Asking 3 young millionaires how they make $1.8M, $5M, & $12M/year

0:00 All right, today we're playing Shoot Your Shot, where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million dollar businesses all the way up to a hundred million dollar businesses. They get fifteen minutes and in it, they start by telling us the one big number. Give us the pitch. And uh and shoot the shot. They get to ask any questions that they want. Yeah. We've done this in New York City this time. It's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, uh you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube. Look us up on My First Million, and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next. All right, let's do it. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like a day

0:41 Alright, you wanna bring the first guy out? What's the hook? Let's go on. Like yeah.

0:52 What's good. Hit us with the big number. All right. Um, so I'm I'm running a backup generator company in California. Okay. We're doing about twelve million in ARR right now. Wow. And uh we've got line of sight to fourteen million this year. And contract it to go out to around twenty five. Okay. So the the big number is twelve million in revenue and you're What are you providing for people use you provide?

1:12 Backup generator, sales and service. What does that mean? Like I'm a house h I'm a homeowner out here. That's right. I would just buy a unit, I rent a unit, or you sell it to power companies. We'll sell generators. Service generators. Um we typically do higher end units. Um our clientele are typically the Like high end estate properties, as well as Large, more regulated facilities. So every telecom tower, every nursing home, every police station, fire station. Gotcha. Every data center. So it's B to B.

1:40 Mostly B to B. We will and in the product that the high end estate properties get, that's a it's an industrial product. All these businesses that as soon as somebody says them, I'm like ah, of course. Yet they've been a complete blind spot to me my entire life. I've never thought about it once. And I always wonder How did that guy start thinking about this? So how did you realize This is a

1:58 So I started my career in management consulting where you dabble around a bunch of different industries. Uh At one point I landed in a corporate job at NRG, large power company in the US. was doing innovation projects there, strategy. And One of the areas we had the hardest time finding good expertise in was backup generators.

2:17 And a backup generator is If your power goes down for one minute or twelve hours because of a storm or an e earthquake or something. This thing kicks on, you're good to go. You do not want the power to go out when you're on the surgery surgery table. Unless there's a backup generator there to cover. Great. And so every surgery center, every hospital, they've all got'em.

2:35 When did you start the company? Um, so I acquired the first one and so this has been an acquisition venture. It started with a thesis. went around looking for trying to find us uh service provider to buy. We bought our first one in January twenty twenty four. And then bought a second one about five, six months later. And describe the industry. So is this a bunch of mom and pop companies, a few large players? Like what does the industry even look like? So very barbelled. So you've got we go head to head up against big, big industrial names like Caterpillar and Cummins and Generac on the direct side where we're competing for the business of, you know, marquee names.

3:08 big counties, big state but state contracts and things like that. We also go head to head against the small mom and pop players. But really the the lion share of the market is owned by the the bigger platform. So you did a search. You quit your job and did a search. You searched on the side. What'd you do? So this was actually this is my third search venture. Um I had done My first one was an office plant company. Uh?

3:30 An office plant company? Plants? Yep. Like Probably possibly those. How'd that go? Uh that that's still own it. Um You own it. Bought it in twenty seventeen.

3:40 Um, we've done fourteen acquisitions on that platform. Uh hold on. Uh how much revenue does that do? Uh that's around ten million. What? You owed it out, right? Uh me and my partner. Yeah. Okay. How much evida?

3:52 Uh a little over two. Was that a thesis or that was I stumbled into a guy who owned a plant? That was a failed venture back startup. There's gotta be an easier way to make money sitting on my couch cruising biz by cell in the way that a lot of people do with Zillow. Uh instead of You had a a a venture f uh company that failed. Yep. And so you were like a management?

4:14 But you were like a management consultant nerd. You were just like a uh uh an academic Ivery tower, here's your board deck. Yeah, you're like all right, now I need to get after it. So uh this company, it failed. Now we're gonna get into plants. Yeah. Okay, something like that. We did bought it with an SBA loan. It was like the polar opposite of what I had been doing throughout my career, which is a mix of like. Management consulting boardroom Fortune five hundred type of stuff. And venture back startups.

4:40 And I guess there's a third leg to that, which is the small business world. You did plants, then what? We carved out a portfolio of commercial landscaping contract in that plant business and sold that to private equity. How much do you sell for? Uh, just a uh a little over a million. Okay.

4:56 twenty percent of my cash flow and like eighty percent of my headaches. And that freed me up. Um'cause I was like the Biz Dev guy. I was finding the plant acquisitions. I it that business I built it.

5:07 I bought did the first acquisition, I did four after that, and then I kinda handed it off to my partner to run day. You you like doing the search The business doing the M and A. You have a partner who does operations or Yeah, that's right. How much did you raise for this third business? So the third business on point. On point. Yeah. Okay. So this is the first time we've raised outside money because we felt that Given where the macros were in terms of electricity demand booming, data center market booming.

5:32 You know, electrical contractors booming. We felt like to meet the opportunity where where it was gonna be, like we needed to raise some outside capital. So we brought in six and a half million Um, we did a significant chunk of it, but there's you know about five million of outside investment in this one. And how big is this gonna get? I don't know yet. I think this business can get really, really big. Hundreds of millions? Hundreds millions. I think we can get to we're

5:54 The question will be. It's really revenue throughput. Do we have the technicians to pull off the work? I've got the work contract it. It's pure uh it's purely an execution game at this point. And so describe you said you go up against Caterpillar and these other larger players What what axis do you need to compete on? Is it price, is it what what uh how do you win the pitch? Hundred percent speed.

6:13 They are slow. They're good at what they do. But they're very slow. What's the speed difference? How long? For us And and AI has been an absolutely central part of our strategy of speeding up every single process in that business. I need to be able to deliver a quote while my guy's there.

6:28 These are complex machines with a very difficult part supply chain. It can take weeks to turn around a quote from a, hey, your generator's broken to, hey, here's what it's gonna cost me to fix it. And when we can do it. It's very, very slow business and it's very, very difficult because of all the research and tribal knowledge and it's you know spread across the street. If let's say the guy standing there. Yep. Understanding what's the issue.

6:51 Yeah. Is he inputting something on his phone and he's getting wheeling. And we've done all the backend work of every document that we have ever produced as a company has been ingested and studied by AI. We've built a reg uh retrieval augmented system so that We can Do research on the fly. And produce answers on the fly.

7:10 This is great. So there's companies I've got a friend that owns it. H VAC company. And it does close to two hundred million in revenue. And he was complaining and lamenting over all my business sucks for this reason, his bus you know, yours suck for that reason. And he was and he was telling me like he was like Well, we just have to get better at buying Google AdWords. And and he was like, The demand's there. Like I just had to like operate and I was like so envious of that because that's not what I have. I've got to like teach people what it is and Whatever.

7:34 Are you in the weeds of training people or is your personal job just Finding who else you're gonna buy. Um so We've kind of put a pause on MA right now. We're really trying to nail the operational workflows and that's what you're doing. And AI support. And I'm doing a lot of the building myself. Is it a pain in the ass to train these technicians? I'd say it's more than a pain in the ass. It's impossible. Like this is very very both.

7:58 Because A there's not enough of them. Those that exist are on their way out, not in. And who is they? Uh Field technicians. I know, but what what did they like

8:08 Are they in the same category of an HVAC person where like if you give me eight weeks of your time, I could teach you how to do this, but it's hard to find someone who's willing to do it. I'd say not far off of that. Okay. Um it's mechanical, it's electrical. And it's both. And usually very few guys are good at both. It's increasingly instrumentation and controls. So there's more computer and uh like troubleshooting diagnostics. How much does a field technician make? Is this like a job that people are gonna want because it's pays really well? This is a good job. This is an opportunity where the elite field technicians they will clear well into the six figures, a guy with a high school education.

8:42 but it takes time to accumulate the experience. And you don't see a lot of generators, so experience accumulates slowly. Even in HVAC, you might do, you know, three, four service calls a day. Our guys are doing one or two service calls a day. The consequences are massive. The consequences are massive. How big is the average contract? Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes. The team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple Relatable. interesting, profitable uh ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys.

9:22 Back to the show. How big is the average contract? It varies tremendously depending on whether you're dealing with a you know a three megawatt unit at an AWS data center or a Frank and Shirley's generator in their backyard for the you know data center units. You're probably talking twenty five thousand a year in service revenue. And is there ever churn?

9:43 There is But Generally they kind of want accountability on the vendor. And so and that is one thing that's hard about competing against Caterpillar, right? Like the the facilities guys like, Well, I hired Caterpillar and they couldn't figure it out. So Right. So so let me make sure I understand.

9:59 It sounds like you do you sell the generators, but you service them pr I would guess servicing is more than new new sales. Yeah. And You get brought in directly by the facility or by the guy whoever the company is that made that. They ought they put service they need service technicians out in the field everywhere. So they subcontract out to you. So we're an independent. So we have to we have to Eat what we kill, basically. So we gotta go straight to the facility. We can work through the proje uh through the facilities operations companies like the J L's and C B R E real estate. And now You're you're saying my biggest bottleneck is

10:30 I gotta get enough. technicians to be able to service the workload that we have. How you gonna solve that problem? So Well

10:37 Still figuring it out. We've got every recruiter you know, we've got e every recruiter spun up sending us leads. Some of it is a like you can pay to bring guys here. Will they stay here? Open question. I'd say we can find the guys who says that he knows how to fix those things. Can we select for the guys who actually know how to fix those things? That's uh I think we've had a harder we've had an easier time finding people and getting them in the door and selling them on joining our company than we have had Yeah. Damn certain that when that guy shows up there, he's gonna find the problem and fix the um

11:10 Like we this is the second number you've mentioned him, but like you know, Tommy Mello, the A one garage door guy. Have you heard of that guy? Yes. Um and then there's like tons of these like influencers who are legit business guys. What have they done to like'cause they have all had the exact same thing where they're like You know, garage doors, like a lot of the people who come to me are kinda like problematic and I gotta teach'ho like I think he said he's like we teach'em how to like

11:31 Pet the dog. You pad the dog right when you come in. You ask may I come in? He does like sales excellence. Yep. But st still he needs the technicians to go do the work. One of the things we always talk about is like Uh As an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel like

11:43 I have this This problem, this burden, and it's like unique to me. And it's like P very few problems in your business haven't already been solved by somebody else. So the easy thing to ask them who else has solved this problem and how how the heck do they do it? So

11:55 He's saying how the heck did the garage tech how did the garage companies get a scale up their technician force. Who do you look at that's already done this? So you basically have to start a trade school. You are the trade school. You have to bring these guys to the buddy who I'm referring to, he has Hoffman University. You have to. Have you done that? Not yet. We're not big enough to do it just yet. We're working on building our shop, building we have a third bay in our shop.

12:17 That is the training bay. And we've handed our lead technician you know, a an assignment to we gotta build out our own training capabilities. We've built the digital side of it. So turning every job we do into a training experience that can be relayed under the tr team because I need the guys to get more than one

12:35 Rep a day. Right. I if I can turn every rep we do that day into a bunch of rep how are you turning it into like a simulation. So As guys submit their field reports, we have a pre-job briefing. So we prepare these guys to go out to the field like their CIA agents being dropped into Afghanistan, right? Here's everything we know about this unit. Here's everything we've ever seen. Like they play it on their phone. They can listen and hear, hey, this is what I'm this is what I'm facing. And so and that's the AI side.

13:03 Then They do their report. And they document their findings in the report. Um and we've got a pretty slick data collection process where they can use their voice to produce their report. We've got AI reading everything that they do, everything that they say.

13:17 And then at the end of the process when they submit their report We will flag the reports that are the the best training material. When you're laying in bed at night and you're thinking, If we can do this, this and this. Maybe in five years we could sell, or maybe I can have this much annual income, or like whatever that number, that that vanity thing is. For you, what is that? Man, I think

13:39 For me, this is my third time around. And I feel like I'm doing this because I I chose this. I wanted to be doing this. So it's kind of about. Like What are all the cool capabilities that we could build that have never been possible before? Okay, and be specific though, when you're like when you're thinking about this, you're like w what is that? Like what really gets you going? Um I think making like really great jobs for these tradesmen.

14:01 Helping them achieve. Ordinary people. achieve like really, really extraordinary performance. Yeah. Um I'm like super excited about what we're gonna be able to do and like how we're gonna be able to empower people who have never really worked for a company that gave a crap that much about the process. There was this really cool company. I forget the name, but they took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or some huge national publication.

14:24 Th and they played off this idea of like You know how like your grandfather walk me around the city and he's like, You see that building? I made that. You know, and he was just part of the construction crew or like you know, look, about fifty years ago we installed this thing because here and there's like this pride and the ad that they put out'cause they were trying to recruit people is Do you really want to brag to your kids that you made B to B software just a little bit better? You know, something like that. And like

14:46 I wonder if there's like some cool like um mission driven like angles that you could take to this like recruiting because when you talk about like I'm passionate about giving like everyday guys like a chance to like do something interesting. No, it's an interesting idea. I and I think there's definitely a point of pride over oh we work on you know ca it's kind of fun too,'cause we work on a lot of high end properties. So these are like you know lifestyles of the rich and famous type of stuff where we work on those properties. We put those generators in And the mission critical hospitals, whatnot, yeah. And that, right? There's such An an important duty. Seems like like I coached high school basketball this year and our Star player, the power forward.

15:20 He's graduating, we're like, Do you want to go play in college? We can get you in front of some scouts and he's like I'm going to trade school. He's like, I'm not gonna the trade school doesn't have a basketball team. He wanted to go work for, you know He wanna become like an electrician, but like feel like crazy stuff, like hanging out of a helicopter doing some repair and some crazy sight. And it made me realize

15:40 You know, there's probably a lot of people who are like Have the talent. Yeah, whether it's Veterans. Whether it's uh ex athletes

15:48 They kinda like the idea of doing certain types of work, getting paid really well for it, not having to go to a four year university. And I wonder how you can surface more of them faster or where they're going today that you can tap into that flow. I think the stigma of the trades is gone. I think that is behind us. Like the things that we were told when we were, you know, coming up, like, you know, you gotta go to college, better make sure it's a good one, yada yada. I think that there's some of that still there, but like I think the stigma of going into the trades

16:14 is behind us. And now it's like this is the opportunity for the tradesman's craft to shine. Right. And we're trying to give them the tools so that they really can and so that they can grow faster, learn faster. Well, nobody's built a great brand around the trade school, right? Like No. What's Harvard? What's Stanford for for that, right? Like where could you be proud that you got into, that you're going, that you're coming out like a Navy SEAL who's gonna be able to do all these amazing things. That to me is a

16:39 even bigger opportunity than what you're currently doing because that's like a hundred fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, it serves all kinds of industries, you know. And there are some that are really niche. You know, and they're uh they're d with that specific trade. Yeah. And so it's there's not like a big one that everybody would know. Oh, that's the stamp of approval, but there's not a Harvard of The trades in general. Which I do think there's like an excellent opportunity there. And I would love to work on that. I feel like right now I'm working toward that and I need to understand it. at a level of depth and have solved it for one quarter of the universe so that we could think about okay, what what would how would you next level this thing? You have very um kinetic and contagious energy.

17:16 I I have a feeling that in the next four or five years uh you're gonna be uh significantly further along than where you are now. It's very evident. It's so cool. We had a guy, the last guy was like a franchise guy. And you're you you're doing entrepreneurship through search and acquisition. Uh I just love all the different styles. So yeah, appreciate you coming on, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, we appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah.

17:40 Sure. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data.

18:02 So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. We have someone else? Welcome.

18:13 How's it going? Good. Excellent posture. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, you scream good. I work on it, I'll look at this guy too. Up my game a little bit here. All right, what's your next? I'm Kevin. Kevin. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome to shoot your shot. Um Hit us with the big number to start.

18:31 So Big's relative, my number is one point eight million. My I think I'm a little unique with this setup'cause I actually just sold my business about Two, three weeks ago. Nice, that's what I sold it for. Start a business. On the board. Wait, so you are you just exited at one point. Just exited at one point eight. Yeah. What did you sell for one point eight million dollars? Uh it was a franchise business called Smash My Trash.

18:51 Smash my trash. I've heard of this. Have you heard of this? No, what is Smash My Trash. Explain. So the basic concept is Companies that produce a lot of trash, industrial businesses, warehouses, factories, things like that. throw away a lot of stuff in these open top dumpsters that are these rectangles. that hold like forty cubic yards of stuff. The pricing model is that every time you fill it up and you need a new one.

19:12 You have to get it replaced and that can cost like a thousand dollars. Yeah, I used to like get on top ours and like jump up and Imagine some giant thing came and smashed the trash down. I thought I was gonna like hire some boy to come and jump on the trash for me. That was it. No, so we have these trucks. The back up to the dumpster. Like you said, Sean, there's a crane on the back with this spinning spike yarn that goes in, pushes the trash down. The deal is basically

19:36 Let's say you get ten pickups a month, a thousand bucks, that's ten thousand dollars a month you're spending on trash. We'll get you down to just round numbers five. And we'll split the savings with you. Wait, so one uh a large company will spend ten grand a month in trash? Yeah, or more. Who? Like a warehouse? Big factories, production facilities in like agricultural California's where I was doing a lot of work. Wow. These are like you just go to the parking lot, there's a huge dumpster back there.

20:02 That's that was the opportunity. That's the opportunity. Smash it the trash down so you have to do less pickups per per thing'cause you're paying per pickup. That's it. And you smash Smashing trucks exist already. It was a new concept. So it's a franchise. This guy came up with the idea.

20:18 Started growing fast, decided to franchise it. So these didn't really exist. They exist in Europe, but they're like mounted to the side of the building. So those companies would back the dumpster up. So the insight was throw these things on a truck, have'em drive around and do it as like a mobile thing. So you bought a franchise and then now sold your franchise. Correct. One location how many Five locations. Five locations. How much did it cost to buy in? I bought it in chunks of my think my buy in was like a hundred eighty five K.

20:45 Up front. Up front. How did you have money before? I worked in tech. I was like somebody worked in SaaS. And uh had like the W two thing. Yeah, it was in like sales and product and stuff like that, like the kind of classic Bay Area W two thing. So this is so interesting. So you're just sitting there at the office, you got a good job. You're working in tech. And yet you're like, I need to get out there amongst the trash. What was the what was the chain of events that led you to like

21:09 Quit this safe thing. And go buy into it. Smash my trash franchise. Yeah, there's a couple of things. So it's like a growing sense of dissatisfaction. I like I kinda started to realize late in life that I wanted to work for myself. And I was also like in this venture world where you're like going after like the next round of funding, this eventual exit. And I didn't I was like blind to the way that a lot of the world worked in terms of like cash flowing blue collar businesses.

21:33 And I started to get bit by that bug a little bit. Like I started hearing stuff about that. And I got interested And then it was really when I got married and went on my honeymoon. And I waited till like the last minute to book our honeymoon, so we stayed at places that like we probably shouldn't have gone to that were nicer.

21:49 than we otherwise would have started talking about started talking to people there at the pool and stuff and been like all the rich guys are trash people. People make cash doing businesses that are off the beaten path. What were they what were they saying? What did they do? So one guy did like real estate, one guy did like a food truck, but like did like a food truck like as a serious operation, like had many of them. I had also had the seed planted on my bachelor party. I was there with my friend who was in private equity. And he actually got and smashed my trash before me. Gotcha. So he planted the seed. And he's a private equity guy of the of the one eighty, how much of was that a huge chunk of your savings?

22:25 I did eighty five myself. A buddy gave me seventy. And then so that was like the equity. And then I did a three hundred fifty thousand dollar SBA loan. But were you were you like this has to work or was this like a safe like I'm putting a small amount in. I'm happy. It felt like a pretty safe side bet. I had more than that that I would have been able to, but it felt uncomfortable. Okay. So you you decide to go in, you buy one.

22:49 What happens. So I actually bought three out of the gate. Okay. I bought I about three territories out of the gate. Now territories in franchise world, like a lot of times people picture restaurants where like it's clearly a unit. This is area. So I mean it's really one business. The areas are a little arbitrary. How many years ago was this? This is in twenty twenty two. I got started. Okay, so four years. Four years ago. So got started. And part of the reason I got into it was I was interested in something where I could draw a direct line between like brute force effort.

23:15 And cash in the bank. I feel like in tech world I was so many layers abstracted away from like eventually. Brute force to cash for the exact. So one what do you mean? You just meant like if I more people I call, the more money I'm gonna make. Right. Like I had a this no brainer offer. I had these people who definitely could use this and one hundred percent could make money. And all I needed to do was go get them to believe me. Yeah. and I could just start making cash and it wasn't like this promise of some future outcome. And I found that really motivating. Okay. So I paid somebody

23:49 Overseas to like zoom in on Google satellite view and put pins. On every dumpster. Okay. And like that was my plan. And I would drive from Walnut Creek Down to s you know, San Jose to Celine, it's like hour and a half, two hours each way, every day. And just like

24:05 Trespass. Go into warehouses. Try to talk to like the person there who's in charge of the dumpster. Right. And just kinda welded into existence. started driving beyond the confines of my team. Zoom in you go, you drive okay, contractor gives you a a pin, you drive to the pin.

24:21 You get there. You weren't invited. Knock knock. Now what? So not even knock knock. Drive right around to the back where the dumpster is. Okay. My I so I build this up over time. I learned. Yeah.

24:32 You don't want to go to the office because the office they're gonna you know they're gonna tell you no. So what I would do is I had a red hard hat that I would put on Get the clip cord going. Walk into the back and try to find the person who's physically loading the dumpster. You got the red hard hat on, start asking questions. Most of the time they would just He's like, dude, there's no construction around here. You're the trash contractor for the company. Right. They're just not sure. They're just like this guy's asking me like how many pickups do you get? Who's in charge of it? I start to kinda size the account, get some info, and then I would go to the front.

25:02 Armed with info. And then I would, you know, work my way to the decision maker. How many months until your first dollar? Right away. Right away. And the first How thrilling was that first sale? Oh, it was great. Oh, it was great. I was like out with our neighbors when they first

25:16 'Cause these are like kinda chunky contracts. They're talking about like large I mean, for me at the time, you know couple thousand bucks a month recurring revenue. So it only took two, three, four accounts. to basically pay my debt service and my driver Do you had a driver right off the bat? I hired a driver right off the bat, yeah.

25:34 And did Smash of Trash give you this playbook or you were just like I'm gonna red hard hat this or they were like, Hey, here's why you do it. They didn't tell me about the red hard hat, but they gave you the basic playbook and then I before I opened, went around to a couple of other franchisees, including my buddy I mentioned. And just was like Show me everything, how do you guys do it, what works. It's sort of like have you ever seen those videos where someone's my my friend Neville Madora, he's a an Indian guy and during South by Southwest, every year he dresses up like a sheik.

26:02 Like he wears like a white uh thing has one hat. And then he just like I get it. And then there's like these Instagram videos of guys who like they're like I'm just gonna like look like a DJ, whatever that means, and then they get into the club. Uh that that's like this version of that. Exactly. People just don't ask questions. So you this is amazing. Okay. So you said you sold the business now. Year one, do you remember kinda like what was the P L like would you would you make in in first year of business? It's hard to say. I

26:33 Because in the first year I bought the uh two additional franchises. So one day I drove beyond the bounds of my territory and I found like the trash gold mine. And I bought those two franchises and bought two more trucks. Okay. So all the cash went right back in. Were all three territories successful or one sucked but another one was amazing. That was kind of it. There's a great one, there's an okay one, there's a medium one. And then I added on like these two amazing ones. Um so I had to buy two trucks, I had to buy two new

26:59 uh territories. So all the cash went right back into that. I think I probably did like six to eight hundred K of top line. In those first two years. Wow. What was the biggest pain in the ass looking back?

27:12 The trucks. Um not even the operator. Fixing the trucks when there's issues. Well something I just don't it's a big truck with hydraulic equipment. And I eventually just kind of adopted the philosophy that like I had a mechanic

27:25 He was gonna charge me what he charged me and I he was probably overcharging me, but when there was an issue, I would just overpay for it. shopping around you could do for smashing. Yeah, I just wanted to get it done. Like a lot of our accounts, they're paying us a lot of money every month. And if we can't get to them I just was willing to pay a lot to just solve that problem and have it not be something we deal with. So how much profit did how much take home income did you do your last year? So it was kinda like the first two years and the last two years was were very separate chapters. First two years, I was down there every single day. Not taking anything out.

27:57 Reinvesting everything into new trucks and new territories. The last two years basically twenty twenty four to twenty twenty six summer. It was like Maybe around like four fifty EBITDA, if you want to call it that, but 150 K that was debt service. So really my take home was like three hundred K. So why so?

28:16 It was you know, it just it felt like a starter business. It was always kind of my starter business. I got into it because I thought it would be like this direct line. It just weighed heavily on me in a number of ways. Like one, these loans, and I got loans for the second two trucks. So it's that first three hundred fifty K S BA loan. I got subsequent loans for the other trucks. So that's a personal guarantee in my head every day. Right. The a lot of people don't realize franchise agreements also have a personal guarantee. Where you owe them royalties every month as a percentage of revenue. I think most people know that with franchises.

28:47 But there's minimum royalties, which means you either pay some percent of your revenue Or this fixed amount on a schedule, whichever is higher. And that's a ten year long agreement that also has a personal guarantee. So I always felt like I could handle that, but that's like also weighs on you.

29:03 And just like having these Big trucks down every day. We're like Couple times a year I'd get a call that was like Something bad happened. What it what did it feel like when the wire hit? It was kinda anticlimactic a little bit. So I had already like I'd worked with my accountant on like all right, tell me like after tax after everything what the number is. I had like seen that number in a Google sheet.

29:24 And then when it happened, I was very happy. My wife and I for like we had a trip just coincidentally planned to go somewhere the next day. So we did get to enjoy it, but now it's just like Back to baseline kind of. Right.

29:36 I feel the relief of not having like the responsibility. And like I don't have my phone on me right now. I'm used to like You're walking around, you're raw dogging, you're no phone right now. No phone. What I'm saying is normally I would be stressed even stressed out in the background. I could go back and there could be uh just like a bomb dropped on me on my phone where, you know, something went wrong. Who bought it? Was it just somebody else who wanted even more territories or is like Who who's the buy that, who's the neighboring franchisees. So it's a great thing where you know

30:02 I was happy with the amount they paid. I think they're gonna they got a great deal on it for them'cause they're just gonna be able to fold it into their thing. Right. That's how a lot of franchise M and A ends up happening. I have a feeling that you're plotting. You have something that you've been that you've been thinking about. What is that? What are the list of things. And also did you know what that was before you sold or The space gave you the time to figure it out.

30:22 So the first two years were a dead sprint. The last two years I got it in passive mode. I had two kids. And so I wasn't able to go down there every day. So I did a lot of stuff to make it like truly passive.

30:34 And I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out my next move. I don't want to say too much about what it is. Um but I do have something. in the works. What other opportunities did you consider doing that you did not So what I got really interested in was like this concept of How you could sell somebody a financial

30:49 ROI no brainer. Where the only objection is that they don't believe you. And it would be like cheap or free to prove it to them. And so I was looking at all kinds of stuff like that. Like I think you can like audit people's utility bills. I think the idea of doing like site speed optimization for e commerce is kind of interesting. That was like the insight that I uh

31:07 That I thought was like a fun playbook to run that was like pretty straightforward. If you're not that smart and you just want to work hard. What's really smart about your approach that I think very few people do. Is in business what most people do is they think about the product. They're like, Oh I love that product, or I know about that product, or I love this industry. I've I They think about their college major or stupid shit like that.

31:29 You work backwards from like what type of sale process do I wanna do every day? Because that's gonna be like ninety percent of my existence as an entrepreneur is just going trying to sell, get more business. And so you were like Yeah. Where somewhere that I can just brute force You know, get dollars in the bank by going and you know

31:46 calling or showing up on more sites. And then even just now you're like, and the pitch I wanna be giving is a You definitely are gonna make more money. Mm. All I gotta do is prove it to you.

31:56 And I can prove it to you. on a cost that's very little to me or a quick quick uh demo from my side to show you that the value is there. And I think so few people take a sales first approach, but as an entrepreneur, that's actually all you experience in the business is just growing the business mostly. Uh like the product is very like

32:13 fungible. You could swap the product out. Yeah. That I so what it is for me is I just I think like you guys, I like business. Like I'm a business nerd. I like hiring. I like selling. I like figuring out the systems and the processes. So when you have that, you kinda have the luxury of being able to pick A business that you think would be enjoyable and straightforward to run. When are you gonna start it?

32:34 I already started the the new thing. So you only t and that's only three weeks ago that you sold. Yeah. Do you have a new mindset with this new one? Like it what's changed now that you had that experience? You're going into the new one. Do you have any new rules uh how you want to do this? Bootstrapping. Bootstrapping. I found and this is probably just'cause I'm r more risk averse than I care to admit, but like

32:54 This idea of the personal guarantee being tied to a franchise agreement. I really felt like the one way door, you know, rev irreversible decision thing. So I think going forward, I'm gonna try to bootstrap as much as I can. And keep my options open. As much as I can.

33:12 Maybe your tech co workers Or like That's this is very risky. You know, this is like insane what you're doing. What I've noticed talking to a lot of uh entrepreneurs on here and through my life is that most entrepreneurs I don't consider myself to be a very risky person at all.

33:27 Uh and most of Say that as well. They're like I I I'm not that risky. And like it's this idea of like there's a difference between uncertainty, which always exists, and risk, which you can reduce. Uncertainty always exists. And you've just gotta get comfortable with that. But you can definitely can like limit the risk and taking this person personal guarantees, that's actually quite risky.

33:43 Uh and so it's funny to hear that you're a risk adverse person. It's like great fighters. They don't Pride themselves on. How much like how much risk they're taking in a fight. It's all it's really it's a self defense. It's hit and don't get hit. Right, and like the best fighters if you look at like Floyd Mayweather un goes undefeated. He f didn't even really get hit that much. Didn't really get hit that much. It's like the black belts understand that it's about minimizing the damage you take.

34:06 While still winning. Yeah. Like there's all these investors and they're like rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, pay attention to rule number one. Uh and it's pretty funny. Let me ask you another question. I'm I'm talking to my friend who's uh a friend from college and he's got a a normal job business. He wants to go do something entrepreneurial. And I think he wants to do it very much for the money, but I think truly the benefit would be That he's just gonna have a lot more fun. He doesn't like his job and just Liking your day matters a lot more. You had a good job. You did it for four or five years.

34:33 Did you end up way ahead financially versus where you would have been just Taking your salary with raises and savings. Was it a big financial win or was it the life win, the confidence, the fun that you had? Like where was the win? I think about it as like the escape velocity that I needed to go work for. I can work for myself for the rest of my life as long as I don't like mess it up. And that's how I think about it. It gave me that Escape velocity. out of that and is it financial runway or it was confidence. It's financial runway, it's confidence, it's experience, it's pattern recognition, skills, and everything like that.

35:06 And for me I kinda had to like Do the Because and really because I bought the business so far from my house. I was gonna try to keep my job for like a second there and then I realized I had to quit it. That was the case for me.

35:17 I think for s other people the move is just find something you can like step into and test it out a little bit. Before you pulley Before you like fully rip it. We've never done franchises, um and I've always been a little skeptical of franchises. It's like s franchises seem like great business for the franchise oars, uh not the franchisee. And so

35:36 You did it. You have a good outcome. What's your current perspective on like Is franchises a good good place to go or like Did you discover some other franchise along the way that you're like, Shit, I wish I had done that one. That's Now that I understand what makes these work, that's a way better one. Tell me something smart about franchises. I think there's three

35:52 situations where doing a franchise makes sense. I think the first one is If the franchise or actually has some secret sauce. And like the nerdy way that I think about it is if you listen to like the acquired podcast, they do the seven powers. If

36:05 The franchise or gives you a sev one of the seven powers. It could be worth it. So that's brand. With like the Midas touch. Or it's like cornered resource, like the Chick fil A recipe. You can only get a Chick fil A. That's worth it. Those are rare and in high demand. The second one is if you are going into it to do like a roll up.

36:24 Franchises are friendly for roll ups, I think, because you just have carbon copies of each other. Like the systems are like the integration is the hard part of a lot of roll ups. The integration of a franchise is just like the people stuff. It's pretty straightforward to roll up and it's like a walled garden. Like if you're in the system and you have the appetite and the capital to do a roll up. You can do it in a lot of cases and

36:45 A lot of franchises are ripe for consolidation'cause They're incentivized to sell a lot of units'cause they make franchise fees on each unit. And then what that means is in a couple of years It's just like begging for consolidation. And the third reason is

36:58 basically my reason, which like if you're literally not gonna do anything else, you're not gonna do something unless you feel like you have the training wheels of a franchise. That's what it took for me to do it. Like I don't regret doing it. I probably won't do another franchise in my career, but like it played a important role in my uh where you wanted to go. Right. I wasn't gonna do it otherwise. Well, Kevin you're the you're the shit. Thank you for doing this. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Yeah.

37:23 Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why uh I like products that are easy to use.

37:46 I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. Uh, one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So If you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to Mercury.com/slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members FDIC.

38:15 Bring him in. What's up? What's going on? Good to meet you. Great meeting you. What's up, brother? What's your name?

38:22 No. Know him. Yes. No. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Okay. I don't know if they told you what you're getting into, but uh Maybe start with what we call the big juicy number. So give us one number that'll get us interested. All right, big juicy number. We're doing four hundred thirty thousand dollars a month selling heated jaw massagers. Jaw massagers. Yes, sir. Okay. Heated baby in high school. Less detailed the better on that one. So Do you have one?

38:55 It's in your pocket. Is this like a lipmaxing thing? See, Steve Jobs had a thousand songs in your pocket. He's got one hot jawbone in your pocket. It's uh it's super kosher, actually. Okay. Yeah. Uh it's not going in your mouth. But I mean so I have two actually This one is like what we're selling right now. Okay. Uh it's the gen one. It's like three D printed, looks like a vape, right? Um this one is Gentoo. I'm flying to China tonight, actually, so I'm tryna Do it, but you basically click this button.

39:25 Adjustable. Gen one doesn't work. Yeah, that one doesn't work. I gave I gave all my San Francisco Gen ones away. I was just at a conference. It's over. I only have this. But yeah, you you have the two buttons there, adjustable heat, adjustable vibration. Yeah. There you go. Literally. Okay, so I do this? Yeah, so it's like a couple of things of muscle scraping. Is that what we're doing? You know what? Some people or looks maxing, but Um the main thing actually is it's for people with like TMJ disorders. Right. So I mean there are like tens of millions of people out there dealing with like chronic jaw pain and generally that audience is uh is not the looks maxing crowd my my main

40:00 Customers not that, but they do exist. So it is TM. TM uh TMJ can you explain TMJ like in America, how one out of every how many people have it? Give us something like that. Yeah, so around five percent of people seek treatment, but It's many more that have it and potentially don't even know. So like There are a lot of like really

40:21 common things that happen like the way I started dealing with it was like five years ago my jaw started clicking on the right side. I was like Okay. I think my mom got this. You get it like temporarily sometimes, right? Stress and things like that can bring it up. Is it just annoying or is it dangerous? So the the clicking, um if it's pain free, oftentimes it's it's just annoying. Some people say uh up to like one in three people have this at some point in their life, but For me it started getting worse. It started clicking on the left and then my jaw started like locking closed. And then I yeah, that would happen like once a month and then once a week, then once a day I would wake up and I couldn't like brush my teeth. I couldn't What causes this? It's a good question. Like a lot of different things can cause it. You know, like clenching, for example, a lot of people have a clenching issue, clenching grinding at night.

41:02 Um some things is like, you know, a lot of looks maxing can actually end up causing this. It could be trauma to the joint. It could be all this for for lock up specifically, there's like a disc in there and it you know, it can displace And you put this on your jaw how often and how long? So the idea is uh a couple of things. for for the musculature, right? Like

41:23 most people's pain actually ends up coming from like the muscles and because it's overcompensating that kind of stuff. Um so you're using it as like a scraper, a heater. Once a day, uh or like a couple of times a day, twenty minutes a day. That that's what the research says you should do the doctors say. But honestly it's just like uh Hey I am I have a flare up, my my head hurts, uh you go in, you You work on the muscles or you just have like instant heat in your pocket. Close to half a million a month.

41:47 Uh yeah. So you sell like five million a year of this. Uh that's uh annualized. Annualized. Yeah. And it's call it's called your TMJ Pen. How much does it cost? So we're we're normally two forty nine. Uh right now there's like a clearance sale. And did you raise funding?

42:03 No. No no, it's no very much fully boost trapped, yeah. This is uh I feel like I would see this on TikTok shop. I would see this like on IG ads late at night. Yeah, listen. I'm the guy. I wish you're the guy. I am that guy. I am that guy on Instagram. I am the TMJ guy. I've seen you. You're you're the face of this, right? I am the face of that. I think I've seen you. A lot of rage bait on Instagram. So what what's you said rage bait. Okay, so one of our like big and most viral videos is like I'm on this plane, right? And uh I uh

42:33 This this Karen This absolute Karen next to me starts like calling me out. She's like, Hey, you can't be vaping on a plane, you know? And I like get really flustered and like oh no it's it's uh it's not a vape. Um let me explain it. And I'm like I'm like flustered trying to like explain this that it's like my invention. Like I I made this, it's for people to drop in. It's not a vape. Um and That concept got like a hundred million views. Really? Wow. Uh how did you think of that, just to go with the Karen on the plane. Where it's mostly the vape. It looks like a vape. Everyone tells me that. So

43:05 Right. What's gonna stop every Chinese knockoff from coming after you. I mean listen, at some point Like they're they're gonna come, but the reality is like when I when I started this, like I I I looked

43:18 I looked it up. I I was he and massaging myself like every day with like a mug of water, I would microwave it, whatever, and I would I would look it up and Um, there wasn't a heated massager for the jaw that there were no products period sold for people with TMJ problems, like not a single one, which was Baffling. And so I like not there was no brand, there was no developed the actual. I developed this and Yeah, like I I'm the first brand. Did you say you three D printed this?

43:43 Yeah, so the way I started the business is'cause like Dude, listen, hardware used to be, I think, one of the most risky things you can get into making like a hardware device. Like you'll look at Shark Tank, like people are like, yeah, I spent like a hundred grand making this, and it's like Oh, that was a big mistake. How much did you spend to make the first handful? I spent less than three thousand dollars.

44:05 And The idea was like there are like three things that like aligned in this Asia we're living in that makes it Probably not one of the least risky things that you can do making like a hardware consumer product first having

44:19 all the access to like information. Like engineering at this point is like low key kinda easy. Like, okay, don't clip that, but with ChatGBT with YouTube, like I didn't know how to make electronics, I didn't know how to make a P C looked it up. I was a I was a mechanical engineer. I was in college, like how old are you now? Twenty four. How old is this? Three years since I started making it.

44:38 And then two years of selling it. And so you're like I'm I'm an idiot. So you have a three D printer at home. Yeah. And you're on Chat GPT. At the time. And you're like, teach me how to like You're like give me a chat back in the day was not good enough. But then like there's a motor. I mean I don't know how electronics. I wrote out what do I need this thing to do? I need it to heat, I need vibration, I need, you know, it to charge, it needs to be portable, da da, whatever. You write out what you want.

45:06 The obvious thing that it needs is like a P C B. It's a printed circuit board, so It d it's those little green things. Yeah, it has it ha it looks like a chip. It has a bunch of things, a bunch of lines on it. Um so Wh I looked on Reddit, I asked for advice, I I w went on YouTube.

45:23 I figure out how to design this thing. Um, that was like the first thing I did. Then you designed the casings. You look up Potential motors, you buy them all, test them and And uh making

45:35 The assembling the thing yourself. If you want. Yeah, so for I was assembling these things myself up up until literally a year ago to the day. Um we We got up to

45:45 Like eighty K a month. I was assembling shipping. I had two three D printers running my closet in like In my apartment. And then I I kind of went like Alex Ramosy mode. I was like, wait, what if I just s you know do this but more, you know? So I found like a three PL Uh and then normally a three PL is I mean You know this, but Um they just ship stuff for you.

46:06 uh they like fulfill your stuff. But I was like, hey, let me use your employees. Like I'll put my three D printers in your place. You guys can use them and make them on the spot there. Yeah, you can make them and so now my three PL makes it and that's how we gr we're able to grow to this point. So you're flying to China tonight. I'm fine to try it tonight. You're gonna get you already have'cause this is made. Yeah. So we made a prototype. You found something on Alibaba, what'd you do? No, no, I d I did not do that. That would be risky. Um I I got connected. So I I I'm like pretty big on Instagram now and like YouTube, so

46:34 I I I made sure to like get Connected via word of mouth. Um so I found a factory d together with them, we we designed this thing. I flew there like a couple months ago. We Um we got to this sort of like golden sample.

46:47 And now production is like Sort of done. Dunn ish. So I'm going there now to like get the final samples and then we'll be able to do it. How many employees do you have? I don't have any like

46:56 Like full. Uh I but I have like You know, contractors that have like um Five. So have you taken money out of the business yet?

47:05 Oh, took a million bucks out of business last year. Yeah, so like this year it'll do let's say let's say hypothetically you do five million in in tot total revenue in twenty six, how much cash flow Like how much uh profit? I don't know if you measure it. Uh yeah, it's around like twenty percent like net. Um Income. I don't know, I I I kinda look at it, it's just like my business. Like some of it's in the business bank, some of it's in my vanguard, some of it's in my personal bank. I don't know. I just kinda like

47:29 Take it as we see fit. And do uh there's no repeat purchase, right? Like nobody's gonna buy Yeah, there's no. But what is like uh I remember years ago when uh Ther you know, Theragun. Yeah, like my I have a hypervolt that I use forever. I love it. And I remember they came out and people were like Dude, like all the Chinese companies are just gonna knock this off. But they they didn't. They did. But they did do a good job of like kinda branding it where I I I am like into my hypervolt.

47:53 But then they also came out with like thirty products. There's like the things that like do my legs. And I love all of'em. And it's become my routine. Is there like a Other things that you're gonna you can do? I do have this vision of being like a a brand specifically focused on making products for

48:09 the TMJ community. The brand is like your TMJ. Yeah. So it's like your TMJ pen, then I'm thinking like your TMJ band, your TJ. We had this guy in the podcast named David. Yeah. And his whole company and like we started out as a shtick, but it wasn't entirely a shtick where it was like Sam doesn't believe that Picking an important name is actually important. And this guy's whole job, he makes a lot of money naming companies Blackberry and Swifer and Sonos, Fabriz, he named all this stuff.

48:36 And I am totally on board with what he's doing now. And his whole I actually just hang out with him the other day, his whole thing is like If you're uh a young entrepreneur, start your company, who cares? But once you get some traction, consider making a name that can last forever because it actually does matter. And I buy into that. I would highly consider keeping that as maybe the T M J pen That product but having like a proper Company name.

48:59 Yeah, that's that's possible. I don't know. I feel like it's just like not the main like concern right now. Cause like the maybe it's for the for this product, yeah, like people it's like this is like the TMJ Pen, you know, it's like it's like when people say TMJ Pen it's this, like there's no other thing. So it's like I think that's a pretty good name, but yeah, for the company like Well, you said like you did have a question. Well what was your question gonna be? Well yeah, my question was gonna be like, listen, you're gonna you're gonna be like oh money doesn't matter, da but No, we won't say that. We won't say that. It's called my first million, not just one million and stop. I've I've heard a lot of guests come on the show. It's like uh you know they've made it and it's like oh yeah, dah I'm just like, no, I want a couple of mil in the bank, right?

49:39 I want that. So I get this urge to like sell In maybe two to three years or something. Yeah. And I don't know what Therefore I should like really be focusing on'cause like if it For me, like the obvious thing right now is like, hey, what's the like main constraint? It's uh

49:55 You know, going and Solving the supply the supply issue. Then it's gonna be like demand. And then you have your long term constraint in the s in the scenario. Yeah. And and I don't know what the like long term like maybe it is a long term constraint to not have other products, but The issue is like I don't know like what would be super important then to weigh against like losing focus on just like cranking up more ads now. So maybe it's

50:16 uh vr recurring revenue, right? Like maybe uh I should get into TMJ like supplements and And oils and creams and stuff, or maybe it's having uh more products on the consumer side. Maybe it's having IP, maybe it's having r registration with FDA, maybe it's having like three options. Yeah. And you don't have to decide right now, but it's good to know what they are'cause then when you're doing the business, you'll look for clues that support one of the three options. Either you can go wide or TMJ. So you could say, Great, TMJ, this helps, but it's not a solved problem.

50:44 I can sell the creams, I can sell the oils, I can sell the supplements, I can sell the whatever. So you're wider T M J. You can go wider pain relief. So Maybe heated massage.

50:54 for other conditions, other parts of your body, the kind of hyperice model, the um Thereagon model where you're gonna create Yeah, right. They're just like a recovery company. Yeah, they're a recovery company. They and you would be a pain relief company. And you would say, Okay, cool. I'm gonna go find all the different types of paint. I'm gonna create like specialty products, I'm gonna run the same playbook across them. And so like right now the those sli heated s heated vibrating slides is like the big one that's going viral right now that I think uh someone's Nike's doing or somebody's doing. Yeah. So you could you could go wider in that direction of pain relief, heated maybe heated massaging pain relief.

51:26 Or you could just say Actually I just got good. uh doing this model of like content based selling of products. I now know how to do a little bit of supply chain, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but I'm really good on the marketing side.

51:40 And it and I'm fundamentally limited by category and product. And if I just take, you know, I'm a I'm a nine out of ten entrepreneur, I just need to find a nine out of ten opportunity. TMJ is just a two out of ten opportunity because of. The nature of what I'm doing. And you just take your highly transferable skills. Of creating content, selling through content.

51:58 You know, and you just apply it to a a better category and you that has tailwinds. You don't fight the the small Tam problem that you got there. potentially have liquidity already. And you're so young, you're gonna have money in the bank and you're gonna have like a bunch of lessons learned that with a clean slate. Like This can be your starter business.

52:15 Like most entrepreneurs have a have a starter business, have a thing that they did early. That wasn't their lifetime business. And you know. So that's the other possibility. So you y you know, you don't know which one of the three it is right now. Maybe you should

52:27 Write down a hypothesis as to which one of those three it is. And then as you operate the next six to nine months And you're focused on growing this business, you'll at least be aware of and looking for clues as to which one this might be. Maybe you launch a little test in one of those one of those three areas and you figure it out that way. Yeah. I mean I think I think it's What it is is like I I like to use the business as like a learning opportunity, uh like as just like a personal growth thing.

52:52 It's probably gonna be like, Hey, is there more juice to squeeze out of that in in the TMJ space is. I think so too. A few a handful of years ago I had Lyme disease. And I like would look on like Reddit and stuff and I noticed that the the very clear trend and um amongst some other friends who got sick with different illnesses or injuries, there's dozens or hundreds of injuries or illnesses where people feel like no one's listening to me. No one takes me seriously. What the hell? But I know something's wrong. I don't feel good. And so they go to these communities

53:22 And they buy these products where it's like finally I'm being heard and I'm being catered to. And it's I if I had to guess, this is one of them. Because I've heard that word TMJ, but when you see it like clicking, I'm like, Oh, that can't be that bad and then the person who has it, like it's horrible. You know what I mean? Uh and if you go to the doctor, they're just like Well, you know, just because it's like I'm pretty stressed because this hurts every day also, in addition to whatever caused in the first place. My my first my first uh specialist I went to person got me like two thousand milligrams of Tylenol a day. I was like, I would if I had to make a guess This will you're gonna grow a lot over the next three years and sell it. And I think that would be pretty cool.

53:55 These are fundamentally pretty tough businesses to sell. Um, you know, non recurring niche product heavily based on your marketing genius. So It might be that like Optimizing for the exit. sometimes looks different than optimizing for cash flow.

54:10 And so you wanna kinda weigh those. Uh you don't even again You can go look at some comps and be like Is there any Who's done this before and exited well? Let me go talk to them. And understand like Does the factors that made that a successful exit match what I

54:24 what I have fundamentally in my business. But if it's just a cash flow business, that's great. Cash flow businesses can be awesome. Have you ever talked to any bankers or brokers? I haven't. A lot of times people only do that when they're ready to sell when you should have done it three years earlier and you find out you're like I have a number in my mind.

54:38 Just tell me what I need to achieve to make that number possible and I'm just gonna go do that for two years. Tell me three companies you looked at that are like this. What did they sell for? Why did they get that much that they got? When did they do it? And you're like, Okay, it could be like This revenue, this cash flow, and uh, you know, these are the the five or six other metrics, I'll just do that for three years and then I'll and then I'll look up and be like, Okay. Okay. Yeah, I if you guys know any like I I had some people like reach out on LinkedIn about it, but they seem kinda skeezy, so I was like, I'm good. Yeah, no, I I would so I would talk to Quiet Light. They're more of a Online.

55:08 Brokerage. But they're they're easy to talk to. Go to they I if you go look at their thing, they'll they have a lot of these like FBA businesses that they sell. That like Or kind of like I would say lower durability, lower quality businesses overall, but they seem to be selling. So like they know

55:23 How to package those, what type what businesses work into it. Quietly brokerage. Okay. Yeah.com. So go to them. And then go look at brokers in your space, maybe like, you know, you you just have to Google and like tell ChatGP to go do deep research on. Who sold you know, who who are bankers that sell products like mine. Like I don't even know what the name of this category is, but it might be like non medical wellness. Nonmedical wellness devices. Okay, cool. And you could you email the founders of people who have had had access and say, Who did you who all did you talk to? Because everyone who sells at a company will talk to three or four. They'll say, I use this person, they were great. These two were kinda good. But I would not delay this. What Sam said is he's absolutely right. You don't talk to them when you're T's time to sell.

56:00 You first talked to him a year or two before. Yeah. actually understand what you need to do in the next twenty four months. to be a sellable business in the end. And it The good thing about a sellable business is

56:10 If somebody else is gonna wanna own it. It's probably the same. like reasons you would want to own it. So there's no harm in building a very sellable business. 'Cause at the very least, you made a business that's higher desirability to own for yourself or for somebody else. Yeah.

56:23 Dude, thanks for doing this. You're awesome. No, of course. Thanks for having me. Good luck in China. Yeah. Good meeting here. All right, that is part two of Shoot Your Shot. We got one more episode coming out of the San Francisco location. We got three more founders coming up on the next episode. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, on Spotify. We looked at the data. I think eighty ninety percent of you guys are not subscribed who watch the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode two.

56:48 And do me a favor. Whether you're a listener, then you're gonna go to Spotify. Or if you're a watcher, go to YouTube. Put in the comments the city that you want us to go to next. Right now we're doing this in San Francisco, we've already done New York. We'll go somewhere next to do it. So let us know in the comments right now. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my law in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Battel and Eric Sue. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

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