How to Get Used to Being Uncomfortable to Get Comfortable

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I'm really excited for today's guest, but I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, the Brain, the professor, your flight school sherpa. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com or learn anything about anything. Investor ninjas.com Scott Todd how are you?

Mark? I'm great. How are you?

I'm a little intimidated, I'll tell you. I don't often get intimidated by our guests, but I'm going to put on my anchorman place. Our guest today is a big deal. Ryan Frederick is a founder and product person at heart. He has founded and grown several software and service companies from inception to viability through to sustainability. He has been instrumental in capitalization activities and has even expanded into international markets. Ryan is an active angel investor, mentor, advisor, author and speaker. He recently released a new book, the Founder's Manual, a guidebook for becoming a successful entrepreneur. Ryan Frederick, welcome.

Geez. Well, you read the bio, you know, perfectly. But that part always makes me super uncomfortable because it's seems so staged when someone reads the, you know, when someone reads your bio. But I guess I'll take it.

Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let's just rewind the tape and just the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey all the way to business. Yoda.

Yeah. Didn't really, you know, predict any of it. Small town boy from a, a place in upstate New York, a town called Johnstown. And now as I've matured, I realized there's a Johnstown in virtually every state. I just happen to grow up in the one in New York. Pretty typical middle class upbringing and no entrepreneurial sort of flavor and bent in the family. And then I don't know, there was a switch that flipped at some point that said I'm not really much of a big company guy and I think if I start working at a big company and sor, that's my career trajectory, I'm not going to be very happy. And so was fortunate to join. But then we called the small business, we didn't really call things startups back then. I'm old enough now to predate even the startup thing in moniker. And then we had some success there and then was fortunate to be part of starting a couple of other companies. So it just sort of, you know, it's certainly much more opportunistic than strategic. Let Me put it that way.

Okay, Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

You know, I think that that's what happens a lot of times is the, you know, you kind of just go down this path and then all of a sudden it starts to reveal for you. Right. Like you, you go down a path that may not be what you're thinking, but it opens up for you. All you got to do is start taking the action. So it's kind of cool to see.

Yeah, I think that people try to. And we should be strategic in certain aspects of our lives. Right. But I think people often get too strategic before there's an opportunity. And I think if you're more opportunistic and then you get strategic inside of an opportunity, now you have something to be strategic about versus being strategic about. I'm not sure what if you're not doing it inside of an opportunity?

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. So when you're meeting with founders and entrepreneurs at different levels of their business growth, is there something that kind of stands out to you as sort of a common mistake that you see sort of over and over again that these entrepreneurs are falling into, like this typical trap?

Yeah, I mean, there are several. And that's really what drove me to write the book the Founder's Manual. But I would say that the overwhelming one is most people think that being a founder and an entrepreneur is a very egocentric, ego driven endeavor. And there's certainly some component of ego as part of the process, but it's actually a much more humble, selfless endeavor. Because if you don't keep at the center of what you're doing, your customers and working in the product's best interest and in your customers best interests over your own and over your own personally and over your company's, then you're probably not going to go very far. And so most people get it wrong thinking that it's about them. The focus should be on them, the focus should be about their company and, and they look too inward instead of looking outward and spending most of their time working in the interest of others versus working in their own interests.

Yeah, I mean, Scott Todd, I could imagine you being an egomaniac might have the counter argument to this. Like, look how successful I am. I own a plane and I completely disregard my customers. What is your, what is your rebuttal?

Wow. Wow. Thanks. Thanks for that, Mark.

You know what, I think that too much coffee this morning, it's already getting nasty.

I'm really interested to see how Scott's now going to respond to this. How an egomaniac responds to a question about humility.

First of all, I'm not an egomaniac. I mean, that's like way far reaching. Like, come on. Look, I think that one of the things is that people miss is. Is a lot of times when you're doing something, you do it. I think initially, if your heart's in the right place, you'll do it to fix a problem that you have. Right. Like Mark. So Geek Pay, for example.

Right.

Like, Geek Pay was a problem that we had. What was the problem? Well, we were getting nickeled and dimed on the fees. Okay? Like, fees, fees, fees, fees, fees. So you solved the problem for yourself and for us. You solved your own problem. Then all of a sudden, now, now it creates another business. It's the same thing I did with, like, Lan Moto. Okay? So like with Lan Moto, you know, you know, I was paying, I was happy paying this company called Land and farm, like, $50 a month. Next thing you know, they changed the pricing to like $500 a month. And tell me, like, they're telling me you have to be on all these websites. And I'm like, I don't want to be on these. I just want to be on this one that I know works for $50 a month. But see, the company came in and they dictated. A big company came in and dictated what. What my pricing was going to be. So essentially, I think that what happens is, I think good companies, if they can solve a problem for, like, the founder or they can solve a problem for the person who started the thing, well, that's a real deal. LG Pass, same thing. Land Moto, same thing. Geek Pay, same thing. To some extent, even, like everything we've done, it's been that same approach. And so I do think that, you know, like, for me, I might not necessarily go out and do all this market research. I saw problems that I have, okay? Like, that's the way I approach things. And look, if other people can benefit from it, cool. If not, like, I'm solving a real life problem for myself. But we're different, right? Because we're not setting out to go create another business entity. We're solving our own problems and allowing people to use the same platforms that we are.

Right. And it knows. Yeah. But you know, in all seriousness, like, because I was teasing you, Scott, about being egoic, even your very beginning burning desire to get out of your executive VP job was more to protect your family.

Yeah.

So really, from the very beginning, you, it was all purpose driven, something bigger than yourself. From the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. I think. And I think that's the thing is, like, whenever you're gonna, you know, if you're gonna start something, I really think that that's one of the mistakes that people make is that they go, try to start something. And look, I did this. I'm not saying I'm not guilty of this because there were times where I would start counting the dollars like I'm dreaming, right? Like, oh, my gosh, I've got this idea for this great product. And like, first thing I would do is I would go to the spreadsheet and I'd start number crunching. Go, these are the projections. We're going to be billionaires. Okay. As opposed to, like, okay, who really has this problem? And is this a real problem? Forget the spreadsheet for a minute. Solve a problem in the world and then the money will follow you.

Right? So, so, Ryan, just to riff off of that, because I imagine you work with a lot of early founders. You're. You're. One of the characteristics you're looking for. Let's just call it. Let's say we're going to make an entrepreneurial Stewart. Right. You're throwing in a dash of humility. You're throwing in a dash of, I would assume, purpose. What else are you looking for when you're evaluating do I want to invest in this founder or not based on these characteristics of this stew.

Yeah. To build off of what we've been talking about. I think being an entrepreneur by definition is being a problem solver. And so my first threshold with a early stage founder is how well do they understand the problem? And I don't think that you can solve a problem in a commercially viable way if you don't understand the problem to an expert level. You have to understand the problem better than the customers that you're ultimately going to try to provide a solution to for the problem. And I think to Scott's point, the best founders are typically the ones that have been exposed to and have lived with the problem for an extended period of time. Because now their ramp between problem sort of realization and then problem understanding at expert level is going to be much faster and it's going to be much easier if they've already been exposed to the problem for a long time. And so my. And then my second sort of threshold is, well, how capable are they of solving the problem? So if they understand it at an expert level, now there's another big leap between standing it to an expert level and actually being able to solve it in A way that customers are going to value and care about. And then that gets down to the team. Right. And how capable is the team? How skilled is the team around specifically solving that problem? You can have an uber talented, skilled, smart team, and they may be able to solve a different problem in a much better way than solving the problem at hand. So there has to be team sort of problem and capability alignment. And that's sort of my third. That's my sort of third threshold.

So team and capability alignment. Can you sort of expand a little bit more on that?

Yeah, I think that if you're going to build a software product, for example, and you don't have a software product person as part of the team who understands what it looks like and what it takes now to build a successful software product. And if you don't have an engineer who's capable of writing code quickly and robustly, and if you don't have a designer that can create a user experience that's going to be simple and elegant, the chances of you creating a successful software product and then company on top of that product are pretty low. And so I look at startup teams as, I don't like the war violence connotation necessarily, but I look at startup teams as a team of Navy SEALs, highly skilled in a multidisciplinary way that allows you to get traction and to accomplish a lot in a really short period of time.

Very cool. Very cool. So looking at the book, the Founder's Manual, and the aspects of being a founder, creating a product, building a company, you say it's counterintuitive and you say founders have to run to the fire, not away from it. What does that really mean?

Yeah, because being a founder is fundamentally being a problem solver. It also means that when you're building a product and creating a company to commercialize that product, you're going to be confronted with an unending series of problems. Right. The world at the beginning is working against you because no one knows that they should that think that you should exist and that you should be solving a problem. And so you just have this series of unending problems to deal with. And most of us are wired. And if you look at the hierarchy, it's innate to us that we don't run toward problems. We typically ignore them, run away from them, procrastinate around them, hope they go away. And if you're going to be a founder, and if you're going to be a successful founder, you. You have to rewire your thinking to run to problems. And the way that I phrase it is you have to be willing to run to the fire. And there are reason that firemen get trained and women get trained to run to fires to extinguish them. It's because most of us are taught and our instinct is to run away from problems. And founders have to rewire their perspective to confront problems head on and then figure out what's a problem or an obstacle that they can sort of acknowledge and then say, okay, that doesn't matter that much right now. I'm going to look beyond that. I'm going to keep moving versus saying, holy cow, this obstacle that we're now confronted with could completely derail us if we don't deal with it. So I think if people have the understanding being a founder is fundamentally being a problem solver, then they also then have to rewire themselves to get comfortable running to those problems.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Scott, Todd, what are your thoughts on this?

I think that that's the analogy, right? We're talking about the Navy SEALs. Okay. So, you know, I like to tell a story about a friend of mine that was a Navy seal, and one of the things I really learned from him was the importance of being comfortable, being uncomfortable. Right. You know, like, it's the ability to kind of look at a problem and say, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go in, or I'm gonna take action on this thing, even if it makes me feel uncomfortable. And I think that too many times, we all bring weaknesses to the table. Like, there's always things that we're not good at. But essentially, you know, if you have someone on your team who can. Who can. You can deploy over there to. To go solve that problem, great. But it comes back to building a team. Kind of what Brian was saying, you got to build the team of people who can go do what you're not any good at or don't want to do. But then beyond that, like, you really need to embrace the experience of being uncomfortable. And if that means that you've got to attack the problem and, you know, get. Get close to the fire, then that's what it means, and you got to go do it.

Yeah. And, you know, and I love that analogy. Sort of like the military embrace the suck. And so many of us, and this is a Seth Godin quote, we feel most alive when we're living on that edge of failure, and we just don't know. And Scott, I mean, you know, to go back to your pilot analogy, I mean, that's a hard endeavor to take on. It's like okay, I'm wake up one day, I'm going to become a pilot and start learning to fly a freaking plane. Like, that's really getting out of your comfort zone. And that's solving so many problems where if you don't solve it right, your life sort of is in jeopardy. Right. And I think that's, in a way, this is sort of this. Your entrepreneurial edge is looking at the world this way where, you know, you never want to be comfortable. But to Ryan's point, it's counterintuitive because we kind of are just wired to seek comfort, avoid pain at the most fundamental level. And now we gotta rewire ourselves and go towards the fire. So I find that really interesting. So, Ryan, getting back to that. So you also say that scale doesn't matter until a small number of customers love what you are doing. How many customers? And define love?

Yeah, I think love is customers can't live and can't operate without your product. And when, when you have a small number of customers, I think in groups of ten, it's just easy. Mentally, it's easy math. I think, before you worry about whether. And you know, Scott was talking about, you know, the spreadsheet projection. I mean, we've all been there, we've all done that. Right. This is how big the business could be. This is how big the market is. And if you see most startup pitch decks, they talk about tam, total addressable market. Right. How big is the sliver of the market that they're going after? And I've never seen a startup pitch deck that the TAM wasn't over a billion dollars. Right. And that could be true. Maybe it's not true, but at the beginning it doesn't really matter because if you don't have 10 people and then 50 people and then 100 people and then a couple hundred people and then a thousand people in love with what you're doing and how you're solving the problem and making their life better, then you're never going to get to any of those crazy projections anyway. You hear startups and founders talk a lot about, and investors have created a lot of this specter and a lot of this narrative, and they talk a lot about scale. Well, we fund companies to scale and you've got to be on a path to become $100 million company, and it's got to be big, et cetera. So founders then take that narrative from investors and think, oh, well, if we don't have something that's scalable and if we don't scale quickly, then it's not worth doing. And I would actually say the opposite is probably true in that if you can figure out niche and if you can solve a problem that 10 people care about and then 100 people care about, you can probably then figure out how to scale it and how to make it broad based. But you're almost never going to take something that you start out trying to make super broad based and then go find 10 people that actually love it.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that's a really interesting metric. And for the listeners in our niche for land investing, all these lessons still apply because everyone listening to this, whether you're in land investing or some other niche, whether it's real estate or you want to start your own company, you have to look for those things in the beginning that don't scale. You have to look for your, your, those, those customers that are going to go out in the world and sing your praises so that you can grow and, and get to that next level. Now when I think of scale, it's, it's probably not like what Ryan thinks of scale. Like you're probably thinking, okay, we're going to scale to a billion dollar company. But when I think of scale, I think of, you know, getting to that next level where you're, you're doubling, you're tripling your revenue, but you're also, you're decreasing the time that you're in the business and you're working as a CEO on the business. Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, I think that it comes down to what you want, right? You know, it comes down to do you want to, like, for us, you know, we're looking to build passive income. Okay. Like we're, we're looking for, I don't necessarily want another full time job. I want to enjoy the life that I have. Right. So I'm looking to maximize or leverage the time and the properties I have to create a passive income for me so that I can go, I don't know, do whatever I want to on a Monday while everybody else is at work. Right. Like, you know, I can tell you some great stories, some great Monday stories, some great Friday stories. You know, I try to take Mondays off, Fridays off. I mean, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean, I'm not thinking, it doesn't necessarily mean that things aren't going on, but it just means that I'm enjoying my life because I've built the passive income there to do it. And so to me, that's scale. Right. The scaling comes in, is that I want more time. So really what I want is I want a machine of people and systems that work so that I don't have to. That's the. That's the difference. That's the swap part. So I think it really comes down to what you want.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Ryan, your mentorship. This podcast has been fantastic, and we're at that point now. In the podcast, we're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

Yeah, I would. I would leave people with be intentional and be disciplined and value that over hustle. I think this hustle narrative that has sort of societally swept us is bad and misguided for a lot of people, because side hustles are often just hobbies that don't pay anything and don't turn into anything. So if you're going to do something, be intentional and disciplined about it. And one of my favorite books, and there's a whole series of books, my favorite author is a guy named Ryan Holiday.

Oh, I know Ryan Holiday really well.

Yeah, yeah. The Stoic, one of his books that I think is the best is the Obstacle is the Way. And it really talks about some of the things we've talked about. Running to the fire, confronting problems, you know, being comfortable with discomfort. So if people haven't checked out the Obstacles the Way by Ryan Holiday, I would highly recommend it and some of his other stuff.

All right, fantastic. Well, before we get to Scott Todd's tip, I have to mention our podcast sponsor, flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks of your life can literally be transformative. Go up that mount of land, vesting quickly, safely, efficiently with Scott Todd as your Sherpa, and start building that passive income in only 16 weeks. Because once your passive income exceeds your fixed expenses, you're working because you want to, not because you have to. And we're getting rid of the renters. No rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. Learn more. Get on a call with the Zen master, Mike Zano or the nightcap OG dude, buddy. Scott Bossman. Thelandgeek.com training thelandgeek.com training Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

You know what one of my pet peeves is, Mark?

I talk too much.

No, no, no, no. But it could be close. I cannot stand long emails. Okay? Like, to me, an email should be like, boom, Say what you want to say and let's roll. Okay, but like, to write. To write out a book. I don't have time to read that, so a lot of times I'll. If I even read it, I like down. I'm like, deleted. Move on. Time to move on. If it's important, it'll come back to me. But check out this tip. It's Sayless email. That's the website, Sayless Email. And what you do is you type in whatever you want, and there's actually a demo on the front page here on the homepage. Like, you type in what you want, you hit, like, the button, it will go back, and it will use AI to compress all the words that you're using into something that's short, sweet. And you know what happens when things are short and sweet? You get a response. So if you're sending, like, emails to. To your buyers list that are books, I'd say stop. Use something like this to think about what you're going to say. Make it streamline and try to get them to respond back to you. Especially on, like, sales emails. Stop sending books. They less. Oh, my gosh, I should be paid for that.

You should be. And I think I'm guilty as charged. I look at some of my. My emails. I'm like, man, this is long. This is great. This is great. Is this a subtle hint to me, Scott?

No, never, Ryan.

See how big my ego is? It's all. It's all about me, right?

You also, apparently, you know, Scott has trashed you in the past because you're. You're pretty defensive about his recommendations and commentary.

No, no, not really. It's just I'm. I'm a true, you know, narcissist. And whatever he says, I try to make it about me.

See? See? And earlier in the podcast, when he said I was an egomaniac, he was reflecting or deflecting on me, Right?

I was projecting it all onto Scott.

That's the word I was looking for.

Yeah. He was trying to make. He was trying to make you the one with the problem, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And like, in a way, you might have fallen for it. He got you.

Yeah, I believed it in the moment. Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty convincing like that.

All right, well, look, your guys had really good tips, but mine's the best tip because mine's the only tip that can really change your life. And learn more about Ryan Frederick at ryanfredrick Biz. We'll have a link to the site, but ryanfredrick Biz. Check out the book, check out what he's doing. And, you know, not that the Obstacle is the Way isn't a great book, but it's really not going to be about how to grow a business and be an entrepreneur. That's going to be more philosophical and it's a great, you know, sort of mindset book and not that, you know, this say less email stuff isn't cute. It is. It can help. But RyanFredrick, biz can really help you. So go check it out. Ryan, are we good?

We're good. Thanks for having me, Scott.

Todd, are we good?

Mark? Great.

All right. I want to thank the listeners. Just remind them the only way, the only way we're going to quality guests like, like a Ryan Frederick is if you do us three little favors. You gotta subscribe, you gotta rate, you gotta review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to support@thelandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 course, how to double your money 30 days or less. So please do that. All right, Scott, you ready to do this? I am, yeah. One, two, three. Let, let, let, let, let freedom, freedom ring. Thanks, everybody.