Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Surviving Betrayal and Federal Litigation: How Justin Lund Turned Trauma Into Triumph

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Surviving Betrayal and Federal Litigation: How Justin Lund Turned Trauma Into Triumph · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:05
  It was, it was an aha.
• 0:06
  Like, aha, I'm an idiot.
• 0:08
  What am I even doing?
• 0:10
  And then from there I started thinking, I need to figure out what is going on.
• 0:16
  Today's guest is Justin Lund, a seasoned entrepreneur, founder and the CEO of Propel.
• 0:24
  With a knack for scaling companies beyond the first few million in revenue, Justin's journey has been anything but ordinary.
• 0:31
  From building a nearly nine figure marketing and hosting business to weathering years of intense federal litigation after discovering a trusted partner was siphoning millions.
• 0:42
  Justin shares raw and inspiring story of adversity and resilience.
• 0:48
  In this episode we dive deep into the lessons learned from addiction and recovery.
• 0:53
  The staggering betrayal that nearly destroyed everything and the grit it took to rebuild.
• 0:58
  You'll hear how Justin's experience now fuels his passion for helping founders avoid the same pitfalls, offering actionable insights on scaling, delegation and regaining control of your business.
• 1:11
  Buckle up for a powerful episode packed with hard earned wisdom and hope you don't want to miss this one.
• 1:18
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:23
  All right, Justin Lund, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:27
  Thanks for having me.
• 1:28
  Happy to be here, Dave.
• 1:29
  Yes, sir.
• 1:30
  We appreciate you being here.
• 1:32
  So Justin, you are the founder and the CEO of Propel and that is a company that helps founders scale after they've hit a certain revenue wall within their business.
• 1:44
  Usually first couple million dollars in revenue.
• 1:47
  Yeah, that's what you.
• 1:49
  But we, we were just talking off camera and you've had quite a, quite a dramatic business journey up until this point.
• 1:57
  And four years of intense federal litigation actually led into this incredible company that, that you have today.
• 2:07
  Can you just give our viewers your backstory and how you got to where you are today?
• 2:12
  Yeah, after some, some accelerated plans to get married, a relationship I had with my then girlfriend and we found out that we were expecting and so we sped that process up.
• 2:25
  I was in college at the time and working a sales job part time to put myself through college.
• 2:31
  And that I liked sales.
• 2:34
  It was, I was kind of had a knack for it.
• 2:36
  I loved psychology.
• 2:37
  Those were some of the courses I was taking in school.
• 2:39
  Although I didn't really like the path of therapy or social work or lcsw.
• 2:46
  So I didn't really know what I was going to do.
• 2:48
  The sales thing I enjoyed.
• 2:50
  But then when I knew we were getting married and had a family to support, I went all in on sales because I could make a pretty handsome six figure income there.
• 2:59
  Even while I was only working part time in going to school.
• 3:03
  So went full Time into sales.
• 3:05
  And there were just some, some toxic behaviors in the atmosphere there.
• 3:10
  Prescription drug abuse.
• 3:12
  Then I became addicted to prescription drugs, painkillers.
• 3:16
  And that led me into just trying to maintain that habit and keep my family together.
• 3:21
  And you know, addiction is never pretty.
• 3:24
  It's not a pretty outcome ever.
• 3:27
  And over the next couple of years and trying to juggle all of that, I wasn't, you know, it just got worse and worse and worse and worse as time went by.
• 3:35
  And then after a couple of arrests, some run ins with the law, I was kind of compelled to go into rehab as kind of maybe a last ditch effort to avoid doing anything serious in terms of time in
• 3:47
  jail, prison.
• 3:49
  So that was an awesome experience for me.
• 3:51
  It's where my love of psychology really clicked because I had this team of people that were working with me, on me, about me, you know, no phones, no distractions, it was all just, you know, figuring my stuff out
• 4:03
  and what made me tech.
• 4:05
  And I learned a lot of really good frameworks and paradigms there that just helped me to filter my world and my reactions and this, this gap between stimulus and response.
• 4:17
  You know, there was, there's this moment that I could choose and so building that up was awesome.
• 4:22
  When I got out of there, part of them kind of teaching, part of the teaching in there is that you're going to leave this place and now you're healthy, you're feeling better, but the world outside remembers you at
• 4:34
  your lowest point.
• 4:35
  So you got to be ready for them to.
• 4:37
  I mean, that's where you're going to be met, is they think you're at your lowest point.
• 4:41
  And that was definitely true going through, going through all that.
• 4:47
  And then, you know, addicts are never truthful and honest and upstanding citizens.
• 4:51
  So there was a lot of stuff that I needed to kind of repair and build.
• 4:56
  And it prepared me for that for the next couple of years of just being willing to kind of suffer then almost like retribution for the life that I've been living.
• 5:05
  I kind of got to settle the score sort of thing and let's people heal and overcome that.
• 5:11
  So I really put a lot of focus in going all in on my business.
• 5:14
  I started a business.
• 5:16
  I learned in rehab that one of the things that may be triggering for me to look for an escape that I found in drugs unhealthily was just kind of settling.
• 5:26
  You know, I would, I would take a job or do things or trade my time for things that really there was a dissonance between what I felt like I was capable of and what I was actually doing and
• 5:38
  choosing to do.
• 5:39
  So when you create that disconnect in your own mind, it, it leaves things unbalanced.
• 5:45
  And so you can either go to therapy or work through your imbalances or you numb those imbalances is what most many people do, whether it's drinking, food, drugs, whatever.
• 5:58
  So I really wanted to go in on something and see if all these, the myriad of opportunities and businesses that I'd done a little bit of this and a little bit of that, could I really pull it off.
• 6:09
  And now that with, without an addiction or anything like that kind of hampering me, I had more of my mental faculties available to pour into it.
• 6:17
  And I just did.
• 6:19
  I went all in and I built the business and over the next five years got to almost a nine figure revenue per year run rate.
• 6:29
  I just learned a lot of really good lessons and, and built a fun enterprise there.
• 6:33
  One business we got really good at in the first three and a half years, then started putting together other businesses that were supporting that business.
• 6:41
  And then we're doing, you know, went from marketing into hosting and this before AWS and Google Cloud and everything.
• 6:47
  So we were setting up complicated infrastructure and server hosting environments and things.
• 6:54
  And we had 98 employees to a group really big.
• 6:58
  But I always had kind of a, I was never good with numbers.
• 7:03
  You know, I, I had that fear that I didn't really want to get too deep into the tax stuff and I didn't really get involved with like the financial side.
• 7:10
  I knew what, I knew what we owed our vendors, I knew how much we were getting in accounts receivable.
• 7:15
  But beyond that I, I was pretty off to the side and I brought a partner in who was taking care of, of all of those things.
• 7:23
  And so at the time I thought this is a dream come true.
• 7:26
  I get to just kind of stay in my lane, do what I feel like I'm good at and all this other stuff somebody else is taking care of for me.
• 7:33
  Turns out that wasn't really being taken care of.
• 7:36
  It was being taken, not taken care of.
• 7:38
  So there were tens of millions of dollars that just get.
• 7:44
  That was kind of siphoned off the balance sheet in that last couple of years.
• 7:48
  Maybe the whole time, I mean I spent after that the music stopped, if you will, and the, there was no chair left for me to sit in.
• 7:57
  The money was all gone.
• 7:59
  I began trying to piece things back together and figure out what was going on and where some of the money went.
• 8:05
  And there was a lot of transfers that took Place over the years, checks written to entities.
• 8:10
  There's just.
• 8:11
  It was a complicated scheme of shell companies and LLCs that were set up that ultimately funneled back to this person.
• 8:21
  So I never actually got to the bottom of how much money was taken, but it was, it was tens of millions of dollars.
• 8:28
  And that began the next chapter of my life, which was four and a half years long.
• 8:34
  Litigating with all of these parties, this individual, a bunch of different companies, and trying to figure out where did the money go, who filed the taxes, what's going on.
• 8:44
  And that then became a concurrent fight with the IRS because there were millions of dollars of taxes that were unpaid.
• 8:53
  Turns out.
• 8:55
  So it turns out if you don't pay taxes, then there's more money for somebody to take.
• 8:58
  You know, so there was a lot more money there that was kind of removed out of the equation.
• 9:04
  So it was four and a half years of a battle in court and with the Treasury Department, not people I like to fight with.
• 9:12
  But that's, that's what the next four years look like.
• 9:16
  Okay.
• 9:17
  All right.
• 9:17
  Wow.
• 9:18
  So you build this.
• 9:20
  You, you so much to unpack there.
• 9:23
  And I appreciate the explanation.
• 9:24
  Right, so you've got this natural knack for sales, right?
• 9:28
  You have a family very young, and you go all in to really take care of your family.
• 9:33
  You go through your, your, your addiction issues with the prescription drugs and a couple stints and rep rehab and eventually you, you, you get sober, you, you, you know, get past that addiction and then you're at this, this
• 9:49
  point in your career where you, you begin building this incredible.
• 9:53
  I guess it's a web server company.
• 9:55
  Is that, is that what you're doing?
• 9:57
  It started out as a marketing agency, like an affiliate marketing network.
• 10:00
  That was the first sort of business model and plan where.
• 10:05
  And it morphed just a little bit into more of where I was not as much an affiliate network very close to where I, where I would take somebody selling widgets.
• 10:14
  You know, that somebody has a product and they don't really know how to get it out to market.
• 10:17
  So I would find essentially traffic sources for them.
• 10:21
  You know, if somebody has a blog that gets a hundred thousand visitors a day, a month, a week, whatever, I would kind of facilitate a relationship between these two parties.
• 10:29
  The widget maker and the blogger or the email list manager or the Google Ad buyer or Facebook ad buyer.
• 10:38
  You know, these were kind of newer technology.
• 10:40
  Like Facebook was new then Facebook ad ads was really quite new.
• 10:45
  So I facilitate the connection between the two of them and manage the money that Went back and forth.
• 10:51
  So they're paying for ads.
• 10:52
  I'm delivering them their cash and making sure these two parties just maintaining the relationship on both sides of the ledger.
• 10:59
  Okay, okay.
• 11:00
  So.
• 11:01
  So you build that kind of.
• 11:02
  In the early days of all this stuff, right?
• 11:05
  You get really good at it.
• 11:06
  You scale it to nearly nine figures.
• 11:09
  And like you said, you had a partner.
• 11:11
  And.
• 11:11
  And because you were like a sales guy, you were not deep in the numbers.
• 11:15
  You have this partner that can handle the books, handle the accounting and that sort of thing.
• 11:20
  And you said it felt like a dream come true because you could focus on your zone of genius, and then you've got someone else handling the money in the books and the numbers.
• 11:28
  Right?
• 11:29
  And.
• 11:29
  But then that.
• 11:30
  That dream turned into a nightmare where you realize your partner was actually stealing and it wasn't being taken care of, but the money was being taken.
• 11:41
  I mean, did he just drain the accounts?
• 11:43
  And you woke up one day and you realized that, like, there's no money.
• 11:48
  That's how it ended at the.
• 11:50
  In the very.
• 11:50
  At the very last draw.
• 11:52
  And this was going on in 2009, 10.
• 11:58
  And if you remember back to then, we had the housing crisis going on.
• 12:03
  There was a big problem with banks and liquidity, and the FDIC was taking over a lot of banks at the time.
• 12:11
  So there was a.
• 12:13
  It kind of parlayed with that season of our.
• 12:16
  Our history, or economic history, I guess, if you will, to where over the course of the years, it turns out there was a lot of payments being made that were little onesie twosie things.
• 12:26
  You know, Maybe it was 10 grand here or there that went to an LLC that looked like it just fit in with all the other vendors.
• 12:32
  Because, mind you, our model was we bring in all this money and we manage payments to dozens or even hundreds of vendors for all the marketing.
• 12:41
  So some of those entities could have been.
• 12:45
  Some were definitely some of the entities of this part.
• 12:49
  We found over 200 entities as we began to do discovery that this person had set up shell companies that led back to different holding companies, that led back to offshore companies.
• 12:59
  So the web of financial complexity there was so intense to try to unravel it all was insane.
• 13:07
  But yes, in the last moment, there was.
• 13:11
  I don't remember if it was 1.6.
• 13:13
  1 point.
• 13:15
  It was just over a million and a half.
• 13:17
  If I remember right, that was in one account, and that was our main operating account.
• 13:21
  And all of a sudden it went to a thousand dollars.
• 13:26
  And things were slowing down because of the economic.
• 13:29
  You know, we were, we were conserving, we were reducing, we were dropping payroll, we were letting people go, laying people off.
• 13:35
  And I saw that big transfer take place and reached out and said, whoa, where did that cash go?
• 13:41
  He's like, don't, don't worry about it.
• 13:43
  I would just, we're worried about the bank.
• 13:44
  We believe there's going to be, the FDIC is going to come in and start freezing assets.
• 13:48
  And we don't want, we're just keeping you safe.
• 13:51
  You go out there and keep doing what you do, we're gonna do what we do and taking care of your money and keeping you safe.
• 13:58
  And so again, well, it felt a little weird.
• 14:00
  That was the one single biggest transaction, biggest move.
• 14:02
  I think it was a 6 or 700,000 in one transfer.
• 14:06
  And a million dollar check was another one.
• 14:08
  So the two together was just a little over a million and a half.
• 14:12
  But again, there was always a reason in a story.
• 14:15
  Why.
• 14:15
  So that made sense because one of the banks we were banking with just three months before FDIC did come in, they froze the bank we got, everything was insured that we had at that bank.
• 14:26
  So we didn't lose money, but we couldn't access it for weeks.
• 14:30
  You know, there's a period of time where we couldn't get anything, we couldn't move anything because the FDIC just froze it all.
• 14:36
  They went in with their controller and just assumed the responsibility of the bank and taking everything over.
• 14:43
  So again, kind of passed the snip test.
• 14:45
  And if you don't really want to know, because you don't, you're, you're the kind of guy that doesn't really dig too deep.
• 14:51
  It's like, okay, I guess that made sense.
• 14:53
  And I think that's really, that's why and how that whole thing lasted as long as it did, because I didn't want to know.
• 15:00
  And he did a good job of saying, you're so brilliant out there, you know, stroking my ego.
• 15:05
  To keep me out in the field, to keep me on the road, I traveled a lot.
• 15:09
  I was creating new connections and bringing in new accounts that were revenue producing.
• 15:14
  And it was always like, wow, you're so amazing.
• 15:16
  You're just doing such a great job for building this enterprise into such a massive company.
• 15:21
  But it allowed me to just really stay out of the numbers that, well, I don't really want to go hang out in the numbers, you know, you'll never see me hanging out.
• 15:28
  Even today.
• 15:29
  I don't go open spreadsheets to have a good time, you know, so it was how that kind of came together.
• 15:36
  Okay, and what.
• 15:37
  When did you, like, actually find out what was going on?
• 15:44
  The big telling moment was I had.
• 15:48
  There was shortly after that big transfer, and I started thinking, okay, things are not going well.
• 15:53
  Maybe in the three months that followed it, because it still wasn't totally apparent.
• 15:58
  But we started really scaling down and going down from 100 people to a dozen, you know, over the next three months.
• 16:06
  And as we're trying to keep things going, and we had a few different businesses on supporting businesses like the hosting company, different things that were still bringing in some revenue.
• 16:17
  It was just the behavior seemed a little weird.
• 16:19
  There was more and more distance becoming between us.
• 16:23
  And again, there was always.
• 16:24
  There was always a reason for it, but it just.
• 16:27
  It started to just not finally pulled my head out of this and a little bit, I guess.
• 16:32
  And I had lunch with him one day and said, okay, here's what I'm going to do.
• 16:35
  I got a new plan for kind of rebuilding and starting over.
• 16:39
  My wife's a little apprehensive about everything because we don't talk as much anymore.
• 16:44
  We're not in the same offices together anymore.
• 16:46
  So she just feels a little leery.
• 16:48
  I'm good, but this was kind of my attempt to just bring things to the forefront.
• 16:54
  So I said, I need.
• 16:55
  This is what I'm gonna do.
• 16:56
  I laid out a plan for him over lunch and showed that I need $600,000 to have a year Runway.
• 17:03
  And that year, this is what I'm going to accomplish, and everything's good.
• 17:05
  And if I show my wife that we have that operating capital in the bank, she's going to feel good and just leave me to do my thing.
• 17:12
  And he's like, okay, cool.
• 17:13
  That's.
• 17:14
  I love it.
• 17:14
  You're a genius.
• 17:15
  You're brilliant.
• 17:16
  You're.
• 17:16
  You're going to knock it out of the park.
• 17:17
  Way to go.
• 17:18
  I'm like, cool, so just send me back 600,000 of that money that you just transferred a few months ago.
• 17:22
  It's like, all right, cool, let's go.
• 17:25
  The next day, I got up, checked the bank.
• 17:26
  There was nothing in the bank.
• 17:28
  I text.
• 17:28
  I tried to call him, went to voicemail.
• 17:31
  He text me back and said that he was on the Runway on the tarmac, and he was getting ready to take off somewhere.
• 17:36
  He couldn't take my call.
• 17:37
  I said, I didn't get the transfer.
• 17:39
  And he replied with, what transfer?
• 17:41
  Like, man, I just had lunch with you yesterday.
• 17:43
  We went over this in.
• 17:45
  In detail, the whole plan, the $600,000.
• 17:48
  And he replied with, there's no money.
• 17:50
  I don't know what you're talking about.
• 17:52
  So let like 16 hours before that, we're face to face with each other talking about it, and everything's awesome.
• 18:00
  But now that he's on a plane and about to take off, there's no money, and he doesn't know what I'm talking about.
• 18:06
  And that's when.
• 18:08
  That's when it really just like, oh, wow.
• 18:11
  I.
• 18:12
  I knew, I knew.
• 18:13
  I kind of knew something was going on, but that was when there was no more hiding anything because he was not going to send a dime of money my way.
• 18:21
  Okay, all right.
• 18:23
  So you have that aha moment.
• 18:25
  It's like a dagger in the heart when you realize this person you trusted now is.
• 18:29
  Is a con artist, basically.
• 18:30
  And it finally hits you.
• 18:32
  So.
• 18:32
  And at that point, after you've spent so long building this business and working so hard, and to.
• 18:39
  You basically left with nothing.
• 18:41
  Like, where do you go from there?
• 18:44
  What happens next?
• 18:46
  Yeah, I've never heard it described as an aha moment, because usually those are good, right?
• 18:50
  You have an aha, and you're like this new awakening.
• 18:52
  And it.
• 18:53
  But that's what it was.
• 18:54
  It was an aha.
• 18:55
  Like, aha, I'm an idiot.
• 18:56
  What am I even doing?
• 18:59
  And then from there, I started thinking, I need to figure out what is going on.
• 19:05
  So I grabbed.
• 19:07
  I had one employee, well, I had a few, but one that was kind of working on the books.
• 19:12
  And I, I grabbed that guy and said, get all of the QuickBooks files that you have that are my.
• 19:18
  That I'm on the company.
• 19:20
  Download them.
• 19:21
  Let's get them off the servers or computers or wherever they are.
• 19:25
  I need to start figuring out what's going on.
• 19:27
  And so I, I told him just a little bit of information that was going on and said, we're going to office somewhere else, so get your stuff, we're leaving.
• 19:34
  And we started to look at some of the financials, look at some of the books.
• 19:40
  And I went and met with some different accountants and attorneys.
• 19:43
  And that's where they began to kind of open my eyes over the next few weeks or what really had been going on.
• 19:52
  And they would ask me questions about, well, what about, what did you.
• 19:54
  What did this company do back in 2008?
• 19:58
  I'd say, I think it was like, I don't know, 27, $30 million or something like that.
• 20:04
  And they're like, they did a discovery with the irs, and I don't know if you know what that Is.
• 20:08
  But you can.
• 20:10
  You can contact the IRS and you can say, tell me what you have as a.
• 20:13
  It's a transcript.
• 20:14
  So you do.
• 20:15
  They provide you everything that's been reported, everything you have filed.
• 20:18
  And any, like, if anybody's 1099 you that they have records of, they provide all that information and just a little printout.
• 20:25
  So one of them did that on my behalf, and they were looking at some of these numbers that I was telling them, like, 27, 28 million.
• 20:32
  They're like, well, this shows like hundreds of thousands of dollars is all.
• 20:36
  Like, wait, what?
• 20:38
  So there was a.
• 20:39
  Just a deliberate gross understatement.
• 20:43
  Sometimes 10 to 100x of revenues versus actuality.
• 20:50
  And then there was just so much going on.
• 20:53
  I mean, this is over the course of five years.
• 20:55
  So these people started to tell me that, well, what you probably need to do is go back and just try putting this puzzle back together and getting as much financial data as you can get to try to put
• 21:08
  the pieces together.
• 21:10
  Or there's door number two, and door number two is you just slip off quietly and you say nothing to anyone and you hope to hell that nobody ever looks.
• 21:21
  So what happens if I go through door number two and people look, they're like, well, you'll probably go to prison.
• 21:26
  Because it looks like.
• 21:28
  I mean, before we.
• 21:30
  There's millions of dollars in taxes owed that you haven't paid.
• 21:35
  So, well, how am I going to pay it?
• 21:37
  And there was no.
• 21:38
  That was just all there was.
• 21:39
  That's all we had to work with.
• 21:40
  We knew that there was a gross understatement of taxes.
• 21:43
  We knew there was a lot of funny business going on, and we had very little of the records and details to actually put Humpty Dumpty back together and piece together what happened over the previous five years.
• 21:55
  So I didn't want to go.
• 21:57
  Now I have a family of four.
• 21:58
  My fourth child was just born right before this.
• 22:03
  And, you know, there I am again, kind of looking at the possibility, the threat of potentially prison for something that I had no.
• 22:10
  I mean, I didn't even have any of the money left, right?
• 22:12
  The money's gone.
• 22:13
  Everything's out of there.
• 22:15
  So I.
• 22:16
  But I got my family.
• 22:17
  I've got to protect, I've got to be a provider for.
• 22:19
  So I'm like, all right, let's.
• 22:21
  Let's start putting Humpty Dumpty back together.
• 22:24
  And that meant we have to file a lawsuit.
• 22:27
  We have to start going into discovery.
• 22:29
  So that's what the next four and a half years were from that Point forward.
• 22:33
  Okay.
• 22:34
  All right.
• 22:35
  And so let's.
• 22:36
  And before we get into that, because through the darkest periods of your.
• 22:43
  Of your career spawned, you know, one of the brightest.
• 22:47
  And we'll get into that.
• 22:48
  But quick question.
• 22:49
  So did this person, did they ever, you know, face the consequences for what they did?
• 22:57
  We settled our case just a week or two before the trial date was to begin.
• 23:03
  I've not Googled or checked anything since.
• 23:07
  So that's not.
• 23:07
  That's between him and God and not between me.
• 23:10
  You know, I have no idea.
• 23:13
  Okay, but you settled and you got.
• 23:15
  I guess you got.
• 23:16
  You got payment or some.
• 23:18
  Some sort of settlement.
• 23:19
  The IRS did.
• 23:20
  The IRS got the money because they were so.
• 23:23
  They were so hot and heavy about what was going on.
• 23:27
  I mean, like I said, I was.
• 23:28
  It was a.
• 23:29
  There was multi fronts of this battle taking place concurrently.
• 23:33
  So there was the.
• 23:35
  Trying to get the information from this party and the dozens, which turned into hundreds of shell companies.
• 23:41
  And then just to put, you know, insult to injury, his.
• 23:45
  Some of the strategy was sue anybody and everybody that might be related or close to or connected to me in any way, because that gives me just something else to deal with that.
• 23:56
  I got to pay another 10 or 20 or 30 grand in legal fees.
• 23:58
  So the.
• 24:00
  The approach was to attempt to kind of bleed me out.
• 24:03
  And just about worked.
• 24:04
  I mean, we got.
• 24:05
  I paid a lot of millions of dollars in legal fees, and I didn't have.
• 24:09
  By the end, I was into.
• 24:12
  I think I was into my attorneys by $1.5 million, 1, 3.
• 24:16
  They had put a lien against my home.
• 24:19
  They had.
• 24:20
  I mean, just to keep going, because those last few months, I couldn't.
• 24:22
  I had zero.
• 24:23
  I had nothing.
• 24:24
  I had a settlement on with the accounting firm that was kind of in cahoots with him.
• 24:30
  They had an insurance policy that settled with me that gave me some Runway.
• 24:37
  So that's.
• 24:38
  That's kind of how I funded and financed all of that.
• 24:40
  But at the end, there wasn't a big payday or a huge celebration other than I didn't have to deal with it anymore.
• 24:46
  And the IRS was paid and satisfied with the.
• 24:51
  They got millions of dollars in back taxes and penalties and interest and.
• 24:55
  And everything.
• 24:56
  Okay.
• 24:57
  All right.
• 24:57
  And so while you're going through this process, your current company, Propel, was formed to talk about how that happened.
• 25:08
  And actually, it's just kind of a nuance.
• 25:11
  It wasn't actually formed, but it was born then.
• 25:13
  And what I mean by that is we didn't have a website.
• 25:15
  We didn't have any idea of.
• 25:17
  I had a friend of mine call me two and a half years into this ugly process and, and she just asked for some help setting up payroll.
• 25:25
  She had a new business idea and she wanted to hire somebody.
• 25:28
  So she wanted herself and a friend that she was going to work with to just get payroll twice a month.
• 25:35
  So she's like, don't you have professionals that like, working on your case and stuff that could do that?
• 25:39
  So we just did it kind of as a favor because it was helpful for her.
• 25:43
  And that's just stuff that she didn't really like to get into at all.
• 25:47
  And she told five or six of her friends and immediately they called us and asked if we could do the same thing for them.
• 25:54
  Within a year, we had about 50 clients.
• 25:58
  So we still didn't have a website, didn't really have an official company.
• 26:02
  You know, I had an LLC set up that was just kind of a holding thing for other stuff.
• 26:05
  And we ran it through there for a while and then, then eventually Propel was formed because it was, it was a business that was bringing in some decent revenue and we were doing books and records and accounting things.
• 26:18
  Payroll, full outsource accounting work for, for a lot of, for 50 different companies, all from Manhattan to Hawaii and everywhere in between a lot of different industries.
• 26:30
  Okay, so for, for someone that didn't like to go hang out in the numbers and, and got in.
• 26:39
  A crazy.
• 26:40
  Predicament with a, a business partner, basically swindling millions of dollars and defrauding the irs, lo and behold, now you've created a successful accounting company where you, you handle the books and the numbers for other entrepreneurs.
• 26:57
  I mean, that, that is the, the ultimate irony, I would say.
• 27:01
  It is, it is.
• 27:02
  And I don't, I mean, I definitely recognize that you still don't find me, like I said before, you don't find me hanging out in spreadsheets or QuickBooks just to have a good time.
• 27:11
  But what I got to do as part of that, I had a good team that was helping.
• 27:16
  They did all the work, you know, as far as filing the 941 returns and running payroll every two weeks and getting all the accounts payable, handled the AR, the accounts receivable and the invoicing.
• 27:27
  So we had clients that we would just do some basic stuff, some that we would only work a couple hours a month and just do like reconciling and just check what their internal team was doing all the way
• 27:38
  to full service.
• 27:39
  Like 100 of the.
• 27:41
  Their accounting was outsourced into our office.
• 27:43
  And we just kind of acted as one of their representatives in that process.
• 27:50
  My personal role in that is that I would work with the founders directly and just try to help them.
• 27:57
  Really.
• 27:57
  I, I was essentially saying in a number of different ways, don't do what I did and get the results that I got, because that there was no part of that that was fun or enjoyable.
• 28:07
  So let me show you how you can maybe create a report out of.
• 28:12
  Let me translate what our accountants are saying into human, into entrepreneur, you know, because most accountants don't speak entrepreneur and vice versa.
• 28:20
  So let me help you translate and then let me help you tell them how you could get a report that actually serves you.
• 28:25
  It's all from the same source, it's the same data.
• 28:28
  But when you get a P and L on a balance sheet and you're like, okay, I'll check that out next week, and you never get around to it, like, that's just not a good strategy.
• 28:36
  So you can actually build things that work and serve you so that you can pay attention to the real needle moving stuff going on in your business.
• 28:44
  And you don't have to be a master's level accountant to read a basic report.
• 28:48
  You can build one that works for you.
• 28:50
  And then maybe next month you're just a little bit better at dealing with these numbers than you are this month.
• 28:55
  And you know, you keep that progress going, then maybe in 12 months you're quite a bit better and you just continue to get better and better at handling some of these issues that sometimes can be a little vexing
• 29:08
  to you and your business.
• 29:09
  So that was kind of my role.
• 29:11
  And then as of in the last year, I've separated and sold out.
• 29:15
  Some of the, the bookkeeping and accounting clients are now with my former employee that was managing that whole team, he's now running that division separately than me.
• 29:25
  And we do just the consulting and content here to help.
• 29:30
  I really want to reach and get this message out to as many founders and business owners as possible.
• 29:34
  These startup guys, these small companies that make our economy work, you know that there's so many of them that feel the same way.
• 29:42
  They have, they have an idea, they have passions, they have, they have some spark that they're willing to go out and risk it all for.
• 29:50
  But there's other areas.
• 29:51
  You know, once you reach a ceiling, your capacities are.
• 29:57
  Well, I use an example sometimes of somebody baking cookies just to explain the, the concept.
• 30:02
  Like if you're really good at making cookies and you make a really good cookie, enough people will tell you you should sell these.
• 30:07
  These are great.
• 30:08
  These are, you know, people buy this, they're so good.
• 30:11
  So you go out and you hang up your shingle and you're like, okay, I'm, I'm a cookie maker.
• 30:15
  There's going to be a point in time if you continue to grow where the skills that you need to keep growing and have nothing to do with your skills in the kitchen.
• 30:23
  They won't have anything to do with flour, sugar, baking temperature, you know, nothing, nothing that you were excited about in the beginning.
• 30:30
  And that's where most people hit that ceiling of capacity.
• 30:33
  And typically they just turn back down because it feels painful.
• 30:37
  When you reach that you're getting stressed out, you got to file a tax return, you want to hire somebody, but you don't know how to do payroll or maybe you've hired people and now all those complexities are now
• 30:48
  boiling up because now you got human resources to deal with.
• 30:50
  And you didn't deal with that before.
• 30:52
  You just dealt with flour and sugar resources.
• 30:55
  All these kind of stretch your capacity.
• 30:57
  And so a lot of founders find themselves going through this, the cycle where they hit a ceiling, they come down, they hit the floor, they hit the ceiling.
• 31:03
  And this usually goes over a six or 12 month period of time where they go up and down.
• 31:07
  But if they look back over a longer arc of a couple of years, they'll see that there's been a trend.
• 31:13
  You know, they, they hire somebody and then the revenue starts to dip.
• 31:17
  And then, and that's what we help people through now and just helping them, helping them with the sequencing of how to grow.
• 31:24
  Because a lot of founders, that's one of the big issues that they run into is they reach that ceiling of capacity, they're feeling stretched.
• 31:32
  It comes with a feeling of, you know, they're tense, they're stuck, they're pressured, and they know that somebody could help them, but they often misfire.
• 31:42
  Like they, they, they go out of sequence for who the person should be that could help them.
• 31:48
  They go to this, if I could just find an operator, I can be the visionary and I can bring in an operator.
• 31:53
  So they hire way outside of what they probably should.
• 31:56
  You know, if there's a company doing a half million bucks a year and they go hire125,000 CEO or COO, that's so rare that that's actually going to help the company.
• 32:07
  Because that's the kind of role that steps into a three or four or five million dollar a year company.
• 32:12
  And it's usually when there's enough Systems and processes in place that a role like that can come in and really leverage their expertise to get them to the next level.
• 32:22
  But instead, founders often make the hire out of order.
• 32:26
  Wrong sequence that takes money off the balance sheet, drains their bank account, because now they're paying 10 or $15,000 a month to this one person that is essentially looking at a mom and pop shop kind of business that
• 32:38
  they don't like.
• 32:39
  Hey, I'm not sure what to do.
• 32:41
  And so there's just.
• 32:42
  It's a mismatch for timing and sequencing.
• 32:45
  So six months later, that person may no longer work there, but you paid 15 grand a month in payroll to that person for six months.
• 32:51
  So now your cash reserves go down and it comes right back to that founder saying, see, I got to do everything anyway.
• 32:58
  It's just always up to me, no matter what.
• 33:00
  I can't find the right people.
• 33:01
  I can't do the.
• 33:02
  No matter what happens, I have to.
• 33:04
  Everything has to come through me.
• 33:05
  If I leave, everything collapses.
• 33:07
  And that.
• 33:08
  Those are all telltale signs that you just, you've hired in the wrong order and you don't have the systems and the playbooks because you gotta hire lower on that.
• 33:18
  That.
• 33:19
  I call it a delegation pyramid, priority pyramid.
• 33:22
  You gotta hire lower so that you can get some of your time back and start building your skills as a founder to get out of the kitchen a little bit and learn how to read a financial report or
• 33:32
  learn how to deal with human resources so that you can bring a team in and that team actually wants to stay and work for you.
• 33:39
  So there's, there's different skills that the cookie maker doesn't really contemplate when they first think, yes, I'm gonna go make cookies and share my recipes with the world and everybody's gonna be happy.
• 33:49
  No, there's a lot of stuff to.
• 33:51
  To a lot of things to unpack between the start and that scaling.
• 33:56
  Ah, okay.
• 33:58
  All right.
• 33:58
  And Justin, if people want to learn more about Propel, if founders out there are hearing this and they're in that revenue range and this story is resonating with them, I mean, what's, what's the best way people can learn
• 34:09
  more about this company and how you can potentially help them.
• 34:12
  Yeah, I appreciate that.
• 34:14
  I would say come follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn or tick tock.
• 34:18
  We're on all, all those platforms same handle it at it's Justin Lund.
• 34:23
  We try to put out videos, multiple videos every day because we there.
• 34:28
  This is very common in this stage.
• 34:30
  And so if there's anything there that resonates, like, come consume our content, let us know, send us a message like, what are you struggling with?
• 34:37
  I also have a number of different playbooks, Dave, that I utilize with my coaching clients and anything that from how to hire a CPA or how to onboard a new professional outsourced service, how to, how to give your
• 34:53
  executive assistant a to do list and a playbook to follow to bring them into your world.
• 34:59
  Any of all of those playbooks I'll share with anybody who needs one.
• 35:03
  Like, that's often a big hurdle that I see with founders.
• 35:07
  If I talk about, oh, maybe it's a good time for you to look at a VA or an ea, you know, virtual assistant or executive assistant.
• 35:12
  Like, well, that, that sounds nice.
• 35:14
  I just wouldn't know what I'd have them do.
• 35:15
  Well, I got like a 27 page Google Doc that my VA uses, my EA uses and you can have it, you know, if.
• 35:23
  And that like literally from day one, you can give that to a new hire and say, here's the operating manual for how you deal with this role and how you interact with me and the job duties that you
• 35:34
  have.
• 35:35
  And that takes 90% of it.
• 35:36
  Not everything's going to be applicable to you in that case, but 90% of it is.
• 35:41
  And then you can customize the 10% and it makes it an easy process to not to onboard somebody that can really give you back 10 hours a week.
• 35:49
  And so that's, that's my goal with founders, is I'm not going to come in and try to just do everything for you or have some magic bullet or magic wand or, you know, and I would tell you, don't
• 36:00
  go hire some unicorn that you think is going to solve all your problems.
• 36:03
  The problem to solve is how can you get more freedom out of your business?
• 36:07
  Which means you need more time.
• 36:09
  So if you can get a little bit more time, you have the ability to solve problems.
• 36:14
  You've demonstrated that with however long you've been in business.
• 36:17
  The problem is you're missing the forest for the trees.
• 36:20
  So I've got to show you how to level up.
• 36:22
  The problems that you're solving need to be up here and not down here.
• 36:25
  So what's the quickest way that I can give you 15 hours a week, not working later?
• 36:30
  Okay, not, not Saturdays and Sundays, but where can I get you 10 to 15 hours a week back in your schedule so that you can actually solve different problems and focus on sales, marketing, you know, the things that
• 36:42
  are going to be growth drivers still don't try to delegate those.
• 36:45
  That would be a mistake.
• 36:46
  That's out of order.
• 36:48
  You own those.
• 36:49
  But now with this free time that you're not doing administrative or back end stuff.
• 36:54
  And that's what we noticed with our clients.
• 36:56
  Right, Dave?
• 36:56
  As we did as Propel was born and formed, we recognize these companies now.
• 37:03
  Getting rid of all the admin stuff.
• 37:05
  Like there's all these things that just sucked about business they just didn't like doing.
• 37:11
  All of them saw an uptick in revenue initially because they, as founders had more time.
• 37:18
  And when they had more time and less stress because someone's taking care of some of these things they didn't have to keep in their mind, they naturally went out and solved more problems.
• 37:26
  And that usually meant more bids, more requests for quotes, more sales calls, more conferences.
• 37:34
  That turns into more opportunity.
• 37:35
  They're closing more deals.
• 37:37
  So they quickly see this bump in revenue.
• 37:40
  And with that bump in revenue, you can use that's more resources for the business.
• 37:44
  So now they can hire maybe another person.
• 37:46
  And that's the cycle that keeps on giving.
• 37:48
  And that's why I get founders out of that cycle of just coming back to everything's got to come through me.
• 37:53
  That guy didn't work out.
• 37:54
  I can't find good people to.
• 37:56
  I have more resources.
• 37:57
  Let's delegate the next step.
• 37:59
  Now I have more resources.
• 38:01
  Let's expand our marketing.
• 38:02
  Now I have more resources.
• 38:04
  You know, more resources to the founder generally equates to growth because founders are problem solving.
• 38:10
  I mean, they kick ass.
• 38:12
  They get up out of bed, they don't know what's going on.
• 38:13
  They don't know what the day holds.
• 38:14
  And they're just like, hey, let's do it.
• 38:17
  And it's pretty special.
• 38:19
  Most people don't have that.
• 38:22
  All right, well, well put.
• 38:23
  All right, well, Justin, fantastic.
• 38:25
  We'll link all your socials in the show notes here for everybody.
• 38:29
  And we greatly appreciate you sharing your journey, this incredible story that you've been through and how it had a, a happy ending to where now you've got a company that is doing a lot of good for founders, and
• 38:42
  you certainly enjoy your work and you made it through this, this harrowing journey.
• 38:47
  And you're on the other side with a business that is truly fulfilling you for sure.
• 38:52
  Fantastic.
• 38:53
  Thank you.
• 38:54
  Appreciate you being here.
• 38:54
  Thank you, thank you.