Lessons - Two Proven Frameworks That Built Multiple 8-Figure Companies | Colin C. Campbell - Serial Entrepreneur

In this lessons episode, discover how a decade-long commitment to excellence built a top-ranked book on entrepreneurship. Learn why relentless effort and deep focus create a competitive edge and understand how a framework of story, people, money, and systems drive scalable success and profitable exits. 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 you send me some accolades or some rankings or some top charts that you hit with this book, and I'm super curious where this book has ended up right now, because I can probably pull it up. Well, I could tell me, yeah. I think 30 years is a serial entrepreneur, but I'm also curious 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 a book. I know, it's insane. It did it on airplanes. You know, there's one passage in there about Doc Club, which was written 10 years ago, so I kept the exact thing, because this was before Doc Club launched. I wrote it. It was fascinating. So I kept the exact, I said, we're going to follow the start scale, excerpt, methodology. We're going to focus on story, people, money, and systems, and it's there. So 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 of 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 Doc. 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. Well, I don't think they hardly sell out of that. I get them all my hot cats call it. And they look at them like last week, we're 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? That was fascinating. I think that there's a lesson there. I think putting 10 years into something, there's so much competition at the bottom and mid-market in terms of like mediocreness. There's so much competition when you put out 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 0.001% 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 and sweat 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, 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 different. It's a different philosophy to than 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 of 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 so 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 to want to go section, but they 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 and these 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 February 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 of starts failing to repeat, what are the things? Because again, this is position for an entrepreneur, not trying to build a unicorn or a billion dollar company that even happens with 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 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 the start process that can impact to 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 the big ones. They're really bad. They're the elephant, right? They wanted to. And so often what are the 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 that things can happen, right? And when you, 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 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 got to 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 the right. Yeah, we also want to state pure, you know, we're 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 it, it's got to be clean. Okay. And there's some certain 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 valuations 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 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 going to build it out and we're going to 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. They 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 your company and spending that you shouldn't really be doing. One of my favorite forms of funding is customer funded startups. And we had a gentleman named John Mullins on who wrote the book customer fund and startup. And we interviewed him for this book. And I can't tell you how many companies that fortune 5,000 list use customer funded techniques use your customers to fund your business. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.