193: Billion-Dollar Founder Shares His Secret Weapon From the Swiss Army – 8FE

What could a Swiss Army officer possibly teach you about building and selling companies worth hundreds of millions? Turns out – everything.

Today’s guest, Sam Goodner, took the discipline and precision he learned in the Swiss Army and applied it to entrepreneurship. 

He founded Catapult Systems, scaled it through two major recessions, and eventually sold it after 20 years. Later, he helped take Flash Parking from a stuck $3M startup to $100M in revenue and a billion-dollar valuation.

Now a mentor at Capital Factory and author of Like Clockwork: Run Your Business with Swiss Army Precision, Sam distills 30 years of lessons into practical principles that help entrepreneurs scale businesses that thrive without them.

In this episode, Sam shares why scaling always begins with a sales playbook, how “cloud conversion therapy” won over 100% of skeptical customers, and why annual contingency planning can make your company recession-proof. He also breaks down what it really takes to prepare for a sale years in advance and how unforgettable first-day employee experiences can shape culture for decades.

If you’re ready to scale with Swiss Army precision and build a company that runs without you, tune in now.

Inspiring Quotes

• “At some point, you realize that at a certain size, you’re the bottleneck for scaling your company any further because you’re in the middle of every decision.” – Sam Goodner
• “If you don’t actually put your entire sales process into a playbook and write it down, then you can’t hire another salesperson, let alone build a team that can deliver without you.” – Sam Goodner
• “If you want to scale any business, it starts with sales. Period.” – Sam Goodner
• “A reckoning is coming. Everybody is doing everything with AI right now.” – Sam Goodner
• “Have a number. And once you can sell your business for that number – sell it.” – Sam Goodner
• “We made sure no single customer was ever more than 5% of our total revenue.” – Sam Goodner
• “Instead of slowly building our operations team from scratch, we immediately hired an entire expert team from Siemens – all on the same day we closed our funding round. They already knew how to install, scale, and deliver at a professional level, which helped us skip months or even years of trial and error” – Sam Goodner

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:02:03 Running a business like clockwork in practice
• 00:17:00 Curated client experiences turned skeptics into loyal customers
• 00:25:33 Starting Catapult Systems
• 00:28:54 Recession-proofing strategies
• 00:33:49 Separate teams allow multiple ventures under one umbrella
• 00:38:54 Selling businesses: Define your number and prepare years before exit
• 00:43:07 Strong EBITDA and audited records maximize company valuation
• 00:48:17 Choosing investment bankers
• 00:53:45 “Like Clockwork: Run Your Business With Swiss Army Precision”
• 00:59:54 First-day experiences build culture and long-term loyalty
• 01:01:35 Advice to young entrepreneurs
• 01:05:09 Wrapup

00:00
Brad
Feels like an uphill battle when you have to convince dumb people of clear things.

00:04
Sam Goodner
We never call them dumb.

00:05
Brad
I do.

00:06
Sam Goodner
You know, they’re.

00:07
Brad
It’s a blessing if your biggest barrier is education, if that’s the barrier. But the technology isn’t the barrier, man.

00:15
Sam Goodner
If you have a Microsoft problem, we are the organization that can help you implement it, integrate it, build on top of it. We had this dot com bubble burst and within six months we lost half of our clients.

00:25
Brad
Then we go into the 08 collapse.

00:27
Sam Goodner
And over the next 10 years we became the number one Microsoft partner in the world.

00:30
Brad
And you sold the company in 2013? Yep. So you had a 20 year period where you went through two recessions. What are the things that you would do today that you didn’t do during those times to safeguard yourself for a recession?

00:42
Sam Goodner
Well, number one is congrats on getting beyond a million.

00:48
Speaker 3
What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimert and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had.

01:00
Brad
The privilege to work with more than.

01:02
Speaker 3
30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today. In Those multi million 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million.

01:25
Brad
Sam Goodner, you are a man of many talents. You’ve got several entrepreneurial journeys under your belt. Catapult Systems was the probably the largest Microsoft Systems integrator company. 450 employees, 10 offices. You built that out over time, sold it. You also spun out a bunch of other companies through that journey that I want to dig into. But you also built flash parking to 100 million in revenue, billion dollar valuation. Crazy stuff. Most recently you wrote a book. Wrote a book like Clockwork. Run your business with Swiss army precision.

01:59
Sam Goodner
Love it.

01:59
Brad
Welcome to Beyond a Million.

02:01
Sam Goodner
Thanks Brad. Good to be here.

02:02
Brad
Awesome, man. Well, I want to talk about a lot of things, specifically the journey in spinning out all these companies. But let’s start with running a business like Clockwork in practice. What are the tenants of that? What does that mean for somebody in execution when they’re growing a business like most entrepreneurs?

02:20
Sam Goodner
When I got started, I knew nothing about running a business. And you just kind of get started like you did. I’M sure, and you just kind of, you know, figure things out along the way. But at some point, you realize that at a certain size, you’re the bottleneck for scaling your company any further because you’re in the middle of every decision, which is great. It’s heroic. All entrepreneurs kind of start that way. But if you wanted to be stuck at 3 million, that’s a, you know, stick with that. If you want to scale a business into it running without you being in the middle of every decision and hiring, you know, it’s about, you know, hiring the right people and building the right systems around them and in your organization so it can scale without you in the middle of every decision.

03:07
Sam Goodner
So that’s what I mean.

03:09
Brad
You know what’s funny about that is literally my next question that I’ve written down is many founders keep themselves at the center of everything. What are the most critical steps for making yourself irrelevant in your own business so it can scale without you?

03:20
Speaker 4
Yeah.

03:21
Sam Goodner
So that’s it. I mean, well, give me.

03:24
Brad
Give me, like, the framework. So if you’re a founder and you need to get out of things, let’s start with what the sort of categories of tasks are or departments. And obviously this varies from company to company, but it does. We. Let’s use yours as an example. What were the core things that you were stuck in the middle of that you worked yourself out of?

03:40
Sam Goodner
If you want to scale any business, it starts with sales, period. If you don’t have revenue growth, there’s no need to scale any other part of your business that doesn’t matter. And so focusing on how do I scale my sales organization or even build one, that’s always step one, in my opinion. And the best tools around that is if you want to have anyone other than yourself out there selling without you in the room with them, then you have to build a sales playbook. You actually have to understand and codify. All right, who are we going after? What’s our message? Who specifically? Not only the type of industry, the size and all of that, but who is a decision maker in that company and how do you get in front of them? What objections are you going to hear over and over again?

04:25
Sam Goodner
How do you overcome them? What is a good opening email or phone call look like all the way down to how do you close that business? If you don’t actually put that in a playbook and write it down, then you can’t actually go higher. Another salesperson, let alone build a sales team that can go out there and deliver that without you. So for me it starts with sales, the other one. And I know many of your guests on this podcast always talk about you can’t build an organization without great talent, obviously. And so starting to think through a real process for how do I recruit, interview hire, onboard talent and how do I make that more repeatable and what exactly am I looking for? Like just recently you had a. You who did you have. You had.

05:16
Sam Goodner
Had Robert Glaser on talking about core values and doing values based interviewing. Couldn’t agree more by the way, to actually put that in place and a. Understand what your core values are and what you’re looking for in a candidate and then systematizing that super important. So phase two is that. And then you start looking at all the other parts of your business so that now it’s business specific.

05:41
Speaker 4
Right.

05:42
Sam Goodner
So at flash parking, for example, we go out and install parking systems in garages and surface lots across the country. And that was a big bottleneck initially when I joined the company, like they did not know how to do that at scale at all. I mean the founder was still going off and drilling holes. And in Gar Rogers, how big.

06:04
Brad
Was the company when you jumped in?

06:05
Sam Goodner
Oh, it was tiny. It. They. I was looking for a startup that I could either buy or invest in and then join full time to help scale. I looked at over the course of a year, my first retirement, I became angel investor. I looked at over a hundred companies and then I met the young founder of this company, Juan Rodriguez. Great, great young guy, great entrepreneur. But they were stuck. They were stuck at 3 million. Had been stuck there for three years. They had 12 employees. They had this, they had built this amazing, you know, platform in an industry that was still stuck in the 1990s. And they just didn’t know how to get it to the next level. So they needed a. Some investment capital and some gray hair that I could provide both.

06:46
Sam Goodner
So I, I took down their whole round, put myself on the team as president, left Juan as the CEO and then we proceeded to go implement all the things I’ll talk about in the book just one at a time. So in that case, get back to, you know, operational scaling. A big, you know, problem that they were facing was, you know, how do we god forbid we sell it. How do we go actually install and implement this and support this and even manufacture this at scale. And the way we did that was, well, we cheated. Now that we had investment capital, I went and Hired a, a full on delivery team from the whole implementation team from a friend of mine’s old company called Site Control. My friend Dan Sharplin put him on the board of directors of Flash.

07:29
Sam Goodner
Actually he co invested with me in the deal and his whole operations team that now worked at Siemens. We hired the entire team on day one that we closed our round.

07:38
Brad
Crazy.

07:39
Sam Goodner
And they had been doing this for 15 years at scale. Different industry, sort of different design brief. But they knew how to do this at scale, how to create a design brief to go turn what could be a three month prop project into three days or even one day at scale through third party contractors and installers to really, you know, broaden our reach. Once we did that, were doing things in the industry that had, that were simply impossible before.

08:09
Brad
Well that’s a, so that’s like, that’s a, a hell of a pitch for bringing on smart money, right? So there’s this constant conversation in my head of bootstrap versus funded. And as a bootstrap entrepreneur that has gotten to where I am without taking on capital, I, I tend to lean in the direction of bootstrap. Now that said, were I to start over, I almost certainly would bring on capital to grow faster. But be at some phase, in many phases like I have friends that Bootstrap have bootstrapped to, you know, 10, 20, 50, 80 million and then brought on a bunch of money to grow. And in my head I’ve always thought what the fuck, like why would you do that at that phase once you have built stability?

08:55
Brad
But you just gave a really good answer, which is you can compress timeframes to bring on that system immediately instead of figuring it out yourself.

09:02
Sam Goodner
So let me be clear, my nature is bootstrapping, period. You know, all the companies until Flash, I’d always bootstrapped, took no investment and was in complete control of our destiny. Flash Parking was the first time went and you know, AI invested at that scale in a company. And then we went on to raise more money a few years later to go really big. It is a compromise and it is a very, is a decision you should make very deliberately. Anytime I sit down with a young entrepreneur at Capital Factory where I mentor, for example, and they’re raising money. My first question is why are you raising money? Do you need to raise money? You’ve never raised money. You have, you’re building a services based business where you’re cash flow positive pretty much from day one.

09:50
Sam Goodner
Tell me exactly why you Want to go raise money, Maybe there’s a good reason. I don’t want to hear it from them. I don’t hear it. They’ve really thought it through. Because as soon as you raise money, you now have a partner at the table that has very strong opinions on where you should take your business. And you better have a plan for an exit because. And as angel investor, I’m not investing in your business unless you have a plan for an exit. I’m not trying to fund your lifestyle business. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with a lifestyle business. You want to build a lifestyle business and cash flow it and build a great culture and have a great team and grow it organically over 10, 20, 30 years. Amazing. Go do that. Just don’t complete the two.

10:27
Sam Goodner
If there’s a market opportunity that you cannot take advantage of without moving at blitzkrieg speed, then you might have to go raise money for that.

10:38
Speaker 4
Yeah.

10:38
Sam Goodner
Obviously, if you’re building a drug company, a product company, anything that requires a whole bunch of R D up front, you’re gonna have to raise money.

10:45
Brad
Obviously.

10:45
Sam Goodner
But there are plenty of businesses, probably most businesses in this country don’t need to raise any kind of capital to. To build and to grow and to be successful.

10:55
Brad
Yes. Particularly today.

10:56
Sam Goodner
Yeah.

10:57
Brad
With how much easier it is to execute.

11:01
Speaker 4
Yeah.

11:02
Brad
Well, so I guess one of the lessons with flash parking, then. And just to be clear, with flash parking, when I. I haven’t dug into the company, but yeah. The label.

11:10
Speaker 4
Yeah.

11:11
Brad
Indicates to me that you are creating a different way to pay for parking automatically. Automated systems pay for parking.

11:18
Sam Goodner
All of it. I mean, we build ERP for parking operators and. And, you know, and asset owners that own parking garages and lots. And we do valet parking, event parking lot. So if you’ve entered a parking lot with a QR code or if it scanned your license plate and opened the gate automatically, if you’ve bought parking on Ticketmaster, for example. That’s all our underlying technology.

11:37
Brad
Awesome.

11:38
Sam Goodner
We also have the hardware that goes, you know, in the field that still is required in some cases to pull a ticket, use a credit card, you know, if you don’t want to use your mobile phone. So we do all of it. But when we came, you know, on. On the market, parking was still stuck in the 1990s.

11:53
Brad
Oh, yeah.

11:54
Sam Goodner
The biggest objection that I had to overcome this is I joined, I invested in 2016. So put yourself now in 2016. The biggest objection that were encountering at the time from our potential Customers was, you know what we’ve been told. You can’t run a parking garage from the cloud. Like, I think that, you know, credit card processing fees are just not going to work. The gates aren’t open in time. You know, we’re not, we’re going to have backup in traffic.

12:21
Brad
Crazy.

12:21
Sam Goodner
You know, that was the objection. Our competitors, who all back then required a rack of computer servers in the back of the garage on their systems had, you know, had convinced the entire industry were stuck in the 90s. So.

12:33
Brad
Interesting.

12:34
Sam Goodner
Yeah, that was a fun. It was a fun thing to overcome.

12:37
Brad
Well, that’s also a, it’s an interesting element of a million industries, which is, I think that on a lot of levels, when you’re an entrepreneur, you look at objections like that and you think, what a pain in the ass. Like, well, first of all, what. What are you talking about? Second, what a pain in the ass. This is hard, but it’s a blessing if you’re, if your biggest barrier is education in a lot of ways.

13:03
Speaker 4
Right.

13:03
Brad
If that’s the barrier, but the technology isn’t the barrier.

13:06
Speaker 4
Right.

13:06
Brad
Man, now it feels like an uphill bag.

13:09
Sam Goodner
Still a barrier overcome.

13:11
Brad
Yeah. Feels like an uphill battle when you have to convince dumb people of clear things.

13:15
Sam Goodner
We never call them dumb. They’re just. I do, you know, they’re, they just haven’t managed.

13:21
Brad
So we built ignorant, obviously.

13:23
Sam Goodner
We, we devised this strategy. We called it, we call it cloud conversion therapy.

13:33
Brad
Nice.

13:34
Sam Goodner
Where for customers we needed to bring over that decision line, we would invite them to come visit us in Austin. So they would fly in. I would pick them up with the co founder of the business, the CEO Juan, in my Tesla Model X. So first of all, many of them had never driven an electric car back then, let alone, you know, one with falcon wing doors. And then everything from that entire day was carefully curated, starting with we’re driving my Tesla, which opens up the conversation to, you know, what’s connected to the cloud. I get updates in, you know, over the air, real time. I get new features every month without anybody, without having to bring into the shop or any mechanic coming to the store.

14:17
Brad
Strong.

14:18
Sam Goodner
Then we would, you know, casually drive by downtown Austin to get to our offices and I would say, hey, by the way, you know that most of the garages in Austin, of course, were in our technology. Would you guys, you know, like to drive through a few garages before going to the R and D lab? Well, not a customer in their right mind would say no to that, well, we had carefully curated the route. It looked random. Nothing was random. Right. We had gone and made sure that everything worked that day before. And by the way, we don’t own any of these facilities. We don’t operate them. We just have our technology. But we would even pick up trash ahead of time to make sure everything looked great.

14:48
Sam Goodner
We drove through this carefully pre planned route where in some cases I’d enter with the QR code. The other time they would my license plate, I would pay with my mobile phone. It went in and out smoothly. Then we got to the R and D lab. We had our best product manager of course, present all the latest capabilities of the product right there in the lab, anticipating every possible scenario that, you know, that they could bring up. We’d then order in Rudy’s barbecue of course for lunch, always Rudy’s. We’d have our head of AI come and show him all the futuristic stuff were working on. Then we’d drive him out to our manufacturing facility in dripping springs. Dig. 30,000 square foot warehouse. Every assembly line was man, perfectly, you know, groomed. All the inventory, racks were full.

15:33
Sam Goodner
They got the tour from the, you know, the head of manufacturing. Tell them about our supply chain logistics and all that. By the time they got back to the airport at the end of the day, it’s like they felt like they came from the future. 100% of the customers we brought through that program ended up becoming customers, prospects to customers. Yeah, 100%.

15:54
Speaker 4
Yeah.

15:54
Brad
I think the, I mean that’s such a beautiful example. A whole bunch of things there pop out. One is from the beginning, the Tesla. And I think that when you think about practical application in other areas of sales or your client experience, it’s analogy, right? That’s it. And if you’re doing the storytelling pitch, you’re giving them a third party data point that completely reinforces your sale, your pitch. And that was, that’s just a hilariously beautiful example of that. The other big one for me in general is that the client experience is going to happen. Either you’re going to control it or you’re going to have a bunch of miscellaneous stuff intervene into the process that’s going to distort it from what you actually want.

16:39
Brad
So if you don’t take the time to clearly define what that client experience is going to be, then it’s going to be a whole bunch of stuff for different people.

16:46
Sam Goodner
Yeah, the lesson here is leave nothing to chance.

16:49
Brad
Yes.

16:50
Speaker 4
Yeah, I love that. Yeah.

16:52
Brad
100% is pretty good batting average.

16:54
Speaker 4
Yeah.

16:56
Brad
I mean, a thousand, I guess, if we’re doing sports now, I mean.

16:59
Sam Goodner
Fair enough.

17:00
Brad
All right, let me back out here because one of the cool things about your journey is that catapult systems.

17:09
Speaker 4
Went.

17:09
Brad
Through two major recessions. And truth of life is that humanity seems to go in cycles and the economy certainly goes in cycles. They’re not always the same, but they have a lot of similarities and a lot of lessons can be pulled. So you started Catapult in. And I think that this is relevant because we’re going into a pretty gray murky hallway towards superintelligence and we have no way to know what’s going to happen there. And so listening to the journey through these different cycles of recession and challenge the ups and downs is incredibly applicable now. The environment’s different, the technology is different, but the lessons should proliferate here.

17:55
Sam Goodner
Yeah. In fact, I have a whole chapter in my book on recession proofing your business, which is mo. Probably the most difficult thing to do. And. And I start by quoting the Stark family from Game of Thrones, which is Winter is coming.

18:06
Speaker 4
Yeah.

18:07
Sam Goodner
When I first started catapult, I was 26. It was 1993. I had never lived through a recession as a professional.

18:12
Speaker 4
Right.

18:13
Sam Goodner
The last one happened maybe when I was in college or high school and I was writing the tech boom of the 90s.

18:20
Speaker 4
Yeah.

18:21
Sam Goodner
And I mean we had the Internet, we had Y2K.

18:24
Brad
Let me tee this up because so for framework and for just so people can think about size and scope here, you started catapult in 1993.

18:33
Sam Goodner
Yes.

18:34
Brad
Crazy, right? So you started in 93 for people that weren’t born at that point in time.

18:39
Sam Goodner
Most of your audience.

18:40
Brad
Yes, some of them for sure. The Internet functionally didn’t exist at that point in time. I mean, in the dot com. The first wave of the Internet starting was 98, 99, where it actually started to be commercialized. So like E commerce was around then the world collapsed that. That whole industry collapsed. And it wasn’t until, you know, 030-405-03. Yeah, we start that. We started to see like real. Where I was going was where we started to see real E commerce happen.

19:07
Speaker 4
Yes. Right.

19:08
Brad
And so we got out of the recession in 03, but at 0405-0607 we started to see Web 2.0 in e. Com. Then we go into the 08 collapse, which is real estate focused. And you sold the company in 2013.

19:22
Sam Goodner
Yep.

19:22
Brad
Great. So you had a 20 year period where you went through two recessions and that’s that like that framework I think is really important for people to see because you went through all these waves. But also there’s a tremendous parallel between the rise of the Internet and the rise of AI.

19:38
Sam Goodner
I think you’re right actually.

19:40
Brad
So tell me how Microsoft or how Catapult System started and tell me what a systems integration company is for Microsoft in the first place.

19:48
Sam Goodner
So I had two co founding partners and our vision was again were young and didn’t know any better. We just wanted to start a company. We didn’t exactly know what kind. All three of us had technical backgrounds. I’m a computer science, you know, major from college. And our dream was to build a software product company. Like that’s what we knew. It didn’t take an advanced degree in accounting to realize, well we need funding for that and we didn’t have any. Like the entire sum total of our savings was $17,000 that we put in the bank. So we didn’t have enough money. And this is before you could go raise money from venture capital. So that wasn’t even on the table for us. So we figured, well, we know a lot about building this thing called client server systems. This is from mainframe computers.

20:36
Sam Goodner
This big migration from mainframe to client server, I bet companies would pay us to help them figure that out. So none of us came from a consulting background that we accidentally create a consulting company with the hunt. The goal was and we’re going to take all of the proceeds from that business and self fund all these different product ideas that we have and eventually that’s going to be where we go. And it’s exactly what we did. We started basically selling our services to clients who were willing to pay for us. And we started growing that business. We took all the cash flow from that, started incubating different ideas. Our first product was called Advanced Power Tools and a product called PowerDoc. Then we created our flagship product Inquisit in 1997.

21:23
Sam Goodner
It actually was a big hit and became its own company that we spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary. It had a successful exit 10 years later. But along the way we had accidentally built the this services company or an IT consulting company. Now back then weren’t focused on Microsoft at all. We would do anything for anybody. That’s by the way part of the lesson learned there is in the 90s when business was so good, all we had to do was find the talent. If were good at finding, attracting and retaining the best talent. Business was falling in our lap suddenly, in mid 2000, as you described earlier, we had this dot com bubble burst. And within six months we lost half of our clients. Like they either went out of business or they stopped, you know, funding IT projects.

22:11
Sam Goodner
And were left, it was, by the way, we barely survived to be clear. I mean we had several rounds of layoffs. We, we all took pay cuts, we retracted from multiple offices back into one. Like we took a, it was batten down the hatches, survive this, you know, austerity measures. And by the way, we got lucky. The only reason we’re still in business is we had created this software product company that had a recurring revenue model that was, you know, not as cyclical as all of our other consulting clients. And the cash flow from that subsidiary Inquisit allowed us to weather the storm. That was an accident. Now in the middle of this, it’s 2002, we’re looking around going, you know, our consulting business looks like everyone else. Nothing sets us apart. Like we’re not best in the world at anything.

23:02
Sam Goodner
And when you’re, you know, when you’re, when you look like that, then you have to compete on price. And so we started really doing a lot of deep dive thinking on what can we best in the world at? How can we set ourselves apart from everybody else? What I call what is our unfair advantage. So we looked for specialization. I’ve heard you say do less better in one of your podcasts. Big, big believer in that. And so we looked at first of all industry verticals.

23:32
Brad
Hold on. Yeah, you said you’re a big believer in do less. Better yet, you made like six software products while you had a consulting company.

23:39
Speaker 4
Yeah.

23:39
Brad
How do those things reconcile?

23:41
Sam Goodner
Great. You want to come back to that? Oh yeah, okay, let me give me, I’ll come back to that. But, but to finish my story on focus, we a first looked at any kind of vertical specialization. Like could we become the best IT consulting firm for semiconductor manufacturers or finance or banking or government? We couldn’t find a single vertical that was big enough to support our company. So we looked horizontally, like let’s align ourselves with one technology provider. And the choices at the time were IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Really in our world, I think we could have picked any one of them. But we decided, you know what, let’s go all in on Microsoft. We like their vision, we like their partner model and we made the very deliberate decision.

24:20
Sam Goodner
We’re going to within a year exit all non Microsoft business and we’re going to go 100%. We’re only going to hire Microsoft certified consultants. We’re going to, we’re only going to train in Microsoft, we’re only going to sell Microsoft solutions. We now have to expand from just pure custom application development to do software integration which is going to push more Microsoft licenses for them, which is what they care about. We’re going have to expand into networking and all of, all of the other things that Microsoft does. And that became our singular focus. So went from this doing everything for everybody to we want to be known. If I leave a conversation with you, a potential customer, I want you to remember us as Catapult Systems. You’re the Microsoft consulting company. Don’t call me for an IBM solution.

25:03
Sam Goodner
Don’t call me for anything related to Linux or anything else. If you have a Microsoft problem, if you’ve embraced Microsoft already, you know, the Microsoft stack in your company, we’re the organization that can help you know, implement it, integrate it, build on top of it. And over the next 10 years we became the number one Microsoft partner in the world according to their ranking, not ours.

25:24
Brad
A parallel today would be you’ve got businesses that are, have a whole bunch of systems automations in place that involve humans.

25:33
Sam Goodner
Yes.

25:33
Brad
And you have an opportunity to move people with a service based AI implementation agency.

25:39
Speaker 4
Right.

25:40
Brad
And say, hey, this is if you wanted to replicate your model today, move companies into how to use AI and then through that process you could build software that integrated AI and potentially spin out those software companies. And to extrapolate further, and I don’t think we’re at a point where we found the winners yet, but to extrapolate further, you could say I am the open AI or I am the anthropic or I am the Gemini agency and we only focus on that AI. And I don’t think that’s wise right now. But that’s the loose parallel to what.

26:09
Sam Goodner
You were doing by the great analogy.

26:12
Speaker 4
Thanks.

26:14
Sam Goodner
A hundred percent. And just like we saw in the, you know, the fallout of the dot com era, you’re going to have the winners and losers from the AI era. It’s coming. There’s a, everybody is doing everything with AI right now. By the way, I would love to be an AI consulting firm today. They have to be on fire. There’s so much demand. Every company has an AI initiative on the books. They don’t know how to even spell AI. And so if you’re an AI consulting firm today, you’re super busy in terms of the winners or losers on the AI applications that Everybody’s building. A reckoning is coming. So back to the recession. I had no idea that one was coming. It hit us in the face. We got lucky in how we survived.

26:58
Sam Goodner
So when we came out of it in 2003 and suddenly we had the wind in our sails and were moving again and opening new offices and hiring and growing 70% a year for five years in a row. We literally, with the executive team, we sat down and said, how do we recession proof our business? How do we make sure that what happened to us in 2000 doesn’t happen again? Because you know what? I know now it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when the next one is coming. I don’t know when, but it’s coming. And so we took very deliberate measures to diversify the industries that we focused on. The size of the different companies geographically as well. The, the types of services that we provided wasn’t just, was just, was beyond just custom application. It was soft integration.

27:39
Sam Goodner
We created a managed services part of our business that had recurring revenue. Love recurring revenue. So we found that recurring revenue model for our business. We made sure we, that no single customer was ever more than 5% of our total revenue. Hard, fast rule. If one customer started to get bigger, we would just slow down with that customer because guess what, that customer can fire you next year. We made sure we always had three months of cash and credit, a Runway, you know, in case something happened. We always had enough, you know, financial cushion in the bank to get us to the next spot come 2008-2008-2009-2010. Seemingly a much bigger recession. The world would say, yeah, were profitable the entire time. All we did was slow down our growth, didn’t have a single layoff, no pay cuts.

28:32
Sam Goodner
We came out the other end, you know, and, and did great the whole time because we took preparation measures assuming a recession was coming.

28:40
Brad
And you mentioned some, I think, great steps to safeguard yourself that, you know, it’s one of those things that I like to say. I’m very good at learning from my own mistakes after I’ve made them a few times.

28:53
Sam Goodner
We all are.

28:54
Brad
But not great at learning from other people’s. Yeah, but again, these things are predictable. Like you go through a recession like that or you go through any negative impact for your business. But specifically a recession in an industry focused recession, you can see, oh, what was I doing that had myself so concentrated here that got in my own way? And so one of the things that’s Practical is to think about what, in what way can you safeguard your business so that maybe it’s so that during a recession all of your cash flow doesn’t get crushed. And maybe it’s your target market and distributing your target market. Maybe it’s that you need a residual stream.

29:32
Speaker 4
Right.

29:33
Brad
Maybe it’s, I don’t know, what are the things that you do today that you didn’t do during those times to safeguard yourself for a recession?

29:41
Sam Goodner
It’s different for every business. That’s first of all the key, the important thing is to realize, is to actually spend time thinking about it. If you don’t spend any time thinking about it when it happens, you’re unprepared. You don’t have a plan B or a plan C. One of my friends, actually he’s one of the case I use in my book on the chapter on recessions, runs a, a residential mortgage company. Talk about ups and downs. Brutal, right?

30:07
Speaker 4
Yeah.

30:07
Sam Goodner
And I mean you’re at the whim of interest rates and all kinds.

30:11
Brad
Of raining cash in the good times and it’s brutal in the bad times.

30:14
Sam Goodner
And again, I won’t, I’m not going to, you know, go too deep into that. But what they found is the unsexy part of their business of actually servicing the loan is fairly recession proof. Now you don’t make a ton of money when interest rates are low and you’re selling a ton of mortgages comparatively. But suddenly when interest rates go through the roof and you’re not selling as many mortgages, that loan servicing business that you just build up and build up, that keeps cash flowing. As just one example of something I would have never thought of.

30:46
Brad
Can you, can you help me with the financial model behind that? Because all I really know, and I know a decent amount, but like in my head, mortgages get sold all the time. That’s right. From a servicing.

30:56
Sam Goodner
And so if you don’t sell the mortgage and you actually service it yourself, you have to build up capital to do that. But you’re actually now, you’re now getting the fees for all that ongoing servicing work.

31:06
Brad
But basically you have to have a big enough bankroll, you have to have enough cash in the back end to actually pay for the homes that you write the mortgage on. Or is it leveraged?

31:14
Sam Goodner
It’s leveraged. It is leveraged. And now you’re getting of course, outside of my area of expertise. So you know, taking the spread of something, you know, have Tom Rhodes, he’s the founder of Sente Mortgage on. On your podcast. Amazing. An amazing entrepreneur, by the way, and he really nerds out on this stuff.

31:31
Speaker 4
Love it.

31:32
Sam Goodner
But now you’re way out of my depth already in terms of how they. How they actually do it.

31:35
Brad
All right, so. So mortgage.

31:36
Sam Goodner
But. But the point here is mortgage experts. Yeah.

31:39
Brad
You know, post in the comments to answer this question.

31:40
Sam Goodner
Yeah.

31:41
Brad
Explain the model for us.

31:42
Sam Goodner
It is. It is different for every business, but you have to think about it. One of the exercises I had my entire executive team do once a year regardless, was I said, okay, I want you to imagine that suddenly we lost 20% of our revenue. And I’m going to come to you and you have to cut 20% of your department in two weeks. I want you to come up with a plan to do that in writing. And it’s not a hypothetical plan. I want you to come up with how you’re going to do it. Whether it’s this budget, that budget these people. I actually want real names. And I want to review the plan. If we’re just going to. I’m going to review it. Make sure you actually did the exercise and thought through it. We’re going to file it never.

32:20
Sam Goodner
And not look at it again until next year. But forcing yourself to think through what would happen and what you would have to do is a really healthy exercise at least once a year.

32:29
Speaker 4
Yeah, I love that.

32:29
Brad
I like to think about. I’ve talked about this a ton of times, but I like to think about the absolute worst case scenario.

32:35
Speaker 4
Yeah.

32:36
Brad
And you’re confronted with this when you’re doing any sort of investment. And so I do a bunch of real estate investments. So every time I’m buying a piece of property, I’m looking at it and thinking, how could this go horribly wrong?

32:46
Speaker 4
Right.

32:47
Brad
And the truth is, the absolute worst case scenario is really not worth planning for because there are a bunch of these crazy edge cases. Right. So you pull it into what’s the likely worst case scenario?

32:56
Speaker 4
Yeah.

32:56
Brad
And then you have to plan for that stuff because those do happen. And if you haven’t thought about it, you’re right.

33:02
Sam Goodner
We cannot plan for World War iii.

33:04
Brad
Exactly.

33:04
Speaker 4
Right.

33:05
Sam Goodner
That happens. All bets are off because all trying.

33:07
Brad
To survive the robots.

33:09
Sam Goodner
But what the. Like you said, the likely worst case scenario is what does that, like, look. Look like?

33:13
Speaker 4
Yep. Yeah.

33:14
Brad
So, okay. I love that. Annual contingency planning.

33:18
Sam Goodner
Yes.

33:18
Brad
With your management team or if you’re smaller, executive team.

33:21
Speaker 4
Yeah.

33:21
Brad
Yeah. Yourself.

33:22
Speaker 4
Yeah.

33:29
Speaker 3
Insert funny advertisement here.

33:32
Brad
Or just check out Easy Pay Direct.

33:34
Speaker 3
It’s epd.com forward, slash, bam. And you can find out about credit card processing for your business. Lots of our guests use us for credit card processing and this seemed like.

33:47
Brad
More fun than writing a scripted ad. Okay, so let’s back out to why you to the idea of do less better and focus on your core thing.

33:55
Sam Goodner
Yes, against.

33:56
Brad
Let me spin up a bunch of software companies inside of my main company and roll some of those out.

34:02
Sam Goodner
Actually the two are not mutually exclusive as long as you realize that they’re completely different businesses. And for I’ll taking quizzes as an example because they really became, you know, our flagship product and had a successful exit. I realized very quickly I can’t use the same people. I mean we can share, we can even share office space. We can share IT support and HR and accounting on the back end. Shared services. Fine. I have to have dedicated sales, dedicated marketing, dedicated R and D, dedicated support. And they need to wake up every day not worrying about Catapult systems and what they’re doing and that marketing plan and that sales approach. But how to sell Inquisit, how to market Inquisit support, Inquisit, develop, you know that. And so they were completely focused 100% on their mission and Catapult remained completely focused on ours.

34:49
Sam Goodner
The key is those are not the same people. Same thing for running it, I immediately hired a president to run it. So it wasn’t me day to day. I mean I had to get it started. I was the first salesperson that got it started. But then I’m very quickly finding people that are dedicated to that mission. And so the two are not mutually exclusive.

35:05
Brad
Interesting. So when you spun up these new software products inside of Catapult Systems, were they immediately their own company or just their own department?

35:14
Sam Goodner
Within Catapult, they were initially their own department, their own business unit. So we tracked the P and L and the expenses and all that separately. And then at one point you spin off into its own company, if that makes sense. So I two other service parts of our business. One was a digital marketing agency called slingrock and the other one was a mobile application development firm called Mobile Alchemy. Those were both service based companies. Same thing. It’s very different. The kind of people you hire for a digital marketing agency, they look a lot like you. Actually they don’t look as much like me. You know, they all have Macs and we’re a Microsoft shop. Mobile application. Microsoft completely missed the boat on the mobile phone. Apple came and ate their lunch and so the whole Microsoft mobile OS went nowhere.

36:00
Sam Goodner
So we Couldn’t have in legitimacy creating mobile applications on the Microsoft platform. So I created a different brand, different company, different focus, different tools called Mobile Alchemy to go build mobile apps on the iPhone. And they focused on their own, you know, on their own thing.

36:18
Brad
How do you think about those initiatives relative to core values directives? Are they, even though they’re sort of legally and structurally a department inside of Catapult? Yeah, they are their own initiative, own product, own team. Do they come to the company meetings? They have their own set of meetings entirely. Are they integrated to the company? What does that look like?

36:41
Sam Goodner
Well, I can only tell you how we did it, and I don’t know if it’s the right way or the wrong way. Culturally, were still one big brotherhood, you know, our sisterhood. You know, were one big family. And so we had monthly company meetings. They definitely came. Everybody came to the same company meeting. We all had the same core values. Eventually, if the company, I think if the company gets big enough and you truly spin it off and then they go into their own world, their own space, I think you then give them permission to go rethink their own, potentially their own culture, their own core values and all of that. For us, we had tremendous energy and benefit and camaraderie from being sort of one big family. And so we kept those, for the most part, together.

37:31
Speaker 4
Right.

37:31
Sam Goodner
They were operationally different. They had their own operational meetings, they had their own planning meetings. They had their own, you know, all of that sales meetings, marketing meetings, that was completely separate. But culturally, we all came together and celebrated sort of the bigger fun of being part of this big family together.

37:48
Brad
Interesting.

37:48
Sam Goodner
Then I don’t know if it’s the right answer or not, but that’s how we did it.

37:51
Brad
I don’t, I mean, I, I, I’m pretty firm in my belief that there is not a right answer.

37:56
Speaker 4
Yeah.

37:56
Brad
To most things. Yeah.

37:58
Speaker 4
Yeah.

37:58
Brad
There tends to be examples of highly successful people, initiatives, organizations, governments that are radically different. And so I think the path to get to a good outcome or the desired outcome is wildly different across the board.

38:17
Sam Goodner
Agreed.

38:19
Brad
But, but that’s good to know, I think. I mean, the question is, if you did see a successful outcome, clearly there’s something to study through that path. So I like the idea. It’s interesting to hear the idea of one umbrella, but operationally, your own meetings, initiatives, you know, et cetera.

38:35
Sam Goodner
Yes.

38:35
Brad
In one building.

38:37
Sam Goodner
Well, at headquarters in Austin, were in one building. We had offices all over the country. Ten offices, you know, for the Catapult Systems part of the company Inquisitive was all in one building. They were on a, at one point a different floor. We got big enough. We thought of ourselves as all being part of one family.

38:53
Speaker 4
Love it.

38:54
Brad
I want to talk about selling stuff. So you sold Catapult Systems. You also grew Flash parking to a billion dollar valuation.

39:04
Speaker 4
Yeah.

39:05
Brad
Which is wild. But only 20 to 30% of the companies that put themselves on the market to sell actually end up selling. Why do you think that is? And when do you think somebody should actually think about selling versus growing?

39:21
Sam Goodner
A lot of lessons learned and on the M and A side. And so my numbers are, I’ve sold two companies in my lifetime, Catapult Systems and Inquisit and in capacity at Flash, certainly in my capacity of. As a chief strategy officer that enrolled, that I moved into, I bought 10. So I’ve sold two. Bought 10. The number one thing, when I sit down with other entrepreneurs, and I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs make mistakes here, my first question for them is, okay, what is assuming you don’t have investors because you have investors now, suddenly you have people that have an opinion on what that should look like. But let’s assume you’ve bootstrapped your business. It’s just you. What do you want to do? Is your goal to have, you know, a financial outcome one day and then what would you do next?

40:09
Sam Goodner
And then if your goal is no, I really want an exit. I really would like a big financial outcome from this. My answer is, my question is always the same. So what is your number? And everybody’s number is different. And I wonder. I want you to think about what is your number after taxes, after you’ve paid the stock options to your best teammates and all of that. Like, what is your number? Sit down with your spouse or your partner and think through what number would it be worth my while.

40:36
Speaker 4
Yep.

40:36
Sam Goodner
To do this? Because after that I’m just going to be a different part of my life, different phase. And once you have that number, you don’t get to change it. You can maybe adjust it for inflation, I’ll give you that much. But once you have that number, don’t change it. Why? Because when you’re grinding out through a recession and your. And your hair’s on fire and your customers are firing you and your employees are upset, that’s when you want to sell your business. Like, I can’t wait to get rid of this business. And that’s the worst time to sell. When you’re suddenly growing like crazy and you’re on fire. And you customers are flocking to you, and your employees are happy and you’re growing. That’s when you don’t want to sell, but that’s precisely when you should sell.

41:21
Sam Goodner
So my message to any entrepreneur that I mentor is have a number. And once you can sell your business, if your goal is to sell it for that number, sell that business. And how do you sell the business? Well.

41:34
Brad
Well, let’s pause there for a second because I think that there’s a tremendous lesson there that has tons of parallels in life, but it is. Functionally, it is. Don’t let your present emotion get in the way of your previous calculated goal.

41:52
Sam Goodner
I love that. This has to be a rational decision based in numbers and facts that you’ve thought through, based on the lifestyle that you want to have. And everyone is different. Everybody has a different number. I don’t care what the number is. Could be a million, 2 million, 100 million. Your number is your number after taxes.

42:07
Speaker 4
Yeah.

42:08
Sam Goodner
When you can hit that number, you execute. Period. If you don’t, I’m going to call you out because I’ve seen people go, no, I told you 20. But now we’re on fire. If I wait one more year, it could be 40. And guess what? Then it’s 2008, and they have to wait seven years to get back to that number or it never happens. And I have seen it countless times, Brad.

42:28
Speaker 4
Yep.

42:29
Brad
Well, and the other thing that you said that I want to highlight is what are you going to do next? And if the answer is not clear to you, then maybe you shouldn’t sell.

42:42
Sam Goodner
Again. Everybody has a different answer for that.

42:44
Speaker 4
Yeah. Right.

42:46
Sam Goodner
Some people might want to go do it again. Some people might want to retire. Some people might want to travel the world with their family like I did for a year. You know, there’s all sorts of different reasons you might want to do this, and everybody’s answer is different. But have answer.

42:58
Speaker 4
Yeah, I like that.

43:00
Brad
Okay, so be clear on why you’re doing it.

43:03
Speaker 4
Yep. Right.

43:04
Brad
And if it is something you should do at all.

43:06
Speaker 4
Yeah.

43:07
Brad
And then the question is, how do you do it? Because I know that you just said exited two companies bought 10. You’re probably in the fraction of a percent with those stats. Most entrepreneurs sell a company, if they sell at all. In fact, most entrepreneurs never sell their company. So the lessons of what to do and how to do it are tremendously relevant for anybody that wants to go down this path and knowing the failure rate of taking a business to market and actually selling it, which is, you know, 70, 80%, take it to market and never end up selling it. What are the, what are the first things you want to think about to structure something for sale or to go into that process?

43:47
Sam Goodner
A lot of parts of that answer. I’ll start with one, which is in our business, we are used to, like in your business of credit card and credit card processing, you’re always the smartest guy in the room. Pretty much in your field, in your business, we are used to being the smartest guy in the room.

44:04
Speaker 4
Yeah.

44:05
Sam Goodner
You’re now selling your business and you’re the dumbest guy in the room because you know nothing about that process. So step number one is actually find a real advisor, whether it’s an M and A, an investment bank, an M and a broker, someone to actually help you navigate this process. And yes, they’re going to take a commission and they’re worth every penny because they can do things that you’re not qualified to do and you’re doing for the first time, if you’re lucky. And you’re going to be across the table from some head of M and A, from a larger company wanting to buy your business, and they do this for a living, they’re going to eat you alive if you don’t have someone in your corner to help you navigate that process. So that’s number one.

44:49
Sam Goodner
Number two, selling your business starts several years before you actually sell the business. You have to start thinking through. There’s many ways of doing this. If you’re an industry where you already know the top five likely buyers of your company, for example, and a lot of companies do, then you start thinking your entire business, then your entire strategy should be around how do I align my business to be the most tasty, the most appealing business for one of these five potential acquirers? What is it that, where do I fit in? What’s the puzzle that they’re, that I know they’re missing? And if Salesforce buys me or if Oracle buys me, I’m going to just beautifully fit this hole that they have right now. And I’m going to align my entire business around filling that hole because that’s going to maximize my valuation.

45:47
Sam Goodner
Not all companies have that kind of clarity of who might buy my business. I didn’t. I did know that EBITDA really matters now when I’m growing. When you’re a privately held company, you know, you make enough ebitda, you’re positive you don’t necessarily care about what that number looks like as long as it’s greater than zero. In some years it’ll be greater than others. But really at some point, because, you know, the faster were growing, were definitely, it was definitely burning through some EBITDA each time you open a new office. For me, it was a million dollar investment. Yeah, it was a million dollars of expenses before I started. You know, I got back to waterline, break even on that new office, for example.

46:28
Sam Goodner
But when a company’s buying you might think you’re super strategic and I’m going to be a revenue of, I’m a multiple of revenue. Most companies that are bought in the United States are a multiple of ebitda.

46:40
Speaker 4
Yep.

46:41
Sam Goodner
I’m not saying there’s not that rare technology company or that, you know, that drug research company that doesn’t have an ounce of ebitda. Those are the exceptions though. So focusing on what does a really healthy bottom line look like in my industry compared to everybody else. And I want to be in the top 10% there if I can. So really start focusing on emidas several years before you want to sell, start doing really healthy things like having audited financials, running your company as if one day you were going to be part of a public company. Just again, not all the overhead, but really thinking through stupid things like my record keeping, like, do I have all my customer contracts signed? And in one place have every one of my employees signed that employee agreement?

47:23
Sam Goodner
We don’t think about these things very much when we’re just running the business every day as a entrepreneur that owns a business. And yet all of those things really matter. When you start lining up your company for a sell. If you have all of your ducks in a row, you have good growth, strong ebitda, great records, you have audited financials now for several years. It makes that entire process, first of all. And you go hire an advisor to really help through that process. And they’re going to tell you up front, listen, we think realistically your business is worth X. These are the multiples we’re seeing. Kind of like when you go and use a real estate, you know, broker to buy or to buy an office building, like, I don’t know what price per square foot I should buy an office building on.

48:05
Sam Goodner
If I’m going to buy one, I want to hire somebody that can actually help me navigate that process and help me understand am I overpaying, underpaying. What’s, you know, what should I buy or sell this building for same thing in selling your business.

48:17
Brad
So I, so I’m glad that you use that example too because in the case of real estate, for example, yeah, I have quite a few reps.

48:24
Speaker 4
Right.

48:24
Brad
I’ve bought dozens of things so I have a lot of data points for it. Similarly, if I’m hiring a salesperson, I know what questions to ask, I know how to screen that person, I know what that interview process looks like, I know what the tells are.

48:39
Speaker 4
Right.

48:40
Brad
I do not know how to pick out an investment banker. How do you find a good person to advise you? Yeah, through the M and A process. If. Well, let’s just go with selling. It’s a great sales process.

48:51
Sam Goodner
I interviewed 12. So a, as you’re running your business, you’re always approached. At some point you start making. And I’m sure you have been. You’re approached by investment bankers that are like, hey, have you thought I sell your business?

49:02
Brad
It’s worse today than ever because of how solicitation happens. So today, you know, like early 2000s to early 2010s, I think the, well, I don’t know, spam was probably there then. But yeah, like the aggressive spam from investment bankers, venture capital, et cetera is wild.

49:23
Sam Goodner
So you can ignore all the spam, but if they get to the point where they’re actually reaching out to you and calling you and want to have a meeting with you, I’m always going to take that call even if my timing is not right. And I’m just going to file that away as okay, I’m going to take a list over the years of companies that start surfacing in my industry as reliable, you know, M and A bankers or brokers. And then it’s a process. Like I went and interviewed 12, I ask around other, you know, I ask around people that I know in the industry. Who have you used, who have you heard of, who has great reputation and you interview them. You go through that same in depth interview process you would any vendor or any employee.

50:02
Sam Goodner
You ask for references, you speak to those references like I want to speak to the CEO of a company you’ve helped in the last couple of years sell their business. I want to talk to them, tell me what was good about working with that company. Tell me where they could have done better, tell me what the outcome was, you know, and then, you know, obviously the terms of the deal, those matter less. I mean, you have to negotiate. Obviously everything’s negotiable. By the way, they’re going to say, here’s your fee and here’s our tail and all of that. And by the way, know that all of that is negotiable. But, and I’d rather incent them heavily on the high end of the, of the multiple.

50:37
Sam Goodner
So if they’re quoting me X percent for, you know, to sell my business, I’m like, okay, great, I’ll pay you x percent plus 2 if you sell it for this much. Like, okay, like I’ll put incentives on the table for them that they hadn’t even thought of.

50:51
Brad
For the person that’s helping you, for.

50:53
Sam Goodner
The investment banking, investment banker trying to help you sell the business. Again, there’s always some sort of retainer, but there’s usually a commission. There’s always a commission for the successful sale of your business and there’s always a tale if you don’t consummate that sale right away. So usually it’s a year or two where if, God forbid, somebody comes and buys your company without them involved, you still have to pay them the fee for a period of time. So again, all that’s negotiable. But I went through an interview process and found the one that I was really comfortable with and really loved working with them. They were great.

51:25
Brad
I think that’s great. Specifically references. So when you’re doing reference checks, hiring new employees, generally speaking, the references you get are you have to work to get good data from reference checks. In my experience.

51:39
Speaker 4
Yeah.

51:39
Sam Goodner
When you call the CEO of a company.

51:40
Speaker 4
Right.

51:41
Sam Goodner
Like, like anybody calls me, I’m going to give them.

51:43
Speaker 4
Right.

51:43
Sam Goodner
Like I’m going to give them the truth.

51:45
Brad
That’s why I bring it up. Because it’s a different framework for a reference check.

51:48
Speaker 4
Yeah. Right.

51:49
Brad
So if you’re talking to the founder, owner, CEO, whatever.

51:53
Speaker 4
Right.

51:53
Brad
Operating person in that company relative to their experience with investment bankers selling the company, you probably get better data points.

52:01
Speaker 4
Yeah.

52:02
Sam Goodner
And then once you’ve had a successful transaction with one, chances are you’re going to go back to that same, you know, that same company, that same, you know, m. And a broker because you know how to work with them, they know how to work with you trust them, you see what they’ve done. If you do multiple transactions, what are.

52:19
Brad
The main things that entrepreneurs should look out for when they are going to an investment banker to sell their company?

52:26
Sam Goodner
Well, again, number one is remember, everything is negotiable.

52:31
Speaker 4
Right.

52:31
Sam Goodner
They’re upfront fee, the retainer, the percent. You know, you want to make 100% sure. That obviously their interests are 100% aligned with yours. The other thing is you want to make sure you don’t get the bait and switch. So if you’re interviewing and you’re speaking to the big dog, the partner that has all the connections and, and you’re like, you’re blown away by what they know about your industry and who could potentially buy you. And like, they know more about your company than. But then you actually, you know, they give you the team that’s going to work with you for the next six months, and it’s a different team. So be careful of the bait and switch. Make sure that you insist on. I only want to meet with people that are going to be assigned and working on my project.

53:11
Sam Goodner
If it’s a company that has more than one employee, be careful. Debate and switch.

53:16
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah.

53:18
Brad
You know what I mean? I do, totally. It’s scary and it’s super interesting too, because it’s very common. I can’t speak to investment banking, but anytime you’re working with a large financial institution, it’s very common to end up with that situation where you get pawned off to an associate or something.

53:33
Sam Goodner
Yeah. I want to be only dealing with. I’ll meet you, but I only want to do this process. I want to meet with the people that are going to be working on my project.

53:41
Speaker 4
Love it.

53:42
Brad
Beautiful. Great advice. Awesome. I want to hear about your book, man. So, like clockwork, run your business with Swiss army precision.

53:51
Sam Goodner
Yeah, there are.

53:52
Brad
So, there are great things about this, but I think before we officially got going, you gave me a very good framework for the book, which I thought was cool. So you grew up in Switzerland?

54:04
Sam Goodner
Yes.

54:05
Brad
And part of being a Swiss citizen is that you have to be in the military.

54:10
Sam Goodner
We have compulsory military service for all men. Yes.

54:13
Brad
How long were you in the military and how did that play into the framework of the book?

54:17
Sam Goodner
So, and by the way, the reason I speak with no accent is both of my parents were American, so I moved to Europe when I was one. I moved. My parents moved me to Europe when I was one. They became Swiss. So I grew up there. Local passport, local schools. And again, we have compulsory military service. So after high school, all young Swiss men have to go serve. The way it works is you go through basic training, which is about five months, and if you just remain a soldier, then you just go back, like in the reserves, three weeks every year until you out until you’re 30.

54:49
Speaker 4
Whoa.

54:50
Sam Goodner
It takes two years to become an officer and you go back every three weeks until you’re 50. So our entire military system is made up of reservists, basically. But we can mobilize about 600,000 men in 24 hours, which makes it a formal defense force, you know, right there in the center of Europe and a very desirable kind of crossroads of north, south, east, west. And by the way, the only country in World War I and World War II that was not invaded. Not because were neutral. Five other countries were neutral on paper in World War II, for example, Germany invaded every single one of them. The only reason they didn’t invade Switzerland is we had 400,000 men on the borders ready to defend the country. We can blow up our infrastructure in two seconds. You’ve ever been to Switzerland? It’s very mountainous. You can’t.

55:32
Sam Goodner
Very difficult to, you know, move big land army through Switzerland without going through the mountain pass, all that. But. So I served two years, became an officer, and then I came back to the US to go to college and end up at one point in Austin to start my first business. What I didn’t realize is I was sort of naturally wired or good at building these, what I call people centered systems and processes to kind of run the different companies that I was. That I founded over 30 years. I just assumed that all companies were really good at this until I realized, wow, they’re not. And so the book is my way of. I mentioned I’m a mentor at Capital Factory. I love mentoring young entrepreneurs, but I often find myself repeating the sort of same lessons over and over again.

56:25
Sam Goodner
So I finally decided, let me actually go write a book where every chapter starts with a story from my time in the Swiss Army, a principle that I learned during that time that I then later applied in running one of the companies that I ran. And then to kind of, you know, give it a more solely rounded, you know, point of view. Every chapter has a third party case study where I interviewed another entrepreneur, CEO and how they implemented that same. That same principle at their business. Some are really easy. Once you understand it, you’re like, that’s obvious. So, like, chapter one, by the way, Randy, is a case study. Randy Cohen, you mentioned earlier, is a case study in chapter one of my book.

57:08
Speaker 4
Love it.

57:09
Sam Goodner
The first chapter is First Day. It’s all about how do you create this amazing experience for your employees on their very first day, first week, first month on the job? For most companies, that’s an afterthought. Most companies show up in. The receptionist says, hi, who are you and how can I help you? If you turn that around into making it this immersive, completely engaging, everything is ready for them. There’s balloons at their desk. It’s a big, you know, they’re taking them out to lunch. They get to work immediately that afternoon. Like there’s no idle time. You assign them a mentor or, you know, or an ambassador for that first week, first month, first three months, and you.

57:46
Sam Goodner
Everything is scripted right at home, if they’re married or if they have a partner, they get a big, you know, cookie basket that says, welcome to Catapult Systems. We can’t wait to see you at the next family event. If you just put a little thought in that, you can make this. And by the way, new employees are nervous.

58:02
Speaker 4
Yeah.

58:02
Sam Goodner
They, they made a big decision by joining your company and that first impression they get of how you have your stuff together or not and how engaging it is going to be very telling for them, especially young employees these days. And so we curated that entire first experience and Randy had this great. Again, I share his story because I love it. When a new employee was heard at Ticket City, he threw a party for them, literally with confetti and margaritas. And the new employees would run down the hall of the company and all the employees were lined up with their hands up in the air like that. And they’d run through all the high fiving, all the new employees like a star basketball player running into a basketball court.

58:44
Sam Goodner
And, and you know, and then he paired them up in two day increments with somebody to sit next to and mentor them and show them how it’s done here at Ticket City. Like all that leads us. Amazing. And by the way, his average tenure at ticket city is 20 years.

58:56
Speaker 4
Yeah.

58:56
Sam Goodner
It’s ridiculous, right? Yeah. So I share that story to just give a different flavor of it, but that’s an easy principle to implement because now you’ve heard it, you’re like, you’re right. I should make our new employee experience more engaging than it is.

59:09
Speaker 4
Mm. Right.

59:10
Brad
I love that. Well, I like the, I like from a structural perspective in the book. I like the idea of military principle.

59:16
Speaker 4
Yeah.

59:17
Brad
Applied to business and then case study of some way it’s there. And there are a lot of reasons I like that. But it’s a good, I think it’s a good structural framework for lots of things that people do in life. Because you can teach a principle, but if you teach the principle and you don’t show it in application in another place, it’s. It’s very hard for people to latch onto without additional thought. Basically, you’re giving them the additional thought versus making them try to figure it out themselves.

59:45
Sam Goodner
Listen, as human beings, I think the way we retain information is through stories, storytelling, if you’re a good storyteller. So one of the things I talk about is we had this really, I think, amazing employee onboarding program where about a month or 45 days into them joining the company, we had a catapult boot camp. I called it boot camp, obviously from my military background where it was two to four days depending on the department they joined. And day one I taught personally, I put combat fatigues on red beret and it was all day cultural indoctrination. And pretty much all day what I did was tell stories, tell the origin story of catapult and how we got started and what the idea was and how we grew.

01:00:29
Sam Goodner
And this is, you know, and then I talk about our core values and I tell stories around every single one of them and you know, and examples. We talk about our golden rules of customer service in the afternoon. And these are these how we, this is how we’ve codified our best practices and everything was a story. Like to just tell you know, you only have one chance to make a first impression. That’s great. But I’ll tell you a story where somebody botched that and that’ll, it’s going to crystallize it in your memory. So my point, my goal with the book was every chapter is a story. It’s a real story. Nothing’s made up. It may or may not apply to your business. You have to choose, but it’s a story. I love that.

01:01:11
Speaker 4
Yeah.

01:01:11
Brad
I mean I think you’ve got 30 chapters and 30 years of entrepreneurial experience to back that up. There are, entrepreneurship is sexier than it’s ever been. There are more people leaning in that direction than ever before. And I think that’s going to continue with this, with the wave of AI, with the wave of, you know, one person companies coming.

01:01:34
Speaker 4
I agree.

01:01:35
Brad
What advice do you have for a 25 year old entrepreneur getting started today?

01:01:40
Speaker 4
Wow.

01:01:40
Sam Goodner
First of all, there’s never been a better time, in my opinion. There’s never been a better time. All the tools are there. If you just dig a little bit.

01:01:47
Speaker 4
Right.

01:01:48
Sam Goodner
You don’t need a big HR department. You know, we don’t need a lawyer. I mean it helps have lawyers sometimes, but all these tools on how to get started with the business. You go incorporate with Zen business this afternoon and have this whole framework for Getting started. My advice is, and I do, speaking at high schools and colleges is always the same. Start sooner than you think. Start sooner rather than later. It is so much easier to start a business because you have to be willing to risk everything. That. That is still the common denominator here. And entrepreneurs are different than employees because they’re willing to risk everything. Right? Your tolerance for risk has to be really high because chances are you’re going to fail and have to start over and fail again and start over again.

01:02:36
Sam Goodner
So when you’re young and don’t have that big mortgage or that family yet and those mouths to feed and that college tuition to save for, you really have nothing to lose. Why not start now? You don’t need to wait 10 years in your industry to go just launch into something new. And you have this now amazing thought partner with artificial intelligence that we never had back in the day. I had my Oppenheimer moment six, eight months ago. I’m mentoring a young. I meet for the first time for office hours at Capital Factory with a young entrepreneur, Griffin. And he’s telling me the story for his. What his company does. And I think I’m in a sort of South Park. I look around and go, okay, I’m being punked right now because surely this is not like, this can’t be real.

01:03:28
Sam Goodner
And I’ll tell you what it is. He’s. And he’s doing it, by the way. He’s building basically this. This device that you put on dairy cows to capture the methane from their burps. And I’m thinking, cow burps? Really? Who’s punking me right now? And I’m thinking, okay, keep talking. And he’s like, this is a big problem, blah, blah. I mean, like, literally, he’s beginning to convince me with all these numbers. I’m like, okay, so you have a background in agrotech, surely. And he’s like, no. I’m the number one salesperson for a, you know, for a roofing company across the U.S. i’m like, okay, so how’d you come up with the idea? I was like, well, I was using AI as a thought partner, and I put in these parameters, and over the course of two weeks, went back and forth and back and forth.

01:04:14
Sam Goodner
I want to solve a big problem that has been solved before, and I want it to be this and be eco friendly. And we came up with this together. And I’m going, okay, it’s a new world. You mean it’s not that you’re using AI as a tool to help write code or your emails or it’s a true thought partner. Now, that helped. You came up with the idea for this company. And then I’m like, okay, well, you have to have a background in engineering to build this thing. It’s like, not at all. It’s like, well, how are you going to build this? Well, I work with AI on that, and AI suggested that I put this very carefully crafted thing out on LinkedIn to look for partners to come help me build this thing.

01:04:50
Sam Goodner
I have 10 PhDs that volunteer their time for free just for a piece of the pie, because they believe in the cause so much that they’re willing to help me engineer this thing. I’m like, okay, this is a new world.

01:05:01
Speaker 4
Wild.

01:05:01
Sam Goodner
And he’s actually doing it now.

01:05:03
Brad
That’s amazing. I love that. Well, big ups to Capital Factory and you for mentoring.

01:05:07
Speaker 4
Yeah, love that.

01:05:09
Brad
Sam, it’s been great talking, man. I appreciate you coming out.

01:05:12
Sam Goodner
Pleasure.

01:05:13
Speaker 4
Yeah.

01:05:13
Brad
Where do you want to point people? You find. Find the book coming out.

01:05:16
Sam Goodner
The book comes out September 9th.

01:05:17
Speaker 4
Great.

01:05:17
Sam Goodner
Amazon. You know, I’m warning you, I recorded in my own voice, so if you download the audible version of it’s in this voice. But yeah, the hardback paperback on Amazon, September 9th, if you want to find out about it or sign up for, you know, free chapters, you can go to samgoodner.com that’s the website for the book, and find out all about it. You’ll see, you know, a bunch of chapters in there. But yeah, samgoodner.com or September 9th, Amazon. Like clockwork.

01:05:45
Speaker 4
Love it.

01:05:45
Brad
Sam, thanks so much.

01:05:47
Sam Goodner
Thank you. It was a pleasure.

01:05:49
Brad
Likewise.

01:05:51
Speaker 3
All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me, my name is Brad Wymert. I am also the founder of Easy Pay Direct, which is a payment processing company that serves a tremendous amount of our guests on the show and a ton of our audience people like you. So if you’re accepting credit cards and you would like better service, better rates, and a way to optimize the way that you’re accepting payments, you can check us out@e epd.com forward/b a m Again, that’s epd.com forward/bam.