How To Be Successful With A New Startup Company In A New Country With No Connections With Susan Kish
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
In today’s episode, we talk about how to be successful with a new startup company in a new country with no connections, which our guest, Susan Kish, has done. Susan Kish is working on her own startup, is working inside large companies, she’s had successful exits, and she’s raised money. She talks about not having to have an exit strategy for certain industries, the timeframe that inventors expect to make profit from their investment, and so much more. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Be Successful With A New Startup Company In A New Country With No Connections With Susan Kish
Hello and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Susan Kish, working for her own startup, working inside large companies, she’s had successful exits, she’s raised money. She just has such a huge background starting with graduating from Harvard and going into banking and then being the director of Knowledge Services at Bloomberg, all the way up to being the CEO and founder, dealing as a business development consultant with companies focused in transition. As if that’s not enough, she recently became a Connections Science Fellow at MIT Media Lab and is currently working as a senior advisor to a handful of Fortune 100 clients in media, energy and finance. Susan, welcome.
Thank you so much, John. I’m delighted to be here.
Let’s take a deep dive. Take us back to getting out of Harvard, 1980, what are you going to do with your life, how did you go from that to where you are now?
I can assure you, it never crossed my mind that I would be an entrepreneur, that wasn’t a career path, wasn’t something folks talk about at that time. If we thought of an entrepreneur then, it was Richard Branson in Virgin. I’m not even sure he was around then. I went to work for Chase Manhattan Bank, who at that time had a fantastic training program. It was like an MBA for a first graduate. I’d major in history and science, which was a fascinating area to major in. Not really good on the what you do next category.
How To Be Successful: I really loved building businesses, that that was really what made me happy to work until whatever hours.
But a bank like Chase was extremely happy at that time to hire liberal arts graduates and basically put them through a training program that taught you all about accounting and taught you about finance and taught you about corporate finance, M&A and it was really a terrific foundation. It was wonderful at that time to being a banker. I was at Chase for five years and then at UBS for close to fifteen. In retrospect, I was what was now called an intrapreneur. We didn’t have a term at the time. I started a series of business, launched a series of products and found that I really loved building businesses, that that was really what made me happy to work until whatever hours and happy to work whatever is required.
Can you tell us the story of one of those businesses you started as an intrapreneur?
One example would be municipal finance. UBS, this is the late 90s, UBS was a AAA rated Swiss bank. At that point, when I joined them in the late 90s, ’95 I think was when I started, I joined them in ’85. This would be the early 90s when they had me starting this for finance group. UBS had decided that there was an opportunity in the domestic, meaning the US based municipal finance sector, but they didn’t know what that opportunity was. I had started a broker dealer business lending to broker dealers. The branch manager called me up one day and said, “Susan, we want you to start a municipal finance business.”
I had no idea about what this sector entailed or what our positions should be. They gave me probably a month to immerse myself in the sector. I came back and I said, “There’s a niche called credit enhancement.” That’s where we use our credit rating to take the risk and provide investors with the security of a note issue, a revenue bond, a municipal bond. He said, “That sounds great.” I came back with a three page business plan and it was all systems go. We built a small team and within probably three, four years, we were the leading provider of credit enhancement. It was a wonderful niche market and it became a very profitable business for the bank.
How wonderful. Great experience. You really had the inside scoop as to what it takes to make a startup inside a big company, not instantly but certainly sooner than later, profitable, which is always a great sign of success.
I think so too. It also taught you patience. You don’t turn that around, you don’t build a business like that in six months to a year. I consistently found that when I worked at UBS. I needed to budget myself three to five years to get a business to pivot to the right place for you to find a niche and to build from there and to build something sustainable and something with significant impact. I’ve actually seen that consistently in my career. Big businesses rarely happen in the three to six months timeframe that we’re all seduced by these days. Businesses often take that three year plus to really make sure you got traction, you’re in the right market, you’ve positioned and priced it right.
[Tweet “How To Be Successful: Big business success rarely happens in 3 to 6 month”]
I love it. We’re going to tweet that out, “Big businesses rarely happen in three to six months.” That should grab somebody’s attention. From there, you’re working at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London. You’re traveling the world and learning all kinds of things. One of the things I see here is that you were involved with Coding for Non-Coders. Let’s talk about that since that’s a big topic for you with your TED Talk.
There were a couple of years in there when I was a classic entrepreneur with a variety of different forms and exits.
Let’s hear about that because everybody loves to hear a story about somebody who has a successful exit. Please, tell us one of those.
When I left UBS, it was to start my own company in Zurich, which was of course the triple challenge. You’re starting a new company and in a country where you don’t speak the language and where you actually don’t really know that many people and don’t know that much about building a business.
That’s the three Cs right there. A new company in a new country with no connections.
Add to that, the fourth C, which is the language, though that doesn’t start with a C. It was a fantastic learning experience. I found it exhilarating. Having been in a large corporation for all of my 20 years as a banker, being liberated to start something up in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was so much fun and so energizing, it was fantastic. We sold in the end, we sold that company to a … That company was a, in retrospect, I call it business think tank. It was focused on introducing the investors to entrepreneurs, it was focused on pulling together diverse perspectives to deal with, at that time, the very tough emerging questions about sectors. We sold that company to a firm called XING, which was the German LinkedIn. Then I joined a friend of mine, Michael Liebreich, who was building a clean energy research company called New Energy Finance. In turn, we sold that firm to Bloomberg in 2009.
Let me just ask you two questions right there, because so many people want to know, did you have an exit strategy at the very beginning or is this something that just evolved?
How To Be Successful: Given a choice of an investor who’s building to flip and an investor who wants to build a great business, I’d go for the latter every time.
For First Tuesday, I can say with complete confidence, we did not have an exit strategy. First Tuesday was part of a global network that had started in London. We were part of the first wave or expansion. In the beginning, it was simply a cocktail party that worked up and turned into a business. An exit strategy was the last thing in our mind. Over time, we had found a sustainable business model turn more into a professional services firm. This predates LinkedIn, it predates Meetup, it predates so much of the technologies that we find ubiquitous today. That firm was also really affected by the collapse of the dot-com world and then by 9/11 and the nuclear freeze that happened after that. I would say that we never had a strategy of building to sell or building to flip. In fact, in my experience, I think given a choice of an investor who’s building to flip, an investor who wants to build a great business, I’d go for the latter every time. There’s a different commitment, there’s a different frame of mind, there’s a different sense of timeframe. One is being built for generations and sustainability and one is being built for whatever is going to get you a bang for your buck.
Let me ask you Susan, because you’re the perfect person to answer this. If you as an investor are looking to find a founder who’s not interested in selling it in three to five years, which is sometimes investors want that because they go, “Oh, then I can get my money back in three to five years at a high return, but instead, I’m willing to invest in you because you’re not going to sell in three to five years.” How do the investors typically see themselves getting their money back as the company just doesn’t go public or doesn’t get bought but just keeps getting bigger and bigger? Is it that the revenues are so huge that the percent of the company that they own is giving them some kind of residuals?
That’s an extremely interesting question. It comes up a lot in the energy and industrial sector. I do a lot of work with energy venture investors. I started a conference with Emerald VC. Emerald Technologies is a VC based in Zurich. They were one of the leaders in clean energy financing in early 2000s. We still convene as investor for them fifteen years later. What you found is that, in that sector, in contrast with much of a consumer based digital technology, you cannot invest with the intent you’re going to get out in two to four years. Industrial applications, most B2B applications really don’t get enough traction or scale to make an exit within that timeframe.
Yet, investors are needed because these companies have huge amounts of value to create and they need that financing to bridge them from the idea, the garage to the incubator, to the first office and beyond. I think typically how these investors view it is that they are building it to scale for the longer term and that often means, from an investor perspective, that you’re looking for an investment where you see a strategic investor in there from a very early stage. An energy investor for example, maybe there are two or three standalone VCs who are in there but they’re really happy when an ABB comes in, they’re really happy when a GE Ventures comes in because that gives you a path to hopefully on one hand a sales force, an application, a way to really leverage the technology. It also gives you the hint of maybe there’s an exit at some point down the road.
Got it.
How To Be Successful: As an investor, you’re looking for probably more of a strategic sale than your whiz-bang unicorn based billion IPO.
It’s a different perspective because in that case, you’re typically, as an investor, you’re looking for probably more of a strategic sale than your whiz-bang unicorn based billion IPO.
If customers become investors and then sometimes investors become the people that buy you or someone on your advisory board becomes your exit strategy, it all ends up in a way that the investors get their money back, it’s just done in a different strategy. Is that accurate?
I think so. Also it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get a multiple for your investment. It just means you probably need to be a bit more patient and you need to have a long view in mind.
Yes, especially if you’re going to wait that long then you want the multiple to be higher as well typically. Let’s dive into your TED Talk about Coding for Non-Coders and how your whole philosophy is how important it is to stay relevant. I watched it. It was fascinating and riveting. It’s always the unexpected that grabs people’s attention in any kind of a pitch or a talk. Bring that talk to life a little bit for us.
For me at Bloomberg, I was working for the CEO, managing the portfolio of innovate projects. Typically, that involved two or more divisions of the firm. I was frustrated when I had the opportunity to work with the tech folks and the engineers because they were making decisions, evaluating options and positioning initiatives in ways that I didn’t really get it. It was hard for me. You can only ask a stupid question so many times. At the same time, I was seeing that there were all these fantastic learning to code initiatives going around and yet they were all focused to, I don’t know, teenagers or first time entrepreneurs, people in their teens and 20s. Yet, what I was seeing was my generation, senior executives were needed to have that same understanding because there was really no channel with which they could do that in a gracious way that fit in their schedule.
It’s almost like you’re speaking a different language literally.
Absolutely. In my generation or when I started working, you had to understand the difference between an account receivable and account payable. You just needed to know that. Now, I think you need to know the difference between JavaScript and Java. You need to understand what’s the difference between building for an Apple, for an iPhone and Android. You need to understand what the functionality is, what the impact of your resource decision. The decision to learn to code was for me a decision of one hand of maintaining relevance, on the other to be able to have a voice in those resource and strategic conversations. It was a decision also of curiosity. It’s clear to me that the world is becoming more, not less, digital. Just saying it works or it’s a black box doesn’t make it. I don’t think that allows you to make an intelligent decision. Also, it was to me, the heroes of this age are the folks in California, the technology entrepreneurs. They’re not the heroes of Wall Street anymore. I wanted to understand what it was that made that difference, why it was that this series of entrepreneurs often who had come from an engineering and tech background, what was their magic sauce?
[Tweet “How To Be Successful: Stay curious to stay relevant.”]
We’re going to tweet out your line there, “Stay curious to stay relevant.” That’s such a great takeaway.
It is critical I think as we do it. What I found in Learning How to Code was it was on one hand breathtakingly, humiliating is not the right term, but really brought your feet to the fire because you had to figure out how to write a line of code, you had to figure out that if you put the period in the wrong place or used a comma instead of a semicolon, the whole damn thing will be screwed up. You needed to not just learn one language. At that time, I was building a website, an online magazine because I wanted to read articles from Bloomberg News in a more pleasant way. I found I had to actually master three to four languages, I had to have an aesthetics sense, I need to have design, I needed to understand problems, you had to apply logic. All these things had to come together. It was hard for me to do because I’m not an engineer by background. It was also hard for me because a classic executive schedule is broken to 15 minute or 30 minute chunks during the day. To actually do this, you need to be able to zone in for one hour to three hours.
Do you think your experience learning a new language in a new country helped you learn this new coding language?
To a certain extent, it did. On the other hand, it was illusory because when you learn a language, let’s say, you’re travelling in Italy, you can always get away with half a dozen words of those languages and pointing and sign language. You can communicate. People are forgiving. Coding is not forgiving.
That’s so true. One little thing is often, “Forget it.” I love it. Let’s dive into what you’re diving now with being the advisor to so many of these Fortune 100 companies in this media energy finance. Is that some trifecta that I’m not 100% familiar with? I know about energy and finance, but the media part is new to me.
I think what is common for all those sectors is that they are sectors at various stages of transition. To some extent, media was really a leader in that. The transformation of the web, whether it’s newspapers or print or magazines, continues. The business models and the relevance of those players is, it’s played out in everything we see. The other of course, transformation media was the telcos, the battle of the telcos and the voice over IP providers, the battle of the telcos and cable. We continue to see that. Yesterday, I got something from Verizon trying to make sure that I didn’t cut the cable. I already did cut the cable. What’s interesting between that sector and, let’s say, financial services or energy is that those are two sectors that are I think in early stages of complete transformation. For banking, you can’t read about financial services without reading about the surge of fin tech and reading about, gosh, what is it that Facebook’s thinking about? What is it that Google is thinking about?
Just the way that we all send payments now, you can use PayPal, you can use Venmo. Who needs a bank?
How To Be Successful: The change is not going to happen in a year but the world will look very different in ten years.
When was the last time you physically walked into a bank? Financial services and not just banking, banking, insurance, reinsurance, the whole panoply of those services is undergoing transformation and there’s such inertia and there’s such a huge amount of regulation that prevents these guys from being nimble. The change is not going to happen in a year but the world will look very different in ten.
Those companies have their own venture capital division now looking for startups because they can’t be as nimble as they need to be and they want to invest to stay cutting edge.
A firm like Goldman Sachs has really shown that actually you could do that very powerfully. They have put a lot of money into that area. They’ve put a lot of emphasis in some of their best talent in that area. Their technology is increasingly viewed as really an interesting view. You can see what these financial institutions are doing around the technology like blockchain to find out where they’re trying to experiment and where they are fighting to maintain. Again, I would argue their relevance in that world.
What do you do Susan, when you’re advising some of these executives in these industries that are going through such disruptive change? How do you help them through this transition? Do you work on a long term plan? Do you work on short term plans? What do you find consistent things that all of these industries in huge transition need your advice on?
It probably would go down to three things, one is the classic issue of strategy. How we position ourselves and our firms so that the words in our mission statement are more than just words. Every business plan says something about innovation. Every business plan is something about repositioning. How do you actually translate that into something that’s not window dressing? Even VCs, there were just recently some research done in these months, I think Harvard Business Review article, about VCs, corporate VCs are increasingly focused on financing return, not strategic return.
Because it’s easier to measure a financial return, it’s harder to measure a strategic return. How do you reconcile those conflicting messages? I think that’s area number one, is around strategy. Area number two is around questions of what’s perceived as thought leadership. If you are in a sector, let’s say you’re a data company and you’re trying to ensure that your product remains relevant, top of mind, ahead of the curve, something that’s going to help your own clients transform, how do you do that? There are a gazillion data companies out there. What is it that’s going to make that difference so that somebody says yes to your product?
[Tweet “How To Be Successful: What is the difference for somebody to say yes to you?”]
It’s not being seen as a commodity if you’re an architect firm for example. “Everybody could design this.” “No, we have a unique something that keeps us ahead of the curve.”
That’s right. You’ve been in sales for many years. You know it’s difficult to actually make a distinctive, to genuinely show that there is a distinctive difference and it’s not just window dressing, it’s not just a spin to it. The third area is, actually through working with them, is driving real innovation. That typically means helping them get out of their comfort zone, helping them work across their divisions and sometimes helping them work with outside players. Because sometimes all those talents, your firm itself may have a huge amount of talent but if they’re not given a safe zone, it’s tougher than to go out there and really try and experiment. It gets back to where we started, which was you don’t deliver that in three to six months.
Exactly.
You need to have that patience.
Love it. That’s so great. When you had a successful exit for your next one before you had to exit there, did you have to raise money? Did you have to pitch and raise money for the second company that had the exit?
Yes, we did. We needed to raise a second round before we did our exit. That was fascinating because at this point, New Energy Finance, this was mainly led by the founder CEO, Michael Liebreich and the senior executive team was a component of that. We had to figure out a balance between demonstrating where our potential was and demonstrating where our tangible benefit was. The tangible benefit was, “Here’s all the research that we produced, here’s the unique data sets that we’ve created, here’s our pipeline, here’s our existing clients.” That shows where the tangible benefit and the track record is. But effectively by asking for that next round, we were asking for the money to go to the next stage. We were asking people to buy into what the potential was.
Really I think the key takeaway for me is having had a successful exit under your belt, when you go to pitch for a second round of funding on your other company, there’s so much more credibility built up because you’ve already done it once successfully, the investors are much more confident in investing in you, the jockey, that you’re going to figure out how to do it again.
That’s exactly right. Also, I think there’s a difference when you have gone through that first round and you have looked how much cash you have in the bank and were your revenues are coming in and you’ve decided that you need to cinch your belt. Investors appreciate when you have gone through that kind of process. It’s remarkably easy to spend money. If you’re a well funded startup, the temptation to get lovely new offices and fancy furniture and Tuesday catered lunch is, those are marks of stature. Sometimes you need to look at it and go, “You know what, my revenue’s flattening out. This isn’t going quite the way. I’m going to have to pivot. I have to make the tough decisions.” That typically means an investor needs to know that you can make that pivot. You can say, “From now on, every penny is a hostage until released at gun point.”
That’s fantastic. What a great line. “Every penny is a hostage until released at gun point.” I love it. We’re going to tweet that out.
[Tweet “How To Be Successful: Every penny is a hostage unless released at gun point.”]
It is a flip of mindset for companies. In an environment where perhaps you’re nervous about raising that next round or perhaps you’re hearing that it takes a little bit longer to close that next round or perhaps you’re nervous about the outlook in your sector. Your ability as a CEO to make the hard decision needs to be seen as a sign of strength and a sign of resilience, not as a sign of giving up or sign of weakness.
Nice. Strength and resilience, what a great place to end the podcast. Susan, is there a book you’d like to recommend for people to read?
Actually, there is. I’ve been reading Behind the Clouds: The Untold Story of How Salesforce Grew by Marc Benioff. I have been really struck by how he talks about the power of events. For him to turn his customers into his partners or turn his audience into a community and to really harness the power of live events and live interaction to help drive his business. Somebody who has used events or been surprised over and over again at the power of events to put you on the same side of the table as your clients, he articulates it really well.
Susan, how can people keep in touch with you?
The easiest way is probably through [email protected]. I do a fair amount of work both in conferences and in speaking engagements. That’s probably the best way to find out what I’m up to.
Wonderful. Thanks so much for being on the show, Susan. You’ve been a fascinating guest.
Thank you so much, John. You’re a wonderful interviewer.
Thanks.
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Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade – Dr. Robert Cialdini
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career researching the science of influencing and earning him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance and negotiation. His new book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade is now becoming a Wall Street Journal and New York Time’s Bestseller as well . He’s frequently regarded as “the godfather of influence”.
Listen To The Episode Here
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade – Dr. Robert Cialdini
Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Dr. Robert Cialdini who has spent his entire career researching the science of influencing and earning him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance and negotiation. His books including Influence, Science and Practice are the result of decades of peer reviewed research on why people comply with request. Influence has sold an impressive three million plus copies. It’s a New York Time’s Bestseller and it’s been published in over, get this, 30 languages. His new book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade is now becoming a Wall Street Journal and New York Time’s Bestseller as well because of this worldwide recognition, his cutting edge scientific research and his ethical business and policy applications. He’s frequently regarded as “the godfather of influence”. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. I’m pleased to be with you and your followers.
It’s so fascinating to see your interesting and worldwide global influence, obviously, on people. One of the questions I always like to ask my guests is, you’ve been on Larry King, you have clients like Google and Microsoft and a wide variety of insurance companies and obviously, Harvard University, when you were first starting your career, did you ever imagine you would have this kind of influence in the world?
I never did, John. That expectation was confirmed for the first three or four years of my book, Influence, which pretty much did nothing when it first came out. Then all of a sudden, it started to sell, reaching bestseller levels where it stayed ever since. The best I can interpret that is in terms of something that happened in the society that we live in. Right around that time when it started to sell, the idea of evidence based decision making began to take over the major institutions of our society. Business, government, education, fundraising, even sports. People needed to make their decisions based on data, based on evidence. The book Influence at the time had provided a compendium of research based evidence on how to get people to say yes to a request or a proposal or a recommendation. It was all right there in this one place. I think that’s what accounts for the popularity of the book ever since.
Fascinating. It didn’t just start off as a bestseller. I think when someone sees your kind of influence and success, they just assume, “He’s never had to overcome any challenges or obstacles in your life,” but it sounds like it wasn’t a hit from the get go from what you just said.
That fits with the thesis of the new book, Pre-Suasion, is that it doesn’t matter how good a seed you have, if the ground hasn’t been prepared ahead of time, it’s not going to bear fruit until that cultivation is done. Something else has to happen first for the thing really to get leverage and traction.
[bctt tweet=”Pre-Suasion: Plant seeds in fertile soil to get a yes.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You talk about that in your book Pre-Suasion where it says, “There’s a privileged moment for change that you need to have to get people to be receptive to your message.” Can you expound upon that? I love the analogy of the fruit of soil.
Privileged moments are those moments that occur just before a message is delivered so as to create a state of mind in recipients that’s consistent with the forthcoming message. It’s the moment in which we can arrange for others to be attuned to our message before they encounter it. That step is crucial for maximizing desired change. For example, in one study, when researchers approached individuals and asked for help with the marketing survey, only 29% agreed to participate. If the researchers approached a second sample and preceded that request with a simple presuasive question, “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Now, 77.3% volunteered to help with the survey. Why? When asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone answered yes. Then when the request occurred, most agreed to participate in order to be consistent with the recently activated idea of themselves as helpful people.
I was listening to one of your talks that you gave on your website, the clip about how important it is to have somebody else edify or talk you up, introduce you before you get up and plant that seed. I think that’s so important. When people are pitching an investor, there’s a big need for a warm introduction. What I define as a warm introduction, I’d love your opinion on this, is not just meet so and so, but you need to really talk up why you like that person, why you think they’d be a good person to invest in so that that person doesn’t have to “start from ground zero”, that the soil is already fertile, to use your analogy.
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Exactly. This goes all the way through your organization. We have an office in the UK. My colleague, Steven J. Martin there, did a little experiment with a realty firm that was having trouble converting callers into customers. They’re located in London. He took a look at what a receptionist said when she received a call. Typically, she would say, “Are you interested in commercial real estate or residential real estate? In what part of London, is it Knightsbridge, is it Bloomsbury?” Then she would say after getting that information, “Let me connect you to one of our realtors.” What Steve had her change was to say, “Let me connect you to Clive who’s our expert in commercial real estate in Knightsbridge. Or let me connect you to Sarah who’s had fifteen years of experience with residential real estate in Bloomsbury.” That produced a 16% increase in conversion from calls to customers. Here’s what I love about this. That receptionist was doing it anyway. She was sending the caller to the expert in that arena. She just didn’t say so.
I love it. This really goes to what you talked about in Pre-Suasion, which is, “It’s not just what to say, but when to say it.” We’re going to tweet that out. That’s such a great line. Because when you’re pitching an investor, you need to decide, “When do I say this really impressive thing about myself? Do I say it at the beginning or do I wait until the team slide comes up?” All that strategy, just trying to figure out what to say or when to say it is really the key.
[bctt tweet=”Pre-Suasion: To be influential, it’s not just what to say, but when to say it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let me give you something as an example that Warren Buffett does every year in his annual reports to shareholders. I happen to be a shareholder. I’ve been getting the letters to shareholders for fifteen years now. Here’s what he does on the first page, first or second page. He mentions a weakness, he mentions something that went wrong the previous year. That establishes him as honest about everything he says, and then he describes the strengths.
I love what you just said there because so many investors tell me time and again, we have to trust this person before we can even like them. You have to be completely candid and transparent because if you’re not in the pitch, it’ll come out in due diligence and the deal will fall through. Being a little vulnerable and being upfront that you may not have all the answers or may you have had a problem or you had to pivot or whatever the issue is is so important to build trust that you don’t come across as a know it all or arrogant.
Buffett’s brilliance in this is that he puts it first so that it colors everything he says next. Typically, the weakness is the things that went wrong or buried in a footnote at the end of the report. No, Buffett says, “Look, I’m honest. I need people to recognize that before they go through the material, all of the material that I have to present.” Because now, they’re experiencing that information as coming from a credible source, a trustworthy source.
You also write about, in Pre-Suasion, the importance of channeling people’s attention. I love the story of you being a palm reader at a party. What you get people to focus on really influences what they think is important.
That’s right. I learned that if I said to somebody after bending back their thumb, “I can see you’re a stubborn person,” they will go through a memory exercise and they will find a time when they were stubborn. They’ll say, “That’s right.” But if I said instead, “I can tell you’re a flexible person.” They’ll go through a different direction. It’ll be another memory exercise but an opposite one, to find times when they were flexible. They’d hit one. We’re all flexible and we’re all stubborn. They’d say, “You’re right.” I’ve put them in a place where they believe what I’m about to say now about their flexibility. If I were to say something that required them to be flexible, because I’ve got a brand new idea or initiative where they’ve got to get out of their old habit and into this new way of thinking, what I have to do is ask them about their flexibleness first.
It goes full circle to what you just said at the beginning of the podcast episode, which is, do you consider yourself a helpful before asking someone to fill out a survey. It’s such a great example.
There was another example of where they simply walked up to people and gave them a flyer that allowed them to get a brand new product, a new soft drink. If at the top of the flyer it said, “Do you consider yourself an adventurous person?” Now, people were almost two and a half times more likely to go ahead and provide the information that would allow them to access this new product. You put people in mind of a particular concept, it becomes focal in consciousness. It’s top of mind. What’s top of mind drives behavior.
You talk about that there’s all kinds of ways to command attention. Boy, if you’re given just ten minutes to pitch, you have to grab that attention in the first 90 seconds. There’s different types of attention grabber techniques. One you said is the attractor and then there’s something you wrote about called, am I pronouncing this right, the magnetizers?
Pre-Suasion: People need to know the answers to mysteries. We all have a need for closure.
Yes, those that hold attention. The one that I like these days, besides something like credibility, which of course, you want to listen to people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy, but I like the idea of beginning your pitch with a mystery story. “How could it be that our idea …” Let’s say you’ve got to write a project or a company and you want people to invest in it. How could it be that something that’s only five months old has gotten a better market share than various companies that have been around for a long time? What would it be? You know what, your listener needs to know the answer to that because people need to know the answers to mysteries. We all have a need for closure.
That open loop. Can’t stay open, it causes us anxiety, doesn’t it?
Now, that you set this up as a mystery, they’re going to process the details of what you tell them because to sell the mystery, you have to understand the details. You’ve arranged for them to pay special attention to the complexities of your case because they need the details to solve the mystery for themselves.
It’s so good. Another thing that’s so important in influencing people, and you talk about this in Pre-Suasion, is we relationships. Not just being together but acting together. Can you tell us a little more about that?
People who act in cooperative togetherness kinds of ways on some task and can see that they have a common goal that they are moving towards as a unit then become much more cooperative with one another on other topics. One thing for example, here’s something that’s very hot right now in marketing. It’s called co-creation. I think it applies to investors who are making a pitch. Very often, if you’ve got a product or a service or an idea and you want to get support from someone else, you’ll give that person a blueprint or a draft of the plan that you have for it and you will ask for that person’s feedback. Instead of giving me your opinion of what you think of this, that’s typically what we say, “Can you give me your opinion?” That’s a mistake.
It turns out that when you ask for an opinion, people take a half step back psychologically and go inside themselves for the answer. They look inside themselves. They separate from you. Now, if instead you use one different presuasive word, instead of asking of their opinion first, ask for their advice on the plan. They take a half step towards you psychologically. They see themselves as part, in partnership with this idea. The research shows, now they will be more supportive of the idea because you’ve put this togetherness, partnership, unity state of mind installed in them. They will now be more supportive of the idea that you then present to them. I’ll just give you one more example of this togetherness idea, getting this unity thing in mind first.
[Tweet “Pre-Suasion: Don’t ask for someone’s opinion, ask for their advice.”]
There was a study done. This is the study of all of the research in the book Pre-Suasion. Rocked me back in my chair when I read it. It was a study done in Belgium. Researchers brought subjects into an experiment and they showed them photographs, for 1/3 of the subjects, of a single individual standing alone. For a 2/3 of the group, another third of the group, they saw photographs of two individuals standing apart, separate. Third group saw pictures of two individuals standing together, shoulder to shoulder, in a cooperative, unified kind of pose.
Those in whom this togetherness idea had been installed first were three times as likely to help.
Then in all cases, the researcher got up from the table and pretended to drop an array of items onto the floor. The question was, who becomes helpful? Who now cooperates with the researcher by getting down off the chair, onto the floor, hands and knees and helps the researcher pick up these items? There wasn’t any question about it. Those in whom this togetherness idea had been installed first were three times as likely, tripled. Now, that’s not what made me rock back in my chair. It was when I read that the subjects in this experiment, all of them were eighteen months old.
What? That is shocking. Babies. Wow.
They were babies, John.
That’s so young to have that instinct to help.
Only when they were first exposed to the idea of unity. That’s how primitive … I don’t mean that in the negative sense.
No, it’s instinctual.
The elemental sense. That’s how primitive this process is in human functioning. We’d be fools if we didn’t employ it because everybody responds to it. I’ll give you an example that happened to me. A while ago I was working on a project, it had a deadline of the next morning. I got to the last section of the report I was supposed to write and I didn’t have the data I needed but I knew that a colleague of mine had done some research and he did have the data. I sent him an email and I said, “Tom, I need some data. I don’t have the data in my files, I know you do. I’m going to give you a call in a few minutes and ask you to get to your archives and give me that data.” I did call him.
This is a guy who is known for being kind of a disagreeable guy. He works in the psychology department where I am housed for a long time. We’ve known each other. He said, “Bob, I can’t help you on this. I know you need it tomorrow but I’m a busy man too. I can’t be responsible for your poor time management skills. Sorry, can’t help.” John, if I hadn’t read this research, here’s what I would’ve said to him. “Come on, I need this. I’ve got this deadline tomorrow.” Instead I said, “Tom, we’ve been in the same psychology department now for twelve years. I need this. I need it tomorrow.” I had it that afternoon.
There’s an example. There it is, everybody. When to say it. You planted that seed, you showed him that you’re in this together and, “We’ve been doing this for so long so you can’t isolate yourself from your needs versus my needs because we’re part of the same team.”
We’re part of the same, yes, the same membership.
Culture.
The same identity. We share an identity here. He knew that at some level.
But it wasn’t focused.
That’s the bull’s eye insight, John.
Love it. That’s so valuable because now everybody, you can take these lessons and apply it to when you’re pitching your team, that you tell a story about how your team has worked together and why you’ve worked together so well and invite the investor to join that team and get them visualizing themselves, helping you make this disruptive new technology that’s going to change and improve everybody’s lives.
Be sure to ask them for their advice in the process. Now, you’ve got all kinds of stuff going.
Collaboration. One of your talks about reciprocity, you said this great line that I want to tweet out, which is, “You need to invest in people that you want to invest in you.” That is just one of my favorite lines ever.
[Tweet “Pre-Suasion: You need to invest in people that you want to invest in you.”]
We have to figure out, if we want people to benefit us, we have to figure out how can we benefit them first?
Doing some research on them too. You really talk about the importance of that, figure out something that you have in common with them because that really gets your rapport building skills up fast.
Exactly right. Another thing that you do first, establish a sense of some parallel or some commonality. As a result, you establish rapport. People are more likely to say yes to those who are like them because we like people who are like us.
You have to figure out a way to do that. Another one of your talks about this sleuth of influence, you talk about find a reason to smile when you give a talk. I love that because it’s so valuable to people who are nervous pitching for money, you need to smile when you get up there, and not a fake smile but find some reason to smile that’s authentic.
Exactly. I once was advised by a consultant who advises speakers how I could sharpen my platform presentation. We spent about three hours together. I don’t remember anything except one thing he said and that is what you just said. He said, “Before you go on, find a reason to smile at your audience.” He didn’t say, “Before you go on, be sure you remember to smile at your audience in some sort of counterfeit way.” No, find a genuine reason. They will see the authenticity of a genuine smile and now you’ve got a rapport that you wouldn’t have had before.
One of the reasons I love that so much is the investors tell me a lot, “We really want people to be human when they’re pitching. We don’t want to hear a performance, we want to have a conversation, a collaborative conversation.” That little tip you just gave is a huge tip of just starting off with a smile and figuring out a reason to smile that makes you a human and connects them to go like, “She or he likes me and I like him. Now, I trust them and now I’m willing to listen.” I think the importance of liking and trusting people before you’re open to hearing what they have to say can never be overemphasize. You’re the master of that.
What I love about this particular example is we now make it ethical. It’s not something we fabricate, it’s something we locate. What is it in this situation or these people that would make me smile? Because I know somebody out there or because I feel confident at my material, whatever it is. Locate that thing that causes a genuine smile. Now, the newest research shows, people can detect the difference between a genuine smile and a fake smile.
I’m sure. We can feel it too. You can not only see it, but I think you can literally feel it. This whole concept of ethical is so important when people are deciding who they’re going to fund. They’re all deciding between this deal and that deal, they both seem to have the same amount of traction. I’m interested in both. They both seem qualified to execute this idea. It’s going to come down to who do I trust and like, but more importantly, who do I feel is the most ethical use of my money that I’m going to give them. I’d love to have you just talk a little bit about that.
I think we come back again to the Buffett strategy of every case has strengths and weaknesses. What Buffett recognized is you make lemonade out of the lemons by mentioning them in a way that they establish your honesty for the strengths of your case that go next. You wind up being ethical and effective at the same time.
[Tweet “Pre-Suasion: Be ethical and effective at the same time.”]
I love that. Be ethical and effective at the same time. There’s another tweet. This has just been an incredible amount of huge takeaways. I can’t thank you enough. The book again is Pre-Suasion: Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. We’re going to put it in the show notes. It’s available wherever books are sold and online of course. Is there any last bit of tips that you want to give our listeners on what they can find in Pre-Suasion that will persuade them to not only buy the book but make a difference when they’re pitching for funding?
I guess the summing up that I would say is that we’ve always thought that the way to move people optimally in our direction is to operate on the message itself, to go inside the boundaries of the message, make sure that we’ve got it logical, we’ve got it clear, we’ve got it favorable to the best things that we have to offer. That’s true. But there’s new research that says, “If you really want to optimize, if you want to maximize your success, you also have to go to the moment before you deliver your message.” Operate on that and it will give your message special traction.
Love it. What’s the best way for people to follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter handle, all that good stuff?
I think the best way is just to go to our website, which is www.InfluenceAtWork.com. All that information is there.
Fantastic. I can’t thank you enough for all this. Thanks for writing another great book. I know that I’m going to be one of the millions of people who get a great deal out of implementing all the things I’ve read.
Thank you, John. You asked great questions, I have to say.
I appreciate that. That’s a wrap. Thanks again.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Crack The Funding Code!
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How To Sell Your Company for Maximum Value – The Robin Hood for Small Businesses – John Warrillow
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest is John Warrillow. He has a value builders system that creates a score on whether your company can sell and for how much. The key factors that he look for when he funds a startup is that the founder has humility, resilience and discipline. He looks to hear a story of showing those attributes. Be sure to find out how he decides what valuation things he looks for when he’s looking to decide whether he’s going to fund a startup or not. There’s wealth of information on how you need to know your numbers. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Sell Your Company for Maximum Value – Interview with John Warrillow
Hello. Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is John Warrillow, who is the author of not one, but two amazing books. It is called The Automatic Customer: Creating A Subscription Business In Any Industry. Also, Built To Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You. He’s an Angel investor and the founder of the Value Builder System, which helps startups and anybody figure out how much their company is worth and how to increase it when they want to sell. John, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
John, I always am fascinated to find out what is it that causes people to get started. Before you became an author, before you became an Angel investor, take us back to your own strategy of this is what I want to do and how did you get there.
Built To Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
I wrote Built To Sell after having been involved in a few startups myself and literally made most of the mistakes you can make in creating a startup. Writing the book helped me codify some of those mistakes and get them out on paper. I didn’t really have a business idea to … A lot of people have a business and they write a book to support the business. In this case, it was the opposite. I wrote a book and a business plopped out at the bottom of it where we put together a questionnaire that would allow business owners, readers to figure out how their business stacked up using the same lens we talk about in Built To Sell. In other words, how an acquirer would value and look at your business from the outside. The questionnaire was super popular. We built a business around it, we licensed it to advisors and now we’ve got something like 600 advisors around the world who use the platform. That’s a circuitous way to getting started.
Wow. Tell us about the first book that was Built To Sell, that was the first one and then out of that was the second one?
Actually, I wrote a book years ago, 2001, called Drilling for Gold, which is about how big companies can market to small companies. At the time, I was running a market research business where we had a unique niche. We worked with very large companies. American Express and Citibank, Intuit were all customers of ours. We help them reach the small business markets. I wrote a book about that topic. In that case, it was really to credentialize the company. That was a book that I wrote back in 2001. Built To Sell was written in 2011.
Got it. What is the big message in Built To Sell that you want readers to take away and why would somebody … Obviously the big lesson there?
Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Just chasing profits is not the same thing as building a valuable company.
One big lesson is that so companies are not built to sell because they’re too deeply dependent on the owner. I think in a lot of cases, entrepreneurs build … I think we confuse profits with value. We assume what will make us more profitable will also make us more valuable. If you just look at a company like Uber as an example, a company worth tens of billions of dollars, $80 billion last time I checked, something like that, it doesn’t have any profit. Clearly, just chasing profits is not the same thing as building a valuable company. I think one of the things we tried to communicate in that book was that for your business to have value, an acquirer really has to see how it’s going to operate without you. Of course, to buy you, they’re going to get rid of you. The next question is, how things are going to run without you? That’s if you were to distill 200 pages into one thought. It’s how you’d get it structured to work without you.
[Tweet “Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Don’t confuse profits with value.”]
It’s a great tweet right there, “Don’t confuse profits with value.” I love it. What have you found, is 90% of people who buy a company and the founder doesn’t stay? Is that right or is it even more than that? Sometimes founders do want to stay, yes?
Most buyers want the founder to stay for a period of time. Most founders hate that experience. If you talk to an entrepreneur, it was one of the worst, lowest days of life. It was grinding your way through a two year earn out where you go from being in charge of your destiny, the founder making all the decisions, getting all the accolades, to reporting to the regional director of such and such who reports to the senior director, reports to the vice president. Brutal. You go from really being the king of a small castle to being a cog in a very large wheel. It’s horrible. Nobody likes it.
Let’s talk about the next book after that. What motivated you to write it? The whole concept of automatic customer. How do you create a subscription business in any industry? That’s what’s fascinating to me because usually it’s, “I understand it for this but would I do it for XYZ?”
The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry
When we looked at the kind of big drivers of company value, there are eight of them we discovered. One of them is recurring revenue. It is the one where a lot of entrepreneurs fall down. Some of the other ones are things like growth potential and how customer concentration and specific forth. We were seeing a lot of businesses, in particular non tech businesses, really struggle with recurring revenue. Because everybody thinks about SaaS companies and they say, “Sure, if I had a SaaS company, a software as a service business or a cloud based application, sure I can understand how it create recurring revenue. What if I own a distribution business or retail company or a manufacturing company? How on earth am I supposed to create recurring revenue?”
That’s really what the book’s about. It’s about we discovered nine different subscription models. The premise of the book is no matter what industry you’re in, you can create some recurring revenue, applying one of these subscription models to your business. The postscript is, that’s going to make your business more valuable. It’s also going to make it a lot more predictable. That’s really the reason we wrote the book.
Let’s have you put your Angel investor hat on for a second. What do you look for when you hear a pitch in terms of do they have a plan for recurring revenue?
I look for the LTV to CAC ratio, which is a very technical term. It stands for lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. What I’m looking for as a potential investor is at least a three to one LTV to CAC ratio. Meaning, for simplistic terms, imagine you have a subscription where over the life of the subscriber, she’s going to pay you $100 a month over twelve months. Your lifetime value of a subscriber, if that would be the average, would be $1200 or $100 times twelve. Your allowable cost to acquire her as a subscriber could not exceed $400 all up, including all your sales and marketing expenses, including your salaries, your software, your marketing if you’re buying lists and so forth. What I’m trying to look for are subscription models where the LTV to CAC ratio is better than three to one. Lots of companies fail to reach that threshold but the ones who are at least three to one have the potential to scale.
[Tweet “Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: What’s the lifetime value of your customer?”]
Two incredible takeaways right there. Number one, you have to understand the concept. If you get asked that question, you’re not deer in headlights. Some people think, “Oh, if I just know the cost to acquire a customer, I’m good.” It seems like it’s a little more sophisticated than that. Number two, I love how you broke it down to the three to one ratio. The cost to acquire is $400 and the lifetime value is $1200, there’s a three to one ratio. Did I get that right?
That’s right. Yet, if your cost to acquire is $700 and your lifetime value is $1200, clearly you’re underwater and you can’t scale.
Exactly. What I really love about what you said John is don’t just count how much money you spent on Facebook for example, to get that customer. You have to also account for all the other things that you suggested, overhead, salaries, etc. that I don’t think a lot of people realize goes into that cost to acquire a customer.
Just to be clear, the cost to acquire a customer would include all of your sales and marketing expenses. Not all of your overhead, not your office space, etc. but it would be all of your overhead associated directly with sales and marketing. If you had a VP sales for example, his or her salary would be part of your cost to acquire customers. If you have a subscription to HubSpot, it would be part of your cost. Your office manager would not be included in that calculation.
Got it. Thank you for that distinction. Do you see that that’s a mistake that a lot of people make, that they don’t include those sales, salaries and they just include the cost of the marketing?
Probably the classic mistake would be to not include the time of the owner. Most owners are the best pitch people for their company. If you’re paying yourself, whatever, $100,000 a year and 90% of your time is dedicated to sales and marketing, then 90 grand should be incorporated into the annual cost associated with marketing attributed directly to your salary. That’s probably the most common thing that’s left out of the calculation.
[Tweet “Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Owners are the best pitch people for their company”]
Thank you for that deep dive on both of those amazing books. Let’s talk about what made you start the Value Builder System and what problem are you solving and for who?
Three out of four small companies in the United States, and the number is the same in virtually every western economy, are planned exit their business in the next ten years. When they go to the negotiation table to do that, on the other side of the negotiation table, they will be faced with a mercenary business buyer, a killer, a shark. Somebody who’s trained to buy that business for as little cash upfront as possible. There are schools that teaches, there are techniques and sleazy, disgusting ways that they go out and buy businesses for less than they’re worth. For a lot of business owners, they get completely hosed in that situation because for most of us, we don’t have the opportunity to think about selling all day long. We’re making widgets, we’re hiring employees, we’re doing all the things that entrepreneurs do. It really only is one or two times where we actually get the opportunity to go through the sale of a business process.
Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: We want to defend the rights of the entrepreneur from the predators of which there are many.
What we’re trying to do at the Value Builder System is really tilt the world back in favor of the entrepreneur, is give entrepreneurs the tools, the resources, the content to really get them armed to go into that negotiation from a position of strength so that they’re not taken advantage of when some corporate development person had a big company or when some private equity partner offers you some massively under-weighted earn out or some huge vendor take back with horrible terms or when some venture capitalist frankly, comes in and says, “We wanted a 2x preference on our investment.” These kinds of things happen every day. We were trying to defend internally, we don’t usually talk about it too much publicly. We think of ourselves a little bit like the Robin Hood of a business. We want to defend the rights of the entrepreneur from the predators of which there are many.
I’m going to tweet that out. “Meet the Robin hood of small business.” The Value Builder, how soon should a small startup start using this? Before they even pitch to get funding so that there’s some strategy in place for an exit strategy? What do you recommend?
[Tweet “Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Meet the Robin hood of small business.”]
Anybody’s welcome to do it. You can just go to ValueBuilder.com and complete the questionnaire. Ideally, you’ve got some revenue. Ideally, you might have an employee or two before you do it. I can tell you that the majority of our users are business owners that have revenue between a million and $20 million and annual top line revenue between $1 and $20 million. You don’t have to have that but I can just tell you, that seems to be the sweet spot. Beyond that, you’ve typically got some sophisticated money people around the table, be it a CFO or outside investors. Below that, it’s usually the owner who again knows everything there is to know about making whatever widget they make but often doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what are my exit options, how do I value this, what are the ways that I can monetize this. That’s where we really play a role.
Let’s talk about cash flow, because that’s one of the things in your Value Builder System, is this valuation teeter totter. How does that work and help people improve their cash flow?
When you buy a business, if you can wear the hat of the acquirer for a moment, you’ve actually got to write two checks. Most of us, as entrepreneurs, we focus on the first check, which is the one that is written to us. The actual acquirer has to write a second check, and that is to the business that they are buying to fund its working capital. Working capital is MBA speak for, how much money does the business need in the bank the day that the new buyer takes over? To me, that’s immediate obligations.
If you have a model where you’re just sucking up a lot of cash, constant contact, had to dilute themselves a lot because they just sucked up a lot of cash, then that’s going to depress the value of your business in the eyes of a buyer because the buyer, although they write two separate checks, they’re both drawn on the same checkbook, the same account essentially. The more cash your company sucks up, you need a lot of inventory to run your business. You’ve got a really weird subscription model where you capture the lifetime value of the customer over years and get no money upfront. Those are situations where you’re underwater and then it takes a lot of time to recover the cost to acquire the customer. In those situations, your business is going to be discounted because somebody’s got to fund that working capital. In that case, the acquirer would.
Now, putting your Angel investor hat back on for a minute, what are some of the best pitches you’ve heard actually with somebody referring to the Value Builder System, ideally? I’m guessing there’s a story that somebody smart enough to have used that when they’re pitching you, yes?
Interestingly, no. Because we run the platform. Meaning, the platform is the software application, a set of tools and a set of lessons. We actually got to go to market through a network of advisors. We’re actually not directly serving the business owners that use the system, we license the platform to advisors who in turn will use the system with their clients. I can’t give you a pitch example from Value Builder. We’ve got lots of examples of companies that have used the system successfully. One comes to mind is a woman who ran a home cleaning service. She was in the business of basically holding yourself out as a home cleaning service. She had a few cleaning people who went out and clean people’s homes, very very low tech, analog business. She was doing it on a break-fix business model or a transaction business model, which is running advertising, waiting for the phone to ring, somebody had a party, they need a home cleaning service and she would dispatch a team to go clean the home. Of course, it’s a very difficult business model.
Through the Value Builder System, she learned that recurring revenue is going to A, make her business more predictable, also make it a lot more valuable. She changed the business model. It’s a very simplistic example but she just basically created subscriptions for home cleaning. Now, in her staff, she will sign up on a subscription, they then clean the home in the same week, in the same time every week. She’s built a recurring model that comes scales beyond her initial team, much more predictable, she knows how many cleaner she needs.
Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: They went from having a transactional business model, which was very expensive to stimulate demand to one where the lifetime value of the customer is measured over a year.
Another example, is a guy who runs a corporate cleaning business. I don’t know why I’ve got cleaning on my mind today. Maybe I’m feeling kind of dirty. Anyways, this cleaning company based in New Jersey, they would sit around waiting for the phone to ring, buy lots of advertising to try to get you to click on their ad when you needed your rugs cleaned. What they did is instead built a VIP Gold program where twice a year, without fail, they would come in a clean the carpets. The pitch was, “Look, the health of your employees is at risk if you don’t clean your carpets at least every six months. We’re going to take care of that for you, make it very predictable. They went from having a transactional business model, which was very expensive to stimulate demand, to one where the lifetime value of the customer is measured over a year. A couple little examples.
What type of startups do you like to invest in? What are you looking for when you hear a pitch?
I’ve spent a lot of time focused on SMB, small-medium businesses. For me, that’s just the space I get and know. I’m curious when I see businesses that have that as a target market, SMB, small-medium business. It’s usually an area that’s horribly misunderstood because we think of, the United States for example, the SBA boasts that there are 30 million small businesses in the United States. Reality, 22 million of those have no employees. They are home based, often times shell companies setup by lawyers to avoid taxes. The real market is something closer to eight million. Whenever I see a pitch that shows the SMB market as 30 million and we’re going to sell XYZ widget for $5000 to 28% of the 30 million, I know we’ve got a problem because it’s just a misunderstanding of the SMB market. For me, I look for B2B companies, business to business companies that have a specialization and focusing on the SMB market. Mostly just because my former company, we did a lot of market research in that area so we kind of have a bit of a sense of what it takes to get a company like that off the ground.
Interesting. It doesn’t have to necessarily be tech related or does it?
Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: That’s okay, if you’re not a bleeding edge technology company to be targeting SMB.
No, it doesn’t have to be by all means, no. SMBs buy in large are usually not as tech savvy as their large enterprise customer. One of the beauties of targeting SMB is you don’t have to be on the bleeding edge of technology. You don’t have to have the latest, coolest wiz bang technology. Intuit is a good example of that. Intuit, $28 billion market capitalization. They make QuickBooks and you could make a very good argument that QuickBooks is perhaps, on a feature to feature basis, less easy to use than Zero. You might make the argument that that’s okay because their customers are somewhat technology laggards. They’re not going to be adopting technology the same way as a larger enterprise company. That’s okay, if you’re not a bleeding edge technology company to be targeting SMB.
John, what do you look for in a team when you’re hearing a pitch to invest in?
I’m probably not really the right guy to ask that question in the sense that I think the founder is probably 90% of the equation. I think teams come and go. I think the one person that is going to make or break the business is the founder, or founders if there are multiple founders, then by all means, I’m evaluating them.
Let’s talk about what you evaluate in a founder or founders. What’s important for you in those people?
Competitive drive. What did they do in school for sports and how competitive were they. That usually says a lot about their resilience, their desire, their ability to overcome, their ability to be disciplined. A lot of humility. I like it when people say, “I don’t know the answer to this question but here’s the three ways that we’re planning to find that out.”
[Tweet “Founders need competitive drive, discipline and resilience.”]
Nice.
It’s pretty quick. I don’t I’m alone in this. I think it’s pretty easy to sniff out vapor ware and a superficial pitch. You wouldn’t need the money if you had all the answers. I like the pitch where there’s a hypothesis but there’s still a lot of questions on the table and a lot of humility among the founders, their desire to find out the answers.
I’m fascinated. I’ve never heard anybody describe the resilience story that you could tell about being in sports and school as a way to show how you have discipline and resilience. What a clever way to bring that to life during your pitch. Are you geographically agnostic?
For the most part. Obviously, I’m based in Toronto. Toronto base is a lot easier practically. Toronto is certainly not the only town that’s got great company. No, I don’t do deals in Asia or South America. First of all, I don’t speak the language. Second of all, there’s plenty of stuff to do here in North America.
You do speak French I noticed on your profile. Let’s talk a little bit about your podcast before I let you go. What would people learn listening to Built To Sell podcast? I got the name right?
Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Listen to Built To Sell Radio.
It’s just called Built To Sell Radio where we interview once a week an entrepreneur who has sold their company. I ask them the nitty gritty plumbing of what was the deal structure like. How did you sell it? Who did you sell it to? Who made the first move? How did you figure out what it was worth? How did you negotiate a better price? How did you play one offer over the other? All the mechanics of selling a company. We don’t talk about how do you build a company, how do you start a company, how do you grow. Lots of good resources for that. We’re really focused on how do you exit successful. I just interview a different entrepreneur every day. The current one that I just did this week, we talk to a guy who had a $5 million software company. These aren’t massive companies, these are real businesses ran by real people. It’s not Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, it’s real entrepreneurs who have, in many cases, this is their lifework, this is their retirement, this is the wealth they will create in their lives. We ask them how they did it and what mistakes they’d avoid.
I love it.
They’d recommend others avoid.
Really, The Successful Pitch podcast and your podcast are the perfect bookends, the beginning, how to get your pitch going to get funded, and then you’re the great one to go to figure out how to sell what you’ve created.
I think they’re even more aligned. I don’t know if I’d characterize them as bookends as much as peas in a pod in the sense that I think for a startup, to know what your exit strategy is is important. Because as we talked offline John, for anyone investing, whether it’s an Angel investor, venture capitalist, corporate buyer, they want to know what the exit strategy is. They want to know how they’re going to get out. That’s the only reason they’re going to invest. It’s not because they have some passion for your business or because they think you’re going to change world. It’s because like, “I want to make a dollar I invest in your company worth $10 in five years’ time.” Explaining in very clear terms how you’re going to make it worth $10 and how you’re going to exit, I think it’s very important. I’ll give you a quick example.
[Tweet “Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Buyers want to know the exit strategy.”]
Please.
I interviewed a guy who had an ice cream company. He came up with a cool new ice cream concept, low fat ice cream. He wasn’t sure how to sell it. He started to create some retail stores. He also started to forge distribution relationships with big grocery stores. He went out and over 15 or 20 year period, he built 60 different ice cream stores, retail stores. Had to dilute himself, give up equity to finance it, had to hire all these people. A complete spaghetti ball mess of nonsense to create all these retail stores. He went to sell the business after 15 or 20 year run and he found that the only thing anybody who would be a likely buyer for his business cared about was his wholesale distribution network.
Sell Your Company for Maximum Value: Know what you’re acquirer is going to value from the earliest stages of your business.
Anybody buying the business would immediately shut down the stores and focus exclusively on his relationships with Kroger and Safeway and all the big distribution companies, the big box retailers. That’s exactly what happened. He sold his business for a very low multiple because he wanted to be valued for all of his business, not only the retail distribution but also the wholesale distribution. But a buyer wasn’t willing to pay for the 60 stores because they’re going to shut them down. It’s one example. I think knowing what you’re acquirer is going to value and really being clear about that really from the earliest stages of your business I think gives you a really good place to start with your pitch.
We’ve come full circle, haven’t we? You started with don’t confuse profits with value and now you’ve closed with a fantastic example of someone doing just that.
That’s exactly right.bui
How fantastic. John, what is your Twitter handle? How can people follow you on Twitter and other social media?
It’s @JohnWarrillow, or Facebook it’s just Facebook.com/BuiltToSell.
Nice. It’s been fantastic having you. Thank you for sharing all your insights and wisdom on not just how important it is to have an exit strategy, but the details that need to be understood before you even enter into getting your first round of funding. Certainly, everybody should get your books and check out the Value Builder System.
Thanks, John.
Thank you.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Crack The Funding Code!
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