232: AI, Acquisitions, and the Cost of Scaling a $1B Company with Bill Tyndall

Today I’m talking to Bill Tyndall, who helped build Electric AI from an idea into a company approaching a billion-dollar valuation, raised $211M across eight funding rounds, and now serves as CEO of Techvera.

Bill has spent his career building companies around automation, IT, cybersecurity, and digital transformation. But his biggest lesson isn’t just about AI. It’s about capacity.

We get into why AI is a capacity multiplier—not a magic fix—how companies create artificial bottlenecks inside their own operations, and why clean data, better routing, strong documentation, and faster adoption may matter more than simply throwing new tools at the problem.

Bill also opens up about the founder side of the journey: what it felt like to take money off the table, why a big exit didn’t create the happiness he expected, and how he now thinks about purpose, delegation, acquisitions, identity, and building a healthier company.

Mic Drop Moments

• “Business and purpose are two very, very different things.” – Bill Tyndall

• “There will always be humans involved in some capacity, but it will move away from the vast amount of repetitive manual tasks and more focus on knowledge, work, consulting.” – Bill Tyndall

• “It doesn’t matter if you have a team of five-star recruits. If they don’t know how to work together, it’s irrelevant.” – Bill Tyndall

• “For us, in business, very similar to sports, we have a saying in our company, ‘It’s not who is right. It’s what is right.’” – Bill Tyndall

• “We live in a world where the innovation curve has changed to where it’s now changing on a daily basis, but the adoption curve is still slow.” – Bill Tyndall

• “If you don’t know how to take a step back and give yourself a little grace and appreciate the things that you’ve built, you’re just constantly demoralizing yourself, beating yourself up. And it’s really unhealthy to do that.” – Bill Tyndall

• “You have to find an outlet to reconnect with yourself and to have people around you that you can have real authentic conversations with.” – Bill Tyndall

• “Life is incredibly messy, and that’s what makes it so beautiful.” – Bill Tyndall

• “Getting okay with the idea that you don’t have to have all the answers all the time is a really big piece of unlocking how your business will actually grow.” – Bill Tyndall

• “I’m a big believer in trying to fire yourself from as many things as possible and creating psychological safety within a team to make decisions.” – Bill Tyndall

• “You figure out how to support your customers well, you will naturally win over time.” – Bill Tyndall

• “AI is, in one hand, our savior, and our demise on the other side.” – Bill Tyndall

• “People who have gone through really hard times can also put your own problems into perspective.” – Bill Tyndall

• 01:08 Business vs. Purpose
• 02:51 Will AI Kill Managed Service Providers?
• 04:36 Running a Business Like a Football Team
• 06:53 The Injury That Ended the NFL Dream
• 09:46 Why a “Boring” Industry Attracted $211M
• 15:15 What an MSP Actually Does (Plain English)
• 20:18 Artificial Capacity Constraints – $17M to $38M in 1 Year
• 24:32 Building Faster With AI Tools
• 28:03 Why He Walked Away From a $1 Billion Company
• 32:50 When Money Doesn’t Fix Happiness
• 39:48 How to Avoid Regret After An Exit
• 41:46 Effective Delegation
• 44:41 The Problem with Roll-Ups
• 49:19 Acquisition Integration Challenges
• 52:50 The First 120 Days After an Acquisition
• 54:50 Returning To The CEO Seat
• 58:27 AI As A Capacity Multiplier
• 01:02:11 AI Governance & Control
• 01:04:16 Advice For Young Entrepreneurs

Brad Weimert: Former Cal Bears offensive lineman, raised 211 million across eight funding rounds, built Electric AI from idea into almost a billion-dollar company in less than four years, and most recently, you are now the CEO of Techvera. I want to talk about all that stuff. Bill Tyndall, welcome to Beyond a Million.

Bill Tyndall: Good to be here.

Brad Weimert: It’s great to see you, man. Let me start with you had a company that was very close to a billion-dollar valuation before you took money off the table. In one sentence, what did that teach you about business relative to purpose?

Bill Tyndall: That’s a really interesting question, actually. Well, I think that business and purpose are two very, very different things. And I didn’t realize that until I did take money off. And I think we may have talked about this, but like the day that I got money was one of like the saddest days in my life. I always thought that money would bring a lot of happiness, and I had sacrificed like a lot of who I am personally in building that company. I just kind of compartmentalized everything down, and now I run our company very, very differently, like very open, transparent. I spend a lot of time working on myself, but I realized that I probably would’ve made a lot of decisions very differently, and I would’ve presented myself very differently, aligning my purpose with the business to create an even better outcome, if I could do it again. Both personally, health-wise, and professionally, I always show up for the team.

Brad Weimert: Fast forward to 2028, will autonomous AI agents replace or amplify managed service providers?

Bill Tyndall: Ooh. Well, so, I actually just gave a talk on this in LA a couple of weeks ago, but the reality is AI’s coming for everybody in some way, shape, or form. My general stance on this, though, is that AI is a tool just like anything else that’s ever been created. And so, there will be a lot of work that will not be done by humans anymore. And like I could give you a thousand examples of that inside of Techvera today. But the reality is AI is an incredible doer of things. Over time, I think it will be able to have more creative input. But the reality is, as particularly in our industry for managed services, and what I think I’ve rebranded it towards what I call digital transformation, like the assessment, deployment, management of technology and infrastructure, and doing that in a secure way, there will always be humans involved in some capacity, but it will move away from the vast amount of repetitive manual tasks and more focus on knowledge, work, consulting.

We’re going to move more into what I think of as like management consultants on how to implement these new technologies. And then the technology itself will then do help desk and onboarding and offboarding and everything in between. And we already see that a lot today. We’ve fully automated a ton of work that was done by humans even 12 months ago.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I’m excited to dig into some of that stuff relative to the newest journey that you’re on right now. But before we get there, let’s back out. So, let me rewind to the locker room. So, you played college ball. How did playing the offensive line at Cal shape the way that you run business?

Bill Tyndall: There’s a lot behind that. I was actually with a buddy two days ago when we were talking about sports transition into business. But there are a few things that I think are really prevalent that have stayed with me since being an offensive lineman at Cal. And one of the big ones was on the necessity of teamwork. It doesn’t matter if you have a team of five-star recruits. If they don’t know how to work together, it’s irrelevant. And you see it all the time. You see a five-star recruit come out of high school, and he’s what we call a practice squad All-Star. Like, we’ll never play because he cannot integrate into a system. And so, for us, in business, very similar to sports, we have a saying in our company, “It’s not who is right. It’s what is right.”

I don’t care if you missed the block. I don’t care if the project got delayed. It’s about what happened, what has to change, and how do we move forward as a cohesive unit. And so, that creates both in sports and in business a lot of psychological safety. It’s like, “Look, you miss that block. Quarterback gets sacked. Doesn’t matter. That play’s done. Like we need to now get back on track.” And you’ll see a lot of people derail and start to unwind when they start to embody a lot of the issues versus realizing like, “Hey, this is an ‘us’ problem. This is not a ‘you’ problem.” Eventually, you do get to a place where you may need to bench somebody, move them into a different spot.

But we run Techvera very similar to a football team across the board. Like, we’d spend a lot of time learning and development. We’re a massive data company. And so, even looking at efficiency of employees, why does it take Paul 30 minutes to do something and Susie 65? Is it where is there a knowledge gap? Where do we build training into that? And so, everything that we do is running this business like a football team.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I love that. I think that that’s a difficult gap a lot of the time in business to get people away from, “It was my fault,” or, “It was your fault,” to, “It’s our fault.” Right? We need to fix the core problem here. Did you have ambitions of playing in the NFL?

Bill Tyndall: I did, and life happens. I’ll never forget it. And sometimes I actually still wake up thinking that I’m there. But the last play of our spring game, which is the last practice of spring training, going before you go to summer and then into the season, very last play I got rolled up on by a guy named Deandre Coleman. And getting rolled up on is more or less somebody hits you from behind because they’re getting probably pancaked or something like that, and it completely tore my whole ankle, spun around, leg broke. It was a really big mess. And so, I spent three months. They flew in a doctor. I did this crazy surgery. And they had me back playing for the season, but I referred to my senior year as that broken toy that has this level of like nostalgia. I’m like missing an eyeball. My arms halfway ripped off.

And I was very grateful for them to find positions for me to get into. But I knew at that point that I wasn’t… This was pretty much the end of my career, and it was such a gift because it allowed me, in my senior year, to actually look at some internships. I had to start thinking about, “Well, hey, if I’m not going to go to the NFL, what am I going to do with myself?” And so, it was actually a massive gift in disguise. At the time, it was the end of my life. It was my first major identity crisis as a human. And so, yeah, it was a big thing. But I did think that I was going to go to the NFL for a bit. I was not nearly as talented as the guy who was my predecessor, Mitch Schwartz, who was one of the highest-paid offensive linemen in the league. I think I could have played for a little while, but I would’ve been probably in business at some point anyway.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I always find the transition from sport to business interesting. It seems like there are tons of parallels through that period, and some people do it gracefully with power, and some people struggle through it.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. And I’m a big believer that we all have five or six identity crises in our lives. Some people more, some people less, but the transition is no different than selling out one company as well and figuring out who you are and what you’re going to do and how you rebrand. I mean, we as humans attach ourselves so deeply to labels, and these like what is our brand label as a person? Am I Bill, the CEO of Techvera? Am I Bill, the division one athlete? Or am I just Bill? And I think a lot of people have difficulty in separating themselves from that. And a lot of athletes, in particular, struggle for years after finishing football because they’re so used to that identity. And once you’re done, it’s like it’s just not a part of your life anymore.

Brad Weimert: So, after that chapter, pretty quickly after you launched Electric AI, which is a managed service provider company, which seems like an incredibly boring space, and it also seems like a really saturated space, you raised $211 million to build Electric AI. What did you see in that market that made it an exciting target for you?

Bill Tyndall: Well, there was a lot, and the backstory in that is I had a friend named, Ryan Denehy, who had previously also built a company called Swarm, which was more or less using, he called it an iBeacon, but it was more or less using an access point, which is how we receive Wi-Fi to track people around stores is how you get brick and mortar? How do you get online analytics into a brick-and-mortar retail store to see where people are moving around, what they’re doing? Their distribution point was into managed service providers to do the install. And so, he saw this problem and I, prior to that, my first job out of college, when I got back from Russia, was the automation of accounting.

And so, how do you take, and this is still fundamentally the business that I’m in today, but how do you take machine learning, natural language processing, RPA, all these things that have been around forever, and how do you eliminate repetitive manual tasks to create a more automated experience? We had partnered with the entire back office infrastructure of automation. At that time, there was legal tech automation, there was HR automation, accounting automation. And what I started to see is there was nobody really automating IT support at that time, which is another fundamental core pillar that touches all of those different pieces. And so, we came together, and we threw out a bunch of crazy ideas.

But the core thesis of it was all of this other technology is now moving in real time. If you fundamentally believe that businesses are moving into the cloud and that cloud technology has available APIs, you should be able to automate a large amount of repetitive manual tasks in that space. And that was the inception concept for Electric.

Brad Weimert: So, one of the things that I heard was your partner, Ryan, was selling, you said iBeacon was the company?

Bill Tyndall: It was called Swarm, but they were selling what they called an iBeacon.

Brad Weimert: Right. And y’all realize that… See, I’ve been in Texas so long now I say y’all, which is weird to me. I’m a Midwest guy, so I used to say ‘you guys’ all the time. In fairness, I do think y’all just makes more sense.

Bill Tyndall: That’s way easier.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, y’all realize that the managed service providers were the strategic partner, right? He was selling his product at Swarm through the managed service providers. And that was a realization of that’s really the control point for a lot of other things.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I love that. The strong strategic partners as a distribution channel is a theme that I see all over the place in so many different businesses. And in fact, I talked to somebody. I had somebody on yesterday, Will Caldwell. His entire business was having one significant strategic partner and selling one product into this massive strategic partner, and that built the whole company and ultimately sold it to a different company entirely. But the whole thing was built on that.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Did you know going into Electric AI that you were going to raise several rounds? How did you lean on or how did you land on raising a sh*t load of money versus bootstrapping it?

Bill Tyndall: So, there was a very unique, we built Electric at a very unique time. We started that company in 2016, which venture was just going wild at that point. And so, every time that capital was raised, it was never really initiated by us. Investors would come in, see what we were doing. They would recognize that this was a massive, massive market. When you look at managed services in itself, when you look at the broader category, managed services become the gatekeeper to all technology. Like, we make the decision with our clients as partners, but we guide our clients on what technology that they should use.

And so, if you have two options, Slack versus Teams, Google versus Microsoft, you are coming to us to get told what to use. And so, that data and that control is very, very interesting for a lot of people. And so, there was tons of money that was getting flooded, and we’re still seeing it today now on the acquisitive side. I mean, you’re seeing all these venture groups coming into funding these, what I think of as traditional roll-ups. Obviously, we talked about that a little earlier, but we were preempted almost every single round. So, seed round all the way through Series D was more or less preempted by venture, looking to deploy more, accelerate our growth.

Brad Weimert: Was that the ambition from the beginning, or did it just sort of happen?

Bill Tyndall: We knew we wanted to be a venture-backed company. Ryan had done it. Ryan was a serial entrepreneur. That was my first bout of going in and doing it from the ground up. And so, I got to learn so much from him. But we knew that we were going to go venture versus bootstrapped in that one.

Brad Weimert: For the sake of everybody in the world that doesn’t know what a managed service provider is, first off, can you just break down what that means? And also tell me the target market, because like for me as a bootstrapped entrepreneur, I don’t go find an MSP from the beginning. Right? And so, I think that in the enterprise world, it’s super, super common. But I also know that you sold into a different target market. So, can you give me a background of that and who actually uses them?

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. So, simply put, managed service providers are companies that are responsible for the assessment of technology for businesses, regardless of what size. They then deploy. So, the assessment, simply put, would be, “Hey, should I be on Microsoft versus Google? Should I be on Azure versus AWS?” The deployment of that technology, or the migration from one to the other, and then the management of that technology, and then ideally doing that in a secure way. So, management becomes onboarding and offboarding of employees, troubleshooting, help desk, access controls, and the security side is just making sure all that’s locked down. There are security policies in place, multifactor authentication, et cetera.

That’s really the core of the industry. For us, as you were alluding to, this is very common in enterprise environments. But particularly with all the downward pressure coming with bad actors, hackers will always try to hack enterprise companies. But when you actually look at cyber threats, over 50% went to small businesses last year.

Brad Weimert: Easier targets.

Bill Tyndall: Super easy targets, and the ransomware is usually far below the FBI threshold. And so, it ends up going down to local municipality, and good luck having the defunded police in Austin figure out where that money just went. And so, you’ve seen this massive uptick because now, particularly with AI, their ability to try to infiltrate small businesses, I mean, it’s expanded exponentially in comparison to what they were able to do even a couple of years ago.

Brad Weimert: So, for anybody that’s listening and they’re like, “I wouldn’t do that. It’s not worth it. I don’t have a line item for it. It’s expensive. We manage this stuff in-house,” let me say this another way, all of the technology tools that you use in your company that as you scale went from a million to 5 to 10 to 50 become a geometric pain in the ass. Just significantly more of your time goes to, did we set up the roles and responsibilities right? Are the permissions right? Do these two things talk to each other, right? How do we on-board somebody onto this platform? All of those things, they will be a pain in the ass for you, period, in business. And so, managed service providers are designed to do that. But as I started with, enterprise is where people normally do this. Electric AI targeted small businesses, didn’t you?

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, 20 to about 250 employees, and that’s still where we target today.

Brad Weimert: Got it.

Bill Tyndall: And so, Techvera was actually a carve-out of Electric. I repurchased a portion of that company to bring back over. And so, we still manage the same base. We range really from about 20 employees up to about 600. We have an incredible client base that we’re very, very proud of, but we really focus on that small to medium-sized market. And typically, the sweet spot of where people end up coming over is usually once they’ve hit about 50 employees, you officially have enough complexity to where you have your CTO or your office manager has been managing it up until then. You’re starting to see slippage. And I mean, you’d be shocked the amount of times that we go in and we’ll do a license audit against Google and you’ll say, “Hey, did you realize that this person has been inactive or out of the company for two years,” and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, that was our CTO from two years ago that still has access to everything. We didn’t actually offboard him.”

Brad Weimert: God.

Bill Tyndall: So, yeah, you just see a lot of stuff like that. And so, a lot of people, I always refer to it as like a duck analogy. A lot of people see the top, and they just say, “Hey, yeah, this looks really stable. It’s not broken.” But when you look underneath, it’s just pedaling by a bunch of people, and it’s just chaos beneath the surface.

Brad Weimert: What do companies with less than 20 people do to manage those services? Are there products for them out there?

Bill Tyndall: Well, so you’ll still see people working with managed service providers. A lot of them will just have the most technical person in-house do it, and they’ll learn a little bit enough to be dangerous. But there’s a lot of products, like Rippling is a great example of a product that the smaller businesses will use. Even Electric, in their new form, they’ve built a lot of self-service technology to help those companies as well. There’s a lot of automation products that have come out to make that easier, but most just run off of what we call the de facto IT person.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think at some point, too, for a small business, you have to ask yourself if the value of the person’s time in-house that’s managing it makes sense to deploy towards, functionally, tech admin.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Right? Really, really important tech admin, but tech admin.

Bill Tyndall: Yep.

Brad Weimert: Tell me about the phrase ‘artificial capacity constraints’ and how that drove you from 17 million in 2020 to 38 million in 2021 with Electric AI.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, I mean, this is a huge… And this is for all businesses. We all get in our own way, and I can give you a couple of really, really great examples in the managed services industry. But to define artificial capacity constraint, this is when you’re onboarding new customers, and your team is complaining they’re like, “Hey, I’m swamped. We can’t take on more customers,” and you’re looking at the model that you’ve put together, which, to be quite honest, modeling is modeling. It’s not life. And there’s a disconnect between the feedback that you’re getting from your team in comparison to the output that you believe that you should be able to get for a specific individual.

And so, for us, as an example in the managed services industry, you see this a lot in a variety of different ways. And so, going back to this idea of when we were talking about the coaching, I may have two help desk technicians solving the same ticket. And let’s just say it’s a Microsoft ticket. It could take one person 20 minutes to do it, and it took the other person an hour. And so, I’ve now spent an hour and 20 minutes on two tickets when it should have only taken 40 minutes in total. You multiply that across 10,000 tickets a week, and you have a very large delta between more or less optimization and actual output. And so, for us, one of the big things that we started to see is four things that humans have to do. Do you have smart routing in place to actually get the right ticket to the right person?

And so, in that situation, oftentimes what happens is you have two people who are at the same level but have different specializations. And so, one might be a Microsoft guru, and the other one’s a Mac and Google person. And so, if you send a Microsoft ticket to a Google person, they’re going to end up on YouTube trying to figure out how to do it or going through Reddit. And so, it’s how do you use data to get the right information in the right projects in the right hands of the right person? For me, the example I give to people, if you sent a request in, if you’re one of my investors, and you ask for a highly complex model, I could figure it out, but it might take me two weeks to what a CFO could do in 20 minutes.

And so, it’s how do you get the right things in the right place? And then how do you optimize process? I think a lot of people are really excited about AI and automation, but there’s so much capacity gain to be had, and just good process and documentation around how to get stuff done.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. So, routing is a part of that. You said documentation being a part of it in the process. Are there other keys to optimizing constraint capacity?

Bill Tyndall: It’s, I mean, data integrity. So, we look at managed service providers all the time, and what you’ll see, and once again, this is universal across all companies, and I talked to hundreds of companies a year about automation and AI because we do automation as a service. And they’ll say, “Hey, you know, we started building stuff, but it’s just not working.” And then I go and look at their data, and I realized that it’s all fundamentally flawed. And so, in managed services is the example of this. I couldn’t tell you where that capacity constraint is if I don’t have good documentation on each ticket for categorization, classification of ticket, resolution steps. Most MSPs just leave that stuff blank. When we bought the last company, over 50% of our tickets were either misconfigured or no configure.

And so, when you think about understanding where we are bleeding right now without taking a rigorous approach on data, you have no idea what, you’re just putting your finger up in the wind and trying to figure out how to change.

Brad Weimert: If you started Electric AI today and you raised $211 million today, how would that money be deployed differently?

Bill Tyndall: Well, one, I don’t think that I would raise $200 million again today. The world has changed so much, and I’ll give you a great example. So, we just launched a brand new website for Techvera. Our head of marketing, who is very traditional, had gotten a quote to build a new website, $75,000 for the base, and then there was a more or less a $15,000 potential overage. So, call it $90,000. We built, and it was going to take 20 weeks to build. My COO and I sat, and we talked. We were like, “That’s crazy.” We built the full website. I don’t know if you’ve gone and looked yet. We built that full website for $8 and built it in 24 hours.

And so, reality is the tools available now to innovate have changed so much. I could probably rebuild Electric today with $5 million to $10 million and a fraction of the team just because the tooling has changed. And that’s what’s really exciting to me about the managed services industry today. We live in a world where the innovation curve has changed to where it’s now changing on a daily basis, but the adoption curve is still slow. And so, the question is, how do you catch people up to the delta? Because once you get there, your ability to innovate and compete is so different than if you… So, if you’re a 10-year-old business in comparison, if you started the same company today, the tools that you use, the team and expertise that you need, fundamentally different. And so, our team would just look exponentially different in how we approach that model.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think there are kind of two camps of entrepreneurs right now, the people that are really, really leaning into AI, and those people tend to feel like they’re tremendously behind nonstop. And then the people that know what’s happening and are just like, “Oh yeah, this thing’s happening,” and they’re having emails written by an LLM, and that’s the extent of it. And I think you articulated that well, which is that the innovation curve is probably literally exponential, but the adoption curve is very linear. So, the adoption is happening pretty slowly inside of businesses, but the technology keeps getting better and better and better. So, you need to allocate some time to think about how you’re going to get your team to adopt faster so you can take advantage of that.

Bill Tyndall: 100%. I mean, for Techvera today, and this goes back to the sports analogy, we have taken a very hard stance on being an AI-native business across sales, finance, HR, operations, delivery. We’re actually building out entire training curriculum for the entire company. And so, we have sales reps building inside of Claude. We have our HR team, we have our ops team, we have our finance team. Every single department inside of our company is becoming AI literate over time. And that’s not just obviously to improve their own workflows, it’s our responsibility to also be able to digitally transform these clients. And so, we have to eat our own pudding, so to say, as it goes to that, but massive opportunities across all departments with this stuff.

Brad Weimert: Why pudding?

Bill Tyndall: You know, I don’t really eat pudding, but the how the pudding’s made. I’ve never looked into it personally, but I assume it’s a pretty nasty process.

Brad Weimert: I would think so. It was gelatin and some other nonsense.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Alright. So, let’s talk about the transition for you. So, you had all these rounds of funding, and in, I think 2021, you had your Series D was 90 million. And at that point, you took liquidity and left the company. Why did you choose that point to leave, and what did you plan to do with your time?

Bill Tyndall: That’s a great question. So, there are two pieces of it. So, one, back in 2018, I had started to form a new opinion on the world, which was that it’s amazing to be able to build automation in these different care areas. It’s amazing to be able to programmatically reset a thousand Google passwords in a second, but so many of our clients were like screaming for help on, “Hey, should I be using Microsoft versus Google? How do I get from one to the other? I just took over my dad’s business, and it’s literally the whole company’s running on on-prem infrastructure in his closet. What do I do?” And we were a tech company, so we didn’t want to do professional services, all this work.

And so, what I started to realize is when you actually look at the core business in America, like they’re not ready for what we’ve built. And so, the question is, who’s going to get them? Like, what’s going to be the platform to digitally transform them to get to a place where they can leverage what we’ve built? And I realized that was the actual managed services market. And the problem with that is when you think about, “Okay, well, what’s the platform?” you realize that that platform got shattered into tens of thousands of local businesses that have different opinions on how that should look, how that feels, the rate of growth. And so, I started to realize that digital transformation had become inaccessible to so many people because the managed service provider industry has a very low amount of trust with the client base.

Like, people think about managed service providers oftentimes as a marriage of convenience. Like, I need somebody to do this. They’re not that good at it, but it’s still going to be there anyway. And so, I wanted to figure out how to build the platform that could make digital transformation more accessible, more data driven, faster, more efficient, and build that trust to when I step into a client’s office or when our team steps into a client’s office and says, “Hey, here’s our roadmap for how we catch you up on this curve,” that we’ve commanded the respect enough to be able to say, “Hey, yeah, let’s do this,” and we can actually make progress for those businesses.

The second piece on why I exited when I did was really around 2020-2021 was when valuations started to correct. And my example of this is Peloton. Peloton is fundamentally the best fitness company that’s ever existed, in my opinion. People can argue with that all day long, but when you look at the math, the math says Planet Fitness. So, once you take away the sexiness of the name and you just look at the math, the growth, the underlying economics, eventually you’re going to get corrected. And so, we then saw this post-2021, when capital started getting more expensive, people started looking at the math and saying, “Well, this business is really like a glorified professional service company.” Like, we were running below the 80% gross margin mark.

And so, I thought that there would be a correction. I thought there’d be a massive correction at that time across most of the tech industry, where valuations are going down exponentially. And so, we’ll get into what I did after I got out, but I had this thesis that I was going to get back into the world, but not from a technology company perspective, from a professional services company perspective, that I could then build technology into. And so, if I’m able to buy it five to eight times EBITDA and fundamentally double or triple the gross margin profile of that company by building automation and expanding that capacity, my theoretical value of that business should be accretive like there should be the concept of like alpha in that investment in comparison to always investing at the top and having to justify the valuation that we’re currently at.

I could do it from the other side and meet somewhere in the middle of those two lines, decreasing tech valuations, increasing proser valuations. And so, to me, it was just a good investment.

Brad Weimert: So, I think what I heard was you felt like the business model of Electric AI wasn’t supporting where you wanted to go, and so you wanted to leave to pursue a different business model that had better economics.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Describe the first morning after you closed the deal, you walked away with a bunch of cash.

Bill Tyndall: I mean, it was surreal at first. I know we’ve talked about this because we hang out socially, but I grew up with nothing. My mom was a preschool teacher. My dad did maintenance. The end of every single month was a struggle for them. They would never let us know that, but like it was clear. And so, I had spent so much time thinking about what my life would feel like when I had money. And I remember the first time I saw exponentially more money than I’d ever had in my life, like my ex-wife and I like were living paycheck to paycheck for so long in New York City. And to have that change, it was surreal at first. And then I did the stereotypical thing. I went out and bought a sports car.

Brad Weimert: What did you buy?

Bill Tyndall: Aston Martin.

Brad Weimert: Ah, nice.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. I am still a big James Bond fan, so that was like a very natural thing for me to do. I got this car, and it got delivered in that really fancy way that you see in all those videos. And I sat in it, and I just started crying for like two hours because I was so unhappy, realizing that I had really lost myself in building it. But yeah, I tell people all the time, like, money’s such an incredible thing and it’s really important, and it affords you a lot of convenience in your life. But I did not answer what I did for the year after I took a whole year off after we built Electric, and I just went and found myself and spent a bunch of time working on me, figuring out how I wanted to be in the next phase. Because I knew that I was really unhappy in how I presented myself, how I lived my life in building that last company.

Brad Weimert: What was it about that, personally or professionally, that made you feel like more than enough wasn’t enough?

Bill Tyndall: We could rabbit hole on that forever. I’ll give you the shortest version of this. A lot of founders are founders because they have a chip on their shoulder, hard childhood, bullied, trying to prove they feel less than. And I mean, that was the same. And I still struggle with this today. I mean, it is so hard for me to celebrate wins. And it still is. And I think that there is a gift in that of always wanting to do more, always wanting to build. But if you don’t know how to take a step back and give yourself a little grace and appreciate the things that you’ve built, you’re just constantly demoralizing yourself, beating yourself up. And it’s really unhealthy to do that.

And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of people end up building because they’re trying to prove something to themselves. And I’m no different than so many other people in that, and I think that’s why you’re seeing such a movement to people coming back into finding healthier outlets. Obviously, a ton of people are going and doing retreats these days, et cetera, but it’s hard. I tell most people that they should not start businesses.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I completely agree with that. And I think that entrepreneurship has become so idealized, put on a pedestal, and popularized that people feel like that’s the path, and it’s sort of this, the number of times that I hear people say things like, “Oh yeah, I want to run my own business so that I have more control of my life.” I’m like, “Oh boy, buddy, you’ve just got a thousand more bosses. You don’t have one boss anymore. You have every client, your staff, the rest of your world that makes you feel like you need to appease them in some capacity.”

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. I mean, I tell people this all the time. You have zero autonomy as a founder, and not just because… You are responsible, and your clients are now your employees. Whether you have five employees or 500 employees or 10,000 employees, you are a servant to them. And it’s more than that because you are actually responsible for putting food on their table, for keeping them in a good head space, and the weight of being a founder, and how I easily just explain is you are responsible for the single worst problem that has to be decided on any given day of the year. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas day, Thanksgiving, your birthday. Like so many people idealize it, as you were saying.

They look at Instagram, they look at all these things, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, like if I become a founder, I can go spend 50% of my time in Mykonos.” And that’s not how the world works. And even if you do find the time to go on a trip, it may look good on Instagram, but I mean, if you are anything like me, you’re still spending that entire time thinking about the business. You’re on calls. And so, yeah, it is a rumor that I think a lot of people have gone into, and once they dive in, they see the reality of that, and that’s why most people quit.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I operate very much the same way as you. And I also have sort of reconciled the fact that if I’m on a trip and I travel quite a bit, we were on an amazing trip in Croatia together.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, we were.

Brad Weimert: Where you were taking calls on your laptop, et cetera. And the nice thing about being with high-performing entrepreneurs is that nobody says, “Oh, come on, man. You really have to take that call right now?” Or, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re working while you’re on this trip.” People that aren’t entrepreneurs say that, and the people that are entrepreneurs have sort of gotten to the point very often to being like, “No, no, I get to be on the trip because I’m taking the calls right now and doing this work right now.”

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. Well, I think the other thing that, because one of the topics that people ask me about, just going back to this idea of, “Oh, I’m going to be an entrepreneur to get my time,” like that doesn’t exist. I mean, there’s a reason why most entrepreneurs get divorced, et cetera. There is no work-life balance. I mean, even my son had a birthday the other day, and right up until it started, I was on a call in my car outside of the venue. And that’s just a part of it. And so, I think that the big thing that I talk to people about is finding ways to integrate the work that you do and the life that you want to have.

And just as a result, like most entrepreneurs end up hanging out with entrepreneurs because we then, one can empathize with each other and don’t make it weird when we’re on calls at 3:00 AM in another country. But also, we can all do work together and support each other. And so, just integrating the people that you spend time with and finding ways to help and support, like that’s been one of the biggest pieces for me, as an entrepreneur, is just spending time with other people who are going through it, and we all just find ways to support each other through that.

Brad Weimert: You said that you sort of lost yourself through the process of the business, and it caused this tremendous dissatisfaction and sadness immediately after you cashed out, and for a good chunk of time after that. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs that are going through it to avoid feeling regret and sadness at exit?

Bill Tyndall: I think one of the biggest things is learning how to be authentic and real with yourself. It is very easy to lock away your true self in a little tiny box, because it’s hard. I mean, you’re firing people, you’re making hard financial decisions. Growth can be stressful, and it’s really easy to lock away emotions and just make the non-emotional decisions that have to be made. And there’s a time and a place to do that but finding ways to keep yourself in that process and finding reset. So, as an example, like I’m a big proponent of like ketamine therapy, as an example. I have generalized anxiety disorder. It rules my life in a lot of ways.

So, whether it’s therapy, finding space, physical activity, finding ways to reconnect you with this, even as simple as journaling, but finding a way to get it out and stay connected with yourself is something that a lot of people really abandon for a long time, and I’m seeing it more, particularly in serial entrepreneurs. I see a lot of first-time entrepreneurs totally abandon this idea. They’re working 20 hours a day. They think that that’s a good thing to do. And eventually they wake up, and they realize that they’re actually a fraction of the level of efficacy or efficiency that they would be if they had better structure.

But that’s the big one, like you have to find an outlet to reconnect with yourself and to have people around you that you can have real authentic conversations with, because it’s way too easy to silo, particularly if you have negative core beliefs that make you feel like you have to have the answer to this, otherwise you’re not worthy to be doing the thing that you’re doing.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about that concept, and how it collides with the reality that there’s no balance in scaling a business?

Bill Tyndall: Well, I think that when you and I say this a lot, life is incredibly messy, and that’s what makes it so beautiful. I think that acknowledging that all of this is chaos, even if you’ve built six businesses before, there is always going to be something new that you’ve never seen before. I see it all the time. And just getting to a place where you can acknowledge once again that it’s not who is right. This is not my problem, this is not my fault, this is a team effort, and learning how to ask for help, seek advice, get mentors, bring other people in to help you solve those problems is a huge piece of that to me. Because, I mean, even things that I’ve done before I see again, and I’m like, I have no idea how I’m going to take this on.

And just getting okay with the idea that you don’t have to have all the answers all the time is a really big piece of unlocking how your business will actually grow. Because most founders just get in their own way, and they try to answer themselves, and as a result, they get some optimal results, because they are creating a bottleneck to growth for their own company.

Brad Weimert: What’s the alternative for that?

Bill Tyndall: I mean, I’m a big believer in trying to fire yourself from as many things as possible and creating psychological safety within a team to make decisions. Like my COO is a phenomenal example of this. My COO does not ask me for permission to do almost anything. He tells me what he did. I trust him fully, and if there’s something that we need to pull back, we can have that discussion. He does not take any decision personally, but he knows that I trust him, and he knows because we have such open dialogue and communication what my vision is and what we’re trying to get to, that it is very rare for him to come to me with, “Hey, this is the plan that we’re going to roll out. We’re going to do this thing tomorrow.”

And he’ll ask me before the trigger is pulled, but he’ll have it done, and my decision is, “Yeah, I endorse this,” or, “Hey, we might need to think about this a little bit more,” but creating a world of trust, even if people stumble and fail a little bit, if you don’t have a team that can run autonomously, though, or if you got hit by a bus, the whole company dies. That’s, one, it’s bad for enterprise value, because you now have Q-Man risk issues, but two, it’s also just inefficient, because you’ve created all this additional work on top of what you already have to do just to have your company run.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, man. That’s a very, very difficult thing for a lot of founders, myself included, and I sort of consistently struggle with that as we grow through each phase of effective delegation, which is what that is, I think. Well, let’s talk about Tynrose. So, eventually you sell, you make a bunch of money, you go on this existential crisis, where you’re figuring out who you are and how to be a better human, and you dig into what sounds like the reason that you sold in the first place, which is Tynrose, which is approaching the MSP game from a different angle. And what it looks like from the outside is this idea of rolling up MSP companies.

And it seems like the idea of doing a roll up, the idea of like going and just buying similar companies that are already operating, that already have money, and putting them together to create more enterprise value, to create a company that will sell at a better multiple, that’s super sexy, because then you kind of can theoretically live as the owner and not the operator of these things. What is the truth to that? And what are the misnomers there?

Bill Tyndall: Yeah. So, I tell people this all the time, because I get hit up for advice from people wanting to start roll-ups, and my biggest thing is I think that roll-ups are a fundamentally flawed, like mental concept in itself. I think that executing on a roll-up very, very well, and you’ve seen so many throughout time. I mean, Wayne Huizenga did waste management. That was obviously amazing. There’s a number of roll-ups that have had success, but if you don’t have a fundamental thesis around how to build an actual platform and you just pull a bunch of stuff together, there’s no actual value there. You just still have a bunch of subscale, independently running businesses.

And so, what I tell people all the time is a roll up in itself is just another tool for go-to-market expansion, like you can either acquire customers organically, you can scale teams organically, or you can go buy talent, and you can buy scope expansion, and you can buy revenue, and you can buy EBITDA, therefore, off of that, but it has to be able to fit together to be of value. And so, I see this all the time. I see people come to me with, because we do occasionally buy businesses if there’s strategic scope expansion. We want to move into a new service, whatever it is. We’ll start looking at that space or serviceable addressable market depth. So, we’re already in the city, or hey, we have a large concentration of customers in LA, we might want to buy business there.

But there has to be a really good reason for us to want to buy that, and the culture then has to be able to integrate into ours, as well as the tool stack, the client base, because you’ll see this. I looked at a company the other day where they ranged from Fortune 500 companies to five-person businesses. I don’t know how you think that is going to translate, like that’s different teams, that’s different stacks, different processes. And so, so much of it is just having a core thesis around what you’re trying to do. And then if you can get the capital to acquire things, that’s great, but buying things for the sake of buying things, and that’s why when we built Tynrose, we built it as a holding company.

I didn’t want a deployment schedule. We got offered tons of money to build a private equity roll-up, and I mean, our first one is a friend offered us $150 million, but we had to deploy it in 18 months. And I told him no. There are not $180 million worth of managed service providers that I’d buy today. And so, I wanted in building Tynrose for two things: one, to be able to expand in a way where we always had options, we need to be able to scale, tone back sales, tone up sales, tone up hiring, turn down hiring to build for a business that can be a major brand player 10 years from now, not three years from now, not five years from now.

And the second piece is I’m never going to buy a business just because we’re trying to hit three businesses and an extra $4 million of EBITDA this year. It creates the wrong incentive for growth if you’re just looking at the bottom line in comparison to how are you providing value to the businesses that you’re trying to support. You figure out how to support your customers well, you will naturally win over time.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. So, I think that applies to basically every facet of business, which is have some, you know, thesis is the word that gets used in the world of roll-ups or PE or venture but have some basic fu*king idea of where you’re going and how you’re going to do it if you’re going to buy companies. One of, I think, lots of entrepreneurs, but one of my fundamental fears of acquisition is the integration of businesses. What’s the craziest operational nightmare you inherited through an acquisition, and how much money was unlocked by unwinding it, or solving that problem, I should say?

Bill Tyndall: There are so many. I mean, I could give you a bunch of different examples, but there’s a lot that I’ve learned through buying businesses. A lot of them are on more of the back office side. So, integration is complex. You’re integrating everything from sales systems, operation systems, HR systems, financial systems. One of the big areas that we started to see, particularly in buying small businesses, because we typically buy businesses doing less than 15 million of revenue, and so they don’t have annual audits. So, no audited financials, etcetera. And usually this ends up working in our favor, like the last acquisition that we did, we realized that they weren’t actually billing for about $90,000 of MRR in their clients. They had stopped doing license true-ups.

And so, when we got out, we generated almost a million dollars a year in additional revenue by just messaging all the clients, saying, “Hey, by the way, we saw this discrepancy. Guess what, though? We’re not going to back-bill you for any of this. You’re welcome. We’re just going to start it as of today.” And so, 90,000 of MRR just brought right back into the business. And so, we see a lot of issues around financial systems. How are you billing? I would say that financial cleanup and integration is typically one of the harder pieces in these businesses. Everything else is training, like, we don’t use traditional IT systems for what’s called PSA, so the ticketing system itself.

Most companies use ConnectWise as a product. We actually built our entire ticketing system inside of Jira Service Manager, so it’s a different fundamental workflow, but it’s not rocket science to train people up on how to use that system. But the hardest part of integration outside of the systems themselves is the mindset of people and how attached they are to the tools and processes that they are responsible for bringing in. And you can get a tremendous amount of resistance for product changes, process changes, data changes. I mean, even with acquiring Techvera, which was a carve-out of the last business that I owned, I’ve worked with all these people for 10 years, and it was still, in some situations, difficult to convince them to look at the world differently.

And that’s where you see a lot of issues in roll-ups and acquisitions in general. You tell somebody to change process, next thing you know, you have a mutiny of the staff. You have staff that leaves, that then leads to service or product degradation, that then leads to churn. And now, next thing you know, you bought a business that did 10 million of revenue, and you have 7 million of revenue because you just churned out that whole base. And that’s where the work goes in. So, I see people that buy five companies at a time that have never done it before, and I say, “Good luck. It’s hard enough getting one of these things to go with another. You just bought five. They have no idea who you are, like that is going to be a lot of work.”

Brad Weimert: So, simply put, how do you attack the 120 days to integrate a business when you first buy it?

Bill Tyndall: So, that’s a great question. One, we put together who’s more or less the integration team and it’s a combination of our current team and new team, because you need buy-in across both of those segments. Going back to our principle of it’s not who is right, it’s what is right, we try to not assume that we today have the best process for everything, and so we have that team break down into leads over finance, operations, HR, and we have those people look together, and this is pre-deal close. This is because we want to build out a roadmap of what systems are we using, what’s the process going to be. And they put together the proposal of systems, adoption, SOPs.

And so, then once it’s done, there are certain things we try to integrate pretty quickly, HR, finance, operations. Ticketing can stay separate for a period, but we want to know pre-close, this is the exact timeline for each of these projects. What’s the cut-over date? Things that you factor in that make it easier to figure out to prioritize, as well as when are renewals? Like, if I have to renew a sales force contract and it’s going to, the one business that we just bought is paying $500,000 a year for theirs, and there’s a bunch of stuff we’re not going to use, and that renews in two months, we know we should probably figure out a migrate into our $100,000 instance as a first priority, otherwise we’re going to get hit with that renewal, and now we just lost another $500,000 for a tool that we’re not going to use.

And so, for us, we oftentimes do an audit on what renewal dates are looking like, how much they’re paying for those directionally seeing, and that educates a little bit of the step-by-step process.

Brad Weimert: I love that. That’s helpful. So, I want to go into your newest chapter here, but you had this existential crisis after leaving Electric AI. You go into this roll-up mode, and I know you have issues with that phrase, maybe, but part of that, from my perspective, is what it sounds like, is again, you working on the business versus in it. And now you’re finding yourself today as the CEO of Techvera. Did you think you’d be back in the CEO seat?

Bill Tyndall: I knew I would be for a period, and there will be a day where I potentially am able to step back up to the holding company and do that. But to me, everything is about execution, and we have an incredible team, but we are still so much in the wild west of digital transformation that being able to sit in at the operating level and have my hands still at least overseeing a variety of different areas to keep vision on track with our growth, and all these pieces. When I first started Tynrose that the intention was not to be operational for as long as I have. I love being operational, though, and as long as we’re at this rate that’s scaling, I will continue to do that, and I’ll probably do it for the next five years.

But the reality is we are a growing business, and we have a phenomenal leadership team that I love working with, and I love scaling with. And so, it’s been great for me to do it, but with the rate of change in our industry, AI adoption, I’d love to be able to say that I could step back and relax, but the rate of change is so fast, to where it has been beneficial for myself, for our shareholders, for the company to have me operationally involved in that.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I can totally understand that. It also sounds like there’s a part of that that is, “I want more control over the process,” and I don’t know that that’s a bad thing, but it’s this push-pull of effective delegation and let the COO do the right thing, and, “Oh no, no, no, I need to be involved to make sure we’re running in the right direction.”

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, my involvement is much less on operational process and much more on ensuring that we keep the integrity of my vision input across what’s then being deployed into departments. So, as an example, I will not make a decision that will jeopardize client experience, and I veto stuff regularly that I think will negatively impact. It is really easy to say that we should throw bodies at problems, and I will push back on those areas and say we need to look at ways to bring more automation into this. And so, over time, as the team continues to get better at those things and really embody that ethos, I can step out.

But to me it’s important to be able to have this reminding guide on why are we here, what’s the original mission of this business, and just how do we make sure that people are making decisions in line with where that wants to go. So, they make their decisions, and I more or less either approve it or deny it, just based on, like, hey, is this taking us two steps back from where we want to go, or is it accelerating two steps forward?

Brad Weimert: So, let’s pull this to today, and what acceleration looks like today. In 2024, on a tech summit panel, you said AI is a capacity multiplier, not a savior. Fast forwarding to April of 2026, do you still feel that way? And how do you think things have changed so far? And how do you think they will evolve?

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, I think that fundamentally, my answer is still the same. Tech automation and AI, more broadly speaking, is just a capacity expander for humans. I mean, even this week we rolled out a new piece of automation that’ll save us 100 hours a month for what people were doing a week ago. But the people still exist. They just do different things now. And so, we’re about a 100-person company. We service a few 100 businesses. So, it’s a fairly scaled company in itself, but the things that are changing are the amount of people that we have to hire over the next couple of years to keep up with the same rate of growth. Like our hiring needs have changed with automation coming out.

So, it’s not us firing people. It’s not us doing a Twitter where we lay off for PayPal, where we lay off 50% of the staff, because we just don’t need it. Like, we still are growing at a rate to where we need to keep those people, but we don’t have to add headcount at the same rate of which we did. So, it’s still a capacity expander for people. I do think that there will be certain types of businesses that are more impacted by this.

Brad Weimert: Sure.

Bill Tyndall: But the reality is it’s your responsibility to figure out where you’re going to be adding value to your customers tomorrow. And for us, that’s changing a lot. I think that managed service providers are going to be going out of business if they’re still pitching 24-hour helpdesk and onboarding and offboarding. A vast majority of that’ll be automated in the next two years. So, where are you now adding value to your client in that version? I think there’s going to be a lot of compression in we charge per employee per month. I think there’s going to be a lot of compression in that pricing for those services. And so, then the question is, where are you adding enough value to not have to compress your pricing?

Brad Weimert: What was that thing that you did to automate away 100 hours a week, or a month, rather?

Bill Tyndall: It was the automation around the onboarding and off-boarding of employees, and more or less the triggers for account creation and deactivation, coupled with some work on the back end around hardware provisioning. So, when you on-board a new employee, there’s a computer that they get, there’s software that they get, like we’ve built out a lot of automation around. And at Electric, we did this as well. We were one of the first people to work with Apple and some of the providers for what’s called zero-touch deployment. And so, we’ve just built more on top of that and eliminated a lot of manual work that humans were doing yesterday to be able to do it.

There are 1,000 examples of it, though, I mean, even routing and escalation. To give you some perspective, when we first got into this business to route… So, you’ve told me that you have an issue. Somebody has a conversation with you to figure out what that issue is. That person is then responsible for finding the right technician to solve that ticket. That piece took seven minutes a ticket. We do 10,000 tickets a month. That’s 70,000 minutes spent every month, just literally playing traffic cop. That is so easily automatable. That is, what is your problem, who has the right certifications to solve this, and are they available right now? And so, just looking at all these opportunities to once again reduce that artificial capacity constraint and to speed up the efficiency of getting the right things to the right people.

Brad Weimert: I love that. The tools are more available today than they ever have been to do that, too.

Bill Tyndall: Truly.

Brad Weimert: What is a blind spot from a security perspective that most small businesses have that they’re unaware of?

Bill Tyndall: Well, I mean, this could be a huge rabbit hole in itself, but AI is, in one hand, our savior, and our demise on the other side. AI has become the largest component of shadow IT across all of our customers. And define that, it’s technology that’s being used inside of your business that you don’t know is being used, and how it’s being used by who. And so, when we’re talking about spend issues, we had not a client, but we had a friend who runs a business. The other day, they were using OpenClaw, which, by the way, nobody should be using for anything company-related, but he was using it for personal use. And he had it running a process, and he had left his Azure keys open, and it wanted more compute.

And so, he woke up in the morning with a $30,000 Azure bill from this tool, and you multiply that across having 100 employees, every single one of them could be using an independent cloud instance or OpenAI. And so, you start to end up in this place where security profiles aren’t configured properly, and so you have company information going out into the world. You have tools that they just shouldn’t be using, like OpenClaw. And so, a big area of focus for us right now that we’re providing for clients is around AI governance and control. Did you realize that you have 30 independently running Claude instances going in your environment versus one corporate account?

How are those things actually being billed? Is it tokens versus platform fee? And then, what’s the security profile around that? Do you have information that is able to be shared outside of your business that could be information you don’t want getting into the wild?

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. Tremendously relevant right now in April of ‘26 as we move into this, and honestly, it’ll be relevant for the next several years as the adoption curve turns to a curve, as opposed to a linear line.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: What advice do you have for a 25-year-old entrepreneur starting out today, or should an 18-year-old or 13-year-old entrepreneur starting today?

Bill Tyndall: I think one of the biggest things that I’ve always leaned in, and it’s been tremendously helpful, is finding mentors, finding people who have been there, done that in the next phase. Like, I’m a big believer that you become the five people you spend the most time with. And so, particularly when you’re a first-time entrepreneur, even second-time entrepreneurs, a 25-year-old, finding people that you can call when things are off, things are weird, you don’t know what to do tremendously helpful for your own personal growth, and also for learning how to get out of your own way. And the second piece is really learning how to manage yourself, and learning how to accept feedback, and hiring people that will give you feedback.

There’s a great book called The Advantage, which talks about the difference between healthy organizations and smart organizations. Healthy organizations welcome feedback, big believers of not who is right but what is right, versus a smart organization is a bunch of people who think that they’re the smartest people in the room. You give them feedback, and they don’t accept it. And how do you surround yourself with people that will give you honest feedback regularly? Because one, that’s the best way to make sure that your business is going to have the best outcome, but two, it will help you to grow faster into the CEO that you need to become tomorrow.

Bill Tyndall: You mentioned mentors, and you mentioned a book. What other books, podcasts, things, people are you listening to right now for your own journey?

Bill Tyndall: So, I love to read. To be honest, I prefer to read autobiographies of people who have gone through tremendously crazy things. And so, The Splendid and the Vile is one of my favorite books. It’s Winston Churchill’s more or less account of World War II up until the US decided to join, which, if you’ve known anything about history, it was an awful time in the UK. And he was a very hated person in a lot of ways and had to make a lot of hard choices. I think there’s another book that was the story about Bob Iger, who is Disney. It’s called The Ride of a Lifetime.

Brad Weimert: Great title.

Bill Tyndall: Great title. I like reading about stories about people who have gone through really hard times, because people who have gone through really hard times can also put your own problems into perspective. I may think that a missed sales number is an issue. Imagine what it would be like to be Bob Iger in Hong Kong, getting ready to open up the largest project for Disney ever, and find out that the bombing that happened in that nightclub in Florida, that guy actually was trying to go into Disney, and they had video of him trying to go around and ended up just going there because he had nowhere else to blow up. And then two days later, a little kid gets eaten by an alligator at your park.

And you’re now sitting and thinking, “Am I making the wrong choice? Should I open this park?” And he just talks about sitting on his bed and crying for hours, figuring out what he’s going to do. And so, it just really puts life into perspective when you hear that you’re not the only person who has these problems. I find that we think that our problems are the biggest problems in the world and reading and seeing these things are really big. And then, from a mentor perspective, just to answer that, I try to find people who have been there and done that and hold authenticity in a way and values and morals how I want to be. I might not necessarily hold all those today, but people that I idolize and being able to ask them questions on how they might approach a situation that I might disagree with based on how I am and how I act today.

But it’s important, in my opinion, to have people that don’t just agree with you on everything and challenge you and challenge you to grow, and so I’ve had phenomenal mentors over time. They all are still very, very dear friends of mine, and I’m grateful. I send them notes multiple times a year, just thanking them for the wisdom that they’ve given me.

Brad Weimert: Amazing. Well, Bill Tyndall, where do you want to point people? Where can people find out more about you and what you’re doing?

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, I’d say LinkedIn is pretty easy. You can just, if you type in, or if you just google me, I’m usually the first person that comes up for Bill Tyndall. It’s not a lot of us. So, I’m pretty easily google-able. LinkedIn is really easy to find me. It’s just the LinkedIn URL/Bill Tyndall. I’m sure that we’ll put it in the title after this, but I’m also just available. You can find me at [email protected] if you want to find time to chat, riff on business, and all life. But I’m easily findable.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Bill, always good hanging out, man. I’m looking forward to the next time.

Bill Tyndall: Yeah, for sure. Appreciate you having me on.

Brad Weimert: For sure.