Scott Duffy Talking About What I Would Do If I Had To Start Over

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to what NOW with Scott Duffy. I want to welcome you this morning. It is Thursday. Cannot believe it's Thursday. What a week it's been. And we have so much to talk about today, so much to go over. It has been such a busy 24 hours and I am really looking forward to joining all of you today. Again, this is Scott Duffy and we're going to give this just a couple of minutes to propagate across the Internet. We're coming to you Live on Facebook, YouTube, on Periscope.

On Apple TV on Roku and so many other places. And again, I just want to say thank you. By the way, if this is your first time to join our show, if you can please drop your name in the stream from wherever you are, the business you're in, maybe the biggest challenge that you're having today, I want to do everything I can to help shape this show around you. We're going to have a shortened show today. I have to head back up to Los Angeles, but I wanted to make sure to come on because I have a really important lesson I want to share and some important news as well. So again, if you're joining right now for the first, good morning to you joining for the first time or you just, you're one of the old crew, please come in and say hello, your name, the industry you're in, what you're working on, biggest challenge you're having. And we'll make sure to get to all of that today. And we're about to get ready for radio here. We got just a minute.

And here we go.

Good morning. My name is Scott Duffy and this is WHAT NOW with Scott Duffy, presented by SAP Concur. I want to welcome you from wherever you're listening. You can tune in each day at 10am Pacific to watch the live broadcast on YouTube and Facebook or download the podcast. Now, this show is for entrepreneurs, small businesses and those thinking about starting their own company. It's for people affected by this economy. Maybe they lost their job, they lost their business, they were furloughed or they saw their consulting contracts canceled. It's for people asking, what do I do now and how do I come out of this crisis even stronger? Our focus today is on what you need to know to start a business during pandemic protests and uncertain times. Again, what you need to know. We're going to talk about the first three steps that you need to take to start a business during pandemic protests and uncertain times. And our special guests I've mentioned throughout the week on Monday, we start a new show format. We plan to start that earlier this week, but with all of the protests taking place across the country, it's affected a handful of the people that we were planning to bring on. And so we decided to push until, until next week. Now, next week, each day we're going to have a special guest and we're also going to be bringing people into the show where we're doing what we call hot seat masterminding, which basically means we want to talk to you about your business, who you are, what it is that you're working on, maybe the biggest challenges that you're having in your business, the biggest goals that you have so that we can work together, me and you and our guests, to help you to try and come up with answers and solutions and hopefully get what you want faster with far less capital than you ever imagined. So we'll be working on that starting next week. Now, I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it's been 12 weeks today. 12 weeks today. Three months since the model of the whole world shifted on this 12 weeks ago today that the market crashed, which is so crazy. As a country, what have we done during the last three months? We've sheltered at home for weeks to slow the spread. We entered the biggest recession of our lifetime. We've seen unemployment, business closures and bankruptcy filings hit all time record numbers. In fact, some crazy stuff. Unemployment claims today hit 43 million across the United States, 43 million in unemployment claims. But what's really crazy is that while we have news like that about unemployment, we've seen all the protests this week and all the disruption. The stock market today, the NASDAQ actually hit an all time high, which is just kind of mind boggling when you think about it. The stock market went from losing to a bunch of percentage points when the market crashed initially three months ago to gaining all of that traction back and actually passing its all time high as of this morning. Which is just absolutely, it's just crazy when you think about it. It's like there's two different economies. There's the Wall street economy, this Wall street economy that we see today, and then there's this economy that 99.9% of the rest of us are experiencing, particularly small business owners. And so it's just really interesting to contrast now today again, I'm going to share some ideas with you. I'm going to give you three ideas, three things I think you need to do today. The most important things you need to do today, if you're planning to start a business during this, during this period. But before we get to that, I want to shift to some good news. I just want to shift to good news because I think we need more good news today. And what I'm committed to doing, we're bringing on a show producer right now, is sharing with you every day a segment where all we do is talk, talk about great stuff. All we do is talk about good news. Because there's so much negativity outside going on around us. I think it's so important. So some good news today. First of all, more of America is opening up, which is great to see here at Orange County. I'm in Newport beach today. We saw a bunch of restaurants and a bunch of other businesses open yesterday that hadn't been opened over the weekend. That is great news. The NBA today announced it is restarting its season on July 31, with the season ending October 12. So for all of you sports fans like me, it is so cool. It's so exciting to see that the NBA is going to be back, which means that other sports leagues are going to come back. And it's interesting how they're going to do it instead of having kind of like the Lakers, that's my team, instead of the Lakers playing at Staples center, all of the teams are going to go down to Orlando, Florida. They have a tournament type of thing that they're setting up, which is going to lead to a playoff and finally a championship in October. And so it's cool to see that sports leagues are getting started back up. Also in the news today here in Southern California, we're getting word that schools are planning to reopen in the fall, which is so cool. My daughter, she's in middle school. She's actually in elementary. She was supposed to be graduating this month from the sixth grade in the middle school. It's a big stage of life. She was really, really happy and really excited. They had all kinds of really cool, traditional things that her class would do that the sixth grade class would do every year. Kind of a rite of passage. And all that got canceled, which really sucks. But the good news is that it looks like everyone is going back to school. And today Anthony Fauci, from a national perspective, also said that he thinks it will be a good idea for people to go back in the fall. So that is really super cool and exciting and exciting to see. Also, it feels like we've started at least here in Southern California to see a shift in protesting, which is another great story and a great win because I'LL tell you, those first few days were awful. Being somebody who's in Southern California, who lives up in LA most of the time, you know, there's so much going on in so many cities that, you know, I may not know what you're going through in Seattle or San Diego or Washington, D.C. because I'm so focused on what's happening here. And what I know is that where we live in Los Angeles, one block alone on that first day had over 88 businesses that were destroyed in our small little neighborhood. There were literally over 400 businesses that were destroyed and looted in those first two, three days. It was crazy. We're a mile and a half away from the main police station in the area. So it sounds like it's just constant 24 hours. Lights, sirens, screaming, helicopters. It's been really crazy. So yesterday we. A couple days ago I decided to leave LA and head back down to my place in Newport Beach. This is where my kids are. So I got down and yesterday morning, woke up, went, okay. So we're kind of away from all of that being like at the heart of all that in la. We're going to at least be able to catch a breath today and be able to refocus because it's been so hard to focus on anything.

Go to Starbucks at six o' clock in the morning and the person at Starbucks who I know, she's writing on the windows that they're closing early. Why are they closing early? Because it just so happens that there's four protests yesterday scheduled in Newport Beach. In fact, one of them was right across the street from my house. And so again, it's just like you can't seem to get away from it now. Here's the thing. What's cool is how cool the protests were. And what seems to be happening at least here in Southern California, is we're starting to see. We're starting to see that these protests. And by the way, that Naja, that is such a great point. The protests are one thing, right? I got to separate this. The protest and the looting are two different things. What we found in our personal experience firsthand was those first few days, the protest kept turning into something that was much different because of people that came in that weren't part of that beautiful protest. And, and, and we saw we were a part of some really scary things that were happening. Anyway, yesterday was really awesome. It was really chill, it was really beautiful. The energy was incredible. At the ones that were outside in la, it seems like something has shifted the looters a Lot of the violent stuff seems to be moving away. The police seem to be getting a handle. The people seem to be policing in a way that is so cool. And it is so, to me, so exciting, so compelling, so amazing to see so many people coming out to support, to support this cause. But I do want to say this. You still got to be careful if you are in or around any of the protests that start in a totally peaceful way. And everyone who's there has the best intention. You never know who's going to show up. So yesterday again, we had four protests here in Newport. A lot of kids were out here in Newport, very family oriented in a lot of these here in Newport. But then what happened? Somebody got in their car and tried to actually drive through the biggest group of people and run people down out of nowhere. And then what happened? About an hour later, somebody ends up getting in an argument with somebody and pulls a gun here in Newport. And so again, we just have to be really careful. And by the way, that sense of being careful that we have at something like this, like a protest, we have to carry that same sensibility on to our interactions with people every day. They could be our friends, they could be our family, our customers, they could be our prospects. Because what happens is people right now, many people are so on edge, there's so much pressure, there's so much going on inside of them and around them that their fuses are a little bit shorter. And because fuses are a little bit shorter, we just need to make sure that we keep a level head. We know when to step back, we know when to remove ourself from a situation. And we know that if somebody seems like they're upset, they're short with us, they're a little bit more on edge, it probably has nothing to do with us, and just give them a mulligan. I think that's so, so important today.

So let's just get right into it. As I look today at this economy and I talk to people about what's going on and how it's impacting their businesses, as I talk to entrepreneurs who are starting new companies, and these are people that in many cases they may have had an existing business that was forced to close, or they're pivoting or adapting their new business, or they're people that were unemployed or furloughed, they were laid off or they were furloughed and they're trying to figure out where to start. What I want to do is I want to share with you three simple ideas today. Three Things I think that you really need to keep in mind if you are starting or pivoting a company so important, particularly in this market. The first is this. When starting a business, the last thing that you should be thinking about. Actually, let me say a different way. When starting a business, the first place to start has absolutely nothing to do with business. And you see, here's what I've learned in my career is this. It's that I used to think that the number one job that any entrepreneur had, the number one thing that we had to do as business leaders was be like a good manager, a good leader, be incredible at articulating a vision and getting people behind us, raising capital, all these different business things. But what I've learned in my career is this, that the most important thing about business has absolutely nothing to do with business. The most important thing that you have to do is learn how to protect yourself. So if things take longer than planned, they don't go as planned. They go sideways. You can recover and, and you can bounce right back. I'll tell you a story. So I'm a person that is like, I am a huge, like, fan of space travel. I'm the geek. I am totally the geek that gets on YouTube when I want to chill out. And I type in space shuttle, and I will watch every single one of those space shuttle takeoffs, one after another after another. I turn up the speakers, I listen to the sound of the engine. I watch it from this view and that view and the pilot's view. I love space flight. I want to go to space so bad. And I remember I always wanted to meet an astronaut because I wanted to ask one question. And here's the question. So if you watch a spacecraft like the space shuttle back in the day come back into the Earth's orbit, they're trying to land, here's what happens. There's a moment where for about seven minutes, that's what it is, seven minutes. What happens is that space shuttle is completely surrounded by a ball of fire. When it hits the atmosphere at that speed, it's completely surrounded by a ball of fire. And so I've always wanted to ask what that's like. A few years ago, I had a chance to do. Do it. A few years ago, I had an opportunity to meet a space shuttle commander. Actually the commander of more space shuttle flights than anyone else. And I asked him, I said, I have a question. I said, when you are coming down, you're landing back here on Earth, and you're completely surrounded by that ball of fire. I said, are you, like, just freaking out? Because I know I would be. And the commander looked at me and he started to laugh. And he said, actually, he said, when that happens, he said, you can see it. He said, you know what? You're in. He said, but I'm so busy at that time. I'm looking down. And he said, I'm looking at my equipment, and I'm, like, steering up, flying the ship. I'm so busy, I really don't even know or pay attention to what's going on. He said, but there's a moment right before that happens where things get a little bit tricky. I said, what's that? He said, when I land the space shuttle, he said, scott, I want you to picture this. He said, I am flying over 20,000 miles an hour. Get this, 20,000 miles an hour, upside down and backwards. And my job as commander at 20,000 miles an hour is to flip the shuttle all the way over upside down. And he said, and picture this. He said, picture, at the tip of the nose of a space shuttle is a needle in the tip of the needle at the tip of the nose of the space shuttle. He said, when I come in 20,000 miles an hour and I'm flipping it over, he said, if the tip of the needle at the tip of the nose of the spaceship, isn't it at the perfect angle of attack? He said, if I am off by more than 1 to 3 degrees in any direction at the tip of the needle, the second I hit the atmosphere, we explode. And I'm like, what? He said, I go. My reaction was, I go, what? I go, that sounds risky. And here's the lesson. He looked at me and he said this. He said, risk should never be risky. Risk should be well thought out in advance. Plan for systems should be put in place. Alarm bells should go off. So again, so if things go sideways, you can know right away you can recover and you can bounce right back. And so today, what I want to talk to you about is how you mitigate risk as an entrepreneur. If you're looking to start up a company or right now you're in the process of pivoting or adapting, here are three things that I want you to pay attention to. And again, the number one job of every entrepreneur has nothing to do with business. The number one job is learning how to protect yourself. So if things go sideways, you can bounce right back. You haven't gone through all of your cash. You're in a place where you're still protected. So how do you do that? There's a couple ways.

The first is this. You need.

To understand how much time and money you're willing to invest in this. But before we get there, I have to share this.

You need to be on the same page with the people that are also affected by your decision. Okay, let me tell you a story because I really want to make this clear. A few years ago, I had, I was putting on an event and I had the opportunity to meet Howard Schultz. Now, Howard Schultz, he is the founder of. He's the founder. Well, not the founder. He was the primary owner for years and he was the CEO and chairman of Starbucks. And Howard Schultz is like one of my hero entrepreneurs. So I was really excited to put this event on with him. And it was in Los Angeles. There were about 400 entrepreneurs that attended. And I remember when Howard came in, he got on the stage and it was really interesting because he sat down on a couch and he was interviewed by someone from CNN and an anchor from cnn. And I remember when he was talking to us and answering these questions, these pre prepared questions.

It just sounded so corporate. It just sounded like nothing that I could relate to as an entrepreneur. And so what happened was he finishes his thing, didn't stood, sat down the entire time on the couch, answered these pre prepared questions. And then finally when he was done, it was time for Q and A. And a friend of mine got up during Q and A. Name is Marty. And what Marty did is he said, Mr. Schultz, he said, I got to tell you, he said, first of all, I'm a huge fan of yours. He said, and I love Starbucks. I go to Starbucks every day, I hold my meetings at Starbucks. I love your stores. He said, but if there's one thing I learned from you tonight, it's this. He said, I am nothing like you. He said, the reason is tonight when you talked about going through hard times, you had a billion dollars in your bank account. And when everyone else in this room goes through hard times, they're trying to figure out how to make payroll and feed their families in the same week. And he said, so Mr. Schultz, he said, you know I love you, I love your. So I said, but if there's one thing I've learned, I'm nothing like you. And he literally turned around and sat down. He didn't even ask a question.

And in that moment, Howard Schultz became an even bigger hero. I became an even bigger fan. Because what he did is he stood up and he walked across the stage. He said, what's your name? He said, great. He said, it Was Marty. He said, Marty. He said, I'm exactly like you. And I'll tell you why. He said, a few years ago, you know, several years ago, I was a guy that used to be a salesman, and I would sell these parts and these things, these machines, and I would sell the coffee stores. And he said, one year, said I was on a business trip to Seattle and I was selling this stuff, and I met the guys at Starbucks and they had two stores. And I was like, gosh, I love Seattle and I love what they're doing here. I want to be a part of it. And he said, and eventually they hired me. They hired me in a marketing job, moved his family, moved his wife out, and they lived in Seattle. He was working for Starbucks.

And he had this big idea. And I believe that the big idea was something like this. I believe the big idea was he wanted to take the espresso machine that was in the back and he wanted to move it to the front so people could see their drinks being made. It was something like that. And what happened was they liked it so much they fired him. So Starbucks fired Howard Schultz. And he was so pissed off that what he did is he said, I'm going to compete. He went to Europe, he found the licensed, another coffee brand, and he decided to open up new stores.

So he's over a year, I think it was closer to 18 months into this whole process. And what happens, what happens is one day he gets a call from his father in law, and his father in law says, it's time for us, we gotta meet. And when they sit down, Howard really knew it was coming. He said, look, he said, we got a problem. He said, my daughter, your wife, is eight months pregnant, and she's the only one that's brought in a paycheck for over a year. He said, maybe it's time. He said, respectfully, you know I love you, but maybe it's time that you put this vision, this dream that you have on hold. Maybe it's time that you. That you shelve it and go get a job, a paying job.

And Howard agreed. And so what he did is he went home and he told his wife, Sherry. He said, he said, look, here's what happened. And he said, here's the keys. Tomorrow I'm going to shut down. And what Sherry did in that moment is she gave what I call the Rocky speech. It's like the speech that Adrian gives to Rocky before the big fight. And she said, no, that's not just your dream, it's our dream. That's not just your vision, it's our vision. And if it takes all night to figure it out, that's what it is that we're going to do. And they did. And what I learned in that moment is this. What I learned in that moment is I always thought the most important person in every company that I started or I grew was me because it was my idea or I ran it. But what I learned is the most important person in every one of our businesses isn't us. It's the people that we come home to. That could be a husband, a wife, a spouse, a significant other, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, whatever it is. Because these are people that are typically going through the same highs and lows, the same ups and downs that we are. Many times they're equally invested because we're pulling from joint savings in order to do this. And the thing is, so I, by the way, I give these people a name. They're not CEOs, the chief executive officers of the company. They're the CVs, they're the chief venting officers of the company. And the reason I say that is when we get to like as entrepreneurs, sometimes it's hard to find people to talk to. So what do we do? We come home after a hard day and we just venture all over those people and we feel great because we got it off our chest. Those people, they're at home with one eye open. They can't sleep at night. And so what I learned is the most important person isn't me as person. I come home to number one. And number two is in order to make this work, there's a couple of things I need to do if I'm starting a new company or I'm pivoting or I'm adapting through this period. First is I have to get on the same page with my chief venting officer about how much time and how much money I'm willing, we're willing to risk on this business or invest in this business. I would rather invest less time or money and know I'm on the same page, that person. Then invest more and know that they are up every night with one eye open or during the day they've got sick, nervous knots in their stomach. So that's number one. Number two, you have got to come to agreement on the communication strategy between you and your chief venting officer. And here's what I mean. That person at home, they may be a person that wants to know everything about the business. They want the blow by blow. But for many People, all of that is just like way too much. And so other people. So what you have to do is understand how much information that person wants to hear or know about the business and when they want to hear it. You know, for some people, they want to again hear it every day. For some people they want to hear it once a day. They can get an update like once a week and that's all that they can take. They may not want to hear about it right before they go to bed. They may want to hear. So what I want to do is find out how much time and money we're willing to risk and what the communication strategy is. And also the way that you spell love with an entrepreneur is T I M E. When you have time with that chief venting officer, that person at home is incredibly important that you really drop in during that time. So number one, the most important thing we're going to do right now is get on the same page as the people around us. That's number one. Number we're going to separate our risk and our risk capital, wherever that is right now. A new business or an existing business. And what that means is this. A lot of the times people go through startups or pivots and what they do is they only have one account that's set up where all the business activity takes place. It's their personal account. And so as a startup this is incredibly dangerous because what happens is starting up a business usually takes twice as much time and five times as much money as you originally planned. So what happens is you decide that you're going to invest X amount of money into getting this thing going. But what happens is it takes longer and costs more and you keep putting money in and getting you get caught up in this process and before you know it you get a bank statement and you see that your out of cash, not just to pay for the business, but to pay for your mortgage. And so what's incredibly important is that you decide how much you're willing to invest upfront and whether it's for a new business or for it's for a pivot, how much we're going to invest in the pivot. Then what you do is you have to separate all that risk capital on day one. So if you have a new business, you need to set up a separate business checking account. If you have an existing business, you do this in your existing business account. Then you take whatever money you are willing to risk, whether it's from Your savings, your 401k or from the stock market. Or wherever it's coming from, and you cash it out and you put it in that business account today. You put it in the account today. You've got to discipline yourself so you don't go into your personal accounts. And what happens is when you put all of your risk capital over here in one place, you pay more attention and you're able to actually watch what happens to that risk capital. You can watch it go up, you can watch it go down. Most important is you see it and it's separated. You see how much you're taking on personally, you see how much you're willing to risk on the business. And if that money gets too low in the business, then you can make an informed decision about what it is that you should do next. Finally, if you are starting or you're pivoting right now, what we really want to focus on is doing one thing at a time. Don't try and do everything. Try and do one thing. Really nail that thing and move on to the next. And again, the metaphor I always use is something I call hammers and nails. Let's say, give you one hammer and one nail, and your job's simple. All you have to do is bring that hammer back and drive that nail into a piece of wood. Just nail that one business. Now, the odds are you may miss the first, the second, the third time, but eventually I'm going to bet on you. Eventually, I'm going to bet that you're going to nail it. So let's say, give you two hammers and two nails, you got a problem. Who's going to hold the nails? You're holding two hammers. Let's say you find somebody crazy enough to do it. Here's what you have to do. You have to bring both hammers back, and boom. You have to strike at the same time and think about how clunky that is. You may miss the first, the second, third time, you may never get it right. Let's say give you 10 hammers and 10 nails. You get the point. Again, the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when launching or pivoting is they focus on too many things. So don't focus on one thing or don't focus on everything. Focus on one thing. And it should not be the hardest. It should be the simplest. Really nail that one thing and then move on to the next. Now, before I wrap today, I mentioned it's going to be a short show today. I just do want to say hello. I want to say hello to so many of you who have joined today. And let's see if we can do this and we can do it right.

Daya, good morning. It is so good to see you and thank you for joining. So great to see your smiling face. Helen, great to see you this morning. Thank you so much for joining. Sita Thompson, always good to see you.

Nadja, great to see you this morning. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining. I hope everything's going well for you. Lisa. Lisa, it's good to see you. Let's see the energetics of merging the Fed with Treasury after 270 years as a private corporation, I actually got the message from astrologers that the we will have economic resurgence at quantum speed because of all the dramatic shifts in consciousness. That would be amazing not to minimize the current events, but awakening is happening in mass. It certainly is. And you know what was crazy is last night I realized it was a full moon, which I think if you're spiritual and you believe in astrology and these types of things like I do was pretty magical. Doc V, Good to see you this morning. Thank you so much for joining. Kimberly Schulte, it's always good to see you. Great to connect with you again yesterday. Hey, to all of you that joined today, I just want to thank you for hopping on again. Today's a short show. Three things that we talked about though. If you are starting or pivoting a business, number one, make sure that you're in alignment with the people that you are spending your time with that you come home with. I call them your chief venting officers, your CDOs. These could be your husband, your wife, your spouse, your significant other, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, people that will be impacted by your business startup or your business pivot, people who energetically are going to pick up what you're dishing out, people who may be equally invested in this business because you're going through joint savings. Because make sure, number one, you're on the same page with regard to how much time and money both of you are willing to invest in this thing. Make sure that both of you have a communication strategy in place so you're communicating what they want to know, when they want to know it. And finally, make sure that when you're with them, you drop in and you know that you spell love with an as T I M E when you're an entrepreneur. So that was number one. Number two, we talked about separating our risk and what that means is taking deciding how much money we're willing to risk on the new business or pivot opening a new business checking account. If you're a new business or leveraging an existing business account. If you're pivoting, then taking all of that capital, you're willing to risk, whether from your savings, whether from your retirement, your 401k, wherever it's coming from and on day one, cashing everything out and putting it into the business checking. That way you can see the risk over here. That way you've separated the risk. Super important. When you see the risk over here, the odds are you're going to be much less impulsive. And if things get low, you'll be in a position where you're not just pulling money unknowingly out of your personal accounts and dwindling your personal accounts because you get caught up in this process and you're protecting yourself, you're protecting yourself financially. And finally we talked about doing one thing at a time, really focusing on one hammer and nailing one nail, nailing one thing and then moving on to the next. I want to thank all of you guys for joining today. Love you all. Hope you have an incredible, incredible day and I will see you tomorrow at 10am Pacific. Take care.