Episode 245: It Only Takes One Person to Make a Lone Nut into a Leader with Serial Entrepreneur A...

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm here this afternoon with Anthony Franco. Anthony is a serial entrepreneur and he just got through telling me he's had five startups so far. He's four years into this one. He's the founder of MC Squares, a dry erase whiteboard tile business. And they've gone through a lot of the, the startup steps that you go through. But one thing significant, they were on Shark tank in season 11, 2019, got $300,000 for 25% and he's been through that education. Their sales are up over 2 million 600% increase from first quarter 2019 to first quarter of 2020. And you know, before the bottom dropped out with COVID So lot of experience. He's advisor in different areas, he's a mentor and he's actually founded seven successful companies and he's been in that founder and president role for 10 years. He's learned a lot about winning folks, and it's exciting to have him on. So, Anthony, thanks so much for spending time with us today.

Thanks for having me.

Anthony, when you what are you most proud about this particular startup and what's happening there? Usually it's your, you know, you can have a lot of kids, but it's your newest baby that you're most proud of, it seems. So tell us what you're proud of. That's about this one.

Yeah. Well, so my other companies that I founded and exited were all tech startups. And in this company I wanted to build something where we actually built physical products. And so we make really simple products, simple to understand. Reusable dry erase sticky notes are easy for people to understand, but the way we make them is quite advanced. We have an advanced manufacturing facility that we started ourselves and have learned how to, how to make products on our own. So even though the company feels simple from the outside, it's a pretty interesting engineering feat. What we've been able to accomplish on the inside and what.

To people like me who are not in manufacturing have no clue the difficulties. I do remember Elon Musk recently talking about going through 10 years of manufacturing hell to get to where he is today. I'm sure that would resonate more with you than it would a person like Me, what are some of the challenges you run into in that?

Well, so it's a lot like. So let me talk about the differences between software. So today if you build a piece of software and you make a mistake, you can change a line of code and it instantly is deployed across your entire user base. So a website for example, I can make a change right now. And you would see that change on your computer monitor right away. Where in physical product development, if you make a mistake, it's not like all your customers get the benefit of the fix. You have to reship out product or sell more in order for people to get the benefit of that change. So, so certainly nowhere near as complex as making lithium ion batteries like Elon Musk does or self driving cars. But I can certainly empathize with the difficulty it must be to do what he's doing. He's literally changing the world with tech and doing it with physical products. And yeah, the complexity for what he's doing is astronomical. But for us it's, you know, it's, it's, it's learning how to make something that hasn't been made before and doing it in a scalable way is, it's.

Complicated and there's nobody. You couldn't outsource this. I mean, how quick did you realize I'm not going to be able to outsource this. I've got not only come up with the idea, I've got to figure out how to make it.

Yeah, well, I mean we could have outsourced it. Wanted to have a lot more connective tissue to the manufacturing process ourselves. So I'm a product guy, I design and build products. And so having the ability, you know, you're getting your hands dirty in the manufacturing process means you can make products better. And so outsourcing it just wasn't a thing that I was, I wanted to do. I wanted to be closer to the manufacturing process, closer to the design iteration process. And I'm really glad we did so. But learning how to do it was, you know, I got laughed out of a lot of outsourced companies before we started manufacturing ourselves because we wanted to do things that they just had never done before. So we had to put cobble some machinery together and put some automation and encode that in order for it to work the way we wanted it to.

And how many people are we talking.

About with we, oh MC squares right now is 20 people.

But I mean in the beginning when you started, when you were figuring it.

Out, oh, it was me and one other person.

Okay.

Trying to figure stuff out.

Yeah, yeah. And it's a small week, but. But I tell you the importance of having one other solid citizen, like minded person who is totally committed to the vision. The idea that you can bounce ideas off of that can take over some of the overflow of work, can come up with ideas on their own that you never thought of. The dynamic of that can be more than just two people. Can it?

Yeah, it absolutely can. It does take a leader, but it also takes somebody to get. What's the phrase? It takes only one person to make a lone nut. A leader takes only one trait.

Right.

I love that phrase because that is absolutely true. I was, you know, if you're doing it by yourself, you're just a crazy loon.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

How did you get started in this inventing entrepreneur mode? Where did that come from?

It was actually what I was fascinated by was advanced manufacturing techniques. So again, I have a tech background. I used to be a software developer and I really was fascinated by how manufacturing is changing. And so I started by purchasing a very expensive. In my last exit, I was able to afford a toy. And the toy I decided to buy was a very nice 3D printer so I could learn how to manufacture stuff digitally. And so that was the gift to myself, is to learn something new. So yeah, that's what fascinated me. And then so I learned how to design and manifest things in the physical world and then it kind of grew from there.

What, how much does a 3D printer cost?

Well, that one was the one that.

You would be interested in.

So you can get, you can get 3D printers now for your home for a couple thousand bucks that are fairly capable. But four years ago, the printer that we bought, that I bought was the size of a Fiat and about 150k.

Aha. But then the potential for all kind of madness was, was huge, I guess.

Yeah. I didn't go to college, so I figured I viewed it as my, as my college education.

How did you, how did you educate yourself to become an inventor and write software and start your own business? Do all these startups take us through that?

Yeah, well, I mean, when I went to high school we had a Apple Iie computer lab and I took a computer programming course and that's really kind of where I fell in love with software development. There was something really interesting about, you know, putting ones and zeros into a computer. That's not what I did it in, but you know, putting code into a computer and have it making it do something you wanted it to do. And you know, from a very early age I've always been a builder and loved building stuff and then, and then trying to sell it to other people, right?

Yeah, yeah, you have to do something with it. It filling up the garage with, with trinkets is not.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's a hobby.

Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, you got to get it to market. So when did you, when did that light bulb come up?

Really early on I, my very first business was I bought a large format printer and started creating T shirt designs and screen printing materials for a T shirt company that was printing T shirts for Mexican radio stations out in la. So very early on I was putting my computer and graphics knowledge to work and just doing little odd jobs here and there for people that couldn't do it.

And you had to have been a problem child. I mean, I've got visions of all kind of madness that you must have gotten into. What was the first thing you did to make money?

The first thing I worked at a car wash. The first thing I ever did to make money is I worked at the local car wash, worked in the restaurant industry for quite a while trying to find my way. And computers were just a hobby. And then my, my first business was taking my computer knowledge and creating silkscreen stuff for Mexican radio stations. And then from there I started applying my high school taught computer programming into building software for smaller companies and then kind of grew from there.

What did you learn from those initial work experiences that kind of informed what you wound up looking for next and evaluating people and positions?

I think what I learned is I suck as an employee. I'm a terrible employee. And so we. What I figured out is that in order for me to earn a living, I had to have myself as my boss, otherwise I wasn't going to be able to hold a job.

You suck. You learned that you suck as an employee and I'm sure the people you work for were the ones that made that very clear to you.

Yeah, I was not the best employee. I always wanted to figure out why things were done a certain way, and I just couldn't do it because I was told to do it that way. I wanted to figure out why. I wanted to look under the hood. I wanted to improve the processes. And, you know, if you're, if you're managing a restaurant, you have a server that wants to figure out why you're doing something, you just, you don't want them to dig that deep into it. You just want them to do it the way it's supposed to be done or that it was designed in the, in the, in the employee manual. So, yeah, I learned very, very early on I need to break other things to figure out how they work so I can, I don't know, get out of bed in the morning.

Yeah. The thing is that, that appears to be what Mark Cuban did from an early age. He refers to the only job he could get is working at a computer store as like a glad hander. You know, people walk in and he. He'd find out what they're, what they were looking for, and he would take them over to different parts of the store. But in the meantime, he'd ask questions on both ends for the people who were servicing them. And he found out, he just kind of found out everything that was possible to know about the computer business from the retail side, and he parlayed that into his next position. Everywhere he went, he was asking questions like what you're talking about here. There's a lot to be found that can be found out just simply by learning and having an instinct that you develop about asking the right questions, because everything can be improved.

Yeah, I think, you know, I know a lot. Quite a few entrepreneurs, and the defining trait of the successful ones that I have is this overwhelming sense of discontentment. So not being happy with the way the world is, or not accepting the way things are, even to the extent of going into a restaurant and picking apart how they do things, or not being able to enjoy a meal because they could have constructed the menu differently, or that the wait staff isn't moving in an efficient way. Those things that might drive other people insane thinking about all the time. It's just kind of a natural state of being for us. So. So that wanting to improve or knowing things can be better. I wouldn't recommend it for everybody, but it is a common thing that I see in other entrepreneurs.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world. I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, Go.