@0:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Shades of Entrepreneurship.

This is your host, Gabriel Flores.

@0:35 - Justin Goodbread

I'm here with Justin Goodbred, Justin. How are we doing? Man, I'm too blessed to be depressed, brother.

@0:40 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Too blessed to be depressed. Oh, I got to hear all about this. But first before we get into Justin, because now Justin has a very extensive experience, over 30 years of experience scale and exiting success of businesses.

He's ever now an entrepreneur, an author, a business coach. So we're going to get into all of those, but first.

Justin, go ahead and introduce yourself. Who is Justin Goodbread?

@1:04 - Justin Goodbread

You know, Gabriel, the way I describe it is Justin Goodbread's just an old country boy born and raised in our dirt road in South Georgia and live on a gravel road in East Tennessee, man.

Been blessed to be the oldest of two siblings on a mom and from a mom and dad who just born country.

You know, like the old country song says, just born in the sticks raised in the south, but mom and dad trained me to be a business owner.

now for 30 years, I've been a successful business owner. As many would say, I've had seven exits from seven, eight, nine figures.

And now I'm having a blast at coaching business owners how they can radically change their lives for the rest of their lives.

@1:41 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So that's who I am, man. I love it. I love it. So let's kind of get into it. Let's talk about how mom and dad raised it.

Give us a little bit of background. are you, you mentioned you're from Georgia now living on a gravel road in Tennessee.

In fact, folks were earlier talking about how those Georgia Bulldogs are sitting pretty up there right next to the Oregon ducks on the football.

But. Before we get in all, let's not divert too quickly here now. So give us a little background, tell us a bit about your upbringing and how did mom and pop get you to become an entrepreneur at such a young age?

@2:10 - Justin Goodbread

Absolutely. So I was raised in Brunswick, Georgia and literally on a dirt road, but my mom and dad will raise from dysfunctional families, let's call it, very hard, very hard families.

And they made a decision, Gabriel, like so many of us with our children, they made a decision that they wanted to change their family's trajectory for the rest of their lives.

And so in their humble, ignorant ways of doing things, they started going to conferences with this company called Amway way back in the day, a multi-level marketing company, but that exposed them to people like Zig Ziglar and Les Brown and Aug Mandino and Charlie tremendous Jones and all these books.

my dad who got out of high school could barely write, just had this vision that hey, I want more for my children than I have.

My mom who is college educated said well, his or my dad's name was Alan, we call him Pops. Well, he's, she's

Well, if that's what you want, I'll sacrifice my career as a nurse and come home and homeschool our children.

So way back when homeschooling wasn't popular as it has been since COVID and some of the recent shifts in our demographics here in the United States, 40 years ago, they brought us home and started homeschooling us when I was about the third grade.

But our curriculum wasn't, you know, math and literature and English, even though we had some of that, it was literally reading books like by Dave Ramsey, thinking in Thinking Grow Rich on Napoleon Hill and my very first book I ever read, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

This was my education and at the age of 15, I found myself with my brother who was three four years younger than me.

We found ourselves cutting grass and this grass cutting business went from two boys in a truck with a dog to within two years, my brother and I were making more income than my mom who was a full-time nurse and my daddy worked at a Georgia Port Authority each.

Let me say that again, my brother and I each were making more. come to my mom and dad combined and we learn real quick.

April that business business is a road map it's hard map but it's a road map for financial freedom and so that is what launched the journey into entrepreneurship.

@4:14 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Man I love you know fact you mentioned a few books like Rich Dad Boardad I read that book as well got got several different business books you know that kind of you know really help you kind of narrow in on your focus and and what is that if you're trying to go into a specific vertical folks there are so many different books out there like I truly believe we're at a moment in time where we are very fortunate you know as as Justin mentioned his mom was doing homeschooled but now look you can essentially give yourself your own education right now and it's in the power of your pocket sometimes with inside your phone you go to youtube university and learn all these things or you can go to the shades of e.com you can check out the website subscribe to our newsletter we'll have all this information as well so Justin tell us about that kind of transition you know you mentioned you're you're starting a lot more.

business now, folks, I got to tell you, there's nothing cooler than starting out with doing a lawnmower business. That was my first little, uh, forte into the entrepreneurship world, pushing my dad's lawnmower around the community.

Now, tell us about the transition now. How'd you go? What, what happened to the lawnmower business?

@5:15 - Justin Goodbread

then where did you go from there? Yes, my wife came to my family. We were married in about 2002.

And my wife is Filipino by national descent. And we came into South Georgia. And for the first time, Emperor Gabriel, I saw racism and the ugliness that happens with racism.

I'd never experienced that. Mom and dad raised us to be very accepting of people, to be very loving of people.

And I saw the harm that racism did from ignorant people, how, how it actually cut to my bride, my beautiful wife, cut her to the soul, man.

And so we made a decision that, Hey, I'm going to sell my landscape company still in existence today. The person who bought us doing a phenomenal job down the islands of South Georgia.

But we said we're going to sell the business and we're, I'm going to relocate from. out Georgia to Tennessee.

Yes, I'm a bulldog up here in volunteer country. It does create some problems this time of year or deer football season.

But but I moved here to East Tennessee with this mindset that look, I've already created a business one time.

I'll do it again. And so in East Tennessee, I found myself being recruited in the financial services industry. The financial services industry did well for me.

I became the CEO of a very, very prominent company. And quickly, they're after went through my first business divorce.

Let's call it a lawsuit. It is not fun. Some of us have been there. And that launched into seven years of what I call tribulation, Gabriel.

We had some very hard times during that seven years of pain. Not only was I dealing with a lawsuit, I was relaunching another business and sold that business.

My wedding party, three of my men and my wedding party died. I had a family member commit suicide in my pops who might have greatly passed away unexpectedly.

My dad, who's my hero. We had three miscarriages deer that time he was hard period of time. So what I often say is as business owners, if you can

Imagine I have dealt with it. Whether it's from a personal level, whether it's from a business level, hardships, harassment claims, lawsuits, concentrate, you name it, I've dealt with it.

And it wasn't until an epiphany that happened to me on a mountaintop in West Virginia. was about I was about 28 and I was about 36 years old at this point, 36 years of age at this point.

I was talking with a client who said, good bread, I'm broke. Now, when you look at this guy, like so many business owners, they look like they had it all together.

He was taking the exotic trips. He had the beautiful car. He had the pay for house. He had millions of dollars worth of equipment inside his lot that he used to do, basically blue collar type of work.

It's a good bread I'm broke. And I'm like, come on, man. And I didn't really grasp the gravity, what he was saying.

He was in his mid 50s Gabriel. And all he had was a couple hundred thousand dollars in his bank account.

Not a bad thing except for this lifestyle. Like so many of us in business have achieved, this lifestyle could not be sustained.

Unless he figured out a way to get enough money inside of a bucket that was going to provide him income for the rest of his life outside of his business.

And I can remember sitting on that mountain top sitting on the side by side looking across the vista Gabriel and his name is Steve.

I said, Steve, there's got to be a way that you can bridge this gap. There's got to be a way that you can as a business owner rapidly accelerate your net worth your business values that you can retire.

He said, well, I want to do it the next seven years. Let's fast forward. What we're going to talk about and what I do now and what I what I learned is what led to his success allowed him to achieve his goals.

But it's what also led me to walk away from a quarter million dollar take on pay recurring revenue jobs started business up from scratch.

And then within 49 months have experienced my own eight figure exit. So I spent 20 something years Gabriel learning that business makes wealth.

Yes, it provides good income, but unless we learn to build the asset, the business itself. Kylie transferrable, then like Steve, I might find myself as so many business owners nationally, find themselves in a position where they have this very nice lifestyle, but they have nothing to support it once that business is gone.

@9:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, and that's a great point in regards to I think also the the operational speech, like you're mentioning, making sure you actually build a business that another organization wants or you're willing able to sell.

And that kind of comes down a lot of that operational piece, folks, making sure you have your operations button up, making sure you have your policies button up, because if somebody comes and opens up the books and is like interested in your organization, and and I do like you know, you're mentioning the residual revenue, right, the importance of creating a residual revenue.

Well, again, folks, if you're starting a business and you create it from scratch and you you really kind of make sure you put the work into it, the nuts and bolts, so that operational piece, the policies, you make it so it's when somebody does come looking at it, because it sounds like, you know, Justin, you mentioned you had a couple blacks, it's what you

to talk about here momentarily, but without having all those things button up and please Justin, correct me if I'm wrong, it kind of seems like organizations or individuals, angels, investors or whoever may not be interested in your organization if all those things aren't really buttoned up.

Is that correct?

@10:17 - Justin Goodbread

I would take it a step further. Here's the statistic from the AMAA, the Academy of Mergers and Acquisitions Advisors, as well as the Eggs and Planning Institute provide two shocking statistics.

Here they are. For us as business owners, what we end up finding is that 80% of our net worth on average as a species is wrapped up in our business.

It's highly illiquid asset. But when the time comes for us to exit our business, whether that's to pass it on to children, to a key employee, to an angel investor, VC firm, whatever it may be, when it comes down for us to exit our business out of desire or necessity.

It's one of those two reasons, right? But whenever it comes time, only about on the high side, 20% of business owners ever transition their company.

That means that 80% of business owners who who But 80% of their net works out in their business will never capitalize or turn this business into capital.

So the way I describe it to business owners is like you have this rental house that's you're collecting rents off of, that's your income, but you can never sell a house.

You don't own it. That's what the reality is. So in order for us to drive high how valuable businesses, we have to know that there are a couple of key components.

And we'll dive deep into this because of the interview, but there are eight key value drivers that drive the businesses value, but there are eight areas of business that we as business owners often jack up.

We don't understand them because we're really good at one thing. Most founders, most people who are entrepreneurs in nature, you know your product, you know your service, you're probably a phenomenal sales person.

Why? Because you had to get your business off the ground. If you're in business anyway, if you're in length of time, especially past that catastrophic period of time, then you know your product, know your service, you know how to communicate its value.

To your would be customer, you're a sales person more than likely, maybe a dominant personality type, you may be a dreamer, may be a CEO type.

But more than likely you do your shortcoming on as you're mentioning systems That's one of the things operational efficiency more than likely you're shortcoming on that But as we build a business Everything has to be designed for our client now when I say client in this conversation I'm talking about the person who's gonna come in and give you some money shell some cash out to you, That's your client We often though we focus on our customer the person who's buying our product and service and we focus it on customer And we forget that somewhere down the line a bank's gonna have to finance this a VC firm's gonna have to finance this an angel investor firms Got to finance this and more than likely there's gonna be somebody who's gonna add a personal guarantee to write you a check That is who we're bringing the business for man and Gabriel wasn't until I was on that mountaintop in West Virginia And already had three eggs and somebody my bell that it clicked in my head just like that It was like holy crap.

I've been building my businesses Three businesses my landscape company my dental consulting firm my insurance based business. I've been building

for the customer, but the customer is not going to write me the check. I have to shift my mindset and start building this business now for the client, the person that one day down the road in the future and I don't even think it's going to happen is going to look at this business and say, man, you've got an asset that I'm willing to sign my name on as a personal guarantee.

I'm willing to put some money in your pocket so that I can take possession of this asset. Whenever that clicked in my head and I began backwards engineering on how to make that work, my life changed.

@13:30 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, folks, let me give you a great example of this because I love this conversation right now, Justin, truly do.

A good example of this is right now. Folks, like some of you guys know, I started the nonprofit Latino founders.

We started with myself, Juan Paraz and Edgar Navas. Our goal is to help scale 100 Latino businesses here in the Pacific Northwest, million dollar revenue in five years.

So, Justin, probably going to pick your brain. We bring you on as a mentor. Now, one of the things we're doing right now, and it was very interesting.

I was having a conversation with my wife about it last night. I'm putting together a call. analysis for these pitch Latino events.

if we got communities, we host event, how much does it cost, right? So putting her out of this cost analysis, then she saw us and she's like, okay, well, this is this is really good.

But what's the value back to the organization, like the people that are going to actually sponsor the credit unions, the local business entities, right?

I'm like, well, that's a great question. And so then I had to start to re kind of think the cost analysis to make sure that the value back to the community is also stated, right?

Bringing the entrepreneurs together to showcase that their community within their community, inviting the community actually vote on the pitch competition, right?

So they're the ones actually vote on who the winner is. They're the ones then also identifying the amount of unrestricted grant funding we are rewarding, right, to help them scale these businesses, right?

And then also not only that, but making sure our executive director and our business accelerator manager are also involved.

So post production, there's still being and toward and into this realm, right? It's not like we're just going to do this one event and walk away.

And so to Justin's point, that's how we started to create the brand in our message. So when we go into communities and they are wondering about the pitch competition, we now have a value for our customers, entrepreneurs, we help support, but also the funders, the people they're going to help actually push this over the finish line.

@15:23 - Justin Goodbread

So I really, really love that store that you brought up. Absolutely. Absolutely. It sounds like you guys amazing work that I love the drive and I love the calls.

@15:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, yeah.

@15:32 - Justin Goodbread

I wish more seasoned business owners would take an interest in the next generation of business owners, because we know so much and we've already got all the cuts and the bruises, man.

@15:42 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

We don't want our fellows to do that. The people following behind us to have the same experiences. Exactly. one thing you mentioned, which I want to bring up too, is when you're thinking about exiting.

And this is also folks, again, Pacific Northwest Oregon, we got a lot of farmers in our community that are, I think, 59 average farmer age about 59.

@16:00 - Justin Goodbread

yet they don't have an exit strategy and a lot of their kids they don't want to go into the farming area so again we're talking about exits one of two things you said is most individuals that exits for two reasons desire or necessity talk about those two things and why it's important for entrepreneurs to begin to think about those two things yeah so let me lay the foundation with two statistics that are shocking okay right now there's about 13 trillion dollars in business value that should transition that should that's able to be transitioned that that could move from the founder or the current owner to the next owner in the next ten years 13 trillion another study that came out said there's roughly 11 million uh business owners right now who want to sell their companies they may not have listed them yet but they desire to sell them because the gen x and the baby boomer population and roughly only a million of those businesses will transact okay that's already a devastating number here's where gets even crazy of those million that will transact only 400

I'm sorry, only 40,000 of those business owners that transact will be happy with the value. Okay. Those should shock you as a business owner.

So the reason why to your root question that it comes down to desire or necessity is, you know, often we hear in real estate for those of us who've been around a while, you hear three words, location, location, location, right?

When it comes to business, it's all about timing, timing, timing. So whenever I say either by desire and necessity, every business owner should desire to exit their business.

Here's why I say that statement so emphatically is because you have been entrusted and you take the utter privilege to serve your customers, your team, your communities, your vendors, your charities, everything that's attached to that business, you have the honor and privilege to serve, and you love it.

But there could be a point in your life where a death, a disability, discouragement, disagreement, some of these things could come up in your life that you least of all expected.

If your business has not been prepared for that exit that whatever the timing, timing, timing lines up that you're not going to capitalize on the max dollars.

I'll give you a real life example for me. So here I was. I started my company from scratch in December 17, 2017.

away $40 million revenue and said, I know how to build a highly valuable business. I'm going to build this thing.

My goal of my coach was a six year period. Here we are three years in this journey and my wife gets sick during COVID.

Like so many are on the country. We didn't think any major, but before long we found her in the hospital on a a on a health issue that was only documented four times at that point in in the entire United States.

Very, very wild thing. Now, before going any further, she's fine today, perfectly healthy.

@18:43 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

God bless this. Okay. let me just throw that one out there.

@18:46 - Justin Goodbread

But at this time, gave her only in the hospital beside my wife, literally looking at a 12% success rate of her actually making it through this particular thing.

And in that moment, I wasn't thinking about my business. In that moment, I was thinking about my wife now, dear.

in this time period where we were here for 16 weeks, my business grew 40% because I had built it to sell, I had built it to where I operate without me, excuse me, I had built it to operate without me.

But at that particular point, I found myself a wife in the hospital saying, man, what's next? And she looks at me, Gabriel, and this is not just inflexing, this is just real life being really authentic and vulnerable.

She looked at me and she said, Justin, what's another million dollars going to do for us? And it wasn't to say that we're rich, by no means very rich.

But it was to say that, look, there's more to life than money. Whatever that she made that comment, I couldn't answer her.

So I went to a coach, my business coach, I'm a firm believer in every business on Chevy business coach.

And I went to my business coach, and he said, if you had unlimited time and unlimited resources, not money, resources, what would you do tomorrow that you're not doing today?

And I said, I always spend more time with my family. Now, in the light of my wife, I don't think she's gonna live.

My kids are now on their teens and I'm going, my goodness, where's the time gone? I've got my daughter at home for two more summers.

got my kids by boys home for four more summers. And at that point, they're gone. I'm now a dad and a business owner, but I feel like at that point, I waste my entire life.

And he said, think you should sell your business. Now, timing, timing, okay, three timings. Number one, I did not expect my wife to be sick.

I did not expect me to pay first face to those questions. Financially, we were good. My business was a dream.

I was making more money. I was taking four months off a year. And now I'm sitting here in my early 40s saying, what would life be like if I had unlimited time, unlimited resources?

What would I do? And I'm writing these things down, Gabriel. And I went to my coach and said, okay, going to sell it.

And he tells me my value, my value because I had built this thing with the end of mine, because I was preparing my life in this business for that ultimate exit that everybody should be doing.

Because I was doing that, I said, I think my business is worth it. And he leaned back. For those of you who aren't watching him, just want to do it, leaning back and he put his hands across and I folded his arms and he smirked and he goes, hey, good breath.

You passed that number three years ago, brother, and I went, oh, you're full. crap, man, I know what my business is worth.

You get now, you don't because what's happening as you've been building your business is your particular industry, the multiple accelerated.

And right now, because you're best in class, because you have this thing built where it can run without you, you're probably going to get X.

ended up happening was is I received an X figure exit, mostly cash with the, I don't know what to earn a house or hold backs or claw backs or all these crazy things often happen in business, because I had built my business with the end in mind.

So the reason why I say out of necessity, because life could happen to any of us at any time or out of the desire, I was faced with both.

Did I have to sell my business? No, not really, but if we didn't know what my wife was going to be like, if she had passed away, I would have been the dad with three kids.

I would have been necessity to sell my business or reload or do something drastically, or because of timing, timing, my stock value was far greater than it should have been.

And it became a position where now I could sell it and move forward in the future. that's why I couch it with necessity in time.

@22:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And I think that's a great story for folks to, you know, really kind of take in because when you were talking about the necessity piece, a lot of the necessity occurs because of a life changing event, right?

Somebody, either your business partner passed away, or you got injured, or your wife's getting hurt, right? are the necessity things.

Now, the desire piece, I want to kind of dig into a little bit more of that. Give me some actionable steps to make a business attracted to buyers, ensuring that they can achieve a successful and profitable exit.

@22:33 - Justin Goodbread

Perfect. What do we have to deal with?

@22:36 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

What do have to deal with?

@22:38 - Justin Goodbread

are entrepreneurs? do I got to do? Here's the four steps that I think every business owner should do. Number one is you should know your value today.

is the value of your company? Second thing is, what's your value gap? Now, what a value gap is, if I compared your company to the exact same company, exact same revenue, exact same everything within your industry, is your company higher or lower than a best in class?

See? Whenever people look at the company value, they'll say, I'm producing a million dollars of revenue, so is Kerry over here, and Kerry produced a million dollars of value, so we should have the same value.

That's not the case. See, underneath the company's value, there are things that hold up. fact, there's 256 points that I can measure to say, is this company highly valued, best in class or lowest?

about on a bell curve. For those who have seen a bell curve, we're talking about the top 5 percentile, best in class.

So we need to know our value, and then we need to know our value gap. How does our company's value line up with the best in class business as all things being equal?

Once we know that value gap, now we know how much equity we can close by enhancing those 256 points.

So the 256 points are comprised of eight areas of business. Every business, no matter what it is, has eight areas.

The first is, is you should be doing planning. What are you doing tomorrow? What are you doing for the next 90 days?

What are you doing for the next year? What are you doing for the next three years, five years, et cetera?

Everybody should be doing planning on that topic. Whenever I'd set out and launched my firm in 2017, I actually built a pro forma, a forecasting pro forma, and I had so detailed and so well thought out Gabriel, that whenever I got to the closing table, I brought it out and put it in front of the buyers and said, Hey, by the way, my forecast going forward is going to hit the mark.

And here's why four years ago, I projected that I was going to be exactly where I'm at. And I'm $30,000 in a while above what I projected four years ago.

And if I modify this right now, here's where this business to move over the next four years, it's through another seven figures on my, on my earned on my purchase price because of that planning component.

So planning is important, leadership, are we teaching our team to operate without us, how we're removing ourselves from the epicenter of the business, sales and marketing the next two, they've got to work in conjunction with each other.

Today I see this on Facebook, on Instagram so often that people talk about marketing marketing marketing, are they talking about sales, sales, but they've got to work in cohesiveness together so that your prospect will know what your ultimate customer experience is going to be.

So that's the first four. The next four, are your people. You have to have a team that's going to walk with you through the exit and stay past the exit.

You've got to have a team of A players that people want to recruit away for your company. You've got to have top talent, the higher the talent, the higher the value.

Your operation structure has to be so refined. That's number six. Number six is your operations. Your operation structure has to be so refined and so specific that you can see whenever something breaks.

You as a business owner should literally be able to go to the beach, read an iPad and know exactly where your business is performing this month, last month and the next 90 days.

You should be able to see that with KPIs, KRIs, performance indicator, key results indicators and all these different management tools.

And the last two are finance and risk management are legal. So your financials is making sure that you have audited financial statements as well as having proper cash flow management, having good CFO tech capabilities within your company and the risk management, which is number eight, that is making sure that you you're dealing with all your

clients, things where that be state or industry specific, that you have your right insurance is in place, you have your right legal documents in place, your contracts, your intellectual property, all these things are the eighth month on our areas.

Now, there's 256 points underneath those. Within those eight areas of your business, there are how you drivers, things that kind of work in each of those areas.

example, recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is one of those eight value drivers. You can see recurring revenue inside your planning, inside your planning.

You can see recurring revenue in your risk management. You can see recurring revenue in operations. You can see recurring revenue in each of those eight areas.

Another one is owner dependence. I can look at a company's financial records and tell you how dependent this business is on the owner.

By the way, the financial records are set up. I could do that to see in thousands of businesses. So owner dependence is one of those things.

So there are eight different areas for value that drive the eight areas of business that ultimately point to moving the business.

value higher. So now to your question. Now that we understand that, if we're talking to business owners today and we're like, okay, Justin, I hear you, I want to increase the value of my company.

We already know where we're at. And in terms of we know our valuation, we know what the value gap is.

And now it's time for us to start moving it. Here is the number one, number one thing that will drive value to your business more than anything else.

Business owners, get out of the way. Business owners build a business that doesn't require you to do anything. Your team wants it, your customers want it.

Everybody wants it, including your future client. But we business owners are too daggum smart. We know our stuff. We're tenacious.

We're resilient. We're all those things that we know we are. And we're on our own stinking worst enemy, Gabriel.

We're our own worst enemy of the fact that we know that we can grab the bull by the horns and we know we can wrestle it to the ground.

We see the problem. We know we can fix it. I literally have business owners say, Justin, as long as I can put my hands on the steering wheel of the business and drive.

I'm good. And I'm like, no, you're not. If you put your business here with the business, you just shot your value.

So if you want to do something more than anything else, get yourself out of the business. Here's what I teach clients to do.

Here's an example. Every day at the end of the day on your drive home or from your walk to your office, to your living with whether it's home or wherever, get your phone out, turn on the recorder and record three things that you should be doing as an owner.

And start compiling a list, put it out there and chat GTP. And you can now find out what type of job position will take on that role and then hire them.

And whenever you hire them, yes, it's going to cost you some money. But whenever you hire them, you're free your time up so that you can work on the things that you should be doing so that you can free up the next level and the next level and the next level.

So there are eight areas that we can drive value with Gabriel. There's eight areas of business. And there's 256 methods within that business that we levers we can pull to actually make that value where a buyer is going to say, Hey, I'm going to want you, I want to write you a check right now.

Here you go.

@28:57 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, I really love this. The piece you mentioned was the sales and marketing piece and how it needs to be cohesive.

It truly is, folks, again, if you guys listen to this podcast, again, check it out the shades of e.com, subscribe to newsletter because this is some of the things that talk about constantly the sales funnel, the marketing funnel, right, and how it needs to correlate the awareness piece.

That's the newsletter, right? That's the newsletter, getting awareness out there, right? And then you're trying to get engagement. So the engagement piece is the actual end user getting back to your website and starting to look at your, so you're trying to engage the conversion, right?

So you're trying to get them to convert to, now they're on your website, they're looking at it, they're checking out your products or service, right?

Then you want to get it to a purchase. So right now they purchase your item, okay, boom, now that you have them as a purchaser, now you want to create a loyal, returning consumer, right?

You can do that with some discounts, a loyalty program, a communication back, right? And then at the end of the day, asked like, hey, we'd love for you to actually put, you know, write up, write up a Google review online for us, and I'll give you 10.

say, you know, offer your next thing, because then you can go and take that and put it on your website.

You know, in fact, you know, this is a great segue, because again, one of the things I'm doing Justin right now, as I mentioned that nonprofit, I just got off a meeting this morning and we're talking about creating some sprints.

We got our 501c three about seven months ago. Now we're like, okay, to Justin's point, I'm trying to create this so it's scalable internationally, nationally and internationally.

So the first, the first print, handbook for employees, right, create a comprehensive employee hand, right HR policies, onboarding policies, know, what does all that look like, right?

The second operational cost analysis, I want to know how much it is to run the business and how much do we need to continue to fundraise throughout an annual basis to stay, just to stay manageable on the end of that very frontline level, right?

Not talking about scaling yet, just talking about saying we want to stay afloat, right? Again, we're six months in.

Next one, product roadmap to your point. How do we now create? How do we continue to improve? we're doing so we can create revenue drivers, right?

Continues, what's the next stream of revenue? And then the last one and to your point was as the website marketing design, creating a brand guideline, right?

sure we go out. I got the fonts, I got the colors, I got the logos. You want to use the brand, okay, here's the template flyer that you use, you can input your information, here's a presentation template.

And the goal behind all this is very simple. I don't want to be doing this for the rest of my life.

My goal with Latino founders is, you know, folks, I've been in healthcare for over 22 years. got, that's, I'm building a resume with healthcare, right?

Latino founders, the first 30 years you build your resume, the last 30 years you build your legacy, right? So Latino founders is building out the legacy.

However, I'm building it in a way, Justin's really pointing that. I'm creating it and I'm building it out in a way with our board members.

So in 15, 20 years, I can come back and I'm no longer the president or the president of the board or anything, I make a look back and it's still self-sustainable because we created all of these, the foundation, right?

A foundation of a business. is that can continue to be managed by itself. In fact, Justin, you mentioned books.

The lazy CEO is another great book where it really talks about, you know, grading processes that you can walk away from.

So the business, because you know, Justin, mentioned it perfectly, you know, if you have both hands on the wheel, you can easily drive the business.

Well, guess what, folks, sometimes you have to pull over and pee who's going to take the wheel, right? So you got to be ready for those moments as well.

Now, it's really, let's kind of talk about the marketing piece, because I think that's something that some folks kind of get a little skewed about, right?

They think it's all like flyers. Tell us a little bit about your experience with marketing and how does how does being able to pivot in a rapidly changing market important?

@32:46 - Justin Goodbread

Yeah, I'm going to ask that question a lot of value because I think it's if we're trying everything we do has to drive value.

@32:51 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's my ethos with my the way my brain works.

@32:54 - Justin Goodbread

I agree. Yeah. Whenever I whenever we do an appraisal on the business and we do evaluation, a benchmark, whatever you want to call

on the business, we have these 256 points. Well, they may be, I think there's 30 or so of amenities, the marketing component, right?

Whenever we make a decision where we're putting out the big rocks as, as EOS often talks about, or the list as you're talking about, there's a sprints, 90 days sprints, 30 days sprints.

Whenever we do in that, in order to drive value, we want to make sure that we're driving value, getting the biggest return on our time as we're moving here on the sprints.

So what I can illustrate is I can say, you know what, let's say hypothetically, we do go out and create an NHR manual.

And if we do that, we're going to spend 16 hours of our time is going to cost us $1,000.

I'm picking numbers out thin air, right? We're going to get 16 hours of our time $1,000. But yet we get this HR manual in place, even though it's needed.

I'm not saying not to do it. That may only add $30,000 of value to our company. However, let's say we built a detailed marketing plan, and we identified our KPIs and our K and our key performance indicators and our performance indicators and our key results indicators from this particular marketing plan.

We We nailed on our avatar, we nailed on our funneling, as you just said a while ago. We nailed that down.

If we build this thing out, where it's fully vetted and everybody on team understands it, if we did that, that may drive for $100,000 of value.

Yes, now it's going to take us six months to build this properly. It may take us time to test it, do some maybe testing, all these various things in place.

Marketing is one of those areas that many business owners, I hear this all the time, Gabriel, I'd love to hear if you hear the same thing.

I hear this all the time, just a marketing doesn't work, especially small business owners.

@34:34 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Marketing doesn't work.

@34:35 - Justin Goodbread

I'm like, wait a second, before you go any further, if marketing doesn't work, explain to me how Apple, the company that's in literally the jungles of Africa, why are they spending billions with a B, billions of dollars in marketing every year if marketing doesn't work?

Could it be that you as a business owner don't understand marketing? understand sales, you understand how to sell your service, but you don't understand the marketing aspect of it.

What led to My eight-figure exit friends is that I was in the highest regulated industry in the world, financial services industry, highest regulated, because most financial advisors, out there are wealth managers, whatever time you want to have, they'll say marketing doesn't work, because compliance is so, is so arduous, is so choking from the life of marketers.

I was able to simply build a marketing funnel that wrote books, I wrote books, had podcasts, I had videos, I had social media, had lead magnets, I had all these funnels that were built to where after period of 36 months, I literally was receiving 10 to 12 highly qualified leads who had walked into my funnels per week.

That is a part of, that is ridiculous in the financial space. When I say high qualified, I'm talking about people that were millions of dollars, that just wanted to work with somebody who got them.

I literally had to turn away clients, I know we can't work with you. We're going hold no more clients right now, and we'd have people call us and they'd say, hey Justin, we have some

$64 million of money, would you manage it for us? We love you, we can't get to you because we're full.

That is the benefit of marketing. Now, whenever I did my value growth analysis, and I said, okay, I know my value, I know where it could be in order for me to bridge that gap and my business was to focus on marketing more than sales, anything else.

It's not always the case. There are some companies out there that need to focus on operations more than do marketing or leadership or some other area.

But regardless of where you're at as a business owner, marketing is one of those foundational eight areas, and marketing is tied directly to all eight value drivers.

And if you build your marketing plan with the value drivers in mind, what's gonna happen is you will reap what you sow.

It's the law of nature. If you sow money to marketing, you're gonna reap it. Now, here's the arrest of the law.

You're not gonna reap it whenever you want it. You're gonna, if I sow corn in the ground here in Tennessee, first of all, I'm not gonna get oak, I'm gonna get corn, second of all, if I sow it the spring, I'm not gonna reap it the spring.

I'm gonna reap it in the summer. on. It's going to reap later than I expected it to come. So I often tell people in business, you're going to spend money for a period of months, maybe a year before you actually see the return that you expect.

I had a pool company that was the swimming pools, very high-end swimming pools, and I said, look, we can drive the value your company substantially up.

Now, for them, we had a recurring revenue model in the operations department. They had to quit going from just building swimming pools to actually doing pool cleaning where they had that recurring revenue model.

But what I told them is you're going to market and you're going spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing, but you're not going to see a result for 18 months.

And in 17 months, they finally broke even. All the money that they had spent, they finally broke even on.

That's the instant gratification world that we as business owners often live in or the shiny object syndrome, where we're going down the road.

did a good idea and we say, we're going to begin marketing and all of a sudden squirrel, something happens over here and we get off of marketing, so we cut it and go apply it to a new hiring a new team member.

Friends, if you're building value, marketing is one of those. One of the key eight areas that you have to focus on it's not anymore important anything else if you build just a marketing business And I'll have the other ones leveled and you're gonna have a marketing business And I was gonna pay you the highest value, but it has to be equally as important as your sales as your finance as your leadership and everything else Yeah, you know, and that's I love I love what you're saying because again That's kind of why we insured we put the or the way we call it the product roadmap But to your point the value roadmap, but how we how we what's the value not just to the individuals the entrepreneurs We're helping to support right and scale their businesses But what's the value of the communities that we're going into the value of the philanthropists and then each one of so another thing About marketing folks is very interesting that you know, really started to dig into it is the segmentation piece Not every message is the same across every single channel, right?

@38:48 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

My alumni for the accelerator pitch competitions are gonna get one communication versus the philanthropist is getting a different conversation Versus a volunteer versus somebody who attended right so each one of

Those are also going to be different. Now, however, you can also reutilize a lot of this content, know, like, you know, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that Justin's team has recording of this.

And again, you can check it out in the shades of E.com. Go ahead and subscribe to the newsletter, but I'm going make sure his team has this information so they can use it if they want to do a publication.

reached out to a Christian, a gentleman I work with photography. I'm like, Hey, I'm doing the Oregon Entrepreneurship Award Show.

I'm hosting it. I need you to come take some recording, some photos so we can create some, you know, some branding, some working as the, as my own business consulting firm starts to, you know, take off.

again, all of these pieces, I, again, I hope you guys are, have a piece of paper and a pencil out and scratching a bunch of these notes because this is extremely valuable insight of how to really work through the business.

Cause, you know, mentioned there's going to be moments of hardship, you know, you mentioned seven years of going through the legal battles and dealing with those, it's, it's those moments of

kind of where you're really getting tested, your character gets tested, you're going through these adverse moments, and it's how you actually come out of those moments.

It defines you not only as a person sometimes, but also it's the passion that you have for what you're doing that's going to kind of propel you through those dark moments, those gloomy days that it's raining, because it rains a lot here in Oregon, folks.

So making sure you have that passion too is going be entrepreneurs that might be thinking about going either becoming an entrepreneur, or they currently have a business and they're looking at scale.

@40:36 - Justin Goodbread

two different questions. First, we'll start with the up and coming entrepreneur advice. Yes, if you're considering being a business owner, I'll say it this way.

one, business ownership is not for everybody, but it's for a lot more people than what the statistics would say.

Business ownership is super easy whenever you find what you love. Whenever you find I go back to Robert Kiyosaki's rich debt poor dad the very first lesson that book is rich don't work for money And the reason why he says that is because of many times business owners will find what they love and when you find what you love Yes, you have learned some of these other things, but you end up having a passion like you I hope you can hear my voice in Gabriel's voice that we really like what we do after 30 years, man I'm having a blast like I said, I'm greatly blessed and highly favorite.

I'm lit. I'm I'm I'm unbelievable right now unbelievable in my life because it's found what I love so if you're thinking about business ownership give it a try especially if you're young when I say young under the age of 30 when I say under the age of 30 is what happens if you fall out on your face no big deal you still have the rest of your life to make up the difference so might as well take a risk business ownership is also going to be one of the few ways that you can actually break through some of the economic barriers that many of us face to gone other days where you could go work nine to five save your 20%

and expect to have the economic status that so many people desire. It's just not there anymore, but being a business owner and realizing that you are paid in proportion to the value that you create for the event.

And so let me say again, you're a prepaid, you're paid in proportion to the value that you create. You're not paid for what you know.

You're not paid for who you are. You're not paid for how pretty you are, how you look at these things.

You're paid for the value you create. If you get that friends, then business ownership is powerful. So that's what I would say to those who are considering business ownership.

Now, for those of you who are business owners, congratulations. you've even made it more than a year of business, you're automatically know that you're tenacious and resilient.

You are my peeps. You're the brothers and sisters out there that I want to hang with and I want to play golf with or maybe crack a beer with.

You're my peep. That being said, I want you to think about where are you going? Why are you going there?

If you could, if you were faced with the same questions that my wife said, Justin, what's another pick-a-dock figure her number was a million.

What's another dollar going to do for us? Answer that question first. It may radically change life. It may not.

But answer the question and then ask the second question. If you had unlimited time, none of us do, or had unlimited resources.

Now, resources not necessarily means money. It could be talents. It could be connections. It could be gifts. It could be a number different things.

If you had unlimited time and limited resources, what would you do tomorrow that's not doing today? And if you find yourself in business right now, handicapper, or feel like you're locked in or caged in or handcuffed where you're not able to achieve that, then let's start making an exit plan.

It doesn't mean you have to sell your business. It doesn't mean that you have to sell your business. What it will do though, if you start building your business for exit, you're going to align your company's attractiveness with the buyer externally.

And at some point, as it becomes more attractive, you begin stepping out of the episode of your business. You begin having the golden goose as we all aspire to have.

So if you're in this business ownership now, what do you want, man? Where you going? Get crystal clear on where you're going.

If you can do that, this backwards engineering, what we need to do today to start making a proactive step.

Now, for both of you, both the people who are not business owners and those who are business owners, do you realize in five years of your time you could radically change your life?

The next 60 months, from this point forward, today you hear this episode, so for the next 60 months, you could radically change your life.

You could change your life for the rest of your life. But it's going to step back to what do you want and how bad do you want it?

@44:40 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, folks, I tell this, I tell folks lot of times, go out and share your idea. I don't hoard your ideas because at the end of day, I think a lot of times people are, oh, I can't tell anybody because then somebody's going to steal my idea.

If somebody has that same idea, they're going to already be doing it. And if they're doing it, then they're doing it, then just do it better than them.

I really try to push people to share their thoughts and ideas. Nobody's out there trying to steal your idea because they're not passionate the way you are passionate about.

They're not going to build the way you're going to build it. They're not going to provide the value that you're going to be able to provide.

@45:14 - Justin Goodbread

Gabriel, you know, even the reality is, if you were I were in the exact same business and I'm going to coffee cup up and my voice is hurting today, but if you and I were both in the exact same business of building, court bottom, I think it's a ceramic ceramic black coffee cups with financially simple on the side that in my company, we're in the exact same business.

We're not still not in competition. The reality is, is your race has its own direction. You're gifted and you're equipped in your life experiences, has prepared you for what you're going down.

And my life experiences and giftiness, everything is different, even though we could be direct competitors. Man, if I'm chasing you or you're chasing me, we're never going to end.

There's no reward for us. So the reality is, is that each one of us are specially equipped. And there's already thousands of people out there within this ethos, seven, what, seven, billion people in the world.

There's that there's somebody out there thousands of people who are already willing to buy What you want to sell or what your gift in this is and even if we're both doing the same black coffee cups our circles aren't even the same We're not in competition.

So friends if you even have a passion if you have a desire If even no matter what it is take one step take one step and take the next step and it's gonna be hard But get this yes, it's hard being a business owner is freaking hard.

There's no other way around it But so was walking when you first tried it as the toddler and So was pick something so was doing your first push-up or so was driving the car for the first time or so was playing that musical instrument It was all hard until we did it very true.

Same thing is true about business ownership friends run your journey run your race She's your skill sets and just charge out with the water pistol make it happen You know it's great you're saying this because again One of the things I tell people when to do the pitch competition we have

@47:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

one individual token at their market they're doing crema they actually won the portland pitch competition recently and they're like if we get 1% of the market share just 1% of the if this what market share was like something 358 million dollars of revenue that have again folks 1% of 1 billion dollars is 10 million so if you say oh there's the markets already saturated there's there's already too much create a different creative value that somebody sees a value and even focus on a niche right maybe focus on the golf industry or focus on the podcast industry or whatever riches or the niches folks but 1% of 1 billion dollars is 10 million that's again just having a small slice of that market share is still extremely valuable the difference is you just kind of create a different value stream than everybody else and again to just this point market the hell out of it make sure that your value proposition you're marketing the line and as well that you're marketing tactics have a end goal and so your sales team knows if you're implementing this specific

marketing tactic, then this is your actual end goal and you have KPI's key performance indicators to say, hey, this is working or that's not working so you can pivot.

Now, Justin, I really love this conversation. Now, folks that are interested maybe, you know, finding more about you, maybe learning about more about your business, where can they go online?

@48:18 - Justin Goodbread

Where can they find you? Yeah, so check out Justin Goodbury.com and if you go to courses, we're currently running a special.

So we have several different courses that we operate. One is called the Value Growth Academy. We're currently operating a special where you could step in and see what's in the Value Growth Academy for five days, free of charge.

And if you decide to stay, it's $97 a month. We're talking a lot of money. Here's what's inside there is you're going to learn about the eight key areas of business.

You'll be able to get an estimated valuation on your business. But more than that, once a month, I'll hop on a live call and I'm teaching a very targeted matter.

So for example, on our upcoming call in November of this year, 2024, I'm teaching how to hire best in class talent that will stay through a transition.

How do you actually find those people? That's a number one request that we have. This last meeting we just had was, how do you build a marketing plan that drives value?

actually walked through my own marketing plan. See, I sold financially simple for seven figures three years ago, and I bought it back for a dollar in December.

And when I bought it back for a dollar in December, had no revenue. company bought it, destroyed it. Now, since December of last year, here we are now nine months later, I've now been rated over six figures in revenue on this marketing plan.

It works. This is not hard friends. So we teach the Value Growth Academy. from there, you can learn about our other courses that are like our universities or 12-week program.

We have a Mastering course. so much you can learn from. That's where I would target people. Or you're like, good, Brad, I'm starting up business.

I'm not sure if I want to go there. Then go to Amazon, pick up my book, Your Babies Ugly.

Your Babies Ugly was number one on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list. number 56 on USA Today, it actually outlines the eight areas of business.

it will, as my dad says, I thought if I was a business owner, this kicked me in my teeth.

It is powerful. It's going to. your world. When you start thinking about how to build a best in class business is highly transferable.

@50:05 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love the I'm going to grab that book because I love the title. I always I try not to have folks.

I hope I'm not offended. Anybody about I always do encourage folks. You can't be afraid to kill your baby when you're when you're working in business.

There's going to be times where you might have created the best solution that ever anybody has ever seen. Yet you realize that it's a solution that a problem that only you had.

So there really is not a big market for it. So it's it's okay to pivot. It's okay to share your idea.

Get out there and network. More importantly, subscribe to the Shades of Entrepreneurship by visiting the Shades of E.com. We will have Justin's contact information on the newsletter as well on the blog post.

@50:41 - Justin Goodbread

There'll be a transcription of this conversation and for these Patreon fans, Patreon for five dollars a month, you can actually receive this this actual interview a week before the episode airs on Patreon.

Go ahead and visit our page at theshadesofe.com. Justin, any last words before we leave? You know, each of us are gifted the same amount of

and a day. And it's up to what we do that's going to change our lives for the rest of our lives.

Let me challenge everybody who's listening. You have it within you to reach whatever the success that you desire is.

You have it already within you to drive your dreams forward. Let me just challenge you to take the next step.

Get out there and make it happen friends and let me know about it when you do.

@51:20 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. Challenge yourself to make this next step. innovation become your tradition, folks. So again, thanks you. Please visit the Shades of E.com.

Go ahead and subscribe us. We're on the social sites, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn. Go ahead and again, I'll have Justin's contact information.

So please subscribe to the newsletter by visiting the Shades of E.com. Thank you. Have a great night.