#380 – The Entrepreneur’s Odyssey: Sell – Scale – Exit – Repeat with Colin Campbell

#380 - The Entrepreneur's Odyssey: Sell - Scale - Exit - Repeat with Colin Campbell Speaker 1: Yo, yo, yo, welcome to episode 380 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week, my guest is Colin C. Campbell. He's the author of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, a number one bestseller when it comes to e-commerce and a whole bunch of other categories on Amazon. It's an excellent book. Colin has a wealth of business experience from a young age. He exited several different companies, has his ups and downs. He knows a lot of the top entrepreneurs in the world. He interviewed them all for this book. It has their stories in it. We talk about what are some of the keys to starting a business, what are the keys to scaling, what are the things you need to think about when exiting. And what do you got to do to repeat this whole process? It's a brilliant discussion. I think you're going to find a lot from this. I hope you enjoy it. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Where we explore opportunities in e-commerce, commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Welcome to the AM PM podcast Colin Campbell. How are you doing man? Speaker 2: Well, I'm so excited to be on with you. You are such a legend in your industry, and I'm so excited to have a chance to talk with you. Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm just trying to take it take a small A bit of your shadow because you're like the legend out there. You know, I've heard, I've known Norm Farrar, a good friend of yours. I've known him for like six years. He's always like, Kevin, Kevin, you got to meet this, my buddy Colin. He's always, we're smoking cigars, you know, for three or four hours after events. And he's always talking about Colin this, Colin that. I'm like, who's this Colin guy? He's like, you got to meet him. You got to meet him. And he'll tell me a few of your little stories. And then, so I saw that you were speaking back in, I guess it was in October. There's this event happening in Orlando and you were speaking at it. It was an Amazon event. I wasn't planning on going, but I had another event I was speaking at and hosting the next day in New York. So, I was like, you know what? Orlando is kind of sort of on the out of the way there. So, I'll stop by and I'll meet Colin and I also wanted to meet, there's one other guy there, John Dirkits, I wanted to meet there. So, I stopped by. I had a chance to briefly talk to you. I was very impressed with you and your partner that was there. I picked up your book. I'm actually one of the lucky ones that actually got the book before it sold out. Norm told me just today that as of this recording, it was actually sold out, the physical hardcover. Now, it's on the Kindle and you got some more on the way. So, congratulations on that. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it shocked us. This book is published by Forbes Books. We did a reprint a week before we launched because they said the demand for the book was coming out very strong. So we did a reprint which came out I was coming out at the beginning of November. So there's definitely tons of inventory now for all of your listeners. We've completely restocked. By the way, in January, we got into 135,000. Airport locations. Oh, wow. The demand for this book is incredible. And it shocked us. We debuted number one bestseller in four categories, including starting a business, entrepreneurship management, new release. E-commerce, we debuted number one for e-commerce, which was very cool because in the book, I talk a lot about e-commerce companies as a number of the companies that I've run have been e-commerce companies. We run a dog products company called paw.com in the incubator and we've been on the Inc. 5000 list for one of the fastest growing companies three years in a row. We run a glasses company called Hip Optical, sort of like an edgier version of Warby Parker that we run and we have an actual factory in Fort Lauderdale so we can produce glasses within 24 hours for anyone in the state of Florida. So it's fascinating that we really cover a lot of e-commerce. But I will tell you a lot of the concepts and the learnings in this book can be applied to almost any industry. We just happen to do a lot of e-commerce businesses. Speaker 1: So the name of the book for those that are listening, and we'll talk more about this in a minute, but here it is. I'm holding up for those who are watching on video, A Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. And this book is thick. I mean, this is not a quick five minute read. I mean, it's detailed. It's in-depth. I have a couple of people I know. I'm starting it right now, but I haven't finished it yet, but it's a really good book. And basically, I mean, let's talk about actually why it's doing so well. And a lot of that has to do with your background and your experience. I mean, a lot of people don't realize you're kind of unassuming when you see you in person, but you've done some major things. I mean, I remember, was it two cows? I was one of the things that you did. I remember that was like a shareware site or something like that. Back in the day, I'm an old man, old guy. I remember back in the 90s, you know, downloading stuff off of 2Cals. It was T-U-C-O-W-S. And then you were involved in the .club domain and a whole bunch of other stuff. What are some of the big things that people may recognize that you've had a hand in creating or just blowing up in the past? Speaker 2: Absolutely. And let me just start by saying 30 years as a serial entrepreneur, 10 years writing and researching this book. In the last two years, a staff of six members Who work with me on this book. Also, we run a club called Startup Club with almost 1 million members on Clubhouse. So this staff has interviewed over 200 people and we put only the top interviews into the book. All right. Look, my career and let me be very clear here. My career has been a roller coaster. It's been ups and downs. And all of the stories, this is really a collection of stories that are in the book. Failures and successes. We don't just focus on the successes, Kevin. We really do go into the failures and why the failures happen. I would say almost half of the interviews we do are also talking about failures because we can learn from those failures. I started in 1992 right out of college working on the family farm with no money, literally credit card debt. Money I made from selling and flogging vegetables and I dropped out of my fourth year of college, used the money I got back from the government student loans. I know that's probably not correct, but I hope I passed the statute of limitations on that one. And I borrowed $12,800 from my mother and we opened our first company. Within that company, we opened up a BBS, a bulletin board service, became the second largest in Canada. Then we opened up an ISP, Internet Service Provider, and that became the largest company in Canada for providing internet services in the mid-90s. And we took it public. In the late 90s and then sold it. And then we also did a company called Two Cows. Speaker 1: You're in your young 20s at that time. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would be 22, 23. Yeah. A little naive, a little bit, you know, and again, with this book, we talk a lot about the successes and the failures and a lot of my failures, I admit, come early on in my 20s. And if I had the opportunity to read this book, you know, maybe I wouldn't have lost the kind of money I lost. And if you want, we can go into one of those stories in really in-depth because I think it's valuable that we all learn from it. Speaker 1: Well, don't they say the 20s are for learning and the 30s are for earning? Speaker 2: Well, there you go. Well, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Why don't I just hit it? Why don't I just tell you what happened? So yeah, let's do it. We're number one, okay, in Canada. Number one fastest growing company in Canada on Profit Magazine. That's their version of Inc. Magazine. They put our pictures on the front page. We were publicly traded. We decided to merge with a cable company and apply for a license from the government to get fixed internet wireless license. We won that license. We won 50% of it and our stock. Here's a company, Kevin. I own 13%. I'm 28 years old. Publicly traded company and the stock shot up to over a billion dollars. Okay. Now, nothing could go wrong. This is 99, 2000. The internet's just taking off. It's changing the world. Nothing could go wrong. Well, what happened in March of 2000? Do you remember? Speaker 1: No, what was happening? Is that the dot-com bust? Yeah, yeah, that's when all the guys that raised 80 million dollars and did some Super Bowl Super Bowl ads and had like $7,000 in recurring revenue and spending millions on super well that whole time. Yeah, I remember that. Yep. Speaker 2: Yeah, actually, and so that's what happened to our company. We were raising $50 million that month after a judge announced the breakup of Microsoft in March. The Nasdaq fell from $5,000 to $4,000 and the people that were in control of the company at the time decided to pull the offering until the market came back. Well, guess what? The Nasdaq went to $1,200 and didn't recover for 15 years. Needless to say, fast forward a year later, the company filed for bankruptcy protection. And a stock that was trading at $19 a share, I ended up selling at $0.06 a share. That was devastating. It was embarrassing. It was horrible for me, for my investors, for my employees. It was absolutely devastating. And there are two lessons I learned from that. One, liquidity or control. See, we had merged the company, but we agreed to an 18-month lockup. We never imagined the world would fall apart. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: Okay. And that's the second lesson. Bad things do happen. And we saw that, unfortunately, occur again in 2022. E-commerce companies in 2021 were trading at values that were probably 80% more than in 2022. It literally did crash. It was a tech wreck. Allbirds, let me give you one example. Allbirds did their IPO. I think it was around $18 and then traded around $2 or $3. I mean, it was a complete wipeout of economic value of e-commerce companies. And ironically, we have a number of e-commerce companies in our company, including paw.com, which again, was killing it. You know, it was the pandemic. Everybody's buying dog products. We innovated a lot in paw.com and created a lot of new categories. We were just killing it. And yet, for some reason, I did not get a chance to read this book because bad things do happen. We had potential buyers, you know, it would have been, you know, it's sometimes, you know, you just think keep things are just going to keep going. And I want people to think about themselves not as I am CEO of this e-commerce company or that e-commerce company. I want you to think of yourself as a serial entrepreneur. And entrepreneurship is a trade, a trade that you need to master like any other trade. You can start, scale, exit, take some money off the table and repeat. And by the way, there's a lot of tax benefits for doing it that way as well. Let me give you an example. So I told you about that failure. Well, fast forward, after losing $100 million, fast forward six years later, we did another IPO with another company, and two or three years later, we sold the company to a Fortune 500 company for 17 times EBITDA. Stock's trading at $4.55 a share, the next day it's trading at $10.55 a share. That was Vinda fucking Kation. We came back and it was an absolutely amazing feeling. Now let me tell you this, 17 times EBITDA, our tax rate was 36% federal and 5.5% state. So we're running about 41% corporate tax. We're also paying a 15% dividend tax. So we're running about 56, 57% tax. When we sold that company, we paid 15% capital gains. When you start to look at the number of years it would take to take that much money off the table to be paid out in dividends, you're looking at probably 20 to 30 years. Now, I know we were growing and it was expanding. So there is a really strong economic case from a tax perspective. Of course, talk to your accountants, talk to your lawyers. But there's even a clause, a section 1202 in the United States, where if you hold a C corporation for up to five years, you can have the first $10 million tax-free. Look, I'm telling you, the system is geared towards capital gains, not income. And I know there's a lot of aggregation going on with e-commerce companies. You saw it, Kevin. And you now are seeing what happened to a lot of those aggregators. I'm not saying we're ever going to get back to that time. But does it make sense for you to sell your e-commerce business at 6, 7, 8 times? I don't know. We'll get back to that. And I know even now, six to seven, eight times earnings is probably pretty lofty. So you've got to have something unique and different. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that as to how you can increase your multiple. Speaker 1: I know Scott Dietz is from Northbound, someone that's in our space, that one of his big sayings is 60 to 70% of the money you ever make is the day you exit, not the day you run the business. And it's gaining that leverage of moving that money forward, like you said. And too many people, I think, get too They're too close to their business or they're too like, this is growing. Why would I sell right now? You know, I can double this. I can triple it. I'll sell down the road. But like you said, you never know economically, physically, mentally, what's going to happen in the market. And for the audience listening to this, you can relate to this to Helium 10 software. Manycoats and Guillermo Puyol started that in 2015. They had a background in gaming before that. So they were running like Twisted Humor and they were doing some mobile games and stuff. That kind of had its ups and downs. Manny started selling on Amazon, started building software to manage his sales. It took off in 2019. They said, Hey, you know, we're booming right now. We're just, we're going gangbusters. Should we sell? Or we think we can double this in the next couple of years. And they like, we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know what's going to happen with Amazon. We don't know what's going to happen in the marketplace. Let's take some money off the table. And what they did is they took, I don't, I don't know the exact figures, They negotiated to where they retained some sort of ownership. I don't know the exact amount. It was a small amount. And the company that bought them, it was a software aggregator called Assembly that was buying up some different software companies in space. They made another sell three years later, I think in 2022. And Manny told me his second payday was bigger than his first payday. Would he have made that money if he would have just kept running the company? Probably not. I think that illustrates the point that relates it to This audience is sometimes it's time to let the baby go and adopt a new baby and move out and move on to the next one. And that's how you scale. And that's how you generate generational wealth is by starting something, scaling it, exiting it, and then repeating the process. Because then the second time, you know how much better it is. And there's someone in our business, David Cupps and his wife, they started a business in 2015 with like five grand. She was stay-at-home mom. He kept his insurance job for like a year. They built this business up. I was there with them in 2017 when they sold it for $3 million. Then what did they do? They didn't go to the beach and sit back and like, okay, we've made it. They took their knowledge, had a non-compete in certain categories. They went and did it again. They sold the next one for like $7 million. Two years, a year and a half later, they did it again. So that went for 12 million and just kept stair-stepping their way up. And now they, they don't have to ever work a day in their life if they don't want to. Um, that's the, that's, it's part of the secret to this that a lot of people, I think they just don't get it and they don't understand. And that's what you explain in this book with, with vivid examples. Why do you think it is though that people don't want to talk about their failures? Is it a pride thing? Is it a, I lost a million bucks during the pandemic selling on Amazon. I talked about it in a case study. We did a case study and showed exactly here's what happened. But why do you think it is that people want to just push that stuff under the rug and only talk about their successes? Speaker 2: I mean, come on. It's not easy. I mean, when I lost 100 million at 28 or 29, it was like, you know, I wanted to go home, curl up in a ball and just that's it. I mean, I really felt like that. And it's not easy. And would I talk about it back then? Probably not. Now I can laugh about it because we've had seven big exits, more than $10 million since, and I'm like, okay, what could I learn from that? What can I take from that lesson? I mean, we spent 10 years building a company and 10 weeks screwing it up on exit. My gosh, don't make that mistake. When you begin to think about the exit for your company, there's a lot of things you should think about. Just don't screw that up. And the book goes into detail. We walk you through all the way from start and all the ways you can come up with an idea for your business to taking action on those ideas, to scaling those ideas, to exiting and then repeating. And there's so many. We do it in a way that there's a lot of stories. Look, I recognize... A lot of your listeners might not want to read a book. We do have Audible. All right. It's not read by me. It's read by a professional. We do have Audible. But, you know, the book, if, look, it may be big, but it's been written for ADHD entrepreneurs. We have 58 chapters, 200 call-outs, dozens of illustrations and charts and graphics. We've tried to simplify it as simple as possible. It's color-coded for each section for start, scale, exit, repeat. So even if you get the audible, you may want the book Just to refer to it, you know, we talk about many, many different concepts. So let's just say you're getting to a point where you, you feel like you're, you're in a mode where you're just sort of going along, you know, you're doing okay, make a little bit of money. But you want to break that trajectory. You want to scale your business. Well, we talk about a lot of techniques in scaling your business. See, back in 2006, that second public company we were running before we sold it for 17 times EBITDA, back in 2006, we did flatlined. We had in fighting with my brother and I were both running parts of the company and I was CEO, but we're still fighting. Staff were fighting. The revenue stalled. And then the board of directors started moving against me. And one board member said, look, you're too young and you don't have enough experience. You're way over your head. We might have to start looking for alternatives. And even though we founded the company, my brother and I, we didn't have majority control. So I flew to Vegas and I met a gentleman, Patrick Theon, who runs Rhythm Systems. And I asked him if he could get the board off my back. I need professional systems in place to scale the business. But that being said, at the time, I'm like, I don't really need to do all the hard work. You just need to get the board off my back. And he actually refused to work with me. He said, I can't work with you. I was like the doc. I was like the patient going to the doctor who wants to lose weight and say, you know, I don't really want to do the change my diet. I don't really want to do the hard work exercise. I just want the pill. That's all I want. I don't want to do the other stuff. And so he said, I'm not going to work. I said, fine, what do I need to do? And you know what? We did it. It changed my life as an entrepreneur. See, entrepreneurs go, we're ad hoc by nature. We go from one fire to the next fire, the next fire, next fire. We just keep going, going, going, going. We don't think of systems. We're not operators. I would argue that most Entrepreneurs are more artists than operators, okay? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true. Speaker 2: But when we begin to bring in systems, so we brought in two days of strategic planning, 90 days of execution. We did goal setting, annual, quarterly, individual goal setting with software. We brought in profiling. We did a sales playbook. We did so many things to scale the business. And it began to work. We tripled in size and that's when we sold the company to a fortune 500 company. Look, I know you're out there and I know a lot of you think you know what you're doing. You think you got it. But if you can begin to apply coaching and goal setting and all of these systems, you can scale that company. See, the vast majority of small businesses in the United States are small businesses. They fail to scale. It's actually in the area of the high 90 percentage, like 96, 97%. Speaker 1: People create jobs. They don't create businesses. Speaker 2: Yep, that's right. They fail to scale. Yet, there is a formula to scale and in this book, we go through that in detail. I've done a lot of companies and we've been very successful. I've spoke at MIT to a group of entrepreneurs in 2012 and we talked about the patterns of success. And that became the basis for the book. That in this book, there's four sections, start, scale, exit, repeat. And in start, it's all about a great story, great people, the right amount of funding and the right systems. And it completely changes for scale. And this is where a lot of entrepreneurs, especially the type A entrepreneurs who tend to be the chief sales officer as well, okay, which are about 70%. This is where they sometimes get into trouble. You got to learn to... I'll say this, Kevin. The number one reason why most businesses fail to scale is because the entrepreneur is in the way. If they can learn to check their ego, can learn to work with others and learn how to hire great people, hire leaders, delegate responsibilities, not tasks, then they can scale that company. See, when you are an entrepreneur, everything comes up to you and the stress is crazy. And my wife and I, we own a school. Let me give you an example. I don't know how many times I've told her delegate responsibilities, not tasks. I know she won't listen to the show, so it's okay. I can talk. I don't think anyone's going to tell her. She's got 16 teachers. She's up almost every night at 3 o'clock in the morning. And don't get me wrong. There are moments when I'm up at 3 o'clock in the morning. And when the responsibilities go to you, if something's wrong with the infrastructure or the inventory or the accounting and it all comes to you, you're the one worried at 3 o'clock in the morning. But when you hire a leader, Kevin, And you say to that leader, okay, now you're responsible for all inventory management. Let's go with that one alone. Oh my gosh, we screwed up inventory management so bad so many times until we figured out how to hire the great people, put them in place, let them run it. Do you think I get up at 3 o'clock in the morning and worry about inventory management anymore at paw.com? No. It's completely delegated. So you have to begin to change your mindset. To become thinking about delegating responsibilities, not tasks. And when you do that, It's a game changer. Speaker 1: I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they can't get, like you said, they can't get out of their own way. And a lot of them feel that they can do it better. And that's a problem of not hiring. And that's a problem of just assigning tasks. And I'm always either partner with the right people or hire good people and get the fuck out of their way. And I think that's difficult. How do you actually find those right people? Like on this inventory example, what is What are some tactics to actually find that right person where you can actually feel like confident to give them that trust as an entrepreneur that's been doing it or overseeing it yourself? Where's that magic bridge that allows you to do that or that you can take to do that? Speaker 2: Okay, so when we're in Start, we're going to look at partnering, all right? Cash is oxygen. So we're going to want to find people we can partner with. In fact, I have a startup that I've been working with and we just brought back someone who was working from one of my prior companies. He was being paid $250,000 as a CTO. He agreed to come back to work for this company and we pay him $120,000. And we gave them 10% of the company in options, okay? I know that may sound a little radical, but when you're small in a startup mode, we have to think a little differently on the way that we compensate because the reality is we're up against Fortune 5000 companies when it comes to hiring. So we got to be a little more innovative. When we begin to scale, we're now in a position to pay a little bit more, but we still need to give options. We still need to entice them We need to think about their needs first. We need to recognize greatness. We need to wrap our startup around them, not the way, not the reverse. And I know this is counterintuitive for some of you thinking about this, but we really do. We need to understand what their goals and aspirations are. All right, and that's just a start. Now, how do we find them? One of the key things that we've done, and we go through this in detail in the book, And I think this has made a difference in all of my companies is that we do profiling. And we use a disk profile method. I'm not certain if you're familiar with disk. There's Myers-Briggs. There's different ones. I like the disk profile. So the first thing I suggest that people do I know it's going to sound basic, but it's to profile yourself. Figure out what your strengths are. Now, once you've identified that, you're going to want to identify all the positions in your company and the profile for those positions. And when you begin to hire, use profiling as a method of hiring. We hired, yesterday at the signing, I had a gentleman came in. He's CEO of Mopro, a big website development company. And he was actually, I hired him 15 years ago. And this gentleman, I got all these profiles, but I didn't look at resumes. I just looked at profiles. I know that sounds crazy, but I just look at profiles. And I read his profile and I'm like, okay, I have to see this person. He was going for call center manager. And I saw that he had run a company a couple of years ago as well. And he went traveling for, he sold it, went traveling for a couple of years. So I looked at his profile. I'm like, oh my gosh, this guy's good. So I met him in an interview. Instantly, we hired him as call center manager. Within six months, he replaced the guy that had hired him to become chief operating officer. And two years later, he became the CEO or three years later when I stepped down. And then he left that company and then I was looking for somebody for MoPro. So I gave him a call. He's been running MoPro for five years. He's absolutely phenomenal. And I'm telling you this, I'm not good at sales. I kind of suck at it. I hate it. I hate rejection. And the reality is I find people to do that for me. And that's where some of the dominant influential, the sort of sales-oriented, social dominant personalities get them in trouble because the sales are reliant on them. They need to be out of themselves and get others to help them drive the sales as well. And now that's just people. I mean, if you want to talk about scaling, we should talk about the number one thing that e-commerce companies can do to scale their business when it comes to their story. Speaker 1: Before we do that, I want to ask you one other question on this for people, then we'll go into exactly, I want to get into that. Which is more important, experience or aptitude? When you said you don't even really look at the resume, you just look at the reports. So a lot of people, I think, get that wrong. They look at who's got this experience and who's done this, this and this rather than the aptitude. Speaker 2: It's the profile. It's the profile. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Look, I don't care if, you know, look, I had a CFO about eight, nine years, 10 years ago at Dot Club when we first started for the first two years. He was horrible. He was the most social guy you could ever meet. He loved to talk. Well, I'll tell you one thing. I hate lawyers and accountants who talk too much. I don't know what it is because they're just wasting my time. They're billing me out $100 an hour, $300 an hour, whatever it is. I fired lawyers over it. I fired accountants over it. I want people who are efficient, quick, you know. So, you know, you got to have the right profile. It doesn't matter the education or the qualifications or experience. If you don't have the right profile, they're not going to be able to sell. And by the way, a good friend of mine, this is a chapter in the book. He does, we talk about reinventing your company into a sales organization. Have you talked to my friend? He's made hundreds of millions of dollars, okay? He sells distribution to a lot of e-commerce companies. He sells the UPS shipping accounts to e-commerce companies and other companies. And he sold out a company, made hundreds of millions of dollars, and then he's doing it all over again with his son right now. And the whole thing's happening all over again. And you know what he says? It's so simple. All I do is a sales playbook. I hire young people who have the right profile. I teach them the scripts. Not just totally scripted, but he has a way with his sales playbook. I teach him the stuff. I put him in the chairs. I train him for six months. I put him on the street. They sell, and we scale that. So what about all the other stuff? What about, no, that's all we do. You know, I met Manny Medina who is a billionaire. He did the data center down here in South Florida. I was doing a judging competition and we were actually judging him for Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Like I'm in his office and I'm looking at his planes and boats and everything. He goes, oh my gosh, it's the simplest thing I ever did. He did Simple Health or Simply Health. And he says, all I did was hire people, put them in chairs and sell insurance to small businesses. And I did it over and over. I did a company. I sold it. I did it again. I sold it. I did it again. I sold it. Unbelievable. Sometimes it can be so simple. Speaker 1: What makes something scalable? Is it systems, SOPs? Is it certain business may be scalable, certain business may not be? What makes something scalable? Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is why I do like e-commerce businesses. When my wife and I wanted to expand our school, we hit 110 maximum capacity. We looked at adding a floor, looked at buying the buildings around it, looked at the regulatory environment. We're talking millions and millions of dollars to get from 110 to 111. We eventually abandoned the idea. It was just too much. We just said, that's okay. We're not going to do that. She enjoys the school and it's a lifestyle business for her and we'll just leave it at that. Okay. What I loved about paw.com is we could hit one success after another and just scale to infinity. And so sometimes the idea, it starts with the idea. And if you're in pre-idea mode, We talk about this in the book. We have a whole chapter on picking an idea that can scale. And I actually suggest that people rate it from 1 to 5, your ideas. And we give examples of types of businesses. So if you actually pick an idea that can scale, That's obviously positions you well to grow. If the idea is not scalable... Speaker 1: Can you give an example for those listening that haven't read the book yet? Like what's one that can scale and what's one that can't scale? Speaker 2: I'm going to give an example. Yeah, I'm going to give an example. So I talked about the school. I gave that a rating of 1. Very high infrastructure cost. I talked about e-commerce companies. I gave that a rating of 3 because you can actually scale Massive leader volume. You just need the distribution. You need the sales, but we have one unfortunate problem with E-commerce companies, and that is inventory. And now we're hitting very high interest rates, and that's an issue as well. What I talk about the most scalable business concepts are digital platforms. An example of that is .club, which is an annual revenue platform. We started .club in 2012. We scaled it to 1 million domain names, and then we sold it to GoDaddy Registry two years ago. Unlimited inventory, 90% gross margin. Now, you're saying, well, well. Speaker 1: It's all digital air. You're selling air. Speaker 2: It's all digital air. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Kevin, this occurred to me in 1998. I told you I started farming, okay? We used to be the raspberry farm of my grandmother of South Florida. Sorry, Southern Ontario. I'm sorry. Southern Ontario. And you know how hard it is to pick a flat of berries? I grew up every summer picking a flat of raspberry. I worked for six hours, eight hours to get to two, three flats. Now I know other people can do it faster. And I'd make like, as a picker, you'd make like five, six, seven bucks. And then you go and you sell the flats for 20, $25 to people on the market or whatever. You work so freaking hard. But then in 1998, we're selling domain names. I'm giving you kevin.com or whatever it was and they're giving me back 70 bucks. Now, when you own the registry, you get all the money. So, any domain... Speaker 1: You did 70 bucks one time, 70 bucks recurring. Speaker 2: That's right. Exactly. Speaker 1: That's a big difference there too. Don't try businesses that you don't just get paid once. I mean, recurring revenue is a big key to scaling. Speaker 2: And it doesn't have to be in the digital space. A good friend of mine, Joe Martin, did a company called BoxyCharm. BoxyCharm sold for $500 million three years ago. It was in the business of a monthly box that went out to people and had beauty products in it, sort of a competitor to Birchbox, but they would do full products instead of sample products. They took off. They worked with an influencer. I know they worked with the Kardashians. They did all that kind of stuff. They sold for a half billion dollars. One, he got the timing right. Two, he had subscription. And three, he was able to scale it. So I actually think that you can take e-commerce products or you may have an e-commerce product and if you can make a subscription out of that, it can increase the enterprise value. There's a caveat to subscription revenue is that sometimes your cost of acquisition doesn't give you an immediate payback. The company I told you about that we sold to GoDaddy with a million domains, we lost two and a half million in the first year. We sold 2 million in the second year, a million and a half the third year, half million in the fourth year. We broke even the fifth year. We went up to a million sixth year. We went to 2 million the seventh year. We went to 3 million profit the third year, and then we sold for an absolutely crazy multiple. Speaker 1: But to do that, you had to have funding or investors or something, and that's a sticking point for a lot of entrepreneurs when they're in that start space. They don't know how to raise the money, or they don't have the money. They don't have a rich uncle. They don't have the credit. So how do these people that see these big opportunities, how can they execute if they can't get the funding together? And they may have the best idea in the world. They just don't know how to do it, or they don't know where to go, or they don't know the process. What's something that people that are just crushing it, but they're just hampered by cash flow? Or in your case, you need a five-year runway. Amazon had the same thing. 10, 15 years before they actually turned a profit, something like that. How do you overcome that? Speaker 2: Okay, so we have two separate scenarios here we're going to talk about. The first is you're in start mode. And again, the first section of the book is start. The third section of start is money. So we get into multiple ways you can raise money. All right. The first thing is generally no investors are going to back your startup unless it's proven. All right, so it does require sometime your own personal investments. Speaker 1: The business is proven or you're proven. Sometimes in Silicon Valley, they will back someone who's proven even though the business is not proven. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's correct. It can go that way sometimes. So what you need to do really is prove your concept. And I suggest that first-time entrepreneurs just starting out pick a certain stage gate where that's that they've proven their concept. It could even be an MVP, minimum viable product. It could be a product that you sell 100 units on Kickstarter. I don't care what it is, right? But we want to be able to prove that product and then we want to start to approach investors. And we can do that through pitch competitions. We can do that by joining an incubator. You would be surprised at how many Free resources there are out there for startups. We do an incubator here in South Florida at FAU. I do one at FAU and I also do one at FSU. I'm sorry, NSU. And it's called the Allen Levan Center and they have a free incubator, a 10-week course. We kick off the course and we do a mini business plan, a four sticky note business plan. We talk about that in the book. But they can also help you with government funding. They can introduce you to angel investors. They do a pitch competition. You can join pitch competitions and win money for your startup. And even if you lose in a pitch competition, what does it hurt? You're getting yourself out there. So early on, money is critical. It is the oxygen in the room. So I talked about the way you can attract people by giving up equity in your idea and your vision. I will say this, nothing motivates more than success. So, it's going to be important to sell a vision to attract people to your startup. That's absolutely critical. And one of my favorite chapters in the book is Customer Funded Startup. We have a company. That was running out of money. It was a startup. They literally got a three-year contract, $450,000 payment up front for three years of services. You can actually do this. If you do a subscription, you could have paid the 12 months up front. Another technique is to talk to your suppliers. Like quite frankly, the interest rates now for e-commerce companies for inventory is very high. Once you begin to establish a little bit of credibility with your supplier, go back to them and say, okay, look how I've delivered. We have one supplier right now that's giving us credit for 30 days after the product arrives in the United States. We designed them all here and we shipped them from China. And we pay them 30 days after the product has arrived. Okay? Speaker 1: That's huge. Speaker 2: We were at HSN last week. We're already blowing up on QVC. And I was talking to the person I'm working with, I'm saying, hey, because they want a lot of units and BarkBox wants a lot. They just keep asking for more and more of our products for paw.com. And we're just, we're blowing out distribution in 10 different ways for paw.com, which is another chapter in the book. But we're talking about HSN. They wanted product too. And I'm like, you know what's cool? If we could somehow get a deal with them where they'll give us the airtime once the inventory arrives, we know how many units we're going to sell and we can sell 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 units in a show. We'll sell those out before we even have to pay the supplier. Wouldn't that actually be cool? Customer-funded startup. I actually, you know, I've used some techniques, but in this book, we brought in, I told you, over 200 interviews of authors, experts, and serial entrepreneurs. We brought in John Mullins, who wrote the book, Customer-Funded Startup, and he helped us with that chapter in the book. Speaker 1: I've actually done something similar that I had a collectibles business doing trading cards and collectibles and we got into a point where we needed money for inventory and I couldn't negotiate with the supplier so what I had a list of at that time maybe two or three thousand customers. I created a membership called the Gold Club. It was $99 for a year and I got them a membership card, a 10% discount and they got some other whoop-dee-doo first dibs on something and that did so well. I got like 300 of them to pay me You know, I raised 30 grand, which at that time, this is 20 something years ago, was significant. And I was like, this is pretty cool. How can I take these guys and raise up on another level? So I created a platinum club. That was $199 a year. You had to join the Gold Club first. And if you joined the Platinum Club, then you got some sort of special collectible as a bonus for signing up. It cost me a buck or two. And you got all this other stuff. And we raised money that way. And that's what funded the entire thing. I got into the internet business. I had a membership website. We were charging $19.95 a month. We had like 2,000 or 3,000 people paying for that. And at one point, I needed to raise some money for the physical product side of things. So I just went to those people and I said, I think it was $9.99. You know, this ended up biting me in the ass a little bit down the road, but $9.99 for a lifetime membership. So I knew my customer lifetime value was like 4.2 or something. So I knew there's 80, 85 bucks or whatever it was at that time is what their lifetime value is. But I charged them 99.95 upfront and then I was able to scale and do it that way. So you got to get creative is what Colin's saying here. And that's what he talks about in the book is you just can't go the traditional route and you got to be creative in your way of thinking. There's lots of ways to do this. There's hundreds of ways to do this. And those things, it's guerrilla marketing. And, you know, like you said earlier, the day you stop selling is the day you start dying. You got to do these things right. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And remember, I still want to say the number one thing you need to do scale and story. So I can talk about that. Speaker 1: Actually, I'm sorry. Let's go back to that. Yeah, you said the number one thing on scale. Let's talk about that. Speaker 2: So let me take you back to 1979 and a gentleman named Joe Foster who founded Reebok. He got to $9 million in sales. He applies for Three shoes, he applies to Runner's World for reviews. He wins three five-star reviews, okay? Isn't this interesting? Reviews. How important are reviews to your listeners? Absolutely critical. So, what's old again is new again. He then, and by the way, he's been in business now for 19 years with his brother, Jeff, okay? This is a chapter in the book. We interviewed him. He's got these shoes, these reviews. He wins these three five-star reviews. The next thing he does is he goes into the US because of the reviews. He got the attention of Paul Fireman who decides to distribute Reebok shoes in the United States. So now he wins a distributor. By the way, it took him 11 years of rejection to get a distributor in the United States. Okay, there was no Amazon back then. All right, there was no buy it on the e-commerce site or whatever. There was no Reebok.com. Exactly. So we got the distribution agreements and then One of his designers says, you know what? This thing in LA is taking off. It's called aerobics. Aerobics for women. Now, back then, nobody wanted to build anything but running shoes. It was all runner's world, running shoes. Reebok was in the running business. He even had a little bit of a fight with his partner about this. But they decided to design these aerobics shoes. So what Joe Foster calls this is going into the white space. Go where no one's gone before. This might start to sound a little familiar. Okay, and I'm gonna give you a couple examples in a minute. Well, guess what? Twelve months later, somebody wears their shoes on public television. Jane Fonda wore Reebok shoes on public television. And I asked Joe, Joe, did you pay Jane Fonda? And he said, no, no. Jane Fonda had to pay for her own shoes. Well, guess what? They went from $9,000,000 after 19 years in four years to $900,000,000 eventually being built in mid 80s. The eclipsed Nike is the largest shoe company in the world. It was phenomenal to see how he did that and caught the big break. We detail it in the book. But can you replicate that? That's the question. Reviews. What's old again is new again. Reviews. Influencer. Influencers. What's old again is new again. But what's also I think what's old again and new again is what he talks about going into the white space. At paw.com, Okay, at paw.com, we design multiple products. We design patents, design patents, utility patents. We do a lot of very interesting products. Every time we've tried to copy We get destroyed. We did. We did. You know, we have almost a million customers. So we did vitamins for dogs. They're not that you could get vitamins from other companies. This is what we literally sold 37 memberships. And I think I was one of those 37 memberships. We did. CBD for dogs that didn't work out and so I killed that. And then we did shampoos for dogs, which are really nice shampoos, by the way. They are human grade shampoos. I'm making the best pitch I can for you to buy these shampoos because we have a 100-year supply of shampoos at pod.com. All right. Now, let me tell you what we did well. We invented new categories. We trademarked those names for those products. We patented those products. We invented memory foam pup rugs, memory foam car seats with clasps, and also waterproof blankets, and they took off. They just absolutely took off. We went into the white space. We created a moat around that white space by getting the patents and trademarks for those products as well. So don't just do it. You got to protect it. You do have to take on the legal and all those, you know, you have to take on the legal work. You have to do that. And by the way, again, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm going to caveat this, but If you don't know the products can be successful, you don't necessarily go need to spend five, 10,000 to patent the product. You can wait till it launches and then get the patent rights in the United States. If you want global patent rights, which we did for a number of our products, we would actually apply for the patents before the product even launches. And that's necessary for Europe and some other countries as well. Again, I don't want to get into that. The book talks about that and we interview lawyers for the book as well to really try to help you figure that out. So, what he did and what other companies have done, what Pod.com has done is try to create an X-factor. What do you have, Kevin, that's unique and different that no one else has, okay? And if you can figure that out, Then you can win in your market. What he had, he had aerobics shoes. And by the way, before I even knew Joe Foster, I bought a pair of Reebok CrossFit shoes because they specialized in the CrossFit shoes at the time. I know that some things have changed recently, but they specialized in that. So I bought those shoes because they went into the space that other companies were not playing in. Okay, think of Domino's Pizza, 30 minutes or free. They had to re-engineer their entire organization to be able to ship pizza fast. All right, think about national car rental. Just show up and get into a car. They had to redesign that entire process. It was not easy for either of those two companies to make those big changes, but they did that. Now, national car rental leads the market. Think of Warby Parker. Warby Parker is killing it. They own the glasses market online. They are killing it. And we happen to own a competitor to Warby Parker, which is called Hip Optical. And now, so we're coming into this and Hip Optical, by the way, is more edgier designs, more design forward kind of stuff, a little bit of a younger audience than Warby Parker and whatnot. But that's not enough to be a differentiator. That's not an X factor. We figured out our X-Factor against Warby Parker because we located a factory right in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It cost about $3 to $4 million to build this factory. And now we can manufacture glasses and lenses within 24 hours. So we have store locations. You have online. If you're in the state of Florida, you can go to hipoptical.com, order glasses, and you can get them in 24 hours. It takes over a week to 10 days to get your glasses from Warby Parker. That's an X Factor. What do you have that's unique and different that your competitors do not have? What is the bottleneck in your industry that you're solving? If you can figure out your X Factor, and we've done that for many, many companies, the dominoes will fall and you will just win the marketplace. And on Amazon, it's absolutely critical. Because I'll tell you this, you want to be the king of the hill on Amazon. Do you remember that game, Kevin? The king of the hill and you're pushing the, you know, you're saying, I'm the king of the hill and someone pushes you off the hill. Well, when you're on Amazon, You got to be the king of the hill. That means more and better reviews than anyone else. Have a unique and different products than everyone else. If you come in and say, you know, someone's got all these reviews, I'm just going to make it cheaper. I'm telling you right now, that's a flawed strategy. It's a failing strategy. A few people might get a little bit of short-term success on that. But if you can come into Amazon with a unique and different product that you've patented, my gosh, you're going to kill it. Speaker 1: I mean, you hit on two things there. Innovation and marketing are the keys to success in business. And a lot of people don't realize that. You just gave perfect examples of that. And the other thing that you just said is that, and this bugs the hell out of me, is that the younger generation, they think this is something brand new. This is the new silver shiny thing of a way of marketing. And like, no, everything that's old is new again. It's just new technology, new way of doing it. And one of the best things you can do is go back and study the people from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. Yeah, they didn't have the internet, but they were doing it the old-fashioned hard way. And those principles of psychology, principles of business, all that still matters today. And if you roll that into what you can do with the technology today, you can skyrocket. And what I think another mistake you've kind of hit on too here, and you've done this in the book, is that I Illustrate this in the book is that a lot of people, they read self-help books or they read from advisors who are consultants in this industry and they write a book. And I think that's the wrong way to do it. The better way is to actually study people that have done it and read their biographies or read their stories. And that's what you've done in your book. It's like, would you say there's 50 some odd of those in there or 200 interviews, but you said there's like 50 something stories or whatever. Yeah, that's where you're going to learn. That's where you're going to learn and that's seeing how others have done it, not by listening to some consultant that has an MBA from Harvard that's never done this stuff and maybe talk to a couple people and come out with his own way. That's a mistake I think a lot of people make. And so, I think what you've done here is brilliant and I'm glad that this book is taking off and I hope that, you know, a couple of years from now, you're in line at the grocery store and someone taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, are you Colin? I read your book and now, you know, I was doing $600,000 a year and now I just sold the company for $80 million. You know, that's one of the biggest rewards you could get. Changing people's lives and showing them the right way to do things. So back when it comes to exiting, what are a couple things around exiting that we can talk about real quick that people need to be aware of? Speaker 2: You're going to want to position your company about two years before you go to exit. All right. The first thing to recognize is that bad things do happen and timing is half the value. So what are the signs that we are in a really good market? Let's think back in 2021. GameStop stock going out of control for absolutely nothing to do with fundamentals, maybe a sign. How about NFTs, people paying a half million dollars for a cartoon ape? Is that a sign? Right? So we're going to want to look when a market's moving along and it's in there 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years, we're going to want to look for froth in the market. And I often say that when the market's hot, it's time to exit stage left. It's okay to sell your company. Let other people make money from that company. Just exit stage left. Okay? Early on, and I mean when you start your company, set up a virtual drive, have all your documents uploaded. That's absolutely critical. All right. About a year or two before you consider selling or even sooner, begin to think of compiling a list of potential acquirers. I know at Dot Club, we said we wanted GoDaddy Registry to buy our company and we made that happen and we did not use a broker. Now, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't use a broker. I think in a lot of cases, it's a good idea to use a broker and we've used brokers for many, many companies. But we're going to want to put a list together of these companies. And I want you to break them into three categories. I want you to break them into cash flow buyers, sort of generally private equity, right? I want you to make a list of competitors who can buy your company. And I want you to make a list of strategic buyers. Now, if you don't know of any of these companies on this list, that's okay. Let's just open the spreadsheet up and let's just start. With that, okay, I would often get on all of my companies, this cash flow buyer that call us up once a week, at least once a week, we get a call. Even now, we're still getting a lot of calls on paw.com. And they tend to be the problem with cash flow buyers is you're going to be based on an earnings multiple. And what's worse in today's environment is that earnings multiple They're looking at leverage. Most, I'm not saying all, but the vast majority of private equity firms like to buy companies and leverage the cash flow so they don't have to make that full investment. They typically will do about 70% leverage. I know it varies based on the market. Maybe it's actually, I've been hearing that it's been tougher for private equity right now. They've been having to leverage a little bit less. But if you're going to be selling to them, And your interest rate is 11%, 12%. Already, just for them to break even, you'd have to have 12% return on that acquisition price. So the reality is they're going to be looking at about 20% on an e-commerce, maybe 25% because of the nature of e-commerce, the way it goes up and down. And that's like four times earnings. So that's the kind of company that I like to say, if you're in trouble, you want to get rid of your company, just go do the deal. But even if you're in that scenario, I would still encourage you to talk to your competitors because If you sell to your competitor, they can eliminate duplication of costs and you'll get paid somewhere between what it costs for you to sell the company on your own and the benefit that goes to the competitor that buys your company. They get an arbitrage. They're not going to give you a full arbitrage, but they generally will give you somewhere between 25% to 50% of their arbitrage, okay? The third buyer are the strategic buyers. And these are my favorite buyers because these buyers will take your product, your company, and they'll leverage it with their existing customer base and increase the earnings based on that leverage. Okay? If we were to sell Paw.com to Petco all of a sudden now, All the products that we developed at paw.com could be sold into Petco and all of Petco products could be sold online at paw.com and they could get a really nice lift. Now, that's strategic. Now, they're not going to give you full value for strategic. They will give you somewhere in between. In my lifetime, I sold myself off twice. Once in the late 90s with a company called Internet Direct and the second time in 2008 with Hostopia. And in both cases, my job was to buy companies. Now, I'm at a Fortune 500 company here in 2008 and I bought about 10, 15 companies. And I'm telling you right now, the mentality that they have in these larger companies is all about how can I add bottom line to my company instead of necessarily looking at your bottom line. If you can make the case to We could go on for a long time here because we're just touching. We're just getting started. If you can make that case, then you can get a premium for your company. I can keep going on and on and on, but I'll leave one more here. We've got like six or seven or eight different techniques you can use to sell your company. Everything from getting an exit coach, somebody to coach you through the exit process. Sometimes it's a multi-year process. So to positioning your company for sale, taking yourself off the salary, replacing yourself with another CEO, but I want to leave you with this last one on exit. Check your ego at the door. This is a time for you to step back and promote your people. Your people are the assets. Now, this might be hard for some of you to understand, but most investors, most buyers think of entrepreneurs as a little kooky. When we bought those 15 companies or so at Internet Direct and 15 companies at Hostopia, I don't think there was one entrepreneur that stuck with the acquisition over a year or two. I'm telling you. And it's also not these big corporations are not necessarily environments that entrepreneurs wanted to work at. I worked for three years for a Fortune 500 company. It was hell. It was very hard. So buyers know this. So the more your business can run and act independently without you, The higher the valuation and the easier it is for them to migrate that company into their company. We cover so many different techniques in this book on how you can maximize value on exit. If you are thinking about exiting, that would be a section of the book I would suggest you jump to and just really get into it. But I also often will tell people, well, the day you open your company, think about your exit. Think about who to buy it, visualize it, get that hard drive, that virtual drive set up and prepare your company from day one. Prepare the story on exit. In exit, we talk about the story, the people, the money and the systems on exit. We cover it all. And believe it or not, in each area, you can maximize the value of your company by positioning the company correctly. Speaker 1: I agree. Build to exit from day one and I'm actually doing that on one of my companies right now. Very specifically, we built it to exit. Real quick, we don't have but a few minutes here. On repeat, a lot of times people sell their business and we're entrepreneurs, we have ADD. We can't just sit around and do nothing. So, what are a couple of things that on the repeat that you recommend people look at when they've exited, they've taken a bunch of chips off the table, maybe they take a little break and go play a little bit, buy a couple of nice things, and then what's the right mentality moving forward to do this again? Speaker 2: All right, so one of the concepts I have in the book, it's called laddering up your wealth, right? We talked about the benefits of selling earlier, the tax benefits. The idea is to start, scale, exit, take some money off the table, repeat. Instead of delegating responsibilities, not tasks, why not consider delegating companies? Okay, this might be a little more radical. Why don't we take The people who are successful at help are the leaders that we used in scale that helped us build the companies and partner with our ex-employees, especially if they're working for the company is sold. I don't recommend hiring anyone. Because I don't think that's ethically correct. But if they've already moved on to another company, it's fair game. We're going to want to track our A players. I do that through LinkedIn all the time. I told you at the beginning, we hired someone who would work for me 20 years ago. And we hired him a year ago and we gave him 10% of the company and he's working for a lot less salary than what he was getting paid for. Another thing I talk about is dress for success. This is something a lot of your listeners might not have thought of, but you are a brand. And I don't mean literally dress for success, because if you know me, I'm always wearing the same shirt every day, the polo, black, you know, jeans, whatever. I'm talking about online. I'm talking about your LinkedIn. I'm talking about the front page of Google. You know, when I first set out on this project with Forbes, they asked me to change my name. My name is Colin Campbell. There's a hockey player that's Colin Campbell. There's doctors, famous doctors. There's Lady Colin Campbell. There's so many Colin Campbell's out there that they said, change your name. You want to be on the front page of Google for your e-commerce products, but you also want to be on the front page of Google for your brand, your name. The next thing, which if it's very hard to do, I know it's very hard, but if you can get a Wikipedia page about you, there's high notability requirements. I was fortunate that someone did that for me 5, 6, 7 years ago when we were doing .club and we're getting enough notability. That can be a breakthrough as well because we want to really set ourselves up to use OPM when we do the next play. And I'm not suggesting to use OPM when we test our products. Let's get that company up. I invest 100% into the startup. Whatever it costs to get the startup to a point in time where we've proven the concept. Then I bring in the mom test. If I think this company is safe enough for my mom to invest in it, To scale, then I'll let others invest in it. And in giving an example of that, we raised $7 million of the $12 million to launch Dot Club. And my mom was one of those investors. By the way, we had to raise $7 million in 30 days. I did it with my LinkedIn contacts. And talking about dressing for success, we did a private placement memorandum. We filed a Reg D with the government. We did all the funding. And if this is a little bit confusing, don't worry. It's all in the book too. It's all laid out very clearly. But when people receive that documents and they saw that we were raising money and by the way, no revenue in the company at all. None. I sent it to 36 contacts. We closed 27 of them on LinkedIn. And a lot of that has to do with reputation. I talk a lot about reputation in the book. But if you dress for success, you have the right documents, you have the right signage for your project, people look at you in LinkedIn, they see your Wikipedia, they type in your name and you come up on Google on the first page. That's why my name's Colin C. Campbell. It's not Colin Campbell. Now, when you type in Colin C. Campbell, 1, 2, 3, I'm on the front page. So, there's just a few techniques I talk about and repeat. Today, I have over 10 companies I'm a principal shareholder of. I'm invested in 20 companies. I'm involved in 20 companies. Maybe it's a little too much and I talk about that too in the book, you know, that entrepreneurship is a drug. Sometimes we go a little too far, serial entrepreneurs, and I think some of you can relate to me when I talk about entrepreneurship being a drug, and you do get a fix out of it, akin to a blackjack player like myself who gets a fix out of playing blackjack at the casino. So you do have to find ways to temper that, but for the most part, you can begin to use other people's money. You can scale companies, but the key The key in repeat is you need to have really good people. You need to have really good stories. You need to have really good systems. By the way, you apply the systems to every company. Every company we have does two-day strategic planning, goal setting, daily sales huddles. We do it across the board. We expand distribution. We do profiling. We do all of it. So you have great people, great systems. You have the money, other people's money to grow these and you scale them quickly now because you want to scale based on after it's been proven, it's simply like throwing fuel on a fire. So it's just put fuel on it, it explodes. That's what investors really want. And you have to have a great story for every one of them. You get those four components right on repeat. You can do it over and over again like we have. And we continue to expand and grow. Speaker 1: Awesome stuff, Colin. So if you want to get the book, this is the book. If those of you watching on YouTube here, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, you can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, I'm sure, maybe your local bookstore. Next time you're flying, check out the local airport. They may have it sitting there right there for you. If people want to reach out and learn more, how can they follow you? Is it on LinkedIn or is it, how would they get in touch or follow you if they want to know more of what you're up to, Colin? Speaker 2: You can reach me on LinkedIn, Colin C. Campbell. Of course, I'm happy to connect with you. Also, I do a live show on Clubhouse every Friday at 2 o'clock Eastern and LinkedIn audio at 3 o'clock Eastern. I do the LinkedIn audio. We're doing an open mic. So if you're reading the book and you're stuck on something, you have a question, you can come on stage. Or maybe you're an expert at starting, scaling, exiting, repeating, and you come to the show and share with us these live shows, share with others your experiences. But the way to really connect in my ecosystem is to go to www.startup.club and sign up to our mailing list. We have great speakers. We'd love to have you on, Kevin. And by the way, We got to partner up on Start-Scale-Exit-Repeat for Amazon e-commerce stores. That would be a great one. Speaker 1: I think we have a few things to talk about here. Right now, I want to say thanks, Colin, for spending the time. You're a busy guy. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing. I think this has been very helpful to a lot of people. Make sure you go out and get Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. I bought it. I endorse it. You've probably seen it. If you're reading my newsletter, you've seen me plug it in the newsletter. Go back and listen to this podcast a second time because Colin was dropping a lot of nugget bombs there. So make sure you do that. And Colin, look forward to seeing you again soon. Appreciate it, man. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I'd love to come back on. Speaker 1: Great stuff with Colin in this discussion. You know, one of the ways you can level up is to surround yourself with people that are a step or two ahead of you. Colin is a few steps ahead of me, even though he's a little bit younger than I am. He's a few steps ahead of me in business. We've both got a lot of experience and a lot of things that we share in common. So it's always great to speak with someone that's been there, done that and understands it all. If you haven't gotten a copy of his book, make sure you get that Start-Scale-Exit-Repeat. You can grab it on Amazon. Or wherever you like to buy your books or get the audio, audible or audio version of it is also great. Like you said, it's read by the guy that does all the Budweiser commercials. Colin is an amazing entrepreneur, really smart guy, very well connected and someone you should definitely follow on LinkedIn or Clubhouse if you're using the Clubhouse app and join him for one of those talks like he does on Fridays. Great stuff. We'll be back again next week with another excellent guest. I hope you enjoyed this and are having a great start to the new year. Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com and also don't forget the virtual event is coming up. The virtual BDSS event is coming up February 21st and 22nd. You can do it from anywhere in the world. Go to BillionDollarSellerSummit.com to get more information on that. It's an incredible lineup of speakers. You don't want to miss this event. And before I leave you today, I've got some words of wisdom for you. You know, if you get caught in a storm, the way you survive is make sure you're holding tennis balls and not eggs. If you get caught in the middle of a storm, make sure you're holding tennis balls and not eggs. Think about that for a second, how that applies to your business. And while you're doing that, have a great week and we'll see you again next Thursday. I'm wisdom.