0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Sales Evangelist. Today we'll be breaking down the start scale, exit and repeat method. What makes a Startup successful? To drop these value bombs, I brought Colin Campbell into EOFire Studios. Colin is a Serial entrepreneur, #1 best selling author who started, scaled and excited over a dozen companies worth almost 1 billion dollars. He also runs Startup Club with 1M members. And today Fire Nation, we’ll talk about what makes a startup successful. We'll talk about what makes an idea great, the four sticky note business plan, and so much more.

0 (48s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring today’s episode goes to Colin and our sponsors,

Marketing Made Simple (53s):
Marketing Made Simple hosted by my friend Dr. JJ Peterson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must. Listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts.

0 (1m 15s):
Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. A four time TEDx Speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought-Leader can help you get there. Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to Millions. Call and say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 44s):
My kids tell me all the time that it was a lot easier for me to start a business in the nineties than it is today. And let me be pretty clear with you, in the nineties, it was a lot easier to start a business compared to the 1960s, and I'm gonna make the case here. It's never been a better time to start a business today in the 2020s. It takes a lot fewer people to Launch a successful company than it did in the nineties. I, I don't know if you know this, but we paid a hundred thousand dollars for our first phone system for our office in the nineties. Now you can get that for $99 a month.

0 (2m 24s):
Come on, Fire Nation. Oh yeah, come on. I mean, just think about this stuff. I mean, man, it is amazing what you have at your fingertips today and it's only gonna get better and easier to start scale, exit, and repeat. And man, Fire Nation. There are a lot of you in the Startup phase right now. So Colin, let's go to you somebody who has been there and done that With over a dozen companies. What makes a Startup successful?

1 (2m 55s):
Oh my gosh, going back to 2012, I was asked to fly to MIT to speak on the topic of starting, scaling, exiting, repeating, and it was from a former mentor of mine and Vern Harish, who runs the Masters of Entrepreneurship program. Recently I had, before this, I recently just broke my leg skiing. So I literally walked into lecture hall on crutches, hobbled in there and reflected back on what it was that I was doing over and over again. What were the patterns that I learned? And I learned, excuse me, I learned that every Startup needs to have a great story. It's got, I have great people, enough money to succeed and the right systems at the start phase.

1 (3m 41s):
And by the way, that changes for scale phase and for exit and for even repeating. Now, I if, if, gimme a minute here. I'm gonna take you back a little bit. I'm gonna tell you about my past. Going right outta college, I worked on the family farm for four months. I earned a few thousand dollars, maxed out my credit cards and borrowed $12,800 from my mother to start my first business. We started a software rental business, which did okay, but had a short life because it got outlawed. Software rental was outlawed January 1st, 1994. But during that time we started something called A-B-B-S-A Bulletin Board service. And although we loved that business, we saw the potential with this new thing called the internet.

1 (4m 25s):
So we basically had to shut that business down in order to Launch the internet. Well, we launched the fastest growing company in Canada at the time it went public and we saw an opportunity to Launch software downloads through a company called Two Cows, which today is quite a, quite a prominent company. And in 2000, we launched another company called Hostopia, which became the largest web hosting and email company and then Geeks for Less shortly thereafter, which had 800 people in Ukraine. See, one of the things that I learned from all of these companies that there were patterns and it really break broke down to three things. One, that each of these ideas we launched were highly scalable.

1 (5m 5s):
Second, we learned pretty quick to build a moat around our businesses, brand focus, distribution being the best product in that market period. And number three was each of the companies we launched caught a wave, which occurred to, you know, which occurred to me now is that the, probably the biggest wave in the 2020s is AI that is truly going to mint more millionaires than any other technological shift in history. There's two other quick things. One, it takes a village to raise a Startup and you're not alone. We're not gonna go back to Steve Jobs and Wozniak in a garage. We can go to incubators.

1 (5m 46s):
I teach at an incubator called the Allen Lavan Center at NSU in South Florida. And they have a free incubator program with 10 sessions, including myself, who helps kick off with a four sticky note business plan. And we do that in 30 minutes. And then the sessions finish with a pitch to investors. I had the opportunity to interview Bridget Westin, who's the head of score. They have 10,000 volunteers. She makes the claim, JLD, believe this, listen to this. She makes the claim that you could increase your chances of success by more than three times by having a mentor.

1 (6m 26s):
And it's free, absolutely free

0 (6m 29s):
Fire Nation, I hope this is getting the hair on the back of your neck to stand up a little bit because it's right there. It's right in front of you. This is what works and it's free. Now in today's world, Colin, we can't just be good. We must be great. So what makes an idea or a story? Great.

1 (6m 53s):
Yeah, I think every great story needs a purpose or why. The reality is I love dogs, which is why I love our company. po.com, that's one of the companies that we run in the incubator here in Fort Lauderdale. But lemme give you another example. We actually run a, a vacation rental company and our concept came at about, based on the travels of my wife and I, we would, I look, I traveled, oh my gosh, for 50 countries. And I went to, you know, every time I'm staying at a hotel rooms, I began to get depressed in hotel rooms. So we would choose vacation rentals as an alternative. But you know what we found?

1 (7m 33s):
Like the mattresses were so cheap the air conditioning wasn't working. There was one place we went into where they had a sign saying, please don't eat the meat in our freezer. I mean, it was just, it was just a mess. So we launched a concept called escape club and it, and we, we put in wein, heavily heavenly mattresses, pottery Barn, furniture and cookware. And of course we have lots of games and entertainment for the guests. We tried to solve a problem, which was we want the quality of a hotel, but we want we, but we also want the vacation rental experience. And I also want your listeners to think, we don't always have to solve global warming. It could be something in our day-to-day life that we see that's out there.

0 (8m 16s):
Fire Nation. I hope this is kind of stirring up some ideas, some thoughts. I mean, what in your life makes you depressed that you wanna just mix up a little bit and make great? What's that mean that you find yourself complaining about time and time again that you know you can make better. That you have a passion to make better, that you can make? Great. Now you have a four sticky note. Business plan, Colin. Let's talk about the first two. Now,

1 (8m 42s):
I mentioned that earlier that we, we, we do a four sticky note business plan in about a half hour. It takes about 30 minutes to complete. So think about this, I'm asking you to just spend a little bit of time thinking about now why sticky notes? Well, one, 'cause they're sticky, we can stick 'em up on the board that keeps us focused. And two, they're small. 'cause we want this to be very, very simple. We don't want a complicated business plan. If we want that business plan for investors, we can take our four sticky note business plan, pop that into chat GPT and it'll pump out a really nice business plan for us. That's not what we're trying to achieve here. What we're trying to achieve is something that allows you to focus and be strategic with your Startup.

1 (9m 26s):
So the, so on the first sticky note, we're gonna wanna title it story. What is my story? What is my purpose? We talked about that. What is the space that I want to own on the front page of Google? I, I usually say, what's the space I wanna own? But I, I usually say, but but also think about it in terms of somebody on the internet searching at, on Google to find a service or something like that. And you come up on the front page. So, which means you might not have to, you might have to think a little differently. You might not think about more geo. You might think a little bit more particular. You can't necessarily be the number one in the country, but you could be number one in a, in a smaller geo, what is the space?

1 (10m 7s):
What is the space that I want to own? We also wanna identify the customer persona. And then also this was, this one was a little bit controversial when we wrote the book. Do we put X factor in there on the four sticky note business plan? Or do we save that for scale? 'cause it really is a tool that helps you scale and we decided to put that in there. And what an X factor is, is something that you do that nobody else does in your industry. If you can crack that and you have it, nobody else has it, you can kill it. I would argue that Tesla's most powerful X factor isn't their technology or the fact that they're first doing electric cars.

1 (10m 48s):
'cause there are other companies doing electric cars. I would argue that their X factor is their network of charging stations. Hmm. It's so powerful that they recently announced that they would open it up to GM and Ford and to other companies as well. So first thing, first note, first sticky note. You got your purpose, the space you wanna own the customer persona X factor. And lastly, the stage gates. What is the specific point in time that you have achieved a SMART? Goal specific Measurable. Attainable relevant and Time bound. So do you remember those card games where you, you're driving and you stick a quarter in Oh yeah, in the gate, right? You have to, you have to, you have to hit your gate or you don't have more time, you're out or else you gotta put another quarter in.

1 (11m 32s):
Well I want you to think of your Startup like that because if you can pick that point in time, whether it's 10 sales, whether it's an MVP, minimum viable product, whether it's a hundred distributors, whatever that point in time is, if you can pick that point in time and say, if I hit it, great, we'll go to the next stage gate. If I don't, I'm either gonna pivot or kill it. And then on the next three sticky notes, you're gonna wanna put people, how many people do I need to get to my first stage gate? How much money do I need to get to my first stage gate? On the third one? And on the fourth one, all I want, all I'm asking for you to do is just come up with some basic KPIs, KPIs, key performance indicators.

1 (12m 15s):
And if you can, if you can identify leading indicators such as the number of phone calls I need to make per day to reach number of proposals, to get number of sales. You know, at po.com, which is dog products company we have here as well. We, we actually ha track our ROAS return on ad spent per day and all of the executives look at that roas. Having a four sticky note business plan is all about drowning out the noise that comes along with the chaotic rollercoaster of a Startup phase of your business. That's it.

0 (12m 50s):
Fire Nation. I hope you've taken notes and I hope you stick around because we have some Value Bombs coming your way when we get back from taking our sponsors.

Hubspot (12m 60s):
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0 (14m 0s):
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0 (14m 43s):
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0 (16m 5s):
Alright, Colin, we're back and I wanna keep rocking with this sticky notes business plan. Let's wrap it up with a bow finish Strong. What is the rest that we need to know about this?

1 (16m 19s):
The sticky note business plan is all about identifying your strategy when it comes to your story. the people, the money, and the systems And. if you do that and you do it really well, your chances of succeeding will increase. See a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, I'm guilty of this. We Launch a business, we Launch a business, right? And, and, and you've probably done this before, you Launch it, but you don't really plan it. It's sort of like you fire, aim, and then shoot whatever, you know, you select backwards. We're, we're doing it all backwards. We're using our instinct to get us there. And the fact of the matter is, if we take a little bit of time, and I'm not asking for a lot of time here, I'm just suggesting 30 minutes to write down on these four sticky notes, the story people, money systems.

1 (17m 7s):
If you do that, your chances of succeeding will increase dramatically.

0 (17m 11s):
Fire Nation, I really hope you're listening because we need to do everything we can to increase our chances of success. 'cause there's enough obstacles out there in this world that we don't want to be hitting those when we have lessons that can be learned from people who have avoided them in the past. And you have a chapter in your book, Colin, that centers around why startups fail. Can you share some of these reasons?

1 (17m 37s):
Yeah, and actually there's quite a few, but I'll share a few of them with you right now. There's a US bank study that was done that 82% of small business fail because of poor cash management. Oof. That's usually, that basically means they run outta money. So going back to that sticky note business plan, we said here's our stage gate, this is the amount of money we need to raise. I can't tell you how many times I've seen businesses Launch, they're great, Entrepreneurs great concepts, they even track their KPIs, but they just don't have enough money to get there. So that's probably the number one reason why. But I've also seen the opposite. We've all have where a company gets too much money, I dunno if you know this, but 75% of venture backed companies fail.

1 (18m 25s):
And recently there was a company called WeWork, which you know about and I, I coined in the book, I talk about them catching Silicon Valley disease, which really is a condition where the founder of the company received too much money and they made a lot of bad choices, a lot of bad leases, lavish offices and parties. And they did a lot of weird side ventures that were nothing to do with their core business. And ultimately that company collapsed and failed. So you can see how not enough money could be a problem, too much money can lead to Silicon Valley disease. But there are other things and probably, you know, the one that really stands out for me is that bad things do happen.

1 (19m 9s):
You know, in 2024, sorry, 20 20, 20 20, we saw the lockdowns, right? And in 2024 we saw, oh my gosh, 2021, we saw inflation po.com, which is, I mentioned our is in our incubator. Lemme tell you this, the, the container costs went from $2,000 and we do a hundred containers a year. Went from $2,000 to $24,000 of container. That's $2 million of losses that hit our books. And then we had the tech wreck in 2022, the crypto crash, I mean, bad things can happen, which by the way is the thesis of this book start scale exit, take some money off the table, repeat.

1 (19m 55s):
So

0 (19m 55s):
I wanna talk about this start scale, exit repeat. Because the reality is a lot of people don't do that. They don't take money off the table. They don't understand that we live in a world of cycles and that this too shall pass. Whether that be the lowest of the lows or the highs of the highs, like you're gonna be crushing it and then you're not, you're gonna be an absolute disaster, dumpster, fire and then you're not like everything will pass. So talk to us about your main belief around scaling, around exiting, around, repeating.

1 (20m 30s):
I think that scaling is very different than starting. And you as an entrepreneur need to transform yourself as an individual. You know, the number one reason why companies fail to scale, in my opinion, and by the way, the vast majority never do scale. It is because of the entrepreneur is in the way. The entrepreneur, entrepreneur is their number one worst enemy. So we need to change our mindset when it comes to running a business. We need to hire leaders and delegate responsibilities, not tasks. See, when you're in the start phase, it's all about delegating tasks.

1 (21m 12s):
You basically have everybody around you and you're, you're moving in many, many different directions very quickly, quickly, you're, you're handing out tasks to everyone. When you begin to get into the scale phase, it's time to delegate responsibilities, not tasks. I got that lesson back in 2006. We were running a publicly traded company and the board was a board member came to me and, and, and suggested I was over my head and was talking about firing me. And I met, I met a, I met a gentleman named Patrick Theon from Rhythm Systems. And you know, at the beginning I was like, just, just help me get the board off my back. And eventually he's like, no, I'm not gonna do this without you unless you do it correctly. So we launched a lot of systems.

1 (21m 53s):
We launched goal setting, annual quarterly goals. We had individual goals, we had weekly status checkups, we had daily sales huddles. We did two days of strategic planning, 88 days of execution. We developed core value statements. Now I understand at this time we had 600 people in the company and we were flatlining. It was a difficult situation. Here were the results. We doubled in size in three years, sold the company for 17 times EBITDA to a Fortune 500 company and we were trading at $4 and 55 cents a share and then 10 55 per share the next day.

1 (22m 35s):
It was incredible feeling. And JLD, when you finally exit, you finally do that as an entrepreneur you can repeat the process all over again. And in the book we talk about the best way to do that.

0 (22m 49s):
Fire Nation, I hope you are getting excited. I hope you're taking notes and Colin, let's end with a bang. What is the one thing you wanna make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation and what call to action do you have for our listeners?

1 (23m 4s):
Yeah, I think the number one thing for, for your listeners is that you're not alone. You have people who want to help you. And that there is, there are systems that you can follow to start scale, exit, repeat. I'm telling you, I learned the hard way. Many, many lessons and learning is the key. Entrepreneurship is a trade and mastering that trade, you need to continue to develop and learn and hone those skills. I believe the book does really does address that. We interviewed over 200 people for this book.

1 (23m 46s):
Took 10 years to write that book. From the day that I went into MIT, that was the very first day that we began writing this book. In the last two years we had six full-time people working on it and it's available everywhere. It was number one bestseller in eight categories on Amazon from starting a business to entrepreneurship management. And you can get it with the audible on Amazon or or in physical, a a physical book. And by the way, this physical book is big. It is, I admit it, but it's full of illustrations. Over 200 colleges. We wrote this book for the ADHD entrepreneur. That's what we did. It's really meant to be simple and digestible.

1 (24m 27s):
And a lot of stories that draw conclusions.

0 (24m 30s):
Fire Nation, if you think you got value from this conversation, think about the value you'll get from this book. So take action. Colin has been a repeat guest on Entrepreneurs, on Fire for good reason and you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with cc and JLD today. So let's keep up that Heat Fire Nation. And for links to everything we talked about, visit EOFire.com type Colin in the search bar and the show us page will pop right up. Colin, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. Today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

1 (25m 7s):
I love Fire Nation.

0 (25m 9s):
Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Colin for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That's why I created The Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in a hundred days. And we're talking step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com and it'll catch you there. Or on the flip side, Marketing Made Simple hosted by my friend Dr. JJ Peterson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must.

0 (25m 49s):
Listen, listen to Marketing Made Simple. wherever you get your podcasts,

Thought-Leader (25m 54s):
ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx. Speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought-Leader can help you get there. Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.