E5: What is some of the worst advice you hear people telling founders?

Ira: 0:05

Hi everyone. I'm your host, ira Gordon, and you're listening to the Accidental Entrepreneur, a show about the ups and downs and ins and outs of the journey of starting a company when you have no idea what you're doing. If you caught our last episode, you may already know what the question of today is. But if not, why don't you let everybody know what the Wheel of Names pulled up for us? Stacee?

Stacee: 0:33

The question is "hat is some of the worst advice you hear people telling founders. This is a really good question, because now that we're entrepreneurs and founders and we've had successful exits, we get invited to all these places where people think we know what we're doing. So we hear their stories. You particularly because you work with the what is that called Ira?

Ira: 1:07

Veterinary Angel Network?

Stacee: 1:09

Well, I was thinking of the pitch contest.

Ira: 1:15

Oh well, I did The Idea" through Vet Prep, which was for vet students.

Stacee: 1:19

Yes, "The Idea. Tell us about that.

Ira: 1:22

The idea was an innovation competition that we built at Vet Prep specifically for veterinary students. The idea behind "the idea was that my partners and I felt like we just totally accidentally fell into entrepreneurship when we started Vet Prep because we were suffering from this problem and we just wished there was something better and decided to do it ourselves. We had no idea what we were doing and we had each other to encourage ourselves and we were lucky that we ran into some fantastic people that helped us and mentors along the way, but figured that lots of people may not have that, and so wouldn't it be neat for us to create a competition to encourage students to share their ideas and provide some mentorship to help them really evaluate those ideas and think about if they could be a potential viable business and then potentially provide them with some funding if they won that competition as well? So it was pretty neat.

Stacee: 2:15

So you probably heard some stories where people shared what others had told them. What's some of the bad stuff you heard?

Ira: 2:21

Well, so my favorite piece of bad advice actually came from my partner at the second business I was involved in, which was the veterinary practices that we built and that I worked in for many years, and he already had an existing veterinary oncology business at the time that we were coming together to build a veterinary radiation center and cancer center and he really wanted to hire me rather than necessarily partner with me, and I remember him saying that the business advice that his father-in-law had given him is that you should never take a partner unless you absolutely have to.

Ira: 3:04

And I just remember thinking to myself that that seems like terrible advice. I partnered with my vet school classmates to start Vet Prep and obviously we did a lot of great things there. But in addition to having my partners to improve the business that we were actually building, the whole fun part about it was doing it with people that I liked and not just kind of building something totally on my own with nobody to sort of commiserate during the tough times or celebrate the good things. But actually working with a team of co-founders that I really liked, that were fun to think through, problems with and work together, was probably for me like the most rewarding thing about entrepreneurship, and so hearing this advice that you should never take a partner was kind of jarring, and I am happy to sort of look back and say that when I point out that he gave me this advice back when we were first starting to come together, he's totally come around to my point of view.

Stacee: 4:11

What do you think some good qualities are in a partner or co-founder? Because I do think there are a lot of horror stories about companies basically tanking because the co-founders couldn't agree on the direction or the strategy of the company.

Ira: 4:31

Yeah, absolutely. It's a big deal to be partners with somebody that aligns with you and that you can collaborate with, as opposed to clash with. You don't want somebody that's just going to agree with you. You actually want to have productive conflict and conversations about difficult things. But I think it's certainly having it be somebody that you trust and not somebody that you've just been through sort of easy things with is good.

Ira: 5:02

It is certainly ideal, in my experience, to partner with somebody that has something different than what you have.

Ira: 5:10

And although at VetPrep my partners were also all like, we were all vet students when we started, so we were all idiots and we were all interested in the same kind of medicine, but it turns out that our personalities and the way that we operate are different enough that we were extremely complimentary.

Ira: 5:28

So I am sort of the thoughtful, curious, quiet, introvert, but really sort of an operator that likes figuring out how things work and getting into the nuts and bolts of that. My partner and best friend, Mauricio. He is an energetic, visionary, just idea factory that is constantly thinking about wouldn't it be cool if" Sorts of questions. And then our other partner, steve, is sort of the voice of reason in between the two of us, and so I think we really balance each other out. I know I couldn't have done it without them and I think that they couldn't have done it without me. So having that type of complimentary something whether it's a skill set or a sort of aspect of your personality and how you operate would be important to think about as you come up with your team of co-founders.

Stacee: 6:29

Yeah, I ended up getting a partner too, and you do like you do when you're dating you ask around, you see who their friends are, you see if the are a genuine person, and some of it's got instinct to some degree, but a lot of it is just hanging out in the preface and, like you did with your, your fellow classmates, you'd hung out with them a lot before you got the idea to do this thing. And also, for me it comes down to two big factors, which is trust and communication, like honest communication, not someone that's just gonna, you know, have a hard time telling you when they disagree with you.

Ira: 7:12

Yeah, I think it is. It's unromantic to say this, but a business partnership is a bit like a marriage right. You are contractually sort of bound to work through the future, whether for better or for worse right, and if things aren't working out, the consequences of splitting up can be really pretty negative for all parties involved.

Stacee: 7:41

What's that saying? I think it's two beers and a dog. Have you heard that?

Ira: 7:45

Wow, no, I've heard of two MBAs and a PowerPoint.

Stacee: 7:50

So two beers and a dog is, if you like this person enough, that you go have two beers with them.

Ira: 7:56

Okay.

Stacee: 7:57

But if you really like them a lot, you'd have them watch your dog.

Ira: 8:01

I like it.

Stacee: 8:02

So that's a good litmus, thinking about getting into a partnership with somebody.

Ira: 8:07

Well, how about you, Stacee? What's some of the worst advice that you've heard ?

Stacee: 8:12

I've heard this one told to so many people and they say it to me and it just literally makes me cringe when they don't even want to tell me their idea because they think I'm going to steal their idea, and that they've been told that they should not tell their idea to anybody because someone's going to steal it, and I'm like that is the worst advice ever, because that idea getting the idea is not actually even the hard part. It's all the work to turn the idea into a product or a service, and you cannot do it alone. Even if you aren't thinking about getting a partner, you need people, and there's so many people that want to help you, and so when you keep everything hidden behind closed doors, nobody can help you, and I think you have such an increased chance of failing.

Ira: 9:06

Yeah, I'm sure there are a small number of exceptions to this rule, but I absolutely agree with you. I mean, I think about what we did at Vet Prep. I am a thousand percent sure that we were not the first vet students to complain about the fact that we didn't have any cool study materials and that it wasn't fair that the med students had all this great online study material and we were stuck reading through these long and painful books to get through, to try to go through that process. It was a great idea, but we certainly weren't the only ones to have it. The hard part is actually building something valuable and for 99% of businesses, you're absolutely right.

Ira: 9:48

I think that I mean, I've probably had thousands of ideas that other people have turned into great businesses. They didn't steal my idea, because lots of people have ideas and you're probably not the only one that's thought of it, but you may be the only one that actually cares about it enough and has the ability to turn it into something valuable. So, yeah, that's great. When we were you mentioned the idea innovation, competition earlier we had some people that were helping mentor the students that were involved, and I most specifically would call out a guy named Aaron Massecar, who you probably know, and I mean this was like the battle he would fight all the time was trying to get students to share their ideas and their plans with each other so that they could help each other and really kind of having to fight that narrative of your ideas are the value of your company? They probably aren't.

Stacee: 10:47

They're not. They're not. It's the hard work it goes with the idea. All right. Well, let's jump over now to this part of the show where we will share a favorite quote book, tech, tool or person who do you got for us today, Ira?

Ira: 11:06

I will mention a technology tool that it took me a long time to actually come around to, and that was a CRM, which I believe stands for Customer Relationship Management Tool. I might have that wrong and if so I apologize, but when we started our business, we had our first customer and I put their name on a spreadsheet along with what they bought, and then I added to that over time, ultimately building that to tens of thousands of lines on a spreadsheet and adding some fun formulas to calculate things. It wasn't until, as I said, 10 plus years into the business that somebody said what do you mean? You guys don't have a CRM.

Stacee: 11:53

You have a special secret spreadsheet.

Ira: 11:59

The one we chose is called HubSpot. There's lots of great CRMs out there, but having a tool that allows everybody that is a customer, everybody that might be a customer, everybody that's worked with your products in some capacity, and actually monitoring them, managing them and marketing to them, was something that we really never thought was an important thing until we implemented it. It was a pretty significant difference maker for us to start using one.

Stacee: 12:35

That's so funny. We have a similar story that. So when I left my hospital, my practice manager, Karyn, she's like don't leave me here, I'm going with you. So she quit too and we both went to start that to pet. And right away she's like we cannot keep our customers in your little notebook, we're going to have to have some professional product here. I'm like, oh no, I don't think that's necessary. Oh, it wasn't necessary. Yeah, we ended up going with Salesforce and you know, the key to those things working is setting it up well.

Stacee: 13:16

And if I could give advice to my former self, I would say spend the money, get someone to help you set it up, the infrastructure of that thing really good, and then you'll be so happy in the future.

Stacee: 13:29

For me, I'm going to share one of my technology tools I can't imagine I could have started Vet2 Pet without, and that is Keynote, which is the Mac version of PowerPoint.

Stacee: 13:44

And Keynote I was able to basically have a clean whiteboard that I could do design on, I could put ideas on, I could build mockups of what was in my head in a program that was easy enough for a regular person to use, and over the years I just hacked up that keynote. I would have vision and boards and all kinds of different things that I could play around in, and it would be like 300 pages long. And I'd start a new one and I just called it creative ideas, and it allowed me to take what was in my head and show it to somebody else, because that transfer of knowledge is a real problem if you're trying to grow fast and you're trying to innovate. So when I showed somebody what I was doing in keynote and they're like a real professional person and they're like, oh my God, what have you done here? You've repurposed this tool for something completely inappropriate and I'm like, well, I don't know, this is just the only thing I know how to do. So it worked.

Ira: 14:59

That's great. Yeah, I used more of like a Google Docs person for that kind of thing, but that's fantastic.

Stacee: 15:07

I don't think I knew about Google Docs back then.

Ira: 15:10

Yeah, but I feel like I've been using it for a while, but I couldn't tell you how long. All right, everybody. Well, thank you very much for joining us on today's episode of the Accidental Entrepreneur. I'll help you. Listen to us again for our next episode.