Proven Podcast - Talent Acquisition On a Budget - Dave Kerpen

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

In this episode, Charles delves into the innovative world of apprenticeship and entrepreneurial growth with Dave Kerpen, a serial entrepreneur who's built seven companies and successfully exited two. Dave shares his remarkable journey from hiring college students to developing the groundbreaking Apprentice program that's reshaping how businesses access and nurture top-tier talent. Dave challenges traditional notions of education and work experience, highlighting the immense value of practical, hands-on learning in the business world. Charles and Dave explore the delicate balance between formal education and real-world experience, the power of building genuine connections in the digital age, and creating sustainable businesses that prioritize both profit and personal growth. Dave's entrepreneurial spirit shines as he breaks down his strategies for scaling businesses, leveraging young talent, and building strong, lasting relationships in the business world. He emphasizes the importance of authenticity in networking, the strategic use of social media, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance even as the business grows. Whether you're a startup founder looking to tap into fresh talent, an established business owner seeking innovative growth strategies, or a young entrepreneur navigating the complex business landscape, this episode is brimming with valuable insights. Get ready to transform your approach to talent acquisition, business scaling, and personal brand building. KEY TAKEAWAYS: Uncover how Dave turned hiring college students into a million-dollar business model Learn why practical experience can often outweigh traditional education in entrepreneurship Gain insights into building genuine connections and leveraging social media for business growth Understand the power of mentorship and apprenticeship in nurturing future business leaders Explore strategies for scaling a business while maintaining work-life balance Head over to https://provenpodcast.com/ to download your exclusive companion guide, designed to guide you step-by-step in implementing the strategies revealed in this episode. KEY POINTS: 2:01 Hiring College Students: Reveals how Dave leveraged student talent to build his businesses. 4:35 Learning Beyond College: Discusses the value of practical experience over traditional education. 6:11 College vs. Business: Explores the debate between pursuing higher education and starting a business. 9:12 Starting a Business: Outlines Dave's approach to launching a new venture with limited funds. 11:05 Viable Problem Assessment: Explains the importance of identifying and solving real market problems. 13:52 Unit Economics Importance: Highlights the crucial role of understanding business unit economics for scaling. 16:55 Hospice Experiences: Shares insights gained from working in hospice care and their impact on business perspective. 22:00 Learning and Teaching: Emphasizes the bidirectional nature of mentorship in business. 23:31 Building Rapport: Offers strategies for creating genuine connections in professional settings. 27:11 Listening Skills: Stresses the importance of active listening in building relationships.

Welcome to the proven podcast where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Everyone says business is about strategy, tactics, and system. Today's guest, Dave Kirpin, proves it's actually about relationships, and he's built seven companies and successfully exited two. While others chase algorithms, Dave proves that people still buy from people they trust. The show starts now. All right, welcome back to the show. Today we're on with Dave, and this is an individual who, his book's amazing, and he's built seven companies. He's exited from two.

He's doing something that I love, but before we get into it, thank you. so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So tell me more about apprentice and what you're doing, especially since you're doing this wonderful thing where you're supporting your family, you're helping your daughter out learning business as well. I absolutely love that. Tell me more about what apprentice is. Sure. So with my first several businesses, I didn't have enough money as I was starting the businesses to hire full-time staff. And so we started hiring college students in my first company that my wife and I sold a couple years ago. likable at one point we had 60 college students working for us in just 12 full-time staff

and I found it was a really great way to develop talent to access really great talent without paying full-time salaries and and I saw I kept doing it with different companies and I would hire many of the students full-time when they graduated and they would jump into more senior positions like marketing director and chief of staff the they co-authored books with me because I I had had the opportunity to get to know them and they had the opportunity to get to know me and understand how I like to work, et cetera. And so I had a young man that came to me after working for me for two years while he was in college. And he said, Dave, I think there's a business model here connecting college students like me with entrepreneurs like you. I've learned more from you

than I learned in three years of college. And I know I've been very helpful to you as well. He had co-authored a book with me. He had worked on a million dollar real estate client almost exclusively for me. And I said, yeah, you're right. And so we started a business together that was called Apprentice, scaled pretty quickly to a million dollars. He was young and a bit over his head, and I actually empowered him too much. He ended up moving away from the business. But it became a really wonderful opportunity because my daughter is in college right now. And so I took the transition as an opportunity to help teach her about business and help build

the business with her, rebuild the business with her. And so now, yeah, so now I get to work with my daughter and hundreds of college students that continue to support entrepreneurs and small businesses in four different areas, marketing, biz dev, data analytics, and operations. And it's been a blast. You know, I am very, very fortunate and grateful and not, it's very clear to me that I have a wonderful luxury right now in my life that I can afford to build a business with my daughter, to teach her, to take it slow, to be patient because of my previous exits. And I feel really, really blessed every day that I can live that sort of life. I love that you're doing it, but also more importantly is kind of what he said, that he learned more interacting and working

with an entrepreneur live than he did in all three years of college, which I think is the experience for most of us that have gone to college. And there's this bit of a push right now saying, do you go to college? Do you not go to college? Your daughter is still in school, which I completely support. I'm curious, as an entrepreneur who's exited and done this, where are you to, obviously, you stand specific on a certain spot

when it got to university. Why have you decided and what makes you still believe in college is a viable form? Well, to be clear, it's not that clear to me. My wife is more traditional in wanting our kids to go to college. But I am totally okay. I have a daughter that's 20. Charlotte works on the apprentice business. I have a daughter who's just turned 17 today, the day of this recording,

and she's studying neuroscience at USC this summer as a high school student, and she probably will go to college. And then I have a son who is nine. That being said, if any of my, I have said many times if any of my kids came to me and said, Dad, I'd rather build a business than go to college. I would offer $250,000 to start a business in lieu of college. I do think young people, well, I think people learn a lot more from doing. And it depends what they want to study.

If you want to be a doctor, you've got to go to college because then you got to go to medical school. If you want to be a lawyer, you got to go to college because then you want to because then you got to to go to law school, et cetera. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, you know, you probably don't have to go to college, ultimately. So for the apprentice, when people come into that environment for apprentice what's working on, do they have to be college students or do you work with individuals who are not college students as well?

They do. They do. That's the current model. I've thought a little bit about, but more than a little bit about expanding it, stay-at-home moms, people transitioning in life. I think there's a very interesting model there. I think the challenge to be quite frank and quite transparent is from a dollars and cents perspective. I pay all of our apprentices. We pay all of our apprentices. And if I were paying, you know,

45-year-old going back into the workforce, you know, there would be an expectation that would be different from what a college student might have as a young person might have as an expectation. Now, an 18-year-olds that wants to learn the trade of entrepreneurship and is in school, that could be interesting too. The challenge there is that the value prop that we offer our clients is really, really smart-driven students. And so they're expecting a Harvard kid. And if we bring them somebody that's not in college, there's unfortunately a reality around the perception of what the value is there.

They may be wrong about it, but the perception is reality to an extent. So I have to be caught with it. But it's an interesting question, certainly. And I do one of the one of our core values, my favorite core values of the company's bi-directional mentorship, I believe very, very strongly that we all have something to learn and something to teach, whether we're at Harvard or have had seven businesses and written five books or are a homeless person. We all have something to learn and something to teach.

And I do really believe that. So in an ideal world, yeah, we could all be apprentices. I would love to be an apprentice for Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Melinda Gates or Oprah. But it's not an ideal world. So there are some real challenges. So you talked about, you know, if one of your little ones came to you and said, listen, I just want to start a business. I'm going to give you a $250K.

You know, we're going to go rock and roll in this. And you have these apprentices, apprentices, I don't know what the plural of that is. We're going to use that as a little bit of a train. Apprentices. I got there. Yay me. I was educated in Florida. So, yay me.

So I got that one. But as someone's coming in, if you gave them $250,000, there's going to be a playbook. There's going to be like, hey, you built seven companies. You've done two eggs. You became a New York Times best seller. What is the playbook that you look at? So, okay, here's the cash. Here's $2.50K.

What are the things that you go listen? This is what you have to knock out right. You know, here's the list of these things that you're like, these are the things that I'm going to look for before you decide to go throw this quarter million dollars at something. What are some of the things that you look at as a potential as someone who's, may not be able to have the opportunity to work with, Apprentice? What are some of the things that they're going to run into?

It's going, all right, this is someone who's done this. They've been successful. What are the next steps? So I love Vern Harnish's one-page strategic plan. I've learned a lot from that. And so what I'll say it's not first is a 50-page business. plan, you know, with with with with a ton of data analysis. I think people get caught up sometimes. Again, maybe in college and business school, et cetera, in some of the formalities there. So I think a

one page strategic plan is valuable. And the most important thing about building any business. And I do I do lectures on entrepreneurship to kids as young as fifth grade and high school students and college students and successful. entrepreneurs out there in the world. The most fundamental thing is, is there a problem? Is it solvable? And then, depending on what your goals are, is it scalable? For a fifth grader, when my daughter was, was in, was 10 years old, she came to a farmer's market, organic farmers market.

And it was a hot summer day. and she had gotten some bread and a cupcake, and she said, Dad, I'm really thirsty. Nothing to drink. And I said, you're right, there's nothing to drink. So how do we solve that problem? And she said, well, we need to get some, something to drink. A water is a lemonade, et cetera.

I said, cool. You think anyone else has that problem? She said, yeah, everywhere. It's really hot. So she started an organic lemonade stand at the organic farmers market. And that summer she made $6,000 in eight weeks at the age of 10. there's only so much that that could scale, but it still comes down to,

is there a viable problem? And can I figure out a way to provide the solution for that? And I think that's ultimately why I would fund a $250,000 business for my kid or with my investor hat on, why I would fund any business of an investor that comes to me and pitches me. Is it a viable problem? Can you solve it? Do you, can you put together the team to help solve it?

it and then is it scalable, repeatable, et cetera? So one of the reasons it's a little bit harder to scale in that environment is pretty obvious for anyone listening. You've got a local environment. It's an organic market, unique situations. When you go to scale other businesses that you've done and you've run into, what are some of the things that you look at that you're like, hey, this is one of the things I look at to scale.

We talked about systematizing a little bit there. You know, you're like putting that together. But what are the things that you look at when you're trying to be there as an investor or scaling yourself? What are the kind of the breakdowns of, hey, this is I need to do for scaling? Because I'm guessing this is a question that your apprentices are asking you when they come in as well. What are the, sorry, what are the processes? What are the things you look at for scaling when you're trying to get into and you're trying to actually properly scale?

Because to go in and, you know, you and the misses created a company that was a beautiful exit, how do you scale effectively and how are you teaching your apprentices how to a scale effectively? Yeah. So it has to do, well, there's a couple of aspects of it. First is scaling yourself and building a great team. You cannot do it all. Too many folks try to do it all. And that's my latest book, Get Over Yourself, talks about delegating and building a team

and scaling yourself so that you have others on your team that are working with you and for you. And then scaling a customer base involves figuring out a predictable, repeatable sales process and or predictable, repeatable marketing process to generate customer. Anyone can generate customer one for anything, pretty much. Can you keep customer one? And then more important, can you predictably generate customer two, three, four, 20, 30, 40, 200, 300, 400.

And I failed a lot of times, to be clear. I mean, success is wonderful, but fleeting. And, you know, the biggest example of a failure, I raised $5 million for a company that unit economics just didn't work. We were spending too much money to acquire customers that didn't provide enough value for us. So the economics have to work when you're scaling. Like, you know, you have to, if you're, if it costs you $100 for a customer, that customer has to be worth at least $400 to you.

And if you're, if the customer, if you spend $100 for a customer and then the customer's worth $50 for you, you don't have a business, right? You have a, you have a losing proposition. So figuring out those unit economics along the way is really important. So how do you get over yourself? Because it's, it's really important because a lot of, we have this whole, this culture right now, which is all about. grind. Get up at 4 a.m. work out seven times, have 15 meetings. Then, you know, that's this whole idea and putting, not putting family first, not making that a priority, not making health first. And then, so we're in this culture that doesn't normally feed to long-term success. How do you, as you said

in your new book, how do you get over it? How do you get out of your own way? How do you get over yourself? Well, the first thing to do, and this may seem ironic, because, you know, we're talking about scaling, but the first thing to do is to understand what your priorities are in life. Nobody ever said in their deathbed, I wish I had built a bigger business. I wish I had made more money. I wish I had scaled more. But many, many people have said, I wish I had more time with my family, more time with my friends, more time to take care of myself, more time to travel, more time to pursue ex-passion, etc. It's really, really important to identify one's priorities and then truly put those first.

That comes first. If we're not doing that, then none of the rest really matters. Then, okay, with respect to building whatever business it is that you are, in fact, secondarily focused on, it's a matter of setting boundaries, really firm boundaries and sticking to them no matter what. So for me, I finish work at three and I pick up my son off the school bus at three o'clock or camp in this case at three o'clock. And that's it. it's not negotiable. And back in the day when we were scaling more and more,

I was a much more ambitious, a growth marketer, growth, you know, entrepreneur. I still did that. But maybe I went after the kids went to sleep and my wife went to sleep, I would work another four or five hours. And that was my grind time. But that time felt good because, I had already, I had prioritized what was important first.

I had already done that. And I think when you're working nonstop, you're often losing that joy and then there's regret. And then it's not, even if you're successful, it's not valuable. And often we're not successful. So we have to make sure at the end of the day, we have our priority. priority is really, really clear with ourselves.

Absolutely. I spent eight years in hospice watching people die around their IT division. So I was in the rooms with those. And I lived in South Florida. I live in Boca Raton. And the hospice was some of the wealthiest people I had ever met. And being in the rooms for hours rolling out in EMR, I would be in there because it was 1990.

So we had to do long updates and it took a long time. I was in the room with these individuals. And there wasn't a single one of them that ever said, this is my business experience. They would talk about their kids. They were talking about the experiences they had in life, and they would talk about their priorities. And as entrepreneurs,

we definitely don't establish our priorities in any way, shape, or form. We just go out and smash into the wall. You also talk about something that most people don't talk about, which is a lot of human behavior, about how important it is to connect with people, how when you sat on a plane and at the end of the plane ride, you had an investment, you talk about these ways to connect with people.

And now with social media, I know you've written a book about this as well, building rapport is one of the most magical, powerful things you can do. And there's so many times where you've said, well, for you that people connected with you better than or knew more about you about them than their own family. How do you do that in a social media world? How do you build that world when, and I already got ripped on before we started recording that my LinkedIn is garbage, which it is.

I am working on it. If you have advice, I will humbly do it. But how do you build this rapport? How do you build connection in a social media where we're so, overly connected, but in a real world, not connected in any way, shape, or form anymore. How do you build that rapport and how do you do those things? Yeah. So it's harder on social media to be clear.

But on the other hand, so it's harder to listen at scale, but it is easier to talk at scale and social. So by sharing content, we can build a, a profile by being valuable to others, just like by being valuable to others in the real world, if you will, in the physical world, by being valuable to others in the social media world, we can build our reputation, et cetera. So I've built my social following by sharing lots and lots of content over the years.

By trying to be as valuable as possible, I've probably written 600 or so articles and done, know, hundreds of videos and hopefully, I think my content's been, been well received for the most part over the years. And that's, that's what's helped me create an online persona and a following, if you will, that has scaled very well. The listening is also really important. and I think the best way to do it ultimately is to focus 10 minutes, 15 minutes, a certain block of time per day on just following other people and responding to them, engaging with them, et cetera.

And those can be people that are important to you that are close in your life, friends, associates, et cetera, or they can be, you know, potential prospective clients. I think there's no better way to build a relationship with a prospective client than checking out their social media and engaging with them and responding to them and connecting with them there. And they can even be aspiring influencers in your life. I connected with Barbara Corcoran online by seeing that she didn't have much of a LinkedIn presence and helping her get into the LinkedIn influence. And she was so grateful that I helped her that she's been a great friend to me. We pitched her for her business. She's endorsed a couple of my books.

So that's how I've done that with Barbara Corker. And so if anyone else, you know, and I already had a lot of followers and a lot of so-called success, et cetera. So anyone listening can connect with anyone out there. It's a matter of looking, you know, seeing people and following them and engaging with them and figuring out how you can add value. When I lecture at colleges, college students or my apprentices even, I did this lecture with my apprenticeses just a couple weeks ago. They say, I say reach out to people, figure out how you can help them. And they say, well, how could I help a Fortune 500 CEO? I'm just a college student.

And I said, well, you'd probably reach out to just about any Fortune 500 CEO and say, I'd love to teach you how TikTok is used and help you understand, you know, in 15 minutes, how my generation uses TikTok or chat GPT for that matter, right? And any smart, successful person is going to want to pick the brain of a young person that understands TikTok and chat GPT. Those are two companies that are fundamentally changing the way, not only the way we do business, but the way we live. And so it's, it goes back to that idea that we all have something to learn and something to teach. Absolutely.

And especially when it comes to the things that we have no concept about, none whatsoever. Again, LinkedIn for me, even though I have a strong IT background, I purposely tried to protect my own identity. So for years, I'm not going online, no one's going to know who I am. and then we grow 100,000 followers on Instagram, and I immediately stopped posting because it was getting too personal. I was like, no, I don't want to do that. So, yes, if you have any people in the Apprentice program who want to yell at me about how to do LinkedIn,

I would gladly take that phone call. And TikTok, yeah, even better. No clue, no clue whatsoever. One of the things you've done very, very well is you've done rounds of funding and getting people to invest in your companies. You know, it doesn't always work out, and that happens. How do you build rapport? How do you build connection and to get the investment?

going because again, you've raised a ton of cash and you've had very successful exits. When someone comes in, what are you teaching your apprentices? What are you teaching them saying, hey, this is how you build rapport. These are the questions you ask. This is how you can do it. And because when you go to scale, a lot of people need money to scale. You will reach a point where you need it. How do you do that process?

I think there's two, there's three important aspects to fundraising. One, one, and this is the most obvious, the easy one. I'll get this one out of the way. first is to have a kick-ass deck that walks through the problem and the solution and the team and the strategy, the go-to market, the basics.

You can literally Google like, you know, perfect, you know, best, best fundraising decks and get dozens of examples of really, really good decks. So that's one thing.

The second goes back to building rapport, getting warm intros to people that, and building around connection. So whether it's the college that you went to or the hometown that you grew up in or the sports team that you both follow is finding common ground, building rapport with the person.

And then the third piece that is often overlooked as well. The second is overlooked because especially technical entrepreneurs and folks that aren't necessarily thinking about people skills, they maybe lose sight of the fact that ultimately people invest in other people. So it's just like building any relationship. The relationship to build based on building rapport and finding common ground. But the third aspect is understanding what somebody wants to invest in, what they have invested in in in the past, et cetera. If you come to me, so I always want to add value with my investments.

So if you come to me and I'm a, let's, at the risk of alienating over half your audience, I'm a people person. I'm not an animal person. Not my thing. So if you come to me and you're, and you've got like a pet food supplement that you're, that, that, that you want to bring to market. Like, I can't add any value. I have no interest.

It doesn't make any sense for me as an investor. Thinking through finding the investors that have invested in stuff or built companies that are tangential, very similar to, even if you think they're competitive to, what it is that you're building and doing, that's really valuable. Because if you come to me with something that's very similar to something I worked on,

but you have a new twist on it, I'm going to be super interested. I gave, you know, however many years of my life to building some business or investing in a business, that's something I'm going to want to keep talking about and keep working on.

And similarly, that's what other investors will, they'll want to do something that they know and that they understand. So thinking through talking to the right people based on that, building rapport around mutual interests and connections, and then having a kick-ass deck that quickly and effectively summarizes the basics problem, solution, team, go-to-market strategy, etc.

I love that it's a systematic approach, that you're not just randomly talking to anybody. you're like, okay, this person, it's not a pet person. Myself's pet, I need to find this. So doing the research beforehand, so you have that. One of the things that, you know, again, when I was doing research and learning more about you was that you have this ability to build that rapport and that connection very quickly. Now, we all know the basic stuff like, hey, I went to the same school. I went to Harvard.

Oh, I've lectured at Yale. Oh, I'm a Wall Street Journal bestseller. You're a New York Times bestseller. So there's things that are crossovering, but those seem very surface level. How do you build the real rapport where someone. is like, wow, I want to talk to him again. This is Dave really, I connected with Dave. I connected Dave better than I talk to my own family sometimes. How are some of the ways that you do that? I know the number one way you always talk about is just ask a question, then shut up. Yeah,

that's it. It's just absolutely. It's really important to do that because most people don't do that. They, you know, as you said so, so well, people will talk or listen to reply instead of listen to to authentically, listen. How does one do that? How does one put themselves in an environment? Is there It's the ways that you can answer books or resources, or even your books and resources, where someone can learn because it's a skill to offset this desire to want to speak and not be replied to. Yeah, so broadly speaking,

asking questions and listening and listening to understand versus listening to reply is really, really valuable. And then the strength of your questions makes a difference too. And so you got, you touched on, like the ground level, stuff. But if you can go deeper, it's better. And some people have a hard time with this. It's not easy for sure. But there's also available information publicly in many cases, like on LinkedIn, for example. One area that I think is really powerful is charities,

is charities that one supports. Right. So even no matter how wealthy or not people are, typically people have charities that are important to them. Many, many, many of, many, many of those instances include really personal things. So if, if you, you know, see that I'm a big donor online to the MS Society and you have somebody in your family that has MS, you know, that's something that if you connect with me around that, that's going to build a really strong connection quickly. And you get me talking about how my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law have MS and how my wife was on the board and how we've been very active and in looking for cures and and and services

for those afflicted that that's that's how you can quickly go from um you know start to go in in um in a manner of moments with someone right now now we share a bond where it doesn't have to be ms right it could be cancer it could whatever it is whatever somebody's really a charity that somebody's really passionate about is going to be a quick way to to build a stronger bond than say the fact that we both went to the same college. Although for some colleges, I mean, talk to a Michigan person or a USC person or certain schools where they won't shut up about it too, then that can work well too. In sports sometimes, but the charities work intensely.

I've got a buddy of mine who's got MS and we talk about it and I don't know he does it. if someone wants to come in and I know time's limited, how does someone get a hold of you and how does someone connect to be part of the apprentice program? What are the qualifications? What are the things that they need to know? How do they, again, pitch to you in a way that's going to get them to that higher level they get to interact with you or you work from your clients and be a part of the apprentice program as a whole? So chooseapprentice.com is our apprentice website. That's where folks can learn about what

we're doing there. I give, I have free office hours every Thursday afternoon. So anyone on the planet that wants to meet with me for pro bono coaching can go to ScheduleDave.com and chat with me there. And then I'm pretty open on social media so folks can reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram, Facebook X, etc. And college students, but chooseapprentice.com is great for both college students as well as entrepreneurs and small business owners that are looking to scale. and then all of my books are available and bookstores everywhere and Amazon, etc. Is there anything that you want to have people like, I wish they would have had this prepared

before they jump on a call with you to save some of your time? Do you're like, hey, I wish you'd really have this, this and that? Yeah, I mean, well, look, if you book office hours with me, then the time is yours. And some people are very well prepared and they have an agenda and they have asks and they have a backgrounder information, and then some people have absolutely no idea what they're doing

and they just want to meet me. I don't really care, but it's really up to folks out there to make the most of their time, right? It's like you prepare for this interview, did some research. The more research you do, the more prepared you are in life, the better an outcome you'll probably get out of your time with somebody. And most importantly, for anybody who's listening,

make sure your LinkedIn is done properly. If not, you will get picked on for it. And I'm going to go work on that now. No, I mean, I was surprised because I would think that I was surprised. The Wall Street Journal bestseller. You have a great title, Charles. You are the Wall Street Journal bestselling author with the smallest LinkedIn I've ever seen. It was my goal.

It's a bit of a backhanded compliment. But on the other hand, that you could achieve that level of success in this day and age. with that strategy is actually quite impressive. We can talk about that strategy if you want. It's not that complicated, but I really appreciate you coming on and tracking down and also donating your time so much. Most people don't give up their time to have people call in

if they're prepared or not prepared, just to actually want to help people out and, you know, apprentice and kind of mentor people. It's a huge thing. So I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure. Great to, great to meet with you and connect here

and if I can help one person, then my day has been made that much better. While everyone's chasing the latest growth hack or productivity trend, the fundamentals of business remain unchanged. Problems need solutions, relationships need nurturing, teams need building. Stop looking for shortcuts and start investing in the basics that actually create lasting value.