Noob School - Episode 54: Creating a Better Workforce with Scott Millwood

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

In this episode of the Noob School podcast, technology entrepreneur John Harrison gives hiring managers tips for choosing the right people, and for job applicants, things to do to nail their job interviews. Scott also talks about his new company, Next Founders’ Fund, which provides support for entrepreneurs looking to fund their vision.  HIGHLIGHTSBring data to show your accomplishments and track record Be prepared and know who you're talking to You want to have just the right amount of flair Be comfortable with talking to older peoplePrioritize process over personalityUse everything that you can to make your resume stand out What the ideal candidate looks like You need customers to be a ‘real’ companyIntroducing the Next Founder’s Fund QUOTESScott's thoughts on applicants that come unprepared: "I'm always amazed even with today, of the vast amount [of] information that's available on the internet, clickety-click-boom, that people will show up and still be unprepared and not have the ammunition ahead of time."Scott on why you should choose attitude over aptitude, if you can only choose one: "You can skill somebody up. You can put them to training, you can invest in them. But it's really difficult to change attitude."The ideal sales candidate, according to Scott: "Somebody that can go the distance, that can come in and will sit there and make the calls and do the deals at this level, and can hire and grow and keep going." Follow Scott through the link below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmillwood/LinkedIn (NEXT Upstate): https://www.linkedin.com/company/next-upstate/ Connect with Noob School and John by visiting the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsterling1/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnsterlingsalesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnsterling_/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_TikTok: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_Website: http://salestrainingfornoobs.com/

If you can bring something to the interview that it is the standout, who shows up with the results of their last job in writing? Like, as you can see, you know, that's like, wow, okay, that stands out. Or something that you've been great at in the past. I know there are personality traits that go in it, but we always found ourselves that, you know, I'd go to customer effective where we hired tons more consultants than we had salespeople. The salespeople we hired were bigger hits or misses because of just the swing in revenue. Yeah. We heard a lot of consultants, though.

Not as big a hit on swinging revenue back and forth, but the long run, we ended up figuring out that you have to hire on aptitude and attitude more than anything. You can generally, with somebody's got a good attitude, that goes a long way. They have the aptitude, meaning they can actually do the work. Yeah. Great. If you hire based on just pure experience of has this person done this exact, exact thing before, usually that's a lower probability hit. Welcome back to Noob School.

This is where we interview successful business owners, and we dial it back to the beginning and figure out what they did to make their revenue grow. All right, welcome back to Noob School. John Sterling here. I've got a repeat. customer. Second time Scott Millwood's been with us. Welcome, Scott. Thank you. Glad to be here. Can't believe it's a repeat. It's a repeat. I must have done something all right. One of the first repeat customers. But, yeah, Scott's back today specifically to talk about two things. You know, where we're doing a whole series based on how to get that first job, how to pick where you want to get that first job, mistakes, do's and don'ts, things like that.

So Scott has been a VP of sales probably at six or seven companies at least. And he has lots of stories about what to do, what not. to do. And then he's, I want to talk about what he's doing now, morph into what he's doing with the next organization and a fund to help fund startups in the Greenville area, I think. They'll require a lot of salespeople. So we'll start with the interviewing part. And so Scott and I go way back, we started together at the data stream company. And at that time, I mean, you were kind of a manager right off the bat, weren't you? I came in, actually, you may not even recall this, but this is my story of the small lifeboat that's attached to the bigger lifeboat.

I actually came in to try to get a startup going inside a startup. So this was the beginnings of I procure. Okay. And we were looking at things e-commerce related and trying to figure out how to do things with MRO parts. Yes. And I quickly figured out in watching you and Larry and Dan, you all were over there. there row in the boat and you know the boat had a had a needed a few patches and I'm over here in another little boat going hey let's do this other thing let's try to get this going and you know one

day I think you and I had a good conversation about it was like I'll get in the big boat and row with that for a little while so that was the beginning of corporate sales yeah um which was you know trying to take the the best of the best team that was on the inside and and and you know teach them how travel and present and talk and fly in planes. Yes, we're long pants. Maybe ask for bigger dollars for the most part. Yeah, that's right. So we had, at that time, a couple lessons there.

We had a big group of good inside salespeople very young. Scott had experienced as a serious corporate outside salesperson in Atlanta. And I was kind of put two and two together and said, why don't you start our group going out and doing bigger deals? It was exactly what happened. Yeah, so really, I mean, what I ended up doing early, early days was interviewing the people that you had already hired up and trained to, you know, be good on the phone. Yeah. And then interviewing that crew to see if they could, you know, walk upright and carry a, you know, a bag and go do that.

So for our Noob School crew, what are some of the things that you would want to see from somebody at that time to become an outside traveling salesperson? person versus an inside person. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously we had the inside track on knowing if they had a track record, right? So first is, can you perform in the job that you're already in? And can you describe that in a way that's kind of metric oriented? You know, don't just tell me like, oh, I did real good or I think I was a top guy or I think I'm the best.

Yeah. Give me numbers. You know, show me what you did. Yeah. And if you had some sort of a report that was like, this is. is my number compared to others even better. That's probably number one is just having the track record. And you and I would talk about the people aptitudes, right?

Like this guy may be better than this one, this gal may be better than this. So we had a little bit of that already. So you're saying, for their sake, if you can bring data. Bring data. Instead of just telling the story, you bring the data and show them. Yeah, yeah. Give me a prop of some sort of, if you have a track record, right? And if you have anything that you've ever sold, give me some sort of, you know, something for us to just look at and talk about as a data point.

I think that's probably the first. And, you know, it probably goes without saying, be prepared. You know your audience, right? Like, who are you talking to? Where has this person been? Yeah. What are they looking for? Like, what are those qualities that you think the hiring manager is looking for in X type of salesperson?

It's like, and I'm always amazed of, even with today, of the vast amount of information that's available on the internet, right? Clickety click, boom. Yeah. That people will show up and still be unprepared and not ask, not have the ammunition. Yeah. Ahead of time. Just, you know, pull out one little thing. I mean, everything about me is available.

It's like one, just pull one little thread. Something. That might even be, hey, I understand you like to map. mountain bike. Right. You know. Yeah. What's that alike? Yeah. Like just easy openers. Something. Yeah. Show some interest in your, in your audience. I totally agree. I totally agree. And I'll talk to some other folks, you know, you want to have almost like the flare thing. You want to have a little bit of flare, but not too much. You don't want to be like stalking Scott Millwood. Like, and you live there. Live on third house on the...

Right. You're youngest child. Yeah. You just want to have just something. Maybe something. Maybe something. where you have somewhat of a connection. Right. Right. Right. And, you know, the best interviews are usually a conversation. Right.

Versus a Q&A. You know, it's the give and take. What was Furman like? Yeah, yeah, it's the give and take. You know, it's a, and you can, can always tell when somebody's easy, easy in a conversation, particularly with someone who's older than them. It's like, I always tell my kids, like, you know, go talk to people that are more. much older than you, get used to that.

Be comfortable in that dialogue. Because that's a, that's a, that's sometimes as a challenge, people just get completely wowed by, by someone older or who they perceive to be more accomplished. Like, it's just a, it's just a person. Right. You know, have a conversation with them. Yeah. Be comfortable.

Yeah. Well, that's a really good point. It is for them, and again, it's easier said than done, but I remember we had at one time, we had the guy who made the decision for the biggest deal that we ever did, that you were a big part of, the Miami-Day deal, $30 million into the day deal. And this guy was CIO, big old tall guy, two-star general in the Air Force, been to Desert Storm, you know, kind of had him up on a placard of wall like John Wayne, but once we met him, we had him come to Greenville, and we all met him, and he's just a guy.

You know, and he was in the order of the Scottish... Scottish something. I don't know. I don't know. It just seemed very normal. And one of us kids killed him a hard time. And, you know, like the rest of us.

Yeah. You know, one of the, it's funny, you bring that up and thinking about being relatable. And I think I remember thinking back to, you know, hiring corporate sales at Datastream, right? A lot of people that came through outside, outside of Data Stream and inside. And a lot of times people would say,

oh, this is a perfect safety. sales guy, you know, he's just got that personality for sales. And I would always kind of like, that was my early warning, like, yellow flag, like, uh-oh, this is going to be a BSer. Right. It's just somebody who's got the gift of gab. The party guy. Right.

It's like, everybody likes to talk to this person. Yeah. And I'm immediately going, yeah, I've not had a lot of great experience. Usually, that's a person that you like, but they don't have that follow-through element of, you know, chop, chop, run the process, right? It's like we hired this guy at customer effective. And again, outside sales guy, his background,

he used to be an accountant. Bring the noise, Frank noise. Frank, if you're watching this, tell a story about you. Frank has this accounting background, and he's a Bostonian, and he's very matter of fact. And he's always got on a blue blazer on a white shirt and usually a tie.

It makes him very uncomfortable not have on a tie. And he runs a process that will drive everybody crazy, but it is effective. And he's not the guy at a party who's circulating and glad-handed. He's probably over by the door kind of looking around trying to make an escape to get out. But in the morning at 6.30, got a cup of coffee. He's running through his action plan. And he took this from our strategic selling, the Bosworth guys. Remember those guys?

We did big training of the corporate sales team to bring them up to speed on how to sell in an enterprise-level sale. He took that solution-selling methodology that we adapted at customer effective to use action plans, which really is just a closing plan. He expanded that into a project plan. And the project was, we're beginning it right now. Yeah. And yes, we're going to go to close of this deal, right? You're going to sign the agreement.

But he would connect that then to the actual implementation project plan and tie it all together. So what the customer was buying is the end result of their outcomes, right? Way out here. Not our outcome. Not the outcome of you signed the deal. It was. And a lot of times it would come back. round to, oh, well, if you needed to get this done by July, and we're sitting here in October,

we really have, we kind of needed to get this signed in August. Yeah. We're a little behind, right? But we can still make it. We'll get there. Yeah. So my point at all that is he took an approach that was very cut and dry, very matter of fact. And he's not that flower, you know, that gregarious person.

And he learned a lot from that. It's like, it's not personality. Yeah. You know, aptitude, will persistence, work the process. Yeah. Work, sound like Nick Saban, right? Yeah. Just work the process.

Yeah. I had a guy not too long ago who contacted me through LinkedIn. And I can't remember what he said, but it was so darn clever. It was like, found you on LinkedIn, John. You know, I think I know some of the people you know. I'm not sure if we're the right fit, but we can usually save companies. company is your size 20%? Could I come check that and see if I can save you money?

Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, how can you say no? I mean, he related to me a little bit. Maybe I can help you just one cup of coffee. Let's talk about it. And I said, what do I have to do? Because I won't spend any time on this.

He goes, let me talk to your bookkeeper, tell her, give me this stuff. And he said, yeah, this is what we can do. And it turned out to be a good thing for us. Wow. And he is not. You're going to drink a beer with me? Yeah. You know, we're not going to a football game.

Yeah, it's just doing the job. Just process. Yeah. And it really, I learned a lot from that because a lot of my interactions were people who are a little more, you know, into it. Another guy, Scott, Tim Dant was the head of the Hyatt at one time. And you and I both knew like Tom Voss and we knew a couple of those guys that were, because, you know, we did business with him. Tim took over and I went to meet him and he goes, now John just right up front.

you should know, I'm not going to be like the other guys. I don't like to drink beer. I don't like to party. I'm not going to be your buddy. He goes, but anything you guys need, I'll take care of it. He knew himself. He knew what he's going to be good at. Fair enough.

Yeah, yeah. Very fair. He just told me. Right. Right. So, yeah, I agree with you. I think when people try to lean too heavily on, hey, Scott, how are you? You know, I went to Clemson 2, you know, that kind of stuff.

What Scott's thinking about is, can this. guy helped me make my number or not. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So there's a, there's a, you know, back to kind of thinking about, you know, interviewing, right? And that front end, usually that's a nerve-wracking process, particularly the younger you are. You haven't done it a lot. So, yeah, I know you've said get reps, practice, just, you know, get more comfortable in doing that. But I think that, you know, and it's harder to do when you're young, but to know thyself, you know, to know what's your strength and your weakness. When you're young, you maybe don't completely know, but you can intuit what that is.

Are you that gregarious person? Okay, well, then maybe that'll work for you. Are you not maybe that person, but you know you have a will and determination to succeed and you've got a track record and whatever it is, right? It might be, hey, I was the, you know, I was the first chair violinist. Right. Whatever it is that you did, that you succeeded at, that you was, that you, that you, that you were excellent at, talk about that, right? Like, that's the thing that's, that makes you unique. Yeah. So what were some of the mistakes you've seen people make coming through your interview process?

Oh, man. I mean, I'll talk about the mistakes I made. Me too. Yeah, I mean, you know, the, you know, the showing up unprepared, right? I mean, it only takes a few times like that. I went to what I did not realize was an important job interview when I was a senior in college trying to get a job in advertising in New York. I thought I was prepared. I'd done an internship at Henderson advertising Greenville, South Carolina.

That's a great friend. You know, and it wasn't as easy as it is now to find out background on anybody, but I did not know that the guy that I was going to see was running this ad agency. I'd gotten a nice end from Jim Brandhorst at Henderson. And he was running the BMW account. And he literally asked me the question, so what do you know about us? And I'm like, I don't know a lot. You're an advertising agency in New York. And it was, I mean, I don't say it was over then, but it was one of those like, you walk out and you just go, man, I whiffed that one.

I wish that one pretty good. Need to say, I did not get a callback. Right, but I mean, it rewind the perfect world. You're like, well, of course, you guys are this, this, and this. And what I understand is you're getting big into automotive. In fact, you've got BMW yourself, and that's right in my backyard. In fact, I know Jim Wilkenhorst, who's the VP of, you know. Even simpler, John, all I really needed to do was use the relationship I already had with Brandhorst

to call him before. going to New York to say, hey, your buddy Bill, tell me a little bit about him. Yeah. Is there some background I should know on him? Yeah. But, you know, I just didn't know that that was what I should do is just to be prepared and use the resource. I mean, I could see here and say, that information ought to be on the Internet, blah, blah, blah.

Really, I should have just used the relationship that got me the interview to go back to him and say, what can you share with me about him and about what his work is? So really the first person who showed up who'd done that level of homework and was a good, you know, good conversationalist or whatever, probably got that job. Yeah, absolutely. Because most people were like me and you just kind of like, well, I got an interview in New York. See you later, you know. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, and I'll say the other thing that if you're, and you know this, if you've interviewed lots and lots and lots of people, it's easy to page down on somebody within the first three minutes. Yeah. It's kind of like, is this going to be a captivating dialogue? Yeah.

Or is this going to be a struggle, you know? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, so I'll usually try the open-ended questions. And so as an interviewee, you want to be prepared for the big, wide open interview question of like, so tell me about yourself. Yeah. And if it's a chronological pathway of like, well, I always. was born and I went to school and I did an X and as you can see on my resume I was a Y.

You know, it's like, right. Yeah, snooze fast. But if it's a personality trait or an attribute of characteristic, something that's like entertaining or interesting, it's like, well, you know, I raise rabbits in my, as a hobby and I erased them. Yeah, yeah. You race rabbits? What? I didn't even know there was a thing. So something, you know, some story.

Yeah. that makes you stand out from the other 20 people that are going to interview for that job. At least it gets your resume a scribble of some sort. It's like rabbit razor, like that. I'd be all over that. I want to see the YouTube's the whole thing. But I would add to that, again, be prepared for that they will just ask you about every single thing on the rest. Absolutely.

They're going to say, what was Furman like? What was it like playing tennis on the, you know? What was it like doing this? Racing rabbits, whatever it is. And then I'll say something, I suggest people say something about it quickly and then try to morph it back to the guy's company. Yeah. And say, that's why, you know, the racing experience we had, we're going to do them a little

short promotional videos, which I know you guys are doing with BMW, you know, and so you don't do it every time. Yeah. But try to flip it back. Relating it back and tying it back in. Yeah. Yeah. And anything that you can, if you can bring something to the.

the interview that it is the standout, right? So who shows up with the results of their last job in writing? Like, as you can see, you know, that's like, wow, okay, that stands out or something that you've been great at in the past. Yeah. That always is a good one. You know, it's a, I know there are personality traits that go in it, but we always found ourselves, you know, I'd go to customer effective where we hired tons more consultants than we did salespeople. The salespeople we hired were bigger hits or misses because of just the swing in revenue. Yeah.

We heard a lot of consultants, though. Not as big a hit on swinging revenue back and forth, but the long run, we ended up figuring out that you have to hire on aptitude and attitude more than anything. Because you can generally, with somebody's got a good attitude, that goes a long way. They have the aptitude, meaning they can actually do the work. Yeah. Great. If you hire based on just pure experience of has this person done this exact thing before,

usually that's a lower probability hit. Right. Abtitude and attitude, you can skill somebody up. You can put them through training. You can invest in them. But it's really difficult to change attitude. So such an important point. I totally agree with you.

And most hiring managers do it wrong, particularly smaller companies that don't know any better. They want to go hire someone who knows how to sell this stuff. And boy, it does not work. I can't even explain to you why it doesn't work. Maybe because if they were that good, they wouldn't be available. They still be doing it somewhere. Yeah, they wouldn't be available. So, you know.

So, but here's where you can flip it for the Noob School folks. So many of them believe, well, if I just had the experience. And so they believe they're not going to get the job because they don't have the experience. And they ought to flip it and say, I'm perfect. I'm perfect because I'm moldable. I haven't been trained yet. Your company can train me exactly how to do it. I've got an interest in what y'all do.

So don't you have a training program, Scott? I'm investable and I'm coachable. Yeah. Right, right. Invest in me because you can coach me up. I've got a great attitude. Entry level. I'm going to be your next greatest salesperson.

I just need some investment. Oh, yeah. I remember, Scott, you and I, of course, we've bitten this hook before, right? When we're like, we've got to go find some really good salespeople. That's right. We've got to go find some really good ones from Oracle and places like that. And it doesn't matter how much we pay them because they're going to be selling so much. And first of all, we did pay them.

They didn't sell so much. And they were impossible to manage. That's a hard lesson to learn. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. Hard less than words. We did it, though. We bit the hook.

Yeah. Well, you know, we'd absolutely bit the hook. No doubt. No doubt. You know, actually this morning, I was out talking with a guy at a very successful founder, CEO of Systems Integration Company. Yeah. We were talking about a salesperson who wasn't really a dyed in the wool salesperson. It's kind of biz dev person at a marketing firm prior.

And I referred him to. to this guy probably four years ago. And I asked him like, you know, how's he doing? It's like, you know, he finally came around. I'm like, wow. It's like, that's a long investment. It's like, yeah, you know, we knew he had the right aptitude, right? And we knew he'd finally catch.

And what he said was interesting. He's like, he's finally carving his own path. And he said, you know what I mean? And I'm like, that's a good way to describe it. I do. Meaning he's owning it. He's generating his own business. It's not being fed to him. He's generating his own business. And he's closing his own pipeline and owning the progress of it all the way through. And that's one of those signs of like, okay, I mean, four years later, for this guy, that's probably generating four or five million dollars in revenue. Yeah. You know, at that kind of

enterprise level of stuff. He probably sold a couple hundred grand in the first year, million the second. But when you own it and you're carving your own path, you're now at that level. So, you know, you can do – he's got a job as long as he wants it now because he's figured out how to make that fly. That's great. But let's – we can jump in and out of interviewing do's and don'ts as much as you want, but why don't we switch on over to what you're doing now. When you – after data stream's success, you had your own company that you and Michael started, a customer effective that you built and sold Hotachi.

Right. And then you started another company called Yes, Flo. Have you, is that sold now? Or is you, the process? We are exiting. Yes. Purchase agreement signed to a very familiar company. Not going to say who it is.

You can't say that on air. And, you know, that should happen here very shortly. So, you know, another one in the book, so speak. Good, good. So you don't, you're not going to sit on the beach too long, I wouldn't think. So you're already started. a new company. And I'm, why don't you, first of all, I'll just say, before you explain it, I'll say this is going to be great for Greenville.

It's going to create tons of sales jobs for tech startups. So tell us what we hope. That's what we hope. Yeah. So this is kind of an evolution of what I've been working on for years. I got started an entrepreneurial support organization with several other tech founders. in 2006, got pulled back into that in 2017-2018 as board chair and through a long convoluted path of one CEO leaving and doing an executive search and hiring a new CEO and recasting the board

and pulling it. A lot of gyrations, four years of really looking at, well, how well is this entrepreneur or support organization actually doing and serving the needs of the founders in our communities. This is all, you know, really Greenville. Yeah. And, you know, by my judgment, we're doing okay. Yeah. You know, we've done okay.

There have been some good, some good base hits. We just had a venture summit, which you have been a part of graciously in the past to, you sit on a panel. Alex runs his board chair of that. And we had 300 attendees, 35 VCs, and 100 applications narrowed down to 10, got a lot of spotlight on them. Great success. You know, really, really good, you know, results on the surveys afterward, really high 76 NPS score, you know, for those who know what that is. So we've hit some, we've had some nice successes.

But we've seen in our little Greenville community kind of a tapping out a gap between where founders can get help and where they don't get help. So where we see founders getting help is once they've gotten to about a million in recurring revenue, 50, 60, 70 percent year-over-year growth, got a nice customer base, product has proven. things are kind of working well. Well, there's a lot of VC that will fund that business, right? That's a, you know, I'll call it a darling, right? So you're already hit darling stage. Well, how do you get to that? You know, what are those in the mud steps that you have to go through?

And as you know, I mean, you've done this. It's really freaking hard to get out of the mud. Yeah. So what we're seeing is this gap, right? They can't get funding. Maybe they've got product market fit. maybe they got a first customer. Maybe they have a little bit of revenue.

Probably a person or two or three that has pulled us off with their own writing of checks. Maybe it's family and friends. And now they're sort of tapped out. It's like, well, they've had some success. But now their job is, well, what do I do next? If I go to the VC, well, the VC are going to go, now come back and see us when you've shown year over year, 50, 70 percent growth. Yeah.

And you've gotten to a million. Well, who do you go see? Right? So a lot of folks will spend time in Greenville, and you've been hit on this before. Hey, John, I got this great idea. All I need is 25K. I just need another 50K. And I just got to get it to here. I think that'll get us this new hire, whatever it may be. And we've all done that. We've all written those checks and look around and go, what happened with that one, right? Yeah. So Shea Hauser had just exited U-turn back in the summer, and he came to me and to several others like, I want to get something going again. I don't want to start something from scratch.

I think I sense from talking to some of the founders around town, there's a problem. Like, yeah, we got pipes built. There's no gas in the pipes. They're missing funding. But really a lot of what they're missing as well is leadership and guidance from the people who have done it before, the experience, right? Yeah, yeah. So here's the concept.

The thesis of this thing is exited Greenville founders and current successful CEO founders investing back into a new next wave of Greenville founders. With all of that being done in a 12 square mile area, right? Keeping that money local and putting founders in front of founders so they can help each other to grow. Shea and I are going to put together this thing called a venture studio, which is us and some of the other founders coming together to work on this thing 24-7 with six to eight companies that'll be in that, probably take us two years to get the right ones picked, and we're going to raise a small microfund, five million. So not a lot of money. We put that

to work in three to 400k each, you know, maybe with a follow. on three to four hundred, maybe we level up to stay, you know, status quo in the A round. And we think we're going to find, you know, a handful of these founders that are, that are going to do really, really well. So if you found 10 in your first class, 10 to invest in it, you might use like 300,000 per and put 3 million of that to work over the first year. And we might follow on. So you might have half million in each one of them, you know, over time. And we'll try to get them from, we've got a classic one right now that's 150,000 in recurring revenue. Product is built, V1, but it's deployed with some enterprise grade, referenceable customers who have awarded them supplier of the year designation.

And it's like, okay, well, these are high quality guys. Their products out there. It probably needs more work. They don't have a sales team. So that's the first role we're looking for is we've got to get a salesperson. And we know we can't afford in this construct. We can't afford a high VP of sales experience. This is going to be hiring.

The ideal candidate is you in 1986. Right? It's like somebody that can go the distance that can come in and will sit there and make the calls and do the deals at this level. and can hire and grow and keep going. And I mean, you know you're a rare individual that came in there and went all the way. No. But we know they're out there.

Well, yeah, that's cool. So for the Noob School folks, if you had 10 of those companies, it does sound so familiar, this company you're talking about, I mean, they're doing well. They don't have a salesperson. I mean, all you got to do is get a couple of, you know, two good salespeople in there. But would each company, would you think they'd have one to three sales people? Yes. Okay.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And then if you got that kind of job, you'd be kind of probably entry level or maybe a little bit of experience, but you'd have a chance to learn the startup game and eventually get a piece of the pie. Right. Okay. Absolutely. Same as you and I did.

Yeah. Right. You come in, it's a lower number. Yeah. Than probably what you think you're worth. Yeah. But you're going to, just like we did. Yeah.

You're going to learn from founders who are already there. You see how they do it. Maybe, I mean, my first sales job out of grad school, I got a little, you know, bucket of options. And then I ended up buying some options from one of the dummy salespeople who was leaving the company and willing to sell them. So when we ended up going public in that thing, I had a little, you know, a little equity. And I kind of got a feel for like, oh, this is cool. And then same thing with data stream. Yeah.

I would think for the Noob school folks, if they got into something like that as a salesperson, you know, it's probably, don't think about that specific job as the end all. It's like you're just getting, you're getting into the game. Getting into the game. And the game might not end with this one. It might be this one or this one, but you're learning how to do it. And one of the things I think that that company is going to need to find is more than just a salesperson, is what is the market?

Who are the people that might buy it? Can you get your hands on them? Can you start to pulse them? Absolutely. Find out who's interested in talking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I made the mistake before getting salespeople before marketing. Yep.

And that doesn't do anything. They've got to have someone to call. Got to have somebody to call. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's, and what we see, I mean, it's kind of my bent is I look at anything that's already got a product built with a customer. Yeah.

I'm like, okay, that's half the battle. Yeah. And now we just got to figure out, well, how do we sell that product, right? And how do we repeat that thing over and over again? So it's not a one-off every time. Can we repeat the same, you know, same rhythm? Is there a process here that's, you know, not a custom sale every single time

or a custom delivery? It's like a repeatable process and a repeatable sale. Then you can find somebody that can figure out how to, you know, fare it in there and do that over and over and over again. I'm like you. I think you really kind of have a. of, you know, use Larry's like a real company, as soon as you have customers paying you money on a regular basis that roughly match up to what you have to spend, that's a company.

Because from there, you can make adjustments and raise money. But the people who are like, I've got this idea, I mean, Scott have an idea, we'd like to raise a million dollars. Like, that's tough. Right. That's very tough. Yeah. I mean, and I lean towards anything.

And you're right. I mean, Larry was awesome on this. you have a real company when you have customers that pay you money for your product or service. Like, okay, well, everything else is just what? Right. Not a real company yet. No. You know, not a real company yet.

Yeah. So I definitely lean towards evaluating our targets to invest in to those scrappy founders who have figured out some way, some way to sell something. Right. I don't care if they gave the product away, but they sold. 150 hours of their consulting time to deliver it. Okay. You scratched the pad, right? And the product is now in place at a customer that you can call up and say,

hello, I have customer number two. Can you reference from me? Huge, huge, because you know how hard that is to do? One of the guys at one of those next conferences you were talking about, it was a couple years ago. And he hit, you know, he'd hit home run. He crushed it. And they were asking him how in the world he did that.

Of course, that's what we want to know. And he gave just this very sober answer. He's like, well, we didn't have any money. But we knew this industry real well. Yeah. And so we started consulting in that industry. Oh, absolutely. While at the same time on the side, we're building the product that fit this industry.

And so as we're learning more and getting paid, we kept making this product better, and eventually we started selling it back to the same customers. Right. Until we didn't have to consult anymore. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So John Scott, Scopstack, who's local company, has been now five years in the making. And he came through the next VMS, the mentoring service that we offer. And the first time he showed up, it was an idea.

He was working for a corporate in a pre-sales sales engineer role. He's like, I think there's a better way to write scope documents. Like, yeah, that, I mean, from my customer effective and data stream day is like, that's a pain. Yeah. He's like, I think I've got a better way to do that. So he described what he wanted to do. The feedback immediately was don't quit your day job, you know, keep building that kind of side hustle, test it. And then a little later, six months later, is like, go get a consulting job with that, right?

Just see if you can land a consulting gig. with one of these targets on your idea. He did. They kind of helped him fund the product. So fast forward that thing a little bit, and he's now obviously left his corporate job. He burned the boats, out on his own, did it through his own bootstrapping,

and now he's raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and he's headed towards a million in recurring. Now that's five years, right? So the goal of what we're doing with the next founder fund is can we compress that five years down to two and a half? Yeah. Right. Could we take that and say, okay, look, that's a brilliant idea. Still, don't quit your day job.

But when you get that first customer on consulting, okay, here we're funding. Right. Now let's go do it and go ahead and market and hire a salesperson and build the product the right way. And maybe we cut off, you know, two years of that hard work. to make that happen. So just to wrap it up, what's the name of the new company? The next Founders Fund. Next Founders Fund.

And people, are you actively seeking investments in the fund? Actively seeking limited partners in the fund. Their funds would be used to fund these companies, and hopefully we get more big companies. You make money from the fund. Right, right. And actively seeking targets to invest in in Greenville. Okay, in Greenville. Are you looking for anything else?

You're looking for people, any other help or anything? I think the biggest thing right now is really the both sides of that coin, right? We get funding line up and we get our half dozen good targets that we'll start due diligence on. And that's a good starting process. We'll have some other things that will come out of that. Certainly we're going to hire sales. We'll most likely hire marketing. We'll probably leave product development to a latter stage because it's, you know,

expensive hire. Sure. And we can outsource some of this early stage stuff. And most of the companies we're talking to have already gotten a little stub of a product already done in their own way. Right. Yeah. Okay.

Well, thank you. You have a lot of things you could be doing with your time. And we appreciate that you're putting those efforts towards our community. And you've already been doing it, you know, for many years on the side. So I'm glad you're making it full time. and hopefully we'll get you some moves school folks to help. It'd be great. All right.

Thank you, man. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.