Episode # 536 - Your Worst Case Scenario is a Lot Better Than You Think It Is with Colin McIntosh

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm talking with Colin McIntosh and sheets and Giggles is his company. It's one of the fastest growing in the country and he's getting the education of a lifetime by the time he's 32 years old. So. Congratulations, Colin. And one thing we touched on last time. I got two things I want to ask you. Number one is what would you say to people that are pretty much paralyzed by fear of, of starting out or, like, if their company goes under or whatever? It's like it's. You. You have options. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

You know, life will not disappear up in a cloud, you know, if that paycheck doesn't come in and, and help them see the big picture.

Okay, What I, what I always tell people is if Sheets and Giggles didn't work out, right, I would have moved. I would have known in six months. Right. I did a crowdfunding campaign six months after I founded it. So I, so I set myself up to learn in six months whether or not this is going to actually be real. If it wasn't real and it was going to fail, then I would move back to Seattle, which is where I was living before Denver, and I would have gone back to work. I would have applied for a job at Amazon or Microsoft. And I feel with my education and my background and everything that I had done up to that point in the first five years of my career, my worst case scenario was that I would go work for one of those two companies or another, you know, somebody else in Seattle, like a Zillow or an Expedia. Like, there are a million. Starbucks, Nordstrom. There were so many options for me back in Seattle. Right. And there are a lot of options in Denver, too. And I think that when you put it like that to somebody of, like. And it's actually a lesson that I learned from a friend. If you write your worst case scenario down on paper in your head, like, what would you do in your worst case scenario? You call, call your friends or your family or, you know, you'd go get support from somewhere else. Something like that. Some people have a support system, some people don't. But if you're lucky enough to have a support system and you're lucky enough to have an education and you're lucky enough to have some valuable experience, then the Worst thing that can happen is you just go somewhere and have a normal career. And if that's your worst case. If my worst case scenario is that I go work at a well respected employer that pays me a good salary with good benefits, that work on interesting things like fuck me, why am I not founding a company and actually trying to do something of my own? And so that's what I tell people is like, dude, your worst case scenario is way better than you think it is. Like way, way better than you think it is. And, and so that's, that's what I try to impart.

Yeah. And how did you. Thanks for that and, and talk about, you said, you know, we're basically. I forget how you phrased it. We're in the, the first phase of, you know, where we're getting started. You know, we're in a startup and staying centered in my first business is the first.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

And what does that mean to you, staying centered in your first business? And are you, are you looking at moving through this, the growth of this business in particular phases or you're just taking it as a come or do you have a picture in your mind where you're going to feel like this thing has stabilized itself and start feeling like longer term planning and stuff like that?

I think yeah, it is phases, right? There's the startup phase, a lot of frenetic energy, a lot of movement, a lot of chaos. It's usually one person plus a bunch of agencies and contractors and part timers circling around you. And then you, you know, second phase is full time employees. You've got few people working for you full time. You're, you got benefits, you're, you know, you start to build a culture or structure a day to day. You start to, you know, solidify some systems, have some more accountability. And then I think like the third stage is kind of the one that we've, we've moved into recently, which is that scaling stage. And that's, you know, I think in today's world that's a very difficult stage to get past because frankly the inventory requirements are so dangerously high. And you're predicting things, at least for a physical product. You're predicting things so far in advance now because of a post Covid world where logistics and shipping and production can take two or three times as long as it used to. And um, you know, you've got to outlay some pretty serious capital in order to hit these growth goals. And how do you do that without going out and raising massive amounts of capital from venture Capitalists, how do you do that? So for me to answer your first question of how do I stay centered on this and how do I, how do I. What does that mean to me? What it means is reminding myself that this is my first business. I'm still learning. I'm always still learning. I'm not that, you know, I'm, I'm still the same Colin. I'm still, you know, I'm not ascended to some, you know, CEO guru type of person. Like, I'm a few years older than I was when I founded this company. And so when I talk to investors or I talk to people about the business, I always say, like, sheets and giggles is going to grow at this rate. Here's, here's what I think is going to happen. I try to hit my forecast, make them reasonable, conservative forecasts that I think are reality based. Yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of founders who are especially, who are raising money, they don't have reality based forecasts. They will, they will say, okay, we're going to do a million dollars in year one, $8 million in year two, $24 million in year three, and $72 million in year four. And it's like, how, how do you, how do you think you're, you're like. So whenever I judge pitch competitions, which I do a lot because I've won a lot of pitch competitions, I get a lot of weird vibes from founders who don't seem to understand what realistic growth actually looks like. And they pitch this very pie in the sky graph all the time. So that's kind of for me, what it means to me is just being reasonable about the business. And every business is different sheets and giggles. Reasonable growth looks different than a software company is reasonable growth. And so, yeah, what's a pitch competition? So that checkup there, I won $95,000. I won from Denver Startup Week 2018, first place. And then I've won multiple entrepreneurship pitch competitions. I love pitching. It's something that I love to do. I won first place at Denver Startup Week 2018, which is the giant $95,000 check above my head. True story. I jumped into bed with that check. I took a picture of me naked, that check after I won it. It's not every day you win 95 grand. And I've won multiple entrepreneurship pitch contests. I've won 10,000 here, $20,000 there. And it's great. It's always so fun to get on stage and command an audience. I love being in front of an audience. I come alive and so now I teach people how to pitch and I also judge pitch competitions. So I'm judging this year's Denver Startup Week pitch competition. I judged last year's and the year before as well. I, I will, I'm going to pitch practice at techstars in a couple weeks and I'm one of the mentors who teaches the 10 companies every year how to pitch. When I was on stage in 2019 at my Techstars demo day, really brought the house down, man. It was so fun and had the whole place cracking up about a thousand people. And the techstars now globally actually shows my pitch for their, their dozens of programs across the world as like a how to pitch tutorial, which is really, really flattering and really cool. So I've got like Collins 13 rules of pitching and a bunch of other stuff that I've come up with. And yeah, so it's just one of my, one of my superpowers I guess I would say is being in front of a crowd.

How would people find Collins 13 rules of pitching?

They have to email it to me because I haven't, I haven't published it. So I, the one thing I'm really bad at, Larry, is like the side hustle project stuff. Like I could write these how to guides. I could have a tick tock about this stuff. Like what you know, but that, but I honestly like, I like, maybe it's just because of how my life has, has become but like, you know, I'm engaged. I love my fiance, I love my life, I love my family. Seeing my family like so I have, with sheets and giggles. I don't have a lot of outside time for projects. So I'm kind of like, you know, why would I start this and half ass this? So if anybody wants those rules, they can email me for them and I'm happy to walk them through them.

Well, the thing is that you've kind of answered your own question about, you wonder about going forward when you get all these ideas, how you, you know, how do people bat through them, what, what you do? It's, it's. I heard this a long time ago. The value of an executive is the number one value is the ability to say no because everybody's got an idea and they go to the, you know, the top of the company is like, we need to do this. We need to, you know, a lot of, a lot of times we need to buy things, but we need to do this. You know, we need to expand our product line. I'm sure you get this all the time. You know, we need this, that the other. And so what you have. Yeah, that the, the idea is one thing, but do you have the ability.

To execute in the, in the time and for God's sake, yeah, well, that's.

The ability you got to have all the time. The money. You, you know, it's like what I tell, I used to tell our people, I said, you know, when Coca Cola got the okay from China to go into China, if they didn't have already in advance, massive layers of management already trained, you know, and things in place, there's no way you can go into, you know, a couple billion people and penetrate that market, start a training program.

So it's shocking to me how these large organizations can be so, so well structured. And I know they're not always well run, but like the organizations that humans can build are really, really impressive and incredible. And I get daunted by that because I've got my little company and this is, you know, it's hard enough and I think about Jesus running, running a multi thousand person organization one day. Like, you know, that it's a lot.

To do, it's overwhelming. But what it is is big companies are lots of little companies and a few bigger units inside. You know, it's like all large organizations have lots of small. It's like a big church. A big church is a collection of a lot of small churches. You know, the old people, young people, the one, you know, the young married with kids and young singles and you know, and so it's always groups and. But keeping up with it again is.

Well, I will say I do have time for one thing that I do on the side, which is a lot of fun. I do brands workshops for companies. So I don't do like the pitching rules. I like to give that away for free for startups because most people that are pitching are startups and they don't have a lot of money. And I'm like, all right, I'm not going to charge you for this. Like, let me teach you how to pitch. The brand identity stuff is something, you know, you can see with, with sheets and giggles. Like I love branding and brand identity mapping and like helping people understand their core brand promises and what that means. And so that, that is something I do on the side here in Denver and Boulder for companies is I. And I'll do it virtually too for some folks. But like, God, it is so fun to walk somebody through a brand identity exercise.

Yeah, they become like your children.

Yeah, yeah. I'm proselytizing the, you know, the branding that we've done here at Sheets and Giggles. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Well, hey, thanks so much, Colin. This has been a whole lot of fun and looking forward to seeing you guys continue to compound and grow. Call me anytime if you feel like I could help you. I'm looking forward to checking in with you down the road and seeing what kind of new adventures you get, getting yourself into. Any last comment that you want to put on this thing as a wrap up, I'm gonna let you have the last word.

All I'll say is I really love this interview. I appreciate you having me on. If anybody listening out there, if you think I can be helpful with anything for your business, you can reach me. Colin C O L I n @ sheets as in bed sheets. Giggles as in giggles.com. that's our website. Sheets, giggles.com no and in the URL. And I'm also really easy to find on LinkedIn. Colin McIntosh, sheets and giggles. You'll find me and I'm happy to, you know, help anyone how I can. I love paying it forward and, and you know, give first is kind of the, the mantra here in Colorado. So hopefully this has been helpful to some people out there and I had a blast.

That's what you did today. You paid it forward and I appreciate you doing it. Thanks so much. Wish you the best.

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