 We have a fantastic guest on the show today, Dave Will, a serial entrepreneur starting a new company PropFuel, which we'll get into later, and he's been an EO and building relationships is what he does well, and I've researched you a lot and found amazing things and great insights, and I've actually learned quite a bit about being an entrepreneur and living in a startup world and exiting, so thanks for coming on the show today. Yeah, of course. Thanks. That's awfully nice. So tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, kind of your family, because I think it's great to get people insights and where you came from so they can really understand your journey. Yeah, I wish I had a story about growing up in the plains of Africa, or in Squalder and living homeless, I'm thinking of Tony Robbins, he's got some great stories. I don't have a great grow up story, although let me rephrase that, I actually do have a great grow up story. That's something I really enjoyed. My childhood was awesome, you know, we were lower middle class, I grew up in kind of a nondescript part of Connecticut, always been a New England boy, and my parents were married for a very long time, until my mother passed. What did your parents do for a living? My mother was a teacher, my father was an engineer. My father was, really is, is, still is. Really smart guy, like really smart guy. And then he, it's, I must skip a generation, because my kids are really smart too. My brother and I, we, you know, we got solid B's in school, but, and what, when you were going to schools or anything that you loved or were passionate about, like studying or, or figuring things out. I loved the big cheese. That's what we called it out of the recess, and it was this thing that looked like a saddle, and I, I don't even know how to scribe it, I could probably draw a picture with this weird geometrical shape, and it's called the big cheese, that's what I loved in school. So when it comes to what I loved in school, it was not the reading, it was not the writing, and it wasn't the arithmetic. How's that? So that's, yeah, I'm not an academic. You know what, which is funny, because at one point, I, I think it was when I was, actually, so I left college, I went a pretty traditional path. I left college, worked for a couple of years, big Fortune 500 companies, and then- Why'd you start on that path, just work, because it was like it seemed to be the natural path to go? That's what you're supposed to do, right? Right, exactly. Especially when your mom's a teacher and your dad's an engineer, and you grew up with this dream of one day making a hundred thousand dollars, you know, like if I could make a hundred thousand dollars in a career, that, I, I'd look at that and I think, my God, that's, talk about shooting for the stars, you know. Yeah. I did not have great aspirations of walking on the moon. You know, I grew up in everything about my life and growing up, it was, again, it was a phenomenal childhood. My parents, our family was wonderful, went on great vacations. Now, when I say that, I didn't fly in an airplane until late high school, I think, and that was a school trip, you know, I was in the Boy Scouts, I was in the marching band, I was in a great athlete, I developed late in life, I was an average student, so I, I took an average path in life. You know, I worked for the big company. And SAP? No, not yet. That was a little later. So, I, I went to college, I, I got a job at the Fortune 500, I, I got my MBA and I, now at that point, interestingly enough, I thought, ooh, maybe, maybe I should be a professor. Because now I'm getting a little cocky. I think I went to Penn State, you know, which is a top 25 business school, which is, it's, I say it like that because it's funny. You see, you thought about teaching. What about teaching time you on or excited you or? Oh, access to the gym, access to the, like walking around campus. Just the freedom that you have in being a professor on campus, kind of defining your own career path. It wasn't the reading, writing, or arithmetic that turned me on. So, it was, it was just, you know, I was young. I had all these strange perspectives of how to create a career path. You know, so my career path was focused on what can I get out of it? As opposed to what can I dive into? You know, it was a totally different mentality. And I, I went down that path for a long time. Well, what changed your perspective and what seminal pivotal event or person really made it all shift? Because obviously you've shifted gears in a big way from that thinking to where you are today. Yeah, it's, it wasn't necessarily a person as much as it was an event. And the event was, I got fired. So, I worked, you know, so again, I worked for Nielsen, Kraft General Foods, MBA, PricewaterhouseCoopers, traveling, nonstop. So I had good jobs, like they were really good jobs. And I was making pretty good money. And then I didn't want to travel as much. So I found a niche boutique, doing systems integration stuff. By the way, yes, I worked for SAP for a very short period of time as an intern, a summer intern in my MBA. And working for the small boutique, it just so happened that small boutiques don't do so well in a bubble, in when the bubble burst, I should say. So this was back in 2000, 2001 when technology bubble burst. And so now they're not getting the business they need. And so they kind of look and figure out, where's our greatest return? I was making a little more money than I should for what I was bringing into the business. They did the absolute right thing. They fired me. So I remember very clearly, 1030 in the morning, this was 2001 in the spring. It was actually, so what is it, April? So I remember walking to the pier in Boston, waiting for the ferry, because it took a ferry in to downtown Boston from where I live. And I called my wife from the pier to let her know I was coming home. And I remember as soon as I heard her voice, I don't think I said anything. I just burst into tears. I imagined her. And I could even hear our first born son who's 16 now, almost 17. And he was in her arms. I could hear him cooing, blabbering, talking about stuff. And she answered the phone. And I thought we had just moved into this new home. And a somewhat affluent part of the South Shore of Boston, she wasn't working. And we had this baby. Shit, I just got fired. And so in a heartbeat, my whole plan crumbled. And I. How are you feeling now? Oh, Jesus, I was in tears. You were in tears, but what caused, I mean, letting people down, did you think? Or just not looking at the expectation? That's a great question. So, you know, they say that. You feel like you were letting your wife down? Yeah, my son. My nine-month-old son, my wife, my father. Why your father? Was it just? Well, they say that we're always trying to please our fathers. You know, that's something I read when I was, we have three boys. And as we're raising, actually I read this book called Raising Boys. And so as we're raising boys, one of the things that I read, which rung true with me, is we're always trying to, no matter what stage of life we're in, we're always trying to impress our fathers. My father is a great dad, is a great dad. And there's nothing in particular he did that warrants me having to prove myself to him. But it's just something that I think we as young men and adults always strive to do. Whether you come from an abusive relationship with your father and wanted to prove to him that you're of value, or really come up from a loving relationship with your father and want to prove to him that he was right. The latter is more true for me. But regardless, yeah, I felt like I'd let other people down. I felt like I'd been exposed. People knew you were a fraud? Now all of a sudden, you know, I'm not what I always said I was going to be. I'm not valuable to this company. Did you feel like an imposter on them? Or just being exposed to people just saw that you really couldn't do what you thought you could do? I never felt like work was a part of who I was. Work was a place I went to. Work was something I did. Work was something I tried to get out of. And work is something I wasn't very good at. So did I feel like an imposter? I don't know. I felt like I lived before 9 in the morning and after 5 at night. Even though I was 30 years old, I wasn't a kid. I was 30 years old. You'd think by then I would have figured it out. I think most people do actually. But people reinventing themselves now at way later and different stages of their lives. I think it's challenging because everything changes different points in what you want, where your trajectory is, what things matter to you from experiences in your life. It's also possible that I mean I'd lived a very comfortable life. I didn't have a lot of hardship, you know. I didn't have, we didn't have a lot of wealth compared to a lot of people I knew either. But we had a very solid family. I had great experiences in life. I was well educated. So you know, I needed something jarring. And this was something jarring. So what did you do from this moment? What did this moment propel you to do? Oh yeah, so I went home and I trimmed the hedges. So naturally that's what anyone would do when you get fired. So it's about noon, I'm home and I'm not really hungry so no sandwich. So what am I going to do? So I trimmed the hedges. So I remember her going out and I got my weed whacker and my wife, she doesn't know what to do. She's just kind of trying to be as positive as possible. And so I get the weed whacker and I think I was like three or four minutes in and I sliced my finger open. Just like my mind was not there, I was just in a haze and I'm weed whacking and it wasn't weed whacking, trimming the hedges. And the blade from this thing trimming the hedges like slices my finger and like I got bone. I was looking at bone on my finger. Granted, I could lose the finger and that would have been the greatest hardship in my life right at the point. So I asked my wife, I said, I think we need to go to the hospital. So we get in the car and again, we're new to town. So I said, listen I know there's South Shore Hospital, that's like 20 minutes away, let's just go to this one I saw, it's not that big a deal, small hospital is fine. So we go to this place, we don't have to get on the highway, just kind of around town. I remember seeing the sign for this hospital. And so we take a left at the Dunkin Donuts and we go down another 120 yards or so and then on the left there's this hospital, he pulls in, she goes into emergency and drops me off and I go in like this and I cut my finger and I might need some stitches or something with this and she says, oh that looks bad and she's like you should go to a hospital. I'm like, well where am I? And she says, you're at a psychiatric hospital. So that was my experience, so that's what I did. That's what I did when I got fired as I ended up going to a psychiatric hospital for the wrong reason but maybe it was the right place, I don't know. So ultimately I got a little scar that's about it. To really answer your question, I tried to get another job and I did actually. I got another job offer and I remember this feeling, this is a really dark feeling. It's a feeling that I'll have this feeling inside my head for the rest of my life but in my heart I remember thinking about this job and as it commuted into Cambridge, Massachusetts, a tech company, cool company, cool job, making about the same what I was making in my last job. The offer came through like within two weeks of getting fired, sweet. So I'd even have a little severance and I mean, perfect, right? I should take it. I just didn't want to, it was just another, it was this point where I had hit this realization that it's just doing the wrong things, just doing the wrong things. And a friend of mine had come to me recently with a new idea. And how'd you figure that? I mean it was just you're not passionate, you're just like do I have to just do this another nine to five quote unquote job all over again and like. Yeah, you know what it was, a lot of fear knowing that they thought I was much more capable at doing what they needed done than I actually had confidence in. So going on the first day of the job, I mean I sure, I could probably learn it. But I just didn't want to have a similar experience where you go into something with these people having expectations of something that you can deliver and you just got to figure it out. You were just getting sick and tired of having to live up to these new expectations. I was a great chameleon. I did what I blended in to what I was supposed to do. Dave the chameleon? Yeah. So I just, it gave me a dark feeling without defining it, it just gave you a dark feeling. We have a dark feeling about something generally you don't want to do it, right? Right. But we got to put food on the table. We did not have a big savings account. So what'd you do? So a friend of mine came to me with, this is like, right around the same period of time, a friend of mine came to me with, his name's Rick, came to me with, this thing called web conferencing and this is back in 2001, so he came to me with web conferencing and said look I have a relationship with someone I think I can get us some licenses and I know a ton of people that need this stuff. So we actually had this acronym. I can't remember the acronym it was, but it stood for the tired old sales executive. That wasn't exactly, but that was the person we were going after. Not to be negative. We weren't necessarily insulting this person, but that was our persona. That was our target audience was the person that's tired, old, generally in the sales area and by the way old is relative, but somebody was late in their career that was typing with thumbs and fingers and this is pre-smartphone too. And we wanted to hold their hand through this process, so they weren't going to just go buy Webex and live meeting didn't exist yet and go to meeting that didn't exist yet I don't think. So Webex was the only major player out there, but we had licenses and we just started selling these things reselling them and that over time evolved into the business that I sold 14 years later to private equity. Yeah, massive transition. But you massively pivot, but you started out for nothing and got up and make these phone calls. I mean. Oh yeah. Oh my God. That must have been difficult if you had never done anything like that. Oh brother. Oh my God. No. For the first time. Never. I made $40,000 my first year. So I was making enough to support a company, I mean I was making enough to support a family in a fairly affluent area when I got fired. Then I come down and make $40,000 a year, which is really difficult to live on and again in this neighborhood with a baby and a wife who's not working. Not to mention debt from my MBA and I'm sure we had a car loan and all this other stuff that we had to pay. So I was making $40,000 the first year and that was even debatable whether or not we could. And that was $40,000 revenue. That wasn't like $40,000 profit. That was $40,000 in revenue I think we made the first year. Between you and your partner? Yeah, so he had a full-time job. So he didn't care about it or anything. No, it was 50-50. I never thought about actually selling that business and I didn't really sell that business. It evolved and grew and turned into a different business. But this was the start. And the start was all about putting food on the table. We just needed some money to put on the table and I didn't know how to run a business. But it wasn't hard in the way that it was something that I'd never done before. It was the most amazing feeling because I would go down to my basement where I had a desk and a little window, one of those basement windows. And there's a door going out through the back here that was sloping. And I would go down to that basement. I wouldn't come up unless I had to go to the bathroom or I was hungry or it was dark. I loved it. I just loved it like immediately. I just found something that I loved to do. I don't know why really because I didn't have this. Do you ever watch Silicon Valley? I've seen it a few times. Love this show Silicon Valley. So they joke in Silicon Valley it's all about changing the world and what this technology can do to change the world. I didn't have any perspective of how selling web conferencing to tired old sales executives was going to change the world. I didn't care. For me it was more like a game. We're just having fun. I was picking up the phone. I was having conversations with cool people. I was going to get them to buy something I was selling. I was just having fun. And it was paying some of the bills. And I remember saying this for like seven or eight years that one day I might have to get a real job. But I said that for seven or eight years before I finally accepted I guess this is a real job. Like I guess I got a job here. And so anyway no it wasn't. Of course there were a lot of hard things in growing the business. How did you take it to the next level because you were making forty grand and then how did you get it from there to be like because obviously it turned out to be. Overnight success. No it's just completely opposite. It was extremely slow. Was there a pivotal moment that kind of put you kind of to the next level? Did you sell? Was it a big deal that you sell or is there something like that? There were a lot of transitions. So in one of the things I've heard you talk about is pivoting in the business. That you were able to pivot the business and change it over time in order to make it to what you eventually sold the company. So I think that's the important thing whether it's a pivot or an adjustment or taking advantage of opportunities I don't know whatever you want to call it. I like the word pivot which may be overused especially in the tech and in Silicon Valley. But instead of moving in one direction and deciding that this is not at all who we are and switching to something else that's a real pivot but I use the pivot in more of a forty five degree angle as opposed to a full ninety or a hundred eighty degree. So yeah it was constant. So there are two things I was constantly looking at in hindsight and one was how do I make this more valuable? That was more later in the business I should say. It wasn't early on where I was thinking about the value of the business but how do I make this more valuable was something ultimately that I ask myself just about every day and there wasn't always an obvious answer it was a mindset. But the thing I thought about with especially early on is what do I need to do to make sure that I'm here tomorrow. In other words what do I need to do? What demons are chasing me and what am I chasing? So looking over my shoulder what are the competitors doing? I've always liked looking at competitors. I know a lot of people say don't look at your competition. I was a competitive archer growing up and I remember my coach telling me I'd ask what the closest guy's name was Duncan. Duncan was always real close to me and poor Duncan never won though. And I remember asking what's Duncan got, what's his score, my coach said don't worry about it. I was like come on I want to know what Duncan's got. And so ultimately I figured out what Duncan had and knowing that I really liked it. So I like keeping an eye on the competition. So I'd always be watching the competition figuring out how can I stay just ahead of them. And so that led to a lot of pivots. So one point of, one milestone was when we went from web conferencing and helping organizations run successful meetings to creating an alliance, I'll say, because Walmart didn't become our customer. But Walmart was kind of a strategic partner of ours where we would reach out to their supplier base. They have 50,000 suppliers. So supplier being people that put stuff on their shelves. So the manufacturers of paper, of equipment, of glasses, of pencils, of anything you see in this room that they sell at Walmart, those are suppliers. And so Procter and Gamble and Polaroid and Ocean Spray and all of these organizations that sell stuff at Walmart, those became our customer base because they were the ones interested in learning more about Walmart's inventory management software called Retelling. And so we created the online version of something that already existed which was Retelling User Group. And again this was something my partner Rick brought to the table. He had experience. He was working in that industry, he had knowledge of this. So Rick brought us into this world of creating a digital version of this learning community. So that concept of creating these courses online for 50,000 suppliers to tap into. Because they were having a problem utilizing the system Walmart had and they couldn't figure it out. Walmart was horrible at training. They did zero training. They said, look take this software, this is how you're going to save money because now you don't need to buy Nielsen data or IRI data. Take our software, we're going to give you all the data for free, for free. Which is millions of dollars worth of data. So Walmart gives that to their suppliers and says okay now you have this data, now make it less expensive for us. And so but nobody knew how to do that or how to manage the system. So there were experts in the industry. We tapped into their knowledge, put it into courses and started selling it. So then we had a couple other organizations pop up that said hey we kind of want to create a community like that, a community that we can create and sell content to. So I hired a developer, contracted, didn't hire, contracted a developer to build a learning site very similar to the one we built with Retail Link. And then another one. So now we got three or four, we're taking like six months each to build these things out. It was incredibly slow, not scalable at all. Yeah. And that's when ultimately we discovered the world of associations. So we went from consumer goods, tired old sales executive. We realized that that's fine. We're doing some business and we're growing gradually. But the opportunity for us now lay in the association world. And so we found associations which are these organizations of members that have thousands of members and belong to an association. And they are all creating knowledge about a certain subject area. So instead of building these one off sites, I found another organization in this space that we partnered with and ultimately merged with to create a learning management system. So that with a flick of a switch, instead of six months with a flick of a switch, we could take what we're doing earlier and make it scalable. So now we had a learning management system and we got up to about 250 customers in a fairly short period of time. And I'd say if there was a hockey stick, it's more of a field hockey stick, I think. But anyway, if it was a hockey stick, that's the moment where we really found who we were. We found a niche, which is another real key to doing things well. It's finding a niche and focusing on that niche. You were determined and perseverant and you pivoted along the way. And because you stayed the course, you eventually found your hockey stick up. Yeah, it was a relentless forward motion is a mantra I subscribe to. And that's- Do you find that with the- I mean, a lot of people don't do relentless forward motion. A lot of people don't. And that seems to be a separating point for a lot of people is that relentless forward motion is what allows them eventually to break through and stay the course. Yeah. And find there, because most entrepreneurs, maybe some people get lucky and they do within the first year or two. But most people, when you talk the journey, it's 5, 10, 15 or more years where they're having their big moment that really took them up. So people get tired. Yeah, people get tired. And they just give up. But I think you found your passion and your purpose. And you also knew that if you just didn't work, you'd have to go back to that tired old nine to five job that you hated too. Sometimes these fuels around us get us- There was never a question of giving up though. And I don't even think of it as giving up. Well, I know, but other people might look at it like that. For most people, I think what happens is they get to a point where it's so tiring that they think, you know, I'm going to get much more personal reward of going to work for Fidelity or State Street or this Biotech or this other guy. They're going to find more reward in that than they are in doing this. You know, so over the course of the 14 years, I had two different partners, both of which I bought out at a certain point. My first partner, Rick, who I've mentioned many times, is still a very good friend of mine. And how did you decide to buy them out and approach them? It's just when it's course and they weren't interested anymore. So I'll tell you each one. So with Rick, it got to a point where it was no longer just dabbling and trying something. You know, we're just $40,000 bringing in it. We were two or three years into it. We were finding some traction. It got to a point where I thought, you know, if we're going to move forward with this, if this is something that we're going to pursue, we've got to be all in. We've got to, we've really got to be all in. And so I asked him to join me. I actually quite the opposite of what happened. I asked him to come and be all in with me. Or not, one or the other. It was more or less an ultimatum saying, look, we've got to be in or out. And he understandably had a great career. He's a little bit older than me and had, you know, he's looking at his pension. He's thinking about his future. He's making good money. He's got a steady job. He's enjoying it. This was a hobby for him. And so he said, you know what, I think, I think I'm out. I got a daughter going to college. So we came over the reasonable price. I bought him out for, in hindsight I laugh, at that time it was the right amount. I bought him out for $17,000 and a laptop. So I let him keep the laptop, which I think he gave to his daughter going to college and the $17,000 helped pay for the first year at college. And he was happy. And I was happy. So now I'm the sole owner of the business at the time. And then I mentioned that we found another company and married that company. And at that point, we're both about the same size at the time. And we had an advisor that we trusted value the businesses. And because mine was valued a little more profitable, I got the majority of the shares. So which is relevant to the story. So I got, I think I was at 68%, my partner was at 32%. And so three or four years in to that relationship, he came to me at a conference. I remember we were in the middle of a conference in DC for associations and he came to me. Really surprised me when he says, yeah, you know what, I'm tired. And I had to be honest, I'm not a majority shareholder or an equal shareholder. And I just want to do something fun for me again. So he stopped having fun for you. So again, he didn't quit. What happened is he just found a greater return doing something different. So maybe it's semantics, I don't consider that quitting. I consider that a personal pivot, right? So he decided to leave and we found a mutually agreeable value for his shares and I bought him out. No, I didn't expect. I had every intent of selling the business at some point, as did he. Neither one of us expected it to happen that soon. But I created a five-year plan from that point with my executive team and said, here's where, when I say I created it, we had some help from the outside. It was a phenomenal process. But we created this vision, it was actually a three-year vision. Was that the Prometheus process? Yeah, Prometheus, it was called. And we used a gentleman named Kyle Howlin. What is that Prometheus? He's with the core group, by the way. So he was incredibly helpful. So yeah, let me come back to that second. So we created a three-year vision, a very, very clear vision of where we wanted to be as an executive team. And then we thought, when we hit that goal, when we're there, when we're at that vision, we're going to essentially open our minds to the thought of selling. So what that meant, I didn't really know yet. But we're going to prepare the business for sale and then we're going to sell. So that was very, very, I was very transparent with my executive team about the selling part. I don't think I was as transparent with our employees about our goal to sell. Because there's a lot of options that could have presented itself at that point. And it happened much quicker. So we ended up selling two years into that three-year vision. So instead of five years, it was two years later that we ended up selling this. Do you think that having that vision helped you sell the business quicker? Absolutely. Oh my God, absolutely. So that was a key piece of it was actually having a crystal clear picture of where you wanted to go. And then what happened is you sped up the process because everyone was aligned to where you were headed together and bought it. So at this point, I'm all in a culture. A culture to me is an incredibly important part of the business. What does culture mean to you? Because people say that. So culture. I'm going to steal this from Brian Halligan, who is the founder of HubSpot, one of the two founders of HubSpot. And HubSpot is a marketing automation platform. They've gone past 12 or 13 years, 12 years I think, to a $2 billion valuation. They're a public company. So he's done a great job. One of his mentors described culture as the way people make decisions when you're not in the room. So to me, culture is this guiding force that helps people behave the way they should. And how did you create that guiding force? What concrete steps did you take in order to make this? There's three elements to creating a great culture. One is motivation, finding the right motivation for your people. And it's actually a pretty generic formula, I think. The second thing, I'll get into that in a second, the second thing is trust. That's really, really hard because you're bringing people in, you don't know them. Yes. And now you have to trust them. That's hard. And then you have cadence. Cadence is a word I like to use because I think cadence leads to habit. Habit is, it could be good or bad, but cadence is something you actually can do to maintain good habits. So that's why I like the word cadence better than forming habits or patterns. So looking at motivation, if you can create an environment and a culture, I'm not talking about hats, prop fuel. So I'm not talking about hats with the prop fuel logo, I'm not talking about pens and pads. Actually, so let me put a little interlude in here. One of the few people that ever left my company, and I say that purposely, it sounds a little arrogant, but not a lot of people left our company, very, very low attrition. But one of the people that left, left because she wasn't into her career, she was into making money so she could pay for school. Her passion, and I know this because she came to me and said, I'm struggling. I like it here. I love the people I work with, but I need to make more money. I said, well, why? What's going on? And she's like, well, because I need to pay for school. That's where I want to go. And she said, and the last company I worked for is inviting me back and paying me more money. I encouraged, I said, you should go because you're not here to form a career. You're not here to create a great life for yourself. You're here to make money to pay for college. Go take that career, bank it, and go to college as quickly as you can. And so she called me back two or three months later, she sent me an email saying, so can you tell me where you get your hats and pens and belts and bags and all that stuff? Because I'm trying to teach my bosses how to create a great culture. And I didn't know where to start. So I wrote her back in this email saying, I can give you those links and those phone numbers, but the perks that you're talking about are not going to create a great culture. So going back to motivation, what creates motivation is not the extrinsic stuff, right? So Dan Pink has this great video on what motivates people. And I subscribe to a lot of what he says. For me, motivation often is confused with money. So how much money do we need to dangle in front of people? Or a carats, even a trip somewhere, giving people a trip or bonuses. And they're nice. They really are nice, but science proves history shows that it doesn't drive. It's about what happens inside. It doesn't drive greater, yeah, it doesn't drive greater success, or greater results. So it's about the intrinsic. So how did you create that intrinsic? Vision, purpose, and values. So vision, purpose, and values are what drive people far more than money. People need money, right? But vision, purpose, and values are what drive people to come to work. Yvonne Charnard, I think, I hope I said his name right, he's the Patagonia founder. He has this great quote in this book, let my people go surfing. So in the 60s, in the early 70s, he was building Patagonia. And they made parts and pieces for climbing, gear. That's all they made. He actually fell into clothing. He didn't love it, but he fell into clothing because that's what paid the bills so he could go climb more. He had this book called Let My People Go Surfing. And he described as they were finding success, as they were getting bigger, he said, I knew we needed to get bigger and I knew we needed to grow, but he still knew how important it was for his people to come to work on the balls of their feet climbing the stairs two at a time. So that's the passion. That's the motivation. We get people coming to work on the balls of the feet climbing the stairs two at a time. And I get chills every time I say that, I just got this little chill saying it, but to me that's what drives, that's a big part of what drives growing a business. And so the way you get people to come to work on the balls of their feet climbing the stairs two at a time is from the inside. And if you can create a vision, and that's where Prometheus for us came into play. Prometheus was just the name of the process that Kyle Howlin from the core group brought us through. And I can describe that in a little bit of detail. I'll put links in the show notes for people so they can figure out and take a look at that. So the core group is, I think, probably coregroup.com. We can figure that out. So the Prometheus is what helped us create this crystal clear vision, crystal clear with 12 descriptors is what they call it. All the way from, yes, finance. You want to talk about your financial goals. That is far from the vision. Too many people say, oh, we want to get to 100 million, or we want to get to 50 million, or we want to get to 20 million in profit. That's cool. That's a great metric. But it's not going to drive people from the inside. So although finance is a part of it, there's the corporate citizenship. There's the philanthropy. There's the outsider perspective, the insider perspective. There's 12 of these elements that define what your organization really looks like now in the three years from now. And then how do you get there? So it's very similar to traction. It's similar to Rockefeller habits. So there's all these methodologies that help you see something and then figure out a path to get there. So vision. And then whatever one you use is cool. So whether it's the core group or traction or Rockefeller habits, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. We found great success with Kyle. The second piece of that is the mission. So this is where purpose comes into play. I actually prefer the word purpose. But purpose is the thing that drives you. It's the reason you get up in the morning. And that comes through stories. That comes from taking what you do and how it's actually changing people's lives. Because everything we do, every business we're in, no matter what it is, you are improving people's lives or else there's no value to what you're doing. Now there's probably some exceptions to that rule. But for the most part, even, I mentioned Walmart earlier, a lot of people love to hate Walmart. Walmart is actually reducing the average income, or the average spend on groceries by a couple thousand dollars, something like $1,800 or $2,200 per year for the average household income. Do you know how important that is to middle America to save $2,000 a year on groceries? That's a huge impact. Not only that, but they're doing, when there's major worldly events like a hurricane, they are there on the scene with it. And they actually know what supplies their stores run out of first. So boom, they give the red cross, the water, the toilet paper, the band-aids, whatever people need in a major issue, they're on it, far before any non-profit or any governmental organization. So my little soapbox when people like to bash Walmart is I bring those two things up. So having said that, every organization has a purpose and it's our job as leaders of those organizations to be the megaphone and to help people that work for us. Did you get a perfect statement that you gave people? Yeah, we did. It wasn't as important as the stories that supported it. Got it. So the stories are... The purpose statement, if you just say a purpose statement, it kind of sounds like bullshit. It sounds like... Yeah, you got to have the stories behind it to make it comfortable. So what about the values? Because I want to get on that. Okay, so then there's the values piece of it, which again, alone can seem like bullshit. You have to live it. You really have to live it, not just live it, but you need to constantly talk about it. You need to constantly bring it into your stories. You need to iterate it. You need to create passion for me. The values didn't come from me. The values came from our employees and we had a process, it's probably not worth going into here, but we had a process in how we developed and came up with our values by looking at the employees that epitomized our company. And by describing them, we created who we all wanted to be. So how did you do the trust part of it, that's quick? So the trust piece of it is not about I trust you to pay me back for that launch I bought you the other day. The trust piece of it comes from, as a leader or a manager for that part, it comes from trusting that you're going to deliver on something that I ask you to deliver on. Let me be more specific. Oftentimes, we give somebody an important job. The more important it is, the more we look over the shoulder. The more important it is, more likely we are to actually kind of take what they're doing and now we grab the pen for a second and we're just marking things up and we get the pen back. But then we take the pen and the paper and now they're watching us do it. And oftentimes we want to get involved in the most important piece of our business. The trust comes from you giving things to people that are really important to the business and letting them run with it. And here's the key and this is the really hard part, is how do you let them run with it? Even though they're doing it differently than you would do it. The rule I had for myself and our executive team was we can only interfere with people's processes and their methodologies and what they're doing if it's going to hurt the business. If it's not going to hurt the business, just because we think we could do it better, that's not for us to mess with. We need to trust that people are taking it where they need to take it. Now that doesn't mean you don't help people improve, doesn't mean you don't coach your employees. What it means is you trust your employees to do the job. Okay, I want to talk to you about exiting the business. How did you ultimately, and how would you advise someone to figure out how do you exit a business? Because that's the question people often say, when do I sell, right? Like how do you come to that conclusion? Or how would you advise someone else to do it? So oftentimes, I don't know, so I'll tell you about my experience as opposed to telling other people how they should do it. Because I don't know, there's so many scenarios in how people want to exit a business, whether you're retiring or whether it's a family business or whether you're sick or whether the business is failing or whether the business is skyrocketing. So there's so many different scenarios. I can only tell you about my experience. My experience was one where I belonged to a space. We had a great technology company that was doing well. It wasn't like off the charts making hundreds of millions of dollars. And I heard you say that you saw the future and at that point, there wasn't as much upside, or you didn't see it happening and growing at the rate that it had been, was it? No, actually, on the contrary. I think our business was really healthy. Like we could have taken our business to some great heights, I believe. In fact, we made a bunch of transitions where we went from being a services-oriented business to a SaaS software-oriented business. We went from being project-oriented revenue to to being recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue. We had long-term contracts. It's a long-term monthly recurring revenue contracts with our customers. So we were creating, we had standardized processes. We're incredibly scalable at this point. We could double the business with very few additional people. So we had some really, really, we had a bright future. Very, very bright future for the business, which actually puts you in a great position to sell. Well, yes. So what happened is the industry we were in was becoming noticed by money. So now private equity is coming into our space. And I noticed they had bought up a couple of companies. Not a lot, but there's a little activity going on in our space. And so what's happening is a lot of the bigger entities are seeing an opportunity in a small community, associations. Again, niche, if you have a niche in a specific area, you're going to be strong in that area. We weren't trying to be everything to corporations. We were focused on associations. So when the money was coming in, I started to get more and more phone calls. We're always getting phone calls every now and then from people just fishing for businesses. But I started to get some phone calls from private equity firms that knew the businesses in our space and truly knew us, which surprised me, because most of the phone calls claimed to know you, oh, we've been watching, we've seen your site. But these guys actually knew the businesses and talked to the businesses in our space. So I knew there was something going on. So I entertained some conversations with multiple private equity firms at a certain point. We had a couple offers for our business. Now, the offers, they came very clear that we had good software, but what attracted the private equity firms was the culture of our businesses, the way our customers talked about us and it was the way our reputation, it was our reputation in the market, which comes, the big part, comes from the culture of the organization. So they confronted me. Now, at this point, I had the choice of finding a broker, managing it on my own, or working with a lawyer. I had a lawyer that I worked with for quite some time and I had a great deal of faith in him. I still do. He's helped me with PropFuel, our new company as well. And so he became my trusted advisor. I had debated bringing in a broker to help or an investment banker to help navigate and to help us benefit from the deal more, but there was no point where I felt I wasn't getting what we needed. So I turned down the first couple offers because they simply weren't what I felt they didn't match the future of the business. Like I said, the business is doing awesome. We're doing great. So, but they kept coming back with more offers. So at a certain point, there becomes this point where the amount of money you're being offered and the opportunity for your people and the opportunity for the entity, the organization, is far better under that management than it is under our management. Got it. So money was a piece of it, a big piece of it. Don't get me wrong. But a requirement was a bright future for our customers, a bright future for our employees and therefore a bright future for the business. So that's how I made the decision. And then you sold the business and I want to get in this sort of quickly. We have a few minutes remaining. Is it you sold the business and then how did you get to prop fuel from there? Yeah, so I sold the business. I worked for the company, the acquiring company for a period of time. I think it got to a point where both I was grateful to step out and I think the company was probably grateful to have me step out because there's bumps along the way. No matter how good a cultural fit it is, it's never the same culture as the one you've created in your organization. That's difficult. I had no problem, by the way, selling the business. I hear it from a lot of people, it's a sad thing or it's this personal thing. For me, it was like dropping a kid off at college. There's some sentiment. It's not like I'm a robot, there's some sentiment, but it's this joy of seeing something that's created thrive. So that's how I felt about it. So then we were talking about this earlier when we were setting up for this, but then I left the company and I just started saying yes to everything because I thought I'm free. I can do everything I've always wanted to do. First thing I did is I watched The Godfather which was a movie I'd never seen and that's a long movie. Three parts, lots of downtime on the couch. It took me like three weeks to watch those 10 hours. So that was the first thing I did. I'm still working on reading and Rand Atlas Shrugged. That was another thing I wanted to do after I sold the business. And I wanted to clean my basement. I haven't gotten to that yet either. But I said yes to everything. It's somehow, I got really busy. I don't know what I was doing. Like I don't know, I didn't have that purpose. I was no longer focused on that one major goal. And so I was kind of running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I was okay with it. I wasn't sad. I wasn't depressed or anything. But you didn't have that one thing like you had in the past. So you needed to have that one thing back. Yeah. Again, so how'd you come up with this idea? So there were a bunch of ideas. You know, I went from, I actually never had interest in writing a book. I know a lot of people talk about writing a book. I know a lot of people talk about consulting or coaching. Didn't want to do that either. I thought about the incubator idea of creating funds. I initially thought about doing it with kids in high school. I thought about doing it with kids in college. And then I thought about maybe just organizing a collection of investors. So creating a fund. And again, none of those got me as excited as when I'd be sitting down with a buddy over a beer talking about an idea and bringing it to market. So I concluded that I needed to grow another business for two reasons. One is it's what got me turned on. Number one. Number two, it's a kind of wanted to prove to myself that the first one wasn't a hoax, that it wasn't a. It wasn't a fluke. Yeah, I wanted to, I still need to prove to myself that the first sale wasn't just an accident. So I struggle in calling myself a serial entrepreneur. I don't use that term to describe myself oftentimes because I have yet to become a serial entrepreneur. But so ultimately after a lot of different ideas, I mean tons of ideas. And I would write them down in Evernote. And so I have lists in Evernote, business ideas. And I take one and play with it for a month. And then either most of them just at some point hit a wall. Every business hits a wall with the idea. And some of them I figure out how to burst through and some I couldn't. So which one? So PropFuel. So PropFuel came from this concept of creating a great culture. And it's what we did really well at my last company. And what I really enjoyed at the last company was the culture piece of it. One of the things we did in that culture piece to so that I could understand what was going on in the heads of my employees. And so that I could get that feedback from them on a regular routine and a cadence. This is one of the things that I think builds a great culture is creating a cadence. It's reaching out to my employees, giving them an opportunity, to pat each other in the back. Number one, so recognition. And number two, an opportunity to give me some feedback. And what's going on out there in the field? What's going on when you're talking to your customers? So we had this weekly survey, for lack of a better word, that went out to our employees, asking them those two things. Are you happy in your job? And I mean, generally opening the door to what can we do to support you better in your job. And number two is who do you want to give recognition to? And who do you want to nominate? We have this Peach of the Week as employee of the week. And so who do you want to nominate for that role? So every week in our company meeting, we take the last five minutes, we go through this stuff. If somebody wanted an exercise ball to sit on, we buy them an exercise ball on Amazon. If somebody wanted a stand up desk, we buy them a stand up desk. And those are the kind of things people wanted to make their jobs better. So this is the feedback, and this is the recognition that drove the impetus behind prop fuels. So now think about Yvonne's quote, people coming to work on the balls of the feet, climbing the stairs two at a time. Think about this other stat. I learned that only 13% of the people in the world love their job, 13%. I fell in the 87% before I got fired, definitely. And as soon as I figured out what I really enjoyed, I became part of that 13%. So I wanted people working for me to be a part of that 13% of people that love their job. And the first step to doing that, well, second step, the first step is creating that vision, purpose, and values. The second step is allowing them a chance to reward and recognize each other intrinsically. And then the other part is figuring out what's going on in their heads, what are they doing? And so that's what we did with prop fuel. Prop fuel is a super inexpensive way for entrepreneurs of small businesses, 10 to 100 employees, to understand what's going on in the heads of their employees and to give them a chance on a weekly basis to give recognition to each other. It's a great, super, super simple, easy to use software, and it's like 50 or 100 bucks depending on the size of your company. That's awesome. Yeah, it's cool. So where can people find more about you in the business? So prop fuel.com, P-R-O-P-F-U-E-L, so propfuel.com. You can find me at Dave at propfuel.com. That's probably the best way to reach me is via email. Okay, beautiful. Well, thanks a lot for joining us on another show of executive breakthroughs. It's been fantastic having Dave here show us, share with us all his insights and things that happened, and we'll have a lot of things in the show notes and probably some fun surprises as well. So watch out for that. Fun surprises, Jason. Thank you so much. This is really fun. Thanks for having me on the show.