Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean Steele: G’day everyone, and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fulfill the potential of their business, make bigger decisions with greater confidence, and maximise the value and impact they can create in the world. I am your host, Sean Steele, and my guest today is Brian Will, Serial Entrepreneur, Founder, and Author of The Dropout Millionaire 37 Business Lessons on How to Succeed in Business With No Money, no Education, and no clue. How are you, bro?

[00:00:27] Brian Will: I'm good, and check me if I'm wrong, but you're in Australia. It's morning for you over there.

[00:00:31] Sean Steele: It is morning. Yep. About 08:30 in the morning for me. And you are in Parks City, Utah. So, I am feeling very jealous because I would rather be on the snow than in the heat.

[00:00:39] Brian Will: Yeah, it's later in the day here.

[00:00:42] Sean Steele: And sadly, you didn't get out on the, we were having quick chat off air and you didn't get out on the slopes today. I'm sorry to hear that. But you have brought with you your Barry Manilow voice.

[00:00:51] Brian Will: I did. Yes. It's either my ‘a day after drinking’ voice, or ‘I'm sick’ voice. Either one of those, I get the whole Barry White thing going on.

[00:00:59] Sean Steele: We get the benefit. So, that's good, that works for me. Well, look, I've got heaps of questions for you today. Brian, you've got such an interesting background and so maybe if I can have a crack at your, the sort of overview of your story and you can then correct me, you fill in gaps. I'm sure I'm going to get things in the wrong order.

[00:01:15] Brian Will: Yeah, let's rock and roll.

[00:01:16] Sean Steele: All right. Well, you grew up in a sort of low-income household. You found school pretty challenging and ultimately you dropped out of high school, but you found, I guess, entrepreneurship as a way to build a better life for yourself and probably for your family. You've created or co-created six successful companies in four different industries over the last 35 odd years. And you early days, you started out like I did in a lawn mowing business, where all of a sudden you realised that the owner was probably making a lot more money than you. And so, you ended up starting your own business, which you ended up franchising into seven locations. You've sold t-shirts out of your car, which you grew into a successful clothing brand. You started multiple insurance companies, a software company, a digital marketing company, a real estate investment firm. And you own a chain currently of eight restaurants. And in terms of exits, you sold three companies to VC or private equity and out of those three, one of those also then went on to go public. How did I go?

[00:02:13] Brian Will: Pretty good. You're close. I didn't drop out of high school. I failed out of high school.

[00:02:18] Sean Steele: Oh, you failed.

[00:02:18] Brian Will: And then I actually got back in, but I graduated with a 1.2 GPA, so I don't, it's pretty much the same thing.

[00:02:25] Sean Steele: Yeah.

[00:02:25] Brian Will: And yeah, I did do the military service thing right after that because I got kicked out of the house. And my first landscaping company, that is the funny story. I went to work for these guys and I was making four bucks an hour, right. And we were doing about $2,000 a week in this truck. So, one day I thought I'm making $160 and this guy's like making 1500 and all we're doing is mowing. You know, anybody could mow grass. So, I quit and started my own business, and that's how my entrepreneurial journey started.

[00:02:55] Sean Steele: I love that. You know, it's just, and you know, you don't require any vision to do that, right? You just need to go, hang on a second. This does not make sense. And I know that my younger son out of the two boys, he is, I can see that the older one is like the super hardworking one, unbelievably diligent, massively responsible, but may not kind of get annoyed by the fact that somebody's making more than him, whereas the younger one really doesn't want to do the work. But he's always asking questions about shareholders and how boards work and how decisions get made. And I can see he's probably the one, he'll probably have no money for a really long time and then he'll probably start something.

[00:03:31] Brian Will: That's a future CEO right there.

[00:03:34] Sean Steele: Totally, totally. Well, look, before I ask you about sort of entrepreneurship and scaling which I have lots of questions, did I hear correctly on the Grapevine that you're planning to go into space next?

[00:03:44] Brian Will: How in the world did you hear that? That is true. So, there's a company called Space Perspective, which is different than say the Elon's company, or Bezos company or Branson's company, I guess. Space Perspective takes you up in a balloon. Not unlike the ones that keep getting shot down over America right now. So, I've got to tell you, I may be a bit worried.

[00:04:07] Sean Steele: A bit nervous.

[00:04:09] Brian Will: But yeah, we go to a hundred thousand feet in a balloon. It's like a air conditioned, you know, it's got TVs, Wi-Fi, you can stream from up there. It's got a full bar. I mean, you can, it's a six-hour journey, um, and it's going to be super fun.

[00:04:23] Sean Steele: A hundred thousand feet in a balloon.

[00:04:25] Brian Will: For a hundred thousand dollars, which is much cheaper than everybody else.

[00:04:28] Sean Steele: Yeah. Wow. What made that come about?

[00:04:34] Brian Will: You know, I have always, since I started making some money, Sean, I have tried to do, I call it chasing your passions, right? Everything that everybody always says they're going to do, but nobody ever actually does. And so, when we sold the companies in 06 and 08, I became a pilot, a divemaster, I climbed mountains, I signed up for a space tour. I mean, pretty much I ran with the bulls in Spain. I've walked the Great Wall of China, dove with great white sharks in Africa. Just every, you know, I don't want to die and think crap, I forgot to do that. So, I'm trying to do everything you can possibly imagine.

[00:05:08] Sean Steele: I love that. You know, I don’t know if you've read the book - Die With Zero, but that is 100% that philosophy that's like, stop trying to like hoard all this money for some future date where you think just in case I might need that extra, you know, I might need that million dollars in the bank. It's like, well if you die with all that money, like think about how much earlier you could have stopped working and just been enjoying yourself and doing all the thing. You don't know when you're going to cock it. So why not make the most of it. Yeah. I share your philosophy, absolutely. So, thanks for that. Well, I'm interested in if we were to kind of reflect back on the past, because you've built a lot of companies, right? What was the biggest turning point in your journey that really shaped your approach to business after that? Is there something that stands out for you?

[00:05:48] Brian Will: Oh yeah, this one is easy. And remembering, I came from a rough household and I was an angry young man and failed out of high school and had a giant chip on my shoulder. And when I went into business, I had an ego problem, even though it was, you know, and didn't deserve to have one. I always laugh when people have ego problems and they have no right to have an ego, quite frankly. And so for a lot of years, the old adage that when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. I was a hammer and I just beat people up. My employees, I was not a nice guy and never really hit it big until I met my mentor Steve, and there was a turning point, and there's a whole story behind this where I almost quit one day and he walked into my office and he said, look, you can leave right now if you want. Give me my equity back. You owe nothing. We had borrowed like a half a million. He goes, we're going to walk away as friends, but we can't ever have this conversation again. I don't want to hear any doubt, I don't want to hear any arguments or anything. And I sat there looking at him and I'm shortening that story up. But I finally looked at him and I said, all right, Steve. And he had been very successful in life and I wasn't. I said; all right, Steve, I'm in. Whatever you say I'm going to do. And it was the first point in business for me that I started listening to somebody else and just watching the way he treated people and the way he worked in business and everything he did. And interesting story, we hadn't done a dollar in revenue for nine months and the very next month after that, convers. we hit our first deal on the internet and we did like 6 million that year. 13, the next. 30, the next and 60 the next. Sold the company for 80 million. And I literally, it scares me to death to think that if I could have literally said ‘I'm out’ instead of ‘I'm in’ and my life would be completely different than it is today. And the lesson there is sometimes you need to let other people lead and you need to listen and get your ego out of it. And that's what I had to do and that's what I learned.

[00:07:49] Sean Steele: Oh, I love hearing you say that. I mean, that is such the philosophy of the kinds of Founders that I work with worked with. You know that the kinds of people that are listening to this today are usually Founders, they're first time Founders, their businesses are doing well, right? You know, they're probably, maybe they're in seven figures. They maybe haven't broken through to eight, but also, they're really conscious of the fact they don't know what they don't know, and they're open-minded and they're looking for answers. They're not thinking; I've got this now. I've already got to three mil. I'm definitely going to take us to 20. It's like, no, no. They know that they don't know how to get there,

[00:08:15] Brian Will: That's interesting that you say you're working with those folks because that's rare, if everyone you're dealing with is, has got their ego in check. That's really a really, really good thing. I don't find that a lot in young generation.

[00:08:25] Sean Steele: Right. Okay. I think, and probably also because I spend most of my time with services Founders, and they're not tech Founders, so they're not typically focused on a big exit with huge multiples of revenue and so on. They're like, no, no, I just need to build a sustainable business. And if it goes well, at some point somebody will want to buy it. And so, they're sort of a little more incremental maybe than so, you know, rapid, super hardcore, capital raising sort of path. What about, sometimes we get lessons from really unexpected sources. What's the most surprising lesson you've learned from a place that you didn't expect to get it from?

[00:08:55] Brian Will: My personal assistant. This is a funny story, a couple of years ago and even today. When I started down a path, I'm like an A personality. I'm an ADHD. I'm very driven. And I get short with people and I'm just like, yes, no, yes. Do this, do this, do this, do this. And one day she came to me and she said, if you don't start being nice to me, I'm going to quit. And I was like, am I not being nice to you? She goes, no, you're short with me. I'm afraid to call you on the phone and I don't want to work for you if that's the way you're going to be. And I was like, crap. All right. I apologise. I'm sorry. Like I had to apologise for five minutes to keep her from quitting because I really needed her. And since then I kind of try to watch myself very closely that I'm being a nice guy to work for, and not just a driven entrepreneur.

[00:09:44] Sean Steele: It's such an interesting lesson in humility, isn't it? Like yeah, we may have the immediate, you know, I always found, my HR director was great at kind of pushing me on that. She's like; Hey, Sean, like, I know that you can see where we need to go, exactly how to get there, what every single person needs to do, but everybody's not on that journey yet. And if you don’t come back and like, meet people where they are, and then think about leading them there, then there is no journey, right? Like no one is following you.

[00:10:08] Brian Will: A hundred percent.

[00:10:09] Sean Steele: Forget about it. Well, that kind of leads into a question about team. You know, one of the biggest challenges for Founders is figuring out, especially if you're trying to break through to seven to eight, like it's really about team, right? You know, you can no longer do all the stuff yourself. You can't be the smartest person in the room. You've got to really build some leadership capability in your business. What's the most important lesson you've learned about building a successful team, and how do you go about identifying and recruiting the right people into your organisations?

[00:10:34] Brian Will: Identifying, recruiting is always hard, as you know, because I find a lot of people, here in the US we call it resume hopping, right? They jumped from a Director to a VP and six months later they're trying to get the next one up. And the reality is they were never qualified for the VP in the first place. This is resume-hopping, so it's always tough, but one of the things I have, when I work with folks, one of the things I have always told them is, if you're going to bring people in, you need to allow them to fail and learn so that they can be good at what they're doing moving forward. If you don't allow people to fail and then you go in and you take over for them and do their job, then you're always going to have this person didn't learn how to do what they did and you're always, as a Founder or a CEO, going to be working a hundred hours a week. So, you got to let people learn to do their job. You got to let them fail without getting upset. Because if they learn then they're a much better person. It might have cost you a little bit of money or time, but have a much, much better employee. So, that's what I always tell people.

[00:11:29] Sean Steele: Mm. That's interesting. When you are looking for good leaders, do you tend to run the kind of traditional process of, you know, putting up a job ad and seeing what comes in? Or do you proactively go on and sort of tap people in the industry that you, I mean, obviously when you've been in business for a long time, you build quite a big network and so you probably think people network…Yeah. Okay. Work that network. Yeah. What's the worst business advice you've ever received?

[00:11:55] Brian Will: Well, this goes back to what I said a minute ago, and in fact, weirdly enough, I told you I was on a podcast in the UK this morning and the podcast host was like, yeah, you really need to learn everything about everything that's going on in your company. And my answer to that is, no, you don't. I don't have time as a CEO to understand how everything works. I got to be at 30,000 feet. I got to be looking down all across the organisation and guiding people and doing strategic direction. If I got to be down there figuring out how to do your job, then once again, I'm back to working150 hours a week. And I just don't have time to do that. So, I don't think you need to know everything. I think you need to know how to do your job and understand finance, because that's critical to every business. But you don't need to know everything about everything.

[00:12:35] Sean Steele: Mm. I always feel like the sort of role of the CEO is to like, know enough to be able to challenge people's thinking and maybe, you know, hold them to account or sort of know when you're being taken for a ride, but never to get beyond that. You know, like that's their job to get beyond that, but you've just got to be, know enough to be a little bit dangerous, but don't fool yourself into thinking you actually know how to do it because you don’t.

[00:12:53] Brian Will: And really the way to do that is just to ask questions, because if you ask questions over and over, people will reveal themselves whether they are trying to pull the wool over your eyes. So, I've always said success is about not about having the answers. It's about knowing how to ask the questions. Jack Welch, one of the most prolific leaders in the United States, was huge on asking questions. He would just walk around GE asking people questions. He didn't have answers. He just talked to people and asking questions, and he was a great leader.

[00:13:22] Sean Steele: I think there's probably a new name for that now, Brian, which is like prompt engineering because you know, you see people using Chat GPT and asking like the first level question and going, oh, I've got an answer, move on. It's like, no, no, no. That's not how this works. You need to follow up the question, ask a better question, now ask a deeper question now ask a deeper question. It's actually about the prompt engineering, if you like. It's got a new term, but it's the same stuff we've been doing for a while.

[00:13:42] Brian Will: Keep asking questions.

[00:13:43] Sean Steele: Keep asking. Okay, I like that. So now look, you're still running businesses now. It's not like you're done, and so I'm interested in how you think about running your current ones. How do you know when it's. Pivot or make a change in direction in your business, and what advice would you give somebody who's facing that decision at the moment?

[00:14:01] Brian Will: You know, I actually do a speech called Time Travel in your Magic Crystal Ball. Okay? And basically, what that says is that, as a CEO or an entrepreneur, you need to be able to look ahead into the future and see what's going to happen in your business. And the way you do that is what we call Trend Following or, or Historical Analysis of P&Ls, right? So, if I have a 24 month P&L and I can go backwards in time and track every single line item in a P&L from top line to bottom line and everything in between, I bring it up to today and if I go through and look at the trend analysis on every one of those lines, if nothing changes, I can pretty much predict what's going to happen in the next 12 months, right? So, if I see a downward trend at that point, I need to be able to improvise and adapt as we say, and make a change, or you're going to continue down the path that you're on, which might not be the way you want to go. I always talk about Apple computer, they started building motherboard, and then somewhere along the line Jobs is like; Hey man, we should put music on an iPod. And the next thing you know, we have an iPhone. And every bit of information known to mankind is now at your fingertips. That's astounding change. IBM started building typewriters and today they're whatever the heck IBM does. So, you have to look at your business, you have to look at the future. You have to look at the business you're in, is going to be sustainable. And if it's not, then you need to improvise and adapt and change. So, to me, it's always about looking backwards up to today, and then figuring out if what you're doing is really the future. But look, I'll give you an example. I was on another podcast yesterday, and I won't say any names, but these guys are harvesting rainwater for drinking water, which sounds like an amazing thing to do, but they're selling it for $2.50 a bottle when I can go down to the local grocery store and buy it for 10 cents. And I know it's a great idea and it's probably better for the environment, but nobody's going to buy your $2.50 bottle of water.

[00:16:01] Sean Steele: If I can buy it for 10 cents.

[00:16:02] Brian Will: If you can buy it for 10 cents. Like, why? Why would you do that? Unless you're just hardcore green. Nothing wrong with that, but the business model is not going to be sustainable because the general public isn't going to buy it in enough volume for you to make money. And that's, you know, they might need to figure out another thing to do there.

[00:16:18] Sean Steele: Mm. It's interesting isn't, it's like when you think about strategy, I always think that, because this is an interesting point that you brought up, like number one is looking back to the past and seeing like what is the past telling me about what's likely to happen in the future. And then the second part of that is you said around your crystal ball is to go, add into the future. And actually, you know, remember that your job as the CEO is, you're the only person that's actually going to be spending time thinking about what's coming in the next three years. What things are going to affect our industry, what new technologies are going on, what are competitors doing, blah, blah, blah. And you actually have to craft some kind of a path through that. It doesn't mean that you know what it is, but you have to be able to make some decisions about where you think it's going to go to help the business, not just focus on like incremental optimisation of today. Because sometimes if you are so head down on incremental optimisation of today, you miss some of the step changes you might need to make or you know, all the, you know, to your point, they were making motherboards, all of a sudden they had this idea around music. Like if they weren't thinking broadly enough, they wouldn't have been thinking about how people are going to use these in the future. And those opportunities don't come up.

[00:17:15] Brian Will: Here's a good one. I'll give you another one. I was just out at SpaceX out in California.

[00:17:20] Sean Steele: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:21] Brian Will: Elon Musk again, and also the Boring Company is headquartered out there. And I'm on city council in my hometown here. So, we went out there and went to visit the Boring Company, and they're digging these giant long tunnels, you know, underneath Las Vegas and in Fort Lauderdale. And we come up with an idea in our city, we're trying to bore a tunnel underneath a six-lane highway for a walkway for the city. And, the cheapest pricing we have gotten as a city is 8 million to do. In talking to the boring company, they said we could do that for 3 million. And we were like, holy crap. Have you ever done that before? They said, no, but it'd be very easy. And I said, this is a whole new division for the boring company. So, we're right now working on getting them out to Alpharetta, Georgia to bore under a six-lane highway for us so that we can have a tunnel for people to walk. And who knows, this could be a whole new direction for the boring company in Elon Musk Company to go, but you know, things happen, you change.

[00:18:19] Sean Steele: That's it. Yeah. You can't get too wedded to what you think it's going to be. You still have to have your mind open to what's possible, which you don't know when that's going to come up. Well, thinking about that, then sometimes you also have, it's the balance of being able to adapt and change, but also sometimes to be able to stay motivated and focused on something that's longer term. How do you make sure that, what, what habits do you use or what strategies do you have to not lose sight of your vision that you might have for your business? And sometimes avoid burnout a long way, because sometimes the grinds just super hard. Right? What do you do?

[00:18:50] Brian Will: You know, the burnout question. I love the burnout question, and I heard somebody else say this, I'm not going to take credit for it. When you started your company, did you start your company so that you could work a hundred hours a week, miss your family, miss your kids' performances, and not be home? And I would say 90% of the time the answer is no. So, the reason you started your company was to build a better lifestyle for yourself and make money. And yet all these entrepreneurs get in there and they think they have to do it all and be everything and everywhere and work 24 hours a day. And that's where the burnout comes from because they've forgotten why they did this. We don't build these companies to kill ourselves. You build them to create a better lifestyle. So, you've got to focus on the end goal, the end result, and what you're really trying to accomplish. And maybe back it off a little bit and enjoy the fruits of what you've done, and quit trying to just rock it up to a billion dollars in sales right now. Look, I did that. This is why I'm telling you, I did it and I wasn't there for my family enough. It ended up getting a divorce, because I worked as I like to say, dark to dark seven days a week. That's all I did. And looking back now, yes, I've achieved success, but was it really worth it?

[00:19:57] Sean Steele: Mm.

[00:19:58] Brian Will: And I'm not sure it was, I could have done it different.

[00:20:01] Sean Steele: Yeah. Isn't, it's like you think about, because I've met a lot of Founders in my time. You know, I've been in lots of the YPO and EOs and sorts of CEO clubs if you like, and I often meet Founders who I'm thinking, I hear you say that you're doing this for your family, yet have you asked your family what they want? They just want you, they couldn't care less whether you make a dollar or $5,000, as long as you're happy, living in a caravan is your kind of your worst case outcome. They would rather have access to you than you make you, like you get so excited. You're like, no, no, I'm doing this for the family. I'm doing this with family. And then seven years later you have a big exit. You've got a huge, and you turn around and you're like, oh, where's the family? Oh, they left.

[00:20:39] Brian Will: It was right after my exit that we got divorced. And I'll tell you another thing, it affected my daughter to the point where she doesn't care about money, doesn't want to make.

[00:20:47] Sean Steele: Wow.

[00:20:47] Brian Will: She works for the Salvation Army. She works in non-profit. She could double her income in corporate America tomorrow, but to her, the money represented Daddy being gone and she didn't like it.

[00:20:57] Sean Steele: Wow. That's a tough lesson. Can I ask how you think about risk taking in your business? Like how, I've got a friend who I just love the way, you know, I'm typically pretty, I don’t know what the right word is - Pro risk, like taking bets, like I'll happily take risk on, I'm not a super sceptical think about all the possible consequences kind of guy. I had a good colleague who's a great entrepreneur and every time we have a conversation about deal he's making or a new business he's creating, it's always about, and this is how I've protected my downside. It's always trying to ring fences risk. How do you think about risk taking and how do you sort of still pursue growth but minimise your downside? How do you think about that?

[00:21:39] Brian Will: I'm more like your friend. I got to be honest, but I do it from a point of asking questions. So, if we're going to start down a new road or start a new business, the first thing we do is we start asking every single possible question we can ask. I play devil's advocate on everything. You think it's great, I will come up with five reasons why it's not. You think this is going to work, I'll come up with the five reasons why it's not, not because I'm trying to be negative, it's because I'm trying to protect my downside, because I want to be prepared. If you tell me we have a risk of X, fine, how would we possibly get around X if and when that happens? And it's much like, it's weird, but I don't know how you are, but like, if I'm about to go in and have a sales presentation, I practice my presentation. If I'm about to have to go fire somebody, I practice what I'm going to say. If I'm about to argue with my spouse, I go practice what I'm going to say. I do that because I want to be prepared for whatever's going to come at me so I'm not surprised. And that's the way I look at business as well. I got to ask a thousand questions and find out every possible thing that can go wrong. It doesn't mean I'm not going to. It just means I'm going to prepare myself so when that happens, I can go, oh yeah, okay, we got an answer for that, and I can react quickly to whatever is happening to me.

[00:22:51] Sean Steele: Wow. That's so interesting. Like I am, anyone who knows me, who always worked with me in the time will say, you've never met anybody more prepared than Sean Steele. Most detailed notes, most prepared, like if there's every town hall, every major presentation, every client meeting like I am unbelievably prepared. And yet when it comes to taking risks, I don't naturally go to think of all the possible consequences and all the things that could go wrong, which is really interesting. So, what I do is I rely on one of my closest friends who is exactly why I'd like that. I'm like; Hey, I think I could do this and I'd like it to look like this. Tell me all the reasons this is not going to work. And he is just so good at you. So, I recognise it's a real gap of mine. And so, I have to bring people around to kind of fill that because I just know it's not in my nature.

[00:23:37] Brian Will: That’s just super key though. At least you're reaching out and looking for somebody to play that role for you so that you will be prepared. Look, it's willing, taking risk is not that big a deal if you're prepared for the risk that you're taking. Taking silly risks are not, I mean that's crazy. I don't take silly risks.

[00:23:52] Sean Steele: One of my mentors, he was one of the first guys I worked for and I followed around for years, and he always said just in his own private investments, he said, well, look, I don't ever risk any more than sort of, you know, 10-15. Like I need to know that I would, even if I made it 5 million tomorrow, I would still only risk 10 to 15% of that in the next venture. I would never risk the whole thing and go, oh, if I put all that in, then I could get that, you know, it could be 10 times. He's like, I don't think that way. I'm always then protecting that downside by thinking…

[00:24:19] Brian Will: My personal risk threshold is that I will risk my income and not my assets.

[00:24:25] Sean Steele: Ah-ha.

[00:24:26] Brian Will: Right? So, I have a pretty high income today, and I will risk every dollar of it. If I make a million and a half dollars this year, I'll invest a million and a half dollars. I'm just not going to touch my assets. I'm not touching my stock, not touching my cash, not touching my real estate. I'll risk my income because I know it's going to come in again next year so that risk doesn't bother me.

[00:24:43] Sean Steele: Ah, I like that. Yeah. It's really interesting psychology. What do you think are some of the unappreciated, or sort of not talked about skills or traits that help people really succeed in entrepreneurship?

[00:24:57] Brian Will: I think the biggest one that I try to tell entrepreneurs is on the financial side, you've really, really, really got to know your numbers. You don't have to be the person in there. being the CFO or counting the dollars. But you really need to understand the numbers in your organisation, and this is not even for young entrepreneurs. I've done consulting for Fortune 500 companies and the people that run those things don't understand the numbers, it fascinates me.

[00:25:22] Sean Steele: Oh yeah.

[00:25:23] Brian Will: And you give them a simple formula on how to I call it bottom up P&L, we don't look at organisations from a top down. We look at it from the bottom up. Because if I can fix a P&L, and I call every individual salesperson an individual P&L, because every organization has to sell something. So, your salespeople have a P&L. It's fixed opex, it's variable opex, it's cost of marketing and then what you're paid and whether they generate a profit. And it's fascinating for people to go, oh, I've never thought of that. I'm always like, yeah, more people does not equal more profit. More revenue does not equal more profit. Profit starts at the bottom of the organisation and works its way up. And I can tell you, every organisation, a sales organisation I've gone in to, we end up firing 20-25% of the sales staff and revenue never takes a hit

[00:26:10] Sean Steele: Yep.

[00:26:11] Brian Will: Because I take the lead generation in marketing and I throw it over the people that are actually producing.

[00:26:15] Sean Steele: That are actually good at it. Yeah.

[00:26:15] Brian Will: They make more money. The organisation makes more money with less overhead. I can give you an example after example of how I do this, and it's really about building that bottom-up P&L marketing that we then go in and say, okay, Joe, I know you think you're selling, but you're actually losing money for the organisation, so you either need to correct or I don't know what to. So, it's understanding the financials.

[00:26:35] Sean Steele: Yeah, I completely agree. And if you've grown up in an environment where you've just never been exposed to it, then you better find yourself a good virtual CFO to kind of help to learn from and go; Hey, unpack this thing for me. Tell me how I should be thinking about this. Ask me really hard questions so I can get better understanding. Like to your point, you know, my first executive role where I probably had, I don't know, 70 million budget or something, I didn't know I had to read a balance sheet whatsoever. Like I'd seen, you know, I'd looked at P&Ls, but primarily from a sales perspective because I'd grown up in sales. And so, I didn't understand the rest of it, really. So, I had to go and take myself to, you know, post-grad school and do corporate finance and all that stuff to actually get my head around it and then lean on my peers, you know, and CFOs and management accountants and stuff to improve my understanding of it. And I’m always, always still learning, big time.

[00:27:23] Brian Will: It's a critical skillset.

[00:27:25] Sean Steele: And I think, you know, one other point on that is I see so many Founders do these kind of top level budgeting, like, I don't know I've been trained to make everything a bottom up budget, right? It's like if you're going to build your budget for next year, you start from the assumptions that we spend no money on anything and you sort of re-justify everything. Think about that supplier. Is that the right cost base? You know, if we do actually still need that thing, like don't just assume because it was there last year, you should add 5%, or 10% or whatever the number is. And just do a really lazy budget. Like that helps you understand your numbers from the bottom up if you kind of zero based budget it.

[00:27:59] Brian Will: A hundred percent. You're right.

[00:28:00] Sean Steele: Looking ahead, Brian, what are your goals and aspirations for both of your business, but also for your personal life, and what do you think you are going to have to prioritise to achieve those?

[00:28:09] Brian Will: You know, I've done so many different careers. I call this, I'm on my seventh career today from landscaping to insurance, to technology, to restaurants, and I talk about in my book the difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Most of your people, if not all of your people here are business owners if they're building something that has intrinsic value, that has a potential exit at the end of the day. But with that comes, you know, a lot of the headaches of business. I have 150 employees today, and I just got sued by the EEOC again for something that some employee did to another employee that I've never met. And now the EEOC is coming after me. After a while that, that starts to grind on me. So honestly, my personal future is I'm looking to sell the restaurant chain, the real estate I'm keeping, because it's all passive income. And I am shifting my, I'll call it my career goals or my next career into working with young, we call it well funded startups to 10 million in revenue that are looking for mentoring and not coaching, right? I'm not here to do the fluffy stuff and I'm here to say, look, this is the deal, this is how it works and this is what you need to do. So that's my next big push is moving into the mentoring role for these entrepreneurs, because I've got enough experience that we can bring down to these guys and, and help them, like you've said in the past, go from seven to eight figures right and beyond, so to speak.

[00:29:34] Sean Steele: Nice. Well, I'm excited to follow along and see how that plays out. Brian, I'm sure you and I have got lots of opportunities to chat given what, you know, kind of in a similar space. I've got one last question for you, and I'm thinking about if you were to take a long look back and look at all of your successes, but also all your failures as an entrepreneur, what advice you'd give to Founders, I should say who are going well, who are in seven figures, but who really want to, but struggling to kind of make that transition to eight and beyond, which does require a sort of step change in the way that you think about your business. What advice would you give them?

[00:30:07] Brian Will: You said it earlier, Sean, and, and it's very fortunate that apparently the folks that you're working with understand that they don't know how to get to that next level. And I have a key phrase in my book. I say, stop chasing the advice of billionaires, right? Because billionaires can't help you. I use the example of if you own a trucking company and you're moving product between LA and San Francisco, and your people keep getting stuck in traffic every day, you're going to have to figure out a new way to move it, you know, at night or in off hours, or, that's how you're going to figure it out. Elon Musk, when he got stuck in traffic between LA and San Francisco, he said, screw this. I'm going to build a tunnel underground. Okay? He thinks differently. We can't do that. His advice isn't going to help you. So, I tell people, if you need to get to that next level, you need to find that person that has done that, and they've taken it from 7 to 8 or even 8 to 9, who's 10 steps ahead of you, not a thousand steps. Who has recent relevant experience in how to get there and just say, look man, get on my board of advisors, get on my board of directors and come in here and talk me through this because you figured out the key to get there and I don't know what it is yet. So, check your ego, find that person that can help you and then listen to them.

[00:31:19] Sean Steele: I love that. And you know, when I first decided to build this podcast and of course blank canvas, right? It's like, well who do I really want to bring on this podcast? And I was very deliberate and have continued to be deliberate to not go after people, not go after Founders who are like, 500 million, a billion, multiple billions just because of the notoriety and the celebrity. And I was like, that is not helpful to a seven figure Founder. To your point, maybe it's a bit of inspiring, but it's not practical. And I want people to have practical advice and therefore that's why the Founders who succeeded are in, usually in high eight or nine figure businesses. But yeah, they're close enough and recent enough to having done the thing to be able to explain how they did the thing.

[00:32:00] Brian Will: And it's amazing how they'll go, look, I tried that. It didn't work. This is what I did. If you'll do exactly what I'm telling you here, it will work for you too. And then you go, holy crap, I never thought of that. And then now you've moved. But here's the thing, these entrepreneurs got to get their egos in check and you're telling me the folks you work with do. But they got to get their ego in check and be willing to take that advice and listen, because you know, we're all hard driving red a personality. We think we're right all the time. We make fast decisions and you know, you got to get that thing in check and let somebody come in and do what they do best and help you.

[00:32:34] Sean Steele: I love that, Brian. I'm really grateful for your time today, but also I'd just like, like to acknowledge the way that you've built these businesses, because what I feel from you is this really, this success has come off the blend of humility and courage, you know, the ability to take risks, but also the, the ability to learn and open your mind to the fact that maybe you don't know everything and that you had to kind of constantly learn from others along the way. And I love that you're making that transition in life to being able to go, okay, now how do I codify this and help other people? Do it because you know how life changing it can be. And that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be financial. Yes, it could be financially life changing, but all to your point like, if you are able to get out of working a hundred hours a week and never seeing your family and get back to something that's reasonable, that is life changing. And if you can help somebody do that, that's unbelievably rewarding. It's one of the things I love most about what I get to do. Brian, if people who wanted to sort of follow along with your journey, hear what you're doing in the future at mentoring, like, where would you direct them to?

[00:33:30] Brian Will: Yeah, go to my website. It's www.brianwillmedia.com. BrianWillMedia.com, and my podcast shows on there. My books are on there. All everything's on there, so that's easy.

[00:33:41] Sean Steele: Beautiful. Folks, if you've enjoyed today, we of course really appreciate if you subscribe, leave us a review or share Brian's episode with someone that you know who'd love it. We would, I'm sure he and I would greatly appreciate it, just gets his wisdom into the hands of more people. And if you'd actually like to learn about how to build a kick ass growth strategy for your business, then you are in luck because after creating a hundred million bucks in revenue in for four companies over eight years, with myself and my team, uh, I'm now starting to, I'm putting together those lessons to share with seven figure Founders, trying to break through to eight and beyond in my inaugural scale up roadmap course, and the doors open in early May for the very first time, and they're only going to open three times a year. So, if you want to find all at all about it, just go to scaleupsroadmap.com au. Pop your name on the wait list, and we will share with you all the details as they come available. But please join me in thanking Brian, uh, really grateful for your time.

[00:34:31] Brian, you've been listening to the ScaleUps Podcast. I'm Sean Steele and I will chat to you all next week. Thanks again, Brian.

[00:34:36] Brian Will: Thank you.