Collin Stewart - Co-founder and CEO of Predictable Revenue

3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to another episode of Founder Journeys. We've got one of the Launch Academy network ogs. We got Colin Stewart. Colin is the CEO of Predictable Revenue. And as you guessed it, they talk a lot about revenue and they focus on revenue. We're going to dive into what the company does. But again, as I said, he's an og. He's been at Launch Academy. He was at Launch Academy basically from the very, very beginnings in 2012. And I witnessed his company go through a lot of ups and downs, a lot of changes, but he is that resilient entrepreneur that keeps going and has built a great business, a global business. Colin, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and that journey to build predictable revenue to where it is today.

Cool. Thanks for having me here, Ray. It's cool. I know you're not actually in Launch Academy, but the background is like, it's definitely bringing me back. I used to sit just over.

Well, right over my shoulder.

Yeah, just over your shoulder there. It's like that. That was my home for a number of years. And as we were just talking about Roger, one of the co founders there, used to call me the cockroach with Launch Academy, which I guess I took positive at the time. It was totally accurate. But, yeah, I don't think he meant.

It as an insult. It's more of a motivational. Like, you literally were always there and you're going through ups and downs and we're like, just. Just amazed that you just kept plugging away and you always had this positive attitude. And when I say always there, like, you were one of the first people there, as one of the last people there, helped lock up the place for me a lot. Bunch of times. Security guard for me a bunch of times.

Totally. I think the only guy that was ever there more than me in, like, my peak time was. I won't say his name, but somebody who turned out to be living in Launch Academy.

Yeah, yeah. That came out in a blog post later.

Yeah, I remember. Like, I can't, man. Like, I can't believe it. Like, not that it's a competition, but I'm a little bit competitive. I'm like, how is he always here? And I'm. And like, I'm here a lot and turns out he was living there. So that made me feel a little bit better that he's like, literally living there and I was just figuratively living there.

And for everybody listening, we do have showers and Launch Academy and so it wasn't as sketchy as you might think. We won't go into it, but that was an entertaining, entertaining discovery there. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us about you. Tell us a little bit about Predictable Revenue and the industry that you're in as well. But yeah, we do want to circle back to you and start talking about your journey.

Sure, yeah. I mean, I'm co founder, co CEO of Predictable Revenue. We're an outbound success company. Basically we help companies build outbound sales teams. I've been working lately on producing a bit of a basically building the methodology, building the formula to predictable revenue. It's been one of my goals since I got here was to really help people figure out and understand how to unlock growth in their company. And we do it particularly through outbound, like sales development. We build and train in sales development reps. If you've read the book, we're that company and we'll talk about the journey to get there. I mean, I started with Launch Academy back when it was hack hut out of Eastside Games and quite literally built the tables and disassembled all. Remember all those visit the partitions or whatnot, that whoever was in there before. And I remember vividly hating Ray because Andy and I, we basically we stayed there super, super late. Ray bought us dinner. We moved all the partitions into this one back room and Ray shows up and he's like, guys, partition is supposed to go in the other room. And this is the closest I've ever come to murder.

So that was all caveat. Though I did help. It's not like I was ordering stuff for me.

No, no, no, that's fair. And like we probably weren't listening in the first place because we were also drinking beer and screwing around and this and that. But I mean, yeah, I can attest to that too. There was the great debate over who's going to move the Deadmau 5 and spoiler alert, it was not me. I think we may raid you that.

Yes, I did. Yeah.

So, yeah.

So first of all, thank you for all that help and support. You literally are as part of the blood, sweat and tears behind Launch. But just to clarify for the audience, you didn't mishear him the book Predictable Revenue. It's an amazing book. Pick it up. By Aaron Ross. That is your co founder or sorry, your co CEO. And it is literally that book Predictable Revenue. The company is about helping outbound sales and building predictable revenue streams for your business. What does that industry look like, though? So Predictable Revenue is obviously successful, but is this like a one Off. Are you a niche or is this the way moving forward for a lot of companies?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean obviously every company needs to grow and so that's not unique. I think what's unique to us is that we bring an element of specialization and not that we are specialized ourselves. Sorry, we are ourselves. But one of my favorite pieces from the book that I didn't know Aaron, before I read the book actually in the hallway just behind you there behind make the Leap, I bumped into James Clift and he's like, hey dude, I know you're building a CRM. Have you read this book? Predictable revenue. And that's how I found out about it was just randomly bumping into James. And James, if you ask him, he'll take credit for basically founding my company for me and doing all the work. I love you James, but like that's, that's where I heard about it. And my favorite part of the book is the element of specialization. And it essentially says salespeople shouldn't prospect. You should have sales development reps, a certain specialized type of salesperson that should do the prospecting for the account execs. Now I know I'm imagining the majority of this audience is sort of founder led sales. And a common question I get if I can go on this little tangent is about, you know, what should my MVP sales team look like? Like what, what should I do first? And this is my journey. And then I was in my, in the last couple months I've been working on the formula and sort of battle testing it with some other thought leaders. And I was talking with Lars Nilsson who's running, I think one of the, if not now will be by the end of next year the largest sales development team in the world. And we were talking about early founder led sales and amongst other things. And him and I both had, he basically described my journey and that was the founder needs to close the first half million to a million dollars in ARR. And then you want to hire a sales development rep, somebody that can just prospect for you to feed you meetings and feed you meetings and feed you meetings. And once you're too busy closing deals that you can't run the company, then you hire an account exec who has management potential. So basically hire a closer who can close for you who will eventually in a year time be able to manage the, manage your account execs and your sales development reps and that person turns into your head of sales and then you just, you basically continue doing that up the scale until you get higher and higher jobs. And so that's the, that's the idea of specialization. I mean, that's. Sorry, that's the founder. That's the founder journey I followed. Now I probably stuck a little bit too long in the sales role. I hung onto sales entirely until a million dollars. I did hire a sales development rep to handle the inbound because we got a crazy amount of inbound, which is ironic for an outbound company or a company that preaches outbound. But I probably did that around the half million dollar mark. And then at the million dollar mark, I hired an AE that could manage the team and handed everything off to her. And she did a phenomenal job.

But in terms of, that's like a common challenge that a lot of founders have. It's giving up control or delegating, especially with sales, like revenue is one of the most important things for a business. And so, um, especially the founders that really get entrenched in sales, it's hard to detrench yourself and move into more of the operation side as your company grows because you're, you're afraid to let go or you're afraid to lose those sales or that momentum. But that has to happen at some point, right?

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's kind of two types of founders there. There's the type of founders that don't want to do the sales and those, those founders don't last very long. And then there's the founders that hang on for sales too long and you know, it just, it doesn't scale. So you need to kind of thread them, thread the needle. You need to be right in the middle in terms of being that sort of jack of all trades. The general idea is doing things that don't scale. Right. Like that's what you need to do as a founder, especially in the early days. And I see too many founders that want to either scale sales or outsource sales or shirk that responsibility. And I think it's the, I can't say it's the number one reason, but it's, it's been one of the biggest reasons why I've seen the companies that I've come in contact haven't really made it past, got off the ground, made it past a million bucks or $500,000 a year is because the founders don't want to take on that sales responsibility. And so, you know, it's probably, it's not the hill I would die on. But if you are a founder and you're wondering why is there no momentum here, it's because your job is to create that momentum.

Yeah. And a lot of founders that don't want to be that front facing salesperson or the face of the company need to realize that nobody knows your business better than you. And in those early stages, early days, you have to be the one that's going to sell the vision, sell the dream, sell the value propositions to those early customers. And without that, no matter who you bring on on board, they have nothing to work with. And so they need that foundation and you have to set that foundation for them.

Totally. And I think the argument against is, oh, I don't have a sales background. And I think the most important thing in sales is not a sales background, it's understanding of the customer. And as the founder, you have the deepest understanding of the customer. And as the person with the C level title in a sales conversation, especially founder CEO, in the early days you get like 150% lift on anything you say because you're the founder. So it doesn't matter if you suck at sales. If you deeply understand your customers and the problems and you can clearly articulate how you solve those and why it would be valuable to sell, then you don't really need to know how to sell. I mean, that's your framework right there. That's really all you need to know. Because in the early days you're not going to be engaged in the most intimate, delicate, high level, B2B multimillion dollar, billion dollar deals. You're going to be just getting whatever you can across the line. And generally it's not going to be starting with seven, eight figure, nine figure deals. It's going to be starting with low five figure deals. So yeah, that's where I would start.

I think you and I could probably sit there for, sit here for a couple hours talking about sales and revenue and founder challenges. But I do want to focus in on your challenges as a founder. What was your journey like? We kind of alluded to Voltage CRM. You were at Launch Academy and meeting first reading Predictable Revenue, then meeting Aaron and then kind of morphing and changing the business into what it is today. So let's talk about your journey and the ups and downs and challenges that you had to face. Sure.

And so I joined. I mean I started the company in 2012 and I was still working full time as an account exec, territory manager, area manager for a fairly large public company, but we were effectively selling diesel generators and renting. Selling, renting diesel generators, welding equipment, et cetera, et cetera and so that was eight.

That was.

Yeah, about eight years ago. Coming up on eight and a half years ago. And I think I'd spent most of my life in sales and I understood the pain and I, but I didn't under. I understood the pain of being an account exec, of being a salesperson in using certain softwares and I think I did a good job of like I thought constantly about the pain of problem. The first mistake. So I'll give you the quick journey and then I'll talk, I'll highlight like where I can, I swear. Yeah, and talk about where. Talk about where I fucked up. Because there were some like pretty serious fuck ups here. And so basically started as Vulture CRM, which was supposed to be a CRM system. It was like CRM system for the, for salespeople. And really what I was saying was I want this to be a sales enablement tool. But I couldn't quite articulate that.

Solving an itch or a problem that you had faced yourself as selling these diesel engines and generators. You were faced with these issues and you're like, there's gotta be a better way.

Totally. And I made the same boneheaded move that every early founder says makes is like the exact pain that I'm facing is felt by everybody in the same way. And basically I think if I look at like the difference between the problem space, which is like identify the problem of. Sales tools aren't built for salespeople. They're built so that managers can get their data right, which is the wrong approach. It needed to be sales tools built for salespeople to enable them to get their job done. And then there and then if you do that, you'll get better data. If I could articulate this eight years ago, I'd be multi, multi millionaire right now. Because I thrashed around trying to build a CRM system. And so I had the problem space right, but I didn't have the solution correct. And so problem space was what I mentioned. Solution space was a CRM that does all this. And every customer I ran into said, why are you, why don't you build this? They're like, why wouldn't I do this in Salesforce? Why isn't the Salesforce? And I just, I'm like, no, they don't get it. And I wrote off that these idiots, they just don't see the vision. And I was the idiot. And I didn't see reality, which was Salesforce was a dominant platform, but that didn't invalidate the problem space that I was that I, I'd been experiencing. And I think the first biggest fuck up was the fact that I, when I was, I read the, I read about product management and how you do customer development and just customer discovery. And I think the challenge I ran into was my mindset going into that. Customer discovery was really more customer validation. And it wasn't, it wasn't even customer validation. It was Collins idea validation. It was, here's this cool thing I built. Isn't it cool? And Ray's like, yeah, yeah, that's kind of cool. And then so we went out and built it and then when I came back and I was like, hey, Ray, here's what I built. Would you give me like 10 bucks a month for this? He's like, oh, no, I'm using Insightly or base or pipedrive or Salesforce. Like, ah, okay. So how did I miss the mark? Because I was totally right on the problem space. And the next iteration, like we spent 18 months on voltage this voltage CRM. I'm sure you've heard of it because, you know, all of one customer, we had a rocking 1500 bucks a month of that. I think two or three hundred dollars went to launch Academy to pay for our, our, our desk. Yeah. And I may have illegally smuggled in one or two extra people on that desk. But don't tell Ray.

Like, as you were talking to these people, you always had this bias because you were building it from your perspective of what you wanted solve for your problem that you faced back in your old job. Yep. So how did you overcome that? Like, what was the epiphany moment?

Well, there were many. Since this is a Launch Academy themed podcast, I'll highlight a conversation I had at Launch Academy again with Roger, the one, the only. And I vividly remember sitting down and he's like, colin, I can't wait until you're working on something that you can be successful at. He's like, you're working so hard. I just, I want to see you get it done. And I was just like, oh, that is such a mean thing to say. But I mean, he was right. And it was that, that like, opened my eyes to like, okay, well, maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am. And like, so I've got this formula in my head and I've made all of these assumptions that I'm not questioning, which was the idea that Salesforce wasn't important and that I could sell around that and I was very close minded or I had blind spots that I didn't realize That I was, you know, not like there was a great product opportunity in front of me and I wasn't seeing it because I had these blind spots. And I think the sort of first great value of Launch Academy was not just the network of individuals, but it was the people there to challenge me and tell me when I was being a dumb.

Yeah. And so unscripted collisions or conversations that you have that can be those epiphany moments, but it's hard to recognize them in the moment. But in this case, that did open up your eyes and you were able to kind of re examine what you're building. But what did that feel like? You were probably like a good year into it before you had that conversation. Abandoning what you're building or shutting things down is a big step. And I know Roger's point there is, as we know from our experience, it's that second or third startup that entrepreneur is building that has the greatest chance of success. And seeing somebody like you plugging away and putting in the hard hours, we know this person has the grit, this person has the no quit attitude and the die hard desire to solve a problem and build a business. He's just building the wrong business. Or she needs to find that co founder that can take it to that next level.

Yeah, I mean was like, I don't know, it's sort of like going to the dentist to get your tooth fixed. Like you're, you're not looking forward to it. It's lots of like it's painful, it's an unpleasant experience, but you know, it's the right thing so you feel good at the end of it and you know that it's like it's a good thing. And, and so yeah, that's like me.

Going to the gym or going for a run every morning. I don't want to do it, I hate it. But afterwards you feel amazing, right?

Exactly, exactly. And it's. Yeah, I mean it was those really tough conversations and there's probably like a series of like seven or eight of those key moments in my life where somebody stepped in was like, you're going the wrong way. Like you're being an idiot, you're being an asshole. You don't realize it, but you're doing X and having those people to like poke holes in your reality and like show you that you're disillusioned or you're not going the right direction. Super, super critical. And I've had opportunities where I've had plenty of those and I've had opportunities where I've had none of those. And I can tell you the biggest growth moments come from having people give you, like, make you feel bad. Not bad, but like pop your, burst your bubble, destroy your, your value prop and like, because they challenge you to like, be better and get, I don't know, they push you in the right direction. And it felt great to actually push through that. Even though it was sort of a challenging, you know, I kind of laughed and he laughed. I was like, this is, you know, one of those awkward ones. And every time I see him, I still give him a hard time about that, but in a great way. Because had he not said that, I might still be plugging away trying to build some serum that nobody wanted. And I can tell you that, you know, sort of to the next piece, which was carved at IO, it felt amazing. Suddenly I went from pushing a big rock up a hill and not making much progress and I was like, I was pushing pretty hard and then all of a sudden there was no more hill and it was rolling downhill. And I literally remember sitting in Launch academy and people are coming to me. I sat down in launch, I had a conversation with Mac and then Slavin came and heard about what we were doing through Mac and was like, hey, it sounds really awesome.

Give.

Can we, like, can we, can you do that for us? Can we buy your software?

Just take a stop here for our audience. So Voltage CRRM was the CRM system that you're originally building. Then you had this heart to heart moment and you've changed your business strategy, but you created a new company called Carb IO and Carb IO, what was the purpose of Carb IO?

What was the. It was the same, uh, vision, it was the same problem space of we wanted to build a sales tool for salespeople, specifically prospectors. A couple of things that sort of unlocked it for me was realizing that what I was trying to build was a sales enablement tool. I still thought it had to live separately from Salesforce, which in some ways I was correct, in some ways I was incorrect. Um, but I also reading Predictable Revenue and realizing the importance of prospecting and the fact that there were no tools for it. So again, it unlocked. I understood the problem space and then suddenly understood why the timing was right. Because this book had just come out a couple of years ago. Nobody, I think people in Vancouver had heard about it, but nobody actually had. I want to say Clio was the only company in town that I knew of, maybe Vizier, that had sales development teams, but most startups didn't.

Well, Everybody in the Bay Area. This was like, again, we know from traction and our network in the Bay Area, like Predictable Revenue was a very, very well respected book and kind of like a bible for a lot of sales teams out there. It just hadn't hit outside of the Bay Area yet. Like smaller markets like Vancouver and Denver and other places, they were just starting to learn about Predictable Revenue and the value that add.

Exactly. And so in some ways, I got incredibly lucky with the timing here because I had this vision and this book had just come out and suddenly it was. This vision was a lot more timely and there's a lot of things going right and working in my favor that I didn't realize. It wasn't intentional. It wasn't some genius founder was like, oh, sitting there with a spreadsheet and doing all this research. It was just, it was pure luck that I spent my time as a sales rep in the time that I did dealing with the tools that I did. And I noticed something, right? And then suddenly I read this book and that something that I noticed was suddenly way more important because I realized there's going to be a huge influx of this specific type of salesperson and there's really no tool set out there that's great for them. And so the timing was incredibly important there. And really with CARB IO, our goal is to basically capitalize and build a tool specifically, like a workflow tool specifically for sales development reps that fulfilled on that goal of being a tool that enables you to do your job better, faster and smarter. And that was the next journey and the next sort of leg of the journey. And that was a really exciting one. There was so, so like the first, the first 18 months, it was, it was like. Have you ever water skied before?

I tried that. Didn't go well, but I should try.

So the, the, the first like 12, 18 months was sort of like you're learning to water ski, but you don't have skis on yet. You're literally just hanging onto the rope, onto the rope. It's, it's not technically challenging. It's just like a matter of strength and the fact that you're just not going to give up, right? And you're just taking water in the face and then suddenly we've got traction and there's like people coming towards us. And now it was, now it was intellectually challenging, still hard, but just a different kind of hard. And we had customers, we had so many customers coming to us. I think at one point in the summer of 2014, we went from when we first launched the product and way too early with just, yeah, I made a mess of so many things and some of them were engineering problems, but they were engineering problems that I caused by decisions that I made in terms of prioritization and what to prioritize and how to build things. And like just so if I, if I'm talking about, oh, we didn't execute from an engineering perspective, I don't blame our engineering team. I blame obviously myself because it was at my direction to like don't go back and fix the, fix the bugs and don't go back and do all that refactoring. But we went from, in the summer 2014, we went from 0 to 45,000 monthly recurring revenue in about a six week period. And that was like all of a.

Sudden rocket ship growth.

Yeah, I want to say I can't remember, I haven't looked at the data recently, but I want to say peaked at like 60k or something like that, which is well on all the way to a million dollars. And that was like within two, the first couple of months. And so like, you know, I felt product market, I felt really, really strong product market fit. And I think there's sort of degrees of product market fit where like you, you know, sort of like there's zero and you don't have product market fit and there's one and you have product market fit but it's not strong. And then there's like a 10 product market fit which is like Uber or when like I was, I was part of, through our company, I was part of the Uber Eats launch and we helped them roll out Uber Eats to the top 50 cities in North America. And man, the product, their product market fit for that product was insane. Like we had a, we were running email campaigns for them and they had like a 30 to 40% response rate. And like most of the people that responded took a meeting with the salesperson. It was insane. So they're like, if the scale of product market fit is on a scale of like 0 to 10, their product market fit was like at 400, it was insane. But with carb, our product market fit, we were up at like an 8. We just didn't execute. And so the first learning was like trying to figure out how to distill an insight into a product. And that was like a huge journey there. The next piece was the tactical how do I build an engineering team? How do I make good decisions around people, around process, around technology? And I just, I didn't make the great decisions I look at what my co founder and I, Preston. Preston did a valiant job. He worked his, like, his ass off. And like, just in terms of sheer output of features and code so much. It didn't, it didn't get us there because we weren't, we didn't make the right decisions. I didn't make the right decisions at the beginning. And I'm not trying to say, you know, it was also.

Let's just say that there's also this fine balance of like the mantra back then, as you know, is fuck it, ship it, get it out there. Because the longer it takes you to get your product out into the hands of your customers, the longer it takes for you to gather data, to figure out what you did wrong and what you could change. And so hindsight 20 20, you're able to look back and see all these things that you should have done or you could have done or errors that you made. But at that time, at that moment in time, if you had waited longer, you might have missed that opportunity, you might have missed that. You would have been delayed and that chance with Uber Eats probably would never have happened because you weren't ready at that time because your whole cycle was delayed.

Yeah, I mean, fair. I think there's, there's sort of two pieces I'll point out. One is that the Uber Eats thing, that was a services thing that we did for them using our software. And then the. I think the thing that I got wrong. So if people are listening, they're like, well, what's the, what's the valuable learning here? What, what did Cullen do differently that I can learn from is. I pushed. I pushed too hard for features. I was like, I remember vividly. Honestly, I think we had this conversation for like two years. I said, preston, we send emails. We need to make phone calls. If we want to be feature parody with sales loft and outreach, we need to make. We need to incorporate the phone. And for the longest time, Preston was saying, we need to rebuild. We need a system that will actually support the users because we're an email platform and it was taking. As soon as you hit send, it would take a week to send that email. So that's why we, that's why the revenue graph looked like this dropped, jumped up to like 45 and then it did this. And then we eventually got it going again and we were able to send emails and we got it up to like 60 or 80 and then it just, it died. And, and it was because we never, we never paused and said. Everybody said, like, oh, Fuck it, ship it. But nobody said what's the minimum viable product? I thought I knew what it was, but I did a piss poor. If you talk to my customers, I did a great job of delivering a prototype that understood their needs and I did a piss poor job of delivering a minimum viable product that they could actually use. And I think that's the thing is I pushed for what I thought was the thing that was gonna get us help us be competitive and I was ignoring the thing that was gonna, that was causing churn. And the thing that was causing churn was the fact that our users couldn't send emails. So like, had I taken. And again, hindsight's 2020 and I didn't have the skills I had now. But if I was in a similar situation now, I would pause and I would give the engineering team some time to pay off that technical debt so that when we were onboarding new users, we could actually handle them because it, it, you know, like it doesn't matter if you get to product market fit. And carb had 10 out of 10 product market fit eventually, but we just couldn't execute on it. We couldn't keep the product, the platform alive. So we didn't actually ship an mvp. I think you could make the argument we didn't ship the mvp. So I think that's the learning is that I saw the vision. I didn't understand, I didn't have. And I don't mean I didn't have good people on the. I didn't have good engineering leadership advice, right? Like Preston was an amazing engineer and we didn't have like great engineering or product leadership advice. And we eventually got some. We had Joel who was amazing, Kareem who is incredible. And I didn't listen to them. So we had these people telling me these things and hey, you're doing it wrong. And this is the incorrect approach. Preston was even saying, he's like, we shouldn't be pushing for new features. We need to push to do some rebuilding. And I remember I was like, oh no. I've read Joel Spolsky and he says never refactor your code base and so don't do that. And that advice was both correct and incorrect because at that time I definitely should have gone back and invested in. Because we just forked the voltage CRM code base. We didn't rebuild, we didn't start from scratch. And so I should have done it then and I shouldn't have done it later because we started doing it, we started rebuilding it like two years ago. And it was already too late. We'd already missed the opportunity and we spent a year on that rebuild and never shipped it anything. We went with all this, like, fancy evented architecture and using all these cool tools that were awesome, never shipped. So, like, I made the same mistake on both sides of the coin in two different scenarios. Um, so I think the, the learning there is like, what is like really, if, if I'm doing it again, I'd really make sure I define what is my IC like. Sorry, what is my minimum viable product and like usable also gets to.

Prior to that is is having good, thorough customer discovery and then talking to your customers. And you probably would have learned that, okay, all these things and that I think are important are just not important unless the client can ship their email. And so you want to discover that before we jumped onto the podcast here or the, the notion of business coaches and when to engage them. And so like you said, you had good, solid advice, but you weren't willing to listen to them or you took their advice but did your own thing. How do you tell another young entrepreneur or whatnot to. To check their ego or check their vision and start listening to coaches and mentors, advisors.

Yeah, this is, this is a delicate one because in some ways you're never going to make it unless you have more experienced people telling you when you're right, when you're wrong. On the flip side, there are so many people that want to sell services to startups and they come hawking, oh, I've got decades of this and why experience. And I've got some horrible advice. I had somebody who is like a consultant and they're like, oh, no, definitely don't do the merger with Aaron Ross. If you just operationalize this, you'll do way better. And like you should, you could just raise money on your own and yada, yada, yada. And it was the worst advice. And so find people that you can trust and generally start with one person that you know that's. You know that you can, that you trust and ask for a referral to somebody that they trust and literally build your network out that way. And you need to have people that know sales, engineering, product operations, finance. You probably need at least one of those for, for sort of each. And if you're early, you don't need a board. Later stage, you definitely want a board and you should have somebody that understands each of those intimately. But in the early days, it's very easy to reach out and understand and like, they, they don't need to be paid Consultants, the number of like mentors and free help and free advice that I've gotten either through Launch Academy or somebody I met at Launch Academy or asking for referrals or just hitting people up on LinkedIn, it's been insane. I've had like, on average, if you average it out, I've probably had two calls a week over eight years with experienced people.

And I think that's a very clear differentiator from a lot of other people. A lot of people will gather names and they'll put people, hey, I've got all these people on my board of advisors put on a pitch deck and have all these LinkedIn connections, but they don't actually ever reach out to these people. Or if they do, it's for a superficial reason. It's not to actually get advice. And if you really want advice, you have to execute against that advice and go back for more advice and feedback on the execution. And so it's a cycle and people drop off, they don't commit to connecting with their advisors. It's a two way street. Like the advisor has to be there to keep giving the advice. We had conversations with other people on our show about paid coaches, business coaches, where there's accountability and you know, they gotta be there and it's more structured process compared to like a mentor advisor. But regardless of who it is, you have to be engaged and you have to want to be part of that feedback loop. Give them the results and let them tell you what they think.

Totally. And like you said, you need to not just engage them, but you need to be open to listening to what they're saying. And like, you need to be selective with who you trust. But when you do trust somebody, you need to listen to them and they need to be able to influence you, otherwise you're wasting your time. I've had so many conversations with entrepreneurs all around, all over the place and some will reach out and I, I can tell that they're listening. I can, I can see it in that, the, in how they're responding, that they're open to what I'm saying. And the ones that, that aren't like, I'm, like we're literally just wasting our time here because I can tell you're not listening. I can tell you just want to fight with me on these things. And so you either respect my opinion and my advice or you don't. And like your advisors aren't going to be right all of the time, they're probably going to be wrong a good deal of the time. And You've got to sort of judge when somebody has a real accurate picture of the scenario of the situation you're in and you have to make that call. But yeah, I think if I look back to the biggest mistakes I've made and things that I could have done better and will do better next time, it's finding the right, finding people I trust and listening to them.

That's probably one of the most critical things when it comes to working with advisors is having trust both ways, two way street, but also the willingness to learn. Nobody knows your business better than you. That's hands down that advisor mentor. No matter who it is, they don't live and breathe your business like you do. But at the same time, as you pointed out, if your advisor mentor is giving you advice and it's just going right over your head or you're closed off, you don't want to listen, they're not going to be engaged moving forward. Like I know from my perspective, I sit with so many entrepreneurs if they're not listening to me. Okay, great. You got your 30 minutes today. Very unlikely. That may give you another 30 minutes because I got 20 other entrepreneurs that want my advice that will probably sit there and have a proper dialogue with each other. And it doesn't necessarily have to be just sit there and yes, yes, yes, take raise advice, have a two way dialogue. Tell me why you don't think these are going to work. Educate me more about your business, more about what you're learning and then I might be able to chime in with other aspects. Colin, this has been an awesome dialogue and conversation. Like I said, I think you and I could probably sit for hours talking. I want to wrap this up with two specific questions. The first one is a tool, app or resource that has been extremely valuable for you as an entrepreneur in your journey that you think our audience should know about.

Yeah. So I'm going to give you a different answer. I'm going to answer that question differently because I feel like too many times people have a pain. They've got, there's something they're stuck on and it's too easy. They take the easy route and they say I'm just going to buy a tool because mentally I feel like I'm solving the problem if I spend some money on it. But that's never the case case. And so the actually I'm going to totally cheating. I'm going to have three books. The first book that every entrepreneur should read that's Managing People is Extreme Ownership and that's basically the it sets you the mindset that everything, every decision in the company, every action in the company is your responsibility. And not that you need to micromanage, but you need to own the outcome of those results. Even if you weren't the individual that was running them and you weren't responsible for doing them, you were responsible and accountable for putting that individual in that seat, giving them the training they need, giving them the sort of operating system that they had. And so you need like that, that one concept, that idea has been super instrumental in how I work with my team, how I see the business. And it's helped me so much. It's a bigger lift mentally. Cause it means you actually have to own up to the shit. Um, but it helps you sort of. It's that moment in the matrix and you take the red pill or the blue pill and you take the. I can't remember which one he takes, but you take one of the pills. Now you, now you see into the matrix and you're like, oh, crazy. Like when you, when you look at it through that lens, it's real. It's a real eye opener. The second one, if you're hiring who, the book is from the author of Top Grading. If you're hiring people, you need to be following the who process. The book is like 10 or 20 bucks. Go buy that book, follow that process. It was an entire game changer. Literally. Implementing that meant we hired better people. That stayed like it doubled the life, instantly doubled the average lifetime of an employee and customer. And then the third book is for when you get a little bit bigger. Once you hit the say 1 to $2 million range, you should be thinking about this, but it's still a worthwhile read when you're sub a million. I read it back then and I didn't get it and I didn't understand why it'd be important. And that would be. There's a couple of different books, but it's traction. It's about the EOS entrepreneurial operating system. And we've recently implemented it. We're at about 50, 60 people. And it's been a game changer for us just in terms of how we run the company. Yeah, it's cut down costs because we're a lot more efficient, we see the world better. I've got better information, everybody's better aligned. We're doing a better job with our customers. So we're about a year into that journey. It's going to take time because there was some baggage of us not doing things correctly. And again, we haven't adopted it entirely blindly, but there's some really great concepts in there around getting your values aligned and how to come up with your values to how to run meetings with the L10s to. The thing that was most impactful on us was probably the L10s but also the how you like, basically how you plan and run the business from like planning and yeah planning perspective. Like we were doing OKRs before and we switched to this because OKRs are sort of just one piece of like, okay, every quarter you got to do this. Whereas EOS provides the like, here's the journey, here's the things that you do every month, every three months, every year. And that's the piece I loved about it. Now it's not going to be right in all instances, but we now we're spending time working on our products and innovating on our products and our services as opposed to like how we run the company, which has been tremendous.

Especially when you start getting in that over 50 headcount. You need to have the structure in place.

Yeah, I wish I did it at 20 or 25 people. Would have been way more helpful. Not way more helpful. It would have been exceptionally helpful had we started it then.

Colin, it's been awesome conversation. You've been really generous with your time and the advice and insight and transparency of the journey. We're now at that point where it is your turn to put in your call to action. What can our audience do for you?

Yeah, I mean if you're, if you're looking for advice on sales and growing a company, hit us up. Follow us, Follow us. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. I go live on there pretty much every Thursday. It's sometimes it's somebody else in the company, but we're live on there every Thursday answering questions, doing stuff like this. We bring on great guests. We do like mini webinars. Got tons of great content coming out on the YouTube channel. So follow us there and if you need a hand building a sales development team, feel free to reach out. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Name is Colin Stewart. I'm sure Ray. I'll throw a link somewhere.

Yeah, we'll have the links up. But definitely like you're one of the companies that has consistent content out there on YouTube. You're on there, you're actively on there. There's lots of valuable content and actual content. That's one of the most things, most important things. It's, it's a lot of times people talk about things that are just high level or, or superficial you guys get into things that you can actually turn around and implement your business right away, and that's super valuable.

Thanks, Ray. That's the goal.

Awesome. Colin, thanks for joining us on Founder Journey. We'll hopefully see more from predictable revenue online.

Right on, man. It's great to see you again.

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