The Inventive Journey
Episode #325
Find The Holes In Your Business
w/ Brooke Alpert
Connect With Me

"As soon as you think you've done enough research, you are only halfway there. You need to do more. You need to act as if you are currently running a business and find out where those holes are. If you could be where I was a year into my business when you first start, which I think entrepreneurs can be if they just know more. It's a great system. I would also ask to speak with other start-ups in similar industries. Not someone who would be a direct competitor because that would be strained. But if someone is willing to say well with me and CBD and someone is launching a different type of nutritional supplement. Approach someone like me who is obviously willing to share but learn where these holes are. I can listen to as much expert advice but, if I can't really see where other people have made mistakes it's very hard. That's why I think it's such a great question. It's very hard to then know what your potential mistakes are going to be. So as soon as you think you're done, you are only halfway there when it comes to preparing to launch or actually make it happen."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

 soon as you think you've done enough research you're only halfway there you need to do more and you need to really act as if you're already currently running the business and find out where those holes are because if you could be where i was a year into my business when you first start which i think some entrepreneurs can be if they just know more um it's a great system and i would also ask to speak to other startups in similar you know industries not someone who would be a direct competitor because that could be strange but if someone is willing to say you know look if it's me as cbd and someone's launching a different type of nutrition supplement like approach someone like me who's obviously willing to share but learn where these holes are you know like i can listen to you know as much expert advice but if i can't really see where other people have made mistakes it's very hard and that's why i think it's such a great question i think it's very hard to then know what your potential mistakes are going to be so as soon as you think you're you're done you're only halfway there when it comes to preparing to launch or actually make it happen [Music] everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller a serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he held startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat now today our we have another great guest uh brick alt or alpert if i can say it right hopefully um and uh brick was a competitive horse jumper um in their competitive show horse jumper in high school um then went to college on and did writing as well majored in psychology um went to work for vogue magazine then to team beau went to new york working for a while and then went to back to school for time for a period of time and then uh went to do be into being a dietitian husband had some health issues and moved over into the cannabis and cbd world so with that much his introduction welcome on the podcast brooke that is me in a nutshell thanks for having me on absolutely well let's uh let's unpack that nutshell a bit i packed everything into 30 seconds so why don't we go back a bit in time to when you were doing a competitive or show jumping and go from there sure so um i mean i was the barn girl so i would leave high school early every day and head over to my horses where you know i'd help take care of them as well as train uh so we could compete all you know around the tri-state area and more um and it really i'm i think that it's any sport in general is so important for kids i have two daughters they both figure skate i just think anything that you have outside of school really helps with confidence really helps with independence i i think it's an incredibly important skill set to learn um and i'm grateful for it mine was certainly unique dealing with live animals um and the time that it was required but i'm really really grateful for it and high school was funky for me i fit in i didn't fit in all at the same time so but i was always very good it just about describes everybody's high school experience or almost everybody's so so now you say okay you did you know that was high school experience you did the show jumping and i think they even did that as you started out in college is that right yeah i wrote all through college i went to a very small school called goucher college that had an amazing equestrian team and that's why i went and it was a great going from a small school and really living at a barn more than anything it would have been a big jump to go anywhere else so this was a really nice step to move to like a small liberal arts school with an incredible team and a great coach well that's awesome that sounds like it was a a great opportunity and so now you're saying okay go do that throughout high school do it in college you know it's a great opportunity it sounds a lot of fun and then in the meantime saying well i may not be able to do this as a full-time gig when i graduate so i have to get a degree in something else and so you went into psychology or majored in psychology and then you know help us understand how you went from psychology in college to working at boge magazine that may be a great fit it just wouldn't have been the first thing that came to mind for a psychology major so how did you kind of make that transition it's a good question i came into college being a biology major i was convinced i was going to be a vet like i never lost that idea um that i had as like a four-year-old kid right um and then i got creamed during classes my freshman year just creamed um and between having to keep up with my classwork for you know the pre-med world to as well as keeping up with the team i was i was drowning um but i loved a psychology course that i had taken there a teacher it's funny all of the things that have really affected me in life it's always when there's that one teacher that just sees you for who you are and every so often you get a teacher that sees you when you feel like nobody else does and i i just really connected with the psychology head there and really loved her and felt very like welcomed and accepted into her program and i dove head first into it and i'm grateful for it because it was a great i mean no one's gonna ever not use any sort of psychology classes right like for the rest of your life but um you know when i left school i went and i got a job i moved right to new york city where um i was from right outside of the city and i i somehow during one of my internships over the summer i was in the magazine industry so i had a little bit of an in and so my first job that i was offered and accepted was at vogue because you don't turn that down when that comes your way no it and i said it's a big magazine well known and you know and i agree that there's a lot of psychology one of the complete a side note but i think is i always find psychology interesting i always look at it more from the buyer psychology of you know how you make decision new decision making for uh making a purchase and what the what is that process and how people think about it and what is subconscious or conscious and i always love to dive into that so i think that that definitely makes sense there's a a lot of overlap there and so you say okay good opportunity came my way decided that i couldn't pass it up type of thing so you go to work with teen air with vogue and what did you do with bogue as far did you use your psychology degree or kind of what did you do when you were there i mean i used my degree in order just to like help me survive being like you know a young 22 year old new to the city new to this life it was a pretty you know there was no um warm-up time you know you were really sort of thrown into the defense and i was so ignorant about what i was getting myself into um but i ended up loving it and i had a great boss and she was also taking the lead of the they were doing like a an insert of teen vogue into the regular magazine of vogue every couple of months so maybe it was quarterly or or or twice a year um and so i was already had like a little bit of an in with team vogue and so it was great to get to watch her you know it was a startup magazine basically but it had the foundation of the name vogue so it was very cool to see the startup world from that aspect um but at vogue i worked in the beauty section so i was you know doing beauty writing beauty editorial um meeting with pr teams it was it was a great you know it paid terribly but it was a great like way to sort of like meet people in the city because you know i was introduced to people like you know 17 times a day um it was great oh and it sounds like it'd be a definitely a fun opportunity so so now you say okay you've done that for a while now you transitioned from just a vogue magazine to what is teen vogue um so you know what was what was the genesis for that transition and you know what or how how did that go for you so my boss that was the editor in chief of team vogue so while they were just doing it as like a addition to regular vogue um i was already working with her and i really enjoyed working with her so when she had the opportunity to leave vogue just really run the startup of teen vogue i hopped in with her you know she offered to take me with her so then i became you know the assistant to the editor-in-chief so it was a bigger title a bigger promotion for me more responsibilities um i'm very type a when it comes to my organizational skills so uh it was a really good fit as well and the cool thing was while i was there i got to sort of really learn more about the other departments where i was really just stuck in beauty editorial and i it was really fascinating to get to learn you know about what other other sections were doing and what could possibly be of interest to me in the future um ironically when i was really ready for the next step and to get a promotion my boss was not ready to lose me as her assistant and so she kept sort of holding me back but i'm grateful for that because if i had continued to go up in the ranks i probably never would have looked to change right so also and i started thinking about what else were my passions and nutrition was definitely one of them so from there i basically started taking nighttime classes uh just to see if i would be okay going back to school and learning about dietetics and nutrition and then when i never got that promotion officially i was like i'm out and i went back to grad school full-time you know it makes sense you know i i can get it on both sides on the boss i do a great job and you're helpful and i want to keep you in this position because there's an impact going on in the end on the other hand you're saying hey i want to have the ability to expand and grow and have other opportunities and i don't want to just be you know stuck so to speak in a given area and never have an opportunity to rise and so you know make sense why you go back to school started exploring that and then you know as you were to as that didn't their opportunity never became available to finish that up so you come out of school now as a dietitian and did that how long did you do uh the dietitian or how long did you how did you what did you do to get started as a dietitian how long did you do that for sure well graduate school took four years so in order to become a registered dietitian it also includes like a full year of what we call like our it's called the dietetic internship but it's basically like a residency so i was working in the hospital um you know i was really sort of like thrown into the clinical dietetics world where my real passion was going to be more and the community working one-on-one with people um less clinical more health focused more you know wellness um so after the four years at that time i'd already met my husband uh we were engaged to be married by the time i got my masters um and my full degree so it was we didn't own property we only had like a small rent to pay or small by new york standards um and so utah standards but at least small by new york city yes yes yeah for the two of us you know to be living in a one-bedroom apartment we were living like a very nice life and so at that point he's like listen if you're gonna do a startup if you're gonna launch yourself this is the time to do it because there's mortgages weddings babies all in our future and so i i dove in and i started my own practice with nothing i rented a tiny office twice a week and i had to wheel my scale in and out of the closet in the beginning because i shared it with a psychologist who thought a scale would be traumatizing to their patients so there may be some truth to that it might not have the right impressions i know i'm excited about wrong but i mean i still remember like you know i'd be like all dressed up in the outfit i'd want to be in you know trying to look this part of something that i really felt like i was an imposter for trying to like wheel this giant doctor scale in and out of the closet each time um but i started with no patience and slowly you know got one and it just sort of builds uh and snowballed into i needed to move and get a full-time practice and associates and you know it was a really lovely growth and then i could just expand as i went so it worked out really well and sounds like it was a great a great timing and a great opportunity so now you do that and how long did or how long did you build your practice for how long were you doing that i still have my practice even though it's really one of the small percentages of time that i spend my my energy on now but it's been 15 years so in that course i've written three books two best-selling um it's been it's been quite um it's been an amazing experience for sure yeah no and i think that that in you know it's it's fun to build a practice and then you also have opportunities that come along the way and you kind of expand almost as you kind of did with the you know cannabis and cbd and you're saying you know it feels to some degree it's like a natural extension out and so now help us understand so you're building your practice doing a dietitian that's still going as of today and then along the way i think you mentioned your husband started to have a bit of health issues and you know how did how did that evolve into getting more into the cannabis cbd world so you know i i always say like i come home feeling so satisfied with the work i was doing you know i had other you know new happy patients i had people feeling better telling me that you know their aches and pains or whatever their issues were gone and then i'd come home to my husband who was struggling and in hindsight he's been sick much longer than we ever realized we just always had something else to blame it on oh he's not a good sleeper oh he's in pain because he hurt himself you know but in in you know if we're totally honest with ourselves we were kind of blind that there really was something brewing and and eventually he was diagnosed with a severe autoimmune disease that basically prevents him from standing or walking for any period of time about eight years ago it spread to his arms from it was originally just in his lower legs and feet it spread to his arms and hands um right around the time of our second daughter's birth um so it's it's been you know living in new york city and having a husband who can't walk um very far it's a challenge so it really did interfere with our quality of life and his chronic pain is a big deal being married to a dietician and i think you and i spoke about this offline earlier like it's no fun being married to a dietician when you've got some health problems because i was on that poor guy um really like i'd you know find research that said like gluten free dairy free grain free i mean i was throwing everything at him just to try to give him some comfort and nothing really worked and i eventually put him on an insane diet called the wallace protocol which is an incredibly effective diet for people with ms his symptoms are very similar to emma so i was like well this isn't going to hurt um and i just tortured him he was eating liver and red cabbage for most of his meals um he really he hated me at some points so the joke is that he fired me as his practitioner uh but kept me on as his wife and his baby mama so um you know it's very hard to stand back and watch your partner struggle and not be able to help i mean you know even something like if he couldn't open a jar like you know i want to jump in and help and i'm sure people can relate to that right and telling me to back off was was a real challenge um it was almost harder for me to deal with than like the the reality of his disease so i backed off but during that time i'm always doing research and that's when i luckily stumbled across some really cool information about cbd and pain and eventually i just approached him after i got my facts straight enough and i said i don't know what this is i don't know much about it it's made from pot and he's like all right this i'll do and uh that's like fun why not if nothing else i'll have a good time he's like you've never offered me this so um and it was the first time that anything i've ever recommended or anyone as it recommends it'd be signed up besides pain medication has given him relief and that's when i knew i needed to learn more and you know i'm a science nerd at heart right that's always where my my passion has been i like research i like proof to say what i'm doing right like i like facts like i drink this because i know it's good for me based on these like 17 studies so i started doing more and more research on my own and the more research i did the more i realized like i need a full education so i went back and uh enrolled in this awesome program and became certified as a cannabis practitioner and while like i was doing my certification and studying and it was incredibly intense i just i fell in love with cbd my degree like would give me you know i could work with people with medical marijuana i could really sort of expand outside of cbd but i fell in love with cbd and it's what helps my husband and it just was you know any time that that was like part of the coursework i was like double focused on it so i found like a new passion within a you know a passion already which was pretty cool well that is cool you know it's it's one where i ca i could get that in the sense that you know my wife always hates when i i play the the lawyer type of a thing when i'm sitting there and i'm arguing and debating and poking holes and it's more of like it gets frustrating to her because she doesn't want to have discussions with the lawyer she wants to have discussions with her husband and so i have to kind of to the degree i'm able to which is difficult for me to kind of turn that off and just have a normal discussion or turn off that part of the way that i like to approach their solving things and i can only imagine there's probably something you know some overlap here similar to what you found of hey i don't need to sometimes i don't need the dietitian i just need the the wife and the spouse and that type of thing to help me through this heart issue but it's also great that you're able to kind of continue to figure that out and find a solution that works for him and then also find that that expounds onto your passion so that kind of now brings us a bit up to where you're at today and so you have the continuing to do the cannabis cbd for part of the practitioner they're also running the dietitian so now you kind of say okay that's what i'm doing today if you're to look into the next you know six to twelve months where do you kind of see things headed or what's the next next part of your journey really for the last like four years it's been i'd say 90 cannabis and cbd 10 nutrition um and it's so easy to fall back on nutrition because it's it's fast it's i can do it quickly like it's old hat right and the money is solid and in a startup world like i constantly need that but i find that it really distracts me from my focus and that when i spend too many days with a couple of patients and preparing for those sessions i i really lose a lot of my focus for my own business um so there's it's you know it's it's a it's a really hard tight rope so i'd say now five percent of my time max is spent on the nutrition side of the world um i use it more now with my daughters so i can torture them instead of my husband about why that you know boxed food isn't good for them but um yeah it's mainly mainly um the cannabis world that i'm in and what happened was falling in love with cbd and seeing what it did for my husband was you know mind opening and i could find tons of products for him but i couldn't find anything that like would make sense for someone like me to take right so learning about what cbd can do for anxiety for sleep for stress relief you know all of those things were what i personally would always deal with and what my most of my patients in my practice were dealing with so i couldn't find something that felt like not medicinal that didn't feel like a product for an illness you know versus like i wanted a product for wellness so like my husband is sick right that he has a true disease he needs help he takes these pills right he takes these tinctures all of that makes sense for him but i already take enough vitamins i didn't want another pill i wrote a book against sugar i couldn't create a gummy or it didn't feel authentic to eat or consume you know or recommend gummies so it was really hard to find like well where's cbd and then they were like vapes but i'm like i'm literally a health you know expert like there's vaping is not happening for me and i have children so what i realized was missing in the field was really a cbd product that met all of like the obnoxious standards that i have right but that especially was you know focused on wellness right where i'm not fixing my husband's autoimmune disease with my own product i'm not changing you know someone's psychological makeup or taking them away from the meds that they may or may not need but where are people like me and the hundreds of people that i saw in my practice what kind of product would be meant for them and that's why i created daily habit no and it sounds like that you know it's it's fun to kind of hear that going through all of that and what that journey was led up to and then it kind of also puts you on a maybe a trajectory that you hadn't necessarily thought of is one that you find that you enjoy and are passionate about so that's a definitely a fun journey to hear and for you to share well with that um now as we kind of reach uh you know to your to where you're at in the present even looking a bit in the future now is um it kind of reaches that point of the podcast where we i always ask two questions at the end of each journey and so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it you know i think i've made a bunch of worse decisions there can only be one worse there could be a lot of bad decisions but only the worst is one you know i think the hardest thing for me moving from really just like a single practitioner right or even the people that worked for me my business model when i was just doing nutrition work was really simple right how many people could i see in a day what was really expected what was my overhead it was very very simple and it was really all based on the amount that i was able to work because i could work up to 20 hours a day if i wanted and i could make that money moving into e-commerce and moving into a consumer product was a world that i didn't even realize how different it was i thought i understood numbers i thought i understood business because i had run mine really really well right i was doing incredibly well as a dietitian it's a completely different animal shifting over into a consumer product you know uh company and i just didn't know enough going in and i thought a lot of it i could win and i couldn't and so that first year i made some decisions and i'm proud we i chose no outside investors even though we had some offers because i wanted full control you know i really made all of those decisions but my ability to know where the holes were in the business right of like knowing i didn't even know what i didn't know and so that's where like i have had like the steepest learning curve and some of the hardest times because i wasn't even aware that i needed to be doing so much more it was it was shocking to me as someone who was a workaholic and i get it all done that there were so many like things that i was missing so i really could have used a little bit perhaps more time although i don't think i should have taken more time because of this market right but really more of a deep dive or a crash course more so i was so focused in creating and the science and the development of the product and the communicating and the writing about it which is what i specialize in you know this the the public face of it that there was a lot of the business end that i i just could have done better i think like legitimate one of the worst decisions were right at the height of the pandemic is when we launched our single serving to go packets which were like oh people bring these on their way to coffee shops you know like that was supposed to be this big launch that timing-wise was terrible it was a great product but the timing was terrible so i can definitely say that was a bad decision in hindsight but i i think just not having enough of my ducks in a row to know what i was missing when i first launched was the the worst mistake i made and i think that that one that's always a hard balance you know a multiple kind of competing interest in the one sentence you want to get things out in the marketplace you've done in other areas and you're saying in a lot of times you don't even know where i'd go to get more of the information and so you kind of say well i've done this before i've run other businesses i've been successful and it gives you a bit of that false and security and so then you get going and i've done that multiple times as well where you find out there's a lot more involved there are a lot of things you didn't think no and you didn't figure out and sometimes it's you know years down the road before you really said well it would have been really helpful if i'd known this before and yet you have to get going somehow and you dive in anyway so that's a certainly an understandable to make and a mistake to make and the one that's great to learn from second question i'll always ask you is this so if now if you're talking something that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you'd give them as soon as you think you've done enough research you're only halfway there you need to do more and you need to really act as if you're already currently running the business and find out where those holes are because if you could be where i was a year into my business when you first start which i think some entrepreneurs can be if they just know more um it's a great system and i would also ask to speak to other startups in similar you know industries not someone who would be a direct competitor because that could be strange but if someone is willing to say you know look if it's me a cbd and someone's launching a different type of nutrition supplement like approach someone like me who's obviously willing to share but learn where these holes are you know like i can listen to you know as much expert advice but if i can't really see where other people have made mistakes it's very hard and that's why i think it's such a great question i think it's very hard to then know what your potential mistakes are going to be so as soon as you think you're you're done you're only halfway there when it comes to preparing to launch or actually make it happen no and i think that that's a it's a great uh takeaway because to your point there's you can do a lot of research now i don't know that you know you can go to the extreme and i'll carve out it with you can get some research paralysis or you always are looking at it so much and i'll see occasionally you'll be people that hey i've been working on this or thinking about it for 10 years and well at some point you have to say i'm never going to know everything but i think that the other thing is is to continue to learn as much as you can push it as far as you can get going but then don't just turn it off and say well we'll figure it out as we go along but continue to learn and to grow and i like the idea of going out in a sick it could be somebody in the exact same industry but at a different marketplace maybe it's geographic location so go five towns over somewhere that you're not gonna be a competitor with but learned a lot of mistakes or to your point if it's someone hey this is something that they are gonna be a competitor then go find a similar vertical and go learn that from them and i think that it gives you the ability to learn from others as opposed to having to always make those mistakes yourself so i think that's a great takeaway well as people excuse me if people want to reach out to you they want to find out more they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor if you ever decide to take on investors or they want to be your next best friend what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more everything can be found at our website which is dailyhabitcbd.com so every everything there if you want to invest come on over right now because i think my mind has definitely changed after you know three plus years of doing it solo um but dailyhaventcbd.com all right well i definitely encourage people to reach out connect and otherwise find out more because it sounds like it's a great opportunity on all on all friends to whether it's anxiety health or you have a specific needs or if you'd like to work there be an investor so or maybe just make a new friend so definitely check them out on their website thank you again brooke for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to share your story so go over to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things make sure to click subscribe leave us a review and share it as much as you can because we want to make sure to help out as many startups and small businesses as we can and share all the stories along the way and so with that if you ever need help with your patents or trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to reach out to us at millerip law just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat thank you again brooke for coming on the podcast and uh wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you so much for having me [Music]

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The Inventive Expert 
Episode #62
How To Launch A Business
w/ Tristan Pelloux
Connect With Me

"My advice is always to put your thoughts on paper. A lot of things are in your head. As you put things on paper, it becomes a bit clearer how you are going to delegate them. It does not need to be very complicated at first. You write down this is my idea and, then you start to break it down. This is my idea; what is my product or service? What is my market? How do I sell to my customer? You try to answer these questions. After that, you start breaking down all these items. Putting things on paper because if it sits in your head it may be super clear to you. But as you put your idea on paper, you will already judge your idea. It's also what you can share."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

 advice is always to put put your thoughts on paper is that a lot of things are in your head um and as you put things on paper it becomes a bit clearer on how you're gonna execute it so things that we've talked about that okay you literally doesn't need to be very complicated at first like you write down this is my idea and then you as i said you start to break down okay this is my idea what is my product or service out of this idea okay what is my market what how do i sell to my customer and you try to answer these questions and and after that you you start breaking it up breaking down uh all these items but putting things on paper uh because it sits in your head and maybe it's super clear to you but first as you put on paper you will already like judge like a bit your idea and also is it's what you can share [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive expert i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur has grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller iplock where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat now today we have another great uh guest on the podcast tristan palu and uh we're going to be talking with them a little bit about a lot which is uh or how to launch a business some things you need to be aware of um how to go from an idea to a business and then how to scale the business and what why a great idea doesn't matter as much as the execution does um some of the practices you may want to consider about business planning and even maybe a bit about idea validation and using data and using your data versus your gut and whatever role they may play so but that much is an introduction welcome on the podcast tristan thanks for having me david absolutely so now we've had you on the the other podcast the inventive journey and we went through a bit of that i'm excited to have you on the inventive expert but for those of uh that haven't caught that episode and i dare definitely encourage people to go back and check that one out um but uh maybe just take a minute or two to introduce yourself to a bit to the audience and uh why you have a background and experience in this area yeah sure so um i currently live in barcelona i moved here um a year and a half ago after a few years in london working in corporate strategy and corporate finance so a range of projects uh from ipo preparation to strategic planning and establishing joint venture and launching new products and and working with our own strategic partnerships and um after these years in london i i started working as an independent consultant and since then i've helped businesses launch and also kind of help businesses that were stuck at the middle at the moment of their their growth try to fix some some issues that they might have um and yeah so that's that's what i do i help help people figuring out how to how to go to market or how to go from as you say from an idea to an actual business um and that's that's a hard part yeah that is always the takes uh that is the hard part so i think that maybe this and definitely thank you for the introduction so maybe just diving into some of the topics at hand and the one you hit on is a great place to start which is you know one of the the things that i think people haven't you know probably are in no part or no small part due to television and movies and books and podcasts and everything else because i think all i need is a great idea and that will make for a great business in other words if i just have that one idea that's going to be there set me apart that's going to be what matters and then i'll you know the business will just fall in place and i'll be you know money will rain from the sky and everything will be great afterwards which i think is far from the truth in the sense that there's a lot more that goes into a business and it's a lot more bad execution which is a little bit more about what we talked about beforehand so help us get an id you know give us a bit of insight as to what is the tradeoff or how do you you know take it what is a great idea but actually or why does execution matter or how to get started on execution exactly i mean an idea is is somehow important but actually it doesn't doesn't matter so much is that she looks some of the great businesses that have been built over the years um the ideas are are generally not novel or um it's it's rather using the execution so if you look at when since the ipad wasn't the first tablet around but it was the one that worked better tesla wasn't the first electric car so it's it's more about how you execute an idea and you need to be you need to be like very organized and basically take your idea and kind of test it so you try to what you do is like you apply a framework you build a business plan around your idea and this is how you're gonna see how you go from okay i have this to okay what does it mean in terms of products what does it mean in terms of distributing this product or services um you know what what do i need in terms of people in terms of finances uh is it viable because sometimes a great idea actually to execute it you realize you need a ton of money that you don't have so you're like okay fine it's a great idea but it's never gonna work so there is this uh there is i i find it a lot a gap between uh people's expectations they're saying yeah i have a great idea but unless you find someone that wants to execute it for you you're gonna have to find a way to to execute it and i mean don't get me wrong if if you have a really great idea and a great execution you have a killer business sure but it's better actually to have a okay idea a great execution because you're going to have a business rather than a great idea and a crappy execution then your business is not going to be viable no and i think that that that's definitely true or holds true now one of the questions i'll ask is kind of a bit of a follow-up which is you know the the difficult thing oftentimes is you you know coming up with an idea i don't want to excuse that because i think that there is you know you do need to come up with an idea that people are going to pay for that you're excited about and you're passionate about on the other hand you know people come up with an idea and then they're kind of okay came up the idea now kind of what's next or what do i do after i have the idea and oftentimes they kind of get stuck or they get uh you know stumbled there because you know we say we need to execute on it but they're not they don't have any their you know idea they haven't done this before they don't necessarily know how to execute so once you have that idea how do you go about figuring out what that execution is in other words how do you start to go about building the startup or building that you know that business around the idea so as in any big problem the the easiest thing to do is to try to break it down so you first try to break it down in into big categories so what is going to be the the marketing so how do i go to market who are my customers so you try to break it down into guama customers how what do i sell to them how do i sell it to them so you try to break it down in this big big categories and then you look at this and you break it down even further so you know marketing okay well these are all the bits that i need to do to in order to achieve this top objective um and basically by doing so you're actually building a business plan and once you have your business plan uh and you have all these steps and all these things that you know you know you need to do this is how you have your plan and then you start executing it and this is how you go from basically your idea to an actual an actual business and so it takes a bit of time obviously and but as i said the thing is you take it one step at a time is that first breaking now into three things which is okay what's your products who are your customers and how do you reach them how do you sell it sell to them you answer these three questions and then you go a bit deeper into into the three the three things and you add uh you add other other things to it uh but yeah as i said you need to be organized and metadata technical uh about it and i think that definitely makes sense and you kind of touched on one of the questions that's going to hit on which is okay you know you you have the idea you say you break it down but what are so and you started to touch on what are some of the things you should break it down into in other words did you first focus on who was your customer should you focus on the market size should you focus on how you're going to fund the business or how you're going to pay for it because there's a lot of aspects right and it's building a team there's where do you do this do you have time what is it going to cost to invest and so in other words there's a lot of things to start to break down into the business plan and if you've done it before you have experience great then you can you know have a bit of a leg up but if you're starting out for the first time you know maybe you go online and you google it what do i put in a business plan or how do i get a business started but what are some of the kind of the key or the core areas that you start to work out as far as that business plan that you really should be considering so i mean two elements are quite key when you when you build a business is well actually it's one element but you will hear a lot about finding product market fit uh which just means that what you offer as a market so uh so that that the two things are quite key that first look at the market so you think you have an idea okay is there is there a market for it is that is there anybody that is willing to pay and to pay for what you're offering um and sometimes there is a clear answer because sometimes you're looking at something that already exists and in that case it's easy to well easier to estimate your market i don't know you want to uh you want to build a hotel in uh in a city so then you know you know more as the industry you know like how many hotels you know so you can estimate your mortgage when you try to be innovative and launch something new then you will need to find some proxies and estimate what your market looks like and the the reason why it's important to look at the market is that this is where you know if there is any money to be made uh and how much money you think you're going to be able to capture because sometimes you can have a great idea but actually there is no market because no one is willing to pay for what you're offering or the market is so tiny or it's dominated by huge companies are going to crush you or you're never going to be able to compete on price that's why like looking at what your market what the market is it's super important and then you look at the product is that okay well this is a market and this is what i'm offering and then you try to see okay well you know is is is there any value do i think customers are gonna want this uh and this is where you start to go into like the next stage which is try to see if you how you can estimate that customers are going to want it so you can do like surveys or you can test it you know you go into beta you test it a bit you see how people react to it um so yeah so it's quite cheap but yeah for me market is is super important and then you go into like because this is where with the market this is where you see if there is any any potential and for instance if you go to if you want to find an investor what they're going to look at is your total address will market your serviceable addressable market but what they're really interested about is okay how much how big is the market the bigger the better obviously uh because this is this is giving you an idea of the potential size of the company um if the total market of your company is a few million then your company can be that big ultimately but if it's hundreds of billions then yes your company can be huge even if you capture a tiny bit of it i think that that's the good points i mean i think that you have to look and say okay well what's the address you know a lot of times what they call the addressable market right in other words how big is your market now that may be huge but if you have no plan to get a any piece of the market it doesn't matter how big it is you can say it's a 10 billion dollar market but if you know there's a whole bunch of players and it's a crowded field just because it's a big market doesn't mean you're able to get sales and vice versa it can be a 10 million dollar market there may be no there isn't anybody addressing it or there's only one player and you may be able to come in and you know get a very sizable piece of the pie out of the shoe um and it may be worthwhile to go after so i think that you know hitting both those two points uh one is how big is the market but you also how are you going to make an entrance or what is your plan to capture some of that market so now shifting gears just a bit and so one of the other things is so let's say you okay you have the idea you start to figure out break it down for execution you get the business plan you get the business up and going a bit and you say okay we've at least now making some income making some uh you know some profit and now we're looking to scale what are some of the ways that you should consider as far as scaling the business or growing that in other words there's kind of that hey we have to make something we get or find some customers they start to pay us we have some sort of success but now how do we get to that next step of growing it and expanding the marketplace what are some thoughts or things that people people should be considering as far as when they're scaling business um yeah so what i've seen is that some people without having this very organized approach to like building a business to just go for it and as you say they start to have a few customers and it works well uh and then they hit like some kind of wall uh in scaling and i i find often that it's because they haven't done this this work properly like around building a proper business plan and trying to see how you know how do you do you build more your business and because the thing is if you do a business plan properly you know the resources that you need to get to the next level you need you know what kind of marketing what kind of distribution you that that will be required to actually go after more customers what other products you could develop so this is when you start organizing all that is it okay i have this product and i have this number of customers how do i grow more am i getting more customers am i launching a new product to address what's your needs so i i basically like i mean to increase your turnover is that easier you increase your prices you launch a new product so you like kind of uh address the same customer but you sell them more stuff or you get more customers and so you need to like organize your business fund to know how you're going to grow and then what resources are needed to do that do i need more salespeople do i need to invest more in marketing but you need to do this work of figuring out where where the growth is going to come from and again you come back to the market is that okay well i've gone to this market and i've captured a decent amount can i grow more you look into it like actually i don't think so because the the dynamics of the markets are like this but i could go into this adjacent market or i could launch this new product like attached to it so so you go back to doing the same exercise and actually a lot most companies are quite established they do this exercise on a regular basis it's not because you're established and you're okay you're growing but you still need to do this exercise to know where the growth is going to come from but also where the threats might come from because you look at your market maybe you're in established business you look at your market and like okay there is this new guys are coming at us and there's this new product so our assumptions are not going to work if they capture too many too many customers or stuff like that so it's to have this this constant approach to to like driving your business uh in a very like organized manner um yeah so my advice is always to go back to the drawing board and go back to the basics oh and i think and i think that definitely makes sense and one or a follow up question to that is so how do you go about doing that in other words ones that you don't know you know it's always it always is easy if you know the questions or you can you know where to get started to get that information but let's say and i'll take an example let's say we're in the um legal services just because that's what i happen to be and i do intellectual property so your patents and i do trademarks and say okay i know my market fairly well now should i you know try and or throw more marketing dollars at the same market and that's how i scale in other words i just go out and try and find more customers but i you know i don't know where i throw those dollars at or should i go out and try and expand the number of servers or the types of services so maybe we expand into bit divorce law and i'm making it up but you know those type of things and so you know in that kind of real world application how do you actually go about analyzing where is the opportunity or where you should look to scale because maybe i don't know and i don't know you know i'm not real familiar with how i go about analyzing that how do you even get started yeah so i mean the the thing is you try to you try to find a number of opportunities that you can you could you could go after um as you say oh is it increasing my marketing or is it going into an adjacent market then once you you've you've identified a few opportunities you basically do a pros and well you you can look at frameworks or or stuff like that but it amounts to doing a pros and cons in doing that and not doing the other and if i spend uh you know ten thousand more marketing what am i expecting out of it if i spend that amount and i would i do something else am i getting better results so it's kind of trying to estimate where if you invest your time and money into something what are the returns what is the long-term long-term opportunity short-term so you try to capture as much information and try to make a decision based on data um so i mean it's it's the same like the way to look at it is let's say let's say i'm here in spain and i want to expand into a market like an another country so i'll look at a few countries i'll look at france i look at germany i look at italy let's say and i'll do just the pros and cons in like okay well if i expense this market is my product going to fit how much it's going to cost me what what size is the market what are the customers and and i do this across like different countries and then i make a decision based on and where do you go about getting that information because i said you you say you look at it you obviously have to get that information to begin with right you have to see what is the market number of customers well how do i know how do i know how many people you know going back to my example let's say i wanted to go and expand out my services how do i know how many people in a given location need a divorce or how do i know how much they're willing to pay so how do you actually go about you know it's easy you know easier once you have that information to compare them side by side how do you go about gathering that information yes so that's that's the hard part is that uh um usually i mean unless you're super lucky it's not sitting here you google for five minutes and then you have like certainly exactly this information so usually easier you have to pay for it or you have to estimate it and and this is where as i said like the hard part comes in is that you need to do a bit of analysis around okay well um in this given market how do i estimate the the market and it can be like quite complicated uh i've done some market research market analysis that you can take quite a bit of time if you want to go granular and if you want to maybe you can estimate it by looking at competitors or for instance are public that might disclose information about the markets uh or you look at what all these com you you look at all the companies and the one that publish their results and you try to see their turnover by division so you can you can do like you can spend a lot of time trying to estimate the size the market or the number of customers or looking at public data or like but there is no i mean there is no straightforward answer to that it's just it takes a bit of time and analysis trying to but the best thing is to try to have as much data as possible from trying to get reliable sources and out of the strength to build some kind of view um and once you've done a bit of this homework um you try to bring it all together and and get your your view of of that opportunity but yeah i there's no i mean i've been doing this for a few years so it's never quite easy sometimes it's faster than other times because as i said sometimes you have a market and it's quite uh it's well defined and maybe you're gonna have uh like ideally you can have like a competitor like a public one that like or that has disclosed this information they said this market has that many customers it's that big and we're going after and you're like oh perfect then you have it but most of the time it doesn't work that way all right now i think that's some great guidance and pieces of advice so as we start to wrap up the the episode and always play more things that we could chat on that never have enough time but you know we've talked about quite a bit everything from going to idea to execution and how you might execute things to consider how you might scale where you might find that information and you know kind of a lot of things that people probably should and could get started on but most of the time you're saying hey there's way more things that i probably should be doing that i have time to do and so if they're to have kind of one takeaway one thing that they should get started on uh what would that one thing be um my my advice is because i i'm i'm doing some mentoring as well as consulting and usually entrepreneurs that have just an idea advice is always to put put your thoughts on paper is that a lot of things are in your head um and as you put things on paper it becomes a bit clearer on how you're going to execute it so things that we've talked about that okay you literally doesn't need to be very complicated at first like you write down this is my idea and then you as i said you start to break down okay this is my idea what is my product or service out of this idea okay what is my market what how do i sell to my customer and you try to answer these questions and and after that you you start breaking it up breaking down uh all these items but putting things on paper uh it sits in your head and maybe it's super clear to you but first as you put on paper you will already like judge pick your idea and also is is it's what you can share if you want the advice of someone you're like okay well this is my idea like like a one page this is what i'm gonna do what do you think uh rather than you telling it's it's easier to judge by by reading some things and if i'm telling you i'm gonna do this and that and that i don't have time to analyze and really know uh if this is workable well i think that that's definitely a great takeaway i mean i think the other thing when you're writing it down putting your idea on you know pen and paper so to speak is it also forces you to one thing through all of those things that you know a lot of times you may not think of through your head or your gloss over or don't give enough thought into it also helps you to sometimes identify those holes in uh where things where you may have thought we're fine and then when you actually have to write it down and figure it hang out oftentimes you'll say oh that is a bigger deal or bigger issue or it it presents a you know something that otherwise might not have considered so i think that's definitely a great place to start was people want to reach out to you if they want to um you know be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an investor they want to be an employee they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more um so they can find me on linkedin or go on on my website stretchy.com uh and and reach out through there like hello at tryjoy.com and i'm always happy to have a chat here hear people about their story what they want to do um sometimes it's quick advice i i often like break dreams but that's a bit the the reality that i like to be honest and sometimes you know i can tell people like look this is not to work and i'm sorry to tell you that you your super idea is never going to work but it's it is a reality but yeah people can reach out any any place awesome well i definitely encourage people to reach out to you contact you and use your services because you know getting or one getting an idea to execution takes a lot of work and then to scaling the business is also it takes a different set of skills and so definitely worthwhile to cultivate and otherwise get mentorship and direction on how to do both of those so well thank you again tristan for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners uh just make sure to click subscribe make sure to click share and leave us a review because we want to make sure that is we can help as many entrepreneurs and startups and small businesses as possible and the best way to do that is to share this episode with them so they can get all this great information so with that um if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else with your business uh feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always here to help and thank you again tristan for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks for having me davin

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The Inventive Journey
Episode #324
Be Open To Advice
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"Be open to advice from others. Listen to people. Learn from people. Find people that have done something similar and try to learn from their experience. I can't emphasize enough how much it has helped me. Not just having a mentor but having people around me. Being able to learn from people, for example: with fundraising. The first time I went out and did that I got a tremendous amount of input from a good friend of mine that has done it before or multiple friends that have done it before. With scaling operations, It's always great to get input from people who have done that before. Hiring if you don't have experience, it's tremendously difficult to find the right people to work with when you get to that stage."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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 be open to advice from others uh listen to people uh learn from people um find people that have done something similar before and try to learn from their experiences uh i can't emphasize that enough you know how much it has helped me not just having a mentor but having people around me and being able to learn from people for example with fundraising the first time i went out and did that i got a lot of tremendous amount of input from uh from a good friend of mine who had done it before uh or multiple friends had done it before actually um and also with you know scaling operations it's always great to get input from people that have done that before with hiring if you haven't done don't have experience with that it's tremendously difficult right to find the right people to to work with [Music] everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast uh roon hogga and i'm pretty sure i slaughtered the last name but it's my best attempt but uh roon um was from norway probably why i slaughtered his name although i slaughter lots of people's names um and was an athlete in high school but realized he wasn't gonna go pro so started getting more into business and that side of things i got into a great program in finance and economics and worked in finance for a bit and also went to business school at duke and got an mba and then from there moved to san francisco and started an apparel company which he later sold then started a uh text or then did a tech startup for streaming joined another company um as part of a the founding team a couple years uh later uh left the left to start a mentor camp with the with his co-founder um went to bali and got to the mvp i got some traction from celebrities and got a bit of attention expanded the business raised more money and then as now uh has i think a 10 person team or more and then continuing to grow so with that much as a introduction welcome on the podcast roon thanks devon thanks devin that was a great summary of almost my entire adult professional life why could i you know take in someone's life and condensing into 30 seconds is a talent in and of itself but uh no let's uh unpack that uh just a bit so i gave kind of the 30 second version but tell us a little bit about how your uh journey got started in norway as a high school athlete and where you went from there yeah yeah um so so i i uh i loved playing basketball doing all kinds of sports growing up but the basketball was where i excelled and uh you know it's a pretty marginal sport in norway and i i was good by norwegian standards but i realized pretty quickly when we were playing people from from other places that maybe i should pay a little more attention in school uh because the the the path from the norwegian basketball association to to to to going pro uh in in in the states is very long so anyway uh i uh i got a degree in finance and economics uh as an undergraduate and then in grad school as i was doing uh during my mba i did an exchange semester at duke university and uh life sort of happened uh and i ended up moving out to to san francisco instead of taking a stable job back in norway and founding this apparel company and i didn't know anything about startus at the time what what you know so you get a an mba at duke and you go through and get your degrees and coming out of school you know what made you first of all go to san francisco so from norway to duke to san francisco and then what made you land on an apparel company to do kind of what uh guided those decisions or what was the genesis for those yeah yeah so so both great questions um so there was uh there was a girl involved of course so there always is yeah she ended up getting a job at a sales force and you know i i was kind of adventurous and wanted to do something different and i've been thinking a lot about you know all these ideas i had on of bringing something norwegian to uh to the world of apparel i was always interested in design uh had his idea of doing maybe ski base layers or something that norwegians are known for uh and i realized pretty quickly that you know people are aren't that many people are skiing to begin with uh and uh we we sort of quickly became an underwear company because that was sort of the i guess the closed custom uh and and it had it had a market and it had legs uh and i kept doing it for a while and the relationship didn't work out uh as these things sometimes go but but the company was still around and um so i i stayed in san francisco for a while now you say okay follow the girl love your life that didn't work out spoiler for everybody it's not always like it is in the movies um but you then you say okay we did the apparel company for a reasonable period of time you know did that um sounds like you get your got a bit of traction and then you decided to sell it now was it the selling it because hey it was on the downward turn or you got worn out of it or you saw a different opportunity or kind of what made you to sell and decide to chase a different opportunity yes so so that that journey was definitely a grind uh we we basically didn't raise much capital all uh more or less bootstrapped got a little bit of friends and family uh in investments but we i didn't know anything about racing capital uh i did everything more on a shoestring pretty much uh barely able to get by for a while but um there was this niche following that really really uh was into it uh and uh i remember i had this one moment where i realized okay this this is interesting because i went into one of these stores that was selling that the underwear would go and visit them all the time right this big uh big thing that uh that uh you know you hear people tell founders all the time so you gotta talk to your customers talk as much to them as possible so i would go and and visit these stores that were selling the products once a month and uh this british gentleman was uh was there i just happened to be there you know this is during the day and and you know he the store owner said there's the founder ask him some questions about this and uh i didn't think much of it the guy bought some underwear i thought i'd never hear anything about it again then the next month i came back and the store owner goes like well we're out of all uh all your underwear in this particular size uh remember this british guy i'm like yeah i remember him well that was danny boyle he was here in town filming the steve jobs movie i'm like whoa yeah he came back and said this is the best underwear he's tried in his entire life uh and i really went to the on the we had a shopify uh store as well and i went on it and i realized this guy was just ordering a ton of it so i'm like okay this is kind of cool this is funny this is just one customer uh but is a loyal customer and we can find more loyal customers right and we had some of these serendipitous encounters um or i had some of these serendipitous encounters that made me realize okay this i have to keep going i have to keep doing this there is always something to motivate me um and then it got to a point where someone called me out of the blue and said hey you know i've been following your company for a little bit and uh would you be interested in selling i'm like yeah uh sure because at the time we were you know sales weren't growing tremendously much but um yeah timing worked out well and and yeah and that makes sense and you know sometimes it is in the timing saying hey you know sales are a bit stagnating you know it would be a good time to exit i have some other opportunities there are things i've always liked to chase and so i say sure money is always right and if you make a good offer i'm happy to sell so he decided to do that um and then i think from there you know after you sold it you know you started or i can't remember if you started or joined a tech company in the streaming industry but how did you kind of land going from apparel you know doing underwear you know underwear and e-commerce to going to streaming so at this point i'm about five years in in san francisco and now i have a network of of uh of people i know other founders and and i got connected to someone because of that the e-commerce component that i've been doing and with with this apparel company and uh i was connected to another norwegian founder who was playing around with the idea of doing this this live shopping streaming where basically people could log on to a live shopping event and you'd have for example a nutritional supplement company selling uh protein powder and you have a fitness influencer talking about uh the benefits of using that particular protein powder right on the livestream and then people could chat uh and it was my e-commerce background and the background with consumer packaged goods that led me to this conversation with this other founder so we uh we decided to do that together i came on as a as a co-founder a late co-founder uh i suppose with um this other person and did that company for a while we did raise a little bit of venture capital a little bit of money from professional investors but i think we were a little early uh for various reasons it didn't pan out uh i think geography was just one of them you know i was based here is based in norway um and uh so so that company uh i didn't have a successful exit from but i learned a lot and then suddenly find us to find myself in in sort of the consumer tech space they say okay hey i made the transition to the you know made the entrance into the consumer and tech space and maybe it didn't you know work out perfectly or wasn't as grand of an exit as you know the the first company but it got you into that tech space and got you going and then you know so streaming didn't necessarily work out um but it sounds like you may are continuing to make a good amount of network and then i think you know a couple years uh past or a period of time passed and you decided to with one of the other people you knew from i think one of the founding teams you started a mentorship camp was that right yeah so i i started uh i had a short pit stop at a uh another um startup through i guess my roommate at the time was doing doing y combinator and he introduced me to the founder of a startup that he did y commenter what's the startup accelerator and uh i did that for a little bit uh as part of the the early founding team i wasn't the founder of this company that i joined we were uh i think we were three we were five people and down to three people at some point and then we grew it to uh two to some 20 25 people and uh i i did that experience i did that for a little while and then i realized all right i i have that i have the founder's stitch uh i have to start something and you know i thought back on you know a lot of the things i learned uh i kept thinking about what we had done at the pre-play the streaming company we know what what worked what didn't work one of the things that did work well was that people wanted to pick these people's brains um on topics that they knew so i thought about something on along those lines and you know i my co-founder benjamin and i we we we met through mutual friends went to bali and then came up with with i guess the mvp for fermentercam this idea that hey there there are so many mentors out there most of us agree that having a mentor can be tremendously beneficial yet very few of us actually have a mentor so let's let's make mentorship accessible at scale let's see if we can help more people find a mentor that can ultimately help them with whatever goals they have in their careers or or their lives um where mentorship can be beneficial oh and i think that you know there's a on the one hand you know it seems like everybody is a coach or a mentor and that you always hear that's the where people get into and yet there is there is i think a large need for uh being able to get that you know have the right mentorship for the people to guide you in other words just having someone that tells you how to run your business or give you guidance doesn't make sense but if you can have somebody that's experienced that has the right mentorship and then and then to have those mentors that know what how to mentor all those kind of combined definitely makes for more successful businesses and uh think there are things along the way um and so now as you're starting the mentor or mentor camp and kind of getting that up and going was it something to where it caught you know you caught a lot of traction and it was you know or took off or was it kind of one where there was a lot of competition and fair took a time a period of time to um you know figure out your place amongst the competition or kind of as you're getting that started how'd it go yeah so so so mentor cam is is pretty much exactly a combination of the other two words that make up the name right it's mentorship and it's done with a camera right you're connecting with someone through a camera so these are the two things that we fundamentally believe in that look you you you get access to these mentors and you do it in a way that's low touch on the mentors side uh when we started out we just did asynchronous videos we now actually also launched live calls but uh you do it in an easy way to facilitate and we there weren't really anyone else doing it when we started out about two years ago thinking about the mvp and how we're going to build it uh and we've since gone on to uh take it to market to launch the beta erase some some capital we did y combinator et cetera and uh i we're now seeing that the space is getting more crowded uh there are more people coming to the table i think they're coming at it for the most part with a slightly different approach um one of the things that we found that's very i think that we're doing that is very unique is that we're honing in on this this personal development personal growth aspect of advice right because that that's the thing that will follow you over time i was lucky enough to have a mentor when i was in college and we're still in touch uh without going into how old i am but it was a while ago um so yeah i i mean the the the market is is growing the uh the number of players uh naturally as you know this this opportunity becomes apparent to more people is also growing but i think it's healthy too it's healthy because it keeps us sharp don't i think that you know it does seem like it's an area and i think that it had been flows and you know depends on you know what's a bit of the flavor but i think that the overall or the long or long lasting portion of it um definitely is here to stay and i think that the understanding that mentorship you know doing it on your own yes you can probably figure it out do it you're going to make a lot more mistakes and your likelihood of making it decrease it a lot and if you can find good mentors and people that know what they're doing you've been through it before you can avoid a lot of the mistakes and otherwise um increase your likelihood of success and and making sure the business is sustainable so definitely makes sense as you guys continue to grow and expand so well that brings us a bit to you know where we're at today and uh now one you know kind of one follow question i always have the two questions at the end but before we dive into that those two last two questions as a preemptive to those two questions kind of now looking a bit into the future kind of the next steps or then where things are headed you know if you look kind of six to 12 months out of the future where do you see things headed and what's up what's the path for you guys yeah i think for us right now is is uh really figuring out how we can make this accessible to the masses and what i mean by that is now that we have sort of started to see see product market fit and you know where where this is applicable and in terms of like what users uh are relevant and you know who are the mentors they're interested in who are the mentors that are interested in doing it uh we we we need to scale this and uh we are in a really really good position now fresh off uh a recent round of funding uh to really do so so we're we're growing the team we've added a few people uh on the on the operational and and growth side as well before that was mostly benjamin my co-founder and i and uh a handful of of uh software developers um so that's it's a really really exciting time for us we're we're also looking to grow our mentor base and we want to make sure that we have enough mentors to take on the the demand so that's also a big focus for us now in the next six months sounds like it's definitely an exciting direction to be headed and definitely a lot of opportunity so now with that is kind of bringing us a bit to where you're at today and even looking a bit into the future great time to now transition to the last two questions i had asked at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made what'd you learn from it the worst business decision i made was my first company where i thought i had to develop the entire product from scratch i didn't understand the concept of building an mvp just doing something very very simple and testing it i built out a full product line all kinds of different colors all kinds of different variations uh and it just took a tremendous amount of time um so i i think that's something that i encourage everyone to do just to build the same most simple version that you that you can and see if people actually want this stuff uh we ended up with a warehouse full of boxer briefs that uh that took a while to sell but um i think that would be the one thing that i would advise that and perhaps also you know not don't don't try to do everything yourself you can only do so much focus on one thing and do that really well don't i think that that's a great you know pizza advice and i always excuse me i always joke with our team you know i always tell them i hate the terminology mvp because in my mind it was always you know whenever i heard it is let's put out the crappiest product as quick as we can and see if anybody happens to pay us for it and so we always use a minimally viable skateboard in other words before you build a car you build a skateboard you build the bike and then you build a vehicle and you get progressively more intricate or you know improve the product the next generation and so i think that you know not necessarily starting with put out a crappy product but look and see do you have to build it all from scratch can you do something off the shelf is there a simpler product is there a way to get it out into the marketplace so have a good representation of your what your product is or your service or whatever you're providing but at the same time not have to invest at all get all the way to the end and say well i hope this works because i have no idea and not having any of that feedback and having all that investment so i think that's a definitely great piece of advice second question i was asked oh yeah second question i always ask is um along your now if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them um be [Music] be uh to advice from others uh listen to people uh learn from people um [Music] find people that have done something similar before and try to learn from their experiences uh i can't emphasize that enough you know how how much it has helped me not just having a mentor but having people around me and being able to learn from people for example with fundraising the first time i went out and did that i got a lot of tremendous amount of input from uh from a good friend of mine who had done it before uh or multiple friends have done before actually and also with you know scaling operations it's always great to get input from people that have done that before with hiring if you haven't done don't have experience with that it's tremendously difficult right to find the right people to to work with when you when you get to that stage so i think that's the one piece of advice that i would give is just you know don't don't be shy about finding uh or asking people around you for for help no and i think that that's a great night you know it it sounds simple and it's not like oh of course you know ask people for help and yet a lot of times i think you get into a small business or startup and you figure one you know i gotta figure this out on my own or i gotta prove people i can do it or two people wanna invest their time or their effort or you know i can't afford it or any number of things and you make up excuses i mean most of the time when you get into it you actually ask for people that for that help most time people are pretty willing to give it to you and they're wanting to help you along their way and they're wanting to see other people succeed and make those connections and all those things and so i think it's definitely a great you know thing for to ask for that help and also to get it because i think it can make a again have a big impact on that with that if people are wanting to reach out to you they're wanting to find out more they're wanting to be a customer they're wanting to be a client they're wanting to be an investor they're wanting to be an employee they're wanting to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out contact you or find out more well coincidentally there is this this platform called mentor cam so you can go to mentor dot cam slash rooney how are you n e h a u g e you can find me there uh and uh you can also hit me up on linkedin if you uh if you prefer a different approach but those are probably the best ways to to reach me all right well i definitely encourage uh everybody to reach out whether it's on linkedin whether it's via the website find out more support them and if you're looking to to get involved with mentorship definitely a a great place to to connect well thank you again for coming on the podcast room it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you just go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show a couple more things uh make sure to listen or click go subscribe make sure to share make sure to leave us a review because we want to make sure that everybody finds out about all these awesome episodes and help all the entrepreneurs and startups along their way to success and with that if you ever need help with your patents trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with me to chat and i'm always here to help thank you again rooney for coming on the podcast and uh wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin thanks for having me it was great

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Episode #61 
How To Use Technology
w/ Aaron Golbin
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"You don't have to use or make your own technology. You can just go online a free API free open-source code and just start using AI. It can really improve your business and improve your customer experience. So, I think that leveraging artificial intelligence with any company or most companies rather is super important, and it defiantly has a big application."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

 you don't have to use your own technology you don't have to make your own technology you can just go online get a free api free open source code and just start using ai and it can really improve your business and improve your customer experience so i think that leveraging artificial intelligence any company or in most companies rather super important and it definitely is a big application [Music] everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive expert i'm your host evan miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast aaron uh goldman and aaron we're going to talk about a few different things and that includes kind of technology um using it our technology as far as for ai debating and for predictions and producing uh prediction or predictive information about users and for users um maybe a bit about media and taking immediate for people and curating it aggregating it and what that might mean and also a touch on a better innovations and uh educational products and how to or use those to include improve not include improve retention for kids so be a lot of uh great areas and a fun discussion and with that much this introduction welcome on the podcast aaron thank you devin great to have you great thank you for having me absolutely so i just gave kind of a quick run through some of the the topics at hand or the areas of expertise but before we dive into those uh for those of you that didn't catch your inventive journey episode on the inventive journey podcast uh maybe just give a one to two minute kind of quick introduction about who you are and why you have experience in this area yeah sure so i'm a youth entrepreneur i've been an entrepreneur since the age of eight i found a co-founder been involved in eight startups and companies to date i'm the founder and ceo of debateion.com which is the largest online debate platform in the world by activity so we allow anyone to go online and debate with others while connecting with others as well and we have a bunch of revolutionary ai products so we're really innovating in the ai space of online communication debating i'm also the founder and ceo of the american post which is a brand new startup and we're the first hub of opinion articles in the world so we allow people to go online and curate opinion pieces as well as political research if they're a premium member to view different articles on political topics global topics on 40 or more issues uh featuring foreign policy domestic policy and others on opinion pieces from various different publishers as well awesome well that's definitely a a fun area and i'm excited to chat with the with you about it there are several of those areas so maybe just diving in so you know one of the areas i think is a hot area it's also it feels like it's becoming a bit of a buzzword is the idea of ai or machine learning and using that technology because everybody says they have ai and half the time is true and the other half of the time they have something that's very rudimentary and that you know a couple decision trees and they say hey this is ai and now it's predictive right so within that is you're looking at kind of debating and or incorporating ai how do you or how do people go about even thinking about a why is whether it's specific to debate platforms or using it for other levels of prediction how do you or what's the how do you go about even thinking about incorporating that into technology yeah so i see ais being very powerful because it can allow humans to be freed up from work that they should not be doing in the first place work that they can you know really be automating much more as well as having ai help humans uh improve their skills so what debate island does is we leverage ai to improve debating skills as well as writing skills and critical thinking skills in the education context as well as just the consumer product context so we have a bunch of different ai products the first one is deborah ai which is what we call our artificial intelligence suite of products so debra ai analytics and that's a bunch of different analytics using very powerful data on arguments as well as users so we can tell you how considerate your argument is what you can improve on your grade level uh and various different metrics of those kinds which are super unique then we also have deborahii prediction and that's the first of its kind in the entire world we allow users to see the prediction uh on debate so we can basically predict the winners of online debates or the winner of online debates with very high accuracy all through artificial intelligence and a proprietary algorithm and we also have user analytics in terms of political affiliation and presidential candidate as well as argument analytics on that level so we can predict with high accuracy the political affiliation and presidential candidates recommended for the 2020 election cycle for users as well as arguments and that includes you know joe biden donald trump and a bunch of others so now one question that you know kind of comes up so you talk about predictions i think that that has a much greater expanse or application to a lot of businesses in other words a lot of businesses are trying to predict everything from you know what users will buy or what users they should advertise to or purchase or when they'll make purchasing decisions or in your case you know how to debate the outcomes might go so as you're looking to incorporate ai in how do you go about setting up intelligent enough ai that it actually has some meaningful feedback or meaningful use to a business yeah our aria is pretty advanced for sure we're using a bunch of different apis open source we're using a lot of proprietary algorithms as well which we built in-house so it's definitely advanced and just looking at our data sets and looking at what our deborah ai has predicted we have very high accuracy i mean almost everything is correct in terms of prediction so it's based on a lot of different factors and a lot of different data trees and i think that it's super powerful and that really shows its application no and i think that that makes sense and so um you know one of the interesting applications that i thought you talked about is you know using predictive data you know for users about users with with regards to debate now walk us through a little bit and within not getting into anything proprietary anything that's too uh too behind the scenes for you guys but how do you go about doing that because i think that that has insights into if you're looking to predict you know outcomes of debates or who might win or who's a stronger debater or the topics and whatnot you can uh do a lot of those same or carryovers with the with other areas so how do you guys kind of go about uh making some of those predictions yeah definitely so online communication especially debating obviously is very text based uh so we have a lot of natural language processing or npl and that's a big factor in terms of understanding what the text is like so we can figure out is it going to probably win or not we ask we have a lot of various analytics that go into it that's actually from deborah ai analytics so our suite of ai products really worked together in a very good way we utilized ai analytics to power debra ai prediction in in a small way as well so we take a lot of different factors from that and we figure out what what is the likelihood that they're going to win based on specific factors then we compile it all together in an algorithm and then we come up with our prediction as well as npl and obviously apis fair enough so no i think that that that's uh there's certainly an interesting application in interesting area of ai so now maybe uh switching gears just a bit and talking a little bit i'm about kind of the media aspect of because i think one of the other things that you guys are either doing or getting into is curating mid air media aggregating content getting uh you know research and opinion pieces and again that you know wallace is a bit more specific to the debating platform it also has a lot of areas because people are always looking to one every business is trying to figure out how to put out content whether it's for seo and to increase engagement and to otherwise you know get people interacting and coming back to them not only just for services which is the end goal or for product but also to kind of have them actively and keeping them forefront of mind so as you're looking to take media to you know people and doing that curation aggregation all that what are some of the steps that you know people should be thinking about or otherwise looking to tackle as they're looking to set that up maybe within their own businesses yeah sure so the american post was a totally separate entity from debate island uh we're basically giving people the power to see what opinion articles they want to see um right now there's a lot of polarization in the media you have two different sides basically and a lot of information is really unfactual or it's just absolutely nuts and it's really it's not reflective of american society it's really just these two media uh bubbles so what we're trying to do is allow people to go and see any rpms they want to see based on what they want to see so they can curate content i think that aggregation is really powerful because you can you don't have to produce original content oh we also produce original content which i think is really factor-based and high quality you don't have to do that you can just take articles in the legal context uh from various different publishers and you can produce that in an interesting way that it has a good user experience so that can be curated by yourself that can be curated by your users if you have a platform that can allow that technically there's a lot of ways to display content which i think can be really really interesting and can make a good business so if you're looking at so one of the questions as far as being kind of that curation or aggregation is because there's always that trade-off with curating versus creating the own your own content there's kind of pros and cons within both in other words if you're getting content from a lot of places i mean kind of the platform in the one sense you have a lot of content on the other sense you always have to worry about whether or not you owned it whether or not you have the rights to it and even also as to whether or not google is going to ding you because now you're simply you know not in a bad way but regurgitating other people's content as opposed to original content and it looks at that a bit of a different way so how do you go about kind of weighing that as far as looking to be a content aggregator versus creating the original content yeah sure so we're not a media house uh we're a technology company so we're similar to let's say flipboard or smart news but really for opinion uh we're just giving people a functionality to go and to curate their own opinion articles so what we do is produce our own content which we think is really great we take in a lot of content in a totally legal way and we send articles to the original publishers if people click on it and we just allow people to go and to figure out how they want to see it and what exactly they want to see based on political affiliation what topic they want to see political research or actually just articles opinion articles rather and that's what i think is interesting in the venture so we're not uh a media venture really we're just a technology company and we're changing the way that people take in opinion articles i think that that uh definitely makes sense so have you as you've been implementing that and i don't know we didn't talk about this beforehand but i just was kind of interested as the discussion went along as you're curating that how does google or do you know how does google treat that in other words if people are kind of making that decision hey should i curate it and should i otherwise aggregate it or should i do all original content and google is trying to analyze that and see how you rank or whether or not you're important or not because everybody is that's online or predominantly uses google and that's how they find out about people um how do you kind of go about how does that go into er affect things as far as aggregation and curating yeah great questions so our company is totally unique and brand new uh we don't really reproduce uh content so the way that we're structured is we have a bunch of different pages and that's our home page where you can just curate your own opinion pieces we also have topic pages so like 40 plus different issues all around a bunch of different sectors and then we also have our about pages and things of that nature which are not really part of the functionality itself of the platform if you have a structure that way it's totally you know approved by google and search engines almost certainly uh you cannot go and just have content from like let's say the new york times or from fox news and just have it on your own platform we don't do that we have our own content in our own platform as well so we have our own articles and that's available on google and bing and other search engines uh worldwide and that's optimized for those searches as well so that's totally fine to do and it's definitely optimized for seo interesting so if i were to do that so and i was probably framing it slightly different and so i appreciate the clarification because when i typically think of aggregation curating it's going out and finding other articles and what you're saying if i understand it right definitely if i put the wrong words in your mouth definitely feel free to uh to uh clarify or to to correct me but when you're saying aggregation curating it's more you're still having original content but it's a lot of user created content and user provided information that allows you to provide a platform where people are able to share ideas share or share differently debate topics your information and so it's original in that sense and you're not having to all of yourself or all of your team or create all that content rather you're just simply managing is that right so we have the aggregation section where we've taken from a bunch of different publishers all over the world ap uh npr a bunch of others as well all over the political spectrum left center and right uh moderately center i mean moderately left moderately right as well and then we also have our in-house publishing uh sector as well where we publish our own content so those are those are two separate segments and we have it all in one platform where people can view all these articles in one user experience and this added curiosity and there's probably more for my curiosity so is it easy to distinguish between your articles versus ap articles in other words is there hey i know this is a original content versus this is something that's from a different source or do you tend to just say hey this is all news and we attribute it correctly but you know it doesn't have that distinguishment so i'm just trying to think if i was to go through it and say hey i want to see what's going on around the world versus i want to see original content does it matter to users does it do you need to distinguish it or it's all just kind of hey as long as it's meaningful content i don't care about the source yeah great question so throughout our entire user interface we have uh big distinguishing factors of both so first of all if it's curated content isn't to say by whoever the publisher is so buy on pr buy fox news whatever it may be if it's us we buy the american post and then as well if you click on the content itself to go and see you know to actually read it it's gonna take you if it's a curated if it's an aggregated rather piece of content it's gonna take you to the publisher's website where it's available because that's all we can do we cannot publish it ourselves we can display it on our own website uh if it's our content we're gonna take you to our platform in our very nice designed uh readers page for the article one other maybe shifting gears just one more time just because there are a lot of fun topics to hit on another one that we did or area that we talked on a little bit before the podcast was the areas of innovation and kind of creating and it kind of goes along with a lot of the way doing on the media side but as educational products and you know kind of almost see teaching people online about debates and discussions and getting you know improving kids retention and that so help us a bit understand is kind of if you're looking to create agile educational products and to teach and to otherwise help or help the community what are what are the kind of products you could be considering or what are some of the things there that you should look at yeah so we actually have commercial solutions for both the american folks and debate islands talk about a little bit both so it's a better only it's a bit on education which is an ed tech solutions award-winning um a lot of demand for it so we're really revolutionizing the sx space we're incorporating online debate in a casual way and incorporating artificial intelligence for the first time ever into the classroom through a debate format so we allow teachers to have online debating classrooms where you can view students can view lectures assignments discussions as well as debates all over five formats and leverage artificial intelligence to improve critical thinking and debating skills so for example a socialized teacher in wisconsin an eighth grade teacher can go and she can incorporate debate into her classroom so she can post a debate that they had in in the classroom regarding support some piece of content so let's say they were talking about american revolution they kind of debate about that topic and how the students debate it in the classroom all in real time online in a very easy way it's user friendly especially for middle schools and high schoolers as well and then in terms of the american post we have commercial solutions so we have the american post researcher the american post think tank the american post political ventures we also have the american post um think tank as well so basically we're allowing political research to be easily taken by these various ventures um that could be political campaigns it could be think tanks it can be individual researchers as well and i think that's really powerful and extremely unique and innovative uh and it's gonna really streamline their entire research process well i think that that there sounds like some great areas of utilization of training and teaching and otherwise providing information so now i'm going to shift gears and it wasn't one that we talked about beforehand but it's just one that was interesting because as you're teaching people how to debate as you're training as you're doing predictions as you're incorporating technology and as you're creating the platforms one of the things that it seems to and it goes on you know all sides of the political aisle is the conflicting air confliction between hey we don't want to have fake news or we want to have freedom of speech or we want to have let people debate or to say what they are and let the audience choose first we want to limit what is people said i'm not taking sides one way or the other because i can probably make arguments on both sides but how do you kind of sift through that if that is kind of your goal of one is providing more content to is teaching people how to discuss how to debate and also trying to be a bit of a a you know intermediary arbitrator that doesn't take science or is unbiased how do you kind of go through and balance all of those fake news versus not fake news freedom of speech and all those things as you're trying to to do that yeah so the answer is pretty simple and this is just my ideology personally let the users decide a lot of users aside so we allow the user to curate we do not touch in any capacity what is shown not google not facebook we don't do the biased stuff we let them decide what they want to see it's their decision 100 percent that's hard to debate island as well as debate news so that's just a big belief of mine let the users decide what they want to do and that's what we have going on in american filters no interference whatsoever by us or by any person or entity in what users see other than themselves because they can just curate content by themselves and so and decided again i'm more out of this curiosity you see that that is a positive in other words are people wanting or open to and willing to accept or at least be willing to understand that there's a varying different viewpoints because you listen to the media listen to the news and you hear both sides and again not taking sides because i think that you can argue both sides but some people are wanting more and less and so do people are they willing to and open to listening to both sides or at least or understanding their multiple sides of the debate and you know i just was curious more on mainstream media versus how people are actually debating or discussing things does that kind of line up with what we see in in reality or is there a bit of a disparity definitely so um we're frequently taught that you know fox news and msnbc cnn they're the big channels and that's what almost everyone listens to it's not true whatsoever actually a minority of americans listen to these crazy you know channels where you have uh just straight politics and it's usually very biased and that's on all sides right and left um most americans actually listen to non-biased news were a little bit of a biased news so nbc abc fox and pr ap which is totally unbiased and those types of uh publications so definitely there's a big demand for unbiased opinion articles and obviously opinion articles have bias in terms of political ideology because they're saying an opinion but you know what the what the background is whether it's left or it's right or to center it's always fact based and evidence based and it's not based on strictly ideology and just selfishness so i think that's super important in our platform and it's super important to me to give that kind of content you know and i'm probably a lot along the the same lines and since one of the things i always like to do is one i always like to play devil's advocate but two i think if you know if you're really wanting to be able to have a open and honest debate and discussion and learn and grow and to otherwise teach people how to do that it has to be a willingness to accept information from all sides and then you have to also learn how to sift through that so i just thought that was you know a bit of an assignment an interesting area because i think that it has applicability throughout a lot of things including you know if you're a small business or a startup if you're looking what kind of content we share what kind of platform should we do you know should we take a stance we're not taking stance there's always a lot of those implications you're having to decide your business and you know it's interesting to see how what that impact might have one way or the other so definitely actually speaking of that we also have a commercial solution just for companies so they can do exactly that they can figure out what opinion pieces um are shown and what opinion they want to take if any and that's gonna really help their investor relations their public relations and i think that's super important for them no i i couldn't agree more so i think that's that's sounds like it's a great tool well as we start to to wrap up the podcast i always uh wrap up with the one question so we'll jump to that now which is we've hit on a lot of different areas um of discussion which includes you know ai and debating and technology and predictions and media and curating and aggregation and different opinion pieces or research and the innovation and technology and education and and all of those things and so there's a lot of things that we've hit on and a lot of things that people could be thinking about and how they might uh utilize it or incorporate into the business and if you're giving if people are walking away saying there's a lot of things i could be doing but i don't have the time to do it all what is one thing that people could do to start incorporating or to utilize what we've discussed in their businesses yeah you don't have to use your own technology you don't have to make your own technology you can just go online get a free api free open source code and just start using ai and it can really improve your business and improve your customer experience so i think that leveraging artificial intelligence any company or in most companies rather super important and it definitely is a big application so i think that's a great point a lot of times people get a bit overwhelmed hey i have to build this and it's going to be a large cost a big investment and what do i do and how do i do it and you know if you were to build it from scratch yeah you're going to be investing a large portion i think there's a lot of whether off the shelf or otherwise kind of the build versus buy and a lot of time if you're buying it or otherwise utilizing what others people build it can help to leverage your business incorporate new and additional features that others may not be providing without having to build it from scratch so i think that's a great takeaway well if people want to reach out to you they want to find out more they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to go on your platform and debate they want to go out in your platform and get some interesting articles or media and whatnot they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more sure so first of all visit the american post dot versus american post at theampo.com t-h-e-a-m-p-o dot com you can also find out more about the american post at the input.com about visit debataons.com at debatable.com contact me at my email you can find on linkedin linkedin.com aarongolden all right well i definitely encourage everybody to check out the various platforms a lot of uh great uh information great uh platforms and a lot of the things that they can learn from so well thank you again aaron for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners uh if you can make sure to let or leave us a review click share click subscribe because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome expertise and then helps them as they are building and growing their businesses and with that if you ever need help with uh patents or trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to reach out to us and go to uh strategymeeting.com grab some time with us at chad we're always here to help well thank you again aaron for coming on and uh wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you devon [Music] you

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The Inventive Journey 
Episode #323 
Prepare For Growth 
w/ Phillip Hogan
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"So, I've learned that you prepare for growth and have the compacity. Then once you have the compacity, you start the marketing piece and the sales piece. You start looking for new business. When the new business comes in, you can handle it. Then your customers won't be dissatisfied, and your new customers won't be dissatisfied because you are able to meet their quota. That's the most important thing that I have learned. I really encourage any start-up that; don't rush to get more business. Build the compacity and infrastructure. Then once your infrastructure is built, you have the ability to meet the needs of your clients."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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 so i've learned that you prepare for growth and you have the capacity and then once you have the capacity then you start this the marketing piece you do the sales piece you start looking for new business and the new business comes in then you can handle it and then your customers won't be this your existing customers won't be dissatisfied and your new customers won't be dissatisfied because you're you're able to meet their coder and that's the most important that's the really the most important thing that i've learned uh and i i really encourage any startup that don't rush to get more business build the capacity build the infrastructure then once your infrastructure is built now you have the ability to meet the needs of your clients [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller a serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help now today we've got another great uh guest on the podcast phillip hogan and uh philip is a quick introduction so graduated high school in new york um jumped around a bit through her in in uh through the 70s and traveled to the 80s and then settled in new york and i decided there started to work in a family business but then wanted to do something for himself so i went back to school and pursued a social worker social working degree at in the university of new york graduated and purchased a building i think in 2000 and decided to start a business with the housing management provided housing to those or for substance abuse program or coming out of substance abuse program did everything out of pocket worked full-time ran the program for uh several years got a bit burned out closed the program sold the bills in building took a break um and then decided to move to georgia found a few new jobs and then uh ended up getting divorced got a few better jobs and then the last job was a it was working at a program for providing housing for hiv patients and then shifted the um to a business so that's more of a mobile uh notary business which is what he's doing today so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast phillip thank you glad to be here so i just absolutely and i just took a much longer journey condensing into a much shorter period of time so let's unpack that a bit so tell us a little bit about how your journey got started in new york coming out of high school oh coming out of high school oh gosh well i graduated i graduated hampshire high school in 1975 and uh at that time just decided to do a little traveling and at that point i was pretty much like a sheltered child and it was time for me to see the world a little bit and see how other people lived and and associate themselves with their surroundings so i traveled throughout the country uh and i got opportunity to travel internationally and i was able to live abroad for a little bit and uh for i think for the best 10 years after high school i just was really into the mode of finding myself and finding out how other people lived and find out to be quite enjoyable but then when that time ran up it was like okay you know let's settle down what are you going to do here so that's when i came back to new york and got involved in a family business a very successful family business that my dad had started who was a a uh a decorated retired police detective who's deceased now and um so he and my mom would run into business he asked me to help him and i decided to come and join him and it was a great experience and that was his dream it wasn't my dream it was his dream but that was my father so he asked me to come work for him and how could you ever say no to your father so so i did and it was a great experience i learned a tremendous amount my business acumen that i have now it has really come from my mother and father working side by side and seen and built not only one not only two but three successful businesses so um so then you know it came time to again find myself on another level and so i just you know my father and i sat down we had a conversation and i said listen papa i need to go and do some other things with my life and he understood unwillingly and so then i uh got invite admitted into i started the pursuit of human services so i got my undergraduate degree from metropolitan college let me just ask one or one quick question i know dive into the middle of your story but one of the questions i had is you know so you're working with your dad and i definitely get hey how can you say no to family and helping them out and learning the family training you get a lot of skills but what was kind of the genesis or the tipping point to say okay i need to go out and do things on my own was that hey i can't stand working for my dad or hey i love you dad but i really have a different passions and different priorities or kind of what was that trigger that tipping point to say hey i want to go out and do my own thing and then start you down the path of going back to college yeah it was as i mentioned earlier that was my father's passion that business was his business and so i didn't join the business to really learn the business i somewhat i i mean it was part of the process but my real passion and real reason for joining the business was just to be about my father's side and to help him and and to give him the assistance that he needed to build the business and so at that so so that was fulfilled and then i forgot then began to experience that well listen this is really not my this is not my path right this is really not the things that i want to do it doesn't really express who i am as a person uh deep down the side uh as a family person yes as as as a busy person yes but as a passion for something for me to pursue that just wasn't quite it so we had it it was a tough decision devin it wasn't something that you could easily walk away from you know but it was a decision that had to be made to bring me peace and also to help him be satisfied to know that okay well listen you know what let me not think that my son is going to be here forever and a day when in fact he has some other desires to pursue himself and so those those are the reasons that i uh those are the reasons that led me to move on and moving on i began to my undergraduate degree in human services uh did well there and then i got accepted into fordham university school of social work uh got a great social work degree and um this is a 97 so in 2997 got the opportunity to purchase a building as you mentioned in your intro and that's where i started i decided okay how can i use the business acumen that i learned from my parents coupled with the social services education i acquired from the school and the work that i was doing at the time and at the time i decided that to let's open up a transitional living community for adult men formerly incarcerated non-violent drug offenders in brownsville brooklyn new york so in 2000 october 2000 we opened up housing matters of new york and converted into a non-profit and began providing the services to help these men transition back into everyday life now one question to that because so how did you see i in one sense that makes sense you know you get the social worker degree kind of where your passion when you're coming out and you got the building on the other hand you know that would be wouldn't have been the necessary the first thing would have come to mind you know social working degree in other words you may go work for public services you may help people get jobs and that so what kind of drew you to that or what made you decide hey i'm going to go through something on profit do a business or you know set up the the business and do that or at least you know and offer those services how did you kind of land on that as kind of where you wanted to head sure and so at the time uh in 1993 i got hired with the health and hospital corporation uh outpatient substance abuse program and there we were doing a lot of we were treating our clients were those mandated into treatment for substance abuse by division of parole administration for children's services and other state type run agencies that are required to monitor the movement of those that have been admitted into their programs so at that point for and i had the opportunity to do this work while i was through my entire educational venture and so i realized that many men were coming home from corrections facilities going back into the city shelter system and where more crimes were being created or they were creating crimes and what was happening they were being reincarcerated because they had a parole violation so these men were who and they couldn't go into the new york city public housing authority because they had felony convictions and a person with a felony conviction cannot live in the project or in public housing so they were only the only option were to go into the shelter system all the other type of transitional living communities beds were filled and so at that time there was a tremendous amount of men and women coming up for correctional facilities and really the systems to provide services to them were oh were being flooded because so many people were coming home and they just weren't prepared to meet those type of numbers so i said to myself well the issue here is that they need housing right and the program that i was working for didn't get into housing and they didn't have people who were really many they didn't have any any collaborative relationships with those who could provide housing so i says well you know what i'm going to start a housing program and one of my f one of my professors asked me says okay just as we're graduating he says okay phillip now that you have graduated what are you going to do with your degree and i said to him i wanted to get the housing and so when i graduated the opportunity to purchase this building became available and i did just that no no i think that you know i think one that that's a great mission to be on and say hey i recognize that there's a need in the community i think that they can make an impact to make help utilize both the degree as well as you know i'm just generally wanted to have that giving nature which i think definitely um is a great uh mission to set out on so now so you set out on that you know you get the housing and i think you did that for a period of five years is that right five years yes and then i think as you as you mentioned there was we chat a bit before the podcast at the end of it towards the end of that five years you got you got a bit burned out in other words there's a lot of time a lot of effort you're having to you know spend a lot of extra you know spend a lot of your i'm sure nights weekends all of your free time thinking about it running it and otherwise doing it and so you're coming out and saying okay i'm getting a bit burned out which definitely understand and so now as you're saying okay i'm getting burned out and i want to do something you know do something else i want to shift or pivot or adjust kind of how did you decide okay as i'm burning out and i want to do something else where what was going to be the next part of your journey sure well you know we had we uh became a non-profit we got a 501c3 and we got some funding some some private funding some state funding and uh some city funding and so we were doing well in regard to we had more more need for the services opposed to the funding for the services and so i was doing my best to convince uh those at the city and the state level that this is a program that is is essential for this community and your involvement financially and um proactively would make a huge difference in the community because these these men are coming home these men committed crimes they came from these communities they committed crime in these communities and they're going to come back to these communities and if they don't have any place to live guess what they may may create may do more crime that would then what hurt the community in addition to put them back in prison so rather than see that happen let's join a comp let's join an organization that is there to meet the needs of these of both the community residents as well as the uh the new as well as the phone incarcerated so both parties could possibly have been these men well the community quite deceived that way and after just repeatedly speaking to a number of individuals i just got i got between working full-time raising a family two children and a wife and you know i had my own private home and then you know just trying to tend to the needs of the business i just got i got i got torched and so i had a conversation with the board the board president and let her know where i was where i was and it was very difficult decision because we thought that we were really on the right track to make a difference in the community but after some soul searching after after the mission of me being just completely burned out we decided to suspend the services so we we went on ahead and transitioned them in from the building into other programs so they can continue on with their treatment and when the building was completely empty and all residents personal property have been transferred to their new residence that's when i put the building up for sale and i sold it and really uh devin you know as i look back that time i was i i had been working hard from probably about 1993 to 2005. i mean it was just chasing the the education the career goals the educational goals the family goals and so when i stopped in 2005 i hadn't realized i had been running uh not running but working so hard and so focused on meeting the goals that were placed in front of me that i was due for a good break and so at that time also my son who is now 27 and lives in georgia was graduating from his uh undergraduate he was graduating from his uh junior high school his his elementary school went to the sixth grade and he would have had to travel to a largest high school uh junior high school in another part of queens new york and my son had never traveled underground to trains and trains and buses and public transportation before in his life so to say to put philip on a uh on a bus or train and say okay this is how you get to school it just wouldn't have worked for him and and i knew that so you know my wife and i at the time decided what's the next best thing to do we had some friends in georgia and uh they invited us to come down check some things out and so so we drove down to georgia and i said this is a place where i think phillip and his sister can continue to live and grow up in a slower environment a safer environment where we could be a part of a community and that was and so that was the decision and we relocated to georgia in 2005. and i say and i think that definitely you know making or making the move for the family saying hey we need a environment we'll be you know good for school both that you know i get i don't know that i'd want to put my kid on the subway or have them go out in the world i'd probably be a bit too protective and i definitely get for that uh that desire comes in says okay i'd like to you know make that transition that shift and then it's a good time to do so as he's great you know as he's moving along in his education and he's doing that now on the kind of on the career side as you're now moving into a different area you know something that you're you know i would assume that without or having you know compared to other side new york and georgia are going to be a bit of a different environment different things that are going on and then that so how did you kind of transition your career or what did you do as you're moving into a new town probably not knowing it you know other than having maybe a few friends not knowing as many people or having connections how did you kind of land on what your the next phase of your career was that's a great question devin and i i'm i'm kind of i'm an adventurous person so you know we just decided that georgia was a great place to live uh the economy was pretty stable uh this part i live in the uh atlanta region and so this part of georgia was really up and coming and um so i says you know let's go for it so we packed up and literally came that solar solar liquidated the real estate we had in new york and my son and i first came down and um so i felt that since i had a very good education from a tremendously well-known school both undergraduate and graduate level that i shouldn't really and then i had the experience i shouldn't have any problems finding a job and i did i didn't have problems finding a job i just had problems finding a job that could earn that i could earn the type of money that i was earning in new york that was a challenge right so so i found myself you know leaving jobs and taking another job uh for the sake of the money opposed to the really passion for the work that i was doing and i had my family we had built a home in georgia so i had responsibilities and i had to make decisions for the the welfare of my family and so therefore i did in a short period of time i was able to maybe change two to three jobs and the third job was finally one that really fit we it was a fit it was it was organizational fit and it was a career fit in myself and so i worked there for about a year about a year year and a half and then i got laid off and uh and it was it was a layoff you know it was interesting because it was it was a hiv community it was hiv a program for people hiv positive and hiv is it is a disease that's ravishing all type of communities uh but in the in the hiv community is predominantly this the workers and those that do the work are predominantly in the gay community and i don't have a problem with with uh being working with anyone of any denomination or any sexual orientation you know you are who you are and we're coming together for common cause uh but i just wasn't a fit for the community uh because i'm i'm a straight guy and people would look at me and say well listen you know straight men don't do this type of work why are you doing this type of work and i would my response to them says you don't have to be you know hiv doesn't select what your gender is or your sexual orientation it is what it is and so we have to be open-minded to all walks of life uh for workers as well as those that come to us for assistance uh but it was just it was it it it became a um it became an issue as to my sexual orientation in a industry where uh straight african-american men are not known to work so that became more of an issue opposed to the issue that brought us to the table which was the clients that are hiv positive so it was a mutual decision for uh for me to be released because i just wasn't a fit for that particular assignment that definitely you know makes sense in the sense that when you're working with anybody it just has to be a cultural fit it has to be a fit where everybody feels comfortable and if that's not the right environment even if it's no fault of your own is one where you have to say okay i've got to find one where it is a good fit and it's one where everybody you know everybody's comfortable and everybody it's a good environment for everybody and everybody can have make sure to serve everybody it's knowledge you're saying okay that's not a good fit you know it might here or look for you know a different opportunity or different um you know or place or area to within which to explore your talents what was kind of the next step or phase or what was the next part of your journey yeah uh well the next step was to uh you know with his social work degree from florida university i i was really committed to providing you know i you know uh devin my family my mom my my my my dad um our public servants who are public servants uh my sisters are uh have advanced degrees and you know their public servants in one capacity or the other so we're just we're a family of servants we believe in serving the needs of those in our communities and in our in our uh families in our regions and so i was committed to continuing to be to be of service to those in need and that's what i was trained to do so i was able to get another job uh with a very successful non-profit here in the atlanta area and um and so i i we worked together uh as i was a director of human services program and um and i think i was there for maybe i don't know two three years uh it was a family run it's a family-run non-profit so while we did great work there were some challenges to me ascending to uh higher position leadership because the family was at the top of echelon of the the the organization and so my opportunity for k for growth have been capped and i realized that there wasn't just any more room for me to grow and if i wanted to stay in this position for the next 10 15 20 years they had been fined by them but i had much more aspirations and i was just too talented and too ambitious to to remain there so i got another opportunity with the company where we were providing hiv homeless prevention program for hf for people hiv positive down in south georgia and that was a great program because uh they were awarded you know a whole bunch of money about two and fifty thousand dollars a time hiv homeless venture program in south georgia and um so i was able to i got hired and had to set up the program in south georgia while i remained in atlanta so we had the staff we had the we had the office we had all the all the things needed to to run this program and uh but we only had a year to spend 250 000 and that's quite a bit of money in the non-profit world to spend when you don't have the structure when i say the infrastructure to spend it you know the money was only supposed to be utilized for um for those that are recipients of the program you couldn't use it for administrative costs so trying to spend a quarter million dollars without an administrative cost was kind of challenging and the company the non-profit didn't have the the the um they didn't have the resources to hire more staff and pay them to assist in getting the work done so we on a limited budget um with limited staff we were not refunded so that was a year it was a good experience and um so then i kind of like said i tried to find more work and i just couldn't find my work and i i really got burned out i got burned down looking for more work i knew i had a very good degree i knew i had the experience i knew i had the passion to really be a service and um but i just didn't i just got tired of the of the rejections i got tired of you know resumes falling into the black hole so to speak so i just pulled back and um and then one day i met a notary who came to my home to notarize some documents and i had never heard of a notary coming to your home to notarize documents so i says okay what's this all about and you know he after the notification we chatted he taught me a little bit more about how he became a notary and how he became to to doing this type of work and i said okay you know what i could do this i i could do this is something that i think i can do it doesn't require me going back to school because i was really burned out with going back to school so i got my notary commission pretty much followed his uh his blueprint to become a mobile notary and went to the national notary association's website learned how to and took the certification courses to become a certified notary signing agent which would then allow you to been trained as a how to notarize mortgage documents understand the mortgage process so uh so i learned that uh in in one vein if you will and then in another vein i was interested in becoming a mortgage loan officer so i went and learned how to become a mortgage loan officer well i learned a lot and but when it came time to take the test to become a licensed loan officer i didn't pass and so i says okay well maybe you didn't you're not meant to become a loan officer phillip because you're pursuing it for the money and you can't that's not that's never been your your objective in life so um so i decided to stick with the notary and um and then the notre business grew i began getting more customers i i learned the process i didn't know anything about the notary signing business i knew nothing about it everything that i learned i learned by by just on this job training so to speak and i had a really great client out of florida that was sending us a lot of business a lot of refinance business and i just couldn't handle all of it so so they they asked me well philip you know we have a lot of business and we want to send it to you but you're having some difficulty managing our book of business what are you going to do well that was the million-dollar question do you do you walk away from this opportunity or do you rise and so i said i'm gonna start a signing service and they said okay great let us know when you're up so in july of 2016 i launched signing services of america which is a national notary signing service we are hired by national mortgage lenders and title insurance companies to schedule and close any of their mortgage product loans throughout the united states so in 2016 we started signing service america i had this account that was sending us about 150 200 a month and back then for that type of business with the startup was fantastic i mean no business comes in the door making money we were making money but i was learning along the way at devon so so um so fast forward uh we got through 2016 uh with some bumps and bruises um but 2017 is when things kind of like fell apart and um the the business that that company went out of business and that was my main source of revenue and so i had to really learn the sales side of the business and so i learned how to learn the marketing side of the business and then you know between the two i i was just able to um piece together smaller accounts that can allow us to continue to keep the doors open i did hire one person in 2016. she i had to let her go in 2017 and so in 2017 is when i was really pushed to the brink of i don't think this is going to work phillip you're going to have to walk away from it you know um so during in that year devon it was a time it was a very trying time um i used to live and listen to a lot of motivational tapes uh or youtube videos um i talked a lot i prayed a lot i cried a lot um i i challenged myself to get up every day i was very depressed um many days i didn't want to get out of bed many days i i just i i got out of bed but then we're going to the office but i think that office i think that office was a big part of me hanging in there because i had a i had a rental agreement with my landlord and it was you know whether you close the doors and never never do business again or not you still have to pay your rent and so i said well shoot if i close the doors and go home guess what i still got to pay rent so i got to pay rent and i might as well stay here and fight and so and that was one of the things that really that really kept me going he said you know you got to pay this rent phillip and if you got to pay the rent then you might as well fight it out so days were long then devon you know uh they were very long they were started nine o'clock and sometimes they went into one two o'clock in the morning but that's what was required and um so we got through 2017 and when i got through 2017 it was like it was a major breakthrough man because then it was like okay you could do this philip you know and um so 2018 you know uh had his own set of issues but we were we we never had the kind of financial issues we did in 2017 right there were other issues right and and i'd be happy to talk about those um but i'll let you ask some questions or something no i think that's a definitely a great walkthrough and it's always you know i think that it paints that real picture of you know people oftentimes just have the idealized well you know yeah there's a few hard years but oh it was fine because it all worked out in the end and in reality it really does or it does take a toll and you do get burned out it is a lot of work and you having to you know have the un or the lesson fun situation of letting people go and then rebuilding it and otherwise fighting and struggling all which i think is real and and paints that real situation so i think that that is uh definitely a great uh a great walkthrough of your journey and an interesting one of that so now you kind of you know as we talked a little bit before i'm here you know the business is still going you're able to you know you kind of uh pivot and adjust and otherwise keep it growing and building and this year having to to navigate that um it brings you to a bit to today and i think there'd be definitely some fun conversations to have maybe on a future episode or have your bag and talk a little bit more about kind of um now how you you know as you struggle through where the business is at today and where it's going um but with that you know we are as we wrap up towards the end of this or this podcast episode i always uh wrap up the episode with two questions so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made what did you learn from it well my journey was the worst business decision i made when i learned from it there was so many um i think that uh yeah i think the worst business decision i made uh devin was to walk away from my father and um and uh walk away from my father's business i think that uh the the what he understood it it was very painful for the both of us i'm his only son and that was his legacy and it would have been as i looked back it would have been an honor to be able to continue on my father's legacy and not allow another family person to do that right um so i think that was the worst decision no i think that that's you know that is a hard one in the sense and i've worked with family on some businesses and it's oftentimes worked out great but it does have that layer of complexity and it does have that layer of you know is it one year having to deal with a family dynamic and two you're doing it for other motivations and sometimes it's the right decision to walk away to preserve a relationship or to explore go after your passion other times you're looking saying hey i wish i stuck around or it could have been it turned out differently so i think that is definitely an atmosphere you know mistake or the worst decision but also definitely one to understand and it allows you to pursue are some of the other passions that you have second question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them to take your time and grow take to uh take your time that you know the growth of a business you can you can either yeah you can either the business you could prepare for growth and then do well or you don't have the capacity for growth and you get the new business and you're not able to handle it so you'll wind up losing the business and you could possibly lose you'll lose the accounts and you'll lose the business so i've learned that you prepare for growth and you have the capacity and then once you have the capacity then you start this the marketing piece you do the sales piece you start looking for new business and the new business comes in then you can handle it and then your customers won't be this your existing customers won't be dissatisfied and your new customers won't be dissatisfied because you're you're able to meet their coder and that's the most important that's the really the most important thing that i've learned uh and i really encourage any startup that don't rush to get more business build the capacity build the infrastructure then once your infrastructure is built now you have the ability to meet the needs of your clients no and i think that that's a great piece of advice and i think that you know oftentimes yeah we are focused on growth and growth is a great thing for businesses if you're not you know growing can bring in more revenue and that but if you're so focused on growth oftentimes you are aren't focused on you know you lose track of the customer service or otherwise providing a good offer you know providing a good service to your customers and taking care of them and and all those things and it can have that negative repercussion of hey yes we're growing on the other hand our clients are unhappy and where it you know has that negative long-term impact on your business whereas if you can set it up to have that structure and that ability in place that as you grow you're able to meet the needs of your clients is a much better um path forward so i think that's a great uh great takeaway and a great piece of advice well as we uh wrap up if people want to reach out to you they want you know they're looking for a no mobile notary they're wanting to be a customer they want to be a client they want to set up their own or they want to pick your brain about how you've done it they want to be an investor they want to be an employee they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more sure be happy to talk with you and anyone else on any one of your in your audience devin so my email is p hogan uh s p h o g a n at signing services america our website is signingservicesofamerica.com and our telephone number is 770-984-5390 eight or nine nine well i definitely encourage everybody to check out any or all above email website or give them a call because uh definitely it's a great service for those that are in need and i think and also not an interesting business opportunity for those that may be wanting to look into it so well thank you again uh for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you um feel free to apply to be on the show just go to inventiveguest.com and play a couple more things as listeners make sure to listen make sure to subscribe make sure to share leave us a review in other words help us make sure that we can share these journeys with all those all the other entrepreneurs and startups out there so they can be helped along their journey as well last but not least if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else in the business just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat well thank you again phil for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure and wish the next leg of a journey even better than the last devin it's been a pleasure being a boy thank you so much for the opportunity you

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The Inventive Journey 
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"Bootstrap. It's incredible what you can think of and come up with limited resources. Giving away equity and bringing in a partner soon. I find that these create more problems than they solve. Getting outside funding. Borrowing heavily to launch a business, I think, is a mistake. Scaling it down to the point that you control it, you don't owe anyone anything makes you very resourceful and creative. I think ultimately you will grow the business faster and bigger that way. So, running lean. Keep all expenses variable. Use contractors, not employees. And delay in-fact avoid partners if you can."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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 bootstrap um it's incredible what you can think of and come up with with limited resources um you know giving away equity um bringing in a partner too soon i find that these create more problems than they solve and getting outside funding borrowing heavily to launch a business i think is a mistake scaling it down to the point that you control it you don't owe anyone anything makes you very resourceful and creative and i think ultimately you'll grow the business faster and bigger that way so running lean keep all expenses variable use contractors not employees and delay in fact avoid partners if you can [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur has grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups some small businesses with their patents and trademarks you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help now today we've got another great uh guest on the podcast dan bauer and dan was uh going back to high school knew that we wanted to do in high school which was he wanted to go and ever into advertising so had a passion for writing um so he went to ohio university and got a communications and advertising degree and he worked for a firm for about four years then went to work for another firm in hawaii and did that for about 13 years and then moved to the end during that time i think moved to the financial advertising and business side as well and then came to the realization that you are needed a bit more experience and numbers and on the business side so i went and got an mba at harvard business school um then took some uh senior marketing roles at uh citibank and mastercard um and then they wanted him to relocate and he said i don't want to relocate and so he decided that at that point he'd become an engineer so or an engineer an entrepreneur maybe an engineer as well but entrepreneur and uh tried to initially launch a mini mba program found out that that's not necessarily what people were willing to pay for or were looking for i'm so pivoted to more of a career consultant or career path consulting business and launched that as uh launched that been doing it for 20 years and then they an employee offered to buy out the business from them so we sold that in about 2016 and remained on for an advisory role for a bit of time launched a marketing and communications practice after that wanted to pay it forward so it's also been focusing on doing a couple things with entrepreneurship forums and also doing some uh entrepreneurship camps for high school kids so with that much his introduction welcome on the podcast dan thanks so much devin i appreciate it it's funny to hear one's own wife uh compacted into 60 seconds exactly kind of like that you know when you die and you see the light flashing before your eyes you're like yeah that's all everything that i did that's interesting though it's a great journey and i kind of ran through it in a much quicker fashion so why don't we uh unpack it a bit and so tell us kind of how things got started in high school for you and how you always knew you wanted to be in go into advertising which i'll say is not necessarily the the typical thing that high schoolers are thinking about going into so tell us how your journey got started there well early on i realized that uh words were my friends more than numbers and so um writing and uh framing ideas uh creating was really my thing and i enjoyed that a lot and um was exposed to uh my best friend's uncle ran an ad agency uh where i was growing up in cleveland and went to visit him and i just saw it felt the vibe of that place and i said this is where i need to be and so that's what attracted me the agency business my writing ability and planning abilities served me very well there and it was a great run this was a different ad world though this was more the mad men uh era uh and uh the word digital uh was not in existence at that point so i grew out of that decided the client side would be a little more interesting um and uh at that point i had found myself in hawaii where i had been recruited by an agency just jumped over like 20 years or 20 years of time so we're going to jump back just a little bit to dive in so coming out of high school you went to ohio state university or ohio ohio university i was i was i said as soon as i said i'm like wait it's not a ohio state but ohio university and he got your communications and advertising degree which makes sense you know you liked advertising you liked writing saying numbers aren't my my strong suit or at least not my passion and so then you come out of uh come out of school and you worked for a firm for about four years is that right yes an agency in pittsburgh called catch mcleod and grove i started as at the bottom of the ladder uh my office was literally a broom closet that they took the brooms out and put a small desk in there and i just hunkered down and said i'm gonna learn and i'm gonna you know perform and uh and uh make my mark here one day my boss did that so no and i the ironic thing is so i have my son which is now not quite a college university graduate a bit different but he works in one of the very small family businesses and we basically did the same thing we had a small kind of closet um said okay he doesn't need a lot of room he's pretty small and you know he'll just be excited he has his own little office so he we set that up so now you get now so maybe that will be his or circling back after he comes to college you'll have to take back over the same office but um no you did that for four years and say okay you got some great experience kind of worked your way up a bit started from the broom closet now how did you after at the end of the four years say now i'm gonna go to hawaii you know sounds like a great place to go i'm not not disagreeing that it would be a fun trip but kind of what caused that transition from the broom closet working your way up to move into hawaii well sometimes sometimes good things happen to you as opposed to by you and so in this case i had been developed some some mentor mentee relationships in the agency um and uh um confided in my mentor that uh i was looking for a bigger more consumer-oriented advertising experience and i just filed that with him he knew that this was my plan so one day he calls me he says i have a good friend with a larger agency that is looking for somebody like you i'd like to connect you with them and i said sure if you think it's a good opportunity i'll be happy to talk he says by the way it's in hawaii and i'm in pittsburgh at the time in the winter so i said well i'm intrigued um but you know i don't think it's realistic but i'll be happy to talk with him um and that's really what started it i had the conversation we we met i met some of the principals of the agency in new york and then san francisco they made me an offer i said i can't accept it without seeing it they said well we don't fly people to hawaii um you know we've had we've been burned too many times by folks just looking for a free trip so i said okay probably come true to that you know you're saying oh i'll at least entertain it they'll fly me out i'll spend a few days in the hotel you know take a grip of it and so i i i probably get that there there would be the opportunity for a bit of abuse there so go ahead well so i told them you know what i'm serious about this i will pay my own ticket i will fly out there for two days and we'll make a decision and i did and fell in love with it a great agency an incredible experience a boy from the midwest seeing hawaii for the first time uh and so i said all right i'm gonna do this we'll try it for two years i was fairly uh uh i i was 25 i've been married two years and uh my wife you know signed up for it with me and off we went and turned out to be a tremendous move so nothing to lose everything to gain an incredible adventure on a personal and a professional basis i climbed the ranks rapidly and after about six years at the agency then was recruited by the competitor of my client i was first hawaiian bank was my client bank of hawaii was their rival they hired me to run their communications department so i became a client for the first time it was in that experience that i came up against my ignorance frankly my my business depth and rigor were now tested because i'm in a bank now i'm the client i need to understand what businesses the bank is in uh so i can recommend marketing for them so i started to attend some uh executive education programs at cornell uh where was the other one um at uva university virginia taught by graduate professors graduate business professors it blew my mind i was turned on now from a communications background i was really getting exposed to what marketing was all about that planted the seed in my head that i need to get more education i need to come up against back to the numbers the numbers that i had avoided in the high school and undergrad and i need to come face to face with that now with a young family two small boys four and two and a wife who had a great career in hawaii i had to make it count i wasn't going to get this education at anything less than the best and so i applied to i fell in love with the concept of harvard business school and uh explored it and said if i can get in there that would be the place for me and so i did and off we went and relocated from honolulu to boston uh bought a winter coat uh bought a white shirt and a tie and uh and there we were at harvard and turned out to be incredible now one question just that i mean i may have missed or that if you did or my apologies so you know you're saying okay i need to better understand kind of their products and you know the number side my ignorance is finally kind of catching up with me so you say okay took some initial executive classes decided to kind of go full bore and go to harvard you know get the mba now that time were you you know was the employer saying you know great we'll pay for it we'll put your career on hold or you did you do it remotely or kind of how did you know what happened as far as a career side because if on the one hand you're saying hey i need this knowledge in order to be a better employee and to be able to better service the client the other end you're saying i'm going to take a break and you know i won't be around for a while how did the or how did that work with the the the job you had so that my knees were knocking and my palms were sweating when i went as the ceo of the bank and said i've made a big decision i'd love it here this is great but i want to reinvest in myself and so i cut the cord i left a great job in paradise frankly uprooted my family but i had i just had faith i had faith that this place harvard harvard business school getting this mba would open up avenues for me that i could never even put a toe into if i didn't do that so i we liquidated i sold my house packed up the kids and off we went for this adventure just basically i'm on confidence and faith i i knew that i could make the most of it and you know this is like burning the boats you know there was no turning back once i left this first time i'd ever been unemployed by choice at least and uh and i knew that i had to make it count so if you put enough of a bet on it you're gonna you're gonna win and and that's what happened now you say okay you know you take the old cortez line you know burn the ships you're exactly there you're going to do it and you know you don't have you know you've made the decision you don't have any choice so you go into the you know you go get the nba at harvard and you know certainly a good school and and you know from the educational perspective but you know you still have a bit of that uncertainty was it you know you have burned the ships you don't have a decision but you can always say was it a good decision where the ships or should we have sailed back that type of a thing or should i go should i stay in hawaii so as you're coming out of you know out of the getting the nba you know was a good decision and kind of what was the next step from there so it turned the reward the uh the uh you know recognition that this was a good decision came to be during the recruiting season when i uh because i was more experienced than most of my classmates i had a sort of a hybrid profile and so this this appealed to um quite a few companies um i had four job offers coming out of harvard and here's where i got a little bit conservative i decided to go back to the industry that i had left financial services so rather than doing you know mckinsey consulting that sort of thing i said all right i'm going to retrench now where my experience and my profile were the most valuable to the marketplace was in banking and so i accepted an offer by citibank and joined them as vp of national marketing that's what brought me to chicago from boston was to join citibank um it was interesting a very political environment very corporate a lot of turf struggles and i think if i was rethinking my decision to leave hawaii and get the mba it was never really tested at business school but now it started to be tested when i entered this corporate environment assessing is this really for me is this really what i did all this for and so um uh before i could really conclude that i was uh recruited by mastercard uh also in chicago with a great opportunity senior vp of global marketing for their debit business and that was fabulous i love that now i was now i was being rewarded for having the sacrifice and taken the risk of leaving hawaii to do that this was a great job it was a great job until as you said they asked me to relocate now they wanted me to move to new york to westchester and my wife and boys were now you know more entrenched in chicago and i didn't want to do that to them again you know we we've been everywhere we've done everything it was time to settle so that's when the entrepreneurial bug started to get seated in me um and that was my moment of truth now one question and that may definitely make sense now the question is is you know was the entrepreneurial bug it's more of hey i finally have the opportunity to chase a idea that i've always had or is it more of i don't want to move i don't want to go work for someone else and so i'm kind of you know forced into that box not in a bad way because i i love entrepreneurship but was it more of kind of thrust upon you or did you kind of more seek it out yeah good question devin it was really a combination of the two without being soured on the corporate america experience i don't think i would have done it in other words i'd seen the downside of that um you know i i don't want a bad mouth but uh i that ran out of excitement for me my passion was not that anymore and deposit from the positive standpoint this mba education had been so incredibly um you know empowering for me and and invigorating for me that i felt that there was an arena there where i could build an entrepreneurial venture and speak to my passion and leverage that passion so that was really it was the it was the you know enough of corporate america and here's a brand new door that opened that makes my heart beat faster and that was in the education higher education sector so the the the crossover between those two was my marketing and strategy background and i said i can capitalize on that in this education and development sector and create a business and so that's that was the opening to entrepreneurship to me oh and that definitely makes sense now because i as you got into it you know and we chatted a bit before the show you had kind of the idea of a mini mba program or for those that want to get some of that education but don't want to do it as a full-time or a part or nighttime student and you know we're having a bit more condensed and i have to have the near amount of expense as well as you know time commitment so that was the original idea and it sounds like when we talked to you know while it may have been a good idea on paper is one of those that didn't work out in reality and and that one flopped is that right yeah exactly i had everything but customers um great sometimes it's a little bit important very important but uh i i found that throughout my entrepreneurial journey and sometimes the second idea that's the home run you've got to learn by doing the first one and that's what i found so it got me into the marketplace the education marketplace but i realized people wanted the real thing and so uh fortunately um shortly after graduation i had been an interviewer admissions interviewer for harvard business school as an alum i learned a lot about the process what they look for um what the pool of applicants is like and so this was my aha moment i said i will guide people in their careers and their educational choices and enhancing their candidacy so that they have more opportunities and that's what launched my business called the mba exchange um and uh you know that was really the beginning of that hands-on entrepreneurial journey i grew it from myself and a laptop to uh about 75 consultants around the world over the span of 20 years we served about 5 000 young people clients and uh just created a business of which i was extremely proud and could justify my seven day weeks and 18 hour days and loved every minute of it i thought that as soon as you became an entrepreneur you work you know according to television movies you work about one to two hours a week and you get paid millions of dollars that's not the case no i not the case certainly joking on that one but uh you know i think that there is sometimes a disconnect that just because you're following what you love and uh doing your own business doesn't mean that you're not going to work a lot of hours it doesn't always mean that you're going to just have money rain from the sky those things may come and you may be able to get to a point that you can take a little bit of a breather but that's not going to be the beginning and it may not ever come and so you might as well just say hey this is what i love and that's what i want to do so now you're doing that and you did that for you know quite a period of time and you know grew it you had you know quite a few people on the team or you know as uh and it was expanding it and then i think as you mentioned around 2016 you had one of your employees that came and kind of offered to buy out the business and and to take over for you and is that the case yes exactly so this was you know i wasn't necessarily looking for an exit at that point uh maybe a few years short of that but i realized that you know a service business is not easy to sell sometimes and um and the due diligence process of selling a business can be very complex and exhausting and and not fruitful and so this one just this opportunity seemed to me to be the best of both worlds someone i knew liked and trusted who knew liked and trusted me would keep the due diligence process more minimal he knew the business and uh i decided to do that and it also it allowed me to stay with it my ex included several years as an advisor um and chairman and uh this was my baby and i didn't wasn't quite ready to park company with it so that turned out to be the way that i did my my exit in 2016. oh and that that makes sense and you know it is one where service-based businesses are always generally and it is a rule much harder to sell because most of it is still it's based on relationships and the person that's you know the founder and the one that has all the connections and it's been built over a period of time and so it's often very hard to transition that to someone else because as that person leaves that everybody has a relationship with they no longer have that connection and they they tend to look somewhere else and so definitely sounds like hey if we can have someone that's already familiar with the business already been around for a while and then otherwise um can make it much better transition sounds like a great opportunity so now you're saying okay coming out sold the business move to an advisory role now how did you kind of get into the current things what you're doing which is you know doing a marketing communications practice you're also doing entrepreneurship forums and also entrepreneurship camps and so it doesn't sound like you sold the business and just said i'm going to take a break and retire but it sounds like you had a few other things so how did you kind of transition or what made you decide to go in that direction so i retired for a weekend that was pretty much it i had a saturday and a sunday and uh realized that you know business is my my my hobby my passion my network you know i identify with it and uh and wanted to do it i think it probably was that mba education harvard is known for what's called the case study method and rather than a lot of lectures and textbooks students are immersed in hundreds literally hundreds of case studies new ones every day and in the course of a 24-hour period i was immersed in a business given some facts but not complete information and then forced to make a decision what are you going to do so i really got an appetite for this immersion in brand new industries and brand new companies you know framing problems coming up with hypotheses testing them implementing them tweaking them and then moving on to the next situation i found that to be very gratifying for me so consulting was the way to do that i i i'm fascinated by new industries and new companies and so i tapped into my network that i had built over the years and had my first couple of clients and that was really the beginning of it i i haven't had to go out and hunt and gather very much since then i love the doing the work the trust that's built up with clients and again this exposure in this education so by now i've probably worked in probably 40 industries and each one is you know the next one is the one that turns me on the most and so that's what i've been doing is strategy competitive analysis stakeholder interviews you know branding this sort of this sort of thing it's just great now at this chapter of my career um uh again being so such an evangelist for entrepreneurship i wanted to give back and pay forward and all those other cliches and so i did that in a couple of ways one was forming uh forums uh groups of non-competing entrepreneurs uh to engage with each other sort of serve as a personal and professional board of directors so i've done that i'm now splitting my time between chicago and nashville and i did that with two groups in nashville the other thing that i wanted to do as a as a dad and now a grandfather was thinking about the next generations of entrepreneurs and so um i have again i'm an educator a mentor a coach and i decided that a camp summer camp for high school kids to study entrepreneurship and really get hands-on would be the way to do it i assessed that market i found some programs being offered by colleges that were really sort of thinly veiled recruiting opportunities for them to get high school kids to apply to the school and i found some very tech oriented camps that had a narrower window if i was think if i was a high school student thinking about a product or a service business it really wouldn't relate as much to me so i i recruited a couple of great partners a title sponsor of inc magazine which is the bible for entrepreneurs and a wonderful camp company called summer discovery to provide the logistics and a third nonprofit called the network for teaching entrepreneurship to come up with a curriculum and provide certified teachers so i aggregated them and now we're launching this summer a program called inc young entrepreneurs that will be held on four college campuses uh for high school kids i'm really excited about it and uh that'll start at the end of june that's awesome that sounds like it's a you know gratifying way to give back to to continue to participate in a lot of the things that you've ever been excited about for the last part of your career you know all of your career but even more so dive in the last part of it and then um and also uh you know or explore a new opportunity and i had to laugh when you say no startups are my hobby and because that's usually what i i say as well usually when people ask you know i'll give some other you know can try things there are other things i enjoy but by and large usually if i have some free time and my mind tends to wander and ends up wandering back to a new idea or a new startup or something that to do with the current businesses i run so i think that there's definitely that that mindset i'm thinking that you know a lot of the entrepreneurs that watch your podcast they may have kids or neighbors or nieces and nephews in high school age that might be really turned on by this you know we all want to pass this on to our kids uh one of my sons is a is an entrepreneur here and so i think that giving back is very important it's also exposed me to some other educators in entrepreneurship at the university level and i have actually three ceos from shark tank funded companies that are going to be mentors and judges in our program this summer so if anyone's interested in learning about it they can go to uh www.summerdiscovery.com and they'll see details about it there awesome i definitely encourage people to check that out we'll we will uh or mention that again as we wrap up so we'll give enough people an opportunity to hear that again and find out a little bit over there but before we dive to that part and we are we can now as we're kind of at the you know the present day or kind of where your journey is led to up here to where you're at today great time to transition to the two questions i always ask you at the end of podcast about your journey so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it um i think the worst decision i made was just prior to the entrepreneurship journey which was taking a job just because you need a job financial obligations the fear of unemployment um those are very powerful forces in anyone's life they were in mine and so um you know at a point where the uh the current job was not what i had in mind instead of starting that entrepreneurial venture at that point i delayed it one more stop and and i regret that because it became stifling and frustrating to be ready to be an entrepreneur but to not start the effort so i guess taking a job just to have a job is was the worst decision i made i pulled the court on that after a year and then the heavens opened up and i could pursue what i wanted so take the risk bet on yourself you know having the marketplace is the variable rather than the politics and and uh you know uh myopia of uh bosses uh is is not as risky as it may sound and so that's that was my learning moment of in my path no i think that's a great takeaway because you know it's interesting i think that you know i think we're now with coming up on 400 episodes and out of all that there's a lot of different answers that people given but there's a certainly a common theme with a lot of times the biggest mistake people make it's not getting started earlier it's not that you know hey it's not that they necessarily would have been rich beyond their wildest dreams or even that they would have been more successful or anything else it's more of a pay i found i love this it was a great passion of mine i enjoyed it made a big difference in my life now i wish i'd just done that ten years earlier before i went through all the other things that i thought i had to do in order to get here so i think that that's a great takeaway for people to be reminded of second thing is is if you were to talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them okay i was thinking about this and i'm gonna i'm gonna cheat a little bit and give you two one is bootstrap um it's incredible what you can think of and come up with with limited resources um you know giving away equity bringing in a partner too soon i find that these create more problems than they solve and getting outside funding borrowing heavily to launch a business i think is a mistake scaling it down to the point that you control it you don't owe anyone anything makes you very resourceful and creative and i think ultimately you'll grow the business faster and bigger that way so running lean keep all expenses variable use contractors not employees and delay in fact avoid partners if you can alliances are better than than alliances and contractors are better than partners and employees eventually you reach a point where to grow you've got to do that and going kicking and screaming into that is a good way to do it your decisions will be more precise you won't have to look back and say geez i did that too soon i gave away too much of the pie i didn't need to do that so it would be you know bootstrap and scale organically and count on yourself rather than trusting in partners no and i think that there's a lot of truth things i mean i think that people often times they get into it and they think oh i have to have a partner i have to you know have that you know person and that resource in order to be able to grow and i think you hit on two things one is you know i think for some businesses you may not want to scale or have to grow beyond a certain size you may just enjoy being able to find your own thing make your own decisions have a good or a good business good or a good income and it may not be a good opportunity you may not want to bring on those partners because it does change the dynamic and it changes it from hey i can have an idea implement it do my own things try it out you know or set the the business i want to go to hey now i'm accountable to someone and if that's an investor now you have to make a return if that's a partner you have to have a second second person making decisions which can be good things they can also leverage a lot of things but i think that you should go slowly kind of you said kicking and screaming and see do you want that person you really need them and if so wait until you need to get to that point and certainly don't bring them on early because i think that there it changes a lot of the dynamic and can cause a lot of issues with the business so i think that that's definitely absolutely nice the the other one that i want to just hitchhike on that was start with the website a lot of people think well geez i need to form my business structure etc then i'm going to eventually come up with a website i find that starting with a website is a great way to do it don't don't launch the website yet but unless you can craft your value proposition into something tangible start to make promises then you figure out how to fulfill those promises so starting with the website is not a bad way to flesh out a business rather than starting with a rough business plan you'll back into the business plan based on how you go to market so that's a little irreverent but that would be the other advice that i would have oh and i think there's a lot of because when you go through a lot of what you're doing in a website design especially if you do a good job now people sometimes just put up pretty pictures and it doesn't really do but if you do a good job on the website design you have to think about what is your value proposition what is your pricing whose customers and it's going to be a lot of the same thing as you mentioned almost as doing that business plan but one it's a lot a lot of times a lot more fun to have a website that's visible and tangible that you can see but to it also it tends to move it along and make progress and so you kind of hip that a lot of the same things you're doing with business plan but you're not having to sit down and begrudgingly put it on paper and write it out because you're doing that same exercise so i think that's a great great piece of advice yeah well as we wrap up um if people want to reach out to you if they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to go to one of your camps they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more sure so in terms of the camp again young inc young entrepreneurs um that would the details there would be at www.summerdiscovery.com that's our camp partner as far as myself my consulting practice and so on best way to reach me would be at my website which is bauer b-a-u-e-r dash inc inc dot com bower dash inc dot com awesome i definitely encourage people to check out any or all of the above is there's a lot of good resources and you know like i was in high school i wish i could have gone to a camp and did not one that it's just trying to get you to go to the school but as you said a real camp where you can actually get the experience and try it out and see whether you love it and you know i think that that's just it sounds like something pretty exciting so on a lot of fronts i think there's a lot of great great reasons to connect well thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have uh if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you just go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show a couple more things to listen make sure to leave a review click subscribe click share because we want to make sure that everybody finds out about all these awesome journeys we also want to make sure to help as many entrepreneurs along their path as we can so go ahead or go ahead and do all the above if you're if you're able to and last but not least you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else with your business just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help thank you again dan for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you devin i enjoyed it you

Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.

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The Inventive Journey 
Episode #321
Get A Mentor Right Away 
w/Roberto DaCosta
Connect With Me

"If someone is starting, I would say, get a mentor right from the bat. Get someone who has helped build a business from the ground up. Don't just try it yourself cause it will take you four years where it could have taken you a couple of months to figure out exactly what you are doing? Who you are doing it for? What's a mission and vision is and how do they differ? And how having that strategy set up from the start will help you exponentially in a year."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

 um if somebody's starting i would say get a mentor right right from the back get somebody who has helped other people build a business from this from the ground up uh don't just try it yourself because it'll take you four years where it could have taken you a couple months to figure out exactly what you're doing who you're doing it for uh what a mission and the vision is and how they differ and how having that strategy set up correctly from the start will help you exponentially yeah in a year [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller a serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller iplock where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help now today we've got another great uh guest on the podcast roberto de costa and uh roberto uh went to our high school in long island was into arts um hated the school session love arts uh but there wasn't money in art so i went to college and got a degree and then and college also got an internship that later turned into a job in web development um did that for about a year and a half and then later quit the job and went to a senior developer at another position did that for another year and a half and then uh decided he wanted to start his own firm learned a lot of great skills and foundational things he could do got better at branding and marketing site and also needed to learn the finance and networking side a bit more um so figure that out for a while and then 2020 with covet hit and things went downhill and had to pivot and adjust a bit and took it in a bit of different direction which is where he's at now and we'll get into that a little bit more of the journey so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast roberto thanks for having me dev my pleasure so i gave the kind of can a much more condensed version of a much longer journey so with that let's uh take it back in time a bit and tell us a little bit how your journey gets started in long island in new york yeah uh i mean i was just i was just you know a silly kid in high school and i just really liked art i was always told uh you know i i could color within the lines really well um and and i think i just had a nap for drawing and painting and that was that was a thing i did as a as a hobby never too seriously um and then after that i you know looking at my senior year in high school i took in graphic design as a as a course and i fell in love with that you know and also graphic design was a serious market um at the time so painting wasn't so you know i'd rather do something that i could make money off of so that's that's where you know the game started really so now you're saying okay you know love art and i think it's still hard i think i don't know i think that's the perpetual artist you know the plague of artistry in general is typically hard to be unless you're just you know the one in a million that catches uh you know uh following and has a lot of people but for most service you always have the starving artists and so it seems like that's a natural transition to say okay now i can get into web design and web development and kind of graphic design and that one does have the people are willing to pay for it and it has kind of that the job availability there so you go into college and i think you got a degree in graphic design and web development is that right it was graphic design i picked up web development you know small skills on the side just because i i found it interesting and funny enough somebody i worked with at a restaurant told me somebody needed a um a graphic design done i did that graphic design for him and he asked me if i could do a website and so and so i started working with him a small budget website it was a basketball tournament teen website and he knew somebody who uh saw it and wanted my number that person carlos called me i'll never forget it and he said when can you start and this was like a friday i said monday so i i dropped everything in this i took an internship that turned into a junior developer job at a small marketing firm and you know the rest the rest is history i just graphic design you'll need it for everything you do like it everybody needs to know a little bit of graphic design so that's that's still a thing that i like to do uh but web development really picked up and then all the marketing skills came from working in a marketing firm for you know three three years uh two different marketing firms so my junior job led to my senior job at a different firm and and then you know i left that and i started doing my own so i started my own little before you dive into that too much because i think that's interesting so you know i definitely get hey we went into graphic design one you know said you know hey somebody wants to hire me to do your website why not they're paying and it will be a good opportunity you can learn some new skills and then found out that you know people started to like your work and then you said okay now make it a make your career but so to speak and so worked for some other people for a period of time and moved up to senior developer all that makes sense so what made you decide or what was kind of the trigger point to say i want to jump out and do something on my own as opposed to continue to you know move along the ladder so to speak or work as a senior developer for someone else what was kind of that trigger or that cause to make that leap year-round seasonal depression uh it was working for somebody just didn't fit me i it's not that i have an authority issue it's just that i knew that you have an authority you just hate authority not just kidding i just hate authority no it was it was that i was providing a lot more value than i was getting back um and i knew that if i just uh focused on myself a little bit on my off time i would be able to do it by myself so either the idea was a year before i quit was yeah i could do this by myself so i started picking up clients after hours and i built a small little clientele and by the time i left it was january 7th um i i had enough to keep being going and before i looked for another job i said let me see let me see six months down the road if i could if i could do this and then six months came and i thought let me see six more months and i kept pushing it and i pushed it back uh and then you know after a year and a half of pushing it back i said you know i'm not even gonna look i'm not even gonna bother because it this was just too much fun uh learning by myself doing it on my own picking up the skills that i needed to you know have a sustaining income no and i think that you know that's a lot of times how it kind of starts out well i'll try this out it's probably gonna fail and i'll keep trying and then it keeps you know keeps paying the bills and gets a bit more success or keeps you know we're working towards it before you know it the thing that was started first is a side hustle a little bit extra money that turned into i'll try it out turned into an actual career and i think that that's always a fun way when the things develop and continue to move forward so you did that i think for quite a bit of period of time and then i think we mentioned when we talked a little bit before one of the things that you found that you also needed to learn was a bit more on the the finance and the networking side so how did that kind of fit into your journey in other words i think that you know branding and marketing side and you got better that and already kind of had that as educational background but just saying okay building growing and getting better how did you go about expanding your skills in the finance and networking well you know i think i think underneath it i always understood that networking was a key component on on how to keep my income flow up uh you know because clients in web or design they don't need you full time they need you for that that service and the only way that i was really growing was through word of mouth that was like the solopreneur that's their bread and butter is word of mouth um so without knowing it i was doing a lot of networking um but it was you know four years into running this thing by myself i uh i found myself on a plateau that was that was harder to break from than uh i thought it would be so for me to hit that next level i needed to do something radically different um and and inside somewhere i knew that networking was going to be the thing like i just felt it because it without knowing it i knew it uh so i started going to networking events and and and it wasn't it wasn't long until i and from when i started to to the point where i found out that that was the key you know how i got more clients how we got a real community of of uh business owners that would call on me and rely on me solely uh was all built from a strong network group um several of them so yeah i learned all the skills that i needed to have to thrive in the network community uh by just being you know a a good a good friend to people uh in in those networks uh and that that's what the true skill of networking is it's not how many networks can i hit it was learning how to become a good person in in that community uh and that leads to trust and trust leads to clientele you know it was small skill oh but i think it's one of those that it's a small skill everybody knows what they should do and yet it can certainly be impactful and have a good or have a set your business on a much better and different direction as you continue to get that word of mouth and make those connections and so it sounds like you know you were learning those skills putting time and effort into them and things are continuing to to grow and you're building out your network and building a team and then about that time 2020 hit with covet and things kind of took a different turn from there yeah i mean i'm sure everybody can can say they experience the same thing uh it went from busy to not busy real quick uh and i th it took me from march when covet became a thing uh until until october for me to to pivot my entire business uh and how myself as a as a solopreneur in that time it was just just trying i just kept trying and trying i knew it was going to come back but i didn't know when and some people could still say it's still kind of hard to get you know get back in the ball on the ball and continue on where they left off in march 2020 right so that was that was a hard transition but it wasn't it wasn't hard for me to figure out my next move which was doing networking as as a business so i found the thing that i loved which was networking and i just made i made it into a business of mine they say okay now you know takes i think it took everybody different periods of time and you know it was kind of one word and it still feels like we're two years in and people still don't know what's going on but you know you're saying you know now that you have that realization saying okay at some point i've got to figure it out i've got to make the pivots it's not going to be the same it's not going to be a couple weeks and we're going to be back to life as normal and so you say okay making that transition and that switch a bit you say okay networking is the key so how did you start where did how did you pivot the business in that direction honestly it was luck um i bought a vr headset um to play video games in but i needed to make it a business expense because you know money was low so i needed to make every dollar count to something uh and i uh the the headset really was a supposed to be something for fun but i needed to make it a tool and in my search for a good tool to use vr for my design and web development services i found out that there was a bunch of people regular people like you and i in virtual reality just hanging out going to events and these events were meditation events dj clubs things that i didn't i didn't realize existed before i jumped into vr um and i remember vividly the first day i jumped in i went to a karaoke night and then i jumped into a cards against humanity room and people were just playing cards against humanity and hanging out and listening to music and and i asked one of the guys there is there any business events happening here and he said no and then i looked i looked deeper and i saw that there was a huge vacuum of business uh talks or or the topic of business in in social virtual was empty um and and that got me really excited so my transition happened that day you know uh i saw a huge vacuum in in how people connected in vr uh when it came to the topic of business no i think that you know sometimes it's that you know happy happiness stands that are happy coincidence that you do something as starts out as personal enjoyment and you know similar almost a little bit to the idea that hey you had someone that said can you build a website for me this one happened to be a little bit coincidental in the sense that hey this is something that would be fun and interesting and why don't we make it a you know a business expense and make it into a business opportunity and that you know pivot scenes in a different direction so that kind of takes us a bit to where you're at today so where's the business at today is it launched is it coming soon is it uh already have millions of dollars of money raining from the sky you're kind of where along that journey is the business that you've pivoted and looked at kind of more of that networking and virtual reality aspect no it's it's very much still in developmental phase uh it's not so much in develop like we have a we have a community which is the part of the product what what i've done since last not this past october but last october um was create a a strong community of business owners in vr and i started to market myself as uh vr networking um and then the whole brand took off and i i went from having a room filled with uh 12 business owners who wanted to continue networking from home you know but not over zoom the way that we got used to over the pandemic which was it doesn't give you the same sense of being with somebody and building uh that community with that with that person that trust isn't is it really there on 2d where it is in vr it's just a different sense you have to experience it to understand right but from from developing this small little community of 12 people uh per event once a week an idea continued to grow from networking to running speaking events so we brought in you know some some people who were professional speakers people that were featured on ted and we threw that in in virtual reality we had an audience and then the idea of what about expos and trade shows so we built out a trade show space and we rent out boots uh for the year so that we'll run 12 trade shows once per month uh and have businesses market themselves in these trade shows we just relaunched that whole system with a new trade show space so they all these different products all building out one larger community um and the size for comparison is at the beginning of this we had you know on average five 12 people come to networking events last monday we had 200 people show up to a networking event yesterday we had 170 people show up to a networking event and this is like this is not even the beginning of it i haven't even laid a solid foundation yet my hope is to build a community that on on any given day uh you'll have a networking event with 10 000 people showing up you know have a real solid ability for you to market your business in virtual reality with a community no and i think i think it's an interesting application to you know a bit of a time old thing in other words networking has been around for a while but looking and saying how can we adapt that and how can we adjust it and then where's the opportunity so it sounds like a differently a great avenue and a great uh path to go down um so now as we've kind of brought ourselves to a bit to the present day of where your journey is taking you so far great time to transition to a couple questions i always ask towards the end of the podcast about your journey so with that the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it worst business decision is taking on debt too early um that was a big mistake not not that it was too much but it was enough to you know slow me down for the long run and i'm still i'm still dealing with the debt that i took on the first two years to make that work um so definitely having having a solid stream of income and not having any gaps in that while you're building up a business uh was important something i overlooked no i think that you know it's one of those where it's hard because sometimes you're saying if i don't have the money then i'm never going to be able to start the business and yet on the other hand you take on the debt you take on the money you know on that on that commitment and then if the business slows down or doesn't go in the direction or you have to pivot or adjust sometimes it can be that those handcuffs that make it difficult to be able to navigate the business or otherwise make it successful because that you may not be able to do or pursue the things that you want or it can otherwise be that handcuff so make sense on kind of how the mistake occurred but also you know the motivation for for not doing their learning from it so 100 yeah second question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them um if somebody's starting i would say get a mentor right right from the back get somebody who has helped other people build a business from this from the ground up uh don't just try it yourself because it'll take you four years where it could have taken you a couple months to figure out exactly what you're doing who you're doing it for what a mission and the vision is and how they differ and how having that strategy set up correctly from the start will help you exponentially yeah in a year no and i think that that mentorship can and be making or as you said have a big impact in other words you can get direction and sometimes a mentor just tells you the things that hey you may not want to do that you may want to slow down here are the mistakes i've learned and sometimes you say appreciate the input i'm going to do it anyway another time it can certainly give you some lessons learned avoiding mistakes and so i think along the way it's certainly worthwhile to have that that mentorship and someone that can be a sounding board can provide guidance and feedback and sometimes put you in a different or better direction so i would say that's a great piece of advice well as we uh wrap up the podcast that people want to reach out to they want to be a customer they want to be a client whether it's in the vr networking or they want you to build an awesome website if you're still doing that if they want to be an employee at some point if they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more i'm always taking friends and i'm always taking more people want to network uh they can go to vrnetworking.com um you can always reach me out at roberto at conan vr which is the business name c-o-n-i-n-v-r dot com uh and and hopefully i'll get to see you in virtual reality well i definitely encourage people to reach out i think it's a fun place if nothing else to catch up in the in the vr world and uh and uh worthwhile to connect up and and pursue things further so thank you again for coming on the podcast roberto it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell them you'd like to be guests on the podcast and share your journey feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show also make is a listener make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes and all the journeys that people take and last but not least you ever need help with your pot area for your patents your trademarks or anything else to do business just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always here to help thank you again roberto and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks kevin [Music] you

Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.

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The Inventive Journey 
Episode #320
Be Cautiously Fearless 
w/Carol Bettencourt
Connect With Me

"Tell them to be cautiously fearless. I would tell them that there is nothing stopping them. They have as much right and as much ability to do this as anyone else. I've met some people that maybe their IQ isn't the highest or maybe their family does not have the most money. But they would just come and, they did it. People will help you if you ask for help. Don't be afraid to get advice. Don't be afraid to listen to good advice. Sometimes you have to go in your own corner and plan. Other times you have to just listen and ask. Where there is a will, there is a way."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

 tell them to be cautiously fearless i would tell them that there is nothing stopping them they have as much right as much ability to do this as anyone else i've met some people that maybe their iq isn't the highest maybe their family doesn't have the most money but they were just determined and they did it people will help you if you ask for help don't be afraid to get advice don't be afraid to listen to good advice sometimes you have to go in your own corner and plan other times you have to listen and ask and where there's a will there's a way [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo of miller ip law we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat now today we have another uh great guest on the the podcast uh carol bettencourt and uh carol grew up in south carolina in her own words was a bit of a shy kid but went to university and uh majored in biology and spent a year post-grad at a job that she didn't like and then decided to go in a bit of different directions so she went dance for disney in orlando did a bit of ballet did some uh her work on cruise lines and then decided to open up a dance dance school and open up in a few locations um did that for a period of time and then decide she wanted to take a step back and work from home for a bit so got a remote job work or writing users guides and then that company got acquired um then she became a consultant and also ran her dad in studio um everything was growing and then her mother got alzheimer's so she decided she wanted to slow things down a bit help her mother and then her mother passed away and now she took a transition and is being the vp of marketing um for a business as well so with and then uh but in her own words she also has about at least one more entrepreneurial entrepreneurial endeavor left in the future so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast carol wow well thank you very much devin it's it's a pleasure to be here hey my pleasure and i just uh went through and uh condensed a much longer journey into a 30 or 40 seconds and so why don't we uh unpack that a bit and tell us a little bit about uh growing up in south carolina and uh how or how you journey i started there wow okay uh yes i did grow up in south carolina and i grew up in a family where i had the privilege of seeing a mixture of examples my father was very much a corporate man he was an engineer he worked for the same company for a long long time retired with the gold watch and everything and was very happy in his world and so i saw the benefits of that level of security but my mother's father my grandfather was always an entrepreneur he invested in real estate he invested in futures um my uncle um did similar types of things and so i kind of saw the benefits of both and even in my in in in looking at a figure of my father who who i admire very much i saw even though he was very loyal to that that company and and the the security that it provided in his worth at work ethic i also saw things that informed my own entrepreneurial journey whether you work for someone else or for yourself you take ownership and you bring ideas to the table so that's that's how my growing up influenced my journey the rest of the way now i say okay that definitely is is helpful and you say you say okay that kind of influence the beginnings of your journey um then as you're growing up you're coming out of high school you're going into um university and decided to major in biology is that right that's correct that that is correct and people often raise an eyebrow when they hear that was my major and they hear what i do now which is associated with the broadcast industry and software and hardware development they hear other things that i've done in the world of the arts and they shake their head how does biology major turn out to be this way well as that child in south carolina i always enjoyed experimenting i always asked for things like science kits and microscopes and telescopes and things like that were my favorite christmas presents well i had other things too but but i really enjoyed this i enjoyed experimenting i enjoyed um just getting my hands wet and i enjoyed all of the school that that that was involved with when it came to my my very first job in the field i didn't enjoy it i didn't enjoy the routine lab work i didn't enjoy the type of goals that the organization i was working for had and i won't really elaborate on any of that that's well in the past and i didn't particularly at that point in my life want to face the schooling another four years of school or seven years of school that might be recommended to pursue that field at a higher level and i do like doing things at a very high level so i just decided well i'll step back and do things i enjoy for a little while until i sort myself out and it became very clear that that background of experimentation would also serve me well on my entrepreneurial journey so i i looked ahead thinking it might be for a short term i enjoy being a ballet dancer i enjoy some other things that i've done i didn't even tell you about the folk crew job maybe i did i don't remember but um i i just thought that i would do things i enjoyed for a little while but those turned out to be the seeds of larger entrepreneurial ventures instead of just a time out from my journey as a scientist no i think that that makes perfect sense now what makes one sense on one side no but here's my error when he started to touch on it going from biology to get hey you go work for a you know a company or an industry and say hey it's just not a good fit don't enjoy it and it's not what i see doing for the rest of my life that i definitely understand but how did you go from that to kind of you know i get on this one side you're saying it's temporary but did you do dance where you had did you have a lot of experience or how did you kind of get into that whole realm as far as saying i'm going to make a fairly large departure pivot even if it was originally intended to be for a short period of time what made you decide to land on that i didn't just i didn't just do it randomly and you did ask about my growing up and i guess i didn't tell you that part i i grew up taking ballet i was a fairly well-trained dancer i took modern dance all through university it was a love of mine it wasn't something i and it's not you you can't be a professional ballet dancer and just randomly decide i'm gonna do this you you have to be trained to do it and and i was but it was not something that my rather conservative parents thought was a good career it's it's good to be a young lady who can sit up straight and so on but i think they were a bit mortified when they saw me at 15 and 16 getting really deep into it and they thought a more serious a science degree was more suitable for anyone who wanted to have a proper income uh but but i i went my own way hey every every entrepreneur's got to go their own way in the way that uh makes sense to them so so now you say okay it started out as i'm gonna take a break i don't wanna you know i just got done with school maybe sometime i'll go back and then uh from there kind of expounded the two you started out kind of doing things i think where you mentioned the ballet for cruises for disney and other things then what made you decide to do the dance studio is it kind of just that natural progression or you wanted to transition to somewhere it's a bit less travel or kind of how did you get into the almost a bit more of the business side of running your own dance studio i like money don't we all and and dancers don't don't make that much i'm sure they make more than than when i was working at that back in the day um i if i remember correctly my salary as a ballet dancer for a regional ballet company that would give me a 20 week a year contract my salary was around 110 a week which was fine as long as i lived with my grandparents in palm beach in their lovely condo but it wasn't fine for making a life of my own disney paid a little bit better but it's still not it's not a lifetime career it's fun there's nothing like getting applause there's nothing like being in the spotlight but it's not and it's tough it's tough work it's physically demanding you have to be in peak condition 24 7 365 and it's not a lifetime thing that you're gonna do um you're you're gonna age out at about 30 if you're a star and you're a hard worker and you really are passionate about it you might age out at 40 or 50 but still it's not a forever career and like i said i do like money and i started doing the math and i had always admired my teachers growing up and i thought well i could do this and i started putting pens paper as we used to do um fingers to keyboard and i started sorting out just the the nuts and bolts of a brick and mortar business what would the rent cost what would um utilities cost what would building out the space cost what would insurance music rights who would i hire and i just planned it all out it's really i not that hard i i think whether you work for someone else or work for yourself you can take a creative position and you can ask for advice you can look things up but you can make a plan and and so that's what i did and it turned out to be a good one no and i think that there is a definitely a lot of a lot to the wisdom there in the sense that to your point you can either work for someone else you can work her in either way you can still have creativity you can enjoy you can or take it in the direction and for me at least you know working for yourself you get to have some of that creative passion and and have that greater control over the direction that you um that you were maybe a lot of people are looking for so now you did that and you took the dance that you know did the dance studio in your school and you actually drew it into several locations um and then at one point you decided to take a step back a bit and do a remote working position was it just more of hey i got burned out or is a lot of work or i'm wanted to take you know take a rest or want something easier kind of what made you decide because again it's a bit of a jump so they went from biology into kind of more of the dance and then from dancing to doing user or writing users guides at a remote position how did you kind of what prompted that to transition well i think every stage in life is different devin and and just like you you you may have a friend who's your best friend in kindergarten and they might and they might be kind of your person that you run with when you're 14 but maybe when you're 30 they're not they might still be your best friend but they might not different different things in life fit at different times and i think different careers are good for for different times when i turned 40 i had my second child and i decided that i didn't want to raise her the same way i'd raise my son my son was a dance studio kid he would come there after school and that's where he would do his homework and sometimes we had a nanny that picked him up sometimes his dad picked him up but very often he was at the dance school and i would be finished working at 9 or 10 at night i did have other staff obviously working i wasn't everywhere at all the locations all at once but it still was pretty hands-on for me and my intention was to to scale back my involvement in that and just leave it to staff and eventually sell it to one of them or have them take over but i was looking for something interesting that i could do at home i didn't want to raise my second child where i'm giving my attention to everybody else's children during those after school hours and not my own so i thought i'm just gonna be a part-time worker and more of a full-time mommy if i don't do it now it's it's not gonna happen so that's that was what was right for me at the time no i think that makes sense and sometimes you're saying as you pointed out different times or periods of times of life you're looking for different things and then different things are exciting or fit what you're what the lifestyle you're looking for and i definitely get you know as you're looking to spend a bit more time with kids to take a step back not be working so many crazy hours and be able to focus on that a bit it makes sense um and then i i think that you mentioned you were uh you i think due to a degree you continued to run the dance schools um and you also transitioned as that other company that you're doing the user guys for um got acquired you became a consultant and then uh you know things kind of continued to grow and again as you were looking into hitting a different phase in life you had your mother that got alzheimer's and you had to slow down and help her out is that right that's correct uh things kind of morphed over time i did get what i was after as far as staying home with my infant daughter and then when she was six or seven and she herself was in school we had a good after-school nanny and i was asked by the one company that i had started with as well as several others in that field that i had started consulting for to actually do on-site systems integrations training and it tucked into another love of mine which is travel so sometimes i would be at home planning things writing things communicating with customers but other times i would be on the road whether it was at the fox studio down the street here in greenville or wadc in new york or kuwait tv in kuwait or directv in california i would get to fly and go and help them set up and at that point as my daughter got older that became okay it was fine until then uh 20 i think it was uh 2000 2009 i assumed the care of my mother after after my dad passed away and i don't think there's really anything in life that could have prepared me for that it's it's it's different it was rewarding but challenging more challenging than kids and it really took i didn't have a guide for that i really need and she did require full-time care we went through some that worked and some that didn't and um so so i just kind of stepped back from everything i kept fingers in a little bit but i actively tried to disengage from most things it was time for another reset no i think that you know again almost a bit of that reset but a different point in life you're saying okay one thing is definitely makes sense or important to take care of family and to help out your parents as they get elderly but on the other hand you know as now they you know pass on and they're no longer with you first of all it's it's always a big reset and cause or pause or cause for a bit of pause and kind of reassessing but then uh two is kind of saying okay now that that phase is you know of stepping back and taking here the parent is over what do i do next and so how did you decide kind of now as your mother's passed on and you're saying okay doing or getting back about i'm in the workforce looking for a change you know where did or how did you land on the vp of marketing as far as the business in other words you've done a lot of things for yourself and doing your own businesses what made you decide to go and kind of uh do uh work for another business well it is a bit backwards isn't it a lot of people start working for someone else which is actually a good idea i i don't think i wish to do everything over again but if i could there is a lot of value in working for somebody from whom you can learn so after everything kids business dance schools consulting flying all over the world taking care of mom honestly devin i was a bit tired and i did want that luxury that people are sometimes looking for when they don't want to be entrepreneurs i was looking for somebody something where it would be very clear what i was supposed to do every day and very clear what i was going to get out of it and i've never really looked at entrepreneurialism as a particular risk some people do and that's frightful i think for some people i really think working for somebody else is a bit of a risk you could get fired any day or the business could go out of business any i personally i don't think it's more of a risk than working for for yourself but i didn't want to go through that phase where you hustle and hustle and hustle to get something going i was tired and i also felt that there's something magical about being part of something that's bigger than yourself and maybe finally in life i learned to be a little bit humble i decided that there would be value in in learning what much larger not just low seven figure businesses or high six-figure businesses are doing or anything that i can bootstrap or whatever what really large companies do how they do it how they scale so i wanted to learn i want i wanted it to be i won't say easy but i wanted to it to be clear-cut and a company that i had been consulting for a little bit offered me a full-time position i had to move to canada to take it which was fun and fine and then to grow further um i several years after that i accepted a position with the company i'm currently with and what fascinates me about the company i'm with right now chiron which makes software and hardware for live television broadcast is that even though it's a 60 year old company there have been a lot of restructuring and there's a lot of new products so it is fairly a lot of ways like a startup but a very big one so there's a lot of opportunity for me there i've i've had um the chance to use my entrepreneurial chops and i've built a team from nothing to about six people and more are coming and i have um been very instrumental at a high level in making product suggestions marketing suggestions so right now it's it's suiting me just fine so i i can't remember did that answer your question it answered a whole bunch of questions no that was great so um so now i think the last thing that we chatted on just a bit and that kind of brings us up to where you're at today but now you kind of mention hey looking in the future i still feel like there's maybe that one last entrepreneurial endeavor or something that i you know last hurrah or right off of the sunset or whatever you want to call it but do you have any ideas to what that might be in the future is it still unknown and you say have that the desire that some point and still going to hit that or do you have any sneak peaks as to what that might be it's not defined enough to give you a sneak peek and there are two very different things on the table one thing because before we had our first conversation devin i was thinking about i i did some thinking i thought how i'm gonna answer his questions what does it even mean to be an entrepreneur so i looked in the dictionary uh and the definition is a person who pro no an entrepreneur is a person who organized and operates a business or businesses taking greater than normal financial risks and i think in this conversation i've already touched on a person who operates a business well that's the creation and i think you can create within a company you can create in a small business or you can create something really really big as far as financial risk i don't 100 buy that i get what the definition means but i i think there are ways to do it with with raising startup money that's not risking your own house and the food on your table and i also as i just said a little while ago i think working for someone else is a financial risk whether you realize it or not but the third part that i don't think that dictionary definition touches on is scale and when we think of a truly successful entrepreneur we think of somebody who scaled something much much bigger than themselves i think so far my personal entrepreneurial ventures have been more in the line of what i would call self-employment rather than a full-on huge entrepreneur and and that's that's fine i have scaled a little bit beyond myself as far as having employees and multiple locations but i would like to do something that's that's that really scales that's that's really big and i think in this day and age of designing apps that suit a need and pricing them in a way that will serve many many people that's that's one possibility the other possibility is do do i really even want to go there do i maybe just want to do something that is not scaled at all that that could scale but not in that way just me do i want to write a book and if i sell it that's great if i don't well then i'll sort that out when when the time comes so so it will either be some kind of app that serves a lot of people or it will be a book all right well those both sound like they could be exciting maybe you'll have to do an app about or a book about writing an app or an app that writes a book or something but it sounds like it'll be a fun adventure and uh definitely uh or interested in seeing how it turns out so with that is we're now kind of caught up to a pres the president even a bit looking to the future as we wrap up the the podcast i always have two questions i ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i was asked is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it oh that was pretty clear and i think i i told you it was pretty clear when we had our chat a few days ago so you know i own some dance schools i was approached by a couple who owned a dance school in a nearby town very small town and they wanted to sell it and my ego made the decision instead of my brain i did my due diligence as one should but i ignored it i i looked at demographics okay if i want to dance school what do i need i need kids and i need people who can pay for lessons so i ignored the i didn't completely ignore it oh and i also need a staff and i thought well i can do this it's going to work the same way as all my other dance schools there are enough kids there although there's was not a massive population there there were there were enough in my due diligence i found that 80 of them were on freelance programs that should have been the only red flag that i needed um another red flag was when i asked for the financials of the business i was not granted full disclosure and then once i assumed control of the business i found that even what i had seen was not really indicative of the whole picture i should have dug deeper what i should not have done was oh boy i can be the lady that owns four instead of three and this will be easy well i was wrong and i sh and isn't this a cute like town where i can have a cute quaint business well it was not cute at all and it caused a lot of heartache i still have some very good friends from that adventure but uh it cost me dearly so i would say do your due diligence don't let your ego get the best of you if it doesn't look right doesn't smell right walk away no and i think that that's a great thing you know sometimes to you almost to your point you know you get excited about the opportunity and the idea and hey it'll be great to expand and you know this is it'll be fun and those type of things and sometimes you just want to skip over that due diligence and yet oftentimes most of the time the people i hear about when you skip that due diligence is when you get and you just love the excitement take over is when you make the mistakes and if you slow the process down do a bit more research and review things oftentimes not always because you still make plenty of mistakes and everybody does but you can avoid some of those mistakes so i think that's a an easy mistake to make with a great takeaway as well second question i always ask is along your journey or sorry not a long dream but if you're talking to somebody that's going on their journey and they were getting ready to start doing or they're just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them i would tell them to be cautiously fearless i would tell them that there is nothing stopping them they have as much right as much ability to do this as anyone else i've met some people that maybe their iq isn't the highest maybe their family doesn't have the most money but they were just determined and they did it people will help you if you ask for help don't be afraid to get advice don't be afraid to listen to good advice sometimes you have to go in your own corner and plan other times you have to listen and ask and where there's a will there's a way no i think that that's a lot of great takeaways and i think the one that a lot of times is people are shy or bashful or otherwise don't want to ask for advice they don't want to or impose on others or something along that nature and yet most time people are fairly willing to help you they want you to succeed and if there's an ability that doesn't cost them tons and tons of time and money but they can help along the way and give a bit of advice or direction or guidance they're definitely willing to do so so that's a great uh great takeaway to to make sure to ask for that advice and that help as you go along your journey so well if people want to reach if people want to reach out to you they want to contact you they want to be a customer they want to be in client they want to be an employee of your next venture whether it's a book or an app they want to be an investor of your next venture whether it's a book or an app they want to be a your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach you contact you find out more i am on linkedin carol bettencourt and i am available at my email carol.betancourt.cb gmail.com professionally for the company that i work for now i am available at carol bettencourt at chiron c-h-y-r-o-n.com and any of those are fine i'm happy to chat with anybody who's interested all right well i definitely encourage people to reach out contact you find out more and uh and uh get involved with your next venture whenever when it comes about and in the meantime check your or work out with your the current company you're doing so well thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners and if you have your own journey to tell we'd love to share your journey so feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share and leave us a review because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes and these great journeys because we want to make sure to help as many entrepreneurs and startups as we can and in that note we if you ever need help with your patents or trademarks or anything else your intellectual property or your business feel free to go to a strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat thank you again carol for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last my pleasure devin thank you you

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"You need to know enough about finance to be able to speak the language. I relate it to communication. If I am going to go to a foreign country if I know how to speak the language, I am going to have a much better trip than if I have no idea how to speak the language. That does not mean that I have to be a professional speaker or that I have to be a literary genius in that language. But, I have to have a basic level of literacy."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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 no you do you need to know enough about finance to be able to speak the language and and i relate it to just communication like if i'm going to go to a foreign country if i know how to speak the language i'm going to have a much better trip than if i have no idea how to speak language and that doesn't mean that i've got to be like a professional speaker i've got to be you know a literary genius in that language but i've got to have a basic level of literacy [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat now today we have another great guest on the podcast ryan murray and uh ryan started uh as entrepreneurship in uh pre-high school and uh he'll maybe give a little insight there but then really when he got married launched a catering business did that for about three years i've decided to spend some time learning how to run a business as opposed to just diving into a business and so went and got a degree in finance from westminster um and then also got an mba and uh with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and then wondered what he wanted to do after graduation so did a few internships while i was going through all of that but then sir quickly realized that he enjoyed working with entrepreneurs and so got into uh doing a bit of more mentoring coaching training and those type of things i'm looking at marketing and management and money and other keys that will uh help help individuals and entrepreneurs and i built the training program um did a few different programs and i've been doing that since uh 2014 and been growing the business ever since so with that much is introduction welcome on the podcast ryan wow thank you i appreciate it so i gave a much more condensed shortened version of what is a much longer journey so why don't we unpack that a bit so tell us how how your entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey got started and then uh we'll talk from there i i was gonna say you know i feel like when those people you know they get in a car accident they're like my life flash before my eyes i'm like wow listening to you my life flashed before my eyes and so no i i appreciate the introduction it it was actually don't die on us yet let's keep you with it [Laughter] but uh yeah my my entrepreneurial journey uh i i don't know that it uh was too obscure from what a lot of other entrepreneurs have done is you know they kind of they kind of start out at a young age with this idea of of entrepreneurship me personally i always say that entrepreneurship is a terminal disease once you have it you're never going to be cured from it and you know you might go on pause for a minute but you always kind of come back to it and and so when i when i was a kid i always kind of dabbled in in different things and a little bit more than you know the typical lemonade stand and uh yeah and so by the time i uh you know finished high school and was getting into uh getting into college i decided to launch this this catering company and i remember there was there was this pivotal moment for me when uh it was i was gearing up for an arts festival uh you know i was gonna be one of the food booths at this arts festival and it was a little bit after midnight uh i was still sitting there prepping food and needed to be up at five in the morning to get ready to to set up and i'm thinking myself i'm like it's after midnight i'm still working hard and i haven't even started yet like you know the day starts tomorrow at 5am and i'm already dead tired and it was a moment where i started thinking there's a better way to do this you know when when i was running my catering company so i did that for about three years and you know i mean technically i made it i turned a profit every single year and so you know by by some definitions you could say wow you know that that success is you know you're able to turn a profit in those first few years i'm like you know what yeah sure but there wasn't there wasn't growth i was working way too hard for my dollars i wasn't counting my hours if i would have given myself any sort of hourly wage above you know a buck 17 i wouldn't have been profitable and you know so it it just wasn't the right mix and and that pivotal pivotal moment uh allowed me to really think about entrepreneurship as more of a an art and less of a just dive in and start swimming so i decided to actually learn what i was doing and uh i went to westminster college and uh at first i was gonna just you won't get definitely get into westminster and that was there a tipping point in other words so you're working hard and i get that and first of all a lot of times you're saying man i work a lot of hours for not a lot of pay or you also tend to get burned out and you're saying you know this isn't where i want my life to go in the long run but was there kind of a tipping point or something to say was it just kind of slow transition to where one day to say no i'd like to or look at something else or is there a tipping point or kind of what causes you know kind of that going over going along for a period of time and saying i want to switch yeah yeah great question so for me the first year that i went out i just made all my mistakes and i sort of had in the back my mind that you know you're supposed to make mistakes everyone tells you as an entrepreneur it's just you make mistakes and you just keep on moving forward right and so i made all my mistakes and uh and i thought to myself okay my second year's gonna be better and and i got into my second year and man i had improved on so many things i i had refined my recipes i dialed in kind of who i was targeting in terms of customers uh you know i had dropped some of the events that were not very very good for us you know and i i kind of moved to better events um you know i i had figured up figured out how to do faster setups faster tear downs and and just really you know really kind of refine the process and at the end of year two there was not a significant difference between year one and year two like in terms of the bottom line it came out about the same and i thought to myself okay i need to make some you know some dramatic changes i i shouldn't just try and you know incrementally improve like i need to really shift things up and so so i went and you know kind of made some of these big shifts and at the end of year three there wasn't you know there there wasn't much change from year one two or three and and that to me was when i knew what i was doing wasn't making any sense because you know when when you're an entrepreneur there's something to be said about working hard and you know being willing to put in the long hours and and chase a dream but there's also something to be said about okay at some point you're not on the right road and you need to have the humility inside to recognize that so for me it was year three i remember talking to an entrepreneur once that they had gone seven years they owned a small boutique retail business on on main street and they had gone seven years and had never turned a profit in seven years and i just thought to myself what are you doing i mean at some point you got the wrong business model and so you know for me it was it was three years and i had had you know i had had a couple a couple moments like that one where i was just you know flat out exhausted thinking why am i doing this and you know realizing that it wasn't working correctly but it was really at the end of year three that i said you know what i've tried a lot of things i've experimented with a lot of things i'm on the wrong road it it's time to just you know pull off to the side and ask for directions hypothetically speaking you know and so so so that that's kind of what i did is uh is i i thought to myself there there's no growth happening here uh i'm beating my head against the wall sure i could go around and tell people yeah i own a business and you know kind of brag about it a little bit but deep down inside i knew that it wasn't what i wanted it wasn't getting me anywhere you know i wasn't quitting my day job over it that was for sure and uh and so it wasn't uh you know it wasn't right it was not the right fit i kind of think that that makes sense i mean you're going along and you see all those and i you know now i'll give it the the caveat is i think you get into your own business and you a lot of times you you have those thoughts no matter how hard or how well maybe at some point if you reach to a level of success but for most startups and small businesses saying you know is this worth it should i go back to just working for someone else or should i go do my own thing or you know that but i think that you know you also get that point of you have to look back and assess and say is there if i really see this as a long-term plan is this really what i want to do am i passionate about it or do i want to go to different directions so it sounds like you hit that tipping point so now you're saying okay i'm gonna go back to school and learn a little bit more about business and you went into finance and then went and got the mba and so you know coming out of those programs it sounded like you were still saying what do i want to do when you're trying to figure that out as far as now what do i do with this education or how do i position myself to something where it is sustainable that i do enjoy so how did you kind of as you're getting those degrees and coming out of it how did you figure out what you wanted to do yeah so uh for me it really was third time's a charm uh so you know the current business that i have marketing management and money um we we actually you know we've been going eight years strong and it's it's it's a great business model that works for me uh this is the third entrepreneurial attempt uh you know that that i took and so the first one was the catering company three years and i'm just like no that's not going to work the second one was kind of interesting so i had gone to school and you know i studied finance and i figured okay finance is the language of business now i'm going to know what i need to do there's a huge difference between learning corporate finance in you know in a college setting versus what startups actually do you know i'll just put that that little caveat out there but uh and you know and then i went and got an mba with emphasis in entrepreneurship and figured okay now i've got some education behind me let's do this again and i went and uh and i i actually went into very similar to what i what i'm doing now with my business uh but the the whole emphasis was on the marketing side of things and you know we were gonna do some marketing consulting that was supported by digital advertisement and uh we we had kind of an interesting uh i i had a really unique experience that that taught me a lot so we contracted with a company out of pittsburgh to manage all of the back end for the digital advertisements that we were going to do and so we were we were working with businesses putting together some you know digital advertisement packages and we had this company out of pittsburgh that was doing the back end support for us and it was interesting because as i was working with them all of a sudden i got to this point that i'm like uh something's not working you know like there's there's a serious problem and and i went and talked with the uh you know i talked with this company and there's like no everything's good on our end you know i'm like there's a serious problem serious problem a couple weeks go by and i'm like look there's got to be something wrong because this is just not working and so they dig into a little bit they're like oh we did a major coding error that broke everything i'm like oh yeah i'm glad that this is casual for you because it completely you know just ruined the the business that i was going after and you know and they wouldn't do anything about it and you know and so i ended up having to shut that business down because of a single coding error and that taught me to you know kind of like back up my core competencies you know if there's something that i profess to do that you know i'm going to have expertise in it needs to be something a little bit closer to home rather than you know going halfway across the united states you know relying on a on a partnership that i barely formed you know two months prior and so you know when i launched into it the third time i really went into it saying okay what are my strengths and i'm like you know what i'm really good at i'm really good at training like i i can work with companies and i can go in and i can get them to perform at a higher level like like that that's my specialty and so i built everything around what what i was good at because everything else it wasn't it wasn't what i was strong at it was stuff that i thought there was opportunity in you know i'm like oh yeah digital advertisement that's this is huge you know you look at today with how big you know pay-per-click is and amazon and all these huge players that are making you know billions of dollars off of all this advertisement but it wasn't my specialty and so even though there was tons of opportunity it didn't make sense for me and so i i guess one of the things that that i learned and i didn't learn this in college i learned this you know out doing it was to stick with your strengths you know understand where you fit in and where you're really good and leverage that and and that requires you to have a little bit of humility and say you know what there are things that i don't do i mean i'll do marketing trainings and this is this this took me a while to understand you know like i'll go in and train small businesses on how to do their marketing successfully but they'll come to me and they'll be like okay i want to talk about social media and digital advertisement and i'll just flat out tell them i'm not your guy you know what i will talk about how that fits into your marketing strategy but you need someone who has that technical expertise and and i i felt like because i did these marketing trainings that i had to know everything there was to know about marketing i'm like no no i need to understand how to put together strategy because that's what i teach you know and so i stuck to my strengths i stuck to what i was good at and that's how i've had a successful company for eight plus years you know is just sticking with what what makes sense and what yeah i think that makes sense now one question i'll ask is in one sense you're moving out of entrepreneurship and on the other and you're in other words you're helping other entrepreneurs be successful which is a bit of a different approach on the other hand you're still having to run a business you're still having to find clients you're still having to provide that service and otherwise assist them and so you know in a sense you're still a startup you're still small business so what do you think was the difference or the the shift was it the hey i'm now more you know enjoying passionate or whatever you know whatever the buzzword you want to use but you know that there's something there that this is what i enjoy doing and so that now the aspects of startups and small business entrepreneurship is something i i tend to enjoy was it more of the shift and the type of business or service you were providing or kind of what or what aspect was it that lended it to being more successful within that given avenue when some of the other entrepreneurial endeavors you found that it wasn't what you're enjoying yeah you know so i don't know that i would use the word enjoy um that's kind of an interesting thing uh you know like i uh my wife asked me just the other day she's like so do you enjoy what you do and i'm like well i'm bribed with money and you know like if if the money stopped i would stop doing i would i would you know i would spend my time like out hiking around because that's that's what i really and like you don't have to pay me to go hiking but you do have to pay me if you want me to come and provide my services and so so i'm like if you look at enjoyment i'm like do i enjoy helping businesses absolutely do i enjoy making a difference absolutely you know that that to me um i i guess and and i'll i'll get back to your questions in just a second but what really what really gets me going is when i can sit down uh with a company you know so i i had this opportunity where i you know i i had uh this company attend one of it's our growth by the numbers training it's our finance training one of our more popular and they they sat through this training and they came up to me at the lunch break and they said i just want you to know that i've done tons of financial trainings this is the most relevant that i've ever seen for small businesses and i thought it was a huge compliment i'm like wow this is wonderful that you know it made a difference for them and then at the end of the training they came to me and they said hey could you help us implement some of this stuff and i'm like oh okay yeah you know what are you thinking they're like what are you doing now like oh wow you're serious and they're like yeah we literally want you to come check out our business now and so i'm like well let me let me wrap up with the training finish up what i'm doing you know and so i went over to their business and i sat down with them for a couple hours and literally in a couple hours i saved them between about ten to twenty thousand dollars of you know a simple mistake that they were making and you know and and i walked out of there like feeling like one i you know well learned what they paid me and two i made a huge difference for them because this was ongoing that they were going to see these savings you know in their business and so that to me is is really where i kind of found my groove and where i found my passion now now tying that back into the question that you were asking is i needed to realize that that was where i needed to be um you know like i i love one one of my skill sets is being able to relate well with what is happening in a small business you know being able to understand what what some of the real challenges and the real problems are and and so i developed training models around that you know trying to keep it very real and authentic and and not so much shark tank style where i'm like yeah sure there's nothing wrong with shark tank but you got to realize that that's like a really small minority of businesses they're going to fit the shark tank model the majority of businesses are guys that you know they they run a quick lube joint they they run a restaurant they they run a bookkeeping service and and it's not flashy it's not exciting but they still are entrepreneurs and they still have passion and i've been able to connect with with those types of businesses and so for me for my own business we realized that our target market was the the real entrepreneur as we like to call it you know the the people who make up 80 to 90 percent of the small businesses you know across the united states that they're just they're just doing their business they're just out there you know doing what they're what they're good at and they need a little bit of support complementing the you know the the money side of things the management side of things the marketing side of things you know and that's where we really shine is coming in we don't we don't consult you know i i've done consulting before i've enjoyed consulting um i'm i'm pretty good at consulting but that's not you know that's that's not the that's not the mix that you know that those are not my secret herbs and spices no and i think that makes uh that makes perfect sense and you know what i don't know you raise an interesting question which is i tend to use the word enjoy in a sense if i had unlimited funds would i come in and work i'm i still might i mean i i have a sense of i love to build things and to grow things but there is a point of would there be a trade-off to where i may not work as much or i may adjust that sure but i think that there is a level of enjoyment you can still find within a business or a startup first or maybe it's a relative term in other words hey i don't like working for someone else and if i'm going to by necessity of life i have to earn an income and i have to pay the bills and if i'm going to do something relative to working for someone else or doing this other job over here i enjoy it much more now maybe i'm not as saying as is what my passion about or what i would do with unlimited funds so that is a fair point or an interesting question and and this is something that i like to bring up with entrepreneurs because a lot of people they love what they do and so they automatically want to turn it into a business and i'm like there's a difference between a hobby and a business you can be going through the exact same actions but i've seen so many people hate their passions once they turn it into a business and i'm like you got to understand like why are you why are you wanting to turn this into a business you know is is it that you really want to be an entrepreneur or is it that you're just super passionate about that and some things you know you see this a lot with artists like my wife she she's an amazing singer a phenomenal singer and you know she gets asked all the time to sing and she does like these community concerts and different things like that and she's kind of a little bit of a local celebrity and she always talks about oh i want to go big i'm like um do you want to go big because you're having a lot of fun right now like you really enjoy it and i'm not sure that you would enjoy it if you were you know having to travel constantly to you know to sing to a different audience all the time i'm like you know maybe you've got a good thing maybe you should just leave it a hobby and and and be okay with that but other things you know the passion comes in growing a business i mean there's a lot of satisfaction in providing you know great jobs for people and you know providing great products and services like that that has its own level of satisfaction so yeah it's and i agree and you know that we and that's an area where you can chat i'm sure for quite a long time in the sense that you know it's interesting i i left i worked for some very large law firms over the the space of my career before starting my own and i always think you know i always think well you know most attorneys is hey i want to go and just become a huge behemoth law firm and that's my passion and when i start a law firm and i think you know what growth is good and i want to make a good income and i want to be sustainable on the other hand do i want to become a huge law firm to where you have hundreds of attorneys and you're having multiple offices does that sound fun and i think to your point is sometimes that doesn't sound fun and it's you know the it would lose uh what is does make things enjoyable or what makes it fun to come into the office you would lose some of that so i think that's a fair point and we can now we could talk on that all day and i'm sure it would be it maybe we'll have to have you back on for a you know an expert episode and we can dive into that a bit more um but in the meantime is as we're getting back a bit to the the journey and which is happens to be the folks of the podcast um so we bring ourselves up to you know kind of where you're at today and how you're helping other businesses and how you find that that's where you're kind of your sweet spot or the the area that at least i would say enjoy it however we uh defied that enjoy it i mean don't get me wrong i love what i do but you know so now as we've got to uh caught up to a bit of the the present you know i always ask you questions as we talk through the journey as we reach the present portion of the journey which is so along your journey as you've now come up to where you're at today what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it so you know i don't know that i could pinpoint it down to one worst business decision but there's been a recurring theme and that is um like who you partner with and so so first off i think that every business has partnerships whether you're in a formal partnership or whether you just have you know people who they might be mentors they might be advisors they might be a spouse you know but you've got to be so selective with who you partner with and so all of my you know regrets business related i can always pinpoint down to a partnership that i wish that i either would not have been in at all or i wish that i would have not taken as you know seriously as i did you know when i talk about that that second business that i did that fell apart because i jumped into you know the the company that we were working with they weren't a bad company there was nothing wrong with the company they just weren't qualified to do the level of work that we wanted done and so i formed a partnership with them thinking that they were just as excited about my success as i was i'm like no they weren't they were collecting a paycheck and you know i was just i was paying them for a service that was a little bit over their heads and and so you know i i i look at at like who who do i partner with and and are those the right people and you know i could say the the the flip side of that is the best moves that i've ever made in business have always been connecting with the right person and that can be a formal partner that could be connecting with the right customer you know i mean like i i've got this one customer she is amazing and i look at how much business has grown because of her like she goes and and just you know every time that i've done a training for her she'll tell you know three other people and and like just i get these quality contracts that are all coming from her and i'm like that's the type of partnership that i want to have so to me i i think that we we don't recognize how critical to our success partnerships are and just the right partnerships they they make your business the wrong partnerships they break oh and i think that that's an absolute a great takeaway and i think that one you know one thing you hit on is that oftentimes you think people either whether it's partner and employees that are coming into the business that they're going to work every bit as hard as i am and they're going to be as passionate and they're going to love it and they're going to just work the nights and the weekends or whatever it takes to be successful then you get in and say no they're not like and that's not a bad thing it's not that you're you're probably putting a unrealistic expectation on them to say they're not going to be the same as a person that starts a business they may not have that and some people are there you know and it sounds like you know you say they're for a paycheck and that's not a bad thing they're if they're doing a good job they're providing a lot of work yeah they're doing a great job they're helping you build your business that's what they're there for and you should just recognize that but i think that when you then change that from is an employee or is it you know a contract or something else you as a partner you got to make sure that those are the people you really are or pat that are going to be worthwhile to make and or they're going to be passionate and otherwise and you that you want to take on a partner put aside that whether they're a good fit some people and i'm probably in that boat i don't want a lot of partners i don't know if i want any partners just because not that they're bad but i like to be in control i'd like to say hey i want to decide the direction for my business i want to maybe be able to make the decisions i don't want to have to do decisions by committee i want to know if we if we do well then it's because i mean if we don't do well i have no one else to play with myself and on and on and so i think that you raise a lot of interesting points with that second question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you'd give them so i i know that i kind of uh downplayed this a little bit and so i'm glad you're asking this question to give me a chance to uh to uh just kind of clarify uh what i stated earlier with i i went to school and i got this degree in corporate finance and i said you know corporate finance and small business finance you know they're so unrelated however finance is the language of business and one of the things that i think is absolutely critical is every entrepreneur i in my mind i put no exception to this i don't care what you know i mean you you're uh you're a legal firm right and you're a legal firm who does a podcast so you could argue you're like well i don't necessarily need to have you know this this understanding financials because that's not what i do and i'm like no you do you need to know enough about finance to be able to speak the language and and i relate it to just communication like if i'm going to go to a foreign country if i know how to speak the language i'm going to have a much better trip than if i have no idea how to speak language and that doesn't mean that i've got to be like a professional speaker i've got to be you know a literary genius in that language but i've got to have a basic level of literacy and i think that's one of the mistakes that entrepreneurs make is they assume that because they're an amazing you know uh web developer that they don't have to worry about finance i'm like no finance is the language of business you need to speak enough that that you can see what's happening and and know where it's going and so the advice that i would give kind of get summed up in if you don't have a basic understanding of small business finance get one and and spend the time reviewing your financials and and just being you know being current it doesn't actually take that much time but it gets ignored by so many entrepreneurs and so don't ignore the finance learn what you need to learn you'll be so much happier with whatever business endeavor you're in oh and i think that that's absolutely great great piece of advice and great takeaway so well now as we wrap up with the podcast if people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to hire you they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more so uh email is going to be the best ryan at marketing management marketingmanagementmoney.com you can check out our podcast it's marketing management and money uh or you can go to our website marketingmanagementmoney.com and check out the different trainings that we offer the different programs that we have we would love to love to connect and uh love to meet new people who who are interested in the entrepreneurial journey all right well i definitely encourage everybody to reach out connect and find out more and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you just go to inventiveguest.com why to be on the show um a couple more things make sure to listen make sure to subscribe make sure to share make sure to leave a review because what we want to do is make sure that everybody finds out about all these awesome journeys and they can find helpful on their own journey and last but not least you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat well thank you again ryan and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you [Music] you

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Episode #319 
Understand Finance 
w/ Ryan Murray
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"You need to know enough about finance to be able to speak the language. I relate it to communication. If I am going to go to a foreign country if I know how to speak the language, I am going to have a much better trip than if I have no idea how to speak the language. That does not mean that I have to be a professional speaker or that I have to be a literary genius in that language. But, I have to have a basic level of literacy."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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 no you do you need to know enough about finance to be able to speak the language and and i relate it to just communication like if i'm going to go to a foreign country if i know how to speak the language i'm going to have a much better trip than if i have no idea how to speak language and that doesn't mean that i've got to be like a professional speaker i've got to be you know a literary genius in that language but i've got to have a basic level of literacy [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat now today we have another great guest on the podcast ryan murray and uh ryan started uh as entrepreneurship in uh pre-high school and uh he'll maybe give a little insight there but then really when he got married launched a catering business did that for about three years i've decided to spend some time learning how to run a business as opposed to just diving into a business and so went and got a degree in finance from westminster um and then also got an mba and uh with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and then wondered what he wanted to do after graduation so did a few internships while i was going through all of that but then sir quickly realized that he enjoyed working with entrepreneurs and so got into uh doing a bit of more mentoring coaching training and those type of things i'm looking at marketing and management and money and other keys that will uh help help individuals and entrepreneurs and i built the training program um did a few different programs and i've been doing that since uh 2014 and been growing the business ever since so with that much is introduction welcome on the podcast ryan wow thank you i appreciate it so i gave a much more condensed shortened version of what is a much longer journey so why don't we unpack that a bit so tell us how how your entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey got started and then uh we'll talk from there i i was gonna say you know i feel like when those people you know they get in a car accident they're like my life flash before my eyes i'm like wow listening to you my life flashed before my eyes and so no i i appreciate the introduction it it was actually don't die on us yet let's keep you with it [Laughter] but uh yeah my my entrepreneurial journey uh i i don't know that it uh was too obscure from what a lot of other entrepreneurs have done is you know they kind of they kind of start out at a young age with this idea of of entrepreneurship me personally i always say that entrepreneurship is a terminal disease once you have it you're never going to be cured from it and you know you might go on pause for a minute but you always kind of come back to it and and so when i when i was a kid i always kind of dabbled in in different things and a little bit more than you know the typical lemonade stand and uh yeah and so by the time i uh you know finished high school and was getting into uh getting into college i decided to launch this this catering company and i remember there was there was this pivotal moment for me when uh it was i was gearing up for an arts festival uh you know i was gonna be one of the food booths at this arts festival and it was a little bit after midnight uh i was still sitting there prepping food and needed to be up at five in the morning to get ready to to set up and i'm thinking myself i'm like it's after midnight i'm still working hard and i haven't even started yet like you know the day starts tomorrow at 5am and i'm already dead tired and it was a moment where i started thinking there's a better way to do this you know when when i was running my catering company so i did that for about three years and you know i mean technically i made it i turned a profit every single year and so you know by by some definitions you could say wow you know that that success is you know you're able to turn a profit in those first few years i'm like you know what yeah sure but there wasn't there wasn't growth i was working way too hard for my dollars i wasn't counting my hours if i would have given myself any sort of hourly wage above you know a buck 17 i wouldn't have been profitable and you know so it it just wasn't the right mix and and that pivotal pivotal moment uh allowed me to really think about entrepreneurship as more of a an art and less of a just dive in and start swimming so i decided to actually learn what i was doing and uh i went to westminster college and uh at first i was gonna just you won't get definitely get into westminster and that was there a tipping point in other words so you're working hard and i get that and first of all a lot of times you're saying man i work a lot of hours for not a lot of pay or you also tend to get burned out and you're saying you know this isn't where i want my life to go in the long run but was there kind of a tipping point or something to say was it just kind of slow transition to where one day to say no i'd like to or look at something else or is there a tipping point or kind of what causes you know kind of that going over going along for a period of time and saying i want to switch yeah yeah great question so for me the first year that i went out i just made all my mistakes and i sort of had in the back my mind that you know you're supposed to make mistakes everyone tells you as an entrepreneur it's just you make mistakes and you just keep on moving forward right and so i made all my mistakes and uh and i thought to myself okay my second year's gonna be better and and i got into my second year and man i had improved on so many things i i had refined my recipes i dialed in kind of who i was targeting in terms of customers uh you know i had dropped some of the events that were not very very good for us you know and i i kind of moved to better events um you know i i had figured up figured out how to do faster setups faster tear downs and and just really you know really kind of refine the process and at the end of year two there was not a significant difference between year one and year two like in terms of the bottom line it came out about the same and i thought to myself okay i need to make some you know some dramatic changes i i shouldn't just try and you know incrementally improve like i need to really shift things up and so so i went and you know kind of made some of these big shifts and at the end of year three there wasn't you know there there wasn't much change from year one two or three and and that to me was when i knew what i was doing wasn't making any sense because you know when when you're an entrepreneur there's something to be said about working hard and you know being willing to put in the long hours and and chase a dream but there's also something to be said about okay at some point you're not on the right road and you need to have the humility inside to recognize that so for me it was year three i remember talking to an entrepreneur once that they had gone seven years they owned a small boutique retail business on on main street and they had gone seven years and had never turned a profit in seven years and i just thought to myself what are you doing i mean at some point you got the wrong business model and so you know for me it was it was three years and i had had you know i had had a couple a couple moments like that one where i was just you know flat out exhausted thinking why am i doing this and you know realizing that it wasn't working correctly but it was really at the end of year three that i said you know what i've tried a lot of things i've experimented with a lot of things i'm on the wrong road it it's time to just you know pull off to the side and ask for directions hypothetically speaking you know and so so so that that's kind of what i did is uh is i i thought to myself there there's no growth happening here uh i'm beating my head against the wall sure i could go around and tell people yeah i own a business and you know kind of brag about it a little bit but deep down inside i knew that it wasn't what i wanted it wasn't getting me anywhere you know i wasn't quitting my day job over it that was for sure and uh and so it wasn't uh you know it wasn't right it was not the right fit i kind of think that that makes sense i mean you're going along and you see all those and i you know now i'll give it the the caveat is i think you get into your own business and you a lot of times you you have those thoughts no matter how hard or how well maybe at some point if you reach to a level of success but for most startups and small businesses saying you know is this worth it should i go back to just working for someone else or should i go do my own thing or you know that but i think that you know you also get that point of you have to look back and assess and say is there if i really see this as a long-term plan is this really what i want to do am i passionate about it or do i want to go to different directions so it sounds like you hit that tipping point so now you're saying okay i'm gonna go back to school and learn a little bit more about business and you went into finance and then went and got the mba and so you know coming out of those programs it sounded like you were still saying what do i want to do when you're trying to figure that out as far as now what do i do with this education or how do i position myself to something where it is sustainable that i do enjoy so how did you kind of as you're getting those degrees and coming out of it how did you figure out what you wanted to do yeah so uh for me it really was third time's a charm uh so you know the current business that i have marketing management and money um we we actually you know we've been going eight years strong and it's it's it's a great business model that works for me uh this is the third entrepreneurial attempt uh you know that that i took and so the first one was the catering company three years and i'm just like no that's not going to work the second one was kind of interesting so i had gone to school and you know i studied finance and i figured okay finance is the language of business now i'm going to know what i need to do there's a huge difference between learning corporate finance in you know in a college setting versus what startups actually do you know i'll just put that that little caveat out there but uh and you know and then i went and got an mba with emphasis in entrepreneurship and figured okay now i've got some education behind me let's do this again and i went and uh and i i actually went into very similar to what i what i'm doing now with my business uh but the the whole emphasis was on the marketing side of things and you know we were gonna do some marketing consulting that was supported by digital advertisement and uh we we had kind of an interesting uh i i had a really unique experience that that taught me a lot so we contracted with a company out of pittsburgh to manage all of the back end for the digital advertisements that we were going to do and so we were we were working with businesses putting together some you know digital advertisement packages and we had this company out of pittsburgh that was doing the back end support for us and it was interesting because as i was working with them all of a sudden i got to this point that i'm like uh something's not working you know like there's there's a serious problem and and i went and talked with the uh you know i talked with this company and there's like no everything's good on our end you know i'm like there's a serious problem serious problem a couple weeks go by and i'm like look there's got to be something wrong because this is just not working and so they dig into a little bit they're like oh we did a major coding error that broke everything i'm like oh yeah i'm glad that this is casual for you because it completely you know just ruined the the business that i was going after and you know and they wouldn't do anything about it and you know and so i ended up having to shut that business down because of a single coding error and that taught me to you know kind of like back up my core competencies you know if there's something that i profess to do that you know i'm going to have expertise in it needs to be something a little bit closer to home rather than you know going halfway across the united states you know relying on a on a partnership that i barely formed you know two months prior and so you know when i launched into it the third time i really went into it saying okay what are my strengths and i'm like you know what i'm really good at i'm really good at training like i i can work with companies and i can go in and i can get them to perform at a higher level like like that that's my specialty and so i built everything around what what i was good at because everything else it wasn't it wasn't what i was strong at it was stuff that i thought there was opportunity in you know i'm like oh yeah digital advertisement that's this is huge you know you look at today with how big you know pay-per-click is and amazon and all these huge players that are making you know billions of dollars off of all this advertisement but it wasn't my specialty and so even though there was tons of opportunity it didn't make sense for me and so i i guess one of the things that that i learned and i didn't learn this in college i learned this you know out doing it was to stick with your strengths you know understand where you fit in and where you're really good and leverage that and and that requires you to have a little bit of humility and say you know what there are things that i don't do i mean i'll do marketing trainings and this is this this took me a while to understand you know like i'll go in and train small businesses on how to do their marketing successfully but they'll come to me and they'll be like okay i want to talk about social media and digital advertisement and i'll just flat out tell them i'm not your guy you know what i will talk about how that fits into your marketing strategy but you need someone who has that technical expertise and and i i felt like because i did these marketing trainings that i had to know everything there was to know about marketing i'm like no no i need to understand how to put together strategy because that's what i teach you know and so i stuck to my strengths i stuck to what i was good at and that's how i've had a successful company for eight plus years you know is just sticking with what what makes sense and what yeah i think that makes sense now one question i'll ask is in one sense you're moving out of entrepreneurship and on the other and you're in other words you're helping other entrepreneurs be successful which is a bit of a different approach on the other hand you're still having to run a business you're still having to find clients you're still having to provide that service and otherwise assist them and so you know in a sense you're still a startup you're still small business so what do you think was the difference or the the shift was it the hey i'm now more you know enjoying passionate or whatever you know whatever the buzzword you want to use but you know that there's something there that this is what i enjoy doing and so that now the aspects of startups and small business entrepreneurship is something i i tend to enjoy was it more of the shift and the type of business or service you were providing or kind of what or what aspect was it that lended it to being more successful within that given avenue when some of the other entrepreneurial endeavors you found that it wasn't what you're enjoying yeah you know so i don't know that i would use the word enjoy um that's kind of an interesting thing uh you know like i uh my wife asked me just the other day she's like so do you enjoy what you do and i'm like well i'm bribed with money and you know like if if the money stopped i would stop doing i would i would you know i would spend my time like out hiking around because that's that's what i really and like you don't have to pay me to go hiking but you do have to pay me if you want me to come and provide my services and so so i'm like if you look at enjoyment i'm like do i enjoy helping businesses absolutely do i enjoy making a difference absolutely you know that that to me um i i guess and and i'll i'll get back to your questions in just a second but what really what really gets me going is when i can sit down uh with a company you know so i i had this opportunity where i you know i i had uh this company attend one of it's our growth by the numbers training it's our finance training one of our more popular and they they sat through this training and they came up to me at the lunch break and they said i just want you to know that i've done tons of financial trainings this is the most relevant that i've ever seen for small businesses and i thought it was a huge compliment i'm like wow this is wonderful that you know it made a difference for them and then at the end of the training they came to me and they said hey could you help us implement some of this stuff and i'm like oh okay yeah you know what are you thinking they're like what are you doing now like oh wow you're serious and they're like yeah we literally want you to come check out our business now and so i'm like well let me let me wrap up with the training finish up what i'm doing you know and so i went over to their business and i sat down with them for a couple hours and literally in a couple hours i saved them between about ten to twenty thousand dollars of you know a simple mistake that they were making and you know and and i walked out of there like feeling like one i you know well learned what they paid me and two i made a huge difference for them because this was ongoing that they were going to see these savings you know in their business and so that to me is is really where i kind of found my groove and where i found my passion now now tying that back into the question that you were asking is i needed to realize that that was where i needed to be um you know like i i love one one of my skill sets is being able to relate well with what is happening in a small business you know being able to understand what what some of the real challenges and the real problems are and and so i developed training models around that you know trying to keep it very real and authentic and and not so much shark tank style where i'm like yeah sure there's nothing wrong with shark tank but you got to realize that that's like a really small minority of businesses they're going to fit the shark tank model the majority of businesses are guys that you know they they run a quick lube joint they they run a restaurant they they run a bookkeeping service and and it's not flashy it's not exciting but they still are entrepreneurs and they still have passion and i've been able to connect with with those types of businesses and so for me for my own business we realized that our target market was the the real entrepreneur as we like to call it you know the the people who make up 80 to 90 percent of the small businesses you know across the united states that they're just they're just doing their business they're just out there you know doing what they're what they're good at and they need a little bit of support complementing the you know the the money side of things the management side of things the marketing side of things you know and that's where we really shine is coming in we don't we don't consult you know i i've done consulting before i've enjoyed consulting um i'm i'm pretty good at consulting but that's not you know that's that's not the that's not the mix that you know that those are not my secret herbs and spices no and i think that makes uh that makes perfect sense and you know what i don't know you raise an interesting question which is i tend to use the word enjoy in a sense if i had unlimited funds would i come in and work i'm i still might i mean i i have a sense of i love to build things and to grow things but there is a point of would there be a trade-off to where i may not work as much or i may adjust that sure but i think that there is a level of enjoyment you can still find within a business or a startup first or maybe it's a relative term in other words hey i don't like working for someone else and if i'm going to by necessity of life i have to earn an income and i have to pay the bills and if i'm going to do something relative to working for someone else or doing this other job over here i enjoy it much more now maybe i'm not as saying as is what my passion about or what i would do with unlimited funds so that is a fair point or an interesting question and and this is something that i like to bring up with entrepreneurs because a lot of people they love what they do and so they automatically want to turn it into a business and i'm like there's a difference between a hobby and a business you can be going through the exact same actions but i've seen so many people hate their passions once they turn it into a business and i'm like you got to understand like why are you why are you wanting to turn this into a business you know is is it that you really want to be an entrepreneur or is it that you're just super passionate about that and some things you know you see this a lot with artists like my wife she she's an amazing singer a phenomenal singer and you know she gets asked all the time to sing and she does like these community concerts and different things like that and she's kind of a little bit of a local celebrity and she always talks about oh i want to go big i'm like um do you want to go big because you're having a lot of fun right now like you really enjoy it and i'm not sure that you would enjoy it if you were you know having to travel constantly to you know to sing to a different audience all the time i'm like you know maybe you've got a good thing maybe you should just leave it a hobby and and and be okay with that but other things you know the passion comes in growing a business i mean there's a lot of satisfaction in providing you know great jobs for people and you know providing great products and services like that that has its own level of satisfaction so yeah it's and i agree and you know that we and that's an area where you can chat i'm sure for quite a long time in the sense that you know it's interesting i i left i worked for some very large law firms over the the space of my career before starting my own and i always think you know i always think well you know most attorneys is hey i want to go and just become a huge behemoth law firm and that's my passion and when i start a law firm and i think you know what growth is good and i want to make a good income and i want to be sustainable on the other hand do i want to become a huge law firm to where you have hundreds of attorneys and you're having multiple offices does that sound fun and i think to your point is sometimes that doesn't sound fun and it's you know the it would lose uh what is does make things enjoyable or what makes it fun to come into the office you would lose some of that so i think that's a fair point and we can now we could talk on that all day and i'm sure it would be it maybe we'll have to have you back on for a you know an expert episode and we can dive into that a bit more um but in the meantime is as we're getting back a bit to the the journey and which is happens to be the folks of the podcast um so we bring ourselves up to you know kind of where you're at today and how you're helping other businesses and how you find that that's where you're kind of your sweet spot or the the area that at least i would say enjoy it however we uh defied that enjoy it i mean don't get me wrong i love what i do but you know so now as we've got to uh caught up to a bit of the the present you know i always ask you questions as we talk through the journey as we reach the present portion of the journey which is so along your journey as you've now come up to where you're at today what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it so you know i don't know that i could pinpoint it down to one worst business decision but there's been a recurring theme and that is um like who you partner with and so so first off i think that every business has partnerships whether you're in a formal partnership or whether you just have you know people who they might be mentors they might be advisors they might be a spouse you know but you've got to be so selective with who you partner with and so all of my you know regrets business related i can always pinpoint down to a partnership that i wish that i either would not have been in at all or i wish that i would have not taken as you know seriously as i did you know when i talk about that that second business that i did that fell apart because i jumped into you know the the company that we were working with they weren't a bad company there was nothing wrong with the company they just weren't qualified to do the level of work that we wanted done and so i formed a partnership with them thinking that they were just as excited about my success as i was i'm like no they weren't they were collecting a paycheck and you know i was just i was paying them for a service that was a little bit over their heads and and so you know i i i look at at like who who do i partner with and and are those the right people and you know i could say the the the flip side of that is the best moves that i've ever made in business have always been connecting with the right person and that can be a formal partner that could be connecting with the right customer you know i mean like i i've got this one customer she is amazing and i look at how much business has grown because of her like she goes and and just you know every time that i've done a training for her she'll tell you know three other people and and like just i get these quality contracts that are all coming from her and i'm like that's the type of partnership that i want to have so to me i i think that we we don't recognize how critical to our success partnerships are and just the right partnerships they they make your business the wrong partnerships they break oh and i think that that's an absolute a great takeaway and i think that one you know one thing you hit on is that oftentimes you think people either whether it's partner and employees that are coming into the business that they're going to work every bit as hard as i am and they're going to be as passionate and they're going to love it and they're going to just work the nights and the weekends or whatever it takes to be successful then you get in and say no they're not like and that's not a bad thing it's not that you're you're probably putting a unrealistic expectation on them to say they're not going to be the same as a person that starts a business they may not have that and some people are there you know and it sounds like you know you say they're for a paycheck and that's not a bad thing they're if they're doing a good job they're providing a lot of work yeah they're doing a great job they're helping you build your business that's what they're there for and you should just recognize that but i think that when you then change that from is an employee or is it you know a contract or something else you as a partner you got to make sure that those are the people you really are or pat that are going to be worthwhile to make and or they're going to be passionate and otherwise and you that you want to take on a partner put aside that whether they're a good fit some people and i'm probably in that boat i don't want a lot of partners i don't know if i want any partners just because not that they're bad but i like to be in control i'd like to say hey i want to decide the direction for my business i want to maybe be able to make the decisions i don't want to have to do decisions by committee i want to know if we if we do well then it's because i mean if we don't do well i have no one else to play with myself and on and on and so i think that you raise a lot of interesting points with that second question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you'd give them so i i know that i kind of uh downplayed this a little bit and so i'm glad you're asking this question to give me a chance to uh to uh just kind of clarify uh what i stated earlier with i i went to school and i got this degree in corporate finance and i said you know corporate finance and small business finance you know they're so unrelated however finance is the language of business and one of the things that i think is absolutely critical is every entrepreneur i in my mind i put no exception to this i don't care what you know i mean you you're uh you're a legal firm right and you're a legal firm who does a podcast so you could argue you're like well i don't necessarily need to have you know this this understanding financials because that's not what i do and i'm like no you do you need to know enough about finance to be able to speak the language and and i relate it to just communication like if i'm going to go to a foreign country if i know how to speak the language i'm going to have a much better trip than if i have no idea how to speak language and that doesn't mean that i've got to be like a professional speaker i've got to be you know a literary genius in that language but i've got to have a basic level of literacy and i think that's one of the mistakes that entrepreneurs make is they assume that because they're an amazing you know uh web developer that they don't have to worry about finance i'm like no finance is the language of business you need to speak enough that that you can see what's happening and and know where it's going and so the advice that i would give kind of get summed up in if you don't have a basic understanding of small business finance get one and and spend the time reviewing your financials and and just being you know being current it doesn't actually take that much time but it gets ignored by so many entrepreneurs and so don't ignore the finance learn what you need to learn you'll be so much happier with whatever business endeavor you're in oh and i think that that's absolutely great great piece of advice and great takeaway so well now as we wrap up with the podcast if people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to hire you they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more so uh email is going to be the best ryan at marketing management marketingmanagementmoney.com you can check out our podcast it's marketing management and money uh or you can go to our website marketingmanagementmoney.com and check out the different trainings that we offer the different programs that we have we would love to love to connect and uh love to meet new people who who are interested in the entrepreneurial journey all right well i definitely encourage everybody to reach out connect and find out more and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you just go to inventiveguest.com why to be on the show um a couple more things make sure to listen make sure to subscribe make sure to share make sure to leave a review because what we want to do is make sure that everybody finds out about all these awesome journeys and they can find helpful on their own journey and last but not least you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat well thank you again ryan and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you [Music] you

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