[Greatest Hits] It Only Takes One Person to Make a Lone Nut into a Leader with Anthony Franco

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 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. You know, they've gone through a lot of 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 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 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 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 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?

So let me, 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 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 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 learning how to make something that hasn't been made before and doing it in a scalable way.

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 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 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. But learning how to do it was. 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 cobble some machinery together and put some automation and code that in order for it to work the way we wanted it to.

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 we. 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 give. What's the phrase? It takes only one person to make a lone nut. A leader takes only one trait. I love that phrase because that is absolutely true. If you're doing it by yourself, you're just a crazy loon.

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

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. Yeah, that's what fascinated me. And so I learned how to. To design and manifest things in the physical world. And then it kind of grew from there.

How much does a 3D printer cost? The one that you would be interested.

In or the one. So 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 huge, I guess.

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

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?

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

Yeah, yeah. You have to do something with it. Filling up the garage with trinkets is not.

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

Yeah, yeah, right? Yeah, you gotta get it to market. So when did you. When did that light bulb come on?

Really early on. I've. 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.

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 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 and 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 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 learn 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, yeah, I was not the best. 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 if you're managing a restaurant and you have a server that wants to figure out why you're doing something, 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 employee manual. So yeah, I learned 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 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 would walk in and he, he'd find out 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 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 your 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.

I know 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 like 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 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.

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