The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The $100M Journey: Your Guide to Growing the Business of Your Dreams without Going off the Cliff by John St Pierre

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

The $100M Journey: Your Guide to Growing the Business of Your Dreams without Going off the Cliff by John St Pierre https://amzn.to/49z2kG5 The $100M Journey: Your Guide To Growing The Business Of Your Dreams Without Going Off The Cliff! is an inspiring and thought-provoking read about an entrepreneur's wild journey and turnaround. It is written for entrepreneurs, business owners, and executives of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who seek to achieve their wildest dreams of entrepreneurship while navigating growth challenges and avoiding potential failures. After making fatal errors in aggressively growing a business, the author was fired from the company he cofounded after 15 years of building it to over $50M in global revenues. The author took this failure as an opportunity to learn from his mistakes, find his True North, and develop a Strategic Plan with the 7 Principles that he used to effectively and successfully grow a business to over $100M, the right way! The $100M Journey is an essential read for anyone looking to build a successful, profitable, and sustainable business. The author provides an in-depth look at how to build a successful company while avoiding some of the most common pitfalls and mistakes entrepreneurs make. In The $100M Journey, the author outlines the 7 Principles of Entrepreneurial Success that must be mastered to break through the Messy Middle, overcome the Growth Paradox, and build a long-lasting business asset. Those principles are: - Principle I: Protect and Grow Your Equity - How entrepreneurs must build and protect their equity and control of their business - Principle II: Build Your Own Capital - How entrepreneurs must build their own capital by generating net operating cash flows versus relying on bank debt or outside investment - Principle III: Reinvest Smartly - How entrepreneurs must reinvest wisely and patiently into their growth to build a High-Performance business - Principle IV: Build a Culture of Intrapreneurship - How entrepreneurs must fully engage their leadership teams and provide them an opportunity to participate in equity appreciation - Principle V: Protect the House - How entrepreneurs must strategically assess and manage internal and external risk factors that can harm the business - Principle VI: Access Owner's Liquidity - How entrepreneurs can build their balance sheet's strength and access its liquidity - Principle VII: Move from CEO to Chairperson - How entrepreneurs must replace themselves operationally to strategically rise above the business The $100M Journey provides in-depth knowledge to help you design a Strategic Plan for building a High-Performance business. With the tools and resources in the accompanying workbook, you'll be equipped to reach your goals and dreams. Are you ready to take control of your entrepreneurial journey? It's time to Kick Some Ass, take action, and achieve the success you've always dreamed of achieving! Biography John St Pierre is an accomplished entrepreneur with an incredible depth of experiences from both significant failures and successes. John has co-founded and led two companies he built and scaled to over $50M+ in global revenues. One of which he lost dramatically, while the other grew to $100M+ by implementing his entrepreneurial learnings. Empowering others on the Entrepreneurs United podcast, John is a trusted investor, speaker, and mentor to many entrepreneurs in the business world today.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Just like the lady says, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the Big Show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Without you guys, we wouldn't be anything. We'd just be the crazy show that comes on, and we'd just talk to each other on the wall and go, hey, how's it going, eh? You'd be like, it's going fine, eh?

And then that would be it. That would be like the whole show. But thank you always for tuning in. Remember, for 15 years, three to four shows a weekday, 15 to 20 shows a week we are pumping out these days ladies and gentlemen if you are not keeping up there's a test on saturdays and uh you want to be able to pass that test so make sure you listen to every show i'm always astounded after all i've seen and been through in the thousands of interviews we've done on the chris voss show to every time we have a guest on, there's new epiphanies, tidbits I learn, little juicy gems, as we like to call them on the Chris Voss Show, the juicy gems of the Chris Voss glow that

people get where you learn stuff that will change your life, improve the quality of your experience, your life. And if not, better go back and re-listen to each episode because you probably missed it. Probably went right by you. You were looking at your phone, so don't do that anymore. Today, we're going to be talking about growing a business, how to build successful, profitable, and sustainable businesses because doing the opposite isn't much fun. He's the author of the newest book that's just coming out November 30th,

2023. It's called The $100 Million Journey or 100M Journey for those of you Googling it. Your guide to growing the business of your dreams without going off the cliff. That sounds like a good idea because I've been off a few cliffs in my life, and I've got some scars, and it hurt, and I might be still bruised. John St. Pierre is joining us on the show today. He's the author who's putting out this amazing book that you'll be able to preorder right now up until November 30th. And what a great gift it gives away there, too. You might make it part of those Black Friday sales, buy a whole bunch and give them away for the holidays. John is an accomplished entrepreneur with incredible depth of experiences from both significant failures and successes.

He's co-founded and led two companies he built and scaled to over $50 million in global revenues, one of which he lost dramatically while the other grew to $100 million by implementing his entrepreneurial learnings. Empowering others in the Entrepreneurs United podcast, John is a trusted investor, speaker, and mentor to many entrepreneurs in the business world today. Welcome to the show, John. How are you? Doing great. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interims, please?

Yeah, 100mjourney.com would be the spot to find our website. There you go. $100 million, because that's better than 99. That's right. I don't know. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside the book, John? Yeah, inside the book is my journey as an entrepreneur, both failure and successes, and the seven principles of entrepreneurial success that I was able to determine is really

the key to building a business the right way versus building a business that eventually you can lose and fall off the cliff and have those scars you talked about. Ah, yeah. I've seen, you know, it sounds like you've had some scars, losing some businesses. So inside, what are some of the things that you're providing to people, John? Yeah, I think first off, Chris, I provide the journey, right? All entrepreneurs go through their own journeys, their own rights. And, you know, the entrepreneurial life is up and down and up and down.

And a lot of us learn not in the classroom when we're in college, or even if you didn't go to college, you don't learn that way. You learn in the streets of hard knocks, right? Really learning the lessons the hard way. And so that's my journey there. And the journey of really losing something you put 15 years of your heart and soul into because you make some catastrophic mistakes and how to avoid those mistakes and really build the business the right way. So we go through how to do the right strategic planning, how to really know what your true North life plan is. And those seven principles of entrepreneurial success I spoke about, that if you don't have, you could really ascend your business

to the depths of the messy middle. Yeah, if you fail the plan, you plan to fail. Tell us a little bit about your history and journey in your words. What was your origin story? Yeah, so I, you know, from Canada, came to the U.S. to go to college and ended up getting a degree in accounting which was great i was part of a you know an entrepreneurial business when i was in college with a company called college pro painters painting homes as a franchisee for that

business for a couple of years and became a general manager with the parent company got in a dot-com business the late 90s we were growing gangbusters that crashed with the dot company. Got in a dot-com business in the late 90s. We were growing gangbusters. That crashed with the dot-com crash and I was looking for something else to do. So in 2003, I started a sports business on one side, which was more of a hobby business

with my best friends and started a construction project management company on the other side, which was my day job. So that's 20 years ago today. And I took one business and said, you know, this is a

lot of fun. Let's grow this thing very aggressively and become the biggest company in the world in the youth sports industry. And we grew that to north of $50 million over a course of 15 years and lost it in dramatic fashion and got fired from my own company five years ago this month. And the company subsequently fell apart through the COVID crisis and basically lost everything we had built. And a lot of lessons learned there. Meanwhile, the other company, the Tortoise was kind of continuing to grow and grow slowly, but it wasn't as sexy or as exciting for me. When I had my massive failure, I went back to that business and said, you know what, let's learn the principles I learned in this business and apply them over here and do it the right way.

And subsequently, we were able to grow that business from a little south of $5 million in revenues to north of $100 million over a couple years. And I did it the right way and didn't make the same mistakes I made before. Well, the good thing is you learned about, you learned from your mistakes. A lot of people don't learn from their mistakes, especially, you know, they're just like, well learned about, you learn from your mistakes. A lot of people don't learn from their mistakes, especially, you know, they just, they're just like, well, let's keep making the same mistakes. Maybe, maybe if we just practice these mistakes and get better at them, this, something different will happen. So, um, you, you talked about planning for a business, uh, and why is it important to plan or kind of lay out your vision etc etc well you

know what chris what i what i learned uh is a very small percentage of entrepreneurs actually have a life plan for themselves period they grow their business and that's what i was doing i was growing my business for growth sake i had this vision of building this large business but i didn't really know why like what was my goals as a person in life? And so what I learned the second time around was, you know what, what do I want to achieve in my life? And let me align my strategic business plan towards that, as opposed to just having a strategic business plan over here. And I'm just operating my life over here separately. And aligning those two became really, really important. A lot of businesses have plans, but they're not always aligned to the entrepreneurial's life plan.

Yeah. And it's important to kind of're not always aligned to the entrepreneurial's life plan. Yeah. And it's important to kind of know what you want to achieve in your life. You're right. A lot of entrepreneurs, we're kind of thinking the moment because we kind of, I don't know, the way our businesses work sometimes is you're just, you know, you're fighting day to day sometimes, especially in the early days, you know, just to get to the next day sometimes or get to the next week. And so, you know, you're like, well, I'll enjoy life when this thing finally gets successful or not. There's something you talk about in the book called Breaking Through the Messy Middle, Implementing the Seven Strategic Principles for Entrepreneurial Success. Can you tease out some of these seven strategic principles? Yeah, I think, Chris, when you just mentioned it, when an entrepreneur goes through the startup years, right? It's the tough slugging.

You're trying to pay yourself, let alone your employees. Get something going. Wait, we're supposed to get paid for this? Well, eventually, right? But eventually, you get to the point where your business is, let's call it a nice lifestyle business, where you're paying yourself some money. You have a nice business. But you start questioning, do I really want to take this to the next level? lifestyle business where you're paying yourself some money, you have a nice business, but you start questioning, do I really want to take this to the next level? And to take it to the next

level is going to take some additional sacrifice, maybe some additional capital, other components that may take it. But as you start going from a lifestyle business to a high performance business, there's this big chunk in the middle, I like to call the messy middle. And it's the most dangerous phase of a business because as you start growing from a lifestyle, comfortable i'm now earning income i now got a nice business with some employees we're doing good in in our business and you want to take it to become a very large uh high performance business you start getting into messier terrain you know you get the growth paradox where as you grow you need more employees you need more customers more problems happen you bring on capital you get diluted you lose control of your your business. There's a lot of areas there you just got to be careful about.

Oh yeah. I mean, it's a wilderness of pitfalls, if you will. Exactly. And traps and places where you can go wrong. So principle number one, you talk about protecting and growing your equity. Tell us a little bit about that, if you could expand on it. Yeah. I think, chris the best way to share that is with my own personal story right i always wanted to start a business with partners and you know you you hear all the horror stories about partners thankfully i had phenomenal partners but the reality was is i immediately was deluding myself out of the gate wow instead

of starting a business myself having the confidence that I can go build something, I start a company at 25% or 33% ownership as opposed to 100%. And right off the bat, you're deluded. And a lot of times the value that everybody was bringing to the table was different. And their contributions over time was different. And so a lot of times you hear about partnerships ending and sometimes in very destructive manner because of the contributions of others, you know, aren't equitable. And so I learned over time that, you know, really protecting your equity, that's how you will create wealth through owning a business entity or a business asset. You have to protect that with all your might. And way too many times entrepreneurs just give it away loosely. They hire a good employee. They want to give them a piece of the business or they partner up with people right off the bat. That's the one side of the coin. And the second side of the coin is how do you grow the value of your business so your equity is worth more over time? So protecting and growing your equity is something I think entrepreneurs

take way too much for granted and really need to sharpen in. That was something I found early on with my best friend, a business partner. He was a great guy for many years and my best friend. I would have done anything for him. I think we were friends for 22 years and business partner, he was a great guy for many years. And my best friend, I would have done anything for him. I think we were friends for 22 years and business partners for 13. And we had a pretty good run. I was the visionary. He was the guy who could do the grunt work, the redundant sort of do the paperwork sort of thing.

And I could be visionary and be the creative. And early on, I remember one of our, we were going loggerheads and he had no business experience of being an entrepreneur. And I did from multiple companies I'd owned before. And I finally realized that we couldn't keep having these sort of conversations where he just you know someone

without full experience even though he had me my back in a lot of ways uh i i couldn't do it and so this very early on in the in the first three months once we started hitting the skids i i said no we're changing this from 50 50 to 51 49 so i not going to keep having these conversations 10 years from now. Um, I know more than you, I have more experience than you. And, um, uh, yeah, I mean, just, I mean, and, and so the things we're arguing about, I wrote about my book, the things that we're arguing about, um, if we, if I'd let him win those arguments, we would have been bankrupt within a year or two when it never made it off the ground. would have been bankrupt within a year or two when it never made it off the ground but uh uh and then you know the other thing you have that you talked about is uh they can change you know mine changed

mine got a yoko ono uh girlfriend wife who uh started whispering his ears you know you don't you don't need chris you don't need this you know you can do whatever you want blah blah blah and you know just really interfering with the business um and for 13 years he was pretty square and then, and then just enough of that loaded into his head and mucked it all up. Uh, and then, um, I don't know that I would ever do partners ever again. I really like if I don't own it and control it, I don't do it. If I, if I were to do something involved, a partnership, I would, I would have earned equity in it. So like basically, okay, yeah, you could be a partner where you get a percentage, but you, you know, you either have to bring cash to the table for that position.

And there has to be a continuing, um, performance resolution or some type. Um, I tell people they should have some sort of performa resolution just cause you own 50% of the company doesn't mean you get 50% of the profits and whatever. It's how much you're if you're working as much as I am, fine. But if not, you don't. And people do change. And he did change over the last couple years of the business where he was involved in it. I couldn't get him to help out. I'm like like i'm doing all this work and he's getting the same fat check i am so i i highly recommend a second what you say

um and and the whole thing could change you know we've done we've done small deals where we still hold controlling interest but with a partner for like franchisee uh build outs that we did and you know they promised the moon i'll be there every day to do the thing you know and then you're like what happened to joe yeah i think a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that going into a partnership is much like a marriage you don't just talk to somebody at the at lunch one day and say hey let's be partners let's do this thing 50 50 and then come to realize a couple years later that it wasn't what you thought it was going to be and one of the things i talk about in the book, Chris, that resonates 100% while you

talk about is way too often entrepreneurs just give their equity away too loosely on the formation or even later on. And one of the formats I've put in place is a phantom equity instrument that's over a five-year period. There's a threshold of performance that has to be attained. It's treated like almost like a bonus, but it's actually based on the value of the company and how much it appreciates during their time there. So it gets them involved as you know, people want to own a piece of something. They want to be a part of it.

It doesn't mean that they have to be doing taxes, voting on parts of the business, other components of it as well. You can bring people into your business and really incent them to grow the value without making them an actual equity partner. I think a lot of people, when they start a business, they're like, Hey, we'll get a bunch of friends and blah, blah, blah.

And I'm just like, I just do the work yourself, man. Build it yourself. I mean, don't give away the equity. If you want to, if you want to have your friends work for you, hire them. Just like an employee. You know what they also do though? They also get, I'm going to raise a ton of money. That's going to help me grow this business.

Guess what? They give away equity that way as well. That's true too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really important. And then you can get voted off the farm in cases like that, you know, where they go, Oh, you know, you suck at this, or we don't like you. We're just going to replace you with somebody else. And you're like, well, I have 15% there. I'll like have fun with that. See you. Bye. That's exactly what happened to me exactly we formed a

company right uh started with a couple partners had 33 ownership but by the time i got fired i had eight percent ownership uh and got voted off the island uh lost control of the board and and the trust of the board and and lost the business i poured 15 years of my heart and soul into it but i had diminishing returns at eight% ownership of what we had built. Yeah, definitely. Principle two, build your own capital. We've kind of alluded to that a little bit. What's that about? Yeah, we did allude to it for sure. If you're going to grow your business beyond its current stage, you got to know how fast your company can afford to grow. And you need to know how much net operating cash flow your business is generating that you can reinvest in its growth. And if you don't, if you don't know how much

capital you need to grow your business, but you try and grow beyond your skis, well, guess what? You got to go hat in hand to the bank. You got to go to investors, got any more capital I need to grow. And that violates principle number one, protect and grow your equity. So how to build your own capital, cash is king and queen, Grow that capital, learn how much you can actually grow with such capital, and stay within that boundary until you can earn more cash to grow even further. I think that's really important. Entrepreneurs want to grow way too fast sometimes, not really realizing the implications of such.

There you go. When we started our first companies, we really didn't have much choice but to go with sweat equity as a way to do it and a little bit of seed money we'd scrape together and what was so beautiful about about it was we were literally profited within three to four months um and uh and part of it was me because i'm so good at what i do i was then when i was 20 um and uh uh because of, we were able to reinvest the profits and we could fund our own growth. And yeah, it's really important to know your burn rate.

It's amazing to me how many people don't know their burn rate when I talk to them in bailing out their businesses or something. They just have no idea. And they're just like, well, you know, we just burn through money and eventually it all comes even. And, you know, and you look at people's burn rate and you're just like, do you, do you don't understand, man, you are, you are flaming through the atmosphere, rocketing to the ground and there's no slowdown in sight with where you're going. You're, you're bleeding hard, but you know, like you say, being able to ask for cash and go big in the cash in Silicon Valley, we've seen so many companies that crash and burn because their burn rate is so high and by the time they actually go hunting for more funding you know they just they just look like that giant asteroid coming in the atmosphere and a ball of

fire and people like you know we're not buying that thing i think it's already on trajectory um there you go yeah and you talk about burn, Chris, you can even go the other way, which is you're growing so fast. Things are going really, really well. You're looking at your profit and loss statement. Things look great. It looks like you're profitable on your P&L, but the reality is your net operating cashflow is negative because of your working capital or other components. I mean, growth takes cash, period, end of story. And you can actually grow yourself out of business. In our case, we were growing so fast, we kept reinvesting as well simultaneously.

We were actually running out of cash and going back to the bank, getting more debt, loading up our balance sheet with leverage and kind of going through that cycle over and over again. So growth can take cash as well. And you really need to know how fast your company can really afford to grow. There you go.

Yeah. Principle number three, reinvest smartly. How entrepreneurs must reinvest wisely and patiently into their growth to build a high-performance business. Yeah. I mean, it's funny how this conversation is kind of walking us from one principle to the next, which is fantastic.

They're all tied together. But what I used to do is we'd make net operating cash flow and I'd say, okay, what next? What else can we grow? And we'd go invest in these areas that would consume cash. And we would go into the shiny object syndrome. Let's go over here. Let's go over here. Let's build this new product. Let's go this new business line. Let's go buy this business. What was consuming cash, putting more debt on the business versus reinvesting smartly where you're reinvesting in areas that can grow more net operating cash so you can build more capital to further protect your equity so they all kind of play in sync if you don't reinvest

wisely and you reinvest carelessly it's going to really you know flow downhill pretty fast definitely you know i was hearing that uh recently about it was a brand called baby brand it was founded by actors kristin bell and daepard that just recently filed for bankruptcy. And they, I guess one of the biggest problems is they're being torpedoed by high shipping and production costs. I think the COVID didn't help them, but they took, they had a ton of money. They like had a ton of money they like had a ton of money and they in in to try and beat the shipping costs and different uh issues they were having they started buying out uh little companies and trying to figure out ways to buy around it they were trying to buy their way out of the mess that they had and in in just like you said earlier um you know sometimes buying the shiny objects and then

dumping cash that you you're never going to be able to get back uh at least not in the short term especially if you get pinched you know there you are and i was reading about their thing um the uh you know i think i think it burned through like 100 million dollars just an astounding amount of money or something um and uh and then they were just throwing money at stupid shit trying to fix the bleeding when really they probably would have been better off just to try and ride it you know but but if you if you're going to compound your bleeding by you know throwing a bunch of money at something that i'm trying to think of some other things that that i that i've read about i

think you know there's probably an example there in we work i mean their recent bankruptcy they just oh no question what a day or two ago i think in the last days of their crazy ceo that they end up ejecting he was buying stupid shit too um and they were just over dumping money into stuff trying to you know just desperately save the company and sometimes the better thing to do is maybe not expand so much maybe tighten the bat and the hatches down lower your bleed and all that good stuff so yeah yeah well i think about part of the problem with that chris is we as entrepreneurs just want to grow we want to build something so fast and so aggressive what do you mean slow down i see the opportunity to get a lot more sales if we do this. Let's go. Let's make it happen. That's exactly what I was doing. I was

like, let's grow. Let's get this company to 100 million as fast as we can. I don't care. Let's go because if we get there, everything else will get figured out. We'll have tons of money. Everything else will happen right. But the reality is halfway on that journey, I lost control of the business and lost control of the board. And so all so all those things start happening and you're right. You have to reinvest so that you can actually create more cash so you can further reinvest and just take that slow March. Good to great talks about that. Jim Collins, like take that slow March slowly and keep your equity.

You'll be a lot happier in the long haul. Definitely. Uh, building a culture of entrepreneurship. This is something I talked about in my book, too. I think we coined the term entrepreneurship before. I don't even know if anyone was using it before that. But I remember my CEO said to me, we're going to make you an entrepreneur. And this was the 90s.

And this is so important to have a learning organization, an organization where your employees can act a little bit like entrepreneurs. Talk to us about what an intrapreneurship is and how to build that culture. Yeah, I think a lot of businesses face one big problem today, and it's not necessarily getting more revenue. It's actually production capacity. It's the ability to actually produce at a high quality, at a good margin for their customers. And the best way to do that is to create a culture of intrapreneurship within

your business. And if you're not hiring people within your business, they're going to treat your business like it's their own. And you have loss, you have waste, you have management influence waste that actually happens along with that. So the, the way to build operational capacity in my mind is you hire,

you know, you hire, right. I wish we could talk about, right? You situationally lead them and train them and develop them in their certain areas and you make them feel valued and important. I think the days of, you know, treating an employee and micromanaging them and or, you know, not letting them go to their doctor's appointment, they got to go to a doctor's appointment, whatever it may be, it's kind of over with. And we got to create a culture where you can attract people to your business and the way to do that is creating a culture of entrepreneurship there you go you know and we've been talking about this we talked about this earlier today with a guest and uh throughout

several guests we've had recently where we've been talking about the gen z group and you know these folks want to be a little bit more entrepreneurial slant than, you know, some of the baby boomers and maybe the Gen Xers. They want to have more fulfillment. They want to have more life. They want to have more good feelings about what they're doing. They want to appreciate everything. They want to feel like there's purpose in what they're doing and stuff. And I think, especially with the, you know, we've had all the baby boomers and some of the gen extras that have early retired. So we actually have a lack of employees, especially skilled workers in the base to deal from.

That's why we're seeing the economy still going no matter what the Fed does. And employment hiring still up is because there's just no room, man. We don't have enough employees. That's the basic problem. And by having a culture of entrepreneurship and making people feel like they're more engaged and more fulfilled in the business, then they're less likely to go start their own companies.

And then they're likely to stay with you their own companies. And then they're likely to stay with you as opposed to all the hopping we're seeing right now from Gen Zers trying to find the job they like. And they're looking for leadership too as well. No question. I mean, every entrepreneur is looking for an ROI from the employees they hire, right? So if you hire someone for $50,000, you want to be able to generate $100,000. So you get an ROI off that hire, right? But when do we flip the the switch when do entrepreneurs actually think the other way how much of an roi am i giving the employee for coming to work for my business and that that means a lot of things mentorship leadership development we talked about you know phantom equity opportunities

you know before we really don't own a piece of the business with you necessarily but you give them a taste of the value appreciation that they participate in, right? Make them feel like they own it and they're a part of it. I think it's so critical if you really want to be on the cutting edge of bringing on the top, you know, talent to your business, you got to create that culture of entrepreneurship. Most definitely. I totally agree, especially with this new generation and what their sort of expectations are. I think they kind of, I think they're going to have more of an entrepreneurial slant than any other generation before. And I think they kind of see businesses as like,

you know, you guys just lay us off. We don't want us anymore. And they kind of want to do multiple things. They kind of feel more fulfilled when they do it. I've had a few of my people who hire a lot of Gen Zers say, you know, they don't really want to do the one job. They want to feel like they can participate in a lot of different ways. That can make all the difference.

Let's tease out principle number five, protecting the house. Sounds like a Vegas thing. Yeah, it certainly is. But if you think about it, as entrepreneurs, too, we run so fast in all directions for that matter. When do we actually work on the business to make sure that all of the holes in the boat are plugged and really strategically rise above it? All coaches and mentors are like, hey, you got to work on the business, not in the business. That's easier said than done when you're running around ragged trying to fix your business. And what I've learned is it's a game of whack-a-mole, right?

You hit one, two, three down, next thing, four, five, six pop up over here. And if you don't have all the holes in your boat plugged, that one hole you didn't plug is going to burst through, whatever that may be. So how are you protecting your business? And what are all the different ways you need to protect your business? I mean, the horror stories I could share of things that have happened to me, because we just weren't focused on it. But a couple hundred thousand hour loss over here, a hundred thousand hour loss over there, a fifty thousand hour loss over here by waste of really just not protecting the business, doing vulnerability assessments on the

business, having good hiring and HR processes to cash controls and the wire fraud that's going on, a whole bunch of different things that's happening. How are you protecting your business is really what that chapter is about. Yeah. Even what's the other big thing that's uh huge now ransomware yeah that's that's uh that's that's out of control you know we've got to protect our technology wise now a lot as well i don't think

that's going to hit them they think oh that's only for big governments and whatever but it's gonna it's gonna come to small businesses municized businesses as well. We really got to be careful. Internal fraud, et cetera, et cetera. One of the funny stories, did I tell this in my book? I don't think this made it in the book, but there's a funny story where it was funny at the time. I had an employee walk into my CEO's office and he pops down. He's one of my salespeople.

He goes, hey, man, how's it going? I'm doing good. And he goes, hey, man, I found a way that, you know, you can get free office supplies to take home and set up your home office. I'm like, what? And he goes, yeah, there's a room. There's a room in the back there where they have, like, all these office supplies. You can just go in there and staplers and whatever you want,

and you can set up a home office and work from home. And I'm like, at first I thought, are we on candid camera? Yeah. Is that that one show? Um, and I'm like, are you for real? And he goes, yeah, yeah. You want me to show it to you? Uh, I'm like, no, I know what the room is.

Cause you know, I pay for it. And now I'm 51% of it. Uh, and he said, he's told me and I and i go i go do you understand that you're stealing from me that's this is my company and uh you're stealing from me and my business partner i own 51 percent of this company he goes no no you don't understand this is a corporation this is a big company and so he's got four offices and and uh you know it's it's a there's there's no real victim crime here because it's owned by you know some people somewhere i know it's owned by 51 of me i'll show it to you if i want yeah um i'm like are you out of your freaking mind but that's just one of the funny

elements of having shit stolen in front inside your own company. The you talk about accessing owners liquidity. Tell us what that means. Yeah. What I learned, Chris is as you grow a business, all of your equity is caught up in your balance sheet. If you try and build your business, well,

you need more cash. The cash needs to be on the balance sheet. If you want to go get a bank loan, they need to have certain debt covenant ratios that they need you to achieve, which means your balance sheet needs to be strong. And so what ends up happening as your business continues to grow is you look at your balance sheet growing, but when does your balance sheet grow? So when you think about balance sheet of the business and your personal balance sheet, how can you transition wealth or transfer wealth from your business balance sheet to your personal

balance sheet in a tax efficient manner for the business, for its employees, for you, the owner, for everybody? How do you create a win-win situation? There's a lot of tax efficient strategies out there that entrepreneurs quite simply just don't even know about. Yeah. That seems like a never ending tax strategy thing that you can take and do. Um, but the more you, the more, you know, I mean, it's one of those things where you just gotta, you just gotta go and master it. And, you know, you're, you're trying to, you know, you're trying to have tax retention where you're not paying too much in taxes, getting all the appropriate write-offs and stuff you need legally so that you can, you know, you can put that money back in the business. Um, I've always

kind of looked at it like, you know, any money I can save in taxes legally, I can put more in the business. And, you know, that means we hire more employees. And technically the taxes, you know, go to the US more and, you know, more employees, more taxes. There you go. That's exactly the way they write it. They want you to reinvest back in your business so that you can actually further grow to have more employees at work. And that's the way the system works. And there's a lot of really great tools out there to do exactly that, that everybody wins. There you go.

And final number seven, how to move for moving from CEO to chairperson. Talk to us about what that means. Replacing ourselves. Yeah. A lot of entrepreneurs don't become an entrepreneur because they want to work 80 hours a week, be fully stressed, living that type of lifestyle. They don't. They really don't.

That's what they end up doing. When you think about a real estate investor, they don't just buy one building and become the janitor and the changeover person and the clerk. They buy multiple buildings. I'm professionally managed, but yet as entrepreneurs, we typically buy one business and focus on it and stay in that one business. So one way that I've learned, sometimes you're not the best person to run your own business. That could be a surprise to many entrepreneurs as well. But if you do the principles before it,

one through six properly, including build a culture of entrepreneurship, there are probably people within your business that can someday run your business. So you can focus on what you love doing, whether it be what you love doing within your business, whether it be what you love doing outside your business, or whether it be diversifying into other business assets that you want to spend time and investment in. So moving from CEO to chairperson to me is that level seven, that principle seven that you should aspire to be so you can create passive income from this business asset. There you go. You've got to basically replace yourself. You've got to get your leaderships built. There's so many companies that, you know, they'll run for 40 years and the dad

or the grandfather or whoever is still running it. And once he passes away, the whole thing just collapses like a thing of cards. A lot of businesses aren't built to transfer or resale. And sometimes there's such an enigma that when they lose that person, it's like losing one of their top employees. The value of the company just goes kaput and of course preparing too for selling your business, resale, etc, etc. So this sounds like a great book. It's going to be coming out here that people can take and pre-order uh up to november 30th 2023 um you do some mentoring you have a podcast let's get some plugs in for that work yeah absolutely like you said the book can go to 100mjourney.com to learn more about the book pre-order on amazon

is available uh very excited about that date so that's 100mjourney.com i host a podcast co-host a podcast i should say with uh my best friend, Rich Hoffman. It's called the Entrepreneurs United Podcast. So we talk to a lot of advisors and entrepreneurs through that journey. So that's exciting. And I can be found at any social platform, if you will, at John St. Pierre 100. And if people want to mentor with you or get coached by you, you do that work? Yeah, I do a one-on-one coaching. We have a mastermind group. I do some speaking as well.

So that, that shall be found on a hundred and journey.com. There you go. Well, John, it's been very super insightful, brilliant discussion that we've had with you. Give us the final pitch out on the book and.coms and all that good stuff as we go out. Yeah. One hundred, the 100 Million Dollar Journey, your guide to growing the business of your dreams without going off the cliff, and the seven principles of entrepreneurial success that are included, I think are key. We'll also have a workbook, the 100 Million Dollar Workbook,

that can go along with the actual hard book as well. So you can all find that information at 100Mjourney.com. There you go. You should have a little sound bite that goes with it. Like how to, you know, without going up the cliff. I have one of those old style, you know, the old movies with the train that drives right off the rails and goes. I love it.

Something that would be quite cool. I don't know. It's what I think of. So thank you very much. It's been wonderful to have you on, John. Very insightful. Great discussion as well. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks, Chris. There you go. And thanks to us for being here as well. If it wasn't for you,

we'd just be talking to each other and, I don't know, showing each other our navels. But since you guys show up, we have to impress you and talk about really cool stuff in business and how to improve the quality of your life. Great stuff. Pick it up where refined books are sold. The $100 million journey, your guide to growing the business of your dreams without going off the cliff with the applicable soundtrack there of the train going, woo-hoo. Maybe that should be on the cover.

No, I'm just kidding. You don't want it to be on the cover. That's the whole point of reading the book, eh? So you don't crash. There you go. Thanks you go Thanks for tuning in Go to goodreads.com Fortunes, Chris Voss LinkedIn.com

Fortunes, Chris Voss Subscribe to that LinkedIn newsletter I think grows like a weed, man It's crazy There's even two of them now There's one on the company page And the big 130,000 group on LinkedIn Go to Chris Voss 1

The tickety-tockety Go to youtube.com Fortunes, Chris Foss 1, the tickety-tockety. Go to YouTube.com, Fort S. Chris Foss. I think I said Goodreads, and I'm just making sure to up as I go along. Go to Chris Foss Facebook.com. You can talk to the show and me. You can message me, and I'm not on Snapchat either, so stop it. Stop asking.

Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.