Zero Debt, 100 Stores: The Truth About Scaling Nobody Talks About with Brian Treu | Ep. 188

0:05Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Brian True. And Brian, you are the CEO and founder of Intelvio. and you've had an incredible time scaling this company, this business. We're going to go into all that. We're going to dive into all things scalability and how other people can also replicate in their business the ability to grow as big as you have, which I know I'm sure there's been challenges. There's been amazing things along the way. So let's kick it off, Brian, with how did you get into this business and why this industry? Yeah, I was actually very similar to most entrepreneurs.

0:43I had a very entrepreneurial spirit about me. I didn't really want to go to school. College wasn't my thing. So I was looking for kind of a way to make an impact. I was super young. I'm fresh out of high school. And I was at the doctor just getting normal after high school. Where am I going to go to college? Kind of check up. And the girl who was drawing my blood was missing. And I have great veins, absolutely incredible veins. And I said, you know, I was joking. I said, well, where'd you go to school? And she said, well, there's no school for phlebotomy. And a light went off and I said, we're doing invasive procedures on individuals and there's no education.

1:13There's no formal education for it or structured training for it. There needs to be. And by February 3rd of 1993, I was two weeks short of my 18th birthday, I got together with a guy named Jason Blood. And we started our first class. He taught and I did the business side until I got a little more experience. So that's kind of how things started. Wow. So talk about finding a problem that you need to solve in the marketplace that you're not even in. Many people, I think, are only focused on what they know. You found a major problem that needed to be solved in an industry that you weren't even in.

1:48That's amazing. So you figure this out. You find this partner. You get going. And then what? I was actually super scared of needles. And so it was really hard for me to actually determine, hey, we're going to do this. And so he said, look, I'll do the business side. I said, I'll do the business side. you do the training side. So we did that for two or three months, maybe six months. And then we parted ways and then I just stayed with it. For the first six or seven years, it was really like a working day job, doing the training thing at night. And it was kind of building steam, building steam. And then maybe 10 or 11 years into it, my wife looked at me and she said, you know, you're making more at the side gig than you are at the day gig.

2:22Maybe you ought to quit the day gig and do more of the side gig. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. And so that's when I decided to really buckle down and start scaling. And it took a little bit of a shift in mentality for me. I was already fairly disciplined, but I learned a good business lesson that I essentially taught myself. I didn't really get it from anyone else, but that was the maintenance versus momentum mentality. And that's when the interesting part about my business and my life story was the schedule that I maintained for a better part of 20, 25 years that got me to where I'm at today.

2:53You can talk about that if you want. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's amazing. So you're working six or seven years in the business and then also a job. That's incredible. And then you realize that your income now has surpassed your job. It's better to go all in on the business. And then you come up with this lesson. I mean, the fact you've been in business for over 20 years is obviously not common, right? Most businesses, you know, they die in that five, you know, two to five year timeframe. So please, I'd love to learn more about this lesson. And then I'd really love to learn about longevity? So 32 years now, February of this last year was 32 years that we've had the operation.

3:33I'll be it. You know, you really count about 20 of those years as a solid actual business because it wasn't really making as much money when I was kind of double dipping. The nice thing was that I was actually working in the day jobs as in clinical research or in medical jobs. So I was using my skill set every day on the job, which was nice. The lesson that I taught myself was I worked in the business. So when I finally quit the day job and went to work just in the business, what I found was up to just the eight to five, all I was doing was doing maintenance. It wasn't, the business wasn't growing.

4:00I couldn't scale. I couldn't find time to scale. I was just answering phone calls, returning emails, printing certificates, making curriculums, putting kits together, and then showing up at night to train and then coming home the next day and repeating the process. And one day I was just sitting there. I thought I've got to figure out a way to build momentum. But when? It was a big question of when do you build momentum? And that was when I started with my work schedule. And it It was really, really odd. Historically, I've always loved to sleep, but I kind of shifted my focus and I stopped sleeping as much.

4:30So I would go to bed around 10, 1030 and I would get up at 330 in the morning and I would be sitting at my desk at 4 a.m. And I would build all my momentum between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. And then I'd go in and spend some time with the kids. And I've got I've got five kids had five before 30 years old. So I had a bunch of kids. And so I do all the kids stuff. And then I go back to the office around 9 to 11 and then 11 to 1 at the gym and then one to five working on maintenance and then family stuff in the evening. And I'd go back and do a couple hours of work in the evening or teach in the evening. But that uninterrupted quiet time between four and 8 a.m.

5:02was the most priceless thing to me because no one interrupted me. There wasn't emails coming in. I didn't, I could focus on what's the plan. What's the Gantt chart look like for the growth? What's the group? What does it look like for us to open three more campuses this year? How do I do that? I could look at leases in the morning when I didn't have people interrupting me. I could look at, I could shop for properties. I could do all the things that required me to build momentum in the business as opposed to just doing maintenance all day long. And I think that's where a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck is they go to work all day and they're like, they're gassed at the end of the day.

5:29And they're like, man, it was a hard day. Ooh, I'm spent. And then you go, well, did you build any momentum or was it all just maintenance? And most guys will tell you, yeah, I just kind of did maintenance today. I just kind of solved problems and put out fires, but I don't really feel like I built momentum. And that was my thing. I had to have time where I built momentum and then I would do maintenance to balance of the day. And that was kind of the secret that I taught myself. Ironically, about a year ago, I stopped doing the 3.30 a.m. thing. That was about two years ago now. I sold half the company to private equity, and the early, early morning thing had kind of burned me out, and I was in a financial position to not have to put in that time, and I could delegate to others.

6:05And I had employees that I could give the story and the narrative to about what I wanted and the vision, and they could go get up early and build the momentum for me. No, that's amazing. Um, so when it, when you, cause I think some people might hear momentum and that might mean something different to them. So what did momentum mean to you? Momentum is just the ability to make sure that the business is making progress forward. If you have a goal, like I had a goal to open 150 campuses in 50 States. And I think I had six or eight at the time. And so I'm like, okay, well, how do I get to 10 by the end of the year?

6:38And that momentum was, okay, well, I've got to be, I've got to get myself in a financial position to sign, to be able to take on more debt. I've signed leases, which were more debt. I've got to be in a financial, I've got to be in a position to understand marketing better. I've got to be SB or better at SEO. I've got to be better at my pay-per-click. I've got to evaluate the market, do comparable market analysis. During the daytime, it was, hey, there's an instructor with a fighter. This person locked out of the building or this person forgot their book. It was all just maintenance that wasn't, didn't build productivity, didn't build any, wasn't really producing anything.

7:06The momentum was all the stuff that allowed me, gave me the time to do things uninterrupted that actually built the business one location on the next. And I think, you know, now we have, Oh, there's a few behind the scenes that are about to launch. I think we're 110, 115 locations in 40 states. And so that's kind of where that's really for me, the momentum was uninterrupted time to do things and activities and behaviors that allow the business to grow as opposed to helping people with their, you know, their keys got locked in their car out in the parking lot. Now I got to solve that problem. So a lot of the guests that we have on, they talk about transitional milestones and how they had to change in business going from a million to 10 million to 50 million to 100 million in revenue or one store to five stores to 50 stores or 1 ,000 employees.

7:51How was that for you when you went from, I'm sure, 10 stores to 100 stores, you had to make some significant changes or maybe milestones of employees or revenue as well. What was maybe looking back some sort of milestone that happened where you had to completely change maybe what you were doing because it was so different? Yeah, great question. And the singular answer to that is one thing, and that is I had to stop being scared. I did 80 locations before I sold to anybody. So I had 80 leases on my plate, which at three or four hundred thousand dollars in lease would be 30, 40, 50 million dollars in potential debt that you're carrying on your shoulders if it doesn't work out.

8:33with personal guarantees on every single one of them. And so to get to that point from 10 to 80, I had to completely dismiss all the fear and, uh, and, and walk away from all things that scared me about, about growing the business. And most of it was just fear of failure. So changing your attitude from, uh, from, from a, I, I want to grow, but I don't know how I want to grow, but I'm scared to grow too. I don't care what happens. I've seen, I've seen 10 work. And as soon as I get 15 to work. I'm going to go for 25. It's just 25 work. I'm going to go for 40, et cetera. So you just, it's just your, your, your shift has got to be the fear.

9:08And a lot of business owners and young entrepreneurs, they're scared rightfully so. But I was able to, to kind of encapsulate that fear and put it in bottle it and put it onto the side of the desk every single day and go, I'm building enough stuff by way of momentum. And I'm doing a stuff maintenance wise that I can actually become, uh, that I can actually do great things when it comes to the business and grow it without that fear involved. Man, fear has held me back in my life. That's one of the one things that I am totally working on. And I could see that, you know, you open up one restaurant and you have the fear that if you open another one, it's going to be the same, another one, another one.

9:41But it sounds like something you did very differently. And by the way, personal guarantee scares me. I have a fear around that. But something you did differently is that you, it sounds like you started setting yourself up for the future instead of waiting till you had 80 and then making the change. It sounds like you had to do a lot of change. What were some internal changes that you had to do or maybe even external? So maybe in your family, I know you talked about some of the times, but I imagine there were some changes that had either been made internally or even externally, maybe with your family.

10:14Yeah. Yeah. Having a lot of young kids was tough. and so it was really a balancing act, right? My dad would always tell me, you got to take time to sharpen the saw and I would just work and grind through work and then not have as much time for the kids. But you don't become as productive as a father and as a husband and as a CEO or a founder of a company unless you have a lot of balance in your life. I've heard that lesson taught many, many times by a lot of successful entrepreneurs or the lesson of balance of, hey, take time for family, take time for your kids, take time for your wife, take time for yourself.

10:43The mental health portion of this is very, very important as well. I think that's a lesson that I'm not scared to share, which is lots of closet crying sessions. I mean, just like scared to death, just like looking at my wife, like, are we doing this? Like, what happens if like all Christmas time comes and none of the classrooms are full and we still have leases due? And can we have Christmas with 40 locations? You know, there's a lot of those where it's just the fear and the scare. So, yeah, you've got to take time to balance your life out and make sure you give enough time to your kids and your wife and your business and things like that.

11:14But a balance is key. And one philosophy that I've always stuck with my whole life, and it's a philosophy a lot of Utah people follow, which is no success in life makes up for failure in the home. And so you really want to make sure that your children are good people, your wife's in a good place, your relationship's in a good spot, and that you're giving the business the attention that it needs in order to succeed. I imagine 32 years ago, nobody was talking about mental health or balance. Those weren't even things that we even thought were or burnout. Like these are phrases that nobody thought was a need, which maybe that was an issue.

11:50Maybe we should have been thinking about that 30 years ago as a society. I'm curious on challenges that you've been through and what you learned from that. Was there maybe one challenge that stands out and what was the lesson? Good question. There's been a lot of challenges along the way, financial challenges mostly. We chose very early on to never go into debt. And so outside of the money that we owed on leases over time, we chose to never borrow money. I could have expanded a lot faster, but never taking on it and never taking on debt was something that was very, very challenging. So basically bootstrapping the entire business up until we sold to private equity.

12:27And then even short time after that, private equity hadn't taken on any debt for us. We were a debt free organization. And a lot of people were like, well, how'd you get to the size and scale without carrying debt? I said, well, you make a lot of individual sacrifices. You drive old cars and you live in your old same home that you lived in forever. And you make a lot of those sacrifices that make the business successful. But that was probably the biggest challenge was wanting to take on debt, having the ability to take on debt, making enough money to service debt, but not taking on the debt because the growth trajectory was nice and measured.

12:56Although fast, I mean, I think we grew to one year, I think our biggest year was 35 locations we set up. That was three a month. We were expanding rapidly. But yeah, just a very measured approach to the growth and expansion was important for us, but it was very challenging because you got to now save up for the next location. Well, I need 50 or$100 ,000 dollars to do that so now i'm i'm taking a profit from these classrooms and pouring into the next ones and then you got to measure those on a timeline on a gantt chart because if you get too many too much expansion going on late in the year then you go into your your week your dip months you have a big dip in the winter months when it comes to education training november december january because people are thinking about other things so you got to make sure that your your approvals from the states come at the right time you really want them to come right in spring but sometimes it strings out you didn't get the bond you needed or the bonding requirements were too great or you didn't have the net worth requirement there's a lot of challenges from a state licensing perspective.

13:48And really to this day, there's nobody who's done what we've done as far as the volume and quantity of state licenses. Operating in 40 plus states, the 110 or so locations is very complicated. We've got a licensing department that is a very, very important department to our company. And so, yeah, that was a big challenge was expanding without borrowing money. I mean, that's amazing. I think most people have the mindset of, I need to go raise funds before I start versus I need to get started and slow. When you say the word slow to somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur in business, I think many times they want to go super fast, which as you and I know, it's not most of the time a reality.

14:31And you've really proven that you can make it happen. You've done all this stuff. You've had success, sold half the private equity, grown really first in your industry, maybe one of the only people to even do what you've done. What's next for you in terms of a milestone that you want to hit in the future? Yeah, the next big milestone is taking what we've built in the allied health care field. As far as phlebotomy is concerned, we're now offering medical. We're now offering pharmacy technician classes. I think we're licensed in 32 states to do that now. Medical assisting is on the next on the horizon and that'll grow very quickly.

15:05So now it's just scaling what we build, right? We built the infrastructure, we built the foundation. Now it's just time to scale out the different programs. So medical assisting, pharmacy technician, phlebotomy. On top of that, we'll be dental assisting, which you're going to jump into the EMT market. We're so good at the brick and mortar slash hybrid training program style of training that we feel like we'll be very successful in those five medical modalities. Build it for two or three more years. And then we'll have another liquidity event with the private equity group. And at that point, on to the next venture.

15:33No idea what that is, but my wife tells me it'll be something, even though I want to kind of retire, but I think there'll be something else in the works. Can an entrepreneur really ever retire? I'm not really sure. It seems like people retire for a year and then they have a new idea, a new problem to solve. Plus your tremendous amount of experience that you have, I'm sure makes it things much easier in the future. if you could share maybe one more lesson, one more tip, a strategy, something else that you really love to share with people when it comes to business. Good question. Fear is a big one.

16:13We talked about that a little bit, getting over your fear of just a fear of failure, right? Nobody wants to be judged for failing. I think that's the biggest thing. Fear for me is more like financial fear. Like what if my family goes bankrupt and I've got a house full of five kids and we've got nowhere to go. So fear is a big one to get over. I think emotion is probably the second biggest lesson that I would teach people. I've been involved with a lot of people in the world of business. And there's definitely a time and a place for it to be very, very emotional and strong, strong about your feelings when it comes to business.

16:40But it's generally not with your employees or the partners or the people we've got an investment in yet. Unless there's an incredible case where you feel like you need to be very emotional about something and have passion about it. But communicating with the content, communicating is one of the things that I teach my employees and my staff. And that's just, listen, I don't need all the emotions behind why you're upset. I just need the content so we can make really good educated decisions. So communicating without emotion. Like I said, in the world of business and entrepreneurialism, there's definitely a lot of emotion, but it doesn't necessarily have to be there on a daily basis.

17:11So communicating with content is very important and keeping your emotions in check. If you've got a problem, walk away for 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour until the next day. I'll be surprised how much better you'll handle the situation if you just take a deep breath and leave. Yeah, no, that's been amazing. I had to do that yesterday, by the way. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff happening in the news right now. Markets are crazy. I had to walk away for 15 minutes because I felt like my whole world was being consumed with the news and all the things that are happening and reading. What if this happens with my business now?

17:44It could be impacted. That might be the best thing that most business people do because it's hard not to be reactive. You're doing great in business. And then all of a sudden you get that email or that message where like your whole world just feels like everything is collapsing. And it's hard not to be emotional and to be reactive in that moment. But I really like the walk away for 15 minutes because everything does change when you kind of take a deep breath and walk away. But Brian, this has been really amazing. I'm super inspired today. So many soundbites that people are going to walk away with.

18:18But if they want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information about the company, how can they do so? Yeah, you can reach out to Intelvio.com. My staff's there. I'd be happy to share my email or phone number and the link if you so choose at the end of the thing. But yeah, I love the, I'm a real big fan of helping young entrepreneurs. I speak, I've spoken a couple of times at the BYU entrepreneurial class and I love mentoring younger kids and tough spots that they're in with making business decisions when they're young. Predominantly love helping them not give away their equity.

18:47Please stop giving away giant chunks of your equity as a startup, knowing it's your idea and your money. But love to help the younger generation kind of determine where they're going and how they're navigating things. And yes, I'd love to love to reach out and help people wherever I can. There you go. That's you. That's your one lesson right there. Stop giving away all your equity. By the way, Utah is one of my favorite states. It's one of the most beautiful states, I think, overall in terms of outdoor activities. But Brian, this has been really great having you today. super, I took a lot away.

19:18There's a lot of things. That's why I like to get to, I love to talk to people like yourself because I learn. And as you're talking, I'm even thinking like, okay, you know what? I need to do this, this, and this because I need to, I need to get my momentum. So thank you so much for joining us today. I'm super appreciative of your time. And I can't wait for you to come back in, in a few years from now, tell us how things are going then and whatever your next venture is. But Brian, thanks for joining us today on Founders Story. sounds good thanks for having me