Million Dollar Solo Businesses: How to Thrive Without a Team? | Elaine Pofeldt | MMP #022

Million Dollar Solo Businesses: How to Thrive Without a Team? | Elaine Pofeldt | MMP #022 Speaker 1: Well, probably the most important is can you make a sale? If you think you want to be an entrepreneur, but you cannot sell, then you need to do a little work on that. Unknown Speaker: You're watching The Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Kevin King: Mr. Norm, welcome back. Welcome to everybody out there that's listening to another week. It's Tuesday. A new edition of The Marketing Misfits Podcast has just came out. Thanks for joining us. Norm, I'm glad you're here too. This wouldn't be the same if you weren't here. Norm Farrar: Well, yeah, somebody's got to make sure that you're in line, you know. Kevin King: Someone's got to hit the record button, you know. Norm Farrar: Exactly, exactly. That's my duty. Unknown Speaker: You've given me one responsibility. Kevin King: Every once in a while, get a word in edgewise. Someone's got to do that. Norm Farrar: Yeah, that's my job. Hey, we're getting some content. I just looked at YouTube and the podcast. It just seems like it was yesterday that we launched it, but we're already on to our 14th, 15th podcast. Yeah. Kevin King: Yeah. There's some really good episodes. If you just found Marketing Misfits and you haven't We've gone back and listened from episode one all the way. There's some really strong content and we've got some cool stuff coming too. Norm and I just recently got together up in the Great White North. Well, it's not white right now. It's the Great Hot North. Norm Farrar: Exactly. Kevin King: North of Toronto and I had a powwow. That was really fun. Coming out to the Norm Castle and Connie making cinnamon buns for us and making sure we're well hydrated and well fed. That was all great. Norm Farrar: Cigars, Dallas, the whole thing. Kevin King: Cigars, exactly. Dallas, the dog. A lot of you know that it's in the logo that Norm Norm is a huge cigar smoker and I smoke some too. And Norm, when I got up there, he had this incredible treat for me. So I get up and he's like, Norm, Norm's like, all right, we're going to go outside, grab some Coke Zeros and smoke a cigar tonight after we do our brainstorming. So we're in there six, seven, eight hours, brainstorming on different things that we're working on. We go out to his balcony, it overlooks this big lake, get nice views of the moon and all kinds of animals and frogs and everything, birds. Really cool. Norm whips out this cigar, puts it down on the table and says, this one's for you. Normally, we smoke the same thing. I'll share two of mine, he'll share two of his, but there's one of this thing. It's in a wrapper that looks like something my mom would have in her hoarding pile from a newspaper from the 1970s that she's been saving because she's going to read it one day. My mom really does that. But it's all wrapped. Norm's like, Kevin, this is pre-Castro. It's a pre-Castro cigar. I'm saving it for you. Castro went into power, was it 1959? So I'm like, I can't smoke this. This should be for you. He's like, don't worry. I already smoked one. I saved this one for you. We're talking a little bit. It's like, what would this thing cost if you went out there to buy it? Norm's like, at least $1,000. I'm like, no way. I can't do this. Norm's like, just do it. It's for you. Gift for you. I'm like, all right. I start to smoke this thing. It ruined me. You go to the best three-star Michelin restaurant in the world. And then you come back and you eat, you know, macaroni and cheese or something that you cooked and didn't boil water or something with ketchup. It just, it wasn't the same. Every cigar after that, even though how good the cigar was, was like, man, just nothing compares. It was freaking amazing. I really appreciate that, Norm. That was very kind of you. Smoked on that for like an hour and a half. Just one of the best smokes. What's that, 70-year-old tobacco or something in there? Norm Farrar: Something like that, yeah. Kevin King: Something like that, yeah. It was amazing. I appreciate that. Norm Farrar: I got to give a shout out to my buddy who gave that to me. It was Ron McDonald. He gave me a humidor with about 10 or so pre-Castro cigars. They've been sitting in my humidor for quite a long time, but in his humidor since his family moved from Cuba to the States. Kevin King: Yeah, that was incredible. That was an experience that can't be repeated, I don't think. Norm Farrar: I'm glad you liked it. I gave it to the right person. Kevin King: You gave it to the right person. That's right. I smoked until I think my fingers were burning. I was like, I don't want to like, you know, sometimes people smoke a cigar down to it's like half an inch or an inch. I'm like, all the way till like my fingers are burning and then one side of the fingers burns like that's not enough. The whole thing's gotta like burn all my finger and then I'm putting it down. I'm getting every last puff out of this thing I can. But that was really cool. You know what else is really cool is our guest today. We've got Elaine on the show. Elaine Pofeldt. If you haven't heard of Elaine, I think she's a journalist. She'll tell us her story, but she's been in journalism for a while and written a couple of very successful books, hosts and moderates a lot of things. She's all about this one-person million-dollar business. We're going to ask her about that. Her philosophy is that. I'm going to be interested to see what she has to say about now. The old way was one person could create a million-dollar business by utilizing the Internet. I'm sure she's got some other tactics she'll talk about, too. But what about now the one-person billion with a B-dollar business using AI and stuff? It's going to be interesting to see what she has to say about where everything is going. It's going to be exciting. Norm Farrar: It's going to be a great show. Our buddy Ben Leonard recommended her, and she's been on the Lunch with Norm podcast as well. So let's bring her on. Let's see if I can do this. This is part of my job. I just have to press a button. There we go. Hello, Elaine. Speaker 1: Hello. It's so nice to be, well, I don't want to say back because it's a different show, Norm, but it's so nice to reconnect with you. And Kevin, so great to see you. I'm so happy to be here and I'm always delighted to talk about million-dollar one-person businesses and even more delighted to talk about billion-dollar one-person businesses. So it should be a fun convo. Norm Farrar: Yeah, I can't wait. But before we do that, you want to just give us a bit of your background? Speaker 1: Sure. Well, I've been a journalist for a long time and I write about entrepreneurship and I'm also a book author. I wrote about million-dollar one-person businesses in my book, The Million-Dollar One-Person Business, and a new book called Tiny Business, Big Money, which is the sequel where I look at these businesses. Once they've added one or two people because of necessity, how do they keep all the benefits of location independence and I'm a senior contributor to Forbes, and I write for a number of business publications. I used to be a senior editor at Fortune Small Business Magazine, so I've been pretty steeped in this world, and I seem to be addicted to it. I can't get enough of it. Kevin King: Have you ever been an entrepreneur yourself, or do you just cover it from the outside, or have you ever dabbled in anything? Speaker 1: Well, I've been self-employed for a number of years, and I've been a freelancer for a number of years. Almost 18 years actually. I've always had a full-time business and support a family that way. I would say I'm an entrepreneur-lite. I'm not a traditional scalable entrepreneur. I've been the longtime writing collaborator of Vern Harnish, who founded EO, and one of his books is Scaling Up. I have a foot in that world also and totally appreciate scale-ups and all of those things. I have four children. The last 20 years, one reason I did start my business was I was raising them. Three of them will be in college this fall. And so I'm scaling up a little bit. Norm Farrar: You just mentioned Vern Harnish. I was a member of EO when it was YEO. Way back in the day. Started one of the original forms up here in Toronto. But for anybody, if you want to become a misfit, Learn to break the rules. This is an organization that still exists. It's called Entrepreneurial Organization. If you're in any major city or pretty much around the world, check it out. You have a What I call the forum, or they call the forum, where it's a group of just trusted people that you could go in. It's almost like a board of advisors and non-competing business. You can sit down and trust. My forum has been going for, this is the 28th year. Unknown Speaker: Wow. Speaker 1: That's beautiful though, that having that connection with other people on this same entrepreneurial journey is just incredible and incredibly valuable. Norm Farrar: Especially if you have the good times and the bad times, and even the ugly times. You've got somebody that will help. I remember, and don't want to get off your story at all, but I just remember that I had this horrible thing happen. I just talked to the guys in the forum, and this was a Sunday. We all got together at this, it was a golf course close by, and we all just got together and just worked it out. The information that I got was invaluable. Speaker 1: Well, you're making a very good point, Norm, which is there's no substitute for learning from other people or breaking through just the roadblocks that exist. I was talking with a friend this morning about this, how there are so many systems of new technologies and things that are so hard to cut through sometimes when you're trying to do things fast and energetically. And sometimes the only thing that can help you is another person. And I think the human, even though I write a lot about automation and outsourcing and things like that, the human connections are going to be so much more important in the future than ever before. It's kind of a counterintuitive point, but things like this, this podcast, where you're going right to your audience with information from the front lines, from other entrepreneurs, are so powerful because sometimes there's no one to ask. Sometimes there is no forum, but when you have these forums or informal groups of people that are helping you, you have to hold them tight because sometimes they could save you years of mistakes and stress and they're such a great source of emotional support too. Kevin King: What do you find the differences between, like you said, online forums or chat groups or WhatsApp or Facebook groups where people are helping each other versus going in person to, like Norm said, to this golf course and meeting in the boardroom or something in the golf course, having a mastermind at a mansion or something like that. What do you think the difference is for entrepreneurs between those two, or is there any difference? Speaker 1: There's definitely a difference. It's funny because my call right before this was with a team that I'm part of. It's called the Dave Alexander Center for Social Capital. This is aimed more at bigger businesses and scale-ups. It's about companies that put people first. I had been working with this team for over a year. They're in Scottsdale. I'm here in New Jersey. We had never met in person. We got there and we were on fire and we got more done in one day than we've probably gotten done, you know, in three meetings online. And it's not that you can't get them done, but when you have the benefit of nonverbal communication or just having a meal together and just relaxing and the ideas are flowing. I don't think there's any substitute for that. You can't always do it. And I think you'd miss out on a lot of valuable relationships if you only did things in person. I mean, you probably have friends all over the world at this point, thanks to videoconferencing. I do too. And it's really expanded my reporting. I wouldn't trade it. But if someone comes into New York City and wants me to come in on the train from New Jersey and meet them, I'll gladly do it because I know that the quality of that interaction will be different. And the thing with video conferencing and online meetings and things is there's a lot of speed, you know, where you don't have to wait till that next in-person meeting if you just want to hop on and talk about an idea. At least you could see each other's faces, WhatsApp, you know, on your phone you can put on the camera. I think we need a mix of both, really. And a lot depends, I think, on your preferences for communication. Also, my son communicates on Discord all the time with his friends, and they're perfectly happy doing that while they play a video game. I probably would not get that much out of Discord. I don't use it, but maybe I would. Who knows? So a lot is your preference as well. Norm Farrar: It's interesting that you say that because during a virtual meeting or meeting somebody in person, completely different scenario. But even when you get a transcript, so I use Fireflies, I get transcripts, completely strips any emotion out of it. If I send emails, so sometimes Kevin and I will go back and forth, completely If you miss the point of the email or the context of the email, I'll take it the wrong way, I'll shoot something back over to him, and then it takes you 10 times as long rather than getting on a video call, but actually meeting somebody in person. Just at the beginning, we were talking about Kevin coming over this weekend. We got so much done and some of the things were incredible that even if we were on a Zoom call, I don't think we would have got it done. Speaker 1: I agree. There were also other sensory cues. You were talking about smoking a stogie together. There are just certain things that if you're sitting around a fire or having a glass of wine together, whatever, there are other sensory elements to the engagement that trigger different parts of your brain and trigger a different flow of ideas. We need a whole repertoire of these communication tools, but definitely in-person is really important. We were all deprived of it during the pandemic and came to our own conclusions about how important it is. It's nice to still have the remote options for things because there are relationships that are now continuing with people that maybe would not have continued as much, but definitely we need them all. Norm Farrar: Now, a quick word from our sponsor, LaVanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it. Kevin King: That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right. It's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from. Norm Farrar: So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. Kevin King: I don't know, Norm. Coming to meet you in person, I had to watch you eat macaroni and cheese with ketchup on it. I don't know. Norm Farrar: Who doesn't eat macaroni and cheese with ketchup? Kevin King: If we were doing that on Zoom, I wouldn't have had to watch that display of eating. Putting ketchup on your good mac and cheese. Norm Farrar: You should be used to it. I ate dog food at your place. Kevin King: That's true. You did accidentally eat dog ice cream. So, Elena, what do you see? I mean, you've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and spent a lot of time with them. There's a lot of people out there that are like, I want to quit working for my business. I'm tired of working for somebody else and making them money. I'm going to go make my own money. They think they're cut out for entrepreneurship and they find out pretty quickly that they actually might not be. What do you see that if you're advising somebody that wants to get into entrepreneurship, whether it's a one-person band or they're going to start a company of four or five people or their partners or something, what do you say are some of the characteristics that you've seen that they need to either possess this inherently or they need to learn this? What do you see that really makes the good entrepreneur? Speaker 1: Well, probably the most important is can you make a sale? If you think you want to be an entrepreneur, but you cannot sell, then you need to do a little work on that. And I'm not talking about cold calling a zillion people. It could be you want to quit your job. Why don't you tell, confidentially reach out to some people in your network and say, Hey, I'm taking on consulting projects. Can you give me some advice? Where should I start? You don't want to hit them up for work, but just ask for advice. And then if they're in a position to help you and maybe are inclined to do it, they'll say, Hey, you know, we have this little side project. I don't know if this would interest you, or I have a friend who was just asking me for someone who can do X, Y, or Z. You can also register for some platforms like there are networks for fractional CFOs, for instance, or CMOs. Put yourself out there if you can without losing your job and see if you're even comfortable with that process because if money is not exchanged, it is not a business. Eventually, I mean, in a startup, maybe it won't be, but when I ran the Fortune Small Business Business Plan competition for five years, I had the opportunity to see a lot of businesses that are now successful at the ground floor and that are still in business. And we had amazing judges. It was Anne Winblad, Kay Koplowitz, Michael Greeley, some really celebrated venture capitalists. And what I found was they would almost always choose the businesses where the founders were selling, not just the people with the big ideas, but they had gotten some proof of concept. So that's what I would say to anybody. If you feel like, oh, that's like just sort of, it makes me squirm, I can't do it. And you won't do it, then you probably can't be an entrepreneur. If you feel that same way, but you will do it, and you'll say, but I don't want to do it, but I will do it because I want to do this business, then you can be an entrepreneur. Norm Farrar: Outside of the selling to that investor, to the bank, that's a big one, just sell the bank, you know, to invest in your company. But what are the traits in a business plan that stand out? Speaker 1: Well, innovation would be one of them, but not every business that succeeds is innovative. So if you're going to Silicon Valley or equity markets, they're probably looking for innovation and scalability. They want to make sure that this They're looking for things that can be sold beyond your little town and that it can be replicated in other markets. Sometimes they're looking for things like, say you launched it in Europe. Well, could this be launched in the US? That's another big ancillary market that they could then move it into and make back their investment and even more. So they're looking for an upside that you have not tapped into. They're probably looking for a lot of other things, You know, the numbers in your business plan make sense that you're not just making projections that are, they call it the hockey stick graph, you know, where everything just goes straight up and nothing bad ever happens to this business. They're looking at your relationships. They look at the person behind the startup. I mean, you probably lived in this world, Norm, you know, where they'll bet on the person and not on the plan as much because a certain type of person who has intangible qualities that they immediately recognize will They make any business successful. They make everything they do successful because they will find a way to make it happen. They're very resilient, bringing us back to our misfits mindset. And they won't go with the system. They'll find a way around it. They'll tunnel under it. They'll come up with a new system. But they'll say, I can do it, and I will do it, and they do do it. And for a different type of business plan, like a small business plan that you might bring to a banker, They're more risk averse. They want to make sure you're going to pay a loan off. So you want to show stable patterns in the business of consistent sales, of good fiscal management, of relationships with advisors who they may know or are very credible, who are behind you, highlight your team, people in your industry that really bring a lot of chops to the table, things like that, because you're talking to two different types of people. With the businesses I write about, the million-dollar one-person businesses, often they're not necessarily innovative in terms of being inventors of a product. Some of them are. They might do a direct-to-consumer product in e-commerce, for instance. But sometimes they're doing something other people are doing. They just put a different spin on it. And they don't really need a business plan because they're self-financing in the beginning. They may need it for their own planning purposes, but they're not really selling anybody with it. So that's a really long answer. Kevin King: Isn't innovation and marketing the foundation of all business, basically? Innovation doesn't always necessarily have to be technology. Some people think innovation is technology, but innovation can just be a totally different way of doing things or a totally different approach or something as well. Do you think those are the two fundamental underlying principles of all business? Speaker 1: Not necessarily because there are a lot of middle market firms. One of the biggest areas of Million-dollar, one-person businesses, professional services. You could have an accounting firm that is very innovative, that's using AI, that's doing a lot of cutting-edge technological things, or you could have one that's just excellent at execution. Maybe they've just nailed traditional execution really well, and they know how to build a great culture, how to get people really excited about it. But if you looked at it, they didn't really invent anything new. They're just doing it Whatever they do really well. That is a real business to me. They could be making millions of dollars in a scaled-up accounting firm. It is a real business, but I don't think they're necessarily innovative. You might not even want an accounting firm to be that innovative. You could be too innovative in certain industries. What we want them to do is do our tax returns, give us advisory on other financial things. We want them to know what they're doing. I think it is for many businesses, but not all. For entrepreneurial businesses, it is. Kevin King: Is there a difference between an entrepreneur and a business? I mean, I have not read your book, but the one person million dollar business, they take the example of what you just said, an accountant that's been working for a big accounting firm and says, I'm going to go out on my own. He did the route where he asked some people for consultancy and kind of felt the waters out. And he said, there's enough here where I can go hang my own shingle, work from home, or get a little office somewhere, and I'll be Kevin King accounting. But at that point, I might do a million dollars, but I have a job. I don't have a business. I mean, yeah, it's a business on paper, but it's not really scalable. It's not something I'm still, it's basically a job. If I'm a plumber, if I'm a, you know, I got to be there. If I'm not doing the work or my assistant's not doing the work, we're not making money. Is there a difference really in a business where you're working on the business, not in the business? What's your, what's your, what's your, how do you see all that or explain all that? Speaker 1: Well, in Tiny Business, Big Money, I looked at some of the businesses that would hire employees, right? They get to that stage, but they're keeping a lot of the benefits of the million-dollar one-person business, which is they're very tech-driven. A lot of times they'll use automation, virtual assistants, other routes to getting the work done than the entrepreneur doing it themselves, but it isn't having payroll yet. We're at all ever because some of them just don't want to have payroll. With the tiny business, big money, I looked at businesses that had the most money left over after making payroll with the caveat that you've got to research the cost. So I like data and I use for both of them. I use census data in the back of tiny business, big money. I have this chart where we did the math and Among businesses with fewer than five employees, the top one was casinos. It's riverboat casinos. I'm not recommending that one for obvious reasons. If you're in that industry, but that's a highly regulated industry, it's very hard to get into. But the second one was creamery butter manufacturing. And the average receipts per firm, this is with less than five employees, was $26.3 million. The average payroll is about $849,000. So receipts minus payroll was $25.4 million. I'm curious about that, right? Why is it so high? Maybe they have very high overhead. My guess is these are probably spinoffs of big dairy companies or something. They're organized as a separate LLC or something. But that's one I want to look into. Third one is ethyl alcohol manufacturing. 10.4 million average receipts per firm, average payroll 172,000 and change. So these are probably heavily automated, or maybe they're outsourced to an outsourced manufacturer, and there's one person. I'm the person in the book who makes the voice boxes for the Bears in Build-A-Bear workshop. He runs this company from his living room. He identified a chip maker. He also does those birthday cards where it sounds like Elvis Presley singing. Basically, it's all outsourced. The innovation is more in the business model. He's not the guy who owns the means of production. He re-envisioned what it is to be a manufacturer, but he's not the only person doing that sort of remote manufacturing. So you could say that they're all innovative in certain ways, and a lot of times the owner doesn't do the work of the business. Like if they have a team of virtual assistants, a lot of them are overseas and they're able to do time arbitrage and make the most of different time zones and things. Maybe the innovation is in that, like not doing a typical employee business, but doing it without employees and maybe using a lot of technology or AI to get things done. Kevin King: The one-person million-dollar business is not one guy wearing all the hats. He might wear a bunch of hats, but it basically means there's no payroll or no employees and everything is outsourced to VAs or to partnerships with people. Not everything, but a lot of the stuff. That's how you define that. Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it has no payroll. It's the census definition. It's called the non-employer business, which is just so technical. So I don't use that. But basically, the idea is they have no employees. And when I first started writing about this, it was probably about 2012. It was almost like these were an afterthought. But I notice now the Chamber of Commerce, the Census Bureau are kind of celebrating them more because I think what is being realized is Among the people founding these non-employer businesses, two of the fastest growing groups are women and people of color. These are both groups that have had trouble getting access to capital. You usually need capital to run payroll because the day is going to come when a customer paid you late or something and you have to run payroll or you're going to get in trouble with the state. So I look at them as a national treasure because there's so much more attention now to trying to find more inclusive ways to fund businesses. So imagine if some of these really strong highly profitable non-employer businesses started getting networked into the sources of capital that they need. They could become employers or even scale-ups if they wanted to and they had the right kind of idea. But even so, What it also does is there are people like me who want to, you know, I was a mother. I wanted to be home when my kids came home from school. I worked from home. There's lots of people like that. Now it's more popular with fathers too. Now we're in an era of paternity leave and things, but people need to work. They need to have a roof over their head. They need to have food in their refrigerator. So if you know how to really amplify your revenues and your profits, You can have those things which are very elusive in today's world of very high rents, high interest rates on your mortgage, $6 loads of bread, you know, the things that require us all to make more money than we would probably rather make and if we want to have time with the people that we love. Norm Farrar: There's something not to do. We have an agency. A few years ago, somebody called me up and they were talking about they wanted to get into Amazon. They wanted to create a private label brand. At that time, it was my agency to get them through it, a managed service. They were just going to pay me. I was going to go and try to get them onto Amazon. The guy had sold his house. He had literally sold his house, sold his truck. And the reason he was doing this is because a member of his family had cancer. And he said, so will you help me out? And I'm sitting there all emotional on this call going, no, I can't help. You're just passing all that over to me. And if I fail, I'm going to get killed. And by the way, don't use that money. You need that money. You can't use money that's in your house. This should be disposable income or get an investor or find somebody, but don't shoot yourself in the foot. You might have the greatest idea, but if it's not implemented properly or something happens, you're done. Speaker 1: A lot of people do it on the side. I think that's the smartest way to go for most people. I know there's a whole culture of all-in, but very few people are at the stage of life where they can just quit everything, go live in a business accelerator and never go home. People have families. They have other responsibilities, the kids in college, whatever it is. I think if you do it gradually, it is a little frustrating because entrepreneurs have a bias to action, and we talked about that earlier. If you're the kind of person that is so excited about what you're doing that you almost can't help but sell it, well, you're an entrepreneur, you know, and you may not be successful at it, but if you have that That energy, but at the same time, you have to rein yourself in on certain things because you won't have enough runway if you spend all your available capital. First of all, you'll probably spend too much money on the business. It's better not to have that much and to have that constraint and have to be really resourceful. Maybe I could get an advisor to advise me for free in the beginning and then later bring them in as an employee, or maybe I could just ask a friend about this and only hire people when you really need to. Only pay for things when you need to. Operate from your house like a lot of people do now. Don't get an office space yet. Wait until you really have money coming in. You're much better off anyway because you'll become a better operator. That's one of the things I have learned from these businesses. I didn't include people. I verify revenues unless I know the person really well and have reported them many times. They're very profitable. Kevin King: And now a word from one of our sponsors, one of Norm and I's favorite tools, Stack Influence. Norm Farrar: Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first-page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help. Stack Influence pushes high-volume external traffic sales to Amazon listings using micro-influencers, and guess what? You only have to pay with your products. They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top-category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products. Right now is the best time to get started with Stack Influence to crush it during this holiday season. Kevin King: That's right, Norm. Sign up today at stackinfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits, that's right, Misfits, M-I-S-F-I-T-S to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to stackinfluence.com right now. Speaker 1: Profits are important. I know people try to minimize them to lower their tax bill, but you do need to be thinking about that too. And if you're spending all your money, you will not be profitable and you won't have a lot of sustainability in the business. And I mean, I know you are You know what you're talking about with entrepreneurship. You really want to build something sustainable, not just something that's going to crash and burn in a few years. Kevin King: What does pretty profitable mean? If someone's thinking about jumping into entrepreneurship and being a one-person, million-dollar business, what's a good benchmark that you say, is it all just dependent on what your personal goals are? When you said, I've looked at a bunch and they're pretty profitable, what does that mean? Speaker 1: Well, it would be very specific to the industry. You really need to A lot of times people who read these books are looking to be a career changer. So what I would recommend is if you think you want to do e-commerce, for instance, you have to do some market research, talk to people that are doing it. In my experience, the ones that are million-dollar one-person businesses are generally in the area of about 25% profit. That number in professional services would be pretty low. It would be much higher than that because a lot of times it's A skilled professional basically working from their house. They don't have a lot of overhead, but you also have to take into account what would your real salary be if you were paying someone just like you. To figure out the true profit, but on paper, it's different for each industry. So there are reports and I actually referenced them in here because I asked myself that question. NYU Stern School of Business has good up-to-date data on different industries that you can look up online and see what would be a good profit for your industry. And that might change too in different markets, you know, in COVID, maybe everybody, Who knows if profits were up or down in your industry, depending on what you sell. So that's where the community that you were talking about earlier, Norm, is so valuable. The other thing with profit is people fudge it in so many different ways. And we see this when they sell the business. They put their car in the business or other costs that maybe they use it for the business some of the time, but if they were going to sell it, they would take that out of the books and then they correct the books and show what the real upside could be to someone who didn't do that. They're allowed to do it if they're using it for business, but that's why profit is not as firm as people think sometimes. Norm Farrar: Usually, it's not paying themselves, so the profit is just false. Kevin King: It's profit on paper, but you're reinvesting that a lot of times to try to grow it or to do stuff. What do you think like AI is a big scare right now? A lot of people are like, AI is going to come take a lot of these jobs, and it will take some jobs, but also see it as an opportunity for people that want to do a one-person million-dollar business because I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity, especially in the service sector. I mean, a lot of people, the old plan from the 50s and 60s is go to college, get your four-year degree, get out in the workforce, and that's how you make a living and support your family, but a lot of people now are doing more trade school, or either going for a year and a half or two years, or going for a year and focusing on trade school, and then going out and starting their own business in all kinds of different service sectors, and making more money than someone's got a heavy debt burden from going to a four-year college and working at Starbucks at the end of that. What are your thoughts on around this change that seems to be kind of evolving right now? Speaker 1: I think it's a good change. I do think the workplace always changes, but I think back to the days of cloud computing. I remember I was standing outside the Port Authority, somehow fitting in a phone call in New York to a venture capitalist. He was saying that he couldn't find enough deals to invest in. Because people didn't have to buy the servers anymore and they were doing so much in the cloud, but it's a tremendous democratizing force because that means the people that didn't raise capital can get things done. Using these tools, so that means people that may never go out to Silicon Valley now have much greater odds of starting a successful business because maybe they can use chat GPT to lift their load and they don't have to yet hire a social media agency. A real person needs to touch all this stuff. I experiment with AI and A lot of it is very sloppy right now. It will get better and probably some of the things that I do or you do will go away. But then we'll have more time to do other creative things and we'll be interacting with other technologies and coming up with cool things we can do. And I don't think that it's going to eliminate much. But what it does is it forces all of us to keep on educating ourselves. We can't stay stagnant. It brings a little bit of anxiety into the world, I think, because people What does this mean for my career? I think we should all have diversified sources of revenue because we don't really know. No one really knows what it's going to do. If we have a few different things, I actually think your point, Kevin, about people doing more tangible work, like CPG has gotten very big consumer packaged goods among younger people. I think they have a hunger for real things they can hold in their hand and the same thing With skilled trades, that's something that we will always need. There's not going to be a robot that can fix every sort of leak that happens in our sink or, you know, in our plumbing or whatever. You need a real person with a brain and their people with different types of intelligence. I mean, this is one of the great things I have found about entrepreneurship in school. They only recognize people that are academically smart, but we all know in adult life, there are people that are brilliant in a lot of different ways. They're brilliant with their hands doing beautiful craftsmanship or craftsmanship, or they have a beautiful singing voice. I mean, there's so many other things that you can have a high level of intelligence. You could have high social intelligence. And become a really great politician, right? We need somebody like that, right? Or great at sales or a great leader of a company. These are things that don't get recognized and a lot of people come out of our schools feeling like they're stupid, you know, because they're not good at writing an English paper or something or they're not good at doing the math that they learn in school instead of realizing what gifts they do have and monetizing in some way so they can live a great life. Kevin King: Do you think our schools, though, educate for the real world? Are they teaching to a formula rather than teaching to entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurship is unique. It's not one-size-fits-all. I know there's a really famous TED talk from several years ago. It's like three and a half minutes. I can't remember the fellow that did it. He talks about how we stifle. Like you just said, everybody may not be academically smart, but they've got a unique craft. That could be ballet dancing. That could be playing the fiddle. It could be doing something business-wise and the education system seems to kind of stifle that and put everybody into this formula. How do you see that affecting entrepreneurship? Speaker 1: I'm so glad you asked. Well, this is what I think. There's a book called The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, who passed away a couple of years ago. He was an award-winning public school teacher in the New York City school system. And after 30 years of teaching He also wrote the book Dumbing Us Down. Basically, he talked about how in the industrial era, there were a lot of people living on farms and they needed to be turned into industrial workers. The way that public schools were designed was with bells that ring and all these things that would train us into becoming industrial workers. They're still kind of like that in many ways. My kids have gone through the public school system. We've been lucky to have a very good public school system, but there are certain things about it that really don't make sense for any other reason. They ask me many times why they have to do certain things, and I would just agree that whatever it was made no sense because it usually didn't. But at the same time, it's what we have to work with and it does bring education to all. So it's what we have. It could always be improved upon. And I think it is pretty open. I think the system is open to book authors coming in and people like that for people volunteering. So the onus is on us to go back to the schools in our community and try to make them better. But I think eventually that whole model is going to fall apart and be replaced by something else. Because of a host of factors. I mean, there's so many great teachers. They'll probably be teaching in some other type of system someday. Just because the way it's organized, it doesn't really match the digital era. We have so many issues with kids bringing their phones into schools and being distracted, for instance. There were no mobile phones when the public school system was designed. It's kind of like software that people keep tacking stuff onto, and then it just becomes this big mess. You try to work with it, but it's just groaning under the weight of it all. People are making the best of it. There are some really amazing people in these systems who love kids and love teaching and love learning. But they have to be improved upon for the modern era. And I think what's going to happen is it will just happen organically because people like my son who's 14 will say, why are we doing it that way? And then all of a sudden all the other people will be his age and they'll just change it because it doesn't make sense to anyone anymore except the people that have been in it for 50 years and didn't know it could be done this new way. Maybe they'll be glad to be rid of the old ways too. But for entrepreneurs, I mean, this is, there have been a lot of, Failed experiments with privatizing the public school system. So I don't want to say that that is necessarily the best route, but we do see the charter school movement. We do see some innovation. I have confidence that something will happen on that front because people need to learn. They want to learn. The schools, I think, do want to stay relevant. It's just a question of, they're like a battleship that you've got to turn. How do you turn that battleship? Probably an entrepreneur will figure it out. Norm Farrar: A good school teacher is a misfit. I think if you ask anybody that there's one teacher, possibly two teachers that changed your life. Why? Because they thought outside the box. I know for myself, I dropped out. I went back later on. But there was a couple of teachers that I actually brought them to my wedding. There was two teachers that I invited to my wedding. But the one teacher, he broke the rules. He was great. Not breaking the rules criminally or anything, but he really tried to help out the student. I work with them, work with them after school, work with them even evening, which you could never do nowadays. I was making a film once. One teacher came over to the house and was helping me do these die-cut animation for days, but he'd come over to the house, work in my basement with me. These are the two teachers that really stood out. They were great guys. The problem is there's a lot of teachers that just go by, how do I put it, without offending too many teachers. They just do the norm. They don't really consider the working with the individual, it's working with the group. And like you said, the term was just dumb it down so everybody fits in. Speaker 1: I think that a lot of people go in with very high energy and expectations for changing things and then they bang their head against the system. Some people Maybe don't let the system keep them down as much as others. It might be how we're raised or whatever to be more obedient or less obedient or whatever. I mean, entrepreneurs are very disobedient people generally, right? And that's what their gift is. So some people are going to be more obedient. They're going to just conform to the system. And why, I have no idea. But I think there are a lot of good people in there that are just so frustrated that they can't do those innovative things. When you think about what the teachers are dealing with, you know, mass shootings and, you know, I remember my daughter saying they had a drill for the mass shooters and she had an English teacher and her role was to hold a baseball bat behind the door. And she's like, but mom, she's a little old lady. I'll be that little old lady someday. But I think, you know, they're under a lot of pressure and they're there because they love teaching English or something like that. We're putting a lot on them. I think the great thing is we have all these different open source learning platforms. I was looking at one by MIT and there are people that are so hungry for knowledge around the world that can now get to it if they have an internet connection. Africa is very interesting right now. It has the biggest youth population and there's so much entrepreneurship percolating because of the lack of jobs. And I'm hearing from a lot of young people in Africa and I've been reading a lot about it and I thought, wow, now people who maybe didn't have many entrepreneurs in their community that were familiar with Western ways of doing business, they can familiarize themselves. And learn, you know, what is the standard if you wanted to do business with London or something like that? Like how do you break into that market? You could learn all of that online. And so there are people that have been kept out of the entrepreneurial talent pool that we're going to hear from and they're going to do things differently because they're living in different geographies. They have different life experiences. I think it's going to be tremendously exciting, but also force everybody to raise their game because now your competition isn't just in your town or in your city or in your state. It's all over the world. But there's also all this cross-pollination. And I do think that just from having interviewed probably thousands of entrepreneurs over the years, because I've been at this a long time, there's just something entrepreneurs have in common, no matter where I talk to them, Whatever country they are in the world, there's just something about them that's similar. And it's just a way of thinking and living and being. And I think there will be tremendous connection going on that crosses the lines of different countries that's built around this shared passion, similar to artists or musicians. You get them in a room together and they just connect, which is very exciting. Kevin King: Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Norm Farrar: Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Kevin King: Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say. Norm Farrar: I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too and we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Unknown Speaker: Yikes! Norm Farrar: But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits. Kevin King: Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. Norm Farrar: I was going to say, a lot of the time when we're outsourcing, we'll see the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Latin America. We had a guy fly in from Rwanda and trying to talk to us about hiring their pool and how many honors student, master's students they have in communications. And all of a sudden, I never, ever I thought I'd be talking about Rwanda. I have hired some people in the past for content out of Nigeria, and I was very happy with them. Now, all of a sudden, he said he had about 100,000 people in his database. Speaker 1: Wow. Norm Farrar: That's crazy. And yet it really hasn't picked up yet, but he's just starting to market. He was actually in the States trying to market his new idea and trying to get some support from other agencies to help market his outsourcing company. Speaker 1: That's super smart, isn't it? The partnership model, right? And have a guide on the ground in whatever country. Think of all that they'll learn by doing that. One other thing, Kevin, you'd raised a question about the commonalities, and I think it's a lack of fear of failure. I think what I see with the million-dollar one-person businesses, because many of them I've known since I wrote the first post, is they put things out there and maybe it doesn't make it into the media if they launch something that failed, but they have their failures like everyone else, but they dust themselves off and get back up. Kevin King: You learn the most from your failures, I think. I always say success without failure is luck. And you see a lot of these most, there's not necessarily overnight sensations that you think, even though they might be young, but you look at a lot like you were saying, Entrepreneurs are disobedient or don't really like to go by the system. You look at some of the most successful entrepreneurs that have changed the world and mostly college dropouts. If you look from Apple to Facebook, you just keep going down the list of the modern-day people and most of them say, this system is not for me. This is not for me. I'm going to do it a different way and they end up going out there and changing the world. Speaker 1: There is something different about how they think, and I think some of them are academic, but I think a lot of them aren't, and they just have a lot of other types of smarts that, you know, thank God they do, right? Our lives would not be the same if they didn't. But we need all different types of people when you think about it, just from A Darwinian perspective, if everybody was exactly the same, like everyone was an entrepreneur, everyone was a school teacher, everyone was a police officer, whatever, we wouldn't want that. We need variety for all the cross-pollination and also to counterbalance People, you know, the risk-averse people maybe needs to be brought out of their shell a little bit by the extreme risk taker. But somehow that cauldron of all the people coming together keeps the planet turning on its axis, right? Otherwise, it might blow up, you know, with one of these personality types going off the rails. But I think Now we're going to learn more. I think one of the things about AI is there's so much machine learning and things. I think we're going to have a lot of research into what makes successful ventures and what makes successful entrepreneurs. We're going to find out that a lot of the things that we thought were true were not because it's happening in medicine. It's happening in other fields. I really look forward to that because there's so many cliches and stereotypes about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. I think one of the big ones is that, for instance, corporate people cannot be good entrepreneurs, but many of the people I talked to who started businesses hated their corporate job and they went out and they were really good entrepreneurs because they had to perform at a very high level. They were too innovative for their company. That's why they were always bumping heads. They have a good network. Maybe they made some money that they saved. So they actually can really excel. Also, the idea that older people cannot be good entrepreneurs. The Kauffman Foundation has done a lot of data about people over 50 are very successful entrepreneurs. Norm Farrar: I still have a chance. Kevin King: Norm, we don't have to shut down Dragonfish after all. Thank God. Wasn't one in Kentucky Fried Chicken? What was he? Fifty-six, sixty-three or something or Colonel Sanders or Holiday Inn. Speaker 1: Holiday Inn is a good example too. Yeah. So I think we're going to see a lot of these myths turned on their heads and We have a much more inclusive vision of who can be an entrepreneur, who is successful at it, even maybe defining what entrepreneurship is. We were talking about that earlier and I was like, wow, this is a very stimulating discussion because what is it exactly, right? Who has the right answer to that? Well, maybe it takes many forms and that's something that I think we're going to see many variations on the theme, especially with AI coming into the mix. And we talked about the billion-dollar one-person business. And that was something one of the venture capitalists in my first book in 2018 talked about, a billion-dollar valuation company. But I think that there's going to be somebody Who finds a way to amplify what they're doing using all these free and low-cost tools and gets to a billion just because it's there. It's a challenge that somebody wants to break that record and be tremendously exciting to see who it is and what they do. Kevin King: I'll be you, Norm. It's going to be you. Speaker 1: It'll be Norm. Unknown Speaker: Here we go. Norm Farrar: I'm in. I'm in. Kevin King: What do you think about all the people, the younger people especially, I see this in their early 20s especially, there's a sense of entitlement. They go out and they talk to these VCs and they think they have these big brilliant ideas and they think that they paid their dues and that they should be getting $5 million for their idea because it's revolutionary and whatever. I think some of that's starting to go away a little bit, but there was a big wave of that, of entitlement from the younger people. Have you seen that in all your studies and looking at entrepreneurs, either some of the successful ones or failed ones, some of the sense of entitlement? Speaker 1: I haven't seen it. I usually am writing about the people that didn't get funding because I used to write more about startups, but now I do more in the area of these one-person businesses. They don't have funding and they're using all their resources, rolling up their sleeves, and they get turned away a lot. A lot of times, they'll bootstrap to a certain size and then they might get funding, but by that time, You know, they've been through a war basically to start this business, so they seem pretty hungry to me. And even just getting interviewed for a story, they're always told they're too small, they're not significant businesses, and they always seem happy that I see them for the little gems that their businesses are. And I also have had the chance to now see what the trajectory is for these businesses. So some of them just stay boutique-y and small. Some become traditional small businesses. Some become startups where they go that route that you're talking about. And then some even get acquired. You can acquire a one-person business now in a roll-up or something like that. And that never used to happen. In terms of entitlement in general, I would say, One of the benefits of being young that we probably all wish for is we don't know what we don't know. You know what I mean? Kevin King: We keep going the wrong way to make mistakes too. Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean, if you go into thinking you're great and maybe there's a lot of other people who are greater than you, well, enjoy that moment of feeling like you're really great because life is going to hand it to you eventually. And it's such a brief window in time where people feel that way until they start experiencing some failures in life, which everyone does, with things not going according to script, and then the humility sets in. But some people are a little cocky, you know, in the beginning. I definitely think that's true. Kevin King: What do you see like when you just said they start as one person and they scale it up and they get to a point where they need to take on some money to keep it going or to grow to the next level? What do you see as better? Is it better to go and take a loan and pay back interest or is it better to bring on a partner and give away equity? Speaker 1: It really depends on scale, I think, because there's certain businesses that will never reach their natural size without the money that you would get through equity financing. It would be hard to borrow enough to really do that. That said, you might want to delay the moment when you do that, maybe take a loan when maybe you need $100,000 or something like that, and get yourself to the next level, so your valuation We'll be better in the end, you know, and like you're going into it from a stronger position. You're not going to dilute your valuation too early because people, I mean, a lot of times the entrepreneurs do give too much away. Maybe an investor can see more in the business than you can. So I would say hold on to it. The other thing that people have told me is sometimes when you get sucked into these portfolios, you're very excited to have the money, but These are people that are investors. They don't love your business and your customers and what you're doing the same way you do. They want to make a good return. They have a portfolio. And if one business in the portfolio is the horse that's outrunning all the other ones, they may close you down, even if you're successful. And that's happened to people I've interviewed. So if you're so passionate about your business that you couldn't live with that if it got shut down by someone, even while successful, then that would be something to consider. You lose control of it. You get the money. But then maybe the business is gone and if you just get a nice exit, maybe you don't care. But I don't think most people are motivated by exit alone or just getting rich alone. People say that they are, but the reality is they have a lot of heart in these businesses. The people that I think are most successful on that front are people, maybe they worked on Wall Street and then they do a startup like a FinTech or something like that. They're very detached from the business from the beginning, so then if somebody invests in it, it doesn't hurt them inside if the investor kind of takes control of it because it wasn't really their baby the way some of these businesses are. If you have an invention or something like Spanx or something, you know what I mean? I'm sure Sarah Blakely wouldn't want it to be just closed down. She had trouble raising capital. I think she has a lot of heart in that business and it's a platform for a lot of other things and there are a lot of businesses like that. Kevin King: You see this on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den too, like you're saying the passion of the business or someone will come on and they'll be offered. It's clear to me watching them like, you should take this offer to give away 30% of your business because you're not going to go anywhere without this. But they're like, no, this is my baby. I've worked so hard for five years. The most I can give is 5%. What do you say to those type of people or what do you think causes that? It's rational but it's irrational thinking. Speaker 1: Oh, there could be so many reasons for that. It could be fear of success. It could be that they haven't done their homework. They don't have good advisors. They're not good at math. There's a lot of things that could be affecting them. I mean, it might be ultimately they don't want to let go of control. Maybe that's okay. Maybe this is a business that they want to run for the next 20 years and suddenly they have a moment of truth. This happens a lot with writing too because I do ghost writing of books in addition to my own books. There are different inflection points where, to me, it seems very obvious what should be done. You know, for instance, they'll say, if you're going to write a business book, you need to build a platform, which is basically a group of followers that will buy the book because the publisher is like an investor, right? You need to demonstrate to them that there are people that already like what you write. So that way when they buy the book from you and they pay all the money to print it with the global price of paper, they're going to get their money back and make a profit. So if you're not really willing to put in the work to Building that ahead of time and you're not famous, then it will be very hard to commercially publish a book, but people won't do it. They'll say, well, I don't like social media. It's a waste of time. And you think, but your book is so good. This is the only thing standing between you and a commercial publisher. Why won't you build it? And yet they won't. And I had to come to the conclusion that they just don't want to do it. They're so averse to the process that that would not be true to their vision. And they would rather self-publish and they could still do a good job with it, have a wonderful book, but they just won't have that collaboration with a commercial publisher. And sometimes it's just, you have to let people stay where they are until they come to another conclusion, just because there's something they just don't want to go with. It's not just about logic. It's like maybe they're knowing themselves and they don't have the patience for certain things. Maybe they're seeing what it's like to really deal with an investor and they don't like it. They don't like financial people. They don't like people looking in their books. It could be so many things going on under the surface, but I agree. It's not logic at all, but sometimes the truth isn't logical. It's emotional. That's probably what you're seeing there. It's like they're making decisions based on emotion, but maybe that's true to who they are. Norm Farrar: Scaling up can be. Unknown Speaker: Horrible. Norm Farrar: Sometimes it's better to stay small. I know I was involved with a hyper growth company back in the 90s, my first experience, and I didn't sleep at all. I stressed out and then I read the E-Myth Academy, or sorry, E-Myth book, and then I went to the E-Myth Academy. But there was two other books too that helped me understand growth and hyper growth. That was Inside the Tornado, Crossing the Chasm, I think it was, I hope it's right, Geoffrey Moore. And those were two incredible books. And then the process book, Putting Everything Into a Process, that's what literally changed my life. It's so important because scaling, when you get to a certain point, it's hell, unless you've gone through it once or twice or 10 times. Speaker 1: I think it's still very difficult. It's, I mean, that's what Vern talks about. It's basically putting the systems in place, people, strategy, execution and cash. And he's greatly simplified it, but within his books, The newest one on that topic is Scaling Up. He breaks that down. Someone said to me, I do case study interviews for him of people that use the system. It was like a manual on how to be a CEO. He had gone to Harvard Business School and he said, they don't teach you that, what the job of the CEO really is. I learned that from this book. That is what it does. It teaches you how to think strategically. There's so many different areas of your brain and your experience you have to engage to do this right. And it takes a lot of stamina. I think it does take support. I think that's why you have YPO, EO, and the other groups. Vistage, other ones like that that provide support because how many people are even in that elite group of people that scale beyond maybe 20 employees? Not that many, and there's not many people to turn to. There's a lot of pressure when you have people's salaries that their family is living on the money that this company pays them, and something could happen. Your bank calls a loan or something. It's not easy at all. It's not for everyone. That's where I love entrepreneurship because it's a continuum. There are people like me. I wanted to work from home with my kids and do the work that I love without having to go into an office. I would be on one end of the continuum. Then there are the people that Vern writes about or like you that scale up. We all are connected, but we're not the same. The question is, why is somebody running a scale-up versus a freelance writing business or a smaller business? Who knows? There's a lot to be researched there and to be found out, but the good thing is we can all do this in our own way and there's no right way. It's more self-knowledge. Norm Farrar: Okay, we are coming. We've gone over the hour limit, so this is awesome. I didn't even realize. I thought it would be about 45 minutes or so, but this went by too quick. Speaker 1: It did go quick. Kevin King: Too much fun talking shop and entrepreneurship. This has been awesome, Elaine. This has been really good. Speaker 1: Oh, I loved it. This is what I love to talk about, so I enjoyed every minute of it. Norm Farrar: Well, I hope you have time to come back one of these days. Speaker 1: I would love to. I would be honored. Norm Farrar: So I got a question for you. At the end of every podcast, we have one question. Does our guest know a misfit? Speaker 1: Yes, I have the ultimate misfit for you. It's my business coach, Doug Wick at Positioning Systems and I'll tell you why. In 2012, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and he had a 2% chance to live. He was at MD Anderson. He's writing a book about it and I'm helping him with this and I made him go back to his doctor to confirm that and he did. It spread throughout his body and When he found out that it was very serious, he was told in front of his family, his kids were there, his wife with no warning, and told to basically get his affairs in order. He got so pissed off, he would not accept the diagnosis. He accepted that it was true and he did the treatment, but he went through five rounds of chemo. It wasn't working and he decided to do it his own way and he started reading Joe Dispenza's work, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. It's about meditation and he started meditating twice a day in the hospital. He had an accountability partner and months into this, it was getting quite serious. The doctor called him and he said, you know, I don't usually call people at home, but I have some good news for you. You're now a candidate for a bone marrow transplant. He hadn't been before. I'm not great at science, but basically, the cancer had spread to more than 80% of certain cells. It was quite dire. He got the bone marrow transplant. He's writing a book about this. Why he was a misfit, he, while in the hospital, refused to follow the rules. He wore his business clothes in bed. He wouldn't wear the robes. He would put signs up and say, business meeting in progress. He couldn't go along with it. And he's a person of deep faith. He knew that He would be cured deep down. He felt this and he didn't know how, but he put his trust in his higher power and he was, but the root was unclear to him at that time. Whenever you call him on the phone, I say, how are you, Doug? He goes, unbelievable. And we're talking about being disobedient. Think about how psyched out he would have been being in the hospital for months at a time in isolation without his work. Because his work is what fuels him. And he refused to obey. And doctors came to respect that. And he got out and he's still here. He's 70 years old now and he's in excellent health and he's coaching people. He actually just went for the Joe Dispenza training to be a Joe Dispenza coach and an incredible inspiration. And so whenever I think about him, I think about how important it is to be a misfit and be disobedient sometimes and go with what your heart is telling you to do because it can lead to big things. And he should be on the show because he's got an incredible story. When you asked me the question in the beginning, I was trying to think of who it was. And then I thought, oh, he's the person I talk to every week. He's perfect for this show. Norm Farrar: I can't wait to get his information. Kevin King: Well, Elaine, if people want to grab a copy of, you said you have two books out. How would they do that or how would they reach out to you or follow or learn more about you or follow you or join your community or whatever? Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Well, it's called X now. X and Facebook under my full name. And this is one of the books. This is the million-dollar one-person business here. I think you're seeing it backwards. But this is a new one. This is big money. Norm Farrar: No, it's fine. Yeah. Speaker 1: Oh, it's fine. OK. They're on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the online bookstores. Sometimes if you live in a big city, it might be in the physical bookstore. Also, indie bookstores. I always support them because they're entrepreneurs and it's hard for them. I encourage you to check them out if you can because there are a lot of case studies in them of regular people that started these businesses. I didn't look for people that are trying to sell you one webinar after another. These are real businesses. I do a lot of free live events with them for the New York Public Library on Zoom. Find out what they are at www.nypl.org slash tinybiz. They're very inclusive events. We have people from all over the world and You can learn from the real entrepreneurs that I interview on the program what they did and ask them questions. We have a Q&A where people submit lots of really good questions, and it's become sort of a community. We did it in person in the beginning back in 2018, and then COVID came. It was New York City, and nobody wanted to be under one roof, and we couldn't do it. So we started doing it on Zoom, and we'll usually get at least 100 people on there. It's been going for a long time and it's been so energizing because it's entrepreneurs coming together at very different stages. They don't know much about business at all. They just have an idea in their mind and then other people are pretty advanced and they could be one of the panelists and there's a lot of sharing and vulnerability there. You know, we've had some entrepreneurs crying on, you know, like they're so happy with their four-hour workweek lifestyle and things that they would do. It's really quite moving to see people coming together in that way. I mean, you must have that on this program as well. So join us there. It's the second Monday of every month, we have it through the end of the year and hopefully into next year. And sometimes I do live events other places physically. I put them on my LinkedIn. So I hope to meet you someday and write to me. I write back. It makes me a better journalist. And I really look forward to continuing the conversation with Norm and Kevin. I mean, this was just so awesome. So thank you so much for having me. Kevin King: Thank you, Elaine. Norm Farrar: Very welcome. All right. Well, thank you, Elaine. We're going to remove you now. So this guy's probably got something to say to me. Unknown Speaker: All right. Well, thanks for coming. Kevin King: Bye. Speaker 1: Bye. Norm Farrar: Bye. Kevin King: Yeah, that's good stuff. Norm, as usual, always Deep, thoughtful conversation. I found that TED video that I was talking about that I recommend everybody watch. It's Sir Ken Robinson. Sir, S-I-R, Ken, K-E-N, Robinson, and it's called Do Schools Kill Creativity? I think it applies to the arts as well as business. It's like three and a half minutes, but it's probably one of the most... I've watched this video probably 10 times. It's one of the most well-done three and a half minute TED talks I've ever seen. Norm Farrar: Three and a half minutes. Kevin King: Three and a half minutes. Let me just double check that. It came out in like 2006. Yeah, it's got 77 million views. That's how popular this thing is. Wow. Oh, no, I'm sorry. Not three and a half minutes. I lied. It's 19 minutes. There is a three and a half minute version, but it's 19 minutes and 11 seconds. It's worth every bit of that to watch that. I think that would go really nice with what Elaine was speaking about. Norm Farrar: Okay, that kind of wraps everything up. That was great. We could have talked another hour with Elaine. Kevin King: For sure, for sure. But you know what? We're going to be talking another hour next week too. So if you want to make sure you don't miss a single one of The Marketing Misfits, you want to make sure you bookmark this, hit that subscribe button so you get a notification every time a new episode comes out whether you're watching it on YouTube or you're listening to it on Apple Podcast or Spotify or your favorite player. Make sure you hit subscribe. Give us a rating too. Let us know or type in a comment and say what you like or What you don't like, even, if there's something that you, or you have an idea for a guest that you'd love for us to reach out to and speak with, that you think would be a great misfit, feel free to suggest that to us, too. Norm Farrar: Should Kevin grow a beard? That's a good question. Kevin King: Should I grow a beard? Or should Norm use makeup on the glow on the top of his head? I have it. Unknown Speaker: Whatever it is. Norm Farrar: All right. Kevin King: Coke Zero, you know, we both have our Coke Zero. That's it. Norm Farrar: Mine's bigger. Kevin King: Yours is. Everything's bigger. I learned that when I came to your house. I'm like, damn, these things are like twice the size of mine. Norm Farrar: All right, everybody. I hope you had a good time today. And we'll be back next Tuesday. And like Kevin said, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review. We always love those things. Kevin King: Ciao.