Noob School - The Extensive Career of the "Swamp Fox": John Warner

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Today on Noob School, we’re joined by an old friend - John Warner. John takes a look back his extensive career, hitting on some of the key points that ensure success, such as the importance of hiring the right people for the job, all the while lending his experience to any sales Noobs out there who are looking to take theirs to the next level. John also has a new book soon to be released, hopefully by the end of this month - February 2024. Tune in for a lesson in best practices, and you’ll leave with a better understanding of what it looks like to lead a fulfilled life and career. Check out what the Noob School website has to offer: https://SchoolForNoobs.com I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School, everybody. Today I've got another wonderful old friend, I think, going back maybe 30 years or maybe a little bit more. Long time ago. A long time ago. John Warner, John has literally been a friend since back then, and John today has become a very sought-after speaker on entrepreneurship. He's written a couple of books on entrepreneurship. and he's written one about to be released on artificial intelligence

and how it relates to kind of what's going on in the entrepreneurial world. He's been on the radio a lot on, I guess it was NPR. About 20 years. 20 years of NPR. So everyone probably knows his voice. He's the Swamp Fox on NPR. But anyway, we're friends and thought we should have him on the podcast and just kind of hear his story.

Hopefully some of that story will help our listeners as they navigate their their lives as well. So welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. Amen. Well, let's start in the beginning. I know you grew up in Charleston. I did. And which high school did you go to? I went to a small school called College Preparatory School. It was on Archdale Street right across Mutarian Church in downtown Charleston. I lived almost to Somerville, so that was a pretty good hike to school every day. Right, right. And that's before, you know, you didn't have your phone to look at. No, you didn't. And standard transmission, which kids today have never seen.

Right, right. Wow. Okay. Well, Charleston, I mean, would you say Charleston's changed a whole lot since then? Oh, of course. Absolutely. What's different? Well, you know, when I was growing up South Abroad was a middle-income neighborhood.

Uh-huh. And today, unfortunately, a lot of those houses, somebody lives in five, six weeks a year. Right. They're ended by people in Connecticut and New York. So it's changed a lot in that way. Greenville and Charleston have a lot in common in South Carolina in that per capita income and educational attainment both Greenville and Charleston is comparable to Riley and Austin, Texas. It's not true for the state as a whole.

And there are too many other places in the state where that is true. So kind of the two bright spots in that regard is Charleston-Mount Pleasant in Greenville. And why didn't Columbia fall into that? You know, that's a really good question. You know, just speaking from Greenville's perspective, and we have a long tradition of public-private partnerships, don't we? Going back, you know, several decades, and whether it's the Peace Center or Floorfield or Falls Park or whatever,

and we just, it's part of our culture. And Columbia just has a hard time kind of getting that together. You know, they have a hard time building those kinds of partnerships and being able to move forward. And you would think, you know, with the university downtown, they had a big advantage, but I guess they also have the legislature, which is big negative in terms of whatever Columbia does. So it's just a different place.

Yeah. I think you're right. I think they have some tremendous advantages with the university being right there. And also, you know, so much of our tax money kind of goes there and then doesn't make it back out, right? So a lot of us there. But they still don't have a great. great city.

Right. You know, so something's not working. And I think in our case, I mean, Charleston, you know, it's just in such a beautiful place in the world. I think things are just attracted to it to some degree. But they had Riley for all those decades kind of leading it. And we've had, in our lifetimes, you've had what, four mayors? We've had four mayors, but Knox has been mayor for a while.

He has been. So, you know, he's been mayor since the mid-90s. And, you know, Charleston and Columbia and Greenville are roughly the same size, but Charleston's got the port, it's got tourism, Columbia, as you mentioned, has got the state government and the University of South Carolina. All Gravill's got is business. That's all we have. Isn't that one of those things where you turn your disadvantage into an advantage? Since we don't have those other things, we kind of have to make it business? I think that's a big advantage for us is that we have, you know, we

much more industrial, much more business-oriented than the rest of the state. The upstate as a whole is. After high school in Charleston, you went to Clemson? I went to undergraduate school of Clemson, and then went to graduate business school at Georgia. Okay. And you major in accounting? Majored in accounting. Okay. Yep. And how did you know you wanted to learn that field? Because I failed an architect. Is that a bad question? Well, I went to Clemson to be in Arkansas. and you had to interview with the dean at the time, and his name was Harlan McClure, and he told me I wouldn't survive two years.

And I stayed two years just to spite him pretty much. But he was right. I mean, it wasn't a talent that I had. And so I'd taken some economics classes and couldn't quite figure out what to do with that degree. So got into accounting thinking it was a practical application of economics, which of course is wrong. And anyway, I got a degree from Clemson. And then I had a professor at Clemson said, you need to go to graduate school. And I grew up in kind of a lower middle-income family and had no really idea what that was.

And he told me to go to Athens and talk to this professor, Earl Davis, and I did. The next thing I know, I was in graduate school of Georgia and all on the, you know, recommendation of this Clemson professor. And then bumped into a professional. I was in the recruiting lounge and bumped into a CPA from Greenville, Charles Butler. and we just happened to have the same 30-minute break, and we started talking, and he said, would you be interesting coming to Greenville?

And, you know, I'd been to Clemville one time when I was at Clemson. We'd gone to the Greenville Mall when it opened. Other than that, I knew nothing about it. And so I came to dinner, and next thing I know, I've been here 43 years. Well, that's good for us. I'm glad that happened that way. Interesting. So I'm curious, what is the,

what is the guy, what kind of questions does he ask you about architecture that makes him believe you're not going to be a good architect? Well, that's good. That's a good question, but it was also 50 years ago, so I'm not sure I can tell you. I'm not sure I can tell you in detail.

But I, you know, I went to high school in downtown Charleston, so I was drawing old historic buildings and I had the portfolio of work that I brought with me, and I thought it was pretty good, but obviously he'd been doing this a really long time. and, you know, he could look at what I did, and, you know, this probably ain't going to be for you. And exactly what he saw, I don't know.

And he wasn't ugly about it. I mean, he let me in. You know, I had good grades and I had done the work, and he gave me a shot. Maybe he told everybody that. I don't know. I just know he told me. And, but it was a very visual discipline, and I'm a very analytical person. I mean, you know, Devin's on the left, credits on the right.

I got that. You know, that's no problem. But the visual part of it, I wasn't particularly talented in. And he'd been doing this a long time, and he just sensed that. And he was right. Yeah. So you ended up with Pete Marwick, which became today's KPMG. And how long were you with that company?

I was with them eight years. And it was an amazing entrepreneurial time. I mean, some of my clients were Ryan's founding me, steakhouses, which was the best performing stock on the NASDAQ at the time, Tellman, which was a long-distance phone company, went public, baby super stores, which became Babies R-R-S, part of Toys R-R-S. Datastream wasn't a client, but, of course, D-A-Stream was a very successful company at that time. So during the 80s, I mean, Greenwood was a pretty entrepreneurial place in a way I think a lot of people don't really appreciate.

I agree. I mean, of course, I hit the scene right then and joined one of these growing companies. My brother joined Tellman right out of college, and I joined Datastream by that college. and I joined data stream by that college. Like, we thought this was normal. Right. Like, where's the next one? Right.

They're not so easy to find. Neither is Ryan's. I mean, that company was just going crazy. Baby Superstore. Now, how did you, as a young CPA, get those cushy, not cushy, but those wonderful gigs with those companies? You know, that's kind of funny because nobody else wanted to do it.

I mean, they all wanted to work on the big companies. Oh, okay. You know, the BMWs and the global companies. Okay. And so there was the real estate practice and there was the international practice. And I used to tell people I had the cereal practice. I got all the fruit flakes and nuts. I got all the entrepreneurs.

Yeah, yeah. Layton Coverage and those guys. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. So can you tell me what you learned from each one of those, those couple of real great companies you worked for? Well, Alvin McCall was the founder of Ryan's.

and we used to go to lunch there fairly frequently because they were a client. And I just remember Album Call sitting in the first booth, you know, Ryan's on Lawrence Road, and he would watch customers the whole time. He'd watch them come in and watch him go out. You know, and they made several changes to the Ryan's format during that time. And he had just, he was a great student of who was coming into his store, you know. Tellman, I mean, the big takeaway from that was they started a long-distance phone company. Judge Green had deregulated AT&T, which caused lots of small startup long-distance companies to start.

And Richard Ingram was the real founder of it. He put together a team, Charlie Hauser and some others. And they just anticipated that all these telephone companies were going to have to consolidate. And so they built Tellman to be a platform that somebody would buy and consolidate. And they made a lot of money. But it was because they really strategically thought through that clearly. You know, Jack Tate was a Harvard MBA, and he saw the baby boom. And, you know, the baby boom was going to have babies.

And that was really where, you know, babies are us came from and our baby superstores. And so he really did his homework on, you know, the market research and the demographics and, you know, quite frankly, didn't run the company all that well. But it just grew so fast and it was so big that, you know, somebody came along and paid him a lot of money for it. Toys R Us, right? Yeah, right. So the things I remember, first of all, about Ryan's, they were a little before, I guess I was still in college when they were rolling. And I got to know that some of their store managers were Citadel. grads. Yeah. And so they were hiring these young, aggressive citadel grads and making them store

managers, and they were quickly, you know, making the numbers good, making really good money right out of school. And it kind of planted the seed for me when we started doing our hiring is to go find those same kind of people and put them in data stream. It's all about people, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you got to get the right people on the bus. Yeah, how come one steakhouse is 10 times better than the other one? It's because of people, right? Because of the people. Right. Well, you know, the interesting thing about Ryan's is that was not the first

Steakhouse change Alvin McCallage started. I mean, he had opened about five or six stores. And, you know, that was where his prototypes. He kind of tested out his ideas. And he sold those to Jerry Richardson and Spartanburg. That became Quincy's. And so now he took what he learned and he started Ryan's. And so he had a proven model from store one.

But Alvin was the founder of both Quincy's and Ryan. That's so strong. Yeah, pretty special. The big lessons for me from Ryans was they had a, their office was a house on Wade Hampton Boulevard and the top floor, they cleaned out all the walls and so they had what they called a war room and it's just covered in maps. I mean, it's like Sherman coming into Atlanta, you know. And they were going into Atlanta at the time and they would drive around Atlanta and they

would find an intersection that intuitively they thought, you know, felt pretty good and they would come back and they put a pin on the map and they'd order the demographics around it. And so where the science of the demographics met up with the art of their intuition, that's where they'd open a store. So 200 stores, they'd never had a failure, which is why they were the best performing stock on the NASDAQ. And I was supposed to be tick and tying down in the basement. I'm up talking to the real estate people about how they're doing that.

You know, and fast forward 10 years, and I meet a hippie in North Carolina, running an organic grocery store chain called Earth Air. Yeah. And, you know, their demographics was vegetarians. Half their customers were vegetarians. Ryan's had a very demographic-oriented model, too. They were looking for, you know, upper blue collar, 3.2 children, married, overweight. Not overweight parts of a joke.

But, and so I saw, you know, Roger with this demographic, that was a very strong demographic in his store, and reached back out to some of the folks that I knew from Ryan's days, you know, years earlier. and put together the store location model for Earthfair. So the dirty secret of Earthfair was its store location model was the steakhouse, a store location model with the demographics changed. And, you know, I found that that kind of thing, you've probably seen this too, where people that have been really successful

are able to do that, take, you know, a chunk from their prior experience and apply it, you know, in the future. I mean, you wouldn't think an organic grocery store and a steakhouse chain had much in common. But the ability, you know, how you went about finding a location and opening a store wasn't all that different. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I agree. I agree. But I want to ask you just sequentially for the viewers. Clemson, grad school, KPMG, eight years. That puts you at about 32, 33. Yep. And then what? So then there was my animus, horribalous year.

I had a client that decided it was a good idea to buy Samoy Sports World. And so he came and wanted me to be the chief financial officer, and I said, I got a job. I don't need a job. So he said, well, I gave you a third of the company. Again, I'm 32. I grew up in kind of a lower middle income family, so that was a big deal. So I leave and help him. and we closed in June of 1990 and within 60 days,

George Bush raised taxes and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and we had a recession. Sam Weiss was losing money. We did not have a recession built into this business plan. And so it was just, it was a horrible year. Yeah. And a year later, I left and my partner hung around for a little bit after that. But, you know, it was just one of those things, you know,

it seemed like such a good idea. at the time, but almost from the beginning, it just fell apart. And, you know, if you live this lifestyle, it's rollercoaster in it. You take your chances. I mean, you got to be willing to deal with that volatility because it's not a straight line. You know, it's not a, you're not climbing the ladder to corporation. No, I agree, but I just want to point out to the viewers, the way you set your career up to get to this position. was, I think, just right, really.

I mean, you went to a local school, got a good degree, another local school got a good graduate degree in a field that's very applicable to entrepreneurship, right? You need to understand how the language of business to be very effective. And then your job, they were paying you handsomely to go around and get under the covers

of the best companies in Greenville. You weren't over there at Michelin looking at their stuff. You were at the best companies learning, right? It was a very interesting ride, that's for sure. Yeah. And we were dealing with some pretty creative entrepreneurial people. And, I mean, the accounting was one thing. You're right.

I mean, you know, not only did you get to talk to these people, but in accounting, you know, you know the secrets of their financial statements. So you're digging into their business pretty deep and trying to understand it. But I think the thing I got the most out of that was just getting exposed to the business community. in Greenville at a pretty high level because we were regularly working with the CEO and CFO. And, you know, I'm in my 20s. And it was interesting. One of the things somebody at P. Mark told me early on was to call clients by their first name. So I wouldn't call you, Mr. Sterling.

I would call you John. And we did that with everybody. And it worked. I mean, you know, in the South, that sounds a bit disrespectful. But it kind of puts you a bit of a peer. You know? And another thing they told us was, you know, in a public accounting firm, I mean, you're on the bottom rung of the ladder. And so you feel like you don't know much and you're not, you know, really prepared.

But when you go out to the client, you're the expert. Act like it. Yeah. You know, and so those two things together, you know, to have this mental attitude that you know what you're talking about and to talk to people like their peers. And to do that with the leadership, the business leadership. in the city. I mean, that's really probably the biggest thing that I got out of that eight years plus working with these really successful entrepreneurial companies. Well, I had a small snippet story on you from those days because, you know, the way I met you was you asked me and my dad

to drive with you to Charlotte for a basketball game. Yeah. And, you know, to me it's kind of was like, what is he doing this? He goes, well, no, you know, my dad's, he's just entertaining us. He's taking us up there to get to know us and whatever for something down the road. And I'm sure you did that with lots of people, right? And it's just so obvious that what a smart thing that is to do if you're taking the long view of things. Like if you were trying to get me to sign a contract to buy something right now and said, I'll take you to the football game, I think, well, that's kind of weird.

But if you said, I don't want anything. I just want to get to know you. Hopefully we'll do some business over the next 40 years. You know, that's exactly what happened. So closing that loop after Sam Weish, the managing partner of KPM, which he was Daryl Hunter, and he had gone to work for Barton Tuck in a company called Golf South. And I was around trying to talk to some of the people that have been clients about investing in entrepreneurial companies. Today we would call that an angel fund.

I never heard that word at the time. That's what you would call it today. And one of the people we went to talk to was your father. So he was one of the 15 core people, you know, that got it off the ground. So you're right. I mean, it helps when you can go talk to somebody and you know who they are and they know who you are. You know, you get over that kind of personal thing. And now it's just a good idea question.

Yeah. And I think that there's such a difference. First of all, with someone who might be someone a business partner somewhere down the road or customer or whatever, you can certainly do nothing. That's one choice. or you could do something small, like send them an email and say, I'm here for you if I can help you someday or here's a, you know,

you know, a Christmas ham or something, you know, just something, kind of a throwaway thing. Or there's something big. It's like, I'm going to take you over to the Clemson game on the bus. I want to take you to the Charlotte game or Atlanta or something bigger than just normal

and it establishes this link. I can still remember the game. I remember it was Utah and I remember him alone had 52 points and, you know, and we only did it once, but that's, it established something. Right. Well, you know, the other thing that, and Charles Butler at Pete Marwick taught me this, and Charles still lives in the upstate, this was really powerful.

I know, you know, you like to talk about sales. And so what he taught me to do was to go to clients, go to lunch with clients, and ask them what their problems were and shut up and listen. And they would tell you what their problems were, right? And you come back with a proposal, says, I can help you with this and this and this and this. And they'd almost always do it because they just told you. That was something they would listen to. I actually had a client, and he was buying a company in New York.

And I said, you need to take me with you. And he said, well, why would I do that? I said, because, you know, it's going to cost you X amount of money. And if it's not worth it to you, you don't have to pay me. I mean, the partner that was with me almost fell off in the floor. I mean, she just hyperventilated. You know, what do you do? you don't have to take vacation if he doesn't pay you kind of thing.

And so I go up there and we spend a few days and, you know, go over all these meetings with him. And again, you know, I'm 20-something years old. This guy's a 50-something-year-old CEO and we're up in New York doing a deal together. And get back to Greenville and I write him a letter. And about six pages. And the first letter says, I don't know anything about the apparel industry. You know, I'm not an expert, you know, yada, yada, yada. But you paid me, so here's what I think.

And it took Pete Mark several days to figure out, whether they were going to let me to send this letter because they didn't think I had the, you know, the expertise to apply. I said, he knew it when he hired me. And the first paragraph of the letter says, you know. I don't know. I don't know anything. And he paid me and everything was good and everything was happy.

But it's just that, you know, kind of listening to, you know, their problems. And that's been very useful to me kind of throughout my career. And, you know, what I've been the most successful is when I did the best job of kind of understanding where a client or a customer was coming from and where I have failed the most is when I assumed I knew and we did charge and forward and turns out that I was solving a problem that nobody had. Right. Yeah.

For anyone listening to John here, that's sales. That's sales in a nutshell. If you can get people to open up and tell you what their problems are and perhaps quantify them to dollars and then try to try to. solve the problems for them. I mean, sometimes they will select you to solve their problems only because you figured it out. Maybe I don't know if you can solve it or not. It's like, well, John Warner, he heard me. And I think he can figure this out. Or he's figured it out before. Yeah, he's figured out. Right? He's done it before, so he can probably do this. And that's the

reputation you want, right? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that sells in a nutshell. And the longer you're in the game like me and you, the harder it is to do it right, because you're, you're you want to just say, listen. I know exactly what's going on here, and this is what you want to do. And people don't want to hear that. They push back, right? Right. Well, the Angel Fund we formed, we raised about $15 million from about 150 wealthy people in Greenville,

which, you know, in New York's not a rounding error, but in Greenville, Sack, gone in 1995, that was a chunk of change, probably still a chunk of change. And, you know, that was listening. You know, you would go to talk to people, you'd bring them into investment, you'd listen to their concerns, and that got factored into the next person you talked to. And I got John to where I could walk into somebody, sit down, and within about five minutes, I could tell you, well, I could definitely tell you if you were not going to do it, right?

And we just, this conversation just needed to end, and we need to be talking about something fun. And I really kind of got to the point where, but when I walked out the door, I was generally right whether you do it or not. And that's just listening to people and kind of understanding where they're coming from. And, you know, what are those triggers?

You know, if people ask certain questions, they're trying to talk themselves into it. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that's true. Well, so going back to the timeline, after KPMG, you're 33, you get pulled into Sam Whitech as a CFO with a third equity, third of the equity, and it didn't work. Didn't work. Which is completely okay in the entrepreneurial world, right? You set yourself up for a chance?

I should have had you tell my wife that, because she was not happy, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mine's gotten used to it. So then what happened? Well, then we started this Angel Fund, and we started investing in entrepreneurial companies, and we had some small failures that didn't work, but then we made some investments in things that, you know, we're doing okay. And we put together this marketing book that kind of explained what the company was called Capital Insights.

And the first part of the book was about an entrepreneur we invested in a guy named Errol Corolla, who ran a company called Special Electronics in Landrum. And the back half of the book was about Bill orders, orders distributing. And they were about 20 years apart and age. And I don't know that the book ever said it, but definitely the message was Bill had been Errol 20 years earlier. And that was part of what people bought into, you know, that folks that had been very successful kind of investing in the generation before them. So we invested in, I don't know, maybe a dozen different companies over seven eight years. By far and away, the most successful was Earthfare.

We grew it to a chain of about 15 stores and sold it to a private equity firm. I loved Earthfare. I used to go to the one on Gusta almost every day for a little bit. little while. As long as it was open. Yeah, it wasn't open all that long. Yeah.

Where was it before? Was that, that's, is that the only location in Greenville? Well, the earth fair that's been in

Greenville, the longest is on Pelham Road. Okay, Pelham. Yeah, I haven't been over there. I used to go to the one in Charleston

briefly. Now, there's still one in South Windermere in Charleston. That's actually the second. That's the first one I opened. Okay.

With South Windomere. Yeah, I like South Windhamere. Well, it's cool. So you, so you, it's kind of bold, I think, to go, you know, I would say normally you consider a CPA to be kind of a conservative, more conservative type person. You're a little bit out of the mold there.

Out of the mold is a safe way to put it, yeah. But then to go do something that doesn't work. Right. And then to say, well, my solution is I'm going to start an angel fund. I would have thought maybe you go back to work for a little while. Yeah, yeah, my wife thought that was. Yeah. Yeah, no, I went in, I went in charge ahead and then, you know, get to 2000 and, you know, the Internet bubble, you know, blew up and then popped. Yeah. And all these wealthy people saw their, you know, their stock portfolio melt down. Yeah.

And they said they, you know, they couldn't invest more money until they started getting some of what we had invested back. And that just took time. And what I do to force that? So my largest investor was the chief financial officer of Kemet. which was a New York Stock Exchange company. And believe it or not, he and the CEO didn't like going to New York deal with analysts. So he basically hired me to do that. And I did that from about 2000, 2005.

Quite frankly, that was a blast. I mean, if you want people that have expense accounts, you go talk to analysts on Wall Street. Me, those people drink some expensive wine. So I had a good time doing it. But, you know, wasn't one of those things I thought I would ever do. You know, it was kind of what we were working on had. run into this dead end and it had nothing to do with me. I didn't control the internet bubble blowing up, right?

Yeah. But then you kind of have to figure out what to do. And to your point earlier, just about getting to know people. I mean, the CFO's name was Ray Cash, and he had invested in specialty electronics. He was on the board of specialty. I got to know him pretty well. We were actually at a specialty board meeting one day, and he told me they were looking for somebody to do this job.

And if I knew anybody, you know, would I let him know? and I got home that night and started thinking about it and said, you would never thought of this and I would have never thought about it, but it sounds kind of intriguing. And the next thing I know, I'm VP of strategy for Kevin. So, you know, they had a few hundred million dollars in cash and we were going to go acquire a bunch of companies. And then, of course, the world melted down.

And we ended up restructuring the company. And that was not a real fun experience, but it's just another one of those. You never know what's around the corner, right? No. I mean, you never do. No, no. We had a, with the data stream, we went public, you know,

and we all own stock options and stuff. And after one board meeting, the stock was just going like this. And one of the savvy board members says to me and Larry, he goes, you guys should sell some stock. We're like, what for? He goes, well, you just need to sell some stock. He goes, what's it? What's it?

have things going like this. There's nothing can stop us. And he goes, something's going to go wrong. Yeah. And we said what? He goes, I don't know.

I don't know. But something, sure enough, you know, it was like a whistleblower or something. It was maybe the dot-com crash or something. Right. Something, right.

So you never know. Well, and sometimes it's something you do. Sometimes it's something internal, but oftentimes it's just some externality that you had nothing to do with it. You know, I mean,

right now is we're speaking. I mean, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world, and there's no telling what's going to blow up, literally what's going to blow up tomorrow. Yeah. You know, and change everything. So you got to prepare for stuff happening, that's for sure. Okay, so you had your time running strategy and endless relations, PR, and all that for Kimet, which had to be a blast. I mean, interesting time. And that got you to 2000 and what?

About 2005. 2005. Yeah. And then what? Well, we sold Earth there, so. I had a little bit of time, a little bit of freedom and independence. I could do what I wanted. And so I've always been passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship.

And so I had a venture capital conference in 2004 and convinced Charlie Mosey, which ran the largest venture firm in the southeast to come to Greenville. And we had Jim Barker, who was President of Clemson, and Andrew Sorenson, who was president of the University of South Carolina. The governor, Mark Sanford, came. So, you know, we did a good job of pulling people together. had pitches of about six or seven entrepreneurs in town. And when it was over, I was talking to one of the associates at Norrell Mosley,

which the big firm in Atlanta, asked her how we did. And she said, well, energy and enthusiasm, you've got an A plus, but quality of your companies, I'm not coming back. Well, I was the wrong answer, you know. And that kind of threw me for a loop. And then so we started thinking about, you know, what does she want to invest in? She wants to invest in talent. Well, in this area, where's the talent?

at Willis at Michelin and Milliken and GE. And so the next year, we put a better conference to start looking for innovation at the intersection of major corporations and entrepreneurs and academics. And we did that for about 10 years. Ultimately produced about 13 conferences that a thousand people or so came to. And just, again, another one of those entrepreneurial things.

I mean, just like I made up the Angel Fund. I mean, I never heard of it before. I mean, we made Inadventure up. Yeah. We just created it out a whole cloth. But it's going out and talking to people and listening to them and iterating and doing it again and listening and iterating. And, you know, you do that enough and you get that flywheel spinning. Well, innovation has been great for Greenville.

That's for sure. I hope you keep that rolling. Is there another one scheduled? Well, we hadn't had one in a number of years. And so we had the first one last September. You were there. Played your sacks with the sweet peas and then gave us a great presentation on the jazz of sales.

And so we were hoping to do another one again this spring. We're trying to get one done in April and May. Okay. Well, I'd love to come back and do it again. I love that group. Well, do you want to talk about your book? Well, it's one of those things I've been working on probably 15 years, various aspects of it. But where we are right now is the electronics around all of us is getting more intelligent.

And it's rapidly getting more intelligent. And I really think it's going to transform human history in ways that nothing has before. And I frame this as intelligent agents. You know, devices that actually sense the environment around them have access to massive computing and shared data begins to reason, you know, begins to think through a problem. Maybe not in a human way, but in its own way, and then starts to act on that. So, I mean, literally, it's an intelligent agent. And so the first part of the book talks about the electronics trends that have got to. here. How did we get here? Where are all the parts and pieces that got us here? And then there's a

part of it that says, what is this? I mean, you know, chat GPT, well, the T is transformer. What's a transformer? And why is that such a game changer? Because, you know, I think most, the general public first realized that this huge wave was upon us was when chat GPT became so popular. Yeah. And then we start talking about, now we're back to lessons from you know, Pete Mark days and Capital Insights days and Inadventure days, all these various stories of things I've seen people be both very successful and people crash and burn. And, you know, how do we learn from those stories? Now we have this wonderful opportunity, this intelligent agent opportunity. How do we take advantage of that? How do we create value with it, you know,

so that we can all be successful? And, you know, how do we avoid getting run over by it? Yeah. Well, you're kind enough to let me read, you know, early copy of the book. And I think it's a, it was a page turner, like I told you. I mean, I thought I would just breeze through the book quickly like I do most, you know, nonfiction books. And it took me a couple of days because I wanted to read every bit of it. Well, well, coming from you, that's incredibly humbling. And I'm grateful that you took the time to do that. Sure. It's great. I can't.

When do you think it'll come out? Well, actually, I turned it over to an editor today. and they've told me it'll take two, three, four weeks for them to do their work. And so it's going to be self-published. And end of February maybe. Good. We'll put a blurb on this about how they can get it in the name of the book and everything. Okay.

A couple more questions, Mr. John. What's your favorite all-time book? You know, one of the books that had the biggest impact on me in college was 1984. And, you know, I think the lesson from that is just how powerful culture is. At 1984 and Animal Farm, both written by Souls and Eats. And, you know, one of the lessons from that is, you know, all animals will create it equal. Some animals are more equal than others. We used to say at Pete Marwick, all partners are equal.

but some partners are more equal than others. And that's a lesson through my career that, you know, people sort themselves. The business book that I've gotten the most out of is a book called Crossing the Casm. You know, and my copy is highlighted and tabbed and dog-eared. And it's just, I got that during my Capital Insights days. And the guy that wrote it's a fellow named Jeffrey Moore. And I read it on a plane on the way home from Chicago one time. and it was like, this guy sat in the office next to me.

I'd made every mistake he had in this book. And it's like, golly. And it's just been a powerful book for me over my career. Well, I mean, that's the thing is we can know the answer and still not do it. Like crossing the chasm, as I recall, the premise is if I want to sell, if I want to get in the cooler business, I can say I'm going to sell coolers to the whole world for every possible way. Or I'm going to pick a chasm to cross, right? about an area of the chasm to cross.

Pick something. I mean, that's the theme of if cross on the chasm is pick something. Pick something. And the first thing that Capital Insights invested in was this little company called Quick Alert. And we could put a sensor on a refrigerator or on a piece of manufacturing equipment or a code blue alarm in a hospital. And we could send a message to an 80-character alpha-numeric pager. Now, there you go. We're starting to age ourselves.

We started talking about pagers. And, um, and, um, and, um, and, um, and, um, we're, you know, we're starting to age ourselves. We had all these phenomenal opportunities, a manufacturing plant, a hospital, the waterworks and Rock Hill. We thought we were going to make a gazillion dollars. And it was just crickets. We had a local PR firm that got us on all kinds of industry trade magazines. And I just, for the life of me, didn't understand why that didn't work.

And then I read this book. And what he said was pick something, pick one. Yeah. You know, so that you get that flywheel spinning, and it's like, you know, you laughed at me about this, about the book where at the end of it, I said, this is the one I want to mulligan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like that one back. I mean, I sliced that ball off in the woods. And, you know, there's no reason that wasn't successful except that I was inexperienced and didn't know what I was doing.

Yeah. So. Which is a great point. And I, we can move on after this. But I think, you know, if we have an idea for to solve for a market, I think we get so caught up in, A, not being able to pick the vertical we want because we don't know which one to pick, or B, too greedy.

I want everything. In our data stream thing, we ended up having a good company, but we were a broad maintenance software company. Right. So anything you want, any maintenance department, whether it's a ship or a building or a factory. And sure enough, even though we were the number one player, If somebody came in with a niche, like a little company came in and said, we're the hotel maintenance kings.

Right. And we have one feature which integrates to the phone in the room where they can pick it up and call maintenance. That was basically it. And we could not win a deal against them. Well, you mentioned earlier that, you know, on the radio, I kind of went by this name, Swampbox. I grew up in Charleston, and Francis Marion, you know, was an American Revolutionary War hero. and he took on Lord Cornwallis, and the best trained, best equipped military on the planet,

and, you know, he's given credit as being one of the first guerrilla warriors. So he changed the rules of the game, right? If he'd have fought Cornwallis the way Cornwallis was prepared to fight, he'd have taken him out. And so he did everything but that. You know, he sniped at him from the trees and ran off in the swamps, and he did everything except fight the way the British wanted to fight. Rope adope for long enough for Nathaniel Green to come down,

Southern campaign and, you know, really the American Revolutionary War is one in the South. But Swamp Fox became an analogy for South Carolina innovation and entrepreneurship. So you're talking about somebody attacking data stream and they did it by, you know, picking a spot and defining the rules of competition in that spot and doing it better than, you know, anybody else could. And that's kind of the lesson across in the chasm. And, you know, I mentor a lot of young entrepreneurs now and often, you know, they'll be doing something really sophisticated with technology. and I'll tell them none of that was on the CPA exam. So I can't tell you which to pick, but I can't tell you to pick something. Pick something, right?

Well, we could go on and on. We could spend all our time on it, but I mean, you do have to pick something. All right, another important one, John, favorite band? You know, I don't know. I'm not a big music person like you. So I saw that question coming. You know, the musician I grew up with was James Taylor. Okay, sweet.

And so, you know, I listen to this, you know, eight-track tapes. You remember that? Oh, yeah. I remember listening to so many... I got to where I breathed the way he breathed, you know, on his albums. Yeah. But that's a long time ago. Yeah, yeah.

Young people today probably don't know who James Taylor is. He's still kicking, man. He's still out there playing. But, yeah, J.T. He was the man. And how about favorite word? You know, that's a really good question, too. So I can tell you maybe a favorite phrase because I end a lot of things with this and that's just carpe diem. And to me what that means is being the present, you know, look around, take advantage of the opportunity that's in front of you.

You know, sometimes we get all caught up and overthinking things. And sometimes it's just right there. And, you know, seize the day, seize the moment that you're in and kind of, You know, take, make the biggest advantage of it you can. Yeah. And, you know, Seneca, philosopher Seneca said that you should treat each day as if it's a lifetime. Yeah. And I think about that all the time.

Try to every day as a lifetime. What can I see or do or make happen today? Not like, well, you know, I've got this meeting coming up in April. You know, just ignore all this time we have. Well, today is really all you have, right? I mean, yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not here, so all you really have is today. You know, and we're getting to the age where, you know, we see friends and you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Might be it.

You know, we talked about things happening to businesses. It happens to people too, right? And so you just kind of have to live in the moment. Some of our friends are getting old, I've noticed. Yeah, older than us for sure. I don't know what's happened to them, but yeah. Well, thanks a lot for taking some of your time today to be with us. You continue to have a remarkably interesting career.

I think you started it out on the right foot. You did kind of a lot of the right things to prepare yourself and look forward to people reading your book and all the stuff you're going to do from here on out. Well, you've been phenomenally successful too, and I've enjoyed watching you and appreciate it. you know, that we're still friends and, you know, look forward to, you know, how do we make Greenville a better place. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you very much for being on. Thank you. Appreciate it.