Part 3 - The Art Of Choosing The Right Cofounder

Foreign 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 everyone. Welcome back to the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weidel. Now today we're going to talk about one of the most important decisions you'll make in your entrepreneurial journey. And that is choosing the right co founder if you can. It's nice to not have to come up with all the thinking, all of the planning, shoulder all of the burden yourself. And the bulk of successful startups have two or three people sharing the burden and the decision making. One might be the dominant one who's in control, but there's usually some other key people, like I heard early on in my career from Art Williams, the founder of our company, that most revolutions are run with a few people at the core. And that's why when you're growing fast, you don't have, there's, it's complex, there's a lot of things happening and, and you don't have time to, every time there's a decision, you got a lot of decisions to make. And every time there's a decision to make, there's context, there's experience, there's background and you don't have time to get everybody up to scale when it comes into making a decision. And they'll always be when you have your core group around, they know because you're talking about this stuff all the time. And so it just way it evolves the implementation of the ideas and the game plans and the decisions spiral out of that core. But it's amazing how much you do with just a few people. And that's why I've always loved that phrase where most revolutions are run with just a few people at the core. And so how can you choose your right co founder and such a big key to getting yourself up to where you can make seven figures and fast. You want to get somebody who could complement your skills, your vision and the right one will help you accelerate your growth. The wrong one can of course kill you. So we could say slow you down, but basically undermine you at every step of the way. Suck your enthusiasm out and you want to make good decisions, bad decisions. I used to have, I always looked and evaluated. When I was expanding into North Carolina, I had two major mentors and when it came to a fork in the road, the way I decided which way to go was I called up one and Explained them both as best I could and then one would give me his recommendation, then I'd go and do the same thing with the other one. And invariably the one who was actually my closest advisor, he disagreed. His recommendation was not what I felt I should be doing, but the other one was more at a distance. It was hard to get my hands on him and give his time. But he and I were almost like that completely at sake. So if I got a yes from the guy over here, I knew probably the right thing. But then I had total confirmation if I got a no from the guy on the other side. And so you got to figure out who you can get advice from and just see do these things turn, how do they turn out? So are the people making a contribution or not? So finding obviously finding the right one is essential for success and can significantly impact your the rate of growth of your new venture because you're going to be making right decisions and there's a fine line between mediocrity and greatness. And what you're looking for is greatness. And so you're looking for someone that can complimentary skills, someone that can fill the gaps. Nobody's great at everything. And so you're looking for someone with skills that together as a team you've got a killer combination and developmental strengths. Marketing, financial insights. Some people are good with people, some people are good with money, some people are good with strategy and organization. So you want to share a common vision, you want to be on track with your goals but you want to ensure both are you'll get the same values and you're not going to be finding yourself. One of the early people that came to work with me, he was just leaving a business where they had done some investing in real estate. My guy was new to that and trusted the other guy. And so he woke up one morning to find out the other guy had closed the bank accounts that sold off the property and left my guy with a 400 disappeared, leaving my guy with a $400,000 real estate debt. And that was in 1979 I think. So that's probably several million dollar debt in today's thing. So you want to know about the people you're involved with, what's their morality? What can they be trusted? Do they over the long haul are they going to be dependable? And so do your due diligence. Don't just say he's a great guy at a picnic. We just had I met him and we shared some laughs and let's go into business together. No check These people out. And so even sometimes people you've known your entire life, you don't know how they perform in a business setting or when money, you know, money's when people crumble. Financial pressure. You find out how tough people are if they keep their commitments or not. So you want to find out about it. And maybe you have a trial period where say, let's just give it a chance to see if this is going to work out. So you want to share, so what are the things you look at? You want to have shared visions and goals. You're going to line up on your, what you want to accomplish, how fast you want to accomplish it. And that's going to keep you on track and allow you to make the right decisions getting to the end result. Then you want to have complementary skills. We talked about that. And you want different skills and expertise you don't want to have. It's not going to be a great co founder partnership if you're both our strength in marketing and dealing with people. But nobody knows how to keep the books. Nobody knows how to keep the inventory. My cousin Edward was the founder of mits. I bring him up occasionally and Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. This was the company he owned that came up with the first personal computer. And it's where Microsoft came from. It's where at 19 years old, Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved from Harvard to Albuquerque because this was the first they wanted to do software for a small personal computer. And this was the first one. So as soon as it was there, they wanted the nationwide contract, so they moved there. And that's where Microsoft came from. Micro is, was Micro Instrumentation. My cousin was fascinated with putting little gadgets in rocket ships and firing them up. Some Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry systems was his fascination. And he went over into the computers because he had built computers in his garage at Oklahoma State because he was fascinated with how they built back then to build a computer. Computers were as big as a garage, but he learned how they went together. And so when he said all these new smaller pieces, you know, circuit boards and things like that were coming out, he said, wait a minute, you could put this desktop. And so he veered off from the, the rockets, which is his main interest, and take telemetry, taking pictures from rockets and drones and things like that over into computers. And so the lesson, one lesson there is be flexible, connect dots and see how maybe your technology you come up with might work even better in an area you had not thought about. And so anyway, unfortunately with him, he got Driven out of the business too way too early because he had an operations person who we found out about 10 years later. And thanks for listening to the Million Dollar Mastermind. Now if you like the episode, don't forget to subscribe, share it with friends, leave a comment and I will see you next time. My cousin was wondering why everybody was always mad. The customers were mad, the people were mad. Is because this guy, his right hand man, Mr. Doctor so and so I won't give his name. He would just promise he was lousy at administration so he would just promise everything. Oh yeah, we'll have him there by Friday. Oh yeah, I'll talk to Ed and we'll get that done. And if he had, he would have probably stayed in that business and made billions of dollars if he had the right hand man. But it drove him so nuts. The early success because of the administrative and personnel problems that just kept flooding him, driving him nuts all the time. Well he couldn't concentrate on design that he wound up selling for like $2 million, can you believe it? To a German company sold the whole thing and they of course bungled the whole thing away within five years. Pertech is the name of that German corporation. But anyway Gates and Allen came out okay. They moved back to Seattle and they did, did pretty well. But it's the Altair 8800 which is in the lobby of Microsoft up there. And that's where it all started. But having the right co founder can make a difference between you wanting to just pull your hair out and sell out and just get out of it after with a couple million dollars even if you're sitting on a gold mine rather than being able to ride the thing out and, and walk away with several billion. And we've seen this played out many times. So you want to get complimentary skills and you know what your skills are but you want to get very clearly that the other person has up to your level at the complimentary skills. Then you want people that you value their thinking. There's wisdom in many heads, different eyes looking at the same subject and they'll see things you don't see. So a strong partnership will allow you but not 30 or 40 people. Again small people, a small number of the core. And so a strong partnership allow for better decision making and because you get perspectives that you appreciate and you have confidence in. So they're going to bring their perspective in. You hear that and you're like oh yeah, and how many of us. It won't be long if you have it done this Already you get a great idea, but you need feedback. It's just like even if feedback is totally wrong, the feedback part of it is you need someone to bounce your ideas off of. And as these decisions come, you need to be able to like, what if we did this, what if we did that, what if we did that? And they may improve the idea or just you saying it out loud and reading their reactions will tell you what you need to know. But if that's a bonehead over there that you're telling your what if we did this? And if somebody is over there that's not going to give you the feedback that you can trust. So anyway, you want a strong partnership, allow better collaborative decision making and better outcomes and less costly mistakes. The other thing is accountability. If you've got other high quality people involved and they've got skin in the game, they're putting the time, the energy, maybe some of their money in with a co founder. They're going to hold you more accountable than you would be otherwise. So you're going to kind of keep each other accountable for effort, energy, financial, how you use the money and for your commitments, your goals, your timing. Are we on track? If there's maybe you have an employee that needs to be dealt with and if it's up to you, it's like you might let it slide. But if you got a co founder where you're like no, that person's got to go and if you're not going to handle it, I'll handle it. And so that allows you to stay on track. That's just one example of accountability improving with the right co founder and then you have networking and resources. A well connected co founder can bring valuable networks resources from their experience, industry contacts and not just what they show up with in the beginning, but what they develop going forward. Part of this, it's like recruiting a drafting quarterback out of college for the to the NFL. It's not how great they are today, but how much are they improving when they drafted. There's a big thing for those of y', all, the two to young, this will mean anything to you. But there's a big dilemma early on, early we going to draft Peyton Manning or are we going to draft Ryan Leaf? They both have the same stellar college careers and there's a big debate. Well, Peyton went number one. He wound up with MVPs, winning Super Bowls, etc because he was relentless in improving. Ryan Leaf went out and was like out of the league within a very short period of time. And now of course he realizes he didn't really have the right approach, but sometimes it could be overwhelming. But to his credit, he's come back and had a great career as a coach. It made a name in the industry, but coming out of college he was not, didn't even have it in his mind. The same things that Peyton Manning had about improving. So what you want to get is a co founder that's really into it. They're making contacts, they're reading things, they're going to events possibly where they're meeting new people and bringing other fresh ideas and energy into your collective collaboration. And so it's not just you always having to come up with a new contact or the new resource or the new idea. So the right co founder will be into it and they'll just naturally bring more to the table and a lot more than when what you first start with now this, some examples like in our company, you know, my main company, Primerica Financial Services, we had a founder named Art Williams and he did well, but he was like a football coach. Go, go, go, go, go, go work, go, blah blah, blah. And then. But you know, it's a lot in financial services, there's a lot of back office things and things really cooked in the early 80s when he teamed up with a guy named Beau Adams. And Bo was a wild bird. You could never understand what he was talking about, but he knew what he was doing and he was a great negotiator, he's a great administrator and he ran a tight ship and together they ran. We were able to explode because of the empire building opportunity they put together. But you have and wound up becoming the largest independent financial services organization in the world. New York Stock Exchange. That's why I was talking about we were on the New York Stock Exchange on the ringing the bell. But it all started with Art and both then you have Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Commit to your personal and professional evolution with our free training video. It's designed not just as an educational session, but as a transition transformative journey for those bold enough to aim for the stars. This isn't just any webinar. It's a roadmap to achieving the extraordinary. It's tailored for those who dare to dream big and yes, it is completely free. Join us in a network of ambitious professionals ready to take their careers to a new heights. Secure your spot now@whitelawnwinning.com and let's unlock your potential together. Thanks for being part of this community.