"Дойдох да правя Бизнес в България " From College Dropout to Business Owner - Stapho Thienpont's

hey hello everyone this is the first english podcast of uh impact with stan and nicola that we've ever had and our first guest is a really dear friend of mine stafford tienpont and we're going to talk about a lot of things there's going to be subtitles so please do check the description of the video for the subtitles um but before we start let me just remind you guys that you can comment in the comment section please rate us in itunes and spotify and um uh yeah if you want to join our patreon community you can do that you can also check our sponsors for this podcast which is me and stan so you can check our websites for the mentorship program and also our supplements company proof nutrition so i really wanted to get that out of the way not make it too promotional this one but stafford welcome it's a real pleasure to have you on board here and do you want to introduce yourself to the audience oh yeah eva it's very nice to be here and uh for me i used to live in bulgaria for a while so it's always nice to get in touch with the bulgarian community a little bit more um so about me well in short so i used to basically be college dropouts um and what i did what i dropped out was i moved it to uh gym in stockholm and i lived on the mats basically for a year and a half at some point i figured out like really i'm not helping anybody doing this this is purely for myself and i figured like my core strength is more thinking than working with my body so so then i'm like okay so i'm going to go back home live back with my mom and figure out how to be a marketer because it was a guy that let me stay at his house for a month um when i was in stockholm and he was a brilliant marketer and i was like i could do this but it's actually more difficult than think marketing after spending about a year studying marketing and watching a lot of gary vaynerchuk who i'm not that big a fan of anymore um i figured out like okay i've built this facebook group i know how to get post viral on linkedin and all this kind of stuff it's time for me to start a business so i go to like the the business application thingy and turns out you need to have some kind of degree in belgium and i'm like okay sure i'll do that and i'm like halfway through the course and i'm like okay so if you're going to start a business this is how much money you're going to need it was like 8 000 euros or something was the recommended i was like what i don't have eight thousand euros i'm starting to try to start a business to make some money however i could do this i'm so broke because i was spent on my money living in the gym um so yeah me and my um co-founder from back in the day we were like okay so let's just go somewhere where it's a little bit easier and we just landed in bulgaria we just flew in met our accountant it's like yo can we start a business like yeah sure what do we need to do it's like i need signature there like what is it like 100 level or whatever and the businesses start they're super easy to start business and i i already had some clients lined up and when they invoiced us it was not that much like 1000 euros 2000 euros 2000 euros something like this and we managed with that money to rent an apartment and get our first hire and just get started and in belgium that would have just been impossible i would have had to do everything by myself and yeah it was really nice here to do it because the cost of living is so much lower um taxis are also everything's just so much cheaper people are very smart and although bulgarians they they talk a lot of about each other i i've only had pretty much only had good experience with all the game people that i met here so yeah we and then we started to build an agency focus around lead generation on linkedin so called messaging and also content marketing for our clients and then we hired um first mate with datolof uh and he was like a super smart guy um but it really wasn't a marketer so so we i i helped i helped him develop as a marketer then we hired nikolai same deal very smart guy not so much experience in marketing and yeah from there we grew the agency we went to six figures in in dollars um well multiple six figures and dollars and yeah i did that for a while at some point um there were some problems and my co-founder left let's say and then i was like okay so i'm in bulgaria my girlfriend is in stockholm and my family is over in belgium and my stepmom is really uh well she's having health problems so it's like okay what am i doing here why am i here just doing this business stuff like stressing out all the time working super hard and i decided to you know make an exit from the agency the agency is still running is the the marketing family um so yeah i moved back to belgium and i started a job at butters which is a digital product studio and i became like the head of head of grove there my technical title is like external growth lead or something and yeah i've been helping them implement like a full funnel b2b strategy um and that's been really wonderful and i know that's one of the things you want to talk about today it's like going from entrepreneurship to then having a job again and for me it's really been a wonderful transition being back in belgium yeah it's um it's actually let me turn to to the audience a bit uh again this is the reason why i chose to to talk with stafford so first of all he's a really great entrepreneur he's an amazing marketer but he just breaks a lot of misconceptions that people in bulgaria have so first the first misconception that you broke like the first limiting belief is it's hard to build a business in bulgaria and you literally came to bulgaria because it's the easiest place to start a business in the eu yeah the second one is that you need to have a website and you have you need to have all those fancy things and you can delve a bit deeper into that because uh stafford just mentioned that he had quite a successful uh marketing agency and as far as i know you guys didn't have a website no yeah and then you made like the third uh the third transition um uh that is from being an entrepreneur to selling your agency and going into a startup we can say that's a corporate job although like a startup is a different type of corporation but still it's it's just a lot of things that we talk about that you've implemented in a different way and specifically me and stan we're we've been very supportive of the fact that you can start a business in bulgaria you don't need a website or all those things but we're a bit more biased towards people being entrepreneurs and of course that's not the only option and you're one of the perfect examples of how things can play out in such a way that working in a startup or in a corporate job might be actually really cool as an experience and give you a better lifestyle so let's start uh first if you want about um about your your experience i actually didn't know that you lived uh on the mats in the gym for a month and a half a year and a half oh year and a half yeah wow that's that's quite a lot yeah yeah it was cool um because and and this is like a red thread through all the things that we're talking about today is my philosophy is like okay figure out what it is that you want to do well probably you should start with why but simon sinek can't cover that but you start with what it is that you want to do and then you just figure out what is the best place to do it so for me i was in school and i was like school's a huge distraction i'm gonna be go be as used to world champion which i've never managed um but i just visited stockholm and i liked the training there a lot um the coach was showing much more very interesting stuff how did you end up in stockholm how would you how did you decide going there was a good idea it was just as random as bulgaria i had a friend that went to this gym he said this gym is great i went to visit her for a month and i was like okay this is great i actually met a girl there then at that time and then i came back was supposed to be for a week and then after like four days i asked this girl like would it be okay if i stay here and she's like yeah sure and then i just basically called my mom and i said look i'm uh i moved to stockholm i'm not coming back i'm going to be back in a year and a half yeah i i thought it was going to be forever really but yeah i was just like okay it's a good gym i like it here i know i can be i can progress here and i and i just stayed because i was still in school i just basically didn't write school or anything i just quit and then everything kind of took care of itself so you quit school or university uh yeah so college it was a scholarship okay studying nutrition okay pretty cool and and then um you said you lived with a guy that was a really good marketer so how did you figure out that you wanted to be a marketer how did you get good in marketing because you didn't study that in school yeah it's actually very funny because so i was living in a gym because my coach had invited me but then it's a different difficult different way of thinking this person but um basically he wrote me hey uh you so there was like five guys there's like you eric and simon you gotta leave the gym you have 30 days i was like what i don't have any money like where have i got to go it's like oh yeah you figure it out josh can stay he's cool so so so yeah and then i wrote this guy that i met in the gym and i was like hey um i heard your son was gonna sublease his apartment or whatever or gonna something along those lines there's a place and could i take a look and it's like oh man i i don't know exactly what i said we said basically i think that one's gonna be difficult for you but uh we'll take care of you i'm like okay and then he offered me to stay with him and it was like for two months and i just always saw him when he was working it looked super chill like designing some logos or whatever it was like ah that seems cool i could do that and yeah that's how i got inspired and then as i was like transitioning out of g2 i just started studying just really random courses in the beginning like gary vaynerchuk his book and the google ads course and and i have literally never run google ads in my life still but i was just like starting somewhere and go you know kind of like doing it randomly until free resources or did you did you buy some books and courses well obviously you bought garyvee's book but yeah i might not even have bought that one that they can listen to it on script so there was like a 10 year subscription and the first course that i bought and i bought a couple um was the facebook group growth um book from course from charlie price and vince uh i forgot his last name for a second of and clancy and i used that to grow my group and then to them i sold how to grow facebook group so i was just like the perfect example of one of those really pyramid scheme type marketers so yeah and i grew the group for the with a friend of mine back then and but that's also when i first noticed that it's so important to have a good business partner i mean he was a great guy but right at the moment when we sold the course he was like ah i'm sick of this i can't do this anymore i'm like what right when we're gonna start making money you're gonna leave it's weird uh but yeah then i found some other guys they also quit and this could be the pattern never that happened a couple more times that i'm like super driven i'm like okay let's post four times a day let's do this let's do this let's do this and i mean for me it was easy i didn't have any responsibilities whatsoever but if you already need to have the money right now and that's very difficult so choosing a business partner that has that it's easy for them to do it's like and with easy i mean they have a natural interest in what it is that you're doing and they either have another income source or they have money ready or i mean your business is set up to make money quick but yeah those things are very important so starting a business setting a business that can make money quick you mean that's basically a service business because you don't need to buy stuff and then resell it you basically sell your expertise and your competence to to people yeah that too but what i meant is like if you choose a partner you need to take a look at their life and see if this is going to fit into their life um and and then see if the plans match up with that so for example let's say you wanted to have a podcasting business which is a perfectly legit business model but you should probably not expect to make to be able to live of it the first year most likely right so if you're going to have that as a business and you're like we need to spend four hours a day on this you need to have somebody that can make that time and do that and not starve to that yeah exactly okay cool so then you wanted to legitimize the business and you you went back to belgium obviously it was super expensive uh so how did you end up in bulgaria did you look up eu country with lowest corporate tax or how did you end up here yeah no that's exactly what i got you really yeah i'm not kidding and but also my co-founder at the time he had been in bulgaria once he said it was great i'm just like okay so that's legit nice and then you you founded the marketing family that's the name of the the company and how did you narrow it down to specifically linkedin b2b marketing sales it was just like so i'm trying a bunch of stuff and the linkedin stuff seems to work and i think i could do it for somebody else that was it how did you make it work because to some people linkedin is the most black box thing ever like they're really good at facebook at google ads but they're like a linkedin marketing how the hell do you do that yeah it's a good question actually so so in linkedin you have these things called engagement pots and you have them basically on all social media where people um agree to support each other's post by commenting on whatever and i got into this crazy engagement pot i know i don't know if i'm supposed to say who was in there but there's a very very like people that have been on the cover of founder magazine on in there and i was just like um i mean i'm just asking them dumb questions all the time like hey i'm trying this what do you guys think and it was also when just when the organic reach of on linkedin was booming so so you it's still pretty crazy now but it was super crazy back then like i remembered my friend of mine he wrote a post about how browsing linkedin is something to do it's similar to a bunch of dwarfs standing on a on a staircase or something like the dumbest post ever like 600 likes and like 200 000 views so jesus that's when i came in so and then i started building the audience just asking dumb questions reading some ebooks or whatever and i was just like for me this is consistently working i have people asking me how to do it all the time i was like okay this is just what i'm gonna sell yeah and you started selling it to to other businesses basically yeah and help them sell um create a sales funnel well yeah that's some of the things i learned later on because we just only take care of the or back then we only take care of the linkedin stuff so that means we make a list of people that could be clients for you based on your criteria then we're going to send them a message if they if they don't answer we're going to send them some more messages if they answer we answer back to them and we book the sales call for you that and also we we figure out what is interesting about you and your company what does your client base want to hear learn about we're going to create content use stuff like engagement bots and all this kind of stuff to get that content seen and then if they respond to you we respond to them and then we set up the sales call but what we really learned is that you need to have a very solid sales team or sales structure in place already because i can't even count how many calls with like really brilliant leads just went absolutely nowhere and we just see them in the crm disappearing um yeah so we didn't do the sales funnel part at that stage at that stage um but yeah we just just only did the linkedin stuff yeah so basically the content itself and creating the content uh communicating with the leads and getting them to to to book a call um but did you guys took any sales courses no no just self-learn everything is self-learned yeah pretty much well i'm just very enthusiastic and i see opportunities so i'm talking to do you have somebody reaching out based on my content and my content is about growing on linkedin or what's about growing on linkedin anyway to reach out to me or i want to also grow on linkedin like okay let's hop on a discovery call i learn a little bit about our business i get excited about something and then i think my excitement just transfers really easily to them nice and what strikes me strikes me in your in your story is that you're not afraid to ask dumb questions to people that are to some quite intimidating you mentioned that someone was on on the cover of founder magazine so probably a really famous really big entrepreneur and he just showed them a message hey i'm stafford uh you don't know me never heard of me i'm just like a random dude but please answer my question this is this is my question well those people so those engagement posts is really like a group chat so everybody's talking all the time so i'm not just sending them random messages but i am sending them the dumbest questions i can possibly come up with because i'm not trying to look cool i'm trying to like make progress as soon as i can and i'm not going to wait around four months until i figure it out myself because it takes too long for basically whatever you want to do there's no point yeah there's no points and they they always answered you they never said well you like the most person ever get out of the chat no everybody's always been incredibly helpful to me and then i figured okay now i need to get and ask dumber well smarter questions to smarter people and and that was kind of like why i started my podcast i was like okay that person seems very intelligent i i go look on their website oh consulting 500 euros per hour no i don't think i'm gonna do that hey you want to be on my podcast oh yeah of course that was there was also kind of reasoning there because because you you do need when people talk about mentors they they're thinking like mr miyagi you know like like he tells you want to wake up and and to wax the car or whatever but you don't i don't i've never felt i needed that but you need somebody that can ask questions and i will tell you like if you're doing something stupid so so i was trying to find my mentors like this and i found a really brilliant mentor um andrei zinkovic pretty much the greatest b2b marketer of all time that i'm aware of and that's very very very good at explaining how to do it so that's how i became friends with him and really now at my job i'm let's say 75 of what i do it's just stuff i've directly stolen from him so so yeah nice so how did you approach him you approach him for an interview on your podcast or yeah i i don't really don't really remember i think we also had one of those linkedin parts going on and the thing is like i'm different from i was different from other marketers so the marketers what they would do when they go on linkedin they would just engage with the other marketers and only play like the marketing game but what i did differently is i went for the people that are native on linkedin so the native linkedin influencers and i got in conversations with them and you learn very different stuff from them and at the very least it it's very good for engagement and visibility and all this kind of stuff so i was looking much bigger on linkedin than i actually was like i was looking like 100 times bigger than i actually was on linkedin and and that also gave me the leverage to have these kind of conversations with way better marketers because while they're better at marketing and making more money and maybe more handsome um they weren't getting the same amount of views so that was kind of like my way in okay like i don't have all these pieces but i have this piece and i'll tell you everything i know about it and then maybe you will tell me something as well yeah so basically you developed competence in an area and you exchange that competence for another piece of competence so maybe as you mentioned someone's really good at sales but they have one like proposed no one's seen them on linkedin and then you can help them explode uh being in front of the eyes of millions well hundreds of people let's not say millions although in some cases it might be possible i mean i did like three million views or something yeah this is uh probably i'm pretty sure some of our clients also reached millions so yeah so actual millions of people and imagine having millions of people if you're a great salesperson that's like at least a million bucks if you have a good product to sell yeah okay if you know how to then also do the sales for sure and and actually deliver deliver the service it's a quality service and how much did the company grow in terms of like team size and managing clients it always stayed pretty small to be honest i always had this idea that i wanted to have a couple of clients that i like that paid me a lot of money that was that was kind of like the whole strategy and then the team i think when i was still running the company the most we've ever been is four full-time and then some freelancers and now i think they're bigger i think they're like six seven eight something like this i don't i don't know exactly but it was always very small yeah small in size but you're really efficient and you had a lot of uh high income clients i just say say like that that pay you know higher retainers per month because they can also um uh convert that into sales yeah i'm going to get them the leads but i'm not even going to flex like i don't even think we were that efficient like back back in the day this this i always have this idea that and i'm changing my i've actually changed my mindset a lot because i used to think and this was also how it wasn't jitsu is you have to like basically run in the mud non-stop forever to get somewhere and work really really hard and that's what we're doing we're working really really hard and if something was hard it's like okay it's part of the deal now i've really changed my mindset on this because now i'm like okay if you know very well what it is that you want to accomplish you can then think about how you can do it easy and that's how i that's what i try to do now but back then i would definitely not say we were efficient like like we were just like okay this is a great story so so when we first hired mate um i told them like look this is the tool that we're going to use and here's the documentation about the tool so please set up a campaign and he's been bothering me about this ever since that was the worst approach ever and like yeah it was the worst approach ever but you're probably the best outreach guy in the world right now so so yeah there's maybe something to say for it but if i would do it again i would obviously do it entirely differently i'm very very big on recording your standard operating procedures and really recording your screen is oftentimes um the best way to do something like this i would say okay so you weren't that efficient but you guys were grinders yeah pretty much yeah yeah and your philosophy is that it nowadays has changed that you can always do things smarter so do you take the time to you know develop competence make things easier or do you still go straight ahead into like a new project and and do sort of like this running and gunning approach yeah so so i do a little bit of mix so on the one hand i believe in mvps minimum viable product which is basically what is the smallest possible thing i can build or process i can build or action i can take that will give me enough feedback from the market or for me even just like other people in the company to see what is it that i need to fix first so so you can iterate that's like one side of it but that's more of like a maybe like a business operations kind of view on it but on my personal well my personal life i have i i have a different approach so one thing i have done is set very clear work hours so i'm like i start then then i have my break and then i stop and when i start a task i'm like okay this should take 50 minutes i have a little timer a time timer which shows you like a little red circle of how much time is left put it on there 50 minutes and i'm going to finish it in 50 minutes i'm not going to do it finished in 51 i mean i'm not jesus sometimes i might really ruin my plan but the basic idea is i will get this specific outcome in this specific time frame and by and by limiting my my hours in a day i have to do it in that time because what i would use to do is i'll just keep working till i'll dump till i'm done but then you don't really have like okay when is it supposed to be done okay there's a deadline in three weeks but i've decided to do it now this is gonna take me three weeks now it's gonna take me 15 minutes so that's been a really big one that i got from kurt mercadante who's a very very very interesting coach this has been on my podcast a couple of times and then the other thing is it's all about managing your energy so this i got from my other coach from sarah sarlock um and also from this harvard business review article and the basic idea is that time is limited and it's limited for everyone but your energy is not limited if you have if you have really good energy you could do something in 10 minutes that would otherwise take you five hours i think everybody's experienced this when you're like okay now i feel good everything's good so smoothly and then you feel bad and you don't get anything done for weeks happens to to many people to myself included so what i'm looking at is like okay every morning i give myself a score out of ten how is my physical energy one one to ten right how much energy am i feeling my body mental energy how how what how good is my ability to concentrate today one to ten emotional energy it's not am i feeling good am i feeling bad it's okay somebody calls me can i swear yes somebody calls me a and i'm angry all day okay bad emotional energy somebody calls me a and i laugh good emotional energy and then spiritual energy one to ten how meaningful do i feel the things that i'm doing today how many if i'm doing something how meaningful do i feel it is and i'm always trying to be at nine across the board if i get eight okay if i get a seven and a half a couple of days in a row okay i gotta fix something and for example you make a blueprint for yourself for me my mental energy goes goes up if i meditate and when i sleep well my mental energy goes down when i'm in conflict okay mental energy has been six out of ten for three days in a row what's going on okay i'm fighting with this guy let's resolve this right now okay okay i'm i'm saying i'm just a consistent meditator i haven't meditated for 30 days and that's that's how i'm always like managing my energy and i think just like looking at the outcomes per time combined with managing your energy and then also creating frameworks to do the things that you're doing really allows you to make hard things much easier because because if you're starting business right now it's sure you have to hustle right garvey hustle hustle hustle 24 7 whatever okay but what you can also do is you can figure out what is it that you want to accomplish and then think deeply about what the easiest way is to get there and then just fail all the time and you know like try something analyze how it went and then build on it iterate on your on your mvp mvp quote-unquote that's amazing that's really great insight i'm probably going to steal this uh yeah this journaling of of uh you know my emotional spiritual mental physical energy it sounds really cool when you're talking about mvps and and the concept of failure obviously it's not failure if you give up it's only failure if you give up if you don't give up then it's just you know uh trial and error but uh when when you're talking about mvps um yeah continue no no i i've actually also i don't believe that if you give up your failed necessarily if you give up on something that you want to continue but you're too to do it then you fail yes that's what i meant but many times something is just not right for you anymore that's how i felt about jitsu like because people like oh you're giving up i'm like no bro this is just not for me anymore so i don't know i think that was that's also a part of managing your energy you don't have to spend ten times more energy doing something that's not a good fit for you anymore just so we can show off to people and then be absolutely utterly destroyed by it you can switch and that's just smart giving up when it's time to give up um but but yeah i meant in the context of you wanting to succeed in some area but you fail and you decide to give up just because uh it you weren't successful the first time i mean that's failure but you know when you failed that's just one way not of uh you discovering how not to do things so when you're speaking when we are speaking about mvps if you were to start let's say a service business again in the marketing space but you don't know your niche is it linkedin is it google facebook how would you approach uh building an mvp for your business because a lot of people want to start a business but they know the concept of an mvp but they don't know how to build it and what i found is that most people when they think of an mvp they want to do a full business they actually over feature the mvp they don't get the concept of a of an mvp yeah as as to what to do so i mean you could read the lean startup um and and then they have some guidelines on what to do but my approach is much more simple my approach um i believe in following what interests you naturally because you cannot decide what it is that interests you and if you're going to be spending crazy amounts of time and energy on something it better be something that interests interests you so i remember tai lopez he did this exercise people are mentioning today um so basically what you can look at is like okay what have you done the last 10 years what is it that you could talk about on a saturday night um what is it that strangers tell you that you're good at and and then you can add to that what will people pay for so i think looking at like what's interesting to you come by and then combine it with what it is that you actually know how to do uh gives you a really nice place to start i wish i remembered the the name of that exercise was great exercise if i was gonna if i was gonna start a new business which i might at some point in the future i would actually think i would start as a freelancer rather than try to because everybody's like oh it's got to be so scalable everything got everywhere everything got to be scalable all the time these days but if you haven't sold one clients and they haven't given you their hard-earned money and they're not happy you don't have anything to build a business around right so it's also a little bit about how i started my agencies i was just coaching people first doing my doing my own content and and then i saw okay what am i getting good feedback on what is it that this resonating with the market so i would probably you do something along the lines of like okay what am i good at what am i interested in what do i think people are paying for and maybe try sell it on upwork or fiverr or whatever see get some good reviews there do up a bunch of times and then use that to start and then when you have so much work that you can't do it by yourself okay then start outsourcing right and many people should answers sooner rather than later but outsourcing doesn't need to mean like let's hire somebody full time it could be like okay let's get a nice freelancer from upwork or free up or fiverr and let's let's just hire them for two hours a day and let's give them just the tasks that drain my energy too much right or that maybe our routine and then start there and then from there on out you will just make sure that you really listen to the feedback of your clients i definitely recommend basically everybody to interview their clients at least every client needs to be interviewed at least once they really really should be interviewing them at least once a year um and and then using this feedback you can move forward uh i would say okay so for example if i'm a copywriter i'm just starting out as a copywriter what you would do is go into upwork or fiverr and start taking up like the most basic of gigs pretty much yeah that's a great it's a really good example uh so i have a good friend daniel bershkart and he did this exactly so his story is really funny so basically he was a canadian and he traveled in asia and one day he realized his money was out and there was a guy in his hotel eve and he seemed to be making some good money so he's like yo how are you doing this can you help me he was like oh yeah we're just going to set up an upwork profile for you like okay let's be a writer let's snitch it down like super like and i think he's he's doing supplements actually okay actually good writer for your company nice um and yeah so he just was like okay sure let's undercut the markets let's do it for like 20 bucks per hour or whatever 10 bucks per hour who cares and then every time he got a good review he doubled his price and then he only stopped decreasing his price when three out of five people rejected him because of the price nice i think that's a great way it starts yeah so he wasn't the copywriter he just went straight up into copywriting yeah he's just reconvincing guy but now he's i mean then of course yes you have to do a lot of like studying and practicing and that's also i think where the the whole thing of having to be an entrepreneur but versus learning on a job i mean for for copywriting it's a little bit different but in many cases let's say you're interested in something new it's a very good move to do it as a job first and then because that's also a way to get testimonials you build your network it's way less stressful you can really focus on the craft because you have to remember as soon as you start a business even if it's a freelancer also you gotta figure out how to get leads you gotta figure out how to do your accounting you have to figure out how to close your leads you have to figure out how to keep your clients happy you have to figure out how to not get sued how to do contracts and it's all this stuff they don't see in the uh that's a hostile 24 7. yeah hustle porn doesn't tell you this so basically what you're saying is if we because i've shown this on the channel the basic freelancer business model consists of three parts you have delivery you have sales and you have legion yes and most people should start from the delivery but if you don't want to do everything else besides the accounting and everything that goes outside of these three components you can work at a job as a copywriter for example so you work only in the delivery and someone else think is thinking about driving in clients closing them accounting logistics everything so you become really good at the delivery and then you because it comes naturally to you you go into upwork or fiverr and you just start developing your other two skills which is legion and sales and what happens when you learn all of those because pretty much right now i know you can deliver a service i know you're good at sales and i go i know you're one of the best at legion so now that you have all three isn't it better if you start as uh as a business or would you still start as a freelancer and why wait so if i would start and sell services sell skills i already have yeah exactly if if now you're going back as you mentioned if i'm going to start a new business i'm going to start as a freelancer but you know how to do sales you know how to do legion and you probably know how to deliver a service so why would you start as a freelancer as opposed to just hiring people if you have the capital and just scaling it straight up yeah if you have if you have a capital that's uh that's different i was just thinking like if i was back right coming out of the gym and then starting a business then i would go for the freelancer okay yeah now yeah now what i would do is i would already get a lot of my standard operating procedures done before i would leave my job so so i would do this in the weekends and also i think it's very important if you transition out of a job they don't that you still deliver on your actual job because these are very worthwhile relationships just the right thing to do to make sure that you keep doing a good job unless you're doing like a really shitty job maybe but still then let's say it's like this let's say you're a waiter then um if you're a good waiter everybody that you work with the their day is a little bit better right you're nice to them maybe you're the only person nice to them in the day right so no matter what it is that you do you should do whatever it is that you're doing with full commitment and trying to make the world a little bit better place now if i was going to start a business i would probably do something that's that's very related to the skills everybody have i i think i would more likely go to uh information products right now or consulting so let's say i was going to go for consulting um so i would do me basically a freelancer model as in i'm going to do the services but i'm immediately going to get a good accountant i'm immediately going to get a nice va to deal with the stuff that i know i don't want to do and i might already answer something to like an agency or whatever but i would be doing the delivery myself in the beginning yeah for sure yeah cool let's um i want to talk about a lot of things but let's talk about uh the transition and the decision of actually selling your or part of your business or the entire business so why did you decide to switch from being an entrepreneur to working at a startup yeah so what i noticed for the way i had set up my business an agency which is very much dependent on the basically the time spent of everybody in the agency as the founders definitely and i was doing the marketing and sales for our own company and what i felt and i and i don't think this is something that's applicable for everybody and also it's something that you could overcome if you wanted to but i felt very pigeonholed in the business i had built so i was like i was just a linkedin guy um sales was still on me marketing was still largely on me and i wanted to be a full funnel b2b marketer so i want it also depends very much on what motivates you if the money is just your motivation you're going to take a different path for me the motivation is getting better at something i just love practicing same with youtube i just love getting better at stuff and i figured that if i was going to go become the best marketer that i could be i would want to be spending all my energy on this and i didn't want to even spend eight hours a week i'm doing accounting and all this kind of stuff i wanted to spend if i'm gonna set an eight hour night nine hour or twelve hour workday for myself i wanna spend all this time on getting better in marketing and i felt that well first of all i was already good enough at my craft to offer really good value to the company that i'm working for but i knew i wanted to develop as well and that was really the the main thing also i wanted to move back to belgium because bogai is a great country to to start a business but at the same time if you're away from your family that's that's that may that's a different different aspect of it so that that was really it for me i wanted to practice all day and i wanted to do it in a company that would have the resources let's say i'm like okay i need to if we're going to go to the next level we need to have a google ads guy okay here here's the money tell me the budgets you know like defend the budget all this kind of stuff but basically if i if i have a good reason of doing it the budget will be there for me and that's just so much easier doing this for for another company uh especially if they're like a high growth comp high growth company that wants to keep growing and they want to invest in marketing for me if i was still working on my own agency budgets are limited time is limited um so yeah it was for me was much better to practice like this yeah so basically you wanted to practice at the craft and become better and at some point you got to realize that uh having your own company and you having just started out and it being like a consultancy model which is very limited to scale you're playing in the d leagues and you can move at least to b or a league and you can really play with a large budget stakes are higher so obviously the learning is a lot more because there's a lot of lessons that you can't learn while you're making half a million per year but when the company you're working for is pushing for 50 150 to 100 million per year and you have to drive in the money because you're the marketing guy then the level uh the playing field is is completely different like the level is different so there's a lot more lessons to be learned at that point and that's what motivates you as far as i can tell exactly awesome awesome so how do you like working in a company and not having to think about accounting sales and all that stuff it's much better for me i'm really enjoying it but you have to also know that i was very very lucky with the company that i ended up in so the founders and steph and jill they're really phenomenal entrepreneurs and they're also really good at managing the team and they're very busy so that means that i can make make a lot of calls and they trust me of with doing this and just everybody in the company is really nice and everything has very strict processes so so just for me it's the like it's the perfect combination of freedom and then having something to fall back on as well as just ambition of the whole of the whole company and then also having nice people in my team so for me it's been really wonderful um but i wouldn't have taken just like any any random job right because i had my company i was you know i was getting by there was no reason for me to jump ship for for any random company so it's really like okay what do i want to learn i want to learn about rapid experimentation and validation that's really what i wanted to do and i don't want to that was like some of the hard skills i wanted to learn and well the other hard skills were like i want to be a full funnel marketer so that means from before people know you until they're your customers for 10 years i want to do growth across this whole this whole funnel i want to have impact on all those and all those things at the same time and i can do that as at the company i'm at so that's why i'm very happy but i wouldn't have taken just like any random job like i wouldn't be doing like some b2b something like this big manufacturing machines or for a million or something that wouldn't have interested me at all yeah and um to one to to what extent you you consider yourself a entrepreneur so within the company yeah so so so so usually if i'm thinking about the word intrapreneur i would think somebody that is creating a separate division within a company actually a startup that is dealing with high degrees of uncertainty so in that sense i wouldn't consider myself an entrepreneur but in the sense of like okay this is your team you manage it you decide the projects you you you make the standard operating procedures you see if things are going good or going well or not well all this responsibility is with me so in that sense i do feel it doesn't feel much different for me compared to when i was an entrepreneur entrepreneur the mindset that i take into things is the same responsibilities are pretty much the same so so yeah it feels like being an entrepreneur let's say it like this yeah nice yeah that sounds really cool but then you you really you're relieved of a lot of the other stressors that come as you being like that so people that people depend on and like the single point of failure because in your business you're the single point of failure if you're gone then the business is pretty much gone well i mean the guys that took it over were my employees at the time and they did a really phenomenal job without me so i um i would be overselling myself if i would say that everything depended on me but but i did i did start it and i and a lot of the decision-making responsibility was with me but they've proven to be perfectly capable yeah i meant at the time obviously as far as i can tell they're really doing a magnificent job now at building the business even scaling it further which is amazing to hear maybe we should have them on here as well to explain a bit more i think that would actually be really good there would be really good guests for the show for sure nice and you mentioned like a bunch of times sops sops procedures and most people are unfamiliar with the term but pretty much everyone that's uh has had a business for a while and they've had to scale that business have to learn what sop means and how to do one and what's your approach at writing communicating storing organizing sops yeah so you have to kind of like think about what kind of well if you're starting business you're going to need them no matter what um but also later some other people can do it as well um so just to uh to to interrupt you for a bit we didn't explain what an sop is and it might be a good idea because not many people know what an sop is yeah so an sop is basically a standard operating procedure which means if you're in this situation that is what we're going to be doing or this is how we act if somebody writes us on facebook this is how we act if uh this is how the first week of our delivery looks like we're taking in a client this is what the onboarding looks like so structuring how things are supposed to be done within a business and that is really the well my view on what an sap is pretty much how to make the mcdonald's burger for example that's like the perfect example of an sop you take this thing you fret for 30 seconds then you put this then you put that then you wrap it in this specific way and it should be done in two minutes yeah well i wouldn't say i'm especially good at making a piece but what i will say is that um if you're somebody that likes to figure out things so i like to figure out things i'm very bad at doing things routinely that's a really big weakness for me i do not like to do the same thing twice uh and when things are halfway launched i'm basically done with it and if if i can i will delegate it if i have to do it i'll do it of course but i really like figuring out how things should be done so when i make an sob if i can if it's something simple like today somebody asked me how are we going to do trackable links just make a loom recording which is screen screen recording software and i just literally filmed the video was four minutes explains exactly how we're using trackable links from now on so if you can do it like this that's better that's like a very basic tactical let's say sop when it gets more in-depth the way i look at it is really you're doing a study so we have we have this problem let's say what we wanted to do recently is we wanted to figure out okay people are in our crm how do you know which ones of them are interested so people are in our marketing system how do i know who wants to talk to me so so so i started studying i asked my mentor what is it how would you do this i asked my customer support rep from hubspot like okay which features do we have and i started googling and youtubing and all this kind of stuff and i figured out in this example that what i can do is i can make a score that adds up their activity so if they look at the case study that's high intense i'm gonna put five points on this if they open five emails okay it seems pretty engaged i'm gonna put one point on this then we make a system that's automatically adds up the points if it's above 10 then they will go to sales so then so you're really studying like what would be the most optimal way of doing it but you don't try to make it perfect because that's never going to work just make it how can i make it so it works right now mvp yes you leave it you you let it run and you start complaining to the people that are not doing their job or you start solving problems that you've created yourself which is what i'm always doing and and then after a couple of months you know finally you managed to get everybody in the company to take a look at it and then you get some feedback oh this doesn't make sense okay great or you see like okay this person had a low score they should have had a high score okay i'm going to adjust the score so just periodically check in once a month once every three months we do once per quarter and you see okay how's this going no it's going well could be better let's make a change and that's how i think if you're making like the tackling complex stuff like client onboarding it's also a pretty complex one for many companies it's like let's let's just draw out the most basic way of doing it and let's do it for a while and then we're going to see how they're going and collect feedback from clients yeah and also your team members because that's something that nobody tells you in a business is that you can ask you can delegate something to someone and they might not do it because they have like it's like priority 17 on on on the list of 50 or whatever and and so so it's also like okay is this actually being done and and a lot of times even if you work with the best people ever i mean they have priorities they they ca they have limited amount of time amount of energy so it's like okay or is the is the team doing it am i doing my part which you might not even be doing your own part and then sometimes you might need more automation or delegate it to somebody outside of the company this kind of stuff nice so you're basically running experiments that's how you you deal with mvps oh sorry sops you if it's something simple obviously sop is like one two three four just record a video and then you know go ahead and distribute that but if it's something more complex then you start with what makes sense then just ask along the way team members clients reiterate and then do this a bunch of times until you refine the the sop and then you have a quarterly review of sops to double check okay we thought this is the finished version what has changed since last quarter do we need to change something and if not you validate it it's good and if you find something meanwhile then you can always change it yeah and i don't actually look at the sops themselves i just look at like okay what were we trying to accomplish we were trying to help us find the interesting leads interested leads have we found them yes did we find out with my sop or did did somebody just get inspired to start checking the score every day even though that's written down nobody nowhere i don't care we're just gonna what we're trying to do do we manage to do it we didn't okay let's see what we what it is that we need to fix nice nice that that's really good and i feel like that gives a lot of clarity to to some people that might be afraid of failing because what i've noticed is most people try to make everything perfect for the first time and that's never going to happen in entrepreneurship ever it's too messy the whole business thing is too messy it's supposed to be messy yeah you're trying to create order out of chaos that that's what being an entrepreneur is 100 nice nice well uh that was it for for this part uh of talking about you know the corporate job i think a lot of people got insane value from it and i'm not sure what what your future plans are for business but let's talk about something else i want to learn about your jiu-jitsu journey because you're really passionate about brazilian jiu-jitsu and i've been practicing it for a while by the time you release this it's going to be almost half a year and half a year in most things for me means i've achieved a pretty good level of that thing and in this it's like as if i started yesterday it's it's nothing it's really i still feel confused when i enter the gym me too nice so how did you got into jiu jitsu so um i was always really into ninjas and i was always i always liked shows with a lot of fighting you know and i pretty much never got into random fights my whole life like i'm i'm not aggressive but i've always been very passionate about like anime and people beating each other up and video games and that kind of stuff and just so my parents were split up we would live in one one town during the week in another town during the weekend and then i was just googling like which uh which martial arts are the rounds and then well i saw a video of jiu jitsu i was like that looks super lame like i've never seen anything lamer in my entire life the two just a bunch of people cuddling i thought it was so lame but they also had like an mma class so i started doing the mma class and then uh i don't know it's i was looking on some forums apparently this works pretty well i was looking at some old ufcs like oh look these guys are doing challenge these skinny guys checking out this big muscle guy must break yeah and then i got into it and and but i could only go i could only make like two classes a week so so the first thing i did was we've got maths so we got our own maths and i started forcing like a guy from around the neighborhoods as well as my little brother to just do jiu jitsu dvds with me all saturday every saturday and and i i mean i was never really good at paying attention in class not not in jiu jitsu and not in any class really i don't like when people tell me what to think about when i don't know this yeah whatever so so yeah we started just on the journey and then okay i started find a place to train where my mom lived as well i started driving around to to get to different gyms i was i remember at some point it was like driving two or three hours to get to a gym in another city train for one hour and a half and come back and i didn't have a car so i'm always convincing other people to drive me and then it got to the point where every morning i was just taking my phone it's like hey i'm healed do you want to train today oh no not today okay okay bye and then hey nathan you wanna train today i would just call everybody until i found somebody for the day so i would have one training during the day and then one training at night with at the gym and then that just escalated until i dropped out of high school to do it not high school sorry college and then i moved to the gym i was training way too hard there that's also something i would have done way differently i would not uh tackle training the same way that i did back then but yeah it was just like at the gym we were we have a mooring session where we did sparring then we'd have physical training then we would nap then we'd nap and then we would have one or two evening classes which we also would roll in and then we would usually have a drilling session before or after as well and it was every day except for sunday no except for saturday because we did this on sunday as well that's a lot yeah it's way too much it was really stupid like i really wouldn't recommend anybody to do it like this i don't think it's the way to go but that's what i did for a while and um the interesting thing is i got better in the sense that i got more i got more of a fighting spirit let's say and my timing got better and i was learning more how to fight you know like against really really good people and give it my all but if i look back at my actual jiu-jitsu my my systems and my set of techniques i really limited my scope i was just doing well basically just entering 50 50 and then coming up from 50 50 those and then try to take it back sometimes my jitsu got very narrow well now recently i'm really making different systems and broadening my my scope and just being becoming much more well-rounded and it's like okay what is it that you want to ultimately accomplish do you want to be a world champion you you still need to be well-rounded but you're going to have to have a couple of areas that you're world class at but that's not really what i want to do anymore what i want to do is i want to start teaching again at some point and then for this i need to have a really nice well-rounded game so that's what i'm working on right now for how long have you been training well i started when i was 15 i'm 26 so 10 10 11 years something something like this and you've recently got your brown belt yeah i'm super slow it's really not making any progress how how much time does it usually take to uh to achieve a brown belt level because it i think it's like eight to ten years or something for most people it depends very much on because that's also the thing with jiu-jitsu there's many many more jiu-jitsu gyms than there are qualified jiu-jitsu trainers like the ratio like i'm yeah okay i'm talking but the ratio is probably something like one to five or something like for every good teacher you have like at least five very shitty gyms and it's probably worse than this because and there's many things that make a gym good or bad um but you have a couple of requirements you need to have somebody that knows how to that has the technical knowledge you have somebody that knows how to actually relay this information to you you need to have regular classes and you need to somehow be able to give your students some direction right and most gyms basically miss all four let's be honest um mcdojo no they're very well intentioned people and the problem is pretty new they're like there's no gym around i'm gonna do this i'm gonna build a gym they're doing phenomenal efforts and cannot say anything bad about them in the sense of like their intentions they're doing trying really well but it takes so many years that takes you 20 30 years to get really good that you can also teach it for most people unless you're really training full-time the whole time um so yeah um i kind of forgot how i how i started with that one yeah so how long does it usually take to get the brown welds if you're in a gym or you have a good coach and you can train every day most people do it in like let's say six to two eight years something i would say yeah it's still it's still a long road oh for sure most people at least in uh some of the other martial arts to reach brown belt or black belts like three years so that much yeah as far as i see the challenge videos yeah yeah getting destroyed uh how how has jiu-jitsu impacted your life and your philosophy because now you're a huge fan of the sport obviously as you want to teach it someday that's a difficult question um one of the things that i've for sure learned from jujitsu is that if something's hard you can still do it it doesn't really matter if it feels easy or not and i think this has been bit me in the ass a couple of times too when i'm kind of like enjoying how hard things are while it could be easier and then more efficient so i think that's been a really big part for me and then i think also just like understanding that for me it works much better to do my own research as opposed to following a class somebody telling me what to do i like it when people give me direction so my coach max max limbaugh he told me he sent me like an instagram dm's like hey i think you should focus on closed passing and then the last guard in bramble on the bottom that's all i need right so now i can start my study of these topics and become really good at it but learning that you have these people with a lot more experience than you that are teaching it oftentimes they're teaching it because there was nobody else to do it so they're really doing god's work um teaching it but they don't have the answers either and it's not it's not their fault it's kind of like how you realize at some point that your parents don't know everything i remember that was a very tough one to realize for me like you haven't figured this out why am i here that's that was kind of like how i felt same with jiu-jitsu so just learning that you can teach yourself stuff and it will work and it will work so well that you can do it competitively so that other people that are trying to do the same thing do it worse than

2021-05-19 06:24

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