What Eric Learned From A Private Founder's Retreat

We're going to start off with what I learned from a private founders retreat.

Can you first describe the founder retreat, the type of people that make it up, and why you do it, and how long you've been doing it for?

Yeah. So this group, we've had it since 2018. I started it. We have Syed Balkhi, who owns a portfolio of WordPress companies.

WPBeginner.

WPBeginner. We have Yaniv Masjedi, who owns— co-founder of Nextiva, and they do well. We have Al Doan, who has like a 9-figure quarter. Quilting company.

Quilting?

Quilting company. Like quilts for like blankets? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and he buys towns. So his town is like a quilt town. It's like Disneyland for quilting. And so like all these middle-aged old women go to that town and they just go to town on quilting. It's a really good group. So, and I can tell you how we iterate over the years, but I think I answered your first 2 initial questions, right?

Yes. But what is the purpose of a founder group? Because I'm assuming you're not talking about like, hey guys, we're all starting up our business. It's not like EO or YPO.

It is like EOYPO because EOYPO, you do a retreat every year with your forum. And so we just— this is like our annual retreat. We're actually going to do 2 now. This is where we're just having a good time. We're eating good food. We're talking about business ideas. We're talking about challenges we're facing, AI ideas too, and other things that are going on in our lives. So what I learned with this group, because we're all kind of growing old together, we're all in our mid-30s. Some people are in their 40s or so. This group, All we do is we'll, we'll do active, we'll do activities. Um, we'll talk about business the whole time. So we're doing presentations like, hey, here's my biggest challenge with this. Okay. Everyone experience shares, things like that. Right. We'll eat dinner and we go to bed after dinner, but there's no like, hey, let's go party. Right. Whereas one of my other groups that I just was with, we were, they just wanted to party. Right.

The first thing that you mentioned is you guys do activities. I saw some of the activities online.

So tennis, tennis, archery, pickleball. And then usually we play basketball because there's some people in the group that are really good at basketball.

All right. What's the purpose of the activities?

Because we don't want to be bored. Um, so it's either physical activities or spa because Yaniv loves spa, right? Yeah.

I'm down with the spa.

Yeah. So he gets like all the massages. So he books all the massages for us and everything. I think that the big thing is we have done this for 8 years or so. We're very comfortable with this group and we've gotten it to a point where this is our core group now. We used to rotate people in and out. We're no longer doing that. The key thing is these people are like loaded with money, right? But there's still groups like this and There's a lot of groups like this that will be together for 20, 30 plus years or so, and they'll grow old together. Like you'll hear about their kids, you hear about their family and things like that. And so I think the whole entire purpose of this, it's very lonely at the top. And we both know that entrepreneurship's a very lonely game. And to have a group like this where you know you can trust everyone and you would do anything for these people goes a long way. It's like you and I have a very, there's a close relationship, right? But I feel like that's that with this group. And that's why I love this. And that's why I've always been a proponent of EOYPO, 'cause they force you into groups like this, but I just happen to make my own. It's worked out that way.

All right, so from a business standpoint, what'd you guys end up discussing during the retreat?

So this is this will probably be helpful for everyone. I want to give you guys some frameworks that you can use. So the way we do this is all right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing—that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative—and there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to Singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. When you're in the EO or YPO forum, you will come with your— we call these hot seats, right? Or no, we call these now explorations. So Neil, let's use you as an example. What's the biggest challenge you have right now in your business?

Biggest challenge I have in my business is convincing people to sign up faster.

Okay.

Sales cycle's long.

So sales cycle's long. Okay. So you might say, okay, that's the challenge, and then you get 10 minutes to frame what the problem is. And then we get 10 to 15 minutes to ask you clarifying questions around the room. So you have a group of smart people in different industries, right? They might not understand your core issue, but they might have an experience here that's relevant, right? And sometimes they can say pass. Then after that, each person gets 5 minutes to experience share, not exactly give you advice. I know Neil's the type to kind of be direct and say, no, you should do this, right? In this scenario, you're actually supposed to hold back and just share your experiences. Sometimes people go directly into advice sharing, But each person goes for around 5 minutes.

Wait, wait, wait. Why are you supposed to just experience share and not give advice?

You're not supposed to give advice because whatever advice that you give is unique to your experiences and your life. And so some— what happens is the argument here is from EOYPO. It's called Gestalt rule, right? If I give Noah a piece of advice here and it screws him over, he will hate me for that, right? Or if I give you advice and you don't take the advice, supposedly I will be annoyed or whatever. I actually don't really care. Nor would Neil care. Like, Neil would just give advice, right? So the idea here is like, if I just experience share you, I tell you my story, you will come to your own conclusions on what you should do. And that feels better. And I will say I hated that in the very beginning of EO and YPO, but I grew to love it because I came up with my own solutions. And I actually, I didn't really like it as much when people gave direct advice because it was so contextual to them. So we would do that. And that's the format of it. Each person gets about 40— each person's presentation goes about 45 minutes and we'll just go around until everyone kind of finishes it. And so when you share these stories, you can— in certain cases, people are tearing up and stuff. You got a lot closer to these people too. And if you're gonna spend a lot of time with these people, you want to know how they are, right? Um, for you, you'd probably be like, screw this stuff, right?

Yeah.

But, but like, it, it has been generally helpful. Hensel asked— I like these dinner questions. He— you just keep going around the room. So I'd say, hey Noah, um, no, I'd say, no, if you really knew me, you would know that I played drums when I was in high school, right? And so random facts, and then you would go, if you really knew me, you know, something else, right? If you really knew me, you— if Neil said this, oh yeah, I used to sell CDs and I used to burn CDs and sell them in high school. That's Neil, right? Yep. So you just share these random facts and you learn all these things about people. It's like, holy crap, right? Like some people have been through some really tough stuff. Um, I learned in that group that everyone was broke before at one point, which is why I love this group. All right guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow. Bye.