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The Modern Independent
The Modern Independent
Mastering Clear Communication and Strategic Networking: Garrett Dailey's Entrepreneurial Journey
What if the key to your entrepreneurial success lies in mastering the art of clear communication and strategic networking?
Join us on this episode of the Modern Independent as we sit down with Garrett, a standout graduate from Indie Collective's fall 2023 cohort. From his roots in rural North Carolina to co-founding a valet trash service and journeying through multiple startups, Garrett's story is a testament to resilience and continuous learning.
You’ll hear about his challenges, triumphs, and the invaluable lessons he gathered along the way, such as the importance of simplicity in pitching and the power of effective communication.
Discover the transformative power of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) framework and how it significantly enhances client targeting and service offerings. Garrett walks us through his experience of attending strategic networking events in East Denver and Austin, revealing their impact on business opportunities.
He underscores the importance of understanding your client's needs deeply and shares real-world analogies that will help you refine your approach to marketing and lead generation.
Garrett's insights on resilience, strategic networking, and continuous learning are sure to inspire and equip you for your entrepreneurial journey.
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All right, everybody like you just heard inside of that intro. You are listening to another episode of the Modern Independent, so let's dive right in. Today I will be interviewing another Indie Collective grad named Garrett. He was an Indie Collective grad, I believe, initially in the you're going to have to help me the fall spring, the fall this past. Fall me, the fall spring, the fall this past fall. Yeah, so fall of 2023.
Speaker 1:So very, very, I'll say I won't say fresh, maybe fresh from any collective grad, but not fresh to the world of entrepreneurship and his passion for business kind of overall. And one thing that really stood out to me when Garrett and I first connected inside of our office hours during the fall cohort was this idea of really looking beyond the superficial when it came to whether it was branding, it was business building, it was pretty much anything. You ask a question about a process and Garrett was like, well, have you thought about the process from this angle? Or what about this person's insight? And so we were able to.
Speaker 1:I think our first office hour session was supposed to be half an hour and ended up being like an hour and 15 minutes. I mean, there's so many ways that he's able to kind of dissect situations and look at things differently. That I'm super excited for you to listen to this episode and kind of get that full experience as we go through the next hour and some change together. So, garrett, welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time to come hang out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So I mean, as we were talking about before we turned the mics on, there's so many different places that we could start off this conversation, but I think you know, for the sake of everybody that has never met you before is tuning into the show for the first time, kind of thing. I think maybe we back it up and start with the basics, right, when are you located and what was the initial call to going independent or entrepreneurship, whatever you want to label it as, but everybody has that jumping off point. So what was that point for you?
Speaker 2:Let's see. Yeah, so the older I get, the more I realize my backstory is insane and abnormal. So I grew up in rural North Carolina. My dad was a Marine, so it was like half California when I was a kid and half rural North Carolina in a relatively miserable town um called Jacksonville uh, not not the cool one in Florida and I was always trying to do stuff. Uh, but it's. You know, if you have a, my graduating class is like 200 people, so I was always trying to. You know I wrote a script for a movie like a zombie movie before it was cool. Uh, I, you know, I tried doing um like a video game design team in high school. I was always trying to do stuff right, I would never, ever, ever get anyone to do anything with me. So very unpleasant place to live. Um, I originally I almost went in the military, but my mom talked me out of it. My dad was Special Forces Marine. She was like don't do that to me. I was like okay, fair. So the only other option to get out of my hometown was go to school. I went two years late and I was only there for three semesters total. I did not enjoy the process, but I was at Poole College of Management at NC State and that was, I don't know, not the best time in my life, but I ended up.
Speaker 2:Right before I failed out of school, a friend hit me up that I used to sell hair straighteners on a mall kiosk with and was like, hey, we're starting a business. I was like, all right, perfect. I had no plan. So I fell right into co-founding a valet trash for a multifamily housing company called Freedom Way Waste Valet, and this is in Fayetteville, north Carolina. I did that for a while. That was the first time I had totally free reign to do whatever I wanted. So I had done some graphic design and stuff in the past. I built out the brand. I built out the first website I ever made. We would stay up all night and just do research on all these different complexes that we were trying to target and all kinds of stuff. We did this for a year. At one point we even did little dollhouse trash cans that we put our logo on, filled them up with candy and business cards and we'd give them out to people. We did a co-drive Everything in the world you can think of to market this thing right. We did it for a year. We got absolutely zero traction, just blew a bunch of money. We were like whatever? So there's some other uninteresting stuff in the middle there.
Speaker 2:Three years later, on LinkedIn, the primary person that we were trying to get in contact with said we're ready to talk now. And I learned at that point a lesson which is OK, the next thing I do. I should just stick with it, because if we had done something that wasn't trash which no one's passionate about, I assume probably we could have stuck with it, but that was not a cool business. It, but that was not a cool business. And later I learned that if I had known about the B2B sales cycle, then I would have understood that there was about one month of the time that we were active that we could actually gotten a contract, and that was very early in the process in October, when they're doing the budgets. We didn't know.
Speaker 2:So I floated around the country, went out West, worked in some other not super well thought out startups with different people there's. One of them was like a vape delivery company that was based at NC State that I had some branding for, and I started a small media company when I was in Reno, nevada, doing. I had been writing a lot of time. I wrote a lot of abstract philosophy and did tons and tons of podcasts. We ended up as a group producing like an ebook and we did a like 32 speaker conference Um, I think we made a grand total of like $3,000 from that Cause. Just, we were missing pieces. It was good. The conference itself was cool, um, all kinds of stuff with that.
Speaker 2:So I just I like a lot of misadventures for a long time, right, I came back to North Carolina and got a job at eventually working at this design agency and it was there that I kind of like it started to click for me, right. So we worked mostly with early stage startups, which I always loved. You know, I had at that point a lot of experience early in the process of like what are all the things you have to do to like build legitimacy, look like you're serious. And then I learned a lot more formal process for how you kind of deal with that stuff While I was there. This is not a particularly well-run company, but by the end of it I was in charge of like all the accounts.
Speaker 2:I was hiring and training and running design teams, doing all the client management stuff like that, and I realized that we had these exercises we would do when we'd onboard clients, called sprints. I had started trying to make them make more sense, because these are just generic documents and I realized like, oh, if we spent more time on these, we really dug into the values, we dug into the mission, the vision, a lot of the philosophy of the company, that we can get a better result Because we would do them in an hour. No matter what we got the answers, no matter how it came out, I was like, oh, we just spent more time on this and really dug into it, we can make better brands, better decisions. So after a year and a half at that agency, I started my own and for the last two and a half years I've run Ion Enterprises, which was originally a business philosophy and design agency.
Speaker 2:In the process of doing that, I originally just started doing brands and websites and kind of moved into pitch decks. I was raising for a startup of my own in the middle there and I was also chief of staff for a crypto company for a little bit before the market blew up and I realized, man, I really like pitching, I really like helping people explain complicated stuff because I've written like 160 five to 10 page philosophy articles for years. But most of the people that talk about this stuff talk about it in this academic, abstract, unnecessarily complex way and you really don't. Everything can be explained simply if you get it right. I know that's kind of a platitude, but it's true. And if you can't explain it simply, you don't get it. Yet the problem that I had was with ION. This was like a this is a personal art project for me. That also happened to be a business. It was not the other way around and in the process of trying every possible version of how to pitch that, when that finally clicked for me in January, what happened was kind of this cascade of I just understood all the mistakes I'd made for all these years. That just clicked and so what that led to?
Speaker 2:There's a couple different things. One is that I'm fundamentally an artist type of person. I really care about the work itself. I want to do great beautiful work and I really enjoy helping people do stuff. I'm very service oriented as far as the business side of stuff, like building out processes and systems, all that kind of stuff. I'm very service oriented as far as like the business side of stuff like building out processes and systems, all that kind of stuff. It's not my forte. I just I want to just do the work, right.
Speaker 2:So I realized I was like, oh, I probably need to bring on a co-founder that is more interested in that kind of thing. Right, and I happened to have worked with a guy who was an advisor for my startup. We had done some work together after the fact. His name's Brian Schuster and I messaged him when I had this realization. I was at Tony Robbins Business Mastery. It was like halfway through the week oh my God, I get it Highly recommended, by the way and I messaged Brian. He was like, let's go. At the end of that process they had Donald Miller, the guy who wrote Building a Story Brand and several other very good books. I'm working my way through his corpus. Right now I have Story Brand over here.
Speaker 2:But there's this exercise he does, which is the one liner where you have to explain your business in one line, and this kind of thing where I could explain what I am was simply, I was never able to do it because what it was to me and I think this is common with not all entrepreneurs but a certain subset of entrepreneurs I typically end up working with is that you have this mission-driven or vision-driven, like values kind of person that loves the work. They love this big, beautiful thing. It's very personal to them. That's the obstacle. The love that you have for the thing that you're trying to do is, in fact, an obstacle for you to do it effectively. And I only know this because this is me, for the entirety of my career was oh, I'm so attached to this that I can't see what it actually is. It's not about me.
Speaker 2:Business philosophy, I think, is super, super valuable, but nobody knows what that is. And I can try and explain to people what that is, but that's not why they're hiring anyone, right? What somebody says is I need a brand, I need a website, I need to scale my revenue, I need to processify our operations, right, all that kind of stuff. The things that go into that are, in fact, philosophy. But I no longer pitch that it's philosophy because, a it's the worst possible pitch you could ever make and B nobody needs to know how the sausage gets made. If you're hungry and somebody offers you a sausage, you'll eat it. If somebody explains to you how the sausage is made, you will not be hungry at the end of that explanation, right, and this, this realization is really profound. How doesn't really matter that much, right? What matters is the problem that a person with a problem and the means to solve it uh, you know they have the money and the resources to dedicate to it. You can communicate, that you understand their problem, you know empathy and can help them solve it. Authority, and you can do this to a large enough market that you can build a business. Right, this is the most basic. That's it. A business is ultimately a tool or a system that solves a problem for a specific person, repeatedly, right, a specific type of person.
Speaker 2:And when I realized all this, the culminating thing that came out of this was the one liner for what is now my consultancy, lucid. It's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it. Lucid helps you talk about your business with clarity so you can close more deals. If you don't know how to talk about your business, there are about 400 other things that we have to sort out in that process. That is not the point. People are not buying the how. What they want is to be able to go out in a room with their ICP, say what they do and have the ICP understand that they can be helped and give them money so they can help them.
Speaker 2:Getting to that level of simplicity was three years of pitching Ion wrong right, those three years of going through every possible variation of words, of angles, and now it works right.
Speaker 2:So the difference was I am a prolific networker.
Speaker 2:I go out all the time and I would maybe get like one person that I might be able to work with out of like five events or something like that, whereas we've been going super hard this year.
Speaker 2:We were at East Denver two weeks ago and then Brian came in to Austin, where I'm located now a great city, and he just left this morning and I think we've got like 20 meetings booked over the course of the next four weeks and we only did two days of networking in Denver and I think maybe left the house twice in Austin while he was here other than for us doing work or doing work with clients, right. So all of that to say what I thought I was getting into this for was how do you solve big problems in the world? And that's true, the way I thought you solved that was by trying to teach people better philosophy and that business is actually the greatest problem solving system ever created and if you had better philosophy in the business, you'd be able to solve bigger problems, when in reality, it's like okay, there are people out here solving problems already.
Speaker 2:The real problems they're, you know, like building, like that is a problem. People have that their clothes are dirty but nobody needs to have a laundromat explained to them. Real problems are complicated, they're abstract, the solutions are usually obtuse. Right, and if you could help the people who are trying to solve the real problems in the world communicate that effectively, then the stuff that gets funded and the stuff that gets marketed and the stuff that gets sold is going to be the stuff that matters and not just like B2B SaaS, number 407 or Uber for blah, blah, blah, because those are easy to pitch, because everyone already gets that. So that's what I'm really passionate about is help people that are too smart for their own good learn how to talk about what they do so they can actually do the thing they're passionate about in a way that scales Long intro, but feel free to jump in wherever you want with that yeah, yeah, no, I'm, I think, long but necessary, right I?
Speaker 1:the way that you explain so many different things inside of that you know storyline is so many things that I try to hit on with people inside of you know whether it's office hours or we're at an event or you know anytime. I'm talking about indie, because a lot of people will look at this 10-week bootcamp and they're not saying that we don't see people that within that 10 weeks make massive improvement, that don't see a return on their business, that don't end up partnering with somebody or landing another community member as a client. That happens pretty frequently. But that 10 weeks isn't meant to solve all of your problems. You're giving yourself processes, systems and learning to ask questions that will set you up to solve more problems exponentially more effectively over the next three years, until you realize you've been pitching your business completely wrong. And then you know our bulletproof psychology section at the end is to give you the resilience so that when you have that realization, you're willing to make the pivot you know like. So there's so much that you just said inside of that that that resonates with what I've seen continuously, cohort after cohort right, because at this point I've been involved.
Speaker 1:I've been the head of community now for almost two years, which is bonkers, but before that I was a student. So I've been around Indy now three and a half years and gotten to see people that graduated, that are now one year out, two years out, three years out and beyond. You know some single cohorts, some coming back for multiple cohorts and everything, and there's always new problems popping up that are different and bigger and hairier. And you think your problems are big when you're at $80,000 in revenue and you're a solo shop, when you want to get to that quarter million mark. When you get to that quarter million mark, you have quarter million dollar problems that you have to solve and it keeps iterating. And to hear you constantly say, okay, I'm willing to re-explore this, I'm tinkering, I'm re-pitching, I'm looking at, I'm having an aha, I'm calling a friend because I had an aha. I'm starting that conversation. I'm.
Speaker 1:You know all of those things are all I mean. Those don't just appear inside of somebody right, like you were. You were either taught to do that, you have it naturally as a gift, you know, or something kind of keeps that engine, engine running. So I don't know exactly where that, where that takes the conversation now. But you know, I just wanted to double click on that because I see it so often as like a theme, you know, for people that come through the program and stuff, and you just hit on like a whole bunch of stuff that I was trying to figure out how to put words to, um, which is pretty typical for our conversations for everybody listening. Like every time I have a conversation with garrett I'm like, oh, you said something I knew but didn't know how to say. So thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah definitely, I think that the benefit.
Speaker 2:I happen to be much, much more stubborn and obstinate than the average person, which is not necessarily a good thing. In a lot of cases, However, I have a much higher capacity for punishment, I think, and if you're willing to go do things wrong for basically a decade, by the end of that you have seen more problems than the people that were not, by a factor of some insane amount, Right? So, having been in so many startups that didn't work and like it, especially in the earlier stages, why I still had like a jobby job that I was doing whenever on the side, um, I think I've had like 28 actual jobs before I even was like full-time entrepreneur. Some of those were small teams, some of them were bigger companies, whatever. But when you can see all of that, you start to see things right, and I think that's part of what led me to consulting is because I was always a generalist as a kid and that's not a good thing to be until later in life I've learned, but just being able to be exposed to A lot of people.
Speaker 2:If you think of the normal career path, maybe it's different now. I know people don't stay at jobs as long, but if back in the day you can have one job forever, and maybe some people have like five or six jobs their whole lives. So they've seen five or six teams. They've seen five or six types of problems, right. Especially if they're specialists, they may have their niche of stuff sorted, but that's it. And even with founders who tend more towards being generalists, if you're a founder and you're working full-time on solving whatever problem your company solves, you only see that right, and you end up blind to a lot of other stuff. And so, watching not only that kind of constraint but also the personality dynamics that go into founders that are successful and founders that aren't, that perspective is it just required 10 years of processing all that stuff before it's like ah, okay, now I get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to double click on that real quick too. But just because, if you're listening to this and you're somebody that has been beating themselves up because you're like I've been at this for three years and I haven't made a bunch of progress or this is happening, or this is happening, I want you to pay attention to the timeline that Garrett just chose to throw out right there Decade. For whatever reason, we get into consulting and maybe it's because some members come in and they're literally launching their business with that 10-week cohort, so they're starting in at ground zero, have very minimal expectations about where things are going, because they're just like I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm going to do this thing. But then we also have individuals that have been inside of the corporate space for 10 years, 15 years, and then they come in and they expect that 10 years of experience to directly transfer into the entrepreneurial space, and it's not a one-to-one ratio. And so you come in and you may have a decade's worth of experience. But when you read startup literature whether it's from Y Combinator or it's from Deloitte or Accenture or any of the consulting firms that do studies on startups and their average lifespan and the cycles that they go through and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:You're looking at at least five years to make it through the ideation, the storming phase, leveling, actually getting sustainable, profitable, having systems and stuff like that and courses like Indie can help accelerate that process and everything. But really the first five years are experimenting and trying to grow. It's not like you're going to directly take that 10 years of experience and then boom, I have a fully functional. I know exactly how to talk about myself, all my systems are in place, I've got a good VA, I know how to invoice, I'm an S-corp. All of that stuff doesn't happen boom overnight. It could take five years for you to get there and if you just mentally commit to that frame versus trying to put the pressure on yourself, where you're like I have to make this work, granted, sometimes there's financial stuff that goes on where you're like I have to make this work in the next three months. I've personally been there. There's been stages along my journey where I was donating plasma to buy groceries.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you just end up in those spots to be a battle for the next three to five years and I'm just going to accept that it's going to be tough. I'm going to have to change direction a lot. I'm going to have to put myself in uncomfortable growth situations. I'm going to have to network If I'm not a natural networker. If I am a natural networker, I'm going to have to learn how to draw stronger boundaries with my time so I can actually fulfill on work, depending on what type of personality type you have, the different things you're going to have to work on. But then you get to that end of that five years and you can look back and you're like man. I am so grateful that five year ago me decide to take this leap and commit to it. You know I think about that all the time Like man. 23 year old Jan was a nutcase but God bless him. You know I'm glad that he did what he did.
Speaker 2:Amen to that. Yeah, the? Um. I want to touch on something you said. Well, first off, like man, what a great thing If you were starting out. Indy would save you so much time. Um, that, right off the bat, that would be awesome. Um, I wish I had known about it sooner. Um, I wish I had known about sooner the thing like on that note, on the indie note, the ICP structure that you guys use. I think that was a pivotal shift.
Speaker 1:It's not just it's ideal customer profile is what ICP stands for.
Speaker 2:for those of you listening yeah, so I've kind of played with that. The version that I'm using now is basically the same thing, but it's easier way to remember. It is ideal. Customer profile. Icp squared equals person plus problem or person times problem. Right, and that was a big one of the sessions that. That really opened my eyes. It's easy If you put the squared in there. It's easy to remember. There's two P's. Right, you have the person you're serving and the example they give an Indy, which I love is you have a 30 year old guy who works, you know he has a tech startup and all this other like demographic information and stuff. Does he go to a cheap pizza parlor or an expensive Italian restaurant? And they let everyone answer this question. Everyone's like, oh well, you go here because of this or you go there because of that, and the takeaway from it is it doesn't matter until you know what his problem is.
Speaker 2:So there's a version of this I've been riffing on as an adjacent kind of concept, which is why does someone go to McDonald's or a Michelin star restaurant, right? Why does someone go to McDonald's or a Michelin star restaurant, right A? Regardless of which restaurant it is, a person who has just eaten a five course meal is not going to either of these restaurants. So, acknowledging these two things serve the same basic need, which is you're hungry, right, but then outside of that every other need that they serve is completely unrelated.
Speaker 2:Right, mcdonald's is like cheap, fast, volume of food, convenience, whatever. The Michelin star restaurant is like status, prestige, quality, the experience, whatever. That's a really interesting concept. It's like you have basic needs and secondary needs, um, or wants, and that's that's something you kind of have to grapple with. Right, it's like um, at any rate, that was going to go off in the tangent but, um, but that was something. That huge takeaway from indie was that, uh, the two parts of the icp, like I hadn't seen that anywhere else and that is something I use literally every day with my clients.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that too. Like when I first went through the program, I remember hearing that and then realizing it was I'm only looking at them based on a perceived need that I think that they need as a marketer, not what they know they need as the customer. So I was looking at people like, oh, you need a new website because I see it hasn't been updated for whatever, whatever. And the customer would be like I don't ever get leads through my website, I just have it there as a placeholder, I don't care about it. I'd be like trying to make them care about their billboard site that they just didn't care and I wasted so much time trying to educate like the wrong customer profile. But then when I started realizing, oh, I should be putting out content telling people how to ask other agencies questions so that they can figure out whether they're getting good service or not, we immediately started getting a crazy amount of referrals just from organic content that we were putting out, because they were like, hey, I asked my agency this question.
Speaker 1:They couldn't answer it. Could you audit my stuff? I'd be like, of course, and so we weren't causing a problem. But what I found is a lot of agencies had practices that were little sketch and I just empowered a group of people to ask the right question and the next thing, you know, I'm starting to realize, oh like, the real problem is they stopped getting leads randomly a month ago and they're still paying the same amount.
Speaker 1:Or, you know, you start to uncover all of these conversations that they're having, and I was able to put together a product that, instead of just trying to sell SEO, sell Google ads, sell web refresh, sell branding, I was able to say this is a lead gen package. Here's how much it costs, here's what it looks like, here's the sprint. I was able to take it and turn it into a bunch of processes for my team to go right down the line. So I'm able to take somebody and drop them into this bucket now. So I'm able to take somebody and drop them into this bucket now, and I'm selling four services instead of one. The customer feels really good about it. It's predictable for the team. They know exactly who's going to be working on what in which stages, and typically, once they make it out of that sprint, they just want to keep us around to maintain it all.
Speaker 1:So it was a great like pairing those two was. It was a great transition on our side too, which actually, um, makes me, makes me wonder a how did you even find indy in the first place, right, and then, because you said like I wish I would have found sooner, but then like it could potentially have saved a bunch of time, so where did you end up finding it? And I know me personally, I actually deleted the first email that I ever got about Indie Collective and I was like, absolutely not. Um, you know, I've seen so many courses I'm not, you know, dropping four grand, five grand on this course, um, so you know what actually made you follow up on the email, yeah, so part of the process that I would say, the beginning of me, the first series of things that happened that led to the series of realizations that created Lucid.
Speaker 2:I had the only time at ION I ever had retainer clients. I had one that hired me. They're the only people that ever paid me just for philosophy. It was a leadership management consultancy that I did I worked with for like a year and a half. I was there for a long time, longer than a lot of the full-time employees by the end of it. And there was another company where I worked this is the first time I did teamwork, team project stuff with my current co-founder. That was a smart contract auditing firm. So for exactly two months I had two retainers at once and both of these retainers caught me in the same month. It was right after I got a car I have a car payment now that I was like, oh well, I can afford it, I have retainers, so this is stupid, don't do that.
Speaker 1:Um, so anyway, I'm laughing cause I've also been there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it happens. You're going to do it, just don't do it yeah.
Speaker 1:At least if you're listed, you can. You can, you know, relate to the fact that crazy stuff happens to everybody. It's not nobody has like a spotless story when it comes to entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:So yeah, certainly not me. Mine is nonsense.
Speaker 2:And then it started to work at some point, you know, but it's really it's not impressive to to hear about Um, but it is informative if you avoid mistakes that I've made. But anyway. So they both caught me at the same time, and so I was having like the worst existential crisis in my career, right, I was like, oh my God, I don't know what doing. I screwed everything up because I thought it was my fault at the time. So, as a consequence, um, what I did is basically the entire month of august last year I went to canada to go visit my old co-founder for my startup uh, good friend of mine, him and his wife, and this is right when hermosi was putting out the $100 million leads webinar and stuff like that. So I had pretty much a whole month with no work to try and figure out what went wrong. And so one of the exercises that they do in indie that I actually just decided to do beforehand, before indie was this you make a spreadsheet with everyone you ever worked with how much they paid you, how much you liked them, where the lead came from, how long they lasted, what are their industry type if it's a startup, what stage are they every piece of information you can get. And so for the first two years of ION, I thought I was targeting early stage startups. It turns out that 80% of my revenue had come from four B2B companies and one post-seed startup that had raised a million. So when I was targeting what I thought I was targeting, I was shooting myself in the foot. It was a giant waste of time. That was the beginning of when things started to make sense.
Speaker 2:After that month, conveniently, the consultancy that I was consulting with cut. Somebody that I know is awesome and I had theories. Side note good, important lesson for everyone. While I was consulting with them, one of the things they did when I first came on we did values exercise and established a business philosophy and stuff. Somewhere around there. They brought someone else in, established a business philosophy and stuff. Somewhere around there, they brought someone else in. They changed the company values and that was the beginning of the end.
Speaker 2:Now I tried to tell them this, but it's so abstract and nobody really believes you. That company now has lost all their contracts. They fired almost everyone on the team and they're probably going to go under. But at the time I was like, oh my God, it was me, which is a good, valuable exercise. You should always, if something goes wrong, always assume it's your fault until you can prove it's not. That's one of the best rules in life. You will pay the price for having that rule, but it is better to think it's your fault and have it not be your fault than to not think it's your fault and have it not be your fault.
Speaker 1:Then do not think it's your fault and have it be your fault.
Speaker 1:I've gotten that piece of advice from so many different mentors and it's so counterintuitive because we operate on this premise of innocent until proven guilty and so to have the assumption of guilt and then prove innocence and actually it's difficult to adopt that headspace at first but as you get used to it, I mean you can prove innocence relatively quickly.
Speaker 1:But if that base level assumption is, I'm going to, you know, it's kind of the same thing as the anecdote of like, for every finger is pointing outward.
Speaker 1:You have three pointing back, you know, or start with the person in the mirror, right, there's all of these references that we have across different you know eras and people conveying it in different ways. But it essentially comes down to audit self before you audit external factors, pull the plank out of your own eye before attempting to pull the plank out of somebody else's. So I 100% agree with that. If you're in a situation and you're looking around especially if you've lived your entire life kind of pointing outwards, um, you know, it may be a intense uh, coming to moment to have that realization you're like shit, like I've had a to play in, like all of those situations. But it is so unlocking and so gratifying to then finally constantly chip away at those things that you were consistently messing up on or whatever else, and then learning that reflex to prove your innocence mentally relatively quickly, because otherwise every time you fail can be crippling mentally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't learn how to do the fast part of that, so that was a lot. I spent a huge amount of this. Also probably is because I like do the fast part of that, so that was a lot. Like I spent a huge amount of this. Also probably because I like philosophy and like that's a lot of that is like be self-critical, you know.
Speaker 1:question your questions Ask meta questions about your questions, and it goes on forever.
Speaker 2:And then eventually that's kind of where it's also like with the philosophy stuff, where it's like man, so much of this stuff is a giant waste of time, like the field of philosophy as a whole in the modern day, like probably the last 400 years of it's kind of crap, uh, unpopular opinion, um, but kind of like what. What I watered that down into is like what is the point of philosophy actually? And I've argued with like philosophy phds on twitter because I'll occasionally post some spicy thoughts about certain philosophers who shall not be named, but it's like the point of acquiring knowledge is not to acquire knowledge. I have a little bit that I'm trying to workshop into it being the right way to say it, but thought is not made complete. No, thought is made complete in action.
Speaker 2:The point of thinking is not thinking. The point of thinking is to do better, like literally doing stuff more effectively than you're doing it now, right? Um? So the point of philosophy then as a whole should be like how do I live better, how do I be a better person? How do I help the people around me better? How does the world function better? And if it's not about that stuff, it's just don't read it, it's not going to get you anywhere. You're just going to become like a nihilist or miserable or whatever, and many philosophers are. As a consequence, you have to ground yourself in something useful, right? Everything should be about like what are you actually doing? It's not just think, think, think in a cave for your life. That's not effective, right.
Speaker 1:If you want different stuff maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just had a conversation yesterday with a guy that I think I'm going to end up doing some work with. He's looking at starting like a construction firm. He's a general contractor, you know, making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, but really wants to take it to the next level Prior service Marine. And so, being prior service Air Force, like I Force, regardless of what branch you were in, I am always able to connect because we have this base root in just like, if it's not practical and it doesn't make sense, why are you overthinking it? And so I was laughing to myself, though, because I was explaining to him. He was like, oh yeah, like you know.
Speaker 1:So what do you do with the business coaching stuff? And I was like well, you know, we set goals out and then we start talking about blah, blah, blah, and then we add this here and we add this here and like do all this other stuff? And he's like, oh, so you help people reverse, engineer, backing up to a goal? And I was like, yeah, yep, that's it After I had just gotten done talking for like 30 seconds straight, and then we both just started laughing and I was like, man, I'm getting corporatized. He was like hey, you could have just said that you just help people reverse engineer a plan. I was like, yeah, fair, fair.
Speaker 2:Yeah the best. Usually it's not you that knows what you do. The universal problem of people that know stuff is they forget what it's like to not know things. Uh, as a consequence, we don't understand what words actually convey the information that we're trying to convey. And then somebody else who actually gets what you're saying. This is like more or less what my actual job is with my clients, outside of all the other myriad things that I do is like I know what you're doing, but I also know what words describe that, and it's not the ones you just said. Right, I can intuit what you're trying to say when people are talking about their business, but we're going to get to the place where someone that doesn't know what you're doing knows what you do, right?
Speaker 2:and that part of that is like reframing, because it's not about the thing. That's a really hard thing. It's not about you. Nobody cares about you first off, as a rule, and nobody cares how it works or what it is. What they care about is I have a problem, I need a solution, I want to benefit and if you want to add an extra little bit that's useful is I have a problem with a pain. I need a solution with a benefit. Right Problem, pain, solution, benefit. It's the easiest way to write copy in the world If you just do that for any time you're talking, start with their problem, explain why it's painful. It's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it. Or you could do a version of that, which is it's hard to grow your business.
Speaker 2:It's even harder to grow your business when you don't have to talk about it. Right Problem paying so that I don't know? That, I think, is so critical because it really like what? What is the thing that actually allows you to communicate better is taking yourself out of your own head. And so to the earlier point you, if you are not interested, or you don't have the affinity for it, or you don't want to be relentlessly self critical, this is not entrepreneurship, is not for you. Get a job, do something else, like go work for somebody, is not for you, because you have to be the person that is responsible for everything that happens and the you know there's a myriad list of um personality defects that prevent people from getting out of the early stage of a company. And the absolute number one killer if you're going to work with other people in your life is not blaming yourself first. Leaders, eat last is a way to say that or extreme ownership. I was just about to bring up Jocko.
Speaker 1:Extreme ownership. That seed got planted in my head in 2017. And it's been's been. You know, because you don't to your point, you don't realize, when you're on the outside looking into entrepreneurship, that having complete freedom to do whatever you want with your time is the most intoxicating and terrifying thing that you will have to learn how to self-manage. You know, there's no, there's there's no outside of financial and like you know other existential stuff, but they can be very vague. You know, sometimes these threats or whatever, but you don't have like your boss threatening to fire you if you show up late, Right?
Speaker 1:So, you know it's easy, it's really easy to get into a slippery slope where you're like I'll start work at eight.05 today instead of 8. Or oh, I'll move this around because I can do this. Or like, oh, I'll just cancel that meeting and reschedule it for later Instead of having the discipline to be like, no, I don't care if I don't have meetings until 10. Every day I'm waking up at 7.30. And I'm going to have that time to go on a walk and think about my business and plan ahead and journal. And you know you have to build all these other habits and stuff to kind of keep things moving and keep things on track. Or at least I have right, and maybe that's somebody that's, you know, dealing with a little bit of neurodivergence, having to police themselves and keep themselves on track. But I think it's pretty universally applicable across all entrepreneurs in general too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolute freedom is absolute responsibility. There's no one to blame except for you, right, and that's just again. It's so, so, so common that people are like, oh, it didn't work out because of this, it didn't work out because of that. You can any legitimate thing that someone else did that caused you a problem as something that you failed to anticipate or deal with in advance, right. So, even if it is someone else's fault for example, um, where that, uh, the consultancy that I was at or that I was I was consulting with um.
Speaker 2:There were a couple critical mistakes I made over the course of that long time that I was with them, which is A the first thing, I went from being strictly a consultant to having a scoped role, at which point I more or less became the lowest paid employee instead of a part-time consultant. So as to advice to anyone who does anything approaching retainer work, a sufficiently long retainer is indistinguishable from you're an employee In most cases. It's very, very difficult to manage that. And also, just like time bound your retainers, you don't want to be on a retainer forever, cause probably not providing consistent amounts of value over time in a linear fashion. Right, which is another good indie thing is like talking about value-based pricing. That's a different discussion. But so when I switched roles, I gave up agency and that changed the way that I was perceived by the company, because instead of being, hey, this is the guy you're supposed to take advice from, this is like hey, here's a person who has this weird set of tasks that it was really hard to scope. That was the beginning of me losing a lot of the impact that I needed to have to be able to help them.
Speaker 2:There's another series of problems which is specifically the thing I think happened is the founder didn't want to sell. They hired people who were supposed to help with selling, but a rule a universal rule the founder of a company is the first and last salesperson. If the founder cannot sell, no one else is going to figure it out. There are probably exceptions in the sense that you could theoretically have a simple enough thing that you could hire someone to sell for you, but if you're starting a company, it's a novel company. If you don't figure out how to sell it, nobody else can figure it out for you, because you know more about it than they do.
Speaker 2:That is the number one startup killer, because if you can't pitch your thing you don't have a company. If you can't do sales, your company doesn't exist. So that was more or less the real problem. There were other problems, including some hiring decisions they made that were questionable, abdicating a lot of responsibility away from the founder towards other people that should not have had that much responsibility, which is ultimately the founder's fault. Even if you set up your employees for failure, that's on you. It's not their fault that you gave them an impossible task. But that's a really common thing is people say I'm going to bring on someone else to do this or someone else to do that.
Speaker 2:You have to know how to do it first, like one of the rules I learned at the agency, cause I was in this one like awful, awful mess of a project where there was a client who hired an agency, who hired us, and then my boss hired a subcontractor who hired a guy somewhere else that didn't speak English and these guys barely spoke English. It was a giant nightmare, right, and this was a development project. I am not a developer. I was managing our part of this. There's nothing I could do when it went wrong, and it went so, so wrong. It was giant. It became a legal problem between my boss at the time and the guys who hired him, but they were also completely advocating the responsibility because they were just like subcontracting the people they hadn't vetted, they did Subcontractors. If you can't do the subcontractors task, you should be very cautious before you hire them.
Speaker 2:My rule when I made my agency is I did three things right, or technically four, but like three, which is brand decks, websites, because I also did all the work myself. I experiment with subcontractors. It wasn't worth the margin for people that are not as good at it as I was, so it was just a pain. But yeah, do not start trying to outsource stuff until you know how it works, unless you have someone who has an equal amount of responsibility that can own it. So my co-founder is like the process and systems guy. I am not that Ion never had that, other than my core process, which I provide to my clients because I love the work.
Speaker 2:My co-founder, we have very distinct, separate areas of ownership. That's how it works. I'm not subcontracting someone to figure it out for me. We both are equal owners who have to figure it out together. So it's different. In some cases you will have to hire people to do things that you don't know how to do. Avoid that as long as you can. Try and understand at least enough about whatever you're managing so that you can see if it's going wrong. You kind of know how it's supposed to work. But again, you really would just be better off staying in the realm of stuff you know better than your clients know it. And if you, if you don't know your clients don't know it.
Speaker 2:That's why are you doing it right?
Speaker 1:it's that that entire story is reminding me of a story that I? Um was told when I was at a? Um, oh, it was like an accelerator clinic that I went to before I was in indy. Um, there's a local university here in ohio called the university of akron and they have a I'm pretty sure it's a national program called I-Corps and it's basically like an eight week or 10 week, you know program. They force you to build a business plan and you're doing a lot of customer interviews and they hook you up with CEOs that you can ask questions and all this other kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:And I remember talking to one of these CEOs and he said, well, he was like I'll tell you a story. He said, well, he's like I'll tell you a story. He said my son was in trade school and in this trade school they had plumbing, they had carpentry and I think it was auto or something like that on this campus and he ended up sitting next to this kid at lunch and they would talk all every day and he ended up realizing that he was the one of the sons of the Kohler family from, like you know, every sink and urinal yeah, like, every sink and every uh urinal like made in the U? S. Basically, you know one of the largest plumbing companies in the country, um, and probably you know globally at this point I don't. I don't know the size of their company, but big, and probably globally at this point I don't know the size of their company, but big and they got to be friends and at one point his son was just like dude, why are you here? Why are you in entry-level journeyman plumbing training when you're a Kohler? Shouldn't you be working in corporate? Shouldn't you be learning the business side or figuring out all this other kind of stuff? He said that his old man had a rule that if you couldn't plumb, you couldn't sign contracts. And I don't know if that's the right way. I don't know if plumbers plumb, but if you couldn't run pipe in a house or troubleshoot copper, or know the difference in the price between one type of coupling versus another type of coupling, or understand what a contractor is trying to tell you when they say, oh, this job is going to take X amount extra time because we ran into XYZ and be able to call BS or not, if you didn't have all of those traits, you weren't going to be successful at those higher levels and so he was like every son um, you know that wanted to do that. Uh, cause I think that it was mostly boys inside of the family or whatever, like they had to go through that training and then they were allowed to work in the business.
Speaker 1:And I've always kind of thought I don't come from an affluent family by any means or anything else, but the principle of having to be in the trenches before you're able to lead, I think has been pretty universal across my life, whether it's been in the military. They are really good at forcing you into that structure. You start out with your head shaved at boot camp, learning how to tie your boots while getting screamed at all the way up through. Now you're 20 years old, in charge of a unit of five to 10 people and they give you the training and equip you to do all that other kind of stuff. But then in the business world, in my career as an RN, anywhere that I've been in life, if I'm able to relate to the people on the ground floor because I've been there, it saves so much time and it saves you know, you're able to empathize, you're able to push them, it gives you the. You know how to throttle that dial. You know if somebody, if you've done the task and you know hey, I know this is possible in 72 hours. I know you think it takes two weeks, but let me show you how to get it done in 72 hours. They might get it done in five days, not three, but you still just took them from 14 down to five because you were able to empower them by showing them something that you've kind of figured out in a sense. So I am a huge proponent of that principle and being aware of that principle in life in general. And so if you're somebody that is entering the space and Ashley Quinto-Powell actually talks about this inside of her session there's a reason why creating an army of advocates for yourself and leaning on your warm network is so important as a founder-led organization, because, to your point, you're the one that's going to be able to talk about it the best. Like. If you are thinking, if you're listening to this right now, and you're thinking you're going to outsource sales for your founders-led consulting organization within the first year of you doing it, may the odds be ever in your favor, right? I don't think that it's going to happen.
Speaker 1:And learning how to do all of that stuff up front. Yeah, it could be a pain. Yeah, you're having to learn a whole bunch of new skills. Yeah, it may not be fun learning how to do LinkedIn copy, or it's uncomfortable getting in front of a camera, or it's terrifying to get on a podcast, or you hate having to track stuff in an Excel sheet to make sure that numbers actually balance out. You don't want to have to talk to your bookkeeper. These are all just. You're getting insight into the things that I find frustrating. Right, but all of those things because I know them or because you end up learning them over the course of the process. You're able to be so functional across so many different avenues that when you go to interview that person to your point, you go to interview that bookkeeper that's going to take care of you and they start to say like, oh well, we're going to do this, this and this. You're like I don't know, maybe I'm going to have two or three more interviews and see if it lines up.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's actually a good segue from that Ties into, kind of the problem that we're solving now, right? So what I've discovered in five years of agency work and 10 years of startups that overlap with each other, there's a I'm calling this like the I think I'm going to call it zero to two phase. There's a like a Zen saying or Buddha saying, to the effect of if it happens one times, it's a, it's a miracle, and it will never happen again. If it happens twice, it will happen three times. And so that's where I'm instead of zero to one, zero to two. And what I mean in the zero to two phase is can you Get the thing that you're doing to work more than once, right?
Speaker 2:If you're doing, uh, personality driven sales, every single one of those is a one you're not saying the same stuff. People are buying it because they like you. People are buying it because you have a reputation, but they're not buying it because of the words coming out of your mouth, which means you're going to be stuck in founder-led sales and the lower form of that, which is personality-led sales, when businesses can do that consistently, even if it's still the founder selling, but they're saying the same thing and the messaging is good. That opens the door for everything else. To start working your messaging and marketing your overarching market positioning. If you're going to be pitching, pitching, if you're gonna be doing sales calls or you're gonna hire salespeople, you have to have gotten it from zero to two, because you've gotten that one thing that actually works Right. So I lived in that phase forever and I don't want to live in that phase.
Speaker 2:I wanna help people who've gotten to two get to 10, right, and so being able to do the thing, figure out how the thing works. You have to do that. You. You, the founder, are the only person that's going to be able to do that. Nobody can do it for you, even if you hired consultants and stuff to help with your messaging.
Speaker 2:The things that lead into being able to talk about your thing are so nebulous and abstract unless you have a straightforward business where, like a laundromat or something, none of this pertains to you. That's a different set of problems. What you actually have to do is be able to pull your ego out of it, empathize with the person that you know really well that's in your ICP understand their problems and be able to speak their language better than they can back to them, right, and the things that are required to do. That is actually just doing it yourself a bunch of times until you get it right. There's no bootstrapping that that thing and other people can come in and tell you stuff, but it's not going to be the magic of having that perfect statement until you've done the work to get there.
Speaker 2:Now the kicker is actually a lot of people have this stuff. They're just not good at messaging, right? So where I can sit down with founders and start pulling out, I hear, as they're kind of, you know, usually just let them ramble about oh, this, this and that with the client, but you can hear where it's like oh, that was it. You just said a piece of it, right?
Speaker 2:And people don't know when they say the things that that hit because they I don't. Maybe that's just why I like messaging so much, because, like, in the process of trying to explain philosophy to people for years and years and years, going from hey, I'm going to ramble about nothing important for four hours to like I can talk about something really abstract and uh that most people consider boring and make it interesting. You, you just have to attune yourself to like watching when people respond, when you start losing them. What when their eyes light up when they get it? Um, but so something. I guess in there, what you're trying to do as the founder is just go get as many shots of bad as you can get right, talk to everyone about your thing.
Speaker 2:When I was raising for the social media platform I was trying to build, uh, before we ever went to pitch VCs, I had done 20, 20 or 25 formal pitches to people that would be users of the platform. There were content creators. It was a content creator uh centered approach to social Um, and before I had ever talked to the content creators, I had pitched probably 50 random people on the idea. And before I had ever talked to the content creators, I had pitched probably 50 random people on the idea and before I had ever pitched those people, I happened to run a podcasting company, so I knew all the problems that content creators had really, really well no-transcript.
Speaker 2:These are non binding contracts that say I so and so would use this if it existed. There's two kinds of these the price one and the unpriced one. It's easier to get the unpriced one, but you can also, low key, just tell people this is not a legally binding contract. It says it in the contract, but emphasize that and say, hey, I just need you to sign this so I can go take it to the VCs, give me some money.
Speaker 2:It's better if you don't do that, because if they sign a priced one, then they have more or less like you sold them it formally and you could go sell them like when you could actually pay for it, but anyway. So when did that? Pitch content creators nonstop by. So I went and did that, pitched content creators nonstop. By the time we went to pitch this was in the middle of 2022. So if anyone understands what the VC environment looked like in the middle of 2022, I can tell you it was not good. So Brian, my co-founder he was an advisor for the startup he got us five VC intros. That was all we ever got. I didn't know how to meet VCs and I moved to Austin with the intention of meeting more VCs and I mostly failed to do that, which is cool because I don't need to do that anymore. But I got an offer on the fifth pitch right, which also, if you know anything about the number of pitches required for startups to raise is unusually high. That's like getting one in five is not common.
Speaker 2:I was going to say that's not common. No, that's not common. And then we ran out of VCs and then the market completely shit the bed and that was the end of that. But so I realized I was like, okay, well, what I'm going to do is start working on pitches with my clients, because obviously I know what I'm doing, but by the time I'm going to go raise for something in the future, I will pitch more than anyone else ever pitches.
Speaker 2:If you think about people going to pitch, maybe you raise for one company. If you're an experienced founder, maybe you have a couple of companies ever, but at this point I probably worked on something like 50 pitches with people. So trying to figure out how to explain all these different complicated things. And especially now, um, once I realized that I really don't want to work with early stage because they may have problems that even if we come up with the best pitch ever, it still doesn't work because there are founder, founder center problems or like business center problems that you just can't they're gonna have to solve. Um, also, if you're if you're an early stage startup, you should not be paying someone uh, probably to help with your deck unless you have revenue or something like, you just need to go pitch with a shitty deck. A great salesperson can pitch with a napkin. A bad salesperson could take the best pitch and the best deck in the world and still screwed up right. So the deck?
Speaker 1:doesn't really matter that much it's the story I use that same analogy. I just say sticky note, yeah. So whatever it is, they can pitch with nothing.
Speaker 2:Right, right, like the, the we work guy, whether or not people like him, that guy can pitch right. I got pitched like a stupid insane raise to a 16 Z after he screwed up. We work cause he's so good at pitching Right. You want to. You don't want to be him and like be an unethical business person or something, but if you could pitch like that guy, you'd probably be better off than having a really nice deck. Yeah, but I guess the the point of that being to get to the point where you're actually in the. You know the. I only have a finite number of chances at bat. I have to get this right. Figure out how to practice so much before you get there that you you know what they say it's not don't.
Speaker 1:Practice so you get it right, practice so you can't get it wrong yeah, that was just yep, yep and I I always compare this back to um. You know my involvement in combat sports and you know if anybody has ever trained in athletics and everything like that you're the first time you get into. I'm a boxer and a jujitsu player. So the first time you get onto a mat or the first time you step into a ring, um, you're gonna get hit, it's gonna suck, and your intuition is off. You can't trust it because you know, yeah, exactly like when I first got onto a jiu-jitsu mat, I was like I'm a fantastic wrestler, like this is gonna be great. And then I realized that I have this belly down reflex built into my nervous system from wrestling that will every single time get you choked. You know, because jujitsu players, that's a great place to be full guard and you're on your belly Awesome, kimura arm bars, I'm choking you. I'm putting an elbow in the side of your ear, like it's just a terrible place to be. So until I got reps and I was able to get that reflex off, then you start to get to the point where you can actually trust your intuition and you can surrender to like a flow state and then your body just knows okay, this guy's arms moving here. I'm not even thinking about it, I'm already countering. I'm moving to this same thing in boxing. Right, I can watch somebody's center of mass and I can see, oh, their hip just shifted slightly. They're about to throw a punch. I'm going to move before that punch even leaves the holster, whereas in the past you're so focused on looking at their fists that by the time it's head and towards your face, you can't even move. And so in life in general, let's say you're not somebody that's trying to pitch VCs.
Speaker 1:And I know, when I was listening to that and I heard people talk early on, I'm like, well, I'm building Squarespace sites for people. I don't need to go pitch investors. Why does this matter to me? The same principle applies if you can have a conversation with the gas station cashier, with the Starbucks barista, with a close friend at a bonfire, when they ask you what you've been thinking about working on Anybody that you can get to listen. And sometimes I say the cashiers and the Starbucks baristas are great opportunities if it's not a busy day because they're imprisoned behind the register, they have to listen to you for a short period of time, and if you can practice Exactly If you have that captive audience and you can get it down to where you're like hey. When I first started trying to explain this to my close friends, they had no idea what I was talking about. But I just got a gas station cashier in less than 45 seconds to understand what I was talking about.
Speaker 2:And you don't want to impose it on them.
Speaker 1:You don't want to impose it on them, but a lot of times people will ask in human-to-human conversation you make eye contact with somebody. They're going to be like how's your day going, what are you up to? And as soon as they open that door, boom, hit that 30 second elevator pitch, see if you can get it down. And if you can get it down and to your point, next thing you know you've got 100, 200, 300 reps of talking about this. Now go out and try to pitch the bigger companies, pitch these other people, get into curriculums, all this other kind of stuff, curriculums, all this other kind of stuff. And that is a process, regardless of whether you're launching your business for the first time, or you've had your business for 10 years and you're just trying to launch a new product or service, or you are killing a business that you've had for a couple of years and you're starting a new one. It's evergreen, any part of the process that you go into. My friends know if they open up that door and a lot of times I'll get my buddies that'll be like hey, like let's go out to Taco Tuesday. And as soon as I sit down they're like all right, like fill me in what's going on. You know what's new inside of your world and I'm like you know. Can I give you a couple of ideas that I'm working on and it helps so much.
Speaker 1:So it doesn't have to be VCs, it doesn't have to be actual clients that you're trying to pitch. It can literally be anybody that you run into that's willing to listen. But you have to be willing to talk about it and sound dumb the first couple of times. You try to explain it and slowly get better at refining that. Just like I, when I first got onto the jujitsu mat, would consistently get choked out. I mean, for like three months I was just getting choked constantly would consistently get choked out. I mean, for like three months I was just getting choked constantly. But then I'm probably one of the best I can defend the shit out of a choke now. Like ain't nobody getting anywhere near being able to put me in a rear naked, exactly.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:No, I had the opposite thing with Jiu Jitsu. I started Jiu Jitsu in high school because I got in a fight. I was like I neither thing with jiu-jitsu. I started jiu-jitsu in high school because I got a fight. I was like after I neither won nor lost, it was, it was a very neutral draw.
Speaker 2:But I told my dad I was like I wouldn't be able to kick people's asses. He's like going to jiu-jitsu, um, I did that. And then I wanted to go do wrestling and the first day that we I feel so wrong because I've been doing it for like two years, uh, but like the whole, um, let them have your back. I was like no, no, no, which is a shame, because I would have loved to have wrestled. And I will say wrestlers are the most hardcore people of any. Any basic sport like they, the way they train, is the most. Um, statistically, wrestlers win ufc by a factor of like 50, like all. Almost the most champions are wrestlers and I think it's jujitsu and then it's kind of arbitrary stuff after that. But at any rate, yeah, I have nothing but respect for wrestlers.
Speaker 1:Uh, that was not for me, um yeah, no, yeah, you've hit everyone for sure pitch everyone all the time.
Speaker 2:You are always selling, selling. Here's a really, really important reframe. So, like I briefly mentioned, I had two sales jobs before I was actually into entrepreneurship proper. One of them I worked at a movie store at the Jacksonville mall and we had magazine subscriptions and membership cards and I was obsessed with it. I was like, oh my God, when I decided I wasn't going to go in the Marines because I pretty much like had the thought to myself was like either I'm going to have to beat my dad at being the most hardcore human being alive, which is not possible, because he did some things that cannot be redone in the military. Uh, he was in the uh unit called detachment one. That was the pilot program for Marine Special Operations Command, marsoc.
Speaker 1:So you can't do that again. They did it right. Okay, that's intense.
Speaker 2:So I was like yeah okay, I can't beat him at his. If I did my absolute best, I could maybe potentially equal him, but I can't win that game. So it's like, okay, what's my dad bad at? My dad is not a people person by any stretch of the word. Right, it's like okay, well, I'm just going to become awesome to people, uh, because then I can optimize for something that he's not good at. I can beat him with that. Right, that's a motivator for me.
Speaker 1:I don't know if everyone feels that way about uh, is that maybe a firstborn something, but I was gonna say I feel that way about my dad. I'm also the older yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:You have to right job at that, selling movies, dean subscriptions, stuff. By the end of like the first six months I was like number three in the region. This is a Suncoast which is related. It's a subsidiary of FIE, if you've ever been to those. And then I went out like there's a guy selling hair straighteners with the Israelis it was the one American that was allowed to work with the Israelis, it was very uncommon. And straighteners with the Israelis. It was the one American that was allowed to work with the Israelis. It was very uncommon. And I had met him at the mall. His kiosk was right outside our store and he was like what do you do? I was like, oh, I sell movies and magazine subscriptions. He's like you want to sell hair straighteners? I said okay, fast forward. I'm now selling three $400 hair straighteners to unsuspecting strangers at the mall for 12 hours a day and I got okay with that.
Speaker 2:I was never amazing at it because it's very high pressure. And then somebody told me how much they cost wholesale, which is $6. And I felt really bad. So I swore off of sales. I was like God, if you let me get into college to get out of this hellhole, then I will never do sales again. So I went to school for marketing because I was like how do you sell without selling? Right, and that was something I was obsessed with is like could you, could you have the words so good that they sell without you having to push at all? Right, and that was something I was kind of optimizing for is like I just was morally opposed to the idea of any kind of pressure in sales whatsoever, so I didn't use any pressure and that as a general rule, you should probably have. You know, like, be at least somewhat comfortable with pressure in sales. I really don't care for it and I don't think you need it if you do your job Right, but if you intend to do sales as a career, um, it makes it really really hard.
Speaker 2:I'll just tell you from experience, um, but that's kind of how I ended up moving towards pitching, because it was like, yeah, marketing, whatever. And then it's like, oh wait, you're saying I could just tell a story and then people decide they want to buy stuff. Right, and I've kind of made my peace with sales now because I acknowledge that actually I do sales all the time and I'm pretty good at it. But it took me, it took me most of that decade to that and a lot of that was just figuring out. Ok, how do you just make it sound so appealing that people want it without you having to push them right, and what that really is?
Speaker 1:go ahead.
Speaker 1:I was going to say I just had a conversation with somebody that I'm mentoring about a week ago and they are fantastic at what they do, terrible at sales, right, and they're like I don't even know what exactly I want to do in consulting, but I know I need to have this skillset. I've never worked retail. I've never worked a sales job before, I've never had to be in front of people what do I do? And we came up with this plan for them. That I think is really ingenious, because I had a similar experience to you. I was set up with these types of jobs from a young age, so kind of been through the crucible of door to door knocking sales, trying to sell knife sets to people that were overpriced type of thing which teaches you a skillset. But for her she had never been inside of that position. So I was like well, find a nonprofit locally that you really, really love that's running their annual donation campaign, and start door knocking to solicit donations for the nonprofit. I was like same type of principle You're going to have to learn their pitch inside and out. You'll probably figure out ways to improve on it after you've been told no a couple of hundred times and, best case scenario, you end up learning a skillset raising a ton of money for a nonprofit. Worst case scenario you get 100 reps, 80 of which say no. Now you have more experience, a a little bit thicker skin, because you've been told no a bunch of times, which is a skillset of its own. But now you've gotten to pitch 100 times and the only reputation side effect is this person's really passionate about this cause.
Speaker 1:And she was like oh, I really love that and it's been working really well for her. We just had our check-in call today. I'm like so how's it going? She's like well, I've raised $500. And I'm excited about all of this stuff and I feel like I'm getting better at it. My hands don't get sweaty when I'm trying to talk to people about it now. And I'm like cool, that's great, as you continue to get through this. You've got one month left for this campaign to be done.
Speaker 1:And then what Do you think you're going to be able to go out and pitch your own stuff? And she was like I'm starting to think about it. But I'm noticing that there's a flow to things and I can talk about it this way. And I'm like oh yeah, that's great, congrats. But so there's so many different ways that you can get yourself exposed to it. So if you're listening to this and you're like, well, garrett, jan, I didn't have the ability to have a job like that. I've never got the chance to try to sling hair straighteners in the mall for 12 hours a day what do I do? Now? There's still ways that you can put yourself out there and learn that skillset that's going to benefit other people you know in the cause and stuff like that along the way. So all hope is not lost, like there's still chances for you to get reps without necessarily like putting your own reputation on the line or the reputation of whatever you're trying to build on the line to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, on that note, if I had to tell myself what to do without the ability to do any of that stuff, this is what I would say. A the first and most important thing is that you have to sell something that you believe in. If it's your own services, this is hard. What you can do to bootstrap that is do it for free for a number of times, right, nobody's going to say no to that, unless they absolutely don't need your service. Go do it for free, get some testimonials, track the metrics, whatever it is right, cool.
Speaker 2:Let's assume that your product or service is sorted. Let's ignore that, right. You have to fundamentally understand that what sales is is not persuading people to do stuff. Sales is communicating the value of a solution to a person with a problem. Right, you are helping people solve problems. If the thing that you're selling is not helping them solve a problem, you should not be selling it. Let's assume that that's already sorted. That's the easiest first thing to do. You are not trying to persuade anyone. This is the key. If you're targeting the right people, you have your ICP sorted and they have the problem and you know who the person is, then all you're trying to do is basically hey, you have this problem.
Speaker 2:This is going to sound more salesy this is the right phrase for it, but it sounds very harsh. But, for example, if Jim goes to an office job that he hates from 9 to 5, and then he gets off and has beer and hangs out with his wife and kids and his dog and forgets how much he hates his job, if you were trying to say, convince or suggest that he could get a new job or do something about it, right, your product or service remedies the pain of him hating his job. And you were doing this off hours. You have to. Tony Robbins calls it disturb the prospect, like throwing a rock into a still pond.
Speaker 2:I call it twist the knife right. So if you go to the doctor and your arm's broken, the first thing the doctor's gonna do is like, poke your arm right. Because when he pokes the part of your arm where it's broken, you're like uh, the point of that is not that the doctor is hurting you. That is the first step in the doctor helping you is knowing where the problem actually is, and and that the 95% of people really more. But 95% of people are not motivated by pleasure, they are motivated by pain, right, you are. It's. It's much easier to sell painkillers than it is to sell vitamins, right? I think that's? That might be an indie thing.
Speaker 1:If not, um, that's a they talk close, close enough, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we talk about painkiller problems, for sure, not vitamin problems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that framing as well. That was really helpful. But so you have to figure out where it hurts right To fix it when you do this, right. Hey, it's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it.
Speaker 2:My ICP knows that problem. They're like oh my God, yeah, I've tried to explain it to people all the time. They don't get it. Or I'm trying to pitch it and the VCs don't like it, or whatever. Because I know the type of founder that I work with, who is someone who's too smart for their own good, that has a really big, meaningful thing they're trying to do, and instead of talking about how this solves somebody's problem, they're trying to explain what it is to people, right, which is the mistake. Nobody cares how the sausage gets made. They care. I'm hungry, give me the sausage, right? So that is the basic thing you have to understand. You are a doctor who solves problems for people, right? You're not selling. In the same way, the doctor is not selling you on. I'm going to set your arm that's broken or I'm going to surgically remove cancer. For you, it's like let me help you. We need to get Let me guide you through the pain.
Speaker 1:We used to talk about that in nursing. All the time You're not there to make it is. Make it is kind of counterintuitive, but like, sometimes the nurse isn't always there to make sure you're comfortable. The nurse is there to make sure that we're guiding you through some of the most painful things that you're going to experience, but we're not there to lie to you. I'm not going to sit there and be like hey, when I stick this needle into your lower spine, everything's going to be great, Like it's not going to feel like anything. Blah, blah, blah. I'm looking at you dead in the eyes, like this is just going to suck for about 30 seconds. I need you to trust me for like 30 to 45 seconds and we're going to make sure that we take care of you afterwards.
Speaker 1:It's a necessary process. We have to make sure that we run this cerebrospinal fluid to make sure that you don't have meningitis and in order to get that. Here's why we have to do what we're doing. It does not eliminate the fact that the process is going to be painful in some instances, but what I can say is, on the flip side of that process, we'll make sure that you're taken care of and we'll be able to more conclusively tell you whether you just need antibiotics or you need a spinal fusion, Because those are two very different problems to try to solve. We won't know which one it is until we do this diagnostic, so Perfect example.
Speaker 2:That is the perfect example, because that is what your job is right. If I am for me to for that one liner to function as it functions, the person that I'm talking to has to know the pain of not knowing how to talk about their business right, which, if you have ever had that problem, you know that is the most painful thing in the world, because you get this, you know that it's good and you just can't get people to see it and that is the loneliest feeling in the world. You feel like a loser, you feel like you're wrong or you're crazy, you feel useless, right, and then you can be resentful. You're like they just don't get it because they're dumb or something right, and I've seen founders in every stage of this grieving process of dealing with that.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people get stuck there and then they give up or they become jaded and they just stop trying to do anything. They're like they'll never understand my vision, right? But that's what you're trying to do. Never understand my, my vision, right? Um, but that's what you're trying to do. You're twisting the knife. You're like, hey, where does it hurt?
Speaker 2:pulling the knife out of you hurts, right? I'm gonna patch you up, though, and so that getting over the fear or the aversion to causing discomfort that helps, is very important. You have to. You have to make people more uncomfortable before they get more, before they become more comfortable than they were, right? Um, because you're trying to help.
Speaker 1:It takes a true expert to be willing to be with somebody through that process I used to. When I first started, I mean I was like, oh, my job is to make this as painless as I can, which can be important, but I would do it to the point where, early on, I would shoot myself in the foot and I'd lose contracts because I would try to say that it wasn't going to be a zero pain process, instead of being honest and saying like it's going to take six months, there's going to be a lot of highs and lows, but I'm here to help you with the 80% of the stuff that you can't see right now that's going to come up over the course of that six months. Versus saying like let me prove myself for 30 days and then there's going to be these results and then you can renew me for the next 30 days and whatever, which only comes with time. You have to be working with people for a long period of time and multiple types of accounts and you got to continue to learn with different customers and stuff to be able to see and experience those problems and and solve them. But I mean at this point like I think we're just kind of, you know, reiterating point after point that we've been talking about for this full, for this full hour. And so if you're listening to this, unfortunately we're coming up at the end of our time to this, unfortunately we're coming up at the end of our time and I want you to be able to go away from this conversation really understanding that there's so many different skill sets, there's so many different things that go into building the business.
Speaker 1:And if you are able to continuously be curious, ask questions and open yourself up to change and criticism, like you're going to make it, if you're listening, if you're in a Valley right now, eventually the Valley turns into a Hill and you have to climb it and then eventually you make it out and you may be on a plateau for a period of time. Guarantee you're going to find another Valley. It's an ever living cycle. It's going to happen. If you're listening to this right now and you're on the top of your mountain, you're like I just had a great win, everything's going solid.
Speaker 1:Don't rest on your laurels, enjoy it for what it is. I'm not saying don't congratulate yourself, because there is such a thing as just like constant, chronic self-deprecation. You don't want to get caught in that. Either you want to celebrate your wins, you want to take them for what they are and acknowledge your successes, but if you just get to the point where you get so lost in the horizon and enjoying the view from the peak, a valley might sneak up on you and you have no idea that you're even in it until it's too late. So where can people? You know, if people want to hear more about the stuff that you're continuing to build, or they really enjoyed this conversation and they're listening to it and they're like, hey, I actually don't know what I'm talking about. I'm constantly trying to pitch my business and everybody's giving me feedback that they kind of get what I'm saying, but not really when is the best place for them to reach out to you or get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can email me directly if you want. Garrett G-A-R-R-E-T-T at lucidconsulting, you can go to lucidconsulting. That's our website. There are about 15 buttons that will take you directly to my calendar. If you want to schedule with me and not, the buttons on the website will take you to a meeting with me and my co-founder. If you want to schedule with me directly, lucidconsulting slash G is my calendar. So any of those work we will have content and stuff at some point. I haven't. I'm working on a series of what I think are like the fundamental fallacies that everyone does. So I've gotten like three quarters of the way through three articles, like the engineers fallacy, which is, if you build a great product or service, they will come. That is, that's how anything works.
Speaker 2:I have a list a great product or service, they will come that is not true.
Speaker 1:That's how anything works.
Speaker 2:I have a list of great products or services that lost to inferior things. New Coke is a good example of that. Scientifically proven to be better, Almost destroyed the Coke brand. So at some point we're going to have content and stuff like that coming. But honestly, usually when I start a business it's like, oh, we need to go find work. We actually had clients. We Usually, when I start a business, it's like, oh, we need to go find work. We actually had clients. We haven't even finished incorporating yet. We're in the process right now and we're already probably going to be booked out in a month. So that's a great set of problems to have. I'm very fortunate for that.
Speaker 1:But content will come.
Speaker 2:So just hold your horses, we'll get there.
Speaker 1:I love that, though I love that you had that mission. It took multiple years. You pivoted, had these conversations, did a lot of the hard work and now you're seeing, hey, a simple swap to acknowledging that I needed a co-founder, I needed to exist in my own zone of genius and I needed to refine my ideal customer profile and the service I'm offering. Boom Led to you potentially being booked out with business before even finalizing the incorporation. That's the statement in and of itself.
Speaker 2:Can I say one more thing to bookend our overarching topic the thing that really had to happen for all this stuff to work. Obviously, we talked about a ton of different pieces of things that go into this and stuff I learned, but what really had to happen is the, the pain that you feel when you're in the valley, the discomfort that you have when things aren't working. Part of who you are that is used to things being the way they are has to die, and the experience of part of yourself dying is indistinguishable from actually dying, as far as I can tell. Um, the that's the way that our brain works. So usually the experience of doing this is called bashing your head into the wall, trying to solve the same problem forever and when, when you've actually finished processing it, it doesn't feel like you did. You feel like you're giving up, and that's actually that part of yourself that needs to die for the insight to come in giving up. Because for me it was like dude, I three years trying to say the same thing, you know, like three years. And then, when we actually sat down to do the one-liner exercise, me and a buddy of mine who's a fantastic salesperson sat down for two and a half hours to make that sentence work, after I realized it was going to be a different company, it was different stuff, right, but that was two and a half hours on top of years and years and years and years. Right.
Speaker 2:But what happened during that week was the part of my brain that said, oh, it's the business philosophy agency and I'm the business philosophy guy, had to die. That was the last thing I thought about, because that was my identity, right? I was like, oh, I have to be this, that's not up to question. I realized like, oh man, I was a sales guy before I did philosophy. Right, I was like the sales and marketing guy, which is weird because I've just been the philosophy guy for 10 years, almost right?
Speaker 2:Um, the point of this is not about philosophy. The point of this is your identity to reach new levels of stuff has to change, and the experience of identity change is the most painful psychological experience that you're ever going to have, because it, your brain doesn't know the difference between that and dying, which is why if you attack people's identity, they will, um, literally fight you, right? Um, people can't tell the difference between a threat to their sense of self and a threat to their physical body, and that's the same for you. So when you are being self-critical, like you know, in a positive way obviously, don't just like beat yourself up. That is the pain of that is the pain that leads to you getting to the other side and you have to be willing to let.
Speaker 2:I think, um, something I've always said is uh, entrepreneurship is self-development, right, especially when it's early, is at a certain point, um, you may have more technical problems than you do like logistical, personal problems, but certainly if you're a solo person and or you're early, or both, all the problems that you have are problems with you, even if you think they're external, if you think they're, uh, like, my team just won't do stuff.
Speaker 2:It's like oh, you're not the leader you need to be, yet right? Oh my, oh my, my customers don't get it. You're not good at pitching, yet Right? Oh, my product isn't there. You don't understand the problem well enough to fix it Right. Everything is that and that realizing that hurts, get used to it, it will not stop.
Speaker 1:I love that you put the word yet at the end of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just either, if you choose not to quit, you either win or you die, right, but at least you die trying. So learn from that one story I told, which is that I just kept doing this and it evolved into many different versions of the same thing. Lucid is the spiritual successor to Ion, and I would never have gotten Lucid without doing Ion, but I also had to kill my baby for it to work. Right, I had to cut myself out of it and make it something that doesn't work for me and my personality-driven sales, my idiosyncratic talking about philosophy stuff, for it to make sense, right? Yep, that's how it goes.
Speaker 1:I've got nothing else to add. I think that's a great place to end. Thanks for tuning in everybody. Um, if you're interested in joining an indie collective cohort I'm sure that you heard our pre-roll and our mid-roll ads, but if you made it all the way to this point, then you're truly a dedicated follower.
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