Callum Laing

@0:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr.

Flores. Today.I'm here with Callum. How are we doing?

@0:14 - Callum Laing

 I'm very good. Thanks. 

@0:18 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I'm really looking forward to this. Yes, this is going to be a fun conversation. So Callum is the CEO over progressive partnerships.

A co-founder and CEO of MBH Corporation, PLC. It's actually a company that acquires small businesses around the globe. very, very unique what you're doing.

But before we get into all that, Callum, go ahead and introduce yourself.

@0:42 - Callum Laing

Yeah. So I've been an entrepreneur for 25 years now. I've written a few books about the journey. And I've really been doing all sorts of things.

started off in recruitment at the height of the dot com boom. And then the. last 10 years, I've really been focused on helping what I think is a neglected part of the economy, which is the small businesses that aren't startups, but they're not big companies yet.

They're 50% of the economy, but it's almost impossible to connect those businesses with the capital markets or sophisticated investors.

There's no financial product for the biggest part of the economy, which is a bit strange. I've spent the last 10 years grouping together small companies, taking them public so that they can get access to their capital and investors can get exposure to small businesses, but without the risk of an individual company.

In the last couple of years, one of the perks or benefits of doing what I was doing was I got to sit on a lot of public boards, I got to advise a lot of boards, and I realized that

but the board system is quite flawed and that is a very exclusive environment. If you don't look the right way, if you haven't been to the right schools, know the right people, you just don't get the opportunities.

And so a lot of talent was being overlooked and a lot of people that were getting board seats that probably shouldn't have had board seats.

And so a couple of years ago, I set up a company, Vebland Director Program, to help women minorities and first-timers to get their first board seat.

And we've helped, last year alone, we've helped over 200 people get over 300 board seats. So that's fun and it's something I think all entrepreneurs A should sit on other people's boards.

think it's a great learning experience and B should have their own boards much, much earlier in their journey. And so I talk about how they can go about that.

doesn't need to cost you a lot of money, doesn't need to cost you any money, but it can be

the incredibly pivotal in your entrepreneur journey. So yeah, that's kind of me in a nutshell, I also help people around capital raising and that side of things as well just by virtue of spending so much time in that space.

@3:16 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, I got to admit, you know, sitting on a board the amount of experience and education, free education, you kind of receive a sit on a board.

Some are paid, some are volunteered, and you know, asking, is it a working board versus just kind of a meeting board, having a good understanding of the general rule of thumb, I would say like, you know, for the folks listening, if you're going to go on to a board, if you're a board member at large, you're kind of expecting like one hour a week, and versus an officer, you're probably looking at about five.

so, so kind of think about that way. But again, you know, to your point, the the amount of experience and learning and growth you get from that because you truly are running a business, right?

the CEO or executive director or whoever's employed to run that business reports up to the board. So you, you know, they bring us their problems.

They do their feasibility analysis and present it to the board and the board is the one making these decisions.

so it's really cool. especially to, I think, to the point that you made the size that you're working with currently, it sounds like, you know, a lot of these board members are also very deeply involved with the work that goes on on a day-to-day basis, I suspect.

@4:30 - Callum Laing

No, not necessarily. mean, you kind of have executive board members and non-exact board members. what, I mean, my kind of point that I think is super relevant is there's 330 million companies in the world, Kieltake.

And less than 1% of those companies have an active functioning board. So it's a tiny, tiny minority. of companies have an active functioning board and yet every single successful company you can think of has an active functioning board so clearly there's something missing there and i think the way we teach our members and i talk about it my most recent boardroom blueprint is a startup should have the very least an advisory board and an advisory board doesn't need to cost you anything it can be a monthly coffee meeting most of these meetings happen over zoom now anyway so super super easy and you and you don't need to pay these advisors the advisors often are doing it a lot of employees a lot of executives so are more than happy to sit on your advisory board because they get to live vicariously through an entrepreneur which is as exciting for them and other people do it because they want their experience it's it's nearly impossible to get a

good big board seat unless you've got board experience. So you kind of, there's a weird thing that at the end of your career, you find yourself back at the beginning of the career where you can't get a job because you haven't got the experience and you can't get the experience because you can't get the job.

And that's how boards operate. So sitting on advisory boards, leveraging that up to get other boards. And it can be super, super lucrative.

We've got members that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in their first year. So there's lots of ways you can, people tend to think about the salary.

The salary is only one way of monetizing a board seat. So yeah, I think they're massively overlooked and under-talked about area of entrepreneurship.

the reason is that they've been very exclusive and very mysterious for over a hundred years. mean, in big companies, everything grinds to a halt when the board comes.

We've got to get reports ready for the board and drop everything and it's like they're these mythical magical creatures that fly in and have a board meeting and can change everything.

And so, yeah, there's a lot of weird perceptions about them. Because of this idea of you can only hire a board member that's got experience as a board member, what happened was you had a very small pool of people that were sitting on lots of board seats, not adding a lot of value, to be honest, because they didn't need to.

They were being very well paid just to kind of tick a box. And what's nice now is that the mood has changed.

Investors that used to be the ones that would say we only want people with experience. And now, after the global financial crisis saying, no, we need fresh ideas on the board.

We don't want groupthink. We want people that will challenge what's going on and ask the hard questions. And that means in a corporate environment, we want an entrepreneur.

If it's full of old people, we want a younger person. If it's all males, we want gender diversity in there.

So, fortunately, there is a little bit more pressure to change. But equally, as you probably know, managing a small committee or a small board is a very difficult thing.

And the reason why, even with all this shareholder pressure, there's been so little change, so little diversity added to boards, is that the risk for a public board, especially of hiring somebody that turns out to not be good, is incredibly high.

You know, if you hire customer service staff and they're no good, you find them and hire someone else. If you hire a board member and they're no good or they're actively disruptive, if you fire them, the whole board looks incompetent and your share price plummets.

if you retain them and put up with them, the average tenure of a board member is nine years. That's a long time that I want to be disrupting meetings.

consequently, boards have stuck with, well, we'll only hire what we know. And so you need to kind of get around that.

You need to build the relationships and build the trust before they will make the logical step to diversity. But all of this creates opportunity from entrepreneurs, which is great.

@9:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, one of the things you mentioned during that time is too, is you mentioned one of the books you wrote.

Now, folks, I got to apologize. think at the beginning of this conversation, I mentioned that you were the CEO of Progressive Partnerships, but that's actually a book.

@9:44 - Callum Laing

You wrote another book. Tell us about all these books. Some people call me an author, some people call me CEO.

Yeah. look, it's pretty, I guess, followed my path. So the first book I wrote, which was nearly a decade ago, was called

progressive partnerships. And it was really about how I had learned to scale small businesses and startups through partnerships. I had to.

I had nothing else. I didn't have any resources. And so I had to use other people's resources. And I learned through trial and error the best way to create partnerships and grow to very, very successful businesses through leveraging and helping other people get what they want.

And so that book, progressive partnership. By the way, if you go to calomlang.com, all of my books are free.

@10:36 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You just download them from there. I think Bezos has enough money without selling more of my books.

@10:43 - Callum Laing

There you go. So yeah, that's very much about that. I think I authored a book with my business partner Jeremy Harbour called A Glomra, which was about this idea of solving a problem for small businesses by grouping them together and taking them public.

Um, and then I, I then spent quite a lot of time speaking to investors and in the public markets.

So obviously, and so I wrote a book called entrepreneurial investor, which is, or entrepreneurial investing, which is really about how investors can benefit from this huge pool of talent that, that hasn't had an influx of capital and so it's an undervalued asset and I give the example of REIT, for example, which you know, you're in the US, REIT's are very popular in the US, REIT's was a something that Congress came up with in, I think it was the 50s and it basically they look, all the money is being made on these big commercial projects and big commercial property developments and mum and pup investors can't get access to them.

So what we need to do, that's too big, that's too liquid. So we'll create reads, which is a way of, in today's world, we'll call it tokenization of these big assets, but allow people to trade little bits of them.

And it took a few years to take off, but that became, because you brought liquidity to an illiquid asset.

What happened was that became a $7 trillion industry over the next few decades. Now, if you look at small business, small business is 50% of the economy, 90% of private sector employment.

Yet, if you're a sophisticated investor, it's too risky. It's too risky and it's too illiquid. You cannot get your money back out.

Every entrepreneur will tell you they're going to exit in three to five years. It's a line we were taught at birth, but it doesn't mean anything, because there's just not many exits out there.

It's very difficult to do. And investors know that. And so it's very risky to invest in a small business.

And so entrepreneurial investor was really about understanding that opportunity and that mismatch and how you leverage it. And then yes, my last book was called Boardroom Blueprint, and it was really what I had identified, which is, once you're on the inside of these boardrooms, can be incredibly lucrative, incredibly rewarding.

contacts you make, the opportunities you get exposure to, but you need to know how to get in, and you can't go in the front door.

There's got to be a back door. so, one of the public companies that I was involved in, we created an apprentice program to young people, disabled people, minorities, let them get experience sitting on the board.

There was no risk for us, we didn't pay them, we didn't give them votes, but we were able to learn from them.

They were able to learn from us and get that much needed board experience. experience, which could then let them go.

Now they had the contacts, now they had the experience, they could go and start their board careers. And that's really what kind of started the Veblen Director Program and the book, Blueprint book is about my experiences, but also sharing many, many experiences of our clients who have gone on and done incredible things.

get offered much better board seats than I do now. It's very frustrating.

@14:29 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, and folks, can tell you, first, kind of just a definition for you folks that we're talking about is a real estate investment trust.

So it's essentially, know, you can invest in real estate, but a multiple homes, kind of like just like a ETF that you'd probably see in the stock exchange, very similar to that.

But you know, one of the things that's very interesting is that I thought about the boards is the kind of the structure that you have to abide by on different boards, because boards, know, or, you know, kind of have like a set.

policies, they kind of put voting in place and you have to present things. It's a very kind of a formal structure in that sense.

But with that said, folks, I got to admit, you know, having an opportunity to have now sat on a few boards, it's interesting because as you mentioned, as soon as you sit on one, almost like there's more opportunities come available because people know that you're now in that circle, which is very, very small, as you mentioned, small circle.

And so offers tend to come quite frequently to the point I've had to decline a few in because my wife is like, okay, you're going a little bit too much at one time, right?

But but let's take a step back. Let's take a quick step back is let's how did how did you get to this point?

How wouldn't your entrepreneurial journey begin?

@15:49 - Callum Laing

Sure. So, look, I grew up in in the UK, New Zealand originally, but I grew up as a immigrant in the UK to pausing.

little mother and so by default did the kind of hustling and like car washing was my first business and graduated from from that I was I had one of the first Ben and Jerry's ice cream recipe books in the UK in probably the late 80s early 90s and I used that to make and sell homemade ice cream to bars and restaurants around my local town and probably breaking lots of F&B rules but that was good and yeah kind of just went went from there I think my first grown-up business so I did a degree in business and computing never quite finished it because the dot-com boom had taken off and I was off at a position at a very big internet one of the biggest internet companies.

in the world and I was never particularly good technically, I just didn't have that you know that retention to detail but I was the only person in the tech team that could articulate what was happening to managers and to customers and turned out that was a very valuable skill so even though I broke things I could then explain what that meant whereas my colleagues who were awesome coders would just grunt and so I got kind of promoted very quickly up the ranks and I started being head hunted it was a time when there was farm or need for technical skills and then there was technical people you know the internet protocol was a brand new thing and I couldn't like I was early 20s being paid way too much money and being offered

sane salaries. And I couldn't work out why these recruiters would fly to Amsterdam where I was at the time, take me out massive meals, I had spent all this money on the thinking, why are they doing this just to get me a job?

@18:15 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

kind of them.

@18:16 - Callum Laing

And then I understood their model and a lot of it at the time, it was day rates and a huge money.

And I realized that they were once they've done the deal. They were getting 20% on top of everything that I made for the six month contract.

I did all the work. They just kept getting paid over and over again. I thought, well, that's a good game.

And because I was in the middle of all of that, I knew all the IP engineers, I knew all the telcos that needed them.

So me and a business partner set up our own recruitment company, basically solving that need. And yeah, that was really kind of my first

growing up business experience. And of course, at a young age of sort of early 2023 24, we were making lots of money.

I assumed that it was because of my natural talent and good looks. And then the dot com bubble burst.

And suddenly all these telcos stopped hiring. And it turned out I wasn't nearly as talented or good looking as I thought I was.

And it was a very rude awakening. But I was also kind of broken at that point. I couldn't really go back to being an employee once you've been on the other side.

one of the interesting, when I had been looking at business opportunities, one of the trends that I got directionally right that made a few mistakes was directionally the internet was booming.

And I hadn't realized it. as we were in such a bubble. But directionally it was right, it just took a few years of correction.

The other mega trends that I thought was quite interesting was, and this is way back in the late 90s, people were talking about there was the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind from west back to the east.

And I say back to you China had done that sort of a and so you remember kind of the Asian tigers and the crisis in the 90s and stuff.

And as a young entrepreneur, I thought, well hang about it, there's trillions of dollars going from west to east surely it makes more sense to be on the receiving end of that game rather than the killing end.

And so I said to my then girlfriend, now wife, look, I can get work anywhere. She's a primary school teacher.

said, look, find something in Asia. and let's go and do that for a few years. And she got a great job offering Bangkok in Thailand.

Yeah, we went over there and that was incredible time. We ended up spending nine years in Thailand. And it was, again, as an immigrant, but also an immigrant that didn't know anyone, didn't know the language.

Really, the only opportunity was to be an entrepreneur and was to try and figure things out. And it was a much harder journey, but it was also a great place to learn my chops and figure out what works and what doesn't work.

And if you can be successful in that environment, you can be successful anywhere. so, yeah, that was, I spent nine years making a lot of mistakes in business there.

then moved to sing out one of my My business took off, but I kind of needed to be in a more developed economy for it to go to the next level.

so we moved to Singapore about 15 years ago, I think. And all of my business is global, and Singapore is just a great launchpad to be anywhere in the world.

That's kind of how I got into it.

@22:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Well, let's dive into that a little bit. do you navigate, you know, you have multiple businesses, you mentioned, left from Asian now in Singapore.

How do you navigate international markets for global business expansion? What are some insights you have on that?

@22:43 - Callum Laing

Yeah, look, I think it's a little bit scary at first, but you realize that fundamentally the human's are all the same, everything fundamentally still works the same.

Of course, there's new answers that there are some markets that are easier in some respects and harder in other respects.

I think you can always, as an entrepreneur, can always find what works and what doesn't work. And I think one of the lessons that I learned, not soon enough, but I remember to Thailand, if you've ever been to Thailand or South East Asia, quite a relaxed culture, it's very laid back.

And I was struggling to motivate my team and I started to relax. can never be successful. But what I realized was you go into a Starbucks anywhere in the world and everyone's the same level.

Everyone's working hard and they're committed and they're trained. that was really annoying because it meant the problem wasn't a tie.

It was the fact that I wasn't training them or getting the best out of them. you realize that in every market you've got driven ambitious people and you've got people that aren't.

And that's fine. And I think as a startup or an early stage business, you can't attract the best people.

You can only attract what you can afford. And all you can do is do the best with what you can afford.

And so I think being open to that limitation, because I had gone from sort of height of the dot-com boom, being inundated with brilliant people that wanted to work in that industry because that's where the money was.

so, and certainly when I was at a company, they had gone through a recruiter, they'd gone through HR, they'd gone through a first line of interviews, then they came to me.

my hiring was was on point, like everyone at high was brilliant. Again, just proof that I was such a good hiring manager.

And it turns out when you're a startup, it's a very, very different process. so you have to adapt accordingly.

yeah, look, think there's opportunities everywhere and there's challenges everywhere. So it's just picking, picking your opportunities.

@25:25 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, I think that's one of the difficulties about entrepreneurship is, you know, identifying opportunities and picking the right opportunity.

Sometimes we tend to identify a problem that maybe not many people still have. And we tend to create a solution for this problem and spin our wheels, right?

And with that said, think one of the things you mentioned is you had a partner kind of creating this business and you've been expanding.

One of the biggest issues I think with entrepreneurship is finding the right strategic partnerships. How did you go about finding the right strategic?

partnerships, and how does that kind of help expand your business?

@26:05 - Callum Laing

So what I talk about in the book, progressive partnerships is you talked to lot of entrepreneurs about partnerships and they'll say, I tried one once and it didn't work.

And what tends to happen is we look at who would be our perfect partner? We could just partner with Google, like that would just transform the business.

And so you're kind of going from here, trying to partner up here, and you've got very, very high expectations of what they can do for you.

of course, A, you're probably not even going to get the meeting. But even if you do get the meeting, they don't really care about what you care about.

And so a lot of partnerships fail because of these mismatched expectations. And so what I talk about in progressive partnerships is start small and progress.

And so basically what what I mean is you start doing partnerships that people will say yes to. which means you're probably going to contribute more to the partnership than they're going to contribute.

And it's got to work for you even if they contribute nothing. And what I mean by that is I will go into a partnership with a media public, so a small magazine that nobody reads, nobody cares about, and I'll say, Hey, look, I will become your partner, I will introduce you to advertisers.

If you can just put my logo somewhere in your publication, I don't care whether they put my logo in the publication.

What I care about is I can now go to the next partner and say, Hey, I've got a media partnership with these guys.

Would you do something else that works that I can help you with? And and again, I don't really care whether or not they deliver on that.

I use it to bounce and I've got partnerships with this company and this company. what happens is, if you think about doing, so if you if your goal is partnering with Google for

For example, if you go to them now, even if what you're offering is absolutely perfect for Google, the risk to the employee that does the deal with you is so high because it's not about what's best for Google, it's about what's best for that employee.

And if they take a risk on a new company or a small company and it goes wrong, if it goes right, happens.

If it goes wrong, they get fired. So it's not worth the career risk for them to partner with an unknown company.

However, if you've now partnered with 20, 30, 50 people in your industry, there's now a career risk for them not partnering with you, because if they don't partner with you and their boss says, hang about, these guys like they've clearly been vetted by all these other partners, why are we partnering with them?

Now there's a career risk if they don't do it. And so this idea of progressive partnerships, And it really comes down to lowering your expectations.

I expect every partnership to not deliver what they say they're going to deliver. And that way, occasionally I'm delighted.

But more often than not, I'm just leveraging it to get the next partnership. And what happens at a certain point is you build your own momentum and then people start coming to you.

And when people start coming to you, that's a very different game. Because now you can set the terms and now they have to deliver because they've come to you.

But you can't do that at the beginning. So, and look, I kind of use that model. It's basically the model that we use with getting board seats.

You don't go to Apple and knock on the door. You go and start with some cafe around the corner that, yeah, can I help you build a board of And then you go to a tech startup and it needs help with funding.

Can I help you with that? and you build it up until you've got this. And look, it doesn't need to take long.

worked with a guy in a guy called Ralph White in Atlanta, in the US, and he literally owned a cafe, he was still owned as a cafe.

He became an apprentice on a European public listed board, did some fantastic work for them around ESG reporting, because of that, he ended up getting offered a non-exec director of a sports and entertainment company, a listed one in the US.

And all of that happened within nine months. So it can happen very quickly, but you've got to kind of lower your expectations to start with.

@30:45 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I really like the strategy of leveraging the partnerships mentality. folks, this is kind of goes like, if you want to learn any industry, one of the things I kind of pretty consistently talk about is fake it till you make it.

I don't mean like wing it. What I do mean though is finding a trade show or conference or something and go to those trade shows and conferences you can pay to attend as a member learn the craft really truly learn the craft and then from there you can start to iterate create your own models and and crow from there but understanding the baseline of any any market any profession because you can truly do it you can truly go out there and network and and build that build that collaboration with someone in a partnership to begin to begin to think about how you can continue to grow your brand I really love that idea in fact I might begin to start using that leverage in the partnerships again I don't care if you put my logo on it it's just basically now I'm trying to leverage it for the next one because you do have to you know you do kind of have to leverage those those things in order for you to continue to grow and now let's talk about like embracing collaboration it seems like you know collaboration is something that you want to embrace because it seems like it is a benefit to strategic partnership but yeah

@32:00 - Callum Laing

Look, I think everything that I do is based on collaboration, I think, collaboration beats competition all the time. And I think the, you know, you can look at the success of any company, and there will be pivotal moments where they have partnered and collaborated with other people to suppliers or distribution partners, whatever, to go to the next level.

And just like everything else we've talked about, it starts by looking at understanding other people's problems and how you can solve them.

It doesn't start with, this is my problem, how can you help me? nobody cares. it's a little bit like, you know, day one of entrepreneurship, your clients don't owe you.

you anything. You have to be solving a problem for them to get this exchange of value. That's the same with partnerships and collaboration.

But a big tactic that I use a lot, which I think is very useful, is as entrepreneurs, we tend to get stuck in what and how questions.

So, what can we do to grow the business next month? How are we going to pay salaries at the end of this month?

And the problem with those questions is that we're asking ourselves and we don't know the answers, because if we knew the answers, we would probably have done it already.

And so you end up either jumping into the unknown or getting frustrated because you don't know the answer. And so I think when you change that to asking who questions, everything changes.

If you start asking, all right, who already knows the answer to this that I could be working with, who would benefit the most if I'm successful?

So I'll give you a great example. I run a program called Guild, which is all about helping people to raise capital and learning to raise capital.

One of the things that I've been advising companies that want to raise capital for years is most people follow the Silicon Valley approach of build a deck, knock on the doors and and it's just soul destroying and it's ridiculous because investors aren't sitting there with checkbooks waiting for you to do an amazing picture.

That's not how it works. that advice is so outdated. But the easiest way is to go to people in your industry, so go to your suppliers and say, hey, look, we want to grow from a million a year to 10 million a year.

If we do that, our orders for you are going to go from this. to this. We need some growth capital to grow.

Now, there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can inject capital in the shareholder or you can potentially give us product upfront in return for a stake in the future.

And it's much, much easier to do that because they already understand the opportunity. Whereas if you go to venture capital, you're going to get stuck in front of some intern who's only been taught one question, which is what's your USP and they understand the industry, they don't understand what you're trying to do.

But really, they're not going to invest in you unless they've seen their peers invest in you, unless it's been referred by somebody.

So much, much easier to go to somebody who already trusts you and who already knows the size of the opportunity.

who questions in whatever your problem is, is always, I think, the best way of doing it. that's why, you know, that ultimately is kind of what leads to.

to boards of advisors. I started having boards of advisors before I even knew what the term boards of advisors was.

used to just find successful entrepreneurs and take them out and try and get them drunk and learn their secrets.

And yeah, ultimately, those sort of became boards of advisors. so I think those asking those who questions really is the best way to move forward.

@36:28 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Throughout your entrepreneurial journey, have you ever had a moment of self-doubt?

@36:35 - Callum Laing

Have I not? Yeah, of course. And anytime I don't have self-doubt, it's something too many variables. mean, look, people come on podcasts like this and they share what?

Worked for them and none of us tend to talk about the huge amount of luck that is involved Yes, there's things that you can do to control your outcome, but 99% of What's going on in the world is completely outside of your control yet employees having?

Yeah, fairs or stealing money or the economy being destroyed by a politician late. Yeah, there's so much stuff Outside of your control That if you don't have self doubt about What's going on?

Probably delusional It's I mean, yeah, there's I Think you can have a self belief that whatever comes along you will deal with it and definitely that's a muscle that builds with time Unfortunately, you do need to get kicked in the nuts a few times to learn that it's not the end of the world

My business partner, Jeremy Harbour, has a great saying that I really like, which is being an entrepreneur is like walking on a tightrope.

And if something goes wrong, you fall off the tightrope, but what you discover is that the tightrope was only a foot off the ground.

It's not the end of the world. Like if you have to shut the business down, have to let down clients and stuff, it's not the end of the world.

You can get through it, you can take the lessons and learn and move on. So I think that's a very good analogy, but yeah, goes plague the self down.

@38:35 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, that's a great analogy because I think every big problem is the end of the world. Every other week you're fighting, is the business going to make it this week or next week?

then it's almost like skateboarding. You have these moments where you have to push and then you have these all their moments we get to glide.

And it's the gliding moments that we all aim for in entrepreneurship. then we're like, all right, now we're gliding.

I like the push and I like the challenge, you know, now, what are some things like, you know, have been super challenging or maybe challenging that what are some of the things that you notice the most challenging for entrepreneurs that are that are trying to scale their business, either by themselves there within the confines of their own country or even internationally, what are what are the what is like the most common kind of thing you've noticed?

@39:30 - Callum Laing

I think it's the universal thing that all business owners look for is good people, because ultimately that is the difference between success or failure.

So I think whatever stage of your journey and I think, you know, coming back to my point earlier, it's very easy to say

like, yeah, there's just not good people out there. Or, you know, you can, I hear a lot of people very dismissive about the talent pool.

And I think that's, you know, you have to take responsibility for that there. We've never, never lived in a world with so many talented people.

And it's crazy. I mean, so I, because of the, I guess, the global outlook that I have, I don't limit my hiring to who's in the local neighborhood.

I look for the best people I can afford anywhere in the world. And, and if you look at the Vedland Director program, which has been very successful companies, less than two years old.

But our CFO is in Melbourne, Australia. I'm based in Singapore. My CEO is based in the UK. My COO is based in Portugal.

The rest of the team is dotted around Asia. Half of the and South Africa and the US, way more than half the team I've never met in person.

And I really don't, I'd love to. I'm sure at some point we will. But if you, yes, you give up some things by not being in the same room as somebody else, but your pool of talent grows exponentially.

And as long as you're not a micromanager and you focus on results rather than process, then it becomes really easy.

And there's just so many talented people out there in the world. So I think, and look, I mean, this is sort of our approach with board members.

There's companies out there that want to be able to look you in the lights of the eyes and sit down with you in person.

Great. Good for them. They've got a very, very limited pool of talent that they can reach for. There's other companies that say, I just want cool people from around the world be able to move faster and do more.

So look, think more and more people have to be thinking in terms of remote working and working with the best people.

And I think that's the universal factor that slows any growth down is your ability to attract great people to your company.

@42:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I really like your analogy that you use with with Starbucks because it's true, you know, When you go into Starbucks, you tend to see, you know, I mentioned this, I think, in a previous podcast is like, you know, when you're when you want customer service, you don't want your, you go to Starbucks, you don't want your order, you know, correct sometimes or usually you want to correct always, right?

they created, they created policies and processes in place to get the end result. That's, that's all they care about is the end result.

They want it to be a standardized result. In fact, folks that may not know this Steve. The Howard Swartz that started Starbucks, he actually got this idea from going out of the country and actually seen these cafes in Europe and wanting to bring that, that same type of feel to the United States.

So I think that goes back to Colin's point, know, going outside of your own country and thinking outside of the box is very, it's a very good way to not only inspire and create new ideas within yourself, but you can find some phenomenal talent out there.

it's really remarkable. So, know, start to think about that as well when you begin to look at growth. Now, what advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?

@44:12 - Callum Laing

Look, I think the game has really changed a lot. When I first set up my recruitment company in Holland back in the late 90s.

Remember, we spent nearly 300,000 euros or kilos at time, euros on building a CRM piece of software, custom relations management to manage all these recruits, because that was what you had to do.

yeah, today you can get free CRM software that is 100 times better than the rubbish that we've built. So, there's so many tools out there, there's so much information out there, there's so much opportunity out there now that there wasn't.

that can be a little bit overwhelming. But I think the ability to go and test your idea before you go all in never used to exist.

And it does now. There's no reason for you to quit your job and build a business before you've got customer orders.

And I developed a rule having made this mistake repeatedly many, many times. I'm a very slow learner. I finally came up with a rule for myself, which was I didn't launch a business unless I had at least five forward orders from clients or had raised at least 100 grand in investor capital.

Because if I couldn't get those, the idea wasn't good enough. And what I used to do was go and talk to my friends at the bar and say,

I've got this idea for the business and they go, wow, great idea. And I'd say, would you buy it?

And they go, definitely. And so I'd go away and I'd invest in it and I'd spend time and I'd build it.

And then I'd go back to them and say, great, I've built it. And they go, oh, now's not a good time.

But brilliant product. Well done. And yeah, you really kind of the only true thing that matters is the response you get from the market.

And if you can't get, if you can't sit down, every business I've done, I've done Veblen Director program when I started that, I came up with the idea, I did a webinar, it out to my network, invited, I think we probably had like 20 people on that, I said, look, this is something I'm thinking about doing.

If you would be interested in being in this first cohort, let's have a chat. You'll put down, I think it was a $2,000 refund.

It deposit if I didn't go ahead with that, but if I did. go ahead with it, I'll work with you, we'll get you that board seat.

And then once I had that, like I had five or six people said, yep, I'm up for this. Then I had to build it.

I to build it quite quickly. But I knew that there was a market for it. I did the same when I launched Guild Members.

And that's a much, much easier place to be building things rather than what I see a lot of people do is build it and then you just keep adding value and go and somebody says, well, yeah, but if it was just in blue, and you go, I'll make a blue one.

And you know, you're just constantly running around as opposed to focusing on having the hard conversations, which is, will you give me money for this?

Because that's ultimately all that matters.

@47:52 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yes, yes, very true. All that matters is, will people reach into the back pocket and pull out their wallet and actually pay for the thing you created.

signed or service you are providing.

@48:02 - Callum Laing

Now, if folks wanted interested to learn more about you, maybe learn more about some of your books or the MEH Corporation, how do they find you on the website's social?

Where are you at? Yeah, so social LinkedIn is kind of home. So, yeah, mention this podcast, if you connect with me so that I can, I'll accept you.

Callumlane.com is hopelessly out of date, but as long as you stick your email address in there, you'll get access to all of my books.

And most of the time, I forget I haven't used letter, so it'll be like six months before I actually email you.

But yeah, those are kind of two main places.

@48:46 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Perfect. And folks, don't forget, if you forget any of this information, you can also subscribe to the Shades of Entrepreneurship newsletter that is sent out weekly.

Go ahead and visit the Shades of E.com. You can also follow us on all of the social sites at the Shades of E.

And if you are so inclined to, you can become a patreon member for $5 a month. You can help support the show.

Go ahead and visit the patreon. I look for at the shades of E $5 a month. You can help support the podcast, which allows me to continue to bring on phenomenal guests, like the one calling in from day again from Singapore.

So so it is like eight in the more almost nine in the morning now over there as it is almost 6 p.m.

on the west coast. So again, thank you so much for joining us. So a very, very enlightening education. I'm going to go and connect with you via email offline.

I'm actually running the business accelerator program. And so I think we have, you know, some businesses here if they want to go into that route, love to have that connection.

As all folks, please go ahead and subscribe to the newsletter at the shades of E. Thank you and have a great night.