Founder Mode for ETA: $6m to $25m in 3 Years

whatever reasons of wanting to be their own boss or make money, or frankly, not even having a clear idea of what they want to do. And I think that is one of the biggest differentiators to me. And if I was going to invest in somebody else trying to buy a business or build a business, I would only invest in somebody that I thought had this founder owner operator type energy towards what they were…

What do the following Acquiring Minds guests all have in common? Doug Johns, Morley Desai, Tim Erickson, Chirag Shaw, Shane Ursum. They all went through the Acquisition Lab, the accelerator and community for people serious about buying a business.

The lab offers a month-long intensive, almost daily Q&A sessions with advisors, live deal reviews with Walker, deal team introductions, and an active community of serious searchers. Check out acquisitionlab.com, link in the notes, or email the lab's co-founder, Chelsea Wood, chelsea at buythenbuild.com.

Isaac, the conventional wisdom, so the anti-founder mode conventional wisdom is that scale only occurs when there is delegation. And so that's why, you know, hire great people and let them do their jobs and get out of their way. So two questions. How is it that... So it comes from a pretty rational place, this conventional wisdom.

How do you see that now that you're in there? And isn't there a logic to that? At some point, you're not going to be able to be involved in everything after you get beyond a certain point.

Although, of course, as you just pointed out... Elon Musk and Steve Jobs were running the most valuable companies in the world. And they both had brought the founder energy and obviously had scale. So where is that disconnect?

Yeah, so this is also, I'm shamelessly stealing this from Brian too. Like he says that in this speech, and I agree with this, that you have to own the product as the CEO or the founder or whatever you are. You have to own the product of the work, meaning the final output, whether that is your marketing strategy or your warehouse strategy or your sales system for your in-home professionals.

Like... You need to ultimately own how that ends up. And you can't delegate that, but you can delegate execution of stuff. So as you scale, more and more of the execution can be delegated.

And then you have to then have control points where you're checking the execution to make sure it matches what you have as a strategy. But like, okay, so if my company is a direct-to-consumer sales and marketing business...

i cannot delegate marketing to somebody else in my company and i never can and i never do so like i think about all the marketing campaigns we should be running i think about all the different areas and ways we should be marketing i read books about you know like right now i'm reading three books at once about direct mail marketing and like thinking about what we should be doing with direct mail…

And like that, I cannot delegate to anyone else. Now, when I come up with some stuff to do on marketing, and it's not that my team doesn't give me ideas too, but I cannot ultimately delegate getting leads and marketing to them. So, you know, let's say I'm reading these books.