TSP057 | Michael Glauser – Transcription

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TSP058 | Bob Burg – Transcription
TSP056 | Andrew Goldner – Transcription

John:

Hello and welcome to This Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Michael Glauser, the author of “Main Street Entrepreneur: Build Your Dream Company Doing What You Love Where You Live”. He literally rode over 4,000 miles in 45 days, and interviewed more than a hundred entrepreneurs in a hundred cities. He distilled those interviews to 9 Keys to Becoming Successful. He said he is an entrepreneurial anthropologist. Business is all about building strong relationships, Michael says, and the way to do that is to become good at pitching. He said if you ask somebody to give you 15 minutes of their time, respect it. Don’t go over that unless they give you permission to keep talking. The real secret he talks about is work with zealous tenacity. When they were bike riding and would tired, instead of asking each other, “How are you feeling?” they said, “How are you thinking?” and that made all the difference to success. Enjoy the episode.

Are you a founder struggling with your investor pitch? Do you need warm introductions to the right investors to get your start-up funded? Do you need a funding road map to get you there fast? All of this and more can be found in “Crack the Funding Code.” Judy Robinett, best selling author of “How to be a Power Connector,” and on the board of Illuminate Ventures, and I, invite you to our free “Crack the Funding Code” webinar. Simply go to Judy Robinett, J-U-D-Y-R-O-B-I-N-E-T-T dot com and click on the webinar tab to see how to tap into our network of investors around the world. There’s a link in the show notes as well. You’re only one click away from getting funded fast.

Hello and welcome to This Successful Pitch podcast. I’m honored today to have Michael Glauser PHD, the executive director of the Jeffrey D. Clark Center, for entrepreneurship at Utah State University. He’s an entrepreneur, a business consultant, and a university professor. But what really thrills me about having Michael on the show is he visited a hundred cities, and talked to hundred entrepreneurs on a bike seat. He climbed over 165,000 feet high, and spent 4,000 miles in 45 days, so obviously he’s recovered from that journey but has lots to tell. Welcome Michael to the show.

Michael:

Thank you John. It’s great to be with you today.

John:

I love this concept of “Build Your Dream Company Doing What You Love and Where You Live”. Can you talk about the opening of your book which just literally grabs everybody by the — How important it is to have a strong opening is one of the things I’m telling everybody in their pitch, and you certainly do that in your book. Could you sort of give us the CliffsNotes of what that experience was – to have somebody come and want to buy your company when you weren’t even trying to sell it?

Michael:

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that I had a number of reviewers look at the book, and they said, “Mike! You need a stronger opening. You need a stronger pitch to start this book.” So that story that starts the book of is based on feedback I got from particularly great writer named Scott Hamond. So what I do in the book is I talk about building this company – had built it for 10 years. It was a multi-million dollar business in the foodservice industry. We had about 500 employees so we were quite a large company, and I was sitting in my office one day minding my own business, and I got a call from the chairman of the board from a company called Yogen Früz International in Toronto, Canada. He said, “Hey Mike! I’ve been studying your business, I want to buy your company”, and of course I was flattered. But I said “Michael, it’s not for sale” and he said – what all buyers say is every company is for sale for the right terms, the right price, the right conditions. So he convinced me to let him come down from Toronto to Salt Lake City where our company was based and he spent a couple of days analyzing our financial statements, our company documents, and he came back into my office after the second full day of due diligence. He placed one page offer sheet on my desk, and I took a quick look at that, and knew it was not enough, that I would never sell it for that price. So I said, “Michael, I told you the business is not for sale. This price won’t fly, and I’m not sure even that a higher price would make this deal work”, and he said “Put a price that you would sell it for.” So I wrote down a really big number, I increased his offer by about 30%, and he looked at it with wide-eyes and said, “Wow! Okay, let me get back to you.” He came back the next day and he said “I’ll take your offer on two conditions.” The first one was that they had a facility in Dallas, they had their own executive team, they wanted to move the company, and he said, “We really don’t need you and we don’t need this office, and I’ve talked with my executive team and my board mate. They felt fine about that. So the second one he said, “Now this is the deal-killer. If you don’t agree to this, we’re going to have to get on our plane and go back to Toronto,” and I thought, “Okay great! Here it comes.” Since I’m not selling the company, I’m not going to compromise. Then what he said is he said, “You have to take cash for this deal at this price.” So that was it.

John:

As opposed to stock or something, right?

Michael:

Yeah. But we didn’t really want to own stock in his company. It was a food service company. He was rolling up a number of food businesses into one, and coming and buying companies in the US. So he offered us a very nice multiple and cash, and our board thought that they would be a good caretaker of what we had built for 10 years and so we sold the company, and that’s what launched me on this new career request which I’ve been on for about 20 years.

John:

What a great, great story, and what made you decide that you’re going to take this ambitious, needless to say, bike ride?

Michael:

Well, I’d been in academics earlier in my career, and I was pretty discouraged that the way entrepreneurship was being taught was very scholarly, very academic. It was professors correlating variables. It had very little link to reality. So I thought, you know, I’m going to go out in the field and kind of be a entrepreneurial anthropologist, and I’m going to start observing businesses from the ground – private research.

John:

I love that phrase, that you are an entrepreneurial anthropologist. What a great line.

Michael:

Yeah, so I started interviewing a — basically collecting oral histories, complete stories of how companies have been built from the very beginning of the concept up until the day that I hit the plan or the factor in the office. So I’ve flown on helicopters, I’ve toured factories and plants, I’ve spent hours and hours with hundreds of entrepreneurs. So I do this every year, and I try to interview about a hundred of these, so we have a huge database of success stories of old entrepreneurs, younger entrepreneurs, men, women, black, whites, Asian, Americans. We have all the demographics represented in this large database. This tour of the books about was focused more on entrepreneurs that are really trying to merge livelihood and lifestyle. They’re saying, “You know what? I’m sick of the big city. I’m sick of the corporate rat race. I want a smaller environment that’s safer and cleaner and friendlier,” and they’re moving to these places where there are no jobs, and then they are creating jobs for themselves, and for their family members and for people in their cities. So we wanted to find some really interesting fascinating successful people that could show us how to succeed in our careers in this new economy.

John:

It’s such a great story. So there’s a lot of preparation involved in that, and I also just want to go back to this concept of being an entrepreneur anthropologist. Even if you’re not going to take a bike ride to a hundred cities and talk to a hundred entrepreneurs. I think there’s such incredible value for any startup founder to think of themselves like that and say what, “I may not have a targeted itinerary like that but it’s important for me to talk to these many different founders as possible so I can learn not to make some of the mistakes they’ve made,” right?

Michael:

Yeah, well that’s pretty much how mature science has worked over the years. We first go out and observe a phenomenon for years, maybe decades, before we start creating theories and doing research about it – empirical research. When we came on studying entrepreneurship for — when I started my career I wasn’t fashionable into entrepreneurship, and if we had an entrepreneurship professor coming and teach the class, we’d kind of sneak in the back doors, because it was all about leadership in big corporations. This was in the ’80s and the early ’90s. Then when the market started driving the study of startups in entrepreneurship, we had a lot of college professors that started teaching the subject and just starting to do research by correlating this variable with that variable, and producing results that were maybe statistically significant but they were not practically significant. So we skipped that whole set of operation. So I thought if I’m going to teach entrepreneurship, I’m going to go out and start on the ground floor, and I’m going to look — you know what hundreds of entrepreneurs have done. I’m going to try to see if there’s some key factors from those that are successful from those that fail, and so pretty much what I’ve been doing for years.

John:

So let’s — before we started the show we were talking about the importance of a pitch. Can you expand upon that? Certainly if you’re pitching for funding that’s important, but, just the importance of being able to pitch for getting people to join your team. What are your philosophies and learnings from talking to all these entrepreneurs about the importance of a pitch. What makes a good pitch?

Michael:

Well I think most of the successful entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed over the years would say business is all about strong relationships. It’s about getting mentors and advisers around you. It’s about building team members, it’s about strategic partnerships, and that requires great relationship building skills and so, even if you’re not pitching for funding, you’re going to be pitching your business constantly to people that are absolutely critical to the success of your company. So you’re going to pitch potential partners, you’re going to pitch team members, you’re going to pitch strategic partners, you’re going to pitch suppliers, you’re going to start pitching your customers basically. So we have seen that the best entrepreneurs — they can give a really quick business description and exciting summary – you could call it as a business summary, a business description elevator pitch – but they can engage you quickly and interest you quickly with passion about what it is that they’re doing.

For example, I’ve been at the frozen dessert industry. We were the very first to create a whole line of ice cream type yogurt products that had no fat whatsoever – no calories and so, we would say we have a product that taste as good as the best ice creams in the market, but they have no fat and they have low calories. So that was the opening statement and that hooked people in.

John:

Sure.

Michael:

This business that we’ve built now, My New Enterprise, which is a training company for entrepreneurs with online training tools. We start of by saying My New Enterprise is the ultimate online resource center to help aspiring entrepreneurs turn business ideas into opportunities, and opportunities into sound businesses. So you kind of need an opening statement that’s engaging — that you’re passionate about. Then you need to describe a little bit about what your company does, why your team is the right team to do this, why it really benefits the customers, and why it’s better than other options out there. So those are kind of the steps to a great pitch that interest people in what you’re doing even if you are not looking for money.

John:

One of the things I really like in your book, the Main Street Entrepreneur — you know we’ve talked about the importance of having a second business model, and you have this great acronym N-E-R-C-M, NERCM. Can you break that down for us and tell us what those stand for and briefly what that is?

Michael:

Yeah, we look at successful entrepreneurs that succeed and those that failed, and compare them. What I say is successful entrepreneurs launch a true business opportunity not just an idea. So when ideas — something maybe you think upon the couch while you’re watching basketball, or you think up in the shower and you go and you think it’s great. Then you start looking online and you find there’s ten other companies that have already done it. So that idea is very different than a true business opportunity, and we find that those that create successful companies meet this test, we call it the NERCM test, N-E-R-C-M. So N stands for — the first step is that you have validated a NEED in the market place with lots of primary evidence. So you have people saying, ” Boy! I need that. Boy! If you created that I would buy it.” I have a problem with this, I don’t like the way I’m served, I don’t like these products. You have just a lot of great data that is continually coming to you. The E, the second step stands for EXPERIENCE, and this basically means that you’re familiar with that industry in some way, and it’s kind of interesting – the entrepreneurs we interviewed on this bike ride, a third of them had worked in the same industry they started their business. A third of them has worked in related industry, but a whole of – fully third of them were users of the product, they were serious users of the product. So they hadn’t worked in the industry but they’ve been using it for years. They knew who all the suppliers were, they knew their competitors, they knew what people like, what people didn’t like, and they thought the product could be better than it was. So first is the need, second is some level of experience. The third is RESOURCES. You don’t necessarily funding initially, but you’ve got to create a prototype and test it quickly, and prove that it works and so you do that with you know — you use mentors, you use used equipment, you borrow equipment, you work on old metal desks in your garage, whatever you get. You get something into the market quickly with a variety of resources often other than money, and just see if people buy it. That’s the biggest test of validity for a business concept is when someone starts buying the product from you.

John:

Have you ever come across someone who has become – than a customer of the business that who wants to then become an investor because when I’ve interviewed some other people, they said, “Man, if your customers have ever become investors that becomes really attractive to investors”, and I just wondered, with the hundred plus entrepreneurs you’ve seen, have you ever seen that happen?

Michael:

Yeah, we see that actually quite a bit where customers start using the product and go, “Wow! This is fabulous! This is better than anything else. I wonder who these guys are, I wonder what they’re doing, I’m going to go and see if they need some help,” and often that help is angel money begin with.

John:

Great! Alright let’s finish your wonderful acronym. So we’ve got NEED, we’ve got EXPERIENCE, we’ve got RESOURCES.

Michael:

Okay, C is CUSTOMERS, which you mentioned, and we found — it’s pretty amazing that a lot of these people have customers that have agreed to buy the product before it’s even built. So we found a guy that created software for the banking industry and a bank bought it before he finish the software. We found a lot of customers that said, “I’ll buy it, I’ll sign the contract. You build and tell me when it’s ready”, and of course this is what we do with crab funding with Kickstarter and Indiegogo is we create a concept, we throw it out in the market, we see if anyone wants to buy it, and if they buy it then we build it. So we saw that over and over again that they build it, they determine the need, they had the experience, they had the resources, and they had customers saying, “Come on! When is it going to be ready? I want it. I’ll buy it. I promise I’ll buy it!”

John:

That letter of intent – are people putting their money with their mouth is so important to investors where there’s crowdfunding angels or even VCs. They really want to see huge growth and rapid growth from people who really want this problem solved, right?

Michael:

Yeah. So the fourth item in the NERCM model is M, and that stands for business MODEL, and basically you just need to have the right margins. You need to know that you’ve got to grow some margin of 40 to 50 percent, you’ve got a net income of 15 to 20 percent, that you can charge a price that’ll allow you to build a sustainable business based on the finances and the numbers. So I’ll give you an example of this, we built this strong retail food company and I had all these major players calling me and say we want to buy your product to sell in our business. So for example, a chain of convenient stores called, and a chain of hamburger stores called. It was Hardee’s nationwide, and I kept saying we don’t sell our great retail product on the wholesale markets because we don’t want to dilute our brand but they kept calling over and over again and one week I had two major companies – it was Maverik Country Stores and Hardee’s Hamburgers called, and I looked at those accounts. They were – it was half a million dollars’ worth of business for a business I didn’t even have yet. So I called them back and said, “Okay, I’ll give you our product but I’m going to put it in a different box with a different name so we don’t dilute our retail brand. Would you be satisfied with that?” They said, “Absolutely!”, so we created a new company called Northern Lights, and we launched that product to those two customers, and we had a half-a-million dollars of sales on day one. So the need was there because of the phone calls I was getting, the experience was there because I was in the industry, we had all the resources – strong cash flow – we had customers that were ready to buy, and we knew the business model work because we’re already in the industry. So that’s what I call a NERCM opportunity or true business opportunity versus an idea or a pipe dream.

John:

What you just did there is a wonderful example of taking a concept and attaching it to a story so that it comes to life and become as memorable, which is what you need to do when you pitch. Great, great example. What I love to do now is expand on what you said about business is all about strong relationships because the investors tell me time and again, we’re really investing in team even more than the idea. So one of the key things you talk about in your book is developing your supporting cast, and advisory boards are really important to angel and VCs. So can you talk about how to build a good advisory board, you have a whole wonderful graph here that’s you know – through networking and finding the right advisers.

Michael:

Yeah. It’s really pretty simple. Most of these entrepreneurs use – they create a brain trust, I call it, which is basically mentors and advisers. They have some primary mentors that will meet with them regularly every week. Maybe their father or their cousin or their uncle or their neighbor or professor. But then they need to identify experts in fields where they need input, where they don’t have the skills. So the first thing we have people do is really evaluate what are the needs of this new business, what skill sets does this new business need? Then we have them do an honest evaluation of what skills do they have personally, and so they see that they have some of these skills but they have a lot of missing pieces as well. Then through a process at networking we have them go out identify three to five mentors that they can visit with and they say, “Hey! Here’s a business I’m building. It’s very exciting. I’m passionate about it. I’m committed to do it. I’ve got these skills but I don’t have these skills and I can’t afford to hire anyone yet.” So I need some advisers or mentors that I can call, do you have anyone you can refer me to that might know about marketing or finance, or retailing, or offshore manufacturing or whatever, and you start generating list of names as referrals. If you go to 5 people, they each give you 3 names, there’s another 15 potential contacts. So the very best entrepreneurs – most of the ones we see in the book, they have 6, or 8, or 10, or 12 people that they’re talking to regularly that have agreed to mentor them. What I found is that successful entrepreneurs are very open to mentoring new entrepreneurs. They’re very willing to do that, and I mentor aspiring entrepreneurs all the time. What they often do is I have them say, you know, you need the lunch can I come to your office and bring you lunch or meet you for lunch once a month, and it’s pretty amazing how many people are willing to help. So what we have found is the bigger this brain trust of mentors and advisers, the more success you’re going to have because they — you know you don’t have to learn everything though trial and error. They could show you what they have done and help you jump-start this venture basically.

John:

Do you have an advice for people who are looking for mentors? In other words, if you’re going to find someone like you who is so experienced, and gets lots of request to be their mentor, I would think you have a certain criteria whether you thought it through or not, I’m guessing you have thought it through based on your skill set. But if some of it just got — how you approach someone is so important — in other words “Hey! I want to pick your brain,” which to me does never sound pleasant. It has to be a two-way street, don’t you think?

Michael:

Right. Absolutely, and what I advise people to do is start with the people that you know. They’re willing to see you. If your pitch is impressive and they like what you’re doing, they’ll refer you to their friends, and if you have a referral you’re more likely to get in the door. But you need to say to them, “You know, I really like what you’ve done. I’ve tracked your career, I’ve seen what you’ve done, I’ve read about you. It would be an honor to meet with you. I just have a few questions and it will only take about, I promise, no more than 15 minutes of your time.” Especially younger students, being younger students they know a lot about social media, and they’ll say, “I might have a few things I can help you with and I’m willing to share as well.”

John:

There we go. That’s what I was looking for. I love it. It’s show respect, do your own due diligence on your potential mentor, and then offer to help even if you think you don’t have anything to bring to the table, you probably do. It’s just the offer is worth something, right?

Michael:

Yeah, in the long run if the relationship’s going to work, it’s got to be mutually beneficial. There’s a lot of things young entrepreneurs can do for more successful and older entrepreneurs. I find that the students I teach at Utah State University, they don’t know a lot about of business concepts, but they know some things about social media and marketing, kind of this new-age marketing that I don’t understand as well. So they do have some things to offer and then the other thing I often hear an aspiring entrepreneurial comeback and say — I asked this incredible guy for 15 minutes, and I was in his house two-and-a-half hours. I am really proud of that, and I say, “Well good luck getting in there again because he’s going to think you’re going to take two-and-a-half hours.” You’ve got to respect the time commitment that you make and say, “Okay, the 15 minutes are up, I’d love to speak with you again,” and then if he invites you to continue, great, but you’ve got be respectful of their time, you’ve got to research their background, and you’ve got to think of something you might be able to offer to that relationship.

John:

Nice. Really great takeaways there. Michael, thank you. Now the other thing that I have never seen before, and I’m always loving a graph because it’s visual, and the importance of a decent person, and a skill set. I’ve talked to many people in HR, especially in other startups and they say, “You know what? So many people are in such desperate need to hire somebody, they hire the wrong person and, in their gut, they know it’s the wrong person but they need that job filled, and they get it filled with the wrong person and that’s detrimental to everybody, and you’re better off keeping a job open versus filling it with a wrong person. First of all, I guess my first question to you is do you agree with that, and do you have a story around that?

Michael:

Yeah absolutely. We find that team Marcus is tough. It’s hard to build a strong team. You have a lot of people, different opinions, and you want the team to be diverse. You don’t want them to be like you. If you hire a group of people like you, you’re not going to be successful. So what we saw on a bike ride across America with these successful entrepreneurs is they tended to hire based on character first. They hired people that were honest, that had strong work ethics, that didn’t have huge egos, that were willing to do all the jobs that would be great team members, and then if they needed a specific skill like engineering skills or graphic design skills, they would then hire for skills second. So, character first, skills second. If the job was something that could be easily trained, someone could easily learn to do it through training, for example maybe customer service wrapper, customer service manager, or a small shop manager whatever then they would trade and they would find the person with the great character and then do the training to bring them up to speed on that job. So that graph kind of shows that if the person isn’t a decent person – if they’re not honest, they don’t tell the truth, they don’t work hard, they have huge ego they always have to be right. You just don’t hire those kinds of people. Even if they’re highly skilled on the skill set that you need. So you hire decent people and you make sure that if you need specific skills, they have those skills, and if those skills can be learned, you find people that are willing to learn the skills.

John:

The same thing is true not only when you’re building your own team, but the kinds of investors you want to have in your culture, because you get married to those people specially if it’s at the VC level, and you can work with them in years. If you don’t want to be micro-managed, and you don’t have a sense of trust, that can be disastrous too, right?

Michael:

Yeah, I think it’s especially important that you get group of investors that really like what you’re doing, that are passionate about what you’re doing, that are honest and decent people that they know that you have to be treated fairly, and that you have to be successful or they’re not successful. If you get investors that like to take advantage of new deals and have it highly favor them as oppose to the entrepreneur, that business is just doesn’t going to work. So you want people to know that this is going to be win-win relationship here, and they have to be willing to mentor you and help you and have had experienced relative to what you need to do. I call it smart money versus just plain money.

John:

The other chapter that’s a big favor to mine in Main Street Entrepreneur is “work with zealous tenacity”. We’re going to tweet that out. It’s such a great line and great chapter title, and you have several examples in that chapter. Pick your favorite one if someone who’s got zealous tenacity.

Michael:

Well, I think that pretty much everyone that we’ve interviewed over the years has that combination of zeal and tenacity, or passion plus tenacity. First, I looked at these as two separate traits like you first had to have passion, and then you had to have tenacity. But it’s a combination of the zealous attitude towards your business and the — you know I’m not going to quit attitude, so I call it zealous tenacity, or you can call it even zealacity for short. So this passion comes from your purpose. Most of these entrepreneurs had a very engaging purpose for starting their business, and it was more than just making money. They know they needed to make money, but it was I want to make money doing something that I love, I want to create jobs in my town, I want to solve the problem, and so this passion flows from that purpose, and coupled with tenacity, that’s how you build a business. This is probably the most important quality of all the things in the book. If you don’t have a passionate tenacity and a drive to stay in there for three to five years, and pivot every time you need to until you gain traction, you’re not going to succeed. So I gave a lot of examples in the book, the one that’s quite impressive is Jon Schmidt, the founder of — co-founder of The Piano Guys, just absolutely loved music and he played music. He could play music eight hours a day. He was writing songs, he was performing and he was never more than kind of a regional talent in the Intermountain West here. He really discovered YouTube and the internet and started creating these just bizarre videos where they’d take a piano and put it up on a 1,500 foot red rock cliff and play a song. The videos went viral and they’re now the number one act booked by Sony Entertainment Worldwide. It was his passion and then hey, he hung in there for almost 20 years before he really hit the big time. So there’s just story after story like that in the book, and people loved —

John:

That’s some visual and I can see why it’s a huge hit on YouTube, but the way you described that story right? It’s a red rock, it’s high, where instantly — you’re such a good storyteller Michael that you’ve just made us visualized somebody playing a piano on a top of this rock overlooking — it’s great. This begs the question for you to talk about what you have in the book on zeal and tenacity with the actual bike ride that yourself. Talk about tenacity and you have to go back to your why am I doing this in the first place? Can you share with us some of your important lessons learned about managing your thoughts and taking regular breaks?

Michael:

Yeah, we were extremely passionate about this bike ride. It was more than just a bike ride for us. We were seeking out some of the most innovative entrepreneurs in the country, and we were going to spend time with them in their plants and their factories and their offices, and we were going to record them on video and audio. We’re going to produce a book and documentary film, and we just wanted to bring this message to the world and so we were very, very passionate about that. I have trained for about six months for this bike ride. We rode almost a hundred miles every day and we climbed a lot of big mountains. It was very, very difficult but the commitment had been made before. We’d made a public commitment that we were going to do it, so there was no backing out. We’d get up on some mornings the first couple of weeks, you’re just absolutely exhausted, you’ve ridden a hundred miles, you’ve ridden through the rocky mountains, you got out of bed and you can barely stand up, and you knew you had to get on that bike again and ride another 80 to 100 miles. If you thought too much about that, it was almost overwhelming. So we quit asking each other “How are you feeling?” We started asking each other “How are you thinking?”

John:

I like that. What a great distinction. Wonderful.

Michael:

Because if we said “How are you feeling?” we all felt — the answer is really, really bad. My rear end hurts, my back hurts, my feet hurt, I’m tired, and so if we started thinking you know, we’re going to just go slow today, we’re going to stop after 20 miles and eat some food, we’re going to have a nice lunch break, we’re going to go a little bit slower, we can do this. If we were very positive in our thinking, we could do it, and the amazing thing about this bike ride you know – I’m not young guy, I’m 60 years old so it was a challenge but I had trained well enough to do this, and after about two weeks, all the pain started going away. There’s no more back pain, the rear end no longer hurt, the legs didn’t hurt. After the last, say, four to five weeks, it was really pretty easy. The physical journey was easier than we thought it would be, and when we got to the east coast in Virginia, we felt that we could have turn around and ridden all the way back to Salt Lake City, Utah.

John:

Really? Wow.

Michael:

Here’s another interesting fact, we were burning six to seven thousand calories a day the first few weeks, but as our bodies adjusted to it, it was like our bodies said, “Okay, this guy is going to keep doing this every day. This is reality. I’ve got to figure out how to do this.” Then we started using fewer and fewer calories. We could ride a hundred miles a day and maybe use 2,500 or 3,000 calories of food the last few weeks. So you just adjust and it really wasn’t as difficult physically the last month as it was the first few weeks.

John:

I would assume that’s the analogy when you’re running your startup, right? We have to pivot, we’ve talked about that in your book about it’s so important to pivot to get multiple revenue streams. The same thing with pivoting your thinking is what allowed you to complete this bike ride in the same concept of “How do I feel about my business right now?” it’s like, “What am I thinking?” I just loved that so much Michael. Are there any final thoughts you want to leave our listeners on how to be a successful entrepreneur from any of the nine keys that you have in this wonderful book, Main Street Entrepreneur?

Michael:

Well I think the thing that was most impressive to me when we finished this bike ride is that I often work with companies to get venture funding, tech companies, companies that go public, and we were working on this project with this basic businesses that everyday men and women in America were creating all across the country. I was so impressed that when we finished that anybody can do this. We can’t all build the Facebook, or Google, or an eBay, or an Instagram, but anyone can build one of these main street businesses where you’re doing something you love, you’re serving customers, meeting needs in communities, you’re living where you want to live, you’re creating value and you’re taking care of yourself. So I would say that anybody can do this that really has that passion and tenacity and want to learn this keys to success which are outlined in the book, Main Street Entrepreneur. I think the other thing, there are probably two statistics that really troubled me this last few years, and one is how unengaged we are at work in this country. The Gallup poll shows that about 70% of us are unengaged, we don’t like our work, we don’t like our jobs, we work so we can go play after work. I think that’s kind of a tragedy, and then the second statistic is the rapid rate which jobs are going away due to the acceleration of technology that there just aren’t going to be enough jobs in corporate America and throughout the world. So, the need for entrepreneurship, the need to create your own company, create your own job, is going to be greater than ever, and that’s exciting to me. I’m not alarmed about that, that’s an exciting opportunity that we have a chance to create our own jobs, create our own companies, live the lives of our dreams and do it where we live. That’s the message of the book.

John:

It’s great. It’s a great, great message. Very inspiring and backed up with actual ways to do it and not just a dream. Michael, how can people follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter and all that good stuff?

Michael:

I’m @mjglauser. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. My website is mikeglauser.com, so it’s M-I-K-E-G-L-A-U-S-E-R.com, and we’ve just launched the new website in conjunction with this book. It’s themainstreetentrepreneur.com, and it has a lot of free resources, videos, and podcasts, things that are really helpful to entrepreneurs in addition to training program we’re just launching as well that is available at teachable.com, and if you go to my website, mikeglauser.com, you can learn all about that training program.

John:

We will put all those links as well as, of course, the link to buy Main Street Entrepreneur in the show notes for our listeners. Thanks again, Michael. It’s been a privilege and I loved your whole way of thinking, and your way of showing us how to have zeal and tenacity.

Michael:

Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure talking with you today.

John:

You too.

Thanks for listening to This Successful Pitch podcast. If you like the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out. People say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So how do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of the river bank and you have to cross the river, and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens. So first you make up your idea, then you make it real, then you make it reoccur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get to funding that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own, with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of no’s, and you don’t know why. So if you want some help getting funded faster, with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar, and sign up and get in depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.

 

TSP058 | Bob Burg – Transcription
TSP056 | Andrew Goldner – Transcription