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Guest: Kyle Isaacson

00:07 
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Again, this is both a podcast as well as a video cast. That's what we are trying in 2020. So let's give it a try. And then today I'm very, very excited to introduce you to founder or owner of a company. So his name is Will Hankinson. So Will Hankinson is the owner of www.introcave.com. He is a YouTube intro maker he purchased in 2018. And the Will has a very interesting and diverse background. He's been building websites and video games since 2007. That's 13 years. His expedience ranges from 2% startups to running large Facebook games to working at a digital agency. He has participated in game jams, hackathons, shipped multiple flash and mobiles games, built websites. And believe it or not, he taught as an adjunct professor at Savannah college of arts and design. It's a very popular, a famous college in Georgia and of course in the country as well. And also, he has some investment stake in real estate as well. So as you can see, a very diverse background that it's going to be very interested in conversation. And so Will welcome.

01:28 

Will: Thank you. Thank you, Ramesh.

01:31 

Ramesh: So you're a big-time gamer.

01:31 

Will: Yeah. I mean you can tell from giant gaming headset; apex legends is my current mega league vice.

01:42 

Ramesh: Will what's your pop current game.

01:42 

Will: Apex legends. It's a competitive Fortnite which you've probably heard of.

01:45 

Ramesh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So fantastic. So that's good. All right, so I have a gamer friend. I keep [01:50 inaudible] him like, man, what are doing? Just killing people in the game. So what fun you get out of it. But anyway, I don't know much about it, so I will not get into it. So let's talk about Intro Cave So you are the owner of www.introcave.com, so Will, why don't you introduce yourself in your own words and then about the business that you're running.

02:08 

Will: Sure. So I sort of bounced back and forth my whole career from video games and web development. That's kind of where I got started. At the time I was in 2018 when I bought it. I was working at a mobile game studio here in Atlanta and I would sort of work on video games all day and then come home and keep working on either the same game or different games, smaller games. I felt like I needed a little bit more variety. I'm a big reader of like hacker news, in any hackers’ places like that. I'd read a couple of stories of people buying businesses. And that actually kind of just struck a nerve with me. And so I started Effie international is the one that I sort of basically just analyzing deals. So probably for like a, let's say like six months or a year. I was on their newsletter sort of just analyzing deals that came through.

02:55  Ramesh: Sorry for interrupting. So what you're saying is, it's not that you were thinking about starting a business for quite some time. I mean you're taking this course or that course, but you suddenly happened to see this newsletter called hacker news and then that lit a bulb, is that how it started?

03:12 

Will: I mean I’ve always had side hustles even since I first started my career in 2007, back then it was me, back then I was working on the web and making flash games on the side. So now it's kind of a reversal of that where I was working in games and figured I should maybe work on the web on the side. So I’ve always had side hustles. I'd say that since I have a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, so since having kids, I'd say my time for working on side hustles as has gone down dramatically. So having read about some guys on a blog part post somewhere that they had bought their business, that just seemed like a good way. Like, you know, I don't have but maybe 10 or 20 hours a week to work on the side business. So starting from scratch just seemed a little too daunting. And I had a couple of false starts and you know, I’ve launched a couple things, but nothing really ever got traction. So the idea of just buying something that I could optimize and grow, there was already sort of proof that Hey, this is a business that can make money. Just sort of fit what I was looking for.

04:11 

Ramesh: Okay. So www.introcave.com is what you bought. So what is www.introcave.com? I know it said YouTube intro maker. So for somebody who doesn't know much about it, I mean, what is it about.

04:22 

Will: Yeah, so I mean YouTube is huge and it's continuing to grow. Everybody, you know, I think they've done surveys with high school students and the number one job that everybody wants right now, it's no longer like astronaut. It's like, you know, pro gamer, streamer or youtuber. So there's constantly new people coming onto the platform. You know, if, if you want to brand yourself or brand your business on YouTube you may have a logo or a tag or some sort of like, follow me, subscribe. And if you don't know aftereffects or Apple motion or, I mean there's a couple of software packages that do this and you want to have some sort of like cool particle logo reveal or announcement like title card animation. There's not really like an easy way to do that. The tools are very expensive and there are quite a bit of knowledge to put something like that together. So what intro cave does is, it's got a library of about a hundred templates. Some of them just have a logo, some have like a logo and a subtitle, some just have texts only. And you can go and pick which template you like, upload your logo, change some colors, change some text, and it'll actually fire it off to a render server on a separate, so I have a web server and a render server. It'll fire it off to the render server, render a sort of crappy small preview, 480 by 270. Send that back to you. If you like it, you can pay five bucks for seven, 720P or 10 bucks for 1080P and it'll take about an hour to render it in HD. 

05:44 

Ramesh: Okay, so how long is this intro video? 

05:48 

Will: Up to, I have some, even up to like 30 seconds that are really more like a micro ad spot, but I'd say the sweet spot is probably in the four to ten second range. 

05:56 

Will: Oh, I see. So 4 to 10 seconds range. And it's, I say, so essentially you guys are doing a sell up of the video and that's how you're making money.

06:05 

Will: Correct and it's not liked a perpetual license either. It's like a pay per render. So it's not like, you know, some of my competitors are more like a subscription fee and you pay you know, 10, 20 bucks a month and then you can render as many videos as you want. Mine is just a single transaction Elkhart pay per render. And I think that works pretty well for intro videos because you, you know, once you have a logo reveal, you don't end up needing like, you know, two of them a month. I do about maybe 30% of my business is repeat customers. But for the most part, once you have your intro video, you know, once you're sort of just getting started, one is really all you need.

06:39 

Ramesh: Okay. So that's a very good overview of the business. It's basically YouTube intro videos with, and then your sell up option to do that. And then you also contrast it from a business perspective. How you're differentiating is you're not doing a subscription kind of service. You're doing one at a time. That's how you're differentiating. And then let me ask you a question. How did you come up with a $5 for 720P and $10 for the, you know, HD 1080P, of that kind of pricing?

07:10 

Will: I mean, really, I just inherited it. So when I purchased the business in 2018, it was $4.99 and $9.99. I've since rounded to even flat numbers just because the, you know, it's easier to put on the video or on the marketing site and things like that. I've tested a few more prices. I tried going to 12. I didn't see enough conversions. I actually, like I saw a dip at $12. So I’ve moved it back to $10. Last summer I tried just getting rid of the $5 option entirely. Figuring some, my average purchase price is about, I want to say like in $7.50 to $8 range, so it's pretty evenly split, may maybe slightly skewed towards the $10 videos. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll just get rid of the $5 option entirely and it'll go all the way to $10. Conversion dropped like 40, 50%. And so the increase in revenue was only about, it'd be like a net 25% decrease in revenue. There's probably some sort of like price anchoring going on there where, you know, when people see the $5 and the $10, they're like, Oh, well I’ll take the 10, but when they only see $10, they think, well maybe I don't need a $10 video.

08:17 

Ramesh: Okay. Actually that is very, very, good point. I think in terms of price anchoring that you talked about and having the different prices, how psychology works. So let's take it one step at a time. So Will so you bought the intro Cave and then you agreed on some kind of uprising by looking at the valuation of how much money they're making and all that stuff in 2018 and how was the journey and then what, how much time were you spending after you bought it? And then if you could talk about, let's talk about 2018, I don't know how much time you had in 2018 let's talk about that first.

08:52 

Will: Sure. So I got pretty good at doing sort of financial modeling of these deal prospectuses that were coming through the newsletter I signed up for. So I basically run you know, a 10-year model of like, okay, if I can increase traffic by 1% a year or increase conversion rate by 2%, here's what the business might look like in three to five years. And I was looking for something that was sort of in my technical wheelhouse as well. So my background is in games. So I’ve done a lot of scripting and Photoshop. I've done a lot of similar scripting. So the backend servers are running aftereffects, which has the same scripting language as what you would use to script Photoshop. So this one just ended up being something that was right in my technical wheelhouse. As well as I, you know, doing games and digital media my whole career. You know, I studied animation in college. So this sort of felt like a, Hey, this is like this thing I used to do in the dorm and maybe I’ll pick it back up again and start creating some of these intro videos myself. So sort of like scratch all those numbers. I sort of looked at it as, you know, depending on some of the businesses I was looking at, like if it was a sass and it'd been around for five years, maybe the multiple goes up a couple, I sort of assumed the base starts at around 30 times EBITDA, like monthly EBITDA. So like if it's making, you know, $1,000 a month that you know, sells for roughly $30,000, that kind of thing. So sort of my, in my head where I value things was sort of at somewhere in the 30 to 36 range. And then I would sort of tune that number up or down based on, you know, how long has it been around, how volatile is the traffic. Do they have sort of repeatable acquisition channels? So this one was actually a fairly young site. It had only sort of been earning at that level for about eight to 10 months. Something like that. But so I actually sort of put a little bit lower ish then than what I ultimately paid for. But there were multiple bidders. And so what we ended up doing, the seller actually got enough interest that he was thinking about just holding it for another year and continuing to grow it and then selling it, you know, for double, you know, a year later. Yeah so, we ended up working out a kind of an earnout schedule where, you know, the base price was something I was comfortable with. And then if the earnings grew a ton in the first year I would pay, not quite, you know, double, but you know, pay more for it. So I think my final price multiple ended up being somewhere in the like 30 to 36 X EBITDA range.

11:16 

Ramesh: Okay. So you bought that and then you said you wanted to optimize the business, increase the traffic and increase the conversions and that kind of stuff. So how, did it pan out or were there any ups and downs in your thinking when you bought it and then as you're working on the business?

11:37 

Will: Yeah, for sure. So I bought it in, the deal closed in May. I didn't take it over until June. I was traveling until June. So once I took over the business in June, I was making around, I want to say like $2,500 profit a month. So I had pretty much the whole month of June to work on it and sort of do the onboarding, takeover of the business. And then my day job, I'm currently on a digital agency. I only work four days a week, so I have every Friday off. So I'd probably put in about 16 to 20 hours a week on the business after June. So at first everything went great. So, you know, I took over the business at about $2,500 a month or so. And then I grew that steadily through the end of the year. Just optimizing SEO. I started a newsletter. There wasn't a newsletter before. I revamped a lot of the design and the blog, got rid of some of the really poorly performing templates and grew from $2,500 up to about $5,000 profit in January. So in the first seven months I doubled it. Which is great for me. Not as great for the earnout. So basically, I hit all a hundred percent of the first three quarters of earn-out. And then around March, so February is another big month. January is a big month. So January is sort of cyclical for this business because a lot of people you know, you're a podcast of yourself, I'm sure, so a lot of people, you know, when new year’s hits, they're like, this is the year I'm going to start my podcast. I'm going to start my YouTube channel. So January is a huge spike of like, you know, $5,000 profit or something like that. And then that dropped back down to like $4,000 or so in February, which seemed like a more sort of normal run rate. And then about halfway through March, there was a big Google SEO algorithm update. And basically my main keyword that I rank for just disappeared entirely. So my traffic went from about 2000 people a day to like, you know, 400 or 500 people a day. 

13:36 

Ramesh: Okay. So I think we all go through the Google algorithm gods wishes and all that stuff, okay fine. So how did you recover from that? 

13:45 

Will: So my plan had actually been since taking over the business is this thing is held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I'm going to rebuild the render servers, make it super stable. It turns out when three quarters of your traffic goes away, it doesn't need to be that performance or stable anymore. So suddenly I had plenty of computing power and, and so the thing that I was working on kind of didn't make sense to work on anymore. So I sort of just completely re shifted my efforts into SEO. Really just learning everything I could about Outreach, SEO. I joined HARO, help a reporter out. So helping a reporter out is like a daily three times a day newsletter where people are just looking for sources. And so I just tried to respond to three to five of those a week. That's how I got onto this podcast even and just sort of start building a word of mouth that way. I started investing in Twitter. So I wrote a couple of bots for Twitter to basically just a scrape the timeline for mentions of subscribe to my channel, new video out, that kind of thing. And then run a little bit of very simple grading of like, okay, this keyword is worth five points, this keyword is worth 10 points. And sort of split that into a couple of lists of sort of prospects of low value, high value prospects, and then I can go and interact with those people and try to drive a little bit of traffic that way. I'd say that's been mostly a miss. And then right around the same time also my, you know, I get about, and this kind of blows people's minds, you know, a thousand to 2000, sometimes 2,500 people on my newsletter every month just signing up for intro cave accounts. So when I took over the business, the newsletter was about 20,000 people, I want to say and starting around, you know, February, March, kind of the same time the traffic blew up, my list was up to about 40,000 - 50,000 people. And me having never really sent a newsletter before. My, you know, strategy for that is like, you know, load 50,000 names in a mail gun and press send. It turns out that once you get above like 10,000 to 15,000, that doesn't work anymore. So I thought about migrating over to MailChimp or something like that, that'll sort of automatically warm up the servers and send them out and you know, get good deliverability. But you know, at my list size, it was, you know, $400 or $500 a month on one of the sort of pro, you know, email platforms. So to me it just didn't, you know, at the time I was only making like a thousand dollars a month in profit. So blowing half of that on a newsletter that drives, you know, maybe $200 of sales a month didn't seem worth it.

16:13 

Ramesh: Hey Will I have a question [16:15 inaudible] heard about in that aspect that there are some services where you could ascend straight from your WordPress or whatever website without having to go to the email marketing solutions like a MailChimp to the world. You get unlimited sense. So did you say that, that did not work out for you because of the deliverability of the emails? Is that what you said?

16:38 

Will: Yeah. So when you, so most of the email service providers, so Gmail, Yahoo, I mean Gmail is the big one. Gmail is like 90% of my emails when they detect a ton of traffic from one IP, that's really, really bursty. So, you know, I send maybe at the time I was sending about 40, 50 emails a day, just sort of normal transactional, thank you for signing up. Here's your password, that kind of emails. So when your traffic goes like 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50,000, 50, 50, 50, 50, that kind of spike just doesn't make it through. So you've got to kind of warm it up. So as part of that, I implemented a bunch of transactional emails. So now my daily volume is closer to 400 to 500 emails a day. And then when I send a newsletter, I ramp it up. So instead of going like, you know, 400, 400, 400, 50,000, I’ll do like 400, 1000, 2000, 3000, 10,000, 20,000. 

17:29 

Ramesh: Okay. So you're still doing that thing as opposed to relying purely on the email marketing solutions, like a MailChimp for the world?

17:35 

Will: Yeah, yeah. I basically built my own newsletter service at this point. That's pretty much the big engineering effort of this year 2019 last year, I guess now.

17:44 

Ramesh: Okay. Fantastic. So that's good. So you have built it up and then you build up the mail service. That's awesome. And then did it go back to the original at least $2,500 or when, what's happening.

17:58 

Will: It's improving. So I'd say you know, March through September, August, September, it was pretty flat around making it about a thousand profit a month and that sort of like profit from an analytics side I would say that like an EBITDA side. So, you know, I financed the business when I bought it, so I'm still paying, you know, $400 or $500 a month in debt service. So, not a whole lot of profits starting around like September, that outreach started to seem like it would work a little bit. And so the numbers started ticking up. This most recent month there's another algorithm update a couple of days ago. There was one in December. Those have all benefited me, so I'm starting to see traffic for my top keywords again. And so it's looking like this month will probably be closer to 1500 or 2000, and its sort of on an upward trajectory again.

18:50 

Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. So it's a fascinating story, right? So you bought a business instead of building it and then you went through, the reasons why like you didn't want to spend, you know, enough number of hours just building it. And then you went to the pricing discussion. You went through the ups and downs of building the website to that. So now you started the whole thing as a side hustle, as a side business. Okay. So let's talk about what are your thoughts now, now that you have a business that is at least minimum of $1,000 on the side that's getting you on, you have a full-time job. So are you feeling comfortable that at some point you will quit your job and then focus on your business?

19:32 

Will: I'd say yes but not because of intro cave necessarily. So the plan for it was really you know, we also do, my wife and I do real estate investing, so, you know, we're sort of on the fire financially independent retire early plan. So, you know, we're basically building up a rental portfolio. Then when that's paid off, we'll replace our salary, sort of W2 income. She's on board with that plan. She's not on board with the will wants to start an indie game company and hire artists plan. So if I want to, you know, have some sort of slush fund to like to hire out contractors and artists and grow beyond just what I would work on myself, I need more revenue to support that plan. So my plan with intro cave is actually, to for one, all it's doing now, every dime that comes in from it just goes into paying down the debt of buying it off. So theoretically it's going to pay for itself in you know, with the debt service drag like four to five years unless I grow it significantly. But then after that, every cent that comes into it, it's sort of like Will's fund money that I can just use on whatever I want. So I do have plans for what would it look like if I went full time on it. You know, it's nice, like I didn't sort of waste two years you know, working on a business that could never get big. Like, I sort of hit a high watermark now where I know that in January of last year, I made $5,000 profit in one month and that was at, you know, an average of let's say fourth and fifth in the search rankings on my top keyword. Which for me is intro maker. So when the algorithm change happened, I lost all my traffic for intro maker. But I was still ranking for a lot of other sort of peripheral keywords. So that's where most of the traffic was coming from at that point. When I was analyzing the business and doing due diligence before that, I saw that almost all the traffic was coming in on that one search term. So I sort of hedge my bet against that. So at the same time I was negotiating to purchase intro cave. The domain www.intromaker.com was available. It was, I mean, just a parked domain. It wasn't like freely register. So I reached out to the owner of that and spent like two or three months negotiating to buy that domain. Bought it for, you know, hefty sum. I was going to say it's like nine grand, something like that. Right now it's just parked. It's just not doing anything. It's just says, Hey, maybe someday there'll be something cool here.

22:00 

Ramesh: Probably forwarding it to your, this business anyway.

22:05 

Will: Yeah. Oh, well it's just a landing page right now that says, Hey, go here if you want something, maybe I’ll build something cool here eventually. So I have kind of like two directions I could see going. One is having a background in games. I'm super interested in Realtime rendering, which is that's been used recently in like rogue one. It's been used in the Mandalorian that's basically something that takes aftereffects two hours to render you could do in a Realtime engine in unity or unreal in like, you know, two minutes. So I want to start investing in building a pipeline to build intro videos in unity or unreal that then can render much, much, much faster than aftereffects can render. And my thinking was that it'd be pretty easy to build a sort of like a front-end editor for like sort of like a more of a Wiziwig. So instead of having like prebuilt pre-packaged templates, more of like a true editor and putting that up on inter maker.com that's like sort of the grand huge vision. You know, working on it 16 to 20 hours a week. It's moving pretty slowly. I don't see myself getting there anytime soon, so I may just rebrand intro cave as intro maker and start moving it over to there, that'd be the shorter-term play for that.

23:17 

Ramesh: Okay. So exactly. So now you've started talking about the time management aspect of running a business, which is that you have two kids and then pretty young kids and then so the most you can afford to put on the business at 16 to 20 hours without really compromising the work life quality and all that good stuff. Is that right?

23:35 

Will: Yup. Yup. I'm kind of lucky actually that everyone in my family goes to bed by nine o'clock and I go to bed at two o'clock, so then I can sort of get like five hours every night where I can do whatever I want. Lately that's been apex legends and video games. But you know, sometimes I'm more highly motivated too jam on intro cave in the evenings.

23:54 

Ramesh: Okay. So fantastic. So we covered a lot of ground here. We'll then, if I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, based on your story, what can you tell me?

24:05 

Will: I mean get started young before you have kids is a great piece of advice.

24:09 

Ramesh: I didn't do that, so then what is the next best?

24:13 

Will: I, I'd say like one mistake I’ve made, this is looping around to your question is, I'm currently on a sort of huge gaming laptop and I have three monitors set up and I’ve gotten very comfy in my old age where, you know, I have to be at work in my setup. Probably in the next six months or so, I'm going to buy a new like a razor blade or some sort of like windows equivalent of like a MacBook pro or something like that that actually has a decent battery life. When I was much younger in my career and when I was just dating my wife, my now wife we spent a lot more time together while I was working on my businesses. So, you know, I used to make flash games and websites, but I would do it from a small laptop and so we would sit on the couch together and she'd be watching a show or there'd be a show on and she'd be, you know, browsing reddit or whatever and I could be working on it, you know, while still with her. I feel like right now, I go to my office and I sort of shut out the family. So I mean, I'd say if you can figure out ways to work on your business, at least in proximity of the people around you.

25:15 

Ramesh: Well fantastic. That is what I do as well, where I was sitting in the living room. You know, that way what happens is though, getting the family support is extremely important and then how you get it, I think you gave a very practical tip, not many people talk about it. That's very good. So Will just to wrap up this discussion, just let me summarize. You know, your way of getting into the business is buying it, not building it and for many reasons of course the number of hours that you can put on the business and then the business you went through the valuation X number of times kind of calculation. That's good. And of course went through the natural ups and downs of the business. And I think to, if I could summarize where you came from, you're a techie guy, right? And you bought a business that you could work on if something goes wrong as opposed to a purely entrepreneurial person who just bought this business when the algorithm went down or when the rendering issues that you talked about are not working out, that person could not have worked on the business. Is that the right way to say it?

26:18 

Will: Yeah, I'd say the Intro cave is very tech dependent. So you know, even I keep in contact a little bit with the previous owner. I had a huge outage maybe three months afterwards and he's like, Oh, I'm so glad I sold to an engineer and not like product manager type. Cause they would've just had no idea how to fix it.

26:34 

Ramesh: Exactly. And then you have to spend money on somebody else doing it and then that eats into the profits and all that good stuff. Right. So that's other part of the business because I'm all talking about the different aspects. It's like, you know somebody buys houses for real estate investment, if they depend handyman to do it, it eats into the profits. But as if you can do the work yourself, then of course it's more for you.

26:54 

Will: Yeah, it's funny. The week that I closed on intro cave, so I took last June off. I actually, we also had a tenant move out on one of our rental properties and so I completely redid the floors, the drywall, painted the whole house while I did that during the day, and then was working on intro cave with the seller in the evening. So I was doing both of those at one time.

27:15 

Ramesh: That's fantastic. Okay, so Will this be a fantastic interview. So how can people know more about you and where should they go? And just a wrap up the video cast, podcast with that information please.

27:29 

Will: Yeah. I mean, I can give you my email. Learn your ABCs, which sounded cool in seventh grade when I made it. At the time it was Hotmail, now it's g-mail. So learnyourabcs@gmail.com. I'm Simian logic on all the, you know, Twitter, everything, Xbox live. If you want to play and text with me. I'm at intro cave as well, and Twitter, www.introcave.com is the website. Happy to answer any questions or email me.

27:53 

Ramesh: Fantastic. Hey, will thank you very much. And we'll stay in touch. Again, folks, I mean, it's an entirely different way of building a business. You don't have to build a business from scratch. You can buy the business and work on it. Of course you have to pay for it, and then you have to take other factors into consideration. But I think Will walked us through in a different way of being an entrepreneur. Thank you very much Will. 

28:18 

Will: Thank you Ramesh.

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Guest: Sukhi Jutla

Episode Transcript

00:07
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneurial podcast. And this is your host Ramesh Dontha. Today I'm very excited to bring an entrepreneur from United Kingdom. She's the founder of www.marketorders.net. She's a very sought-after international speaker, leader and qualified IBM blockchain developer winning numerous awards including Asian women of achievement, female entrepreneur of the year, and top 100 European digital pioneer by the financial times, no less and of course Google. In 2018 Sukhi made global headlines becoming the world's first number one bestselling blockchain app. Sukhi, I am so glad to have you on my podcast. Welcome.

00:53

Sukhi: Hello Ramesh and it's really, really great to be here and thank you for that wonderful warm introduction.

01:01

Ramesh: All right, Sukhi, so please, let's go ahead, please introduce yourself and then let's talk about your business. What is it?

01:07

Sukhi: Yeah, sure. So you know, you introduced me in a great way, but in my own words, I usually say I'm a bit of an accidental entrepreneur. I actually started my life as; I usually say a corporate cog. I sort of fell into that rabbit hole of doing a 9 to 5 job working for a very prestigious bank. And I was in banking for a number of years, but it was just something in my soul I think that always was quite creative and just very entrepreneurial. And over the course of the last 10 to 12 years, I’ve actually started a number of different businesses. Some didn't work how it, some had some you know some promise. But at the end of the day I think I was just trying to figure out what it is I wanted to do with my life. And today I'm the cofounder of market orders. And so I feel like I find what it is I'm supposed to be doing. I really enjoy being an entrepreneur and being a technology entrepreneur and marketing order today is a tech marketplace where we connect suppliers and retailers who want to buy and source gold and diamond jewelry products. And what we're doing is very disruptive, because it's a very traditional industry whereby most of the transactions when it comes to high value products like gold and diamond jewelry is still very much done in person because of that trusted element. But what we are doing is, I usually say it's like the Uber for gold and diamonds. We just, we are just a better way to help suppliers and the retailers to access the products that they need in a much more efficient manner.

02:56

Ramesh: Wow. So it's a high value business and you're using latest technology like a blockchain to disrupt the gateway. So when did you start market orders?

03:05

Sukhi: So market orders were started in the summer of 2016. So we are speaking in January 2020. So it's coming up to four years. And over the course of four years we have really iterated the business multiple times, which is why I'm really happy to be speaking to you because you're very much about, you know, the agile entrepreneur and I really do believe that your business is going to evolve and it's going to change so many different times until it gets to the customer. Because I really do believe as well that when you create a business, you really all co-creating with the person who's going to be using your product. So as much as you can sit there and create your business plan, you are going to have to be open and take feedback. So for example, when I created my first a pitch deck, a pitch deck is a document that you put together when you are raising investment or funds for your business. I was literally on version like 278 by the time I actually got my funding because every time, yeah, honestly Ramesh it's like I was pulling my hair out. Because every time you speak to somebody, they are going to ask you questions. And then you have to address those and add it into the deck. And the business that I'd started back in 2016, it has changed quite a lot and we are slightly different but a much more improved version. And it's all about learning. I don't think there's anything such as a failure. I prefer to call it feedback.

04:42

Ramesh: Yeah. So you learn from them. So just so that we put the right context, what was your original business model about? What did you think that you were starting in 2016?

04:52

Sukhi: Yeah, so we, myself and my co-founder, we wanted to be able to supply gold and diamond jewelry from the suppliers and then distribute it to the retail shop owners on the high street. So although we're an online business, our real customer are the jewelry owners who have a shop on the high street and what we were, our business model was we as market orders, we'd go to the supplier, patches the stock, bring it into the UK and then distribute it to the retailers and then take our commission. But when we did that, we just found that the process was a very inefficient, what was happening was we were taking the orders from the customers in the UK, then we would get onto a plane and go to Singapore where most of the suppliers are. By the time I spoke to my supplier, I placed the order, I wouldn't receive the order until three or four months later. And then, so bear in mind four months after I’ve spoken to my customer, I go back to him and I show him the products and he says to me, Sukhi I ordered these products four months ago and I don't want them anymore because they're not going to sell. So I was just left with a bag full of gold, which I had to melt down. And when you're melting gold jewelry, you are literally seeing your profit go down the drain. So myself and my co-founder, we said, this isn't a scalable or a viable model. I said, that's when we changed the business. And we decided that we would be an online marketplace where we allow the suppliers to upload their products and then we let the retailer go online directly and choose the products that they want. And another example Ramesh is we were taking the orders as they came in. And so again, I always feel like as much as you can prepare to swim, you really don't know the temperature of the water until you actually jump into the water.

06:52

Ramesh: Then only then you will know.

06:54

Sukhi: Yeah, absolutely. So again, when we were running the business, what I noticed was every time we were getting an order from a customer, I would place that order immediately with the supplier knowing that it's going to take four months to deliver. So I was very incentivized to make sure that orders were going out on time. However, what that meant was every time we sent an order, we were getting charged a flat rate fee for the transportation and the insurance costs because we are dealing with gold and diamonds. So what we, the change that we identified was rather than shipping the orders out, you know, on a daily basis. I also noticed that when the orders came in, the vast majority of the orders were very much around the same product type. So what, so what I decided and my co-founder as well, we downloaded all the orders and we noticed a pattern on a spreadsheet, and I noticed that day where certain orders that were coming in at the same time and they were the same product. So what we did was we decided to aggregate all the products which were by product type, aggregate the order into one large order and then ship one order to the supplier. So now that meant the supplier was not getting like 20 or 25 email alerts from me. He was getting one order from me, which showcased all the different orders within that because it was for the same product and we were only being charged one fee to ship the products back and forth. And so that's our example.

08:28

Ramesh: The business model as you were learning more and then you improve the efficiencies of your operations.

08:36

Sukhi: Oh absolutely. And this is what I mean Ramesh that it's very good to have a business plan but just know that, that plan is just a starting point and you really do have to listen to you what your customers are saying and what your suppliers are saying. Because for me, the reason I changed my model is because my suppliers were complaining to me and saying, Sukhi you keep on sending these orders, but I know it's for the same product, so I have to keep on putting on the same machine every day. Why not you just ship me, you know, you say you want a hundred pieces, I’ll just do a hundred-piece phase and that goes to the different customers. And then my customers on the other side was saying that you're taking too long for us to get the product, so I don't want to work with you. So this is a way I devised, which was a way more efficient way for us to be able to match supply and demand and logistically get the business going in a much more efficient manner.

09:27

Ramesh: Excellent. So Sukhi, I'm just continuing that line of thought. When did you actually switch your business to an online marketplace?

09:36

Sukhi: Yeah, great idea, a great question. And so I always say so market orders is actually a third iteration of this type of business. So I actually had a gold and diamond jewelry business and it was the same model. I was sourcing products from suppliers, bringing them into UK, but we were doing this in a very offline manner. So this was literally orders were coming into emails or WhatsApp or a text message. When the goods were arriving in the UK, my cofounder and myself would collect the products from the airport, get into our cars. He would drive up to Scotland, I would drive up to the, a different part of the country and we would try to ship the goods and then if they didn't sell, we'd come back down to the airport and then ship them back. So yeah, so we did this for a number of years. And so market orders, I say it's the Phoenix that arose from the ashes of the previous two companies and market orders was the iteration where we finally switched from going analog and you know, very unsophisticated manner, into going digital and online and with market orders I was really, really specific and particular with the fact that I wanted every part of the customer journey to be fully digitized because I could see how inefficient the entire industry was operating. And there's not many people who are doing what we're doing. There's this mindset in our industry that you have to touch the products, you have to feel the products before you buy them. So for my customer, you know, I give them a lot of credit. The customers that work with us, they took a leap of faith with us. They were very worried about placing large orders, you know, gold and diamond jewelry. And if it's being bought on a wholesale basis, you're talking about 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 pounds worth of products and our customers had a lot of faith in us that we would deliver exactly what we promised. So, you know, we don't have any issues about ordering something from Amazon. But if you're ordering 20,000 pounds worth of gold and it's 22 carat, what's the guarantee that you all going to get what you asked for? And you're not going to get some costume jewelry, you know, some rubbish. So I always say market orders is not selling gold and diamonds, we are trading on trust. Our customers come to us because they trust us and our suppliers come to us because they trust us and that we will get them the customers that they are you know, finding difficulty in reaching.

12:15

Ramesh: Excellent. Excellent Sukhi. So let's switch a little bit from how you built a business to Sukhi, you as a person and who became an accidental entrepreneur. Okay, let's actually talk about your career. What were you doing before you started the business?

12:35

Sukhi: Sure. So straight out of university, I did what every good Asian girl does, which is to get a good job, respected institution, and you're expected to be there and to collect your pension, so I was very lucky that I’ve got a very great a graduate job at one of the biggest American banks. It was fine for the first one or two weeks. I was very excited. I thought it was a new journey and I was working for an investment bank, so it was very exciting. But I literally, I always say within five days of starting my job, I knew that this was not the place for me. And I always believe that as human beings we are like flowers. You need to be in a right environment to really blossom and fulfill your potential because all of us have something really unique to offer. So I was in the banking world, but I knew within five days it wasn't the right environment for me. I didn't enjoy the work I did. It was very repetitive. I also didn't enjoy the environment. It was quite hostile. It was a place where people kind of jumped on top of each other to get these salaries. And it was very much driven about staying within the lines. And I felt you know, you can learn so much working in a corporate world, you know, so I have a lot of gratitude for that. But the downside in working for a very large organization is that there's not much scope to be creative and there's not much scope for you to voice your opinions. And I just felt that there were lots of inefficiencies, but people usually say just do it because it's been done like that for years and you know, you just get the job done. So I knew I wanted to do something different and that's when I started to actually create a number of side businesses over that time period. Unfortunately it took me...

14:35

Ramesh: Out of curiosity if you don't mind me asking, what was your very first business.

14:39

Sukhi: So my first business was actually the gold and diamond jewelry space. Yeah. Cause I was working in banking and my cofounder was also working in banking and he was a foreign exchange and commodities trader, so he came up with this incredible idea. And so that was the first iteration of our business.

14:59

Ramesh: What made you get into blockchain? You wrote one of, I think the [15:04 inaudible] books in blockchain, and then you're applying blockchain to diamond business. And that is definitely the most exciting technology area. So tell us about, how you got associated with blockchain.

15:19

Sukhi: Sure. So again, Ramesh, it was purely accidental, you know I wish I could say I planned it all. It was this perfect, but it was purely accidental. So as I mentioned, I was working in the banking world and I was in banking for over 12 years. You know, I didn't enjoy it, but I just kept doing it because you know, it's paying well. And what happened was whilst I was in the banking world, I kind of started to follow my curiosity. And around 2015 I started to become aware of Bitcoin. There was this white paper that was released by Satoshi Nakamoto. And I just, I just became a bit intrigued. So I took a few books out of the library and I came across this term called fintech and I didn't know what fintech was. Today it's quite a common word. And I just started to look into what fintech was and then I became aware that there were loads of companies up there who mish mashing finance and technology and allowing people who didn't have access to banks primarily in developing countries. And I just became really interested in how this technology was helping this huge layer of people in the world who just couldn't get access to funding. And I do believe that in order to really fulfill your life potential and get yourself out of poverty, I think every human being needs to have access to some sort of financial system whereby they can get credit or loans or some way to actually do a business. I mean, there are so many business owners in developing countries who are struggling because they just don't have a bank account. And I, you know, I'm exceptionally lucky that I am born in a place where I have access to bank accounts. It doesn't even cross my mind that some people don't have bank accounts because it's so normal for me.

17:12

Ramesh: And when thinking of not having a bank account, but there are million people who do not have any access to banks and financial institutions.

17:19

Sukhi: Yeah, totally. And so that's where I started to look into what fintech was and what Bitcoin was and what blockchain was. And it really got me excited because it was the first time that many people could now have access to something that's pretty vital. You know, the flow of payments. And that's when I started to do a lot of research and I started to go to a lot of networking events. I went to lots of meetups you know, meeting these you know, really funky programmers and they were telling me more about what this was. So it was just an interest and a curiosity, which I followed. And what I'd say Ramesh is when I was in the corporate world, there were many things that interested me, but I never sort of followed my passion. But I think it's so important that if there's something that gets your interest, you should follow that curiosity because you just don't know where it will lead. And so coming back to the blockchain element, so because I was now involved in this community, so I was doing all of this stuff after work and during the weekends and I came across this network and I was invited to contribute my thoughts on fintech in developing economies. And that's how I authored my first book called the fintech book. And then when I wrote that book, someone contacted me and said, could we work together to talk about how blockchain can be used by creative entrepreneurs and authors and musicians? And so my second book in blockchain came about that way. And then I was also writing my third book, which is called escape the cubicle. And that's more about how I left the corporate world to become an entrepreneur. And again, someone found me online, they were a Latvian publishing company and the CEO reached out to me and he said that they were devising a new form of publishing whereby they wanted to publish books using blockchain technology and would I be willing to help them and advise them? And so I said yes. And that's how I ended up becoming the first person in the world to have a book published using blockchain technology.

19:31

Ramesh: Very inspirational and follow your passion and you don't know where it will lead to. So it's fantastic.

19:40

Sukhi: Thank you. So yeah, just say yes, you just don't know where it's going to end up.

19:43

Ramesh: So now, switching back to the business, one of the thing that I am a strong believer in is something called agile entrepreneurship, right. Which is, you know, start now, keep learning, keep iterating and learn from your mistakes and keep building. I think from the predisposition that we had that you really followed agile, true to its form and especially in how you got your first customers. So can you talk a little bit about how you, different strategies that you used in getting your customers?

20:15

Sukhi: Yeah, absolutely Ramesh. So I think as a business owner and an entrepreneur you are very constrained in terms of time and your resources. So you really want to make sure that you're utilizing them in the best way. And I think today sometimes it's too easy to go for a very wide approach and you think that you can just approach anyone and everyone will be your customer. But your superpower as an entrepreneur is the ability to go niche. And it feels still a very small business. You can afford to actually reach out to those one by one. So what I did was my business model is I am connecting suppliers who are, because of the nature of my business, my suppliers are based outside of London, in Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and Malaysia. But I made a conscious choice that I was going to get those products from those countries and supply them only to the UK market. So the UK is, you know, it's a big country, not as big as a USA, but it's still a relatively big. So I knew that I needed to prove my business model, so I decided to target a particular area in London where I live. I wanted to test this model and see if I could actually get those customers. So what I did in order to find my customers is first of all, who is your customer? So I knew very clearly, I am targeting a business owner who owns a retail jewelry shop on the high street. So very specifically, I'm not going online, I'm going to bricks and mortar shop. So in London, in the UK, every company has to register with the government and when you register with the government you get a specific registration code and you can look that up on the government's database to verify if the business is a legitimate business. And this is pretty much open source data that anyone can access. So what I did was I went onto the website, it's called www.companieshouse.gov.uk and I basically downloaded their data and when I downloaded, you can download all the in-company information, put it into a spreadsheet, and then every company has a particular code and that particular code tells you what the business does. So I looked up my relevant business code and my business code was retailer of gold and jewelry done in products. So now from this big database, I now was filtering down to that particular target group. And then what I did was, because I had the addresses of those companies, I filtered down to the retail shops in the particular area I wanted to target. And I deliberately targeted a 10-mile radius from where I was based. So from thousands of names, I now came down to a hundred potential customers and from those 100 potential customers, I picked the top 50. And then I went, I got into my car, me and my co-founder visited those 50 customers over the course of the week. We pitched them our business and we asked them to place orders. And that's how I got my first 50 customers. And to this day, they are still my customers.

23:34

Ramesh: Fantastic story. So basically you're telling us you know a story about you don't have to wait months and years to get your first paying customers and if you have, you combine the technology in a very unique way to niche down to the right customers that you wanted, but you combine that with actually physical activity, you know, hitting stuff online contacting what you wanted to establish a relationship. So that's a very unique way. You combine technology and then again you establish relationships. But you know, you were able to do it within a week.

24:06

Sukhi: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Ramesh coming back to the relationships you said, I think sometimes as entrepreneurs, especially in today's online world, we kind of forget that businesses are still very much about relationships, which is human to human. And sometimes there is a temptation to sit behind our laptops and just send emails to customers. But it really does make a huge difference if you actually go and speak to your customers. And I think it's, if you can try and talk to them and see them in person because those first 50 customers, you know, the way we pitched our business to the first customer, by the time we got to the 50th customer, the way we pitched to them was completely different because we were literally taking the feedback. And then if customer number 26 said to me, Oh, but I don't understand how this commission works. By the time we went to customer number 41 we were able to tell him, okay, this is how the commission’s work, and this is, you know, and it was just so much clearer.

25:04

Ramesh: You are learning, you're iterating and that's fantastic. That's again, a very agile way of doing business. So I'm very inspired by your story. So as we begin to wrap up this podcast and video cast first thing is where can people reach you? Just if you want to give out the website names or contact information.

25:28

Sukhi: Sure. Thank you, Ramesh, for the opportunity. So please go to www.marketorders.net where you can find out a lot more about what we're doing. We've got loads of press coverage and some articles that tell you what we do, and you can check out our products. You can also contact me personally. I'm on all social media, so I'm on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so if you message me, I will most likely message back. So do come along, say hello and you know, maybe just share what you met from our session today and if you have any questions, please do, let me know how I can help you.

26:01

Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. So just to summarize the discussion, Sukhi she was in banking and then she always wanted to not always wanted to, she became an accidental entrepreneur because she wasn't happy with what she was doing, and she really wanted to measure her life by what she does personally. And then she started this with a co-founder, this diamond and jewelry business. And once she figured out that whatever business model that she had wasn't working. She switched to an online the market model and she use technology and then she used blockchain, the latest technologies, which was her passion and build this www.marketorders.net into a very agile in our business. So Sukhi, thank you very much for sharing your story and thank you for coming on this podcast.

26:53

Sukhi: Thank you for sharing this space with me Ramesh. It's been really great to chat to you and yeah, best of luck. I think the agile entrepreneur is the way to go. So thank you so much.

27:02

Ramesh: Thank you everybody. So you can catch up on all these podcasts on www.rameshdontha.com/podcast and of course you can go to iTunes, Spotify, whatever your premium player is, and then you can get this podcast as well as of course the video cast as well. Alright.

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Guest: Cory Minton

Episode Transcript

00:07
Ramesh: Okay. Hey, hello everybody. This is Ramesh Dontha, the podcast host for the agile entrepreneur podcast. And this year 2020, this is my first podcast and also, we are also doing the video cast as well. So I'm very, very excited to introduce today our guests, Corey Minton, who is the editor in chief of Big Data Beard. So Corey, welcome. 00:30 Corey: Hey, thank you very much Ramesh. Glad to be on another podcast. It's pretty fun.

00:35

Ramesh: Yeah, this is going to be a video cast as well. So I came across your Big Data Beard and I met you in Las Vegas for the BrightTalk interview. Impressed with what you guys are doing and you talked a lot about Big Data Beard and then switching the direction. So why don't we take it from the beginning? So what is Big Data Beard and then how you got involved with it?

00:57

Corey: Absolutely. So Big Data Beard is a creative media company that's really focused on talking about the trends, technologies and the talented people that are really making big data a big deal. And big data is certainly evolved over the last few years, has becoming an in-vogue term that people didn't really understand completely. And it was exciting to now it's almost, it gets polarizing, right? But it really, what we try to focus on is finding those nuggets of wisdom with smart people and smart companies that are leveraging AI, Big data, machine learning, deep learning, IOT, this modern emerging technology landscape to really do something transformative. So whether that's, you know, talking with the founders and the CTOs at cool, interesting startup companies to talking with industry executives who are actually using these technologies to impact the quality of human life or their business. And so really, it's really a great way for myself and our other contributors and members of the podcast team to really get to talk to the best and the brightest in the industry. And we really, that's how we started. We really just wanted an excuse to talk to the best and the brightest so that we would constantly stay as educated as possible on these emerging trends. So that we can continue to be great technologists in a variety of ways.

02:38

Ramesh: Okay, fantastic. So that is fine, actually you're doing a very interesting thing Corey, one is that you're fully employed, but started Big Data Beard on the side as a side hustle I would say. So talk a little bit about the Corey not the big beard guy. What do you do?

02:57

Corey: Yeah, so not Big Data Beard, my job is, I'm a strategist for Splunk, which is a big data software company, a publicly traded company. Very interesting, cool software used really to help make machine generated data usable, accessible, and valuable to everyone. And so my job as a strategist is very much to help understand where is the industry going, where are organizations leveraging these technologies and helping our company understand how to bring the tools and technologies we have to market effectively and just make sure that we're conveying the message and we're solving meaningful problems in a repeatable and scalable way. So it's a really fun gig. My past was actually pretty new at Splunk. I've only been there about a month. Prior to that I was the principal engineer at Dell technologies responsible for a lot of the emerging technologies work that we did in terms of architecting hyperscale solutions for artificial intelligence, machine learning. In the past it was building large scale storage systems for things like Hadoop and spark. So really have been in the big data ecosystem for a number of years. And my day job actually was part of the reason why I felt like I needed to start Big Data Beard. It was because in my day job I am very much an engineer and a hand on, you know, a technologist. And a lot of times I do things, you know, in my lab, in the cloud, in different places that is really interesting. But it is totally inappropriate for me to publish on my employer's websites. And so, that's originally how the blog started out. That's really where this thing started was, I started the blog about six years ago and that's what I was publishing was, Hey, here's the things that I'm doing that are technically interesting but probably aren't appropriate for like a corporate blog. So I was actually like breaking things and finding like limits and finding things that didn't work and things that did work. And so I started publishing, you know, sort of technology opinion pieces and really hands on kind of experiences. And then it evolved. I started finding other, you know, other engineers who are hands on like me and that frankly just love technology. And then they started saying, Oh, I would love to, like I did this cool thing, but I really don't have any outlet for it. And so we started thinking, Oh, well, Hey, why don't you just publish on Big Data Beard? And the we handful of us got together. We said, I think we have something here, but we kind of need this thing to be funded. Like we can't afford to just, you know, have all this hosting services for podcasting and traveling to conferences and doing all these things. And it's not appropriate for our employer to pick up those tabs on many cases. So we started the Big Data Beard inc as a, as a company incorporated in the state of Alabama because of that day job. But we did it because we wanted to continue, and we wanted to expand our capabilities. And I kind of tell the, I kind of tell the joke from time to time that it's like, you know in the podcast, in the early days, if I'd called somebody and said, Hey, I'm this engineer who works for Dell and I'd like to talk to your founder and your CTO, that most organizations would be like, I don't have time for you. Like, why would I, why would I let them talk to you? But if I call them and I say, Hey, my name is Corey, I run Big Data Beard. It's one of the fastest growing podcasts in big data and AI. I'd love to give you an hour of time to talk to our, you know, crazy numbers of listeners. Then It's nuts. We've been getting, you know, we're over 160,000 downloads now, so it's crazy. So anyways, we started it and it bloomed because we actually incorporated it and we got it funded and now we're actually able to enter in, you know, really cool partnerships with companies like Microsoft, with info works and others in sponsorship relationships and as a media influencer. So really, it's my day job. I continue to have a great day job. I think that Big Data Beard as a company is interesting, but it absolutely keeps me Polish and better at my job, at my day job because I'm able to get experiences that are so far outside the realm of capability without Big Data Beard.

06:53

Ramesh: Actually that was very, very interesting. That's why I was interested in talking to you because what I consider, you're living your dream life, which is many of dream about. Be employed and getting the benefits and all that stuff, but also have the entrepreneurial spirit and do something on the side, right? Not a conflict of interest to anybody.

07:17

Corey: Yeah. That's really the beautiful thing. And I’ve had to be very open and honest with my employer. And I think that's always the case. Like there's, you know, there's lots of legal things that, you know, people get wrapped around, but if you're honest with the people you work with and you're up front, then I think it avoids any of those challenges. And frankly, the companies I’ve worked for while I’ve been part of Big Data Beard, have been super open to it because they understand that they actually benefit from it. And having you know, an employee who's getting perspective that they'd never get as part of their day job. But it's also great because it helps from, you know, from an expense perspective. Like I’m, we're keeping these activities completely separate. And I know that's sometimes a hard thing. People may see the blurred lines, but we're able to keep them, you know, totally separate. We act as an influencer in the market and yeah, I do. I will say it is kind of the dream and you know, I think someday as entrepreneurs have to figure out their revenue cycle and how do you become a sustainable revenue. That's where we are today. I think our long-term vision is that Big Data Beard becomes a full-time employment opportunity. As we grow our media base and we glow our revenue models. I absolutely believe it could be a full time gig, but it's, as you said, it's a great balance to be able to continue down the path of, you know, have an employment benefits and all the good things that come for working for great tech companies and at least in my area of industry, but also being able to kind of triage and test and like try out some of these entrepreneurial things while still having some of that parachutes. So yeah, I totally agree. It is a perfect world scenario.

08:54

Ramesh: Exactly. I myself you know, while I was fully employed, I wanted to get my feet wet with web development. And so buying the domains and all that stuff, that's how I got started. But one of the things that people will keep asking is, and you talked about the legal aspects of it, is there a checklist of items like somebody who is fully employed, still wanting to do something in the side gig, you know, top three or five that come to your mind that people should not do as opposed to what they should do.

09:27

Corey: Yeah, I think the number one thing you should do is you should absolutely be communicating with your leadership team. So in my case it's direct and you know, layers of leadership above them and then it's initiating conversations with corporate legal teams to establish a full understanding of what the relationship is. And in my case that was covered fully in like as I moved from working for Dell to working for Splunk, we had those conversations with the Splunk legal team and made sure that they understood the scope of the company. We shared our legal documentation. So when I say be open and honest, that's what I mean is number one rule, you know, if you have a side hustle and it's going to create revenue and it's a company and its taxable and those things, you need to communicate that to your employer to make sure there's no conflict of interest. Because whether you think there is or not ultimately it doesn't matter. It's really what the legal team, your employer thinks is the most important. The other thing I would think is, you know, best practices, try to separate church and state as much as you can physically. And by that, I mean, you know, really you shouldn't be doing a work for your side hustle using your day jobs company resources. So whether it's, you know, what laptops you use for recording like this recording now, this is being done on my personal laptop cause we're talking about Big Data Beard, my Splunk laptop is right over there. It's okay. I keep those separated for that purpose. And from an information privacy perspective, I think that's incredibly important because the last thing you want is, somebody thinking that your side hustle is leveraging some intellectual property of the cover your day job for that reason. So I think separating those, having very clear distinction lines of resource utilization and information and data I think is really the other top thing I would say. And then three is just common sense. Like if you have a day job and it's in a technology area, let's say it's in security. You probably shouldn't have a side hustle that is a hacker job or like a, or even starting your own security. Like it really shouldn't be in completely similar industries. It should be in pretty well defined separate where you know, if you did have a, you know, a noncompete, you could totally say like, I'm never going to go sell what Big Data Beard is doing to somebody who would buy Splunk for what Splunk does. You see what I'm saying? Like you just got to use some logic that like if you think there's conflict of interest, it probably is like if you think they could convey it that way, you're probably doing the wrong side hustle. But if it's beneficial to our parties and you use logic and common sense and say, you know, there really isn't a reason why and it's beneficial for all parties and you've been open and honest, and you've done a good job of separating the two. I think you're, I think you're generally down the path.

12:13

Ramesh: Fantastic. So now I'm switching gears Corey. When we talked, you said the prior podcast that Big Data Beard was doing were more episodes, like you would talk to some guests. So you share the knowledge that you have you know, with people. But you told me that your planning has shifted to an editorial kind of a podcast. Can you talk a little bit more about it?

12:36

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. So really, if you go back and listen to the last 110 episodes of the podcast, we've done almost every single one of them was what I'd categorize as a conversation very much like we're having today, where, you know, we'd find somebody really smart doing something really cool and ask them to tell us their story. We'd get some background on them. We don't ask, you know, how is this cool thing that you've built being used and you know, to impact human life or business or, you know, wellbeing or something. Or we'd ask them, you know, they would be highlighting some use of technology for that reason and we'd go through it and explore it and it would just really act as an inspiration hopefully to people to, you know, explore technology to tinker, to try things. And it was frankly just a good way to stay abreast of like, what are people doing today in technology and what's interesting. But what we decided was one that is, it's a lot of work to publish a podcast every single week as you Ramesh know. I mean it's, doing a podcast is, it is a big, it's a big lift. But one of the things that we wanted to do was I think we've, we've moved from this place of our value is just finding other people to talk to and really highlight and given them a platform to, I think our value is shifting to, we've had a bunch of really good conversations. We've got some really smart folks on our team. What if we go tackle some topics and we really start to unpack what's going on in a particular area of technology and really start to understand the polar sides of it. And so I’ll give you some examples. Like we're looking at things like ethics in AI as a conversation. And it's really like, we're not just going to go sit down and talk with one, you know, PhD in ethics and have their opinion. What we want to go do is we really want to tackle a topic and say, what does it mean and why is it important to have ethical AI? And start to understand, you know, what are multiple perspectives of opinion and really uncover both the, you know, the good and the bad, the for and the against, right? The, sides that pull. And then based on our conversations and the things we learned, hopefully start to have some opinion about, hey, based on what we've experienced and what we're researching, our opinion is this. Our opinion, our taking this as that, and you know, that's kind of the ideal scenario. We're also looking at more less about just about technologies that are being created and more about how technology is being used. And so we want to shift into, you know, these great kinds of deeper dive converse topics, you know, episodes where we look at a topic and from a variety of lenses. But we also want to look at some episodes where we look at how is technology being used in real life. And I'm excited about this first one we're working on for the season. It's actually about how AI and machine learning technologies have collided with IOT to help race car drivers go faster around race tracks. And so there's this really interesting startup that we found that's got this driver feedback device that's actually using some pretty advanced accelerometer technology from an IOT perspective, integrated with a real time feedback system and does a ton of data collection that in real time is helping drivers understand how much grip they have remaining on the tires in a corner and giving them real time feedback to say, Hey, you could go a little faster or you could break a little later into the corner. So we're going to be exploring, you know, what does that technology, was it taken to build something like that. But then how is it impacting the racing culture or the high-performance driving you know guys on the weekends and gals on the weekends, like myself who go out and try to drive our cars around a track fast and really explore what that means and try to get some perspectives not only from, you know, the people that founded the company, but actually go talk to some professional, you know, racing drivers and weekend warriors who are using it to get their perspective on it. Just again to explore more than just one person's opinion per episode. Really to have a malty lens kind of conversation.

16:35

Ramesh: On a specific topic. So that is fantastic, that's very good. So now, I alluded to Corey, the personal side a little bit. You said you race on the weekend. So now let me switch. So we know a little bit more about the Corey beyond the Big Data Beard, but the guy with the beard. So what does Corey Minton do in weekends and just to give us a little flavor of your personality.

16:59

Corey: Absolutely. So obviously Big Data Beard is a big part of what I do on the side, but my weekend life is, I’ve got two beautiful children, seven and five, a wife and they're crazy travel adventurer. So in my role I get to travel around the world and I'm crazy enough that, well, one, I love my family and I don't really like being away from them for extended periods of time. But as you probably know, traveling around the world, going for four days, like during the work week, kind of stinks because you end up spending half the time jet lagged and awful and feeling terrible. So over the last three years, my wife and I started www.gowithdaddy.com which was her little travel blog where whenever I go on international trips, I try to make them, you know, multi-week long trips and try to make, you know, obviously if the company's going to spend money to fly me to Australia, maybe I should use that time to go, not just for a week, but maybe two. And I could visit multiple cities, maybe tack in a trip to Tokyo cause it's on that side of the world. And so what I’ve started doing is putting together these longer multi-leg trips for a month to six weeks at a time and actually take my family along with me. So I use my miles and points to pay for their flights and then they, you know, I pay for hotels on the weekends, but they get to enjoy while I'm working in a steady, they get to go explore it as a mom and two young kids. So we've, my kids are, like I said, seven and five. They've been to 19 countries. They've spent more than 30, I think it's like 36 weeks of their lives outside the US and you know, we live in Alabama and people think of Alabama as being you know, small back water, kind of, you know, Southern place. But what we are really trying to do is we live in a beautiful area. We have our own personal beliefs and things that we hold very true. But we want our children to have perspective on the world and that the ways that we do things and that they see things done in their home, in their city, it's not the only right way, like the right way for other people to live is highly dependent on their belief system, on the geography, on the food supply, on the water supply, on economics and socioeconomic things that absolutely make people different. And I think exposing them as young children to those differences, I hope will make them more empathetic. More just better general citizens and nicer people to deal with as they turn into adults. And I think that's our thing as parents is, we're trying to turn our kids into great adults someday. And that's what we're really trying to do. So we love to travel. I do race as often as I can, when I say race It's really, let's be honest, it's high-performance driving. I have a, I have a car that’s, it went from being a daily driver to, it is full on, like set up for the race track. It's got a roll cage. There's no, there's no, like, it's racing seats. There's no backseat. There's, you know, all the metal is exposed in this thing. It's loud and it's awful. It's still slightly street legal, but that's only because I live in Alabama. If I lived in California, I'd be out of here. So there is a beautiful race track that is about 20 minutes from my house called barber Motorsports park. And Mr. Barber is the, like the largest dairy farmer in the Southeast of dairy millionaire. Huge racing aficionado actually has a vintage motorcycle museum that's the largest collection of vintage motorcycles on the planet right here in Birmingham, Alabama. But it is a beautiful two plus mile course with lots of undulation, great turns. It's actually where the Porsche driving school has one of their locations. So I get to go out there about once every other month and just absolutely rip it on the racetrack.

20:33

Ramesh: So you have a very fascinating life Corey. Started off with the second sentence, so you have a dream life, now you have a much dreamier life. You're able to mix your work with your passion of entrepreneurship. And so traveling the world and of course the racing as well. So you have a full whole circle of stuff.

20:54

Corey: I'm a very lucky and blessed guy. There's just no question about it.

20:57

Ramesh: So towards the end of the podcast here, so what are the next steps? I know that you started with Splunk recently and then pitching the gears in the Big Data Beard. But what other bucket list items that you have?

21:10

Corey: Yeah. So next for us is really looking at how do we expand the Big Data Beards ability to help and influence for good. So we're actually taking a couple of segments this season and we're going to focus on some nonprofit organizations to give them some exposure. Because we are, we're huge fans. We obviously know we're blessed in many ways. We're lucky to have you know, I live in American and it's a great country. I know you live here. But you know, there's lots of good things going on in our lives. I'm a pretty happy guy. But it's really about how do we help to do more for those around us. So I really want to start figuring out ways to leverage our influence for nonprofit organizations, those organizations trying to do good in the world and really expose them to more audiences so that, you know, frankly, if you're, you know, benevolent and you'd like to give and you have a philanthropy kind of a background, then you know, hopefully we'll identify some organizations that could use your help. So that's really kind of the big next step. The kind of the longer term is, you know, for the company, for Big Data Beard, we're really trying to look at our sponsorship model to see if, you know, how we could really create more of a sustainable model to actually bring on a full-time employee. And probably I wouldn't be one of the contributors today. We're really thinking if we could start to build enough to get a program management kind of brand and social creative person, a full time to take the content that we're creating and actually help promote it more, to increase awareness of our brand, increase consumption of our content, then it really starts to spiral into that ability to, you know, increase our sponsorship fees, to get more opportunities for advertising. And so that's really the long-term is how do we, you know, like most entrepreneurs trying to figure out the next revenue cycle, how do you improve your revenue stream. That's a big one for us. And trying to expand into potentially a headcount someday. And personally I think it's all about the next adventure. So we're you know, in the short term we're going to the beautiful city of New Orleans, which is really not that crazy for the weekend. But one thing that we're trying to do is we're riding the train. So I know in the, like everywhere else in the world trains are totally like common. They're not really commonly used in the US. So we're actually taking our kids on the Amtrak from Birmingham to New Orleans on Friday. But then we're also planning a, we've got a trip to, our first trip to Africa this fall. So my mother-in-law has actually been kind enough to invite us on a Safari with the whole family. So there's going to be a nine of us going over to Tanzania in November to experience the great migration. And that is, it's like a bucket list goal for me. It's going to be incredible. But I think my son is obsessed with animals and I say obsessed, like it's crazy. I fear his head may explode. So a part of my job is going to be cleaning up the mess of my son's head exploding on Safari.

24:04

Ramesh: Fantastic. You are a Mr. experience. So the family up for experience is fantastic man. So I'm so happy that I'm starting my 2020 podcast, video cast episodes with you, Corey. You know it's a fantastic experience. So what are the websites that you would look like to talk about that people can come and visit?

24:26

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. I encourage your listeners if they like podcasts, which they clearly do, check out www.bigdatabeard.com is our website. You can also visit pretty much any of your favorite podcast platforms. The most popular for us is iTunes. But if you're into Spotify or player FM, Stitcher, tune in, we're in there. Just type in big data. We generally come up pretty quickly, Big Data Beard. And honestly the Big Data Beard is because I'm into big data, I have a beard and I'm not that creative and the domain happened to be available. So that's how we landed on it. But we do have a pretty sweet, we have a pretty sweet logo. The beard is the likeness. And if you find me at a conference, I’ve got stickers. You can also check out if you go to www.bigdatabeard.com, we have got some really cool T shirts, hats, and stuff that people have really dug. Cool hoodies, all kinds of cool stuff. So check it out and represent with pride.

25:21

Ramesh: Myself. Yeah, that's great. So fantastic Corey, thank you very much.

25:25

Corey: Ramesh thank you so much. Have a great year.

25:27

Ramesh: Yeah you too.

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Guest: Dr. Darian Parker

Company / Business name: Kadavy, Inc.

Dr. Darian Parker, Co-Owner of Epic Leisure Management. Darian has almost 20 years experience in the exercise industry as a corporate executive, personal trainer and education provider.

Episode Transcript

00:08
Ramesh: Hello everybody. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host, Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is for people who want to start and build their own businesses with purpose, passion, perseverance, and possibilities. Today I have a guest in an industry where somehow, we end up in whether we like it or not. So I would like to introduce you to Dr Darian Parker. Dr Darian Parker is a co-owner of Epic leisure management. He has almost 20 years’ experience in the exercise industry as a corporate executive, personal trainer and an education provider. So Darian, welcome.

00:55

Darian: Thank you so much Ramesh. I appreciate you having me on. I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

00:59

Ramesh: Excellent. Excellent. So Dr Darien Parker. So what's your doctorate in Darian?

01:05

Darian: It is in sports education leadership. I got it from the university of Nevada, Las Vegas. And the emphasis of it is in behavior modification and sports and exercise settings.

01:18

Ramesh: Excellent. So it's interesting when I looked at your company's name, Epic leisure management, so that did not ring a balance. That's okay. So they are in the leisure management. Then I went and started reading more into it. You're in the exercise industry, you provide consultation to entities about health and wellness. So what's the leisure about it?

01:42

Darian: Well, most of the people we work with, they're in the leisure industry. Leisure, meaning that they're basically in the amenity business. So they have health and wellness amenities either in hotels like hotel gyms, spas, private residential communities where there's a private gym or a combination spa fitness facility or in kind of your corporate campus setting. And we're even working in kind of your high-end boutique fitness facilities as well.

02:15

Ramesh: So essentially, you're working with entities who don't have expertise in building these kinds of facilities, but you have the expertise, so you provide your expertise in terms of conservation. Is that how it works?

02:28

Darian: Yes. Yes, definitely. What's interesting is we're always kind of, you have to explain a lot about what you do when we're doing it because people go, well, you have a gym or you have a spa, you know, we just hire some people to run it. But generally what happens is these spas, these fitness facilities, boutique facilities, but primarily let's say your hotels, private residential facilities are owned by developers and the developer, their business is not health and wellness amenities. They just know that they need that in that facility. So often what happens is they just hire somebody that they think would fit that and they say, Hey, run this spa, run this fitness facility. And then generally what happens is they recognize that they weren't really understanding how to actually hire somebody to increase the revenue, provide really great customer service, because their area of expertise is hotel management or, and land sales or development. So we come in equations say, Hey, this is what we do. We actually specifically recruit, hire, consult space programs, audit pro formers, five-year business plans for that particular space, your health and wellness space.

03:41

Ramesh: Excellent. So, Darien, if I could ask you questions about your entrepreneurial journey, when did you guys start this company?

03:49

Darian: We actually very new, we launched last November, so we're coming up on a year. We launched it and really the, I would say my business partner and I, we are probably the last people you would think would be entrepreneurs, but we enjoyed working for, we worked for the same company for a long time. Me for 12 years, him for 20. And I think we were company guys. You know, we really enjoyed working and learning under the total of job. You know people who have owned a larger company. I think, you know, for me, I was looking to, I'm always looking to expand and grow, and I said, you know, maybe it's time to do something different and I'm 41 and I said, I think this is the time to make it happen.

04:37

Ramesh: I see. And then how was the transition? So you thought about doing it and then did it jump with both feet in it or did you take some time to figure out what you're going to do? Can you talk about the transition?

04:52

Darian: Yeah, I think it definitely took me some time. When I knew I wanted to do it I gave myself a good six months or so where I was kind of like, okay, how do I want to do this and how can I continue to have income as I'm going to become my own boss? And so that's really what led me to kind of a different business in conjunction with that, which is a live online, personal training business. And so I figured, you know, this is something that I could do while I'm building the other business that will sustain me financially while we're getting, I'm getting the other business up and running. So it was definitely a plan of like, okay, I'm going to be doing this other business primarily first while getting Epic leisure management up and running. So I definitely had a plan. But I thought it wasn't seamless, I would say, but it was as seamless as I think it could be for me. So the transition was, wasn't rough in that sense. And I went from going from working, you know, running a high-end gym for over a decade to working from. So I became a remote worker immediately, like immediately. And that was very different.

06:04

Ramesh: Yeah. So I mean, could you have started this as a side hustle while you were working full time?

06:13

Darian: You know, the Epic leisure, no, because it's the very similar to what I was doing in my previous, yeah, it was like, it's the exact same thing. Except we want it to be a much smaller version of that. We were in a company that was, gosh, in 33 countries, huge. Yeah and we were just wanting to be on the West coast, take a small piece of the pie. We're not trying to conquer anything. We're not super like, Oh, let's just get so many properties and manage all these things. We just want to have a nice simple life and have a little bit of the pie.

06:43

Ramesh: Okay, great. So then let's talk a little bit about the first paying customers. That's one of my fascinations which is that there are two elements. One is, you launch your business, you start your business. That's one aspect of it. And then the second one is actually start getting the customers in who in turn might refer you to other customers kind of stuff. So how did you nice get your first paying customers?

07:06

Darian: Yeah, it was much sooner than we thought actually. Getting out I had no illusions that it would be, oh my gosh, we're going to come into all of these clients because we have all these connections. I mean we are very realistic. Like we're going to take our time. We actually ended up, one of my connections who I’ve known for probably over 10 years was letting me know that he had a friend of his that was opening a gym in Houston, Texas. And he really needed help with the financial planning of it and the pre-opening. And so we just had a conversation. We got in real tight with the guy and it was very seamless, honestly, after that and did a site visit down there and we helped them to open their gym and do the five-year programming or the proformer for that. So that was our first paying customer was really, it was really fun because it was kind of like, man, I'm out of my own doing this, you know, this is like my company. I'm not traveling for somebody else. So that was pretty neat.

08:06

Ramesh: Excellent. So after you got the first paying customers, did you get reference to them or how did you expand beyond your first paying customer?

08:18

Darian: Well, we have a pretty unique approach I think in that. We were not trying to expand, which sounds weird. That was very unintended for us. It was definitely a huge referral. It was good business for us, but we actually tried to slow down after that on purposely and say, no, no, no we want to really continue to build the back of the house. Really makes sure that we bake the cake completely instead of kind of just doing stuff and figuring it out later. I feel like that's done a lot and we decided to not go for the money grab, just go for, let's get our systems in place. And once we did that, then we kind of sourced a little bit more of our referrals. And then we had another project where we worked on a dance gym, which is complete opposite of what we are doing with the other project. So we really, and the other thing is we kind of do one project at a time. We want to make sure that we're giving enough attention and quality to a project. So currently we try to keep things kind of one at a time, maybe two max.

09:23

Ramesh: Okay, I see. So your pipeline is essentially it's not full of prospective customers and you're whittling them down to one or two. Essentially you have a design cycle at most probably to start engaging with two or three and then you're managing only at most two looks like.

09:41

Darian: Yeah. And I think that's very opposite of the approach in our business, which is get as many projects as possible. And we had experienced that. And I'm not saying that that's, well I'm not saying it's as bad, I'm just saying this like it's not for us. You know, we would much rather take our time. Do a really great job, focus on building the personal relationship with our, with the project, you know, the developer and then move on and do what we can actually handle. It's just two of us. So we're not going to take on so much that we can't handle it ourselves.

10:16

Ramesh: Actually you're bringing up a very, very good point, which is growth for growth's sake can actually burn companies, right? There's so many stories where people went after growth could not sustain the growth for whatever reason. And then they just took on a lot of debt and took a lot of things and then just got busted.

10:38

Darian: Yeah. And I think for us we just, we had seen kind of that churn and burn mentality just like take whatever comes your way, take any projects, get them, get the fees for it. And again it's, I guess, you know, that works for some companies as big companies. They want to continue to grow and you know, we're not looking for a lot of overhead. We are just two regular guys with a lot of expertise in this area. And the goal is just to, okay, who are we working with that makes sense, that aligns with our values and how can we give them a really close working relationship, provide what they need, and then we move on to another opportunity after that.

10:39

Ramesh: So Darian now, my next question is that do you consider yourself to be in the service business where you get paid for the number of hours or is it like a package deal where you just take the engagement and then you just get paid. The number of hours is left up to you.

11:08

Darian: I would say it's both. You know, a lot of what we do is about the number of hours. It depends on how much time it's going to take us to say for instance, if somebody says, Hey, I would like to, I would like to have a programming audit. You know, I would like to do a five-year proforma and maybe a competitive analysis. And so then we tell the client, Hey, this is how many hours we think it's going to take to do this based off of the size of the property, the amount of information they already have available to us, how much we have to research on our own for that. And so we can either say, Hey, this is, this is a flat fee. What we'll do for all of this work, here's a flat fee or here's the minimum that will do the work for and then anything over that, we'll add onto it for that. So it can be both ways. Yeah.

11:45

Ramesh: And the reason I'm asking that question is many service companies they want to go away from the service model, and they want to productize the service in some form or fashion. So is that, is there a part off productizing your service or you already think you have enough of a business model where you have a combination of a service and the package deal?

12:07

Darian: I think, you know, I think it's case by case for us, I think we have to be whatever works for this situation. So we can say, Hey, this is our business model. This is how we price things. But we actually can't do that because we are working with such a variety of different developments that it just won't make sense. Like, if we're working for a client who has a 5,000 square foot yoga studio versus a client who has a 50,000 square foot clubhouse that's going to have a dog spa, concierge, grocery lockers, all just, it's just going to be a very different, and how we're, what we're doing.

12:46

Ramesh: I see. So Darian going back to how you acquired customers, and I think I'm a really, it's good to know that you relied on your network. Which is what I keep hearing again and again either first customers are for you know, prospective customers, people keep relying on your network do, do that. So, is that network is still the main source for your customers? Or how are you reaching out beyond your network to get newer set of customers?

13:00

Darian: I would say initially right now it's all referral based or people that we have had relationships within the past that are not, I would say they're, they're not part of people like who are, like if they were a part of the previous company we were with, we are not reaching out to them. We want to be respectful and we don't want to, we don't want conflict. We're not, we're not about conflict. You know, we want to be respectful of the previous relationship we had with the company we're with. So it's more of just like people we've networked with that, you know, it didn't have anything to do with the other company, just that they have their own projects going on, things of that nature. This year though, in 2020 next year I guess, that's where we're going to start our push, where we're going to start getting out to conferences, load more of like an introductory to who our company is to the world. At this point it's been very underground for us.

13:37

Ramesh: Okay. I know it's relatively new, it's a one year under your belt, but what's your sales cycle like? How long from a prospective customer to an actual customer, how long does it take for you guys?

13:50

Darian: Oh man, I got to tell you it could be, this is not even a joke. We could get a call about a project that is going to open in one week. And that's the cycle. Like we got to get it done in one week or it could be literally now I haven't experienced this with our current company because we've only been around a year, but in the previous company, which is very similar business, we could have relationships for seven, eight years before it actually becomes an actual sale. It's just really going back to the city, Hey, I know you've got a project. Sometimes a developer has a project 10 years down the road and they really mean 10 years. So you're just, you're just developing the relationship over the course of that 10 years. And hopefully when they, when they get the green light to start moving, they'll continue to think of you to do that project for them.

14:43

Ramesh: So the other thing I think I observed from my prior engagements with other entrepreneurs is a business like this where you are part of a larger project like real estate development and things like that. So these they have established relationships and like for example, I’ll give an example, it’s an elevator, so the company is selling elevators to real estate project. They already have established for a new company to come into that and then try to get the business away from established. It's difficult. Is that how it is in your industry?

15:17

Darian: Yes, yes and no. I would say we're competing against on some level. The former company we're with, cause there, they've been around for 45 years. It's very well known. But on the other level I was even more, we're competing with companies not even know that what we do exist out there. They just think, you know, we have this amenity and you hire somebody to work in that area, so like say a hotel. They go, okay, yeah, we have food and beverage, we'll hire a food and beverage director. We don't really know anything about it, but we'll hire them to do that and we'll hire a spa director because that's what we need for the spa. Whereas your, you know, for us, you're outsourcing the running of that facility to a company like ours, even though they're our employees, they're still working underneath the cover of the, let's say the hotel. If they're a Hilton employee, if they work at the Hilton, the people there think that that person works for the Hilton when they actually worked for us, it's basically like you don't see that, you don't see Epic on their shirt or anything. You see the Hilton for that. So many ways the companies that might say, Hey, why would we source this out? We can do this ourselves and it may be cheaper whole thing. But we always counter it, well you can do that, but usually what happens is you have a tremendous amount of turnover in that department, because they don't know how to hire the right person, that person doesn't know how to create sales revenue for that space. And we teach that to the directors that we hire for that.

16:49

Ramesh: Excellent. Actually, that's good to know. So Darian now I would like to switch gears a little bit. I want to go into Darian Parker, Dr Darian Parker as a person. And so you've done your PhD in sports and related stuff. So what was your motivation? Like why you got motivated to get into sports and then if you could talk a little bit about that.

17:13

Darian: Yeah, definitely. So I grew up in a very athletic family and sports was always a huge part of what we did as a family. My father was a collegiate athlete and football. My brother was a collegiate football player and I was a collegiate track and field athlete. And so I was wanting to do something in exercise and sports. I thought sports primarily. But I was a track and field coach for a little bit and I just realized I did not want to work 80 hours a week and travel every weekend. And then I was initially thinking, well, I'm going to get my PhD so I can be a professor and teach. And then I found out teaching's really not a huge part of it. It's a lot of is research and a lot of kind of bureaucracy and grant writing. And I was like, Oh, I don't want to be involved in that. So much you know, I'm like, I just want to teach. I love teaching, I love people. I love conversation. So it just basically personal training was always part of my life, always from the beginning. It was kind of a side thing for me. And as I kept moving through my education, I continue to train people and I started working vocational schools that certified personal trainers. So I was teaching trainers and I just wanted to be anywhere I could be that was related to exercise or sports. Because it just had been such a big part of my life and it wasn't something that I was like, Oh, I'm going to go into this and I'm going to like to make all this money. I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to have something I enjoy doing in my life. So that was the motivation.

18:55

Ramesh: Yeah. So I mean, you're growing up as you are doing, working for the corporate, even going to education on that stuff. So who are the people that might have inspired you or motivated you to keep excelling in what you are doing?

19:08

Darian: First and foremost, my parents are amazing. They are incredible people. They are ambitious people and my father is in the military for 28 years. He was a Colonel and incredible veteran served in desert storm over in the middle East and a just huge inspiration. Survived the nine 11 attack. He was in the Pentagon when the plane hit, Pentagon. Just amazing stories like escape death so many times. And just an amazing person that I look up to. My mother is very strong, very independent. And so they always pushed me to explore who I was as a person and take that and that I was always good enough that I would find something that I enjoyed, and they never pushed me to like be in a certain career. You know, some parents do that. They say, you have to do this, you need to get in this position. They never did that. They said whatever you would like to do that you feel good about doing, we want to support that. And so that gave me a lot of freedom initially.

20:13

Ramesh: I mean, I have a huge respect for people who serve in the military. Definitely a lot of thanks to your dad for his service. I mean, escaping death is many times you don't think about it is it's so close for people in the military.

20:27

Darian: I tell you, like, my dad doesn't talk a lot about his military service. I think there's just a lot of things he saw that were pretty rough. But I can remember during 9/11, I was at James Madison university where I was doing my master's degree there and I remember I was teaching and they came in and said, Oh, you know, a plane, you know, hit into the towers. They brought the TV in and then they said the Pentagon. And I knew exactly where that, where I saw where the plane is, my dad is in that area. He's literally in the area. And my dad always tells the story of how basically, you know, when you are evacuating a situation in military, you evacuate by rank. My dad was Lieutenant Colonel. My dad's a Lieutenant Colonel. So when he, when they were leaving out of the office area, he saw the, he saw the roof caving in with the plane and he could not leave. He couldn't just, it's not a free for all like that. He gets out. So he's second in command. He barely gets out. The general who he serve for died. So he didn't make it. So my dad, my dad would have been the leader, the general, he would have passed away. He would have died for that.

21:42

Ramesh: That's amazing stuff. It's like, it's so real and so close.

21:51

Darian: Oh man. I just, I was, I was hysterical, you know, and you know, we got word later on that day that he was alive because all the phones were down. This wasn't the cell phone era, you know, you couldn’t just call people, landlines and stuff, you know. So I didn't, I had no clue for probably a good 12, 13 hours if he was alive or not. I had no clue.

22:11

Ramesh: What a story. Thank you.

22:14

Darian: Yes, of course.

22:15

Ramesh: Yeah. So now switching gears a little bit again to the business side of it. Having looked at your journey you worked for corporate world for quite some time and then you decided to start it. Could you have done differently? Is looking back, anything that you think you could have, this is more not as a regret, but more as a learning experience for others.

22:40

Darian: Good question. I'm not sure, honestly, I'm really like thinking about it. I think when, you know, at least the past 12 years, I maximize it, I think to my full capability, I really do. I don't think I left anything on the table. I moved up through the ranks. I tried to do as much as I could with the former company, I thought, I just felt like I was at the end of what I could accomplish. And I think sometimes they were very gracious about it with me. It was very nice. But I think sometimes we think, wow, I could have done more. My life has never been about that. I usually max out everything I do and I'm like, well did all that. So kind of going to move on from that now, you know.

23:24

Ramesh: Okay. So I know your journey is just starting as a little under a year, but based on all the experience that you had working for somebody, working for a previous company because you are participated in its growth, what kinds of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

23:42

Darian: You know, one of the biggest things I would say is, actually I was just, I was just doing my podcast yesterday and I was talking to somebody and we were having kind of this conversation is, I think you got to be careful about stepping into something just because you're passionate about it. I think passion is like, like I like music, but I'm not trying to be in the music industry. You know, like, you know, I think it's sometimes, because sometimes the thing you are being entrepreneurial about is something, you're just very passionate about. It's a hobby. And that sometimes when you get into, when you start monetizing that, it changes the relationship that you have with that passion that you have with it. It becomes different in that sense. And so I think a lot of people, they think, Oh, I'm doing this now. Like I should just love doing this to do it. But now it's like running my life. I got to always look for sales, cold calls, all this stuff. I'm constantly doing it. So be careful about if you want to actually take your passion and monetize it because it might change the relationship you have with that passion.

24:49

Ramesh: Excellent advice. Because I was talking to yesterday Darian, the gentleman talked about a book called E myth, it did came out in 1950s or 1950s. It's a story of a Baker who wants to start a business. I mean, he was very passionate about baking, but once he got into the business of baking, he realized that he needed to be a salesman. He needed to be an accountant. He needed to be a lot more than just the baking aspect of it. So same thing with any business, which is the passion is fantastic, but passion would alone would not bring, you know, the food on the table.

25:29

Darian: Yes. I think a lot of people, they're doing something and let's say they're not making money at it. It's just doing it for fun. You know, like an artist, you know, they do paintings and they're like, man, I just love painting during my free time. It's really nice. But as soon as you have to actually monetize it and you have to get people to buy your paintings and stuff, well you still have the same love for it because now becomes a business, it's becomes marketing and sales and the whole cycle behind that. So I think it's good to think about that ahead of time. For me it was easy because I was already doing what I'm doing now. It was something I had been doing for a long time. It was just, I wanted to have my own version of it. I didn't, I wasn't just like starting, I was already making money doing the thing I'm doing now. It's just I was working for somebody else.

26:18

Ramesh: Yeah. Excellent Darian. And actually a couple of things you really brought out as to I want to summarize towards the end of this podcast. One is, you started a business of something that you already know. As opposed to going into totally different like digital marketing from tomorrow. That's not what you do. So I mean that is, I think aspiring entrepreneurs should take something out of it. Because if you can do a business out of things that you already know, your skills or your other assets that you have, like a network and all that stuff, it's much easier to transition. That's one thing [16:51 inaudible] right? And the second thing that I’ve learned is that first prospective customers are always, you know, explore your network, because you may not know it, but they are most likely will refer you to your first paying customers.

27:04

Darian: Yeah, definitely.

27:06

Ramesh: And the third thing is, passion is fantastic, but you know, don't jump in with the blind passion to build a business, because it takes more than a passion to build a business.

27:15

Darian: Yes. For sure.

27:17

Ramesh: Excellent. Thank you very much you know, Darian and this is fantastic advice. Dr Darian Parker Epic leisure management. Good luck to you as you're building out and in a very thoughtful, methodical way. I think that is the way to do it. Thank you for your time Darian.

27:35

Darian: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Guest: David Kadavy

Company / Business name: Kadavy, Inc.

David Kadavy is a creative entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, and creative productivity expert. David believes that one of the biggest challenges we face in the age of AI is the ability for humans to tap into their innate creativity.

Books/ Tools/ resources

Book: The Heart To Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating Book: Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty

Episode Transcript

Complete Transcript
00:08
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This podcast is for people who are interested in starting a business with purpose, passion, perseverance, and possibilities. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Today I'm very excited to introduce a guest who I came across while I was writing and reading in medium. And then later on was referenced by many people about his work. His name is David Kadavy. So David is a creative entrepreneur, is a podcast host himself and a very accomplished writer and a bestselling author. And then we'll go more about his work you know, very soon. So David, welcome.

00:59

David: Thank you so much for having me Ramesh it's great to be here.

01:02

Ramesh: So David, I know I introduced you and I probably short changed many things, but why don't you tell us what you do.

01:11

David: Yeah, well, I guess primarily I'm a writer and podcaster. I made the decision about four years ago to really double down on that. I was already had written a book and I just wanted to take the time to follow my curiosity and read what interested me, talk to the people who interested me and to share what I learned along the way. And so that's what I do in the form of books and a podcast and some courses and occasionally speaking as well.

01:47

Ramesh: So one thing David that I was struck by introduction on your blog, right, so you start off with I'm a creative entrepreneur, so that's what I really wanted to dig into a little bit. What creative entrepreneurship things have you been doing?

02:04

David: Yeah, so it's an interesting term, creative entrepreneur because, I guess when I first started on my own, my main mission was just to follow what I was curious about. And that was 12 years ago or so. And along the way I didn't really think of it like as a business so much, as much as I thought of it as an artistic journey of let's find what's interesting to me, let's create things and let's figure out some way along the way to make some money. And you know, I eventually learned that people who are the traditional entrepreneurs think a little bit more structured about running a business is that there's a product, here's some customers, here's the market that's addressable and here's your marketing. And there's a system to all of that. And in a way you're not that concerned with your own creative expression or your own personality. It is what does the market want and how can I get that and how can I make money doing it? And so it's a complex balance to be struck there because I’ve also learned that, while you can follow what you're curious about and create whatever comes to you, whatever intuitively you want to create, you, you still do need to think about products and customers and resources that you have and processes for creating the product. And you know, what are the costs of that and how can you make that sustainable. You know, I liked the Walt Disney quote. We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies and I’ve come to think of my work that way. I don't write to make money. I make money so I can write. And so that's what being a creative entrepreneur means to me.

04:09

Ramesh: Yeah. Because the reason it struck me is that when I came across your writing on medium, I never thought you were an entrepreneur, right. I thought you were a writer, an author. Right. And then as we are getting prepared for the podcast, I was reading more of your stuff and then I came across this creative entrepreneur. I said, okay. And then because one of the challenges that people have is that they want to start something with a passion. So nothing wrong with it. But the challenge with starting something with passion and really doing something with passion is that they lose the perspective of profitability, making money and in the process, the passion you know, it goes away. So I think you are able to combine your passion to what you're doing, but at the same time keeping the money aspect in mind.

04:57

David: This is a difficult balance to strike is that well, if I was going to just be a writer and I would need to, I would need to have somebody else taking care of all the business stuff, you know, making it so that I could make the money to write. And so that would involve, I'm working with publishers, which I have done, but I tend to not to do now. I prefer to self-publish. And so you have to become a business person in order to make that work unless you're going to have an agent who takes care of all that stuff. Fortunately I'm curious enough and have a wide variety of enough of interests that I'm interested in doing that. And I enjoy all aspects of not only creating the work, but also trying to create a business around it. And it's a tough balance to strike because sometimes I find myself getting too caught up in the business parts of it is what do I feel like I should be doing. And then my work suffers from it. So you have to constantly be juggling that mind of thinking about the market and the marketability of your work with connecting with what it is that you're really interested in and what is really important to you and what you actually believe, not just what it appears that the market wants at this moment in time.

06:27

Ramesh: Excellent. I can relate to so many aspects that you're referencing here. Anyway, so let's now start tracing your journey here. So, David, I know you are a product designer in your past life. So if you could tell us, when did you make the switch from working for somebody to deciding to work for yourself?

06:49

David: Well, it was a July 17th, 2007. I was a product designer in Silicon Valley and my boss came to my desk and asked me if I could join her in the conference room and we walked down the hall and I was wondering what's in that yellow Manila envelope. And she sat me down and said, I need to terminate your employment today. And I didn't really, I didn't, I didn't fight it. I didn't really ask a lot of questions. I just got up and smiled at her and said, oh well thank you. This is going to be a special day in my life, July 17, 2007. This is the day I start working for myself. And it was funny cause I instantly knew that, and the problem was that I had not, my heart had not been in my work for a while. And I probably should have quit but then I got fired and that very instant, I knew that I was going to be working for myself.

08:09

Ramesh: Okay. So this is excellent. So then afterwards, excellent in the sense of the news was not excellent. What does excellent that you got to start.

08:15

David: It was excellent news actually turned out to be.

08:19

Ramesh: So then from that day onwards, did you have in your mind what you wanted to do, or did you take some time to figure out what you wanted to do? If you could talk about the initial few months or years, whatever that was.

08:34

David: Yeah. I had no idea. All I knew was that there had been some point in time where I loved something about what I had turned into my job. And that at some point in the previous three years or perhaps, during that previous three years, slowly I had lost touch with that, and I didn't love it any more. And so the first thing I wanted to do was just reconnect with that feeling. And I just felt completely debilitated and burned out to the point that I just, I couldn't fathom doing anything for anybody else, whether that was even freelance work. And I was in Silicon Valley with coding skills and design skills in 2008. So I had an enormous amount of opportunity right in front of me. And I just didn't, wasn't interested in any of it. Now I had built up a bit of a retirement portfolio of stocks and such. And fortunately the timing was right. I had gotten some Google and Apple and had made a good profit on those stocks. And so I thought to myself, well, my roommate's going to business school for his MBA. Maybe I should think about something like that. Yeah. The more that I looked at that path, the more I thought, well, that's not going to get me where I want to go. I don't want to you know, do marketing at Proctor and gamble or something that doesn't interest me. And so I thought to myself, well, what if I just, you know, business school costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think, I'm not sure. What if I just gave myself the space and the time to explore and to try to learn. And you know, I wouldn't have an MBA when I was done, but an MBA isn't going to get me what I want, right. But I would have something, I would have some semblance of a business and I would certainly have skills and knowledge and experience that it didn't have before. So I cashed out about $40,000, and I said to myself, all right, well this is my DIY MBA. I mean, it wasn't, I wasn't necessarily studying exactly what they study in a business school, but I said to myself, well, I just need some time to not think about think about money. And it was tough. That was a huge chunk of my retirement portfolio, which if I had held onto it, would probably be you know, it would have grown to this to this day, but I just saw it as well, I can't, I just wasn't happy. I just, what good is the money if I'm not happy. And so I thought maybe I could invest in that. And so that's what I did. So for a year I went to a cafe every day in San Francisco. Went from one cafe to the next and worked on various things and built a Facebook app and made mockups and little prototypes of hundreds of other things probably and wrote blog posts and simply just try to reconnect with curiosity the best that I could. And so about the end of that year I then realized, well, you know, I did kind of what I wanted to do in San Francisco. I've worked for startups. I met a lot of people, a lot of connections that still to this day serve me. But, you know, now it's time to disconnect. This is just noise. It's distracting. There's something in my brain that I have to share with the world. I don't know what it is. I need to find out what it is. And then I moved to Chicago now. Why would anybody move from San Francisco to Chicago? It's supposed to be the other way around. Yeah, exactly. And you know, I remember my roommate being like, are you all right? This doesn't, have you thought this through. And you know, I just, it's funny I missed winter. I didn't, I didn't miss the cold. I didn't miss the snow. I hate all that stuff. I didn't miss tracking a bunch of a sludge of salt and sand and melted snow on my carpet and having to scrub it out. What I missed was the feeling of having no choice, the feeling of it being snowing outside and it's 20 below zero and all you can do is stay in. And when you stay in, you're reading books, you're learning programming languages, you're working on projects. I missed that long expanse of feeling like I didn't have any choice. And I also felt like, you know, San Francisco or Silicon Valley, it's a big hype place. You know, people get really excited about certain trends and such, and most of the time it's not going to work out. And so I saw it as noise and I really wanted to disconnect from that and go inward and explore and find out what was there. And so roughly, oh gosh, almost exactly three years to the day after July 17, 2007, I think it was July 13th, 2010, I believe was the day that I came up with the idea that became my first book designed for hackers. And so it was just as long process of exploration that culminated, in that book.

14:48

Ramesh: So your first "entrepreneurial journey" as a book, I mean, of course the book is the foundation of many adventures. So that's good. And then you also said that you talked about....

15:03

David: I will add that there were a lot of things that I did that didn't work out on the, on the road to arriving at that book idea.

15:11

Ramesh: Right. Yeah. I mean that's a typical path. Anyway. So, but at what point did you feel comfortable in this new journey that you were you know, doing, is it 2010 when you launched the book? Or it took some more time for you to say, this is where I want to stay, and this is the path that I want to pursue.

15:32

David: By the time I was offered a book deal, it was clear that there was very little hesitation that I wanted to do that. And you know, it wasn't that I had set out to write a book. It was, I set out to do something. You know, and it was clear by that point that this was the thing that I had been searching for. Because, you know, after that first year of wandering around and when I moved to Chicago, I started trying to, I started freelancing cause I needed to, I needed the money. So I started freelancing, but I was very intentional about limiting the number of hours a week that I did freelance. And I tried to mix in a certain number of hours a week as well of trying to build passive revenue streams. Seeing that I would be buying myself time, at some point down the road where I could have more space to continue to explore. And so when I did get offered the book deal, I had set up everything in my life for an opportunity like this. I fortunately, the timing was great. One of my passive revenue streams started to grow just as I got that book deal which was totally necessary because the advanced wasn't going to be enough to pay my bills for six months or whatever it took to write the book. So it all, it all felt, it all felt comfortable that, this was something that I wanted to do, that I had been waiting for. And it was, it was more of a, it's about time feeling. Finally, I'm this person that I have known myself to be and finally the world is going to acknowledge it.

17:25

Ramesh: So David, it's a very fascinating, so what you have done to really go on this dream journey that you have. You first made sure that practicality, you know, in the sense in terms of multiple passive income streams, you know, whether it's a retirement stuff that you had that initial seed money afterwards that some other freelancing and few things that you're doing that sustained you. I think that is a key learning for everybody who wants to do it right. So making sure that those are there. Otherwise what happens is people, you know fall on the face and then they go away, right. I mean, at the same time you are investing all those into your passion of writing. So the third thing that I learned is your first book was not a self-published book. It's some, basically, so you're going to advance for, publisher paid you for this, is that right?

18:21

David: That's right, yeah. It was with John Wiley and sons, which is a huge publisher.

18:26

Ramesh: Okay. So David, if I could dig a little bit into that one. I myself you know, explored many areas, but I went to self-publish route. So if somebody is there, a combination of entrepreneur, author wants to be, so how did you snag this initial deal, book deal.

18:45

David: So what happened on July 13th, 2010 was that I came up with this idea of design for hackers. And the reason why I came up with this idea was because I was trying to get a, I was trying to get a slot to speak at South by Southwest. Which is a big tech conference. And it's, you know, prestigious, whatever to speak there, but they have a sort of democratic panel picking process where you need to get a bunch of votes to have any chance at having your panel chosen or your talk chosen. And so what I decided to do since I didn't have much of a platform at the time was to right the best darn blog post I possibly could about some element of designed for hackers. And to get that post to do very well on some portal. The portal being a hacker news at this point. I had a pretty good feel for what it took to get something to the top of it. It's, you know, it's one of those upvote sites like Reddit. And so I wrote this post why you don't use Gerome on the web. And in the post, I asked for votes for my South by Southwest talk. Well, yes, and so I wrote that posts, it went to the top of hacker news within a few days. I had an email in my inbox saying, Hey, I like this idea of a design for hackers. Have you thought about writing a book about this?

20:23

Ramesh: Fantastic. David, that is a very good story. Okay. So excellent. So now let me go segue a little bit into, so we talked about your book and then I’ll come to the heart to start book a later on. And then, but I want to go into the podcast. Love your work, right. And is the podcast being also a business venture or is it more a venture of your heart? What is this?

20:51

David: Oh, boy. I mean, is there a difference? And for me, sometimes it feels unfortunate that it feels like there isn't a difference. Is that a lot of difficulty doing stuff that isn't an endeavor of the heart? You know, it's a part of my business for sure. I spend money on it. I make some money on it. I'm a little bit more than break even on it. But it is more a personal exploration than probably anything else, which, I mean, I guess I see my entire business that way. In that I'm always reading books and it gives me an opportunity to connect with and meet the people who write these amazing books or heroes in other avenues. People like Seth Godin or Jason fried or Joanna Penn who is a big self-publishing guru and so many people. Steve case, the former CEO of AOL. Adam Conover who has a great television show, John Bokenkamp, who created the blacklist for NBC. I get to talk to all these people, and I get to test my theories with them, I guess, like, ask them questions and match them up with the things that I and learning and wondering about what it takes to make it as a creative entrepreneur. How do you navigate this space between all right? Commerce and art and so primarily that's what I get out of it. And then the byproducts are books and blog posts and some courses that I'm working on as well.

22:47

Ramesh: Okay, great. I mean, you really have some big names there, James Altucher, I see there as well, Savannah Edwards. So how did you get them as your guests? If I could ask.

22:59

David: Yeah. I don't really know. Sometimes I don't, Sometimes I don't really know. Certainly having, if I were to guess, I would say that it helps that I already had an audience from design for hackers. You know, when I started the podcast, my email list was somewhere around 30,000 people, something like that. But this was for design for hackers. These days I have, I’ve broken it up in a different email lists for different interests and I’ve also cut out a bunch of people who weren't, who weren't particularly responsive. But to be able to say, hey, I’ve got this podcast, I'm an author. I would love to promote your work to 30,000 email subscribers. I'd like to have an interview. It'd be over the internet. It'll be an hour long. That goes a long way. And in some cases, some of these guests, they were familiar with my work. They maybe weren't huge admirers necessarily, but they at least knew that I existed. You know, I was living in Chicago for eight years. Jason Freed is based in Chicago. Through the grapevine I'm sure he was familiar with my work. And you know, Seth Godin was somebody who I’ve probably first emailed Seth Godin in 2005, and you know, not that he knew that I existed, but there's that little sort of subconscious thing of, Oh, here's this name that showed up in my inbox. Do I recognize that name? So maybe of that as well. I think more than anything though is simply being a fan of the work and truly understanding the work, being able to, you know, being able to write that one sentence. I mean you don't have very much time when you're trying to connect with somebody that you don't know who has a lot of people asking for their time and they don't, they don't know who you are. Being able to write like one little sentence that tells them, I have read all of your work and I understand it and I want to promote the values that you promote. It's not saying that, and it is not, I'm quoting anything that they've said. It's demonstrating that you have truly internalized what about, and that you have genuinely something that you're curious about to talk to them about. I think that that helps. And then of course, after a while it becomes, you know, all these people have been, Dennery Ellie's been on my show, James Altucher has been on my show. Being able to have those names and names that they recognize that they would like to be in the company. I think that probably helps as well.

25:55

Ramesh: Yeah. The food is then it self actually that is very interesting. Yeah. So one thing that I wanted to ask you David before, and I'm going to ask you on this forum. I stopped while I was reading your biography at one point where biography in a sense or whatever you wrote on your blog about yourself is that you moved to Columbia. And then I said, wow. So what made David take this step? So if you could talk a little bit about you know, your move to Columbia and then why you decided to do it.

26:32

David: Sure. Well you know, it's the land of opportunity. No, you know people move from another country to another country often because they see some kind of opportunity there. Now, plenty of Colombians would love to move to the United States. I am not, that is not a surprise to me. The United States has a lot of wonderful opportunities in it and I have been privileged to be able to be a part of that and to still have the blue passport be able to come and go as I please. What I saw in terms of opportunity in Columbia was that I, as a writer or what I really wanted to double down on writing and podcasting and I really wanted to take the time to read about things and learn about things and share what I learned along the way. I felt like I was going to need some runway to do that. And I wanted to be in a place where there was going to be very little friction where I could really dig into thinking and writing and that there wouldn't be distractions. So it was a little bit like my move from San Francisco to Chicago, but a little bit more intense in that, you know, living in Chicago, I might get, I have a friend say, Oh, I'm having a cocktail party this weekend. Well, my friend lives in New York. And so I would fly to New York to go to a cocktail party or, I would get speaking invitations that didn't pay. And they were wonderful travel opportunities. And it was amazing for a few years there. I got to travel all over the world. I spoke in eight countries and Chicago was a great airport to fly out of places, you know. And so I wanted to kind of create a forcing function of, all right, well, you're in Columbia. If you're going to travel somewhere, it better be important. And on top of that, Medellín is the city of eternal spring. It is room temperature all the time. It's close to the equator. So the sun rises and sets at the same time. And so as I was trying to basically optimize ways of being creative, of having ideas, turning them into finished products and developing systems and habits and routines, that centered around that. Medellín was going to be an obvious place for that. I had already spent a couple months here several times and so I made the move. It was going to be cheaper. It was going to be less friction. I could still get books over Kindle, which at first, I thought was a disadvantage, but it turns out because I can aggregate my highlights using tools like, one that's called read wise. It turned out to actually be an advantage to managing my knowledge and processing the things that I'm learning and turning them into finished products. And so from all those standpoints, it was the land of opportunity for me because anything that would get in the way living in the United States, a lot of that stuff would be out of the way living here in Columbia.

30:12

Ramesh: That is true. So David as we come towards the end of the podcast, so you know, the thing that strikes me is that you are able to combine and you're not a typical entrepreneur, right. So it's going out doing affiliate marketing or whatever, whatever. Right.

30:28

David: I mean, I did plenty of affiliate marketing, but that was to, you know, make money so I could write more.

30:34

Ramesh: Yeah. Yeah. So you're not building on those things, right, but exactly. So essentially writing is the linchpin of all your efforts and then you're able to connect different dots into your writing and books and all this stuff to make money. The business out of it, let me put that out. So, and then, so everybody has a different path. And then going back on your path, anything that you think you could have done differently, or this is the path that you're destined to take in spite of, you know, different digressions that maybe.

31:10

David: I mean, it's always so hard to look at the past and even picture doing anything differently because I think we're naturally biased to not have regrets, right. To not think that we made the wrong choice in any way. So the only thing that, you know, if I could wave a magic wand and be a different person, I think I would well, you know, like you say, I'm probably not your typical entrepreneur. I do things my own way. But that has been, that's always a struggle to do that. And I look at some people who are even more so that way, who really don't care what anybody else thinks that they should do or thinks that they should be like or thinks what they should think or what they should say. And that's something that I'm constantly striving towards is okay, the decisions I'm making are those decisions, am I making those decisions because I’ve seen somebody else do it and I think that I should do it, whereas this would I truly feel is right for me. I just, I always have wished that I could, if I could change anything, it would be that I could be more that way more quickly and it's an ongoing process.

32:39

Ramesh: It did definitely then. So another person told me is that, you know, even the ups and downs, everything was, I know as a teaching experience. So all the steps are necessary to, for them to be where they are now kind of stuff, which is what I think. The last question David, as an aspiring entrepreneur, sitting at home, are there any things that you could tell them they should be thinking about or doing based on your experience and based on everything that you've learned from your podcast and your engagement with other business people?

33:20

David: I think that it's good to ask yourself, well, I think it's good to understand or accept it. There are no guarantees in this. And especially if you're going to be a creative entrepreneur, it's going to be very uncertain and volatile and there's going to be a lot of randomness involved in your success and luck involved in your success. And so if that's the path that you want to go down, you have to ask yourself if you're okay with failing at it, and what does that look like? And if you can go down the chain of events to where you're failing more and more and more and more, and you still say to yourself, okay, I'm still up for this, then go for it. Otherwise, I would say don't. 34:13 Ramesh: Okay. David, thank you very much. I'm a huge fan of your writing. But that's good to know that you're a writer who also makes money. It is practical. Because at heart, I'm a more a business person. And then writing is on top of it. And then you are on the other way around. So it's a good to meet you. Thank you very much. And thank you for your time, David. 34:40 David: Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor. 34:42 Ramesh: Yeah. Thank you.

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Guest: Manuj Aggarwal

Company / Business name: TetraNoodle Technologies

David Kadavy is a creative entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, and creative productivity expert. David believes that one of the biggest challenges we face in the age of AI is the ability for humans to tap into their innate creativity.

Books/ Tools/ resources

Book: The Heart To Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating Book: Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty

Episode Transcript

Complete Transcript
00:08
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This podcast is for people who are interested in starting a business with purpose, passion, perseverance, and possibilities. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Today I'm very excited to introduce a guest who I came across while I was writing and reading in medium. And then later on was referenced by many people about his work. His name is David Kadavy. So David is a creative entrepreneur, is a podcast host himself and a very accomplished writer and a bestselling author. And then we'll go more about his work you know, very soon. So David, welcome.

00:59

David: Thank you so much for having me Ramesh it's great to be here.

01:02

Ramesh: So David, I know I introduced you and I probably short changed many things, but why don't you tell us what you do.

01:11

David: Yeah, well, I guess primarily I'm a writer and podcaster. I made the decision about four years ago to really double down on that. I was already had written a book and I just wanted to take the time to follow my curiosity and read what interested me, talk to the people who interested me and to share what I learned along the way. And so that's what I do in the form of books and a podcast and some courses and occasionally speaking as well.

01:47

Ramesh: So one thing David that I was struck by introduction on your blog, right, so you start off with I'm a creative entrepreneur, so that's what I really wanted to dig into a little bit. What creative entrepreneurship things have you been doing?

02:04

David: Yeah, so it's an interesting term, creative entrepreneur because, I guess when I first started on my own, my main mission was just to follow what I was curious about. And that was 12 years ago or so. And along the way I didn't really think of it like as a business so much, as much as I thought of it as an artistic journey of let's find what's interesting to me, let's create things and let's figure out some way along the way to make some money. And you know, I eventually learned that people who are the traditional entrepreneurs think a little bit more structured about running a business is that there's a product, here's some customers, here's the market that's addressable and here's your marketing. And there's a system to all of that. And in a way you're not that concerned with your own creative expression or your own personality. It is what does the market want and how can I get that and how can I make money doing it? And so it's a complex balance to be struck there because I’ve also learned that, while you can follow what you're curious about and create whatever comes to you, whatever intuitively you want to create, you, you still do need to think about products and customers and resources that you have and processes for creating the product. And you know, what are the costs of that and how can you make that sustainable. You know, I liked the Walt Disney quote. We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies and I’ve come to think of my work that way. I don't write to make money. I make money so I can write. And so that's what being a creative entrepreneur means to me.

04:09

Ramesh: Yeah. Because the reason it struck me is that when I came across your writing on medium, I never thought you were an entrepreneur, right. I thought you were a writer, an author. Right. And then as we are getting prepared for the podcast, I was reading more of your stuff and then I came across this creative entrepreneur. I said, okay. And then because one of the challenges that people have is that they want to start something with a passion. So nothing wrong with it. But the challenge with starting something with passion and really doing something with passion is that they lose the perspective of profitability, making money and in the process, the passion you know, it goes away. So I think you are able to combine your passion to what you're doing, but at the same time keeping the money aspect in mind.

04:57

David: This is a difficult balance to strike is that well, if I was going to just be a writer and I would need to, I would need to have somebody else taking care of all the business stuff, you know, making it so that I could make the money to write. And so that would involve, I'm working with publishers, which I have done, but I tend to not to do now. I prefer to self-publish. And so you have to become a business person in order to make that work unless you're going to have an agent who takes care of all that stuff. Fortunately I'm curious enough and have a wide variety of enough of interests that I'm interested in doing that. And I enjoy all aspects of not only creating the work, but also trying to create a business around it. And it's a tough balance to strike because sometimes I find myself getting too caught up in the business parts of it is what do I feel like I should be doing. And then my work suffers from it. So you have to constantly be juggling that mind of thinking about the market and the marketability of your work with connecting with what it is that you're really interested in and what is really important to you and what you actually believe, not just what it appears that the market wants at this moment in time.

06:27

Ramesh: Excellent. I can relate to so many aspects that you're referencing here. Anyway, so let's now start tracing your journey here. So, David, I know you are a product designer in your past life. So if you could tell us, when did you make the switch from working for somebody to deciding to work for yourself?

06:49

David: Well, it was a July 17th, 2007. I was a product designer in Silicon Valley and my boss came to my desk and asked me if I could join her in the conference room and we walked down the hall and I was wondering what's in that yellow Manila envelope. And she sat me down and said, I need to terminate your employment today. And I didn't really, I didn't, I didn't fight it. I didn't really ask a lot of questions. I just got up and smiled at her and said, oh well thank you. This is going to be a special day in my life, July 17, 2007. This is the day I start working for myself. And it was funny cause I instantly knew that, and the problem was that I had not, my heart had not been in my work for a while. And I probably should have quit but then I got fired and that very instant, I knew that I was going to be working for myself.

08:09

Ramesh: Okay. So this is excellent. So then afterwards, excellent in the sense of the news was not excellent. What does excellent that you got to start.

08:15

David: It was excellent news actually turned out to be.

08:19

Ramesh: So then from that day onwards, did you have in your mind what you wanted to do, or did you take some time to figure out what you wanted to do? If you could talk about the initial few months or years, whatever that was.

08:34

David: Yeah. I had no idea. All I knew was that there had been some point in time where I loved something about what I had turned into my job. And that at some point in the previous three years or perhaps, during that previous three years, slowly I had lost touch with that, and I didn't love it any more. And so the first thing I wanted to do was just reconnect with that feeling. And I just felt completely debilitated and burned out to the point that I just, I couldn't fathom doing anything for anybody else, whether that was even freelance work. And I was in Silicon Valley with coding skills and design skills in 2008. So I had an enormous amount of opportunity right in front of me. And I just didn't, wasn't interested in any of it. Now I had built up a bit of a retirement portfolio of stocks and such. And fortunately the timing was right. I had gotten some Google and Apple and had made a good profit on those stocks. And so I thought to myself, well, my roommate's going to business school for his MBA. Maybe I should think about something like that. Yeah. The more that I looked at that path, the more I thought, well, that's not going to get me where I want to go. I don't want to you know, do marketing at Proctor and gamble or something that doesn't interest me. And so I thought to myself, well, what if I just, you know, business school costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think, I'm not sure. What if I just gave myself the space and the time to explore and to try to learn. And you know, I wouldn't have an MBA when I was done, but an MBA isn't going to get me what I want, right. But I would have something, I would have some semblance of a business and I would certainly have skills and knowledge and experience that it didn't have before. So I cashed out about $40,000, and I said to myself, all right, well this is my DIY MBA. I mean, it wasn't, I wasn't necessarily studying exactly what they study in a business school, but I said to myself, well, I just need some time to not think about think about money. And it was tough. That was a huge chunk of my retirement portfolio, which if I had held onto it, would probably be you know, it would have grown to this to this day, but I just saw it as well, I can't, I just wasn't happy. I just, what good is the money if I'm not happy. And so I thought maybe I could invest in that. And so that's what I did. So for a year I went to a cafe every day in San Francisco. Went from one cafe to the next and worked on various things and built a Facebook app and made mockups and little prototypes of hundreds of other things probably and wrote blog posts and simply just try to reconnect with curiosity the best that I could. And so about the end of that year I then realized, well, you know, I did kind of what I wanted to do in San Francisco. I've worked for startups. I met a lot of people, a lot of connections that still to this day serve me. But, you know, now it's time to disconnect. This is just noise. It's distracting. There's something in my brain that I have to share with the world. I don't know what it is. I need to find out what it is. And then I moved to Chicago now. Why would anybody move from San Francisco to Chicago? It's supposed to be the other way around. Yeah, exactly. And you know, I remember my roommate being like, are you all right? This doesn't, have you thought this through. And you know, I just, it's funny I missed winter. I didn't, I didn't miss the cold. I didn't miss the snow. I hate all that stuff. I didn't miss tracking a bunch of a sludge of salt and sand and melted snow on my carpet and having to scrub it out. What I missed was the feeling of having no choice, the feeling of it being snowing outside and it's 20 below zero and all you can do is stay in. And when you stay in, you're reading books, you're learning programming languages, you're working on projects. I missed that long expanse of feeling like I didn't have any choice. And I also felt like, you know, San Francisco or Silicon Valley, it's a big hype place. You know, people get really excited about certain trends and such, and most of the time it's not going to work out. And so I saw it as noise and I really wanted to disconnect from that and go inward and explore and find out what was there. And so roughly, oh gosh, almost exactly three years to the day after July 17, 2007, I think it was July 13th, 2010, I believe was the day that I came up with the idea that became my first book designed for hackers. And so it was just as long process of exploration that culminated, in that book.

14:48

Ramesh: So your first "entrepreneurial journey" as a book, I mean, of course the book is the foundation of many adventures. So that's good. And then you also said that you talked about....

15:03

David: I will add that there were a lot of things that I did that didn't work out on the, on the road to arriving at that book idea.

15:11

Ramesh: Right. Yeah. I mean that's a typical path. Anyway. So, but at what point did you feel comfortable in this new journey that you were you know, doing, is it 2010 when you launched the book? Or it took some more time for you to say, this is where I want to stay, and this is the path that I want to pursue.

15:32

David: By the time I was offered a book deal, it was clear that there was very little hesitation that I wanted to do that. And you know, it wasn't that I had set out to write a book. It was, I set out to do something. You know, and it was clear by that point that this was the thing that I had been searching for. Because, you know, after that first year of wandering around and when I moved to Chicago, I started trying to, I started freelancing cause I needed to, I needed the money. So I started freelancing, but I was very intentional about limiting the number of hours a week that I did freelance. And I tried to mix in a certain number of hours a week as well of trying to build passive revenue streams. Seeing that I would be buying myself time, at some point down the road where I could have more space to continue to explore. And so when I did get offered the book deal, I had set up everything in my life for an opportunity like this. I fortunately, the timing was great. One of my passive revenue streams started to grow just as I got that book deal which was totally necessary because the advanced wasn't going to be enough to pay my bills for six months or whatever it took to write the book. So it all, it all felt, it all felt comfortable that, this was something that I wanted to do, that I had been waiting for. And it was, it was more of a, it's about time feeling. Finally, I'm this person that I have known myself to be and finally the world is going to acknowledge it.

17:25

Ramesh: So David, it's a very fascinating, so what you have done to really go on this dream journey that you have. You first made sure that practicality, you know, in the sense in terms of multiple passive income streams, you know, whether it's a retirement stuff that you had that initial seed money afterwards that some other freelancing and few things that you're doing that sustained you. I think that is a key learning for everybody who wants to do it right. So making sure that those are there. Otherwise what happens is people, you know fall on the face and then they go away, right. I mean, at the same time you are investing all those into your passion of writing. So the third thing that I learned is your first book was not a self-published book. It's some, basically, so you're going to advance for, publisher paid you for this, is that right?

18:21

David: That's right, yeah. It was with John Wiley and sons, which is a huge publisher.

18:26

Ramesh: Okay. So David, if I could dig a little bit into that one. I myself you know, explored many areas, but I went to self-publish route. So if somebody is there, a combination of entrepreneur, author wants to be, so how did you snag this initial deal, book deal.

18:45

David: So what happened on July 13th, 2010 was that I came up with this idea of design for hackers. And the reason why I came up with this idea was because I was trying to get a, I was trying to get a slot to speak at South by Southwest. Which is a big tech conference. And it's, you know, prestigious, whatever to speak there, but they have a sort of democratic panel picking process where you need to get a bunch of votes to have any chance at having your panel chosen or your talk chosen. And so what I decided to do since I didn't have much of a platform at the time was to right the best darn blog post I possibly could about some element of designed for hackers. And to get that post to do very well on some portal. The portal being a hacker news at this point. I had a pretty good feel for what it took to get something to the top of it. It's, you know, it's one of those upvote sites like Reddit. And so I wrote this post why you don't use Gerome on the web. And in the post, I asked for votes for my South by Southwest talk. Well, yes, and so I wrote that posts, it went to the top of hacker news within a few days. I had an email in my inbox saying, Hey, I like this idea of a design for hackers. Have you thought about writing a book about this?

20:23

Ramesh: Fantastic. David, that is a very good story. Okay. So excellent. So now let me go segue a little bit into, so we talked about your book and then I’ll come to the heart to start book a later on. And then, but I want to go into the podcast. Love your work, right. And is the podcast being also a business venture or is it more a venture of your heart? What is this?

20:51

David: Oh, boy. I mean, is there a difference? And for me, sometimes it feels unfortunate that it feels like there isn't a difference. Is that a lot of difficulty doing stuff that isn't an endeavor of the heart? You know, it's a part of my business for sure. I spend money on it. I make some money on it. I'm a little bit more than break even on it. But it is more a personal exploration than probably anything else, which, I mean, I guess I see my entire business that way. In that I'm always reading books and it gives me an opportunity to connect with and meet the people who write these amazing books or heroes in other avenues. People like Seth Godin or Jason fried or Joanna Penn who is a big self-publishing guru and so many people. Steve case, the former CEO of AOL. Adam Conover who has a great television show, John Bokenkamp, who created the blacklist for NBC. I get to talk to all these people, and I get to test my theories with them, I guess, like, ask them questions and match them up with the things that I and learning and wondering about what it takes to make it as a creative entrepreneur. How do you navigate this space between all right? Commerce and art and so primarily that's what I get out of it. And then the byproducts are books and blog posts and some courses that I'm working on as well.

22:47

Ramesh: Okay, great. I mean, you really have some big names there, James Altucher, I see there as well, Savannah Edwards. So how did you get them as your guests? If I could ask.

22:59

David: Yeah. I don't really know. Sometimes I don't, Sometimes I don't really know. Certainly having, if I were to guess, I would say that it helps that I already had an audience from design for hackers. You know, when I started the podcast, my email list was somewhere around 30,000 people, something like that. But this was for design for hackers. These days I have, I’ve broken it up in a different email lists for different interests and I’ve also cut out a bunch of people who weren't, who weren't particularly responsive. But to be able to say, hey, I’ve got this podcast, I'm an author. I would love to promote your work to 30,000 email subscribers. I'd like to have an interview. It'd be over the internet. It'll be an hour long. That goes a long way. And in some cases, some of these guests, they were familiar with my work. They maybe weren't huge admirers necessarily, but they at least knew that I existed. You know, I was living in Chicago for eight years. Jason Freed is based in Chicago. Through the grapevine I'm sure he was familiar with my work. And you know, Seth Godin was somebody who I’ve probably first emailed Seth Godin in 2005, and you know, not that he knew that I existed, but there's that little sort of subconscious thing of, Oh, here's this name that showed up in my inbox. Do I recognize that name? So maybe of that as well. I think more than anything though is simply being a fan of the work and truly understanding the work, being able to, you know, being able to write that one sentence. I mean you don't have very much time when you're trying to connect with somebody that you don't know who has a lot of people asking for their time and they don't, they don't know who you are. Being able to write like one little sentence that tells them, I have read all of your work and I understand it and I want to promote the values that you promote. It's not saying that, and it is not, I'm quoting anything that they've said. It's demonstrating that you have truly internalized what about, and that you have genuinely something that you're curious about to talk to them about. I think that that helps. And then of course, after a while it becomes, you know, all these people have been, Dennery Ellie's been on my show, James Altucher has been on my show. Being able to have those names and names that they recognize that they would like to be in the company. I think that probably helps as well.

25:55

Ramesh: Yeah. The food is then it self actually that is very interesting. Yeah. So one thing that I wanted to ask you David before, and I'm going to ask you on this forum. I stopped while I was reading your biography at one point where biography in a sense or whatever you wrote on your blog about yourself is that you moved to Columbia. And then I said, wow. So what made David take this step? So if you could talk a little bit about you know, your move to Columbia and then why you decided to do it.

26:32

David: Sure. Well you know, it's the land of opportunity. No, you know people move from another country to another country often because they see some kind of opportunity there. Now, plenty of Colombians would love to move to the United States. I am not, that is not a surprise to me. The United States has a lot of wonderful opportunities in it and I have been privileged to be able to be a part of that and to still have the blue passport be able to come and go as I please. What I saw in terms of opportunity in Columbia was that I, as a writer or what I really wanted to double down on writing and podcasting and I really wanted to take the time to read about things and learn about things and share what I learned along the way. I felt like I was going to need some runway to do that. And I wanted to be in a place where there was going to be very little friction where I could really dig into thinking and writing and that there wouldn't be distractions. So it was a little bit like my move from San Francisco to Chicago, but a little bit more intense in that, you know, living in Chicago, I might get, I have a friend say, Oh, I'm having a cocktail party this weekend. Well, my friend lives in New York. And so I would fly to New York to go to a cocktail party or, I would get speaking invitations that didn't pay. And they were wonderful travel opportunities. And it was amazing for a few years there. I got to travel all over the world. I spoke in eight countries and Chicago was a great airport to fly out of places, you know. And so I wanted to kind of create a forcing function of, all right, well, you're in Columbia. If you're going to travel somewhere, it better be important. And on top of that, Medellín is the city of eternal spring. It is room temperature all the time. It's close to the equator. So the sun rises and sets at the same time. And so as I was trying to basically optimize ways of being creative, of having ideas, turning them into finished products and developing systems and habits and routines, that centered around that. Medellín was going to be an obvious place for that. I had already spent a couple months here several times and so I made the move. It was going to be cheaper. It was going to be less friction. I could still get books over Kindle, which at first, I thought was a disadvantage, but it turns out because I can aggregate my highlights using tools like, one that's called read wise. It turned out to actually be an advantage to managing my knowledge and processing the things that I'm learning and turning them into finished products. And so from all those standpoints, it was the land of opportunity for me because anything that would get in the way living in the United States, a lot of that stuff would be out of the way living here in Columbia.

30:12

Ramesh: That is true. So David as we come towards the end of the podcast, so you know, the thing that strikes me is that you are able to combine and you're not a typical entrepreneur, right. So it's going out doing affiliate marketing or whatever, whatever. Right.

30:28

David: I mean, I did plenty of affiliate marketing, but that was to, you know, make money so I could write more.

30:34

Ramesh: Yeah. Yeah. So you're not building on those things, right, but exactly. So essentially writing is the linchpin of all your efforts and then you're able to connect different dots into your writing and books and all this stuff to make money. The business out of it, let me put that out. So, and then, so everybody has a different path. And then going back on your path, anything that you think you could have done differently, or this is the path that you're destined to take in spite of, you know, different digressions that maybe.

31:10

David: I mean, it's always so hard to look at the past and even picture doing anything differently because I think we're naturally biased to not have regrets, right. To not think that we made the wrong choice in any way. So the only thing that, you know, if I could wave a magic wand and be a different person, I think I would well, you know, like you say, I'm probably not your typical entrepreneur. I do things my own way. But that has been, that's always a struggle to do that. And I look at some people who are even more so that way, who really don't care what anybody else thinks that they should do or thinks that they should be like or thinks what they should think or what they should say. And that's something that I'm constantly striving towards is okay, the decisions I'm making are those decisions, am I making those decisions because I’ve seen somebody else do it and I think that I should do it, whereas this would I truly feel is right for me. I just, I always have wished that I could, if I could change anything, it would be that I could be more that way more quickly and it's an ongoing process.

32:39

Ramesh: It did definitely then. So another person told me is that, you know, even the ups and downs, everything was, I know as a teaching experience. So all the steps are necessary to, for them to be where they are now kind of stuff, which is what I think. The last question David, as an aspiring entrepreneur, sitting at home, are there any things that you could tell them they should be thinking about or doing based on your experience and based on everything that you've learned from your podcast and your engagement with other business people?

33:20

David: I think that it's good to ask yourself, well, I think it's good to understand or accept it. There are no guarantees in this. And especially if you're going to be a creative entrepreneur, it's going to be very uncertain and volatile and there's going to be a lot of randomness involved in your success and luck involved in your success. And so if that's the path that you want to go down, you have to ask yourself if you're okay with failing at it, and what does that look like? And if you can go down the chain of events to where you're failing more and more and more and more, and you still say to yourself, okay, I'm still up for this, then go for it. Otherwise, I would say don't. 34:13 Ramesh: Okay. David, thank you very much. I'm a huge fan of your writing. But that's good to know that you're a writer who also makes money. It is practical. Because at heart, I'm a more a business person. And then writing is on top of it. And then you are on the other way around. So it's a good to meet you. Thank you very much. And thank you for your time, David. 34:40 David: Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor. 34:42 Ramesh: Yeah. Thank you.

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Guest: Steve Folland

Company / Business name: Being Freelance

Steve Folland is a video and audio producer from the UK – building his business to work around looking after his kids. He’s also behind long running ‘Being Freelance’ – the podcast, vlog and community, where freelancers from around the world share experiences, support, laughs and cookies. More recently he’s launched the Doing It For The Kids podcast for freelancing parents.

Tools / Books / Resources mentioned

Tools: FreeAgent, Rev, MailChimp, Facebook, Ecamm Live, Zencastr

Show Notes

Steve shared his story of starting a side-hustle video & audio production while working at a radio station. Steve shared his definition of ‘being free while freelancing’ is about having the freedom to choose what one can work on and being in control.

Steve then started his ‘being freelance’ podcast to learn from other freelancers, teach others about freelancing, and also not to feel isolated while working as a freelancer. Steve interviewed about 200 other freelancers since he started his podcast and feels connected to them.

Steve explains the freelancer journey as one where success comes from being good at whatever you do first, then finding a way to productize their services to switch from being a freelancer to an entrepreneur. Long term success is to be able to find multiple revenue streams.

Steve also gives tips about getting first paying customers and the first stop is to tell friends and family about your freelancing. And connecting with people in multiple social media forums (but pick one or two that are most applicable for you), and building an email list.

Few of the lessons Steve learned over the years are: (1) Push yourself forward so people can notice you as opposed to waiting for them to find you (2) Stay close to your finances and keep your overhead low (3) be clear about what lifestyle you are after so you can manage the growth.

Episode Transcript

00:02
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance, and possibilities. Today we have an exciting guest who has been at freelancing for quite some time. So, I'm very happy to introduce Steve Folland. Steve is a video on audio producer from the UK building his business to work around looking after his kids. He's also behind long running, being freelancer, the podcast we log and community where freelancers from around the world share experiences, support, laughs and cookies. Most recently he's launched the doing it for the kids podcast for freelancing parents. Hi Steve. Welcome.

01:00

Steve: Ramesh, thank you so much for having me.

01:03

Ramesh: So how do you guys share cookies while you are remotely podcasting?

01:08

Steve: Oh, well that's the best bit. You share them, but equally you can't lose any, like you said, you still get to eat them all to yourself. But now do you know one thing that we do is every Friday in the being freelance Facebook group, I do the non-employee of the week awards live as a Facebook live. So, people come and join all at the same time. And then I chat for a bit and then we basically celebrate one of the freelance communities from that week, you know, saying what they've been doing great. Sometimes they've been going for a rough patch, whatever it might be, but part of the main prize is a box of cookies or biscuits as we call them. And so, yeah, so they get posted out, they get mug and then everybody just sits there eating biscuits. Maybe it's a very British thing. We love our tea our biscuits and cookies. So yes, but I’ve ended up sending these cookies to the States, to Canada, Australia to Brazil. So yeah, word's getting out

02:13

Ramesh: Excellent. Maybe I will receive them one of these days. So, Steve so how did you build this podcast communities and when did you start building them?

02:23

Steve: It must be nearly five years ago now. So basically, I went freelance. I worked in radio for years for about 10 or 12 years, and then decided to go freelance as you say, to look, you know, to be flexible around my family. And after about a year of trying to figure out how to be successful at being a freelancer, I found myself like listening to podcasts, but none of them, you know, they might be speaking to entrepreneurs, but they weren't necessarily speaking directly to solo freelancers. It's a crossover, but there's a difference. And so, since I couldn't find a podcast I wanted to listen to, I decided to start it. So, I just, basically, each week I speak to a different freelancer from around the world. And it's not about the job that they do, but it's about the being freelance, so about how they've found clients, how they deal with the work life balance and the finances and collaboration side projects. And yeah, so that's how it started. I wanted to listen to it, and I couldn't find it to listen to.

03:26

Ramesh: Excellent. So, when you switched from whatever you were doing five years ago or so to be a freelancer, what were you trying to freelance in?

03:38

Steve: So, I started doing video and audio production and I started doing it on the side of my full-time radio job. I started doing things like script writing or video presenting for people. And then so people will come to me and say, can you present this video? And then I would say, I can, but I can also edit it because I was trained in that years ago. And this was just at the crossover point where people started using video online much more. And so, there was suddenly there was this need and the technology was such that we could edit it at home and not need to be in offices and things like that. So, I was doing it on the side and I just started getting more and more freelance work on the side of my normal job until maybe I’ll be up. And you know, only getting a few hours’ sleep a night. And clearly, clearly that had to stop. But also, clearly there was kind of a neat there. There was this, there was a need for people who could write scripts, do voiceovers, edit videos and create storytelling in that way. So, I decided to go for it. As soon as our son was about to start school and we had our second kid and we needed people, you know, we thought, maybe I can work from home, maybe I can make this work.

04:52

Ramesh: Okay. Excellent. So Steve you already talked about the motivation for you to freelance and one other motivation I keep hearing from freelancers is a freedom, like if it's, you wanted flexibility, but people also are looking, they said freedom, but the unspoken truth is that freelancers are probably working lot longer than if they're employed. So, what was your experience freelancing, what you are looking and what you got out of it.

05:23

Steve: Yeah, you are right. You can end up working a lot, but at least you're in control of it. And what I quite like about it is, if I'm busting my gut and working really hard, at least I tend, if I'm doing it right, to be financially rewarded for that and also creatively rewarded for it because I tend to work with lots of different clients and lots of different things at once. So yeah, it was freedom for me, but it was creative freedom to work on lots of different things with different people. But also, that financial freedom, not in a way that suggests I am going to retire in two years’ time, but in order to set my own levels and to reward myself as I want to. Whereas, you know, if you work for a company, you can really work incredibly hard and maybe not even get a thank you, let alone a raise. So yeah, so that wasn't why I went freelance, but it was a nice side effect.

06:20

Ramesh: Correct. So, one of the things about this show is that we want to reduce the fear of starting a business, right? A lot of people, they want to start a business, but there's a fear of uncertainty, fear of unknown kind of stuff. So, for you, when you, you started this as a side hustle, right? You were working full time and then you're working. But when you did a complete switch, I mean, how did you manage the fear?

06:51

Steve: I don't, I don't really think I had the fear of such, I always just felt that if it didn't work out, I could go back and get a proper job in quotation marks. I knew I had the skills, I had lots of experience and so ultimately, I could go and get another job, but it was more like a determination to make it work. There's nothing like having two kids and a mortgage and so on and so forth to just make you really get your head down and work. So, I’ll be sending out cold emails and like building relationships and gradually things started to pick up. So, I don't think there was ever a fear as such for me. Maybe it was just blind naivete. But like I say, I did, I had been, I had been doing on the side, I did feel like there was a need for it. And so, and so I just knew if I get kept looking and kept doing good work, then things would pick up.

07:51

Ramesh: Okay. So good. So, you started the side hustle and at some point, you made the switch over and then afterwards you also picked up podcasting. And nowadays I'm seeing lot of for training courses, Hey, do your own podcast and start your own podcasting. It's really picking up. So, I wanted to ask you, when you started the podcasting, how was your learning experience? Did you have to go to the coaching class? A training courses? How did you do the podcast?

08:19

Steve: Well, you see, so I had a head start in, I worked in radio for years. And so even already had a microphone, because I was doing voiceovers as part of my freelance job. So, I had the microphone, I had the laptop, I knew how to edit audio. You know, other people were paying me to do already. So, it's kind of, I was already there. In fact, for the radio station I worked for, we already made podcasts. So, I even had an idea of, you know, adding the metadata and adding the titles and all of that. We've been doing it for years already. So yeah, I didn't coach as such. I kind of knew how I wanted it to sound and I knew how to interview people. I've been doing it for years, I’m probably very different in that respect to a lot of people who need a hand. And sometimes now I help people launch their podcast or they, you know, I don't do a course. I don't offer a course, but I do offer help and I get that. I think a lot of it is to do with confidence, but there's the technical side of it as well. And yeah, I had an unfair advantage in that respect.

09:29

Ramesh: Excellent. Excellent. And let me tell you about my own motivation for you know, doing the podcast and I want to understand your own motivation. One is that it's a content generator, because by talking to people, there's a lot of content that gets generated that can be used for blogs. It can be repurposed in many different ways. That's one piece of it. The other more important one is the networking, the connection to the people, right. Talking to people, we mutually learn from each other. That is really, really important. And then in the long-term, it could be monetarily, you know, it could be monetized in terms of sponsorships and other things like that. I mean, right now we are not at that stage. I wanted to understand your motivation. Why did you start podcast and why do you continue to podcast?

10:14

Steve: Well, so the funny thing is I think I really did start it to learn. I started from a place of wanting to talk to other freelancers. I didn't know any other freelancers. There weren’t meet ups, they weren't co-work spaces. I was just reaching out to some people that I’ve met on Twitter and then interviewing them. So, I wanted to learn. And also, it felt, and I hear this a lot from the audience, like you feel, it can feel really quite isolating, especially if you work from home. So, it feels less isolating to know that people all around the world as well, not just in your country, have a very similar story, a very similar feeling. And it's all trying to figure it out. So, there is a lot more stuff out there now for freelances than there was five years ago, even a couple of years ago.

11:01

Steve: So, I started it for that reason. Now you're absolutely right though, that I have now of course, I’ve nearly interviewed about 200 peoples. I've met all of those people effectively. Had all of those conversations, but also you, you're also networking in a way with your audience because they are feeling like they know you. And so even though I don't, I don't create a podcast in order to get work, that's an excellent reason to get to do one. But that's not why I did it. It's more I guess philanthropic than that really. It's just to help people. And to help myself. But yes, you know, people do. I guess my profile has raised and so people see, I'm a much more visible, put it that way. Or the work that I might get from my video and audio work. And also, I guess it shows to people even if they're not going to hire me for making this podcast, if they want me to create videos of them, they're looking at my website, they can see that I have been, you know, consistently putting this out for say, five years. And, but it sounds a certain standard and it's obviously popular. Like all of those things are ticks, I think if you were sort of independent creator. So, in that respect, that's been great. And really, it's only been in the past year where I realized actually, I’ve got a large enough audience now and it's a niche enough audience that I can sell it. I can make money out of it because I can clearly appeal to advertisers who are trying to target freelances with a service for, I believe in helps a freelancer. So, you don't, when it comes to podcasting, if you've got a niche audience that actually is a benefit when it comes to monetizing it in that way, because you don't need tens of thousands of listeners, hundreds of thousands of listeners in order to actually be really effective for advertising for a niche product.

13:09

Steve: So yeah, so actually now you know, I do have sponsorship on the podcast, so in theory, yeah, it pays its way, but definitely I put way more hours into producing it out of the love of it, passion for it than I do. But you know, I could definitely make more money doing my video and audio stuff when doing the podcast. But it just fulfills me creatively and those are socially since meeting all of the people I’ve met and the audience as well

13:41

Ramesh: Actually, excellent reasons and I feel the same way. The people that I interviewed so far about the 50 of them, I mean, I feel connected to them. I feel when I send out an email to them, much better response pretty much close to 100% respond. So, a lot you know, a higher quality connection than a cold email.

14:02

Steve: And definitely and you know, and your audience will be getting to know you as well. For anybody who starts a podcast. It's a really close relationship in a way, even more so than video because you write in their ears, you tend to have their attention. And it's amazing, you know, that used to be something that only people on the radio or in films or TV or whatever you used to be able to do and now there's nothing stopping any of us doing it.

14:26

Ramesh: Excellent. So, Steve, let me switch topics a little bit. You've interviewed about 200 plus freelancers. So, if I could ask you a few questions about the freelancing industry, if somebody wants to go into freelancing, maybe it will help them. So, what characteristics have you seen across the board that made some of these freelancers successful? More successful than others who are not.

14:55

Steve: Crickey, I think you need to, you obviously need to have the skills, good at what you do. With that some self-confidence as well because you are doing everything. Therefore, you have to do for selling of your skills to some extent. You need to be organized to stay on top of your time. You need to be, I think self-aware so that you can develop yourself, you can see what's working, what isn't working and sort of improve like your work life balance and your actual professional skills as well. What else do you need? I think having people around you helps. Well, so not feeling like you're just going to do it all yourself looking for collaboration or just looking for support in other people, be it online or in real life. And then there is the entrepreneurial side. Like I said earlier, like I think every freelancer has an entrepreneur inside them, but they have to in order to realize that their services are worth selling. But then others take it up a gear, maybe they start to productize their services. So, they like creating packages or may be, and I see this a lot, you know, people are starting to create actual digital products or physical products in the case of illustrators and designers. Maybe they are creating apps, you know and then on top of that stuff like courses and communities. So, they're realizing that, they can sit back and wait for other people to pay their bills but offering them work but also if they can create another revenue stream and could be in charge of that themselves. And actually I think that's in there, mixed in there is a key thing is that having, I think if you want to be successful long-term, it helps if you have multiple revenue streams that all of your eggs aren't in one basket and that if certain things die off slightly, you can pick up others. But definitely the more, you don't have to be an entrepreneur, you don't have to call yourself an entrepreneur. But the ones who take up a gear certainly have that element in them that lets them see opportunities and start embracing the business side of it. And in fact, some of the people I’ve spoken to have taken it further and you know, brought on employees and created agencies or production houses and ended up effectively not being freelancers but going further. And then some of them decided they don't like that. They don't like managing people. They've got too far away from the creative side and so they pay strip it back down again. Cause that's the great thing is that the core of it, you'll still have freelance or you still have your skills. You can just retreat back into that. Yeah and like me, myself, I have grown my business by bringing on other freelances to work with me. So, I'm selling more than just my skills. And so, there's, having your eyes open to those opportunities, listening to your clients or potential clients and seeing ways that you can help them and being helpful and nice. Like these are all things I think that can help you have a successful career as a freelancer.

18:15

Ramesh: Excellent segment, excellent segments, Steve. Thank you very much for that, those insights. So, couple of other areas we typically have discussion on our podcast is what I call the first paying customers. For any business person entrepreneur when they're starting out. The biggest fear is how do they get the first paying customer. Once you get the first paying customer, the anxiety levels go down and then hopefully you can get a referral or a testimonial from them that will lead to a second paying customer. So, what do you advise these freelancers who are starting on their own? I mean, what are the different strategies that you give them or tell them that they should go after to get the first paying customers?

18:57

Steve: I think one of the key things to begin with is to think about the people you already know. So that might be friends and family. So, like tell your people. When you're a freelancer you have to go out there and make opportunities. So, tell people, because I think we even neglect like even our brothers, sisters, cousins, parents, like they're not just solo people. They know, they have connections all over, but you won't even be aware of. So, you have to let people know when it is and actually even telling them what it is can be quite useful cause it forces you to think about what it is that you actually do. I guess your elevator pitch, you know, you should be able to vocalize it. And then also the people that you used to work for, let loads of the guests that are being freelance podcast have found their first clients through either being hired by the company that they used to work for or from people who were within that company who have since moved on. So, there's that key thing of not burning your bridges. And then quite a lot of people give freelance job sites a chance. And you know, some of those have better reputations than others, so I won't get into this, but certainly here's the thing with those sites. In theory that are clients approaching those sites with a job, they want doing and money ready to pay it. And so actually if you can put forward a good pitch and not sell yourself short and it is a good way to get started because you can start to build your portfolio and maybe your confidence and lots of people would say they were based to the bottom. And I would say that you should always just remember you don't have to work for anybody you don't want to. And not for price but you don't want to. But I know lots of freelances who have had a lot of success on those sites. Social media is really powerful. It's a great way, not just, I guess board cause what you do, you know, share your portfolios and stuff. But to connect with people, to connect with other freelances, because you have to realize they're not like the competition. So, to connect with people they might end up referring work to you. Also, to follow companies that you want to work with. You know, gets in, know people. Don't just pitch to them straight away. But just to I guess build up a connection. So, one day when somebody, it's amazing how many people, for example, on Twitter or LinkedIn suddenly say, Hey, I'm looking for this job, I'm looking for a graphic designer and you'll say, Oh, I'm a graphic designer and say, Oh, I'm aware of that person. Cause I’ve seen their little avatar so many times. So actually, social media is a really useful one. And LinkedIn, the obviously it depends where your potential clients are. Obviously, it’s a really useful one for lots of people. Then there's the wave, like I mentioned earlier, I sent out loads of cold emails and some of them have turned into extremely valuable long-term gigs.

22:08

Ramesh: So, email is not dead, huh?

22:11

Steve: Definitely not. I think if you, as so long as you pitch it right. You know, so long as you're not, so long as you're researching who the person is and you've actually got a reason why you're contacting them and what they want, what you're offering them. Or you know, lots of illustrators do this, for example, you send them something in the post that's going to get you standing out even more. And I’ve even knocked on doors and I’ve spoken to people on the podcast to knocked on doors and introduced themselves. I did that like years ago when I worked in radio, I went and knocked on doors of an independent production company in London. And it was so rare that anyone did that, that the managing director came out to see me. And I ended up doing work for them. And then I guess probably, like one of the biggest things is just meeting people like getting out there and it might be to networking events, be it more formal ones or more informal one meet ups, whatever it works, meeting people online, meeting people in person, going to conferences and just not being shy, actually putting yourself forward. One of my guests said that you just have to keep meeting people. That was like, he was convinced that was the key to it. Just keep meeting people and the reason freelancing kind of gets easier as time goes on is just because you get to meet more people. So yeah, I reckon those are good places to start when you are first starting out.

23:40

Ramesh: Excellent. So, let me switch gears a little bit and let's talk about Steve Folland. So, Steve as a person, right. So, who are you, what motivates you? What inspires you? What are your hobbies? Just talk about you, if you could

23:57

Steve: Well, like I mentioned, my kids what motivate me. But to a certain extent they still do. And also, they, as far as hobbies go, they pretty much to sucks up all of my time as well. So, I'm definitely at this, but gladly because they're at this age, they are aged six and nine, nearly 10. They're at that age where actually they still like me, pretty much most of the time. So yeah, just being, you know, being freelance, the podcast is so demanding, and my work is so demanding and family time is actually the rest of it sort of just becomes hanging out with friends and stuff when you get a chance rather than a hobby. You know, I used to go salsa dancing, you know, in my twenties, and I don't get to do that anymore. Recently though, I have started doing way more fitness, which was really linked like to just getting older frankly, and not wanting to have that dad belly. And so just, I do realize that staying fit gives me more energy into my work. I'm really not like a gym type person, but I’ve been going and because of our son has been learning tennis and so I’ve been playing tennis against him, so I’ve started playing tennis. So, it's yeah, it sounds terribly dull. I want to tell you something, like I go skydiving and kites. I don't, I barely watch. I barely even have time to watch TV and films and stuff like that, so it's not exciting.

25:35

Ramesh: That's, that's fine. That's fine. Couple of things. Like going back, looking at your own journey any things that you think you should have done differently but not in a regretful way, but things that would have improved in many aspects of what you are doing right now?

25:57

Steve: I always kind of think the only real regret or the only thing I would've done differently was years ago when I worked in radio and I always had this thing, you know, I wanted to be on like the biggest radio station in the UK, you know, like to be a really big presenter. And I ended up on the breakfast show of this sort of commercial station just North of London, but it was relatively small, but I had so much controller I could play whatever I wanted. It was crazy. We had so much fun and I just got comfortable and I always thought that just because I was good at what I would do. Eventually somebody at the big radio stations would notice. It was stupid. What I should have been doing was going out there and putting my demo out and making opportunities for myself. Like one, I was sitting there at the end of the, I guess the street where the big radio stations were thinking they might notice me. Other people were knocking on the door of those buildings where the radio stations, other people were climbing through the windows. And so, it made me realize in hindsight that being good isn't good enough. Like you actually have to push yourself forward and make opportunities if you want stuff to happen. And that was something that I then learned and has made me much better as a freelancer because I realized that, you know, if I decide I quite fancy speaking at conferences like I did last year, that's not going to happen unless I start applying for conferences or I tell people about it and then they go, Oh, actually I know somebody who's organizing the meet up. How about you? Like, stuff doesn't happen unless you start taking positive steps to make it happen. And I learned that by just getting comfortable and not pushing myself forward and I'm not letting that happen again

27:46

Ramesh: Excellent. Now we can’t go back and do it, but as you are talking about that pushing into one thought that came to my mind is my belief that anything a product or service is only 30% of the business. The remaining 60 to 70% is a marketing slash, promotion. And then, you know, all those aspects. Right. I agree with you. So last question Steve. I mean you talk to a bunch of people, 200 plus freelancers and you have your own experiences. So, what advice would you give to people who are aspiring entrepreneurs, but they're just waiting to see what they should do?

28:31

Steve: Oh, I think one thing is to stay close to your finances, keep your overheads low. I reckon that translates nicely between freelances and entrepreneurs of any sort. Also, especially as a freelancer. But you know, you get to define what your vision of success is as well. You know, it's wonderful, but we live in this world where there were so many people sharing their experiences online. But I think you have to be really careful about what are you actually aspiring to and what are you trying to achieve? And so just because somebody is living one set of lifestyles doesn't mean that is what you're after. So, I know what I want, and I don't want to like hire a big office with lots of staff and stuff. I like the fact that I can stay really agile bringing on freelances and being there for my family and picking them up from school and stuff like that. So, I think be really clear about what your success, what you want to achieve is and that can change over time. It's fine for that to change. So, yeah. And then I think just time, time and patience, perseverance. Again, so many people feel, it feels like they're in a bit of a rush and actually something to be said for just consistently turning up and doing good work or putting out that podcast or that video, like being regular and yes, you have to keep promoting it and pushing forward and telling people about stuff. Yeah, it can take a little bit longer. I think sometimes people in a bit too much rush and possibly that, you know, that crosses over into lots of different business fields as well. Sometimes companies grow way too quickly. Trying, you know, and they lose control of it. I swear there were a lot of freelancers in this world who are probably way more profitable than a lot of companies. I sometimes look at these massive companies which suddenly collapse. Isn't that ridiculous? I am actually more profitable than that massive company because they're living on such small margins and they've grown so big out of greed that suddenly everything has collapsed underneath them. Whereas actually I can adjust and be flexible. And so actually I'd rather be where am. So yeah, just don't get dragged into other people are doing and do what you want to do. It's cool to be inspired, but you don't have to be sucked in.

31:09

Ramesh: Yeah, that's right. Hey, Steve. Excellent discussion conversation. Thank you very much for people who are listening. For other excellent episodes like this go to www.rameshdontha.com and go under the podcast. You will get it there. So, Steve, thank you very much for coming in.

31:26

Steve: Thank you. I've really enjoyed that. Good luck with it all. Really appreciate it.

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Guest: Bob Burg

Company / Business name: Burg Communications Inc

Bob Burg is a sought-after speaker at company leadership and sales conferences sharing the platform with everyone from today’s business leaders and broadcast personalities to even a former U.S. President.

Bob’s Favorite Books (Click on the links below to buy)

Bob is the author of a number of books on sales, marketing and influence, with total book sales of well over a million copies. His book, The Go-Giver, coauthored with John David Mann, itself has sold over 850,000 copies and it has been translated into 28 languages. His and John’s newest parable in the Go-Giver Series is The Go-Giver Influencer.

Bob is an advocate, supporter and defender of the Free Enterprise system, believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve. He is also an unapologetic animal fanatic, and is a past member of the Board of Directors of Furry Friends Adoption, Clinic & Ranch in his town of Jupiter, Florida.

Tools / Resources mentioned

Gmail, Xero for accounting, and Intercom as a CRM

Show Notes

Bob started his journey as a news anchor but switched to Sales and later into speaking. His first realization to be a successful entrepreneur is to grow from inside which manifests in success outside.

Bob’s entrepreneurial journey started with a side hustle of selling someone else’s audio cassette program and later his own cassette program. After his speaking engagements became paid engagements, Bob started venturing into writing books to establish himself as an expert.

Bob then talked about his book ‘The Go-Giver Influencer’ which is about influencing people through pull as opposed to push. This type of influencing makes everybody a winner and longer-lasting.

Bob talked about his philosophy of being ‘an advocate, supporter, and defender of the free enterprise’ and the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to the number of people they serve. Being entrepreneurial makes the capitalism work and capitalism serves the people far better than any other ‘ism.

Bob’s advice to startup founders and aspiring entrepreneurs is to place the interests of others first, build relationships, and follow through with human touch. Bob, based on his own experience, advises entrepreneurs to embrace change as change is inevitable whether you like it or not. Tells entrepreneurs that they don’t think they need to go alone and rely on mentors and having a system.

Episode Transcript

00:02
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance on possibilities. Today I'm very, very honored to have a distinguished guest. His name is Bob Burg. You might already know about Bob. Bob is a very sought-after speaker at company leadership and sales conferences, sharing the platform with everyone from today's business leaders and broadcast personalities to even a former us president, Bob is the author of number of books in sales and marketing and influence with total book sales of well over a million copies. Believe it or not, his book, the go giver coauthored with John David Mann. Its self has sold over 850,000 copies and it has been translated into 28 languages and is the latest in the Go-Giver series. John and Bob have worked on this book called the Go-Giver influencer. Bob, welcome.

01:12

Bob: Thank you Ramesh. It's so great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

01:17

Ramesh: Actually, I don't know where to start. I'll be very honest with you, but I think that this is, because you are so well established by now. I would not start with what you're doing currently because we all know what you're doing currently. I want to go back to how have you started, I'm sure you did not start out as the inks at top 100 influencers of all-time kind of in a pedigree. So, you must have started somewhere. If you could just tell us how you started your journey.

01:47

Bob: Well, I began in broadcasting, first on radio and then on television. I was the late-night news anchor for a very, very small network affiliate in the Midwestern United States. So, it didn't pay particularly well, but I’ve got a lot of experience and that was good. But I really wasn't a very good news person and it wasn't long before I, as I like to say, graduated into sales. Now the problem was I knew nothing about selling and the company that I started working for, their training, let's say, wasn't very good. Actually. It wasn't that it wasn't good, it was non-existent. I was kind of on my own. And I floundered for a few months. And then while I was in a bookstore one day, and this is about 40 years ago or so, so quite a while ago, I came across a couple of books. One was by Tom Hopkins, one was by Zig Ziglar. And I bought their books and I began to study them, and I really, really studied them. And then just as importantly, of course, I began to apply the information they were teaching. And in a fairly quick period of time, my sales began to do very well. And you know, at that point I was encouraged, and I began really getting into personal development. I realized right away that that a success in selling, success in business, success as an entrepreneur was really about growing yourself from the inside. And that inside success manifest itself outside. And so, I began reading all the, you know, the great classic, such as how to win friends and influence people, thinking big, think and grow rich, you know, all those. So eventually work my way up to sales manager of another company. And you know, as time went on, I began teaching other people what was working for me and its sort of morphed into a speaking business.

03:46

Ramesh: I see. So, it's at some point then you quit sales or is it I don't know if that's the right path you took and then you started a full time into speaking and other engagements.

03:59

Bob: Yeah, though I never stopped selling you know, I'm still a sales person to this day. You know, I just sell a different product and myself, you know, as well as our books and various other resources. But no, it's, you know, still selling. But yes, I began a speaking business and like anything else, it's a business and so you need to learn how to sell and market your services and run the business in such a way that it's a, you know, that it's a, a profitable, sustainable business.

04:32

Ramesh: Alright. So, one of the things that a we talk a lot about on the show is how do you transition from working for somebody working for yourself. So, you were a sales manager and then you really did quite well because you're investing in yourself in a self-development. And then it was the transition sudden, like you said, I'm not going to work for somebody, I'm going to work for myself. Or was there a like a side hustling kind of way? How, how, how did you manage the transition?

05:01

Bob: Yeah, I did it as a side hustle first in that I started, I actually sold someone else's, back then it was audio cassette taped programs. And so, they taught me how to do free speeches all over the place at different civic clubs, groups, organizations, all types of, you know, company, different things where I'd speak for 30 minutes and then I would sell the tapes. And so that was very good experience. So, I did hundreds of talks for free, although I was also able to make some money from it too. And sell a really good product that was the other person's but eventually I decided to, you know, transition into my own business. And I developed my own at the cassette tape program on the topic that I was doing. And eventually once I got to the point where I felt I was ready to make it full time, that's what I did. But it, you know, it was still a struggle at first and there were times that, you know, I didn't know how much longer I was going to be in business and more than one, more than one occasion, I checked the want ads of the newspaper, which many of your listeners may not even know what that is, the want ads or the newspaper back then, that was a big, that was a big thing. But fortunately, I was able to have a couple of things happen at just the right time and it kept me in the business.

06:24

Ramesh: Hey Bob, Actually, you touched upon another topic I was going to get into. You said there were some tough times and you are somehow able to manage and some things you know, came through that helped you. Okay. So, if I can touch upon, how did you manage those tough times? Was there an internal grit that you had resilience you had or externally somebody was helping you manage? Or how did you manage those downtimes?

06:51

Bob: Well, you know, I mean, downtimes are uncomfortable, so you know, I think when people say, well, just, you know, realize it's all for the best and just have a good attitude. Oh, you do have to have a good attitude, but you do have to realize it's for the best. But that doesn't mean we're happy with it. I mean, it's tough. It's lousy when businesses aren’t good or even when it is good, but it's not sustainable, and so yeah, I mean, you handle it just by handling it. You basically, you sell yourself into success. So, in other words, you know, typically, and this is assuming you're running the business correctly, so that when you have clients and customers, it's profitable. Assuming that's the case, typically you need more clients and customers. So, you continue to sell, and you sometimes may feel like, Oh, this is just, you know, it's hopeless or it's useless, well, that's a decision you've got to make. But the chances are it's not hopeless that if you just keep on prospecting and connecting with people and you know, providing people the opportunity to buy that it's going to happen. Sometimes you just got to work hard your way out of a situation.

08:13

Ramesh: So, and then you switched into public speaking. It was the public speaking itself enough for you to sustain your business or what you are selling some product or service. And then public speaking was wrapped around the product or service or how did that mix happen?

08:32

Bob: Once I went into business for myself as a speaker and did it full time where it was my own product that I was selling. I had a, again a cassette tape program, which was pretty much my, at that time when I developed, ended up developing a couple of them, but at the time, there was one main cassette program. And what I would do is I would I did charge a fee for speaking. I learned how to market myself as a speaker, as a professional paid speaker. But of course, at that time it was not a very high fee. And so, I also at those events would sell a cassette tape program. And you know, those two together, again created enough income that, you know, I was able to struggle my way through. But you know, after a while, thank goodness it got to a point where it was, where as I like to say, it became sustainable.

09:27

Ramesh: Excellent. So, I think in every person's journey I see couple of inflection points. So, things that really you know, transform them from an also ran into no, suddenly an influencer kind of stuff. I mean, what was the transformation in your journey? Was it the speaking thing or afterwards we'll get into the book again, but what were the inflection points in your journey?

09:53

Bob: Well, my big challenge with the speaking in terms of the sustainability was I was a one-man operation, so I was selling my engagements and then I was out on the road speaking. And of course, when I'm out in the road speaking, I'm not selling anymore engagements. So there was that cycle right of, and eventually you know, I had to get to a point where I was willing to hire someone part time at first who then grew into full time, who could, you know, help with the marketing and selling and the logistics and the different things that freed me up and made it so I could do what I do best, which was the selling and the speaking. And so, you know, once that happened, But it's always difficult. You know, the question is so often the question is so often asked, when do you know, when do you know how to when the time is right to you know, take someone on. You can't really afford it, but you really can't afford not to. And that's the what you got to just make that decision and go for it. And it can be very, very difficult. I don't know of any magic bullet answer. It was very scary

11:09

Ramesh: I call it working for the business versus working on the business.

11:13

Bob: Well, that the key. And I mean, that's, you know, in that goes back to Michael Gerber's excellent books on the E myth and so forth. We've got to be, we've got to set up the business from the start so that as quickly as possible, it is sustainable. But at first you are everything.

11:29

Ramesh: That is true. So, Bob, at some point then you grew to become an author and then a very successful author. So how did that writing thing come into being?

11:43

Bob: So, this was, it was actually very utilitarian. Okay. I did it because I was at a national speaker’s association meeting. I'd been in business for a year. I was on the cusp of, you know, doing well and a few people there said Burg, if you want to take your business to the next level, you need to write a book. You need to get yourself positioned as the expert. You can also, it's easier to market yourself and sell yourself. When you have a book, there's more credibility and get higher fees, you're more desirable and you know everything. And it turned out to be great advice. So again, it was just utilitarian purposes for, I wrote that book. I didn't really want to write a book. I did it because it was going to help position me better. And it did. After that my books that I wrote after that were because I felt I had something to say that I really wanted to say and wanted to share. And you know, and so all the rest of the books I’ve authored and coauthored have all been for those reasons. But the very first book was because I basically needed to write a book for my business.

12:46

Ramesh: Correct. So, Bob if you could talk a little bit about your Go-Giver influencer, I mean, that is a new parable as you call it. What is it about, and then what are your beliefs that you're conveying through the book?

13:01

Bob: Well, we really wrote the book because we wanted to take the topic and the concept of influence to a much deeper level. Because influence is so important. When you think about it on a very basic level hat is influence? Well, it can be defined as the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. Now that's the definition. It's not really the essence of influence though. The essence of influence is pull, pull as opposed to push. We often hear the question; how far can you push a rope? And the answer is not very far, at least not very fast or very effectively. And that's why great influencers don't push. They don't try to push their will on people. They don't try to push people and manipulate people. It's not sustainable. Bob: And it's typically not even, it's typically not even instantly doable. Sometimes it is, but it's the wrong way to do things. And again, it's not sustainable. Pull or attraction is the way to influence successfully and sustainably. What do I mean by pull or attraction? It's understanding that, and again, I’ll go back to Dale Carnegie, what I believe was his underlying premise in his classic how to win friends and influence people where he wrote, ultimately, people do things for their reasons, not our reasons. So, the most effective influencer knows that they need to ask themselves questions to make sure their focus focuses on the right place, which is the other person. In other words, how does what I'm asking person to do? How does it align with their goals, with their wants, right, with their needs, with their desires? How does what I want this other person to do? How does it align with their values? What problems am I helping them to solve? How am I helping them to be happier? How am I helping them to you know, achieve this or that what have you? And when we ask ourselves these questions thoughtfully, intelligently, genuinely, authentically, not as a way to manipulate another human being and to doing our will, but as a way of building everyone in the process. Now that's influence, that’s influence. You know, I like to say ultimate influence or genuine influences, the ability to work with others in such a way that everyone comes out a winner and being able to deal with others in a way that we make them feel genuinely good about themselves, about the situation and about us. And that's the ultimate in people's skills, which is the big differentiator. People skills is the difference maker between the person who maybe attains a reasonable level of success and that person who just attains enormous levels of success and achievement and seems to have the world just, you know, really eating out of their hands.

16:22

Ramesh: So, thank you very much, Bob. That was a pretty insightful discussion there. The other thing is you also have a podcast. I mean, you're doing so many things. You are hitting balls out of the park every day. So, what's your podcast about, what are you focusing there?

16:45

Bob: Well, the podcast is really featuring people. Other, you know, entrepreneurs' and authors, thought leaders, what have you, that really have a set of skills to bring to share with the audience. That in each of these people who were featured as guests, they really all tend to run their business, what we would call the go giver way. So, there are people who have a real true focus on bringing value to the lives of others touching the lives of numerous people would their value and also being very financially successful as well.

17:23

Ramesh: Okay. So, this is the question I ask. I'm in myself about other people and then some people asked me as well, a successful person like you who have done quite well. Financially, I'm sure you've done well. And then with the influence wise, you've done well, you've sold over 1 million books, but you're still willing to come on shows like these podcasts. And hustling, so why, I mean, is that a definitely, I don't believe it's a need, but you still are trying to hustle on a daily basis. What's the motivation here, Bob?

18:04

Bob: I love what I do. You know what I mean, There's nothing really more to it than that. I love what I do. Being able to share a message that I feel brings a certain amount of value to the world and people seem to be receptive to it. And I love learning. I love continuing to learn. I'm a voracious reader and listener and so, you know, because I have the opportunity to chat with so many people like yourself and you know, it helps me to continue to learn and feel good about myself.

18:35

Ramesh: Thanks Bob. So actually, one sentence I read on your bio, on the new website, it was interesting to me, so I just wanted to get a little deeper. You tried to say that you're an advocate, supporter and defender of the free enterprise system believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve. So, question is, why did you feel the need to put the sentence out there? So, you must believe in something that you thought is necessary for people to know.

19:03

Bob: Well, that's a very, very insightful comment, Ramesh and that really is, and you're absolutely positively right. And I mentioned that free market, free enterprise. Because they're really, you know, at least in the, in the United States, and I think in other countries there is really such a misnomer and such a misunderstanding of what true capitalism and free markets represent. You know, and by the way, there's a big difference between free market capitalism and something called cronyism, which we have quite a bit of in the United States, which is where special interest groups and oftentimes big business, big industry get together and they buy the vote, you know, they buy special rules and regulations through their contributions to the government you know, through the politicians, through lobbyists and so forth. And they create an unfair advantage. They basically keep competition out of the marketplace and it's really, it's really a crime. I mean, it's really horrible that this goes on and it hurts everyone. But unfortunately, too many people think that's capitalism. That is not capitalism. That's cronyism. And it has really nothing to do with true free market capitalism, which simply means no one is forced to buy from anyone else. People do business with each other because they believe it's in their best interest to do so. And that means that it's better for the consumer. It's better for the business. It's better for the economy as a whole. Free market has resulted in an immense uptick in the standard of living in every single country that has tried it. Meanwhile the opposite of free market capitalism, which is socialism and its uglier cousin communism has resulted in massive poverty and starvation, jailing, killings everything bad. And you know, on the surface, socialism seems so generous. Right. But it's not, it's not, it's about control. And what it does is it doesn't honor human nature and people have a need to be free. And people have a need to be rewarded for their work and that reward doesn't necessarily have to be money. But for some people that is. Really, free market capitalism is not about money. It's about freedom and it's about people living their lives and pursuing happiness in whatever way they see fit, providing of course, that they don't infringe upon the rights of anyone else to do the same.

21:54

Ramesh: That is very true. Thank you very much Bob. That's great. You're also on a personal level, unapologetic animal fanatic. And a past member of the board of directors of fury friends’ adoptions. The question is are you biased towards a particular kind of animal or all animals?

22:14

Bob: I love all animals. You know, I grew up with dogs and I seem to have an affinity with dogs, their sense of loyalty and unconditional love and so forth. But I love all animals. I can't think of an animal that I don't love.

22:28

Ramesh: Okay, excellent. So, let's get into a little bit of on the advice to other people aspiring entrepreneurs. So, your own journey as well as the people that you talk to on a regular basis in their podcast. And then of course people that you've touched you know and, in your journey, so there are certain characteristics of people who are continuing to be successful versus people who are struggling to be successful. So, what are the attributes or characteristics that you have noticed in the people who are making an impact and then being influential?

23:03

Bob: Well, I think that they really, and this is law three from the Go-Giver, which is they place the interest of others first. They focus on their customers and I'm talking about from the moment they meet that person and through the relationship building process, through the sales process, the follow up and follow through the referral process. There are always you know, we say placing the other person's interests first. Now let me qualify that by saying we don't mean that they are a doormat or that they're a martyr or self-sacrificial. Absolutely not at all. But they understand that what I call the golden rule of business is that all things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like, and trust. And you know, there's no faster, more powerful or more effective way to elicit those feelings toward you from others than by genuinely and authentically moving from an I focus or me focus to what we call and other focus, looking for ways to make your win all about their win. And these are the people who are the most sustainably successful business people.

24:20

Ramesh: Excellent. That is only one thing. And I’ve seen that from my own experience. I see that from experience 100% agree with you Bob. So, the next question is looking at your journey and I don't want to talk about in a regretful way, but things that you could have done or should have done sooner or something differently, whatever that is, you think as a piece of advice to other people?

24:47

Bob: Well, I think I resisted change at different stages of my career. And at a certain point, this was I think in a late nineties as the internet was really, really starting to get big. I mean, it was still well before social media, but the internet had now started to really catch on. And I really resisted at first, because I'm not very proficient when it comes to technology. But also, my business was at that point, we were really successful, and it was working well as it was. And I didn't want to have to change. And what I found out was it didn't matter whether I wanted to change or not, change was happening, and I was either going to adapt and adopt or be left behind and I really let myself get left behind and I had to kind of rebuild my business again. So, I would've adopted to and adopted technology a lot quicker. But I think again, that's a symptom, not a cause. The cause was not understanding that I had to be willing to change regardless of whether I want it to or not.

25:48

Ramesh: Yeah, very insightful there. How about the social media? Do you think you adapted to the advent of the social media, especially with people talking about video being the next big thing and things like that?

26:01

Bob: I wasn't excited about social media, but I learned my lesson and I realized I was going to have to you know, get involved with it. And now social media is a very, very big part of my business and I have a very big presence on, you know on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and my presence on Instagram is growing. And we do a lot of videos and you know, I'm very fortunate, my business partner who I’ve had for the last 10 years and who's an absolute genius and she also happens to be very technologically oriented.

26:35

Ramesh: I see. I think that's a good advice having a very good business partner definitely helps you on that one. Excellent. So last question Bob here. I know you give advice to the leaders and then the management team, but here we are talking about people have probably jobs and trying to do a side hustle or they want to be solopreneurs. So, these are the kinds of people, what pieces of advice would you give to people starting out or started, but you know, going through that chasm?

27:09

Bob: Well, first I would suggest you know, they read Michael Gerber's work you know the E-myth. Because, you know, he has some very important points there. Carol Roth also has a great book, the entrepreneurial equation, and there's, you know, there's others and of course making sure they tap into their coaches, such as you and so to really find the information. Don't feel they have to go it alone. Instead, you know, tap into the people who, you know, whether through their books, through their podcasts and through their coaching, such as you and so forth, and learn the information, have someone working with you, but you know, decide what you want to do and then seek out the information or what I call find the system. And I define a system as simply the process of predictably achieving a goal based on a logical and specific set of how-to principles. The key being predictability. It's been proven that by doing A, you'll get the desired result of B. Well then, you know, you need to do A and keep doing A until you get the desired result of B. And then, you know, I just say, act. And then stay persistent because understand you know the road is going to be paved with no’s and you got to get past the nos. You got to just keep going, get past them, understand that you're going to get a bunch of them, and that's okay. You know, you just keep going. You don't have to enjoy them, but you just keep going past them until you get the yeses you need.

28:44

Ramesh: Excellent. Bob, thank you very much. It's very insightful discussion and then lots of you know, great advice. Thank you very much.

28:53

Bob: Well, thank you, Ramesh. I appreciate you.

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Guest: Paul Benson

Company / Business name: Financial Autonomy Podcast

Paul is a financial planner and owner of guidance financial services. He helps Australians plan and invest so they can gain the choices in life that they deserve. In addition to that, Paul also hosts a very successful podcast. His podcast is called financial autonomy podcast.

Books/Tools/resources

Book: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Tools: Gmail, Xero for accounting, and Intercom as a CRM

Show Notes

Financial Autonomy podcast has been going 2 years, however Paul has been a Financial Planner for 20 years, running his own practice since 2006. Started the Financial Autonomy podcast following the realization that the traditional work/life plan is far too narrow, but most people don’t get the choice to do anything else.

2008-2009 period was very challenging with share markets diving – Paul reduced his staffing, his wife came in to assist so that we could retain cash flow within the household, focused in on a particular retirement strategy that held some appeal during this period – just didn’t quit!

Paul’s advice to entrepreneurs? You don’t have to go all in from day one – build and plan – real life is not like the movies. Work out your marketing plan at the outset. You likely know your stuff, but unless you have a way to let the world know about it, you wont succeed. Monitor your cash flow – it’s no good making a profit at the end of the year if you cant pay your rent in month 3.

Don’t fall for the prescribed life of having to work until you’re in your 60’s and then having to retire – life can be far more varied than that.

Episode Transcript

00:02
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneurial podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance, and possibilities. Today I have a guest from across the world, the very first time from Australia. His name is Paul Benson. Paul is a financial planner and owner of guidance financial services. He helps Australians plan and invest so they can gain the choices in life that they deserve. In addition to that, Paul also hosts a very successful podcast. His podcast is called financial autonomy podcast. Hi Paul. Welcome.

00:50

Paul: Hello. Ramesh. Thanks for having me on. All right, so let's start with your podcast itself. You are a financial planner. Instead of just a having a financial services business, you wanted to start a podcast, why?

01:08

Paul: Well, initially the train of thought was a random marketing strategy. I guess the little bit of backstory there is, I’ve been a passionate podcast consumer for a long time now. You know, I had on runs and walks and that sort of stuff. I've have been enjoying listening to podcasts for a long time. And I guess, I know for your listeners it's about entrepreneurship and building up business. And I’ve been running my own business for a while and something that I’ve discovered that at least for myself and I think others too, is easy to underestimate, is how challenging it is to get a successful marketing strategy. Something that's repeatable and that generates a positive ROI. And so, I’ve tried all sorts of things over the years and I’ll have to say most of them haven't worked. And so along the journey decided, look, I love podcasts and how about we give that a go as a marketing Avenue and almost surprisingly, but it's actually worked. And I know that obviously you're a podcaster as well, so you've discovered a similar outcome. But yeah, it's one that's been successful for us as a marketing channel and something that we've expanded on in a few different areas since, which you could maybe touch on later, but certainly in terms of was start the podcast. It was about marketing to grow the financial planning practice.

02:26

Ramesh: Excellent. So, I mean it looks like you have crossed 100 plus episodes. Congratulations on that one.

02:33

Paul: Thank you.

02:36

Ramesh: Are most of your podcast listeners from Australia or you have listeners from across the world?

02:39

Paul: Yes. Look, today we've focused on Australia and that's really because thus far as a site was a marketing channel for the financial planning business. And financial planning is pretty local. For instance, your, you know, 401K like in the United States are quite different to what we have here in Australia. So that's been a little challenging to translate. Down the right I do have some interest in trying to expand beyond Australia, but we might just need to have a slightly different offering there. So yeah, to this point it's been quite Australia focused.

03:13

Ramesh: Excellent. So, Paul, because we don't know much about the entrepreneurship in Australia, I would like to dig a little bit deeper into entrepreneurship in Australia. First let me start with some statistics. In the US, the more I read, I discovered that 70% of the U S adults who would like to start a business, right. Actually only 15% do something about it. So, the number of businesses that get started at less than 15% of whatever. So, there is a huge gap and there are a lot of factors why that is the case. We can get into that later. But how has the scene there in Australia about entrepreneurship?

03:51

Paul: Yeah, look, I think in Australia, in the United States. I suppose I would think of them as cousins. You know, we're pretty similar. Obviously, we speak the same language and we both watched Netflix and you know, we are doing the same podcast. So, there's a lot of commonality between Australia and the United States. I, I would think from an entrepreneurship, probably not quite as strong as the United States. But nevertheless, obviously we're a capitalist society and you know, there's plenty of hungry people out here too.

04:20

Ramesh: Excellent. So, the question about your own journey you probably had a chance to go work for somebody else right after your college. Did you go work for somebody else? And then later on you started on your own path. Can you just go over the journey please?

04:36

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. So yes, look, I worked for a bank, one of the, one of the big banks here in Australia. And in fact, I worked there for 16 years. When I finished high school, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do at university. And so, I was, fortunately I got a job at a bank, a pretty low-level job, but nevertheless and then I guess I’ve got a bit more clarity as to what I wanted to study. And the bank was good enough to sponsor me through that. So, I ended up doing my degree on a part time basis, so a half load and working at the bank whilst I studied. So that worked quite well. And, and yeah, they supported me financially and gave me time off for exams and that sort of stuff. So that was excellent. And so, I ended up at the bank for 16 years and the final seven of those was as a financial planner. And so, I guess in a financial planning context, I sort of think of that as my apprenticeship, if you like, in the financial planning space. And then in 2006 I guess I got to the point and I know speaking to friends, it's not an uncommon one where you're enjoying a particular role that you're in, but the nature of big organizations is that is an expectation you're going to climb the corporate ladder. And I was a senior financial planner, I was in terms of actually sitting in front of clients and helping them with financial planning. I was as high as I could go. And the expectation was we'll, the next step is to become a team leader. And I didn't want to become a team leader. I liked planning. So, and I guess I had always harbored a bit of an ambition to have my own business. And so, in 2006, I made the leap and left the bank and started my own business. And at the time I had, you'd imagined as a financial planner, I'd thought a little bit about the numbers. And so, I had some accrued leaving things that I hadn't used. So that when I finished up, I had about eight months wages as a lump sum and then I guess was my runway to start the business. I was fortunate that I couldn't, in leaving the bank, you know, I couldn't approach my old clients. There are contract issues there. But nevertheless, some of the clients found me and which was lovely. And so that gave me a little bit of a start. And then I worked on growing organically and then an opportunity came up in 2008 where a planner was retiring and selling his business. And so, I was able to acquire that. And that was a sort of, it was a bit like hitting the fast-forward button for where I would have been you know, had I just continued to grow organically, just sort of pick up a group of clients and be able to work with those was fantastic. Now, 2008 was a challenging time and probably more challenging in the United States than in Australia. But I mean it was pretty global in terms of share markets had a horrible period and economies generally been doing it pretty tough. So, my timing perhaps wasn't brilliant there. But it's easy to see that in hindsight, we started negotiating in 2007 and these things take a while to come to fruition. And yeah, so look, there are issues with my timing, and I guess again, just thinking about your listeners and lessons that they can take. I suppose as a buyer, look, I’ve always felt I paid a bit too much for the business, but I think talking to everybody else, nearly every buyer thinks they pay too much and probably nearly every seller thinks that they didn't get enough for it. So, you know, to be cautious when you're, when you're buying a business, I would encourage people to consider that as a way to accelerate becoming viable as a self-employed person. It's certainly worked for me. But you know, be cautious on what you pay, but also recognize that no matter what you pay, you'll probably always end up feeling that you paid too much. I think that's just inherent in the nature of it. So yeah, so acquired that business and you know, there's been various bits and pieces that probably don't need the detail from there, but, you know, we've essentially grown and built from there. And you know, it's still not a huge business. I've got three staff and we look after a group of clients and you know, do our best to love them to death and make sure that they achieve the objectives that they're trying to achieve.

08:44

Ramesh: Excellent. Paul, that is a really, really good story. It gave us a lot of inside scoop on how you were feeling and what you were doing. So, but let me just dig a little bit about the 2008-2009 piece. I believe I read it on your blog itself, on your website. It was, it seemed like a tough time personally for you. I mean, not only that, you bought another practice and then the economy was in deep recession at the time. So were there times where you taught probably should go back or your regretting your decisions to study our own and then of course you are also bought something as well.

09:26

Paul: Yeah. Look, there's certainly, I guess after I bought the business any to do that required me taking on quite a bit of debt, the most debt I'd ever had in my life. And as you say, the economy was doing it tough. It wasn't quite as bad here in Australia, but nevertheless it was down. And the share market, which was particularly relevant for the business at the time, because a lot of our revenue was based on a percentage of client’s balances. It's less so these days. But at the time that was an important source. And so, client's balances went down because the share market went down. And so therefore our revenues went down. But of course, I still had a loan disservice. So, it was challenging. And certainly, I know I can quite vividly recall sitting down with my wife and talking about, well, gee, we might need to sell the house here. You know, cause it’s getting challenging as to how are we going to make this work. I mean, I had to at that time only had one staff member and I had to make him redundant, which was not a lot of fun. And that was actually in fact, prior to that, he'd already cut down to four days a week from five days a week to try and give us a bit more runway. But even then, you know, it was a tough time. So, it was challenging. I suppose in terms of going back, well, the reality is I had a debt there and I had to work my way through it. So, I guess I knew I could always go back. I left on good terms and back management and said that I would be welcomed back. So, I knew that there was a job waiting for me potentially if I wanted it, but that wasn't going to solve the problem of a pretty large debt. So, I really did just have to work hard. My wife actually says so, I only had one employee, well, I had two. One was sort of finish it up and I didn't replace them. And then the second person I had to make redundant, so my wife actually came in at the time she was at home with young children, so she came in and gave me a bit of administration support, so that at least as a household there was no money leaking out and we just really tighten the belt and just worked their way through. It was a challenging time, but we got there. To some extent the fact that markets were down, at least the clients that I'd taken on as part of the acquisition, they came to talk, you know, when things are going well...

11:44

Ramesh: Nobody wants to talk to you.

11:46

Paul: Yeah, yeah. Just, they're happy for things to tick over, that's fine. But when things are tough, it's like, gee, yeah, I do want to think about opportunities and at least that was good. There was an opportunity for me to sit down and really build relationships with clients and I had the time and I clearly had the desire to strengthen those relationships. And so, you know, even in bad times there are some positives to be gained. I guess also slightly had the challenge that the bank that had loaned me the money decided that they didn't want to be lending in the financial planning space any longer and therefore they all had a better two- or three-year loan. So, I had a little bit of time frame, but you know, that was an added bit of complexity that I didn't really stress that I didn't really need. And certainly, I’ve never done any business banking with that bank again. You know, that won't be forgotten. That was pretty disappointing that in difficult times the bank certainly wasn't there to support you and I guess that's certainly a learning I’ve taken from that period is these days I always have lines of credit loan facilities available, not drawn down, just available. During the good times when we are making good profits and always ticking over well because my experience is that in the hard times banks don't come in and help. Banks look after themselves. And there's no point in when times are tough go into the bank cap in hand and asking for help, because my experience is, they won’t. So, you need to go when you're in a position of strength and set up your facilities and it might cost you a little bit to keep those facilities open. But nevertheless, have them open and available so that in difficult times you don't have to be asking for five is you've got things lined up already.

13:28

Ramesh: Right, right. Hey very good. So now let me switch a little bit and then talk about your clients. Are there any entrepreneurs in your clients? Like what is the general mix of your clients with respect to salaried people and are retired versus entrepreneur’s kind of stuff?

13:48

Paul: Let's say well, relative to the broad population, I guess we tend to skew a little bit older. I mean, generally perhaps people in their twenties and even thirties might not have financial planning relationships, although increasingly in their thirties they do. I guess financial planning does become a bit more important as you approach retirement. You've got your retirement savings and you've got to know what to do about it. So, our client base would skew a little bit to the older demographic, but we've certainly got a mixed client in our thirties, forties. I don't have the stat, but if I was to take a stab, I would've thought the average age of our clients, probably mid-fifties, something like that on average, I'm guessing. In terms of employee to self-employed, I mean this is a mixture of both. The majority would be employee the same as the overall economy, but certainly we have some self-employed and business sign clients in the mix too.

14:44

Ramesh: Okay. So just talking about the self-employed people, I mean, you have discussions with them, you engage with them about the planning in terms of characteristics that you see, because one of the things that we always dig into a little bit is what differentiates the successful entrepreneurs from entrepreneurs who are struggling right across many spectrums, right? From a financial planning perspective. Speaking from your experience as you engaged with these people, entrepreneurs, self-employed and business people, what, what I mean some things I'm sure are coming out to you like it or some are proactive, some are reactive. Anything that you can talk about people you sense an entrepreneur which make them successful?

15:29

Paul: Oh, I think it's about spending habits and lifestyle habits. So, one particular client of mine who's been extremely successful in the building trade and yet you could cross him, you know, walking down the street and you would think he earned, you know, 20,000 a year. Like he's not in any way glamorous. I mean I’ve been to his house; his house is certainly impressive. But in a general context, cars he drives and this sort of stuff very down to earth, normal guy, not extravagant at all. The ones that I see struggle are the ones that feel the need to try a certain image. So, they feel that, well to demonstrate that I'm successful in my business, will I have to drive the Audi or the Porcha and I have to look a certain way and I’ll have to be loud and boisterous and you know, shout everybody at lunch, those type of people often. Then I sit down with them and we go through their personal balance sheet, It's dreadful. You know, they'll owe heaps of money on credit cards and all sorts of things. But their intent on portraying to the world this success and these big games and big noting themselves. And typically, they're the financial values. So yeah, look, that would be my observation. It's the more modest people that sort of keep their head down that are the successful ones.

16:52

Ramesh: So, the Warren Buffets of the world.

16:54

Paul: spot on.

16:55

Ramesh: Okay. Excellent. Yeah. So, he is clearly down to earth and all this stuff. Okay, good. So that's fine. So, let's talk about your business. You talked about growing your business right over the years. So, as you're growing the business, are you consciously looking at this is how I want to grow my business. Maybe the sudden segments, let's say, Hey, I want to go off for the building industry and I want to go after whatever, is that how it's working out? Or is it organically through word of mouth, your clients just bring in new clients? How does the growth happen for you?

17:33

Paul: So certainly, a combination. And I guess again, just thinking about lessons that, that I can share to help your listeners. I'd encourage them to be thinking about a combination too, because the reality is, so look over time we've thought about different focuses and different ideal clients and how we could communicate with different ideal clients. And sometimes that's worked and sometimes that hasn't worked. And if we put a hundred percent of our effort into saying, all right, this particular type of client is all we're going to focus on and everyone else we're going to turn away. Well, if that didn't play out, it would be a pretty ugly situation. And whereas what I tended to do is, all right, here's a particular segment that we think is interesting. So, let's work on how we can communicate that we exist and promoting our services to that particular group. But at the same time, continue to communicate to our existing clients that, Hey, if you're happy with what we're doing, plays refers to a friend. So that's something that we communicate regularly to our clients through different communications that we have with them. And then we also have relationships with other you know, professional people that we work with, most particularly accountants, but mortgage brokers and the like as well. So, relationships with other people that you know, you can build those relationships over time. And with I then if I have a client that has a financial planning need, they can refer those clients to us and then we various ways that we can make that work commercially. But you know, that's been an important source of new client acquisition for us too. So, I think it's important in a business, particularly once you've got a few staff and with that as a business owner comes responsibility. I mean, I know that my staff have got mortgages to pay and the like. And so that's a weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I've got to make sure there's money in the bank to cover their wages. And so, you definitely want to ensure that there's a few different strings to your bow from the marketing strategy point of view. Because I mean the other thing too is cyclical. So, like say as I mentioned accountants, we've got relationships with a couple of good accountants and I refer as clients, but accountants naturally have ebbs and flows in their own business. There are times where there were personal tax returns to do and they flat out. And then there are times where there's not and things are quieter. So, you'll tend to get waves of referrals from those partners at certain times of year and then nothing for perhaps the next six months. So again, you need, you need multiple avenues to your marketing approach. And so yeah, that's the way I’ve certainly done it.

20:08

Ramesh: Excellent. So, Paul, the other thing about business people is that they would like to differentiate in some way. So, and I'm sure you're competing with other financial planners in your area. So, you need to differentiate, I mean, how do you see yourself as differentiating in with respect to other people?

20:28

Paul: Yeah, that's a really good point in something that I’ve wrestled with really for the entirety of running the business. Because you're exactly right. There are lots of other financial planners as there are in your country and similar to over there in the United States. It's a pretty regulated industry and because you've got to comply with the regulation, of course, that tends to create a bit of uniformity in the industry. We're in a profession and so it's not easy to stand out. And yeah, it's certainly something that I’ve struggled with. But I guess that's something where the podcast has really helped, have got that focus as you touched on in the introduction, you know, our theme around the podcast and indeed we have a weekly email as well. And the weekly email is called gaining choice. And that's the same as the podcast as well. And that's just something having been working with clients for 20 years now. Something that I learned early on in financial planning discussions, we normally talk about goals because everything else sort of flows from there. What are your goals? And very often people are, they want to pay off the home loan, save for retirement, regular sort of stuff. But actually, what I found over the years is sure they want to achieve all that, but if we dig a little bit deeper than that, what they really want is the choice, the choice about when they want to retire. So very often if I'm sitting down with someone who's 45, it's difficult for them to say, well, I want to retire at 60 or 65. I don't know how they're going to feel at that point. It depends what happens with their job. It depends who their bosses or whatever they are doing. So really what they're saying is I want the choice to retire at age 60, now 65 or whatever that point might be, 50, whatever. So, I guess I’ve come to recognize that choice is what people are seeking. And so, we've used that as our theme, and I guess as our point of differentiation that what we try and solve for our clients is how they can gain choice in life. And for some people that's about retirement. For some people that's about moving from employment to self-employment. It might be about a career change. So, choice can look like all sorts of different things. And that's, I guess that's what we're trying to explore in the podcast. But yeah, that gaining choice. So that's been my way of differentiation. I mean, as you mentioned, we're at about a hundred episodes of the podcast and they go out weekly. So that tells you that it's been running for about two years and it was about six months in the incubation before it went live. So, it's about two and a half years that we've been running this. But of course, I’ve been running the business since 2006. So, it's certainly not the case that from day one I had this figured out and I'm sure, and I wouldn't profess to have it totally figured out now either. But I do feel that things are tracking along well. But I guess, you know, I wouldn't want listeners to take away that, you just wake up from day one in the morning and you just know your direction. Certainly, wasn't the case for me and for other people that I’ve spoken to, it's not the case for them either. In fact, I read just recently Charles Darwin, you know, theory of evolution and around the fact that people who have read his journals, he was sort of circling around the idea of evolution for years before he really just jelled. And I just really took that away is really useful and certainly applicable to me and I suspect applicable to a lot of other people. Sometimes you read articles or podcasts and it's like this sort of genius just woke up one morning and it was just all clear and in front of them and they knew exactly what to do. Well that hasn't been my experience. I've been trying different things and experimenting with different things and different targeting and trying to see what resonates and what captures people's attention. And it's really taken some time. And as I say, I don’t think we've, you know, I wouldn't claim that we've totally nailed it now either, but a couple of years into this whole financial autonomy project, it does feel like we've certainly found something that's working for people. And so that makes me very happy and I know then I wouldn't have been invited on your show. So, there's another good reason to be happy for it.

24:33

Ramesh: That's right. And Steve jobs said, if you really look into overnight success, it actually took 20 years in the making.

24:40

Paul: Well, there you go.

24:42

Ramesh: Yeah. So as the last, a couple of questions, maybe the last question is what are the three to five tips that you would like to give or advice you would like to give to that aspiring entrepreneurs?

24:56

Paul: Focus on your marketing strategy. I mean it's a bit of a given, you know, in my case I knew financial planning, whatever you're going to start your business, I would hope it's a given that the particular area that you're going to start your business, you know. But that's not much good if you don't have any clients, sooner or later someone's got to buy it, whether it's a B to B situation or a B to C situation. So, I would encourage people to really give a lot of thought to what their marketing strategy is going to be. Have multiple streams to that marketing strategy, have redundancies if plan A doesn't work, but at the end of the day, if your business isn't bringing in revenue, you're not going to survive. So that would be my number one strategy. One of the two strategy I think is just recognize that it's, it's a long game. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So sometimes I come across people who are going hell for leather and working 15-hour days, seven days a week. That's not smart. You're not going, your business isn't going to succeed or definitively succeed in the next six months or something. You need to be pacing yourself so that you can sustain your effort over an extended period of time. So, pacing and thinking about that long-term I think would be a key suggestion. And probably the other one is, as I mentioned earlier, thinking about your banking relationships and ensure that you've got things lined up when times are good. Don't get yourself in a position where you need to go to the banks when times are tough.

26:26

Ramesh: Wow. Phenomenal. Thank you. That's excellent advice Paul. Paul Benson from Australia, head of a guidance financial services and financial autonomy, podcasts running successfully for the last two plus years. Well, thank you very much for coming on early for you. I mean, not so early, but again. Thank you very much.

26:48

Paul: Wonderful. Thanks very much for having me on Ramesh.

26:51

Ramesh: Thank you, sir.

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Guest: Gene Caballero

Company / Business name: Greenpal Inc.

Gene Caballero is the Co founder of GreenPal Inc. GreenPal has been described as Uber for lawn care. Saw a need for this type of service due to my background in landscaping. We started by going door-to-door to see if homeowners would use a product like this and once we had that positive reinforcement, we decided to move forward with a company to start building it.

Books/Tools/resources

Book: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Tools: Gmail, Xero for accounting, and Intercom as a CRM

Show Notes

Greenpal is ‘Uber’ for lawncare connecting lawncare providers and landscaping professionals with consumers. Greenpal handles demand creation, scheduling, route optimization and payment processing. In return, Greenpal takes 5% commission.

Gene and his co-founder Zach Hendrix started Greenpal in 2012. Gene has been taking care of lawncare since high school and when he saw Uber & Lyft take off, he saw a similar model for lawncare as well.

Gene and Zach spent $125,000 for someone else to initially build a platform but after that company went broke, Gene decided to bring the development in-house and have a technical co-founder to take on this task. After 2 years or so, starting in 2014, Greenpal started accepting customers and have been profitable since 2016.

Gene and Zach cashed out their 401K money to start the initial investment and took the risk. The initial risk started paying off in 2016 but initially it was like rolling the dice.

Greenpal used Facebook creatively to start local FB groups to recruit homeowners and also used creative ways such as pet owners to grow affinity towards Greenpal. Greenpal is currently in 40 states in the US. Greenpak assesses the target markets based on local weather, landscaping habits etc. to decide if they should go after a market.

Gene gives the following advice. There is never enough money and enough time. Best thing is to get started now. Be passionate about your ideas. And talk to strangers about your ideas and not your family or friends to get an unbiased opinion.

Episode Transcript

00:02
Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance, and possibilities. Today we have a very exciting guest working in a very interesting business. His name is Gene Caballero. Gene is the co-founder of Green Pal Inc. And then the founders of Green Pal described the business Green Pal as the Uber for lawn care. I think now you get the picture hey Gene welcome.

00:45

Gene: Hey Ramesh, how are you? Glad to be on your podcast. Thank you so much.

00:49

Ramesh: So yeah, Green Pal just by the name, the way you guys described it, I think I clearly understand, but in your own words, we would like to know what Green Pal business all is about.

01:01

Gene: Yeah, so Green Pal has been described as Uber for lawn care and it's the easiest way for homeowners to find, schedule and pay their lawn guy. Also, we've kind of been coined as the first true operating system for landscaping professionals. So not only do we handle their demand creation, we also handle their scheduling, their route optimization and their payment processing.

01:29

Ramesh: So, if I understand your business correctly, that both the lawn care providers along with the customers, both of them will register on your platform. Is that right?

01:40

Gene: That is correct.

01:42

Ramesh: Okay. So, you're connecting them both and then in the process collecting some kind of accommodation or something like that?

01:49

Gene: Correct. Yes, we take 5% of everything that goes through the transaction. So, this industry is very antique when it comes to payment processing, when it comes to scheduling and when it comes to route optimization. So Green Pal technology basically brings all that in house to make both the vendors life easier and makes, you know, it makes it more convenient for the homeowner to find their lawn guy.

02:10

Ramesh: Excellent. So, Gene, when did you guys start Green Pal? And if you could just tell us the story of Green Pal, how it got started.

02:19

Gene: Yeah. So, we started in the spring of 2012 and I’ve kind of been in landscaping myself pretty much my whole entire life, you know, in middle school and high school, kind of mulling lawns for extra money. And then in college doing it for the summer as well, just to kind of, you know make extra cash. And when I graduated, I went, I went and got a corporate job. Surprisingly enough it was in tech sales, so kind of privy to you know the new technologies that were coming out, my territory was the West coast, so I had heard about Uber and Lyft and the on-demand platform. And knew that at some point that if homeowners were going to summon a stranger to come and pick them up, they would also do the same with lawn care. And so that's when we decided to move forward with Green Pal in 2012.

03:15

Ramesh: Okay. Was there a problem in the sense like for my care I, you know, ask my neighbor or somebody else instead of, Hey, who's your lawn care? And then I went with that. But did you guys see a problem in the marketplace? How did you know that your idea was viable?

03:34

Gene: Yes. So, a couple of ways we knew, you know, kind of knowing the industry. Like, yeah, you can ask your neighbor, your coworker who you want, you know who they recommend. But if that guy going to answer the phone when you call him or when you text message him nine times out of 10 when you call a landscaping professional in the middle of the summer, you're going to get a voicemail. So, you don't know when he's available. You don't know when he's going to call you back. You don't know what he's going to be able to just service your property. So, we knew right then and there that, you know, granted recommendations are great and fantastic, but you know, how quickly can he get back over to your property if he's not at your neighbor's house already. So, to kind of prove this theory, we actually went door to door for the first summer that we started Green Pal. We would knock on people's doors and ask them, you know, about their lawn care. What they liked about it, what they didn't like about it, you know, if this was a service that they would like to use regarding, you know, being able to put their lawn out for auction and have, you know landscaping, vetted landscaping professionals bid on the property and then basically, you know keep that relationship on a secured platform. And after we did that for a few months, you know, the resounding answer was yes, we would love to use a product like this if it wasn't for not only, you know, just to find a new guy, you know, to make sure my guys coming and also to not have to basically leave a check under the mat. So, we knew after kind of knocking on thousands of doors and getting this critical feedback that, you know, there was an opportunity to digitalize this industry. So, it looks like your platform is also extendable to other businesses. Like because I am speaking from my own personal experience. By the way, I went to the same experience that you said. I called multiple people and answer and all that stuff. So, but something like a swimming pool operators and things like that. Do you see your business extending to other areas?

05:39

Gene: Yes. So, you know, when we first started this, you know, we want it to be the default go to place where homeowners can find any home services outside of the house. You know, that's a very grand gesture to say when you haven't even, you know, scratch the surface of your potential base in one vertical. So, you know, we're slowly adapting and being able to add those additional services. But as of right now we give the vendor the ability to quote any additional services that that homeowner wants done. So once the vendor gets to the property and sees that, hey, these, these shrubs need to be trimmed back. I need the gutters need to be cleaned. The staff needs to be painted. So, we actually put that on the vendor to be able to quote that service or services to that homeowner instantly through Green Pal.

06:29

Ramesh: Excellent. Actually, I love you know, what you guys are doing in a non-intrusive way to connect the homeowners and the service providers. So, Gene my question is, yours is not like a consulting engagement or business coaches, some of those businesses, you guys need to actually create a product and then go after the customers or the providers. So, I mean, how did this work out? Like a, when did you start making money? Right off the bat or there was a time that you had to take to build a product? And if you could talk a little bit about that period.

07:04

Gene: Yes. So, we made the mistake of thinking that we could hire a firm to build our website and it'd be up and running and be perfect. So, we spend about $125,000 initially paying a shot to build what we thought homeowners wanted and vendors wanted. After we spent this money, that shop actually went out of business. And so, we knew right then and there that we had to have a technical cofounder you know, on our team. So that is when Zach actually quit his corporate job to go to software school to learn how to code and to rebuild this app from the ground up. So that was our first biggest mistake that we had was, you know, not knowing that you know, none of us had ever done this before, that you needed somebody technical to oversee and make sure that everything is being built properly and everything is working accordingly. So, it was a blessing in disguise at the time it was like, you know, there's no shame in backing out or you know, we can just take a little more time to build it because I got to learn how to do it. And then, you know, year two years, we know we've got a product that will be sustainable and be replicatable. So, we didn't actually start getting going until about 2014, 2015 and we've been profitable since 2016.

08:36

Ramesh: I see. So, Zach, you mentioned Zach Hendricks, who was the co-founder of Green Pal.

08:42

Gene: That is correct.

08:43

Ramesh: Okay. So, a couple of questions. Number one, how did you guys find each other? Because many times companies or partnerships struggle not finding the right partner. So, what's the relationship between Gene and Zach?

08:58

Gene: Geographically grew up close to each other. So, we were neighbors growing up in the same neighborhoods. We played sports in middle school and high school. So, you know, just being friends and you know, having the same interests and having the same goals. And we actually worked at the same tech firm as well for a little while before Zach quit. So, you know, being friends since we were, you know, 13 or 14 years old, you know, we knew that starting a business wouldn't be an issue. There wouldn't be any, you know yeah, trust issues and stuff like that. So that's a, it was very fortunate Zach grew up where I grew up.

09:42

Ramesh: Okay, excellent. Actually, that is very important ingredient actually of any business to tell you the truth.

09:48

Gene: Yeah, it is. I couldn't imagine doing this with a stranger not knowing any of their idiosyncrasies or any of their habits or any other pet peeves or anything like that. So, it was a perfect business marriage for sure.

10:02

Ramesh: Yeah. Excellent. So, the other question I had was so the first $125,000 you spent on it was not going anywhere and then you guys had to rebuild, but during this time, because technology is evolving so rapidly, was there a concern that somebody else will come up with a similar idea and do it while you were regrouping?

10:22

Gene: Yeah, I mean, you always have that fear of, oh my gosh, somebody's going to steal my idea. I don't want to tell anybody. You know, I want to keep this as a secret, but you know, a lot of people, you should be so lucky to have somebody steal your idea and actually go forward with the idea. Ideas are cheap. And so, you know, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't anticipate somebody to you know to come and revolutionize the industry in that small amount of time. But there's always in the back of your mind with what happens if, you know, like an Amazon or a Google or a, you know, a home Depot or Lowe's or something came in and tried to do the same type business model, but, you know, we just kind of kept her head down, focused on what we needed to do and that's kind of what we've been doing and it's turned out pretty well so far.

11:19

Ramesh: Okay. So great. So, Gene, the other question is while you're forming and storming the company the initial phases, like definitely there was a financing piece, $125,000. And then on top of it, anything else that you needed? How did you guys come up with that money? You put your own personal finances. How did you guys go about it?

11:41

Gene: Yes. So, you know, Zach and I are we were in our thirties when we started. So, we each had, you know corporate life for, you know, 10 years and, you know, we had 401ks, savings and stuff like that. So, you know, we had a little bit of money put back for an opportunity that may present itself. And so that's kind of what we did. I think he ended up cashing out his 401k and I did as well. So, you know, your kind of just, you know, roll the dice and you know, believed in yourself and the idea and put the skin in the game and got everything going.

12:23

Ramesh: Excellent. So, the other interesting aspect of Green Pal is how you guys grew the business in terms of getting more homeowners and all that stuff. It looks like you guys use Facebook quite innovatively and extensively. If you guys could talk about how you use Facebook as a platform to grow your business.

12:46

Gene: Yes. So, what we've done to grow it faster on the vendor side is use Facebook as a vendor growth channel. So, before Facebook, we were literally growing about one market a month. Meaning that if we wanted to launch, let's just say San Jose market, we would have to manually call, texted vendors to you know, basically sell them on why they should join Green Pal because we're, you know, we're starting this service in the area. That would take about one month per about a market per month. And so, with Facebook we were actually able to accelerate that. And actually, we're launching a market a week now. So, Facebook has helped us grow exponentially on the vendor's side as far as being able to launch a new market, then to do our PR in our marketing and the area for the homeowners.

13:46

Ramesh: Excellent. So that is pretty creative. There's another interesting story that I found out about Green Pal. How you worked with the homeowners you know, pets and there is an interesting story. Anything that you could talk about you know, their love for pets and then how it played into your business.

14:08

Gene: Yes. So, when we first started out, I literally knew the names and basically of all the customers. I had a spreadsheet and after a service provider would go mow that property, we would, you know, follow up personally on how everything went. On the onboarding process we actually had a form that a homeowner could check if they had a dog or not. That did two things, that will let the vendor know that, there's a pet they have to be careful not to let them out if there's a gate. And also, for us to basically get the word of mouth going after the first lawn had been completed to send their pet a bone and ask some critical feedback about their experience. So, we sent out, I'd say probably a 1000, 2000 dog bones to homeowners that notified us that they had a pet. And we sent them, you know, our social media and stuff like that to, you know, spread the word if they had a good experience or if they didn't to let us know what we could improve or anything like that. So that necessarily didn't go viral. But it did help with our, you know, with our word of mouth and also our name brand when it came to, you know, customer loyalty and also vendor loyalty because, you know, the more homeowners you have signing up, the happier the vendors are going to be. So that little critical piece of information you know, that we were able to capitalize on, kind of helped us gain a little momentum with our and know a little more with our customer base.

15:46

Ramesh: I think it also helped with the loyalty of the owners to your business and application, I would think.

15:53

Gene: Yeah, exactly. And you know, the customers like to be heard. And so, you know, when you put, when you put a small detail like that and send the dog a bone and they'll reward you for it certainly.

16:06

Ramesh: Correct. I mean so your next question is, are you all in every state in the United States or you're growing organically? How does it work?

16:17

Gene: We are at 40 States now. And so basically all of our growth comes from PR and SEO. We've kind of got really good at that over the years. We have about six or seven link-building campaigns and constantly pitching PR and new markets. Letting them know about, you know, new services and you know, obviously the new markets that we're launching it as well.

16:44

Ramesh: So, I'm mean, I'm kind of curious now. Because it's a web application what you have. So, what prevents you from going all across the US, why only 40 States?

16:54

Gene: Yeah, so a lot of the, a lot, we will get to the, to all 50 States. Some of them just don't have a lawn care you know, maybe about two or three month a year and addressable market is just so big that, you know, they're, you know, sub-markets in Florida or Texas that mow for nine months out of the year as opposed to those three months. So, our ROI on that is, is just, you know, basically, you know, we have bills to pay as well. So, if we can launch a market that is nine months out of the year per se, as the market, that's three months out of the year, we're going to go with a nine month out of the year, nine times out of 10.

17:41

Ramesh: Okay. Got it. It's a more a market opportunity. Not anything the regulations or anything like that.

17:48

Gene: Exactly Yes.

17:50

Ramesh: Okay. So, Uber, I think they all have to go through some regulatory issues and okay for you there's nothing like that. Okay. Got it. Okay. Excellent. So, I mean, what are the next steps for your business from a scaling that growth or what are you focusing on right now?

18:08

Gene: Kind of what we're focusing on now is doubling down into more of our sub markets. So, know what I mean by there's, you know, we're in probably the top 100 markets in the US. But with those markets you typically have, you know, five or 10 other large cities in those States that are, you know, wanting our service and they need our service. So, for the rest of 2019, we're going to double down on markets that have been really, really solid for us and then start launching in the sub markets. And then we're also, you know, doubling down more on the vendor side of it. We're building more tools for them to be able to pull more services. We're building more tools to them to be able to onboard their non-Green Pal customers onto our, onto our platform. And then we're also, this'll be the first year that we're actually offering snow removal in the areas of States that have snow in the winter. So, we're slowly getting some momentum with the vendor buy in. You know, we have, I think 15,000 total landscaping professionals that have signed up with youth Green Pal. So, you know, we're just trying to, you know, build a system for them that they can run their business from their phone and make their lives easier.

19:29

Ramesh: Okay. So, you're going deeper into the States where you're already there into sub markets and you're going broader where with the new services, like snow removal and things like that.

19:40

Gene: That’s correct.

19:41

Ramesh: Okay. So deeper and broader, I like that strategy. So, let's talk a little bit about Gene, the person. Okay. So right. I mean, why entrepreneurship? Why couldn't you, why couldn't you be just happy getting a salary at the end of the month?

20:00

Gene: Yeah, I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. My dad is an entrepreneur. I've got three cousins that all own their business. My mom owned a business and her you know, when she was, you know, my age. So, I kind of come from that entrepreneurial background and, you know, I remember, you know, growing up, you know, my father being able to kind of go and come as he pleases and kind of being able to do what he wanted to do. And he always, you know, instilled in me that, hey do whatever you need to do to, you know, to be happy to make money to you know, just make yourself a better person. And I remember that you know, asking about what I wanted to do in life and stuff like that. And he's like, you know, you can always be an entrepreneur. You're bound by nothing. You know, it's a little harder path, but you know, if you have a business idea you know, ideas are cheap yet there's always a customer for any sort of type of business that you want start. So, I remember having that conversation with him and you know, being able to see him kind of go with the pleases and you know, I had other friends that dads were in the corporate world and, you know, they were on a strict schedule and stuff like that. So, I kind of always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and do something and just waiting for the right opportunity to do so. So, you know, when an opportunity came about, I was fortunate enough to be able to do that. I stayed with my corporate job for five years and did both. So, I had a lot of you know, a lot of hours racked up, you know, on the weekends and at nights after work. So, it's a lot of harder path than the traditional retired 65. But you know, when you're impacting somebody's life, making it easier and they're thanking you for that product, that's why you get out of bed every morning. And that's why you want to grow this business to be as successful as it can be.

22:15

Ramesh: Excellent. Actually, there's a good learning that came out of it, which you said you didn't quit and then start this. You started this as a side hustle. Yeah. Side hustle. So that way you felt comfortable and only then after some time you quit.

22:33

Gene: Yeah. I mean, I was in my corporate job with seven to 4:00 PM and from five to 10, five to 11 I was at our Green Pal office working. And then Saturdays and Sundays we're basically all Green Pal. So, if you can do both, do both. You know, you do sacrifice a lot when you do both. You know, you have zero free time. Vacations are, you know, irrelevant because you're not going to be able to take them. But you know it keeps you in the game longer. You don't have to worry about money at times, so highly recommend that.

23:10

Ramesh: Excellent. So, it looks like Gene your family members inspired you to be an entrepreneur. Any other books things that you can recommend that you know, that inspired you?

23:24

Gene: Yeah, Steve blank, the four steps to epiphany. That was a great book that kind of taught you how to get you know, out of the building. And you know, that kind of is what prompted us to go door to door to see if people would use our product. And then, you know, kind of once we built it, we kind of got out of the building to basically get our first few hundred customers. So that kind of you know, gave you confidence to say, hey, you've got to go out there and ask for it, not people aren't going to come to your brand-new website and asked for your services. And another one is the lean startup by Eric Reese. You know, when you're sitting there with a business idea, you think you need all the bells and whistles to make that thing operate to get customers, but it's actually the opposite. You need the MVP to get started and then you listen to your customers and they tell you what you need to build next. So those are the kind of the two books that, yeah, I think any young entrepreneurs should live by while they're you know, thinking or starting their business.

24:32

Ramesh: Excellent. I mean, I like the lean startup as well, and I call the agile entrepreneurship, which is just to get your minimum viable product out the door as soon as you can. And then so keep working on it. Excellent. So, if I could ask you a couple of questions about your operations of your business. So, I mean, you are a technology company, you're not a landscaping company, you're a technology company. So, for your operations, what kind of tools that you guys use mostly? So as an advice to other businesses like they can benefit from.

25:09

Gene: Yeah. So, the first thing we implemented when we could afford it, it was an app called Intercom. Basically, Intercom is kind of a customer relationship management tool, but it will kind of allow you to, it puts you in the, you can actually add any sort of like chat or anything in a certain part of the customer journey. So, you know, you can ask questions, pop up questions when a homeowner's there, if they need any help or anything. You can also send timed emails dependent on different scenarios of where the customer is in that journey to get feedback or to ask them, you know, to schedule additional service. So, with Intercom, we're able to basically insert ourselves in every part of the customer journey and be right there with our customers if they have any anxiety, if they have any confusion or if they just have any questions in general on how everything works. So that was the, probably the biggest tool that kind of helped us. Like, hey, we know right here customers are getting confused because of so we need change that. So, Intercom was one that we, that we still use to this day to kind of help us build more of what the homeowners want or expect as opposed to what we think they want or expect.

26:31

Ramesh: That's very good. All right. So last question, Gene. As a parting advice to the listeners who could be aspiring entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs trying to, you know, get to the next level, what would you offer?

26:50

Gene: I think any entrepreneur that you know, that's looking to make the leap or to start a business, make sure you're passionate about your product. You're going to get a lot of people that are going to, you know, tell you that, you know, it's not the right time. You don't have the right money, you don't have the right resources. So, you just got to be really passionate. It got to be really, really stubborn about your idea. And knowing that it works. I would also recommend getting as much feedback from strangers as you possibly could about a business idea. Hey, I want to start this business idea. What do you think about it? We went to random strangers in malls. We went to random strangers at dog parks and ask them. So, getting that critical feedback before you spend a dollar is so easy and it's free. It just takes, you know, just take effort to ask people about this type of business. So, I think those are the two biggest pieces of advice is, you know, before you do anything, talk to strangers, not your friends, not your family. They're going to tell you it's a great idea. They're going to tell you that, you know, they're excited about you starting a business, how successful you're going to be. But you know, strangers will tell you if they would buy it, if they wouldn't buy what they like, what they don't like. So, heed the advice of strangers, not your friends and family.

28:10

Ramesh: Excellent. I think another thing that came through your conversation is that it looks like you want to people to start as soon as they can about a business. If they're thinking anything about a business, you know, there's no perfect time. Now is the perfect time.

28:26

Gene: There is no perfect time. You'll never have enough money. You'll never have enough time. But getting started and getting momentum, doing something, even if it's one thing per day to get the business going forward, you'll be so far ahead in six months, then a year and then you'll be closer to knowing whether or not you want to pursue this. So, getting started is I think is the hardest part, but if you do something just one thing per day and keep that consistent, it'll pay off in the long run.

28:59

Ramesh: Excellent. Gene, great advice. Thank you very much for coming on today. Good luck to you.

29:08

Gene: Well thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

29:09

Ramesh: Yeah, my folks. So that's another excellent conversation there. If you want to listen to more episodes like that, get onto www.rameshdontha.com and go to the podcast section, so you'll have a lot more episodes there.

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