How does a multi-time, serial entrepreneur and his small team of just five, create four big successful businesses from the ground up, exit and move to another?
In this interview, I am joined by Tony Peas, a multi-time entrepreneur, former US Navy veteran and a dad of three.
Tony is also founder and CEO of Carimus, a software development firm and creative agency,
We discuss the creation of a business from the idea stage, identifying market opportunities, launching to running a successful venture while simultaneously running other businesses.
Do you also want to know how other businesses are adjusting to the pandemic in order to come out on top?
How you as a business owner can identify new opportunities?
What areas of your business should you to invest in?
Get the answers to all these strategic questions from a serial entrepreneur who has been through many seasons and come out on top.
In this interview we cover :
How a team of five serial entrepreneurs discover opportunities and launching multiple businesses from the ground up, optimizing and eventually moving to new exciting ventures.
What measures to take in your business, while still identifying market opportunities during this shutdown economy.
Should you be focusing on one venture or explore multiple ideas at the same time?
What are the dynamics of a small team of serial entrepreneurs solving big problems?
What marketing strategies should businesses be adopting now?
Get a checklist on how to determine what “business guru” advice is the best for your business right now.
Helpful resources
1) For more live interviews and insights
2) If you’re marketing is broken doesn’t make money…
Interview transcript
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Reade Milner (00:01):
Too. One. Hey everybody, welcome to the growth secrets interview series. I'm so glad you're joining us. I'm here today with Tony P's. Tony runs caramel. He and I have had a little bit of a conversation before this. We just talking about the thing that's on everybody's mind is how businesses are adapting and they're able to continue building and growing during all of this strange Corona virus shelter in place, shut down economic crisis, whatever this thing is going to be called in the history books. So I'm excited for you guys to get to hear this conversation with Tony. So Tony, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me.
Tony Pease (00:43):
Thanks for having me.
Reade Milner (00:45):
Awesome. Well, do me a favor, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about your business.
Tony Pease (00:52):
I'm Tony peas. I'm the founder and CEO of [inaudible]. We run but the kind of the combination of a software development firm and a creative agency. We also have a good bookie, which is a charitable betting platform, which is one of our products. For me as an individual, I'm a dad of three. I'm a former a us Navy veteran and I'm a multi-time entrepreneur. We've the team that I currently work with, we've started and exited from four businesses and this is our fifth.
Reade Milner (01:25):
Wow, that's fantastic. So you, so, so of all the people that put serial entrepreneur on their Instagram handle that or that are not that you're, you're the real deal?
Tony Pease (01:38):
Well, I would say yeah, me and my team are our specialty is actually starting and getting things launched and then we lose interest once it becomes like an operational business. So if you consider it like a space flight, we get things in orbit and then we'd come back down to earth and start over.
Tony Peas(01:55):
That's really fascinating to me. I think I'm my, I get excited about the start phase. Like I get, I get really revved up about the, from the ground up phase. So I think this is gonna be a really fun conversation. So could, can you walk me through like what the process is like for you when you're saying, okay, here's a new idea, we're going to build and launch this product or this business. What, what is the very high level of course view of, of what happens there?
Tony Pease (02:34):
Yeah, I mean we, there's a couple of ways to look at this, but one, it's your, what's your intention? Like what are you trying to accomplish for yourself? You know, are you trying to, you know, people ultimately try and think about starting a business as a moneymaking venture and the money will come. Well, you know, if you're good at whatever you're interested in. And so where we always start is we start with a market opportunity that aligns with our skills and interests. And so in the past we've always been software. We've done more of a consulting service type business, you know, whether it's for doing integration software for manufacturing or working on a software technologies for kind of really heavy websites and doing some of the programmatic things on that. And for this last iteration, what we found is we really like the intersection of art and engineering.
Tony Pease (03:19):
And that became very satisfying to us as we started bringing our own products to market. We realized that there was a market need for that as well. So it starts with something that you're interested in that you have kind of an intellectual curiosity about. You know, it best if you have some expertise or experience in there, then you find the market, Mmm. The, the market gap. And then you just kind of go back and forth between interest and gap till you find a product market fit that also meets your kind of core thesis for starting the business.
Reade Milner (03:50):
Okay. And, and so do you guys or do you bootstrap these or you just kind of like rolling over, cause you mentioned your team, right? You guys have done this several times or you just kind of rolling over your cash flow from one to the next?
Tony Pease (04:04):
Yeah, I mean that's probably one way to look at it. Our objective is to start at to bootstrap it. So we typically haven't raised outside funds. For any of our projects because when you're running a service business so it has to stand on its own, you know, a good indicator whether the businesses will succeed is the people are paying you to do it. And so the earlier you can get that piece of data the better. So we've typically tried to start businesses with a little bit of an overlap. So some success, you know, before we've typically, before we've exited one, we've been started, we've started working on the other.
Reade Milner (04:41):
Okay. So that brings up an interesting question. So I, I hear called business gurus. They talk about this idea a lot of like focusing on one thing at a time, right? There's this heavy emphasis on focusing on one thing at a time. Do you agree with that? Do you have like a process of like, we're going to get a business to this point before we allow ourselves to, to start thinking about the next thing? Or do you, do you have a few things kind of in the hopper at all times and then you, there's a point at which you say, okay, now it's time to shift focus more to this? Or how does that, how does that work in your head at least?
Tony Pease (05:22):
Well, I think it starts with the understanding that people are different and people have different interests and different biases and different abilities to focus and multitask. So for me and the team that I work with we actually don't like to just focus on one thing because we find that it's, it keeps us kind of like intellectually stimulated to move from project to project, which is why we really liked the consulting gigs because consulting is a good opportunity to work into somebody else's passion for a period of time, kind of experiment with it and then go back to your normal day to day business. So our team actually likes having a couple of in the fire. And yeah, so no, I don't, I don't really agree that the focus is for everybody. And I think if you broke down a business into certain phases, the first third is very experimental no matter what. And so you can't really be focused on anything until you get some sort of product market fit and then you can get traction. And then what we would typically try to do is operationalize that piece and hire people in to run that piece so that we could kind of start exploring different areas of interest.
Reade Milner (06:24):
Okay. No, I, I, I can appreciate that. I feel similarly, right? Like my I like the phrase you use, right? You said creatively stimulated, right? Having a few irons in the fire kind of keeps you intellectually stimulated, you said? I tend to agree. I think it's, it's helpful. It helps me focus on other projects when I can kind of get out of that for a minute, focus on something else, really think strategically about something else. It's like it Stokes that creative or that strategic intellectual fire that I can then apply to my core business. So, sure. I actually agree with that perspective and I don't agree with the idea of the hardcore focus to the exclusion of everything else. I think that can be limiting. Tony Pease (07:13):
Well it's an interesting analogy was when people talk about, you know, kids being focused on singular sports being multi-verse game multi-sport athletes. It's the same thing I think in business because different sports were different. Muscle groups in different projects require you to, you know, become more of a well rounded business operator. And I think, you know, the goal for most of us as small business owners is to be well rounded operators. We need to have good experience and the various facets of our business, which could include things like finance and legal and you know, of course the things that you're focused on in which in our case is software development and creative work. Reade Milner (07:49):
Okay. I love that analogy between like single sport athletes and multi-sport athletes and yeah, I mean, looking back, the guys that I played with, they were equally talented and football and baseball and they played golf on the summers and stuff and it was like they didn't take away from each other. They actually added to each sport. And the same thing. Yeah. The second see how the same thinking applies to business. So that's really good. Well another thought that I had about this is your, I can just tell in the short conversation that you're, you're very analytical. You seem to have a pretty methodical approach to how you do things.
Reade Milner (08:31):
Has your Naval experience contributed or how, I guess a better question is, how has your Naval experience contributed to your entrepreneurial career? Tony Pease (08:43):
I mean, solving big problems and small teams, you know, that's essentially what being an entrepreneur is all about. It's kind of paving new ground, doing it with a group of people working together against a common goal. I think the Navy, you know, I was on a submarine, which is a very small team. And then there are small teams within the small team of a submarine and there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And that work has to be divided amongst a small group of people with a limited number of resources. And so I think as being an entrepreneur, you have to optimize opportunities with limited resources and you kind of go with what you have. And so I think for most people who have had a military background where the mission had to be accomplished with whatever was available, and I think that very much translates into an entrepreneur's thinking because most entrepreneurs, you know, particularly after they have their first or second rep, it's not whether you can or can't do it, it's how you do it.
Tony Pease (09:37):
And then, so everything that you go into, all your thinking and all your energy goes into how does this get accomplished? Knowing that there's an infinite amount of pivots and adjustments that can be made to accomplish any goal versus, you know, people who are just coming into our furthest like, well, I'm not sure if I can do it. You know? And, and that I think is a big limiter and that, and the military I think gives a lot of people confidence to do things that they didn't know that they're capable of, particularly because the military is great at giving a huge amount of responsibility to people at a very young age. Reade Milner (10:06):
Hmm. Okay. So that's, that brings up another couple of questions, right? So
Tony Pease (10:14):
You're, you're
Reade Milner (10:16):
Repeating the same refrain of like my team, my team, my team, right. And I give you a lot of credit for doing that. So what is this, what does this team look like? Are, are, do you guys have your own specialties or, and you're just kind of this like business dominating like, like a unit or is it just a few few guys, guys and gals who have a passion for this and tackle projects together? What does it, how is, what's the makeup of that team?
Tony Pease (10:45):
Well, one of our mantras for care miss, which stands for care, I must and it means that we have to be kind of emotionally connected to everything that we're working on. And then when we were sitting around thinking about how we were going to evolve our business, you know, I don't remember which one of us it was, but somebody said, you know, I just want to do interesting things with people I like. I'm like, okay, well there's a good a reason as any to run a business is just to do interesting things with you, like, and not probe for deeper meaning. And so we do have a diversity of skills where mine is probably more in the kind of the process and business development. We've got some folks that are more in operations and HR and people management and some folks in creative and tech and you know, a pretty well rounded group. There's about five of us. There are five of us that are, that founded [inaudible] and good book in a few other things that we're working on.
Tony Pease (11:34):
But yeah, we're just trying to do interesting things with people we like. And you know, we, we've, you know, originally when we said that, it's like, it sounds cheesy and it sounds like arrogant, like what right do we have to do that to say that this is what we're going to be focused on, but if that's really what we want to do is we want to explore a variety of projects that intellectually stimulating that I have a PR that have an impact and purpose to us and we want to do it together. You know, why not just stay with the mission edits. Yeah.
Reade Milner (12:02):
Okay. I love that. So is is Cara Mustin like, like a holding company or ms, do you have it structured that way and then care of us owns these other businesses that you've, that you've
Tony Pease (12:13):
Nope. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'd like when we write the book about this company, it's going to be all very methodical and we had it all planned out and it was very purposeful and reality. It's not, that might be a fiction book. Fiction. That'll definitely be revisionist history. But in reality, we're just kind of flowing with the opportunities. So, you know, we started [inaudible] with good bookie, good book. He was the first product. And the idea was we're going to revolutionize kind of sports betting and engagement and tie it to social impact. And then what we found and doing that is that there was, we were trying to use the subcontractors to do this so we wouldn't have to have a big team. But what we found is we weren't getting the level of work that in quality that we needed with subcontractors, and we can never find somebody that had both the technical and creative.
Tony Pease (13:01):
And so we started piecing these things together and people wanted us to help them with their services. And so that we kind of built our service business organically. But it is a holding company in a sense because there's another company every stage and see, which was one of our partners reemerged early on. Good bookie is under the [inaudible] umbrella and we have a few other investments that we've made out of that business. But Kara miss essentially the mission for [inaudible] is to be excellent at bringing things to market, like building things for the first time or rebuilding things or relaunching products, which is why we have the combination of the creative and the software development and the same office. And we use all US-based employees and you know, which I think is unique for a company of our size, especially in software development.
Reade Milner (13:46):
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Just talk to the head of made in America, the organization. The other day, and we were talking about that. We're talking about how a lot of a lot of eyeballs go towards the, the blue Jean manufacturer, right? It's, that's all made in the USA, right? Or the, the automotive manufacturer facture it's made in the USA. But like when you get into these soft skills,
Tony Pease (14:09):
It's a, it's even,
Reade Milner (14:11):
I don't want to say more difficult, but it's probably more rare that the entire group is is, is sourced in the United States. So that's, that's really interesting. Okay, another question about this team, and this might be, you know, too close to home. So, so tell me if I'm prying too much. But you know, I've had a lot of conversations with entrepreneurs and they say
Tony Pease (14:33):
I own the whole thing and I'll never have a partner again.
Reade Milner (14:36):
Right. Or I'm an entrepreneur because I don't want anybody to control me. And you know, this and that you guys have five, there's five of you. You said there are five of us. Yeah. There's, there's five of you and you've done this together multiple times and you all still like each other and there's no issues with, do you go into everything equal split? I mean that, again, if I'm asking too much, just tell me to back off. But I'm this, I'm really intrigued by that.
Tony Pease (14:59):
Sure. you know, the intent is for it to be an equitable division and it's not equal because people take different risk profiles. So some of our partners didn't come into the company until they knew they could get a full paycheck. You know, so they didn't put cash up front. Others put cash up front. You know, there's, there's just different mechanisms for establishing market position and valuation and et cetera. So you know, that our intention for Keramas is to be an employee owned company and to have all of our employees have a stake in the company. And in fact, that's one of the things we were working on before. You know, the apocalypse started is getting getting you know, options and equity to our employees. But you, you know, are we friends? We are friends, but you know, how interested we are and being friendly with each other, ebbs and flows.
Tony Pease (15:49):
But the most important thing is we trust each other. You know, we definitely fight and we have, you know, hard conversations and we get annoyed with each other, but we trust each other. And that's, that means that we can be more freely ourselves. And I think in any business relationship, the more you can be yourself, the faster you can move. And because we have such a long history with us, you know, the little mistakes that we make based on our lack of experience or whatever, you know, they, everybody on my team has a great work ethic. Everybody cares about people outcomes and everybody's trustable, trustworthy and reliable. And so those are [inaudible] hallmarks of great teams. The people who you say, we'll never have a partner again. I mean, if you ask a VC, would a VCs invest in good teams? Right? That's what they always say. So I had to, I'd tell those people to rethink their position and maybe, you know, I don't know if there's a dating app for entrepreneurs where they can do like a match.com but maybe you need to make one,
Reade Milner (16:46):
Oh, I am not going to publish this because I'm going to steal that idea and run with it. Right. Record that you gave me the idea. And by the way, if there was an award that was given out for the best way to say that sometimes we fight it is our interest in being friendly with one another, ebbs and flows. I'm using that. I'm stealing that too. That's fantastic. That's really great. And so you mentioned something I have to talk about, right. And it's the block, the apocalypse that is, that has come upon us right now. Has your business been affected and what do you guys do and to adjust? And if that's clear yet.
Tony Pease (17:27):
You know, this is a complicated question because I, I've been through a couple of ups and downs and businesses and our team has been through ups and downs and businesses and I think the moral of any crisis is you have to outwork it. You know, it's, you know, the 40 hour work week goes out the window, the work life balance, you know, takes a back seat. You know, I mean in terms of crisis, you have to knuckle down, you have to be smart and fast. So what are we doing? You know, we, we decided three weeks ago well maybe, actually it's four weeks ago now. As soon as you know, things started coming off and they were thinking about letting schools that we decided to shut our office down and send people remote. That just, just be ahead of it. Now we thought we were being really ahead of it and it turns out like in North Carolina, three days later, you know, the, the, the government was saying that officers should be inserted recommending the office should be doing that.
Tony Pease (18:18):
So we've been, we wanted to get ahead of the disruption that is working from home. And the other thing that we talked about as founders is we don't want to fire anybody. Now, I'm not guaranteeing that that's going to be the case for our company cause we don't know what's going to happen. But an easy way out would be to cut costs, cut people related expenses, you know. But then at the end of this recovery, we'd be weaker. We wouldn't be ready to move quickly. But, but most importantly, we wanted to, we wanted to fight in this as a team and use this as an opportunity for us to work through this problem and get out the other side stronger. And so we decided that, you know, we were going to do, our goal for this whole activity was to not have to lay anybody off throughout this process.
Tony Pease (19:00):
And so far we've been able to do that. And the way we've been able to do that as, like I said, without worked at, we've had a couple clients pause their contracts with us as a service business, which is painful. We definitely cut our, our non personnel related expenses and some of our benefits, you know, like four one K matching and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean our, our men, our methodology is just outwork it. We redirected everybody who's not billing or selling to selling or billing. And so that's another thing where people who have had jobs that have been in HR have had to kind of re establish their careers to work in business development. And that's just what it means to survive in a crisis.
Reade Milner (19:42):
Okay. And that I'm not certain, but I mean, that feels like a very militaristic approach. I mean is that, that that had to have come out of it because the idea of outworking the problem and just realigning I think is really, and I say mil militaristic in a very positive sense, right? It just like, look, this is what has been dictated to us by the situation. So we adapt and we survive. Cause there is no, what is the alternative, right? We're going to sit around and wait for a government chance. Right. I don't think that that's going to be the thing that saves us all. Tony Pease (20:17): Yeah. I mean I think from the military, of course you draw a lot of IX when you've experienced military service, you'd draw a lot of, of what you do from that training. You know, it's a very good system. It's very good training and very good opportunity. And but you know, the military, the big thing about the military and you know, I think athletes have this a lot too, and people who have played sports at a high level, it's not, can or can't. It's how, and so when you're, when you're going through the crisis, you don't say, well, we can't survive this crisis or we can survive this crisis. It's going to be easy. It's that candor candidates. How and then if you eliminate the decision of can or can't and you only focus on the how the problem actually becomes a lot simpler.
Reade Milner (20:59):
Gosh, that's so good. Well, okay, so speaking of the how, and I kind of took you back off off, back to the military thing. But, but I want to get us on to this idea of like how we're continuing to grow our business. So you mentioned you realign to some people. We talk a lot about in this, in this interview series and, and just given my background, we talk a lot about marketing, digital marketing, sales. You're a creative agency. You're already seem like you're, you're in that space. You're doing those things. So what are you guys doing from a marketing perspective? How has that changed in the last month or so? And what do you see as being the, the tactics or the principles that, that work today and are going to be working into the future?
Tony Pease (21:47):
Yeah, I mean, that's a big question. So let me start by realigning everybody into doing as more sales things means, you know, if you think about this is a bi-week for everybody, you know, there's no game to be played. There's not a lot of new sales that you can do. So this is an opportunity for people to sharpen their skills, hone their message, and get ready to be strong on the recovery. And so for us, what we've done as we're repackaging all of our service offerings, we're, we're kind of segmenting our audiences to see who makes sense to what, you know, we've doubled down on, on government. Mmm. Contract positioning, you know, cause we're a veteran owned business, so, you know, they're making sure that we have the right messaging to send out to the government agencies who are facilitating a lot of this recovery. And so what we're doing is we're using this as opportunity to get our house in order because whereas, you know, two months ago we were at 90 a hundred percent utilization for our, our delivery resources. Now we're at like 65 70. And so there's still a 30% of capacity and we've just taken that capacity and said, okay, let's redo our website. Let's redo all our content. You know, let's everything, let's get perfect, let's get automated, let's get fast. And so when the recovery happens, you know, we're already, we're actually investing more this month in SEO than we ever have. And the reason is, is because, you know, just bits and bytes, key keywords are cheaper right now because people, that's what people are cutting. So ads are cheaper, everything is cheaper. So,
Tony Pease (23:18):
You know, the, you know, you buy when the market's down, right? That's kind of a good lesson for investing. It's a good lesson for anything that you have to do in business.
Reade Milner (23:28):
Yeah, that's good. I've been talking a lot of my clients about the same thing. It's just, look, you can, you're, you're probably not going to close a lot of deals during this, but there it's not a good idea to just sit and wait and do nothing. Right? Like you can keep the full, I've been talking a lot about how ads are on sale right now. You know, it's time to buy. It's not time to hold. So yeah, a lot of things you're talking about. We're, we're implementing as well, so I completely agree. I really liked the idea. I hadn't thought so much about this is calling it a bye week. Right. And a bi-week doesn't mean that you get the week off. A bi-week means that you, you take a little bit longer term approach. You, you rest, you recover, you, you repair things, you update things, you upgrade things, you take another look at the playbook. And then you can, you can be ready to ready to play. I'm liking the sports and the military now. Make a lot of sense. So yeah, I like that way of looking at things. Cause I think a lot of people are, they're saying, well let's just sit and wait and see what happens. Right. And to me that's, that's a missed opportunity, right? Because while you're waiting and doing nothing and just seeing what happens, other people like you are being proactive and getting things done,
Tony Pease (24:52):
Right. If you wait, what's going to happen is you're going to get your doors blown off by, by your competitors. You know, it's like you have to work hard, you have to outwork 80% of your competition. Reade Milner (25:03): That's really good. And that's a that's another message that I think has gotten lost and it's gotten confused. I think we live in this, and I'm sure you've seen these guys and I, and I like the Gary Vaynerchuk of the world, right? The, the hustle all the time folks. And I think that has unfortunately skewed the message or distorted the message of hard work versus like laziness. Like it's not really that die. It's not that binary, right? Where you're hustling and you're killing yourself and you're, you're, you're ignoring your, your family responsibilities when you're excusing all other personal responsibilities in life, but like, you can responsibly bust your tail and outwork your competition and still have a balanced life. And in some ways
Tony Pease (25:52):
I don't really subscribe to the you know, hustle and grind and 90 hour work week. And it might be because I'm a little older and you know, I, it's just not as important to me as, you know, my kids and, you know, hobbies and all sorts of other things. It's just, I don't know, maybe that's a condition of, of my life, but you know, I think in this time, of course you have to grind because this is, this is a particular time that requires a particular high level of effort. What I think a lot of those guys miss in their messaging for pressurable young entrepreneurs is the idea that it's not about how long you work, it's about how effective you are. You know, you can go out and dig a ditch with a shovel, but if you can get a backhoe in there and pull it out, you know, who cares if you work eight hours, the ditches dug, you know, eight or one hour.
Tony Pease (26:38):
And so the more efficient you are with your time is actually the message. And I think, you know, you probably understand that as a marketer, I understand that as a marketer, the more that you can have these machines and your digital properties working for you while you sleep, you know, the objective is to automate. And we have another saying in our company is to optimize to do nothing. So, you know, if you're, if you're doing something that's like a repetitive task, then you know, there's no, that's, that's not creating joy, that's not creating learning, that's not creating value, you know, automate that task and move on and build your skills. That's what I think. And this time in particular, you know, I do like, I, you know, I'm, I like the Gary V Dave Meltzer. I actually met Dave Meltzer a couple of times. But I've, I like listening to those guys cause I find them like motivational. Like Cole Kogan was motivational when you watch wrestling, but you know, just cause those guys say it and it worked for them doesn't mean it's gospel. And that kind of goes back to, you know, where people are saying you want to be focused on one thing. If that's not what you want to do, that don't pretend that you're that guy. Be that be who you are most naturally and everything will be a little easier.
Reade Milner (27:46):
That's really good. I think we in in this
Tony Pease (27:51):
[Inaudible] Reade Milner (27:51):
There's a good and the bad to this right today and Gary Vaynerchuk is actually largely in those guys you mentioned are largely to be credited for this. Is that like the the heroes like the Michael Jordans of today are entrepreneurs, right? People look up to him and they glorify him. And the good, and the bad of that is we forget that to be really successful is you have to figure out your own unique value and your own unique skillset and your personality and kind of own that. And not just try to model Gary Vaynerchuk. I mean, to use another sports analogy, I loved Michael Jordan, but if I tried to play like Michael Jordan, it would have been embarrassing because I don't have a 45 inch vertical and I'm not six, six, right? So I had to figure out how a six foot tall white kid could find a way to put the ball in the basket. Right? And the same goes for, you know, business where if you have a particular skillset that you can exploit, that's got to be your focus to figure out how to do that. Right.
Tony Pease (28:51):
Totally agree. And the other thing is you gotta put, you gotta put it in context. You know, there's a lot of times where people are presented as experts and they're not really experts. And so you have to listen to the advice that you're given and that you're absorbing, but you've got to put it in context. You know, is it interesting to you to do what they're saying? Do you feel compelled to follow that advice? Are they really experts? You know, we have one of our co-founders we were at a startup pitch competition for good book in the early days, like of good bookie, which was not too long ago, 2006. And we had time with the VC mentor and we went in and had the conversation with this VC mentor and he destroyed it. He destroyed our idea and our concept, he didn't get why we were doing it, you know, he didn't understand the vision and we walked out of there and I was like, and I'm, I'm listening to this.
Tony Pease (29:41):
It's like one or two nuggets is all I'm looking for. They gave a couple pieces of information that were useful to me. Those are the things I'm taking away. I'm dumping everything else cause it was largely negative and my co founder was really disjointed, you know, it was like very upset about it. Like, Oh man, I don't know, now I'm reconsidering that we should do this. Just it's like, are you kidding? You're reconsidering this. The person that just gave us this advice and here did a business that wasn't a tech business from their parents and sold it four years later and they have not started a company since. What do you care what they think? They said this and this which are value. Everything else was garbage. Move on. I was just like, well how do you know that was it? Cause I researched him, like I looked the guy up and I read the articles about what he was saying and he'd never interested in social impact, had no expertise in technology. You know, he ran like a basically a farm stand and from inherited from his parents and sold it. He's not this tech VC mind that I need to like bow too.
Reade Milner (30:37):
That's good. Yeah. No knowing the people that you get in to look into using. An example of people that I think a lot of people are familiar with is guys that you mentioned grant Cardone and, and you know, name it, right? Figuring out before you start taking these people's advice, go ahead and look at their track record and are they celebrities? Are they real business people? Right. And does their business knowledge have anything to do with your business that you're in? And does it make sense? Like I think, I think we should all be very careful about taking advice from a lot of these guys.
Tony Pease (31:14):
All right. Just taking it unchecked, you know, I mean, it goes for, you know, we have politicians giving us medical advice right now back to the apocalypse. There's a lot of bad advice out there. You know, just take it all in, digest it free, search it should I fact check it and then move on from that. Reade Milner (31:32): Use your brain. Okay. The next lesson here is use your brain people. Okay. So you mentioned a couple of other things and then and w we'll, we'll wrap this up. So are you building these businesses with the intent to sell? So is there a process that you go through? Okay, we're going to make an optimize for nothing, I think speaks to that, right? Is that the goal is to build something that can operate without you. Is that the mindset from the beginning?
Tony Pease (32:00):
[Inaudible]. So the optimized to do nothing is like a process thing. The goal is to create the conditions for us to explore our interests, right? That means that we're not going to want to do any one thing for too long. You know, we're not going to want to be in the rivet manufacturing or rivet riveting business for 10 years or 15 years. And the natural evolution of a quality business is to exit it because there are really good investment bankers. They're really good larger corporations that would like what we've built but can't necessarily, that aren't flexible and nimble enough or, or have the stomach to make as many mistakes as we had to make to get here. And so they're them acquiring us is kind of that orbit thing. You know, it's like we've gotten it into orbit. We don't really want to be the ones who are operationalizing another 1% of profit or EBITDA, right.
Tony Pease (32:56):
That we've lost. That's not our game. Somebody else will do that and do a fantastic job of it, which is why a lot of times, you know, you see this arc with startup founders where they start the business and then in very rare cases, are they the ones that ended up running the business. You know, it's because it's because either they're ill-equipped to do it when it comes to like a public company or a very large company with a shareholder board or something or they don't have interest in doing it or a combination of both. And so we are the people I, you know, just speaking for me, I don't have interest in doing that. So we do look to exit these businesses, you know, and five or so years when we feel like the valuation is cracked and it's a good enough quality and you know, we're ready to move on.
Reade Milner (33:40):
Okay. okay. That's good. Yeah. I think, and I wrote down what you said there is creating the conditions to explore our interests. That's another big takeaway. And if that means exiting, I imagine you probably keep opening your mind, Hey look, if we do find something that I really love, you don't have to leave. You can keep in it as long as you want Tony Pease (34:01): This list of things. That's like when we have beers or something and we're just BS saying that's like really crazy off the wall ideas. And then, you know, a couple of them are hipster electric motorcycles. You know, like if you were like, I'm a motorcycle guy. So if you think of like the Royal Enfield bullet, like an old motorcycle that's just got very classic cafe cruiser styling, you know, making those things electric. That's one of them. And then we had this one idea about bringing blimps back, you know, like luxury air travel by blank. So we come up with all these obscure, you know, discussions. Which is fun. It's fun to brainstorm and kind of think about how it might work. And for the most part they, they, you know, end with the drinking and a reality. But you know, some important, write them down, some of them stick. Tony Pease (34:50):
And that's pretty much how good bookie started as we were, you know, making, we used to, and one of our earlier companies, we used to, rather than having these long circular arguments, we'd make dollar bets. And so if you like you and I disagreed about something rather than us debating it for 30 minutes, there's like, I bet you a dollar, you know, and that would be the end of the conversation, which was in itself a real efficiency mover. And so then whatever would occur and then the evidence presented, one person was ready, the other the person would have to write with the bet was and then sign it. And then, you know, you would keep it as a trophy. And so we would collect these dollars. And so we thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if we could digitize this? And so that's what we did with good bookie. One of the things that you can do a good book is you can make digital prop bets and a good book you, the loser makes a tax deductible donation to the winner's charity. So if you and I made a prop bet on something, we could do it on good bookie and we can pick the charity and pay directly to the charity and it's tax deductible. So that's kind of like a digitized version of one of those ideas that perhaps we took it too far. But you know, we're still having fun with it.
Reade Milner (35:51):
No, I love that. I just decided I'm going to implement that instead of arguing the whole like the silly debates, you know, they go for like 30 minutes or so is implementing the dollar bet rule.
Tony Pease (36:04):
Well, try and do it through good buck. You can, you can give me a shameless plug there.
Reade Milner (36:11):
Tony, have you read the intelligent entrepreneur bill Murphy? I have. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to get that to you. Cause so much of what you're talking about. I read that book years ago and it made a big impact on me so much. What you're talking about just reminds me the, the process is talked about in that book. It's basically three different entrepreneurs that one of them actually came through the military and then there was the Navy, if I'm not mistaken. And then through Harvard business school and then they all became successful entrepreneurs. One of them was the guy that founded ladders.com. Oh, but anyways, their stories and so much of this conversation reminds me of what I read in that book. So I'm going to send you one of those. But I, I could pick your brain about this stuff for much longer than I'm sure you have time for. But Tony, this has been fantastic. Where, what is what's a way that people can learn more about you guys and what you're doing and maybe get in touch with you if they've got, got an opportunity for you.
Tony Pease (37:09):
Well you can go to www dot [inaudible] dot com which is our, our main website. If you want to hear more about good bookie. That's good. Bookie [inaudible] dot com. I'm on LinkedIn. You know, I'm pretty open, so if somebody wanted to ask me some questions about something like you did, I'm happy to jump in and share it. If it's useful. If I ha I'm a good manager of my own time, so don't hesitate to ask.
Reade Milner (37:35):
That's awesome. Well, I'll make sure, guys, if you're watching this, I'll make sure the links are in the comments or in the description if you're watching this on YouTube or in the show notes, if you're listening to the podcast. Guys, this has been Tony P's with chemists. I appreciate him, Tony, and I appreciate you for being here very much. If anybody has any questions, reach out to me. I'll put you in touch with Tony if those links didn't get you there. Thank you all so much for being with us today. Well looking forward to the next one. Thanks a lot, Tony.
Tony Pease (38:08):
Make sure you're nice to meet you.