366 - Scaling Startups with Simplicity: A Veteran Entrepreneur’s Guide to Vision, Cash Flow, and Building Winning Teams with Graeme Barlow

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Hey, Graham. Graham Barlow. You are one of the most amazing guys I've run across in a long time. You live up in Vancouver, BC, and If anybody were to read your bio, which I hope everybody that's listening to this will, 'cause you're pretty easily accessible, made your first million at what, 16, 17 years old?

16.

16.

Had to split it with a bunch of partners, but we got the number on paper.

Now, 7-figure sellout. You started the start of the business at 10, right?

Yep.

All right. And today, I mean, come on, you're a serial entrepreneur. You've had a lot of entries and exits. And today, I think your passion is helping founders really scale their businesses.

Yeah. It's funny. You'll see a theme in my world. I've done a lot of the things rightly or wrongly out of frustration with the universe.

You sound too much like me.

I got started in the entrepreneurship world out of wanting to justify playing more video games and trying to come up with an excuse to do that. So, we were one of the first companies in the world selling currency on eBay back in the day. Oh my God. Then got into— fast forward, I don't know, 27 years, um, and we're in the kind of community world helping entrepreneurs because I got so frustrated with so many kids on TikTok and Instagram promising to help the world and teach you how to do things that had never actually built and sold companies. So come, come full circle, but had a, had a pretty, pretty crazy journey, um, along the way.

Well, why don't you start out, start off at the beginning, give us a quick backstory.

Yeah. So as you said, kind of got into entrepreneurship before I knew what that meant. We took items from online games like Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Neopets, and ultimately World of Warcraft, sold it on eBay. That went from us playing the games to building really basic bots to do it at scale, scaled that, and then had to get out of that in a hurry when the US decided that cybercrimes were a thing and that whole industry became a little bit spicy. So managed to sell the bulk of the company and currency and everything that we had to a Chinese partner at the time. And that was kind of Entrepreneurship 101 for me.

From there, what did your parents think about all that?

I mean, they mostly saw the side where I just spent 10 hours a day online playing video games, so were less impressed that I had a bunch of money on the internet.

Really?

At the time, it was, it was not as easy to move money off of, um, eBay and PayPal and different digital sites onto a 16-year-old's account.

Wow.

Um, so it was, it was an interesting, interesting time. We got to spend a lot of time like being super internet rich and then trying to figure out how to be real world rich. Um, went from that to co-found a game. Well, I tried university, was terrible at that. So after about a semester, tried a couple things. Ended up co-founding a game development company called Rocket Owl. We built games on Facebook at the height of like Zynga and FarmVille. We did an eco-friendly social impact version called GreenSpace, got it up over a million active users, went through the whole pre-seed, seed, Series A kind of journey, then went through the less fun version of that journey where you take a decent-sized team doing high growth, run out of money, scale it down to very, very lean. And ended up selling the company to a private equity group. Spent a few years running their early-stage investment side, invested in a bunch of companies. During that time, I co-founded a company called ProPet Software, did business management tools for the pet industry. Um, that company is still active today with about 5 million customers globally. Um, think of everything for business backend for like dog walking, daycares, groomers. That kind of thing.

Mm-hmm.

Um, 10 years ago, joined as a partner at a software development company in Ottawa. At the time, the team was like 4 people and we had a suite of solitaire games and we're doing really basic mobile apps. Helped scale that business into 8 figures, doing everything from critical infrastructure health systems and tooling to augmented reality tools in around the NFL. Which was a pretty wild experience.

How do you learn all this stuff?

Uh, I like to say that I'm very good at finding cool people and being able to kind of align them in the right direction. So my whole world has always been find interesting opportunities, be the person that's willing to say, yeah, let's try it. And then crazy enough to be able to go recruit other people that believe me and try and attack it. And so, so you kind of—

so you truly are a leader. I mean, you're not, you're not, you're not a coder out there doing the coding.

I have not, I have not meaningfully touched code since building JSP bots back in early 2000s, um, and a little bit of like WordPress.

So I'm—

I, I pretend to be technical on TV, but otherwise, um, no, I'm, I'm way better at finding people that are infinitely more capable. I like the people side of it. I like the sales side of it. I love the finance side of companies and how to like get people operating and running.

Wow. And so how to get people operating and running, that's got to be the most— I think that's the most challenging work that any human being can undertake. How to take a bunch of people who don't know each other, bring them together, Give them a vision, have them buy into the vision, and then motivate them to make things happen.

Yeah.

How do you do that?

Ooh, I love it. Uh, clarity and simplicity at a, at a very, very high level.

Clarity and simplicity. Don't overcomplicate.

Don't overcomplicate it. It's one of the most challenging things ever for really smart people running companies is Everybody likes to try and prove to everyone else around them that they're really smart. And to most of us coming up through school, smart meant complex, complex meant intellectual. And so you build systems that are incredibly intricate and incredibly fragile because you don't want to be the person that's just like, oh, it's like push the green button and you win.

Right.

And so a lot of the work I do, and actually you mentioned this a little bit, like A few years ago, we started a founder community called FounderLink, and a lot of that was on the thesis of how do we help founders focus on core principles that are going to help them get to their first million in revenue. And oftentimes the biggest stumbling block is people try and build like enterprise-grade complexity into their company when you just need to do one or two things. And so creating systems, creating rules, creating to some extent intellectual safety for people to focus on simple solutions has been one of the most powerful tools I've ever seen.

I hadn't thought about it that way until you just talked about it. But now that you're thinking about it, it makes so much sense to me that that's a problem that people face. You got a lot of really smart people. They got complexity coming out their ears. And the most difficult thing in the world for them to do is dumb stuff down to make it simple. I remember when I was teaching law—I'm a lawyer turned peacemaker—when I was teaching law, I would have my law students take a very complex problem and say, "You've got to write the solution on one piece of paper. You can use Times New Roman 12, double-spaced, 1-inch margins. You get 250 to 300 words." And they could— they couldn't do it until they— until I taught them how to do it. Distill it down, distill it down, simpler. And, and even then, I was, I was teaching my students, never write above the 8th grade level.

I would argue that's probably come down to like 5th grade at this point, but probably, yeah.

You can, you can have multiple graduate degrees and be the smartest guy in the world, but never ever, ever write above the 5th grade. Yeah, because it's not— it's not the people are stupid, they don't have time. So they don't have time.

And like, if you succeed in building a company, things move fast. And when things move fast, you need to have simple foundations for people to be able to rely on and repeat, and simple operating procedures that allow you to scale. If everything is complicated, everything requires huge knowledge transfer and huge depth of expertise, you, you have inherently created a system that doesn't scale. Right. And that identity, I, I've, I've done a lot of work with founders, both like in companies we've invested in and in the community of trying to strip away that perception of the complex, the value is in the complexity. Wow. And it's like the value is in the simplicity and the ability to scale.

And that's gotta be really hard because in my experience in working with founder-led companies and private equity post-acquisition companies where the human dynamic is getting in the way of stuff going on, people wrap their identities around this complexity and getting them to understand that that doesn't work, it's challenging. Extremely.

And what's interesting is It happens to all of us. I, I have yet to meet anyone at any level that hasn't like learned this lesson and then 2 years later been in the depth of needing to learn the lesson again, right? Like, are you one of those things involved in, you know, I mean, well, it's, it's a combination of like ego's getting low, but also you just, you lose focus on it. You react day to day, you create your own world, then you're living in your own world. You have to like keep sustaining it, and then all of a sudden you look backwards and you're like, oh my God, I have made this thing again.

So how do you help people simplify and clarify?

Yeah, well, so I, I come at it from the lens of CEOs, right? CEOs or founders. But I fundamentally believe that CEOs at scale have 3 core responsibilities in a company. The first responsibility is don't run out of money. Yep. That is, that is foundational and core. If you screw that one up, nothing else matters. The second one is set the vision and direction clearly. What are we doing? What are we going after? Why? And sometimes I think people overthink this. I have met like small services companies that like are trying to figure out their grand vision, and it's like, your vision can be $2 million this year. Like, it doesn't have to be we're going to solve world hunger. It just needs to be a singular thing that acts as a focal point for the business, right? And I think some people overcomplicate that. And then the third is build the people and systems to deliver and get out of the way. I realize that is a big bucket, and we're going to kind of brush over that, but I use, I use that matrix as a little bit of a, um, clarifying point when I first meet founders or CEOs and I come into the organization and we start chatting and I kind of go through that list of where is your time going, have you solved these appropriately? Because I also, generally speaking, believe you can only really meaningfully solve one major thing at a time. A lot of people like to try and solve everything all at once a little bit, and I have yet to see that actually work.

It can't. No, that's It's a big myth we create ourselves that we're multitaskers and we're able to— our brains just are not wired that way. It's stupid.

It's— yeah, it's— that's stupid. I'm, I'm big on— so like, have you solved for cash? Yes, no? Assuming yes, then is vision clear? And one of my favorite exercises to do here is like, most CEOs will be like, yeah, absolutely. I'm like, cool, give me 5 of your team members at random. I'm going to go ask them what the vision is. More often than not you get 5 different, wildly different answers. And if you dig one layer deep of how do you contribute to it, half the time nobody knows, right? It's like, cool, so job 2 is not done. Everyone just jumps to the doing, and if you don't nail the direction, the doing over time just goes everywhere.

That's right. And the problem for a lot of these people CEOs is they've come up being doers. Oh yeah. So they know how to do, and that's how they got graded in school, and that's how they got reviewed in their early careers. And they're— and the doing gives them gratification because they can see results. But leadership is not doing. Leadership is learning. Leadership is choosing the doers and then guiding the doers and getting the doers all to pull in the same direction. Boy, think about the different skill set it takes to do that as opposed to the simplicity of just doing.

Some of my favorite conversations I've had in my life have been with founders and CEOs I've been able to work with where we've come in and helped build proper systems and kind of get scaling go-to-market in place and do those things and then have a conversation with them. I got a text like this like 2 months ago from one where we've actually built a whole executive leadership team around her and I got a text from her on a Friday. She's like, I don't have anything I have to work on right now. I am so anxious. What do I do?

And it was like, I get it.

I've been there. There's nothing on fire. I don't have to frantic. I was like, amazing. Now maybe breathe, look at strategy. What's the, what is actually the next move that needs to be made because you're no longer in the day-to-day survival of everything. And so many people have come up with like, they just don't know how to do it. That's right. How to have space to think, how to have space to be strategic. And the second you start to have time, they find reasons to go back into the company and just fuck with stuff.

Right. Right? Because that's what gives them meaning. Yeah. I learned in the leadership positions I took, mostly in the nonprofit world, I learned that doing nothing was the most important thing you can do. Holding a presence was important, and, and having that sort of gravitas, important. But don't do anything, just listen, take the information, work with it. Direction, direction, focus, and safety.

I say relentlessly unblock the people that get stuck. Yeah, right. Like that's, that's, that's kind of the loop. And like when I, when I go through like, those are the core 3 for a CEO, a lot of people are like, okay, like, well, how do I do, how, what do I do for the 3rd one? Where do, who do I hire? What do I do? And for me, that kind of feeds into like the next matrix of 3, which like for me is any company at any given time can only be constrained by one of 3 things. It's either constrained by capital. Awareness or delivery. At any given time, you only get to have one of those as the top problem in the business.

Pick which one and work on it.

And that's where you get the people, you build the systems, you do the things. Um, if it's capital, you can solve capital raising, going into debt, or selling more shit, right? If it is delivery, then it's build the people, build the systems, build the tools. If it's awareness, then you got your entire go-to-market channel. But like, again, it goes back to like prioritization. People wanting to feel busy. People wanting to feel like things are complicated. It's like the world's not actually— companies are not that complicated. You need to do a thing that is valuable or have a thing that is valuable. People need to know you have it. And then you need to be able to exchange currency for it.

There you go.

That simple. It genuinely is. And I think so this gets—

yeah, I want to— listening to all of this, what is it about you that's made you so successful at all of this? What do you, Graham Barlow, bring to the table that nobody else does?

Uh, lots of pain, suffering, and— okay, I get that. 3 decades of doing it all the wrong ways and then looking backwards and going, yeah, all of that really hurt a lot. Generally, I think from my view, I've been able to be— I've been very lucky to be exposed to a lot of different kinds of companies. I've built product companies, I built services companies, I've built SaaS companies, I've built knowledge-based companies and because of that depth paired with we've invested in a lot of companies and get to kind of look behind the scenes. I've seen and lived through a lot of it, and I've suffered through a lot of poor choices and have been able to recognize that every time I've been in the trenches or been in the weeds and been running, been doing what I felt like was running fast, I've often been going slower than if I had paused enough to take a breath calibrate and pick a direction properly. And I learned in scaling kind of a software services company that for Iverson, as an example, right, where we built software and we embed teams, our product is people. And the more valuable we want to be as an organization was directly tied to the more valuable an offer we could make to the people that would want to come into the business. So we were one of the first companies that went to a compressed 4-day workweek. Hmm. We went fully remote. We did all of these things to invest in people and culture because our competitive advantage in the market, when everyone else is selling software development, became we have happier, healthier, smarter people who want to stay with us longer term and are excited to work on your project. I can recruit people you can't recruit because we have an offer that is different. Wow. And so for me, the takeaway there is like, I've had the privilege to learn how to slow down to go faster in a lot of different companies and now have a lot of the objectivity to be able to come in and help people through that process.

Wow. That's amazing. Tell us about FoundersLink.

Yeah. So FoundersLink, we started almost 2 and a half years ago now. And was started out of my own frustration from going to founder events and then meeting the 9 lawyers, 6 bankers, 4 insurance brokers, and 3 real estate agents chasing 2 founders around a room. Right. And saying, this is not, this is not what I want to be attending. These events suck. And so I started out by hosting a couple founder dinners where The goal was bring together friends that I didn't think knew each other. We tried to fill the room with kind of half the room would be exited founders, a quarter would be growth stage, like $1 to $10 million, and a quarter of them brand new, completely industry agnostic. So we'd have retail, we'd have e-com, we'd have SaaS, we'd have services, and just create a space where people could share their stories and learn. And by the third dinner, we had overwhelming feedback of, hey, how do we stay in touch with each other? Where do we meet others that were at a dinner? We saw some photos. And so we started a Slack community for people to join, called it FounderLink. And fast forward today, I think we've hosted nearly 40 dinners all over the world. We've been in Europe, we've been throughout the US, we've been in every major city in Canada. There's almost 2,000 founders in the community. We do 2 dinners a month plus meetups plus webinars. And the entire principle was an accessible, community by founders for founders without the $8,000, $10,000, $20,000 price tag of a lot of the premium communities. Create a place that I wish I had had access to 20 years ago that we're now in a very fortunate position to get to build and create.

Yeah, that sounds pretty exciting.

It's been awesome. It's my favorite thing to put time to.

What is it about that work that floats your boat?

Biggest thing for me was trying to set a big, crazy goal that I could get excited about. And so it wasn't necessarily gonna be like sell the next company, set a BHAG. And so the BHAG for FounderLink kind of grew into, and we started tracking, how do we help 1,000 founders get to their first million in revenue? And if we do that as an open community, we've created $1 billion of economic activity. Wow. That's a bhag. And that, that gets me excited. That gets me really keen to try and change the world a little bit. So you're still a pretty young guy.

Where do you see yourself in 15, 20 years?

Ah, oh my God. So this is— this has been an, like, identity crisis, because, like, in some context, I'm like, I am young. I've been running with a team of 17-year-old AI, like, growth experts recently, and at 37, I'm like, I am ancient and decrepit. They don't Wait till I get to my age, 75. I had one of them ask me like what the world was like before software, and I was like, shut up, I have had software my entire life, thank you very much.

I can tell you stories.

For me, it's like keep building, right? Like I think entrepreneurship and building community is the path to most of the change in the world that I want to see. Yeah. And whether that's creating economic opportunity for people to change their lives or elevate products that can change the world, like, it is the most interesting, exciting path I can see. And where I am spending all of my time is how do we help and elevate the next generation of founders? How do we create the next wave of kind of world-changing companies in the middle of the AI revolution.

Exactly. Which is crazy, crazy by itself.

Yeah. How about you? What? Pardon me? How about you? How about you?

What is the next— oh, my goal—

5 to 10 years of ambition?

Hmm, you're sending shivers down my back. My goal is to teach 10 million people in North America How to listen each other into existence. Hell yeah. Where people are not only— people are feeling deeply heard and deeply validated. Because my experience is that when that occurs, there are no more fights and arguments. And people can have sharp political disagreements, for example, But as long as everybody feels heard, they can get along with each other. And the differences don't become that big a deal. That's just in the political arena, but in personal relationships and business relationships, when leaders learn how to listen their people into existence, they're getting exactly the result that you're talking about. People feel valued, they feel heard, they feel safe, they feel treasured. And they'll work their butts off for you.

Hell yeah. So that's what—

that's my goal, is to teach people how— that simple skill. I love it.

He's a 10— 10 million in North America. 10 million. First question is, how do I help? Second question is, how are you measuring it?

I'm measuring it by, uh, how many people are learning these skills, either through my book sales or through my work. You know, it's, it's, it's scalable and leverageable based on how many people I can train to teach these skills. Amazing. And so it's just a process of getting out there. And, you know, I'm an author, Simon Schuster author, so I've got my 5th book coming out in September. And it's just a process of, to your point, awareness. I'm kind of in that awareness stage. Go to market, get people aware, get people aware that this idea is out there. So I just did it. I did my first TEDx in April. It just came out and landed on YouTube a couple of weeks ago and already hit 2,000. Congratulations. Hit 2,000 views. Yeah, thank you. Hit 2,000 views. That's huge. Yeah.

It was phenomenal.

It, uh, I, it's delivered exactly the way that I wanted it to deliver. So it's, you know, it's just this kind of iteration doing this, getting out there, talking, meeting people like you. Um, and that's it. One more question, I'll let you go. Yeah, because I know you're a busy guy. What's one thing, Graham, about you that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh, I like that. That's a good question.

It is a good question, isn't it?

We'll try and go a little bit deeper here. I was like, I'm going to lean— I was going to lean into like Pokémon and gaming, but like, let's go something that's maybe more useful. 27 years of building companies, 3 company state figures, and on a weekly basis, I still live through imposter syndrome in a lot of rooms that I walk into and reinvent identity on a regular basis to understand What's limiting me? Good. And I think some people lose sight of the fact that that is a never-ending journey. It is, it is ending.

It will end. It ends as you get a little older and as you mature. You're 37 now, probably around 50 it'll start to shift. So 13 years to go. Love it. But good for you. If I were to tell you something about me that you would never know, I'm a jazz violinist.

Amazing. So very—

amongst many, many other things. I have a lot of interest, but that's it. Anyways, I love it. I could go on and talk to you for hours, and I want to have you back some other time so we can talk some more. You're doing amazing work. Please keep it up, and we'll talk soon. Thanks. Likewise.

Thank you, Doug.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team.

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