How To Market And Advertise

Joshua Lee

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/30/2021

 

First and foremost, understand your XYZ statement. This helps with everything. I help X, which is your ideal client to do Y, this is the service they do so they can have or, they can achieve Z the outcome. If someone actually goes through and understands who they help, what they actually do as a service, and what the outcome is. I help x to achieve y so they can have z. This will help you across all different aspects because it allows someone to understand. It's kind of like your elevator pitch but in a short precise way. Now I can build out targeting based on who I help. I know when I'm creating content. And I know who I am talking to.

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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 is first and foremost as you're looking at you know understand your xyz statement right and this helps with everything like i help x this is your ideal client to do y right this is the service they do so they can have or they can achieve z right the outcome if someone actually go through and understand who they help what they actually do as a service and what the outcome is i help x to achieve y so they can have z this will actually help you across all different aspects because it allows someone to understand it's kind of like your elevator pitch but in a short precise way because now i can build out you know targeting based on who i help i know when i'm creating content i know who i'm talking to [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive expert 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 grab some time with us to chat and we're always here to help now today we've got another great guest on the podcast joshua lee and today we're going to talk a lot about marketing and advertising and that can be everything from social media marketing online marketing in general organic marketing we might even get a little bit in shift gears a bit and talk a little bit about being a parent as an entrepreneur and work-life balance and how you might deal with divorce as an entrepreneur or whatnot so we'll see where things take us that's another fun area that we'll hopefully hit on as well so with that much as a introduction welcome on the podcast josh devin man i always love to be here um you know we have such great conversations and i i doubt today will be um anything but that right you know we're gonna have a great conversation today but yeah hi everyone i'm joshua lee um devon brought me on here based on some of my background i've been you know an entrepreneur for 20 years very similar to devon multiple different startups in the six seven eight figure range um i started my first business back in o2 with uh clients like myspace and google and yahoo and you know since then i've probably monetized over half a billion dollars in advertising and controlled over 35 trillion online impressions across my own servers so you know i've been in the traffic game worked in the marketing and advertising and these days right now i do a lot to really help with the organic side of that marketing and really teaching people how to be able to really connect with their audience rather than actually sell them so anyway we want to want to jump in man we can we can do it today awesome well i think that's a definitely a great introduction i'm excited to have a great conversation so yeah with that you know we'll talk a little bit about you know marketing slash advertising i know that they are different depending on you know what fields you're in you say no marketing is completely different advertising and advertising like no it's all part of marketing and everybody gets a bit of a different answer so even if it i'll probably use eternity interchangeably even though i do understand there is a a bit of a difference or a big difference depending on who you ask but with that you know there's there's a few ones that we've talked or we hit on just talking a little bit before the podcast that you can jump into when you're looking at i'll say getting the word out there in other words marketing and advertising what you're really trying to do is drive sales you're trying to drive revenue you're trying to get more customers and you're really trying to get more sales in order to make more money for the business so with that you know there seems like there's a few different ones you can do social media marketing and that can be everything from facebook instagram tick tock twitter linkedin i'm sure there's about 20 other ones that i'm not hip enough to understand or know about but then you also have just kind of generally online marketing which i would put is probably more of ppc or paper you know paper pay-per-click which is you know google adwords i think ming is still out there maybe they are yeah it's i think it's still kind of good but you know or basically we're paying for clicks and then you also have organic advertising which can be everything from seo to some you know organic posting and creating and following a community so with that there's a lot of different ones we could hit on and we'll probably touch on a few but if you know it seems like and you can definitely you're the experts that correct more wrong but depending on your business different ones may work better for your business in other words sometimes organic may work better than social media if you depend on your business or pay-per-click may work better than artwork you know seo or different ones so if you're a business and you're trying to figure out let's say you're new to this and you have some early success you're getting the business up and going and you're trying to figure out what is our marketing plan or how do we tackle this and there's so many different avenues i can go and i don't have the bandwidth to do all of them what are kind of some of the ideas or ways you start to figure out which one you should initially focus on yeah well you know i mean devin it kind of starts with when you look at marketing and this is almost a different thing too like marketing versus branding right so i think a lot of times people go in and go i need to get to marketing well if they haven't if you haven't really flushed out your brand and what you're doing and why you're doing it and what your end customer is getting out of it right because this is the biggest thing i think most people look at is they sell on the service not the outcome and so that's where most people miss out and they go oh i'm gonna market they're marketing their service like why am i spending all this advertising dollars and actually not getting a return because you didn't take the time energy and effort to really go in and understand what your brand is and i think that's where i think a lot of people we live in a world where i mean dude i mean i think you and i when we both started our companies like i didn't have access to these social media platforms like we do now where i could do a post i could get you know 5 000 people or 500 whatever it might be to respond and give me their inputs because you know everyone's got an opinion so that's the beautiful thing that i think that most companies need to start when you're going in is how do you test your market well yes facebook linkedin instagram depending on what kind of product you're offering each platform is it works really well in different ways for you depending on what you're trying to accomplish but use and leverage these right go out there post something hey i've got x service and it gives this outcome would you would it be something you'd be interested in right instead of just putting an ad out there i think it's better to be this is the way i've seen it spent lots of money in advertising i've actually monetized a lot for many other people and these days if you don't understand who your audience is why you do it and the brand behind it i'm going to tell you like it's when you start advertising and devin please weigh in any point in time man it's how much money are willing to spend or lose to understand what works and i ask everyone that right like how much are you are you willing to spend or lose five thousand ten thousand if you're going to go straight into advertising if you don't know how your market actually responds so that's really kind of you can play along with the social and get some free opportunity to understand and then move to marketing no and i think that that's it's a hard question because i would if you're to ask me not to say i want to lose as little as possible in other words i don't know what i need to lose you know because it's a hard one if i were gonna go and spend five thousand dollars and you know initially losing five thousand but we we use that five thousand or we gain experience understanding and after that it takes off then sure i'll lose five thousand and then i'll make a hundred thousand that's a great you know great trade-off mother on the other hand i lose five thousand i don't learn anything and it's just sunk cost then i'm gonna say well i don't know if i wanna just lose five thousand dollars for the fun of it so but i do agree i think that you know doing a little bit of figuring out where your customer lies or where they're at is going to be are beneficial and it seems like you know a lot of times you can start to take baby steps and you don't have to go out and have the hundred thousand dollar marketing budget to say social media at least early indications may not work for us you may say hey we'll try a little bit of pay-per-click we'll try a little bit now you have to give it enough wherewithal you can't go do it for a couple days and say hey we didn't make you know we're not the drop ship company that we did facebook ads for two days and we didn't make money so we're going to close down and you know and then go away that's probably not going to work but so now let's say let's let's just uh dive in a bit to each of them so we'll go with the one that's i like the most but i think it's also the hardest and i think businesses struggle the most and i know it's not an order um which is organic advertising which i'd say is you know you can say hosting is one and you can also say seo is one so let's go with either or let's go with seo just for the fun of it but you know you have seo which is for those of listening search engine optimization it basically tells you if you do a good job you rank higher on google or maybe bing if anybody is big i'll pick up bing just because i don't know of anybody that's actually used it but you know you go you go with google and you say okay i'm searching for this term and whoever pops up at the top that's because it's you know not only just relevant but they also do a good job of within google's algorithms of getting themselves to the top but to my in my mind it seems like it's a longer lift or at least that's kind of the general thing it's not going to be an overnight hey i'm going to write a wonderful my amazing the best article in the world and next week i'm going to have everybody reading that article and i'm going to have tons of traffic because i put on the time and so how do you as a business if you're saying i think seo is important i think it's something that we should do long term but in the short term it may not have it may not have as quick of a turnaround or have that return on investment first of all is that accurate and then second of all how do you weigh that against the other avenues that may be a little bit more instant gratification or quicker turnaround i think we all have to play the seo game to some extent but the biggest thing is you're always playing against the algorithm right i mean like seo is a long long tail play right i mean like if you're just looking for a short term to make money well you're always gonna have to continue to reinvent if you're just trying to make that short quick gains so seo is the long play and i mean look i've been doing this business long enough to be able to understand that actually i want to be able to play the long game because it allows like guys like you and i and people listening to be in the industry longer than just to be able to take up oh this is hot right now let me put some money behind it and then you're looking for the next trick or you know to be able to jump on so one way that we've actually used seo we work with our clients too devin is seo takes like look to be able to get rankings you're gonna spend anywhere from potentially two to ten thousand dollars depending on the company to be able to kind of come in there and be able to rank it'll probably take up to six months sometimes to really get in there now a trick that we've found is using linkedin so most people don't realize that linkedin is very highly seo optimized and indexed by google so prior to this we've all seen when you search for someone i guarantee you if everyone here goes on google right now and searches devin miller i bet you ten to one that his profile on linkedin is probably gonna be one of the first posts to come up it just happens that way you know and because of linkedin indexing the that aspect of your profile and when you actually go through them now they're used to also devin index articles so that the beautiful thing about linkedin is the moz score moz and if you don't know this this is just kind of not you devon specific but people listening this is how google kind of ranks the seo abilities 0 to 100 and linkedin is actually a hundred out of a hundred on the moz score so you can take your exact same blog that you have on your own website and actually take that on linkedin well actually because of linkedin and the the partnerships that they have there it will actually rank higher in google so now you're not only getting organic visibility on a platform like linkedin but you're also getting on that one platform we all care about which is google so and a huge shift they just did in the last couple of months devin is now they're actually indexing your post so everything that you're doing on a platform like linkedin you're getting that double dip and i mean this is where you want to play the short term games of the instant people that are seeing it on social and i'm playing the long tail game because i'm getting everything indexed on google so that's kind of how we play seo and it works really really well if you're really paying attention to leverage like it's the same thing right like pinterest is indexed by google so it's a great way to be able to take those same articles pin them on pinterest youtube is another search engine so you've got to be able to understand what other search engines are out there that also index on google and you can get multiple facets of opportunity no and i think that that's that's some great thing i like how you know we've done a time to repurpose a lot of our content on linkedin just for that very fact of hey it gives you a bit of you know what was interesting is we'd have articles i wrote i think i wrote originally on linkedin and then we ended up putting it before even though this is before we really got our website up and going i was putting content on linkedin and i was working with other law firms and before i got my own law firm up and going and some of that content still outranks us that you know you'll search it and it'll come up and it will still be on linkedin first now i did while you were talking i did go and google myself on link or google myself to see where it popped up and i don't get number one ranking for anything with my name but i am ranked number two and it is my linkedin profile a number three ranking is the the website so link linkedin beats me by one position so i'll have to see what i could do to work on that but no i think that's a good point now one question with um with seo and it comes up and i've had the question and thought about it and kind of go both ways is you know to your point there is always an evolving algorithm you know if you're to go back long enough with google from my understanding again i don't i'm not an expert but i play one on a podcast which is um you know there it used to be if you had so many backlinks and if you had a whole bunch of backlinks and you would be ranked higher because backlinks indicated that a lot of people were linking to his experts well they found that people were gaming the system they were you know maybe yeah i can go on like fiverr and get a whole bunch of backlinks yeah so now that's you know you can still go on fiverr and get a whole bunch of backlinks it just isn't worth the five dollars right for it but you know and and they continue to shift you know and i know i don't keep up the speed nearly as much but the question that kind of comes up is should we more focus on building your content based on the current algorithm or should you be more building good just good content which will always be what google's trying to find out in other words i'll give you a couple examples let's say i write really great seo optimized articles that don't really provide a lot of value but have a lot of the keywords a lot of things that are going to be hitting on what i want the seo to rank me for or i can do you know a great article that is really you know informative is helpful if people were to find it it might have video content it might have written content you know it's very interactive in other words when people hit on it they're going to think it's a really great article they're going to dwell on it longer read it longer but it may not be as seo optimized or may not be the focus which is kind of the if you're taking a long-term strategy should you kind of do the content to our geared towards the algorithm or should you do it hey we're going to make long-term content and we think that our google will always man i mean this is the whole thing and if you're always trying to game the system you're always going to try and get it's you're always trying to move towards the what the algorithm is going the algorithm for these platforms change constantly they're trying to beat the people that game the system if i find an article that's super seo optimized and it doesn't read any value that's great but it's really not doing anything the one algorithm that i think that truly matters more than all others is the human algorithm and that one's that's the one that just adjusts over time but it doesn't change like we the human algorithm has been within us and how we actually connect and relate to other human beings so much more in the value so 100 man if i was going to be able to go in and tell someone hey if you're going to take the time energy and effort go in you want to be that build that know like and trust and if i go to your article and it's just seo optimized and gives me no value that doesn't build no like and trust at all it might give me the no because i see your name but now i know you don't add value to my plot to me for anything that you're doing so 100 go through always add value because if you continue to constantly do that you will show up in a world result because what we want to be able to do is when you do that you build advocates of your platform and an advocate is so much more powerful because it's someone that like like devin him and i have connected here a long time and like you read something i wrote and you potentially share it i want to be able to have that in that algorithm more so than just showing up and paying to pay to play so to speak yeah no no i'm not saying you can't try and do both you can do real you can't of course seo optimize but i think that you know the point and i think you hit you are hit on a bunch better than i would is that you know playing that long game of hey this is going to be content that people are going to resonate that's going to that's always going to think in the long term play well with the algorithm they're going to look at dwell time they're going to look at how long you share they're going to look at whether people are actually enjoying it whether or not you're getting reviews for it or whether or not it's getting posted or commented on all of which i think to agree impact the algorithm and even as they make those shifts you know if all you're doing is trying to play the game at some point they're going to figure out you're playing the game rather than creating good content you're going to get caught that's exactly significantly your hand for what you're doing yeah i mean devin dude i have an article i wrote on medium i have a few actually i wrote on medium 10 years ago on the first platform i still on a weekly basis anywhere from 15 to 20 reads on these articles and i mean that's what they weren't nothing to do with seo optimization it was truly about how do i actually give value and like to be able to have something that's lived that long and continue week after week be able to get that that's just because i gave value each and every time no i think that's that's a great takeaway so now let let's shift gears just a little bit so we hit a bit on that all of these topics could be something that you could i'm sure we could go on for much longer but they kind of give a bit of an overview so now i go to online advertising versus social media and i know that there's kind of an ongoing battle some people are much in the social media camp of hey it's going to be you're going to be reaching better audiences or maybe it's less expensive or maybe you can better target or you know the same thing you can make the arguments for pay-per-click or for you know for google searches as oh this is more targeted they're higher in 10 and it seems like you know depending on where you specialize and you know if you specialize in both and you're saying hey they're both good avenues but you also have people that are just social media or just google and it is becoming more specialized and it's harder to be an expert in bold unless you spend a lot of time on it but how do you kind of decide should i do the social media if i had to choose one social media you know do the outreach whether it's facebook linkedin instagram tick tock i don't know there's 20 others um or you do you know maybe you do the new truth social with trump i don't know i don't even know how or you do more of the high intent people are searching for you you know what are the trade-offs what you know how what should you be considering when you're looking at the between those two um as to how you should start to tackle you know it's it's time versus money right i mean this is the really how how do you do it if you have enough time to be able to be able to invest in i mean the best way to be able to go about it is to be using social media and being able to really be able to garnish an audience that continues to be able to come time after time because as you continue to be able to grow you'll be able to grow that audience grow that opportunity and be able to connect but you can't just put posts out there you've got to be able to put posts and then engage with people that engage with you and be able to start conversations so like i said it takes a lot of time now if you've got enough money to be able to invest in if you want to be able to move faster 100 percent you can be able to put it into advertising you can be able to go in but it does it's it's not like back in the day when i first started devin i mean look man we were buying clicks at tenths of a penny right you know i mean it doesn't happen and it actually converted into good traffic now i mean you go on platforms like linkedin on advertising i mean you're looking at a minimum cpc you know to be able to go in at anywhere from five dollars and up facebook these days i think averages are anywhere from two to three dollars i mean they've constantly going up i mean i've talked to friends now and the season we're in and i mean they're seeing double um what it costs to be able to convert into a client than it used to so that's the whole piece right and every single person has to i wish i could be like you know what this is the end all this is exactly what you have to do but each and every person is different and their business is different so i would say it's a combination of both right you can't lose one for the other but it's really if you have time take the time if you know how to be able to connect with your audience you're going to be real raw and and connect social media and the power behind it is amazing but what people are looking for is real and raw not overproduced if they think that you're actually on there doing a commercial you're talking about yourself you're like oh there's there's josh again that dude never shuts up about linkedin that's exhausting no one wants to hear that all day so you have to be able to allow that connection opportunity but if you have the money aspect you can go through like you said on facebook you can do 10 a day test be able to understand from multiple different campaigns and really be able to figure out where your audience is then build retargeting but the average person you're competing against everyone that's been doing that for so long so it does cost a lot more to be able to get that visibility that's in there so now i'll ask one more question then we're going to shift gears i'd like to at least touch on a little bit of uh parenting and work-life balance but on the social media aspect so i know we're jumping between a few of them but now let's focus in on social media one of the other questions i think often comes up and i know all of these are you can do all of them and if you had a limited time money and budget you wouldn't you should probably should do all of them you know oftentimes you're working as a startup or small businesses yeah i have the all i don't have an unlimited budget i don't have an unlimited time and i have to start doing something and i know i should be doing everything but i can't do everything so now when i go to social media you know there's a couple ways that you can attack it you can do what i'll call organic and maybe that's the wrong term but where are you doing posting and you're sharing content and you're just going on and being active on social media you don't have to pay for any of that unless you're having a social media you know manager but you're not paying advertising you're not writing facebook or the different social media platforms to put your content on there versus you can go and just do straight advertising you can do targeted ads and how do you weigh those or how do you balance or how do you decide hey should i start out just building your organic audience and providing great content or should i do or start doing ads and if you had to choose one how would you choose one of those two if i had to choose one and being able to go through right now i mean like we we've made a big shift i work with you know a lot of you know startups and you know and through our courses and training and being able to teach them how to be able to go in and be able to leverage because the biggest thing is devin you can't go out there especially on social media and put out a post to go okay look up towards the sky go they're gonna come here comes you know here come my my clients that doesn't happen you have to be able to post and then engage on other people it takes a lot of time to be able to go through that so me personally when we actually train our clients we train them how to be able to post how to you know we use linkedin specifically and how to be able to draw on that audience be able to engage with the people and start a conversation because all the magic and social media really happens in the dms the direct messaging and so being able to connect with the people that engage in your content following up with them asking questions and building that conversation that relationship same thing with someone looks at your profile or identifying your ideal audience and engaging on their content that's really a true social media play if you're going to do the organic side so that's what we really bet on um now if you're trying to just sell a project let's let's say it is um devon let's say it's you know you're you're selling a product like a true on like under 100 product because this is where i'm going to tell you go the advertising route right because i think you can really be able to pull it up a lot faster you know most of our clients have products or services that range anywhere from three to five thousand dollars and up so they're a high-end product doing advertising dropping someone into a funnel on a high level is doesn't work as well because we know most of us understand automation we kind of pull out of it really quickly but on a smaller product we're selling a whole bunch of it let's say sunglasses whatever it might be i think the way to be able to go is the advertising way because you can be able to identify your audience be able to go in based on their what they know and then be able to use retargeting to be able to get directly to them for your product or service i think that's uh that's some great uh advice and some great takeaways so yeah now with that shifting years just a bit and one of the other things that we chatted before the podcast which i thought was a fun point and i think it's one that is you know it's different from advertised differently different from marketing what we've hit on but definitely something that everybody gets hit with is how do you do work-life balance how do you you know deal with if you are going or either heading towards a divorce or gone through a divorce and how do you deal with parenting and all those things kind of intermix because you know it's a contrary to what you might see on television and movies just because your successful work doesn't mean you're successful in the family just because you're successful with the family doesn't mean you're successful work but they do have an inner play and they do have an impact if you're working all the time your family usually suffers if you're at home all the time having a great time with you know like in the movies when they seem to work about one hour a week you can have a great family life and yet your finances and your business are going to suffer so give us a little bit of thought or impact how do you find that work-life balance and how do you deal with those things yeah and i mean i think the the biggest issue that most people see is that work-life balance balance is such a heavy word balance is so hard and it's almost impossible to achieve right we have to be able to look at more integration how do we integrate the different aspects of our life and this is something that i went through i mean like when i quote unquote had or is pushing towards work-life balance devin i mean you know this is back today yes i was running 10 different companies but was 45 pounds overweight my relationships were monetary and i had no vision about where i was going to see where i was at everything was work or play and i mean it was really unbalanced in that aspect and i was miserable and i really had to kind of reset my life and be able to go through and you know really take a step back because you know outside looking in the perception was uh josh had a lot of money um wife the kids everything the house all that stuff and you know it was it was great but i wasn't happy because it wasn't actually being fulfilling and i wasn't integrating the different aspects that i needed to be first for myself and this is where i think a lot of people need to understand to be able to be a good father to be able to be a good husband um to be a good partner business all is that just a good human being if you don't give to yourself first and be able to make sure like how do you wake up right so those were a lot of things that i had to be able to shift was how do i give myself that energy to be able to fill my cup first and so i could actually fill others right and be able to go through in every aspect as entrepreneurs we put ourselves in these silos and we're always giving giving giving and doing and trying to take on everything and you know it's kind of like atlas pushing the boulder uphill and our cup gets empty and so if our cup is empty we can't fill anyone else's cup and then we just kind of continue to be able to go through or our cup is too full because we're taking on too much so these are the different things that i had to figure out devin and i mean look i i did i had to go through divorce and um it was where we're at what kind of situation i wish i could have been able to figure out a better better solution but that was the solution that was best for myself and my former and for my kids and when i reset that and started going through it's kind of where i wrote the book balances you know bs because we have to be able to shift that and look i want my kids to be able to be proud of who i am not just how much money i make but how i am as a human being and as entrepreneurs we have the ability to be able to shift and change this world more so than anyone else and if we burn out as we're seeing more and more millennials and younger individuals trying to really be burned out it's we're not going to be able to make these shifts so first it comes with some of the guys like you and i have been doing this for a long time sharing what we've how we've fallen and how we've gotten back up again no and i think that there's a lot of truth you know what what is hard and i think that you know across my fingers i have not had to go through a divorce and hopefully never have to but i think that a lot of times i know earlier on in my career the balance was certainly over to the i'm working a ton of hours getting experience being successful and it wasn't what they intend to pay i want to shaft my family it was just hey i've got a lot of things to do and i've got to get them done and i only have so many hours in the day and oh you know i i'll get caught up on this one thing and then next month i'll spend more time or next week or next year tomorrow or whatever spend more time with the family and it's easy to get out of balance and i think just like we almost talked about with you have to balance a lot of times marketing and sales and what you're taking on and what you're going to do and trying things out you also need to have that hey i'm going to have balance with my family that i'm not going i have to have a variety and not just work in my life and not just family in my life but i have to balance that i think that you know once you gain that is interesting at least for me personally i found that when you get that balance in work and and family both are more successful and do better if you are spending you can spend 20 hours a day on the business and you know only sleep and never have any time to family and or you can have a better work-life balance and your work-life balance when you have that right you're going to have the more today the less amount of time you're going to be spending at work is getting me more productive you're gonna get more done and you're gonna be more you're gonna be happier all in the process so i think it's definitely worthwhile to pursue well as we start to wrap up and there's a whole bunch of more things that we could hit on that we'll have to we'll have to chat sometime down the road on but if people are wanting to reach out to or before they want to reach out to you and i almost jumped ahead over the last question shame on me before we get to there before we get to help people reach out to you always have one question at the end of each podcast which is you know we've talked a lot of things we've talked about seo and organic advertising online you know pay-per-click social media we talked about work-life balance and i mean all the various aspects that people are considering the business and you know way too many things to add to get to all get started on today so if you say hey you know for those startups or the small business out there if they can only have one takeaway one thing that they can get started on today what would that one thing be the one thing that i would push anyone as you're starting out your business is first and foremost as you're looking at you know understand your xyz statement right and this helps with everything like i help x this is your ideal client to do y right this is the service they do so they can have or they can achieve z right the outcome if someone actually go through and understand who they help what they actually do as a service and what the outcome is i help x to achieve y so they can have z this will actually help you across all different aspects because it allows someone to understand it's kind of like your elevator pitch but in a short precise way because now i can build out you know targeting based on who i help i know when i'm creating content i know who i'm talking to one i know the service and allows someone else to understand what i do but that's always the biggest thing right it's the outcome of what you do this is the biggest thing that most people miss out on and when you can figure these things out you can build marketing plans you can do advertising you can actually build out the content and it gives you the the framework that you need to be able to build out that business and be able to allow your message to be able to be received by everyone you're trying to attract no i think that that is that is a great takeaway and definitely something that people can get started on now as we wrap up and as if people want to reach out to you if they want to you know be a customer they want to be a client 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 dev and of course you can always find us at standoutauthority.com but i mean even better man i love when i'm on a podcast with someone like yourself you know linkedin is my power platform you can find me joshua b lee on there and you know reach out send me a message tell me why you listen to devin miller all the time so that gives me a reason why i can reach back up devon go hey dude look at all these amazing messages i got about all your listeners that reached out to me so that's always what i love to be able to do because it not only allows me to build a relationship with them but it also lets me build a better relationship with you as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to reach out connect and leverage the expertise and make those connections that can help grow your business well thank you again joshua for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners out there make sure to subscribe make sure to share the podcast and make sure to leave us a review because we want to really make sure that we can share this expertise and this knowledge with as many startups and small businesses as it are out there because our mission is really to help startups and small businesses any way we can including with patents and trademarks so if you ever need help with patent and trademark just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat thank you again joshua for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last appreciate [Music]

How To Build A Driven Culture

Boris Blum

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/28/2021

 

I will be a little self-serving here. This article that I am posting, they can go on LinkedIn and download this. There's more than one thing there that they can do. The article is called The Great Resignation And Its Predictable Failure Of Leadership And What To Do About It. There are lots of great suggestions within the article. And it's very well backed up with some studies and things that were done. I will be posting that later today actually on LinkedIn. If anybody wants to look me up, they can find me on LinkedIn and take a peek at the article. I think it would be very useful.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

i'll i'll be a little self-serving here you know this article that i'm uh posting they can go on linkedin and download this there's more than one thing there that they could do uh the article is called the great resignation and it's a predictable future uh predictable failure of leadership and what to do about it um there's lots of great suggestions within the article and it's uh very well backed up with some um studies and things that were done so i'll be uh posting that later today actually on linkedin and anybody wants to look me up they can find me on linkedin and take a peek at the article i think it'll be very useful [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive expert i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the 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 and we're always they're always here to help now today we have another great expert on the podcast forest bloom and today we're going to be talking about a few different things which i think are always very impactful and helpful to a business which include you know building a purpose or building a purpose uh driven culture within your business and also how to talk or talking about how it's much easier to build that from the inception or from the get-go as opposed to changing information now we can change a culture but we're going to talk about why it's beneficial to get that started earlier the better we're also going to talk a little bit about some different actions that would be great within the the business to take and including you know one of them that is getting people employees and other people that are working for you as well as yourself to show up with their best selves each day so they can be the most productive and get as much done and also have an enjoyable life doing it and then we might also talk a little bit about the strategic alignment and building that with an organization so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast boris well thank you i i appreciate you inviting me back absolutely so um now before we dive into kind of all the expertise and the areas of hand uh maybe just uh for the audience and those that didn't uh catch the inventive journey expo episode um but for those that are just uh joining or otherwise um getting to know you um give us a quick introduction kind of what is your background your experience why do you know or why are you an expert on these areas or why do you know what you're talking about uh absolutely so i appreciate it um i spent most of my career at least the first part of my career in the financial services space and i kind of built around the niche of working with successful ceos and founders of companies when i got out of financial services i really wanted to focus on what i had a passion on which was connecting uh individuals purpose and and sort of their passion in life with profits in their business uh i found that most organizations were lacking a very clear purpose in what they were doing and i started uh working with companies that were in crisis because this was in 2008 and so um going forward i became a what you would consider a crisis consultant a turnaround expert for companies and i really found passion in working with these what i call purpose-driven uh growth-minded entrepreneurs and that's what i've been doing ever since no i think that's a great introduction definitely gives you a great perspective on the to share some of the the topics that we're going to be discussing and chatting over so with that you know the one of the things that i think you know there's a lot of their discussion and you know articles out there and otherwise advice is to building a purpose or purpose-driven culture and within a business and you know it's everything you know so before we dive into how you or why you should build it or how you build it maybe help us define just a bit what is a purpose-driven culture what what i guess why does it matter what is it kind of what is that step as to why everybody's talking about it and what impact it has on a business well i think one of the reasons why it's very relevant today is we've keep hearing about this great resignation that's going on and and people are kind of disengaged and even prior to covet if you look at some of the uh statistics you know many of them said as much as like two-thirds of uh people at work were just disengaged with their job they weren't happy at what they were doing they were just showing up kind of like robots and this is before covet so i gotta imagine that those uh percentages have gone up quite a bit so the question is you know how do you get people really engaged in what they're doing in fact i just wrote an article about this called the great resignation a predictable failure of leadership and what to do about it um i think it really comes down to the fact that people don't see their clear place in an organization and um that starts with why and simon cynic's written many books about it he's got lots of ted talks and so he's by far the expert in in trying to discover what an organization's why is but i think it needs to be clearly communicated for what i call strategic alignment you know um back for the last 30 or 40 years organizations have been struggling with how to build strategic alignment within their organizations and that has always been a challenge but now more so than ever when you have people that are fully uh disengaging from their jobs on an active basis and looking for something else that they want to do i think younger generations today are just much more focused on these aspects of why are they doing what they're doing and why they're showing up every day it's not just the paycheck to them no and i think that you know there is definitely that sense and it seems like it's what's interesting it seems to be a bit of a generational shift in the sense that for you know you to take probably my grandfather's generation but maybe a little bit my parents generation but certainly my grandpa's you know the idea is hey i'm going to go get a good job i'm going to work there for you know basically or most of all my life and then i'll you know either have a pension or i'll have you know savings or i'll have a you know retirement fund and that's what i'll do and now it seems like people are looking for something more than just a paycheck and a job and something that gives you that studying and although that's not important but they're also saying in addition to that i want that purpose i want to feel like i'm having an impact or that you know what i'm doing for a good majority of my life is actually worthwhile to pursue and it seems like now people are trying to look to figure out how that they can achieve that within their business so so now with that you know what one thing we talked about a little bit before the podcast was how you build that culture and you know there's certainly you have kind of two things one if you're from inception and you're just getting a business going how do you build that culture and how do you define it and then you also have for those that are hey i got a business going i have a startup or a small business and started me going for a period of time how do i if we haven't already been purposeful or purposefully doing that how do we build that into the culture so we'll hit on maybe a bit of both of those but for those that are just getting started and going that are able to kind of build that culture from the from the ground up what are some or ways that they should go about thinking about it or otherwise focusing on it so i think for organizations that are startups or younger organizations with less maturity they they have an advantage here because they can build this purpose-driven culture from the beginning and onset it's much easier to do that than try to change an organization that's organically developed into something different um so i think you have to first define what is culture right culture is not a set of values you know it is partly values but you know people uh corporations put on the walls all the time integrity ethics you know like what does that mean like is there any organization that doesn't want to have integrity and ethics in how they operate you know i i think that that's corporate speak i think at the end of the day it's not about just the values that you share potentially with uh your employees but it's really about how people behave it's how they show up each and every day and there should be an expectation obviously from the organization's perspective of what they see as indicators of positive behavior what they view as ways to be accountable in the organizations ways that they operate that's different than maybe another company so understanding what behaviors you expect in the organization helps you attract the right people it also helps to turn away people that wouldn't be a good fit for you so i think defining that on the front end is so much more easier to do once you've figured out what is really the impact that the organization is looking to have in their community in their business model whatever it is that they're focused on what is their purpose and build around that the behaviors that you want to see people show up with each and every day and then you can do selection and recruiting towards it it becomes a a unique attractor to your company instead of a detractor in many cases today where it does just doesn't exist and people are disconnected with their their work that they're doing no and i i think that uh definitely makes sense so i'm gonna follow just with one question on that which is you know it's easy in retrospect or when you talk or talking to it on the podcast it makes it easy oh yeah just figure out your purpose figure out your culture and then go out and you know infuse into your business you know but if uh if you're kind of starting from more of the inception where i'm hey i've got maybe myself a business partner maybe one or two employees at the most i'm really just getting started i absolutely you know let's say i'm bought in i should have a purpose-driven culture but maybe i don't know what my purpose-driven culture is in other words i'm just focused on hey i've got to get the business up and going need to get some sales need to get uh you know or get some income coming in such that the business actually stays there and you know it actually grows or we can continue to support it so how do you if you don't really know what you know you want to build a culture you know you want to build something that's worthwhile that people are wanting to show up and work at and enjoy and otherwise do but once if you don't have a good idea of what that purpose is or what that purpose-driven culture should be well i think you're bringing up actually a whole different point here that's important which is i view all organizations as having three levels of maturity and a level one mature organization is one that has figured out what their operating model is like it's what i call the tactical layer they know what products they deliver they know how they deliver them they know what their unique way of doing things is within the organization all of that has kind of been outlined and they're able to deliver consistently what that experience and what that product looks like to the consumer i think that if you if you're not there yet it makes it really hard to build a really solid culture right now you need to have the culture on the front end so if you think about how you're going to deliver the services and the products in whether it's a blue collar or a white collar environment what is the business you can build around the behaviors that you would expect people to have in in you know accountability for example well maybe that's a really important uh distinction if you've got some kind of a business that is creative and has knowledge workers but if you've got a blue collar environment maybe accountability is not the number one thing because people show up and they put screws and holes or you know whatever the the day-to-day function is so you have to build the behaviors around the business and the service offering that you have and that starts with the culture that's that's how you build that first initial culture but once you've mastered as an organization what i call level one which is tactical implementation that's where you start to develop what we'll call strategy and that's the second layer and culture is a part of strategy because it will determine whether you want to go after certain channels in in certain ways of distributing the products and services which is you know i don't want to digress into a different area but strategy is very flexible and culture is very fixed culture is something that is think of it as a non-negotiable this is how we show up each and every day to do what we do and if you don't fit the culture it's probably not a good fit as as an employee to come on board so understanding that tactical implementation process and procedures is fixed and culture is fixed and same between in between there what i call level two is strategy and strategy is the reverse it's actually very flexible needs to be flexible if it's a good strategy and so that can create friction okay and if you don't have the culture well defined on the front end it's going to be very hard to keep that strategic alignment and in your strategy will not usually execute well so hopefully that makes sense no i think that definitely makes sense i think that was a very insightful and then helpful so now with that i'm going to ask one question which is we kind of pounded on hey it's much easier to get that culture from the front end to take do the work to define it to figure out what the values are what you want to accomplish and then create that culture around that now let's say on the other hand you aren't in that situation where you're just getting started with business but rather you've been in business for a few years or for quite a bit of time and you're saying you know and it seems like in my limited experience you know sometimes you'll have as a business grows to a period you're saying hey when we started out that culture was kind of natural because everybody was there from the inception from the get-go we kind of already knew the players or had worked with them before or otherwise people kind of the culture was built as we got the business going maybe not as intentional maybe not as well but you know there was some inherent culture there but now the business is growing and it's either bringing on more employees or expanding to new locations or otherwise you've just been in business for a while and now we're looking to make a transition of leadership any of those and you're saying hey maybe we need to focus more on this culture we need to make sure it's more ingrained or make sure it's more prevalent or it's on the you know the or more top of mind and so if you're in those businesses that aren't just starting out building a culture but have already maybe they haven't you know been around for a bit of time how do you go back and start to adjust or otherwise build that culture in or to reingrain that culture for those that may have you know it may be a little bit more not our other habits may be more entrenched so i think the first step you have to think about is what is the culture that exists today like if you have no framework to understand the culture that exists it's going to be very difficult to build a new culture because you don't know where you're starting there are lots of tools and assessments that you can use to identify people's skills but skills are useful only to a certain degree it tells you whether somebody is capable of doing things but the question is will they actually execute on the things that you need them to execute on and that's really where the cultural aspect starts to come into play if you have a culture that is uh very engaged meaning most of the people show up every day and they're excited to be there the the the company's experiencing good growth there it doesn't seem evident that there are major problems with the culture then in that case you've got to start thinking about what would be optimal in terms of your organizational culture what are we looking to accomplish goes back to the y discussion and then you start comparing fit does the culture that we currently have fit the culture we'd like to have optimally and where we're headed to now that's one example and how do you do that well you you look at the behaviors you look at how people show up and if for the most part they're showing up the way you want them to and you're making great progress in most parts of your business then maybe the culture you have is not really very broken it just needs enhancing um but what happens a lot of times is there is nothing to compare fit to that there is no existing an understanding of what the current culture is so people show up and people get added to the culture uh kind of in a haphazard way i mean there are maybe skills and assessments that are being used around skills uh but nobody's spending a lot of time thinking about what is the right fit for us from a cultural perspective that becomes a challenge and you need to go back to square one you need to say what is our optimal what what are we looking for in a candidate not around the skills but about whether they want to be here do they get it okay are they capable and are they willing to deliver okay so if you've got the right components the person's got the skills and they get what you're trying to accomplish as a from a cultural standpoint you might have a good fit there and you start adding people to the organization that are fit and people that are not a fit sometimes you have to make those difficult decisions and say maybe this is not the best place for them or you find another seat on the bus as they would say as jim collins says you know you find a place where they actually do fit within the organization maybe it's not their current role so there's you know there's different ways to assess it but it all comes down to behavior and how are people showing up each and every day and is it what you want them to do where are the gaps so now and i think that that's it definitely makes sense and it is interesting now i'll follow up with the question because um you know it seems like you sometimes you can train culture and er sometimes i'll back up conventional wisdom i've seen a couple different ones you should hire culture in other words so when whether or not someone's going to be a good fit with the culture is a lot of times made at the point of hiring as to whether or not they're going to buy in whether or not they're going to like it whether or not they're going to agree with the purpose and others are saying no you know really a culture is a matter of training in other words a lot of people can fit within the culture but they need to have the training of the skills or otherwise have the time and the support to do that and so you know which camp are you in or which do you think makes sense or is it a combination of both you know is it more on the you should be hiring for culture as you bring people in and that's where it should focus or is it more on the internal hey we should focus on building our culture for within for existing employees and put you know put a greater focus on that does that make sense uh sort of yeah so i think you have to look at how people are going to show up there are three components in my mind there's mindset skill set and tool set right so number one is do they have the right mindset are they the type of an individual that's going to fit into your culture and gonna help move things forward for you i think that's that's an important piece of the assessment skill set is very clear i mean do they have the skills to do the job that you're looking to do and there are a ton of different ways to assess that to make sure that they are capable of doing the job that you're asking them to do and then toolset is all about giving them the resources it's about the training and this is something that's not their responsibility it's your responsibility so if you don't have as a leader a well-defined uh job description what expectations you have of this individual what are you looking for in terms of role fit and and um you know how are they going to be culturally a good fit for your organization if you don't have those things defined it's really hard to train it's really hard to give them the resources and things that they need as a part of the tool set so i think all three components have to uh exist and i think you have to take as a leader you have to take your tool set ownership and and make sure that you can deliver at that level that you provide them the resources and training that they need to do their job well but ultimately it's up to them to show up with the right mindset and skill set to deliver no i think that uh that certainly makes uh makes a great deal of sense now fault or kind of a follow-up question to that and i know i'm asking a lot of questions i just find it interesting okay um so you know let's say you've done all the work you know on the front end you've tried to define the culture you have you know tried to hire for the culture you tried to do the training on the in you know they are training in otherwise make it transparent give the resources and otherwise do everything you can to build a culture and you're having some people that just don't feel like they're fitting the culture in other words you just you know no matter what you feels like no matter what you do you have some employees that fit well within the culture and doing great and some that's there tend to struggle or just don't seem to be a good match for what you're trying to build you know is that something where what is that cut off point between you keep trying to help them to fit within the culture versus you're saying hey this just isn't the culture for you and what you're not going to be happy here and so we need to part ways kind of how do you make that balance or how do you make that determination well i i think the real underlying question of what you're asking about is how do you make sure that people get results right that they are executing on what you're expecting them to execute on well and there's really two components to this it's one is communication and one is coordination of action so as a leader what you're trying to do is manage that process of communication and coordination of action so there's a framework for doing this i call it objectives and outcomes you have to have very clear objectives for the organization that you're trying to accomplish and you have to have identified what the clear outcomes are now you may want to what's this got to do with culture well it has to do with the fact that people can't show up as their best self if they really don't know what's being expected of them and so you have to make sure before you make decisions around whether this person is a good fit or not whether this person can deliver or not is have you done your part as a leader to provide them what they need in terms of their environment in terms of the tool set the resources whatever they need to be successful in that environment if you've done that job well that means you've communicated your expectations extremely well and you've coordinated action by um giving them a way to make progress towards whatever initiatives you need them to make progress towards you you've laid out a strategy and a plan and you've got clear execution expectations from them now the question becomes is if you've done all that and they're still not executing well then you've got a difficult decision to make as a leader you have to figure out is this person just incapable of delivering what you want um that could be a case but oftentimes that's not the situation or maybe they're just not interested they're just not motivated enough to deliver what you want them to deliver and you have to make a decision is do i change the people or do i change the people right what kind of change needs to happen here and if if you come to the determination that this individual just won't deliver over the long term and and they're not interested in being part of your culture in your organization they're just not passionate about what they're doing every day you know then maybe you do have to change the people you have to find somebody that's a better fit um but you also need to give them the opportunity i think to understand where their um where they're failing and in their delivery and give them an opportunity to step up and say you know what i take ownership of some of this and and i can solve this i want to solve this i want to be a part of this organization no i think that that definitely makes sense i mean it always does seem to be a bit of a balancing act at least for me i found that you know some people the culture just no matter what you do culture is just not going to give you a good thing sometimes it's not their fault i mean sometimes if you're if you're redefining the culture shifting you're adjusting you're just better understanding what you want the culture to be and you know maybe that they just simply aren't you know through no fault of their own just it's not the culture that they're going to enjoy they're going to fit with and so sometimes it's going to be that conversation of hey this may be my fault or i may not have conveyed the culture who's right for you or we you know we're making a culture shift or adjustment or whatever that might be and i think it's kinder to for those people it just it's not going to be a good fit to let them go because they're not going to be happy and they're not going to show up and be the you know the their best or perform to the best of their abilities and on the other hand sometimes it's just a acknowledgement and helping them to understand what the culture is and what you're trying to accomplish and how they fit within that and that training that information can help them to make that that mind shift so i think that definitely makes sense well i i just want to add to that i think you know people are the most they could be your best asset or your biggest liability as a company right and so people you're investing as a leader into your organization by recruiting and hiring people on and and you have to think about it from an investment perspective does this make sense to continue to invest into this individual can i make good investments in some cases you can by even providing some outside help getting them a coach getting them somebody to help work through some of their problems a lot of times people don't execute because they're just not being challenged i mean think about that it's all about perceived ability and perceived challenge called tension management everybody shows up at work and they they want to do well i don't i don't believe that they show up just because of a paycheck oftentimes you can tell who those are right on the surface but people who really show up at work and they want to do well but they're struggling making progress on their initiatives for whatever reason well there's a process that you can utilize to help coach them through that and identify what are those blockages that that are causing them not to deliver well over time and then help them if they really want the help to become more productive to execute better um and they become very valuable to you uh and actually can you know become very valuable to themselves because they they get re-energized or re-engaged because now they're being challenged to actually deliver something no i i couldn't agree more i think that definitely makes sense so well as we know wrapping up the pot we had talked about this for a long time we didn't even get to some of the other fun areas that would have been that great to chat on but uh you know always always more things to talk about than time to talk about them but uh as we start to wrap up we've hit on a lot of different things that people could then and should really get started with their business you know as a business owner you always have more things to do than ever time to do it you're always trying to balance things and what are the highest or most critical things and how do you get those started so if people are listening and they're saying hey we know here what is one thing i can do what's one takeaway that i should get started on that i can't er can get started on today what would that one thing be you know i i'll i'll be a little self-serving here you know this article that i'm posting they can go on linkedin and download this there's more than one thing there that they could do uh the article is called the great resignation and it's a predictable future uh predictable failure of leadership and what to do about it there's lots of great suggestions within the article and it's very well backed up with some studies and things that were done so i'll be posting that later today actually on linkedin and anybody who wants to look me up they can find me on linkedin and take a peek at the article i think it'll be very useful awesome well i definitely encourage you know one is to connect up with you on linkedin and then two to check out that article and the other content that you're uh looking to or that you're sharing because it definitely sounds like a great uh resource to get things going for the various businesses so with that as we wrap up but people do want to connect up to you such as on linkedin or otherwise reach out to you connect up with you they want to be a customer they want to be a client 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 connect with your contact or find out more yeah best way for me is my email which is boris b-o-r-i-s at my my ceo.com uh or you can obviously look me up on linkedin my information is there and feel free to uh send me a message those are the best ways all right well i definitely encourage people here to reach out connect and otherwise uh get engaged because it's certainly an area that can make it or have a big impact with your business as you said the employees can be your your greatest asset or your greatest detriment so with that 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 uh make sure to click subscribe make sure to click share make sure to leave us a review because we want to make sure that everybody finds out about all this uh great uh expertise that's being shared and helping other people our people as they are looking to build and grow their business and on that note if you ever need help with the patents trademarks or anything else to help grow your business we're definitely here to help and you can go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat well thank you again boris and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last awesome thanks devin bye-bye [Music] you 

How To Make An Impact

Mariam Ispahani

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/23/2021

 

Well, I think, first of all, we have to see what is the market? You are trying to solve a problem. So, you have to make sure that that's a problem. Then now you figure out ok do I have a solution? Can I come up with a solution? More than anything, and I have learned from experience is you have to see what do the customers want? Because who is going to buy this product at the end of the day? The customers. So, you have to understand what do they need? If you are going to make something that they don't require, that does not make sense. So, I would say the first thing is to speak with customers to find out what are their requirements? What do they need? If we make this, what will they do? If we make that, what will they think?

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 well i think first of all you know we have to always see what is the market right because you're trying to solve the problem so you have to make sure that that's a problem and then now you figure out okay do i have a solution can i come up with a solution but more than anything and uh you know i've learned this through experience you have to see you know what do the customers want because who's going to buy this product at the end of the day the customers right and so you have to understand what do they need if you're going to make something that they don't require that doesn't make sense so i would say first first thing is to speak with customers to find out what are their requirements what do they need if we make this what will you do if we make that what do you think [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 the founder and ceo of miller ip law we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat now today we have another great uh guest on the on the podcast mariam is as close as i'm going to get to getting it right very good but mariam is uh is a scientist she's working on a product that's hopefully going to help to have an impact on the world for the good and to help to um deal with the problems of plastics and today we're going to talk a lot on the as far as areas of expertise with with regards to one how do you make an impact and how do you develop a product how do you convince people your product will make an impact and it's worth investing in but also too it's how do you work with scientists and how do you work with a scientific product and how do you come here you know earn your unofficial master's or phd in a in a field that you may not be familiar with with the get-go but have to have a good enough understanding in order to run things so it'll be a great discussion and uh definitely excited to uh to go through and and chat about it so with that much is introduction welcome on the podcast brian thank you very much devon always nice to meet you and enjoy your sessions and i've heard several of your other podcasts and so it's always a an exciting guest well i'm excited to have you on and we had you on the inventive journey which is a another a fun episode so people can always go check out that podcast on that episode but uh for today for those of you that maybe haven't or those listeners that haven't been uh introduced or having to you know become become familiar with it yet i'm giving maybe just kind of a one to two minute uh quick background on yourself a little bit about what you're doing and what you're working on and why why you become an expert on this area sure uh well i've been in startups pretty much besides working for two non-profits so i'm a total entrepreneur person i enjoy that i love the energy the passion uh trying to find something that you believe in it's a lot of hard work and i decided that like after i tried a few different things that i wanted to be in the renewable space so i've been in the renewable space for just over 10 years now i started out with the solar energy startup and then after that dabbled a bit in wind and hybrid systems and now for the past just over two years have been focused on the plastic pollution problem and so this comes under climate tech which is also still under renewables clean tech climate tech they all kind of under one umbrella and this is our focus right now to see what we can do to solve the plastic pollution problem with plant-based or bio-based products now one and no that was a great introduction definitely uh helpful thank you now one now just kind of diving into the area of expertise and kind of follows right along with that so you know it's it's definitely when you're getting to the plastics you're getting into you know it's certainly a scientific problem and also a product that you're looking to bring out so as you were getting into this originally you know were you an expert already on it was it something you already knew a lot about and it was just kind of natural iteration or something where you had to learn a lot and come up to speed and kind of how do people or you know if they're wanting to get into those type of products how do you how do you go about tackling it yeah well having been in the renewable space i already had a little bit of a know-how as in what's going on where are we at plastic you know is polluting the oceans the land it's impacting us but uh yeah of course i wasn't technical i do not have a scientific background i have worked in semiconductors for seven years but that's completely different and i i had to learn really fast because i built a team and my team of scientists who are on this with me they have you know phd degrees in polymers and biocomposites etc so you know they are the guys who know all the the chemistry behind things and in order for me to understand them and to work with them and for us to work together and see how are we gonna build this company and what are we gonna do to put this uh these products out there in the market uh i had to be technical to an extent and so especially one of the scientists on our team has been extremely helpful in uh educating me and pointing me in uh in directions where i could find links to read up and learn but also you know over time once once you start working with uh with the team and once you start not just that but working with the customers and seeing what are the customer requirements what do they need how do they need it uh you also start collecting information and suddenly you become a let's just say semi expert lack of a better term in the space now one question that would uh kind of come up that i'm sure that because that that i think that feeling and that need is going to be coming up in a lot of different areas in other words let's say you wanted to make you know as you did a scientific product something that was you know going to affect the earth for a positive and you weren't an expert or you weren't a scientist then you're gonna have to come speed same thing if you're wanting to go into software development or have an app or a software application made and you're not a programmer or you know you want to go start a restaurant and you have no idea how to do a restaurant and you know almost every area unless you have a very uh steep background or done this before you're going to have to become an expert in those areas that you're wanting to tackle on or take on as a new project so as you were kind of figuring that out you know how did you go about kind of becoming you know i'd say at least a pseudo expert or enough of an expert that you can understand what's going on you can make sure that it really get being done right and that things are moving along because you know the fear is is that you go and hire whether it's a scientist or the software program or whoever might be a good person and you know get well experienced and then you don't know if they're doing a good job you don't know if you're paying them you know what they should you don't or have that understanding so how did you go about kind of tackling becoming an expert in that area so that you can get comfortable with those that you're working for and hiring and that the project was being done right yeah yeah well first of all being in a startup and being a founder being a ceo whatever have you has all its challenges so you're dealing with that so you're dealing with setting it up you're dealing with uh operations people sales people marketing customers etc but if you do not understand the basics of what it is that you're making it becomes you know even more challenging and then i didn't want to stand in front of customers and not know what i'm talking about and also when we're looking for customers right i have to know what kind of customers are we looking for who's going to use this product and what i did actually interestingly i went to a used bookstore here in california and i went to the science section and they had a whole bunch of chemistry textbooks and i just spent hours reading and then i finally bought three books uh chemistry textbooks different kinds very high level but at the same time it had a lot of chemistry 101 and interestingly these textbooks because they're newer then you know when i went back you know to college and study chemistry physics biology etc uh these textbooks had entire chapters on carbon and on plastic and also environment and plastic pollution and so i said oh this is great and i read and i read and you know it gave me a better understanding but besides that also i joined some organizations so that i could learn more i attended a lot of webinars and you know we were going through this whole covet time in the past uh over a year and a half and so what was there to do but to sit at home and i watched lots of uh webinars uh participated asked questions in fact even you know was a speaker and i felt like networking with people and then i got on linkedin and i connected with like hundreds of people anyone who wrote anything about plastic plastic pollution climate the situation that we're in as well as the kind of products that would uh be an alternative to this situation that we're in to replace petroleum-based plastic i connected with learned more farm found out about their projects and i interviewed a few dozen scientists and yeah we have a few on our team right now but i interviewed dozens we have several people who in fact you know want to join us and uh just yesterday i got another message and a call about it so you know now we are on track to uh better understand what it is that our customers need and the planet needs cool so no so if i were to kind of maybe summarize that just a bit is one you know you went out and it's many avenues you could find information you said hey i'm at least going to get a reasonable or higher level of understanding on the science read some of the papers connect you know do some research on the people that know more than i do on this topic become familiar with them follow them and otherwise gain that knowledge it's really just a matter of you know studying out the speaker putting in the hours and the time and effort to study and you know you may not go get the official phd but you should you get that familiarity that's where you can say hey this you know this makes sense or you know if not then you at least have the foundation for now the scientists can explain it to you and you can get you can understand what they're explaining to you at least on a higher level so hey that definitely makes sense so now shifting gears just a little bit so you know you come up you say okay gonna go and get some of that knowledge gonna figure out you know what the science is gonna read the books read the papers and get a better understanding get connected with those and maybe bring some people on board you know one of the other things that we've talked with a bit was convincing people that you can make an impact or your product will make an impact and why it's worthwhile to invest in that because a lot of times when you get into those impactful products or cert you know products and whatnot it can make an impact it's worthwhile to invest in but one there's either been a lot of failed projects and or they're more expensive than the lesson you know environmentally friendly impact or full product so you know how do you go about convincing people to work on or or invest in your in or your your product as it there to make an impact one thing is interesting we are getting a lot of requests reason being more and more you see in the news people talking about the climate so in a way that in a way uh i suppose we don't even need to do that much marketing of course we we are doing marketing we're very active on social media media we have a huge following on you know all our accounts and all that but uh more than anything uh people are coming to us and they are saying hey so you here saw this post read on the website did a google search because the need is you know so clear right now whether the ipcc you know of the united nations released that report saying we are in a drastic situation we need to do something about the climate or whether you know it was the cop26 event that took place recently people are basically waking up and this has been going on for decades but you know let's just say now i think more so the younger people are waking up and saying hey this has got to stop we have to do something now they make that realization so are they ready just knocking down your door willing to give you money and invest in your product and do whatever they need to or is there still any kind of convincing that needs to go on in other words there's a lot of ways that you can tackle different climate issues some of them it feels like have been you know bait and switch to where people make a lot of promises and never deliver and so it's been kind of a hit or miss kind of an industry so people realize the need and is there any gap that you have to overcome in convincing them that you're feeling that need yeah well we've got different things going on over here one is on one side we have customers and we have letters of intent we have letters of intent from companies from europe to the us to canada and south asia so we have distributors who have signed up all the way from south africa to india etc so on one side we have those uh parties who want to partner with us who want to buy from us and sell for us and on the other side we have the potential investors so we have a lead investor right now and we are waiting for a co-investor to sign on the dotted line and then we should be good to go we're hoping to wrap things up this uh december which is already here and we'd like to do this by you know before 2022 hits so on the investor side of things we have not to be honest have not spoken with a lot of investors but the few that we did connect with they believed in what we're doing uh we spoke with one angel network and you know they were not ready for us and they had some other questions but that's okay that's a different thing and now we are talking to others who totally see uh the value in this and they share our mission the mission the vision you know that we need to do something so basically what we're doing is we are making products and these products are an alternative to petroleum-based plastic these products can be used in injection molding machines 3d printers in the packaging industry in the automotive pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry so we have different products that go in different spaces and right now we are very focused on customers and the fact that we have these large letters of intent uh in the millions and millions of dollars that they require this product from us is extremely exciting so the investors see that they understand that and they have been excited about that too that there is huge potential here oh and i think that that makes sense since in other words you picked a and it one that is a problem that people readily recognize it's one that others are already working to solve and then you're providing you know a good solution that's well explained and you're providing that information to people such that they understand that it can be impactful and how will be impactful and how it works and then it makes it a much easier ability to convince them that that you're you're providing that solution that people need so now one last year one kind of circling back and one of the other things we talked about was a little bit on and you'd hit on it was you know communicating a technical issue to customers and so you know it seems like a lot of times for different businesses and a lot you know depending on the technical issue there's kind of one you know one of three options that you can do and i i have my preference on which option probably makes the most sense but if you're having to explain technical issues to a customer you can have one of your scientists or one of the other people on your team to explain it you can try and pretend like you make it up or otherwise pretend like you understand it and give them very high level answers and then you get stuck as soon as they ask you a question or you can you know come up to speed learn it well enough yourself and be able to explain it but it also takes time and effort to come up to speed so as you were as you've been looking to communicate with customers on the technical issues kind of what approaches you have you taken and what is what would you recommend yeah well i'm a very straightforward person and i don't like to talk about things i don't know anything about i don't like to look like you know oh i know things when i don't and so i'm very clear if i don't know it i say i don't know and if i know it or if i could find out where the information is then i say you know i will check on that and get back to you uh but for the most part yeah i'm happy to have a scientist on the call with us uh you know we have four key scientists on our team and we have like about four or five others who are like ready to jump on a call anytime as consultants as advisors so yeah i could have scientists on the call have scientists on the email thread cc'd and therefore we can address the issue if there's something that i can tackle and many of the customers depending on what their requirements are some of them very basic some of them they start to get a little technical technical because uh for example one of our products are there in pellet form these pellets have to fit in their 3d printers have to fit in their injection molding machines and so they have to make sure that it's not going to mess up their system what are the specifications how is it going to behave what are the mechanical properties etc so for all these things my scientists have created data sheets so we have the data sheets we have the specifications uh one of the scientists on our team just for one of the products gave me like a 50 page report it had images in it it had technical data in it every single thing you know that she worked on and what she did and how she did and it was just fantastic you know just that for me was a a awakening experience to learn so yeah i mean even when i was in the semiconductor industry when i first started out i used to spend a lot of time in the lab with the scientists with the engineers and working with them seeing what they're doing how they're doing it seeing how things are processed then i used to learn and when i attended meetings as a salesperson always it would be myself and then like a master's degree level or phd level uh engineer in the meeting to answer any technical questions but slowly over time as i understood things better most often i did not need the engineer with me at those meetings when i met with ceos of startups and ceos ctos mostly no and if i were to kind of parse x i think there's a lot of good advice in there a lot of good or guidance is one is you should put in the work to understand it as best as you can as reasonably as you can from the get-go in other words you should you know as the owner of the business or the person that's running it or you know the founder one you need to be able to understand so you make sure you're running it well but also too so you can talk intelligently with other people now you're not going to be an expert you're not going to become an expert on all their to the same level maybe as all the scientists and all the people you've hired that's why you're hiring them but you can one is you can work with them ask them questions understand it come to speed two if you get asked a question that you don't know when you're in a meeting say hey i don't know but we have these people that i'm sure will know let me circle back with you and get you that answer but three is also i think is uh come prepared with data sheets with information so that they have a lot to take away so even if you don't have all the answers which you get enough meetings you'll get a bill for a lot of the answers but every so often you'll get caught off guard or you'll have something that you haven't thought of or that don't have the answer right off hand then you can say but here's all the other information here's some things to get started to review over as we get that as we get that additional information for you and it gives people a lot higher degree of confidence so i think that there's a lot of great takeaways in there well as we start to wrap up the episode there's a lot more things i'm sure we can hit on but as we start to wrap up you know we've talked a lot about you know everything from you know how to make an impact how do you identify what you're going to make an impact with how to work with scientific products how to work with scientists how to become a you know a pseudo phd or to earn your you know unofficial phd how to you know convince people that your product will raise a solution we've also talked about you know how you're going to present it to people and ask answer customer questions or potential investor questions with all that there's a lot of things that people could start on a lot of things that they could get going on today especially if they wanted to get working on an impactful or scientific product now with all of that you know can't get going on everything today can't get started on everything all at once so if you're to say you know one thing that if people that are interested or wanting to get going in a product you know in this field what would be that one thing that they should take away or one thing they should get started with okay well i think first of all you know we have to always see what is the market right because you're trying to solve the problem so you have to make sure that that's a problem and then now you figure out okay do i have a solution can i come up with a solution but more than anything and you know i've learned this through experience you have to see you know what do the customers want because who's going to buy this product at the end of the day the customers right and so you have to understand what do they need if you're going to make something that they don't require that doesn't make sense so i would say first first thing is to speak with customers to find out what are their requirements what do they need if we make this what will you do if we make that what do you think and in our particular case we've made a lot of prototypes and in fact now we have customer orders and several pounds of this and several pounds uh you know of that and uh units of this and that for them so that they can test these so that they can evaluate them and then we get the big orders so that's that's the way we tackled it but it is uh depending on the product there can sometimes be a lot of back and forth uh between us and the customers so that's why it was very important to find out what they want so that we can then uh adjust ourselves and adapt accordingly no i think that definitely uh makes a lot of sense i think that that's you know almost a universal uh good takeaway is especially especially in this industry is go talk with the customer see if you're actually solving the problem that they want to have solved with they're willing to pay for that will make an impact that you'll actually be able to make progress and too often you say hey i have a great solution i just want to make a go solve this problem and i think i'm going to do it without ever talking with the customers and then you kind of come to find out you make a disconnect your people aren't going to invest in it they're not going to pay for it and even while you think it's a great solution it's never going to see the light of day so i think that starting at that point is a definitely a great takeaway well if people want to reach out they want to be a customer they want to be a client 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 yeah definitely we have a website sonalibioplastics.com and it's uh you can send an email through there you can find us on linkedin we are on facebook we are on twitter uh you can find me i am very approachable i always like to network always open to new connections and seeing how we can help each other and even if you know a can't help b well b no c knows d and that that's how networking works uh so i'm on linkedin also uh so i can be approached that way we are definitely going to be hiring in fact we need to start talking about what we're going to do because based on our financial plan we need close to 200 people uh to get this uh manufacturing off the ground and so i think we're gonna start talking about that uh pretty soon let's let christmas get over let's get into 2022 and after we all have a nice little uh vacation uh then we will get to that but always approachable uh any time well awesome well i definitely encourage uh people to connect any or all of the above or any or all the above ways and uh certainly worthwhile to make those connections and to network and to utilize the expertise so well thank you again uh miriam for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure and uh thank you for the listeners and just a quick reminder to make sure to subscribe make sure to share make sure that you leave us a review because we want to make sure everybody else learns from all the experts as well and then has access to this expertise um also if you ever need help with our expertise which is patents trademarks and copyrights feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always here to help thank you again maryam for coming on the podcast and wish the next league of your journey even better than the last thank you very much devon appreciate your support and we'll keep looking forward to your podcasts and listening to all your interesting guests thank you [Music]

Be Prepared

Michael Crandall

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/22/2021

 

Be a little bit more prepared in the beginning. Understand the true costs of what it will take. I had the fortune of having a little bit of a savings plus retirement income. Plan out your I can do this. I have six months to start making some revenue. What is my minimum revenue point?

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 be a little bit more prepared in the beginning um understand true costs of what it will take um i like i had the fortunate of having a little bit of a savings plus retirement income but plan out your i can do this i i have six months to start making some revenue and what is my minimum revenue point [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 into 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 of 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 michael crandall and uh michael is a quick introduction so graduated uh from high school went to college no shocker there got a political science degree um was going to be a lawyer and then changed courses and has ended up signing up for the military um was i think in the military for a period of time every four years would uh re-up and re-enlist was there for about 20 years and retired from the military um got a job as as a with the business as a did a lot of big government contract works and then decided to start his own business from there and it's been expanding ever since so but that much is a introduction welcome on the podcast michael thank you devon thanks for having me absolutely so i just took a much longer journey and condensed it into 30 seconds so maybe we'll unpack that a bit so with that um tell us a little bit of how your journey got started in high school and college and we'll go from there yeah i um in high school always wanted to be a lawyer and uh went off to poli sci and after four years of college realized i was a burnout on schooling so decided hey i'm going to join the military and see the world do that for a few years and they offered me some education into the computers and i t and cyber before it was really called cyber and uh that peaked my interest and they sent me to europe so i was enjoying europe and every four years they teased me with another assignment in europe and more training so then 20 years later oops didn't make it the law school uh i've retired from the military i went to work for a large government contracting company now one question just because you're so you know had a best of intentions we're going to go in to be uh an attorney well maybe that was a good thing he didn't but uh who knows i'm i i like attorneys i know a lot of people like law school um but so you did that and you don't go into the army do that for a period of time now you could it wasn't the when you got done with the i think it was around 20 years or so was the intent of hey you know i don't want to do this anymore i'd like to step out and try something different was it you couldn't re-up anymore and that was you know you'd hit the limit as to what they would allow you to do or kind of what prompted that transition from doing the the military to do or to going and working on that in private or business yeah after 20 years and multiple deployments i was kind of broken down physically um so i'm a um certified disabled veteran um so yeah it was this time couldn't keep up with the pt and the physical standards so you know i made it to the 20 and decided to uh pull the golden handle call them parachute and get out and see what was new on the other side hey i don't blame you at all so um so now you say okay pull the you know the gold handle the parachute or whatever that is i'm going to retire you know or at least retire out of the military maybe not retire in the sense of no longer working and so you're coming out of the military and how did you decide kind of what was next it was just hey i had a buddy and i had a giant job lined up and or hey this is the area i wanted to go in and government contracts is greater this is the only thing that's going to pay me any money now so what was kind of that that transition or how did you figure out what you're going to do as you left the military yeah it basically boiled down to um i had 30 um 90 days of terminal leave that's like vacation time that i'd stored up so i had 90 days off after i retired and i took the first 30 and thought i'm just going to relax and do nothing and then everyone said you know coming out of the military with a clearance you get a job no worries well i get into my second 30 days and i'm putting out my applications and resume and thinking like well any minute now any minute uh into month three i started to get nervous uh about what would uh be next and then the job offers started to come in and it was government contracting you know people i had met or knew from when i was in the military looking in their commercial jobs who they were previous military so i kind of just stepped into it from there because it was what i knew and i think that makes sense a lot of times you're saying you know i'm gonna first of all i need to make an income need to make money and what uh what becomes available you know that's reasonable within what i'd like to do and what was that what i need to get paid you take that and so you're saying okay this is something i'm familiar with i'm comfortable with it's you know it's a good job and you go from there and you say how long did you stay with the you're doing the government contract work well i um initially thought i got the job and i was happy and you know being a military guy and doing 20 years with one company the military i thought well i'm gonna i found my company let me work my way up and i'll stay with them and i started as a technical writer and worked my way up the director of operations um during a five-year period uh but what also happened was we were bought three times so i was actually hired by three different companies even though i stayed in the same kind of you know position business structure uh the ownership changed and on the third purchase i had kind of promoted myself into a position that they duplicated and didn't want to bring me on to the new company they kept who they had i got paid a severance and my choice was go looking for a job again or branch out and you know put it out there and see what i could do on my own so now and so now as you kind of come and come up with that or you're looking to say okay got those two choices how did you weigh those because you know up until this point in your career and nothing wrong with it by any means you've worked for someone else and you know you've had me work for the military and with the government then you work for a big business and now you're saying that you know what was it what was the tipping point of saying hey i'd rather go try something out on my own do something else versus trying to go find another job yeah i found that i um when i was working to me newly out of the military what i the civilian world you know this brand new civilian world i would go out to um dc their headquarters and i'd be the first one in at 7 30 and i'd be the last one out about seven o'clock at night um and i just looked around and realized people weren't putting in that level of effort and i thought well if i'm going to continue working the way i've kind of just been brought up to work um i might as well do that for myself uh and while in the beginning the um the pay won't be the same because i'm starting out without any um i knew that i had my military benefits to kind of fall back on and i think in america one of the biggest concerns people have is health care i had health care covered so with health care covered and enough to cover the mortgage i thought well if i'm gonna do it now's the time to do it and that's what i did i jumped out and no it's i mean and i think that that's a bit of a great place to be right in other words you have you're not you have some of the benefits you're able to do a level support yourself and then otherwise have a bit of that you know safety net in a good way and so you're saying okay now with that as a as an ability to go forth why not you know why not rather than simply going and working you know the extra hours and the you know the night you know the nights and weekends and those type of things why not uh put that time and effort into building you know doing it for for yourself and building something out so makes perfect sense at least to me now as you're doing that you know as you're starting out how did it go was it just a rocket ship to the top and just every but you know people are banging down your doors to to get to get business and to pay you money or was it hey it was a long ramp up and it took a while to figure out where you were gonna where the business was gonna be or kind of how was that to transition as you're doing your own thing we um we were lucky it wasn't a meteorological rise to the top um i would say it was a nice bump and steady climb we started out in federal contracts because that's kind of what i knew so i was chasing federal contracts and within six months we got a fairly large federal contract with four employees working overseas so that kept the lights on now we were an actual business had revenue you know could hang a shingle know what was going on um and then that grew into two contracts um and then we kind of pivoted and decided we wanted to started chasing um commercial work so we started chasing small to medium-sized business work and that's been slowly growing um so yeah over we've been doing this now for five years so i would say the federal contracts we got in the early days and then subsequently have helped us keep the lights on allow us to show a nice steady income and then our commercial work has been projects and other growth you know kind of incremental hey well that's that's a good thing to be able to keep the lights on that you have a paycheck and be able to give yourself or yourself you know give yourself and other employees a time to expand and grow the business is a great a great great direction to be and makes it uh you know doable on and making a sustainable business so now we kind of fast forward a bit to where you're at today and you know so you take you know and this is for the audience how long have you been doing the your own business now we started in november 2015. so we're coming up on six years so coming up on six years and you know now kind of saying okay we've got continue to build a business and you can grow it a bit get in there you know continue to sustain things now looking at a bit of the the next you know six to twelve months so projecting a little bit out into the future where do you see things headed is it kind of just a continual steady growth is it a pivot is an adjustment unknown or too hard to tell and where do you see the next six to 12 months going for you well we actually just open an office in london ontario um canadian government asks us to open a subsidiary so we're also digital beach in canada now and we've opened an office there and the goal is to grow in the life sciences and manufacturing up there they have a lot of manufacturing and life science kind of requirements for cyber and so that was kind of they asked us to come up to help fill that gap which we were fortunate enough to be asked so our our pivot focus is now north of the border and seeing what we can do for canadian expansion well that's awesome that's definitely exciting to be able to expand into additional countries expand the footprint and otherwise continue to grow and be successful so it sounds like a great direction to have well now as we've kind of caught up a bit to where your journey is today and even there where your journey's taking you today and even looking a bit to the future i always love to ask two questions at the end of each journey 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 did you learn from it uh not being prepared for the finances at the startup we assumed looking online that a small business loan through you know the sba is something that you just go to the sba and say hi i'm starting a new business give me my money that would be an awesomeness hey i'm gonna do i got an idea for business i need 10 million dollars what do you think oh sure and we found out being a [Music] being a cyber company every bank told us and that's what we didn't realize is the sba loans are through banks not through the sba directly they just held back them so you have to have some sort of collateral and you can't put up your homes you can't um put up personal collateral and our business cons consisted of a phone and a laptop at that time there was you know we have they literally said if we were a construction company you know we would have had assets that they would have loaned us money that they knew they would have gotten back loaning us money on a we're going to get customers one day it just didn't fly and so what we learned was there are organizations out there that understand the federal government business and can give you loans against contracts so that they knew but we ended up funding ourselves we found this out down the line you know and there are agencies that will say you have a federal contract it's worth this much we'll front three months salary for your employees because that's what you need to cover so we you know if we've done a little bit more like business research other than okay we have a name let's go sell it [Music] hey it could have been a whole different store but on the other end you know maybe the the inexperiencer not on unknowing that was a benefit in the sense now you had to figure out how to bootstrap it how to do these things and you weren't able to simply go and you know rely on the the government so the speaker you know the sba not necessarily the government but getting a loan but rather you had to figure it out now you can maintain that it forces you to figure out the ways to make it uh profitable and possible without relying on you know debt so i think that it sounds like it was overall it was a great uh great experience even if if you've done a little bit more research on the front end it might have helped to accelerate or otherwise taking in a different direction failure is always an opportunity so when any failed to get the money up front we we found other opportunity and that drove us absolutely so now second question i'll ask is you talk to somebody that's just getting into a startup or small business would be the one piece of advice you give them uh be a little bit more prepared in the beginning um understand true costs of what it will take like i had the fortunate of having a little bit of a savings plus retirement income but plan out your i can do this i i have six months to start making some revenue and what is my minimum revenue point you know there's always what i call the crap or get off the point to where if you're doing a current job and you're trying to build a new organization one is taking too much of your time but the new organization probably isn't paying you what you've been making or what you're used to at some point you got to know when to pull the trigger and just trust your gut and go for it no i think that that and i think you know it's interesting the the trusting your gut and you know sometimes you say i'm like that's always wrong but you know a lot of times if you were able to if you were to do that you almost what you said do that little bit of homework and taking you know some of those takeaways and do a little bit of research making or be able to have an educated gut and then they're simply pulling the trigger because you can also get the analysis paralysis where you know you're always trying to get more research you're always trying to get more information you're always trying to do it you go to such an extreme that you don't you want to do risk as such so you never have to trust your gut because you know all the answers you're never going to get started so i think that there is that takeaway of kind of finding that balance and we say that in cyber security there is no cyber security there's only risk management and it's the same with a business you're never going to be 100 because you never know what's around the corner i mean we just had coded right no one knows what's going to happen so you do your risk management and say where where can we accept risk and what risk am i willing to uh mitigate et cetera and then you just have to go no and i think that that's uh definitely a great takeaway because you know it's a lot of the same thing that we as an attorney everybody wants to say well you know is there any way that i can make sure guarantee i don't get sued and it's like well you can do things to reduce that likelihood and best prepare for it but anybody can file a lawsuit and it doesn't matter if it's legitimate or not you get to still deal with it and that's part of the legal system and so it's more about that risk mitigation how do i anticipate what are my biggest risks what are my their like best likelihoods and how do i avoid or adjust to or reduce those risks as best i can and otherwise prepare for it and then you just have to go under we don't have perfect knowledge and we're not going to be able to perfectly be able to address those and we're going to do the best we can so as an attorney you don't give guaranteed wins if i could give guaranteed and i could actually meet the guarantee i would be uh one in a million attorneys uh there may be some attorneys that guarantee wins and those are the ones you want to run from because they can't guarantee it they're just lying to you to try and get your money yep so once we now wrap up the podcast and uh people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client 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 uh you can reach out to us at uh our website digitalbeachhead.com or on email info digitalbeachhead.com awesome well i definitely encourage everybody to reach out connect and uh otherwise uh make a new best friend if nothing else now with that um you know for all or thank you again for coming on the podcast michael now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell me like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have or have you i'm just go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show a couple more things make sure to like subscribe and otherwise leave us a review because we want to make sure that everybody finds out about all these awesome episodes and last but not least you need to have a patent trademarks or anything else in your business just go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help thank you again michael for coming on the podcast and i wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you [Music]

Invest In Your Equity

James Regenor

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/20/2021

 

For all the early people you bring on or cofounders, invest into your equity and into your position because you are getting married to somebody. In some cases, you might not know the person very well. Maybe you have different opinions or something several months into it or a different direction you want to go. A pivot you want to make. So if you don't invest in your equity, it makes getting a divorce very difficult. If you and I were in a business and I said Devin, hey, we are just going to split the equity fifty-fifty right from the get-go. Then we get to a point where we decide we want to go in different directions. Now I have to deal with you. You have fifty percent of the equity and, I have fifty percent of the equity. As opposed to if we were in an investing schedule. Where every year, we are investing ten percent till we get to what it was and we decide to part. We would have some sort of recourse to not have to give up half the company or not buy out the company.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 for all the early people you bring on or co-founders or whatever vest into your equity invest into your position um because you're getting married to somebody in some cases you might not know the person very well and maybe you have a differing opinions or something three four six eight ten months a year into it or a different direction you want to go or pivot you don't want to make there um so if you don't vest into your equity it it makes getting a a kind of a divorce very difficult um so if you know if you and i are entering into a business devin i said hey we're just going to split the equity 50 50 right from the get go and then we get to a point where we decide we want to go different direction now i've got to deal with you you have 50 of the equity i have 50 in equity as opposed to if we were on a investing schedule where you know every year we're investing 10 until we got to what it was and we decided to part um you know we would have some sort of uh some sort of recourse to not have to give up half the company or not have to buy after family or whatever it is [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 and uh seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help start us in 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 we're always here to help now today we have another great uh guest on the podcast james uh regener by and i'm worried i'm going to mispronounce his last name so hopefully i was close but uh james uh left high school as a junior and or after the junior year and went into the air force and went into the air force academy and got a degree was in the air force for i think about 30 years and then retired and went to work for a supplier for a while um within the some of the kind of governmental agencies and then uh got into 3d printing business as well from uh and did that for a period of time i started creating digital assets and then went on his own for uh for a few years and then when did another startup covet hit pivoted to ventilation systems and then after coven shifted back into the aerospace industry as well as i'm doing some things with aircraft so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast james well i appreciate you uh appreciate the opportunity to be here devon and i look forward to uh to our discourse today uh that was that was it was a generous introduction so uh and it happened all about that fast so that's awesome so thank you awesome well i'm hopefully not quite as fast otherwise your whole life has been about 30 seconds so maybe with that as we dive in so i just packed a much longer journey into the 30-second version but why do you unpack that a bit and kind of tell us how you know life started as you're wrapping up high school and getting into the air force yeah awesome so uh so like everybody uh you know back in the early 80s uh rolling out of the uh carter years and ronald reagan uh years coming up i was excited about kind of what the new world's going to look like and was looking for an adventure i was also ready to start my life as much as odd as that sounds but at that point i wanted to just get on get moving forward and i worked at a grocery store and every night a air force recruiter come in his name was tech sergeant chuck tache and i would say hey i want to go in the air force he'd say hey come see me when you finish high school i'd say hey i want to go to the air force and we went back and forth finally i said dude i'm going so i went down to his office and signed up for the asvab test i scored really well on it he said i'm going to take a risk and let you go into open general which normally you didn't do you wanted to have a some sort of committed job i took the risk and it worked out well for me and from there i was able to move forward as an enlisted person in the air force and then from there get accepted in the air force academy then my time there went off to fly jets uh really had a great opportunity in the air force 149 countries all 50 states uh i managed to visit um but uh some great things happened in there one of them i worked at one point i worked at kennedy's think tank called checkmate which is a deep strategy cell another staff simon i actually went to work at the white house i was the deputy executive secretary in the executive office of president for the national security council i was hired by george w bush so 43 i was the senior member to stay for the transition to obama i stayed the first six months and then from there i went out and led a large logistics organization 15 locations 11 countries across three continents doing about 65 000 maintenance touches moving uh 2 million people 570 000 short tons a year so really uh out of that kind of drove my innovation i was always starving for spare parts when i left the air force you know i said there's got to be a better way to figure this out there's got to be a better way to get spare parts out to places like minas kyrgyzstan or balad or bagram or some of these bases we're at where we'd have airplanes get broken and have to repair them i went to work at moog which is an aerospace level jump in really quick in this so because it sounds like you know see it ended up working i think with the air force for 30 years is that right yeah 31 years yep so yeah tonight that you know that's a pretty good period time both as far as or the amount of time you stay at the air force as well as that's you know a lot of times a fairly full career and so as you're coming out you know and retiring so to speak from the air force it's the intent hey i'm going to take a break relax catch my breath and otherwise have fun or just saying hey i'm on to my next thing and here's my next opportunity so it's kind of weird so i um metaphysically so i ended up in buffalo let me just go walk backwards a little bit so when i went into the the air force i grew up in erie pennsylvania and when you enter any of the services you would go to a mep station which is how you enter a service you get sworn in and they should be off the base train it happened to be in buffalo new york for erie so when i finished um i had offers from a couple different companies one of them was here in buffalo new york it's about 80 miles from my home uh erie pennsylvania is fairly depressed right now so uh you know there's not a lot happening there um but coming back to buffalo which is where the headquarters was promote kind of closed that first loop metaphysically allowed me to start the next kind of the next loop and i wanted to do that with as much as much vigor and get as much success out of it as i could but a tension exists between time responsibility and money so when you retire you have to figure out where you want to play in that you know if you want to take on a lot of responsibility it's going to cost you a lot of time most likely you'll make a lot of money if you want a lot of time you need a job with less responsibility chances are you make less money so so you have to figure out where you're fitting there i i just jumped in the pool i got hired an executive and uh thrown into the sharks right away working in the military after market for this company which was an area i was familiar with um and able to leverage my rolodex but uh it was uh i ended up leaving there three years later because i was just running other executives right so it was i wasn't able to really expand um you know kind of the left side of my brain which is something i was eager to do um but when we acquired when moog acquired a 3d print business i said hey let me take a look at 3d printing it's going to be commoditized but let me look at what the future looks like in this digital world i'll pause there and we can unpack that as we go but uh i got a little sidetrack sorry oh you're good so now you're coming out of the you're coming out of the the air force you've done that for a period of time say okay retirement you know do i want to do it going on sounds like you know kind of said hey given the balances of those various factors i'd like to continue to work and you went into being a working as a for a business that does supplies for a period of time now as you're doing that business i think you also started to get into 3d printing is that right and kind of maybe started as a bit of a side hustle or hobby and that and then it kind of evolved into being more of an actual business is that about right uh no actually so so the 3d printing was acquired by mo becoming i worked at i said let me let me bring that into my portfolio and start to look at it the idea was to put a 3d printer in the middle of a depo when these military depots and kind of create a fox and then in the hen house type environment where work would come to us because we had a capability there um we offered to give a printer to the government million dollar printer to the government they're like we can't we don't know how to accept three things so uh you know it was it was a little convoluted but but now that um you know i did a lot of scenario-based planning we developed a couple scenarios that really drove me to where i'm at today and i'll just share that scenario with you but you're on an aircraft carrier you're in the indian ocean you have an f-18 that has to fly critical mission lines are at stake it needs a part you have a 3-d printer how can you set apart directly from the part manufacturer out to the aircraft carrier so that it can be printed and put on the jet and standing on the aircraft carrier looking backwards which is kind of how we do the scenario-based planning we accept the fact that what we're asking ourselves is possible and i'll dive in that a little bit more but what we found was there were some gaps in there and really the gaps were around trust how do you trust that nobody corrupted your data your enemy didn't come in and corrupt that digital data and that the processes that were required to be followed for the parts of the air where they were actually followed um and from there we started to look for what trust solutions now mind you this is november 2015 crypto was just starting to become kind of a bitcoin crypto was just starting to become kind of a buzz and i had a colleague come back from mit and said hey look have you thought about blockchain and blockchain being the foundation of cryptocurrency we said no we hadn't we didn't know much about it um i dove into it real quick and said this is a really elegant solution for this problem it allows us to to establish trust outside the four walls of a factory which was significant so once you unmoor it from the cryptocurrency craze there's actually quite a few tools there that are beneficial in the industrial world so that's right so no that makes sense so now you're saying okay both on the crypto side on the this the 3d printing site in general there's a business case we've made there as well as digital assets and kind of giving getting into that you know if it sounds like it started a bit with the business you're working on and the opportunity you had i think at one point or at some point along the way you transitioned to doing it as you're kind of your own business or your full-time or full-time endeavor is that right yeah so you know once we married those two things up the 3d print build file and block in providence to create digital assets we said hey this is interesting we actually created a new form of a new new modality of logistics if you would you could now send things digitally to the point of use to manufacture the time of need so no longer do you have to ship by airland or c which are the traditional modalities of logistics and we also created a new type of commerce and i won't say created we we took a type of congress uh commerce that was very popular in the b2c world and made it a b2b so for example that's digital karma so you consume music video apps on your phone right so consumers are consuming digital commerce every day but now to make an industrial application where i can sell a digital file to somebody and allow them to then printed at the point of use um you know that upsets the whole apple cart right we're able to take lead times that were 265 days and reduce them down to six hours and that's from order to full production and another case we did a real-time use case where we had a flight launch from ucla new zealand and ruto los angeles they had a cabin park that filled um that would have rendered one of their business premier seats um unoccupiable for three legs they would have lost thousands of dollars of revenue um we succeeded at a digital part in singapore they purchased it i was on prem in la printed the part out of a suitcase that i had with a printer they did the quality inspections with a clean land they put it on it but all of a sudden everybody goes holy smokes we can do this we can create these digital supply chains we don't have to maintain these inventories and so on um it really became an exciting venture so i left at that point and said i'm gonna go out and evangelize i spent about a year and a half going to all the shows uh traveling the world actually evangelizing this digital supply chain solution in a company called blockchain resources group and then in 2019 august 2019 i said i'm ready to practice this i went back to the company where i invented the uh intellectual property moog and said hey i want to get these patents that i uh co-invented a license for that and the other ip because you're not using it so we swapped equity for a license and we set out on a our company called veritex and we got our first government contract very quickly and then we ended up in a program called techstars that was sponsored uh by the air force it's the large accelerator with different sponsors this one was air force and then the pandemic crashed down on us so but uh that's how we that's how we got to where we were so morgan is still a great partner um they own about nine percent equity in the company they're also a tier one aerospace supplier so it's rare that you have a startup that's got it you know kind of a big brother that's helping shepherd him through but that's how it was no and that definitely made sense and sounds like it was an interesting and fun part of the journey now one thing you just hit on towards the end there was that you know as you're getting into coped things started to slow down or shift or otherwise necessitate a pivot or an adjustment and i think that's where you got into a bit of the the ventilation systems and doing that for a period of time to address the knee during covert is that right yeah so uh we were up in boston uh at uh state street building on one lincoln beautiful place and for tech stars they said hey look we're gonna go virtual there's a huge outbreak in boston at the time that was one of the first big super spread events which was actually part was in our building and part was on the streets so uh in fact my son was part of the company had to go the hospital he had a bad respiratory illness chances are it was probably that um but we packed up the car we're driving home and i said you know this pandemic and i had um i was doing these little just blurbs putting out on youtube and for the about six weeks before i was talking about the pandemic saying hey this is going to be a big deal it's going to impact the supply and so on and sure enough that's what happened so in that car ride home i said look we should open our aperture we've always been after aerospace medical and industrial applications where there's a you know high consequence of failure that's kind of our sweet spot so i said let's open the aperture let's get into medical right now but i didn't want to risk the whole company out so we stood up another entity so that day driving home and said we're gonna stand up another company we're gonna look at how we can support digital supply chains in the hospitals every hospital's got kind of a closet of misfit toys it's missing a knob a switch or something so they have equipment that's out of operation because they can't get parts to i said let's figure out what that looks like and let's kind of hunker down that night i went to sleep i had a dream about a new type of ventilation system now this will sound hokey to you but i'll give you the back story why it was in my head and why it came out this way and i woke up with an idea so i penned the idea real quick drew it out rough sketch um sent over to a engineering friend of mine said hey look can you make some engineering design or drawings on this and uh um i'm gonna patent this so very quickly called my attorney and said let's get some provisionals set up i set up a company called rabbit medical parts uh got that all together got the first round of designs um and then i went back to the dod who was you know this time we thought there's gonna be a huge ventilator you know problem in the u.s and globally i said look i got this idea it's based on a kc-135 which is type of airplane supply aerocycle machine it's going to be a high-performing low-cost ventilator like well we're interested um so we drew it up gave it to him uh we went from that idea dream to the dod dpa title three contract the same one tesla general motors and fork got in 12 days now when i was in the air force i didn't buy toilet paper in 12 days all right mind you start a business with absolutely no reputation um so so we did that um it was quite successful however there wasn't this huge problem that we had and the others that were making the ventilators of the day that were you know out there um you know they made enough production so there wasn't a need for what we're doing so we got all the way up to the fda uh what's called emergency use authorization steps and that's where the funding cut and they said look we like the idea they red teamed it they brought in a whole bunch of respiratory therapists and doctors they looked at what we did they said wow that's remarkable because we neck down what you know hundreds of parts down into the 40 parts manifold um using air off the air oxygen off the hospital wall at 50 psi going through a venturi pump to increase pressure volume and we're able to create a very wide operating envelope for this uh for this ventilator solution um and that's where we're at so we're waiting for the patents to come through on that we'll eventually take that ip we'll we'll produce the product and we'll do the approval and it'll be ideal for probably places like india and indonesia and you know asia and south americans because you know we can sell it for low dollars we've created a digital supply chain to support it all but about four parts in it are 3d printable and there's 40 parts total to include the six screws that hold it together you know so it's a pretty credible design uh pretty incredible machine when you think about it no sounds like it was a quick and a good pivot and a fun journey so now that kind of brings us up a bit to where you're at today you're gonna be looking out a bit into the future do you see things more as going back to a bit more of the you know military aircraft 3d printing digital assets is it more on the ventilations unknown because the world is still up in flux or kind of if you're looking at say you know the next six to 12 months where do you see things headed and what's the the next steps for you i think what we learned through the pandemic and what we're still learning today is company spent the last 10 to 15 years leaning right they leaned down to supply chains internal processes lost elasticity that sort of stuff um so you know you have to know further than four that's got all those f-150s part wait for chips or any other companies right supply chains the rigid supply chains are a thing of the past so being able to move into digital supply is going to be a big deal so so it's actually serendipitous that this happened and we're a digital supply chain solution so you know we went back into aerospace we picked up a large government contract is a prime for that and now we're building out uh a digital supply chain solution for the air force logistics and it's it's a big deal because that's a you know that's a big spend right if you look at the dod and you look at uh you know aircraft parts and stuff it's about 77 billion dollars a year um and then if you're going to build some structure for the dod you can look outward and say hey look the boeings and the you know the honeywells and the lockheeds and others if you want to supply to the dod you're gonna have to come through this portal to enter into their digital supply chain um so it's a huge opportunity for us and right now we're in the process of you know getting through the first phase and showing that we can do it but it focuses around i'm creating a digital marketplace so like a digital amazon where you can point click buy parts also about providing a data fabric so you know they have all these legacy systems that they have to extract out of so you gotta lay down a fabric layer over and our piece is providing providence to that data so that you have that data integrity um so you have data assurance when you start running a on uh uh or i'm sorry ai and ml type of applications on it and then we're building an application layer which is like a manufacturing execution system using blockchain smart contracts to create these 147 step and beyond uh manufacturing uh flows right in a trusted manner so with verifiable id and some other pieces that that play into it but we create a very secure environment because the dod operates under a framework right now which is kalua lua logistics under attack so every day our adversary and our competitors are trying to attack our digital supply chain whether it's at the air force proper or at the suppliers you know they're out attacking the bones and honeywell's trying to steal ip because they know it's cheaper to steal it than it is to you know done it themselves no i think that that sounds like it will be a fun and uh an interesting journey ahead and definitely one that will uh i'm sure be fruitful and be enjoyable so with that now as we kind of get towards the end of your journey and we've kind of started from from the beginning and worked away to the present maybe you've been looking a little bit in the future great time to transition to the two questions i asked at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the the first question i always ask is um along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it so i i think the the worst business decision i ever made is um you know structurally when you set up a company there are some things that you have to do and it kind of gets kind of convoluted in the idea of i'm trying to push this idea forward you got to do parallel lines efforts so the same time you're trying to get your technology moving forward get your idea moving forward you also have to structurally create two things one is an avenue to take money um we've we were very late trying to create something you should you know you should have a safe or you should have a convertible note the minute you start so if somebody says hey i like that idea i want to give an investment you have a vehicle to take money uh we didn't have a vehicle to make money for a long time which which was silly because we had people that were willing to to invest and uh the other piece is to understand um your equity grab and i would tell you you know we entered into we've entered into an accelerator i won't name which one we've we've done a couple but we need to accelerate it and you know they take six percent equity in this case um six percent's a big deal but when you're starting out you think six percent not a big deal uh so that to me was kind of a bad decision especially since we didn't get much out of it there was you know the the promise of investors on the end and all this other sort of stuff it never really materialized um that that costs us time and it costs us equity that six percent equity is very precious to us especially now we're doing series a round um which we're uh going through right now when's this when's this going to air uh this will later in about a month or so okay so uh yeah i don't want so we're going through uh we're gonna go back cut that out so right now we're raising money and that six percent would make a difference i don't want to mention the series no i think that uh that definitely makes sense i think that the main thing you're hitting on is say you know equity there's always a trade-off between equity versus cash in in other words when you're a business you can the more money you get in especially earlier on it's usually the most expensive money the earlier on the more expensive the money because you're having to give up a larger portion of the equity but at the same time you're also saying if we don't have if we don't have money if the business isn't able to support itself it's not going to be able to um get anywhere and so that equity isn't worth anything so it's always that constant potential so i think that that's definitely something to learn from and something that every uh startup and small businesses ever has to deal with and grapple with second question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business what be the one piece of advice you give them i think the one piece of advice i give them is for all the early people you bring on or co-founders or whatever vest into your equity vest into your position um because you're getting married to somebody in some cases you might not know the person very well and maybe you have a differing opinions or something three four six eight ten months a year into it or a different direction you want to go or pivot you don't want to make there um so if you don't vest into your equity it it makes getting a a kind of a divorce very difficult um so if you know if you and i are entering into a business dev and i said hey we're just going to split the equity 50 50 right from the get go and then we get to a point where we decide we want to go different direction now i've got to deal with you you have 50 of the equity i have 50 in equity as opposed to if we're on investing schedule where you know every year we're investing 10 until we got to what it was and we decided to part um you know we would have some sort of uh some sort of recourse to not have to give up half the company or not have to buy half the company or whatever it is because you're dealing in terms that are at that point to start you're dealing with terms that aren't real what's 50 of your equity worth a year into a startup zero most likely right but from your perspective you look at long-term potential and you know hey you know five years from now this might be worth five million ten hundred whatever it is so it's really hard for you to kind of let go and start to make decisions so what happens is a lot of times you just have to flush that endeavor and say i'm out goes to start up again something else but you don't want to do that right you want to keep that momentum going and so on so by vesting into your equity with your early employees or founders or whatever it gives you options and optionality is key in any startup especially in foundation structure as you move forward um and you know and it goes back to the same question as before it's the equity piece right equity today when you're in startup doesn't mean anything having a couple people that say you know hey we're going to run towards the cannons and they go yep i'm going to follow you that's really important right um but you get signed you know can sidetrack so you have to project what the future looks like and say hey in five years if i'm a 10 million dollar company you know what does that look like what's that equity cost me if i'm a 100 million company what does that equity cost me and the decisions i make today are going to be impacting what that future looks like so you really have to be delivered so hard to do because you're so focused on just getting it moving on the tech and whatever you're doing so i would tell people take the time take a breath kind of project in the future look at what that looks like and then look at different uh off-ramps you know hey i need to off-ramp this technology because it's not going anywhere what do i do or or i need to offer this employee or or me and the other founders we're going different directions you know what i do so build a plan that has some off ramps and then everyone knows about it so when you get to that off ramp or that inflection point you stop you put it in park and you say hey look where are we okay this isn't working out we're going this way that way you're going this way i'm going that way whatever but but it's deliberate it's planned it's intentional and no hard feelings right so oh i think that that's definitely a great piece of advice and uh and great take away so with that is the wrapping of the podcast so people want to reach out to you they want to uh be a customer they want to be a client 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 your contacts you'll find out more yeah so the best way to reach out to me is jim at veritex v-e-r-i-t-x dot c-o and that's uh that's the main email that i respond to i would tell as we close i would also tell folks um you know there are very few times in your life where you get to a point where something interests you you're at an inflection point you have a vision for a future um what what what i tell all founders and i do a lot to support founders i mentor quite a few founders um within our environment everybody that works for us has got a side project going on so we're trying to create almost a co-op environment that we you know rising tide lifts all ships they learn from what we're doing we're learning from them and so on but what i tell people is it takes courage i mean i have done more things in the air force and flown missions and done this and done that that i said hey this this takes some courage it doesn't take the courage i mean i was at the peak of my earning potential and i i kind of checked that looked over at my wife today we're going to go out and work for no money for a couple years and uh i'm telling you it takes a lot of courage and it takes strong mental health because there's so many lows in the startup that uh if you can't manage yourself through the lows and see the you know the upside coming um you'll go crazy uh so i would just uh yeah no i think that's uh definitely a great uh great first of all i encourage people to reach out connect and always uh utilize your service if they're in that industry or otherwise if they're looking to invest to connect there and i think that's a a great takeaway as well so i appreciate that so with that is we're wrapping up the podcast thank you again for coming on it's been a fun it's been a pleasure you know for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell we'd love to have you on the podcast and and share it you can just go to uh inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show and also as a listener make sure to click subscribe make sure to click share and make sure to leave us a review so we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes so please make sure to do that and last but not least if you have any help with your patents trademarks or anything else with your startup or small business just go to strategymeeting.com well thank you again for coming on the podcast james and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last i appreciate it thank you you

How To Break Into An Industry That Has A Monopoly

Tom Milliagan

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/16/2021

 

Build a pitch deck. Google pitch deck and find a way to build your pitch deck. The reason for that is who knows you might need to go out and get funding so, that is the first reason you might want it. The main reason is it really does bring home and drive home what it is you do. Why you do it, and why somebody should care. If you do a good pitch deck you touch on your finance, marketing, operation, and founders. You've touched on every single thing in a very short time frame but, it's incredibly valuable.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 build a pitch deck uh google pitch deck and find a way to build your pitch deck and the reason for that is who knows you might need to go out and get funding so that's the first reason you might want it but the the main reason is it really does bring home and drive home what it is you do why you do it and why somebody should care and it because if you do a good pitch deck you you touch on your your financing your marketing your operations you've your founders you've touched on every single thing in a very short time frame of course but but it's incredibly valuable [Music] hey 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 into 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 we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast tom mcgillin and uh tom we're going to talk a lot about uh breaking into an an industry that otherwise might have a monopoly and in this case it'd be more of the legal industry so tom is not an attorney as far as i'm aware unless he corrects me otherwise but he uh is uh providing a lot of uh services and legal industry with regards to divorce and uh providing kind of an alternative approach to that and with that you know having to break into the legal industry where attorneys are going to be you know holding on to that very tight and i play both sides but i'm also an attorney but also talking about how you educate the audience about what or whether or not they need the experts how you might break a break into the marketing and what those approaches might be and how you do gorilla marketing so it'll be a great conversation definitely looking forward to it and with that much is an introduction welcome on the podcast tom thanks for having me devin it's great to be here so i just kind of gave a quick run through of a lot of the topics we'll be uh covering and talking about but kind of before we dive into that maybe give the audience a little bit of your background why you know what you're talking about what or what your experience is and where you come from well the way we got here is is uh like a lot of entrepreneurs probably it wasn't by design i never intended to be in the legal business let alone the divorce business no i am not an attorney from your intro i want to make that very clear i don't practice law i don't play an attorney on tv but what happened was that after uh 18 years of marriage my my wife uh decided that her boyfriend was more important than our marriage and therefore a divorce was pending and i had been divorced about 20 years earlier and decided that divorce cost me 18 months of my life and about 40 000 and i thought you know what if it's about to happen again i just don't want to go through the pain and the the money and the time there had to be a better way so i created a plan and by following my plan my wife and i were able to have our paperwork ready to file within 48 hours and it cost us nothing now it's important to understand that the average divorce in the u.s takes 11 months and costs 11 000 in attorney's fees and since there is a divorce finalized every 42 seconds that's 8 billion a year and that's that legal monopoly that you talked about those attorneys they want to hold on to that eight billion dollars and i don't blame them sure so now you say okay i'm finding myself uh you know having to go through divorce there's you know kind of the perpetual or every you know inventor wannabe inventor so there's got to be a better way you have your eureka moment so to speak and then you get to work and building your software and you know you guys have now launched and you have the software there and you're working to you know to break into the market and kind of add we alluded to or talked just briefly about you know legal industry and i'll be the first one to agree that there is a monopoly now i can defend i can defend both sides of it and probably like any attorney as to why it makes sense to some degree to have a legal monopoly and why it also is detrimental on other ends and so there's probably a pros and cons on both ends but nonetheless you're saying okay i'd like to you know break into this industry i think this is a product and a service a lot of people can use and it'll be worthwhile saves them time money heartache and expense those type of things and now how did you kind of go about breaking into the legal industry because most people kind of as we chatted a little bit before the podcast most people had the idea that you need going into an attorney to get a divorce so how did you kind of go about correcting that perception well the first step of that was correcting it in my own mind of course i i was like i said i had been divorced 20 years earlier but when i when this second divorce came around i was sitting in my hotel room after being separated for about four weeks and i realized that things were going south and i thought there's got to be a better way so i sat up all night and i wrote up basically a project plan i've been in business for 30 years so i you know i'm familiar with project plans so i wrote up a project plan and that's how i treated my divorce i didn't treat it as a legal action or or anything else i treated it as a project that needed to be completed by two parties my ex-wife is a product manager so she too is very familiar with the concept of a project plan and getting through things and so when i sat down with her two days before thanksgiving in 2019 and said are you willing to follow this plan she said yes a few days later i actually the very next day i sent the completed plan to an attorney friend and i said we're ready to get a divorce can you draw up the paperwork and he called me and he said where did you find this plan i said i made it up and he said if you could package this you'd put every divorce attorney in the country out of business and that's where the idea was born now i want to be very clear i don't believe that i'm going to put every divorce attorney out of business i think that there's a very big need for divorce attorneys i just think that the need has been ballooned beyond where it's actually required and i i tend to use turbo tax as an analogy if nothing else pre-online taxes people did their taxes by themselves or they hired an accountant those were the two options but then turbo tax comes along and changes the paradigm accountants aren't out of business they are still needed they're just needed in more complex cases and they think that's exactly the way it works for divorces they're not divorce attorneys are not going away and nor do i want them to no i'd agree with you because i mean i think and i think that that's the where you get the attorneys that are tend to think too highly of themselves and i again i play both sides of the field but in the one sense you know another one analogy i'll use is legals in right so legalzoom is out there now half the time when you talk to attorneys like well we're just gonna ignore it pretend that it's not there but it's still a big industry and kind of like that you know if you're doing something simple as an example an llc you you don't need if you you know if you're doing a complex business structure you're doing something that requires more complex i wouldn't recommend legal zip if all you have is hey i have an idea i want to pursue it and i want to try and get it up and going and i want to have an llc so somebody doesn't come take my house away if i get sued right beagles is probably not a bad option it's less expensive if it's just a kind of a cookie cutter i'm getting a business up and going i really don't have much complexity it's me and my spouse or me and a business partner and that's it then there's a need for it so it sounds like kind of that same thing with divorce if you're getting into a very you know painful divorce where you can't get along there's a lot of assets you're disputing a lot of things it's going to be a lot of back and forth there's fight over the kids everything else you're probably going to need an attorney on your side to make or find that good fight on the other hand you're making it what would be at least an amicable or reasonable separation to where you're not going to need all that complexity you're not going to be fighting over all those things and you can work out a reasonable plan then it sounds like you know that it kind of fits that same error that same uh structure absolutely correct and i always say if you think about it in order for our divorce.com to work there there are several things that need to fall into place first off if either or both parties for that matter but if either party gets greedy or contentious or wants to fight just to fight we're not going to do it for them that's when by at that point get your money out and hire a great attorney but if both parties want to work together and don't want to spend the 11 000 and again that's just an average um yeah but i mean it can go much higher than that i promise but because it can go so much higher it's worth giving it a try if both of you at least profess to want to get through it amicably no and i think that that's that's a great point now we could go into the you're it's an area where i i think it's very interesting and doing diy type of legal products and diy kind of gets it well you're going to do yourself have no idea and i think that it's not you know maybe it's not quite diy but it's guided you know guided legal products then i think that that's definitely um an area i could spend all day talking about but you know it's refocusing just a bit on the area of expertise so now you have this under you understand that that you know there isn't an attorney you know you don't have to have an attorney there are options at least for those that are going to amicably separate or that aren't going to have a contentious separation and divorce now how do you break into an industry even if it's that's true there's a difference between public perception or people's perception of how you get a divorce which other or versus what's actually reality so how do you start to make inroads or you know make the jump to actually educating people or getting people to realize this is another option yeah that's it's a great question and i'm glad we're here to talk about it because and i think this goes for any any industry any entrepreneur you the first thing you have to do is educate your audience and in my case like i said i had to educate myself first and then once i was convinced that i could do this then it's how do you convince there are 750 000 divorces in the u.s every single year not all of them are going to fit but some of them will and i don't know which ones they are but the challenge was finding those that fit before they get to an attorney because the attorney of course is going to convince them that they can't do it so they riley should if they want to stay in business they're going to convince you need an attorney just like the car salesman is going to convince you you need a new car right and they're also going to tell you you shouldn't use carvana or any of the other dealer non-dealerships i mean i totally get it i don't blame them i don't i don't spite them for doing what they have to do to stay in business which is but it's a it becomes incumbent upon me to find those customers before they find an attorney and so we we decided that we had to go and blanket the world with brand recognition but we didn't have a lot of cash like a lot of entrepreneurs we you know it's not like i had 50 million dollars to buy a super bowl ad that would be nice but we so we knew that we had to kind of go on more of a gorilla tactic and so we have a four prong marketing approach the first one started in september of 2020 when we published our first tick tock now i will tell you that tick tock is not what you would consider a traditional marketing avenue for a divorce service that being said the hashtag divorcetalk tok um has hundreds of millions of views um the hashtag ourdivorce just hit 24 million views so we're doing roughly 2 million views a month on just our own hashtag and so we've become very successful and i'm happy to announce that as of this morning we literally just about two hours ago hit a hundred thousand viewers and two million likes on our videos so we we have carved out a niche if you will on tick tock where we have created a good mix of advertising and inspiration and what that does is roughly two million views a month as i said generates between five and ten thousand site visitors every single month to our website that's a marketer's dream because it cost me literally nothing i spend between i don't know 10 and 15 minutes a day creating a new tick tock and that's all we do and that's what brings in most of our site visitors so that was our first thing but everything we do has to be kind of a guerrilla marketing campaign because number one we don't have the cash and number two the attorneys do so they're going to do everything that they can to discredit us and i understand that now let me ask kind of on that tick tock approach because i you know i i'm a you know market i love the business the marketing side of a law firm and yet i've always looked at it and said it doesn't seem like it fits for a law firm model in other words you know people are typically wanting to have an attorney that has a level of i don't know sophistication or professionality or whatever it is in other words hey if i'm gonna go pay an attorney all this money i want to i want them to you know be worth it so to speak or have that perception and tick tock has always been a bit more informal and videos and definitely has its place but it seems like for a lot of times law firms i've seen a few law firms that have started to get into it haven't been very successful the tick tock hasn't been a very good platform for law firms and you know it sounds like for you guys it's been a a great platform so how did you kind of bridge that gap to where most law firms have struggled on it whereas you've made good inroads and had success well i i think luck had a lot to do with it to be honest i wish that i could say that i spent a bunch of time researching it but we we put out a tick tock and you never know right you never know what your tick tock is going to do it's just like posting anything on facebook or anything else maybe you're going to get 20 likes maybe you're going to get zero i was stunned i posted on a friday night i woke up saturday morning thinking maybe 10 or 20 people would have viewed it but it had over a million views in just over 12 hours and so it was it was quite shocking to me but what that meant was well now we kind of had a tiger by the tail and and that's what we had to work with so that's when i started doing actual research and i did find that there are i don't want to say hundreds but there are dozens at least uh divorce attorneys and divorce uh firms that that do have successful tick tock accounts and i follow all of them they follow me and we've actually become fairly good friends i've actually referred business to several of them which i think is also an important thing because like i said i'm not trying to put anyone out of business and collaborative family law is a is the fastest growing segment of family law right now attorneys are realizing not everyone wants to fight and so i'm building a stable of collaborative law attorneys right now that i can refer business to i don't make any money on it but i want to help people that's kind of the bottom line and we're trying to be very genuine and authentic about that no and i think one of the other things to hit on is it's other attorneys that are divorce attorneys it works well and so just because as an example one guerrilla marketing plan works for one business doesn't mean it's the secret sauce or the secret combination for every other guerrilla marketing plan for every other business in the world and i'm not saying it wouldn't work for but maybe it works great for divorce because hey everybody is divorced tick tock you know is a great place and maybe for immigration law or for you know or white-collar crime maybe that's not where your you know the white-collar crime type of individuals are looking at but i think that same concept of one you have to try things out and two you have to look for where the where your people are going you know where your potential clients or customers are going to be and be able to resonate with them so one of the things you did was tick-tock and kind of looking at your guerrilla marketing another one that you mentioned is you also you know you're on this podcast obviously we also started your own podcast so tell us a little bit kind of how that fit into the marketing plan for doing guerrilla marketing as well sure so again all of this comes down to cost and brand exposure the idea is that i'm not trying to convince anyone to get divorced but hey at any given point in time someone's probably going to go through this unfortunately therefore i want the first thing that they think about is our divorce.com and so to get that point across we created our own podcast it's called my crazy divorce uh we're available on every platform available uh apple google facebook amazon stitcher all of them and my crazy divorce every single week i interview a guest and i then narrate their story and they talk about their crazy divorce we're talking about attempted murder we're talking about poisoning we're talking about arrests false accusations a million dollar divorce last week was a million dollar divorce um and it never it never ends and the reason we do it our divorce.com is the exclusive sponsor of my crazy divorce and and so what we've done is we have um we basically were highlighting how dumb it gets with the idea and these every one of these guests have said if only we could have used ourdivorce.com and then we we juxtaposed that we got this guy last week who spent a million dollars on his divorce he could have spent 299 dollars at our divorce.com so again it's it's brand new we've been at it for just five weeks now we're gaining a following um i got a call from a friend of mine the other day who just found it by by chance and he binged all five episodes and was just oh my gosh i can't wait for it this coming week so we're gaining a following and that again it's virtually free i mean you know i mean you're a podcaster you know there are some costs involved but it's it's not that expensive sure i think that that definitely makes sense and i i like it i mean again i think one of the podcasts in general i think it's an as a very growing exploding area in the sense that people like to consume it when they go to work it's a way to get more information either for entertainment or for if you're like me i listen to you for a lot of marketing and business ideas and for other ways to grow the business but i think it's definitely a good way to highlight it um and also to make connections and to grow the industry so that's true so we've got you know four-year guerrilla marketing you've got tick-tock you've got started your own podcast and i think you also got into affiliate marketing is that right yeah so what we did and we did this too early i'll admit that openly we started this way too early as we went out to several we we kind of got too big in our own heads and we thought we'd become tick-tock influencers so we reached out to some other tick-tock influencers and signed them up as affiliates and basically what we did is we paid them a commission for every couple that navigated our process and ended up paying us at the end because that's the thing we don't charge anything until the very end um well we had i think it was about 12. i think it was 13 total affiliates that we had and they were all over the country and of course they're on tick tock primarily doing their thing we had this one lady her name's heather and every time she opens her mouth she gets about a half a million views i don't know why but she just has some magic and so she started talking about our divorce and i got 40 000 hits on my website overnight which is great the problem was at the time we were only in like two states uh and so we just started way too early we're now in 12 states which represent about 57 percent of all divorces in the u.s and so we're getting closer but we pulled back on our affiliate marketing program until we figure we want to be in at least 40 states and we're adding about a state a month maybe two depending on how complicated they are so we'll get there here sometime in 2022 as we'll be in 40 states and at that point we'll relaunch our affiliate marketing program it was just too successful which is a really bizarre thing but it really got the word out very quickly and it cost me again it cost me nothing unless i got paid first all about gorilla and it gave us incredible exposure no i think that you know i think two things get highlighted sometimes and i've done those programs where you get really excited about them first of all you get really excited about them you don't think all the way through and they bomb which is one you know one in the extreme or they do incredibly well but to your point if you're not set up for all of the people that are going to come through in their use of process it may not be that you're ready for that you know for that type of thing so i think that definitely makes sense but again i like the idea of let's figure out different ways let's look for influencers and again i don't know you know i'm sure there are and i'm probably in the wrong i'm not in the divorce industry so i don't know who those influencers would even begin to be nor do i want to be at the divorce i don't want to be or go through a divorce so fingers crossed um but i think that that may definitely make sense let's go to the influencers that you can have they'll make that they also need to be set up so that they match the what the services you provide or the areas you do that so so that's number three so you do tick-tock you do um you know a podcast you affiliate marketing and then the other one is you started advertising on other podcasts is that right we are beginning that in the next month or so we have chosen a few uh somewhere between 70 and 80 of divorces are filed by women and so that is our demographic so we are working with an ad agency right now a podcast advertising agency to basically determine the best podcasts for us to advertise on and one of the challenges we run into is that people they hear what i talk about they hear that we're trying to make it as easy as possible and they think that we're glorifying divorce or that we're celebrating divorce or encouraging divorce and we're doing none of those things so our advertising has to be careful i think is the right word we have to be mindful that some people feel that way and you know turbo tax isn't glorifying taxes and so so they've done a good job uh we need to as we go forward advertising on other platforms we have to be really good about making sure that we we make that very clear no and i think it is that messaging one of the interesting things kind of on those lines just to kind of brought to mind was so i've done you know no surprise to anybody that knows me but i'm the member of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints or known as mormons or lds and one of the small businesses has been kind of a fun family business doesn't make the time has been some religious products just associated with the church and then we do and then sell on just some e-commerce site and one of the things we found is there is a very fine line between what you can or what you should say and what you shouldn't say is it's where the audience will resonate with it or whether they'll find offensive you know no one fences ten it's not offensive content but just how you know people will say you know what are the i don't find that you know this is relevant or i don't find that funny or i don't find that you should be making those type of comments and there was nothing intended but you know along those same lines the same with the podcast just because there's a lot of podcasts out there you can get a big audience or you can get it you know you can get in front of a lot of people you have to find those ones that are going to be the right audience or the ones they're going to resonate with that are going to or the message going to resonate with them because if all you do is get in front of a whole bunch of people they're saying this has nothing to do with me or i to your point hey i don't i don't want this it feels like it's glorifying divorces it doesn't do you any good just because you get in front of a lot of people a lot of people right and going back to those affiliates by the way that kind of brings up that point the types of affiliates it really doesn't matter if you think about it because again it's just we need to cast the widest net possible because it's not about finding people who are of like mind or of a certain age or i mean gender does matter to a certain extent but the point is if someone's going to get divorced someday whether it's tomorrow or 10 years from now i want them to think about ourdivorce.com and that's really all we're doing with the affiliates and and we still pay them by the way those affiliates that we did have we basically stopped we asked him to stop what's the word i'm looking for promoting our website but we still have people that show up because their videos still live on they might be a year which is great on anything is evergreen content right if it's up there whether it's a podcast blog post or anything of that nature is it continues to live on so i definitely can see how you know what i'm a big proponent or proponent of guerrilla marketing and i don't you know groom marketing just sounds like hey we're going to go do something that others are not just because they're not doing it which i think is not true in the sense that you still have to be methodical you still have to think why is this going to work you have to have a plan for how it's going to work why this you know maybe it's untapped but it still has to make logical sense don't just go and try and do a whole bunch of crazy things just because they're crazy nobody else has done it because you're going to waste a whole bunch of time money and effort that you're never going to recoup but if you can find those areas that are untapped that are niches that aren't the ones that are being addressed or are have for fertile or fruitful ground i think it definitely makes sense especially when you don't have a lot of money and have to be scrappy yeah because if you think you just hit on a perfect perfect thing and that is that if someone's not doing it there might be a reason right there's there's a fine line between guerrilla marketing and just wasting money yep and i think so and i think that too often people say well i'm going to go do these crazy things they're going to get attention well even if you get attention it may not be the right attention it may not be the right people or it just may not get any attention all of which you just you wasted a whole bunch of time money and effort and so it is that hey you need to be methodical there are i think a lot of untapped markets there are a lot of places where people are getting used to are entrenched and just doing a way of marketing and never broaden their horizons so there are plenty of possibilities but you have to think of here you have to have a plan in place we could talk through this all day and i'm sure it would be an awesome and fun conversation but we are reaching towards the end of the podcast um so as we wrap up you know we always talk we've talked through a lot of things we've talked through generally you know breaking into a legal industry and educating the audience as to why they may not need an attorney we've talked about different ways of doing guerrilla marketing whether it's affiliate marketing or a podcast or tick tock or others and kind of that overall concept and so walking away with a lot of different things that you know startup or small business could consider or start to do and you know i've been there and you're usually saying well that's a lot of great things that i could be doing i don't have the time bandwidth money or effort to be doing all of those and so if they can kind of only get started on one thing today kind of have that one take away that at least to have an impact on their business what would that one thing be you know that that that's a loaded question uh i would because there's so many different things that that everyone has to do but i would suggest something that i wish i had done a year ago and and i've just done it in the last couple of months build a pitch deck google pitch deck and find a way to build your pitch deck and the reason for that is who knows you might need to go out and get funding so that's the first reason you might want it but the the main reason is is it really does bring home and drive home what it is you do why you do it and why somebody should care and it because if you do a good pitch deck you you touch on your your financing your marketing your operations you've your founders you've touched on every single thing in a very short time frame of course but but it's incredibly valuable and i again i wish i had done that a year ago i only did it this month well i guess it was last month now but it has been a an eye-opening experience for me and i suggest everybody do it right now no and i think that that's great i mean one thing now all caveats i'm not a huge proponent of pitch decks in the sense that you don't need to have the 30 page long drawn out every possibility and you're going to go and pitch it to everybody because half the time you're going to pivot you're going to adjust you're going to learn new things and so it shouldn't be the hey we're going to make the bible for our business and we're never going to deviate from this i think on the other hand it's going to get there it's going to force you to sit down think about what your business is get some strategy in place get some or plan in place understand you know what is the everything from competitive landscape what are our price points what are differentiations how we're going to reach our market and i think it's a great exercise to walk through and then it also helps you so that if you are pitching someone you are reaching out you are connecting or otherwise looking for partners or investors or customers or anything else you have that solidified in your mind because you've had to go through that exercise so i definitely think it's a worthwhile exercise just within the context of you need to know why you're doing it so i think that's a great takeaway and a great piece of advice with people do want to reach out to you they want to find out more about your business they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be a 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 well you can uh if you're trying to be a customer just learn more about our product ourdivorce.com it's always there if you want to reach out to me directly tom.milligan ourdivorce.com if you want to hear the podcast go to mycrazydivorce.com or of course search for my crazy divorce on apple or google or wherever you get your podcasts if you want to be a guest on my crazy divorce please go to my crazydivorce.com and click on the be a guest button we'd love to have you all right well i may not make the best guess because i haven't been through divorce tonight certainly peter's cross don't want to ever go through a divorce but i definitely encourage everybody if you have a crazy divorce story to reach out and go on the podcast it sounds like a great time i'll have to check it out so well thank you again tom 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 expertise you'd like to share or you have your own journey you'd like to share or your inventive journey feel free to go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show make sure to also like share subscribe because we want to make sure that everybody finds out about how to or all these great expertise and how to grow their business how to be successful and hear everybody else's journeys along the way so make sure to like share and subscribe well thank you again tom it's been a pleasure and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin [Music]

Look At What Already Exists

Constanza Roeder

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/14/2021

 

Definitely, what I said earlier of really looking at what already exists in your community. Not just well, no, I have never heard of someone who is doing this. No, you need to dig in. Most of these have nonprofit councils of some sort. Dig in and see who is at least serving the demographic of people that you want to serve. What in the area are you doing with them? Can you partner with them on adding something to those services?

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 well i mean definitely what i said earlier of really looking at what already exists in your community and like not just like oh well i've never heard of someone doing this it's like no you really need to like dig in there most cities have non-profit councils of some sort or um like really dig in and see who is at least serving the demographic of people that you want to serve um and what are they already doing with them and can you partner with them on adding something to those services [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan miller the cereal entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you're needing 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 costanza raider and uh costanza grew up in a musical family so when she was about 13 years old she also had leukemia and figured out that arts was a important tool for her to cope with the illness and during that or later on also had an opportunity to move from california to texas and study music in psychology in college after graduating went to uh do musical theater as an actress and was a music instructor for a while and uh during that volunteered as an oncology unit in the hospital and there weren't a lot of activities for adults in the oncology unit um and the peter saw that these patients were suffering needlessly um decided to sign up for patients to lift them up started a non-profit and saw an opportunity for artists to uh to share their their different things and help with those units so with that much is an introduction welcome on the podcast thanks i mean that's that's my story i think i'm done we're good hey that's it's always a good it's always good to get a nutshell and now we're going to go and back it so i just condensed a much longer journey into about 30 or 40 seconds that was pretty impressive actually i do what i can so with that let's go back a bit in time to where your journey started which was uh growing up in a musical family and also having to deal with at a younger age with leukemia and how that got your journey going yeah i um yeah my mom was really musical she was a singer and we did um performances and shows with different groups as a family growing up that was a big part of our of my childhood and we had a piano and you know from like i don't know barely able to stand up i was pulling myself up and and playing on the piano in our home and um uh i little did i know that that was gonna be kind of what i did the rest of my life and would also be the thing that would um heal me later on when as we were um as i faced challenges throughout my life so uh so yeah i so yeah grew up in physical family in california i was diagnosed with leukemia at 13. um i had 130 weeks of chemotherapy um so most of my high school time was was dealing with with cancer and um i was fortunate in a lot of ways like you mentioned in the introduction because i had access to the arts when i would go in to the clinic for infusions when i was admitted to the hospital there was always someone coming by trying to like cheer me up or do um coloring pages with me or you know fill in the blank whatever it was um there's so many resources actually that get thrown at supportive services for um pediatric oncology patients which as it should be like that's it's a it's a really challenging thing for patients and their families to go through but when i graduated um from college and i should let you know i have been cancer-free um since 2002. so almost almost 20 years whoa it's a long time um i uh um went on to study music and psychology in school like you said and in san antonio i started volunteering on an adult oncology unit and saw that there it was very different than the environment that i had that i was in when i was treated and a lot of the patients that i worked with weren't much older than i was when i finished treatment and yet they were alone for long stretches of time whereas i was never alone when i was in the hospital um but i mean if you think about it especially young adults like they um often have like young families and so someone has to stay home to take care of the kids or keep working so that you can still have insurance and all those issues um so yeah a lot of the patients lived in the hospital for weeks and months at a time and the boredom anxiety depression isolation was it's deadly in a place like that and if it's not addressed um patient outcomes suffer that's um well established in the research that um that these psychosocial issues impact our body's ability to heal it influences the rate that tumors and cancers grow in our bodies actually and yet we we're still really lagging in supportive services especially for the adult population which is the vast majority of people that are in hospitals are adults and so yeah started singing for patients and it just that little bit of bringing that little bit of beauty and human connection into a place like that is um it was just it was transformative and incredibly powerful and my patients usually cry um good tears you know and just begged for more and they wanted things that i didn't know how to do and so i i started um my non-profit so that we could now let me just jump in because non-profit because you were at the time if i remember in our conversation so backing up the journey just a bit so you got the degree in music psychology but before you kind of started the non-profit you were also worked as a actress for a period of time or musical theater actress and i went to music instructor so help us understand a bit of that journey was this you know did you start volunteering while you're doing those or did you do those first for a while and then start volunteering you're kind of what was that portion of the journey yeah that's always a tricky thing how do you go from your day job to your dream job right when you're an entrepreneur um so yeah i uh and not that the work i did previous wasn't fun and i loved it uh yeah i um i did a lot of performance um after college and started a voice studio which is my like other love i just absolutely love um when people come into my studio especially those that have been told that they can't sing or beca that they have some sort of wounding around their voice and around their creativity um and to create safe space for them to explore and learn and build skills and build confidence um in their voices when you when you change the voice you you affect the whole person when you free up the voice you free up the whole person and it's it's it's addicting to watch it happen and to get to be a part of that process so um i was actively doing all those things for many years while i was volunteering and initially i was volunteering very occasionally and i would bring castmates in to do little performances on the units and um i would bring friends to come and you know play and sing with me and and that was really fun but as it went on i just really felt the strong sense that this is really what i want to do with my life this is my favorite place to perform like i don't like on stage is great and i love the camaraderie of of theater it's such a that's its own healing process to um to do theater and be part of performing groups like that uh but the level of fulfillment and impact that i saw through the work in the hospital was there was just no comparison to it so um so yeah i was was doing both for a long period of time and slowly did more and more and more and how long when you say long period time was just a space over one year five years 20 years you know how long was you kind of doing the volunteering on the side doing it as kind of a hey i want to get back or want to you know i've been through this experience and i want to help others how long was that period of time where you're kind of volunteering as you were working the full-time day job i started volunteering in 2009 and i started my organization in 2016. so there's a good chunk of time and some of that too was the the emotional hurdles that i had to overcome because when i would go into the hospital it would re it would trigger some of my own trauma that wasn't fully resolved yet and i i would sometimes call my mom on the way to the hospital like crying like on the edge of a panic attack and she's like just breathe like she'd talk me through it and because she knew that i i really wanted to be there and i was making an impact um uh but it was still really hard so i couldn't do it as often as i wanted to even with the other job um there was some emotional stuff i had to get through first and so i had a really lovely uh mental breakdown in 2012. which um it's actually pretty common in survivors about 10 years out there's sometimes there's often this resurgence of our this emergence of all this um trauma that's kind of locked in implicit memories that kind of bubbles to the surface and then it's like okay you're in a safe place now now you get to deal with all of this all this junk uh so got some really great therapy and as i got through that i really felt like okay i'm free from all that now i can really be present and serve in this way that i want to serve so yeah no i think that definitely makes sense now so as you're doing that so you're working the full-time day job you did the volunteering it sounds like you know from about 2009 to 2016 you're basically working as an actress and you're working and coaching others and helping them and doing it the you know instructions and that um and then it sounds like in putting words in your mouth you can correct more i'm wrong but 2016 you decided to make the non-for profit a more full-time endeavor kind of what was that transition from going part-time you know kind of doing this as a volunteer work on the side while supporting yourself just saying hey this is really where my passion is i'd like to focus on and i know i'm asking a compound question so i apologize the other part of to that is what was the kind of the trigger to say hey i've had enough of this there i've had i want not had enough in a bad way but i really want to make this my full-time focus and what was kind of that trigger that said okay now i'm going to make that leap what was the inciting incident um in my story yeah uh let's start there because that start that was um a year or so before i started my organization i um met this patient uh one of our young adult patients and her name is gracie i have permission to tell her story and which i'm very grateful to her husband um for um and i met gracie like the day after she was diagnosed with cancer and she was um her early 20s she was far from home she was about three hours away from her hometown and when i first went in to work with her she was sitting in a ball huddled in a ball in her bed and just really flat affect and i went in and introduced myself and said hey do you want to hear some music and she's like well i'm not really like a nazi person i don't even really listen to music so you know maybe not today and i was like okay that's fine um we never we're never mad when people say no it's the no is part of as part of the um therapeutic aspect of it it's it all centers around giving patients choice and that's something that she could say no to that day but then before i left she stopped me and she's like well actually um actually if you know a christian song i feel like i could really i really need to hear that right now um and so i sang um i don't know if you know the old song his eye is on the sparrow and i know he watches me he's i on the sparrow and i know he watches me and i much better than i've ever seen so that was awesome that's why they paid me the big bucks not really uh but yeah as i sang through the verses of the song i just watched the tension melt from her body and and tears come to her eyes and when i finished she just looked up and said thank you and i actually got to work with gracie a lot over the months she was in the hospital she lived in the hospital for six months while she was receiving treatment she couldn't they couldn't discharge her because of the way her insurance was they wouldn't be able to re-admit her to finish treatment so they had a keeper in the hospital and she was alone a lot and um i worked but her favorite day was wednesday because i would come in that was my day to come and um play music and we had a group for young adults with cancer on on the unit on the at the hospital and we would play music and share stories and we just had a great time connecting with each other um and she did finally get to she did find we did finally get her in remission and she got scoped she finally got to go home we were super excited for her um but a few just a few months later she was back in the hospital because her cancer was back and this time as soon as i found out i i went to her room and expecting devastation because this is like the worst nightmare for survivor and this time i found her sitting on her bed smiling i was confused and she's like oh my gosh i'm so glad you're here i want to show you something and she pulled me over to her bed and she rolled up her sleeve and there was a brand new tattoo of of a sparrow that she had designed herself that she'd gotten as soon as she got out of the hospital and she said you know i'll never forget that first song you sing for me and i know now that no matter what happens that he is watching over me and of course i lost my mind and just cried for three days like you too um and then you know unfortunately they weren't able to get her cancer back in remission but um before she went home on hospice she called me to her room again and she grabbed my face and she said we need more we need more art and music we need more reasons to get out of our rooms and out of our isolation because we need to remember the reasons why we're alive as much as we need the things that keep us alive she made it very clear that while she appreciated that i was there once a week that it wasn't enough and that there were many patients that would come after her that needed more and she said you gotta do something about this and i was like yes ma'am um and it had been it had already been an idea forming for a while but she really gave me the kick in the pants to say you you got to take action now um and so i did i did the research like googled how to start a non-profit and did a lot of research on other arts and health programs like ours that do bring the arts into hospitals uh like how do people do this and um all of that and then started my nonprofit in 2016 and we hired our first visual artist the next month well that's awesome now that's a that's a great story and uh certainly is uh heartwarming you know when it's something that comes out of a loss but also gives you an opportunity to serve others and kind of make that the transition of that full-time focus so yeah that was just as you've done that you know as you put that as more hey we're gonna do this as a full-time focus and really make it uh the endeavor you're gonna do you know i don't know a ton about non-profits i've worked with some and i know some but i've never dived into that very deeply but you know is that a you know generally the model is you have you're continually going around trying to fundraise trying to get people to donate otherwise doing it and a lot of them tend to not make it very long just because you're having to continually get donors and you get people that are willing to contribute on a regular basis so as you're getting that up and going you almost have to focus a bit on the you know not just the mission which is definitely important but also a bit more on kind of the business related side how did that go for you was it something where you're able to get people that saw the vision and really you know bought into it where they're supported was the hospitals on board kind of how did all of that go for you that's a great question because it is there's not really i think a straight line of um or like template that really any nonprofit founder necessarily follows like each kind of takes their own path to um get to stability like what's kind of the goal is to have stability so that you can continue to execute your mission in perpetuity that it's not just this like one-time thing because a lot of nonprofits do fail within the first three to five years uh so i um you the second part of the question you asked previously was that transition between my other job and then the work i do now and the first three years of the organization i didn't take a salary i employed artists and because you know it's a core part of our values is providing economic opportunities for for creatives because they're generally underemployed um and this is it takes very skilled artists to do this work and so they should be paid for the work that they do um it's also an issue with equity too because if you only if your nonprofit is only run by volunteers then only people that can afford to volunteer can be part of the mission and that won't necessarily be a group of people that if reflects the diversity of the people that you're serving um so we have people we have artists on our team that wouldn't be able to they couldn't afford to volunteer but they're some of our most valuable artists because they they can connect with a demographic of people that we serve that um that i might not be able to connect with or someone else that's like a little side piece a lot of people think nonprofits like oh like it's all volunteer no one's making money and yes volunteer work is an important piece of nonprofits i don't want to totally negate volunteering um but for anyway for this type of work it's really important to to pay our artists that was a priority and i in in nonprofits a lot of nonprofit founders um well let me back up if you are a person thinking of starting a nonprofit please um don't until you really search and make sure there's no one else in your area that is doing is serving the people that you want to serve or is doing something related because you can you can it's much easier to partner with an existing non-profit to to fill a need that you see in your community or to og and augment what someone's doing because it's a big drain on resources to create um a separate nonprofit i ended up deciding to start a non-profit because there wasn't anyone in my community that was doing what i knew needed to be done um and nonprofit founders generally are on the founding board as well and when you're a board member you can't be paid or it's not best not good practice to be a paid staff member and the board because the board employs the executive director essentially so you would be your own boss and you're you're not getting those checks and balances so i didn't take any salary for the first three years so i'm still teaching um i and each year i slowly knocked off a few of my students as my workload increase but the only reason i was able to do that is because of my husband and i do want to acknowledge him and the the fact that like i went to him i was like i'm not i'm quitting my job or i'm like cutting down on students and he's like yeah do it this is what you're supposed to be doing like we can make this work and um go for it so um our the organization wouldn't exist without him and he was our first and largest donor was my husband because he let me donate huge chunks of my time and my um my economic potential if you will um but eventually we were able to transition into you know recruiting enough board members so i could exit the board and could start um drawing a salary and um and devote more of my time to um to the nonprofit um so yeah it's not it's a lot of people are like oh i want to get paid to do i want to start a nonprofit so i can get paid to do this work that i want to do and it's going to be a long road if that's your goal um and anyway so uh there's a lot to unpack in this topic well there's so many directions you can go but i will say the thing that gave me a give me an advantage is um my aunt happens to be one of the top persuasive communication experts in the world and i got i learned from her um how to how to do that how to even storytelling and and create persuasive presentations so that we were able to build our donor base a lot quicker than um we would have otherwise because i could explain to people in a way that connected with them so they could see what we were trying to do and they could see the part that they could play in in achieving this this vision that i had so well that's definitely an awesome journey and sounds like you know as with i think a lot to do with whether it's non-profit or worse or you know a startup or a for-profit business you're going to have a lot of the same things of making a sustainable model something that people are willing to purchase or you know donate or contribute to and figuring out how to do that is definitely always a journey and sounds like certainly no exception here so we could go on and i'm sure for a lot more and it'd be fun to have you maybe come back on in the future and talk a little bit more specifically about non-profits and some of the thoughts and the pointers and people if they're looking to get into that so we'll have to have you back on i'm there at some point but as we do wrap up this episode i always ask two questions at the end of each uh and end of each podcast we'll go ahead and 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 um so this this um the answer to this actually involves ip so i feel like this is perfect for your podcast um it ended up being okay well this whole street so there was did you watch um a series of unfortunate no no that's not it um oh my gosh what is the name of that show that was on netflix um with count olaf and the children do you know what i'm talking about i do like series of unfortunate events series of unfortunate events i think that's the right name okay i i did get it right in one of the episodes um a few years a few years ago when it was first coming up there's an episode of where they show people going into the hospital is like singing and like trying to cheer up patients and it's just this parody on the work that we do and it was so funny and i sent it on and it was intended to be kind of disparaging about that but i thought it was hilarious so i sent it to my team and they're like this is amazing we should try to do this art like do our own version of this and so we um we uh started making putting together script and we found a photographer like a videographer and we were getting into it and we were um recording it and on location at the hospital anyway this whole thing and then we were like halfway through it and we're like you know i don't think what we're doing is enough parody to co to consider this fair use and um we're gonna have to scrap this whole project because it's we're just recreating what they did um and like maybe it would have been okay but you know we're an arts organization that's a bad look ripping off giving the appearance of ripping off other people's art might be a bit of a problem right right so we sunk a lot of time into that project before we stopped it um but we ended up having this whole blooper reel that we played for our staff um at the christmas party that year and so we all had a really great laugh about that that blooper it was a blooper reel of of a blooper it was fun well there you go that is a good mistake you know it's one where i again because that is a fine line to walk between parity and what's fair use and what's not and then you pile on top that you are an arts organization where it's going to come off looking even worse for you if you don't do it right and so definitely is one that makes sense as to how you go down that road and how you might make that mistake but the definitely fun to hear we got our our excitement got ahead of us but yeah go ahead i understand so no i was gonna jump to now the second question i always ask which is if you're talking to somebody that's uh just getting into a startup or small business and maybe we'll shift the question just a little bit to say a non-profit startup or small business what would be the one piece of advice you give them well i mean definitely what i said earlier of really looking at what already exists in your community and like not just like oh well i've never heard of someone doing this it's like no you really need to like dig in there most cities have non-profit councils of some sort or um like really dig in and see who is at least serving the demographic of people that you want to serve um and what are they already doing with them and can you partner with them on adding something to those services so that's the first one we have too many non-profits and it lessens the effectiveness of of the sector in general at attacking some of the world's biggest problems that we're trying to address as an industry and second i would say a lot of people come to service work because they're trying to fix something in themselves where i need and and that was you know part of my journey too of starting with okay this is something that i had and i needed and people i knew needed and so there's there's a piece of me that needed to get healed in the process and that was a really important process of stepping over like doing something for myself versus really looking clearly at the person i say i'm trying to serve and app and asking brutal questions am i actually accomplishing the goal that i say i want because um and i experienced this a lot as a as a as a kid there were so many people that wanted to help me that needed to help me they needed me to respond in a particular way so that they felt validated for doing something good or or whatever it is and me as the recipient did not feel um that didn't feel good right because that's putting extra burden on me when i'm already in a vulnerable tough place so you gotta do the tough inner heart work and and ask yourself why do i want to serve and that and that place of um that place is often a starting point for something good but you got to clear out you got to clear out your own ego stuff so that and get those needs met elsewhere so you're not overburdening the people that you're trying to serve with your own stuff no and i think that's a great takeaway and it sounds like you know not an area i'm is a it's uh familiar with as far as doing it myself but it certainly seems like you know a lot of times when you're going to go through the passion of doing a non-profit and uh and doing something that is a much more of a kind of a giving in nature you're going to have to make or find that balance so that it doesn't get overwhelmed with other those those additional things so i think that's a definitely great takeaway and just real quick for small businesses too i think sometimes we get as entrepreneurs we get attached to certain ideas and and lose sight of because entrepreneurship is service too we're finding needs and trying to address needs but sometimes we get attached to address attached to our own ideas or how we think something should go or look or should look when we're and we stop we lose focus of of who we're trying to serve and and then we're frustrated because they don't get it or whatever the reason is you know how can we how can we as entrepreneurs um really connect empathetically with people we're trying to serve um so that we are addressing real needs no i think that's a definitely a great takeaway and good advice so now as we uh wrap up the the episode if people want to reach out to you they want to connect up with you they want to be a customer they want to be fine they want to donate they want to be an investor they want to be an employee they want to be an artist that works for you or they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you to contact you or find out more sure well i highly recommend going to our website heartsneadart.org uh if you're interested in learning more about this field of arts and health and how the arts impact our health and why like what is the mechanisms behind that um check out our podcast it's called arts for the health of it and it's on all the podcast platforms and you can learn more from researchers and artists and all the amazing people that we get to talk to also on our website you can um you can browse our artists that we employ and actually you can choose one to support so if you find one that connects with you um that you want to support on a monthly basis uh then you get um monthly messages of stories of impact that they made in the hospital because of your gift and it's a really cool way to kind of stay connected to this mission and to support to support this mission and now that we're serving virtually in addition to in person our resources are available and for any caregivers or patients out there survivors and that you can access on our website and click on the virtual resources and you can actually make appointments directly with our artists and there's no experience necessary we just we we're there to have a good time and hold space with you as you explore your expressive and creative voice awesome well i think that's definitely some great resources definitely encourage people to connect up and whether it's donate whether it's you or share their talents or any other way definitely a great mission and a great thing to to support so with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the 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 feel free to go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show also as a listener make sure to click subscribe share review because we want to make sure that everybody finds out about all these awesome episodes and last but not least you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else in your business just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat well thank you again uh costanza for coming on the podcast and what's the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you for having me [Music] you

Be Ok With Making Mistakes

Sheila Mac

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/13/2021

 

Definitely get your paperwork and everything in order, and then be ok with the mistakes because that's part of the fun and part of the learning. No matter how much you study or how much you learn, actually going and doing is going to give you better results even though you make a million mistakes than if you just think about it forever.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 hey um definitely get your paperwork and everything in order and then be okay with the mistakes because that's part of the fun and part of the learning and no matter how much you study or how much you learn actually going and doing is going to give you better results even though you make a million mistakes than if you just think about it forever [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 of miller ip law where we have startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and we are always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast sheila mack and uh sheila is a quick introduction so she was i think in her words uh homeless from ages 10 to 13 graduated high school at about 15 and a half got emancipated went to college got a computer science degree um later i think also a business degree from not mistaken and went into work for a jpl uh to uh there for a business um did it uh primarily for the money found out the money wasn't always gratifying so as a hobby she had uh started to buy stuff at the garage sale or garage sales and storage locker sales and whatnot and uh turned that into their hobby into a bit more of an actual business opened up a store opened up a few more got into uh shifted the the model with a bit into real estate and also went to digital and uh did a few other things so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast sheila all right thanks for having me on the show absolutely excited to have you so i just gave the much uh much condensed version of a much longer journey so let's go back in time a bit to uh your journey starting out i guess when uh when you were homeless for a period of time and graduating high school so tell us how your journey got started well um i was staying with grandparents and they got sick and there was a lot of violence going on at home so my mother actually told me to leave and i was like okay and i went from friend's house to friend's house i stayed in school and i actually worked i worked for a company called junior careers selling cups coolers and candies at 10 and a half on and so i actually made my own money and i would stay at different friends houses i actually slept on the benches at the troubadour a few times i had a friend that worked there that let me stay there sometimes and i just had to figure things out and then i found this magical foster care i didn't even know it existed and so i finally got into that and then emancipated at 15 and a half i was there a few years and had an incredible experience working for these these people that i knocked on their door they had bought the old orphanage and and they had art in the white house and the the wife did architecture and so i was like their apprentice and they taught me so much about business so by the time i emancipated i was already very involved with a lot of things and that's my alarm that should not be going off one moment sorry about that okay gosh i thought i silenced that all right anyway sorry about that that was alarming so yeah so that's that's what happened there and yeah you got emancipated and you said okay and i think after that graduated high school went off and got a degree in uh in the computer science as well as business is that right yes uh computer science business and then i got a teaching credential and um real estate at usc so i did a lot later on i had to make money in between to support myself so that kind of had to make me a entrepreneur early on so no that definitely makes sense so now you you you get the degrees you graduate and say okay the first thing i'm going to do is go make a whole bunch of money so i think you said you graduated and went and worked for a company called jpl mm-hmm yes so it you know i was not the best math teacher i taught myself algebra to do the programming class you know and i was like the c student but out of all those really smart kids i was the only one that was brave enough to knock on the door jpl and i actually got hired and i passed the whatever test and i got in and i worked there until you know my little side business of buying and selling things and i thought hey you know i'll just start a gift store and that was my first big business it was 5 000 square feet so it was a big store now let's jump back just for a second we'll definitely hit on that part of your journey but so you initially started with jpl and how long were you with jpl for uh three and a half years and then i actually i wanted to there's like at the time there was ten thousand jobs it was pasadena jpl nasa and you have to get permission to get another job in a different department so i was in the engineering department and i wanted a different job just because i never got a raise and i needed the money and so other people wanted to pay me more almost double but my supervisor at the time would not like sign the papers to let me go because she couldn't replace me obviously for the cost and i was the one that would get there early stay late and get all the work done and help everybody else you know pick up the slack with everyone else so because i really needed the job so everybody appreciated the work ethic and wanted me in their area as well and so i left and programmed with the phone company which was it was gte and then it became verizon now yes now now with going along with that so because i think one of the things we chatted about uh before the podcast was um that you know you originally went to kind of jpl because the pay was good the money was good and you know you're looking for and i think a lot of people do that looking for the security looking for good pay and otherwise been able to um you know afford a good living um you know along that uh portion of or that of your journey was there kind of when did you kind of realize that the money portion wasn't gratifying or that wasn't where you wanted to focus your career or your living at well i was helping doing the books and i was never in there for a raise and i kept being promised you know they kept promising me this raise that never happened and at the time i actually had one child young so i couldn't afford to pay for this child care and all these other things and i was buying my first triplex at that point so i was saving every penny and investing and we lived in the little teeny back back unit and rented everything else out so you know to pay that off and so i was struggling and i said you know this is just a lot and i went to my grandma who was talking to me again at this point and and i said listen you know what what do you think and she agreed and and told me to go sign up for the other job that paid about double believe it or not so i had to go take that job all right so you listen you listen you take the job and and then you're going along doing that now where did the storage unit and kind of the you know garage sale storage unit buy and sell things how did that kind of factor into the journey was that kind of i think you said it was a side hustle or side hub we were doing these jobs right so it was my weekends off i would go do that and then actually i stayed with jpl for like about a month or a few months and did the day the night shift at gte so i was like really burning myself out and then then i you know i gave my really fair notice and then left to make sure i actually helped train the person that took my place and then i went over and did that and that was my side gig that was like fun money i used to call it this is my fun money so whatever i can earn with this i could just have fun and so that was that yeah so now one question is or kind of was so you started that off as a side hustle or kind of like your fun money and i always you know have that kind of that same thing some of the times or especially uh earlier on in my career i was saying hey you know sometimes i feel bashful of taking the money that i'm earning with my full-time job and doing fun things with it i'd like to keep that for paying off debt and otherwise you know building up savings in that but it's kind of fun to have hey if i'm doing this kind of outside of my normal job let's have a bit of fun money so i definitely uh resonate with that now how did you transition or say i'm going to take what is my fun money side hustle and i'm going to make that a full-time endeavor well i saved up and then i realized you know you're making when you do retail it's two and a half times whatever you get the wholesale price for and i thought oh this is going to be easier because i can just i don't have to like go hunt for the stuff i can just order although you do have to you know buy and pick things out and i thought that would be easier i didn't know what i was getting into when i started though and and so i found this building it was the old dorsey building a big department store back in its day in montrose california and it had been vacant for like four years so i i looked up the landlord and i made a deal and i said i want at least six months free rent i want money to do upgrades and you know this and that and this is how much i have to start and so that's how i started my store yeah so now you say okay you're gonna start the store i'm gonna try it out and i'm gonna you know i've already been doing this in side hustle so i can know i can make you know at least some money at it maybe if i put a full-time endeavor i'll all you'd be able to make more out of money at it and have a replacement of kind of income but also enjoy what i'm doing as opposed to just focusing on the the money side of the career so as you did as you kind of opened up the store and put that as a full-time endeavor did it take off and do well and you're able to take that store and be able to make it you know make a good retail or make a good income on it or was it kind of rocky or did it take some some time to build a clientele or kind of how did it go or go as you were moving that into a full-time gig okay well um based on what you do the first thing i did was i did become an s-corp so that was the first thing because everybody's like oh it's trip and fall you better protect yourself or you could lose whatever little bit you have and so i did do the s corp and uh i opened and i didn't know i was 23 when this happened by this point in my life 23 and i opened a store uh 5 000 square feet a dollar a square foot 5 000 a month once that free rent was over so i had to really figure out how am i gonna make money i was still doing the night shift at the phone company to you know because i was afraid a little bit but i was having fun and i ordered things that weren't right for the community it was a kind of a retirement kind of community at that time it's changed a little bit now and so things that i ordered weren't exactly a fit so i had to learn how to buy and this the swap meet back then was still opened and and so we would go sell at the swap meet on the weekend so anything that didn't sell goes to swap meet and then i i'm really good at negotiating i don't know i've had that my whole life and maybe because i had to and so i would go to the trade shows and i would negotiate um at the end of the show it used to be that you were able to go and negotiate to buy everything at 50 to 70 off of the wholesale price and so i would buy the truck and i would rent a truck and fill it up with everything and i'd say if it sells i can reorder it and then i hired the top designers at the time i think it was 10 15 an hour probably 20 now um that actually did like armani shop in beverly hills all these fancy stores and i had them design so that the the displays looked really beautiful and i kind of learned how to buy based on what people wanted and then everything that didn't work goes to swap meet so you're still at least getting your money back or more and that's how we did it then i hired marketing about four months in i hired a marketing company and i wanted i i interviewed three or four because i wanted one that would teach me how to do it myself because i knew i wasn't going to be able to pay like a lot of money to start to continue like every month and because the monthly rent was going to come due soon and they taught me enough where i started marketing really well and i teamed up with back then it was crabtree and evelyn i had yankee candles certain items that they did uh cooperative ads and i learned i learned so much i learned i made every single mistake possible and that's how i learned oh no i think that uh that's a great way a learning experience and you know it sounds like yeah you bet had to go through you know what sells what doesn't sell what's with the community what are they going to buy you know based on your location and then also figure out a bit of the pricing or you know continue to figure out how much do i need to sell and what the pricing is to make that all work now as you start to build that i think you went from one location to a few locations over a period of time yeah so then i went and i didn't like this rent idea remember i was buying my first triplex already so i came from that environment where i had parents early on that always had real estate so i thought well you know i'm giving them so much a month i could be buying a building this is crazy and so i bought the other buildings with the cash flow from the store uh i learned about business credit which helped me i could by the time i was 24 25 if i could go buy a car with zero they would give me zero down interest zero interest whatever and no money down because it was the s corp buying it and i had this credit and i could get into land and property i did and i saved a lot of my money to put the down payments and with the business credit i was able to buy properties over time and i paid them off quickly with the income from the stores and as soon as that one lease it was a five-year lease as soon as that ended i actually left that place because i just wanted to keep buying and they the other store owners it was the mantra shopping park they were two three times my age literally and they came to me and they're like okay like you're successful and you're young and how teach us how to do this how do we we still we're still paying rent and so i got my real estate license after the first deal and i started um helping other people do commercial investments or 1031 exchanges into commercial from like maybe they had a triplex or something and that's so i kind of ended up doing something on the side that became another business that i didn't even think about yeah so that kind of happened no and i think that you know it seems like it was hey is we're getting success as we're growing as we're expanding we need more room and also generally if you can expand you can reach a different different audience and you can also increase the revenue and the income so now one of the things that we touched on is you started to pivot and adjust from kind of just expanding to your own stores and as things kind of moved online and moved away from the stores you kind of shifted and pivoted online with more of your inventory and then moved to be almost the real estate side of things as well is that right yes and and consulting with businesses i didn't even know it was called i know it's called business consulting like i didn't have like a consulting license but i had this successful business and the other store owners were like well how the heck did you do that you're like half my age or less or more and so you know could you help me and then i would charge them a fee and i probably weigh undercharged because they were like friends and i didn't know there was even a way you could charge people for this thing called consulting and then i would help them with the real estate and i was just having fun and happy to see that i was helping these other businesses because they were also friends we worked in the shopping park together and so that's kind of how that went and then after it was about 17 or so years i started switching over as we got into um we got into the computer age and things we actually could sell and buy and do things online and i realized i went back to school part-time to get this business degree because i was like running businesses and i had no business degree i was like well that looks stupid i need to have this paper just say i can run a business because i don't know why i just everybody had one and so i go back to school and i'm sitting in class and one day this professor tells me about the opportunity cost and i was like oh my gosh holy smokes i own all these buildings free and clear now and i do not have to work 17 hours a day and i was like i'm going online and i'm done and by then i had adopted three children and had three of my own so this big family and they learned so much being part of the store they i brought them in and they learned about business that way but i wanted to just spend time with my kids and so i got my degree uh ucsb i did montessori teaching and then later i did waldorf teaching and i just had fun and i still worked with the businesses and i still did real estate on the side but it was just fun stuff and it it made more than enough income and uh that that's what happened then so now that i think that catches us mostly to where you're at today right in other words you transitioned online you're now saying hey based on looking at where i'm at and it makes more sense to you leverage your real estate for other things if you kind of have that passive income now they're free and clear and otherwise you're selling that online which is where it seems a lot of that is now headed so as you've now kind of caught up to where you're at today kind of now looking a bit into the future kind of what the next steps will be or where you're headed where do you see the the next you know six to 12 months to air heading for you well i missed a whole thing where i traveled for seven years straight and i learned from tony robbins and all these incredible people and did all that fun stuff and brought my kids along for the travel so that was another experience and lots of training so right now i have a radio show that i host i have a book out um bootstraps and bra straps i have another book that is coming out very soon and so we're working on that right now and i also am continuing to grow my courses i'm doing a lot of online stuff because of the covid and all that it's just easier right now so i do lots of online consulting and courses and i'm enjoying that i and i'm really grateful i wanted to add that i traveled for those seven years because i'm grateful i did and i'm kind of good with i don't have to travel right now because i did everything on the bucket list for traveling everywhere on the planet so that that's good yeah oh sounds like it was a great way to er a great uh our opportunity to go do some traveling and now uh or to transition a bit more online or continue to translate things online with uh with everything you're doing in the endeavor so that sounds like an exciting time well as we uh start to wrap up the the podcast i always ask two questions at the end of each episode so we'll go ahead and jump on or 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 oh my gosh one worse one oh holy smokes i think you know i didn't delegate enough i didn't hire enough people when i started out so one day in that store probably when i was about 23 and a half almost 24 i was doing my own um sales and use tax my own paperwork everything myself i didn't hire a cpa and one day these men in suits about 14 men or so come in and i thought oh my gosh it's the fbi they're coming to take me away i must have made a mistake on the paperwork and it turned out it was president clinton it had been ate visited rocky cola and he came over and visited we gave free gifts and then he kept going and that was like i mean i there was this moment where i was like should i run no i'll never get away you know like i was so scared and i thought okay i need to hand over and the next day i delegated and i hired a cpa and i started to hire more help because that was that was a big mistake that i made so it sounds like an interesting and fun mistake and even a little bit of excitement so that's great all right second question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business what'd be the one piece of advice you'd give them i would say um definitely get your paperwork and everything in order and then be okay with the mistakes because that's part of the fun and part of the learning and no matter how much you study or how much you learn actually going and doing is going to give you better results even though you make a million mistakes than if you just think about it forever all right and i you know i i think that that's probably out of all the different episodes and different entrepreneurs and people we've had on the podcast probably the number one thing that i think is over there is the biggest piece of advice that people tend to give is you know you can always make excuses you can always say that now is for the reason why now is not the right time you can uh you know trying to otherwise wait and then you every time people finally make the jump they get going on and they say hey this is what i love this is what i but what i'm passionate about and i wish i'd get started on it earlier so i think that resonates well with what a lot of other entrepreneurs and business people find so well with that if people want to reach out to you they want to be you know with your counsel or with getting a consultation and having you come and consult on their business they want to be a customer they want to be a client 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 and find out more um i would say go to uh www.sheilasheilamacmac.comsheilamac.com all well i definitely encourage people to reach out contact you there and find out more well thank you again sheila 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 we'd love to share your journey on the podcast just go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show also make sure to listen or listen subscribe leave us a review because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all of our awesome episodes and last but not least if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else in the business just reach out to us at miller ip law by going to strategymeeting.com thank you again sheila for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last all right thank you [Music] you

Focus On Finding Your Niche

Nikhil Joshi

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/10/2021

 

When you are starting a company, you don't need to decide what you are going to be you should actually focus on what is really going to sell and, can you really add value? In the process, can you learn? It's obvious that you have dreams and aspirations. If they are very big, such as wanting to create a very large company, then focus on finding something very unique that you are going to do. If you don't find it and you still have that ambition stop. It's ok to close down the business if your ambitions. But if it is not, then know in your heart that you still have a better company and have gone through the same pain that other companies have gone through.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 um when you're starting a company you don't need to decide what you're going to be rather than you you should actually focus on what is really going to sell and can you really add value pretty much and in the process can you learn and it's obvious that you have dreams and aspirations and if they're very big uh you know to create like you know very large company then focus on finding basically something that is very unique that you're going to do and if you don't find it and if you still have that really great ambition stop like you it's okay to close down the business right if your ambitions but if it is not then know in your heart that you still have built a company and have gone through the same pain what you know probably somebody who built facebook or google has gone through [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 the founder and ceo of miller ip law where you 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 nikhil joshi and uh nikhil was born in india and uh has a background in industrial engineering um started off in that industry and started working or started a company right out of college i think that was about 15 years ago and decided they wanted to grow so grew a team and then eventually moved to the us as a part of that growth the business model was heavily service based and made it a bit harder to sell so moved more to a product model instead of a service model and that has been able to increase uh the a bit of the revenue as and also a bit of the direction and then the kill has moved back and forth i think uh been himself between the u.s and india and i think he's now in the us but he could frankly wear wrong but by necessitation of how the company is grown and evolved so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast thank you thank you so much for having me absolutely so now i've taken a much longer journey and condensed it into a 30-second version so let's unpack that just a bit so with that you know tell us a little bit how the journey got started in india for you and getting your getting your background in in industrial engineering so i think i was in my final year of industrial engineering and i think there was an interview for a job that i'd applied for and it was a sales job they asked me all technical questions and it kind of didn't feel right so i said hey you know maybe we need to do i need to do industrial engineering myself and we just said let's start a company so back then it was uh a classmate and mine uh we we said just let's be contract industrial engineers and that's how the whole idea grew and we spoke to some of our professors uh some of our friends and nobody was really taking the entrepreneur route uh so everybody told us nice things on our face but i'm pretty sure everybody's saying like these guys have gone mad so that's how we started and i think pretty much in the first few months we realized that we had no experience so we kind of didn't know what we were doing but that sort of pushed us even hard to get back to you know going deep in terms of what we could do how we could work and what services we could provide and we kind of looked at the industry more with an eye of implementation rather than the eye of what we probably studied back in college and that's how it all started what yeah no that's definitely interesting now one one question to kind of follow up on that is you know when you're getting it sounds like you pregnant wrong when you were you basically graduated from school and said hey we want to start a business we think we can do it we're going to get going you know was that in retrospect you know give or i'll back it up just a bit so if i were when i graduated from law school i thought that would have sounded interesting and yet i would have been worried that i didn't have quite enough expertise or experience or mentorship or kind of seeing what others are to make that leap directly so is it more of just hey we you know we're going to figure this out along the way we really want to do a uh in a startup and do our own thing we don't want to work for someone else or is it more of just uh hey you know what else is out there doesn't interest us in the workfield we're going to do it or kind of what made you decide just kind of from hey we're going to get a degree and we're going to dive right into doing our own business it was a bit of both uh and primarily the latter that you mentioned that hey we're not really seeing uh what's out there in the market might be good uh like you know what i personally wanted to do but uh also the idea was not very big right like if you see today's startups uh you know the unicorns the funding there's a excuse me there's a lot of process uh that is attached to starting up a company and back then uh we didn't have any of that and our idea was pretty much so small to say that hey i just hope we can take what we know uh technically to multiple manufacturing companies rather than just you know uh being in one environment day in day out uh that's that kind of maybe sounded boring to us and we just didn't want to be bored uh maybe that was all up to it and i think when you're 22 you don't think too much you say let's try and see worst case you know you'll get back to whatever it is that everybody's doing and the today when i reflect back i think uh the ability to take risks that time uh was more about how much willpower you pretty much had and if you have been bought up in an environment where you've been thought like persistence willpower these kind of things you're not really going to shy away from taking risks and i think that was the foundation that whether it was our college whether it was family or it was our community we pretty much i at least grew up in that kind of an environment where nobody stopped me from taking risks and i think that that was uh instrumental uh in we just taking that decision so easily to say hey let's let's just try this no i i think that you know i first of all think it's admirable because you know too often you get out and you're saying oh i want to be risk averse or i don't want to do these things and then you always kind of it becomes kind of one of that putting it in the sunday pile in other words someday i'll get to it you never really get to it because you get bogged down with life or you have a family have kids you you become more risk averse than anything else and so i think that a lot of times do trying something out once you're just coming out of college when hey you have a lot less you know uh family to worry about or kids to worry about you don't have as many obligations if you fail great you'll pick yourself up you'll go find another job or you'll do a different business and it makes it you know gives you that ability to navigate and try things out a lot more than you might later on down the road so i think that definitely makes a great sense so you come out and you say okay we're going to do this we're going to try this if we if if it's successful that's awesome that's what we want to do if it fails so be it then we'll do something else and so as you're getting started out and as you're kind of building that initially how did it go was it something where you're able to start to get customers and get clients and you're able to build a reputation was it more of hey it was a long hard slog and it was eating you know the beans and rice so to speak and sleeping on the floor as you get it going because you know you're not making a lot of money you're kind of how did that progression go as you started to get going yeah i i remember uh this story uh or this incident you know which happened with me in the first two weeks of the business because that really shaped as to how i had to start thinking about the company right uh so uh i made a few calls and finally somebody gave me an appointment they made me sit outside like for an hour uh and then finally they called me and like it was almost lost that hey why are you here and i sort of gave him our company brochure and um you know uh he he he heard me for like 10 minutes and they said how old are you my son and that whole response like kind of startled me because he was not really taking me as a professional we just thought i am some kid who just walked in and was trying to do something that actually taught us a lot or at least personally taught me a lot that hey you know i need to go more prepared um so those early days like i used to even like keep like a french beard just to look a little old just because you know manufacturing uh is primarily basically a lot of very seasoned experienced people uh were there at that time as we see a lot of youngsters now uh you know taking to manufacturing and so long story short in the first three or four months our attitude was pretty much that hey we'll do whatever it is all we knew was that we need to be in that manufacturing environment because those are our customers and the more we could basically spend time in those environment um you know we would learn and uh with that attitude when we went uh people basically said that hey you know we don't have that thing that you're offering but we'd like we are we're looking for somebody to do something else but uh uh we are not finding anybody do you know i said we'll do it for you uh so it kind of started off like that and that sort of at least paid our bills in the first few months but we did not lose focus from what we wanted to do so i think it took about six months where we really landed our first deal which was like our core services product that we wanted to offer and that kind of got us going uh from there so uh but we did not uh uh the the only midnight oil that we were burning like was on learning uh so i would if i if i'm doing like you know six seven hours or eight hours of let's say either building a website or talking to customers or you know working on a project or trying to basically garner class which is your day-to-day recurring execution stuff i was almost spending eight nine hours uh reading studying getting back to my books trying to really make sense of whatever i'd learned and putting how do i put it into application given the fact that you know i started the company you know with zero industry experience um also uh you know we started uh snic solutions pretty much uh bootstrapped and uh you know we i took some money my dad gave me some money uh and he said don't ask again uh you but he did say that you know you don't need to worry about the house for like three years uh so that that was like a little bit of cushion that he gave but which allowed me that whatever we earned from the business we got an opportunity to invest back in the business so those were some good uh opportunities that we got which allowed us to focus purely on learning and growing the business and remain focused no i think that that definitely makes sense and sounds like uh exciting journey along the way now help me because i know we talked a little bit uh as you know as we were before the podcast and then talked a little bit about your journey but there was a bit of a a couple things a pivot in transition is things were growing to between you know being located in india versus being located in the u.s and there was also a bit of a pivotal adjustment from services to products so kind of how did that fit into your journey and kind of how did that go or how what necessitated that and how did that go uh that's a great question so then what happened was that when we started the company we we pretty much just wanted to be industrial engineers and essentially when we started uh the only way we could start off you know with the low-cost uh investment was you know just offer services because it's pretty much our time that we are offering when we started doing one of the understanding that we got was that it's too time consuming and uh it also if if we need to have some sort of a scalability you just can't basically have service models with human capital um also from the industry side like what was the need of the hour for manufacturing was that um things were becoming more and more complex in manufacturing for our customers uh like you know if you see today right like you want to go and buy a shirt uh 20 years ago you know your options were limited but today like you know right from the fabric to the color to the customization uh that whole customization for manufacturing has just made doing manufacturing more and more complex so our customers were expecting us to be fast they were expecting us to be efficient and that's where we kind of said that hey you know how uh what does what does our customer need and that kind of was the thumb rule that allowed us to you know make pivots in life or in the last 15 years that we have made and our first pivot pretty much came in the first year where the customer said that look uh when i budgeted the whole project i said we'll need one and a half years to do that and they said we don't have one and a half years you got three months and that kind of inspired us to say okay how do we leverage technology and we started getting into reselling software uh but as we started going like about three years into the business we realized that there are some rare really complex problems to solve in manufacturing and uh that kind of don't need just like plug and play software like you know how we just use windows excel or powerpoint we can just buy the license and start using it you kind of need more like platforms and then you understand the customers requirement and sort of kind of implement uh to their needs and so that business is that the business model there is more of a system integration business model it's still a services model but it requires a good amount of technical expertise to deliver what the customer is looking for so that was our first pivot and then as we started getting more experience and i sort of moved from being more of a hands-on person to having a team we had other problems too or challenges to tackle to say you know how do we keep the knowledge uh how do we make sure that you know we can do more of these and that kind of uh speared us into that hey uh we're using basically somebody else's platform we're giving these services uh it's all fine but uh companies uh are looking to do more of this and that's where we started pivoting to product to say that what can what is the intellectual property that we could build with just you know crashes the service time if we are taking today six months can we do this in like you know four months or later can we do it in three months so that kind of led to the next level of pivot to say that hey we need to have some intellectual property uh fast forward today to 2021 uh especially from post covid um the the challenge that uh is there like if you you must have been seeing in the news right about all the supply chain issues etc so the industry is pretty much uh fragmented in some people really needing some things very fast and some people don't mind waiting you know even if it is for a year and with the with that kind of case we are now going to another pivot where it's pretty much hybrid in nature where we would have intellectual property but we would also have to give services and some of them who have capacity in the hand they would just choose to just do it themselves uh given all this it allowed us to say hey we probably now need to take the next level of pivot to say that we need to decide on a business model that now works for us for the next 10 years and that's how now we are pivoting to say that you know how do we productize more of what we know so that the customer has the option to choose what they want rather than you know we telling them that this is how you need to work with us and that's how the pivots have been more from a technical side from a personal side the pivots have pretty much been like i was i was the i was the janitor and i was the ceo when i started the company and i'm now being asked that hey you can't attend this meeting you please stay away from this meeting you have to behave like a ceo it kind of it's it's it's kind of tough for uh uh someone like me who is like just being around uh being so hands-on uh but i think that's the learning and the pivot that as a small business entrepreneur i would give my two cents to any other business entrepreneur who is trying to scale or who's trying to grow his company that you need to basically let things go uh you know if you need to grow no and i think that that and we'll maybe we'll we'll leave that one as just the one piece of advice so we'll circle back to that when we uh do the the one or one of the questions at the end and we'll kind of as a perfect transition or segway kind of hit on those now because i think that that brings us really up just being you know an interesting journey and interesting how to you know how things progress and how products and services progress and locations and that all evolve as the business grows and as you have to adjust the adjust things to grow with the business so with that let's go ahead and we can jump right now to the to the questions i asked at the end of each episode so the first question i'm going to ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it one of the worst business decisions that i made was uh more uh initial in my uh in my journey where uh uh there was a point in time where we got like a couple of large projects and then uh we said we are not gonna invest in a team you know we'll just do this by ourselves and uh we we didn't try to create an organization we were thinking more that you know if i am one person i'll just have like two or three other people just like me who would do the work uh and we didn't think of the entire thing more as an organization to d skill have a junior engineer have somebody senior overlook have somebody project manage um and and and those projects just overnight became tough because that's the kind of an organization and set up that it needed for us to do those projects as well as uh uh you know scale as a company and i think that was one of the worst decisions that i took because uh i was thinking more like uh a doer and not uh uh like a manager or a leader uh and it actually it actually put us back like a few years uh uh in terms of where we could have been today uh and i would say that's that's that's that's one of the worst things uh that happened in the past to me no and i think that you know that's an easy mistake to to make and one that we often do and i've made it with some of my businesses because you know one is you always tell yourself like you know one i can save money and i'll get it done myself or two i can get this done quicker than i do it would take to train someone else or bring someone else on and yeah what you end up doing is hampering the business because now you're putting your time and effort on the things that you could reasonably offload or other people could do or could assist with and you're not able to focus on other aspects of the business where you can really drive that value so i think that it's one where it's a natural hey having to step back and say how can i add the most value to the business and where is my time best spend then you're going to have to bring people onto off center to do those other things that maybe your time isn't best spent doing so i think that that's both a mistake that's certainly understandable and one that is a great take away yeah second question was asked which is what you kind of already touched on but maybe uh or we can dive in just a bit deeper which is if you're going to talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you give them um i one of the things i've always uh like a lot of people write to me on linkedin they say hey fantastic story etc and then the moment i tell them that look you know it's uh we we are still small business after 15 years and their instant reaction is why are you still small uh why are you not like a unicorn etc and everybody who's starting a startup is kind of in the more that you know they really want to build a very very large business and i always tell them that uh you can build a large business you know if there's that much kind of demand and if you hit on something like you know which nobody else is doing but the entire business community is not made of that if you see the largest business community is made of small business entrepreneurs much like me and many others so one of the advices that i always hear people who talk to me and reach out to me is that when you're starting a company you don't need to decide what you're going to be rather than you you should actually focus on what is really going to sell and can you really add value pretty much and in the process can you learn and it's obvious that you have dreams and aspirations and if they're very big you know to create like you know very large company then focus on finding basically something that is very unique that you're going to do and if you don't find it and if you still have that really great ambition stop like you it's okay to close down the business right if your ambitions but if it is not then know in your heart that you still have built a company and have gone through the same pain what you know probably somebody who built facebook or google has gone through there's no drift difference uh so that's uh that's one thing i would say and the other other thing that i can share from my personal experience is um one of one of our customers uh ceo had sent had i told me at at a very early stage uh during my journey of entrepreneurship i think this was the first three years of our business and uh one of them said that you know nikhil my fear is that you started the business and you're going to probably quit in three years and go and join a job uh and another one basically told me was [Music] that uh you know take care of your business because 90 of the businesses fail because of bad financial management and both these basically have stayed back with me because i've always made sure that you know we managed our finances well as well as basically you know i did not give an impression to my customers that i'm just going to quit because i used to look young and i had so many aspirations so these two kind of stand out uh uh for me and i'd i'd really say that uh you know starting uh entrepreneurs or anybody who's getting into a startup uh needs to think of this in my case it's a funny story darren that the first three years when i was handling the whole business myself was very bad with finance and then i got married and i happened to have my wife who had you know a good background in finance and when she took over those responsibilities we we kind of could see basically the difference in you know we're starting to grow and starting to see money uh and i would highly recommend that if you're bad at finance then yeah get a partner uh who really complements you with the financial capabilities no i think that that is uh definitely a great uh great advice and a great takeaway that uh people can get started with so well perfect well now as we wrap up if people want to uh reach out to you they want to connect up and they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend and you're all about what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more uh anyway uh our company is snic solutions uh so uh i am available on linkedin uh with my linkedin details being linkedin.com uh slash nikhil k joshi uh as well as you could email me just with uh nikhil.joshi at snic solutions.com if anybody is looking for any advice or any questions and i'm very active on quora to answer questions uh especially related to industrial engineering just for the larger community uh or even basically on startups or entrepreneurship so if there are questions that could help a larger community i pretty much you know take that question take those questions on quora but yeah this is where amy if there are customers i don't know uh a better thing rather than to reach out to me it's better to write to sales at snic solutions.com given the stage we are at uh my vp of business developments are going to tell me that nikhil you're not taking those sales calls so uh that would be nice that if they could uh reach out with their inquiries uh at sales at snic solutions.com all right well i definitely encourage people to reach out to out to you contact you and uh you know use your services uh become an employee and or just making your best friend so that sounds great 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 make sure to uh if you first of all if you have your own journey to share and you'd like to share it feel free to go to inventiveguest.com we'd love to have you on the podcast and share your journey um also make sure to like subscribe and share and leave us a review for the podcast we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes and the great journeys of all these uh entrepreneurs and uh and startups so um now with that uh if you also in addition to uh liking sharing sharing podcasts if you ever need help with any of your patents or trademarks feel free to go to inventor go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help thank you again for coming on the podcast uh nikhil and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin for having me

How To Get Referrals

Caleb Roche

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/9/2021

 

If you can get a CRM and set that up and then use that to build out send email marketing. That gets further down the road. Start to collect data on each person you are working with. Use that to further conversations and start to realize how you can plant those seeds. Whether they enjoy a local coffee shop or they are a huge foodie. They love an NFL team. Find things that they enjoy and use that data to plant those seeds. So I think, get a CRM. Start adding people in there. Existing connections, people that are new. Then start to build out your CRM. Start to learn how to use that better. Then effectively within the next year you should be able to have this referral engine that you can start working with.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

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 so you can get a crm and just set that up and then use that to build out send email marketing and that gets further down the road but start to actually just collect data on each person that you're working with and use that to further conversations and start to realize how you can plant those seeds whether they enjoy a local coffee shop or they're a huge fan of their foodie or they love a nfl team or whatever that looks like finding things that they enjoy and using that data to plant those seeds is important so i think get a crm you know figure out start by adding people in their existing connections people that are new and then start to build out your crm start to learn how you can use that better and then effectively within the next year you should be able to have this kind of referral engine that you can start [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan 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 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 have another great guest on the podcast and this is an expert episode which is always fun because we get a dive into a variety of different areas of expertise and today is no exception so we're going to be talking a bit with caleb roche and a lot about referrals so how to grow with referrals to doing or whether or not to do average online advertising or whether you grow your business with referrals how to ask for them how to plan seeds with them how to in in line with that how to build a good customer experience and what that marketing strategy might be and a few other things i'm sure along the way as well so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast caleb thanks devin i appreciate you having me on absolutely so now i've just gone through just a quick uh run through of a bit of what we'll uh talk today as far as expertise but before we dive into that maybe uh share with the audience a little bit about yourself why you're an expert on the episode on this uh this area and uh why they should listen to you yeah so as you said my name is caleb roach located in edmond oklahoma just north of oklahoma city it's kind of a small town not really and i own a marketing consulting firm so we help small businesses all the way up to 100 plus million dollar organizations figure out their marketing strategy and what they need to do what makes me the subject matter expert sometimes sometimes i people ask you know what what makes you qualified to say this and previously before i worked in marketing consulting um i did product insights and consumer insights for a large major brand um where we studied kind of the what what consumers wanted from that brand in regards to product differentiation what different products they actually wanted and how to actually improve those so i have kind of a history of helping a brand improve their product line and meet what their consumers are wanting which has helped me improve my business and other people's businesses through what i learned at that that experience with that company awesome well i think that's uh definitely a great background and uh certainly a great area of expertise and i'm excited to cover it because i think you know this on the general area of referrals everybody knows it and you know deep down or maybe not even so deep down referrals are a great source i mean you hear about it on marketing all the time in that you know referrals are going to be one of the best you know the best you know first probably the very best is just repeat customers because then you know they already you already have an established relationship with them and they've and you've already worked with them before but i'd say right on the tells of that is if you can get somebody to say hey this guy does a great job or this guy is you know is worth his weight and gold type of a thing then that is a great impression to start out with and it sets you off with on the right foot to begin with and yet it's while it's invaluable and people know it it's oftentimes a hard area to figure out how to get referrals how to ask for referrals should you ask for them or should they be organic and kind of all that and i thought when we or chatted a bit before one of the main things that you guys have done to grow your business is really ban primarily on referrals so maybe walk us through a little bit of you know a quick overview and we'll dive into and have a good discussion but you know how how do you go about basing your business on referrals yeah and i mean it's one of those things like you mentioned it's it's definitely cheaper to keep existing customers and gain new customers and so you know if you can build kind of an infrastructure system around keeping you know customers as you acquire them and focus on that customer that you acquire before you're even focusing on new client acquisition is important and so what i did when i first started the company was i found people that through referrals because you know i was kind of young in business and so i didn't know do i do digital marketing channels do i as a marketing company do i just get a bunch of like random online businesses that i can market or do i focus on my local area and how i can help local small businesses and so you know to be honest with you at the very beginning it definitely wasn't a profitable model in the first year because you know a lot of referrals and a lot of building connections with people is giving more than you get and so you have to keep this mindset of when i talk to people i want to provide as much value into their life and their business as possible without expecting something in return or even hinting that i want something in return as well and so obviously in the long run you expect that roi roi to pay off but when you talk to people especially if you're expecting referrals or want to build kind of a referral base is you have to expect no one to ever refer you and when they do you have to be super excited because i've seen a lot of people i don't know if you've had this experience in your lifetime but i've worked with them and they seem excited about my business and how they can provide value to my life and then all of a sudden um they're expecting things from me or the the conversations that are happening seem kind of intentional that they're wanting something out of me and so it leaves me a bad taste in my mouth and so it's kind of a balance that you have to have on building a you know like i said a non-profitable business for a little bit on building connections meeting people where they are getting them starbucks gift cards bringing them something that they like identifying things that they can you know resonate with and kind of build that trust in that relationship and eventually start to show your expertise and skills and how you can help them and then in return that hopefully leads them to having a situation where they've identified hey i need his services or i know someone that needs his services um because as i'm sure you've seen you know you don't want to come across as this guy that i can help you out and in the long run there's some expectation down the road that you didn't realize that there was no and i think that you know that's uh i'm always slightly jaded you know you see that and it's whether it's on linkedin and people reach out and want to make connections or or they get she can email or connect up to you and say hey we just want to add value to your network and let you know and blah blah blah and you know usually the subtle underline is just hey i want to pitch you our services because we you know we think you can benefit from them which doesn't come across as genuine and just come across as hey the only reason i'm connecting with you is to get as much money from you as possible now the opposite and one other thing i wanted to circle back with that you talked or touched on was you know it is something that takes a long it's a long at least in my experience a longer lift to get there in other words if you want to start out with referrals you're not going to likely have referrals on day one right you're not going to be able to get those referrals to where they're going to just simply flood through your door on day one because one you haven't built the relationships and two it takes a while to cultivate those relationships and to plant the seeds and to you know build all that pipeline and until you do so you're not going to have those referrals so it is a longer term strategic plan and yet the issue that a lot of people have is great that's lo in the long term that works out wonderful and on the short term how do you you know how do you keep the business and floater going so that you don't go out of business while you're waiting for those referral pipeline to start to build so when you guys when you're you know because now as i understand it you guys heavily rely on referrals and that's where your lot of business was coming from when you started out how did you keep the business going as you were building those referrals yeah no absolutely it's definitely a balance because and that's where we you know within our business model we've seen a lot of agencies heavily rely on you know advertising models to gather business in which is a good thing but then they're not you know retaining customers and it's kind of a you know bring in and burn out as quick as possible get as much money and so it's definitely kind of a you have to have a multi-level plan within there and so as you're building you know as your building referral partners and people that are coming into your business you definitely have to work on lead generating outside of that as well so you have to get your at least short-term customers that are going to pay your bills and so what i had to do was we did a lot of and we still do online advertising get people in the door that we can make a you know an offer that isn't a promise but just how can we help you and build upon that like we have a free strategy session per se for our business model and so we help business owners under 500 understand what they need we don't sell them but we do at the same time and so we give them a plan of action and most business owners don't have the time or they don't want to you know expend the resources that it takes to build that plan or you know implement that plan within their business and so they can hire us to do that and so we had to build a business model around acquiring these short-term customers that have turned into long-term customers but then at the same time making sure that we're not spending too much energy on the lead generation side that we're forgetting our referral partners so it's kind of a juggling act you know you have your referral partners and you have this you've got to keep the bills paid and you've got to keep you know the lights on and so balancing how much resolution am i coming in this month how much how many of my you know leads am i generating and how much new business do i have but at the same time how much time am i actually able to spend with my referral partners because as you said it's a long-term relationship i have people that i've nurtured for a year that are just converted now and not that there is a time frame associated with that but you know here they are a year later realizing holy cow he can provide value to my business and it's helped them out down the road but it's not something that you can pressure someone into or you can't force it down their throat on this is the value i provide and so like you said it's a balancing act you've got to have the business coming in but in the long run like for our business past you know two years we've seen the referrals coming in at a you know much higher rate than we have and so now we've kind of like lowered our advertising channels always getting new business off advertising channels but we're really heavily focusing on you know putting dollars into refer like referral partners them like giving them some incentive to refer us because we've seen it be so profitable from them so now you just touched on so a couple or kind of follow-up questions to that so one is what would you say and i know i'm sure it is industry a bit different depending on the needs of services you're offering but at least for you guys when you are starting to set things up for referrals down the down the road or in the future how long was it within your business when you start before you started to see referrals start to come in i mean it was a solid six months before we actually saw a pretty good roi on everything we got in and so you know within the first six months we'd get a couple trickle in but it was still kind of scrambled on people not knowing what exactly you do or kind of a soft pass and so that's where we kind of built upon the referral model of making sure because within referrals you have to keep a couple things into account you've got to keep the referrer updated on the status of that because they want to know that when they refer you that you're taking care of the referral to making sure that they're educated on exactly what services you provide your price points all of that as much as possible and then three obviously creating that into a system where it doesn't take as much time off your hands and so for us first six months was people refer us hey do you do um you know x and it was like completely outside of marketing you know do you do like laptop setup and we're like no we are a marketing company and people associated it with marketing so it took us six months to tell people we're not an i.t company we're a marketing company and for them to actually understand that so it was about six months before we started seeing a positive roi on what we're doing and then within a year um we got about 25 of our incoming new business to be referrals and in this past year it's been about 75 so over the past three years it's it's shifted dramatically from you know a small amount of referrals to heavily now just to kind of follow that out of curiosity so what were you doing during those first six months to plant the seeds because just simply making connections you know better than nothing don't get me wrong but if all you're doing is just simply making connections with individuals but nothing more it's difficult to convert them into refer for them to really even ask for referrals and it seems like you almost have to kind of plant those seeds along the way so that when because you never know when they're going to have the referral pop-ups and when they have someone in mind that they're going to say hey you should check them out or someone asked them do you know this person so what were you doing to kind of plant those seeds or kind of prepare the people that are likely to going to give you a referral so when that opportunity comes up they're thinking of you so it's like that you put it really well put because you know it's it's not something that you can just put them on an auto trip plan and they're gonna like convert like crazy um you know there's a lot of i did a lot of handwritten thank you notes especially after meeting with people and so and i i you did a great job after the first podcast the one thing that i really appreciate about you as a host is you actually sent me a thank you card and it was handwritten and that that really made a cool thing and so you resonated in my mind and so after meeting with people sending them a handwritten thank you note with some sort of like it was great meeting you i love your business model and not just a generic like thanks for taking the time to talk really finding something that you really enjoyed about that person and then finding ways within the next six months that you can strategically bump into them or think of them you know top of mind whether that's you know um you're you're by their off their office and you've got coffee in your hands what kind of coffee do you like or hey i've got a starbucks gift card that i'm not going to use would you like one or you know asking them to go to lunch and when you go to lunch not talking about your business and asking them about the different parts of their business to where they leave that lunch and they're like we didn't talk anything about caleb and we you know i felt like i talked all the time i want to learn more about his business and so all of it is just strategic there's no malice intent behind it but getting people to feel like you really listen to them that you are there for them and you're going to provide these this consultative approach to when you you listen to their business that's going to make a huge impact so obviously industry and by industry it it changes but the biggest piece is just staying front of mind finding ways you can pop into that business owner find a way that you can call them check up on them without having your business included brings that value to where it's three months into that six months they're going to start asking about your business and caring when you know you've given giving given it's like that um is it gary vaynerchuk hook cook right jab um always provide that value and kind of bring in and that at that point where they kind of had that realization that holy cow i don't know much about his business and he knows everything about my business that's when the shift happens and that's when it's like holy cow i like this guy no and i i think that there's definitely a lot there a lot to that and i think that you know a lot of what you kind of covered is there's intentionality in other words it doesn't need to be that you simply say hey well i don't want to be salesy and i don't want to be pushy which i agree i don't think that that's the right way but it does have to be okay what are these small touch points or the small seeds i can find maybe it's just say thank you it's a bumping into them it's you know having a reason to connect up with them that isn't just simply pitching you and your services but rather is it you know feels much more genuine and kind of just builds that relationship now the one thing i'll caveat is is you know the the opposite what i've heard and as i have mentioned multiple times is for listeners on the podcast is i love to listen to podcasts and i don't just listen to like law firm podcasts i also love to listen to other ones that i think have a lot of insight and one of them was with real estate it's called the real estate marketing dude and reason i listen to them is mark real estate people have to be good at networking and marketing if they're going to stay because it's a very crowded market and one of the things that he talks a lot about is you know people do need to know what you're doing now that you have not to piss them hard but he gave kind of the example and i think he was in the bar or out to dinner with a friend and you know the friend was talking about how he just referred this you know and he wasn't obviously the guy was in real estate but referred this or this whole cells of a house over to this really hot chick and i that's his words not by it so don't take it um but you know it's kind of just going on about how he was hoping to get a date with her and it was so great and then he turned you know the guy turned his friend says i'm in real estate too and he's like oh yeah i kind of forgot about you and that kind of thing it was like he didn't you know he would have happily referred it over to a friend but because he didn't ever have a top of mind he's referring it over to someone he's hoping to get a date with rather than his friend that he would want to help out with simply because it wasn't top of mind so it seems like there is that balance where you have to have some intentionality to where you do are top of mind or that they do think of you when they need that referral and yet it's not so so you're not pitching them and hitting them up so much and trying to hard sell them to the point that they're turned off and saying well i never would want to use them what if that comes up because they drive me nuts type of thing yeah and i'm assuming you probably didn't get the date either i'm assuming so yeah they never finished that part of the story so it'll be i guess we could just choose our own adventures yeah you can choose your own point of view um so what the one thing that i've learned um and as you probably know running a very successful business a lot of this is learning and so there's no perfect approach that you'll ever figure out and so for me i learned better when i have situations because i've had situations like that happen too where people were like man i paid someone like three thousand dollars to build me a website and it was garbage and i'm like looking at that mob you know i build websites right and they're like oh i thought you just did advertising and like oh yeah so you know you learn situations like that i think it you know you don't want those like major failures all the time but i think major failures like that where you you have someone realize and you're like i was not intentional enough about telling this person my service kind of teach you like the ways okay i was a little too bearish on this like i was kind of too timid so here's how i'm going to change that and i think it's always changing things because as as you probably know like there's no perfect strategy to how to influence people or how to win people because people are so different that it's kind of an adjustment game of sometimes some people really prefer you to be more aggressive and you learn that through that relationship and some people are like if you try to sell me i will never be your friend and so you have to find like this balance of how do i tailor and adapt to each person like you said i mean it's it's one of those things that's kind of testing and changing on how do you balance you know having situations occur where people refer you and they know what you do but at the same time not having that situation like you you know you recommend like make sure that doesn't come up as often as you're getting business and it's a fine balance because some people you can tell them to you're blue in the face that i do marketing i do marketing i have people that i've known for two years and they pick up the phone like so how's it business or how's the sales consulting business and you're like we've been we've known each other for three years i can tell everything about your business and yet you can't tell me it's just some people it doesn't resonate with them you know they don't they don't have the mind space to think about you no and i completely agree and one of the things that i think that you know makes it and what we touched on is it's that kind of consistency and that's why a lot of times you know people will send out whether it's doing a podcast they'll send out newsletters and it's a very soft sell and you're trying to provide value and you're trying to provide information and a sad subtle reminder of hey i'm in this field i'm doing these services while not having to pitch the service all you're doing is sending out a newsletter every week saying hey we've got this great sale or come use our services or here's our prices absolutely nobody's going to want to pay attention because they get those you know it gets there throughout it gets clumped in with every all the other junk emails that they get but if you're saying hey we've got something that's a podcast let's just say something that provides value to you and it is helpful or we've got a newsletter that really provides information that you would be helpful to you or it's you know you provide youtube videos or you do tick tock or instagram whatever it is but you're not hard selling but you're continuing to maintain those relationships and those connections definitely i think adds a lot of value there so shifting gears just a little bit uh kind of i think along the lines of uh referrals but i think it almost sets up four referrals down the road which is kind of building a client experience in other words if the client is it doesn't have a good experience with you they're very unlikely to send a referral your way later on even if they know about you because they're saying oh that wasn't a good experience and i get that all the time as lawyer you know lawyers have most lawyers law industry in general doesn't have a stellar reputation most people don't like lawyers or they all have their own lawyer joe and they all have you know something that their lawyer's story to share and most of the time it's not favorable so it is on the one hand it's hard to overcome that bias me on the other hand if you provide that good experience it sets this stage for setting yourself apart because you stick out that much more of having a good experience and so as you're kind of building that experience in the anticipation both for referrals and for helping the client in general any tips or any thoughts or tips on that on building that client experience yeah so from my perspective you're going to make a lot of mistakes and it's always going to be something that you're optimizing that's something that we're learning still on you know there's things that you think will be a great idea or things that you try to implement and in theory it sounds like a great idea and it turns out terrible or you can't implement it so the biggest piece of building a customer experience that i've learned is executing your ideas and so an idea is only as good as you execute it and so you can come up with all these great ideas they're always in your head on how do we make a better customer experience but the biggest piece of actually having that customer experience positive is actually executing on your ideas and so something that we've kind of learned is adjusting and executing so we'll execute an idea like we've implemented you know a couple months ago we started doing monthly reports sent to our clients with everything and so instead of just calling them and saying hey here's a rundown of how it's going you're having just kind of an informal phone call we made it more formal and here's a report here's a client portal that you can view all your instant data and so we started setting those out weekly and from our team it became pretty tedious from a cost perspective and a resource standpoint and so what we did was we cut it down to monthly well of course some of our clients are getting it weekly go where's my weekly report and so for us it was identifying hey we had to adjust you know our execution because it was it was interfering with the work that we were able to provide in the level of service now once that happened that experience went better but for us we started seeing that our customer experience was going down because we were putting too much effort into this program that we didn't need for weekly because in marketing weekly versus monthly doesn't make a huge difference if they want to know more weekly they can call us and so um but we saw that our experience was lacking because we spent so much time on this weekly thing that we were we were taking away from the actual customer work and so for us it was finding out we needed to adjust on that and then execute on that and then adjust continually so we're we're changing back to bi-weekly now i'm looking at what that looks like and so it's always adjusting and identifying that your customers will always be you know there's always i think mark cuban puts it there's always someone work out working you to get your customers and so what are you doing to outwork that person and so you always have to continually look at how am i providing more value to my clients without you know unrealistic value of i'm losing money or i'm putting way too much work into this from you know nothing back but at the same time you have to think there's always a newer better company and so what are you doing to encourage that customer to stay with you to appreciate them for them being a client because there's a million other businesses just like yours that you might have a little bit of a difference but they're all basically the same and then see it's actually what are you doing to keep them in as a customer as well so always improving on the value that you provide new systems that you can implement how many times are you actually talking to your customer how much does it make sense um at the same time making sure that you know the systems and services that you provide are actually tailored around what you want because you know i've seen this i don't know if you've seen this in the law world and you've you've done an incredible job of like differentiating what business owners need but identifying products that not trying to sell products on something someone that's they don't need because i don't know if you've seen that i'm sure in the long world it might work a little bit like this but for the social media for this marketing world you know marketing firms push social media all the time and so it's like you need to be on twitter linkedin facebook instagram tick tock and even pay so much money well for a small business starting out it might be a great idea to try to go viral that might be a great strategy but in the long run paying that money to you know for someone to handle all those different channels probably isn't the best idea i mean twitter for a small business it's there unless you're a service-based industry that you need a support channel it's probably not the best channel to put all your energy and money into and so you know building products around what does this person actually need starts that experience better because then you're not trying to make up a way for that business to continue your service because they're not seeing the roi from that but in turn you're setting them up for success by putting them with the right product or service setting up the process to where as they interact with your business you're giving them the best touch points and the other piece of customer experience that i think is important is when you do make mistakes or you have a hiccup or they're not happy identifying and apologizing right away is huge for our business model we've seen that we've made a couple mistakes with some clients and instead of pushing off the burden of oh my gosh that was a tech air i don't know what happened or because you can do that within most businesses you can say oh x happened x happened we're so sorry i don't know how that happened but actually identifying that we made that mistake here's what we're doing remedy it and then this is what we're going to do to you know ensure that this doesn't happen again that's an important piece too because a lot of people like to pass the blame and that never goes well and so all those things i think really combine for an incredible customer experience and just learning because i mean i don't know if you read jim collins but jim collins has wrote several books on you know building a business that lasts and all these companies and the ones that succeed sometimes struggle or they sometimes go up and down and up and down they're always continuing to add that value that people want not just trying to push out this product or service that they're making money off of yeah i know you hit on a ton of things i think and i yeah i am a big uh lover of a lot of the the jim collins books i love the the good the great and that's a definitely an iconic book and he has a lot of other great ones out there but you know i think you hit on a lot of things along the way and the one that i always kind of take away is one i agree with you or i guess i think that building or continuing to try things out and test them is worthwhile and different now the thing that you have to be willing to understand is that not every program you put roll out is going to be a raving success not everything is going to work out perfectly and sometimes you are going to inevitably hit those errors to where it is going to i don't know create a bad user experience most time you can avoid that but it may create a sub-optimal in the sense that the new program or the system either one doesn't work as well as you thought or two has glitches or unanticipated consequences i don't think that should stop you from trying things out but i think to your point when you hit those things where it doesn't always work out perfectly or doesn't always you know work out as i is anticipated than to be a bit bird to be more transparent rather than trying to hide the ball or make up excuses to say hey this is a new program or something or system or something we're trying out and appreciate the feedback we are looking to always make it better and improve it and trying to adjust it and we apologize that this is didn't work out as it was anticipated and here's what we're doing to fix it and you know sometimes you have you know you offer them if it's a mess it up on there you know on their particular project maybe offer them discount or sometimes just enough of the hey we're sorry we're working to fix it sometimes i think it even provides a bit more of that genuineness too hey they're not perfect but that's awesome they're trying new things out and trying new programs and trying to make it better i certainly appreciate that from the customer perspective and just having a bit more of that transparency i think is definitely worthwhile well i think too you know when when it comes to you know peop that the thing businesses don't i think understand and i'm still learning to understand this as well and i have a lot of anxiety around it a lot is businesses that are purchasing your services or products they don't understand what's going on in your organization and so if you're rolling out let's say this client reporting software that we had you know they don't see the time that it takes or they're not seeing that so for their perspective they think it's just three clicks of a button and they're done and so explaining the process what went into that and the time that it takes sometimes actually works out because they're just mad because they think that you're just being lazy and in turn you're like hey we've spent 35 hours this week you know we've been up till 1am trying to figure out the code for this so we can't they don't see you staying up until 1am they just see that i'm not getting my report or i'm not getting x and so um you know i think part of it too like to go off of what you were saying was you have to explain this is what we did and you know this is what we're trying to do we're trying to build this better customer experience and this is where it went wrong or this is what happened and so explaining your perspective without being like this is not our fault it's huge because then it gives them a better perspective of oh wow okay he was spending a lot of time on this that you know sometimes that that doesn't happen but most of the times it does no i think that's absolutely and you know most times they're not going to want the excuse of this isn't working but it's more of hey this is what we're doing to make because i'm you know it's interesting to making most of time people don't necessarily understand or anticipate you make a simple good user experience takes a lot more work than to make it complicated multi-step everything else and you know the that's why when people this is simple it should be straightforward it's like no there's a lot of work to make something quote-unquote simple because usually the simple approach is taking a lot more work on the back end to give that appearance and that simplicity makes it much more difficult than a complicated thing that on the front end has a whole bunch a bunch of complexity and makes a bad user experience and so i think there's always a bit of trade-offs and we can we could talk about this for a long time and i'm sure would make it be a very fun conversation but we'll try and keep the podcast to a reasonable amount of time so as we're starting to to wrap up you know i always have one question asked at the end of each expert episode which is if you know we talked about a lot of things we talked about referrals planting seeds user experience and they all kind of go together but there's a lot of things that people could or should be probably doing as they continue to ramp up their system and continue to build out their referral network but if they could get started with just one thing today what kind of one take away that they could start to execute on what would that one thing be so if anyone's not using a crm right now customer relationship management software if they're wanting to get into you know networking groups or referrals the biggest piece that they can do is get a crm there's millions of them out there as you probably know i've spent a lot of time and don't spend too much time like just get something that you think is going to work and work off of it because i spent hours and hours probably days trying to find the perfect crm and never found it it doesn't make sense it doesn't exist there's always something that it does too much or does too little um and so find take it from my experience just find something that looks like it works figure it out don't try to add too much complexity get us your rm and start adding the people that you're meeting in there and add as much information as possible where they live where they work what they what they do for work any notes if you have a conversation add them in if the crm has a note section add a note section add whenever you have phone calls add phone calls in there what you talked about because the more data that you can get that you can have those conversations you know you you heard that their son is sick or they're they're they're going through a tough time or being there and actually remembering those conversations is huge and so you can get a crm and just set that up and then use that to build out send email marketing and that gets further down the road but start to actually just collect data on each person that you're working with and use that to further conversations and start to realize how you can plant those seeds whether they enjoy a local coffee shop or they're a huge fan of their foodie or they love a nfl team or whatever that looks like finding things that they enjoy and using that data to plant those seeds is important so i think get a crm you know figure out start by adding people in there existing connections people that are new and then start to build out your crm start to learn how you can use that better and then effectively within the next year you should be able to have this kind of referral engine that you can start working with no and i'm a big believer of crms i think that now i think they can be way over utilized and you can have so many drip campaigns and trickle campaigns and follow-ups and everything else that it can go to the opposite extreme you're saying we're going to do everything automated i'm a big you know i'm a big believer in automation but i think it has to be done right so i think your crm as far as helping with your business is going to be a great tool but it has to be one of those that are done right they're implemented you're thoughtful kind of going almost back to the user experience it should be adding to the user experience adding to your ability to help them and to provide their service to them and not just a way that feels like it's a cheap sales engine that's continuing to bother people now and i i'd like the second point of is you know getting going with something is the first step even if the crm that you pick it's not perfect you end up switching and we did that we started out with hubspot because it was the you know high end and we thought it would be everything and it was it had a lot of good things into it we just recently transitioned over to a different crm which is more specific to our needs but it was one that hey we still i've still was it was great that we used hubspot it was great that we got things up and running we learned what we liked what we didn't like what were the holes and what weren't the holes and it was just a matter of let's choose something get going build it out and then figure out if there's something we need as we continue to return to grow so i think that that's a great takeaway well people do you want to utilize your services they want to become a referral from the podcast or from anywhere else or they want to reach out to they want to be a customer they want to be a client 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 connect with you or find out more best way if you go to our website www.ccroachconsulting it's c-r-o-c-h-e not like the bug it's pronounced like the bug but not spelled like the bug um if you go to my our website or connect me with me on linkedin my name is calebroach um find a way to either message me or connect on like a free strategy session even if you want to become like a referral partner add that in the notes and schedule 30 minutes and let's talk about how you want to work with us or how we can help your business like we talked about on podcast it's not a way for us to sell necessarily it's just a way to connect and find ways that we can help you improve your business if there's ways that we can work together that's the most important part so identifying those needs is important so go to our website schedule free strategy session or message me on linkedin i'd love to help all right well i definitely encourage everybody to reach out connect and certainly is a great expertise and something that's definitely worthwhile to leverage so with that we'll go ahead and wrap up thank you again for coming on the podcast a ton of expertise it's been fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own expertise to share or you have your own journey to share feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show we'd love to have you also make sure to like subscribe and share this podcast we want to make sure that everybody finds out about these awesome episodes and last but not least if you have any help with your patents trademarks or anything else with your business just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us or chat we're always happy to help thank you again caleb and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks dave have a great one [Music]

 

Set Up An Advisory Board

Jeremy Smith 

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
12/6/2021

 

Set up an advisory board of people that you can talk to along the way immediately. Two days after you start your business. In fact, you should probably, before you start your business, get one or two people that you can really trust and run some of your ideas by them. Not that you're going to listen to everything they have to say but having people around you with diverse backgrounds and experiences makes the process much easier to go through.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 um set up an advisory board of people that you can talk to along the way um immediately um like two days after you start your business in fact you should probably before you start your business get one or two people that you really trust and run some of your ideas by them not you're going to listen to everything they have to say but having people around you with diverse backgrounds and experience makes the process much easier to go through [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 with 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 jeremy smith and just as a quick introduction to jeremy so i was educated uh educated to value his family um and as he got going one of the things he found out kind of growing up was he read a lot of books about stocks and investments in that section of the newspaper and um educated himself on that um and then as he's going through high school got bored really quickly and so um around that uh time he was also he started running a concession stand as an entrepreneur endeavor with the family graduated high school got into a sales position at an ad agency worked for them for 22 years um started a business with his brother that he got into sold that business and learned that he never wanted to sell his business again so with that much as a introduction welcome on the podcast jeremy thank you thanks for having me on your uh program thank you absolutely so i just ran to uh uh i just condensed a much longer journey into about 30 seconds or so so let's unpack that a bit so tell us how your journey got started reading the the stock and investment section in the newspaper as a kid well you know it was um i was always a little uh you know we came from a quirky intellectual family that um uh was very into reading books magazines newspapers and um there were two things that i really loved um the weather and um i used to try and compete with our local weatherman on tv to see if i could out forecast them and so i i learned how to read the bars in the newspaper uh the weather bars because um today it's very different you don't get the same sort of information that you used to get in a printed newspaper so the new york times would print the entire u.s map and would show you all the barometric pressure and the bars and the lows and the high pressure systems and then with when it came to stocks i you know i became fascinated with um the stock market and that you know the it used to be about like the sunday paper uh the business section the stocks alone was about a 16 page uh part of the newspaper because it displayed all the stocks and the latest quotes the highs the lows and um i was fortunate enough in junior high school to take a class that was offered to us which was on the stock market and i started buying stocks when i was 13 years old and my first lesson was never use a broker which at the time when i was 13 years old uh you just you didn't have an option there was no charles schwab um there was there was no internet so well there was but we didn't know about it it was under the defense department so no one really knew about it but so we we could we we had those options you went to a broker and i had done all my research uh found this company called bomar um which uh they pretty much invented the calculator and i thought wow that was a pretty cool item i think this company could be really successful and the stock was around four or five bucks at the time and i went with my mother because yeah you know you can't as a miner you can't go in and buy stocks even with a broker and my mom and the broker convinced me um well i would they really shove pan am airlines down my throat and i i learned that you know brokers have their favorite stocks and really they're just sales people stock brokers um with a different title most of them and so they convinced me to buy pan am which went from i bought it at 10 and a quarter went up to 10 and 7 8 and over the next 10 years never went any higher and then they went bankrupt and so as to where bulmar went from like six to eight dollars a share to 120 bucks and um uh so i called that one right and then i i realized that if you do your own research um and really study things that you can figure things without so-called experts on your own and so i that was kind of became my guiding principle for life in general with um uh with things is that you know education whether you go to college or you don't go to college there's no excuse for not being educated and so um the more educated you are the more options the more knowledge you have uh the more opportunities come your way and so i've always lived my life that way that's awesome no i think that definitely is a great approach to take with life so so you go you get into a bit of stocks and investing and you get some good advice get some bad advice we kind of get some initial education you go throughout high school you graduate and i think you said right there right after graduation you took a sales position at an ad agency is that right yeah my mom had passed away prior to that we were working for her concert company and that's how we got into the concession stand business was um my mom needed somebody to she was having problems with the employee that managed the business and she asked my brother and i to take over and run the concession stands at the concerts and that's really my mom was really my first on the first entrepreneur i knew and you know she took us through the whole process of profit and loss and you know how the difference between a five percent and a ten percent amount of ice in um a coca-cola or beverage uh uh plastic container can net you an extra dollar fifty to two dollars per everyone you sell and so um you know we started learning about those things and then when i was um after my mom passed i um joined a small typography company and um started working for them selling to ad agencies and then got involved in the ad business as well and and did that for quite a while but i i worked for a gentleman named drew andreessen who really was one of the first entrepreneurs outside of my mother that really i spent 22 years there so i learned a lot about marketing and design and working with some of the greatest designers on the west coast um you know some of them like keith bright you know who did the the uh the summer olympics uh graphics for um the uh in la and then um you know it's done major airlines food packaging design like saffron road i just learned a lot i mean you know it's it's you know you're around these people and it's a free education spending time with these people going to lunch with them and figuring out what their approach to design is and communications and how they run their businesses and and and so it kind of was like going to college but i was getting paid hey well that's a great way you get the education and you make money doing it so that definitely sounds like a great job now you stayed i believe with the same ad agency for about 22 years is that right yeah it was a firm called andreessen and um i stayed with them uh i left once or twice to go try some other things but i always came back because i i had a lot of admiration for drew andreessen and um i just learned a lot from him and uh you know i still almost everything i learned there i um you know went into um my business uh later on in life and um you know i think that that's part of um working for other people is there are so many things to learn some sometimes we you know you hear the stories about people that you know um uh go to work for people and then they go start their own companies and they often forget really what they learned and some of the the people they work for and and i've never forgotten anybody that really helped me along along the way and so um you know everything comes together for a reason um whether it's karma whether it's luck whatever your belief system is but if you can if you take if you can slow down for a minute and take in what people are trying to teach you um a lot of times you can learn a lot more than you know just being a bull in a china shop and and going forward so um i learned a lot there and it gave me um insight into how to market things far far uh better than i would have if i hadn't um had that experience and so i i always treasure um the time i had but i was a kid i was 20 21 years old and you know i hit it i hit it big at 22 i'm making 85 000 a year which today is pennies but back then that was worth all you know a lot of money and you know being a kid like that making that kind of money you know almost six figures you're you're in a position where you know you know you you know life is is fantastic and that's the thing about sales is that if you can get into um a commissionable salesperson you can make a half million to a million dollars a year and a lot of people don't realize that that it you know um that's why i would never go to work for a firm that doesn't pay commissions if i didn't own my own business because um you know you can um if you're talented you can go out and make as much money as you want and uh it gives you a lot of freedom no i think that that definitely is a great uh point and i think that a lot of times people are focused on hey what is the pay or what is the salary or how much am i going to make an hour and yet a lot of times when you get into those sales positions you have the opportunity if you're good at your job to be able to make it considerable about more and people oftentimes overlook that because they're so focused on other things so now as you're kind of you do that for you know in and out a bit but overall you're with the agency for about 22 years and then as you come to the end of that you shifted and tried or went into business for a period of time i think with your brother or whatnot um but what made you decide to jump out going or going a different direction try a business or kind of what uh what was the cause of that transition well i had been running at andres and i had been running some divisions so um when you're running a division it's um often like owning your own company and so um uh they're very similar um the the great part is that uh if you lose money in a quarter it's not your own money until you own the business so um so i learned a lot from that and then um i really didn't have an intention of starting my own company um although now that once you do it then you realize i should have always been doing this but you got to get to the point where you're you're ready for it because it has very different challenges you know now instead of getting a paycheck every week you're you're trying to meet payroll and it's a very different uh and for all your employees but my brother and i are very close we're 16 months apart and we've always worked well together and so um it was a great opportunity to go work for him and and i had just come off um i was burning out kind of in the advertising world and um you know i'd been doing the same thing pretty much for um almost 26 27 years at that point and i had recently met steve jobs and and he kind of in a meeting kind of encouraged me to go out on my own that there's nothing like it and then an opportunity presented itself with my brother to start a food brokerage firm in working with food and beverage brands to help facilitate costco uh to work with costco and so what happened was we became very successful my brother um had been in retail a very long time and didn't want to do this anymore and we had the opportunity we were approached by some people to sell the company and um uh that experience into itself can be in could be an entire podcast but it you know the the payment portion went well but the the transition was um truly uh difficult and and i've talked to other entrepreneurs who have the same thing you know you're in charge of something and now you start reporting to people again and going from a 12-person organization to a 40 000 person organization is is is very different it's like you know living in uh des moines iowa and then um you know the next morning you wake up and you're in shanghai um it's so different all the processes are different and it all the entrepreneurial spirit was sucked out of the company and it's true a lot of large companies so i knew i needed to get out of there and they were happy to accommodate me because they knew i wasn't happy and they they realized that um maybe they weren't the best place for entrepreneurs so um so i went in and uh uh we had a discussion and i departed and um started launch pad in 2017 and you know have never looked back uh to this point it's uh that was the first time i i really began to reflect back and realized that i i probably should have started my own business much earlier but some some people are cut out for starting businesses um you know my mom used to always say to us there's there's people that will spend their entire life working for sears although that might not be possible today but um sears might not be around around too much longer but there's certainly a point made yeah so you know there's certain people you go in you do your job or maybe it's walmart and there's nothing wrong with that it's a honest uh job and good you know decent pay and um you know if that's the career you want to have that's fantastic as well but then there's other people you know that are like the steve jobs or and i'm not comparing myself to steve jobs because he was one unique individual but there there's um certain people that are meant to be entrepreneurs and there's certain people that aren't and um if if you do have the the cut for it um and can withstand the stress and the loneliness sometimes because you know you're you know when you make a mistake it's all on you and when you're successful it's all on you but um you know failure is also an important part of of learning you don't you don't learn from uh uh success the same way you learn from failure it's a very different experience and with azarina's article by george uh with an interview with that the actor george clooney and he said that he's learned so much more from failures and he's so happy that he failed early on in his career because he wouldn't have known because he said if he when he looks back at his career he he learned nothing from the successes he he learned everything from the failures and so um all of those things go into rounding out i think the character of the individual um uh and allow you to be more uh successful long term when you do have some uh failures because of what you've learned from them and um you know if you look at them as learning experiences and and don't get sucked into the the negativity around failure you can turn it into a very positive event no i i definitely think that makes or makes a complete sense so now we we walked through most of your journey so you started out the business with the the brother doing some of that ended up saying it wasn't the best or wasn't the right fit got bought out and so what or how did that transition or what did you once as you're coming off of that and i think that leads into where you where you're at today and what you're doing but kind of how did that transition to where you're at today and how did you decide what that next step or that that phase that leads you up to where you're at today well it was getting to the point where um the company that i was working for um couldn't stand me and i couldn't stand them and so um um unfortunately i'm a very direct person and so i i actually had to confront my boss because i he was saying things to other people that you know this you know the acquisition wasn't a good fit but i can't stand people that don't have the guts to tell you to your face what they're really thinking and so he couldn't do it so one day i just called him on the phone and i said don't you think this is pretty up and he got really quiet and and and choked on his words for a little bit and he says oh i always like your directness i said no you don't it scares the out of you you want i i hear you want me out of here and i said i'm happy to accommodate you but i'm not walking out with nothing you know meaning that um i want additional money to leave and so we had a long discussion about that and three weeks later we reached an agreement and they you know i have to give them credit they had acquired the company and they allowed me to go back out and compete against them which um you know a lot of companies wouldn't do um and so uh they uh were cool with it and they were just happy that i was out of there because i kept trying to talk to them about company culture and how important it was to retain our culture and they said you know level one marketing which was the name of the company they just kept saying over and over again forget about level one marketing it's dead it's gone and um uh i i said well i i don't agree but um you know and and again out of that failure came you know this new idea and actually i pitched them on the idea of doing launch pad uh as a separate division within their company and um it you know it seemed like they were going to move forward with it and then they said you know we're not going to but if you want to go do that um on your own and you know we're happy to do that so i am thankful that they they did that and they paid us a fair price for the original company and you know sometimes these things don't work out but again there were a lot of lessons learned there you know if you know i've had some people um want to buy launch pad and i'm not ready to retire and sell yet but um i would never i would never stay on um again that would not never happen because um you become too attached to your brand and your identity at the company sometimes and then to have other people basically um tell you that it's uh um uh you know that's not how they want to do things this is how they do it it's not it's not a good fit and it's why you know a lot of um entrepreneurs uh butt heads with the new group when they stay on so i i would you know unless it's a 12-month stint i i wouldn't consider staying on like i get helping out on a transitionary period that i would do but um uh i would never stay on beyond that like i like i did previously and it's a hard thing you know it it's uh you take deep pride in owning your own business and starting it from the ground up and you know i i love cars and i i i i every car i've sold you know i i still regret because there were so many good times and memories with it and it's the same with the business you know when you finally give it up you generally um you know have i've talked to other entrepreneurs about this you kind of feel like you know what's you know the big question is obviously what's next and you know are you going to miss what you once had on the other hand uh because because the one one of the things that i think is really important is that you know at first you're all excited and selling it because you get this big check and you know and you and and most people don't get to sell their companies especially family-owned companies and and um so you get excited about that but then you know in the end the money doesn't have the same meaning um as the love uh and passion and all of the hard work and sacrifice that you put in for the company getting that big check doesn't make you any happier um uh you know you've got to deal if you happen to have uh i think i think that that definitely makes sense and i think that you know every you know you spend a lot of time and effort on you know every business that you devote yourself to and get up and running and everything else and you know leaving you're making that exit or that transition is always difficult because you always feel like you're leaving a part of yourself behind that you were you know very very diligently to build so i think that there's definitely a lot of wisdom in there well as we uh start to wrap up the podcast and you know now we've kind of walked through your journey where up until where you're at today i always have two questions i hit at the end of each podcast 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 did you learn from it well i i still go back to uh for me i think selling the company was the worst decision um that we made but at the same time what you also learn from it is there's no way to predict the future so you don't know going in you know everyone said the right things and so um i would do if i were to sell my company again um i would do a lot more investigating i would insist on meeting with people face to face uh more often and i would d dig much deeper into the company culture um and not allow them to push the people on to me that they wanted me to talk to because they're only going to have you talk to the best people i want to talk to some of the other people at the company so i i would say that that i learned about that but but lastly i would say that the most important thing that i learned from all of this is that um uh that you should never love what you do you should enjoy what you do but love is an important emotion that should be reserved for your family and your friends and um you can have passion for your business and all that other stuff but when you start intermixing the word love with your career um you're you're basically uh associating an incredible emotion that's normally reserved for family and friends and you know your wife or your husband and you're you're taking in an object that's not even real it's not alive it's just a business and so it's still important to remember that no matter how important your business is nothing's more important than your family and friends because um you know otherwise you'll wake up one day with no friends no family and all alone no i think absolutely and i think that you know it's an easy one to say on the front end hey friend you know family is always the most important thing and then you get into a business and you always are putting out a fire you always having you know things to deal with and it's always one of those where life tends to get out of balance if you let it too and i think that putting that focus on the the family is definitely an important and valuable uh takeaway so now the second question i always ask is if you're talking to someone that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you give them um be f um set up an advisory board of people that you can talk to along the way um immediately like two days after you start your business in fact you should probably before you start your business um get one or two people that you really trust and run some of your ideas by them not you're going to listen to everything they have to say but having people around you with diverse backgrounds and experience makes the process much easier to go through because um most of the time when you run a business you at some point set up some sort of advisory board or a board of directors but you do it much later and you miss out on the the the knowledge bank that all these other people can bring to your business and so one of the first things i did when i started launch pad was to set up a group of four people that are my advisors to a certain extent and it it's not just for business it's it's for all different things hey i'm feeling this way emotionally right now about this am i getting too tied tied into this what are your thoughts um you know and and when we were going through the pandemic there were you know um being able to discuss with them you know what was their opinion what did they think was going to happen how long is this thing going to freaking last having them um was a really valuable experience this time around and i'm glad that i set that up at the beginning i think it's really important for anybody going into business no matter how small your business is that you have some people and they can't be family members you have to be people that are independent and have strong voices so no and i think that that definitely is a great uh takeaway in other words i think whether it's you know partners whether it's employees whether it's mentors you know having someone that that one can you know give a different perspective a different point of view give you some mentorship or otherwise uh give you this the sounding board if nothing else definitely is beneficial especially as you're doing a startup or small business a lot of times you don't know what you're doing and you certainly don't feel like you know you're doing and so you're you're looking for someone else that they may not know what they're doing but at least it'll give you some direction and some insight as well so i think that's definitely a great take well i think it's also really important when you start looking at if you're going to take money in if you're going to take an investor in to have those people that have that experience and talk to them about it first because when you take money in if you do it's a very important decision and talking to people that have experienced before that can give you some of their share their experiences of what worked and what didn't could really prepare you for doing a better job at it uh no i think that absolutely so well as we're now wrapping up the podcast um if people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any are all the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more best way is my email address jeremy launchpad group usa.com or on linkedin um you can reach me there and again it's same thing jeremy that you know you can look at launchpad and find me on there i'm on linkedin all the time but those are the two best ways to reach out to me awesome absolutely encourage people to reach out and connect well thank you again jeremy for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure um now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell we'd love to have you on the podcast so feel free to go to in inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show and share your journey and also make sure to uh click subscribe share and uh promote the the podcast so that everybody can find out about all the awesome episodes and the great journeys that are a lot of different startups and small businesses they're taking and last but not least if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else with your business then feel free to go to uh strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat well thank you again jeremy for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you take care

Be Clear On What You Want

Moshe Amsel

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
11/24/2021

 

Get really clear on what it is that you want. I'm in the position now where I work with hundreds of business owners. Most of them have gotten lost on the journey and forgotten why they started in the first place. The truth is that we usually tend to overcomplicate what we are doing. We usually tend to add on more than we want and make it more expensive than it needs to be. If you really get in touch with what is the result you want? What is the lifestyle you want? And you build your business around that you'll avoid a lot of detours that are unnecessary. The last thing you want to do is build a successful business 20 years from now, look back and say I don't even like what I built, or even like where I am at. That's what a lot of people are on the path to do.

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.

Get In Contact With The Guest

ai generated transcription

 to get really clear on what it is that you want i am in the position now where i work with hundreds of business owners and most of them have gotten lost on the journey and forgotten why they started in the first place and the truth is is that we usually tend to over complicate what we're doing we usually tend to add on more than we want make it more expensive than it needs to be and if you really get get in touch with what is the result that you want what is the lifestyle you want and you build your business around that you'll avoid a lot of detours that are unnecessary and the last thing you want to do is to build a successful business 20 years from now look back and say i don't even like what i built i don't even like where i'm at and that's what a lot of people are on the path to do [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 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 grab some time to chat with us now today we have a fun guest on here and we'll get to a little bit of intro but it was fun it was one of the i think it was either the well i don't know if it was the first it was one of the first podcasts i was on i was i had an opportunity to be a guest on which is he uh does the profit with law podcast so so one if you're an attorney you're doing legal related services um that is a great podcast and one that i definitely recommend and listen to frequently myself um but with that it was one that i kind of started a bit of uh my podcasting experience and has grown since then and it was a genesis in part on this podcast and so i'm excited to turn around a bit and have him as a guest on the podcast for once and to talk to a little bit of his journey so with that we will uh go ahead and uh dive into a bit of his journey and have a good conversation so welcome on the podcast moshe oh thank you so much devin for having me it's a it's an honor to be here um and i i mean i love podcasting i you know i listened to podcasts back in when you had a downloaded and put it on an ipad ipod um so i'm an avid podcast listener and i love the opportunity to be on somebody else's show so i appreciate you having me here and hopefully i can add value to your listeners you know it's uh it's always fun it's fun to be or to be on both sides of the microphone so to speak uh being able to uh be the the host as well as to be the guest and it's always a different experience so now i'll just congratulate you in front of the audience so moshe just had a child is that right yep a baby boy baby boy so if if you if you get tired or you're not off or anything else definitely understand why because uh i have uh four kids that are ages uh five to eleven so been through that four times and definitely understand the the the little bit of the losing sleep and otherwise being distracted so appreciate you you fitting us in after after that having the newborn yeah you know what i'm just trying to catch up to you you know i this is my sixth sixth child but my three older ones are you know much older so i want to get that bunch of four in this in that small age group so uh just give me a couple more years well we'll be up we'll be back and talk about the fourth one all right well it's a good aspirations and something there's definitely a good goal to shoot for so with that we'll go ahead and dive in and then and as the listeners are used to we do go through the journey of kind of how you got to where you're at today so maybe a given introduction started the high school college time frame but kind of get us give us an idea of how your journey gets started and led to where you're at yeah it's you know what everybody's got their own unique journey and uh mine is definitely unique so i don't know how many of your listeners have been exposed to the orthodox jewish community but i was raised an orthodox jew and i didn't necessarily buy into the way of life that orthodox jury provided so being an orthodox jew has a lot of limitations on what you can do it's very restrictive and i didn't know it at the time but i was in constant rebellion so my high school journey was very interesting because uh give me a year and i was in a different high school um so i bounced around just declared so you went to four different high schools over four years that's correct that's correct so uh whether whether it was my doing or their doing and somehow you know somehow either they didn't want me back or i didn't want to go back and gave my parents a run for their money for sure uh but it was all private schools and and you know the first one was way too religious for me uh you know i was just there was two different things at play one is that you know i'm i'm very smart i don't want to toot my own horn that's not the point but the classes were boring to me uh i would read the textbook in the first three weeks of school and i knew the curriculum for the year so the rest of the year was just how can i enjoy myself in the process so i'd be sitting in the back of the room and i was the jokester in the class and i would you know and constantly eating snacks during class stuff like that just and that was just how i carried on through through high school um but i never really found my place because i just wasn't comfortable with where i was uh and in that process uh my father has been a i don't want to call it an entrepreneur i think there's a better word for it but he was constantly doing a new business every couple of years uh but he never hired staff so it was always like um solopreneur you know in an entrepreneurial fashion uh but he was always looking for the next you know get rich quick scheme and uh never really built a business the way that a business needs to be built which is to bring on people to do the job that you'd be doing and then you reap the rewards so in his venture of not hiring staff he put his kids to work so i have a very eclectic background throughout my childhood we had a flower shop we had a gold refinery these all happened in our basement by the way um we had we had a a business where he would buy all this inventory that couldn't be sold and then we'd sit down and say okay why didn't this sell so there was like a board game called plutocrat that when you opened the box there were no instructions so there's a whole bunch of game pieces but it doesn't tell you how to play so like oh of course this didn't sell so we sat there and we made up a game and then we wrote wrote up a rulebook and we repackaged the game nicely and with the instructions inside and then he turned around and sold it for a profit so those are the kinds of things that i was being exposed to as i was growing up and when i was in high school he partnered with a israeli software company that was creating um jewish software for talmud and and the old testament and stuff like that so there's like bible scholar and tourist scholar and the talmud scholar was the names of the software and he basically was starting their north american division this is the only work that he did that he actually brought on staff so he he hired the support personnel to take tech support calls and i would come in at night from school and of course i did my homework on the way home and i was bored when i got home and i would sit there in the office and i would answer the support line i would start helping people with their computer problems and most of these people were just they just didn't know how to operate the computer so you just needed to kind of like walk them through where they needed to go um but it let my parents know that i had a knack for technology so after my stint of four years walked through and within at least four years you went from boardgate sales they're board game salesmen you did flower shop you did gold refinery and you did i t customer service at least not all not all that happened during high school so that was i don't know the time span of that but my guess is probably like third fourth grade okay all the way through the end of high school um but this software company was the last two three years that i was in high school was when the software company was happening ultimately they ended up taking it back over he stepped away he just again it came back to he likes to do he likes to own the tasks and i don't want to make this about my dad but he likes to own the tasks and i think he had a really hard time with the delegation aspect so it really didn't work out um and he moved on to the next thing that he set out to do which is um microsoft access database programming which he's still doing today interestingly enough so he's been that longest [Laughter] so now he found his niche now on your journey as you're saying okay had this kind of bounced around through different high schools also is doing entrepreneurial and endeavors and you're now saying okay i'm graduating from high school was it a straight shot to college and you know how did the or what did you figure out or how did you figure out what you wanted to do in college or kind of how did that next phase of your journey go okay so the interesting thing is is that in there's different gradations of orthodox jews but the modern orthodox they they feed into the college system just like the rest of america but the rest of the orthodox community they either don't go to college or they only go as needed like so they stay and study torah for a certain amount of time and then when they're ready to go out into the workforce maybe they'll go to college maybe they just start working so i was not being roomed to go to college that wasn't part of the plan and college really wasn't on the radar when i finished 12th grade i really didn't have anything that i needed to do like what's the next step like the normal next step for somebody in in the circles i was being brought up in was to go to a talmudic college which is you know it's they don't call it that um but that's basically what it is and i had no interest in doing that so here i was an adult i can make my own decisions i'm not taking that step so what did i do i went out with friends and i live in a suburb of new york city so i went into manhattan every night and we went clubbing so i'd be out until three four in the morning i come home and what do you do when you're up till four in the morning you sleep to one in the afternoon so i was at this place where i really had no purpose and um as far as my mother was concerned she raised a bum and she was like totally like she was coming off of that reception on her head that it at least the outward perspective that is what it would probably look like yeah so she was really really mortified by what what had happened and she said you know what i he needs to have some sort of responsibility so she went to a local computer store and she had a conversation with the owner and she said look my my son really doesn't have direction in his life right now and i really think that he'd be amazing at whatever you do in your computer store would you take him in and he said i'd like to meet him first but yeah i'd probably give him a shot so my mother comes home and she says you know i set up a an interview with you for you and you know just go meet with this with this computer store owner so i was like oh what the heck why not so i went and i sat down with him and he basically told me what they did uh which at that time what a computer cost two and a half thousand dollars so there was a big business to just assemble and sell computers because if you bought it from dell for two and a half thousand dollars we can assemble it with the bare material costing about five six hundred bucks so we can make that two thousand dollar profit right so there was a lot of a big business and actually just created you know building the computers and selling it to uh to the clients so he basically said look i'll take you on as an intern and the first moment that i can send you out to a client site to work and you're able to bill on your own is when i'll start paying you and i'll pay you 200 a week cash so three weeks later i went on payroll um i was doing that for a very short period of time uh probably if i had a guest probably about four months and he sent me out to a client in new york city and i'm at the client the way that he did this was he would have you go with a book you know like just a blank receipt book that had a carbon copy and you'd write a bill when you were there so he had us call before we left the site and and write a bill so i called him up and i said okay this is what i did i basically spent an hour there and i did you know i tweaked a couple of things in their software and i fixed their problem they were happy as can be and he had me write the bill and he had me write a bill for ninety dollars for my hour of work and he also had me add another fifty dollars for travel and i handed a hundred and forty dollar bill to them and they gave me a hundred forty dollars back and in my infinite wisdom of business i came back and i said i want to raise hey i got i made you money give me more so how did that go look i looked at it i said he's billing me at dollars an hour quick math that's thirty six hundred dollars a week i'm getting two hundred dollars a week something's wrong here right now clearly i wasn't billing at 40 to 40 hours a week but that was my that was my mindset so i asked for a raise um he said i'm going on vacation to israel when i come back let's talk about it he went on vacation i think he's coming back and i'm going to be a rich man um and he gets back and he says you know i really thought about it and i'm not in the position to give you a raise right now and i said what do you mean you're not in the position to give me a raise an hour off for me how could you do that right well it could get me to 300 an hour it only takes two and a half three and a half hours for me to for me to break even for you every week like this is a no-brainer but bottom line is is that i came home and i told my mother what happened and she said well i have somebody that i want you to meet and she puts me in touch with the i.t company that was doing the i.t support for her office and i went and i met with them and they turned around and offered me a real job with a real paycheck where i get to pay my taxes on it and and i started working for them to pay the tax well you should pay your price as you have to but yeah right well i was getting 200 cash and as a teenager earning cash taxes wasn't on my radar none of that you know none of that adult stuff was there but i was earning money but i realized that i was not earning enough that made sense for what the work that i was doing um and that the next job uh i got i think i started there at 23 000 a year salary um but while i was there the a few things happened number one the owner of the business it was a novel shop novell is something that nobody today knows what it is but um what microsoft is today novell was back then so essentially they held they they had the the server business um for for small businesses or even large businesses everything ran on novell netware and microsoft was new to the was new to the game when it came to server side you know corporate networks and there was a certification called a microsoft certified systems engineer where you can get certified on the microsoft server operating system and that was a six exam certification and it was at the time was very valuable um at the same time i got married now mind you i'm 19 years old um and i got married and that goes back to the way i was raised the jewish orthodox traditions and uh you can't really be with a woman unless you're married so i fell in love with a girl and the only way for us to be together was to get married so that's what i did now um i don't have any qualms with what happened with my life and where that took me but at 19 before i turned 20 i already had my first child and so my oldest is is now 20 she also works for me she's a podcast producer here at my podcast profit with law um and she's a college student at suny empire state um but i am 42 years old i've got a 22 year old daughter uh so at 19 i was i just gotten married and i had her now a pregnant wife and i started to realize that my 23 000 salary ain't gonna cut it and that's where i think that a lot of my motivation on my career path was driven by necessity rather than by what i you know i desired or wanted or thought about that i wanted to do because it was one step after another always trying to keep abreast with the added responsibilities i created for myself so i went into my boss my new boss i was there what nine months or eight months when this happened and i said look i want to know if there's a way for me to earn more money here and he said well yeah actually there is if you get this microsoft certification then i will give you a raise and i'll raise you from 23 000 to 27 000. so i went through and i built my own two computers at home and i made a server and a workstation and i went through the material and i took the test and i worked really hard to get the certification and when i was done it was right around the time that my baby was born and i went in i got my raise and i was feeling really good and then i read an article that said that the average mcsc was making seventy thousand dollars a year yeah i got a raise and i'm way underpaid exactly so i started to shop around what's out there and i ended up getting a a job at a pre-ipo company now mind you this is 1999 and everybody was going public so like the place to be was a pre-ipo company now let me just ask one question on that so you're working at novella and just as a complete aside so people some of the listeners at least i know who nobel is because it was started in utah so because it was started in utah it was actually started in provo which is where i went to school for undergrad there's at least a very tangential connection between you or between nobel and why i would actually know what it is because you're right most people would remember it but now you so you go before you made the jump to going to kind of the pre-ipo did you go into the boss did you say hey i can make double if i go somewhere else or he's just saying hey we're not we can't we're not in a position to pay you or kind of what made you decide to make that leap or make that jump from working to noelle which was a big company at the time to going to more of a pre-ipo company so it's exactly how it happened so the owner of this business that's basically was a a computer support company um a small shop we had five of us that were working for him he was in his 70s and i went into him and i said look you know i i really appreciate what you're paying me i appreciate you taking me in i'm working hard for you um i know that we're making we're making money i don't know if it can support this but here's what the industry is paying people that are doing what i'm doing with the amount of experience that i have um is there anything that you can do to improve my salary and he said um no that's the best that i can do and i actually i my recollection may be off i think he may have given me a small raise i think he may have bumped me up another few thousand dollars but that was it um then i went and i found a job um and i and and the job was gonna pay me 54 000 was the salary so it was it was practically double or just shy of double of what i was earning so i went into him and i said look i now have a job offer before i take it i just want to double check nothing nothing doing here and he said nope nothing doing and i said okay um here's my two weeks notice so at that exact moment he called everybody together into the office into the conference room and he said i just want you all to know i'm retiring and moshe's leaving he got another job and i'm going to um if you guys want it these two people i'm going to hand the cut the clients off to you uh we'll we'll make some financial arrangements and that was that was it my exodus was basically the demise of the company that i was at uh not my doing he was held a company together well i think he was ready i think he was like you know and i think he knew it was coming so i think he waited until he didn't have to let another person go um and it just gave him the peace of mind that he can move on and retire in peace so i started the software company at the software company uh i did most of the work on the team that i was on a lot of the guys were smokers and every 15 minutes they went to smoking breaks and you know i ended up carrying the carrying the bag for a lot of the work they did and i turned around and very quickly asked for a raise from them um and they turn around and my manager basically gave me the run around for a while and ultimately came back and said he you know he can do an 800 dollar raise um and i guess it's better than nothing but not a whole lot yeah it was like a and basically the conversation he had with me was very like this is not how to have employees he calls me into the office and he says you know yeah mcses are a dime a dozen so i was able to work out an 800 raise for you you know like you owe me the world so um at that time it was shortly thereafter i walked into my father's house and it was a sunday morning he was meeting with a gentleman who was installing a phone system in his house so he was having this meeting with this guy and i walked in and i said hi and i said hello to this person and i went up to talk to my mother and when i walked out of the room he turns to my father and he says oh what does he do and my father says oh he's in computers he does networking blah blah blah he says well i have a company that does phone systems i would love to add computer networking to the mix of what we do is he looking for a job so my father tells him i don't think so he just started at this uh at this other place why would he be looking already yeah so he turns around and tells me this conversation and i said well wait a second i want to hear what he has to say so i sat down with this i sat down with him and i had a conversation with him um and he told me what he wanted to do what his vision was and i said i would love to start your it division for you i'd love to be your director of i.t i said i don't have the experience of managing people i understand that you're taking a risk with me but i've never let any of my employers down i've always worked really hard i've always made sure to get the job done and i will do the same for you i said and on top of so he wanted to know what i wanted to earn i said seventy thousand dollars a year and he hemmed and one he wasn't sure i said i'll tell you what i i see that this is a difficult dollar amount for you to for you to swallow i said i will go i will start at sixty thousand i'll work for three months if after three months you're not happy with my work you think that you made a mistake i walk away you know you saved a little bit of money if you are happy you give me a raise to 70. and he agreed and i started working there i ended up working for him for six years um and i developed his i.t department into a dozen technicians i flew all across the country i sold over 30 million dollars in sales for him um and it was it was a it was the it was a great place to land um it was a great place for me to flourish but more importantly it gave me a ton of experience in basically starting a business running a business where i didn't have the the same challenges as somebody who owns a business does because i didn't have to worry about where the money was coming from necessarily right um so i didn't lose sleep at night but i learned a ton about vetting people hiring the right people managing them um you know criticizing them in a way that's constructive and be able to get them to to to be team players and work with you uh it was a very impactful job for me but during that time i know that we're probably going to be running out of time soon so try to rush the story up a little bit during that time i went through my divorce and it was the last couple of years i was working for him and when i went through my divorce i basically my ex-wife wasn't working and i was and i was earning at that point i was already earning six figures over six figures i actually got to a hundred thousand dollars in salary before i turned 21 and and i owned my first home before i turned 22. so i was like really always on this fast track of rushing to get somewhere where i was rushing to who knows but i always thought that somewhere well you know what i had this i had this belief that you know people work their whole lives to reach retirement and then they get to retirement they get to enjoy life and they're too old to enjoy it oh i agree it's like finally when you have your house paid for you have the money you have the means and then you're saying now i'm too tired i'm too old and i can't do anything to enjoy everything that i built and so then it almost seems backwards but when you're young you know so it's kind of you know retirement is wasted on the old and you know and there's some truth to that so now help us so i had this i had this idea that i would have all my kids out of high school and you know through college by the time i was 45 i'd be retired and i'd be able to live and enjoy life so um you know that's so i was always on this rush because i had created this this you know time frame for myself that was a lot shorter than what most people would have their careers in now mind you i never went to college at this point and i also had something that i was doing on the side so i wasn't uh i was an emt an emergency medical technician volunteering for the local ambulance corps um and that was something that i just did as a hobby on the side had nothing to do with you know my my uh my career so i went through my divorce and in the process um first of all my work um fell off the cliff when i you know like i just my head wasn't in the game i wasn't motivated like everything that was motivating me was my family and my family was falling apart um and then i got to this realization where logistically it made sense since i was the breadwinner that i would have the kids only one night a week and every other weekend and she would have them all the other times which and you know in hindsight that was the stupidest thing for me to agree to but it is what it is water under the bridge it makes sense and it worked or you thought it would work and come to find out different right so then i had all this free time in the evenings i was like what am i going to do with it so i actually decided to join a paramedic program and put myself through a paramedic school and the paramedic program is a 2 000 hour program so that's like the equivalent of a full-time job and i was doing this while working my job so i would go to i would leave work and i would go to class in the evenings we had class from 7 to 11 and then i had to do three eight hour rotations a week at at the hospital so some nights i would stay there do my eight hour rotation from eleven to seven and then go to work at seven a.m the next morning uh and sometimes i did it on the weekend when i didn't have the kids somehow i balanced it i figured it all out it was a very difficult year but at least i felt like i was doing something at the same time that i finished my medic program things really got bad at work the company wasn't doing well they were having a hard time my performance had fallen off the map most of my team was already gone and my boss started to fall behind in payroll and it got to the point where i was like you know what there's really there's no future for me here i went into his office and i said look either catch me up or i'm gone and he said okay see ya so i'm donating the extra money that i didn't pay you so now so now that's kind of fast forward so you're saying okay i'm in a transitional point in life i you know going through divorce you're also saying okay i'm gonna do emt school now where we where we intersected was a bit more of now with profit with law which is more right right business so how did you make that jump or that transition because it seems like it's a fairly big departure from what you were used to or what you're doing uh before then yeah so what happened was i started working full-time as a paramedic and a paramedic on a 9-1 unit it could be a very um adrenaline rushing job it could be very emotionally draining but one thing that it had was a lot of downtime so there was all this time that i was sitting there and what did what did they do right they sit and watch tv right now i'm sitting there i'm in the medic station and i'm and i'm three hours downtime between calls or whatever it is and we're watching tv and at some point i'm like what am i doing with my life like why am i not being more productive with this time i'm getting paid for it i may as well do something with it and that's when i said you know what i'm going to go to school i'm going to get my bachelor's degree i never did it i always wanted to do it i'm going to do it so i i enrolled at suny empire state which had an adult learning distance learning program and i started going for my bachelor's and when i had to start selecting what my major was going to be or what classes i wanted to to take i knew that business was where i wanted to be but i looked at my experience and i said what am i missing from my experience and i realized that i never was involved in the financial side of the business because i was only involved in operations so i honed in on accounting and that's when i started going saying oh maybe i want to be a cpa maybe you know that's where i want to go and uh ultimately what i ended up doing was i got my bachelor's and i went for my mba did all of that right through and then things started changing in my life like i met my my wife my current wife now and um i started to settle down and when i started to settle down my medic salary really wasn't cutting it i wasn't even cutting it before because um most of it was going to child support and private school tuition for my children um but at now if i want to start life with somebody else i really have to get serious about the money that i'm making so the the knee-jerk reaction instant you know solution to the problem was to go back to it so i did i went back to it and i was i did that and i did medic full-time three nights a week so it was three 12-hour shifts a week at night and um and you know and i and i did did i t during the day all while i was still doing i was a full-time student so um i i wasn't busy at all didn't have much on your plate right right exactly um so that was a really busy time in my life uh but then then i found out that my ex-wife was an alcoholic um basically kids moved in with me once that happened i couldn't work at night anymore it just didn't work for my wife to be a primary parent for them um so that you know i had to come back from my medic hours um and that's when i really when when that happened um that's when i really started to look at my life and say what am i doing like i've always worked for somebody but i never wanted to work for somebody and now i've got my kids going through this crisis and every day i'm running them to therapy appointments to alatine meetings and i'm constantly needing to ask permission to do that i don't want to i want to just be able to be a dad to them in a way that feels natural to me without needing somebody's permission for that um and that's really what where i started to say okay i really want to start my own business i want to work for myself and the seed was planted ultimately that was 2014 is when i started that journey it wasn't until 2019 where i settled on who i was serving and how i was going to serve them so it took me five years to really what's that as you can see it took you about five years and that's what i like to hit on is that you know it always feels like when you read the book you listen to podcasts you watch the movie it's oh i was an overnight success and you know it just everything clicked and exactly what happened and then it was this fluid journey and it was everything was perfect and it's oh 99.9 of the time it's never the case and even once you made the jump it still took you five years to figure out where you wanted to focus on and what you wanted to drill down on yeah and what's interesting is is that finally like the end of 2018 beginning of 2019 is when i realized that attorneys was who i'm going to be working with but even then i still didn't have clarity on what i was doing for them because initially i was setting up a traditional accounting firm but ultimately that's not what i wanted to do and when i started to really look at the impact i wanted to have and how i wanted to help people i realized that what i really want to do is help people be successful and i didn't want to just look at people's past results and tell them how to save money on their taxes and you know and and that be the end of it i really wanted to work with people to help them figure out how to turn their business into a cash generating machine and then figure out what to do with that cash later right so that they can make a difference in not only their own lives but also their kids lives real quick tangent um this was all motivated by an experience i had for my grandfather so my grandfather came from nazi germany when he was 11 years old with his father he lost his mother and his twin siblings in the war and um when he when they came over i think they went to israel first then they came to the u.s when they came they really had nothing um his father had had sent over um i think he sent over some diamonds um so he basically had an orange orchard and um over in germany uh and he was very well connected he was a businessman and uh basically he was an orange merchant uh and when the war started to happen he because he was well connected he he was getting intel from top officials really telling him what's going on so i think he took his entire family fortune and converted it into diamonds and and pre-sent it to the us so when he finally ended up here in the u.s he had merchandise to sell um and he started started a diamond business in manhattan um ultimately my grandfather worked in that business with him um and was was successful with that business uh to the point where he and four of his cousins decided to buy a piece of real estate they bought an apartment building on the west side of manhattan um and now that move looks looks genius looking at it 60 years later or whatever it was right but that investment that he made in in himself and his family's future bore significant results so the tune of um he gave he gave each of his 36 grandchildren the down payment for their first home purchase and he also put each of us through it helped put each of us through private school and our children through private school so every year he's you know part of my kids tuition was paid for by my grandfather um and being on the recipient side of that it had such a major impact on my life it's a minor thing like in the grand scheme of things when we become older we realize that forty thousand dollars is nothing it's a drop in the bucket it really you know it's not really that big a deal but for him to be able to provide it to us at that moment in our life when it was so significant and allowed us to get a step you know towards home ownership and being able to settle down um it was such a blessing to have that that's really what's motivating me to help others create something like that for their families um that's a that's an awesome story and it's kind of fun to see how a gen the generational impact of something that happened generations back is continuing to both impact you from a financial but also from a direction you take in your life and your business so i think that that's that's definitely fun fun to hear so well as we wrap up and we could go on for much longer and i'm sure we'd have a great conversation so we'll have to have you back on i'd love to have you on we do an expert episode and it's a bit different flavor than the journey but we get to talk and share your expertise and i always love listening to your podcast to sharing your expertise so maybe we'll have to have you back on in the future but as we wrap towards the end of this podcast now we've kind of caught up a bit to your journey definitely encourage people to check out your podcast with profit with law and also all the services you guys offer but i always ask two questions at the end of each podcast we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is is you know we've talked a lot about your journey and along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it well i mean the worst the worst decision that i i shouldn't say decision the worst thing that could have happened to me along my journey at the time was going through divorce but when i look back at the journey and i say well you know where did i end up i would never have ended up here had i not done that right so when you're going through that crisis it feels like the world's fallen apart and this is the worst thing that could have happened to you but it's part of the journey and you know i i am where i am because of lots of decisions that i made on the heels of that um but that's not really that's not the business decision so the one business decision that i that i regret that i wish i could have done differently is simply how long i waited so i started my business moonlighting so i started building my business while i was working as an employee and i'm sure a lot of people do this and i did it at a necessity because i have to put food on the table i had a mortgage to pay i had kids to put you know a kid's school tuition to pay i had you know mouths to feed so i had this need and based on the need i felt like i wasn't ready to take the plunge ultimately what ended up happening was is i build up clients to a certain point and then i couldn't serve them my service would fall off the map and clients would leave that would make room for new clients and i had this ever evolving door that was being created by the fact that i was building my business in this way um and when i had reached that first point where i am too busy i that that should have been the point where i said okay i'm giving notice and i'm moving into this full time and just trusted that i could have continued the process fast enough to be able to get the income that i needed from it um that game of going back and forth and really killing myself in the process like getting the clients then killing them off and then getting them again uh that went on for over two years and you know at the end of the day it was it was basically a coaching session that i had with a with my business coach um where it really became clear to me that i needed to make a decision but it also became clear that it wasn't all or nothing and basically i went to my boss and i said look it's time for me to go but financially i'm not ready so i have a proposal for you there's one major project i'm working on everything else is kind of like extra anybody else could do everything else this major project requires me to be on client site twice a week how about i stay on to do two days a week of work and here is what i would charge for that and i basically named a fee that was 75 of my salary and they said yes so ultimately i cut down to two days a week and was making most of the money i was making yeah and you know and and ultimately at the end of the day that was how that was what my solution to the problem was three months later that client stopped paying and that was the end of that so i was out whether i liked it or not but um it was the impetus that i needed it was the push that i needed to just put that behind me so that's the answer to you your first question is you know like the biggest mistake that i had was just not trusting myself enough to be able to take the plunge and do it um and then the second thing is the biggest piece of advice that i could give to somebody who is building their own business thinking about building their own business is to get really clear on what it is that you want i am in the position now where i work with hundreds of business owners and most of them have gotten lost on the journey and forgotten why they started in the first place and the truth is is that we usually tend to over complicate what we're doing we usually tend to add on more than we want make it more expensive than it needs to be and if you really get get in touch with what is the result that you want what is the lifestyle you want and you build your business around that you'll avoid a lot of detours that are unnecessary and the last thing you want to do is to build a successful business 20 years from now look back and say i don't even like what i built i don't even like where i'm at and that's what a lot of people are on the path to do and that's why i work with my clients the very first thing that i do i have like a 90 day law firm turnaround program the very first thing that we do when we start is to go back to the drawing board and identify what their vision is for themselves for their family for their personal life and then how does that translate into what they want to create with their business so my best piece of advice for you is go back go back and get clear on what it is that you want to make sure that what you're building is in alignment completely with that oh and i love that because you know that is really most people start a business they have a clear goal in mind they have a reason why they start the business and yet either because you chase the dollars you get pushed in different directions or other things oftentimes by the time you get to 10 15 20 years down the road the business is different than what you wanted to do and you're not even enjoying running the business anymore so i think that is definitely a great piece of advice well as we wrap up and before we go if people want to reach out to they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor in your business they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out connect with you or find out more best thing is to go to profitwithlaw.com or search any podcast player and look for profit with law tune into the podcast if you're not a lawyer or in the legal services first of all a lot of my business friends have said that they really enjoyed the show even though it's they're not a law firm because business is business and there's a lot of really good ideas and good conversations that happen there but if you know an attorney or you are one um share it you know let tell somebody about it it's a great show and really ev all the instructions on how to connect with me is buried right in there you know listen to any one episode and you'll find out how to take the next step with us go to the website there's links there as well that's really the start of the journey is just get to know me and my brand by tuning into the show and checking out our website and uh if you like what you see reach out to us well i definitely encourage people to reach out i love the podcast i'm an avid listener and i'm worth it for those that aren't on the legal side i listen to you as an example real estate is one of the podcasts of real estate marketing is they have a ton of advice that i am import over to the legal sphere i think there's a lot of times when you listen other industries you can get a lot of insight as to what they're doing well and what they're not doing well and learn that so definitely encourage people check out the podcast go to the website and uh and connect and learn more well thank you again moshe for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show we'd love to have you also make sure to subscribe and make sure to share the podcast so we can make sure that everybody can find out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always there are always here to help thank you again moshe and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you