More Money Podcast - 019 Hustling 101: From Bartender to CEO - Quin Sandler, CEO of Plantiga

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

Quin Sandler, CEO of fitness technology company Plantiga, and I talk about being a serial entrepreneur and what that means for his budget, retirement plans and career aspirations. Long episode description: My guest on this podcast episode can be summed up in one word: hustler. Quin Sandler, who I was introduced to by my husband Josh, is one motivating character. He’s an entrepreneur and is currently the co-founder and CEO of the startup Plantiga. In this episode we talk about how he’s created several different businesses including a tutoring business and a web design and branding business, and how that led him to his new venture in wearable sports technology. We also dive into how he budgets (or does he?), what he does to supplement his income when money is scarce and what his thoughts are on retirement. We mentioned a ton of things on the show, so I’ve organized everything to make it easy for you below. Thanks for listening and make sure to let me know what you think about this episode or my show by leaving me a review on iTunes or stitcher! Links Quin Mentioned Plantiga, his new business Brad Feld’s book on life as an entrepreneur, Startup Life: Surviving & Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur About Quin Quin in The Globe & Mail talking about Plantiga: “Smart Shoes Creator Considers Running Out of Canada” Check out some of Quin’s original music! Check out Quin on Twitter Shownotes: jessicamoorhouse.com/19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to Episode 19 of the podcast. I am your host, Jessica Morehouse, and thank you so much for joining me today. I'm very excited to introduce my next guest. You know, I've done quite a few episodes featuring solopreneurs and freelancers, people who are able to quit their nine to five job at the company so they can work for themselves either to, you know to have more time to travel, do what they want, or just make more money for themselves. So I'm very excited because my next guest is actually an entrepreneur. So not only does he work for himself, but he has a company, he has employees, he has products. And if you're interested to know specifically, we will get to the specifics in the episode, but you can also check out his website, plantiga.com. And his company actually makes wearable technology, fitness technology, specifically for footwear.

So it's a pretty cool thing to do. And how I actually met my next guest, his name is Quinn Sandler, by the way. I actually met Quinn through my husband, Josh. They know each other through the Vancouver music scene. Quinn is not only an entrepreneur, but he's also a musician. So when I found out more about his company and what he's done, and he's actually made quite a few companies before this particular company, I knew I needed to interview him because entrepreneurship is such a cool thing, but I also kind of just want to know what's the personal

finance side of things. How does he budget? How does he save for retirement and plan for the future? And so we're going to get to all that good stuff in this episode coming up. Well, thanks Quinn for joining me on the program today. My pleasure. So let's kind of just jump in. Where did this all start for you? Were you always interested in starting your own business or was this something that kind of you got into as you grew older? I kind of always been a serial entrepreneur. I started, I guess my first company was a tutoring company. So coming out of high school, I had a phone call from a family friend, and their daughter wanted some help with math.

And I think I was 19 at the time, and I started tutoring. I thought, hey, I can charge like $40 an hour. This is pretty good. And I grew that company to a couple people helping me. I almost did $40,000 in revenue when I was about 21 or 22. So at that young to kind of be self-employed, running a bunch of clients and tutoring was kind of amazing. And it was- Yeah, that's really amazing. It kind of was insightful for me because I thought, you know, if you want to work hard

and kind of be your own boss, there's a lot of money out there. So I tutored for almost five or six years. The company was called Keystone Learning. I had clients at Collingwood and Sutherland and Argyle and Carson Graham all over North Vancouver, a little bit of downtown, lots of clients from a school called the Walder School. So that kind of was my first business. So really I've been kind of in entrepreneurship. I'm 31 turning 32 now, so for as long as I can remember. Then my second business was called the Principal Design Group, where I started.

I kind of was kind of done with tutoring. I've taught grade 9 math probably about 45 times. So I started doing design work. And my dad is a great designer, so I always just grew up in a very design-driven household. So I never went to school for design, but I started kind of building websites. I took on a restaurant where I was working. I did their website, and then I thought, hey, I can do this. And four or five years later, I've probably done close to 70 or 80 websites.

I've done branding and identity for, man, I don't know how many companies. And then I kind of wound that down and then started my third company, which was Plantiga, the one that I'm in now, where we're building kind of advanced sensor inserts and selling that kind of performance wearable data to sports teams. You seem all like very different businesses. How do you kind of take the leap from tutoring to website design to wearable technology? So the tutoring to website design was more of an organic growth, I guess, just because I was done tutoring. I built my tutoring website. So I always was a little inclined on the web design level and the graphics and my banners and friends of mine and realized that I actually was pretty good at, and I had a good sense of taste and then just felt like, well, now I started getting, it's actually been all, all referrals, whether it was my tutoring or web design, you literally, you do one, you do what you think looks good. And then people start phoning you. And then before you know it, you're getting clients every month and then you're just freelancing.

The third business was, I co-founded it with my father. So that's where my father was like in a background of design and product design. And me and him founded what is now our company now, which is kind of wearable sensor kind of fusion. So that's how I kind of fell into all three of them. So what I'm kind of curious about, because for me, it seems such an amazing idea to start a business. And that's something that I've never, well, I've sort of wanted to get into that. I mean, I do that a little bit with my blog and podcast with my personal brand. But for something like an actual business where you have lots of clients and you're making that kind of revenue,

where do you start? Do you have to have quite a bit of money saved up to even start something like that? I guess that was, yeah, it's not easy, that's for sure. Throughout that time of tutoring and web design, I always supplemented my income with bartending. So sometimes it was a lot. Sometimes it was like once a week or I didn't bartend for a big chunk of time, like six or eight months. And my business was doing very well, but it is very hard to freelance. You know,

if I'm glad I did it because it taught me me because part of freelancing is you hustle for your next thousand dollar gig or your next twenty five hundred dollar gig. So you get very good in business development. But I was very fortunate where I was bartending when I was going to university. And then just because of strong relationships, I always just knew people that own bars or pubs. And if I wanted to pick up some shifts because I didn't really have a lot of work in the summer, then I could go and do that. So I do, I do attribute that to kind of allowing me, because some months you do very well, like as a freelancer, man, like you could go from like September to February and make really good money and then really only get one client for three months.

And that's just the wave of it. As much as you try, sometimes it comes and it goes. That's the challenging part for sure. But do you also, because like you said, it seems very kind of risky. You don't know when your next paycheck or sometimes it's feast or famine. Is that kind of something that instead of, you know, we'd probably scare most people. Is that something that kind of drives you, I guess? Yeah. It's, I can't really work for people. I feel like most people are idiots. That's the problem.

Maybe it's a, maybe it's a blessing or a curse, but most people that I have kind of come into contact with, like I've been offered jobs for sure, whether it's business development or marketing or all of these things, but it's very hard if I feel like I could do a better job. Maybe that's like an egomaniacal complex. I don't quite know. I don't think it is. I think that's pretty normal. Yeah. It's like most people are kind of retarded and it's hard to kind of work for them and not be frustrated. And because I always had this ability to go get contracts and do things like that, I feel like that kind of kept me going. But yeah, it's very difficult for me to go and work for somebody, especially with the incompetence you see out there from so many different, like I, you know, I've engaged with very professional companies

like Honda and Volkswagen and Live Nation. And the incompetence that I've seen in those organizations is insane. So even in very established places, there's just, there's idiots everywhere. So very well, you were just like, you know, just working for a company wasn't really an option. You needed to, you were just like, you know, just working for a company wasn't really an option. You needed to, you just had that kind of hunger inside you that you needed to be your own boss. That's what it seems like. And I think that's, you know. Yeah. And like where I am now, you know, we're in our own company. It's a very prideful thing for

one. Let's say that it never went anywhere. Well, then I would just start on another one. Like, it's kind of interesting. I think as, as as you know i think entrepreneurship is an overused word maybe the word founder is awesome but like once you found something and or you you like literally you found a company even if it doesn't work you probably just go and do it again with something else because it's very challenging to then go back into a pecking order and not be your own boss and drive your own initiatives. I think like I like, I don't think I could go back. So because you have started, you know, quite a few companies with this current company of yours, do you have kind of, what is your kind of end goal? Do you want to, you know, just keep it growing and then add stuff? World domination? Or is it to kind of eventually get it to a certain level

and then sell it and start another company? I think the one I am now is actually quite exciting. Over the last year, we have started talking to NBA teams and NFL teams. We have been fielding investment inquiries from very established investment players. I think the end game ultimately would probably be a sale. Yeah, totally.

You'd probably get it to the point where you'd have some type of company that would be interested in how we are measuring human performance and movement from our footwear inserts. And the software and the algorithms that we've developed and would probably want to roll that into their business. So that's probably, but I'm not doing it necessarily for an acquisition. Like it sounds altruistic, but really I'm doing it to make people's lives better. Like what I'm doing now is the closest to being happy in a business that I've ever been at where, you at where we're making something that literally might make an athlete's life be extended or their career be extended or prevent them from tearing their MCL or their ACL. That stuff is life-changing. That's pretty awesome. That is amazing. I think that's

a key thing to remember. No matter what you're doing, if you do want to start some sort of a smaller, big, you have to have a passion for it and believe in it. And it can never be about the money. I remember, you know, when I first started getting into blogging, all the stuff I'd read about was don't focus on, you know, getting a lot of readers, focus on writing really amazing content. And I think that's the same kind of thing with you. It's like, you need to really believe in creating a product that's going to, you know, help people or change lives and hopefully the money will follow, but you shouldn't chase the money basically.

Totally. And that's the truth. I literally have not been in this business to get fame or fortune or money. It's really to actually make something that's useful. Like in the tech world where I am now, and I've been to conferences and sat on stage with other entrepreneurs and all that, you do get a slice. You get different motivations for why people are in companies.

And I think that it's the ones that will be the most successful are the ones that are just trying to make something that's useful. Like it's the ones that will be the most successful are the ones that are just trying to make something that's useful. Like it's almost that basic. Like you want to produce something that is actually useful to people, something they can use, whether it's a service or it's a piece of hardware or whatever it, it needs to be like useful because my God is there's so much shit in this world that's just useless. I think if you do that, you'll be happy. I had a branding and identity company. I got to say,

I wasn't necessarily very content with it. Even when I was tutoring, I was making kids' lives better. I still run into tens upon tens of kids all throughout Vancouver that I've known and tutored when they were 16 or 17. And that feels good, but I still wasn't getting the gratification that I am now. So obviously that's why I wrapped those businesses up. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. So kind of going to a more personal finance area. What I'm curious about is, I guess, when you are starting a business or in a business, there's always the risk of failure. And with that, there's also, you know, the potential financial failure. Are you, do you put kind of safeguards in place or do you have like a plan B? Like, you know, you try your hardest and what if it just does not work out for some reason? Oh, that's hard for sure. Like I, no, it is like I've, uh, I have invested in parts of our business

that have, has left me in debt. And then I've had to go and consolidate that and then pay it down there. Anybody that's bootstrapped, it's not just me. Cause I've met lots of people that bootstrapped their companies. You're like, I might, I, I might take a freelance gig so I can survive and it'll be like a good amount of money. And then I'll take some of that money and pay down some debt that I have and then live off of that. And then might take another 1500 bucks that I made and put it back into the business. So, you know, again, I'd say that you, if you're going to bootstrap any business in entrepreneurship, you sure as hell have to have a way to make money that's outside of it that will allow you to see that company through to its ultimate end.

Because a lot of people give up on their businesses because they literally just can't afford to spend the time doing it. And I get that. I've been there. But yeah, no, it's hard. It is. So I guess when I kind of because i'm just kind of thinking i'm like how do you you know when i like for instance i'm just thinking of like

myself and josh when we talk about budgeting we talk in very small terms because you know um we kind of know what kind of money we have and we've got a little excel spreadsheet and everything like that with you i guess it seems like it's more focused on not so much saving money, but just being able to make more of it. Or I could be wrong. How do you budget? I'm just curious. What is budgeting or saving? Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm a little fearless. I always think that I'll be able to make money. I do. I think my best days are ahead of me and I'll think that until I'm dead. So even when I'm a little fearless. I always think that I'll be able to make money. I do. I think my best days are ahead of me and I'll think that until I'm dead. So even when I'm 50, I'll think my best days are ahead of me. I feel like I'm constantly getting better. So even though I might not have

savings today and I've made investments into my business, I've paid down massive amounts of debt that I've accrued from other parts of my life. I feel like I'll always have the ability to make more and more. So I don't know. I just look at it a little. I do definitely live within my means. I'm very conscientious that if I make a couple grand in a month, which might be not that much, but then I do realize that I can't go out and buy a lot and I got to eat in more and I have to make coffee at home and like do you find that you have to make quite a few like personal sacrifices in order to you know afford this business like oh we can't do a trip you know might be a camping trip your friends are going't have the money to go and do something. And that's just a fact of life. It might've annoyed me a little bit when I was younger.

It doesn't so much now. And it kind of comes and goes because sometimes I do, but sometimes I also don't. So it's just the reality. At the end of the day, I live in Canada and I do live in Vancouver. And what is like, we live very, very fortunate lives. So when I say no money, it's like quote unquote, because I always have money. You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah. And it's important to have that perspective.

But it does seem like in order to pursue, you know, having your own business and being an entrepreneur, you can't play it safe. And I'm definitely more of a play it safe kind of person. I like knowing exactly how much I'm going to make per month and how much I can save so I can look and be like, all right, yeah, I can definitely see retirement by age, whatever. But it seems like I may not. If I kind of live that, yeah, that's definitely not you, but I feel like what's retirement. I don't even feel like I, I just grew up in a different household. Like I will never retire. I won't, I don't understand that concept. I will be working until I die or until my body gives out. I just, I just know

myself. Like I don't, this is a, this is a, a deviation of topic, but the concept of retirement, I think, is a little messed up in today's world. We think that we work really hard in life to get to a point where then you just don't work. For me, it would be more like work-life balance, where throughout my next, I'm 31, let's say I live to 85 and be lucky. Let's say my next 50 years of my life, well, I would like to work and then maybe just take a year off with my young family, go traveling. I just can't see myself working for a bunch of years and then just stop working. No, that's fair. And when I talked to Josh about it, I'm like, I don't know if I can do that. I think I'd get really bored. Yeah. I think you would get really bored.

I probably would. I know for a fact, Josh isn't going to retire. That's for sure. Totally. But yeah, no, I, but we are like, I'm also, you know, I'm very fortunate to be with a partner in months. She has a very good job. And in months where I don't make as much as I should, she definitely pulls more slack. And I'm very fortunate for that. So I don't think you can discount the support, I guess, like the huge support you could get from a loved one.

Well, that kind of piques my interest. How, like, do you, being an entrepreneur, I mean, me and Josh have conversations about money all the time because we kind of need to know what's going on, especially, you know, him being a freelancer, his paycheck is always, we just never know what it is. So we do have to talk about expenses and stuff like that. Do you find it challenging being an entrepreneur and having a partner who has kind of a regular salary job? I do, but I feel, again, so I have a lot of gratitude that my partner is very understanding. This is something that you should look at for your listeners, but you should look at an entrepreneur called Brad Feld. He is a VC, so a venture capitalist. He invests in companies. He was a main investor in Fitbit and all sorts of things. He's an unbelievable guy,

but he actually writes a blog post, which I read every morning. But him and his wife wrote a book on what it meant to be an entrepreneur. And his wife wrote half the book of what it meant to be married to an entrepreneur. Because before he was a venture capitalist, he was an entrepreneur with ups and downs. I think they went bankrupt once. Anyways, I've not read it, but I've wanted to for a while, where it's this perspective of wife and husband talking about entrepreneurship and finances and raising a family or buying a house or not being able to buy a house. Anyways, really cool. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Well, yeah, that's another thing, I guess, when there's things up in the air. Can you make those kind of long-term plans of like, oh, we'd like to buy a

house? Well, maybe not right now because I've got this business thing going on. Do you have to have those tough conversations? How do you deal with that? I don't know. You just deal with it. Is it just that you have the eye on the prize and that's the priority until it's not? You do put some milestones in place where if the business is not progressing then you have to take very hard looks at things. But because we've been progressing, it doesn't make sense to wind it down. Right. So like we brought on personnel and then moved into office space and then got into an accelerator and then got two patents granted and then started talking to these teams. You know,

it's like if it wasn't progressing and something wasn't there, then you need to have harder conversations. But if things are progressing, then I think patience is, is, is a virtue. Um, I just want to actually ask you specifically, what is the product that you're working on currently? Cause I think it's from the time, yeah. Tell me about it, because I think from the time Josh first told me about you and your business, it's changed. I think it's quite a bit different now. We started building smart footwear products, so kind of like a brand new suspension design in a shoe

and then outfitting it with a bunch of sensors that would generate similar data that you'd get from a force plate, which is this type of tool they use in a human performance lab. That kind of reads data on your balance and your stability, your speed, all sorts of things. We made a pivot to building a razor-thin sensor insert that would fit, not like an orthotic it would go underneath your insole in a shoe and then picks up on a lot of biomechanical parameters in real time and then sends that data to a mobile device whether it's a tablet or a phone or like a desktop version and the focus right now is we've been able to build a product demo

and a working kind of platform that measures body asymmetries in real time. So in any athlete, it's very important to know if they're compensating one side of their body over the other and by how much. And we can measure that in dynamic movement as well as running them through an asymmetry test. And that becomes very predictive of one side of your body over the other and that starts to spread. Your rate of injury goes up massively. So we're kind of building a predictive technology that will let you know when you're getting into that range where you might hurt yourself. We brought on kind of a world-renowned researcher in this area of asymmetry. He is one of the head coaches for the National Olympic Team in Canada for downhill skiing,

for bobsled, for track, for a couple of different sports. And he's done his PhD work, but basically he found a connection between asymmetries and your rate of tearing your MCL or your ACL, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. So basically we have built a product that can measure that in dynamic play as well as measure their fatigue level. So as someone starts to get tired, their ground contact starts to get a little more, like they basically get heavier feet. So being able to measure that and visualize that in real time on an app or whatever is kind of what we're about.

So that's kind of our new product market fit and kind of our new platform. And it's going very well. That sounds pretty awesome and it sounds very in in like line with kind of all the health technology going on right now so i'm excited to see where it goes totally yeah like there's we've thought about doing a kickstarter and kind of more that consumer route focused on professional teams and have had amazing dialogue and are setting up beta programs in the fall with NBA teams, NFL teams. So it's going really well. And I think the next year is

going to prove to be a very exciting time for us. Well, maybe I'll have to interview you again when you're a big, famous person. Yeah, for you, anything. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and thank you so much for listening to this episode of the podcast make sure to check out the show notes for um links to more information about quinn i'm also going to include uh links to some of his music if you want to check that out all you have to do is go momoneymohouses.com slash 19, because this is episode 19. And if you want to check out the whole library of podcast episodes and show notes, please visit momoneymohouses.com slash podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I also just want to say thank you for everyone. Like I've

been checking my stats and there's some really cool countries checking me out. So thank you for everyone who is listening and you're not from my home country, Canada. I think you're awesome. So if you want to say hello, give me feedback. I would love that. Make sure to please leave me a review on Stitcher or iTunes, or you can always tweet me at MomoneyMohouses, of course, or you can send me an email. Totally cool. Love getting emails. Jessica at MomoneyMohouses.com. Well, thank you so much for listening again, and I will see you here next Wednesday.