 I built up an organization. We were kind of approaching a million in revenue. We probably had 15 employees. We were not profitable yet, but well on the path, like it was very clear what was going to happen. And then someone turned off the faucet and all the business went away. Welcome to the Revolution of One Podcast, where the revolution will not only be televised, but also individualized. This is TK Coleman and you're watching the Revolution of One Podcast. Today's guest is Jeff Graham. Jeff is the founder of Gill Quality and a partner at the ION Group. Today, Jeff and I are gonna talk about some of the early failures and the lessons that he's learned along the way, his superpower and how he discovered it and made it work for him and some of the advice he would give to young people on how to find and follow their passion. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Glad to be here, TK. So Jeff, most conversations that I listened to on One Podcast, they usually began with success. People talking about their latest project, how they're crushing it in entrepreneurship, whatever it may be. I wanna start with failure. And I wanna start with failure right now. I wanna know what's not coming together easily for you right now. Oh man, well that's a really personal question. I gotta give some backstory to do that. So I began my professional path at a young age working in construction and stayed on that path as I got older and older and built homes, developed real estate and then started in my late 20s started a software company that still serves the home improvement remodeling and construction industry and grew that business and all the companies I'd had or been involved with up until that point are very, very small. And so everybody did a lot of different things. And then the software company Guild Quality as we grew first, you know, me and the dog and then larger over the following 15 years and when we sold that business two years ago to a private equity firm we were about 110 employees. And that was something that I never, that growth was something that I never really, I mean, we were actively working to growth to grow to build the business, but there's a subtle thing that changed from the time you were one or five or 10 employees until you were to the point you were 30 or 50 or 100. And it was that as a leader, my job changed from doing things to empowering people to do things, to charting a course and setting the framework in which people can be successful. And so sold the company a couple of years ago, stayed on with them for a year, helped them, you know, continue to grow and integrate with other businesses and find new leadership and then left in January because I have my list of businesses that I'm interested in starting and have dived into starting those new companies. And the thing that has kind of hit me in the face like a two by four has been I no longer have this great deep infrastructure of wonderful people who share the vision and wanna go execute and I gotta rebuild that team. You know, something that took 15 years of time to really, and a lot of trial and error of getting wonderful people around you. So it's, I'm kind of off on my own, my own, you know, and Sealer Tahiti trying to build it all by myself and starting from scratch again. So the most painful thing for me right now, the thing that I actually am kind of flailing about with is like who are, and it was a problem faced early on as a real estate developer and then early on building a software company or like who were the first right people to really begin this journey with and so struggling with that, yeah. You know, I think you're a great example of this. I think a lot of people look at successful startup founders like yourself and they think, oh well, you know, for this guy, failure is a thing of the past. That's probably something that he experienced in eighth grade or something like that, but now he's successful. And there's this level you get to in life where you no longer have to deal with difficulty and you can just sort of buy your way out of it or network your way out of it. And that's clearly not true, you know. There are struggles at every level. I'm curious, how are you dealing with that one? You had this infrastructure, now you're by yourself again. How do you get back to that? Well, I mean, I've probably done something for a couple years, which is I'm kind of torn on the notion of goals, like setting goals for yourself. I think there's a lot of people who are hardcore about having goals in a lot of people who are less passionate about it or even think it might be counterproductive. A lot of very successful people in both of those camps. And, but I have been, I'm reasonably goal oriented and try not to get too attached to the distant future but try to be reasonably focused on what I'm gonna work on. And so setting the stage for my new businesses to be platforms in which people can come in and be successful and accomplish things are big parts of what I've been working on the last couple quarters. They're on my spreadsheet that I look at every day of like, okay, what are the various things that I need to be paying attention to. I'm curious, you mentioned that there's a debate on goals, whether or not they're useful. What's the case against goals? The case that my good friends who are opposed to goal setting have is they can blind you to opportunity that presents itself and they can set you up for failure and frustration if you don't achieve them or if circumstances outside of your control change, which there are plenty of circumstances outside of your control. Have you set the right goals that enable you to to kind of pivot in response to those circumstances and still achieve them. So the way I rationalize like how I recognizing that there's so much outside of my control, the way I look at my own goal setting is I try to have all the goals that I set be things that are entirely within my control and let what will be, will be. So like a goal I would set would not be to, if you're in a sales oriented environment, it wouldn't be to close a certain amount of business by a certain time. It would be to do a certain amount of activities by that time that would maximize my chances of having success in that area. So like setting a goal of like by the end of this year I'm gonna have a million in revenue or something like that's not a goal I would ever set. And so I think when people are, the group that's down on goals, when you really drill into it, they're big on making plans, like making a plan and doing the work, like Steven Pressfield, right, do the work. But I think what they're really down on is like setting, putting flags on the ground and saying I'm gonna go, I'm gonna have a million dollars in revenue by this point or I'm gonna have 50 employees or whatever, those things are kind of outside of my control. You know what, James Clear kind of talks about this concept where you have people set these goals like I'm gonna lose 20 pounds by this date and then even if they lose 15, they feel like a failure because they measured it in terms of outcome versus something like look, think about the kind of person you wanna be. You wanna be healthy, what do you need to do to be healthy? Go to the gym, say I'm gonna go to the gym every day and that's a goal that you can achieve, that's entirely in your control and you get to feel good, you get to make progress and you're not over analyzing every aspect of the result that fell short. I kind of like that approach. I work with a lot of high school, college-age students who feel really confused about the whole goal thing. They don't know what they want. So what advice would you give to someone who says, hey look, I wanna be productive, I wanna make progress, I wanna invest in my future, but I don't even know what I like yet. I don't even know what I'm passionate about. I'm not, I will tell you, I'm not big on given advice. I try to avoid given advice. I can share with you my own experiences like what's worked for me and what's not worked for me. And I just, from an early age, I had jobs. Like I got jobs and did work and I was incredibly fortunate like just as a teenager and then growing up to almost all of the people I worked with worked for all of my bosses or managers or whoever were outstanding people. And so what was great for me was to spend time with people who challenged me, who gave me responsibility, who had built a platform in which someone could thrive and develop, who were patient, who I enjoyed being with. And they exposed me to all kinds of different things. It's like, I'm also kind of like, there is a saying, you know, do what you love and the money will follow. The money will follow, I'm not, I think there's a lot to be said for do the work and your love for it will follow. I mean, if you only do things that you're immediately drawn to, you're never gonna broaden your palette of what you might eat or you're never gonna, you know, experience new, new things. So ask me the question again because I don't feel like I'm answering it. Yeah, well you are answering it. I'm curious about the younger people who feel like, hey, I want to be a go-getter. They're listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast, they're watching Gary Vee videos and they're thinking, I want to be this motivated, successful, productive person, but I don't know what my thing is. I don't know what my passion is, so. There's a whole lot of things like what are things that everyone should be doing when they're young or could be doing when they're young to help them get pointed in the right direction. Like I think about with my own children, what I try to help them do is like, okay, like you have so much opportunity ahead of you now, what are things that you can do that open doors rather than close them? Like expand the number of doors that are open to you rather than closing them off. Bezos, I think it's Bezos, I haven't actually, I've just heard that he's the one who says this is there's two types of decisions. You can make those that you can walk back from and those that you cannot. And I think it's as a young person, it's important to think about those sorts of things like what are decisions that, as you can go down that you can walk back from and what are those that you can go down that you commit, like having a family is one, you can't walk back from. Like those are ones you really need to deliberate. Taking on $100,000 of student debt. Like once you've done that, like you've done it or buying a house or like lots of things wedge you to a path where there's no walking back from it before one enters into things like that, they need to reflect on them and be cautious and deliberate on them. But the ones you can walk back from, go boldly, like do those, experience those new things. That's my take. I mean, you're the interviewer, but I admire you and your perspective on everything. It's like, what do you tell people? I mean, I like the way you put it and the way I would articulate it is, I make a distinction between preferences and leverage. Preferences are like, this is what you want, right? I want to live in this kind of place. I want to work this kind of job. I want to be around these kinds of people. And leverage is your ability to make an economic demand on the world, right? If I say, okay, I demand that I make this much money or I want to come in at this time, my ability to get that depends on how much negotiating power or leverage I have. And when you're young, your preferences are high, but your leverage is really low because you don't have a lot of experience. So it's not very expensive for people to say no to you. It's not very expensive for people to say, oh, I'm not going to hire you and give you what you want because the cost to replace you is pretty low. And so the advice I give the young people is, keep your preferences, be loyal to those. Your preferences are your preferences, stay true to that. But when you don't have experience, optimize for leverage. Take the kind of opportunities that are going to help you accumulate negotiating power over time because your preferences may change, but even if they don't, what you want is to be in a position over the course of time where you have a greater ability to say, hey, this is how I want it or this is what I'd like to do. And people are more inclined to say yes to you. So I tend to deter people away from expecting to have their dream job on day one or right out of school. I think a lot of people are selling that, but I think it's important to prioritize learning and growth when you're working your first job and not treating it like a marriage. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And something I've heard you talk about is mentorship. And I'd add to something you just said about the type of work that you pursue and what you should look for in it. And one of those things would be to look to work with and for and alongside people that really excite you and are good, like honorable people, people who are creative, people who are, if you have a philosophical bent, people who have that as well who, I mean, you're gonna become, as the saying is, you're gonna become the average of the five people you spend time with. And the people you work alongside and work for are that. And so, man, when you're young, the work itself provided it aligns with your values and things like that is not nearly as important as the people you are working with. Yeah, I'm absolutely in agreement with you on that. I mean, if I had the opportunity to drive the bus for Elon Musk, I'm taking that job no matter what my title is, right? It's who I get to be around. So I don't know if you've heard of Cal Newport. He has a book called So Good. They can't ignore you. But he made a big stir a few years ago by doing a lot of talks on the whole follow your passion piece of advice that's often given. And he sort of criticized that. He would tell people, don't follow your passion. Too many people are psyching themselves out with that. And he said, when you look at successful people who appear to be doing what they're passionate about, it's usually the result of this process of experimenting with different things, getting practical experience at things that they weren't really passionate about when they first started out, but then developing useful skills and that passion is something that you manufacture over time by getting experience, developing useful skills and figuring out a way to sort of put your unique self into that. And so he discourages people from looking at it as like, it already exists, and I've gotta analyze my way to finding my passion. And if I'm working a job that I don't love every aspect of, I'm doing something wrong, to say, no, take the experiences that you can get, bring your best self to it, use everything as a learning opportunity, and you'll figure out how to manufacture your passion over time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a muscle you develop or a skill you acquire over time and it takes practice and returning to it over and over and over. You mentioned that work was very helpful for you with this, that you took a lot of different jobs. What were those jobs like and what made you take them? Were you choosing them because you were interested? I gotta say, I was, my parents never, I was the youngest of four children and my older siblings will tell you that my parents never made me do anything, which is completely true. There were no rules for me. It was, I was a good kid, very dorky. There didn't need to be any rules for me. I was not trying to break any rules. But my first job, first like real paying job, I think I was 14 and I was selling Christmas trees for a woman named Mary Goldberg who's since passed away, but she had Goldberg's nursery on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard in Shambly, just outside of Atlanta. And she hired young people, because she needed the extra help during the season and I just answered an ad and showed up and she hired me. It's completely lucky. She was an outstanding first employer. I went back and would work for her on weekends and summer and the summer following that, doing more broad nursery type stuff. But Christmas tree sales, selling Christmas trees at Christmas time, of course, nothing puts you in the mood, like the holiday spirit than wearing your Santa Claus hat around and like bringing joy to all these people, giving them their tree and putting it on top of their car and tying it down and working for tips and negotiating with them and having a boss like Mary who was just so supportive and encouraging. It was my first job. Then I worked for her for Christmas holidays and one summer after that and then answered a WAN ad. This was back in the day when there were newspapers, like you would open the newspaper and in the back of the newspaper there was the WAN ads and it's essentially Craig's List now and you would just respond to the little printed out thing, Carpenter's Helper needed and a guy named Craig Seacrest who had a small remodeling business needed an assistant to help him and got a job working with Craig. Now, are you thinking this sounds fun or I just need a job and I think I can probably do this? I just felt like I needed a job. I mean, I liked building things and I felt like I needed a job and wanted to make money. I didn't really have any, there was no push from my parents to go do these types of things. I have no idea why. I mean, now I see that it's less common, I think for, I know that it is statistically it's far less common for young people to have jobs now. I think it's like half as many, the teenage employment rate is something like half what it was in the 80s when I was doing this. And I think part of that is parental pressure to push kids to do activities that can help them build resumes that can lead them to having whatever certifications or resume things that they need to go to college to then go to eventually get a job. But yeah, there was nothing pushing me to do this. Carpenter, then I did one summer as a lifeguard which was like the easiest and most stressful job at the same time. So I loved it and hated it but mostly I turned back toward working with my hands and building things. Yeah, and what point did you decide I wanna be an entrepreneur? Like how did that happen? Well, I mean, I think that there is a study on entrepreneurship that showed that you are the single, the attribute that is most likely to predict one becoming an entrepreneur is to have at least one parent who is an entrepreneur. So to have, and I would extend that, and essentially the study is saying that that if young people see that that is a path that one can do, they're far more likely to do it which makes complete sense. So like if you have someone who is close to you when you're growing up, whether it's a parent or a relative or a friend or a friend's parent, it's just gonna be a normal thing to become an entrepreneur. Like that's something you do. My wife's family, that entrepreneurship is not common in her family. And when they met me, it was like, does this guy have a job? What does he do? And they very quickly got over it. They're wonderful people and love me now, or at least they act like they do. But there was no stigma associated with it or it wasn't a random thing to do. It was a normal thing. So my dad's an entrepreneur. My oldest brother is as well, both of them in real estate. So I got into construction, more rather than the speculating on land development more building and remodeling homes. And then we are very early on in my career when I was 23, I think. We partnered together to become real estate developers and start our own real estate development company in Charleston. Going back to failure, what was your, what was like your initiation ritual into the entrepreneurial path? What's a moment where you just got your back pushed against a wall or reality set? Nope, I'm not gonna cooperate with you. I was, I was, I mean, I feel incredibly fortunate in the path I've been on. I got entering into entrepreneurship. I had great models for people who were really close with me and former mentors from other employers. And then I began in real estate development. And my first, I mean, I had some small businesses when I was younger, sort of, you know, like kid type businesses that were fun things, but really becoming an entrepreneur in my early 20s, I entered into real estate development at a time, the late 90s when it was hard to not make money. Just the nature of the real estate cycle was such that things were just on fire. And we happened to, you know, have a great vision and a great product, building something that had not been built before that the market really responded really well to. And it was awesome. But in the whole time, we were like, we're so smart and we're great and everything's awesome. But the reality was that we were doing a good job and the market was there with us. Like it was, it was, we were gonna be successful with that project because the market timing, which was outside of our control. And then so I had great success early on and then started my software company in the early 2000s and started, you know, again, on a really good tear with that business. And then the recession hit and our software company was selling to the home improvement and home building and remodeling industries. And the recession hit those industries a year before it hit everybody else. And I mean, someone turned, I built up an organization. We were kind of approaching a million in revenue. We probably had 15 employees. We were not profitable yet, but well on the path, like it was very clear what was gonna happen. And then someone turned off the faucet and all the business went away. And it was at that point that I realized, like thinking about failure. Like I had a lot of dependents personally, like I had family now, wife and kids and then all these people in the company who depended on our business for their living and some of them had family as well and all of it went away. Like the revenue just disappeared. Homebuilders were not buying anything. They were all going out of business. It was like, it's tough to appreciate unless you were in a business at that time how painful and difficult it was. Like everybody was just going out of business. Great businesses that had been in business for, you know, for 60 years were going out of business. And it was tough to sell. And we had to completely rejigger everything and I had to look hard in the mirror and realize like, okay, Jeff, you have had some great success over the last decade. You know, I guess decade or so, you know, your professional career, a little more than that. But the reality is you were surfing on an easy way to surf. And now it's no longer pretending to have a business. Now you really have to dig in and you have to build a really strong company with strong roots and make it into something that can endure and grow. And that was very difficult. That was three years, the hardest three years of my life, you know, most stressful was laying off people, you know, working incredibly hard to hold the business together. We dropped from I think like 15 employees, probably down to seven. And then slowly, you know, kind of growing over and over again, I laid off four or five people at once. Things like now I wouldn't think are all that big a deal, but at the time when I was 32 or so and working on it, that was really painful. And but we, you know, we powered through it. We hunkered down like a mule in the rain and powered through it. And it took about three years to sort of get through it. And by 2009, we were like, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Late 2009, we were like, we actually have figured this out. We figured out how to breathe underwater. We've grown gills, whatever it took to do to be able to survive in the new economic reality where every business owner by necessity was incredibly, and was scrutinizing every penny they spent. And so if they were gonna invest in your product and your software solution and you as a person and your company, they had to have an enormous amount of confidence that you were gonna help them be more successful. And it took us a couple years to kind of wrap our heads around that and then another year to really kind of to become successful in that way. And then we started kind of, we kind of flat lined growth-wise in 2006 and then we really started to grow again in 2009. But it was, I mean, I called it, I wouldn't call it a failure. It was like the greatest learning experience I could ever, professional learning experience I could ever possibly have. And the people who tend to fail forward so to speak are the ones who look at it in exactly that way. Often the difference between a successful reaction of failure and a non-successful reaction is whether or not you choose to label it as failure. Is it failure or is it a learning experience? Is it an opportunity? I will say at the time I felt like I'd not done well and that kind of hovered around me for a long time. But to be honest, there was no, I had no choice but to succeed. It was, I'd taken all the money that I had made in real estate development which was great and fantastic and it invested in growing this business. I mean, had nothing, had no money in the bank account and two children to feed at home. That's good, that's good. And there was no choice but to succeed. It was, I mean, I guess the other choice was to completely fold and go get a job with someone probably great, and who knows, that probably could have been a great outcome as well, but I would have, a lot of people would have suffered more if that happened. But it worked out. I mean, it was not, it was, I had great people who were long for the ride, you know, who were, they were, you know, and I'm still close with all those people who were with us through that period. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you see yourself as not having an alternative as an option, right? When you have that ultimate skin in the game. There's something about responsibility that it's such a great intelligence enhancer, you know? Yeah. One question for you. So when, my theme for this month with the revolution of one videos is non-zero days. And I talk about this idea of creating, creating change through small steps. You know, the idea of a non-zero day is that anything that's not zero, that works, right? So even if you just get out and just walk one block today, even if you just write one sentence, don't let a single day go by without you logging in some kind of action step that moves you in a constructive direction. What's your take on the idea of non-zero days and what's a way that perhaps you've been able to create changes in your life or in others through small action steps? I think you did, I love the way you describe it. I've not heard the term non-zero days before, but I completely get what you're saying. I have, I've taken to saying, I'm sure someone else said this and I probably got it from them. I don't know who it was, but the habit is a superpower. And like the only real superpower that we're gonna have is habit. Like what we, the habit we develop, the rituals we have, and they could also, they might not be superpowers, they could be great handicaps if you choose the wrong, if you develop the wrong habits. But if you can develop habits that push you in the right direction to non-zero days every day, they're incredibly powerful. And like personally, that is, can come in the habits that you develop from your diet or the habits you develop from your exercise routine. The habit you develop to say no, to turn down things that might distract you from, you know, might pull you off the direction you wanna be in. Professionally, the rigor of measurement, I'm actually kind of a big measurement guy. I'm also a believer that not everything that matters can be measured. And but of the things that do matter, they should be measured. And to look at those measurements on a daily or weekly or monthly basis are important. How many times did you work out this week? You know, how many times are you going to? I know one of the habits of yours that we talked about is reading. You love to read. Yeah, yeah. What are some good book recommendations you make for our viewers? So on directly related this point, there is an old book, a very old, very short, illustrated book called The Man Who Planted Trees. It's by French author Jean Journeau. I think that's how you say his name. About A Man Who Planted Trees. And it really is about the power that can come from doing what appears to be a small action over and over and over again every day. It's about a man who creates a forest, essentially where there had not been one before. So I'm a big fan of that. That's like a book you might, one might read and they would love it and you could also read it to your children at bedtime and they would love it. But it's essentially a parable. So I also love, we were chatting about Steven Pressfield, I also love The War of Art. I think that is a great read and that is about like doing the work. Like you gotta get up every day and do the work. And but I came to Steven Pressfield through one of his fictions, Gates of Fire. I don't know if you ever read any of his fiction, but it's about the battle of Thermopylae, you know, the 300 Spartans going against the invading army of Xerxes and it's a historical fiction. But reading those two books together, you see how Pressfield as an author lives in the same way that he practices his art of writing in the same way that the Spartans and their, I can't remember the term for them, but essentially their pages developed themselves as a fighting force. And so those would be two good books to read together. And I like to read books. I'm reading the recommendation of a great friend or a brilliant friend. I'm reading Montaña right now and also reading a bio of Montaña at the same time. And I love doing those two things together. I think the best advice I ever received about biographies is over the course of your lifetime, read a thousand biographies. Because in doing so, you'll build a vast vocabulary for overcoming incredible odds. And that's kind of what I want to achieve with Revolution of One. I mean, I think it's so easy to kind of get stuck in your own life and feel like, well, I'm the first person in history to have this particular problem. Or I'm the only person on earth to have this self-defeating thought. And then when you read other people's stories, you listen to other people's journey, everyone's gonna have a different aspect to their lives. Everyone's gonna have things that don't kind of match up with yours. But it improves your ability to sort of contextualize your own life. You say, ah, okay, this little thing I'm going through here, that's kind of what Steve Jobs went through in chapter three. That's kind of what Michael Jordan went through in chapter seven. That's what Jeff Graham talked about on that podcast, that biographies give us that ability to make better sense out of our own stories, I think, yeah. I was thinking about that, again, I feel like I've had, my life has been, I've had challenges, but I feel like they're not all that. I guess maybe everybody feels that way about some of their challenges. But I don't think, I think everybody has their own versions of these challenges and struggles that they have. And I think there's a big, I think we live in a day where people talk up a lot more, you get a certain amount of status elevation to having challenges. So it's like people talk them up a lot more than they did 20 years ago about the hardships they have endured in their lives. That's just my general observation about that. Is I do not know anyone who has a big part of their personal identity wrapped up in a disadvantage who ever accomplishes anything. Anything enduring or like to have your, to identify yourself as a challenged person with something holding you back. I think it's probably something that's, it would hold me back. Like it would make it harder for me to accomplish some things if I viewed myself as, as not having all the advantages that everybody else had. Yeah, I'll hardly agree. It's not the disadvantages that define us. It's the determination to overcome them. And finding your own unique way to overcome those advantages. That's what makes your story. Yeah. I say all that is like, you know. I just don't feel like I've had all that many disadvantages in my life at all. So, you know, feel pretty lucky to be where I am. Also, I've had the greatest people in my life too. And I have this, I think if I have a special skill, it is, I haven't really thought about this, but I have so many wonderful people in my life that I have met kind of randomly. I would include you on that. It's, I don't know, just my special skill, maybe meeting all these great, wonderful people who helped me have a positive outlook and inspire me. Yeah, and I think that's the thing right there. It's possible to listen to that and say, well, gee, Jeff's a really lucky guy. I wish I had that special skill. Or to say, well, wait a minute, here's a guy who freely admits that there are a whole bunch of things that he's not good at. Who freely admits that there are people that are better than him at a bunch of other things. But he's got a couple of special things that he's learned how to work. And he used those special things to create advantages. And I think everybody has that thing. Everybody has that special thing, you know? I may not be able to be the next Jeff Graham and charm people in any way that you do. But everybody's got their own special thing. And it's a matter of finding that superpower, figuring out how to make that work for you, I think. Jeff, I appreciate you sharing your story, man. Thank you, TK. Love being here with you. Absolutely. If you want to follow today's guest and learn more about how he thinks, you can follow him on Twitter. His handle is at JeffreyD Graham. Also, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash fee online for more Revolution of One videos. And go to our Instagram channel to check out our motivational Mondays, instagram.com slash fee online. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play. Thanks for watching.