The Dave Crenshaw Success Show
Learn how to achieve balanced and lasting success with world-renowned author and keynote speaker Dave Crenshaw! Dave has already taught millions how to be more productive through his online courses—now listen in as he explores the untold stories of some of the world’s most accomplished people. Dave’s mission is to help his kids become successful human beings, and you get to come along for the ride! Discover how to develop your career, manage your money, find time for fun, build stronger relationships, and make your mark in the world. Every episode ends with clear, concise tips you can implement to reach your goals. If you’re looking for a wholesome, family-friendly podcast to achieve happiness and find prosperity, The Dave Crenshaw Success Show is for you!
The Dave Crenshaw Success Show
The Serial Success Builder, Young Han - COO of Forever Young Agency
Young Han, COO of Forever Young Agency, shares his journey from aspiring musician to successful entrepreneur. Influenced by his father's entrepreneurial spirit, Young transitioned from the music industry to business, learning valuable lessons from his father's struggles and successes. He studied marketing in college and gained experience at Starbucks and Apple before founding multiple businesses, including a Korean restaurant, a coffee company, and a social good platform. Young emphasizes the importance of systems, data-driven decisions, and the willingness to fail. Currently, he focuses on consulting and building small businesses, balancing work with family time, and aspires to clean pools for joy. Listen to his story today and pick which action below best fits your needs.
Action Principles
Pick one to do this week:
1. Be vulnerable. Find someone you trust to help you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. ACTION: Choose someone you admire and ask to schedule a meeting or phone call.
2. Test new ideas. An A/B test helps you compare data for new ideas to see what works and what doesn't. ACTION: Create an A/B test using a proven idea and a new idea to compare results.
3. Reflect. Evaluating your current business or job helps you stay on target. ACTION: Schedule time to reflect and evaluate on your current career path and whether it still brings you happiness.
4. Articulate your goals. Telling others about your long-term goals will keep you accountable. ACTION: Share your goals with a mentor or close friend. Take it a step further and write them down, as well.
Guest Resources
Follow Young Han at AlwaysHan.com.
Suggested LinkedIn Learning Courses
The Focused Business
Free Time Management Course
Thanks to Dave Crenshaw's partnership with Microsoft and LinkedIn Learning, you can get free access to his full course, Time Management Fundamentals, at DaveGift.com.
Dave Crenshaw develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities, and organizations of every size. He has appeared in Time magazine, USA Today, FastCompany, and the BBC News. His courses on LinkedIn Learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. His five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is The Myth of Multitasking—a time management bestseller. As an author, speaker, and online instructor, Dave has transformed the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands around the world. DaveCrenshaw.com
I'd love to be a pool boy, and then I'd love to clean like 10 pools a week. That'd be so really,
Dave Crenshaw:how fun would that be? Man, in this episode, you'll get to know young Han, the serial success builder, and you'll hear the story of how his background of working with large companies such as Starbucks and Apple is helping small emerging businesses be highly profitable. I'm Dave Crenshaw, and this is my success Show. Welcome back, friends, to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show. This is where I speak to some of the most successful people I've met in my life's journey, and I'm on the hunt for universal principles of success that can help both you and my family succeed. If you're not familiar with me, I'm a best selling author. I speak around the world of Fortune 500 companies, and I've taught millions of people how to be successful through my online courses, in particular my courses on LinkedIn. Learning with this show, I wanted to create something lasting that could help my family succeed, but I also thought you'd enjoy learning along with them, I interview people who have multi faceted success in many areas of their lives, and I'm looking for actions that anyone, including you, can take right now to be more successful. So as you listen to today's episode, look for something you can do. Don't just listen to the story, which he has a great story, but look for actions you can take, and then that way you'll make my guest success story a part of your success story, and you're going to want to do that today with my guest Young. Han Young is the COO of Forever Young agency, and is a growth catalyst. With over 20 years of experience in helping companies scale, he's been instrumental in developing companies like Phil's coffee and Limelight health, and has also contributed to major brands like Starbucks and Apple, as the founder, co owner and investor in multiple businesses. Young has helped dozens of emerging businesses grow. He also hosts the girl dad show, a success podcast. Young has fun creating music, traveling and playing with his kids. Young, I'm excited to talk to you today. Thanks for being here.
Unknown:Hey. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Yeah, and
Dave Crenshaw:where are you located today?
Unknown:I'm in Austin, Texas. I moved here about five years ago from California.
Dave Crenshaw:That's a real exciting place. Lots of stuff always happening in Austin.
Unknown:Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things happening here right now. It's a great time to be here, for sure. And
Dave Crenshaw:I just want to point out most people are just going to be listening to this, but I like how you've got your nice backdrop and you've got a hashtag, girl dad, light up. I've got two girls myself. So I love that you do that and that you have a podcast about that. That's a lot. I
Unknown:didn't know you were a fellow girl dad. That's fantastic. No wonder I like you. Yeah, kindred spirits.
Dave Crenshaw:I've got three kids, one, one boy, right now, he's 19, and then a daughter 15 and 11. So, oh,
Unknown:wow, that's amazing. I love it. So you're in the latter half of the raising part. I'm in the front part of it,
Dave Crenshaw:yeah, well, it's each stage is fantastic. Yeah, you're quickly going to get to the stage of having to be the taxi and or the Uber everywhere. So yeah,
Unknown:it's I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, it's a fun time, for sure. Already, I'm enjoying it. I have a five and seven year old, and they're starting to develop, like, their identity and starting to question everything. And so I'm excited about this next phase where they start to kind of really dig into who they are and what they want to be. So should be fun.
Dave Crenshaw:Yeah, they keep you on your toes, and you always have to watch out, because your own behaviors get reflected back at you. So you you go, Oh my gosh, they learned that from me doing that it's for good or for bad. So okay, so with the show, what I like to do is I start every guest with the same question, which is, when you were young, I'm talking more in your teenage years, what did you want to be when you grew up? What did you think your career would become? Young man,
Unknown:I was known for always wanting to be something different. Every week. I always wanted to be something different. I was so infatuated with just the newest and shiniest thing. And and I'm not really sure how that you know, correlates with me now, because I also still have shiny object syndrome pretty badly, and I think I equate it to being an entrepreneur. But I remember growing up just getting excited about every new thing that I learned about, and really wanting to be that thing. But I will say the core thing that I really wanted to be growing up was a musician. I really wanted to be a rock star, a super bad and I committed a huge portion of my day in life to it, and begged my parents to give me lessons pay for lessons for all these different instruments that I learned and stuff. And then inevitably, I remember my mom sitting me down when I was a junior in high school or something, and I. Saying, Hey, I'm probably the only person that loves you enough to tell you this, but you're not that good. And you really should consider something, oh my goodness, because she saw serious I was taking it, and she's like, Hey, you know, I don't really know anybody else in the world that will tell you this, that you know, that you actually need to hear this. And so you really should consider at least a secondary thing, to make money and afford a lifestyle. So,
Dave Crenshaw:so first comment, here's another connection we had, because that was part of my backstory. In fact, I talk about it, yeah, when I speak on stages, I talk about how I was off the charts, ADHD, I am I off the charts? ADHD, and how I had a band. I tried to be a rock star. Now for me, it was keys and I wrote songs and I sang. So what was, what was your, uh, instrument? Of my favorite
Unknown:one was guitar, singing, and guitar and singing, okay? And I also used to try to write songs as well, too. I mean, that's not try. I did write songs, yes.
Dave Crenshaw:So your mom saying that to you, that's pretty blunt. Was that what your parents regularly did with you is give you tough love like that, or was that just happened to be that situation with you trying to be a musician? Yeah, they're
Unknown:very they're fairly pragmatic people. And so I think just culturally, most Asians are right. We're really about like, you know, building, you know, a good lifestyle through chances and hedging our bets. And so they were pretty realistic. My mom was not, though. So my dad was very binary and very literal. My mom was very soft and emotional. And she actually comes from a family of artists, right? So all of her siblings draw, and they're incredible artists, and my mom is an incredible artist, like she can sketch and draw things beautifully. She paints, still to this day, interesting. Yeah, yeah. So it was kind of a tough thing to hear from her, because as the one artist in my life, I just assumed she would be very supportive of me doing that, and she is, by the way, I shouldn't say that she wasn't supportive. She was just having a realistic conversation about making money and living in a decent standard of living, you know. And
Dave Crenshaw:you took that to heart. And what did you start pursuing after that, then I
Unknown:started pursuing business so I started to explore what it looked like to get a business degree. And, you know, follow more in my dad's footsteps, which was, he's also a great musician. Oh, wow, that's actually funny. He's actually a guitar player and singer, and he can sing really well, interesting, yeah. So he's a musician as well, too. And I grew up listening to the Eagles and, you know, and just, just like listening to my dad sing, and, you know, good old, good old classic rock, but he never did it professionally. He just did it as a hobby. And he would, in rare occasions, play, I almost forgot, because he played so little, but when he did, he was incredible. He was, he was beautiful voice and great guitarist, yeah, but he pursued business, and so I kind of grew up watching him build businesses, and so I kind of followed in that footstep. He was an entrepreneur. Yeah, very much. So very, very cool story. He started with the little liquor store in Oakland, built that and was successful with it, and took it to another larger business, and started selling jet skis and motorcycles as a Kawasaki dealership. And then did really well with that, then bought a Yamaha, and then so and so forth. And just kept growing and growing and growing. And I watched this man build a very, very successful business career, you know, in one lifetime. And being able to see that was incredibly influential in my life.
Dave Crenshaw:That's really interesting so early on in my life. Now, now in my family, I have some successful entrepreneurs, but early on, I had lots of entrepreneurs around me who were all failing at it. So I learned, originally, to avoid it, and also learned lessons about the mistakes that someone might make, but in your case, you were actually seeing success. So what were some of the early lessons that you saw that still influenced the work that you do today? Well,
Unknown:I think that you have to compliment the story of success with all the pain that he went through. So just just to be very clear, like, you know, when I talk about it in a short way, you say that, yes, he went from this to this, to this, to this, to this. But the actual journey of watching this man do this was not staggered and sequential like that. I mean, we had to move 13 times. There was a lot of money issues, there's a lot of strife, there's a lot of hard work, a lot of long hours. There were years where I would see him very little because he was working in the business and trying to build equity and assets and brand notoriety, or whatever that may be. You You quickly learn how hard it is to achieve what he's achieved. And I learned that at a very young age that you can achieve amazing things in this country, and you can achieve amazing things through business, but it does require quite a bit of sacrifice.
Dave Crenshaw:And what were some of the sacrifices that you saw? You mentioned moving around a bunch of times, yep. What were other sacrifices?
Unknown:So there's two core things that I learned from my dad just watching him work, is that you have to be smart enough to know when. There's a good opportunity, and understand the risk, right? And then you have to be dumb enough to do it anyways. And so that's the one thing I learned from my dad, is that you cannot exponentially grow your business without risk, and risk comes with failure, and that's part of the process. And more often than not, you will fail more than you win. It's just that you have to keep doing it over and over again, which leads me to my second lesson. You have to want it bad enough. He says this to me all the time. You know it's like, it's not about how good looking you are, it's not about how smart you are, it's not even about how knowledgeable you are. It's quite literally, how bad do you want it more than the other person you're competing with? Because anytime you hit some level of success, there's going to be a million copy cats that try to take it from you. So then it just comes down to the fight in the dog and how bad do you want it?
Dave Crenshaw:The word I like to use is passion. You need to have a passion, and this is not just with starting a business, but your career. You need to really deeply love what you do, because every job, every business, has terrible things that you hate. That's right, that's inevitable. But if you love what you're doing enough, and you're passionate about it, you're willing to work longer, you're willing to do the things that other people are not willing to do. Is that, is that what you're saying, or is the want driven from a different place?
Unknown:I think it's really accurate. I think that, yeah, you're absolutely right. There's so many pros and cons, and I often think that the cons actually are quantitatively more than the pros, but the pros are so deep qualitatively that they overcome the cons, right? And so I absolutely think you're you're barking up the right tree there, and passion is a good way to articulate it. But I also think that it comes down to what is the end state, right? So, what is your end goal, and what are you trying to do? And for my dad, it was provide a better life for his family and his kids, right? Than than he had for himself. And so that was worth more to him than, you know, sleep, physical health, mental health. You know, sometimes even time with his family that he was building this for. You know, he sacrificed his time with his family to build this thing, and this, this ecosystem where we could have a better life than he did. And so I obviously, you know, didn't understand it growing up. So just I sound very sage saying this now in my mid 40s, but I didn't truly understand or love my father until I started having kids, and then I started realizing the sacrifices that he made, and my obvious empathy for him shot off the roof, but not only empathy, but understanding, started to come into play over the last few years. I want to come back
Dave Crenshaw:to that later, how you've juggled the responsibility with your family and your business. For now, let's talk about what you studied in college. You studied marketing, correct? Yeah,
Unknown:so I studied marketing in college, and it ended up being marketing because I had started a business in college, and by the time I was getting to the point of dropping out because my business was all consuming my time, I had quickly realized that I needed to finish college, and I chose marketing because there was the least amount of credits and scoring that you needed to graduate. Okay, and so I actually wanted to go into business management or information systems, so mis but I chose marketing because you can get C's and D's and take a lot less classes, and you can get that marketing degree. So I chose that one at the at the very tail end of my college, college career, that's
Dave Crenshaw:interesting, that in in and of itself, is a entrepreneurial approach to it, right? It's very pragmatic. I know I need to get this done. I kind of did that late on. Now, I studied entrepreneurship, but yeah, during the back end of my senior year, I was already running my business, and I'm like, no one's going to look at this resume. That's right. I'm going to accept C's on these not because I'm not capable of getting an A, but I just, I've got better things to do right now, but I still learned a lot during that time. Did you did you find that you learned a lot about marketing that's still useful to the work that you do today?
Unknown:Absolutely, I learned a lot about business in general, and I feel like I was probably one of the most productive students in my classes. And I don't say that lightly, because I feel like I aced all my tests, I participated, I attended every class, and I learned I just didn't have time to do the homework because I was busy running a business, and so I ended up getting C's and D's because, you know, most of the classes are weighted to be instructional in that sense, but I aced my testes and failed my homework and got C's, and it was a good rub out, and I still got my degree.
Dave Crenshaw:And what did you do so you were running the business? Did you continue to run your business after you got your degree? Or did you start working for another company at that point? Or both?
Unknown:I did start working for another company, the business was all consuming. I didn't realize it was going to be so successful, and I just didn't have the hard skills. I was young and dumb and nice. What was the business? It was a Korean restaurant food business of all things. Yeah, me and my business partner had no business being in the restaurant. A business. Let's just say it that way. I
Dave Crenshaw:was going to ask about that, because isn't the restaurant business perhaps the hardest business you can try to run as an entrepreneur? I know I would never recommend to an emerging entrepreneur to start a restaurant. That's right.
Unknown:I do the same thing now too. So when people ask me what business they should start, I always tell them not to do food business.
Dave Crenshaw:For those who are unfamiliar, why? Why is that a bad choice? There's
Unknown:too many variables. You just have your bet stacked against you. You can make great money doing it, but it's just there's a lot more variables. So there's not just cogs, there's also labor, and then the labor is also finicky, because there's part time labor and full time labor, and then there's all the rules and regulations that go around that two, there's also perishables. So within the cogs, there's many variables. So it's not like you just have cogs of goods. They're perishable cogs because they're food items. And then lastly, you're you're dealing with a mass amount of direct to consumer so you're talking about food safety, you're talking about a customer interactions, customer service, regulations that go along with those things. All of this eats into your margins. So even at the best case scenario, let's say you knock this out of the park and you have a wonderful food business. You're talking about an average food business having 10% margins. There are way easier ways to make money. And so I don't recommend it being the first business that people start. I recommend it being like the sixth or seventh, because then it doesn't matter if they make money or not. They could just have it for fun, and then if it does, well, great,
Dave Crenshaw:yeah. And for those who are familiar, you kind of mentioned it, but COGS is short for cost of goods sold, which is just basically, when you sell something, it costs you a lot to sell it, and that's why your margins are so low and and honestly, that's why starting any kind of business that is product based, it just takes longer it. There's a lot more stuff that you have to put into it. So okay, so you had that restaurant. How did you exit that? Or is it still going?
Unknown:Yeah, we it's not going anymore, but we did exit it to another restaurant tour. So me and my business partner were just overwhelmed, and we were not running it well. We were just inexperienced young kids, and we did our best to hire more senior staff that knew the industry better. And even with that, though, I was just involved in the business too much, because I was compensating a skill with time, and so I was just investing a lot of time, and I was starting to get D's and instead of C's, so that's inevitably why I got a marketing degree, because I realized that if I didn't finish college, then I would have never finished so I was about to drop out or get kicked out, and I just said, I need to finish this, because I know for fact, I'm never going to go back to school if I don't do this. And I told my business partner that, and she looked at me, she said, well, let's just drop out, because we have a successful business, we should double down on this. And I just said, I just need to finish this. And so she's like, Oh, I'm not doing this, if you're not doing this. And so we decided to sell, and I went to college and finished out my degree, and then what we were going to do next was do another business together, but be a little more educated this time. And so we were thinking about doing either a Japanese restaurant or a coffee shop. And so I worked at Starbucks part time while I finished school to learn about the coffee industry, and she worked as a waitress at a Japanese restaurant that was kind of the next stage. Yeah. Wow. So
Dave Crenshaw:you were using your time at Starbucks with the mindset of, I'm going to create a coffee business someday.
Unknown:That's right, the thesis was, this time, instead of just jumping into a restaurant, like not expecting it to be successful, let's expect it to be successful and actually learn about what the heck we're getting into. And so the next business was going to either be a cafe or a sushi shop. And so we're like, Let's go work there and learn it, and then we'll reconvene in six months. We'll finish school, and then we'll figure out which one we're gonna do next.
Dave Crenshaw:I've said this quote a few times on this show, but there was a mentor of mine that said, What's the secret of success in entrepreneurship? Make sure it's your second time. See, see an entrepreneur appreciates that, right? That's awesome, but that's really what happened, right? Like, you gave a shot and you're like, oh, that didn't work out so well. Now I know what I need to do, because I I had that experience. Okay, so, did you end up creating that coffee business? Or did that that experience, start to shift your attention elsewhere, because I, when we were doing research, I didn't see a coffee business pop up there, unless I misunderstood. Yeah,
Unknown:I fell in love with working at Starbucks. And so six months later, we reconvened, and we talked about, you know, how they ordered their fish, and how they structure their business. And it was really cool. So we did the analysis on the sushi restaurant, and then I gave her the analysis on a coffee shop. I'm like, I feel very confident. I know how they make their drinks, how they manage their cogs and like their labor, and feel good. And she's like, okay, great. So which one are we doing? And I said, there's a problem. And she's like, what I'm like, I love working here. And she's like, What do you mean? You love working here? And. I was like, I love working here, and I don't want to do this anymore. I want to stay here for a few more
Dave Crenshaw:years. Okay, and and then you also work for another coffee company. Is that correct? Yeah, I
Unknown:work for three coffee companies in my career. Lot of coffee. Okay? I definitely love coffee a lot. I love everything about it. And I've done Starbucks and helped them open a bunch of new stores when their anti competition with Pete's ended, they could expand into the West Coast. And so there was a big land grab for Starbucks back then. And so the second coffee experience was a startup. We were a venture backed coffee company called Phil's coffee, and we raised quite a bit of money in a short amount of time, and I helped them open up 60 locations across the country.
Dave Crenshaw:So was that you had equity in that company when you were working with them? I
Unknown:did, yeah, I was an early stage employee, so I have, I still have equity, yeah, in that company, it's still
Dave Crenshaw:around. Okay, so I want to pause on this for a second, because you definitely have an entrepreneurial spirit and background, yet you've worked for large companies. So sometimes I think people consider those options, they're very different from each other. So could you just shine a light on what the difference is between working in a large company versus being entrepreneurial and starting your own company?
Unknown:For me, I lacked a lot of hard skills, and I think you can learn a lot by doing, which is really important, and a lot of people don't ever do, which is the problem, right? But the other problem with just being an entrepreneur or not having workplace experience is there's some common business practices that you'll never learn unless you go through it and you learn it all over again, the hard way, which is kind of insane to think about, because most business concepts and processes have already been researched and discovered in Harvard, Harvard Business reviewed. They're all on YouTube. It's about stitching it together and synthesizing that information right? You can, like, find all the information you need. There's not that much innovation in how business is done, but it's about synthesizing it and making it usable and practical. And some of these corporations have figured it out. That's why they're big corporations. And so, you know, for me, it was a way of getting university right, getting those hard skills taught to me in a packaged format. So how do these companies structure their internal operations? How do they do recruiting? How do they do employee engagement? How do they scale this into multi units? How do they build this beyond 20 employees. Like, all of those things are packaged up in a really unique and neat way. And for me, my experience at Starbucks and Apple were polar opposite, two incredibly successful companies, but run completely differently. And it was a really good, hard knock life lesson for me as an entrepreneur to see how those two companies did that. Okay,
Dave Crenshaw:so let's say that I already have a business. I'm already an entrepreneur, and I'm hearing this going, Wow, those are really great lessons, but there's no way that I'm going to go work for an apple or a Starbucks. How would someone in that situation go about learning those lessons without having to, you know, get a second job.
Unknown:My recommendation would just hire someone that's a consultant that has those big box experiences that they can pick their brain on or bring them in. There's a lot of ways to structure mindshare and synthesis of like these kind of like frameworks and processes, and that's my recommendation. So you can do an advisory board, and have start building that some sort of advisory council for that specifically, and we're just flat out hire mercenaries, right? There's a ton of consultants out there that have that big box knowledge that can come in and give you advice in any kind of structured scope. Way.
Dave Crenshaw:Is that what you're doing right now is acting as a consultant? Yeah, that's
Unknown:right. So that's what I do currently. So over the last five years, I've just been consulting. And so I just help companies take my knowledge, building companies at early stage, startups, building my own businesses, and then working at these large corporations, and then synthesizing all of that to help them figure out what works best for them. How
Dave Crenshaw:receptive are entrepreneurs to that kind of training? And I'm this is a loaded question, because having having been someone who is coached small businesses, I know what the answer is. So what sort of obstacles do you run into when you're trying to lend big box knowledge to a small business?
Unknown:It's hard, it's very, very hard for especially small business owners to adopt something that they're not used to or uncomfortable with, because they're used to being in a position of power and almost unilateral control. And then having someone tell them that they may be wrong is hard for most people to hear, especially if they have a successful business, right? So if people like, Hey, I have a $5 million a year business, or even a $30 million a year business, you that's, that's fairly successful. I mean, that's, you're already in the top 10% of businesses, you know, in that sense. And so it's hard for those kind of owners to hear that there's a skill gap that that may be there. But I will say that the biggest hurdle is, my biggest hurdle is owners that are not willing to try to fail. So. So I'm not as concerned with people that are insecure, or I don't mind that as much, and I think that that's fine, and that's absolutely normal human reaction. The problems that I have when I work with clients is the clients that can't fail, they have too much ego, or they're scared of the failure or the perception value of it. That is something that I have a hard time working with. And I'll usually exit myself out and say where I'm not a good fit, because it's just not worth my time
Dave Crenshaw:without naming names. Could you give me an example of what that's like someone not being willing to try to fail? Yeah.
Unknown:So my operating system in the way that I have found success, in all the things that I've learned is having a very low ego about your business and letting the data tell you what it wants to be. So let it win, let it make money. Let it do its thing, right? It naturally wants to make money, and typically it's the owner blocking it from doing that. And so I basically try to tell them, like, let's do this and figure out what is the actual data and what the business wants to do to make more money without you being emotionally object. I'm sorry, emotionally, subjectively altering that trajectory. And then once we have that data, then we can recourse and say, Hey, what about this? Do you like and don't like? But at least we have some quantitative numbers to say that you're doing this, eyes wide open, instead of just blaming the market or blaming the customers or blaming this and that whatever. Because the reality is, I can get this to make more money, I can get this to grow more I can get this to not use you or your time to operate this. The reality is, it's just a matter of you being okay with it at what layer. But we need to first figure out how that's going to work, and that requires a lot of testing, a lot of testing, and probably 70 80% of failing and testing to figure out what that right thing is for top of funnel. What that right thing is for bottom of funnel, what that right thing is for employee engagement and recruiting, what that right thing is for financial analysis and product margin fit, right? There's a lot of testing that goes into figuring every component of your business and getting it into a quantitative measure. And then from there, once I know that how I can make it money, you decide, do you want the money, or do you want your ego and how much between?
Dave Crenshaw:I think this applies to anything. But I like to say that in marketing, the two most important words are test it. You do not know whether or not something works just because you you're picturing it in your head, or because you asked your friends or family, what do you think about this? Like? You actually have to do it. And it applies to all of the the numbers of the business, right? We got to test it. We got to get the data. It sounds like that's what you're saying. That's
Unknown:it. Yeah, I love that. You just simplified what I just said in a very obtuse way. That's exactly right. And I think for me, it's just a matter of, like, finding those people that are okay failing a lot, because it's not easy concept for most established business owners to adopt, because they've built this infrastructure, this ecosystem, this this thing, and typically it's like eight or nine years, you know, of building this thing before they hire someone like me because they want to scale it. And so now I'm dealing with legacy, right? I'm dealing with years of structure that they built. Now I'm saying, Hey, we're going to test all of it. We're going to, like, break everything and see if we can't do it better, you know? And it's unnerving, yeah, yeah.
Dave Crenshaw:It's so funny that you just said that number, because I actually say this on on stage, like I'm going to an EO event. Are you familiar with Entrepreneurs Organization? Oh, yeah, yeah. So I'm speaking to them, and in this presentation, in my book The Focus business, I talk about how entrepreneurs are typically unwilling to get help until five to seven years into their business. You just said eight to nine, but it's so true, right? Like you've got to get past that ego and have beat yourself up over and over to go, Wait a minute. You know, maybe I should bring someone in and help me out with this. That's right, speaking the same language there, yeah. Where'd you get your five to seven from I love that school of hard knocks, just working with entrepreneurs, yeah, just anecdotal. Because, you know, someone comes in, they would say, Hey, I think I'm interested in coaching. And I start talking to him, I'd say, How long you been in business? Oh, a couple of years. And then what is the person who's been in business a couple of years? Do they start telling me about everything that's great in their business, everything that's going well, because they feel like they have to justify that. I'm a good business owner, and they'll do that. And I'd say, Well, it sounds like everything's going well. Sounds like you don't, sounds like you don't need a guy like me. And half the time, maybe more than half the time, they go, Yeah, you know what? Everything's going great. I'm like, it's a pleasure to meet you, if you if you ever need me in the future, come back, and that is a pattern of behavior that is so consistent. In fact, I would, I would qualify customers if they hadn't been in business at least five years. I wouldn't even talk to them because I knew that the chance of them hiring me was almost zero. Yeah,
Unknown:it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I guess anecdotally, I think I feel like it's the same thing for me too, like I've noticed the trends over the last, you know, four or five years of doing consulting and coaching is that they need to be tired enough to understand that they're they're the problem, and they have to be okay with it, right? Because it's an emotional journey being a business owner. And then I. Also, I'm a business owner too, right? I've started a bunch of businesses, so I'm also starting to understand their psyche, because I'm also going through advice, and I have these like little defensive moments as well, too, you know? And so I totally empathize with it. Let's
Dave Crenshaw:use that as an opportunity to return to your your career timeline. So you leave Starbucks, you work for Apple, you work for Phil's coffee. So talk to me about how you made the transition from that into again, once again, starting your own business.
Unknown:Yeah. So I was very curious about using some of these new skills and building things out. And I met my co founder at Apple, actually, and we started to incubate these ideas for a social good platform, and so I started a company called Go volunteer in between that and Phil's coffee, which inevitably failed, but in a lot of ways, it succeeded, but it was our way of trying to bridge the gap between our desire to do social good and Be civil stewards of our community while being tech innovators and business people, it was a very cool platform and product that I was very, very passionate about, because I was trying to figure out ways to mirror, you know, doing good in the world and making money. And it was a really cool idea. And we, we became the largest volunteering network in Northern California. So that's one, our one claim to fame. We had 55,000 active volunteers giving back to the local community through our system. But inevitably, I couldn't raise enough money and couldn't sell enough enterprise clients to make it work, and so I had to stop it and shut it down and then go get a job.
Dave Crenshaw:Okay, so that, I think you just answered my question, which was, you know, you said it failed. So on a practical level, you just didn't have enough money, you just didn't have enough funding for it because you were spread too thin, like, what? What was the catalyst for it not working out?
Unknown:Yeah, that's a great question. So practically, yes, I ran out of money. But fundamentally, the issue was that I didn't know how to do enterprise sales, and I had no skills in doing large scale sales efforts, and it's it's a completely different process than normal sales. The executive sponsor, the stakeholder dealing with constantly changes. The sales cycles are over a year long. There's a lot of politics that go into enterprise sales. You have to understand the nuance of the various stakeholders, the executive sponsors, the people actually using the platform. There's a separate person that approves finances and the decisions. It was much more complicated than I ever could have realized. And in hindsight, I feel like I have a better understanding, and if I had to go at it now, I feel like I could, I could tackle it better. But in that moment when I was in building that business and doing it for the first time and learning it as I go, as I did it. It just was a massive, massive undertaking that I just fell flat on my face on and I just kept hitting walls and getting frustrated and emotional and mentally blocked. Yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:well, and the the sales time is slow in enterprise, right? Like we're talking about a restaurant, your sales lead time is a day. If you're just trying to get an investment, or if they're in the restaurant, it's two minutes, right? That's right. But if it's enterprise sales, it could be a year. It could be two years to move someone through that, and it gets to something else too. I mean, we've talked about test it, but I also think the phrase I like is prove it. This is so true for new ventures. If you've got a good product, prove it by selling it. And sometimes I'll be presented with opportunities to invest in a company, and I say, Well, where are the sales? Show me that you've got sales. If you've got something valid, you should have been able to sell it at this point. And, man, it's amazing how many businesses get started and just aren't able to demonstrate that they have a valid model just by selling the product themselves.
Unknown:That's right, yeah, it's a really good thesis, and I completely agree with it. And now that I'm on the other side as an investor, you know, I used to be fundraising, I'm still fundraising, but I also do investing, and it is interesting because I lean more towards that now as well, too. Whereas before, I used to be a lot more idealistic when I was younger, and now it's like you have to be able to sell it. You have to find someone that finds enough value to give you money for it, and you got to keep proving it. It's a really good thesis. I like it. So
Dave Crenshaw:it sounds like you're still doing a lot of different things. So kind of paint a picture for us about what a day in your life is like when it comes to your career. Yeah,
Unknown:so I've been kind of on a weird trajectory ever since I turned 40. Had a pretty interesting midlife crisis, and instead of just buying a motorcycle or a convertible like everyone else does, I moved my family to small town Texas, and I live, you know, in a small town here, and I just started to optimize for time. And I started consulting and using my skills to be a consultant, because that's the after doing a bunch of research, I found that that's the thing that I could do for high rates. So I could work 20 to 30 hours a week and spend. More time with my kids, you know, and I wanted to be there for more quantitative time, literally, just more time. I wanted to be there for the first steps. I wanted to be there for their first day at school. I wanted to be there for those things, and I wanted that time optimization. And so I started researching how I could do that. And one of the things that I felt like was applicable, given my strengths and weaknesses, was using the experiences that I had to consult and sell my time for an hourly basis that I can control. And so I embarked on this journey of doing this, but I've never been a consultant before, and I didn't know how hard and how long it would take, so I moved my family to a lower cost area so that I could buy myself more time to figure out how to be a consultant, and I'm glad I did, because it took me nine months to figure it out I could not sell myself for nine months. Dave, it was one of the worst experience, most humiliating and ego dropping experiences of my life. Because I feel like I was so successful with my career and moving up the ladder and getting to this point, and then all of a sudden, I just like, it's a different thing, selling yourself as a consultant versus selling a restaurant like packaged good. You know, it's very different. Yeah, the
Dave Crenshaw:product is you, yeah, it's
Unknown:you're selling yourself. You're like, that's literally what it is. Yeah, would
Dave Crenshaw:you mind talking to us a little bit about what that conversation was like with your wife to make that kind of move? Yeah,
Unknown:and I'll be very transparent here. So because of our experience in living in Silicon Valley, because of the venture backed company experiences that I've had, and the different corporate experiences I've had, I feel very confident that my rock bottom is I become a tech executive at at a really well established startup. So our worst case scenario is still
Dave Crenshaw:very comfortable, the risk was mitigated a little. Yeah, the
Unknown:risk to ruin was very, very low. It's very, very low. And so when I look at our life, I, you know, told my wife, I'm like, I just feel like we owe it to the people that don't have this luxury to go try and do something that feeds us more. And I don't know if if it's justified or not, but it worked, and she she believed it, and she said, Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, that we should try it at least. And I said, worst case scenario, we moved back to Silicon Valley, and I go get a job, and we make great money and great benefits, and I work nine to five, and we have a very comfortable life, and that's literally the worst that's going to happen to us, and so let's go try to do this thing. And we packed up our bags, and sight unseen moved to Austin, Texas.
Dave Crenshaw:Yeah, I think that's really smart. I think a lot of people will if they have a midlife crisis in quotes, or whatever it is, where they feel like I need to make a change, sometimes they're not considering the risk. They're not considering the practicality of such a thing, and then later have to deal with the consequences. So I think it's educational that you made that choice conscious of what the risks were.
Unknown:Yeah, thanks for saying that. I mean, I try to do as much research as I can on any decision that I make, and then I always try to remind myself again what I talked to you about earlier, just be dumb enough to do it anyways, a lesson I learned from my dad. Yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:yeah. Well, there. There is a lot to be said for just, you know, just jumping into something, not knowing what you're getting yourself into. Okay, so what has been successful so far? I know that we've, you've tried lots of different things, and you've had a very diverse story as an entrepreneur, lots of different experiences, but it sounds like you've gotten into a groove, that you found your niche, so to speak. So
Unknown:I finally figured out how to be a consultant, and it took me a while, and that was very eye opening and good for me, you know, it brought me down to, you know, brass tax hard skills, which was really good. And then once I started closing deals, and I started doing it, I started to realize I was very good at structuring things and helping these businesses scale. And what I used to do at one company, I was able to do at six or seven at a time, and it didn't require me working 50 or 60 hours a week, because 70 80% of the stuff that I was doing was the same. And so one of the biggest epiphanies I realized was that there's not that much uniqueness in each business. I'd say 30% or less is unique. 70% it's all the same. And so if I could fundamentally figure out what the 70% is and build it into a process, I should be able to help more businesses. And so going back to optimizing for time, I can now work less and charge more. And so that was my singular focus for about a year and a half, is just figuring out ways to optimize for time to spend with my kids. Then I started realizing that that time spent was even optimizable. So how can I build assets that were not in exchange for hours? And so I started investing. So I started taking this excess capital with my cost savings and moving to Texas, and then the income that I was making, you know, with this optimization of consulting to invest. And so I started doing the typical stuff, like stocks. And then I started trying, um. Real Estate. And then finally, I landed on small businesses, and the same things that helped me make money in operating and being a consultant allowed me to operate businesses really well. And so three years ago, I started building a small business, and it's something I'm really good at. I'm naturally good at, and so I've been doubling down on that, building an operating system that I can replicate over and over again, and now I'm testing it on multiple businesses. So
Dave Crenshaw:the small business is different than the consulting business, yeah. So through
Unknown:this process of consulting, I started documenting the 70% that's the same, and then putting it into a system, and then I've been applying that system for small businesses as a coaching service. The actual reality of it is, is that one of my friends reached out to me from a video production company Flippered films, and she said, Hey, I need you to I heard you're a consultant. Now I need you to consult for me and help me fix my video production company. I'm like, no offense, but like, you can't afford me because I have to work with tech companies, venture back tech companies, because you probably can't afford me. She's like, listen, we're either gonna shut this thing down or you're gonna help me, because we make enough to, like, make a living, but not enough to make a living. Do you understand? And I'm like, I think I do. And she's like, I've been at this for seven years. I need something to change. Oh, there's the seven years again. Dave, yeah, I've been at this for seven years. I need something to change. And I said, Okay, let me just do it for free. Let's just do a pro bono and so I just started meeting with her and her team for a couple of hours a week. And eventually that became a paid contract, because they started scaling so fast, they started optimizing and operationalizing and making a lot of money, and they were very pliable and open to trying things and failing forward, which was amazing. That led to a bunch of referrals. And I said, Hey, I'm not a small business coach. Stop referring me. And she's like, I'm not trying to refer you, but we're making more money. We're getting more successful. All my small business owner friends want to know what I'm doing. And so I started helping them, and lo and behold, we helped. I want to say six before I hired someone. I said, Oh my gosh, this, this, this system really works. And so I really doubled down on the system. I hired someone and really formalized the operating system, and then I trained someone on it, and I started having her do it to see if it's something that was applicable. She was also able to help four clients achieve a million dollars. It's not necessarily the end goal for me, but we've helped. Now, at this point, we've helped 13 companies make a million dollars in less than a year. So that's kind of our operating systems success criteria. And so then I'm sitting here going, Wait, why am I making all these other people rich? I should do this for myself. So I started a pool cleaning company. I was really frustrated with my pool service. I was on my fourth pool service, and I just could not wrap my brain around why it was so hard for these guys to do their job, right? So I started researching the industry, researching the mechanics of the business, and I found a business partner in GM. He's my pool builder. He built my pool. I convinced him into doing it. Showed him all my financial models, showed him the business, whatever, and I showed him my business system. I said, this is going to sound really weird, but I'm going to give you equity and a small salary, and I'm just going to run you through my system, and we're going to test to see if this works. And it's been a huge success. It's my most successful small business to date, and that kind of inspired me to start multiple businesses. So now I've been opening four businesses on average a year for the last three years. The
Dave Crenshaw:phrase that I like in what you shared here, or the word is system. And that is my background. That's where I came from. Was learning the value of systems, processes, procedures that you put into place with a business. If you look at all the big businesses that you've worked with, young Starbucks has systems, Apple has systems. All of these companies use them, and yet, so often, entrepreneurs just run things by the seat of their pants, and once you get that good system in place, everything starts to take off. So I like that you're highlighting that for us. Hey, thank
Unknown:you. And I love that you're a fan of systems, and obviously that's probably why you're so successful yourself, because I think people underestimate how the boring stuff, the kind of mundane systems building, actually stacks up to you being more creative and visionary. If you just sacrifice a year of your life to build proper systems in your business, it'll literally free you from your business. And it's the biggest jump that I've realized is that like I felt hostage to my consulting business because I had to sell, I had to do finance, I do all this other stuff, but then I also had to be the product. And so it was always inevitably time in and time out. Even if I was controlling it by optimizing for time, I was still hostage to the business. It could not run without me. And what I realized was the only way to scale this so that the business worked for me, and I was the owner of the business, where I could, you know, own the business, and it could grow and operate with or without me, was by building systems. And so I love that you said that, because it sounds like you realize this much younger than I did. I started to put this together only a couple of years ago.
Dave Crenshaw:Well, yeah, I first learned about systems. When I was in college and I was studying entrepreneurship, and they were talking about it, and that's when it clicked in my head. I was like, oh, that's why my family that I had seen struggle over and over. They weren't using systems, and that's why all that happened. So, yeah, that was it from the beginning. Okay, so before we wrap up, I want to talk just a little bit about how you are spending your time. You You made that move, you changed your strategy to optimize time. So how do you spend time with your family and with your kids to make sure that that's a priority?
Unknown:Yeah, so I struggle with it a lot right now, because I'm super busy with a lot of commitments that I've made, and somewhat intentionally too. I mean, this is a little more personal, and again, going back to being transparent and vulnerable here, but up until about, I want to say, two years ago, I optimized for time so I could be at everything that my kids did, and my kids were starting to grow up, and there were obviously signs that we were too abundant. And I don't necessarily know if they understood how hard it is to live in this world and how hard it is to make money. And so I'll just tell you the story. So my oldest daughter just out of nowhere, just looks at me and says, Dad, are we rich? And I have to look at her, and I just stare at her for like I could have been. I want to say it's like 30 seconds of pure silence just trying to process what she's saying. Meantime, my wife is freaking out, right? She's like, who's asking you this? Why do you want to know that? Who's saying this? Like, where did you get that idea from? And she doesn't pay attention my wife. She just stares at me, you know? And just kind of stares intently. And I look at her, and I remember this video that I saw on on some tick tock or something, where shack said it, and so I repeated it, and it was awesome, but I basically said, Mommy and Daddy are rich, you're poor. That was the line I quickly was able to pull out after like this, we say the same thing, dead silence. But what I realized was, after like weeks of processing, why she would say that is because, you know, we're at everything her, her mom's at everything she. Mom volunteers at PTO. She picks her up, drops her off, she's, she's, she's involved in the school. There's like, meet the teachers. I'm at everything, like, I'm accessible for every single possible thing. And there's sometimes where other kids don't even have one parent, let alone both parents, are there for everything, right? And so I'm realizing that I may be sharing a different point of view of what kind of person I want them to be and I want them to grow up knowing that you know you have to sacrifice things. Things aren't easy, and sometimes things are hard. And so I've made a conscious decision two years ago to start, you know, showing them how hard I can sacrifice and how hard I work to build something that's more meaningful. And so as it relates to spending time with my kids, I try to spend as much time as I can with them. And so I try to make sure that I spend roughly minimum 25 hours a week with them, qualitatively, whether that's through dinner or activities or reading or some sort of fun activity and stuff, right? And then, obviously qualitatively, I try to, like, make it really qualitative as well. So whether that's like doing something innocuous, like just hanging out watching a show together, or whether it's really intensive, like we're gonna go do some sort of activity, like an escape room together, right? Some something experiential, but very intentional about that time, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Dave Crenshaw:And what patterns have you seen from that? Tracking the patterns
Unknown:that I've seen from that is me being able to manage things on a monthly basis. So every month I look back at it and I say, How do I feel about how things are progressing versus how much time I put into it? And then I make those micro adjustments on time spent on things for the following month. So if I'm feeling like my businesses are failing or these businesses are not succeeding, I look at how much time I'm putting into it, and I adjust it. And I'll try to say, let's give this eight hours instead of three, right? Whatever that may be this month, and then I'll adjust that and sacrifice sleep or health or whatever to adjust for those hours. And then I'll see how that performs the following month. And then I'll assess how I'm feeling versus the hours that I put in. And I'll keep just making monthly micro adjustments on it, but I don't mess with my family time that one's kind of stabilized. Oh,
Dave Crenshaw:that's good. I'm glad to hear hear that I'm going to send you a copy of my book, young the focus business. Oh, my God, thank you. I'll be interested to see what your take is on it, because you've used the word sacrifice a bunch of times. I actually talk about that in the book, how entrepreneurs don't need to sacrifice quite as much as they think they do. So I'll be interested to get your take on that when you read that, what do you see ahead for the next five years. For you,
Unknown:I'd love to continue to meet other business owners and help them understand how they can operationalize their business. I'd love to continue to consult and coach. I feel like I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. I love I love this. And even if I had all the money in the world, I don't know if I'd ever stop. It's it's super fun. I've never felt more alive in my life. And it's weird saying that in my mid 40s, right? Because I think a lot of a lot of my peers are starting to, like, think about legacy and winding down, and I feel like I'm just starting all over again, because I feel like I actually am doing my my thing. So I feel like I'll do that, but probably. Probably a lot more controlled and tempered. And I think based on the trajectory of my pool cleaning business, I should be able to do a lot less consulting and just pick the ones that are going to be really fun for me, emotionally and mentally. And then I'd love to clean, like, 10 pools a week. I'd love to be a pool boy. That'd be so really, yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:how fun would that be? Man, would that be awesome. So you like, enjoy just that action of cleaning out the pool.
Unknown:I do it for my own pool. I mean, I just do it periodically. It's just therapy, right? It's just kind of fun to, like, go in there and clean it and brush it and and stuff. But I think that there'd be something really fun about, you know, being a part of the business in a very micro sense, one, communicating that standard to the staff. And then two, also for me, just to kind of level set, you know, what the point of all this is? The point of all this is not money. It's what makes you happy. And what makes me happy is, you know, downtime and things that I could do with my kids. I can imagine a world where my kid comes and cleans a pool with me, right? And especially if I'm only cleaning 10 pools, it's like, it'll take me a day and a half, two days to do that, you know. And I mean, that's not fair, because my staff does that in one day, but I would take two days to do that. Those would be the 10 cleanest pools in our in our portfolio, for sure. But you know, how enjoyable would that be to like, listen to a podcast, clean a pool, you know, be in the water, be near water, be able to take my girls with me, clean pools together, like it just checks so many boxes, right? Getting their hands dirty, teaching them how to make money, teaching them, you know, the arbitrage of value, like just all these different lessons that go into cleaning a pool.
Dave Crenshaw:That's a fantastic place for us to end. This is, and I completely agree, the purpose of owning a business is for that business to give you more happiness, to give you more joy. Yes, money is important, but you want to feel that it's giving back to you. And I think that that's true for a career as well. I think that you want to be in a place doing the thing that is helping you feel fulfilled. And for you young, apparently, that's that's cleaning the pool. I love it. That's great. All right, so what I what I do at the end of every one of these interviews young, is I want to help my audience find actions that they can take, because I'm a big believer that it's about the actions that you take more than just the knowledge you gain, that's what's going to push you forward. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to suggest three things that someone can do today or this week based on your story, and then what I'd like you is to add a fourth one in there, a specific action that a listener can do. Okay, great. So I'm going to go right back to the beginning, and I think the beginning was full circle with your story, where your mom sat you down and said, Young you're not going to be a musician. She had an honest conversation with you, and that's also what your career is about, right? Sitting down with entrepreneurs and having honest conversations about objective information. So my suggested action is to find someone who can have that conversation with you, someone who you trust, and have them tell you the things that no one else will say bring a low ego to it, and that is always eye opening. It's not fun. It can be a little bit painful, but having someone you trust have an honest conversation with you is always valuable. The second I'm going to go back to that phrase that you used. You were talking about data and reviewing things, test it if you have an idea for a business, or you have an idea that can help the business you're working in Grow test it. Create an AB test where you do one thing one way, and the other thing the other way, and compare the data and see what happens. Try to move a little bit away from just relying on intuition and gut feel. And then last one, I'm going to go back to that final concept, which is, ask yourself, is the business that I'm in, is the job that I have? Is it giving me more happiness? Is it giving me more joy? And if not, ask yourself, What's something I can do to move a little bit closer to the thing that actually is going to make me happy? That might be a difficult decision. It might take some time. And maybe you can't uproot yourself and move to Austin to make that decision, but you can do one thing today, to move yourself a little bit closer to a job, a role, a business that gives you happiness and joy Young. What's a an action you would suggest for someone?
Unknown:Yeah, yeah, so. And just to add to that, a fourth one that might be helpful for the listeners is articulate the end in mind. So what is the end goal? And if you can, and I know this is weird for some people, but just repeat that end in mind every morning. Just make sure that you articulate that to yourself every single day. And. Yeah, just kind of give yourself the daily affirmation, because all of it is all of it should nest into an end goal. And you have to be very, very clear about that end goal for yourself, both personally and professionally, or no one's going to be able to help you, and you can't help yourself.
Dave Crenshaw:I love it. That's fantastic advice. One way that I do that is I create a weekly email that repeats and it sends myself a reminder of all those things that are most important. So nice. Yeah, that's a great advice. Young, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you and get to know you. If someone wants to follow you and they want to learn more about you, where should they go? Obviously, if they've got kids, girl, Dad would be a great podcast. But what's a place where they can get in contact with you personally and learn more about how you might be able to help them? So
Unknown:the central place that leads out to everything is always han.com so it's kind of my play on my last name, H, A, N, so always Han is always also on, because I'm always on. Oh, so yeah, always Han is kind of my main website that leads to all my businesses and how you can work with me. And there's a little widget that you can say and you fill out a it kind of leads you through logic tree to tell you what best way to work with me is. I love
Dave Crenshaw:it. Always han.com. Young, thanks so much for sharing your time generously with us. I know that your story will inspire a lot of people.
Unknown:Thank you so much for having me. I had a really great time, and thank you
Dave Crenshaw:everyone for listening. Remember, it's not just about the knowledge that you gained or the inspiration you received. It's about the action that you take. So do something. Do one thing today based on what you heard, and you'll make young Han success story a part of your success story. Thanks for listening.
Darci Crenshaw:You've been listening to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show, hosted by my dad, Dave Crenshaw, and produced by invaluable incorporated research and assistant production by Victoria Bidez, Sound Editing by Nikic Wright, voiceover by me Darci Crenshaw, and the music is by Ryan Brady via Pon five licensing, please subscribe to the Dave Crenshaw success show on Apple podcasts Spotify, wherever you like to get your podcasts. If you have a suggestion for someone my dad might like to interview, please send it to guests at Dave crenshaw.com and please don't forget to leave us a five star review. See you next time you.
