I'm Brody Vinson, and if you don't know me, I'm the owner of Scale for Sale, a company that helps business owners plan for and execute successful exits of their business.
I started it after making my own successful exit. It was a staffing company that I helped found and build up to a little over $3.2mm in revenue over 2 years with about 15% in net cash flow.
Earlier this year, we were approached by a strategic buyer who ended up acquiring the company and keeping a couple of partners on. I'd built myself out of my role, so I sold my portion and moved on, along with my good friend Andy who you just heard speak.
I'm gonna talk about building today. Because that's the goal of an entrepreneur right? To build an incredible company or companies that are massively successful?
I think it's important to understand what being an entrepreneur really is. Entrepreneurship to me comes from the pairing of 3 things:
An insatiable urge to design and create the life you want,
The optimism to believe that you're capable of doing so,
And the drive to make it happen, no matter the cost.
The game of entrepreneurship is one devoid of comfort, full of challenge, rife with uncertainty, and prone to isolation.
There are two traps in the entrepreneurial journey, and I'm gonna talk about how to avoid them or overcome them
the first trap in entrepreneurship I call this the ‘bikini model on Instagram trap'. a lack of giving yourself time to catch momentum in your venture will simply not work.
leaning into your existing experience is the best jumping off point for entrepreneurship.
You start off with blind optimism. But eventually things get hard, and you have two choices:
Accept the challenge of it, and build with each other through it, benefiting from the compounding effect of a long-lasting and fruitful partnership…
OR DM the bikini model and watch everything you built together fall apart.
This trap stems from something called Shiny object syndrome.
In other words, every time the thing you're doing gets hard, you jump ship for the next “shiny object”
We humans love novelty. We crave it.
Your job as a business owner is to get a handle on this craving and keep it in check.
Name it if you have to do you can more readily identify it: I call mine the novelty monster
Why do we need to avoid this trap at all costs? Falling for this trap results in an inability to unlock the power of the compounding effect. If you chase every new opportunity, you don't TRULY capitalize on any.
The antidote to this trap is something that doesn't come easy. They're skills that can be trained and built upon. They're focus and discipline.
Focus is the inner peace that comes from having direction, knowing where you're going, and having a plan for how to get there
Focus can start small. Give yourself little reminders that the thing you're working on is hard and that it does take time to get better.
Seek people ahead of you in the venture and share honest candor with them about the challenges you're feeling because they will back this up.
Discipline is control that is gained by: requiring that rules or orders be obeyed
The second trap I wanna talk about tonight is one that comes after you've defeated the first.
This is the classic trap of being stuck IN the business and not being able to remove yourself and focus ON the business.
I call this the “I'm a special snowflake trap”
In other words, you're so tied up in your own ego that you don't believe anyone could possibly do any of what you do better than you currently do.
To be a good business owner, you absolutely MUST be able to get people to operate on your behalf and continue getting them to do so for a long time, benefiting from the compounding effect they get from getting better and better at their job, in service of the mission you've given them.
Here are 3 key lessons I've learned from first failing terribly at this, and then eventually getting a little better, and eventually being able to retain and grow a complete A player employee
The first one:
“Any idea could be better than yours. Hear and listen to them all.”
The next lesson is “Retention over profit”
The way you do this is with the 3 C's of growth engagement
1. Consistency: Regularly meeting with them
2. Caring: Regularly making time to ask them how you can help them and what they need to be successful and what they're aiming to do
3. Cultivating: Doing whatever you can to support them in their needs within reason, for the sake of keeping them happy and engaged
The third and final lesson I'll share with you tonight is “be a value builder, not just a money chaser”
It is your job as a business owner to continually identify the assets that you can build into your business to increase its collective value.
And if I can leave you with one more powerful statement about that, it's that building a business that's ready to be sold is just good business, for everyone involved.