Next Level Pros - #54: Mastering Sustainable Business: My Time On The ConsistencyWins Podcast

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

On this weeks enlightening episode of The Founder Podcast, I join the ConsistencyWins Podcast. Listeners gain a deeper understanding of diminishing consumerism in business. I share invaluable insights, emphasizing the importance of cultivating a business that not only thrives sustainably but remains consistently productive. A must-listen for those aspiring to build a resilient business model immune to the shifts of consumer trends. The conversation delves into the genesis of Solgen, my revolutionary vertically integrated solar company. We discuss the challenges we  encountered in navigating the heavily regulated solar sector, underscoring the pivotal roles of a robust team and effective standard operating procedures in overcoming hurdles. This episode transcends a mere interview; it serves as a masterclass in business and sustainability. Don't miss the opportunity to glean wisdom from my time on the ConsistencyWins Podcast. Highlights: “I utilize the law of management, which says no one person can manage more than five to eight people.” “Once it becomes impossible to grow, then now it's time to hire and time to delegate.” “So important in running a business that you have to own the truth and be willing to work with what is true.” Timestamps: 00:00: Introduction on ConsistencyWins Podcast    02:58: Overcoming Limited Beliefs  08:57: Importance Of Culture  14:45: Risk Taking  17:09: Entrepreneurship 28:08: Prioritizing Focus  35:47: DISC Assessment  40:41: 5-Year Growth Chart  50:59: Business Growth    Live Links: 🚀 Join my community - Founder Acceleration https://www.founderacceleration.com 🤯 Apply for our next Mastermind https://www.thefoundermastermind.com ⛳️ Golf with Chris https://www.golfwithchris.com 🎤 Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-founder-podcast/id1687030281 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=dc252f8540ee4b05 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@thefounderspodcast

And this goes back to like eliminating consumerism as a business owner. Like you've got to stop being a consumer, especially early on. You do not deserve a dang thing. Like stop it. Stop playing the voices in your head. Stop thinking like I want to prove to social media or my friends that I've made it or whatever else. Bullcrap. Like that is the worst mentality you're going to have. All right, we got here chris lee i could not be more excited about this one ever since we connected um i had i just randomly dm'd you on

instagram after listening to your podcast with ryan panetta then started going down the chris lee rabbit hole i was like wow like how have i never heard this guy before like multiple nine figure exits um chairman at soul gen built a completely vertically integrated solar company, which I'm excited to dive into. Thank you so much for coming on, man. Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely.

So what I wanted to do today was less of the, hey, tell us a little bit more about yourself and your story. If you guys want to hear about Chris's story, there's a bunch of podcasts that I've listened to, very accessible to hear about Chris's story, there's a bunch of podcasts that I've listened to, very accessible to hear about Chris's story, starting at such a young age, like 12 years old, having the newspaper route and kind of fending for yourself for a long time. But I really wanted to accelerate more towards the tactical side of things, if that's okay with you. Absolutely.

Cool, man. So why don't you give us a little bit of background in terms of the business world and what your life looks like today, and then let's kind of hop right into it. Yeah, so life looks like so I run a I recently launched something called the founder project in which I run a community founder acceleration. I also host masterminds. We're launching founders con this next year in 2024. We're going to hold big conference. And so most of my time is spent up with that, where I consult, uh, different entrepreneurs, people that are building businesses, help them scale up guys that are doing, you know, two to 10 million, scale them up to a hundred

million. Uh, so much of my day is, is focused around creating content and, uh, involved in these different communities and, uh, really consulting. So outside of, I mean, that's the business side. And then much of my time is spent with my kids, my family, fostering those relationships and becoming the best version of myself. I love it, man. Appreciate you sharing. So I wanted to go back a little bit because I heard on a podcast you talk about you had like 14 or 15 businesses before this thing actually started to take off. Yeah, so I've founded a bunch of different businesses. What was the question? Sorry. Oh, I was saying because after those, you know, in your words, quote unquote, failed, you went back to go work for someone.

Like, I'd love to walk through your mindset at the time of like, that could be deflating at times of like, you know, hitting these highs and then going right back to, you know, quote unquote, working for the man. But you went in with this mindset of like, really looking to learn from these CEOs. So I'd love to, for you to walk our listeners through like that transition and how you were so intentional about that. Yeah, you bet. So first of all, not all my businesses were failures. My very first business was a drastic failure, filed bankruptcy for $2.2 million, scaled too fast, too quick, did a bunch of things for the wrong reasons. And then I've started several different businesses that were like, eh, okay, they've made some money or just broke even or whatnot. And I've always been an avid real estate investor, which is something that I've consistently added to over time. But yeah, so when I had these different businesses going on

and they were doing okay, much of them were self-dependent. They required me to be a part of the business. And I was really scared of scalability and taking real hard risk. And so I knew that there was more that I needed to learn in the corporate world. And so I decided to, with intentionality, to go and work for other people for another four and a half years. And this was after I'd been on my own for five years doing different businesses, successes, failures, all the different things. And it wasn't like I wasn't making money. In fact, when I went to go back and work for somebody, I had a search engine optimization business that was on autopilot. I had read the four-hour work week by Tim Ferriss and, you know, was utilizing people overseas, outsourcing and all the different stuff.

But I was really bored and and wasn't once again, wasn't really focused on scaling. I knew there was a lot I needed to learn. And so at that moment in life, I decided to go back and with intentionality to study high growth CEOs and leaders that were doing things at a much higher level than me. And so I knew that the best way to really get involved with these guys because they weren't offering courses or anything else was to go and work for them. And so I looked at this as like a paid education point in my career. So over four and a half years, I worked for three different companies and during that time saw a ton of success, made they were doing to create an incredible culture, leadership, accountability, how their offers were structured. And so that was a very important time in my career and where everybody else that was sitting at the table at those organizations, they were there for a paycheck and you could tell. And I just like, I was involved on the sales side for most of these organizations. And like I sold differently because I understood from a business owner's perspective, you know, like my, uh, the things

that I was involved in was very clean, very precise. But, but yeah, it was it was a fun experience. And, and one I would highly recommend to any entrepreneur that is struggling with scale that is struggling being a solopreneur because, you know, there's being a solopreneur is cool. And you can make good cash with it. But very few solopreneurs ever get to enterprise value. And that's one thing that I wanted to learn was how to establish enterprise value, something that I could take and sell and extract a ton of money that was not dependent on me day in, day out. And so that was the intention. And so over those three years, I experienced two different IPOs being a part of Sunrun and Vivint Solar and saw this rapid growth. I was the vice president of human capital for one of my buddy's startups that we were the largest dealer of Sunrun. We built that to 28 locations in two years. I recruited thousands of salespeople as that position, ran a huge recruiting arm. And yeah, it was just an overall incredible experience. And then ultimately, I walked away. And I walked away kind of at the top of the employee game.

I was making a half million bucks a year. I had this awesome gig, like company credit card that I could spend whatever, whenever, however. I think my last year I went to like 16 different major league baseball stadiums with recruits. It was a cool, it was like the funnest, most interesting gig that you could have as an employee sitting down, recruiting, casting vision to people or whatnot. And then I ultimately, I just decided to walk away because I felt at that moment, I had learned what I came to learn and I was ready to take the next step in my entrepreneurial career.

So can you talk about some of the bigger takeaways in that journey, right? Because there's a million, right? But like, what are the ones that stand out the most? One thing that comes to my mind, and I'd love to kind of riff with this and get some feedback from you, is there's some value of being able to, you holding your position

in those type of corporate settings, your production and your credibility and your ability to stay in that seat is based predominantly on that, on that growth you can drive, but it's not with your money. It's with someone else's money. It's with another entity that you're kind of driving and it's your reputation that's on the line, not your bank account as much. Right. So when you step into the world of the solopreneurship, it's like, I think a lot of where a lot of people hit that ceiling is they still have that scarce

mentality. They start to, when it's their money and it's their thing, they start to jump over $5 bills to grab pennies, which ultimately inhibits them from enterprise value. So I don't know, just riff, maybe riff with me on that a little bit and just give some feedback and big takeaways you had from that, from that experience. So, I mean, biggest takeaways were, were setting up an offer the correct way. So, you know, my, my very first business failed because my offer was, was incorrect. Like, uh, and, and what I mean by that was I was, I was in business to compete and most, most guys, they, they try positioning themselves in the marketplace from a standpoint of, okay, where do I want to be priced? What value can I create versus this other person? You know, instead of like, I'm in business for me and me alone. And I'm going to create an experience that is unlike anybody else's. I'm not even going

to compare myself. And I am going to charge a price that makes sense to me, not to the rest of the marketplace, not the rest of any of that type of thing. And so, um, you know, cause like my very first business, I, I priced it in a way that I wanted to look good to others. I wanted to look good to the customer. So we were the cheapest in the marketplace and I wanted to look good to my internal staff where we were paying the most. I was paying my salespeople the most. And so it was like this death spiral of shrinking margin because it was purely off of looking good and competing against others. And so I worked for a CEO, Todd Peterson. Todd was just probably my greatest mentor and inspiration in the way that I've built my business. And, and the thing

with Todd is like, he paid, he was, he had a army of salespeople. He had 3000 salespeople and he paid these guys on a per deal basis, really less than the whole rest of the marketplace. And he didn't care, right? Like it wasn't, wasn't it what he wasn't in competition to pay the most on a per deal basis but what he provided was a a uh community of competition a culture of like complete buy-in where guys could earn a piece of the upside and and all these different things. And, and so, um, he, he provided compensation in a way that was not like, uh, that wasn't just cash. And, and so, and, but because of it, people actually made more cash with him. They were able to go and produce more sales and do different things in, uh, working with, with him than any other part in the industry. And so for

me, like, that was like a big breakthrough of like, okay, one, I got to focus on culture, like culture is the most important thing to grow in any any organization, and I got to make it wherever I'm at, it's got to be a cool place to be and it's outside of what I pay, right? I got to, I got to truly value the human, I want to help develop them into being incredible human beings outside of just receiving a paycheck. If I can do that, in turn, they will make more money because they will be more productive. They will do these different things. And so that was one thing that I learned from Todd. The other thing I learned from Todd was transparency and owning the truth.

It was actually prior to working at Vivint under Todd, the financial crisis had taken place. And in the sales door-to-door world, which is what Vivint was a part of, they have something where you sell, you make a portion of your commission up front, and then you make what's called a back-end check. And the back-end check is usually

50, 60% of your overall commission. And that's paid after a summer, six months after you've completed your work. And it's based off of your portfolio, basically performing and hanging on. There's no attrition. And during that time, they were in financial struggles and they could not afford to pay the back end checks. And, you know, young Chris, being an owner of a situation like that, would have figured out a way to pay their checks and not be truthful to employees that we could not pay their check. But what I learned from Todd during this time was he got up in front of the group and he said, look, we love what you're doing here. We love that there's so much buy-in. We need you here. We need you now more than ever. Right now, we cannot, because of the financial crisis, we cannot afford to pay your back-end check. What we're going to ask you to do, and you don't have to, we'll still pay if you don't want to do this, but we are going to allow you to invest your back end check into the business and be able to

have a portion of, of like growing and being an owner in this business. And it was something like 90% of the Salesforce participated in, in investing their back end check into the organization. And, you know, it was like so powerful to me to like someone that was willing to own the real situation and not not hide from it. And like this is like so important in running a business that you have to that you have to like own the truth and be willing to work with what what the truth is versus like hiding the truth and trying to figure out a solution without involving the rest of your army. And, you know, when when you create that type of buy in with with your people, like it becomes something special where they feel like they own a piece. And and eventually, you know, each of those guys that did invest their back and check, they made a freak ton of money because they ended up a few years later selling off to Blackstone for $2 billion and

doing an incredible transaction. But I'm not sure if that's where you were going with the question, but like these are, these are some of the like the things that like just became very apparent to me working for other people, like principles that I could extract. But to your point of like being unwilling to scale and take a risk, like that is just something that you, you have to get over. I don't know if it's necessarily learned it. Well, it, it, it's learned in the fact that you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And the more you're uncomfortable, the more comfortable you will be being uncomfortable. You know, and, and like, like, I mean, I remember when I, when I first started investing in the stock market back in 2008 and I had like a few thousand bucks in, in, in, well, actually no, 2006 is when I started. And I remember having a few thousand bucks put away in the stock market and I'd lose like a hundred dollars in day. And it was like so painful. And, you know, because it was this risk I was taking, being exposed in the market, you know, I'd be down $100.

Like, fast forward to today, I've taken so many different risks in the stock market. And like up, down, I've bought and sold options and calls and puts, you know, just all the, all the things. And like today I have a, uh, uh, I have an option that's expiring on me that, uh, that I, it was just a little bet I made like a week ago. It was like $50,000 and it's going to expire at zero today, you know? And so this is very like raw in my mind right now. And it's just like, you know, and it's just something like, like water off a duck's back where like 10 years ago, I would have been freaking the freak out right now that I had lost 50 grand off of a stupid, essentially, bet that I made in the stock market. Like you've got to be willing to make those $100 bets initially. And you've got to get comfortable winning $100, winning $200, losing $100. Hiring an employee, them not working out, or spending $5,000 on a marketing campaign that doesn't quite work out or semi works out.

You've got to slowly get that and you've got to compound that over and over again. So that eventually when you're spending $2 million a month on Facebook marketing and Instagram and YouTube, like we were at, when I was, when I was at the helm of my, my most recent business, like it no longer become, no longer feels like I'm taking a $2 million a month risk, right? It just, it feels like 2006 of losing, losing a hundred bucks or investing in a hundred bucks. And so like, I mean, that's probably the biggest piece of advice I give. Like if you're scared of taking a risk, just start taking a little risk right now. And, and as you get comfortable in that risk, take more and just consistently get outside of your comfort zone.

Hire that next employee. Experiment on that next campaign that you're not sure that's going to work. And the way that you can become comfortable around that is you've got to stop being a consumer. Most solopreneurs are such big consumers that they can't afford to take risks, right? They, they, they would rather wear the nice watch and drive the nice car than invest into their business that is only giving them $10,000 a month. Right. And so that's, that's probably like the, the, the biggest thing is like, how, how can I slow down my consumerism and put every freaking dollar that I make into my business back into it, taking risk, learning, growing, developing, ultimately building that enterprise value? I mean, if people got to stop and go listen to that again, that was incredible.

Thank you for sharing. There's so much more I want to dive in on that topic and get to. But you said it best, right? The word enterprise value, I feel like a lot of people don't understand truly what that means, right? Because a lot of people right now think they're building the way with those simple little bets, that was like a huge piece into you taking the risk of knowing when you started this Solgen company that you wanted to sell it. Because there's a big nuance that I don't think a lot of people understand of like, if you understand that you want to build this thing to sell and build enterprise value, you're not going to make that much money early on. Like you're not going to, you know, just take a lot of chips off the table early on. And a lot of reinvestment goes back in and you're planning for this large exit that may never come. That's right. As opposed to just like building this high cash flow business for your own self. So, so can you walk us through that small nuance of when you first started and where your first investments landed inside of the company? Absolutely. So first year in business, we did $17 million and that's a, you know, it's a, it's a decent chunk

of money. And I, and I think from that, we made about 4 million bucks. But here's, here's the, here's the nuance is like the first six months in business, even though we were making revenue, I took zero in a salary, zero. Like, and so, and there were, there were a couple other guys that were involved with me that had equity positions that either took zero or very low salaries, right? We attracted in guys that, that like, for example, I have one business partner that we brought him on about a year into the business for a $40,000 salary. And he had just sold an Amazon business for several million. And, and he was willing to come work for 40 grand

because we were going to give him some upside, but going back to like how we compensated ourselves initially, what, and the whole purpose was that of that was because we wanted to invest every freaking dollar into marketing and things that really mattered. And so the dollars we spent were only things that we could get an ROI on. And this goes back to like eliminating consumerism as a business owner. Like you've got to stop being a consumer, especially early on. Like you do not deserve a dang thing. Like stop it. Stop playing the voices in your head. Stop thinking like, I want to prove to social media or my friends that I've made it or whatever else. Bullcrap. Like that is the worst mentality you're going to have. So initially, the first two and a

half years of my business, and remember, year one, we did 17 million. We operated out of my garage. And, and so, uh, my garage is a little bit bigger than most. I had been somewhat successful. Like I said, I was making about, you know, uh, between four and $500,000 a year. And I bought a nice home that, that had a, uh, that had a 3,500 square foot shop, but we operated out of that shop because it was free. It didn't, it didn't cost us anything to anything to be able to do it. Because at the end of the day, as a solar business, what we operated out of did not make us more money. And so once again, going back, every dollar that was spent those first couple years was specifically to get a return, specifically to build enterprise value. So the things that were enterprise value building were our brand. So we spent a crap ton of money on creating great

content, great marketing, great ads, right? Like what the customer saw, right? The van with the nice wrap on it and the product that was being delivered to them. That was top end, top tier while operating out of a garage, right? And like when I talk about operating in a garage, like I don't think people realize like what that actually meant. Like our first six months, we didn't have like a really good functioning heater or air conditioning unit. Like my my operations manager got the guys and gals that were on the computer like wet towels to put around their necks while they're sweating, typing like we're literally running like a sweatshop. Right. And and so what the cool thing is, is like that created just the coolest culture of like, Hey, we hear grinding and we're investing on everything. And so as soon as we could afford to invest into the next marketing campaign or the next

employee that was going to help the business scale, we did. Right. And so, and, and then going back to like, we didn't take a diamond salary. What we did do was for the first six months, if you wanted a paycheck and you were an owner or you had any equity or, you know, it was like me and my, my other, uh, there was two other founders that were a part of with me. The only way that we could do it is we could make a commission the same as our sales reps that we had hired to go and sell our product, but it had to be outside of

your normal job. So what I was doing those first six months, actually the first year I would work eight hours in the office and this was clerical and everything else, building out SOPs, standard operating procedures, and how everything else is going to work in the business, shooting marketing content, doing all these things. And then I would leave my house at five o'clock and work from five till nine o'clock out in the field in customers' homes, selling them our product. Because that was the only way that I was going to get a paycheck was by creating commission for myself. And so about six months in started receiving, started receiving a salary, but we kept the salaries low. Once again, it was like, we, we weren't in this thing for self grandeur or consumerism or anything else. Like initially,

I think our, our, uh, um, salaries were 80,000 bucks, you know, and this is like, I don't have a, a, a wife that works. I have five children, right? Like $80,000 bucks, you know, and this is like, I don't have a wife that works. I have five children, right? Like $80,000 doesn't barely pay for that. So meanwhile, I'm still going out and I'm selling products and I'm still participating in the commission. I did sales as a side hustle for my business the first two years that we were in business and, you know, year number two, we did about $32 million out of my garage. And, and so like, meanwhile, so we're, we're gaining this momentum and it wasn't until about, uh, I think at the end of year two that we finally raised our salaries and we raised our salaries to $120,000. And I didn't get an additional raise until we sold off to private equity

for over a hundred million bucks and so like did i participate in distributions and did i get some of those other things absolutely but the only reason why we ever distributed was if we had all the money in the world to invest into whatever growth that we needed or wanted. And there was just this extra amount of cash. That's the only time we ever distributed. We would never rob the business in order to appeal to our own egos, right? In order to go get the new boat or to go get the, whatever else it was like the, all, everything that we have is going into going into this business. And so, I mean, that's, that's what we did. And so I built that. We exited this thing. Our first exit was four and a half years into this business. So in four and a half years, we built it to over $100 million valuation, building just strategically real enterprise value.

And when you're talking about enterprise value, you're talking about a machine that works without you, a management team that works with a little bit of your influence, right? Like having a full structure, standard operating procedures, something that produces day in, day out. You can leave on a two week vacation. You can come back. It's still, it's, it's holding itself together, right? Like, so that's, I don't know if that, that is a hitting on exactly what your question is, but I think, I think that's where the main focus was. Right, right on the money. And something that comes to mind just listening to your story is shiny object syndrome, right? So you touched on the shiny cars and the toys and the things that don't serve your business and don't help drive enterprise value. But something that Antonio and I have realized through building our business in

the last four or five years is shiny object syndrome also exists inside the walls of your business, right? So would you mind talking about some of those journeys and just some do's and don'ts you see entrepreneurs make? It's like, yeah, we're chasing, we're chasing this one rabbit, which is this business. But inside of that cage, there's a lot of shit that you can, that you can chase inside of your business. Right. Absolutely. And so, um, shiny object syndrome is absolutely, uh, like the, the craziest thing for any entrepreneur, right? Like we, we all have great ideas and we all have ways to make more money. Uh, it was funny. I was shooting a podcast down in, uh, LA, um, a few weeks or not LA Las

Vegas a few weeks ago. And, uh, in this studio, there, there was this young hustler, right? And he was doing all the classic hustles. He had cars that he was renting out on Turo. He had a little FBA fulfilled by Amazon thing going out of the back. Let me guess, ERC credits. Probably doing ERC credits. He had a podcast studio that he was renting out to me. Right. It was just like all these all these little things. Right. You know, a bunch of holes one feet deep. And, you know, my favorite my favorite quote is that you don't hit oil digging a thousand holes one feet deep. You did. You hit oil digging one hole a thousand feet deep. And, and the reason why that is like so imperative is that you have to be willing to say no to, to all the things. And eventually you can say yes, but you can only do so if the bandwidth is, is in a, in a way that, that allows you to expand. And this is what I mean. So initially I knew that we had to learn to say no, but, but even then we said yes to expand. And this is what I mean. So initially I knew that we had to learn to say no, but, but even then we said yes to things. And so initially we were a solar company

and then we started like, Hey, let's try out restoration. Um, you know, we can, um, I can also run kind of this coaching business on the side where I can do masterminds and like workshops and like share with people what I'm learning and building my business. So I've already had a lot of success in like the year and a half, two years we've been in business. Like, let me go share this. And it like, it wasn't until I learned, I'm just like, dude, I got to shut this crap down. And he's got to be a hundred percent focused. And like, uh, and then when, when you have something that runs in parallel with that, the only way that you can ever say yes to that is if you increase your bandwidth.

And the only way that you increase your bandwidth is by hiring high level people that are just as capable as you. I'm not talking about 50 to $60,000 employee. I'm talking about that 200 to $300,000 employee or somebody that's going to come in, take a piece of the pie that has high level management background that you can expand into that vertical that runs right in parallel with what you are doing. Because too often entrepreneurs, right, we want to say yes to what we call a parallel, but it's literally so far off and left field that like it doesn't, it's not even applicable. And so for us, we wanted to vertically integrate within our organization. So initially it started off as we were going to do sales, marketing, and installations. And then there was additional

verticals that we wanted to own, but we knew in order to get there, we had to increase our bandwidth before we could turn it over and expand and actually say yes. And so as an entrepreneur, you have to get into the habit of saying no, no, no, no matter how tempting it is, no matter how good it feels, like you've got to be able to say, no, not right now, maybe sometime in the future, maybe when I'm retired, whatever, then I can expand that because, you know, another one of my favorite quotes is you can do anything, but you can't do everything. And so I know that anything that I put my mind to, I can be extremely successful at it. But if I put my mind to too many things, I am not going to be successful at any of them.

And so just getting behind that. And so eventually what happened was we got to a point where it made sense. We had enough leadership and we wanted to expand our product offering where we wanted to actually source our product direct. And we wanted to become the distributor of. So in solar, there's a few different verticals. There's there's the manufacturing side. There's the distribution of equipment, sales and marketing, installation and the financing of it all. And so we knew we didn't want to go and bite off manufacturing and owning a huge manufacturing plant, but we knew we wanted to get rid of the middleman of the distribution side. And so me and my business partner, never having been to Asia

before, we picked up, we went over to China, we toured all the different manufacturing facilities, we created relationships direct with these people. And then, so then we understood, okay, this is what it's going to take to get into this vertical. But instead of just saying, yes, we're going to take this on and split our bandwidth, I went out and we hired this guy that I was telling you about that had recently sold his business from Amazon. He had, he had a experience in sourcing product directly from Asia, dealing with imports and exports and tariffs and every, everything else. So we bring him in, pay him $40,000, give him a piece of the, give him a piece of the pie. And we say, Hey, we need you to expand our bandwidth and take this, this distribution aspect over. And so we increased our bandwidth by hiring this high level person. And once again, you either

got to pay him a piece of the pie or you got to pay him a really big salary. That's the only way you're going to be able to attract people that are as capable of you as you within the organization. And so we expanded into that. And then later we ended up buying a bank and we brought in somebody else to come in and run that. So then we did the finance. And so at the end of the day, when we went and we created all this enterprise value and we sold off, we owned all the different verticals within the solar industry, except for manufacturing. It's incredible. There's a really good book by Dan Martell called buy back your time. That is incredible on everything that you had just talked about right there. And I think a lot of people that are listening to this in that solopreneur space are looking to genuinely scale, not just grow, should definitely look at like what their buy more minutes here and I want to get to like the exit side as well. But when hiring an operator, like what does that process look like?

Because those are like the people that are really going to like help take leaps inside of the business. So walk us through like your decision-making process and then how you go about painting the vision as a leader to that operator to create the proper deal for them. Yeah. So let's rewind it just a little bit before that. So, you know, a lot of guys, they want to scale, but they choose their ego over scale and going back to not because it's just consumerism, but I want my time, right? Like I want to be this solopreneur that has like a few outsourced people in the Philippines and in India that do all the work. And then I can like appear on a beach, you know, looking good work laptop, uh, you know, entrepreneur,

solopreneur lifestyle, which is the biggest bull crap. But, um, unless that's for them, like if that's what they want, then so be it. But as far as like the first hires one, you got to make sure that you're not hiring yourself. Because you're only hiring yourself when you're expanding bad bandwidth and going into a different vertical of something else. When you're hiring an operator, hiring an employee, you got to understand 99 times out of 100, this person is not you, it's not a self reflection. And so, which can be hard for us as entrepreneurs, because we go and we do the interviews. We want to hire the person that appeals to us, that is friendly, outgoing, you know, because many of us as entrepreneurs, we're great marketers. We're great salespeople.

We're good at talking. That doesn't necessarily translate into somebody that's really good at like doing paperwork or, or, you know, keeping things tidy and organized and project managed and whatnot. And so for me, one of the biggest things, and we didn't start utilizing this until we were almost three years into the business and going back, starting a business now. And, and if I were to do it all over again, I would have started utilizing this. It's called the disc assessment, D I S C. Are you guys familiar with that? Yeah. So the disc, the disc assessment is probably the easiest way to understand, uh, how, uh, how these different things, uh, work. And so, uh, we actually, uh, part of, part of the founder project, we offer free disk assessments for entrepreneurs that want to utilize our assessment. And so I can give you the link that you can put in the show notes. But the disk assessment is so vital to understanding who you're actually hiring. And so like, for me, I'm a high D high I. And, uh, and so that, uh, that includes

like, I mean, I'm very decisive and driven, uh, and with high influence and everything else, but like the SC is really the most of the employees that you're going to be working on handing over tasks to S stands for steadiness and C stands for conscientious and like, and a mix of those with occasional D or a little bit of I are really going to be your, your best, uh, your best workers. Now, if you're hiring salespeople, salespeople, you want to make sure that you have some level of D in, in the, uh, um, in, in their disc assessment, because this is what makes them, that actually gives them the drive and determination to close deals. A lot of people will hire an I as a salesperson. I is great if it, if it's alongside the D, but only eyes are

actually terrible salespeople. They appear great in an interview because they're influential, they're influential, right? Like, uh, but they're not direct, right? And so they won't hold somebody's feet to the fire when, when you, when you actually have to get a decision from a customer. And so once again, this person can easily, uh, uh, make you believe that they're going to be a great salesperson when in reality they're not. They're just, they're just a people pleaser. And so like understanding those are very important. So that's like the personality side and a disc assessment. The beauty of a disc assessment is that people, it's really hard to lie on those, right? And they can lie in an interview. They

can look good on paper, but the disc assessment is going to be your highest quality to really understand what this individual is like. Once you have that, you've got to, so that's the, that's the personality side. But the other side is like making sure that you are offloading the right tasks and that you have those tasks well-documented. Employees don't train themselves, right? I have yet to find one that has figured it out completely on their own. They have to be trained by somebody. And early on, that somebody is you. And so the best thing that you can do is think through your whole customer experience, whatever it may be, your whole product experience, whatever. And you have to create standard operating procedures, how you would handle certain situations. What is the process? What is the

experience that people go through? What happens if this, in this particular scenario, and you have to document the document, the crap out of this. And one of the books that I would highly recommend for this, for this process is the E-Myth. The E-Myth is a, is a great way of like removing yourself from your business and making a scalable business, right? Removing the identity that this is mine, this is me, but like the, and you become less people-centric and you become more operating centric. Now you still got to, you as the entrepreneur still have to develop your people, but they have to be trained to these processes. So regardless of someone gets hit by a bus or quits tomorrow or whatever else, somebody else can come in and learn the processes almost

overnight because it's well-documented and they can be able to come in. And so, you know, some of the key hires initially, you got to, you got to have somebody selling your product. You got to have an executive assistant that can take things off your plate. A project manager is highly encouraged and making sure that you're identifying the issues that are keeping you from having the perfect product or the perfect experience. And they're helping create a project around those issues that solve them and, you know, properly delegating tasks. And then really just depending on the business, you know, you have a bunch of technicians, you know, whether that's installers or permit pullers or document people or a camera crew or whatever it may be, right? Like, and, but the biggest thing is you, you have to have it well-documented of what you're going to get. And, but before backing a little bit further,

you have to create an org chart that shows exactly what you need in your vision. And do we got a couple of minutes to go into this? Let's rock and roll. Okay. So with your chart, that's like one of the things that I started with day one. You have to look at your five-year vision org chart.

And what that means is like, okay, what is my goal to hit five years from now? And if it's a revenue goal, say I want to hit $300 million a year. And I know that an average salesperson in this type of industry can do a million dollars a year in revenue. Then five years from now, how many salespeople do I need? I need 300. And then I utilize the law of management, which says no one person can manage more than five to eight people. Then I'm going to back into that. And at the higher level, you get the less and less

people that has to be right. So if I'm a high level manager, I shouldn't be managing more than like three to four mid-level managers and then so on and so forth. But at the lowest level, from a technician standpoint, the most somebody can manage is eight people. And usually the five to six is a little bit more. And so then you back into this, right? And so now if I have 300 salespeople and the average, there's a manager for every six, that means I need 50 managers. And if there's a manager for every five of those, I need 10 higher level managers. And then I have a VP, right? And now, now I have my, my org chart. Okay. What kind of support do I need in order to fulfill on that type of revenue? What kind, how many permit people? And then

you build out, literally, you got to just take it and you build it backwards up with the amount of revenue that you're going to be generating, starting with sales, starting what it would take to generate. Okay. If I need $300 million in sales, how much marketing and ads do I do? How many people would it take to run those ads? How many people would it take to create those ads, right? Like so on and so forth. Now, after I go through the whole exercise, which should take you a day or two of like really backing up and like creating, like go up into a cabin and do this thing. Now you have a five-year growth chart, right? And now you take every single person that's in your organization, you, a business partner, whatnot, and you delegate every single position on that map to somebody, right? Okay, you're going to take the sales hat. You're going to take the permitting hat. You're going to take this hat. You're going to take the camera hat. You're going to take, right? And they wear that hat until it's impossible for them to continue to grow it. And once it becomes impossible to grow,

then now it's time to hire and time to delegate somebody. And now you have a growth map of exactly, okay, it looks like this would be my next best hire because it's going to take three hats off my head. I'm going to continue wearing 14 hats. They're going to take these three hats. I got to make sure that these three hats have the proper operating procedures affiliated with them. Well-documented, ready to train videos done on it, everything like that. Then day one, I bring them in and be like, Hey, this is, this is what's ready for you. I can train you up, get them up to speed. Then you keep growing. Then if you become, again, the limiting factor as the entrepreneur wearing 14 different hats, okay, now it's time to delegate

three more hats, right? And the same thing goes for the person that's wearing the three hats. Once they become limited and you're outgrowing their three hats, you hire somebody to come and take off one of those hats, give them a hat. They wear two hats until they no longer wear it. And then you slowly fill in this org chart of five years that whatever it is. And so it's interesting because our five-year growth chart was, I want to have 500 employees, right? Like, and that's what my growth chart showed at day one when we launched. And everybody thought I was crazy, right? Like, and that's, that's what my growth chart showed at day one when we launched and everybody thought I was crazy, right? Like, Oh, you're not going to have 500 employees in

five years. Like that's, that's impossible. And I was just like, no, this is the vision I have. And so the org chart helps with creating the vision, help guys see like, Hey, this is where we're going. This is what we're developing. And you as the entrepreneur, the visionary, this is what your role is, is that you can help row the ship to create this, this great. And, and, and the other thing that you got to understand is along the way, you can't just grow to grow. Don't just grow to grow. You got to grow when it's viable, when, when you are being profitable and it makes sense to take that next level risk. Right. And so we had this map, we built it. And at the end of

five years, guess how many employees we had? A thousand employees, right? Like it was twice bigger than I ever thought it was. And I was shooting for the freaking sky, right? Like, and people thought I was crazy at that number and we ended up doubling that number. And so that is how you strategically go about forecasting employees, hiring the right employees, making sure that you're building the right teams along the way from a high level. This has been a masterclass for entrepreneurship right here. I mean, absolutely amazing takeaways, ton of value. I had one more question, tactical question. You bet. You know, we could probably spend a whole podcast doing this.

So try to keep your response within like two minutes or so. I know we're over time a little bit, but to go off of everything you just talked about, how do you see AI fitting into this delegation and optimization of business systems? Like where do you see AI replacing jobs in the future? Where do you see this taking shape? First of all, I freaking love AI. And so we're with our business right now, we are trying to hire as few employees as possible and analyze where we can stick AI in. For me, I believe that the future of most employment, most office jobs are one, you've got to be a prompt master or two, you got to know how to develop GBTs on the

back end, right? So you're either training GBTs, or you're prompting GBTs, right? And so that is where I think like the vast majority of employment is going to turn. And so that's, that's a question that's got to be constantly asked. Can this be done by AI? If it can't be done, when will it be done? And what is the potential of it being done? Right. And so consistently and constantly like asking, okay, how can, how can I replace myself? And the biggest thing is like telling your employees, like, look, this won't, this will not replace employees. It will replace employees that refuse to use it.

Right. Like that, that's it. Right. The, the, the future of employment is people that know how to use AI, not AI by itself. Well said. You got time for one more question? Absolutely. Awesome.

So, so now that we're towards like, you know, we built the business, you walked around, you know, how to continue to grow and scale. Now we're on the exit. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts and like your business had unreasonable margins, like margins that you don't see in solar. And I know you had talked about, you know, you guys had the best quality service and you charged a premium on the product and customers were happy to pay it. How did you have to make sure the P&L and the balance sheet look as attractive as possible to get the best multiple on your exit as you're nearing towards that exit? Like, can you walk us through like the, like knowing when you're about to sell and start shopping this thing around, what adjustments

do you have to make inside of the, the actual balance sheet and P&L to make sure that you're getting your best multiple? So first of all, the adjustments to the P&L and balance sheet, I've got to start day one, right? And it's all about how you set up your business. If you don't set it up properly with proper gross margins from the get-go, you're setting yourself up to fail. And I think that 99% of entrepreneurs just price themselves out, right? They don't know how to properly put together a correct offer. And it goes back to my previous point of they're in the business to compete rather than just being a dominant force. And so one, you got to make sure that you have a very healthy, profitable business, right? Most of our gross profit margins were close to 55, 56%, a gross profit.

Now net margin ended up between anywhere from 20 to 26%, depending on the month, which is very healthy in the solar industry. Average, I think was like 5% net margin for those that were actually profitable. And so, yes, we were a premium. You got to make sure that that is set up. But like the most important thing in preparing for an exit is making sure that this thing

can hum by itself, right? So having a proper management team in play. So going and hiring the right people that can scale the business with or without you and making sure that there are proper KPIs in play and, and KPIs, every single position should have three to four KPIs that they are only measured off of. Okay. From their upper level management. Now they should be looking at other aspects that feed into those, those KPIs.

And by that, I mean, key performance, uh, key performance indicators. And so getting those in front of people, that's really what drives the growth and drives the value is like that people have clear responsibility. They know exactly what their job is and what their job isn't. They know exactly how to win, which is the KPI. Like, am I winning? Am I losing? Nothing kills an organization faster than an employee that has no idea how to win. Or they think that they're supposed to win this way and they do it and they're told that they're losing, right? Like there's nothing worse than that in any organization. And I've seen that. I mean, I've seen that from personal experience when we didn't

have good, clear KPIs or good numbers. And so, one, you've got to have good KPIs. You've got to have a great management team. You have to have clean data. Most guys, they're like, what is our conversion rate? And someone thinks it's this. And based on another report, it's that or this, that, or the other. Your data has to be clear, concise, reportable that, uh, anybody can look in and dissect it. You've got to understand your

financials inside and out. You got to be making comparisons month in month out. Okay. Why did my, why did my costs of this particular product increase 1%? We didn't pay the manufacturer 1% more. Why did it actually increase on the P&L? Was it because there was loss? It was broken or whatever else. And understanding as the CEO, you've got to be analyzing those books. One, you've got to get books closed and back to you within 10 to 15 days at the end of every single month. And two, you've got to be able to actually compare them and not only compare them month over month of what the actual cost is, but what's the percentage of increase or decrease, right? Like that's the most important. Like I've increased by 0.01%, like so what? But it increased

by 2%, that's a big deal. And so really understanding, and then you have like leading indicators and lagging indicators. You know, financials are lagging indicators. You want to make sure that you're leading indicators that are eventually going to show up on the balance sheet and the P&L are closely being monitored. And it's like, so one of the things that I do and still as the chairman of the board, I get is I get these text messages right, right at the top of my phone right here. I have this text message. I don't know if you can even see it here. No, it's not showing. Yeah, I don't know if it's focusing.

It's not focusing, but it literally shows me a sale as it happens. And this is showing like what marketing campaign it came from, how much revenue was generated, who the sales rep was, what market it was in, where it happens, this, that, and the other. And then it shows me the last 10 days, the last 15 days, the last 30 days of every single market. I get that in real time as these things are happening. That's my leading indicator where

I know where we have to be for it to eventually show up on the P&L that actually gets me that enterprise value of going and getting the proper multiple, of going and getting these things. But real quick, going back to the multiples, most solopreneurs business are worth about two to two and a half times EBITDA because they are the people that are over it. It's very self-dependent.

You go and you build, you go and build a management team. You're gonna add about three times multiple, multiple. So you're going to go up, you're going to graduate from about two, two and a half to about five and a half multiples. And then to get that last anywhere from five to 10 multiples, it's all about volume. And so if you can show that this is actually scalable and you have consistently done it month in, month out, year in, year out, now you're starting to get in the big boy multiples of making 10 to 15 times your money. I mean, most people pay thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars

to get an hour with you asking these types of questions. The least that everyone can do is at least shoot Chris a follow on social media, check out the Founders Accelerator. Talk to us about the next step here and the coaching offer and the events so that all of our network can tune in, please. Yeah. So we have a group that meets together three times a month. We do a virtual call and it's really awesome. We do a hot seat with different business owners. We dive in and we pick them apart. And then one thing that we do that's unique that nobody else does, once a month, we fly in a random person

from our group to spend a half day with my founders team. And, and then my team is the same team that went and built Solgen. I've slowly extracted them out. And now we are, we are consulting these people. And so we, that's about a $75,000 offer that we do randomly for one person out of our community every single month. And we record that and we share it. Um, but, uh, part of, so that's, it's a $500 a month group. It's like literally the cheapest employee you can have is be on there three times a month with me and my team. We give live Q and A's. We do hot seats. Like we are literally picking apart, applying the principles. We also do some really cool things like have

different physical challenges and spiritual challenges and things because we really believe in development of the whole human in order to be a successful entrepreneur. And so so we have that. Once again, it's 500 bucks. It's just founder acceleration dot com. You head over there and you can sign up outside of that. We do masterminds. They're significantly more expensive. We do intimate 10 to 12 person masterminds. Those range between 20 and $25,000 a head. But we go and we spend three days where we go and do fun activities. We dive into your business. We do like full, like in depth, you know, and frankly, I don't really send, sell my one-on-one time anymore. I used to sell it for about $30,000 an hour. I don't really do that anymore. For me, I like to have the big groups or the intimate groups where there's

several different entrepreneurs that we can all learn from at the same time. And then we're going to, like I said earlier, we're going to be putting on on Founders Con this next year, which I'm pretty excited about. Hoping for that to be a 1,000 to 2,000-person event should be pretty awesome. Incredible, man. Well, thank you so much for just delivering legitimately max value. The unbelievable podcast got super tactical. Thank you so much. And we're excited to continue connecting, man. And our listeners following all your journey.

Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.