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Escaping the Founder's Treadmill: Building a Business That Runs Without You with David Grau Sr · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  But what I learned pretty quick was that I I did not own a business.
• 0:11
  I owned a job with overhead.
• 0:14
  Most founders build a business that quietly traps them.
• 0:18
  David Grouse Senior went from securities lawyer to business owner to author.
• 0:24
  And somewhere along the way, he figured out the difference between working in a company and and actually owning one.
• 0:31
  In today's episode, David unpacks his concept of the founder's treadmill.
• 0:36
  Why founder dependence is unavoidable at the start, when it becomes the thing holding everything back and what it actually takes to build a business that runs without you at the center of every decision.
• 0:48
  If you're grinding hard but feel like the business still can't survive without you, this episode is worth your time.
• 0:54
  And as always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:00
  All right, David Grouse Senior, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:04
  Thank you.
• 1:05
  Appreciate being here.
• 1:06
  Yes, sir.
• 1:07
  We're excited to have you.
• 1:09
  So, David, you are now, I'll say semi retired to where you you had two businesses and, and exited those.
• 1:17
  And now you're doing what you love for a living, which is writing books.
• 1:21
  And we're going to talk about your new book that's coming out here in a few weeks.
• 1:25
  But if you could, for our audience, could you just talk about your backstory and your entrepreneurial past?
• 1:32
  Sure.
• 1:33
  So although I've returned to the Midwest a few years ago, I spent 30 years on the west coast before that.
• 1:42
  My wife and I grew up in a kind of South Bend, Indiana area.
• 1:46
  High school sweethearts, fell in love, got married, and this summer will be year number 48.
• 1:52
  But along the way graduated from Purdue University and after that decided to go to law school for some unknown reason.
• 2:00
  But I came out of high school and I applied for Valparaiso, Notre Dame, iupui got into all three.
• 2:09
  And then the winter, I don't remember what year it was, but late 70s, early 80s, I realized the Midwest was too cold for me.
• 2:16
  So I headed up back to the west coast and went to law school there.
• 2:20
  Came out with a passed the bar on my first attempt and I became a securities lawyer.
• 2:27
  And as such I went to work for the government for a few years as a securities regulator.
• 2:33
  Took me about two years to figure out I wasn't cut out for government work.
• 2:37
  So I came up, opened up my own small securities practice.
• 2:40
  I loved it.
• 2:41
  I was in heaven.
• 2:43
  I was a sole proprietorship Dave, and that's what I always wanted to do.
• 2:48
  My dad, my grandparents were all small business owners and I thought I'd be doing that forever if Your business is.
• 2:56
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• 2:57
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• 2:59
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• 3:02
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• 3:10
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• 3:19
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• 3:26
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• 3:33
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• 3:39
  Calm.
• 3:40
  But what I learned pretty quick was that I, I did not own a business.
• 3:47
  I owned a job with overhead.
• 3:50
  And in the world of law, it's an hourly building job, right?
• 3:53
  I mean, you may, you know, build for $200 an hour, but it's still hourly.
• 3:58
  And I didn't know how to build a business.
• 4:00
  I, I didn't know how to hire for capacity and develop the talent and give them authority.
• 4:06
  And so I literally just kind of worked myself to death.
• 4:10
  And along the way, another idea and another opportunity came up and I got a chance to start a new consulting business using my law skills.
• 4:21
  And I got to work with people all around the country based on this newfound contraption, if you remember, in the last late 1990s called the Internet.
• 4:30
  And so we, we, we built a website.
• 4:32
  It was, we called it eharmony for financial Advisors.
• 4:37
  You know, turn up, turn up the, the, the idea.
• 4:41
  But the business did real well.
• 4:43
  And it, it grew to about 65 people.
• 4:46
  We had half a dozen owners.
• 4:48
  And I gradually sold out and retired to write books.
• 4:52
  Living, Living the dream.
• 4:54
  Okay, all right, so let's, let's key into.
• 4:56
  On the first, your first business, which is the law practice.
• 5:00
  So, you know, you, you go to law school, you move to the west coast because you want the warmer climate first.
• 5:06
  You get a government job.
• 5:07
  You realize you don't like working for the government, so you decide to open up your own practice.
• 5:11
  And you said you were in heaven in terms of being a sole proprietor, right?
• 5:17
  And then before long, you realized that you really didn't have a business, you had a job.
• 5:22
  So, so what was, what was it at that point where you realize that, you know, you couldn't scale having to do everything and, and just focus on hourly billing.
• 5:34
  You know, at first, I'll say it this way, for the first two or three years, I, I didn't mind the hours at all.
• 5:42
  It, it, it didn't bother Me, I loved doing what I was doing.
• 5:45
  And I just, it was like every other law practice and any other lawyer I knew.
• 5:51
  Everything went through me.
• 5:53
  I had to be the smartest guy in the room.
• 5:55
  I loved that I was the bottleneck, so to speak.
• 6:00
  I touched everything.
• 6:01
  I controlled every aspect of it.
• 6:03
  I thought it was wonderful.
• 6:05
  But then my small law business started to grow a little bit and so I hired help.
• 6:12
  I didn't hire capacity.
• 6:14
  I didn't hire anybody that could really make any decision without me.
• 6:18
  I just hired help.
• 6:20
  And I thought somehow that that was going to solve the problem.
• 6:24
  It didn't.
• 6:25
  I think I actually worked harder after I did that.
• 6:29
  And so I didn't understand that.
• 6:33
  You know, four years, actually five years of college at Purdue and then four years in law school.
• 6:41
  I had nine years of college and I did not know how to build a business.
• 6:47
  You go through law school and Adeb, I'll promise you, there's not a single class, at least where I went, devoted to how to build a business, how to make more money, how to scale.
• 6:57
  Not a thing.
• 6:58
  And what I learned at Purdue wasn't applicable to what I was trying to do.
• 7:04
  So little by little, I grew frustrated with it.
• 7:07
  And I had a founder dependent business and I was a slave to it.
• 7:14
  Okay, and we're going to get more in because you're certainly setting up the topic of your new book, which is going to be great for our audience.
• 7:21
  So we'll get into that.
• 7:22
  But real quick, so what's the difference between hiring help and hiring capacity?
• 7:27
  Yeah, thank you for that question.
• 7:29
  And by the way, just a quick message to your audience.
• 7:32
  You can edit this out if you want, but this is a compliment to you, today's audience.
• 7:38
  None of these questions were delivered in advance, so I have not had a chance to practice.
• 7:42
  And I like that this is going to be a impromptu and off the cuff and we're going to figure this out as we go.
• 7:48
  And that to me, that's gold.
• 7:51
  So the difference between hiring help and hiring capacity.
• 7:55
  So think of it this way.
• 7:56
  And honestly, I didn't fully understand this for years and years after my law practice.
• 8:02
  When you're running on the treadmill, you can't look around very much and understand it.
• 8:07
  So what I did and the way I explained it is this.
• 8:10
  When you're on the treadmill, you're running a founder dependent business.
• 8:14
  The founder dependent business.
• 8:16
  Think of a bicycle wheel, right?
• 8:18
  And as the founder, you are the hub of the wheel.
• 8:22
  All the things that go around you, the spokes, the Tire itself.
• 8:27
  That's everything you literally choose to build and surround yourself with.
• 8:32
  But it all runs through the central hub, a founder dependent business.
• 8:37
  And they built it on purpose eventually.
• 8:39
  And that's what I did.
• 8:40
  So when you hire help, help is designed to do some of the menial tasks, but then to come to you with every problem, every need for a solution, every decision is trained to route back through the hub.
• 8:54
  That's help.
• 8:56
  Capacity is when you hire talent and you authorize that talent within bounds to make decisions, to own certain aspects of the process.
• 9:09
  Not equity, but own aspects of the process so that they sit down with a client, they understand what it is they're allowed to sell, what it is they're allowed to do.
• 9:19
  How do they make an exception?
• 9:22
  When do they have to come back to the hub for help, but not every time they own something.
• 9:29
  That's capacity help.
• 9:31
  I learned this in my second business, Dave.
• 9:34
  As a group, I was up to about 10 employees and we still had the hub of the wheel approach.
• 9:40
  And I had 10 people and they all came into me every day.
• 9:44
  Hey, boss, one quick question.
• 9:46
  Hey.
• 9:46
  Got time for one more question?
• 9:49
  Everything ran through me.
• 9:51
  We got bigger, but we didn't get more efficient.
• 9:54
  We never scaled.
• 9:55
  We didn't grow more valuable.
• 9:58
  It doesn't work if it always routes through the founder.
• 10:01
  It works initially, but eventually it stalls out.
• 10:05
  Okay, learn that one the hard way.
• 10:08
  Okay.
• 10:09
  So how did you transition out of the law business?
• 10:11
  Did you end up selling that practice?
• 10:14
  Thank you.
• 10:15
  So I love my law practice and I really thought I would be doing it forever.
• 10:21
  But as I mentioned before that we started, I married my high school Sweetheart this summer.
• 10:26
  48 years together.
• 10:29
  She didn't love it.
• 10:31
  There's an old saying, law, and I think this is true of any small business.
• 10:36
  But in my case, law is a jealous mistress.
• 10:39
  It wants all of your energy, all of your time, all of your excess capital.
• 10:43
  It just has a voracious appetite.
• 10:46
  So I did the best I could, but I'm literally, I was working 80 to 100 hours a week to keep up.
• 10:54
  And I made a good living, but there was no one else to do the work or make the decisions.
• 10:59
  So I always wanted to be a small business owner.
• 11:03
  And along the way, the Internet came out.
• 11:06
  I was in the securities world.
• 11:07
  And it was pretty clear that when I worked with people like a Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, or any of the independent broker dealers or independent insurance companies, that these people had a valuable small business.
• 11:23
  But they didn't know how to Run it.
• 11:25
  They didn't have any way to sell it or monetize it at the end of their career.
• 11:29
  So I created, effectively, what we called eharmony for financial advisors.
• 11:35
  We built a website that was designed to help buyers and sellers find each other.
• 11:40
  And then we would take a transaction fee in the middle.
• 11:43
  We'd provide valuations, we'd.
• 11:45
  We'd provide contracts.
• 11:46
  We'd do deal support, we'd do transition support.
• 11:50
  We'd help them turn that business into a multi owner, multi generational opportunity.
• 11:56
  And it started slowly, but it grew and it worked quite well.
• 12:01
  Eventually, it swallowed my law practice.
• 12:03
  There wasn't time for both.
• 12:06
  Okay, all right, so now you started this one right, in the late 90s, kind of at the advent of the Internet.
• 12:13
  So clearly the audience is familiar with that model today, those kind of matchmaker or aggregator type sites.
• 12:20
  But starting one way back then, when the technology was.
• 12:24
  Was nothing like it is today.
• 12:26
  I mean, what.
• 12:27
  What was the logistics of that business like?
• 12:31
  In a word, rough.
• 12:34
  So.
• 12:34
  So, you know, and.
• 12:35
  And I.
• 12:36
  So I bootstrapped the whole thing, you know, didn't go into debt other than, you know, maybe living off credit cards for a few years.
• 12:42
  But we opened that business up.
• 12:44
  And this sounds funny now when you look back, right?
• 12:48
  But we opened up January, year 2000.
• 12:52
  And in those days, if you had anything moving or any kind of fancy logos or diagrams on your website, it literally would take about two minutes to load the page.
• 13:05
  So I had one helper at the time, and we both learned when a client called in and wanted to walk through the website, we would talk to them long enough for the website to load up so we could
• 13:19
  move through the process with them.
• 13:22
  It was arduous.
• 13:23
  It was difficult.
• 13:24
  It broke a lot.
• 13:26
  And so it was cool to own a virtual storefront in all 50 states.
• 13:32
  That's the best thing we had going for us, I think.
• 13:35
  We built a website about every three years for the first 10 years.
• 13:40
  And it got better and better and faster and faster, and we survived.
• 13:45
  We did okay.
• 13:47
  Okay.
• 13:48
  All right.
• 13:48
  And there was six founders, is that right?
• 13:50
  No, originally we had five founders, and I was one of the five.
• 13:55
  And you look back, and I was a new young lawyer.
• 13:59
  Right.
• 13:59
  You think you're a lot smarter than you are, but had five founders, and somebody had the idea that we'd all be equal.
• 14:07
  5, 20% owners.
• 14:09
  Don't ever do that.
• 14:10
  That almost never works.
• 14:12
  And so little by little, as we bootstrapped this operation, we were all putting in money.
• 14:18
  I think it was like 5,000amonth, every month is kind of seed capital, if you will.
• 14:24
  And it took a while for the business to grow and to take off for us to learn how to build a website and how not to do it.
• 14:32
  We learned it eventually, but so pretty quickly, within the first year or two, three of the other founders just got tired and they wanted to go back to their day jobs.
• 14:44
  It sounds funny now to think back to it, Dave, but people actually believed late 90s, early 2000s, build a website and it'll run itself.
• 14:53
  Yeah, it didn't do that.
• 14:55
  So I bought out three of the founders that was relatively inexpensive because they wanted out.
• 15:01
  And then the last one, it cost me a lot of money to buy him out.
• 15:05
  But eventually I bought all four partners out, and I was the sole owner again, the hub of the wheel.
• 15:13
  And initially I was happy, just a little slow to learn that when everything runs through you, you're the bottleneck.
• 15:21
  And eventually I learned that.
• 15:24
  Okay, all right, so what, what was it like when you have this, I guess, epiphany, right, where, like, you, you can't scale and ultimately get to where you want and everything goes through you.
• 15:35
  What, what happened?
• 15:36
  And then what did you do?
• 15:38
  Well, let me just, you know, be honest and humble here.
• 15:42
  I, I, I, you know, I, I, I, I skipped a part of my story.
• 15:45
  I've got 11 years of education, and I thought I knew a whole lot more about running a business than I did.
• 15:52
  And so, Dave, on my own, I'm not sure I would have ever figured it out.
• 15:58
  That's partly why I wrote the book the Founder's Treadmill.
• 16:01
  When you're busy running on that treadmill and surviving, making all the decisions, making everything work and make it all happen, you know, you don't have a chance to look around and say, hey, am I doing this right?
• 16:16
  You just don't.
• 16:17
  And of course, where did I learn my business law?
• 16:20
  Other lawyers.
• 16:22
  And what do lawyers do?
• 16:23
  Well, they do the same thing.
• 16:24
  Most CPAs, doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, you run it through yourself because you're the smartest guy in the room.
• 16:34
  You've got the credentials and the degrees.
• 16:36
  So I never did figure it out.
• 16:39
  What I figured out was that I owned a really, what I thought was a great job, albeit one with overhead.
• 16:47
  But I was working too hard, and it was really hard on family and life.
• 16:51
  And so I brought in an outside consultant and I said, what am I doing wrong?
• 16:57
  I can't scale this thing.
• 16:59
  I don't seem to build any value because everything literally runs through me.
• 17:03
  If for Some reason I got hit by a buzzer, you know, fell off my bike and I couldn't come into work for a month.
• 17:08
  My business would be dead.
• 17:10
  And so I brought in a consultant and he walked around and he studied and he listened and he, you know, learned and, and, and finally one day we were sitting in my office trying to have a discussion.
• 17:22
  He was trying to tell me what I was doing wrong.
• 17:25
  And this sounds, again, funny in hindsight, it was pretty serious at the time.
• 17:31
  Every five minutes for an hour, somebody walked in my door.
• 17:34
  It was closed, but they knocked.
• 17:36
  They walk in.
• 17:36
  Sorry to interrupt.
• 17:38
  I got a really important question.
• 17:39
  Sorry to interrupt.
• 17:40
  Can I just ask one or two quick questions because we got a problem out here that, you know, I can't wait for you to get done with this meeting.
• 17:47
  And after about the fourth or fifth interruption, the consultant walked over and he closed the door harshly, hard, very hard.
• 17:55
  And he blocked it.
• 17:57
  And he turned to me and he literally just blocked the door.
• 18:00
  He said, just stop it already.
• 18:04
  You're running this like it's a law firm that's not scalable, it's not valuable.
• 18:09
  Everything cannot run through you.
• 18:12
  Let me help you.
• 18:13
  We're going to lay out a plan and we're going to get you to the point where you own a real business and it doesn't all need you to run.
• 18:23
  I didn't believe him, but I thought, it's got to be better than what I'm doing now.
• 18:28
  Let's try it.
• 18:30
  And we literally laid out the 15 steps that I put in the founder's treadmill.
• 18:35
  And I lay them out.
• 18:36
  Three upgrades, I call them per year, over five years.
• 18:40
  If you want to go full tilt, completely get off the treadmill, I'll show you how.
• 18:46
  What I'm explaining is what I did, you know, what they tell you in high school, Write what you know.
• 18:53
  Okay.
• 18:55
  Okay.
• 18:55
  So then this consultant took you through the process of getting off the treadmill.
• 19:00
  And can you just run through some of those steps, high level for the audience of kind of like what you did?
• 19:06
  Thank you.
• 19:07
  So, Ken, let me say it to you this way.
• 19:13
  I took all of these 15 steps and I'll lay out the highlights here in just a moment.
• 19:18
  But my book isn't about getting off the treadmill.
• 19:22
  That's not the right answer for everybody.
• 19:24
  For some folks, what I hope to do is to help you understand that you are on the founder's treadmill, that you are the hub of the wheel and you probably are the smartest, most important person in that room.
• 19:38
  Now that, you know, that let's make some decisions.
• 19:41
  One decision is, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.
• 19:45
  Thank you for the information.
• 19:46
  I'm glad to have better perspective.
• 19:49
  A second pathway is I'm going to stay on the treadmill.
• 19:53
  I like being the most important person in the room, and I want total control.
• 19:58
  But I also would like to build value and have scale and do things a little bit better and more efficiently.
• 20:03
  So I'll implement a handful of the most important upgrades.
• 20:08
  And the third choice is I want to build a real business completely start to finish.
• 20:13
  So those are all good pathways in my world and in my book.
• 20:17
  Now, here's a handful of the most important ones.
• 20:22
  First, just stop for a moment and take perspective of where you're at.
• 20:28
  What is it you want from your business?
• 20:31
  More money, more time, more value, more freedom?
• 20:35
  You want to build something that goes global and gets an IPO someday?
• 20:40
  You want something that doubles in size every four or five years?
• 20:43
  What is it you want?
• 20:45
  Get specific.
• 20:46
  Write it down.
• 20:48
  Next.
• 20:50
  Depending on your goals, one of the most important things a founder can do is to get the business out of their head.
• 20:59
  Again, for me, it's, you know, get out of a pen, get out a legal pad, and start writing down what only you know in terms of running your business, your expectations, what the definition of good is.
• 21:14
  Write it all out.
• 21:15
  That takes a long time.
• 21:17
  Today, you probably do it digitally.
• 21:19
  But get specific and then get it out of your head.
• 21:23
  Next.
• 21:24
  I'm a technician by trade, Dave Law.
• 21:27
  Background, tax background, securities regulation background.
• 21:31
  So there's a lot of technical explanations in the book if you want that kind of thing.
• 21:37
  But set up an entity.
• 21:39
  What kind, what kind of entity do you not want?
• 21:43
  And so I explain that.
• 21:45
  How many shares of stock, what kind of entity?
• 21:47
  Tax conduit or a C corporation.
• 21:50
  You have to have a business, something that has equity in it and can help you organize the business.
• 21:58
  Third, you need a cash flow system.
• 22:00
  And I'll stop after this, let you in the audience.
• 22:03
  Take a breath.
• 22:04
  But you need a cash flow system that focuses on profits, not gross revenue.
• 22:11
  What can you bring to the bottom line?
• 22:13
  How do you do it?
• 22:14
  How much do you need to bring to the bottom line?
• 22:18
  Why does it matter if it all goes home anyway?
• 22:21
  It does matter.
• 22:22
  It matters a lot.
• 22:24
  And this is where you know, using a cash flow system through an entity to reach your specific goals and your dreams, that's pretty much year one.
• 22:34
  Okay.
• 22:35
  All right.
• 22:36
  And so those, like you said, that's.
• 22:38
  That's A handful of them, some of the most important.
• 22:40
  And there's.
• 22:41
  There's numerous more, but.
• 22:42
  So you went full tilt and you implemented all of these over a number of years, and then what.
• 22:48
  What was the result?
• 22:51
  When I retired, we had 65 people, six of whom were owners.
• 22:57
  And honestly, literally, I did eventually leave that business completely, and it continued on just fine.
• 23:06
  I was off the treadmill.
• 23:07
  I was not the hub of the wheel anymore, and neither was anybody else.
• 23:12
  We created a real business and.
• 23:14
  And we hired great people and we gave them authority.
• 23:19
  We developed capacity, and I mean, we literally just grew and grew and grew.
• 23:26
  That business doubled in size about every three years, and I didn't work any harder.
• 23:33
  In fact, became a point there in the last four or five years.
• 23:38
  And with COVID helping me along, I didn't even go into the office anymore.
• 23:42
  I wasn't absentee, but the business didn't need me to make decisions every day.
• 23:47
  We had a great team.
• 23:49
  We both.
• 23:51
  Okay, all right.
• 23:52
  And then.
• 23:53
  So since then, you've now retired and you're doing what you truly love, which is writing.
• 24:00
  So.
• 24:00
  And you alluded to it many times here.
• 24:03
  But let's talk about your new book coming out, which is the Founders Treadmill.
• 24:08
  Like, why did you write that book?
• 24:13
  I think like many writers, or at least non fiction writers, I wanted to make a difference.
• 24:19
  I said earlier, you know, all of my high school and college English professors always said, if you're going to write, write what you know.
• 24:28
  Make a difference that way.
• 24:30
  And so the Founder's Treadmill is literally what I learned and what I know, aided by a little bit of perspective as I get to my late 60s here and have a chance to look around.
• 24:43
  You know, I think if I'd have written this book 15, 20 years ago, I'd have said you all need to get off the treadmill at some point.
• 24:52
  Follow me today.
• 24:55
  I'd like to think I've grown up enough and matured enough, and I'm wise enough to say, you don't have to get off the treadmill.
• 25:02
  There's a lot of folks out there that love being on that treadmill.
• 25:06
  It's what they get their identity from.
• 25:07
  It's the control they've always dreamed about, and they make just enough money, they're happy.
• 25:14
  Then don't change it.
• 25:16
  But another path is the Founder's Treadmill is not a bad thing.
• 25:22
  It depends on what you want.
• 25:24
  And so I wrote the book to help people understand that they have choices.
• 25:30
  But, Dave, I also made a point to stress and I Think a lot of your listeners and what I hope a lot of my readers come to realize, they're small business.
• 25:42
  It's not a hobby.
• 25:44
  It can be, but for most people it's the single largest, most valuable asset they own.
• 25:51
  But it needs to be nurtured and cared for.
• 25:54
  It's more than just a cash flow machine.
• 25:57
  It's an opportunity to take care of you, your family.
• 26:01
  It can help you retire on your terms.
• 26:04
  It can give you the opportunity to take care of your current clients, children and grandchildren.
• 26:09
  If you build something that outlasts you, that's huge.
• 26:13
  And that's how I want to make a difference in the world.
• 26:16
  I want to help these small business owners do it better.
• 26:21
  And so I.
• 26:21
  You've been working with many of them as well through, you know, through, throughout your, your post career.
• 26:30
  Let me just ask why.
• 26:31
  Why do you think so many people, so many entrepreneurs have a problem get, you know, getting off the treadmill?
• 26:38
  Oh yeah.
• 26:39
  And the great question.
• 26:40
  And, and they do have a problem.
• 26:42
  First, they don't realize they're on it.
• 26:45
  They don't realize, really realize that being the hub of the wheel is the system because early on it solves a whole bunch of problems.
• 26:54
  If you're bootstrapping a small business, you've gotta be the hub of the wheel.
• 26:59
  That's what makes it work.
• 27:01
  And that's what I learned.
• 27:03
  There was no better way to do it.
• 27:06
  What I didn't understand and realize, and what I hope my book helps people understand is you can't be this hub of the wheel forever.
• 27:15
  If you aren't, then you just own a job with overhead.
• 27:19
  If you want to build a business, eventually you have to transition off the treadmill or run smarter on the treadmill and build scale, build profitability.
• 27:30
  You've got to develop growth engines.
• 27:33
  You've got to give up some of the authority and the decision making capacity.
• 27:37
  It's just a normal, natural part of the business.
• 27:40
  But it also means you've got to change the systems.
• 27:44
  You can't be the hub of the wheel forever.
• 27:47
  And that's hard because it works initially.
• 27:49
  It just can't work forever.
• 27:52
  It doesn't.
• 27:54
  Okay.
• 27:55
  That's the point I really tried to make in the opening chapters of the book and I made it by telling my story.
• 28:02
  Eventually you just run out of gas.
• 28:05
  Ah, okay.
• 28:06
  And David, when you look at your journey, right, and especially with the perspective, being in your 60s now, when you look at how you became an entrepreneur, the couple businesses you had, the success with, the scaling and the
• 28:19
  exit and now you're doing what you love in terms of writing.
• 28:23
  Looking back at this whole journey, what's been the best part of it for you?
• 28:29
  Well, I'm going to wake up at 3am this morning and think of the other answer I wanted to give you, but off the cuff.
• 28:38
  My wife laughs as we think back to my time at Purdue and then in law school.
• 28:44
  If I could have, I'd still be in college.
• 28:46
  I love education.
• 28:49
  To this day, I spend an hour or two every day learning something new.
• 28:54
  It's just what keeps me alive.
• 28:56
  And so hiring that consultant and learning how to run a business successfully, you know, to go from the hub of the wheel to a business that, you know, literally didn't need me anymore, but while it kept growing and
• 29:12
  doubling in size was a feeling of tremendous accomplishment.
• 29:17
  I, I helped 65 people pay their mortgages every month.
• 29:22
  I built a business that's going to be around, I think, 30, 40 years from now that changed the lives of just about every independent financial advisor in this country.
• 29:34
  We gave them better value.
• 29:35
  We gave them a way to realize value.
• 29:38
  I made a difference that feels pretty,.
• 29:43
  Yeah, doesn't get any better.
• 29:46
  And if I'd have stayed the hub of the wheel, I might have made a little difference, but I wouldn't have made the national difference that we eventually did as a team.
• 29:57
  We had a lot of smart people working there, Dave, and the ability to hire them and hang on to them and empower them that came with learning how to build a business wasn't about me.
• 30:09
  That's hard to say even today.
• 30:13
  All right.
• 30:13
  And David, if people want to get your new book the Founders Treadmill, or learn more about the, the other work that you do, what's the best way people can reach out to you online?
• 30:24
  Probably the easiest way.
• 30:25
  And the best way, just go through my author's site, www.DavidGrausr senior.com and I've, you know, I've got four books that I've written in the last four years.
• 30:39
  You can buy them directly through me, you can go through Amazon, but you can also, you know, read and learn.
• 30:44
  I've got a blog post up there.
• 30:46
  If you have questions.
• 30:47
  There's.
• 30:48
  You can subscribe for a 330 minute consultation and no cost.
• 30:53
  We'll have a zoom call just like this and talk about you and your treadmill and see if there's some way that I can help.
• 31:00
  I'm a force of one.
• 31:01
  I don't have a business here to sell anybody.
• 31:04
  I just want to make a difference and help people.
• 31:06
  And so if you think I can come, visit me on my website and sign up for my newsletter, almost everything's free.
• 31:13
  Okay.
• 31:13
  Love that.
• 31:14
  All right.
• 31:15
  Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 31:22
  We greatly appreciate, appreciate.
• 31:24
  Thanks for having me take care.
• 31:36
  Of.