From Bourbon to Finance: How to Find a Financial Advisor You Can Trust

How to Find a Financial Advisor You Can Trust

In From Bourbon to Finance: How to Find a Financial Advisor You Can Trust, James Vermillion, founder of Vermillion Private Wealth, joins host William Glass to discuss what to look for in a financial advisor. You’ll learn:

  • Preparation is the key to success
  • How to pick a financial advisor
  • Finding peak performance in your career

James has built multiple businesses including a real estate flipping business, bespoke candle company, and his own financial advisory practice. This episode is jam-packed with value. In addition, I had the pleasure of sitting down on James’s podcast called Bulls, Bears and Bourbon. Check it out wherever you listen to Silicon Alley.

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About James Vermillion

James is the Founder of Vermillion Private Wealth and Wixology Candle Company. His curiosity about entrepreneurship led him to start his first company while serving as an officer in the US Air Force. Since then, James has continued to grow as an entrepreneur. As the owner of Vermillion Private Wealth, James serves as a fee-only financial advisor and investment management, overseeing investment portfolios that focus on innovative and disruptive technologies. With Wixology, James works alongside his co-founders to continue to grow the brand, emphasizing sustainability.

Learn more about James Vermillion: https://vermillionprivatewealth.com/

Transcription

This transcription is autogenerated and may contain errors.

William Glass: [00:00:00] One of the areas finance I am most skeptical about is finding a financial advisor. Who’s actually good at what they do and will put your interests first. Unfortunately. Uh, not so great things out in the wealth management industry, but luckily we were sitting down with James Vermilion who was going to give you all of the things that you need to know in order to find the right financial advisor for you, and really understand what you should be looking for when interviewing and talking to financial advisors, James Vermilion is from Vermilion private wealth.

And has started his own firm after going from the air force to being in the bourbon business, to working at a large financial advisory practice where he wasn’t always able to put his client’s interests at heart, because it would go against what was best for the firm. And instead started his own practice where he can really focus on building those relationships.

What he’s learned is that preparation is key above anything else. And if you were properly prepared, that is the most important thing. Business. And second is how to find that peak performance in your career in life. James actually hosts a podcast called the bulls bears and bourbon podcast, which I had the pleasure of sitting down on.

So definitely go check out that episode. We got to sip some bourbon and talk a little bit about money and finances. So definitely go check that out. I’m William Glass CEO and co-founder of estrogen, of course, your host of the Silicon alley podcast. Whereas my job to talk to top performers, entrepreneurs, and VCs, to understand what it truly takes to grow and scale a business.

If you have not already, please go and pound that subscribe button so you can notify one when it air every Friday and without further ado, I hope you enjoy today’s finance focused episode of the Silicon alley podcast, featuring the James Vermilion. 

Are you interested in growing and scaling your business? Welcome to the Silicon alley podcast, where you’ll hear from entrepreneurs, venture, capitalists, and top performers on what it truly takes to grow and scale a business. You’ll walk away with actionable insights. You can apply in your own business and life.

Now Dwayne blasts, the CEO and co-founder of ostrich and your host of the Silicon alley podcast.

 James welcome to Silicon alley podcast. Super excited to have you on.

James Vermillion: [00:02:07] Yeah. Good to talk to you again, William. 

William Glass: [00:02:10] I know. Yeah. I feel like we just did this one a couple of weeks ago, but, uh, inverse 

James Vermillion: [00:02:15] I’m on your turf now, man. So 

William Glass: [00:02:18] exactly. Yeah. And so if you don’t know what I’m referencing, James hosts, a podcast called bulls bears and bourbon, which is a lot of fun. We, had, a very strong Ry, uh, during that conversation, which was, uh, delicious.

But man, I was feeling it at the end there. 

James Vermillion: [00:02:32] Yeah, it was. Not mild. Put it that way, but, uh, this is, this is not bourbon in my glass by the way. It’s just coffee today. So 

William Glass: [00:02:41] fair enough. Fair enough. Well, yeah, I’m excited to dive in. We kind of touched on it and you’ve got a really interesting background, um, as an entrepreneur in finance.

Doing all these, these various things. But I’d love to just start out and understand before you got into your career, you’re in the air force. Can you talk to me a little bit about your time in the air force and how that’s kind of impacted you moving 

James Vermillion: [00:03:05] forward? Yeah, definitely. The. Reason. I went into the air force that, you know, yes, I’m patriotic.

Yes. I love America and all those things, but if I’m being perfectly honest, the reason I joined the air force was to, to get an education. And I was a junior senior in high school and I was talking with my mom, you know, how are we going to pay for this college thing? What’s the, you know, w w what’s the situation.

And so she and I sat down. Um, I actually did want to join the military at some point. Didn’t really know both my parents were in the air force. Didn’t really know about the officer side of things. And my mom, you know, came up with, you know, she was like, if you’d looked into this ROTC scholarship and I hadn’t, I hadn’t heard of it.

We didn’t have ROTC at our school at the time. I think they may have it now, as far as junior Razzi. So that sounded really good. So I went through that process of, you know, applying for that ROTC scholarship and was very lucky, um, to get that and had a four year ride to university of Kentucky, which is about 45 minutes from my hometown in Frankfurt.

So that worked out great. So that that’s kind of how I ended up in the air force, but, what a unique experience that was to be thrust at age 26. As an officer into a leadership role, not knowing what the hell you’re doing and, and trying to figure out, figure it out step by step and, and day by day.

And it really learned so many things, you know, that whole trial by fire and that sort of thing. That’s really what it was. And a lot of those lessons directly correlated with trying to start a business. Whereas, you know, you’re constantly putting out fires. You’re constantly learning new things. You’re constantly realizing you’re ill-equipped in certain areas and trying to write those, those before they get out of hand.

So it was definitely a great learning experience, a great leadership opportunity, great educational opportunity. And it just kinda set the stage for my future. It was never something I intended to make a career of really. And, but it’s something I definitely have no regrets about. It was a fun. Exciting and very educational experience.

Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:05:18] no, that makes a lot of sense. And, I think that’s one of the great things, about what the military and ROTC scholarship pride is the ability to go get an education and take advantage of some of the benefits that are, that are unique when you choose to serve the country. What have you translated into your entrepreneurial career?

I’m curious if there’s anything specific that like you’ve really, really taken, you mentioned trial by fire, you know, learning to overcome some obstacles. What are some of the things that you as an entrepreneur really look back on and say, I can tie that back to my time in the 

James Vermillion: [00:05:50] air force. Well, I think the cliche answer would probably revolve around discipline, right?

I mean, that’s kind of the thing when people think of, when they think of serving in the military, going through boot camp and waking up early and, you know, hospital corners on your bed and don’t get me wrong. All of those lessons are super valuable. I think. A fairly disciplined person, even before that.

So it was a good fit for me personally, but really the lessons that I think resonated and carried over the most were more relational because here I was at 22 year old kid didn’t know anything about what I was doing. I ended up being a munitions maintenance officer, working on components for nuclear Wells.

Basically. So obviously I know I did, I had no background. I was a political science major for crying out loud. And so here I was working on the nuclear program in the air force and I was quote unquote in charge of, or, or overseeing people who had 25 years of experience. And, you know, the classic young officer mistake is to walk in to the show.

Like you own the place and start telling people how smart you are and how much better you’re going to make things. And I learned from my parents who were enlisted and. Incredible people. And we’re, we’re, you know, in the air force, that’s, that’s not a good approach. That’s not going to get you very far.

And so I really tried to embrace and learn from the people that were there. And, and I realized pretty quickly that if I were going to be successful in what I was trying to do was going to be because of the people around me, not because of me. So I’ve always tried to kind of take those lessons and apply them even, you know, for my business, with Vermilion private.

I’m a solo practitioner, but relationships are still the most important part of my business. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:07:45] no, I’m I appreciate you diving in there. And I think that’s a really important mistake that, I know when I first moved into management and it was, was managing people and, you know, a couple people that were older than me, I’ve made some of those mistakes, right.

That, uh, you know, oh, I, you know, I can do it better than, you know, the other bot, the other boss. Right? Like, and then you get in there and you’re like, wow, this is a. A lot different than, than what I anticipated. So that’s incredible that you came in with that knowledge and your parents helped to guide you because it’s definitely a mistake.

That is a, is a common one. 

James Vermillion: [00:08:17] My dad made. Very sure that I wouldn’t do that. I’ll put it that way. And I appreciate that very much. 

William Glass: [00:08:25] Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that’s really interesting is that it sounds like you made the decision. You sat down with your mom, it sounded like it was you sitting down saying, Hey, how are we going to do this whole college thing?

Um, right. So there’s a focus and it sounds like about planning and thinking about finances. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Cause you’ve obviously ended up in wealth management, so you’re, you’re interested in investing in finance, but have you always had that. 

James Vermillion: [00:08:49] That was a hell of a good transition.

I’ve got to say. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think so. You know, one thing I’ve always been proud of with my parents is they both have done better than where they came from. And I don’t mean better as far as people, I just mean financially and being in a position to. Provide us with opportunities. And I’ve always taken that very seriously and tried to not screw that up and, and hopefully continue that and provide my children.

I have one daughter now with even better opportunities than I had. So I’ve always taken that really seriously. And I was, you know, a really good student in high school for the most part. And no one in my family had graduated from college. So we hadn’t gone through that before. So yeah, there was an element of that.

Me thinking forward. I knew I wanted to, advance my education. Didn’t really know exactly what that would look like. And my parents knew as well, and they obviously wanted that for me. So I think it was a combination of my parents realizing that’s what I wanted to do and wanting to be available to help me, but certainly in my mind as well, there was, the thought of what do I need to do next?

What’s what’s the best move for me, kind of looking forward in my life and where I want. 

William Glass: [00:10:04] No, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And so when you came out of the air force, you ended up in finance. Can you talk to me about that transition and, you know, definitely want to get into what ultimately led you to want to strike out on your own and talk about some of the other first entrepreneurial 

James Vermillion: [00:10:24] endeavors that you yeah.

And I won’t give my whole life story here because there, there are a lot of twists and turns, I think. It really started when I, when I got out of the air force, like I said, I knew it wasn’t going to be a career. You know, I wasn’t going to be a lifer. I really never planned on it. Um, I did consider it a little bit, but never too seriously.

I was already married and we were ready to move back to Kentucky and, and, you know, go ahead and put some roots in and things like that. So that was kind of off the table. At that point, I actually got a call from, a very good friend, one of my best friends from high school who was working in the bourbon bit.

He said, Hey, are you still getting out? Are you still moving back? You know, what’s that look like? Someone at our company just left and I think you’d be a great fit. So I ended up in the bourbon business, working for Blanton’s bourbon, which is a fantastic product out of Buffalo trace. If you haven’t had it, go try it.

It’s it’s amazing. And I did that for a while, working on the international side, kind of this hybrid sales, logistics, position during that period, I met another friend and he was in the wealth man. Business. And he’d asked me a couple of times, as we got to know each other a little more. Hey, would you ever consider.

You know, coming into this business and maybe working at my firm, it’s a great firm, all of these things. And I said, no, you know, I’m really happy. I’m traveling the world, you know, pushing bourbon, you know, how much better can it get? But over time, you know, I, I considered it a little more and he’s a pretty convincing guy, which is why he’s so successful.

And I ended up making that switch. This was, you know, about three, four years ago and. Didn’t really know what I was getting into. So fortunately I kept one foot in the door and still do some work with Blanton’s. But yeah, so I made that shift over to wealth management. There were some things that I love, some other things that I didn’t like quite so much.

I, I, you know, then we could fast forward and get to the why I kind of struck, struck out and decided to, to. You know, develop my own firm, but it’s a really good fit for me as a whole, because I do like those planning elements. I do like talking with people, I like relating to people and, and, and all of those things.

And I just felt like, Wealth management gets a little bit too bureaucratic, a little bit too stuffy. I think when people think about going to talk to a wealth advisor or a financial advisor, whatever, they, they feel like they’re getting ready to go play in their funeral and pick out a casket. And I don’t want it to feel that way.

I want it to be fun. I want people to actually enjoy thinking about their future instead of, of dreading. Yeah, no, that 

William Glass: [00:12:55] makes a lot of sense. And you know, that the planning aspect, right. It sounds like that that was a really nice fit. So what were some of the things that you liked about financial planning, working for a firm and some of the things that ultimately led you to, to strike out on your own?

I think if I’m not mistaken, real estate was a, was a part of. In terms of what you incentivized to essentially advise clients to do, but we’d love to hear a little bit about what ultimately led you to start your practice. 

James Vermillion: [00:13:25] Yeah, that’s a great question. And there it’s really, it’s difficult to answer, to be honest with you because there are so many kind of bits and pieces that, that on their own, weren’t really a big deal, but combined in the timing of things and, and COVID happening and my daughter being born and some of the things going on.

In my life kind of collided with some of my thoughts on the business side of things. And it kind of just really made for this situation where I said, okay, this is the right time. I should go ahead and do this, but kind of going back to where I was before. You know, I love the wealth management space in the sense that I’m fascinated by this stuff.

Right. I love learning about it. Even now where I’m doing it every day, I still just really enjoy reading some white paper on some fascinating topic that I maybe don’t understand as well as I want to. And I love thinking about the future and I get excited about the world 20 years from now. And I get excited when I think about the world that my one-year-old daughter is going to live in.

I look around so many other people are so scared of the future and they’re so worried about things going wrong. I don’t, I don’t see most of those things. And maybe, maybe that’s not always a good thing, but I’m very optimistic. I really believe that things are improving even when we don’t see them in the news and we don’t see them in the media.

And that’s the part I like. I like talking about the future with people and hopefully shining a positive light. On things and getting people excited about their future and what they can achieve. And hopefully being just a small part of enabling people to find success in a way that they want to. But there were also some things I didn’t like and namely it was around how I could do these things.

And as you know, anytime you get in a big company for that company to operate efficiently, They just have to kind of put people in boxes and this is your role, and this is your role and you stay in your box, you stay in your lane. And I struggled with that because there were some things I wanted to provide.

Some advice I wanted to provide. And you brought up the real estate thing. If, if a client came to me and really want to talk about buying real estate or something like that, I had to be pretty careful about it. Especially if it’s an investment property, about how much advice I could provide.

On that investment, since it was kind of outside of the firm, you didn’t want to, you know, sell away clients when they could be putting their money with you. They’re putting it somewhere else. And things like that. On the marketing end, I really wanted to do a podcast. I really wanted to spend time creating content writing.

I’d love to yeah. And I couldn’t do those things. So I wasn’t spending my day in a way that really kind of was peak happiness for me, you know? And I, and I struggled with that a little bit, and I’ve said this, on some other platforms and I truly believe it, peak performance occurs when you can be yourself and when you can play to your strengths.

And I really wasn’t feeling that I was operating at at peak capacity. So I wanted to make a change to hopefully get to that. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:16:22] no, that makes a lot of sense and the limitations, right? I think that’s, that’s one of the key things that drives a lot of people to start something of their own is, you know, being stuck in that structure and not being able to, you know, do the things that you really want to do create.

To, you know, advise people on what you felt like was the best full picture versus just, Hey, here’s the one thing that you’re allowed to talk about. Right? Know, there’s all these other things that might be a great fit and, you know, being stuck in that, in that structure. So, James, what’s it been like starting the practice.

What have, what has been that experience and what are some of the challenges that you’ve, that you’ve had to face early? 

James Vermillion: [00:17:02] Well on the whole, it’s been fantastic. It led me to a world of things that are out there that I actually had no clue existed. There are financial tools that are just incredible, that I didn’t have access to before there are platforms to work with my clients that are out there that are very easy to use, very intuitive and great fits for my clients.

So there, there are, there’s a whole world, a whole suite of things out there that I have no clue about. So it’s been really exciting to. Not just learn what those things are, but to incorporate, incorporate them into my practice and, and, you know, get client feedback and determine what’s the best way forward.

Is that something you like? Is that something you didn’t like? So really building the practice that I want that gets me exciting or excited, but there, there have been some challenges, no doubt. And as you can imagine, and as you know, with what you’re doing with ostrich, and I don’t know, maybe not to the same extent, but it’s a very, very heavily regulated.

Industry and, you know, for a small business, I mean, big firms have compliance departments that are staffed with many, many, many people. So, you know, trying to make sure that I’m doing all of the things I need to do by the book. And the book is massive. It’s definitely a challenge, but again, there are tools out there that make those tasks easier and it’s a matter of finding them and implementing them.

So you’re juggling as, you know, as an entrepreneur you’re juggling and right when you get into a good flow with, with four balls here comes another one. So. That’s the challenge. It’s making sure you’re spending your time on things that are actually productive. And for me productive means, are they benefiting my clients or is it just something that makes me feel good?

Because ultimately my job is to make sure my clients feel good. And that’s what I wanted. 

William Glass: [00:18:49] Yeah, no, I love that. And the, the compliance piece is definitely a whole monster in and of itself. There’s just, especially if you’re creating, right. So creating a podcast, if you’re writing, like there’s, there’s so many things that you have to think about when you’re in such a heavily regulated industry that, you know, most people don’t even think about it.

They can post whatever pictures, say, whatever they want on social media and it is what it is. Right. They might get a little blow back from. You know, they’ve got strong opinions, but beyond that, it’s not like they’ve got to worry about, regulatory bodies 

James Vermillion: [00:19:20] coming down on them. Yeah. I got, I had a conversation the other day.

Yeah. And I, I, I think I got a little animated, so I’ll try to keep it a little calmer today. You know, I was thinking about the medical profession and I could be wrong. I don’t want, you know, any doctors or whoever you might have listening to come at me, but the amount of information on clients that I have to get, keep understand before I can implement certain things with them.

And then I think about going to a doctor where I fill out a form. Yes. But the doctor’s in there for three minutes, didn’t ask me anything. And then they just prescribed something. I’m like, it seems like, you know, as, as important as money. Health is probably even more important or not probably health is more important.

So I, I feel like there’s certainly an outsized eye on the financial space, but you could obviously argues for good measure and to keep people from getting taken, if you will, by by bad players. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:20:14] no, no. I mean, there’s obviously obviously a purpose. That’s interesting comparing it to yeah. To the medical profession.

I think collectively less time than I saw the doctors, like the last three or four times I maybe saw them for like, I don’t know, maybe five minutes, if you add up the entire time, uh, you know, there’s three visits, right? It was maybe five minutes the whole time. Cause it’s like, I wasn’t one of the 80 year old clients that had a lot of problems.

Right. So. Uh, not yet. Yeah. Yeah. Knock on wood. Hopefully it stays that way, but, it’s very, very interesting how, how another still heavily regulated industry just in different ways,

James Vermillion: [00:20:49] operates. It is. And, and, and it can be frustrating at times, but it’s one of those things. Kind of the cost of entry.

So you do those things, you do them well, and you create as few problems for yourself as you can later. So that’s kind of the attitude. I try to take like that. 

William Glass: [00:21:07] So what are some of the things that make your practice unique that make it different? And maybe it’s the, you know, talking about the kind of like target customers you go after or how you work with them.

But I’m curious, what are some of the things that make you unique? 

James Vermillion: [00:21:23] That’s a great question. I think it goes back to. Kind of the origin of how I built the firm instead of starting with what experiences did I like, my prior firms and trying to replicate those, I started with, what do I not like, what do I not think?

The clients like. And I tried to find ways to ensure that they were not part of the experience with clients of Vermilion private Wells. So that was my starting point, but some of the things I think that are different, I was willing to step out a little bit and try some different things. And a good example is the custodian platform that we use.

We use altruists which the CEO, Jason wink is just an incredible guy. Great team of people behind the scenes, really working to modernize and provide broader accessibility of financial services. And they’re doing an incredible job. They’re very young though, and they don’t have the robust system that a Schwab does.

And, you know, some people might have said, Hey, I need to check all of these boxes. But for me, the important part was. Will this work. Does it meet these requirements? Yes. Okay. That’s good. Are they improving? Are they really trying? Are they listening? Are they accepting feedback? What’s really behind the scenes.

What’s that culture like? And that to me was the difference. When you look at some of the existing traditional finance, and then you look at some of the new stuff out there, there’s a culture gap. And I would rather for the most part. Work with people, whether there’s a cultural fit and maybe there’s a feature missing that I can figure out a way to plug something else in, then to go with someone that’s a terrible culture fit.

It doesn’t work with what I’m trying to do. But it’s got 500 features, only 10 of which I use. So that was, that was another thing that I think kind of makes, makes what we’re doing a little bit differently or a little bit different. And then frankly, you kind of alluded to it. I serve a younger clientele.

I don’t, I don’t see myself as a sales person. I see, truly see myself as a portfolio manager and a financial advisor, not someone who my job every day is to go get new clients. Of course, I have to get more clients. That’s part of, you know, my livelihood and keeping this business going and growing. So that’s definitely a part of my everyday routine, but I’m patient.

I can play the long game. And I know if I take care of my clients, if I provide an experience that they actually enjoy, instead of dread the growth will take care of itself. And I was listening to a podcast recently. I think it was Arnold Vandenberg. He said when he was young, this is, you know, he’s probably in his seventies and growing his business.

He focused so much on trying to get new clients every day. And he was realizing I had, he had, he said he had the best prospect you could ever imagine. They were ready to do business with somebody. And he was the first one there and he didn’t, I didn’t get the business. And he said, what I realized was I was spending too much time worrying about getting the business.

I wasn’t spending enough time being prepared. So he reset his life focused on preparation and becoming knowledgeable and putting his platforms and systems and getting his mind prepared. And he said the business started flowing. So that’s kind of the approach that I’m taking. I’m doing the things that I enjoy, and I’m trying to create an experience that will help my clients become advocates and help grow my business that way.

And we’ll see how well that will work. But I, I think it’s doing pretty well. So. 

William Glass: [00:24:54] Yeah, no, I like that. And it kind of goes back to the whole planning aspect, right? When we’re talking about why you, why you ended up in the air force, right. Is thinking ahead and planning, preparing, making sure that you’re creating a great experience that your customers, clients are gonna absolutely 

James Vermillion: [00:25:09] love.

Yeah. And a lot of financial advisors are very impatient, which, you know, it’s not what you’d really want or expect, but when you’re trying to hit some quarterly or some monthly metrics, And that’s all you’re focused on. I think you’re really doing yourself and your, your clients and your future clients, a disservice.

So, you know, yes, those things are still important for me to grow my business, but that’s not what I’m going to focus on when I need to be focusing on the clients. Yeah, absolutely. 

William Glass: [00:25:36] I think I can’t remember the stat, but it’s like somewhere around like maybe 10, depending on what industry are 10 times more expensive to go get another, to go get a net new customer than it is to just work with an existing customer and help them see success.

So really growing, growing your client base internally and helping them be successful also helps you as a, as a, as an advisor. 

James Vermillion: [00:25:59] Yeah. And my clients are in their, you know, late twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. And they’re going to come into a lot more money. They’re going to earn more as they grow their own businesses.

A lot of them are entrepreneurs themselves, or as they move up the, the structure at their, you know, at their current place of employment, you know, we’re getting ready to see a massive, massive transfer of wealth coming up over the next decade. So a lot of those clients are going to inherit money and they’re going to need someone to help them determine what the best use of, of that is.

And my future revenue is already here. It’s just a matter of time. And I kind of look at it that way and adding new clients is bonus, but I also want to make sure those clients are a good fit, both for me and for them. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:26:42] absolutely. So along those lines, then James, what are, what are some tips, advice you have for someone who maybe hasn’t worked with a financial advisor before, but has thought about it as interested, wants to explore it?

Like, what are some of the things that you should look for? 

James Vermillion: [00:26:59] It’s a great question. I, I tend to want to say some of the industry standard stuff about fiduciaries and all that stuff, and that’s fine. People can Google those things, but what I would really just tell people is make sure that culture is there.

And on the investment side, when I’m looking to choose a new stock to add to a portfolio, for example, I really try to look at a company’s culture. Is that a place I would want to work? Do they have a mission that’s really inspiring or is the mission just to make money making money? Big part of, of the equation of whether or not that’s a suitable stock for me to select, but companies with that mission that is really inspirational, both to employees and to customers.

That’s really important. And I would say that’s very important with an advisor to make sure that, that, that advisor, when you’re, when you’re talking to them, It was just a good fit that you get along, because this is someone you want to be honest with and talking about your life and the good and the bad, and sometimes the ugly it’s someone that you want to be able to relax around.

Instead of, like I mentioned earlier, feeling like you’re planning your funeral, so yeah. You want to feel good about it? It doesn’t have to be, but it’s, you know, younger clients in particular don’t want to feel like everything is a white tie. You know, sometimes they want to just go in and have a conversation and they want to get some things off their chest and they want to plan for their future, but not in a way where they’re uncomfortable.

Sometimes they might just want to have a glass of bourbon with you and talk through some of their goals and aspirations. A financial partner is, is kind of the way I look at it. Not just someone who’s going to tell you. We need to make some adjustments to your asset allocation. Like yeah, that’s, that’s all important, but if you don’t enjoy having those discussions with that person, it’s probably not going to be a very fruitful relationship.

Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:28:52] no, that makes a lot of sense that culture fit and being able to build trust and really connect with, with an advisor makes complete sense and creates a better relationship, as you said, for the long-term. 

James Vermillion: [00:29:03] Right? Because definitely the 

William Glass: [00:29:05] idea of switching advisors every, every year is not advised nor will that probably lead to success.

So finding someone that truly is a good partner 

James Vermillion: [00:29:14] is key. Definitely. Yep. 

William Glass: [00:29:17] You talked about really being interested in the future and that you’re very optimistic. Can you talk to me a little bit about some of the things you are most optimistic for or things that you’re really excited about based on, based on what you’re seeing in terms of, uh, you know, investments 

James Vermillion: [00:29:33] and just.

Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. So you, you might have to stop us at some point because I can really go on, you know, for a, for a long time, but I’ll kind of start more broadly and, and just say, and I wrote a piece about Rosie retrospection and the idea that people view the past more favorably than it was.

And that leads to them thinking worse about the future. And I think that’s a big problem investors, have they underestimate how good it’s going to be in the future? And in a couple pieces I’ve used historical references. I always talk about 1960. And as everyone probably knows that was a pivotal year in American history.

A lot of very difficult things were going on during that time. And I think a lot of people had a hard time seeing light at the end of the tunnel for America and for themselves and their children and their futures. And there are going to be time. Like 1968 where we’re looking at each other saying, oh my gosh, like, are we going to survive this?

And it’s very scary. I mean, COVID, was that to an extent nine 11 was that to an extent the financial crisis, but we get through them and things go on and we’d learned from them and we make them. Better and we’re never going to be perfect. We’re certainly not now, but thinking about the world through that lens of how difficult things have been in the past and how we got through them and generally came out better on the other end, gets me thinking about the future.

You can see that reflected in my portfolio management style, by the way, because you’ll see a lot of things that are kind of based on what I think are macro trends that are shaping the future things. Artificial intelligence and deep learning robotics and digital wallets and decentralized finance, genomic coding, and some of the healthcare possibilities around some of that work that’s going on.

So all of these things, I see brilliant people doing brilliant work, and it’s not in the news every day. I honestly don’t even watch the news all that often because it’s not particularly useful in my opinion. But yeah, those are the things I get excited about and I think. The problems we’re solving now.

And of course we’re going to have new problems. I mean, right now, some of the things that are happening in the green energy space and things happening that are going to help us solve the climate crisis. Now, granted, we pushed them shit to the very edge. We wait until we’re staring down the barrel before we decided to do something.

But when we decided to do it, we’d usually do it pretty quickly. And with a lot of fun, And I think that’s what you’re seeing right now. So yeah, I just, I really do. I see so much opportunity for investors. I see so much opportunity to make everyday life better for people. I want my money to, to benefit from that as well.

And I think. Yeah, no, I like 

William Glass: [00:32:22] that a lot, James. And I think that you’re spot on in terms of how we, how we look at the past and have those rose colored glasses. And we forget about all the bad stuff and how are we feeling? And just, you know, we came out of it. So therefore, you know, there were actually good things that happened.

And, you know, we missed that. A lot of the, the same things that we’re experiencing now is what we’re experiencing. 50 a hundred, 200 years ago, whether in history, but we just don’t recognize that there’s that same level of conflict. And feel like, you know, the future’s the challenging part. Yeah. Where do you recommend people go to, you know, you’re not consuming the news.

If I want to educate myself, I want to get smarter about some of these different emerging areas that could be great investments or just interesting things to know, because that’s, our world is going to change because of them. Where do you recommend people go to find those type, that type of thing. 

James Vermillion: [00:33:10] Here’s what I see happening.

It goes all directions. You have a choice every day. Of what information you want to consume. If you are thinking of very evil, main thoughts, you can go find a community of people who will echo those thoughts and make you feel good about them. You can do the same with people who. Are very positive about the future.

You can do the same with really any opinion you have. You can go find someone no matter how ridiculous that opinion may be. You’re going to find a group of people out there who will make you feel like you are absolutely right. And that’s where we’re at. I’m not saying it’s the worst thing of all time.

I’m just saying it’s, it’s what I think is the truth of where we’re at with social media and rapid fire information. And reducing very complex ideas. And to headlines, what I have done is I’ve really tried to read more. Books, actual books and that’s foreign to a lot of people. It seems, but reading podcasts, sometimes you don’t need some, a quote unquote expert.

Who’s going to make money off of telling you the news to talk about something. You can hear two people like us having a conversation about it, and maybe you learn something that way. And then even social media, there are really good opportunities. I have learned an incredible amount of information in certain areas in particular artificial intelligence and decentralized finance.

Because there are some brilliant, brilliant people who openly share their knowledge in places like Twitter. Now the danger is you can create your own little bubble where, like I said, you’re hearing exactly what you want to hear. So I think being self aware. And, and understanding that those things can happen and trying to make sure just like you had diversify your investments, make sure you’re diversifying your information and not getting married to some idea that you remain open-minded.

But I think largely it’s a choice you can choose to be open-minded and choose to go find information a different way, or you can choose to sit around and watch the news and get angry and frustrated and fearful about the. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:35:25] no. Yeah. You’re, you’re spot on. It’s so easy now to find the, whatever you’re looking for online, there’s a, someone’s created a blog, a community, a subreddit, a whatever, whatever it is, a discord server or something where you can find absolutely find like-minded industries.

So being able to diversify your information, I think is absolutely spot on. I, I, I’d love to dive a little bit deeper into, into defy specifically. So decentralized finance, I think that’s such a interesting space. And in the context of when we’re recording this, which is early July, 2021, there was a big project that mark Cuban was invested in the defy space that I think a couple of weeks ago went from, looked like he was doing well to zero.

So I’m curious, like, what are you, what are you seeing in the defy space? What are your thoughts? Whether it’s following certain people on, on Twitter? Like what are you thinking when it comes to decentralized finance? 

James Vermillion: [00:36:20] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s a really interesting time. I think we’re not even in ending number one yet.

I think we’re still warming up prior to the game and stretching. So I don’t have really strong opinions on it just yet. I think people, people always want it. Some opinion, right? I’m open to admit that I’m learning right there, along with everyone where I don’t want to find myself, especially as a financial advisor is five or six years from now as if the industry’s changing and the financial world is changing.

And I’m totally ignorant to it because I said, all this is silly. I don’t believe in this or this isn’t beneficial to me. So I’m going to ignore it for a decade. So what I’m really trying to do is learn. I’ll give you an example. I just started the COVID. Actually today for the certified digital asset advisor.

So it’s the first certification that financial advisors can get to have that certification to advise clients on digital assets. Now, my goal is not to go build a practice on advising on digital assets. That’s not, not where I’m at. That’s not where my mind is, but I want to be informed. And I want to understand these concepts.

And I think it goes back to. 2008 that’s when Bitcoin was created coming at, you know, financial crisis was happening. Public trust in financial institutions was, was not, not high to say the least. And another system was offered up. And of course it’s been a 13 year journey from then to now and a lot’s changed.

And now there’s this whole budding space of defy and digital assets. A lot of which is, is probably gonna prove to be absolutely not. And you’re going to hear a lot of those stories of this token or this coin or this digital asset or this cryptocurrency that ended up being absolutely nothing. But on the other hand, I do think that finance system is going to be up ended at some point, not, not in a bad way.

But it’s going to advance, you know, the internet does almost everything at this point and it’s, hasn’t really been able to disrupt traditional finance. And I think that is going to happen in our lifetime. And I just want to understand the concepts. I want to understand what is cryptography. What is Bitcoin mining?

What, you know, when people say mining, what do they mean? You know, when you hear about the blockchain, what is the blockchain, how might that apply to my clients or what other technologies could the blockchain be used for? So it really, if nothing else is exploring what other questions I come up with and tried to seek answers, and I do get excited about it.

I don’t know where it’s going, but I think the possibilities, I think it’s probably like the very, very early days of that. We can’t even fathom at this point, you know, you hear about black swans, like these bad events that no one saw coming. I think they’re also reverse black swans, these good things that we never could anticipate.

And I think when you look back 20 years on around this time, I think it will be one of the big things. You know, the nineties was the internet. Boom. I think this kind of period of time will be a shift in, in finance to, to a largely digital EcoSys. 

William Glass: [00:39:30] Yeah. No, absolutely. And that makes a lot of sense. And I wasn’t it, wasn’t trying to get you to take one opinion or just interested in what you’re saying, because there is a lot of, a lot of noise, 

James Vermillion: [00:39:40] so much noise just 

William Glass: [00:39:41] specifically around cryptocurrencies, but 

James Vermillion: [00:39:44] I’m not advocating anyone go load up on cryptocurrencies.

All, all I’m saying. I love thinking about these things. And I think if you are going to do something like that, or if you’re considering buying some cryptocurrency, you need to do the same thing. You need to educate yourself and make sure you actually understand what, what it is you’re doing, what it is you’re buying.

And. A question. I always ask why, if someone comes to me and says, Hey, James, I’ve been looking at this particular stock or this particular cryptocurrency, do you think I should buy some? Well, first off, I probably haven’t done the research on that exact asset. So I’m not going to give them a, a buyer sell opinion.

But second, I usually ask them why, if they have a compelling reason and a thesis as to why. Why they came to conclude that this would be a potentially good investment, then it probably will be okay for them to do that. But a lot of times it’s, well, you know, it’s that FOMO, it’s that hype it’s that seeing crypto millionaires and wanting to be, that’s not a good why, if your, why is because everyone else is doing.

You probably need to go back to the drawing board and really think about how you’re choosing your investments. Yeah, no, I 

William Glass: [00:40:50] think that’s, that’s spot on. There’s just so many different coins that pop up and they just try to price some. So they’re super low. So if it goes to a dollar, you know, but there’s, I don’t know how many trillions of coins out there, you know, it’s just, it’s the 

James Vermillion: [00:41:03] wild west.

It really is. When I look at that stuff. I can never even keep up. Even if I tried, I couldn’t probably keep up if I had a team of 10 people. So what I’m really trying to do is go back Bitcoin. To me, that was kind of the base. The Bitcoin white paper was really kind of what started this whole movement. So that’s kind of where I’m starting and make sure that I at least have a base level understanding of why it was created.

How it might impact the future. And then I can start to look at, does it make sense to include whether it’s Bitcoin or potentially some other digital asset as a portion of client portfolios? Does it make sense to include 3% or 5% allocation into a growth portfolio? Because Bitcoin is largely uncorrelated.

You know, those are the questions I want to ask and I’m not to the stage at this point and feeling comfortable. Coming up with those conclusions, but I want to get. Yeah, no, that makes sense. 

William Glass: [00:42:03] That makes sense. It’s thinking about the underlying use case for a coin, right? Like Ethereum has shown that as a blockchain, there’s, you’re able to build smart contracts and NFTs have come off of that primarily off of Ethereum and there.

So thinking about like, what are the actual uses that people are actually, is there utility in something or is it just, maybe it’ll be doge coin and go to them like, and someone will keep buying it as a joke, like, you know, 

James Vermillion: [00:42:28] Uh, yeah, there were a lot of shit coins out there. Right? 

William Glass: [00:42:32] Exactly. Exactly. Well, James we’ve, we’ve kind of taken this, this into a very, uh, decentralized, conversation around cryptocurrency, which wasn’t the intent, kind of bringing it back to, to your practice and you know, what you see for the future.

How do you define success? Like what does success look like to you? 

James Vermillion: [00:42:53] Oh, I love these questions. I really do because it makes you reflect and examine yourself. I think to me, it really doesn’t even have anything to do with money or objects. I would say it’s how happy I am and satisfied. I am with myself and how proud of myself I am.

If I can look in the mirror every day and feel like I’m doing a pretty good job, then that’s success. And, you know, we all have our demons and we all have our areas for improvement that, you know, we need to work on, but I want to feel like I’m learning every day that I’m challenging myself. That I’m trying to be a good husband and I’m trying to be a good dad, a good friend, a good advisor.

If I’m doing those things. And I feel good about myself and I feel good about what I’m doing then that to me is success pretty simple, but it is yeah. 

William Glass: [00:43:42] Getting a good night’s sleep and being able to, to feel good about what you’re doing, what you’re putting out into the world and what you’re accomplishing.

I think that’s absolutely a great point. So we’ve talked a lot about finance in general. What would you say is the best investment that you’ve made 

James Vermillion: [00:43:59] yourself? The best investment. Well, people have listened to my podcast, probably know the answer, this, and, yeah, at least from a return standpoint, at least as far as stocks go from a return standpoint, it would be Tesla that said probably the best investment I ever made was some of the early real estate transactions I did because I was, you know, 24, 25 years old and had some, some nice, you know, singles, doubles and triples.

That allowed me to reinvest and, and put me in a position to have a better start than I would have had otherwise. So probably I would say that the real estate, some of those real estate transactions early on. Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:44:39] So what type of real estate? I think everyone’s familiar with Tesla. So what type of, of, of real estate investments.

James Vermillion: [00:44:47] Yeah. So, you know, I’ll, I’ll go back just a little bit. I was in the air force and a good friend of mine was here in Lexington and we had kind of talked about real estate before. And when I was a kid, I was fascinated with those flipping shows and all that stuff. I can remember sitting around the living room with my parents and telling them I’m going to do that one day.

That looks fun. So I did. So that friend ended up kind of managing. The actual projects and I was more on the analysis side. So what we did, we basically took a year, tried to learn as much as we could about real estate from the local markets to financing, to actually running, managing a construction project, to, you know, the numbers.

And to me, the numbers part, as you can imagine, that’s what, that’s where I had a lot of fun and, and I spent a lot of time. I can remember. Sitting around and looking around, you know, looking at a house that’s for sale, going home and basically running a simulation. What would this need to look like for this deal to make sense?

And for me to me to make money and. I found an online community called BiggerPockets, which I know you’re aware of. Probably a lot of the listeners are aware of too, but if not, it’s a great place for learning about real estate investing. And I just dug in and I, I started reading everything I could, I started interacting.

I started asking questions. I started writing for them. I was the writer who provided the knowledge. Point of view. So that was, you know, that was kind of fun and, I just really enjoyed it. And then after that year or so we, we bought our first house and I think I ended up doing, I don’t know, probably about 20 flips and made money on 19 ma.

That’s awesome. 

William Glass: [00:46:22] That’s awesome. Yeah, so, and definitely, uh, definitely check that out. Right. I think you were one of the, one of the first, the first few guests on bigger pockets. 

James Vermillion: [00:46:32] Yeah. And I have no idea why Josh dork had, and Brandon Turner had me on, because frankly, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was a young guy who was just getting started.

I don’t know if they were throwing me a bone or what, or if they were that desperate at the time, I think it was episode 22 or three, but it was a lot of fun and it, it made me uncomfortable being on that podcast. And anytime I can make myself uncomfortable, I feel like I learn a lot. So, that was a good primer for things to do.

Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:47:02] No, absolutely. And definitely, yeah, if you’re interested in real estate, real estate investing BiggerPockets is a great community podcasts, tons of books now. Oh yeah. Forums. And you can find deals now on there. They keep expanding what all’s, what all is on the platform, but it’s a 

James Vermillion: [00:47:15] big time now.

William Glass: [00:47:17] Yeah. So definitely, definitely worth checking. James, we don’t always make a decisions. What would you say is the dumbest money mistake that 

James Vermillion: [00:47:26] you’ve made? Oh, wow. It’s never fun talking about your mistakes, is it? But it’s, I think it’s really important. I made the same mistake twice, actually. And, and I’ve done a lot of silly stuff, especially when I was younger and had a harder time envisioning 20, 30 years out.

Can I, than I do now, one of the reasons I understand the importance of really. Getting my clients to understand the long-term perspective. Is because I had a hard time doing that when I was younger, I was really hell bent on fast moving things. You know, I liked the excitement of it, almost a gamblers, not almost, it really was a gambler’s mentality.

So I’ve made a lot of those mistakes, but something that sticks out to me, this is the one that still bothers me. I guess I didn’t take my own advice. As far as when you have a high conviction, an idea, or a company or a stock or whatever it is. And you really understand it very well. That’s, especially when you need to tune the noise out and stick with your thesis and go from there.

I hate to bring Tesla back into the fold, but I’m going to anyway, I sold a good chunk of my Tesla position. Way too early, because I got freaked out by what people who probably didn’t know what they were talking about were saying. And you know, that was one of the bigger regrets and it’s not just because of the money I missed out on.

It was because of the feeling I had. Of, I didn’t stick to what I believed in and I allowed myself to be influenced by outside noise. So that was kind of like the disappointing part, you know, shame. You’re like looking at the mirror and you’re just mad at yourself. And again, it wasn’t so much the money, but just that feeling.

But I learned a valuable lesson and that’s one of the reasons I really have these conversations with my clients. And I really have that conversation with myself when I’m managing money. Why would I make this change if I don’t have a good reason? I’m not going to do it. I’m not getting paid on churning portfolios pain because people trust me to help them reach their goals.

It’s a, it’s a fight. You have to fight every day because it’s very easy to find reasons to be active when the best thing to do is not to be active. Yep. So, so that that’s one and I’ll give you another one too. Another one was, and this goes really, it’s an entrepreneurship lesson. As much as it is a money lesson.

A couple of times I’ve quit too. And I say that not in like a quitter’s mentality, like I give up, but in the sense that. And it really goes back to that real estate piece. I was building a nice little real estate business, and again, I allowed myself to be spooked. This was back, you know, several years ago, everyone’s saying interest rates are going to go up housing market’s over priced.

We’re going to see another oh 8 0 9. Oh, here it comes. And I ended up divesting a lot of that, which luckily I put into things that, that also did well, but again, I let that noise influence my decision. And I mean, look at how look at the housing market today compared to six years ago, five years. Would have been fine.

I would’ve done a spine. Had I left it in there. So those are two of the lessons, unfortunately, the same lesson twice. But I think, I think I finally, I learned it that second time. I’m 

William Glass: [00:50:44] glad you, you brought that up. I think it’s a, it’s very easy to get spooked or distracted or, you know, let other opinions, which you should be taking in other information, but also, you know, making sure that it’s valid and not just for them.

Someone who’s just has a loud voice and doesn’t really know what they’re talking 

James Vermillion: [00:51:02] about. Well let’s face it. I mean, most of those people, or at least a good chunk of them, they’re getting paid for, for clicks and views and things like that. So the louder and more obnoxious they are, and the more fear they can conjure up, oftentimes the better, the better they do.

So their interests aren’t necessarily aligned with, with what you’re trying to achieve. So I think people just need, keep that in mind, 

William Glass: [00:51:25] James, along those lines, what would you say. The biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges that people are facing today when it comes to 

James Vermillion: [00:51:33] finances and building that’s a good one.

I think expectations are really challenging. I think people set their sights too low to be perfectly honest. I know it’s probably not what you were expecting me to say, but I’ve noticed this with, with a lot of my younger clients, they’re making good money. They’re doing a pretty good job of saving they’re investing.

And then when you go to sit down with them and talk about the future, they vastly underestimate what they’re probably going to achieve, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Obviously that’s better than overestimating what you’re going to achieve. But I think a lot of that is maybe a humility thing.

People don’t want to weird to talk about being rich in the future. Especially if you come from like a humble background, but I think a lot of it too is just not understanding how powerful some of these things are. I mean, compounding, I think we talked about it when you came on on my show, it’s incredibly powerful.

And when you run even just some basic future value calculations with somebody, you oftentimes blow their mind because. Just can’t wrap their head around how a relatively small amount of money along with some contributions over time and compounding returns can just absolutely blow the top off, you know, so I want to get people excited about the future.

Get them thinking about buying yachts. I mean, if they do it even better, but you know, I want to get them thinking about being successful. And I think when people can start to taste it and feel it, and they can start to see it, that gives them a little extra fire to keep doing what they’re doing instead of getting discouraged after the first two or three years.

As you know, with, with compounding, when you look at that chart, that’s the whole nature of compounding. It hits that velocity. Yeah. I try to keep people focused and really thinking longer term. And I think that’s the challenge. Everything is. So short-term today, it’s it’s quarter to quarter it’s month to month.

It’s day to day it’s what’s the market up or down today. And it distracts people. They underestimate. The the longterm impact and they overestimate the short-term fluctuations. 

William Glass: [00:53:41] I think that’s a great answer. The expectations is a, is definitely something that, especially if you’re just thinking short term and not thinking about long-term, don’t understand compound interest, it’s easy to feel helpless that you never can really get ahead or that, you know, you’re not doing enough because you saw someone on social media who did, you know, whatever bought that coin and ended up, you know, And doubled their money in two days.

And you’re like, why didn’t I do that? You know? So I think on both sides of the equation, I think that’s a great observation. 

James Vermillion: [00:54:13] Yeah. And maybe it’s a little counterintuitive because of course there are a lot of people out there who are overestimating what they’re, what they’re going to do. But I found that most people, they just don’t see it.

And then maybe it goes back to that Rosie retro retrospection thing, or maybe it just goes back to some of those concepts and some probably cognitive biases that people have. But it’s really hard for people to imagine just this abundant future. But I think if you go back and yeah, Your grandparents or, you know, if you could go back and ask your great, great grandparents, things probably turned out a lot better for a lot of people than they expected.

And what I would like to see is more people to have that experience, people who didn’t have access to some of the things that are out there, the concepts, the education for those people that have those same futures ahead of them, and to not only have them ahead of them. Just be able to see them and to be able to reach for them.

Yeah. And I know you’re working on that. 

William Glass: [00:55:08] Yeah. Well, that’s, I think, I think we’re aligned there and this goes back to what you were talking about earlier, about how you see the future in more of a positive light. Right. I think that’s exactly what I heard there. Things will, will be better. They can get better.

And if you stop listening to all of the instant, let me grab your attention right now. The world’s on fire and everything’s terrible and horrendous. And look past that and look at what’s what’s going on and see the positive things and see how things can get better. You’ll have just a completely different experience life.

James Vermillion: [00:55:38] Absolutely. And there’s that famous? Jeremy Siegel quote, fear incites human action, far more urgently than does the impressive weight of historical level. And that is so true, right? I mean, all sides can be pointing one way, but if something freaks people out, they’re going to lose their minds. 

William Glass: [00:55:57] Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. That fear uncertainty and doubt that’ll, that motivates that fight or flight instinct that kicks into our lizard brains when that gets triggered. So yeah, 

James Vermillion: [00:56:06] exactly. 

William Glass: [00:56:07] Absolutely. James. This has been a, been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you sitting down. And we talked a lot at the practice, the wealth management practice.

We didn’t even talk about the other business that you have, which we’ll have to save that for another question. Cause I think there’s a lot of lessons learned there and I know we talked about it a little bit on your podcast, so have to save that for, uh, for round two, I think. 

James Vermillion: [00:56:27] Absolutely. Absolutely. 

William Glass: [00:56:29] I really appreciate you sitting down and spend a lot of fun.

If you could leave the audience with any last words that you want impart them with, and then also please let us know how we can connect with you outside 

James Vermillion: [00:56:38] of this. Yeah, I would just say, if you’re not investing or thinking about your, your future start today and you don’t, you know, it doesn’t matter where you’re at.

Doesn’t matter if you’re doing well, or if you’re struggling, it doesn’t matter if you’re 17 or 70, if you start now, you’re probably going to be better. Then you would be if you didn’t. So I would say that’s the parting wisdom. I would give someone, and give the listeners and then you guys can find me online.

Obviously you mentioned the podcast, bulls bears and bourbon, so they can listen to that anywhere where they’re listening to your podcast and then for a million private wealth.com, that’ll take you to my website. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, all those fun things. I’m notoriously bad at social media though.

Take that take that for what it’s worth. 

William Glass: [00:57:24] Awesome. And all the links will be in the show notes for sure. But, uh, James, thanks again for sitting down. 

James Vermillion: [00:57:28] This was a lot of fun. Absolutely. I enjoyed it. William. Good stuff. And I appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you. 

William Glass: [00:57:34] Way out. Please share the podcast with others. It’s the only way that the community grows and others hear these incredible stories from entrepreneurs and top performers.

Pound that subscribe button. So you’re notified when new episodes drop every Friday, I’m William Glass, CEO and co-founder of ostrich. And of course your host of the Silicon alley podcast have a very profitable day. You got no time 

to waste, but still you, as it say, caught in a circle say, and I’ll never leave this place

Some words got you searching for the bright side over and over.

End of Transcription

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Side Hustles: How to Start a Podcast with $100 | The Frugalpreneur, Sarah St John

How to Start a Podcast with Less than $100

In How to Start a Podcast with $100, Sarah St John A.K.A. the Frugalpreneur, joins host William Glass to discuss the keys to starting a podcast and building a lucrative side hustle. You’ll learn:

  • How to take your show from idea to reality
  • How to avoid podfading (when podcasters quit after the first 10 episodes)
  • Key tools to run your show for less than $50 a month

Our Sponsors

Ostrich helps you go from being one of the 92% of people who fail to achieve their financial goals to one of the few who does. 80% of Ostrich members are on track to achieve thief financial goals. Sign up for free at https://www.getostrich.com/download

About Sarah St John

Sarah St John is an entrepreneur, podcaster, online course creator, and author. She has created several startups throughout her entrepreneurial career of over a decade. She currently owns a podcast production agency called PodSeam. She is also the podcast host of “Frugalpreneur: Building a Business on a Bootstrapped Budget” which aims to show people how to launch and manage an online business on a budget.

Learn more about The Frugalpreneur, Sarah St John.

Transcription

This transcription is autogenerated and may contain errors.

William Glass: [00:00:00] Sarah welcome to Silicon alley podcast. Super excited to have you on today. 

Sarah St John: [00:00:03] Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. 

William Glass: [00:00:06] I’m excited to dive in as someone who , brands themselves as the frugal preneur and has a podcast by that name. And I’m really excited to dive into bootstrapping and, and all the different things that you can do in terms of building a business on a tight budget.

But we’d love to get a little background on you, Sarah, and kind of open up to the audience as to who you are. If they’re not. 

Sarah St John: [00:00:27] Sure. Yeah. So , I started my entrepreneurial journey probably over a decade ago,  2008 is when I really started. I had had six different jobs that year, not at the same time, but throughout the course of the year and realized that I wanted to be my own boss.

And , so I started a photography business. And I realized that while I liked taking photos of animals and landscapes and architecture, I didn’t like taking photos of people, but that’s where the money is. I was doing weddings and portraits, but the bigger issue than that was actually just the expense to maintain and, you know, equipment and software and all that stuff.

So I decided to switch to an online business model, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So I. A bunch of different things like affiliate, marketing, drop, shipping, blogging , it was in that process that I discovered all these free or affordable tools, resources, and software to run a business on a budget.

 And so I decided to, or I got the idea to write a book called forego preneur. Uh, that kinda covers like the different online business models and how to run them on a budget. And then while I was writing that, I got the idea to start a podcast, to coincide with the book. Also called frugal preneur, but it was just going to be, you know, like 10 episodes or something, an extra marketing outlet, I guess.

But I was getting more traction and leverage with the podcasts and the book, and I love the connections I was making. So I kept doing that. , I’m been doing that for a couple of years now have almost 90 episodes and , I’ve been producing my own podcast all along and the way and,  enjoy. And I decided, well, why not launch a podcast production agency and get paid to do it for other people.

And now I’m working on a podcasting course. And so I’m kind of all in on podcasting, but it took over a decade of trying this, that, and the other thing. Before I finally landed on that thing. 

William Glass: [00:02:31] That’s quite a journey. It sounds like you’ve ran the gamut of, of ways to,  build out businesses online.

 going back , what  motivated you to make that leap. You said you’d had six different jobs that year and  wanted to take over your own. I guess schedule in life through entrepreneurship. Like what was the impetus though, to really make that leap? Have you always been an entrepreneur at heart?

Sarah St John: [00:02:54] I feel like I have been, it was one of those things where I didn’t really realize until I started doing entrepreneurship and then kind of looking back on my life and realizing, oh, I think it’s always been there because when I was a kid, I would gather up. Stuff that I got for free, like candy or pencils or whatever, and sell them to my friends and just different things like that.

But I guess I didn’t really make the connection. , I just kinda went along with the expectation of going to college. I only got as far as an associates degree in journalism, but, um, but you know, just kind of followed that path that’s expected and didn’t realize. Think about entrepreneurship, I guess maybe it was just buried or suppressed or something until I had had a few jobs after college and was like, Hmm, I don’t know about this.

William Glass: [00:03:54] Yeah, just,  , over time developing , , that interest in going back to, as a kid, being able to, to sell everythings that you got and make some cash that way. So you started off in photography, realized that wasn’t going to scale. And man, people are a lot harder to take pictures of than landscapes and sculptures, and they’re much more demanding.

So talk me through  the journey of all these different things that you tried from affiliate marketing and blogging and pod, like, talk to me about like that journey and  what you’ve learned.  Cause it sounds like you’ve tried most, most everything in terms of ways to make money on. 

Sarah St John: [00:04:31] Yeah, I feel like I have.

 so after the photography business, I tried a bunch of different things. Like , I still do some affiliate marketing, but I did have a drop shipping business. , which what I liked about that was that you didn’t have to have an inventory, so there’s still very little overhead, but depending on what your drop shipping, I mean, I was doing baby onesies.

And so the average sale is what I, I mean, I was making maybe making like 20 bucks profit or something per sale. And it was just kinda like, I don’t know, , small margins. Yeah, exactly. And then blogging. I didn’t do a whole lot, um, okay. But, you know, try to incorporate affiliate marketing with that. But I do affiliate marketing through the podcast like if I have an author on, in the show notes, all linked to their book or, you know, something like that.

 Or if they own a software program, you know, something like that. But, um, let’s see, I did print on demand, which is kind of like drop shipping, but I was creating. My own designs and things like that.  I had a, 

William Glass: [00:05:43] that process, like what, what were some of the things from the drop shipping print on demand?

Like what, it sounds like the margins are really small. Like what made you move? 

Sarah St John: [00:05:51] Yeah. The margins are small and. It’s  hard to, I mean, first of all, you have to run ads pretty much to get traffic. So then your profit margins even smaller and like to compete with Amazon. Yeah. It’s difficult. I mean, I know there are people who do it successfully, but I realized that it wasn’t me.

Passion. Oh, I also had an online travel agency which actually did pretty well , had that for about five years while I was kind of doing this, that, and the other thing on top of it. And I thought that that was where I was going to end up , you know, stick with that. The problem was especially with COVID.

 so I closed that. Like a month after COVID hit, because all my bookings got canceled. And the thing with a travel agency is you don’t get paid until the person completes their trip, basically. And so I did a bunch. So I did a bunch of, you know, work researching and booking all this stuff for people, but then never got paid on it cause they didn’t get to take their trips.

And so I was like, oh, plus I was really getting into podcasting and enjoying that. And so I was already thinking about stopping the travel agency and going all in on podcasting. But then when COVID hit, I was in all of that intense. I was like, okay, now’s the time to close up, shop on that.

William Glass: [00:07:23] 

Makes sense. . So, so talk to me a little bit more about the podcast frugal, preneur. You have a book by the same name and the podcast sounds like kind of accidentally spurted from the book. , talk to me about the podcast and how everything’s 

Sarah St John: [00:07:35] going. Yeah. Yeah. Accident in a way. I mean, I guess it was intentional that I started one, but that wasn’t something I was planning from the get, go and.

I wasn’t planning on it being a long-term thing. I just love the connections that I’m making, like meeting people like you and I actually recently interviewed pat Flynn. I’m assuming you know who he is. Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:08:03] Yeah. I was looking on YouTube earlier and saw that you did the interview there.

Sarah St John: [00:08:07] Yeah. So just like getting to, well, maybe not technically me, like not in person or not right now anyway.  meet these people, but like being able to talk with people and, you know, even people I didn’t know before podcasting, just interesting people and their stories I feel like with podcasting, you’re almost kind of getting like a one-on-one consultation in a way.

 and learning. And then that person might know someone who might know someone and it just kind of snowballs. I feel like. so I I’ve just loved it and found like people find you easier. I feel like with podcasting then maybe blogging or even YouTube or whatever else.  

William Glass: [00:08:51] I’m a, obviously I’m a big fan of podcasting since why we’re here.

And I completely agree. It’s a great way to connect with people. What are some of the things? So whether it’s from the conversation with pat, or just in general, like, what are some of the things that you’ve learned or taken away from some of your conversations with people that have built businesses with little to no money?

Oh, 

Sarah St John: [00:09:14] wow. So. Originally, when I started the podcast, I was interviewing  CEOs or founders or people within companies of like various software programs that I use that are free or affordable. Then I kind of started interviewing people that I admired or looked up to in various niches within, entrepreneurship, whether it was.

Podcasting or affiliate marketing or whatever. And then this year I started interviewing people who started their business with less than a thousand dollars and built it to at least seven figures. In any timeframe, it doesn’t matter what the timeframe was, but without any kind of like outside capital or loans or credit or investments or whatever.

And so I’ve learned some really interesting or heard some interesting stories from some of those people. Like one guy I interviewed who, when I was looking at my statistics, actually I have currently the most downloads on his episode, I don’t even know if people know who he is.

 but he came from Africa and came to America with only a hundred dollars and has built three different businesses to seven figures by all bootstrap. And so just in his process, was that. So, I guess here’s one thing I learned was that his process was, he would try to remember what his first business was.

I think it was building websites or something and you know, start that for hardly anything. And then. As he started getting income, then he would spend like maybe 2000 that he earned and then he bought a camera and then he started doing photography. It seems to be a common thing that people try where he could charge $2,000 per, wedding or whatever he was doing.

With just a $2,000 investments, a one gig, you know, canceled that out. Then he would take money here and from that, and then he would invest in something else. And now he has a software company. That’s kind of like an all in one business management platform and then let’s see someone else I interviewed recently.

She. A lot of these people were immigrants. Actually. She came from Germany and started a business  bootstrapped it and. One of her businesses. It was actually also photography, whatever, a lot of photographers. Yeah. But her particular type of photography was like for magazines, like Vogue and stuff like that.

And she was able to sell. Her photography business to bill gates for seven figures  but I’m just like, wow. She started in dead actually 130, 5,000 in debt. Bootstrapped sold a company to build gates for seven figures. Now she has like a coaching business and whatnot, and yeah, just different stories like that.

It’s inspiring to know that, other people have done this and you can do it. It just takes determination and hustle and resources, like just being creative, I guess, in a way of how to kind of. The almost like stepping stones or building blocks. 

William Glass: [00:12:55] Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s really, yeah.

Really interesting.  to hear other people that have bootstrapped and, you know, I think that’s obviously a very attractive, attractive model, especially because most people don’t have a ton of money that they can throw at a business or trying to. create something because they need to pay a bill or X, Y, and Z, you know, whatever, whatever the motivation is.

So, you know, being able to lean on and see other people that have been able to do it and know that it’s possible to build, build businesses with little to no capital. It’s. , very important to talk about and share those stories. When you think about What you want people to take away when they listened to an episode what is it that you want people to come away feeling or knowing, or what action should they be taking after they hear a, an episode?

Sarah St John: [00:13:44] So I guess with episodes like that, it would be inspiration. And there’s usually in those episodes, the person I’m interviewing usually gives. Kind of a strategy or tips or something that someone can implement or consider. And then if it’s an episode where I’m interviewing, someone who’s an expert in some area of entrepreneurship, or maybe they work for a particular software company, if something that I use and recommend, just, taking away.

A lot of times people  haven’t even heard of these platforms that are free or really affordable. They’ve heard of competitors that are,  expensive, but they haven’t heard about these, these just as good, if not better, like free or affordable options. And so a lot of people I’ve heard, like, there’ll be taking notes, like, oh, I gotta check that out.

I gotta check that out. And then they, sign up for it and whatnot. And, um, So, I guess just like, I feel like in the process of writing the book and then the goal of the podcast is saving people time by them not having to research these types of things. Like every day, I feel like I’m online looking for new tools, resources, and software to try out or to recommend.

and so I think. It does save people time or people might not even spend the time anyway, to look up all that stuff and do comparisons and whatnot. But, I like doing it bigger. 

William Glass: [00:15:25] Yeah, no, it makes sense. Yeah. Being able to save people time or depending on, like you said, the type of the episode, whether it’s strategies or tips from guests of how they can, how they were successful and implementing it makes a ton of sense.

In terms of, of pod team.  How did you develop the business and talk to me a little bit about going from producing your own show  learning all about all these tools and resources,  sharing them with, with other,  frugal preneurs.  how did you end up starting pod scene?

Sarah St John: [00:15:55] So. I’ve always produced my own show and people would compliment me on it and say that it was, you know, for doing it myself, that it was done pretty well. So then I got the idea and then I implemented it by, I mean, there’s so many tools that I use myself for my own show, whether, and all I can just list some of them, So like a D script is a good one for creating transcripts or even I like to edit my audio and or video through Descript because you can edit out, you can remove filler words and with a click of a button.

So basically you edit the audio or video by editing the transcript so you can remove ums and UHS and things. And then you can even create like audio grams in there now. which I also use headliner or,  repurpose I l.io. Those two I use for audio grams . So before I started doing video podcasts, and it was just audio, I would create through repurpose a.

A long form audio gram, or it turns it into a video, better than nothing, I guess, but now I’m starting to do like video podcasts, like kind of like what we’re doing and then put that on YouTube and then take the audio from that and turn that into the podcast.

And then like, caption social media,  like where it has clips of the interview. But it’s like caption. Cause a lot of people, when they’re on social media, they they’re in a situation at work or wherever where they can’t listen to it. So the captions, you can read it as it’s playing without hearing it. And there’s something called clip scribe for that.

And then I create graphics in Canva. I mean, all of these things are either free or really affordable. And so, and there’s some others I can’t think of at the moment, but basically just using all these tools and then it’s like, other people wouldn’t have to pay for these tools and they can just pay me to use these tools to create.

but then also. What I’ve discovered is that it isn’t really starting or recording a podcast that people have an issue with. It’s the post-production. And that’s why so many people pod fade that’s the term used, like when people usually on average, only put out seven to 10 episodes and then they.

They’re like, forget it because of all the post-production people don’t think about that when they start like the editing production intros, the outros, if you want ads put in, if which I don’t personally do, but some people do. And then, the audio grams, transcripts show notes, social graphics,

and some people don’t do any of that, but I recommend. If you want it to sound the best and make the most impact or reach most people or, or whatever. I recommend doing all those things. Right. , basically the way podseam works is that when someone just records their episode, whether it’s audio or video sends it to me, and then I do all the post-production backend stuff.

So then it’s, it’s. A lot less likely that they’ll pod fade. If all they have to do is record the episode. 

William Glass: [00:19:32] That, that makes it a lot easier. I, as someone who has self produced, I can, I can second that , it takes a lot of time and effort and things that you don’t realize. And  it’s not easy.

So I see the value.  in Podseam and what you’re doing. And I was not aware of a lot of those tools. Some of them I’ve used like headliner and Canva, but I’d never heard of Descript. 

Sarah St John: [00:19:55] Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. Descript will pretty much change your life. 

William Glass: [00:20:01] It sounds like it, it 

Sarah St John: [00:20:02] sounds like it, they do have a free plan, but it’s limited, like.

Only, I mean, you might be able to use it for a month or two, but the plan that I’m on is only $15 a month. And I’m thinking about switching to the, to the $30 a month plan because of what it offers. It’s very, it’s one of the very few things that I actually pay for to run my business, but it’s a big time saver.

Oh, 

William Glass: [00:20:31] absolutely. Yeah. I think the editing process is, is, uh, is definitely, one of the biggest times sucks, I would say.  even if it’s not necessarily hard, it’s a lot of time. 

Sarah St John: [00:20:44] I’ve noticed that for every hour episode or so that I have, it takes anywhere from three to five hours for all the backend stuff.

William Glass: [00:20:55] Yeah, it takes a lot. So Sarah w what would you, if you were advising someone who’s just starting a podcast or wanna start a podcast, like, what steps should they take? Like what, what are your thoughts around, around that for a newbie? So they don’t podcast. 

Sarah St John: [00:21:08] Yeah. Uh, well, the first thing is to find a niche.

there are some podcasts out there where they talk about anything and everything. but very few people can pull that off.  so it needs to be niche down, but it’s very specific topic and audience and then have some kind of,  clever, I suppose, name,  but something that people can tell. Means by, by reading it, I like you, the title of your shows, it’s Silicon alley and, you know, people think of Silicon valley.

And so I thought that was creative. So a creative title that tells people what it’s about. Some people want to name their show after them, but unless they’re. Well known, like unless you’re Oprah or something, I don’t recommend saying the, your name show or whatever. And then as far as like, cover are definitely something that pops out, not a whole bunch of words.

I guess you could have your face on it. If you don’t use your name. I think if you use your name, like the so-and-so show, And have your face on it. If no one knows who you are, then that’s just, it’s a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I think yours has your face on it, but it also has, , it has a building of some sort.

I can’t remember. Oh, it was, yeah. 

William Glass: [00:22:32] It’s the flat iron and, uh, the, the clock that’s in front of the 

Sarah St John: [00:22:35] building. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, having some kind of image like that, I think is good. And if you’re going to put your face on it and that’s all that’s on it, ideally it would be cart, like kind of a cartoon. I think those pop better than someone’s actual face, but each have their own.

Um, and then of course with your title, I think it’s good to say whatever your title is with. So-and-so like your name. and then, okay, so those are just some kind of basics to get started. and then you need a podcast host.  There are a couple of free ones, but I personally recommend one. I recommend that this is one of the areas that you actually pay for.

I use captivate, which is like 19 bucks a month and they’re really good. You can have unlimited podcasts and all this stuff. They have a lot of like marketing tools within it, but there’s a lot of good ones out there. Like Buzzsprout is pretty good. So, yeah, usually you can get hosting for under $20 a month.

And then as far as equipment getting started, you technically could use your like, well, you have your, your buds w apple earbuds with the little mic that’s built in. Um, and. Oh, that’s just so you can hear. Okay. 

William Glass: [00:23:56] Yeah. Yeah. I try not to, unfortunately, sometimes I have caught myself post production that I did record with this and you’ll hear the, the little it’ll hit the 

Sarah St John: [00:24:05] collar.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I recommend a Mike. I have an ATR 2100, which was like 60 or 80 bucks. There’s also Samsung Q2 U, which is about the same. And then. It’s a USB mic, plugged it right into your computer and then like what you’re doing and what I’m doing using some kind of earbuds or headphones so that when you’re listening to the person so that it doesn’t come through the computer and cause an echo.

I would say those are like starting out. Those are the areas that you want to first focus on and invest in. If you want to go completely free, you could use your earbuds for both the listing and the recording, if you wanted to and use like anchor for your hosting. But I would say if you have like a hundred bucks and , a hundred bucks to start with, get a Mike and you probably have headphones or earbuds laying around.

Um, and then if you have $20 a month, then yeah. Get a podcast hosting platform. 

William Glass: [00:25:14] Why, why the hosting do you think it’s important to pay for versus using like an anchor or one of the other free tools? 

Sarah St John: [00:25:21] Yeah, so I think anchor has improved. but I know the issue with them and maybe this is the issue with any free one, which I’m not sure how much.

Or actually totally free, but yeah, it might 

William Glass: [00:25:34] be one of the few WordPress. I think you can use some plugins, WordPress plugins and hosted on your own website, but you still pay for the website hosting. So I don’t know if it’s really free. 

Sarah St John: [00:25:43] Yeah, yeah. That’s probably the last way better way to do it. but as far as I think the issue with anchor in the beginning was that, and maybe they sold you this, I don’t know, is that like, at least for apple podcast, When they distributed, it’s like through their account, you don’t do it through yours.

And so. Any kind of changes or any kind of, you want it, if you want to log in and look at your analytics or whatever, you don’t have access to that. And then if you try to change, it’s apparently a big mess. And then plus I think like maybe they put ads in. I’m not sure. I know in the beginning I heard negative things and now I hear it’s slightly more positive because they’ve made some changes, but.

I don’t know. So I just stay away from it. A sounder actually has a free plan and paid plans. and spreaker as well, I started on spreaker because it’s free up to like, five hours. I don’t know if it’s five hours. Yeah. It must be five hours total. So you, it doesn’t get you very far. But then the paid plan after that was like seven bucks.

So that’s a little bit cheaper. Or sounder, they have a free plan. Yes. 

William Glass: [00:27:04] So any, and then in terms of like, how do I decide if I want to do an interview show or a solo show or a panel, or I don’t know, what are, what are the, you know, how do you figure out what, what format to use for the podcast?

Sarah St John: [00:27:19] Yeah, those are the three main types. Um, I think the majority of shows are probably interview. And what I like about the interview style is that you get to meet people, connect with people, network with people.  but those could potentially become your clients. If it makes sense,  form friendships, they might know so-and-so that 

but then also. You’re getting someone else’s perspective. And,  so I think for the listeners, that’s good because you’re getting someone else’s perspective and learning from that person. But then for yourself, kind of all the other things I said, with a solo show, the advantage of that. And I’ve done a few solo episodes that I’m thinking about doing more, the advantages, then you’re more of the expert because when you have an interview and there’s the guest on, they become more of the experts.

So they get to really know the guest and not as much, the host. so I think really the best way to do it is to do both, like to have, yeah. To have interviews for the pros of that, but then have the,  solo episodes for the pros of that. So that you’re kind of, you’re kind of getting the best of both worlds.

And then as far as like a panel or like,  a co-hosting or something like that for some people it’s makes sense, but I don’t know. I feel like with that scenario, you’re almost getting the worst of both worlds and maybe the best, I don’t know, but I’ve never been interested in that format.

I think it’d be a lot more to manage with like scheduling and cause if you have two hosts and the guest, or if you have like three hosts and no gas, Any more than two people? I don’t know. It seems like it was scheduling. It would really become kind of a nightmare. Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:29:13] Yeah. You have to have like set times of  here’s when everyone’s free and.

 Some people that I know that have started off have started off with co-hosts and then they’ve split. And one person’s been like, I don’t think I want to do this anymore. So you’ve also got to make sure that the person that you are, if you’re co-hosting is committed or that you’re committed, if you’re, you know, that you at that way.

So that’s another consideration that I’ve at least I’ve seen. Hmm. Sarah in terms of like success. When you think about the podcast, when you think about,  podseam, like, what does success look like for you? Like what does, what does that look like? 

Sarah St John: [00:29:51] I think a couple of things,  probably the most important actually would be knowing that you’re making an impact in some way, shape or form.

 I think kind of the goal with the podcast that I have is. Helping people understand or know of different ways to make money online, how to do it affordably on a budget, whether it’s something they want to do. Full-time at some point, or just as a side hustle and for extra income, with their day job, you know, pointing them to the right types of online businesses, the tools or resources, software to run that.

So I think when you, when you get feedback, I think that is encouraging. And,  and then I guess another thing would,  would be on the monetary side, of course, would be, , once you start seeing income coming in of some sort, then, then that would also be. I guess the second thing. 

William Glass: [00:30:53] Yeah. Side success, right?

Yeah. You’re providing an impact to people who are, whether it’s through advertising or affiliates or subscriptions. However, however, the monetization works, being able to see that impact and that people are getting value and want to want to pay. And that’s coming down to your bottom line. 

Sarah St John: [00:31:10] Right? Exactly.

So how do 

William Glass: [00:31:14] you recommend people sort through kind of the noise around. Entrepreneurship and creating online businesses. Cause there, there are a lot of legitimate ways to make money. And then there’s a lot of people out there that are trying to sell, get rich, quick schemes, or, just take advantage of people or make it seem like some of this stuff is a lot easier than it actually is.

What are your recommendations for someone that is. Trying to navigate this space and, and figure out like who to trust . 

Sarah St John: [00:31:48] I think one problem, most entrepreneurs have, I know I’ve had a, is the shiny object syndrome where you start something and then you hear about, or think of something else you’re like, oh I got, just try that.

And that’s part of the reason I have so many different businesses and it took me so long to. Figure anything out. I feel like I waste a lot of time, was trying anything and everything. And so trying to recognize when that happens and reel it in.  But then also. When you’re trying to decide what to do, or how to make money online.

I would say there’s a few things to keep in mind. If there’s something that, you know, you’re good at or something that someone or that multiple people have told you that you’re good at, that should be a sign that, is there a way you can monetize whatever that thing is. and another thing is what is something that you enjoy doing?

That is maybe just a hobby, but is there a way you could monetize it? People make money in the weirdest ways, like it might be a hobby of some sort, and then somehow they’re able to maybe teach other people how to do that thing. Or, you know, maybe there’s something that they’re making. That they could then sell to other people, maybe other people want that thing, or, they’re an expert at something that they could teach and maybe it’s very niche,  if someone is into something the surely there’s a few other people out there that are into it as well.

so just like finding your hobby, what you’re good at. What you enjoy doing what you could see yourself doing long-term or something that people tell you you’re good at and finding a way to monetize that thing versus, trying this, that, and the other thing. Cause what I found was that I guess I tried a bunch of different things.

Cause I was curious, I just didn’t know what would take off, but it was like most of the things I didn’t even give it enough time to even see if it would take off. I just lost interest because it wasn’t like a passion or something. I was that interested in, it was more just like getting my feet wet or something, like with the drop shipping, for example.

And so, but with podcasting, for example, that was something, I didn’t know. It wasn’t like I tried. For the purpose of, I didn’t have long-term goals for it. It just, but then I realized how much I liked it and all that stuff. And it became a passion and I guess a hobby in a way. and so I found a way to a few ways actually to monetize that, through the production agency, but just, you know, filling marketing or whatever else.

And. So, yeah, I think that those would be things to take in to consideration. 

William Glass: [00:34:50] That’s great advice, Sarah. I thinking about what is it that you enjoy, whether it’s a hobby and then. Focusing on that, versus someone said a shiny object over here, you should try drop shipping or blogging, or, become a TikTok star and get a, you know, whatever, whatever it is, and actually focusing on what it is that, that you enjoy and then kind of what business might,  might be the best way to monetize that, that interest.

I like that a lot. In terms of your relationship with money. And I’m curious, could you, could you describe what that is? 

Sarah St John: [00:35:24] Sure. I grew up and a family that’s very frugal. I mean back in the day, maybe they probably didn’t make much, my parents, they got married young in their late teens, like right out of high school and started having, they had a kid and then we’re pretty spaced out.

But, and then my dad went on, like he has a PhD and so he went on with schooling for several years. And so I think. Maybe because they had tied finances because of schooling and being so young and having a kid and all this stuff, they probably had to penny pinch. But now all their kids are out of the house.

They’re all they’re practically retired or semi-retired, You know, their houses, you know, all this stuff, and yet they still penny pinch. And so I think, because I grew up that way, kind of the frugal mindset. I mean, they still use coupons and just all these different things and, So I think that’s kind of been my mindset.

I don’t know if I’m as bad as them, but, but you know, being frugal. And so I kind of incorporate that into the business, or a different kind of spin or take on entrepreneurship is that you don’t have to have a million dollars to start a business. I mean, well, it depends on what kind of business you have.

That’s why I like online business versus like retail or brick and mortar because you don’t have all that overhead. So I guess it’s still kind of on the frugal side, but it used to be where any kind of money that I would bring in from business.

I felt like I needed to. Save it or use it for bills and things like that, which I still do to some degree, but now I try to invest more of like what I bring in. I try to invest most of it back into the business so that I’m not really spending out of my pocket per se. I’m just kind of recycling the money, I guess.

I still manage my businesses. Well, my goal has always been under a hundred a month, but I think it’s actually down to like 40 or 60 a month. Wow. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:37:44] that’s impressive. 

Sarah St John: [00:37:46] So yeah, I guess that’s my take on money. 

William Glass: [00:37:52] Yeah, the frugal focus and being able to recycle it in the business.

I mean, that’s how. You grow your business, right? Is,  obviously it depends on the model, but even whatever the model is, right. And being able to invest that back into whether it’s better tools or advertising or marketing or whatever it is to help you continue to grow and grow that revenue stream makes, makes a lot of sense.

Sarah, what would you say is the best investment that you’ve made?

Sarah St John: [00:38:26] Well, I suppose in terms of podcasting in particular, I guess it would be a mic which was a cheap investment.

William Glass: [00:38:34] Go good returns on that. 

Sarah St John: [00:38:36] Yeah. 

I would probably say books like. I have tons of books. I’m always reading a new book, always,  business-related but just,  10 and 20 bucks for a book and some books, you feel like you’re getting like a two or $20,000 education.  Yeah, so probably various business books.

I like 

William Glass: [00:38:59] that. Yeah. I’m a big reader, myself side. I love that answer. Are there any books in particular that stand out is, is ones that you recommend or must reads, 

Sarah St John: [00:39:10] Are you familiar with Russell Brunson?

William Glass: [00:39:15] I think so, 

Sarah St John: [00:39:15] but he’s the ClickFunnels guy. Um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t even know I use his software cause it’s like a hundred bucks a month. And since my budget is a hundred a month, then that would take it all up. Maybe that sounds silly, but I have his three books which are really good. Dot com, secrets, expert secrets and traffic secrets.

And they’re just so jam packed. Like I’ve read them both like twice, which I rarely read a book twice. I think in kind of business owner, especially online business owner would get value out of those books. And there’s a whole bunch of other books. 

Robert Kiyosaki. Rich coordinate. Yeah. Let’s see. I will teach you to be rich. Mike McCalla was, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but he has a bunch of books. I’m not sure. Mike McCalla it’s like profit first and fix this next 

William Glass: [00:40:12] profit first. 

Sarah St John: [00:40:13] Oh, are you familiar with John Lee Dumas from entrepreneurs? 

William Glass: [00:40:17] Uh, I, I am, I’ve listened to his, to a show, but I’m not, I don’t know. Does he have books as well? 

Sarah St John: [00:40:22] He just came out with one called, uncommon pat, on to comments as sec success or something along those lines, I’m totally messing it up. That’s a really good book. It has like 17, each chapter is a different, like thing that he’s noticed.

Entrepreneurs he’s interviewed, like that’s a recurring thing that, that every business should, I guess, implement. And then I’ve read like pat Flynn books, like super fans. There’s just so many. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:40:55] yeah, no, I love that. Yeah. A couple more that I need to add to my list that you recommended.

So it’s not all good. Right. We don’t always make the best decisions. So what about the flip side? What would you say is the dumbest money mistake that you’ve made, 

Sarah St John: [00:41:14] okay. I had forgotten about this, back when I was trying this, that, and the other thing, I, one of the things I did was became like a white label reseller type thing for some different companies, but it was like a hundred bucks a month just for. To be able to be a reseller. And I was like, okay, this is getting too expensive.

I mean, That works for some people, but for me, I guess it was, I don’t know if that was my biggest mistake, but, I guess just wasting time and money on a bunch of different business ventures that I, once the website was up. That’s about all I did with it.

Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:41:59] That makes sense. Unfortunately, I think a lot of us have those have those. I know I’ve got a couple under my belt as well, 

Sarah St John: [00:42:07] so, or just like buying up domains because you like the domain and you think you. Have an idea for it, but then, but I don’t know. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Cause one time I bought a domain, a preneur press, cause I actually have three books.

Now they all end in preneur for prenuer authorpreneur and podcasts for newer. So I created like, I was thinking of how like my own little self publishing thing. And so I just bought preneur press because it was available. Never ended up using. And then not even a year after I bought it and I bought it for like a buck on, I always use one-on-one dot com for my Domains.

It’s the number one and one a, because they’re like a dollar. So I bought it for a buck and then before it was even up for renewal, someone contacted me like a domain broker or whatever, and wanted to buy it. And I made like 700 bucks or something. So nice. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good return 

William Glass: [00:43:14] right there. Yeah.

A hundred percent. Yeah. 

Sarah St John: [00:43:19] So, I mean, I guess it’s okay to, if you think of a creative domain that, that wasn’t my intention to, you know, sell it when I bought it, but since I hadn’t started using it and I was like, okay, sure. I guess that wasn’t such a bad way to spend a buck. Yeah, no, 

William Glass: [00:43:42] not at all.

I would say that’s good.

Sarah. I appreciate you coming, coming down and sit down on the podcast. Is there any kind of final words of wisdom you want to impart on the audience? And then obviously, please let us know how we can reach you. If folks were interested in using, Podseam or just in general, following the podcast, how can folks connect with you off?

Sarah St John: [00:44:08] One mistake that I’ve made and sometimes still struggle with is spending so much time learning and not implementing,  like I read all these books and watch. Webinars or trainings and listen to all these podcasts and all of that. Stuff’s good, especially in the beginning.

But at a certain point, if you’re not implementing what you’re learning, then it’s pointless. So for every hour I spend learning, I try to spend another hour implementing. And I think that’s kind of a good thing to kind of keep in mind. Like the whole Justin time learning today, I was listening to a podcast and I heard him say, Just in case versus just in time, I’ve always heard of just-in-time learning where you’re learning, the thing that you need to know right now.

But I had never heard of just in case, which I guess would refer to the type of learning that I’ve been doing. You know, that I struggle with is like learning all these things just in case I need it. Of course, by the time you need it, you forget it. But anyway, which is why I’ve had to read Russell Brunson’s books twice.

But yeah, as far as finding me the podcast is called frugal preneur, which you can find in any podcast app, just search for an it’ll come up, pod scene it’s pod S C a m.com. I actually give away all three of my books for free the PDF version at the Sarah St. john.com forward slash free. And that Sarah with an H and then S T J O H N.

And then yeah, on my website, I have, Like there’s a tab up there that says like 27 tools. I use that’s all the tools. I actually need to update it because I started using a new one and stopped using one. So I need to switch them out, but I usually keep it up-to-date, but it’s all the tools that I use and recommend that are either free or really affordable. Social media everywhere at the Sarah St. John. 

William Glass: [00:46:02] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sitting down and I appreciate you sharing your wisdom about how to build this. This is a, uh, on a frugal budget. It’s been a, it’s been a lot of fun, Sarah. 

Sarah St John: [00:46:13] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me.

End of Transcription

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How to Successfully Crowdfund, The Keys to Building a Marketplace

Ed Vincent, Founder of festivalPass

How to Successfully Crowdfund, The Keys to Building a Marketplace

In How to Successfully Crowdfund & The Keys to Building a Marketplace, Ed Vincent, founder of festivalPass, joins host William Glass to discuss the keys to raising money from your customers and creating loyal fans. You’ll learn:

  • “Always on” crowdfunding
  • How to build a marketplace one geography at a time
  • How to develop an innovative business model

Our Sponsors

Ostrich helps you go from being one of the 92% of people who fail to achieve their financial goals to one of the few who does. 80% of Ostrich members are on track to achieve thief financial goals. Sign up for free at https://www.getostrich.com/download

About Ed Vincent

Entrepreneur with over 25 years business, technology and management experience including 6 years banking and valuation experience. Founded an e-commerce business in 1999 which was sold to a competitor in 2001. Repeat Founder including SimplyEngage, myProducer, & Predict Ventures. Currently Founder & CEO of festivalPass.

Learn more about Ed Vincent and festivalPass.

Transcription

This transcription is autogenerated and may contain errors.

William Glass: [00:00:00] Do you love live events? Have you ever wondered how to successfully equity, crowdfund or interested in building a marketplace business and how that works? Well, so then this episode of the Silicon alley podcast is for you. I sit down with ed Vincent, he’s the founder of festival pass. And talk about all three things.

This is one of those episodes where you just come away learning so much, and we dive deep into the nuances of equity, crowdfunding, as well as how to build a marketplace for live events and creating community. While you build a marketplace, it’s really, really interesting. And you’re going to take a lot away that you can apply in your own business and life.

And that’s what this podcast is all about. It’s all about talking to VCs entrepreneurs and top performers to understand what it truly takes to grow and scale a business in this episode will not disappoint. If you haven’t already, please go ahead and pound that subscribe button or click follow on whatever app you are listening or watching this episode without further ado.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Silicon alley podcast, featuring the Ed Vincent. Are you interested in growing and scaling your business? Welcome to the Silicon alley podcast, where you’ll hear from entrepreneurs, venture, capitalists, and top performers on what it truly takes to grow and scale a business.

You’ll walk away with actionable insights. You can apply in your own business and life. Now to William Glass, the CEO and co-founder of ostrich and your host of the Silicon alley podcast. Ed, welcome to Silicon alley podcast. Super excited to have you on today. 

Ed Vincent: [00:01:28] Thanks Will. Yeah, absolutely. 

William Glass: [00:01:31] I want to start off.

You’ve done a lot over your 20 plus years as an entrepreneur, also on the investor side, advising side. But I’m really curious because the venture that you’ve started right now is called festival pass and it’s in the entertainment industry. But if I look back at your background, you actually have a finance background.

Can you talk to me about the, how you went from finance to entrepreneur and entertainment and media and creativity? 

Ed Vincent: [00:01:53] Sure. I mean, there there’s context, every story, of course. I came from the finance world as a finance major in college. , even sat for the CFA, if anybody knows what that is.

And then went on to be an investment banker first at KPMG, then a Toronto dominion bank. And you know, that was the full aspiration sitting in college and a state school in New Jersey, you know, to be an investor investment banker in New York city. It was like the, the, the. Until I got there and realized that while.

Yeah, it’s cool. And I’m sure if I stayed in it, it could have made a ton of money. But the reality is, is, I had the entrepreneurial bug since I was 10. Yeah. And it, it, it there’s there’s context to it. I started by, uh, throwing big new year’s parties in New York city with a buddy of mine. And,  one year probably, I guess it was 1999, we threw the party and realized that, Hey, there’s this thing called the internet where we can accept credit cards and actually pay for the tickets rather than running all over the five boroughs of New York and collecting cash on the street corner for new year’s Eve tickets.

And that was kind of the introduction to the internet. And from there things got built. 

William Glass: [00:02:59] Nice. So I’m assuming that wasn’t what the, where the bug started at 10 years old, but it’s how it developed a later. Otherwise you were very adventurous. Ten-year-old throwing parties in New York city. But talk to me about that initial interest that led  to, that decision and, and building the business around accepting payments.

Ed Vincent: [00:03:17] Yeah. I mean, if you’re talking about like the 10 year old that are, who are the 10 year tenure, I was like, I always say that I was a, a, a poor kid in a, in a rich town, meaning that I grew up in, on the Jersey shore in a really nice town and area, but we were the poorest family in the town. Various reasons along the way.

So even at 10 years old, I was putting newspapers together at the local luncheonette at secret luncheonette to get my $5 and a free breakfast. And that was always kind of the concept of being self-sufficient and you know, that rolling into, you know, working through most of my life. And then in college, I ran a real estate appraisal business out of my dorm room.

And, I was one of the few kids that actually have. Fax machine. And if anybody even knows what that is, the fax machine and a laptop in my dorm room, you know, working in between class. That’s awesome. Okay. 

William Glass: [00:04:09] So yeah, it sounds like you’ve you have that drive wanting to be self-sufficient as you said.

So talk to me about how that developed the 20 year old you, and then wanting to go in investment banking, thinking that was, you know, the epitome of success as being a big wall street guy, and then that translated into, you know, accepting some of these entrepreneurial behaviors that you clearly, you clearly 

Ed Vincent: [00:04:32] have.

Yeah. I mean, I remember when I, when I had the real estate appraisal business and this being a finance type show you there in the concept evaluation, you know, I say this then, and I’ll still say it today. There’s only three ways to value anything in life financially. I mean, Not talking about love and all the, uh, nice things that are valuable that aren’t financial related, but in the world of real estate, there was three ways to value a piece of property.

It was, you know, what is the discounted cashflow? What would it cost to build it from scratch? And what are other things like it selling for same, goes to stock. Same, goes to companies. Same, goes to anything in life, and I’d be hard pressed to have anybody prove to me differently that those aren’t the three evaluation metrics to create.

That all being said fast forward to going into banking and realizing how fun it was. But I realized that even in banking, you’re always a service provider to the, to the leader of a business. And I loved being part of the transaction and helping people raise capital. And, but then I’m like, well, I kind of want to be that guy that I’m helping raise capital for.

And then that kind of. Was that inspiration and launch. And back in 1999, when I was mentioning we’re throwing these big new year’s parties, after realizing that there just seemed to be so much fun opportunities to take a business online and build it. And the first company was city stuff, dot com, where we sold things that made cities famous.

And that was an offshoot of our new year’s party. Nice. 

William Glass: [00:06:01] That’s awesome. Yeah. I love that kind of transition. And I guess, talk to me about the creativity side specifically, right? So you’ve got festival pass. You’ve decided, Hey, I don’t want to be in this, stuffy investment banking, kind of a world anymore.

I want to be the guy that’s getting the checks written or the entrepreneur. That’s kind of taking all the risks. So can you talk to me about, that, and then the first venture. As you, as you took the business online and start thinking about festival pass, 

Ed Vincent: [00:06:30] Yeah. So if I, if I could start with festival pass and go backwards, one of the things, and we can get into what festival passes, but I like to think that every entrepreneurial company that I’ve built in the past all led up to what festival passes today, and you know, On the outside people that I go, you know, it’s in live events.

I get that, but it’s much more than that. It’s, it’s very much a financially driven credit based currency model that all of my, finance background really helped drive. It has a lot to do with my agency. I had throughout the two thousands, I had a bout a 70% experiential agency called Minson partners.

And we, uh, Bring big brands to big events and help launch and build a few film festivals. We owned a film festival at, down in the Dominican Republic and all of that kind of love of live events is what kind of drove me to that path. Subsequently after that agency, I had a SAS business. Got me understanding the concept of monthly subscription.

And I was like, okay, I get this recurring revenue is actually a good business model. And then leading up to the next business I had, which was a data-driven business called predict analytics, where we helped a lot of big entertainment companies understand their consumer data. So if I look at what festival passes today, it’s a very data-driven dynamic pricing subscription-based model that I only would know about had I.

Been in the data business for five years, I’d only think about subscription. Had I been not been in the SAS business and then leading back into the product, which is live events themselves. 

William Glass: [00:08:06] Gotcha. That’s really interesting. So all of your experiences leading up to festival pass is really, what’s enabled you to get to the point to build the company today.

And I think one of the companies, right, that you consulted for in the data side was movie pass. Can you talk to me a little bit about, obviously very similar in terms of movie pass festival pass, there’s a naming there, but can you talk about how the business model is different? Because for those. Are familiar, you know, that the business wasn’t successful because of their business model had a ton of success in terms of consumers loving the product, but they didn’t have the economics.

Right. So can you talk a little bit about, the distinction between festival pass, movie pass and what you learned from that experience? 

Ed Vincent: [00:08:43] Yeah, so it’s a very different business. You’re right. The name is very similar and I did enjoy the experience there. Um, I was the interim chief data officer, so I was able to kind of get under the covers and had the opportunity to see what three and a half million subscribers look like in terms of the data.

But, um, it is a very different business model. And, you know, I like to use the, the John Bolton or Hamilton theory, whichever one analogy you want to use, but it was the room where, where it happened. I was sitting in the room watching a really great product market fit, but a very bad execution of a business model.

So it was a, it was a great learning experience. The core of the differences is festival pass is a credit based currency model. Yeah. I have no problem sharing that. We learned a lot about it from some others successes, like ClassPass, if you’re familiar with ClassPass, I like to, I like to tell people that it’s a, Airbnb meets ClassPass for live events.

If, if, if they can put their head around what that means. So it’s a marketplace utilizing a credit based currency for a subscription product that just happens to be live events. So the difference between movie pass is movie pass was an unlimited product based upon a industry where the, the actual person supplying the supply, the inventory, had no control over the pricing.

So think of a studio studios control the pricing of the ticket. The exhibitor, which is the movie theater,  has no control over the fact that it’s $15 in New York to see a movie at noon on Wednesday. And it’s still $15 on Friday night at eight to see a blockbuster film. So there was no pricing disparity.

The independent film is the same price as the big $200 million blockbuster. So that causes a lot of problems being able to. Play with, or even understand dynamic pricing for supply and demand. So on top of that, the, the core issue is that when you’re promising people and unlimited use of something that you don’t own, meaning you don’t own the inventory, you have a difficult model that you’re trying to accomplish.

You know, everybody tries to say, well, okay, it’s just like a gym it’s breakage. The truth is, is that it’s not breakage because in a gym it’s a self regulating. So you go to a gym, you pay 30 bucks a month. And all of a sudden at five o’clock it’s busy, what do you do? You stopped going at five and you go earlier or you go later.

So you, it eventually self regulates itself where supply and demand comes together. Problem is, and, and MoviePass business that didn’t exist. So they were subsidized. The customer for far too long, and that really hurt the growth business. 

William Glass: [00:11:24] That’s a really interesting distinction. The two pieces around not being able to control your pricing right.

And having control over, over that aspect of it, movie theaters, didn’t didn’t have that capability. And then the self-regulation, which is something that I hadn’t thought about. Can you talk a little bit about how that stiff. For festival pass and how you are able to work with venues and kind of talk through the model that you’ve developed, in a little bit more 

Ed Vincent: [00:11:50] detail.

Sure. So first of all, a lot of people don’t realize how big of a business, the, um, live events businesses. So it’s a $200 billion global business. And also sometimes people confuse the fact that we call ourselves festival pass with the assumption that it’s only for festivals. That is not the case. I mean, we chose that brand name just because it evokes some kind of emotion, especially for kind of the millennial and gen Z said, it’s that experiential thing that you feel when you’re at a festival?

But we’re all live events. And when you look at the live event, spectrum it’s, it’s movies, it’s concerts, it’s festivals, it’s food and wine events. It’s feeder, it’s sporting events. It’s, it’s pretty much everything that is alive event. So globally it’s a huge business. The other misnomer that a lot of people forget is that everybody thinks of the large companies that control a certain portion of the industry.

So I’m sure you, you know, some of the names, live nation, a few others. But the truth is, is they don’t control as much as everybody thinks globally. You know, there, there are a small percentage of the overall live events market, meaning that there’s tens of thousands of producers, venues, event owners, rights holders, all the above.

So when you take a market where you have tens of thousands of people contributing the inventory to that money, it’s a ripe for a marketplace business model. So that’s one of the key things. And then the second key thing was the credit based currency model. So the way festival pass works, which is not the way a movie password is that people sign up and pay a subscription fee, whether it’s nine or $99 a month.

And they get a certain amount of credits for that. So if they’re willing to commit to $99 a month, they pay less per credit for the credits they’re buying. And then once they have those credits, They can choose to use those credits to go to as many live events as they can can for that amount of credits.

So I liken it to the you’re probably too young to remember this, but the old world or the arcades. Some people might remember Dave and busters these days, but the old world of their kids is you go in and you put $20 in the token machine. You get some tokens. And the cool shoot ’em up game is four tokens and the pinball is one token.

So you can choose how you spend that money. So for us, there’s a couple of things we’re solving, is one. We allow people that commit to a higher monthly, ongoing subscription to effectively attend events cheaper because they’re paying less per credit. And then we’re also solving for a lot of the friction that has existed in the business for a long time.

Nobody likes paying ticketing fees. They don’t like, you know, a hundred dollar fee. And then on the way out, it’s an extra 20 bucks. It’s just, a lack of transparency of the market has been dealing with for decades. And it almost doesn’t matter. The consumer, the price they’re actually paying.

It’s just, it’s just, they don’t like that extra surprise at the end, but not only are we moving to a model where there are no ticketing fees, we’re also making sure when people are getting events, they’re going to be costs less than they will elsewhere because of the fact that. We can have predictable revenue with the ongoing recurring revenue sessions.

That’s awesome. Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:14:57] And thanks for diving deep there, ed. So you’ve got to really get the venues as well, because as you said, this is a marketplace, right? So the reason that you’re able to the credit based business model works is because you have both sides of the marketplace. Is that correct? Cause you’re being, you’re able to.

Provide some sort of service or benefits to the venues, the producers, the people that are putting on the events, as well as the consumers that want to go to live events. And as you said, not have to pay fees, which I hate fees, bank fees, any kind of fee I had to pay a fee to earlier today. And I was really upset.

It was only like a dollar 50, but I was still upset. So I completely get that. So that’s why this works though, right? It’s because you’ve got the, both sides of the market. 

Ed Vincent: [00:15:36] That’s correct. Yeah. So there’s a, there’s a lot of ways to the consumer side is easy, is the wrong word. But in the world of today in digital marketing, it’s easy to reach a lot of people to let them know about your offerings and to have a little.

Discipline over the price, you’ll pay to reach them. So we, we, I wouldn’t say we have that down at scale yet, but we have pretty consistently know how to fill the funnel where as long as we tell people what we’re doing, we’re getting a big, huge response of people wanting to come and join festival pass initially as a free member.

And then when they see an event, they like moving into a paid membership. So, the consumer side, I think we have solved in terms of the brand, the promise, the value prop on the flip side. We need the inventory right? To, to make people be able to use those credits and still be excited to continue to stay on month to month.

So there are, there is an interesting way to gather a lot of this inventory. So we have partnerships across the board. So we have partnerships with some event producers. We have partnerships with some venue owners. We have partnerships with some ticket aggregators. We have partnerships with some primary ticketing companies.

We have partnerships with, Overall, how do I call it a data feed supplier of event listings? So what we do is pull all of these mechanisms together, and then bring it into our database. So we can actually showcase these thousands of events for our, for our users. 

William Glass: [00:17:03] Gotcha. So that makes a lot of sense.

So the value prop for venues is being able to sell out essentially right, being able to sell all their inventory, make sure that they put on really great events. And I’m assuming essentially partly marketing, right? If you’ve got this huge consumer base, the benefit is I don’t have to go list it on, you know, live nation and meetup and all these other different websites where you can Facebook events or all the, all the different places now where you can put an event.

It’s you just go to festival pass. And it’s, it’s done. You sell your. 

Ed Vincent: [00:17:34] Yeah. So there’s a couple of things is one. Yes. We, our members tend to be high frequency event. Goers becomes a popular group to present information to. It also is very helpful that we’re building this recommendation engine that really doesn’t exist anywhere else.

So kind of like a Netflix like recommendation engine. So as our members join, we know a little bit about our members, you know, I come from a data background, so I know. How do, how do I say, provide more insight into who our members are. And then as they create behavioral aspects within our environment, we start to learn a little more about, do they like rock and roll?

Do they like country music? Do they like soccer? Do they like football? And what that allows just like Netflix is when you have thousands of opportunities to choose from, how do you show.  Will the right 20 events on the right day at the right time. And, and how to ed, how does that get different events then we’ll get based upon the location based upon the interest.

And what that does is it really puts the right opportunity in front of the right person. So when you talk about the marketing aspect, that is absolutely part of the case, right? So we already know. Our members are high frequency live event goers. We already know that if I list or have a partnership with festival pass, my event’s going to be shown to the right people at the right time.

So yes, the idea is over time, we’ll be able to drive as many people to that event as desired based upon the capacity for an event, either sell it or not sell out the one thing, add to that, which is interesting and why. Event producers, the venue owners kind of like what we’re doing is because we’re a membership based community.

And because we are credit-based currency, it doesn’t cannibalize their full price ticket sales. So a lot of times in the past, Somebody has a, an event. And they’re like, okay, well, we can fit 5,000 people at our event. And I know typically I’m going to sell 4,000 tickets or 3000 tickets, and I’d love to get an additional 500 people there or another a hundred people, whatever the number is.

In the past, the way they would do that is they go to a group on, or a couple other different venues and they’d listed for 30% off. And people come in and get a ticket for a discount, which is great. They fill, fill the seats. But what that does is it creates a problem for anybody coming and buying that full price ticket.

Because it’s public because now people see it’s discounted on Groupon. Why would I ever go buy it for full price? If it’s just Canada and Groupon. And because of the way search engines work, Groupon will come up just as quickly as the a hundred percent ticket. So in our worlds, it’s a membership. People are pre committing their dollars to pre committing to be a live event goer, and it’s not available for a discount to just the general.

William Glass: [00:20:19] Yeah, no, thanks for pointing that out because it’s a really interesting point that you made, because I think about like the, the subscription food delivery services, I don’t know, like hello, fresh and blue apron. Like I think I will never ever pay full price because I get so many coupons and discount codes.

And part of that is a little different right. Where everyone’s fighting to get market share, and they’ve got billions in their coffers from VCs. So that’s part of it. But as a consumer, once I know that I can get, you know, the meals for half off, why would I. Pay full price. And I think that’s a really, a really important point from both the consumer perspective and the model that you’ve got set up towards credit based.

So I I’m getting a discount, but the public doesn’t necessarily know that. And then also protecting the venue and the integrity of the venue to still be able to incentivize people to, to go to the event that wouldn’t necessarily, and they’re getting a discount, but it’s a way to kind of mask that discount.

Yep. So really, really, really interest. Perspective there. So I’m going to assume this answer, the biggest challenge so far, it’s probably, yeah. Pandemic and no live events going on for, you know, a better part of a year, longer than a year. So I definitely want to touch on that, but I also am curious to think about moving forward, building a marketplace, building this credit, as you keep saying, credit based this currency as well.

You know, the overall, the overall business, what are the kind of the biggest challenges that you’re tackling today? 

Ed Vincent: [00:21:44] Yeah, so I do think. Yeah, full transparency on it is, is when you have a marketplace, you do have to fill both sides. So it’s about filling ’em in the right time, in the right place. So in, in the concept of a marketplace, you either have a route density or a global density marketplace.

The analogy would be like Uber or Lyft. As long as there’s enough drivers and passengers in one market, you can have a route density marketplace only in New York, only even Queens, and still have a successful marketplace, as long as. Buyers and sellers are meeting there. So in that capacity, as we go fill more and more live events that are in our network, we’re doing so in geographical, areas.

So, you know, right now, central Texas is important to us. New York’s important to us. South Florida is important to us. LA is important to us, Phoenix and Nashville, But eventually we want to make, we want to have events in every major city throughout the country that are enough to sustain somebody’s desire to be a subscriber.

But that’s the challenge is, is to, to focus on meeting the needs of people where both sides of the marketplace are growing. It’s a similar capacity, making sure our marketing span is going where our events are. 

William Glass: [00:22:51] Perfect. It makes a lot of sense. And I like that you brought that up the route density. So you can have a successful marketplace in one location and you don’t have to worry about trying to, you know, make your Toronto subscriber happy, even though you haven’t, you don’t have any venues in Toronto because you’re focused on U S markets and specific locales.

So it’s a really interesting way to think about it. 

Ed Vincent: [00:23:08] It also helps us in the future for global growth. So it’s easy for us or will be easy for us to say, okay, now we have hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers in the us. Let’s just do Germany. Okay. And let’s spend six months building a route density marketplace just in Germany.

So then let’s go to the UK, then let’s go to Australia. We can do that because you only need, tens of thousands of users in each market in order to support a route density market. 

William Glass: [00:23:35] Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I’m assuming, there’s probably large companies that own venues or put on events and multiple locations.

So if they’ve already having success in one market with festival pass, it’s probably easier to get that, that same provider to open up. And as you said, Germany in Munich or wherever, wherever that is. Agreed. So ed, one of the things that you’ve chosen to do as well is, use equity, crowdfunding. And I’m curious if you could talk about why you chose to do equity crowdfunding pretty have a pretty good pretty suspicion as to why, but we’d love to hear your rationale of why you chose to go that route in terms of raising.

Ed Vincent: [00:24:17] Sure. So a lot of it is, explained if anybody wants to read an article, I wrote called zero to a hundred million dollars in revenue with no VC funding. You can just type a type that in, Google and it will show up with my name. But it, it just really explaining the concept that today there’s just so many more sources of capital and it’s not that I dislike.

VCs, it just comes down to there’s so many, sources that can allow so many other people to participate. So in my kind of 20 years of going through the process, I I’ve raised capital from VCs have raised a bootstrap companies have raised capital from private equity groups and each one comes with a different flavor of, uh, how do I say.

Opportunities and challenges. So part of it is really understanding what capital sources, right? For what stage of a company and today with equity crowd funding, where you can raise up to $5 million a year with reg CF and up to $75 million a year with a reggae. It becomes this really amazing opportunity, especially with a consumer product to allow your members to actually own part of the experience.

So I just have always loved the idea that a member of festival pass can actually be an owner of festival pass and vice-versa and owner can be a member. And as, as time goes forward, those who are investors and owners are going to be much more likely to be the biggest fans and biggest influencers telling everybody else to participate.

So that’s one big piece. And then the other really is, is the idea that, I’ve always believed that main street investors should have an opportunity to be a part of something that has the capacity to grow to multiple hundreds of millions of dollars before it goes public. So not just waiting till Airbnb goes public and, and then having the Robinhood investors come in and pay five times as much as all the VCs did originally.

So I just have that kind of. Democratized way of thinking about how investing works and that’s, it’s Democrat democratic with a small day, but I’ve always wanted that. So, and just to share with everybody is, we have a multiple prong approach. Yeah to our capital raising. So we do have a crowdfunding available as we speak today, probably be alive for another month or so, for this first campaign and we’re planning to do an always-on equity crowdfunding campaign.

So we’ll never not be raising money. It just, every quarter to valuation is going to go up. So we’ll go up to match the fundamentals of the business. So in the process of that, I look at capital from three sources. One is equity crowdfunding. The other is strategic equity. And I’ll share in a minute, we have a lot of amazing individual investors that are part of it.

And then the third is low cost debt. So up until a couple of years ago, there wasn’t the ability for direct to consumer companies to go access low cost debt capital, you know, in the hundreds and the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars for digital marketing. So when I look at all of our future growth dollars that we’re going to use to acquire new customers, it’s all going to come from low cost debt.

And then we’re going to use our equity, crowdfunding, and strategic investors for operational capital. Got it. Okay. 

William Glass: [00:27:34] So that’s, that’s very interesting. So can you talk, so a couple of things that I want, I’m wanting to dig in on, I guess the first is this, you mentioned something that was interesting. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about it before.

Is this always on. Funding. So, can you talk about what you mean by always on crowdfunding? 

Ed Vincent: [00:27:50] Yes. Usually what happens in the crowdfunding space, and this is something that I haven’t seen yet either, but hopefully it will work is, people have a campaign and they say, okay, we’re going to go out and raise a million dollars or $5 million.

We’re going to do it over three to six months. And when it’s over, it’s over and then maybe a year or two from then they’ll come back and say, okay, Maybe I’ll try and raise more money. And then there’s been companies that have been successful in doing that. And most of the ones that have gone on to raise tens of millions of dollars do so through a reggae.

But what we’re doing is we have a campaign that’s live now and we’re raising at a certain valuation and we’re building the company. But within that three months that the campaign went live to one we’re going to complete. It is a, there’s been a lot happening in the company in terms of growth. So. After the three months, we’re going to pull the campaign down and then we’ll go live with another campaign immediately or within a few days.

And the valuation will match the current valuation of what the fundamentals of the business say it should. So I’ll give you a random example. Like right now we’re raising money at a $20 million evaluation on start engine. Once we do the second campaign, maybe it’s a 25 million or $30 million evaluation because now we have 50,000 more subscribers.

Now we have a thousand more events. Now we have, you know, X amount of people that are, paying $50 a month to be subscribers. So when we can match the valuation with it, what it does is it creates a mark to mark a value. So I know if I came at $20 million valuation and now it’s trading at a $30 million valuation, but as an investor, I’m excited because I saw, okay, cool.

You know, it’s on paper, but I now have 50% increase in the value of my investment. In the traditional private company world, it’s very difficult to understand what something’s worth. So this creates a quarter to quarter mark to mark valuation. It also helps with outside strategic investors.

So we’ve raised a bunch of money from some really influential people. And a lot of times they’re excited to invest because they know within a few months we’re gonna, valuation is gonna increase again. 

William Glass: [00:29:55] Got it. That’s really interesting. And. It’s just something that I haven’t heard anyone doing.

Cause typically it’s, you know, at least in the VC world, every 18 months, you’re raising, if you’re doing really well, maybe it’s it’s sooner or if you’re not doing so well, you’ve got to do a bridge round to get to the next round. So you’ve essentially just kind of turned on this, way to allow mainstream investors.

But also it’s a way to kind of always have continuous funding for the business as you’re building. What about giving away too much equity? Is that a concern of that? You’re going to dilute yourself out if you’re always raising or I guess curious about how that piece works. 

Ed Vincent: [00:30:31] Sure. So, so it’s, it’s actually the exact opposite because if we had taken traditional institutional VC money early on in the C seed stage or the classic kind of series, a worlds that comes with a lot more restrictions to say it lightly, and there’s, there’s a lot of different ways.

Some institutional investors require their investments to be made that protects them. I’d say from. And anti dilution, but also, ends up diluting some of the initial investors. So what happens in this concept of crowdfunding is because on a quarterly basis, the valuations increasing the you’re never really been diluted at all.

So it’s funny when people in the world of dilution, sometimes they don’t understand the concept. Sometimes they say, oh, well, I used to own 5%. Now I own 3%. That doesn’t matter. The concept is, is, is the money that you pay. At 5% now with more in total than it is at 3%. So as long as the valuation’s continuously increasing, you’re not really being diluted.

You might own less percentage of the company, but you’re whatever you own is worth much, much. Yeah, 

William Glass: [00:31:41] I appreciate you explaining that because I think that’s the common misconception is, is you typically don’t want to phrase it a lower valuation, then that is not the case, but as long as your valuation is going up, then the fact that you now own 3% set of 5%, you should have, it should be worth more in terms of value.

So, what is, I guess, success look like for festival pass? Right? We’ve kind of talked a little bit, and I alluded to some of the things that you’re thinking about in terms of, you know, where you’d like to be globally, but, you know, talk to me a little bit about the future festival pass and what successes.

Ed Vincent: [00:32:15] Sure. I mean, for me, it’s about having this, this way for people to connect live. Like, the overall mission really is about getting people to connect with humans, more often and more regularly and build that community. So that’s what always has driven me. That’s what I’ve always loved about live events.

It’s a once in a lifetime experience, no matter what event you’re at, it will never happen. So the, the people that are at a specific event at that specific time is a magical experience. Whether it’s a, you know, a football game or, or a cool little concert in a dive bar, they’re all really cool experiences.

So I think the dream or success to me is when, you know, I can see somebody, I don’t know, looking at festival pass. You know, really enjoying the fact that, you know, here let’s as an example here in, in Austin, maybe they’re looking at ACL, which is one of the biggest festivals here, and they’re like, cool, I’m going to ACL.

Cause I got it through festival pass and there’s 50 other venues in town this weekend. And there’s a band playing at each of these 50 venues. And I can look at the app and plan my entire weekend just by using festival pass, knowing I’m going to go to. The show at X X venue, I’m gonna, you know, whatever the, the concept is.

I just want people to be able to experience that discovery, and to be able to do so. 

William Glass: [00:33:39] Love it. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. I think that I know when it comes to live events, if it’s not a big market event, like an ACL, but even with ACL, there’s obviously, you know, nuances of how do you actually create a great experience?

Because there are so many performers that are playing at different venues at different times. Sure. But it’s also just like, for me as a consumer it’s discovery, right. I mean, there’s just. You know, H how do I know which event or live event to go to? And I, you know, you go do a quick Google search and it always returns results that are old, or they’re only on, you know, one type of event.

And I’ll see all the events for networking events around entrepreneurship, but I actually wanted to go see something else, but that’s just what meetup or whatever Google, you know, shot back at me. So I really like the fact that you’re, you’re really focused on this, connecting people with events that are meaningful to themselves.

Ed Vincent: [00:34:27] Yeah, it’s fun. And like all of the, there hasn’t been that many social experiences in the life of them business. So, you know, there’s a couple of ticketing companies that have tried a social approach, but you know, the way I look at it is I want to see when I log in a festival pass and that these are features that are a few months out, but you know, I’ve interconnected with 500 people on festival pass that are all also members because I’ve connected my Facebook or Instagram or whatever, chosen social network.

And now I flip up an event, let’s say, this event is. I’m trying to think of an example, city winery in New York and it’s, you know, for the old people out there, it’s Joan Jett playing or whatever, or for, for young people, it’d be somebody else. But now I can immediately see these little faces on this event page and be like, oh, okay.

10 of my friends that I know are totally going to this. I’m going to go to, and now it creates this ability for us to interact pre show after show, during show, we’re going to let people be posting, you know, photos from shows and then kind of creating this experience that people want to be, on festival pass pre during and post the entire live show.

William Glass: [00:35:30] Yeah. Not like that at it. Cause I think you’re, it sounds like you’re tapping into something that the social media platforms used to be good at when they were smaller. Right. Where you could discover that a friend or someone was going to be in the same place or same event venue. And now there’s just, you know, you’re inundated with so much stuff that you, you know, you might find out a week later that someone was at the same event as you.

And you’re like, man, we should have connected. So I love that you’re creating that ability again. 

Ed Vincent: [00:35:54] Yep. No, I agree. It’s really just about connection and community and having a frictionless approach to, to experiencing live events. Awesome. 

William Glass: [00:36:02] Well, Ed, I want to transition now and talk a little bit about personal finance as someone that’s been on all sides of the equation.

It sounds like in the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial world, I’d love to get your take on personal finance. And specifically I’d like to start with your relationship with money. How would you describe that? 

Ed Vincent: [00:36:21] Yeah. I don’t know how to answer that question so much. I mean, I have three daughters and an ex-wife, so there’s been a process along the way, but, I do realize that, in and of itself, as an entrepreneur, for me, I constantly reinvest in, in what I’m doing and in myself and my time, as well as capital in order to kind of explore what’s important for me in life.

So. While I’ve had many successes in the past, the actual dollar amount of money. Isn’t that important to me what’s always been important is to, you know, wealth, to me is being able to kind of experience what you want to experience when you want to experience it without any, you know, weight of financial.

William Glass: [00:37:03] I love that. Yeah. It’s that, yeah, that kind of like capturing your time. Right. Being able to in the live event space, right. Go and have experiences with the people that you care about and when you can and not worry about, am I going to be able to keep the lights on or, you know, feed the family? Exactly.

And what would you say is the best investment that you’ve made? 

Ed Vincent: [00:37:25] Yeah, I, I guess I can go there. There’s some good ones and bad ones. So at the end of the day, there’s public market investments that are as good, which are interesting. And then there’s, just entrepreneurial investments. So in investing in myself and time, Here’s one example, I would say, and it’s not even a classic financial investment, but I’m part of a, an entrepreneur group called EO.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of EO entrepreneurs, organization. There’s a there’s YPO and EO, which are two very similar organizations and one is for entrepreneurs and one’s for presidents. Anyway, it’s a, it’s a global organization of 14,000 entrepreneurs, and I’ve been part of it now for about 14 years and, you know, costs X amount of dollars, every year for dues.

And, there’s an investment into participating in a bunch of the events. I was lucky enough through the program to go to MIT for three years for an entrepreneur master’s degree with 70 other entrepreneurs globally. But, but going through and investing in that process of, being a part and spending the thousands upon thousands of dollars necessary to do it was, you know, the return that I’ve received from that organization has been a mess.

That’s 

William Glass: [00:38:33] awesome. Yeah, no, I love that. And I’m glad you brought that up because I think that there’s that opportunity to connect with other people. And as you said, the organizations that are really focused on development and it’s not just, I got X amount of money for, investing in this stock or this startup it’s, the kind of those intangibles, going back to the things that we can’t value, right.

That are harder to value. 

Ed Vincent: [00:38:55] Yeah. No, it just goes back to the place where some people might get an initial financial return from, as you said, a stock or something else, but having built their capacity to earn any more so than anything else. And, you know, at some point in time, the market might go down or, an investment might not pay off as well as it can be.

But when you continue to invest in yourself, you’re, you’re always have the capacity to earn perfect. 

William Glass: [00:39:20] So ed not all the decisions we make are always good. So I’m curious to get the flip side of the coin. What would you say is the dumbest money mistake that you’ve 

Ed Vincent: [00:39:28] made? Yeah, I think I’d have to say when we had city stuff back in the day, we ended up selling at a time where it was a fear-based sale because we’d, we’d launched in 1999.

It was a 2001 and you know, the internet 1.0. Bubble turned into a bust. And, we didn’t know if we’re going to need more capital. We didn’t know, how we’d continue to run the company, even though we were successful, we had all these great, you know, you being from New York, you would recognize it.

You know, Junior’s cheesecake from Brooklyn. Yeah, absolutely. So we have juniors chase. Can we sell millions of dollars of cheesecake through city stuff? Because that was before juniors had their own website. Right? So they, they were doing mail order and you know, around the holidays, we would just crank out, you know, cheesecake orders amongst other things like H and H bagels and all the other great things in New York.

But, and this was all. Put the timing and perspective. This is all before Google and Facebook even existed. So the way you get information out back then was all about PR. It was all about, let me, let me, uh, hold a big sign in front of a today show or good morning America with city stuff, dot com, which we did many times, because you couldn’t just go to a search engine and find it.

You couldn’t, you couldn’t buy media through Facebook to get to people. So it was a different experience, but at the time we ended up selling to a company. And Connecticut for what I thought was a great deal. It was stocking this other company. I was worth millions by millions of dollars on paper at 25 years old.

But then subsequent events happened nine 11 came, in New York, the economy dried up, especially in Manhattan. Things came to a big halt, all that millions upon millions of dollars, you know, basically went to zero. So it was an experience that I wish we, I wish we didn’t. And, cause if we just held on, even if we had a kind of reduce expenses and kind of reformulate the team for a period of a year, on the other side of it, everything started growing again.

Google actually came to be, all these other things that would have easily excelled us to, a different level. The reason why I bring that up as it was a bad decision, but also a bad investment of money or a depletion of value. But even today with festival pass, we launched festival pass prior to the pandemic, you know, nine out of 10 other entrepreneurs, maybe not entrepreneurs, but, had we taken, institutional investment capital prior to, we would have been told to shut down.

We would have been told you can’t start a, a new company. Based upon live events when we don’t know if live events will ever come back. And that was a learning experience that came from city stuff, which I said, well, no, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the money we have today. We’re going to spend it wisely.

We’re going to keep building infrastructure and we’re going to be ready. Thanks come out the other side and that’s what we did. And right now it’s awesome because it says the roaring twenties are coming back. We’re just, uh, we’re in a place where the economy is good or growing live events is, you know, one of the biggest businesses, you know, for the next 18 months, it’s going to be crazy and we’re ready because we have the tech built and we have the partnerships in place.

So we’re excited to go on this ride. That’s awesome. Yeah. 

William Glass: [00:42:47] I love that. I love how you were able to take that, that, that lesson. And from city stuff and be able to apply that to a festival pass and hang in there and not, not take that fear-based approach, but really think about where are we going to be in the next year, 18 months and prepare for that eventual future in reality.

So ed, one thing that I, that I missed that I wanted to dig in on is that you kept using the term, this credit based currency, and you’re also, work with a blockchain incubator. Is there, is there some future plans where you’re going to turn, where you’re going to take what’s going on in the crypto and blockchain space and utilize that with festival pass.

Just a shot in the dark here, but I’m just curious, based on your background. 

Sure. 

Ed Vincent: [00:43:32] So it’s a good question. And there will be some. Integration with the concept of blockchain in the future? Not probably not in the way you’re thinking now. So the credit based currency that we’re using internally, it’s important to understand the way cryptocurrency or any kind of currency works on the blockchain is that there’s either decentralized or centralized, um, uh, govern governance.

It’s important for festival pass to have centralized governance because we’re actually maintaining the value of the currency. So for us to be able to have gross margin, positive metrics on every transaction, we need to be able to manage that supply and demand and the dynamic pricing that enables our consumers to get the best deal and enables the event to sell the product at the right value and for us to get a margin.

So the answer is. Our credits likely will not turn into cryptocurrency in any capacity, but where I do see a lot of value is the ability to create a couple of things. One is rewards programs within a crypto environment. So will there ever be a festival past coin maybe, but it won’t be the core coin that drives the ticket pricing.

What it may be as a rewards mechanism that can be tracked or converted into festival pass credits. So there is value. So that’s one aspect. And the other one, whereas more likely is in the, crowdfunding world. So there are, as you can imagine many marketplaces that in the future of the next call it one to three years, we’ll provide, more and more exchanges available for privately held companies.

Some that may be blockchain driven, some that may be crypto driven. So. Another strategy to this overall crowd funding concept really is, is as we have tens of thousands of investors in the company, we will be having secondary markets for our shares. And that can happen on many different exchanges. Some of which will be blockchain.

Gotcha. 

William Glass: [00:45:36] Thanks for explaining that. And delineating between blockchain and just a centralized and decentralized cryptocurrency, because I think that’s a really, important, uh, important thing to note. And I noticed that you’re on start engine now, but had you used other equity crowdfunding platforms?

Is that because start engine now has the ability to trade shares, secondary shares, and you’re going to have this kind of always on 

Ed Vincent: [00:45:55] model. It’s a great question. And you are right. That was a big factor. When we chose to go with start engine. However, what I’m realizing is over time, start engines. Great.

I’ve no issues with start engine, but I’m realizing all of them will have that secondary market. Anyway, it was just start. Engine was better at marketing it initially. And I think over time, We’ll see how long the process will go. There are a lot of other opportunities to manage crowdfunding without a traditional marketplace.

Or how do I say, a traditional company, like a start engine or others? I think once we’re past, you know, call it a year or two from now, once we’re in a place where we already have tens of thousands of investors, we may be able to manage that whole system ourselves through a white label process so that we’re not always, and then the core reason, and I don’t know why I’m being so transparent right now, but the core reason is I’m a consumer marketing conversion guy.

And when you’re, when you market and tell people to come in and learn about your process, and then you ask them to invest. And they have to then sign up for another platform in order to get to the place of making that investment. It’s like the old Amazon, you know, reduce the clicks. So I just want to create the least friction and letting a main street investor participate in the auction.

William Glass: [00:47:14] Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I appreciate you being very transparent of look, I’ve personally spoken with a lot of these different platforms. So just curious as to your decision-making and as to why you chose to go that route. And then the last thing I’ve got just around festival passes is their ability to transfer credits, or is that something that might be on the roadmap?

Because I could see that where it’s like, I want to gift credits too. You know, a friend or  maybe I got sick and I can’t go to any live events for a while. So, you know, I still want to continue to be a consumer and get value, and be a part of the community, but can I, you know, trade or sell or gift 

Ed Vincent: [00:47:50] credits?

So the answer is you’re right. It’s on the road. It doesn’t exist today. And there are a couple of nuances, especially with the understanding of data. And this is something I did learn at movie, which was very important was that having a deterministic dataset is important. So we, we want to know and be able to provide even anonymously who goes to what event.

So we all always want to try and. Make sure that somebody that’s using one of our tickets, is actually, a user. Even if they’re a free member of festival pass, we at least want to know who they are, what their email address is, et cetera. So what we’re going to be doing is allowing people to that are on the platform connect.

So almost like a social network where you and I are now both festival past members and we’ve friended each other, if you will. So once that has happened and we’re kind of interconnected within festival pass together, we then will allow you. To transfer credits to me because we’ve chosen to be connected in our environment.

And that will, I think, facilitate some of the kind of group planning. And we’re also looking at things where it’s not necessarily the transfer of credits, but you might say, Hey, I just got a ticket to black Pumas. And, I want these 10 of my friends that are all on festival pass to go with me, click a button and they all get an invite to say, Hey, let’s all go to Blackpool.

Cool. 

William Glass: [00:49:15] Okay. That makes sense, ed, and yeah, I appreciate you on the roadmap. I assumed that it was probably a future thing based on, based on what you shared or the challenges and kind of focus at the time of the business, but that’s awesome. I’m really excited to, and I appreciate you sitting down and this has been a lot 

Ed Vincent: [00:49:30] of fun.

Thank you for having me. This has been awesome. 

William Glass: [00:49:32] Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ll leave it at the last word. If there’s anything that you want to leave the audience with, and then please, let us know how folks can connect with you outside of the box. 

Ed Vincent: [00:49:42] Sure. So, I just think for connection, I mean, festival pass.com is the easiest way to go sign up, be a free member.

Even if you don’t see an event you like today, you will, there were new events coming every day. And then, on social Instagram, tick-tock you name it? Facebook, all the above, depending upon,  what your preference is. And then if you go to invest.festivalpass.com, if anybody wants to participate more only going to have that campaign open for another month or so before.

Raise the valuation and go to the next, that’s just a great way to participate early on. We’re excited about building this and the next 18 months is going to be a lot of fun. 

William Glass: [00:50:18] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, ed. And again, appreciate you sitting down. 

Ed Vincent: [00:50:22] Cool. Thanks, Will. Appreciate it. On your way out. 

William Glass: [00:50:24] Please share the podcast with others.

That’s the only way that the community grows and others hear these incredible stories from entrepreneurs and top performers. And of course, pound that subscribe button. So you’re notified when new episodes drop every Friday, I’m William Glass, CEO and co-founder of ostrich. And of course you are the host of the Silicon alley podcast have a very profitable.

You got no time 

Ed Vincent: [00:50:46] to waste, but still you say caught in a circle say, and I’ll never leave this place.

Go to such a vulnerable right side over, over.

End of Transcription

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Data Driven Decision Making, Levers Book Amos Schwartzfarb & Trevor Boehm

Data Driven Decision Making

In 3 Questions Every Business Owner Must Ask & How to Make Data-Driven Decisions, Amos Schwartzfarb & Trevor Boehm, Co-Authors of Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability in Your Business, joins host William Glass to discuss scaling your startup. You’ll learn:

  • The W3, which are the three questions every business owner must ask themselves about their customers
  • How to move from metric aware to metric driven in your decision making
  • Why you should be focusing on repeatability and NOT scalability in your business

This episode is jam-packed with value and will have you understanding how to make data-driven decisions to grow your business.

Support Silicon Alley through the online merch store!

About Amos Schwartzfarb & Trevor Boehm:

Amos Schwartzfarb is the Managing Director of Techstars Austin and author of the best-selling books for startup sales, Sell More Faster – The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups and LEVERS – The Framework For Building Repeatability Into Your Business.  Amos began his career as an entrepreneur in the mid 90’s in the Bay Area at Shoreline Mountain Products and HotJobs.com. In 2004 after moving to Los Angeles, Amos founded Work.com which was eventually merged with Business.com where he was VP of Sales. Business.com sold in 2008 and in 2009 Amos moved to Austin and founded mySpoonful with Stacy Horne. mySpoonful was sold in 2012 and Amos joined Blacklocus shortly after. A year later Blacklocus was sold to Homedepot. In his spare time, Amos loves to hang out with his family, mountain bike and play in the mountains.

Trevor Boehm was a writer before finding his way into building companies. A serial founder, he has also invested in more than forty startups, many of those through Techstars’ first Impact accelerator and as Managing Director of Alexa Next Stage, a program run with the Amazon Alexa Fund. He is currently at the venture fund Saturn Five.

Learn more about Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability in Your Business.

Transcription

This transcription is autogenerated and may contain errors.

William Glass: [00:00:00] Are you interested in making data driven decisions that will enable your business to scale and be successful? If so then you’ve come to the right place. I’m William Glass, CEO and co-founder of ostrich. And of course you were a host of Silicon alley podcast. Today. I sit down with Amos Schwartzfarb as well as Trevor Boehm, the coauthors of levers.

[00:00:22] And this book is all about how to identify the key metrics and key analytics within your business that will ultimately. To scaling success. You’ve got to figure out what those repeatable processes are and they dive deep into why this is so important and how you can actually implement this in your business edition.

[00:00:38] They talk about the W3C, which are the three questions you need to ask in order to truly understand who your customer is and what it is that they understand and love about your product or service together. They have a plethora of experience in the startup world, both within Techstars, as well as their own ventures and entrepreneurial.

[00:00:58] And also in venture [00:01:00] capital. So we dive deep into some of their experiences just in general, within venture and at the end, talk about their best investments and, uh, some of the ones that didn’t pan out. So well, if you haven’t already go ahead and pound that subscribe button. So you notify windows air every Friday without further ado.

[00:01:14] I hope you enjoy today’s entrepreneur focused episode of Silicon valley podcasts. Trevor bell and AEMO’s Schwartz far up. Are you interested in growing and scaling your business? Welcome to the Silicon alley podcast where you’ll hear from entrepreneurs, venture, capitalists, and top performers on what it truly takes to grow and scale a business.

[00:01:35] You’ll walk away with actionable insights. You can apply in your own business and life now to William Glass, the CEO and co-founder of ostrich and your host of the Silicon alley podcast. Amos, Trevor, welcome to Silicon alley podcast. Super excited to have you guys on today. 

[00:01:51] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:51] Cool. Thank you. So, yeah. 

[00:01:54] William Glass: [00:01:54] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:01:54] I’m excited. Dive into all things entrepreneurship. You guys have written a really awesome book called [00:02:00] levers, and we’ll definitely want to get into that. But one of the things before we hit record is we were kind of chopping it up and you guys have a really good rapport and dynamic between each other.

[00:02:08] I’m curious, how did you guys meet and come together and decide to write this book? 

[00:02:14] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:02:14] Uh, I’ll take the first part of that Trevor. You can take the second. Yeah. Um, we, we met, I kind of a long time ago, Trevor worked with another. Friend of ours at, um, at, uh, uh, impact accelerator called, uh, gosh, unlimited. Um, and there was a point, uh, several, a few years back where unlimited actually became part of Techstars and, um, and Zoe Schlag, who is the other person that we know in common and Trevor became part of the Techstars.

[00:02:50] Uh, family for a little while. And so Trevor and I, we knew each other prior, we worked really intimately together in Austin, uh, as we were running [00:03:00] a couple of different programs in Techstars. And, um, and so we just got to know each other really well, you know, investing together, uh, alongside each other building companies together.

[00:03:11] Um, so really kind of hands-on um, and then I’ll, I’ll let you Trevor to the second part. How did we, how did we come up with the idea for write a book? 

[00:03:20] Trevor Boehm: [00:03:20] Sure. Yeah, I can do the, I can do the book story. Uh, so the, the short version of how we came up with the idea to write the book was, uh, we’d been working together.

[00:03:32] Both on the investing side and on the support side, right. It, it once, okay, now that we’ve got these companies, how do we make sure that they don’t fall off the rails as they’re, uh, as they’re headed into whatever direction they’re going. And then we started to take what were pieces of, uh, of our own experiences that we’d been working using within our companies for years and years.

[00:03:53] Um, and. And as we were, uh, taking those pieces and [00:04:00] using them in the, in the investing and support and coaching that we were doing, um, it just all started to click together. And it just, I think, I think kind of mutually became to this point where it seemed like, well, it was really, um, not only this is valuable, we knew this was valuable to us.

[00:04:15] We understood the power of a metrics driven business and the perspective that we took and how to, how to get there. But it’s really resonating with the companies that we’re working with. And so I think it was Amos pulled me out, uh, late one night, uh, when we’re working with a bunch of founders and sort of took me into the corner of a room and said, Hey, what did we wrote a book on this?

[00:04:36] Can I sorry? Uh, wait a second. Uh, let’s let’s think about this a little bit, because books are just, uh, you know, such a massive project. Um, but it, it just kept, uh, it kept pulling and we kept working on it. And then, and then here we are today. 

[00:04:52] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:04:52] Well, I think, and I just to add to that, one of the things, you know, that Trevor and I, when we were working, you know, when we work with these companies, there is [00:05:00] these two individuals that we would bring in a lot for part of the, this process, which we’ve been running this process for a long time.

[00:05:06] We just named it in the book. Um, we would bring these two particular people all the time, uh, for their areas of expertise, which is around. Um, prioritization product prioritization and financial modeling, um, financial modeling, meaning building your, your forward looking plan, not your reporting backwards.

[00:05:22] And so, you know, when, when Trevor and I finally said, okay, let’s, let’s, you know, let’s see if we can pull this off. You know, one of the first things we did was we turned to Trevor and Cody and said, Hey, will you guys participate in, in the writing of this book? And so when we look at it from the eye, it is a big undertaking.

[00:05:39] A book is a huge undertaking. If you haven’t written one. We had the fortune of having four people who have, are experts in their field, being able to write about their thing. And then, you know, for, you know, Trevor, you know, is he’s been a part of several books, books being written, which is why he knows how hard it is.

[00:05:57] You know, we had his brain to be able to sort of wrap and [00:06:00] say, okay, how do we make this something that’s actually cohesive that people will enjoy and get value out of and not just be, you know, something cobbled together. 

[00:06:08] Trevor Boehm: [00:06:08] Yeah, no. Oh, just a quick, quick note. Troy, Troy EMS, Cody, and I

[00:06:19] Yeah. 

[00:06:20] William Glass: [00:06:20] Perfect. So that’s awesome that you’re able to bring in people from different areas of expertise to really focus on those key aspects of the book. I want to actually use something in the book and use it on you guys. So you’ve got this thing called what? The three W’s or w three. So what, what is that?

[00:06:36] And can you use that to talk about who this book is for and why it’s different than all of the other business books? 

[00:06:43] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:06:43] Yeah, we, we, we can, um, and we, we actually talk about this a lot and we talked about it, even in writing the book, we do, we are very much drink our own Kool-Aid and, and we can go down a path to talks about how we do that as well.

[00:06:56] Um, so the, the w three, this is. Like, [00:07:00] so let me step back for a second. There is nothing in the book that has not been talked about in some way before, right? There’s no invention in the book. Well, we have done in the book has said, here are these concepts and we’ve created really simple to follow hard to do, but simple to follow frameworks for each piece of the, of it and, and put, put it together in a way that’s really understandable and, and approachable.

[00:07:21] So w three came out of, uh, the time when I was at a, at a company that I, I stepped into a sales role. Sales leadership role. And the company had been doing, you know, several million dollars in revenue for a long time, but not growing. And so I had the fortune of walking into a company that had customers, but didn’t know anything about their customers, which is why they couldn’t grow.

[00:07:42] And so I, I, it really was me asking three simple questions over and over until I felt satisfied with the answer. And when I was satisfied with the answer, we put the pedal down on it and it’s who is our customer? Who do you believe your customer is? And more importantly, what is the data? You have to prove that you’re right.

[00:07:58] What are they buying from [00:08:00] you? Not what are you selling to them, but what are they buying from you? Um, and then why does it matter to their business and to the individual buyer? And for all of those things, like what is the data that we have that says we’re right. And so when you can answer those three questions, any entrepreneur can try to answer those questions and have an answer, but when you can answer those questions and back it up with data, you know, that you’re set, you’re starting in the right path.

[00:08:23] You can put the pedal down. Um, and so. For, for levers, we are looking at business builders, meaning, you know, people who are actually trying to build something that, um, that they, they have a theory of who and what it is that they want to do. And they might be a little bit down that path, but what they haven’t found yet is repeatability in their business and their, and that’s what they’re looking to do.

[00:08:49] They’re looking to, how do I figure out the opera operational operationalize the repeatability in our business. And then we w I’ll just take it a step further [00:09:00] because we also teach levers Trevor and I teach levers as a, as a course for companies that are a little bit further along. And for those companies, we’re even more specific in our w three, which is the company should be generating revenue.

[00:09:14] They should have line of sight of nine to 12 months. Of, um, cash in the bank to run their business so that when we, and there’s a bunch of other things too, but so that when we work with them, they actually can focus on their business and not be stressed about making payroll or fundraising or whatever.

[00:09:29] And then some of the other things in that w three are, um, there needs to be CEO led business. There needs to be at least one other senior, your executive on the team. Um, I’m sure I’m missing a couple of other things too, but. It wasn’t a cute, 

[00:09:43] Trevor Boehm: [00:09:43] awesome. 

[00:09:43] William Glass: [00:09:43] Yeah, no, I appreciate you explaining that. And I think it’s, you know, as you said, it’s very easy to come up with an answer to those questions as an early stage startup founder, I can throw stuff at the wall, but having the metrics to necessarily justify the w three, I think is really important.

[00:09:59] So yeah. What are [00:10:00] some of the, the metrics or things that you track to be able to say, yes, this is actually our customer. And here’s why, like, what are some of those things that you can be thinking about? Entrepreneurs can be thinking about that they need to be tracking to answer those questions. 

[00:10:16] Trevor Boehm: [00:10:16] You just to make sure I understand your question.

[00:10:17] Are you speaking specifically to how we think about our metrics relative to the book or how, what, what entrepreneurs should be doing, uh, generally as they track metrics for their customer? Yeah, 

[00:10:28] William Glass: [00:10:28] I was thinking in generally, so applying it generally, but if you want to use levers as an example, feel free.

[00:10:34] Trevor Boehm: [00:10:34] Okay. Maybe we’ll jump in, but I just want to make sure I, I thought that’s what you’re saying, but I wanted to make sure. And then I, then I’ll back up just to Tony back actually, because  did a beautiful job articulating the first step you, but, but there’s also the other two, as we think about who, who, what this is to them.

[00:10:51] You know, who it matters to you and why, and quickly on those, the way we see that, uh, the what in terms of what it is that they’re actually buying [00:11:00] relative to the book relative to any work that we do with them is really controlled. Uh, the there’s, there’s a lot that happens in the world of, uh, of growing and building a business.

[00:11:12] And the vast majority of it, it feels like it’s completely outside of your control right now. You don’t understand what’s happening. You don’t understand how to repeat what you would, the success you’ve had in the past. So our hope is that we’re able to bring control back into the driver’s seat of the business builder through a metrics driven.

[00:11:28] That’s the, that’s the big vision. And then the why there, uh, the reason that matters to the, to the people who care about this aspect to the business builders, who you would be interested in reading the book is that they want to build the world that they see. Right. Like they care about building a vision of something that they’re usually sort of compelled really driven by some picture of the world that they want to create.

[00:11:52] And this allows them to do that, or it puts them in the driver’s seat. And in order to do that, it’s not, it’s not about fundraising, but it’s not about trying to [00:12:00] pitch some really great stories that you can get a bunch of money. Right. And it’s not about, uh, just trying to sort of. You know, kind of a hustle to get kind of whatever, whatever success you want kind of in the day to day, it’s really about like, how do I put myself in the driver’s seat and get to build whatever world, you know, is important to me.

[00:12:20] Okay. So that’s a w Surrey then to the metrics question. Yeah. So metrics are. Are I love talking about metrics or KPIs, key performance indicators. I think the vast majority, there’s a lot of good content on this. I think there’s a lot of really bad content and by bad, I mostly mean confusing. Uh, it’s it’s an area where like people get paid to make it sound complex and to make you take you to you don’t actually understand what’s happening right now.

[00:12:49] And so that for me, the big sort of power. Of identifying the metrics that matter in your business are giving you the ability to make decisions. Again, back to this idea of [00:13:00] control. Like, do these numbers help me make decisions in the business and do they help me focus on what matters most? And yeah. And to that, what matters most piece is the key for knowing whether or not you’ve gotten there for, if you have something that actually matters is that you have some kind of metric that’s geared towards a milestone that unlocks a new future, right.

[00:13:23] A new reality in your business. So, so again, to me, as I think about metrics, as you’re trying to figure out how to identify the numbers that matter in this stage of the business, It helps you make decisions. It takes you to some key milestones that you’re trying to get to. And that milestone unlocks something totally new.

[00:13:42] Like if you’re able to get to, you know, some type of conversion rate or some customer acquisition costs, then you’re able to spend a bunch of money on that channel because you know that it’s going to be profit. Right. And so then suddenly you change, you change, right? Your, your KPIs are actually relative, right.

[00:13:57] Those metrics shift now, because instead of [00:14:00] focusing on the customer acquisition costs and optimize NEC you can just focus on dialing that whole thing up. Right. And just expanding as much as he can in order to get customers activated and then keep them on, on your product or. 

[00:14:12] William Glass: [00:14:12] Gotcha. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

[00:14:13] And yeah. Thinking, thinking of metrics in a way of allowing you to make decisions that give you greater control of the business. I like, I like that definition a lot because I think I know I’ve been guilty of it. You hear data driven decisions or, you know, all that kind of stuff, but there’s so much data out there now that you can collect, but is it actually.

[00:14:32] To the business. And I think that is a challenge that I know I faced and I’m sure other entrepreneurs face. And, you know, based on your experience and this working with companies through Techstars and all of the other ventures that you’ve done, what would you say are some of the key challenges that you’ve seen companies when it comes to identifying these metrics or tracking the right things?

[00:14:53] Like what are some of the challenges that, that you’ve seen. 

[00:14:57] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:14:57] You, you know, there’s a few and I would say [00:15:00] that probably, you know, and, and, and I bet you, Trevor and I have slightly different answers here. So, so, so Trevor definitely chime in too, but I think the most common one is sort of the simplest one, but it goes, it, it parlays off of what Trevor just said, which is, or will you just say, which is there’s so much data out there.

[00:15:19] And especially as an early stage founder, you know, if you’re raising money or even if you’re not raising money, but you’re, you know, you have, uh, you know, advisors, whatever you’re trying to show that you’ve done something. And so what happens is companies become really metrics aware of the things that they’ve done that are lagging and anchor on those.

[00:15:41] And so they’re trying to drive towards an anchor that looks at the past versus what Trevor was saying, which is I’m doing things that are unlocking something for the future. And that’s a difference between being metrics, aware, looking at something that tells you what happened versus being metrics driven, which is doing something that is [00:16:00] creative.

[00:16:01] The next thing that is going to happen. Um, and so like another way to think about that is when you think about even looking at your financial model, which you know, is assuming that companies have even a basic one, the difference between, you know, you telling the model what to do and the model telling you what to do, right.

[00:16:16] You’re trying to get to the point where the model is telling you what. But you have to do those things to get there. And, and so that learning process and being comfortable with making tons and tons of mistakes as you learn that that to me is the biggest challenge I think, would becoming metrics driven versus metrics, aware the fear of like, if I make a mistake, I’m going to be viewed a certain way, or I’m not going to be successful when actually the mistakes are what make you successful?

[00:16:41] The learning from the mistakes make a success. 

[00:16:44] William Glass: [00:16:44] Yeah, Amos. That’s a great way to, to frame that, um, in terms of, you know, focusing on the, the forward looking things, allowing the model to actually help you drive and make the decisions in the business. So how do you think about financial [00:17:00] models then? Right.

[00:17:00] Cause I, I mean, one of the. One of the things that you hear in the fundraising world and startup world is that, ah, we all know it’s wrong. The model that you’re creating at least early on, it’s just, you know, what are the assumptions and thinking through, but we know that every number on there is going to be wrong.

[00:17:15] So how do you go from that sort of mentality into a model that drives your business? 

[00:17:23] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:17:23] Can you mind if I start this one off? Cause I love you too. Yeah. Cool. So I, I think, I think that there’s this notion where people, you know, like, like people have said, oh, we know your is wrong. We just want to see it.

[00:17:35] Right. And somehow that is manifested into this very flippant, like, oh, who cares? It’s just a model. But the reality is w w w w w what we’re really saying is that it’s not the numbers that we’re focused on, but it’s trying to understand what are the mechanics of the business. And like, so if I’m an investor looking at your model as an entrepreneur, I want to see how your thinking about the business, because you’re the one who’s doing the [00:18:00] complex brain work.

[00:18:01] And so if you’re asking me to go do it. For you, like, I might as well just go do the business. So I want to see how you’re thinking the mechanics might work so that we can have an academic discussion about the things I believe, you know, as an investor believe, and don’t believe more importantly, you as the entrepreneur, what are you going to go to do to prove whether or not the thing you, how you think it’s going to work will actually work.

[00:18:21] The numbers will flush themselves out over years, not, not months, years. So like, how do we know that we’re going to be heading in the right door? 

[00:18:30] Trevor Boehm: [00:18:30] Yup is that I think that’s great. And I’ll add two pieces to, uh, uh, Troy who wrote the shorthand ACOs, who wrote the financial model chapter chapter in the book talks about the power of your, an assumptions driven model in anchoring the conversation.

[00:18:48] Very similar to what Amos just said, um, towards the specifics of where you either agree or disagree. Right? Well, in, in, in the logic or in the thinking, so it’s easy to be [00:19:00] able to present. So what does that mean? So in other words, it’s easy to be able to present some hockey, stick growth, spread of like, okay, here’s how things are gonna look.

[00:19:06] Here’s what our performance looks like over time. Uh, but if you have an assumptions driven model, meaning if all of those, all of those numbers are actually. Um, resulting from some very specific, uh, assumptions around who your customer is, how you’re getting them on the cost for getting them what the acquisition channels are going to be, which all, all of that.

[00:19:25] Um, then you can actually go back to the model when you’re having a conversation with an investor or whomever and say, okay, well, this is, this is the assumption I made, right. That actually drives that growth. Tell me where I’m off. Like tell me where you actually disagree. On a given assumption and then you have a much more robust conversation, right?

[00:19:41] Because then they’re talking about, well, actually I don’t think your customer acquisition costs is going to be like that, or they’re saying like, I’m not really sure that you’re going to be able to maintain, uh, that level of, you know, ratio of like sales person to convert it, you know, whatever it is. And, um, and then you can back that up.

[00:19:58] Here’s my data. Here’s the, here’s [00:20:00] the, here’s the thing I went and tried. Right. And the experiment that I ran that allowed me to conclude that this would be the assumption that I put in. So. That’s on the. That’s on the fundraising side, but that we actually don’t take financial models are primarily a fundraising tool at all.

[00:20:15] Right. Well, they’re, they’re actually an operating tool, right? How does this allow you to see into the future so that you can make decisions for your business? And a key part of that in the beauty of the financial model is it’s, it’s, it’s gives you the, the ability to play what. Right to run scenarios on what might happen within the business so that you can make a more informed plan.

[00:20:38] So you’re able to say, okay, if I charged him, I increased my price by 50%, right. What would happen if I increased my advertising spend by 25%, you know, what would happen there? And you can suddenly see its effect played out over time. And of course it’s riddled with assumptions that, that you’ll get better and better at identifying over a time.

[00:20:56] So at first it is all wrong, but, uh, but eventually it’ll get more [00:21:00] and more, right. And, uh, and, and, and so that’s scenario planning that allows you to say, okay, here’s where we really need to go, uh, based on the data that I have and then go act on it. 

[00:21:12] William Glass: [00:21:12] Oh yeah. I appreciate you guys breaking that down. Cause I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of how to really utilize a model, to make decisions, start with the assumptions and then start testing and actually putting in real-world numbers that you get that allow you to then play out the scenarios.

[00:21:26] How effective is that? Have you seen that? Do you have any examples of companies that have done this successfully or, you know, just how, how do you actually do this the right way? 

[00:21:39] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:21:39] Yeah, lots of examples of, I mean, I would argue every successful company or almost every successful company has, uh, has done this well.

[00:21:49] Um, uh, I, I’m not sure that I know how, like some businesses can stumble into decent. Early success without it, but in order to get to true [00:22:00] repeatability and scale and, and, you know, be something that’s, uh, you know, providing value. I don’t, I don’t know that you can, you don’t have to use our process, but I don’t know that you can actually do it without being, you know, truly metrics driven and have a financial model that is predicting, you know, trying to predict the future.

[00:22:15] Right. That’s what public companies do all the time. Right. They’re using their model to say, here’s what we think our earnings will be every quarter. And when they’re not. They know very specifically why? Because they have such a good handle on their I’ll 

[00:22:27] Trevor Boehm: [00:22:27] give, I’ll give three examples that, uh, quickly that are different, very different companies and at different stages.

[00:22:35] But, um, each I think demonstrate the power of the model in their own way. So one would be a company called creation, create these are all companies that, um, we’ve invested in as well. So creation create is a. Um, it’s a subscription box, uh, for stem education. So, you know, help you or, or your child, uh, learn how to unpack like different build a robot or, or sort of other [00:23:00] kinds of cool projects.

[00:23:01] And they have, um, they’re so dialed in, in their model, meaning like they, they so deeply understand how the mechanics of the business work that, um, they’re able to predict. Really regularly what the next quarter is going to be, um, with like some pretty remarkable consistency. And, and so the, the power of that is then they can like go back and back on.

[00:23:25] Um, they’re able to sort of have confidence in what they do. Um, what they’re investing in, right? So they’re, they’re actually having to buy inventory at times. They’re having to make big bets on what the holiday season is going to look like. Right? Because the holiday season is a key part of, um, a lot of the sales, right.

[00:23:41] And they have that confidence because they have confidence in their model, which is backed by data. The second is, um, a company called, um, skipper or skip town. Skip town is a, is a. Retail sort of, uh, experience for dog [00:24:00] owners or I should say for dogs, what do they say for, for, um, for pets and there, uh, do you have a term for parents or something and their parents?

[00:24:09] Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s like not pet owners, right? Sick. The tech is the primary and then the, you know, the person who’s just along for the ride and, um, And they, they had a huge shift, right? So they used to be this, uh, marketplace model for, for, for pet walking right services. And, uh, they shifted towards this retail experience.

[00:24:27] Uh in-person bar food, dog park, cleaning, all kinds of stuff. Right. Huge, big bet into this, into this retail space. Uh, but they had a deep understanding of their customer and it. It’s really robust model based again, based on data, not just sort of made up in the middle of, you know, the air and they were able to say, okay, how many down to the level of like how many drinks is somebody’s going to have every time that they come in?

[00:24:52] Like, how frequently is somebody going to come in? And how long are they going to stay? How much food will they buy? Right. What’s the margin on each of those items. [00:25:00] And, and that visibility allowed them to say one. To launch, which they launched in the middle of the pandemic, which is a huge feat in and of itself.

[00:25:09] And, uh, and, and it they’d be actually beat all those numbers, right. They should did better than what they assumed they would be. Last one, uh, is a company called home buyer and there are, they’re pretty early stage. Um, there are a mortgage lender, uh, that, uh, that, that offers a really great. Fast mortgages to first time home buyers.

[00:25:29] And, um, and, and th the, the stage perspective matters because they’re at this part right now where they’re focused on sort of really nailing the top part of their funnel. Like, if we can really understand how it is, we get customers, then everything else will trickle through. And, and then, and so he’s been very focused narrowly on sort of the heart of this part of the model.

[00:25:49] Um, when most people would be focused down stream, right? Saying like, okay, well, how many actually, how many, how many mortgages are we actually doing? Right. Which is an interesting number, but it’s a lagging number and it actually doesn’t help you [00:26:00] that much. And so by having that full model, he’ll have active conversations that we’ll be talking all the time, they’ll say, Hey, what?

[00:26:06] Um, Uh, you were seeing this number play out. And like in my model says that if we can hit these numbers, then we’re going to be a really good shape over here. And so it gives him conviction and confidence to be able to focus on something that might, you might feel. Nervous about red. You might sort of say, ah, no, I need to go focus over here.

[00:26:28] Right. Because, um, it’s not, it’s not resulting in these direct sort of impact on revenue. Um, but because he has an understanding of how that will trickle down, eventually he’s able to sort of stay the course right. And optimize the part of the business that he thinks is most critical. Right. 

[00:26:43] William Glass: [00:26:43] Awesome. Yeah.

[00:26:44] Thanks for sharing those Trevor. It makes, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate you highlighting how to do this successfully. Um, cause it sounds like this is almost a priority. It’s a prioritization tool as well. Right? Where do I spend my time? Based on the model, the assumptions that I’ve made, the things that are [00:27:00] actually driving the business forward.

[00:27:01] I’m not worried about the thousand things that I, that are, you know, asking for my attention as an entrepreneur, but I can focus on the one, two key things that are actually going to drive the business. 

[00:27:12] Trevor Boehm: [00:27:12] Yep. Yeah, that’s right. I am. And you must have been talking to you my ticket. Go ahead. If you have a comment or 

[00:27:19] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:27:19] I w I was just agreeing.

[00:27:20] I mean, I think, you know, we, we believe that too, and we’ve sort of built that into the process itself, which is, you know, maybe another, you know, there’s probably several like, common things that Trevor and I, if you put us in separate rooms, ask us what, what are the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make?

[00:27:36] Like, we’ll probably tell you mostly the same. And one of them is. Um, is working on all the wrong things. And so I think, I think you’re right, which is why we’ve built a piece of that into the, into the framework. 

[00:27:49] William Glass: [00:27:49] Yeah, no, I love that. And I’ve definitely, I feel like probably every entrepreneur is guilty of focusing on the wrong things that at some point in time, and, you know, hopefully you figure that out sooner rather than [00:28:00] later.

[00:28:00] Um, one of the things that you’ve talked about, um, is one you use the term repeatability, which is, I noticed it’s different than saying scale. Um, which I think is interesting that you didn’t note that. Um, but there’s also this notion of that the unit economics have to make sense in the longterm. And if, even if they don’t in the short term, could you speak to that in terms of, of, of why that’s so important?

[00:28:25] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:28:25] Yeah, well, I will. And I’ll touch on the repeatability versus scale first, which is the thing that, the thing that I think people miss is that, um, repeatability unlocks the ability to scale and a big, another big mistake that entrepreneurs make is they’ll, you know, they’ll do a couple of things. They’ll say, great.

[00:28:41] If we want to scale, right, I’ve made three sales. I want to scale our sales team, but you don’t actually know how to do that. So you go and hire a bunch of people, but no one knows what to do, right. Or whatever it might be within products. So repeatability unlocks scale. Um, so, uh, to, to, to answer your other question, [00:29:00] um, which just escaped me, cause I, again, I haven’t had enough cost of care.

[00:29:03] Well, they’re important because you know, at the end of the day, if your unit economics said the simplest way, if your new unit economics don’t work, your business goes away because you literally don’t have money to run it. Right. And, and, and there are, you know, you know, cases and, you know, I guess, you know, you can probably use, um, you know, Uber as an example of this, or, you know, some of the other, you know, uh, what was the daily deal site from, uh, from several years back that never actually had positive unit economics, that company doesn’t exist in the same form anymore.

[00:29:36] They were able to raise a lot of money on the hope that they would get to go to unit economics at some point in the future. But the thing that understanding that you can get to positive unit economics, Allows you to do is it allows you to take more risks. It allows you to go and unlock the, you know, different parts of the business.

[00:29:55] You might not have been otherwise able to do because you always know. Well, if I do [00:30:00] these, if I just scale back or maybe scale back, because even the wrong say, if I, if I bring it to these things, I can run a business for as long as I need to. I may be not grow as fast as I want, but I understand. And I also understand what the, where are the points where I can put the pedal down so that I can start to scale what is repeatable.

[00:30:19] William Glass: [00:30:19] Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, Amos. So in, in terms of this book, it’s not just for companies that. Want to go raise venture capital it’s for companies that are trying to become profitable and maybe never take on capital. Is that, is that correct? Cause that’s what I’m hearing through the, the repeatability and the scalability.

[00:30:38] It’s not necessarily you’re advocating one, one route or the other. 

[00:30:42] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:30:42] That’s right. We’re not advocating for a path what our goal in this. But our biggest goal in this book is to say, you want to build a business. It’s really hard. There’s going to be lots of things flying from all over the place. This book will give you the discipline, the disciplines you need in order to [00:31:00] figure out how to achieve the vision that you have for the thing you want to go do, regardless of the path that you want to take.

[00:31:06] So we’re not biased one way or the other against raising capital or. You can be a real estate agent. And in fact, we’ve, we’ve worked with a real estate agent who is looking to go from, you know, a sole agent to a multi-agent, um, uh, office and used our process to figure out how to do that. 

[00:31:26] William Glass: [00:31:26] That’s awesome.

[00:31:27] Yeah, no, I love that. Cause I think that, you know, obviously being, being in venture world that tends to be what gets the headlines. When a company raises a ton of money and you don’t hear about the company that has slowly built up. Up to tens or 20 hundreds of millions of dollars. And they’re in some, some industry that is waste management or something like that, right.

[00:31:48] That no one’s going to be, be talking about. Cause it’s not sexy. Um, so I love that you’re that you’re supporting the entrepreneurs. Um, but I’d love to get your take on the, you know, the, the venture side of it as [00:32:00] well. When you think about how tech stars fits in the ecosystem, um, how regular venture funds, I think, um, you know, one of you guys was also with, uh, like the Alexa team for a while, right.

[00:32:10] And that fund and corporate VC. So like, there’s just so much out there. How do you decide as an entrepreneur. Which route would be best for your business and navigating the various accelerators venture funds, corporate venture that are out there. 

[00:32:27] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:32:27] I think to some degree it’s largely a personal decision early on, meaning like.

[00:32:36] You know, if, if I’m going to go build me Amos, you know, and Trevor we’re, you know, I’m going to speak for Trevor here. Cause I I’m pretty positive that we’re in the same boat here. If we were going to go build a business tomorrow, we would put off raising outside capital as long as possible. Um, because for many reasons, but one is, you know, because we want to have, have enough understanding and control of what [00:33:00] the business actually does before we take on the responsibility of someone’s capital.

[00:33:04] And when we take on that capital, we want to use it to scale because we understand repeatability not to, not to, you know, give us, um, a leash to learn and see if there’s even anything here, which. Yeah, there’s a world where that exists and I’m not saying it’s more or less responsible, but it’s a, it’s a different kind of responsibility you’re taking on, um, in a different kind of capital you’re taking on.

[00:33:27] So I think there are some businesses that don’t require raising capital. You know, maybe you can get there faster, but they don’t require, and there are other businesses, like if you’re in biotech, it’s probably pretty hard to build something. If you’re not raising outside 

[00:33:39] Trevor Boehm: [00:33:39] capital. You know, Thomas’s last point right there.

[00:33:44] Um, different kinds of opportunities require different kinds of fuel, right. Are different levels of fuel. And, um, and also different entrepreneurs have different like, um, risk tolerance is capacity, right. And, and resources to go execute on the [00:34:00] world that they. They want to, they want to build. So there are a lot of, I think at the earliest stages, particularly, um, it detects the beauty of the world we’re in now is that there are so many resources that can, um, help entrepreneurs at the early stages.

[00:34:16] Um, get, get moving and that’s the beauty of an accelerator, right? That’s what programs like Techstars do really well. Um, and I think, um, people, the thing I would say around venture capital or sort of funding. Generally is that, uh, so we’re going to say one thing would be that most people don’t really understand, uh, the sort of implications sort of the third, the fourth, the fifth step down the, what you have down the path of the choices that they might be making, or that they would be encouraged, right.

[00:34:49] To make, um, relative to, you know, to the business they’re trying to build. So. Well, what do I mean by that? I mean that, um, most like big VC [00:35:00] is expect huge returns and not every opportunity or not every business, uh, can, can command that kind of return. And so for the entrepreneur, having a really clear idea of like, what kind of business do I want to build?

[00:35:13] What kind of, how much competence do I have in that, that business is going to, it’s going to be of that size and how. How do I, if I don’t have that level of conviction, how do I stage my commitments in a way that maintains the optionality, which is, which is what, some of what Anissa’s was talking about.

[00:35:28] We’re saying like, how do I move forward in a way that says, even if I’m a $20 million business, right. Instead of a hundred or a billion or $10 billion business, right? Like I still have a great outcome that it’s still really good for me. It’s still really good for the people who are part of it, you know?

[00:35:43] Uh, and, uh, And I can, you know, right off to the sunset. And then it, rather than saying, like, I’ve now narrowed the possibilities of success for myself in a way that I really only have one do it outcome and it’s 0.005%. The chance. [00:36:00] Which for some people is great. Right. They’re sort of going for it. But, um, but I, I like to find ways in which to use the Amazon language, talking about Alexa in a second ago, Amazon has this concept of two-way doors, basically like structure as many things as you can so that if you go through the door and you don’t like it, you can walk right back out the door and everything’s still okay.

[00:36:21] Hmm. 

[00:36:22] William Glass: [00:36:22] That makes a lot of sense. And I like that concept and yeah. Why Amos, I think you used the word responsibility when raising capital and Trevor, you, you hit on this too, of, of once you, once you take on investor capital, you now have a responsibility to that, that party, right? So there’s the, the way that you make decisions changes as well as the implications for the decisions that you make as an entrepreneur in terms of.

[00:36:47] If, if you, if, if someone’s reading this book levers and they take away one thing or, you know, one major concept, what is the, the, the thing that you hope they take away, or the action that you hope someone takes after [00:37:00] reading 

[00:37:00] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:37:00] the book? I think the, the thing that I would want anyone to take away is that regardless of whether they subscribe to the leverage process or not.

[00:37:12] That they understand the importance of becoming metrics driven versus metrics, aware to set them up for the best possible success. Yeah. 

[00:37:23] William Glass: [00:37:23] That’s great. And then I’m curious to get a little bit more personal on each of, of how you guys define this yourself. Um, have obviously, you know, wrote a book that, which is incredible, um, a big feat in of itself worked in venture and startups and all these different things at this point in your life.

[00:37:41] How, how do you define success? Like what does success look like to you? Personal professional, whatever successes to 

[00:37:49] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:37:49] you. Yeah. I, for me, for me, I think about this a lot actually, and I have a lot in the last couple of years, it’s too, for me, it’s two things. One, am I [00:38:00] making an impact, a noticeable and ideally quantifiable impact on the people around me.

[00:38:06] Me that, um, you know, that I’m working with. And I think, you know, just to that point, like the answer to your last question, um, we don’t care if you don’t use our process, we want you to be impacted by the notion of it more importantly. And if you, and if you subscribe to it and you share it with others, because you think it’s great, that’s an extra bonus, but you know, the out the, the hope is we’re making an impact on people.

[00:38:29] So, so one is the impact and. And the other thing for me personally, when I’m, when I’m trying to achieve something, is, do I have a clear understanding of what the goal that I’m trying to achieve is do I hit it and if I don’t hit it, do I understand why? And it’s okay if I don’t hit it, but if I understand why I look at that as successful.

[00:38:52] William Glass: [00:38:52] I like that a lot understanding, understanding why. Right. Cause I think pretty much everyone has had a goal and [00:39:00] either not stuck to it or missed it or whatever it is and whatever aspect of your life. So I really liked that, that focus on at least understanding why, if I don’t achieve something, 

[00:39:10] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:39:10] what about UT.

[00:39:12] Trevor Boehm: [00:39:12] Yeah. So there’s a, I’ll give to you. It’s just a question. The first is sort of, um, more, uh, almost superficial, which is just, I like building things. Like I like seeing things that don’t exist in the world start to exist. Right. So that’s, that’s fun to me. And, uh, and I just enjoy it and I probably am too. Uh, Uh, uh, I’m, I’m, I’m pretty fun driven, meaning like, I just liked doing things that I like doing.

[00:39:40] I don’t like doing it. I’m like, I don’t know how much I want to do that. Not that not that hard work, isn’t a component of that. Right. But I’m sort of compelled to something that just sounds really good to me and exciting to me. And I’m willing to sort of put in the, um, the, the discipline right ticket. So that’s one answer.

[00:39:55] The second is really, I find myself to be not dissimilar to what Amos just said, very [00:40:00] people driven. And there’s an old story that I’m still in from a book whose name I can’t remember right now. It talks about these two politicians in, in England. And, uh, and they sort of contrast the two people and gonna say, you know, about this one politician and he would talk to.

[00:40:16] And after you talked to him, you left that dinner party, right? Thinking, man, that is the most interesting, uh, most fascinating, intelligent person I’ve ever met. And then there’s this other politician that you have conversations with. And then after you leave that, you know, same dinner party, and you’re talking about, um, the conversation you, how do you say man, that person made me feel like the most interesting, the most intelligent, the most fascinating person I’ve ever met.

[00:40:43] And to me, it’s that second. Uh, person that I, that I aspire to, to be, and the language that they put it again, I’m still on from this book, but it’s the idea of how do you identify the treasure? And someone else and then put it to good use. So, so for me, if my [00:41:00] life could be about, about anything, it would, it would be about that.

[00:41:03] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:41:03] Yeah. That’s awesome. I haven’t heard that story. That’s a good one. Yeah. 

[00:41:08] Trevor Boehm: [00:41:08] Yeah. 

[00:41:08] William Glass: [00:41:08] That is. Do you, have you, have you, uh, found any success or certain things that you’ve done, that, that, uh, how you’ve been able to unlock treasure that treasure and other people, anything that tactics, things that you’ve done? 

[00:41:21] Trevor Boehm: [00:41:21] Yeah.

[00:41:22] Yeah. Hi, if you just get genuinely interested in what other people are doing and kind of what they care about, and you learn how to ask questions, that help to draw that out in a way that, um, helps you, where do you see them light up? Right. And get excited and hopefully get clear, get a better sense of clarity into their own thinking.

[00:41:44] I think, um, like even sort of there’s like your own internal dialogue. Great. How do you have more, better, better converse, helping others have better conversations with themselves that, uh, I think that goes a long way in that 

[00:41:56] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:41:56] I think. And I’ll just chime in that. Trevor is [00:42:00] exceptional at doing that at making people feel, everybody feels special.

[00:42:05] Um, and what do you think is exceptional about the way that he does that is he does it in a really subtle way. It happens and no one realized it’s happened until afterwards. 

[00:42:15] William Glass: [00:42:15] That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love that. So one of the, kind of to wrap up the show, um, my focus is on personal finance and I’d love to ask you guys a couple of questions around that, especially coming from an investor space.

[00:42:32] I think you guys have some interesting, uh, interesting thoughts around it. Um, but how would you describe your relationship with money?

[00:42:43] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:42:43] Uh, man, I have, I grew up pretty poor and I grew up with, um, you know, I had just had this conversation with my father a couple of weeks ago where he was out of the blue apologize for me for not giving me more education around personal [00:43:00] finance. Um, I have a, I have a fear like, like for me, money is like, uh, um, that not having.

[00:43:08] Is is scary. And I would say it is, uh, is probably in some ways made me a better investor and in some ways have, maybe even held me back. So probably had if had both things, but, um, uh, I’m, I’m grappling with that now as I try to loosen up my fear and understand it more deeply. 

[00:43:29] William Glass: [00:43:29] That’s interesting. And I, you’re not alone there when it comes to fear.

[00:43:31] I think that’s one of the most common, common responses. Unfortunately, fear and shame. Get that a lot as well. 

[00:43:40] Trevor Boehm: [00:43:40] Trevor, what about you? Yeah, this is a fun question. So I, uh, I have probably a couple of sort of perspectives on, on personal finance. I think growing up, I had. I like a lot of interest in, uh, in money and, and [00:44:00] almost like in the game sense of the way.

[00:44:01] Um, so I would, my, my dad introduced me to the stock market, like really early on. Um, and I had saved up some money, you know, from, from working, uh, Odd jobs. Right. Okay. Since I was like seven, I’d been pulling weeds and mowing lawns way too early. Right. I was like behind a lawn mower and like age, literally age seven.

[00:44:20] I can’t imagine as it is as a parent of a 40 year old, I can’t imagine my child mowing lawns for somebody else in three years. But, uh, but anyway, I had, I had a little bit of money to put it in the stock market and, um, I’m going to sort of revealing my age here, but I thought, okay, what do I put my money into?

[00:44:36] I’ll do it. The, the two things I like best. Uh, and Pixar because, you know, toy story is a great movie and a Netscape was a pretty cool internet browser that I used. So, um, so is there any, all that to say, like there’s one part of me that sort of just had a lot of fun with it, the idea of like, sort of building wealth and then I took the other part would be, um, uh, [00:45:00] back to the like less that if you, if there are two dynamics, right.

[00:45:02] Sort of fear and shame would be more on the shame side. Right. I feel like this is a lot of fun and like, you know, when it. The consistency of building the discipline right. In my own world and life that’s did the work right. For me. If how do I make sure I’m establishing the disciplines that really matter, right?

[00:45:20] Uh, for, for long term financial health and security. And, uh, and how do I like to make sure I, I keep that sort of, uh, Open attitude right. In my own. Like, it’s easier when you’re, to me, for anyone I’ll speak for myself. Right. It’s easier when I’m sort of thinking about it in abstract or even within the work context, or it’s really thinking about the decision-making when I’m making an investment, it has a different layer of psychology to it.

[00:45:46] Then, uh, then when you’re talking about sort of your own, your own world, um, some people probably feel differently and it’s probably for good reason. Like I wish I probably had, you know, it was more consistent. Yeah, that’s my story. [00:46:00] Yeah, no, 

[00:46:00] William Glass: [00:46:00] I appreciate you sharing. And that’s lucky that you had a, that you had a dad that introduced you at least to the stock market at a young age, because even if you made some good decisions, I’m assuming Pixar probably did pretty well.

[00:46:10] Netscape. 

[00:46:12] Trevor Boehm: [00:46:12] Who knows? Well, they, they both did great actually. Um, you know, it wasn’t very much money. It wasn’t very much money, but, uh, but you know, relatively speaking, they had some pretty good stuff. 

[00:46:22] William Glass: [00:46:22] There you go. Yeah. And that guy that piqued the interest. So what would you say is the best investment that you’ve made?

[00:46:30] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:46:30] In myself. Is that fair? Is that a fair answer? 

[00:46:33] William Glass: [00:46:33] Your answer? It’s your answer. There’s no wrong answer. Right? So whatever’s, whatever’s true to you. So yeah. 

[00:46:38] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:46:38] Yeah, I think, uh, I, I remember hearing it from somebody early on. I don’t even remember who, but I just read another article the other day about it. Right.

[00:46:50] It’s like the most common thing to say, but I think most people don’t do, but I think investing in myself to be able to get the most out of life. 

[00:47:00] [00:47:00] William Glass: [00:47:00] Okay. 

[00:47:01] Trevor Boehm: [00:47:01] So what do you mean dig in there a little bit? Yeah. 

[00:47:07] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:47:07] Um, meaning, uh, I th you know, w like your question I think is around finances, and I think I’m just extra abstracting it out further, which is, you know, we’re on the, you know, we’re on this planet for some amount of time.

[00:47:21] And I think, you know, I’ve, I’m trying really hard to make the most out of that time. And, and, um, so the, you know, whether it’s, um, things to do to keep my brain healthy or my body healthy, um, Okay. Whether it’s things so I can get more experiences or I can bring more impact to the people that I’m working with, but making sure that it’s not that there are things in every day of my life that are helping me feel healthy so that I can be better at all the other things that I do.

[00:47:54] William Glass: [00:47:54] That makes sense. Yeah. It kind of goes back to wanting to make sure that you’re healthy so that you can have that impact on the people that are closest to you. Going [00:48:00] back to how you’re defining sex. 

[00:48:02] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:48:02] Yeah, but if you’re asking financial investment, it was investing in home Depot several years back.

[00:48:08] Perfect.

[00:48:12] Trevor Boehm: [00:48:12] Treasure. What about you? This is a fun. Yeah, this is a fun question. I, uh, and I liked the way Amos took his answer because you think about. What is the most, uh, valuable asset that we have. Um, the one reasonable answer would be your sort of physical body, right. Or, or sort of yourself. Right. And so by taking care of that, you can ensure that it, it sticks around.

[00:48:34] Right. And you get value from it into the long haul. So, um, and there’s probably sort of emotional, relational, you know, mental components to that as well. I like that. Um, I also think about the question relative to like outcomes versus process, right? So the best in. You make, like, does that mean best investment decision or does that mean best like best outcome?

[00:49:00] [00:48:59] And those things are not the same. Like I, uh, you know, early I’ll give them, I’ll give you the answer is sort of, I think my first, my first best investment. Right. Which was, uh, which is actually the home that my wife and I bought together. Right. And, and like, I was not, um, Uh, that was not a good decision process on my part because I didn’t want to do it.

[00:49:20] I was like, ah, it was just dumb. I like, I feel like I’m going to be tied to Austin and I don’t want, I want to get out of here. I, I don’t want to put a bunch of money into this house. I didn’t get to take care of. And my wife was like, well, I don’t want to be bouncing around, you know, from, from, uh, you know, to apartment apartment every year.

[00:49:34] So we’re going to buy a house and, uh, and it was a great, it was a great outcome. Very great decision because. It one, it, it, it, you know, it, it kept us in a city that we now deeply care about. Um, and, and have, you know, strong relationships with, uh, you know, the Austin real estate market is obviously been boom bang.

[00:49:54] Right. So, um, it set us on a good path right into the future, uh, that, that allowed us to [00:50:00] do a bunch of other things, you know? And so, uh, but, but yeah, the process, the decision making actually itself, I don’t know how thoughtful I was, you know, in that process. 

[00:50:10] William Glass: [00:50:10] Yeah, no, I’m glad that you brought that up because I think that’s a distinction between the actual decision-making process and not, you hear like, uh, I’ve heard poker players think about this, right?

[00:50:20] You may lose a hand, but if you played the odds, right, and you just got unlucky, you just got unlucky versus you make a really reckless decision and you happen to win. You’re going to actually incentivize the wrong behaviors. Long-term, that’s kind of how I, you know, how I’m interpreting your response to them.

[00:50:36] Mm. 

[00:50:37] Trevor Boehm: [00:50:37] And I think that’s a lot of the venture world, right. Especially in the, in the early stage world, like what hits is, is like sometimes more, um, can be more sort of random than, than not. Right. And so you, you as an investor, right? It’s easy to get sort of, um, put too much. Uh, energy or focus on, uh, what you perceive to be [00:51:00] doing the best.

[00:51:00] And usually that means the amount of money they’ve raised most recently, which is not, it does not an indicator of longterm success. Right. Um, and, uh, and so it’s, it’s critical. I think that that attitude, I think hopefully will sort of in the longterm. Uh, make towards better sort of financial investing, venture investing, right.

[00:51:22] By saying like, okay, how do I, how do I resist sort of leaning towards whatever, perceived, whatever I perceive to be the best outcome at the current moment. Yeah. 

[00:51:31] William Glass: [00:51:31] Love that. And so we’ve talked about the good stuff. What about the other side? What’s the dumbest money mistake that you’ve made?

[00:51:44] Trevor Boehm: [00:51:44] I’m glad that you’re going first. 

[00:51:46] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:51:46] Yeah. I missed money mistake. I’ve made a lot of dumb money mistakes, one that one that actually haunts me on a regular basis. And I don’t have a ton of things that I’m actually regretful for in my life. But, uh, I [00:52:00] lived in LA for nine years and we had a great apartment in Santa Monica.

[00:52:06] And we sold it. It was so stupid. Like it’s probably tripled in value. Plus we don’t have a place in Santa Monica anymore and it was no relative, even at the time, it wasn’t expensive to have kept it and we could have rented it. And it just was, you know, growing up without any financial education, I thought having the cash in hand was more valuable than the asset itself.

[00:52:30] There was a lot of learning there. Yeah. That’s 

[00:52:33] William Glass: [00:52:33] a good one. 

[00:52:35] Trevor Boehm: [00:52:35] I don’t know if I have a great answer. I’m trying to think through like, what would be a really, like, I’m sure I’m missing some like massive, you know, bad decision that I’ve made of like a large magnitude, but I’m only thinking of like small magnitude decisions.

[00:52:50] Um, and I, and I kind of cop out answer I’m thinking is, uh, is, is I have not like early on, I, I wish I had been more [00:53:00] consistent about just to like, get rich slowly. Uh, sort of dynamics around just the small amounts of money invested and uh, in, in, in, um, Assets that are, you know, creating compound interest.

[00:53:15] Right. And that like has such a good compound effect. And I even knew that sort of in my head, in my early twenties, right. Sort of knew that, that the power of those dynamics, but I didn’t always play them out. So I’d say that that’s a kind of a simple answer or not that interesting of an answer, but, but isn’t one, um, I made some bad decisions in the startups that are.

[00:53:35] Um, I made some bad decisions in starting the company. So I started, so I think like those would be another like, like really not really seeing the risk tolerance I had before I jumped into a SIG would be, uh, probably be the only. Like that. 

[00:53:52] William Glass: [00:53:52] Yeah. Awesome. Well, guys, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you guys sitting down and sharing a bit about the book and, [00:54:00] um, how people can think about entrepreneurship and then, you know, getting a little vulnerable here at the end, talking about, uh, some of the good things and not so good things in terms of finance, but I want to leave you guys with the last word.

[00:54:10] So if there’s anything you want to share, and then also please let the audience know the best way to connect with you outside of the podcast and where they can get the book. 

[00:54:17] Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:54:17] Yeah that well, firstly, thank you for having us on. I really appreciate it. And it was fun to chat with you. Uh, I think for me, um, you know, I’ll just probably restate something I said before the, the, the thought for any, you know, entrepreneurs and founders out there is.

[00:54:33] Um, figure out how to be, not just metrics aware, but metrics, metrics driven, you know, you can use our process or not, but it’s going to be critical to your long-term success. Um, and you know, the probably the best way to get in touch with us right now is just to go to levers book.com. Obviously you get the book there too.

[00:54:52] You can learn more about, um, the, the, when we teach the process without when we work with PR entrepreneurs, hand in hand on the [00:55:00] process, you can learn about it there and you can reach out. Uh, through leversbook.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn, of course. 

[00:55:06] William Glass: [00:55:06] Awesome. Thank you guys. Appreciate you guys sitting down and, uh, have a great rest of your day.

[00:55:10] Cool. Thank you so 

[00:55:11] Trevor Boehm: [00:55:11] much. On your way out, please 

[00:55:14] William Glass: [00:55:14] share the podcast with others. It’s the only way that the community grows and others hear these incredible stories from entrepreneurs and top performers. And of course, pound that subscribe. And so you notified them and upstairs to drop every Friday. I’m William Glass, CEO and co-founder of ostrich.

[00:55:28] And of course you are the host of the Silicon alley podcast have a very profitable. You got 

[00:55:34] Trevor Boehm: [00:55:34] on top two ways, but still you, as it say, caught in a circle say, and I’ll never leave this place

[00:55:47] so much, go to such a vulnerable right side over and over.

End of Transcription

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55. Never a Bad Time to Start a Company with Nick Hughes, CEO of Founders Live

Never a Bad Time to Start a Company

55. In Never a Bad Time to Start a Company, host William Glass sits down with Nick Hughes, the founder and CEO of Founders Live. Together they discuss how to get above the fray as an early-stage entrepreneur and really hone in on your mission. Plus Nick shares some of the challenges solo entrepreneurs face and how even non-technical founders can build technology companies. A jam packed episode great for entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs.

About Nick Hughes

Nick Hughes is an American entrepreneur with experience in e-commerce, social media, digital payments, & technology startups. He excels at interpersonal leadership, communication, business, & product development.

Nick currently holds the position of CEO and Founder of the global entrepreneur platform Founders Live. In addition to creating Founders Live, Nick stays busy as an advisor to numerous startups and occasionally takes positions in sales or biz dev roles if needed. He is also cofounded Callin’it, a fun fan engagement and predictions app for sports fans. Previously he founded the mobile payment startup Seconds as well as helping start Coinme, a company built around expanding bitcoin and digital transactions into the physical realm via Bitcoin ATM’s.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jnickhughes/

https://www.facebook.com/founderslive/

https://www.founderslive.com/

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Music

Theme music is Million Voices by Brett Miller

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#41 The Mission Isn’t Money, It’s Impact with Deric Cahill

The Mission Isn’t Money, It’s Impact

#41 Deric Cahill – The Mission Isn’t Money, It’s Impact and How to Build a Chocolate Empire, host William Glass sits down with serial entrepreneur, sales professional, and podcaster, Deric Cahill. Deric shares his experience building multiple different businesses from car detailing to handcrafted chocolate. You’ll hear how Deric overcame a poverty-stricken childhood and parents with substance abuse to ultimately find his purpose. A couple of quotes that stand out from the episode include:

“Center everything in your life with what you believe in.”

“You can’t afford not to be happy.”

“The mission isn’t money, it’s impact.”

About Deric Cahill

Deric Cahill is a husband, father, career sales professional & serial entrepreneur. He currently serves as Vice President of Sales at a global technology firm, co-hosts a personal development podcast, and is the co-founder of Wicked BOLD Chocolate. Deric has a strong passion for helping people realize their potential and he strongly believes that action is the key to everything.

Purpenthicity is a podcast that discusses and dissects the pursuit of excellence in ones life. Austin & Deric bring a combination of deep life experience as well as pragmatic approaches to bring purpose & authenticity into focus.

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Theme music is Million Voices by Brett Miller

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#40 Being a Human is Hard, Work-Life Balance is Nonsensical, & Why Entrepreneurship is Foundational to Society with Brad Feld

Being a Human is Hard

#40 Brad Feld – Being a Human is Hard, Work-Life Balance Is Nonsensical, & Why Entrepreneurship Is Foundational to Society, host William Glass sits down with renowned Venture capitalist Brad Feld. Brad shares his insights across a number of areas including leadership during a pandemic, advocating for social justice, and accessing mental health care when you have limited resources.

“Being a human is hard.”  – Brad Feld

“You know… I think I’m done striving.” – Brad Feld

LINK COMING SOON – Brad answers audience questions

Brad Feld’s Bio

Brad Feld (@bfeld) is the author of two new books: The Startup Community Way and the second edition of Startup Communities. He has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars the global startup accelerator community. Brad is a writer and speaker on the topics of venture capital investing and entrepreneurship. He’s written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution series and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals.

Brad holds a bachelor of science and master of science degrees in management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brad is also an art collector and long-distance runner. He has completed 25 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 states.

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Theme music is Million Voices by Brett Miller

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Ostrich is a personal finance app that curates information specific to you and uses the power of positive social accountability to help you define, set, & achieve your financial goals.

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#39 Why Is My Brain Thinking This Way with Randall Ledet Jr.

Why Is My Brain Thinking Like This

#39 Why Is My Brain Thinking This Way, host William Glass sits down with Randall Ledet Jr., a technology sales executive at Gartner. Following the death of George Floyd and truly seeing the reality of Black Americans in our society, host William Glass posted on Social Media that he would use this platform to be an advocate for People of Color. Randall and Will coordinated this episode to tell his story as a Black man building a successful career in corporate America. 

Randall’s Bio

Randall Ledet Jr. is a sales executive for Gartner where he works with leading technology providers grow and scale their businesses. Randall has achieved winner’s circle, Gartner’s top sales award every year since joining the company at the start of 2017.

Before Gartner, Randall spent time in the supply chain organizations of UPS & DHL. Randall boasts a bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain & Logistics from the University of Houston. Now living Atlanta Randall’s focus is on continuing to build success in his career, relationships, and life.

We discuss his experience, what drives him, and how Randall has overcome depressive episodes. I remember when Randall first joined Gartner and am happy to be able to share his insights and what has helped him be successful in his sales career.

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Theme music is Million Voices by Brett Miller

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Ostrich is a personal finance app that curates information specific to you and uses the power of positive social accountability to help you define, set, & achieve your financial goals.

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#38 Don’t Just Focus on the Money with Karen Swyszcz

Don’t Just Focus on the Money

#38 Don’t Just Focus on the Money, host William Glass sits down with Karen Swysczc, a best selling author, entrepreneur, and teacher. In today’s episode, Karen opens up about not growing up with the entrepreneurial bug. As well as she discusses how her career has been more of a rock-climbing wall than a clear path. 

Karen Swyszcz’s Bio

Karen Swyszcz graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry. She started Makinthebacon as a hobby blog back in 2012, as a way to escape her monotonous day job. Over the years, it has evolved into a platform, initially providing content on personal finance, to now providing inspiration for entrepreneurs/aspiring entrepreneurs through blog posts and interviews. She has partnered with brands such as Camp Tech, Minted.co, Meridian Credit Union, and Supperworks on digital campaigns. She has also interviewed CEOs in the areas of fintech and travel.  The advice she gives other digital entrepreneurs is “don’t just focus on the money.”

From 2017- 2020, Karen provided 1:1 consulting services and workshops for small business owners in blogging, social media, and the basics of WordPress. She is a part-time continuing and professional studies instructor with Sheridan College. There she teaches their blogging and social media strategy courses.  

In 2019 she co-authored the Best-Selling Book in Women’s Health on Amazon – Fitness To Freedom. And launched a business and technology podcast – The Bacon Bits ‘n’ Bytes Podcast.  Karen has co-authored another book called Lighting The North, which will be launching this Fall 2020. 

Karen is the co-founder of Kaibigan Connection – an organization that is dedicated to connecting Filipinx entrepreneurs and professionals. When she is not working on her many endeavors, she can be found at the gym teaching group fitness classes.

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Theme music is Million Voices by Brett Miller

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#37 Seven Lessons From The First Year of a Startup

Seven Lessons From The First Year In Business

#37 In this episode, Seven Lessons From The First Year In Business, host William Glass shares 7 key lessons he’s learned through the first year of building Ostrich. Glass provides concrete examples of what has worked well for him and what has not. You’ll hear from past guests that embody the lessons learned from Andrew Holliday and William Glass’s first-year starting up Ostrich.

The 7 lessons are:

  1. Expect the unexpected – Steve Hoffman, Founder of Founders Space, Investor & Entrepreneur – Episode #26
  2. Build a team with the right partners – Yotam Hadass, VP of Engineering at Electric.ai – Ep #22
  3. Have cash reserves – Steve Hoffman, Founder of Founders Space, Investor & Entrepreneur – Ep #26
  4. Build conviction
  5. Develop a strong routine and accountability system* – Jeff Wald, Founder of WorkMarket – Ep #31
  6. Explain what you are doing and then explain some more – Sophia Sunwoo, Founder of Ascent Strategy – Ep #32
  7. Get lots of constant feedback – Ben Sampson, Founder of WeHero – Ep #33

* To learn more about the accountability tracker you can listen to Ep #8 or read the post. To download the tracker go here.

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Ostrich is a personal finance app that curates information specific to you and uses the power of positive social accountability to help you define, set, & achieve your financial goals.

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Silicon Alley is a Financial Glass Production

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