Business SOS - Episode 75 - Scott Gabdullin - Learo.io

Speaker A: Hey you.

Speaker B: Yes you. You're listening to Business sos. Uh, yep. Business Stories of Success where we interview successful business owners for successful business owners. How do they make it happen? How do they keep it going? Join us with your host and business advisor, Mark Adams.

Speaker C: Foreign. Hello, you're with Mark Adams at Next Level Business Advisors. And today we're joined by Mr. Scott Gabdulin. I'm uh, gonna say not serial entrepreneur entrepreneur, but multiple entrepreneur. Uh, he's the CEO of Liro I.O. and he's gonna help us to understand what that's about, but also other businesses that we can learn a lot from. So just welcome Scott. I appreciate it.

Speaker A: Thank you Mark. It's great to be here.

Speaker C: Yes, I'm excited and I know, um, when we were chatting before we got here, they call it the green room. When we were in the green room, you were talking about marketing at different stages. I think that's powerful. What you shared with me. I can't wait for our audience to learn about it. But before we get into the lessons that you teach us, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your business and the role that you play.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, so like you said, a multiple entrepreneur. I've got an entrepreneur bug. Uh, early on in my life, uh, went into engineering as to get education engineering. Graduated with computer engineering degree and then realized that it wasn't for me. I did work for enterprise company AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, producing graphic cards for PlayStation 4 and whatnot. And uh, three, four years in and I was like, I just can't see myself doing this forever. I mean it's a great job, great career, but it wasn't just the right fit for me. Yeah. And so I started dabbing into marketing and 12 layer. 12 years later worked for marketing agencies like Saatch and Saatchi, Sapient, Razorfish Global Agencies, worked in, in house for software as a service companies and later on just started launching my own businesses. And Liro, Liro I.O. is one of those businesses, uh, we do lead generation for small to medium sized businesses largely in house. Home services, accounting, um, a little bit of pretty much everything. Every kind of a small business niche out there, uh, as well as a number of other businesses that if you want to, we can dive deeper into later.

Speaker C: Wow. Wow. So let me just dig into Liro for a moment since you mentioned that one. If we wanted to find you in this great Internet world, how will we find your company?

Speaker A: Yeah, Lero IO L E A R O Liro. It's a combination, uh, of Two words. Leads and hero Lero. It's kind of how it was born.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker A: And uh, that's a website where you can find more information about Zilize.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, I like that. I like that. Leads Hero Liro. I love it. Um, I wish I had that kind of a creative mind. So cool.

Speaker A: I'll be honest. I did steal that one. I did steal from someone else. I saw it in the news and I was like, someone else got a cool name. Uh, different. There was a car Hero, I think, and they called it Caro. And I was like, oh, leads hero. L. Well, great ideas, you know, you got to steal them.

Speaker C: Hey, that's what it's all about, my man. Yeah, don't reinvent the wheel. Just make it more shiny or whatever you need to do. Uh, I like that. Um, so we, we find you on liro.com and liro IO. You know, that's interesting because back in the day everything was dot com, but IO is the. Is like I'm finding that especially with the software, sort of software as a service kind of businesses. Awesome. And you said you work primary. That specific business works primarily with small

Speaker A: to mid sized, small to medium sized businesses.

Speaker C: Yes. So, so, so how do you classify a small to medium sized business? Because my listeners might want to know, are you right?

Speaker A: For me, Yeah, I would say businesses that are from zero in revenue per year just getting started, looking to get off the ground to probably a million, a million and a half a year. I would say those businesses could all qualify. Is just, it's. You have to have a little bit of a different mindset as you start to pass through $200,000 revenue mark and then going into the 200 to 500 to a million, we start to. Leads start to play a little bit of a different role, let's put it that way. But yeah, um, those is just different stages and different mindsets when it comes to marketing and sales.

Speaker C: Okay, I'm going to put a little bookmark right there because that's powerful what you just said. I want you to teach us that as we move forward. But before I do want to just get a couple other things in place because we're always learning about our entrepreneurs. What made you decide, um, to take the leap into business ownership when you could have, you know, kept your secular world? What made you say, finally I'm going to do it?

Speaker A: Um, I always feel felt limited when I was in the corporate world. I still did work in corporate when I was in marketing field. Um, but I felt like it was a Lot of limitations, a lot of red tape. You had to ask for permission to do things. And as someone who always gets ideas in my head and wants to implement them and just go and try things out, I could probably take the path of being intrapreneur, you know, internally, um, um, creating and generating ideas within the corporations. But it still felt quite limiting. So, uh, the bug came to me pretty early on. As soon as I left engineering field, I knew that I wanted to do my own thing. I just didn't know what it was. So I had to spend some time in the marketing field, uh, gaining experience, getting as many skills as I could, and. And then that was it. As soon as I felt like I'm ready, I had a good client list, I had a good business, uh, I just made the jump.

Speaker C: Yeah, I love it. So how long have you been an entrepreneur then?

Speaker A: An entrepreneur, I would say ten plus years. Uh, full time on our own, I think was four plus, five years. Uh, time flies fast. M. I must say. And, uh, I think one of the key things to remember whenever you go into your own, on your own is that everything takes time. It takes time to build something that you can actually rely on, something you can, you know, your family can rely on. It takes two, three, five years to get to a point where you feel good about it. Uh, and, uh, a lot of times social media and YouTube will tell you otherwise. Everybody's a millionaires the next night, the next days, they wake up after starting a business, you know.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, and that, yeah, right. That whole concept of viral. Yeah, okay. It does work for some, but not the majority of us. We have to build over time. Cool.

Speaker A: Yeah, cool.

Speaker C: Now you mentioned something, and I want to just pivot right into this whole part of the podcast where people learn. You said, you know, when you're, when you're starting out, you might help them with lead generation, but you pass a threshold like $200,000. And you said something about leads will change or there's a different purpose. So then how can you explain it to us? What's the right solution for marketing in different stages of business?

Speaker A: Great question. So when someone starts business from scratch, day one. Right. Uh, a lot of times what you'll see is the advice said, you should go learn marketing, you should become good at sales, you should figure out your hook on your website and all that type of stuff. And as a business owner, it becomes quite, quite overwhelming quite fast. Um, my recommendation to every business that we work with is focus on what you're good at. If you're getting at the plumbing business, I assume you're good at being plumber. If you're getting into electrician business, you're an electrician, focus on that. And what you need to do is you need to figure out how you can get calls coming to your business via, uh, marketing, via some kind of a solution. Now for a small business to hire an agency and to do mark to do marketing for them in the early days, it's, I think it's too expensive. That's one and two. It takes time, right? So if we for example do um, SEO and paid advertising for enterprise clients and it still takes six months to 12 months to deliver results, a lot of small businesses might not even have that time when they're just getting started. They might be out of the business in the next three months. So what I recommend is find somebody who you can get quality leads from and, and just get them to give you calls straight to your phone number, customer calls. And all that needs to happen is you need to answer the call and be good at sales and offers them whatever it is that you do. Right. So eliminate all whole marketing part. Don't focus on that. Do not think about it. Right now the whole point is spend some money to make more money. So that's the key. The phone calls comes through you calls that, you close that call. You, you get paid on your job. You take some of that money to put it aside for your family and then take the other and reinvest back into the leads and you keep growing. We have businesses that we worked with, they started, started, just started, you know, their business three years ago. They got lucky. We called them up cold call. And the guy now is at ah, 220, $250,000 a year. Right. Purely through our leads. Uh, so he builds the entire business. He's smart. He keeps reinvesting back into the leads, keep growing as a customer base. And I think that's a good strategy where you don't sit and wait for marketing to kick in. You just get what you need. As you know, you, you're getting exactly what marketing is supposed to be getting to you, but you're getting it right away as leads, as calls. And that's what I recomm. Businesses that are going from 0 to 200, 250, 000. Focus on leads, focus on phone calls.

Speaker C: Okay, so then what happens after that? So like I'm at 250 now.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, that strategy worked well. Why would you say to change. What's the, what's the switch?

Speaker A: Yeah, For a lot of businesses, once they get to a point where It's a hundred, $120,000 in revenue, there's obviously hard costs that they have to, you know, account for, but it's more or less enough to, to take care of his family. Now in majority of the states and provinces in North America. So what happen that they start to look at hiring more, you know, employees or contractors to start to grow the business? So one day, one morning they wake up and they start to ask themselves a question. Wait a minute, I've got four guys working for me or gals, and Scott is the one who gives me all the leads. What if Scott has a heart attack? Or uh, what if he decides to sell the leads to my competitor? What happens to my business then? Right? So it's a natural hap question to ask a business owner to ask. And what I do recommend at that point is you still probably should be buying leads, but what you should be looking at now is taking some of the profits and reinvesting them into marketing and building a brand. Now all that advice that you get from online, from social media, it becomes relevant because you've got some money to spend. You're no longer, you know, in a starvation mode where you're trying to figure out how to take care of your, you know, bills at the same time, how to grow a business. Now you have a business, you have your family taken care of and you've got some money that you can start to invest, invest back into the business, build a good website, put some effort into social media. You probably got time because your, you know, four contractors are running around doing some of the work, taking it off your plate so you can start to learn things on your own as well. So this is a good point at, uh, starting to reinvest money into actually long term investments like marketing. That's, that's when it starts to happen, usually 200, $250,000 mark. And then, um, what, what happens is that you still can get leads and you can do marketing. And then it's kind of starting to bridge the gap. The marketing starts to kick, you know, generate more of the leads because your brand is growing bigger. And you start, you start, you start to rely less on us and uh, you probably will sleep better at night as well.

Speaker C: Nice. Very cool. I like that, that journey you took us through as a business owner. And that's always a big challenge for people who, especially when they're starting out. Where to allocate my dollars? Yeah, where do I allocate my dollars? I have precious few. Yeah, they're not coming in from the business. It's pretty much what I saved up or what have you. So how do I know how to properly spend. So I like that concept. Don't spend it on and tell me if I'm wrong. Like building the most beautiful website and do spend it on getting your phone ringing.

Speaker A: Exactly. I'll, I'll tell you right now, I have plenty. We, we have 80 plus of our own websites that generate leads. And most of them are not pretty. And calls are still coming through, especially in niches where something is an emergency, right? Plumbers, electricians, tree services, lawn care. Customers know, expect that someone probably will not have a website that looks like Nike when they offer three services. I mean, it's great if you do, but if you don't, it's really not the expectations a customer has. They want to call somebody, they want to be greeted well, they want somebody to answer a call saying like, hey, this and this. Tree services, how may I help you? That's the part that really makes a difference. The website just put something out there and as you start to grow, uh, over time, you can bring people into graphic designers, web designers to make it better for you. And then there is kind of a third stage, right? You're in a point where you are getting some marketing off of your brand and then leads are you buying from someone else? And then the third stage, when you get to a million million and a half, businesses start to think to themselves, what if I am generating leads from my own brand, but I can actually double dip into the leads that someone else generates and I can get my competitors out of the market, Right? You start to. Yeah, that's kind of the evolution. I actually had a phone call, funny enough with someone yesterday and he was like, hey, what happens if someone pays you for the leads before I pay you? And I'm like, we're on first come, first serve basis. He's like, I'm going to send you $10,000 to top up my account, right? I don't want anybody to get this lead. That's a mindset that you get to when you've got, you know, millions dollars of worth of equipment and 40 people working for you. Because now you don't want anybody else to get that opportunity. Uh, you know, some might think it's not very, you know, honest or nice, but it's business, right? So he's got his business to protect, his family to take care of, and that's the way that he's looking at it. Very compet. Competitive, very kind of conquesting type of a mindset.

Speaker C: Okay. Wow. That is some journey though. When you get to a certain level.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: You have to start thinking in a different way. So that's powerful. And um, it makes a lot of sense too, right. If you're starting out just 100. The journey. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I work as obviously advising businesses and some of owners, especially new ones, they fixate on the prettiest website and they fixate on the logo and designing this logo and it doesn't look right and I'm going to change it from green to fuchsia and from fuchsia to peach and from. And it's like, dude, make a sale, lady. Uh, please make a sale. Because if you're not making sales, no matter how pretty your logo, you're not in business.

Speaker A: No, no. And we, we got out of the web design services kind of business model long time ago because we realized that everybody wants a different color here, a different font and different size. And I'm like, it doesn't matter. You need something that works and that's all that matters. Everything else is so subjective because what you like, your customer might not even like.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You need to get people to the website before you even decide to change something on it so that it's based on actual, real, real world feedback.

Speaker C: I like it. Do you know what it takes to be successful as a business owner? There are five keys that every business owner has to master in order to be successful. How do I know these keys? Well, I used to say that I made them up, but really I've learned these five keys in two ways. My name is Mark Adams. I'm the owner of Next Level Business Advisors and the host of the podcast Business Stories of Success. In the podcast, we discuss success with business owners from around the world. We talk about what it means to them, how they achieve it, and the single biggest quality or personality trait that's needed in order to be successful. As a profitability and growth business advisor, I work with business owners around the country to help them increase profit and or accelerate growth. Now I say or because some business owners aren't properly positioned to accelerate growth, in those cases, we actually focus on honing in on profitability. If you are a business owner and you're excited about improving your profit or accelerating your growth, feel free to download my free ebook, mastering the five keys to make your business successful. It's found at my website, nlbusinessadvisors.com Five keys. That's the number. Five keys you can Also, subscribe to my podcast, Business Stories of Success. And if you're really ready to start accelerating your growth, feel free to schedule your free discovery call. We'll talk about where you are today, what your goals are, your challenges, your obstacles, and I can help you to hurdle some of the hurdles to your own business success. Join me at Next Level Business Advisors and schedule your appointment today. Exactly. I'm going to pivot a little bit and I'm going to talk about the. The theme of our whole podcast is business stories of success. So how do you define success?

Speaker A: Wow, good. Deep question. Um, success. I would define it as waking up in the morning and feeling good about the day. Um, not every day is going to be good, but that would be my definition. And that can mean. Can encompass a lot of things, is that you have to feel good about your business. You have to be. I think you have to be passionate. There's a lot of folks who say that don't start a business that is your hobby or you enjoy it will, over time, become kind of a job. I'm m. Complete opposite. I love marketing. I've been doing marketing for a long time, and every morning I just. I want to do more of it. Right. And I. I'm excited about it. So I believe that you got to feel good about your business. You got to feel about, you know, your family, the fact that you took care of them and there's no stress is that something happens and, you know, your family might be in danger and whatnot. Uh, that's very important. That's, to me, a success. Your. My family is my. My wife, my child, my parents, taking care of them, making sure that they're. They're stable, their life is taken care of. That's extremely important to me. That's success to me.

Speaker C: Awesome. I. Absolutely. So do you consider yourself successful, sir?

Speaker A: 100. Yeah, I definitely wake up feeling good about the business. I feel good about safety in my family. So I think, yeah, I would define myself as successful.

Speaker C: Nice. Nice. So here's the part where people are going to steal from you. You stole Caro, uh, and we got Lero. So here's what they're gonna steal from you. What did you do to make yourself successful? What are some things that you've done to make yourself successful?

Speaker A: A lot of work. Um, it's if. If you want to build a business. And, you know, like you said at the beginning, there are some unicorns who get overnight success, but most of the time, it's 10 years in making and it's not just 10 years of nine to five. Uh, it's 14 hours, 18 hours a day, sometimes two. Two all nighters. I used to have two all nighters back to back when I was in corporate because I wanted to learn skills and I wanted to impress clients and kind of build up a reputation for myself. And I would do two all nighters back to back and then I would pass out after 48 hours of not sleeping. Right. But that's what got me here. I've got the skills that now I can monetize and really do anything I want from anywhere really. Uh, that I want. Right now we're in Toronto, but we're thinking of, hey, why not Thailand, why not, you know, Bali, Somewhere else and somewhere else where it's warm or, you know, 365 days a year. So in my opinion, it's a lot of work and persistence. Uh, you just gotta be very persistent and believe that, you know, you, you can actually make happen whatever it is that is in your head.

Speaker C: Okay, nice. So now you've gotten to this level of success, you said that you've done that, you've done it with a lot of work. What are some things you do to maintain this success that you have?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, you have to understand how business operates. And what I mean by that is there are, uh. The way I always simplify it is that three components to a business, there's marketing, there's sales and there's operations. That's just in very simple format for me. And what I know is that I'm very good at the first one third of it, marketing. I can generate a ton of leads. If I go into partnership with someone, I know right away what we're going to do. We've got systems in place, we've got processes. My team can go and write content, we can start to do SEO, we can uh, start to do paid advertising. That type of partnership will be successful as long as someone else is fulfilling the other two thirds. So it's someone else answering the phone calls. Fantastic. Is someone else providing fulfillment?

Speaker B: Boom.

Speaker A: We've got our self successful business. We started one a couple of months ago in 3D printing services just here in Toronto. And in less than two months it made five and a half thousand dollars in sales. And $17,000 is right now in the sales pipeline waiting to be closed. And that's because I've got a business partner who's good at that second half of the business and I'm really good at the first half. So I think figuring out what it is that you're good at what it is that you're bringing to the table. And then finding the right people to fill the apps is something that will help you maintain that success. Because in the beginning I was very much, I want to do everything. It definitely was useful. I learned a lot of skills. But, uh, I also realized that, hey, perhaps sales and cold calling is not my thing. Perhaps doing something, fulfillment, you know, cutting lawns and whatnot, is not my thing. And if I want to own 20, 30, you know, traditional businesses, marketing is what I do. So whenever people look at me and they're like, you own this business, you own that business, you own the third business. Everybody says you should focus on one. And I, I always say I always focus on one thing only, and that's marketing. That's the first one third of the business. I always do the same thing for every single business. Uh, and that's what helps me maintain success.

Speaker C: I like that. I like that. Now you, you actually slipped in there.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: A nugget that I don't think everyone caught, but I caught it. Okay, you said you own these businesses, so what do you mean by that? How do you own other businesses besides your marketing business?

Speaker A: Yeah, so when businesses come to us and they buy leads, uh, like I said, they get to a certain point and they wake up and they're like, hey, maybe I should start to diversify and kind of move away from the leads that Scott provides in case Scott disappears one day. So then we, what we do is we don't provide marketing services to small businesses. We don't go into this whole retainer for a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars. It's just, it's a lot of work. And retainers are usually not large enough. So what we do instead is that if we like someone we're working with and they're really great at servicing clients and providing fulfillment when we know it, because we can see it in a, uh, in a CRM and a customer relationship management platform. How they answer the call, how, how you know, how quick they're on the follow up. Then we make an offer. Hey, you can go and hire marketing agencies yourself. You can try to figure this all out. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to lose money, and it's going to still take time. That's the way it is. Everybody thinks they can just kind of find the super marketing agency from the first try and it's going to work. Uh, unfortunately there's too many that are not good. So what we do is we offer them to Buy into their business at 10 or 30%, anywhere between 10 and 30% and become part of, part of owners of the business. Right. And then what we do is we essentially, you know, if the business followed our advice and relied heavily on just leads, we go and build the website, we produce all the content, we'd start to build brand, we start to try to get them into the newspapers, local newspapers. As a business owner who build a business from scratch. Right. Interesting stories like that, doing pr, traditional PR and whatnot. Uh, and the goal for us is technically not to build a lifestyle brand where we stay for the next 30 years in this business, but more to build it towards acquisition. I think there are a lot of business owners out there who look at their business and they actually wouldn't mind selling it. When it gets to a certain point, if the multiple is high enough, they could take that money and they could retire, invest into other things and try different things. And uh, we really like tree service in this niche, for example. And because there's a lot of acquisitions happening by larger conglomerates, they're buying out smaller players because of the book of business equipment and whatnot, and they kind of consolidate all that, uh, all that brand. And that's something that we like to do. So yeah, that's, that's the roadmap that we're taking right now. It's something we've been doing for the last two years, I would say. But, uh, whenever we don't, we, we don't have business to acquire. We just start, uh, uh, one ourselves. If I find a great operator, I know someone is truly passionate and they're tired, for example, of corporate and they want to get out. Um, we'll start a business from scratch. We'll start from scratch, build it up, and within the first couple of months it's making money.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's a brilliant business model. And I remember we chatted about it and I wanted to share that with others. That's not going to work for everyone because you really have to know a lot about what you know, which is the marketing. Right. So you can find a great operator, you could find someone who can fulfill. But if they can't sell and you can sell it, they might be in trouble buying it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: But when you have something that you can complement another business with, that's a nice model to be a part owner.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: To make that offer. I like that thought. I would just highlight that. Thanks for sharing that. Um, what do you think is the single biggest quality needed to be a successful business owner?

Speaker A: Deep Questions. I love these questions. Um, I think not even say a business owner. I think to be just in general, successful entrepreneur. Um, the first thing that comes to mind is Will Smith's quote. Um, he said, successful people, and I'm just quoting here, I'm not. Don't exactly don't, don't remember exact words, but successful people have to have a delusional quality. Whereas he believes that something that hasn't happened can happen. Right. And that I've heard that first time in university, when I was in university, and I probably listened to that video 300,000 times and it just stuck in the back of my mind is that. And as an entrepreneur, you have a vision, you have a dream inside that head and nobody else can. Doesn't even know the, the, the, the full scope of that dream. And so you have to be delusional to go and keep building it while everybody tells. Everybody else around you tells you it's risky, it might not work, it might not happen, it's dangerous. Why would you do that? Why don't you get a government job and just retire with a golden parachute, you know? Um, it takes a delusional person to do that. That's really my opinion. And I do think that in a way I am delusional. So I don't even know how to, you know, rephrase it in a way. But it's a. You have to be delusional. That's a quality you gotta have as an entrepreneur.

Speaker C: Okay, cool. I like that. Um, I've heard many different qualities, I must say. Delusional has not been one of them.

Speaker A: Probably not. Yeah.

Speaker C: But it's cool because what you're talking about really is just saying that it's delusional, visionary, whatever you want to call it. Right.

Speaker A: Persistent vision.

Speaker C: Yeah. Right. Yeah. They have this vision of what they're, what they're going to do, and they make it happen. Sometimes I think about Jeff Bezos. Right. Yeah. Like books.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker C: I don't know. I don't even know if you could find a book on Amazon. No, you can, but what a, what a difference. Right? So definitely. I like that quality. Um, I want to just tribute for a little bit because you said you're a successful entrepreneur. You've been doing it for several years now. Have you made any mistakes in business? What's one mistake you care to share

Speaker A: that we can learn from A hundred percent? Um, I think the biggest mistake was to, was probably to have a wrong expectation of how long it takes to actually become successful.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Right. Um, I've read too much online content where all you read is unicorns. Someone build a business and six months later, then, you know, next m month and they are making a million bucks a year. It happens, it truly happens. But I think that a lot of uh, a lot of those articles and, and videos, what they miss is that there's 10 years of building up on skills and crafts and you know, kind of life experiences and business experiences that actually culminated in this $1 million that they as a business owner. So for me, this expectation at the beginning was completely wrong. I thought that, hey, one year in and I was like, I'm not making this money. Two years in, I'm not making that money. And if I wasn't delusional, I would have quit long time ago. But there were, there were a lot of lows. Um, there were moments where I was, you know, we were making minimum income. I had to switch careers, was literally, you know, $30,000. That would probably be. Well, it's not minimum income, but it was going from $75,000 an engineer going to $30,000 as a, as a, um, as a marketer. That was a big cut to take. And you just, you had to believe in it and you had to work in it. And I, uh, always believe that next year I'm going to be it, next year I'm going to be it. And maybe that's what got me here. But uh, set your expectations correctly. It takes two, three, five years to become to build a business that actually works. It really does take time.

Speaker C: Um, do you think that having a mentor or do you think coaches help at all with this journey?

Speaker A: 100 and I think coaches and mentors come in different forms. So some people do get lucky in my opinion. They will find somebody who, who will talk to them in person, they will hire them or they will have them in their life as someone who is maybe older and sees them as an apprentice. Uh, I, I wasn't that lucky. Um, what I did find in terms of mentorship is YouTube.

Speaker C: Okay?

Speaker A: A million million, uh, minutes of advice. How to build a business, how to grow a business. If you really listen into those podcasts, and I don't mean like a 10 second, you know, tick tock video of, of kind of really boiling it down to a core component. I mean like an hour, an hour and a half conversation. If you listen in, you will learn a lot from mistakes that others made. And then when you go through your business and something happens, this aha moment goes in your head. I remember this person saying that and it's exactly what's happening right now. And here's how I'm going to pivot, here's what I'm going to learn from it, how I'm going to handle it. Um, so that was for me mentorship and kind of uh, where I got it from personally.

Speaker C: Okay, cool, cool. The University of YouTube.

Speaker A: That's right. We live in the best time. I mean you can learn anything on YouTube these days and just online in general. I think it's the best time to start a business is just because all that information, all the wisdom and all the knowledge is literally on YouTube or uh, all other video platforms. You just have to be willing to tap into it and take time away from movies and you know, entertainment and dedicated to, to improving yourself.

Speaker C: Yeah, you will be investing a lot of time um, in order to be successful. There's just no way around it. And so that's absolutely the case. I'm going to ask one final question if you don't mind. Yeah, go ahead. What advice would you give to a brand new business owner?

Speaker A: Brand new business owner? Well, I guess tying it all together, everything that we've talked about, uh, one advice or can it be a complicated multi step?

Speaker C: People want to learn, so give it to us what you got.

Speaker A: All right. Set the expectations correctly. Make sure that you, you know that it takes time to build something worthwhile. Um, do not focus at the beginning on something that you're not. If you're already in a business, focus on what you're good at and find others who will do something that will be, you know, that you're not good at. So if you need, you're doing marketing, you need marketing. Find guys who can get you leads. And just as expectation you probably should know how to do fulfillment. If you're starting a brand new business, that should be your core expertise. Um, and uh, yeah, and just keep believing in your dream. I mean anything is possible truly at the beginning. It is the hardest, it is really the hardest to get to first a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollars a year, uh, just because you've never done it and it's so much more uncertainty. But once you make that first dollar, first a hundred dollars, first a thousand dollar check, you're gonna look at it and be like I can't believe it, I should probably increase my price. You're like, uh, I can get paid even more.

Speaker C: That's right, that's right. Once you fulfill, it's a beautiful feeling.

Speaker A: That's it. And start to value yourself because you are providing a service everybody thinks that if they start a lawn care business, it's just like any other. It's really not. You're unique. As a result, your business is unique as well. So there is something special about you that you're doing for that business and try to tap into it, try to make it, try to make that as a differentiating point.

Speaker C: Love it. Awesome. Hey Scott, thank you so much for giving us some time and some expertise. We look forward to watching you on your continued journey to success.

Speaker A: Thank you, Mark. It was a pleasure. And uh, looking forward to staying in touch.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Mhm, Mhm, Mhm.

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