Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:36:58 · Alexa von Tobel, Michael Brown
[00:36:58] S1: I love it. All right, I want to run through some of your best tips. And we're going to start with, what's a book that shaped you? It can be anything. It doesn't have to be a business book, but a book that you recommend everybody read for their life. [00:37:09] S0: That is a great question. I... So... Okay. On the business side, the the book that I think for sort of business people, whether you're a startup or whether you're running like a oil and gas service business, anything, I I think that actually a great way to learn how to just run a business day to day is a book called Traction by a guy named Gino Wickman. And he just wrote this book on how it was basically a marketing tool for their consulting business. But it's just a really, really simple way to break down running businesses. I think that I like a lot of history books and biographies. And so I really like Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs. I thought that it was really fascinating. And he's a complicated person. But I think it was really cool to read sort of the in-depth story of Apple and of him. [00:38:02] S1: Love the book, too. What's a mantra that kind of runs in the back round of your mind?
00:38:02 · Alexa von Tobel, Michael Brown
[00:38:02] S1: Love the book, too. What's a mantra that kind of runs in the back round of your mind? [00:38:08] S0: Everything is workable. I remember... I don't know where I saw it, but I saw it and now... I didn't have a mantra before that. But I think it goes back... It it relates to your question, like, a a couple of minutes ago. Like, that's the mantra. That's it. Everything is workable. You get dealt a different hand. Okay. So you gotta adjust. Right? And so if you have conviction in what you're doing, right, everything is workable. [00:38:32] S1: In some ways, Michael, that is your superpower, which is that you have such crazy conviction in what you're building that it makes everything actually easy. That is actually one of the superpowers. It just hit me that you have more conviction, than most founders in your future, and it actually makes weathering storms easy. [00:38:52] S0: That's right. [00:38:55] S1: So many more questions. When a problem feels really big, how do you break it down? Just give us the... How do you process big problems?
00:39:02 · Michael Brown
[00:39:02] S0: So it depends on the nature of the problem. Have a phrase... I don't know where the phrase come from. I think it might be an engineering phrase called rubber ducking. But basically, sometimes you just need to talk out loud. It depends on the nature. There's versions of problems that are like, hey, this is kind of like a quick decision. I'm overcomplicating it. That's like a good sort of rubber duck where you just sort of like, you know, talk to talk to a peer or a colleague or someone like that and sort of think through it. If you're trying to build out something that you're like, we're we're really, like, reviewing our strategy for x, for our software, for our financing, whatever. I'm actually a big fan of getting in a room and actually just whiteboarding and taking a couple of days if it's that important a decision or set of decisions you're making. I really like having multiple stakeholders with multiple viewpoints and getting in a room. And then I think then if it's a project, I think that's classic project management of breaking things down into phases. And knowing... I think you got to sort of... I mean, the process of going public is a very good example. We started that process sort of last June. It's gonna take sort of almost a year to complete. And so you sort of need to know, okay, what's the arc of all the phases? But, like, you don't need to know in phase five the minutiae of everything. You just sort of need to squint and say, okay. That's what it's gonna look like, I think, when you get there. And over the over the next sort of two months, here is all the steps we have to do, and here is gonna... Who's gonna own each step and have a good structure for sort of project management around it. So I don't know. Those those are the sorts of things that come to mind for me.
00:40:37 · Alexa von Tobel, Michael Brown
[00:40:37] S1: By the way, I... You and I share in common that I I love being locked in a room while porting a problem out [00:40:43] S0: and Absolutely. [00:40:44] S1: And and and and not leaving until you figure it out. That is one of the things I always like about being in person. [00:40:52] S0: It's also a great thing for if you ever have to get into a negotiation. I think it's a really... Because, obviously, when we buy the businesses, we have to go through sort of, you know, negotiation. Thankfully, sort of venture docs are pretty straightforward and pretty standardized. Right? There's not a lot of that in venture financing. But I've found that if you get to some sort of set of key issues on a transaction, getting on a plane and going in person and just saying, like, we're gonna get in a room for a day, we're gonna sort all these things out, works very well. [00:41:21] S1: By the way, it's old school. It's really effective. Works a [00:41:25] S0: lot. At a minimum, they're not like on their second screen doing Slack or multitasking. So you have each other's full attention. [00:41:33] S1: Yeah. No, I like that a lot. What would you say is one of the most unique small businesses you've encountered?
00:41:42 · Michael Brown
[00:41:42] S0: Unique. Oh, wow. We've seen a lot. So I'll give you a lighthearted one and a grim one. Good. So we we saw an onion packing plant in Idaho that only made money when the price of onions was at a certain price. And so it was like... It was dead on arrival because it was, like, zero profit zero profit, 3,000,000, you know, 1,000,000, negative one. It was so bizarre. But that was just the most... That was by far the most volatile. We also saw a business that had... We've seen two businesses that have one customer, which is really interesting. I'll give you the the morbid one. You know, this one is... It it was one that was an interesting case study of, like, a good business that we didn't take on. So it was a business that was in the space of actually cleaning up after violent acts and stuff like that. Wow. And so... Right. Of course. Wow. Right? So if you think about that and detach yourself and emotionally, oh, that's a service that needs to exist. That's a traumatic experience for everyone who's sort of involved in that. And so that service has to exist. Right? But when we thought it through the lens of Teamshares... And it was a it was a good business financially. What we thought about through the lens of Teamshares, like, I don't think that that... There's there's... There was no ethical issues or anything like that. It was more just like, I don't see us being able to hire and retain a president. It's like growing that business just felt weird inside of a corporation. And so that was an example. That was a very, very unusual business. But we've... I mean, we we closely look at 1,500 per year. So we've seen the full we've seen the full gamut.
00:43:16 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:43:16] S1: 100 per year. There we go. Few more quick things. I... What's one piece of advice you'd give any founder that's listening based on what you've learned being in this seat?