The Great Minds Of Investing – Interview with William Green
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Episode Summary
William Green is the author of The Great Minds of Investing, a book that features profiles of famous investors. William interviewed 22 investors for his book, including many billionaires, and breaks down what makes them truly unique and different people from the rest. There are so many great qualities you can take away from these brilliant investors who have made tremendous mistakes both throughout their lifetime and in their career.
The Great Minds Of Investing – Interview with William Green
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is William Green. The author of The Great Minds of Investing. William has written for many publications both in the US and Europe including Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, The New Yorker, The London Spectator and The Economist. He edited the Asian edition of Time while living in Hong Kong, and then moved to London to edit the European, Middle Eastern and African editions of Time.
As an editor and co-author, he’s collaborated on books such as Guy Spier’s much-praised memoir, The Education of a Value Investor. I had Guy on recently and he’s fantastic. That’s how we actually were fortunate enough to connect. He’s also coming up with an autobiography of a legendary art collector. Born and raised in London and received a master’s degree in journalism in Columbia. He’s now in New York. Guy, I can’t thank you enough for introducing us. William, welcome to the show.
John, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.
I always like to ask my guests, how do they get started in the world of journalism, investing, and how did you become passionate about that. Can you take us back to your childhood if you don’t mind?
The Great Minds of Investing
Sure. I grew up in London and I grew up in a very bookish family. My father was a very literary judge. My mother was a writer. Everything really was about words and language and the like. I went to Eton, which was this very posh English school, which was where people like Prince Harry and Prince William went. I was supposed to be this great English gentleman and I thought I’d be a man of letters.
I went off to Oxford and I studied English Literature. So far so good. I leave at 20, 21 thinking I’m going to become a famous novelist. To my surprise, I discovered the stock market. Basically, I had owned a small apartment with my brother at London and we sold it. I had a little bit of money. Not a great deal because in those days land and property wasn’t as valuable.
I needed to figure out what to do with the money. I started to study investing. What I found was really intriguing, was that there was this elite group of investors who were just incredibly smart, who had this record of beating the market over many years. They were these master game players. I think there was a part of me that had always been very lazy and never really wanted to get my hands dirty. I never would have summer jobs where I would do anything really serious and painful. I always had this fantasy that I would just make money by using my brain.
When I was about fifteen, I had become obsessed with horse racing. Again, because I thought, “Here’s a great way of making money without doing any real work.” I think what happened to me when I discovered investing was I thought, once again, “Okay, this is this really cool area where if you’re really smart, you can actually outwit the crowd.” Initially, what happened to me, my interest in business and investing really was born out of my total laziness, my just wanting to make money without having to do a lot of work.
Then as I became a journalist in my early 20s, I had this incredible opportunity to go interview some of these people. I would go off, say, to the Bahamas, to interview Sir John Templeton, who is this guy who had averaged 15% a year returns for 38 years and ends up making $400 million selling his company. I would actually get to see these extraordinary people up close.
What started in a way, is this naughty, somewhat lazy, indolent boy wanting not have to do very much work actually became this intellectual passion. Because I looked at these guys like Templeton or Peter Lynch who I interviewed, or Michael Price who is on the cover of Fortune as the biggest SOB on Wall Street.
I would look at these guys and think, “What do they have that other people don’t have? Why, when most people are going with the flow, doing okay and sometimes doing well, then failing and then being fearful and not really fulfilling their potential? Why is there this group of people who perform extraordinarily well, that they win over the long term?”
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: What do they have that other people don’t have?”]
What I found that’s been an enduring fascinations to me really over the last 25 years, has been this idea that if you want to be more successful, both as an investor and also in life, in business, in your family life, you should really study people who are extraordinarily successful and then reverse engineer them and figure out why they win.
I’d say my interest in these people became a little bit more profound as I got older and ceased to be just about how do you make money and became more about how do you become successful in business, how do you become successful in life? What matters in life, what disappointed them, what fulfilled them?
In a sense, what I’ve been trying to do for the last 20 odd years is to figure out what can I learn from these people that will help me in life. I think, probably, that’s the overarching theme of a lot of my writing and also the speaking that I do. That’s really the question, is how do you actually reverse engineer these people so you can become more successful yourself and hopefully happier yourself?
One of the blogs that you wrote on your LinkedIn profile about Warren Buffett is so fascinating and just full of great quotes. Is there something from there? The one that resonates with me is about taking action. “Predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.” Is there one theme that you’ve noticed not only in Warren Buffett but other people you’ve interviewed that are successful entrepreneurs that you can expand on that quote with?
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building an ark does.”]
I think one of the things that’s really fascinating about Buffett, one of the reasons why he resonates with people so deeply is because he has extraordinarily values. Here’s a guy who’s unbelievably smart. He clearly has an IQ that’s off the charts. I think the reason when you read something like that piece on LinkedIn that he resonates with you is that he’s actually talking about some fairly deep values.
If I remember rightly, the first quote from him was something where he said, “When I look back at my life and figure out what the reason was why I’ve been so successful,” he said really, the key was the unconditional love that he received from his father.
Great Minds of Investing: Warren Buffett said the key was the unconditional love that he received from his father.
Here’s someone who we think is just going to tell us how to get rich. Actually, he’s talking about unconditional love. I’m looking at these quotes from him like that and I’m thinking, “How do I become a better father?” Because I have a fourteen year old daughter and a seventeen year old son. I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s really interesting.”
Buffett is actually saying that that the reason why he’s become this guy who has $70 billion and has beaten the market over 50 odd years is actually because of the love of his father. I think what’s really interesting with someone like Buffett is that it’s not just about how do you beat the market, how do you make money. It’s about these broader values, these broader ideas of what works in life.
When you look at the way that Buffett runs his business, he has a tremendous emphasis on integrity, decency. There’s a wonderful line from Buffett at one point where he says, “You can’t do a good deal with a bad person.” I actually think what’s really striking about Buffett on many levels is his profundity as a thinker about life, not just about business.
Part of what fascinated me with Buffett is that I figure there were all these people like Robert Hagstrom, these great writers about why Buffett’s such an incredible investor. My fascination increasingly over the last couple of years has been, what can we learn from Buffett about having a more successful life? I think that idea of integrity and honesty that he represents and these values, like trustfulness and authenticity, these are incredibly powerful ideas.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: You can’t do a great deal with a bad person.”]
One of the reasons why he’s been so successful is that he has a reputational advantage. You know that if he’s going to take over your company, he’s going to leave you in place as the CEO, he thinks you’re doing a great job. He’s going to treat you decently, he’s going to let you have some autonomy. I think for a lot of us, we look at the business world and we think if you want to be really successful, you’d have to be at snake. I think what’s fascinating about Buffett is that you realize that’s not actually entirely true.
There’s this other more enlightened way to be a capitalist were actually being decent becomes very powerful. There was a fascinating speech that Buffett gave many years ago where he was talking about his partner, Charlie Munger.
If I remember rightly, he said something like, “When I look back over the last 41 years, or something like that, that I’ve been in business with Charlie, I’ve never seen him take advantage of a single person.” That’s an incredible reputational advantage. I think this is something that applies to all of us. You have to figure out, do you want to get ahead by whacking everyone in the face with your elbows on your way up or do you want to try to do it this other way?
That’s a great quote that you have in your blog from Warren Buffett, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Exactly. These two friends of mine, Guy Spier and Mohnish Pabrai, had a charity lunch with Warren I think it was in 2009 where they paid $650,000 to have that. They won this charity auction to have lunch with him. One of the most memorable things, particularly for Guy, that Buffett talked about was this whole concept of the inner scorecard.
The way Buffett presented it, he said, “You have to ask yourself, would you rather be the worst lover in the world but known publicly as the best, or be the best lover in the world but known publicly as the worst?” His point was, you have to have this internal barometer of how you behave. He said his father was the greatest sort of inner scorecard guide.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Live your life by your inner scorecard.”]
His father was a congressman. At one point, I think there was some change in the salary scale of a congressman. They told his father, “Okay, you’re going to get an extra couple of thousand bucks.” His father said, “No, I was elected a salary of $12.5 thousand and so that’s how much I’ll take,” and he returned the money to the treasury. I think this had a huge impact on Buffett, this idea that you should act in a way where you look yourself in the mirror every morning and you just think, “Yeah, I’m okay with who I am.”
We shouldn’t lionize Buffett or any of these other guys. They’re all flawed just as we are. Buffett had problems with his relationships, with his marriage. He clearly had an extraordinary wife who divorced him and who he continued to adore and remain close to. It’s not like you can look at these people and say, “This is a saint and everything is perfect.”
That’s not to be disparaging about Buffett, who I really do revere. I think it’s just a reminder, we’re all deeply flawed. When you look at people like Buffett, it gives you something to aspire to because you start to think, “There’s a different way to do business that might almost seem naive but actually there’s a tremendous advantage to behaving in an ethical decent fair way.”
What you said about living your life by your own inner scorecard, for me really is just a great reminder that you can’t live your life worried about what other people think about you.
Great Minds of Investing: Templeton had this extraordinary ability to go his own way and to think for himself.
I think that’s really key. This actually, this was one of the very profound lessons I had very early in my career as a writer. When I went to Bahamas to see Templeton, before I had my interview with him, I sneaked behind a tree and was watching him exercising. He would go into the ocean every day and would pump his arms and legs under the water for 45 minutes using the resistance of the water to exercise. I’m looking at this old guy, at the time I think he was 86. His face is slathered with this horrible white goop to protect him from the sun.
Sunscreen.
Exactly, but super thick. He’s got this ridiculous hat on with floppy ears, with ear flaps. As I was looking at him, I was just thinking, “Here’s a guy who just absolutely does not care what anybody thinks about how he looks, how he exercises, how he thinks.” It struck me, it became a metaphor in my own mind, that he had this extraordinary ability to go his own way and to think for himself.
Someone had a lovely phrase to describe it when I was interviewing people about Templeton, where he said, “It was the willingness to be lonely.” I remember asking Templeton, where did this come from? Actually, it was funny because I said to him, “Who were the biggest influence on you?” He said, “Really, nobody. Nobody influenced me.”
I thought this was this incredibly arrogant thing at that time. Then he started talking about his parents. He said that they would go in these road trips when he was a boy. They would put him in charge from a very early age, seven, eight, or nine, of navigation.
They basically left him totally in charge of this. He said there was one occasion, where, finally, after a couple of hours, he realizes that he’s taken them 200 miles in the wrong direction. They haven’t told him. They really were just saying, “You’re free to make your own mistakes.” This, for him, became this enormously powerful thing. He was able to go his own direction.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Go your own direction. Think for yourself.”]
One of the reasons why he became one of the greatest investors of the last century was that he had this philosophy that you would buy at what he called the Point of Maximum Pessimism. For example, during World War II, he made this extraordinary investment when the world seemed to be ending. He bought something like a 104 stocks for under a dollar each. I think it’s something like 36 of them were in bankruptcy at the time. He told me that basically, over the next five years, he quintupled his money. Because the world righted itself and he had the strength of mind to go his own way to think to himself.
I think whether you’re a great contrarian value investor like him or you’re a great entrepreneur, you have to have this tremendous ability to think for yourself, the emotional strength to go against the crowd and the confidence to go against the crowd. It’s not something that many people have I think, to have that degree of independence of mind. I think when you see people like that, it makes you realize, “This is what I have to aspire to, I need to have a little more courage.”
One of the things also that Buffett said to Mohnish and Guy at their lunch is, “If you want to get better at something, hang out with people who are better than you. You can’t help but get better.” Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, says, “That includes hanging out with the eminent dead.” You should be reading books about Ben Franklin and whoever, anybody you admire. You’re reading books about them and you’re figuring out, what can I take from Steve Jobs or from whoever it might be that I can use in my life?
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Hang out with people who are better than you”]
I think it’s fascinating that these people like Buffett and Munger who we regard as these titans at the moment, actually, have done exactly the same thing where they’ve been studying people who were better than them and figuring out, what do I learn from them?
Two things you said that I just really like a lot, which is one, not only do we not have to let go of what other people think about us, and you’ve painted great picture of him in the ocean with all that sunscreen and the hat, but we don’t have to wait to be in our 80s before we can let go of worrying about what other people think. Most people think, “When you get to a certain age like that, then you’ll let go of what other people think.”
You’re really inviting us, at any age, to stop worrying about what other people think. That story about how his parents let him get lost and make his own mistakes, to me the thing that really stands out is not only did they let him make his own mistakes, but then they didn’t beat him up and make him feel bad about making it.
That’s an important point. I hadn’t really thought about that. He said this really had a lifelong influence on him, the fact that they allowed him to make those mistakes. I think with all of these people, the ability to make mistakes and then not be crushed by them is absolutely key. It’s very easy when you look at the life of an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, or tycoon or investor. I’ve interviewed so many billionaires over the years. These are remarkably successful people.
Great Minds of Investing: The ability to make mistakes and then not be crushed by them is absolutely key
You look back at their life with the sense of it was almost inevitable. Actually, when you’re living the life in the present tense rather than looking back at it, there was nothing inevitable about it. There were moments where these people were totally crushed. There was a time early in his career when Charlie Munger lost his son who died. He lost all his money trying to basically pay the medical bills. His marriage ended. Munger is the one guy who most investors regard as even smarter than Buffett.
When you look at him now, he’s 91, 92 years old and he makes these incredible statements, where he just, he speaks like God. Just with tremendous intelligence. It’s as if he always knew the truth. Actually, when you look at his life, these were very, very hard earned lessons. He invested on margin at one point, I think in the 70s, and almost went under.
When he’s talking about how to avoid stupidity, how to get ahead by actually avoiding folly and stupidity. He’s not talking as someone who’s just looking at everyone else and saying, “You guys are idiots.” He’s saying, “I screwed up. I almost destroyed myself through stupidity and here’s what I’ve learned about how not to be foolish again.”
I think that ability not just to learn from your own mistakes but, as Buffett said, “It’s great to learn from your own mistakes, but it’s much better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” To read about someone like Munger getting almost undone by investing on margin and then the world going haywire and him being exposed, those are very powerful things.
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I think these are habits that all of us should develop. This ability to look at extraordinarily successful people and say, “What did they do wrong? Also, what did they do right?” Not to lionize them. To say you know, “Why was their emotional life a wreck? Why did their marriage go wrong?” It’s like with your parents, I tell my kids, “You should learn from the stuff that I do right, but also learn from my idiocy. Don’t repeat the stupid things that I do.”
When we show people our flaws, I think that vulnerability is what makes people be able to relate to us.
David Hawkins talks a great deal about authenticity, about being totally truthful and just not lying.
I think that’s very powerful. One of the people in this book, The Great Minds of Investing, that I wrote, one of the people I connected to most was this guy Mohnish Pabrai, who’s very close friend of Guy Spier’s as well. Mohnish is fascinating because when he stumbles upon a very important idea, he totally internalizes it and makes it 100% what he does. One of the massive ideas that he encountered in life was from this book Power Vs. Force by this guy David Hawkins. Hawkins talks a great deal about authenticity, about being totally truthful and just not lying.
You can see when you spend time with someone like Mohnish that he just … I went to India with him for about five days a few weeks ago. Whatever question you ask him, he’s going to tell you the truth. I think when you spend time with people who are less honest, you start to sense it. Mohnish’s view is that whether it’s intuitive or explicit, you actually sense when somebody’s lying to you or holding something back.
I think one of the things that strikes me as a powerful lesson from these guys like Buffett, Munger, Mohnish Pabrai, Guy Spier, is this idea of becoming more and more authentic to who you are, more and more truthful. One of the things that Mohnish discovered, which I thought was fascinating, was during the financial crisis, he had a terrible time and his fund was down 60 or 70% from peak-to-trough.
He said, he went to his shareholders and he just said, “Yeah, the market suck. It’s been a tough time,” but he said, “That’s not really the reason why our losses were so bad.” He said, “The reason that our losses were so bad was that I made this mistake, this mistake, and this mistake.” He said the amazing thing was that almost nobody bailed out of the fund, because he said really, what people want is for you to tell them the truth.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: People want for you to tell them the truth.”]
I love that. We just have to really play that up so much William, because it’s something that needs to be underlined and bolded, especially for the listeners when they’re thinking of pitching an investor, they must be 100% truthful. They can’t hide anything, because it will come out in due diligence and then the deal will go sour, or they get an investor and things aren’t going well, they need to be able to tell the truth to the investor and own up to the responsibility of what they did wrong and what they’ve learned from it and not do it in order for the investor not to suddenly micromanage them.
I think you’re absolutely right. This really applies to everything. It applies to when you’re running a business, it applies to when you’re talking to your kids, it applies to everything. If you’re going to pitch your company to a venture capitalist, they might not know specifically what you’re lying about, but I think they sense when you’re holding something back. I think there’s something tremendously liberating when you just decide, “You know what? I’m going to tell the truth and we’ll see where the chips fall.”
Great Minds of Investing: When you peer under the hood and you want to see the dirt in there, it’s actually tremendously liberating.
I had this myself because there was a period when my career hit a rocky stage and I got laid off during the financial crisis. For a while, you feel ashamed and you’re like, “Okay, maybe I should hide this and I should pretend that everything’s great.” Then after a while you start to think, “To hell with it, I’m just going to be honest about what’s going on in my life. I’m not going to hide the fact that I’ve gone through tough times. I’m not going to hide the fact that I’ve written stories that got killed by major magazines or whatever.”
Once you start to do that and you start to say, you want to peer under the hood and you want to see the dirt in there, it’s actually tremendously liberating because you don’t have to remember what you’re lying about. I think the extraordinary thing is that people start to look at the truth tellers. This is not to say we’re all super truthful. There are degrees of honesty and dishonesty.
I think people look at investors, CEOs, writers, whatever it is, who are trying to tell the truth, who are pushing towards this level of integrity and honesty about themselves and what they’re doing. I think they sense it. I think of one of the things that’s really interesting that I’ve found in life, people always say, opposites attract. I don’t think that’s true at all, I think like attracts like.
As you start to behave somewhat better in your own life and to be more truthful and more open about your flaws and your failings and the like, I actually think you draw into your life a better quality of person. You might find that if you lie or prevaricate or you conceal a little bit about the problems with your company or your career or your background, that you do still manage to sell, you do still manage to get founders and the like, but they’re probably not going to be the people you actually want to have in your life.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Superpower in life is being authentic.”]
You’re drawing less high quality people into your life. What I found really fascinating is when I’ve seen people like Mohnish Pabrai or Guy Spier who behave in this way where they’re trying to be more decent or more open and more honest about their flaws and their failings, their mistakes. They draw an incredible group of people around them. I think it’s a superpower in life, once you understand this. Exposing your vulnerability and your mistakes, because people sense whether they can trust you or not.
When you take down your mask, which is another way of saying that, and show your flaws a little bit to people and don’t pretend that everything’s always perfect, not only you’re going to attract the right investors, but as a startup you’re going to attract the right quality of people to join your team. Because they won’t feel like they have to be perfect to join your team.
They’re like, “If you, as the founder, are willing to share your flaws and not be hypercritical about them, then maybe that will be a place where I could make a mistake and not feel like I’m going to be fired tomorrow.” That’s what’s going to attract really great people on your team. As we all know, having a great team is one of the keys to being successful.
I think it’s hugely important as a manager. When I look back on my own career, when I look at the best bosses I had. When I worked for people who were bullies and who were not that talented. I couldn’t wait to get out. When I worked for people who were really decent and kind and supportive, I would do anything for them.
You don’t want to sound naive about these things. There are incredibly smart people who get by being sons of bitches. I think there’s this other way where you see people who behave very decently and they attract great people in their lives.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Decent people attract great people in their lives.”]
I was trying to think about it, who was it, there was someone I interviewed recently. He was a multi-billionaire who is running one of these big funds. He had a partner and he just said to me, “We haven’t argued in 30 years. We’ve never had a difference about anything in 30 years.” That’s an incredible thing to say, where you treat someone, you treat your partner that decently. Actually, I remember it was Mason Hawkins, who’s a close friend of Buffett’s. He runs a firm called Southeast Asset Management. He said to me, “My partner is just the most decent human being you’ve ever met.” What a wonderful thing to be able to say about the person you work with every day?
I can probably bet a lot of money that that’s the kind of person they’re looking to invest in too. They want to only be around people that match their values and their sense of integrity.
Exactly. One of the things Hawkins said to me that was really fascinating was that, he was talking about the type of people who he hired and he had about six characteristics he looked for. Actually, he said that the single most important thing he looked for employees he hired was generosity. He said he look for people who … He knew they were going to have excess income, he knew that we’re going to become rich if they were good in what he did.
Great Minds of Investing: People who shared their wealth had much more longevity in the investment world.
He wanted to know that they were going to be prepared to share some of that wealth. He said the extraordinary thing was that you actually, you discover that the people who were prepared to share their wealth and be very philanthropic had much more longevity in the investment world.
If you were just working for yourself, if it was just about how do I buy a faster car, or a red Ferrari, or a bigger house, or whatever, then that drive at a certain point wanes a little bit. What he was saying is that he felt that when there was a slightly broader cause than just your own ego and getting the best Volvos and toys and the like, you actually did a better job.
I think again, there’s nothing wrong with buying a beautiful car if you’re very successful or buying a beautiful house. These things are all fine. I think one of the things that strikes me with these guys who have been very successful is some of them are really pretty evolved and thoughtful about what the money does and doesn’t buy them.
The ones who strike me as most impressive in terms of models to how you want to live your life are the ones who haven’t lost sight of things like generosity, philanthropy, having a good work environment and the like. The ones who are really just out to dominate the world and prove to their father that they think they were better than he thought, those guys can be incredibly successful but they tend to create a lot of chaos, both to the people around them and also in their own lives.
I think again, when you’re trying to study people that have been very successful, you want to figure out what are their relationships like, both inside their company, with their wives, and the like, with their kids, how messed up are their kids. Look at them be like, “What do I want to be like?”
I had this fascinating exchange with a guy called Irving Kahn, who died at the age of 109 last year and was one of the famous value investors. He was too sick to talk to me in person when he was 108, so I gave him various questions that his grandson, who is in his 30s, went over with him for several days. His grandson came back to me with the answers that he’d written up.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: It’s all family, it’s all relationships.”]
One of the things I said to Irving Kahn is, “When you look back on the last 108 years, what’s the secret not just of a very profitable life or a very long life, but a successful life?” He said, “It’s all family, it’s all relationships.” He said he’s really proud of the fact that he built a company, Kahn Brothers, that has three generations of his family working for it and is really successful and does the right thing by its clients.
It’s that combination of having built something worthwhile, that force for good in the world, his company, and the fact that he has healthy kids, healthy family, and good relationships. I think that’s really striking when you see someone with that 109 year perspective saying, “It’s not that I’m dying with the most money, or the most toys.”
It’s great. It’s full circle to the beginning of the episode where you talked about Warren Buffett’s whole focus on unconditional love from his father being one of the keys to his success. What a great insight you’ve given everybody to think about themselves, how to approach investors with authenticity so that you attract the right investors, and just how to be a happier person through this whole mindset.
That’s why your book has got a great title, The Great Minds of Investing. Everyone’s going to assume, “It’s all about the mindset of how to make money,” but it’s that and so much more. I highly recommend everybody getting that. We’re also going to put the book you mentioned, I believe you said Power vs. Force in the show notes.
Yeah, I think it’s an important book. It is an important book.
William, how can people follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter and all that good stuff?
They’re welcome to visit my website, which is WilliamGreenWrites.com. They’re welcome to find me on LinkedIn and become friends with me there. I don’t tweet as much as I should and so I’m struggling even to remember what my Twitter handle is. Sorry about that.
No worries. We can certainly follow you on LinkedIn and visit you on your website as well. Thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been an honor.
Thank you so much. A real pleasure of me, John.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
William Green Website
The Great Minds of Investing by William Green
I’ve Followed Warren Buffett For Decades – LinkedIn Post by William Green
William on LinkedIn
Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins
Crack The Funding Code!
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How To Pitch So Investors Say Yes – Interview with Matthew Pollard
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Episode Summary
Matthew Pollard has five multi-million-dollar business success stories under his name and is the founder of the Rapid Growth Coach. Matthew grew up with a disability and felt like he would never, ever fit in. Despite being extremely introverted at the time, he took a door-to-door sales opportunity and excelled in it by teaching himself the ropes through YouTube videos. Matthew’s story is nothing short of amazing and this is definitely an episode you won’t want to miss.
How To Pitch So Investors Say Yes – Interview with Matthew Pollard
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. I’m thrilled to say that today’s guest is Matthew Pollard, who is known as the Rapid Growth Guy. With five multi-million dollar business success stories to his name and the prestigious Young Achiever Award, Matthew’s been characterized as a true differentiation niche marketing and sales system powerhouse. He was honored with the induction into the International Sales Blogger Hall of Fame as well as named in Evan Carmichael’s report as the 43rd most retweeted business coach on Twitter.
Recently, he was a top ten finalist in the Top Sales World Magazine for the number one sales and marketing video. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s been nominated for Austin’s Change Maker Award. He’s a recurring guest on Fox 7’s Good Day Austin. He is also a sought after judge at many of America’s most startup events, including Google Startup Weekend, AngelHack and Microsoft’s 60 Seconds to Startup. He’s a pitch coach that has a ton of expertise to share with us. Without any further ado, welcome to the show, Matthew.
Mate, I’m impressed you got through all of that. I apologize. I should have cut some things down for you.
I stumbled a little bit, but I’m not trying to be perfect. I think that’s actually a big lesson for people, is just be yourself. Be authentic. You don’t have to be perfect. If you say a word wrong or stumble over something, don’t freak out. Just keep going.
100% right. What I find is people that go to all the effort of being absolutely perfect, don’t come across as authentic and come across as obviously, they’re trying too hard, which means if you spend six months preparing to be absolutely perfect for a pitch, what’s going to happen when you need to do things on the instant?
Before we dive into all your awards and all your multi-million business successes, can you take us back to where did you grow up and how did you decide you wanted to become an entrepreneur?
Investors Say Yes: I felt that the world wasn’t going to learn to love what I did and how I did anything..
I didn’t actually decide it, it decided me. I guess the best way I can tell the story is that I grew up in a not a hugely poor area, but not a wealthy area at all. It was a little area just outside of a place called Meadows, which definitely not poor by a lot of standards, but where I grew up, it was considered poor. For me, I really struggled in everything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had a reading speed of a sixth grader in late high school. I just felt that the world wasn’t going to learn to love what I did and how I did anything because everything in school, I just struggled with.
Give us some context. You’re in Australia, going to school?
Correct. I was in Melbourne, Australia. I was just really struggling and there was some support there. Anyone that’s had a disability, and I had what’s called Irlen Syndrome, which is often misdiagnosed as dyslexia, which basically means you put a pair of glasses on and all of a sudden things start to work again, I just couldn’t read. Except for the fact that you have to start again. I got diagnosed when I was about sixteen and a half and from that point, I then started to learn to read but I had to start from scratch.
For anyone that comes from that far behind, and school was really hard for me, but it took me everything I had … I got into the top 20% of my state for educational school. But it took every piece of energy I had to do that. I just didn’t have it in me to go to University. My parents knew that I didn’t. I needed a break, and in my father’s words, I needed to work out what I wanted to be doing and what my passion was before I could go back to school and do that. Luckily enough, I did find that passion. I won the Young Achiever of the Year Award in 2007 and I then get invited back to do an MBA when I hadn’t done an undergraduate. I got to study and do my MBA without doing the undergraduate degree.
What I then did is I went to a real estate agency and the goal there was to really hide away for twelve months and relax and try and figure out what I wanted to do, but really, the goal was to hide away. Luckily, unluckily, depending on how you look at it, that real estate agency went bankrupt within just a few weeks of me working there and about a couple of weeks just before Christmas. America and Australia are slightly different when it comes to Christmas holiday, because it’s our summer as well. We tend to close down on the 20th of December and reopen somewhere between the 15th and the 20th of January.
Investors Say Yes: I decided to go home and work out a better way.
Getting a job just before Christmas is virtually impossible to do. Here I was where I committed to my family that I was going to support myself and obviously they could have supported me but they would have struggled and that would have been completely my fault forever. I had to go and find a job quickly and the only job I could find was commission only sales. I was really introverted. The reading speed issue created a huge amount of lack of confidence within myself. I really took a long time to warm up to anyone. I struggled to talk to my own friends. Commission only sales, door-to-door, was the only job I could get. Outside of disappointing my family, that was what I had to do.
I went out door-to-door selling with no sales training, they gave us five days of product training, dropped us off and said, “Hey, good luck with that.” I went, “Okay.” The first day, I went to 93 doors. You have to see an image to know what this feels like, to walk down a street of stores that all look like places you’d never want to shop. But, that was the strip that I went down and I had to try make a sale. My 93rd door, I made my first sale, I remember walking out ecstatic, I’d made about $70. It just dawned on me that I had to do this every single day. That was horrible. I got told to get a real job, to get out, I got sworn at for 93 doors before somebody finally said yes to me.
What I then did is I decided to go home and work out a better way. What I did, I was dyslexic and I couldn’t exactly pick up a Zig Ziglar or a Brian Tracy book and read how to do it. I turned on YouTube and I watched YouTube videos and I trained myself how to sell. I first learned the steps of the sale and then I focused on one new step every single day for about a week and a half. Every day, I got slightly better, I got to the next stage, I got to speak to more people, then I got more people interested, then I learned how to close.
Over the space of about a week, I started to get comfortable. Within six weeks, I actually went from a person that had no business being there, definitely not a natural, which what most people say you have to be to be in sales, to the number one sales performer in the Southern Hemisphere. To cut a long story short, about twelve months later, I’ve been promoted seven times and I’ve been promoted to state manager, foreign state and then the head office state for the largest sales and marketing company in the Southern Hemisphere, which wasn’t bad.
Then I transitioned into my own business, which was a tiny little thing above a Subway restaurant that within twelve months I grew to a million dollar concern. Within three years, it turned over $4.2 million and was the largest independent broker firm B2B, business to business, cellphones in the country. Then, going to now, I’ve been responsible for five multi-million dollar success stories from telecommunications all the way through to high level education. I work with people and teach people all over the world and actually, next week, flying to Bangkok, to speak for Electrolux, at their conference, to help them understand rapid growth, and that’s all I do for a living now.
What a story. I love stories. I’m a big fan of being a storyteller to communicate your points. It’s one thing if you just said, “I’m persistent.” But, you didn’t say that. You painted a picture for us of what persistence looks like 93 doors later and with very little payoff and figuring out a better way. That you weren’t that kind of person that could just crack a book the night before a test and wing it and do well. You had to work harder than everybody else. That, in my mind, created the grit that’s necessary to become a successful entrepreneur if you’re willing to work harder than everybody else because you have to, not because you want to. That’s the secret to your success, in a way, I think.
Firstly, you’re 100% right about the stories. If we’re going to be talking about pitching anything, stories is your number one resource. A lot of people say they don’t have stories. They have stories everywhere. Think about yourself at a dinner party when you go out. Tell me you have never once told a story. It just doesn’t happen. Everybody tells stories. They just think when it comes to business, that’s not what they should be doing.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Stories is your number one resource in pitching.”]
Secondly, the working hard thing, yeah, I did work really, really hard and a lot harder than anybody else would have. A lot of the naturals, their skillsets were based on their personality. They just have a fight with their girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife or mama or dad or friend, all of a sudden, they’re not selling today. My skillset was regardless of whether it was rain, hail, or storm, I did the exact same thing and it was fine.
When I had to learn to be a manager or a business owner, all of a sudden I needed new skills, so all of a sudden I went back to my old competency of search and discover the things that I need to know to make it possible. As soon as you do that, then you’re now fantastic at that and then you can go about doing it, and it’s much easier than everyone else. If you ask me, which one would I prefer, would I prefer to work hard for six weeks instead of the rest of my life, or twelve months instead the rest of my life, I choose the former. Most people don’t. Most people choose to work hard every single day, but still clock off at 6 o’clock.
What a fascinating perception. Is that how you came up with your tagline that you’re the Rapid Growth Guy, because you figure out how to do it faster so you don’t have to keep doing the same thing?
I think the Rapid Growth terminology came from a couple of places. Firstly, I’m a big believer on using technology so you can automate things and then move on. If you’ve got lots of automated functionality, then you can be much faster than most other people. If you’re intelligent about how you do that, then you can be much faster and much more effective than most people doing it manually. First, what is rapid growth? Rapid growth can be building up your business to a point where it needs to hire more sales staff, more development people, more everything, because now you’re becoming a bigger business, or it can just be increasing your rates. I’ve worked with, a lot of consultants, ghostwriters, all sorts of different businesses that don’t want to hire staff, they just want to work for themselves but they’re struggling to make ends meet.
I had a ghostwriter that I worked with back in 2014. He earns I think it was $12,000 by the time he called me and $27,000 the year before. Within two weeks of working with him, he’d made $40,000. Within seven weeks, he’d made $80,000. By the end of the year, he’d made $120,000. By the end of 2015, I think he was just shy of $250,000. That’s the difference. But, again, just him, he just increased his rates by using strategies to get busy and then strategies to put your prices up.
Rapid growth doesn’t come from being a great salesperson. That helps, but I’m a big believer of saying that if you start with sales, you’ve already lost. What you need to do is pull all of that back and say, “What is my unified message?” What is the thing that differentiates me from everybody else? Not like a branding person or an SEO person does, because what’s most important, especially for a person that’s just starting out is that that message is congruent with them. Because if it’s congruent with who they are, they will tell it to everybody, where if they find themselves being disingenuous, they won’t.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Craft a message that is authentic to who you are.”]
It’s about really crafting that unified message that draws their specific customer that rallies to what they talk about to them. The second step is really working out which niches of customers are they the most lucrative, they make the most money out of, and that sing their praises out to the world because they deliver so highly on them, and that they enjoy and love working with. Once you have all of that down, you then work out what technology you need, what networking events you need to go to, what podcasts you need to be on.
All the different things, the artifacts of the things that you need to create so that when you start to sell, your customer comes to you pre sold. Or when you go and sell to them, you really don’t have to try very hard and you don’t have to be that hard salesperson. That was never me. I just built a big enough value proposition and told enough stories that by the time we got to the point of talking about working together, I just assumed we were. I’d say, “Do you want a day course or a night course, or would you prefer to start in January or February?” I would use what’s called a double bind close and they generally respond well. If they didn’t respond well, you’d say, “No, I was just asking because there’s more information I need to give you based on whether or not you’re starting in the day or the night or whether you’re starting in January or February.”
Once you have your goals, you can then work out what your unified message is.
Therefore, it’s really, really relaxed. You can’t not be a hardcore salesperson if you haven’t done your homework. Most people don’t know what their goals are, and if you don’t know what your goals are, how do you know where you’re heading. If you don’t know what your goals are, how do you know what’s congruent with you. I’ve got a podcast where I talk about … This is the Better Business Coach Podcast. One of the episodes is dedicated to talking about your goals and working out what they are. Once you have those, you can then work out what your unified message is. You were a member of one of the calls that I was on recently where I outlined a full five step process for really how to work out what that message is. Once you have that, then you can start building the stories around that that help you do an investment pitch or a new client pitch, or a publicity pitch.
I love what you said here. “If you start with sales, you’ve already lost.” We’re going to tweet that out from the show. That’s a great line. It’s memorable and it makes people think and go, “What?” Just to recap what you said, craft a message that’s congruent with who you are, figure out who your ideal customer is that’s going to sing your praises, and then figure out ways to market yourself using podcast and technology that spreads the word for you. Would that be a fair summary?
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: If you start with sales you’ve already lost.”]
It definitely is, but I will make one point. Up until a few years ago, 100% of my business was outbound, and I was doing it wrong. I could have saved a lot of time and a lot of resources, and yeah, my businesses were successful. They just could have been much more successful if I focused on inbound traffic too. Now I also focus on inbound traffic, and I’ve been reported for turning my business 100% inbound within seven months. But that doesn’t mean I hide behind my laptop either.
I think a lot of people in today’s modern world, they want to live behind blogs, email addresses, and that’s their world. I still go to networking events. I still go out and publicly speak. I still do a lot of things out in the world. I think that’s why I’ve been nominated for that Change Maker Award, because I’m out in the world. No one would have given me that award if I didn’t go out and speak to people. The whole process is that you craft this message and then you outwardly focus. You use technology, you go to meet up groups.
But, please, if you’re a PR agent, don’t go to a PR agent meet up group. If you’re a business coach, don’t go to a business coach meet up and call that marketing. That’s you hanging out with your friends. You’re not going to find a person that needs PR from a PR agency meet up group. Go out and speak to different groups where your customers hang out. That’s really the real key focus is. Look, it’s up to you, but if we have time, I can go through a very simple process how you would start to really understand what your unified message is, because that’s vitally important when you’re going to start to craft a pitch, that people understand how to do that.
I would love to have you do that because I think it’s really valuable for our listeners, since you’re judging pitches, you can share what you look for that makes a unified message and then makes you say, “That’s a good pitch that I would fund or not.”
A unified message is really something that’s going to get people to hook. After this, what we can do is we can go through what I’m looking for in a pitch. Because, what I find is a lot of people want to get up in front of me and tell me all about the features of the product and why the product is so cool in the technology. I don’t care. We’ll talk about what I do want to hear because I want to hear stories, but there are specific types of stories in specific orders that I want to hear. But, let’s go through the five steps of creating that unified message. This is simple to do, no one ever does it.
I did this at the National Freelance Conference the other day. This is going back in November now. I had a room of 150 people. We did this as a workshop with me from the stage. More than 70, 80% of the room said that they’d never spent as much time on the marketing as they had with me in that room. The workshop was 45 minutes. These people, a lot of them have been in business for five years. How is that possible?
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Don’t hide behind your functional skills.”]
What I’ve learned is most people want to hide behind their functional skill, which is the skillset that they love to do and have had years of experience doing. It’s fine to do your functional skill. Go and work for somebody. If you want to earn a living running a business doing your functional skill, you have to spend time on other things too. Just like the bookkeeper and the accounting that you have to do, otherwise the tax man comes after you. With the marketing, the business cemetery comes after you. You just shut your business down. You have to market and sell, but make it easier for yourself. Have that unified message.
Here’s what we do. There’s a link that I crafted for you, which was MatthewPollard.com/Pitch, and if you go to that, it will give you a much better outline of what this is and as well as a bunch of other information about how to really craft that unified message, find your niche market, and find your sales system. That’s a specific link that I designed just for your listeners.
The basic process is write down a list, and all I want you to do is write down the names of the people that you get your absolute best results from. If you can’t think of who those people are, think about the people that give you referrals, think about the people that write you testimonials. Think about the people that keep increasing how many hours they spend with you or how much money they spend with you or how much they order from you. Those are the customers that sing your praises.
Now that you’ve got those names down, write down the names of all the people you make ridiculous money out of. People you make fantastic money out of and that every time they place an order, you know that it’s a profitable one. It’s not just cutting costs because you negotiated the price too much at the beginning. Write down the names of all those people.
Now, you’ve got two lists of names. You’re going to see similarities between certain names. What we want you to do is write them into groups. What we’re starting to design here is what we call customer segments. Basically what you’ve got is you had two lists of names, now you should have several groups. Now, what I want you to do now is I want you to pick up two colored pens. I always say red and blue, but it really doesn’t matter as long as they’re two different colored pens. Let’s pick up the blue pen now and I want you to circle all of the customer groups that sing you praises, give you massive numbers of referrals that you know just love to work with you.
Investors Say Yes: Your ideal customer segment is where you want to focus your time.
Then pull out your red pen and circle all the ones you make fantastic money out of. What you’ll notice is some of these circles don’t overlap, but there’ll be a few or at least one where you’ve circled it with a blue and a red circle. This is what’s called your ideal customer segment. This is where you want to focus your time. Now, if you’ve got a couple, what I want you to do is look inside yourself and say, which one of these is more congruent with me? Which are the ones that make me jump out of bed and make me want to work? Because that’s the group. Don’t pick all three or five or ten or two. Pick the one that you love the most.
Now, a lot of people, at this point, will say, “Yeah, but there’s only two customers in there or one name. I only worked with one client.” I had a client in California who owned a language institute and she taught people how to speak Mandarin. When she did this, what we discovered was that there was two clients, only two that were in this customer group. These were people she taught Mandarin but she helped them with other things as well. She helped them understand the concept of galaxy, which is the Chinese form of rapport.
See, in China, they want to go out to dinner with you several times before they talk business. They probably want to see you drunk over karaoke to see what kind of person you are. They want to find all out about your family. Now, you think, from a sales perspective, imagine having several meetings before you even got to speak about your product. For an American, it’s ridiculously frustrating. We want to have one meeting and sign the deal. If not, maybe next week we’ll go back and sign it. We definitely don’t want to go back seven times.
As an American though, we go to China and we try and do this and we fail miserably, and we never get welcomed back. What happens is that this all derived from the fact that we don’t understand their concept of rapport. The reason why we don’t understand it is that in America, we’re signing 12 to 24 month contracts, where in China, they’re signing 50 to 100 year deals. That’s longer than some people’s lifetimes.
Whole different perspective.
They want to know who they’re getting into bed with. That’s the first thing. She also helped them understand the difference between eCommerce in the US and the eCommerce in China. The next thing she helped them understand was the absolute necessity for accent reduction training. See, Americans think they just need to learn Mandarin. They don’t think they need to learn how to reduce their accent. People in China don’t expect you to know and speak exactly like them. They do expect you to try, because in China, it’s all about respect. If you’re seen as disrespectful, you can’t do business with a person.
That’s why they’ll hand you a business card and you have to hold it, look at it, appreciate it, almost bow sometimes, put it in your card case, that’s right, a card case, and show that you’ve incredibly valued it. What do Americans and Australians do? We throw it in our pocket and keep on talking. She helped them understand these three things. She was worried that there was only two people. What I said to her is where there’s one, there’ll be many. You just need to get out there and find them.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Where there is one ideal customer, there will be many more.”]
Let’s go into the next step. What we then got Wendy to do is write down all of the things she did above and beyond for this customer or these two customers that were outside the scope of her functional skill. Because what she did was she taught people language. The next step was she wrote down all of these above and beyond things, that she helped people with galaxy, that she helped people with eCommerce, that she helped people with accent reduction and understanding the psychology of why that’s important.
Then, what the last step is is we then ask, “What is the higher level benefit of this?” See, for Wendy, the fact that she was teaching people language was only part of the puzzle, and for that, she was struggling to get $50 to $80 an hour. There’s so many people moving into California from other states or from China that were willing to cut their prices to the bone just to deliver the same service, and they were delivering it for $30 to $40 an hour. She was losing market share. For these people though, she didn’t just teach them language. She helped them become successful in China. She couldn’t see this, but by doing this exercise, all of a sudden when I said it to her, she’s like, “That’s right. That is what I do.” From that point, we then transferred her name into the China Success Coach, and she had the China Success Institute.
Oh, how great.
Then we networked to a bunch of, and this is going into niching, we went and spoke to a bunch of immigration agents. Immigration agents are those people you go to to get a visa to go and work in a foreign country. They’d make a couple of thousand dollars at the absolute most to go and do a visa, and then they’d have their time and their costs on top of that. She sold a program that was a $30,000, five week program, that worked with the executive, the spouse, and any children to be as successful as they possibly could when they get relocated to China. Why the spouse and the children? One, you can charge more when there’s more people.
But, secondly, if the spouse and the children are unhappy being relocated, they’re going to act out. The executives are going to be called home. The immigration agent got paid a $3,000 commission for any successful introduction. That was more money than they made off the immigration deal itself and there was no work requirement. Wendy is now ridiculously busy. She doesn’t do any of her own sales. Remember how I said if you start with sales, you’ve already lost? All she had to do was sell a few immigration agents on the idea, and now she’s fully inundated with clients, and not only is the immigration agent ecstatic, so are her clients, and she created the industry. Going back, it’s, what are all the higher level benefits that you deliver to the people that are within that blue and red circle? Then, last, what is the higher level benefit of that?
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: What is the higher level benefit?”]
For Wendy, she delivered success in China. She became the China Success Coach. For me, I’m a business coach, I’m a marketing specialist, I’m a branding expert, I’m a sales strategist, I’m a sales systemization specialist, I’m an NLP coach. It’s so ridiculously confusing and everyone tries to tell everybody what they do. What’s the higher level benefit of that? I help people obtain rapid growth. It’s simple. There’s a lot of other things I do. Like NLP isn’t really about rapid growth, and business coaching is all about setting the foundations for rapid growth. But, if I try and explain all of that to a customer straightaway, then actually I’m going to lose the customer because there’s just too much. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn it. I can’t expect them to learn it in 30 minutes.
It reminds me of that phrase, “If you over teach, you overwhelm.”
Exactly right. There’s a sales term, “Keep it simple, stupid.” The reason why it’s so important is because once you get to work with them on something, you then can educate them while they’re paying you about all the things that you do above and beyond that. I work with clients for six hours. That’s all I do for my initial engagement. That is it. Because a lot of my clients, at that point, have all the tools they need to obtain rapid growth. If I identify that there’s a specific thing that I can help with outside the terms of rapid growth, then I suggest that we continue to work together.
Let me just quickly recap. I love what you said here, we’re going to tweet this out. “Don’t hide behind your functional skill,” and the third tweet’s going to be, “Where there’s one ideal customer, there will be many more.”
Investors Say Yes: We have the ability to be able to go and speak to everybody in the world now.
That’s exactly right because you think about it, I remember seeing in a sci-fi once that they discovered moss, which was like a form of life on a foreign planet. They said when there’s one form of life, there’ll be many more. The truth is that’s exactly the same. With the amount of people in this global economy, and remember now, we’re not trying to find customers just next door or within our specific city, or we don’t have to take horse and cart. We have the ability to be able to go and speak to everybody in the world now. I’m traveling all the way to Bangkok to speak for 90 minutes because they found me on an obscure website. All of these comes from the ability to be able to disseminate your information to the world. If there’s one customer per country, you’re still going to be a very busy person.
Let me just quickly recap for the listeners the five steps to a unified message. Number one, put a list of names together of the people that sing your praises. Number two, put a list together of people who you make the most money from, the profitability customer. Number 3, take two different colored pens, put them into different groups and to different customer segments, and figure out then which of those people make you the happiest to work with. Then the 4th step is figure out what higher level benefit you offer to those people, and take yourself out of just being a commodity. Then, there’s a 5th step that I’m missing, is that right?
In simple terms, it’s step one is write down a list of all the customers you get the most referrals and testimonials from, the people that love working with you, then write a list of all the people you make the most money out of. That’s step one. Step two is seeing the similarities within those and grouping them together into what we call customer segments.
Got it.
Step three is grabbing out a red and blue pen and circling the ones in red that you make the most money out of, and in blue, the ones that you get the best referrals from and all the people that clearly love to work with you. Then, pick one of those that you congruently feel most comfortable working with. The one that you pick has to be the one that has a red and a blue circle around it.
That’s step 4.
That’s step three, still.
Oh, okay.
Step four is saying, “Now that I’ve picked that group, I need to write down all of the things outside my functional skill that I deliver above and beyond for these people.” Now, you’ve got a long list of things that you deliver above and beyond your functional skill. Step five is asking the question, “What is the higher level benefit of that?”
Terrific. Thanks for the clarification. Because there was so much great information there and my left brain wasn’t processing the numbers properly, but now I totally get it and you sent that great link. Let me just repeat that for the listeners, MatthewPollard.com/Pitch just for our listeners today. What great information.
One of the things I will make clear here, and because I think this is an important point. What I did was I talked about a five step framework, but did you notice how I used a story to explain the last three steps?
Yes.
Investors Say Yes: If you tell a story while explaining a framework, even the ones that don’t get it know they want to know more.
The reason for that is whenever you discuss a framework, people are either going to get it or they’re not. However, if you tell a story while explaining a framework, then even the ones that don’t get the framework know they want to know more. The story will engage both groups to say, “Okay, I understand the framework, the story, I want what Wendy has.
I want to be my version of the Chinese Success Coach.
Exactly right. Because of that, regardless of whether they’re going to come and work with me as a client or go to the MatthewPollard.com/Pitch link, either way, they’re going to know what that methodology is because they want, that because they want what Wendy got. That’s what the purpose is.
One of the things you said to Judy Robinett’s group, Crack the Funding Code, that I just love is that when you tell a story, nobody objects to the story because there’s nothing to object to. They also give you more time that you can also use stories to answer potential objections.
You can look at the fact that if we had gone through this five step strategy, we would have done it in maybe a minute and a half. With the story, it took ten minutes. But, nobody minded because they loved hearing the story of Wendy and then they wanted what Wendy had. The other thing that happens is it goes through the logical barrier. See, if I’m giving you a framework, you can decide whether or not you think that framework will apply to you, whether or not you think the framework will work, or whether you think I read a good book last night and I’m now telling you about it today.
If I tell you a story of Wendy, just like when I’m telling you the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you have to take, as reality, that bears have beds, that bears eat porridge, otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. That’s why stories are so powerful. Look, I want to make sure that we give people the framework of doing this pitch, and that’s a great lead-in for it.
A lot of people talk about when they first get up and talk about why they’re introducing technology or why they’ve created technology, why they’ve got a great idea even if it’s just a bricks and mortar business. They get up and they start talking statistics or functions of what they offer. That is a huge mistake because that doesn’t get people in.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: People love stories, so why not pitch with a story.”]
Instead, what I do with all pitches is I like to take a bit of a backward seat to this and say, “How does a person want to hear it?” People love stories, so why not do it with a story. What do stories have? Stories have chapters. Let’s look at what chapter one would be. Chapter one would be a story of a problem. You can make the problem sound global, but that’s going to be a real issue, because if a problem sounds global, am I identifying with any one individual? Like, there is world starvation out there. Can you fix world starvation? Probably not. Can you identify with global starvation? Definitely, you can’t.
But, what if I talked to you about the guy, John, that’s down on the corner of the freeway holding the sign that doesn’t look quite as healthy as he did last week? All of a sudden, we want to help this guy, John. When you’re talking about implementing a CRM system, you can talk about moving to a new one or doing an upgrade on an old one. You can talk about the fact that this one specific customer, their life was ruined, or they had this massive ordeal over six months and that’s why they’re giving us negative reviews and it’s our fault.
These are stories that people can get behind. If you’re speaking to a boss or if you’re speaking to an investor, both of these groups, if they can see that this specific person has a problem, they’re going to want to help that person. They’ll believe that it’s worth solving because they want to help John or Sarah, because that person deserves being helped. There’s still a financial element there. They need to know that they can make money out of this too, because they can’t just throw money, otherwise there’d be no world hunger, there’d be no world problems at all. We’d all just be helping everybody all the time. They need to know that they can make a financial return.
Step two, or chapter two, if you like, is taking that story of Sarah or that story of John and then saying, “But there are so many Johns out there in the world or there are so many Sarahs that are experiencing these problems with us and with our competitors that if we change our system to support Sarah and John, they’d come flocking to us.” Or if we created this system, all of a sudden, we’d have first mover advantage in a market that doesn’t quite exist just yet. Do you see the power of that?
I do. You paint a picture because people remember your stories, not your numbers. Then, once they understand the story of one person, you explain how many other people are having the same problem.
Investors Say Yes: Venture capitalists have so many opportunities to invest, they may as well invest in something that serves the social good.
What then happens is a person then says, “Wow. There’s A, a reason I can brag to my friends at the golf course that I’m saving something for the social good.” Because let’s be specific here for a second, these days, venture capitalists have so many opportunities to invest in things, they may as well invest in something that serves the social good because then they’d feel good and make money. If you can hit both of those, then you’re going to obviously do so much better. What we do is we tell a story about a specific person that has a problem, then we talk about the global epidemic of the problem or the company wide epidemic or industry wide epidemic, however you’re going to talk about it.
Then chapter three is you then say, “Imagine if.” Imagine if the problem was sorted. What would the technology look like or what would the service look like or what would the retail space have to look like? What you’re doing here is you’re asking them to use their imagination. Now, the reason why we do this is if you then suggest the technology, again, they can decide whether or not they like the idea or not. But, they haven’t got anything to base it off, so it’s about do I like it or do I not like it? By saying, “Imagine if,” we’re actually incorporating a double bind into our pitch because they’re going to evaluate our idea that we’re about to present them to the idea that they’ve just come up with.
Nice.
Now, what we then do is we then present our solution. We talk about the technology that we’ve created and how it would help Sarah or John. Bring it back to that one person. Now, the reason why this works so well is the venture capitalist will either have had a better idea than you, in which case, what are they doing? They’re thinking about your idea on how that’s a great foundation and how they’d love to bolt on all the things that they had in their mind. What they’re not thinking about is that your idea sucks. If they had an idea that wasn’t as good as yours, then all of a sudden, they’re ridiculously excited about your idea. Either way, they’re now thinking about how they invest in your product or service or your new creation, not whether or not they want to.
The technique shifts it to automatically getting them to be collaborating with you in their head.
Exactly right. What it does is it escapes the logical mind. We ask the imaginative brain to be engaged so the logical brain is switched off. Then we introduce our solution, the emotional brain looks at it, and the emotional brain says, “What I just came up with, this is almost that. Let’s make it happen.” All before the logical mind switches on.
Nice.
Trust me when I say, there’s huge amounts of studies for this, that the logical mind and the emotional brain cannot work at the same time. That’s why when you go and speak to someone about their problem and they buy it, and then all of a sudden, tomorrow, they change their mind, it’s because their logical mind goes, “Hang on a sec, what the hell did you just do?” Now, that’s why there’s all these strategies about getting rid of post-sale dissonance. What we need to do, a good pitch captivates the emotional brain then gets the emotional brain going, “Let’s do this,” and then we need to introduce the logical reasons for why it’s still going to work.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: The logical and emotional brain can’t work at the same time.”]
Otherwise they’ll just say, “Oh, I want to think about it.” They’re scared to make a decisions just based on their gut.
What you’re going to find is at this stage, people will offer you money or talk about the fact that they are going to invest in you because they’re still emotionally engaged. But tomorrow, they’re going to call and say they changed their mind or they had a conversation with somebody and they decided. Because what happens is they tried to explain to a friend, a partner, or somebody else why and they didn’t do it the way you did it and there was no logical way of explaining it, and therefore, they’re going to call and say, “Sorry, but no.”
Now, chapter five is this time to really start to talk about the truth of everything else. You talk about the fact that you know exactly where the market is. If there are other people in the market already, you talk about that, but why you’ll place to take over that market. You talk about the risks involved, you talk about how you differentiate from the potential competition and what your advantages are. You come 100% clean, you talk about the entire logical business plan.
Engage them emotionally then back it up with logic so that they feel that you have covered all the bases and that they can go back to saying, “This still makes sense both emotionally and logically.”
Exactly. The emotional brain is engaged still at this point, but when they wake up tomorrow or they try and explain it to someone, they will have all the information to answer. You’ve basically just given them the objection handling list for anyone that says, “What are you doing?”
Including themselves.
Exactly right. Chapter six is you then transition into the ask. You talk about what it’s going to cost or what you need. Then you transition straight into chapter seven, which is the opportunity, how much money can potentially be made, the team, and why your team is the most equipped to take this idea forward.
Nice. Wow, you’ve given us so much. You’ve given us these great five steps through a unified message, which can be found at MatthewPollard.com/Pitch. Now we have seven amazing chapters on how to make our pitch not just concise, but compelling and overcome any objections that people might have after they say yes, which is fantastic information. Thank you so much, Matthew. You’ve been an incredible value resource. I see why you’re getting booked all over the world to speak. How can people follow you in social media, hire you to be a speaker, anything else you want to share with us?
Definitely. Obviously, if you type my name, Matthew Pollard, into Google, you’ll find I take up most of the page anyway. You’ll be able to find me there. But, you can find me at, my Twitter handle is @MatthewPollard_. My LinkedIn is just MatthewPollardSpeaker, and you’ll find me at MatthewPollardSpeaker on Facebook as well. Check out my website. It’s MatthewPollard.com. One of the other great things you’ll see there if you go to the start here link is I list down underneath how to pitch to investors there, what the top three pitching mistakes are as well, and I talk about how to not write a deck.
Those things are really, really handy because a lot of times, people do everything right but then they put out a clanger. I’m not sure if that translates into American. They make a really big mistake and the whole pitch goes south. Getting in front of the right venture capitalist happens few and far between. When I suggest to people, really, really practice and have it honed like I did. Spend the six weeks so that then you don’t have to work so hard after that. You need to eradicate those pitching mistakes before you start.
Fantastic. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I can’t thank you enough, and we look forward to checking out all your links and all your great insights and listening to your podcast, the Better Business Coach.
Not a problem. It was an absolute pleasure to be here.
Terrific. Thanks for listening. Goodbye for now.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Matthew Pollard Website
Matthew on LinkedIn
Matthew on Twitter
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Startup Tricks Of The Trade – Interview with John Shumate
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Episode Here
Episode Summary
John Shumate is the CEO of Venture First, a financial services group with a strong focus on empowering entrepreneurs. Venture First helps companies by providing the financial and strategic tools necessary to succeed. John dives into how entrepreneurs can structure their funding, how to build a better connection with investors, and shares a client case study. Tune in to hear more about John and Venture First.
Startup Tricks Of The Trade – Interview with John Shumate
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is John Shumate, the CEO of Venture First. John is the CEO of Venture First and focused his career on working closely with venture-backed companies. He’s worked with hundreds of early and growth stage companies across many industries, many of them dealing with highly technical products or business models. He believes strongly in the use of carefully applied rigor to rationalize financial models, business plans and valuations. He’s got over a decade of financial experience, including the buy side and the sell side of mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity capital raises, strategic consulting, complex financial modeling, very few people do that, business plan development, equity and derivative valuation. John attended Wharton. We are so happy to have him on today. John, welcome.
Thanks so much. Happy to be here and looking forward to talking to you about the entrepreneurial world.
I want to jump in and find out how you got to be where you are. Did you know when you went to Wharton that you wanted to start your own VC firm? How did you get there?
Startup Tricks: I got my foray to ventures and venture capital groups and that whole ecosystem and I absolutely loved it.
No, not at all. Business has always intrigued me. When I was a kid, I collected coins and baseball cards and was always hustling and dealing with different people as a kid. I knew I always liked the personalities of people, I liked the interaction, I liked the stories that went along with it and didn’t mind making a buck along the way. That was all good. I knew I wanted to head in that direction and that’s why I went to Wharton to get that classical economic training, but didn’t know that I wanted to go in that direction. Wharton, like a lot of schools, really try to mitt people out to go straight to Wall Street. If you’re not going straight to one of half a dozen investment banking shops there, you don’t want to do that, they think you’re nuts. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do. They probably thought I was nuts.
I went to work for an incubator, B catalyst, back when I don’t think incubators were cool or at least not as cool as they are now. That incubator, like many incubators, were flawed for a couple reasons. I was there as we ended up turning it into more of a services group, more of an investment banking group working with earlier stage companies. That’s how I got my foray to ventures and venture capital groups and that whole ecosystem and I absolutely loved it. Ever since then, I’ve just been off and running in that realm.
I love what you said about the stories from the coins and the baseball. I collected baseball cards myself, Ernie Banks was a big one to get. The importance of storytelling is everything when you’re pitching someone. Let’s dive into what do you think some of the secrets are to having a good pitch?
I think the biggest secret for having a good pitch is to be genuine. I think so many VCs, they see so many stale pitches that come across. I don’t care who you are, you’re not the first person to come up with an idea to try to revolutionize an area of healthcare or a piece of technology. You might have your own special twist. But more often than not, VCs are betting on the person. Everyone thinks that they’re betting on the idea, but they’re betting on the person. You see this.
[Tweet “Startup Tricks: Sell yourself first before you sell anything.”]
There’s later stage funds that all they do, and these are later stage private equity funds, all they do is go out and fund individuals for whatever their new venture is. Because they know if they’ve been around the block a few times, they’re probably not going to screw it up. Even if there’s a problem with the idea, they are not going to panic, they’re going to be nimble, they’re going to communicate well with their investor and they’re going to pivot and turn it into either a similar company or something completely different than it already is and they’re going to get a win. They’re betting on the people.
I always tell people, if you can go in and connect with the person you’re pitching to and have a real conversation, whatever that is, maybe talk about their family, maybe share the same alma mater, maybe you had the same healthcare treatment, maybe you go for the same sports team. Whatever it is, make a personal connection and sell yourself before you sell anything. I always start off with that, sell yourself and then get into the issue and what it meant to you to get into this venture, why it resonates with you and why you have a passion for it. Then it becomes so easy just to step into the pitch and talk about the business model.
When these guys challenge you, and even if you have a perfect pitch, they’re going to challenge you because that’s what they’re paid to do, have a collaborative conversation. Let them feel like they’re cooking a soup a little bit with you even if you feel like you have pretty good ideas. Don’t get into a pissing match, don’t argue. Firmly hold your ground on your beliefs but have an intellectual conversation about it. If you make it personal, you got a much better chance.
[Tweet “Startup Tricks: Have a collaborative conversation with investors.”]
I love so many things you just said. We’re definitely going to tweet out, “Sell yourself before you sell anything.” I’m a big, big believer in that. “Have a collaborative conversation.” What a great alliteration that is because people think, “If I have a perfect pitch,” which there’s no such thing, “no one’s going to question me and all that other stuff,” but the whole point is you have to show you’re coachable to have that collaboration because people want to not just give you their money, they also want to give you their ideas and see if they like you.
That’s right. Absolutely.
What are some of the reasons you think most startups fail?
There’s a variety of reasons most startups fail. The biggest one is actually pretty simple, they run out of cash. This is something that I preach to startups. You see so many people, when they’re initially raising their first round, and they love their idea, they’re confident that it’s going to work and that’s great, and they’re extremely concerned with preserving every percentage point of equity that they possibly can. I’m not saying you want to end up with a goose egg when you sell the thing. You don’t. You shouldn’t be foolish about it. You’ll hear successful entrepreneurs say time and time again, “I wish I’d gotten a little bit more cash. I wish I’d have a little bit more room to pivot. I wish I’d gone faster.” I generally tell people, “Raise more money than you think you need.” At least 20% more than you think you need or probably three to six months more than you think you need if you think about it in terms of time.
[Tweet “Startup Tricks: Raise 20% more than you think you need.”]
Got it. How long do you think somebody should plan for? Is it twelve months, eighteen months?
I generally advise people to do eighteen months between rounds or at least between when they perceive a round. The reason is most funding rounds can be pretty drawn out even with a good company, whether it’s through negotiations or telling people your stories and there’s this decent battle of attrition that goes on. I like to tell people to budget six months for a raise. It might be faster, but you got to do six months for a raise. The good news is if you do that and you plan for eighteen months, that gives you a full year just to focus on executing and you don’t have to worry about funding. I’ll tell you what, having that funding distraction, as fun as it can be, it really is a big distraction while you’re trying to execute. You’re trying to have a full year support.
Let’s just do the math recap real quickly for everybody. Get enough money to last you eighteen months so you have a whole year to focus on execution and then you have six months window to be executing and raising funds. It’s an 18-12-6. I love that little formula. Thank you so much for spelling that out for us. Since you’re an expert in valuation, I would love to just hear you talk about, are we experiencing an early stage valuation bubble? How does a founder decide how much they should value their company?
It’s a great question. You have a lot of economists and people in their early stage space talking about this frequently. Really, the short answer is, “It depends.” I think if you look at some of the larger household name ventures, if you look at the Facebooks, if you look at the Ubers, if you look at some of these big valuations and sometimes big IPOs, I think there can be an argument on some of them that there’s a bit of a pricing bubble. There’s just so many dollars chasing those ventures, it gets a little inflated. However, I think if you look at the rest of the pack, the rest of the good ventures out there, I really don’t believe there’s much of a bubble.
Clearly, maybe there’s been a little bit of a hump here with some good economic times and maybe you’ll have a little bit of a dip if we have a little bit of a downturn. I think what we’re actually seeing is a new paradigm for how innovation occurs in the modern economy. What you’re seeing is a good amount of churn. In the past, if an entrepreneur failed and had to close a business, they were labeled a failure. This person is not someone you want to do business with. This is not a stigma, at least in the technology hub. It’s not in Silicon Valley, not in Boston, not in Research Triangle Park. This is not a stigma that sticks with people.
[Tweet “Startup Tricks: No stigma to failing.”]
This is where you’re betting on the person again. It is expected that if you go through enough ventures, you’re not going to win on every one of them. If you take that lean startup approach and you’re going in and you’re doing your work, you’re going to realize some of these don’t work or you’re going to realize that you have to pivot to something else and there’s a lot of change. The good news with this new paradigm, as I would call it, is that it brings innovation to the floor more rapidly. By fleeing more quickly, it allows a new leaf to be turned over for those smart, aggressive entrepreneurs to go on and do the next thing.
The companies that do make it, it allows them to get funding more quickly and come to the forefront more quickly. If you think about the life cycle of a company, or even of a technology in its entirety, it’s much shorter now. If a hundred years ago, GE came up with a technology and took it to market, they could expect that technology to last perhaps decades before it started to decline and they had to either change the product or a competitor will come along and do something different. Now, technology comes out so rapidly that it’s a rapid spike and sometimes that’s sustained, but there’s often a rapid decline after that when something replaces it.
You get a lot of companies that are flash in the pans. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t important technologies. Again, this comes back to why it’s important to have a really good leader in that venture, because even if you knock one out of the park, chances are somebody’s going to be hot on your tail and you’re going to need to change what you’re doing or tweak it in some way to catch up with the trend.
What you just said brings up an interesting question for me, which is when someone’s pitching you, when you’re making a decision whether you’re going to fund someone, not only are you looking at who they are and their track record and not associating any stigma to any past failures, as long as they have some successes in there, but how important is it to talk about a barrier to entry from competitors, that they’ve thought that through?
That’s a good question. I think different people have different approaches on this. To me, I typically am not looking for huge barriers to entry. The reason is, I think most of the time what most people think is a barrier to entry can easily be worked around. I remember this lesson back from when I had a summer position in college at Johnson & Johnson.
Startup Tricks: What most people think is a barrier to entry can easily be worked around.
One of my roles was to support the engineering department for a particular line and make sure they were getting the budget and funds that they needed. I remember one of the engineers looking at a particular product that a competitor had a stranglehold on the patents and the designs on, and he said, “If you could give me a few hundred thousand bucks, we could engineer around this,” and I said, “There’s so many regulations. How does that make sense?” He said, “Listen, if you’ve got a smart enough team and a little bit of cash and enough time, you can get around just about anything. You just got to play with the design.”
When somebody comes to me and they say they have this marvelous barrier to entry, I’m always dubious. I think there’s exceptions when that’s the case, but I really believe that more often than not, it’s about who hustles the fastest, who’s going to beat the next guy to the punch, who’s going to alter their strategy and change and be nimble when they have to. I think that’s the most important thing. Frankly, I’ll tell you, a lot of people, it bothers them if there’s a competitor in the space. It doesn’t bother me that much if there’s a competitor in the space if you can offer some special twist. If there are competitors in the space, that tells me there’s a market for it. How are you going to be better and do better than those competitors is what I want to know.
What types of startups do you like to specialize in, or do you specialize in certain things?
We’re more generalists. However, we obviously love anything in healthcare, a lot of technology. Frankly, we’ll look at some pretty, what I would call, boring ventures. Frankly, you’ll see some, everybody wants these sexy ventures that have a flash in the pan, but I have no problem with what I would call boring industries, manufacturing or the like, that have some cash flow, have a lot of demand and have longer sustainability curve than some of the technology.
Interesting. Now, are you funding at the seed round or are you in series A? What is your niche there?
We’re typically working with companies anywhere from the seed stage up to series B. We have a wider range than most of the guys in our space. We really believe that you’ve got to laser focus in on having the right person and the right ideas. If we constrain that to a very narrow niche, a lot of times it’s hard to find enough ventures to make it go.
Have you a story that you can share with us of someone you found at a seed range and have been able to give them multiple rounds over a period of time since you’ve been in business since 2009?
Startup Tricks: We got involved with them very early on and helped them do a round with some other Angel investors.
There’s a great company that we’ve worked with. We just did a round with them here recently, called Edumedics, and it’s a great company out of Louisville, Kentucky. They are a disease management company. That’s become a little bit of a dirty word in the space because a lot of the companies aren’t driving results, but they really are. The founder’s background, the CEO, Alice Shade, came out of the insurance industry and plan design and had a healthcare background. She really understood the ins and outs very well. The other cofounder was a physician with a lot of hospital administration background. Together, they’ve built this cool company.
What they do is they work with large self-insured employers or large Medicare groups who have large insured populations. A lot of them typically have very high spend for chronic disease. 20% of their members might make up 80% of their spend. It becomes immediately very important to figure out a way both to control that spend and simply to have a healthier workforce. You’re going to have healthier people, you’re going to do the right thing by those people and you’re going to get frankly more production out of them if they’re healthy. What they do is they set up clinics, they do a lot of sophisticated data analytics to really zero in on a particular patient population and they give them some coaching.
The guy who’s got diabetes and COPD and something else who doesn’t really go to the doctor that often and just frankly might need some basic medications and a little bit of coaching, you’d be surprised how much a little bit of that can go a long way. We’ve liked them a lot, so we got involved with them very early on and helped them do a round with some other Angel investors. Then we’ve continued to work with them and just helped them with a $4.2 million round. They’re on their way. They’re running fast.
That must be so rewarding. Since you’re based in Louisville, Kentucky, are you mostly looking for people who are geographically close to you, or are you geographically agnostic?
We’re geographically agnostic, for sure. We’re typically working with companies anywhere from Silicon Valley to Research Triangle Park. We’re mostly in the US at the moment. However, we’ve looked at some deals in Latin America, in the Caribbean, so I would say we’re opportunistic.
Nice. What is your favorite way to have someone reach out to you? Is it through warm introductions? How do you find the founders that you want to hear a pitch from?
I think warm introductions are always the best. Any time you can really sleuth on your LinkedIn and get someone mutually respected to introduce you, it’s certainly going to get a lot more immediate attention. We try to do a pretty good job, whether we get a cold call or an email from somebody who finds us online, or wherever they find us, it’s really important for us to get back and give good feedback.
That’s the southern Midwest polite manners coming through there. I love it. One of the things you said on your LinkedIn profile is that you offer Wall Street quality at Midwest prices. Can you elaborate on what services you offer at those Midwest prices for Wall Street quality?
These are more advisory services. We do a lot of valuation work for early stage companies and for VCs and some transactional advisory services as well. There’s other guys doing this out there who are good, but if you are a venture on the west coast, Silicon Valley Bank, for example, they do good work but they’re usually 3x the price than we are, and we do a great job.
I’ve interviewed a lot of investors on this podcast and I’ve never met anyone who does as many things as you do so well, which is everything from seed to series B, as well as being an expert in valuation, which leads me to a question of, what tools are you using to run your business and stay so organized?
TSP 069 | Startup Tricks: When you’ve got a lot of pieces flying around, you got to keep them organized.
That’s a good question. I’ll just say, for us, we try to do different things because we really believe in supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole, whether that’s working with other investors or working with companies and really supporting the entire ecosystem. We think that’s where you get the best squeeze. You’re absolutely right, when you’ve got a lot of pieces flying around, you got to keep them organized.
We’re certainly fans of all the Google tools and we use that for mail and for calendar. There’s other tools as well. We like to use Asana to keep all of our projects organized and we have a lot of people working on a lot of different projects. We can communicate on that and organize them and make sure everybody’s on point with what they need to do. For scheduling, we really like Mixmax, which is a tool that allows you to embed your calendar availability or what you want to show someone is your calendar availability to set up a meeting. You have one email and someone clicks on it that allows you to, in one email, get a meeting scheduled instead of having four, five back-and-forths about when you’re available. We like that as well.
Especially for time zones, that’s really helpful, isn’t it?
Absolutely.
John, is there a book that you would recommend founders read, either about financial valuation or just life in general?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
There’s a bunch out there. I think the number one for entrepreneurs, if you haven’t read it, is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. This is Horowitz’s book. The guy has been very successful, both running an early stage company and as an investor. He’s a little irreverent, which I like. It’s not polished PC stuff. There’s really good advice. Frankly, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, all of us need a support group when they’re going through stuff to see that other smart guys have gone through the same problems they have and it’s not just them struggling. This guy is very, very open about his struggles. Times that he’s completely failed in a company and how you pick yourself up and you do the next one. I think that’s the most important thing for any entrepreneur to read.
Great. How would somebody follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter and all that good stuff?
Twitter is @schumate_john. You can follow Venture First on Twitter as well. If you go to VentureFirst.com, that has a blog post and different articles. We’ve got some good white papers in different studies and some good data on there as well that entrepreneurs can read.
Fantastic. John, do you have any last minute or last thoughts that you want to share with the audience before we let you go? Any last minute startup tricks or anything?
Just have a lot of fun. Try not to stress too much. Work on things that are really interesting to you and that you love. Don’t get too concerned when you hit a hurdle. Be flexible and reach out to folks in the ecosystem. The wonderful thing about the early stage ecosystem as opposed to typically later stage companies is people aren’t as especially guarded about information. They’ve been through the battles just like you have and they want to help you out. Enjoy the community of it.
What a nice, upbeat ending. Thank you so much. You’ve been a terrific guest. We look forward to following you on social media and reading your blogs. Thank you for all your insights about what it takes to be successful, organized and most of all, how to enjoy it and have fun. Thanks, John.
Thanks so much.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Venture First Website
Edumedics Website
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