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Founder's Story
From Selling Scribbles at 4 to Leading Multi-Million Dollar Businesses | Ep. 238 with Charles Gaudet Founder of Predictable Profits
00:22:57
Charles Gaudet, founder of Predictable Profits, shares how he built and rebuilt multiple businesses through economic downturns, emphasizing strategic thinking, founder branding, and resilience. From selling art at age four to launching Founders Fuel, his story is a raw look at grit, growth, and staying visible when others hide.
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- [00:00]
Charles
Foreign.
- [00:03]
Dan
Well, I'm super excited today, Charles, because you and I have known each other for a very long time. Yesterday we were having an incredibly deep conversation. I know I'm going to learn a lot. But I want to understand something you said before, that you love a bad economy. That scares a lot of people. And I know a lot of people are really worried right now for the future. Why do you love that?
- [00:27]
Charles
Well, the interesting thing is that there's really no such thing as a bad economy. We have a good economy and we have a bad economy by classical standards. But really, ultimately, it's just a different economy. And a different economy requires different strategies. There's still buyers. But what happens in a quote unquote bad economy is that, you know, business owners do what they're taught to do in business school, right? They, they lay off employees, they cut down expenses, they reduce their marketing costs. They go on the corner and they just sit and they wait for the economy to pass. So meanwhile, what that does for the strategic entrepreneur, that's really leaning in, it makes it one of the easiest, greatest times in the world to capture more market share, because while your competitors are playing hide and seek, you're out there earning more business. And so if, if you pay attention to the companies, really great companies, you'll find that so many of them have actually been born in these quote, unquote bad economies. So that's. People think, I have, I got two heads, and I say, I love a bad economy, but, you know, it takes more strategic thinking. You deal in a very discerning market environment. Right now, people are more careful with the money that they spend. In a good economy, mistakes go unnoticed. In a quote unquote bad economy, mistakes get punished. So if you're not making any mistakes, you're going to win incredibly well during this time. So, yeah, that's why I love it.
- [01:55]
Dan
You also mentioned that now people need to see your brand dozens and dozens of times. I can't remember the number, but I know you could tell me what has changed and why is that? It almost seems many people would think, like, how could somebody even see me that many times before they make a decision?
- [02:13]
Charles
The four magic words that if anybody says this to you when you get on the phone, you just, you know, off the, right off the bat, it's going to change the game. If they say to you, I see you everywhere, I see you everywhere is a four magic words that just changes things, right? So it's called the laws of effective frequency. I didn't make that up. It was Actually something that was designed, you know, know, many, many years ago. And what they found is that when you look to create demand, the very first time somebody sees a brand impression they're like, eh, you know, interesting. But then the more they see it over and over and over again, suddenly it begins to create more, more of that demand until they're finally like, I need to buy this stuff. And so it's 20 brand impressions. Now people think that's great, but I don't have deep pockets like an Apple or some forth. But you don't need deep pockets if you do something as simple as retargeting. Depending on the platforms that you use, it could be $10 a day per platform for every 10,000 people that you have on your market, in your market that you're retargeting. So it doesn't have to be expensive, but you can use platforms like AdRoll, GDN, Meta. Everybody has this opportunity to retarget and, and then it's like surrounding the dragon. Everywhere they go, they get up in the morning, they see your logo. They're standing in line at Starbucks to check in their phone, they see your logo. They go to, to bed at night, they look at their phone, they see your logo. It's for the same reason. I have a text from you actually, where you sent me a message and you said, charlie, I am seeing you everywhere. And then you followed with you must be crushing it. And that is just the natural perception that we believe to be true. When you see the company's logo and you see the, the founder brand or whatnot over and over and over again, you see them so often, you just get this natural belief that I see them all the time, so that they must be crushing it. So when companies, for example, when they're trying to target or prospect people, if you're trying to prospect enterprise or whatnot, a lot of cold email fails because they're trying to hit a cold prospect, they're trying to hit somebody that they've never seen before. So you can actually preheat these people ahead of time, show your logo, your brand over and over and over again to the point where it's like they can't get away from you. Then there's a few other elements of social selling you built in so that by the time they look at your brand that you reach out to them, they're like, oh, I've seen this company everywhere, they must be crushing it. Yes, I'm more than happy to have a conversation.
- [04:46]
Dan
I see you everywhere and, and you must be Crushing it. I like that. By the way, that needs to be an assert. Tell me about how you brand yourself because I think you've done a lot of amazing things when it comes to branding yourself and I do see you everywhere. So what was the change for you where you said like this is so important that I'm, I'm really going to go all in on this.
- [05:12]
Charles
You know, I've been doing that. So I've been an entrepreneur all my life, but I've been know predictable profits. I started 15 years ago. One of the blessings of the work that I do is I get to work with some of the brightest people in the world. Seven, eight, even a few nine figure CEOs. And so over time we begin to see the difference between, you know, what's working and what's not working. What do we see as a common themes for those who are the most successful versus those that tend to be struggling quite a bit? And one of the common themes among those that are the most successful is that they carry two brands. They have the company brand and then they have a founder spread. And when you look at the data, what you'll find is that when you run both of them together, they do better. It's not a 1 plus 1 equals 2. It's like a 1.33 plus 1.33 equals like 2.66. It's something along those lines, right? It's. So it's significantly more effective than just one plus one equals two. And then when you look at the founder's brand, the founder's brand generally brings in more leads at a lower cost than the company brand. It's why when you look at companies like State Farm as example, Jake, who's a fictional character from State Farm, will actually have more followers than State Farm itself. You know, Richard Branson has got more followers than, you know, his virgin companies, right? It's people want to follow the founder, learn more about the founder and the principles and the theories and the concepts and everything else. And then when they're in that real buying mode, then they'll switch over and they'll begin to follow the company. So a founder's brand is an essential part of the customer journey and it allows you to occupy more of that head space. And when somebody in that, in that category, so whatever that category might be, you know, if, if somebody is looking for a business coach, you know, I want to occupy that headspace, they see me and they see predictable profits over and over and over again. And so that. And it creates affinity, right? So let's think about it for a minute. A lot of people have this real strong affinity with. With Apple. Apple products. And it's a strong affinity because they know who started Apple and they're a big fan of the. Right. They're a big fan of the Journey and they resemble. With the Journey. But if I said to you, you know, Dan, if you saw, if you were at ExxonMobil and you saw gas across the street that was 5 cents cheaper, would you have any issues going across the street $0.05 cheaper to get gas? Yeah. And that's because most people don't even know who founded ExxonMobil. And so we couldn't even care less. There's zero affinity. If we see something cheaper, we're going to go somewhere cheaper. But when you can resonate and emotionally connect with a brand, in many cases, the only way you can emotionally connect with the brand is if you can put a person or a figure behind it. That's why Geico created the Geckos, because you don't know who founded Geico, but a lot of people still have an emotional connection to the gut, to the Gecko, and it still creates a. You know, it still does its trick. Maybe not effective as a founder's brand, but in the insurance world that's doing its trick or flow for progressive. Right. You just need Iglant.
- [08:41]
Dan
Every time I see somebody named Jake, I can't help but think of. Of Jake from State Farm. They did a phenomenal job. So when you, when you look at your life and then your journey to going way back, you said you're an entrepreneur for basically your entire life.
- [08:57]
Charles
Yeah.
- [08:58]
Dan
What were some of the things that you did in the beginning? Rolling up to predictable profits.
- [09:04]
Charles
Some of the different companies that I did.
- [09:06]
Dan
Yeah, companies. Maybe, maybe failures that you had along those lines. Also, what's the first thing that you sold? For me, I think it was like expired chocolate.
- [09:16]
Charles
I sold artwork to my neighbors. So this is at 4 years old, I would create artwork and I'd run to my neighbor's house and I'd sell it and it was it. Probably one of the most important lessons that I ever learned was actually when I was at little, because, you know, I'm this little kid, big eyes, the whole deal. I'm running around, I'm saying, you know, $0.25 or $0.50, you know, people would just go in their pocket and pull out the money and they'd give it to me and send me on my way. But then there was Mrs. Hersey and I went to Mrs. Hersey's house. And I showed her my artwork and she says, is this really your best stuff? And I was honest with her because I was putting things out at volume. It was like, scribble, stick it in the bag. Scribble, stick it in the bag. You know, because everybody else that I met with would buy it, except Mrs. Hersey was like, is this really your best stuff? And I was like, no, it isn't. And she said, then why are you trying to charge me 25 cents for something that actually isn't your best stuff? And I didn't have an answer. And I started getting embarrassed and I could, I still to this day, you know, 40 something years later, I can still remember feeling like the blood rushing into my face and my feeling the heartbeat, you know, in my cheeks because I'm like really, really embarrassed right now. And she said, what do you think this is really worth? And I'm like, I don't know. And she said, most three cents. And so she pulled off three pennies and she offered me three pennies. And that was the last house I went to when I was trying to sell my artwork. And then I committed from that point because I was so embarrassed that I would never sell scribbles again. And so that created the tempo for everything else. When I was in college, I started a consulting company that led to eventually creating one of the world's first, first pet health insurance companies. We are nominated by Ernst and Young as having one of the nation's best seed stage companies. That worked out really, really great. We had, we raised some seed money and then we are going ahead to, to race a big multi million dollar race. We, I just finished negotiating a lease earlier that morning. We were expanding our team, sitting in the boardroom.com crash happens investor walked in to tell us to our face he had to pull the plug. There was no money. So we ended up having to renegotiate out of the leases and close the business that same day. You can imagine the emotions going from I finally made it to now, I've, you know, I've lost it. And so what do you do that shortly thereafter? I believe that I, I sit thing. You, you play, you play the best hand with the cards that you've been dealt. So at some point you got to audit. The cards that you've been dealt with are the opportunities that currently exist in my, in my world. And my dad, he was a hard money lender and that was his role. And so I said, all right, my dad's a hard money lender. That's his job. He was going to negotiate a piece of property. I asked if I could sit in on the negotiation. When he said, when he did the negotiation, as soon the guy didn't close the deal. Just then I get in the car and I said, if somebody else made you that deal, would you take it? And he goes, it's the first one to the table that will do it. So I said, all right, I'm in. And so I bought my first track of land. It was raw land. I knew nothing about construction at the time, but I'm like, you know, I'm 20 something years old. Who cares if I lose it all? I have plenty of time to make it back up again. But I bought a track of land. I went to Barnes and Nobles to buy a book on how to do real estate development. And I'm reading the book, I'm driving into other developments, trying to see who the contractors that you're using from. The people that I knew had a good reputation and I'd call them and they'd come in and before you know it, now I'm buying, you know, another track of land. And so I built roads and neighborhoods and so forth. That did really well. You know, I went from several million dollars in debt over to paying double digit interest rates because it was hard money loan to then, you know, progressively founding my first multimillion dollar company. And then I did a whole bunch of other things in the mix. I mean I've, I took several million dollars and I did a proprietary stock trading company where I built algorithms, ran millions of dollars in the market. At one point we had Tony Robbins mentor that said, let's fund, let's create a hedge fund and commit to several hundred million in, in race 2008 happened and that squashed that idea.
- [13:45]
Dan
I feel like most, I've interviewed maybe a thousand people at this point and I have to say I still don't think that everyone is really cut out to be an entrepreneur. It's not that they can't be because anyone can be. And it's even easier now than ever to just start. But that doesn't mean that you can really, really successfully live it day in, day out, full time. But I would say resiliency almost seems to be, or grit might be some things that really come up because like you said, there's like ups and downs, like nobody really goes through, barely anyone ever goes through without this ups. But big ups and big downs, it's often like manic in its sense. How do you feel about that? In terms of, like, the people that you. Because I know you get to come in contact with incredibly successful people. Does this relate to how they are?
- [14:37]
Charles
You have to be a little crazy if you want me to be honest, yet you have to be a little crazy because it's, you know, you're basically, if you put this on LinkedIn and you're like, hey, I'm looking for somebody that is going to put their life savings on the line to get up early before everybody else, to work longer hours than any other person for less of a salary than you'll be paying out to other people for the first few years with a hope and a prayer that you are going to then hit it big. Like, you'd have nobody applying for the job, right? And that's the way the most entrepreneurs end up, you know, going through this journey. I've almost hit bankruptcy three times before in my life. When somebody says they hit rock bottom, I now know what rock bottom is. But when somebody said it before, like, usually it's like they have a bad day, I hit rock bottom. Now when somebody says they have rock bottom, I look at them and I'm like, unless you get to a point where you no longer want to be here on this earth, you have not hit rock bottom. And I got to that point one time where I'm. I was literally driving in the car and I said a silent prayer that somebody, because I was. I was too, too chicken to do it myself, that somebody would just hit me head on because I. I couldn't handle the pain anymore. It was that extreme when there was just. There was so much stress, there was so much debt, there was so much everything. I just didn't see that there was going to be any way out.
- [16:17]
Dan
And.
- [16:18]
Charles
But I had a mentor of mine tell me one thing that I'll never forget. And he said, you'll be the closest to. That you will ever be to breakthrough success, the very moment that you want to quit more than anything else in the world. And I found that to be true not on just one occasion, but also on multiple occasions. It's the hard, hard, hard, hard, hard moments that if you can persist through this, that you'll go ahead and you'll find that breakthrough success. But entrepreneurship is a lonely game. You're fortunate in that you have Kate and that Kate is there to support you and have your back and everything else. And I do find that it's really important for the entrepreneur that wants to do really, really well that they have to have a support system if it's not a mentor group. If it's not a supporting spouse or family member or friends, you, you need that in the moments when you really doubt yourself, because you're going to do that. The moments where you doubt yourself, where they're like, come on, man, you've got this. You've got this. One more day, one more day, one more day. I believe in you and that's what will get you through it.
- [17:32]
Dan
That's how we met, right through our group. I mean, I made so many friends through these groups because we get each other. Like, you're telling me something. I'm like, wow, I can relate to many of those things. I've been there. I don't think you're crazy where somebody, like you said, if you were to tell someone who's been working a corporate job for a long time, they'd be like, why don't you just go get a job? I've heard that many times too. Like, as things start to be unsuccessful, people are just like, just go get a job. Like, who cares? And you and I know, like, we can't just go get a job. It doesn't work that way. I know something that's been really important to you has been fitness. By the way, you're looking super fit now. I was like, because you're by the beach now I get it. Like, it's, you know, it's, it's the opposite of bulking season now, I guess. So for you, how has that played into, you know, business entrepreneurship? Has that helped? Does that do anything for you? Is it, is it a mental clarity? Is it making you feel good? Is it legacy? What is fitness to you?
- [18:37]
Charles
So I often talk about, as an entrepreneur, you're an intellectual athlete, right? And I say that because when you wake up in the morning, you need to be on point and ready to go and make decisions fast. And so if you're one of those entrepreneurs that you sleep in, you're sluggish, you got brain fog, so you can't really set any appointments until, you know, 11, 12 o' clock. Then you have to have six cups of coffee in order to be somewhat functional. And then you're just exhausted by the end of the day. You know, you're ready to crash and so forth. You're unable to make really effective decisions. You get paid in direct proportion to the. Your ability to use your mind and think. And so when you're, when you put health as a top priority, that then allows you to wake up in the morning, be on point, sustain that energy throughout the day, make some great decisions. And all in all, it makes you a better, a better entrepreneur. And then just as important as training, which is you actually sitting there every day working is a recovery. So what do you do when you're not working? You have to have rules, disconnect. Not going to check my emails. When I shut down my computer, won't check my emails on the weekends, you know, I'm going to go to bed early, get my sleep, really prioritize that. And you know, that's, it's actually, here's a secret. I don't think I've ever, I've told you this. It's actually formally going to be launched next week. But here's another company that we actually just launched, this is next week and it's with my health guy. And so I work with one of the top health guys on the planet named Reagan Archibald. I hired him because I said, I want you to optimize my mind. I get paid in direct proportion to the mind. I, I want you to optimize this. Make me superhuman. And so it was over a year of trying to formulate something that would allow me to optimize my mind in a way that didn't violate any of my health rules. Because I really want to make things, put healthy things into my body. And we formulated Founders fuel and then through that I, I gave it to somebody and they were like, damn, like, what is this? Like, I want it. Then a few other people wanted it and we're like, well, you know, we'll bottle it up and we'll put it out there and it's sort of like if it makes a hundred million, then awesome. If I end up with a few thousand bottles, you know, in my, in my house, that's okay too because ultimately it was for me anyway.
- [21:05]
Dan
Well, I need, I need the Founders fuel.
- [21:08]
Charles
Yeah.
- [21:08]
Dan
Like you said, how do I get Founders Fuel? Because I really need to get it.
- [21:12]
Charles
So foundersfuel co when it does release. But when it releases, I'll send you a message, you know, and I'll let you know.
- [21:22]
Dan
Yeah, it's. Yeah, like you said, if you're sluggish, if I don't sleep, if I don't have clarity, I'm like dead. Like I can't make decisions. It's really bad. I have a decision fatigue issue and it really, really impedes everything I do. And I, I see a direct relation. Like if I meditate at night and I put something on, I wake up the next day, I can be really successful. It's really, it's like night and day difference that if I get bad sleep and I can't focus, I'm like sitting here, you know, useless all day. And you know we only get paid if we get paid, right? So, like if we're not doing something or performing, then we don't get that paycheck. But Charles, this has been amazing. So many quotes. I love the book. What is your your book called? And how could can I buy your book online?
- [22:13]
Charles
Predictableprofits.com the book is the Predictable Profits Playbook. You can get it on Amazon or you could get it free plus shipping on the website. If you go to predictableprofits.com under resources, you'll see book and you can get a free plus shipping over there.
- [22:27]
Dan
Love it. I did read it though. It was a bit ago. I loved it. But no, Charles, it's been amazing. I'm glad that we were able to connect again. I don't think I've ever really gotten to talk to you about your history, everything. So I was excited to do this just because every time we talk, I learn something new. So I want to make sure that you and I connect more often and I need to get the fuel that you have. But thank you for joining us today on Founder Story.
- [22:51]
Charles
Hey, together we're better, buddy.