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Travis Makes Money
SOLO | Make Money by Finding Market Gaps, Building Relationships, and Thinking Long-Term with Gary Kusin
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What's going everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the show. In this episode we're continuing along our journey of covering some of the amazing guests that I've had between my podcasts over the last almost nine years now. So on this episode we're gonna be talking about Gary Cusan. Gary is the former CEO and co founder of GameStop. He also was a CEO who was responsible for selling Kinkos for $2.4 billion in cash to FedEx back in the day. One of the most successful and smartest entrepreneurs that I've ever been able to talk to. And I actually got him on because this was during the time where GameStop had this random, you know, bump from, I think it was Wall street bets, whatever it was. Some, they got wind that some massive hedge Fund was shorting GameStop stock and then the Internet basically said, no, you're not gonna do that. And they made the stock price soar and it went crazy over a week, two week long period. Now obviously it tapered off after that and it probably was a good, a good bet to short the stock when it was at its peak during that run. So I, I got in touch with them because it was during this time and I was like, oh, who better to speak into this than the former CEO and the co founder of GameStop? And the conversation ended up being really fascinating. We talked for over an hour and it was one of those conversations I tell people all the time on, on. When it comes to podcasts, especially when you're interviewing people, it's like Sometimes I have 15 minute conversations that feel like an hour and sometimes I have hour long conversations that feel like 15 minutes. And this is one of those hour long conversations. I think we, I think it was closer to 90 minutes, honestly, where it felt like, felt like it just blew by. So here's a few of my key takeaways from this episode. If you are in business, if you're an entrepreneur and you listen to this, like, I highly recommend going and checking out this full episode. There are so many golden nuggets in this episode. So no, I'm not talking about the casino. I'm talking about truth. Truth. Truth bombs would be another way to say it. Number one, first, first lesson, first, first takeaway from this episode with Gary. Find the hole in the Market, the passion can stay a hobby. Gary doesn't run businesses that he's personally obsessed with. He didn't. He, you know, he's not, he's not the follow your passion guy. He's the find what people want to buy and then build something that sells them the thing that they want to buy guy. So he wasn't in love with video games. He wasn't a video game guy. He wasn't a gamer. He also didn't love cosmetics, but he built and sold a cosmetics brand. He didn't love copiers, but he was the CEO of Kinko's. What he loved was seeing a gap and figuring out whether a business could fill it. So his entire framework is form a hypothesis, test it, see if it holds. He even said outright, why would you ruin a passion by running it as a business? Leave it alone. Go find the market instead. I thought this was really beneficial. In a sea of people who are telling you to follow your passion, there's usually the most successful people that are like, yeah, don't do that. It's basically like a waste of time. And then you end up not liking your passion anymore because you just turned it into a business and now it's something that is annoying you at one o' clock in the morning. So people like this tend to. Because here's, here's what happens. Here's what happens. You tend to get this advice from people like this most of the time. People who are already monetarily successful, like, they don't ever have to work another day in their life if they didn't want to work another day in their life. And so now they're in a position where they get to follow their passion. And they're living this beautiful, abundant, happy, fulfilled life because they, it's full of all the things that they love doing. And while that's great, they often made their money in something super boring like iron or like selling steel or, you know, plumbing or electrical work or something like that. So the different, the only caveat that I would give to this is that the difference for Gary is that the, the landscape was wildly different when he started in business. I think he's in his 70s now. So when he started, you know, 40, 50 years ago, it was a little bit different of a world and you. It was a less direct path to monetizing passion projects than it is today. So that would be the only caveat that I would give to it. Because, because you may not have the lofty goals that someone like Gary had where he had, you know, billion dollar exits and things like that. You might just be trying to run a lifestyle business and you hate your job and you hate your boss and you just want to get out of it. In which case following your passion might not be a bad idea. Because if you could make 80 grand a year making YouTube videos about building Lego sets with your kid versus making 120 grand a year working a soul sucking corporate job for a person that you don't like or respect at all, that might be a really good trade off for you. So take this advice with a grain of salt. But in in his words, find the hole in the market, the passion this
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Chime.com disclosures stay a hobby number two mentors matter more than almost anything. But the wrong kind can backfire. So Gary's done over a thousand mentoring sessions, and he built his entire career on the back of relationships that started with Ross Perot at his high school graduation. But he's also deeply opposed to formal corporate mentoring programs, and his reasoning is pretty airtight. So when you mentor someone inside the same company, they'll eventually tell you something toxic. You know, they'll they'll uncover an affair or a hostile environment, hostile workplace situation, and then you'll be obligated to disclose it. And then you'll blow up their career in the process. So find mentors that are outside of your company, but find good mentors. And obviously, Ross Perot was a pretty solid one. He was a presidential candidate back in the day, an independent billionaire, and Ross Perot was the person who he went to, who helped him in the early stages of GameStop. Interesting enough. So mentors matter more than almost anything. Number three Hard work is not optional. Hard work is not optional, and it's not in conflict with working smart. When the women in his first department store tried to run him off with an impossible weekend project. Gary locked himself in and finished it perfectly and cleaned the floor when he was done. And that one act changed everything for him. It changed how people viewed him. It changed their perception of him. And he's watched people rationalize their way out of hard work with the, with the, the cliche, you know, work smarter, not harder their whole careers. And he's seen where that ends. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the people who win the most do both of them. Obviously, hard work is not the only factor in the equation, the only variable to consider. It obviously is not. There are plenty, plenty of examples of people who work very, very hard and they put in long hours. They're doing hard labor, physical labor, manual labor, or even ment labor, and they get paid next to nothing. So hard work is a variable. It's not the only variable, but it is a variable. And then, so he was, he was basically just making the point that like, the people who do the best are the people who both work smarter and work harder. They, they work really hard, but they work on solving problems that tend to pay a lot better. So hard work's not optional and it's not in conflict with working smart. Number four, Debt in a seasonal cyclical business is a time bomb. The gamestop bankruptcy didn't happen because the business model failed. It happened because the debt that came along with an acquisition couldn't survive a predictable cyclical downturn. Exactly the kind that anyone who understood the video game industry would have seen coming. Gary and his co founder never carried debt. The company they acquired did. The ending was entirely predictable and it still wiped everyone out. So the business that they were running was very cyclical, meaning that the revenue was high during the winter months and it was lower during the summer months. And so when you take debt on, when you incur debt on a business that's like that, and then you have problems servicing the debt during the down season, it could be the thing that destroys the business. So be really careful when you're examining debt, when you're, when you're deciding whether or not to take on debt, debt, like I said, like I've said multiple times on different episodes, I'm a believer in having like that there are, that there is such a thing as good debt, but only to the degree that you can protect the downside, protect the risk of the debt. If you think that debt is going to save your business, probably not a good thing to do. Okay, so debt in a seasonal cyclical business can Be a time bomb. Number five, keep the aperture open even when things are going well. Gary's version of career insurance wasn't luck. It was a habit. Even in the middle of his successful runs, he was always talking to people, always building relationships, constantly developing what he called a plan B. He said luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparedness. He was never coasting, never comfortable enough to stop paying attention to what was next. And so this ended up being obviously something that was really beneficial for him over the course of his career and then eventually having the opportunity to take over Kinko as CEO and then being able to sell it to FedEx. Also, he tells. He tells this really cool story that I'm not going to ruin, I'm not going to spoil, because I want you to listen to the episode. But he tells this really cool story about the Kinko's business and FedEx when he was during 911 and that he was approached by the government to get some name. It was, it was a very, very interesting story. So I highly recommend checking that out. But yeah, Gary's, you know, a category of person you don't run into super often. Someone who's genuinely earned the right to give advice but still doesn't walk around acting like it. You know, like, we, we talked about a bunch of this episode. We also talked about, like, barbecue restaurants and stuff like that afterwards because I was in Dallas interviewing him. He's been the founder of the first video game specialty store in the world. The CEO who turned Kinko's from negative $11 million in EBITDA to a 2.4 billion dol sale in just three years. The guy who lost everything on margin when GameStop went bought, went bankrupt, and then worked his way out of it quietly. He's been at the top, he's been at the bottom. He talks about both the same way. So the thing that I walked away thinking about most was probably the mentoring piece, the mentorship philosophy. He's done over a thousand sessions himself, not because it's a part of his brand or his book tour, but because Ross Perot grabbed his parents after his high school graduation and quite literally changed the trajectory of his life. And he never forgot what that felt like. So every door he walked through, Ross Perot was there holding it open. He. He built entire management teams, specifically with the goal of creating the next generation of CEOs. So I loved that. It was like I had so much direct impact from working with somebody like a Ross Perot that I cannot help myself. But go spend time with, like, the future generation of CEOs and leaders and entrepreneurs. The Kinko. The Kinko's turnaround is crazy to me. I mean, taking over a company as CEO that's negative $11 million in EBITDA would be so daunting. And I asked him the question when we were talking, like, what's the first thing you do? Like, what do you do when you, like, it's day one, here's the keys to this kingdom that is $11 million negative every year. What do you do? And then three years later to turn that into a $2.4 billion cash sale to FedEx and then find himself in these, these rooms with the CEO of like, it's just a really, really cool story. Recommend checking out some more stuff from, from Gary because he's one of the, like I said, sharpest entrepreneurs that I've ever had the pleasure of talking to on the show. So that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.