And I looked at their model and he he started that business to be a franchise. And I had read The E-Myth by Gerber. The premise of the book is why do four out of five businesses fail after the first year and another four out of five fail after five years?
Acquiring Minds
4th Time's the Charm: 3 Broken Deals to Buy a Great Business
Excerpts · 263 segments · ~1:13:45 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
And so Gerber did a ton of research. And what he came up with was the number one reason businesses fail is that the... operators, the entrepreneurs that are starting the business fail to create the systems that are needed to support the growth of the business past a certain level.
And a lot of businesses either grow themselves out of business or they just fail because they don't have the right systems in place. And so the premise is if you design your business to be a franchisor or a franchise, it forces you to systematize all of your processes just like a franchise would have to systematize their marketing strategy and your hiring strategy and your IT strategy, all that…
It's all documented and you have systems in place. So we treated it like a franchise from day one and it was a lot of fun. And what happened? So rather than get bank money or any type of SBA money, I went for private equity.
And so I leaned in on people that I knew, which a lot of entrepreneurs do that. And I...
would discourage anyone from doing that if you can at all get away from borrowing from non-sophisticated investors but that's what i did and so i slowly accumulated a group of investors that helped to fund the startup and the subsequent growth of the startup we were started to sell franchises but again we were selling franchises to some of the folks were very sophisticated and some were not as…
as we rounded the corner into 2008 if you recall that was not a great year for a lot of folks and ourselves included and so capital was drying up and we really needed to pull ourselves out of it and in the process of that i had
uh some shareholders decide that they um wanted to go a different direction and so to make a long story short there was kind of a behind the scenes rally and uh because i didn't have any capital uh my my venture capital that hasn't backed out on a deal in 16 years up until that point had to cancel the appointment because it was 2008 and the market had just crashed and so i went through a hostile…
And that was going into 2008, 2009. So not a great period of time, not a great experience to go through. I don't recommend it to anybody.
Yeah. And yet you still didn't... doubt your decision to leave syntax and become an entrepreneur oh no not not even a little bit not even a little bit wow and so then if you didn't regret that decision when you're licking your wounds it's not i'm going to go back and get a job it sounds like you were basically a convert you were an entrepreneur uh come hell or high water at that point no matter…
yeah i i that's a great way to put it um i i i definitely it's a it is a decision it's a choice and it's different for everybody but i i just felt like if i went back and got a job that it would be that comfort would be hard. It would almost be like a trap that would be hard to get out of.
I was I was proud of myself for leaving in the first place because that was extremely difficult. And and and, you know, financially and otherwise, all my all my friends were there. I had been there my whole career.
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗