What a Small Business Owner Can Learn from Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to Business Boot Camp podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing with you some of the things I've learned recently from some of the greats of our of our era in business and entrepreneurship, including Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Before we jump into those though, I want to say a big thank you to sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't Already, go to gusto.combootcamp for a free 90 day trial, three month trial of their software. And what Gusto is going to allow you to do is pay your people in a very transparent way where they can see what's going in, what's going out. You do direct deposits, run your payroll through there and save money on either A, your current software and B, the time it takes to sometimes go back and figure things out and ask an accountant. All of those things can be much, much more lean, much, much more simplified by going to Gusto.com Bootcamp, run your payroll through there and let what you think about it. But I promise you and many other people have come to find that Gusto is a very simple solution and fantastic for the small business owner like you. So before we get into today's show, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for listening, for all your support recently, a lot of your questions and emails and all of that. It's been fantastic. I really appreciate that. But today I wanted to talk about basically at the beginning of this year, one of the things I wanted to do was read the autobiographies of three of kind of the legends of the last couple decades of in business. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, now co founder or founder of SpaceX or so Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, the Boring Company, Apple. Apple was Steve Jobs creation. He's now passed away. And then of course we have Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Blue Origin, which is a space company, as well as Amazon, a little company called Amazon, which is housed a couple hours from where I live here in Seattle. So at the beginning of the year I wanted to read their books. They're all long books. And so I was like, I'm not really good at books, number one. So I have to listen to audio books. And then to try to fit that much time in is not easy as well. So it's something I've been wanting to do for the past five, six months and I got it done before the mid mark of the year. So I'm pretty happy about that. But I wanted to see. The main reason I wanted to actually read their book is cause so many people comment on them. And a lot of people ask me what I think about them or the way they've done certain things. And usually I just kind of pass and don't talk about it. Cause I don't know. So I wanna just kind of educate myself and learn from their experiences, learn from their life. And I learned a lot of things. What not to do, what to do, things like that. And some of the things, honestly, I would say that I'm not willing to sacrifice or be that way, even if it led to the success that they had. So I don't care if I'm going to put people in space. I'm not going to be an absolute idiot to my employees or to my family. Like, those things are just. By no means by me talking about these business legends am I condoning their poor behavior, whether it be in family, around people and things like that. And so for many reasons, I would never want to be like them. But I think from a business standpoint, when I look at their lives and their autobiographies and what they've done in business, there's a lot I can learn from it. And so that's. This is the Business Bootcamp podcast. This is not like People magazine where we talk about their lives. So I'm gonna strictly focus on what I learned from a business point of view, because there's plenty of things to pick apart in their personal life. The way they treated people. The way they treat people. So those things I'm not gonna really talk about, I don't really care about. This is a business show, and those are the things that I was learning about by reading their autobiographies. And so what I found really interesting, I learned so much. I'm gonna talk about four things I wrote down real quickly about some of the things that popped out to me in there in reading these books and things that I kind of personally took away from it. I think if you read them, you'd probably take away total different things. There's probably 20 things that if I really sat down, I could think about, but these are the four that kind of came to my mind right away that I will kind of take away from reading these over the past few months. And so I wanted to share those with you. So, like I said, a lot of these have to do with me personally. The things that I learned and have to. Then that has to be brought to the filter of My mistakes, my failings, the things I'm not very good at, the things I am good at, my strengths and things like that. And so I wanted to just kind of share those things with you all. So number one is I feel like there's two ways to really motivate your employees. And number one, that is to scare them, or number two, it is to inspire them. And I feel like all three of these people that Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, they all inspired their employees to an enormous level by having a great mission, a way that they saw the world, and the way they wanted to change the world for the betterment of humanity, for the betterment of the company, for the betterment of their employees. And so they basically inspired people to do great things. And for the most part they did that. But they also did use some level of literally scaring people into submission in their. In terms of when they're first starting out, like doing things, saying things maybe aren't politically correct, maybe screaming at employees, like things that I would probably never do. But I think it was good for me to read it because I tend very much to lean on. Like, I want everyone to feel good. I want everyone to be happy. My employees, I don't want them to get them.

I want everyone just be happy. And so that's probably my failing as a leader many times, is that I don't bring the law down. I don't just tell people, hey, look, this is my business. I'm running it the way I wanna run it. And.

I am the one that governs the mission statement where this company's going. I pay the bills, and you're gonna do it the way I want it to be done. And.

There'S a place and time for that. And there's a place in time for the way that I generally am, which is hear everybody out, take everyone's opinion, test things out, listen to what everyone el talking about.

And then get their reactions and then make a decision. And whereas I found with many times with these entrepreneurs, there were times that they were just blatantly going forward. And if people didn't align with that mission, people didn't align with what they thought the company should do. They literally just chopped them, they fired them, they got rid of them, they moved on. And I found it very fascinating that all three of them had these characteristics. And it's something that I still need to work on. I tend very much, like I said, I tend very much to really listen to employees. Maybe it's cause I'm like A millennial or whatever. And I want to hear people's opinion. I want them to feel good. I want them to not have conflict in the workplace. On the other hand, I need to balance that out with the fact that I have a certain mission. If people aren't aligned with that, I just need to let them go. And I don't care if they get mad at me or if they don't like me, and just let them go and not get so wound up in the feeling side of things and the emotional side and just focus strictly on the business and the mission. And if people aren't gonna align with that, they gotta go. And there's that balance, because I don't feel like that should be the primary way to run a business. I don't feel like you need to scare people by hanging their job over their head all the time by saying, if you don't align with our mission or what I'm thinking or how I want things to be done, that you're gonna lose your job. And so there's that balance of inspiring people by scaring them and.

Inspiring them. And I tend much more to lean towards trying to inspire people, trying to have a mission that's bigger than anything else, trying to have a mission that bigger than your competitors so you attract great talent having a mission that is going to change the world. Like, Steve Jobs wanted to put a dent in the universe. He wanted to create, you know, put a thousand songs in your pocket and all of these things that basically, you know, the reason people get so up, you know, you know, so encouraged and so inspired by Elon Musk is because he wants to, like, go to space and he wants to colonize Mars, and then he wants to, like, solve the energy issues with Solar City and, like, creating renewable energy. Then he wants to create a vehicle that's an electric vehicle that's cost effective and that can travel around the country for free using charging stations that are ran by solar system. And, like, and then he wants to dig tunnels across the country and have faster transportation. And so, like, people are inspired by that. And so that's why many people stayed at SpaceX, even though after, like, three failed attempts of the Falcon 5, they literally, the SpaceX was one launch away. If the fourth attempt had not. Had not worked out, we probably wouldn't even be talking about them today, because they were that close to going under. But I feel like the reason their employees stayed with them, the reason the employees stayed with Elon and supported him, is because he had a goal. He had an aspiration. He had something, a mission that he was going for that was greater than themselves, it was greater than their little lives and what they were going through. And so when you can get your employees and inspire them to something that's greater than what they're doing, their day to day job and what the menial, somewhat, the seemingly menial tasks that they're doing, if you can get a mission that they're going for, a goal that drives them, I feel that's very powerful. And so it's not so easy. This is the part that I was thinking about. It's not so easy to use that method when you're doing something that seems very, very menial or seems very, very like it's not gonna impact the earth, it's, it's not gonna impact humanity. It's not gonna make a massive impact on society or your local area or anything like that. And so I think it's very easy to be like, okay, well that's easy for Elon Musk because he's trying to like colonize Mars and like change the way we drive cars. But on the other hand, I think it's very important that if you look at the micro of your business and figure out what are you doing to change the lives of your customers. And this is one thing that all three of these people, these business leaders talked about and thought about is the customer, the end consumer. And I think if we actually think about our end consumer. So for instance, landscaping and lawn care, that's not great, it's not amazing. There's thousands, hundreds of thousands of other companies that can do what we do. But then how do you inspire, how do you inspire your employees to even care? How do you inspire your employees to want to go beyond, go the extra mile and do something extra for the client and think outside the box and really perform the job with pride. And how do you do that? Well, if you take it back to the customer for the customer, if you actually look at it like if we're doing landscaping for a customer's property and we're mowing their lawn.

Their little heaven is like their property, their flowers and their lawn and having the trees just right, that's their little heaven. And we are literally caring for their safe place. When they go out from that place to work and school and they go do things, they might be running a business, they might be running a family and taking their kids all these places, but when they can retreat and come back to their safe haven, we're taking care of that place, that place that they want to look beautiful and be proud of and have peaceful moments with their family. And memories are made in that place. Like that's something you can get inspired about. Something that we are maintaining the heaven for our customers. Their little heaven, their little haven of rest is outside of their life of business and hectic work schedules and school and stress, all of those things. They can retreat back to the place that we create for them and we maintain for them. That's a little bit more inspirational. So I think we can all look at our business, take it back to what our customers needs are, and then get a goal, a mission, something that we can inspire our employees with that's bigger than themselves. So number one thing is, like, I really realize that there's two ways to motivate employees. Number one is to scare them. Number two is to inspire them. There's a little bit of the scaring part I need to work on. And I don't mean like, I don't like using the word scare. It's not really a good word. But there is a portion of that I probably need to work on. And then two, inspiring your employees with something that's bigger and better than what they're doing on a day to day basis and get them to think ahead of what the day to day grind is. Number two is I really found that they all went out and got their money first. They got that figured out first. They got some sort of money first. And what I mean by that is like Elon, he didn't start off with Tesla. He started off with Zip2, which was an Internet company. And it basically was kind of like MapQuest and would do like reviews and like, of different local, like pizza shops and show people where to go, what their closest pizza shop was. And local, kind of like map, kind of like MapQuest. And that's what he originally started with his brother. And that's where he made his money. He sold that for millions of dollars to Compaq, and that's where he originally made his money. And then he went on to make X.com, which became PayPal. When he sold PayPal, that's really when he made his money. And that's the money he then used to launch Tesla, SpaceX and make all these ventures, at least start them. And so I find, and you know, same thing with even Steve Jobs at a very micro level. When he got his first job at Atari making video games, he got a special project and made $5,000 to make a video game. And he, I think, gave like 350dol of that to Steve Wozniak to actually create the game. And so with that, money is then what he used to get parts to then start building the first computer later called Apple. And so I feel like many, many times young entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs, are wanting to get into the game of making the next Apple, not realizing that they had some sort of a foundation financially. And so think it's very easy to look at all these great entrepreneurs and people are making great changes in the world and starting these startups and starting these companies, starting out of a garage, all these things. However, I think if you actually take it back, most the time for a company that's bootstrapped and for a business that is invested in by the founder, significantly, the founders originally made money somewhere else and many times not in things that are super elaborate or fancy or shiny. Like Jeff Bezos started Amazon selling books. And once he became successful at selling books, then he became Amazon what it is today. And with massive logistics and, you know, all the shipping and selling, just about everything and anything in the world is on Amazon. But it all started with something simple, books. And once they figured that out, then they begin to grow and scale and do things that are amazing. And so I feel like many times small business owners, we can be like, oh, we're just starting, but I feel like getting your money right in the beginning is super important. So for me, like, I'm still super young. I'm, you know, don't have a lot of experience. I'm running Augusta Lawn Care Services. We've scaled it for five years, got the business model down, now we're franchising. But like, in five, probably 10 years, like, Augusta Lawn Care is not my end game. It's the thing I get my money right and I get and I hone my skills. And I think for a lot of not just young entrepreneurs, but new entrepreneurs, we have to realize this is a long game. This is gonna take years for you to get actually the experience and the money required. If you have the audacious plans and goals to go change the world and make an amazing startup, an amazing business, like does a technological revolution, if you have massive goals and ambitions for that, I would recommend being humble enough to figure out that and realize that you're gonna have to go hone your business skills and get your money right, stack away a couple million dollars, stack away enough money to go do the thing that you are passionate about. Maybe you don't want to change the world or technological innovation, but maybe you want to only have to work 20, 30 hours a week. Maybe you want to travel more, maybe you want to get into an industry that you're really passionate about. But before you do that, you go and you get the business skills and you go get the money that you need to have the foundation for that next venture. So I'm super passionate about health. I'm super passionate about like global health and things like that. But I'm not going to go right now and go make the next, you know, app that is going to be able to test for certain types of diseases in Africa. Like, I don't have the money for it, but what I can do is get the business skills, the leadership skills and the money required by spending my 20s by building up this thing called Augusta Lawn Care. In an industry that's not very cool. No one really cares about it. It's just lawn care, just landscaping, everyone can do it. And trying to figure out how to way to disrupt that industry before I move on to something that's much bigger and will have probably a bigger impact on the world. But for now, I gotta focus on the thing that's gonna make an impact as small as the lawn care and landscaping industry. And when I say small, I take that, take that with a grain of salt. Cause I think it's a big deal what we're trying to do with Augusta. So, you know, and it's all started small, you know, five, five little over five years ago, I started Augusta Lawn Care. And I started off solo by myself part time, you know, then it grew into where I got a couple employees and now it's like, okay, we have a solid business mall now we're franchising. This time next year, there'll probably be, I don't know, 20 locations of Augusta Lawn Care around the country. You know, two years, maybe 150, I don't know. But like there's that slow progression, that growth, each of those steps along the way I'm going to learn, I'm going to grow, I'm gonna figure things out. And then one day it'll be better for the franchisees and for the business that I'm not the one running it and that someone else takes over. And when I sell, that money will then be used to go to the next venture. And so I just saw that continual pattern with these business leaders that they got their money right, they figured something out. And usually in an industry that wasn't super cool or super interesting, and they maybe didn't even make that their main in life, but.

That was their stepping stone. That was the thing. They figured out the money, they figured out their business skills, and then they went on to grow and build on that foundation. Third thing I realized, and I learned when reading their books is risk. I think risk is part of the game when it comes to entrepreneurship. One thing that amazed me is their level of risk tolerance was absolutely incredible. The amount of times that they literally were going to go bankrupt or they were, like, days away from paying payroll, from not being able to make payroll with very little cash in the bank. Like, I. I don't have a huge amount of risk tolerance at the end of the day. Like, some people would laugh at that because I have multiple businesses and I have ran down to where there's not money in the bank and things like that. However, I'm not the type. Like, for me, the biggest stress is if I had. If I had investors and I get and they gave me money, like, I would not be able to sleep if I was not on a path, a very confident path to returning their money back to them. I would not. Like, I just want to be a handle. Same thing with loans. Like, I would just, like, if I'm not on a very clear path to profitability, it would be very hard for me to take people's money and promise, like, and take personal loans and. And even promise employees stock options when I don't know if they're actually going to vest. Like, so their level of tolerance of risk was enormous. Like, there's one that actually stands out to me. Tesla. This is back in 2012, when Elon Musk was literally a day away from, like, payroll was the next day. He didn't have enough money to make it. But what he had done the week before is what happened is to make a reservation for a Tesla car, you can put, like, a $5,000 reservation down, right? But what was happening is people were not actually buying the car. They were just making the reservation, but then they weren't buying the car. They, number one, they wanted to wait for new features that were promised. Two is that people weren't really even confident Tesla was gonna be around in five years to maintain the vehicle. And so literally had all these $5,000 reservations but no actual orders. And so they actually shut down the Tesla factory for a week. And to the media and everyone else, they just said that, hey, we were doing this for maintenance. We need to do all these scheduled maintenance things on the factory. But in reality, they didn't have any cars to make because there wasn't enough sales to keep the factory busy. And so what Elon did is he knew that the company was on life support, he knew that they need to make sales. So he had all his engineers, all the people that worked on other like machinists, all those people good on the phone, and start calling these people that had reservations and asking them to actually buy and actually like selling them on the phone. And so what happened is they end up selling like 500 vehicles that week. And that was enough for them to get the money and generate the first profitable quarter of Tesla's history. Thereby, like the stock just went to the moon. And that actually is what created, prevented Google from acquiring Tesla for like $6 billion back in 2012, is literally that one week when they were that close to going under and that call was made to get on the phone, make these sales, and literally they were two days away from not making payroll. And same thing with SpaceX. Like I said before, they had failed mission after failed mission after failed mission, and they were running out of cash. And if they wouldn't have gotten that last fourth mission accomplished, they wouldn't have been able to secure the government $1 billion or $3 billion deal that then they secured the funding to actually continue with the projects and continue with SpaceX. There's a good chance, like I said, if that fourth mission would not have gone well, if it would have failed, they wouldn't have got the government contract. We might not be talking about SpaceX today if that would have been the case. And so I find it amazing the amount of ups and downs in all of their, their businesses, even after times like in 2012, 2013, when you think it's like, oh, like that's only five years ago and yet literally they were on their knees financially it Tesla or SpaceX. And so I find it amazing that all these business leaders had the guts, had the fortitude when finance. Like, I'm not very good with financial stress because especially when it has to do with other people or loans or anything like that, I'm not very good at that. It's something I need better at. And I know I probably have more risk, less risk aversion than most people, but when you're gonna really change the world or like take money from investors and do something amazing, you really have to have the, the stomach to take a lot of risk and promise, make promises that you know you can keep, but go against the odds of business, go against the odds of, you know, gravity, like all these things. I thought it was amazing the amount of fortitude they had time and time again year after year, when stuff kept going bad and they just kept coming back time and time again, it was amazing. Fourth thing that I found that was important was that the CEO or the founder, all three of these business leaders, they are the heartbeat of the culture of their business. And so if you look at Elon Musk, the way that he works tirelessly, tons of hours, he expects that from his people. And that's the culture of Tesla and SpaceX. And the boring company is work, work, work, lots of hours, work on the weekend, hit deadlines, things like that. Same thing with Apple when Steve Jobs was there. And that was the culture, that was the culture that was in Bread. Same thing with Jeff Bezos. But all of those leaders, the thing I found fascinating is that at the end of the day, they all were consumed with one thing, and that was the customer, that was the consumer. And at the end of the day, the reason they were is because they were sales centric. They were always thinking about sales. They were always great at selling, whether it be selling investors, selling employees on their inspiration, the inspiring goals and aspirations they had, selling the consumer on the product, selling the media on what was going on in the business. I found that so often the greatest CEOs and the greatest founders have an innate ability to sell things. And a lot of times, in my opinion, it's selling their people on their ideas, selling people on their mission, selling people on what that product or service is going to do for them. And thereby it, it fuels the entire culture of that business to be a sales organization. Like, there's a reason why Elon Musk got all his engineers on the phone to start selling because he in himself was a salesperson. If you look at his presentations, same thing with Jeff Bezos, same thing with Steve Jobs. If you look at any Apple presentation, like the ipod of the iPhone, these are salesmen up there. These are people that are incredible at their craft of telling a story and motivating and inspiring customers and employees and staff to get around their goal and their mission, their idea, and buy their products and buy their services. And so I feel as a founder, as a CEO, that's something we gotta work on. That's something that we have to take into account that, hey, if the culture of our business is gonna be sales centric and it's gonna be customer centric, that has to be the motivation behind our goals, has to be the constant theme, the constant thing that we're thinking about is what's the consumer gonna think about and how am I gonna sell this product or service? To them. You can listen to Mike Andes on the Business Bootcamp podcast. Until next time. Be great, because nothing else.