00:44 Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm so stoked today to have Jeff with me because he is a growth and scale and junkie just like me. And Jeff, I'm let you tell the story. Who are you and what do do?

00:55 Yeah. So I'm a principal of, of really a couple of different organizations. One of them we call Startup Junkie / Conductor. And, that is a, what we call a funded consultancy. So we work specifically with Arkansas based companies and we have third party sources of funding, to work with them at no cost, no strings attached, doing entrepreneurial support. So we have a contract with the Arkansas economic development commission, a couple of contracts there the U.S. Small Business Administration, the University of Central Arkansas, City of Fayetteville, and a variety of other funding sources, all of whom have a vested interest in economic development, specifically through entrepreneurship for the state of Arkansas. So that's our startup junkie conductor world. After a few years of doing that, we started having larger companies coming to us. Call it five million to $500 million companies basically saying we need some of the same kinds of things, but we'll pay you for it because we know we don't qualify for the funded services. So we created Innovation Junkie as our billable consulting firm. So we do a couple of things. We really focus on helping organizations create sustained strategic growth. We inform that growth planning through the creation of some innovation exercises a lot of times. And then while we're working with organizations to help them implement what we call our strategic growth system, we make some observations about other things going on in their companies and we've created a framework that we call the culture of excellence and help them focus on remediating specific areas that might be standing in the way of them building that culture of excellence.

02:35 Well, I've got so many questions. You just spawned a lot of different thoughts in my head as you were going through that little spiel there. I mean, that was a lot of stuff. This is not the first time you talked about this, obviously, but one thing I want to know is, you you started the conversation in talking about there's some type of structure that the state of Arkansas is funding. You said no strings attached funding. I think most people hearing this are going to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I want no strings attached funding. What are you talking about?

03:08 Well, so, so they actually contract with us to be the technology commercialization center for the state of Arkansas. 

03:19 Wow!

13:20 So, so basically they provide us funding and we provide the no strings attached coaching, consulting, mentoring, and training. So meaning that we don't take equity in their company. We don't charge them. We don't invoice them. they can come to us specifically to help them start their company, to help them grow their company, to help them race capital for their company or or what have you

03:40 Fantastic. And then the state is then in turn funding you to provide the consulting and training and coaching because obviously there's no government agency that's going to be able to teach this stuff. Brilliant.

03:52 That's exactly right. so we use that. We have a contract with the University of Central Arkansas who wants to do entrepreneurship in their region. The US Small Business Administration has funded us for three different regional innovation clusters. And so it's kind of an unsustainable business model that we've been able to sustain for about 15 or 16 years.

04:20 And is it a five one see three or is it just a?

04:21 No, it's not. It's actually an LLC because we're kind of a social enterprise, I guess you would say. We are a consulting and events company, but we are an LLC. Now we have a parallel organization called the Startup Junkie Foundation that is in fact a 501c3 and it does parallel work with us, similar kinds of work, but their sources of funding are those sources that only, only run it through 501 C3s.

04:50  Very cool. Wow. That's fascinating. That's actually really cool. And I don't think that there's too many states that... Are there a lot of other states that have similar programs where the government's actually funding?

05:00 You know, there are some similar states that do that. So we do quite a bit of entrepreneurial ecosystem building in our state as well. And that's part of the contract is that not only are we working directly with entrepreneurs, we're trying to build an ecosystem, a support ecosystem to also drive entrepreneurship as well. you know, traditional economic development is generally about recruiting jobs into your into your state from another state or from a business and it's very competitive. And so it's a more mature model for states to drive economic development. But more more states are starting to invest some money in the creation and empowerment of entrepreneurs as well.

05:45 Well, I definitely agree with that, but I think that the way that your state is doing it is very creative and very, very smart. I just feel like too many state run anything is generally not effective. And the fact that they're choosing to work with a group like yours to that actually has experience and can actually give them the right mentorship is really awesome. That's very cool.

06:09 Well, and you know, yeah, I agree with you. You know, we, we're also investors, so we have a fund called Cadron capital partners and my business partner is another Jeff named Jeff Amoran. And, you know, he's been in and out of about nine startups and three fortune 500. You know, I've, I've worked for a publicly traded company and then spent a career in healthcare and actually ran global operations and mergers and acquisitions for a publicly traded company and have invested in a number of local businesses. And so between that, we're not just consultants, we're operators, we're advisors, we're investors, we're founders ourselves.

06:45 I love it. I love it. Love it, love it. And do you open that door to other investor investment groups and other funding partners who might be interested in certain niches that you're helping or? Awesome.

06:54 Sure, we do. We do. Yeah, our fund, we're on our third fund now, and it's called Cadron Capital Partners and we're on our third fund together. And it's, you know, we've got about, I don't know, three dozen investors. And some of those are fund to funds, some of those are individual high net worth individuals and, and etc. Most of them come from Arkansas, but not all of them.

07:18 I love it. I love it, I love it. Very cool, very, very cool. I love what you're talking about. I love the path you've taken to do this and very cool stuff. Now, given that you're in this scenario where you've not only built and your own companies, but you're also like constantly looking at people's operations and constantly looking at all these different groups and how they're running and trying to run towards growth. What are some typical challenges that you see that as people try to crawl their way out of a launch mode into kind of a consistent growth trajectory, what do you see as typical issues that you're constantly solving for them?

07:59 You know, one of the things I see is they really don't know where to start. They don't really know the various domains that they need to work on within their business to create that sustained strategic growth. 

08:13 Makes sense.

08:14 We have a GrowthDX, growthdx.ai that we use to help them actually conduct a front-end assessment. Effectively, what it does is it allows the leadership team or whomever they designate in the company. We like to suggest the leadership team because they are the foremost experts of that company, but it enables them to assess the company against about 70 different best practices spread across seven different diagnostic domains. And that kind of informs the process to say, okay, where are our knobs and levers? Where do we really need to focus? And, and then we help them actually not only create a strategic growth plan that's informed by that diagnostic but we drive it down to actually helping them wrap around an execution system around it. So a lot of people can build a plan, but on the average about 90 days in, they get distracted from their plan because of shiny objects, obstacles they didn't plan on, worldwide pandemics or whatever else. And so having a strategic growth system that has a weekly cadence wrapped around it is the way to keep them accountable to that plan so that they can create that sustained growth. And so those are two solutions that we've created to actually handle the biggest challenges that we see. Not knowing where to start and not having accountability to the plan.

09:34 captainscouncil.com

11:12 I 100% agree with you, but I have a question about it. So you're talking about a strategy versus a system. Talk to us about that difference because I think a lot of people feel like, okay, we've got a strategy. We white boarded this thing out. We're done. Like what tools are you talking about? What are you doing to hold them accountable?

11:34 So really building out that strategic growth plan and that strategy, the mission, vision, value. So who are we, where are we going and how are we going to get there? So that's what the plan really answers. Those three things. Who are we, where are we going and how are we going to get there? And then actually building a meeting cadence around that, that actually we don't just stop with what are our short-term goals, say for the next 12 months. We actually move down and say, what do we have to do in the next 90 days, Q1 of this year, in order to get at least a fourth of the way down the path of our 12 month goals? So it's a cascading strategic plan. And then we actually have those quarterly priorities. Every quarterly priority is assigned to someone, one name. And then we have a weekly meeting cadence where we're constantly looking at. Where are we? So we, we meld the operational aspects of our business with the strategic aspects of our business. And every single week we're looking at both.

12:37 Fantastic. And are there tools associated with this? Or are they just like a cadence of like, hey, I'm gonna call it, let's have a weekly call this time and let's just review the X, Y, and Z? Or are there, is it software driven? Is it just like...

12:53 Now, you know, so our strategic growth system is not software driven, it's agenda driven. So every single week we meet at the same day, the same time with the same participants, we start on time, we end on time, and we have a specific agenda that has times associated with it that takes us through the very specific aspects of the strategic growth system. We have experimented with everything from spreadsheets to subscription software to be able to manage the strategic growth plan. And we really lead it up to the group. What we tell them is that we're gonna provide you with a strategic growth system and a set of recommendation and some tools to be able to execute it. But we don't want you to execute our 100 % system with 70%. We'd rather you take it, customize it for yourself. We'll take 70 % of our recommendations executed 100% versus 100 % of my recommendations executed 70%. And we work with them to actually customize it.

13:56 I think it's such a smart, yeah, that's so smart. I feel like everyone kind of, as they launch, they kind of grow accustomed to a certain set of things they like to use to do what they're doing. And I think if you tried to get them to change completely, it would cause a lot more friction than help.

14:11 Sure. You know, there are some systems out there. There's the entrepreneurial operating system by Gino Wickman and written about in the book Traction. There's scaling up with Vern Harnish, which incidentally Vern and Gino seem to be buddies because they talk about each other in their books. There's the advantage by Patrick Lencioni. You know, there's the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. So, our system has a little bit of all of what we consider the best elements of those and we shy away from some of the things that we think are not the best elements. But you'll see a little bit of each of those representative in our growth system.

14:48 That's fantastic. Fantastic. And for those of you listening, if you don't have an operating system and what he's referring to as EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system, there are multiple types of operating systems out there. However, if you don't have one, traction is an easy way to get going on something that will get you into a regular cadence. And I highly recommend it as well. It is a fantastic model and there are great EOS implementers out there that can help you connect the dots and make it happen. Jeff, I love that you've kind of, you're not 100% on board with it, you've kind of taken the best parts and used other parts from other places. I think that's common. I think that's more common than not when people are trying to implement EOS. Would you say?

15:30 Well, the problem with EOS and scaling up and the advantage is with any system is they don't give you an alternative if something in it doesn't work for you. And so it's kind of, and I like Gino Wickman's work, I love traction, but it's either Gino's way or the highway, right? And so, what we do is we've implemented traction in, I've implemented traction before in a business or two. I've implemented elements scaling up. And so we just worked over the last four five years, built our own, but then we're very, very clear with our clients that say, look, if something in here doesn't work for you, then I will help you adapt it to a way that it does so that I'm not just saying, Hey, it's innovation junkies way or the highway. Here's what our recommendation is, but if it doesn't work for you, we'll help you adapt it to where it can.

16:27 Well, another thing to note from what you just said for those listening is that, know, trying to implement on your own is very challenging if it's your first time building a business. If you've got somebody like a Jeff or an implementer or whoever that can kind of help guide you along that journey, it does fast track the adoption of those systems much, much faster. Would you say?

16:51 Absolutely. In fact, had a customer tell me, know, the last 90 days that you have spent with us, working us through the implementation of the strategic growth system, you have moved us forward further in 90 days than we've gone in 10 years.

17:08 I love it, love it. I think that's more common than not. And I think that all the good intentions of every founder trying to self-implement, they're good, they're good intentions, but it just, takes a little bit of third-party viewing to see what you're not doing so that you can fix it and stop trying to hit your head against the wall so many times, right?

17:33 Yeah, I know you, yeah, I know you do this all the time as well, Todd. And I'm sure you've seen situations where, you know, you're working with a client and they hit an obstacle and they just can't get over it. so helping them navigate that obstacle, helping them break it down into its relevant parts and, helping them systematically solve that particular obstacle. sometimes it does in fact take that third party view.

17:42 Love it, love it. So as we talk about growth and we talk about scaling a business, I personally feel like there's a very different set of actions for launch than there are for growth and scaling. My guess is that in your system and in the way you execute your strategy with people, you probably talk about this a lot. What do you see as the main differences between a launch mode and maybe that growth and scaling trajectory mode?

18:21 You know, we spent a lot of time working with entrepreneurs on the launch side to help them make sure that they've got product market fit and problem solution fit, right? Unfortunately, so many entrepreneurs come up with an idea. They fall in love with their idea. They do no validating or invalidating research of that idea. And they're so willing to mortgage their house and max out their credit cards to bring that idea to fruition and no one will buy it because they spoke to no one. So, so we do a lot of, we do a lot of work with entrepreneurs on the customer discovery, customer development side of the house, around launch mode. We also do quite a bit of work on building out their launch plan, know, the sequential steps. When you're in scaling mode, sequentially is not as important. Doing all the steps is important, but you can run some of them concurrently where in startup mode or launch mode, there's a sequence that one needs to be thinking about. then, 

19:22 love that you said that. Yeah.

19:23 yeah, for sure. Go ahead.

19:24 No, you're gonna say something else there along that.

19:28 Well, and helping them think through in the startup phase, who their customer is, how they're going to access their customers and what's going to be the mechanism to actually acquire them. If you're in scale up mode, you're already acquiring customers so we can tweak that. But in startup mode, there's just so much that starts from a blank sheet of paper and we need to help startup founders challenge their underlying assumptions and refine those functions based upon data.

19:59 Totally. You're exactly right. And I love that you brought up that case of the typical founder who mortgages their house and maxes out credit cards with an idea that they haven't even gotten customer feedback on. They just know it's gonna work. And yet they've got no buyers, they've got no one who's tried it, they've got no one that's done it. And what is the value? I wholeheartedly agree. And being a marketing background, just I love the journey of mapping out and strategizing that client profiling step in building your business. And it is different. At the beginning in launch mode, it is very much a product market fit. Who wants this? Does anybody want this? Whereas in a growth and scaling trajectory, it's very much a matter of, okay, out of the last hundred clients we've onboarded, who are the five we love? Who are the five we hate? How do we get more of these guys and less of those guys, right?

20:53 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. Understanding your ideal client profile, your personas, your avatars, whatever you want to call them critical aspect in being able to, you know, even when you're pitching to investors, I, I, I teach an entrepreneurial finance class at the university and yesterday I was teaching my students, NBA students on pitching to investors. I said, winning pitches, even if it's to an investor, a banker or a buyer is predicated on having a keen understanding of who your ideal client profile is.

21:30 For sure, for sure. And even who your ideal investor profile is. Right? 

21:31 For sure. For sure. Yeah, I completely agree.21:32 I think a lot of startup founders have this impression that all investors are the same and they're just out to take advantage of you and all they want is to take a half of your profit. That's not how most investors are. How do you teach? I'm really curious now. Because a lot of these people that are the listeners of this show have either gotten maybe a little bit of seed funding, maybe they're a series A, but they're really trying to figure out how do I find the right financial partner to get me into a growth trajectory? What do you suggest there?

22:09 Yeah. Well, I always suggest that first and foremost, they need to understand, are they ready to seek an investor yet? You know, are they investable? Are they credible? Do they have any track record or what have you? You know, they need to also understand that people buy from people they know, like, and trust and, an investor is actually buying equity in your business. So you're, you're selling to them, right? And so I try to help them think about you know, does your funding strategy match your operating strategy? You know, what kind of capital is best for you at this particular time? Is it equity? Is it debt? Or is it a contract for equity? What are some of the strings that are going to be attached with that, with that investor? What kind of control are they going to be looking for? you know, the, the other thing is that is your investor a potentially value added investor? Anybody can write a check.

23:04 I just gonna say, are they bringing you new clients because of relationships that they have?

23:05 Yeah. Are they bringing you new clients? Are they bringing you other investors? Are they bringing you expertise that you don't currently have? So what's the value that they're adding to your business beyond just writing a check and then recognizing that when you take on an investor, you're taking on an equity partner, just if you take like you take on a co-founder as an equity partner. and that's a marriage and marriages are hard. And if you don't know whom you're marrying, it's even more difficult. So,

23:36 Love it. I think that that's kind of the voodoo magic that a lot of founders don't understand is the investor play. They don't understand that people are looking for strategic buys. They don't understand that people are looking to buy into a new channel of client that might help them and their business. I think that what you just described is perfect for people to be thinking about that investors really are running a business. They are making a strategic play in their business, in you, to try to add value to their business. And if you're not gonna add value to the business, they're not gonna invest in you. Like, it's not just a game about you.

24:16 Well, and yeah, for sure. And if you think about that from a venture capital perspective, right? So on the VC side, whether they're angel investors or actual VCs, they don't make their money until there's an exit. So you as the founder, when we talk about exit strategy, lot of founders tend to talk in terms of their exit strategy, but they're not thinking about how they're going to actually exit their VCs or their investors with with gains. so, yeah.

24:46 Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah. No, thank you for bringing that up. Cause I think that exit to most, I don't know. Like I talked to a lot of business owners. I talked to a lot of people, both in person, on the show and everywhere I go. And I have this gut feeling that I would guess less than 10%, maybe less than 5 % of all small business owners really have a plan or a strategy for exit.

25:11 You know, if you, so that's a great, that's a great point. If we move away from the scalable ventures, you know, and it's kind of the small business world of, know, you know, mom and pop businesses or what have you. Generally their exit plan is I'm going to sell my business for $3 million and it's going to be my retirement. That's generally their exit plan. And what they don't understand is that business is built so tightly woven around them as the owner that if you extract them out of it, it's not worth 300 grand and they don't understand that, right? So taking some of the elements of building a scalable venture backed business and applying that to some of the more non-scalable venture backed, non-venture backed businesses, you can actually drastically increase the value of your company when you do exit.

26:10 I love it. I love it. I think you're exactly right. And I think that the fear of talking about exit, I don't understand the fear of talking about exit because I feel like exit is such a beautiful thing when it's done right. And it's such a painful thing when it's done wrong. Having done it wrong three or four times, I can tell you, those listening, exiting wrong generally happens when you don't have an exit plan. When you have an exit plan or a strategy or a place you're trying to get the business to before you walk out of it,that always works out better than when you don't have a plan and all of a sudden there's a buyer and they're like, hey dude, yeah, market kind of sucks right now, but I love your business, I'll take it. And then you practically give it away.

26:46 Well, I give you great example. I was facilitating a leadership round table and it had one group over here that was more of a non-scalable business. And then there was a software company, a product company that was very, very scalable who had accepted venture backed funding. Well, one of the goals of this non-scalable, by the way, the multiples on this company were revenue based multiples if they were to exit where multiple or revenue based multiples usually about three or four times revenue. And they kept talking about wanting to build a building. And it was going to be a couple of million dollar building. And so the software guy said, why would you do that? And they said, well, because we want a really nice building. And he said, well, isn't that just kind of a vanity issue? And they said, well, what are you talking about? He said, what you're talking about exiting your business in about five years. And so if you took the $2 million that you're going to spend in a building that you might get 2,500,000 back for in five years. What if you spent that $2 million of just generating more clients and more revenue where you're gonna get a three or four multiple on that. And they stopped and they went, never really thought of that. So my point in that is that your exit strategy is just not just about what you're going to do when the five years comes or the three years come or whatever but it changes how you invest in your business and how you behave in your business on a day-to-day basis because you're trying to build value for a period down the road.

28:15 Totally agree. Now, I think it's fantastic that you bring that up. I think that exit is kind of the lost conversation piece. Nobody starts a business thinking about their exit just like nobody is a teenager thinking about death, right? mean, it's a very similar life cycle and we don't know when the end is gonna come, but the more you're planning for it, I like to think the better the outcome.

28:44 Sure. Yeah, I agree. I agree with you for sure.

28:45 So this is fantastic. Jeff, I love this conversation and I know that most people out there listening are loving this type of topic too because it is a challenge to think about these types of things. Raising money, exiting a company, these are not the things people think about when they think of starting a business, but they should. And so what are you guys doing to kind of get that conversation started as you're nurturing these startup concepts or these scale up concepts as people are working through their issues with you.

29:15 Well, we're, we're, we're driving them to have conversations. It's, it's again, back to that third party perspective, right? So when you have a third party engaged in your business and by the way, even every coach should have a coach. Every consultant should have a controller. but when you've got that third party engaged in your business and they're asking you those tough questions, you can't just gloss over them like you can when it's just you and your leadership team. we'll deal with that down the road. No, actually he's asked us, how are we going to deal? What is our exit strategy? What is our go-to-market strategy? Who is our ideal client profile? What is our plan to achieve multiples of growth over the next three to five years, et cetera? so just really asking the tough questions is where we find ourselves. Much of our business is very Socratic in nature of asking difficult questions.

30:10 I love it. And knowing the difficult questions to ask is what gets the thoughts going. And so that, that my friends is why you need a Jeff. That's why you need a Todd. You need somebody looking at your business and saying, dude, why are you doing that? And how is that getting you to this goal that you magically have that you think you're going to get to with no strategy? I love it. Jeff, this has been a fun conversation. This is about where we tie things off. And I, I want to thank you for your time.

30:30 That's right. That's right.

30:31 I feel like this conversation is so relevant to everybody listening to this, and I hope it's been relevant for you and your audience, and we can add value to them as well. So thank you so much for the time, and I'm gonna post links to all the different programs you're associated with right now in the show notes. Please look them up, reach out to Jeff via LinkedIn. How do people get ahold of you?

31:02 Yeah, so there are really three ways to get a hold of me. one is LinkedIn. I'm very active there. Jeffstandridge.com, InnovationJunkie.com. Those are the three best ways. Todd, I know you're doing the Lord's work as well. So you keep doing that. I wish all of your listeners and all of your customers the best and be happy to interact with any of them at any time.