How to Become Forbes Best Start-up in the Future with business leader David Karandish

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell and before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I am talking with David Carandish from St. Louis and former CEO, founder of Answers.com sold for $900 million. Started another company folks in 2017 just simply because he likes to help people and do great things. I love people like David that have a heart and a passion for doing something great that can impact the world and make things better for everybody else. And he came up with a practical solution. A help desk powered by AI automate support for your customers. They had in was that 2021 you had the 6.4 million revenue David.

So we're shooting for that this year.

That's your goal this year. And he's been named America's best startup. He's working with big financial institutions, big government agencies, colleges, big companies and lot of lessons from this. He had five startups that he participated in even before he got out of college. So he's got a wealth of information. So congratulations on all that David. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me here.

Talk about being named America's, this is kind of a big group, America's best startup by forbes and, and 2020. How does that happen?

Well, we went through a big interview process to be included on Forbes lists of top, top startups. Some of that comes from our, our employee reviews that we do, our team members, we really like to refer to them more as team members even than employees. We try to listen and provide a great environment. But if you said to me David, what, what's the defining characteristic of us beyond the software side of things? We try to pay competitively. There are other places where you'll make better short term compensation. We try to have a great working environment. We've got snacks and all the things you expect out of a startup but those are kind of nice to have. I think the thing that really stands out with us is that working for capacity you are going to learn so much more because your responsibility level and the speed and the pace in which we operate you as a person, whether you're on the engineering side, on the sales side, no matter what part of that org you're in, you are going to be growing new skills at a rate so much faster than anyone else. I look every, everyone we hire in the eye. And I say, look, my goal here for you is that you look back on your time at capacity 20, 30 years from now and you say, I did my best work at this company. And I did my best work because I grew personally by being thrown at some of the hardest challenges of your career. But working with a team, that's there to help you see it through. And so I think we're competitive in a lot of other areas. I think we're fun group, I think we have great camaraderie. But the thing that stands out is that the amount of career development you are going to get, it's like dog years here at capacity. Every one year is like seven years of career growth.

And that's the way it should be. If you're in the right kind of company, it should turn you on to work there. It should reward you with lots of great experiences, but also lots of great opportunities, develop new skills. And when you, if you were to, let's just say, let's, I'm going to put you on the spot. How would you, and you've earned the right to answer this question because you've climbed this mountain. How would you tell people to go about putting themselves when they're starting their company? They're working, they're making decisions about their company to give themselves a shot at in the future being named best startup by organization like Forbes or something similar. Maybe they're not a startup, but in a certain industry they're tough. What kind of advice could you give that would allow people to tailor their actions, their words, their goals, their focus to give themselves the best shot at having some kind of mind blowing thing like that happen.

If I was going to give two pieces of advice that are broadly applicable, I would say two things come to mind. The first thing is that I find the best entrepreneurs aren't necessarily entrepreneurs that have the wildest or craziest or most mind blowing ideas, but they're the entrepreneurs that are really good at variable elimination. When you start a company, you're going to have so many variables that are seemingly important to go figure out, but really don't ultimately affect the model on whether or not you're going to have a success or not. And so that the companies that I see that break through are the ones that can separate the chef from the wheat in terms of here are the five or six key variables that we have to go tweak and optimize for and grow and understand. And they let everything else become secondary or peripheral to whatever those key Metrics are my previous business, it was around, you know, time on site and traffic acquired and cost per click. In this current business, we're a software as a service business. So it has to do with our cost of customer acquisition and our subscription rates and our product penetration and our match rates around our bot. But figuring out what is that handful and if, and if you come back and you say, oh, I've got 30 or 40 different important variables, you probably haven't done enough elimination yet. So I like to say get down to around four to six. What are the four to six big assumptions, big variables that we have to get right in order for this thing to work. That would be my first piece of advice. And then the second piece of advice I'd say, which is related to that is what's the model? What's the model for getting those variables in? Because if your team thinks variable A is a big coefficient on it, it's really, really important and you think actually that's not that important. We need to focus on variables B, C and D. Getting that model down, turning your business into the equation of success, I think is so important because then you can go back and say, okay, well how did we do this week? Well, our sale, our, our sales are not where we wanted them to be. Well, did we get the calls in made that we thought we would? Okay, yeah, we did. Okay. Did we get our initial meeting set? Oh yeah, we did get the meeting set. Did the people show up to those meetings? Oh, we had a drop off there. Okay, how do we optimize that? Okay, for the people who did show up to the meeting, what did we do to qualify them or disqualify them? So it's figuring out how to build the model behind the business with those important shortlisted variables that I think ends up being a significant factor on whether or not you're likely to succeed or not.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to whiteellumwinning.com I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

And would you say that is a process that is not something any of us are smart enough to know how to do all at once, is it?

Oh no, I mean it's really figuring out, to quote Ray Dalio, it's figuring out your machines. What are the machines that drive each of those variables. And machine might be very manual to start, right? Your marketing machine might be you emailing your contact list manually initially, but over time it's how do you automate that? How do we get more contacts in, how do we qualify those contacts, how you do, how do we nurture the contacts that haven't responded? And you build these machines up across the entire business to where you as the CEO, as the founder, as the startup leader, you are effectively the operator of a bunch of interconnected machines and you're constantly trying to figure out how do we improve those machines, how do we fix the ones that are broken and how do we get the right people on so that ultimately those machines are self replicating, they're building and growing from there.

And I'm sure you would agree with this, that's part of the fascination. Because as you make adjustments, volume increases, more people are hired, expansions take place and now you got to reconfigure. Absolutely. Yeah. What worked with seven people doesn't work with 17 and doesn't work with 70. And it won't work with 700 either. It won't work with 700. But if what you're doing with a 70, you know, there's a mantra that I heard early on, David, is like if a well run business will grow, I don't know what that means in everybody who's listening, their arena, but if you make, you know, you probably got a pretty clear idea of what a well run business is like in your universe. And the quicker you get your business to model that with those systems, those kind of people, those kind of focus, those kind of goals, activities, chances are you're going to start growing. And so it comes down to.

People.

Get paralyzed because they think they have to do 300 things at once. But you only really have to do the next thing is right, David.

Exactly.

And the next thing is usually in the area of like you say, where things are broken or they're. A lot of times what I find in growth, David, it's they bottleneck. You know, systems fail because it worked with 100 calls, 100 sales a week or a month, but not at 300, you know what I'm saying? And so somewhere it's like the load, the body breaks down as you're lifting weights, as the weight gets higher. And so you find where the breakdown is and that's the next thing to be fixed. So it's not from that standpoint, if you're asking the questions and you're watching the flow of activity, it's not really complex what needs to be fixed next, is it?

No, it's all about tying it back to those equations, tying it back to those machines and then going in and saying, how do we optimize each one? And it's interesting too, because sometimes those optimizations might only be a 1 or 2 or 3% lift, but on enough, enough prospects or sales or widgets or whatever you're doing, it can turn into very, very big changes down the line.

Yeah. Because, you know, here's where the thing is. 1% more today, every day, every week, every month turns into astronomical bigger numbers down the road. And so when you, you have become, you know, you served on the Forbes Technology Council, what's that like? And what is that?

Yeah. So it's an opportunity to both write about and speak into the trends that are happening from a technology standpoint. I, I believe that we are in the middle of not a page turn or a chapter turn, but we're in the middle of a throw the old book out, rewrite the entire rules of how businesses operate with this AI revolution that's happening. So we've gotten a chance to speak on that to different groups across country.

And what does it mean that you are a board member of Equity and Varsity Tutors? What does that entail?

Yes, Equity is a incubator my business partner and I started a few years ago, specifically focused around starting and investing in companies here in the, in St. Louis, in the Midwest region. And then Varsity Tutors is one of those investments. It's the largest online tutoring platform in the United States. Happened to meet Chuck Cohn, the founder there after he had launched the business fellow Wash U alum and they're now about to go public as under the new nomiker nerdy.com here in the next couple months.

Wow. Well, you've had an exciting and productive life. The stage is set for some mind blowing. Even though you've already had mind blowing success, it's even more mind blowing success. And I know there's going to be a lot of rewards going to the people that have bought into your vision and your plan or working in your company. And I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and share some of this stuff today. David, I'm going to let you have the final word, the last word that you would say to people who, you know, they want to do something big in business.

Yeah, I mean it's, I'm not the first person to come up with this, but they talk about how a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. The first thing you got to do is get the car out of the garage and you might have to turn it around, you might need to stop for gas, you might need to do an oil change, but you're not going to get to your destination with your car in the garage. So I encourage people to get out and get started.

Well said. Thanks so much, David. This has been great.

Thank you.

So, David, I don't get to St. Louis that often. Is it St. Louis, Missouri or Kansas?

It's Missouri.

It's a Missouri. And I don't get that way very often. But if I do, I want to give you a call and maybe come by and see you and we spend a few minutes together and I can see your operation and all the great things you're doing. Yeah, man.

Let me know anytime we can grab lunch or dinner or beer or something.

And I, I'm kind of not for pay, but I just by my contacts and everything. What essentially I do is I'm a coach for million dollar earners and people are on the way up to a million dollar. And the kind of thing is the bigger what I tell everybody and I've never been challenged on it, the bigger you get, the more I can help you. And so I'm a sounding board for people that move up. And I just want you to know, I'm sure you have my number, know how to get it now and so feel free to call me anytime.

I appreciate that.

I am. I've done this a long time and things in business situations that are confusing, I somehow know, I don't know how I know, but I somehow know what's probably the direction that would work. And so all of that expertise has been gained by massive failures for 50 years.

Well, there's one thing I've learned to do in AI work. Pattern recognition improves with lots of training data.

Yeah, well said. And so I'm looking forward to watching your company grow. Congratulations. Thanks so much.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch, go to whiteellinwinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast, fast as possible. I'm Larry Widell and I run. The million dollar Mastermind. Go. Go.