229 - Michael Girdley's Guide: How to Start a Successful Business in 2025

0:00Michael Girdley:Tell me when to stop. A billion? Two billion. Oh my gosh, Michael, stop me. Three billion. What? Three billion? I would not go buy a business at this point. Let me give you this pitch. And then you can tell me I'm stupid. This is better than any MBA. School does not teach you this stuff. Even an MBA does not teach you this stuff. What do you think are the most overrated businesses, opportunities right now? The thing I think is screwed in the future, and I'm happy that it's screwed, is... If you had to start over in 2025, how would you make your first million dollars? I would actually do it in a two-step process.

0:30Michael Girdley:The first step is entirely data-driven. Step number one, I would go...

0:37I don't want to have a boring interview where I just have you rehash all of your wins and your fails and every story that you've already told 1 ,700 times. But I do want to give just a bit of context to the audience of who you are. You started out Alamo Fireworks. You've grown that company over time. It was a family business. I saw you're getting your son in on the action recently, which is really cool. He was working the firework stand. You've invested in a company called Code Up, which is a coding bootcamp in Texas. You've done some real estate investments with Dryline Partners. You've had some venture funds, Red Runner Coffee, which I think you've divested, Dura Software, Mir, which is a staffing business, Scale Path, which is a CEO, Peer Network, and then obviously Girdly Media.

1:17Did I miss anything in there that was major that you're like, oh, hey, you didn't talk about my favorite thing, which was...

1:22Michael Girdley:Oh, there's a top secret project that I teased you about that we can't talk about yet, but we'll get there. But no, that's it. I mean, in general, what I do is these days, like I incubate businesses and then I support them by being a board member and hopefully not having to come in and run them at any point. So. Can you give me an idea right now, size and scale? Like if you can't give me a revenue number, just number of employees or number of operations, just to give context to kind of... I mean, the big help was actually having the coffee business from an employee standpoint. Like people don't realize like how many people work at like a Chick-fil-A or a Dairy Queen.

1:59Michael Girdley:It's like hundreds. So I think when I counted it up, like across all the businesses, it was six or 700 people last time I counted up. Let's say there's four or 450 people working at companies that I own these steaks in and have big chunks in. And then I generally only count companies there where I have like either majority control or a big level of influence. I'm sitting on the board, that kind of stuff. But yeah, that's kind of scale number. Okay, so 500 million? No, no, 500 people. Tell me when to stop. A billion? Two billion. Oh my gosh, Michael, stop me. Three billion. What? Three billion?

2:40Zimbabwean dollars. Inflation happens that fast. Here's what I'm curious about. You've had a ton of successes and you've had a ton of failures and you've been open about those things. It's 2025, AI is here. Everybody's talking about HVAC businesses they want to roll up and how AI is going to eliminate every business position that you can think of. If you had to start over in 2025, how would you build a business or what business would you go after? How would you make your first million dollars?

3:10Michael Girdley:I would actually do it in a two-step process. And this is entirely, the first step is entirely data-driven. So let me give you this pitch and then you can tell me I'm stupid. So step number one I would go do is I would actually first and foremost, let's say I'm like a 22 year old straight out of school. I would go find somebody who is an entrepreneur that I really admire and I want to do what they're doing. And I would go figure out how to work for them for a year or two. And I would just basically go pitch people on, hey, I want to do chief of staff for you. I want to be whatever that role is that can get you in the room where you see the entirety of what's going on with a small business operation or somebody that's running the type of business you want to actually do in the future would be where I would start.

3:56Michael Girdley:So if that's, you know, you want to run a real estate brokerage someday or you aspire to sell widgets or you want to run a media company, like go figure out how to get in that room and do that job first and foremost. And the reason I say this is this is better than any MBA. This is better than any trial and error. This is better than any other way to actually go build the skills that you need to have to run a real business. Because school does not teach you this stuff. Even an MBA does not teach you this stuff. And so that's first step. Step one I would do is I would actually, if I wanted to go get into business, I would actually go work for somebody who I would aspire to want to be someday.

4:31I agree with step one. That's kind of what I did. Are you familiar with the Enzyme Group? Have you ever heard of them? No. They're a big skilled nursing facility company, mainly in the Western United States. And the way that they operate is each one of the skilled nursing facilities is its own standalone business. And they have a CEO, they call them, in the facility. And they let the CEO run it like their own small business. They manage the P &L. They have full purview to make decisions. And that's where I got started. I didn't get started on the skilled side. I got started in home health and hospice.

4:59But I learned what a P &L was. I learned why collections were so important because we wrote off 10 % of our revenue in year one, right? So I agree with you. I think getting experience is a fantastic way to start. All right. So that's step one, getting experience.

5:12Michael Girdley:And as part of that, like I would live super frugally. Like I would figure out how, like, am I putting a few thousand dollars a month aside for me to be able to go work on step two, right? Because would you just be putting cash or would you like, okay, I'm going to take that money and put it in an index fund or I'm going to put it into Tesla stock. Like, are you risky with it or is it very safe? Look, you can put it in crypto if you want. It's your money. Do whatever you want. But I think for me personally, it's important to understand a certain level of cash in the bank for you as an individual provides you optionality and a ton of safety.

5:51Michael Girdley:And that optionality is, okay, I could go six months without having to work and I could live off my savings. The other end of the spectrum of the impact of that, just it being in cash and very safe, is it changes your mindset in terms of how you can think. right? Like, let's say you only have two months of savings saved up. That really hurts you in terms of being able to think long-term, which is what you want to be doing when you're an entrepreneur. So I'm a big fan of, look, put a year's salary or work towards a year's salary if you can, or a year's living expenses in the bank somewhere. And then you have that and it unlocks this, like so many new things that you, so many different things that you could actually do in terms of business opportunities.

6:31Michael Girdley:But secondarily, it also changes how you think about the world and how you view the world by being able to open up your bankstand and be like, yep, if nothing else happens, I know I can just sit at my house for the next six months and I'm going to still have another six months worth of money left over. So that gives me a lot of freedom to pursue ideas and be comfortable and sleep really well. Okay. So step two, what's step two? Step one, you've got, you've got experience. You feel safe. You got some cash. What's step two? Step two. Okay. So this is an opinion. I would not go buy a business at this point.

6:59Michael Girdley:I would not do that. Really? No, no, no, no. I'm this person, this 22 year old, this fictional person who has just worked for a boss for a year or two. I would go start some sort of services business with very low capex. I would not go take a big PG at this point to go buy a business. I would go try to do what's where there's a ton of demand right now, which is basically like some sort of digital services business, some sort of staffing business, something like that, that is B2B services. I can start with very little money and it'll cash flow very quickly. I don't know if you've heard this though, but you can buy a business with zero money down, Michael.

7:40Michael Girdley:Oh, really? Well, how much? Have you not heard this? And this is something I tell people. If you are going to personally guarantee a loan or personally guarantee anything like that via SBA 7A or whatever, or personally guarantee something to a bank, You should just mentally picture yourself taking that money out of your pocket and giving it to, you know, giving it to the other side to invest in it. And then when you do that, you should also realize to pay that money back, you're going to have to earn that many post-tax dollars. So in most businesses, you have to pay taxes. In most countries, you have to pay taxes, including ours.

8:15Michael Girdley:I don't know if you're aware of this. I'm not. I don't believe in taxes. It's theft.

8:24Michael Girdley:so it's not only do you have to pay that amount of money back you have to pay it back plus the amount of taxes you're gonna have to pay when you earn it so it's like oof like pg you should treat a pg like i'm just taking out of my pocket which that's what's going on with these seven you know sba 7a loans and i don't i don't i don't think a lot of people look at it that way well next month it'll be a year since i started this podcast i've had over 100 interviews it's been a ton of fun, but I promised my wife at some point I would decide whether or not this was going to be a business or we would just continue to pay for it out of our pocket.

8:53And I'm exploring monetization, to be honest with you. There's not a ton of costs, but I do want to figure out a way to cover the editing and the packaging and the promotion costs of putting this podcast together. So I am looking for sponsors. I don't know what that looks like. If you've enjoyed this podcast and you've ever found some value and you want to sponsor, reach out to me, nickatcofounders.com, and let's get back into it. I fall down these rabbit holes where the algorithm starts to find what I like. And so on Instagram in particular, I get a bunch of gurus and a bunch of people who are like, I'll show you how to buy a business with zero money down, no personal guarantee, no loan.

9:27You'll be cash flowing$50 ,000 a month within three weeks. Just because it's like, it's like looking at a car wreck for me. It's like so fascinating.

9:34Michael Girdley:Those are big information. You know, those are big data, data businesses, information businesses, right? Like in the top corner probably says sponsored because those folks are selling courses and meetups and all that kind of stuff. A quick tip to anybody. If somebody's business is selling you the idea of business, you are the product. It's a scam. I mean, it's not always a scam, but anyways, buyer beware, buyer beware in those instances. It's an, it's an interesting thing, right? Cause I did. And then I retired from doing a couple of courses, mostly because the topic that I did, which was holdcoing was just so niche that I didn't see a way where I could ever get paid if I wrote a book and it sold 3000 copies.

10:17Michael Girdley:Like, I was just like, I don't know why I would bother with this. So, you know, so I did a course, but you're right. Like it is just one of the weird things about like courses in general, which is no matter how much you approach it with high integrity and trying to give people high value, like people look on paid online courses just negatively. whereas writing a book is totally okay like that's fine doing a paid course is not cool i really don't get it it's like you'll pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to college why would you not why would i not pay money to have a course taught by michael girdley like yeah you've done some really impressive things and your course isn't like i promise you no money down no personal guarantee no like no it's not you're not over promising all of these things like your eyes wide open hey this is what i'm teaching you i think that's perfectly fine but But in my course, I felt like I spent half the course telling people not to do a whole co.

11:11Michael Girdley:I was like, don't do this. This may not be for you. I'm like, don't do it. So that was the best course. I bet you dissuaded a lot of people from losing a lot of money. It's fantastic. So here's the, sorry to keep going on this, because I've thought about this a lot, because there's a lot of haters about courses out there. Here's why, you know, when I looked at courses and the business of being in courses, I was like, okay, like this isn't what I want to do long-term was when I got it out there and I saw a few people made it all the way through and took the stuff. And then those fewer, even fewer number of those people took the stuff and put it into practice.

11:47Michael Girdley:And then I started to look at the numbers. I was like, this is weird. I started looking at the numbers of people who actually finish courses. And it's like 80 % of people never even finish the courses they buy. Like they, they spend all this money and they never even finished the course. really yeah yeah so to me that was this thing where i was like like i'm doing this course kind of the reason i like write stuff on social media or i do videos or whatever which is like i want to help people and then i want to bring in a little cash because i have 10 people like helping me produce stuff right like it comes out of my brain and then there's a machine that like produces content and that's how i can produce a lot of content and not spend much time on it each week.

12:26Michael Girdley:And I said, look, I'm doing this because I want to help people, but there's something about the course model and the delivery vehicle that just isn't effective. Like it isn't helping people like I want to be helping people. And so there's got to be like better, there's got to be a way to create better relationships with people than the way the course kind of creates a relationship with the buyers of it. Do you know who Jason Kalkanis is? Yes. So he has, I think it's called Founders university is what it's called and you can apply to it and you have to pay i don't know what the number is let's just call it a five thousand dollars you have to pay five thousand dollars but the five thousand is fully refundable if you complete the course chris and i have toyed with this idea of like hey let's do something and we'll fully refund it if you complete these steps because you know that a certain percentage you're not going to complete it okay but i don't know it kind of creates this social contract contract beyond just i paid the money, there's like this incentive where you can actually get the money back that I think is interesting.

13:25Anyways, that's just an idea if you ever wanted to try that.

13:28Michael Girdley:Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a fun idea. Like I've, I've toyed also with the idea of doing kind of in-person educational events, right? Like seminars. And I think there's two reasons I like that. One is it just feels much more personal versus doing an online course, which just is like, Hey, I published this thing. And then you never really develop relationships with people. And it's, it doesn't feel like you're providing that much more of an improved life for people because they're just digital bits downloading your thing with credit card numbers. But I think secondarily, those kind of in-person learning events, I suspect they are a lot more effective because when you put somebody in a room and there's a bunch of peer pressure and there's 15 or 20 other people there, they're going to pay attention and hopefully get something out of it.

14:10Michael Girdley:The same way live lectures, live schooling is much better than virtual. I was going to wait to talk about this, but this is like a perfect segue for it is that why you launched holdco conference frankly the reason was of conferences i would go to every year it was like one or two like i'd go to very few conferences and you know john and kelsey who had been running it their lives had gotten pretty busy and they came to us and said hey like we need to keep this thing going and we need a partner to do that and the primary motivation was frankly sadness because i was like i really enjoyed this i I like the, if the idea of it like going away and then not existing anymore when I liked it so much, even though the conference last year was in Cleveland, like they had it in Cleveland last year and we're doing it in Utah.

14:57Michael Girdley:That's a place, but it's a place. Cleveland wasn't too bad, but that was the primary motivation. But frankly, like the people that are doing the kind of parallel entrepreneurship path that I'm doing, there's, you know, there's a small percentage of the total population of people that are entrepreneurs. And then there's a smaller percentage of those that want to do it in this fashion and getting them together in a room together and kind of talking about the challenges. And some of the speakers we have, by the way, like, like I didn't have an awesome year in 2024. I talked about it, some on social media.

15:28Michael Girdley:And, but like, there's other speakers who are just like, yeah, like here's some opportunity to learn from lessons of what happens if like things go wrong for you. And here's what happens if multiple things go all go wrong at the same time and the lessons they learned from those. So, you know, I think that creates just a powerful, like kind of real environment where people can be themselves, you know, face to face in a conference like that. And, you know, I'm excited about it happening, happening this year. I talk about this often, but I think failure, obviously failure is one of the best teachers.

15:56But I think about people, do you remember the Fyre Festival? Yeah. Okay. So for those who don't know, there's this thing called the Fyre Festival. And this guy, Billy, I think is his name. He'd had all these successes leading up to this. and he announces this festival and is like a very fake it till you make it type of entrepreneur, right? It's like, Hey, we're having this festival. It's going to be in the Caribbean. He's like, pre-sells all of this stuff. And he's trying to get the logistics together. And he never had anybody telling him really no. And he thought I can overcome any challenge that gets in front of me.

16:26And so like, he gets to the end and like the crap hits the fan. It's, it's a total disaster, right? People show up, there's no lodging, there's no food. It's the travels, a nightmare. It's, it's a disaster. I think he went to jail for fraud. He did. I can't. Okay. Yeah. But I can empathize with him. I'm like, I see that in, in, in like, I'm not saying I would do it, but I see the fake it till you make it. It's like, Hey, yeah, you got to kind of put yourself out there. There are some risks that you have to take. Like I could see a scenario where you're like getting to a place where you kind of convince yourself.

17:03And I think the main difference is he had never had a real experienced a real failure before that he'd always figured out you know some scammy way or some way around it and unless you experience failure you don't see the yellow flags that are like blaring in your face until it's too late and then like so the level of his failure was catastrophic right i mean it was just on a scale you want to be able to fail when you have the stakes are smaller and i think you talking about bringing people together to the whole co-conference to hear people's not only wins, but also their fails. It's just really valuable to hear a couple people at five steps ahead of you that are like, oh, be on the lookout for X, Y, and Z.

17:41Right. Yeah.

17:43Michael Girdley:And I think it's also, it should give people just a level of kind of calmness to when you're, you know, from the outside, like everybody's social media, everybody's life looks like this thing that's just going like amazing and it's all W's and there's nothing wrong. And, you know, I was in, I was in therapy once talking to the psychiatrist and a few years ago. And, you know, I started to, I started to tell the, the, you know, like, oh, well, you know, I feel bad about this because I was doing the comparison to other people, right? Oh, these other people type stuff. And then I saw the look on the psychiatrist face and I was like, but, and I said, but Mr.

18:22Michael Girdley:Psychiatrist, they have their own problems too. And everybody's, you know, the grass is not greener everybody is living their own personal tortures and you just shouldn't assume assume you're special because we we all are going through this so anyway me going to psychologist or psychiatrist is pretty fun because i just spend half the time like self-diagnosing myself and like talking myself in circles that's what i've noticed about a lot of things whether you're negotiating with somebody whether you go to a psychiatrist they they're just like asking you questions when you're just verbal vomiting and kind of coming to your own epiphanies at least that's how i'm a you know i'm a verbal processor as well man that's a skill set well yeah yeah well it's i'm a nerd about human psychology but i think billy from fire festival like i think it's a weird thing where he he's actually my impression of him he's actually a good person there is just something where he's lacking self-awareness totally right where he's just like this picture of the world like he just can like make it to later which like he's doing fire festival too i don't know if you've yeah like and look the guy could be evil but i in my heart of heart i tend to try to think people even the sociopaths and the psychopaths i try to hope they're good people but yeah he's back at it again doing fire festival too ja rule is not involved this time though so no ja rule i'm out I'm out baby I'm the same as you that's why I kind of sympathize with him I was like yeah until you've been in some crappy scenarios you don't really understand how someone could get to that point but then you're like okay I could kind of see a series of events where you build something up to to convince yourself that it's going to be successful because you want to project this image of strength oh yeah it's going to happen let's fake it till we make it and then you just freaking eat it.

20:15Michael Girdley:Well, the weird thing is like you look at the extremes of like Theranos and stuff like that. Like a conference to some extent, there is, I don't want to say fake it till you make it, but there's like a boiling, there's a, you're creating a marketplace here, right? So it's like, you have to talk a few people into showing up and being speakers and those have to be good speakers. And they're kind of trusting you that you're going to do the other side of it, which is we're going to bring some good attendees and there's going to be a good audience there. And then the audit, the attendees are trusting you that the next step is going to happen when you're going to find a great venue and then more speakers are going to come and all this kind of stuff.

20:48So like, that's okay.

20:51Michael Girdley:Like that's the way the thing works where the fake it till you make it people, Theranos or Fire Festival or whatever go wrong is if there's some point where like you are not going to be able to like maintain all those social contracts and like literal contracts you're doing with people, that's where you have to step up and just be like, okay, we can't, I can't do this anymore. And I need to pick up the pieces. and you know eventually you know you hopefully you're one of those people who just steps up and owns it and then other times there's situations where frankly just like people go too far and you end up with aeronauts so i'll be at the whole co-conference this year since all lakes it's in my backyard i'm stoked i'm stoked to be there one of the things i like about it is you're prioritizing activities and this is a bandwagon that i've or the drum that i've been beating for a long time i want to host a conference called the anti-conference where we have maybe one speaker a day, but the whole conference is dedicated to facilitating relationships, pickleball tournaments, ping pong, painting, improv, cooking classes.

21:48Because for the most part, like you've been to a lot of conferences, where do most people hang out? They're like in the lobby or the foyer having conversations. That's where the stuff happens anyways. So I like that you're building that into the whole co-conference, like facilitating those relationships. It is a conference being run by introverts. So like, that's pretty good. If you're an introvert, it's going to be good.