Brian Mac Mahon: Mastering the Art of Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

Never Been Promoted Podcast with Thomas Helfrich

In this engaging episode of "Never Been Promoted," host Thomas Helfrich dives into an insightful conversation with Brian Mac Mahon, the Head Honcho at Expert Dojo, renowned as the most active VC group globally. Brian discusses his entrepreneurial journey, transitioning from startup roots to venture capital expertise, and delves into the intricacies of securing venture capital, the importance of timing, and the essential dos and don'ts for entrepreneurs seeking funding.

About Brian Mac Mahon:

Brian Mac Mahon, a seasoned expert at Expert Dojo, has a rich background in entrepreneurship and venture capital. He has been instrumental in approximately 280 individual investments in scalable companies targeting billion-dollar valuations. Brian's unique approach blends the rigorous discipline of venture capital investment with a keen emphasis on growth hacking and meritocracy, offering invaluable insights into the startup ecosystem.

In this Episode:

• Journey from Startup to Venture Capital: Brian shares his transition from founding startups to understanding the venture capital landscape.
• Essential Factors for Startup Success: Insights on revenue growth, customer retention, and the critical role of cash flow in a startup's life.
• Challenges in Raising Capital: An honest look at the venture capital process, fundraising challenges, and maintaining a company’s core identity during expansion.
• Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Brian imparts his wisdom on the most crucial entrepreneurial traits and common pitfalls in the startup journey.

Key Takeaways:

• The Importance of Execution

Why execution matters more than perseverance in the realm of startups.

• Customer-Centric Focus and Communication

The necessity of understanding customer needs and effectively communicating your product's value.

• Creating a Lovable Product

The idea is to develop a product that deeply resonates with customers, surpassing the minimum viable product standard.

"Entrepreneurs can be very lazy with outreach, but it's impossible to build a lovable product if we're not very close with those customers and how they are engaging." — Brian Mac Mahon

CONNECT WITH BRIAN MAC MAHON:

Website (Company): https://expertdojo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianmacmahon2/

CONNECT WITH THOMAS:

X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thelfrich | https://twitter.com/nevbeenpromoted 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hovienko | https://www.facebook.com/neverbeenpromoted 

Website: https://www.neverbeenpromoted.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neverbeenpromoted/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neverbeenpro

Transcript

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Welcome to the never been promoted podcast with Thomas Helfrich. Get ready for a thrilling adventure as we uncover entrepreneurial journeys and life changing business insights every week. And now, your host, Thomas. Welcome to another episode of never been promoted, where we unleash your entrepreneur by learning from other entrepreneurs and their mistakes, their wins, and things they think about. So in today's episode, I am brought to you. I'm bringing you Brian Mac Mahon. I'm saying it with a little accent because you have an accent. I felt it necessary to throw one in, but he is the head honcho at Expert Dojo, which is the most active vc group on the planet. That is his words, not mine. Brian, how are you?

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I'm very well, thank you. I like how it got expanded to the planet. I'll take it, though.

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Well, let's just be completely american egocentric here. If you're the most active one in the US, you're the most active one on the planet. That's my.

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We actually were like, last year in 2022, we did about 120 investments, which had us about seven, six or seven in the globe. So we do a lot of investments, I think is very fair to say.

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Thank you, by the way, for joining. And today's episode, we're going to cover some of your journey as an entrepreneur, and you've moved over to the business of venture capital. I'd love for you to get in the weeds of what that is and what that means to an entrepreneur when they're trying to chase money, the timing of it, the do's and the don't. But take a moment, set the table with you, your company, and kind of give us a few minutes on how you got to where you are today.

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Well, let me start at the end, and I'll work my way backwards. So, first of all, we have around Expert Dojo, approximately 280 individual investments in companies, and they're all highly scalable companies that we believe have the ability to hit valuations of a billion dollars. Now, obviously, many will not hit those valuations, but we have to feel that there's the potential of doing that. And I'm really happy to share later on the kind of formulas and thought process we go through in diligence to try and get to those places. And we'll invest $50,000 at the beginning, maybe up to $100,000. And then if we really like what the companies are doing, we'll invest follow on checks that have about a million dollars into the companies that we feel are hitting the financial milestones we have. So that's the basic outline of where we are now as a VC and one of the most active vcs in the world. We don't really consider ourselves a VC, bizarrely enough, we consider ourselves to be very much in your world, Thomas. We're growth hackers, and we see that as our edge. And I think, look, anyone who starts a business and a VC is a business venture capital firm is a business in the same way as a fish and chip shop is a business. The same fundamentals have to be hit. Whatever money is invested needs to be returned, needs to be returned with enough profitability so that we have a sustainable and strong business going forward. And so to do that, you have to have something unique. There's no point in being one of tens of thousands of venture capital firms around the United States, because how are you going to survive otherwise? And so that's why we layered in the venture capital, sorry, in the growth hacking piece, because we wanted to take something that we felt was really missing in venture capital, which is meritocracy, and we wanted to combine that with enablement, which our growth hacking skills allow us to do. And, yeah, it was a long journey.

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I'm an old man, so we're going.

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To need more than an hour to go through the piece of how I got here.

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Well, and I think it's just to say that you've been through the startup world, founders, things like this, and anybody that's listening to this is typically an entrepreneur, and they're listening, or they want to become one, or they've just started. And many entrepreneurs, at least I know, I meet hundreds a month, they're clueless to the realities of their business, raising money, the ideas, what matters. And when I think some of the advice, I'd love to start with, you're an entrepreneur, but we'll start with the ideation. One that's got a company that's got an idea, take them versus the one who's established a market. But we'll start with that. So entrepreneurs that you have an idea, you're working somewhere right now, I want to do that billion dollar exit. Let's lay some reality of what you're getting into. So maybe give like the ABCs of becoming an entrepreneur or becoming a founder, of course.

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And look, because I've worked with so many companies, and we've invested with like 280 or so companies, I have the privilege of being able to pattern match a tremendous amount of great entrepreneurs who've been able to build out some amazing stuff. And what I'd like to also do in the podcast is just drop nuggets of things that I think are highly valuable to people in their own lives and what they can do. I'm going to start with something you just said a moment ago, which is like most entrepreneurs are clueless, but we are clueless because we're not taught in school or in college how to be entrepreneurs. And it's such a terrible shame. Like we're taught the same way as we were like 60 years ago when everybody was going to get a job and was going to stay in that job for 20 years. And we don't do that anymore. None of us does that anymore. So I'm just saying to any dads out there, my boy is 17 and I've been teaching him entrepreneurship since he was eight. And so if you really want to give your kids the greatest present you can ever give them, give them the gift of teaching them how to be financially free and start their own companies when they still have somebody else filling the fridge, okay?

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Because it will in my book, I talk about this live debt free. I'm not there yet with a mortgage, but I will tell you, I don't care what your interest rate is on a mortgage and how you can invest. Making sure you have no debt including a mortgage, frees you because you can now know, I don't ever have to move. I own this place. The idea of getting out of school without debt, go somewhere cheap, go somewhere state or great, right? Because that guarantees you become a cog in the wheel of corporate world. It's not that it's a bad thing in the corporate world, but if you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be your own boss. You can't have debt coming out of school. You just can't. You can't have any of that.

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And also most people, the corporate world is really bondage and slavery in many ways because a few people would break through and become ceos and earn tremendous amounts of money. But the idea of the corporate world is to give you just enough to make it to the end of the month, but not enough to be able to break free and have a good life. And then you fight this whole thing till you're like 65 or 70, and then you make it. And sure, you do great things with your family and great things with other people, but if you can start a business like forget a billion dollar business, forget venture capital for the moment. If you can start a business that you can sell for $13.5 million, that is enough money to live the rest of your life. Never having to work again, then you got to avoid dumb stuff. Right? You got to avoid drugs. You got to stay away from letting addictions get the hold of you and afloats.

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And then other things that we won't say the word, but, like, there's the three f's.

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Yeah. With no divorces. Right? So just be a good human being and you can live an amazing life with not very much. So, look, that's my first nugget that I want to throw there. And now you might say, okay, Brian, it's very well to say that, but how do I start a company? But first of all, there's a hundred thousand million things on YouTube and online that show people how to start companies. The way I look at what is a viable company for an early stage startup is that we want to be able to see. We look at really five criteria, right? And I'm going to dial it back to the most important piece in a moment of the most important three pieces about why most companies fail. Actually, all companies fail. But the five things that we would look at as criteria is, like, number one, do you have a revenue that's growing? So let's say you find a product, you find something that you're going to bring out to market. Like, you find a different type of glasses, and you're like, okay, these are the best glasses. I built out this prototype glasses. I'm now going to go out to my customers. I'm going to see who wants them. If we see a growing revenue in the venture capital world of, like, 200% per year, we know the customers have an initial, like, for this product. Because if you multiply out 200% year after year after year, like 10,000 a month to 30,000 a month, 30,000 a month to 90,000 a month, 90,000 a month to 270 a month. It's not very long before you have a business doing two, three, $5 million a month. Okay, so first of all, it is the growth of what the customers are telling you. The ultimate truth is never a venture capitalist or an investor or a banker. The ultimate truth is always the customer. Number two, we're really desperately looking at the churn of those companies as well and saying, how many of the folks that are buying stuff take Apple, like, as the ultimate awesome product? Who churns in Apple? Nobody. What's their average?

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Okay, you have words about Apple and smudge. Get into it offline. But I am. You're the one. But, like, not a huge fan of.

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Apple, but as a company, okay, so let's also take another unalienable truth, which is that 5% of the people who are engaged with you will not stay engaged with you in the future. Right? You can't keep everybody happy. And your job as a company is not to keep everyone happy. Your job as a company is to build something sticky enough that your company will continue to grow. And I don't know if Apple is like a $3 trillion company still, but I think they kind of nailed it, right? To be fair, if we're talking about a company that's done it well with their customers, they started me out on the little ipods. I'm listening. I'm like, oh, my God, this is so much better than all of these discs. And then I won't say floppy disks because that would age me too much. But it's so much better.

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The five and the quarters, like those that you drop, and all of a sudden it's scratched, it doesn't work home. Yes, I remember those.

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So keep your customers continually wanting more. And whether you do it like Apple did, which is a real plus one methodology, or whether you do it by making sure that your customers keep buying more of your existing product, it's okay. But if they're not buying more, if you're dropping more than, like, 3% a month or 2% a month, you know you have a problem with your product because you're losing too many of your customers. Number three, you want to make sure that you have enough cash flow. Like, your job as a CEO of a company is to make sure that you have enough money in the company, is to make sure that you're hiring the right people around you who are able to do the tasks that need to be done. You go from the willing to the able, and it's to make sure that you maintain the vision of how you grow the company. So it's to make sure that you have enough money in the company. And look, in our world, we look and see who else is investing in the company, right? If it's still your mom and dad, then it's got to be a pretty amazing founding team. If it's not your mom and dad, otherwise. So now let me pull all of that, which is, like, our diligence and how we look at a company, and then pull it into lovable product. Lovable product, for me, is the most important thing, period.

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If you don't have a product which.

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Is simple, complete, and transformable, forget minimum viable product. It's an awful concept. It is something that is so focused on the person building the product that is like, I'm just going to get you something crappy out and you just tell me if it's really crappy or a little bit crappy, because it's all we can afford. I'm sorry, that's not the way things work. You wouldn't try that in your relationship. It's like, here's what we're going to do, right? I'm going to be a pretty crappy husband for the first year or two because I'm super busy, but I'm going to really work on dialing that up.

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And making great analogy. I promise over time, if you invest more into me, I'm going to get better. You get the minimum.

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You can't do that. I love lovable product. I love people who are obsessed. I'm obsessed with our product as the venture capitalist. Most venture capitalists think of themselves as a place you go to to raise money. I think of us as a startup in exactly the same way as you do and anyone else does. My job is to make sure that I maintain and build the vision of expert doggio to evolve into something that I never even imagined the year before. And so now, three reasons why companies fail, right? Once you've built that product, and we can talk about afterwards if you'd like, about how do you find that thing, that perfect product, that stuff that people need? It's actually way easier than people think. But like three reasons people fail. Number one, by far the biggest reasons is that entrepreneurs can be very lazy with outreach.

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Interesting.

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Because most entrepreneurs, especially venture backable entrepreneurs, will. Well, let me dial it back again. So let's go back to the very beginning when people were like starting off companies, and I think the US like the greatest place for entrepreneurship on the planet, period. In some ways, it invented entrepreneurship. And I don't mean that it didn't exist in other places long before the US existed. I mean that as a mass, entrepreneurship became this thing, right? Rather than the fringe, it became the main thing. It's like you're american, you can do anything you want in the world. The dream is there for you to take. You come in from outside. As long as you're prepared to work hard, there's no ceiling. And you should never be ashamed of doing amazing things. You build it as big as you can. It's a beautiful thing, right? And so back in those days, people understood that if you opened a fruit and veg shop, or whatever you did, you had to tell everybody about that fruit and veg shop, right? You had to make sure that if people came in, you didn't just give them service. Like, you knew their kids names, you knew where they went to school, you knew everything about them. And so today, a lot of the entrepreneurs will come to us. They'll be like, hey, brian, I want to raise a million dollars, and I want to do this. And I'll be like, what did you do yesterday?

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And they'd be like, oh, we had.

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An OKR meeting, and then we had a creative meeting, and I really worked on the product. Oh, my pitch deck is incredible. Like, we did the pitch deck. We spent, like, a long time. I pitched three investors. None of these things are your company. You should spend 40% of your time cold calling, emailing, door knocking on partners.

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I would argue you should outsource that if you're not good at it. Now I'm being a little bit.

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I would argue that maybe you shouldn't be doing what you're doing if you have to outsource it at the beginning. I'm sorry, it just sits.

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Not at the very beginning. At the beginning, you have to do it yourself. Yeah, but really 100%.

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There comes a time as your company is doing great. And so this actually ties into a second piece, which is that you cannot be an expert at everything. You have to bring in brilliant people who are able to do specific stuff, like landing pages, outreach, email sequences. That's not my skill set. I'm always going to bring in an expert to do that. Branding, I'm really good at, but what I'm not allowed to. What I'm not allowed to is when I don't have any customers, I'm not allowed not look for customers all day. I got to do that, and I got to then take the extra pieces. Once I start working out what's working, what doesn't work, once I'm working out, like, whether they love my product, kind of love my product, love bits of my product, then I start evolving my product, and I look at the things that are winning or losing, and then I start bringing in experts on those places, which is outsourcing to an extent. And then those outsourced companies, those experts, those people then drive that piece of the business. But what I see, honestly, is like, 80, 90% of the companies are maybe spending like, nobody, Coco. They would be like, what are you talking about?

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I have a different perspective because my company, it's irrelevant, does that. So that was my whole reason for forming it, because it's such a painful task, and you're 100% right that people don't like to do it, it's uncomfortable. They want to focus on what their comfort zones are. Do you think that's one of the contributing factors though, of while a startup doesn't get off the ground is because you know what you know and you don't push yourself off of that box. A technical founder has a tough time being a CEO. A CEO founder is not going to be technical. So tell me about maybe at that perspective of if you're going to do this, you can't be what you are today kind of thing. That's what I'm hearing a bit, yeah.

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You won't build a great company unless you drive those sales yourself. Like every great entrepreneur who's made it from. I just spoke to an amazing entrepreneur who built out b dev ventures.

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And.

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It'S like a multi billion dollar company out of Latin America, no vc help, nobody. Giving him money to do stuff. And as he built the company and he understood what his customers wanted, he's outsourcing, like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month that outsourcing to other companies that are supplementing what he's already doing. But if you make this brave choice to say, I am going to build a product which doesn't exist today, it will change the way the world thinks about x. You don't have a choice about outreach, not at the beginning. You don't have a choice. You literally have nothing else to do. Like your job should not be finding other folks to do the stuff that you're too useless at doing yourself because you don't have the money to do that. Remember, at the beginning, when a company starts, they're starting with x. That means they don't have any money, right? Or they have a little bit of money to get started. So they got to make sure that at that piece at the beginning, they understand the customer as well as they possibly can. Because our initial ideal customer profile will be incorrect, 100% guaranteed.

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Right.

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The message that we give to that customer will be incorrect, 100% guaranteed. And how we communicate and how we outreach will be incorrect. Like the only way we can work out who that customer is and what that customer looks like sufficiently well that we can then supplement it. I'll tell you what I said in a meeting yesterday. One of the guys said, well, we can't do this because we haven't done enough paid advertising. I'm like, I'll spend $500,000 a month on paid advertising if I can get $501,000 in.

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Exactly. If you have a positive return of any sort, you spend it a capital machine, 100%.

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But you just got to start. I'm just saying the big piece of advice, and honestly, I see it in all entrepreneurs, is like, we have become terrified to outreach to customers ourselves, and it's impossible to build a lovable product if we're not very close with those customers and how those customers are engaging. Like, I need to know, do people buy pears? Are they buying apples? I need to know, do they want the red apples or do they want the green apples? I need them to come back in and tell me if their kids had three apples today rather than five apples that they know. I need to understand the product. That's what I'm getting to. It actually really worries me that as I go through life and I become older and older, is that I see what I once really loved in the US, which is like really incredible products being built. And now what I'm seeing is really flimsy product being built, and people want to just put smart and clever marketing around that product and clever messaging around it so that people will buy it. And then what happens is they fizzle away five years later. Like, I want to take us back to a place where beautiful things are exchanged between parties of value.

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And before we get to your third reason, I want to dive into that just a bit, because I think the takeaway is this comes down to some resilience ideas, and the idea that you are going to have to get incredible. You're going to cry in a corner doing some stuff. Startup owner, and I don't like the word pivot, but sometimes you're going to have to evolve so rapidly, you won't know who you were a month ago. And I've been through this, and we met through a pitch thing where I went into it knowing that I'm a services company, 100% know that that's not going to get funded, but I know that I had a pivot to that because that's the market I serve. And what I found was I didn't realize that, that I was the one out founder led sales. I was the one in the market asking the questions, not so much. Do you want two or three apples? I'm asking the questions why and the because. The why and the because determined where I needed to go. And so if you're out there thinking about an idea, if you're not understanding the why and the because of your product relative to the needs of the market, you'll never understand how to price it, how to bundle it, how to brand it, and have a story that's compelling and making it so irresistible and lovable, you'll never transform anything. I think what you described also at the end of that, with a general laziness, with so much automation, AI, no code, lots of things have made it easy. The ones that still succeed are the ones are doing the hard work that existed 100, 200 years ago. It's the meticulous ground bootstrap. Even if you've got all the funding in the world, you don't do that. You're not going to work. You're just going to run through a lot of money. I don't know if it's a generational thing, but I see this more and more in younger people that they look for the fastest YouTube influencer type. I call it path of marketing. And they think that's success and it's 100%.

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And by the way, you're an example of how to do it. Everything I'm saying you did, you built a great company. And a services based company is a company. Like the word service is such a beautiful word because it's of service to the people. It means every single thing you're doing is making sure that the customer loves. And I'm with you, I don't use the word pivot. I use the word evolve all the time because I think great entrepreneurs, what happens is this, we may have some vague vision at the beginning of we're going to build a unicorn and we're going to have nice houses and we're going to change the world, but we don't know enough about the customer to know how that's going to evolve. The really great entrepreneurs like you, what happens is you build out your product, you put it to the customer, you watch the customer, you see how the customer is engaging with the product. You then evolve your ideas for better and better and better engagement so that you can drive more and more revenue. And every conversation that you and I have had has tied directly into that. So am I 100% sure you are going to build like a crazy big business with a product that people desperately need communicated in a way that they actually know exactly what the value is? 100%. There's no doubt in my mind, because you're focusing on all the things I said. You didn't find your clients by them finding you. You went out and found them all at the beginning. So that's all I'm saying is you want to supplement everything you're doing. And please, if people are thinking, Brian, there's AI to do this, I'm not saying like, you shouldn't get the help of other people, you should. I'm not saying that you shouldn't use AI and use tools out there, you should. What I'm saying is you got to wake up at 430 in the morning and say to yourself, it's me. Book stops right here. And if I don't outreach, the numbers won't work. Startup is a game of math. It's just about how many people you outreach to, how many meetings you have or prospects you have, how many sales that turns into and what revenue that is. Even if you start from bottom up with ideal customer profile and build a community, it still works the same. You still need the math numbers to build up. So number one is just like be like you, be like me. Like start in the knowledge that you need to outreach 100 times a day, 1000 times a day. I have startups outreaching 2000 3000 times a day to find new customers and building 40 to 50 meetings a week in their diary using every imaginable technology. Email outreach through Apollo cold calls which they're doing like 75 a day themselves, supplemented by using outsourced facilities as well. But they're engaged in the heat of battle themselves.

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Yeah, go on. I want to say just one thing on that. So when you're doing that volume, this is a big piece for us. I tell people, be conscious of what you're doing to your brand. I'm okay with some cold outreach and the more warm you could do it the better. But don't push it to the point where your brand long term is getting spammed. When I say as May, there's 10,000 addressable market people that you want to go hit. If you go spam and piss off 9900 of them, your first few months might look great with the 100 the first year. But if you can't come back to them because they've said I hate that company because they send me so much crap, they call me all you have to balance. I think sometimes this brand long term versus a burnout because I'm seeing companies two, three years in now that have been doing that and they can't get anyone to talk to them. And I'm like, well no shit. You've spammed your entire addressable market without any thought, without any value. It's me, me sales, no one's service up, no altruistic belief. So I'd love your take on that. And maybe it's opposite, I love the high value, but if you kill your brand long term, you don't become as investable. I think because you're going to see a plateau and a dive.

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So there's a few things actually. And this conversation is a really good conversation for folks to listen to because it's highly nuanced. Like there's not a black and white on any of this shades of Gray with the company.

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So let me start with the very beginning.

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Here's this thing, whether it's Facebook or Airbnb or anybody, nobody can remember what.

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Happened at the start.

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They just can't, right? And they sure they did stuff or didn't do stuff that was like perfect or non perfect, but nobody will remember. The only license to experiment that you have is right at the very beginning. You don't get to do that when you have a board and a HR director and finance star. You don't get to do it in series C and D, not as much. You have to ask 100,000 things at this stage. The really beautiful thing about creation, which is what startup is, is you get to experiment with creation to find out what the most beautiful creation is. So I give very high degrees of latitude to founders, but at the same time giving them multiple tools. So for example, I'll give you one great example, ebombo. They outreach 2000 times a day. I think we're up to about 4000 times a day right now. In their emails, they have the full knowledge that there's like 8 billion people in the world and they are not all their ideal customer profile, but that's a lot of billion people. And we're going to have a couple more billion people within the next few years as well. They also know that if they're not growing at two to 300%, they're not going to raise venture capital. So when they first came in, they're like, okay, Brian, what are we going to do? We need. Where I'm doing $30,000 a month right now. We know that the vcs and us and everybody will want us to get an ITK. And so they started doing email outreach. They were using Apollo, using other tools to get the outreach done. Created bots that took the responses from the outreach, had multiple email sequences built into them, then created an appointment without them ever touching it. They were doing about 40 appointments a week. They are still each. There's like three of them doing about 40 appointments a week, which is a startup's dream. To be able to get revenue went up to $227,000 a month. We built a Trojan horse in there because they were selling super app, which is for hate human resource, to entire human resource departments, which is extremely difficult to sell. So we broke down to a very small, easy product to sell in. And I'm sure plenty of people unsubscribe them. But you know what? There's lots and lots and lots and lots of businesses. Now that they're at $227,000 a month after only one year, they've raised tons of money in venture capital. Everybody likes the metrics they're seeing. Now we have to go to the next stage because we can't do that infinitum, right? We have to take the next stage. So the next stage is going to be, we have to see how well digital marketing performs in comparison to it. And for some people, to your point, email outreach may be the wrong path to take. For other people, cold calling may provide no results whatsoever. For other people, it may be that everything gets done on social media or everything gets done in paid advertising. My only real point at the beginning is that 99.9% of startups do not outreach enough.

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That's all. I'm agree 100%.

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You're not there. What else are you going to do?

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Come on, if you're talking about doing things, you're in the wrong spot. Just go do it.

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Yeah, just go do it. I add one other just really important piece onto that. The biggest challenge that we as entrepreneurs have, because me as a venture capitalist is the same, is our families, our friends, and our own mental health. And the longer this goes on without us having sufficient funds to be able to live happily with a decent house and a decent car and a decent everything, the more all three of those fray, and we may think that our family will stick with us forever. They won't. Like, this is a race against time. That's what you're really doing as a startup. You're proving to the people around you who are trusting you and loving you, including yourself, that you can make a success at this. I don't want you not to succeed in your company. And so three years is that period before you get really tired. And if you're not hitting a reasonable revenue in three years where you can cover, you start to get more and more tired, and so do the people around you. So all I'm saying is, at the very beginning, try harder, do more, put yourself into discomfort more and more and more. At the very like, day two, day 1, hour one, start outreaching to people and you'll find that you'll cut down five years to maybe three years.

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Okay, I've got to jump in. This is like such a great conversation and tell you why because your three year mark is so pivotal, because it's where I am on our company. So we are three years, a little over three years into the company and part of the book and never been promoted. I talk about that strain financially and the realities of it where I'm making 10% less, I'm sorry, I'm making 10% of actually, than I used to in the corporate world on my own startup. Now I'm probably ten times times happier. Can't say that my wife is. I can't say that my kids are like, hey, daddy, when it's going to take off, it ties back to something else. In the first couple of years, you're figuring it out. You're just trying to keep from closing shop because you're just trying to keep enough cash flow and to pay people to do stuff. In our third year, we've doubled revenue almost every year or this year as well. So we'll double again. This year is about cash flow for next year. I can't take enough to come up because I need operating capital so I can have a business that I know I can make investment in. I can take, increase and increase how much I can pay myself. You go back to the thing is, if you don't have cash flow, you're done. When you get that three year mark, know that you're going to want to pay yourself more. And unless you really can with some sustainable cash flow, you can't. This is where the debt free, and we go back to some of the things we've already talked about. These things become critical in that market. Three year, when you're about that, you're on the cusp. You're to make the company makes more revenue than I used to make in corporate. Now, that's a great start. Can I triple it now so I can actually pay myself normally? Even then I'll still be a fourth of what I used to make. And so the point is, get your head right that you're going to need to have cash flow plus this and that three year mark is so critical. But if you've done good for your brand, if you've done the hard work, I see a path now where I am much more comfortable with the consistency of what I'm going to see because I have a product and a service that aligns to a need and it's priced correctly and there's options. So anyway, let's get to. I think I thought we were on your third point of what.

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Every time I say something, you say something.

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Really, it's a good conversation people listen to. Can you get to the damn third point? We're like, no, I haven't even got.

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To the second point yet, but I'm going to top and tail what we just said on the first point with saying you move from a place of hope to a place of belief. You're in a place of belief. You're just trying to work out how you can do it best to make sure that it works. Right. But you know what you have works. That's my point. Like if you go hard enough at the beginning, you go from that hope, because at the beginning it's all hope. With such a selfish endeavor that we do, and it's all hope. And so you get to a place, okay? So just outreach, work hard, find customers, move from a place of hope to belief. The second point is the communication of your product, which I think is tremendously important. And the reason I say it's second is if you're not outreaching, don't waste your time with the communication or even building a beautiful product because you got nothing to actually tell anybody anyway. But if you are doing the outreach, that will tell you what's resonating and what's not resonating. So if we're saying to people, hey, we're a company that sell glasses, well, there's 5000 people that sell glasses. But if we're able to communicate, actually we're a company, we've recognized that there is a huge problem with people between the ages of like 54 and 60. And those people, the glasses that they have, are not sufficiently good to do x, y and z and to be able to play x, y and z and to be able to read x, Y and z. So what we did was we built a contact lens which is like this size, which actually allows you to do it with no discomfort. And actually you're going to be so happy because you're going to see every. So the communication of that is so incredibly important. If I give actually a better example, and a real example, liquid death. And how liquid death built the communication around nothing more than La tap water, it's an incredible story if you look at it. Became the fastest growing CPG brand, consumer product goods brand on the planet ever. And it was only water. And it wasn't even, well, I shouldn't say that it was okay water, right? But their branding, their messaging was incredible. And messaging is when you can take a product and move it from feature attributes, product attributes through emotional resonance, all of the way to transformational impact. So that's again why you doing the outreach means you can tell what people love and what they don't love. And just going to your earlier comment of, like, you don't want to piss people off and have people feeling, oh, man, why are they hassling me? Nobody gets pissed off if you offer them a Lamborghini for $10. Okay, so you just got to say, do I have a Lamborghini which is $10 Lamborghini, but it's a Lamborghini worth $250,000. Or do I have shakira set? Do I have a Casio watch?

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Right. But also, maybe I don't need the Lamborghini. So it's taking your analogy right, is that's great. I don't need a Lamborghini. I'd love to have it. I need a minivan. And so understanding that they need something for $10, but it might not be a Ferrari, it might not be a Lamborghini. It might be just a really good Honda Odyssey that I can also put some drywall in the back, as well as seven kids. And so that's part of that outreach, you'll discover, is I don't need to build a Lamborghini. I need to build a pretty good utility thing. And so you may think you meet because that met your needs, but as you meet people, their needs might be different because they're interested in. Yes, but slightly different vehicle to get there. Yeah. And I think that's a key piece of edos I know I've discovered is I thought you needed. So we were really early on OpenAI. We're on the beta side because of an AI nerd title I have. So anybody out there, google it. You'll see me a little fatter, but several hundred videos doing stuff that got me early access. But what we found quickly was, oh, wow. Our premise, as our original company was let's create AI content at scale. And as soon as I saw what OpenAI was doing, I was like, oh, my gosh, we have to pivot immediately. This is done in nine minutes. There's no business here because people are just going to use this. There's nothing. Sometimes you see these pivots and you see the ideas that what you think that the market needed, they needed, but you can't be the vehicle to get there and you're going to have to do that pivot with it.

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Yeah.

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By the way, I'm sorry, evolution, not pivot.

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Yeah, no, I understand. For me, look, I'm kind of combining .2 and, .3 which is like, have amazing communication and have a lovable product, right? And some people might argue and say, and by the way, I entirely agree with you, your ideal customer profile, that avatar is like the most important thing. You should just be going after the avatar. But a lot of folks would also buy the Lamborghini and then sell it for like $90,000, right? I know that's a very extreme example. And sometimes you make the market, is what I'm trying to say. If I even think of myself. I used windows for years and years and years, like, just going back to the Mac example, and my wife used everything Mac, she was an addict to Mac. Mac is a surface, right? Everything she had. And so in the end, I felt like. And I don't know, and I'm not a highly technical person. That's not my skill set. And I used windows for my whole life because I'm from the generation that came from analog to technological and had to learn everything digital as I went along. But as I looked at the Mac, I'm like, man, I really like to look at that. And I kind of feel inadequate. And so Mac didn't sell a better computer at the time. What Mac sold was, or what sorry, Apple sold, was that you get to feel better, you get to feel more powerful. And heck, Brian, you're just a little bit better looking if you're carrying a Mac under your arm rather than carrying a Dell computer under your arm. When I first had Mac, I used windows for Mac on my Mac. I'm such a heathen, right?

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I think he took away the ability to do that with the splitting of the hard drive.

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Anyway, all I'm saying is, as a startup, you have to develop your customer, whoever that ideal customer is, and you have to develop the communication and you do that the other way. If you do these three things right, you're going to build a great company like.

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Period. Agreed. And now, what was the third reason?

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Just a little bit product. Most people are building stuff that nobody gives a damn about.

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I'm going to take a highlight. Give me the three in short form. This will become a social media post. Here we go.

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Outreach, lack of outreach, poor communication, which is lack of attention and detail to how the customer wants to be communicated because they don't understand your product as well as you do. And building a product, which is a minimum viable product, rather than building a maximum lovable product, and so get something.

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That people, I think in the last statement, too, which will help the other two, is initially as niche as you can get it to a growing market. And so the more niche you can get to serve a person or a company that has a very defined area will allow you to tell the story and build a level of product that allows you then to add ancillary stories and features, if you will, that end up having higher value to another set of niche. And so that me, as I found, is that is a very big challenge for entrepreneurs, because what I call entrepreneurial add and this fomo that you feel, because as an entrepreneur, you typically will have lots of ideas for very cheap. The execution is what's going to matter. And those ideas you feel if you see all the opportunity, but what you got to get your head around is there is no opportunity. If you see it all, the opportunity line is take your add and your focus and put all that stuff right into a niche and then do everything you can to make that niche as awesome as possible. That's lovable. That's when people will absolutely identify with your product and want to buy it.

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We said 100% the same thing, like simple, complete, transformative. I didn't say complicated, didn't say lots of features. I said simple. Solve one incredible thing for people who desperately want to have it solved for, like Mac. Sorry, going back to Mac. Don't. Hating me, right? Going back to Apple gift Mac.

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I just got to be all in or not.

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Yeah, but their first users, they didn't go for me, right? They didn't go for the heathens. And we were allowed to come on the train afterwards, right? They went for the incredible creatives who were like almost the fringe community. They're like the skateboarders of computers and they're like, hey, we need this because they're providing something we desperately love.

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So it made me fast forward here, and I'll get to some kind of. We have about five minutes. I'm going to kind of do some quicker questions and stuff just to give. I like to give people some takeaways as I see products take an investment. What I also see sometimes happen is they become. To justify the validation or the valuations that they get. They become these platforms and services that do way more than they originally did. And they actually, then, I think, dilute their value. And I've seen this meaning the automation space where someone's like, hey, we automate certain tasks and then all of a sudden now they're this AI. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, this growth, when you take in new capital that you have to become bigger and do these valuations, and then you become something that's so diluted and like, everything else, it's ruined. And there's a lot of examples of that. I think you see crms that become everything. Tell me about that transition when you're taking on more and more capital, of how you keep the identity and the value without becoming like everyone else. Right.

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First of all, I'm continuing to be outspoken on this issue, but as a venture capitalist, I believe our industry is a cancer in America. I believe that what we're doing to american companies by force feeding them, by just injecting steroids into startups when they should be growing beautiful product on their own and doing it in such an aggressive way, I think, is destroying companies. And we've now reached a stage where it's so inflated, there's so much money there, that it's so embarrassing just to watch it happen. And there were some really, I shouldn't say names, but there are some really big, high profile venture capital funds that had hundreds of billions of dollars, that documentaries were made about the companies afterwards where these money was wasted.

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And it was a Ponzi scheme.

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Yes. And so the money was wasted in the interest, not just of killing great companies. That could have been awesome. And we could say that was wework, right? But I think that was such an amazing company, such an amazing potential founder. He may be a sociopath, but his ability to execute on the first one was incredible. And he was kicking Regis's ass. And I know that business really well. So for me, the fact that they were given so much money that he stopped worrying about fundamentals, he stopped having to build a great company. He just expanded out. What became a Ponzi scheme is, like, really so sad. But what is sadder is how many coworking spaces, great coworking spaces did he put out of business because suddenly he could do three years free rent where nobody had to pay rent. Now we have unfair competition being built simply through the fact that one person has access to three or $4 billion. You could argue the same thing with many of these shared cars, like, I believe Lyft has had something like 30 or $36 billion invested into it to be worth $36 billion. I'm sorry, I don't see that as a success. We can look at what's happened with peloton, look at what happened with CAD. There's dozens of examples. So for me, looking at venture capital as, like, the way is a problem, because it's turning into the great american lie whereby everybody is told they get access to it, but actually, the only people who are getting access to it are the people who are highly connected, mommy or daddy, works for a very nice firm. They went to a wonderful school and they get a unicorn for their birthday. And I'm not taking away from any of the incredible entrepreneurs who have built it up in another way. I'm just pointing and shining a light, like a very serious issue we have that is hurting America in a huge way. So for me, my advice to all companies is how you're doing it is exactly the way. Look, you're going to transform your life and your kids life and their kids life to a place that was unimaginable before that. Three years, maybe four years, if you do it really well, is really tough and it's hard and there's no way to avoid that. And only truly incredible people can break through that period of time. But when you break through, when the company is doing a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month, it's an incredible business that grows and grows and grows on its own, and then you take in money kind of as you need it. So I just think, focus on growth, focus on unlovable product, focus on taking care of the customer and the communication there, and vcs and angels and everybody else will throw money at you. And that way your focus is in the right place.

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Yeah, we should write a book. It's like America needs a bubble. We always need something that's overinflated because that's where the rapid growth goes. Ponzi scheme might be a bit harsh, but those who get money in early get out earlier and they get their 2040, 80% return, maybe in a year, like some crazy number, and then you go create it and the money goes and follows a bubble. But if you're coming in late, like you said, a $36 billion investment for a $36 billion valuation sounds like I just should have put it in a CD. I think I do better on that money at that point because you feel like there's going to be another crash, a rebuy of it, and then now their value is there again, or just go do bitcoin. At least there's a known mathematical certainty at some point it's going to run out. So maybe a fun book to write. You have to be sarcastic together in it. The last peer I'm going to make is the three year mark. I'm going to come back to that because there's a lot of entrepreneurs that I work with that are in that, and I want to be clear on my journey. I had a full time job that I probably worked 99% of my own company, though, with while I had done this. So I'm probably a full time entrepreneur without safety net for about a year and a half. And I will tell you, you do not become a full entrepreneur until you have no safety net. The focus that happens in that moment goes from fun side hustle, it's all protected, everyone's safe, to no excuses, no fallback. I'm unhirable for a w two job because I have the word founder and CEO and how I do my when you're that part, if you're looking in the rearview mirror, you're going to crash. You better have your eyes straight out on the road and just do some glances occasionally to learn what's going on or what's coming up behind you because you will fail. And you better keep that gas and have a full tank as much as you can because it's going to be very difficult and you're going to get low on the metaphor, you're going to get low on gas, and you still might want to have to walk it, but your people might not be willing to get out of that car with you. So my point is, I'm a year and a half in on no safety net, but I like where I'm at. And I think a year from now, I think I won't be transformative at 2300,000 because for a services company to get to that, where we are, it's a little slower growth. But when we are there and I see a path there, I can actually mathematically see it and scale it. I know that I have made the right decision and people around me that time will disappear. Like, oh, I get it now. But you know that without a safety net, you are not there yet. You do not know the full idea of it. Totally. Yeah, I'm sorry. I just think what you're talking about, those things are all relevant to the startup. But my other side of that would be keep your angel investor w two job as long as possible.

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By the way, the other piece is like, raising money is also a skill. And there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of investors who are out there that will willingly invest into your business. My business, everybody's business. Remember venture capital? They raise money as well. Everybody raises money. And so it follows the same funnel as everything else. So look, I'll conclude by saying this. Look, what I say to my team is like, we want to have a billion dollars of assets under management by 2030. We're very clear on it. And we know that to get to a billion dollars in assets under management by 2030. We have to make sure that we hit $120,000,000 in assets under management by the end of this year. And in the world of VC, that's not a huge amount, but from a VC startup that came from nothing only four years ago, it's a huge jump. And so I look at things in the same way. I know our numbers that we have to hit in 2030. I know our numbers that we have to hit at the end of 2024. I know which individual, individual person, our task, if it's a smaller company, that needs to be done to achieve those things. And I have each one of those targets broken down to a weekly basis, not even a monthly basis. So I know if I'm off kilter on what I'm doing, and then I stay obsessive about the product, the future vision of the company. That's my role. I stay obsessive about making sure that we have enough investment in Expert Dojo so that we can keep on investing. That's my role. But that also follows the same funnel. You have to have a certain amount of outreach. You have to make sure that your messaging is resonating. You have to make sure that you're following through and you're dealing with those people. If you're doing both of those things properly, you target everything out. You make sure that you're highly engaged yourself. You manage your time properly so that you're prioritizing outreach and growth over maybe the more mundane tasks. You explain to your other half exactly what you're doing. Especially for guys like us, whereby we're not 15, we have responsibilities, and as responsibilities, those people have got very reasonable expectations. So to break down, hey, listen, darling, whether it's like a husband or a wife or a friend or a brother, a mom or dad or whatever, is like, this is what I'm going to do, this is what my expectations are. And what we'll do is we'll have a chat every month because I highly value your input to get us here. Because as long as I make it.

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To here, then we make it to here, right? So one of my favorite books, and we're going to do a speed round now, but one of my favorite books currently is atomic habits. And with the ideas, there's a lot to that book. But one of the things I love about it is you focus on not the goal, you have one, but it's the process to get there into the execution. Because if you follow that process and you follow the habits of doing good behavior, you'll get to where you need to go and where you should be going based on that. So I love it. Hey, listen, we could keep doing this, but I got to keep in brand, I got to keep a certain time limit speed round. Here we go. And then you get to do the advertisement. This will be great. And I collect this data. I say every time, to be honest, it's for future sponsorship and tagging in post. It's smart. Do this. Favorite scheduling technology on your calendar?

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I actually don't use calendly and it's because I'm managing so many different it's because I'm managing so many different calendars. I do it myself. I'm obsessive. I'm obsessive. I think I've got add. So my favorite scheduling technology is yourself.

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I want you to know that I manage across five calendars with calendly. I can show you how to do that. And there's some other tech you can put in that will take your inbox and go focus. So you and I should talk because no joke, I get over 3000 emails a day across all of them and I only need to focus on 40. And so I'll show you how to do that. All right. Your favorite CRM for startups.

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So I love HubSpot. If you can manage HubSpot properly, it's a beautiful CRM because it's about relationships, it's not about storage. But hardly anybody can manage HubSpot properly and they're in the problem. But if you can manage it and.

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You can learn it, use it. So I tell people this, it's a wonderful, once you have a resource that knows it, lined up to it. Otherwise I would say don't use it until you have someone.

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Yeah, use pipe drive. Hey, but you know what I'm liking a lot right now is notion. I think notion is a great place to actually manage your projects, manage your customers, manage everything in a highly inexpensive way.

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Yes, that's a great one. What's your favorite business book?

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Absolutely. So I read every single day. To your point of getting up, I probably get about 300 emails a day, but the emails that I get are things like term sheet, things like Pitchbook, other areas. So I read probably in the morning an hour of industry related material every single day. And it's super weird. Like I have all these books around me that are just amazing business books and I never get to them because I'm always looking at the content I get online. So pretty much everything I look at these days are either videos about venture capital, videos about business are videos things. And honestly, the best content I get, period, is from all of my founders, even from this conversation. For me, this is like reading a book.

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And that's a problem that a lot of founders and people have, is they have no time for books. I strongly recommend audio and get your health at the same time. So say, like, listen, your health matters most. Man without his health has only but one dream, right? And I would tell you, go take a 30 minutes walk, put a book in your ear and find one and do something different so you can expand. Who's your favorite person to follow? It could be LinkedIn, it could be any social media. But of your content, people, who do you really like to follow?

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I just have a tremendous look, and you'll understand this. A lot of people listening won't understand this. But when you become a startup, you become incredibly immersed into this world, and you move from the adoration of people that you don't know to the respect and love of people that you are engaging with on a daily basis. And so I know so many people who have built up incredible companies from nothing to 100,000 a month, a million a month, 5 million a month. It's not about the number necessarily. It's about the journey that they went through to do it. So I have, like, thousands of people who are incredible to me. And I could name like Eli in San Francisco, who built out a multi billion dollar company in China, and then they ended up getting kicked out of China because they wanted to take it back as they love doing. And then he came over here, so he built another billion dollar company. Like, he's one of my favorite people, or Pablos, who was like one of the top people for Jeff Bezos's blue Horizon head of innovation. And then he went with Bill and Melinda Gates, and he was one of their top people from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Like, they're my heroes, like the other people I read about, the Elon Musk's, the Tony Robbins, the great business leaders. But the people who I think, oh, my God, those people inspire me, are the people I get to touch. And just think about how privileged I am to be in their presence.

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That's wonderful. What's your favorite bank for startups? Well, for entrepreneurs.

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I was part of Boston bank, and I loved it because they actually knew my name and they were nice to me. And that stuff like customer service is so important to me. And then they got bought by Silicon Valley bank, and then I really loved Silicon Valley bank. And then of know the heathens in Silicon Valley ate their young and destroyed them, and then all of the other regions. Then I would have said, oh, First Republic bank, or a wonderful bank. And then they went as well. And then I'm like, pac west, man, those guys are nice over there. And they went as well. So what am I going to tell you? What am I going to tell you? Like, the world is disintegrating to a place where we have faceless banks, large banks, that will never get to know people, and that will continue to treat us like shit for the rest of our lives. So how about none of them?

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All right, I'm going to offer Chase because that's where we bank. And I will tell you, we got lines of credit before we had revenue, and they were so awesome. And they've been good. You're cute, and I hope they sponsor a strategy. You can hope in one hand and poo in the other, which is going to fill up first. All right, I have two questions left. What do you think is the most important entrepreneurial trait?

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Execution. I used to think it was perseverance. I think perseverance is like the worst trait now, because people like us, who are very add, I would keep trying for like 25 years, and I'd have to go through like four marriages and never see my kid for the entire period. So execution is 100%, because those people who can execute, who are not perseverance, you don't want to be perseverant, they want to be successful. Those people start doing that outreach on the first day. The people who are persevering, they hunker down and they get ready for the long haul. You don't want to do the long haul. Your families and people around you can't deal with the long haul, go for the short haul and execute amazingly.

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Resilience, persistence is probably the number one answer to that question. I have a chapter in my book, and I think it's a core piece, but now, you said that the chapter in the book is, ideas are cheap, execution is everything. It's pretty obvious you can execute your perseverance, so if you're able to execute, you're there.

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Yeah, I'm only making a distinction because one without the other doesn't work. Like, if you persevere, without a focus on execution, you're just going to have. It's going to be miserable. Right? But if you execute and you have no ability to persevere, then you're not going to make it, because you're going to get very bored, tired, you're going to distract it and go away, but execute first and then be prepared to deal with the stuff that gets thrown at you while you're executing.

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Yeah. As I've published in this book, the editor and the publisher has come back, said, hey, there's a lot of repetitiveness in your book. And I said was, because they're all intertwined. There's an interconnected tissue of things that matter on both on a different concept. So the idea of execution and persistence are there, but the idea of persistence, but don't being so narrow, you have to balance this. And this is where the people maybe don't realize. All right, final question. In the corporate world, you can't take your own here. Have you ever been promoted? Yes. You can't join the club. You're out. Where were you promoted?

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I did corporate world for 15 years, and it was a friend's company that I ended up doing it in. And so I ended up, it wasn't really called promotion. I just took on new projects, new countries, new expansions, different places to go to. But I now look back at my time in corporate world, and I try and forget as much of it as I possibly can because I was brainwashed into believing that was the path because I was dumbass, stupid idiot. And now I know better, which is why I say to my kid, yeah, dude, work in a job to learn the talents that you need to have your own company. But I will not allow you to be reliant on another man or a woman to be able to tell you what you should do, when you should turn up, when you should come in. This is your world. You get to change it. You get to do what you want to do. You own that. And so I don't want him to be promoted. I want him to learn the skills that he needs to be successful while he's building his own thing. And I wanted to start that fast so that he can build something awesome like you're doing.

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I had this debate with my wife. It was a post I made the other day, and she said, you talk about the freedom, the time. She's like, but without my corporate job right now, we would be sinking. And I was like, that's a great point, is that it's not for everybody to be an entrepreneur, and it's not that bad that you work somewhere, because some people just honestly are not going to be able to stomach it. It's just not in them. It's in me being entrepreneur. If it's in you, you should not be in the corporate world. But you need to have the support structure in place to allow you to start. And that could be funding, that could be a partner. And so I'm not slamming me in a corporate world because for some people, they love the organization and the repetitiveness of it and that really, really works for them. It creates happiness. If it's an entrepreneurial spirit you have, you'll be miserable. So don't fight it. But for us, the reason we survived a year and a half while I'm trying to put everything back into a company is because they have, because there is a steady number coming in. So that's a balance. And I'm like, I was conflicted. I'm like, for me though, I hate it. But if she's like, what if I went out and started? I'm like, what? You're entrepreneur? I'm not sure that'd be a good idea, but you still can't be in the job. Is that officially even?

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We could talk about this last subject.

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For an hour and I'm sure we will probably do a follow up at some point because I think some of their concepts, there's a lot know. But here's the thing, I'm going to leave this with your advertisement as the last piece. The outro and I know we're over just a little Brian, listening to him speak. I've seen him do it live. You're just getting a tip of the tip of the iceberg of how you think and how it's different and why people should work with your accelerator. Do you want to do a promotion of some sort for aspiring people, startup founders, who should contact you and what should they do?

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So anybody looking for investment, it is very welcome. You can apply on expertdojo.com. I'm always very happy we do Monday sessions which we'll do with entrepreneurs. Whether people get accepted for investment or whether they don't, and there's no cost for that whatsoever. But it's all on the website. You can see everything there. Anything anybody wants about me is out there in the world. And I don't really want or need anything. I just want folks to understand the amazing things that can be done when you start and build your own company. And as you're scaling it, then you're doing great and you want a partner who has a strong ability to be able to help you grow as well as invest in you. Then think about us.

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Thank you so much Brian, for attending or joining and giving all the insights. Everyone who's listening, go and leash entrepreneur and go out there and do it. Thanks again for listening to the never been promoted podcast. Thanks for listening to never been promoted with Thomas Helfrick. Make sure to check the show notes for our guest contact information and any relevant links. Connect with Thomas Personal.