Preparing Your Business for a Profitable Exit: Insights from Colin Campbell

Have you ever imagined a world where a business formula actually exists, capable of transforming startups into successful exits?

Colin C. Campbell, a seasoned entrepreneur, shares his invaluable insights on business growth and scaling. With a wealth of experience in building and exiting numerous successful ventures, Colin’s journey is a testament to the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. His book, “Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat,” derived from a decade of interviews and experiences, offers a formulaic approach to achieving business success. Colin’s candid storytelling and hard-earned lessons make him a relatable and trustworthy guide for entrepreneurs seeking to navigate the complexities of scaling their businesses and achieving successful exits.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Master the Formula to Growing and Scaling Businesses: Uncover the secrets to taking your business to the next level with proven strategies and insights.
• Tips for Successful Business Exits: Learn the essential steps and tactics for achieving a lucrative and smooth exit from your business.
• Unlock the Impact of Coaching on Business Transformation: Discover how coaching can revolutionise your business and propel it to new heights of success.
• Implement Strategies for Repeating Business Success: Uncover the key strategies for consistently achieving business success and sustaining growth over time.
• Understand the Importance of Timing in Business Exits: Gain insights into the critical role timing plays in maximising the value of your business exit.

Impact of Coaching on Business

Coaching and mentorship can have a transformative impact on business growth and development. Effective coaching sessions can align the management team, address real issues, and drive revenue acceleration. Collaborating with experienced mentors like Patrick Thean can provide valuable insights and strategies for setting up a business plan, building systems, and navigating the complexities of scaling and exiting a business.

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so you can maximize the valuation and then exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates- Brownsword, and today I’m joined by Colin C. Campbell. Colin’s one of these entrepreneurs that I’ve got a lot of time and respect for. He’s built and exited many businesses himself and got really open mind and is really happy to share his thoughts and learnings and some of his hard lessons learned along the way. Thanks for joining me, Colin.

Well, thank you for having me on.

Yeah, excellent. So, Colin, why don’t we start with just and. Well, I can see you’ve got a nicely branded t shirt there with nice primary colors. What’s it say? Start, scale, exit, repeat. I guess that’s a nice bit of a subtle hint of where we’re headed here.

There’s the book there. Yeah.

That was a ten year project, over 200 interviews, and 50 of those interviews made the book and we were able to get it published by Forbes books on October 3. It’s been a number one bestseller in 13 categories on Amazon. So we’ve been really impressed with the response to the book. There is a lot to starting a business, there’s a lot to scaling it, a lot to exiting. And I know we’re going to talk a lot about that today and then repeating it over and over again.

It’s just a formula by the sounds of it.

There is. It is a formula. Of course there’s luck, there’s hard work. But the fact is it can be formulaic. You can crack the code of what it takes to start, scale, exit, repeat. And we’ve done that over the last ten years and with over 200 interviews.

Okay, well, why don’t we try not to break the formula straight away, Darryl, and let’s start with the start. Let’s explore your background and your business background and I guess your starting point on this journey.

Well, Darryl, let me take you back to some early years here, the early nineties. I graduated right out of University of Toronto, and my brother and I started a rental software rental business. At the time, you could rent software out, and that business lasted about 14 months because new legislation came in January 1, 1994 that banned software rental. It was part of the free trade agreement with Canada and the United States. So we had to close that business down. But in the meantime, we had been working on another business within that business called a BBS or Bulletin Board Service. And maybe some of our listeners might remember this one, but it was the way that people connected before the Internet. But what we quickly discovered was that the demand for something called the internet was hitting really hard. We had a module on it. We began to realise that all the customers wanted to do was access the internet. So within another twelve months, 15, sorry, twelve to 15 months, we shut down our second business, my brother and I.

Okay, over to you right now. We applied all of the resources we had to this new company called Internet Directly. And within eight years we had taken it public. It became the number one, fastest growing company in Canada. We were, you know, here we are smoking cigars, whatever this is, you know, absolutely a time of our life. Then we made a decision in 19 to merge with a cable company and apply for a license, a government license for all fixed internet in Canada. And it was weird, but back then they wanted to stimulate competition with the telecommunications company, so they actually offered us a free license for fixed Internet and we won half that license. And under this combined merger, we’d agreed to an 18-month lockup. Okay, the stock, when we sold, when we did the merger, was publicly traded, was worth about $180 million. Within twelve months, the stock hit over a billion dollars and. Understood. At this time, I’m 28, 29 years old, and I have 13% of the stock. So you can do the math at that point. But we have this 18-month lockup, but it doesn’t matter. Everything is going amasing. Then something happened in March of 2000, it was the.com crash and our stock, which traded as a high of $19 a share. When that lockup expired, I ended up selling it for six cents a share from number one fastest growing company to last place finish.

I mean, it was, it was absolutely devastating for me personally and for my staff, for the people around me, the investors. Ten years you work building a company and ten weeks exiting it and you mess things up so bad, I can’t tell you. So, two lessons we learned from that, and I have a chapter in the book called liquidity or control. So whenever you try to sell your business, always make certain that you’re going to get cash or free tradable stock. I mean, free tradable stock. If you’re going to sell parts of it, you still control the company, that you’re not the ones put in the backseat. And this is a very important concept. And I know that there are some exceptions to this rule where you see some roll ups occur, but for me, it’s just too risky, and I don’t recommend others go down that path.

So remember, liquidity or control? And the second big lesson, and believe it or not, the genesis for the book, the reason this book actually came about was that bad things do happen. Remember 2021, the pandemic. A lot of companies went under with the pandemic. And then in 2022, we had the tech wreck, the crypto crash, the meta meltdown, the interest rate surging, the hurricanes, the war in Ukraine. Bad things do happen. That’s why you need to start, scale, exit. Take some money off the table repeat.

Yeah, take some money off the table. I often talk to business owners about when they’re looking to sell. I go, are you really looking to exit, or are you just looking to de risk and make sure that you don’t have all of your assets tied up in your business and then reenergise and de risk a bit and go again?

Yeah. So after this point, you’re probably wondering, why is this guy on my show when he’s got. He’s now zero three? All right? So another company called Tucows and sold that company for all cash. Six years following the.com crash, we took another company public, and two years after that, we sold that company for 17 times EBITDA, and this time, it was for all cash.

Since then, we’ve done a dozen or so companies, very successful companies, and sold them off, and we sell. People now look at me and ask me, how do you always get the timing so right? And, in fact, that was why I was asked to speak at MIT in 20 to a group of 60 very successful entrepreneurs. And the entrepreneurship manage entrepreneurship master’s program, it was put on by Vern Harnish, and I was asked to speak there. You know, they asked me, what were you doing over and over again to Start, Scale,  Exit, Repeat. And Patrick Thean, at the time, was partnered with Verne, and he wanted me to share those formulas with the group. And so that was really the genesis of the book. That’s where the book really began to take form. And I spent ten years on the plane writing the book and just writing down stories and documenting. And then we, then we began to interview dozens and dozens of others, other serial entrepreneurs, experts, and authors.

Okay. And Patrick’s name will come up later in the conversation, I imagine.

Absolutely. He was absolutely critical. This book could not have come about without him, and my success could not come about without him.

Right. So, and you touched on Colin there, that, how do you always get the timing right? But you’ve already shared that, you know, that the very first experience, you got it so wrong. And, and sometimes there’s a bit of bad luck and sometimes there’s a bit of good luck. And is there anything you did to get the timing right or. Yeah. Was it, is it just a bit of luck? In hindsight, can you share insight?

It’s a formula. You know, we have it in the book. We have a chapter in the book. Timing is 50% of the value of exit. If you think about, I talked about 20 and how we had seen a lot of these stocks crash. We have a number of e commerce companies that are in our incubator right now, including one called Paw.com, comma paw. Just four years in a row, Inc. 5000 one of the fastest growing companies in America. Then the pandemic hangover came. The inflation came. We had $24,000 containers versus what we were paying before 2000 containers. And we do 100 containers a year. That’s $2 million of losses just right there. All of a sudden, we saw e commerce companies collapse in value, even though the stock market, we saw them drop 90, 95% in value. Well, the private market will follow that. The fact is, there were signs of froth in 2021. And I talk about this in the book. We want to watch for those signs. Can you remember some of the signs in 2021? Remember cartoon ape pictures called NFTs? Do you remember GameStop just defied all economics. I also talk, there’s a bit more of a science to it as well, is you can look at the IPOs in a particular year, and based on the number of IPOs that happened in that particular year, that’s when you begin to know the market is really frothy. We’ll call it. And that’s another indicator. At that time, we did exit a couple of companies that year. We did not Exit Paw.com. We did make a huge mistake because we should have, because we had potential buyers at that time. I wish I had read the book before, you know, now, and I would have known better. But when the market is frothy, it’s time to exit stage left, and it’s okay to let other people make money. You know, when we did sell Tucows, we sold Tucows at a valuation, and it was important for us at the time. Since then, the company’s gone to almost a half billion dollars in valuation.

Now there’s been a lot of investment in a lot of pivoting and a lot of different things occurring so your companies can go up in value. But again, I’m making the thesis to start, scale, exit, take some money off the table, repeat. And there’s a couple of reasons for that, too. One of them is a tax reason. In most countries around the world, capital gains is treated at a much lower tax rate than income. When we sold Hostopia was the company. We sold the public one in the two thousands. When we sold that company, we were paying 55% tax, roughly. It was 42% corporate and 15% dividends. So you’re paying about. I don’t know what’s the matter? 57%, 56% tax rate. But when we sold it, we paid a 15% capital gains rate. That’s it. And it would have taken us over 30 years to recoup the kind of money that we got from the sale. By the way, we closed the deal in 2008 with the Fortune 500 company, one month before the Lehman crisis and the stock market crashed again one month before it happened. And that’s the other thing when you’re doing a deal, Darryl, there is no weekends, there is no evenings. This is get the ball across the line, because bad things can happen during the deal.

Back in 1997, we were selling a company, Tucows, to CNET, and it was a pretty big, pretty big offer. It was like $60 million or something like that. And all of a sudden there was this Asian flu crisis hit. They called us up and said, well, we’re cutting the price down to x. And we said, deals off. Never talked to them ever again. So if you’re in a middle of deal, it’s like getting a football down the line and getting it to cross the line and moving at maximum speed.

Yeah. And because, and this, I guess this is a slight aside, but, you know, there’s a lot of stories about once you get the deal happening, A, you’ve got to get it over the line as quick as possible, because you need to keep that momentum and the interest up, and B, you don’t want deal fatigue. You don’t want people going, you’re just drawing on and going, well, give us some extra information. We want a bit of information on this. At some point, you’ve got to go, either we got a deal or we haven’t. You’ve got to close the deal and finish it. And that’s, that’s best for both parties. So how do you, how do you, how do you make sure that, you know, the deal doesn’t go slow and dry up? Have you got any, are there any insights there that after selling so many that, you know,

Yeah, well, it starts from day one, day one when you start your business. One of the big things that delay deals are contracts. You have to find every single contract you’ve ever put together in your company. That’s why in every one of my companies, we have a virtual drive where we store every single contract, every, the minutes from every meeting, whatever it is, they’re stored. The other thing that I would warn a lot of sellers about are the every contract you’re going to have additional. I’m trying to remember the name right now. I don’t know why it’s escaping me. Amendments or not amendments. When you sell a contract, you’re gonna have different..

About variations, don’t they?

So I’m stumped on this word right now. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll get it in a minute. But you’re going to, you’re going to have to document every single element of your company. And to do that, it can take a lot of time. And in fact, we had our lawyer, when we sold club to GoDaddy, I asked our lawyer about that and he said, oh, I got it, don’t worry about it. And two weeks before the deal was to close, he hadn’t had it at all. And we had to hire another lawyer to come in and help put together the appendixes, the statements at the end of a contract. The things that talk about all your inventory, all your liabilities, all those, all those schedules, schedules are absolutely critical when doing a contract. And be ahead of that, don’t be behind that, because that typically slows things down. There are no evenings and weekends. When you’re doing a deal, you are in deal mode. And everybody, even in your personal life, you’ve got to sort of push aside and say, look, this is, I guess, got a focus right now. I’m all out and making this happen. I do want to talk about something else. When you’re thinking about selling your business, Darryl, is how do you find the right buyer to maximise your valuation?

And there are three types of buyers. There are cash flow buyers, typically private equity. There are competitors and there are strategic buyers.

Yep.

And when you sell to a cash flow buyer, especially in todays high interest rate environments, you’re really looking at a pretty low multiple of earnings because typically cash flow buyers private equity like they like to use leverage to acquire their companies, buy it, leverage it, build it up, sell it off to another private equity or take it public, whatever. But that is the type of buyer that we want to, if we have to sell to them, that’s okay, move on. But we want to think about creating a list of competitors and then another list of strategic buyers. And let me give you an example. When we sold club, we were a little bit of both, we were a little bit of competitor and strategic buyer. So a competitor like GoDaddy registry, they came in and they bought our TLD and they didn’t need any of our staff. So they eliminated a million, million and a half dollars in expenses. Now don’t worry about the staff. They were happy with this because they all had a piece of the company, they’re all getting part of the exit and I think that’s an important concept as well. But GoDaddy was looking at that and saying, okay, if I’m saving a million and a half dollars, then I’m going to give you X multiple for that hire. They may not give you 100%, there is an arbitrage, but they’ll give you somewhere in between. But then a strategic buyer and GoDaddy registry was this as well because they have so much more distribution than we have. They could take DOT Club which is like a.com or.net comma, they could take that and distribute that through a much broader distribution channel. So again, they’re going to look at the value of the company, not of what it is from a cash flow perspective, but what it can do for their organisation. And they won’t give you 100%, but they will give you somewhere in between. When we sold that public company for 17 times EBITDA back in the 22, I agreed to work for this Fortune 500 company for three years and I had the opportunity to buy dozens of companies with it. When I had analysts all around me and everything, it was really quite an army of people helping me acquire these companies and we would literally look at it company. It’s with x right now from a cash flow. But if we take this company and we bring it in to our company and we can leverage it through our customer base, it’ll be worth X. So we’d often go in with higher bids than a lot of the competitive bids because we knew of the strategic value. So look for those strategic buyers. From day one when we started DOT Club , we wanted GoDaddy registry to buy us. We literally targeted them in our mind and eight years later it happened.

Yeah. And that’s one of the things we talk about with our Succession Plus clients is not how are you going to sell your business, but who are you going to sell your business to? If you get thinking early on about who you’re going to sell your business to, it gives you some sort of indication of what you need to do to make it attractive to that buyer. Is that the sort of thing that was going through your mind? How do I make my business attractive for GoDaddy to want to buy it from us and as opposed to them to have a look at it and go, yeah, no, we’re not interested.

Yeah. And a lot of that is relationship building. You know what trade shows, getting to know certain people in the organisations. You know, a lot of it is really positioning your company, understanding the KPI’s of the buyer. So if the buyers. So E-commerce is a good example here. Two, three years ago, they were looking at revenue and growth for E-commerce. So there’s a company in our industry called MVMT and they watch company and they sold for one times revenue, $100 million. And that’s good metric. I mean, that’s great to be valued at that metric two, three years later. Now it’s all about earnings per share and we’re looking at really around four times eight earnings per share. It’s all about earnings. So how do we want to position our company a year before we’re going to sell it? If it’s about sales and growth, then let’s focus on sales and growth. If it’s about profits, then let’s really drive the profits the year prior to the sale. So the earlier you begin to think about planning your business, the better you can position it for sale. And there’s a few tricks we talk about in the book. We do say that it’s important to keep running the business like you’ll never sell it, but at the same time, if you’re going to invest energy, you know you’re going to be selling it and you’re going to invest energy in signing deals. You might want to go for the smaller, quicker deals versus the large ones that take two, three years to close. So those are a few examples that we talk about in the book.

And what I’m hearing there, Colin, is if you do some work up front about who you’re going to sell the business to, you’ve then got the choice. If you’ve got the choice, you can go. Well no, I don’t want to take two or three years. I want to do it in a year. So let’s go down this route. Or if you’re a certain size, you know that they’re only going to acquire a business at a certain size, then you know how big you have to get. So whether you’ve got to crank it up and scale it up in terms of growth and maybe that’s at the expense of profit, and then you drive the profit later once you’ve got the client base, but it gives you some indicators of what you need to do so that you can prepare it. If you don’t prepare your business and you leave it to the last minute, you’re all out of choices and you just have to take what you can get. If you can get anything is often the case with some of the smaller to mid-sized businesses.

Yeah. And the other thing I will add is entrepreneurs need to check their ego at the door. And I mean what I mean by that is focus on elevating your people and reduce the impression that you’re the one, the reason this company is succeeding. The fact is vast majority of entrepreneurs, they leave the company within a couple of years of selling their company. This is absolutely across the board and every sophisticated buyer knows this. So any business that can operate without the original founder will be more attractive to a buyer. And I mean be authentic here. Like with DOT Club , I stepped aside, put in another presidents and let her run the company. Two years before we sold it, I was in a meeting with Paw.com and we were looking talking to a buyer and we went around and people were asking me, everyone was doing their intros and they said, what do you do with respect to Paw.com? I said I don’t really do anything. I’m the chairman and I’m the largest investor. But I didn’t do anything because once it begins to be an owner operated business, that can decrease your value. So just watch out for that when you’re looking at selling your company. I know we beat our chest into the but it’s not about us, it’s about our people and it’s about the story and the systems that are within the company that can help you get a high valuation.

Yeah. The business needs to operate without you. So when you’re in that chairman role I understand you weren’t operationally involved in the business, but what was your involvement in the business as the chairman?

Well, no. At that Paw.com comma, it was really just getting investors, ensuring that we bring in the right systems in the company, working directly with the CEO to help the CEO in the company just to learn how to run companies. We had a young CEO in place at the time, making certain we have the right CEO in place. In fact, we have a new CEO now who’s taken over, and she’s the lady who sold my last company. So she’s taken over this company as well, and she’s doing a very, very good job about that. So that’s what you do.

I do want to talk about exit a little bit more and share with you how we did pull off the big exit to that Fortune 500 company, because we had a situation. I was CEO of the company, publicly traded, and our revenues were flatlining. There was a lot of fighting going on between my brother and I and between divisions in the company. The management was pretty much at that point in time, we’ve done what a lot of entrepreneurs do. You run your business on instinct, and we were running it on instant, you know, from day to day, fight fires. You know, what should we do? You know, we tried to go to some conferences and learn some systems and bring those back, but, you know, we struggled. And a board member came to me and said, look, Colin, I think you’re over your head. And I was getting close to being fired. So I called the lifeline. I called a friend who then said, you know, I need you should meet this guy named Patrick Thean, and he runs a company called Rhythm Systems.

So I flew to Vegas. I met with Patrick, and I explained the whole story to him, how the fighting, this, that and the other, and missing numbers and, you know, stocks falling below IPO books, all these things. And I said, so I just need you to help me get the board off my back. And he described how to do it. And by the way, I’m like, no, no, that’s too much work. I can’t do all that. This is like a patient going to the doctor and they’re overweight. And the doctor says, well, you need to change your lifestyle, change your eating habits, take some medicine, of course. And he just says, no, I just want the pill. I don’t need to do all of that. And the fact of the matter is, we had to do the hard work, and it was not easy.

Two days of strategic planning, 88 days of execution. What I loved about Rhythm Systems is they brought in goal setting. And with goal setting, we institutionalised a lot of the processes and business theories around scaling a business. We did three year goal setting, one year goal setting, quarterly goal setting for the company. Then we did individual quarterly goal setting. We met once a week, and we statused the goals red, yellow, and green. Green means you got it. Yellow, it’s caution, red, you’re in trouble. So there was no more last minute at the end of quarter surprises. You knew halfway through the quarter whether that individual was going to derail. And then we applied resources, and then we brought in daily sales huddles, a lot of different systems. We brought in like profiling and, and sales playbook. We transformed into a sales driven organisation. It was transformative. And the effect was that we almost tripled in size in a few years. We sold to that Fortune 500 company, and we were trading at $4.55 a share. The next day, we’re trading at $10.55 a share. All the institutions, all the investors made a killing on that company. And I accredit a lot of that to the systems that we put in place, that we were no longer scaling based on the personality of the entrepreneur. We were scaling based on the systems. And I knew how important that was on exit, because when I was in one of the final meetings, it was a huge boardroom with about 15 executives and the CEO. I’m doing a presentation about all the systems and culture and all the values, everything that we put in place. And the CEO looks at the screen and he points to everybody else, and this is a Fortune 500 company. He says, see that? That’s what we want to bring to this type of our organisation. We were a small company. They were buying. They were the behemoth, and they wanted to bring our culture and our systems into their organisation to get everybody on their executive team and, quite frankly, in the company in alignment. And that just told me at that point, all the work we had done to get to that point that helped us sell this company. Companies want to buy a swiss clock. They want to buy something that runs smoothly. They don’t want the drama, they don’t want to see fight, you know, they don’t want to. They don’t know about personality complex and all that kind of stuff. They want to see a swiss clock, and then that’s it.

They want to buy a boring business, don’t they?

They want to buy something that when they buy it three years later, they’re going to look like a hero and not lose their job, because let’s be quite frank, that’s what most people in these large organisations are fearful of, losing their job. That’s their number one concern. Second is they want to look like a hero, and so they’re going to look at how well run this company is when they make the decision to buy it.

So it sounds like just what you’re touching on a few minutes ago or a minute ago there, Colin, when you bought Patrick in, he introduced systems and structure to the business. It sounds like the management team were working together in a team-based type of working off each other and supporting each other to make sure that everyone achieved their goals. Because it’s a team-based sport running a business, I find. So if one person’s lagging behind, then the other team members can jump in and help them along, but they’ve got to put their hand up and say, hey, look, I’m struggling on my goal. Can you guys help me? Because the only way we win the game is if we all meet our goals, type of thing. So there’s a bit of team based accountability coming in there. And that systemised approach to the vision and the goals and the management of the business is where a lot of people miss when they systemise a business, because what they do is they tend to just systemise the operations of the business and the primary workflow areas. What I’m hearing is that you’ve gone, yeah, we need to do that to the management team as well and get the management team accountable because that’s where the growth of the business really occurs. And Patrick facilitated all of that and started with a two day strategic planning and aligning of that management team. Did I understand that correctly?

That’s right. And let me tell you about our first meeting. It was, we brought Patrick in, he was, the coach comes in and my brother’s there and I’m there, and we have four, five or six other executives. And I couldn’t tell you, I mean, it was well laid out the agenda and Patrick did a good job of moving us through. But the fights, you know, the people, you know, Patrick who had the saying, you know, it’s important to bring the elephant in the room. It’s important to face real issues because you had this. Before this, all you had were different divisions running in different silos.

Now you had everybody together and we’re all sharing the elephants. But what happens when you share elephants? All the other people who are, you know, it’s their area or if it affects them, they’re defensive and there was just constant fighting and all I driving them back to the airport. I was so embarrassed. And I said, Patrick, you know, I apologise to him for the behavior of my team because, Colin, this is perfect because now you’re starting to deal with it. Now you’re starting to really make progress. Well, it got, you know, it got better the next quarter. In the following quarter, following quarter. And that company, that company’s revenue accelerated, it kept accelerating. And I can’t just. There’s so much we talk about in the book. There’s so much that’s in Patrick’s book as well called Rhythm. I can’t touch all of it. But there’s one. One I remember right now is he would say to us, stretch the rubber bands. So we’d go in there for our quarterly goal. And our business was very reliant on migrations, moving websites and emails from telecoms onto our platform. So we did 15,000. We set one credit. So we’ll set the rubber band for 15,000 migrations websites. And we had never done, we’d done like maybe 7000, 8000. So this is what we’re gonna stretch the rubber band. We’re gonna go for 15,000 registrations. And we pulled it off the next quarter. It was like 15,000 wasn’t hard anymore because we’re going for 20,000 or 25,000. He talks about Patrick and shared with us that I think really made a difference for us.

So, Colin, if we’re to pull it all together, and I know you’re promoting the book here, but if you want listeners to go and inspire them to go out and acquire the book, what’s the theme? What’s the next layer down of detail, if you like, from start, scale, exit, repeat. What’s the underlying message of the book that you want listeners to walk away with from our conversation today?

Well, if you’ve never started a business, it’s a great blueprint to get started because we take it all the way through even setting up your first business plan. We call it the four sticky note business plan. And then if you’re in a position where your company needs to scale, it also outlines all of the systems, people, money and story that you need in order to scale. And we do. We talk about the story, people, money and systems, every section, start, scale, exit, repeat. By the way, it’s completely different at each level.

Yeah

And exit you’re going to need. Let me give you an example, a start. You’re an individual entrepreneur, you’re delegating tasks, you’re the go getter, you’re the visionary. Bang, bang, bang. You know, you have a small office, it’s very iterative, iterative and creative. And then in scale, you begin to step back a bit and you delegate responsibilities, not tasks. Okay? So it’s a mind shift, some mental that occurs in the brain of the entrepreneur. The number one thing holding entrepreneurs back from scaling their business is themselves. Okay, then we go into exit, where you begin to think about not only delegating responsibilities, but maybe delegating the company, stepping back from the company, checking our ego at the door, which we talked about earlier. And then in repeat, it’s doing that all over again. But doing it with multiple companies. And when the formula is set, you can actually achieve very successful results.

And it’s all outlined in the book, but we’ve got to move from a task. So this is as the entrepreneur is moving from a startup to a small business owner where a lot of them get trapped and locked into being that micromanager or control freak. Then they’ve got to make that shift from managing tasks to managing people with jobs and roles and responsibilities. And then the next theft or step is the mindset shift. Again, I often see that from revenue growth to profit growth or asset growth, from revenue growth to asset growth. Is that correlate with your thinking?

Yeah, very close. And a lot of tech companies need to transform from a technology driven company to a sales tech and technology driven company. They have to transform. And if you don’t transform and you’re always just that tech company, you’re not going to be able to get the kind of leverage or make the sales to deliver the huge, to deliver that, that huge exit. So that’s all that needs to occur. The right people in the right places in the bus, that helps you scale, it helps you exit. If you put the right systems in place, that helps you scale, that helps you exit if you have the right story. And by the way, that changes between start, scale, exit, repeat as well. And we talk about how to change your story. For instance, when you’re scaling your business, you want to think about something called an X Factor. What is it that you have that’s unique and different that none of your competitors have? So that’s cute. And then obviously raising money is very different at start, scale, exit, and even repeat and repeat. We want to start using our reputation as a serial entrepreneur to use other people’s money and have bigger place.

So what we’ll do, Colin, is there’s a lot of detail in there, and it’s not just a simple formula that we can sort of go into detail over the podcast. So we’ll put all the details of the book and your contact details and how people can contact you on the website with this episode. And we’ll also flag that Patrick, who you mentioned, who was a big support to you and taught you a lot of this methodology and this structured thinking, and who facilitated the retreats and the management team growth he’s going to jump on. We’ve managed a coup to get Patrick on the podcast, and his episode will be the very next episode after this one with Colin. So they’ll dovetail together nicely. So that’s. I’m pretty happy with that to get those two together, to get the if you like the prodigy and the master sharing their stories next to each other.

Exactly. And you can get start, scale, exit, repeat at any bookstore. Amazon has it, an ebook and also has an audible book as well. So if you don’t want to read the book, but I’ll tell you this, it’s over 200 call outs, 30 illustrations, 57 chapters. We designed the book for the ADHD entrepreneur. It’s even color coded, start scale, exit, repeat. Thank you for having me on.

Thanks and thanks for sharing your story and your wins and losses there, Colin. That’s been brilliant.

Thank you.