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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Building Businesses: Lessons From a Career of Wins & Losses 6-24-25
00:47:00
In this webinar turned podcast, Scott Becker shares key insights from his entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing the foundational role of great teams, the importance of focusing on niches, and achieving true product-market fit.
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Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Podcast. Today's discussions Building Businesses Lessons from a Career of Wins and Losses. We'll talk a lot about three cores we think about in business, which is teams, niches and product market fit. We'll also go through five or six other concepts that we talk about a lot. A lot of this comes out of an earlier book we had done called the Entrepreneurs Edge. You know, how to build companies, grow teams, et cetera, et cetera. That book was a B, B minus, maybe a B plus. It was an updated version from an earlier book. If you ever need something for sleeping, the book the Entrepreneur's Edge is right on in a terrific sleep aid. In reality, we're working on a new book more closely titled this Building Businesses Lessons from a Career of Wins and Losses and trying to talk through some of the concepts there. Again, we'll talk a lot about teams, niches, product market fit, and then we'll talk about a mix of other thoughts in terms of wins and losses, sort of that the two bigger wins were building a great niche legal practice in sort of the health care area over a 30 year period. And again, everything that's been a success, this is why this is so important, is built around great teams and we'll talk about that a lot. And it's the cornerstone of the first part of this talk. The second success we've had is building a healthcare media company that I started 30 years ago called Becker's Healthcare and that with a great team and great leadership from a lot of other people, became the leading sort of healthcare business to business media company on the digital side in the country. Sort of digital and events has been just fantastic. Now we also have experiences from serving on several boards. Some of those companies did really well. A couple of them exited for 800 to a billion dollars. I did not have much equity in any of those. Don't think that I did so well in those. So that's a different subject, a different story. Others did really poorly and there's lessons from those as well as to how they ultimately faltered out or petered out. We've also had a chance to invest with private equity and venture capital funds. In some ways I grew up, as some of our listeners did, in a place called Skokie, you know, sort of very middle class on a good day and you know, always the idea was oh my goodness, I'd really be a player if I get it. Could ever invest in private equity funds and venture capital funds? In some ways it reminds me of the dog who caught the Car, you catch the car, you didn't know what to expect. And some of those have gone fine. Some of those have gone quite poorly. And we've learned a lot from those that have gone to zero as well as those that have done great. When we talk about things that go to zero, that is what it means. You put money into it and it ended up completely failing out. And you ended up with putting your dollars in whatever the amount was and getting zero in return. And that's what we call a zero or a bad outcome. The great thing about bad outcomes, and we're a big fan of failures fine, within reason, is that you learn a lot from the things that go poorly as well as the things that go well. I'll start with my core thoughts. We talk about building teams, and I think this is fundamental to everything in every business that I have started. When I've made the effort to build and sort out teams, and we'll talk about what that means. I've done great in every business where I've tried to do it on the cheap or I didn't want to invest the time or energy into building serious teams. I've essentially got to a point where it's become an advanced hobby versus a business, which are very different things. A business is something you make money and revenues from. An advanced hobby is something you put lots of effort into, but doesn't generate money. Wherever I have failed, it's from the failure to build teams. And so that's a cornerstone of everything we think about in business. And I'll just go through 8 to 10 thoughts on Teams very quickly. The first concept is that nothing great gets done without teams. I hear all this discussion. We'll come back to this later. The myth of the solopreneur. And there are people that do it, but even people like this Mr. Beast who's built this crazy online business. But my guess is that the reality is he's not really a solopreneur. He's got lots of people helping with alliances, distribution, and so forth. He may be a creative genius, but not really, quote, unquote, a solopreneur. When I look at the great entrepreneurs of our last couple decades, the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musk, the Judy Faulkner, Bill Gates, and a lot more, none of them do it without building serious teams. They may be themselves very, very effective. And we'll talk about the evolution of the founder, the evolution of the CEO, but at the end of the day, I don't know one of them that's done this without building brilliant Groups of team members. If you look at Elon Musk who's done SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink and so many more things, he can't be every place. He could have tremendous strategic vision, he could be tremendous at inspiring people and coming up with big, big ideas. But at the end of the day he can't do all these things without having great teams of people working closely with him. My sort of core education on teams now critical it is, came from the practice in business, but also the Jim Collins. Jim Collins, one of the great business authors of our time. He was the author of Good to Great, the author of how the Mighty Fail and I think just ultimately a brilliant guy. A second person that was very instrumental in my thoughts on teams was a lawyer from a firm called Latham and Watkins, Jerry Peters, who built this magnificent healthcare practice and was generous enough with me to, to spend a lot of time talking about how we did it and how important it was to build teams to do that. So that those, those are two thoughts. So nothing great gets done without teams jobs Musk, all these people didn't do without teams. Two big influence on me. Both Jim Collins and, and Jerry Peters both fantastic. The next thing I'll talk about is sorting out teams in three or four thoughts on that. When you start a business you have to ultimately sort out your teams and figure out who's a keeper, who's not a keeper, who's a leader, who's not a leader. And in all my experiences this has been hard work and it takes a while to figure it out. Whenever you hire people, it is an educated guess. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen situations where people hire somebody and they think this is the next great coming this person is going to be fantastic and that person ends up being okay at best. The second thing that happens is people hire people and they don't have high expectations and those people become your total leaders, your total winners and so forth. And part of the job of the founder, the entrepreneur, the CEO, is to sort that out and be a little patient in trying to figure it out in building backers healthcare. At the first instance we had about 10 different people working with us. One of those people, a young woman coming right out of college, actually started working in college within a few years started outperforming all of them and I ultimately put her in charge of everybody at a relatively young age. The other people ranged in age from maybe 25 to 65. They were sort of shocked by it. But this is part of the job of the founder, entrepreneur is over. Time to figure out of your 10 people at that point, what do you have, what don't you have, who belongs, who doesn't belong. And, and this is really hard work. It's not fun because it means evaluating people very clearly and try to figure out who are the people you're going to ride or die with for the long run and who you'd be just as happy if they left. Following up on that concept, we talk a lot in business about people that are so great that we think of them as ride or die people. That's one of the common urban phrases, stay, ride or die. But the concept's really true when you find great people, whether I found great people in the legal practice. Amber Walsh, Hallie Buckley, Bart Walker, David Pivnet, Gretchen Townsend, a whole lot of others. Jeff Cockrell, Same thing in the, in the media business, the goal is when you find great people is to find a way that you're working with them really forever, for as long as you can. And one of the things we think about culturally is talking about this concept of thrive, thrive. Every great leader I know at a certain point has to think of the world as thrive, thrive, meaning they thrive and you thrive, the organization thrives and your people and team thrive. It's not just about you. And there's some great Venn diagram overlap where you thrive and they thrive and the company thrives as opposed to at a boss. Early on in my career we used to joke that a dollar for him was more important than a thousand dollars for me. The concept being that kind of leadership doesn't last very long and it doesn't allow you to build teams and great cultures and do great things because everybody feels like it's a zero sum game, a win loss game. What you really want is what we think about often is thrive, thrive, cultures. The next thing I talk about is this concept of in teams and people, a third, a third, a third. And basically viewing it as a. A third of your people are essentially indispensable. You never want to lose them. A third are very, very important performers. And then the last third are somewhat dispensable or fungible. And if they left or don't left, it doesn't really matter. But those first two thirds are what you build companies around. What you build companies around is magnificent people, really good people that do their job. And then the last third are people that you could sort of move in and out and. And again, as you build better companies, those ratios, you want to get closer to 40, 40, 20, 50, 50 you know, 50, 50. You're not going to get to 50, 50, 10, unless you're doing Yogi Bear of math. But the idea is to get closer and closer to, you know, 40, 50, 10, where your lesser performers become a lesser and lesser percentage of the company. Ge, back when GE was GE and one of the leading companies in America had a hardcore rule that they got rid of their top, their worst 10% of people every single year. The worst 10% left every year. They got rid of them every year. That may be too harsh. It's particularly harsh when there's a shortage of people in the labor market. But the idea is constantly understanding what you have and what you don't have in your people. Because really, at the end of the day, teams are really everything to go. As we'll talk about in a moment, product, market, fit, and a lot more. But with people, you don't know what you have till you have them. My next thought is I'd much rather with teams overpay everybody, but not have massive teams. So I have my choice. We're going to have a lean company, 100 people, 100 employees. Whatever the number is, whatever the number is for your business, we're going to be lean and everybody's paid real well versus having a thousand employees and everybody paid poorly. I am still a believer that that top third, that second third are so, so important. We want them being paid well. We don't want them irritated every day about what they pay. There's plenty of other things to be irritated about. We don't want them walking in the door every morning irritated about compensation. So I'd much have a smaller team overpay them than a larger team underpay them. And again, different businesses, different concepts. The ninth thing we'll talk about on teams is a solopreneur. Again, I'm not a believer in it. I'll just leave it at that for the moment. I think it's one of the great Twitter and X myths. The myth of The Solopreneur Team 10th concept is, my perspective is you want to constantly stack talent around your most important clients, your most important areas, most important business areas. Business is very much not a democracy. The worst you could have is 10 of your people, your best people, doing 10 different things versus stacking talent over the things that really matter. So if you're a software, as a service company, you're going to stack and build talent around engineering and around commercialization and not around 30 other things. I spent a lot of my early career in the surgery center Business. The worst thing you could have was 10 different specialties at a surgery center. You know, the efficiencies are horrible. You're far better half having lots of surgeons in a few different specialties than many, many surgeons in my rea different specialties. But you're constantly in business stacking your best people on your most important opportunities, your most important clients. The last thing I'll say about about teams, really two things. The evolution of the founder in three stages. When a founder first starts building a business, typically a situation where he or she is doing almost everything, there's sort of the chief cook, bottle washers used to say in other businesses they might be the chief lawyer and actually the rainmaker too. But that's not sustainable, of course, and you're very limited. When you move a step further, you get to the spot. The second evolution of a founder is he or she has started to hire people to do all the different things that they do, but they're not necessarily better than the founder. And that's still very limiting. You can get to 2x bigger, you can get to whatever bigger, but you can't really explode as a business when the founder is still so intimately involved in everything and it's the leading light in the business. So the second stage is you've got lots of people, but they're not necessarily better than the founder at what they do. The third stage in the evolution of the founder, this could be tough on the founder's ego, but this is where businesses have to go, is where everybody that leads a department, everybody that's running something in the company, could do it now better than the founder could do it. And the founder has to sort of be able to willing to realize that and live with it and get people into spots where he or she is hiring and finding people that are better than him. Gary Keller in the book the one thing talked about the most important thing he had to do in his business was ultimately fill out the top lieutenant spots, the top leadership spots to get the right people in those places. And that's the concept that as a founder we all should aim for, is getting to the spot where we've got the right people in the right places and, and those people are more talented than you. And then the business thrives when you're gone. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is that those businesses are thriving incredibly well once those people have left the building. Obviously Steve Jobs passed away. Tim Cook has grown Apple tremendously since in terms of Microsoft. Satya Nadella who took over, you know, a couple times past, Bill Gates, they've exploded. Microsoft right now is 3.56 trillion in market cap. This morning, Amazon this, Amazon, the same being run by Andy Jassy. Sort of the greatest thing you can say about a founder is that the business does better after they're gone. And that might sound backwards, but I think there's really a lot of truth to that. The last thing I'll say is that in terms of businesses, you have to be big enough to keep and grow the right types of teams. At some point in business, you find you end up growing because you have to have the right level team and quality team versus necessarily that you're trying to grow. But it's imperative to get past that fragility of just a couple great employees. You've got to keep those employees and grow. But part of the core reasons to grow a bigger business is that you actually have and can build the type of team you want to build. The next subject I'll talk about in some depth is niches. And then we'll talk about product, market fit. And these are somewhat closely tied together. So the concept is, and we'll go back to an old. And at any time that anybody has a question, feel free to lob in a question. I'm having a hard time seeing them, but if you lob them in, Rosa will send them to me so I could see them. The next concept on niches is as follows. You know, Jack Welch famously said that whatever business GE was in, and GE back in the day was one of the most best run companies in the world. It's fallen a lot since Jack Welch moved on. That's a different story. But he had a concept that whatever business they were in, you wanted to be first or second in the business or not in the business. And so that, that was the concept. And the reason was if you're first and second in business, when business is going well, you just do fabulously well and you clean up. When business is doing poorly, you still thrive, you're still okay. You might not be cleaning up, but you're one of the survivors. And I think this concept, as true as it was then, is very true today. And quite frankly, if you're picking niches that are so broad, where there's so much competition, it's very hard to do that. And if you really want to build something serious, you've got to try and be number one and two, one or two in your space, whatever space that is. Same thing. If you're running an edtech company with whatever market you're in, you want to be the total leader in that market and just further and further on. So how do we evaluate niches? We evaluate niches in several different ways. First is, the first one is, can we win in the niche? Is it a niche that we can compete well against? For example, if I'm in a niche where I'm competing against Amazon, I don't really feel like I could win or do that well in it. In the law world, when I really got serious about building a legal practice, the best and brightest from my law school went into commercial litigation at the biggest, most competitive firms, where they went into big corporate deals at the biggest, most competitive firms. Could I have won competing against them? I don't know. What I do know, much harder to compete and win against them than picking out a practice area like I did in healthcare and trying to win there. The third concept, is it worth winning in? Obviously, for those folks that I competed against early on that were in corporate securities and litigation, some of those people make so much money at big, big law firms. That's obviously worth winning in. That makes a lot of sense. The flip side is it's health care is 20% of the economy. It might not command the rates they command for the biggest ticket, litigation, the biggest ticket, whatever they're doing, but it still worth winning in. Plenty of room to win in it, enough money to build the team I wanted to build and grow a business and much easier to win in. And so part of your job as a founder, an entrepreneur or leader is to constantly find opportunities where you could, at the end of the day, win, and it's worth winning in. When we evaluate markets of Becker's Healthcare, there are certain markets, micro physician, specialty markets, that we could win in, but there's not enough juice for the squeeze to bother winning in. To really attack. The flip side is we want to attack markets where we can win, stay really closely connected to the audience, but it's not so. And where there's enough revenue and opportunities in the market to win in it. So that's what we think about, can we win in it? Is it worth winning? The next concept we talk about is somebody asked me recently, in trying to find their niche, should they go more narrow to start and find it? My own perspective is probably, yes, you want to go very narrow to try and find your niche, and you probably want to test a few different niches to figure out what the winning niche is for you and where business is going to come, you know, back in the day, when I started a legal practice, people would say to me, you were so smart to start a legal practice around surgery centers, which became a growth vehicle. The reality is I was not so smart. I tested three different areas. It was surgery centers, disease management and cardiovascular. Ended up doubling down on the one that was working. And I'll just take that concept for a second. When you see something that's working, whether it's great people or great niche, great business, the core thing the founder or leader has to do is double down on those people and on those niches and on those businesses. That's a core thought we have regularly. You know, it's. We think about this phrase, double down, stay the course, or bant in it in the brilliance, for example, Amazon's brilliance is it's constantly taking big shots at the plate. And then they figure out, are they doubling down on that or are they not? That's how they grew their cloud business, aws. So they've grown many other things and people say, oh, my goodness. Well, they failed at this retail thing. I look at it very differently. They didn't fail. They tested that way of doing business, decided not to do it. They were smart enough to double down, stay the course, or abandon it. Whole Foods is a place where I'd say they stayed the course. They haven't doubled and tripled down on Whole Foods, but they've stayed the course. So when I think about niches, we're always thinking about double down, stay the course or abandon it. When things are going well, you keep pouring the coals to it. As Jim Collins would say, you keep doubling down on it. The next thing I'll talk about is point solutions. And point solutions are very, very complicated and challenging. Point solution means, and we see it a lot in the software world, where I've invested in a number of companies, some great, some poor, but. But the contemporary point solutions, you're going to do the one thing for the customer better than anybody else. And this is, of course, where many people start a business. We build something that's better than everybody else in a specific area. And this sounds great, but unfortunately, as you deal with customers and you build a point solution and you sell it to customers, you start to run into this concept with point solutions where sooner or later your customers don't want to deal with a thousand different vendors. And so one of the great challenges is I'm a huge believer in starting the point solutions. I'm a huge believer in starting with niches. But the thing you have to realize is if you start with point solutions, start with niches. You are probably going to have to then work on expanding beyond the point solution, expanded beyond the niche. And there's, there's, there's counter examples to that. But by and large you're going to move into adjacencies to grow and stay relevant because increasingly systems customers don't want to deal with a million different point solutions. Somebody had asked the question of are we gonna have a recording of this? And the answer is absolutely yes. There will be a recording of this that will be published on Becker Private Equity and Business podcast and that'll be out in a few days. So you could listen to it then at your leisure or use it for sleep or whatever is best for you. But, but points loses and niches. I'm a huge believer in starting business around points loses niches. In most situations you're gonna have to add on some other niches over time. If you're a point solution, the very best way to start often. But sooner or later you're probably going to have to expand to other areas so that your customers don't don't get you too pointed out. And a great example in healthcare is people point build point solutions. Epic ultimately ends up doing a module in the same area. For a period of time, epic's module is not very good. Then over time Epic's module gets better and better and then the point solution company ends up in trouble. And because Epic sells their entire EHR to include the module, so they're sort of getting that for free back in the day when their module was bad, the point solution could kill it need it for lunch. Over time though, as somebody gets better and better, the platform gets better and better, the point solution probably has to continue to engage and grow. The next point I'll pick at niches is this. Most of us have to be so engaged in business to really see the niches. I'm a believer personally and I wish I was better at this that it's very hard to whiteboard ideas for businesses or brainstorm ideas for businesses without having some real world experience. One of the things we've told the children over the years is or younger people over the years is we really think you out of a job first. And it's much easier to see markets understand product to market fit if you spend some time actually in the market working and doing business. So the concept of I found it much easier to. When I've really been involved with businesses, I've really been great at it. Back in the day we were so engaged you could see the next opportunity so clearly because it would hit you in the face and you would test it and talk about it with your best customers. A couple examples that have grown niche businesses fantastically well intuitive is a is the digital robot companies built the da Vinci robot. They've just done this incredible job of becoming the number one player in, in sort of surgical robots. Leantas has built this fantastic operating system for hospitals to manage their ORs, infusion therapy centers and so forth. And, and one of these we talk about particularly with software companies. But it's true of any business. You better keep on obsessively doubling down on what you're doing to get better and better and better at it that the job of software engineering in the product is never done. I watch things like Apple. One of the reasons Apple's done so great, Epic's done so great, somebody's doing so great is they're constantly improving, they're constantly trying to get better. And I think that's just the reality of any business that you better keep on getting better and better. Few different thoughts on niches. I'll just give a couple more really quickly first. Test, test, test. And as James Collins says, bullets not cannons. You're trying to do a lot of test of things without completely wiping out the company's treasury and cash. But you're trying to test a number of things in. The worst that can happen in a company is people get gun shy about testing. So if you hire people, some are going to go good, some are to get bad. I don't want the manager getting gunshot about hiring. Same thing with testing new initiatives. We want to know what our core issues are and spend most of our time on those core issues. Our corpuses. We also want to be testing new areas and growing into those. But it's testing and not betting the company on those tests. Fewer the thoughts. When people are raising money and they talk about the total addressable market and they give us a total addressable market. That's ridiculous. Everybody's seen this. It's all of China. It's every consumer in the US I basically don't even take those measure discuss them. Somebody just sent me a slide deck. They said their total address of markets 1.3 trillion. I won't go to that investor meetings. I just don't believe it or buy it or sense around it. There's a great quote from eric freed of 37 signals that says all projections are BS. I don't know if that's true but particularly pre revenue in the Startup phase. I think that is larger. True that projections are bs. One great example of a niche strategy. There's a new conference called Shoulder360 and I just love this. It's not one of our conferences, but you really know this is the niche. You're after surgeons dealing with shoulder issues and then their vendors are clear people that sell into that market. I love the niche centric perspective there. Shoulder360, couple other thoughts. When you build past your niche, build past your. Your point solution. We're constantly looking to move into really close adjacent areas. There's a ton of talk about this in a book I love by Chris Zook called Profit from the Core. Next topic is product market fit and it comes close to this concept of being niche centric. But essentially we tell anybody who's doing business, if you're starting something, you talk to customers before you start it to get a sense of is there really interest once you get started, once you get going, it is so easy to build, build, build, because people love to build, build, build. But at the end of the day, you've got to get out there and commercialize early to find out whether people actually want what you're selling. Again, if you're, if you're. People don't want what you're selling, you're essentially doing art. You've got an advanced hobby versus a business. We've all been there at different times in our career. We're most courageous. We're commercializing on the first day trying to talk to people to understand do they want it or not. Reid Hoffman, the famous founder of LinkedIn, basically says you have to get out as early as possible with a minimum viable product to talk to customers about potential customers about that. He basically says that if your minimum viable product is not awful, you're too late in getting out there to the audience. And I think he's right on. I could write books forever, but if at some point I don't print them in front of people and have them read them, it's I'm doing it for my own efforts. We've had lawyers over the years that love their own stuff but don't want to talk to clients. And at the end of the day, you have to talk to clients early and regularly to understand if you're doing what they want them to do. You know, we've seen in the software company, I've served as an advisor and investor in several different software companies. We have seen plenty of times where our software commercial engineers are so bad at that some of them are Great to connect the dots and understanding what the customer looks like and wants. Others are scared to connect dots and talk to the customer. I'm always impressed when I hear about a CEO or CTO that understands in the first few years of startup, they got to spend so much time with customers to really make sure they got what the customer wants and to really hear the customer and see the customer. And in one business I had one of the sales development firms I was working with, you know, scolded me and said, you can't leave it all on us. You better talk to customers to understand what's really going on, what people are thinking. And their advice was right on that people. The founder, early on, he has to spend a lot of time on customers and really being close to customers. The next concept is in terms of testing. We're a big believer in what the CEO of Becker's Healthcare says. Ready, aim, fire. Don't spend so much time paralyzed by thinking, thinking, thinking. You have to get out and talk to people and figure out if what you're doing is something they really want. Great businesses have really spent some time deciding who is their ideal customer, who is their ideal customer profile. So they're really targeting that person. In the healthcare media business, we do a fantastic job of knowing we got to be really close to the CEO, we've got to be really close to the CFO or whoever the Persona is for that part of the business. But to really know who your ideal customer is. One more thing I'll say about product market fit is the worst thing you could hear when you're with a company you've invested with is that they're making a big pivot. And some of you might hear that and say, well, that sounds ass backwards. Scott, making a pivot is important. What I mean by this is when a company has come to you, you've invested in it because they've got a solution for a specific market. And a couple years in, they say to you, we're really going to start looking at a different core market. What most of us as investors do is we go ahead and in our minds, we generally look at that and say that we're now basically writing that down to a zero in our mind. And so that, that is sort of our point is that we're sort of, you know, sort of viewing it as once somebody comes to me and says they're making a big pivot, I basically know we're in trouble. So we've talked about niches, product to market fit. We've talked about Teams, again, foundational to everything are those three things. I'll just talk about a couple other things and hopefully not put people to sleep. We talk often about the five stages of a business and we talk about one, idea, second product, third revenue, fourth profit, fifth scale and for most people don't get from idea to product and then most don't get from idea to product to revenue to profit and then very few get to scale. That's why people talk about these things, these unicorns, stuff like that. At the end of the day for most businesses that are founder led or founder invested in and bootstrapped, you are really trying to go in this order, idea, product, revenue, profit scale and cash flow is king. I can't tell you how many business owners I talked to that started something and they make excuses for why they don't have cash flow. Oh, we're just a year or two away. Most businesses kind take a couple years. At the end of the day we're a believer that you got to get the cash flow quickly. Now the flip side is if you're a major venture capital funded business, it's really a different business model. It's idea, product, revenue scale and then profit. You, you sort of figure out when do your revenue start to plateau, then you try and bring it back in. Did that right. Benefit of cost benefit analysis. You're at the right spot to where you start to scale it and then you, you trim your workforce to get to where you're profitable. But for most of us it's gonna be idea, product, revenue, profit at scale. If you're VC funded, it's probably idea, product, revenue scale, then profit, different ways of looking at it. Both can be right depending on what you're trying to do. The last few concepts I'll touch on very quickly is when you start something, when you want to build it, you better be obsessed with making it great. You better constantly improve. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy Said, you better have a burning desire to succeed. I, I think he is unfortunately right on. I wish it wasn't the case. I wish as I got into the third, fourth, fifth, sixth business that it didn't take so much energy to try and get it right. But I think to be great, you have to obsess to be great. Sixth concept is there's this common phrase that culture eats strategy for breakfast. I again think that this is cute. It makes for a great plaque. But you actually need culture, talent and driven people. Culture, talent, driven people and customers to make it work. Culture is very important because you want to have great people. But at the end of the day, you better have all these things. It's not just culture, it's culture plus strategy plus talent to make and drive to make these things go. It almost goes back to the last thing. You better have an obsessive desire to excel, to make these things work great. Think about serial entrepreneurs. I find serial entrepreneurs so interesting because so many of them think that if they've done it once, they have what's called the Midas touch. And what we have found that there's almost no such thing as the Midas touch. Anybody who's been a founder once done something great once. The great lesson is you sort of know what it takes to do great. But that. But you still have to combine it with everything you did the first time. Building a great team, the nitty gritty, really understanding your customers. Everything else. I've seen so many people that were great in their first business and then started their next business and failed because they didn't have that hunger, they didn't have that clarity. They had an obsession to succeed. And the great lesson I was a founder and a repetitive founder is if I want the next thing to be successful, I better really put my heart and soul into it to make it go. I wish it wasn't the case. I wish it could be a great founder time and time again and golf great and do these other things great. But I find it almost impossible to do. Sad but true. Couple more thoughts. Business plans. I'm a believer that the, you know, three types of business plans, the simple, the medium and the complex. Almost everybody would be good with the medium type business plan, not the overly complex one. That's 100 pages that comes out of. You get online and you sort of build online. I think it's sort of a joke because most people don't really know what they're doing. And what they really need is a 2 to 10 page business plan to give some clarity. This is what we're trying to do, this is what we're trying to serve, this is who we're trying to serve. And here's how we're going to do it versus these expansive, crazy long business plans. The last thing I'll say, and then I'm going to take a couple questions that I see have come through is the best leaders in business, they know their businesses really well. You know, they're not, they're not so bound up in all the external factors. In fact, they're able to keep themselves away from all the distractions of the external factors. They know who their best people are, they know who their best customers are, they know who their best areas are. And quite frankly, they're going to constantly concentrate resources and set resources around their best people, their best customers, their best areas. They're not going to be constantly looking for the next thing. They're going to spend 89% of their business focused on their most important customers, the most important profit areas, the most important people, and they're going to know their businesses crazily. Well fed two different leaders. I watch obviously Jamie Dimon's one of the great leaders of our generation, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. I just think he's magnificent. But it's incredible, the breath he has and how well he knows his business better than anybody else I know today, at least in the non tech sectors, which I can't comment on as well. There was a person I worked with 100 years ago, Bruce St. John in the surgery center sector. And people used to say about Bruce, he would know if a two by four dropped at one of his centers that was 300 miles away. And I did, you know, he wasn't a micromanager, but he has hands on the business. He knew what it was. For me in business, the constant effort has been knowing who are my best people, who are our best clients, and constantly making sure we're building around our best clients, our best people, our best areas, and stacking resources around them. We could talk at length about so many other subjects related to that, but we think that is just critical to look at constantly stacking resources and efforts and knowing who your best people are. Yeah, so these are some great, great questions. We've got a couple great questions. Do you have a process for identifying the top tier customer base before sales begins so you could target the right people? So this is, this is just, you know, brilliant. And I'll tell you some of the errors I've made in this. I love this question. So, so back in the day in the world that we live in, there were people building logistics companies and some people in the logistics space got so rich from that that it was just amazing to us. And the logistics companies had these huge bullpens of people doing deals and salespeople and so forth. And of course for a while I got really excited about this and talked to my CEO about this and one of my partners about this and said, wouldn't this be cool if we had 100, you know, salespeople going like they do in the logistics company, or 300 or whatever the number was? And what I Found to be just fascinating was that, you know, what we really needed was 10 to 20 great salespeople. Because the real list of potential customers for the business we were in at that point, you know, people selling into the hospital health system area, people selling into the surgery center area. The reality was there were thousand to two thousand real targets across what we're looking at, healthcarely serious targets. And so we didn't need 200 reps, we needed 10 to 15 that would cover that really well. If you're a revenue cycle company selling into the surgery center business, you need enough salespeople to cover hospitals and health systems, surgery centers, the different players in the space, but you don't need 200 of them. As I've built new businesses trying to identify this is the ideal customer. So I really need three people every single day. Calling and reaching out to that ideal customer is far better than having 100 people doing the spray and pray type thing. I love the question. I don't think I sometimes are more apt to act and I think urgency is important in business. But I'm a big fan of taking a step back and doing the thoughtful question or the thoughtfulness that somebody had because usually you don't need as much as I was enamored by the salesforce they had at Medline, the salesforce, I saw all these logistics places. We really needed 10 to 15 and it made it much more manageable to grow the business. We wanted to grow because we had a target list. I think that is so important and the more time that you do that, the better off you are. The next question I have is this. Somebody has this great question suggestion for employees when the founder will not step aside and allow processes products to adapt as new people and new ideas enter the company. So this is a great question. And this is really hard for founders and leaders because so much of their ego is invested in the business and who they are and what they do. I wish I was a scratch golfer and more my ego would be invested there. But over the years, a leader has to step aside and make way for multiple different reasons. One, you get to the spot where your best people can do whatever you're doing better than you can. Second, and this is very important, if you don't step away and allow your best people to step into the leadership roles, they sooner or later will disengage and they might not do it. They might not walk out the door, but they might. But sooner or later, they'll put their energies into other things versus what you're trying to accomplish if they don't have a spot for growth and a spot for development. The third concept we talk about, and we talk about this often, is you need to have a broad enough company. It's one of when I first got going and building a surgery center practice and a media company, I had no aspirations to have 50 full time lawyers working for me at one time or to have 100 people in the media business or whatever the numbers were. I had zero aspirations that. But what I found was if I didn't build a big enough team, I was hyper fragile to the loss of critical people. I wanted those people and I wanted to build more people that were great. And so. But when you build, hire and build and cultivate great people, you better find great opportunities for them or they will get bored and they'll blow some of the best years of their life working with you if you're not constantly looking for opportunities for them. So you have to find those. Me as a founder, I stepped down before I was asked the same thing in the war from I stepped down before I was asked and at the war from when I did so, people were like, how could you do this? How could you step down from leadership? How could you no longer be running that practice area? And what I knew was the person up Amber Walsh was, was beyond ready to do it. And in some ways she was far better able to do it at that point than I was. One of the keys in being leading a law practice, leading a business is constant recruiting and developing great people at some point. I served as chairman of the department for 14, 15 years. I was just exhausted by that. I could keep on going through the motions, but there were people on deck ready to do it better than I could do it. And so it was time for me to step down. Even though the firm didn't agree with me in, in hindsight, the firm thought it was brilliant. And Amber ended up being on our executive committee. And then the person that followed her was a woman named Holly Buckley, who also was just fantastic. But, but it's very hard for a founder. There's a lot of ego attached to it. And stepping down when it's time for you to step down versus when you're pulled down. Two different things. So the next question I had is this. Somebody asked the question about, you know, when you're a startup in a broad space, can you really be one or two? Could you be really one or two in the whole software engineering space? Of course not. The concept is how do you niche down so that to the customers you are working with. They are so loyal to you and they love you so much and you had so much value that you could build with and around those customers and so you're not going to be number one in the niche maybe at first, but you're going to be so customer centric and so taking such great care of your customers that, that they just love you and you could build and grow from there. It's a little bit different than being niche centric, but it is this concept of being so customer centric that your customers view as the only person in the world doing this or the most important people in the world doing this. We sort of start there, you know, it's treating every customer and you tear out your customers as well. We'll talk about that as well. Tier meaning T I E R Not T E A R but. But you constantly work with your close customers to be so important to them and then you keep on building, keep on building and you discover and clarify what your niche is. We're the very best at doing revenue cycle for mid size health systems of this sort or we're the very best at doing it for oncology practices or whatever it might be. One of the beauties of the revenue cycle area that I see is there are so many different niches in revenue cycle that those that really go after a niche end up being so, so successful and they ultimately own that niche. And it's hard for bigger providers to compete with them because they know so much about their domain. It's when I look at a software company building on a specific domain, not just being generally an AI company but building on specific domains, I have a much better chance that those software companies, those AI companies are going to succeed greatly. I think we've about worn out our welcome. Let me just see if there's any more questions that people have or if I've touched on all of them or if somebody has a follow up question, please feel free to ask. Yeah, we asked her. I'm sorry, I'm leaning in so much because my eyes are getting worse. I think I've hit most of the questions that people have asked. I really appreciate you joining this. Love a comment from you either online or text. Scott Becker 773 766-5322 Love your comments. We'll be working on this next book. Hopefully it won't be a disaster. It'll be improvement from the last book which we liked but didn't love. Feel free. Obviously we have webinars podcast newsletter at Becker Private Equity and Business and obviously the mothership separate company, Becker's Healthcare. Love to have you work with those. There's one of our favorite slides from being ranked top in the Apple businesses rankings this last month and again this month. You know, right with the Wal and some other great, great publications. Thank you all so much for listening. I love. You know, I got a great text from a close colleague of mine, wonderful, wonderful healthcare leader who I often see at a bar or two saying great webinar. I can't tell you how much I appreciate those types of comments. Thank you so much. I hope our studio audience is listening, enjoying it as well. We'll wrap it up. Thank you for listening. Thank you very, very much.