The One Thing a Person Must Have When You Get into Business with Doug Hartman

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you.

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Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm back with Doug Hartman. And Doug has won big in a lot of industries and is having fun playing the investment game and taking his lessons. He's learned instead of playing golf, he's playing business right now and having a lot of fun and hopefully having a lot more success than he's had various steps along the way to get the education he's got. And so thanks so much, Doug. It's got to be a thrill to know and two different, you know, you got a product in a thousand stores, you've got, you take in software companies public, you got your ongoing financial services business with 1,000 offices, 25,000 people. There's a lot of stability there. But new challenges keep you fresh. And one of the hard things to do is to keep yourself excited. And I think we touched on this. Keep yourself excited about your basic core business and the things you need to be doing. And when you start these new businesses, you pick up fresh ideas, fresh insights. And so let's talk about taking.

Public.

Company, a software company. What, what are some biggest big lessons you retain from that experience?

Yeah, it's a, it's a lot of fun. You know, basically I've, I've always kind of been like that. I've been kind of curious. First thing is that I don't really enter into a business thinking necessarily. It's going to be a very successful business. There's only about, about 1 out of 10 businesses that actually become successful when you start a business. So unless you count the cost of losing money, the best in business is just doing dollar cost averaging into a mutual fund. If you're thinking just about making money, if you do that, you know your, your success ratio is going to be much, much higher than starting your, your own business. I, I do it out of curiosity. It's fun. I, I learn things. It's a, I really enjoy doing it. So for me, it's, it's a lot of fun. And that's why, and, and I, and I, I like what I learn. I learn a lot of things through that.

And so you get a software company. What was the, and this thing went well. At what stage did you get involved in the software company that attracted Your interest and how much involvement did you have as they were growing?

Well, I've been involved in a couple of those, primarily as an investor. So I invest money and that gives me the ability to learn some of the things that are going on and I need to be a little bit. One of the things I learned is that I wasn't detailed enough. I trusted people too much. I needed to know what's going on and have the oversight that I didn't give I think would have probably turned out a lot better.

And in particularly what the thing is when you get in new businesses, you don't know what you don't know. And so what should you have done? Found out from somebody who'd been through that thing and had them to show you the ropes on things to keep an eye on?

Well, people are pretty. People don't really share much about a new business because they don't want the competition.

Right.

So unless there had been involved, if the people you're working with have been involved in it before, you're going to be at a loss of knowledge when you enter that business. And that's one of the negatives about being in business or going into a business is that your competition more than likely has been in that line of business for quite a while. Maybe they passed it down from father to son. They have their equipment paid off. They have a solid understanding of what they need to do. They have individuals trained, so they have trainers there and they have individuals that could follow through. When you get in a business like that, you're way behind. You're behind the expertise. Other people have the expertise, you don't. Other people have the cap. Their equipment's paid off, yours isn't. So you're going to have cash flow problems. They have an understanding of what's needed and what they can do and you don't have that. So you're always at a disadvantage. Does that make any sense?

Yeah, but the thing is you can. That's one of the things you do to start is to make sure you hire people that have that kind of experience or come out of that world that, you know, you got the people with those advantages working for you.

Though it would seem like, well, let me give you the one thing. There's one thing that I think an individual needs to have when they get into business and it's one thing that I couldn't give. The one thing is they can't give up control. You have to have control. And where I lost money, where I lost with business to main more than not. It was where I had no control over it. I had other people, I gave them money and they could do whatever. They use that money and I didn't have any control over how they used it.

Well, that's one thing Trump has done right, you know, in his career.

Yeah.

He won't get involved in anything unless he has control, even if he's not even putting money in it. He's just putting my name, his name on it. He still wants control because he knows it's his image, but that's why he wouldn't get involved with Madoff.

Yeah.

Off came out to the golf course and tried to troll Trump to give him some money. And he said, I don't know your business. He said, he said, I know my business. I'm not getting in your business. I don't know it. And so that's what I mean.

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.

Well, like with Billy, the Billy Board, you know, situation, you were an investor in that. But again, no control.

No control.

Yeah.

And that's the negative about the, the financial business. You can't take control. You have to have passive type investments.

Well, you know, the thing is, even. But you can lose control. Like Bill Gates. Paul Allen wrote in his book that he's having, talking with Bill Gates about when he retired from Microsoft, he still had his office, still on the board. He just gave up the executive functions, you know, CEO running things.

Right.

He said he was in the office the next day, the next day he was in the office and he overheard some of the key execs out of the hallway bouncing ideas around. And it was a subject course. He had just, he had been in charge up till yesterday. And so he knew how this. He knew all about what they were talking about and had some insights that he went out the hall and he said, yeah, he said, and the thing to remember about this is this, that the other. And he gave him some, some tidbits and some pointers that he thought would be well received. And he said, he said I could, he told Paul Allen, he said, I could tell as the words came out of my mouth, they did not care about anything I had to say about it because it was their show now and I was on the sidelines. You know, I was just a fan. And so even that control feature is absolutely critical, especially if you're the one with the experience.

That's exactly right.

You know, you can't get the benefit, you can't get the benefit of your insight and experience if nobody's going to listen Nobody's going to listen to you.

That's exactly right.

And then it's excruciating to see them going down into flames because you're investing in it and, you know, the things they're doing are, you know, going to kill it. And so. But you did invest. You did have one success. The software that worked and went public. Talk about that.

Well, that's hard to. That was a computer company where they. When the computers were first coming out, they talked about how to learn how to do the different programs. You know, it was a. It was really a computer training school. It was a school to teach individuals how to run the computer. That. And that went public, but it was. It really never. It went public because they had a great story. But as far as the market changed, as more and more people became familiar with the computer, they didn't need training in it anymore. And so the winners in that particular company were individuals that got in first and then got out before it crashed. Yeah. And so knowing when to get in, knowing when to get out, everything. Everything has a time. Nothing is forever.

Right.

So things change. People get involved in the business to think that's going to last forever. It doesn't last forever. And so you got to know when to get out and how to get out.

And.

And I learned that the hard way.

Yeah. Always. It is so easy to forget that lesson. On the initial phase of hearing the idea and the people in the initial excitement and you're hearing the story for the first time, it's easy to get infatuated. You know, you're in love again and not thinking about. Most of these marriages end in divorce, you know, unless, you know that's right. What's my exit strategy going to be divorced. You know, like every romance has a honeymoon period.

Yeah.

Most of them, they say it lasts for 100, you know, like a new president's in office a hundred days, you know, it's not going to last forever. You know, sooner or later, the logistics of making this thing work are going to start to add up and, you know, the bloom is going to be off the rose there. Now what are you going to do? And so with the lesson from that is, as an investor, to keep aware of those things and look for.

Follow.

The timing, because that's how you win on these things, because you can't always get control. But how about the one now, your recent thing? This is a success. You're in a thousand stores. How do you get into it? How did you find the thing and how did you get into a Thousand stores and you didn't make it. You know, this is not. Someone probably told you about it. You said it's intriguing. I'll get in. How long have you been involved with this thing?

I've been involved for well over 10 years.

Really?

Yeah. And I've had. I put probably millions of dollars into it. And now it's persistence. Just so you have. You're in it for a long time. Keeping on. You know, all new businesses have ups and downs. I've been involved in this for quite a while. This is going to be a big business now. In my personal feeling, we have developed a. Developed a parfait, a fruit parfait. But instead of. That's what we used to have is fresh fruit parfait.

Right.

And you put it into a store in it. And the life in the life. Shelf life of that is about a week max. So it's impossible to go national with it because it takes at least 30 days to go national and it's. And it's probably more like 60 days.

Yeah.

So we played around with it and through experimentation we came up with a dried fruit parfait. And then we did some marketing and talked to a broker. He loved it and referred us to Chobani.

Yeah. That's a big name brand, right?

Yeah. And they would have never linked up with us except for the broker. The broker has 149,000 C stores. Those are like the Food Mart when you pull into a shell.

Chobani is a big operation. They've been going on for quite a while. They're already nationwide, right?

Yeah. They're about ready to go public. They'll go public in probably the next 12 months.

And so your product will go public along with them. Or is it a separate thing?

No, it's. This is a separate company. We. They. They have put. They gave us their name to put on the. On the. On the parfait. Yeah, we have the marketing. We have. The only. The reason I'm so excited about it is that we have the only product, the only parfait type product that can go national. Wow. None of the others can because they don't have the shelf life. Our shelf life is 80 days.

Ah. So it's really the patent, I guess that's a patented type process or whatever.

Well, yeah, they have their own secret formula, you know, and they were. They probably wouldn't have given us the go ahead to use their product and unless it was for the recommendations we got from these other people.

Yeah. Ten years. So that, that sounds. What's Your projection on your timetable to see this thing roll out.

It's going to roll out. The first rollout is May 19th.

Aha.

Well, and so we have.

That's fast, people.

We have national. We have national inquiries. And my personal goal is a million units a month.

Yeah. How quick?

In 18 months.

18 months. Well, I'll be good for a few units here as soon as it shows up.

Okay.

Get my parfait. But congratulations on that one. And I know there's more coming. And anyway, Doug, thanks for the time. Appreciate the insights. Anything you want to leave people with as we wrap this thing up.

I am very thankful for you, Larry. You were a real motivation for me when I first got involved. And I think they would be well off listening to everything you say and actually applying it. So that's what I'd like to leave people with.

Well, that's awfully kind, Doug. I really appreciate it. And we've always been big buddies, so I'm looking forward to seeing your next success.

Yeah, I don't know how many next success we'll have.

All right. Thanks so much, Doug.

Well, thank you. You too.

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 whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as as possible. I'm Larry Widell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go.