one. That prompted me to go to pharmacy school. I went to the University of Houston and got a degree in Pharmacy. I graduated from college in 1985.
Certified EOS Implementer: What EOS allows teams to do is break these big issues down into their simplest forms. Issue by issue, week by week, quarter by quarter, you begin to solve them.
 
After you graduated from pharmacy school, did you immediately become an entrepreneur or did you take a job?
I took a couple of jobs in East Texas, false starts. Neither one of them lasted very long. I went to work for an absentee store owner in Rusk, Texas. That’s where I cut my teeth. The guy showed up twice a year. He gave me the keys to the store and said, “Make it work.” Over a 3 or 4-year period while I was there, I doubled the store with no insight and help, just good customer service.
My whole strategy is that as an entrepreneur, one of the keys to success is perseverance or, as I like to say, “I’m too stupid to fail.” You keep throwing stuff against the wall until it works. The experience that I got in Rusk was this hands-off owner who handed me his store and said, “I need you to make it work.” That’s what I did.
Entrepreneurs are, at their base, problem solvers. Not necessarily intelligent problem-solvers. Sometimes it’s like, “I tried this, that and then the other thing. Finally, I found the thing that solved the problem.” Too stupid to quit, so to speak. Years ago, you had a successful exit from the pharmacy business but also know that the path to that exit was fraught with problems. Tell us a little bit about that story.
All of my businesses have been family businesses. We started or bought and sold probably half a dozen pharmacies all of them successfully, except for one we had to close. The last one, we opened a little pharmacy in Sachse, Texas. When I say we, it’s my daughter, my wife and I. My wife’s usually always employee number one. As soon as I hire employee number 2, then employee number 1 retires.
We started this little pharmacy and limped along. It was always my dream to have a little corner drugstore like I’ve seen all my life in Rusk and Rowlett but the market had changed. It was passing it by. Managed care was moving in mail-order prescriptions. We were in Sachse. A lot of people there worked for the school system or in the telecommunication corridor. We built a book of business up, insurance would change, they’d all have to go to mail order and it dropped 50%.
A nurse walked in one day and said, “We’ve got these four clients that live in a halfway house. They’re intellectually and developmentally disabled. We need somebody to take care of them.” My background in a previous pharmacy that I’d had was we’d specialize in doing dialysis and transplant. This whole concept of niche pharmacy or specialty pharmacy, I was very familiar with. We were starving, so I said, “We’ll do it.”
I realized quickly that these four clients in this one halfway house were connected to a company that had 6 or 7 other houses in the Dallas area, which was connected to a company that had provided all over the state. There was this market where there were about 30,000 IDD clients that fit this particular niche that was underserviced. They were serviced by about 500 providers, so we saw an opportunity.
To be successful, you have to be the dumbest guy in the room. You needed to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and could help figure out the best way forward, not just your way forward. Share on X
That was in 2005. It took a couple of years to figure out the story and how to service them and meet their needs well. In 2007, we took off. From 2007 to 2011, we grew from about $2 million in revenue to $32 million in revenue, which sounds awesome on the golf course or at a dinner party but the reality is that I’m a pharmacist by training. Although I had done a stint as Executive Vice President for CVS, I had never run a business. My answer to everything was you can grow out of it if I could get more revenue. Get more clients, spend more money and hire more people.
The problem was, on $32 million worth of revenue in 2011, we had a controller who had stolen $271,000 unbeknownst to us. We were executing so poorly that we had created competition where none of it existed. We were 50 days behind with my primary vendor. I was $7 million in debt. I didn’t know what to do but I was too stupid to fail. At the time, I was in Vistage, which is a CEO peer group. One of my buddies was in there and he said, “You need EOS.” I said, “What’s EOS.” He said, “It’s a how-to for people like you.”
People like me are visionaries. A lot of vision, not a lot of execution, not much on the day-to-day but I can see the big picture and hope I can get enough clients, spend enough money and hire enough people to make it work. That strategy kept getting worse, making it worse and worse. I can remember sitting in meetings going, “If we could get to $15 million, $20 million or $25 million, things will be better.” Things were never better. We started implementing EOS in August of 2012. By the end of 2013, we were breakeven from a cashflow standpoint. At the end of 2016, we had an eight-figure exit.
Tell us a little bit about EOS.
EOS is based on a book called Traction which was written by Gino Wickman. The idea behind EOS is that for every business, regardless of industry, there are six components that you have to strengthen. To the extent that you strengthen these components, you get control of your business and get a better life. All entrepreneurs start their businesses and they have this vision of what their entrepreneurial life is going to be like.
It usually involves raining money, laying on the beach, private jets and lots of time with your family. The reality of their life is they’re working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and powering through. The tools and disciplines in EOS give you the ability to create a business that is predictable and sustainable so that you can begin to marry your entrepreneurial vision with your entrepreneurial reality.
EOS stands for?
The Entrepreneurial Operating System.
Certified EOS Implementer: Sales is magic. If you go to the magic box, stuff a bunch of money in it and shake the box hard, sales will fall out.
 
How many companies in the US are using or have used EOS?
There are 14,000 companies running on EOS. When I talk about 14,000 companies running on EOS, these are companies that have hired an implementer like me to help them implement the system. EOS Worldwide thinks that for every 1 company that has an implementer, 10 more companies are self-implementing EOS in some form or fashion.
Tell us a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey as an EOS implementer. 
We sold the pharmacy because once we got it under control and it started making money, we took a long-term look at where we thought healthcare was going to be 10 or 15 years down the road with all the changes that were coming, the Affordable Care Act, reimbursements, how much the cost of healthcare has gone up and where we thought the cost controls were going to be.
Ultimately, the decision that we came to was that a small regional player in Rowlett, Texas would eventually not have a seat at the table. Right or wrong, good or bad, that was our decision. We decided that once we exited, I wanted to do something else. For all of you who are considering exits, one of the best pieces of advice that I got over and over was you need to figure out what you’re going to do next. As an entrepreneur, being drunk on a beach is not a strategy. It works for a week and then you’re going to be itching to do something.
In my next steps, what I thought about was how powerful EOS had been in helping us create a business that was predictable and sustainable. More importantly, it gave me my life back and it allowed me to be present. I wasn’t sneaking into the bathroom on my kids’ birthdays and sending emails. We go on vacation and I would say, “You’re going to have to accept that from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM, I work on family vacations.” By virtue of being able to manage my business, rather than my business managing me, I was able to have the life that I wanted. When I was thinking about my next steps, I thought, “What I am passionate about is helping other entrepreneurs find that same path.” That led me to EOS.
How many clients do you have? 
I have 25.
There are whos out there that can help you figure out your hows. Lean into those whos. Share on X
You’ve been doing EOS implementation for how long?
For several years, when I started doing EOS, I went to bootcamp and got credentialed through EOS Worldwide. When I told my story and talked about EOS and how great it was, I thought entrepreneurs would be the path to my door. They did not.
Many entrepreneurs think, “If I opened my business and hang out my shingle, there’ll be an eternal line of customers.” Typically, that’s not the case.
How it worked in the pharmacy, it’s not how it worked with EOS. Probably, it’s not how it works in any business.
You got to get out there, shake hands, kiss babies, tell your story and tell it well.
I had to learn a whole new skillset to be able to do that, a skillset that I had never had before.
Think back to a hard lesson you’ve learned in your entrepreneurial journey that you’d share with us. Things were not good. 
The hardest lesson that I ever had to learn was that I had to trust the people around me. As this business grew, before we started EOS, I thought I had to have all the answers. I kept doing the same things over and over, expecting a different result. Everybody knows that if you keep doing the same things over and over, it’s a definition of insanity or, as Henry Ford says, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” One of the most difficult things I had to embrace was that I had to realize that for me to be successful, I had to be the dumbest guy in the room. I needed to surround myself with people that were smarter than me and could help figure out the best way forward, not my way forward.
Certified EOS Implementer: What we did was rather than throw money at the problem, we took a step back because sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.
 
One of the things that EOS gave me is the way it systemizes executing your vision with discipline and accountability, it gives everybody a voice at the table and the courage and vulnerability to be able to trust your team because you’ll know that they’re going to deliver. The best example of that for me is on April 4th, 2016, we got a letter from Texas Medicaid that said as of May 1, 2016, we are changing how we reimburse for medications. With the stroke of a pin on May 1st, 2016, the great State of Texas sucked $1 million out of my bottom line. We were for sale. Imagine how that looks on a multiple.
Two years before we started EOS, we would have been running around the hair on fire like chickens with their head cut off, “What do we do?” There was still a lot of that. The reality is because of the systematic way in which we ran our business using EOS, we were able to sit down. One of the cool things that EOS does is it takes these big issues like COVID. “I can’t get sales. We lost $1 million because of forces outside of our control. What are we going to do?” What it allows teams to do is break these big issues down into their simplest forms. Issue by issue, week by week, quarter by quarter, you begin to solve them.
The solution wasn’t easy. We had to make some hard decisions. It took a few months but four months after we got that letter, we’d made up the entire $1 million. It was because we had a systematic way to approach issue solving and I knew that no matter how big the hill looked, I could rely on my team to find the best answers to move forward. That’s exactly what happened.
Tell us about a warp speed moment. Things are going pretty good in your business and then all of a sudden, 1, 2 or 3 things fall into place and it blossoms.
I always did sales in my companies. I’ve always done startups because, as a visionary, I have the attention span of a gnat. Once I start managing a business, I lose interest in it. We had this business we’d grown fast. We had these incredible issues that we had to solve because we were a hot mess. One of the areas that we were stuck in was how do we get more sales. My answer had always been, you go out to a client, sit down with them, throw up features and then pray that they say yes. If they say, no, I got nothing. The tank is empty. I don’t know what step two was. I do now but I didn’t then.
We had gathered up all the low-hanging fruit, all the people that were in so much pain, that I was the clear answer. We had stopped adding new clients. My answer was, “Sales is magic. If you go to the magic box, stuff a bunch of money in it and shake the box hard, sales will fall out.” We hired a salesperson. They came in. I handed them a phone and they said, “What do you need?” I said, “We need sales.”
A year later, I was their biggest client and I fired them because they were not getting sales. Being the bright guy that I am, I went back to the magic box. I put more money in the box, shook the box even harder and got a high-priced recruiter to go find a high-priced sales professional. If you throw more money at it, that’s the answer. Six months later, they quit because they could see the writing on the wall.
We’re using EOS and understanding the power of accountability, discipline and process. What we did was rather than throw money at the problem, we took a step back because sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. We hired a sales coach, identified our sales process, the necessary steps, who we needed to be talking to, who our target client and our targets within the clients. We created the sales process and got the right person in the seat who was an internal candidate. Magically, we got sales and took off. We didn’t get any new business to speak of for two years. We got the process nailed down and sent the person out there. In six months, we’d grown 25%.
You don't walk into a meeting with a potential client to sell them anything. If you'll walk in with the objective to help, great things will come of that and then the money will follow. Share on X
What’s a word of wisdom from Leonard to the readers?
You don’t have to bear this burden alone. As an entrepreneur, in the back of your mind, you are always under pressure because, at the end of the day, you’re the guy or the gal that bears the burden of the business. You’re responsible for the culture, vision and resources. If this thing goes under, they’re not coming to get your employee’s hows. They’re coming to get your hows. That never goes away. That little pressure or voice in the back of your head is always there, which is why you work when you’re on vacation and you’re on your emails at 2:00 in the morning when you can’t sleep because they’re going to come to get your hows.
You’ve made a commitment to all the people that work for you that you’re going to make sure that they can take care of their hows. You do not have to do this alone. Read Who Not How by Dan Sullivan. There are whos out there that can help you figure out your hows. Lean into those whos. Find help and let people help you. There are plenty of people out there who will, if you’re clear on your vision, buy into your vision and will be just as dedicated to your vision as you are. Let those people help you. You are not alone.
If you could go back, we’ll put you in a time machine and you had 5 minutes with 20-year-old Leonard. In those five minutes, all you could do was share one piece of advice. What’s the one thing you’d tell your twenty-year-old self that would have sped you along your path?
Talk less and listen more. One of the things we teach in EOS and it’s not a concept unique to EOS, it’s a universal concept, when you’re talking to an employee, you should only talk 20% of the time. The 20% of the time you talk, you should be asking questions. Get better at asking questions and listening because there is a difference between hearing and listening. Listening is a full-contact sport. Hearing is letting things run through your ears. If I could tell my twenty-year-old self to shut up and listen, my journey would have been much less painful.
I love the questions versus statements. With my sales consulting clients, I’m like, “You can be a good educator with statements but questions sell, statements tell.”
One of the things I’ve learned as a coach is that it’s not my goal to sell. It’s my goal to help if some business comes out of some chemistry that develops and they think that I can help them solve a problem, one of the things that I had to learn was you don’t walk into a meeting with a potential client to sell them anything. If you’ll walk in with the objective to help, great things will come of that and then the money will follow.
If there’s one thing we could do for you as a client, what would you ask for yourself? It’s generally the hardest one I ask because entrepreneurs have a hard time asking for themselves.
Certified EOS Implementer: Get better at asking questions and listening because there is a difference between hearing and listening. Listening is a full-contact sport. Hearing is letting things run through your ears.
 
I don’t know that I’d ask for anything. I’ve had an incredible journey. It’s been amazing. I’ve come from humble beginnings. Against all odds, I started several businesses, all of which were successful, even the ones that failed. In my mid-50s, I changed careers and have successfully made that transition in my mind. If I had one ask, I think the one ask would be I would like to have everyone who has had any input, influence or help that is provided help to me along the way. If I could get them all in a room to thank them, that would be my ask.
How would we reach out to you and find you?
You can call me, my cell is (214) 668-7761. You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out to my website at LynskeyManagement.com. I’m always happy to have a conversation or a cup of coffee and share whatever insights or information I might have.
Leonard’s a great friend. Reach out to him. It will be worth your time, I assure you. Leonard, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, Don.
That’s it for this episode. See you next time.
 
Important Links

Leonard Lynskey
Traction
EOS Worldwide
Who Not How
LinkedIn – Leonard Lynskey

 
About Leonard Lynskey
Leonard Lynskey became an EOS Implementer™ because of the profound impact EOS® had on his own company, helping him turn a failing multi-million dollar pharmacy business into an extraordinary success. Before EOS®, Leonard experienced his own share of sleepless nights trying to find his way past several significant hurdles. As his company edged closer to bankruptcy, concerns such as customer service, turnover, and of course cash flow were constantly occupying his mind. That left little room for the other important thoughts and activities that helped him keep balance, such as family time and vacation.
In 2012, he came across an EOS Implementer and soon after began implementing the EOS model in his business. In the span of two years, Leonard Lynskey and his leadership team turned the company around from a $2,000,000 loss to over $1,000,000 in profit, all thanks to EOS. After several years spent mastering the system for his own company, as well as coaching fellow business owners through their respective frustrations, Leonard realized his true calling was to help entrepreneurs with their journey through business counselling and EOS. Since becoming a Certified EOS Implementer and business process consultant, he has successfully helped many clients get more of what they want from their businesses.
EOS can be transformative for any business in any industry. Leonard will help you and your leadership team strengthen the six key components, correctly utilize the 20 tools, and implement a proven process that will allow your people to execute flawlessly. As a result, you will experience an immediate improvement in both your business and personal life. Connect with Leonard Lynskey today to schedule your introductory phone call!
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E36 | Fanny Dunagan Builds Intelligent Content
Date: August 10, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/fanny-dunagan-builds-intelligent-content/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Episode-36-Fanny-Dunagan.png
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

Content:
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Fanny-Dunagan-China-to-Canada-to-Singapore-to-Texas.mp3
Let Fanny Dunagan teach you how creating consistent thoughtful content, generates warm leads and lands you more clients.
Content Creation Launches Successful Entrepreneur
Fanny Dunagan is a successful entrepreneur. She focuses on high-yield tasks, leverages her skills, and builds opportunities.
A Successful Entrepreneurs’ Young Start
Fanny’s grandfather was a first generation immigrant in Toronto. Her Grandfather opened a Chinese medicine shop soon after moving, it was understandably a family affair. Fanny remembers spending summers in the store while her grandmother and mother stocked shelves and counted inventory. Her first foray into entrepreneurship was behind the cash register.
Fanny had the world set out before her. She played the piano and loved math and science. She was a civil engineering major in university. As luck would have it, she spent a semester in Singapore as an exchange student during her senior year. She fell in love with Singapore. Almost immediately after graduation, she flew back east to take a corporate job in transportation planning.
Quick Transitions
Fanny spent the next few years building roads and traffic systems. While she loved her job, poring over numbers and Excel sheets became a little tiring after five years. The transition to business consulting almost came too easily. She had recently gotten into training, change management, and communication. When her husband had the chance to move to the United States to open a consulting firm, the decision was easy.
They settled in San Antonio, Texas and helped aerospace and defense companies and technology firms build their brands. A work week involved flying out to see clients on Monday, pitching on Tuesday and Wednesday, and flying back on Thursday. The work was exhilarating.
Steady Middle
When Fanny and her husband, Ryan, decided they wanted kids, they knew they had to slow down. Fanny took on part-time hours when she was pregnant with Mia, and then became a stay-at-home mom when she had Tristan.
Fanny started to miss work when Mia and Tristan grew older and more independent. She was in the corporate world for so long. In a lot of ways, it was all she had ever known.
She started volunteering to teach second language classes in a local outreach center in Grapevine. As her students graduated one by one, she recognized a need to help them find jobs. She organized a job fair with two other volunteers. That job fair became a series of career fairs for the community. She marketed these events through LinkedIn and Facebook. The rest is history.
Successful Finish
These days, Fanny Dunagan is known as the leading content strategist on LinkedIn. She is also the mastermind behind talent acquisition and content creation for SAP, the world’s #1 cloud business software company.
At the onset, she had her hands in everything. She was a successful entrepreneur, content strategist, wife, mom, and daughter. The most important lesson she has ever learned was that this was not sustainable. Today, she concentrates on her strengths, hires for her weaknesses, and delegates non-integral tasks.
A successful entrepreneur knows that excellent marketing is dependent upon the quality of the content being delivered. Content should educate, inform, inspire, and entertain its audience. Fanny Dunagan has this down to a science.
Her current motto is to “do things scared.” Curating an online presence is so central to being discovered in this age, and there is little room for doubt. Content creation starts by getting your message out there. Take the video, even if your voice is shaking. Share your message, even if you feel your voice is not loud enough. And #shareyourlight because that is the only way anyone will ever see it.

Fanny Dunagan is the mastermind behind creating consistent content.
For fun and for work, Fanny Dunagan can be found creating posts and sharing content on LinkedIn.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E36 | Fanny Dunagan – China To Canada To Singapore To Texas
Date: August 10, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-36-fanny-dunagan-china-to-canada-to-singapore-to-texas/
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Content:
 
Have you ever had trouble coming up with content? Are you wondering if the audience will receive it openly and respond positively? Good content creation is vital for any business. It helps your organization establish its brand to generate warm leads. In this episode, we have Fanny Dunagan, the CEO and Video Content Strategist of PathLynks. PathLynks is a consulting firm that helps coaches and consultants create digital content, video strategies & content plans. Stay tuned as Fanny will share the principles, foundation, or purposes for creating content!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Fanny-Dunagan-China-to-Canada-to-Singapore-to-Texas.mp3
 
Fanny Dunagan – China To Canada To Singapore To Texas
Engineer To LinkedIn Content Creator Entrepreneur
In this episode, I had my very good friend and a great entrepreneur, Fanny Dunagan. Welcome to the show.
I’m excited to be here.
Thank you so much for coming out. Let’s jump right in. Tell me about your current business. What do you do?
I have my own consulting firm where I help small and mid-sized companies with their LinkedIn branding, video content, and messaging. I also help corporations with employer branding as well as recruitment.
What’s the name of that company?
It’s PathLynks.
When did you start PathLynks?
It was in 2013. We started it because we are helping a local outreach center with job fairs. From there, it grew, and I started creating more and more content for employers as well as job seekers. Individuals approached me, coaches, consultants, and business owners. It has been my passion ever since to create content for others.
Now, you have a LinkedIn Live show.
You were one of my early guests.
A little of our history. A mutual friend introduced us, and you were ever angelical about LinkedIn, and I was reluctant.
You were hesitant, skeptical.
 
Content Creation: More people need to hear from entrepreneurs out there about their gifts and their messages.
 
I was a disbeliever as I was about social media of any kind for a long time, and now, here we are, with The Proven Entrepreneur show and I’m blessed to have many Proven Entrepreneurs who I know and love to guests with me. Let’s go way back to young Fanny. School girl through high school. Were your parents entrepreneurial? Is that where you caught the entrepreneur bug?
My grandfather had a Chinese herbal store like acupuncture in Chinatown in Toronto. My grandfather was very entrepreneurial. He was practicing Chinese medicine, and my mom helped him in the store. I still remember playing around with the cash register and helping out in my little way at the store. I don’t know if that started me on entrepreneurship or not. At that time, I was very risk-averse. I wanted to follow the traditional path of going through school, going through college and university, and then get into a corporate job. I had it all laid out in front of me, thinking that was the path and only path to follow but I’m here now. Something happened along the way.
As a young girl, tell us about your first job.
I was a piano teacher. In high school and even towards the end of high school, I helped out at a local Saturday music class school and taught piano.
You taught piano and got paid. That qualifies as a first job.
It was fun teaching little kids. They were 5 or 6. Since I was young, I liked playing the role of teacher. I used to hang out with my grandmother. I made her the student, and I was her little teacher.
You are still teaching social media strategies. How about that?
I enjoy sharing knowledge and learning at the same time, so I guess it carried through.
After young Fanny, you went on to college and then university. What did you study?
I was a big geek. I studied Civil Engineering. I was fascinated by buildings. I was thinking of architecture but then I doubted myself. I didn’t think I was creative enough to be an architect but I love Math and Science. I was great at it. I went to Civil Engineering, which is the techie side of buildings.
That darn architects are going to need a civil engineer anyway.
To make sure it stands. I loved it. I always tell people that Mac and Cheese, Star Trek, and homework were my staples during university but it was a fun time. I was a big geek.
 
Whatever comes out of your mouth, whatever you have to say, it's enough. Share on X
 
You’ve got your Engineering degree, and you went into the field of engineering?
I did for a while. I did an exchange program through my university with the University of Singapore. I’ve got to go to Singapore for one semester. I fell in love with it. I like exploring, seeing different things, and being in different environments. I ended up getting a job there. After graduation, I went to work in Singapore for 4 or 5 years.
I did transportation planning, planning roads and traffic systems, highways, and train systems. I started to get tired of Excel and spreadsheets, and I’ve got into business consulting. That’s when I got into technology, training, change management, and communications. That’s when my love of creating content started.
Did that bring you back or bring you to the States from Singapore?
I spent about five years there and met my husband in Singapore. We met at work, and he was an American. I always joke that a Canadian, where I grew up, had to go to Singapore to meet an American, fall in love, and then come back to North America. We settled in San Antonio for a while. I have always worked in consulting. Change management consulting, helping technology firms build their communication and training plans and still serving aerospace and defense clients. My inner geek still got to extend itself, and at the same time, I’ve got to still nurture the side of me that liked being with people through communications and training.
Tell us how you started PathLynks. What led to that?
It’s another windy path. Consulting comes with 100% travel. We had the road warrior life for a while. We fly out on Monday, go to the clients, serve them, stay overnight in hotels and then fly home on Thursday. That’s super fun in your twenties but when you are ready to have babies, you can’t do that. My biological clock started ticking, and I wanted to have babies. I paused my consulting career to be a stay-at-home mom, and those years were great. I ended up doing some part-time work for my old consulting firm, and then I had another baby. It was a period of my life when I lost my way because I was so entrenched in corporate, and then I was a stay-at-home mom.
When our second child got older, I was like, “What am I going to do?” I can’t go back to the consulting life, yet I still want to work. I felt like my brain was slowing down if I didn’t work. I started volunteering at a local outreach center right here in Grapevine. That’s how I’ve got into helping them with their training, with GED and English as a Second Language classes. From there, they are like, “Our folks need jobs.” I’m like, “Why don’t I organize a job fair?”
Together with myself and two other moms that were also taking a pause in their careers, we created all these career fairs for the local community. It was in the process of promoting them that I started creating tons of content for Facebook, LinkedIn, and videos. That was when my love of content creation came about. It was a very windy and weird path that I think was thrown into things that eventually turned out. That grew into a business, and now I help all these different clients, business owners, coaches, and consultants. It’s super fun. I love it. I would have never thought that I could have taken on the role of an entrepreneur but I can’t go back now.
It’s intoxicating.
It’s almost like every reward is on me, and every success and failure is on me. You have super great days, and you have other days that you lose a client or a sale but then everything is on me and I like that.
Entrepreneurs can be rugged individualists, though there’s power in the team, for sure. What about a hard lesson? Something you have learned in your entrepreneurial journey that was painful but maybe in retrospect turns out that it was very positive. Is there any hard lesson you could share with us in this episode?
 
Content Creation: You can’t do it all. Delegate and concentrate on your strengths.
 
To your point, we can’t do it alone. I have realized that I can only learn and do so much, and then I burn out because there are only 24 hours in a day, and I still need to sleep, be a mom, a wife, a daughter, and all those other roles that we play in life. The lesson for me was that I had to double down on what I was strong in, which was the content creation side of it, and then hire people for the rest. Over the last few years, I have hired an editor. I hired an assistant and a writer. I have learned that I can’t do it all. Even if I think, my controlling mind might think I can but it’s not possible. To delegate, concentrate on my strengths and hire for my weaknesses.
What about a warp speed moment. You referenced Star Trek, so I know you will understand the reference to warp speed. Things are going along pretty good in your business but then all of a sudden, 1, 2 or 3 things fall into place where things take off.
I landed a big corporate client. I have a big corporate client that I support called delaware North America, and it was through relationships. I always talk about the power of relationships and networks. One of my former colleagues asked me to come in and help them with recruitment. I said, “I will accept it only if you allow me to do employer branding as well.” I was able to incorporate all the content creation and branding side of my work and bring it to their corporation. They take up a big portion of my time but they are also a big client of mine, and that certainly accelerated PathLynks to a whole new dimension.
Certainly, as entrepreneurs, we want clients, and big clients are better than little clients.
It’s the 80/20 Rule.
It’s a good thing to have a big client. First off, let’s give a shout-out to those babies because they will get to read this. Tell us their names.
My daughter is Mia Dunagan. My son is Tristan Dunagan.
What about a nugget? Something you know that we probably don’t know. Let’s put it in your wheelhouse of content creation. What’s something we could learn from you?
One of the staples of content after studying it for so long, what works and what doesn’t work, is all content falls into four purposes. Number one is to educate your audiences. That’s when people create content for the purposes of giving tips, advice, lessons learned, and so forth. That’s how you set yourself up as a thought leader as well, and then people hire you.
Number two is informational posts. It means you inform people of your podcasts, shows, webinars, conferences you are speaking at or you are attending, workshops, and so forth. Number three would be inspirational posts where you create things to inspire people. You may share a painful lesson that you learned and how you overcame it or a quote that motivates you when you vare down. Also, a story that lifts you up when you are having a bad day.
The fourth one is entertaining. We have seen tons of folks be funny and crazy. A big part of YouTube is to entertain. Whenever you can incorporate entertainment or humor into your content, that’s also an extra bonus. Those four types are the foundation purposes of content is to educate, inform, inspire and entertain.
I have a client who shall remain nameless on the show that I have been doing my best to inspire to do a YouTube video about prom dresses made out of toilet paper and tape. They will know who they are, and it will be hilarious. We will see if they actually get there. Fanny, if we could put you in a time machine and send you back to twenty-year-old Fanny. You get five minutes with her. You can give her one piece of advice only. Something that will help her on her entrepreneurial path. What would that be?
 
If you're not online these days, then you're not going to be found. This is the digital world that we live in now. Share on X
 
To not be so afraid. To try things even when you are not sure about the answer, walk into a room and be self-assured about what is about to come out of your mouth because you believe in it and you are passionate about it, and know that you are enough. Whatever comes out of your mouth, whatever you have to say, it’s enough. Even if your answer is, “I don’t know now but I will find out,” that’s also enough. The twenty-year-old me was a lot more uncertain and trying to find my way. If I had half the confidence I have now, it would certainly serve me a lot more but maybe it’s the path that we are on. We need that discovery path. It’s to have courage, not be scared and try it.
Most people probably have that issue at some time or another. I shared with a guest that one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite philosophers is, “You are far better, stronger, and smarter than you think.” That’s by the wise Winnie the Pooh but it’s so true. Many people view themselves with a harsh eye.
We are all better off to give ourselves a break, to boldly go and see how the cards fall. Maybe we win, maybe we learn but learning is just a little slower winning anyway. That will help us on our path. Let me ask you. This is typically the toughest question I ask an entrepreneur. If you could ask one thing from the Proven Entrepreneur tribe for you, what would that ask be?
Do you mean a question that I want answered?
Maybe something we could do for you or that you want that you think this audience could provide? What would that be?
It would be twofold. For selfish reasons, I will first say that if you ever come across somebody that wants to build their online brand on LinkedIn, I hope that they will think about me and refer me. That would be purely selfish. On the other side, it’s something that I also say at the end of my show. As I watch my kids grow up and especially navigate the teenage years, one thing I want folks to ask and encourage themselves is I have a hashtag called #ShineYourLight. I always wrap up my shows with that hashtag because more people need to be sharing their messages, gifts, and voice through video.
Whether they hire me or someone else or pick up a phone, hit record, and post it, more people need to hear from all your entrepreneurs out there about their gifts and their messages. Also, to get out there and put it on video. If you are not online these days, then you are not going to be found. This is the digital world that we live in now and if more people would do that and do it scared. That’s another hashtag I say, #DoItScared. Even if you are voice quivers and you are recording that video, do it anyways. Get your message and your values out there. I would love to leave that message for your audience, Don.
If somebody wants to reach out to you, Fanny, how will they do that?
I live and breathe on LinkedIn. Look up my name, @FannyDunagan, on LinkedIn. I’m the only Asian Dunagan out there. You will find me on LinkedIn creating posts and sharing content tips.
Reach out to Fanny Dunagan on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for joining us.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Don.
That’s our episode of The Proven Entrepreneur show with Fanny Dunagan. See you next time.
 
Important Links

PathLynks
LinkedIn Live
delaware North America
@FannyDunaga – LinkedIn

 
About Fanny Dunagan
Growing up in Canada as a Chinese immigrant, I was a shy and quiet kid. I didn’t dare speak up. Learning English as a Second Language (ESL) taught me the importance of communications, spelling and grammar.
A career in SAP change management consulting and corporate training taught me the importance of creating value for audiences and speaking up.
Now I’m on a mission to help others find their unique voice and brand. Everyone is born with a gift. Share your gifts. Share your message with the world through video.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E35 | Win as an Entrepreneur Reaching Goals
Date: August 5, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/win-as-an-entrepreneur-reaching-goals/
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Content:
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Dont-Focus-On-The-Gap-Focus-On-The-Result.mp3
Win as an Entrepreneur Reaching Goals
The Gap versus the Results
Let’s talk about the gap and results. The gap and results are telling for how entrepreneurs reach goals. I’m on the telephone with great entrepreneur who I’ve not seen in several years. She’s a good friend and a very strong leader. As I see her on our video conference call, it’s obvious she has lost a ton of weight. She shared “I’m down about 60 pounds”. Losing weight is a hard, difficult thing to accomplish. She had struggled with weight loss for most of her life. She would take weight off and put it back on. But this time, she felt like it was permanent. The principles that led to success with weight loss could be the same principles that lead to business success. And she said, “Don, it’s all about the gap, and the results”. Do tell the story, I’d love to hear about the gap and results. And so here’s what she told me.
The Gap Stopping Entrepreneurs from Achieving Goals
All my life, I attempted to lose weight. The struggle in achieving my goals was I focused on the gap. The gap is the unpleasant part of restricting food, alcohol and exercising. That’s where all the pain exists. Weight loss is simply calories in versus calories out. If you burn more calories than you consume, then your body loses weight. And if you do the opposite, your body gains weight. All of her life she had tried to lose weight she had focused on the gap. And that was uncomfortable, that required change and think she didn’t like it.
Seeing the Results Helps Entrepreneurs Reach Goals
We know successful entrepreneurs take actions that unsuccessful entrepreneurs are not willing to take. Previously she had focused almost exclusively on the pain. She focused on her dislike of what she had to do, what she called the gap. This time, she focused strictly on the results. She kept the results front of mind. And she enjoyed the feeling she would have when she hit that goal. Having a vision of where you want to go is job one. Vision and result are just different words for the same concept. If we focus on the end in the beginning, then we know our results or vision. We know where we’re going to end up. And we know how we’re going to feel when we arrive at the result.
I encourage you today; focus on the results, not the gap.
The Proven Entrepreneur Show
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
To ask Don a question please go to Ask Don Williams
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancer. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E35 | Don’t Focus On The Gap, Focus On The Result
Date: August 5, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-35-dont-focus-on-the-gap-focus-on-the-result/
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Content:
 
In business, having a vision of where you want to go is the first step. Without a vision, your business will lack direction, and you will almost find it impossible to grow. In today’s short episode, Don Williams talks about the importance of having a vision and focusing on the results rather than the gaps. When you focus on the end game, what you go through on your way to your goals will not be as burdensome as that might otherwise be.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Dont-Focus-On-The-Gap-Focus-On-The-Result.mp3
 
Don’t Focus On The Gap, Focus On The Result
How Entrepreneurs Reach Goals
Let’s talk about the gap and results. I was on the telephone with a great entrepreneur. I had not seen her in several years, but she’s a good friend, a very strong leader, and I love her to death. As I see her on our video conference call, I’m like, “You have lost a ton of weight.” She shared with me and said, “Thank you very much. I’m down about 60 pounds.” I was like, “That is incredible. It’s very hard, very difficult thing to lose weight, quit smoking, and things like that.”
She shared with me that she had Yo-Yo’ed on the weight loss for most of her life, taken it off, and put it back on. This time, she felt like it was permanent. I asked her if she would share her experience on what led her to success because the same principles with a big goal like weight loss are the same principles we would use to hit a business goal.
Focusing On Results: The biggest common denominator between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs is that successful entrepreneurs do things or take actions that unsuccessful entrepreneurs are not willing to do.
 
She said, “Don, it’s all about the gap and the results.” I was like, “Do tell. I’d love to hear about the gap and results.” Here’s what she told me. She said, “All my life, when I attempted to lose weight and manage my health in a more positive manner, I focused on the gap. The gap was, ‘Here’s what I need to be doing now to end up where I want to go.’ If you focus on the gap, ‘I’m going to cut my caloric intake. I’m going to begin this exercise regimen. I’m going to withhold alcohol from my diet,” or all of the different things that it takes to lose weight. We know it’s basically caloric intake versus outtake. If you burn more calories than you consume, your body loses weight. If you do the opposite, your body gains weight.
All her life, every time she had done it, she had focused on the gap. It was uncomfortable, and it required change, and things she didn’t like to do. We know in success in business, many successful entrepreneurs will share that the biggest common denominator between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs is that successful entrepreneurs do things or take actions that unsuccessful entrepreneurs are not willing to do.
Focus on the results, not the gap, and make big things happen in your life. Share on X
In her weight loss previously, she had focused almost exclusively on the pain, the uncomfortableness, and her dislike of what she had to do in the gap. She said, “This time, I focused strictly on the results. I kept the results where I was going to be in front of my mind. I enjoyed the feeling I would have when I hit that goal. I’m manifesting that in my mind. My reticular activator,” that part of your brain that works for you even when you’re not aware of it, “makes the activities and the gap seem less undesirable.”
We know in business that having a vision of where you want to go is job one. That’s the same thing as the result. If we keep the end in mind, in the beginning, we know where we’re going to end up, how we’re going to feel, and we know the enjoyment that we’re going to have in our vision. Then what we do in the interim is not as burdensome as it might otherwise be. I want to encourage you to focus on the results, not the gap. Make big things happen in your life too. Thank you so much.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E34 | Proven Entrepreneur – Pieter Geldenhuys Walks The Walk (Shoshin Style)
Date: August 3, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e34-proven-entrepreneur-pieter-geldenhuys-walks-the-walk-shoshin-style/
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Content:
 
Proven entrepreneurs need to know how to pivot to thrive. Don Williams welcomes his friend Pieter Geldenhuys, the Founder of Shoshin Walks, who walks the walk. Pieter shares how you need to iterate according to your network and skillset when you have an idea of what you want to do. Then bring in incredible people who are experts in their field to help you expand your business. But make sure to stay present because you run the risk of losing momentum if they leave. That’s why you need to set a business structure in place. Need more wisdom to help you pivot and thrive? This episode’s for you.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Proven-Entrepreneur-Pieter-Geldenhuys-Walks-The-Walk-Shoshin-Style.mp3
 
Proven Entrepreneur – Pieter Geldenhuys Walks The Walk (Shoshin Style)
How A South African Guide Service Survives, Pivots, And Thrives Through a Global Pandemic
In this episode, our guest is a proven entrepreneur all the way from South Africa, Pieter Geldenhuys, who owns Shoshin Walks. He is a good friend of mine. Welcome, Pieter.
Thank you for having me, Don.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Let’s hop right in. What’s one good thing you’re grateful for in your life that we don’t know? I’ll go first to give you a little time. I was on a call with a client. I have a weekly standing call with this client with 8 to 12 people on the call every week. In the call, the second-in-command publicly recognized something positive that a subordinate had accomplished, and you could just see everybody elevate. It’s not just that person but the entire team because of that public recognition.
The CEO of the company shared something from their heart, where they were authentic and vulnerable. That’s the beginning of magic in your leadership. For me, my mission is to help other people improve. It was just magical to see the clouds part, the sun comes down and magic happens. I’m grateful for that. Pieter, what’s one good thing?
I have different gratitude from what I have speaking to you now. I did a bit of Enneagram-based coaching, which is a new thing that I’m busy with my star person, Yolanda. She’s been with me for over ten years. She’s going to wait to have some babies. She’s back as a virtual assistant within this new normal. We did some Enneagram-based stuff, and I felt like I helped her shift something in terms of her self-awareness, which might help her. I was grateful for that opportunity and to be a part of that process. It’s cool to see something shift inside of our heads like, “That might be something.”
It’s so fulfilling to see the light bulb click on and sometimes, it takes a while. I know in my own life, sometimes I have to hear things in different ways from different people, and maybe the 3rd or 4th time I hear something, I’m like, “A-ha, I get that.” The other three people are like, “Don is slow. Why didn’t he get it when I told him?” I know that I have to communicate in a way that people can hear, and that’s different for different people sometimes.
Don, when the student is ready, the master will appear.
Let’s hop right in and thank you for sharing your one good thing. Tell us what you’re doing now. Tell us about Shoshin Walks, when you started it, and what you do.
I committed to starting this business when I met you a few months ago in Detroit at the Regional Leadership Academy for the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. I’ve said, “There are two good things that happened. People want to go away on retreat, they want to do personal work, and just take some time to slow down to speed up again.” The other great thing that people do is go for a dream nature adventure. They go for this long walk in epic places like Peru, the Andes or Europe. I said, “I’m going to combine these two things. I’m going to take people for incredible multi-day walking adventures. We’re going to layer forum posts on top of that, and help people connect with their better selves and the vision for their lives.”
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That was in 2018. You’ve been doing that for a couple of years and probably had a little curveball called a stay-at-home virus, COVID-19, etc. that threw a couple of curveballs in there.
It was an interesting process because, as you might know, the actual business that I run with my wife is a luxury safari business. We bring people into Africa to go to Londolozi and all these kinds of spots. That business was completely destroyed, and it’s been on ice for about a year. We had a big business. We’ve let most of our team go. People are wanting to come back, but we’re still not there as you know. You’ve got to take the opportunity, and within that, I had started this business as a passion project.
The passion projects became the main project. I managed to launch it within this pandemic with local South African products. I want it to be an international business but everybody is traveling locally now. I’m field testing all of the protocols, and the way I do it with these amazing walks we have in South Africa with local companies and entrepreneurs.
It is spoken like a true entrepreneur. When what I was doing couldn’t work, I decided to do something else. As you know, Leta and I had a month scheduled in South Africa just before the world came to a stop. As the world is starting up again, we’re looking to resume that plan. Hopefully, the next time I see you, it will be at your home and not through the magic of Zoom. Tell us about your luxury safari business. When did you start that? How did you get into that?
There are iterations. As an entrepreneur, this whole thing of, “I’ve got this vision for my business,” is often not how we start. We start by solving a problem and going, “This thing is not being done well. I’m sure I could do it better. Let me go out and do that.” That’s what happened to me. I saw a lot of people in Cape Town hosting guests in the wrong way, and I wanted to fix it.
I started with a few vehicles. I became a tour guide and I built it organically. I was bootstrapping it for over a decade. About halfway through, I realized I’m leaving a lot of cash on the table. I have all these clients, they all love me, they all come back, but they are just booking me for these three days in Cape Town. They could book not just the tour but the hotel and flights as well. They can book the whole safari package. Over time, I built all of the vertical products. I do not have more clients. In fact, I have fewer clients now than I had on three years ago by a factor of four. My business is three times as big because for every single client, I do everything for them. That’s the way I went with it.
That’s a magic nugget, people. One-quarter of the clients, three times the revenue, if I heard that right. Many times, entrepreneurs and businesses, in general, underprice the product, service or experience that they deliver. The easiest way in my sales consulting business to bring more money into a business is, “Can we raise our prices now?” Many times, entrepreneurs are so reluctant to do that, but most of the time they are phantom reasons, not real reasons as to why they shouldn’t go ahead and do that. Let me take you way back to young Pieter. A young child through school-age before university, were your parents entrepreneurial? Is that where you caught the entrepreneurial bug?
My parents own a travel agency, so they were in the tourism game. It was different. I grew up where there were people that go, “I want to put away my laptop, my books and my files, go home at 5:00 and have a whiskey.” I grew up with my mom sitting at 11:00 PM by the desk working out travel itineraries for clients. We took South Africans all over the world. They had that business for over 30 years. I grew up in that. That was my learning ground initially as well.
Another point you bring up is this. It’s almost universal that entrepreneurs had a very good work ethic installed in them by their parents. Whether they were pulling vegetables from the garden and selling them in the farmer’s market, working on travel itineraries at 11:00, or waiting tables in a restaurant at the age of ten. They grew up working. There is a saying, “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” and there’s certainly some truth to that.
Shoshin: If you think about selling your business, start putting your things in place three years before you do so.
 
Gary Player, the famous South African golfer says, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”
After that, did you go to university? Did you go to the military? What happened as you launched your adult life?
I finished university and then went away for a couple of years. I worked in places like the UK and Israel. I came back and I joined the family. My father bribed me basically to come back. He promised me rugby tickets to two big games over in Australia and New Zealand, but I fly via South Africa from London to get there. He lured me back with something that he knew I couldn’t resist, and I joined the family business. We worked together, me, my mom, and my dad for about four years. During that time, I got my MBA part-time at the University of Stellenbosch. It’s our Oxford and I got my MBA.
At that time while I was finishing my studies, we decided to exit, and there was a big reason for it, Don. It was a travel agency so airlines got commissions. We are big in the South African corporate market as a medium-sized agency. It’s a great time to sell because it was all going to be about a high niche or high scale.
My father didn’t want to go high niche or high scale either. We had a good medium-level agency, so we sold it. I worked for the corporate overlords for about three years before I cashed in my checks. I went off and take some greens. I came back eventually. I went away again for a few years and did some professional education stuff in the US, and I came back and started this business.
I love the fact that your parents and you saw the full cycle of the entrepreneurial journey. They started a business, they grew a business, and then they sold the business because as we know for most entrepreneurs, their largest asset isn’t their home. It isn’t their retirement funds. It’s that business, yet so many entrepreneurs ignore looking at their business as the asset that it really is. Thanks for sharing that
My father is very smart. He took the lead, and you didn’t just sell your business because as you know if you sell your business, the new guys are going to want you to be in it for a while to hold their hand while they take over your clients and your team. About three years before, he didn’t tell me but he started to give me responsibility. He brought in one of the journey managers and the two of us were running the business when he decided to start to sell so he could step away and we took the pain off.
It’s like selling your car, and now the new guy expects you to drive it. You can’t fix it. It gets run down. You can’t put in gas, nothing. That was what I was sitting with but he was very smart in getting out and getting us to run it. I would always say, if you think you’re selling, start putting your things in place three years before you want to get out. Even if you don’t want to sell, start structuring as if you want to sell. That was a great lesson for me.
I think that is very sound counsel. Certainly, in the States and probably everywhere, you need three years of solid financials if you want to maximize your exit. One year won’t cut it. People are going to want to be able to look back several years. Whether it’s good, bad, or ugly, they’re just going to want to see sound financials and reporting.
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As you know, Don, you can make the business look any which way you want, pay yourself a low salary or pay yourself a high salary. There are lots of ways to look at either very good or very bad, depending on how you want to structure it as an entrepreneur. If you want to sell it, you need to look good.
There are certainly people who can help you with that who are in that business professionally on how to package and present your business. After the exit, you went and did corporate. Tell us how you came to start your first business?
I went away and I wanted to come back and do three things. This is also a bit of a gift of COVID that I’ll get back. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Derek Sivers. He’s a very well-known podcast guest of Tim Ferriss. He talks about the stages in life and how you focus. In 2007, when I came back from my travels and I wanted to restart, I want to do three things. I wanted to write a book. I wanted to be in some kind of management consulting training and I thought as a third option, I’ll go back to starting a tourism business.
When I was 32 years old and came back, I didn’t have the networks, the knowledge, or the support structures to either write a book or be in the training world. I went to the third thing that I thought of and I was like, “This is what I know how to build. This is the world that I know. I have a specific problem that I want to solve.” That’s how it started. I bought a minivan and I said, “I’m to take all these Swedish backpackers on wine tours.” It was how I started, “I’m going to give them a better experience than the previous guy,” and we were off.
If I had an opportunity to take people on wine tours, I might have started my entrepreneurial journey during that.
I had a lot of fun that first year but I made no money, and that’s when I started to iterate. You have an idea of what you’re going to do, and then you iterate according to your networks, your skillsets, and it took eighteen months for the truth to find me in terms of where I should play and how I should play. Once I got there, I was off.
I think that’s common with most entrepreneurs. They start and in the end, you learn. You do and you learn. Most of us start ugly. If we look back at it, we’re like, “I didn’t have this. I didn’t have that. Maybe if you knew then what you know now, you wouldn’t have started with what you had.” You would have said, “I don’t have enough.” I think that’s just the nature of being an entrepreneur.
Sometimes we jump from the plane and build the parachute on the way to the ground, and that’s how that goes. I want to ask about a warp speed moment. Some positive time in your business where things were going fairly well, but all of a sudden 1, 2 or 3 things happened, and your business exploded. Do you have a moment like that you can share with us? 
It’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg because I told you I took some time in between corporate and starting the business where I did some lecturing. I taught at the college, and I was trying to figure out trying to write a book and none of the stuff stuck so I started the business. What happened was I met all these amazing young people I’m teaching. Young people with lots of smarts and potential. I hired two of them, Yolanda and Caren. Yolanda was my first follower.
Shoshin: It’s a big problem if you build too much of your business around incredible people because you also run the risk of when they leave.
 
Any leader needs this incredible person that is going to take up the slack and run with all this stuff. I hired her before I could afford her. The moment I did, the first quantum leap happened in terms of revenue and clients. It took a couple of months and suddenly we were off because she is that good. It freed up my time to do business development and take care of the opportunities that I was not able to because I was too busy in the business. The next quantum leap was a few years later. We built a bit of a team and we had a few very good people.
I had to hire Caren who was a year off Yolanda, also one of my students in a previous iteration. Caren’s thing was she wanted to structure. I was running my business and nobody takes a holiday. Everybody works on the weekends. We’re always setting our souls to this business and funny enough, that initial team was bought in. They bought the vision and we’re doing things differently. As you know, you can solve a lot of problems with talent and work ethic, but Caren came and said, “No. We need hours, holidays, HR structures, and some stuff.”
As Caren came in, we started bringing all those protocols. Suddenly through the structure, gave all of ourselves the permission to also take time off, take a weekend, and hire someone to do the job for us. That was the next exponential. Suddenly, I went from 4 to 12 people. Suddenly I had car washers and contractors. It was interesting and she brought that structure. The structure sets you free, Don. I didn’t want structure because corporate overstructured me, but the structure can set you free. That was the lesson.
On the personnel front, most of us know that the answer is not in the what or the how. The answer is who can fix that? Who can climb that mountain? You almost cannot pay the right people too much because they’re worth everything. The second nugget from Pieter was bringing in the right tools to help you treat the business like a business and not Pieterland, which is probably how it was in the early days. It was Pieter’s kingdom.
The first few years were crazy. I resented her for wanting to form guidelines on a lot of stuff that I said, “That’s not how I do things.” She was consistent with the values. She just wanted us to be structured about how we did things, and it was game-changing. I’m fanatical about the right structures. Good people can be excellent in good structures. Excellent people can fail in bad structures. If you have both things, you can go somewhere.
I totally agree, and congratulations to you for putting your ego aside enough. I don’t think you can be an entrepreneur without ego. The key is knowing when to push my ego aside and let someone else run the ball because I don’t have all the best ideas. The team will find the best ideas but they won’t all start with me or with you.
Thanks for sharing those warp speed moments. Let’s go the other direction. Sometime in your business career, when at the time it was like, “This is hard and painful.” Maybe now, when you look back at those events in retrospect, you’re like, “It probably was for the best, though it was brutally painful at the time.” Do you have a hard lesson that you can share with us now?
There were two iterations of that. I’ll go to number two. I’ve talked about these amazing people. The big problem of that is if you build too much of your business around these incredible people, you also run the risk of when they leave, it’s very hard for the business to keep on the same momentum. Yolanda is working for me again now, as I said before, but she met a guy and immigrated to the UK. When she left, I had twelve full-time employees at the time, and about eight of them left within six months because I had taken such a step back.
That particular year, my father passed away, and I had spent very little time in the business. I let her completely run things. When she left, we changed locations and a few other factors but 70% of my team went with her. Not with her to another company. She trained them and at that point, they all thought she was the boss. I stuck back too much.
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Their cultural affinity was to her, not to the company and each other on the team. A 35-year-old entrepreneur founded a bunch of companies, and I’ve seen what I would call attrition suck. A powerful and important person in the business leaves and sometimes it sucks some other people with them and you have to try and avoid that. That is a hard lesson and one we have probably all been through at one time or another.
I want to expand on that. I ended up in court with some people that I hired and fired right away. I turned to my wife and she says I change staff more than she changes her underwear. That’s when we met. It was quite traumatic but a few months later, things had settled down. A new team was starting to form, and that next year, we grew by 50% in terms of revenue because the new team took up the slack. I had to work hard in the business and reengage, and I could.
What nobody understood in the old team was I was still the business, I just chose not to. It worked out and we bounced back beautifully, but it was hard. I don’t know if I would do it differently now. As you said, it’s all about the values. I don’t make it about an individual. I make it about the team and the way the team embraces the values and the bigger purpose of the business.
I think for many entrepreneurs, if you say, “Would you do it differently?” Most of their answers go like this, “If I knew then what I know now, yes, I would have done some things differently, but if I knew then what I knew then, I’d probably do what I did then.” I was doing what I thought was best and the smartest, and it just turned out it wasn’t. One thing I share with my clients is this. In my own life, I feel that I either win or I learn, and learning is just a little slower winning.
You’re such an Enneagram seven. That’s a total reframe. In the work that I do now, I’m a seven. We see the bright side. This is an opportunity and a learning moment. A lot of entrepreneurs share that trait.
I hope that’s good to be a seven, and if you’re a seven, I’m in good company. The next question is if we had a time machine and I could say, “Pieter, step into the time capsule. We’re going to take you back and you’re going to have one short conversation with your twenty-year-old self.” In that short conversation, you can share one piece of advice with the twenty-year-old. What would that piece of advice be that you would give your twenty-year-old self?
It is to say yes.
I think I know where you’re going, but tell me a little more.
When the national team captain of the golf team asked me to play in our local university team, I said no, and I have no idea why. I was 21 years old and I missed it. I could have made such good friends. I said no and I cannot tell you why. I was asked by a beautiful girl to go to the dance with her and I said no. I cannot tell you why. I was asked to do this particular job in New York, and I said no. I think I was just afraid. I didn’t believe in myself. I don’t even know if that’s it, but if I could shake my twenty-year-old self and say, “When someone gives you a beautiful opening, walk straight to it or run to it. Don’t hesitate. Don’t let your own stuff get in the way.”
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
I think that is such wisdom. A mutual friend of ours, Chuck Bender, shared with me one day. He said, “Don, all progress starts with a yes.” Now, catastrophe is sometimes avoided with a no, but progress does not result from a no. Progress only results from a yes. A client of mine, a really smart lady, suggested to me, “I want you to read this book.” I’m a big reader and learner. I’m only through half of them so far, and it’s a heavy month. The book is by Michael Singer, The Surrender Experiment, a New York Times bestselling book.
It is a couple of hundred pages on, “I built a couple hundred million dollar companies, and I’ve had a phenomenal life merely because I said, yes.” It’s a great book. I highly recommend it. I love that share. It took me years and years to set my ego aside enough to where I would not only listen, but actively seek out other people’s input. Many times I thought I was the smartest guy in the room. Sometimes, I actually was the smartest guy there but probably more than I thought I was. If you did not agree with me, I was pretty sure you were at best confused and at worst impaired because I was right and you were wrong. It took me many years to get to where I actively covet other people’s input and feedback.
Don, you’re also a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. One of the gifts of being part of this group is I went to this international conference in Dubai. It’s 120 people there, and as I talked to people, I was the only person without a coach. I’m like, “What are people on about having a coach?” I had a fitness and voice coach. I had a couple over the last few years, but sometimes it’s okay to hire yourself a bully and someone that’s going to say, “Dude, why this?” Because as an entrepreneur, nobody is holding you accountable but yourself. You’ve got your clients, and maybe your staff will spike up occasionally, but you hire yourself a bully and they give it to you straight, and the magic happens.
I’m stealing that Pieter. I’m using that and maybe HireABully.com. I was probably 45 when I hired my first coach. I did it lackadaisically that a lady that I was sitting with at the table said, “Don, let’s join and do it together.” I thought, “I’ll join just to see that you don’t get hurt,” because she was pre-startup, pre-revenue, and it was fairly expensive. I joined but I learned a bunch. I’m a big believer in hiring that bully. Get one that’s expensive and who can teach you the good stuff.
I met another coach. I was like, “I want one day with you. I don’t want to do your program. I don’t want to do any of that. I’ll fly out to see you, and I want six hours in a room with you. After three hours, we’ll go to lunch and then three hours more.” He was open to that, and I think those six hours cost me $25,000, which is pretty rich. Let me tell you, it was worth every penny.
Sometimes, it pays to be economical and to buy the large case of chips because they’re cheaper but when it comes to improving you, maybe you should look for the premium experience. Somebody who can let you trade your dollars for time. That’s what happened to me. I traded a few dollars for a couple of years’ worth of blood, sweat and tears.
Robert Kiyosaki, the guy who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, was all about hiring experts. I don’t try to fix toilets. I will, but it’s going to take me a lot longer to do to go to YouTube, get the right part, get the guy to do it, or sort through my texts. I have other skillsets, and the same with getting a coach. I had a few coaches and they were either a softy, this, that and the other. Eventually, I hired a bully. He’s not even a professional coach, but I knew this guy. I said, “Just get me through this pandemic. I need to get off my ass and get going on rebuilding product.”
He did that for me because it’s asking the rough questions. I wanted to add to your $25,000, six hours question. That’s cool, and I think there’s also a way around that in terms of there’s nothing wrong with asking. When I had this big struggle with my team, two years into the new iteration, we were doing well but there were lots of misalignment. I know people hated me and I just went, “Who’s the best guy in South Africa in tourism? Who’s got the biggest team, the longest track record, and nobody leaves?” They said it was Terry.
I called Terry. I knew him from my previous iteration of my dad’s business. I said, “Will you be my mentor?” He said, “No way. I’m too busy to be your mentor.” I said, “Terry, can we do breakfast?” He said, “Sure.” I took him to breakfast. We spent two hours. I made three pages of notes and I completely flipped my business. Six months later, my team was, “Whew,” because I went to the top guy and asked him some key questions, and I went prepared.
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There’s another nugget there, which is to ask. In my case, I couldn’t get what I got by asking. I could only get what I got by paying. The other side of it, and I am a big believer in asking, is that when people pay, they pay attention. Sometimes when they don’t pay, they don’t pay attention. They’re back three months later asking the same questions, but I am a big believer in just ask. A good example is I think Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks Owner, Shark Tank, Dallas-based billionaire, his rate card speaking fee is $300,000. If Nike, Coke or Ford Motor Company hires him to come in and talk, he charges $300,000, and he probably donates it, as far as that goes. In the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a guy who had no fear, I reached out to him, and we had him for a private hour on a Zoom call with about 2,500 people around the world.
That was the Santa guy that reached out that was on a show, isn’t it?
I hit one of his best friends. Santa, who will be on the show, was the Chapter President, and the fellow who reached out was the learning chair. He reached out to Mark Cuban and said, “Would you come to speak to a bunch of entrepreneurs?” Obviously, Mark is an entrepreneur and loves entrepreneurship, and he did.
It was a great talk. I saw it. It was an online talk. We all watched it worldwide. It reached thousands of people.
I’ll say this. It was far less than the $300,000 speaking fee. Sometimes you can just get it if you ask. Here’s maybe the toughest question, Pieter. The Proven Entrepreneur Tribe and Clan, if we could support you in any manner, what would you ask of us? It has to be for you. It’s always the toughest question.
I didn’t come here for an ask. The biggest thing that I could ask from the community is an introduction. I’ve already asked that of you even before this call. When I see somebody that I need to meet, it’s always better when someone introduces you. I asked the question because I’ve got this business doing these mindful walks, and I plan to do my first Camino de Santiago, which is this pilgrimage across Spain. I’m planning to do that, if not in 2022, then early in 2023.
I’m taking a bunch of people along with me because this is a proven process for shifting something in your head. I would love to get in contact with Emilio Estevez because he made a movie about the Camino, and I think we would like each other. We could find a way to work together on this. That’s what I would ask is for somebody to introduce me to Emilio Estevez so we can do lunch.
Somebody out there who knows Emilio Estevez, we want to connect him with Pieter. Pieter, if we were going to connect with you, how would we do that? What’s the best email or phone, or what’s the best way to reach out to you?
If you just type in Shoshin, it means a beginner’s mindset in Japanese. If you type in Shoshin Walks on the internet, you’ll find me. I’ve got a YouTube channel. There’s a website and my email address is PG@ShoshinWalks.com.
I’m glad you gave the definition of Shoshin because I forgot to ask. Pieter, thank you so much for being on the show. Folks, that’s another episode of the show. We’ll see you next time. Thank you. Bye now.
Thank you so much, Don.
 
Important Links

Shoshin Walks
The Surrender Experiment
Rich Dad Poor Dad
YouTube – Shoshin Walks
PG@ShoshinWalks.com

 
About Pieter Geldenhuys
I hold space for individuals, teams and leaders to take their next step. Personal coaching and team engagement utilizing Enneagram, Scaling Up and 7 Habits tools. My business interests include Shoshin Walks, Luxury Safaris Southern Africa and Tourism Boot Camp.
 
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E33 | Proven Entrepreneur – Elli Johannsson PE, LEED AP Shares His Success Story “From Finland To Tulsa”
Date: July 30, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e33-proven-entrepreneur-elli-johannsson-pe-leed-ap-shares-his-success-story-from-finland-to-tulsa/
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Content:
 
Is it ever too early to learn work ethics? In this episode of Don Williams’ Proven Entrepreneur, Elli Johannsson PE, LEED AP, one of Tulsa Community College’s 50 Notable Alumni, Owner and Principal of 360 Engineering, shares his journey as a young entrepreneur.
From selling extra paper to coffee shops, running a stucco division to putting up historical buildings, and providing services to retail giants. Tune in and learn how he overcame the pressures of adapting to a new environment, worked around challenges and converted them into opportunities.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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Proven Entrepreneur – Elli Johannsson PE, LEED AP Shares His Success Story “From Finland To Tulsa”
I have my good friend from way up North all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, Elli Johannsson. Elli owns a company by the name of 360 Engineering. Elli, how are you?
I’m doing excellent, Don. Thank you.
Elli and I have known each other for years. We met in EO or Entrepreneurs’ Organization and attended the Regional Leadership Academy together and our LA forum though our tenants are not great. There you go. Tell me a little bit about your company and what you do there. Let’s start with this. Where are you?
I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma in our home office here. We have three offices in Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Manhattan, Kansas. We started here in Tulsa. As both clients’ needs and projects grew and then people who were moving for personal reasons to be closer to families, we decided to move to those locations. It tended to be a great opportunity for us to open offices. It has been a great experience. Oklahoma City is doing gangbusters. There are lots of activities right there. We were fortunate to be able to provide our customers with what they needed. They keep sending us more.
I’ll come back to the type of engineering. I love the fact that you had some team members who moved. It sounds to me like rather than looking at that as a negative experience, you looked for the positive, “Could we expand and have a bigger footprint?” Is that how that went?
Yes. Oklahoma City was a natural progression. There are a lot of companies that are either in Oklahoma City or Tulsa. That tends to be the next logical step there. It’s turning those when those things came along. We have had 4 or 5 people move from the Tulsa office to the Oklahoma City office. It provides that flexibility. Most of it is to be with families or a spouse has gotten the job in that area.
As we recruit people out of school, it’s being able to say, “Which one do you prefer?” There is that natural gravitation. Some want to go from the city they aren’t familiar with but have. The bulk of individuals that started either had young kids or young kids coming on the way. It’s being closer to family. It’s making them part of the tribe and then turning the positive into negative. I read Matthew McConaughey’s book, Greenlights.
Tell me about 360 Engineering. What kind of engineering? Are you mechanical, civil or petrochemical?
We’re structural engineers. Sometimes it’s referred to under the civil category but in our world, civil is roads, bridges, land and water types stuff. We do the buildings. The architect comes up with the drawing, what it looks like and how it functions and we make it stand up with steel, concrete, rebar and all that stuff.
Let’s go back to young Elli in childhood before you went off to college. Were your parents entrepreneurial?
My dad is. My mom is not. She is in Iceland still. My father has his company. Even as he was going through school, he was working a side gig as a mason. As that grew, he gained a good reputation for doing quality work. The reputation allowed him to step out on his own. He’s got two businesses. It’s having that, seeing that and working in that business. During college, I would run a stucco division of that group. I was seeing it up front, having to get the money to come in and pay the money out, not just doing the work.
It comes with working in the business or working on the business. That was a valuable experience to go through and see that. As far as the younger side, I always had that restlessness. Going with the flow and through the day was usually not quite enough. I had to have something else go. I remember the grocery store across the street where I used to live. I applied there. I was about 12 or 13 or so. They were like, “I love the enthusiasm but you’re a little young. Wait a few years.”
I had to pipe around small routes. For the extra papers that I would have, I would find a coffee shop that wasn’t too far and was in an industrial area. I would go sell the extra copies that I would get if they got damaged. I sold those over there and used that money for going skiing or anything like that. There has been a thread throughout the time like, “I got to push it a little farther and see how I can gain a little bit more out of than the average day.”
You were a hustler early. Often, we see that entrepreneurs, whether their parents were entrepreneurial or not, their parents instilled this deep work ethic. They were doing a paper out, selling extra papers and trying to get a job where you had to be 16 when you were 12. There are big goals and a great work ethic. You don’t have an Oklahoma accent and I have a little Texas accent. Where are you from originally?
I’m originally from Iceland. I was born and grew up there. I’ve been here for many years. I lost the accent along the way. When I first came, I had a pretty thick accent. I’ve heard when you moved to the United States at 16, then your final language skills form at 17, 18 or 19. I got here under the wire and was able to lose some of that or adapt it. I wish I still had a little bit. People will think I’m from Oklahoma but they think I’m from somewhere up North or some other parts of the United States.
Do you get back every once in a while?
I try to go back once a year although I have two canceled trips in 2021 due to the circumstances. It’s great to come back the next time I go. I even did a chapter trip with EO to Iceland. It’s fantastic to do that and be a tourist. I got to go see and do some stuff that you probably never would have done because you go home, visit your family and do the normal stuff. You don’t go do the touristy thing. It was excellent. I got to sit back and take it all in as a tourist.
After your childhood and young Elli, where did you go to college?
I went to Oklahoma State. I moved here at sixteen. The school system is a little different. At sixteen, I ended up going to the Tulsa Community College, which was a fantastic experience. I don’t think I was quite ready to go to a full-sized university and live away at 16 or 17. It got me a chance to adapt a little bit and get language skills. It turned out to be good because I was able to focus so much more on those individual classes instead of the whole experience.
The social, the living on your own and all that happened. That community college turned 50 years old in 2021. They recognized their 50 distinguished alumni. I was one of those. I was proud to do that. They’re successful, unique and remarkable people. I’m part of that group and felt honored to be. That was my first experience in the American school system. I go through that and get recognized for it years later.
Is 360 Engineering your first company?
Yes. It’s a full-on company. I had some rental properties, odds and end types of things like that. It’s the first one with employees and what I call a real business, not just a side hustle.
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Tell us a little bit about how you started 360 Engineering. You graduated from school. Did you go work for another engineering company for a while? Did you start your company right out of school? How did that go about?
I started at one engineering firm. I worked there for about ten years. I got a great experience. I was exposed to some great and talented people. I got the opportunity to work on a variety of stuff. It’s anything from big things to small things and being out in the field a lot. I remember getting a tenth-anniversary gift card or a thank-you card. It hit me, “It has been ten years.” It snuck up on me. I even remember being part of that company discussion, “What do we do to retain people and recognize them for their longevity and being here?”
I was part of the discussion and the suggestion, “We should do something nice and get the card,” but I did not think of me being on the receiving end of the card and going, “It has been a while.” I reframed and focused, “Am I here to stay or do something else?” The opportunity came along to be more in a leadership position at a different company that was a lot more multifaceted. It’s a full-service firm with architecture, structural and civil. I got a lot more management experience and hands-on with leading a group and interacting with others. That was a good springboard.
I met my business partner there. It was a good springboard for training and diversity and seeing how others did it to start 360. We had started doing some work here and there and some smaller projects people asked us to take a look at. I know some contractors and architects. I was like, “I’ve got this little thing. Can you provide me a little sketch?” That started snowballing a little bit. I was like, “It’s time to give this a shot as a real deal.” We’re fortunate to get started and get great support from our clients. We’re able to grow the business pretty rapidly.
How old is the company?
I started here in 2013.
Many entrepreneurs even when business is going well and things are growing, sometimes hit a warp speed moment. They’re going along pretty well and then all of a sudden, things are clicking. It might be a major contract or an A-player they recruit to the team. Do you have a warp speed moment that you can share with us?
I can’t think of one specific project or instance. When we started, the goal was 5 people, $1 million in revenue and to get into a building. We started in the back of an insurance office. A friend had a couple of empty desks. We showed up with laptops and did that for a few months. We’re in the back of a garage that was under renovation. There were 3 or 4 of us. That was not very conducive to growth or adding more people. Once we bought a building here in the downtown Tulsa area, we moved into that. The goal was five people. We got to that.
As that had enough legs and capacity to do more work, there was a 6 to 8-month period there where we got more projects, finished those and got another one. It was larger and larger. There was a 6 to 8-month period there where they were coming in way faster than we were anticipating. Luckily, we were able to hire some more people. It went from that. You think you hit your goal and you’re going to plateau from there but it hit that, took off and quickly grew. Maybe I’m off on the numbers a little bit here but it doubled in size. It was about 10 to 11 people.
We added some more capability and brought in some contract labor and assistance there. It was that startup excitement phase. I remember hearing people close by. It’s an entertainment district on the downtown edge. A friend said, “It doesn’t matter what time of day or night I drive by that building. There are always cars there and the lights are always on,” which wasn’t necessary. In retrospect, it’s like, “We could have managed that a little bit better so people aren’t here all hours of the day.” It’s exciting being able to grow and have the capital and finances to support that.
Is there a hard lesson or something that you’ve gone through in your entrepreneurial journey that caused a little pain and anguish? In retrospect, you look back and you’re like, “It all worked out for the best but it wasn’t fun at the time.”
The main thing would be the realization that it’s the people. We don’t manufacture anything and sell a product or software. It’s just our ideas, interacting with customers, solving their problems and providing them the documents that convey that idea. It was in the Clinton campaign in ’92. The economy was stupid. I had a moment. I was like, “The people are stupid.” I was not doing a good job of connecting with employees and recognizing what they were going through.
It was more of the construction or manufacturing mentality, “We got to get it done.” That’s the type of stuff. It’s not quite that bad but the mentality was more of, “All that matters is getting it done.” We went through a period where we lost lots of great people. There was never one specific thing but the focus wasn’t on the employees. That was a difficult time. As an entrepreneur starting a company, work is work and people are going to do what they’ve got to do but you take that.
Certainly, I took it that I didn’t do everything I needed to do to keep them overall balanced. I got the engineering part of it or the work part but not the relationships. That has changed how I look at it. Our lay was a huge game-changer for me in seeing the big picture. I don’t do a perfect job of it but I’m doing a lot better at checking in with people and training the vision, how you view the day-to-day operations and my responsibilities instead of just getting the numbers done.
That leadership role is so important. One of my favorite quotes was from Herb Kelleher, the Founder and original CEO of Southwest Airlines. The first part of the quote is not very popular but I like it too. He said, “The customer is not always right.” That goes contrary to what everybody said. He goes on to say, “The customer is not always right but they are always the customer.” They’re still paying the bill. It’s good manners to let them think that they’re always right.
Herb said, “I’m not going to take care of my customers. I’m going to take care of my people and because I take care of my people, my people will take care of my customers.” It worked pretty well for Southwest. They’re the only airline in history that has shown a profit every quarter for 45 years. Some of the others can’t seem to figure out how to make money in their life. It can’t be that hard. All you have to do is copy what Southwest Airlines is doing. We have seen some that came in and attempted to do that.
Think back to twenty-year-old Elli. If we could put you in a time machine, you could go back and have a conversation with your twenty-year-old self but you could only share one piece of advice and as soon as you give that advice, the time machine would bring you back to the current time but you get 10 or 15 seconds to go back, see your 20-year-old self and give 1 piece of advice regarding your entrepreneurial journey, what would that be?
One piece of advice would be to enjoy the journey. It’s not about getting from point A to point B. I used to almost engineer my way to efficiency. I’ll show up to every meeting. There were five minutes of chitchat in the beginning, “How are you doing? How are the kids?” I was like, “I’m going to show up at the meeting five minutes late. We would get that out of the way and get right to business.” It’s that journey. It would be to enjoy the journey and listen along the way.
You’re a typical entrepreneur. There’s one piece of advice you stuck into. Enjoy the journey and listen to other people. When I have to answer that question, my answer has always been this, “Please, get input from diverse people and people who don’t have my personality and don’t see things the way I see them because I’m right a lot but I’m not always right.”
Sometimes other people see it better than the leader. It’s good leadership to let people know. I’m not the supreme keeper of all knowledge. I might be wrong. If there’s anything that the Proven Entrepreneur tribe or clan could do for you or if you could ask us one thing for you and/or your business, what would that be? It’s always the toughest one because entrepreneurs have such a hard time asking for anything.
Young Entrepreneurs: Enjoy the journey. It’s not about getting from point A to point B. It would be to enjoy the journey and listen along the way.
 
It may be a better way to implement communication and connection with the employees and make them feel valued. Do that in a way where it becomes part of the culture. It’s that integration of people into the culture and the tribe. How do you successfully do that? You’re hiring people and you’re busy. It’s the tendency of, “Get to the chair and the computer and start working,” type of thing and not taking that longer and more in-depth integration part. We do communicate a lot. It was even Herb Kelleher that talked about how the CEO is the Chief Reminding Officer continually reminding the values in what we’re doing and the core focuses but that can take a while to ramp up. It’s a way to do that more effectively.
We know that teamwork makes the dream work and good teamwork makes the dream work well. The faster that happens, the better. Elli, if somebody in the audience wanted to reach out to you, what’s the best way to contact you?
The best way is by email. It’s Elli@360EngGroup.com.
Thank you so much for joining us on the show. That’s it for this episode. We will see you next time.
 
Important Links

360 Engineering
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Greenlights
Elli@360EngGroup.com

 
About Elli Johannsson
21 years of structural engineering experience and more than 28 years in the in the architectural, engineering and construction fields. Licensed professional engineer in 33 states. Extensive background in residential and commercial real estate operation and management. Passionate entrepreneur and world traveler with a thirst for learning.
 
 
 
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Title: S1:E32 | Proven Entrepreneur – World Traveler Natalya Berdikyan
Date: July 21, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s1-e32-proven-entrepreneur-world-traveler-natalya-berdikyan/
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If you’re an entrepreneur, a business leader, or belonging to an organization, you find that achieving goals for your business is a tedious task. Nevertheless, you strive to achieved your target goals. In this episode, we are with world traveler, leadership, and wellbeing coach Natalya Berdikyan. Natalya shares her success story from her humble beginnings to founding and leading her own company, Life by Design Academy. She also talks about how she uses core energy coaching to help entrepreneurs, leaders, and organizations to improve their potential. Join Don Williams today as he talks with Natalia.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Proven Entrepreneur – World Traveler Natalya Berdikyan
From A Russian Vegetable Stand To Barcelona-Based Global Energy Coaching
Thanks for being on the show. Let’s start with one good thing or something you’re grateful for that we don’t know about you. I’ll go first. That’s only fair. It’s spring. I have been fighting allergies and then an eye infection. I am glad for the miracle of modern medicine. For about ten days, I only look like I’m crying all day, which I’m not, but I’m on the mend. I am grateful for that. How about you, Natalya? What’s something you’re grateful for?
I’m grateful that you don’t experience such a challenge anymore with your eyes. That’s something I’m grateful for. For the rest, it’s the ability to travel still between Berlin, Brussels and Barcelona. I’m in Berlin. I’m going to Barcelona. I’m grateful for that.
People have stayed home so much. They are excited to go. Let’s hop right into it. Tell us what are you doing now and your business.
I’m helping entrepreneurs, leaders and their organizations live to their full potential. We use energy leadership coaching to get to the core of whatever that is they’re going through and whatever is at the core and the essence of their thoughts, emotions and actions or inactions, which is a beautiful moment with everybody going back to their working places or whatever those working places look like, dealing with all those challenges and reinventing their organizations and energy.
Tell us a little bit more about energy, how we use or avoid using energy and what it can mean to our performance.
Core energy coaching is a process that supports people in having the awareness of whatever is at the core of their thoughts, beliefs and attitudes about work, life and community. It plays a significant role in determining the experience they live. You can imagine if you believe it’s bad weather and a bad day and you’re feeling mentally down, it physically affects you as well. You have lower motivation, engagement, performance and sense of satisfaction in how you enjoyed the day or not. The same affects every single thing we do or don’t do because of the external and internal environment.
You do that. You own a business based in Barcelona but you have clients all around the globe. What’s the name of that business?
It’s Life by Design Academy.
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I know you and part of your story but let’s go back to early Natalya. Tell us about your first job before you got paid.
It wasn’t an official job but a first entrepreneurial experience. I was around nine years old. I was selling vegetables and fruits from my country house at the Russian market, preparing the crops, delivering the crops, attracting the clients, negotiating the prices and making my grandma happy with the whole process being done and successful.
Mission accomplished. The money was there. I remember it well. I’m sure I got some of it. She was always supporting me. The next thing was babysitting in the US. I was an exchange student in the ’90s coming from Moscow to California. There was some money exchange there if that counts. The official one would be in a bank back in Moscow at the end of the ’90s.
We find a common thread among entrepreneurs. They learned a very strong work ethic as a child and/or were entrepreneurial. You were preparing the crops, taking the crops to the farmer’s market, negotiating a little haggle and trying to get the most money you can. That all sounds pretty entrepreneurial to me. You were born and raised in Russia and you live in Barcelona. I know some of the stops along the way but everybody would be thrilled to know how many stops. Tell us about your journey from Russia to Barcelona and where you’ve been in the interim.
From Moscow, I went to California as an exchange student. I had four stops there. I lived in four different US families and went to two schools from Northern to Southern California. That was that. I moved, studied, finished my Bachelor’s in Business in Amsterdam and moved around Holland as well. I was seven years in Holland. I moved from Spain to the Canary Islands out of all places. I was living on a small island. Do not get a capital girl to a small island. It might start being suffocating pretty fast. That was Barcelona. I ended up living in Belgium for twelve years. I’m now back in Barcelona simply because I love it there. In short, it’s 6 countries, including Berlin in between, and 24 moves if you count the post address.
Life by Design Academy is not your first business. Tell us about your first real business.
In my twenties, I started a company that was producing hair accessories and merchandising. We were producing in China. It was a small business. I was designing all the little things for kids and adults. It’s the girly stuff from hairbrushes to clips and all sorts of things. We were selling to Russia. I was still a foreign person. We’re talking about the Soviet Union and Russian passports. The Dutch student is me trying to make a living and do it legally speaking. I had to change the whole plan, instead of running a company, get a proper job, residence, working permit and all that stuff. That was an interesting journey. I had a business with my business partner running a chocolate factory in Belgium, hence Belgium. I stayed there for a while to keep the lives of many people sweet, and then Life by Design.
How long ago did you leave the chocolate business?
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That was years ago when our common friend Warren Rustand got us on top of Machu Picchu with around 30 entrepreneurs from Entrepreneurs’ Organization. The light bulb went on and Life by Design came to reality. I wanted to make it more meaningful for myself and other people and make a difference in a different way than keeping it sweet.
Both are very beneficial to humanity. Our mutual friend, Warren Rustand, is a big proponent of intentional living or living by design. You applied the principle to your life first and now you help other people on their journey to intentional living. You started that business years ago. Tell us how you ended the chocolate adventure and began the energy adventure.
That was a good adventure. One overlapped with the other. I wonder if we let go completely of something because it stays such an important part of our life, memory and experience, whether the experience of running a company or being a leader, human being and CSO. Years ago, I wanted to build an organization whereby I can provide experts and coaches a beautiful opportunity to do what they do best. Everybody knows they’re great at what they do. The last thing they love is selling and marketing business development. That’s where I come in because I did it for years.
I love connecting people and opportunities and building something. On the other side, it’s the entrepreneurs, their organizations and the leaders of those organizations to develop what they want and change the way of work, the way of life and everything. I thought, “I might as well check out the whole coaching deeply.” One thing is to work with coaches and hire coaches. Another thing is even coming from an HR background and running companies, that was something I wanted to master.
I found the International Institute that works with not only coaching but also energy leadership coaching. That went deep. Apply it for yourself first. I had to go through the whole thing. It’s like peeling the onion and getting a completely different skin on. It’s an interesting experience. I have a team from the US to the Middle East, beautiful experts that speak the same language of business and energy, which is beautiful, and beautiful projects from the US to Asia, profit and nonprofit. It’s super fulfilling and different from creating chocolates and consuming them.
In my journey, I’ve found a dozen companies in various industries. Some of those went well, some not so well and a couple completely blew up and were no good at all. What I found was once I began helping other people improve, that was where my superpower was and where I’m most fulfilled and seeing other people hit their goals. Tell us about a warp speed moment. In one of your businesses, things are going along pretty well. There are no complaints but all of a sudden, 1 or 2 things happened that your businesses shot off. Do you have a moment like that you can share with us?
In the chocolate industry or business, we had a very specific product for the market, which became quite a niche. The market changes, whether it’s COVID or consumer trends. We realize that we were going to lose half our business if not more if we were not going to change something. You have this old big factory and the people. They used to produce the same thing for 130 years in this case. I didn’t start the business. It needs to innovate. It’s pivoting or looking for different products and markets.
That’s what we did although that came at a cost because we got into retail where it’s all about price rather than the quality and service. That was an interesting lesson to have to anticipate, think in different directions and also learn from other examples rather than waiting for your own to come. That was harsh. We had to close the factory and outsource the production. That was the end of the story. It’s a small boutique business. We did shrink and we finally focused on what we do best instead of trying to be everything for everybody. That was the lesson.
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Ultimately, that was an overall improvement for the business.
It simplified a lot of things in terms of the supply chain. You can imagine production is a tough operation, not only do you have the factory, equipment and people to deal with the qualities of the supply chain, stock and everything in between. A lot of brands are brands and distributors. That’s what we became at the end of it. It’s having a good for production that runs everything else until here smoothly so that we can do what we do best.
I was in Zurich a couple of years ago and we visited the Lindt chocolate factory. I was amazed. I had no idea how large it was and how many people were involved. Once you got within about a mile of the factory, it had this wonderful sweet chocolate aroma. If you were a chocolate fan, you couldn’t get within a mile because you would want to come in and walk out with some chocolate for sure. Let’s say we had a time machine and you could go back. You’ve been an entrepreneur for years. If you go back and share one piece of advice with twenty-year-old Natalya, what would you share with your twenty-year-old self that would have been beneficial along your journey?
Listen to your intuition and your gut. Don’t let anything stand between you and your dream.
I put you on the spot. I’ll share mine. Mine is a little different. I am very intuitive for a man. I don’t know if intuition is strictly a female thing. It took me many years to figure out that I should collaborate and listen to input and feedback from people that were different from me, whether they were female, different politically or different personality types.
For many years, I believed that if you disagreed with me, you were either mentally slow, you didn’t understand or you were confused because I was right. I’m not proud to say that. That’s not a good way to be but that is part of my story. It took me many years to figure out I need input from a lot of people. If it’s my role to make the final decision, then I can do that. If it’s not and it’s your role, I can let you do that. It’s to seek input from as many diverse people as I can.
Thank you for sharing that.
It’s my pleasure.
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It relates to that. You cannot change whatever but it’s taking away the ego part and not thinking that you got it right. It’s that openness. I’ve always been curious. That’s why it took me to so many places. It’s that piece of the ego, whether it was cultural, upbringing being defensive or being a single parent kid. A little less of the ego would be even better because that stands in the way. If we can leave the ego at the door, which is hard, and not have the judgment of self and others, that would make things so much smoother and less challenging.
It took me a long time to get there. I was one of those kids who never took a book home. I always had the best grades. Pretty much everything I did went very well. I allowed myself to be rewarded for that. I held a high opinion of myself. If you’re not going to think well of yourself, nobody else will. You should think well of yourself. I certainly missed collaborating with other people that work like me for a long time. That has been a big lesson in my life. Tell us about your business. If somebody reaches out to Life by Design Academy and they look to engage you, your firm or a coach in your firm, what does that look like? Are they working with someone? Give us the outline or the framework because we may have people that would reach out.
That’s very nice. Thank you. It can be anything from having a keynote speech and a workshop around energy leadership and how individuals and their teams manage their energy and move from the place of being a victim of the fact of life situations and people and feeling stuck, frustrated, angry and competitive. Move them to the place of creation, flow, creativity and collaboration as we were talking about, seek win-win opportunities and solutions and ultimately create that productivity and sustainable results.
It can be anything from three months of engagement working with the teams and the people, whether it is moving into rebuilding and rethinking how they work and their mindsets, to two years of ongoing coaching. You can always be more of a conscious leader and the leader that everyone can look up to, including yourself. Self-leadership is very important. That’s the principal part of it. We can always improve and be the better versions of ourselves. Warren always says, “Be the best version of yourself. There are no limits to growth.”
On the leadership subject, I’ve always felt that the eternal struggle is leading oneself. It’s much easier to lead other people. Like most leaders, I carry a pass in my pocket for me if I don’t perform. I’m like, “Here’s my pass.” Sometimes we don’t hold that same pass for others. The hardest leadership is always ourselves. Here’s maybe the toughest question. If the Proven Entrepreneur Tribe could support you, what would you ask from us for you?
Another thing coming up is how can I support you because at the end of the day, what you give is what you get. That state of fulfillment, satisfaction and success and the higher energy level you’re at are all about understanding and feeling that we are all connected. We are a tribe. It’s not about me. It is about the others. It’s all interrelated. It’s energetic resonance. Energy attracts like energy. I’m trying to leave the ego at the door. I’m here for you. I’m grateful for that entrepreneurial drive I had within EO for years, everybody that made a difference in my life and all the people I collaborated with. I want to give back.
If you don’t know, in EO, which Natalya and I have referred to as Entrepreneurs’ Organization, there are almost 15,000 of us around the world. In every country, entrepreneurs are supporting entrepreneurship and other entrepreneurs. You could reach out to Natalya or me and we could get you more information if you were interested in that. Natalya, if somebody wanted to reach out to you, how would we contact you?
It’s Natalya Berdikyan on all the social media like LinkedIn. Otherwise, it’s Contact@LifeByDesign-Academy.com. I’m here to support, raise the energy of the whole wide world, create opportunities and help people to live to their full potential and believe that everything is possible because it is. It’s a place of abundance rather than lack.
One of my favorite people on this planet is my Russian sister, Natalya. Please reach out to her. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the show. I’ll see you next time. Thanks.
 
Important Links

Life by Design Academy
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Natalya Berdikyan – LinkedIn
Contact@LifeByDesign-Academy.com

 
About Natalya Berdikyan
Natalya is passionate about helping people and organizations grow to their full potential, improving the way of living and working, increasing their energy, leadership ability, performance, wellbeing and fulfillment.
Natalya comes from the corporate and entrepreneurial world, with over 20 years in international business development and management, from running a multimillion-dollar manufacturing company with multinational teams to launching a global coaching practice.
She applies her vast experience in living in 6 different countries, handling change, deep exposure to different industries, while finding creative solutions to complex situations. Natalya’s proven systematic approach helps individuals and organizations grow beyond borders and boundaries, to achieve lasting change, eliminating obstacles that stand in the way to reaching full potential, fulfillment and well-being.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E31 | You Can Be Floating On A River Of Cash
Date: July 8, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-31-you-can-be-floating-on-a-river-of-cash/
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Content:
 
So many companies underprice their product, service, or experience – do you? Join Don Williams in this episode as he shares the easiest way to raise your revenue, as you deserve. Elevate your prices as you continue to provide value.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com

Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
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You Can Be Floating On A River Of Cash
The Easiest Way To A Better Bottom Line Is To Raise Your Price(s)
In this episode, I want to talk about one of my favorite subjects on the entire planet. We are going to talk about selling. In my consulting practice, I generally help people dramatically raise revenue. We go find big bucks and start ringing the cash register. We turn those friends upside down because we float on a river of new cash that we bring into a business. I want to share tip one in that process. That is, look at your pricing. Are you charging enough for the good service or experiences that you provide to your customers? Here is a good example, one of my early coaching clients as a business coach and coach from soup to nuts where I focus primarily on the fun part of bringing in more money. This individual does everything, like strategy, teamwork, accountability, etc.
What is most important is not what something costs. It's what it does. Share on X
Their normal rate when they came to me was $4,000 for a day’s worth of coaching with a client. One of my first questions was, why aren’t you charging $10,000 a day? When you bring that question to a client and ask them why they aren’t charging dramatically more for their good service or experience, you are almost always met with this, “I do not feel good. I can’t do that.” My reply was, “For the level of service that you provide, I do not want to say that cost is not important because the cost is important but what is most important is not what something costs.”
“It is what does it do? It is what is my return on my investment? I do not mind putting a dollar into something if I am getting $10 back. In fact, I would like to put a lot of dollars into something where I get $10 back.” Think about it, we live in a world where most investors would be thrilled to get 8% or 10% or 12% consistently on their money but a coach who might give you ten times the return on your money, sometimes business owners or entrepreneurs are reluctant to do that. This particular client noted my point and over a period of time as the demand for their service increased, which makes perfect sense, went from $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, and ultimately to the $10,000.
Raise Prices: It doesn’t matter if you take the big step or a few little steps but look at your good service experience. Are you charging enough for the value that you provide?
 
Now, the stairsteps took place not because of the need for that but because the entrepreneur was not comfortable taking the huge step all at once. I will tell you this. It does not matter if you take the big step or if you take little steps but look at your good service or experience. Are you charging enough for the value that you provide? If you are not, please begin elevating your pricing structure to more accurately reflect the value that you provide and you will make more margins and more money in your business. I am Don Williams and that is The Proven Entrepreneur.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E30 | Spectacular Service For A US Navy Veteran
Date: July 2, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/spectacular-service-for-a-us-navy-veteran/
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Content:
 
What makes or breaks a business is what customers say about you. That is why customer service is crucial. In this episode, Don Williams recounts an experience he had that blew him away. Listen in and hear how Tricare delivers service worthy of our Nations’ Veterans.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
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Spectacular Service For A US Navy Veteran
They know that the success of their business is dependent on people having positive reviews to say to their friends and family that they’ll want to come back and spend more money. Think of airlines, national banks, mammoth companies or big tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple. It’s hard to try and get someone on the phone so sometimes, big companies lose that hunger to provide that romance for a customer experience that will leave their customer saying, “Wow.”
I had a family member who was a veteran of the United States Navy and we’re grateful for his service. He had TRICARE For Life, which is your Medicare health plan when you retire from the US military. It’s the best healthcare plan you can have as a senior unless you served in congress, the senate or the President of the United States. He somehow got snarled up and enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, which is a fine insurance plan for a lot of people but is a complicator if you are fortunate enough to have TRICARE For Life and doesn’t provide any real benefit.
The success of your business is dependent on people having positive things to say to their friends and family. Share on X
A TRICARE For Life member has Medicare as their primary insurer and TRICARE as their secondary. A Medicare Advantage plan replaces Medicare so the Medicare Advantage plan is your primary and secondary. Some copays and providers are out of network. They reach out to me to see if I could help. I wrote the book on Romancing Your Customer so sometimes I am able to get and receive exceptional customer service. Additionally, I’ve been in the life and health insurance business and served a ton of life and health insurance companies over the years.
My first call trying to sort out this mess was to TRICARE For Life. This is the company that provides healthcare service to every retired US service member, whether they were part of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or Coast Guard. I make the phone call and on the first call, I get a customer service agent who says, “May I place you on hold for a moment?” Instead of placing me on hold, they disconnected me but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt because maybe they hit the wrong button. All of us have probably had an experience like that when we were trying to get customer service.
Romancing Your Customer: How to Passionately Attract, Retain, and Win-Back Customers for Unbelievable Loyalty and Profitability
I didn’t get excited. I didn’t hold that against them so I placed another phone call and got another customer care agent but this time, I was a little wary. Was it an accident or was that an indication of the level of customer service that they normally provide? The second agent that I got ahold of was so helpful, knowledgeable and caring about this veteran’s healthcare service. She blew me away.
When you receive excellent customer care or somebody delivers that wow experience and you know that whether they read the book, Romancing Your Customer or not, they’re certainly practicing the principles of romancing your customer, please do what I did and share with them,” This was a great experience. You are very good at your job. I am grateful for your help.”
Those Romancing Your Customer experiences that you can provide to your customers are not as hard as many people think. You just have to make the decision, “I’m going to deliver exceptional customer service that on a scale of 1 to 10, my customers are going to rate it wow.” That’s the biggest step you can take and then that will help you formulate your customer journey map so that you deliver exceptional customer experiences worthy of the Romancing Your Customer label. That’s it for this episode of the show. Congratulations and thank you to TRICARE For Life for providing exceptional customer service for our nation’s retired military. See you next time. Thanks.
 
Important Links

TRICARE For Life
Romancing Your Customer

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E29 | Proven Entrepreneur – JP Midgley
Date: June 25, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-29-proven-entrepreneur-jp-midgley/
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Content:
 
Helping a company grow is one thing. Owning it later is another. So what does it take to go from employee to owner? Listen in as JP Midgley shares his success story with host Don Williams. JP started with Avalon as a Customer Service Representative and later bought the company! In this episode, he shares with us the journey that took him to get to where he is now. JP also imparts some of the wisdom he learned about entrepreneurship and leadership.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
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Proven Entrepreneur – JP Midgley
From Front Line Customer Service To Proven Entrepreneur
Our guest is JP Midgley from Buffalo, New York. JP is the CEO of Avalon. Welcome, JP.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for coming on. W e met each other at Entrepreneurs’ Organization. JP is one of my valued co-authors in the upcoming gratitude book. We’re at 3rd and goal on the 60-yard line. We’re almost to the end zone. It has taken a while. Thank you so much for your participation there. JP, tell us a little bit about Avalon. What are you doing now? What does your business do?
We do a number of things. Our primary business is litigation support. A common question after that is, “What does that mean? What is litigation support?” The answer to that is many things too. It’s anything from traditional litigation support such as copying or scanning documents associated with a lawsuit or in support of a law firm. Sometimes we do that on a large scale with hundreds of thousands of documents. Over time that has changed from paper records to digital. Now we collect email, server and digital files. We build these databases and help attorneys get through the review of those and produce them to the other side. That’s our primary business.
Because we have a computer forensics division that does that for lawsuits, we spun that out into a cybersecurity division as well that responds to data breach type of cases and proactive cybersecurity services. Also, because we have that equipment that does copying records, we do a lot of document automation, scanning documents for businesses or print mail of secure documents. We think of that type of business as well. We’re a little diverse but our primary business is litigation support.
How long have you done that?
Avalon started in May of 2000. I’m not the founder. I started in 2004 on my birthday. I always know the first day I started, January 12th, 2004. I had the opportunity to help the business grow in those early days. I ultimately had the opportunity to buy the business from the original founder. There were a number of friends and family investors. We’re able to buy them out and continue growing this company since then.
When you're unhappy, everybody knows it. Share on X
Your client base, are they in New York? Are they regional, national or international?
All in the US but they are all over the place. We have nine physical facilities across Upstate New York, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. After I was able to buy the company, we expanded into Cleveland, Ohio and Tampa, Florida. A couple of years ago, we expanded into Omaha, Nebraska, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Detroit, Michigan. We do a lot of the quick turnaround-type of boots on the groundwork in those cities. Our tech team do work across the country because we don’t need to be physically in any one spot for that.
It sounds like you’re on the global domination plan.
We do have a take over the world plan here for sure.
That’s true entrepreneurism. You went to work for a company and helped them grow. It sounds like you raised some capital, purchased the company and here you are several years later as the CEO.
Some of what you said is pretty correct. I will give you the high level. When I started in 2004, I was totally entry-level. I was a customer service representative. I was driving my own car to law firms, picking up documents, bringing them back, getting them into our operations team, delivering them, and then delivering them back after. I was ground level at that time but I worked hard. I was able to get some opportunities.
When you said raise capital, we got traditional bank funding. I shopped to almost every bank I could find. Every single one of them said no until finally, one said yes. I got lucky. That was in the 2009 and 2010 timeframe. We had to get creative with the farmer-owners that want to exit and we did want to buy it. I had a partner when we originally bought the company. He’s since moved on as well. That is the story. I feel like I got pretty lucky along the way.
Sometimes luck is aided by a good work ethic. It sounds like you probably had that. How many banks said no.
Customer Service: It is important to have a good banking relationship with a banker that understands what the company’s doing.
 
At least ten, I would say. There was a stint in there I was like, “I can’t get this from banks. Maybe I’ll go to my friends and family.” I still have a letter that I had written. I asked in front of the family to invest with me. I was trying anything. I did have a couple that said, “We can invest a little bit.” I still remember who those people are because they probably didn’t want to but they wanted to help me. I appreciated that. I still have the letter because I remember how much I was trying to make this all work. I remember how lucky I felt when finally I had the right bank or he understood what we were trying to do.
It helped me understand how important to have a good banking relationship with a banker that understands what the company is doing. At the outset, a lot of people look at our company and they look at our websites and say, “You’re a printing company.” I said, “Not really.” It’s hard to get people to understand what we do. We found the right person and they did understand it. They were able to sell the deal internally. Ultimately, the rest is history.
That was history. Were you born and raised in the Buffalo area?
No. I grew up in Syracuse. I grew up in a family that had a commercial printing company. I did come from that world ironically. I went to school for jazz guitar. I have this jazz guitar degree. I still play the guitar. I realized quickly after I got that degree that it was going to be hard to make a good living just by playing music. I’m a very good guitar player but I am not world-class. If you want to be making a good living, you need to be world-class. I was looking for a job. Somebody said, “This company, Avalon, is hiring.” I said, “Sure,” and off I went.
Did your parents own a commercial printing company? Did you come from entrepreneurial roots? 
A little bit. It was my father and his brothers. It was started by my grandfather and my grandmother. It’s called Midgley Printing in Syracuse. It’s still there although it’s one brother left that’s still running it. It was an entrepreneurial family. Not only did my father run this printing business, but he was also big into cooking. We had this food truck before food trucks were a big thing. We would go out and the family would go and squeeze lemonade at the festivals. We would pull up this trailer and make burgers and French fries and squeezed lemonade, stuff like that. We had a few things like that and of course, the paper route, which is a lot of people’s first form of business.
We’re dating ourselves now because there are so many people that are like, “What are you talking about, paper route?”
That was child labor before they realized that it’s not legal.
You either decide you're not going to grow, leave your business, or grow yourself and help the company grow. Share on X
If we go all the way back to young JP growing up, what was your first job? Whether it was official or maybe your first job was working in the print shop. As you look back, what would you say was your first job?
I’m going to give you three answers. I would consider the paper route to be a job because you’re delivering newspapers. The worst part of the paper route wasn’t even delivering the newspapers in the snow or the rain. If you have had a paper route, you know what the worst part is. That is collecting the money.
Walking door to door and asking people to pay for what you did. Some people gave you a hard time with that. I would go to work at the family print shop but not officially. It was more like, “Go to work with that kind of day.” My first real job after that was I worked at an ice cream shop making ice cream cakes and flying saucers and scooping sundaes and stuff for people. I did a bunch of different things in college after all of that and during that. I did play in a band. There were a lot of people playing a band but we were a little more official, a little more professional. We have vehicles and equipment. We would drive around from city to city and we would get paid to perform. That would be my first entry into entrepreneurialism.
After your childhood in Syracuse, did you go to school? Did you go to the military to join the Merchant Marine?
I went to school for music. I went to Ithaca College about an hour away from Syracuse. I got my degree in jazz guitar. I started working at Avalon. I’m still playing music and trying to make both of those things work. A couple of years after that, I went to the original CEO. I told him, “I don’t know where I’m going to go but I don’t want to live in Syracuse my whole life. I don’t want to regret this. Call this a notice but it’s not really a notice. I don’t know where I’m going and when I’m going but I’m going to go somewhere. I just want you to know.” The response I got back was, “I don’t want to lose you. Why don’t you tell me where you want to go and we’ll open an Avalon there?” I said, “That sounds pretty good. I do like this company.”
I made a business plan for Charlotte, North Carolina. I didn’t know how to make a business plan. I googled it or whatever Google was back then. It was still Google. I made a business plan. I’m still trying to sell. At that point, I was doing sales and some other stuff in the organization. On my band’s Myspace page, I was looking at the people that followed our band and there was this woman. She was an attorney. She followed our band. I’m like, “It’s a great sales opportunity. She already knows me. She knows the band.”
She lived in Buffalo. I sent her a message and said, “I want to take you to lunch.” I was thinking I was going to go on a sales call. I drove two and a half hours from Syracuse to go to lunch with this attorney in Buffalo. It didn’t take long to realize that I was going to marry her. My business plan changed from Charlotte, North Carolina to Babylon and Buffalo. That’s how I ended up in Buffalo.
I love that. How romantic. I wrote a book called Romancing Your Customer. Romance is pretty big in my life, business, family and personal. Looking back, is there a hard moment? Is there some time in your business history when maybe it was brutal or it was like, “This is not working the way I need it to work,” that you would feel comfortable about sharing with us?
Customer Service: At that moment, I realized that if I wanted to grow where we wanted to grow, I needed to be a better leader.
 
I have so many of those
As we all do. What proven entrepreneurs know is that failings are an integral part of the success story.
I’m always looking at my phone here. The reason I’m looking at my phone is because I keep a list of things I messed up. I want to be able to remind myself of all these things I screwed up. There are many of these moments. There are times that are tough. Unfortunately, a lot of entrepreneurs experienced some employee theft type of situations. We’ve had some of that happen in a business. In my role, it taints me and says, “Can I trust this team or not?” The answer is you can. Unfortunately, sometimes people violate that trust.
The more I think about it, I got this list of things I screwed up for sure. A few years ago, I remember we were distinctly thinking about how we were not where I wanted to be yet in growing. I wanted to keep growing but it felt so hard. I felt like I was dragging the company with me. I was the bottleneck. I had inserted myself into everything. I was grumpy and I heard that from my team. I would ask them, “Tell me what I’m doing or what I’m not doing.” They said in the most delicate possible way, “When you’re unhappy, everybody knows it.” I’ll never forget that.
I was like, “There are times I’m unhappy. I probably do let it be known.” I’m not a yeller and screamer but there are different ways to let people know. At that moment, I realized that if I wanted to grow where we wanted to grow, I needed to be a better leader. That was the moment I was like, “This isn’t working the way I thought.” It’s because I didn’t know what it was going to take to grow where I wanted to grow so I went to work at becoming a better leader.
I started reading nonstop books on leadership. In Entrepreneurs’ Organization, there are a few different programs. An entrepreneurial master’s program that I was looking at was about scaling your business. There is a global leadership academy program. I’m like, “I want to do both of those but right now I feel like I need to be a better leader.” That’s where I started. It was a totally life-changing program. You’ve been through that program too, Don. You know what I’m talking about.
I wouldn’t say that gave me all the answers, but it put me on the right path to becoming a better leader. I have held strong in staying on that path and trying to better myself. I feel like with every step I have taken to become a better leader, I got so much work to do. I feel like the company has grown. I do attribute a lot to that moment when I realized that I’m not the leader that I need to be to bring this company where I want. That leaves me with a couple of options. You either decided you’re not going to grow, you leave your business or you grow yourself and help the company grow. That’s the path I chose.
My journey with Entrepreneurs’ Organization is I joined to elevate my business. I’m not sure exactly when but at some point, I crossed over to this. For me, the fact is that the best way to grow my business is to grow me, and then everything rises. All boats ride higher on a high tide. When I’m at a high tide, everything in my life does better. I’ll give a plug for that Global Leadership Academy or the regional or any of the leadership academies. It’s totally life-changing. They did not give me all the answers. It did illuminate some of the questions. Part of that leadership journey is knowing what questions to ask and not seeking perfection but just improvement.
Words matter. Be careful with them.  Share on X
I was so frustrated with my business at that time. I felt like I was dragging everyone with me. Through all that reflection, programs and stuff, I realized that I wasn’t dragging them with me. I was capping them. I was stopping it because of my own limitations.
I have looked at my own path at times when I felt like I was a weight on the business. When I did elevate myself, it was almost like cutting the weight. As soon as I snipped the weight, everything bounced to the top. It’s hard to have that realization but I’ve seen that a couple of times in my path. What about warp speed. Warp speeds are in the news a lot because of the vaccination. I remember back when Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek was like, “Scotty, we’ve got to have more power.” Scotty somehow brought warp speed out of a dying Enterprise engine. Sometime in your business, things were not going well but all of the sudden, the clouds parted, the sun shone, the angel sang and things started doing well. Do you have one of those that you can share?
There are these times when it felt like we were working hard. There are times when it seems easy. We talked about those times too. The first one that comes to mind is a couple of years after we bought the business, we acquired a company in Cleveland, Ohio. It was pretty scary for me. I was like, “What am I doing? What’s going on here?” but we did it. We were acquiring this company and we grew revenue from that, but we grew beyond what we had acquired. It was because we acquired talent and we had some tools that they didn’t have and they had some tools we didn’t have.
It was like a one plus one equals not even three, but four or five situations. It was great because we thought maybe if all the stars aligned, these things could happen. If we brought these better technology tools to that company, maybe they’ll have these great relationships. They can sell their clients on it. That did happen. We were not a strong sales organization but the CEO of that company who is still with us was our Chief Sales Officer. He was strong in sales. He helped us build out a real-life sales team.
Now we have twenty-plus people in sales. He’s done that for us. We were able to use his great expertise to help us. They had some service lines that we didn’t have but we had relationships. Everything lined up. It felt easy at that moment. Things really worked out. We’re growing because of resources and talent and putting it all together at the same time.
It’s powerful to weave different threads into cloth in an organization. People have different skillsets and then to set the vision, let them go manifest. Let’s play make-believe. If you could go all the way back to when you were twenty and you could have a conversation with your twenty-year-old self, what is one thing you would share that you wish you knew then that you know now?
There are a lot of those things but I’ll just give you the first one that comes to my head. The first one I can think of is words matter. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t even know I said something that bothered somebody. Later on or sometimes years after that moment, I’ll be talking to them and maybe I’ll ask them a question or something about the past and they’ll bring up something I said that bothered them. I didn’t think about that for one second but it stuck with them for this long. They’ve been carrying this weight of being bothered by something that was said for that long.
That’s what I would tell my twenty-year-old self, “Make sure you mean what you say and think about what you say before you say it because you have an impact on people, especially in a leadership position.” People are looking at you and watching what you’re doing. They’re listening to what you say way more than you realize. It will stick with people.
Customer Service: Make sure you mean what you say and think about what you say before you say it because you have an impact on people.
 
The words you don’t use matter as well. There’s a time when a leader should be stepping in and making it clear the personal values and company values. If you don’t say anything, people notice that too. That’s the last of my problem because I tend to say too much, but we’ve probably all seen moments in other organizations or you’re wondering why somebody hasn’t stepped in and said something. The lack of words sometimes matters. My long-winded answer is I would tell my twenty-year-old self that words matter so be careful with them.
I can’t think of the philosopher who said, “Words are the clothing of our thoughts,” so be careful how you dress. Words are going to be so uplifting and encouraging. People will remember those maybe for a lifetime. The other one is, “Silence means consent.” Zig did quote that but I think it goes back to Plato or Demosthenes. Those are old yet wise words. As leaders, there are times when we have to plant a flag in the ground and say, “No, we’re not doing this. We are going to do that.” If you had a magic wand and you were king for the day, and a Proven Entrepreneur tribe could support JP in some way, what would that be? What could we do for you?
If there’s an entrepreneur tribe and I do look at entrepreneurs like that, I’m going to answer from that perspective, because I think that tribe does provide something for me. That’s not what I thought it would be. We joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. I thought I wanted my tribe to help me tactically grow my business and answer this question for me. How do I do this? How do I create a 401(k) for my team? How do I create a policy? How do I recruit?” All these things. You can get all that but it’s secondary to the support validation. There’s the imposter syndrome in entrepreneurs.
I know a lot of people have that, myself included. Sometimes I’m wondering, “How did I get here? Do these people know that I’m just making this up every day and I’m not worthy of what I’m doing?” We have those doubts. What I get with that magic wand and from that tribe is telling me, “Shut up. You are smart enough. We look up to you. You are a valid leader.” The whole lonely at the top thing is real. We’re not necessarily going down our org chart and telling people the challenges we have. You need that support. Getting that from that entrepreneurial tribe is important. It has been huge for me.
Everybody’s the CEO of them. Maybe they don’t own the company. Maybe they have never bought and grown or maybe they’ve bought and lost the company. They are still the CEOs of something of their own life. That imposter syndrome is a human issue. Maybe it’s magnified in us entrepreneurs but that’s a human problem. I know this philosopher. This is one of my favorite quotes, “You’re far better, far smarter, far stronger than even you think.” Do you know which philosopher that is?
No, but I’ve heard that quote before.
That was Winnie the Pooh. That is one of my favorite quotes ever. That applies to all humans and certainly to entrepreneurs.
Sometimes you don’t know how strong you are and all those things until you have to be.
Sometimes, you don't know how strong you are and all those things until you have to be. Share on X
When people get out of their comfort zone, they’re like, “I want to stay in my comfort zone. It’s comfortable in there. Why would I want to leave the comfort of my comfort zone? It’s counterintuitive. It’s comfortable here. I would like to stay here.” When I get out of my comfort zone, what I find is I performed better than I thought I would. What I teach to my clients is to get out of that comfort zone every day. Exit your comfort zone and it will grow and exit it again, and then you’re just racing out of it. It’s not haphazardly but get out of that comfort zone. 
On that same point is when I was talking about being that roadblock for a company. Some of that comes into play. I see that often in leaders in our own company here where they have people that report to them. We start critiquing the work that’s being done for us like, “I could do that better. I should do that better.” You take it away from them and you do it. “That PowerPoint isn’t as good as I could have created it. That report is not as good as I could have created it. Let me handle the sales call because I can close the deal.” You end up doing that type of stuff and you’re robbing your team of the moment where they can get out of their comfort zone.
They will never get better because you’re taking that opportunity away. I’ve consciously looked at moments and said, “I could probably do this better, but I want them to get uncomfortable and have that opportunity.” Now I find a lot of power in pushing people out of their comfort zone. Oftentimes, now they are better than me and better than I was back then too. It’s because they are better than me at these things. I just had to give them an opportunity.
That folks would be leadership 101. Many times, we throw the word leadership around a little cavalierly that this or that person is a leader. The question I’m always asking is, “Yes, but are people following them?” That doesn’t mean they are not a leader because they’re in the position, but they are certainly not at the height of what a leader is unless they have people that willingly follow. You can’t be a leader if you don’t have a follower somewhere just by definition. Let’s get off of the business and maybe get to our last question. I enjoyed our time together. What’s a passion project. What’s something that’s not business that you care deeply about and get some time, energy, brainpower and maybe some dollars? Any passion project for you, JP.
I had one that I was still mulling around with. It had to do with memories and capturing memories and delivering them to people in the future. I had this idea which I’m trying to revamp now because I don’t think it was working the way I wanted to. To me, memories are important. I’m all about creating these moments and memories with friends and family that they will think about forever. That’s a good example. You have the ice cream sundae challenge at the restaurant like, “Can you eat this obscene amount of ice cream in 30 minutes?” I’ll be the guy that says, “We have to do that.” “Why?” “Because we’ll remember this forever. We’ll remember stuffing ourselves until we are sick.”
I want to capture these memories because that’s what lasts beyond people’s life. I was working on this project of automating how we capture memories, just the most important ones, and then store them away and deliver them back to people either like a photo book or something in the future with comments and commentary that people have never seen before.
I like that but it was hard to get people to pay for something now that they might not get for 10 or 20 years. That was a passion project. It’s something I’m trying to do on the side and something personal. I’m passionate about music still. I built a home studio. I’m trying to get back into that and playing music and recording music. I have a lot of hobbies but there are hobbies and there are passions, I would say.
Next time, maybe we can do it from your studio. I’ve seen it. It’s a totally different look from this room at the office. I would love to do that. JP, I am so grateful that you would come on the show and share your success story in all candor, the good, the bad and maybe the ugly, with our audience. Reach out to JP Midgley at Avalon for any litigation support needs. He will take good care of you. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me
 
Important Links

Avalon
Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Romancing Your Customer

 
About JP Midgley
I am a champion of gritty teams and solutions. When someone has a problem, I am unable to sit still- instead, I jump into action and develop an out-of-the-box strategy.
I am creative and resourceful when it comes to solving problems. People say I am tenacious, and that is an advantage when posed with an issue. No challenge will ever beat me.
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E28 | Build Strong Teams Through Diversity
Date: June 16, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/build-strong-teams-through-diversity/
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Content:
 
In today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur show, Don Williams discusses winning teams built with intentional diversity. When you include people with different viewpoints, attitudes, personalities, and strengths, you will find that your teams are so much stronger.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Build-Strong-Teams-Through-Diversity.mp3
 
Build Strong Teams Through Diversity
I want to talk about strategy in teams. I got done with a multi-day three-day meeting with 14 entrepreneurs setting strategies that would affect about 2,000 entrepreneurs in the upcoming year. To begin the meeting, we had all completed Gallup’s StrengthsFinders, Clifton StrengthsFinders.
The world is comprised of people with different strengths, viewpoints, and personalities. As a team, we perform so much higher if we have diversity.  Share on X
There are tons of those personality and makeup assessments out there that you can use, whether you use DiSC, StrengthFinders, the Birkman, Myers-Briggs or VIA. I don’t promote one over the other. They all have their benefits, but the beauty of doing that is to be sure that you have a team that represents people with diverse skills and personalities. For many years in my own life, I believe I was the smartest person in the room. I’m not proud to say that. That was arrogance.
Diversity: Be sure that you have a team that represents people with diverse skills and diverse personalities.
 
What I’ve learned on my entrepreneurial journey is that my teams are so much stronger if I include people with different viewpoints, strengths and personalities. The world is comprised of people with different strengths, viewpoints and personalities. As a team, we perform so much higher if we have diversity in that team. The next time you set out to map a strategy for your company, a campaign in your company or an initiative in your company, I encourage you to include people with different viewpoints, attitudes, personalities, makeup and strengths in where you put the strongest team on the field. That’s it for this episode. I’ll see you next time. Thanks.
 
Important Links

Clifton StrengthsFinders

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S1:E25 | Creative & Proven Entrepreneur, Walter Monk
Date: June 15, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e25-creative-proven-entrepreneur-walter-monk/
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Listen to Walters’ success story about his childhood in South Dakota to being the man behind the scenes in some of the largest elections in the United States. Walter Monk went to college and took up Wildlife and Fisheries Management but felt empty during classes, so he left to work in a gas station as a manager. That earned him quite a sum of money. He worked in some other businesses and experienced ups and downs, which eventually led him to the political space business through fundraising through texting. Stay tuned and learn more!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Creative-Proven-Entrepreneur-Walter-Monk.mp3
 
Creative & Proven Entrepreneur, Walter Monk
In this episode, we are with a long-time friend, Walter Monk. Walter, welcome to the show.
I am glad to be here.
Thank you so much for coming. Walter, your primary business is a company called Text2Survey.
That is the moneymaker at the minute.
Tell us what does Text2Survey do?
We text people, lots of them. We have got about 300 people working from home. Mostly this is political or nonprofits that are either fundraising or want to do polling or events. In any case, they want to reach out to a lot of people quickly and ask them to do something. Either they are going to ask them to do a poll to find out what they think, click a link to go donate money to some cause, or possibly they are going to say, “We are having a town hall meeting and we would like you to come. Would you be interested in coming?” The people respond back and then our people respond to that. Sometimes, the people do what our clients want them to do.
How did you get into the Text2Survey business?
Many years ago, I had a lot of communication equipment for making phone calls and I was helping coach my son’s soccer team. I was not really coaching. I was just running up and down the lines. The real coach was a political consultant by the name of Craig Murphy. Craig Murphy was starting out then and he said, “I am having a lot of trouble with my phone calls.” He was complaining about and I said, “I do a lot of phone calls. Maybe I could help you with that.” He explained it to, so I started doing it for him. He has grown. His company is called Murphy Nasica. It is one of the, if not the largest, campaign strategist firm in Texas and one of the most successful in the country or anywhere else.
Proven Entrepreneur: It took a while to figure out the bar business, but eventually we did then so we started expanding.
 
He is still a great client and a very smart guy. He even still uses us sometimes for polling and for other stuff. My son and his were on the same soccer team. That is how I got started in the political space. A while ago, we had a client that every so often, we did some work within the political space. They came and said, “You guys can do texting, right?” I was like, “Yes.” “We heard you could use this to do fundraising.” I was like, “I don’t think so. I think the laws are going to be wrong.” We dug into it and sure enough, we could if we did with human beings doing the texting.
We could not do it automatically. We have to do it with human beings. We made it so that it was easy for human beings to do it on a big scale with people working from home. That client was very smart and they blew up. They had a lot of campaigns on a national level and therefore, we did too. That has been a good run.
Think back to young Walter Monk. I know you live in the DFW area but where are you from? Are you from here?

I grew up a lot in South Dakota and then I came down to Texas.
Many entrepreneurs, when they look back at their childhood, were involved in something entrepreneurial, successful or not, but as a child. What about you?
There were many failures. I have tried a lot of things that did not work. This was way before the internet. I read this article about raising rabbits. They said, “Your rabbit will breed this often and you get more rabbits. You can sell rabbits for X amount.” I knew there was a lot of corn around that I could get for almost nothing to feed the rabbits. I already had a lot of fencing to fence them in, so I made out my first projection of a business plan like, “I am going to be a multimillionaire in about a year at this rate.”
The first thing was I got to get some rabbits, so I bought this rabbit. It is a great big female white rabbit. That blew about all my capital getting her, and then I had to buy this skinny, scrawny, little male rabbit. I put them both in the cage and I am expecting fireworks and great things to happen. The little male was amorous. He had come over to the female and she would kick him. He would go into the other end of the cage and it took only a few times like that until he did not try anymore. I had no more rabbits and my dreams of being a millionaire were gone.
I decided, “This was a fiasco.” I decided that I would sell my rabbits back. I put an ad on the paper and I remember this guy coming to buy the rabbits. He was away from the big city. He drove out there and was like, “How much do you want for the rabbits?” I did not know any better. I said the amount that I had paid for, which was $3.75. I was in fifth grade, not very old. He says, “$3.75? I will give you $3.” I was like, “No, I paid $3.75. I want $3.75 back out of my rabbits.” He says, “$3. Take it or leave it. I am leaving.”
There are a lot of things that wouldn’t work in your life. Share on X
He leaves. I know nothing about it. I have no negotiating skills whatsoever, but pretty soon, the guy comes driving back. He says, “You are the toughest negotiator I have ever met. I will give you $3.75.” I did not know what he was talking about. I was like, “What?” Sometimes, you get lucky. At least I got out of it with my $3.75.
No loss of capital, just a little loss of time, energy, effort, and the poor male, maybe some dignity. You left South Dakota, went to college, went to the military, and went to the Merchant Marine, what did you do?
I went to college for Wildlife and Fisheries Management which does me a whole lot of good in current career. I never did go into Wildlife and Fisheries Management.
I was going to say, did you do good in any career?
It taught me that this was not for me. I remember going to the counselor at school and saying, “I am going crazy because I can’t go to classes. I do not get up. I sleep through them all. Is there something wrong with me? Can you fix me?” The counselor starts asking me questions like, “Why are you here?” I was like, “A lot of reasons but I want to do this.”
The counselor says, “Are you sure you want to be here?” “Yes. I definitely want to be here.” Eventually, believe it or not, the college counselor could see that I did not want to be there. I could remember that day really well because he said, “You do not have to be here if you do not want to.” I left and I was so free and happy. I was skipping across the campus green like, “I am free. I never have to go back to class ever if I do not want to.”
Didn’t you?
I did not. I went out and shortly thereafter, I got into my first business that I actually made any money.
Proven Entrepreneur: What was really your limiting factor to keep you from growing was your own incompetence.
 
Tell us about that.
I was working at a gas station when I was supposedly going to college. There was another one that needed a manager. The guy who needed to pick a manager for it had no time and I was the best candidate at that time. He is like, “Would you like to do this?” I was like, “Yes. That would be great. I have nothing else to do for the rest of my life.” I went over there and he took me under his wing. He said, “You do this every day. You do this and this. This station has to be open from 6:00 AM to midnight. You are the only employee and you got to get to the bank sometime in that time.” There are all these impossibly conflicting rules.
Long story short that worked. I made a butt-load of money in the gas station business when I was really young. I thought that was God’s gift to entrepreneurs and I knew everything there was to know. I sold them all and I went to Hawaii to catch lobsters. One year later, I lost my money, never caught one lobster, and came back. That is how it has been ever since.
That is quite a story from, “I am going to rule the oil and gas industry and gas stations” to “I do not know how to catch lobster.”
There were a lot of lobsters. Nobody was catching them on a commercial scale until not too long after that, another 12 or 15 years, some Australians figured out how to do it. Now it is a big business over there.
Did you start Text2Survey immediately after the lobster business?
No, I went into the bar business. I decided, “I am going to do something that seems like it is fun.” I bought this mini bar in the basement. It was called The Last Step. The clients were either alcoholics or drug dealers or both. It was a very strange business in the beginning. We were in business by the time I was married. My wife and I were like, “We are running out of money.” We are sleeping on the floor in the bar. We did not put any money for anything except to barely keep it going. After three months, we finally had a day where we grossed $100 on a Saturday night.
We were like, “It is possible. Maybe we will make it here.” It took a while to figure out the bar business, but eventually, we did. We started expanding. After a while, we had six nightclubs. We moved out of that one and moved into a bigger one. We got it going. We were quite successful in it for a while and made a lot of money. Eventually, the Peter Principle kicked in and everybody moved up until they got to their level of maximum incompetence. I passed that level. It all crashed down, went bankrupt, got divorced, and back to being broke again at age 35.
Everybody moves up until they get to their level of maximum incompetence.  Share on X
You then opened Text2Survey.
No. I was divorced, so naturally, I started dating service. How else am I going to find anybody? I found a wife, made some money and sold the first dating service. I built another and sold that one. I came to Texas built a big one nationwide, and that is where I started doing the automated calls. I started doing it a little earlier than that, but I scaled it out here for the dating service. That is where I met Craig Murphy at the end of that when the law changed that it was no longer illegal to do what we were doing. It was legal for politicians, but it was not legal for dating services. We are in the political space now.
Think back, and if you would share a warp speed moment. Some time, when business was doing pretty good, but then all of a sudden, you had this massive acceleration, and it seemed to take off.
I had two of those in my life. The last one was around 2020. At that point, our first big client figured out how to do fundraising with texting. We were experimenting for about nine months at that point. Some things worked once in a while, and then they really hit it. To these guys’ credit, once they hit it, it was like, “Let’s roll this baby. Let’s go.”
We went from doing 30,000 texts a day to doing 100,000 texts a day. I remember celebrating at that and then it was 500,000 texts a day, and then it was 1 million texts a day. Until the day before the election, we did 10 million texts. That is a ramp-up like crazy. It was three times the best year I had ever had prior to that. That is one.
Tell us about the first warp speed moment.
At one point, we got a great bank in South Dakota, still do. They have taken care of me in any ways over the years. They needed to market credits cards and I said, “I can figure that out.” They said, “We will pay you $75 apiece for every credit card you can issue.” I was like, “Maybe I can make that work.” We tested and tested on some things. We eventually figured out that if we sent out a certain letter that was handwritten with almost nothing inside except one thing that was almost like a Visa card, but not quite that says, “Call this number.” We could make that dog hunt and it started hunting.
I said to him, “How many credit cards do you need? How many do you want?” He says, “All you can get.” I said, “Really? Okay.” We turned on the gas, and this was back quite a few years ago, to put this into perspective, we hit a month where the profit was $500,000 that month. That was about four months after we started. We were like, “We go from 2 people to 20 people to all of the people you can fit in the building that is here 24/7 and flipping shifts.” All of a sudden, they were like, “We got enough cards. Thank you very much.”
Proven Entrepreneur: The key piece of growing a business is just attracting good people and making them give them part of the action.
 
What about a hard moment? Was there something in your past where it was painful and you did not like it, but in retrospect, looking back on that event, you see the benefit in what happened there?
When I was expanding nightclubs, it seemed like every single one made more money than the one before. From my perspective, what I saw as my limiting factor was, “I will have enough capital. How can I get more capital?” I got to be really good in raising capital, but not as good as I wanted to be because I wanted to go build them all over the US. When I got up to the fifth and my same store sales were not going up that year in my other ones, which should have been my “woah” moment. I kicked myself in the butt later and it is like, “Go fix what is there and make the same store sales go up.”
I did do that, but I rolled the dice on the sixth, which was going to make theoretically more money than the rest. It did not and some other things happened. What was really my limiting factor to keep me from growing was my own incompetence. It was my own managerial, not having te systems in place to support that growth at that clip and over-leveraging like, “How much can I get? As much as everything I can possibly throw into this, let’s put it in because it makes money,” but it did not. It was embarrassing. There were lots of people that trusted me in it.
If you could go back and talk to 22-year old Walter and you can say, “Walter, listen to me. Let me give you this good advice.” What would that advice be?
It took a while for me to figure out that the key piece of growing a business is attracting good people and giving them part of the action. Everybody that matters in the business needs to see that if the business succeeds, they succeed more. Their contributions need to be pretty direct. In the beginning, I did not do that. I was like, “If we make money, I make money.”
That for a while is like, “That does not work very long.” People do not like working for somebody like that, so then it became like, “If we make money, we all make more money and we all get to go help more people in whatever it is that we are doing.” If I had to do it over, I would have started that a lot earlier. We eventually got individual P&Ls for everybody that matters.
If the Proven Entrepreneur Clan can support in some way, what would that be?
I have an idea of launching a game that can help people. Before I came over here, I was kicking off a piece of it. I have yet to figure out a monetization strategy for it which is scary for me, but there are pieces of it that I know work. I tried them out on myself to try to make myself a better person and the people around me in that way. It is fun to do and I want to make it a game, ideas or help or anything like that pawn that.
You can go from nothing into half a million bucks a month.  Share on X
Everything from how to make things that are useful for, say, Don Williams that help Don Williams become part of his DNA to how to stop doing the things that Don Williams does not want to do. Also, how can you have fun and keep score in a way that other people are playing too, and encouraging you? That is what I am working toward.
Is it gamified self-improvement?
Take away the stigma. We start with healthy people. We start like, “How can we make life more fun? How can we make life better?”
I think there are a lot of people on this planet that would like to make life better.
Make the world a better place. If I am living a better life and it resonates with other people around me, it is all well and good and it spreads. If I am living a life where I am sucking the life out of everyone around me, then that is not good either. Each of us matters more than we know.
I want to thank you for coming to the show. I want to talk to the audience and tell you that if you want to make your life better and have fun doing it, look for Walter Monk’s new deal that is coming out. It has been fun and life has been better. Walter, thank you.
Thank you.
 
Important Links

Text2Survey
Craig Murphy

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S1:E23 | What If You Had $86,400 Secretly Deposited Into Your Bank Account Today?
Date: June 15, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-23-what-if-you-had-86400-secretly-deposited-into-your-bank-account-today/
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And what if you had another $86,400 deposit tomorrow? And the following day and for the rest of your life? How would you spend it wisely? This 86,400 is the number of seconds we all have every day. So live your life the best way you can by maximizing those 86,400 seconds every day!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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What If You Had $86,400 Secretly Deposited Into Your Bank Account Today?
A good friend of mine, Warren Ruston, tells a story about perspective on time. The story goes something like this. You wake up and had been deposited $86,400 in your bank account that you must spend that day. You cannot invest it. You must spend it. If you only spend $50,000, the balance of $36,400 evaporates. It does not roll over like cellular minutes.
Every day when you wake up, that's a gift. Share on X
You wake up this morning and there’s $86,400 in your bank account that you must spend. What would you go spend it on? Most people have an answer to that. They’d be like, “I’d go buy a new BMW. I’d go buy an around the world vacation.” They have some idea of what they would spend that money on. Here’s where it gets tricky. The next morning, you wake up and you have another deposit overnight of $86,400 with the same rules on that money. You must spend it that day. Anything you do not spend does not roll forward. You cannot invest. It must be spent.
Time Management: Your day contains 86,400 seconds to spend. Spend those seconds wisely.
 
Day after day, you wake up with $86,400 in your bank account that you must spend that day. After a week or two weeks, it’s difficult for most people to figure out what they would spend that money on. The analogy is this. Every day when you wake up, that’s a gift. You’ll reasonably expect that you’ll see the entire day. You won’t expire that day. That day contains 86,400 seconds that you’re going to spend. The point is, spend those seconds wisely. Most people dramatically overestimate what they can get done in the short-term but horribly underestimate what they can get accomplished in the long-term. Use those seconds. Live intentionally toward your outcome. That’s all for this episode of the show.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S1:E24 | What Is The Relationship Of Mindset To Results? Online Membership Expert – Scott Dolloff
Date: June 15, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-24-what-is-the-relationship-of-mindset-to-results-online-membership-expert-scott-dolloff/
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Scott Dolloff is the CEO of Rainmaker Membership Systems. Listen to Scott’s journey through the Martial Arts industry to become one of the nation’s most successful membership programs. Scott’s newest venture is a collaboration with none other than Jay Abraham.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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What Is The Relationship Of Mindset To Results? Online Membership Expert – Scott Dolloff
I am so excited for our guest. I met Scott years ago out in California at a conference. It turns out we’re neighbors. We both live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Our guest is Scott Dolloff. Scott, welcome to the show. 
Thanks so much for having me.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much. Let’s jump right in. Tell me the name of your business and what you are doing now. 
We own a company called Rainmaker Membership Systems. We started primarily in martial arts schools. It’s for martial arts, cheer dance, gymnastics, that kind of thing. It’s used to grow their gyms or academies, manage their tuition, billing, marketing, all that stuff.
Those are karate studios, gyms, and the like would have children in the program. Their parents are the paying customers, and the children are the participating customers. You started this. How long have you had it? 
The software has been around since 2003. We started the company in 2010.
Were you using it for yourself? 
Exactly.
You took something that was costing you money and turned it into income-producing. 
It wasn’t costing us much because it didn’t do much. It did things perfectly for what we needed, but as we started allowing other people to start using it, that’s when things changed. It got a lot more difficult. The development became more important for details to be right. Since we were the ones developing it, we knew how that works and things like that to make it work right. We couldn’t depend on that once we started letting everybody use it.
Let me ask you. Are you a coder? Are you a developer? 
I started with a friend of mine. He taught himself how to program. He wrote the program. I came up with the idea as far as what it would do, and it took off.
You have to make big things smaller in order to grow. Share on X
That’s a very common success model with entrepreneurs. Somebody is the visionary. He sees what does not yet exist, and then somebody is the integrator. They build it. It’s a very common model. How many customers do you have now? 
We have about 2,400.
On software, there are typically a couple of different ways to monetize that. Is that a one-time purchase? Is it a subscription? 
It’s a subscription. It’s a monthly recurring fee.
Tell me the top three benefits a customer gets for using your software solution. 
Number one, it makes it easier for their customers tos, text messages, consistent email marketing, a lot of automation, things like that.
It’s easy for your customer and their customer. We certainly know that in selling, anytime we can make something easy, simple, and if we can add fun, that’s the trifecta. You almost can’t keep people from buying from you. Let’s go way back to young Scott. Where are you from? Were your parents entrepreneurs? 
My parents were not entrepreneurs. My dad was a turnaround  manage their own accounts, update their forms of payment, see their attendance history, and see everything about their experience in that specific gym. For the business itself, it eliminates the mundane work nobody wants to do but needs to be done consistently from making appointments, reminder callmanager for Walmart. Every year, we would move from one area to another. He would work on a store and get it back up to standards. We would go on and move to the next city, next area, and start all over again. He was the fix-it guy. My mom stayed at home for a while. She ended up going to work as well. She ended up managing an HVAC company. She didn’t have any experience in that, but she had a lot of experience in managing books, working with people, and that kind of stuff. I learned a lot from both of them as far as business is concerned.
Talk about work ethic. In my first job, I mowed the grass not because I got paid but because there were consequences for the grass not being mowed. That was my first job. If you didn’t get paid, it’s not really a job. It was just my responsibility. Talk to us about early responsibilities and/or the first job. 
I had all my responsibilities. From the time I was eight years old, I was doing laundry, cleaning, kitchen, cooking meals, and taking care of the house because my mom went to work. We would get home from school and that’s what I do every day. It’s between that and homework. The first thing that I did was to make money. I probably did a lot of what people did. I had lemonade stands. I started selling brownies and snacks as well.
Later I did lawnmowing. I started doing some commercial properties, things like that. When I was thirteen, I started teaching martial arts as an assistant, started learning the business, and ended up buying the school that I grew up in when I was eighteen. I then started learning how to do business. It was a whole different experience.
You were entrepreneul as a child. As a very young man, you stepped into the world of entrepreneurship and found out that, “There’s a lot I don’t know.”
Martial Arts Industry: People will definitely buy from you if you make something easy, simple, and fun.
 
There was a lot I didn’t know. It was painful.
I opened my first company at 26. I did not know what a P&L or a balance sheet was. I was ill-equipped as the owner. I was well-equipped as a salesman and sales manager. If you can sell enough, you can afford to figure everything else out. If you can’t sell enough, that’s a real problem. Was that here in DFW? 
It was here in DFW.
I’ll share this with you. Last fall of 2021, I was in Oklahoma City. That was where Century Martial Arts was way back in the day where Chuck Norris was. 
He was the sponsor.
I met another entrepreneur who had a facility but also sold equipment. I was like, “I know somebody in Dallas-Fort Worth.” He’s like, “I know Scott.” I was like, “Small world.” You were born and raised and did some entrepreneurial stuff. This is so common. In about 40 or 50 interviews, I have yet to find someone whose parents did not instill a very strong work ethic. It sounds like your folks did. You’re going to school, taking care of your schoolwork and the house. 
In my own story, my father was a United States Marine. I got my hair cut every Tuesday. Not that your haircut grows much Tuesday to Tuesday, but that’s the Marine way. We get haircuts on Tuesdays. I was spit shining shoes in kindergarten. Work ethic is very important. How did you come to buy a school you grew up in as a martial artist at eighteen years old?
I got the offer to do it. My boss had been doing another business on the side. He was ready to make a transition over to that full-time instead of the martial arts school. He offered me to buy the business. At first, I said no because I was going to go off to school. I went off to school for about six weeks. I then got another call and said, “I want you to buy the school.” I said, “Okay.” I moved back. I had the money saved. I’d earned quite a bit of money teaching martial arts up until then. I came back and put a down payment and financed the rest for over eighteen months. That was it.
Principal’s there, saving that money, having a little capital and a little owner finance. Many businesses are bought with not very much money upfront but an earnout. A good buddy of ours, Roland Frasier, teaches how to do that very well. At eighteen, you owned your own martial arts company. I went to college for a minute. I was making too much money. I said, “I’m not sticking around for this.” What happened in between the first martial arts studio and software company now? Give us a little bit of that journey. 
I had about 150 students when I started. Within a year, it had 88 students. I did not know how to recruit and enroll new members. I thought it was all about teaching classes. It was a painful lesson. After that, I got on a Greyhound bus because I couldn’t afford a plane ticket. One of my earliest mentors said, “If you can get here, I’ll finance the conference for you.” I went to Irvine, California, on a Greyhound bus.
It was the longest bus trip ever. It was painful going there. I was excited, but coming back, I was more excited based on everything I learned. I made all kinds of sweeping changes that were very painful as far as making announcements to the parents, telling them things that they were not paying for, and they were going to start being charged for. Those are things that I was forced to do or I was going to go out of business. It was intimidating to have to confront all these customers. I brought them in two different meetings, lined them all up, having to sit down in front of me, and laid out the plans. It was difficult.
After that, I finally turned things around. When I was probably 26 or 25, I started getting into websites. A friend of mine was doing well at generating leads with his website. I taught myself how to build websites. Before I knew it, I was doing search engine optimization for other martial arts schools that were friends of mine. That turned into a business that was pretty much equal to what I was doing in the martial arts business. I finally sold the school and did SEO full-time. That got old for me real quick.
All the pain, trials, and challenges that you're going to go through will be worth it in the end. Share on X
I talked to my friend and said, “I want to start selling the software.” He goes, “Nobody’s going to buy the software. It’s very specific to us.” I said, “I want to give it away to my SEO clients. It’s another sticking point for them as far as their monthly subscription to me. I’ll pay you half of what I would charge them to give them the software.” He said, “Okay,” knowing that it wasn’t going to do anything. That took off. Within six months, it was either 200 or 300 clients. It kept growing from there.
You looked past the naysayer and said, “It might work. I’m going to do it anyway. I believe enough to put my own money in it. I’m going to pay you even when I’m not earning.” You saw that grow right off the bat. If you don’t mind, think back into your entrepreneurial journey of a hard moment. You’ve already shared you were a great leader and handled difficult conversations at a very early age. 
Customers are always risky. They might leave. The customer isn’t always right. I love Herb Kelleher. I think he was the first one who said, “The customer isn’t always right, but they do always pay the bill.” We need them to stick around. We need cashflow. While every success story has some pretty significant failings, is there somewhere along the way or something there you could share? 
We were talking about managing finances, P&Ls, and stuff like that. I was making what I thought was pretty good money at the time when I was about 24 or 25. I was not paying my payroll taxes. I was like, “I’ll get to it.” I was an offsite owner at the time and lived in what I thought was life. I just thought, “I’ll get to the paperwork. I’ll write a check. It will be done.” It came to a point where I was like, “I’ve got to take care of this.”
I got all the tax insurances on it. I did everything. I got back a bill with fines and this and that for $150,000. Things changed really quickly. It got real intense fast. I started loving accounts. This was 2008 because the business had gone South at the same time. I didn’t have the cashflow that I did before. I had to turn things around as best as I could. I closed down a corporation and restarted another corporation. That was a difficult time.
There’s no bigger issue with IRS and 941 taxes.
That’s one thing you cannot get out of. Bankruptcy doesn’t do it.
That’s what they call trust account taxes. If you’re a starting entrepreneur and have questions about that, reach out to your accounting counsel now. They’re not very patient and understanding about those types of issues.
They have all the leverage.
Thanks for sharing that. That’s helpful to some companies starting out. We’re still at the tail end of the pandemic. Before, I did go to the opening day of the Texas Rangers with 40,000 of my closest friends. We’ll see how that went. Warp speed during the pandemic is a pretty popular term because of the vaccination program. What about a warp speed moment? Sometimes in your business, things are going good. All of the sudden, the clouds parted, the sun shone, the angels sang, and you had rapid growth, which almost every entrepreneur hits periods of that. Is there one of those you could share? 
It was years ago. We had the server systeme software that you lease on a contractual basis. It’s offsite. It’s in the cloud. We were going to have to upgrade. We got back this proposal, and this was a serious proposal. It was formal paperwork and all this stuff. I have the salesperson that’s calling me all the time saying, “If you can do it now, we can give you some early incentives.” I’m like for th, “This is acting like this is a big deal.” I got nervous all of a sudden. I started looking at the total contract amount. I was like, “I could buy a house with this.” I was like, “I don’t know if this is the right thing.”
I started thinking about it. I was like, “If I’m not able to make this decision now, I’ll never be able to make it later. I’m not going to grow slowly into being able to make these financial decisions.” I said, “I’m going to go for it.” It was a time when I figured out that you have to make big things smaller in order to grow. It helped me perspective-wise to see other problems in a different way and opportunities. It changed the way I thought and performed in a lot of different areas of the business.
Martial Arts Industry: If you can sell enough, you can figure out everything else.
 
Make big things smaller. A comment is, do things scared. I know it’s comfortable in there, but get out, exit your comfort zone, and make those big things smaller because so much of it is perception anyway. Is it really big? It depends on how you look at it. 
If we think it’s big, it may always be too big.
I have an elderly aunt and uncle. As they are progressing age, it’s interesting to me how their lives get smaller, and items in their lives get bigger. It’s the things that a 33-year career Navy Officer that would never have been a topic of conversation are now pretty important. That’s part of life. I love that. That’s worth the price of admission right there, folks. Make big things smaller. Thank you. 
Let’s go all the way back to twenty-year-old Scott. You’ve had the martial arts studio for a couple of years. If you could time travel back to Scott now, what you know now, accumulation of all your experiences, everything you’ve learned, and you could share one piece of advice with a twenty-year-old Scott, what would that one piece of advice be? 
My first instinct would be, “Don’t do it.” It looks nice, fancy, and you’re on top of the world all the time. In order to look that way, there’s a big price to pay. There’s a lot underneath that most people don’t see that is truly difficult. In the end, I would tell them, “Don’t do it, but you’re going to do it anyway. It will be worth it. Know that all the pain, trials, and challenges that you’re going to go through will be worth it even though it’s going to be extremely difficult.”
People who are not entrepreneurs look at entrepreneurs and have a skewed view that they live in this house, drive that car, and maybe have a plane or two. They’re like, “Things were easy.” They don’t see the sleepless nights. Typically, their spouse or mate is not entrepreneurial. There are some challenging conversations across the years between the risk-taker and someone who is risk-averse and some periods of twenty-hour days and other periods where they’re not working much at all or doesn’t appear. 
I remember when my youngest son was ten. I went to meet your teacher night. My normal dress when I owned that company was shorts, flip-flops, and a polo. I go to meet your teacher, and a fine gentleman introduces me, “Mrs. So-and-so, this is my father, Don Williams. I’m so proud of him.” He does this and says, “You can tell he doesn’t work.” I have to be like, “Just because I make it look easy doesn’t mean it is. You weren’t even born when it was hard.” The entire journey is funny. What’s your vision? What does the future hold for you? 
We want to expand into these other different markets besides martial arts. We’ve got some test marketing out that looks promising. I hope to do that. I have a partnership with Jay Abraham in another business. It’s going well. I have been studying Jay since I was nineteen. A few years ago, I met him at one of his private events, and we became friends over the years. It’s odd to think how long I’ve been studying him to be able to know him and give him a phone call. It’s crazy.
The lesson there, people, is to go up, shake their hand, and tell them your name. It doesn’t matter who it is. I met George W. Bush years ago. He’s a different guy than what you saw on television as President of the United States of America. I didn’t love him as much there as I certainly love him in person. 
The person who we know best in common is Nicholas Kusmich. I saw Nicholas at an event and said, “You have to come speak for me. I have to hire you.” Speakers are very open to that. I’ve seen Nicholas multiple spots around the world where we’ve been. Get out there, shake those hands, kiss those babies, and say hello. Don’t be shy. I love that. 
This is our final question. I’ve loved having you here. You’re a great guest. You have to come back, and we’ll dig deeper into some other things. For The Proven Entrepreneur tribe or clan, if there was one thing you could ask us to do to support you, what would that be? That’s the toughest question. It’s like, “You want me to ask something for me?” Entrepreneurs are big givers, so I’m giving you a little time to think here because the response I get is like, “I don’t know. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted.” If we could give you something and support you in some way, what would that be? 
There’s not a lot I need or want these days. Share this show with someone that might need it. They read some of those early lessons that somebody is struggling with, and any type of story where they can see somebody similar to themselves that can pull them out of a road or a deep hole is inspiring. It’s a good story here.
I love and appreciate that. Babe said, “It’s hard to beat somebody who keeps getting up.” For most entrepreneurs, that’s a pretty common thread in our path. In my case, there were a couple of times I wasn’t smart enough to quit. Had I been smart enough? I probably would have, but I wasn’t smart enough. I played through the pain, and there was a pleasure on the other side. Scott, thank you so very much for coming on the show.
 
Important Links

Rainmaker Membership Systems

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: S1:E26  | I Coach Coaches! Melissa Hart Woods – Proven Entrepreneur And Coaches Coach
Date: June 15, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/s1-e26-i-coach-coaches-melissa-hart-woods-proven-entrepreneur-and-coaches-coach/
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Melissa Hart Woods is a Business Strategist to business owners. Melissa is the author of “Secrets of Franchise Success“. Melissa supports franchise executives, franchise business owners, non-franchise business owners and teams.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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I Coach Coaches! Melissa Hart Woods – Proven Entrepreneur And Coaches Coach
I am so excited to introduce a very close friend of mine, Melissa Hart Woods, from San Diego. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us. She was my coach when I was part of Allison Maslan’s Pinnacle program. Melissa is the Chief Mentor and also the CEO of a new startup, Franchise CEO Mindset.
Welcome, Melissa. Let’s hop right in. Tell me what you are doing. Let’s talk about your new venture and what you do at AMI.
It is a pleasure to be here. This is so fun.
I am thrilled to have you.
Franchise CEO Mindset was born out of a book that I co-wrote a couple of years ago with a partner called Secrets of Franchise Success. In that book, we had over 50 different franchisees in systems across the board. We had every kind of business model you can imagine. We interviewed the top 20% producers of each system. We were interested in wondering what was it that made franchisees either in the top 20% doing really well, the 50% were where they were just getting by, or the bottom 30% were where they were failing. I was like, “Let’s figure it out. Let’s interview them and find out what they are doing.”
We wrote this book based on all these interviews and it was fascinating. It took us over a year and a half to get all these franchise interviews completed and then to distill them into what we thought was a relevant book for any franchisee, or for somebody that is interested in going into the franchising world, this would be a great book to read.
What we found was amazing and interesting, and that is their mindset had so much to do with their success. Failure was not an option. That was number one. The other thing was they were good people. They understood how to inspire, influence, and motivate their teams or employees. They put a lot of heart and soul into training their employees. They continually upgraded their training and made sure that they were developing them along the way.
It was fascinating because we found out that the real missing component in the franchise arena was that franchisors typically do not train their franchisees on how to be great leaders. We developed a program that does that. We have an online program that franchisees can do on their own or they can do it along with a coach to help with the facility and implementation. That is where the void is.
You were my coach for several years I have been coaching and consulting. I am a firm believer that changing mindset changes behaviors, changing behaviors change results, and changing nothing changes nothing. It all starts with a mindset, doesn’t it?
It does. It starts with what is between your ears. The first course that we do in our program is just on mindset. We talk about how most of us are on automatic. We automatically do what we have always done. We don’t even think about it. We get triggered and we react. It is a rinse and repeat process. I feel like if people, especially business owners, become aware of how they are operating and sit back and go, “That was weird. I felt it right here and I reacted,” rather than, stepping back and saying, “I am having a trigger right now. Maybe there is another way of handling this rather than doing what I always do,” because you and I both know that when you do what you always do, you get the same results. Typically, that is not what we are after. We want to grow, evolve, and change. It starts with that awareness piece.
Success starts with what's in what's between your ears. Share on X
I love that because I am a firm believer that if you change nothing, nothing changes. Tell us a little bit about what you do as the coach’s coach at AMI.
We are now called Pinnacle Global Network. I started out as part of the mentoring team, and as the company began to grow, we needed systems and processes in place and we needed to make sure, and this is my franchise background, that most of our clients were having similar experiences. In order to do that, there had to be a lot of structure put around the way that we deliver this.
That is when I came into the picture. I said, “We need this. We can’t operate without it.” I pretty much developed my own role out of need and growth. We have fifteen mentors on our team and we are looking for two more. It is a lot of amazing personalities that I get to talk to every day. I don’t look at my role as being a manager. I support them with other client issues that are going on or their own life if things are happening. I am there to support them and also be a bridge between the client and the coach.
That sounds like a true leader. It is someone who sets the vision and then enables people to go and make it happen. Let’s go back to the beginning. Were you raised as a child in an entrepreneurial home?
I was raised in a very traditional home. My mom stayed home, attended to the house and the kids, my sister and I, and made sure that my dad had what he needed. She was such a great ‘50s wife. My dad was a lawyer. He went to law school in his early 30s. At that age, you were considered an old man if you went to law school. He was a traveling salesman. He sold braziers and plastic boxes. He would always say that had my mom not come along, he probably would have been a salesman living in a bar and on the road all the time, but he went to law school and decided early on that he was going to be his own boss. He never wanted to work for anybody else.
He was an entrepreneurial lawyer if that makes any sense at all. I thought all lawyers operated the way he did. His career ended up becoming mergers and acquisitions. He put together incredible deals if mergers and acquisitions, and he always had a way of looking at how to do it from such a creative point of view or an entrepreneurial way of doing it. It could have been that nobody did it before, yet he was like, “Let’s try it and see if it works.”
He always colored outside the lines but within the boundaries of the law. He invented things that you would never have thought of that most lawyers did not. He encouraged me early on to be my own boss and be creative about the way businesses work. We talked endlessly about business. He taught me when I was probably twelve to read the Marketplace in Wall Street Journal.
Every Thursday, we would sit down and I would read the Marketplace. It consisted of stuff that was interesting. It had what businesses were doing, how they were growing, and new ideas that they were putting out. They were toy companies that were inventing new toys for the new child coming up in the ranks. I thought it was so fascinating. He planted that seed in me so that all the time from that point on when I would go to any business or see a need in a market like, “That would be a great business. I wish I had that.” I would be constantly thinking like that.
It sounds like he was a problem solver. Entrepreneurs are problem solvers, and many times, they won’t quit until they get it solved. They keep trying solutions.
He was a problem solver and also a risk-taker. He encouraged me to take risks. He was like, “You have got to do it. You have got to try it. It is a great idea.” He never shot my ideas down. He always encouraged me.
Secrets of Franchise Success: The Formula for Becoming and Staying a Top Producing Franchisee
You and I both know the biggest risk is probably not taking a risk. That is much riskier than taking some risk. Tell me this. Way back in little Melissa’s life, what do you consider to be your first job or something you did that you got paid for?
The very first thing I did that I got paid for was my grandfather had given me a handheld vacuum cleaner. This was before handheld vacuum cleaners were a thing. He might have even invented them. I was 11 or 12 at that time. I thought, “I am going to go from house to house and ask people if I can wash their car and vacuum it,” because that is the best part of getting your car washed. I knocked on people’s doors and washed cars. My dad encouraged me. I don’t even remember how much I made, but that was the very first job I had. The second job I had was working at a pizza parlor. That was a legit job. I was fifteen.
It depends on how you look at what was the legit job to the entrepreneur. Going door-to-door screwing up your courage, putting a smile on your face, knocking on that door, and asking, but to some people like me, that is probably a more legit job than the pizza parlor. Talk about the work ethic that your parents instilled in you as a child.
The work ethic was you had to work to pay for the things that you wanted. That is why I had a job at fifteen. Here is the other thing about work ethic. My dad was home every single day at 5:30 PM. He had dinner with us every night and was available on the weekends. He made it clear that when you work for yourself, you don’t have to be a slave to somebody else’s schedule. You get to make your own schedule. If being with your family is what is important, then that is what you are going to do. I observed that.
We also took vacations. There was never any like, “I have to work.” That was never part of it, yet he was always working during the week. I am thinking he did not look through his cellphone or even a computer at home. It was probably all done when he left the office. He had ten lawyers that worked under him and they probably knew not to call him at home. I don’t remember him ever talking to anybody at home about work. As much as he loved it, he had that balance happening. That was part of the work ethic. It is noticing that there was a balance and that it is okay to have that.
That is huge. Many entrepreneurs have the choice. Your calendar controls you or you control your calendar. There is no tie game. One side is controlling the other, and that is for certain. I know that some people make it look easy, but it does not mean they are not working hard. I remember my youngest son introduced me at a Meet Your Teacher Night. He was maybe ten. 
I showed up in my normal uniform of shorts, flip flops, and a polo, which is what I would wear to the office. He introduced me to the teacher and said, “This is my dad.” You can tell as he raised his hands up and down pointing to me. He said, “He does not work.” We had to have a little conversation after that. I was like, “Just because I make it look easy, it does not mean it is easy.” What was your path? Did you go through school, the military, or the Merchant Marine? Where did you go from there?
I went to San Diego State College. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I started a business when I was in college. That was a great business. It became too big and I had to choose one thing or the other. At first, I was dabbling and then all of a sudden, it was like, “This is a legit business. I would have to quit everything and do this.” I went to college and got married right after.
I worked for Estee Lauder after college. I was an account representative, which was very glamorous to go from store to store. I got trained in New York and I was living in San Diego. I got to go to all these different fancy Neiman Marcus and big department stores and train the counter girls on the newest products that we had. The funniest thing about it was I never liked makeup. I was never a makeup person. I was the surfer hippie girl that never wore makeup. I had to learn how to put makeup on and then teach these pros all about the new products that we had. I always felt like such an imposter in that role.
Those sound so entrepreneurial. I cannot tell you how many people have told me, “I wrote my first business plan by going to Google, copying a business plan and presenting it the next day.” Imposter syndrome is rampant amongst entrepreneurs, but I think it is a human problem. Everybody is the CEO of something even if you are just the CEO of you. There is a quote that says, “You are far better, far smarter, and far stronger than you think.” That is true for everybody. I will put you on the spot. Do you know which famous philosopher said that?
When you do what you always do, you get the same results. Share on X
I don’t.
It is from one of my very favorites, Winnie the Pooh. That is true. Tell me about either your first business in college or your first business after college.
I forgot what my first business in college was. We have this new program in Pinnacle Global Network called Trailblazers. It is for the children of all the members of Pinnacle. It is a wonderful program. It has six different sessions on what it is like to be an entrepreneur, what it means to start your own business, and how to start your own business. I pulled this out of my archives and I was like, “I forgot about that business I did. It was such a great business.”
I worked at my dad’s law firm in Century City, Los Angeles. It was a big office building. I was a receptionist. There were two sides. One was creative artists, which is they hire and manage actors. The other one was my dad’s law firm. I had all the switchboard and everything going. This person would come up every so often and they had lunches for all the people that were sitting at their desks. I thought about what a great idea that is.
People would also always ask, “Do you know if the sandwich people are coming?” I go, “I have no idea. They come every now and then with no rhyme or reason.” When they would come, then I would get on my switchboard and let everybody know that the sandwich guy was out in the front lobby. They would all run out and buy sandwiches. I thought, “I am going to do that in San Diego.”
I called it Melissa’s Movable Lunches. I ended up renting a commercial kitchen. I hired somebody to help me with the different kinds of food that we would be using, and he also helped me put together the lunches. I would go there early in the morning and put together all these box lunches. I had these different kinds of rolling coolers that I used. I would go from office building to office building. I had quite the reputation. It was a legit business. It cost me nothing to make the sandwiches and the different things and put them in the little plastic things that I got from Smart & Final. The margins were so great, but it was a full-on business. I was like, “I don’t know if I can do all this.” That was my first business.
You were the precursor of the food truck. You were the food cart.
I was. I had a vegetarian sandwich and a Turkey sandwich. I would also ask people, “Is there something I am missing? Is there something that you wish I had that I did not have? I will make it next time.” They would go, “We want this,” and I would go, “I am going to bring it.” It was weird because I was not nervous about it. I was like, “I am going to be the savior. People are going to be so happy.” I thought I was solving such a great problem.
I know this, but our audience does not. Share a little bit about your business where you had a very nice asset.
Right out of college, I got married. My dad was encouraging us to get into a business. My husband at that time was really great with kids. We opened up a kid’s gym. My dad gave us $10,000 and said, “This is for you to open up this business. It is not much. It is not going to do a lot for you, but I am not going to give you any more after this. You are on your own.” We each got a credit card. We put most of everything on a credit card. We have rented the space in Solana Beach where I live. That was our original location.
Coaches Coach: Franchise owners typically do not train their franchisees on how to be great leaders.
 
We set about ordering all the toys and putting this program together. People would walk by and they would say, “What is this?” We would say, “It is a gym for kids.” They would be like, “Why do kids need gyms? There is no reason for it.” We say, “This is an organized program where kids learn how to follow directions. They learn all of these incredible skills. I invite you to our grand opening.” We had so much success out of the starting gate. It was crazy. We were this young couple. A lot of times, they thought we were brother and sister and that we were starting this business together.
We had no idea what we were doing with the business, but I liked business. I understood the nuts and bolts of the business part. I was not even that crazy about kids quite honestly. My husband was a magician with kids. He was amazing. We opened our doors, and six months into the program, we had waiting lists. We could not handle it anymore. We had to hire our first employee. We then hired our second employee. Three years later, I was like, “This is a great business.” We worked seven days a week because we did birthday parties for kids on the weekends, but I was tired. I love the business. It was in our blood. That is all I wanted to do. We would go to work at 7:00 in the morning and did not get home until 11:00 at night. We were happy as can be, but after a while, it became a lot.
I was impressed with how we were doing. My dad would say, “Never stay at the top.” We had more money in the bank than we could have ever had. We also paid off all of our debt, but I was burned out though. I was tired and I was like, “Is there any end in sight working 6 or 7 days a week?” My dad said to me, “That is great that you are having all this success, but you are not successful until you can leave your business and have it run without you there,” and that struck a chord with me. I was like, “That makes sense.”
I took that piece over. I was like, “We are going to figure out what we do so well. We are going to train other people to do it and we are going to leave. We are going to go on vacations,” and we did. We went on amazing vacations. We would always see one of our members on one of our vacations. If we were in Europe, we would run into them in some little tea store. We would be like, “What?” If we were in Bali, we would run into them on the beach. We were able to travel quite a bit, and then we went with the family. It became essential that we were not the only ones delivering the service.
We then grew. We licensed the program, and then, unfortunately, we split up. I bought him out of the business and I legit franchised it. We had licenses, but we did not have control over what they were doing. When I bought him out, I knew that I only wanted to be in the business for 5 or 6 years. That is all I wanted and then I wanted out.
That was a whole new hat to wear to be a franchisor. To go from business owner to franchisor was a big jump for me. It was a stretch for me too because all of a sudden, I had to be a corporate girl. I was the creative free spirit in developing all the programs that we had and staying on top of how to be the leader in that industry. All of a sudden, I was all about numbers, audits, and fears. It took the fun out of it for me, but it was still fun. When I sold the company, we had 40 locations worldwide. We were in five different countries, and we sold it.
It was a happy day.  
It was also very strange. It was an eighteen-year run, and all of a sudden, I was like, “Now what?” Much of my identity was wrapped up in that business. That is what happens.
We have to remember that we are not living to work. We are working to live and keep things in perspective. That is a great story. Can you think back during that business to a hard moment or something that was painful that you persevered through? It could have happened now or maybe even earlier where you looked back at that moment and said, “It was painful when it happened, but it turns out that it probably was for the best.”
I have had many of those.
Take everything in stride, and don't be afraid to take risks. Share on X
It is interesting how our success stories often include some stories of failing. For a long time, I thought that was the opposite of success until I learned that it is an integral piece of success to fail and learn. What about a work speed moment? Business is going pretty good, life is good, the birds and angels are singing, and the sun is shining, but something happened and all of the sudden, your business has seemed to explode. Do you have one of those you could share with us?
Our business exploded from the very beginning. When I got into the franchising mode, my dad said, “Let’s put an ad out in the Wall Street Journal and see what happens.” I had no idea what I was doing. The ad was something like, “If you are tired of the 9:00 to 5:00 grind and you want to have fun and play with kids all day long, give us a call. We have a business opportunity that will blow your mind.” After that, our phone rang off the hook. We struck a chord, and that was quite incredible.
There were other things that we did too. We would put a new program together. We did these kids’ night out. We called it Kids’ Night Out, but it was really parents’ date night. We started this whole program. Nobody was doing this. We put it out in five of the gyms that we had. Again, our phones were ringing off the hook. They would be like, “How did you know? That is what I wanted.” I was like, “We did it.”
I feel like so much of that is understanding who that customer is, what pain they are in and how you are going to help solve it for them and creating a message that speaks to them. They are like, “They know that I am tired of my job. That is me. Do I want to own my own future? Yes.” Having that kind of response, we put together camps. We also did summer programs in some of the country clubs. We then got the news channels to come out and interview us in the camp situations. Our phones would ring off the hook. Whenever that happens, it is an incredible feeling to know that it works.
From those phones ringing off the hook, that is about the same thing as the cash register ringing. When people are calling you, that is a good thing. If you could go back in time and have a conversation with the twenty-year-old hippie chick with no makeup who is probably still in there and you could say, “Young Melissa, I wish I knew then what I know now,” is there a piece of advice you would give yourself?
The piece of advice would be it is all going to work out. It always does.
I love how positive you are. Positivity is huge. I have thought about that many times for myself. I would have told myself to listen to people with diverse views more open-mindedly, which took me a while to learn. For a long time, I thought if you disagreed with me, you did not understand the real issue and the right answer. I then realized there are many ways to look at something, and it pays to include all those diverse views.
I am about to wrap up. Let me ask you this. If you were queen for the day and had a magic wand, how could we support you? It is always the toughest question because entrepreneurs are so reluctant to ask for something for themselves. They are typically big givers. It is a pure ask. No motive. What could we do to support you?
I do want to launch this leadership program we have for franchise business owners, so if anybody knows of any franchise business owners that are struggling in any way, this is an amazing answer to a lot of their issues of being burned out and tired of having to work so much as well as not making the revenue that they hope they would make. If anyone knows of any franchisees out there that are struggling, send them my way.
How would we send them to you? 
Coaches Coach: When you work for yourself, you don’t have to be the slave to somebody else’s schedule. You get to make your own schedule.
 
You can send them to me at Melissa@FranchiseCEOMindset.com.
I will echo that leadership is many times the ultimate skill for an entrepreneur to be able to lead, train, inspire, and motivate people to go do the best job that they can. That is how you get to take those vacations in Europe and Bali. If you are an entrepreneur, you certainly deserve that. Do you have any passion projects you want to share with us? It could be something that is not business. It could be something that gets your time, attention, and energy?
I am growing some vegetables. My garden is big. We live on a lagoon, so I have all kinds of wildlife there. At the beginning of the pandemic, I put together this huge thing. I had fences and everything. The wildlife got in no matter what. Nothing stopped them. I started to grow things that maybe they would not like, like broccoli and kale, and it is working. I have giant broccoli stocks coming up and it makes me so happy.
It is early spring here in North Texas, but the kale is already overflowing. The tomatoes and onions are looking good, and we love that. Do you have any last thoughts you think you should share with the audience?
It has been so fun to hang out with you.
It is my pleasure.
I will say to take everything in stride and don’t be afraid to take risks. You have to take risks on things that you don’t know and do it.
I agree. I have a lot of faith in Melissa. I worked with her personally before. That is it for this episode. We will see you next time. Thank you, Melissa.
You are welcome. Thank you.
 
Important Links

Melissa Hart Woods
Pinnacle Global Network
Secrets of Franchise Success
Melissa@FranchiseCEOMindset.com

 
About Melissa Hart Woods
Melissa Woods, Former Franchisor, entrepreneur, and current Business strategist, has a passion for Leadership and business growth.
Melissa has been working as a business strategist for over 20 years. After growing her franchise business to 40 locations worldwide and selling it, her focus has been in developing effective business leaders, who have gone on to have incredible success in their careers and businesses.
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E27 | Ab DeWeese From Philadelphia, MS To Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur
Date: June 14, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ab-deweese-from-philadelphia-ms-to-software-automation-proven-entrepreneur/
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The journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur is not easy. That is why you need to believe in the work you are doing so you can see through the challenges. Listen in this episode as Ab DeWeese shares his success story, from a small town beginning to one of the world’s foremost experts and proven entrepreneurs in Aerospace, Defense and Medical Device Software Automation. Tune in to learn how he went through the ups and downs of his entrepreneurial journey and gain some insights on sales, money attitude, and more.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Watch the episode here
  
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Ab DeWeese From Philadelphia, MS To Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur
I am so excited for this episode’s guest. He is a close friend of mine and somewhat neighbor. We live within 10 miles of each other. In this episode, I have Ab DeWeese. He is a husband, father, founder, and non-executive chairman of Good Automation, which is a software automation company. He is a proven entrepreneur in the flesh. He retired at 37 years of age. He still owns a business and is still an entrepreneur, but Ab does not donate his time to his business. He invests his time in his life and his business allows him to do that. Ab, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Don. I appreciate the opportunity and the invite to join you on the show.
Thank you. I’m so excited about what you’re going to share with us. Let’s jump right in. I want you to think all the way back to young Ab, 5 to 25. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Did you go to school? Tell us about young Ab.
I grew up in Philadelphia, Mississippi. If you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, drive south until you hit I-20, and hang a left. Eight hours later, you’ll be in a little place called Forest. Hang another left, go north about half an hour and you’re in Philadelphia, Mississippi. When I graduated high school, I graduated in a class of 66 people. We did have stoplights. You hear people talk about, “I grew up and there’s a stop sign.” We did have stoplights but only 66 people were in my graduating class. It’s this little bitty town out in the middle of nowhere with good manners and a good Southern upbringing.
I know Zig Ziglar was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. Philadelphia, Mississippi can’t be nowhere because it’s somewhere in retrospect to Yazoo City. How far away from Yazoo City is Philadelphia?
I don’t know. Maybe 2 hours to 2.5 hours or something like that. Because we’re talking about Mississippi, the Mississippi accent is going to sneak through. I’ll apologize in advance. Yazoo City is a little more of the Jackson. I haven’t spent much time there, but my little brother lived in Yazoo City for about 3 or 4 years.
I love the South. I went to New Orleans. I had some charbroiled oysters, red beans and rice. Take us back.
I graduated high school. I went to a place called Hinds Community College. It’s a little junior college outside of Jackson. It’s an interesting setup because it’s the only community college that I’m aware of that has dormitories and on-campus life. I lived on campus at this little two-year school. I was able to satisfy my need for independence very early on because I had a full scholarship. I was able to get a little bit of income from scholarships that exceeded tuition. I was able to be at Hinds and walk onto the soccer team. They were nice enough to let me sit on the bench most of the season. I can name drop that I played soccer in college.
I did that for a year and I was like, “I think there’s a bigger world out there.” I bought a one-way ticket to Vail, Colorado. I had a place to live but not a job when I landed. I probably got fired from five different places. When you talk to entrepreneurs, it tends to be a hallmark. They are not very good employees. I was a busboy. I did this and that work. I worked at the ski lifts for a little bit in the summer. I found my strides in my first ever sales job as an ego-stroking luggage monkey, which is the technical term for a bag boy or a bell boy at a hotel. I worked at the Lion Square Lodge where I can ski in and ski out right off of the slopes at Lion Square Village, which is part of Vail.
If you have the attitude that things just work out for you and you show up and expect things to work out for you, they will work out for you. Share on X
I was a bellhop and I got to ski every day. Even on the days when I had to work a real shift from 7:00 AM until 3:00 PM, technically, but you could get off at 2:00 PM if the other guy came in early. I’m going to go get a few runs in. I skied every day. I got over 100 days of skiing in. I had never skied. I’m not some avid skier. I just loved living in the Vail Valley for two summers and two winters. It was a defining, amazing and wonderful time in my life. I always wanted to go to college and study Physics. I was fascinated by Physics and Math my whole life.
When I finally decided to go to school, I picked the closest school possible to Vail. I did not even look for a great Physics school or Engineering school. I looked at the University of Colorado and Colorado State. The University of Colorado, they call it CU, is in Boulder and was about a half-hour closer to Vail so I picked that one. I didn’t even know about the School of Mines which has a great Engineering program. If I had known of that, I would have gone there because it’s another half hour closer to Vail.
I think college counselors all across the country probably do that a little differently.
They probably do. They probably have a different checklist that they go from.
I want to ask a question about the bellman at the hotel in Vail. I’m guessing your salary was fairly modest.
At that time, the minimum wage was $5.25 an hour which is what I made, but it was all about cash tips. Tip your bellmen, if you’re reading this.
Was that your first step into the world of selling?
Yes.
Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur: That’s why it’s a sales job. You have to romance that customer and make them feel amazing and wonderful about this experience.
 
While $5.25 is shabby, how were your tips?
$100-day is a decent day. It’s a solid day. A $200-day is the days that you’re pushing forward. You want the Saturday shifts and the Friday shifts to get those $250-days in tips. That was good. I went back and looked at it. I think I made maybe $40,000 or $50,000 in 1999, 2000 and 2001 with no degree. That’s not bad.
It sounds to me like you were romancing your customer before I even came out with the book.
Just a little bit because that’s why it’s a sales job, Don. You have to romance that customer, make them feel amazing and wonderful about this experience. Tell them all about how great the mountain, the village and the nightlife are. It’s all about sharing your enthusiasm so that you’re continuing to validate the decision that they made to come and spend a lot of their hard-earned money on the amenities, the slopes and whatnot. You’re selling the experience, romancing that customer, and making them feel good about the purchase. That is directly proportional to the amount of tips that you receive.
As we all know, it’s all about the customer all the time. I love how you selected your school. More college freshmen should maybe consider criteria like that.
It was that and then coming out of Vail, it was 6 to 1, men to women. You see all these pretty little girls walking around the campus and you’re like, “I think I like it here.” When I got there, this is a recurring theme in my life, I found that I stumbled into the perfect place. Not only is it gorgeous and beautiful. It has got this amazing architecture and the mountains are wonderful.
It turns out it is one of the best Physics institutions in the nation. At the time, they had two Nobel laureates. The last time I checked, they had four Nobel laureates. Getting a Nobel Prize in Physics is a big deal. It’s the pinnacle of any physicist’s career to win a Nobel Prize and they had four of them. They had a phenomenal Physics program and I stumbled into it because it was close to the mountains, but my passion was to study Physics and ski.
There’s a lot of that because you continue to do that while you’re in school. I proceeded to study Physics at CU. I met a pretty girl who was in Engineering school. I thought she was beautiful, fun, funny, brilliant and smart. I ended up dating her the whole time. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. That was my second sales job. We had a long engagement. She and I lived together for a year in Denver and she got a job at Lockheed in Fort Worth. I quit, followed her down and I found a job. It’s the second time in my life that I moved to a place where I had a place to live before I had a place to work. It’s minor details but things just work out for me.
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Why do you think things just work out for you?
It’s because I have the attitude that things just work out for me. If you have the attitude that things will work out for you, you show up, and you expect things to work out for you, they will work out for you. If you have the attitude that things aren’t going to work out for you, you show up and you think they’re not going to work out for you, they’re probably not going to work out for you. It’s all in your mindset.
Isn’t it amazing how we manifest our visions? If we expect things to go well, not every time maybe, but they generally do. If we expect things to go poorly, they do. Maybe not every time but they do. It’s so important to have the right objects and destinations in your vision. That’s where you’re headed to.
There’s an interesting corollary. One of my favorite things about you, Don, is your myopic focus on gratitude and appreciation. To me, it’s along the same lines. If you constantly focus your brain and your experience on the things that you’re grateful for, you will have a wonderful and happy existence. It’s so delightfully simple. There are a lot of similarities in that to the thing that you said. One of the things that I admire and enjoy about you is your relentless emphasis on being grateful for things. It’s so cool.
It has changed my life and I’ve seen it change many lives. Anyhow, this is not about me. This is about you. You met a beautiful young woman and you somehow someway convinced her to marry you. I’m still somewhat shocked and now you’ve been married several years. You have children and a lovely family. She’s still there. You’re doing something right.
I haven’t messed it up yet. In fact, there’s a part in the story that’s maybe a chapter or second in the future, but there was a time when we worked together and we’re still married.
That’s an accomplishment for some people. Thanks for filling us in on Philadelphia, Mississippi to Vail to Boulder. You followed a girl to Fort Worth and married her. Now you live in the burbs of Fort Worth. As you guys know, Fort Worth is the major city in North Central Texas. You’ve maybe heard of the suburb that’s about 30 miles East, a little town called Dallas. Ab lives dead smack in the middle of the two. When you came to Fort Worth, did you start a company on day one?
I think so and I do live in Tarrant County. I live on the correct side of the airport, the dividing line. Fort Worth is 2/3 of DFW. It’s basic math. We landed in Northwestern Hills and ran it for a year because that was close to Lockheed, which was down at White Settlement on Southwest Fort Worth. I wanted to be able to target the whole Metroplex. That was close enough to hit it. I ended up getting a job in Addison within 24 hours of posting a resume online and announcing that I was interested in working in this obscure language called LabVIEW, which I’m head over heels in love with.
Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur: If you constantly focus your brain and experience on the things that you’re grateful for, you will have a wonderful and happy existence.
 
I got recruited for a job interview. I went in and did the interview. Looking back on it, I didn’t know. I went in with a ton of confidence. I winged and aced it because I was so genuinely excited about the job. You can’t fabricate that. You talked about Zig Ziglar. I believe in Zig and I can sell anything I believe in, but there’s a very important precondition. I have to believe in it. If you believe in it and you genuinely think it’s going to help people, all you have to do is share your excitement and enthusiasm, and they’ll buy.
If the thing that you’re selling is you, if you believe in yourself and you’re genuinely enthusiastic about the value that you can provide to your employer and you communicate that to them, they are going to hire you. I got this job and I couldn’t believe that people would pay me to write LabVIEW. There’s a certain subset of engineers that stumbled onto this programming language called LabVIEW and they fall in love with it. I would stay at work late at night doing it just because it was so much fun.
I couldn’t believe that somebody would pay me to do this full-time as a career. I worked at this small engineering consultant company called VI Technology for about 4, 5 years or so. About halfway through, they got acquired. It’s a typical case study where a big company acquires a small company and mismanages it. They have a brain drain and all their people leave. If you buy a services company and all the people leave, what did you buy?
It was bought by Aeroflex. I worked at VI Tech and at some point, you could see the writing on the wall. All the senior people were leaving. One guy exited and the other guy was on his way out. You’re like, “I should probably move.” There were two things I wanted in my next job. I wanted to see what it was like to work at a big company. I didn’t know what I was going to learn at a big company because this other company was pretty small. I knew that I would learn some big company things. I just thought that it was an important thing to experience.
The other thing was I wanted to be in the healthcare industry. I was seeking out a job in the medical devices industry because I thought, “There’s something here.” There are a lot of zeitgeists around medical devices around health insurance, the aging population and healthcare. I was like, “I want to be a part of that. There’s something cool there. That’s a way to help people. I can make money and help people by learning how to deliver healthcare. I can bring my own brand of physics and engineering. That’s the way I can contribute there.”
I got a call from a recruiter at St. Jude Medical. She was like, “I know you’re happy in your job and you don’t want to leave.” I was like, “I love it.” I was able to get pulled out of there and recruited into St. Jude. I proceeded to fall flat on my face navigating big company politics. I remember I was there for about a month and I was Mr. Go-Getter. Somebody asked me to do this thing. I wrote an email and I copied two directors that were two levels above me. I’m like, “You go to this and call me back.” I didn’t realize that they both got terribly offended because I told these guys what to do. I got the stupid knocked out of me a little bit in big company land.
When I was at St. Jude, they made Class III implantable medical devices. They make what’s called IPGs, Implantable Pulse Generators. It was like a pacemaker for pain. It was a neat and amazing business. They’re on the brink of making that one irrevocable decision. In some cases, they are contemplating suicide because the physical pain they deal with is unbearable. They have tried everything, surgeries and drugs. They get our device implanted in them. You have these electrical signals that are sent to the spinal cord that interrupt the pain signals. It gives people their lives back. It’s a super moving and amazing thing to be a part of.
They also have this other product line called deep brain stimulation. I like to tell this with a little bit of flare. They implant the device by your pectoral muscle and then they run the electrical leads that run up your neck and your skull. They drill two holes in your head and they stick these electrical leads down into your brain. They plug the holes up and go away. You now have this thing in your chest that can stimulate signals in your brain. They put these things in Parkinson’s patients and it is the most amazing thing. I saw this live on one Parkinson’s patient who had had the device implanted. He came and presented at an all-hands meeting to share how impactful and important the work that we were doing
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I’ll never forget. He stood up. The guy couldn’t even stand up on his own. He had two canes and he said, “Now, I’m going to turn my device on.” He would turn it on and he could walk. It turned off Parkinson’s disease. You take someone who has a terminal illness and you can give them ten years of usable life where he can be a person that can get up and move around. This is an amazing and wonderful place to be working on these life-changing devices. I got to learn firsthand what it means to interact with the US Food and Drug Administration.
I’m guessing maybe that was a little less inspiring than dealing with patients whose lives were totally transformed from devastation to more normalcy.
You have spoken like a true entrepreneur. As it happens, you opened the door to something I’m very passionate about communicating. When I went into St. Jude, I came in and I was like, “I’m going to come into here and show these guys how it’s done. I’m going to break out my scimitar and slice through the red tape. We’re going to move fast. I don’t want to hear anything about all this bureaucracy and FDA stuff. I’m like, “I don’t have time for that. I’m from a small company. I’m going to show these guys how we move and get things done.”
Over a period of about two years, I slowly began to appreciate the enormous importance of what the FDA does. As I left St. Jude, I have the most profound and deep respect for the FDA. I think it is one of the most important institutions in the world, not just in the US because it is the most rigorous and the hardest. The FDA sets a standard for medical device compliance the world over.
There was this guy, Zach Wright. He is a Quality Engineer. He pulled me aside one day and said, “This validation thing, this is what it means. This is why it’s important.” He showed it to me and I was like, “I could see how it’s important. You’re telling me that the medical device needs to be safe and effective for its intended use because you don’t want to hurt people or kill them. You want to help them.” The Hippocratic Oath says, “First, do no harm.” It’s got to be safe and effective for its intended use.
There’s this path from that statement all the way down to this engineering work that you don’t want to do, but it turns out that the engineering work is really important because it’s part of making sure that when this thing goes into your grandmother, it’s safe and effective. I was then able to zoom out and look at all the FDA regulations and the FDA oversight. I was able to see and appreciate an elegant brilliance in the way that the thing is structured. Everything is statistically governed and as a software engineer, I was able to see it very much like this big meta software program that is set up to govern the industry.
The job of the company is to make safe and effective medical devices. The job of the people is to set up the company so that it can fulfill that. I came with this deep and profound respect for what the FDA does and why it’s important to respect its authority. You probably know this as a business owner, an employer and as a parent. You have to have rules, but if you don’t enforce your rules, then your rules aren’t meaningful. I could tell my kids to clean up the room but at some point, they’re going to challenge me. I got to take them to the mat and be like, “No, you have to do it. There are consequences.” Unfortunately, that’s one of the things the FDA has to do. They have to enforce the stuff that they do, but it’s for an important reason because they protect the US population from people who would otherwise sell things that are unsafe and ineffective.
I want to challenge the group. Elegant brilliance, I want to challenge you to apply that to your business and to your life. I appreciate the wordsmithing and applying it to a Federal agency. The elegant brilliance of the FDA. It’s obvious that your heart is in your business first and your business is in your business second.
Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur: If you believe in it and genuinely think it’s going to help people, all you have to do is share your excitement and enthusiasm, and they’ll buy.
 
To that end, if I may quantum leap over to the side a little bit, a lot of the readers have probably heard of the book Traction. They have probably heard of this thing called EOS. Some people have probably tried to implement it themselves. Maybe they’ve succeeded. Some people maybe have hired implementers. I highly recommend hiring a third-party implementer. It’s so much easier when you’re not the guy trying to champion it. You just get to be one of the people that’s doing it together, but you get this thing called core values.
Everybody has heard of core values, but you may not know what they are. They’re essentially a way to articulate who you are. One of our core values is enginerd. We build log cabins together. Those are our three core values. We don’t build castles and space-age houses. We build good old-fashioned log cabins. We build what the customer needs. It’s not necessarily what they asked for and not what the sales guy wants to sell them. We build what they need and we do it together but in our heart, we’re enginerds.
By embracing that, everything became easy. We put that on our website. We put that in our marketing collateral. We got a stroke of genius about how social media marketing for my company is going to become child’s play and fun. We decided to create a good automation meme machine. We’re going to grab a bunch of awesome, hilarious, super nerdy software, engineering and electronics memes and create memes with little short videos around this to be nerdy, funny, fresh, vibrant and approachable.
Our target audience is going to relish the content because they’re going to laugh at everyone. It’s going to be funny, a little inside wink and a nod, nerd jokes and nerd humor. We’re going to have fun creating them. It will be easy. It will be second nature. The audience will gratefully consume the content. Meanwhile, my brand is going to be imprinted in their brain every time they see the meme.
As you know, whether you’re selling submarine sandwiches or submarines to the United States Navy, things need to be easy, simple and fun.
Your customer should have fun. As you said, it’s on two sides. It should be easy, simple and fun for your customer. It should be easy, simple and fun for you because life is short. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong. Everybody will say, “I got lucky.” I hear people say, “I got lucky in my business.” I’m like, “Don’t give me a bunch of BS. I know you worked hard. Stand up and be a man. Take credit for it.” I did work hard to get to where I am, but I did have a stroke of luck because there was one person on Earth that I would have trusted to run my business. His name is Tik Sze. He’s the CEO of Good Automation. He is a guy I’ve known and worked with for over a decade. I worked with him at VI Tech. He is a phenomenal and brilliant manager. He is ten times the manager I’ll ever be.
I recruited him for about four years, from the day I started my company until I finally got him. We know each other so well and we know the industry. We can communicate ten pages of information in three words because we connect so well. Because I knew him and I trusted him, I would have considered two other people, but him being on the top of the list easily. There were two guys that I would have trusted at the helm, but Tik was easily at the top of the list and I got him. It was very much a big piece of luck because had I not brought in Tik, I could not see the next thing, which is what you alluded to earlier. I was able to retire at 37.
I’m able to get all of my time back and focus on what I want to do. I have a little story for other entrepreneurs about my journey doing that. It begins with Napoleon Hill and the book Think and Grow Rich. If you haven’t read it, stop whatever book you’re reading unless it’s Romancing Your Customer. Put it down and read Think and Grow Rich. It will rock your world and change your life. The first time I read it, I was afraid of it and put it down. Two years later, I picked it up and finished it.
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It’s the book that calls me to quit my job and start my business. The book forced me to envision an outcome that in five years, I want to have my time back and I want to have mailbox money. I want to get my time back and be financially independent. I want to be able to apply myself to the things I’m passionate about. I set up a five-year plan. Because I did that and I envisioned it, at year four and a half, I was able to retire from my company. I have a management team run it and get all my time back.
There’s a darker shade to the story. It’s not bleak but for about a period of two years at 37, 38, 39 looking back on it, I realized I was pretty depressed having left my company. Everything that was my identity, a big piece of who I was and what I did, I walked away from that. I had to reinvent myself and my purpose. I wandered in the proverbial desert for about two years, not knowing who I was and not having a purpose. I was wandering aimlessly, even though I had a tree that achieved this dream of dreams. I cracked the code. I don’t have to work anymore. That is a fact. That is a statement. I don’t have to work anymore. It’s what everybody shoots for. I got there and what I found was it was desolate and the lack of happiness.
Many times we see an entrepreneur who is on their first successful exit, and they feel adrift with no purpose and no goal. There is nothing to strive for. There is no resistance. Many times, entrepreneurs’ performance is at their very best when there is some resistance, something to push against. When things get too easy, sometimes things don’t go so well. It was awesome that you shared that. Please go on.
You gave me some insight listening to that because I need something to lean into. If I don’t have a strong wind to lean into it, when I lean, I fall over. I’ve got big sales so I lean way in. When that wind is not there, it’s a little wobbly. To that end, I refound my purpose. Kevin Bonfield, thank you for changing my life. If you haven’t heard of EO, go join EO.
What is EO? Let’s tell everybody.
EO is hard to explain. Justice Stephen Breyer defined this thing that you know when you see it or you understand when you do it. EO is very difficult to articulate from the outside, but once you experience it, you can’t go back. It’s highly addictive. For me personally, I was adrift in an ocean alone. My entire entrepreneurial career started in 2013 even before I left my company. Looking back on it, I now realize I was very lonely. I had friends and other people I’ve connected to, but I didn’t connect with them in the same way because we don’t have the same high-class problems.
As a business owner, you have all these first-world problems. It’s hard to connect and deal with real legitimate problems that you’re dealing with. The people that are empathetic and trying to be there for you don’t have any context for what that thing is. When you walk into an event in EO, you walk into a room of 50 people like you. They also all have the same version of crazy. We all have that same version of crazy. We’re all type-A, self-starters, get going. We’re all positively minded. We love making money. Nobody is ashamed to be like, “I love making money.” There is nothing wrong with making money. The lack of money is the root of all evil. It’s all about helping people and making money and having fun. Have fun, help people and make money.
It’s like what Zig said, “Having money is not the problem. It’s when money has you.” That’s the problem. EO stands for Entrepreneurs’ Organization and it’s a tribe of about almost 15,000 people all across the globe in 60 countries who hang out together, learn from each other, share experiences, and go to events sometimes with 50 people and sometimes with 2,500 people. It’s all about promoting entrepreneurship.
Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur: We build what the customer needs, not necessarily what they asked for.
 
I know Ab and he knows me because we met in EO. We’ve had many adventures since and many more to come. One of the biggest benefits is being around your tribe, people who can put into context what you’re going through. We love our neighbors and our friends that are not entrepreneurs but the entrepreneur tribe, we are our own people to an extent.
If I could add to that, to me some of the magic of EO is there are a couple of rules. One of the rules is confidentiality, which means that you don’t blab about what you hear. The other side of that is everybody agrees to not blab about what they hear, which means that I can say things and I know that they’re not going to leave. It creates the safety for me to say things. The other thing that’s amazing and precious about EO is the non-solicitation rules. Don, do you like to sell things?
If I’m breathing, I’m generally selling.
Me too. How do you know an entrepreneur is pitching? The answer is his lips are moving. You’re in this room with all these business owners and people who love to share their enthusiasm to sell things. There’s a non-solicitation rule in EO. If somebody is like, “Join EO but you can’t sell anything. There are all these business owners, a target-rich environment but you can’t sell anything.” “You’re telling me you’re going to pay a bunch of money to join this group with a target-rich environment and I can’t sell them anything. Why would I want to do that?”
It turns out that if you can’t sell and nobody can sell, it means when you walk in the room, you’re not going to get sold. That means that I can let my guard down. I don’t have to hold back information because this guy is going to try to like spin it and use it against me. I’m not going to always look over my shoulder if this guy is trying to pitch me something or sell me something. It creates this safe place. There’s no solicitation and no selling. Does business get done in EO though? Does business find a way to transact and happen somehow?
People don’t sell, but people do buy. If you’ve been through any of my training or my events, you know that in my Sales Magic Course, one of the keystones is to stop selling and let people buy. I’ve been doing that now for many years. All my life people have said, “You are a great salesperson.” Even now, I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that people love to buy from me so I just let them. I don’t know about the great salesman title or the great saleswoman title, but if you treat people right and you romance your customer and your pre-customer, you’ll never lack for new business.
I am head over heels with EO. You’re right because if you go in there, share your enthusiasm and genuinely help people, they somehow end up buying it. EO brings that. My favorite thing about EO, Don, you are the first place that I heard this word from. I don’t know if you’re the one that coined it, but this notion of instimacy.
It was Dave Galbenski from Detroit, Michigan.
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I met Dave at a virtual event. It’s amazing because you walk into these rooms where EO trains you. You are subjected to the training. You will learn the protocol but the thing is I know we’re not compliant, but if you just comply, follow and trust the process, learn the tools and techniques for communicating what they teach you and how to do this thing called Forum, which is like Fight Club. The first rule about a Forum is don’t talk about the Forum. It’s hard to know what it is until you’re in it. They teach you this way of interacting and it creates this magical ability to connect. You can meet any EO from anywhere on the globe and it’s an instant very deep connection.
You get each other and you now got a friend in every city. I can’t get enough of EO. It’s magical and wonderful. Don, one of the things I would love to go back to is this notion that I claimed earlier that I cracked the code in terms of retiring at 37. There’s something more to share there that touches on something you said. There is an equation for happiness. Do you know the equation for happiness? The equation for happiness is very simple. I saw this years ago and it took a long time to set in. It goes like this. Happy equals what you have divided by what you want.
If you have more than you want, you’re happy. If you want more than you have, you’re not happy. If the things that you have stay constant and you want a whole lot more, your happiness generally goes down. If the things that you have stay constant and you want a lot less. You become content with your life, your things, your relationship and your situation. Your happiness tends to increase. Conversely, if you keep your wants the same and the things that you have like your relationships, house, money or whatever tend to increase, your happiness tends to grow.
If the things that you want to stay the same, and your resources and relationships are pulled away from you, your happiness is inversely proportional to that. Happiness is what you have divided by what you want. T
he magic is there and the part that’s so hard to grasp is that it’s very easy to focus on what you have, but it’s so much more effective to focus on what you want. You have more control over what you want than over what you have. There is a book called The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. It was a reference book of business concepts. One of them was the notion of sufficiency. He defines sufficiency and writes two pages on it.
I want to ask you because I wonder if I heard that backwards or maybe it was said backwards. It’s a very important part. “I have more control over what I want than what I have.” That’s probably counterintuitive to what people think. People think they can control what they currently have and have less control over what they want.
It is counterintuitive. You would think, “I’m powerless over what I want,” but if you stop and analyze that statement, who has control over what you want? If anybody does, who does? You do. Who has control over what I want? I do. Who has control of what I have? As an entrepreneur who can do anything that he wants to do, he can create the future and make things happen, I can have control of what I have. That’s not true, Don.
If we’re talking about physical things, I either have to buy them or they have to be given to me. If it’s relationships, it takes two to tango. I can relate to someone else all day long but if they don’t relate back to me, we don’t have a relationship. I have responsibility for my relationships. My wife, for example, can’t control what I want. It’s up to me to figure that out and to have the discipline of establishing that baseline.
Software Automation Proven Entrepreneur: Getting more is easier. Deciding what you want and drawing a line of where enough is, is the hardest decision you’ll ever make.
 
It’s what you actually desire. It’s not necessarily the appropriation of that but the actual desire itself.
What is enough? I read this little vignette or this little two pages about sufficiency. It talked about it from a business standpoint, but it forced me to stop and think, what is sufficient? What is enough? What do I want? When I started my business, I was able to realize that there were certain things I refuse to give up. We refuse to give up on the quality of childcare. We took our kids to a daycare center close to our house that I was head over heels in love with. It wasn’t the cheapest one but that was something we were not going to sacrifice. There were other things that we could sacrifice on.
That analysis helped me realize, “I can afford to take this much risk. I can walk away from a perfectly good salary and take this leap.” Another similar analysis happened when I was 37. I realized that I could stay in my business and I could continue working 100-hour weeks. I could continue burning out myself and burning out my employees. I could continue driving and pushing and I could grow my business.
What I realized is that this thing that I had was enough. It is magical and amazing. The amount of free cashflow that I got from my business is equal to a good salary. It’s not mega but it’s a good salary and it’s enough. I can pay my mortgage and we can do crazy nice things. I have enough. I have a suburban lifestyle. I don’t have a Beverly Hills lifestyle, but it’s enough.
I could stay in the business, grow the business and grind or I could be satisfied with what I have. I can make what I want to match what I have and be satisfied with that. More than anything, that freed me and allowed me to walk away from my business. When other business owners asked me, “What are your growth strategies for your company?” They’re always dumbfounded when I say, “I don’t care. I don’t want my company to grow. I want it to stay just like this. I want it to not go down.”
Before COVID, I was worried that there was a recession around the corner. I told my team, “We’re going to grow so that when the recession happens, we’ll go back to this.” That’s what we did. Year over year, the revenue change has been zero. The revenue has been flat year to year. It’s a super stable and consistent business. It is exactly what I want. I could go apply myself to the business and grow it but that’s not what I want. I love hanging out with my kids. I love having the freedom of time and flexibility.
My challenge to the audience would be to take a really tough hard look and think about what do you want? What is enough? Draw the line. You can always get more. There’s always more. Getting more is easier. Deciding what you want and drawing a line of where enough is, is the hardest decision you’ll ever make. Once you do, you’ll find that the happiness that comes with it is proportionately huge.
A good friend, Warren Rustand. He talks about clarity of vision. Where do you want to go? Many times in the world, when we say success, they instantly translate that to financial success. It’s dollars. Do you have that Beverly Hills lifestyle? Are you on lifestyles of the rich and famous? We had two people in the last century that were the wealthiest people in the world at the time, Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis, who on their death beds were still spending their time and their life’s energy making more money. Probably for the average entrepreneur, it seems little out there because we’re looking for the perfect balance, however we define that, of our life, our business and our families. It sounds like you know your vision. You have clarity and that’s your success story.
I am so grateful and happy to now be chasing with relentless pursuit something I’ve been passionate about and interested in my entire life. The end of the story is the beginning of the next chapter, which I did at the last minute. The way that I did it was I showed up and did it because I wanted it to happen. Things worked out for me. I enrolled in grad school at UTA, University of Texas Arlington. I’m pursuing a PhD in Physics. I enrolled four days before class started because that’s the only way to do it. I feel so good because I’ve got a headwind to lean into now and it is a fierce headwind and I love it.
I relish the challenge, the focus, the pursuit and the hunt. It’s only possible because I was able to clarify what was enough and what was sufficient from a lifestyle standpoint that I can now go fulfill my deep purpose in life. A huge thank you to Kevin Bonfield for the eccentric event that he put on that helped me confront and realize that I needed to start acting. If I was going to leave my legacy, I had to do it by design and be intentional about it. Tanks to EO for that.
There is certainly some brilliant elegance there. We’re about out of time, Ab. Let me ask you how the Proven Entrepreneur clan could support you? Is there anything we could do for you?
That is the nicest question and it caught me off guard. I guess to have fun, help people and make money, which doesn’t do anything for me but it does a lot for you. The other answer would be to join EO, which does a lot for me because I love EO and it makes the organization stronger to have the audience in, but it also helps you more than it helps me. Join EO and reach out. My cell phone number and email are on the global database. Cold-call me. I love meeting new people.
Have fun, help people, make money, and take a look at EO. Ab, thank you so much for sharing your success story on the show.
Thank you, Don. I appreciate you having me.
 
Important Links

Good Automation
Traction
Think and Grow Rich
Romancing Your Customer
EO
Sales Magic Course
The Personal MB

 
About Ab DeWeese
Ab and Good Automation were great to work with. Ab is the type of person who does not let any challenge get in the way of success. For him, there is always a way. His energy and drive are among the strongest that I have ever encountered.
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E22 | The Reticular Activator & The Law Of Attraction
Date: May 26, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-22-the-reticular-activator-the-law-of-attraction/
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Content:
 
When you expect positive things to happen, they do! When you think about negative things, they happen. What is the Reticular Activating System, and how does it affect the law of attraction?
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
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Listen to the podcast here
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The Reticular Activator & The Law Of Attraction
Let’s talk about expectation. The expectation is an interesting concept. When you expect positive things to happen or occur in your life, they generally do. When you expect negative things to happen or occur in your life, they generally do as well. In your brain, there is a part of your brain called the reticular activator. That reticular activator, when you think about something, it keeps bringing that to the forefront of your mind and keeps working on that in your subconscious. Here is a good story on how the reticular activator works. Several years ago, when my youngest son was in high school, he looked for a particular car. He was looking for a Volkswagen GTI. When he mentioned that to me, I didn’t even know what that car was.
Envision where you want to go and what you want to accomplish and put your brain to work for you. Share on X
I told him that, and he showed me one of those cars. For the next month, everywhere I went, whether I was on a city street or the highway, I noticed all of these Volkswagen GTIs. That is how your reticular activator works. When you think about something, buying that company, hitting that next sales goal, that retention goal with current clients or that culture goal, your brain begins to keep that front of mind and, more importantly, begins to work on achieving that subconsciously. We know that 10% of our brain activity is conscious, and the vast majority, 90% or 93%, is subconscious. It happens without you consciously thinking about it.
Reticular Activator: When you think of a goal, your brain begins to keep that front of mind and, more importantly, begins to work on achieving that subconsciously.
 
I want to encourage you to envision where you want to go, what you want to accomplish, and put your brain, the magnificent creation in all of nature, the human brain, to work for you with that reticular activator and expect positive things. You will be surprised that you will receive positive things. That is this episode of the show. See you next time.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E21 | Be A Person Who Never Gives Up. Here’s Why:
Date: May 24, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-21-be-a-person-who-never-gives-up-heres-why/
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Content:
 
Babe Ruth said it is hard to beat the person who never gives up, and how true that is. Become that person. Don Williams proves this many times, and it’s worth it every time.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E21.mp3
 
Be A Person Who Never Gives Up. Here’s Why:
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” That quote is attributed to Babe Ruth, The Sultan of Swat, leading home run header for the New York Yankees way back. That wisdom is so true that you can’t almost beat a person who refuses to quit. There are so many stories in business and sports, in all areas of human performance, where the person who won wasn’t necessarily the person with the most talent, the best looks, the best pedigree or the best education. The person who prevailed was the person who refused to quit, who even when it was hard, kept going.
Never Give Up: The person who prevails is the person who refuses to quit.
 
I know in my own life, in my first company, I had been the top salesman in the United States out of over 450 salespeople. I had been the top sales manager in the country out of over 40 offices. I opened my first company and I was ill-equipped to be an owner. For two years, I struggled mightily. You could have a second helping of air because we didn’t have anything else. After two years, we figured that out, and then the next 5 or 6 years, we did another 20, 21 locations. No outside capital, no partners, no debt. We sold our way to growth and success. Remember what the Babe says, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” Keep going, keep getting up, and tough it out. You can do it.
It's hard to beat a person who never gives up. Share on X

For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: S1:E20 | Starting From Ground Up To Semi-Retired & Happy Life. Guest Interview: Cole Humphus
Date: May 21, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-20-starting-from-ground-up-to-semi-retired-happy-life-guest-interview-cole-humphus/
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Content:
 
Cole Humphus was the CEO and Founder of Cole’s Classroom. When he sold Cole’s Classroom, he founded Rapid Scale Group that helps online course creators, coaches & consultants rapidly grow their business sales without having to rely on social media or big teams, so they can create a wildly successful, predictable & sustainable business that maximizes their profits & freedom.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
 
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/S1E20.mp3
 
Starting From Ground Up To Semi-Retired & Happy Life. Guest Interview: Cole Humphus
I am so excited. Our guest is, in my opinion, one of the top digital marketers on this planet. I don’t know about other planets but on planet Earth, he’s one of the tops. Cole Humphus, welcome.
Thanks for having me, Don.
Let’s jump right in. What are you doing now?
We were talking offline. I’m doing a lot of fishing. It has been a few years since I sold my company. I like to say I’m semi-retired. For a few years, after selling my company Cole’s Classroom, to a software company, I was helping grow the software company. I moved on from that role to get back to doing my own thing, and it has been amazing, aside from the fishing, which is true. I’m still doing a lot of fishing.
I’m squeezing in some work into the fishing schedule. I created a program called the Rapid Scale System. Essentially, it’s me getting back to my roots, honestly, which is helping people. To be 100% frank, when you go from having this super high volume, very “passive.” We all know there’s no such thing as real passive but a low ticket, high volume business model that is sellable, which is what I was able to do.
There’s this big mental shift for me to be okay with doing consulting and going into one-on-one or even one to a few or a group. Here I am now. That’s what I’m doing. I was doing some one-on-one with very high-ticket stuff here and there. Essentially, I realized that I did a lot of souls searching. Naturally, I did not have to do it but I had to do it because I was lost since selling my company. I would start going down a path to try something new, then I had quickly shut the door because of X, Y, Z reasons that did not make sense. Ultimately, what I realized is like what I talk about to my network, and my friends are still a business and growing business in marketing and sales.
In my head, every single day is about growing an online business. I’m like, “It would be a real shame to the world and also to myself and my family if I did not share that and help people.” Instead of helping people learn how to take a better photo with their camera, which in my past company. Now, I’m helping people go and make these monumental changes in their business that, for many, is the difference from making a low 6 to 7 figures and beyond. That, to me, is the most purposeful and impactful thing I can do.
That’s very common for entrepreneurs who have a successful exit for a while, 6 months, 24 months. They think they are going to play golf or fish, and that’s going to be their life. They wake up one day and say, “Something is missing. I’m not scratching an itch. That’s part of my core,” and so they get back in the game. I know your history but if you don’t mind, share when you started Cole’s Classroom, how long you had that company, and your journey with that company.
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I started in 2013, and I started it because, at the time, I was working in corporate finance. I was doing full-time wedding photography on the side of the finance job. On top of that, we decided to also do another side job, which was teaching online. I think every one of us, at some point in our journey, felt that online is easy. You quickly find out it’s not easy. It’s up to us to decide if we are going to give it the attention it deserves and grow the thing or if we are going to like shut the doors. I almost shut the doors the first 3 times in the first 6 months because it was a very lonely journey.
Nobody was seeing my YouTube videos. Nobody was replying to my email list. It was like, “Why the heck am I doing this?” To condense the story here, I luckily kept going and finally started to get some momentum. By momentum, I mean email list growth. Suddenly, I was getting people coming to the site. I was getting, let’s say, 50 opt-ins a day and had some mailing list and some feedback, which is what I needed at that time. It was like, “Give me a sign that I’m helping people.”
In 2014, we launched our first course and a couple of other products that year. We ended up making $135,000. I say we but at the time, it was only me. We decided that it was time to quit our jobs basically in early 2015 because we are still juggling everything. We are juggling full-time. Corporate jobs we are juggling, full-time weddings, and still growing Cole’s Classroom. The goal is us quitting our jobs was to replace all the income we had, which was $250,000 or so.
I went to the traffic conversion conference because my friend now, Ryan Deiss, was annoying on YouTube ads. I could not that year get away from him. I did not know the guy, did not know digital marketer. I went to this conference because it was in my hometown. It was probably the thing that changed my life because I remember Ryan on stage.
Once again, I’m out of the audience, I don’t know Ryan back then at all. He said something that resonated with me, which was, “People come to me and think they have a traffic problem and they want to solve their traffic problem. There’s no such thing as a traffic problem because you go to the traffic store, and you buy it.”
All of a sudden, I’m like, “That’s good.” I have never done anything with advertising. Right then and there, I was like, that makes sense. I quickly left that conference, knowing I already knew my conversion percentage on my sales pages for these products. If I could get traffic cheaper than how much they are worth, game on. It was simple math.
Luckily, it was simple. It was not simply because I was doing it all and learning for the first time but those were the glory days, to be honest. That was in 2015. I can only imagine if that was me back in 2005, 2008, and 2010. Those days are long gone. Even 2015 is long gone but we will dig into that probably later. The bottom line is that year, I went from $250,000 as the goal to $1.5 million in sales, which blew my mind.
That continued to blow my mind, which was a constant lesson over the years of how we always seem to underestimate our potential because the next year, I doubled it to $3 million. The next year we grew another 50%. We stayed at that number but did change from one time to recurring and ultimately sold the company in 2019. That’s the cliff note version.
Semi-Retirement: We keep people around because we want to be nice, but at the same time, business is business. You aren’t being nice by continuing to drag somebody into a situation that they aren’t fulfilled in.
 
I’ve got to ask the question. I know the answer but you switched from a one-time purchase to a subscription model. At the height, you had how many monthly subscribers?
At the very height, we have 10,000 monthly subscribers. The membership was a $49 a month program. That being said, to be truthful, the $49 was the main price point. We did have a down-sell option. Of the 10,000, I want to say we had about probably, 8,000 of that would be at that $49, and there was a smattering at the 19 and 29 levels but it was a good MRR base.
It was great recurring revenue. It was not easy to get there and keep them from there. That is the big problem with membership sites, especially in the info space compared to SaaS and software. Ultimately, looking back, I now know more than I did even then what was the secret to my success and the rapid growth of that membership.
It’s easy for me to say we went from one time to membership but the actual truth is, we never quit selling one time. We use that as leverage to get people into the membership and leverage to keep them in the membership, which is something that nobody else talks about. I have been, for lack of a better word is, on my pedestal to refute this idea and help people.
A lot of people start this membership with this pie in the sky dreamland. They are going to get all this value. They are going to come in. They are going to pay me forever because it’s such a good deal. They realize memberships are super hard to scale because you are always battling churn. They are super hard to sell because they are not specific.
Let’s say that you have a membership called the Proven Entrepreneur. That’s not specific. I am an entrepreneur but I have no idea why I should pay you $49 a month or whatever. There are all these things that ultimately get people trapped in this, whereas they thought this was going to be the thing that was going to take them off into sailing in the sunset and have this recurring revenue forever. What I find often happens is the people launch these memberships and ended up spending 90% of their time on something that might only be giving them 10% of their revenue. It’s a bad situation.
I have been there. I don’t have a rags-to-riches story like, “I have $0.10 in my bank account, then I put it in the Facebook ad, and now I’m rich.” What I do have is that, honestly, I was there. That was me. In the first year, we had the membership. I was disgruntled over it because we were already making $250,000 a month for the business.
The membership was making $25,000. That 90/10 Rule. I was now having to deal with payment declines, not being able to scale it, retention, churn, all the above, and producing new content. I’m like, “Something has broken here. I’ve got to figure this out,” because I was going to let it die and let it bleed out because it was not worth my time or I was going to go all in. I ended up going all in and cracking the code a bit. The rest is history. That’s a perfect open loop, so I will say, leave it at that.
What gets you to one place isn't necessarily the same thing that will get you to the next. And that's totally true of people. Share on X
Take us way back to young Cole. You are from the San Diego area. I live in the San Diego area now. Did you come from an entrepreneurial family? Were your parents or grandparents entrepreneurial?
Not at all. We are the farthest from it. I don’t mean the other end of the spectrum like lawyers or doctors. None of that. The extent of the entrepreneurial spirit, my dad had his own landscape company but he did not have a bunch of employees and big accounts. It was literally him. I come from as blue-collar as it can get. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky and fortunate for her because both of them instilled some very good work ethic and money management because we did not have money. We were not on the streets. We were lucky that we were able to move into the home. That was my mom’s family home.
At an early age, I learned the value of a dollar. I learned to not blow money and to save. I have guitars with me, even as a kid. I have had a lot of this gear forever. Long before I was an entrepreneur, I was a musician and saving my money from work to go buy that Les Paul. I remember. I paid $600 on it used, still got it. I always have had this idea of, “If not broke, don’t fix it,” thing.
I remember my dad one day telling me something that always resonated with me. I should say, stuck with me. I was in his truck. I was probably 7 or 8 years old. I was old enough to “help him” on a landscape job. I don’t think I was that helpful but nonetheless, I remember I was driving in his truck home. He says, “When you get older, don’t be like me and make money with your hands. Make money with your brain.” That’s what I did.
Good counsel. It’s so common. I’m fortunate I get to do a lot of these and know a lot of entrepreneurs all over the planet, and work ethic is a common thread. The other common thread is so many entrepreneurs do not come from the same type of entrepreneurial background. Your father was entrepreneurial in a little different flavor.
I come from a long line of wheat farmers in Kansas. They never bought anything that could not be baling wired or Elmer glued back together. I used to say, I have the first dollar I ever made but I bought a wallet with that dollar but I have the second dollar. I kept that. What was your first business?
My first “real business” was when we were doing wedding photography, which is a service. My first online business was Cole’s Classroom. Before that, looking back, I had a couple of things. I would not call them a business but they certainly were my first tipping my toe into entrepreneurship. Also, looking back and be like, “I did have that entrepreneurial spirit. I only did not know it.” The first thing I can say is I used to teach guitar lessons. I was probably about sixteen years old. I was teaching other people, both adults, and kids, for $30 or $25 an hour. Honestly, I even had two price points.
I was already experimenting with pricing. It was like $25 for a half-hour or $30, or $35 for the hour. I don’t know but I had a handful of clients there. I was at my parents’ house. They would come over, and I would write down, give them a tab lecture and all this stuff, and off they went. They would do that weekly. After that, I’m also in the music space. There’s this website called SanDiegoPunk.com, which was for punk rock music. It was super niche. It was the community for San Diego local music. I did not acquire it per se. It was gifted to me because we became friends with the person who owned, ran, and managed it.
Semi-Retirement: What makes somebody a proven entrepreneur and, more importantly, a successful one is how committed you are to rolling up your sleeves and scrapping and finding the solutions.
 
He did not want to do anything with it anymore. He was like, “First, I went to my sister, and she did not want it.” He was like, “Do you want it this?” There was one advertiser that was paying money and I was like, “I will take it.” The first thing I did is I started going, getting more advertisers, coming up with more expensive pricing and packages, and locking them in for a year but giving them a discount versus monthly.
Those were fun little ventures. I even remember I took a picture at one point. I don’t know where the picture is but I remember getting it. It must have been cash because I don’t understand why I would have taken a picture of it. I remember when I locked in that twelve-month contract for this local advertiser and took a picture of the money I had. It was probably $600 or something. It was like, “Look at this.” Advertising online.
The first sale you make of anything new is tremendous. Nothing changes. I will share a milestone now. It took a full year of launching Cole’s Classroom. In 2013, waking up at 4:30, YouTube videos, email marketing, blog posts, the whole night for all of 2013, before we even tried to make a buck. In 2014, we produced more content, made products, sell, and we made $135,000 that year, which was great. I looked at my Stripe account and would not know it. I’m at $120,000. I launched this thing days ago. Instead of hundreds of clients, I’ve got twenty.
Without all of the time and YouTube channel, I don’t have any of that without the sales funnel, without the ads. These milestones are always important for us to acknowledge and put them into relative terms, too. I’m excited about what I’m doing now, who I’m helping now but also, what the next few years will bring for me.
The next chapter in the book of Cole. Think back to a hard moment, if you don’t mind. Something in your entrepreneurial path that was challenging. Maybe even brutally challenging but now, in retrospect, when you look back, you are like, “It was necessary, and it served a greater purpose but it hurt when I was going through that.” Do you have one of those?
I’ve got some easy and harder ones. The easier ones are more from a place of logic. I had to let go of two people. Both people were the first two on the team. It was a lesson for the people, even that gets you like, “What gets you to one place is not necessarily the same thing as going to get you to the next.” That’s true on people.
Both of them developed resentment from even seeing the rapid growth of the business. I’m sure I’m not the only entrepreneur that’s had that where you are doing your best as the leader to empower them, to give them opportunities for growth, and take care of them. Even for the work that they are doing, make them feel valued. All those good things.
There could be these internal demons that they have and can develop feelings that then these feelings can magnify and compound. Ultimately, they became a real problem. Not only with our relationship but even the broader team. In almost every case, these people that you end up having to let go, you realize you should have done it sooner. You keep going, “Hope it’s going to change,” and finally, you say, “Enough is enough.” You realize, “I should have done that months ago.”
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Not only we, as a company, better off but they are, too. The inverse of that is what I was going to even share. The other thing I was going to say it’s related to the same thing, which is firing myself from my salary or my job. I’m part owner of this company. I’m no longer employed by my own company because I realized it was time for me to move on.
Once again, I probably should have done it sooner. There are all these, in terms of things that are hard to answer your question. What’s hard is, it’s not that I had an attachment to Cole’s Classroom but I have a lot financially riding on the success of the broader platform that we have. We are continuing to grow. We are continuing to do M&A but the truth is, I’m still a minority owner. It’s not my company. I’m a part-owner but a very small one, in the grand scheme of things, once again, it’s all relative. I had to come to terms like, “It does not matter if I’m here or not.”
The amount of polls that I have is so minimal with the trajectory. The bigger problem for me was all of the things that I loved about entrepreneurship were gone. It had nothing to do with me having a boss per se. It had everything to do with what my day-to-day work looked like and all of the things that I did not like about Corporate America. We are now back. The fact that you had that and it was your own company. That became way more frustrating back when I was in Corporate America.
I had zero ownership, zero track record, zero skills. I was there to do a job. Now, every single week, I am looking at all the things that we should be doing that we aren’t doing. All the things and meetings we were having that did not need to happen. All of the inefficiencies that, in my opinion, did not need to be there. These are all things that simply, as an entrepreneur, we get the freedom to do whatever the heck we want. I missed that freedom.
The important note here that I realized in part of my soul searching was more of the freedom to act as opposed to the freedom on the calendar. The freedom on the calendar is important but it was more of the freedom to do and implement the ideas that I had in my head that I no longer could do. It has been blissful to start my new thing, and guess who’s on the team? Only me. Like, “We need a logo.” I did it. I hired somebody to make the official website but for that whole launch that we did, and even still now, I’m the one running the ads and doing the coaching. It feels great. It’s not going to be that way forever but now it feels awesome.
A couple of strong points there. Number one, what got you here won’t get you there. That certainly can include people. I have a monthly forum of eight other entrepreneurs. I always think I’m the hatchet guy because my rule is, “If I ever think about letting someone go twice, I never think about it the third time.” I’ve got tired of keeping someone too long, finally letting them go, having a huge upgrade in their replacement.
Almost every time and without a lot of effort, then seeing them continue on their path and something that was more fulfilling to them. You come to realize, “There’s no sense dragging it out. This is not marriage and truthfully, everyone will leave.” You will be there at the beginning, and the end, very few will be there the entire ride. That’s the way it goes.
That right there is a lot of wisdom that even for me, I’m like, “That’s awesome.” It’s such a reminder, and we keep people around because we want to be nice. At the same time, business is business, and it’s easy to argue you are not being nice by continuing to drag somebody into a situation that they aren’t fulfilled in.
Semi-Retirement: Too many people want the entrepreneur lifestyle. They want that dream. And they know that it’s out there, but they aren’t willing to do what it takes to get it.
 
It is but it does not sound good on the evening news. It does not sound like you are being nice. Even though you probably are. It does not sound that great. What about a warp speed moment? James T Kirk would call Scotty and say, “I have got to have more power, and I need warp speed.” Sometimes when your business was doing well but something happened where things began to click. You had this rapid acceleration that’s common in an entrepreneur’s journey.
When I think back to the moment where things went fast because to get to the $1.5 million, it was like an accumulation of everything with a month-over-month like spend more on the ad. It was gradual because the truth is I’m a risk taker but also, I don’t take the risk until I have enough statistical confidence that I can go all in. Going from $100,000 to $1.5 million over the course of a year, it was rapid but there was nothing monumental. That being said, the real big moment was when we started scaling the membership because we were growing net MRR growth month-over-month, $30,000 to $50,000 a month.
I saw the chart because I kept it. I know you were in our membership thing. There was a chart in there. The first year we were flat line because I could not figure out what to do to grow it. I was neglecting it, then I figured out what was working well, which was a webinar to a trial. I had these big jumps then I slammed on the brakes.
I’m like, “Let me see if these people stick around or if they are going to leave on day 31, and I’m screwed here.” A few months later, I’m like, “They are still here. Game on.” We went from an $80,000 MRR. I want to say in August to $125,000 the very next month and kept going. The growth from $100,000 in MRR to high $300,000 in about twelve months, something like that.
We were all in our suites. I was in my zone. I already, at that point, had enough mental clarity and experience with a paid acquisition. I had enough chops and talent with our numbers. I have seen the membership attention churn. I knew that. Everything was like all-systems-go. It was like, “How much money can we spend before the metrics fall apart? When it fell apart, let’s get a new offer up, and we would keep going.” Honestly, that’s what’s fun. The things that I missed with not being at the helm anymore. That is the most exciting thing.
We have to take a step back and always appreciate it if we were to go ahead, and most people in America would do almost anything if they can guarantee an 8% return on their money over the course of a year in the stock market. You have compounding. Screw all the twenty-year vision stuff. I’m saying 8% over the course of the year. If you could master turning a dollar of ads, even in a 30-day period, even if it was only $0.50, 50% of your money in 30 days, why the hell are you not going to throw everything at it literally? Those were fun times.
If you could go back to twenty-year-old Cole, what counselor piece of advice would you share with yourself that would have sped things along, smoothed things out, made things perform a little better?
Bet on yourself earlier. There’s a time and place. I’m still doing anything recklessly. I’ve got plenty of money in the bank now but I’m still building my new business as if I have nothing in the bank. The truth is, I don’t because I have a new business account that does not have all the money, all my proceeds from everything else. That’s still smart but too many of us, especially if you are an entrepreneur, are like that because everyone can label themselves an entrepreneur.
There's always this mountain of challenges no matter what you do. What separates the winners from the losers is the hustle factor. Share on X
What makes somebody a proven entrepreneur to piggyback on the title here and, more importantly, a successful one is how committed are you to rolling up your sleeves, scrapping, and finding the solutions? There’s always this mountain of challenges no matter what you do. What separates the winners versus the losers is the hustle factor. Now hustle does not mean it’s a Gary Vee hustle, working fourteen hours a day, every day, and content. I like to work smart, and therefore, I don’t do that but teach his own. The point is, either way, no matter what the hustle looks like, you have to be willing to hustle.
I find in too many people that want the entrepreneur lifestyle, that dream. They know that it’s out there but they are not willing to do what it takes to get it. With that disclaimer out of the way, if I was to look back and if I had the way, I’m wired now. If I had more confidence back then, if I was here now talking to my twenty-year-old self, then I would say, “If you believe that it’s time and you’ve got something to share, help, and you can do it, then do it. Don’t spend the seven years in Corporate America. Don’t continue to let fear hold you back from making the leap. It’s hard.” Even with my new thing now.
Me, walking away from the steady paycheck, it’s different now. I’ve got a family. I’ve got a very expensive mortgage. We live in San Diego. It was still hard because I had to go back, look at it and say, “You say that you want to help more people again, you want to keep working but it’s different.” I’m semi-retired. I’ve got enough money that I could ride the investments. This is what I was asking myself, “Do I still have enough drive, motivation, hunger, and hustle to go in and make this thing something, as opposed to another idea that lasts 30 days, then I shut the doors?”
One of our mutual friends, Roland Frasier. I met Roland years ago at a conference, and I did not know him. We were teamed up. I was sharing something with him where I was like, “I’m a little reluctant to do that.” For our audience, if you don’t know Roland, it’s very a matter of fact of easy to talk to. He was like, “Why are you not doing that?”
I was like, “I don’t have a good answer for that.” The proven entrepreneur is not always someone who’s successful in every venture and typically has ventures. Sometimes there was a mushroom cloud in the Eastern sky. It blew up, and it blew up big but they figured it out. They had enough hustle to keep trying to solve the problem. Sometimes, the problem change but other times, they’ve got to figure it out. Spend a couple of minutes. Tell us what you are doing in your new venture. Tell us the company name and give us as much detail as you like.
The program name is the Rapid Scale System and the website for anyone who wants to go. You can go to RapidScaleSystem.com but you can also go to RapidScaleGroup.com, which is the company name. That’s where I’m going to be sharing all kinds of articles and blog posts and essentially in videos. Everything that’s in my mind is going to eventually be in the blog for free on the Rapid Scale Group.
The program is a 90-day program. It’s 90 days because it’s a group coaching program. You get access to the course curriculum. It’s all about how to go ahead and how to put your business profits on autopilot online. I say autopilot because there are too many people out there that have a product or service but I’m focusing on people that have products, as opposed to one-on-one services.
There are a lot of one-on-one people who want to sell to one to many. I can help those people for sure. The point is you have something. The typical path that people fall into is this idea of, “I’m going to go and put all this content out for free, and I’m going to amass this audience. Once I have an audience, then I can monetize them. I’m going to make up a course, a program or whatever, then I’m going to make some money on them,” and people get stuck because traffic is not limited unless you are using advertising.
Semi-Retirement: There is a shortcut to success. It comes down to three things: the right strategy and foundation in business model planning, the right plan of attack and taking rapid action, and access to the right people who’ve been there and done that.
 
People go, “I made $100,000. People love my product. I’m great. My product is great. I’ve got testimonials.” They go and start running ads, then they are not profitable and are stuck. What I have found is there are a lot of reasons why people get stuck in that organic hustle stage. One reason is if you have never had a cost basis. If your cost was your time and you have an audience, you have already warmed these people up for years. They are going to buy anything you put together. Essentially, you are getting a false positive. You think you ended up having something scalable.
You think you have something amazing but you sold it to the people that already love you the most because you have been helping them for free for the last many years. People end up getting burned out on the organic hustle. We know that Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, their algorithms hate us all. A lot of times, what happens is they think the answer is ads because they see everyone else and people like me doing it.
If you don’t have the right business foundation, right business blueprint, business model, principles or even the right product suite, as I call it, you never can get off the starting line. The reason why is because advertising in the year 2021 and beyond is a lot different than the year 2010. Why? It’s because it costs more money. If it costs more money, then all the easy money is gone. Inherently, what we have is a lot of people that are essentially product creators.
When they need to go and become online business owners and a more fully fleshed out product suite, essentially, we can have something scalable. Something sustainable. To be honest, I have been geeking out on this whole idea. I have been having fun with the COVID vaccination talk by simply saying, “How can we be immunized against Facebook ads cost or any ad platform costs?” I believe we can, and I know we can.
The way that we can become immunized and get our “vaccine” against advertising costs, which will continue to rise is, by having the right strategy foundation upfront to build a business that gives you enough lifetime value. Even if your ad costs were to triple, you are still profitable and scalable. The rapid scale system touches on these five phases.
What I like to say is before you can rapidly scale, you need to rapidly have the right strategy. That’s Phase 1. You need to have the right creation, meaning building your products and services out. Phase 3 is implementation. You have to take action but then you have to measure it and see how the data is looking.
You have to tweak it. You have to optimize it, then and only then you can scale. The Rapid Scale System is 90 days to cover and help people go through that entire five-phase process, you get weekly calls with me. You get access to our group. Essentially, with the 10,000 members before with Cole’s Classroom, I have the same idea, which is, “Nobody should be a pain member and go without getting their questions are their challenges answered.” That’s what I’m up to. It has been a lot of fun.
Let me ask you this, coaching. I hired my first business coach several years ago, and I have been an entrepreneur for many years. When I joined that program, there was a lady sitting next to me that said, “Let’s join together, and we will get rich together.” She was pre-revenue, and her business was a Japanese organization or something where I did not see how that was a real business but I said, “I will join with you and we will see.”
Don’t continue to let fear hold you back from making the leap. Share on X
I did not have the heart to tell her. Maybe my boat is already docked in the destination you are looking for. I’m not new but I learned a bunch. I stayed with that pretty high ticket coaching deal for a couple of years, then I met another fellow that I paid $20,000 for one day and worth every penny. I help people as one of those coaches but in your journey or path, did you have some coaches along the way?
I have been in the War Room Mastermind now for years and that is a brilliant source of multiple coaches. The best part about the War Room or any Mastermind is access to the right people. Ryan Deiss is not the stranger onstage. He’s my buddy, so much so that he’s going to be coming on and helping people in the Rapid Scale System with a VIP Zoom call. We are that close now. The same with Roland Frasier and all these people that are wicked smart. It’s so funny because what I have realized even with my students, I look back and I’m like, “Is there a shortcut for success? Why is it that some people sink and others swim?”
What I have decided is, and I have 100% conviction with this, it comes down to three things. There is a shortcut to success. You have to have the right strategy and foundation in business model planning, all that. The right plan of attack, then you have to take rapid action. The third thing is you have to have access to the right people who have been there and done that. I say that when looking at my path and when you think about those three things, the cool thing is you need all three. You think about it. You can have. You can pay. I could pay $20,000 for a day. I won’t say with Roland because I know he’s more than that for a whole day.
At least now, he is. That’s my rate now. I know that for somebody who comes to me, they will ROI that if they also take action but if they came to me, paid me, and got the access but then they don’t take action, it’s for nothing. Conversely, somebody can go through the rapid scale system. They can have the same blueprint. Not the same, the one for their business. They could also maybe take action but they are still going to hit hang-ups and challenges.
If they don’t have that third component of access and somewhere to go to get unstuck, then they are no longer on the shortcut. Now they are going through trial and error. It’s funny. When I would speak at traffic and conversion conferences or whatever, people would come up thinking about joining the War Room. They would go, “Cool.” The number one question is, “Is it worth it?” Everyone asks me, “Is it worth it?”
I started answering it this way, after how I think about it myself, “There are four meetings a year and every meeting I go to, I will come back from a couple of days of meetings, and I will have a few pages of good notes.” Not even taking down everything. Only like a-ha moments. “If you can’t go ahead and ROI the $25,000, which is what it was. Now, it’s more. If you can get an ROI in that over the course of a year, you are not trying.” It’s that simple. Let’s talk ROI. I did this in my head.
ROI of access, of coaching, and all of that. When I joined War Room, I had a total of $1.6 million in sales to date. That was two years’ worth. I had to implement. It’s not like War Room was not able to help me with that. That was on me but number one, the most obvious thing is thinking bigger. Always thinking bigger around people like Roland and constantly upping what we thought was previously our ceiling. From the time of joining War Room, what’s five years, times $25,000 a year? $125,000. I have now sold over $13.6 million worth of stuff. I went there with $1.6 and sold a business along the way with guidance and help from my mentors, Roland and Ryan Deiss. It’s worth it unless you don’t want to try.
That’s pretty far north of that 8% we were talking about. When I first met Roland, I was an attendee. He was a speaker at this conference. The last time I saw him, I was on a European-speaking tour. I saw a social media post that he was in London. I was like, “I’m in London. Do you want to have lunch?” He was doing an intensive. We met and had lunch.
People’s lives don’t have to follow this rigid life of working for somebody else forever. Share on X
It pays to associate with people who have been there and done that. The average entrepreneur will find their performance most closely resembles the five other entrepreneurs they are closest to. If you want to elevate your game, play with bigger players. It’s doable. We are running out of time. Thank you so much. I’m doing my fourth book now, which is a book on gratitude.
It’s the first thing I have done from the consulting side that is not commercially intent. I have already stated that we are going to donate all the money it makes to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I hope it’s the most successful thing I have ever done. That would be great. Tell us about something you are passionate about that’s not business.
The truth is the thing that I am most passionate about, money aside, is helping grow their business, whether I’m getting paid for it or not, because I never thought my life would end up the way it did. I know that there are so many other people that have such amazing talent and amazing products. They have no idea what their true potential is.
I want to help people break away from this idea, which is such an old-school way of thinking, which is following the status quo. Like going to school, getting a degree. It’s is fine. I’m not against getting a degree but your people’s lives, don’t have to follow this rigid life of working for somebody else forever. Go to school, get the degree, buy a house, do the whole shebang. It’s amazing.
Look at what the pandemic has done now, where people can work from anywhere. There’s an element of freedom that I want everyone else to be able to experience. Anything I can do to help with that is something I’m passionate about. The other thing is, this is more of a deeper personal thing. Something that is a hardship and something that we have had to deal with on the total personal side is starting a family. We have gone through infertility issues when we have been trying to start a family. That was a four-year-long excruciatingly painful process. Multiple years before we even knew what the problem was.
Luckily, we have a positive outcome. We had no choice other than to go through IVF. We did it. Thankfully, I had money in the bank from the business that I was able not to have that financial constraint that other people do. Something that I’m passionate about that I would love to see there being more support for is people who are struggling with starting a family because it is something that has such a stigma about it that causes many people to be very tight-lipped and not want to be open about. That’s the thing I want to break the mold on. Along the same lines, not to go off on a total tangent here but the biggest thing that I see as an issue with society now is the lack of authenticity online with people.
That drives me crazy. Not because I have an adverse reaction to seeing get-rich-quick ads in front of Lambos and all the fast cars. I now have two girls in the family. I look at what social media is now and this constant game of perception over reality. People, men, and women are trying to put on this show to get followers. To me, it’s a problem that we need to get ahold of because there needs to be more authenticity in the world. There need to be more people that are showing reality rather than trying to have a make-belief life. The truth is that’s going to cause a lot of mental harm to a lot of people, and this complaint, this comparison game feeling not good enough. I’m mostly worried about it from kids growing up.
I did not see the real magic in my business, my family, and my personal life until I started playing 100% from my heart. The more authentic people can be, the world will love the real you. Not everybody. There’s going to be some that don’t but for the most part, the world will love the real you and not have much to do with a facade of you.
The truth is that was the secret to Cole’s Classroom success. When I gave a little farewell spiel in our membership group, the most notable comments were like, “We are going to miss the Facebook Lives you did from the gym on the treadmill. We are going to miss all of you showing up and being real in a tank top because you’ve got home from the gym.” I did that because that’s who I am. I did that because that’s when I was inspired. I did that not because I was trying to fabricate what they would think.
I’m not going to do a video because I’m scheduled to do a video. I’m going to do it when I’m inspired and when I can help. I’m going to be doing the same thing with my venture now. I know that I’m doing it for the right reasons. The best part about it like you have experienced it. It’s more effortless. Why should people be spending so much time and work trying to be anything other than themselves?
I cannot endorse Cole and the Rapid Scaling System enough. He truly is one of the most acclaimed digital marketing experts on this planet. Check out his stuff. Cole, thank you so much for joining us. I will see you in the next episode.
 
Important Links

Cole Humphus
Rapid Scale System
Ryan Deiss
SanDiegoPunk.com
Roland Frasier
RapidScaleGroup.com
War Room Mastermind
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: EP 19 | What Happened In My Flight To New Orleans
Date: May 19, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-19-what-happened-in-my-flight-to-new-orleans/
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Content:
 
Many of us get stuck in our comfort zone, and who wouldn’t? But growth only happens when we are uncomfortable, and progress means being comfortable with uncomfortability. Don Williams flies solo in this episode as he tells a story of a recent flight to New Orleans and an unforgettable encounter he experienced. What new insight did Don glean from this? Tune in and find out!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E19.mp3
 
What Happened In My Flight To New Orleans
 
This is a great story. I was flying to New Orleans and I’m on American Airlines, which has who I normally fly because it’s so close. I’m sitting up front. I don’t always fly up front, but I’m sitting up front at this time. An older, well-dressed gentleman, nice sports coat, very traditional like he’s a lawyer, banker or something like that. Nice shoes and the whole thing. I’m sitting on the aisle as he walks up. He’s talking.
I think he’s having a phone call with his earbuds and he asked me if he can come in and I’m like, “Sure.” I get up and he comes in and he’s talking. He sits down and I don’t think he thinks about it. He’s continuing to talk away, and I think he’s on a phone call. He reaches in between the seats and he pulls out the life preserver.
It’s like when you fly and they say, “If we ended up in the ocean, you reach in here and you get the life preserver. You put it on and you strap it and all that.” He reaches in and gets that. He takes it out of the plastic bag, puts it on, and latches it around him. I have flown a bazillion miles. I have been around the world several times. I have seen a lot of unusual things on airplanes, but this is a first.
 
Try and feel good about that feeling of uncomfortableness because that's where your growth is. Share on X
 
He’s continuing to talk the whole time, but I’m looking at him thinking, “Do you know something I don’t know? Are we going swimming and you know it and I don’t?” As we take off, he’s still talking. The flight attendant tells you got to turn your phone off. He’s still talking and five minutes into the flight, he’s still talking. I finally figure out he’s talking to himself.
He is not on a phone conversation. He looked at the aisle, which was me and him and he said, “I’m going to have a conversation with the smartest person on the aisle,” who he decided was him, not me. He’s talking away. He fell asleep during the flight and got the vest on. The flight attendant did not say the life preserver vest and I did not say anything.
It was a beautiful day. The clouds are fluffy and bright white, but it’s been pouring in New Orleans all day as we come into New Orleans. As we get lower, we get into the shady weather. The plane, there’s some turbulence in that. That wakes him up. As we got close to seeing the land, this freaked me out a little bit. He bends over and holds his head. He assumes the position they tell you to be in if you are going to crash. At this point, I’m like, “Do you know something I don’t know?” We land and he sits back up and he takes off the life vest and he folds up back up. He puts it in the bag and he puts it back in between the seats.
 
New Orleans: Try and be comfortable doing something uncomfortable, even if it’s a little step out of your comfort zone.
 
Once in a bazillion miles, do you see something like that? The thing that hit me was this. We talk about our comfort zone. We love to be in our comfort zone. Why? It’s because it’s comfortable. That’s pretty simple. We also know that growth, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and financially, all of that happens outside of our comfort zone.
We don’t grow when we stay in our comfort zone. It’s comfortable and there’s nothing wrong with that, but we are not growing until we get out of our comfort zone. What struck me about this peculiar gentleman was he obviously was an uncomfortable flyer to the extreme. He had somehow come to grips with being comfortable at being uncomfortable.
At being brave enough to go out there and not wilt, my thought for the day is this, “Try and be comfortable doing something uncomfortable,” even if it’s a little step out of your comfort zone. I will encourage you to take it and it will be a little uncomfortable, but try and feel good about that feeling of uncomfortableness because that’s where your growth is.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E18 | Be Kind To The People Who Are Serving You
Date: May 17, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e18-be-kind-to-the-people-who-are-serving-you/
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Content:
 
If you want to be treated with kindness, you also have to be kind as a customer. In this episode, Don Williams shares a heartwarming true story about his experience with Uber and a young man of character. Tune in to learn how kindness comes back to you and why you should be kind to people who are serving you.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
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Be Kind To The People Who Are Serving You
Here is my one good thing. I get to New Orleans. I have a car reserved because New Orleans has been a hotbed of COVID. All those drunk people down on Bourbon Street are not practicing socially distancing. I’m not going to New Orleans. I’m only going to Metairie, which is not in the city. It’s a different parish or county. It’s pouring. I’m not picking up my car. I’m just taking an Uber. I’m supporting Uber. I get an Uber, and it’s Nicholas, a nice young man. He’s very Cajun.
If you have been to that area of the country, they have their language and dialect. It’s part French, part English and part swamp rat. It’s pouring. We get to the hotel. I get out of the car and go inside. I have left my phone in the Uber. I run back outside and then I’m like, “I will put it in my jacket pocket. I’m good.” I check-in and get up to the room. It was my subconscious telling me I had left my sports coat in the car. It’s not great. I get on Uber. How many Uber rides are there a day? There’s about a bazillion. How many do you think leave something in the car? There’s about a bunch.
There’s a thing that says, “You can contact your driver.” It’s a call center technology, and they are very bad at it. It’s horrible. You say, “Here’s my phone number. I want to talk to my driver.” Uber’s phone system calls you back. Ours would work. The phone system calls you back and says, “Press one to talk to the driver.” When you press one, it’s connecting the two calls. It’s a conference call because they don’t want to give you the driver’s phone number and give the driver your phone number. Every time I press one, it hangs up. I do it about 10 or 12 times.
Be Kind: How many Uber rides are there a day? About a bazillion. And how many do you think leaves something in the car? A bunch.
 
If you want to call Uber, that’s hard. Nobody wants to talk. They don’t want to talk to you. There’s another part where you can send an email to Uber. I don’t know if it’s an Uber, an email or a chat but they say they will send it to the driver and tell you, “We charge you $15. We don’t guarantee you get your stuff back.” This sports coat I had custom-made for me in Thailand. It says, “Tailored for Don Williams.” This coat is only going to fit you if you look exactly like me. You are as round and tall as I am. Your arms are as long as mine. That’s the only way it’s going to fit.
I do the text and tell Nicholas because we had a great conversation. I have a nephew named Nicholas. I told Nicholas, “I have a $20 bill for you if you can bring it to the Marriott tonight.” I go to dinner with the client. That’s a 2 or 3-hour thing. I come back and check with the front desk, Janine, an awesome customer service romancing your customer at the front desk at the Marriott. She handed me my envelope back, where I put a $20 bill in and wrote his name on it. She said, “I didn’t hear from him.”
I’m like, “I practice gratitude. It’s not the end of the world. Somebody else needed my sports coat, and it’s going to go to a better home. I will show up tomorrow in shirtsleeves. It’s okay.” The next morning, I’m up early because I’m preparing for the day. As Jeff knows, many times, I’m writing the presentation an hour before I go give it or on the way because it keeps me fresh. That way, I’m not just saying the same things and doing the same stuff. My phone rings, and it’s a Louisiana phone number. I pick it up, and it’s Nicholas. He said, “Mr. Williams, I have your sports coat.” I was like, “That’s awesome.”
If you want to be romanced as a customer, it pays to be kind to the people who are serving you.
He’s like, “When can I bring it?” I’m like, “I’m leaving today at 4:50. I’m in client meetings all day starting at 8:00.” I went to the client’s office, set up the conference room for my kickoff meeting with them, went into a vacant office, and did my weekly call with that client every Wednesday. I did that call while I was in this client’s office, and they were cool about it. I told Nicholas. As I walked into the building, I took a picture of the building and the suite. I asked him if he could bring it up. About 9:30 that morning, Nicholas walks in with my sports coat, and I’m good.
That is my one good thing. That is my gratitude for having a young man of character who wanted to do great customer service because he didn’t have to do that. Uber gave him $15, and I gave him $20. Maybe that was worthwhile from a financial standpoint but in talking with him, he would have done it for nothing. I do also know this about romancing your customer. If you want to be romanced as a customer, it pays to be kind to the people that are serving you. I will save this next story because I have trains, planes, and automobiles that we will talk about on the same trip.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E17 | Deal The Big Deal By Playing “What-If”
Date: May 14, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e17-deal-the-big-deal-by-playing-what-if/
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Content:
 
Big opportunities come with big risks, but these are the ones that come with huge rewards as well. When you’re faced with a giant you feel you can’t conquer, remember that opportunities are put in front of you for a reason. Don Williams shares his client’s experience of closing a big business deal simply by asking, “What if?” He believes that answering this simple question will propel you to greater heights. The next time a deal is too big or too hard, play a little what-if and see if you can do it anyway.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Deal-The-Big-Deal-by-Playing-What-If-.mp3
 
Deal The Big Deal By Playing “What-If”
I want to talk about what-if. A great client of mine is a very smart owner and US-based. He calls me one day and says, “We had the lead for the biggest opportunity in the history of the company. It would be a total life-changer to win this deal, but they happened to be in China. We are US-based and never served anyone outside of this country.” As we were speaking, I interrupted and said, “Can we for a minute or two play what-if?” In what-if, what I want to know is, “What if we were going to go try and win this deal, then what would be the first step we would take?”
What-If: Those opportunities are probably put in front of you for a reason.
 
He provided me with an answer immediately with no pause or hesitation. My reply was, “If we were going to try and win this deal and we had taken that first step, then what would be the second step we would take?” He again replied with no hesitation. He was very confident in his answer. I was like, “If we were trying to win this deal and we had done steps 1 and 2, what would be step 3?” He gave me an answer.
At that point, I was like, “I think there’s only one more step.” He said, “That would be this.” What I encouraged him to do was, “Let’s play what-if in real life even though we are US-based and we had never served anyone outside of the US. Even though this was the largest potential deal ever in the history of the company, let’s play what-if and see what happens.” I think he is going to win the deal.
Catastrophes are sometimes averted with a no, but progress almost always requires a yes. Share on X
Let me encourage you. The next time a deal is too big, too hard or too far, play a little what-if and see if you can’t go do it anyway. Those opportunities are probably put in front of you for a reason. All progress starts with yes. Catastrophes are sometimes averted with a no, but progress almost always requires a yes. That’s Don Williams for this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur. If you would like to learn how to win big deals and see how you can work with me, please go to DonWilliamsGlobal.com on the Work With Me page. I will see you next time.
 
Important Links

DonWilliamsGlobal.com
Work With Me

 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E15 | Do You “Poka-Yoke”?
Date: May 8, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e15-do-you-poka-yoke/
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Content:
 
Do you “Poka-yoke”? Poka-yoke comes from a Japanese word – “Baka Yoke,” which means ‘fool proofing’ or ‘idiot-proofing.’ Poka-yoke is a little milder – it means to avoid an unthinkably wrong move…apply poka-yoke to your business and watch it grow.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Do-you-Poka-yoke-.mp3
 
Do You “Poka-Yoke”?
I want to share a term with you that I learned. The term is Poka-yoke. Poka-yoke comes from a Japanese term called “Baka Yoke,” which means fool-proofing or idiot-proofing. Poka-yoke is a little milder. It means to avoid an unthinkably bad move. Typically, poka-yoke is used in engineering. The example this really bright client of mine shared with me was when you look at a three-prong plug like it is on the end of a lamp cord, a stereo cord, or a computer cord.
Poka-yoke means to avoid an unthinkably bad move. Share on X
One of the blades is a little taller than the other, one of the blades is a little shorter than the other, and then there is the cylinder underneath the two blades. Try as you might, that plug will only fit in the electrical outlet in the correct manner. You cannot mix it up. You cannot put the fat blade in the skinny slot and you cannot put the cylinder in one of the flat slots. It will only go into the outlet the way it was intended.
Poka-Yoke: Marketing sales and customer care are all just different phases of the customer’s experience journey.
 
As we were talking about this in the context of engineering, I thought that when you look at your customer journey map, if you applied a little poka-yoke where a customer and your customer care team, which starts in marketing, marketing sales and customer care, are all different phases of the customer is experience journey. When you apply a little poka-yoke to that to where the customer and team cannot misstep, you provide a more exceptional and consistent experience. When you provide consistent, exceptional experience, you begin to see the magic in your business. Go Poka-yoke. See you next time.
When you provide consistent, exceptional experiences, you begin to see the magic in your business. Share on X
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

====================================================

Title: EP 14 | Larry Huffaker, Owner of Huffaker Roofing Shares His Wisdom & What it Takes To Be A Proven Entrepreneur
Date: May 6, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-14-larry-huffaker-owner-of-huffaker-roofing-shares-his-wisdom-what-it-takes-to-be-a-proven-entrepreneur/
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Content:
 
Listen in as Don talks with 40-year Ft. Worth Area Roofing Contractor Larry Huffaker, owner of Huffaker Roofing. Larry shares his wisdom and what it takes to be a Proven Entrepreneur.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Larry-Huffaker-Owner-of-Huffaker-Roofing-Shares-His-Wisdom-What-it-Takes-To-Be-A-Proven-Entrepreneur.mp3
 
Larry Huffaker, Owner of Huffaker Roofing Shares His Wisdom & What it Takes To Be A Proven Entrepreneur
With this episode, I’ve got a very good, twenty-year friend and neighbor. Our guest is Larry Huffaker with Huffaker Roofing. Larry, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
I’m thrilled that you could come to join us. It will be fun. We have been neighbors for 22 years in 2021. Tell us, what are you up to? What is your business? What do you do?
I own Huffaker Roofing Company.
How long have you had Huffaker Roofing?
Forty-three years in 2021.
Think back to childhood, Larry. Where are you from?
I’m from Denver, Colorado.
They ran you out of Colorado. You are on the run from the law and got to Texas.
No, I went to Kansas for a few years.
Did they run you out of Kansas?
They run me out of Kansas.
Many entrepreneurs had begun their entrepreneurial journey and experience as children. Did you have experience as an entrepreneur as a young man?
No. When I was fourteen years old, I used to sell donuts door to door. We would meet at the donut place and put them in a ‘57 Chevy. It had eight kids in the ‘57 Chevy. I load it with a dozen of donuts in the trunk. They would take us to this spot and let us off. We would go door to door trying to sell the donuts.
I have known a lot of entrepreneurs. I have been around the world three times with Entrepreneurs’ Organization and people from every culture. I do not think I ever heard of someone selling donuts door to door.
It sucked.
It was not good.
It was Colorado. It was cold. Some days, it was nice but it was pretty cold.
Were you a good donut seller?
Yes. I make $0.50 a day.
The bottom line to running a business is having good help and treating them right and paying them right. Share on X
It is common for an entrepreneur to take out an early start, where they were selling something to somebody. When you left donut sales, did your path take you to college? Did you go to the military?
I went to college for a year.
Did they run you out of college?
It was not my expertise being a college student.
What college were you at?
I was at Garden City Community College in Kansas.
After that, where did you go to?
I joined the Navy.
Thank you for your military service.
You are very welcome.
How long did you serve in the Navy?
I served for four years on a submarine.
Did you spend your entire Naval career underwater?
Pretty much. We traveled an awful lot, though. I was on a diesel submarine. We went all over the world. We went into ports. Some nuclear submarines can’t port right into ports. We’ve got to do that and had left. We had a great time.
Is there anything from your military experience that helped serve you well as a business owner?
It all boils down to working hard. I worked hard when I was fourteen, and in the Navy. You can usually do pretty well if you are a hard worker.
Entrepreneurs have a great work ethic, though maybe not always.
I had few jobs or businesses that I did not work hard at.
Samuel Goldwyn said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” It is how that goes. After the Navy, what was your first business?
Another guy and I had a cleanup truck. We cleaned up new houses and sheetrock.
 
Proven Entrepreneur: You’re never going to keep going on if you keep losing the good people that work for you.
 
They are building a new house. After they had done the sheetrock, they made a mess with scrap. You were going in and cleaning it up before the next contractor sub comes in and takes care of that. How long did you own that?
I owned it for maybe a year.
Was it successful during the year?
We did good. It got bad. It was on and off.
Was it Huffaker Roofing or something else?
I went and started roofing in Texas. I went from Colorado to Texas.
Were you roofing on a crew?
Yes.
How many roofs have you been on, Larry?
Huffaker Roofing has done about 30,000. I have been on a lot because I worked as a roofer for a few years. We do a house a day. We work 5 maybe 6 days a week.
Larry’s company has done four roofs for me on different properties. In all fairness, it is not even all day to do a roof. By 2:00 or 3:00, they are gone, the old roof is gone, and the new roof is on. That is a feat of engineering. You started roofing for a few years and opened Huffaker Roofing?
Yes, I started Huffaker Roofing after. It was Meyers and Huffaker back then.
I have known you for many years. I have never heard of Meyers. Meyers went away at some point. He sailed off into the sunset. He lives in Boca Raton on the beach.
He lives in Oklahoma in a trailer. He should have stayed with me.
Sometimes that is how it goes. Did you buy him out? Did he abandon or left?
The business slowed down. We started two other businesses. They didn’t do well. I went into a bar with a partner. He would try to run the company and could not do it. It got really bad. He left, and I went full-time back into the company.
Tell us about a hard moment, sometime in your entrepreneurial career, where things didn’t go very well.
Probably the worst one was when I was working in the bar. I’m laughing about it because working at a bar, you do a lot of drinking. I was not watching Huffaker Roofing. It almost all went under.
You said, “I will start another business.” That other business took your eyes off the ball. How long did you have that business before you said, “Maybe I would better get my eye back on the ball?”
I had that for two years.
You need to work hard at whatever you believe you can do, get good help, and be fair. If you’re not fair, they're not going to stick around. Share on X
You closed that, came back to Huffaker Roofing full-time, and concentrated your effort there?
Yes.
What about a work speed moment, sometimes when things were going along okay but all of a sudden, you had this massive acceleration, and things took off?
At one time, I had ten crews. Now, I have three. I will not have any more than three crews.
Ten crews were on ten roofs a day?
It was close to ten roofs a day but sometimes a roof would take two days. I did big houses. The money was there, so did the headaches. If you are not on top of the job, you can’t be on top of every single job that is being roofed. The people helping you do that are also getting more work for you. The money was nice but I had headaches four years after that because the guys were not doing it like they were supposed to be done. There are new crews, not my crews that I have had for many years.
That is common with entrepreneurs. You can be too busy. You can be doing too much. You have out pandered your coverage. You can maintain high quality to a certain level. If you double or triple that volume, it is hard to provide the same quality.
It is for me. I’m not programmed for that. I have traveled a little bit to reroof houses, apartment complexes, and churches in different states because they want me to. I do not take my crews and move to Colorado because they have a huge hailstorm in Oklahoma. I have never done that. We stay here 98% of the time.
If you could go back in time and give some advice to twenty-year-old Larry that would help you and your business career, what would that advice be?
When I was twenty years old, I had little sense. That is the truth. I was running from this to this. I could not stick to one thing. The bottom line to running a business is having good help, treating them right, and paying them right. That is why my super dentist has been with me for many years, the same three crews several years. Everybody that has worked for me has worked for me for many years except for my kids, which only have been here a couple of years.
You have a son and a daughter. They are twins. You have double trouble.
I waited until I was 42 and married 12 years before I had any kids.
You had 0 to 2 in 9 short months. Do both Danielle and Landon work in the business?
Yes.
Did they start in the business?
No.
They went out, got some life experience, and came back into the business?
Yes. I’m glad you are there. I’m privileged to be able to see my kids every day. Very few people at my age or 10 or 20 years younger get to see their kids every day.
That is the beauty of a well-run family business. Do you have any last thoughts or anything you would share that you think entrepreneurs should know from your experience that would help them with their business?
It all boils down to the same thing to me. You’ve got to work hard at whatever you believe you can do, get good help, and be fair. If you are not fair, they are not going to stick around. You are never going to keep going on if you keep losing the good people that work for you. You have to start from scratch again.
Herb Kelleher, the original Chairman of Southwest Airlines, said, “The customer is not always right but they are always the customer. They are always paying the bill. I’m going to take care of my people, and because I take care of my people, my people will take care of my customers.” He was not as customer-centric as a lot of business theory would tell you to be but he was very staff-centric. Take care of your staff, and they will take care of everybody else. You have been doing a very good job. People have been there for many years. The last question is, how could we support you now?
Find people that I can roof their houses.
If you are in Northeast Tarrant County, Texas or the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and you need a roof, reach out to my good friend, Larry Huffaker at HuffakerRoofing. Thank you so much.
 
Important Link

Huffaker Roofing
Entrepreneurs’ Organization

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E13 | Move In The Opposite Direction
Date: May 3, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e13-move-in-the-opposite-direction/
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Content:
 
Sometimes the best course of action is actually the reverse of your first response. Take a breath and ask yourself should I be looking at this situation differently? See it forwards and backwards and then act!
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Move-in-the-Opposite-Direction.mp3


 
Move In The Opposite Direction
In this episode, I want to talk about going in the opposite direction. A client calls me. They have done an annual performance review for a highly valued team member that ended with them rewarding that team member with a pretty substantial salary increase. Contrary to the response they thought they would receive, the team member said, “Thank you but I was thinking more of this number,” which was a considerably higher number than they were being offered. They responded, “I was not prepared for that. I might need a day or two to think that through as we’re headed out of town.” That’s where the meeting concluded.
Instead of looking at things as a potential problem, look at them as a great opportunity. Share on X
The client talks to me. They’re on the airplane. I can hear the pilot giving instructions. While the pilot is extremely loud, we’re trying to have a conversation, “I suggest that you go on your trip. You can speak with this team member when you return but I want to encourage you to, instead of looking at this as a potential problem, look at this as a great opportunity.” After a couple of days out of town, we had a conversation. As they had been away from their business and had time to think, the clarity they had come up with was, “I don’t think what that teammate wanted was a problem. The way that we would like to meet with that team member is this.”
Opposite Direction: By counter-intuitively going the opposite direction, you can turn a sticky situation or a potentially sticky situation into a real win for the teammate, for the company and for the owner. That’s the type of wins we’re always trying to find.
 
“That’s a great idea. What we would like to do is to structure that in the form of a bonus. That bonus is tied to this performance metric. If you perform at this level, that bonus will kick in. If you perform at double that level then double that bonus will kick in.” Merely by counterintuitively going the opposite direction turned what was a sticky situation or a potentially sticky situation into a real win for the teammate, the company and the owner. That’s the type of win we’re always trying to find. Please go to DonWilliamsGlobal.com, hit the Work With Me page and see how we might work together. Thank you.
 
Important links

DonWilliamsGlobal.com

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: EP 12 | Serial Entrepreneur, Jerah Hutchins Shares Her Success Stories
Date: April 28, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-12-serial-entrepreneur-jerah-hutchins-shares-her-success-stories/
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Content:
 
The gun industry typically caters to men and is mostly about bravado. Because of this proper gun use and safety are either downplayed or completely ignored. Joining Don Williams is Jerah Hutchins of Tier One Security, Clearing the Chamber, and WADE, who shares her success stories around this industry. She talks about educating women and young people on responsible gun ownership to protect themselves from abuse and violence. Jerah also discusses her work in elevating school security to address the huge problem of human trafficking.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
 
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E12.mp3
 
Serial Entrepreneur, Jerah Hutchins Shares Her Success Stories.
 
My guest is a very good friend, Jerah Hutchins. I have known her for several years and to give you a little bit of her background, she is a firearms instructor, a security professional, a Second Amendment advocate, and also a philanthropist. She is a part-owner of a business called Tier One Security, which helps combat human trafficking, provides personal protection, and protects kids in schools. She also owns Clearing the Chamber, a training company that focuses on educating women and youth in self-defense and responsible gun ownership. Lastly, she is the Founder of WADE or the Women’s Awareness and Defense Endeavor. It is a nonprofit that provides self-defense training to single moms, low-income women, and victims of abuse. 
—
Jerah, welcome to the show.
I’m so excited that you wanted to have me on.
We are thrilled to have you and know all about you. You have multiple businesses plus the nonprofit. What is getting most of your time?
It is being divided evenly between the three because they are all necessary. If you had asked me in 2020, my answer would have been different. In 2021 as we reopen everything, the security business never went away. It was always necessary, especially with what we have got going on surrounding the election and things like that. We were needed. I also serve in the Texas State Guard. A lot of people do not even know that Texas has a State Guard. I do something similar within the Guard, but Tier One is taking up a lot of my time, and that is a good thing.
My business partners are committed to the safety of people in the DFW area. One of my business partners is one of our State Representatives. He is doing good things in the legislature and their meetings, looking at some House bills for different things. One of those things is constitutional carry and some of the other domestic violence House bills that we have got coming down the platform. We are digging into new contracts and getting new schools and apartment complexes. One of the biggest areas that we patrol is in the Skillman-Audelia area of Dallas. Those are very high crime areas.
We are revolutionizing what it means to be a security professional. That is one of the reasons why I took on that project because I want to get away from security people being looked at as Paul Blart: Mall Cop. One of the biggest issues in that realm or genre of the industry is how they are trained. It is a minimal amount of training, and then all of a sudden, we are sending these people out with guns to protect other people. That needs to change. At Tier One, we do above what the State of Texas requires for Level 3 and 4 security. I put them through a rigorous amount of gun training.
What are Level 3 and Level 4 security?
In the State of Texas, Level 3 is a commissioned security officer. They are uniformed and armed. You will see those people sometimes at apartment complexes. You will see SROs at schools. Typically, it is my understanding that SROs are TCOLE-certified police officers. Schools can also have Level 3 security officers, which can be armed in schools. You can’t just turn somebody loose in a school with a gun who has no idea about room clearing and tactical response. You got to be able to identify certain characteristics of a threat and communicate with law enforcement and other people that might be in the vicinity.
There is a lot going on with that. I do not feel like they put enough energy into training these people. We do that at Tier One and make sure that they have the highest level of training possible. We require that they shoot at 90% and pass their written exam at at least 90%. We put them through continued education like gang class where we have a TCOLE-certified police officer that comes in and teaches them about the different gangs in the area, what identifying markers are for those gang affiliations, what to do if you encounter one, and what their personalities are like.
In the Skillman-Audelia area, you are going to come into contact with at least 3 or 4 different kinds of gangs. If you do not understand how to interact with those people especially how to get information from those people for link analysis, you are useless. We want security personnel to be looked at as the first responders because that is exactly what we are. We are already there patrolling.
 
Gun Industry: One of the biggest issues in the security industry is how the people are trained. It’s a minimal amount of training and then all of a sudden, they are sent out with guns to protect other people.
 
We have had officers that worked for me. My partner and I saw somebody get shot right in front of us at a robbery in the parking lot of an apartment complex. My partner bailed out, put a tourniquet on the wound, and packed the wound. I was dealing with crowd control and communicating with the police and EMTs.
You got to know how to do that stuff. In the middle of a chaotic situation, you have got to have your mindset right to be able to say the words that need to be said efficiently and well. If you submit to the chaos, too, then you are no better than the other people that are around. You are supposed to be better than them.
It is too late to train when you are in the situation.
Scenario-based training is necessary.
It needs to be done ahead of time. That is getting most of your time and energy.
We have got a lot of new contracts coming up in the pipeline. We are hiring, in case you are wondering. It is TierOneUS.com. Get on board and we will get you covered and trained.
Let’s go back. You live in Dallas-Fort Worth. Are you from here? Where are you from?
I’m originally from East Texas. I was born in Greenville, which is where East Texas started to become East Texas. I was born there and raised in Lone Oak. I got family throughout East Texas pretty much at Stratford.
As a child, many entrepreneurs had an entrepreneurial moment or sometimes began their entrepreneurial journey at seven, buying candy at 7-Eleven and selling it at school for a quarter more. Were you entrepreneurial as a child?
I had a very entrepreneurial grandfather. He and his cousins moved from the North. My grandfather was Sicilian. He and his cousins started this window-washing company. They moved to Texas and spread it out throughout East Texas. They were three cousins. They all owned one of the franchises in Greenville, Tyler, and Longview. What I loved seeing as a child and recognized early was him having complete control of his time. I wanted that. He would get up super early to go to work because when you do day labor like that, you do not want to be in the heat all day in a Texas summer especially.
Tell our audience what super early is in East Texas because they are going to have a different opinion on what that is.
He was up by 3:45 and was out the door by 4:30. He was working, but he was done at noon. He would come home and work on another project. He was a carpenter, handyman, and mason. I learned a lot of trade skills from him. I had an uncle that was into guns. I learned a lot about guns, gunsmithing, and little tinkering work growing up. One of the things that I dug was he was the complete sultan of his time. I enjoyed that. Did I learn a lot of entrepreneurial skills from him? It is not a lot.
 
To be a good entrepreneur, you got to have a servant's heart. Share on X
 
I would not say that he necessarily taught me how to be an entrepreneur per se, but I did understand that I did not like free labor. That is what the grandkids were. He had six children. In the summertime, when we were in school, we were working. We were up at 3:45 in the morning, going and washing windows until noon and coming home. He would pay us a little bit, but we all knew it was not what he was making.
That sounds like an entrepreneur, “Am I being properly compensated here?”
He did not properly compensate for my time, but there were a lot of lessons to be learned throughout watching him grow his business and be the master of his time. I knew at an early age that that is what I wanted.
Surely, the work ethic was one of the huge issues you learned by getting up at 3:45. That serves all entrepreneurs well. It doesn’t mean that we all crush the hours all the time, but we do when we have to.
I never understood this whole glorifying of perpetual hustle. That is exhausting. You have to figure out when to grind and when to take a break because that is serving yourself and other people well. You want to be able to do both. If you are going to be a good entrepreneur, you got to have a servant’s heart. You can’t have a servant’s heart if you are not taking a moment to go, “I need to rest, read, recharge, learn, go back out and hustle.”
My schedule is quite sporadic, but I have this great app called GoodNotes. I bought Boss Planner that goes into GoodNotes. It has got your month lined out. I use my Apple Pen, write out my whole month and go, “I do not think I’m going to work on this day. I’m going to rest, read and recharge.” There are days when I have 16 or 17-hour days. That is fine because I’m getting a lot done, but then I have those days when I’m making notes on things I need to learn, follow up on or look at.
I will sleep in until 10:00 in the morning because I deserve it. My schedule with what I do and when I teach women and youth, a lot of times, their free time is on the weekends. I do not have a traditional weekend. I get to spend doing weekend stuff. This is probably why I’m single, but I love what I do. A big part of my business and its success is being available to people on their schedules. If I’m going to do that, I have to be purposeful in scheduling time out for me.
Years ago, I learned that I have to schedule time for strategic thoughts because if I do not block my calendar to think about what I’m doing, I won’t have time.
That is the key component in the book How Successful People Think. You have to sit there, get a cup of tea or bourbon, meditate over your thoughts and notate them out. To me, it starts as a scribble page of something that will come to mind that I need to do a video on. In my Clearing the Chamber business, when I train women and youth, I write a lot of workshops about things I see and current events that women are struggling with from a self-defense standpoint. One of the things that I thought of in a meditation session was time management.
Most women do not understand that your poor time management directly affects your safety. If you are frazzled and disorganized, you are late everywhere, and your children are driving you nuts because you have no scene control over any of that stuff because you are a pushover, people are targeting you because they can see that all over your body language and in the tone of your voice. They know that. Human traffickers and people who mean to rape and kill are looking for the distracted and frazzled woman or the disorganized mother.
They are banking on the fact that you are unaware, unprepared, and unarmed. You do not have effective time management skills, and you are not correlating those effective time management skills to your safety and thinking about, “Where is my purse, sunglasses, keys, or phone?” It is also tacking on, “What weapon am I going to carry based on where I’m going? What is legal for me to carry? How do I carry it? I got to get that education. Am I going to carry it?” That is a big part of your time management. If you layout your clothes the night before, you should be laying out your weapon as well.
 
Gun Industry: Security personnel must be looked at as the first responders because that’s exactly what they are.
 
When someone is that disoriented, they are more vulnerable because they are not situationally aware.
That is a class in and of itself. When people think of situational awareness, a lot of times, they go, “I already know that. That is just paying attention to your surroundings.” Have you been educated on what to look for, how to position yourself wisely in public spaces, and on key human trafficking identifiers? This is an education. It doesn’t take long. My Situational Awareness class is two hours, but you are getting a lot of things that you can take notes on and study over. I give you homework and things to pay attention to.
A lot of the moms are like, “I have got these kids, and I go to get them in the car, at the grocery store, at the mall, and all this. What is the best way to do it?” I can teach you all the things to look for. It is something as small as where is your car seat located in your vehicle. To me, especially if you only have one child, your car seat needs to be closest to the gas tank. When you get out to go and pump gas, especially if you drive a big old Excursion, you need to be able to see your kids in that car, especially if you have tinted windows.
A lot of times, we love technology and how it advances us. In a lot of the newer model cars, if your key fob is close to the vehicle and somebody goes and tries to open the door, it is automatically going to unlock. They can snatch your kid out of there while you are on the other side of the boat that you drive if you are chatting with the person next to you, or you are in your phone pumping gas and not paying attention. You would never even know until you tried to get back in the car and you are talking to a kid that is not even there.
Pay attention, people. Tell me this. Was your first job working for grandpa?
Technically, yes, but it is not my first W-2 job.
Talk about your first W-2 job.
I worked at a movie theater in Greenville. It was the Majestic 8 at that time. I believe it is now the Majestic 16. They have added some new screens there. I applied for that job when I was 15, about to be 16. I was ready to go to work and have my money and all the things my parents told me that I could not have because I did not pay the bills. I was ready to pay the bills. I would caution you be careful what you ask for because sometimes, riding parents’ coattails is very convenient.
It is convenient, but it is very common that there is little defiance in the average entrepreneur. Many became entrepreneurs not so much for financial benefit, but maybe they had authority issues as an employee and having people tell them what to do. They traded that for the IRS telling them what to do. What about your first business?
I had some side hustles in high school. I worked at the movie theater and I would mow lawns. My grandpa ended up giving me a couple of window-washing jobs that I could do on my own. You mentioned the defiance of an entrepreneur. I have to tell you a funny story. My very first vehicle was a 1989 Mustang 5.0. I was a football trainer for the football team in my high school. I was friends with all these boys that wanted to drive my car. I would let them race it on the weekends down this drag in Greenville and we would bet people on the race and split the money. I made a couple of grand in one summer.
Your side hustle is a hustle.
 
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Needless to say, my parents found out about this little endeavor and made me sell that car. I was heartbroken. I had quit the movie theater and gotten a job at the local Walmart in the lawn and garden department. I was putting together grills, hauling grass, and all that stuff. I was talking with this guy that worked in that department with me. I was griping about the fact that I did not have a car and I could not buy it until my parents told me to.
He was like, “How old are you?” I was like, “I’m about to be seventeen.” He said, “In the State of Texas, you are considered an adult at seventeen.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” He said, “Your parents do not have to go with you to court if you get a speeding ticket. You can get a credit card and an apartment.” I was like, “You can buy a car by yourself?” He was like, “Exactly.”
I had some money saved up. The day after I turned seventeen, I went down to this little used car lot in Quinlan, Texas and bought a 1992 Acura Integra by myself. I shared with him my idea and filled out all the paperwork. I’m so proud of myself. He hands me the keys. I looked at him, and I was like, “You are going to teach me how to drive this because it was a manual transmission.” The little-used car lot guy was like, “You can’t be serious.”
I’m like, “I’m so serious. I just handed you $25,000 for this car. You better get in the seat and teach me how to drive it.” I came home with a car that I was not given permission to drive by my parents, but they could not do anything about it because I was an adult in the State of Texas, and I bought it with my money. You want to talk about parents between a rock and a hard place on that one. I ended up getting kicked out of the house and going to live with my grandparents.
Most entrepreneurs have a little healthy defiance somewhere in their history. What is your very first business?
My very first business came later in life. I had a couple of healthy careers. I was in oil and gas for seven years. I had a little consulting business that grew out of that. When you are in oil and gas, you have to fill out a ton of Railroad Commission paperwork. It is not fun, but I became good and well-versed in it. I had a little side hustle helping other smaller oil and gas companies fill out their Railroad Commission paperwork and keep that all in line.
That was my first little dip into true entrepreneurship and having to keep books, collect money, invoice people, and all that stuff. I had a little bit of a headhunting career in between that. I started the firearms business in my early 30s full-time. I had a little side hustle where I was teaching people how to shoot guns on the side in my late twenties. I have been shooting guns for 25 years, but I have been teaching people how to shoot guns for about 11 or 12 years.
Is it primarily women and children but men also?
Yes. I get a lot of husbands that come to me from the wives that I teach. The wives go home and school their husbands on all the crap they are doing wrong. I have had a couple of angry husbands call me. I have had to tell them, “Wrong is wrong. Sorry about your bad luck.” Most of the husbands that call me are like, “I did not realize that this was a bad habit. Maybe I need to schedule a lesson with you so my wife and I can be on the same page.” I have a new business that I’m launching with one of my mentors and business coaches, Rick Kolster. We are launching Tactical Therapy this summer of 2022.
We are going to be mediators for couples who need safety plans because people do not talk about this the way that they should when they are entering into relationships or marriages. It is a very interesting thing to see in communities where people will come to me and go, “My wife or my husband does not feel like we should have guns in the house, but we should.” Everybody worries about the children, which they should. There is a way to do this that is safe. We have seen a need. You would not believe the number of people on the brink of divorce over this conversation of guns in the house and safety.
I saw this book in Barnes & Noble one time when I was perusing some other reading material. It was 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged. I flipped through that whole book. Do you want to know a question that is not in that entire book? There is nothing about guns and safety. What will be our safety plan as a family? How will we teach our children self-defense as a couple? When will we start talking about situational awareness with our daughters? None of that is in the 101 questions that you are supposed to ask before you get engaged. It is the thing that keeps you safe and alive. I have never understood it. I do not get it.
How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
What spawned out of that also was a workshop that I wrote. Instead of What to Expect When You’re Expecting or this popular book that all new moms read apparently, I wrote a workshop called How to Protect What You’re Expecting because we do not ever talk about that with our expectant mothers either. Feeding habits and understanding co-sleeping are important. When do we start teaching our kids how to eat and do for themselves and all this? That is fine, but we do not ever encourage expectant mothers to get a self-defense education. If you are pregnant and you have no education in self-defense, you should be in a Situational Awareness class while you are pregnant.
Are the courses all live? Do you have some that are videos?
I have virtual classes. You can do a Situational Awareness class virtually. There is no problem, but this is not an issue. When you get not pregnant anymore, you need to start looking into either nonlethal weapons if that is what makes you feel comfortable or get in a firearms class because 4% of the Texas population has a license to carry. You have 70% of Texans that own at least one firearm, but you only have 4% that went on and got an education about it. Only 2% of the 4% carry every day. How many of those do you think are moms and women?
It is pretty small.
It is a fraction of the fraction. These are the people that are targeted for sexual assault, human trafficking, and robbery. There are not a lot of grown men that are being robbed at gunpoint. It is a lot of women. They are not snatching kids up from their daddies. Men are natural deterrents. The people who are being targeted the most are the people who are not getting educated. That is a problem. You can make anything into a business. I have made an entire business out of encouraging women and moms to be better about their safety.
How many businesses have there been?
There are probably 4 or 5 now. We are going to continue to grow.
You have a nonprofit on the side.
We are going to launch Luxe & Lethal. That is going to be a clothing line. I’m bringing together a bunch of different products. One of the biggest complaints I get from women, especially from a self-defense standpoint, is, “How do I know what gear to get? Where do I get all this stuff?” I’m going to have a website where people can dropship some of the most popular gear that women need and want. We are going to carry Alexo Athletica, which is a concealed carry line of activewear. I’m going to team up with Carry Girl Gear out of Austin. We are going to have some popular holsters on the website like Sticky Holsters and The Naked Holster.
Sticky Holsters are so universal. A lot of people do not realize it. They are $30. I’m going to have Bullets n Bombshells, which is a company that I bought from a gal named Lea over in Reno. She has got five kids. She did not have time for it anymore, and I did not want to see it die. I had bought a lot of her products and loved them. It is a line of shirts that are nice-looking for women that like to carry. We are going to launch that. I’m going on a working vacation with my website gal to Boca Raton for my birthday. We are going to take a day to get that website launched and designed and then spend the rest of the time on the beach with Mai Tais.
It is a little work and a lot of vacation. Think back to your past, and if you do not mind, share a hard moment or time as an entrepreneur with us.
I struggled a lot with two things, especially when I started. The entrepreneurship with Railroad Commission paperwork was easy. People needed and wanted it. It fits into what women were supposed to do, so it was easy. Getting into guns was harder. The industry as a whole has done better with encouraging women to get into this. I do not have a lot of complaints about that. In the beginning, it was difficult because mindsets were very different. This wasn’t a thing that a lot of women were doing, but it was a thing that a lot of women needed.
 
Men are natural deterrents. The people who are being targeted the most are the people who aren't getting educated. Share on X
 
There were these firewalls that were in front of women that wanted to get this education because the people that we are giving this education to were not like them. They were not sexually assaulted or sexually harassed at work. They did not have stalkers. They were not moms. What I was trying to do was encourage and be influential in making a safe place for women to be heard in the industry. In the beginning, I had a huge chip on my shoulder about it. I pushed away a lot of well-meaning people because they were not doing it the way that I wanted them to do it.
Had I heard them out a little bit better and not looked at them as the enemy because they were men, I would have gotten further a lot faster. A level of humility is needed. Whether we need to be in it or not, one thing that women need to understand when coming into the gun industry is that it always has been prior to this men’s game thing or sport. There are a lot of men that are going to look at you and not automatically trust you because you have not proven anything to them yet.
There are a lot of women in this game that do not know what they are talking about. That leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths too. They have to have an open mind to give you a seat at the table to hear you out. You have to come, sit on that seat, know what you are saying, and bring truth and knowledge. There are a lot of women that half-assed this that want to be in the gun game because it is cool. They want to be looked at as some unicorn woman that wants to be fawned over because she knows stuff about guns. That has never been my mission.
I want to teach so many women how to shoot. That is commonplace. It is not cool anymore. Do I get fawned over all the time? Absolutely. When people find out what I do, they are like, “She knows how to shoot. This is so cool.” It is not cool. It is necessary. I do not want it to be looked at that way anymore. I struggled a lot with humility and comparison. When you are trying to do something, looking at the way other people do it, and comparing yourself to other people, you are either going to feel superior or inferior. Neither of those is of God.
You have to look at yourself and go, “All I can do is the that best I can do with the knowledge that I have, continue to grow and learn from people, and carefully and with discernment, wisdom and tact call out what is untrue.” That is all you can do, especially when you are a trailblazer in a new area. You have to be humble and willing to learn. You cannot fall into the trap of comparison.
Many entrepreneurs are lifelong learners. It goes with the territory. One thing in my path is for years, if you disagreed with me, I would never say this, but internally, I thought you were wrong because I’m right. In my journey and path, I have learned to get candid feedback from diverse people, different personalities, women, people with a lot of experience, and people with very little experience. There is real value in listening to other people. You also have to have some discernment because you are going to make the call, but the feedback is invaluable.
You have to understand that when you are doing something a little bit different, people are going to initially look at you and wonder, “Are you qualified?” I run a training department for a security company. All of our Level 3s and 4s that come through get their training from me. Grown men that have been in the security world for 15, 16, to 20 years are coming and getting gun training from me because they have to. It is part of our policy.
You have to go through this certain training that we want you to go through. I can only imagine how they look at me. My classes so far in Tier One have about a 48% to 50% fail rate. I failed my family. I have family that works for me here and they did not pass the first time. I have to take it that seriously because I want you to have the knowledge. You have to have at least 10,000 hours or something to be considered an expert. I promise you I have much more than 10,000 hours of handling firearms. I want you to be on the same page and have that good knowledge.
I want the partners that you are going to ride out within these high crime areas to be able to trust that you have their 6:00 and that you have the skillset to get the job done. Also, I have to take it even more seriously because people do not automatically look at me and go, “She knows what she is talking about.” I went to a new range that I had never been to before to do some license to carry qualifications for a couple that is a friend of someone who works with me.
I went to this new range, and they were like, “We need to see your insurance and all of this.” I gave it to them. They went over all the safety rules and told me how things worked there. It was this big and long conversation. I never get mad about that because if you do not know me, we have never met, we do not have a history, and I can’t assume that you know that I have a skillset. I’m always super patient with that.
What I’m not patient with is the guy that comes in after me that has these skull tattoos, the patched-out range bag, and the five-inch beard. They are like, “Have you ever been here before?” He is like, “No, this is my first time in.” They are like, “Sign this liability waiver. We got you on Lane 6.” I’m like, “Pardon me. In case you did not know it, I have 25 years of gun experience, but you did not ask me that.” It is very muddy waters to navigate because you want to get pissed off about that, but at the same time, you are like, “Is it a battle worth fighting anymore? I do not know.”
101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged
How much to win even if you do fight? What about a warp speed moment? You are in a business, and something happens. All of a sudden, your progress accelerates. Can you share one of those?
That was the year 2020 for me or COVID. I saw exponential growth in Clearing the Chamber. Tier One was already busy, but I did not take over the training department until late 2020. This is a new endeavor for me. I have had Clearing the Chamber since 2017. I was busy in 2017, 2018, and 2019 but I was on a flux capacitor in 2020. When COVID first hit, they started to do lockdowns for businesses. I was off work at home cleaning out my garage and scrubbing my house for about three weeks.
People started to figure out that this was not the apocalypse that everybody thought it was going to be. People would under the table call me and go, “I need some gun training. I went and bought a new gun.” The ranges were closed for a while until Attorney General Paxton deemed them essential. People had me coming to their houses to teach them how to shoot.
How do you learn to shoot at your house?
You dry fire or use a Mantis. A Mantis is a device that can log your shooting without you using live fire ammunition. You can use live fire ammunition with it as well. It is a cool tool. A lot of people have purchased these guns. We had more gun sales in 2020 than ever in recorded history. People were scrambling to go, “I got this thing. How do I use it?” At Texas Gun Experience, they had people coming in that were like, “I do not care what it is. I just want something with a trigger.” They were not even having discernment over what the gun was.
They were like, “I just want something that fires bullets. I do not care what it is. I will figure it out later.” That is how panicked people were. That is a testament to how reactive society is about their safety and how they are not proactive. People were calling me. I was teaching people dry fire draw from a holster in their driveways and backyards. As things and ranges slowly started to open up per AG Paxton’s protocol, I was busier than ever. I taught 243 license to carry classes in 2020.
You realize there are 365 days.
There was about a 4- or 5-month period where I did not have a day off. Sometimes, I was teaching 2 or 3 a day. That is a state-mandated four-hour minimum class. I had ER doctors that were asking me to do classes. I did probably three classes for a group of doctors. They were third shift ER doctors. We were starting at 2:00 in the morning and getting done before they went on the third shift. It was getting the class portion out of the way. They would come on their day off and do their shooting qualification. I was getting it done.
Money was rolling in, do not get me wrong, but the hours were insane. I’m certainly not complaining because I loved that people wanted to get this education. A huge part of my business was thinking outside of the box and going, “How can I make this business fruitful with something that is so saturated in the market?” There are LTC instructors everywhere. When I went down in 2017 to take the class right outside of Austin, there were 180 people in my class with two women.
They will tell you, “You are never going to make a full-time living doing this. It is got to be a side hustle, a community effort, or a passion project.” It is all of those things. Do not get me wrong. Me and Courtney, she retired from the Navy, were looking at each other and going, “Hold my beer. You do not even know. There are so many women that need this education. We are about to start businesses and be full-time in this.” The warp speed for me was this whole panic of 2020 where people were buying guns out of sheer fear of the unknown. They needed training for it.
Think back. If you could go back and tell your twenty-year-old self something that would help you in your entrepreneurial journey, what would that be?
I would have told myself to take a Finance class and sponge it in. By finance, I mean understanding investments, bookkeeping, and P&L. It is not difficult, but it is a learning process like anything else. I sat down, started writing that workshop for young entrepreneurial women, and went, “They are not teaching this in school anymore.”
 
When you're a trailblazer in a new area, you have to be humble and willing to learn. You cannot fall into the trap of comparison. Share on X
 
I remember having to take a class. It was not a long class, but it was a project in a class where you had to come up with a business model and a business plan. I do not think they do that anymore in schools. There is no civic education in schools anymore so that people understand how the government and things work.
I started thinking about that and going, “What do young entrepreneurs, male or female, need to know?” You need to understand how to deal with things like QuickBooks, expenses, and things you can write off. Having a CPA is the greatest thing imaginable. It is worth every penny. It is understanding what your monthly expenses and investments are. There are a lot of tools that I use. I have an investment account and an E*TRADE. It is Charles Schwab now or something like that. They bought them out. I have one of those for my big investments. It is something as simple as Acorns.
It is amazing. You can do short-term and long-term Roth IRA versus short-term investments. You hook it up to your debit card or credit card. If you do not pay your credit cards off every month, this is not a good idea, but if you do, you can hook it up. Every time you spend money, it rounds it up to the nearest dollar. Once you reach $5, it sweeps it out of your primary account and into this investment account.
You can choose how aggressively you want it to invest things for you. It is wonderful. They have partnerships with places like Airbnb and stuff like that. If you use these certain partners, they will put money into your investment account. I started doing this years ago. My spare change has turned into $7,000, and I haven’t done anything. I just look at it sometimes.
People continually overestimate the progress they can achieve in the short-term and the long-term with small choices that seemingly are inconsequential but, over a period, make a huge difference.
If you are not following people like @MoneySmartGuy on Instagram and Adam Sosnick whose handle is @SOSTalksMoney, they explain these complicated things like compounding interest and whatnot. That is super interesting. Adam Sosnick even did a thing on Uber versus owning a car that I thought was fascinating. He went over every expense that you have when you own a car and why it is a potentially bad idea unless it is something that you need. In Texas, a lot of us need cars. It is where you draw the line and what expenses you have.
A lot of people do not even understand the mass amount of expenses that come with having a vehicle. I have all these different envelopes because I did the Dave Ramsey system and SmartyPig. You have all these different envelopes in SmartyPig of car maintenance. I have little savings account for tires and oil changes in case my alternator or transmission blows up. You never know what is going to happen with your car.
Anything that I can ever think of, I have a little envelope for. I put $5 or $10 in it every paycheck or every time that I roll money in. You look at it a year later, and it all accumulated. Now you have this money set aside for staff. It downplays your worries. A lot of people that are getting into entrepreneurship or even their first career or job where they are making $40,000 or $50,000 a year do not realize how much expendable income they have and how easy it is to live below your means and still have a ton of fun.
I will echo that. When I started my first company years ago, I could not spell balance sheet and P&L. I learned the hard way. It is a lot easier if you learn the easy way before you need it. How could we, as The Proven Entrepreneur Clan, support Jerah?
There are two ways. We could encourage people to pay more attention to their safety and things that are going on in their legislature. That expands to more than just your safety. You need to understand what people are putting in place that can legally affect you in a number of areas. Your safety does also matter. There are several House bills being considered on the House floor that are crazy.
Representative Meza out of Irving wants to repeal Stand Your Ground, which is nuts. We have got Domestic Violence Carry bill that is down on the floor and constitutional carry that is coming into play. We need to be paying attention to that stuff and carve out little snippets of our time to read some of these House bills. You could follow Rachel Malone with Gun Owners of America because she reads that stuff for you and then summarizes it, which is super easy. You can go, “I do not like that. Let me call my representative.”
The second is to take a look at WADE. It is a one-woman show, but I do not go and raise money on a national platform. I raise it when I have a need. I have got five women that have emancipated themselves from abusive relationships. They are single moms, and they have no idea how to protect their children. They do not even know how to protect themselves. It took them this long to get out of that.
 
Gun Industry: 4% of the Texas population has a license to carry. You have 70% of Texans that own at least one firearm, but you only have 4% that went on and got an education about it. Only 2% of the 4% carry every day.
 
We are going in and resetting their brain structure to help them understand that they matter and count, that they are good moms and good people and that there is a whole other world out there for them, not just an asylum of abuse. If you want to go on Instagram and follow it, it is @WADEForWomen. It is the same on Facebook. We do not have a website yet but we are working on that. That is going to be something that comes. We have done this on social media platforms. There is a donation link.
It doesn’t take a lot. We are not out there raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. We do not need hundreds of thousands of dollars. It takes us about $11,000 to roll each woman through this training academy. We do not buy them guns. They have to figure out how to do that because that is a huge liability, but we pay their range fees, assist with childcare and pay trainers a discounted rate to come in and help them learn. A huge epidemic or problem that we have, not just in Texas but in our country, is human trafficking and domestic violence. It is something that we need to be paying attention to.
Jerah, thank you so much for joining us. That is our time on the show. We will see you next time.

Important Links

Tier One Security
Clearing the Chamber
WADE – Facebook
@WADEForWomen – Instagram
Texas State Guard
TCOLE
GoodNotes
Boss Planner
How Successful People Think
Rick Kolster
101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged
What to Expect When You are Expecting
Luxe & Lethal – Facebook
Alexo Athletica
Carry Girl Gear
Sticky Holsters
The Naked Holster
Texas Gun Experience
E*TRADE
Acorns
@MoneySmartGuy – Instagram
@SOSTalksMoney – Instagram
Dave Ramsey
SmartyPig
Gun Owners of America

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 

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Title: EP 11 | Courage Is An Essential Skill
Date: April 26, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-11-courage-is-an-essential-skill/
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Content:
 
Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s overcoming fear. Courage is when you take action in spite of your fear. In today’s world, having courage is an essential skill. Join your host, Don Williams as he shares a short story about finding the courage to overcome your fears. Learn the true definition of courage today!
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Courage-is-an-Essential-Skill.mp3
 
Courage Is An Essential Skill
 
I want to talk about getting out of your comfort zone. I have about a bazillion Air Miles. That doesn’t seem like a real number but I think it is a bazillion Air Miles. I’m flying to visit a client and I’m sitting up front as I normally do. I’m on the aisle and the window seat is open. A gentleman walks up and says, “Excuse me, can I get in?” I said, “Yes, you can.” I stand up, step out into the aisle, and let him in.
I noticed a couple of things about this gentleman. Number one, he’s dressed impeccably, very classic dress-style and high end. Other than when he was speaking with me, I thought he was on a telephone call through his earbud. He’s speaking as he approaches me, stops his call long enough to ask if he can get in. I let him in and he immediately goes back to what I assume is his phone call.
 
Having Courage: Some people think that all behavior that is different from theirs is odd or peculiar. Understand that it’s not wrong, it’s just different. It’s neither odd nor peculiar.
 
He sits down. While speaking on his phone call, he reaches in between the seats and removes the plastic bag that holds the life preserver. I have a bazillion Air Miles and I have seen a lot of unique behaviors on airplane flights, but I have never seen this before. This impeccably well-appointed gentleman reaches between the seats, pulls out the plastic bag with a life preserver, unzips the bag, removes the life preserver, puts it over his head, and fastens the strap around his chest, all while he’s talking on his phone call.
I want to know, “Sir, do you know something I don’t know. Are we going swimming on this flight?” He’s talking on his call so I don’t interrupt. As we get ready to take off, the flight attendant does not come and tell him to get off the phone. He’s speaking all the way through takeoff and into the air. I finally realized he’s speaking to himself who maybe is the most intelligent person in the row, considering it’s him and me. He falls asleep and I don’t think anything else of it.
 
The true definition of courage is taking action despite being uncomfortable or scared. Share on X
 
It was a stormy day but at 36,000 feet, we were above the storm. As we come down to land, we hit some rough air. It’s raining thunderstorms and that awakens my row-mate. He looks outside and sees the land approach, and kid you not, he bends over and assumes the brace position that you’re supposed to be in if you think you’re having a crash. We land. He sits back up and removes the life preserver, puts it back in the plastic bag, and puts the plastic bag back in between the seats. I’m pretty speechless at this point. I don’t ask him anything. I wish him a good day and we get off the plane.
I used to think that all behaviors that were different from mine were odd or peculiar, but I know now that different is just different. It’s not odd or peculiar necessarily, it’s just different and I’m okay with that. What hit home to me was this. This gentleman was obviously very uncomfortable flying but he did it anyway. He had some coping mechanisms that helped him successfully be on the airplane.
 

 
I thought that was a good parallel for my business life, family life and personal life, and yours too. When you’re uncomfortable, maybe even fearful or scared, yet you take action anyway, that’s the true definition of courage. I’ll see you next time. Please visit my website at DonWilliamsGlobal.com. Go to the Work With Me page and see how we might work together and help you get out of your comfort zone with real courage. Thanks.
 
Important Links

DonWilliamsGlobal.com
Work With Me

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E9 |  Channeling Out the Inner Entrepreneur in you with Chris Do
Date: April 22, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/channeling-out-the-inner-entrepreneur-in-you-with-chris-do/
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Chris Do, part of a family of refugees from Vietnam, left the country on April 30, 1975, the collapse of Vietnam due to communism, landed in Kansas City, Missouri, narrate how he accidentally become an entrepreneur right after he graduated from art school. Let’s find out in today’s episode the power of manifestation and being around the right people for the success of your business.
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Channeling Out the Inner Entrepreneur in you with Chris Do
A book by john Fitzgerald called the adventures that a great brain was about a family of three boys who grew up in the Midwest at a turn of the century. And so the great brain, as described by his younger brother, who wrote the story, was always concocting the schemes to swindle the kids out of their money. And back then it’s like a penny could buy you stuff, a lot of things. And so he’d always invent different things. And we’d go on this crazy adventure of the great brain. And I read this, and I didn’t know at that time, but the great brain was an entrepreneur, he figured out how to use a smart and give the people, his classmates, and his friends what it is that they wanted. And he found a way to profit while everybody was happy. So the great brain was out fishing, and he would sell what he caught to his neighbors. This book inspires Chris to manifest that he’ll be successful one day. Little did he know, that manifestation is so powerful, it leads him to his very first investor.
Entrepreneurship is releasing your inner artsy fashion style. In business, we should be mindful of who we interact with and who we connect with because we might be speaking with the future investor in our dream company. Having a great business plan and gaining trust from those people will be plus points for you in every aspect of your business career, in whatever industry you are in, whether it is knowing current fashion trends because you’re in the clothing designing industry or designing or creating multimedia for the companies,  and while doing this, eagerly and whole-heartedly, it will just be passed by you and you won’t notice that your company is already skyrocketed its sales. But if one is any kind of true entrepreneur, definitely one will have a book deep of failures. And it’s just how those failures were processed and how determined one should be to obtain that future success.
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So don’t be afraid to get out of that comfort zone, even an introverted person, but the world needs to hear one’s unique voice and to learn the things that one has to offer, and there’s a lot to offer. And no matter how much it makes the skin crawl, and the panic attacks that an entrepreneur is going to have, push through it, persevere, and you will be rewarded for it.
 
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Title: E9 | Channeling Out The Inner Entrepreneur In You With Chris Do
Date: April 22, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-9-channeling-out-the-inner-entrepreneur-in-you-with-chris-do/
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Content:
 
Chris Do, part of a family of refugees from Vietnam, left the country on April 30, 1975, the collapse of Vietnam due to communism, landed in Kansas City, Missouri, narrate how he accidentally become an entrepreneur right after he graduated from art school. Let’s find out in today’s episode the power of manifestation and being around the right people for the success of your business.
A book by John Fitzgerald called the adventures that a great brain was about a family of three boys who grew up in the Midwest at a turn of the century. And so the great brain, as described by his younger brother, who wrote the story, was always concocting the schemes to swindle the kids out of their money. And back then it’s like a penny could buy you stuff, a lot of things. And so he’d always invent different things. And we’d go on this crazy adventure of the great brain. And I read this, and I didn’t know at that time, but the great brain was an entrepreneur, he figured out how to use a smart and give the people, his classmates, and his friends what it is that they wanted. And he found a way to profit while everybody was happy. So the great brain was out fishing, and he would sell what he caught to his neighbors. This book inspires Chris to manifest that he’ll be successful one day. Little did he know, that manifestation is so powerful, it leads him to his very first investor.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Channeling-Out-the-Inner-Entrepreneur-in-you-with-Chris-Do.mp3
 
Channeling Out The Inner Entrepreneur In You With Chris Do
 
On this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur, I am so excited. Our guest is Chris Do. Chris has founded two 7-figure businesses. The first of which is Blind, which is an Emmy award-winning motion design studio over $80 million in total billings. The second is The Futur, an online education company whose mission is to teach one billion people how to make a living doing what they love. Chris, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I’m so thrilled you’re here. I’m very grateful. Let’s jump right into it. Think back to early Chris where you were raised, your family. Was there a childhood moment that was the moment of conception when looking back, you say, “That may have started my entrepreneurial journey?”
Yes. My background is I’m a first generation immigrant. My parents, my brothers and I were refugees from Vietnam. We left the country in April 30th, 1975, the collapse of Vietnam due to communism, landed in Kansas City, Missouri and basically had to rebuild our life, culture and family from scratch. My parents were quite busy, working whatever they could do to provide for me and my brothers.
I’m the middle child of three. Growing up, there was always this idea that there were lots of love and support but not a lot of wealth. When I would wake up, my parents were gone. When the sun went down, they were home. It was both of them working up until the time in which I was nearly done with high school.
My older brother is four years older than I am. He would be the explorer. He’s the person who’s going to figure out the world. In a way, he became my surrogate father because dad was too busy. He didn’t understand the culture of America. My brother, one day, came home with his book and threw it on the table. He said, “Read this book.”
 
The Adventures of the Great Brain
 
It was a book by John Fitzgerald. It’s called The Adventures of the Great Brain. It was a family of three boys who grew up in the Midwest in the turn of the century. The Great Brain, as described by his younger brother who wrote the story, was always concocting schemes to swindle the kids out of their money. Back then, a penny can buy you stuff and a lot of things. He’d always invent different things and we’d go on this crazy adventure.
I read this and I didn’t know at that time, but The Great Brain was an entrepreneur. He figured out how to use his smarts and give the people, his classmates and his friends, what it is that they wanted. He found a way to profit while everybody was happy. That started to plant the seed in my brain like, “This is the way I want to move about in life. I want to invent things. I want to make things and hopefully, I’m successful. I get to hire people to work for me.”
That manifested itself in many different ways. I would almost copy what The Great Brain was doing. The Great Brain was out fishing and he would sell what he caught to his neighbors. I went to the creek and tried to catch and sell things to my neighbors. I went one for one. I would buy candy in junior high and sell it to my classmates. This kept escalating to the point in which I started a motion design firm in 1995.
How old were you when you came to the United States, to Kansas City from Vietnam?
I was three years old.
I’ve been to both Vietnam and Kansas City. It’s a big culture shock. The book was almost a physical mentor. What about the moment of conception or birth? What was the moment when you said, “I’m going to start this business?” Maybe that was 1 of your 2 seven-figure businesses, maybe not, but the first business, the moment of entrepreneurial birth.
Hire people to teach you what you need to do. Share on X
When I graduated school, I had an opportunity to work at a couple of different companies. I didn’t last very long in these companies. Something would happen. I would say to myself, “This isn’t right for me. There is something about the way management is done or the work that I was doing that was unfulfilling.” Ultimately, I quit the two jobs that I had and then I started to freelance.
In freelancing, I moved up the chain fast because my educational background in Graphic Design prepared me for the job market. I was arriving in the marketplace with more skills. This was an awesome thing. Out of the blue, my uncle calls me up and says, “I’ve known you for your whole life. I know you want to start a business. If you’re ready, my business partner and I would to start a design firm with you being the principal.”
I was thinking, “How could this happen?” I’m barely months out of school. My uncle is telling me he has a business partner that wants to start a business. He said, “We’re going to be in Los Angeles. We’ll meet you at the Westin Bonaventure. Prepare a business plan.” I didn’t know what a business plan is. This is the dawn of the internet. It’s not like I can jump on the internet and search out a business plan and get templates made for me.
I called my former roommate. His father is an investment banker. In an hour, he broke down like, “Here’s what you need to have.” I worked for days putting together this business plan. It’s 7 or 8 pages along with years of financial projections. I’m an art school kid. We meet at the Westin Bonaventure. We sit down for dinner. I’m nervous. I’m not running on much sleep. I’m wearing a fitted jacket. I’m trying to look professional. I hand over the business plan.
Bob is my uncle’s business partner. He thumbs through it quickly. He’s like, “I like this.” You cannot read that fast but he’s looking for some key things. After having dinner together, he says, “This is going to be an act of good faith gesture.” I’m like, “What is he talking about good faith gesture?” He reaches inside his coat pocket and whips out his checkbook.
I’ve never even seen this done before. He writes me a check for $5,000 on the spot, tears it out and hands it over to me. I was thinking, “What is this happening here? I didn’t even know what I’m doing. You wrote me a check for $5,000, no strings attached.” That’s how I start my business. That’s the moment of conception.
 
Inner Entrepreneur: The business plan was seven or eight pages long with years of financial projections.
 
That’s an amazing story. I loved your comment, “I was an art kid.” One thing I’ve learned in three and a half decades of entrepreneurship is releasing your inner artist, whatever that is. It is your superpower. You boldly went where Chris had not fought to go before and it worked out. Can you share maybe a warp speed moment, a time when business was progressing at a certain pace and then all of a sudden, “We’re doing double, triple, quadruple, ten times?” We find that often in an entrepreneur’s story where all of the sudden everything is working very well.
We’ve been in business for a couple of years. We’re firing on all cylinders and things were going well. I started to notice that we were plateauing. We were hitting some financial ceiling. Right around then, we’ve been in business for maybe 4 or 5 years. We’re doing about $2.1 million, $2.2 million, $2.3 million. I was feeling, “This is it. I’ve hit my ceiling.” I told my wife because we had a windfall of profit that year. I said, “I need to hire some people. I’m going to hire some people to teach me to do what it is that I need to do.”
It happened that one of my friends, an industry person, had invited me to lunch. We’re sitting down and you make small talk, “How are things going?” He pauses and says with effusive energy, “Last year has been so great. We doubled our business.” His name is Hugh. I’m like, “Hugh, how did you do that?” He says, “We hired this business coach.” We kept talking.
I was thinking in my mind, “Ask him who the business coach is. Is this polite?” I sum up the courage and say, “Do you mind sharing this business coach with me?” Hugh was taken aback a little bit. He is like, Yes, okay.” The business coach’s name is Keir McLaren. I called Keir. Keir meets me at my house. We talk and he teaches me how to run my business essentially. I thought at this point in my life, I was good at talking to clients and winning them with my verbal skills, and how I would talk about art and design.
I’m talking to big Madison Avenue ad agencies. He said, “You’re doing it all wrong.” I was a little shocked. I was like, “What do you mean? I’ve been doing this for years. I make millions of dollars. What are you talking about?” He says, “How do you know what the client wants when you never ask them?” I was thinking, “That’s not right, Kier. I’m supposed to use my artistic alchemy and figure it all out.”
He goes, “You ask people. It’s okay to ask.” Keir gave me permission to ask people for what they want. It was awkward and weird at the beginning, but now I’m a big proponent for asking and never assuming. In that first year, we went from $2.1 million to $3.9 million. We almost doubled our billings because he taught me how to ask.
It’s how you process your failures and how you move on that determine your future success. Share on X
One thing we teach clients in the romancing your customer version of selling is that statements tell but questions sell. It’s certainly much easier to sell somebody something they want to buy than to sell them something you want to sell. Many times they’re not the same. Looking back, you’ve been an entrepreneur for how long, Chris?
I’ve been an entrepreneur since 1995. It’s 26 years now.
Can you share an event, a failing something that did not work well, but that in retrospect has turned out to be instrumental towards where you are? 
If you’re any true entrepreneur, you have a book deep of failures. It’s how you process those failures and how you move on that determine your future success. I’ve had many setbacks. One of which was a failed business partnership in the birth of The Futur. When I was running this service design company called Blind, a friend of mine from school appeared out of nowhere. I was seeking some guidance from him in web design.
In that first introduction, we rekindled a relationship. He told me about this idea that he’s running an education company. It coincided with exactly what I wanted to do. He said, “Let’s go in business together.” I’ve been a bad business partner before. I’m reluctant to go into business with someone else. I need to do it my way. It’s the thing I need to do, but I agree.
We started this company together. It’s called The School, and this was in 2014. We started to run this education company. My friend, Jose, could not be more different than I am, looking every which way. He’s more spiritual. I’m more pragmatic. He’s a little bit more Bohemian. I’m a suit and tie guy. I care about the numbers. He cares about feelings but we made it work.
 
Inner Entrepreneur: Start increasing your influence and establishing some level of authority and expertise.
 
We made it work for about two and a half years, but it came to head as we started to pull apart. Our vision, work ethic, everything that we wanted was so diametrically opposed. There was not enough overlap in the commonality that ultimately we had to split up. It was very difficult for me because at that point, when we started, he was my mentor, and I had learned so much from him. I felt like if I broke up the relationship, I was responsible for the failure. I carried it with me for a long time until it came to a boiling point.
I told him, “It’s more important for us to remain friends than for us to have a business together.” I see them moving in separate paths at this point. He didn’t want to break up but ultimately we did. To me, that was a big failure but it gave me the space that I needed to find my own way to become the teacher that I was meant to be, and create the education company I’ve always wanted to have. As soon as we broke off, after the healing happened, the company took off.
What are you working on? What’s important in your business life?
The thing I’m trying to sort out is, “Can an education company like ours who sells knowledge products, do it in a way that’s ethical, in the way that we market to people?” I see there are companies who, subjectively speaking, have a single product that offers something that’s inferior to what it is that we do, but they use all the traditional, tried and true, methods of marketing with ClickFunnels, email tripwires, the soap opera email sequence, and the webinars, and it’s sale. There are tons of pressure to buy scarcity principles. They’re doing well financially.
I think, “Is there a different way? Is there a way for us to sell products that are ethical?” I think of traditional schools like Harvard, Princeton or Yale. Like any good school, they’re not out there trying to pressure to you to buy because there’s a limited supply of what they have, and demand far exceeds supply. I need to figure that out. It’s all about trying to figure out, “Are we a lifestyle business? Are we going to be able to put a dent in a universe in terms of changing the face of education?”
If you had one thing you could share with, Chris, 25 years ago that you’ve learned along that path, what would be the number one thing you would share and tell yourself?
The world needs to hear your voice and learn what you have to offer. Share on X
I would tell myself, “You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone. You’re an introverted person but the world needs to hear your voice and learn the things you have to offer. There’s a lot to offer. You’ve got to get on this content game ASAP. No matter how much it makes your skin crawl and the panic attacks that you’re going to have, push through it, persevere, and you’ll be rewarded for it.”
Comfort zone physics works like this. We’re in our comfort zone and like it there because it’s comfortable. When we step out of our comfort zone, that’s uncomfortable. The physics portion is, “Once I step out of my comfort zone, my comfort zone expands to encompass that step also. With the next step out, it expands again and so on.” 
In my own path, I try and do something that scares me every day. I’m trying to run out of my comfort zone as fast and as often as I can. Most people probably find that they’re better than they thought they were almost every time. Does everything work out? Maybe not initially, but even the failings at the time were brutally painful but in retrospect, they were the best thing to happen to me. Let me ask you this. How can The Proven Entrepreneur plan support Chris?
We have done over 800 videos on YouTube in the last few years. The ask there would be to watch and consume some of our content. If it resonates with you, like and share it with somebody else that you care about. That would do wonders for our channel.
Is that your personal channel?
No, it’s the company channel, The Futur.
There you have it. If you’ll goto YouTube, find The Futur channel, like, comment, share, and give Chris some love on YouTube. Do you have any last thoughts or a piece of advice you would feel comfortable sharing that you think entrepreneurs should know?
The one thing I would share is networking is who you know and influences who knows you. You have something. You want to change the world. You want to make it a better place. You want to make an impact to do the work that matters. You’re a genius. You have to get on that bicycle, start getting an increase in your influence and establishing some level of authority and expertise.
This game of social media feels like it’s for the young people and people who are good with technology, but it’s for anyone that has a story to tell. There is a platform out there for you. It may not be on YouTube or TikTok. It could be on LinkedIn, Medium or somewhere else. I want to encourage you all to share your voice and your story because it’s going to impact somebody out there.
Chris, thank you so much. I’m grateful. We’ll see you next time on the show. 
 
Important Links

Blind
The Futur
The Adventures of The Great Brain
The Great Brain
Keir McLaren
The Futur – YouTube

 
About Chris Do

Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, director, CEO and Chief Strategist of Blind and the founder of The Futur—an online education platform with the mission of teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love.
 
 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E8 | The Breadstick University With Tammy Moore
Date: April 19, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e8-the-breadstick-university-with-tammy-moore/
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Content:
 
The founder of San Diego’s beloved restaurant chain, long-term YPO member, wife of a US Navy SEAL, Tammy Moore, shares her success and failure stories of her businesses, the rapid growth, and the barriers that she encounters while doing her businesses. The moment of conception for Tammy Moore is when she learned that money gives her freedom and that was when she was about the age of 14. Independence was given to her and was allowed to work during that age. She learned that independence came from freedom of working. During her first part-time work, she knew that she will be in sales.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
 
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Breadstick-University-with-Tammy-Moore.mp3
 
The Breadstick University with Tammy Moore
I am so excited about the guest I’ll share with you. He’s a close friend, longtime Southern California restauranteur, Founder of San Diego’s beloved restaurant chain, Pat & Oscar’s, AMI Pinnacle Coach for a few years, long-term YPO member, wife of a US Navy SEAL, thank you and him for his service, and maybe most impressive new design, build and open during a pandemic of Oscar’s Brewing Company, a new restaurant in Temecula, California. Please welcome my very good friend, Tammy Moore.
I’m happy to be here with you.
I am thrilled that you joined us. Thank you very much. We’re going to be thrilled to learn your success stories from your entrepreneur journey. We know that success stories are not always about success. Sometimes they’re about the things that didn’t go so well. We leave that to you. We always like to start with one good thing, something you’re grateful for that we don’t know.
I’ll go first to set the tone. I’m in Texas, in the great freezepocalypse, or somehow in what is the greatest state in the country. We have no power, water, heat, or internet. We have good attitudes, but we don’t have much else. We have continuous power in our properties. I am grateful. That is my one good thing. It’s amazing when you miss the little things, how big the little things can be. Tammy, would you share one good thing with us, something you’re grateful for?
I’m grateful for the people in my life, whether it’s family, my mother. I’m a grandmother of five. I have the most amazing friends, best clients, and team members. It’s the people in my life that I’m so grateful for.
It’s amazing how that connection is so important, family, personal, and business. We generally talk about three moments in your entrepreneurial journey. I want to ask you about the moment of conception. Think back to childhood Tammy to early twenties Tammy. Can you share a moment with us from your life that, looking back, you might say, “Maybe that’s when I started thinking about being an entrepreneur?”
I learned that making money gives me freedom. It came at about age fourteen. I’m 100% Armenian. Being Middle Eastern, they have strict rules with the females mostly. Growing up with these strict parents, which I adore and love, I’ve learned freedom of choice. Independence came with dollars I earned. I was a babysitter. I got my first full-time job at fifteen. I was a hostess at a restaurant. That was my first thing saying, “Independence came from the freedom of working.” That’s my first moment.
Sales is all about connecting with people and romancing customers no matter what you do. Share on X
Since you talk about your heritage, which generation are you? How far removed are you from having family living in Armenia?
I am the second generation. Both sides of my grandparents were born in Armenia, so they were the first to come over.
As you look back at that first job in the restaurant at 14 or 15, do you think that planted the seed for what eventually became Pat & Oscar’s?
I went on from there to do many things, mostly in sales. I was in auto and insurance sales. I had the gift of the gab. I thought most of my career would be in sales. What I learned is connecting with people and relationships, which is what sales is all about. You talk about romancing your customer. It’s creating that relationship, no matter what you do, restaurant or dental supply business.
Everybody probably knows I was a top salesman in the country at 19, top sales manager at 20. All my life, people have said, “You are a great salesperson.” I’m like, “I don’t know. People just like to buy from me, and so I let them,” but it’s all about people. When you see things from the other person’s perspective, and you’re looking out for them, sales become easy. 
People will buy from you, and it’s hard to stop them. Let’s go to moment two. Talk a little bit about the moment of the birth of your entrepreneurial journey, your first launch. What were your thoughts? How were you approaching that? Maybe talk about some curve balls that you had to hit, or maybe didn’t hit at that moment.
Breadstick University: Growing up with strict parents can open your eyes to the freedom of choice. You will realize that independence came with dollars and from freedom of working.
 
I was in sales. We were in the dental supply business. In the early ’90s, things started changing. The internet came out. Our clients could buy the same product cheaper on the internet. That industry started taking a dramatic change. From there, we thought, “We can sell cotton rolls and X-rays, Greek salad, and breadsticks.”
We jumped ship, opened our first 1,200-square foot restaurant, and went to work on touching each guest that came in that door with amazing Greek salad. Our signature item was that warm buttery breadstick. That was our calling card no matter where we went. It was out of necessity. A lot of entrepreneurs will find when they make that leap that it is out of necessity.
I wonder if entrepreneurs don’t need some resistance to push against them and perform at the highest level. Sometimes, we take it a little too easily when things are easy. What was that first 1,200-square foot restaurant? Was that the original Pat & Oscars?
We launched as Oscars and knew that we couldn’t own the domain to take it across the country. Eventually, when Sizzler purchased 82% of us, we named it Pat & Oscar’s, but it originally started it up as Oscar’s.
Oscar’s started in 1,200 square feet. That’s a pretty modest restaurant. It grew to how many locations?
The total was 23. I stayed on through 18 of those 23.
Many entrepreneurs make a giant leap out of necessity. Share on X
Eventually, you exited with the sale to Sizzler. Congratulations. That’s the culmination of the entrepreneurial journey, to launch, grow, and exit.
A lot of people don’t think that far ahead and plan that exit. If you were to ask me the one thing that separated us from everybody else, how we got that valuation, was always the plan for it. We build 25 restaurants by a certain time and sell it all. That was easy decision-making all the way. It gets us to the 25 restaurants in the time period we want and the valuation. Every decision was based on that.
You started with the end in mind.
I wish I could say we did, but it took about restaurant four when we realized we had something. The birth of this was, “We can’t sell cotton rolls and X-rays anymore. We’re going to jump to Greek salad or breadsticks.” We had something, run out in front of Home Depot every Saturday, pass out breadsticks, line out the door, rinse, and repeat. That’s where lines to the door. The other big milestone was, “I have to do some marketing, but I had no dollars for it. Let’s go meet the radio personalities that are number one in San Diego. They’re always doing events. If they speak about you, my gosh.”
I ran to the side of the stage and had my little coupons ready. When they came offstage, it was that bold. You have to have a purpose and a mission. I stood there. When they came offstage, I said, “I want to introduce myself. I’m Tammy from Oscar’s Restaurant.” One of their key guys said, “Oscars, that’s the best place. You’ve got to go there.” He did the introduction for me. They came to the restaurant. Not only am I lined up to the door, but I’m also lined up around the block.
That was free PR right there. We were not waiting for the customers or the clients to come to us but purposely went to Home Depot. My father would go around with baskets of breadsticks to all the businesses and the offices and hand out breadsticks. We didn’t put our shingle out like some people do and wait. We went and actively sought those new customers.
Breadstick University: In the restaurant business, you need consistency. A customer can’t go to one location and be satisfied, only to be disappointed in another location.
 
You got out there, shook hands, kissed babies, and gave away very good breadsticks.
They had a calling card.
No dollars for marketing didn’t stop us. We went and marketed anyway. As often happens, when you deliver a phenomenal experience, whether that’s a product or service, it doesn’t matter. Other people become fans. You went to talk to the radio personality, and somebody else said, “Oscar’s, awesome breadsticks.” Our customers expect us to say good things about ourselves.
When someone else says good things about us, that carries so much more weight than when we do. Let’s talk about the third moment. Are you having a warp speed moment? Your entrepreneurial journey is progressing, but all of a sudden, things are moving so much faster and more successfully. Typically, it’s one small action and thought that accelerates your progress. Did you have one of those?
I talk about rinse and repeat. It all comes down to your operations, systems, procedures, and training. Especially in the restaurant business, you have to have consistency. A customer can’t go to one location and get one thing. The other one is disappointed that it’s not. It took us to about four restaurants where we said, “We have the exact same experience in all four locations. We have the best training. We’re bringing on these amazing people and getting five stars across the board on reviews on how great the service is.”
That’s when we said, “We can turn on the gas.” We went from opening 1 every 2 years to 1 a year, to 5 a year. The only thing standing your way at that point is people and money. If our recruiting was down, we are weak. The best ideas come from people before you. McDonald’s had the system because they created Hamburger U. We created Breadstick University. We were able to come in and train GMs all the way down to, not quite to the dishwasher level, but trainers, key people in those restaurants. We were able to say, “We can open 5 or 6 of these a year.”
Without the people to grow, you’re just going to go at the pace of where you can attract the right people. Share on X
Breadstick University might make an interesting book title, Tammy. Many entrepreneurs spend so much time and effort making decisions day by day, issue by issue. It’s a lot easier when you have a system and execute. Everybody gets on the same page and does things the same way. 
It’s all about the people. Without the people that grow, you’re going to go at the pace of where you can attract the right people. The other thing that was a big game-changer for us was that career roadmap. On our first four days of orientation, you leave an impression on that team member. Are they a lifer? Are they falling in love with you? Do they feel like they’re part of the family?
Those first days, they’re either connected or not. We would hand them this career roadmap and say, “Choose where you want to go.” If you’re coming in as a dishwasher, you can be a general manager. This is the path you have to take. These are the milestones you have to want to go achieve. It was laid out for them. I have a gentleman with me who started as a dishwasher and became a general manager. He is still with me in my new concept in a whole new role.
It’s the American Dream. It’s all up to you. If you want a helping hand, look at the end of your sleeve. That’s probably where it is. Tammy, is there something we can do for you, some way we can support you?
I don’t even know the word retirement. What does retirement mean? It means stop connecting with people and learning. When you are surrounding yourself with this new younger generation, they’re teaching us old Baby Boomers a thing or two about technology and connecting in a different way. I love watching these people whose first jobs are coming into Oscar’s Brewing Company.
Breadstick University: Boomers can learn a lot by surrounding themselves with the younger generation.
 
I love seeing their journey through their career wherever that’s going to lead them. We can support one another through always exposing each other to new things. It gets very lonely at the top. Even in my 60s, I have my mastermind or my forum group where I can get real and raw. That’s so important for every entrepreneur to have that outlet.
I got to plug the YPO. Tammy has been a valued member there for a long time. Are there about 25,000 or 30,000 people around the globe in YPO?
There have 35,000 people. It’s growing big. That’s the Young Presidents’ Organization. Now I’m in WPO, which is Want-to-be Young Presidents. We call ourselves the world presidents.
It used to be young presidents, and I’ll give another plug to EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, which used to be YEO, the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. Those young titles worked well when we were all young in age, not necessarily in attitude. We are still young in attitude. Tammy designed, built, opened a successful restaurant in Temecula during the pandemic. You need big courage and action to get that going. If you’re in that area, stop, have a beer, and have something to eat. Tammy, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I love you. If there is anything we can do to help you, let us know.
It’s my pleasure. It’s always good to see you.
That’s it for this episode. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.
 
Important Links

Oscar’s Brewing Company
Tammy Moore

 
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: EP 7 | The Magic Of Enthusiasm For Your Business
Date: April 17, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-7-the-magic-of-enthusiasm-for-your-business/
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Content:
 
Enthusiasm is the topic in today’s episode. What are enthusiasm and the magic power of this word?
The word Enthusiasm comes from two Greek root words “en” and “theos”. The translation for “en theos” is God within. The words do not mean light the hair on fire and special like the Southern Evangelical Minister shouting fire and brimstone. The real meaning of these two words is that one should be acting and conducting with passion for the project the person is involved in. Meaning, to be enthusiastic, is to be as passionate as you can be. Not as passionate as the people on the television that lit their hair on fire, and is yelling, screaming, and jumping around, that necessarily is not enthusiasm, maybe bravado, but enthusiasm is vulnerable, authentic passion for the business or niche the entrepreneur has been doing. For example, when one is enthusiastic enough for their chosen niche, in fashion, for example, one will make a thorough research on the latest fashion trends, fashion style, men’s and women’s fashion trend for this year, and how to incorporate this to the business and how to deliver it to the customers.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
 
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E7.mp3
 
The Magic Of Enthusiasm For Your Business
I want to talk about enthusiasm, the magic power of that word. Enthusiasm comes to us from two Greek root words, en and theos. The translation for en theos is God within. That does not mean light your hair on fire and speak like you are a Southern Evangelical Minister shouting, “Fire and brimstone.” What it does mean is that you should be acting and conducting yourself with passion for the project that you are involved in. To be enthusiastic is to be as passionate as you can be, not as passionate as the person you see on television who has lit their hair on fire, yelling, screaming, and jumping around.
 
When you're sold to something, it's much easier to convey your enthusiasm and passion to other people. Share on X
 
That is not necessarily enthusiasm, maybe bravado but enthusiasm is vulnerable, authentic passion for what you are doing. I would also like to draw your attention to the last four letters of the word. IASM is an acronym for I Am Sold Myself. We know that when we are sold, it is much easier for us to convey that enthusiasm and passion to other people. Sometimes I talk with clients and they are like, “I am just not really sold myself.”
 
Magic Of Enthusiasm: Find a product or service that you can legitimately be sold yourself. If you can find something you are truly passionate about, that passion will rub off others.
 
My answer to them is always the same, “Please go find some product or service.” Ultimately, an experience. What we all sell are the experiences that people enjoy because of a product or service. “Please go find a product or service that you can, what generally be sold yourself.” It can make your life so much easier if you can find a product or service that you are passionate about, and then that passion will rub off on others. Enthusiasm, en and theos, God within, use your passion, and I Am Sold Myself. Put the magic and believable power of enthusiasm to work for you and your business. This has been another episode of The Proven Entrepreneur.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

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Title: E6 | Whose Perspective Is More Important?
Date: April 14, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e6-whose-perspective-is-more-important/
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Content:
 
As Webster defines it, is the interrelation in which a subject or its parts are mentally viewed or also known as point of view. It is the way that one looks at something. When it comes to selling and marketing, and managing the company culture, the perspective who matters is not the entrepreneur. Whose is more important? It’s always the other people’s perspective. No matter who they are dealing with, their perspective is the thing that should be considered. Whether you’re dealing with prospect, customers, teammates, vendors, partners, mates, spouses, children or whoever else, doesn’t matter. The most important perspective is the other person’s perspective.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here

https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E6.mp3
 
Whose Perspective Is More Important?
In this episode, let’s talk about perspective or point of view. In selling, marketing and managing our company culture, the person’s perspective, who matters is whose. Is it mine? Not really. It’s always yours. No matter who you’re dealing with, prospects, customers, teammates, vendors, partners, mates, spouses or children, it doesn’t matter. The most important perspective is the other person’s perspective. We know that we can lead only through influence. We cannot force people to do anything so the only way to be the most effective of that is to see things from the other person’s point of view.
You cannot force people to do anything. Therefore, the most effective approach to sales is to see things from the other person's point of view. Share on X
The next time you’re making that sales call and you’re speaking with that customer or talking with that teammate, your spouse, your children, your partner or your vendor, be sure that the glasses that you’re wearing are their glasses and you’re speaking to them from their perspective. That’s the easiest way for them to listen and the easiest way for you to have the most influence possible. For perspective or point of view, whose is important. It’s the other guys’ and not mine. I’ll see you next time.
Other Person’s Perspective: The next time you make that sales call, be sure that the glasses you’re wearing are their glasses. Be sure that you’re speaking to them from their perspective.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E5 | From Doubt To “Wow”
Date: April 8, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/from-doubt-to-wow/
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Content:
 
In the past episodes, the Proven Entrepreneur has been talking about the Concept of Wow. It is on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the best, the customers will say “Wow”, and this “wow”, starts at 11 and goes to infinity. In today’s episode, witness how a company delivers a WOW concept as Don William narrates his experience from an unexpected flight booking to a “Wow” experience.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/From-Doubt-To-Wow-.mp3

 
From Doubt To “Wow”
I want to share another story about the concept of Wow. We know that Wow is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best where our customers say, “Wow.” Wow starts at eleven and goes on to infinity. A couple of years ago, my wife and I were headed to Bangkok, Thailand, for a conference. She tells me that she will book the tickets for airfare. I’m like, “That’s fine. No problem.” When I come home that night, she says, “I booked the tickets, and included in the price of the ticket is they are sending a driver to the house to pick us and the luggage up and transport us to the airport.”
I’m like, “You heard and read it wrong. That is not happening.” As it’s most often the case when we disagree, she is right, and I was wrong. On the day of the flight, a couple of hours before takeoff, there’s a knock at the door. A large well-dressed man with a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and black Escalade says, “I’m here to get you and your luggage and carry you to DFW International Airport.” I think to myself, “Wow. I never had this experience with any airline, and I fly a lot.” We get to the airport, and our escort checks us and our bags in and wishes us a good trip.
I’m thinking, “This is pretty cool.” I still don’t know how they did this. We are boarding the plane, and we have not sat down in our seats yet. The flight attendant approaches me and says, “Mr. Williams.” Remember, we have not sat down. She didn’t check us in to go on the plane but somehow, she knew my name, “Mr. Williams, would you like to see a wine list?” I’m a little bit of a smart aleck with her because I’m used to flying where your wine choice is red or white. Maybe they have 2 reds and 2 whites but generally, they are out of one. You are back to red and white.
Concept Of Wow: Dubai is the busiest airport in the world, with over 90,000 passengers a day.
 
I tell her, “If you have a wine list, I would like to see a wine list.” She has a real wine list. I look over the list and ask for a glass of the 2004 Bordeaux. They’re going to serve me a 12 or 13 year-old-wine on an airplane. She brings it, and it’s magnificent. I think to myself, “Wow. I could get used to this.” We take off. It’s a long flight. The way that we are going to fly from DFW to Dubai is sixteen hours. You have a 2 or 3-hour layover, and then an additional 6 or 7 hours onto Bangkok. It’s a very long flight.
As we are over the Atlantic and they are getting ready to dim the cabin where everybody can get some sleep, the flight attendant comes by and says, “Mr. Williams, would you like a mattress?” At this point, it’s humorous to me. I’m like, “If you’ve got a mattress in your back pocket, I would like one.” She shows up in a couple of more minutes, and she has a 3 or 4-inch memory foam mattress. I’m weird this way. I like fine fabrics. It has 1,200-thread count cotton sheets. At this point, my mind is blown, “Wow.”
Another time she approached, she said, “Let me tell you when we are going to feed you and what we are going to feed you.” One of the choices was Chilean sea bass, and another one was a fillet. She said, “We are going to feed you about these times but if you would like to eat earlier or later, let me know because we will cook to order.” I am blown away. We get to Dubai. Dubai has the busiest airport in the world. Over 90,000 passengers a day go through that airport. It’s because we are coming from the United States and going on to Thailand, we have to clear customs in Dubai.
When you make up your mind to try and deliver wow experiences to your customers, you will become life-long evangelists. Share on X
If you travel internationally, you have to clear customs regularly. You know that many times, that is not a good experience. That is a long, slow, tedious, and painful experience to clear customs. When we get to Dubai like at Walt Disney World, where you get the FastPass, and you can go on the short and quick lines instead of a long and slow line, they have the same type of pass. We pass a gazillion people that are standing in line and go through another line, then we are through customs in ten minutes flat.
It’s unbelievable. My feeling is, “Wow. These people know how to do it.” It has been a long trip already at this point. We were in the air for sixteen hours and at the airport for a couple of hours before that. When we get to Dubai, we have a meal. We were tired. While waiting for the next leg of the plane, both of us fell asleep in the seating area provided. Before the plane takes off, the gate attendant comes up, puts her hand on my shoulder, and says, “Mr. Williams, it’s time for you to board your plane.” I’m like, “Wow. I’m blown away.”
We get on the plane, and off we go to Bangkok. When you arrive in Bangkok, here’s the part that I didn’t know. My wife neglected to tell me because of how disbelieving I was. She told me someone was going to pick us up. When we get to Bangkok, there’s a driver there. It’s the middle of the night, and you have been traveling for 24 hours. You are not even sure what the Date Line is or what night it is. The driver collects our weary souls and luggage and delivers us to the hotel. It’s a pure Wow experience. 2 to 3 weeks later, when we are coming back, the process is repeated in reverse.
Concept Of Wow: If you travel internationally, you have to clear Customs regularly. Everyone knows it is a long, slow, tedious, and painful experience.
 
On the concept of Wow, when you make up your mind to try and deliver Wow experiences to your customers, that’s the first step in delivering those Wow experiences. When you do, they will become lifelong evangelists. That trip and those Wow experiences were provided by Emirates Air. This is not a commercial. I received no compensation from Emirates but I’m pleased to share this story because they deliver an experience unparalleled on any of my other flights. That’s a Wow story on The Proven Entrepreneur. I will see you next time.
Important Links

Emirates Air

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E4 | An Honest Mistake And A Wow Experience
Date: April 7, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-4-an-honest-mistake-and-a-wow-experience/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Episode-Art-Square-TPE-4.jpg
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Content:
 
In business, it’s when a company delivers experiences to prospects, customers, teammates, vendors, partners, and even spouses and children to where they hear the word “Wow.” They are so blown away by how well the business or that person nailed that. Don Williams shares a “Wow” moment in this episode of Proven Entrepreneur.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/An-Honest-Mistake-and-a-Wow-Experience.mp3
 
An Honest Mistake And A Wow Experience
 
I’d like to talk a little bit more about the concept of wow. We know that wow is on the scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, that wow starts at 11 and goes on to infinity. It’s when a company delivers experiences to prospects, customers, teammates, vendors, partners, even to your spouse, children, etc., to where you hear the word, “Wow.” They are so blown away by how well you nailed that. This story is from 2002 and that’s important to realize because what wow does is when you deliver an experience to the level of wow people will never forget. They’ll remember forever.
The year is 2002, one of my companies is a contact center. That business makes and receives phone calls, answers chat, email, live text typically for Fortune 500 companies. In 2002, the Congress of the United States passed what’s known as Do Not Call. Anyone making outbound telephone calls to residences needed to scrub their call list against the Federal Do Not Call List. A lot of companies who did that used intermediaries service providers who would handle the scrubbing process. They were more prepared and also gave you a layer of insulation between the process.
Though my company did not need to register as a company to scrub, we didn’t need to register as a provider to companies who needed to scrub. The biggest difference was this back at that time to be the seller, the company that is legally required to scrub for Do Not Call, their expense was $8,500. My company, because we were a service provider to sellers, our expense was nothing because we were not the seller.
 
When you deliver an experience to the level of “wow,” people will never forget. Share on X
 
As often happens in a business when you’re too busy, doing too many things, spinning too many plates as we registered for Do Not Call service with the service provider and I have no one to blame, but myself, I basically checked the wrong box on about a twenty-page form. The next month when my Corporate American Express bill came in, there was this $8,500 charge to the Federal Trade Commission of the United States.
I didn’t need to spend that money and so I reached out to the vendor. I said, “We made a mistake. My mistake, I checked the wrong box, but can you get me a refund? Can I reapply?” The vendor said, “It is a mistake, but it’s your mistake.” They were exactly right. I left that phone call thinking, “It’s not life-altering money, but it’s too much money to pay someone in error and let it go.”
I began placing phone calls to the FTC, Federal Trade Commission of the United States of America. The FTC, at least at that time, wasn’t very good about answering the phone. After I left a couple of messages and received no callback, I reached out to my card provider, American Express. As I was relaying, what had happened with the customer service rep at American Express, she replied to me and said, “Mr. Williams, don’t worry about it. We’ll reverse the charge and you’ll be good to go.”
 
Wow Experience: Twenty years later, I am still telling that story because it still sticks in my mind when American Express delivered a wow experience.
 
I asked her, “You do understand that the merchant, in this case, is the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission of the United States of America?” Her response to me was, “Mr. Williams. It doesn’t matter. We always side on the side of the cardholder.” I thought that was an interesting exchange. When she told me that, I thought, “Wow, that’s unbelievable.”
A couple of days later, the front desk buzzes me in my office and says, “Don, we have the Federal Trade Commission on line one.” I get on the phone and talk with a very professional and courteous guy who recounts what happened. He said, “No problem. We’re going to issue a refund. You won’t have to have American Express to a chargeback.”
It all got resolved as it should and as was appropriate, but the point of that whole story is this. I had a problem and it was my problem. I couldn’t blame anybody. I made the mistake. If it was going to end poorly, it should be my responsibility to live up to my mistake, but my card services company, American Express, absolutely stood in front of me said, “We’ll help. It doesn’t matter whose problem or mistake it is.” Years later, I’m still telling that story because it still sticks in my mind when American Express delivered a wow experience to me.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E4 | An Honest Mistake and a Wow Experience
Date: April 7, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/an-honest-mistake-and-a-wow-experience/
Featured Image: N/A
Inner Images:
- None

Content:
In business, it’s when a company delivers experiences to prospects, customers, teammates, vendors, partners, and even spouses and children to where they hear the word “Wow”. They are so blown away by how well the business or that person nailed that. Don shares a “Wow” moment in this episode of Proven Entrepreneur.

 
Watch the episode here
  
An Honest Mistake and a Wow Experience
The story happened 20 years ago and that’s important to realize because what wow does is when the experience was delivered to the level of “Wow”, people will never forget. They’ll remember forever. In 2002, one of his companies is a contact center, and that business makes and receives phone calls, answers chat, email, live text, typically for Fortune 500 companies. The Congress of the United States passed what’s known as Do Not Call, and anyone making telephone calls, outbound telephone calls to residences needed to scrub their call list against the federal Do Not Call list. Most companies who did that used intermediaries service providers who would handle the scrubbing process, which will cause the sellers around $8500, since his company is not a seller, they shouldn’t pay anything to scrub for Do Not Call list but he mistakenly checked the wrong box in the 20-page form. 
 
He mistakenly checked the seller’s box. So next billing cycle, he was shocked to see his bill that he was billed $8500 that was charged to the Federal Trade Commission of the United States. So he reached out to the vendor and narrates that he made a mistake but the vendor shrugged it off and inform him that it was his mistake and not theirs. He tried to reach out to FTC 
but to no avail, he received no call back from them. The last resort he could think of if to call and reach out to his card company which he did. And as he is narrating what happened, the customer service specialist in American Express assured him that the charge will be reverted, and even though it is FTC they are talking about, the card company assured him that they always side with their cardholder.
 
But the point of that whole story is this. The customer had a problem. And it was their problem, they couldn’t blame anybody because they made the mistake. And if it was going to end poorly, should be their responsibility to live up to their mistake. 
  
But the merchant company, American Express, absolutely stood in front and said that they will help, doesn’t matter whose problem and whose mistake it is. And so 20 years later, it still sticks in Don’s mind of when American Express delivered a wow experience to me.
 
Grab Your Free Gift From Don
Your Sales Blueprint: Turbo Charged Sales Tips!
 

====================================================

Title: E2 | What Does Romancing Your Customer Means?
Date: April 6, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/what-does-romancing-your-customer-means/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Episode-Art-Banner-TPE-2.jpg
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Content:
  When you heard romancing your customer, one might think that it is inappropriate but in Don’s book and today’s episode, it was discussed that there is nothing wrong with romancing your customer. Romancing the customer is merely trying to see things from the customer’s perspective and providing them exactly what they want.
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/What-Does-Romancing-Your-Customer-Means-.mp3
 

What Does Romancing Your Customer Means?
 
Romancing Your Customer: How to Passionately Attract, Retain, and Win-Back Customers for Unbelievable Loyalty and Profitability
I like to speak about Romancing Your Customer. Romancing Your Customer is the title of a book I wrote a few years ago. I’m fortunate that book became the number one bestselling book. In that book, we talked about how to romance your customers. There’s nothing inappropriate about romancing your customer. Romancing your customer is merely trying to see things from your customer’s point of view and to give them exactly what they want. Webster says, “Romance is an emotional attraction or an aura belonging to an especially heroic era, adventure or activity.” The almighty all-knowing Google says, “Romance is a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.” Love, passion, ardor, adoration, devotion, more affection, fondness, and attachment, as in their romance blossom. As a man born in Kansas in the 1960s, I’m pretty certain I arrived on this planet without a romantic gene, but along the way, I learned to be romantic. I have watched romance in an appropriate business setting where you are trying to do the best you can for your prospect, customer, team, and yourself to have huge benefits in acquisition, retention, and win back both customers and teammates. Anticipate things from your customer's point of view, and then try to deliver the absolute best experience you can. That’s what romancing your customer means. Share on X Love is more than a feeling. It’s a verb. It’s an action word. Romance almost always has a degree of surprise or mystery. When you look at your customer’s journey map and you put your Romancing Your Customer eyeglasses on. You will try and see things from your customer’s point of view. You will try to anticipate things from the customer’s point of view. You will try and deliver the absolute best experience you can from your customer’s point of view. It’s another episode of the show. See you next time.
Important Links

Romancing Your Customer

====================================================

Title: The Concept Of “Wow”
Date: April 6, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/e3-the-concept-of-wow/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Episode-Art-Square-TPE-3.jpg
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Content:
 
Don Williams talks about the concept of wow, what it is, and how it is obtained. It is his most favorite subject, and after this episode, he hopes that the listeners will apply the concept of this three-letter word, liberally to every area of their life.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/E3.mp3
 
The Concept Of “Wow”
We are going to talk about one of my absolute favorite subjects. We are going to talk about the concept of wow. Three letters, WOW. Hopefully, after this session you will apply wow liberally to every area of your life. Here’s the concept of wow. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, wow starts at 11 and goes on to infinity.
Wow: When you deliver far better experiences, you’ll have far more customers, and your customers will spend far more dollars, stay much longer, and refer more friends and family.
 
When you look at customer experience and what your customers experience with your company. If you have approached that from the perspective of wow, I want to deliver experiences where I literally hear the word wow when my customer has that experience. You will deliver far better experiences. When you deliver far better experiences, you will have far more customers. Your customers will spend far more dollars, they will stay much longer and they will refer more friends and family. You almost can’t stop the process once you get it started. It’s simpler than it sounds by saying, “I want to deliver experiences at a level of wow.” We will begin the process of you elevating customer experience.
When your customer has that “wow” experience, you'll deliver far better experiences. Share on X
I will share some examples and other episodes of companies that knock it out of the park but you can think of some anyway. American Express, Disney, Costco and there are lots of others that have developed customer experience at such a high level that they are the standard by which all others are judged. If you will apply that to your company, you will make more money, have more customers and you will have more fun.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: EP 2 | What Does Romancing Your Customer Means?
Date: April 6, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-2-what-does-romancing-your-customer-means/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Episode-Art-Square-TPE-2.jpg
Inner Images:
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- https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Caption-1-TPE-2-265x300.jpg

Content:
 
When you heard romancing your customer, one might think that it is inappropriate but in Don’s book and today’s episode, it was discussed that there is nothing wrong with romancing your customer. Romancing the customer is merely trying to see things from the customer’s perspective and providing them exactly what they want.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Watch the episode here
  
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/What-Does-Romancing-Your-Customer-Means-.mp3
 
What Does Romancing Your Customer Means?
 
Romancing Your Customer: How to Passionately Attract, Retain, and Win-Back Customers for Unbelievable Loyalty and Profitability
I like to speak about Romancing Your Customer. Romancing Your Customer is the title of a book I wrote a few years ago. I’m fortunate that book became the number one bestselling book. In that book, we talked about how to romance your customers. There’s nothing inappropriate about romancing your customer. Romancing your customer is merely trying to see things from your customer’s point of view and to give them exactly what they want.
Webster says, “Romance is an emotional attraction or an aura belonging to an especially heroic era, adventure or activity.” The almighty all-knowing Google says, “Romance is a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.” Love, passion, ardor, adoration, devotion, more affection, fondness, and attachment, as in their romance blossom.
As a man born in Kansas in the 1960s, I’m pretty certain I arrived on this planet without a romantic gene, but along the way, I learned to be romantic. I have watched romance in an appropriate business setting where you are trying to do the best you can for your prospect, customer, team, and yourself to have huge benefits in acquisition, retention, and win back both customers and teammates.
Anticipate things from your customer's point of view, and then try to deliver the absolute best experience you can. That’s what romancing your customer means. Share on X
Love is more than a feeling. It’s a verb. It’s an action word. Romance almost always has a degree of surprise or mystery. When you look at your customer’s journey map and you put your Romancing Your Customer eyeglasses on. You will try and see things from your customer’s point of view. You will try to anticipate things from the customer’s point of view. You will try and deliver the absolute best experience you can from your customer’s point of view. It’s another episode of the show. See you next time.
 
Important Links

Romancing Your Customer

 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: EP 1 | Inauguration: The Proven Entrepreneur, Don Williams
Date: April 6, 2021
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/ep-1-inauguration-the-proven-entrepreneur-don-williams/
Featured Image: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Episode-Art-Square-TPE-1.jpg
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- https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Graphics-Caption-1-TPE-1.jpeg

Content:
Welcome to the very first episode of the Proven Entrepreneur. This episode is the inauguration, the launch, the maiden voyage, the virgin run, the Big Kahuna of this podcast. Don Williams, the host of The Proven Entrepreneur podcast. Don Williams is a serial entrepreneur for 35 years, a consultant over half of the Fortune 500, a Million Dollar sales consultant, and if anyone is looking for an increase in revenue for their business, they should seek a consultation with Don because he will help them get that million increase in revenue quickly and easily.
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate
—
Listen to the podcast here
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Inauguration-The-Proven-Entrepreneur-Don-Williams.mp3
Inauguration: The Proven Entrepreneur, Don Williams
I’m Don Williams, and welcome to the first episode of The Proven Entrepreneur. This episode is the inauguration, the launch, the maiden voyage, the virgin run, and the big kahuna. I have been a serial entrepreneur for many years, consultant over half of the Fortune 500, and a million-dollar sales consultant. If you want another million in revenue, I can generally help you get that million quickly and easily. I spend most of my time helping people make more sales, raise their prices, and enjoy their life as an entrepreneur.
The global pandemic Wuhan virus, Corona, COVID-19, wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, stay home, and now you are free to roam. I couldn’t stand on the sidelines any longer. The Proven Entrepreneur is my giveback to entrepreneurs everywhere. Many people have been downsized, pink-slipped, and devastated. I facilitated huge town halls where we helped tons of people get their round one PPP loans, Payroll Protection Act Loans, and some got EIDL Loans. Some got both.
 
The Proven Entrepreneur: We’ll talk on every topic in entrepreneurship from soup to nuts.
 
We have helped people secure their round two Payroll Protection Act Loans, 3P Loans. I have been on webinars with 2,000 people talking about how to protect your cash and pivot to keep your business alive and start your business to thrive during the times we live in. In this show, The Proven Entrepreneurs, I will share things I have learned working with major corporations, and more importantly, our guests will share their success stories.
You will see parallels in your journey to theirs. If you read, learn from their stories, and act upon what you have read, you will grow your business and enjoy your family and life more and more. I’m going to bring you real entrepreneurs and experts who are going to share their real success stories. We are going to lift the hood. We will see where they won, lost, succeeded, failed, and persevered.
 
Don't forget that little companies like Facebook and Google started in the minds of college students and went on to become Titans in the world of business. Share on X
 
We will pull back the curtain, drop that Kimono and share the actual blueprint on how these successful entrepreneurs built their successful businesses. We will share real strategies across many industries. Our guests will be varied and diverse. You will want to tune in to every episode. We will have women, men, people of every race and nationality, billion-dollar entrepreneurs to the best and brightest college students enrolled in the finest university entrepreneurship programs across the globe.
Don’t forget little companies like Facebook and Google started in the minds of college students and went on to become titans in the world of business. We are going to learn from real experts and entrepreneurs in legal, acquisitions, capital markets, marketing, sales operations, customer experience, human resources, time management, company culture, exits leadership, and more. We will get intimate with customer acquisition, retention, and win-back because we all know it’s all about the customer all the time. We will talk on every topic in entrepreneurship, from soup to nuts. I’m thrilled to be your host.
 
For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
Please join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

====================================================

Title: E1 | Inaugural Episode: A Gift to Entrepreneurs
Date: April 6, 2020
URL: https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/episode/inaugural-episode-a-gift-to-entrepreneurs/
Featured Image: N/A
Inner Images:
- https://provenentrepreneurshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-300x251.png

Content:
Welcome to the very first episode of the Proven Entrepreneur. This episode is the inauguration, the launch, the maiden voyage, the virgin run, the Big Kahuna of this podcast. Don Williams, the host of The Proven Entrepreneur podcast. Don Williams is a serial entrepreneur for 35 years, a consultant over half of the Fortune 500, a Million Dollar sales consultant, and if anyone is looking for an increase in revenue for their business, they should seek a consultation with Don because he will help them get that million increase in revenue quickly and easily.
 
https://provenentrepreneurshow.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Inauguration-The-Proven-Entrepreneur-Don-Williams.mp3
Inaugural Episode: A Gift to Entrepreneurs
He spends most of his time helping people, mostly entrepreneurs make more sales, raise their prices, and enjoy their life as an entrepreneur. In times of the global pandemic, many people, especially entrepreneurs, lost their business, experience a decrease in sales, downsized, devastated. He can’t stand to help these people so The Proven Entrepreneur is his way to give back to entrepreneurs all around the world. Last spring, he facilitated a huge town hall, where he helps tons of people get their Payroll Protection Loans, some got idle loans, some got both. Most recently, they helped people secure their round two of Payroll Protection Loan or also called 3P loans. He’s been on webinars with 2000 people talking about how to protect their cash and how to pivot to keep their business alive and start their business during the time they live in.
In this show, the Proven Entrepreneur, he’ll share things he learned working with major corporations, and more importantly, his guests will share their success stories and you’ll see the likeness of your story to theirs. If the listeners will listen closely, they will have a lot of takeaways in this podcast, the listeners will learn how to enjoy life as an entrepreneur while enjoying time with family and their life. This podcast will bring the audience and listeners real entrepreneurs, real experts who will share their real success stories. This is going to lift the hood and see where these guests and experts won, lost, succeeded, failed, and persevered. They’ll pull back the curtain and drop that Comodo. This podcast will share the actual blueprint on how these successful entrepreneurs built their successful businesses and share real strategies across many, many industries. The guests in this podcast are varied and diverse.
The listeners would want to tune in to every episode, the podcast will have women, men, people of every race and nationality, billion-dollar entrepreneurs to the best and brightest college students enrolled in the finest University entrepreneurship programs across the globe, and don’t forget, little companies like Facebook and Google started in the minds of college students and went on to become Titans in the world of business. They’re going to hear and learn from real experts, real entrepreneurs in legal acquisitions, capital markets, marketing and sales, operations, customer experience, human resources, time management, company culture, exits, leadership, and more.
They will get intimate with customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer wins back. Because we all know it’s all about the customer all the time, they will talk on every topic in entrepreneurship, from soup to nuts.

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