CLUB's Founder, Colin Campbell, on Entrepreneurship Triumphs and Trials | Saw.com

Speaker 1: 0:00

On today's show we have serial entrepreneur Colin Campbell, co-founder of 2Cows Dot Club and countless other startups. His businesses have amassed a value of over a half a billion dollars and most recently has published a book called Start Scale, exit Repeat, which I read in preparing for this podcast. I'm going to give you a quick review. Being the founder and CEO of a 15-person company and the successful creation of two others, I often find that many of these kinds of entrepreneurial books either cater to very entry-level entrepreneurs or to those really who are much farther advanced than I am in my own journey my journey, for those listening and wondering, is still wearing many of the hats in a business, from payroll to biz dev, to legal, to marketing, to technology, to being a domain broker, to customer service. I believe this book stands out by providing a more realistic perspective than many others I have read which I can relate to. Colin, I think, has crafted each chapter to ensure a seamless reading experience and if I want to go back to specific chapters in the future based on my situation, I can easily jump back into it or, in reality, not read the ones that are relevant to my business. Yet he also puts stories in there of success, but also a failure from not only himself but other regular business people, which, again, you can relate to. Some of his advice in there is familiar and serves as a reaffirmation, while other sections introduce new ideas. I certainly want to try. All in all, I think it's a great book. You can buy it at Amazon for short money right now and I think it's certainly worth it Now, before we begin, whenever I have a guest on this show, I usually have a brief conversation with them before it begins.

Speaker 1: 1:44

We kind of go over the outline of what we want to cover. I talk about some of the questions I might ask ahead of time, but this time, with Colin, we really just started talking about the domain industry, and this conversation we had to begin was about GTLDs. I decided to start recording right then because I felt you, the listener, might like it and it's kind of like a hidden track on a CD. But yes, that is usually at the end. If you'd like to hear more about the GTLD business, you can, or you can skip ahead the first five minutes to the real intro, or you can listen to the bonus material first. In any event, thanks for listening and, by the way, you can check us out on Spotify, apple Podcast, youtube or uncomfortablelink or sawcom slash podcast. You can contact Colin on startupclub or you can buy his new book on Amazon. Start, scale, exit, repeat. All right, let's dance.

Speaker 2: 2:50

Now, one thing we have is relationship with all the registrars around the world, and relationships are absolutely critical in any business. This distribution is key, and if you can somehow lock in distribution, then that makes your business so much easier, which is why we're thinking about applying for new domain extensions in 2026, because we already have the relationships.

Speaker 1: 3:16

Do you think the landscape has changed, like if you were, if you won Dot Club this time around or you ended up with Dot Club this time around. Do you think that it would be? There's very uncharted territory then. What do you think? What do you foresee it going to be now that there's more of a pay to play model versus just relationships that are going on in the GTLD business?

Speaker 2: 3:37

Yeah, I think that it's a different rule set. I think it's a different game. I think if you try to emulate what others did in that 2012 round, then you're not going to succeed.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:51

I think there's a lot of blockbuster names out there.

Speaker 2: 3:53

I think this the strategy's got to be a little bit more niche and you have to identify markets and segments and how you're going to actually take those, take that product to that market, and right now it's going to be a lot more expensive to go to market. A lot of registrars are charging slotting fees and other fees and if you don't have the relationships it's just going to be very challenging. I just don't think that. I know a lot of people might be banking on a strategy that Paul Stahura, who did donuts sort of like engineered, will say he was the godfather of it all, which was this idea you can apply for a domain extension and then sell your ownership in that extension.

Speaker 2: 4:40

There are some different complexities with this, but also we're dealing with assuming the first round took 80% to 90% of the market. You're fighting for crumbs, right? So when you're fighting for crumbs, you're not going to have as much opportunity as you did on the first round. Now there's a few names likecoin, ornft or some of these other ones that might go for a lot of money, but the competition is going to be fierce and what we did learn from the prior round was that when you go for a name like that, there's a lot of competition and if you get one holdout, you're going to an ICANN auction and there are some unique rules that they're potentially proposing on this round, where, if you come from a disadvantaged country, you would get better credits for an auction, which would lead a lot of game playing to occur in the market. If they do go down that path, hopefully they'll keep it clean and simple like they did last time, but we don't know.

Speaker 1: 5:40

What would happen if they come out with those rules that they're going to do that? What's stopping you from creating the business and basing it in one of those countries to get the advantage?

Speaker 2: 5:49

I mean, it's all about ownership, right, you have to have the right ownership from people who are from those local areas. Are there structures that could get around that? I don't know.

Speaker 1: 5:59

Yeah, well, it's the same as people calling for trademarks and then saying that generic terms of trademarks so they simply get awarded those TLDs as well. It's interesting to say that you're going to go back, you're thinking about getting. You have six already decided. It might go up to probably eight or 10 by the time the auction comes down Possibly.

Speaker 1: 6:18

Do you think that it was the right way to do it last time, when it was, let's say, you and I had a collision for the same TLD, that we had an auction and that the loser gets the money, or were there multiple people with the loser would get the money, or is that, or do you think the money should go?

Speaker 2: 6:36

I think the problem with that model is it attracts speculators. And if somebody really wants the TLD, there's going to be a lot of speculators burned on this round, because whether you go to auction or whether you do it in that model, you're going to pay whatever rate for the TLD. And if you want the TLD, you might just push it to auction through ICANN, because you don't care about who gets the money on the back end. And if they're just speculators out there trying to make a piece of it, I think it's going to be tough for them to really make money. The rules change Like any game play it once everybody learned how to play it this way and now the rules have changed, so it's going to be a different game.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Yeah, I think the perception of it is as well that with a lot of people don't understand how the business works. Is they think that, okay, I get the TLD and now it's like I call all the registrars and they're just going to turn it on like you're getting added to the gun of Coca-Cola, and so you have to get the distribution figured out. You have to choose a back end if you don't want to build it yourself it doesn't really make sense to build one yourself at this point Then you need to negotiate terms with each of the registrars and then you need to give them promotions and things like that and saying, oh, it's free, then we'll just get the renewals. Well, there's a lot of other people doing promotions as well, and so there needs to be for them.

Speaker 1: 8:05

A registrar is paying a lot of money for a customer who wants to register a domain, so giving it away for a penny isn't necessarily the right thing to do either. And then you also have I'm guessing Dot Club had tiers. You had your premium inventory, things like that that kind of come into play. So, yeah, there's a lot to it and it's going to be interesting. Did you participate in the auctions when Frank sold his no, I did not.

Speaker 2: 8:34

We were focused on the sale to GoDaddy of Dot Club and there were some restrictions put in place at the time. So that's okay. But I have an exemption for new TLDs and we're going to be moving forward with some of those in the next round.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Got it Cool, all right. Well, I'm going to get cooking now. So today we have Colin Campbell. He is a serial entrepreneur. He's the number one bestselling author of Start, scale, exit. Repeat, colin, you started, you started scale, then Exit, and over a dozen companies worth over a billion dollars, including Two Cows Hostopia, dot Club Domains, geeks4less and Pawcom. Colin also runs Startupclub, or Startup Club, on Clubhouse that has over one million members. Startupclub is a domain name where you can go and become a member yourself or you can go to Clubhouse and you can also be a member there and join that group. I took a look at that today and I joined myself, so let's get right into it. You know you mentioned in your book that you started about 15 businesses in 30 years. In our industry, two Cows is probably the second or third largest registrar in the world.

Speaker 2: 9:52

I think it's second yep.

Speaker 1: 9:53

The second largest, hostopia is definitely a sizable hosting company in the hosting space. Dot Club which is really how I got to know who you are is through that domain extension. So instead of carscom, it's, you know, startupclub pawcom, which is your pet business, and you also have many others from your 19 rental real estate properties and some others. And, being someone who started a few businesses myself and invested in some others, the question is is how? How are you able to take some of these businesses from zero and really invest yourself in these and really get them from?

Speaker 1: 10:42

And this is really the problem I'm having as a business owner is getting from being, in my case, the domain broker, the visionary, the CEO, hr, business development, sometimes customer service, social media. You know the lawyer, project manager, you know bookkeeper, payroll person, you know all the above and I mean I mean I'm not going to get into all that with you but like, how do you get to that point where you take that great idea and then you're the one you know on the side of the ship rowing and you do have some folks you talk about people in your book working for you, but how do you get to that mass where you end up really starting to delegate and having that time every day to look at where this company is supposed to go and really focus on what is supposed to happen. How do you, how do you do that almost 15 times?

Speaker 2: 11:35

It's almost like you're starting with the repeat section of the book. Yes, I like to say one step at a time. And you know, every company, every entrepreneur, needs to build a foundation. They need to learn how to start a business and they need to understand the story, the people, the money and the systems and how they all connect and how they can increase their chances of success. And then it comes to scale, and the number one reason why most companies in America and probably around the world are small businesses that fail to scale is that the entrepreneur is in the way, and it's interesting listening to you and you talking about well, I'm this, I'm that, I'm this, I'm that.

Speaker 2: 12:22

Well, magic comes. You know you've hit it when, all of a sudden, one day, you're either take off for a week or whatever it is, and one of your people goes out and does something that makes you a lot of money. It's all about hiring great people around you that compliment you but also can be leaders. These leaders can generate value and money for you If they're good at what they do. If your business is something like your business, you can scale your business. You just need the right leaders in place to be able to scale that business and it's like magic, it's almost like it happens by itself. Now, if you take it further and further now as we go through the book, it's a journey, right? Entrepreneurship is a trade. It's a trade like any other and you need to learn how to master your that trade.

Speaker 2: 13:19

You're not just the head of a domain company or the head of or even a domain investor. You're an entrepreneur who identifies opportunities, starts them, scales them, exits them, takes some money off the table, by the way, and then repeat that over and over again.

Speaker 2: 13:35

In the book.

Speaker 2: 13:35

I mean, we go through a lot of different techniques in the book.

Speaker 2: 13:39

Absolutely, this book started in 2012 when I was asked to speak at MIT to a group of 60 business entrepreneurs very successful entrepreneurs called the Entrepreneurship Master's Program at MIT and I came in there, did a four hour lecture and they asked me to come in because they said what is it that you do over and over again to start, scale, exit, repeat. What is it you just keep doing and just keeps happening over and over again? And I said, well, actually, there's a lot of things that I learned from my experiences and I learned that at each stage start, scale, exit, repeat that there are there's a different story and it changes that story throughout each stage. There are different people. They change throughout that those stages. There are different levels of money that you need to to raise and different techniques for raising money at each stage, and then, finally, there are systems systems that you can put in place to help you scale your business. It took me a long time to figure all of this stuff out and by the way.

Speaker 2: 14:52

By the way, Jeffrey, the book doesn't just cover all my successes, it covers all my failures to. I lay it all out there for everyone to see, to see exactly what happened when you didn't have the right story, people, money or systems in place.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Yeah, and you and you also mentioned that in the book in your your quote is my own entrepreneurial batting average is 466, as I've had seven successful exits from 15 businesses I've started over the last 30 years, and one of the bits of advice that you have in the book that I actually is. Another actually really interesting quote is don't fall in love with your business and go down with it. There's a subtle difference between loving your idea and loving your business. Instead of falling in love with your business to the point that you go down with a ship, it's important to focus on the reason you started the business in the first place.

Speaker 2: 15:45

So Can I give some context to that?

Speaker 1: 15:49

So let's go back in time.

Speaker 2: 15:50

a little bit here, let's go back to 1993 when my brother and I were running what's called a BBS. You're too young to know what this is, but it was a bulletin board service, all right, and people would connect together on this bulletin board service and we would go to a conference every year called BBSCon. Okay, that later became ISPCon and then later hostingCon, but it was called BBSCon, and I was fascinated to see how many people loved their BBS. They loved that business. But the greatest technological shift in our lifetime and, by the way, maybe it's now the second greatest, because AI might be trouncing the advent of the internet itself this huge event was occurring and yet so many people held on to their BBS and they just tried to continue to live the glory days of the BBS. Well, we didn't. We were number two in Canada.

Speaker 2: 16:55

Number one, social BBS. We used a platform called Major BBS. Few of your listeners may know this. We use that platform. We shut that business down. We started internet direct. We saw the opportunity of the internet and how it could impact the humanity and we believed it very much. So we shut a business down and that was successful and profitable, and we didn't have the resources to do both. The bank would not back us to do both here, which, by the way, might've been good.

Speaker 2: 17:24

Three years later, I go back to the conference. All those people who had their BBSs I would say 80 to 90% of people who were successful at them hadn't shifted to the internet, hadn't shifted to hosting companies. They remained stuck in their time. So that is something to think about. Is what do you really love about your business? You know, what we love, my brother and I, is how technology transforms the world, and that's something we continue to grab on to. We've including AI. I mean, ai is just absolutely incredible. Hopefully we'll get a few minutes to talk about that and how that could impact your listeners as well.

Speaker 1: 18:03

So I mean, the context you just created there kind of took me off a little bit. So not just yourself, but your brother. You're sitting there, and how do you even bring up the conversation? Or did he bring it up to you to say, hey, we're both doing good and you also let a lot of the left off. A very big part of this story was a year before you're saying 1993, you started the BBS.

Speaker 1: 18:25

But in 1992, you were sleeping on couches at your college because you couldn't afford a place to live at that point Right. So you built it there. You've got money coming in, which was big difference than 365 days before. Your life is going totally in the right direction and where you want it to go, and in the middle there you were farming and selling vegetables for a few thousand bucks. Then you get the business going. You're off the couch, probably got your own place by now, or maybe living with your parents I don't know that part and now you're gonna say you know what, fuck it, let's shut it down and roll the dice again and try something totally different. And so you're gonna pivot based on what Like did? You said that to your brother and he was okay with that? Or were you guys just kind of talking and saying yeah?

Speaker 2: 19:13

We had the opportunity to launch an internet module or a new game and we had a third partner as well and we all voted and I lost the vote. We actually launched the game. I had seen some people in college use the internet. It was something that was just, it was pretty obscure, but I thought the potential was there and when we started to talk to people and figure it out, we began to realize this thing's huge. Like we would do a seminar on connecting to the internet and literally this was before there was a web browser. Okay, so we're talking about Ping and all the old technologies that were there, and it wasn't visually pleasing, but I would email. For instance, I would email the White House and I would get a response back from the White House instantly. It was an auto responder and the audience just went nuts for this. They were like, oh my gosh, that's crazy.

Speaker 2: 20:09

You know we laugh about it now, but it was funny actually and but in any case we saw the potential and realized so it wasn't, we're gonna shut this down instantly and open this up. So basically we had to get phone lines. We had like 300 phone lines running the BBS and we're like, okay, we can't afford to get more phone lines, let's just watch internet directly. We'll assign 30 phone lines to internet direction. Of course it fills up instantly. And then, okay, let's just add another 100 phone lines and it fills up instantly. And then so we whittled it down over a period of about six months. And you know it was the right decision because we began to see and understand and this is in the book this concept of paradigm shifts, change in technology or change in a regulation, the dot club, tld, the alternative to dot com, dot net, dot org that came about through a regulatory change. And in the book we talk a lot about how to catch a wave. One of the most exciting things for me in this book is I had the opportunity to interview Jeffrey Moore. Jeffrey Moore wrote Crossing the Chasm Inside the Tornado, one of the top business books for technology adoption. He actually reinvented the technology adoption curve and we actually did a graphic in the book that shows the technology adoption. So we talk a lot about how do you take advantage of a tornado and right now, with AI, you have a tornado. You know, I don't know about you.

Speaker 2: 21:45

I'm a bit of a domain investor. I buy domain names, like Matt. When AI started hitting last November, I started buying domain. I bought every artist, aicom right there. I bought some dot clubs, I bought dot shops. They're basically my three dot com, dot shop, a dot club. Okay, so they're my three favorite ones, but I started buying a lot of ai names.

Speaker 2: 22:09

I probably got about 100 ai names, because the opportunity in ai and how it's gonna transform the human race is absolutely incredible. It's insane. And, by the way, even if you don't launch an ai company, you need to be thinking about how do we accelerate our growth by using ai? What are the things that we can do to accelerate growth in our company? And I know I tell you in my situation. I've been using it for contracts. I've done three contracts now. Took me 60 seconds to write. I've used it for customer service for pawcom. We've used it even the book itself. We never used any ai.

Speaker 2: 22:55

When we submitted this book it was 100%, by the way, 10 year projects, six staff members. We interviewed 200 people for the book. About 50 people were actually included in the book. But come February, when they asked us to write the inside cover of the book, this was all done by ai. I took the introduction of the book, put it into the ai and it simply came and I said write the inside cover of a bestselling book based on this introduction. It came back and it was almost perfect. And how do I know that? Because when I talked to the Forbes team in April, may, and they used that for the Amazon listing the same description. I asked them well, why aren't you guys gonna change it Like you're the experts, not me?

Speaker 2: 23:44

And they said no, it's perfect, Absolutely perfect. I mean, I can't tell you how many different ways you can use ai, but if you're not jumping deep into that world, you're gonna be left behind.

Speaker 1: 23:55

Yeah, I mean, I've been using it myself quite a bit. I use it sometimes to try different ways of writing. We send a lot of email every day. We've tried different AB testing with our own writing, with AI writing. I do it to summarize certain documents and things I'd like to read. I didn't do it for your book but like, for example, one of the things I did was a trial that I wanted to read about and it was about 90 pages and I uploaded the PDF and I said summarize this for me. And it gave me, you know, pretty like four or five solid paragraphs and in 10 minutes I read it and that was enough for someone who's not a lawyer, just to know what's going on.

Speaker 1: 24:32

You know, and that's important to me, I also use it to look for leads and I started using version four, paying the premium for it and starting to train my own sales assistant. But I think I can get more out of it and I haven't yet and I need to do it more. A friend of mine who's the CTO of computercom, which is another chat EBT kind of a you know another version of it was telling me that he can have three different bots doing three totally different things and then those three bots take their work and then send it to one like kind of head bot, and then that head bot puts the work together and then sends it all to a QA and then the QA gives him the final product and he has them doing development work for him. And he said they're about as good as an entry level developer at this point. So, and they're there all the time, they're consistent and they don't make sloppy mistakes.

Speaker 1: 25:31

And I asked him what he thinks is gonna happen with any kind of kid in his 20s. Will companies wanna take chances on a rookie developer? And he said I don't see why I would. So that's kind of a scary thing, you know, going forward, and when I speak to other developers they say I use chat EBT all the time because if I can't figure something out or I want my work checked, I give it to that and then I can, you know, keep going and some things can take me a week to figure out, and other times and chat EBT can figure it out in minutes, and that's you know. So the question is, it can be scary, but the cotton gin was scary too, and the industrial revolution was scary, and you know so it's gonna be interesting. But getting back to, we're talking about some of your successes. So with Internet Direct you went there and then did that lead to two cows, or how did that work out?

Speaker 2: 26:24

Yeah, so and we talk a lot about this in the book is that when you're in the thick of it, you see opportunities everywhere.

Speaker 1: 26:31

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 26:32

Okay. So when we were at Internet Direct there was a gentleman named Scott Swidorski who was a librarian and he cataloged a number of software shareware software. Before that you'd have to have a discette and you'd put it in your computer or CD-ROM. And he came to us because he was down. He had no internet provider would give him access to their internet because the site was very popular and it sounds ironic.

Speaker 1: 27:03

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:04

And so he came to us and said, hey, can you launch this site? And we said, sure, we'll launch it. We launched it. Well, it took us down, of course, right, and customers were not happy about that. And then we said my brother Jean said, well, because internet at the time was so expensive I know it's a foreign concept it was very, very expensive, right. It's like you know your water bill or something like that, and the more water you use, the more it really costs a lot.

Speaker 2: 27:30

So we created something called mirror sites and we had ISPs over 1,000 of them globally set up a mirror site all around the world, and it was simply done to save money on the internet. Well, we did something we didn't even realize we actually, by doing that, we created a marketing channel and it became one of the top 100 websites on the internet and eventually we tried to become a test registrar for the domains. That didn't happen, and but we still wanted to get into it and we launched the domain side of the business as well. A company called DomainDirect, which you know led to Hover right now Hover on Two Cows, same company and then that's it, and it took off from there and we sold that company in 1999. And thankfully we did pretty well with that transaction because we had some challenges in our other companies as well.

Speaker 1: 28:34

In 1999, before the bubble burst, or is that exactly right about that?

Speaker 2: 28:38

time. So internet direct and I'll throw this one out there Internet direct was the fastest, number one fastest growing company in Canada. We're on the front page of Profit Magazine my brother and I, and another partner as well and we had killed it growing very fast. We got to about an $80 million valuation and then we decided to merge with a cable company that was applying for a wireless license from the Canadian government. Well, the Canadian government granted us that wireless license, by the way, at no cost.

Speaker 2: 29:15

We owned 50% of it and our stock went from. At the time we first started talking, it was $80 million. We hit an evaluation of about $1.3 billion and I had owned 13% of this company at the time. Now, one of the things we had done when we merged is we agreed to an 18 month lock up because they wanted us committed and back in 1999, it was like we were just exploding number one fastest growing company in Canada. We couldn't. Nothing could go wrong. Well, in March of 2000, something went wrong and that was called the dot com crash. That was the day that they announced the Microsoft breakup. A judge announced that this NASDAQ went from $5,000 to $4,000. Well, for those who remember that time, it actually went to $1,200. And we pulled a $50 million offering Fast forward. 18 months later, the company filed for bankruptcy protection and the shares that traded at $19 a share traded at $0.06 a share my God.

Speaker 2: 30:19

And that's what I sold my stock at $0.06 a share. So there are a couple of lessons I learned from that.

Speaker 1: 30:28

What was it like during that time? Let?

Speaker 2: 30:30

me tell you the two lessons though.

Speaker 1: 30:31

OK, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 30:31

The first was bad things do happen, which is why this became the genesis of this book Start, scale, exit, take some money off the table, repeat. And the second is liquidity or control. As entrepreneurs, we either control the company or we get liquidity, and I mean real liquidity, cash or freely traded stock. We don't go in a scenario where we don't have either of those two, and those were sort of the two big lessons. This book covers a lot of Failure, not only my own failure, but failure from other entrepreneurs and we. You can learn a lot sometimes by understanding what went wrong, so you don't repeat that as well down the road. We spent ten years building that company number one fastest growing company in Canada to last place finish Such, a, such a stupid mistake. Ten years building it, ten weeks selling it and we blew it all, not only for us, our investors, but also all of our employees.

Speaker 1: 31:35

We had over ten, ten paper millionaires at the time and they lost it all as well so, looking back at it, I guess the only thing you could have done better, because you wouldn't have known about the storm you were selling into nobody did at the time but you could have not had the lockout right, and so you could have at least sold some of the stock. But a lockout period is a pretty common thing when selling An asset to a publicly traded company. If you're getting stock or if you're publicly traded yourself, I mean, usually you have to wait a little bit of time for stock to vest. I'm guessing I probably can't talk about it with doc club you probably got some cash in stock and that stock couldn't have just been liquidated day one. You probably had to hold it For a period of time with bigger companies like I mean, fast forward.

Speaker 2: 32:23

Six years later we took hostopia public and then we ended up selling it for 17 times EBITDA and this time it was all cash. Typically, when you're selling to a publicly traded company like dot club, it was all cash.

Speaker 1: 32:36

There's a cow, it's all cash.

Speaker 2: 32:38

You don't? They don't like to issue securities Publicly traded companies because they have to do a lot of work with the SEC.

Speaker 2: 32:45

Okay well, we were doing it back in in 1990s. It was a hundred million dollar company merging. Well, let's say, another hundred million dollar company and you know. So it became a 200 million dollar company that won a license that got to over a billion dollars and it was publicly traded. It was a much smaller company and At that point you know, when you're smaller you try to come up with innovative ways to come together and you just have to be very careful of those structures Mm-hmm. Bigger companies are generally all cash, like when Frank Shilling was bought out with all cash, when Birkin spot out from go daddy all cash. They would prefer to do that than to get into securities got it All right.

Speaker 1: 33:23

So Everyone kind of took me by surprise. That's quite a quite a story and it must have been quite a roller coaster ride. What did it feel like on a daily basis when you're just seeing the stock going down and pinned? You know and I remember it quite well, I was still in college then but seeing any possibility of a good-paying job and good opportunities starting to Kind of vanish. What was it like, going to work every day and just seeing the stock going down and down and people's you know just that, seeing some of those paper millionaires turning into hundred thousandaires, then less than that and less than that over time what was that like?

Speaker 2: 34:03

Yeah, it was like you know, it's just not horrible. I shouldn't really compare this, but you know I watched the movie Titanic in the 90s and you remember that scene where Leonardo DiCaprio and the other actress she's there at the top of the ship.

Speaker 1: 34:17

Yep.

Speaker 2: 34:18

So there's this one day when I had a board meeting, I was on the board of directors and we all agreed to go into bankruptcy protection and I said, okay, well, I'm gonna go and fire all my staff, including myself.

Speaker 2: 34:29

Mm-hmm right and I called all of them together and I knew at that day that happened, that the ship was going down. It was just like coming down fast and it was obviously horrible. What we did my brother and I was focused on what we love, how technology can change and impact the world, and by doing that, we focused on building a hosting company called hostopia and we just had a lot of fun building that company and it Recame the the number one provider of hosting an email for telecoms around the world, including AT&T, vodafone, british telecom, bel canada and so many other companies as well.

Speaker 1: 35:09

So you pretty much sold out of that, decided to start a hosting company. Was was hover part which became two cows. Was hover part of the company that went and bankrupting got sold in that, or is that a totally separate thing?

Speaker 2: 35:21

totally separate company. So we had internet directs. We did the two cows business. We built it up, we sold two cows off. Thankfully, that was our transaction. That was our first big transaction when you get to Exit. There's a funny story I talk about when we closed at two o'clock in the morning and I drove home with my partners and we get, I get home and I climbed this very tiny home, very tiny little three-story home okay climbed to the top floor and Touched my wife and I hand her the check and she looks at it.

Speaker 2: 35:58

She goes I don't understand. And it was a 20, it was a $22 million check. Okay, I do not understand, I do not understand, I do not understand. And I was 20, 28 years old, and so that was. That was the good, sort of a good story. And then after that, we used that funding to support to start hostopia and, yeah, we lost a lot on this on the internet, direct collapse. But we saw opportunities. We launched two cows, we launched hostopia and then, within hostopia, we launched geeks for less geeks for less is 800 programmers in Ukraine. Currently, right now, mm-hmm that code and that company's grown quite sizable. My partners and I still own shares in that company and and then from there, while I was working at hostopia, I sold to a fortune 500 company. I worked for three years there, by the way. It was horrible, absolutely horrible putting.

Speaker 1: 36:56

Putting an entrepreneur working at a publicly traded fortune 500 company and making him work there. It's like putting a lion in a very small cage. It was horrible. I'll probably talk to go through all the processes and the meetings and the way they have to make decisions and the waiting. I'm sure some of it was painful for you.

Speaker 2: 37:11

Well, I give Lee Shram credit, who was the CEO of deluxe. He actually I reported to him directly. I remained tamed CEO of hostopia for that three-year period and I reported to him. There was a five or six people and his advisors and I was one of them, and, and, but it was very political and but I did learn how big companies think. In any case, while I'm there, I hired Roger Collins, an old name he used to own after Nick invested in after Nick, and I hired him to do a study of new domain extensions and there's one that popped out for me. It was doc club. So in 2012, I said I'm gonna go for this because that's when they deregulated. They opened that opportunity up and I went for it and you know, we sold almost a million domain names before we sold us to go daddy.

Speaker 1: 38:01

So I remember with the history of doc club you. I remember the launch in New York. I remember reading about it. Yep, you can tell everybody who you had. They're visiting to kick off the.

Speaker 2: 38:14

Into club 50 cent. Right, we had to go. You know we had to be a. I talk about this in the book, this concept if you have a really good product and you, I call it a rotten tomatoes of 93% or higher, okay, yeah then you need to spend money on marketing.

Speaker 2: 38:33

You know, I think of think of a movie like waterworld again, that's an old one, but in the case of waterworld they spent so much on a marketing but had a horrible rotten tomato store and the company they just didn't do well. A company, I'm sorry, a movie called Hugo by Martin Scorsese my kids loved it, we loved it had a 93% rotten tomato but it didn't do very well because it wasn't marketed properly. Okay, the third was Example I use is Top Gun last year. I Mean it was a great movie and they marketed it really well and it absolutely.

Speaker 2: 39:09

Club the same thing. It's a great TLD. We decided to put the money into it. We raised 12 million dollars for the whole enterprise To win it win the name in auction, but also to launch it in a big way and we knew it was a big name globally. The word worked in almost every country in the world, from Russia to China. They loved the word club and that's sort of the same with the book. We know the books doing very well. It's got a very high reviews. So we're putting energy into the book to promote it, to make certain with Forbes and we're working alongside Forbes. They're the publishing. Forbes books is the publishing company, so we're working along with them to to make certain it gets the right exposure it needs to. And we're applying for Dozen awards for the book as well.

Speaker 1: 39:58

So, going back to doc club, and I know right before I don't know when the agreement began or the discussions and negotiations began to purchase doc club from you, from go daddy, but was clubhouse out yet or did clubhouse come out, the app which really got super popular very fast?

Speaker 1: 40:16

You guys caught some serious wind from that and you're talking about a tornado. You had kind of your own tornado by kind of latching on with that, that app and a lot of people. We're getting the matching handles to the clubs that they had within clubhouse and it seemed like that was the launch of that during the pandemic and and the whole side gig idea was the perfect storm and you, obviously your company, capitalized on that opportunity To help you get to a million registrations would probably made that your GTLD so much more Juicy and interesting to to go daddy right, because it just didn't seem like they probably just want to buy one, because at the same time they purchased the MMX TLD is all 28 of them and yours was kind of like a side deal within that deal as well. So what was your relationship with you guys in the clubhouse app at the time?

Speaker 2: 41:07

So no relationship at all. I mean it just happened. It's called catching the break. It's chapter in the book and in our case, you know, it's almost a weird story. I'm walking around with Jeffrey Sass we could go for walks every day, you know, in South Florida when it's not too hot and walking around the block with Jeffrey Sass. By the way, he does dot art. Now he's in the dot art field.

Speaker 2: 41:31

Marketing for dot club for those who don't know about very nice guys and I'm like I can't believe like we spent because we had received an offer from GoDaddy and we're like sort of like a little bit depressed because we're like you know, we work so hard we never seem to catch the big break and we literally get to the office and within minutes we get a call from George for do go.

Speaker 1: 41:57

Okay.

Speaker 2: 41:57

Remember George Okay. So he says hey, are you seeing what's going on? This thing called clubhouse? Everybody's buying dot club names Because you know, john Lee started buying dot club names and yet so many, so many entrepreneurs and club owners buying dot club names and we literally saw our dot club premium names. We sold like I think I think the best day was like 1000 premium names sold in one day or something crazy.

Speaker 2: 42:26

And these are the high. You know we had high low models, so the renewal was always low. But you know, selling even $200 or $500 names like we're just went off, went off the charts and then GoDaddy had to increase their offer to make the deal happen based on that. So thankfully it happened at the right time, Perfect timing for us. In the chapter called catching the wave, I actually have a better story Because, again, we interviewed over 200 people for this book and one of the people.

Speaker 2: 42:55

I interviewed was Joe Foster. Joe Foster was the founder of Reebok and in 1979, he managed to get three five star reviews for his company. He had $9 million in sales in 1979.

Speaker 1: 43:08

That's a lot of money.

Speaker 2: 43:09

Three, five star reviews on from runners world. And then he got a distribution deal in the United States. And then he launched into a new space called aerobics and somebody wore the Reebok shoes on television it was Jane Fonda and when she wore those shoes the company exploded. They went from $9 million to $900 million in four years. It was absolutely incredible success story. And so we get into that catching the wave. There are techniques, there are things you can do to position yourself to catch it. Of course, there's an element of luck. We all know that right.

Speaker 1: 43:50

But luck happens to the same people over and over again. The harder I work, the luckier I get right. That's one of the things and you guys walking that day we're talking about. We bust our asses, we're trying to do everything right. You caught a break, but you capitalized on it. You know you also what people don't listening might not understand. The high low model that you suggested means that you can take domains based on the quality and you put them in different tiers and that the first year's registration is high. So a good name could be $500, $200, $5,000. You know, depending on the tier, you put it in based on many metrics and then the following year would be like $20 a year, forever renewing that name. That's the high.

Speaker 2: 44:32

$10 was about $10. Yeah $10.

Speaker 1: 44:34

So there you go. So they were collecting all those funds up front. And then there's a renewal rate that you're going to look at. So when people usually use the domain, like create a club on dot club, like startup dot club, he Colin's going to renew that name for perpetuity because he's using it for his business. So then there's a percentage of chance of renewals of that, of those domains. So there's a value of those names going forward and that's why they had a reprice.

Speaker 1: 45:00

But talking about Reebok and exploding to that amount, I mean once the shoes are on the feet and people love the shoe, it's very hard to break that bond with people and again it becomes a renewal business. Really, you know, and I'm pretty attached to Nike's myself, I just walk in, grab a pair of 10 and a half, so I don't even try them on at this point. They're always the same, they're always consistent, they're always comfortable and I leave, you know. So I'm actually wearing a pair right now. But yeah, I can see, and that came from a part in the book that you discussed is distribution right? That's a, that's a big one outside of luck. Is distribution and what are some of the other things that somebody can do?

Speaker 2: 45:42

Yeah, and in Joe Foster's case it was. He calls it going into the white space and that's enough. That's a place where others don't play your your the time. Everyone thought those types of shoes were for running only. They thought you know aerobics, that's like dancing shoes. They were talking about how they described it Dancing shoes, why we're running business, we're not dancing business. And but then in the end they might. They did a test and they they launched it.

Speaker 2: 46:15

You know domains. You have a lot of domain investors in your community, your listeners, and one thing I will say is I've never liked the high high model at all for domain investors. If you're not getting the low renewal pricing, I don't know how you can measure the, the value, or because you're really basically just renting that domain name. The other thing I will say about domain investors is they tend to be a little bit ahead of the market because they have to be right. So when something's big trending, like AI, they got to be ahead of the market. They got to be able to think of oh, this name could work by adding AI or something like that and positioning yourself for that way we talk a lot about in chapter three. How do you position to capitalize on a wave and I just find it fascinating that domain investors do a better job of that than most entrepreneurs and that's a skill being able to identify opportunities in advance. Now execution for a lot of domain investors might be a different conversation. Okay, because you know they could have the ideas but they don't necessarily have the execution, and you know that's.

Speaker 2: 47:33

I'm a serial domainer. You know entrepreneurship is a drug and domaining is a drug. I get a kick every time I register a domain name. I registered 100. It's aicom names.

Speaker 2: 47:47

Last year, last November, you know, and you just, there are, there are opportunities everywhere and I know we have to check that. We got to be careful not to overdo it. Right when it comes to, you know, buying domains or starting businesses, focus can, can can be as valuable or more valuable than trying to do too many things at once as well. But I do want to say that most of the domain investors I've talked to, they seem to be the successful ones. They seem to understand the importance of catching the wave before it happens, identifying opportunities before they happen in the world. And we talk about the techniques in this book. I'm actually doing a keynote with Ish Ish Milley. You know Ish. He's got a domain conference, a Web three domain conference, in Vegas next week and we're doing a keynote on how to catch the wave and how domain investors can catch the wave, and that's something that we're working on right now.

Speaker 1: 48:46

Presentation for Well, you can give me the link to that. I can share that in the podcast. If people would like to go, I'm sure you can go virtually or sign up late for the conference. We can do that and give you a link to the Amazon page where your book is, obviously. I have a question, though. You said you don't like the the high low. I'm in the high high model.

Speaker 1: 49:06

I did some consulting for MMX prior to them selling to GoDaddy and they also use the high low model, and one of the things that I noticed was and I did some consulting to dot inc and they do the high high model right quite a bit but they also try to create value where you would get Microsoft Office suite along with the registration or throw in additional sweeteners with it. I find it interesting with the high low model that a lot of the registrar's that I was looking at had some trouble presenting to their customers that it wasn't that price all the time or they thought that the name was registered and owned by somebody because it was the high low. So there's some there's a little bit of confusion there and I think with like dot inc when they were selling the Microsoft Office suite as a sweetener as a package. You know, I talked to them about it and they were saying if people weren't using the promo codes, you know that the registrar would give them to get it for free for a year or whatever. And it was just interesting, you know, to see some of the perception of folks and how they saw that.

Speaker 1: 50:09

And when I was at MMX they switched from a high low model to just like five or six different tiers that just had standard pricing and some of them were higher than others and a lot of names. Their registrations went up in some ways and other ways, yep, they went down. So I wonder what would be the more efficient? And then, going forward with your six in the future, are you going to you know, I kind of said a lot there but are you going to stick with, potentially, the high low strategy or do you think you're going to kind of just do it as a the higher premium? Yearly, yearly renewal would not go, you know, very expensive up to like, say, five grand a year or 10 grand a year or something like that. What do you? What do?

Speaker 2: 50:53

you know, I don't think we'll go that way. Look, I know that dot club was actually the very first TLD to do a high, low model.

Speaker 2: 51:00

We convinced Newstar at the time was Newstar, now it's GoDaddy registry. But we convinced them to enable that and we convinced GoDaddy to launch it and the success was, was, was it was very strong Part of my concern because we have about 20 companies I'm now invested in 10 of them I'm principal shareholder in. We have an incubator we run out of here in Fort Lauderdale and I get concerned when I see a business that can be held hostage for any reason. So, for instance, I'm a business owner. I could pay $50,000 for this name, let's say podcom. Use podcom as the example. We own that. You know we paid a lot of money for podcom, but every year we renew it for I don't know 12 bucks or whatever it is on GoDaddy and I know exactly the equation that we're at. I know exactly what we're going to pay for it. I know how much the investment was. It's all sort of solidified.

Speaker 2: 51:56

I knowcom can't raise the prices of all the comms to $5,000 a year or anything like that. They might be able to raise it to 20 bucks over the next five years, whatever. Sure, it's not material. But if I buy a domain name for $5,000 a year, what's to stop that registry from raising the price to $10,000 a year or to $20,000 a year or to $50,000 a year, forcing me to change over, rebrand my company to something totally different. I don't want that stress. I don't want that risk as a startup. Startups already have enough stress. I would never recommend generally that they do that. I do believe in financing, though. I think if you can come up with a good financing model, we had one called Namesclub. Unfortunately, godaddy registry never continued it, but we sold a lot of names that were financed over five years and we probably made a lot more money financing the names than we didn't, because if you have a good portfolio, people will buy those names and you can finance them for 36 months or even two years or even a year.

Speaker 2: 53:03

You can actually increase the total sales value.

Speaker 1: 53:06

Yeah, I think with any of the GTLDs. As we know, the GTLD owners can raise pricing whenever they want, but it's with backlash of what you said. You have great partnerships with your distribution channel and if you change the price of CoffeeDotClub from $100 a year to $5,000 on somebody, that registrar that you're distributing it through has to give that registrant the good news that their registration is now going to be $4,900 a year. Now they can renew it up to 10 years, but at year 11, they're going to get burned and it's going to be five grand and that registrar is going to come back to you and say you've made us look bad, we're not going to do business with you anymore. They're going to probably cut you out. So there is a little bit of buyer beware, I think. But at the same time, I think the distribution, the people doing the distribution, kind of have power over the GTLDs by saying we're just not going to sell them anymore if you're going to mess around with our clients, which makes sense as well.

Speaker 2: 54:04

Whether you can't do that. You can't take CoffeeDotClub and raise it to $5,000. You could technically do it, but then you'd have to raise every single name to $5,000. And that would cut. You'd lose all of your customers. So, there's an incentive to not. If you got a hundred thousand or 500,000 domains in your extension, you don't want to lose that $10 times 500,000 every year.

Speaker 1: 54:33

No way.

Speaker 2: 54:34

Right. So yeah, you can handle a dollar a year, forever, whatever, but you can't. You can't raise it, so you're actually protected from getting huge increases based on the volume of the domain domain extension. Technically could you do it? Yeah, but you'd lose all of your revenue and your business and all your distributors and you'd kill your business.

Speaker 1: 54:55

So that won't be that won't happen.

Speaker 2: 54:57

But if you have a tier that's high, high, and you have 10 tiers, you can raise one of those tiers, your top tier, to whatever you want, and you're only affecting a small portion of your customers.

Speaker 1: 55:08

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 55:08

So that's why I'm nervous about the high high. That's all for startups and for entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1: 55:12

I think definitely that's a great and a valid point. So I was at my parents' house a few weeks ago in Boston and I was going through some books and I came across a book I don't know if you've read it Johnny Tremaine, and it's from my English class. It's just a Revolutionary War book and it was one of those that we had to read in English class and talk about the Revolutionary War and we had to learn to highlight and when I was going through the pages I was looking at it and almost everything in the book was highlighted. I think at that point I didn't really know what was important and what wasn't. It was actually fun to see the amount that I highlighted in this book and I'm not just saying that because I'm interviewing you and you give me the opportunity, but there were parts where I was I highlighted multiple pages because I read it on Kindle that you can go back and then you can go into your Kindle app and see what you've highlighted. It's because it was a paragraph or certain things that kind of resonated with me and a few of those things was you talk about or making the analogy of in being a startup you call them stage gates where if you're driving in a video game and it's a driving and you go past the next checkpoint, you get more time to go, and then each of those little checkpoints gets you to your major checkpoint, like your real milestones right, and that to really kind of create it in that way. So it's the way I wrote it down or I summarized it. Stage gates for startups are like checkpoints in a racing game. Hit them before time runs out to extend your run or pivot if you fail. The critical milestones that go beyond regular goal setting, which supports the overall plan to reach these pivotal points X number of goals need to be reached to pass a stage gate right. That's like really the synopsis of it. I think that was a really great way of looking at it. As an entrepreneur myself, I'm doing those things and trying to get to that, but it's not as I clearly mapped out in my mind. But you kind of brought that together and then when you were reading about that or I was reading about that, you were writing about that I was thinking to myself how can I make some more reasonable milestones for the next six months, 12 months a year for the business, two years, five years, and really work on the stage gates and making decisions and changes in my business. So that really started to get me thinking. Then you start asking yourself how do I make reasonable stage gates, how do I make ones that aren't too easy to achieve? How do you not? What happens when you don't hit one? I know you go over that and you have to ask yourself okay, that's okay, but do we have to pivot here? You have to reflect and you have to make a decision.

Speaker 1: 58:00

Another part I really liked is chapter 18. It's called scale in zeros. I think that's really good where you go from $10, $100, $1000, $10,000. You could do it as product sold 10, 100,000, 10,000, whatever it is, but it really just really brings in. Resonates that to mind as someone who wants to increase volume for their business and really wants to get things going and I think people starting at zero with nothing and really just trying to get there that first 10 is important. Your first 10 sales are huge, but okay, now let's do 100. Okay, let's go to 200. Let's try to go to here. I was very proud of myself when we did 50 sales in one month. That was a big milestone for me and I was really proud of that as a sale. We didn't sell any names in a package. It was over 50 individual sales in a month and I was really proud of that. So scaling in zeros.

Speaker 2: 59:03

So scaling to 500, now that's your next thing and it's really, it's a mental game. We want to think about the story, the people, the money and the systems. You need to scale to 500, because if we're gonna do it mentally, we've got to almost visualize it, like actually lay it out on paper. These are the people I would need if I wanted to scale to 500. Okay, so now we know its direction. We want to go. This is the amount of money that I need to raise to get to 500 sales per month. These are the systems I need to put in place to get to 500. We want to be running our company as if it's 10 times larger in order to get there. Now, of course, we've got budgets and you can't just hire people right away, but at least we can visualize. We can begin to visualize who we should put in place in order to achieve those 500. And the concept is really just all about scaling in zeros. It's that mental changing your mindset.

Speaker 2: 1:00:03

Actually, it was Jack Welch who said hire people with runway, and I don't mean this is an important point too. Like if you're doing a million dollars of sales and you want to hire a new CEO for your company. You want to hire somebody who's already done 10 million in sales. You don't want to hire somebody who's taken a million to two million because they haven't gone through that whole process. And then the other thing, too, is you don't want to go from hire somebody who's going from a billion dollar a company and work for you because they don't have the ability to come down to that DIY level that you need. You need to be hiring, whether CEO or other executives, for you need to be hiring people who've had the experience launching or scaling the company 10X over your current size.

Speaker 1: 1:00:55

That's really good to add to that and that's some even good advice, some more advice. And then one of the other things is again you just already mentioned it is people. You focus a lot on people in the book and dedicate three or four chapters on it. I was reading some of that and we both know that, being a small startup with a limited budget, that you can't offer the salaries and the bonuses and the health insurance and the stock and all the different benefits that some of these larger companies can provide. But what you can provide is culture. What you can provide is excitement. What you can provide is being part of something that's growing into something.

Speaker 1: 1:01:40

And then you talk about when you know you've really made it, when people start talking about the good old days and the way it used to be until it got much bigger, and you know that your business has grown onto into something else. And it's funny, being in business for me for four years publicly facing we've had three versions of our website, but not a lot of technology facing the industry but there's a lot going on behind the scenes and there's a lot of processes we've created and there's a lot of things happening and looking back to starting day one, when I started the business, my wife gave me this name plate make it happen. But I keep right here in front of me, right on my desk every day. We have come of every long way and I look back at I don't know if they're the good old days, but I look back at those days and I look at how far we've come and the milestones that we've reached and hopefully we can continue to do.

Speaker 1: 1:02:42

And then the other one which I need to really reflect more about myself is your nearly unbearable brand promise, and you also talk about your X factor. But your nearly unbearable brand promise is what Domino's Pizza does, and they go out and they say we can deliver a pizza in 30 minutes or less or it's free, and that's something that their competitors can't really do and that any company should be able to go out there and promise something that separates them from everything else and that really makes them unique, and it's not in a crazy, undeliverable way. It's in a way that really makes them stand out and be different, and I think that that's an important part of the book as well. What do you have to say? What have you done with Dot Club to achieve that? What was that with Dot Club?

Speaker 2: 1:03:39

Well, let me say this that the X factor which, by the way, jim Collins talked about it in his book and Vern Harnish in scaling up as well. We had the opportunity to interview Vern Harnish twice for this book and really appreciated his endorsement on the book as well. But if you wanna scale your business, nothing can help you scale your business more than finding your X factor. You know the company I talked about, hostopia, back in 2006,.

Speaker 2: 1:04:11

We were told that we were going to lose the Earthlink contract. My CTO and I, dirk Baguette, jumped on an airplane, flew down to Atlanta, went to his office and the gentleman who was in charge of this decision the contract was a mid-level executive. He said well, we wanna take you out to lunch, so we go downstairs. We had taxied over go downstairs and he's got a two-seater wego and Dirk sits in the front. I sit in the trunk of this two-seater wego and we drive to the restaurant. When we started and I'm just using that to sort of demonstrate the sort of like what we would do to take out a deal done right.

Speaker 1: 1:04:54

We'll do whatever it takes.

Speaker 2: 1:04:55

Right, and. But we go there and we say to him well, you know, we know, your number one issue is that if something goes wrong with the migration, you're gonna get fired Because, yeah, so here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna guarantee 100% migration. We'll pay you. At the time, it was $350 per customer that we lose on our migration and he had 80,000 customers. Right, we called it a 100% migration. We became the best in the world at doing migrations. We hired over 200 people in the Ukraine who worked on the migrations and I mean, we became the best. We had the best heuristics and we had the best people and we checked every website manually and we really did do these cutovers. Now, were we 100%? No, we're probably 99.9 or 99.8. Do we have to pay a few thousand dollars out in penalties? Sure, we did, but we had to re-engineer our entire organization. Now, after we did this, by the way, we won the Earthlink contract because of that. After we did this, we won AT&T. We won Vodafone. We were in British Telecom. We won them all. We cleared the slate and we were up against Vario and Hostway, two very big companies. We destroyed them, decimated them. We won Domino's Pizza, destroyed the industry, Won National car rental.

Speaker 2: 1:06:19

You just show up, get in your car and go. They're number one. If you can find your X factor in scale it can be absolutely huge. It's what Joe Foster said go into the white space and when you enter that white space you do something different. They did aerobics. You might find a domain name that you go into the white space that no one else is focused on but you think this is going to be big. That can be your X factor. You know every business is different.

Speaker 2: 1:06:47

It took us seven years to find our X factor at Hostopia, so you don't have to have it right away. But I did put in the book in the start section on the four sticky note business plan which, by the way, takes 30 minutes to complete. You can complete a business plan for a domain name. You can do it in 30 minutes. What's the plan? Start to visualize it. I did put X factor on that list under the first sticky note called story. And then you take it from this X factor. Your best in the world at it. You're doing something different that no one else is doing, that solving a bottleneck in the industry or doing something just totally unique and different. And then you take that and you create a nearly unbearable brand promise from that.

Speaker 1: 1:07:32

So they're slightly different.

Speaker 2: 1:07:34

But you know, your nearly unbearable brand promise is sort of like the slogan. It's the guarantee that comes after you figure out your X factor.

Speaker 1: 1:07:44

That's something you definitely got a lot. I'm going to probably end up writing it on my wall, my X factor, and spending some more time going over these things, because I think in the end, every entrepreneur wants same thing. You know they want their project to be successful. If you, if I, made a business plan four years ago. Where I am today, I'm happy with what we've done, but it's certainly not the way I would have drawn it up. And along the way you try different things and you might have a little business ADD and try something out there that doesn't necessarily work, but in the end you want it to be successful. And the question is, what is success to? Each entrepreneur is totally different. Could be the, the billion dollar business. Or in your case, like with your wife, she's built a Montessori school with 100 and something students and she's happy with the size and what's happening there. That's her success.

Speaker 1: 1:08:38

And I think you know doing this and taking the time to do these exercises rather than just waking up every day, getting to work and just going through the same routine and just kind of treading. You know treading water and trying to get to that goal but not really like. You know creating those steps and checking them off. Like, okay, like you said before, jeff, you did, you did 100. Now it's time for 500 or 50. Get to 500. How are you going to do it? Make your steps? You know what? How are you going to get to 500, to 1000 or 5000? Well, you better figure out an X factor and then you better start getting people to believe in your X factor. And how do you do that? Well, you have chapters that talk about your pitch, making the right presentation. You know you have the three C's in there that are all important. I forgot them off the top of my head. What are the three C's I have in my notes?

Speaker 2: 1:09:32

You're catching me, A lot of the chapters were interviews of people Calm comfortable, incredible Right, that was going to say that was done with Lil Roberts and she had won multiple pitch competitions.

Speaker 1: 1:09:46

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:09:46

She is also I do. I teach a cohort at Allen LeVan NSU and she is one of the speakers in that cohort. The cohort usually starts with me opening it up and we do a four sticky note business plan. By the way, we do it in 30 minutes and this is this. This program is absolutely free.

Speaker 1: 1:10:04

How do you do that?

Speaker 2: 1:10:05

South Florida. You can join a an incubator for your business. They have an ideation session, they have an incubator, they have an accelerate, they have post accelerate. They're all free. There's a lot of government funding that goes into helping startups. Every community has them. Just Google it, check with your local university to learn what kind of incubators they have. We had the inter. We had the opportunity a few weeks ago to interview Bridget.

Speaker 2: 1:10:37

She is the CEO of SCORE and she they have 10,000 volunteers for mentors in the US and she makes the claim that you can increase your chances of success with a startup by three times. Three times. By using a mentor Connecting with an incubator, you can increase your chances of success. It takes a village to raise a startup. You're not alone.

Speaker 2: 1:11:06

We don't need to launch these startups in the garage, like Steve Jobs and you know. Today it's the incubator, it's the shared office space and a lot of them are government backed and there's a lot of resources there to help you. Yeah, it is. Entrepreneurship is a jack of all trades, isn't it? Because you talked about? You have to be good at raising money. You have to be good at hiring people. You have to be good at understanding your shortcomings, how you can improve and how you can hire people to compliment you. You have to be good at eventually selling the company. You have to be good at motivating people. You've got to do almost everything.

Speaker 2: 1:11:46

I often say you have to be an amateur lawyer, an amateur marketing person, an amateur. Thank goodness we do have AI. By the way, I've done three contracts using AI. Get legal advice. Don't listen to me please, but I've used it for three contracts already. It's absolutely incredible.

Speaker 1: 1:12:03

I think the basics are fine. I probably wouldn't do the sale of my company contract. No, I wouldn't. The basics, I don't see an issue with that.

Speaker 2: 1:12:12

Yeah, if you have to come to a meeting of minds with an individual for compensation or something like that. You're doing an offer letter which essentially could be a contract as well. Those kind of things you can definitely use chat, gpt or another AI for, but I tell you it's a game changer.

Speaker 1: 1:12:32

Absolutely All right. Well, I think we've gone past our time a little bit, but it's been great because of it. I think there's a lot of information that we've covered today. Like I said before, and I'll say it again, this is a great book. You can get it on Amazon, on Kindle. You have the audio book you said earlier that just came out, so if you just want to listen to it, I think you should read it.

Speaker 1: 1:12:54

I'm more of a visual person, especially with a lot of the pictures they have in there. What I said before we started recording is what I like about the book is that Colin makes himself vulnerable. He talks about his success, but he also talks about the mistakes he's made. He talks to all these people he's interviewed and they admit and talk about some of the mistakes they've made, how they overcame them, and there's just a lot of different things that make you question what you're doing and ask yourself how you can do better and how you can be more successful for your business. And you can pick it up and put it down and really just focus on certain sections that are applicable to you right now. So I'd give that a read and I'll definitely put some information about the incubator startupclub where you're going to be talking tomorrow. You're a busy man, and is there anything else, colin, you'd like me to add in here?

Speaker 2: 1:13:49

Yeah, I just want to say this process of putting this book together was a 10-year process Six people in the last two years interviewing over 200 people to get 50 interviews. We wrote the book for the ADHD entrepreneur. It has 58 chapters, it has over 200 callouts, it's got 30 illustrations. I mean we really tried to make this simple and digestible. Some people will call it like a textbook. Yeah, it's comprehensive. I admit that it is fairly large. I'll admit that. Okay, but the fact is there is so much good information in there and we've made it digestible like one chunk at a time and, like you said, you don't have to read the whole book in one day.

Speaker 2: 1:14:41

You can digest it where you are with your business in life. But I will say, when you do start to, when you do read the entire thing, it connects everything in your brain together so that you can start, scale, exit, take some money off the table, repeat. That is a process and when you learn all of that, you'll begin to think about the exit. The day you start, the day you register that domain name, you're already thinking about the exit.

Speaker 1: 1:15:09

Absolutely Well. Thanks again, colin, and I might have to make the trip across the state to come visit you and go out to dinner some night, so I'd love that, yep. I appreciate it, thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:15:19

All right, have a good one, thank you.