Billion Dollar Goals, Personal Branding & Startups w/ Ulyses Osuna & The Blacklist #scottsthoughts

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Today, you're going to hear me on the Black List, a podcast with Ulysses Osuna. We speak all things, startups, personal branding, and billion dollar goals. Yeah, is it a passion project for you? Or is there a lot of money in this project? And that's why you want to move forward. Listen, man, if you can make money, you'll find some passion around it. But I mean, I'm not doing this just for fun. I'm building a company that's going to be successful. I mean, that's always what I focused on. I work in disruptive industries or with cutting edge technologies and try and build that from the ground up so that there's some sort of acquisition event or exit event so that it's successful. And early on, it's a lot of work. And early on, if you ask anybody, the money in startups doesn't come until much later on. You gamble a little bit of your time so that in the future, you could have an exit event. So you're figuring everything. When I'm working in a startup, I'm coming in at zero. When I say zero, it's free revenue. So we haven't made any money day one. And you've got to figure out all the sales, all the marketing, all the HR finance, logistics, hire all the right people, raise the money from the right investors. That's also a reason why I'm here right now. So I don't know why I subject myself to working in startups, because it's craziness, but it's a lot of fun for me. And I've worked in startups as an operator. I want to say operator like CRO, CEO, like I am now, the head of sales and marketing, VP sales and marketing. I've worked in startups like that. I've also worked as like a fractional CXO. So working with a whole bunch of startups is almost like a consultant. Right. And that's sort of been like my career. I mean, like if you Google me, a lot of this up that comes up is the podcast that I built, brand that I built, but ultimately all that fun stuff, has been built off what I do in my nine to five. Yeah. And, you know, we were talking off camera, that right now you are kind of building up your personal brand. I'd say you do a great job because you have a million followers on Instagram. You have a ton of downloads on your own, on your own, you know, podcasts. Yeah. Why are you building your personal brand now? And are you helping any, you know, any other companies kind of do that? Do the same. So great question because everything that I do for myself, I do for the companies where I'm leading those companies. Yeah. Right now I'm in a CEO role, but previous, I was heading up all sales and marketing and the content strategy that I use for myself, got my own podcast out there and to get for my name in front of as many eyeballs as possible, I use that if I'm going to take a product to market. So why do I do it? I mean, building a, building a strong brand is important for any company, but I think the reason why I'm doing it for myself is because I can take that with me anywhere I go. So I started doing, I mean, I'm this, I'm a student of the Gary Vee's and the Grand Cardones of the world that have built incredible brands, love them or hate them, but you know their name or at least you know some of their names, right? Yeah. And the thing is when you build a name and you build a tribe and you build an audience in a community like that, you can take any product that you take to market and you immediately have eyeballs on it. So you look at what Gary Vaynerchuk has done with VaynerMedia, VaynerSports, empathy, wines, all the products that he wants to launch, he immediately has eyeballs on it. Yeah. And he has eyeballs on that product. So why not get started? Because building a personal brand is what? It's just talking on social usually for free about things that you already love and care about and you're passionate about, right? You build an audience of like-minded individuals around that thing, you do it over a period of time, you're going to have a large community and that's going to benefit you no matter what you do. So right now, I pivot from tech to CPG. I can bring that company in front of the million people that I can talk to on social. I can talk about it on my podcast. I can run ads on my podcast from my own company if I want. I could do whatever I want, but that's because I spent all about four years now every single day putting out content across social, across podcasts, across newsletter to do that purposefully. So then 20, 30 years, I don't know if I'm going to be with on me. I have no idea what's going to happen with this company, but whatever I'm working on then, I still have my name, right? So that's the goal. And what is your goal with this current company? Is it also another exit always? Yeah, I mean, that's what my investors want. And you've got to do well for them. But yes, so the goal is with a CPG company, get it into the hands through direct consumer, Amazon, Shopify, Walmart.com, get it into retailers through distributions. So you're in the Walmart, the public, the CVS, the targets, and then ultimately you grow that way. Yeah. And then eventually you look for like we raised a pre-seed and now we're looking to raise the next round, which is why I'm here. And you keep raising rounds, you keep scaling the company. And eventually, I mean, you can sell it usually around the $50 million annual revenue markets when larger companies will start looking at you. Yeah. So like any of the large, any of the large, like proctoring gamble or anything like that, they'll start looking at you to acquire. If you want to push it further, you want to take it to like the $100 million or, you know, $200 million revenue market, then you're going to get some serious buyers. Now it's a meaningful acquisition. And then if you want to push it further than that, as you raise more money and continue to scale, then you're looking at like IPO, making the company public. Yeah. Now, I don't know where we're going to be. We sort of, you know, as we scale our revenue and we're still very early. I mean, the company's only about a year and a half old. Scale our revenue. Eventually, we'll start to look at offers and see where we want to go. And maybe we don't want to sell at a $50 million revenue market. With the multiple on our EBITDA and that's our valuation. Maybe we do want to take it all the way and go IPO. And that's a conversation with the investors that are on the board or stakeholders or equity holders. Yeah. I mean, that'd be huge. Dude, huge if you do. I mean, that's always the goal, right? And then, like, you always have to understand is the right time to sell is it not? I mean, with my last company, it was a very good time to sell. So we had a product that did very well during COVID. It was a SaaS product, a software product that removed a lot of processes that somebody in a control room, like that would be doing. So we had a lot of traction during COVID for our software product. So coming out of COVID was the right time, right place. We had a great offer. So for the founder CEO, that wasn't me. I joined a CRO for the founder CEO. That was a good offer, right? That was a good time. I don't know what we're going to do. But I know that the current investors for the new company, they really want to take it big. And I'm down with that. Like, that for me is very exciting. Like, I don't want to sell the company when we're only doing 10 million in revenue or 20 million in revenue. For me, I would like to go big. I mean, if I'm committing a lot of my life to it right now, that's exciting. I don't want the future hold. Hopefully it's age as well, who knows. But like, you always want to shoot big. Right, right. And how long do you think it'll take until you guys start looking at those offers? Because it is hard to guess when you're going to hit that certain revenue. But at a certain point, it doesn't become almost predictable. It does. I would say that with a CPG company, with a product that is in a blue ocean, I think you'd want to put between six to 10 years into it. Yeah, that's a pretty safe bet. If you aren't having significant, I mean, if you're not hitting certain revenue milestones even after three or four years, after a while, you're going to wonder if it's worth it. I mean, a business should be scaling. But I think that if you want to have a meaningful exit, the six to the 10-year mark is pretty safe. Yeah. So that's sort of where I'm shooting for right now. And that's the mixture of, again, direct consumer sales and retail distribution. Yeah. And you mentioned that you're going kind of all in on that. But you also have the podcast. And you're also, are you doing anything else outside of that? So I would say my life is split into sort of three parts right now. And I say three parts. But I mean, ultimately, the majority of my time is invested in building a startup. Because that is the biggest time suck, for sure, a ton of work. The other things that I'm building would be my personal brand. And a passion project that I'm heavily involved in, I'm helping two other partners build a private equity firm that focuses on investing in startups. You're telling me about that? Yeah, exactly. So that doesn't take as much of my time. I have two partners that do a lot of the work for that, just because I don't have the time. But that's always something that I've been passionate about. So as my career progresses, as my life progresses, I love working with business owners. I love working with entrepreneurs. I love helping them understand what works, what doesn't, based on my experiences. I mean, I like investing in businesses. I like finding good opportunities. That's me I can do for the rest of my life. Because that isn't, it's a lot of work. It's not as much work as building a startup from the ground up. So I mean, like if this, if on me goes very well, in my future, angel investing, investing in different companies, both cash flowing and more high-risk startups, that's probably where I want to go. But that's where everybody has a good, good exit eventually goes. They want to invest, they want to give back to the business community. Yeah, and I think if you have that personal brand and you take it with you, I mean, anything else. You want to look at somebody who's done as well, but not so I'm looking at startups, I'm looking at tech companies, I'm looking at cash flowing businesses. And I would leverage my personal brand to find both deals. Because if you're trying to invest in a deal flow, and you need investment, because you don't always invest 100% of your own money. In fact, that's kind of stupid. Usually you find a pool of investors or LPs, and you invest their money because you can find good deals, you can find good businesses, you can help them grow, and you can sort of fix the things that are wrong, right? So if you have a personal brand, you can find both. Now, who's done this very well for real estate is Grand Cardone. The Grand Cardone is a huge brand, and he finds good deals, and he finds a lot of investors through his personal brand. Yep, so in the future, maybe I want to do that with more traditional investment, venture capital startups. That's something that I could see working really, really well, and I don't think a lot of people understand the power of personal brand when it comes to building out a VC firm, building out a private equity firm, because these are not the industries where personal brand has really come prevalent. But you start to see leaders in these types of firms starting to understand it. So like, for example, David Rubenstein, Carlisle Group, like he's going on podcast more, like he's putting himself out there, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. So you start to see people that maybe at one point in their career were more legacy thinkers in terms of personal brand, but they didn't really get it, it doesn't make sense. Now they're trying to put themselves out there, so they can start to build an audience in a community around their name. If you look at some of the industry leaders that are starting to adopt it, who are in pretty legacy industries like private equity, if that person is going to do it, why wouldn't you? You understand the value. You see people that are not even like the Gary Vies and the Grand Cardinals with people that have built billion dollar fortunes, and that's the only thing they haven't done. They haven't built the strong personal brand. These people are all billionaires in private equity, and they haven't built the personal brand, and now they're trying to double down and get more exposure, because they want that, and it's going to help them do whatever they choose to do, and it will also help them, I think it's just a general net positive for their business. So if you look at a big bank, or a big private equity firm, or even like a VC firm, and it's just a firm, it humanizes the business. Same like you look at Elon Musk and Tesla, who has more followers on Twitter? It's Musk, right? And if you look at Richard Branson and Virgin, it's Branson who has more of a community around him. So it doesn't matter what you're in, the point is having a personal brand humanizes the business, it's like the celebrity CEO, right? Like you want to put yourself out there, so start now with something you're passionate about, and you don't know where it will go, but it'll be, in my opinion, a net positive, as long as you're comfortable putting yourself out. I mean, you're doing, this is your job, this is your life. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And for somebody that works at those high level companies, or is kind of like a banker, or has a VC firm, how much quicker can they build their personal brand versus somebody else's, you know, just kind of like a normal business owner? Because they have the money, they can essentially pay, you know, big money to kind of do all the stuff that we really have to work really hard for. I mean, overnight, you can become known because you can pay for traditional PR. Yeah, but I do think that the strength in the personal brand is somebody's willing this to be super authentic and not give a shit. That is really the strength. And I think that a lot of people that operate at that level, because they've built their career without putting themselves out there all the time, only as much as they have to, I feel like they may not be as comfortable doing that. So I'm not saying they don't have a leg up, because they have multi-million dollar marketing budgets. Yeah. But I do know that Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone and those people, and probably you when you first started out and me as well, I just started by posting stuff that I cared about. Yeah, that's literally it. And then you find that tribe and you double down on it. And I mean, they have a huge advantage, but social media, organic reach, understanding brands, understanding which platforms expose you to the widest audience. If you do a little bit of research, the playing feels a little bit more even than it used to be. Take me through that, because not too many people know how to do that type of stuff. And they're thinking like, I don't know what the fuck to talk about. Like I don't know what to post about. Yeah, I mean, so if I was going to start off, obviously you're probably focused on a job or a business that you're in. And I would say for content ideas, day one, figure out who your target customer is, and then you're going to be answering questions that your target customer would have. So literally write, if you don't, if you can't think of questions, which is a business owner, I really doubt that's true, but if you're listening to your demos or your pitches or your discovery calls, like write out the questions that your customer's asking you before they close the deal. Yeah, literally write them out and sit in front of a camera or if you have a tough time talking to a camera, then invite a friend over and just tell the friend to ask you those questions. Record that and that's your content. Yeah, that is, that's, it's really not that complicated. Now you can figure out after you record that content, you want long-formed, you want short-formed, you want to put it up on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, real Snapchat, spotlight, YouTube, or whatever it is, but the point is, that's really the premise for the content. You're answering questions, that your audience wants answered, and that's going to help you in a business context. It's going to build a tribe around things that you know. Yeah, right. With so many social media platforms, where do they post? Are they posting as well, where their target audience is or should they post in all platforms to see what's fixed? Okay, so I mean, I'm a little nuts because I post everywhere all the time, and I did that before I had a team. Yeah, because I figured out a process, and this is why I started the podcast, right? Because I have conversations with people who'd be talking about things that I'm passionate about, that I would hope my audience would be passionate about as well. And podcasts were a great way and a great medium to have content that I could eventually chop up into little bits and distribute everywhere, right? My podcast goes into 30 to 60 second clips for all the short-formed video apps. I have quotes to go up on Twitter. I have obviously the podcast that goes up on my RSS feed on YouTube. I take the podcast, transcribe it with a tool called otter.ai, and then I turn that into a newsletter that goes out. So I found a content form that allowed me to go everywhere without too much work. If you don't want to do that, then I would say you should test at the beginning, at least one post per platform per week minimum. But I would double down and triple down on the one that gives you the highest returns. So I would still show up everywhere as much as possible because realistically what's showing up, right? Like if you already have a 30-second TikTok clip, it may not be optimized for Twitter or may not be optimized for Facebook, but still throw it up there. But I mean, if you're building a huge audience on TikTok, for whatever reason, and they love that content, and they love the stuff you're putting out, like triple down on that. Yeah. Triple down on that, that's where you're gonna be known. But I think the easiest way to do that, in my opinion, is to go everywhere, which means that you have that one sort of pillar piece of content, and then you just clip it out and just push it everywhere. Being omnipresent, it's easiest, but it's the hardest, also at the same time. You have to process, you have to really be committed to this. I think that a lot of people, like if they just started, that would be a good first step. They just started with a small little video clip answering those questions, pushing it up to social, that would be the best way to get off the ground. Yeah. But I also think, don't you have to have like, don't you have to have some sort of personality in order to actually grow? No, you definitely don't. No, you don't, because you have to be useful. You can be entertaining, but if you're useful, people, it'll still resonate with people. Yeah. So look at entertaining. Look at like finding value. Look at Lex Friedman, his podcast, if I'm, his podcast is like one of the top ranked podcasts. He's like a super monotone, like, I think he's like a professor from, I think MIT, if I'm not mistaken, but he's had like, Zuckerberg on his podcast, he's had musk on like three times, like, he's a content creator, he's incredibly articulate, very smart, and he's not necessarily that charismatic or entertaining. He just shows up deliver tons of value. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for anybody listening, that means, you know, you guys don't have any news. There's literally no news ever. And it doesn't have to be like business. It could be like, if you're starting like a dog walking business, like push out content about that, because that will also act as demand generation and top of funnel for any business that you create. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's huge. All right. Let me, you know, for people that are listening that I've never heard of you before, you know, what is it that you want to be known about? And, you know, from five years, five years looking back, it wouldn't be like, okay, yeah, like, you know, I totally did what I wanted to do. Man, that's a good question. Five years looking back, what do I want to be known for? I think that the reason why I'm building out another company is because I want to have a big win, like a household name, a household name that I've been able to build up with an incredible team from the ground up and have that, you know, like as the Scott built this. Why, though, why does that matter to you? To me, it's like, it's an accomplishment. It's an accomplishment that I was able to take something from zero to billions of dollars. Yeah, I have no idea if I'll be able to accomplish it. And if not, there's a lot of like, you know, milestones along the way that I still, I'm still happy with where I'm at right now. But the point is, I think that's an incredible and incredible accomplishment. Now, if say I can't do that, what I can do is at least deploy capital and investing companies to create a minimum of billion dollars worth of value. Yeah, I can't do it on my own with one company. I know that I could take several companies from the ground up from zero to 10, which is somewhat my sweet spot right now and provide tons of value to the world at large through startup investment and helping founders sort of navigate their way through their first, you know, few sales, few customers. So for me, it's like, how do I, how do I have a billion dollar mark on this world? That would be a level of accomplishment for me. Yeah. Yeah, why? Like, why does it need to be a billion dollars in value or in an exit or something like that? Is it because, yeah, no, actually because why not? Because if someone else has done it, then why can't I? Yeah. And that sounds ludicrous. But ultimately, if you build a, first of all, if you build a company to a billion dollar plus valuation, it's not like you are running Walmart. You're running a company that's known that is contributed and benefited a significant amount of people. I feel like when you cross that billion dollar threshold, you've now given back more to the world than just something that can put money into your pocket. Because you can make, you can build a good company and you can make significant money more than you'll ever need and a company will never be known. Even if you had like a smaller company that say like had like a 10 million and recurring revenue rate, and you sold it for 50 million dollars and say you were 100% owner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even like 50%, say you had 25 million dollars banked after an exit. That company's not going to be known more often than not. But you're pretty comfortable for the foreseeable future, right? It depends on which city you live in. But I mean, like let's be really, you're still pretty good. So I think that to have a big impact on the world, you have to play big. And I really do believe if more people shot big than at least wherever they ended up would be meaningful. Yeah. So I mean, like you don't need to be there but if other people have done it, then why not you? Why not me, right? Right, right. Well, dude, it was amazing. Where can people find you? You can go to Instagram at ScottyClarry or ScottyClarry.com, all the links, podcasts, all that stuff there. Got it. Well, I appreciate you. You had it, you know, you had a phenomenal session. Thank you so much, dude. Thank you for coming. Thank you for bringing me on. How are we with time?