Fail to Win with Colin Campbell

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. exit, repeat. And today we'll talk about going out and failing. We'll also talk about the reasons startups fail and how to avoid it. We'll also talk about start, scale, exit, and repeat, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Colin and our sponsors. These days, your business needs total visibility from global shipments to tariff impacts to real-time cashflow. That's NetSuite by Oracle, your AI-powered business management suite trusted by over 42 ,000 businesses. Download the free ebook, Navigating Global Trade, Three Insights for Leaders at netsuite.com slash fire.

1:08Colin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Failure isn't always a bad thing, okay? JLD, listen, who do you think has failed the most on this planet? My guess it's probably Elon Musk, right? I mean, here's a guy who launched his first rocket and said, well, this is an exciting test launch. And then the next two rockets went down. And by the way, this fourth rocket, he was pretty much at the end. And he said, like, if this thing goes down, like, I'm done. But the reality is he was able to learn from the experiences and iterate and create better and better versions.

1:51And let me also give you another quick example of this. This is something I was working on yesterday with Google, the Google VO3. And this is an AI that helps you create videos with text. And quite frankly, you know, and you only get five a day, so it's a bit frustrating. So you have to really value it. But I failed on at least four out of five of these videos on this project that I'm working on. But the reality is when you fail at an AI video, it's not as big as a rocket ship. So the reality is get out there, fail, and try and try again, right? Absolutely. And I mean, you know, what is that Thomas Edison, 10 ,000 failures at getting the right filaments for the light bulb before he got just that perfect one that we still now are utilizing in a lot of ways today.

2:38So Fire Nation, let's go. And Colin, you're a big believer in advising entrepreneurs to just go out and fail. So let's even talk about that more. All right. So we have a company here called Paw.com. It's been a company that I'm the majority shareholder of. I've owned this company now for seven years, and it's gone through a lot of ups and downs. It's been a freaking roller coaster, okay? And we've had a lot of failures. Let me tell you this, JLD. We had a hundred-year supply of shampoo, okay? We had thousands of velvet blankets and hundreds of dog beds in the shape of a tennis ball, okay? We call it the Paw.com Hall of Shame.

3:18but the fact is we retooled the company and we refocused and we said okay we came up with this one motto and this is going to sound so simple but it's so important especially if you're in the e-commerce world and we call it test and fail more cut losers quickly and scale winners big See, here's the secret to our success now. The secret is that we do fail at 7 or 8 out of 10 products, but we cut it really fast. We really do. And then we lean into the winners. And I call this concept scale to infinity. Once you've got a winner, you can advertise it on Google, Facebook, and you can scale to infinity.

4:05So that's the idea. You know, you can lose eight out of 10 times, but be a highly successful company because you lean into the winners and you've tested and failed more. Now, I want to go over some of the reasons that startups fail. I mean, because again, we've both done the startup thing. We both failed. But there's reasons that the failures happen and there's ways to avoid those failures. So of course, we can go on and fail something else, but we might as well skip that failure if possible, if we can learn from others. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the number one reasons why startups fail, US Bank did a study that found that 82 % of businesses go out of business because of cash flow problems, because they basically run out of money.

4:51you know to avoid this in the book we talk about stage gates setting up stage gates for your company ensuring that you have enough funding to get to that stage gate I can't tell you JLD how many entrepreneurs in our incubator or ones that I've worked I've worked with hundreds even thousands of entrepreneurs and I can't tell you how many of them have such a great concept they're so good at what they do but they simply don't have enough funding to prove their business model so I'm encouraging everyone to think about setting a particular smart stage gate, you know, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound stage gate.

5:29Like it's like, for instance, in 90 days, I'll have an MVP or by 2020 first quarter of 2026 on December or on March 31st at three o 'clock PM, I'm going to have, yeah. And I'm being specific here, by the way, for a reason, 3 PM I'm going to have 10 distributors or a hundred customers or a hundred thousand in sales. And if you don't hit it, you either pivot or kill it. This is an important concept because mitigating failure in entrepreneurship is just as valuable as maximizing the benefit from success. That's one example. Then there's the flip side. Think about WeWork, right? You remember that company?

6:05Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I've seen entrepreneurs do this all the time. They go to Silicon Valley, they get into the launch and they're doing the incubator. And I call it, they get Silicon Valley disease. And, you know, they raise a lot of money and too much money. You know, we work pretty much destroyed that company. In fact, 75 % of venture-backed companies actually fail, right? So it's something to think about when it comes to failure, whether you have too much money or too little money. And we go through about 20 different reasons why startups fail in the book, like start, scale, exit, repeat, but we can't go through them all now.

6:44I know we've got a lot to cover. We can't, but I will say the book is epic, Fire Nation. Start, scale, exit, repeat. And you do focus on the need for every startup to have the right story, the right people, money, systems in place. They have to be. Let's start by talking about the importance of start and scale, those two things. Yeah, if you miss any one of these four components, the story, people, money, and systems, those four ingredients are necessary for success. And again, I can't tell you how many people launch businesses that just don't have one of those in place. You need a compelling story that generally solves a problem.

7:21You know, you need the right talent to pull it off to get the business started. And if you can't afford it, you do need to partner with someone who complements your personality profile and your skills. You need the right funding to get to that stage gate. And I often say you also need the right KPIs. Otherwise, you're just flying blind. And when these four are in place, boom, magic does happen. But when you miss one of them, I'm telling you right now, failure is almost a certainty. And that is the issue for most founders when they first start out. They don't think about everything. They tend to, you know, fire, aim, shoot versus aim, fire, shoot.

8:07You know, like we really need to think just for a few minutes, sit down. And we have this in the book. Again, it's like 30 minutes of four sticky note business plan. You can lay out your plan, set that stage gate and how many, how many employees do I need or what staff do I need or what talent do I need to get to that first stage stage gate? How much money do I need? How much money do I need to get to the first stage gate? What are the KPIs that I need not only to monitor to get to the first stage gate, but also to ensure that the investors understand how we've proven our model and that we've been able to hit X amount, X KPI.

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10:34In a nutshell, NetSuite helps you know what's stuck, what is costing you, and how to pivot fast. If our business needed a tool like this, NetSuite is what we'd use. It's one system, full control. Tame the chaos with NetSuite. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free ebook, Navigating Global Trade, three insights for leaders at netsuite.com slash fire. That's netsuite.com slash fire. Colin, we're back. And listen, we were talking about story, people, money, systems, those key four elements. Also, of course, start, scale, exit, repeat. Now, something that I think so many people fail at that you've really done so well, and of course, you are very eloquent in talking about it within your book, is that exit, is that repeat part.

11:17Can you talk more about that? Scale, right? I mean, the reality is the vast majority of entrepreneurs fail to scale. And I, when it came to exit early on in my career, did a horrible job of that. In fact, back in the late 90s, I exited a company. It was a publicly traded company. The dot-com crash happened. And I lost 98 % of my wealth, over$100 million personally. Kind of sucked. It really did. And so that's really the genesis of the book, start, scale, exit, repeat, and trying to figure out what is the formula to start? What is the formula to scale? What is the formula to exit? And by the way, that is an important part of the formula.

11:58I say in the book that 50 % of the valuation of your company on exit is timing. And the other 50%, by the way, is who you sell to. And then who you sell to is absolutely critical as well. So it's all connected. you can be the best entrepreneur and start a business you can be great at scaling a business but if you mess it up on exit like i did in my 20s then you you blow it and and that's it like there's an alternative to that it's something that we all need to study as entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is a trade like any other trade and we need to learn how to master that trade and that trade includes all three start scale exit and then repeat and you can begin in the book i get this is really deep stuff when you get into it you know serial entrepreneur stuff where you begin to think about ideas in your existing company and launch those new ideas that can help you expand beyond your existing company and i've done that i could i could walk you through JLD, a company that I started in 1993, a software rental company that had a BBS membership that led to an ISP, that led to a hosting company that led to.club, which we sold to GoDaddy, that led to Startup Club.

13:23And it just one thing leads to another, which leads to another, and you can leverage within your existing organization. But I want one caveat on repeat here and that is that you've got to be very careful not to not to get distracted from your core if you know that you get your core business is doing very well and you you're you're getting a little bored from that you know you're like i'm okay with this and i'll travel for a few months let the team run the company now you're ready for repeat because i often say you should start your next company when you're in your existing company because opportunities are everywhere I've seen too many entrepreneurs who exit, and then two or three months later, after exit, they can't come up with another idea, and they're done, and they don't come back.

14:08But when you're in the middle of it all, the opportunities are everywhere. Now, one thing you also address that I think is really interesting is imploding upon scaling. Like, what does that look like, and how can we avoid that from happening? So the vast majority of companies in America fail to scale, and a lot of them do implode on scale. And I think the number one reason is the entrepreneur themselves. They get in the way. And you need to find a way to change who you are. You truly need a mental shift here. Okay? When you start, it's all about you. It's all about your instinct. It's all about the culture of the people in your office that surround you.

14:48But in scale, it's not about you anymore. It's about your team. It's about building a team of leaders who can build wealth for you, who can actually run the company for you, who are in charge of responsibilities. They often say in start, it's you delegate tasks. In scale, it's delegate responsibilities. And this is, by the way, a massive shift. and then you've got to layer in not only the people, but also raise the right type of funding for the right situation, whether it's venture or whether you really have to study that. We have a great chapter in the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. It talks about how to raise money for your company and the right type of funding for that.

15:35And probably the most important thing in scale is systems. You know, two days of strategic planning, 88 days of execution, uh company goal setting annual quarterly individual goal setting daily sales huddles profiling you know we lay out all of these systems in the book this is something i had no idea what i was doing in my mid-30s in a second public company and in that particular situation we had flatlined and i brought in a gentleman named patrick tian from rhythm systems and he helped us scale this company three times, and then we sold it to a Fortune 500 company for 17 times EBITDA. And that was just a phenomenal exit in the United States for a tech company at the time.

16:20But those four things need to still be in place, your story, your people, your money, and your systems. I think a lot of people in the audience are listening right now and wondering, can we just learn about failure so that we don't have to actually experience it firsthand? or do we really need to experience this firsthand to learn these lessons truth? The reality is in the book, we do share dozens of examples of failure and we analyze these failures. And I think that's important because you can learn from other failures. Now, you can learn from your own failures too. I admit that. And in some cases when you're defining a formula, it really is very unique and different and you've got to learn how to iterate that formula and make it better.

17:02but the reality is you can also learn from others. You know, we make it a bit fun in the book. The stories are quite entertaining. Not your typical guy gets rich book and brags about how he got there. It's quite the contrary. Maybe that's why we won so many awards. But it's a book that really goes in deep and doesn't get into that kind of world. It really talks about the formula for success, but also what can go wrong if you do go off the rails. And then the book is made up of dozens, even maybe 100 stories. We interviewed over 200 people for the book. The fact is we can learn from others, JLD.

17:45I love your podcast. I listen to it all the time. I learn a lot from your listeners. And we can also learn from serial entrepreneurs who've learned the lessons, the hard lessons. And by the way, there's a statistic in the book that talks about serial entrepreneurs have twice the chance of success as a new entrepreneur. And the only difference between the two are knowledge. So if you can accumulate that knowledge, you can double your chances of success. And actually, I remember we interviewed the lady, Bridget Weston, who runs SCORE in the United States with 10 ,000 volunteers. And she made the claim that that that companies that join her organizations free, by the way, could increase their increase their chances of success by three times.

18:33Wow. Right. So that's it. I mean, it's, you know. The only difference between these serial entrepreneurs and first time entrepreneurs is they've already learned how to start, scale and exit a business. Right. And they know the scars that they've had and they understood that. and we can learn from others. And there's a lot of great books out there. There's like the, I love the E-Myth. I think that's a great book. Zero to One, that's another book that I really connect with. The Lean Startup, and of course, Start, Scale, X, and Repeat. I think that's coming out there. It looks like it's going to be a classic as well.

19:08Now, Colin, in our little pre-interview chat that we had, we were talking about AI and how it's just going to take everybody's lunch. Except for those people, of course, that are going to lean into it and embrace it like you are, like I am. And on that note, you have a little song that you created for Fire Nation that, by the way, we will play in the outro of Fire Nation. So stick around for that song because you'll be pretty blown away by that. But take us home with a little commentary on your thoughts on AI. So in the book, we have this concept called a minor major. We talk about a dozen, two dozen minor majors in the book.

19:46We touch a little bit about AI in the book as well. But I really think that AI is at this point one of the most transformative opportunities for entrepreneurs. And you don't have to invest a lot. So a minor major is a minor amount of effort to have a major impact. And when you listen to this song, this song took me. Okay, let me tell you how we made it there. JLD. What I did is I went into ChatGPT and I wrote out the lyrics myself. So I originally I wrote out some cool concepts around it. I went to your website. I grabbed your top five speakers. I popped them in there. Of course, I put myself in the song.

20:29Couldn't help myself, right? But it did that and then I took that. I popped it into a new app called Marika and a couple other little tweaks here and there, a few failures along the way. Within half an hour, maybe an hour, I was able to put together the song. And it's incredible. You just got to listen to it. And Fire Nation, stick around and listen to it because we'll be playing it momentarily here. And Colin, take us home. What is your call to action for Fire Nation today? Pick up the book, Start Scale, Exit Repeat. I mean, we've won 29 global awards. We won gold medal for the top book for entrepreneurship in 2025 globally with Axiom Book awards we just won a silver medal with nautilus book awards for for one of the top business books globally in 2025.

21:18we have a a workbook as well which is a complementary to the book and it it is pretty incredible it's nothing you've ever seen before with a startup workbook uh it's really a master class and um this workbook has uh every chapter has got a google deep dive so you can read a chapter do a deep dive we've got about eight or nine custom gpts to help you create you know your value statements or your your um your uh your your picture domain name or figure out your idea how to create a moat we've got all these software applications that you can use as well and we've got which i'm most proud of is the most ultimate startup checklist and jld I'm not talking about get a bank account.

22:06I'm talking about strategic stuff. I'm talking about really the strategic stuff. And you can just literally go off there and check one off at a time, do one at a time. That's all you have to do is just get out there, get started and launch a business. There's never been a better time in history to launch a startup. Fire Nation, on that note, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with CC and JLD today. So keep up that heat. and for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Colin in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up.

22:38Colin, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value, your AI song that's coming up, Fire Nation. Don't forget with us today. So for that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Awesome, love the podcast. These days, your business needs total visibility from global shipments to tariff impacts to real-time cashflow. That's NetSuite by Oracle. Your AI-powered business management suite trusted by over 42 ,000 businesses. Download the free ebook, Navigating Global Trade, Three Insights for Leaders at netsuite.com slash fire. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and calling for sparsely today's episode.

23:16And I'm just going to play that song right now. So kick back and enjoy.

23:31Blood, sweat, doubt, but we rise to the flame Every failure, just you and the game TR said change your state, take the lead From the ashes we rise, claim the seed Ferris told us how to bend time, break free Design your life, live it like you own the key We're the ones who fall but never stay down Turn setbacks to gold, wear scars like a crown This is the grind to climb the empire We are entrepreneurs on fire Barbar, guilt, your world brick by brick Started small, stood tall, now she's slick Gary Vee said patience, but punch the day Empires are built, one jab, one play Seth got in brisket, go make your tribe Be remarkable, that's how you thrive Through the noise, through the fear, through the rain We bet on ourselves again and again We're the ones who fall, but never stay down Turn setbacks to gold, wear stars like a crown This is the grind, the grind, the empire We are entrepreneurs on fire

24:39Colin C. Campbell with fire in his chest Start scale, exit, repeat, he never rests He built a road map, lit up the dud Now we're all running on that same spot We're going one to fall, but never stay down Telling setbacks to gold, but Scroars like a clown, this is the grind The climb, we empire I am TLD and we are entrepreneurs on fire.