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Heck, drop a reply and if you’re in the US or Canada I’ll help a bunch of folks to pick up a copy before the price goes up.
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Transcript powered by Happy Scribe
Welcome everybody to the show. My name is Eric Wright. This is the DiscoPosse Podcast where we are bringing on a return guest, somebody who I really enjoyed having a conversation with the first time, which is why I was honored to be able to help Michelle Seiler-Tucker. We talked about her book “Exit Rich” that she co authored. It’s an amazing book. I’ve read it. We talk about the 6P framework in her original episodes. Go on, make sure you check out her original show. But to top this off, we’re talking today about lessons learned since the release of the book and an amazing announcement that the audiobook is now available.
So you can follow the links below. Get the audiobook because right now it’s on sale for $299. This is a really really amazing deal. Literally like less than a cup of coffee. Why in goodness name would you not get this book? It’s well read. I love the folks that they had, actually did the reading and just the content of the book is fantastic. So Michelle Seiler-Tucker, thank you very much for letting me be a part of helping with the amplification for the launch. And this is why great people support great things and I love supporting Michelle and all the work that she’s done. Speaking of support, of course, I want to give a shout-out to the folks that support this podcast that make it happen. If you have data anywhere in your world, which you do, I know you do, especially any of the systems you’ve got in your organization, you need to make sure that you protect your data, protect your business, protect yourself, protect everything. So everything you need for your data protection needs can be shopped out by the fine folks over at Veeam Software.
It’s also Veeam-On coming up next week. If you’re listening live and this is a really great time, everybody’s going back in person. So go head on over to vee.am/discoposse. You can see all that they’ve got to offer. I recommend it. I’m a user of the platform myself. Very cool. And also, we are super proud to continue to grow our partnership with the friends over at the Shift Group. So, JR at the Shift Group, if you caught his episode which you absolutely should, this week’s episode is brought to you by the team at Shift Group. They are turning athletes into sales professionals. So if your company is looking to hire driven and competitive former athletes, or considering how do you architect to go to market that can scale efficiently and effectively? Shift Groups not only offering a huge pool of really cool, diverse sales candidates from entry-level leadership, but they’re helping early stage startups to develop a hiring strategy, the whole interview process, and really building sales culture that’s going to scale with you and build high talent, early-stage companies. So head on over to shiftgroup.io and you can check it out. All right. With that, this is Michelle Seiler-Tucker. Get yourself the book. Click the link. Seriously, leave right now. Pause. Go over and download the book, it’s fantastic. Thank you very much.
All right, Michelle Seiler-Tucker, thank you very much. This is a rare treat to have somebody come back. I don’t often get the chance to spend more time, especially with somebody as amazing as you, because I know you are busy in day to day. Plus, we’re here for a special occasion right now. We talked in the past about “Exit Rich”. We talked in the past about your entire story, your business, your own way of helping people to get to success, both personal and professional. But we’re here today because we’ve got something new in the Exit Rich world. So Michelle, if you want to re-introduce yourself to folks that are brand new to you, and we’re going to talk about the new launch of the audiobook and everything wrapped around it.
Absolutely. Well, first of all, Eric, thank you for having me back on. I appreciate it. I am Michelle Seiler-Tucker. I was on your show, I think it was six months ago. I’m Michelle Seiler-Tucker, mergers and acquisitions master, intermediary senior business analyst, certified mergers and acquisitions professional, and a bunch of other acronyms behind my name. I’ve been in this industry a little over 20 years. I think what really makes me neat in M&A is I own other companies. So I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I’ve always sat on the other side of the desk. I’ve always had to be the one to make sure I meet payroll, pay the bills, et cetera. So a lot of my advisers, brokers, have not necessarily owned businesses before. And I think that helps me to be able to relate with my clients and really be empathetic and understand what they’re going through. So at any given time, I own several different companies. I’m also building to sell. Like I said, I’ve been in this industry for a little over 20 years. I personally have sold over 500 companies. My firms has sold probably even more than that.
And we really specialize in not just selling companies, Eric, but we specialize in buying companies, selling businesses, helping buyers buy the business of their dreams. We specialize in fixing and growing a business because Steve Forbes, who endorse “Exit Rich” says 80% of businesses on the market will never sell. 80% – I mean, that should be a big wake up call for business owners because that means you have less than a 20% chance of success when you go to sell your company. And so what I learned a long time ago is if I don’t get in and roll up my sleeves and help fix these companies, help position them and help them build the infrastructure on what we talked about last time, which are the 6P’s, then their business is not going to sell. So like I said, we don’t just specialize in selling. We specialize in fixing these businesses, growing these businesses. So the owner really has a sustainable business that’s scalable. And when they’re ready, sellable.
When this is very important too, Michelle. We often forget about the numbers. And in fact, you are one of my most quotable episodes because in the industry, we’re constantly thrust with this number where people say like 99% of startups fail. And I continue to go back to remind them, watch the episode with Michelle Seiler-Tucker where she talks about how that’s actually inverted. Right. The upside-down numbers that we get from the SBA. And now that 80% that you and Steve talked about there of businesses that are sitting unsold. That is an interesting stat. But if you don’t mind, let’s recap on sort of the failure in this metric that we talk about that small businesses are failing.
Yeah. So small businesses are failing. And to go back over those matrix, I was actually quite shocked myself because when I wrote my very first book, “Sell Your Business For More Than It’s Worth” in 2013, I did the research back then and learned that 90-95% of businesses were going out of businesses were startups. So that is true. However, what’s changed so dramatically is when I did the research for “Exit Rich” in 2019 and 2020, I learned that the business landscape has really flip-flopped. So now it’s not startups a great risk anymore. Startups only have less than a 30% chance of going out of business. A 30%. So they have a 70% success rate. But, what’s so mind-boggling is when you look at America and you look at what the economy is really built-on, there’s 3.2 million businesses in the United States employed over half the US workforce. Over half the US workforce. Think about that.
Wow.
So small business is really supporting the economy, the American economy. If we lose small business, we lose jobs. What happens when you lose jobs? We lose spending power. And then what happens? It’s a trickle down effect. We stopped going to restaurants. We stopped buying ice cream. We stopped doing a spinning discretionary money because we don’t have it anymore. So now you have a triple down effect where more businesses will close. So 30.2 million businesses now, out of 27.6 million companies in the United States, those businesses have been in business for ten years or longer. 70% of those companies are going out of business. 70%. See how it flip-flops. So now startups have a 70% success rate, whereas startups, existing businesses have a 70% failure rate. Pretty scary. And you hear about the big companies all the time in the media like, the media will talk about public companies, Toys R Us – in business 75 years ago, goes out of business. Montgomery Ward, Sears, J.C. Penney’s, Pier1 – I love Pier1!
Right. Crate and Barrel, a recent one as well. Lord &Taylor, lots of the big retail players.
Yeah, but the media doesn’t talk about the private companies. They only talk about the public businesses. On the private side, we got businesses on every street corner and every city and every straight across our great nation. These businesses are dropping like flies. They’re selling from – they’re actually poor, not rich. They’re selling for pennies on the dollar, closing the companies or even worse, filing bankruptcy. And so it’s really scary. And by the way, Eric, that was before the pandemic. I hate to see my numbers now, but that was before the pandemic. And I always say the number one reason for that, why it’s kind of flipflop is because startups are really a different breed now. It used to be the dreamer mentality. People would leave their corporate jobs and say, oh, I always wanted to own a coffee shop. I always wanted to own a restaurant or a clothing store. But they don’t have the business experience. They’re probably not really an entrepreneur, you know, they’re really probably not an entrepreneur. And they have that build-it-and-they-will-come mentality like “Field of Dreams”. Remember the movie “Field of Dreams”, build it and they will come? Now, a lot of those startups go out of business because they’re brick and mortar.
Plus, the business owner is not really an entrepreneur. They didn’t do their due diligence. They didn’t study their area and run demographics. And most businesses fell in those first one to five years because they simply run out of money. They run out of working capital. The startups now are younger generations and they are forward thinkers. They’re problem solvers. They’re solution-oriented. So they’re not just building another coffee shop. We don’t need another coffee shop or another restaurant. So they’re looking around and saying, well, what’s the problem? What’s the solution? How can I fix this problem? Right? And so you have a lot more tech businesses. You have a lot more e-commerce businesses. You have a lot more businesses that are started by, like I said, newer generations. But also, people got laid off from their job during this pandemic. And a lot of people are going – wait, what can I do to start my own business and really make a difference in the world? Now, on the flip side of that, for existing businesses, existing businesses are going out of business because of what I call lack of AIM. Aim is “Always Innovate and Market”. So business owners become complacent. You know that. I mean, look at Toys R US. They didn’t do anything different in 75 years. Look at Blockbuster. Blockbuster had the opportunity to pick up Netflix, to buy Netflix. They sat back to nothing and are out of business. So this is going to become complacent. They also, really they’re in love with their original baby, with their original concept, their original idea. And they don’t like change. And that’s a big problem because you’re either growing or dying. There is no in-between, which is why I always tell business owners, you got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And so that’s the big reason that so many business owners are going out of business because they stop innovating. Here’s the bottom line. The marketplace has changed dramatically. The way consumers purchase products and services is completely different than the way they used to place them or buy them. And you can pick Amazon for that, you can pick the Pandemic for that. But you really got to innovate, and you really got to look at your industry and you got to ask your client, what do you want? What do you want to experience when you do business with us? What can we do to make your experience more pleasant? What can we do to make it easier for you to do business with us? And you got to innovate. You’re either innovating or like I said, you’re dying.
It is interesting that when we look at – especially the historical changes and then the tightening up of that type of thing, I mean, the pandemic obviously reshaped everything, and it made a huge opportunity for a lot of businesses. There are small environmental changes that can ravage a business. I remember I lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the time when the Olympics were coming. And so they said, well, we’re going to build a subway from the airport to the city to make it easier for the Olympics. So it seems like a fantastic idea to build the economy. What do they do? They tunneled underneath the main roads, and in order to do so, of course, you block off the road because you can’t be driving while they’re tunneling. Well, that took 14 months and literally destroyed every business on that road because they were all traditional little tiny met restaurants with local businesses and no parking other than two spots in front. And I think to myself like good galley in that kind of a snap, that stuff can occur over snap, a snap decision that has a 24 month effect, whatever over. It took a few years for it to really finally pay out.
But their inability to go into a new area of the market to attend to a new customer, to figure out a way to get out of that thing, that single event ultimately wiped out. And we see that often, right? And it’s not just whether it’s going towards exit ultimately, but just going towards sustainability if a single market change can fundamentally affect. You taught me this lesson, and I hold it, it’s in my heart every day. And I think this because we talked about this idea of solopreneurs and the risk that people think that they’re in business when they’re a solopreneur. And you taught me these words, if you stop working and the business stops working, you are not in business.
You have a qualified job that you got to work with me versus the business that works for you.
And it reminded me and everything I do I have that in my mind. I’m like, what would Michelle tell me to do to automate this? Make it repeatable, make it scalable, offload it, whatever I can do, not just outsource. Also, another lesson you taught me, just outsourcing it, putting it on Upwork or Fiverr is not actually running a business because you’re not building a team. You’re not building a scalable system. These lessons stuck, Michelle. And I thank you for that.
Glad I can make a difference.
So let’s talk about the book, because not only did I enjoy it thoroughly and I’ve read it and it’s marked up and highlighted and bookmarked all over the place. But I’m not the only consumer. Lots of folks taking the stand. Let’s talk about how the book has been doing.
Well, the book has been doing great. I think I was under show in January and you know, look, like you said, something can happen and completely stop us dead in our tracks. And actually wrote “Exit Rich” in 2019 and we were supposed to publish in 2020. And then this pandemic happened. So we ended up publishing June of 2021. Now is on the show, I believe, in January. So the book is really great. It’s a Wall Street journalist bestseller, not in New York Times, but it will be.
We’ll get it there.
So Wall Street Journal, USA Today bestseller, and it’s in the Hudson bookstores and 99 different Hudson bookstores all around the United States. We’re getting boring recommendations. What I really love and what I guess really inspires me to continue to write and continue to educate is when I get letters from entrepreneurs that have been in business for decades. And we had a media company that emailed us and said, look, Michelle, your book changed my life. That’s what changed my life. I’ve been in business 20 years. I thought I was doing everything right. I read your book and realized I was doing everything wrong. I basically took your book step by step, broken out to different divisions in my company and told them follow this book to a T for everything that she says. And he says it’s really changing his business dramatically. It’s going to come to us in about two to three years to sell. And then we had another owner entrepreneur in Texas. It’s a pharmaceutical company. And he actually bought the book before the booking and launched. So we emailed him the digital version. He printed it out in ledger paper and highlighted everything, gave it to different teams, his teams, and said, listen, do everything she says, on the people, on the product, on the processes, on the proprietary.
And he came to me to sell this business, and we’re going to be selling it for the $25 to $50 million range. And so I love getting those letters. I love getting those calls because it means I’m making a difference. And that’s what inspires me. That’s where my true passion is – is to really help entrepreneurs, really help business owners be able to save that business and be able to not become a statistic of the 80% of the statistics don’t sell, but become in a 20% to where you can sell for premium for maximum value and exit rich. That’s really what my passion is. It breaks my heart when I see baby boomers, their heart, their energy, made huge sacrifices along the way. These baby boomers are actually poor. Many of them are losing not just their business assets, losing their family assets, too, because they take out a mortgage against their family home. And that breaks my heart. I really want entrepreneurs to be able to really retire for their desired sales price and exit rich so they can finally sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labor, because as entrepreneurs, they make huge sacrifices. We go into this and we’re going to have better quality of life.
We’re going to have more time, we have more money. Well, guess what? We don’t always have that right. I talked to a business owner who’s in business for six years. He said, Michelle, I miss every one of my kids soccer games. I miss my girl’s plays. I miss pretty much everything in life. My life just passed me by while I was working in my business. While I was working in my job.
Yeah.
Versus my business working for me.
I still remember years ago working in retail, and there was a fellow who had a restaurant inside a mall. So in Toronto, Ontario, was living in Canada at the time, very busy mall. And millions of people come through here and traffic every day because it’s a subway stop and there’s lots of office towers nearby. And so it was like a falafel restaurant in the food court. And he was doing an incredible amount of business. But it wasn’t enough that he had real margins. And what ended up happening was he ended up after a few years of working there, selling the business to go back to work for a restaurant, because in the end, his direct money he was making to take home to his family was less than he could make in an hourly rate. But he was working open to close every day.
Yeah, that’s sad. That stories are prevalent and it’s very sad. So it’s always been my mission. So they help entrepreneurs build a business, not a job, and really build people, because you don’t build a business. You build people and people build a business.
That’s why I really enjoyed the book, not just in the processes and lessons that it teaches which are real, tangible things you can do that work. I know this. I literally am living the experiences of doing it. So I’m not like I said, I chose my guest. And it was a blessing to know that I was going to get to spend time with you to thank you for this, Michelle, because on top of that, there’s additional stuff that comes from the book you’re able to get in. You’ve got lots of online community. You’ve got great folks that you can get connected with and learn lessons beyond what’s written in the book. But now let’s talk about what’s coming up, because not only is the book printing and doing well on that side, but you’ve got an audiobook coming out as well.
We do. And the main reason for that is because everybody’s asking me, Michelle, I have the printed version but I want the audio so I can listen you know during my commute to and from my company or wherever they’re traveling. So we did come out with the audio version just a little bit more on Exit Rich. Exit Rich again, is endorsed by Steve Forbes. My co-author is Sharon Lechter who wrote “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” with Robert Kiyosaki. Kevin Harrington is the Ford. And Kevin Harrington was the original shark of Shark Tank in the United States. I think in Canada you all have Lionston, I think it’s called. Yeah. Anyway, so Exit Rich, I just want to be crystal clear. Exit Rich is not just about selling the business, because in most cases, you don’t have a business to sell. Exit Rich is all about, number one, figuring out what do you want, what do you want? What is your end game? Like Steven Covey always says, start with the end in mind. Exit Rich is all about planning your GPS exit model, planning your exit from the beginning, and really determining what is your destination. What do you want to sell your business for?
You can’t wake up one day and say, I want to sell my business for $20 million when you haven’t grown a $20-million company. So you really have to plan it in the beginning and say, I want to sell for $29, and then you have to build that $20 million company. You need to know who are the buyers, what’s their buying criteria, where do your numbers need to land? So you need to know all of that. And you also have to go through what I call the “Seller Sanity check” to really check yourself to see what’s the most important thing to you. Is it what you walk away with. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. Is it making sure your place is taken care of? Is it to make sure that your clients are in good hands. Is it making sure that the new order is going to grow your legacy. So you really have to go through that seller sanity check. And then one of the most important lessons of Exit Rich is to build that solid infrastructure, because it’s the infrastructure of the people, the product, the processes, the proprietary assets, the patrons – diverse client base, the profits.
Those 6P’s is what will maximize value. Those 6P’s is what we’re taking it from a three multiple to five, to six, to eight to ten. And then it’s all about how do you package your business for sale. And then so the first half is getting it ready to actually build a sustainable, scalable business. The second half is all about selling your business. So it’s almost two books in one. And so we all come out with the audio version in May. Go get it today. You can go get it right now. You can get it in apple – I believe it’s in Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. So Kobo, Barnes & Noble and Apple – $2.99 which is less than a cup of coffee, less than a quarter pound of cheese meal at McDonald’s. So with $2.99, you can get the audiobook After May, it’s going to go back to its original price, which is going to be $24.99 I believe.
Right.
And so with that $2.99, you also become what Eric was talking about – an “Exit Rich” club member. So you get access to documents. Documents to operate your business. Like sample employee handbooks, non-competes, policy and procedure manuals to sell your business. Sample prospectuses – what they should look like. Sample letters of intent, due diligence checklist, closing documents. All the stuff you need to operate your company and sell your business are there for your download and your use. And guess what, Eric? These documents cost me over $50,000 to create, and you can get them for the $2.99.
That’s amazing.
Yeah. So it’s amazing value and go out and get your copy today. Again, that was Barnes & Noble, Apple or Kobo. And it will be worth every single penny. I know Eric read the book so he can attest to that.
I stand 100% behind. I bought it for full price. It’s funny. I think even your production crew were like, hey, let us know if you need a copy of the book. I said, oh, too late. I knew I could ask, but I also knew I was willing to pay for it. So I wanted to make sure people know that me endorsing this book is 100% because I believe in the book. And like I said, I’m using it in lessons that I’m doing to build things that not even looking at a near term exit right now, but to build sustainable processes and a sustainable business, because that’s just healthy for me. Right. I know what my intent is in growing what I do. And like you said, you set that. What is your expectation, what is your goal? And then how do we build processes to make that business achieve that goal? I can tell you on that side of the lesson. I haven’t gotten to the exit yet. But like I said, we’ll talk in a couple of years when I’m a Michelle Seiler-Tucker, you’re selling my business. We’ll do business together that way, too.
And, you know, I think you just hit the nail on the head, too, because you might say, well, I never want to sell my business. That’s okay. First of all, I never say we’re number one, because you never know what life has in store for us. And number two, even if you go and sell your business, at least you’re building a valuable asset. At least you’re building a sustainable business that can run without you. So you truly do have financial freedom. So you truly do have a better quality of life and you’re in charge of your own destiny and your ability in a business that you can scale. And if the situation ever occurs that you do have to sell, you’ll have a valuable asset. I get calls all the time, Eric, from spouses, where they say, like, a lady called me from Dallas, her husband dropped out of a heart attack at the age of 45, left her with a pile of debt and asked me if I could sell her business. Well, guess what? He didn’t have a business. He had a job. He had a construction company. He didn’t have any employees. He had all subcontractors. He didn’t have any processes, no possible procedure manuals. Everything was in his head. So when the business owner died, he died. So the most important thing here is set your family up for success. We never know what’s in store for us. So we want to make sure that we’re taking almost valuable asset, which is our business, and we want to make sure we’re setting it up for success. So if anything does happen, God forbid, our family will be taken care of.
Yeah. And even as a successful transfer, why wouldn’t somebody want to pass it on to their kids and give that option? Right. People often just think exit means sale, but exit is bringing the business to a new stage and you yourself are exiting. But it’s only good if you can pass that on to somebody else and they can continue to grow it and know how to operate it. Definitely feel and for $2.99, it’s a crime not to get this. There is nothing that is worth more than the time you invest in reading this book, for sure. So I know I will be an early listener and a repeat listener because it’s also not like a read and walk away situation. It does play out like a manual that you want to revisit and recheck. It’s very well written in that way. You and Sharon work together and created a great book.
Well, and that’s why we came out with the audio version, because like I said in the beginning, so many of our readers are saying, look, do you also have the audio version? Because we want to listen in the car, not just read it. So go out there and get both. But if you don’t get anything, get the audio version. Make sure you get that audio version and you’ll love it. It also comes with all the supplements. So like all the glass and charge and things like that that we have in the book, the surveys, all of that will also come with audio version.
That’s always the funny thing when I talk to people and they’re like, how can you listen to a business book? Because it has lots like charts and such. I’m like, well, because they come with a PDF, you can get all those assets, which is great. Now as 2022 kind of a wild time. We’ve got inflation, we’ve got a lot of things going on. But Michelle, what’s the positive outlook? What can people look to do in a good way to embrace sort of current market conditions?
I mean, like I’ve always said, innovate, take a survey of your clients, of your market share. Really survey your clients because so many business owners really lose that perspective. Why are you in business? You’re in business to serve your clients, right? Without clients, without users. If you’re a tech business, if you’re a SaaS business, you got to have users. If you don’t have any users, you don’t have any business, right? So really take stock of your clients, of your market share and actually go back to your clients. A lot of times we think we know what we want our clients to experience, but you really need to go ask your clients. Mcdonald’s did this back in 1940s when they created the fast-food McDonald’s chain and they created a fast-food system. They asked clients because they did surveys and they asked themselves, what do we want our clients to experience? Three things. We want them to get hot food. It’s great-tasting, 30 seconds or less. Come up with the three things you want your clients’ experience, but really look at the markets. Look at what’s happening. Make sure that you research and not just learn from your industry, but learn from other industries as well.
Look at some of the leaders and what they’re doing. Like, look at Amazon. I mean, Amazon is a great company to learn from. So is Disney. So is the Ritz Carlton. There’s so many different, so is Apple. So many different companies to really learn from, because you can take some of the things that they’re doing and adapt it to your industry. But innovation is the name of survival. Innovation is survival right now. With inflation and everything else and the cost of just doing business and retaining employees and everything, you just got to get really creative. You got to throw the box away. You got to do things different than you’ve ever done it before. And if you can’t really see clearly because you’re so in it and sometimes we’re in our pocket foggy, sometimes you’re so close to it, you really can’t see it. Like I always say, it’s hard to read the label. It’s hard to read the label from the inside of the bottle. You need an outsider’s perspective to read the warning sign to keep you out of the danger zone. So if you can’t really see what you need to do differently and innovate, get a mentor. Get somebody who’s been down the road you want to travel. Learn from other people’s mistakes. You don’t have to learn from your own all the time. Get somebody out there to see something that you can’t see yourself. I mean, that’s what I’m really good at. I’m really good at looking at other businesses and asking the question, what business are you in? What’s your superpower? What business should you be in? And those are very important questions to ask ourselves right now. Amazon did that back in the 80s. They asked themselves, what business are we in? We’re in the fulfillment business. What’s our superpower? Fulfillment! What business should we be in? Fulfillment for everybody. But it’s true, right? Same thing with McDonald’s. What business are we in? Everybody says they’re in the restaurant business. No, they’re not. They’re in the real estate business. Mcdonald’s are huge because of Ray Kroc’s starting McDonald’s Corporate Realty, gave him leverage over the McDonald brothers. It is the reason why McDonald’s is the largest real estate holding company in the world. But guess what, Ray Kroc didn’t come up with that on his own. As an outsider, go watch a movie – The founder, that was an outsider looking in on Ray’s conversation when he was trying to borrow more money after being overlapped. So a lot of times, it takes an outsider’s perspective to help us see things more clearly and help us really be able to innovate. But you can’t do the things the way you’ve always done them. The world is changing so quickly. Consumer’s buying habits have changed dramatically. Number one because of Amazon and number two because of this pandemic. And you really got to look at all that and eyes wide open. And don’t do business the same way you’ve always been doing it because you’re going to lose market share and end up going out of business.
Yeah. And if anything, like you said, the lessons are out there to be had. And founders, builders, operators, they love to share lessons because it’s as important for them to talk through what they’re doing. It actually is a great validation. I forget what the process is. Something like, see, say, do teach that’s the way that they do medical school. Right. You watch it, you learn about it, then you explain what it is because by having to explain it, you’re rationalizing it while you’re explaining it. Then you do it and then you teach it. And that cycle flow, there are lots of people who are at that teach phase. If you’re a gamer, it’s like a cheat code for business. Like, why would you just wait to turn a hard lesson on yourself when you can find somebody else that maybe has already had that lesson learned and impart that on them.
Right. But before you get that mentor, we are going to make mistakes along the way. I was just talking to a roofing company. And they’ve done really well in three years. Victor’s EBITDA is earning some franchise taxes. Depreciation is around 2-3 million. In three years, it’s pretty good. And they’re like, Michelle, we made every stake in the book. We made it. And I said, did you get a mentor? And I said, no, I wish we would have. Three years ago. They said, but we felt forward. We keep selling forward. We keep learning from our mistakes. And you know what? If you don’t quit, you didn’t tell.
Absolutely. Yeah.
But they were cracking me up because they’re like, well, nobody can make as many mistakes as we have made. And you know, what they also did is they didn’t just learn from their industry, their roofers. They went and learned from the funding trade, from the logical trade, from the HVAC trade, from all other different service trades instead of just learning from their own industry. And then they figured it out. And then they became marketing geniuses. And it really blew up their business in pretty much a year and a half. So half of the time they made all the mistakes. The second half they go on their business exponentially. But go out there and get that mentor. And that’s what I’m talking to them about. I’m like, okay, I’m going to start a company, but then I want you to go help others. I want you to go help others forward and have them learn from the mistakes that you’ve made in the past so they’re not having to make the same mistakes. I mean, we can all learn from each other. We can all help each other better ourselves.
That’s it. And like you said, it’s how you react to it that will change the outcome, right? There are lots of mistakes that are made, and there are lessons learned from them, and it’s what you do beyond it. There’s a great I think it’s like an Instagram sort of meme or video. And this guy just started talking the back almost like a preacher. And he says, practice, practice, practice. Like he’s talking to crowd. He goes, practice makes what? And you hear the whole crowd go perfect. He goes, Absolutely not. Get that mindset out of your brain. He says, practice makes better. Better means more practice. That’s really how we have to think. Like, you do it and you will make mistakes and you will survive them and you will learn from them, hopefully.
I tell my daughter the same thing. My daughter’s in gymnastics and the apparatus she struggles with the most is the balance beam – she’s great on everything else. This is her first year in competing and she hates practicing the balance. And like, you have to practice, practice will make you I never say perfect. I say practice will make you better. It’ll make you fall less. It will make you fall less. It’ll make you get a little bit higher score. And I had an interesting gentleman on my podcast the other day, Peter Taunton, who was founder of Snap Fitness, he says 10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you react to it.
Oh, yeah.
10% is what happens to you and 90% is how you react to it.
Yeah. There is very much that mindset. And that’s really why mentoring is important, because even the strongest founder’s mind and the perseverance you got, you can still get stuck sometimes and you can still get hung up or feel like you don’t have a path. And going to the community and finding folks that are, like you said, even better sometimes to leave your industry and look outside because a lot of those practices transcend the industry. And in fact, even the best things come. Right. Look at how many companies like you said, McDonald’s, they happen to make burgers. But I remember when McDonald’s and this is back in the 80s, I think, or the 90s, they decided to add pizza to their menu for a very short period of time. Rightly.
I don’t remember that.
Yes. It might have been a Canadian thing. And literally overnight, McDonald’s became the largest pizza restaurant on Earth because they rolled it out to every restaurant across multiple countries. Right. So that scale of business meant like if they are in the scaling business, they were in the logistics business. They were like, that was the thing they were doing. So you can look at that lesson. I don’t want to go to McDonald’s to learn how to cook a burger. I want to go to McDonald’s to learn how to move people in through the restaurant experience.
And how to really create those processes in system to where if you got to, unfortunately, hire someone, McDonald’s get rid of people all the time. People quit all the time. Mcdonald’s can take that SOP checklist and have an employee train within 30 minutes and look at the drive-through or any other position at McDonald’s.
Yes.
So to really learn their systems or processes and how they do things is just amazing because again, it’s all about those processes and it’s all about getting the right people in the right seat to run those processes. Mcdonald’s and Burger King is a great example of that.
There are many things. And even though some people get stuck in the idea that I don’t want to make a checklist out of my vision, well, you’re not. You’re making a checklist out of the operations to achieve your vision and so, don’t ever get lost in the idea of your vision.
What happens to your vision if you don’t have processes. You would never achieve your vision. That’s what happens to so many entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs are visionaries. I mean, most of them are visionaries. They’re not integrators. Entrepreneurs are like squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel and he’s visionaries. But they need a good integrator. Every entrepreneur has to have a good integrator. An actually fun moment with entrepreneurs is, there’s more entrepreneurs by the neuron integrator? There’s really good integrators. And that’s what every entrepreneur needs is that great integrator to really get their vision onto a policy procedure and they don’t really get their vision into implementing it.
Well, if you want to build for the right outcome, then you got to think like you need to Exit Rich. I can tell you, like I said, so congratulations on the release of the audiobook and for folks that are watching and listening, get on it, $2.99. This is absolutely, I’ll buy a bunch of copies, drop a comment on the YouTube. I will make sure I enrich people with this. And a lot of my friends are getting a copy right now. I can tell you because this is absolutely worth it.
You got to be out of your mind if you don’t get it for $2.99. You must be out of your mind.
It’s always amazing to me when people be like, well, they’ll negotiate by 10, 20, 30, $50,000 on the price of a house. But then it’s like $2.99 for a book that could change the future of my business success. If this is the $2.99 you’re fighting in your head over, then maybe you shouldn’t be in business to start with.
It’s really giving up a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Absolutely is. So Michelle, thank you.
Coffee is like $5 now at Starbucks.
That’s it. That’s it. 100% ROI, I can guarantee that. Michelle, thank you very much. And of course for folks you can go to exitrichbook.com. That’s where you can find it. I’ll have links for everybody to get to it and look forward to having you on again as we get further into the year and hear about how the uptake has gone and hopefully that inflation. We’re on the right side of inflation and the economic story. It’s going to be an interesting year ahead for sure.
Yeah, I tell you, it is definitely going to be an interesting year.
And Michelle, I guess I should say just in case any other, what is the best way for folks that they did want to get connected with you? Of course we will have your own website also there. But what’s the best way to reach out?
Yeah, so they can reach out at seilertucker.com. If you want to take the 6P quiz to see how you stack up and how you rate, you can go to seilertuckeracademy.com to take that quiz. Follow me on social media – @michelleseilertucker everywhere: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and then you can also listen to my podcast Extra Rich.
It is fantastic. I was going to say, I also forgot to tell people to go check out the podcast. You got a great array of guests and it’s really well done so I appreciate the listen for sure. Michelle, thank you very much.
Thank you.
