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Entrepreneurs Mean Do (Paul Heirendt and Jamie Schneiderman) · Unstuck Pod

• Jamie: Hi everyone, welcome to the Unstuck Pod. excited today to have Paul Hyrand here as guest. so Paul, welcome, glad to have you. Paul: Thank you for having me, Jamie. I appreciate the opportunity. Jamie: Great. So so you've had a an interesting journey. I I'd love for you to share a little bit about you, your journey, and we'll get to what you're doing now, but let's let's kind of work our way up because I think there's some interesting things that folks would want to hear. Paul: Yeah, I've gotten a lot done in my twelve years. So my my wife says I act like a twelve year old sometimes, so Jamie: Amazing. There we go. Join the club. Paul: Yeah. So I started out I was ⁓ I went to a very interesting high school, I would put it that way. It was an experimental high school in Southern California. So I got exposure to a lot of great opportunities. Also, I grew up in the house of a man that was ⁓ raised in an orphanage during the Great Depression, ⁓ and left that orphanage to create a business that actually there's a business still there today in Chicago. When he sold it, he sold it as Victor's Taylor and Furriers. So he went from penniless in an orphanage, taking his two brothers and a friend out, opening a clean small cleaners, put the cleaners across the street out of business, and then became a tailor and furrier ultimately at World War Two, ended up going in the Coast Guard. His two brothers left to go to the Army. He he went to in the Coast Guard and so sold the business. But so I had a upbringing that was really ⁓ I didn't understand, neither did my other nine siblings. I come from a family of ten. He was trying to create his own orphanage, I think. But anyway. I didn't understand the kind of awesome upbringing I got and the training I got in what it means to be successful and what it means to work hard, right? That was just a given. ⁓ I'll give you an example. we got paid ten cents an hour when we worked around the house. And it wasn't normal chores, just anything above and beyond normal chores, but we didn't get paid the 10 cents. It got recorded in my mom's little black book. it's great financial training. So anyway, I ⁓ in high school had the privilege of our high school was like I said, an experimental high school, and it was designed for 2200 kids, but there were 4400 kids. So they had to do a lot of things ⁓ to make that work. Jamie: Okay. Paul: One of them was they had closed circuit TV to all the classrooms. And so they hired a guy from Hollywood to manage that. And their idea was he would just manage the students going on a room and changing the channel on TV. they shouldn't have hired anybody from Hollywood. Because starting in my freshman year, we started building a studio and ultimately did programming. we filmed my ⁓ Jamie: Okay. Paul: friend and I that worked primarily ⁓ together actually in junior high, but in high school we started filming the football games. But by our sophomore year we were using a Sony betacam pack. So we'd already started moving to video. So great opportunity. I was also in every musical organization on campus and off. So a great opportunity to play music. So when it came time to go to college I got a call that our band had been booked for a year, more than a year solid. And I'm standing in line to register for college and I'm thinking, What am I doing? went home and called and said, Yeah, I'll go on the tour, right? ⁓ and then ⁓ dad didn't like the fact that I was gone for a month or two and then just hung out on my sailboat or went surfing ⁓ rest of the time. ⁓ he said, Come work with me and learn to sell, because you can always sell something. Jamie: Amazing. Paul: he taught me the ultimate lessons that became ⁓ book. Oops, where is it? ⁓ book right there. ⁓ used to being behind the camera, not in front of the camera. So entrepreneur do, right? He epitomized that, right? He was a sales rep and ⁓ regional manager in medical book sales. Jamie: you gotta you gotta gotta get that right. You gotta plan that that's better. Paul: So I started working with him when I wasn't on tour, started enjoying that. He paid me ten dollars a day and gave me lunch, right? Bought my lunch. I didn't think that was very good since I was making a hundred dollars an hour playing music. So got some other lines independently, ⁓ publishers that didn't have a sales force. And so I would help him get set up and then I'd go call on doctors in their offices. Right. So great training, amazing training. I have nerve eruption scars from the nervousness and the and the stress of doing that. But it was ultimately the the best training I could ever have had, right? Because a skill that still applies today. We with our modern consulting company, one of our most effective things is to go door to door to talk to business owners about what they're struggling with and how we can help them. Right. So it that training, that basic training. was like boot camp in the marines, but maybe more like in special forces, right? It was really pretty, pretty amazing. So I ended up engaged. And when I got engaged, I thought I need a real job. So dad and I were at a convention in San Diego and the Mosby, he worked for a company called JB Lippincott Company. And the Mosby rep was there. He was actually a district manager and his booth didn't show up and neither did his books. So I said, Al, don't worry about it. Jump in my van. So I drove him up to the U University of California, San Diego bookstore. I knew the bookstore manager really well. And so she had, I'd said to her, look, he's really in trouble because he's at this biology convention and doesn't even have the main book he's there to promote. It just came out. She goes, ⁓ I have 10 copies. I said, Great. Can we take 10? She goes, No. I don't remember if she let us have eight. Jamie: How nice. Paul: But I remember saying, No, you can't take all the copies. we got him a bunch of books, Mosby books, brought it back, got some poster board and made ⁓ what looked like a a for a grave. And we wrote R R P ⁓ R P R booth didn't make it. Right. So that went really well for him. And he at the end of the convention he said, ⁓ can I offer you a job? Well, the night before, my mom and my fiance at that point came down to have dinner with us. And so that was celebrating our our ⁓ engagement. actually at one point my mom had said to me, We like Karen. And if you don't, if you guys don't end up getting married, she's in, you're out. ⁓ I call it my reverse shotgun wedding. ⁓ anyway, so him me a job was ⁓ perfect because I knew I needed more than just Jamie: Ha ha ha Yeah, there you go. Paul: Being an independent rep where I didn't get paid till they got paid for the book and they let doctors pay five dollars a month, right? So had a whole lot of money ⁓ on paper, but that's not the same thing, right? It was like ten cents an hour in my mom's black book. Couldn't it. So anyway, so I moved into selling, and was pretty successful, ⁓ enough so that asked me to be field sales trainer, and then Asked me to be district manager about five months after that because I kept having to go to the same territory over and over again because they didn't have a district manager and the reps there, even though I trained them well, I think, just didn't stick. So they made me district manager. subsequently I was at a convention in ⁓ Las Vegas, ⁓ and my dad's ⁓ the V senior VP of Sales and Marketing from Lippincott. Came over to the booth and said, I'm going to take you to lunch today. And I said, Well, I can't leave. assigned here. He goes, I'll get somebody to cover. So he went and convinced my mom, who always worked with my dad, to come over and cover the Mosby booth, right? While went to lunch and he offered me the national sales manager position, which I didn't really understand the gravity of that. But my dad said, Look, they offered it to me once. I didn't. I passed it up because I didn't want to move to Philadelphia, but this is a chance of a lifetime. And I was 27, right? So I was like, okay, I didn't know any better. And I got there and I remember sitting in the my office the first day, first time I had been to the offices. my boss then, who was the senior VP of sales and marketing, he said, Well, here's my secretary, she'll help you. And she says, ⁓ look, it's Nina with a beard, my mom's name, right? I humbled from the beginning, right? But that out really well. I kind of fumbled my way through it. Part of it was they hadn't had a sales manager in ⁓ four years. So it's like, well, I can't do too much harm because they haven't done anything ⁓ managerially, right? I kind figured it out, figured out that ⁓ Accountability is a key, right? So they had never published standings and they wouldn't let me publish the standings, but I would the standings on on my bulletin board that I would print out and then ⁓ I would underline ⁓ where thought the break-even was for prov for supporting a rep. So I did it with a red marker. And I didn't know this, but months later my then secretary came in. And she said, you know, I get a call every month about this time. I said, who? From almost every rep. I said, what are they calling about? They want to know if they're above or below the red line. Yep. that taught me about accountability, right? That accountability is critical. Jamie: No way. Wow, you're popular right now, Paul. Paul: ⁓ man, I gotta put it on Do Not Disturb. Sorry about that. Jamie: It's okay. No problem. At least every everyone knows it's real, right? You're you're not AI, it's real because ⁓ because the Paul: No, that's my that's my day. ⁓ it it's real. Well, I am AI, I'm artificially intelligent, but other than that. So anyway, so that's a long story, but you get a picture for kind of my background and stuff. So then I decided if I I was traveling 80% of the time. I went from managing the National Sales Force to being head of global sales. Jamie: Yeah. Paul: So I was traveling all the time. Our kids were small and I thought, if I have to mow lawns for a living, my wife was not happy in New Jersey, right, just outside of Philadelphia. So I said, if I have to mow lawns for a living, we're moving back to California. So Mosby heard we were moving, and they called me and said, How are you getting back? I said, Our furniture left yesterday. Karen's picking me up today. They said, Stop in St. Louis. they said, Come back and rebuild the sales force, because they had screwed it up broyally, which is The main reason I was open to taking the job, right? Because it was kind of a disaster at Mosby. So I said, okay. And I had three conditions. One of them was I'm never moving to St. Louis. the moral of story is, ⁓ say never, because here I am in St. Louis. Holy even the do not disturb's not working. Jamie: ⁓ wait, and so hold on, I wanna know how long you lasted outside of Saint Louis. So so you went back to Cal you went to California and you worked in in Saint Louis, but how how long were you able to avoid moving back there? Or moving there, I should say? Paul: Yeah, we moved Yeah. There was a battle for four years and then they hired a new VP of sales who lasted about fifteen minutes. But one real accomplishment besides getting himself fired for being a moron, ⁓ real accomplishment was that he convinced me he said, Move Or Else. And I tell people I found out what Er Else paid and we moved. So ⁓ that was nineteen eighty six and it's been great for us. wonderful our family and Jamie: Okay. Okay, there you go. Paul: The opportunity was great. I came back, rebuilt the Salesforce, ⁓ a joint venture with other medical publishers, so it was a global joint venture. And then Mosby asked me to come back and we had tried to start an electronic publishing division in nineteen eighty four. A group of us did it without kind of as a skunk works without asking permission. And Times Mirror Corporate got involved and they screwed it all up. So My boss, who we had been sales reps, district managers together. He was the VP of of nursing when I was recruited to come back to Mosby, is ultimately the president of Mosby. And he said, I want you to come back to Mosby and I want you to do MA rebuild the electronic publishing program. So it was a wonderful opportunity. I had authority to go ⁓ write ten million dollar check on any company that I thought was accretive and that passed our Jamie: Well. Paul: our accountants' due diligence, right? that was a great, great experience to see how people ran and misran their businesses, right? And people structured them for tax advantage, which meant we could offer them about half of what the business was really worth because they did not have the cash flow or the profit to show because they had run it as a tax advantage personal business, right? Anyway, ⁓ great that I'm still Jamie: For so long, yeah. Okay, yeah. Paul: that are coming in really handy working with small businesses today. So the electronic publishing division. That went really well. for three it had been in in every acquisition editor's goals to create electronic product. None of them had done anything. So I started the division and from July to December we ended up with 70 titles. And partly because I didn't create individual titles, I built three different engines that were product engines, right? So individual books back then on floppy disk, libraries on CD-ROM, and then multimedia titles for the color atlases, right? In medicine, in dermatology and some of the other specialties, color is critical, right? So we had another platform for publishing those. So it went really well, very successful, got a gigantic bonus about three quarters of what my annual salary was. So I thought everything was great. And then ⁓ all the editors wanted control of their products. And so I had already gotten very frustrated with how they were blocking everything we were trying to do that was running as a business, not as a as a ⁓ kind of vanity project for the authors, right? A lot of resistance by the authors. It's like we sold 1200 Of the emergency medicine library before I had done anything other than spending all nighter making a demo of what it would look like. Right. it was like, I'm this like it's a business. I'm not running this like a vanity project, right? So anyway, I said, that's fine. So I jumped out and ⁓ a company, a small company with one of the guys that I was kind of mentoring in the business development role. Jamie: Yeah. Paul: And we started what we called the visual press, was great. But when was at Lippincott, we had acquired a company called Drug Facts Comparisons. And the lady that was the marketing director then, ⁓ and I her around to the Salesforce and all the major distributors, and we introduced the product, right? Because we had acquired it at Lippincott, right out from under Mosby's nose. It's less than a block from where Mosby's offices were. So anyway. ⁓ when I got to St. Louis, and she knew I was in St. Louis, so we would have lunch about once a year. and then she heard I had left Mos left Mosby. And so she called me and said, What are you doing? And I said, Well, I have the visual press. We're creating CD-ROMs primarily for a company called back then it was software marketing, and then they got acquired by the learning company. So she said, Well, we've been trying to get our loose leaf notebook, which Every month a pharmacist or a doctor had to put pages in to update it, right? Like the legal loose loose leaf, same idea. She said, I heard you did that kind of with Times Mirror with Matthew Bender. And so would you take a project to help us? And I said, sure. So I took the project and from July to December, ⁓ they'd spent three and a half years ⁓ to get up the book on electronic form and ⁓ ⁓ Jamie: Yeah. Right. Paul: In those few months, we had product to deliver at the big pharmacology convention in December. So very successful. She asked me to come on and be the publisher for healthcare. And I said, Okay, that sounds great. Except that I got back in then, I was in another corporate life, and I realized after three and a half years, three years, I think it was, I thought, ⁓ don't like this. ⁓ is not. How I'm built, all the politics, all the resistance. ended up getting fired. They asked me to be CEO. I said, No way, because this has been run like a ⁓ family. I I'll I'll be the CEO if you let me just basically clean house and start over. And they said, ⁓ we can't do that. This is our cash cow. I said, Well, it's goose that lays the golden egg, but you aren't gonna have any more golden eggs because they're killing the goose. they would they didn't believe me and I didn't really want the job anyway. So once again went out on my own. So a friend of mine was an inventor ⁓ and a former Bell Labs scientist, and he he was with a company called Paylinx here in St. Louis, which was the first internet payment gateway. But it was software you had to install on your computer if you were a ⁓ a merchant or if you were a bank, right? So George said. I heard you left fax comparisons and this was at a lunch and he says, I want you to come talk to Bob, the CEO of Paylinx, and because you turned books into a service, I think you could certainly turn software into a service. And there ⁓ really no that was 1997, so it was before Salesforce.com and their famous no software, right? ⁓ So I back and we started working on that project. In the interim, George said, you know, I published this paper on voice biometrics neural nets to speaker identity verification back in nineteen eighty-six. He said, I think right now with paylinks, we're enabling these credit card transactions, these merchants to take more fraud more efficiently. We're not really solving the problem of is this the card holder in these remote transactions? So he said, I think we can use voice biometrics for that. So we formed a company called Trade Harbor, trade being harbor and ⁓ well, trade being exchange and harbor being a safe place. And then our our service was called the Voice Signature Service. So we created as a software service company in night in October 98. So about the same time that that ⁓ Salesforce started. So that was a fun ride. raised nine million dollars for that company. Jamie: Yeah. Paul: At the end of the day, we did a lot of transactions for people to get either health insurance or ⁓ SNAP benefits over the phone because they could be authenticated, right? The credit card industry we learned didn't really want to solve the problem, the fraud problem, because ⁓ make more money on the fraud tools than they make on the transactions themselves anymore. So it was one of those really disheartening realizations, but I thought, ⁓ Jamie: ⁓ it's Paul: Can't do this anymore. In the meantime, I had been spending a lot of time out in Silicon Valley, partly because my family's in California and my parents were in the Central Coast, so I could go out to San Jose and then fly into San Jose, drive down to Pasarobles, visit my folks, and then drive back up and work for the week, ⁓ do it on the other end, right? So was great, a great time. I had met a bunch of really, ⁓ really entrepreneurs. Mostly in the ⁓ cybersecurity world because what we supported was cybersecurity basically, right? Authenticating people being not just out of band authentication, but out-of-band that make sure it's really is you, right? Not just somebody who has control of your phone so they can type in the four digit password, right? ⁓ I still ⁓ time I do it I chuckle a little bit, but also kinda moan at the same time. Anyway, so ⁓ Jamie: Yeah. Paul: That was fun and kept asking me to get involved in advising different startups. And then they wanted to start different startups. So we started a bunch. It's ⁓ Valley is a pace that people just can't understand, right? And do there's a in my book that entrepreneurs ⁓ more than what people can expect with less than what you would think is possible, right? And that's John Doerr, a famous venture capitalist, right? He ⁓ I that's who made the statement. I might be wrong. Check my book. It's in there. But the is they don't have attitude of, well, you know, show me ⁓ show me your 10 customers and then we'll fund you. Right? No, they have the idea of, ⁓ if you got an idea, let's test it. Right. So anyway, so it was fun time. We Jamie: Yeah, yeah. Sure. Paul: Created a bunch of companies. Most of them were interesting lessons, but we created one called Cyber Deadbolt that ended up getting acquired before we even got to a beta product. and so that was fun. It was we kind of culminated several different things we'd been working on together. One was helping people secure their own identity using blockchain using AI model Jamie: Wow. Okay. Paul: user, right? ⁓ and then on top of that, authenticate them, right? Jamie: can I wait wait Paul, I just need to I need to just check in with you on this one. So you say we use blockchain and AI for that. And can you tell me the year that you're talking about when you're talking about that business? Paul: We started working on it in twenty sixteen on the side and it took off in twenty seventeen and we were acquired early in twenty seventeen. we were I was locked up until December twenty seventeen. ⁓ the problem is yeah, the problem is the company that acquired it wanted to use it for enterprise security. And it was like the point was putting people in control of their own identity, not the company, not corporate sovereignty, ⁓ right, or government sovereignty. self-sovereign identity plays the way you use your ⁓ license and your social security card, right, as proofs of identity. It's like, no, ⁓ that's just stupid, right? Anyway, so that was fun, but I I spent the last quarter of 2017 thinking Do I want to do this again? Right. ⁓ that aching feeling that there's an opportunity for individuals to control their identity. So January 20, well, so the last quarter, I had been ⁓ at quite a few conferences, especially out in San Francisco, which I primarily did that as an excuse and a business expense to to get out and see my family, quite frankly, and work with my friends. So ⁓ was part of my strategy. But ⁓ that one company that kept booking me, ⁓ they used to do just cybersecurity conferences. Then two people split out. One split out, started blockchain conferences, and the other one split out and started ⁓ AI conferences. So they had been bugging me to speak. So that fourth quarter I started lining up talks for twenty eighteen when I knew I was free to talk, right? working on my idea called block ID. And the idea block ID is that you use blockchain to secure a person's identity, not only a person's identity, but you can give a unique, a guaranteed globally unique ID to anything, right? A transaction, a step in a process, a piece of piece of art. And this is before the whole scam thing of art as secured ⁓ which Jamie: Right. Paul: That was another giggle point for me. It's like, ⁓ this is gonna have a half-life of a turtle. So wait, turtles l live a long time. Half-life of a guppy. That's better. Anyway, so I started speaking at all these conferences at least one a month, some months two, over the country in Canada. ⁓ it was great, great experience. And I was using it really as my friend Eric Reese, who I interviewed at in ⁓ twenty at Jamie: Yeah, yeah. Paul: The South by Southwest. friend of mine that was on the team, we were down there interviewing people, and he's he's ⁓ the story. We're sitting there at lunch, and Paul's just gone. Somebody said, Where'd Paul go? ⁓ Kyle said, I don't know. He just disappeared. And then he saw me running after Eric Reese, because I knew what he looked like. And I said, Can we talk to you about being an entrepreneur? And so he said, Sure. So ⁓ Eric Reese's whole point is Right. Build an MVP and test use science. The last quote I got from him, I said, What's the one thing you'll tell an entrepreneur if you have one minute with them before they go out into the world? He said, Everything life is a as an experiment, use science. That's also a quote in the book, by the way. Several quotes from Eric in the book. But the point is, was able to use that that 2018 and all those speaking gigs to meet with corporate. Jamie: No, interesting. Paul: Potential corporate customers met with a lot of VCs and angels, met with a ton of kind of normal customers ⁓ to say, would you use this? ⁓ what I came to really probably well before the end of 2018. but let the momentum carry me through December. but the the the finding Again, I was probably 10, if not 15 years too early. That was twenty eighteen and still nobody's doing I was talking about, right? And basic idea was you take anything and you give it a guaranteed globally unique ID, and then you characterize it by whatever factors you want that builds a dynamic model for it, right? So an individual, it could be your LinkedIn, your Facebook, your Instagram, right? Those change. Jamie: Too early. Paul: second by second, right? Multiple times a second in the case of like Facebook or Instagram. it's a very dynamic model of you that nobody could could fake, right? And the point is nobody knows what's being used to create your model anyway. So they wouldn't even know what factors to try to fake. But I found people just aren't that interested in security and they're willing to live with the things that happen on the internet. So Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. Paul: So I thought, okay, life's too short, I'm not doing that. So that's when I just started Jamie: Hard to help people that don't want to be helped, right? It's the ⁓ Paul: Well y more importantly, they don't want to pay. ⁓ wanna be helped, they say, but then when you ask ⁓ to pay, it's like, no, I thought it'd be free. It's like, Well, it is free. I'm only you for the value, not for the thing itself, right? ⁓ Anyway, so kind of my story. I kind of made it long and dragged out, but so I've spent ⁓ after twenty I decided my son and I had a media production company. Jamie: Yes. No no no. Paul: And we had started in 2017 actually, actually before that, but we live stream a couple of events out in San Francisco and then a couple of other things here in town. and I thought I need to get back to my real roots, all the way back to high school days, right? Of working for the local local ⁓ cable station, right, producing content. So my son and I started a media production company. Well, we kind of had it already, but started in earnest. Called Big River Media Group. And so that still continues today. And he we're on the phone today. And he says, Dude, I'm like overbooked for June. Can you help out? And I said, I don't know. Let me see. So it's it's been fun. ⁓ and we started live streaming before most I like to say most people could spell it, right? and then ⁓ I also hosted a weekly show at local It's called Nine Network of Public Media, our local PBS station. and that was ⁓ One Million Cups. It's a program out of the Kaufman Foundation. And we were the first city to actually not only do video, but we were doing live streaming because Nine Network donated their crew and their ⁓ space. So it was a fantastic opportunity and it really got a lot of attention in town for our business of streaming. ⁓ and when the pandemic hit, you know. Katie barred the door. It was crazy. All kinds of nonprofits couldn't have their galas, so they wanted to do virtual galas. We did all kinds of really interesting things. I got involved in the local nonprofit Falcon Roots here ⁓ the Focal Point, because the guy who has run had run sound there for the first 50 years, basically, he was primarily it. Other people filled in, but He called me and said, You probably don't know who I am. I said, ⁓ no, I know who you are. I've been to the focal point several times. I've enjoyed your mixing. our sons are roofing. He goes, Yeah, that's how I got your number. ⁓ Ben took had talked to Jesse and got your number. ⁓ said, We can't, our whole mission is to support the arts and the artists, and we can't do anything because we can't have concerts, ⁓ have people here. So he says, We're looking at live streaming. Will you help us? So I came in and we set up Got them a camera, cameras and a switcher and set them up. and we were able to live stream concerts once a week. They were doing three concerts a week ⁓ person, but ⁓ did one a week and had the artists come in and not at the stage, we actually put black curtain across the back of the room so the band could spread out. And we only had minimal crew and we were able to live stream and a hundred percent of the donations during the live stream. to the artist. So don't think we're the only thing that kept some of those artists alive, but some of ⁓ said I would not have survived financially had the focal point not supported us, right? Jamie: It's amazing. I think it's great. Yeah, it was Yeah. Paul: So then I stayed on after that for a while. Did I produced personally almost four hundred full concert videos. So and then I realized, okay, I'm spending way too much time on this. It's it's a non profit and I'm a hundred percent volunteer. I need to do other things, right? So that's actually when I decided to ⁓ start working on my book, which I started in nineteen seventy nine. Jamie: Yeah. Paul: When I was that sales trainer, right, and earlier in the story, I realized that some of the sales reps I worked with were didn't have the skills and knowledge that some of the other reps had, but they were more successful than those reps who had better skills and knowledge. And I come to the realization that the skills and knowledge don't mean anything unless you apply So that's when I came up with the ask principle. So when I became field sales trainer, I wrote this whole curriculum around the idea of application of your skills and knowledge, right? So in that case, sales skills, interpersonal skills, right? And the knowledge side, market knowledge and product knowledge, right? That was kind of the framework for the whole sales training. But the focus of it was get all that down, be an expert, but you have to actually get your butt out of bed and go make the calls, right? So that's that was really the genesis of it. So I wrote the book pretty quickly because I had kept notes of a lot of the things I had said over the years that I thought, wow, where'd that come from? I don't know, but it's pretty good. Right. People you have all these quotes. How'd you think that up? I said, ⁓ I no idea. It came to me at the time. And I fortunately was pretty good about writing it down, right? Plus, I love quotes from other people that have been successful because there's that's how you get wisdom, right? Is Jamie: Guess you have to be in. Yeah. Paul: To know wisdom is beyond knowledge, right? It's it's knowing not just something, but when and how and why to apply it, right? So anyway, so that's when I started working on the book. When I was pretty close to finished, my son said, what are you gonna call it? I said the ask principle. He goes, you're an I said, He nobody knows that is. And if you look it up on the internet, there's about nine things called the ask principle that are not yours, I said. ⁓ He says, everybody in town, they whenever there's some entrepreneurial thing and somebody talks about their grand plan, you're the one who says, okay, entrepreneur means do. What are you gonna do next? Right? Don't tell me what your plans are, what are you gonna do? He goes, that's what you're known for. And I thought, wow, entrepreneur means do, that's pretty cool. So the book is entrepreneur means do, the ask principle, right? Because the do is point, right? Nothing happens till somebody does something. Or the quote from my dad, which may not have been original from him, but I heard it when I was like 12 years old. So I'm gonna credit him with it. Because of course I'm only 12, so that was 24 years ago. Or something my math's wrong. Anyway. Anyway, that how the book became named what it what it is, right? ⁓ now, recently, a guy I've started a couple different Jamie: Exactly, exactly right. Paul: ⁓ for profit companies and one not for profit organization that was around helping mentors get matched to mentees, right? So building a model of each and connecting a mentee to somebody who they should be talking to, not just who they could. Right. And that was born out of ⁓ was given a couple of mentors. One was great, the others were horrid, because they were middle managers, not in big corp I was Jamie: Right. Paul: A senior manager in in a Times Mirror subsidiary. And Times Mirror was 120 in the Fortune 500, right? So it's like, wow, some of the things you're telling me to do, I would have gotten trouble for doing as a middle manager in my corporate life, right? I don't know how you thought you were successful doing that. the bottom line is a mentor can only be hopeful if they actually have practical. Jamie: Yeah. Paul: suggestions they're humble enough to learn from the entrepreneur as well, right? And that's our current business, big advisors burning issue group. That's the big, right? ⁓ we go into companies and we don't come in as a consultant with a book of answers. We come in and embed as a co CEO helping the the CEO or owner, whichever it is, and their management team. Right. To help them find a healthy way to identify problems, quantify the pro well, validate the problem first, quantify the problem, quantify steps that need to be taken to fix the problem, and then ⁓ assign somebody, well, somebody self-assigned to take that on, and a date, right? So this just very high accountability model because we're working on a with a specialty plumbing contracting company. And I had never heard about about half the things they do, right? Super specialized, they get called in when other plumb plumbing companies are stuck, right? or the drain is stuck more. They're called drain surgeons, right? But we've learned more ⁓ about all of those technologies in two weeks than I care to know at this point. But point is Jamie: Right, I don't care. Paul: We don't come in as experts in your business. We come in and help you actually apply what you know a healthy way to move the business forward, right? And that comes through accountability. So it goes all the way back to the accountability issue, right? So and So we institute a weekly meeting we call a BAM meeting. And it's it's big accountability meeting, right? So burning issues, we burning issues. working with them. So they actually find the issue and describe it, quantify it, and all that. And those are put on the wall. Like you've probably seen it looks like poster paper, but they're giant post-it notes. So we fill out one for every BPI. And in most cases write the kind of categories and then somebody from the company takes the marker and actually does the writing. And then whoever wants to take responsibility for it has to walk up with the marker and write their own name. Jamie: Yep. Mm-hmm. Paul: And they have to stay there till the date. So there it's that's what we call a big accountability meeting, right? They are owning that issue and they are owning, fixing that issue, and everybody in the room knows they took ownership of it and knows what date was set. And so, as Rick puts it, you don't want to come two months later into the room and find four BPIs with your name on it with a red X's through the date with a new date in red, right? It's like Jamie: Yeah, not not gonna feel good for anybody, right? It's like your ⁓ it's like your red line your red line that was the break even line. No one wants to be below that ⁓ that yeah. Paul: No, and he warns him, he says It you you connected the dots. That's what I was saying when I said accountability leading to it, right? It comes back to that. It it really does. And it mean, I I wouldn't mow the lawn when I was growing up unless my dad said, Mow that lawn, right? ⁓ said, I'm gonna find out if you mowed the lawn or not when I drive in in the driveway. It's like, Yes, sir. Right. So it's to me it it ⁓ fits right in the ask principle, right? It's I got great plans. That doesn't mean anything. I know all about this subject. Well, that doesn't mean anything, right? The the one thing that I wrote down, it's a one of my quotes in the book is ⁓ if a great opera singer never sings, it's a waste of a gift, right? It's like you're not an opera singer unless you sing, right? I have a lot of people say, well I'm a I'm a Jamie: Right. Paul: I'm a great developer. ⁓ what have you developed? Well, I worked on this team that's like, no. means you're a team member at a developer, right? So anyway, it's that kind of language important, right? And these days people I would a word, but I probably shouldn't, ⁓ but they up words all the time, right? And they say, ⁓ well, it words don't it means this now. It's like, no, it doesn't. Society decides what words mean, right? If I look up in the dictionary and I read what that word means, it's not what you're saying. My favorite line from Princess Bride, right? You keep using that word. It doesn't mean I don't think it means what you think it means. He was using the word inconceivable in terms of in terms of the idea. Jamie: Yeah. Inconce yeah, I know that. Rick Moranis, inconceiv the anyway, the ⁓ to think back to ⁓ Paul: Yeah. Vizzini was the one using the word inconceivable. it proves he's not all that smart because later he says I would not choose the glass in front of me ⁓ drinks the poison, right? Jamie: Exactly. Nice. So you we that listen, I your career, the journey, ⁓ is right? And the lessons that flow out of it are fascinating. And obviously the good news is you're able to still I say contribute ⁓ sorry help ⁓ let others get or or or benefit from all the learnings that you have over that time between the book and running sessions that you have when somebody listens watches this how can they find you where how can they find the book how do they find you like how what what's what's the best way for them to get to you Paul: Yeah, the book is you probably can't spell my last name, which doesn't matter. Okay. Yep. Yeah, so my book's on Amazon. It's hardback, paper bound, ebook and audiobook. And it's me reading the audiobook because again my y my son yelled at me because I was having ⁓ a AI clone in my voice read it and he goes, Dude, do not do that. You gotta read it yourself, right? Jamie: It'll be it'll we'll put links or we'll put all the it'll be in the description. Everything will be in the description, so don't worry. Paul: So was a month of in studio doing what don't like to do anymore. I used to do a hour long radio show back in the seventies, but I have face for radio, so but Jamie: and what else? And and sorry, and the site for the for the consulting business. What what what's the website? Paul: Yes. So you can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably a great way to connect with me because I get a lot of other spammy stuff from Facebook and other platforms. LinkedIn is the best way to reach out to me professionally. And then our business is bigadvisors.com. So it's Burning Issues Group L L C, but it's Burning Issues Group B I G advisors. So bigadvisors.com. Super simple. So my email is Paul at BigAdvisors. Jamie: Okay, that's pretty. Okay. Paul: And so we we're happy to model is we give the first consulting free. So it could be a 90-minute strategy session. If you've got a small business and you're struggling, we'll give you 90 minutes to to find some issues and help you at those. And that may lead to a relationship, it may not. It doesn't matter. The other thing is if it's a trades business between two and ten million dollars or Jamie: Great. Paul: two to ten years old, it's kind of our brackets. do a big check 360 where we come on site for a day. So that's 10 hours of free consulting. And then we if you like that, if you like the issues that we help you identify, then to build a big plan, that's another 10 hours. And that's at our normal rate, which is 495 an hour. And our ratio near 100% because when we come up with 20 to 23 Burning issues. a company recently, their sales are currently at b a little over three million and we came up with almost five million in burning issues that could be addressed, right? all of a sudden the hundred thousand dollars if we do a four week consulting contract is nothing, right? ⁓ As likes to say. You want me to keep coming back because you want that money. ⁓ If could do it yourself, we wouldn't be here, right? Jamie: Comparable again. I love it. Paul: the accountability that helps them move and ⁓ do, Jamie: ⁓ listen, thank you very much. This is great. fun to like listen and ⁓ of follow along the journey, which is fascinating. ⁓ and hear all the interesting people you've met and things you've done. So so thank you, Paul. Appreciate it. And we'll add like I said, we'll add links into the description. And yeah, otherwise Paul: The other the other side I forgot about is my speaking Author and speaking site which is Paul Heirent dot com. So since you have the spelling ⁓ Jamie: Okay. Yeah, we'll be able to put that we can put that in as well. all right, so for everybody who ⁓ watched, listened, thank you very much. ⁓ to Paul, thank you very much. ⁓ ⁓ until next time, have a good one. Paul: Thank you so much.