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Stuck at Five Million a Month, He Closed the Deal in a Deer Blind · The Turn: Blue Collar to Billions

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Turn.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Corey Mitchell of Iconic Founders.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: On The Turn, we talk to blue-collar founders who've gone through an exit.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: This episode with Brett Biggert is a truly an incredible story.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: He really starts the episode by talking about hitting rock bottom in his personal life, and then the journey he goes on to start a business from nothing, fully bootstrapped all the way to$300 million, and then taking on outside private equity investors is truly amazing.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you like this episode.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I will ask is that so many of our listeners don't subscribe.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Please hit the like and subscribe button.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: We want to make sure this story and other stories like it get out.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's somebody you know that would appreciate it, forward it their way.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Turn is where blue-collar founders talk about the businesses they've built, the value they've created, and what comes next after they sell.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, taking the journey with us.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: After learning a little bit more about your journey to where you got, it sounds like alcohol played a really important role.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I start there because so many people that are a lot like me, these sort of hard-charging, you know, driven people sort of go go hard or they don't go at all.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so many people that I talk to and meet with have this back and forth struggle with alcohol.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do with my relationship with alcohol?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I personally have had the same thing.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I when I quit working after I left my business, I took a year off of drinking because I it it had just gotten to be too much.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it it really opened up my eyes to to how powerful uh that drug can be.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear a little bit about how that experience for you kind of changed or maybe became a turn in your life.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny, you I can't tell my entrepreneurial story without telling my sobriety story because those two things correlate one to one.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's sort of impossible for me to tell you about my career, if you will, and and not mention the sobriety parks at such an integral part.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and quite frankly, continues to be.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just got to have a conversation five minutes ago about sobriety with somebody that works here.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, with almost 15 years of sobriety, I still on a daily basis get to sort of interact not only in my personal life, but also in my business life with it.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a it's very intertwined.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was an alcoholic and a drug addict and was sort of banging my way through life up until I was 35.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: On paper, maybe things looked great, you know, you know, graduating from good schools, getting jobs at places that were sort of hard to get jobs at.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: But the end of the story was always pretty bad.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Losing that job that I got, uh, losing relationships, just sort of battling with addiction.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I was 35, uh, after having worked and built a career, I realized this in sobriety.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was doing things that I thought would be cool to talk about at cocktail parties, but I actually hated.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And because I hated doing it, I wasn't that good at it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so that creates misery.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so doing sort of things that I thought I was supposed to do because other people did them, uh enough was enough.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so at 35, I got sober and was trying to, you know, after going from corporate finance world and trying to jam a peg into a square hole, um, which was not where I was supposed to be, it's another way to say that.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then getting sober and realizing I had to deal with that problem and dealing with it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you would have said to me, Brett, write down the best outcome you could possibly write down for yourself, you know, a couple weeks into sobriety, for example.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: I would have said, well, um, I go back to a private equity job or I dress up my resume and I did and I sort of get back to where I was um in my prior career.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened for me is I got sober and I also did the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that did the 12 steps, and in that process, sort of um did this thing that you were just talking about, which is sort of have to deal with my self-will.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think entrepreneurs and alcoholics, you know, they make good bedfellas, right?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same characteristics.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: The problem of alcoholism was me on the inside of me.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I was treating it with alcohol and drugs to sort of deal with the world.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in the process of getting sober, you sort of realize the the problem is me.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And more specifically, what is that problem?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: You sort of pull back the layers, and I sort of realized that my problem was in a word fear.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh I'm scared I'm not gonna live up to my expectations.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm scared I'm not gonna be a good enough dad.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm scared I'm not gonna make enough money to finance the people I need to finance.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm scared I'm not gonna I'm just scared.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd spent my entire life being a tough guy doing tough guy things, and to say out loud that I was actually just scared of all kinds of things, um, was sort of a big pressure release to be like, okay.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I've said it, I've written it down, I've talked about it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now what?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh I've been shown in this program of recovery that so long as I'm honest about how I deal with the world and how I show up in relationships, and so long as I do the things that I'm supposed to do, um I get presented with opportunities like my entrepreneurial experience that just sort of show up out of thin air.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to explain it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what to say about it, but it just happens over and over and over again.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a program in recovery, there's a saying in recovery that's um that I think about a lot, which is I move at the speed of pain.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And for somebody who's an alcoholic, you know, or struggles with addiction, like your threshold for pain is really high.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Things have to get really bad to make a difference.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they did.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And once I made the difference, I made the decision and took the action to sort of get sober, all of a sudden things just started to open up and things started to open up in a way that fit where I felt like um a sense of usefulness and purpose, maybe is a bet the best way to put that, which was something I was searching for.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: I said putting a peg into a s into a square hole, that was me trying to run my life on self-will, trying to make this job work, make this career thing work, make this whatever the thing is work that didn't really fit.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And once I quit jamming that peg and backed off and said, wait a minute, I'm just scared.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Things started to happen where I started to realize where I was supposed to be and where quite frankly, the skill sets of being an alcoholic, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Living in crisis and dealing with stress and all the things that come with being an addict, those things are actually really great characteristics uh for being an entrepreneur.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: They're very similar.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was sort of blessed with this opportunity to start this business out of recovery.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so those two things, they're they're very parallel.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what does the moment look like where you decide to stop and make a change?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I uh I I mean I remember the day specifically, it was August 29th, 2011.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I knew I had to quit and I didn't know what to do.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the meeting topic was willingness and action.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the chairperson said you had to have both of those things.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: I had willingness, I was there, but I didn't really know on the action part.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: I drove I listened to that meeting, and someone in that meeting told a very similar story to my particular experience.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And there was somebody that had some long-term sobriety.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought to myself as I left, if that guy could do it, I could do it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then I sort of texted myself about willingness and action, and I texted myself about what this guy had shared that was so similar.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I drove home and uh my wife at the time, I walked in the front door and she said, It seems like you're on those pills again.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: I lied to her and said that I wasn't, which was a total lie.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: She walked out to my truck and opened the center console, found the pills, threw them at me and said, I'm done.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we'd had a lot of I'm done conversations, but this one sort of felt different.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I could tell she really meant it.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that was also my daughter's first birthday.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we share a we share a birthday, my sobriety birthday and her actual birthday.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And ironically, she's one year older, right?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because she was one year old at the time.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so Yeah, that's powerful.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: We had a very tough conversation, um, which was I'm leaving you if you don't solve this problem.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know how to solve the problem, by the way, but you must figure out how to solve the problem.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I called a guy that's still my sponsor, and he said, Come to my house tomorrow and we'll start doing the step work.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I pleaded with my wife and said, Look, I need 30 days.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give me 30 days to try to figure out how to do this?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, Okay, I'll give you 30 days.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: You do whatever you have to do.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Go to meetings, burn incense, hold hands with other men, whatever that looks like, you go do it.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: And to her defense, man, she did she did just that.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: The next day I went to meet my sponsor, who ended up being my sponsor.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: We did some step work.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: I went to the trail to run because I'm an athlete and and and that was sort of the only thing I know how to do that I felt capable of doing.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went to go on a run and I came home and I took a shower, and this is a crazy story, but it's what happened to me.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm in the shower and I have this feeling like I'm out of bullets.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm out of, I'm out of arrows, I'm out of all the things that I usually have when I'm backed into the corner to shoot my way out.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Which is usually a bunch of BS, right?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: I now recognize that moment as a thing called surrender.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: At that moment, I heard this voice say, So long as you're 100% honest, I'll take care of you.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just what happened to me.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: It felt like I was in a burning building that was engulfed in flames.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: My family, my relationships, my career, everything that I cared about, my health, that it was all in a house that I was in that was totally engulfed in flames, and I was about to die.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way out of this house was one door that was unlocked.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the agreement to open the door and get out was that I had to be a hundred percent honest a hundred percent of the time.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So long as I was willing to do that, I got to walk out of the door.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I did that.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm here today almost fifteen years later, which is sort of a testament to itself that it worked, so to speak.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's really interesting to me because you have this moment of surrender, and uh you can really make a few choices there, right?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Some some people choose to just give up, die, whatever.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: You changed and took that moment to be you said willingness plus action.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: You took action for a bunch of reasons, two of which were the women in your life.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that I found really interesting about your story there is that you had this, you know, this idea of what the world wanted you to look like, right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it was the party stories or whether it was be this private equity hedge fund guy.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's like this idea of what others wanted your life to look like.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it feels like you also made this change to actually turn it into the life that you wanted it to look like instead of maybe what others wanted it to look like.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, where do you go from there?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: How do you how how do you take this moment of sort of rock bottom and turn your life around with your family and but also start this business that has an incredible, incredible roller coaster ride afterwards?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give you an example through a story of what happened a couple weeks later.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm sort of going through this sobriety thing, I'm holding on, and my sponsor says to me, Um, I need you to go to a men's retreat.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, dude, I'm not going to a men's retreat with a bunch of dudes.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like he said, Well, I thought you were willing to go to any length.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Oh, okay.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Send me the address.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: So go to this men's retreat.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: The guy's the men's retreat, and he tells his story um as part of like the featured guest speaker.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And his story is like jaw-droppingly good.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: This guy is at the end of his rope, and he sits on the end of his bed, and he takes out a nine millimeter and he puts the gun in his mouth, and he loads it, loads it, puts a gun in his mouth, he pulls the trigger, and the gun jams.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: He hears a voice.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: The voice says, You haven't tried everything.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Takes a gun out of his mouth, decides to drive down the street to an AA meeting, sits at an AA meeting, and the meeting was sort of weird.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was like uh it wasn't a great meeting, and which is like one percent of the time.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: So he walks out of the meeting and he's gonna walk across the parking lot, get in his truck, drive home, blow his head off.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And a guy walks out of the meeting and grabs him by the shoulder and says, Hey, um, you said this is your first meeting.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, do you mind sticking around for another hour?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's another meeting.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: That meeting was sort of weird that we went to, like, just hang out for another hour with me, considering his alternatives.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: He said yes.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that guy's been sober now for 20 years.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I just walked out of his office across the hall from me.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he runs our literally today.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you're saying?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Early this morning.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I walked over to sit down to talk to you this morning.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so after that after his speech that he gave, he said, Well, what do you do for work?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Man, I I don't have a job right now.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just holding on.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, What are you doing?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, I have a window company, and you know, it's weird.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: People have been asking me about solar, and I'm I don't know much about it.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he sort of starts to open my eyes to the idea of a solar business.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so we talk about it for a little bit, and I left that that weekend, and I started to look at businesses that were solar companies in Austin, and they were, it's a very fragmented market.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody really knew what they were doing.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't know how to sell it, they couldn't finance it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: I called two of the biggest solar companies in town to come look at my house.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't call me back.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wait a minute, what is going on here?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in Austin, Texas, which was, you know, especially 15 years ago, sort of a green town, a good place to start a renewables business.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I had no money though, zero, negative money.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea sort of got into my head that this was a good market to get into and it was fragmented and nobody really, there were no trucks driving around.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: It just seemed like a spot that was on the rise and nobody had their act together.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I ended up starting a business with a partner of mine, and we started out of a, out of his garage with zero dollars, negative dollars.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: And we just went to go try to sell one deal and then the next deal and the next deal and see if we had anything.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was an opposite strategy of a private equity strategy, which is hey, go raise the money, or a venture strategy, which is, hey, I have an idea, business plan.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know this is gonna work.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the market, here's the TAM, here's our opportunity.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna go raise X dollars and go execute a plan.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, let's let's see if this works, which is sort of like the most fundamental service business sort of question, which is do I have a service that people want?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: And what we found really quickly was the answer to that was yes.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so we turned one deal into three deals, into nine deals, into twenty deals, into fifty deals.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so we sort of just go.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it was clear we had something that people wanted.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so we started building this business.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And as we did it, um this sense of usefulness and purpose that I described before started to become really evident, which is to say, you know, I'm a guy with ADHD, you know, I'm sort of all over the place.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't like to sit in front of a desk all day.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Some of the conventional things that I had to do on a day-to-day basis were perfect in terms of skill set to job need.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: I sort of realize now I identify as an entrepreneur and what that means.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this idea of a sense of usefulness and purpose, having a feeling like what I'm doing matters, and that I'm the right guy for this particular job started to set in with me.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that sort of gave me on a personal level confidence because we started to have wins and the results started to show, and I felt like I was in the right spot.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: And go back to what you said before, which was in my previous life, I never felt like the slipper fit, right?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: I always felt like I was it just I just wasn't really in the right spot.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden I got this experience where the slipper fit, and I was like, wait a minute, this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I still have that feeling today, which is I'm I'm incredibly grateful for because that sense of usefulness and purpose is maybe what I was looking for all along.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's been sort of a wild ride since then.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we can talk about that more.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: But those parallels, you know, the guy that I just walked out of his office to come talk to you, I got to hire him seven years down the road who spoke at that meeting, and I I got to go back to him and say, Hey, will you now I have this business?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: What about running my sales team?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it all worked out where he's been here for the last seven years.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Which is pretty cool.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: But there's no coincidence in that, right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have to you have to sort of turn it over a little bit as they say.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: All of that sounds kind of easy.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like I start, you know, I start selling stuff and then the customers start coming, but but the reality is you started with no money.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: How the hell do you make the math work in those early days when you're trying to like because the reality is like selling is expensive, you know.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: You need working capital, you you know, you gotta make payroll.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and even if the payroll is tiny at the beginning, you have to you have to put food on your table.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: So just give us a little window into what real bootstrapping means.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't, we've never really talked about that.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: People use that word, that sounds cute, yeah, but it's actually incredibly hard to do.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's incredibly hard.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: I actually I think about that often 15 years down the road, which is like um a proper amount of fear, which I described in the beginning of this, is sort of like that was sort of the problem.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like an overwhelming amount of fear is never good, right?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: You sort of get paralysis by analysis and those sort of things.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: But a a healthy amount of fear can be a real motivating thing.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think the entrepreneurial journey had a healthy amount of fear, which is we got to go sell five deals this month, 10 deals next month, and go on and be able to pay myself.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was like five grand a month.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, left a hedge fund job.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm doing five grand a month.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was a big change to sort of support my life.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I had had the act of desperation before with getting sober.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew how bad it could be.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like my life burned down.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: So everything from there moving along to bootstrapping a business, it was tough, but I would say those moments, I'll give you an example.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I drove to work today and I drove down sort of a busy street in Austin, Texas, where I live.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I drove past a building that we put solar on.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the way we got that deal was one day when they were building that building, I just pulled in there in the early days.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, hey, who owns this place?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, Oh, the so-and-so owns it.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, okay, well, where's so-and-so?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so I meet the guy, Sam.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Sam, what's the deal here?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Building this great building, you know, you don't have solar on this, what's the deal?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: You you need solar on it.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we end up selling the guy solar, and we do it was across the street from Whole Foods, and then Whole Foods ends up becoming a client of ours.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And me being willing to pull the car over on the side of the road and get out and say, Hey, who runs this place?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: was because we had to make it work.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And when you burn the lifeboats, so to speak, and you sort of commit to yourself that I'm going to make this work, come hell or high water, it's easy to pull over and say, Hey, who runs this thing?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: But that was definitely sort of the vibe in the beginning, which is like, hey, we're, I'm gonna, we're gonna make this work no matter what.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we were fortunate enough that it did work that way.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we we didn't really know that we had, I wouldn't say that it was sort of clear in the beginning that people were interested in what we were doing.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never been a CEO of a business, I've never run a business, you know, I never had the personal experience of what it takes to go do that.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: That sort of journey along the way of building the business and understanding what it takes to do that, which is largely people.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I sort of felt like a guy who was the coach of a team, and I'm trying to build a team.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And where I had made mistakes in my career before was trying to put myself, I was comparing myself to other people doing the same thing.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm an entrepreneur trying to build a team, and I get to go find people and put them on the team.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: I want the best quarterback, I want the best wide receiver, I want the best defensive player, you know, operations guy versus sales guy versus admin folks in trying to build.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: That team and I felt like um maybe I got lucky along the way, maybe I had some skill.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: There was definitely a lot of um willingness and action.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so putting that together where you sort of build a team of folks that have skills that are not similar to my own was a critical part.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: In the early days, the people that worked at Freedom, I couldn't do what they did and they couldn't do what I did.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do that correctly, you really do get a two plus two equals five kind of outcome.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: That sort of helped us along the way.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And pretty soon, after about five years, we're sort of like doing I don't know what it was, maybe five years into it, we're doing sort of 50 million.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was like I I didn't really, I didn't really appreciate the word, the the acronym EBITA at that time.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was just, it was just net income to me.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: But they're pretty similar in a service business.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: The whole goal was always can we make if it makes money, then we know we have a real business.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so making money in year one, make money in year two, so on and so on.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been focused on that for the last 15 years.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: You find so many businesses that don't think about the the profit piece, they think about it more as like a lifestyle and a job as opposed to an actual business.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when you build it from the beginning as a business, you know, it it just makes for a much easier chance to succeed once you need to break through a certain point of size and scale and and and so forth.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm curious, you know, you talked about getting to 50 million or whatever the numbers were at year five.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Was there some certain point where it just got really hard?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some revenue point or some key thing that happened that you couldn't break through a ceiling, or, you know, just some point in the business where you had to make some key change.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: The one that comes to mind is it it actually it correlates to the the guy I was talking about earlier that told his story at the AA meeting, and then we ultimately hired him.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the circumstance under which I hired him was I was running the sales team sort of de facto at that moment.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: I could not get it to go any higher.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I just cannot get it past, I think it was about five million a month.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had tried everything in my bag of tricks to try to move it, and I just could not get it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so I called this guy and I said, Can you come help me?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot get this thing to move.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Sure, I can come help you.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's gonna cost you.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I said, Yeah, yeah, I understand.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I paid the consulting fee and he came in and I did couldn't figure out if I had a pricing problem or a person issue, a people issue, or a product issue.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: I knew it was one of those three things, right?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I just couldn't figure out which one it was.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like a month-long sort of exercise for him to get to the bottom of it.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so he comes in and he does all this research and he meets with all my people, and a month goes by and he comes into my office, I'll never forget this, and he's got a binder, a leather-bound binder and hard drive, puts them on my desk and he says, I have the answer to your question.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Wow, are you a hundred percent sure you have the answer to the question?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Absolutely.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I know the I know the problem.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Okay, don't tell me the problem.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: My second question to you is, can you solve the problem?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Oh yeah, I can I I'm definitely capable of solving the problem.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Okay.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Third question, how happy are you at your job on a scale of one to ten?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ten is like ultimate happiness, one is a disaster.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, I'm pretty happy.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like a seven.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Okay.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you think living your life at a seven is fulfilling?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, well, it's pretty good.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, what if you came and did this with me and we lived your life at an eight, nine, or ten?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think about that?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Sounds pretty good.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: He said, but you can't afford me.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: I said, you know, let's leave the math out of this for a second.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just talk about whether or not you could do it, you feel confident, and you have the skills to do it.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, No, I do.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: I have the skills to do it.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: We sort of started to negotiate about the price.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And his price was here, and I was here, you know, I could only afford this much.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had this delta that we had to bridge, and so I'm sort of grinding over.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: He loves to deer hunt.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: I took him to this ranch in South Texas, and we sit in this deer blind, and this huge deer walks out, and we're in the middle of negotiating sort of his transaction, and this huge deer walks out, and he said, That's my god, it's the biggest deer I've ever seen.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, shoot it.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I can't shoot that deer, it's too big.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a that's a 200-class deer.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: I can't shoot that deer.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: I said, We're here to shoot deer, shoot the deer.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: So he gets up and he's got the gun and he's got sort of buck fever.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Hold on, stop.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Before you shoot that deer, can you get it to 10 million a month?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Absolutely.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: I said, shoot it.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: He shot the deer, and we worked out the math right there, and I hired him, and he ultimately got it to 50 million a month.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so you know I love that story so much.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: But my point at that is sometimes, you know, it at certain points you run out of the ability to solve a problem and you have to pull from the outside to help resolve, to get off high center.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you sort of have to know what your capabilities are and what they're not.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I I realized that I was at high center and I could not get off without someone else's help.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And here we are seven years later, and that guy's still across the hall from me.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: One of the amazing lessons that Brett talks about in this episode, and I find this so important in businesses that are trying to go from small regional business and take it to the next level and grow and scale, is really surrounding yourself with people that can help challenge and push you in a different way than you might be able to do on your own.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about this really critical hire, and it's an important person in his life, but he brings in someone that brought a perspective to the company that took the business from 5 million a month in sales to like 50 million a month in sales.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely critical hire, and the business probably wouldn't have gotten there without making that change.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I love how he talks about that, and there are multiple other pieces of his story where he brings in an outside perspective to help push him to the next level, whether it's in his personal life or in business.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining this episode of The Turn.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually just part one because our conversation with Brett was so powerful, we decided to break it into two episodes.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: So be sure to tune in next time.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let's win.