What Kind of Entrepreneur are You? - Ep. 51

Foreign.

Welcome, everybody, to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Young, with my co host, Justin Gerard.

There we go.

Well, we're gonna have some. We're just gonna have a little fun today. And our topic today is of entrepreneur.

Are you.

Now again, we're kind of talking to our company founders, company owners, but also keep in mind there's such a thing as an intrapreneur. Also, like, you're an intrapreneur, you're an entrepreneur inside this company. Yes, And I'm an entrepreneur because I started the company. So there are a lot of similar traits. You and I even have similar Colby scores. So the question here is, what kind of entrepreneur are you? There's two really distinct, different styles.

Not only distinctive styles, Mark, but it's what I would call approaches to business. It's understanding who you are because that you're going to. If you understand who you are, then you can plan to be successful.

And here's the thing. First off, I don't care whether you're using Strength Finder or Colby or Myers Briggs or Human Factors, no matter what it is, they always bring you back to the same point. And that is you will always be happiest and you will always function at your best when you're being true to yourself. And anytime you try to be something other than what you are somewhere, you pay for it. You might pay for it by drinking, you might pay for it with stress, you might pay for it because you just are not as successful as you should be. And you fail at what you're doing because you're not being who you are. And we all need to focus on that. So when we look at entrepreneurs, there's a couple different styles. And I'm going to use two famous entrepreneurs because that makes it easy. The first one I'm going to use is Elon Musk. Elon Musk is a hardcore risk taker. So most of you know who Elon is. I don't know if you know his entire story. Elon, you know, he came here from another country. He was an immigrant. He co founded PayPal and he did that with Peter Thiel. And they. So when they sold PayPal, Elon got $800 million. Okay, $800 billion. That's enough money to live the rest of your life. For most people.

Yeah.

Not for everybody, but for most people.

Most people.

Okay, $800 million. Elon decides, I want to go to space. That's kind of a big goal.

A little bit.

I want to go to space. He takes his own money and he starts SpaceX. So a guy who created a credit card processing software decides he's going to build rockets, which is hardware. Big leap, big bet on yourself. Now, if that wasn't enough of a bet, he decided he was going to jump into the electric car business simultaneously. Now, what a lot of people don't know is Elon didn't start Tesla. Tesla was actually started by two other entrepreneurs. Elon came in and they were dying. Elon came in and put money into it and then ended up realizing, I'm a better engineer than the two engineers who took it over. And he ended up buying it out and ran with it himself.

So just to be clear, he built PayPal, sold it for $800 million, and instead of even taking some of that and putting it away, he said, I'm putting it all on these two opportunities and ideas that I have.

He betted on himself. So he got to such point Elon, that he so ran out of money, sold his home, moved into a rented apartment and had to borrow money from his friends to pay his rent. This was a guy who had $800 million.

Wow.

That's what you call risk taker.

Yeah. Say at least.

Now how has that worked out? Well, currently at this very moment, elon is worth $245.1 billion. For the life of me, I don't know why they measure the $0.1 billion at that point. At the point of $245 billion, isn't 1.1 billion just a rounding error?

Yeah.

I mean, would you tell somebody you have $250.1K in the bank? No, I've got a quarter million dollars in the bank.

Right. Yeah, that's fair.

Okay. So you would think Elon would just say I got a quarter trillion dollars.

I mean, he does.

It's a round number, quarter trill.

Makes sense, you know, Makes sense. What's the point, right?

At any rate, Elon has a quarter trillion dollars net worth, also now has the boring company where they're actually drilling underground to make a underground hypersonic tube underground to travel. And he owned SolarCity, which has now become Tesla Solar. And he has a satellite company where he has now activated all his satellites.

Over the Ukraine, I have heard, to.

Give them Internet access.

Yep, I have heard.

So I mean, here's a guy, private industry, who's doing more to help Ukrainians than most governments, Right?

So what's about him that he's able to do this? I mean, I'm sure that many of Our listeners are reacting the way I am. Just thinking, like you said, you had $800 million and you didn't even put half of it on black. You put it all on black.

You would at least say, I'm going to put 50 million in an annuity so that I know I'm never homeless.

Exactly.

And then I'll bet the rest of the.

Right.

But I'm going to put this over here just as a safety net.

Right.

Just feel, feel this for a minute. A year ago you had $800 million, and today you're borrowing money for your rent.

That's what I'm saying. But what is it about him that has wired this way? Because I'm sure many people are like, no way.

He spends about 80% of his time doing engineering work. So he doesn't really operate these companies. He engineers these companies. He is sitting at a computer. He is designing parts. He is out on the floor of the assembly lines with hammers and tools. That's the kind of entrepreneur he is. Now, there's another part to him that we need to discuss, and that is Elon gets much of his personal value, his satisfaction, and his happiness on that shop floor. So work is the passion. Making things that other people have never made is the passion. And let me give you an example. When he created the battery for the Tesla, and I don't know if you know this, most people know this battery for the Tesla is just like 3,000 Panasonic batteries wired together. It's like 3,000 radio batteries laid in a tray. Because the problem was everybody was saying, well, there's no way to do this. You can't make a battery that big. And he decided, well, I'll just buy 1,000 batteries and hook them all together. Nobody ever tried that. Well, that's what the Tesla battery is. It's exactly what it is.

Interesting.

So he finds these different ways to make things, but he derives his satisfaction over these accomplishments. And even when he created his battery technology and his software technology to use the batteries, he literally made it all open source. He didn't protect it. He made it open source. And told every other car manufacturer, if you want to use my technology, here it is, because I think the world needs more electric vehicles. So I'll give it to you. And his thinking was, if GM uses my technology and they beat me and drive me out of business, that's the right thing to happen because it means I'm not making the best product. This guy really bets on him. I mean, think about that. I'll let you have my patent, I'll let you have my technology because I want you to progress, because I want to move humankind forward. And if you can take it and do something better than me, good for you. You deserve to beat me. But I don't think you can because I still think I can do better. And think about how big Tesla is now. Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the world. So for market cap, it's worth more than Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi. That's unbelievable for a startup. Oh yeah, startup in an industry that hasn't had a startup in 100 years.

Right.

I mean, it's just amazing.

It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. So, so what I'm hearing so far about Elon, if we're going to take some few things away, he is a hardcore risk taker, to say the least. He gains purpose and personal value out of the work, out of the business. So he never wants to leave. He lives and breathes, right? The innovation, the grind is really where he gains energy from. Like that's his purpose. This kind of goes with the risk taker. But he bets on himself every single time. If the money's going to go somewhere, it's on me. I will win every single time. But that is a very specific type of personality.

But has the attitude, if I don't win, I deserved it.

Well, 100%. But this is a very specific type of entrepreneur.

Very much so.

And this is where a lot of entrepreneurs I feel think that they are. But I think some of them are incorrect. Not that they're wrong, but I don't think that they're here. Yeah, I don't think they're correct. I think that they may be what we're about to talk about.

Now let's go to the other side of the other type of entrepreneur. The other type of entrepreneur we're going to use is Sir Richard Branson. Now Richard Branson has something like 600 companies. Virgin Air, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Phone, Virgin Music, Virgin, I mean, Virgin Wedding dresses. I mean, you name it, he's got a virgin for it. Now what's different about Richard is Richard is actually risk adverse. You wouldn't see that in him. But he's highly risk adverse.

How isn't he the guy that's jumping out of planes. And that's physical risk.

Physical risk is different because physical risk gives you an adrenaline high. So I race cars, I ride motorcycles, I fly airplanes, I do all that stuff. That's a certain type of risk. That's very different than a Business risk. I will give you an example. I have a good friend who, you know, race motocross his whole life. He will take any physical risk you can imagine. And I mean, he was an outstanding athlete. No risk as an athlete was too much. Jump on a motorcycle and jump over your rv. Sure, let's give that a try. Exactly. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? I can jump an rv.

Yeah. This is not a bad plan at all.

Now, he has said to me our entire adult life, I have no idea how you've taken the risks you've taken in business. It's because I emotionally could never do that. He has spent his entire career being in a Fortune 100 company.

So before we continue with Richard, I just want to talk on this topic because I have a question. In your opinion, how does the mind and the belief system of personality develop to where we can be extremely high risk at this end? Which when you're talking about physical, which you could die. But when it comes to business, you're like, I would be so risk averse. How does the mind do this? And how would a listener understand, be able to identify it in themselves, the physical risks?

Here's the thing with the physical risk. Now for physical risk. For me, in physical risk, I'm a mitigator.

Yes.

I'm actually a mitigator.

Yes. Okay, I get what you're saying.

Look at my race car, five point safety harness, HANS device, full coverage helmets, roll bars, fire extinguishers. I'm a risk mitigator. You don't see me ride a motorcycle without a helmet on, without boots on, without gloves on, without a leather on. As a pilot, I do. I go through pre flight, I go through test, I inspect my airplane tip to tip and make sure everything on that plane is exactly as it should be before I start that engine. I literally risk mitigate for physical risk. Now, our friend we're talking about, that would mean nothing to him. Nothing at all. I'm not worried about mitigating physical risk, but he can't not mitigate financial risk because for some people, financial risk represents something that physical risk doesn't. And here's the difference. Physical risk is immediate and instant. I'm going to take this motorcycle, I'm going to jump over your rv. Okay, this is going to happen in the next five minutes.

So you got adrenaline helping you pump through.

I got adrenaline pumped up. It's going to happen right now. And as long as I land the bike down, the risk is gone, the risk is over. Okay, Short term risk, business risk requires Long term risk, it requires the risk that keeps you up at night. It requires that risk that lives with you. Think about the difference between I'm going to jump over a motorhome and I'm going to bet my $800 million that I've worked so hard to get and get to the point where I can't pay my rent. Because the can't pay my rent thing, it doesn't go away in five minutes, right?

Sure doesn't.

I can't just turn that off. I can't just say, let's jump the motorhome and my rent will be paid. So that's why these two groups of people struggle with that. And again, for me, when we talk about risk, I don't want to get hurt. I don't want to break my body up. Now, again, comparison to the friend we're talking about, he's broke every bone in his body three times. He's younger than me and he's physically probably 40 years older than me right now because he has broke so many parts of his body. I personally can't imagine doing it. He can't imagine not doing it.

Not doing it.

And it's funny because I was with him recently and I asked him, I said, with all the broken bones you've had, with all the injuries and with all the surgeries that you've been through, if you could go back to being 13 years old when you started racing, what would you do different? And his answer was, nothing.

Nothing sounds like him.

Now, if you asked me, if I went back to being 13 years old, what would I do different in business, the one thing I would tell you, I'd have probably taken bigger risks sooner. So it's completely different for me. So let's go to the other kind of entrepreneur, right?

So we're talking about Richard, Sir Richard.

Now, Richard is a massive risk mitigator. And people don't realize that because they look at Richard Branson and they see this guy who windsurfs with supermodels on his back and he does 70,000 foot balloon rides, has been rescued in the open ocean by the military and almost died. So they figure this guy's a risk taker. He is not a risk taker. So Sir Richard, who I've had the pleasure of meeting, Sir Richard, decided he wanted to have a space program. Okay, well, Elon and him, billionaires, entrepreneurs, we both want to have our own space program. We know how Elon got his. Now, how did Richard get his. Now his is called Virgin Galactic. Here's how Richard got his space program. Richard started off by monitoring my friend Peter Diamandis. Dr. Diamandis. And many of you might know Peter Diamandis. He wrote the book Abundance. He also just recently co wrote a book with Tony Robbins. Peter started a group called SpaceX or X Prize. I'm sorry, SpaceX is his. His was X Prize.

Yes.

And X Prize was a $10 million prize that at the time Peter made it, he didn't have a penny of it, but he took the risk and he offered $10 million to the first person or group of people who could create a spacecraft that could fly into the outer atmosphere two times in a row within a two week period of time. So you figure out how to make an aircraft and go to the edge of space twice. Here's $10 million. So several people took up that challenge and that prize was won by Paul Allen. Paul Allen was the co founder of Microsoft. Paul Allen, who has now passed away. Paul Allen had a company called Vulcan Enterprises. You obviously know where he got that because he was a big fan of Mr. Spock.

It's all making sense.

And he kind of had Mr. Spock's personality. So he built an aircraft which I am quite sure he spent more than $10 million on. But this was just a challenge. He built a spaceship and it was actually called Spaceship 1. And it just looked like an enormously wide glider. And they flew it up to 70,000ft and landed it. And then a week or two later they took it back up to 70,000ft and landed it again. When the plane landed on the Runway, standing next to Dr. Diamandis, next to Peter Diamandis, was Richard Branson. Richard Branson was there with a check and handed a check to Paul Allen and said, let me buy your aircraft. Paul Allen didn't want the aircraft anymore because he already won the prize. I already did what I came for. I came to prove that I could be the first private individual to make it into space. That was his goal. So he took the check, Richard took the aircraft. Think of the difference here. Elon, who was a software developer, said, huh, I've got $800 million, I think I'll build a rocket. Which for most part should have landed him in a rubber room.

Yeah, right. I mean, I would assume Richard Branson.

Is, I want to have a space project, I want to have a spaceship, I'm going to find somebody who knows how to build one and I'm going to buy it. But that's not all he did. He still wanted to mitigate that risk. Even more so he went around to groups of other rich people and he said, do you want to buy a spaceship with me? So Richard Branson got lots of investors to put up the money to buy the spaceship. So not only did he not run the risk of, can I really build a rocket to go to space? Nope. I'm going to let somebody else take that risk. Let Paul Allen take on that challenge. Then I want to buy a spaceship, but I don't want to take all that risk myself.

So I'll get other people's money.

So I'm going to put in some of my money and I'm going to collect everybody else's money and I'm going to run it. And now I'm going to go buy the spaceship. That's a risk mitigator.

That makes sense.

So you can be a risk taker. You can be a risk mitigator. For most of our clients. I tend to. And even for myself today, I tend to land in the middle. And what I mean by that is I like mitigating risk. So you'll notice that if we're talking to a new client and it's a doctor product, I will tell the client, don't go make a million pieces of the product. Make 2000 pieces of the product. Oh, yeah, let's not have a warehouse full of this stuff. Make a minimum order. Let's not worry about making money. Let's prove the concept. Let's keep our risk to a minimum. Let's start off slow. Let's see if the public wants to buy it. Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes it before you bet your entire farm on it. So in that regard, I'm very much a risk mitigator. Where I'm not a risk mitigator is I'm usually not in favor of collecting all the outside money. So things I do, I prefer to use my own money. One, and there's two reasons for that. One is I don't want to lose somebody else's money because then I feel like I owe it back to them. That's just me. Even if you put the money up and knew that you were going to lose it and then I lost it, I would be like, geez, I still need to get just this money back because I lost it. Two, I don't play well with others. So I would just assume call the shots myself, because not unlike Elon, I want to bet on me, and I want to bet on my little group of people who I trust. So that's kind of where I am in the middle. Now we can look at these two guys and we can say, well, which one is the better model? And there's one other thing I want to bring up about Richard. Richard. When you look at Elon's focus, Elon's focus is I want to do world changing things that no one else has done.

Okay.

Richard's focus is I want to have the most fun of any human being that's ever lived.

There's nothing wrong with it.

That is his goal.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I want to windsurf with supermodels on my back. I want to go to space. He owns Necker Island. I want to own my own exotic tropical island. That's his focus. His focus is I want to have a blast and I need to be rich to do it. Elon legitimately cares little about his wealth. Yeah, I happen to be the richest man in the world, but yeah, whatever. So in Elon, all that wealth just means I have more money to go do more world changing things. For Sir Richard, it means I have more money to go do fun things. Now, if we look at the two, Elon's worth $245 million and Sir Richard is worth somewhere between five and seven billion dollars. $245 billion. $5 to $7 billion. Granted, Branson's wealth is a rounding error compared to Elon's wealth. From a practical standpoint, other than maybe you want to buy a country, what luxury can Elon buy that Richard can't buy?

I don't know the answer to that.

If you have $7 billion and some people say it's $10 billion, but if you have $7 billion, what are the limitations on your life?

I do not know. I have no idea.

I'm going to guess and say there are some.

Well, there's limitations for everything.

And if you have 245 billion, you obviously have less limitations. But from a practical standpoint, if your goal is, I want to have the most fun of any human being that's.

Ever lived, I think you got enough money to do that.

$7 billion is enough money to have a good time.

Yeah, it's a pretty good party.

So even though one guy has 245 billion, the other guy has 7 billion. I can't say that one guy is more successful than the other one because we have to measure what their goals were.

Well, and that's a great point, and you brought it up earlier when you were saying, great. So let's evaluate which is the better entrepreneur or which the better model? And the answer is neither. It's whatever fits you best.

The best model is being true to yourself.

Exactly. That's what matters most is understanding who do I align with more. So the decisions you make align with that truth because otherwise you're going to keep taking steps backwards, trying to be something you're not.

Right at this moment in my life, I would not take 100% of my wealth and bet it on one thing.

Right. But I know you have.

Oh, I absolutely have.

I know you have. But you wouldn't do that today.

But I wouldn't do it today.

Right.

But on the flip side, I wouldn't go around and take millions of dollars, some other people to go start a company either.

Right.

So I'm still lying someplace in the middle, which is where I think a lot of people are. One of the things that I always try to caution people on, and we see a lot of our clients with this, they're constantly raising money. It's a very Silicon Valley model and got round A and round B and round C, and we're raising money, raising money, raising money. The couple things I want to caution people on, and this is drifting a little bit off of this, and that is the companies that tend to raise the most money are the companies that fail. Because when you raise too much money, you have a comfort level that, oh, we've got tons of money.

Well, and your goal becomes raising money.

The job becomes raising money, and you start to become too comfortable that we have all this money and we can raise more. Companies tend to do better when they're just a little under financed and they don't have rooms for errors. They don't have the room to do silly things. We need to be smart. We have to make this happen. Those are the companies that tend to make.

It makes sense.

I always align being an entrepreneur as walking out on one of those big rope and wood bridges that goes between two mountains. You got a 700 foot drop and you're walking out on this big rope bridge. And right when you got on the bridge, you took a lighter and you set the rope on fire. And now your job is to run to the other side of the bridge and get back on the other piece of land before the rope burns through. So I will give you an example. Same person, same friend has wanted to start several companies over his life. They don't usually work out for him. Why? Because he has an escape hatch. His escape hatch is that Fortune 100 job. And the thing that you know about starting up a business is there's going to be hard times, there's going to be lean times, there's going to be times when you run into trouble. And if you have a safety net, if you have an escape hatch, well.

Then you just use it.

You end to pull the cord and pop your chute and float down. You really need to be the high wire act with no net underneath and you get to the other side. That's the companies that tend to make it, not the ones that have oodles of investor cash or safety nets. The other reason I don't like to bring in a lot of investor cash is because you're giving up control of your business.

Oh, of course.

Other people own your company. And for me that's not something I like to do.

Right.

It doesn't mean I don't like having partners. I don't want to have 100 of them and me end up owning 5%, which is what happens in those environments. But at any rate, to wrap this up, being an entrepreneur is a great experience. If that is your personality. The personality being an entrepreneur is essentially to be an entrepreneur you have a secret and the secret you have. And by the way, let's not confuse an entrepreneur with a sole proprietor.

That's a good point.

A guy can start a plumbing company and I'm a plumber and I hire four more plumbers and I do plumbing work. You're not an entrepreneur. You're a small business owner. You own your job. You have a self directed job. This is not bad. This does not make you a bad person. This is not being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who has a secret. And the secret is I know how to do something or make something better than anybody else. I know how to make a skin lotion. I'm convinced I can make a topical product better than anybody else on the market. I'm convinced I can provide advertising services that will sell products better than anybody else in the country. That was my secret. So you start off with the secret. And you start off with a secret. No money and nothing but time. Then you take the time and you trade the time for money. Now you have some money and some time. Then you trade more time for more money. Pretty soon you have money and you have no time. Now you run into what Dan Sullivan refers to as the ceiling of complexity. And the way to solve complexity is never with more complexity, it is with more simplicity. So that's what I want to leave people with. Choose the type of entrepreneur you are, understand the type of Entrepreneur you are. Accept the type of person you are. I'm a mitigator. I'm a risk taker. I have a secret. I know what this is, what I want to do. Be true to yourself. And the last thing I want to leave you with is surround yourself with people who know what they're doing. The other thing that makes Richard Branson so successful is, I don't know if you know this, but Richard Branson has all these companies. The way Richard Branson opens up a company, he finds an intrapreneur or a small team who are really highly skilled at something and he provides them resources for them to go do their thing. And it's under his brand and he owns a big chunk of it. So he isn't really about working harder. He's about empowering great people.

Yep. That's the who, not how concept.

Right. Where Elon is about me. I'm going to do work if it take. If I have to work 168 hours a week.

Right.

I'm going to figure this out.

I'm going to figure how this thing works.

So figure out who you are and go lean into that and play that hand to card. That's going to be your key to get there. Just to wrap up, I want to tell people we not every client we have is an entrepreneur, but we love entrepreneurs. And anyone that's listening who is an entrepreneur. If you want to talk about your business, if you want to talk about your entrepreneurship, if you're just starting on your path, you feel free to reach out to us, feel free to contact us. I love talking about entrepreneurship. I love helping entrepreneurs, love coaching entrepreneurs. It's not always about paying Justin or me money. Nope. Maybe someday we'll get you to a point where you can afford to pay us money. But right now it's about how can we help other people do what we've already done. And I want people to feel free to do that. And you can find us at cpginsiders.com or at jekyllhyde labs.com youm can find both of us there at either place. And you're always free to reach out to us.

Absolutely.

And do we put our emails in the show notes?

I don't know, but we will now.

Yeah, let's put our email.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Any last thoughts for you, Justin?

Nope. Just want to thank give all of our listeners thank you for your time. Thank you for continuing to tune in and listen to our show. We are always grateful every time we take a look at the reaction that our show is getting the amount of listeners, so we really appreciate it. And if you're getting the value that we think you are, please leave us a five star review so we can reach more people.

That's it. We'll see you on the next episode of CPG Insiders. If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllhideagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-500-4210 ra.