The Big Enough Approach to Entrepreneurship with Lee LeFever

0:01Boom! Shake the room, 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 No Straight Path. Today, we'll be breaking down the big enough approach to entrepreneurship. To drop these value bombs, I brought Lee Lefevre into EO Fire Studios. Lee is a co-founder of Common Craft, pioneer of explainer videos, and author of The Art of Explanation and Big Enough. In today, Fire Nation, we are going to talk about choosing to be small as a constraint, what that means. We're going to talk about the best strategy for you to focus on.

0:39We're going to talk about time as a shareholder and two-person team business models and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Lee and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode all about how Liquid IV is using marketing to shake up the beverage world dives deep into the strategies that have propelled Liquid IV to remarkable success.

1:11A must listen. Listen to Marketing Makes Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Want to meet me, JLD, in person? Attend Clay Clark's two-day interactive business workshop and meet me, Tim Tebow, and Clay Clark this June. Experience the highest rated business Workshop in America and hang out with me in person at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, that's thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Learn more and request your tickets at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Lee, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. All right.

1:49What's up, Fire Nation? It's so nice to be back, John. Thanks for having me. What is something I can share? I think one of the things that I think about is that a lot of people that get involved in businesses and entrepreneurship, we want to be successful financially. And I think that's required. You've got to have a business that earns income, that earns profit. I personally believe that people underestimate the value of time and their free time and their time to have other things going on in their lives, which could be family, faith, whatever it is. I say in my book that time is the new wealth.

2:25I think that it's something that in the future people will make decisions based on what's going to give them more time versus in some cases money. And that's something that's not easy to do, but something I feel like is really powerful. Fire Nation, today we're talking about the big enough approach to entrepreneurship. And personally, I love the Common Craft story. I mean, you went from viral success in 2007 based on animated explainer videos to you've now evolved and you've thrived and it's 2024. And I mean, there's just a lot of stuff going on. So give us a quick catch up. Yeah. In 2007, my wife, Sachi, and I started making animated videos with paper cutouts on a whiteboard.

3:10And we called them, you know, RSS in plain English, wikis in plain English. And And they were the 2007 version of viral and kind of got us started on this idea that we're video producers. We're explainer video producers and became sort of known as the pioneers of explainer videos and got hired by big companies. Eventually pivoted to making our own content that we license through our membership service at commoncraft.com. and that's been pretty much our job since about 2008 or 2009 is having a membership service and also teaching people how to make their own explainer videos fire nation i just love the evolution of businesses that's why i've been having a great time recently bringing people like lee back on entrepreneurs on fire for sometimes after a decade of our first interview i mean we launched in 2012 and i mean this is what has happened over years of entrepreneurs evolving.

4:09Some people that I've had on are doing completely different things. Some people are still saying, you know what, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like we know what we're doing. We're great at it. Let's keep on rocking. And something that's interesting as a statement that I want to dive into is choosing to be small as a constraint. What do you mean by this? Yeah, well, I'll tell a little of a story there. So we were very fortunate to get a lot of attention in around 2008. And we had two choices before us. One was that we had the demand to basically create a creative studio, hire people, have employees, you know, do the normal kind of creative studio thing.

4:52But we also thought that we really wanted to make our own videos and wanted to make videos that were more educational and that helped educators teach technology and so on. And at the same time, we're entrepreneurial and want to scale. And we saw that if we created a studio and hired people that to scale that business, we would just be in the services business and have to keep hiring, keep finding new work versus finding a way to remain small and at the same time scale our income. And so that's when we got into licensing. And so that basically, I call it the business of permission. It's basically realizing that what you make, you own via copyright.

5:36You are the only one that has the right to make copies and that there is a business. I mean, Microsoft's fortune comes from that same idea of the business of permission via licensing. And we started to see our videos as a product that could be licensed multiple times. And that if it worked, it was a long bet, but it could produce passive income over many years versus that short-term income that comes from services in a sort of create a studio context. Well, I want to dive deeper into this thought process because you actually believe the best strategy is to focus on long-term scalable business models instead of that custom agency work.

6:16So can you give a couple examples of these differing strategies and why you prefer the prior? Being a two-person business, we are the decision makers about the direction of that business. And we knew that going into what we call the long game of licensing meant that we would probably have that sort of dip in our world where we would have to realize our income would go down. but we believed that over time it would go up, you know, that we were ready to make that commitment. And if you have employees, if you have a payroll and people are expecting to be paid, then you've got to find a way to get that short-term money into your bank account through things like custom videos or other services.

7:03I think we're unique, and I think that other small businesses are unique in that they can choose to take that risk. They can choose to take that long-term risk by being prepared for the sort of valley of income while you transition to that. So Fire Nation, we have a lot to talk about around this topic, around time as a shareholder value, and two-person team business models. when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Things change fast in the online business space. And when you have a team to manage and a business to run, it can be tough to keep up with all the latest and greatest marketing trends.

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9:29Become the next success story and request tickets to join Tim Tebow, myself, and Clay Clark at the June Business Conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Lee, we're back. And as I kind of tease before the break, you believe that time is a shareholder of value. What exactly do you mean by this? We're taught, you know, if you've been to business school or if you read about business, you read that the reason that businesses exist is to create shareholder value. This is especially true with big public businesses, but every business has stakeholders and sometimes it's shareholders. And when you're small, you are the stakeholder, you are the shareholder.

10:08And I think that if you apply these big business ideas to yourself, then your goal is to create shareholder value, you think about that as money, right? That's income. Obviously, we need income. I think that as a small business, you can also choose to make time a kind of shareholder value. You can look at your business strategy in the context of what's going to pay our bills, but also what's going to give me the time I want to live the life that I want. And I think that that's one way to think about approaching the sort of strategy of a small business is what are your shareholder values? What are the things that you're trying to build?

10:46It needs money, but it doesn't have to be only money. It can be time. And time can take a lot of different contexts. It can mean that you need flexibility and where do you live. That can be a shareholder value. Or, you know, like you're doing, John, there's a lot of ways to think about that. But I think that when we think only about the money side of it, I think small businesses are unique in that they might have the potential to think differently about that shareholder value. Now, you mentioned that you're a two-person team. Actually, myself and Kate are also a two-person team, and we have been for 12 years now.

11:23So let's talk about two-person team business models for those people that are listening that are interested in that kind of thing. Sachi and I, and maybe this is true with you and Kate, we are very different people with very different skills. And I think that's part of our superpower. This isn't necessarily a model, but we both take very different roles in the business. I'm more creative. I do the creative work around writing scripts and making the videos. Sachi is very analytical and detail-oriented. So she is great as an editor. She's great with the business. She's more of like the CEO and I'm more of the creative director, you could say, in this case.

12:08And she's an integral part of everything. And we talk a lot about the business as a part of our everyday lives. That's something that's just normal for us at this point. Now, we've been talking about time today and obviously the mental bandwidth that goes with that. And you're a big believer, Lee, in that free unstructured time is actually becoming a form of wealth. Can you tell us more? I do believe that time is the new wealth. I think it's one of those things that, you know, time we can't control. You know, we can control our spending. We can, you know, to some degree control our income. Time we don't really have control of that.

12:49You can't you can't build it up and put it away and spend it tomorrow. It just, you know, slips through your fingers. So you have to build that into your life if that's something that matters to you. And I think that when we think about success, again, success is most often measured in terms of dollars, and that's totally rational. But I think that there is a version of success, and this is what I talk a lot about in Big Enough, is that I hope that people can reach a point in their lives where they see that time is a type of success. That if you've been able to achieve a lifestyle where you have time, that that is valuable.

13:24And it's valuable in a different context than money, but nonetheless, it's very valuable at a personal lifestyle happiness level. And that it is possible to build businesses and to think about business and an outcome of business being time and being able to grow wealthy with time. And I think that's not something that you often hear. Now, Lee, you wrote The Art of Explanation and most recently, Big Enough. Tell us more about Big Enough. Why did you decide to write this book and why does Fire Nation need to give this a read? From the beginning, we have had a fairly unconventional approach to entrepreneurship.

14:06And a lot of that honestly comes from my wife's perspective about time. She's very entrepreneurial and very business-oriented, but she was really the person that kind of guided us through this process of choosing to be small. and having that be the constraint that allowed us to see things from a different perspective. And I realize that not everybody is going to be making videos or getting into licensing, but I really wanted to challenge the perspective that all that matters is getting as big as possible and going for the sort of unicorn kind of success that a lot of entrepreneurs are sort of enamored with.

14:52And I totally get that. And we need the entrepreneur. We need entrepreneurs that go after those huge goals. But sometimes I worry that that becomes the only way to do it. Or the conditional wisdom is you're not doing it right unless you're going to try to be a unicorn. And I just think that's not realistic. And I think a lot of people are really disappointed about entrepreneurship when they realize that what a grind it can be and what what it can do to your your personal life and your health and all of these things. And my hope with Big Enough is to show an example of a company of two normal people who made some unconventional decisions and showed that now that we live on the web, that the web has opened up a lot of business opportunities that never existed before.

15:37And I wanted to show that by being a little bit unconventional, doing experiments, thinking a little differently, that new things are possible. New businesses are possible. New perspectives are possible. and I want that to be inspiring to people. Fire Nation, you can see why Lee's words are inspiring and why this book could be such a valuable resource for you in your journey. So Lee, where would Fire Nation go to learn more about this book? You can go to mynamelefevre.com and you'll see it right on the front page. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with Lee and John Lee today.

16:16So how about you keep up that heat and for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Lee in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up and Lee, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks for having me, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Lee for sponsoring today's episode and to Fire Nation, are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free.

16:50Freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy, and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode all about how Liquid IV is using marketing to shake up the beverage world dives deep into the strategies that have propelled Liquid IV to remarkable success. A must listen. Listen to Marketing Makes Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Want to meet me, JLD, in person?

17:22Attend Clay Clark's two-day interactive business workshop and meet me, Tim Tebow, and Clay Clark this June. Experience the highest rated business workshop in America and hang out with me in person at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Again, that's thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Learn more and request your tickets at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire.