Sharran Srivatsaa: vom Seriengründer zum Investor

0:00[Music] thanks again for joining me today i am sitting down with sharon srivatsa who is the ceo of kingston lane now i'm very excited to be sitting down with sharon he is a serial entrepreneur he is a global sought after keynote speaker an incredible thought leader uh he writes and contributes for wall street journal success i saw a piece on entrepreneur huffington post forbes he has had six exits in the last 19 years which is absolutely insane uh he has a top rated spotify podcast called business school i have to shout that out he's done so much over his career we'll go into all the things that he's worked on in the past and what he's working on now and we'll also speak about where he came from uh he speaks a lot about his background and the struggles that he went through to to get to where he is today so really appreciate you sitting down really excited to chat hear your story and and just give some insight and some value from somebody who's done so much so thank you awesome hey scott thanks for having me a lot of people don't realize that this stuff takes a while right so even uh yeah this off-camera not uh all of this is not easy to do and the very fact that you're putting all this together uh sharing so freely helping people that don't uh have a chance to get access to folks and giving them their message distill down is super powerful so a lot of a lot of kudos to you for one for having me on but more for you putting this out and doing all the hard work to get a great message out to people so thank you for doing that you know my pleasure man my pleasure but yeah let's let's uh you know you do this too you you give out knowledge you work with entrepreneurs you work with ceos work with all these people so also don't don't sell yourself short um so so walk me through man what's what's your story how did you get to where you are today yeah so um you know i i am the you know the people always say this right they say hey if i can do it you can do it too and there uh there literally could not be anything uh more untrue uh everyone's like if because how often have we heard something like oh if i can do it you can do it too if that was really true then everybody could do what everybody else could do so um let's use that as the the starting point and let's actually talk about that i'll come back to that in a second so um i was i was born in india very mediocre everything uh mediocre living mediocre everything new york or financial situation but the one thing that was extraordinary in my life was my parents uh two amazing parents they've always always had my best interests hard they would go above and beyond to do everything for me and they didn't know early on that i was struggling in school i uh i you know talk about being the underdog i am call blind which doesn't matter for a lot of people so but i got kicked out of art class i'm told that so i got kicked out of music class i was the uh one of the smallest kids growing up so i was the last to get picked on with sports i had symptoms of 80d adhd dyslexia so i wasn't really good in the classroom so you can't hang out with the artsy folks you can't hang out with the music folks you can't hang out with the jocks you can't hang out with the nerds right so literally you can't hang out with anybody and after a while that what that what happens because of that is you get bullied and because you are the easy pickup for anybody to bully you and um i didn't know any different i just thought getting beaten by the lockers was a very normal thing and scott there's a time when i remember where just walking from 100 feet from one classroom to the other i would actually walk around the entire school just so between the one classroom the other was our lockers and i wouldn't i didn't want to get beaten so i would literally run you know close to a third of a mile around the school to go to the other classroom just because i would get away get away from the lockers and my parents knew that something was up and they realized that they didn't know how to talk to me about it and i didn't know how to talk to them about it and i still remember this day it was like my 10th or 11th birthday i was sitting in a park bench and my dad told me this you think about it you're 10 years old and your dad says to you hey sharon we want to give you a bigger and better future like that was his favorite award a bigger and better future and for the person listening i would tell you ask yourselves this question like what is a bigger and better future my parents had never left they left india or anything like that and they said hey there is probably a better cultural system out there maybe in the us and the uk australia new zealand wherever that may uh you know you may succeed in so we need to find you a capability a passport out of here and so that's when i was we were sitting in front of two tennis courts my dad was like hey if you can play tennis that may be an individual skill that can get you out so uh we agreed that day on a whim i never hit a tennis ball before we agreed that day that i would put all my efforts into that and academics would be secondary and uh so first next six years all we did was focus on tennis uh i got pretty decent at it that got me out of india and uh to the u.s and the interesting part there is my parents sold every single thing that they had when i say every single thing i mean every single thing my dad had a little motorcycle in india like a little more that was the only transportation my dad sold his motorcycle to get me a plane ticket to come to the us he sold every single thing and so they sent me to the us with one year's worth of expenses and uh and and a blessing to say okay you go there's a tennis lesson yeah you've got one year's worth of um you know safety net go make it uh the next three years of college are on you if you can't make it come back and that was the beginning of uh you know my my my journey that's uh that's a that's a scary the scary amount of pressure um on a young kid so you come over uh how does tennis work out how does college work out um walk me through walk me through that journey because i know it wasn't so easy um becoming a pro pro athlete is not so easy yeah so so uh there's two stories that are that are super interesting and um i'll tell you this this goes back to kind of the if i can do it anyone can do it i don't think that's true let's if we nail that down just because scott can do it doesn't mean anyone can do it just because sharon can do it doesn't mean anyone can do it what is true is if sharon can do it what was the support system that charon had to be able to do that if scott could do it what was the support system that he had to be able to do that it's not that i'm trying to emulate and model scott or toronto i'm trying to emulate and model their support systems because if you were the underdog if i was the underdog there's a good chance that we could not do it on our own that's what people need to know right if you were not the underdog if you were a super smart kid like elon musk you don't need that support system you're just crazy smart and you figure it out and you're one in 15 million right yeah so i would say that the thing that everyone should realize from the lesson is and everything that we're talking about is how do you install this this support system that allows underdogs to succeed that underdogs don't talk about that often that that's what we need to be modeling not what other people are doing but what the support systems that they have right so i love it yeah i like where this conversation is going too as well it makes a lot of sense and it's something we speak about a lot but yeah yeah yeah so i'll give you two of a very very quick story so my my first story is that my first day in the united states i landed in chicago um i had this was before before before cell phones and all of that interesting stuff i had someone was gonna come pick me up uh i wait for an hour two hours four hours eight hours no one shows up and then suddenly the pager or the public address system goes off and it's like hey sharon trivatsa please report to a white courtesy phone i'm like oh my gosh what did i do so i go to the courtesy phone and says hey the your ride whoever was coming to pick you up uh their car broke down and they need you to take a bus to moline illinois i'm like where is moline illinois i just i just landed here and and so i said cool i'll go take this bus so i i grabbed my one backpack that i had and i go take this bus i get on this bus it's supposed to take like a couple hours but then i realized three four five hours later it's night time i'm the last person on the bus i'm at the bus depot the bus driver comes up to me and says hey kid you may have gotten on the wrong bus where are you trying to go and i'm like molina illinois he says well we're in la crosse wisconsin and i go wait where is la crosse wisconsin complete opposite direction and so i said okay well how do i get there he's like well you may want to uh you know lay low for the night and then i grab the bus in the morning so i grab my stuff get out of the bus and right when i get out scott this guy out of nowhere jumps me with a knife so i get mugged on my first day in the us i don't have anything i have 120 some dollars in my pocket and this guy mugs me and he's like hey give me all your money and i'm like i don't have anything and so he looks through my bags i have nothing and he's like you've got to have some cash and i know that i'm in a weird place right now if i give him my money i can't get to school if i don't give him my money i'm gonna get hurt so i didn't want that to happen so out of nowhere this is what i did i pulled out 100 bill that i had and i said to the mugger i was like hey i have a hundred dollars i'd be happy to give this to you looks like you need it but i i don't think your intention was to hurt me in any way i just got to the us today i need to get to school i have no idea where i'm going i hadn't eaten in 12 hours if i give you this hundred dollars maybe you will consider giving me 50 back and he looks at me and he starts laughing he's like well you're trying to negotiate and i was like i i need some money i'm worth asking so i hand him the hundred dollars i kid you not he opens his ratty wallet and he dishes me back 20 20 and a five he takes the hundred bucks and he gives me back 45 dollars that was my first day in the u.s right like i negotiated with a with a mugger and i not looking back if that happened to me now scott like i couldn't do that but it just so happened like in the moment take some balls it just don't happen in the moment all of that happened so um that happened and then i found my way to uh i found my way to campus after that but then this second thing happened so while i get to campus i have this check that my parents gave me for a full year's worth of tuition i walk over to financial services i hand them the check and i'm like hey i'm here i i will never forget this lady a little hawaiian lady she says welcome sharon hands me the keys to my dorm room and says hey since it's an international check it's going to take 10 to 14 days to clear i had no idea she goes uh at that time your meal plan will get activated like okay and then i realized all right i have no my 45 dollars is gone man very less i have no meal plan so no food but i have a place to stay good awesome so i have my dorm room so i get in my dorm room and then i start scott i start crashing every party on campus right every pizza party it's like every greek fraternity you know math club computer science club i go to every pizza party every root beer float party and i don't know why that's all they had is pizza and root beer floats that's oh i went to every pizza under a beer float party and after like three days they were all done and i hadn't eaten for like 24 hours and i was walking by a dumpster so i see this dumpster i see a bunch of people drop a bunch of pizza boxes into the dumpster and i'm like hey you know what maybe i can grab a couple of slices of pizza so i wait for the wait for it to get dark i jump in the dumpster i grab a couple slices of pizza i run to my dorm room and i'm like wow that was in new low and my parents were not there to see that well another day or two goes by i hadn't eaten and i was walking by the same dumpster and i see a couple of kids throw subway sandwiches into this dumpster it's like huh so wait till nightfall jump in the dumpster grab the subway sandwiches and then i see a box of pop-tarts i grabbed these pop-tarts i had no idea what pop-tarts were i've been in the u.s four days and then suddenly these yellow beady eyes start looking at me and i get smacked on my cheek and i start bleeding and i'm like what just happened well there was a raccoon in the dumpster trying to like fight this box of pop-tarts with me and like you can't even make this stuff up because i am like ankle deep in a dumpster with beer bottles and trash and all that and i'm like oh my gosh so like my fighter flight kicks in i literally kick this raccoon so hopefully there's no you know it's totally in self-defense kick grab these subway sandwiches and i just run and i'm bleeding so i sit down i eat and then i go to get a tetanus shot because i at least knew that and those were my first two days in the u.s like really saying hey this was a new low and uh if i can get through this i can get through anything and i don't think if that had happened if the mugging incident had not happened and if that you know dumpster diving incident not happen and it took me 20 plus years to tell my parents that and that became kind of the new low because if from an entrepreneur's perspective a high achiever's perspective people talk about taking risk right well we only know the risk that to take is is the risk that we have capacity for well my capacity for risk has suddenly been completely changed like i could take on so much more risk because i knew that i'd be okay most people have not been homeless or not had mon you know not had not not not had food to eat but when you know you can do that you've believed that you can take on more risk and not crazy risk but you're like hey i'll be okay i can figure it out and i think that it set a new low new floor for me of hey i i think i can take on more risk in my life and maybe because of that i'll get more rewards so um i i would challenge the audience to kind of think about a low point in their life and the the low point in your life is probably the floor for the amount of risk you're able to take the capacity of the risk you're able to take and if that's why once tough things happen when you are in a in a relationship breakup or a business partner breaks up a business goes under um you know your backup your your your your you know don't make payroll for three months whatever things like that happen that's a low point and that i think it also expands your capability your capacity to take on more risk so i think those two incidents really expanded my personal capacity to take on more risks over the years and those are great those are great stories and great lessons and i think that one other thing that you know that you probably do now is you allow people to not have to hit that floor right because god forbid not every entrepreneur should ever get mugged or have to fight a raccoon to be successful you mentioned all these things about like getting the right people involving the right mentorship getting the right support system um and i think that a little bit of advice plus support systems can can act as some sort of i don't know some substitute in terms of allowing people to see what has happened to others right and that's really where i think that probably that's what you do now you see you help people so they don't have to get to that all-time low to to be successful to sort of emulate that experience through you teaching and guiding and all these passive strengths that you've had like literally quite literally live through that's the way i see it um now as you know you have an incredible professional career how did that kick off because you you had you know you had a hell of an experience as a student um but i'm assuming things hopefully got better over time um and then you had a really really strong professional career by by anybody standards so walk me through uh your professional career uh your exits um you building your own brand your own name and sort of elevating yourself to well now now you you deal with the top the the top leadership across you know probably four to 100 to 500 and others right yeah yeah i i'll let's this this is great thank you let's talk about like two quick stories right the first one is right out of college i was at a um and these map really well i was at a i was computer science and math major and i was presenting my senior paper at the university of california berkeley at a contest at a you know a programming contest so i'm presenting on stage i get my 10 minutes of fame i get off stage and one of the judges pulls me aside and he says hey sharon great presentation you're not going to win and i'm like oh thanks a lot right and he says but i just funded two guys a few months ago to start their own company so this was this was 1999-ish so this was during the technology boom a lot of your uh uh friends would kind of connect with that and they said i funded these guys in the optical switching optical networking space i think what you have will round out what they're doing you should talk to them and that was the pieces of my paper so i was like sure i didn't know any different so i talked to them and then i got a chance to join that startup very early on i was not a founder i was one of the earliest employees uh in the company so i got a chance to get some early equity which was uh which was which was which was great for me and the the judge of the contest who made the introduction was an angel so he introduced me to that company first uh we raised we raised over 27 million dollars of um cap venture capital uh in in a few funding rounds and we were then acquired by a publicly traded company uh for a little over 550 million dollars so now it would be awesome if i'd gotten all that i didn't but i got enough uh to make enough to pay off all my debts enough to uh do everything and give me a five year cushion to travel the world so literally what i said was all right i'm not i'm single i don't you know i've i've paid off all my debts i've put given everything back to whoever i owe now it's my chance to uh so i spent five years traveling the world teaching tennis which i thought was very cool but i was in the caribbean for a year in dubai for a year and on maui for three years so i try to spend my time kind of expanding my horizons but this angel who was at that point isn't in kind of pulled me aside and said he's like what are you gonna do with all this money right and it was not a lot so he became kind of like my advisor and he uh so we started a small fund at that point and we started investing in companies and real estate and so as a 21 year old and he's you know significantly older like a father to me he kind of learned taught me and helped me and without him i don't know anything about anything and so um after that um he said to me hey you've done tennis for five years this is cool what are you going to do with your life i kind of needed a job so he said hey uh you should think about if you like business you should go to wall street because the fastest way to learn anything about business and structuring and deal flow is to go on wall street and you should go to one of the big banks i was like how why is someone going to hire a teaching pro at a big bank he's like no one's going to hire you you need to go to business school so i actually found the three or four business schools that had the best feeder system into wall street and so i went to i got my mba at vanderbilt and uh then i got a job i got job at goldman sachs i had 39 individual one-on-one interviews to get the job enrollment so if people think that oh yeah you just went in and you got hand like it was i i did over a hundred in interviews in investment banking in in a six month period it was 39 just with goldman just with one firm so um so i spent uh you know three years at goldman and two years according to so five years in investment banking and then the same angel who started to become my partner over time had invested in uh we had invested in a small real estate company in beverly hills he's like hey sharon the next time you're in los angeles you should talk to these guys they're a small real estate company they have one office and like 30 agents maybe you can help them well i go visit with them and then i realize that their original founders of that company are not getting along or just have different visions for the world well i told my now partner i told that i told uh my angel uh you know kind of advisor i was like hey i think this is a great business we should acquire it he's like you're crazy who's gonna run it i said not me he goes if you run it then we can acquire it together so he and i became partners and we we bought this business which had one office in beverly hills 33 agents and i didn't have enough money to do this so i reverse mortgage my house took loans from my family again to buy a controlling stake in this business uh at that time my wife who i was who i'm still married to um and was pregnant with our first child too so it was taking a lot of risk at the same time but we had one um one office 30 agents and then i uh and scott you'll appreciate this i was putting a plan together because i was the operator of the business now putting a plan together and i put and we we roughly had done the business was doing fine but they were doing 300 million roughly in sales so top line business uh figure out how all that flows together and i was putting this model together and by mistake instead of the 300 million i added an extra zero made it three billion right and i looked at the spreadsheet and it was all black it was all profit it was all like the greatest spreadsheet you could ever see and i was like wait a minute this is insane like if we had this like we'd have an amazing business so i showed my partner he's like hey you should present this to the board so i made a plan to the board that said we're at 300 million yeah if we three billion duh of course we would all make a ton of cash and this would be an amazing business but we only have five years to do it they're like well why do you only have five years to do it i said well economy generally goes in seven year cycles this is 2008 2009 we are probably a year and a half in i don't know how long this would be we probably need a year and a half to exit so literally we have to do 10x in five years and so the board was like okay we'll come up with a plan for it so i came up with a plan i didn't know anything i was 29 years old i had no idea how how any of this worked i built a plan and literally in scott we grew from 300 you know 30 agents one office 300 million in sales to um close to 700 agents 22 offices 3.4 billion in sales in five years so we did 10x better than 10x in five years and then we were acquired by a publicly traded company out of new york called douglas element which is one of the largest real estate transactions in the country and so it actually worked it it actually worked so that was the and so now the original chance meeting of a judge in the contest became my advisor and business partner for the last 20 years support system mentor partner and now billion plus dollar exit yeah so yeah because i know i know you speak about see when you when you when you advertise you as an individual you go and say i i work with founders he doesn't want a 10x or 100x and i feel like a lot of people even think that's just like a like a figure of speech like i want to 10x my business thinking like you know not by a factor of 10 but just significantly but that's that's a really good point like the proper supports now i don't think it's it's maybe i'm just being pessimistic that it's hard to replicate in every single circumstance but you did it and you you probably worked with other ceos to do it too so is that is that you know you exit that now is that what you're because i want to i want to understand how you did it and i want to understand your process and you know at a high level we only have a few minutes to do this but uh so so after that is this when you started advising is this when uh kingston lane came to be is that after the real estate transaction yeah yeah yeah so so totally so that there's two parts of this puzzle right one well let's actually break down uh you know kind of what is the formula for 10x in the business to everybody so that's really good but um very briefly i'll touch on what i do now so we uh three things number one is i i have active operating businesses that i run and there are across the board some are in the real estate business some are not uh that's but they're all part of what is part two which is my partner and i have a fund so we have a private fund that we invest in businesses some we operate some we don't which means they have professional operators and so we are investors advisors to those and most of my time is spent either operating businesses that we own or that we're investors in that's because that way if i scott you're one of our portfolio company ceos i have a vested interest in making sure that the business grows 5 10 15 x and you succeed i have a vested interest in that now outside of that i probably spent a hand a little bit of time i probably have 68 uh founder ceos at any given time and uh the average business size is roughly 25 to 50 million and the goal for that is to get them to 250 to 500 million over three to five years so that's the goal so i never take on more than six to eight at any given time and most of these folks you know it say it's how do you break the grass glass ceiling of how do i get past this so um it's a it's a cool very cool relationship all all my mentoring relationships all have an equity stake in it which makes sure that i'm aligned with that growth because most operators are like hey i'm doing 20 million you get me to 200 you can gladly have the 10 percent because that's what we started off in the first place so that's no problem at all now let's talk about the formula for how uh you actually you know technically what's your playbook that's good yeah here's a playbook on how you connect something right so uh there's a it's unfair to say that um oh yeah this will work for anything right but but there is a there's a i call it a heuristic there's a guideline like go with the framework right framework there are three parts here part number one is singularity of focus the if you think that you can add 1700 skus 18 business lines and all to get that result you're crazy that stuff does not work like after you've achieved the 10x then you can add more to it but the what drives the bus is hey i'm gonna turn my focus to one big bone i'm gonna wake up and i'm gonna gnaw on this big bone i'm to ask everybody in my organization to figure out what is this big bone that they can on and the question becomes for them hey i'm waking up in the morning am i doing something that's helping me with this big bone or it's not so the filter becomes very clear when everyone's working on different initiatives and different divisions yeah you start to have some accretive revenue on a lot of the stuff but the singular vision's never driven forward so i'll give you a very simple example when we had we decided in on our real estate business's growth that we would drive everything by people so it was all it was straight up everything related to acquiring great sales talent and that sales talent drove our business and so everyone was like well yeah we should train productive people we should have sales skills and i'm like i don't care about any of this our goal is to go higher and recruit and retain the best sales people possible and that's really hard to do in a competitive environment so our singularity of focus was if we got to uh 600 plus really productive sales people doing what they did they would drive our business so that was our singularity of focus now every time i did anything my team would say sean why are you driving to san diego is this going to help us 10x like they would ask me that question so that would be a good team yes it's really good because then i would ask them the same question say like hey why are we why are we spending three million dollars on this advertising campaign does it help us get there right so the filter is really important so number one singularity of focus and the problem with the singularity of focus is as an operator you and i i call it the when you're inside the bottle it's hard to read the label you think 17 things are important but as an advisor when i'm looking from the outside i can tell you 16 of those are noise yes it may drop revenue a little bit but it's really hard to do by yourself right so that's so singularity focus is number one number two uh called the cadence of accountability accountability is is an interesting concept right like hey if you wanna if you wanna lose weight what do you do you take an accountability coach yeah you need some form of accountability right so i'll tell you i'll actually give you the practical accountability that we had so i was like hey we need to go recruit some really badass salespeople and normally what i would say is hey we'd have this chicken call every friday to see where our recruiters were at getting these great sales people and we made kind of bumping along progress and i was like well this is stupid it's this is we're not growing as fast as we need so scott this is exactly what we did at 9 45 every single morning we had 11 what we call sales managers their job was to go record great sales people at 9 45 every single morning five days a week we got on a phone call and the 11 people went in order it was like jim jack scott johnny same order every single day and they would reel out two numbers they would reel out they would say 2 0 1 5 8 7 whatever it was right the first number was how many appointments did i have yesterday and the second number was how many appointments do i have scheduled today so think about that for a second i say 2-0 then you go you say 3-1 then the next person goes and says zero zero how do you think that person feels right now terrible i'll tell you all three of those people should feel terrible because they should be moving in the opposite direction but i i hear what you're saying yeah yeah but nobody what we saw was nobody that said zero zero ever turned up the next day and had a zero zero again right motivated powerful right yeah um and you also realize that if somebody could do it also gives you a perspective of what is possible if someone said 7-3 i had seven appointments yesterday and three today that's crazy someone that says zero nine you know that hey i was busy whatever and scott all we did was this there was no judgment it was a you wake up 9 45 it went in order and if someone missed the call i paused for 10 seconds to let everybody know that that spot was not taken that day i mean it got very very clear and it sounds militant but that was the single most important thing that drove the accountability because we knew that appointments drive people we knew that because without meeting with people you're not hiring anybody so our cadence of accountability was this 15-minute chunk that we installed in our business that literally changed the nature of our entire business right so number one singularity focus number two cadence of accountability now in the different companies that i work with that accountability is a different thing it just so happens that in our business we that was the 15-minute chunk that we came up with number three uh good process and good process alone drives good results so a lot of times what we say is i'll i'll i'll figure it out later is what the average entrepreneur says right and that's why they that's why they'll like doubling your business is actually easy you can tighten a few screws get a few bulls sell and make a bunch of extra calls uh you know offer a bunch of discounts you can double your business but when you do that it's very hard to sustain a doubling because you hacked your way to doubling it and everything starts to break so the one thing that we realized from a process perspective was when a new salesperson came in because we drove our business with people that we needed to have like a badass onboarding program and that's all we focused on because we said if scott comes on and he has a delightful onboarding process he never leaves and continues to be happy producing results for us so i literally shut down my focus on anything else and all i worked on was how do i have the most amazing like we brought a consultant from four seasons and you're you know you is see sharp where four seasons was born was toronto um we brought in a consultant from four seasons to say how do we design this delightful onboarding process that was a process for us so for us it was how do we get to you know 600 plus people selling 3.4 billion dollars a year how do we do this 15-minute call every single day and how do we have an insane onboarding process those three things were this very specific three things that actually drove our 10x growth i love it and it makes sense because now you've taken that you're taking that mantra that ideology that that that that one bone you have to non and then you just you have that one bone in each piece that will actually lead back to your main high level kpi bone whatever um how i now i'm curious how do you how do you figure out what that bone is as an entrepreneur who's stuck in the bottle right yeah so so it's a it's a series of questions and i think that's the process that's a little difficult right and so i'll give you i'll give you i'll give an example um i was driving to a con i drove to a conference that i went to there was a hundred entrepreneurs invited to this conference i'd never had a i i was busy operating my business at this time i get to this conference i sit down i'm put on put on my hoodie i'm sitting in the back i'm like hey i can't believe i'm here i'm committed to being here it's a whole day it's wasting my day that's what most entrepreneur when most entrepreneurs go to conferences there's like i can't believe i'm here right and i'm sitting there it's past lunch and i'm like i wasted this morning i'm here i might as well listen this this five foot four lady shows up on stage she starts talking and i'm like ah i should probably pay attention and scott she started talking about leadership building a business et cetera and i started writing some notes and as she was talking a couple of questions came to mind so i was almost going to raise my hand proverbially to ask the question but i felt like as soon as i asked the question she naturally answered it in my head like an eerie experience right and then i would take more notes i would have another question and she would magically answer the next question i was like that's weird like that how does she know what i'm thinking that's weird and she did this for the whole hour and i was driving home that day and i'm like this is magical call my dad i'm like dad you won't believe what happened and just as a you know i call my dad because i call my dad and he says oh well you should hire her i'm like to do what well if she can answer all your questions even before you're thinking about them maybe she can help you with your business your life whatever i was like well i don't know what i would do and so he goes well write her an email and my dad was very good about you know scripting good about language patterns and he said i'll give you the phrasing he told me he said sharon write her this email that says um hey so and so i i met you at this event and you were amazing and here was the phrasing that he used and says i would like to offer you blank and he said come up with a number a dollar amount that was painful to you but still large enough and at that point in my career when i was 29 years old i picked i'll pick the number it was ten thousand dollars right and i said um i would like to offer you ten thousand dollars as a symbol of my seriousness that was the line right all i'm looking for is for you to prioritize some email communication for me and that's it i don't need any structured calls i don't need any meetings or anything and i was like huh i was like dad really he goes yeah would you pay ten thousand dollars for her to read your mind i was like of course so i wrote her that email within two minutes scott she responds to me and says is this a joke i said no i i said no absolutely i'm dead serious she responds she's like here's my here are wiring instructions i was like awesome i wired the money and she became my first coach literally she was instrumental in helping me chain come up with this 10x plan put the singularity of focus together like i had none of these pieces then and she was the one that told me hey when you're inside the bottle it's hard to read the label so while i was discussing all the things that i was working on she was the one that pulled out that hey you're working on operations and dropping money to the bottom line but you're telling me that the people are the ones that are driving the growth let's think about a future where if it were only the people that you focused on what would happen to your organization the coach asked the right question and coach is an interesting thing coach mentor advisor i i try to call myself i'm my clients as private advisor because for a a 200 an entrepreneur running a 50 million dollar business dropping 20 million to the bottom line doesn't need a coach per se because they're like hey they just need somebody to talk to who is non-judgmental who has been there and done that right so whatever my clients are going through right now i have been there like i know i know that they're thinking about wanting a private jet because their friend has a private jet i know it and i told him i i've been on enough private jets you don't want one you don't want one and i'll tell you why you can charter one all day like you may think this is a snooty thing to talk about but that's what goes through their minds when they hit a level of success hey should i have the jet should i have the car should i have the house should i have the bank balance should i have the second vacation home should i bonus my employees should i have an operator like that's what they're thinking about and when you've already been there i can kind of wade through that stuff and because that's all noise because at the end of the day it is hey here's the singularity of focus here's the cadence accountability and here's a good process right so it's a discovery process there's no like formula for it to come out but i've seen enough businesses service product manufacturing whatever that after like a couple of conversations i can at least pick out the candidates pretty quickly of what is going to drive growth and then you build a hypothesis around saying hey scott if you focused on this division only will it change your business well let's figure it out and then that makes for a really good kind of conversation what advice do you have for people that are looking for mentors or advisors or coaches and it's not a one-size-fits-all but there must be some there must be some red flags in the in the age of internet and gurus and an absolute like how do you find the right people that are actually genuine know their stuff can actually provide value yeah so um i'll answer two ways first way is um this is the number one question that i've ever gotten asked in my career oh okay i'm sorry for reiterating it's really good it's really good uh it's really good and and i think that so what i did was when i launched my podcast by the way and we should link it up my first episode is how to find a mentor like literally i walk you through the 10 step process how are you doing that so we'll link it up anyway but uh and and if anybody's thinking about that they should go listen because i actually lay out a blueprint for how to go find the right mentor for you but we should ask a question and the question is this if i could have blank as my mentor they would give me x capability so that i can go do y so let me break it down for you if i had tony robbins as my mentor he would give me x capability he would give me the mindset of success so that i can go triple my business if you can't write that that person that means one you don't know what they can do for you and also make sure that you don't know what you actually want the clarity of that like that fill in the blank alone will allow you to like sift and sort between mentors very very very quickly right that's the that's the first thing the second thing i'll tell you um scott is i like to do i think we're all influencer junkies right now uh when i say we it's the you have you know you you hey i'm gonna follow greg garyvee i'm gonna follow grant cardone i'm gonna follow his follower tony robbins your entire feed is just filled with i thought you had some negative uh negative uh wording about influencers in one of your one of your past uh speeches or whatnot i mean like you know there were influencer junkies right like and so what i mean by that is that literally we're looking at stuff and we constantly in a stream of weird advice and that's fine what i decided to do just because i was getting overloaded with this stuff scott was i stopped and i unfollowed everybody on instagram and and this is i started this in 2019 every single month i pick one person to do a deep dive on somebody that i really admire someone that i really appreciate and i'll give you an example i did one of my favorite people in the world that i like i would pay money to have just to have this person just talk and just listen i don't even want to like talk right is malcolm gladwell i love malcolm gladwell i love everything about malcolm gladwell i love the storytelling capabilities so i did a whole month just deep diving on malcolm gladwell and it was to the point scott where i would see him on an interview and someone would ask him a question and i literally knew what he was going to say because you've done such a deep dive on that person so before you even hire somebody i would say just spend like two weeks just devouring everything that they have and i'll give you a very simple example i did a deep dive on seth godin really really i mean i love seth godin i actually wrote seth this email he said here are the 18 things i've done i did this i watched this i read this book i did this i did all of that right and i said there's three questions that i have that were not answered in any of your material i'm happy to either send them to you or if it's easier for you i'm happy to do a 14-minute zoom and i just want to share that with my mastermind group are you open to doing that and he said sure like literally i got on with seth i asked him the three questions he's like thank you for being a man of your award i hit stop record and i sent it to my mastermind group i didn't even need to hire him right there's a lot of ways in which we can just do a bunch of deep dives and get what we need but we should definitely link up the episode but ask the question hey if i could have scott help me develop blank capability it will help my get me z result what is that once you have that i think it really gives you a kind of heat seeker missile on who you should hire it's a good framework i appreciate that we'll i'll link the episode as well i'll get some socials from you i want to do a rapid fire some very quick insights from your life before uh before we close off i just respect your time um and by the way before i pivot and then we close off get some social is there anything else that you're working on you wanted to bring up yeah so i that i'm more more as a gift so i'll tell you one thing that everyone should consider i um i spent the last i took the last 20 years of advice and i put it all together into 20 lessons i call it the four week mba it's 200 free yeah uh it's 100 free there's no it's there's no like no funnel nothing it's a straight up kind of like it's an it's a link to a thousand dollar course for free it's the number four weeknba.com i'd love for people just go grab it because it'll give them a chance to get my 20 lessons that i've learned over the last 20 years so 4weekmba.com i'd love for people that that's kind of like my gift to the world awesome i appreciate it i'll link that too we got if any any links by the way you want i'll put them in the notes below so if you want to check it out uh podcast your site um four week mba all of that uh i'll uh i'll get those all set with the show notes um okay uh rapid fire uh you know you can go into as much or as little depth as you'd like but first question would be um one lesson that you would tell your younger self pay for uh pay for a coach as soon as you're able to do it good very good um what is a resource could be a book podcast audible person that you're into now that you would recommend people go check out um i am re-reading influence by robert cialdini uh one of the one of the greatest books on thought processes marketing uh and really framing your message so robert cialdini influence is written like 20 plus years ago a really awesome book um what would be the most influential person outside of family of course uh that has helped you along your career um that's a that's a tough one um i actually will tell you that one uh well i'll give you one person who's actually in your neck of the woods scott his name is walter schneider walter walterstein from trial walter owns um one third of the world in uh re max so he has 41 000 real estate agents that work with him and he built it all with his bare hands and he took me on as little as a you know he calls me kid and took me on uh you know he's my mentor and he's been along my side for many many years and i you know he's uncle walter to me and so look look him up is that walter schneider one of the one of the kindest people out there very good um and what are you curious about or learning about right now in the world of business tech entrepreneurship anything yeah i'm really i'm really curious about uh what uh augmented reality is gonna do for the world especially with uh you know us spending more time on screens and devices i think that hey i'm going to buy a product can i can i put it somewhere in my room i'm going to change the paint color of my house i'm going to wear this t-shirt can i you know i have my body can i just put my t-shirt on and see what it'll look like i'm a i think that it really brings the power of visualization um back because if you can get if if if i can put a piece of art on your wall right now there's a good chance you're going to buy something from my store right it's so amazing from a convincing uh kind of heuristic and so i um i've been talking to a lot of augmented reality companies it's one of the it's an investment we've actually set aside monies to make an investment in augmented reality so that's my uh my big charge for the next upcoming years is to put my money where my mouth is and and learn more about and invest more in augmented reality i think with the future of e-commerce that's the one thing that's stopping people from buying at home right that's all you hear and ikea's doing it too now they're doing um some sort of augmented reality where you can actually push the furniture into a yeah it's it's the next it's the next iteration of shopping for sure for sure um and then last question what does success look like for you um what did it mean for you excuse me yeah for for me uh for me success is kind of figuring out what you're good at i think for a lot of people success is a result of money fame achievement etc and i'll tell you like i've driven the sports car i'm very grateful for it coming from a you know coming from dumpster diving i've driven the sports car lived in the big house like i've flown on the jets all of that that's cool but it didn't change my life like i'm not that that's not what made me i think more and more i wake up and i'm trying to think about scott is okay what am i good at and can i do more of that and i think the faster someone can do that the happier they get because then they're spending their time entirely in their zone of genius right they're spending their time in who they are and what they were put on this on this earth to do now i don't think you need money to do that i just think you need time and i think you need a great support system to get there so um asking uh i was i was talking to one of my friends rob hanley today and he asked an amazing question he says um ask your friends what you are uncommonly good at ask your friends what you're uncommonly good at and maybe that'll give you a little window into the world of what you are uncommonly good at and maybe that'll drive you to figuring out that true skill of why you're what you were put on this earth to do so i am in uh mad pursuit of finding that right now that's smart that's a very good answer i've never heard that answer before but i think that would lead to a lot of other benchmarks for traditional benchmarks for success when you can figure that out um and last most importantly where do people uh connect with you um your website social all of that good stuff yeah um the i'll give them i'll give them to two you know we already talked about the four week mba i'll give them two places place number one is um we talked a lot about 10x right so i wrote this thing called it's a blog post it's called 10x in five years so literally it's 10x in fiveyears.com it's 37 lessons that i learned growing the business 10x so it's there's no opt-in there's nothing it's just a blog post you should go read it it's 37 bullet points 37 lessons that i learned growing our business 10x and five years to 3.4 billion 10x and fiveyears.com that's the place i would send you uh every other place is just you know i'm on instagram and all that stuff but go to 10xinfivers.com sign up for the newsletter i write i write an email three four times a week to all the ceos that i mentor that i share with everybody else so 10x and 5years.com is a place i'll send [Music] everybody you …