Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Two Proven Frameworks That Built Multiple 8-Figure Companies | Colin C. Campbell - Serial Entrepreneur

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Lessons - Two Proven Frameworks That Built Multiple 8-Figure Companies | Colin C. Campbell - Serial Entrepreneur · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover how a decade-long commitment to excellence
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  built a top-ranked book on entrepreneurship. Learn why relentless effort and deep focus
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  create a competitive edge and understand how a framework of story, people, money,
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  and systems drive scalable success and profitable exits.
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  I'm actually very impressed with your book, and I don't usually, I don't usually, like,
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  completely focus on the book when we do a podcast, but how many you send me some accolades or
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  some rankings or some top charts that you hit with this book, and I'm super curious where
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  this book has ended up right now, because I can probably pull it up.
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  Well, I could tell me, yeah. I think 30 years is a serial entrepreneur,
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  but I'm also curious why this book did so well. 30 years is a serial entrepreneur.
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  10 years writing the book. We interviewed over 200 people. That's insane.
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  200 people's 10 years writing a book. I know, it's insane. It did it on airplanes.
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  You know, there's one passage in there about Doc Club, which was written 10 years ago,
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  so I kept the exact thing, because this was before Doc Club launched. I wrote it.
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  It was fascinating. So I kept the exact, I said, we're going to follow the start scale,
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  excerpt, methodology. We're going to focus on story, people, money, and systems,
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  and it's there. So we also, of the 200 people we interviewed, phenomenal people,
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  and only about 50 have actually made the book. We also wrote the book for ADHD entrepreneurs.
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  There's 58 chapters and they're very short and digestible. And by the way, it's stories.
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  It's the stories, my stories, and the stories of those other 50 people who were interviewed for the
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  book. Then we also put in illustrations, 30 illustrations. We color coded it, Forbes books did a
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  phenomenal job putting this book together and making it look like a world class book.
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  It's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories. It's when 13 awards globally,
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  and it came out 11 months ago. It's already won 13 awards. It's the most awarded
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  book on entrepreneurship in 2024. That's for Doc. Congratulations, dude.
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  Thank you. It's phenomenal. And you know, you do these things. I see a lot of my friends,
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  they launch these books and they're people are famous people watching these books.
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  Well, I don't think they hardly sell out of that. I get them all my hot cats call it.
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  And they look at them like last week, we're number one in every category. We were the number
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  four. We were number one in entrepreneurship for a week, and we were number four of all
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  business books in the United States last week. It was up there with Elon Musk and
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  start scale eggs at the peak, right? That was fascinating. I think that there's a lesson there.
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  I think putting 10 years into something, there's so much competition at the bottom and mid-market
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  in terms of like mediocreness. There's so much competition when you put out mediocre content.
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  There's so much competition when you build a mediocre company, but when you put so much
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  time and energy into something and you are in like the 0.001% of individuals, which I think
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  taking 10 years to write a book definitely puts you. I had some other businesses to run too. Yeah,
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  I know, but there really is not a lot of competition at the top of the market when you put
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  that much energy or effort into something. And I think that we are in an era where everyone's
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  trying to do the least and expect the most. And I think that the one and people are so frustrated
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  because they don't stand out on social or they don't feel like they're they write a book in a
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  couple months and they put it out and nobody buys it. Why does why does effort not minimal effort
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  not equal output or outcome? I think it's really because like anything, you just have to put
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  a lot of yourself into it and the market recognizes when you put a lot of yourself into it.
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  I believe that's why it's so successful because you spent so long and so much energy and blood
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  and sweat and tears and insight and thought leadership and experience goes into it.
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  Yeah, I mean, and I think a lot of very successful entrepreneurs like myself, they write books and
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  it's all about them. This book is not an autobiography. Yes, there are the short,
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  there's still stories are in there, right? There are stories in there, but it's not about me. It's
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  about the reader who wants to learn how to start a business. It's about the reader who wants to learn
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  to scale the business. It's about a reader who wants to learn to exit. And it's also about the leader
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  who wants to know how to do this over and over again. So it's really if it's a philosophy and it's
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  it's different. It's a different philosophy to than a lot of other books out there. You know,
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  I read the very beginning of the book that if you want to become a unicorn, this is the wrong book
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  for you. This is not this is all about building a solid foundation of base, building something up,
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  selling that off, taking some money off the table because bad things do happen and then repeating
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  that process over and over again. See, entrepreneurship, you are not a CEO of one particular company.
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  You're not just a podcaster. You're an entrepreneur and entrepreneurship is a trade and if you can
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  learn that trade, you can increase your chances of success dramatically. In fact, we've seen that
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  with serial entrepreneurs, they have a much higher chance of succeeding. It's like almost double.
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  It's like 18% for first time and it's 36% for a second or third time entrepreneur because even
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  if they failed in the past because they've had that experience doing it, it really is a trade and
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  we need to learn how to sharpen that sort and improve our knowledge on the topic of entrepreneurship.
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  And there's a lot of mental health challenges that we have to talk about as well. We'll talk about
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  that in a second. I don't I want to just sort of tie a bow and so the concepts coming out of the
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  book as well and then we can talk about mental health and a couple other concepts. But so just so
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  that people are clear because we sort of gone back and forth between I would guess I would say
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  two frameworks because you have start scale exit repeat, but then you also have story, people,
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  money and systems. So there's a how do these two frameworks play into each other? Okay, so in start,
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  you have to story, you have to come up with the idea, you have to solve the problem so you're
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  talking about the story and then you also have the people who do you need in start and really
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  it's all about the entrepreneur in start, right? And then you have systems they talk about systems
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  and start I just say just figure out your KPIs don't get too complicated. So the support components
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  they do play a piece and any to want to go section, but they changed dramatically. I got between each
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  section and that's how we wrote the book. So you'll you'll see there's the the story, people,
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  money and systems and start and then a story, people and these systems and scale and by the way,
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  it's all different in exit. You wouldn't be surprised how many things you can do as an individual,
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  as an entrepreneur to increase the valuation of your company just by understanding the what goes
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  into selling the company by understanding the mindset of the buyer. I was I was on that when I did
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  work for the Fortune February company, I bought probably about 15 companies. So I totally understand
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  the mindset of the buyer now. And so that's reflected in the book as well. When you go through this
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  process of starts failing to repeat, what are the things? Because again, this is position for an
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  entrepreneur, not trying to build a unicorn or a billion dollar company that even happens with for
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  you, but you're trying to build a process that it's almost like you're teaching entrepreneurship.
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  It's not it's not just dumb luck. This is a process that can be repeated again and again and again
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  again as as you've shown as you've done in your own life. But what are keeping the end in mind
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  or the exit in mind? What are the most important things in the start process that can impact
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  to the exit process? Well, I think one of the things I we did at dot club is we actually identified
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  the buyer who we wanted to buy the company from day one. Right. And we knew it was GoDaddy.
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  Right. I mean, they're the big ones. They're really bad. They're the elephant, right?
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  They wanted to. And so often what are the conferences and we pitched to GoDaddy, met with people,
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  got to know them at the conferences. I like to when we start a company, I always say,
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  you know, one of the biggest challenges when you're selling a company are the schedules
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  and the due diligence. So make certain every contract is an virtual drive. Every single contract,
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  it's got you can't be scrambling at the last minute to put documents together and we know
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  that things can happen, right? And when you, you know, they've got 20 people on the other side,
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  you got two, right? And that's it. And it's it's it's it's it's daunting when you go into these
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  exit processes and it can take months and get bogged down. Um, but no, no, you do need to
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  when you get into deal mode, it's closed mode. There's no such thing as weekends or evenings.
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  It's it's a football game. You got to get that ball across the line. That's it. And, um, and it's
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  start if you don't organize, you know, that's going to be it's going to make it that much harder
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  to actually sell the company down the road. So then we also want to state your family business
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  from the right. Yeah, we also want to state pure, you know, we're we're running a, um,
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  a software platform company. We would want to buy a farm and put that in the company and this is
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  a, you got it, it's got to be clean. Okay. And there's some certain other things we need to do as
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  well. For instance, to get venture capital or we want to stay within the normal standards.
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  And like, for instance, when you do give options in your company, you want to generally want to
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  do it between 10 and 20% of your company. If you go too much higher, it's going to be negative for
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  your valuations down the road. You go a little too low. That can be negative as well. But you
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  generally want to be around 10 to 15% for options in your company. So the certain standards that
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  you can set up early on as well. And we talk a lot about that in the book. It just,
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  it really isn't the type of book that's going to tell you how to make a billion dollars. And,
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  and I worry a lot about, and I've seen too many companies, I've invested in too many company
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  founders where they get Silicon Valley disease. And this is a term that I coined based on this
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  concept that we get this venture funding. We're going to build it out and we're going to build
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  that billion dollar company. By the way, they're pushing you. They're pushing you to get the 10X. They
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  want you to gamble. They want the gamble. They don't want that double or triple. That's not what
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  they want. So they're actually pushing you. And it also can lead to issues in your company
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  and spending that you shouldn't really be doing. One of my favorite forms of funding is customer
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  funded startups. And we had a gentleman named John Mullins on who wrote the book customer fund
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  and startup. And we interviewed him for this book. And I can't tell you how many companies that
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  fortune 5,000 list use customer funded techniques use your customers to fund your business.
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  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you
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  never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links
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  in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.