[Greatest Hits] Episode #246: The Overwhelming Sense of Discontentment with Founder of M.C. Squar...

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 ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Everyone. We are talking with Anthony Franco and we're finding out what motivated him to found MC Squares. Actually, that was his fifth startup and to go on wound up on Shark Tank and they're selling, their sales are in the millions and I get the idea he's got an unlimited number of ideas he wants to unleash on the public. So, Anthony, thanks again for being with us. And talk about how that overwhelming sense of discontent got you started, say, and dominoing through your first startups.

I don't know if I recognized it back then, my early startups were just trying to earn a living. So doing whatever, somebody would be willing to write me a check for just about as long as it was ethical. So, yeah, back it was designing websites and building software and doing graphic design for anybody that was willing to write me a check. As my career grew, as my career as an entrepreneur grew, I started to recognize that, look, on paper, entrepreneurs don't have a shot in hell. On paper, there's no reason why a startup should win over a company with more resources and more people and, and an established brand. There's just no reason for small companies to win. With the one exception that you have somebody, hopefully you have somebody leading the charge that's willing to do things that employees aren't for. Those large companies, they're willing to see the world differently. They're willing to have no shame, they're willing to ask questions that make themselves look stupid in order to build a business around it. So that trait started to tickle itself out more and more as I became more comfortable in my own skin.

Talk about that process because you started, you had to take, you know, early on, I'm sure you had ideas, but then you had to act on them. And there's always a risk, you know, do I want to get into this? Do I really want to? Do I really believe in it? And you've got to get past that before you dive in.

No. So I suffer from delusional optimism. So I don't think things are as hard as they actually are. So I'm able to jump into something with this belief that it's going to take me 10 minutes and three years later realize, wow, that's really hard. But it's too late now. I'm already in it.

So thank you, thank you. I Thought I was the only idiot like that, you know, it's because, like, if, you know, I have heard that if entrepreneurs knew where they were getting into when they started their business, they would never start. And what I've noticed in our business, which is, you know, recruiting, training, putting people into financial services, getting their own offices, kind of like the real estate model of where you start part time and work up full time and then you get your, you know, you become a broker and you have your own office, that kind of model. And along the way you see people fall apart and they got. They fall. The guys who are I would think of as role models. And, you know, they live in their budget, you know, they watch their expenses, they're moderate in their expenses that you always know where they are. I mean, I always just threw everything up against the wall and hope, you know, and ran like crazy to make it worse. The first, the big expansion I went into, we moved up to North Carolina to start a pioneer, to pioneer the company up there. And I had to pay all the expenses out of my pocket. And I was on a low contract. And I literally did not realize what I'd done for four months. And I woke up in the middle of the night, I like, you know, sprang up out of bed and like, with my eyes bulging out, like, what have I done? You know, my wife, my kids, I have no money. What have I done? And then it was like, well, you did it, so go back to bed and go to work when you get up, because there's no backing out now. And I think there's a lot of that with entrepreneurs. And that's what you're saying, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. It's the story of, you know, I think it's a Genghis Khan story where the first thing he did when they landed was burn the ships. And it's like, well, you're going to go that way or you're not, right? Definitely part of it. Again, I would not recommend that course for everybody. I do envy the person that can get up and put eight hours in their workday and come back home and enjoy their life like that. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not in my DNA.

Yeah. And also, no offense, I always notice the guys who are real, really aware of the finances and the budget and everything. Somehow they never took chances, you know, they never. And they stayed kind of average, you know, that being super organized put a limit on what they were capable of. Because you look at these guys, you say, this guy is five Times better than I am at doing this thing. Why won't he go?

Yeah, well, I think both personalities are absolutely required in order to build a company. So there's this book called the Entrepreneurial Operating System or there's this methodology called the Operational Operating System. It's a book called Traction. Very good book. That talks about the dual personalities in a business and you have the visionary, which is the person that you're talking about, that is willing to take chances and can see how things are going to be five years from now and wants to go run and chase it. And then there's the integrator that is absolutely required to make sure that person doesn't go off the rails and create something that. Not sustainable or that doesn't have the infrastructure in place to scale.

Yeah. And the thing is the. Because I'm exactly the same way, you know, I like, you know, write a book, no problem. I talk about this stuff all the time. That'll be easy. And then, you know, years later you're still grinding it out, you know. And I think that's one reason why entrepreneurs and a lot of super successful people are a lot more humble than you would expect because they've done that to themselves so many times. Underestimated how much time it was going to take, this, that and the other. And it's like, you know, stupid me, I did it to myself again, but now I got to finish it.

Well, yeah, I don't know if my personality humble because it takes quite an ego to believe that you can do something that's never been done before. It's the knowledge that plugging through a problem requires quite a bit of failure before you get out to the other end. That kind of keeps you like, I guess when failure becomes, I use that term failure really loosely. But when you're trying to solve a problem, there's a lot more times that you don't succeed than you do. You only see the efforts of when you make it and you don't see all the background behind it. So I think when you talk to entrepreneurs and you're perceiving humility as. Yeah, solving problems is hard, it sucks and it takes the right amount of grit and the belief that you're going to get through it in order for it to happen correctly.

Now talk to us about manufacturing and is it as satisfying to you as you thought it would be to move into making physical products?

You know, I was put on this planet to build stuff. So initially it started with software, but now being able to conceive of something and hold it in real life and hand it to my daughter or my wife or my mom or customers in general is incredibly satisfying. And then trying to manipulate the world into scaling physical products is. It's the ultimate in problem solving. It's just so much fun.

Now what do you mean by that? Manipulating the world into solving problems? Is that what you said?

Manipulating? Yeah. So there's the technical problems that you have when writing software where you're trying to get a computer to manifest pixels in a certain way, or define an algorithm that comes up with something novel. But when you bring it into the physical world, you have that, but you also have material selection and supply chain and manufacturing processes and fulfillment and then channels. All of those things have to kind of come together in really unique ways to make a business that's sustainable. And the diversity of problems, how they all kind of dovetail together. So the way we figure out how to manufacture stuff dovetails right into what is our cost of goods and can we sell something for enough money? Can we convince people to buy it? Are we solving a big enough pain point all of those things kind of in a very interesting and not clean way to make a business out of physical products. It's just a fascinating thing that we're solving all kinds of different problems all the time.

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