LE002: Liam Martin Interview @ Leadership Execution Podcast (17/03/2017)

Hello, I'm Takis Athanassiou. I'd like to welcome you on the new episode of Leadership Execution Podcast, a podcast for leaders who'd like to make a difference. My goal is to inspire you to take the initiative to change what no longer works and to provide you with the necessary strategies, approaches, and tools to achieve that. Without delay, let's start with today's topic. Hello everybody, Takis Athanassiou here. Welcome to the Leadership Execution Podcast. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming and I hope to have you again in the show. Now let's get into today's show. Today I'm excited to have as a guest a person as Liam Martin. Liam is co-founder of 2 companies, Time Doctor and StaffCom, and a really clever guy. Liam's main interest is marketing and process designed for remote teams while he focuses on online tutoring, business development, data analysis, outsourcing, remote work, and staffing. A discussion with Liam is always an interesting one. Let's hear what he has to say. Hello Liam, how are you today?

Good, how are you?

Just fine, thank you.

Great.

So, are you ready to answer some questions?

Absolutely.

Okay, let me tell you something about yourself, like who is Liam and how do you start a business?

Boy, that's a pretty existential question, but I will try to answer it as concisely as humanly possible. So really, I think that there's a lot of fear inside of most would-be entrepreneurs. Most people would call them wantrepreneurs. You might have a lot of people that are listening to this podcast right now—

Yes.

—that are really interested in starting a business but haven't quite taken the jump yet to say, okay, we're going to do this. What I would highly suggest that you do is just start. I know back when I started my first business, it came from a— and based off of our call that we had before, I don't think you were aware of this, but I was— the very first business that I started was actually a sporting goods company.

Mm-hmm.

And the business I think is probably the one that was officially registered. I had had a lot of little jobs and little hustles that I had before that point, but that business was to sell sporting goods material to for primarily winter sports in Canada, which is where I'm from.

Mm-hmm.

And the way that I got started is I basically grabbed my mother's sewing machine. I sewed together what's called a skate guard in Canada, which basically is a piece of fabric that covers the skate blade on an ice skate and put together 5 or 6, took some photos of it, put it up on a website, learned how to build a website, and then tried to get traffic to that website.

Excellent.

I would say probably that took me— and this was before Shopify and before everything. It's so much easier now to do it where you can just literally in 20 minutes be up and running. But that probably took me about a month to be able to go through the entire process from beginning to end. I would say the costs to me were probably around, I would say, $500, and that to me is the best place to start. So say to yourself, I'm not going to quit my job, I'm going to keep my day job, and when I get home at 6 PM, as an example, I'm going to— when I get home from school or from work, I'm going to start working on something till midnight. So just apply 6 hours into the process. So instead of going watching TV or going out or doing all of these other things, invest those 6 hours a night into starting a business. And that's really what I did. And that business ended up actually being relatively successful. And it led into other businesses and where I am right now. So the lessons that I had learned in that first initial business, it was not a million or a $10 million or a $100 million business, but it was— I learned the things that I needed to learn that allowed me to be successful in the current business that I'm currently working on right now.

So basically you invest $500 to learn whatever you need to learn in order to be successful in the future.

Absolutely.

So excellent example, excellent role model, that, because I really believe that you need the time to learn things before everybody knows about it. And because most people, they don't understand how to shift from their regular job to a different kind of job and entrepreneurship mentality. And that's what I'd like to ask you how to shift from a regular job mindset to a full-time entrepreneurship mentality.

Well, I think it's somewhat disingenuous to be able to answer that question. I've never really had a real job and I think that there are There are definitely different types of entrepreneurs. I'm just one that has not been able to— the reason why I'm in entrepreneurship is because I'm unable to hold down a regular job. That's the biggest problem that I've had. Most people have. Yeah, so I've had multiple jobs. They've all resulted in me either getting fired from that position or quitting. Usually, I think the longest one that I had was 6 months. So I've had jobs where I was selling water coolers door-to-door, as an example. And for those of you that don't know what a water cooler is, I think most of you do, it's a big tall machine that you can put a large bottle of water in the top and you pull hot or cold water out through the bottom. And I did door-to-door sales. So I was hired by this company. They don't pay you any money, like they don't pay you a salary. It's completely based off commission. And I knocked on doors for about 4 months and it was very hard work. It was in 40-degree weather Celsius, so I'm talking like 100-degree weather Fahrenheit.

Difficult situation, that means.

Yeah, and I remember Recognizing that we were selling water coolers to individual people, so just knocking door to door, and the most I could sell was one water cooler. So what I recognized was if I went and approached a business— so I went into a large office building and I sold 20 water coolers to one person in one day, and I would maybe sell one water cooler a day.

Interesting.

So I thought to myself, well, this is a great hack. This is fantastic. I spend the same amount of time but I make 20 times the commission. At that point, I think a commission was about $100 per water cooler. They were very expensive water coolers, by the way. You could buy a water cooler at a regular department store for about $200 and we were in essence selling the same water cooler for about $500 or $600. So it was very overpriced, we didn't really have an advantage in the market or at least I did not, but the one thing that I recognized was being able to scale your work. So I started approaching businesses and then after about 2 to 3 weeks, I was making, I think I made like $10,000 in one week at one point. It was pretty exciting for me to be able to make $10,000 in a week, but then the company that had hired me said, where are all of these leads coming from? You know, where are all these closes coming from? And so I explained the situation and they told me that you're not allowed to do that. And I said, why? That seems like a really great idea, like we should shift the model to selling to businesses. And they said, well, we're not contracted to We'll let these go, but you're not allowed to do any more, and all this kind of stuff. And then so what I just basically recognized was, okay, I will work 1 day a week and I will sell 20 water coolers in that day, and then I won't do anything else for the rest of the week. So my numbers will look like everybody else's, but I'll work 1/7 of the time. That worked for about a month until they actually figured that out and Then basically I was pretty much fired from that position. But to me, it was just one of those things that an entrepreneur really kind of breaks things down that way. I have a long-term partner of mine that runs a business right now and she thinks in exactly the same way. So not necessarily breaking the rules, but bending them.

Re-engineering, perhaps it's a better word because what an entrepreneur's mindset is, how something works and how it works better. And I think you find a better way to scaling up your work.

Exactly. And I think that it also connects to another component of entrepreneurship, which is just being able to Not necessarily. If something is unfair, I really do try to kind of maximize my chances of success as much as possible. So, you know, at first I was making a ton of money and then recognized I couldn't make a ton of money, and then I would just work less and make the same amount of money. So always trying to maximize my productivity is really critical for me. So to answer your question, how do you shift from a regular job mindset to a full-time entrepreneurship mentality? I wouldn't have one, but if I was speaking to someone who did have a regular job, what I would tell them is what you need to do is, again, don't quit your job. Go back. Stop when you end your job at 6 PM. Go home. And put in 4 to 6 hours a night working on that other thing. So start with education, start with, you know, this podcast is a fantastic start to be able to start thinking about entrepreneurship and really sort of communicating to entrepreneurs, at least digitally. Get that information in your mind, come up with an idea, and realistically, if you've made the decision now to be able to do something like this, you should probably come up with something. Within a month. So whether that's a website, whether that's selling a digital product, a physical product, whatever it might be, come up with an idea within a month and then just try to execute on that idea and really have a quantitative measurement in mind thinking to yourself, am I going to make a dollar in the next 30 days? The first business, or sorry, the second business that I started, the tutoring business, I did not make So I was a personal tutor for about 6 months and then I started hiring my first outside employee at the 6-month mark and that's when I really kind of figured out, okay, this is not just me hustling deals, this is starting to turn into a business and then it accelerated quite quickly after that. So I would realistically take about 6 months and also recognize what is the personal amount of money That you can survive off of. So let's say that you're making— let's say that if you're in the US, you have a $60,000, $80,000 job. If you can survive off of half of that, then once you're making that amount of money through your business, then you can quit your regular job and you can apply 8 hours or 10 hours into the job— or sorry, into your new business. So just think about it in those types of stages because if you come in and just get right into full-time entrepreneurship and you have no experience, the chance of failure statistically is about 95%. And so it's much better for you to have a day job, spend your time working on 2 to 3 projects, let's say over the next year, and then you'll be able to fail. realistically at 1 to 2 to 3 of those things, and then you'll be set because you'll have the experience. The other side connected to regular job is you might want to just join a— if you're interested in technology, joining a tech startup and being below employee 20 in a tech startup can really accelerate your general—

Skills.

skill set in running a business, because in a tech startup below 20 employees, pretty much everybody does everything and everyone knows about everything else that's happening in the business. So that's another way to be able to learn that, but for people that don't have access to that, I would say taking the route of going home at 6 and working for 46 hours, it's— you'll always learn something.

If you don't make any money, at least you'll learn something So basically you answered me on my third question, which is what is your daily habit? Because it is important not only to have a different mindset, but you have disciplined habits about what you do and how you focus on the things you want to succeed.

Sure. So I have really been focused on overall productivity. So both of our companies Time Doctor and staff.com are primarily productivity products to allow you to make not only yourself but your team more productive. So I take that very seriously. And one of the things, like as an example right now as I'm doing this podcast, I can tell you I have a black Calvin Klein t-shirt that costs about $5 and I buy them in bulk. I have American Apparel jeans. I have about 20 of those in my closet. I've got about 30 or 40 of these t-shirts, and I can't even remember what the brand of socks I've got, but I have about 60 pairs of those. So once I get up in the morning, that's one of the things that I do every single day is I have a work uniform and kind of almost like a life uniform to a certain degree. I really would suggest for anybody that can do this, it simplifies your life in such a fantastic way to wear the same thing every single day. I've been doing this for at least the last 4 to 5 years and I'm never going back. Now that's not to say that I don't have a suit or a couple suits in the closet and I don't have clothes that are fun, but primarily I just I actually chose something specifically that would allow me to throw on a blazer and be able to walk into a business meeting, but then I could also be in a bar and seem just as comfortable. So the black t-shirt, the jeans, the dark wash jeans allow me to be able to dress it up like if I want to put on some formal shoes. So formal shoes. I can switch back between those 2.

So basically you're telling me that you eliminated the decisions you have to take and you focus only on the important things, and this is a major trend for productivity, I believe.

Absolutely.

Because I do follow similar trends as well, and I believe that a lot of people, they mix up about all the choices things and they They believe that they can do everything, multitasking and all these kinds of things around, but at the end of the day they don't have results and the productivity goes poof out of the window.

Well, so I've been— the other thing that I'm measuring right now is I'm currently on the task of podcast. So I'm measuring the task podcast. It's been running for 19 minutes and 13 seconds, and I can compare this podcast to every other podcast that I've done, and I've probably done over 100 at this point, and I'll be able to figure out what's the average amount of time that I can apply towards executing on a podcast, how much time is that versus the returns versus something, some other type of— speaking engagement like a conference, as an example. So I measure all of these variables, and we actually measure them across the company to be able to make sure that everyone is applying their time in the most productive places wherever they can. So that's another part of my life is just making sure that all of my tasks are measured, my work tasks, and then even stuff down to, so before, I jumped on this call with you this morning. I had an intake call with my assistant. My assistant told me all of the different things that I was currently working on today, including this podcast, when I needed to be showing up for all of them, what needed to be changed, all those types of things. And she has access to my email, so she's able to make sure that she stays ahead of all of those problems even before I see them, which is great. And then even down to food delivery, which is a little intense, but for people that are actually interested in something like this, it's not that expensive. You can have all of your meals delivered to you. So I have all of my lunches delivered to me, whether I'm at the office or at home, and it works out to approximately about $5 per meal. The company that I work with at the office is just a local restaurant around the corner and they know my dietary requirements and at around 12:30 I have lunch delivered. And it's very easy for me to not even think of what I'm going to eat. It just shows up and that's what I'm going to eat. It's always good. But, you know, they know my dietary restrictions as well.

Excellent.

So it's very easy for me to be able to Sit down, spend the half hour, eat there, and the decision, I mean, think of your own workday and I'm sure that, I hope that a lot of you will think the next day that you go to work or to school when making the decision of what you're going to eat actually sucks up mental time.

Yeah.

So just remove that. And that's a little extreme, but just, you know, if you can try it for a week, And the way that I negotiated with this restaurant is I basically walked in, I had been eating there quite a lot, and I said, well, could I get a discount on food if you just basically, if I pay you $1,000 upfront and then we just, you know, you basically pull $5 off of each lunch? And they were very happy to do that. So you can negotiate these types of things with restaurants.

Mm-hmm.

They're very happy to get long-term customers that they never have to think about ever again. You could try that even for a week to see how it goes. I've got to tell you, it's probably those few things, making my own clothes, having a workout outfit, having an assistant that's able to manage everything that I'm doing and how to maximize my time, having the tracking technology in place, place to be able to really monitor what the returns on investments are for all activities inside of my workday, and then also having lunch delivered is huge for my productivity. I've probably earned back an extra 3 hours a day realistically when I look at the gains that I've been able to work on. So those are basically my habits. I do a regular 9 to 5, but I think the overall productivity inside of that 9 to 5 is much higher than the average worker.

So you save more or less more than 18 hours a week for something that really is interesting to you.

Exactly.

So many people would like to know how you start developing your companies. I mean, you're obviously a person that is focused on productivity. Personal and work productivity, I mean. How you focus on these particular companies? Both are essentially productivity companies.

Sure. So, well, me and Rob, and Rob's the co-founder and CEO of the company, and I am the CMO of the company. We've been working on this company for, actually it was 5 years a few days ago. I think that we started basically mid-March.

Mid-March.

So that's been— I actually got quite surprised that it's actually been 5 years. It feels actually a lot faster, but it's been 5 years. And what we really do is, you know, we both came to building these companies from different places.

Mm-hmm.

Rob was really focused on productivity, but I know for me personally, it solved a direct problem that I had inside of my tutoring company. So we had— when I started working with Rob, I had over 100 tutor contractors throughout Eastern Europe and North America, and they were all graduate students. The way that the business worked, and this still works now if you want to be able to run a business like this, they're relatively easy to start up, is we did tutoring for university students. Specifically, we tutored university students that wanted to go through their pre-med.

Mm-hmm.

So pre-med students, They must get a 4.0 GPA or they cannot get their choice of schools. So they can definitely go into B schools, but they can't go into A schools— Harvard, Oxford, University of Toronto, McGill. These are A-level schools. So they're prepared to spend exorbitant amounts of money to be prepared for 4 input classes, which is— or 4 basically undergraduate courses, which is Biology 1, Biology 2, Math 1, 2, Chem 1, 2, and I can't remember the last one. You guys can look it up. So what I basically did is I hired a whole bunch of people that were graduate students in and were actually teaching those classes, or they were the teaching assistants in that class, and then they would teach the pre-med students. So we had about 100, over 100 contract tutors, and the problem that I had inside of that business is that I would have a student, and we're talking about very expensive tutors, we're talking about $100 an hour type of tutors. Mm-hmm. So the tutor, the student would come to me and say, hey, you billed me for 10 hours this month, and I only worked for 5 hours with the student, or with the tutor. So then I would have to go to the tutor, and I would say, did you work 10 hours with this student? And the tutor would say, absolutely. So what I would end up having to do is I would pay the tutor for the full 10 hours. But I would refund the student for 5 hours and I would end up making basically nothing. And that was creating a major problem inside of the business. It was very difficult for me to be able to continue on with the business with this problem coming in and it was just a problem of not being able to confirm work hours reliably. So Time Doctor solved that perfectly. What it in essence did Is that it allowed me to be able to manage that entire remote team and know that this tutor spent exactly 9 hours and 52 minutes with this student this month. I can confirm all of the work hours. I can confirm the websites and applications that they were interacting with while they were actually performing the tutoring. It allowed me to just instantly solve that problem. Then the other thing That kind of evolved into a larger mission, which was really focusing on remote work in general.

Brilliant.

In the company right now, we have a mission statement, which is really the core tenet of what we're looking towards, which is we want to empower people to work wherever they want, whenever they want. I'm currently working at home. We have 70+ employees in 26 different countries. We have workers that work in Ubud in Bali. We have workers that work in Phuket, Thailand. We have workers that work in Boracay in the Philippines. We have people that work all over the planet. And if they— we don't really care where you work or when as long as you get that work done.

Right.

And we feel like that's a better way to work. So technology like Time Doctor and Staff.com empowers those people to be able to tell their employer, hey, there is documentation of what I'm doing. I am actually doing work, so I don't need to be in this office anymore. And that's really the core fundamental reasoning behind why we're currently building the company now and we're focusing on that as a clear goal of for the next couple of years.

Congratulations, it is an excellent story and very inspiring. What I would like to do is tell me a little bit more about TimeDoctor and Staff.com, about their doing and operation.

Sure, so TimeDoctor is basically a time analytics tool, so what it does is it measures the websites, applications, mouse movements and keyboard movements on a computer. So right now I'm doing the podcast task. At the end of this call, I'll be able to figure out exactly how efficiently I completed this task in comparison to all the other podcasts that I've done, and figure out what is— how to make that process more efficient. Staff.com is in essence exactly the same product except for large-scale So if you have more than 100 people, you'd really want to work with Staff.com, and Time Doctor is more for the SMB market. So you can get in right away with Time Doctor. You can basically start immediately, sign up, and you can start using it in under 5 minutes. Staff.com requires a little bit more work, but you can get to the same place with that product as well.

Wonderful. So these 2 companies, these business models reflect your own path toward your present status, or is this something that anybody can follow up in order to become an entrepreneur? I mean, solving problems is not enough, I believe. You need some other things as well.

Yes, so I mean, I think The problem for me is there's a lot to say about business models in general. I know that I've gone through a lot. I would say I don't want to pigeonhole people into different business models right now because I feel like there are a lot.

Yeah, there is.

To work on, but I would say to me right now, SaaS is one of the easiest business models I've ever encountered. The reason being— and there are plenty of other business models that work beautifully— the reason why SaaS is so easy for me, and what that means is software as a service. Generally, a SaaS product is a piece of software that you can buy and you get like a— usually it comes with a 14-day trial or a 30-day trial. You can try the software, see if it's for you. And then instead of purchasing it all up front like you buy Windows which costs $200 to $300 I believe, I actually haven't bought Windows in quite a long time. But let's say any other type of software large-scale piece of software like Microsoft Word, instead of purchasing it all upfront, you purchase it on a monthly basis. So Time Doctor as an example, instead of paying $2,000 for Time Doctor, you pay $10 per user per month. So you can expand or contract your team dependent upon your needs. And the other beauty of it is the software is continuously updated for you. So you always have the most up-to-date version of Time Doctor in the company. We push new code every Wednesday, so we're always working on making the software better and better. And what that does is it creates an advantage for both the customer and the business owner. The business owner does not— or the customer does not have to pay a whole bunch of money upfront to be able to use the software. software, but the business owner, as long as they get enough customers, they will pretty much never go out of business.

Uh-huh.

So I would say if you're doing over, let's say, $50,000 a month, as an example, in your business, in a SaaS business, and your churn is below 5% per month, you will pretty much never go out of business as long as you continue to acquire new customers, which ideally you should if you have $50,000 worth of customers that are coming in every month. That's the biggest model that I've seen for success because it allows you to really think tactically about your next move, and there's no contract desperation. Before, I used to be some consulting and you get a $200,000 consulting contract and you would be able to execute on that contract and then it would be done within 2 months, but then you would have to find another contract. With SaaS, it really is just something that continuously comes in every single month and I can pretty much set my watch to what our revenue is going to be next month, next quarter, next year. Inside of that model, for me right now, what we're currently working on is trying to go upmarket, and upmarket means trying to raise our ARPA, which is annual revenue per account. We're trying to target larger customers, customers like Staff.com customers as an example. Someone who has 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 employees is a contract that we're trying to get.

Okay.

The same fundamentals apply. In reality, actually, the customers churn less, and churning means basically the amount of customers that quit every single month or year. And so that's what we're really focusing on now is trying to build that upmarket market, and that's what we're really trying to focus on over the next couple of quarters. is making sure that that's successful because right now in the SMB market, we currently have a large chunk of that market and we don't necessarily see it 100x-ing in the near future.

Uh-huh.

But then you always have to sort of see, okay, what's the next product that you could build or what's the next iteration of your product that you could build that could possibly hit $100 million, $200 million a year as a business.

I hope the best results from the end of these quarters.

Right.

It is an excellent model. I mean, you combine the best of technology models, economic models of technology, and the recurring model for profit growth, and it is a very nice tightly Business modeling facility.

Yeah, one other thing that I forgot to mention as well is that this literally would not have been possible without something like Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure. So those are large-scale cloud servers. Instead of purchasing— basically they are selling servers in the same way that I am selling software.

Yes, exactly.

So you can't— if you wanted to purchase the capacity of Amazon as a complete set of servers, it would cost you probably billions of dollars. But what you can do is rent that capacity at a little bit more expensive than purchasing your own servers, but the cost means you can get in and start a cloud deployment for, I would say, probably You can set up a reliable instance for about $50 to $100 a month that could give you more capacity than a server that is going to cost you $10,000. You'll get a better user experience for your customers. That was one of those things that when I first started, that wasn't actually possible. I have other Other friends of mine that have been in the technology business for really realistically the 10-plus year mark, and that really wasn't possible in the very beginning. So it's one of those things that it's only happened just recently that this process has been so easy for us to be able to scale the SaaS model in general. And I think there really is a bit of a gold rush right now when you look at the pieces that are in place right now to be able to execute on the SaaS model.

Yes, you are quite right because I know a lot of small business owners utilize Amazon facilities in order to have reliable transfer and mail services around. So even in a small scale, this kind of model, it is excellent for day-to-day business. Even if you don't have too many scale expectations at the road. Because I think it is delivered good quality products all over the world now. So, if you could only give one piece of advice to a new business person, as a successful business person, what would it be, Liam?

Well, I probably would also— I would give them the same piece of advice that I had mentioned before, which is don't quit your day job. The chance of success in entrepreneurship is approximately 5% over a 5-year period. Now, if— and maybe I'm going to change your question a little bit— if you're committed to do it, Meaning, so this is a piece of advice to a new entrepreneur. That's for somebody— my question was kind of focused on someone who's just about to go into entrepreneurship, but if you're already in and you've committed and you're doing this, I would give them a different piece of advice, which is find a mentor that is not 10 years ahead of you, but is about 2 to 3 years ahead of you.

Yeah.

So I have mentors that are 10 years ahead. I have mentors that are 20 years ahead, actually. But I find the most value is from talking to mentors that are 2 to 3 years ahead. And the reason why is because someone who is 10 years ahead does not understand your problems anywhere near as well As somebody who had that problem 4 quarters ago. So you need to talk to people that are— let's say you're doing $1 million in your business.

Mm-hmm.

You need to talk to the person that's doing $2 to $3 million in their business. And you need to talk to that person, same business, same sort of— as an example, For example, for me, I'd be looking for somebody who is in product-based SaaS in the SMB market that's about 2 to 3 years ahead. Those are the people that I really want to talk to because they'll tell you, oh, I have a problem. Right now, we're trying to work on our conversion from trial users to paid users. So when someone signs up for a trial of Time Doctor, they have 30 days to decide whether or not they want to use it. And then we send them messaging and we call them and we basically try to make sure that they're successful. And the way that we try to make them successful is to get to their aha moment, which is where they discover what the product does and why they would need it inside of their business. That is a very critical process for us because up until this point we've been able to push a lot of leads into the funnel, but we're not quite happy with the conversion rate from trial to paid customer. I know of 2 to 3 people that I currently work with right now that are friends of mine that are 2 to 3 years ahead and might have a much higher conversion rate from trial to paid. in SaaS, I try to meet with them once a month. I take them out to dinner and show them the new problems that I have. They can tell me, oh, you know what? I tried this and this really worked, or I tried that and that really worked, or they'll be able to look at the business and say, you're really making a big mistake here because I know from A year ago, we tried this and it failed. So trying to collect that information from people that are 2 to 3 years ahead of you is probably the most important piece, and I think it can actually be counterintuitive if you're talking to people that are 10 years ahead, because the people that are 10 years ahead, again, are not experiencing the same problems that you are, and if they had, it's So far off into their history that they've forgotten about it, and they don't really know what— they don't really know how to execute on that problem. They don't know the details of that problem as well as someone who has addressed it only a year or 2 ago.

Okay, thank you, Liam, for your time. I'd like to thank you for all this valuable information because it is really mind-breaking things what you have said, even though— because we usually forget that the most important things is the on-the-ground things.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, thank you very much for having me on as well.

Thank you, thank you very much. We talk soon, Leon.

Thank you.

Thank you all for listening today. I'd love to see you at the next episode of Leadership Initiative for If you have a question or a comment, please send me a message at my site, takisathanassiou.com. Until next time, take the initiative to become the person you want to be. Start now and make a difference. Thank you all for listening.