← Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Starting Businesses, Writing Books, & Lots of Headaches 8-1-25
00:03:56
In this episode, Scott discusses the ups and downs of launching a new business venture, writing books, and navigating the frustrating realities of administration and growth.
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Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business podcast, the Becker Private Equity podcast, and today's discussion is about starting businesses, writing books and lots of headaches. So here's the issue. Over the course of my career, I've had two principal careers. Been a lawyer and built a great practice at a major law firm, one of the best law firms of the business. McGuire woods helped with a great group of colleagues to build a team and build a law firm and build the healthcare practice, but with great, great colleagues, a great team. Second, founded a company called Becker's Healthcare, which became a leading business business media company. Just great success, built a great team, have great leaders at the company. And in both these spots, the law firm and the media company, I've got leaders far better than myself that sort of were mentees of mine at one time, but have done what all great mentees do. They've surpassed the mentor and are much better than me and do just a fantastic job, run the healthcare practices. Holly buckley runs at McGuire Woods. Jessica Cole runs the media company, the CEO and president of Becker's Healthcare both are just phenomenal and whole groups of teams and people around them that make those places work. So more recently, I still do a lot of work with those two companies. I also do a decent amount of public speaking, writing, podcasting, and wrote a book. My first book I'd written in nearly 20 years in this book, being a business book called the Entrepreneurs Edge that came out last year, was a B B plus book. Not bad, not great. But after getting editorial critique on it, went back and wrote a whole different version of that book, a whole new book that'll come out next year in that book because again, on building businesses and what we call building business in a career of wins and losses, because we've had plenty of wins, but plenty of losses too. And it is what it is. This is life. But one of the things that's caused me to do is to get more serious about building another business because I sort of feel a little bit old and artificial if I'm writing about business and not literally engaged in building a business again in addition to my efforts to sort of help and contribute at Becker's healthcare and at McGuire Woods. So we've been involved recently and starting to build a sales team again. We've hired several salespeople and, and, and then so exciting and so fun and so interesting and we'll see how it goes. But, but there are so many more pieces to it because you start to try and get the people paid. You work on your zelle account. And you remember all the headaches originally of business. We got four people starting, all independent contractors, not W2 employees, but either way, trying to get them paid right now through Zelle, when you hit the fraud alert systems reminds me of all the little administrative headaches. You have a business that, that go with the real issue we're trying out, trying to find out if you got the right people in place and if people actually want to buy the product that you're selling, which is a whole different question, a whole different issue, and really the important question. And try not to get distracted by the three hours I spent this morning with Chase getting the account unlocked for potential fraud or fraud alerts and sending money to the people that I'm working with. In any event, those are sort of the travels and tribulations of building a business again. We're very excited about it, but my God, getting stuck in this sort of administrative workflow of dealing with the banks today and dealing with things and trying to get the account back unlocked, which we've done, and trying to get a couple people paid. What a pain in the butt. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business Podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. I hope that people enjoy this. We'll be providing regular updates as we get going on building a new business and working with our remarkable team. Thank you for listening to the Vector Business Podcast, the Vector Private Equity Podcast. Thank you very, very much.