Episode #768 - The Highs And Lows Of Explosive Business Growth with Christian Facey

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. Yeah, it's great to have people on the ground that you can consult.

Oh, yeah.

And you can leapfrog off of their experience. You don't have. Trial and error is the greatest teacher. Unfortunately, the tuition is so high.

Yep, exactly.

And so as you look back, I've got a question about growth and the, you know, living, living through an explosive growth thing. I did that in the early 80s and what I remember, we had like rocket ship growth with offices and people and management and all of this. Well, what I remember was when you're the head person, the good stuff happens, but what comes to you are the problems, you know, and if you've got. If you've got 10 things happening in a month, maybe one's bad, you know, 10% of it is not that great. You got to figure something out. But once you've got 10 things happening every hour, you've got something going wrong every hour you have to deal with. Or like just say if you have 10 management units, one of them could be just, you know, some are doing average, some of them are doing great. But then there'll be one that's just frustrating the, that, you know, you're like crazy. And so if you've got a thousand of these, all of a sudden now you got a hundred that are just driving you nuts. And what I found was by the end of every month, I was ready to kill everybody because I was like, we're not going to have an award show. We're not going to ever end up. What we would do is at end of. The greatest thing I ever came up with was an end of the month recognition thing where I let the top people, the people who had the best numbers for the month speak, and we basically reset awards, reset challenge, and then we go. But the best thing that happened from it was it made me sit down the night before, look at the numbers and reset my brain because at the end of every month, I was ready to kill everybody and just to blow the whole thing up. And we were going. And this was when we were going on rocket ship growth. It could not have been any better. But when you live in the little capsule at the top, the toxic stuff is what winds up filling up your cabin. And it's hard to keep your perspective. I don't know if you've had that issue. But what has it been like for you going through this rocket ship type growth awards with Forbes, 9,000% growth, more users than Instagram on a daily basis. What has that been like for you?

It has been educational. And what I mean by that is, you know, all the good stuff is always great. Right? I mean, it's great getting awards and recognition and you know, having really good people that want to work here reaching out to you, saying, you know, I've heard X, Y and Z. And it's also great to see the changes that we're making in the gaming space, like fundamental changes in the $184 billion industry. Right. However, there's always the flip side, which is with every milestone you reach, the stakes become more real and even greater. Right. So a problem that I remember I had a problem that I was stressing about like when we, when the world shut down and we're like, oh, where are we going to make the first $20,000 in revenue? And now it's like, now I'm thinking like, okay, how are we going to, you know, make sure we're going to have $20 million of inventory ready for a specific kind of client? Like it just constantly gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's what I've learned is to, I've learned a great deal about stress management. Right. And especially like, lot of investors like forget they're like, oh yeah, I'm sure you're going to be able to grow and get triple digits. You should be doing this. And a lot of investors forget that. You know, I know a founder always has to grow a company no matter the conditions. But the conditions in the last four years have been worse than the last, like 50 wars, pandemics, and it's just one thing after the other. So it's not really the issues at the company that have, have stressed me out. It is the constant, is the constant adaption to conditions that I know I'm not in control of. And I was not expecting, I was not expecting that. I was expecting it to be like, you know, between 2010 and 2019, where everything was just fine and consistently growing. And now it's like, it's, it's, it's insane. So the growth is good, but growth, rocket ship growth in these turbulent times, it makes the potential problems much, much bigger because you're just not sure what's around the corner.

Right. And how would you say, you know, the, in my experience, the way you, you know, because you, you know, you've learned Coding, you've learned all of these things. You know, you've learned these industries, you've learned opening offices and getting, you know, venture capital. And, you know, you just learn so much sequel, for one thing. And the people will look at the, you know, hear you talk about that, and they'll say, well, he just, he's just smart, you know, and, you know, or like marketing and, you know, thinking, he's just a smart guy. But. And I'm sure that's true. However, these things, it's important to let people know you got to sweat this every step of unraveling these things. You don't learn coding in an afternoon, right? It's like one thing on top of another, on top of another. It's just, you got to be on it every day, every hour, asking questions, moving forward, figuring things out yourself and asking people to get answers or, you know, learning it. It doesn't happen all at once, does it?

No, it doesn't. And I guess to summarize my mindset in one or two sentences, and a lot of people thought I was crazy for thinking this way, but I guess it kind of is working for me is I was willing to give up my 20s, so I was like, okay, I'm going to give up my 20s and I'm just going to concentrate on my goals and invest all my money and my time, as much of it as possible, in achieving my goal, which was to start a company before I was 30. And I'm not talking about like a little company. I'm talking about like a multi. I want to build a multi million dollar company before I was 30. And people don't realize in general like, like, like how precious time is. And the way I was thinking about it is every milestone I was getting to get into Google, learn about tech, learn about coding, go to Facebook, become a science partner at Facebook, learn about all the sciencey measurement stuff they do out there. I was always thinking like, if I just work really, really hard and sacrifice the time, if I completely fail, trying to go after such a massive goal, then in failure, I'll end up somewhere great anyway. And that's what I was thinking. I will sacrifice 10 years, basically to figure out where I'd end up by 30.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And let me ask you about, what is it like living over there in the Middle East? Abu, I guess Abu Dhabi, right? Or how has it been for you personally?

There are many misconceptions about the Middle East. And the way that I will describe this is like Abu Dhabi, Dubai area. It's like living in Vegas, only there is less drinking. In terms of Abu Dhabi, Dubai is cosmopolitan, it is very liberal. Everything is clean, it is sunny, the food is great, the value for money is great. And you know when you Google things, you won't hear these things, right? I have no idea why, but there is, I think there's a massive, massive misunderstanding of moving out to the Middle east and then even for business, right, with 2454 and AD Gaming, like there is more help than you could possibly want or can get in any other country from what I've experienced. And we've been getting a lot of help in the US and the UK as well. So it's absolutely amazing out here, to be honest.

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You, you could do absolutely other than work. So you know, everything that you could do anywhere else, plus more whether it's you know, bowling or paintballing, you can go snowboarding, quad biking, paragliding, like you can do like anything. So I, what I, what I really like to do though because I, I spend like maybe four months a year here, six to seven in New York and the rest and conferences in UK and the uk. So what I like to do here is like when I'm meeting clients or investors over the weekend, like your Saturday can become like a beach holiday. We just go and work on the beach a little bit because you know, as us founders we have to work six, seven days a week. So I tend to like to do things like that and get like a mini beach holiday in when I'm out here. But yeah, you can do any hobby you could think of out here. Which is, which is, which has been great.

Well, where are you, you know, looking towards your future? Do you feel what is your range of Choices about where you can put your sights and your goals. Do you feel like the pressure's on, I've just got to go for the moon, or can you temper your goals a little bit right now? How do you look at goal setting? I'll tell you mine. My thing I always wanted to go for. I always felt like it was easier to go for number one than whatever that meant. Easier to get my team rallied for going for something phenomenally great than something nebulous like, we want to do 50. You know, corporations are famous for coming up these days. We want you to do 15% more. You know, like, how do you do 50% more, you employee, you know, they, they're all employees and they understand 15% more salary or whatever. And CEOs don't want to do too much in a quarter because, you know, they want to hit their projections because next month they got to make another projection and that, you know, if they hit their projection or a little exceeded, price goes up, stock price goes up. If they miss a projection, even though it was a wild projection, if they miss it, well, they're losers. And so the CEOs always want the temper go up a little piece at the time. But when you're an entrepreneur, it's just like all or nothing, you know, bet the farm, you know, like, because you don't know, you know, it's. You just don't know what it's going to take until you, you make it happen. So how do you look at going forward in the future?

Yeah, so that's actually was very difficult in the, in the first two years of the business because, again, there was just so much turbulence in terms of wars and the pandemic and stuff. But the way that we think about it now is we have the more historical data that you have, the more that you can more accurately predict what a reasonable revenue per head is. And based on those heads in the business, as well as, like, enterprise deals that might guarantee revenue, you can then get an idea of what a reasonable projection is now. So our projections before sometimes were like, like wild, right?

Yeah.

Public company. Right. And what we, what we've had to try and do is really, really figure out what the revenue per head is. But we needed a couple of years of data. So, you know, we've massively. In our first year, like we did, we did. Oh, what was it? We did like 5k in, in 2020, like, our revenue was wiped out and then we did seven figures the next year. Right. So we didn't know we were going to do that it just rocket ship. So while we overshoot on some years and then other years, we still get triple digit growth. But when we, we under underachieve, it's been a real like it was real really trying time in the first two years, but by now we've got a lot of historical data as to the seasonal trends, the kind of games that people like to buy and all that kind of stuff. We've now got a pretty accurate revenue per head that is actually representative of like a top performer in our space. And then we use that to project what we could do going forward. So yeah, we're good now, but it took a while for us to get here.

Well, the great thing that I point out to you is you're kind of creating a category in a way. And so the thing is there's no historical data on it. But the law of averages can only be established when you have high numbers. Like if, you know, you run a casino and you have a year of traffic in the front door, you can figure out what your revenues are and then you can work it back to average number of person through the door of the casino, average amount of money they gambled, or it's the same thing with grocery stores. The number of people will go through the door, they're going to buy $40 worth of, you know, of stuff. So you could do that in those business because they've been established. And so one of the advantages of you having these large numbers now is you can start to define what are reasonable averages and expectations, you know, ranges of expectations barring pandemic or some kind of war or things like that. Have you felt disadvantaged in any way because of any pushback or any barriers to entry or because of being minority status or something like that where they, they try and keep you out? Or has that been because you're in the wild west of gaming and the Internet and all new? Everything is just like every, every person for themselves. You know, it's like nobody cares about anything except performance. Have you had to overcome any kind of prejudices and things like that?

No, actually. And this is going to be quite surprising to a lot of people. And again, it could be a mindset thing or it could be a lived experience. Right. I mean again, I had a privileged upbringing. Family successful, uncle successful. That's successful. Family friends are. And I've always seen that lots of different people that look like me and didn't look like me were successful. And my dad always said, and my granddad always said like, you know, don't be A fly in a jar. Like, don't be that person that accepts that there's a ceiling. And the way that I always operate is as if it didn't exist. And every successful person that looks like me, I thought exactly the same way. And then if you really logically look at this right, looking like me, you have more help than you could ever possibly want, whether it's grants or funding or whatever it is compared to like, you know, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, hell, even 10, 15 years ago. Right. So I've never really thought about it in terms of what I look like as a, as a disadvantage. I actually think of it as a massive advantage. I mean, I'm, I'm more memorable than, you know, most people in the rooms I walk into because usually in the advertising space, I'm the only person that looks like me.

Right. Right.

It's not even been so much, so much that that's never really come into it at all. It's always been the fact that it varies year and year. But the first year. Right. Is like, oh, this is a simple idea. Why has no one thought of it before? It must suck. Like, no, it's like the reason that the idea didn't exist before is that the audio analysis had never. The technology to analyze in game audio on a phone hadn't been invented. So it is more assumptions around the novelty of the technology that has really been the barriers rather than anything else, to be honest.

I see. Well, I appreciate your time. You've been a lot of fun to talk with and you got me interested in going to Abu Dhabi now.

Hey, better check it out, man. But now I appreciate it. Thank you.

And what I'd like to do is I always like to give my guests a chance to say a final word to the people that have hung with us all the way to the end. And, you know, if you have a final word you'd like to pass on from your experience here is in running your own and starting your own business and having this level of success, this would be the time.

Okay. So I guess the one thing I would say is, and I remember, I remember having this mindset switch when I was a teenager up until when I, you know, failed all my levels and went through that change. It's the whole aspect of being afraid of failure. I, I, I do get it because I used to think like that when I was, when I was younger. And what I'll say is for every single person I've ever met that has aimed like, exceptionally high, crazy dreams, crazy goals, if you put everything into achieving that goal and you fail, you are going to end up many mountains many, many miles better than where you are right now. So that's the last thing I'll say. And that's definitely been a driving factor for me. I mean, I'm trying to build a billion dollar company. If I don't probably end up with a couple hundred million, like that's the way you got to think about these big targets and you'll sell it.

Fantastic. Thanks so much, Christian and I wish you nothing but the best. And I'm going to be excited to see how your company continues to grow and probably be ringing the bell on the balcony there at Wall street sometime in the future. Thanks so much.

Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you.

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