Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story About the Hard Lessons Learned From the Messy Path to Succes with Kass & Mike Lazerow

0:29Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation. Salesforce for$745 million. They are in high demand as public speakers, writers, and podcast guests, and recently wrote a book called Shoveling Crap, The Messy Path to Entrepreneurial Success. And today, Friday Nation, we will be talking about one personal habit that's contributed to both of their successes, six questions that help entrepreneurs decide if they should pursue an idea, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Cass, Mike and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:05Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship. A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

1:49Hey, Fire Nation. As I mentioned during the intro, we're talking about a love story behind the hard lessons learned from the messy path to success. And we have both Mike and Cass joining us in the studio here today. And Mike, you've had incredible success over the past three decades, as has Cass. But I want to talk about with you one specific personal habit that you think contributed most to your success? Yeah. Well, first, thanks for having us. And it's an honor to be here. As we thought about our life and reading the book, Shoveling Shit, like most people think you become successful by what you do.

2:28However, how you act, we believe determines your success much more than what you do. So how you act includes the attitudes, the values, the energy. it's not just what you did for someone but it's how you did it and how you made them feel do you do that every day do you do it sometimes if you do it every day it compounds and generates just incredible returns it's that qualities that people remember at the end we believe that you're not going to be remembered by what you did but it's that how you act every day that will generate that legacy of how people remember you. And Fire Nation, that's why one of my favorite quotes is from Maya Angelou.

3:13People will forget what you say. They will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel. How was that feeling in the moment when they were with you? Cass, what was your personal habits that contributed most to your success? When I look back on my career, it's my radical responsiveness. I think that's what everyone has kind of thought about when they then reference me. It's the idea that if you're running, um, if you're, if you're working with a group of people that you are going to be responsive and not be a bottleneck. And, um, I just think that, you know, especially when you run companies and you're an entrepreneur, those founders can become the biggest problem in the company when they feel like they have to micromanage or they're not getting back to people.

4:02So, uh, I've made it a point to always be responsive, even if it means staying up late and answering emails and pushing things forward. Love that answer. Now, Mike and Cass, you both have six questions that help entrepreneurs decide if they should pursue an idea. And I think this is critical because man, so many people, they just have ideas and they probably have multiple sometimes kind of that bright, shiny object syndrome. And a lot of times they kind of make no decisions because there's just overwhelm or they make potentially the wrong decision because they don't go about it the right way. Like, or they just do a bunch of those decisions and pursue a bunch of the ideas, but they never focus on one.

4:40They never follow one course until success. So Mike, why don't you pick your favorite of those six and tell us about it? Oh man, we love all six and it's in kind of the GoGage checklist, which is in our book. And it talks about product and differentiation and a bunch of different things. But what I've learned is that it's really about the customer and the market. So when I say the customer. It's not only one customer, but how many customers are there? How big is the market? We've been a part of a hundred companies that we've invested in and eight that we've started. And at the end of the day, if you pick a company, if you pick an idea to go after that has a massive market, a market that is just, you know, larger than, you know, you think will support your business.

5:26That's what matters. When we looked at Liquid Death, one of our investments that we did before it launched, what's the size of the water market? Water's the building block of life. It's the largest beverage market that's non-alk. And so I've never seen after all these years, a huge company being built in a tiny, tiny market. So focus on stuff that has a big market, however you define that. If you're a restaurant, how many people potentially could you serve? If you're a software company, how many buyers, but really hone into that market and be true to the market and true to yourself. And don't tell yourself stories about how big it is in a way that you'll never reach it.

6:10Cass, what is your favorites of those six questions? So mine is about marketing. It's about how do you take your product and service and reach your customers? and when we talk to founders, I feel like that's sometimes forgotten. That's like a forgotten point that they think they can just figure it out later. Oftentimes they underestimate how much money and effort it's gonna take and we emphasize a lot to make sure that our founders really think through this part. There's a lot of creative things you can do when you're a startup and don't have a big budget and this part has to be thought through thoroughly.

6:49So Cass, I want to stay with you here because you say an entrepreneur who loves to shovel is unstoppable. What kinds of things does that shovel need to do? That's a great question. And we believe that shoveling is really represented by this willingness to embrace this like messy, challenging and unglamorous like work that every founder has to do. so it could be everything from employees quitting on the same day to employees who should be fired but you haven't done it investors calling at the same time you're you know you don't have enough time because you're trying to fundraise customers who are either upset or needy the idea that you're always raising money but you know at the same time like you have to find a new office space or building culture you name it it's it's literally the grind that every single founder has to do that kind of makes your head spin because it's every day.

7:48You never know what to expect, but you have to do it. And it's not always glorious work. Mike, what would you add to that? What kinds of things does that shovel need to do? When we talk about the shovel, and all of your listeners who are entrepreneurs know this, you show up to the office and it hits the fan. You have no idea. Customers are going to want to cancel and employees are going to want to walk out and you're running out of money. And you just have to keep shoveling. And I think what we've realized with our own businesses and some of the businesses we've seen firsthand, like VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk, who started in our conference room at Buddy Media, is the best entrepreneurs learn to love to do that work.

8:34They love the hard conversations. They love coming up with a solution. You know, you know, you kind of have to let someone go, but it just festers for some people. The entrepreneurs who really are successful, they do the hard work. And it's not just that they do it, but they love it. And you look on Instagram and it's easy money and overnight success, you think. But at the end of the day, it takes a long time. You have to commit and it doesn't happen overnight. Right. And so if you're an entrepreneur, you want to be an entrepreneur, you just have to realize that there's both suffering and struggle in the process of building these businesses.

9:17And you will find your purpose and you will grow to love it. And that's where your success will come from. And Fire Nation, you're hearing from two individuals right now who have had a ton of success over decades and decades. So they know it, they've been in it, they've been shoveling for a long time. And guess what? Now they're having a conversation about it and they wrote a book about it. We're going to be talking more about all of this when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're a marketer, then you know what it's like to feel like you're moving in a hundred different directions at any given time, like you're spread too thin.

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12:17Because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, you will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories, and learn about attending the Thrive Time Show two-day in-person workshop featuring the legendary Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Become the next success story. Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Mike, we're back. And I want to start with you because you know that pivoting is very hard for an individual to do, but it's crucial at the right time.

12:59How do we know when to pivot our business model? When you start the business, and we write about this in the book, you have to hyper-focus and see, you have to understand, okay, where do I want to go? So what's your vision? I want to be the number one X in the world, or I want to grow a profitable law firm, whatever that vision is. And then it comes down to what are the three, four, five, six things that you need to do to be successful? So to reach that vision, what do you need to do? And then how do you measure each of those? So oftentimes you pivot because you've set up your plan and it's just not happening, right?

13:37Like you open up a new restaurant, new location, no one shows up, no one buys anything. It's time for a pivot. However, the most important pivots we've seen, whether it's Netflix going from shipping DVDs to streaming, or even our four pivots at Buddy Media are less obvious. You rarely find the inspiration or the meaning for the pivot from your partners or consultants or advisors, it starts deep inside you and you're sitting in your bed at night. You feel something, you have an intuition that something isn't working and there's an opportunity somewhere else that you should be focused on. It's this kind of like, I'm constantly talking about this itch that needs to be scratched.

14:25Tune into your gut. So that feeling you get deep down in your belly for me is always right. Rarely have I heard someone say, you shouldn't have listened to your gut. Gut gets you in trouble. It's the opposite. Your gut is right. Cause it's like the subconscious processing of all this structured and unstructured data around you. But then the next two weeks is like talking yourself out of their gut. So really tune in. And if you know that you're going to be in the future or there are opportunities, just they are waiting to be grabbed, really tune into that gut and see if you need to make a decision, pull off the bandaid if you have to.

15:07Cass, what do you want to add to this whole philosophy around the pivot? You know, we talk about this in the book as well as like you get through these questions, right? And then you actually have to come up with your financials, right? The projections. So we also like to tell founders that those projections are the exact tool that you can measure yourself against. So when you think there's a pivot, go back to those projections, go back to that financial model, because it's going to tell you whether you're hitting it, right? Whether you're hitting your actual goals and the milestones. And so oftentimes we have to tell entrepreneurs like, hey, I know there's not only a feeling that you need to pivot, let's go look at the actual model.

15:53Are you hitting the goals that you've set up? And if they're not, it's another great indicator. Cass, I want to stay with you here because you've had so many successes over your career and there's a lot of lessons to be learned, a lot of strategies and tactics that we can take away from those successes, but we can also learn from failure. Share a failure that you experienced in your career and then the lessons you learned from that failure. I would say the biggest failure and setback we've had was at golf.com. So we started the company, I started it in 1998. Wow. And by December of 1999, which was the height of the internet.com, boom, we sold that company to a company in Silicon Valley named chipshot.com.

16:40And they made custom golf clubs. And so they partnered with us because we were creating golf content and syndicating that to all the big sites around the world. And so we thought this is great. All of our investors and board voted for this all stock deal. And we knew that they were going public the next spring. And that was supposed to be around, I think April or May. Well, come March, we got a call from the president of Chip Shot saying they've run out of money. They can no longer pay our, you know, payroll of any of our employees. And they were going out of business and they just wanted to let us know.

17:18So that was like a massive, massive setback. So the lessons we learned is kind of from what we actually did, which was we dug in, we started shoveling, we got back on the road, we bought ourselves at a bankruptcy from them. And we just started the company all over, raised a new round, and move forward and started all over again. So lessons learned are probably back then, I would say not listening to my gut enough on kind of the deal and the deal structure, perhaps maybe not doing enough due diligence. But at the end, I think we learned such a valuable lesson in that you can get knocked down a thousand times as an entrepreneur, but if you stand back up and just start shoveling, you can still succeed.

18:10All right, that was powerful. I mean, I felt like I was living that with you. I mean, that phone call, what a brutal experience. It was awful. Mike, your turn. Man, oh man, I have PTSD listening to Cass. I can imagine. about that because we were young and we, you know, I don't, we hadn't, we'd just gotten married. We're all in on that. And if this company doesn't work out, like, you know, we're not going to Sizzler. We're, I don't know how we eat. Right. So that was, uh, we learned a lot from that. For me, I'd go back even farther. Um, you know, I applied to five colleges and I was rejected by the first four that I heard from.

18:53And this is a time where you got them in the mail. And luckily, months later, a fat envelope showed up in the mail and I went to journalism school, Medill School at Northwestern. And at Northwestern, I applied for 60 internships to be a journalist during two summers. I was rejected by all of them. And I have every rejection letter sitting right here on my desk. If I hadn't been rejected, I wouldn't have started my own company in college, which I did. And that put me on a path and I learned very early on. And to this day, it's something that has stuck with me. Rejection is a blessing in disguise.

19:40You don't know what that blessing is when you're rejected. It hurts. You want to cry. You want to shrivel up in bed and just not deal with the world. But over and over again in my life, professionally and personally, luckily, Cass said yes when I asked her to marry me. But rejection has been a blessing and has put me on new directions that if I had succeeded or gotten what I wanted, I'd have a drastically different life professionally and personally. Very powerful stuff. And I thank both of you for sharing the difficult times in your journey, in life in general, both business and life. And I'm excited to move on to the final thing we're going to talk about today, which is your book.

20:29And I know you guys are very passionate about what you've created. So let's start with you, Mike. Take it away. We're beyond excited to finally share Sheldon's love story with everyone. It is our love story, but it's our love story to all entrepreneurs. We love entrepreneurs. There's nothing harder and nothing more fulfilling. The book we wrote is really designed to revolutionize how you approach entrepreneurship. It's all the cheat codes we've picked up over the past 30 years. They're cheat codes that we wish we had known when we started out with these businesses. And so we're really pulling back the curtain on these real unfiltered lessons that have been game changers for us and has given us the strategy.

21:17And we think you the strategies to build successful businesses. And so, you know, my only pitch is if you're serious about leveling up your journey, this is, as Gary Vaynerchuk says on the cover and in the forward, your blueprint to make it happen. So just this week, we launched pre-sales, www.shoveling.com. And like everything we do, we're giving more than we're receiving. Order a copy of Shoveling. And we have incredible bonuses that come with it. You get immediate access to the entrepreneur kit. Now, this is everything we've used to create these businesses. It's actual budgets. It's the SWOT analysis documents.

22:07It's the go gauge. It's everything you need to get these businesses up and running. But it's not just about a book. We buy the book and you can join the Founders Farm, connect with other mission-driven entrepreneurs, ask questions, share challenges. And I think what's really cool is the book doesn't come out till June of next year. but anyone who buys today at shoveling.com gets early access to chapters from the book. So you'll be the first to get some of this. So all those bonuses,$350 worth of bonuses given away for free to anyone who buys the book. And this is our life story. So we're taking it very seriously.

22:48And we hope that everyone we meet along the road of promoting the book and discussing the book become people we work with for the next 50 years of our life. Cass, what are your parting words? Founders, entrepreneurs, they have ideas. And it's about taking the risks, shoveling nonstop, and moving forward, right? With communication and decisions. And with our book, I think that the 50 plus cheat codes can really help these entrepreneurs who are out there wondering if they should start a company or right in the middle of it. and we just appreciate that you had us on today. Well, I appreciate you guys dropping nothing but value bombs for this entire chat that we had because Fire Nation knows that they're the average of the five people they spend the most time with and Fire Nation, you've been hanging out with KL, ML, and JLD today.

23:39So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Kass, K-A-S-S, or Mike, M-I-K-E, in the search bar and their show notes page will pop right up. Cass, Mike, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. And for that, we salute you both and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Thank you for your support. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Cass and Mike for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs.

24:13And I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and your fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, which is personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

24:54A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest-rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire.