Colin C. Campbell - Serial Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author | Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

It does take time, but when you get it, the dominoes will. What does it take to start, scale, and exit multiple successful companies? Colancy Campbell has done it all. From co-founding some of the biggest names in tech, like two cows in hostopia, to creating the dot club domain that was ultimately sold to go dad. We had hundreds of employees front page of the profit magazine at the time, bought 16 months later company file for bankruptcy protection. That $19 a share, I ended up selling all my shares for six cents a share. But here's the real story. What drives an entrepreneur to keep repeating the process of building and selling companies even after achieving success? Sad things do happen. Focus on your core business, but then also when you start getting to a certain point, begin to think about watching new businesses outside of existing businesses. Don't panic if you haven't figured out your ex-factor on day one. Think that everybody thinks they have a great idea, but ideas are worthless, actions are priceless. In this episode, Colin shares his journey of innovation, the lessons he's learned from the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, and why is latest books start, scale, exit, repeat, is a must read for anyone looking to build a lasting business legacy. Also launched a company called Hostopia. Fast forward six years later, Hostopia became the fastest growing company in Canada. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. I'm also a big user of HubSpot products. I've supported the show for over three years now. And for all entrepreneurs out there, I need you to go back to a time and place when building businesses as tough as it is, can be sometimes a little bit fun. When you're marketing, it should be fun, but marketing is not so fun anymore because it's very time consuming. It's very difficult and it feels like there's just a lot of friction. Content was simpler to make. Leads were easier to capture and we weren't all spread so thin. As marketers, as entrepreneurs, the bottom line is that marketing used to be fun. It's not so fun anymore. But with HubSpots newly launched marketing and content hubs, I've been using it myself. It brings a little bit of fun and creativity back into marketing for your business. They're going to generate better content. They're going to generate more leads and next level results, which really make marketing fun again. So with tools like Content Remix, you can turn existing assets into all new pieces with just one click. Leads scoring helps you shine a light on the leads that are most likely to purchase. And analytic suites they built out will help you with reports, KPIs and just a gold mine of AI powered insights. It's quick to get your results. It's easy to use. It connects all your teams and your data. So put the fun back into your marketing funnel with HubSpot. Visit HubSpot.com to get started for free. Call it. I'm excited. I'm excited to do this. This is like a long time coming. We should have done it probably six months ago. But I digress over here. So I mean, when we talk about entrepreneurship, I think a lot of people have a lot of failures. I don't know if many of you have had failures as large as some of your failures when you're trying to build things out when you're first starting. So I think that's a really fun place to start it because it will show we have to go through to be successful. So let's kick it off there. So talk to me about, were you always an entrepreneur? Were you born an entrepreneur? Was that something that was just inherent to you? Or, you know, whether it was selling puppy dogs at the flea market or delivering newspapers or you're sitting up a small business in college. We've always had that sort of mindset. I think it comes from my parents. Come from a farming background as well. We own farms in the family. Hard working background. Always selling vegetables at the market. That kind of stuff. So it was great growing up having that kind of experience. And went to college, got a commerce degree, business degree, and right out of college, we started our software rental business. This was in 1993 up in Toronto, okay? And it lasted a while. It lasted a while in a software rental business. So you could actually, before 1994, January 1st, 1994, the free trade agreement came into place and Bill Gates convinced them to put in a tiny law that said software rental would not be legal in Canada. What software rental was, basically, is there discounts at the time and you'd rent the discounts, bring them home. But of course, people would put some of those on the computer or duplicate them. And so there's probably a good reason. It was outlawed, but we had set up two stores. And literally within 18 months, we had to close both of those stores. And it was fascinating exit too. Because we did what we did well on that exit. We learned how to maximize failure. We actually ran full page ads saying the government is outlawing software rental. And we had lineups out the door. But what was cool is we also started something called a BBS, a bulletin board service. This was just before the advent of the World Wide Web. And we had thousands of members who were paying us to be on this BBS bulletin board service. It grew actually quite large. But something else came along. And it was called the Information Super Highway. I'm using some old terms here. Now you're the internet. I don't think people understand how early you are in an online internet digital entrepreneurship. You probably one of the first. We were one of the first internet access companies in Canada. It became, I'll jump into that one first. But we were also the second largest bulletin board service. But because we didn't have the funding from the banks, banks looked us and said, okay, just internet this internet thing, get it, get out of here, right? So they said we decided to shut down our second business. We shut down our BBS. Just to use the phone lines for the internet business. And it turned out to be a good decision. Because when we went to a trade show a couple of years later, all the people who kept their BBS opened, their buggy whips running, they were all out of business. And all the people that transitioned from this industry to the next, they were successful. Well, we grew that company, Scott, to become the largest ISP in Canada. It came in the seventh fastest growing company in Canada. The third fastest growing company in Canada in 1998. I mean, literally one of the most successful stories was a publicly traded company. We decided to merge it with a cable company called Look Communications. And we were granted a license by the government, wireless license for all of Canada for fixed wireless internet. It was incredible. Around that, by the way, that's like wild. So if someone's listening to this, at that time, who were your competitors? So you'd have Telus, Bel Canada, Rogers, and the government thought we can create extra competition by awarding this license to this other company, this internet server larger than all of them. We were larger than as an ISP until later on up. We strike it into the later 90s. They began to just take off. And they were late to the game. We see that often in paradigm shifts in where technologies are adopted. And big companies are slower to the market. And I always say, enter the entrepreneur. And that's what we did. We build it and we build it up to become big and then we sell it to these competitors, the larger companies. But here's this company. You know, we had hundreds of employees were on the front page of the profit magazine at the time, just like the ink magazine and up in Canada as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada. And something happened in March of 2000. I know you're too young to remember this. But that was the time when a judge announced that they were going to break up Microsoft. And we had sold the company. We were down, our shareholders got 40%. So we were no longer in control of the company. And the stock that we did get after that we won the license went to as high as $19 a share, as well over a billion dollars. And I had, how old are you? I have some 28 years old at time at a heart and 30 million in stock. That's why I was insane. Oh, it was incredible because before that you didn't have any big financial wins. You had it. Yeah. So we did. I did have one financial win. Okay. Okay. And that was company called two cows. Today it's worth almost a half billion dollars. And that's another story. Okay, we're talking about that. Get to that in a minute. But here's this company, Internet Directs, publicly traded $19 a share or the fastest growing companies in Canada. And they decide to break up Microsoft. We have something called the .com crash. There was just wasn't enough chairs to go around. In the people running and controlling the company said, oh, let's go back. Let's pull our $50 million offering. We're doing a secondary offering because the NASDAQ had gone from $5,000 to $4,000. Well, guess what, Scott, went all the way to $1,200. Now that is a crash. Fast forward 16 months later, company filed for bankruptcy protection. And I ended up selling that $19 a share. I ended up selling all my shares for $6 cents a share. From one of the fastest growing companies in Canada to last place finished. And that really, really hit me hard. I had failed myself. I had failed my business partners. I had failed my family, my investors, my employees. We had 12 paper milleners as well. And what went wrong? And I looked back at that and I tried to understand and what went wrong with this huge failure. And really, it was two things. One, we had done a lock-up agreement for 18 months. Thinking that things are just going to keep getting better and better. 18 months now. This will be a bigger company. We'll sell for even more money. We didn't know there was going to be a crash. But bad things do happen. And that's what happened. We had the .com crash. And there's wasn't enough shares to go around. So the reality is that company went down. And you're probably saying at this point, you know, why did I invite this guy in my show? He's had three huge failures in his personal business. A lot of $130 million. And I was about 95% of my wealth at the time. Yeah. We were lucky in that we had also done a company called Two Cows. Two Cows was software download at the time. And we launched that business. And fortunately, it did very well because we had a huge technical problem. Internet was very expensive. And this was downloading software and it took down our servers when we launched it. And so we decided to create mirror sites for each ISP globally. Well, it was a technical solution to turn out to be a genius marketing thing. And what happened was all the ISPs around the world would mirror our website. And they'd have local downloadable sites. So that they would reduce their internet cost. But what it did is a great gave us a global presence. And we became one of the top 100 websites on the internet. By PC Magazine, we built it to $5 million in revenue. And then we sold it to the group behind ICQ, a billionaire group. And that was interesting, too, because that was the first time I began to taste money. In fact, there's a story there. Walk me through the timeline, though, too, just so that's 1998. So that's just before the collapse of internet direct. You had the bandwidth to build these at the same time. Yeah, we talk a lot about that in the book. Start scale exit repeat about this concept of focus on your core business. But then also when you start getting to a certain point, begin to think about launching new businesses outside of existing businesses. And so you picked up on something very interesting there because when we were at the software rental, we launched a BBS. And then we were at the BBS, we launched an ISP. And then we're at the ISP, we launched two cows. And then we also launched a company called Hostopia. And fast forward six years later, Hostopia became the fastest growing company in Canada, number one. And we took it public. And we sold it to a Fortune 500 company two years after that for 17 times EBITABs, a phenomenal exit. And guess what? It was a month before the Lehman crisis. That's how close we're talking. But going, that's a very, oh, it's crazy. And I talk it, we talk a lot in the book about the stories. And by the way, they're not just my stories on the book. We interviewed over 200 people, including individuals like Joe Foster, who I know you've interviewed as well from Reebok. His story is incredible. But I will tell you the you asked earlier about, you know, the first early days, you know, when I was 27 years old, and we lived a very tiny home in Oakville, you know, very old car in tiny home, very, you know, big mortgage, you know, the whole kind of kind of thing, although prices of homes were cheaper back then. But it was cheaper. And we sold two cows for $30 million. And it was split three ways. We had to pay 37% capital gains to act. So, you know, there was still, we made a lot of money. At a very short period of time. And you go from the zero to $7 million dollars of wealth, whatever I walked away at that time. And I remember a story because my wife really never believed that any of this was happening. She would, you know, I'm doing this thing. I think we're going to sell this company. So we closed the transaction around one o'clock in the morning, a two about five hours back then to sign all the documents. And so we took the, they gave us a check. No, it's, it's funny. They gave us a certified check for $20 million dollars of first payment. And I was told in check and I brought it home. And I walked up to the third floor, a skinny tiny little home and I walked into the room and I tap on my wife's shoulder and I handed this check for $22 million dollars. And she's like, Larry, I just like one three in the morning and she looks at me and she goes, I don't understand. I don't understand the zero. So like I didn't say anything. She just couldn't understand the zeros. There were just too many zeros. And it was just, but it was interesting going from that point of, you know, we're really struggling as an entrepreneur to this that one of that happens. And the next thing you know, you're, you're a multi-millionaire. So that was, that was an interesting thing. That was a while. So from like 25 to 30, this was a roller coaster. Yeah, it was an internet boom. And you were amazing. Right plays, right time. We're focusing on internet companies. But that's really what you focused on. And the next idea, it came that idea of hostopia that was the next company. It was again, publicly traded. That idea came because we had a customer who was at a Saskatchewan Telecom. There was a, that was appointed by a call to Saskatchewan Telecom. I don't know, but they call this up and they wanted to license our platform for hosting. By the way, I just want to say one thing. So for the audience, a lot of like Americans in the audience. So this is like AT&T Verizon. Like these are the comparables, right? So you're talking about telcos. That, these are the behemoths that are in the US. Similar, similar companies in Canada. If you're talking about Rogers and Bell and Tellus and whatnot. So just to give a comparison, people understand like the game that you were playing and the space that you were playing in. Yeah, so Saskatchewan called us up. They wanted us to license our hosting platform. So Bing, ding, ding, ding. If South Tele wants it, maybe Bell Canada wants it. Maybe Tellus wants it. Maybe Vodafone wants it. So we launched that company and we did sell to 9 out of 10 telecoms in Canada. We broke into the United States and we ended up selling to AT&T, Vodafone, British Telecom. We talk about a really cool story in the book about scaling and how we, we found our X factor. And this is something that I think that if any entrepreneur does, if they can figure out that they're X factor. Now, what is an X factor? Think Domino's pizza, 30 minutes or free. You know, a national car rental. You just get in the car and go. Bernhardt has talks about this. He talks about solving a bottleneck, you know, particular industry. You're solving a problem. And a lot of us can be working today in companies and see, oh, there's a lot of bottlenecks. But AI could do this, this, and this. And ding, ding, ding. That's for the idea for a company can come along. And so that's what we had hostopia. Our X factor was 100% migration guarantee. So here we are in 2005. I've been told that we're going to lose the earth link deal. Earth link was a, if you remember that company, it was a relatively large telecom at the time. I really, I asked one of the companies that you were selling to. You're selling the hoes. We sell our hosting service. Yeah, exactly. And you sold like he said. So it's at 9, 9 out of 10 telecos. Earth link was just one of the other. Yeah, right. But the earth link was one of the big ones before we broke into the US. And, um, but we were told we were not going to get this deal. And I said, okay, I've grabbed the CTO. We got on a plane. We flew down. We met with this mid-level executive, um, uh, at earth link. And he said, okay, let's go to lunch, but he actually had a WIGO. This is 2005. A WIGO was one of the first electric cars, but only had two seats. So I, I, my CTO is at the front, and I sat in the trunk of this vehicle. And we drove to lunch. And this is all just to close this deal. Well, we do anything to close you. Yeah, right? Yeah, but that's not what closed the deal. I'll be quite frank. And we told him at lunch, he says, we're willing to guarantee 100% migration. See, our buyer's not earth link. It's not, it wasn't AT&T. Our buyer were mid-level executives, who were fearful of being fired at their job, if they make a mistake. And migrations are probably one of the number one reasons why these IT folks get fired. So we came in and said, well, we'll guarantee it. And we would pay fair market value. At the time, it's $350 a website. We would, we would, we were moving over 80,000 websites. And probably about a million email addresses. And we guaranteed if we lose one website, we'll pay $350. Imagine losing 10,000 websites, $3.5 million. We'd have to pay the company. I mean, this was serious. Serious about what you're doing. It is a very smart strategy for an entrepreneur for somebody trying to sell anything. You're de-risking. You're de-risking the deal, completely. Yeah, well, we're making it so he doesn't get fired. Yeah, right? Yeah, but by not, by him not, we're going about getting fired. All of a sudden, you just made it, like, you removed all the risk and the stress in making a buying decision, basically. It was an easy, though. Let me tell you. And also, you're putting yourself on the line. It was not easy. And we re-engineered our entire organization. Just think of what Domino's Pizza had to do to get it in 30 minutes or free. Right? It wasn't easy. You had to re-engineer your entire organization. We had hundreds of people in the Ukraine who were all manually looking at websites. We had turistics that we designed and developed. To move over websites and migrate them. And we also stopped letting the customer dictate to us how they wanted it done. Because if they said something that could lead to a migration mistake or an error. And this happened before this, by the way. I won't go into all of our stories, but we went to a telecom that lost 3 million emails went offline and CNN's talking about it. It's all because they wanted to change their user settings. But we wouldn't let that happen anymore in this Earthlink deal. But we won Earthlink. And we didn't only just win Earthlink. We won AT&T, Vodafone, British Telecom. All the South American telecoms, it was a domino effect that was unbelievable. And then we became the number one global standard for outsourcing email and hosting to telecoms. And it was because of the X-Factor. I can't tell you how important it is now. Don't panic if you haven't figured a lecture X-Factor on day one. I often talk to students who are just starting their business. I asked them to think about it. But it took us six years to get the X-Factor. I'm sort of taken dominoes years to get theirs. And national car rental, the same thing. It does take time. But when you get it, the dominoes will fall. When you look at sort of that X-Factor, you've discovered it led to this huge success. As an entrepreneur, how do you make sure that you don't screw up that success or that growth? Because now there's a year's scaling. But I mean, there's all these other components that you have to make sure don't break as you scale as you take on all these customers. Especially if you're going to be guarantee that they don't go down or there's like a financial issue and there's a financial reason why you can't screw this up. Yeah, I mean, you have to re-engineer your organization. You have to re-engineer your systems. But the first thing we did there was we found out who our customer really was. It wasn't a telecom. It was a mid-level executive. Right, that's important. And then once we figured out what made that person tick, first not get fired, second look like a hero. Then we can build a barren promise around that. I call it that in the book, I call it the nearly unbearable brand promise. So it's just something that's almost unbearable. But if you can do it and you can deliver on it, and there's so many examples I can use. I use a lot more of the book. I use another one called Cookie Delivery. This is a company that actually had the domain cookie delivery.com. And they wanted to win the cookie market in that city. It's a city in Texas. And they decided to create a mobile truck to bake the cookies on the way to the office. So when they arrived at the office, they're piping hot. But all the other bakeries would send these cookies from the bakery to the office and they're cold when they arrive. So they sold that bottleneck and they won in that marketplace. It's absolutely incredible. I love that chapter of the X-Factor in the book and yeah. Okay, so then, so this is the, this is, wait, at this point, this is your second public. Second public or third public? Second public, okay. So how did that story end up? Because that, oh, so, yeah. So that's the one that we sold right before. Fortune 500. That's right, okay. Company for 17 times EBITDA. And it was in the nine figures. And it was a great exit. And, um, you know, it was, it was, I called it my lab. Because I had a lot, because it was running positive. I don't know if you've been aware. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can swear. Yeah, I called it Vinden Vindafuckincation. Vindafuckincation because so many of the shareholders were calling me up and screaming me. I had a fight with my business partner. We had to, he had to leave the company. He was dumping shares after the IPO. It was a mess. It was a little bit of a mess, right? And, uh, and then also I had the board beginning to move on me as well. So I was, I felt pretty good about it. I really did feel good about it. You know, I did make a commitment to work for this Fortune 500 company for three years. And I actually did that. And it was very, very tough. I hated it. But I worked at the very top of the corporation. And I got to understand what moves, how a corporation makes decisions, why they're risk-averse. Um, I began to really understand corporate America and the culture and corporate America as well. I do want to talk about one other problem I had at Ostopia. And that was, that was, and you brought it up really, you know, the scaling thing like you're trying to scale. So we actually began to flatline in 2006. And because the problems with my business partner leaving the company and the shares being sold, a board member came to me and says, look, I think you might be over your head called as CEO and, you know, I was, I was feeling it, right? And we didn't have control of the board or venture capables on the board and whatnot. And we've all seen this story before. So I called a lifeline friend called me up and I met this gentleman named Patrick Thean who runs a company called Rhythm Systems. And I went to Vegas, met him in Vegas. They said, I just need you to get the board off my back. You know, because they want to see a professionally managed company that just need him to get them off my back. So can you just give me some stuff to do and I'll just say you're hired or whatever. So no, I don't want to work with you. Because what he's talking about, is unless you do it right, then I don't want to work with you. This is like somebody who's overweight going to the doctors and saying, yeah, I don't really want to work out. I don't want to change my lifestyle. Just give me the pill, right? That's it. That's all I want. Just the pill, right? And no, he said, I'm not going to work with you unless you do it right. And we did it right, and by do it, right? So that's what I'm going to tell you right now. I'm just going to tell you right now. So what that meant was two days of strategic planning, once a year, once a quarter, and 90 days of execution, we had goal setting implemented red yellow green for the company goals for the year, the quarter and the individuals, three to five smart goals. We implemented daily sales huddle. We implemented a lot of systems that helped the company scale. See, as entrepreneurs, we have the right instinct, generally, but really, really don't know what the heck we're doing when we get too big. Most people don't. And if you can implement the right systems, they can help you scale your company as well. How did that get the board off of your back? Because you're doing all the right. 90 days, you can see the numbers turning around. Within three years, we almost tripled our revenue. Like, this was incredible. By implementing these systems, you know, you know, Stan, we used to have situations where, you know, two days before the end of the quarter, somebody says, oh, we didn't get the deal or oh, we'd, we messed this up or something happens. We got blindsided all the time. And so by implementing these systems, it really helped us scale the company. And so that's one of the key chapters in the book I talk about is how to scale by using systems. There's really four things we need to think about in scaling. It's the story, which we talked about the X factor. That's the story, how it changes from start, the people, including yourself and who's around you. That's interesting. The money and the systems. So we've talked about the story. We've talked about the systems. Let me also add to you about the people. The number one reason why most companies in America fail to scale is because of the entrepreneur themselves. A big shout out to HubSpot and the HubSpot podcast network for sponsoring success story. If you enjoy success story, you're going to enjoy a ton of podcasts brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, including hustle and flowchart hosted by Joey Fear. The hustle and flowchart podcast with Joey is all about how to build a business. So it gives you the freedom and fuel for your life. You're going to join Joey as you discuss his systems, mindset tweaks, reframes, and strategies for entrepreneurs and really anyone to enjoy the process of being in business and having fun. This isn't for entrepreneurs looking to build a billion dollar business. It's for somebody who wants to build the lifestyle. Somebody who is looking to build systems that work. Listen to hustle and flowchart wherever you get your podcasts. That was going to be my next question because I was curious if you feel that all entrepreneurs should stick around for the life cycle of a company. You did it successfully, but I have seen instances where entrepreneurs maybe aren't the right fit. They're good for 0 to 5, 0 to 10, maybe even 10 to 50, maybe even 50 to 100, but post IPO or even pre IPO, are they the right fit to bring that sort of over the finish line? You saw that post about Paul Graham. A founder mode, brilliant manager. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I'm well aware of it. And actually, so I live in a world right now where we run a family office. I've invested in 20 companies. And I've removed CEOs at certain stages and brought in professional managers. At the same time, you know, when I was there, I felt I had the capability of delivering the goods, but you could see people were saying, well, not too young. Maybe we need to bring in a professional manager. So I've sort of played both sides. And I just think it really depends. But I also believe that every entrepreneur has the ability to be in founder mode and to scale the company if they so choose. But the first thing they need to do is understand who they are and what the personality profile is. And we talk a lot about personality profiles in the book. And then what we want to do, if we really want to scale, we want to hire executives around us, who have a particular personality profile for that position. And I think the personality profiles are actually more important in skills and even experience. Although I have to say, experience does matter. We're going to want to hire people with runway. That's Jack Welch. Welch is common. But we don't want to hire people. If we're in a million dollars and we want to go to 10 million, we want to hire the people who are working at the 10 million dollar company. We don't want to hire the people at the billion dollar company. It's too extreme. I've seen that mistake happen as well. Would you bring executives down into smaller businesses? But what we do want to do is we want to make certain we hire a team of people around us that have the right personality profile. And under the disc methodology, it's dominant influence, stability and conscientiousness. Under that philosophy, we're going to want to hire D-somethings. So if you want people to be proactive, you want them to be entrepreneurial, you want them to create wealth for you, then you need to hire the right leader. And having a leader who's a DI or a DC or a DS, that's critical for helping you scale your business. And that's what we did at Hostopia. Literally, we had so many Ds around the table. It was dangerous. I joke about this, Elliot Nas, who's the CEO of Two Cows today, we hired him back in 1998. He's to drive me nuts. He's constantly fought me on everything. He's just like, it doesn't. That's like an A. You're getting an A personality. That's an A plus person, a person personality player. Like, they have their own opinions. Yeah, and a lot of people, they make the mistake of the drawing, drawing, drawing, drawing, and they want people just to listen to them. They want the A-sayers. Well, no, I'm here to say bring in the people who are going to challenge you, bring in those people with that personality and what's fascinating is they go and create wealth for you. Well, in this repeat section of the book, we start talking about how serial entrepreneurs can create wealth not only by hiring executives around them, but by hiring CEOs to run the companies for them and finding the right business profile. The last component is money. And it's really important to try to raise the right type of funding for the right situation. And we've done everything from venture capital to the IPOs, as you know, to the REG-D, which is a private placement memorandum. And haven't done the REG-CF yet, which I am absolutely fascinated by. The REG-CF, which you can raise up to $5 million. And it's essentially allowing you to solicit securities, and you can do this, actually, along with the crypto coin too, if you're going to get into that, or you don't even have to use the coin. You know, but I'm seeing real estate projects that are tokenizing and we're seeing some fascinating stuff out there. It was really hopeful SPACs would make a bit of a, you know, where it would be well. I mean, they basically, they blew up completely blew up. And, you know, that was an issue. But it's been very hard for entrepreneurs to raise money unless you go down that venture private equity group. And I, in a book, we talk a lot about venture capital. And we used venture capital. And I think the right type of company should use venture capital. Let me ask you a question, Scott. What percentage of companies that receive venture capital fail? That's a great question. I've never heard a question phrase like that. I mean, you hit the lottery, right? You hit it big, didn't you? I feel like, I feel like I'm going to get, I feel like I'm going to get sidelined by the answer. I feel like, I feel like if the average entrepreneur's start is like 90 or 95 percent of companies fail, I feel like the ones that raise, it's not that different of a number. Can you give me a number? All right, 85 percent. Oh, yeah, yeah, he's sort of know where I was going with that. 75 percent of venture backed companies fail. And there's reasons for that. And because they push companies in a certain way, I'm working with a company that raised $60 million in venture funding. And the entrepreneur put a few million dollars of his family money in. He was second to the funding from the venture capital because there's something called liquidation preference. And if you ever raising money, please look up that definition of what that is. But basically, they get paid out first. You know, over 90, though, in this situation I'm working with, that gentleman completely wiped out 99.9 percent after working for 15 years. And the company still has value. It might be worth 20 million dollars. But they raised $60 million in venture capital. They get paid out first. The delusions are going to eventually come or the eventually is going to wipe out the original investors or the original founders. So you have to be really cautious of this. But under a scenario where all the investors took the same risk, he would have walked to he had about 40 percent of the company, he would have walked their way with $8 million. That wouldn't have been the end of the world. Right? That's not the end of the world. A lot of entrepreneurs don't pay, don't know this liquidation preference. They don't know this world at all. I mean, unless you've done it before, you don't, you're raising money. Raise it on a safe or something like that. You don't really understand who gets their money out first. Or maybe you do. But at that point, somebody's saying yes to you. And you're so damn excited about the fact that somebody's saying yes to you. You're not thinking 15 years down the road. You're thinking, oh my god, the entrepreneurship just worked out for me. I just found a way to raise money. This is what everybody wants to do. Like how could I not be successful at this point? I think there's like so much emotion and a little bit of delusion when entrepreneurs are raising money. They're not paying attention to all, they're not paying attention to this. Because I know entrepreneurs have raised money and they say, well, we raise this at this valuation. At first, I'm entrepreneur. Like you're not going to have any company left in 10 years if you keep this up. I know a kid who had a billion dollar company at the age of 28, who did know shit and got locked up for 16 months. Bad things do happen. The second thing I learned is liquidity or control. Liquidity or control never give up control or a company unless you're getting paid, unless you're taking chips off the table. Yeah, spend 10 years building that company in 10 weeks screwing it up. So you're right. We don't know this kind of stuff. That's why people listening to your show. They can learn about these kind of things and be aware of, at least be aware of these kind of things. You know the night over 90% I'm giving you another stat. Over 90% of companies in the Inc. 5000 do not have venture capital. There's this notion that we all have to have venture capital. Here is the vast majority of fastest-growing companies in America do not have venture capital. There are other methods. My favorite method if you do need to raise money has been the REGD where you can sell securities to sophisticated investors. And we did this at .club. That was one of the next companies. .club was an alternative to .com.net. So if I actually look through all the companies, you've done a lot. So yes, you got two cows. You got internet direct, hostopia, you geeks for less. Geeks for less 800 people. Don per lab. And then startup club. That's a shirt you're wearing right now. So you've done, you've done a, you don't forget pod.com. pod.com. Yeah, that's actually still around. That's that's live right now. pod.com. So you've done, you've done a, so I mean, if you look back at all the companies that you built, was there one that you enjoyed building just the way that you built it more than others, one that was like the least stressful on you as an entrepreneur? .club. And I'll tell you why it's my, first of all, it's a recurring revenue business. It's digital. You have unlimited inventory. And we raised them. We did everything right from the beginning. You know, that coach I told you about, we brought in, we brought them in from day one. We set up core values from day one. We set up the goal setting from day one. It was a micro global brand. We traveled to about 50 countries. Fortunately, we sold that company to go daddy about six months before the tech rec in 2022. So I think it's wild. Everybody keeps saying that. That's why I was asked to speak at MIT on how I always seem to get the timing right. Well, if you remember going back to that big, you know, I think I think it, those failures that we have, like they really are scars of our past that help us guide us through those new ventures. And I was so scarred, but at loss, so paranoid of liquidity or control that and so paranoid of bad things do happen. You do remember 2021, right? When there were $500,000 board apes, when GameStop was hitting $300 a share, when SPACs were going crazy, absolutely crazy. And then 2022, it all came apart. The crypto crash, the tech rec SPACs collapsed. So in the book, I talk about exit. And I talk about 50% of values on exit is timing. And we've actually now come up with a time to sell index, which we do on our monthly newsletter. And we come up with it every quarter. We update it. And by the way, right now, it's at 3.6 out of 100. And it's based on empirical data. And this is only to send you a signal that when you see the time to sell index is here, exit stage left. It's time let other people take some money off the table. Let other people take your company to the next level. It's okay for other companies to make money. In fact, if you look at all of the companies that we've sold in the last 15 years, most of them were to strategic buyers. 17 times EBITDA. The dot club one, I'm not allowed to talk about, but I'll tell you, it was a lot higher than that. I mean, you look at these valuations and they're incredible. Because like, for instance, when we sold the go daddy registry, they have way more distribution than we have. So they can take our product and they can distribute it to a much broader audience. So when you're thinking about exit, it's important to think about the companies that you're going to sell to. The least favorable are the private equity cash flow companies. Not saying you shouldn't do these if that's all your only option. But that they're the least, my least favorite companies to sell to. Is it because everything's based on EBITDA. And when you have a high interest rate environment, they've got a borrow. You generally they would borrow to 75% of these acquisitions. Now, I know it's come down in recent years and the interest rates are up. So they might be paying 10, 11% interest rate. So they need to make 18, 19% interest rate. So they need to have that's a five times earnings on a multiple on a company. It's all based on the earnings multiple. Whereas a competitor, that's the second best, they can come along and they can buy your business based on somewhere in between the consolidated value and your street value. Right? That earnings multiple. So they'll give you a bit of a premium because they're going to reduce the cost. But the best, the best are the strategic buyers. You can identify those and you position yourself to sell to those companies. You'll make, you'll do so much better. And in the case of hostopia, when we sold, the tax rate was 15% capital gains. And we were paying 42% corporate tax. So it would have taken us 30 years to get back the money based on a 17 times EBITDA multiple selling at that point. Because of the higher tax rates associated with income tax and earnings. So we're covering a lot of ground here. But you can see how from start scale exit repeat, there is a formula. There is a for and there's a whole life cycle to this company that you sort of perfected after going through all these different kinds of exit events. Because I don't think many people have access to, okay, we've we've we've IPO this company. And this one was strategic. Like you've gone through all these different iterations of a company life cycle. So it lets you know, you have the experience as to what you like, what you don't like, what's best for the entrepreneur, what's best for like financially, what's best for the entrepreneur after they've built this company spent their whole life trying to scale this. So I think that this is the formula for, hey, this is I've gone through all these different permutations of companies. This is what I think you should do. So it's start scale exit to strategic and then repeat that process. And that's really the net from all the different things that you've done. Yeah, and we've learned a lot of patterns at start as well. So for instance, we learned that the companies that you really want to think about launching are highly scalable, that you can build a moat or defense around that company, and that catch a wave. And this is interesting because probably one of my mentors, I read his book back in the 90s, Jeffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Casm. Inside the tornado, we had the chance to interview him. And it was interesting interviewing him because I had lived it for the prior companies that we had started. But really, one of the things that we've been really good at is figuring out how to catch a wave, how to, how to cross a chasm and win in a tornado. And so when the book we go into that formula as well, and we really talk about the things you can do to win in a tornado, I mean, there are basically three major things. One is make it easy, the easier you make your product or technology, the better off you'll be. I like Jeffrey Moore. He has, you know, he has whoever delivers the fastest wins. Right? And you think about those AOL discats back in the 90s, they just they send it or they killed coffee. Distribution is everything. At Potacom, we're focused now on distributing products faster. So we come up with these really cool trendy dog beds and rugs and and blankets. But then a year later, two years later, we're seeing finding them in Costco. Right? So so we've changed our formula now. We're we're dramatically increasing our distribution. So when we get a product that comes to market is a trendy product. It's trending up and we've got to put three or four right now that are hitting really nicely. We're scaling those really quickly. The third thing is focus, be a laser beam. I invested in an AI company called Pensilla. And when they were first developing, it's been two years now in development. And they want it to be sort of like a Canva 2.0. So you guys are going to fail at this. They they brought it down to become a Canva for e-commerce companies. They're integrated with more e-commerce, super niche, super laser beam focused. If you're the best in the world at it, you're going to win. You're going to with the early majority in tornado once, they want products of services that are the leading products. You know, when you're in the innovator status, when you're early on, you can sort of compete in the market where you're competing for innovators. But early majority, they tend to be a little followers and they're very pragmatic. So they really want to grab on his technology, the pragmatic and that succeeding. We we talked about hostopia and how the dominoes fell. Well, we had to win that earthland contract. We had to have that X factor. And then we had that then we were able to win all the other telecoms and then sell the companies. One thing you mentioned is very important, though, catching a wave. How do you identify a wave? Okay, so I have really cool ideas around this. First thing I do is I always live in the future. Brand new iPhone came out four days ago. I always have a late, I mean, damn. We were quick. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, like people in my office are like, I'll get you a new iPhone call and like, hey, it's so they're already ordering the new iPhone because I know I want the, I want the latest technology, got the glasses, got the fast. I've always had the fastest internet. I was the number 984 for the Model X, right? You know, I'm always trying to live in the future. I call it live in the future. Be part of the future because when you're there, you begin to see opportunity. You know, I have every AI subscription out there. Everyone, I mean, AI, I do. So, and if you're an entrepreneur today, really, this is probably one of the best times in history to be an entrepreneur because you can do so much with AI. You know, I like in it to Tony Stark, you're familiar with Iron Man. Of course, I drive on that, of course. He drops on that suit. Yeah. That's like me at the office now. I strap on that suit and I'm doing legal contracts. I'm not a lawyer. I'm doing, I'm doing marketing things. It's just amazing calculations. It's amazing what you can do with AI. And if you're not embracing it, you're going to fall behind. So, that's the one thing I will say is you want to really focus on using this the latest technology. And then you'll see opportunities. You'll be in your particular industry. There'll be opportunities at AI. And then you can apply those and actually build a company around that concept as well. So, that's it. I mean, that is critical if you want to see what you're on. That's also what's happening. Exactly, I tell you the funny story. And here's the thing that was, because I worked at that Fortune 500 company. Yeah. You know, when we were launching, they were launching .club. They were deregulating the space. So, sometimes it's a technical shift. Sometimes it's a legal shift. Congress is making a new legislation to change something. So, enter the entrepreneur. That is the point where we can move faster, quicker than the big companies. I reached out to the company that bought our company because they, you know, obviously, I had, I had, this was a similar company. They did similar services. So, do you want to, I talked to CEO. Do you want to launch these TLDs? I want to launch one. Would that be okay with you? And he says, absolutely, it's too risky for us anyway. We don't want to go near it. And whatnot. And so, I said, okay, I'll launch it. And this is a big company. It's all big company in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars a profiteer. Yeah. And they thought it's too risky to do. So, here's a software that says, okay, well, I'll do it. So, we did it. We raised $12 million. We sold it to go at any years later for a huge multiple for our investors. And that's it. They're fearful of technology. So, if you, as an entrepreneur, if you can get that window, you've got a small window. Now, I think AI is moving faster than I've seen with a lot of technological shifts. But it also represents the greatest technological shift in our lifetime. It is the biggest. There will be AI will make more millionaires than any other technological shift in history. Now, you have a story. I do have a story. I was laughing because I just came back from Boston and you saw me at inbound. And I did two sessions at inbound. And one was on like marketing and content and brand, which is my thing. I live and breed marketing and content right now. And obviously, by the way, so AI is fully integrated in my post-production workflow. Like every single piece of AI that you can possibly imagine that's consumer facing. I use it in some capacity for audio, video, audio improvement. So, I use Adobe to improve the sound coming out of these mics. So, if we were in like a windy field, it would sound like we're in a studio. Maybe because we're actually in a studio, gives me like a 5% increase in audio quality. But the same AI could be used if you're recording this in the middle of a construction site. So, it's, and then obviously, long-form video, gets turned into a whole bunch of short-form with opus. I mean, perplexity is just like a sandbox for everything else for all the kinds of chat generated. You know, like a generative chat that you want to create. So, my team uses AI in all their post-production workflow. It kind of like as a first pass at the creative process. It's the best way to put it. It's ever going to be the final solution that is not going to be good enough to put out and post. But it's going to be very good at getting 80% to 90% of the work done at, you know, at a fraction of the cost or the time or the energy. But to show you how people still aren't picking up AI, I was asked to do a talk at inbound, not just on content. The second talk was on AI, only because I use it in my post-production workflow. I'm not a developer. I'm not technical. I literally just use tools that I pay between 20 to 30 bucks a month and that already positioned me better to speak about how AI can impact your marketing strategy than a room full of 10,000 marketers, which is wild to me. And the point is, I should not be the one teaching AI. I should not be the one teaching about AI. This has been around for a year and a half and still marketers for large organizations are not using it and are not understanding it. And our listening to a guy like me who is solo printer, basically with a very small team doing a podcast who just nerds out at AI, that's the person who's teaching them. That's not, that's, it should be the inverse. But I think the companies are very slow to adopt. This is not like a, it's not to say that all companies are not adopting to some are, but I think that, I think that a lot of companies are very hesitant to include it in their workflows. And I think that's a mistake. I think that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs and it's an opportunity for disruption. But I think it's a massive mistake. So I don't know if you're listening to this in your company, like start figuring out how to use it. And my favorite little hack recently is our custom GPT's. I don't know if you've been playing with custom. I have, and you have, and so it's all due to agents now. You've used it for two different purposes. You can use a private one. Yes. So first you just open up a private, it takes 10 seconds, clicked on it, uploaded a contract. Now anytime I have a question for that contract, I just go to that custom GPT. I asked the question is if it's a lawyer. And that custom GPT knows that contract better than your lawyer. We had a very big contract at PAW. PAW.com. And so we went into it. I asked it 100. And they keep beating it up. I keep asking and asking and asking questions. And then we said, okay, this is too big to just let AI run it. So we went to lawyers. We had them do it. They came back to the exact same answers. I thought it was fascinating. Second thing is you can post your GPT's in a store now and make them public. Yes. And by the way, you don't have to be a programmer at all. So like you said, you can't program. I'm horrible. I'm not a geek. I only aspire to be one. Right? So I go in there and I create these little apps now. And we did this for a workbook. So we just start scale exit workbook. And is that almost done yet? That's live. It was actually was the best seller last week. I was out of that because when we spoke last time, it was somebody who was ripping off your book on it. That's right. They were doing workbooks. Oh yeah. That's, you know, whatever. That irritated me because their quality was so bad. So we did. We put in all these exercises. We put in QR codes and domain names. Like you can go to personally profile AI.com. And you can actually use a GPT that will tell you your disk profile, your Myers big profile, and then compare you to other celebrities as well. And you can do that with all your staff and it's free. This is what we're talking with. This is the world we're moving to. And I simply answered questions and sat there and spent and there's some tricks you need to do to do it. Like to really make it usable. Like make a multiple choice. Start with question 10. Go down and question one. You know, some tricks you need to do. But it's a really cool hack that should be the next one you play with. I love that. But why do you think, okay, so I'm actually very impressed with your book. And I don't usually, I don't usually like completely focus on the book when we do a podcast. But how many, how many you send me some accolades or some rankings or some top charts you hit with this book? And I'm super curious where this book is is ended up right now. Because I actually, I can probably pull it up. Well, I'll tell you, I can tell me. Tell me, yeah. I think 30 years is a serial entrepreneur. But I'm also curious why. Yep. Why this book did so well. 30 years is a serial entrepreneur. 10 years writing the book. We interviewed over 200 people. That's insane. 200 people's 10 years writing the book. I know, it's insane. It did it on airplanes. You know, I was, there's one passage in there about.club which was written 10 years ago. So I kept the exact exact thing because this was before.club launched. I wrote it. It was fascinating. And so it was like kept exactly. So we're going to follow this. The the start scale.exe or peak methodology. We're going to focus on story, people, money and systems. And it was it's there. So we, we also of the 200 people we interviewed, phenomenal people. And only about 50 have actually made the book. We also wrote the book for ADHD entrepreneurs. There's 58 chapters. And they're very short and digestible. And by the way, it's stories. It's the stories. My stories and the stories. Those other 50 people who were interviewed for the book. Then we also put in illustrations, 30 illustrations. We color coded it. Forbes books did a phenomenal job. Putting this book together and making it look like a world class book. It's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories. It's when 13 awards globally. And it came out 11 months ago. It's already won 13 awards. It's the most awarded book on entrepreneurship in 2024. That's for that. Congratulations dude. Thank you. It's phenomenal. And you know, you do these things. I see a lot of my friends. They launch these books and they're people are famous people watching these books. Why don't they? And they hardly sell out of that. I get them all my thought. Cats caught. And they look at the like last week. We're a number one in every category. We were the number four. We were number one in entrepreneurship for a week. And we were number four of all business books in the United States. Last week. It was up there with Elon Musk and start scale eggs at the peak. Right. I wanted that was fascinating. I think that there's a lesson there. I think you're putting 10 years into something. Like there's so much competition at the bottom and in mid market in terms of like mediocreness. There's so much competition when you put up mediocre content. There's so much competition when you build a mediocre company. But when you put so much time and energy into something. And you are in like the .001 percent of individuals. Which I think taking 10 years to write a book definitely puts you. I had some other businesses to run too. Yeah, I know. But there really is not a lot of competition at the top of the market when you put that much energy or effort into something. And I think that we are in an era where everyone's trying to do the least and expect the most. And I think that the one and people are so frustrated because they don't stand out on social or they don't feel like they're. They write a book in a couple months and they put it out and nobody buys it. Why does, why does effort not, minimal effort not equal output or outcome? I think it's really because like anything you just have to put a lot of yourself into it. And the market recognizes when you put a lot of yourself into it. I believe that's why it's so successful because you spent so long and so much energy and blood as wet and tears and insight and thought leadership and experience goes into it. Yeah, I mean, and I think a lot of very successful entrepreneurs like myself, they write books and it's all about them. This book is not an autobiography. Yes, there are the short stories. There's still stories are in there, right? There are stories in there, but it's not about me. It's about the reader who wants to learn how to start a business. It's about the reader who wants to learn to scale the business. It's about a reader who wants to learn to exit. And it's also about the leader who wants to know how to do this over and over again. So it's really if it's a philosophy and it's it's it's different. It's a different philosophy to then a lot of other books out there. You know, I read the very beginning of the book that if you want to become a unicorn, this is the wrong book for you. This is not this is all about building a solid foundation, a base, building something up, selling that off, taking some money off the table because bad things do happen. And then repeating that process over and over again. See, entrepreneurship, you are not a CEO of one particular company. You're not just a podcaster. You're an entrepreneur and entrepreneurship is a trade. And if you can learn that trade, you can increase your chances of success dramatically. In fact, we've seen that with serial entrepreneurs, they have a much higher chance of succeeding. It's like almost double. It's like 18% for first time and it's 36% for a second or third time entrepreneur because even if they failed in the past because they've had that experience doing it, it really is a trade and we need to learn how to sharpen that sort and improve our knowledge on the topic of entrepreneurship. And there's a lot of mental health challenges that we have to talk about as well. We'll talk about that in a second. I don't I want to just sort of tie a bow and sort of the concepts coming out of the book as well and then we can talk about mental health and a couple other concepts. But so just so that people are clear because we sort of gone back and forth between I would guess I would say two frameworks because you have start scale exit repeat but then you also have story people money and systems. So there's a how do these two frameworks play into each other. Okay, so in start you have to story you have to come up with the idea you have to solve the problem so you're talking about the story and then you also have the people who do you need in start and really it's all about the entrepreneur in start right and then you have systems they talk about systems and start I just say just figure out your KPIs don't get too complicated so the support components they do play a piece and any two one ago section but that changed dramatically. I got between each section and that's how we wrote the book so you'll you'll see there's the the story people money and systems and start and then a story people money systems and scale and by the way it's all different in exit you wouldn't be surprised how many things you can do as an individual as an entrepreneur to increase the valuation of your company just by understanding the what goes into selling the company by understanding the mindset of the buyer. I was I was on that when I did work for the fortune five-hour company I bought probably about 15 companies so I totally understand the mindset of the buyer now and so that's reflected in the book as well. When you go through this process it starts failing to repeat what are the things because again this is positioned for an entrepreneur not trying to build a unicorn or a billion dollar company that even happens good for you but you're trying to build a process that it's almost like you're teaching entrepreneurship it's not it's not just dumb luck this is a process that can be repeated again and again and again as as you've shown as you've done in your own life but what are keeping the end in mind or the exit in mind what are the most important things in this start process that can impact the exit process. Well I think one of the things I we did at dot club is we actually identified the buyer who we wanted to buy the company from day one right and we knew it was GoDaddy right I mean they're they're the big ones really badly elephant right they wanted and so optimal conferences and we pitched to GoDaddy met with people got to know them at the conferences I like to when we start a company I always say you know one of the biggest challenges when you're selling a company are the schedules and the due diligence so make certain every contract is an virtual drive every single contract it's got you can't be scrambling at the last minute to put documents together and we know about things can happen right and when you know they've got 20 people on the other side you got two right and that's it and it's it's it's it's it's daunting when you go into these exit processes and it can take months and get bogged down um but no no you do you need to when you get into deal mode it's closed mode there's no such thing as weekends or evenings it's it's a football game you gotta get that ball across the line that's it and um and it's start if you don't organize you know that's going to be it's going to make it that much harder to actually sell the company down the road so then we also want to state your family business from that right yeah we also want to state pure you know we we're running a um a software platform company we would want to buy a farm and put that in the company and this is a you got to it's got to be clean okay and there's some certain there are other things we need to do as well for instance to get venture capital or we want to stay within the normal standards and like for instance when you do give options in your company you want to generally want to do it between 10 and 20% of your company if you go too much higher it's going to be negative for your evaluations down the road you go a little too low that can be negative as well but you generally want to be around 10 to 15% for options in your company so the certain standards that you can set up early on as well and we talk a lot about that in the book it just it really isn't the type of book that's going to tell you how to make a billion dollars and and and I I worry a lot about and I've seen too many companies I've invested in too many company founders where they get Silicon Valley disease and this is a term that I coined based on this concept that we get this venture funding we're gonna build it out and we're gonna build that billion dollar company by the way they're pushing you they're pushing you to get the 10x they want you to gamble you say want the gamble they don't want that double or triple that's not what they want so they're actually pushing you and it also can lead to issues in in your company and spending that you shouldn't really be doing what are my favorite forms of funding is customer funded startups and we had a gentleman named John Mullins on who wrote the book customer funded startup and we interviewed him for this book and I can't tell you how many companies that fortune 5,000 lists use customer funded techniques use your customers to fund your business um so if you look at all the all the entrepreneurs that you've invested in I will talk about mental health now but the last question on this all the entrepreneurs that you invested in all the all the less sort of lessons that you've learned as an entrepreneur what is the biggest misconception about entrepreneurship do you see time and time again um I think that everybody thinks they have a great idea but ideas are worthless actions are priceless we had a situation back in um 2004 where we were traveling all over the world for the sostopia selling the telecom and we go to these office perks and we we leave the beating and we try to get a taxi and it was almost impossible so we're sitting in a dasha in Ukraine dasha is like a cabin in Ukraine on a farm and we're diving to to drinks and stuff like that too and we're coming up with ideas and we says you know what irritates us we can never seem to get a taxi well I don't we want to come at the time we had a mobile development company which is developing games uh and we say well but why don't we develop a company is we call it my yellow button so it's one yellow button you press the yellow button on your phone and then you can see the taxi coming towards you with GPS and literally the team that's back before this was three years before Uber right and the team went back and we got distracted we came up with another game we never got around to we never took action on it we didn't take action on it and obviously Uber and Lyft launched with billions of dollars and you know now I could laugh but I still own the domain name though my yellow button if you want to buy it it's 20 bucks I feel like it had a little bit more value pre-Uber and Lyft than it does right now but that could be listen I've seen a lot of companies build competitors that they build them be acquired by Uber or Lyft no you can do that too because that's you're thinking with the exit mind that's smart there's a you ever heard of these there's another strategy that I think is very interesting does these brothers do German brothers have you heard of this this family and what they do is they copy ideas in the US and they kick it to the German market and that's quite common as well and Canadians we can copy ideas in US Americans can copy Canadian ideas I mean I think that's actually a smart idea I think the very smart because you already you already know that the idea works right just bring it to your market bring it to your market and I can't remember the name of them now but they've done it's a few times they've done it with like Pinterest they've done it with us and other billionaires so just taken US tech ideas and brought them to Germany and actually have a friend right now who has taken an idea from China which is these pop up phone charger stands and now he's taking he's bringing it to the US and basically you just you're walking in a stadium or an airport and your phone's dying there'll be a little pop up and there's like 20 different ports do you plug your phone to apparently they're everywhere in China now he's bringing that over to the US so I mean there's something to be said for not having to like reinvent the wheel when it comes to businesses as well because the the ideas that work they're all already out there it's just like he said it's action it's all about that it's all about action so talk to me about mental health what do what what what plays entrepreneurs I know as an entrepreneur I haven't done what you've done but already what I've done in my short career very stressful very lonely yeah it's a lot it's a lot I like there's I mean I'm fortunate that I have have Gina too and I feel like that's you know having somebody who who sort of brings you out of the anxiety and the stress when something bad happens just remind you that it's not so bad and you know life's going to go wanting that's very important as well I think I have I think I have a very strong mental fortitude I don't think that I don't even deal with big issues but I know that some of the issues that I do deal with I think that would really stress out somebody who's only ever worked a nine to five w two before so I don't think mental health is spoken enough about enough with entrepreneurs and I think that I think it's something that we should bring up I know you have stories as well but even talked about from your own personal experience dude I haven't lost $130 million dollars I haven't taken a company public I don't even know how I would deal with those situations I'm sure I've managed but how about yourself like when you went through that yeah absolutely and you know that's this is why we had to have a chapter in the book on mental health because and by the way it's it's the last chapter of the book the formula of success yeah you can lay out all these formulas but if you don't deal internally with what goes on this is a roller coaster you're launching a business it's a really off thing to do and those downs I mean sure the highs still pretty good right yeah the downs are nice down those down periods are very hard that the nervous is the payroll the the fact you might lose your home the interest rates going up the external factors I mean it's very stressful um 49% let me tell you something about entrepreneurs there is they are neurodiverse in a lot of ways and that neurodiversity is a positive and and sometimes can be negative okay um 49% of entrepreneurs have some form of mental illness 30% have depression 29% ADHD 11% have addiction issues 9% are bipolar the fact is we have these things some of these things are talent for us and and and help us be successful and some of these things can be dangerous I have a I had a good friends here in South Florida he had a company he'd run more and for about 15 years was a real estate was almost like buy your ugly houses type companies and he ran his company for 15 years he had a hundred employees on Friday he laid them off this was about eight months ago and because he industry it's a gun up nobody was much but selling homes anymore in his business he had a hundred employees Friday he laid all his people off on Tuesday he committed suicide and I don't think it needed to happen because this gentleman was so talented at creating and building businesses yes he needed to shut the company down yeah the industry it took him out external factors but he could have come back down the road when the industries came down or he could have launched their businesses we need to talk about this we need to surround ourselves with others in a community you know I'm belong to an organization called the entrepreneurs organization every month eight of us get together and we talk about our personal family and business issues there are incubators out there there's a community out there and I think the more that we help get help from others the more we talk about it I think the better it is the reality is though I can talk like this but you know and you know but there's only a shade story too and we talk about that in the book and how unfortunately he he's a billionaire any any he dies we don't know if it was accident or suicide but we know is definitely mental health challenges the reality is entrepreneurs they're strong individuals they're perfect they live the perfect life and and it's hard for an entrepreneur to do that it's hard for an entrepreneur to say look I have an issue but I think if we can adjust like I want I ask entrepreneurs to identify their personality profile try to identify your own neurodiversity right and use that to your advantage right if if if you know addiction is an abit of an issue and for me it's buying domain names it's like an addiction but how do I use that to my advantage right how do I take that and use that to my advantage the same time how do we address the negatives of entrepreneurship the ups and the downs and it's not just you it's your family it's your family's good my wife has gone through 30 years of hell you know up and downs and great yeah we've landed well at the end of it all but the reality is it's not easy but a lot of rough times you know in our in our in my career yeah it's it's not easy but but I think it's important to find people that you can get to talk to about this in a safe environment and there are people out there there are groups and organizations out there that can help you do that I think it's also important to understand that no matter what you're going through this is sort of what I was alluding to with when when sort of Gina pulls me back from shitty situations first of all it's not as bad as you think this because life life does go on and second of all this somebody who's dealt with that just at a bigger scale who can probably help you navigate it and I think that that is very hard for the person living in the situation to understand but again if you have friends who have gone through this and who've dealt with it all of a sudden it just puts it in perspective it helps you sort of like like zoom out a little bit and understand that whatever's happening right now yeah you shut down a company with 100 people but there's companies that laid off 3,000 people last week and it's not to say it's a shitty circumstance but it definitely doesn't warrant you taking your own life like there's so much on the other side of that the fact that you could have done that the first time literally I mean this is what you teach it's like if you can do it once and do it repeatedly and in this particular case it came out afterwards that it was his he did it because it was his identity he was successful entrepreneur who ran this business that's not your identity you are an entrepreneur and you're good experience failures and you're gonna accept successes to be too arrogant when you are successful as well and when you do falter when it does all fall apart let's learn from that let's let's take that scar and let's make something of it right and that's our identity we're entrepreneurs that's what we do all the time we face those hardships we fail we get back up we do it again we build something get back we do it over and over again we start scale exit repeat was there a good time 130 million when you were you have to keep saying that because it's such a huge number like it wasn't even bigger back then with inflation so my the reason why keep bringing that up is because I think a lot of people would have not been so keen on starting again after that yeah you know what I did I really internally focused on what I love to do and what we loved was technology and how that can change the world that's why we jumped right into hostopia and that hosting in web platform and we began to scale that and it wasn't easy either that that was you know we had to get venture capital we had to we're we're taking we're taking massive losses up to 9.11 happened and it'll have planned dollars a month and it wasn't easy but every month was getting better and we built it and we just focused on what we loved building technology companies and that's that I think that has to be your north star so outside of all of it because if your north star is money or if your north star is fame or if your north star is anything but what you love I don't think you'll make it through I agree I don't think you'll make it you can't handle those those downs like in pot.com yeah you know we I've had three King Charles Spaniels now I have a Cavapoo for sure three or gone but you can you can't you'd be surprised at at how much these dogs have influenced the products the seat the current CEO Michelle Vento work she's got three dogs and big doodles and how every product is we long dogs we love building dog products we love inventing new dog products you know that's what helps you when you get to those low points and you're always going to hit low points and then you start up I have a question about passion because this is sort of what we're talking about and I think it's this is always sort of a debate for me if entrepreneurs are passionate about something great it will carry them through the highs and the lows but it can also blind them to the realities of the market if they're too passionate about something in the end the market doesn't actually need their their solution so how do you balance that passion and that pragmatism when you're building a company so in the start section of the book we call some we have something called stage gates stage gates are do you remember that video game car driving game when you're driving around the track and you have to get through the gates and if you don't you got to put another quarter and you probably don't remember quarters I do remember cool I'm not that young I want to arcade so if you don't have the you know if you don't get through the gate then you got to put more money and you got to keep going it I call it a stage gate in the book this is a certain specific measurable attainable relevant timely goal smart goal that you're going to pick in the future and if you don't hit it you either pivot or kill it but here's the other thing from a mental challenge because entrepreneurs and I had this when I was starting businesses early on so many people are saying oh you're wasting your time and she go get a lot of degree or she go to this oh this idea doesn't got going to work that you say look guys my stage gate is I'm going to have an MVP ready by this date on this time in the future and I'm going to show it to an investors and try to raise a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars that's my MVP if it doesn't happen fine then you can you can reign on my parade but if it but until then I have the flexibility and freedom to achieve that that's why I love the concept of stage gates and I like putting them in in in different stage gates so I'll do one and then I'll do a second stage gate and in the the start book we also have something called the four sticking oak business plan where why sticking else because you can stick them on the board and they're small because this is a business plan just for you just for your own strategic thinking and it takes ship probably one half hour to put this business plan together and included in that are the stage gates and how much money do I need to raise to get to that stage gate who are the people I need to get to that stage gate and what are the KPIs the systems what are the KPIs I need to track performance to get to that stage gate you mentioned a few times you just mentioned like raising money and this is another thing that I think a lot of entrepreneurs get confused about so you also said sometimes customer funding is the best way to build a business but of course you've raised money as well so when you look at the two options raising money or not is there certain things that you look for or signals that indicate this particular type of business should be something that we raise venture capital or even just angel investment for versus not absolutely absolutely so if we were in a very high mood a very fast moving environment like for instance remember clubhouse that that app from years ago they had to raise a lot of money fast because otherwise if they didn't then you'd have the big competitors and guess what did happen spaces came in chatter came in from meta linked in audio I mean all these competitors came out with a solution so if you're in a in a market like that you have to move quickly venture capital is your best route silicon value I know I call I talk about the negatives but they're all it's also been the most successful environment in the world to raise money and in more successful companies have come at a silicon value than any other any other ecosystem in the world so I'm very positive about it for the right type of company if you need to move quickly if you if by holding back and allowing others to take your market share you've you've made a huge mistake that's is one way do need to bring in venture capital to allow us to win that market because if we wait too long if we try to do it the conservative we get for too conservative all the way long somebody else is going to take that market and and that's I'd rather own a smaller percentage of a product that wins in the marketplace than a niche product or a much smaller market product that has a much lower market share because typically the winners take the lion share of the so that's how you have to look at you and I think this is all it all comes down to not just following a trend but understanding what kind of business you're trying to build in what kind of market I mean there's so many different versions of entrepreneurship too I mean I speak about this a lot but some people don't even want to sell some people want to build lifestyle business it's my wife my wife owns a school she just want to get to a certain level she's got a great school and a great school's job or gets the highest rate in Fort Lauderdale that's it and you don't have to sell that if you don't want to but you have to decide what you want to do and I think that's very important I think self-awareness is probably one of the most powerful things you can have is an entrepreneur yeah well you know what a lot of the Murray or against I know that I work especially one particular one I'm thinking right now I won't mention names oh my god he's of the CEO but he thinks he knows everything and you know he doesn't and when you think you know everything that's the worst mistake you can make when you begin to recognize I don't know everything when you begin to pick up books like the emeth or zero to one or start scale x repeat when you begin to learn these philosophies that can strengthen your ability to succeed in entrepreneurship it'll increase your chances of success what would be some of the most harmful behaviors that you see or or with entrepreneurs when they're trying to scale or achieve success what are things that they absolutely should not do try to try to do everything yourself okay so in the start methodology we talk about entrepreneurs they delegate tasks right they're well you have to be it's like winning a baby you have to sort of be aware of everything when you're in the scale mode it's delegate responsibilities not tasks okay and this is important because this is more than just a nine to five roll this is a 24 and when you're responsible for every aspect of a business time I mentioned my wife she is net she hasn't figured out the philosophy of delegating responsibilities she has 16 teachers 100 students and about 50 parents or 60 parents and she has got her hands and everything okay but she's up in the in three o'clock in the morning almost every brick and night worried about this or worried about that when you've got people who are now responsible let's say you have someone who's responsible for the IT or responsible for the sales and you're you're not having to be up at three o'clock in the morning now they'll have to be up at three o'clock in the morning but they're focused on this one specific area but that's their job exactly but if you're delegating those tasks and you're not letting go of your company you're not delegating responsibilities you're going to hold yourself back I love that that's good um what did we not go into that he think is important for entrepreneurs to know like I mean the book covers so much we know we could do like so many shows you could do one follow just on exactly I know that right because it's so much it really does and here's no one spends it's writing a book yeah are you gonna do another one yeah you always have to say the negative things don't you you lose what how is that negative I think that I think that may suit you know I didn't I didn't actually do well in English in school just see that I did not have the best marks I was much better at math than in economics and things like that um and actually it's interesting because my twin brother he says I really liked your book uh and he goes I liked it because it was simple I understood it they wasn't you know a lot of sometimes you get these business books are ethereal and like really yes probably that's that this is just you know street language on the street this is how it is it's my voice it's who I am I think it's actually super ironic how everything that I think is your superpower you think is a negative so good copywriting is at a fifth grade level that is good copywriting I can't do more than a fifth grade but I'm dead serious this is not like me just like like like uh making up if you want the book to hit home if you want writing to hit home you have to write at a fifth grade level you have to take very complex idea and I actually think that shows that you know the concept better and you take a very complex idea and you can and you can find a way to communicate it at a fifth grade level I think that if you can't do that that means that you actually don't have a mastery of the concept that's my that's my so yeah I'm surprised we got 13 awards because you know I you know literary awards and yeah on we had the American Legacy Book Awards top book for entrepreneurship in 2024 we had the international book awards we had won the best nonfiction first time author and then like IPPA we won the second silver medal for business and business and communications categories so I mean they're big categories and so I was actually surprised we did we did so well but we did have it human editors thankfully and a lot of Forbes books did a great job at helping with the editing and cleaning it up a little bit but it's definitely you know it's written very simply I think I think it's great I mean I've read it it's great it's also out of all the books and I mean I don't have all my books out here I used to have all my books out here at the old and the old studio but I think it's like one of the biggest books yeah yeah it it really is but it was double the size of any Forbes published book and they kept getting mad at me and I said what I kept trying to cut it if I cut this then the entrepreneurs they won't they won't know how to do this or they won't know to do that but it's very easy it's it's like 58 chapters and they're very short chapters so you could just jump to a part of the book or you can I mean I think it's good idea to read the whole book but also we have this gentleman who did the audible he was also he's like a fellow Kenny I didn't to do your own audible I can't kidding me he's a fellow Canadian who he did Budweiser commercials oh yeah yeah so he does quite an entertaining job when he reads the book I've been good I said I'm not do I'm not gonna have somebody reading it putting people to sleep so he's a little animated he's a bit animated he does a good job so the audible comes across very well very good um okay so are you gonna write another one or are you this hit no I keep people keep saying you're right now what we are doing is coming out four workbooks one for start one for scale one for exit one for repeat the start one is out there right now scale I'm having a lot of fun with this but this is going to be the most complicated workbook ever produced for the scaling I'm partnered with two other firms the rhythm systems who I told you about and then also Jack daily and Dan Larson who wrote the sales playbook and working with them as well so we're we're putting together something that could really make a difference for somebody wants to take their business and scale it and it's gonna have of course we're gonna have AI custom GPTs embedded throughout it I love it and so if you want to they want to connect with you um what startup club yeah just go to startup club subscribe to our email lists we do one email a month that is like a publication right and that's where we have the time to sell index now I've added that into it but we we list the authors that are coming on to our show or we do a live clubhouse show but that's yeah people don't even know that maybe some of them do but you that's the largest entrepreneur clubhouse yep so almost a million member ush over a million members now we have 80,000 on YouTube and yeah we just started TikTok a month ago I'm excited about I got 500 followers I saw I've seen your content it's good oh really yeah so we're just starting that and we're just that's taking off and I'm like wow is because our the key demographic our persona is an individual between the age of 18 and 34 younger younger demographic yeah right and I think we had to think like that because you can't just post it on Facebook linked in I'm very big on LinkedIn we do very well on LinkedIn but the reality is to reach the sort of younger audience we said what's going to TikTok so we started to TikTok how does how does your business link do on TikTok it's just seems to be doing very well yeah yeah like I got to figure out TikTok I haven't figured it out yet I know it's nice about it you don't have to have a lot of followers and you get a lot of views right away yeah which I thought was interesting but we're we're looking for engagement as well so if you're if you want to follow us on TikTok this one video is we come out with every week but the best way to do it really get in the know how is just go to startup.club sign up to our email list and then if you want to buy the book go to amazon and you can buy it an audible hardcover softcover and Kindle as well all that we'll go in the show notes too so I'll get all the links for everything yes yeah I mean look I just be clear thank god you saw her to our app.club right but it's www.startup.club okay for it's right yeah www.startup.club and we've written now I think I've written about 20 articles 20 articles for Forbes as well which we link in in startup.club as well so this is like everyone you know if you're listening right now Colin is like all things entrepreneurship so there is not really many questions as an entrepreneur that you could have that he does not have an answer to somewhere whether or not it's in the book or whether or not it's on TikTok or YouTube like I mean you you live and breathe this and I've seen I mean I've seen your co-working space I've seen some of the people like some of the companies you've invested in I saw your talk at EO so in I didn't afford lottery at the power or whatever it's called yeah there's not much that you don't cover in your content yeah I do you haven't dealt with yourself by the way which is actually the that's the X factor in good content I do tend to sort of stay above the fray though and I don't get involved in the weeds I don't rely on of course I delegate responsibilities right so I delegate people to do the TikTok and the LinkedIn and and all the other aspects of our businesses so I'm not a social media expert at all so if you start asking me a question like you know I was getting nervous there for a second no I'm not gonna ask you no I'm not gonna do a quest talk we would ever and I'm like would I always my team's doing a great job I mean I can tell you that well hiring the right people that's that's that's that's half the battle no my point is why I love and respect you so much as an entrepreneur is because you got through again I alluded to this before but you got through so many versions of entrepreneurship that I don't think many people even people that are massively successful it's kind of like they stay within the same version of entrepreneurship and they had one big success or they've tried one thing repeatedly then they have a success but I don't know many people that again have gone through exit events for you know like a strategic buyer also IPOed highly successful failed at the degree that you failed as well like there's so many different versions that you've lived through that's why I think the information's valuable because I didn't get information you can go find it on YouTube but unless the person lived through it it doesn't mean anything that's my that's my two cents at least but I agree and there's other 50 other stories yeah the book as well that really resonated well with us and the team and we put them in there as well um so we've gone through a lot uh do we not really not touch on something that you want it to go into I think we've covered we covered a lot okay the last question that clapping it last question um if you could go back and you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would that be believe in yourself because you know what I didn't really believe in myself when I was in merely 20s I had my head business partners and I relied on the business partners and one of them turned out to be a massive disaster and caused a big fight and I recognized my instinct was right at the time but I was so young and I was thinking I didn't really know what I was doing but my instinct was right I should just believe more of my instincts and it took me until my mid 30s to really break off from from the people around me who were not helping me but but pulling me down right so you know fire those people quickly in your life you know hire yourself believe in yourself and you know when you're not broke you have the right instinct and into the second thing is you have the right instinct but then you don't really know what how you're doing so that's when you do bring in a coach and when I brought in a coach Patrick Tien from uh rhythm systems it changed my life he's been my coach now for almost 15 years and all my companies so he's he's amazing