Building a Franchise Empire | Brian Scudamore | The 2%

Failure is a gift. Not only does do you have to learn how to deal with failure and not be so fearful, but it is a necessary ingredient in the recipe for success.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the 2%, where, as always, we're interviewing peak performers in all walks of life. Why? To decode excellence. To give you the tips, strategies and tools that you can use to close that gap between your current self and your best self. And I'm super excited to have on the show today Brian Scudamore. Welcome, Brian.

Thank you, Eric. Happy to be here. I understand we're two different ends of the planet right now. You're in Portugal, I'm in Whistler. And the beauty of technology. Having a great conversation. I'm excited.

Yeah, we were actually just talking about that before we press record that the pandemic has given us this ability to recognize that it's actually possible to live and work in ways that we hadn't experienced before. Right.

It's unbelievable. For the first time, my wife actually said, maybe we can live in France for a while. It's been a dream of mine. And she brought it up the other day and asked our youngest son what he thought. He's like, yeah, I'd be down with that. So the ability to be able to work remotely and still do great work and maybe even better work because you're more passionate and excited and charged, it's an unbelievable opportunity for those who can make that happen.

Yeah. And you're in Vancouver now, is that right?

Yeah, our head office is in Vancouver in Canada. And right this minute, I'm in Whistler in the mountains, enjoying all this has to offer up here.

Yes. And I can see you have some sun, but I have, like, a different quality sun right now. Mine is more like beach sun and you have more like mountain sun.

Exactly. They're both good.

Yeah. So, I mean, you've done. I have to provide, obviously, some context. You've done some amazing things. I mean, I think of you as a franchise king. You know, you're. To me, you are someone who empowers people who have that entrepreneurial spirit and who want to start something, but maybe they're a little bit scared.

They're.

They're not sure what or how or will I be able to operate it correctly or, you know, all the system, all those things that go into a business. And for me, you're someone who, like, simplifies that for people. And you do that because you have three different massive franchise brands. Right. You got one, 800 got junk. While one day Painting and shack shine. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about each of those. But before we get into that, how the hell did you get into this? Like what sparked all that?

Yeah, 32 years ago, I was one class short of graduation from high school. I wasn't the best student. I love to learn but the school format of sitting down, here's the subject, listening to a teacher speak for an hour or two, it just didn't work for me. And so I failed out of high school. All my friends were going to go to college. I didn't want to miss out, had some fomo. And so I talked my way into college but I had to find a way to pay for it. And there I was in a McDonald's drive thru of all places. And I see this beat up old pickup truck with plywood side panels built up on the box filled with junk. And it said marks hauling along the side. And I looked at that truck and I said, that's my ticket. I am going to go buy a truck. That's how I'm going to fund my college education. A week later I had a business called the Rubbish Boys. It was just me, but a vision for something a bit bigger. And I started hauling junk and it paid for college. But ironically, three years in I was faced with a fork in the road and I sat down with my father and I said, my dad's a liver transplant surgeon, he's done a lot of school. I said, dad, I got some good news for you. I'm thinking of leaving school to build this business full time. And he thought I was crazy. You're quitting school to become a full time junk man. I said, dad, my business opportunity might not always be there, university will be and I can always go back. So I'm going to take a flyer and check this out. And I quit school. I've gone to 14 schools from kindergarten through to college and the only diploma I have, true story, is kindergarten. So my learning has been on the streets and there's no looking back. I love what I've been building. And you said, you know, I've got these three huge brands. I'd say one huge brand, this one 1-800-got- junk is a half a billion dollar business. And the other two are sort of the babies in the family that wow, one day painting and Jack Shine are still growing and We've got about 50 franchise owners in each and they will be huge. But we get to live that fun, that dream again of building something really special from the ground. Up.

I think 50 franchise owners in each for most people wouldn't make those babies. But.

I love.

Fair enough.

I love the perspective. I also love Rubbish Boys. It's like when you said that, I immediately thought beastie Boys. And I thought, maybe. Go ahead.

No, it's funny that you say that, Eric, because people would say, like I tell them I own a company called the Rubbish Boys and they're like, oh, that sounds like a band.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So I had to change the name. So we changed our phone number. Used to be 738 junk. That's what was on the side of the trucks, the phone number for people to call us. And I noticed that people would call us either 738JUNK, our phone number, or the Rubbish Boys. And it was confusing. And so I amalgamated into one and I said, we're going to come up with a phone number that we can use in every city as we grow. And it became just one name, one phone number. 1, 800, got junk.

Simple 1, 800, got junk. And is the family involved as well?

Family's not involved in my business. My kids are young and they haven't expressed an interest yet. My oldest is a teenager, who knows? But I just enjoy what I build and the passion behind watching people grow and being a part of that success that if it attracts my kids one day and they want to approach me and say, hey, dad, I think I want to work in the business, I think I want to learn. Hey, awesome. They want to do something else. That's awesome too. I want my kids to be happy.

And I could totally relate. So we have a 16 year old and a 7 year old and it's tempting, right? It's like you want to, hey, you could take over the business and you could do this and that and, and sometimes when I've said that, it's met with, huh, okay. But not like necessarily the enthusiasm that you're hoping for. And you kind of realize that you have to let them find their own way, right?

Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. So growing up, we traveled a lot. We lived in England for a while, Sweden for a while. My dad was at his job. Yeah, really?

I'm half Norwegian. I'm half American, half Norwegian.

Okay, nice. We lived in Jotaburg.

Okay, cool.

And so. And then we lived in a small town called Varberg on the west coast. So loved that experience. And what it was was we moved away with my, my dad. He's a liver transplant surgeon and at the time he was learning from mentors all over the world how to do liver transplants. So it brought us to some different cities. My point growing up was as a kid, my dad always used to say, you have to go to university. What are you going to do? And I felt the pressure of this university thing. I would get Christmas money from family and I'd write thank you cards. And I was trained to say, I'm going to save this money for university. But that wasn't my dream, that was my dad's dream. And so when I sat down with my dad to say, yeah, I don't know if this is what I want to do, it was a conflict. And so I think I've taken the other extreme with my kids to say, I'm not going to talk about their dreams. I'm just going to show them opportunity. How I show up with my work, my businesses, taking them to Kenya to help build a school, touring rural India. Things that just have them open their eyes to whatever they might be able to see and what opportunity, as you said, they can make their own.

That's quite beautiful. Then it basically, you know, illuminates the fact that there's many paths to success. And I mean, that's a good thread to pull on. How do you define success?

I think it's happiness. Are you happy? Do you love what you do? I think as North Americans, we often define it based on money.

Yeah.

And I can tell you I've made more money over the years than I could ever know what to do with, short of philanthropic type causes. But it's never made me happy. I drive a little Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. I know that cars don't make people happy. They make some people happy for a short time. I had a friend that sold his business for hundreds of millions of dollars and he went and bought a fancy car and he returned it after a week because he said for four days I was excited about it and then it just became another car and he said it wasn't worth it. And so money doesn't make me happy. I like watching people grow and evolve and take opportunity. I love when I, you know. We had a franchise owner, Lee Adler, who is an employee in our company of wow one day painting just celebrated his 15th anniversary the other day. So it's top of mind for me. He started in our call center for 1-800-got junk and today he's a director in our business but also runs and owns a wow One Day Painting franchise. I love that stuff. Like that's what drives me and makes me happy. So to your, your Question of what is success. I think if you feel like you're happy and you're making an impact, if you are doing things for others or contributing to others, that has that, you know, being a father, you and I are both fathers. It's exciting watching kids grow up and live their dreams and knowing that we play a role. And I love that with people, employees, franchise owners and so on. So that would be my success.

And it's tempting. Like, as you're talking.

I almost immediately want to revisit what I was first saying about, oh, let's learn a bit about each of these three businesses. But as I hear you speak.

Clearly, that's not where the conversation. I mean, maybe it will go there at some point, but it's tempting to talk about, yeah, let's grow the three businesses. But that's not really what you're about in terms of growth. And you just said something earlier about growing. People.

Talk about that a bit because that feels like your mission.

It is my mission. So it's just. It's fun, it's rewarding and.

But what do you mean by it, like, to grow, you know, grow? Like, what do you mean? Like, you know, grow people. It's like, I could picture you planting seeds in the field that people are growing, you know, but it's not that. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, it's opportunity. It's development. So as a kid, I loved Lincoln Logs and Lego and building things, right?

Yeah.

And I think that I'm still living that childhood kind of feeling of building businesses, brands, but through people. So when I watch someone come into the business, like Lee, who starts in the call center, and we help provide an opportunity for him to take, to get into a different business, to grow into a franchise.

Did he think he was an entrepreneur? Did he think he was an entrepreneur?

He was inspired by our entrepreneurial spirit.

Right.

And he moved over from Australia years ago. He was a golf guy, and I think he saw business as very similar to playing sports and playing games. Today I spoke with. I had a woman in our business, Farrah. And Farrah reached out to me and said, can we just have a coffee chat? I want to get to know you in this virtual world. She's been working for us for a couple of years, and we've never really connected. And she started in the call center with 1-800-God or with wow. One day painting. She ended up moving into a role where she's on her service desk helping franchise partners with software problems related to booking and dispatch. And I just Thought that that was kind of her path. And so I said, what's your dream? She said, well, my husband and I moved from India two years ago to start a new life. And I said, well, what was your old life? She was a Bollywood actress and dancer. She told me not to Google her and I said I had to. She won like Miss India and it's.

Like the surest way to get someone to Google you.

I know, but she won like Miss India or something. In like 2012. She became a Bollywood actress, but her interest is in business and entrepreneurship. So she said to me, at the end of the day, her goal is for her and her husband to run a franchise.

Oh, cool.

So. So I love that feeling of that unexpected when you find out what someone's dream is and how your business can be. Because as you said, it isn't about the businesses. These three brands are three vehicles towards helping me feel successful and helping others live whatever dream they might have.

Yeah. And there's, there's so much freedom and I mean we're both, we're both entrepreneurs and there's so much freedom and entrepreneurship. You know, the opportunity to find your own rules, you know, set your own goals, decide your own hours, simple things like on a daily basis. Sure. And that's incredibly liberating. And again, what I like about what you do is that.

A lot of people, I think, equate entrepreneurship to having to come up with the next Elon Musk idea. And that is so anomalous to what entrepreneurship is really about, which is just about carving your own path and necessarily need to be this earth shattering thing. And what I really love with the brands that you have is that it gives an opportunity for people who maybe don't have that idea or don't even want to come up with an idea, still get the benefits of entrepreneurship. So get the benefits of the happiness. So get the benefits of creating their own rules, setting their own agenda. Now can you tell us a little bit more about these different paths, different businesses? Yeah.

And maybe I can just layer in first, just on your thought there, which I'm always intrigued by, is that entrepreneurs, you're right, people that want to live the dream of business ownership, you know, we call it the American dream. Yeah. And there is the freedom, the lifestyle, the pride of ownership. But I think a lot of people do come in with misconceptions and they think I've got to have the big idea. But what I've been loving about franchising lately is like the movie founder with the Ray Kroc story of starting McDonald's, all those people that became entrepreneurs that didn't have to have the big idea. In fact, Ray Kroc's big idea was to take someone else's idea and blow it up.

Bingo.

So I think it's often the people that can popularize an idea. So while I started with one truck and a McDonald's drive through, it was our franchise owners that came in that said, I want to be a part of this. And we've been building something bigger and better together. And so I've realized that with franchising, most people aren't pure creators that want to start something from scratch, that get juiced from doing that. They actually want to just be successful and live the dream of entrepreneurship. And so if you can give them a proven recipe with almost freedom within a framework, that's interesting. I met. I was lucky enough to meet virtually Shaquille o', Neal, who, you know, one of the world's best basketball stars. And he spoke at our kickoff, our big annual conference this year with franchise owners. And at the end, he said, I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you about maybe investing, maybe, you know, being a part of your next brand or something. And I was like, this is crazy. And so I had a conversation with him after, and what really impressed me about him is he owns a ton of franchises. Five guys burgers, Annie's pretzels, a whole ton.

Does he? I didn't realize that. Wow.

I didn't either. And I said, so why franchising? He goes, listen, it's like sports, where I was able to lead a team, build a team, have a vision, and have them go off and do the hard work. He said, I see this as you get a proven recipe, you don't need to invent it. You plug in the right team, and you just dial it up and you just say, let's go. Let's go build hundreds of units in this franchise where they've already figured out the proven recipe.

Yeah.

And I just thought that was amazing. And there's a lot of our owners who come from sports backgrounds, college basketball, whatever it might be, college football. And they come to us and they're like, yeah, I want to follow a recipe, and I just want to make it awesome. So it's interesting. It used to be that Franchising was just McDonald's Subway, but people are realizing in our space, home services, you can build quite a team and have a ton of fun in a unique space.

And that's like a great segue. To what the actual businesses are. Because when a lot of people hear franchising, they immediately think of food, and they kind of begin and end with food, but you're doing something quite different and unique with franchising. So tell us. Tell us a little bit about the business.

Yeah. So every one of our businesses. It took me 10 years, by the way, to create the franchise model. So I started with my truck. I kept adding trucks. I grew to a million in revenue with 1,800got junk in eight years. It's a long time.

And that business is going around and hauling away junk.

And so what we do is we go into people's garages and basements and haul away their junk, take it away to the transfer station of the landfill for a fee or recycling. And it's a simple business model.

Yeah.

And so it took me a million or, sorry, eight years to get to a million. My first franchise owner, who followed the proven recipe, got to a million in one calendar year, his first calendar year. So I was just like, okay, we're on to something. So let me just. Yeah. Talk about. You've asked the question. What are the businesses? So 1, 800 got junk. We remove junk removal, we give people their space back. They renovate, remodel, they got crap to get rid of.

That's a nice twist on it. We give people their space back. That's good. I like that.

Yeah. Well, you think of during the pandemic, everybody needed a guest room to become an office. Well, first you had to get rid of all the stuff in there. Right. So our business record, revenue across all our brands. The second business, I started 22 years after we had grown 1, 800 got junk to a size where we figured we'd learned enough that we could apply it to another franchise space. I was looking to get my house painted. I had three guys come in and give me estimates. The first two cigarettes hanging out of their mouth, they show up late. They were exactly what I would have expected in the industry. But the third one came with a shiny van, uniformed, friendly, on time. And he said, I will paint your home with the same quality, same price as everyone else. I'm competitive. But he said, my difference, my unique differentiator, is I do it in a day. I thought, how do you even paint a home in a day? And he took my entire home SWAT team of people that came in, and within one day, every single room, couple of coats, whatever was needed, floor to ceilings, molding, trim. And I was blown away. And I said, have you tried to franchise this? He Said no or sorry. He said, yes, it doesn't work. I said I might be able to help. And I partnered with him and ultimately bought the company and called it wow One Day Painting. Because the feeling when I came home that day was, wow, look at the transformation of my house in one day. No disruption. And so I found another model that was again, home services find great people. And we're not looking for painters as franchise owners. We're looking for someone to come in who says, I'm going to build a business empire of my own. Leadership development, finding customers, marketing and so on. And then the third one is shot Shine. So similar story where I tried to find someone to clean my gutters and had trouble. And I found this company, Shack Shine and ended up buying them. And we rebranded the business and we made it, you know, just fit our brands and started finding great franchise owners. We look for what we call the four H's in owners. Happy, hungry, hard working and hands on. We want people that have a smiley, happy demeanor in life that are optimists. We want people that are going to work hard, that are going to get hands on and understand the business before they try and build and scale it, that'll follow the system and people that are hungry for an opportunity, not someone just looking to be a silent investor. So it's been pretty special. Like, you know, like with kids, you've got a couple, I've got a few, and you watch the first one grow and you kind of learn as a parent what this is all about. And then the second and the third are generally, in my case a little bit easier. And I'm like, same thing's happening with the brands. You know, they go through different challenges, but it's fun repeating the cycle of growth.

Amazing, amazing. And so many, so much opportunity, right? So there's like so many.

Different paths you can choose of the three, but there's a commonality, I guess, in the four H's that you, that you mentioned that cut across all the brands. So, Brian, what do you, what do you believe that others don't?

I believe in possibility. I believe in pure possibility that if you can dream up big things, you never know, they might just happen. An example being one of my goals early in life in the business, when we were a million ish in revenue, is I said I want to be on the Oprah Winfrey Show. My goal was actually to meet Oprah Winfrey, give her a big hug. I love her as an entrepreneur and humanitarian and so on. And so I integrated into my business and I said, we created this vision, this painted picture of all the things we would become as we grew. 1, 800, got junk. And one of the things I said is, we'll be featured on the Oprah WINFREY SHOW. And 14 months later, we made it happen. And we were in front of 35 million viewers live on TV. And I got a great plug from Oprah saying the business a couple of times, talking about the business. And it just rocketed us into a bigger, better place than where we were. And so.

My gift, I believe, is inspiring possibilities and believing that anyone can do anything they dream of if only they start with the idea. I think what happens is people often start with an idea and then they go, okay, so how am I going to get there? And they start to build a plan, and they get overwhelmed by the plan, and they talk themselves off the ledge of taking the leap to make greatness happen. Whereas.

Thank you. What I do is I take this painted picture, this vision in my mind and I say, here's what it's going to look like. I'm not going to worry about how to get there. When I said we'd be on the Oprah Winfrey show, it wasn't even me that made it happen. We hired a fellow named Tyler, who had zero PR experience, but believed in the goal, had all the energy in the world, and he made it his mission to make it happen. Yeah.

So. So cool. The.

My personal view is that the number one reason why people don't achieve what they want to achieve is because they're actually holding themselves back in some way. They limit themselves. They cage themselves. From your point of view.

Why is it that people cage themselves? How do they limit themselves? What's the reason?

Yeah. So my perspective, my own opinion is fear of failure. So I wrote a book. And I'm not trying to promote the book, but it's relevant to what you described.

I actually wanted to talk about the book because this is like.

Here we go.

Yeah, this is why I was asking the question, because I was hoping we could talk about it because I'm so aligned with you on this subject. So go for it.

So I wrote a book called wtf, which actually stands for Willing to Fail. And let me tell you a little story of how I came up with the premise for the book or the title, because it fits in here to people's biggest what's holding them back? So Roy H. Williams, the wizard of ads who does all our radio creative, kept saying to me, brian, you gotta write a book. Gotta write a book. And Every year I'd go visit him in Austin, Texas, and he'd push me to write a book. And I said, I don't need a book. My ego doesn't need one. I'm a terrible reader. I don't do well with books, even though I can't actually write. And he goes, listen, I'll make it easy for you. This is not about you. This is about others. You need to tell your story so that others can be inspired and learned from all you've gone through. We'll mic you up, you'll tell story after story, and you and I will work together to put it into a book. Through the process of doing the book, I kept saying, roy, we need to come up with a title. I'm a branding guy. 1, 800, got junk. Wow. Painting, shack, shine. I start with the brand in mind. He said, it doesn't work that way in the book world. And he'd written a ton of books, so I had to trust him. He said, we write the book, then the title comes out. So we wrote the manuscript and kind of closed it, and I was like, man, this is story of a little bit of growth. And then failure, growth, failure, growth, fail. And I kept failing and the title became wtf, Kind of with a double meaning of like, wow, be willing to fail.

Yeah.

And so I realized after the 30 years I'd had in business before the book came out, that a gift I've embraced even more so after writing the book and having this realization myself, is that failure is a gift. Not only does do you have to learn how to deal with failure and not be so fearful, but it is a necessary ingredient in the recipe for success. I have not met, and I bet you haven't met anybody who's been successful in life who hasn't failed. You don't build a success.

I've royally screwed up so many things, right? And it's like.

You'Re totally right. And it's only because of those things together with understanding what went well as well. Of course, it's not just like failure way through life.

That you find the right path. I mean, I totally agree with you. And how magical is that message then? Because if the primary reason why people don't want to embark on their own, try something, take a risk, take that leap into greatness, as you said earlier, is because they're afraid of failing if they then suddenly realize and embrace what you're saying. What I'm saying that no, the very thing that you fear is the exact path that leads to your Success.

The brain.

Absolutely. And I think what changed it for me was I realized failure is a gift, failure is an opportunity. And so cold calls. Most people hate making cold calls. I would cold call the press and I'd say, we got an awesome story idea for you. And more often than not, what do you think the answer on the other end was from the journalists? No. No, thank you. Sorry. It's not a story.

That could be seen as failure, as a door slamming. To me, it was always an opportunity. So I'd say to the journalist, so, Eric, you don't like the story, and I'm not trying to convince you, but what would make it a story? What's missing? Why don't you like it? They would tell me, as a journalist, exactly why they didn't like it or what was missing. I'd go, then retool. And when I pitched the next person, I was better armed towards success.

And it's every single time I'm like, when I went out to go franchise my business, 1, 800, got junk. I had about a dozen mentors that I went out to and approached and sat down in their office and spent time with them. People from McDonald's and so on. And I said, this is what I want to do. 100% of those mentors said, it can't be done. The business cannot be franchised. Right. And I said, why not? What would make it franchisable? So did I fail in having 12 no's? No. They gave me what I needed. I retooled. I went back to two of them, and I said, now what do you think? And they're like, you might be onto.

Something, might be odds.

Here we are today.

Yeah. Do you know Byron Katie?

I know of Byron Katie.

So when you're Talking about those 12 no's, she said something along the lines once, she said, you can have just about anything you want in life, provided that you're willing to go through 1000 no's. And that's always stuck in my head as an entrepreneur, and it's something I always teach and try to mentor to those in my network that collect your nos. Because yes lives in the land of no. And if you can just rack up your nose, eventually, you know, the yeses just fall out the other end.

Right.

So when you just said the 12 no's, I was thinking, yeah, and you can go even higher than that. You go way higher, and your success is guaranteed.

Yeah. You know, you can take the Kentucky Fried Chicken, Colonel Sanders story. Right. I mean, how many times did he try and sell the recipe. No after. No after. But that story has been told millions of times.

Relating to different people because it's true and it works. And so you have to be tenacious and you have to persevere and you have to. I love that. Collect the nose.

Collect the nose. One other example just comes to mind. I was talking to the co founder of Reebok a few weeks ago and do you know how many times he tried to enter the US.

Failed? So he tried five consecutive different times to enter the US Failed every single time, miserably, picked himself back up and tried for the sixth time and then finally broke into the market. So I think that is, I mean, that's a gem right here, you know, for anybody watching, listening, that the failure is required. The nos should be in a way expected, embraced and like sought after, because therein lies your data for what you should do differently to eventually collect the yeses. Right.

So there's a fellow I met, Ben Zander years ago who was the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and met him after a speaking event. And he was unbelievable. And then we ran into each other in an airport and hung out on a plan and became friends. And what I loved about him was his whole belief with failure is when you make a mistake, you smile and you go, aha, how fascinating. You know, he's got this wonderful, he's in his 80s and has this wonderful British accent. Oh, aha, how fascinating. And you smile. And so I think what people need to actually my wish for people, and I really do this myself, we almost need to set out as a goal. How many times are you going to fail this week? I'm going to go fail right now. I am going to go fail. But imagine the gift of the learning I will get from that failure. So back to your initial question. What's holding people back? They're scared to take that first step. If you don't take that first step, you don't fail. You don't learn from that failure and you don't take a second step.

How do you.

So there's somebody who doesn't never thought they were an entrepreneur. They come across one of your businesses or might be even listening right now, and they're like, oh, gosh, okay, you know, I want to do this. And so they get started and then they fail in some fashion. How do you help them pick themselves back up? Like, what do you do to kind of nurture that failure and development process?

Yeah, let me answer that and I'm going to throw something in. First we Have a lot of franchise partners who have come to us who have failed trying to run a business on their own. And then they succeed with us because they realize it's this bigger and better together. They've got the support and they've got the learning from our franchise partners surrounding them. So the learning from a franchise partner, let's say someone comes into our business and they fail with some of their marketing, will match them up with someone who's had the same failure and learned or who's figured out something in a way that they need to sort of sponge up. And so, so much of failure is not understanding what the mistake was and why you made it. And it's getting the learning. So we want to set you. They say when the student's ready, the teacher will appear. When someone fails, great. Hopefully you're a ready student, put you in touch with a teacher, and again, it's letting the franchise partner know that that failure was okay. Now, we don't like when our franchise partners end up in an ultimate failure of shutting down the business. It's rare, but when it happens, it's because they often weren't paying attention to and listening to all the failure points along the way where they had to readjust which direction they were going.

What's one thing that the person out there who wants more wants to grow? Because you say you grow people, right? So person out there who wants to grow wants to grow themselves. What's one thing that they should be doing that they're not?

I think it's starting with the end in mind. What's your vision?

And it doesn't matter how big it is. Like Obama said one day he would be president. That's a big goal to set when you're a young man. Set the big goal and then start to think backwards. Reverse engineer. What's the one step that I need to take towards failure? What's the one thing I need to do? You know, I mentioned Shaquille o'. Neal. How many teams did he play on? He moved teams because he knew he had things to learn. He knew it was. He loved his teammates. He loved winning. You know.

Camera, what the trophy's called in the. In basketball. It's terrible. But he wanted.

Yeah, he wanted to win championships, but he knew he had more to learn. Michael Jordan quit basketball and went to baseball. Failed miserably, but learned and then came back to basketball. So I think it's. Figure out what the goal is of what you. What happiness is. What is it? Is it. Is it living a life of Freedom and enjoying building a great business and all the good and bad that comes with it. Great. Then if it is, what are the steps that you can take towards failure? I don't say towards success, because if you're just going, I'm looking to succeed, you're gonna make mistakes and feel bad. Yeah. If you're trying to find the failure, the gift, the lesson, you go, okay, did it. Check. And like Benjamin Zander, how fascinating. And you learn and you smile, you pick yourself up, and off you go. Now, hey, I get when people fail, sometimes it hurts, sometimes it's hard. I'm a normal human being. I've had some of those periods in my life where I've spent three days in bed feeling depressed and down about a mistake or what's gone on. But when you pick yourself up and you're ready, reflect on what happened. People say to me constantly, you know, on a podcast or an interview, like, what's the one thing you'd change over the last 32 years? And the answer is always nothing. You kidding me? I needed those gifts. I know you get that.

Yeah, it's like. Yeah, it's the whole, like, you know, time machine thing. If you had a time machine, what you. That's dangerous. You change one thing and unravels everything, and it's like, totally you. You know, you absolutely need everything. Right. And you have to own it all, and. And you become greater as a result. Brian, it's been so awesome that you got to. Yeah, you're just such. You have such an incredible nice demeanor, good soul, nice person.

Really enjoyed the conversation. I'm sure you're having a wonderful time right now with your family and everything. How does somebody who's listening, if they're inspired, if they want to learn more, if they want to break out of their corporate path, or they had this entrepreneurial itch, or maybe they've tried before and now they've failed and they don't think that's possible again, and they want a second shot or a first shot. How do they get in touch? How do they learn more from you?

Yeah. So I would say, you know, put Brian Scudamore into. Into Google and find what content resonates with you. We're on YouTube, social media. You can go to our different brands and check it out. But I. I love inspiring entrepreneurship. I think it's one of the most incredible career choices people can make and love helping people. And I often get people reaching out through social media with notes and questions and ideas, and so whatever someone wants to do to reach out. I love connecting and I really enjoyed this time together. I mean, you know, what a perfect way to spend an hour hanging out with someone who's in Europe. You know, we're both having great conversation here and forgetting that it's actually going out to an audience. And I love reflecting and thinking about the journey and thinking about what's worked and what hasn't and what's next. So thank you, Eric. This is unbelievable.

Awesome. Thanks a lot, Brian. And yeah, really appreciate you coming on. And.

Next time you start your fourth franchise business, please get in touch so we could talk about that.

Amazing. Awesome. Thank you very, very much.

See you then. Hope you enjoyed that discussion. And I know you're going to absolutely love the next one as well. It's with John Lee Dumas talking about his newest book and all the incredible things that you can be learning to increase your financial awareness and wealth, and I know you'll love that. Just click on the link right here and I'll see you there.