Start With A Win - Transforming Ideas into Profits: Insider Tips

Starting point is 00:00:00 No matter whether you put a team around you, whether you get financial resources, at the end of the day, it's all on you. No excuses. I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to start my own business. Or maybe they're doing something on their own. They're a solopreneur, like a real estate agent or a mortgage broker or whatever it is. I mean, how do you get them to start legitimizing this process to go through? Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Are you ready to learn the secrets of

Starting point is 00:00:37 startup success from someone who's been there, done that, and then some? Well, today's guest on Start With A Win is none other than Fred Carey, a true powerhouse in the entrepreneurial world. With over 10 companies under his belt and a knack for turning ideas into billion-dollar ventures, Fred is the go-to guru for navigating the startup jungle. And believe me, it is a jungle. As the CEO of Idea Pros, he's made it his mission to guide aspiring entrepreneurs through the twists and turns of the business landscape, helping them turn their visions into reality. Oh, and did I mention he's also the mastermind behind a weekly show that's captivated over 4 million viewers? Yes, this guy knows a thing or two about making it big in business.

Starting point is 00:01:24 So if you're ready to soak up some wisdom from a true titan of entrepreneurship, you're in for a treat with Fred Carey. Fred, welcome to Start With A Win. Nice to be here. I'm really looking forward to this talk. Awesome. You know, it's not often that we get to talk to really, really strong entrepreneurial development minds like yourself.

Starting point is 00:01:45 But I want to start with how did you get into building businesses? I know you've done like three IPOs. You've built hundreds of businesses. You've got, I mean, just an immense amount of social media followers and personal branding. How did you get started in this? You know, I started 10 different companies. And after I sold my last one, I wanted to do one last thing that really find a place in the market had had a big gaping hole in it. And it was growing rapidly. And unbeknownst to me at the time, it was entrepreneurship. You you know we on social media we we are just trained to think that this is easy and uh all we got to do is leave our cushy job

Starting point is 00:02:34 and we start our own business and and you know we'll be driving our lamborghinis uh before no time at all and as it turns out almost all all of us are outsiders in the field of entrepreneurship and we don't have access to capital. We don't have the resources, the connections that we need to actually have a fighting chance to win. And so I decided to start Idea Pros to democratize entrepreneurship, if you will. I love that. I mean, and there are certainly a lot of highs and lows in entrepreneurship, more lows than highs, everybody that's listening here. You know, it's, there are, I think, a lot of misconceptions about going out and getting into entrepreneurship. And like you said, people are like, I want to quit my job, whatever it might be. But, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:21 we always know that there's this overlap runway of preparing yourself for being an entrepreneur before you get into entrepreneurship. Do you have any advice for somebody who's like, I want to be an entrepreneur? How do I start? Obviously, you know, having a great idea and being able to market that to a marketplace is, is a plus, but you also need to build yourself up to get ready to be there. Don't you? To have any chance at building your own business as an entrepreneur, you really need to be able to go into the fire and be comfortable with it. You can look at some of the most successful companies and leaders in the world today and take the time to study any of their stories and you'll see there were many many times where they were on the edge of defeat in fact they got into defeat

Starting point is 00:04:11 many many times before they got their their victories that they have even companies like airbnb that finally get their shit together after just torturous ways of starting out. They finally become this amazing billion-dollar company, and overnight their bookings dropped 90% because of COVID, and they had to reinvent themselves again as a billion-dollar company. So it's a struggle that never ends, and it's a journey that never ends, and you need to be prepared for that. If you have the guts to pull it off, then it'll happen. If you come in thinking, ah, this is going to be great. I'll work three hour, three hour days and

Starting point is 00:04:49 have all this money coming in. Then this is not the right thing for you. Right. And I mean, having gone to market and also having to, uh, having funded companies, it's, it's fascinating because you've, you've get these instances where people are like, I've got this great product, but they're broke. And, you know, they're just an idea. You have to have multiple steps in order to get there. And I know you guys have this, you know, this three-step process of fund, build, launch, you know, in looking at your website, or maybe that's just, you know, the three legs of the stool or something like that. And that just gets you into the marketplace, I suppose. It doesn't even guarantee anything.

Starting point is 00:05:46 So what do you typically see when people come to you and say, I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to start my own business, or maybe they're doing something on their own, they're a solopreneur, like a real estate agent or a mortgage broker or whatever it is. I mean, how do you get them to start legitimizing this process to go through? Yeah, the very first thing we do when we interview anybody is really see what their metal is. You know, what are they all about? As I just said, you have to persevere and you have to be comfortable with pain in order to pull this off. It's like going to the gym.

Starting point is 00:06:22 You know, you go to the gym on your own. You think everything's cushy. And then the first time you work out with a trainer, you're bitching to everybody who will take your phone calls that night about the fact that you can't even walk. And that's the difference between what you think entrepreneurship is and trying to do it on your own and what it really turns out to be. It's really intense.

Starting point is 00:06:44 It takes a lot of work. And as you said, launching is just the beginning. Yet 99% of us don't even get to the point where we launch. And that's where we position our companies for, our founders for, to really train them, educate them, be prepared for the fires ahead, get them launched, get them their first funding, and then it's an ongoing journey that never ends. I mean, you're always going to have to be looking at your, your growth,

Starting point is 00:07:11 your competitors, how to make yourself obsolete. So you can get to the next generation of what, what you're doing. It's a, it doesn't quit. It doesn't end. There is no end. There's no finish line. And you, you guys bring people into the, you have something called the Insiders Club. And I guess you start educating people at that point. Is that kind of a, hey, let's see if they can stick to systems and processes? Or, I mean, explain to us what the Insiders Club is. Yeah, I started the Insiders Club because I wanted to give a voice to the 95% of entrepreneurs who are not insiders.

Starting point is 00:07:49 We look on social media and we see all these millionaires, multimillionaires, billionaires talking about how easy this all is. And it's the furthest thing from the truth. When you look at the data, the multimillionaires and billionaires that consider themselves entrepreneurs, 94% of them went to elite schools. 60% of those got advanced degrees from those schools. They have professors that can pick up the phone, get a meeting with top venture capital in America, and the rest of us are complete outsiders. So the Insiders is just really, it's a free forum. We have workshops two, three times a month. We have newsletters that go out every week. Really, it's an educational forum where people can really learn what it is that they're going to have to go through before they take those first steps

Starting point is 00:08:38 and actually doing it. And what do you look for? Obviously, it's also kind of an incubator for you guys, I would guess. You're planting a field and seeing what sprouts and what has the consistency and the fortitude, things like that. What do you look for in those people? Is there anything in particular that is a turn on, a turn off? You know, what pushes the, you know, the venture capitalists away from budding entrepreneurs, things like that? Yeah. Everybody has an idea. It's as simple as that. I don't know anybody that's listening to this show that didn't wake up some morning at 3 a.m.

Starting point is 00:09:14 with this amazing idea, fell asleep, and then never thought about it again. So what I'm looking for is a pretty good idea. It doesn't have to be a great idea because none of the ideas we start with are the ones we end up with. A pretty good idea, but a really solid human being that has a high emotional intelligence level, that has this kind of persistence about them, that understands that everything's going to be on them, no matter whether you put a team around you,

Starting point is 00:09:47 whether you get financial resources. At the end of the day, it's all on you. No excuses. You're the one that has to get up every morning and go to the gym, if you will. Can you give us an example of somebody who came into Idea Pros with an idea and has launched a business around that? One good example is a company that we have called Olive and Coop. It's oliveandcoop.com.

Starting point is 00:10:26 And that is an app to put elder Americans together with younger, like college students and people in their 20s, the thought process behind it is older people want to stay home. 92% of them want to stay in place. They don't want to go to assisted living. They don't need caregivers. They just need somebody around the house to help with chores, to make sure they're taking their meds, maybe driving to the doctor or whatever. And young folks can't afford rent nowadays. I mean, here in San Diego, $3,000 a month gets you a studio apartment that you can't even get a roommate for, you know, who can afford that kind of stuff. So in exchange for getting a bedroom and your own space in an elder person's home, an older person's home, you get rent of instead of $3,000, maybe it's $500. And all you do is agree to a list of things that you put together. The couple that started this, they have

Starting point is 00:11:13 like the most amazing attitude. They have no problem at all understanding that they're the ones responsible for pulling this off, figuring out what to do about it, where they're going to start. You know, they have my strategic advice. But I brought the two of them up to Palo Alto just a couple months ago to raise capital. And we had them in front of 50 different venture capital firms. And one, which is a really prestigious firm, said, this is the best pitch I've heard in years. These guys have never pitched before to anybody. You know, they did their homework. They got their training from me. They found their story. By the way, their pitch, unlike most pitches of sophisticated founders, their pitch started with,

Starting point is 00:11:58 let me tell you about the day that I thought my father died. That was the first line. Now, who's not going to put down their email and their phone and listen to hear what the second line is? And by the time they were done, the father was the inspiration for Olive and Coop. By the time they were done, their last line was a picture of their dad, Oklahoma farmer, sitting in front of his field with all these crops behind him, really smiling and happy because he was one of their success stories. I'm looking for those type of people that will roll up their sleeves, that will go find money, that will do all the homework necessary to go out there and make a difference. Wow. I mean, it certainly takes a lot of grit and a lot of fortitude in order to achieve that. Is there a particular demographic? I've heard there that most

Starting point is 00:12:47 entrepreneurs who are successful at launching businesses are somewhere between the age of 35 and 45. But I don't, I mean, are you seeing any trends in what's being successful? What's not any sort of background or education? Or is it just like that scrappy person that comes in and says, I don't care what you tell me, I'm not going to quit? I mean, what direction do you typically find these folks come from? Yeah. And you're spot on, by the way. Our sweet spot is between 30 and 55. That's where they come from. Now, you have the 20-year-olds that are going to venture capital all day long. They're coming out of Berkeley or Stanford or Harvard and even quitting those schools and getting venture capital money. They've never run a business before in their lives. The sweet spot for us, the real entrepreneurs, as I refer to them, are people that are already in corporate America.

Starting point is 00:13:43 They're middle management, upper management. They make a really good wage. They have great benefits. They're only working 40 hours a week and they wake up every morning thinking that life sucks and they just can't do it. We had one guy come over that he was making $750,000 a year in his executive capacity and just hated his life. And so that's what we're seeing as the sweet spot of American entrepreneurship are these outsiders from corporate America. There's no

Starting point is 00:14:13 entrepreneur capability in the organizations that they operate within. And so they're going out to try to do it on their own. So obviously, there's a lot of benefit to coming from corporate America or the corporate environment if you're not in America in order to do this. Obviously, one, you have a paycheck, so you can make ends meet while you're starting your business. But do you find that most of these endeavors that turn into something that creates enterprise value and creates good profitability start as a side hustle? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, you can start as a side hustle, but that's a very brief period of time. The one benefit, I think,

Starting point is 00:14:56 that people who started with our flagship product, Idea Pros, is that we did all the heavy lifting. You have an idea idea you have a checkbook you come in and and basically say all right we're going to spend the next year to two years working on this we're going to build everything we're going to work with you we're going to train you as an entrepreneur so you have an immediate co-founder and team in place you're paying a bunch of money up front but you're paying about a quarter of what it's going to cost you to do on your own. You have the flexibility to stay in your main gig. And then a year down the road, when we're getting close to launch time, then you can decide when it's time

Starting point is 00:15:34 to bail corporate America. But most of us don't have that luxury. So yeah, they kind of start out as the side hustle. Pretty soon you get overwhelmed with what all the stuff that's coming at you and you make your decision to go go leave the job that you have. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's that's that's what got me going in entrepreneurship. I was a police officer. I had two companies. I started on my own and then it pushed me into other things. But it's particularly public servants. You know, if you're working nights, you, it's, uh, particularly public servants. You know, if you're working nights, you've got all day long to run your business. So it's fantastic. As long as you're getting enough sleep to be safe on the job, but, uh, that that's great. Um,

Starting point is 00:16:16 any, you know, this is a fast paced world for startups. We see everybody wants to create a startup and it was, it was very taboo. I'm gen X. And when I was in my 20s or whatever, being an entrepreneur was not a popular thing. People were like, that means you can't work for somebody. And now everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. But is that the place for everybody? Or what path would you recommend for people to start getting to know this? Because a lot of people don't even know the difference between an LLC and a corporation. Or what some of the contract type issues you deal with or anything about marketing. I know you've built

Starting point is 00:17:00 a great personal brand. You've built a great brand around Idea Pros. But it took you a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get there in a lot of time. Anything in particular you see that people are most blind to when it comes into entrepreneurship? I truly think that what people are most blind to are the fundamental elements that you need to have in place to make this work. We do a couple of things that are really improper. Number one, we go into battle without knowing who our opponents are, the general Custer school of strategy. And we also don't really understand the fires and things that we're going to need to go through and understand the fact that it's more likely we're going to fail than succeed. But it's the beginning of a journey, a path to success.

Starting point is 00:17:55 Wherever that success may be, it's going to be way different than where you started. Even guys like Elon Musk, he, with both SpaceX and Tesla, he said he was sure he had less than a 10% chance of winning with either of those. And yet, knowing that, knowing those odds, I mean, you're going to jump out of an airplane knowing you have a 90% chance that the chute's not going to open. We're not going to do that. It has to be that type of person to understand the odds are against you. Nobody's going to give you anything. You're going to fail a hundred times before you find that right path. It takes that type of fortitude and determination in a person to make this journey tolerable. Other than that, this is a suicidal mission. There must be a lot of late nights on Zoom over a cocktail crying with some of these

Starting point is 00:18:48 people to say, tomorrow's going to happen. We just got to keep going. I mean, do you find the psychology in this has just got to be off the charts great with respect to emotional intelligence and things like that? Yeah, I would say two things about that. Number one, with 400 companies under our belt right now, there's a lot of midnight oil being burned. But number two, what I find about the biggest entrepreneurs, the ones that have the best chance, they're going to get on the call with you and they're going to reassure you instead of the other way around. Right. Entrepreneurs that need encouragement. And guys, think about this. You're going into battle on your own. If you need encouragement to go into the battle, you're probably not going to win.

Starting point is 00:19:37 It's the ones that are like, let me in, coach. Let me in, coach. Those are the ones that are really, really going to make it. So if you need somebody to nudge you and encourage you and cajole you into taking that next step, then maybe you're not cut out for this. It's the ones that don't need that support that just need to know that, hey, I'm going into battle with somebody by my side, not necessarily somebody leading me. Those are the ones that have the best chance of making it. Wow. And that's, I mean, that sounds like some leadership principles there, some, you know, internal leadership. And you talk about people who come from the corporate world, that sweet spot. I know they have, you know, once you get to that point, you've been exposed to some different managerial and leadership type components in life.

Starting point is 00:20:24 And you probably supervise some people at that point. How does leadership play into what you do? And I mean, is that an imperative? Because you've got to lead yourself in order to lead others in order to lead the company, whatever. What do you look for in that? And what do you recommend? Yeah, you know, you think entrepreneurship and leadership go hand in hand, but the polar opposites, because as an entrepreneur, when you start out, you're doing everything. You're, my dad used to call it the one-armed paper hanger, right? Everything you're doing on your own. And there comes a point in time when business starts growing, you bring in people, hopefully

Starting point is 00:21:01 really talented people who believe what you're doing. You have to make a really sharp transition from an entrepreneur to a leader. And the leader is a person who lets go of the reins, lets other people run that race with them, and focuses on working on the business instead of in the business, as they say. So that's a big, big shift. And I would say to anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur to understand in the beginning, you're going to do it all yourself. But fundamentally, the way companies work, surround yourself with really, really talented and passionate people, have a great plan in place, and then get the hell out of the way and let them go and execute on that plan. That's the way your company is going to grow into something amazing. I love that. I have something that I call founder syndrome and having started companies, having taken over companies, things like that. I, I've always believed that founders have this, this syndrome of, OK, I'm going to make the decisions. This is my baby.

Starting point is 00:22:08 And they have trouble handing their baby off to those people you're talking about that they should be trusting to go and run and develop the company. And if they did it right, like you said, they're not the smartest person in the room anymore. I mean, you're upgrading. So what does, you know, when I say founder syndrome and struggle with releasing this as the founder and moving on to a, you know, a CEO role or a chairman role or something like that, what do you see as, you know, key challenges that founders have in progressing their company to the next level? Yeah. well, I'll tell you this. If you're listening and you're a founder of a company, the number one failure of entrepreneurial companies

Starting point is 00:22:50 in the first year is that the founder has created something there's no demand for. Because we get so myopically focused on what we want, what we think, what we think is a great idea that we don't look at the rest of the world. We're not going to buy our idea. Everybody else in world is we don't do our homework we don't do our research our studies to see that we're in a good spot there's a growing marketplace with good competition and we found that hole in the market to proceed forward we don't do the intellectual

Starting point is 00:23:20 inquisitory search within ourselves and into the marketplace to see if we're on the right path. So what I would say to any of those founders is let go, man. You just got to loosen up. You have to understand that your good idea today could be a great idea tomorrow if you surround yourself with the right people and you have the fluidity to just go where that river's going to take you. I love that. Go where that river is going to take you. I love that. Go where that river is going to take you. I mean, that takes a lot of guts to do that.

Starting point is 00:23:53 And, you know, we've already talked about the fortitude necessary there. Fred Carey with Idea Pros, a powerhouse entrepreneur, investor. Really, I mean, just kind of somebody who helps others build businesses. Fundamentally, we need more people like you in this world because entrepreneurship drives growth economically and in the communities and society. And it helps people find new opportunities. Fred, where can we find you online? I know you have an awesome online presence and you deliver so much value there. Where can we find you there?

Starting point is 00:24:29 Well, thanks. On Instagram at official Fred Carey, C-A-R-Y. I put one post up a day for right now and hopefully inspirational leadership, personal development, doing the right thing, things like that. It will start your day off right. You can also go to ideapros.com and sign up as an insider. It's completely free. You're going to get information every week, and you're going to have opportunities to be part of our free workshops as well. And if you've got a great idea and you're getting ready to launch and you want to have a co-founder with you, you can actually just write to me at fred.ideapros.com, and I'll take your email, I'll respond to it,

Starting point is 00:25:10 and I can either help you or guide you. Awesome. Make sure you check out Fred on Instagram and also at ideapros.com. Fred, I have a question I ask all the great leaders on this show, and that's how do you start your day with a wind? You know, starting your day with a wind can be difficult. So what I decided to work on before I work on the business, I work in the business of me. And so I make sure I get up early. I get up by five every day. I have a trainer that comes here for 90 minutes a day, five days a week.

Starting point is 00:25:46 When I'm done with that, I actually look in the mirror and do personal affirmations, start getting that positivity going. I practice gratitude. I find at least three things that I'm grateful for this morning, like I did today. And I'll meditate five ten minutes nothing big and then i'll read i'll read something a chapter a page a paragraph whatever it is of the book i'm interested at the time and then i start my day because i my philosophy is if you start your day on yourself first you'll be physically and mentally prepared to handle the challenges ahead of you. So I say start your positive day with your positive self. Wow. That's one of the best answers I've heard. And I love that. So and I mean, we've done over 300 of these. So thank you

Starting point is 00:26:38 for sharing that. This is fantastic. Fred Carey, you've helped a lot of people. You continue to help a lot of people. Thanks continue to help a lot of people. Thanks for all you do and thanks for being on Start With A Win. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Start With A Win - Transforming Ideas into Profits: Insider Tips

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