Scale Quickly. Kill Quickly with Colin C. Campbell

0:01Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Truth, Lies, and Work. Today, we'll be breaking down how to scale quickly and kill quickly. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Colin C. Campbell into EO Fire Studios. Colin is the number one bestselling award-winning author of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. He is a 30-year serial entrepreneur. In today's foundation, we'll be talking about how scaling is tough. There's a lot of reasons entrepreneurs fail.

0:33We'll talk about some major and minor growth facts and AI, artificial intelligence, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Colin and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.

1:06Over 40 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire. Colin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. You know, that's interesting because one of the things about Start Scale Exit Repeat, the whole premise behind the book is that your identity is not based on your company. JLD, you're not just a podcaster.

1:50You're an entrepreneur. And entrepreneurship is a trade like any other trade. And that's sort of a different concept than maybe a lot of people are used to. But the key to succeeding at any trade is learning. and listening to podcasts like this one can help you sharpen your sword and master the art of starting, scaling, exiting, and repeating. It's a little bit of a different way of thinking. I had a, when I was 16 years old, there was a gentleman who did these French fry shops and he would open these French fry shops and then he would make them fairly successful and then sell them off. And I asked him, why do you keep selling your French?

2:29Because my business is not making french fries. My business is selling french fry shops. So that's one thing that I don't think a lot of entrepreneurs think about. You are not a podcaster, Chael D. You are an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur on fire, Fire Nation. So let's keep that in mind for sure. As we talk today about scaling quickly, killing quickly. And Colin was just on the show back in July. And now, actually his show is going live on my birthday. So I'm turning 45 the day that this show is going live. So there's a lot of cool things that are going on. I brought Colin back on to talk specifically about scaling because it's tough.

3:07And there can be a lot of reasons why entrepreneurs, even entrepreneurs who are on fire, Colin, fail when it comes to scaling. What's the number one thing holding founders back from scaling? Yeah. And, you know, 99.9 % of all companies fail to scale, really scale. And I really believe it's number, the number one thing is the entrepreneur. See, it's a very different environment in scale than it is in start. You know, when you first start a business, you're managing every little component. You know, it's almost like weaning a baby when you start a business. But in scale, it's a very different scenario where we need to learn how to delegate responsibilities and not just tasks.

3:52So I really rely on salespeople to help me or sales managers to help me run my companies. But the most important thing is that if we can identify what our personality profile is, we can figure out what we can do to hire leaders around us who have different personality profile. But we first have to figure out what our personality profile is. Now, I want to send a message out here to all the dominant and sales folks out there, all the dominant influence under the disk profile system, that that is the majority of entrepreneurs out there. But they're the ones who fail to scale the most because they need to identify that they are the bottleneck, that they're the ones that need to find leaders.

4:40And by the way, these leaders will disagree with you. They won't always be your friends. I mean, I can tell you about a story about going back to 1998 when we hired a gentleman named Elliot Noss in a company called Two Cows. And in this company, it eventually went public. Today it's worth almost a half billion or whatever. And he's still the CEO today. But I'll tell you this one thing, JLD. He drove me nuts. He absolutely drove me nuts. We fought. Oh, my gosh. We fought. He drove me nuts. But there's no one who built more value for me than Elliot Noss at that time in my life. So that's where I'm going here.

5:16Now, Colin, in your book, you actually talk about four specific areas, story, people, money, and systems. Break down one thing that will fire up Fire Nation within these four. Oh, my gosh, because there's so many things. Like there's so much in the book that it's really hard to break it down. But I'll try. Okay, so for story, when you're in a start mode, you've got to story the people, the money, and the systems. And, you know, you're going to create the story. The people is you. The money is your friends and family. And the systems you're going to try to implement are maybe KPIs, come up with some KPIs.

5:52But when you're in scale mode, it's a whole different way of thinking. So when you're thinking about your story in scale mode, the one thing that you can do more than anything else is figure out your X factor. Okay. Remember Domino's Pizza. I might be going back a little bit here, but Domino's Pizza, 30 minutes are free. OK, think about national car rental. You just show up and walk into your car and go. There's a company called Cookie Delivery that operates out of Texas that got the domain cookie delivery dot com. But they said, you know, we're going to do is we're going to put the cookies in the truck.

6:35We're going to create a truck, build a truck and have the truck deliver the cookies. So when they arrive, they're piping hot. You know, there's a gentleman you had on this show named Joe Foster, who after 19 years of running Reebok within two, three years, he went in what he calls the white space. OK, this is what the X factor is. And they developed aerobics shoes. And Jane Fonda wore those shoes on television. And his company went from nine million to nine hundred million. And it actually became the largest shoe company in the world in 85, 86. But what he did there is he created something that no other company had.

7:14He was different. Look, we have a company here in our incubator called paw.com. I can't tell you how many times we screwed up. Okay. We had a hundred year supply of shampoo. Let me be clear. It was pretty bad. But when you try to copy, we fail. When we come up with unique and different things, we succeed. Okay, so people, I think we talked a little bit about that, but what we're going to want to do with people is we're going to want to make certain that the people we hire, the leaders we hire, complement our personality. There's too many companies where you see the CEOs dominant and everybody's sort of like yes-men around them.

7:51You know, I'll give you the worst example probably in history, but it's probably Putin. Putin in Russia, like, you know, he's got everybody's a yes-man around him. Nobody wants to challenge him. No, that's not what you want to have. You want to have an environment where people are challenging you. And I think I've really covered that already. And then money, you need to raise the right money for the right situation. Let me ask you a question there. What percentage of companies, I mean, think about this for a second, JLD. Companies that raise venture capital and I mean, they've hit it big, right?

8:21They've hit the venture capital circuit. They raised the venture capital money. What percentage of venture capital companies do you think fail? 85%. Oh my gosh, you're damn close. You're damn close. 75 % of venture capital companies fail. 90 % of companies in the Inc. 5 ,000 don't raise venture capital. Venture capital is not the panacea. Now, don't get me wrong. There is a time and a place for venture capital. And my companies have used venture capital in the past as well. But the one thing we talk about in the book is to figure out what is the right situation to raise the right type of funding for that company.

8:53And lastly, I'll leave you with the systems. Systems in 2006, the wheels were falling off the bus. We were running a publicly traded company and I flew to Vegas and I met Patrick Deen, who owns Rhythm Systems even today. And, you know, I had a board member come up to me and say, you know what? We don't think you're capable of running this company and we're going to start looking for another CEO. So I said, just give me a chance. So I called the Lifeline. He introduced me to Patrick. and I went and I said to him, look, I just need you to get the board off my back. And Patrick's, and I said, look, but I don't need to do all this stuff.

9:32Cause he was telling me I got to do a strategic planning. I got to do this. I got to do goal setting. I can do all this. And I said, there's no way my team's going to go for all this. And then Patrick said, no, I'm not going to work with you. I'm not going to work. And then I'm like, what? This is almost like a jail date. It was like going to a doctor and saying, look, I want to go on a diet, but I don't want to do the, I don't want to do the hard work. I don't want to do the, I just want to take the pill. Okay. that's all I want to do. No, he said, I'm not going to work with you. So I said, fine, what do I need to do?

9:58Honestly, it was unbelievable. We had flatlined. We were a public company. Our stock was down below our IPO price. We flatlined. And we implemented two days of strategic planning, 88 days of execution. We implemented goal setting, three-year goal setting, one-year goal setting for the company, quarterly goal setting the company, individual goal setting for the company. And he's got a platform that does that. And we implemented core values. We implemented the daily sales huddle. I mean, this was incredible what happened. 90 days later, we saw a huge difference in the company. See, as entrepreneurs, we have an instinct.

10:37We have a really good instinct when it first comes to start, and we're pretty good at it. But honestly, most of us don't have a good instinct when it comes to scale. That's why we need to learn how to implement systems to help us scale our companies. Fire Nation, per usual, Colin is dropping value bombs, and we are not even close to done. We got more coming your way as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Picture this. You're at a party, and someone asks you what you do as a marketer. How do you even begin to describe it? Not only do you brainstorm new campaigns, create compelling copy, dream up landing pages that will actually convert and generate leads, you also have to gather all the data to make sure it's even working.

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13:41Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire. That's netsuite.com slash fire. netsuite.com slash fire. All right, Colin, we're back. And as I kind of tease before the break, sales. I mean, they are the lifeblood of most companies. So let's have the number one thing that we can do, Fire Nation, to accelerate sales in our company right now. Okay, this is going to sound so simple because we did this and we've done this on almost every company I've ever been involved with.

14:22We do a daily sales huddle. It's usually before 9 a.m., eight minutes long. It's with all the sales team. and we invite all the executives in. But the executives are not allowed to speak. They're not allowed to talk. And we ask three questions. What is your top priority today? What's your victory from yesterday? And are you stuck? Okay, so what is your top priority today? What's your victory yesterday? And are you stuck? And of those three questions, which one do you think is the most important? I'm challenging you a lot today here. You really are challenging me, but I would definitely say the first.

14:58It's not. What? It's what is your victory yesterday? Do you know why? Do you know how I know that? Because I had to come to the table every day with a victory for the team and say, look, I called the CEO of this company. I called the CEO of that company. It changed my behavior. It was unbelievable. And by the way, within 30 days, half our team were gone. because you know right away who's performing, who's not performing. A daily sales title. I actually learned that through when we did go public with RBC. RBC was our underwriter. And they did, by the way, they did two meetings a day, not one, two meetings a day.

15:39And when it comes to sales or that level of delivering success, the underwriters, the bankers, they perform at the highest level. And they did twice a day. So I'm telling you, nothing can change your sales more than just doing a daily sales huddle. Fire Nation, ask yourself a question. Are you doing a daily sales huddle? And are you asking the right questions if you are? Because that's obviously key as well. Now, one thing that you have come to find out, we're going to do something pretty fun in a couple of minutes here. But you found out an ultimate growth hack. And that is AI. That is artificial intelligence.

16:15So how can we, Fire Nation, entrepreneurs in general, small business owners, how can we use AI to scale our business? Okay, so in our book, we have something called minor majors. And I'm just going to give you an example right now, and then we'll jump right into the AI. But my son, Quinn, had the opportunity to go to in-person college through the pandemic for two years as an architectural student. In the third year, he walks into the class. and the end of the first day he calls me up and says i asked him the question where did you sit in the class and he says you know dad i not only sat in the front row but i also sat closest to the professor you are who you surround yourself with and one minor decision in your life just choosing where you sit in your college um makes a difference in your life because you're surrounding yourself with the keeners you're also close with the professor and you're engaged with the professor And we have dozens of these minor majors, but recently AI has unleashed such huge opportunities and can help you scale your business.

17:21First of all, if you haven't already done so, you need to really embrace AI. You need to understand, this is like Tony Stark who throws on that Iron Man suit and now he can accomplish anything. And by the way, I feel like that every day. I feel like that every day. It's incredible. right? I mean, it can help you with your customer service, with content, with creating contracts or analyzing contracts. It can do so many things. There are a couple of things that came out in the last few months that I think are worth mentioning here. One of them is custom GPTs. Have you played with custom GPTs yet?

17:55No, I have not. Okay. So on OpenAI, you can go in and you can click on custom GPTs and you can use custom GPTs. So by the way, if someone has a challenge or a problem, they probably solved it already. All right. Like we use custom GPTs for the workbook, start, scale, exit, repeat workbook. And we put QR codes and domain names. And one of them was personalityprofileai.com. And if you go to that, it will actually analyze your personality profile, your disk profile, your Myers-Briggs, and then compare you to celebrities as well. And this is absolutely free. It doesn't cost you a cent. Right. So we created that and it took us maybe two hours of work using the content from the book and from from disc and from Myersburg.

18:36We put it together and we were able to publicly release that. But I'll tell you this other use case. You can use it for privately. I put every single contract into a custom GPT. It takes all of 10 seconds. Don't think this is coding. This is so easy. You just simply upload the document. It's in there and you can ask it any question. You can ask it to do amendments. You can ask it to do whatever. And be a little careful. You have to still be aware that it does hallucinate from time to time. The other thing that just came out recently was something called Notebook LM. Oh, yeah. And they do Deep Dive.

19:15Have you heard of this one? I've used it actually for a couple things and it's kind of scary good. It is kind of scary good. And so this morning I went on your site. I went to your About Us and I simply, okay, here's what I did. I simply cut and paste your About Us. Get ready because we are going all in on John Lee Dumas. Oh, my God. John Lee Dumas. Here we go. The legend behind Entrepreneurs on Fire. That's right. And we've got a ton of stuff to get through from his websites, his blog posts. Yeah. We really want to figure out what makes him tick, how he built this amazing podcast and brand. Right.

19:54Of course, most importantly, what we can all learn from him. Yeah. And you know what's so interesting about John Lee Dumas, or JLD, as he likes to be called? JLD, as he likes to be called? Isn't that hilarious? This is from your About Us. I literally have chills. It's so crazy. And actually, one of my friends sent me one the other day that was a little sad, actually, where they did a Notebook LM where they had those two co-hosts discover that they were AI, that they were not real. And the guy, the one part that was really crazy, the guy's like, I just, obviously, I couldn't believe it, so I called my wife.

20:34And then the co-host was like, well, what happened? He's like, the number doesn't exist. He's like, we're AI. And she's like, I'm scared. He's like, I'm scared too. And then they cut it off. And it was like, oh my God. If you want to scale your business, you got to get into the AI world. And this is something we're doing at startup.club where we include it. Every newsletter, we do a monthly newsletter and every newsletter now includes it. I write for Forbes. I've done 25 articles for Forbes. And every article that we post on Startup Club, not on Forbes, but on Startup Club, every article that I post, repost from Forbes, it does have a deep dive.

21:09Notepic element, it's not hard to do. It takes 10 seconds. There's no programming required. Or do you just simply go in there, you upload it, and you saw what happened when I simply cut and paste your About Us, put it in there. It was crazy. And it was phenomenal. And happy birthday, JLD. Oh, thank you so much. The big four, five. I'm halfway to 90. Four five, wow. Yeah, halfway to 90. I love it. I can't wait. It's going to be a great second half until my 90th birthday. It'll be pretty cool stuff there. Colin, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, obviously, they're quite aware of you right now because you've been on the show a number of times.

21:47But your book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeats, I mean, there's a pretty cool thing maybe you can share real quick that you were recently alerted of and then we'll say goodbye. Yeah, we've won 15 awards globally and we've been number one in 15 categories on Amazon. And today on your birthday, yesterday it was announced that Kirkus, which is probably one of the highest literary standards, has given us the status of the top indie nonfiction book of the year. So with six other books that they included in the category. And that is something else. And my Forbes, like they called me up and they said, you know, I've never in 15 years seen there's only one other author who's ever gotten this award and you got it with Start Scale X Repeat.

22:33Look, this book took over 10 years, 200 interviews, 180 call outs, 30 illustrations. It's color coded. It was written for the ADHD entrepreneur, just like your listeners. Okay, JLD. It was, and it really has been getting a lot of recognition. It is the most awarded entrepreneurship book in 2024. There's no book that's received more awards than Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. And you can buy it on Amazon, on Audible, and we have a really good, not my voice, but we have a really good Canadian who does Budweiser commercials who actually did the Audible. But we got Kindle, we got paperback, hardcover, and you can buy it anywhere.

23:15and even all the airports. They just launched them on all the airports as well for the next year. And by the way, Fire Nation, if you get value from this, which of course we know you will, leave a five-star review on Amazon. It really is meaningful. It really helps us authors. And you know, I mean, hey, go ahead and leave one for mine as well. If you want to go do two for one, hook up Colin, hook up JLD. Life is good. And we hope you got value from today because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with a CCC and the JLD today. So keep up the heat.

23:49And Fire Nation, if you want to get to the show notes for this page, all you need to do is pretty simple. Go to eofire.com, type Colin, C-O-L-I-N, in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Colin, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Absolutely love this podcast. Listen to it all the time. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Colin for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you?

24:20How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I will catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

24:54AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. over 40 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting financial management inventory and HR into one platform download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire