Part 1 - Navigating The Complex Landscape Of Entrepreneurship

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.

Hello, everybody. We're talking to Adrian Dayton from Salt Lake City. Hello, Adrian.

Hey, how are you?

Larry, this is a lot of fun having you on. And I know you've had a lot of adventures in the entrepreneur world and picked up a lot of real world experiences. That's what we want to tap into. And people are starving for information from people that have been there, done that, and know the ropes. And, you know, it's good for me and you to keep talking about it so we don't forget what at least some of what we've learned along the way. You know, it's just like people say. Some people say I don't know what I'm doing. And I tell them I know what I'm doing. But it was like I knew what I was doing in the past.

I don't know what I'm doing going.

Forward because I've never been there before, you know, and so we're going to take those lessons and see if we can pass them on and have some fun. So, you know, Salt Lake, how long have you been out in Salt Lake City?

So I grew up in Salt Lake City.

Oh, did you?

But then I took a detour, so I lived out in Buffalo, New York for 13 years. Wow. And I came back here about five years ago, so.

Okay. And I don't know what kind of skiing they have in Buffalo, but it's world class in Salt Lake City.

That's right. That's right. The quality of my skiing has improved greatly since moving back from Buffalo. So, yeah, Buffalo does have a couple of actually decent resorts. They just don't have much altitude. So, you know.

Yeah, yeah. As I remember, Hunter Mountain and places like that outside of New York City is like narrow trails and a lot of ice and.

Right, that's right.

Not like the west, but let's talk about winning. And right now you're running a company called entrepreneur operating systems EOS. And since 22, you've kind of had an amazing run with that thing. We'll talk about how you ramped up with that, but helped transform and train over 15,000 professionals into effective business developers with LinkedIn, Twitter blogging strategies and so becoming one of the fastest growing practices in that arena, breaking, it says here, global records in the first six months. So how did you start? You know, it's always great when you can start with a bang because it's always hard to start. You gotta overcome inertia and you've got to put some points on the board to convince yourself and everybody else that you know what you're doing. So it's really great when you can explode out of the gate. In fact, the lesson I would think that you and I would have learned along the way to pass on to people is don't think about just starting your business. Start in your planning process and you're learning and your questioning. Try and get a strategy how you can explode out of the gate because then if you don't explode, at least you get a running start. You know, you gotta maximize your chances of winning, but at least you ought to be thinking about an explosive record setting type start. And you pulled that off. So talk about how you pulled that off.

Yeah, thanks. So I sold my software company and stepped down in June of 22. And then a couple months later I went basically to go through the training to become an EOS implementer. And I thought, you know what, I've sold my company, I made some good money, but I want to still have an impact, I want to still help other companies. So, so maybe I'll find four or five clients and help leadership teams. And that's the way EOS works is you'll work with a leadership team for about five days a year, right, on their quarterly planning and two days for their annual planning. And so I thought that sounds like a great thing I can do and just take it easy and have a nice comfortable life. And then I was sitting in like the big, you know, general room of the last day of the conference after the training and they showed up on the board, all the records, they were like in the fastest out of the gate, you know, in the first six months, like here's the record. And I looked up at that and I said, I don't think I want five clients, I want to break the record. And I just saw that and it was interesting because after being, I don't know, there was a couple years selling my company, then a year, you know, for my earn out before I stepped down, I hadn't been so energized in years. And so I got back and I built a huge network of business owners just because I'm social and I just, I just had fun doing it. And so suddenly I had something to offer them. And you know, people kind of say like, oh, what did you do? And it's like, well, I did was I Just called all the people I knew and I said, hey, here's what I'm doing now. Would you like me to help you scale your business? And yeah, had a great response.

And then of course, referrals from that I'm sure. Of course, success breeds success. But the deal is now you went out there and let's get the term EOS clear in everybody's mind what that is.

Yeah, yeah, so. So Gino Wickman wrote a very famous business book called Traction and he wrote some others like Rocket Fuel, that are great as well. But Traction is the big one. And Traction lays out it's not software, it's a framework for running your business. And that's known as eos or the Entrepreneur operating system.

Most entrepreneurs, they get an idea, they start from scratch, they don't know business. Even if you've been to, you know, MBA or, you know, you have kind of professional degrees, that didn't really, that's really not applicable a lot of that to what you're doing in your startup years and all of that stuff. And so the concept of an entrepreneur operating system, right off the bat, which I'm not familiar with it, but see, right off the bat, the idea of it seems like it could just take a lot of the guesswork out of play.

Absolutely. So Larry, let me share with you like my like EOS story. And look, EOS is amazing, but when I was building my software company, I was a hustler. I was selling, I was making deals, I was building my software, I was a non technical founder. So it was my idea, but someone else did the coding. You know, my team built it. And as the business started to grow, I'd always been great at sales, but no one ever taught me how to run a team, right? And I didn't have an mba, but even if I had an MBA doesn't really teach you how to lead people. It just you look at case studies and it's academics, right? And I remember someone handed me a free copy of Traction. And so I got on a plane ride to California, like long trip, four or five hours. I opened the book, I started reading, read the whole book in one sitting. And it was just like, oh, this is how I run my meetings. This is how I score, create a weekly scorecard. This is how I rate my people and make sure I have the right people in the right seats. It just gave me answers to all of these things that I could have figured out. Like I could have baked it, baked my way through, but just to have a framework, suddenly it Was like, okay, I'll just do this, and I can focus all my creativity not on learning how to grow a business, but on building the best product I can. Right.

Yeah.

So anyway, so it was a game changer for me. My business took off at that point once I had that structure in place, and. Yeah. So that's kind of EOS in a nutshell.

And so here's the thing that before we go on, I got to get this off. I've got to get this out of my mind.

Yeah, I have.

Like I was telling you before we got started, I've got a second cousin, a young second cousin that's got a great idea. Fantastic idea. I won't get into it. And he's starting a. He actually is in marketing with a software company, but he wants to start. He was getting my opinion. And usually people call you for their, you know, your opinion. They've already made up their mind. And so anything you say negative is you're raining on their parade, you know, and what they really want you to say is, go, go, go, go, go. And maybe I'll put some money into it, you know, but the thing is that. Get the reality of us. My.

I hate.

I. I'm the wrong guy to talk to about a software company, because in my experience, the friends I've had and people I've known from little to big to monstrous, it just seems to be a huge pot into which you can pour money and really tough to reach, you know, the point to where you got something that is generating income. And so a lot of times it eats it all up, and then you're bust. But you went through a thing where you were pouring everything into it for years and years before it turned to gold for you, right?

Yeah. So, I mean, when I started my company, I raised a little bit of money. I put in some of my own money, and, you know, over the first kind of three years, I raised in total about 1.5 million of investment money and about $400,000 of a loan we took from the government. So every year we lost about $300,000 for the first, really, like six years. The seventh year, we lost about $50,000. And look, my whole life I've been. I've been a very, like. What's the word? Conservative, you know, in how I save money and how I spend money. And every single year, it just kind of tore at me that, look, we are growing. We're growing quickly. We're spending more money than we made. Right. We're funding our growth, you know, talk.

About why in software, you know, why is that? So people have, you know, there's going to be thousands of people with great software ideas and a lot of them need to go to market. But what they need to know the facts of how it goes and it kind of helps you plan a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

Why is it that this sucker keeps eating up the money?

Yeah, well, there's kind of two points. First off, software companies, especially software as a service, right. SaaS is, it's a recurring revenue business and recurring revenue is worth way more than normal revenue, right. Like, like a dental practice that does a million a year can sell for about a million dollars. Right. Whereas a software company, you know, that does a million dollars a year may sell for five to ten times that. Right? So, so it's all about the multiples. So because of that, $1 of revenue isn't really worth $1. It's really worth potentially worth 10 to $20. And so, you know, kind of the prevailing wisdom is for those first few years you want to grow as, as much as you can, as fast as you can, even if you have to sacrifice profits to get there. You know, I remember flying on a flight with a, a banker from Silicon Valley bank, which is kind of funny with their history now, but anyway, but he said to me, he said if you turn the corner and start, become profitable, he said that's the kiss of death. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, once you're profitable, you're going to be valued based on your ebitda, not on your revenue and your growth rate, you know, and which a different way to think about it. But software, you're in a different world where you want to be, you want to grow quickly, you know, and so.

You and your team, about 15, I think you said about 15 full time people, you know, when you're going through this, you're working around the clock. It's an all consuming thing for year after year after year with no end in sight. And how did you keep yourself going through all of that?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, there's a saying by an entrepreneur that you know, like, you know, entrepreneurship is like getting hit in the head by a hammer and the pain stops when the entrepreneurship stops, right? So anyways, it's very difficult. I think the magic of being an entrepreneur and of building a software company is all about these two combined factors. The fear of failure drives you to have massive growth. And I remember just the terror of like if this thing fails, right? Like I gotta do Everything I can to make sure this grows.

Yeah.

So I read all the books, I listened to the podcasts, I found the mentors. I did everything I could to just give me a little bit of an edge so I could make this thing succeed. And I think when we're growing, when we're growing, we can deal with a lot of adversity because it's so rewarding. You know, that's one thing I miss the most, is the high growth you experience personally as you're building a company.

Yeah. And when you go through that thing, you run into specific problems at each level, and that's where, you know, it's just like. It's not like it's the same thing for six years. It's like, now we're in this phase. Now we're in this phase. Now this has happened. Now this is fast. What are we going to do? And so then it's a matter of finding out people who know the answers to that particular problem.

Is that how you went through it?

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because before I started my software company, I had this really great executive coach, and he helped me build my first business, which was like a consulting business, which was similar to his business. And every question I ever had, he had the answer for me. And then I started this software company, and I was like, what do I do with this? And he's like, I don't know. I mean, it's almost like it was just outside of his experience. Right. And so I realized, like, oh, I can't just use a smart business mentor. I got to find someone that's been on this journey before. Right. So I had to find some mentors that had built and scaled software companies.

And how to go about doing that. Are there conferences? Are there? You know what? Yeah.

I mean, I found some local mentors in my community that were introduced to me. There's a gentleman by the name of Dan Martell, and I joined his. He had a SAS academy. And so three times a year, you would fly in for an intensive with dozens of other CEOs of software companies. And Dan's awesome. He's still a dear friend of mine. But the best part of the conference was all these peers. You could just be with all these people. They're in it. They're in it with you and share success stories and share challenges and solutions, you know? So that was really helpful.

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