How to build a business that thrives without you by EntrepreneursRadioShow

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

Episode 114: John Warrillow In this episode, Travis talks to successful entrepreneur and best-selling author John Warrillow. John is the founder of The Sellability Score and has written various books that help business owners automate their business and develop recurring revenue. Travis and John share various ideas to create efficient and self-sustaining business. John gave his three attributes to a product or service, which he calls TVR, teachable, valuable, and repeatable. He also points out the importance of establishing and documenting workflow to help visualize these processes to the entrepreneur and his employees. They also highlight the value of getting the metrics not only for the daily operations of the business but also helps establish the value of the business. These and so much more are what entrepreneurs can expect from this episode of the Entrepreneur’s Radio Show.

How to build a business that thrives without you TRAVIS: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to episode 114 of the Entrepreneur's Radio Show, a production of rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com, where each and every week I'm going to connect you with self-made millionaires and high-level entrepreneurs that explain their journey to success. Now today I'm going to introduce you to John Warrillow. John is the founder of The Sellability Score. It's a cloud-based assessment tool for business owners to use that basically assesses the sellability of your company. Now, John is the author of a best-selling book titled Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You, which was recognized by Fortune and Inc. Magazine as one of the business books of 2011. Building a business that can thrive without you is one of my favorite topics because it's a common mistake that most business owners make. If you have a business that cannot operate with you regardless of whether you're making good money or not you have a job. And I don't want that for you, I want you to have a business, an asset that you can go on vacation, that you can do things. An emergency could come up, you could not be available for some extended period of time, and you still have the financial security and all the other things that come from a business running without you. And of course, coincidentally, having this type of business is also the pathway to having the time freedom and the financial freedom to do as you please. And basically live life on your own terms. Which if you're anything like me was the whole reason why I went into business for myself. Now, before we get started a quick thank you to Pat Joel from the United States for the 5-star rating review on iTunes. He says, “The show sets the tone for his day.” I love to hear that. I really appreciate that you've taken the time to write the review and share all the positive feedback. So thank you very much for that Pat Joel. One last thing, before we get started you

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

can take the interviews with you or this show with you on the go, through either iTunes, Stitcher, or Android. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com and click on either one of those buttons that apply for you and how you like to listen when you're on the go. And it will take you directly to the podcast where you can subscribe if that's something that you want to do. So, now that we've got all of that out of the way let's go ahead and get down to business, what do you say? Without further ado, welcome to the show John. JOHN: Thanks for having me. TRAVIS: You bet. Hey, I'm super excited about the topic that we're going to talk about today, but before we get to that can you give me the background of what brought you to today? JOHN: I've been involved in just four start-ups and I've ultimately exited one of them most recently, it was a quantitative market research business that was acquired by a public company in 2008. And over those four businesses, I guess I've learned a little bit about what makes a business salable and I sort of tried to document and codify some of those thoughts and that book Built to Sell. So that's really what got us to where you're at today. TRAVIS: Well, but how did you graduate to this level. So what were those four businesses that you built and what was the success of those along the way? JOHN: Yeah. They started off in a very typical I think entrepreneurial way in the sense that they started off as service businesses where you're hanging out your shingles. So I started out we got a radio production business where we produced custom stuff. And it was a classic sell-do business, right? You get a project from a customer, I work feverishly to get it out, and then you sort of send the invoice. It was a sell-do business, very difficult to transition. Moved it to the more embed with a large broadcasting company. And so that was a much more scalable model. I also had a marketing agency that the character in the book talks most along with this marketing agency where, again, very sell-do. What I mean by that is you run around at the beginning of the month try to find something to sell, a service to sell. You sell it and then you focus on executing. And then over time sort of to figure out that what was really important to building scale of the business is doing one thing better than anybody else as oppose to being sort of a mile wide and age deep, I inverse that, right? So we started to get really good at one thing. In the quantitative market research business we started to focus on studying the SMB, your small-medium business market. And we ultimately build up a subscriber list of Fortune 500 companies that subscribe to our research. So people like Google, and Apple, and Microsoft, and Wells Fargo, and those kinds of guys subscribe. So that was a key lesson for me, the idea of-- a lot of service businesses in particular they do a great job, they're passionate about what they do. Certainly in my case I felt really like we were serving our clients. And so good clients come back. They ask you to do more and more things. And pretty soon you're going way outside of what you're really qualified to do because clients want to give you more work if you perform for

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

them. So pretty soon we end up with three clients generating 80% of the revenue and doing stuff that's way outside of our comfort zone. Of course that's the definition of unsalable company because the only person in the company that's qualified to do the work is probably the owner because the subject better expert. And so there's just nothing to sell at the end of the day. So again, it was that subtle but I think important shift. Instead of being an inch sort of wide and assuming a mile wide and an inch deep with why a customer's really entering that of doing one thing for a lot of customers. TRAVIS: So to me it sounds like your first service business, after growing that business and noticing what the bottlenecks and restrictions were with that business model. Because I've gone through the same trajectory to where-- that's kind of feast and famine that you explain you sell it and then you do it. And then, oh, you're out of work, you need to go sell some more, right? And then there's even a capacity constraint. So it sounded to me like you pivoted that business into that-- what did you say, a radio or a marketing business? JOHN: Right. I only have radio broadcasting. We partner with a radio broadcaster so they had only for structure and so forth. So yeah, that was one that was important. Probably the most important thing in the shift. Probably the most important thing is doing one thing. In the book it talks about the marketing agency decided to focus on the logos because they were really good doing that. The second, I think, step in the process Travis is creating a recurring revenue. So having some annuity streamed. That's a service contract so a lot of people say my business doesn't lend itself to recurring revenue. I'm not a subscription company, I'm not a software company. But virtually any business I believe you can create some recurring revenue. You take the typical carpet cleaner. Sell-Do model would be like "We clean carpets. Let us know when you have a dirty carpet." A subscription business would be saying, "Hey listen, your carpet gets dirty every 2 or 3 weeks if you're an office building. We'll come proactively every 14 days, we'll set up a service contract. And we'll come. You don't have to ask us to come, we're going to come and clean your carpets." That's a much more salable business because the choir coming in can look it and say they've got the service contracts and they're renewing a decent click. And so that's the essence of building recurring revenue. TRAVIS: Right. Where does systemization fall into that whole thing because that's a big part. And again, I figured a lot of these things out on my own and I don't want to come off as if I figured them out quickly because it wasn't. It took me 15 years to figure it out. And really, it came from the desire to no longer want to answer the same questions, or solve the same problems, or all of that other stuff. So ultimately I systemized the business so that it could operate without me. And that's another big piece of what I perceive you to be talking about. JOHN: Sure. And you know, that's a big part. I think you can categorize-- First of all, one of the best ways to see how your business is going to perform and whether you've got systems issue is to go on vacation, right? So, leave the mobile phone at home or don't turn it on and go on

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

vacation. Start small, 2-3 days, try for a week, try for 2 weeks. And what I also recommend is you add one extra buffer day. And the extra day is there so that, you tell your staff you're going to be back on a Thursday, and in fact, you plan to be back on a Wednesday. And use that day to really understand where things broke down when you were away. And when you figure out where things broke down, bucket those problem areas. I found that they of often fall into 3 buckets. There's some mistakes people make. Bob, you got to turn off the air conditioner before you leave at night. That's a very tactical mistake with someone you can correct. There's a second kind of project, it's what I call a bottleneck project where things didn't get done because they're waiting for your approval. TRAVIS: Right. JOHN: And the third project is those strategic problems which you're leading. So by definition when you're gone nothing happens. And so for the first bucket of questions, those questions that come up that are very tactical, you just got to correct the behavior, right? Like write an instruction manual, explain to people how it's done. Explain that at 5 o'clock on a Thursday you close up the shop and you turn off the air conditioning, here's the button you push. It can be very tactical. And make sure everybody knows what the deal is. For the second kind of project, you really got to tell people where you want to be involved and where you expect them to run with the ball without you. And that could be at a dollar level, it could be at a point in the project. But usually a lot of employees are afraid to move forward in some cases because, "The boss will want to see that before we commit." And in many cases the boss doesn't want to see it. It frustrates the boss. So as the owner I think you just got to be really explicit as to when you need to be involved in those bottleneck projects. And then on the strategic projects, the third bucket, those come in two flavors, the ones that you inherit by default and the ones that you pick because you should be leading them. And so for the latter group, the ones you should be leading continue to lead and expect that when you're on vacation you're not going to move forward and plan for that. But the other ones, the ones you inherit by default re-assigned to someone who is better able, better suited to deal with those projects. As the owner by definition, if no one else steps up you're the guy that has to have the gall that has to run those strategic projects that aren't necessarily your forte. And so reassign those. And so just by going to that bucketing process Travis I found that taking vacation can be a great way to really start to systematize the business. TRAVIS: Yeah, I agree with you. Most business owners are in the position to where they can't take a vacation. They're so busy being busy that they just can't afford the potential calamities that could happen just due to the way that their business is setup, right? JOHN: Yeah, and I'm a big fan of steering clear of any tactical stuff from the beginning of the day. So Stephen Covey wrote the book on this and did the best job. He talked about, most of us think about projects along two dimensions, that which is urgent and those that are important.

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

And those aren't necessarily the same thing and he said that most of us do what is both urgent and important first thing, which is obvious. So there's a customer's who's angry and you got to go deal with it so that's obvious. It's what we do next that defines our success. Most people seek out that endorphin rush of ticking off the urgent yet not important projects. So responding to email, getting to back to some supplier who isn't really that strategic. Those are the types of things that give you that little mini adrenaline boost when you tick them off your to-do list. But you get to the end of the day and you don't feel like you've accomplished anything because you're just reacting. And so the most successful, and again I'm quoting Covey here. This is not my thinking, this is Covey. The most successful folks said hang-on. When you dealt with the urgent and important, go to the not urgent but important. Those strategic projects that nobody's going to die if you don't handle them today but they are critical long-term to your success. Those folks who go to that second quadrant are the ones that achieve the most in life. TRAVIS: Right. So, all of these things that you're talking about I completely agree. How do you go about mapping, or do you map this out and you write all of this out? I know how I did it for mine but I'm really curious. How did you go about doing that? JOHN: Sure. In the first step, really figuring out what you can be the best at the world at. I use something called Trifecta of Scale. So trifecta being obviously a betting term but essentially what you're looking for is a product or service that has three attributes. It's teachable to employees, it's valuable to the customers, and it's repeatable. TVR. And so, what the first step of the process is if you sell 100 things today or 100 different service, really start putting them through the lens of what is teachable, valuable, and repeatable. So for example, a photography business that I'm aware of based in Denver, U.K. went through this process. And they look at all their products and services that they sold. All the photographs they took, cricket teams, rugby teams, weddings, etc. and said, "What is teachable to employees, valuable to customers are repeatable." And what they discovered was a lot of this stuff that they did was actually low on the degree which you can teach it because it's an art not a science, it's an interpretation, it's photography, it's by nature, it's a very creative service. And what they discovered however was when they focused on school photographs, they found something that is teachable, valuable, repeatable. Because you teach young photographers, not necessarily well-trained or not necessarily famous, but young photographers who want experience you can teach them the formula. And they've got an 8-minute formula they use as seating chart and stuffed animals to get the kids to laugh at the right time. So they've got a formula, they get the photographers to follow. And that's valuable to the people who hire the photographers. And in the case in the U.K., which is where this company's located, it's headmasters of these schools because the headmasters want the kids learning in the classrooms and not goofing around waiting for the school photograph taking a couple of hours in the auditorium. So it's valuable to customers and of course it's repeatable because as parents we want to document the progress of our kids, right? We want the picture every year that shows our kids legacy in school. So it's got a recurring revenue engine because we bring that school photography company back in every

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

year. So that's a business. Again, most people say well you can't scale a photography business. Or you can't systematize a photography business. Well, if you look at the business in a traditional way, No, you're probably right. But if you look at it through the lens of what is teachable, valuable repeatable, you get the school photography company. TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree. I think even the extreme right brain stuff. Well, maybe not extremely right brained but a lot of right brain things can be taught. There is a formula, really, to practically everything you do out there. Now, what I found is you need to map out all aspects of your business, sales, operations. And for me it can be quite a complicated process. And what I had to do to really get my arms around the entire business, and it was a business that I had run for many, many years at the time when I had done it, over 15 years, maybe even 16 years at the time. What I did is I created flow charts that showed the preferred path for everything. And then I started showing potential deviations of when people don't follow those paths or a problem. And I'm not talking about employees say sometimes if we were looking at a sales funnel sometimes your client doesn't come in at the top of the funnel, right? Does that make sense? JOHN: Yeah, absolutely. TRAVIS: And so, sometimes things, even delivering something to a client, maybe they don't take a certain action. Well, there's a way to deal with getting that resolved. And I map all of those things out and then write all the processes out. Have you ever gone to that level in systemizing a business. What's your feelings on that? JOHN: Certainly, work flowing and documenting visually I think helps. It helps employees. The old saying, some employees are going to learn it better if they read it. Some are going to learn it by doing it, some are going to learn better by singing it. So if you can show them the systems and those three formats, you're going to be able to re-educate everybody. And some people and a lot of entrepreneurs I would argue are not great systems builders. TRAVIS: Right. JOHN: Have you ever heard of the Kolbe Index? TRAVIS: Yes. JOHN: So Kathy Kolbe looked at how our natural behaviors are. And she categorized kind of like a Myers-Briggs with one of four streams of behavior. Or gave us a score on 0 to 10 on these four sort of natural instinctive behaviors. If I getting the right one was fact finder, the degree to which you will seek facts before taking a decision. Second one was follow through, the degree to which you build systems and you adhere to systems. Third one is quick start, the degree to which you start lots of things and are animated and so forth. And the fourth one is implementer,

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

where you're good with your hands, you're fixing things physically. And what I've seen is a lot of entrepreneurs are really high-end quick start. So lots of ideas, but very low on follow-through. Sounds like you got a train going through your office there Travis. TRAVIS: Yeah, it's in the background. Everything's okay over here. JOHN: Okay, good. But low on follow-through. And so, you as the entrepreneur may not be the right person to lead the project of systemizing. So what you can do is hire a project manager, someone who's strong on systems and say, "Look, this is a vision that I'm trying to create here. Help me build the system." Just because you want to systematize your business doesn't mean that you personally have to lead that process. TRAVIS: Great point. Most people feel like because they possess the seed at the head of the table they need to do all of those things. And I actually enjoy flowcharting those things and then looking for what's missing. Because it's a very tedious, long, drawn-out process. But the bigger picture of what's going on is a lot of times, depending on the size of your business, most people have a very myopic view of what your business is and what it does, they don't have the big picture. And whenever you're able to draw something out like this, flowcharts and things like that and it sounds really geeky. Flowcharts convey several things that words have a hard time conveying sometimes in a big picture aspect. JOHN: Yeah. TRAVIS: Question. Define quantitative research for everybody that's listening. JOHN: Sure. So when you're using numbers to prove a point as oppose to feelings. So there's two types of market research. One is qualitative market research where you're trying to gather people's feelings about something. So you might do a focus group with 8 people and say, what do you think of Rick Perry as a governor? Let's talk about his strengths and weaknesses. That’s a qualitative research approach. Quantitative research is where you're numerically and empirically proving a point. So it would have typically closed-ended questions. So, on a scale 010 how likely are you to recommend this to a friend or colleague. The net promoters will question. That is a quantitative research study. And so you're getting an empirical hard data point. TRAVIS: And so, I have my own guesstimation at this but I'm really interested in what your guess at this number is. What percentage of business owners do you think drive the core metrics and decisions of the business based on quantitative information? JOHN: So quantitative information being financial statements, revenues, sales projections, that kind of stuff, versus how do they feel?

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THE ENTREPRENEURâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

TRAVIS: Yeah. So lead sources, lead conversion, sales conversion, all of the metrics that drive the growth of the business. JOHN: Jeez, we've never looked at that. I don't know. I wouldn't even be able to take a guess but sounds like you've done the research. TRAVIS: I have and it's surprising. Ninety percent of business owners at under $1 million do not drive their business based on quantitative information. And that's the reason why so few businesses ever reach a million dollars, not that a million dollars is special. Because it's very easy to have a million dollar business that's not profitable as well, right? Although it's emblematic that most small businesses never really grow to that next level. Because it's very hard to tell what is and is not working. And you've got to eliminate what's not working and you have to double down, for a lack of a better term or for a simplistic term on the things that's working for you and continually optimized. And so it's really surprising that it's right at 93%, over 90% that don't use empirical data to make those decisions, and it just completely blew me away. Does that surprise you? JOHN: Not necessarily. Well, I think there's a few things perhaps is going on. A lot of business owners are totally content. They have a $400,000 a year gross revenue business. They're able to pull out 25% profit at the end of the year. They run all their lifestyle expenses through the business and they're happy. And they've got 10 customers and they know them all by name, they know their kid's names, and life is good. And that's okay. I think that's a segment of the market, I don't know what proportion it is, but it's a segment of the market. Where I think the challenge a little bit comes in and sellability score we look at this stuff all the time because we assess the sellability of companies. That company is not really an asset. It's a job for that person. It happens to be that the IRS thinks it's a company but in reality it's not. It's a job. TRAVIS: Right. JOHN: And so, there's no equity being built up and where we I think need to draw the distinction is that if there's no big payday at the end of the line for that business. They've got to take all their money out of that business that they can and invest it outside of the business. Because there's nothing that they can sell. Whereas another business owner, probably the ones that are using quantitative insight more aggressively says, "No, I want to build an asset that I can sell and ride off into the sunset." And that's a different business. That's a business where they are using quantitative metrics. One of the reason quantitative metrics is so important to building a salable company is because that's how acquirers will evaluate your business. So, to get them excited about buying your company you might say, "You know our revenue is X and our profit is Y." But to get them really juiced up and what will be necessary to actually get them to write a check is to say, "And here's our marketing funnel. We have 10,000 unique users to our website every month. We're able to convert about 2,000. The filling at a form of the 2,000 we get a 100

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

to meetings a medium of the hundred, we get 2-second meetings, or 50-second meetings. And 50-second meetings we convert 10 of them. With that level of data and sophistication around conversion rates and funneling, the acquirer can then take that data and say, "Okay, well if we graft that onto our customer base instead of a thousand customers which you have, we have 3 million customers. Then if we have the same metrics they can really start to understand how that business will perform. So metrics are important to running the business day-to-day. But if you ever want to sell it they become essential. TRAVIS: Right. And the interesting thing is the business that's salable is easier to run. JOHN: It's a funny dynamic. TRAVIS: It's crazy, isn't it? JOHN: Yeah. We use the term internally and sellability score, the ultimate litmus test for your business is would someone buy it. Whether you want to sell it is a totally separate question. But if you think about it the ultimate asset test is would someone write you a check for your business tomorrow. If the answer to that is no then really, you do have a job as it's structured today. That's not to say you couldn't structure it but today, even though it may be a very well paying job, there is no end of the rainbow. TRAVIS: Right. I once heard it said that if your business cannot, and it's very close to what you'd said just a minute ago. If your business cannot operate without you and you're making decent money, really all you have is just a well-paying job, right? And there's confusion there, because a lot of people let the emotional aspects of the blood, sweat, and tears that they've put in the business confuse the difference between what we're calling a job and a salable business. Now you've created a really cool tool that determines how salable someone's business is. Can anybody use it and what do they have to do to use it? JOHN: Yeah, just go to sellabilityscore.com and you can use it. But basically you'll do is answer a 13-minute questionnaire and we will assess you on the 8 key drivers of sellability. So you'll get an overall score and then a quantitative score on the 8 key drivers of sellability. And what's really interesting and we've just learned this recently, it really validates a lot of the things we're doing. We've discovered that those companies that score 80 or above on a possible 100-point scale, those companies that score 80 or above will statistically, it's been borne out and proven that they will likely go on to get an offer 71% greater than the average business that's scores on an average. So there's a very quantitative pay-off for you to lift your score north of 80. So, what we do is we give you your overall score and we say, "Okay, these are 8 key drivers the sellability and here's how you're performing on each one of them.” So you get a score on something. Well, one of the ones, we score something called hub and spoke which measures the degree to which your business is dependent on you personally. Something that we're talking

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

about earlier and the importance of building systems. Another one is the hierarchy of recurring revenue, which is the degree to which you've got subscription base, or annuity bas, for service contract based revenue that kind of re-ups and automatically happens every month. So, anyways, there's 8 key drivers, you get a score on each, kind of like a pilot flying a plane. You can see which dial you need to turn to, to improve your score. TRAVIS: Wonderful, great information. What book or program made an impact on you related to business that you would recommend and why would you recommend it? JOHN: Well, I'm a big fan of Bo Burlingham, do you know Bo? TRAVIS: No, I don't think so. JOHN: Okay, he's an editor-at-large of Inc. Magazine. He wrote the book Smaller Giants along with, he co-wrote with Jack Stack, A Stake in the Outcome and The Great Game of Business. He also wrote The Knack with Norm Brodsky. So he's a prolific writer and an exceptional guy. He wrote this book called Small Giants. And it was one of these wonderful books that profiled companies that-- Here's the tag line with the company is they choose to be great instead of big. And the idea is that growing at all costs has costs, right? So most companies have to take on outside investors, then we got to take on venture capitalists or angel investors. They got to share equity with partners to grow it all cost. And his argument was that there was this small but growing factor of companies that are growing within themselves, and they're more focused on building a great company. So it uses the description or the story of Augustine Brilliance of San Francisco, or Patagonia, the guys that make the clothing as wonderfully successful, more money than you'd ever need to live on. These businesses share lots of income from their founders. But they've chose explicitly a different growth strategy and that is to try and focus on growing a great company as oppose to just a big company. And that for me gave-- They kind of gave me an excuse to take the foot off the gas for a moment and actually just kind of sit back and think about what would be the right thing to do to make sure the product was as good as possible and the culture is as good as possible. We're building something that was going to be a good legacy, as oppose to "Where's next sale coming from?" So I really like that book. I'm a big fan. Small Giants is the book. Travis: Excellent. I'm going to put that on my read list. What's one of your favorite tools or pieces of technology that you've recently discovered that you would recommend to other business owners and why? JOHN: I'm an Evernote addict. I love Evernote. So Evernote, if you don't know, allows you to take notes. They can be text notes, you can upload pictures. And what's really fantastic about Evernote is it all syncs with whatever device you're using. So if you're on your desktop you can make an Evernote. And then when you're walking around later in your iPhone and you open up

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

Evernote it'll be there because it syncs by directly. If you guide your iPad out, you're at a conference, you make a note, suddenly that note then appears in your Evernote at your desktop at work. So, I'm a huge fan. They use tags so you can tag things. So I've got tags for sales and marketing and for reaching my employees so I know what we talked about last. Everytime I think, oh, I've got to talk to Bob about X. Instead firing Bob off an email and filling up his inbox, I'll make a note in Bob's Evernote saying I want to ask him about X. And so it's just a very cool tool. Do you use Evernote Travis? TRAVIS: No, and I've heard it recommended a few times. I'm going to have to convert because I recently had a bad experience with iPhone where I lost a year and a half worth of notes. JOHN: Oh dear. TRAVIS: And so, I think Evernote would've helped me circumvent that problem. JOHN: Yeah, it's all backed-up in the Cloud. TRAVIS: Yeah. A year and a half of ideas and notes, that's painful. JOHN: Yeah. TRAVIS: So I'm going to convert. You've talked me into it. What quote would best summarize your belief or your attitude in business? JOHN: I'm a big fan of Warren Buffet and I love his quote. I'm going to misquote him here. I can't remember exactly what he said. But he said something to the effect of. He likes being a shareholder of Gillette because he likes going to bed at night knowing that throughout the night a billion or two men around the world are going to grow demand for his product, the razor blade. And without him doing anything. Without him running a single ad, without him stimulating demand in any way, shape, or form. A couple of billion men will wake up in the morning and need to shave. TRAVIS: Right. JOHN: And I just love that idea. It's about recurring revenue of course and Dollar Shave Club, a subscription company that I wrote about in my new book is certainly following that mantra. But it's the idea that if you could find a business where demand just recurs. It has a natural cadence to it. That's a great model to follow. TRAVIS: Cool. One last thing. If you had to start over today, what would you do to get the fastest results?

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

JOHN: Less stuff, more people. Again, I think the natural inclination for most start-ups is get a couple of clients, figure out what they want, listen to them. And every self-help book in the world says, "Listen to your clients. Be client-centric. Focus on your clients" blah, blah, blah. I'm not a huge believer in that. I think what you need to do is figure out what you can be the best at the world in, number 1. Number 2, go find some customers that care about that thing. That's a very different way of starting a business than go win some clients and figure out what you can sell them. TRAVIS: Right. JOHN: What I find is that go win some clients, figure out what you can sell them approach to starting a business, it often happens in service businesses. A service business with 3 clients, a ceiling on about, 3, 4, 5, $600,000 in total revenue that you just cannot go back because there are only so many hours in a day, and you've got a job not a business, and a stressful one at that. Whereas if you say, we can be the world's best at making wine crafts, or making medicine, I'm just picking up things on my table in front of me, and just do that one thing, then there are customers in the world that will value you for that if you're in fact good at doing that. It's much, I think, easier business to create is to go find the customers that care about that. TRAVIS: Great advice. How do people connect with you? JOHN: Sellabilityscore.com TRAVIS: And what's the name of your book? JOHN: The new book is called The Automatic Customer. And the current book is called Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You. The new book, The Automatic Customer comes out in February of 2015 by Random House. If you want a heads up, it talks about 9 different subscription models and how to convert a business to any industry into a subscription model. If you want to get a sneak preview of the book and the 9 models, you can go to www.theautomaticcustomer.com. And you can fill out the little form there and you'll be able to download instantly the 9 subscription models. And we'll also notify you when the book comes up.

End of Interview TRAVIS: Excellent. Thank you so much. Remember that you can find all the links to the books and the resources mentioned in the show notes. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com. It's a new site that we've building out for quite a lot now that's completely focused on giving you

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

resources to help you grow your business. Before I close the show today, remember that I'll be creating, I don't know how long you’ve been listening, but I've mentioned in past episodes that I'll be creating new types of episodes in the very near future where I'll answer your questions involving any type or problems going on with your business. All you got to do is go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com and opt-in. What will happen is you get my personal email and a quick message from me. And then send me a detailed message about your business and what you're dealing with and I'll give you my advice on air without sharing your last name. So just be sure and give me enough perspective about what's going on and I'll give you my feedback. And we'll be creating new episodes with that here very, very soon. My quote for today comes from Frederick B. Wilcox, and the quote reads, "Progress always involves risk. You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first base." This is Travis Lane Jenkins signing off for now. To your incredible success, I look forward to hearing from you. Take care my friend.

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

How We Can Help You We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That’s exactly why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at a fraction of its normal cost. Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever! We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats within your business. This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons are. As the 'Business Owner' it’s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you’re in the middle of a daily management. And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial. This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man army, or an army of 150, the problem is still the same. Travis Lane Jenkins Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show “Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

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