← Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How I Lost My Company and Built a $500M Business Instead | Brandon Dawson
00:45:49
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- [00:01]
Ilana Golan
Wow, this is going to be such an incredible show today. But before we start the show, I want to ask you for a favor. See, I'm on a mission to help millions leap their careers, land their dream roles, fast track to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or create portfolio careers. Now, this podcast is about giving you a blueprint of how some of the biggest leaders of our time reach success. So subscribe, download so you never miss it. Plus, it really, really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. So let's dive in.
- [00:32]
Brandon Dawson
You're going to make a bunch of dumb mistakes because the only way to build a business if you've never done it is to trial and error.
- [00:38]
Ilana Golan
Brandon Dawson, from one of the youngest to being the bell in the American Stock Exchange, exiting his own Company for 77x EBITDA and now partnering with Grant Cardone to help countless of business owners 10x their own businesses.
- [00:53]
Brandon Dawson
I did the biggest deal of my life and I was at the peak of my career in May of 2001. And when I came home from celebrating in Europe, my private equity group was like, now we can sell the company. I was like, well, I'm not selling the company. And within six months, they had sold my company. There's nothing I could do to stop it. Every person that chooses to can create the life they want. The second business I built, I grew effortlessly and seamlessly, and I shared the equity with my customers. I bypassed Wall Street. I never worried about payroll, I never had headaches, and I shared $15 million of sale proceeds with my employees when I sold. And we all celebrated together.
- [01:27]
Ilana Golan
How do you get back up and continue?
- [01:30]
Brandon Dawson
So you need a lot of things, but the number one thing you have to have is.
- [01:47]
Ilana Golan
Brandon Dawson, from one of the youngest to being the bell in the American Stock Exchange, exiting his own Company for 77x EBITDA and now partnering with Grant Cardone to help countless of business owners 10x their own businesses. Plus, he's also helping us at Leap Academy as we are becoming one of the fastest growing companies in America. So this conversation is really more personal for me and I'm so excited. Thank you, Brandon, for being on the show.
- [02:16]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, love being here. It's great to see you.
- [02:18]
Ilana Golan
I got to take you back in time because it's going to be all about how you got to this level of success and then what you can do for others. But you grew up on Walnut Farm, right? And so relatively humble beginning, if I remember correctly. How did that shape you, Brandon?
- [02:34]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, well, you know, I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, with, you know, with some brothers and my mom and dad and my stepmother and my father and he was a pastor that had gone on to computer sciences and she was an insurance adjuster. And, you know, I went to school with 35 kids in my class. It was a small Christian school. And in order to pay for my cleats and the gas in my car, I had to work besides school. So I did school sports work, and then I always worked on the weekends and everything. And I'd buckay and I'd work in a restaurant and tanning salon and I used to harvest our walnuts on the orchard. I just wanted, when I got 18 years old and I could leave Corvallis, I was like, I got to get out of here. But I wasn't a very good student. And so college, really, I tried college for a couple months and I wasn't going to do well in it, but I'd got a part time job selling and I was killing it selling. So I decided I wasn't going to go to college and I moved from Portland, Oregon, Corvallis, to Portland, went to college, then started selling. And then about six months later, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, become an outside sales rep for a device company. And I realized I just loved going out and figuring it out and that I did so well. At 19 years old, I was making more money than anybody I knew I had done so well. And then it. They asked me to take over sales inside sales in Minneapolis when I was 21, moved to Minneapolis and then I did so well there, they fired my boss and then I took over the department. And by the age of 23, 24, 25, I was making 150 grand a year running sales teams. My confidence was just super high about what I was capable of doing. And then I was sitting in a room with a bunch of older people being told I can't make any more money because I make as much as them. And I decided December 15, 1995 to go and become my own business owner.
- [04:16]
Ilana Golan
And I want to take you there because that's such a brave move, Brandon. Like at that point you basically sell everything. You have a newborn, if I know correctly, and you are not afraid to cut and do it, I mean, which I think is just really. It's kind of burning the boats, right? It's just really, really scary. So what did it take from you and how were you not afraid?
- [04:40]
Brandon Dawson
Well, see, my confidence when I moved to Atlanta. Well, first when I moved Corvallis up to Portland and I started selling and making my Own money. And I wasn't dependent on my parents. I was like, I can take care of myself. Then when I moved to Atlanta and I became an outside sales rep, I had 11 states in a company car and I had to drive everywhere and meet doctors and meet people. I didn't know how to use an atlas. I had to just figure everything out, Check into hotels, do expense reports, do call reports, set up my routings, be in charge of myself, be a good business person for the company I represented. And that just gave me so much responsibility because up till then, every, you know, parents were always taking care of things for you. And so I am self sufficient. I can do whatever. And I think those were all good moments of time for me because by the time I decided to quit a job, I was making a lot of money and had kids and sold everything and started over. I'd had three or four big moves where I was very successful in my mind, like self dependent. And I was like, no matter what I do, I'm gonna. I know how to go out and survive and make money. So the risk isn't. Yeah, did I give up a good job because I thought I could go get any job and make 150 grand selling? That wasn't the issue. It was like, what am I going to do bigger than that. And so I had the courage to make that big bold move. And it wasn't just leaving the job. There was other dynamics. But I took control of my own life. And once I started doing that, I have literally, Since I was 26 years old, I have literally lived my life the way I wanted to live my life. It doesn't mean it's been perfect and it hasn't had hiccups and I haven't had problems and haven't made mistakes. But I have been an independent person, doing what I want to do, eating where I want to eat, hanging out with who I want to hang out with since I was 26 years old. That's 30 years now because I'm 56, which is incredible.
- [06:20]
Ilana Golan
And I do want to go there, into the awesome points, but also the hard moments, because entrepreneurship can also, Sorry, suck. So we're going to talk a little bit about that too. And when you were 29, you already became one of the youngest people to ever ring the opening bell in the American Stock exchange. What drove you, I think, to pursue entrepreneurship so boldly and so successfully, if you will, like at that point, because you're still very young.
- [06:50]
Brandon Dawson
I mean, tenacity. I just didn't have anything to Lose, you know, I made a hundred presentation to raise my first million. I was told no. You know, I was like 105 present. I was told no 104 times. Some people were ruthless. I wanted to give up a few times then trying to buy my first five businesses, I was told no. And I just kept going until I found somebody said yes. I just, it was water over rocks. I just realized that if I just hung in there long enough, eventually something was going to break. And I also recognize the responsibility that if I'm not getting yeses, it's because I'm technically not communicating in a way that's inspiring people to work with me. So I owned modifying my communication pathways as I kept getting more no's until I could start testing into when people were more interested or more engaged. And I just kept making that a better presentation, a better presentation, switching things up, seeing what kind of engagement I can get. And I figured if I just kept modifying until I could get a yes, then I will have learned how to do it. And I just kept doing that. I did it with individuals and I did it with a financial institution. And then I did it with one of the most prestigious private equity groups on the planet, Warburg Pincus. They had 18 billion in private equity and they gave me, they are that 22 billion and they gave me $18 million. As a young entrepreneur, you know, like crazy stuff. And then they helped me go public. And so being that successful that young just kept saying if I just keep pushing, keep figuring out, I will continue to win. What I didn't know is actually at the pinnacle of my career after all that May of 2001, I had finally built the company was going to be profitable. I had finally had everybody in the world throwing money at me and throw an opportunity at me because we were the only ones that consolidated at the time. Hearing care and I was the largest retailer in North America. And so everyone wanted to work with us. And we had systems and process. We finally broke through those platforming things. I talk about where we had technology and we had people and we had systems and I did the biggest deal of my life. And I was at the peak of my career in May of 2001. And when I came home from celebrating in Europe with the supplier that gave me 20 million of free capital and a contractor worth a million dollars a month to bring what we had built here to their market, my private equity group was like, great job, unbelievable. Come to New York, I thought they were going to pat me on the back and instead they were like, this was so valuable that now we can sell the company, get 100% of our money back and make 100%, but that doesn't leave anything for anybody else. So sorry. I was like, well, I'm not selling the company. And in that 15 minute exchange with people that I have been, had been very close to for like five years, they brought a new guy in and said, he's going to sell your company. And within six months they had sold my company. There was nothing I could do to stop it. In the middle of that, September 11th happened. So it just was. Nobody wanted to hear a founder's complaint about getting their business taken away from them. So it just happened. And then I had to start over and I had to learn from the mistakes I made in that process.
- [09:36]
Ilana Golan
I want to talk about this, Brandon, for a few reasons. First of all, this extreme ownership of looking inside and saying while you're trying to go to different venture capital or private equity and just saying, I need to figure out how to change my pitch in order to make it. It's not about blaming, it's not about victim mentality. It's looking at what can I control and change that and that resilience. Because it's never the challenges that stop us, it's the belief around these challenges that stop us. Right? And you continue, but then eventually you're kicked out of your own company, which is, I was kicked out of my own company, so at least I know that it hurts. How do you get back up and continue?
- [10:20]
Brandon Dawson
I think that the number one attribute that you need to truly be a successful entrepreneur or business owner. So you need a lot of things, but the number one thing you have to have is resilience. Because it's always hard. It's never going to be the thing you think it is. People around you will let you down. People around you will use you. You're going to make a bunch of dumb mistakes. Because the only way to build a business if you've never done it is to trial and error. People will try to take your credibility away. People will try to take your company away. People will try to take your money away. People will try to take your success away. And you're your worst enemy because you just fall into these little traps while you're trying to appease people or take a shortcut or figure something out. And you figure it out and you realize you're not doing it the right way. You're not doing it compliantly or legally. And then you're like, oh, I got to Make a change. And it's like, you know, you're just street fighting, right? You're just like surviving, going through the streets. Because most businesses are built through trial and error. And, and that's why 97% of all businesses under 125 million go out of business every 10 years and 2/3 go out in the first five. Because you just make these catastrophic mistakes. And it's the resilience that are going to get you through those moments. Because most people, when it gets rough, will bail on you and leave you to take care of it yourself. Or you're the kind of person that will run the good people off because, you know, you don't want to acknowledge them. See, my first time around, I wasn't good at like acknowledging people and being nice to people because I was always fighting to win every day and everything was a fight and everybody was an enemy unless they were on my side. It didn't work for me. The second business I built that I sold for 77 times EBITDA with the principles that I wanted to create for starting, growing and scaling a business. I grew effortlessly and seamlessly and I shared the equity with my customers. I bypassed Wall Street. I never worried about payroll, I never had headaches, I never worried about problems. And I shared $15 million of sale proceeds with my employees when I sold. And we all celebrated together. It felt really super great. And so then I launched this business with Grant and Elena Cardone and we gone from startup using the principles we've taught and we use and built a quarter billion dollar company and, and helped, you know, $9 billion in businesses in 60, 70 months. And we get to be around people we love. Look at your smile. I get to spend time with people I like. We hug each other, we're all celebrating together. There's still people that come in that environment and try to steal or take away or aren't willing to do their part. And they want to defer, deflect and blame others. But you don't really worry about them because you have too many of the people that are killing it together. And that's why I love doing what I get to do every day is I get to spend time with the people I want to spend time with. And the ones I don't, we just figure out a way to move them out.
- [13:03]
Ilana Golan
As somebody who started in sales and then jumped to entrepreneurship to also learn leadership, we're not really taught leadership. I think leadership, I mean, you guys teach leadership. We'll talk about it in a second. But in general, it's not really something that is taught. After Sonus you're really building Adyagi and really starting to see this like massive success with building incredible team by my by your side. What do you think are some of these things around leadership that then obviously you took to Cardone Ventures and I see and I ripped the benefit. But what are some of these things that you learned in Ijji and maybe even in Sonos?
- [13:42]
Brandon Dawson
Well, what I learned in Sonus was how to be a tyrant. What I learned is how to be a dictator. I was in survival mode. I had the false because I had broke through all the glass ceilings and was always told I couldn't do something. The only way I learned to do something was to bust through glass ceilings and tell everybody they don't know what they're talking about and then become overly self reliant and then made a mistake and then allowed my company to be sold. And once I kind of owned some of that and decided I want to be a different person. I have some phenomenal mentors in my life. But Hector gave me a 21 irrefutable laws by John Maxwell. And I read it and I was like, I identified every mistake I made. And so then I broke down all 53 of his laws. He had three different books at the time. I broke them all down to really understand where I went wrong. What would I do different. And I decided that I was going to put my attention on being a better person, being a better example. And then I started combining the work on leadership with. Because John wrote a book level five leadership. Might have been Collins five levels of leadership. Maybe John or they were the same. So they were friends. So John. I had met John, he said read Jim Collins book too. So I read that. And then I read Good to great great by choice. How the mighty. Then I read all Sharon Lecter's books. I started putting this little algorithm together of things that I had identified all the things I had done wrong in my first business. And I created an operating system off of leadership off of belief system off of operational effectiveness. And I realized those things all kind of tie together. And if you could actually paint a picture elevating people's belief, showing them how to become more operational effectiveness in their day to day routine so they can hit targets bigger, better, faster. And then learn me leadership so I can be an example, then we leadership, I can develop examples and then US leadership when your culture takes over. And that set me on this path for 10 years where we were researching businesses, interviewing entrepreneurs, trying to Understand what was working, what was not working. And then applying that, I was doubling every year. Inc 500, Inc 5000 Entrepreneur of the Year, three times in a row nomination. All these things because we were killing it. And then I started teaching it to the authors businesses. I was working with John Maxwell. We go in and help him. He grows his business huge. And then he, we become friends. It just really. Michael Gerber worked with him for a while. So what happened is I was able to absorb all this knowledge and because I had tried it first and screwed up, I had this perspective of I wasn't learning something new and going, how do I do it? I was like, I'm learning things that I screwed up. I could immediately go, that's where I messed up. So then I was like, if I don't mess up and I do the things I did that was good and I learned to not do the things I did that were broken. And I combined that with what was good. And then I built the prototype and then after I launched it and sold to a billion dollar company and we helped them grow to four and a half billion in 36 months deploying this, then my confidence was super high about creating a whole new business centered around this.
- [16:25]
Ilana Golan
And that's incredible. And we'll talk about it because I think that was almost engineered approach and very clear data driven approach is what sold me. I'm a geeky engineer. So this what sells me. And I want to talk about it, but right before that. So you sell your company in 2016 and for a lot of our audience, they somehow find themselves in a situation where they're trying to figure out what's next for me. And I think for a lot of our listeners this is a hard moment because if you're a high achiever, if you're driven, you always kind of know what's next for you. And there's gonna be times that you're suddenly like, oh God. Like there's like this plateau of opportunities. I don't know what excites me anymore. What was it like for you, Brandon?
- [17:12]
Brandon Dawson
Well, so I sold the company and then all of a sudden I had done 10 years of research and I knew what I wanted. But then I was all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I was like pretty rich. And I had been working since, like I said, since I was 18, always a worker. But I had been on my own working since I was 19. And I never really knew I had hit all. I finally hit my wealth target. My wealth target was 75 million by 47, when I sold the company, I, I had 8 million. And all of a sudden, despite dreaming about doing all these other things, when I first sold, I remember getting the, the money wired into my account because I had to fly to Spain to speak to their global group and the business closed. It was supposed to close on a Friday afternoon, US time. And so I flew to Spain on like a Wednesday and Natalie and I were in the hotel room and we were getting ready to go to dinner and the time zone was different and all this and it was maybe supposed to come in the morning and it was nighttime there or whatever. And so I was laying in bed and there was no notification and there were some last minute signatures and all that. And we were going to go to a celebration dinner, the two of us. And I was laying in bed and all of a sudden my phone goes ding. And I looked at it and in my Morgan Stanley account showed how much money I had in it. And I stared at it for a minute and then I just started crying. It was like, hey, I get emotional mail. It's like, you think that just defined you. You did it. But then you think, who am I now? All the things I was doing yesterday and everything. So plus I rang that bell, I had it, I lost it, I got it back. I hit all my targets. And it's not like you're celebrating, it's not like I was, I wasn't laughing, I wasn't jumping up and down. I just sat there and kind of cried. And Natalie came out and she's like, what's going on? What happened? I said the money got in and I gave her the phone. She looked at and she's like, wow. She just hugged me. I realized that that wasn't really why I did everything I did. And I just wanted to be successful. And so all of a sudden I'm like, shit, now what? And all of a sudden, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because I had given 35% of the equity to my customers as a thank you for doing business with me. And I had given 15 million to my employees. And everyone's accounts were starting to ring. 197 partners got 38 million. Some people got multi millions because they'd been there at the beginning. And all of a sudden I get overwhelmed with hundreds of text messages. You changed my life. We love you. Unbelievable. We're so happy. We trusted you. And it's like now I'm crying because.
- [19:44]
Ilana Golan
I just feel like now I'm crying.
- [19:46]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, shit. Let's go get a Michelin dinner and drink some wine and celebrate. It was a magical time for me, but without all my clients celebrating with me, it felt a little bit like a vacuum. But recognizing you did something, you finally did something so big, Nobody I knew in my family, I was voted least likely to succeed. There isn't one human being I grew up with, I knew I was ever around that did what I did, especially after I lost it all. So to me, I lost it and I got it. That was the point. And then I was uncertain. I had to go to the company that bought me, and I immediately had to integrate for three years everything they bought into their company. So I was busy. Like, I didn't have time to celebrate. I just was, boom. That next day I was on the stage in. In Spain talking to the global group. Here's what we're going to do. Here's. And I just went, operate, operate, operate, operate. It wasn't until 2018, basically. So that was two. So the 16th of July. So it was like July 18th, where all of a sudden I had. I had integrated and we blew the business up to $4 billion from one, basically. So it's like we overachieved. Everyone was happy. I had my team in there, and all of a sudden I wasn't needed other than for special projects. And that's where it really got weird for me, because I'm like, okay, what am I going to do now? What am I going to do? Do I really want to work? I've never got to go play golf. I got to go hang out with my billionaire friends. I was traveling, I got fat. I was eating whatever I wanted. I was drinking with people. My wife was like, I did not sign up for this. After a year and a half, she goes, I want to go build something. That's why I fell in love with you. This is not building something. And I was miserable. And that's where we got our heads together and said, let's go build the next thing. And she had suggested we look at some of these social media guys because I had all the ip, I had built the systems I had the technologies I had that. I had all the research, I had all the. Everything done. It just. I wasn't sure how I was going to go to market. And she found Grant Cardone and we went to his event in 2019 and. And saw what we needed to see and approached him about partnership. And here we are six years later. We've got a business that's worth probably half a billion dollars. We've changed the lives of thousands of entrepreneurs, people like you. And we've had a half a dozen or a dozen of these exits with our clients that went from being broke or only having a $2 million business and now have 35 million in cash or 75 million or 200 million in cash. It's just we get to celebrate all the time. Even if they're little wins, we're always celebrating, which is what I love about what I do today.
- [22:09]
Ilana Golan
Wow. That was incredible, Brandon. We had an episode with the previous president of Starbucks, and he said a quote that I think sits in my head. He basically says, there's no amount of success that you can live on forever. And that one of his hardest moments was actually when he retired. And I thought that was really powerful. And now you decided to partner with Grant Cardone and you work together with your amazing wife, Natalie Dawson, who I love. First of all, how is it working together? I think a lot of people are very afraid of working with their partner. How did you find that?
- [22:46]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, family businesses really struggle, and that's because they. They're under pressure all the time, so they take it out on each other. It's very unfortunate. And it's because they just. They're existing through trial and error, and there's always problems and struggles, so causes stress at home, and it's just very sad. And I had that experience. I'm a prodigy of two divorce, and I had it in two different areas of my life for different reasons. But it is unfortunate. Natalie and I made the decision that if we were going to work together, build together, fall in love, get married, we were going to have the perfect life. So it forced us into understanding what does that look like? And it wasn't until Natalie, what really hooked us in Grant and Elena is Natalie, in 2018, found Elena and started doing Elena's relationship Build an Empire book. And we did this exercise together. My things, I'm excited, and I want to go do hers. And then what we want to do together. And then Elena has a process to have you prioritize the together and then pick a few things that you want to do individually. And we realized that our list was mostly together. We love being together. We wanted to travel together, we wanted to work together, we wanted to earn together. We wanted to spend time together. We didn't want to do anything apart. So we were like, oh, good, let's go design a business. You pick your things, I'm going to pick my things. And. And she's the president of our company, she's the co founder. She is remarkable in so many ways and she lets me be and do what I love and takes care of the details. I told her I do not want to become an operator again. I did that enough. And so we have our, we, we compliment each other so well and we have so much respect for what we each contribute and we don't step on each other, we don't step over each other. I don't get involved with any of her stuff, she doesn't get involved with mine. We coordina, we collaborate, we strategize together. But when I say I'm going to go do this, she supports me. When she goes and does it, my support her. And conversely, we have. My brother runs sales in the business. He's been here since the start, does a remarkable job. Her brother is our chief technology officer. This is a family business and we work with Grant, Elena and the kids doing things. So it's like we consider our business a very tight family business and yet we're a super high performance business on Grant Cardone side and on our side. And we get a lot of flack. There's a lot of haters out there. There's a lot of people to say that we don't say all the right things or we work too hard and we set the wrong examples. But you know what? We're loving our life and the people we're doing it with love being it and doing it with us. So we don't. We've just learned not to care about what anybody else thinks as long as we're happy and we, we are doing the right things and we're doing with the right people, then we're doing everything we want to do. And so if Natalie and I run into a situation where maybe we're not aligned, we really ask the question. But once a year we get in a little tiff about something and then it's like, okay, on the priority of everything we're conquering together, how much of this is really an issue? And we usually start laughing and realize this is stupid. And so we support each other and we encourage each other. I think because of that we want to see the other one win, but we want to also win together. And I think that's different than how most people view their roles, their responsibilities and how they collaborate at work. They end up fighting with each other because they're, they don't want to take it out on everyone else. They're nitpicking with each other and there's so much external pressure, you're in a cooker. So you beat each other up when really you need an external enemy, not an internal enemy.
- [25:53]
Ilana Golan
Hey, I'm pausing here for a second. I hope you're enjoying this amazing conversation. Don't forget to like this video. Subscribe to our channel now. If you're looking yourself to catapult your own career, figure out what's next for you. Get that clarity, fast track your own growth. Check out our free 30 minute training@leapacademy.com training. That's leapacademy.com training. Now let's get back to the show. Let me ask you about a few things that you said that I think are really important. So I just came back from New York. We were recording an episode with Gary Vee and one of the things that he said in his studio is about haters and you touched it for a second. We all gonna see more hate now in the digital space. It's just so easy to hate. It's so easy to bash someone. How do you cope with hate? I think if there's one thing that for me it always like, I try to ignore it and it always hurts. How do you cope with it?
- [26:48]
Brandon Dawson
I have a saying. My older brother used to tell me this when we were kids. He'd say there's the way you'd like it to be. There's the way could be, there's a way it should be. But we live in a world, it is the way it is. Okay? So what that means to me is like I don't worry about what I would like it to be. I don't worry about what it should be. I just allow it to be. And I mean, I have some haters out there right now that quite honestly, people that we've tried to really help and we've added an enormous amount to their life. But you can't change who they are. So they're still miserable and so they're still looking to be a victim and they still want somebody to blame. And so all this energy comes at you. When it comes to you, you got, you can either react to it or you can just say, well, they're the same person. They, you knew that that's the kind of person it was. You were trying to help them. You're the same person you are. Which I'm not going to stop helping people. So it's an implication of you trying to help somebody else and they're going to be victimized by you. So what do I do with it? I move on to somebody who wants my help. Because here's the thing, when you get caught up in yourself and you start self thinking like, oh, me, me, me. The best way to break that is to go find somebody who's making 20 or 30 grand a year and show them how to make 100 grand and celebrate with them. Because you're always going to have the people that you help become millionaires or multimillionaires that then they'll be ungrateful and they'll think they did it all. They're like, this shit happens all the time. So anytime you have that kind of stuff, ungratefulness or pettiness or criticism or hate coming towards you, instead of you talking about it and dwelling on it, go find somebody that could use the help that you can bring to people and go start helping them. Because it just diffuses. It puts your energy on something that's productive for you and them, makes you feel amazing. And if you do that enough, there'll be less haters than there are people running around saying you change their life. And in my case, I have thousands and thousands of millionaires and multimillionaires that I've helped change their life versus one or two haters running around that don't know me real well or took advantage of me or whatever. And so you just got to know who you are. If a hater's getting to you, it's because. And being critical, it's because you have something in your mind that you think there's a reason they are able to do that, like you're allowing them to affect you. And it's usually because you have some things that you've been doing or criticizing others on. And so you're taking it personal. But if you don't have that in you because you feel like you're being the best version of yourself, the operating legal, moral, ethically compliantly helping others, and then people criticize you. You can just recognize the reason they're doing that is because it's them. And that's how you deal with haters. You don't put any energy into it because haters are haters because they have the same problem with you they have with anybody else they don't like because they don't like themselves.
- [29:33]
Ilana Golan
I think some of us like to be loved or like to be like. And even if I know it's them, it's their emotional thing. It's not related to me. They're putting on me something that is irrelevant to me. They might not even know me. They just seen an ad, right, and they already hate me. But the question is, how do you create a little bit of a thicker skin? I think we see it a lot in leadership. Our, you know, our listeners will face it in different things that they do in their life. And I think for some of them, this is almost like a barrier to success. Like they're afraid to be out there, to not get bashed or to not get hate. How do you create a little bit of a thicker skin? You think, just go through enough.
- [30:14]
Brandon Dawson
That's why I use the word resilience, because you have to be tough. Think of it this way. If you're a battery and your battery has a full charge or it's entirely depleted, so you're a battery, and these are your goals, and you're going to take your battery and you're going to stick it into your goals. I don't want a depleted battery in my goals. I want a fully charged battery. So I'm in charge of charging that battery. And if I'm letting you get into my head, if I'm listening to things you're saying about me, if I'm. If I'm getting pulled off target and you're draining my battery and I'm allowing it to happen, I'm choosing that. And then I don't have the energy to go after my dreams and goals because I'm beat up, I'm tired, I'm disappointed. What you think is what you say, what you say is what you do, what you do, what you're known for. So when I go and sit down and have a cup of coffee with someone that might just very well be the person that could introduce me to the greatest business relationship I could ever meet in my life. Instead, I spend my time talking about the problems I have in my life because I'm upset about what somebody said about me. And that person listens to me. And then they're nice. Oh, that's too bad. You're great. But they never got to the conversation of the person they were going to introduce you to because you consumed it all, draining the opportunity because you're feeling bad and feeling. So when you're off target, when. When you're coming off target, you're not talking about where you're going, how are you going to get there, who you want to get there with, what's important to you. This is my mission, this is my vision. That's my value. This is my purpose. This is why I exist. This is where I'm going. But instead, you're talking about, oh my. That person, oh my goodness, it's just so hard now you're consuming energy that somebody else is now winning because that was their whole point pulling you off target. So why would I give them, like, give me all you got. Throw it all at me, get it all out there. And once it's all out there, let the world see it. And once I see it, I'll just drive right through it and get to the next destination because I don't actually am not going to let somebody else dictate my future. And that's how you get through it. You got to have resilience, you got to have trust in yourself, trust in the people around you. And when someone violates that trust, you stop moving at the speed of trust or you go find somebody else to trust and you keep moving at the speed of trust. What you don't do is let them pull you off target and start putting a bunch of weight around you, depleting you, because when that happens, they're actually winning, which is what they want to do.
- [32:25]
Ilana Golan
That was so strong. Thank you, Brandon. I think our listeners need to hear this. And speaking of trust, one of the things that when I engage with you guys, I think I just got to know you last year, actually I think it's our one year birthday three days ago. Brandon, there you go. Congratulations to me. I just met you guys. I didn't know much, but some, first of all, I was very impressed. Again, I'm an engineer. I need to engineer the heck out of your story. Grant's story, you know, they're like, I needed all the pieces, I needed to understand the data and the data was actually fascinating. I'll show it here for the people on YouTube. So if you're listening in our podcast, check it out the video. But one of the things that you talk about is your breakpoints. And the breakpoints basically show exactly where are you in your business and what are some of the challenges that you're going to run into. Now, the interesting thing is, Brandon, and this is probably something you didn't know, I was in charge of bringing Israeli startups into the US And I can tell you each startup where it was in the breakpoint and how it did it was just incredible to watch. So as I was listening to this and again, one of them, you know, exited for 350 million. One of them, you know, IPO, et cetera. So some of them have seen amazing success, some of them not so much. But I can see like to the T where they were when I was trying to work with them in the US and that was incredible to watch. And then I could see it with my own startups and I was like, okay, these guys know what they're doing. And the one thing that you said, Brandon, to me is like, do you trust yourself? And I think this was such a profound question because when I decided to go all in and invest basically for you guys to help me, how much.
- [34:17]
Brandon Dawson
Did you invest with me?
- [34:19]
Ilana Golan
Oh, I don't know, about half a million. Right.
- [34:22]
Brandon Dawson
Like most people would say you're crazy, why would you do that? But what's happened with your business in 12 months?
- [34:28]
Ilana Golan
Yeah, we basically doubled the business. So I mean it becomes a no brainer.
- [34:32]
Brandon Dawson
You've already made it back six times over.
- [34:34]
Ilana Golan
Oh, we make half a million less than a month. So yes, of course, I think it's way beyond that, Brandon, because you guys and I have like a full. You did a whole review on our. And again I'm showing it in video. There's a full review here on our business and we can literally see how we are on track to 100 million, you know, which is a billion dollar company. So I can see the track, which is a vision I didn't even have a year ago. So speaking of growth, that's not, you know, like the half a million is, is a peanut. But I think one of the things that I want to talk about is that engineered approach that you have and how do you bring that data into helping thousands of businesses now? So talk to us a little bit about some of the things that you're doing.
- [35:21]
Brandon Dawson
Well, I mean, look at the statistics and it's been true for a long time. 97% of all small businesses under 100 million go out of business every 10 years. 2/3 go out within 60 months. 98.2% of all businesses under a hundred million are stuck at 3 million or less with an average of 12 employees or less. So those stats right away made me think, why? And what can you do about it? And then what was the difference between the ones that went from 3 to 10 to 20 to 50 to 100? And then I use my own experiences and I reverse engineered where I struggled, where I wish I would have had help, and then all the authors, content and data that I was reading and realizing, oh, if I had that, if I would have known this. And Jim Collins, how the Mighty Fall talks about businesses and silos and hierarchical positions running off the new talent. And I'm thinking to myself, well, that's what a lot of the business Owners do, they get new talent and they're scared they're going to leave them, so they run them off. And so I just started working both sides. The big companies, why they fail from the little companies going to the middle. And started looking at Sharon Lecter three feet from gold, which I was like, oh man, that's. We should engineer businesses using this theory so these things don't happen. I kept adding and adding and adding until I hired FTI billion dollar consulting firm in 2009 because the market was shitty and the economy had dropped. So I could hire them really cheap, hire some kids out of Wharton and Stanford and University of Portland, where Natalie came from. And I said, we're going to break down thousands and thousands and thousands of industries. We're going to interview thousands of. In fact, Natalie, her first intern job when she was a. She might have been a freshman in college or something, was to call thousands of dentists in our dental vertical so we could track to it. And I had a bunch of people calling all these different verticals and interviewing business owners so that we could say what happened when and what would you do different and how would you do it differently? And what was the first thing you learned? What was the second thing you learned? And we just collected all this data and then created a force ranking process which built the break points. And so it's like think about 80, call it if you have 33 million businesses and 32.8 million of those businesses have 12 employees or less, okay, well, that was easy to come up with break point one. So then it's like the 2%. How'd you get to 3 million? Would you do different? And then we found these natural areas, 1 to 3, 3 to 8, 8 to 15, where they would collapse and break and go out of business. There was an interesting cohort group of business owners that had built businesses, failed, then built a business and succeeded. The questions are like this. What was the one thing? Going back and looking at success versus failure, what's the one thing that changed from the business that failed for you as the owner? From the business that failed versus having success. And if you ask a hundred business owners that failed and then went and built something and had success, and you say, what's the one thing you would say? Change? And 70% of them answered the same damn thing, you know you're onto something. And what the 70% said was we stopped listening to anybody else and we started finding the example of who we wanted to become and only focused on that. So then you're sitting back and you're like, okay, when you asked all the businesses that failed, what was the, one of the largest causation of fails, failures, and they say, we started, we were so scared to make a decision. This goes to your point. We were so scared to make a decision, we started asking everybody what we should do do. And we found out in reflection, we're asking all the wrong people. We're asking our wives or our husbands, we're asking our friends, our kids, our, our employees, our, our other co workers. Well, look, if I walk in a room and I'm struggling in business and there's a hundred business owners in the room and I go ask them all the same question, remember, 97% of those business owners are going to fail. So now I got to know, if I walk in a room and there's three out of 100 businesses that have been in business for 15, 20 years that started small and got big, and I know who they are, am I really going to go ask the other 97% what they think I should do, or am I going to go to the 3% that know what to do? So that's what we started honing in on and we built all the science off. And then I applied it, developed it, found success because my company that I sold was successful because I worked with independent business owners. And on average, we were three and a half to 15 times larger than their peers. That's why we got so much money. And I'm like, now I can go do it for all business owners. And I wanted to test it internationally, which is what I did in those eight countries that blew up, which is why we went from one to four and a half billion. So the details and the facts of decision making and taking the right action and getting the right results, I mean, that's an algorithm. It's equally an algorithm to think with broken thinking, do broken actions and get broken results. But if you're not intentionally learning and studying it, then you can only figure it out through trial and error. And that's the problem. You try things that doesn't work and then you don't try them again. But you didn't do it right the first time. You don't know that's what happens. So you know, it's like, it's a difficult game. So what we decided to do is help business owners speed that up, get rid of the complexity, make great decisions, learn the 125 laws to get to 125 million in business and just have data and information that nobody else in the world is providing to entrepreneurs and business owners. And that's why we've been so successful.
- [40:33]
Ilana Golan
And that's incredible. And I know we're almost on the hour and I going to let you go, but you also have an incredible book, the Nine Figure Mindset, which is, I think is so true because it is a mindset. It's the mindset and the help. So I think going through entrepreneurship or overall your career to try to go through it alone is insanity. It's like the most expensive or, you know, mistake in the, in our life because the biggest cost in our life is always the money we're not making. So it's like, how fast can you make it right? And who by your side can help you get there? So, Brandon, what would be an advice to our listeners based on a lot of the things that you learned so far in your career and from the thousands of businesses that you help, what would be an advice?
- [41:17]
Brandon Dawson
The first thing I'd say is that intuitively, most decisions that come to you intuitively are the wrong actions because those intuitive decisions come when you're under pressure or stress and high emotion is low intelligence. So you end up taking the wrong action. I would tell business owners to start using statistics to look at their business, which means if you track your revenue daily, you track your cash collected daily, you track your profitability daily, and you graph those three lines and you take actions to improve all three every day. It's all you think about. Every day, Every day. Then when there's something going wrong, if those three lines aren't trending down, they're still going up. Don't change anything. If you're terrified that something big is happening or changing but they're going up, start being more conservative in what you're doing with your profit and build a fourth category, which is reserves. So if something dynamic happens, you have firepower to withhold or withstand. It's learning to make really specific decisions based on facts, not on emotion. And paying attention to your flight controls, which is about five things you need to look at every day that I look at. And if those things are green lights, go. Don't make any radical changes, just try to improve them incrementally. Micro improvements Jim Collins talks about innovation is granular incremental improvement on the things you can prove work. There's another definition which is radical change and invention. But that's normally where you go broke. So just trust me when I tell you make small incremental changes towards a targeted objective and steer your team. There's and try to eliminate emotion out of the business. Be very pragmatic, and if you need help, go talk to business owners like you who have gotten help, and you've changed how you view the world and how you take action. So therefore, you're getting different results. And I just want to leave everyone with this word. Every person that chooses to can create the life they want and never let anybody else tell you otherwise.
- [43:21]
Ilana Golan
That's incredible, Brandon. And I want to go there just for a second, because you mentioned bring the data, not the drama, which is so, so, so important. Right. The drama will make us steer ourselves in other directions. But I just want to say, in terms of the life that we have, I can't recognize my life this year. And I want you to know that. I want, you know, my listeners know that. I mean, we've been on the Inc 500. We've been on the podcast, our top charts, you know, like, something incredible. I meet mentors like yourself and Richard Branson and others. And for me, it's like I can't recognize my life. And I want to tap into what you just said. You can create that if you're just willing to be resilient, to take ownership, to go with somebody. Like, it's all the usual suspects. But Brandon, thank you guys so much.
- [44:07]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, thank you. I can't wait till we're 300 million.
- [44:11]
Ilana Golan
Let's go. I'm ready. Thank you. Say hi to Natalie.
- [44:17]
Brandon Dawson
I will. Thank you. We'll talk to you later. Bye.
- [44:31]
Ilana Golan
Wow, what an incredible conversation. I am so inspired. I hope you are, too. And if you enjoyed it as much as I did, please share it with friends. It really, really helps us bring more amazing guests. And if you at some point want to take yourself and your career to the next level, watch our free training@leapacademy.com training. It's leapacademy.com training and I will see you in the next show of Leap Academy with Ilana Golan.