Episode #619 - You Are Only As Good As Your Team with Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain

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. It's good to know to have things in your mind that will allow you to stay on track. And I'm sure that's what you're doing inside, you know, laying out the structure in your book. Because you know what, first of all, consistency wins. You know, general consistency wins every time. But you've got to stay on track. You've got to understand why you're doing this stuff. It's got to make sense to you. But one of the things that I always come back to is you beat 50%. Most people are lazy. So you're going to beat 50% of the people by working hard, and then you'll beat another 40% by having some kind of rhyme or reason to how you go about what you're doing. And you can figure that out by just watching the top people and picking cues from the people at the top and start incorporating them gradually into your life. And so then it's a pretty good game plan. Takes a while, but you know where you could feel like you're going to be in the top 10%. And then like we always say, it's a dog in the top. At the top, it's a dog fight. But it's a fun dog fight, you know, because you're accomplishing a lot of great things, helping a lot of great people, making a lot of great breakthroughs. But even 1% extra compounded every day, just pushing for one little extra thing is a phenomenal difference. And I imagine there's people that look at you and say, how did he do that? But what they didn't realize is you're putting that extra 1 or 2 or 3 or 4% and constantly looking for ways to cram in a little bit more activity, insight, knowledge. And so over time, you just kind of elevate yourself. And would you agree with that?

Yeah, I think to that point, Larry, one thing I would say is in three weeks, so, for example, we do this little, I, you know, I speak at a lot of events. I, you know, attend masterminds. I throw masterminds too. But we get this group together once a year and it's eight to 10 entrepreneurs and we go to some place cool and we created this group called the Tulum. And because one of the trips was to Tulum, and everyone I look and look at in the Group. You know, some of them have been in business since they were 13, 15 years old or whatever. And. And they're in their 30s now. And everyone has kind of just continued to compound whatever they focus on. Just continues to build, build, build, where it's almost unreasonable to look at everyone in the group and say, everyone here will at least be, you know, what do we call it? Like, we call it a centimillionaire. Like, at least a centimillionaire, if not a billionaire. And so if you continue to elevate the group, the level of people that you're hanging out with, it, it naturally lifts you up. So the Jim Rohn quote is always that you hang out with the five. You're the average of the five people that you hang. And so I would encourage you. Like, it's not like I'm the smartest person in the group or anything like that, but what I've been pretty good at over the years is making sure that whoever I hang out with, they're at least a couple steps ahead of me. And I've learned that actually from playing games, because I learned early in days, if I wanted to do the best stuff, I have to be hanging out with the best people. And that carries over into real life.

It carries over. And tell me about the tree House.

Yeah, so Treehouse.

Treehouse Island. Treehouse Island. Tell me about that.

That was 12 years ago. So that was the group. That was the company where the CEO threatened to fire me a month into the job. And I actually left that job eight months later to help save Single Grain, which is a failing marketing agency. We can save that for later. But the funny story on Treehouse, the story all wraps around. So I actually offered to buy the TreeHouse website in 2021, I believe, because the business was failing and everyone had left. And I talked to a lot of people that were still there. And my friend and I, one of my friends in the group, we had made an offer to the CEO, the guy that I used to work for. So it was kind of like a ironic twist of fate. And then, you know, he had another offer. I was like, you should take the other offer. Um, but that's what ended up happening with Treehouse. But at the high point of that startup, it was an online education startup the company went from when I was working there, we're doing like 2 million a year. And then I think it went up to as high as 20, 25 million. So not bad. So, yeah.

And how when you go through those stages, having that kind of success, Everybody wonders, what level of success and credibility do you have to create on your own to where you attract the attention of companies that you've worked with, such as Amazon and Uber and Salesforce, which the lies in the world, how does that work to where you're able to have the credibility to get their attention?

Yeah. So I think one of the most underrated marketing channels still today is SEO or search Engine optimization. People like to say, oh my God, it's dying. It's all about ChatGPT, it's all about this, it's all about that. And I always respond to people saying, as long as human beings are around, we will search for things and there will always be SEO. My point of saying all this, how we got an Amazon, how we got a Salesforce or Airbnb, was all through SEO. And so when you search for keywords that are related to my type of business, we will usually pop up pretty high. And so that's how we got them. And at the very beginning, when I was trying to save the business, we were actually referring a lot of those leads out. And then it got to a certain point where it's like, okay, we should probably build a team around this. And so we slowly rebuilt. And that's. The SEO has continued to compound over the years. So SEO actually teaches you to be patient and it forces you to learn the laws of compounding.

Yeah, well, you obviously learned a lot of lessons there at Treehouse when you went over to Single Grain. Talk about that transition and what you did to reorganize this $2 company that you bought.

Yeah, I'll talk about the deal structure first. And I'm air quoting right now because as a 26, 27 year old, I had no idea what I was. I didn't even know what M and A was. And so I didn't realize what I was doing was I was paying $2 out of pocket to buy the company and I was seller financing the rest, meaning that I would use the profits of the company to pay out one of the other shareholders. And I put in a contingency saying that if the company failed, I would owe nothing. And like, I, I made up all this gobbly gook and I just gave it to like a lawyer. And then he put it together and we got the deal done. And fast forward, I already told you the point about the outside accounting firm calling me and saying, hey, it's time to shut it down. I had actually accepted a job offer to go work at a company in Dallas. And at that very moment, the Moment where I said, I accept, my stomach twisted. It's because once I got a taste of the entrepreneurial freedom or just the feeling of being an entrepreneur, I couldn't go back. So I was like, you know what? I can't do it. And so then I decided to focus on the business. And like I mentioned earlier, we continue to get the leads that we're getting. The only difference now is, was that we wanted to fulfill these leads within our company. We didn't want to refer them out anymore. And so we had started to recruit people. I will say the most important thing that allowed the business to turn around wasn't anything amazing that I did. It was the people around it. Obviously people were like, oh my God, it's all about people. Yes, it's about people. But as the entrepreneur, as the main shareholder, the only shareholder in the business at this point, my whole, like, as long as I focused on, everything just flowed. And I think early entrepreneurs, if you're an early entrepreneur listening to this, at least for me in the very beginning, I was like, you know what? I can do this. I can do the software thing. I should do the senior living business. I should do this, this, this. And I had spread my resources five or six different ways. It wasn't until I focused the resources in that we were locking in, and that's when things started to really grow a lot faster. So it's the trade off that you want. You can either grow a lot faster this way or, or you try to spread this way and it grows a lot slower.

Yeah. And talk about, talk about when you talk about going through the focus and what that allows you to do and what you do different when you are focused, how you go about your day, how you go about your planning, how you look, look at things.

Yeah. So I will tell you the bad, what it looked like when it was bad. It was. So to rewind a second, we were, we were losing about $100,000 a month trying to grow our, our software company. And that was even though it was doing $600,000 a year, we're still, you know, netting negative 600 right on, on the year. And at the same time, we also had spent, you know, seven or 800 grand on this education program. Had I put that 1.2 million plus the people resources on the software side, plus the 700k and the additional people, human capital, I would say, on that side, into just focusing on the agency, all our mindshare would have been locked in one direction and we would have grown a lot faster. Instead of trying to start multiple things at once. Because as you know, starting a company takes a lot. Like you can, you can do it, but it's just, you can, you can have anything, but just not everything. That's what I learned.

Yeah. And I read, you know, one of the books I read along the way was they made this point very loudly that I think it was a book something like Value of an executive is the ability to say no or something like that. It was around that theme. And the point was when you're in charge, everybody's bringing you all the great ideas. Hey, we could do this, we could do that. Hey, how about if we did this? And it's incredibly exciting, but you've got devalue away whether or not you have the people, resources and the money and the time to put into this thing. And I use the example like if Coca Cola had not been ready with preparing management, excess management in place when the opportunity to go into China came and it would have destroyed Coca Cola because they would have had to pull out all of their cannibalize their organizations worldwide with management to go into China. But they were prepping for, took years and years passed when they thought they'd be ready. So they were overloaded with management talent to send. And so when you're in that position, it sounds like you learned that was part of the kind of the lesson you learned that we could do all these things, it'd be exciting to do it, but there's a price to be paid. And once you learn that lesson, that makes you a much stronger and effective leader really going forward the rest of your life, don't you think?

Totally. And what's interesting is of all the books that I read or whatever, it doesn't matter until you truly put your hand on the stove and you get burnt. And that's when you're like, okay, I know how it feels now and I'm not going to go in that direction anymore.

Now when you go what was. Let's just take of the Amazon Uber and Salesforce, which was the first one of those you worked with.

Yeah. So bear in mind the, I would say on my end on during my watch, it was Amazon Salesforce and Airbnb. That was actually before I purchased the company. So Amazon came through and then. So to answer your question directly, it's Amazon.

Okay. And how was that working with a company like that? It seemed like it would be a hydra headed monster that would be very difficult to make an impact or to get leverage and get authority to make an impact. So how did you find your way into a position to where you could make suggestions and actually see them implemented?

So with Amazon. Working with Amazon was a unique challenge because at the time we had started to work with one of the software companies that they acquired. And so what I decided to do this is keep in mind, this is when we didn't have many employees. We were rebuilding the company. I would fly up to San Francisco, which is where one of their offices were, and I would meet our point of contact basically once a month or so. I tried to add that touch point. And so in the very beginning of a business, you have to do more and more hand to hand combat, especially if you're the one of the founders of the business. You're trying to learn as much as you can. You're trying to do what we call customer development. You're trying to learn what they like, what they don't like, what they like to see more of. And we did a really good job for them. We were running their ads and later they eventually allow this to expand into running ads. So Google Ads, Facebook ads, or whatever for Amazon ads. So we're running ads for Amazon ads. And then now Amazon ads is like one of the top three or four advertising kind of channels. And so my point of saying all this is that you do the hand to hand combat stuff, you build trust and you start to expand into other areas. But I'll tell you where we went wrong too. Where we went wrong was that Amazon was constantly asking us to do more and more stuff. But because I was not as focused, I had my hand in other cookie jars. Had I stayed focused on the agency, I would have been like, oh, wow, all the clients are asking for this additional stuff. We should be helping with that. Which means we should add these additional service lines which will help with retention. And then it got to the point where Amazon's like, look, we love working with you guys, but we have to go work with another company because you don't have X, Y and Z. And that stung.

Yeah. Well, as you have come up along the way, when did that happen? When was that?

I don't know. Eight years ago.

Eight years ago. And so in the eight years after that, what did you. Okay, Amazon's gone. Now what do we do?

I mean, so I wish I could give you a sexy lesson here, but our leads continue to flow, so it wasn't a big deal for us. Yeah.

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