Mark C. Winters | From Cyber Cafes to Rocket Fuel

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Welcome to the Revolution, the Smart Business Revolution podcast where we ask today's most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, now, your host for the Revolution, John Corcora.

All right, welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I'm the host of this show. You know, I might know my story. I'm a recovering political hack and a recovering lawyer, having spent many years working in politics, including as a speechwriter, stints working at the Clinton White House and for California governor. You know, I spent years practicing law in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco bay area. And 10 years ago, I discovered this medium, podcasting. I've been doing it ever since. I get to talk to incredibly smart and just engaging CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, authors, you name it. For all kinds of different companies, today is no exception. I'm also the co founder of Rise25 where we help B2B businesses with this strategy and production. They need to create a podcast and content marketing that produces tremendous roi, connects them with their ideal prospects and referral partners. And today I've got a great guest. His name is Mark C. Winters is a seasoned professional, over 25 years of entrepreneurial leadership experience working in all kinds of companies, from small startups to large companies like Procter and Gamble, British Petroleum. He's got a diverse background which enables him to identify and apply patterns of success for virtually any business scenario. He's also the co author of Rocket Fuel, the one essential combination that will get you more of what you want from your business with Gino Wickman, also a past guest on the show. So go check that out as well. And we're going to dive into some of the work that he's focusing on these days. But first, before we do that, this episode is brought to you by Rise25 Media. Rise25 helps B2B businesses to get clients, referrals and strategic partnerships with done for your podcast and content marketing. If you're listening to this and ever thought about doing a podcast, especially if you're a B2B business, I say absolutely. One of the best things I've ever done for me, both personally and professionally. Get to talk with really smart people like Mark here today. So I highly recommend it. If you have any questions or you need more help, go to Rise25Media or you can email us at supportise25media.com all right, Mark, I know this was Many months in coming. It took us a while to get around to getting this scheduled. But I'm super excited to talk to you here today. You've got a real diverse background in entrepreneurship. So tell me, I like to ask people sometimes, you know, were you out there on the weekends as a kid, 7 years old, setting up a lemonade stand, kind of like my, my six year old bugging me all the time to do, or you more like me, where kind of later in life you just, you kind of embraced entrepreneurship.

Yeah, so. So, I mean, I probably did a lemonade stand or two and didn't feel like they were big money makers. And so, you know, my entrepreneurial genesis sort of came later in life. And it's interesting. I, out of, out of undergrad, I went to work for Procter and Gamble. So kind of the, you know, prototypical mega Corp, right? And I had a mindset at that time that this is where I'm going to be for the rest of my professional career. In fact, I actually somewhere have a sheet of paper that mapped out to the year when I would become CEO of Procter and Gamble. I knew exactly how long I was going to spend at each level of the organization and how many regimes we're going to have to turn over at the top to kind of open up a spot for me. And, and I think when I was 43 years old, that's what I was supposed to be was the CEO of Procter and Gamble. And then fast forward and I had some experiences where I sort of saw what was happening to some of the other folks that were working around me when they were in their mid-40s, say, and remember, I'm 20, early 20s at the time. And they would be presented with these choices of, hey, you're a good performer. Would you like to uproot your family and move them to a completely different part of the country where we have a place for you, or would you like to leave? And that was something that they were totally unprepared to hear and really left them in what seemed like a really bad position to me. I thought, you know what, this may be kind of a risky thing to be in a company where your sort of future is going to be determined by somebody else completely at their whim. So I sort of had that in the back of my head. And then I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago. I'm sitting in class one day, I remember it was the strategy and tactics of pricing that was the class. And we were doing group projects so teams would Come through and present their widget that they had invented. And it was going to cost them this much to make it. They could sell it for this much and they thought they could move this many units. So here's how much money they were going to make. That's interesting. And then another team would come through and they'd found this unmet service niche in the market and they could fill it. It would cost them this much to fill it. They could sell that for this much. And here's how many of them that they could move. So here's how much money they were going to make. And I thought, you know, that is actually way more interesting than what I'm doing, which is moving toilet paper and diapers and paper towels and coffee and peanut butter and stuff like that through grocery stores. And so I made the decision that I was going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what I was going to do or how I was going to do it, but I literally. That was the moment when I was bitten and. And I felt like I needed to burn my boats. And so I literally went in and quit Procter and Gamble. Probably should have talked to my wife before I did that, since we were married. And what did she say when you.

Came home and said, guess what, honey, I quit?

She was not a fan. Yeah, it was. And she was pregnant to boot. So. But, you know, I had a plan and so I went on to execute that plan.

So was that Cyber Explorer?

It was. It was. You're digging deep into the past.

Well, Cyber Explorer, which was, according to your LinkedIn, was started in 1995, which sounds like a business that was started in 1995.

Yeah, that actually sounds like it was ahead of its time in 1995, which it was.

I imagine it was. So what did you do?

So Cyber Explorer was a cyber cafe. It was a full featured cyber cafe. And so the process was that my first plan was I was gonna start a specialty coffee shop. And as I looked at that, I felt like it was going to be difficult to differentiate. Actually, we were living in Milwaukee at the time. And I contacted Starbucks because Starbucks was not in Milwaukee. So this is how early that was. Starbucks was not in Milwaukee. And I called him up and I said, hey, I'd like to, you know, bring a Starbucks into Milwaukee. And they're like, well, first of all, you know, we don't franchise. We don't need your help to do that. And second of all, we really have no interest in Milwaukee. We're focused on San Francisco and New York and Chicago and kind of just the top tier cities. And so that's how early it was. So then I was going to start my own and just get the best real estate. So that way when they did come to town, they would have to talk to me about the best locations. And then I started looking at how to differentiate and technology. So I found some places. I found one in London, I found actually one in San Francisco. It was called the SF Net that used to make these plywood boxes that you'd put a quarter in to access a computer, actually access a bulletin board network. There was one in New York and there was like some in southern Canada and they're these cyber cafes. And so I was like, this is cool. This brings technology in. That's a differentiating thing that could be really interesting. And so I got in my car with an old video camera, Sony video camera and a notepad and. And I drove across southern Canada down through New York. And actually there was one in Boston too. There's one in Cambridge, right outside Harvard. And I went to each one of these. I walked in, I talked to the owners, hey, you know, how's this working? You know, what's working well, what's not. I talked to the customers, I made drawings and took pictures of kind of how they were set up. And then I came back to Milwaukee at the end of 10 days or whatever and I wrote up the business plan for the ultimate cyber cafe, which was Cyber Explore.

And how did it go?

So it went great at the beginning. So this was my first foray into entrepreneurship and so I had to raise money. And my big lesson that I learned there is everybody wants to talk about it. Everybody wants to see your business plan. Everybody gives you green signals like they're gonna invest, but nobody's investing until you actually clear their check. That's the only time that, you know that they have actually invested in you. I had to sign my first lease, which I, you know, it's kind of a interesting dilemma there where you've got to have, you're committing to the lease. I've kind of got to have the space before I can finish raising the money. And so it was kind of a chicken and egg thing where, you know, I had to wrestle with how far out on a limb I was willing to go personally. And then in raising the money, you, you know, I had a lot of it, but I had a little bit more that I needed and I really needed it to kind of close the lease deal and kind of get this thing going. And so I took some Terms on the last chunk that were probably some terms that I shouldn't have accepted and gave someone something that's called negative control covenants. Being an attorney, you probably know what those are.

Why don't you tell the audience for those that don't know? So negative control, that's an easy way of dodging that question, by the way.

So you'll be familiar with it when I tell you. So basically it seems safe because they can't make you do anything. But it's a list of things that if you want to do any of these things, their okay is required to be able to do them.

So there must have been some deal breakers in there.

Well, there was about 20 things on that list. But again at the time in my brain I was like, just need the money, no big deal, I need the money. They can't tell me what to do. Right. If I need to do any of these things, surely they'll go along with it. So fast forward, we get the deal done, we launch it, we open it up. It was awesome. We've got this retail space. We had 20 different high end computer workstations inside this thing. So high end back then was a Pentium 133 with a 20 inch monitor. So imagine the front of a 20 inch monitor and it was twice as deep as it was.

Massive monitors. Yeah, massive, massive.

We had these little things called a cuc me camera that set up on top so we could do video networking.

Wow.

And then we had all of very advanced for night.

Yeah.

Then we had all of the workstations actually network together so you could come in and we could put a CD game into any of those and you could play it from any other station. We could do, we had a T1 line.

Wow. That is super advanced mid-90s T1 line.

Right. So we're super fast people. Gamers would come in here just to play their games on our connection speed because it was so much, so much faster. And then we built a software system to control the interface. So you'd pay 29 and a half cents a minute, you know, to get access to the stuff on the computer. You could order from the bar, the coffee bar. So I built essentially a Starbucks in a store. So the guy who did go forward and kind of built the Starbucks in town, he, I partnered with him and said look dude, I don't know how to do this. Why don't you come in and show us how this works. We'll brand it your brand, you know, and kind of give you some pub. But, but you know, you help us kind of run this operation. So he did. So he had an awesome setup there.

And that was. That in itself was a really smart decision, rather than trying to tackle that end of the business as well.

That was not going to be our expertise. And he was the best I could find at it. He was really good. And so, yeah, absolutely, that was. That. That worked out very well. They made us our own blend. The only place you could get that blend was. Was from us. And so then as I'm watching this thing kind of roll out, you know, a couple of cool things happened. One was anytime the media had a story on Internet, which was all the time, they needed a backdrop that kind of made sense for it. And so they had come shoot them in our place. We were on the news and news magazine articles, all this kind of stuff. Everybody was coming and doing that at our place, which was cool. We had. I would watch the behavior of people using these workstations on the login and pay 29 cents a minute. And what I saw was they would log in, do whatever they were going to do. There's lots of things they could do, and then they'd log off. Then they'd talk. And so it was really. They were being really careful about how much time they were spending online. And that really wasn't the vibe I was after. I wanted it to kind of be easy. I wanted to try new things. I wanted the grandparent and the grandchild to be talking together and maybe the child teaching the grandparent kind of how things worked and showing them stuff and all that. And so I thought, all right, how could we release that constraint? How can we get them to do that? And so I was thinking of other pricing models. And the pricing model that I landed on was a health club. Health club. You got this big, expensive equipment that people don't have in their homes. You've got other people there to show you how to use it, which we had. And it's sort of social. You're talking to other people and there's interaction that goes, that's kind of like us. How do they price memberships? And so I was like, all right, that's the answer. We're going to do memberships. And so we did a membership program where you could buy an unlimited, unlimited day pass a week or a month or a year. And that was the key. So we did that. And all of a sudden we had lines of people waiting to get on these workstations. So literally, on a busy night, there'd be four or five People deep at a station trying to get on. So if you have more demand than you have supply, what do you do? Change the pricing, raise the price. Right. So we started. So we started raising the price, no problem, but we still had that level of demand. And so I got to the point where I basically doubled the price and we were still holding on. So this is all great, right? We've got good signals, people are using it, they're liking it, we're getting lots of media exposure. So back to the business plan and this being my first rodeo, and you look at the business plan and you find that Mark had a little bit in there for working capital reserve, but not a lot. And so through that startup, we were burning through that as we were kind of approaching a positive cash flow state and really close, but we were out. And so we ran out of cash. And so I had to go back to the investors who everybody was happy to put in more money or the bank was happy to lend more money. Everybody was happy except for one guy. Guess which guy?

The last one.

That one. And for whatever reason, he took a position where he's basically like, nope, not interested. And so we tried to buy him out. He didn't want to sell out. We offered to sell out. He didn't want to buy us out. We offered to take the bank debt. I had a whole other bank arrangement set up to kind of transfer the assets and liabilities over and take that over. Didn't not want to allow that. And so the whole thing locked up and it's really was crazy. And we did after that. So I got to have probably the first Internet auction or one of them where we were, we locked up and we sold all this stuff off via the Internet. And I got to tell remember my pregnant wife, well, that child was born during this whole process and then she was pregnant with our second son. And so the meeting with employees for, you know, telling them that gang, this isn't going to work. We're going to have to shut down and everybody's going to have to go. She's standing there with me, pregnant with that second son.

Oh, man.

And so, you know, it was a, it was a hard one, but lots of, lots of lessons.

How do you pick yourself up off the pavement after that half? You have a setback like that, you.

Know, I mean, it's just raw. Have to. And you know, bless her, she stuck with me and, you know, trusted that I would be able to find a way to kind of navigate out of this.

And.

And it was really focused on about this far in front of you right now to figure out how to get as much out of this as we can. So we limit the hit that we're taking and then kind of jump in and figure out what's next. And you know, at that time, I mean, just, just telling you really, really, she was like, you're done. No more of this entrepreneur stuff. And so I was really fortunate that the next thing I fell into was sort of an entrepreneur in residence for a huge company. So Amoco Petroleum was looking for somebody that was an entrepreneur to kind of come in and challenge all the stuff that they were doing because they felt like they'd gotten big and slow. And so that was the perfect next thing for me because kind of being.

In a larger company but being entrepreneurial at the same time.

Exactly. I had a huge checkbook, tons of autonomy. I could kind of do, do my own thing, but the risk, there was nothing.

And it looks like you maybe about five years or so went by, you had some good experiences, including Experian, and then eventually you start your own, you go back to entrepreneurship, you found another company.

Yeah, so that's, that's actually what Experian was. So Experian was a. So I, from, from Amoco, a. One of the companies that I brought in to help us sort of led me into a whole predictive analytics field. And that led me to a small startup company out of Los Alamos, New Mexico, which we then grew and sold to a big public company on the West Coast. And I was part of that. And then I came out of that and I hooked up with another one of these people that I'd brought in at Amoco who was a, he was a legit rocket scientist, like these people I'd been with in Los Alamos. And so I partnered with him and we started another company that was focused on helping retailers and restaurants do site selection, which was one of the problems that I had faced using high end analytics like, you know, artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms and all kinds of really interesting stuff. And so then we built that company up and sold that company to Experian. And, and so that was another good one.

And, and then we were talking beforehand about, you start a bug, you acquire a bike company. And interesting timing too.

Yeah. So, you know, well, some people tell you, you know, the quickest way they can think of to lose a million bucks is to get in the bike business. And so unfortunately, I never met that person before we did that one. But yeah, so I was a big into cycling and there was a High performance bicycle manufacturing business that was in Texas and I knew about it, knew the product, had used the product, had lots of friends that did and so got into that and actually had built a really nice business model. We're selling high end, high performance custom bikes, you know, 10,000, 12,000, $15,000 bikes. But you know, 2008 happens. 2008 happens. You know, your order list, all of a sudden they're like, you know, we're watching the news and I'm not sure we should be spending that much money on one of these bikes. And so they just kind of started drying up. And so we had to.

It is interesting though. It is interesting to see because a lot right now, this crisis compared to that crisis, a lot of these outdoor recreation companies actually are thriving because totally different type of crisis, but people are stuck at home and like, it's impossible for people to get to get bikes these days, get bike carriers. Anything related to outdoor recreation is doing really well. I don't know if a $12,000 bike company is doing well, but maybe on the lower end.

Yeah, I mean, economically though, this is a whole different situation than 2008. 2008, the widespread nature of the economic impact, you know, it was just, yeah, it was a whole different deal. But you're right, I mean, there's lots of demand creation for outdoor activity products. The strata we were playing out with those bikes was, you know, it was the tippy tippy top of folks that, you know, basically they can spend whatever, you know, whatever they want to look good and go fast and.

Or at least in 2007 they could. All right, so let's flash forward a little bit. You know, you go into coaching and consulting and helping other entrepreneurs, and you discover EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System. You discover Gino Wickman and you strike up a friendship with him and you become a certified EOS professional as well. And then you guys decide to write the book Rocket Fuel. So tell us about what Rocket Fuel is about. Give us a little bit of high level overview, because I know that's your focus now. You've got a couple of new things that you're launching related to that.

Yeah. So Rocket Fuel really dives deep into the visionary integrator dynamic that we see in successful entrepreneurial companies. And basically the pattern that Gino identified and that we wrote the book together about in Rocket Fuel is that when you have a visionary entrepreneur, you think about typically your founding entrepreneur, just their big idea generator. They kind of see the future and they play out there on the horizon. Good at Big external relationships. When you take somebody like that and you pair them up with somebody who is much more execution focused, they're great with the details, they're great with the follow through. They work through and between the other leaders in the organization to really make that vision happen. Those companies go to a whole different level than the companies that don't have that combination. So it's not a easy thing necessarily to get the right pair together. And then once you get them together, by their very nature they're so different that they left to their own. There's a lot of friction there, they'll butt heads. It can actually turn into something pretty negative. So we built a structure to put around that. And that's what's laid out in Rocket Fuel is, you know, here's the five rules you really need to put in place to take that negative friction and blend it into something positive that can really drive this company to a higher level.

And so you have a couple of new programs that you've developed which take those principles, those ideas even further, especially for this virtual world that we're living in these days. And by the way, we're recording this at end of October of 2020. So talk a little bit about Rocket Fue University. You've got the Integrator Academy Masterclass and Integrator certification program.

Great. So yeah, so Rocket Fuel University is sort of the entry point for everything Rocket Fuel, everything visionary and integrated, relates to place for all visionaries, all integrators and really anybody who is interested in their success. So you know, there's recruiters, there are profiling companies, other people that can help them or interested in them. They join this Rocket Fuel University and the first thing they do is there's a sort of a foundational basics video course called Rocket Fuel 101 that lays out all the basics kind of right out of the book, but in a little bit more in depth way via video. And then once you've got that, you move into a community called the Launchpad. And this is where you can, you can talk and connect and share stories and really, you know, get help with whatever's next on your path to move down this Rocket Fuel journey. From there, the integrators that have identified themselves as an integrator and they really want to become truly great as an integrator. We have the Integrator Academy masterclass where they go in, it's a four week intensive with me where they've got video based training and then once a week I get on a zoom call with Them and answer questions. And it's a peer group model as well, so they can benefit from other folks in their cohort, because we move one cohort through there at a time and really understand how to master their craft and become truly great as an integrator as they graduate, that they get invited to apply to join our professional and certified integrator program. So these are the ones that really want to be able to hang that designation out there as a certified integrator, continue to master their craft and get better and better and play in that community of folks who are really at the top of their game in terms of being an integrator. Great.

Well, Mark, I know we're running short on time, so I'll wrap things up with the question I always enjoy asking, which is, let's pretend we're at an awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys, and you're receiving an award for lifetime achievement for everything you've done up until this point. And what we all want to know is who do you think? Who are the mentors? Who are the friends? Who are the peers? Who are the business partners? Who are the better investors? Not the bad one, but the better ones who you would acknowledge in your remarks.

Yeah. So I think there's three people that come to mind for me, John, and one is my dad. So he's kind of the original entrepreneur. He was a physician and so in private medical practice for many, many years, which is that's sort of a business. And he was probably better than most in terms of running that. But, you know, he was also had a ranching business, real estate development. He was always kind of looking for these other things that he would start and get involved with and make happen. So, you know, thank him for giving me that exposure at a young age. Second one I'd have to thank would be Geno Wickman. You know, he and I have become great friends, and I've learned a ton from Gino. The guy's a genius in his own right. And, you know, through the work he did with EOS and then the journey we started together with Rocket Fuel, he's been amazing. And then the third one would be my wife. You know, you heard me talk about some of the roller coaster ride that I took her on, and, you know, she's still with me, stuck with me and supported me and helped me, you know, the whole way. So those would be my big. My big three.

Great. And I actually have a copy of Gino's book, Entrepreneurial Leap, right there.

Yeah, fantastic.

Entrepreneurial leap. Go check it out. All right. So where can people go? Learn more about Rocket U Rocket Fuel University. And I know you have another book coming out that's gonna be coming out soon, Exponential Freedom. So that'll be cool to keep tabs on as well.

Yeah. So I'd say markcwinters.com for kind of everything I've got going on and then the related site is rocketfuelednow.com for everything, Rocket Fuel. And then I'm arkcwinters on pretty much all the socials. So however you want to get to me there, that's how to find me.

Perfect. Thanks so much, Mark.

Thanks, John. Great to talk to you.

Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more @smart business revolution.com and while you're there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution.

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