495. Special Forces Lessons for Building a Self-Managing Practice with Sam Goodner

Speaker A: Go explore new territory. If you keep following where everybody else goes, you're likely to get the same results. Go be different.

Speaker B: That's Sam Goodner, angel investor and author of Like Clockwork. Run your business with Swiss army precision.

Speaker A: How are you different, uh, than everyone else in your industry? What's your unfair advantage? And most young entrepreneurs can, can articulate an answer, but those who can, they're going to outperform, uh, all of those who cannot.

Speaker B: I'm Michael Mogul, founder and CEO of Krisp, the nation's number one law firm growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Krisp started with just $500 to my name and has grown to over eight figures in revenue over the last few years, earning a spot on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo, and define what it means to be a true game changer.

Speaker C: I sat down with Sam to discuss

Speaker B: when founders can become bottlenecks to growth, the importance of strong team onboarding when building firm culture, and why systems are necessary for scaling self managing teams.

Speaker A: If you want people to really buy into what you're doing, you have to take the time to actually let them know what you believe in, where you're going, what are the priorities for this year? How do we measure success? How do we run this business? Who are the other leaders that run the different parts of the business? You want them to know where they fit into your organization.

Speaker B: That's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. Before we begin today's episode, I, uh, want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not going to push any made to order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have, uh, one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five star review, pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free.

Speaker C: All right, Sam.

Speaker A: Welcome to the podcast, Michael. It's great to be on your show.

Speaker C: I will say you've got one of the more, uh, interesting origin stories of Some of the guests that we've had on over the last several years. So born in Texas, raised in a Swiss farming village, I believe around 600 people, trained as an elite Swiss soldier and then came back to America, built a few tech startups, uh, eight, nine figure exits. So I just wouldn't love just if even just going back to the beginning, uh, how does a kid from Texas end up in the Swiss special forces?

Speaker A: Well, the short version of a long story is my parents initially were moved to Europe on what was going to be a, uh, three year work assignment for my father. They got there, my sister was born there, I was born in Texas. They got there and they just fell in love with Europe. They were initially in Holland and then my father ended up starting his own business. They moved to Switzerland because one of their first clients was there and they just decided this is where we want to raise our family. And so my sister and I grew up. They eventually became Swiss citizens, which is difficult to do by the way. It's a 10 year process. My sister and I both inherited the Swiss passport. And for all men in Switzerland we have compulsory military service. When you graduate from high school, it's across the board. Every young Swiss male is conscripted. I ended up volunteering for our special forces unit for, for a whole bunch of things I had to prove to myself. But that ended up both being the luckiest and best decision that I ever made in my life. Some of the lessons that I learned during my, my, my, my two years serving in, in the Swiss military, um, I, I've applied, you know, for the

Speaker C: rest of my life and actually thought that was interesting. So one of the things that I believe you shared is that, you know, you didn't learn how to run a business on the job, in the business, but much of it in. A lot of the principles that carried

Speaker B: over were from your experience in the military.

Speaker A: You know, I didn't realize it at the time. First of all, there are no real good classes. I mean there are plenty of entrepreneurship classes. None of them teach you what you really need to know. So, um, all entrepreneurs, when you start a business for the first time, you're learning on the job. What I realized somewhere along the way is that I had completely subconsciously been applying a lot of the same principles that I learned as an officer, uh, in the Swiss special Forces at the various technology companies I ran over 30 years and initially I started realizing, oh, I, I remember where I first learned that principle. Whether it's about, you know, uh, uh, you know, leading managing Delegating, you know, decision, you know, making decisions under pressure, prioritizing, triaging, you name it. And that's why at some point I decided I need to put this in a, in a, in a book. So I decided I'm going to go back and write a business book on execution, or more specifically, operational scalability. And every chapter starts with the principle that I learned serving as an officer in the Swiss army, that I then later applied at, uh, one of the companies I ran over 30 years.

Speaker C: And were you entrepreneurial from an early age? I'm always just fascinated by that in the sense of how much of it do you believe you're born with versus, you know, skills that you can develop? What was your experience?

Speaker A: Well, first of all, I think it's both. I had an early exposure to entrepreneurship because, like I mentioned, my father was an entrepreneur. So I, I just kind of assumed I didn't know any better.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I was growing up in this. Again, we were the only foreigners growing up in this tiny little farming village in middle of nowhere Switzerland. But my father was an entrepreneur. I always assumed that at one point that's what everybody did, that you went to work somewhere and eventually you went and started your own business. I didn't realize that was the exception rather than the rule. So I sort of was raised in a family that was very entrepreneurial minded. So I got lucky.

Speaker C: And I know the book opens up with Jim Collins's distinction between time telling and clock building. You obviously the book, you know, titled Like Clockwork. Could you explain essentially what, what you mean by that?

Speaker A: Again, I'm going to paraphrase, you know, Jim Collins here, but it's a famous quote from his, his book Built to Last. I'm going to paraphrase the quote right? Imagine you run into a person who without fail has this amazing skill where he can just gaze at the moon and the stars and tell you exactly what time it is. That's pretty amazing. But imagine that you ran into a person who could build a clock and that you would. Then after that they could always tell time whether the inventor was there with the clock or not. And so he calls great entrepreneurs clock builders because their legacy is the company itself. It's not the personification of a charismatic leader. It's not the wealth that they've generated for themselves. You know, it's the legacy is the institution, the organization that they've built that lives on after their leadership has ended and over multiple product or service life cycles. That's what he calls clock building.

Speaker C: And I will say I mean, this is, in some ways it can feel like chasing the horizon. You know, the idea of building a business that can run without you. And it sounds great, right? And you know, we work with a number of law firms and we talk a lot about building a self managing law firm. But from your experience, what, what is this like the first sign that a business is too dependent on its founder? And then what have you seen as kind of like the first step that somebody can take to start building a self managing organization?

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, first of all, acknowledge that like most companies in the U.S. where there's what, 160,000 law firms in the U.S. most of those are one to two lawyers. And all of the principles I talk about in the book, they're kind of, they don't really apply to them because when there's only a couple of you, you, by definition, you are the business. Right. But for those attorneys who want to build a real practice, that's 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 attorneys over time, at some point you have to build in the processes, systems, procedures, infrastructure, organizational structure to allow the business to run without you. How can you tell whether someone is too integral to their business? By the way, sometimes they don't even know. I had no idea. You would have thought that after all the training I received in the military on delegation that I would be a master delegator. And yet it was, it was not until seven years into my business that I had this sort of, you know, accidental life changing experience thrust on me that made me realize that, uh, I wasn't. And here's the story. So this was in early 2000. I had started my first business in 1993. So I was seven years in turning my business. I thought I was a master delegator. I mean, after all, I'd hired a great team. They were super smart at what they did. I thought that I was doing a great job, leading by example, working tirelessly. And then I get a call one day. My father was living in Munich, Germany at the time. He calls me and he says, sam, I've been diagnosed with cancer. The doctors have given me six months to live. So I do what any loving son would do. I go pack my bags, I go to my executive team and I say, listen, I'm going to go spend some time with my dad. It's going to be at least a month. And this is before zoom and all of that. We had email. That was about it. A long distance phone call was lots of dollars per minute. I'm like, listen, you guys are in Charge, uh, you, uh, know, while I'm gone. And they looked at me and said, well, Sam, how are you going to make decisions? I was surprised by that. I said, well, I mean, you guys will figure it out. And I knew that they would. So I went and spent this time with my father now. And it was an amazing five weeks that I spent with him. First of all, the doctors, you know, overestimate or underestimated how long he had to live. He would live another eight years, right? He would eventually die from the cancer, but we had another eight years ahead of us. So we had that surprise ahead of us. But I had another surprise waiting for me when I got back to Austin. When I got back to Austin, my company wasn't just running fine. It was running better than when I left. And not just by a little. Because what had happened? Well, every one of my leaders had had to step up. They had to own every decision that they made. They had to not only make the decision, but then own it. And as a result, all of their teams had to level up. Now, they weren't going to make the decisions the same way that I would have, but frankly, they were making better decisions. And that's when I realized that, uh, even though I didn't realize it, I had been the bottleneck all along. Because guess what? As entrepreneurs, we're really good at making decisions. We've had to make decisions from day one. We're very comfortable making decisions. Like, you come with me A. Or B. I'm very good at saying with very little information. Let's go with A. And when you start your business, by definition, you have run every part of your business, Right? When I started my business, I was, uh, an IT consult, was in sales. I was in marketing. I was our HR person. I was our accounting person. I did payroll at night. I took out the trash. And that intimate knowledge of your business, while it's really, really useful when you're building every one of those departments, then becomes a liability if you don't know how to get out of the way. Because the leaders that you hire to run those parts of the business, they will instinctively come to you for big decisions or even medium decisions. And because you love making decisions, you instinctively just give them the answer. I had become the bottleneck, and I didn't even realize it because they kept coming to me for these decisions, when, in fact, I should have pushed back and said, this is your business unit. You run it. If you want some input, I'll be glad to give you some. Otherwise, you run it. And it's not until after I came back from Munich that I realized that

Speaker C: how do you know when somebody's ready to make decisions without you in your scenario? And I had a similar experience. So I took years ago, I took a month long sabbatical, I stepped out of the business and I was pleasantly surprised of what I returned to and that, you know, the leaders stepped up and the business grew. But for a lot of people, if they were to do that, things could go the other way.

Speaker A: Well, you have to stage it. First of all, you got to make good hires. We can talk about hiring if you want, but you got to make good hires and then you stage it initially. And this is all around decision rights. And so initially, if you put them, if you're not completely sure and you put them in, uh, you know, in charge of this, of this business unit, you maybe you have more restricted decision rights and you initially want them to at least consult you on some of these decisions. And you, and you're clear about which ones those are and which ones they're not. And when they come to you, you always say, when they come to you with a question, you always initially say, well, what do you think the answer is? Always. And then after a while when they keep coming up with the right answers, you basically say, listen, going forward, don't even bother coming to me with these decisions. We're going to move now the decision rights down over on the right hand side. And I don't even need to be informed on these decisions anymore. We can take the training wheels off. So you kind of stage it.

Speaker C: Gotcha. Yeah. And I, uh, do want to touch

Speaker A: a little bit on hiring.

Speaker C: I know you've talked a lot about, I guess this is less to do with hiring, more to do with onboarding perhaps and culture. You've talked about experiences in your life and your career where you've had a very poor onboarding experience and then how that kind of shaped your belief in kind of an onboarding boot camp.

Speaker A: Yeah. So this is where one of the stories I share in the book is I'm 19 years old, I just graduated from high school and I take this six hour train ride to the military base for our special forces in the very south part of Switzerland. So a six hour train ride, a 30 minute bus ride up the side of a mountain with a whole bunch of really nervous 19 year old men in that bus. And as soon as we arrive on base, we can already see the young men running in formation, doing sit ups and push ups. And as soon as the Bus stops. We have drill instructors that jump on the bus, come barking orders. I mean, from that moment on, it was like non stop. There's no, not a second to breathe, not a second to have a second thought. We go from grabbing our equipment to grabbing our gear, to getting our rifle, to getting information, to learning how to make our beds in our barracks. You know, we're doing more physical drills and tests and literally non stop separated into all these smaller groups. And then magically, right before sunset, all of these groups, in a beautiful example of Swiss precision, all converge on this huge parking lot at the same time right before the sunset. And, um, our base commandant, Colonel Hess, walks up on top of this hill behind a microphone and gives us his welcome speech to Special Forces training in three languages. And then it's more running around, more drills, more, until finally we, you know, we hit the Sack maybe at 1 o' clock in the morning. The point I make about the story is that I remember almost every minute of that day. I remember how the air smelled, I remember how the food tasted. And we finally got to eat. And it set such a tone for, uh, the next five months. Nothing could have more perfectly set the stage for what we were about to experience. Now, you contrast that to most first days for most companies, and it's a complete afterthought, right? My very first corporate job when I graduated from college was with a big Fortune 500 company here in Austin. And I'd gone through the interview process. I was offered the position. And on my first day, I walk into the main headquarters, as one does, walk up to the receptionist desk, and the young lady says, there, hey, hi, how may I help you? And I'm like, hey, I'm Sam Goodner. I'm here my first day. I'm excited. And she's like, oh, okay. Do you know who your manager is? I'm like, I'm not sure, actually. They didn't tell me that. And he says, well, go sit down over there and let me see what I can do. So I go sit down. I don't know for how long. Um, again, it's a forgettable day. Eventually, somebody comes out, not my manager. They were not even working that day. Someone from HR comes in, sits me down in a small office, gives me a ton of paperwork to fill out. And then after that, I had nothing for me to do, so they sent me home. That was my first day experience, which was completely unremarkable. We decided when we started Catapult Systems, our first company, in 1993, we decided we Were going to have the opposite. So any employee of ours that started anywhere in the country at one point, we had 11 offices. They would walk into the lobby of any one of our offices. There'd be a huge banner with their name behind the reception desk. Welcome John Smith. The receptionist would go, john, we've been expecting you. We're so excited for you to join our company. Your manager is waiting for you in her office. They'd walk them to the office, the manager would spend about an hour with them, giving them the lay of the land of how things worked in their business unit in our company. Then they'd walk him around, introduce him to the entire team they'd work with. They'd bring them to their desk. They'd be balloons and confetti and a bunch of catapult swag. T shirts, mugs, you name it. A laptop fully ready to go. Business cards, back when you had business cards fully printed with the correct title and phone number login ready to go. And then they took them to lunch. And that afternoon they were put on their very first live project. No time to breathe, no time to think. Immediately immersed in the team they were going to work with if they were married that same day, we would send a big welcome package to their spouse at home that had a handwritten note from the manager saying, we're so excited that your spouse is joining our company. We cannot wait to meet you at our next catapult family event, which we had one every month. And so by the time the employee goes home and sits down with her spouse, they're going to say, you're not going to believe the day I hatch. She's going to say, you won't believe what happened, what just came in the mail that first day, that first week, that first month. It's going to set the tone, it's going to set the stage for everything else that employee experiences at your business going forward.

Speaker C: Are there other things? I mean, just along those lines? I'm curious. Well, I guess two parts. One, have you always been such a strong believer in the importance of, of a, of a strong, like, business culture, or was there something that shaped that? And then I'm curious as some of the other things you may have done.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I didn't even know the word culture, but I think intuitively you come out of a, a, uh, brotherhood of special forces soldiers. You sort of understand the value of trust and the value of getting to know one another and, and being able to rely on one another. And, and, and, and again, there is a, uh, an inherent culture. Every unit in the Swiss army, whether you're, you know, a pilot or infantry or artillery or special forces, they all have their own culture. They all attract different people, right? A very different person goes to logistics and, and, and supply logistics in the military, then signs up for special forces. So maybe some. There was something about that that was intuitive. And then, of course, later you go read Jim Collins, Good to Great Build to Last. And those are two classic books, by the way, that every entrepreneur must read. And he puts in black and white. He identifies. This is what culture means, right? This is what, what you stand for, what your core values look like, why is it important to have a core purpose, et cetera. And so one of the things that we very quickly did at Catapult, we were growing really fast, and we realized we need to some five, we need to create a system to teach our new employees what we believe in and what we stand for and how we work with one another and what our expectations are of them working with our clients. So we created this thing called Catapult Boot Camp. Within their first month of joining our firm anywhere in the country, we would fly them to headquarters in Austin, Texas, with usually 10 to 15 of their peers. That was about a regular boot camp size. And that boot camp lasted anywhere from two to four days, depending on the department they joined. And the days, 2 to 4, those are typical training things you would expect any company to do. Like, here's all of our systems and processes and methodologies, and this is how we do accounting here or consulting or etc. But day one, day one was special. We called day one cultural indoctrination day. And it was so important that I took a day out of my month as the CEO and founder of the company to personally teach day one of Catapult Boot Camp. And as you might expect, of course, I adorned combat boots, camo pants, and a black Catapult T shirt and a red beret to sort of commemorate the event a bit. And what did we talk about on day one? Well, we talked about all the things that most companies don't take the time to share with their employees. Like, why are you here? Like, why did we pick you among all the candidates that we interviewed, why you? What do we believe in that's so special? Where are we going as a company? Not only what do we believe in, but what's our North Star? What do we aspire to become? What do we believe in, but also where are we going? We gave them a sense of our history. You tell them the Origin story. Everyone wants to know the origin story of where they work. And then we bring in the leader of every business unit to introduce their part of the business. And so they get to know them as a human being the whole time we're doing icebreakers and exercises so that that class of 10 to 15 new recruits really gets to know one another at a deep personal level. By the time they leave, you can ask any one of our former Catapult employees today, and there's several thousand, uh, out there. If you tell them, hey, tell me who was in your catapult boot camp, they could probably name everybody that was in their boot camp because they took those relationships with them back to their respective offices and business units. And so that's what you do. If you want people to really buy into what you're doing. You have to take the time to actually let them know what you believe in, where you're going. What are the priorities for this year? How do we measure success? How do we run this business? Who are the other leaders that run the different parts of the business? You want them to know where they fit into your organization.

Speaker C: And I want to talk a little bit about, I guess, on the. Along those lines, like systems over goals. I know that there's a quote from James Clear that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And you spoke about how at Catapult, you codified a number of these things, like the 60 golden rules of customer service, and that this was like a handbook that everybody got. Can you speak to that? Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, by the way, another book that everybody should read is Atomic Habits by James Clear, obviously a New York Times bestseller. And again, my favorite quote from that book is, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And that, of course, he talks about our personal habits. But the same is true in business. Right? Every business aspires to grow and be successful and have positive ebitda, uh, and happy customers and engaged employees. But just wanting that is not enough. Unless you build the systems to support that along the way, you're not going to be able to scale past usually about 10 employees, because it's at 10 employees that if the CEO is still in the middle of everything, you stop to scale because they've become the bottleneck. So when I say codifying your best practices, what do I mean? Well, this is sort of a step along the way to achieve operational scalability for everything that you do, you have to identify what good Looks like. So start by that. I'll take recruiting for example. Recruiting, interviewing, um, obviously really important if you want to grow your business, but when you get started, you just kind of are making, making things up. You're just sort of figuring out where am I going to find good candidates? And when I interview them, I'm just going to interview them the way I was interviewed at my first previous two jobs. You're fumbling your way around and at one point, if you want to become good at this and make it a best practice and you as the founder don't want to be part of every interview process, you have to decide, okay, a, what does a good candidate look like and what does a good interview and recruiting process look like? And you have to put that in writing so that when you hire another, you bring on another hiring manager. You can then train them on your interview process. Because if you don't train them and you just basically say, hey John, I uh, would like you to interview this candidate. I mean they're just going to make it up. Not everybody is born a good interviewer. You tend to just interview them maybe the way you were interviewed when you were a candidate, but that's not best practice. And so for every part of your business, the one I always recommend young startups start with is sales. Because by definition if you're, especially if you're B2B, which by the way, that's most, most practices, most law practices, then the, the head partner is also the lead salesperson. You're the one out there networking, generating leads for your business in this B2B world. And at one point you scale, you scale, you scale if you're lucky. And then you get to the point where you're like, oh, uh, the only way for me to scale is I got to bring somebody else in to do sales with me or for me. And so we falsely assume that I can just go hire an experienced salesperson and they're going to go figure that out on their own. And most of the time that fails. Why? Because all that hard earned knowledge of who is my core customer, not just what kind of industry size, geography, but like who at that organization is the decision maker? How do I get in front of them? What objections am I going to hear? How do I overcome those objections? What price point, uh, can I work with, with those types of companies? What does a proposal look like? All that is in head. So before you go hire that first salesperson or sales team, you have to codify all of that that you've learned about selling your product or services in a sales playbook, then and only then when you have that sales playbook that identifies again who your customer is, how you get in front of them, what the objections are, everything you need to know. Can you then go hire that first salesperson or sales team and then train them on your sales best practices and then you go do that for every part of your business.

Speaker C: And I guess then coming back to hiring Sam, what were, were there specific traits that you'd look for when you were, when uh, you were interviewing people? Like anything that, or even questions that you would ask, like how would you determine if someone was a great fit for catapult?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, first of all, my answers are going to be different than other companies answers because we would hire just like I said in, you know, in the Swiss military, our special forces recruit a very different kind of candidate than someone who's a PIL pilot, than someone who's, you know, in artillery, for example. And so for me it starts with what are your core values? This is the linchpin of why core values are important. As you know, made famous by Jim Collins and built to last. If you understand what you stand for as an organization, then you get to incorporate that as part of your interview process. Not only interview, but even your recruiting process. You are starting to filter for candidates who are likely to fit into that belief system. Now again, I want to be careful here because some people take this too far. You don't want to just hire this homogenous, uh, group that everybody looks alike. That's not what I mean. Core values are much more around the kind of energy in your organization. So for example, if you're a very fast paced organization that requires a lot of quick decisions, innovation, you're very agile. That's one kind of employee who's going to really thrive in that fast changing environment. If you're a state department and you move very slowly or a nonprofit, that by definition is going to move much, much slower. The same kind of employee that would thrive in a fast moving, fast changing, agile environment will really be miserable over there and vice versa. So as one example, but it starts with what are my core values? I really need to understand what those are. And then you have that as a filter. Every person that interviews, you're going to interview for multiple competencies and you divide and conquer when you do that, right? So you identify the competencies you're looking for, whether they're technical competencies, accounting competencies, human resources competencies, sales competencies, you identify those you divide and conquer. But Every interviewer is interviewing for fit. What that really means is, are they going to fit into our culture and our core values? I cannot fabricate that. I can teach you how to program in JavaScript. I can teach you how to use AI. I can't teach you, you know, how to be, you know, how to be agile or, you know, to have a positive attitude. Like, I. I can't.

Speaker C: What would be some ways in which you'd vet that, you know, just through an interview process or even perhaps, uh, some red flags that, you know, that could arise.

Speaker A: My favorite methodology for interviewing, you've probably heard of it, is called top grading. As a father son team, Brad and Jeff Smart wrote this famous book, and now it's well over a decade or two ago. There's a couple of books that have been written by both of them since then. The main lesson, for me, at least from their interview methodology, is the most accurate predictor of future performance is past performance. So if I ask you a hypothetical question, you're going to give me a hypothetical answer. So if I say, Michael, hypothetically speaking, like, how would you get to the moon? Oh, well, Sam, that's easy. I'd build a team and I'd assemble it, and I'd build a rocket engine. And then that doesn't really help me much. And so every one of our questions, again, it's different to give him a problem to solve. That one could be hypothetical. But otherwise, when I'm trying to identify, how are they going to behave under pressure, or how are they going to behave if a customer is yelling at them? Or how are they going to behave if they have this situation with another employee? Or give me your worst customer service experience. I don't want to give a hypothetical. I want to say, tell me about the time a customer yelled at you. I want to give me. Give a specific example. What was going on? Why were they yelling at you? Was it the company's fault? Was it not? How did you handle that situation? So I'm going to give them very specific questions that they have to give me real answers from their past rather than just make something up that they think hypothetically I'd want to hear.

Speaker C: And then I guess, how do you spot, uh, the next generation of leaders just within the organization? Are there other certain behaviors that stick out to you when you're looking at somebody?

Speaker A: Yeah. You've had this experience in your business. Leaders naturally stand out. They naturally stand out. They want to do more, they want to take on more responsibility. They want to make more decisions. They want to help their teammates. And so the key is, when you notice somebody that's beginning to show those traits, you want to create an environment where they have the opportunity to start exercising that muscle. In the military, every officer, um, has a second in command, right? In the U.S. this is called an XO. Now, it makes sense in combat why you'd have a second in command. We've all seen the movies, right? The commanding officer gets injured or killed, and immediately somebody steps in and so the mission continues. But the other reason for that is you're constantly mentoring and grooming that second in command for leadership. In fact, you're training them to take your job someday. And you want to be very explicit about that. One of my favorite case studies in the book is Jerry South. He's the original founder of Town Park. Town park is one of the premier valet companies in the United states. At, uh, one point, 13,000 employees, 50 locations across the country. He started with just himself. So amazing success story. And Jerry had a very simple rule across his entire organization. If you wanted to be considered for advancement, a, uh, promotion, or to go open a new market, which was really the prized, uh, opportunity you had to have already trained your replacement. Think about that. If you aspire for promotion, you have to show the ability to not only identify, but train someone else to one day take your job. How powerful is that? I love that.

Speaker C: Now, I guess you talked a lot about Catapult, but I am curious, you know, when, when it came time to, uh, to move on and to sell, how did you know it was time?

Speaker A: Every person has their own, um, motivations and reasons for moving on. In my case, this was 20 years running catapult Systems. And we had created and spun off several companies along the way, right? So, but Catapult was sort of the base company that I really scaled over 20 years. So my family, we had a, uh, 10 year, big, hairy, audacious goal, if you recognize that term from Jim Collins as well. We had a family bhag, and that was to take our kids out of school and homeschool them while traveling the world for a year. We wanted them to be old enough to remember the experience, but young enough not to hate us for taking them out of their teenage social networks. So we kind of assumed that, you know, that 9 and 10, if, assuming we had two kids would be the ideal ages. So the year that our son was born, 2003, we put summer 2014 on the calendar. 10 years out. Now 10 years out, it's very, you know, sort of just this big shiny Object in the future five years out suddenly starts to get real. My, my, sadly the mother of my children, my ex wife is, uh, was also an entrepreneur. And so we both had to decide if we're going to take this year off, do we still want to be running both of our companies or. Ideally we decided it would be best if neither one of us had any day to day responsibilities. So we both set out to sell our companies sort of uh, around the same time. And so that's what set in place for me, the process of I'm going to go ahead and pass the baton out to someone else.

Speaker B: Now.

Speaker A: I had been training my replacement for eight years. The company ran perfectly without me. At this point I was more in a chairman role anyway. But it was time to sell so it would be completely out. And that sort of was the impetus at least for us, for our family to sell both of our companies.

Speaker C: What happened next?

Speaker A: Like was it, was it everything you

Speaker C: thought it would be? Like what, what was that experience in the, you know, in the months after, Maybe even the 12 months that came after that?

Speaker A: So I was very lucky that we had a very specific family goal that immediately followed that event because uh, I've seen a lot of my friends that have sold their businesses sort of flail. I tell everyone that I mentor if they want to sell their company. You should have a plan for what comes next. Because I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs really drive. They'll do all the stupid things. They'll go buy the fast car, the new boat and uh, all that stuff. None of that stuff matters. It's a short term distraction. And then you find yourself with suddenly all this extra time on your hands and nothing to give you purpose. So we had a very, very specific family purpose. So I sold my business. Um, it was in November 20ah, 13 and I retired in May 2014, um, and, and hand handed the baton over to my replacement. And the very next month we left for a year with four suitcases and four backpacks and didn't come back to the States for 13 months. And that was all about we're going to focus on the family. And it was an amazing experience. Like I'm. If anybody has the opportunity to go do an extended trip with your family, you will get to know your children yourself and your spouse in ways that you never even imagined possible. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: And then after taking all that time, I guess the other thing that's, that's been interesting to me is that you then came back and invested in another

Speaker B: business, but you took your Time.

Speaker C: Right. So you evaluated several companies, uh, and then you did it again. You scaled another company. Right. So it's kind of the difference between, like, how much of it is luck versus, uh, you know, proving to yourself, okay, I could do this again. So what was that experience like? I think it was with. With flash parking.

Speaker A: Yeah. First of all, it's always a lot of luck. Right. Any entrepreneur that tells you that, that luck is not a factor, they're kidding themselves. Luck is always a factor now, yes. Preparation, opportunity, absolutely. Hard work, determination, all of those things matter. But luck plays a big part in every entrepreneur's success. Said that I had a lot of time to think while we travel around the world, what was going to come next. And I knew for two reasons that I was not ready to retire. Number one, I knew that I needed purpose. Ah. And I still had a lot to give, so I knew that I would be bored unless I found something to go do professionally. Number two, I had kids going into middle school, and I knew that whatever work ethic I hoped to impart onto them had to be what I did, not what I said. So if they came home every day and daddy's at the computer in his underwear, investing, that is not the work ethic that I wanted to teach my kids. So for those two reasons, I was motivated to go do it again. I also knew that I didn't want to start one from scratch. So at this point, I had enough capital. I knew I didn't want to start a company from scratch. I had a quite a set of criteria that I developed over several months of the ideal kind of business I was looking for. And I decided to go look for one to buy and one that I could then join full time and help scale. Now, that took longer than I thought. So how do you go about doing this? Well, first of all, I became an angel investor. And once you start investing in a few deals, suddenly you start getting inbound deal flow. Like once you're out there in the market, known as someone who'll write a check, Suddenly everybody wants to introduce you to somebody else who's raising money. So over the course of a year, I looked at about a hundred companies, and some I invested in, but none were interesting enough for me to join or help in any more than just writing a check. And then I met this young founder, Juan Rodriguez. He was introduced to me through a, uh, mutual connection. And he said, listen, this young guy, he's running this technology company in Austin, and they're kind of stuck, and I think you should go Talk to them. I went to meet Juan Rodriguez for coffee and our 30 minute coffee meeting turned into three hours. And after that three hour meeting, I made two phone calls on my drive home. I called my wife and I said, I think I found him. And I called one of my longtime friends, if, you know, ypo, uh, and YPO forum mate, a former YPO forum mate of mine, Dan Sharplin. And I said, hey, remember that? You know, I told you I was looking for a company to buy or invest in. And he's like, yeah, why are you calling me? I said, well, I ran into this, you know, young entrepreneur and I think I found the company and I think you should look at it too, because I really want you on my board. It's a longer story behind that, but, um, I knew, I knew almost instantly. And then we did three months of due diligence before, you know, investing. We took down the whole round. I put myself on the team full time as president. I put my, my friend Dan on the, on the board. And then we proceeded to take this 12 person, you know, startup company that had been stuck at 3 million in revenue for the previous three years. You know, we, we, we 10x the company in two and a half years to 30 million. And then, you know, and then the, you know, well over a hundred million, you know, the three years after that leading to the next round of funding, which was at a unicorn valuation. It's kind of like being a step parent. So somebody, this is, this is my, you know, Juan was really the founder of this business, him and his two co founders. And so I was coming in with more gray hair and a bunch of scars from having done this a few times before. And it was kind of interesting because it wasn't, it wasn't my baby. It was like having a step baby where you can be much more objective. Like, I was not nearly as emotionally, you know, invested in every single little thing that would happen. And you can look at things much more objectively and much more calmly. Uh, and it really helped to sort of have maybe, I think a calmer hand at the till to sort of navigate the potholes that any technology company has when you're trying to scale to the, you know, the size we were trying to scale to.

Speaker C: Did you miss being, you know, hands on or is it just. It was a new season for you? Um, obviously there was the experience of Catapult and the other businesses and this is more of a, uh, it seems like much more of like a mentor, advisory role, but candidly, seems like you built A bigger business than the last one.

Speaker A: Yeah. I was still really hands on. You joined as president a company of 12 employees. You're hanging whiteboards, you're on every sales call, you're at every trade show. I'm assembling equipment. And it helped because, I mean, I had to go build every department over time to build a sales team, a marketing team, an operations team, you know, build an accounting team. I mean, we didn't have any. We didn't have an accountant. So, I mean, it was very, very hands on. But I didn't have to go find the first $3 million of product market fit. They had either very by genius stumbled onto that. Right. And of all things, the very antiquated parking technology space. They realized that there was a huge opportunity, and all the competitors were stuck in the 1990s, and they had built this very first parking tech platform that was based in the cloud and mobile first, and nobody had ever done that. And it was a huge opportunity to go capture market share. So they had already found they had already solved the problem, so to speak. What they needed was some growth capital and some gray hair to help them navigate those potholes. And I could provide both.

Speaker C: And as we come to a close, this being the Game Changing Attorney podcast, uh, Sam, what does being a game changer mean to you?

Speaker A: Go explore new territory. Right? If you keep following where everybody else goes, you're likely to get the same results. Go be different. If you ask the strategy question, to be successful in business, is it better to be better or different? And the right answer is, different. Be different than everyone else in your industry. When I sit down with any young entrepreneur, the very first question, whether I'm looking to mentor them or invest in their business, the very first question I ask them is, all right, tell me what you're best in the world at. And they go, what? Best in the world. That's a really tall bar. I'm like, no, no. Okay. How are you different than everyone else in your industry? What's your unfair advantage? And most young entrepreneurs can't articulate an answer. But those who can, they're going to outperform all of those who cannot. And by the way, best in the world just means best in your market. There's a local bakery right near where I live called Swedish Hill Bakery, and I would contend that they're the best in the world at being a bakery in Clarksville, Texas. Be different.

Speaker B: I want to give a huge thank you to Sam Goodner for taking the time to join us on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can

Speaker A: help you grow your law firm.

Speaker B: Number one, download the first chapter of my book absolutely free at gamechangingattorney.com Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got for me. And finally, number three, if you can leave this podcast a five star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Sam Goodner, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com.