Tim Alison is an entrepreneur who has started and scaled four businesses. At the age of 31 Tim walked away from one of the highest paying sales jobs in the country, moved to a tiny fishing village in Nova Scotia Canada, and started an educational software company. The naysayers laughed. They stopped laughing when his sales topped $10 million.
Profit Whisperer for bricks and mortar businesses where I specialize in helping business owners identify opportunities for improved financial outcomes.
Host and Executive Producer of the Screw The Naysayers Podcast where I have interviewed and amplified the voices of guests from around the globe including the likes of Jack Canfield, Seth Godin, John Perkins and an eclectic mix of Thought Leaders, WSJ and NYT Best Selling Authors, CEO’s, Olympians, Paralympians, Professional Athletes and other women and men who have overcome great adversity. All are seeking to change the world.
We Talk About
- What are the basics that someone needs to know when looking at financials?
- Price a product, what are some mistakes that people are making and what should they be doing that’s different?
- How do you reverse engineer an opportunity, or look at an opportunity to see if it is worth doing or not?
Connect with Tim
CONNECT WITH SHAWN
https://linktr.ee/ShawnflynnSV
- Shawn Flynn’s LinkedInAccount
- Silicon Valley LinkedInGroup Account
- Shawn Flynn’s FacebookAccount
- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Shawn Flynn 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. On today’s show, we sit down with Tim Alison, who is an entrepreneur who has started and scaled four businesses and at the age of 31, Tim walked away from one of the highest paying sales jobs in the country moved to a tiny fishing village in Nova Scotia, Canada, and started an education software company, the naysayers laughed at. Well, they stopped laughing when his sales top 10 million. After selling his company, he started a podcast called screw the naysayers, where he is interviewed and amplified the voices of guests from around the world, including the likes of Jack Canfield, Seth Godin, John Perkins, and an eclectic mix of thought leaders, bestselling authors, Olympic medalists, and more. On today’s show, we talk about what are the basics that someone needs to know when looking at financials? What are some mistakes that people make when determining the price of their product? How do you reverse engineer an opportunity? Or look at an opportunity to see if it’s worth doing? And what are some of the opportunities for the next few years. This is much more today’s episode of the Silicon Valley podcast. And remember, if you enjoy the show, and like it, please share this information with your network to help other entrepreneurs out there to fulfill their dreams and their goals. All right now let’s start the show. Enjoy.
Announcer 1:23
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:41
Tim, thank you for taking the time to be on the Silicon Valley podcast now, Tim, I’ve been a huge fan of screw the naysayers and actually, I was really honored to be a guest in your podcasts for our listeners out there. I mean, you’ve had an amazing journey. Can you catch us up to date on a little bit of you know, screw the naysayers, your current podcast, but a little bit of your career up to this point?
Tim Alison 2:01
Yeah, cause it’s a trajectory. And its always dangerous question trying to ask a guy my age to catch up on my career. But I’ll give you the short version of like, a lot of young people my age, my career started in corporate sales, and I rocked it. I mean, in the 20s, I was in my 20s, not the 20s. In my 20s, I’m not that old. In my 20s. I was certainly the poster child for what success was supposed to look like, back to the six figure income by the time I was 26, which is when you’re talking the mid-1980s, that was in pretty rarefied air at the time and continued by the time I was 31, I was managing sales offices in three cities, basically half of Canada, which is where I’m from, and at the time, Shawn was probably in the top 2% of wage earners in the country. I don’t see any of that the boast because I did the logical thing. And I just quit and moved to a fishing village in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, which is where my wife’s from, and much to the amazement of just about everybody. And a lot of laughter, I started an educational software company, we didn’t have the term e learning in those days, the World Wide Web didn’t exist, we did have this thing called fax machine, but it was still a relatively new technology ran that business for about 18 years. Quieted the naysayers when sales hit around 10 million sold the IP off and that business around 2006 somewhere, I can’t exactly remember the exact date, largely because that entire sector had just gone through a massive consolidation. And it was before the time of the proliferation of everybody being able to get into eLearning. And it was at a time when developing stuff for the internet was so expensive. That was only the mass of the mass of publishers basically by products and companies just to get rid of it to get it off the market so they could dominate it themselves. Spent the last probably 15 years as a small business coach and mentor and, you know, I hit my entrepreneurial background is fairly diverse. So, I do a lot of things in that. But for the most part, it’s been around things like helping people assess opportunities for growth, identify the potential of new products and a lot in financial analysis, just helping people understand the basic financials that always make the difference between whether you have a business that creates wealth and you know when a future or ends up costing you money. And then when I’m 60 years old, I slowed up a bit on that consulting, and I decided to do something crazy again, and I and I started the screw the naysayers podcast, which look I didn’t know what I was doing, man. I mean, it just, I felt called because I was at this point of my life where I was so frustrated by so many young people just being told that it’s all what life is about settling, that it’s about compromise that it’s about making a living, and it’s all about the money and. Look like money because in the current system that we have I needed in order to do the things that I want to do and have the kind of experiences but I don’t want my life’s decisions to be driven by it. My view has always been there’s lots of different ways to make money. So let’s create a life and a business that aligns with the things we really value, and that was my story of us leaving the city where I wasn’t happy living in this rural lifestyle, creating a career, that was exciting that was well paying that was challenging. But still being able to, you know, be a present parent and prioritize my schedule to spend time with my family and those kinds of things. And the thing I don’t know what it is, man, I, the Screw The Naysayers brand, Shawn just somehow engaged with the globe really, in a way that I never would have imagined and so here I am. Well, as we’re speaking here, and it’s just a little over two years. And I’m 300 episodes or so in of talk to the likes of Jack Canfield from chicken soup for your soul, and Seth Godin. And Keltie Knight from Entertainment Tonight is even right now her book is number four on the New York Times bestsellers list, but I got to her recently, I’ve just had such a list of, of people I’ve had an opportunity to learn from. So, life’s great and I’m just looking forward to what the next 20 years holds.
Shawn Flynn 6:04
Now Tim, all that information you just said right there. I’m thinking four or five different areas to go into some questions. And one thing I really want to hit is analyzing financials for companies. But even before that, you mentioned early 20s, you’re making six figures this in the 80s. How has sales changed over the years, because the companies I deal with mostly early-stage startups, they have a few engineers, they don’t have any salespeople and their mind is just build the perfect product, get it out there. What has changed in sales?
Tim Alison 6:36
there are certainly things that have changed and not the least of which is that our customers are waiting way more educated. And they can talk to our other customers quite easily. Like if we have people that are dissatisfied with us, it’s pretty easy for people to express their opinions about our business. What has changed Shawn and I what I think is a problem for most of these people, you’re talking about the people who’ve got brilliant ideas, and know what they want to achieve. But the art of networking, the art of building relationships, the art of realizing that it’s used, almost overused, but the idea that people buy from folks that they that they know like and trust is for sure. still the case today. And so, like I look at we’ve chatted a bit on air about some of the other things I’ve got going on and a summit that I’ve got going on right now. We’re reaching, I’m reaching people from this little fishing village without having to travel around on business or anything else. And just by using my network, and by saying, well, who does Shawn know who does Cori know who does Jack Canfield know and, asking and getting on with those things. And I just think that people have, we started to think of sales as a numbers game, especially all this nonsense about funnels, and it’s all about just tracking as much stuff into the top of the funnel. So as long as you put enough in the top, that the number of customers we’re looking for, it’s going to come out the bottom, there’s no predicting that anything’s going to come out the bottom if you’re not putting the right people into your, into your funnel. And I think technology has made a lot of people in sales, lose sight of the fact that your customers are people. And so, we’ve got to identify the people we want to do business with in the organizations that we want to do business with, and figure out how we can approach them and the people that are the sales reps that are doing that. There’s a young man named Dale Dupree, who has a podcast at a big business is called the sales rebellion. And I couldn’t recommend Dale more highly in terms of a podcast to follow and somebody to reach out to but he’s just a young guy. And his background was in copier sales, but his dad at all the copier business basically selling copiers, so very competitive business type of thing. And Dale started working for him and the model in those days, it was like the Xerox based model was just very similar to the way they taught people to sell life insurance back for many years. All you had to do was have like a fixed number of like, 30 conversations in a week about copiers. And if 30 conversations, got you 10 appointments, then those 10 appointments would get you three sales. And everybody was just on this, get as many of these conversations. And then when I looked at it, he said, that’s stupid, because 27 out of the 30 people that I’m talking to aren’t buying from me. And so, he started really focusing on the individuals and the businesses that he really wanted to do business with. And he created relationships. He dropped gifts off for the gatekeepers who were the Secretary and he said he just he sent weird emails with things in the mail that had puzzles in them and stuff like that. And so finally somebody said, who sent this and then he just did so many things to try and establish human connections. But he got this reputation. They call them the copier warrior, because he was making like five times as much money as everybody else. You know, his dad recently passed, and he decided to, that it was about more than copiers and he started the sales rebellion and I just love the guy. No vested interest here folks, I’m not Getting anything for it. But he’s an example of a young guy who figured out that his generation have really lost that ability to make those human connections. And that’s what sales is about. That’s what’s getting money’s about. That’s what getting financing is about. That’s what getting partners is about, it’s about relationships. And this stuff, I think, is something that differentiates the companies that are killing it are the ones that have somebody within their team that have figured that out.
Shawn Flynn 10:28
that’s really interesting. Because thinking about the funnel, and that when I’ve talked to people in the past, they go, Okay, let’s break down the demographics of this person, what’s their favorite hobby? What’s their book, how long they spend on social, their age, all this stuff? They don’t really say, okay, who have you connected with in the past that has a network that you can reach out to, and maybe invite all them out for dinner or online payment through zoom? Shout out to Michael at Insperity, who invited me and that was a lot of fun, and we all bonded and I’m going to feel like I owe that guy forever.
Tim Alison 11:03
on here today, the day we’re speaking, I was participating in a summit I was telling you about. The host was talking to someone named Heather Moyse, who in Canada is a well, she’s a world class athlete. She’s won two gold medals. I mean, she’s just an amazing public speaker. Because I’ve been participating in the summit. I wasn’t on air at that moment. But the other hosts noticed I commented basically Heather said something about just ignore the naysayers. So, Tim being Tim goes into Facebook and comments, screw the naysayers, because that’s my brand name. And then Cori, the co-host comes on, and he says, Heather, I want to tell you, but I just got a comment here. It said, screw the naysayers. You used the word naysayers three times. I don’t have to look at who it is. Because I know it’s Tim Allison, and you’ve got to go on his show. I would have a very hard time getting straight to somebody like that she’s a huge demand and charges really big fees. But there she is on air saying Tim hit me up. I can’t wait. And it happens because of the things you’re talking about. That you build relationships. Seth Godin came on my show, Episode 100 of screw the naysayers. Seems like a long time ago, it was just a little over a year ago. But I know for sure that journey to get set started with my first guest. Because my first guest was a guy named Don Wetkurt. And I knew Even then, but Seth had huge respect for the work that Don was doing in trying to change and radically change the education system for high school kids. And to promote entrepreneurship and coding and building a technology-based business. It’s not a coincidence that after I’ve earned some other earned the right to make the ask, that when I was able to reach back and say, Hey, Don, it’s been I know that you’ve been on Don’s show. And Don’s when I was my first guest, he did me a big solid. These are the way you build networks, because it’s crazy that people I’m talking to from Nova Scotia, and I was thinking about it the other day, Shawn, I’m not lying, I only left my home village for business twice in the last two and a half years. The first-time last October, I went to the City of Toronto to accept an award of a woman of inspiration conference for the work I’ve done with my podcast and advancing women gender equity. And the second time was in November, I went down to Cambridge, because I was invited to speak on a stage in Harvard. And I thought I might want to do that. Along with all the other people. Every other relationship that I’ve made, I’ve done from the studio I’m looking at right now is nothing but forest and trees and blue sky, in a village of about 300 people that has changed in sales, because we can make human connections without always being there in person. If you really look at successful companies, it always comes back to their ability to build their network. The return on relationship I heard the other day, I hadn’t heard that phrase before, but ROR return on relationships. And I thought, that’s a pretty interesting way of looking at it because I can trace just about everything good that’s happened in my business back to, I know where relationships came from. And Shawn introduced me to so and so introduced me to so and so and those kinds of things.
Shawn Flynn 14:03
I love that phrase return on relationships, I’m going to start using that that’s going to be part of my daily vocab. Okay, and there’s a couple other things in your intro of who you are that caught my attention, the pivot to Nova Scotia, what was going through your mind there? Because I know everyone had to say, Hey, you got You’re doing great. You’re going up the corporate ladder, you’re going to be at the peak soon. And you’re saying no, I want to go to 300-person fishing village where I’m guessing at that time, you’re moving to a new area. I mean, your contacts your network, you’re starting at zero over there. What was that pivot like?
Tim Alison 14:37
Where we moved was where my wife was born and raised, and she has family roots here that could can be traced back to 150 years, which for white people in North America is about as far back as most people can, can trace their roots in North America. So, there was that sense of connection and the challenge was this is that I wasn’t ready for the success that I had in my job, Shawn. I was making a lot of money. I advanced up the management side of things really fast. And I had people working for me that were much 15 years older than me. And I had a lot of success. I didn’t necessarily handle from an ego standpoint, what was going on, I found myself I like I love being outdoors. When I was growing up as a kid, my happiest time were spent at my grandfather’s little camp, basically and a little small lake, but where I was outdoors, and here, I was living in Toronto, and either driving in bumper to bumper traffic or hopping on subways or inside office towers. And once I got to work, I almost never went outside, it would be just down into the subway, up to a client come back in the subway back those kinds of things. And I was traveling, like two weeks out of four, I have two kids under the age of five, and my health was suffering and I was gaining weight, I was not paying attention to my, to my diet when I was traveling, probably was abusing alcohol, and those kind of things in those days. And so, I mean, I knew I was miserable. And I knew that if something didn’t change, I was going to be dead or divorced within five years, maybe both maybe sooner. And my boss had had a heart attack. He was like 10 years older than me. And he used to say for years that Oh, man, I wish I had been where you are, you know, at that age, and I’m thankful crap. I mean, you’re only 40 and I he lived. But I mean, it shakes you out, because I was like a mini boss. You know, it was like all of a sudden, this doesn’t sound so good. So, there was that challenge. I mean, I just knew that I had given a shot. The startup was interesting. The biggest issue that I think I had was that Well, two things that I didn’t anticipate how long I was going to actually grieve the loss of my previous career. Because I had left the job thinking I hate it because I wasn’t there was things that I did hate, and I knew quitting was the right thing to do. But when I got here, I found myself missing those moments of elation when you close the $750,000 contract or something like that, missing the camaraderie with my team when we’d had a success. And we could all go celebrate missing the awards trips, I was fortunate enough with my wife to go to Hong Kong in 1984, I was still under British rule. But I mean, all paid for by the company and one a very extravagant trip. I just didn’t, nobody warned me that I was going to go through this sense of loss, and I know now that it’s perfectly okay to feel a sense of loss for something you’ve left behind. you know it was the right thing to do. But it doesn’t mean you don’t have to go through that kind of mourning. So that kind of screwed me up for about six months. And then the other big mistake that I made was that I even though I ignored all the people that said I was crazy to make the change. I did buy into the idea that I had sacrificed my career. So, I found myself thinking, Okay, I’ve done this for my family, I’m going to live in this community. But the best I could hope for was to make enough money to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head. And that’s exactly what I would use to say, Well, what are your goals in business, to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head? Now anybody that knows anything about mindset business knows that that’s exactly what I did for three years. And so, it was like living paycheck to paycheck except I was writing the paychecks and I was never quite sure those checks were going to be there in itself. It took me that period of time and then the intervention of a rest and peace. Roy Saber and a gentleman came into my life and became a tremendous mentor, and friend. And I remember, I was in California, in San Diego, I think it was their lawyer. We were at a sales conference. And he was sitting there drinking a hangry Martini, I just have a vivid in my mind. And he was asking me, I was like 30 years younger than me. He’s asking me what I had used to do and stuff like that. And I told him about my success. And he asked me about my business. And I told him how we were doing, which was it all that great. And he looked at me said what the, What’s up? I said, Well, look Roy I’m living in this little fishing village. I mean, I can’t expect to be doing the same stuff that I was doing when I was in eighth the biggest city in the world or something what it was in those days. And he said why not? And they told me a story that not any of the young people have trouble relating to but back in those days, Shawn, we used to have to mail our payments to the credit card companies a check in the mail. So, he said, every month Tim, I mail a check to American Express. He says, you know where I send it. I don’t have a clue. He says it’s either North Dakota or South Dakota or something like that. It’s I don’t know; you think I care where I’m sending the check. I said, Well, I suppose not. He said, Well, why do you think anybody’s going to care about where you’re living and where your business is based. And it’s really crazy. Because from that moment on, I started saying instead of having excuses for not being able to do things and I said, Well, what’s the barrier? And I’d start asking, Well, okay, but what if I tried this or what if I tried that what might happen? How could I? And it’s just, it’s insane. And that transformation just changed my life and that’s from there for the for the next we had a very good run with my software company, and it all stemmed back to just stopping Looking for the advantages, and I had a lot of advantages. And I ended up building my own office space, Shawn, because I was looking around for a place to live. But this is way back in the day when everything was on the local area networks. So if you really wanted that office, it was at all technical, you had to have your computers literally wired together, through Ethernet cable, and I outgrew my home, I’ve been working in my home, I needed space, I was starting to hire people. And I was trying to find a space that I could rent because the last thing I wanted was to be in the real estate industry. I couldn’t find anything. Like the only thing I could rent were these old buildings that were falling apart, I literally bought a building lot with an old home on it that was falling apart, I had the house torn down. And I built a small like it was about 1000 square foot, rectangular building my own building wired it up properly. But you know what, I built an office for $40,000. Now I know of course that’s those dollars versus mid 90s versus today, but it was crazy cheap. And then I went out and started hiring people. And glow and behold, I found I thought I’ll never be able to hire people who want to live in the country. Oh wrong. The idea that like, Oh, I can get out of the city and I can come down and I can be five minutes from a beach, and I could not lock my doors at night. And bike and jog in the morning at the side of the road without any people move to the community specifically to work for me. I paid them way above average wages for this community. But I know they could have made more money in the cities. I mean, I just didn’t fit the business model I had. And then nobody ever quit. People just literally didn’t quit because they if you provided them the right work environment and respected them, gave them the opportunities to grow, made them feel part of made sure they understood how they were contributing to the both the growth of the company and the success of our customers. I found advantages. Now I even ran a conference one year, I got, because my biggest line item got to one year and I’m looking at my financials and I’m thinking Gee, I got to do something about my travel expenses, because, and I’m selling educational software at the average sale is between 50 and 100,000 dollars, well, I wasn’t selling that in my fishing village was all mostly all across Canada. So, myself and my staff, my marketing manager, our travel expenses, were crazy going across the country to visit people. And I thought what can I do and then I realized I live in a part of the country that everybody likes to come to in the summertime. I mean, it’s absolutely beautiful in the summertime when people get out of the city come down. So there was a little community up the road called Digby, and there was this old kind of like in Canada we have these railroad hotels, the big old and this was like for seafaring traffic, but there was a place called the Digby pines and beautiful old style 30s 40s Resort with the marble floors and the big lobbies and the chalets and ocean view and everything. And I ran something called the Digby Institute. And what I did is I invited because I thought okay, I want I want to do is I want to sell to the biggest school districts and the big end community colleges and things like that in Canada. So I invited the superintendents and the CEOs and the top person and these organizations, I target the places that I wanted to make connections with, I would invite them to come and here’s the deal, if they got to the pines at their own expense, and they could all do that, because they had professional development dollars, that they could, especially if they chose not to fly, they could drive and bring their wife, take the money and get out there. And I put them up at the pines for a couple of days, I paid the hotels, we had a special program so they could go golfing or whale watching. We even took a half day for even the people in the conference to go golfing and stuff in the championship golf course attached to the resort. I brought in local maritime musicians playing the fiddle, and dancers and going on. And we didn’t sell anything. We ran panel discussions about issues around technology and education. And I got a lot of them to sit on panels. And I would combine them with some of my customers who had been talking stories about how it was great working with Tim. And from then on. If I was going to travel or somebody was going to travel, we knew when we got to that city, we could get into the office of that highest level with the decision maker. I couldn’t have done that if I told them Why don’t you come to Toronto. Last thing we want to do is come to a big city in the summertime, but to go breathe some fresh air and take my wife and I and basically, it’s all free because I fed them and I gave the rooms and then they use them instead of flying they take the cash equivalent they drive even it was 1000 miles they didn’t care. So, I don’t know I ramp but it’s just about looking for the opportunities that are inherent in the assets that are around you.
Shawn Flynn 24:30
Okay, so Tim, we talked about the pivot and I love the fact that you’re talking about looking for the opportunities where you are and I think that’s so timely right now especially here in Silicon Valley with all these companies now telling everyone to just work from home. Some of them are saying indefinitely work from home. I got a feeling in the next year or two people are going to be migrating to all different areas of the country where they can have a backyard where it is safe it where it is clean. So, I could see a lot of opportunity. Arising for people. And I mean, what you’re saying, right there was so timely now, okay, you had your business, I’m kind of curious about the exit, if you are up to talking about selling it. And then I want to go into talking about mentoring company’s financials. And but let’s talk about the exit.
Tim Alison 25:19
So, it was not Honestly, it wasn’t overly lucrative man. And what had happened is that we had a really good run with a core product. And I had partnered with a major corporation in united states that had developed, called Johnston’s learning, it was a division of the yearbook company that I think still out there. And they had a product that was one of the first integrated learning systems in the world. And it taught literacy and numeracy skills to adults. The problem was, it could never have been sold in Canada, because for example, all the math was Imperial measure like inches and feet. And Canada’s been using the metric system for since at least the 1960s. And the reading was a law it was maybe teaching reading, it was things like, learn how to be a good US citizen, the US Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, I’m not criticizing people that it made sense for their market, what we did is we basically hired the Canadian educators, and created content and partnered together to serve to create a version of that, we had a really good run on that. And ultimately, the sad thing that happened to that one is, which I think is really when I was getting to the stage where I probably knew that I would be winding it down within a few years. But I don’t want to get into naming the corporations, Johnston’s had been bought by one of the largest publishers in the United States at the time, who then got bought by one of the largest publishers in the world, who is based out of the UK. And they once that came through, so how this happens, I mean, there’s just been a massive amount of debt that got onto the books. And in order to get rid of the debt, the only way to care about cash, don’t care about profits or growth, or they just care about cash. And quite honestly, they looked at a rinky dink little division that was doing like $300 million a year. And you know, what’s profitable, and everything else, and they just got up one day and closed it. And it left me in a position where I had the legal right to continue to sell the product. But without the support and technology and things like that. I knew it wasn’t really gonna be practical. So, we sort of eased out of that. And then I moved into a phase of collaboration. And we built a few of our own products. And the last one was a product that we actually built in, in affiliation with Houghton Mifflin. But it was on a Boston, a publishing company, I think they’re still around, but they were a college textbook. And we actually created a program and built a program teaching life and employability skills and again to for adults that are perhaps funneled through the crack a bit. It was modern niche at the time. And I just looked around Shawn as that product was coming to completion to fruition. And by that stage, my son had graduated from college, my daughter was halfway through her undergrad, all the money was paid for that. And I looked at the future of the industry. And it was at that stage where as fast as a company, my size could develop a new product. It was obsolete, because the technology just exploded in terms of the way the internet was being used to teach. And I just didn’t see a way to keep up. So, in all honesty, I went to Houghton Mifflin and for a pretty modest amount of money. But I said, Hey, because they were giving me royalties on that thing for significant royalties for forever. And I said, would you like to just buy me out? And they said, Yeah, we’ll, we’ll just buy you. And you know, that was the exit it. I sometimes think about it, I certainly had a goal of, of not so much about creating wealth, because it’s I know, it’s crazy, but it really never was about money for me. But I would have liked to have been able to have kept the legacy in the community in terms of the kinds of employment I was creating white collar software tech jobs. But to be honest, I just didn’t saw a lot of pain and just sort of came to the conclusion that was the appropriate time to realize that we had gotten everything we wanted. Like when we started that company. If somebody had said, here’s the deal, you’re going to get to raise your kids in this little fishing village, you’re going to be when it comes to your daughter’s sports teams because she was in the basketball and soccer big time at school. And so, you’re going to be able to be the desert one of the designated drivers that takes time off work whenever there’s a game. And in rural community. Sometimes you had to drive those girls 200 miles to go to a it wasn’t that far as 100 hundred at least right at 200 round trips easy. But I was to guy because always spend the time and so I was the dad that was in the car with those girls, who after a while they forget that the adults actually in the car and those kids that never talked to you. You’re hearing everything that is going on in your life and my son was like I’m a Canadian dude. So, my son was a hockey player. And they played games on weekends. And Shawn in between ages his age five and 18 when his minor hockey career ended, I did not miss a single weekend hockey game and it was didn’t mean I wasn’t traveling. But I would always fly home on the on the Friday to be home and I always used to cost a lot more money in those dates, because there were these incentives. If you’d stay over a Saturday night, you could fly back on the Sunday for a fraction of the cost because nobody wanted to travel on the Sunday. But I would. And I always said, if my business can’t afford to fly me home, then there’s not a good enough reason for me to go make the trip. And if someone said I could do all those things; I can put aside the money. So, my kids could graduate college without any debt, that would have been able to travel my kids around the world, because what are the concerns that I did have? We live in a really small, almost entirely white, and certainly those days entirely white community and one religion type of thing in the area, I was concerned about the lack of diversity. So, we took them, we traveled the world with them. And we took them to places where they would see people coming across Canada, but what they would see people dressed differently, looking differently, talking differently, behaving differently, that you could get this understanding that we live in this really multicultural community. So those were the things. So, what you the crazy part is when I say I scaled the business to 10 million, and everybody says, tell me about the money? I don’t mind. But if you ask me what what’s most important to me about the business, it was that I created a business that aligned with the things that I really valued in life. And I think to me, I was talking to a lady named Lynn Twist, and she talked yesterday, and she has advised some of the world’s wealthiest families on philanthropy. I mean, some of the world’s wealthiest women, I’m really, and she said, you know what? that most of them are very unhappy. They’re not happy. And I’m not trying to dump on money. Again, it’s not about that. But if we can earn money, doing things that it’s purposeful, is fulfilling, and that sits in with the things that are important in our lives. I don’t know, you can’t put a financial price tag on those things. Yeah, I don’t know what they’re I probably rambled from the original question, dude. But that’s Tim.
Shawn Flynn 31:57
Oh, yeah, I was thinking you’re getting going more the due diligence of the acquire and all that, but we’ll ignore that I actually really like the balanced life because that is something you don’t hear a lot. You hear people just going 100% in one direction, ignoring everything else. And then once they hit that end, they look back and question everything. So, I think you actually your journey, right there is pretty, pretty amazing. I mean, that you’re able to actually have the complete circle as Tony Robbins fans would say. And now you’re mentoring in your advising companies. So, one thing that comes up all the time with companies is financials either before they get acquired this is when a VC is going to invest in them. This is what an angel saying? Do you have any of them? When you look at a company’s financials? What do you see what’s visible to you?
Tim Alison 32:47
That’s a heck of a great question. I want to start by saying this. And the thing that totally shocked me was what I came to realize is that just about all the business owners I said I was meeting I really didn’t understand the financial aspects of their business. And it’s crazy. Some of these many of these companies were quite successful and others have gotten themselves into a mess. And they knew enough to know that they were in a mess. And they didn’t know why. And so, you know, I think anytime, if I’m taking a look at objective look at a company, I bought for I go to a couple of different places fairly quickly. I mean, I’m probably going to start with the margins. That’s just me. And it’s kind of like when you watch Shark Tank, they think they want to know, do you understand your margins? It’s crazy. And I’ve met so many entrepreneurs who can’t tell you the difference between a markup and margin. And if there’s a big difference, and they don’t know how to assess whether that margin is reasonable or has the potential to be profitable for their business, and I’m going to look at their liquidity. But I want to have, I’m self-taught, I mean, I have taken some graduate level courses in accounting and stuff like that. But really, this is stuff that I’ve just learned in the, in the trenches, in the most simplistic way, the way I did it in my very early years of entrepreneurship. When I think of liquidity, what I used to do my laugh about it now, but I used to look at my balance sheet, and I’d see okay, if my current cash in the bank, and my current assets, like not inventory, but current assets, things that I can quickly convert into cash. If I have that, including accounts receivables, I’d add that up. And I’d say okay, how does that compare to the amount of money that I spend every month, my goal was to have six times my burn, I could get to the stage where I that was what I said, if I could get six times my monthly burn, that the world could follow my markets, my biggest customer could disappear, my major supplier could close or whatever. And I wouldn’t have to lay anybody off tomorrow, I could see I’d have some time to figure out what I wanted to do. And I’m not saying I got there right away, but I did. Now I’m going to take a look at liquidity with a bit more sophistication. But I really just want to look at your what cash you’re generating, where the cash is being spent. And there’s a lot of business owners that don’t understand all that the income statement doesn’t show all uses of cash. And I know that sounds crazy, but they will not understand that things like loan principal payment, and depreciation t are part of the use of cash. But instead they said why don’t understand my income statement says, I’m making money. But I don’t have any money is one No, you’d have too much debt or, you know, too much inventory or these kinds of things. And then I’m really looking for trends. Almost if I’m going to take any kind of serious look at a business, I just convert everything to percentages of sales. I don’t want to talk gross numbers. I don’t care about the numbers. Because I mean, how do you even compare like, year over year sales? How do you really compare, because just because a company sale, for example, might have increased in a given year. If their margins went down dramatically, in order to achieve that growth in sales, they may actually have made less money. And for me, profit is king. So, I want to look for trends in terms of percentages, I want to look at what your gross profit margin is as a percentage of your total of your total sales. And look at those trends in the last three years, five years, whatever as many as we can get type of thing. It’s the same thing with projections. It’s the same thing if somebody says, here’s a set of financials that I want to take this to an angel investor, and I want to try to get someone to invest in my company, I’ve actually trained done training for financing organizations that lend money to entrepreneurs, is the first thing I tell all these board members who are charged with doing this. So, the first thing you should do is know that all of those numbers are wrong. Because there’s nobody in the world that at that has the skill set that they can predict into the future exactly what those numbers are going to be. We can make educated estimates about our sales about our expenses. And so, what you do is you challenge all the underlying assumptions. Okay, well, this is what you said your sales are going to be? What are the assumptions behind that? This is what you say your expenses are going to be you and I chatted off there, after I interviewed me on my show about someone who was in a software a gig and was suggesting that they get away but the competitor was getting like a 7% licensing fee. They were going to do it for three, even in their mind probably saying that’s only 4%, which is still a lot but you’re saying Okay, so you’re gonna have like a 60% reduction compared to everybody else, but somehow you’re going to be profitable. That’s wonderful. Why will you still you know, what is unique about the way you’re solving the problem is that and if you’ve got that innovation, then Hallelujah, then we really got some it’s motherhood and apple pie stuff. I wish I could say it was really complicated. The thing that frustrates me, and I always qualify this because I do have a CA that I blessed to run into a lot of years ago and for as a tax advisor is, I think one of the best in the world. But I really believe that whole industry of accounting and CAs and everyone else, they have such a vested interest in complicating the process and making it feel complicated. And so much of the focus is just on tax compliance, and they don’t really care about one of those statements or what information those statements are really providing to the entrepreneur and they Convinced business owners that it’s too hard to understand. And it’s not. And honestly, if you’re going to run a business, I’m not telling you, you should be doing your own bookkeeping. But if you’re going to run a business, you better take the time to make sure you understand the benchmarks in your industry. What kind of margins are we going to have to achieve in order to be profitable? What kind of wage costs can be as a percentage of sales that kind of business like this support? How many times do we look at productivity? The productivity is another thing I’m instantly going to assess. People say, Well, how do you measure productivity? And it’s the easiest thing in the world if as long as you can benchmark it. I’d look at your wage costs, and I say as Okay, as a percent, not sales wages, but the wages in your organization. And I look at those wage costs. And I say, what do they represent as a percentage of your total revenues. And then we go on, we get the industry benchmark data. And we find out you’re competing against the sector where let’s just arbitrarily take restaurants, because it’s a really simple one to the numbers of things everybody can understand. But let’s say that the industry average not a best in sector, but an industry average restaurant and full-service restaurant wage costs around 33%. You’ve got as a restaurant wage costs of 37%. In an industry where the gross profit, the net profit margins are often less than 5%, they tell you two things, you’re either way underpriced, and it could be or you’re not getting sufficient productivity out of your staff. You know, you’ve got people not moving fast enough or sitting around or you know, any of those kinds of things. And you can do that for any business, you might have to dig to find the benchmarks. But and the beauty of it is that you can also track that productivity on a year over year basis. And you can start saying, Okay, well, every dollar of sales last year, at my wage costs cost me 38 cents. If they’re 36 cents this year, and people are still being well paid and they’re happy, then you’ve done a really good job of increasing productivity, if they’re 40, or they’ve gone up. It’s the ability to look at those things. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that stuff. It’s pretty basic math.
Shawn Flynn 40:15
Okay, you went over a ton of financials, they’re a little jargon I mean, burn how much money you spend every month. If someone say someone’s very basic, they have a you know, a PhD from Stanford in engineering, you know, someone some basic, no big deal. What would the financials be that they should look at or think in their head, like the most basic ones,
Tim Alison 40:38
you only need to look at maybe a half a dozen numbers, I mean, it first thing you need to understand is the difference between the income statement, a snapshot of the of your revenues and expenses of your business over a specific period of time, like q1, or for the last year or whatever. There’s the balance sheet, and the balance sheet. Is the financial picture of your business on any given day. How much money do you have in terms of assets? How much money do you owe in terms of liabilities? What is left there in terms of equity for you? So in the income statement, pull out a half a dozen numbers or five, six numbers, pull out your gross sales, like what are your total revenues and pull out what your cost of goods sold is, in other words, if it’s software, you’re going to perhaps going to have amortization, if you’ve invested a whole bunch of money into the software, so what’s showing up on your income statement is the cost of the software. And it would include software licensing, that you might have had to a lot of times we have to we got all sorts of software as service things that are directly tied to our ability to provide the service, those kinds of things. Look at all your other what’s indirect expenses is the easiest way that I would just describe it, which is just all your it’s all your wage costs. It’s all of your if you haven’t if you’re renting an office still in those days, it is any of the software as a service that’s not directly related to client using your product, its insurance, it’s travel and meals and interest on any debt. Like if you’re if you’re paying debt back, all those kinds of things. So gross sales, cost of goods sold your indirect expenses. When you subtract those two sets of expenses from the gross sales, you’re going to get your net profit margin, your gross profit margin, you’ll get simply by deducting the cost of goods sold. From your again, it’s just easier to explain if it’s a tangible thing, if I’m in a restaurant and cost of goods sold is the food, the food that they purchase, in order to resell or a retail store. It’s the food that they purchased. And then you subtract that from your gross sales, you’ve got your gross profit margins. And if you could take that and put them in percentages. So, if sales equal 100% of sales, they always will that’s 100% of the top of the page, and then one of my wage costs, okay, well divide the wage costs by your gross sales. What does that represent as a percentage and a PhD from Stanford, they can do percentages? And all of a sudden you get this measure. Everything’s in percentages. And from there, you can track if you’re able to get some industry or talk to somebody that’s been in your sector has got some expertise. Get some idea what people in your sector pay what those percentages should look like, for a profitable business. And then of course, you can also track your own performance, because that’s how you spot problems. Shawn before they become big problems. Instead of the problem that so many people have is they leave their accounting, and they assume it’s just about its sort of a year-end tax compliance thing. God, it must be a very complicated thing to produce these things. Because the people we pay to prepare those, those statements take about half a lifetime to produce them. If it’s anywhere in here in, the Silicon Valley like it is my neck of the woods. By the time you look at it and say, Oh, crap, the last 18 months, I had all sorts of expenses going out of control, and I didn’t see it. So, like if you saw, for example, that your indirect expenses, like your basic office overheads, and stuff like that, as a percentage of sales were really creeping up. And then if you were monitoring that on at least a quarterly basis, then you dig deeper and say, Okay, well, what’s going on? What’s changed here? Has something gone up in price, are you one of the things that I guarantee you happened as soon as people went into lockdown with the closure around Coronavirus, and on March, every business that I’ve spoken to every entrepreneur that I’ve spoken to, went back and looked at all the money they were spending on software as a service. If they’re anything like me, they were horrified at some of the things that they’ve managed to collect, and weren’t really using, or weren’t using anywhere near to the point where the dollar could have justified, these are the kind of things that can get out of control. And if they don’t. If you’re kind of monitoring that, on the balance sheet, it kind of depends on your business, you’re definitely looking at your cash, there’s something called a I don’t want to complicate but a debt to equity ratio, which is just basically, equity is whatever if we took all of our assets and liquidated them and paid off all of our liabilities and it loans, what would be left? That’s ours so what does that how does that compare to how much debt we have? Those things are things we want to track inventory, if you’re buying it, and re again, may not apply. But inventory is the type of things that are technology-based businesses, like if they’re assembling things, man, if you get your inventory out of control, you can be cash poor, I get to be making all sorts of money. But all of a sudden, if your inventory is not turning over as fast as it should be, that’s an easy ratio. And I know it sounds confusing Shawn, but honestly, that I’ve talked about it, we’ll just put it out there now. But there is a little book I put together with a bunch of these terms. And it’s just really basic definitions. And then people just have to figure out which of these things apply for their business. And then here’s where the accountants don’t like me, is you go to your accountants, and you tell them that you might use, they may need to change the way they’re recording the financials. Because for example, if let’s say a company has three different major product lines, and if you don’t measure your cost of goods sold related to each product, and you might have one that’s losing, you know, you’re losing your shirt on it, and you won’t know. In other words, you have to know the profit margins in to whatever degree of detail you can, or even category, like let’s say we’re selling a different vertical market, I want to know how much money I’m making in a in one market or over another because you know, all revenue is not created equal. And we can sometimes find ourselves getting so caught up and I want to meet the top line targets to show that growth, that’ll make everybody think we’re exploding everything. But if it’s coming at the expense of your cash in your profits, you’re actually maybe better to double down on something else. That’s really profitable. And if you put more focus on it, I know I rambled on, but it really is, it’s five or six things on each of those, the balance sheet and the income statement, and then get your monthly report. And if you do that in five minutes a month, you’ll know if something’s wrong. And then if you have to spend more time on it.
Shawn Flynn 46:51
Okay, now let’s even go further back then say the company doesn’t have any of this yet. Okay. They they’re not worried about you know, just in time manufacturing, they’re not worried about their inventory. Right now. They’re just thinking, we’re building a product, what can we price it at? What’s that mindset? What’s that conversation like?
Tim Alison 47:11
You’ve got to look at how much it’s gonna cost you to run your business, there’s a couple of ways to do that. If you’ve got a good line-item budget, if you’ve got the ability to say a vision that other people I’m going to have to hire, and find I know what it’s going to cost me in terms of technology, and software licenses and all these kinds of things. And that’s a good way of coming up with that number. And you can also look at if there are similar businesses out there where you can get benchmark data and you can look at it and say, Okay, well, I’m not familiar enough with the ranges within the software is a service type of thing, which is really where a lot of the stuff in the Silicon Valley is right now, I could find it. I just have to go look at the ratios man. What you want to do is understand pricing has to take you to that top line that hundred percent. So, if I know that my wage costs and all of my basic costs of being in business, licensing and all that kind of stuff is going to come to a certain dollar amount. And then I look at the end, let’s say $250,000 A year, and I was just going to spend, whether I sold anything or not. And this is what I’m going to spend. And then I need to go look at the industry and say, Okay, well, what does an average software as a service company in this stage spend as a percentage of their total sales, or when they get to the point of being profitable, obviously, you’re not gonna be profitable, right out of the gate. If your game is going to be based on a big volume, then you can’t afford to make mistakes on estimating what it’s going to cost him, the bottom end is 1% or 2%. By the time it extrapolates itself out, so look at what those costs are and say, Well, if I want to be profitable in three years or two year, whatever timeframe you set, it that represents 35% of my sales, I’m just picking an average, you know, a number, you’d have to look at the input some industry stats, and then you’re simply going to say, okay, that tells me that if I’m going to spend that much money, and that should be 35%, that my sales are going to have to be, and you can calculate it, right? I mean, just you just do it live from that stage, and then need to start to say, Well, how many units or licenses or individuals Am I going to need to sell, and it’s just units and price. And you will play with those variables. But usually in the sector, you’re going to be able to look at comparable. There are reasons why so many different products are priced in that 19,20,29. I mean, there’s these scales all the way up. There are reasons for all of these things, you’ve got to figure out whether you can price yourself in that range, what the volume is that you’d have to get there. And then you got to factor in, well, how much money am I going to have to spend to get it. But honestly, if you’ve got good industry data, and you know what those base costs are, then you still should be able to extrapolate what the top line number is, it’s just that what you’ll find is a lot of people will come up with their bottom-line expenses. And if you, you have to validate your price Shawn. So if you have estimated too high, if it’s same thing, the person who said to you, they’re going to come in and all of a sudden, they’re going to be able to charge a licensing fee, but there was a lot less, it’s the same thing of price. If you’re going to be top of market or above market, and you need a very good explanation to what the value is that you got going on here. And you need an ironclad return on investment. And you need to be able to calculate which is the other thing at that price point. And what kind of return on investment is my client going to get for that for that service? And you need an ability to quantify that. And so, it isn’t, it’s always really hard to grab without having the one-on-one conversation. You could put some frameworks around it, you can say, Well, I know that this is what it’s going to cost me for my staff. And I’m going to go with a distributed model and maybe just have a small office or maybe no office at all. And I mean, that bootstrapping stage, I mean, I bootstrap on my business and then figure out what is the minimum amount of money that you’re going to spend? What does it look like the market ranges on pricing? What’s the minimum lead to use Seth Godin’s language? What’s the minimally viable audience? In other words, how many customers? Do I have to reach at that price point in order for this thing to break even? And then how many would I have to reach in order to be generating enough money to repay investors and all this kind of stuff? That’s, I don’t know whether that answered it or not. But it’s an effort.
Shawn Flynn 51:22
Okay, let’s, let’s take it even one step back. Okay. But on your mentor hat, how do you go about reverse engineering an opportunity, or looking at it to see if it’s even worth doing or not?
Tim Alison 51:36
I’m going to make the assumption, the work has been done to sort of validate whether there’s market demand, because there’s really not a lot of point in digging into all the financials, if we haven’t taken our idea, because, you know, entrepreneurship these days is about test and iterate, test and iterate type of thing. So but if you if you have identified the problem, if you’ve had conversations with people and individuals that will be strongly motivated to partner with you or purchase from you, and you’re getting a response that this is a real legit problem that people would be prepared to pay for a solution, you’re definitely going to want to look at how they’re currently solving the problem at all right now. It’s rare, I know, we like to think that we’re going to come up with one idea where we’re going to solve something that a problem that nobody else in the world ever figured out how to solve. In my experience, it’s a painful enough problem, people are solving it in some fashion. The question is you’re trying, you want to solve it for them easier, faster, and more cost efficiently type of thing. So, you want to make sure that the pain of the problem is big enough that this is marketing. I mean, I know its numbers, but you really need to be understanding if that pain is big enough and getting the problem is we fall in love with our own products and our own ideas. And so, if we don’t go out there and have conversations with people to do that, once we’ve done that, then you’ve got to go back to the numbers. So, I mean, you should establish you should work with somebody or talk to us get a mentor in the industry. Find somebody that’s done what you want to do and get an idea on what the benchmark percentages look like. I’m going to be charging licensing fees and for whatever it is like what are the metrics? Look, what are the benchmarks? How would I be able to, to compare my plans for my business to a business that would be probably as profitable in the similar sector doesn’t have to be the same one. That’s how you sort of assess and say, Well, can I do that? And you have to really start to look at? What’s it going to cost you to create that solution? And cash is the other really big concern Shawn. Because then the other thing is, is that how much? How long is it going to take you to get to because if you’re making a really big plate, the problem is, is that, especially in software, as a service side of things have made, it’s usually the kind of game that requires you to get the volume before you start to really breakeven. So, you have to know how much cash you’re going to consume the burn rate, or whatever you want to call it. And everybody underestimates that everybody doesn’t take into account but what’s likely to be happen? I don’t know about you, I know you’ve, you’re an investor, and you’ve dealt with others. But I’m happier if somebody comes in and has maybe, really conservatively estimated how much they’re going to make and overestimated how much it’s going to cost. Because it shows me that at least they’re aware of the kind of challenges we always run into and at the front end, but it still comes down to margins, what kind of gross profit margin Do you think you could get out of this? Once you’re up and up and running, you may not have any cost to product, if it’s software, you may not literally not have any cost of goods sold. So, I mean, it’s literally that you’re just running expenses. So that’s why those businesses get so profitable when they scale because as you do, your operating expenses will increase, because you’ll have more tech support, typically more customer support, those kinds of things, but they don’t go up in proportion to the like sales can be going way up. And that’s where you get the spread between your operating expenses and your revenues. So, but you really, you’ve got to plot those things out and figure out how long it would take you. And then honestly, you have to be honest about your ability to access those customers. I mean, there’s just so many, I don’t know whether you’ve seen this, but I, the folks, they’ll come in and say, well, there’s X number of people in the in the old days, and people will just look at geography. And they’d say, well, in the surrounding area of LA or whatever, there’s this many people, and this many people with this kind of income. But if I get one half of one half of 1%, I’m going to be rich, so therefore this business is guaranteed to succeed. The problem is I see that still today with the models around software as a service and those kinds of things. People just look at big markets and say, oh, that market for this is massive. It’s billions. I mean, we only need a tiny little bit of it well, which tiny little bit of it? And how will you get that tiny little. That’s what’s up was on my show we had, we spent about a half an hour just talking about the whole concept of minimally viable audience, the game of advertising. I don’t know if this is true or not. But he’s a pretty smart guy. He’s probably smarter than me. And he This is pretty close to an exact quote that he gave me shot on my show, he said, advertising stopped working at the very moment in time, when all of us got the ability to access have the tools to create our own advertising. And he’s not saying that you can’t make money with Google, or with Facebook. But he did say that, and I looked at the numbers that perhaps will change. But in 2019, Facebook took in $70 billion US of advertising dollars, at Seth’s exact quote on my show was that a lot of that was dumb money. It’s money that can’t be measured. And he basically said at the moment, you can’t measure it, you’re doing some sort of weird thing called brand marketing or something. And that’s fine if you want to do it. But just know that if you can’t measure it, there’s probably not much of a return.
Shawn Flynn 56:51
So, where do you see the opportunities in the next few years?
Tim Alison 56:55
So, I’m going to answer in a way that may surprise you. But it’s a topic that I’ve been on. I’ve been really talking about a lot on my shrine with others lately, Shawn, I think the biggest opportunities that we really need to be pursuing right now, ones that involve collaboration between Boomer age entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs who have both access to capital, and a lot of entrepreneurial wisdom and a lot of wisdom about relationships and building networks, and have networks and younger entrepreneurs, who quite candidly have forgotten more about technology in the last five minutes than most of us boomers will ever know. And it’s not that we can’t learn stuff than we do. But I really think that if we want if we take that sort of mindset, and then it’s interesting, but I’ve had some amazing guests on my show in the last few months, talking about the way they see the world changing as a result of what’s going on right now. First with the Coronavirus, and certainly with the George Floyd move murder and the Black Lives Matter. There is this belief that there’s an increasing number of people who are realizing that changes need to happen and that we need to build businesses that are in use named John Perkins, who wrote the book, The Economic Hitman. I was on my show the other day, but John Paul said, moving from what the daft economy, which is he says the one we’re in right now, where it’s solely the pursuit of money, and it’s the pursuit of profit over people, which is taking us down this path where if we don’t stick to Earth will survive, but we won’t. So the life economy, which are businesses that are sustainable, and contribute to solving big problems, like gender diversity, or lifting up those segments of our populations, whether it’s black Americans, black Canadians, indigenous people in Canada, those kinds of those causes, or problems around the environment and create opportunities to figure out how we’re going to use technology for humanity’s good. Because here’s my challenge to everybody that’s listening. I put to you that if we looked at society for the last 150 years, and we said, has society advanced, or how have we advanced, I think we would say from a technology standpoint, it’s exploded, the very fact that you and I are having this conversation that I’m having a conversation with anybody in the Silicon Valley, from Santa Falls, Nova Scotia, it’s crazy, but it’s just a simple example of it. But Shawn, we can’t manage our health, we got our healthcare systems that are spinning out of control, we got people, obesity rates, diabetes, we’ve got cancer rates that are out of control, we can’t manage our mental health, we’ve got problems and mental health around the western economies and anxiety and suicide. And we can’t, we can’t even manage getting along together and seeing each other as human beings. So, I know it’s kind of maybe a vaguer answer than you were looking for. But I think it’s to look in your heart and figure out what are the things that you really care about? And then to gather around you people with some similar thoughts. And then start thinking, okay, but young people, because here’s another really neat quote, Lim Twist, gave it to me yesterday, and I’m trying to remember the name of her foundation that it’s escaping me, but she said, when it comes to the universe, our children are our elders. And they are they’re the innocent ones that are going to say, why are we destroying our planet? Why aren’t we not being kind to that person? And why is that person getting followed or beaten or whatever? Why, why why and they don’t want us to, to keep doing what we’ve been doing. So, if I want young people I you know, I just think we need to find opportunities to reengage the extra Gen X to I’m not trying to leave them out. But I do think it’s the boomer age and who has access to capital, access to networks and understand how to solve promise can challenge business models, like when you said, how do you reverse engineer a problem? I probably should have said as my first five questions, what problem do you solve? Who do you solve for? How do you solve it? What happens if the problem isn’t solved? And why should people hire you to solve it? That’s the business side of becoming open. My mind was more on the numbers, those things just kind of second nature to entrepreneurs like myself with 30 years or so of experience. team goes up with the idea of people who see the potential of the technology so it’s not a sector it’s more of the focus on the collaboration and moving towards a life economy.
Shawn Flynn 61:38
Okay, Tim, I got to say thank you for all this information, your five your five questions that you asked right there. Those amazing takeaways, the return on relationships, I love that quote. I’m going to be using it if anyone wants to find out any more information about you screw the naysayers, your podcast, what’s the best way to go about doing it?
Tim Alison 61:59
So, a couple of ways so certainly for the podcast and but everything I’ve got going on there and just screw the naysayers.com. And of course, in the podcast is called screw the naysayers. I also do have another website. It’s called the profit whisperer.io, I referenced people there, Shawn, because if they click hit up free resources at the top of that page, and I have a little book, I sent it out to you, you’ve had a look at it. It’s called demystifying financial statements. It’s a kind of a read that anybody can read. And I’ve done a couple of hours. And it’s free. I do capture your email, but I’m not putting in any kind of funnel or anything with it. It’s literally just the way I’ve set it up for you to get that download. So, profit whisperer.io screw the naysayers.com. And I’m on LinkedIn a lot. And that’s Tim Alison with one hour.
Shawn Flynn 62:43
All right, we’re going to have all that information in the show notes. And for everyone that enjoyed the show, please share among your network, pass this knowledge around. We want to help as many people in the business entrepreneur community as possible, and leave a review on iTunes, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you’re using to listen to this podcast. And Tim, I got to say, once again, thank you for your time today on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Tim Alison 63:07
had a blast. Thanks.
Announcer 63:12
Thank you for listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. To access our resources, visit us at the Silicon Valley podcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at Shawn Flynn SV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by the investors Podcast Network. before making any decisions, consult a professional
Announcer 1:23
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:41
Tim, thank you for taking the time to be on the Silicon Valley podcast now, Tim, I’ve been a huge fan of screw the naysayers and actually, I was really honored to be a guest in your podcasts for our listeners out there. I mean, you’ve had an amazing journey. Can you catch us up to date on a little bit of you know, screw the naysayers, your current podcast, but a little bit of your career up to this point?
Tim Alison 2:01
Yeah, cause it’s a trajectory. And it’s always dangerous question trying to ask a guy my age to catch up on my career. But I’ll give you the short version of like, a lot of young people my age, my career started in corporate sales, and I rocked it. I mean, in the 20s, I was in my 20s, not the 20s. In my 20s, I’m not that old. In my 20s. I was certainly the poster child for what success was supposed to look like, back to the six figure income by the time I was 26, which is when you’re talking the mid-1980s, that was in pretty rarefied air at the time and continued by the time I was 31, I was managing sales offices in three cities, basically half of Canada, which is where I’m from, and at the time, Shawn was probably in the top 2% of wage earners in the country. I don’t see any of that the boast because I did the logical thing. And I just quit and moved to a fishing village in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, which is where my wife’s from, and much to the amazement of just about everybody. And a lot of laughter, I started an educational software company, we didn’t have the term e learning in those days, the World Wide Web didn’t exist, we did have this thing called fax machine, but it was still a relatively new technology ran that business for about 18 years. Quieted the naysayers when sales hit around 10 million sold the IP off and that business around 2006 somewhere, I can’t exactly remember the exact date, largely because that entire sector had just gone through a massive consolidation. And it was before the time of the proliferation of everybody being able to get into eLearning. And it was at a time when developing stuff for the internet was so expensive. That was only the mass of the mass of publishers basically by products and companies just to get rid of it to get it off the market so they could dominate it themselves. Spent the last probably 15 years as a small business coach and mentor and, you know, I hit my entrepreneurial background is fairly diverse. So, I do a lot of things in that. But for the most part, it’s been around things like helping people assess opportunities for growth, identify the potential of new products and a lot in financial analysis, just helping people understand the basic financials that always make the difference between whether you have a business that creates wealth and you know when a future or ends up costing you money. And then when I’m 60 years old, I slowed up a bit on that consulting, and I decided to do something crazy again, and I and I started the screw the naysayers podcast, which look I didn’t know what I was doing, man. I mean, it just, I felt called because I was at this point of my life where I was so frustrated by so many young people just being told that it’s all what life is about settling, that it’s about compromise that it’s about making a living, and it’s all about the money and. Look like money because in the current system that we have I needed in order to do the things that I want to do and have the kind of experiences but I don’t want my life’s decisions to be driven by it. My view has always been there’s lots of different ways to make money. So let’s create a life and a business that aligns with the things we really value, and that was my story of us leaving the city where I wasn’t happy living in this rural lifestyle, creating a career, that was exciting that was well paying that was challenging. But still being able to, you know, be a present parent and prioritize my schedule to spend time with my family and those kinds of things. And the thing I don’t know what it is, man, I, the Screw The Naysayers brand, Shawn just somehow engaged with the globe really, in a way that I never would have imagined and so here I am. Well, as we’re speaking here, and it’s just a little over two years. And I’m 300 episodes or so in of talk to the likes of Jack Canfield from chicken soup for your soul, and Seth Godin. And Keltie Knight from Entertainment Tonight is even right now has her book is number four on the New York Times bestsellers list, but I got to her recently, I’ve just had such a list of, of people I’ve had an opportunity to learn from. So, life’s great and I’m just looking forward to what the next 20 years holds.
Shawn Flynn 6:04
Now Tim, all that information you just said right there. I’m thinking four or five different areas to go into some questions. And one thing I really want to hit is analyzing financials for companies. But even before that, you mentioned early 20s, you’re making six figures this in the 80s. How has sales changed over the years, because the companies I deal with mostly early-stage startups, they have a few engineers, they don’t have any salespeople and their mind is just build the perfect product, get it out there. What has changed in sales?
Tim Alison 6:36
there are certainly things that have changed and not the least of which is that our customers are waiting way more educated. And they can talk to our other customers quite easily. Like if we have people that are dissatisfied with us, it’s pretty easy for people to express their opinions about our business. What has changed Shawn and I what I think is a problem for most of these people, you’re talking about the people who’ve got brilliant ideas, and know what they want to achieve. But the art of networking, the art of building relationships, the art of realizing that it’s used, almost overused, but the idea that people buy from folks that they that they know like and trust is for sure. still the case today. And so, like I look at we’ve chatted a bit on air about some of the other things I’ve got going on and a summit that I’ve got going on right now. We’re reaching, I’m reaching people from this little fishing village without having to travel around on business or anything else. And just by using my network, and by saying, well, who does Shawn know who does Cori know who does Jack Canfield know and, asking and getting on with those things. And I just think that people have, we started to think of sales as a numbers game, especially all this nonsense about funnels, and it’s all about just tracking as much stuff into the top of the funnel. So as long as you put enough in the top, that the number of customers we’re looking for, it’s going to come out the bottom, there’s no predicting that anything’s going to come out the bottom if you’re not putting the right people into your, into your funnel. And I think technology has made a lot of people in sales, lose sight of the fact that your customers are people. And so, we’ve got to identify the people we want to do business with in the organizations that we want to do business with, and figure out how we can approach them and the people that are the sales reps that are doing that. There’s a young man named Dale Dupree, who has a podcast at a big business is called the sales rebellion. And I couldn’t recommend Dale more highly in terms of a podcast to follow and somebody to reach out to but he’s just a young guy. And his background was in copier sales, but his dad at all the copier business basically selling copiers, so very competitive business type of thing. And Dale started working for him and the model in those days, it was like the Xerox based model was just very similar to the way they taught people to sell life insurance back for many years. All you had to do was have like a fixed number of like, 30 conversations in a week about copiers. And if 30 conversations, got you 10 appointments, then those 10 appointments would get you three sales. And everybody was just on this, get as many of these conversations. And then when I looked at it, he said, that’s stupid, because 27 out of the 30 people that I’m talking to aren’t buying from me. And so, he started really focusing on the individuals and the businesses that he really wanted to do business with. And he created relationships. He dropped gifts off for the gatekeepers who were the Secretary and he said he just he sent weird emails with things in the mail that had puzzles in them and stuff like that. And so finally somebody said, who sent this and then he just did so many things to try and establish human connections. But he got this reputation. They call them the copier warrior, because he was making like five times as much money as everybody else. You know, his dad recently passed, and he decided to, that it was about more than copiers and he started the sales rebellion and I just love the guy. No vested interest here folks, I’m not Getting anything for it. But he’s an example of a young guy who figured out that his generation have really lost that ability to make those human connections. And that’s what sales is about. That’s what’s getting money’s about. That’s what getting financing is about. That’s what getting partners is about, it’s about relationships. And this stuff, I think, is something that differentiates the companies that are killing it are the ones that have somebody within their team that have figured that out.
Shawn Flynn 10:28
that’s really interesting. Because thinking about the funnel, and that when I’ve talked to people in the past, they go, Okay, let’s break down the demographics of this person, what’s their favorite hobby? What’s their book, how long they spend on social, their age, all this stuff? They don’t really say, okay, who have you connected with in the past that has a network that you can reach out to, and maybe invite all them out for dinner or online payment through zoom? Shout out to Michael at Insperity, who invited me and that was a lot of fun, and we all bonded and I’m gonna feel like I owe that guy forever.
Tim Alison 11:03
on here today, the day we’re speaking, I was participating in a summit I was telling you about. The host was talking to someone named Heather Moyse, who in Canada is a well, she’s a world class athlete. She’s won two gold medals. I mean, she’s just an amazing public speaker. Because I’ve been participating in the summit. I wasn’t on air at that moment. But the other hosts noticed I commented basically Heather said something about just ignore the naysayers. So, Tim being Tim goes into Facebook and comments, screw the naysayers, because that’s my brand name. And then Cori, the co-host comes on, and he says, Heather, I want to tell you, but I just got a comment here. It said, screw the naysayers. You used the word naysayers three times. I don’t have to look at who it is. Because I know it’s Tim Allison, and you’ve got to go on his show. I would have a very hard time getting straight to somebody like that she’s a huge demand and charges really big fees. But there she is on air saying Tim hit me up. I can’t wait. And it happens because of the things you’re talking about. That you build relationships. Seth Godin came on my show, Episode 100 of screw the naysayers. Seems like a long time ago, it was just a little over a year ago. But I know for sure that journey to get set started with my first guest. Because my first guest was a guy named Don Wetkurt. And I knew Even then, but Seth had huge respect for the work that Don was doing in trying to change and radically change the education system for high school kids. And to promote entrepreneurship and coding and building a technology-based business. It’s not a coincidence that after I’ve earned some other earned the right to make the ask, that when I was able to reach back and say, Hey, Don, it’s been I know that you’ve been on Don’s show. And Don’s when I was my first guest, he did me a big solid. These are the way you build networks, because it’s crazy that people I’m talking to from Nova Scotia, and I was thinking about it the other day, Shawn, I’m not lying, I only left my home village for business twice in the last two and a half years. The first-time last October, I went to the City of Toronto to accept an award of a woman of inspiration conference for the work I’ve done with my podcast and advancing women gender equity. And the second time was in November, I went down to Cambridge, because I was invited to speak on a stage in Harvard. And I thought I might want to do that. Along with all the other people. Every other relationship that I’ve made, I’ve done from the studio I’m looking at right now is nothing but forest and trees and blue sky, in a village of about 300 people that has changed in sales, because we can make human connections without always being there in person. If you really look at successful companies, it always comes back to their ability to build their network. The return on relationship I heard the other day, I hadn’t heard that phrase before, but ROR return on relationships. And I thought, that’s a pretty interesting way of looking at it because I can trace just about everything good that’s happened in my business back to, I know where relationships came from. And Shawn introduced me to so and so introduced me to so and so and those kinds of things.
Shawn Flynn 14:03
I love that phrase return on relationships, I’m going to start using that that’s going to be part of my daily vocab. Okay, and there’s a couple other things in your intro of who you are that caught my attention, the pivot to Nova Scotia, what was going through your mind there? Because I know everyone had to say, Hey, you got You’re doing great. You’re going up the corporate ladder, you’re going to be at the peak soon. And you’re saying no, I want to go to 300-person fishing village where I’m guessing at that time, you’re moving to a new area. I mean, your contacts your network, you’re starting at zero over there. What was that pivot like?
Tim Alison 14:37
Where we moved was where my wife was born and raised, and she has family roots here that could can be traced back to 150 years, which for white people in North America is about as far back as most people can, can trace their roots in North America. So, there was that sense of connection and the challenge was this is that I wasn’t ready for the success that I had in my job, Shawn. I was making a lot of money. I advanced up the management side of things really fast. And I had people working for me that were much 15 years older than me. And I had a lot of success. I didn’t necessarily handle from an ego standpoint, what was going on, I found myself I like I love being outdoors. When I was growing up as a kid, my happiest time were spent at my grandfather’s little camp, basically and a little small lake, but where I was outdoors, and here, I was living in Toronto, and either driving in bumper to bumper traffic or hopping on subways or inside office towers. And once I got to work, I almost never went outside, it would be just down into the subway, up to a client come back in the subway back those kinds of things. And I was traveling, like two weeks out of four, I have two kids under the age of five, and my health was suffering and I was gaining weight, I was not paying attention to my, to my diet when I was traveling, probably was abusing alcohol, and those kind of things in those days. And so, I mean, I knew I was miserable. And I knew that if something didn’t change, I was going to be dead or divorced within five years, maybe both maybe sooner. And my boss had had a heart attack. He was like 10 years older than me. And he used to say for years that Oh, man, I wish I had been where you are, you know, at that age, and I’m thankful crap. I mean, you’re only 40 and I he lived. But I mean, it shakes you out, because I was like a mini boss. You know, it was like all of a sudden, this doesn’t sound so good. So, there was that challenge. I mean, I just knew that I had given a shot. The startup was interesting. The biggest issue that I think I had was that Well, two things that I didn’t anticipate how long I was going to actually grieve the loss of my previous career. Because I had left the job thinking I hate it because I wasn’t there was things that I did hate, and I knew quitting was the right thing to do. But when I got here, I found myself missing those moments of elation when you close the $750,000 contract or something like that, missing the camaraderie with my team when we’d had a success. And we could all go celebrate missing the awards trips, I was fortunate enough with my wife to go to Hong Kong in 1984, I was still under British rule. But I mean, all paid for by the company and one a very extravagant trip. I just didn’t, nobody warned me that I was going to go through this sense of loss, and I know now that it’s perfectly okay to feel a sense of loss for something you’ve left behind. you know it was the right thing to do. But it doesn’t mean you don’t have to go through that kind of mourning. So that kind of screwed me up for about six months. And then the other big mistake that I made was that I even though I ignored all the people that said I was crazy to make the change. I did buy into the idea that I had sacrificed my career. So, I found myself thinking, Okay, I’ve done this for my family, I’m going to live in this community. But the best I could hope for was to make enough money to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head. And that’s exactly what I would use to say, Well, what are your goals in business, to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head? Now anybody that knows anything about mindset business knows that that’s exactly what I did for three years. And so, it was like living paycheck to paycheck except I was writing the paychecks and I was never quite sure those checks were gonna be there in itself. It took me that period of time and then the intervention of a rest and peace. Roy Saber and a gentleman came into my life and became a tremendous mentor, and friend. And I remember, I was in California, in San Diego, I think it was their lawyer. We were at a sales conference. And he was sitting there drinking a hangry Martini, I just have a vivid in my mind. And he was asking me, I was like 30 years younger than me. He’s asking me what I had used to do and stuff like that. And I told him about my success. And he asked me about my business. And I told him how we were doing, which was it all that great. And he looked at me said what the, What’s up? I said, Well, look Roy I’m living in this little fishing village. I mean, I can’t expect to be doing the same stuff that I was doing when I was in eighth the biggest city in the world or something what it was in those days. And he said why not? And they told me a story that not any of the young people have trouble relating to but back in those days, Shawn, we used to have to mail our payments to the credit card companies a check in the mail. So, he said, every month Tim, I mail a check to American Express. He says, you know where I send it. I don’t have a clue. He says it’s either North Dakota or South Dakota or something like that. It’s I don’t know; you think I care where I’m sending the check. I said, Well, I suppose not. He said, Well, why do you think anybody’s gonna care about where you’re living and where your business is based. And it’s really crazy. Because from that moment on, I started saying instead of having excuses for not being able to do things and I said, Well, what’s the barrier? And I’d start asking, Well, okay, but what if I tried this or what if I tried that what might happen? How could I? And it’s just, it’s insane. And that transformation just changed my life and that’s from there for the for the next we had a very good run with my software company, and it all stemmed back to just stopping Looking for the advantages, and I had a lot of advantages. And I ended up building my own office space, Shawn, because I was looking around for a place to live. But this is way back in the day when everything was on the local area networks. So if you really wanted that office, it was at all technical, you had to have your computers literally wired together, through Ethernet cable, and I outgrew my home, I’ve been working in my home, I needed space, I was starting to hire people. And I was trying to find a space that I could rent because the last thing I wanted was to be in the real estate industry. I couldn’t find anything. Like the only thing I could rent were these old buildings that were falling apart, I literally bought a building lot with an old home on it that was falling apart, I had the house torn down. And I built a small like it was about 1000 square foot, rectangular building my own building wired it up properly. But you know what, I built an office for $40,000. Now I know of course that’s those dollars versus mid 90s versus today, but it was crazy cheap. And then I went out and started hiring people. And glow and behold, I found I thought I’ll never be able to hire people who want to live in the country. Oh wrong. The idea that like, Oh, I can get out of the city and I can come down and I can be five minutes from a beach, and I could not lock my doors at night. And bike and jog in the morning at the side of the road without any people move to the community specifically to work for me. I paid them way above average wages for this community. But I know they could have made more money in the cities. I mean, I just didn’t fit the business model I had. And then nobody ever quit. People just literally didn’t quit because they if you provided them the right work environment and respected them, gave them the opportunities to grow, made them feel part of made sure they understood how they were contributing to the both the growth of the company and the success of our customers. I found advantages. Now I even ran a conference one year, I got, because my biggest line item got to one year and I’m looking at my financials and I’m thinking Gee, I gotta do something about my travel expenses, because, and I’m selling educational software at the average sale is between 50 and 100,000 dollars, well, I wasn’t selling that in my fishing village was all mostly all across Canada. So, myself and my staff, my marketing manager, our travel expenses, were crazy going across the country to visit people. And I thought what can I do and then I realized I live in a part of the country that everybody likes to come to in the summertime. I mean, it’s absolutely beautiful in the summertime when people get out of the city come down. So there was a little community up the road called Digby, and there was this old kind of like in Canada we have these railroad hotels, the big old and this was like for seafaring traffic, but there was a place called the Digby pines and beautiful old style 30s 40s Resort with the marble floors and the big lobbies and the chalets and ocean view and everything. And I ran something called the Digby Institute. And what I did is I invited because I thought okay, I want I want to do is I want to sell to the biggest school districts and the big end community colleges and things like that in Canada. So I invited the superintendents and the CEOs and the top person and these organizations, I target the places that I wanted to make connections with, I would invite them to come and here’s the deal, if they got to the pines at their own expense, and they could all do that, because they had professional development dollars, that they could, especially if they chose not to fly, they could drive and bring their wife, take the money and get out there. And I put them up at the pines for a couple of days, I paid the hotels, we had a special program so they could go golfing or whale watching. We even took a half day for even the people in the conference to go golfing and stuff in the championship golf course attached to the resort. I brought in local maritime musicians playing the fiddle, and dancers and going on. And we didn’t sell anything. We ran panel discussions about issues around technology and education. And I got a lot of them to sit on panels. And I would combine them with some of my customers who had been talking stories about how it was great working with Tim. And from then on. If I was going to travel or somebody was going to travel, we knew when we got to that city, we could get into the office of that highest level with the decision maker. I couldn’t have done that if I told them Why don’t you come to Toronto. Last thing we want to do is come to a big city in the summertime, but to go breathe some fresh air and take my wife and I and basically it’s all free because I fed them and I gave the rooms and then they use them instead of flying they take the cash equivalent they drive even it was 1000 miles they didn’t care. So, I don’t know I ramp but it’s just about looking for the opportunities that are inherent in the assets that are around you.
Shawn Flynn 24:30
Okay, so Tim, we talked about the pivot and I love the fact that you’re talking about looking for the opportunities where you are and I think that’s so timely right now especially here in Silicon Valley with all these companies now telling everyone to just work from home. Some of them are saying indefinitely work from home. I got a feeling in the next year or two people are going to be migrating to all different areas of the country where they can have a backyard where it is safe it where it is clean. So, I could see a lot of opportunity. Arising for people. And I mean, what you’re saying, right there was so timely now, okay, you had your business, I’m kind of curious about the exit, if you are up to talking about selling it. And then I want to go into talking about mentoring company’s financials. And but let’s talk about the exit.
Tim Alison 25:19
So, it was not Honestly, it wasn’t overly lucrative man. And what had happened is that we had a really good run with a core product. And I had partnered with a major corporation in united states that had developed, called Johnston’s learning, it was a division of the yearbook company that I think still out there. And they had a product that was one of the first integrated learning systems in the world. And it taught literacy and numeracy skills to adults. The problem was, it could never have been sold in Canada, because for example, all the math was Imperial measure like inches and feet. And Canada’s been using the metric system for since at least the 1960s. And the reading was a law it was maybe teaching reading, it was things like, learn how to be a good US citizen, the US Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, I’m not criticizing people that it made sense for their market, what we did is we basically hired the Canadian educators, and created content and partnered together to serve to create a version of that, we had a really good run on that. And ultimately, the sad thing that happened to that one is, which I think is really when I was getting to the stage where I probably knew that I would be winding it down within a few years. But I don’t want to get into naming the corporations, Johnston’s had been bought by one of the largest publishers in the United States at the time, who then got bought by one of the largest publishers in the world, who is based out of the UK. And they once that came through, so how this happens, I mean, there’s just been a massive amount of debt that got onto the books. And in order to get rid of the debt, the only way to care about cash, don’t care about profits or growth, or they just care about cash. And quite honestly, they looked at a rinky dink little division that was doing like $300 million a year. And you know, what’s profitable, and everything else, and they just got up one day and closed it. And it left me in a position where I had the legal right to continue to sell the product. But without the support and technology and things like that. I knew it wasn’t really gonna be practical. So, we sort of eased out of that. And then I moved into a phase of collaboration. And we built a few of our own products. And the last one was a product that we actually built in, in affiliation with Houghton Mifflin. But it was on a Boston, a publishing company, I think they’re still around, but they were a college textbook. And we actually created a program and built a program teaching life and employability skills and again to for adults that are perhaps funneled through the crack a bit. It was modern niche at the time. And I just looked around Shawn as that product was coming to completion to fruition. And by that stage, my son had graduated from college, my daughter was halfway through her undergrad, all the money was paid for that. And I looked at the future of the industry. And it was at that stage where as fast as a company, my size could develop a new product. It was obsolete, because the technology just exploded in terms of the way the internet was being used to teach. And I just didn’t see a way to keep up. So, in all honesty, I went to Houghton Mifflin and for a pretty modest amount of money. But I said, Hey, because they were giving me royalties on that thing for significant royalties for forever. And I said, would you like to just buy me out? And they said, Yeah, we’ll, we’ll just buy you. And you know, that was the exit it. I sometimes think about it, I certainly had a goal of, of not so much about creating wealth, because it’s I know, it’s crazy, but it really never was about money for me. But I would have liked to have been able to have kept the legacy in the community in terms of the kinds of employment I was creating white collar software tech jobs. But to be honest, I just didn’t saw a lot of pain and just sort of came to the conclusion that was the appropriate time to realize that we had gotten everything we wanted. Like when we started that company. If somebody had said, here’s the deal, you’re going to get to raise your kids in this little fishing village, you’re going to be when it comes to your daughter’s sports teams because she was in the basketball and soccer big time at school. And so, you’re going to be able to be the desert one of the designated drivers that takes time off work whenever there’s a game. And in rural community. Sometimes you had to drive those girls 200 miles to go to a it wasn’t that far as 100 hundred at least right at 200 round trips easy. But I was to guy because always spend the time and so I was the dad that was in the car with those girls, who after a while they forget that the adults actually in the car and those kids that never talked to you. You’re hearing everything that is going on in your life and my son was like I’m a Canadian dude. So, my son was a hockey player. And they played games on weekends. And Shawn in between ages his age five and 18 when his minor hockey career ended, I did not miss a single weekend hockey game and it was didn’t mean I wasn’t traveling. But I would always fly home on the on the Friday to be home and I always used to cost a lot more money in those dates, because there were these incentives. If you’d stay over a Saturday night, you could fly back on the Sunday for a fraction of the cost because nobody wanted to travel on the Sunday. But I would. And I always said, if my business can’t afford to fly me home, then there’s not a good enough reason for me to go make the trip. And if someone said I could do all those things; I can put aside the money. So, my kids could graduate college without any debt, that would have been able to travel my kids around the world, because what are the concerns that I did have? We live in a really small, almost entirely white, and certainly those days entirely white community and one religion type of thing in the area, I was concerned about the lack of diversity. So, we took them, we traveled the world with them. And we took them to places where they would see people coming across Canada, but what they would see people dressed differently, looking differently, talking differently, behaving differently, that you could get this understanding that we live in this really multicultural community. So those were the things. So, what you the crazy part is when I say I scaled the business to 10 million, and everybody says, tell me about the money? I don’t mind. But if you ask me what what’s most important to me about the business, it was that I created a business that aligned with the things that I really valued in life. And I think to me, I was talking to a lady named Lynn Twist, and she talked yesterday, and she has advised some of the world’s wealthiest families on philanthropy. I mean, some of the world’s wealthiest women, I’m really, and she said, you know what? that most of them are very unhappy. They’re not happy. And I’m not trying to dump on money. Again, it’s not about that. But if we can earn money, doing things that it’s purposeful, is fulfilling, and that sits in with the things that are important in our lives. I don’t know, you can’t put a financial price tag on those things. Yeah, I don’t know what they’re I probably rambled from the original question, dude. But that’s Tim.
Shawn Flynn 31:57
Oh, yeah, I was thinking you’re getting going more the due diligence of the acquire and all that, but we’ll ignore that I actually really like the balanced life because that is something you don’t hear a lot. You hear people just going 100% in one direction, ignoring everything else. And then once they hit that end, they look back and question everything. So, I think you actually your journey, right there is pretty, pretty amazing. I mean, that you’re able to actually have the complete circle as Tony Robbins fans would say. And now you’re mentoring in your advising companies. So, one thing that comes up all the time with companies is financials either before they get acquired this is when a VC is going to invest in them. This is what an angel saying? Do you have any of them? When you look at a company’s financials? What do you see what’s visible to you?
Tim Alison 32:47
That’s a heck of a great question. I want to start by saying this. And the thing that totally shocked me was what I came to realize is that just about all the business owners I said I was meeting I really didn’t understand the financial aspects of their business. And it’s crazy. Some of these many of these companies were quite successful and others have gotten themselves into a mess. And they knew enough to know that they were in a mess. And they didn’t know why. And so, you know, I think anytime, if I’m taking a look at objective look at a company, I bought for I go to a couple of different places fairly quickly. I mean, I’m probably going to start with the margins. That’s just me. And it’s kind of like when you watch Shark Tank, they think they want to know, do you understand your margins? It’s crazy. And I’ve met so many entrepreneurs who can’t tell you the difference between a markup and margin. And if there’s a big difference, and they don’t know how to assess whether that margin is reasonable or has the potential to be profitable for their business, and I’m going to look at their liquidity. But I want to have, I’m self-taught, I mean, I have taken some graduate level courses in accounting and stuff like that. But really, this is stuff that I’ve just learned in the, in the trenches, in the most simplistic way, the way I did it in my very early years of entrepreneurship. When I think of liquidity, what I used to do my laugh about it now, but I used to look at my balance sheet, and I’d see okay, if my current cash in the bank, and my current assets, like not inventory, but current assets, things that I can quickly convert into cash. If I have that, including accounts receivables, I’d add that up. And I’d say okay, how does that compare to the amount of money that I spend every month, my goal was to have a six times my burn, I could get to the stage where I that was what I said, if I could get six times my monthly burn, that the world could follow my markets, my biggest customer could disappear, my major supplier could close or whatever. And I wouldn’t have to lay anybody off tomorrow, I could see I’d have some time to figure out what I wanted to do. And I’m not saying I got there right away, but I did. Now I’m going to take a look at liquidity with a bit more sophistication. But I really just want to look at your what cash you’re generating, where the cash is being spent. And there’s a lot of business owners that don’t understand all that the income statement doesn’t show all uses of cash. And I know that sounds crazy, but they will not understand that things like loan principal payment, and depreciation t are part of the use of cash. But instead they said why don’t understand my income statement says, I’m making money. But I don’t have any money is one No, you’d have too much debt or, you know, too much inventory or these kinds of things. And then I’m really looking for trends. Almost if I’m going to take any kind of serious look at a business, I just convert everything to percentages of sales. I don’t want to talk gross numbers. I don’t care about the numbers. Because I mean, how do you even compare like, year over year sales? How do you really compare, because just because a company sale, for example, might have increased in a given year. If their margins went down dramatically, in order to achieve that growth in sales, they may actually have made less money. And for me, profit is king. So, I want to look for trends in terms of percentages, I want to look at what your gross profit margin is as a percentage of your total of your total sales. And look at those trends in the last three years, five years, whatever as many as we can get type of thing. It’s the same thing with projections. It’s the same thing if somebody says, here’s a set of financials that I want to take this to an angel investor, and I want to try to get someone to invest in my company, I’ve actually trained done training for financing organizations that lend money to entrepreneurs, is the first thing I tell all these board members who are charged with doing this. So, the first thing you should do is know that all of those numbers are wrong. Because there’s nobody in the world that at that has the skill set that they can predict into the future exactly what those numbers are going to be. We can make educated estimates about our sales about our expenses. And so, what you do is you challenge all the underlying assumptions. Okay, well, this is what you said your sales are going to be? What are the assumptions behind that? This is what you say your expenses are going to be you and I chatted off there, after I interviewed me on my show about someone who was in a software a gig and was suggesting that they get away but the competitor was getting like a 7% licensing fee. They were going to do it for three, even in their mind probably saying that’s only 4%, which is still a lot but you’re saying Okay, so you’re gonna have like a 60% reduction compared to everybody else, but somehow you’re going to be profitable. That’s wonderful. Why will you still you know, what is unique about the way you’re solving the problem is that and if you’ve got that innovation, then Hallelujah, then we really got some it’s motherhood and apple pie stuff. I wish I could say it was really complicated. The thing that frustrates me, and I always qualify this because I do have a CA that I blessed to run into a lot of years ago and for as a tax advisor is, I think one of the best in the world. But I really believe that whole industry of accounting and CAs and everyone else, they have such a vested interest in complicating the process and making it feel complicated. And so much of the focus is just on tax compliance, and they don’t really care about one of those statements or what information those statements are really providing to the entrepreneur and they Convinced business owners that it’s too hard to understand. And it’s not. And honestly, if you’re going to run a business, I’m not telling you, you should be doing your own bookkeeping. But if you’re going to run a business, you better take the time to make sure you understand the benchmarks in your industry. What kind of margins are we going to have to achieve in order to be profitable? What kind of wage costs can be as a percentage of sales that kind of business like this support? How many times do we look at productivity? The productivity is another thing I’m instantly going to assess. People say, Well, how do you measure productivity? And it’s the easiest thing in the world if as long as you can benchmark it. I’d look at your wage costs, and I say as Okay, as a percent, not sales wages, but the wages in your organization. And I look at those wage costs. And I say, what do they represent as a percentage of your total revenues. And then we go on, we get the industry benchmark data. And we find out you’re competing against the sector where let’s just arbitrarily take restaurants, because it’s a really simple one to the numbers of things everybody can understand. But let’s say that the industry average not a best in sector, but an industry average restaurant and full-service restaurant wage costs around 33%. You’ve got as a restaurant wage costs of 37%. In an industry where the gross profit, the net profit margins are often less than 5%, they tell you two things, you’ll either are way underpriced, and it could be or you’re not getting sufficient productivity out of your staff. You know, you’ve got people not moving fast enough or sitting around or you know, any of those kinds of things. And you can do that for any business, you might have to dig to find the benchmarks. But and the beauty of it is that you can also track that productivity on a year over year basis. And you can start saying, Okay, well, every dollar of sales last year, at my wage costs cost me 38 cents. If they’re 36 cents this year, and people are still being well paid and they’re happy, then you’ve done a really good job of increasing productivity, if they’re 40, or they’ve gone up. It’s the ability to look at those things. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that stuff. It’s pretty basic math.
Shawn Flynn 40:15
Okay, you went over a ton of financials, they’re a little jargon I mean, burn how much money you spend every month. If someone say someone’s very basic, they have a you know, a PhD from Stanford in engineering, you know, someone some basic, no big deal. What would the financials be that they should look at or think in their head, like the most basic ones,
Tim Alison 40:38
you only need to look at maybe a half a dozen numbers, I mean, it first thing you need to understand is the difference between the income statement, a snapshot of the of your revenues and expenses of your business over a specific period of time, like q1, or for the last year or whatever. There’s the balance sheet, and the balance sheet. Is the financial picture of your business on any given day. How much money do you have in terms of assets? How much money do you owe in terms of liabilities? What is left there in terms of equity for you? So in the income statement, pull out a half a dozen numbers or five, six numbers, pull out your gross sales, like what are your total revenues and pull out what your cost of goods sold is, in other words, if it’s software, you’re going to perhaps going to have amortization, if you’ve invested a whole bunch of money into the software, so what’s showing up on your income statement is the cost of the software. And it would include software licensing, that you might have had to a lot of times we have to we got all sorts of software as a service things that are directly tied to our ability to provide the service those kinds of things. Look at all your other what’s indirect expenses is the easiest way that I would just describe it, which is just all your it’s all your wage costs. It’s all of your if you haven’t if you’re renting an office still in those days, it is any of the software as a service that’s not directly related to client using your product, it’s insurance, it’s travel and meals and interest on any debt. Like if you’re if you’re paying debt back, all those kinds of things. So gross sales, cost of goods sold your indirect expenses. When you subtract those two sets of expenses from the gross sales, you’re going to get your net profit margin, your gross profit margin, you’ll get simply by deducting the cost of goods sold. From your again, it’s just easier to explain if it’s a tangible thing, if I’m in a restaurant and cost of goods sold is the food, the food that they purchase, in order to resell or a retail store. It’s the food that they purchased. And then you subtract that from your gross sales, you’ve got your gross profit margins. And if you could take that and put them in percentages. So, if sales equal 100% of sales, they always will that’s 100% of the top of the page, and then one of my wage costs, okay, well divide the wage costs by your gross sales. What does that represent as a percentage and a PhD from Stanford, they can do percentages? And all of a sudden you get this measure. Everything’s in percentages. And from there, you can track if you’re able to get some industry or talk to somebody that’s been in your sector has got some expertise. Get some idea what people in your sector pay what those percentages should look like, for a profitable business. And then of course, you can also track your own performance, because that’s how you spot problems. Shawn before they become big problems. Instead of the problem that so many people have is they leave their accounting, and they assume it’s just about its sort of a year-end tax compliance thing. God, it must be a very complicated thing to produce these things. Because the people we pay to prepare those, those statements take about half a lifetime to produce them. If it’s anywhere in here in, the Silicon Valley like it is my neck of the woods. By the time you look at it and say, Oh, crap, the last 18 months, I had all sorts of expenses going out of control, and I didn’t see it. So, like if you saw, for example, that your indirect expenses, like your basic office overheads, and stuff like that, as a percentage of sales were really creeping up. And then if you were monitoring that on at least a quarterly basis, then you dig deeper and say, Okay, well, what’s going on? What’s changed here? Has something gone up in price, are you one of the things that I guarantee you happened as soon as people went into lockdown with the closure around Coronavirus, and on March, every business that I’ve spoken to every entrepreneur that I’ve spoken to, went back and looked at all the money they were spending on software as a service. If they’re anything like me, they were horrified at some of the things that they’ve managed to collect, and weren’t really using, or weren’t using anywhere near to the point where the dollar could have justified, these are the kind of things that can get out of control. And if they don’t. If you’re kind of monitoring that, on the balance sheet, it kind of depends on your business, you’re definitely looking at your cash, there’s something called a I don’t want to complicate but a debt to equity ratio, which is just basically, equity is whatever if we took all of our assets and liquidated them and paid off all of our liabilities and it loans, what would be left? That’s ours so what does that how does that compare to how much debt we have? Those things are things we want to track inventory, if you’re buying it, and re again, may not apply. But inventory is the type of things that are technology-based businesses, like if they’re assembling things, man, if you get your inventory out of control, you can be cash poor, I get to be making all sorts of money. But all of a sudden, if your inventory is not turning over as fast as it should be, that’s an easy ratio. And I know it sounds confusing Shawn, but honestly, that I’ve talked about it, we’ll just put it out there now. But there is a little book I put together with a bunch of these terms. And it’s just really basic definitions. And then people just have to figure out which of these things apply for their business. And then here’s where the accountants don’t like me, is you go to your accountants, and you tell them that you might use, they may need to change the way they’re recording the financials. Because for example, if let’s say a company has three different major product lines, and if you don’t measure your cost of goods sold related to each product, and you might have one that’s losing, you know, you’re losing your shirt on it, and you won’t know. In other words, you have to know the profit margins in to whatever degree of detail you can, or even category, like let’s say we’re selling different vertical markets, I want to know how much money I’m making in a in one market or over another because you know, all revenue is not created equal. And we can sometimes find ourselves getting so caught up and I want to meet the top line targets to show that growth, that’ll make everybody think we’re exploding everything. But if it’s coming at the expense of your cash in your profits, you’re actually maybe better to double down on something else. That’s really profitable. And if you put more focus on it, I know I rambled on, but it really is, it’s five or six things on each of those, the balance sheet and the income statement, and then get your monthly report. And if you do that in five minutes a month, you’ll know if something’s wrong. And then if you have to spend more time on it.
Shawn Flynn 46:51
Okay, now let’s even go further back then say the company doesn’t have any of this yet. Okay. They they’re not worried about you know, just in time manufacturing, they’re not worried about their inventory. Right now. They’re just thinking, we’re building a product, what can we price it at? What’s that mindset? What’s that conversation like?
Tim Alison 47:11
You’ve got to look at how much it’s gonna cost you to run your business, there’s a couple of ways to do that. If you’ve got a good line-item budget, if you’ve got the ability to say a vision that other people I’m going to have to hire, and find I know what it’s going to cost me in terms of technology, and software licenses and all these kinds of things. And that’s a good way of coming up with that number. And you can also look at if there are similar businesses out there where you can get benchmark data and you can look at it and say, Okay, well, I’m not familiar enough with the ranges within the software is a service type of thing, which is really where a lot of the stuff in the Silicon Valley is right now, I could find it. I just have to go look at the ratios man. What you want to do is understand pricing has to take you to that top line that hundred percent. So, if I know that my wage costs and all of my basic costs of being in business, licensing and all that kind of stuff is going to come to a certain dollar amount. And then I look at the end, let’s say $250,000 A year, and I was just going to spend, whether I sold anything or not. And this is what I’m going to spend. And then I need to go look at the industry and say, Okay, well, what does an average software as a service company in this stage spend as a percentage of their total sales, or when they get to the point of being profitable, obviously, you’re not gonna be profitable, right out of the gate. If your game is going to be based on a big volume, then you can’t afford to make mistakes on estimating what it’s going to cost him, the bottom end is 1% or 2%. By the time it extrapolates itself out, so look at what those costs are and say, Well, if I want to be profitable in three years or two year, whatever timeframe you set, it that represents 35% of my sales, I’m just picking an average, you know, a number, you’d have to look at the input some industry stats, and then you’re simply going to say, okay, that tells me that if I’m going to spend that much money, and that should be 35%, that my sales are going to have to be, and you can calculate it, right? I mean, just you just do it live from that stage, and then need to start to say, Well, how many units or licenses or individuals Am I going to need to sell, and it’s just units and price. And you will play with those variables. But usually in the sector, you’re going to be able to look at comparable. There are reasons why so many different products are priced in that 19,20,29. I mean, there’s these scales all the way up. There are reasons for all of these things, you’ve got to figure out whether you can price yourself in that range, what the volume is that you’d have to get there. And then you got to factor in, well, how much money am I going to have to spend to get it. But honestly, if you’ve got good industry data, and you know what those base costs are, then you still should be able to extrapolate what the top line number is, it’s just that what you’ll find is a lot of people will come up with their bottom-line expenses. And if you, you have to validate your price Shawn. So if you have estimated too high, if it’s same thing, the person who said to you, they’re going to come in and all of a sudden, they’re going to be able to charge a licensing fee, but there was a lot less, it’s the same thing of price. If you’re going to be top of market or above market, and you need a very good explanation to what the value is that you got going on here. And you need an ironclad return on investment. And you need to be able to calculate which is the other thing at that price point. And what kind of return on investment is my client going to get for that for that service? And you need an ability to quantify that. And so, it isn’t, it’s always really hard to grab without having the one-on-one conversation. You could put some frameworks around it, you can say, Well, I know that this is what it’s going to cost me for my staff. And I’m going to go with a distributed model and maybe just have a small office or maybe no office at all. And I mean, that bootstrapping stage, I mean, I bootstrap on my business and then figure out what is the minimum amount of money that you’re going to spend? What does it look like the market ranges on pricing? What’s the minimum lead to use Seth Godin’s language? What’s the minimally viable audience? In other words, how many customers? Do I have to reach at that price point in order for this thing to break even? And then how many would I have to reach in order to be generating enough money to repay investors and all this kind of stuff? That’s, I don’t know whether that answered it or not. But it’s an effort.
Shawn Flynn 51:22
Okay, let’s, let’s take it even one step back. Okay. But on your mentor hat, how do you go about reverse engineering an opportunity, or looking at it to see if it’s even worth doing or not?
Tim Alison 51:36
I’m going to make the assumption, the work has been done to sort of validate whether there’s market demand, because there’s really not a lot of point in digging into all the financials, if we haven’t taken our idea, because, you know, entrepreneurship these days is about test and iterate, test and iterate type of thing. So but if you if you have identified the problem, if you’ve had conversations with people and individuals that will be strongly motivated to partner with you or purchase from you, and you’re getting a response that this is a real legit problem that people would be prepared to pay for a solution, you’re definitely going to want to look at how they’re currently solving the problem at all right now. It’s rare, I know, we like to think that we’re going to come up with one idea where we’re going to solve something that a problem that nobody else in the world ever figured out how to solve. In my experience, it’s a painful enough problem, people are solving it in some fashion. The question is you’re trying, you want to solve it for them easier, faster, and more cost efficiently type of thing. So, you want to make sure that the pain of the problem is big enough that this is marketing. I mean, I know its numbers, but you really need to be understanding if that pain is big enough and getting the problem is we fall in love with our own products and our own ideas. And so, if we don’t go out there and have conversations with people to do that, once we’ve done that, then you’ve got to go back to the numbers. So, I mean, you should establish you should work with somebody or talk to us get a mentor in the industry. Find somebody that’s done what you want to do and get an idea on what the benchmark percentages look like. I’m going to be charging licensing fees and for whatever it is like what are the metrics? Look, what are the benchmarks? How would I be able to, to compare my plans for my business to a business that would be probably as profitable in the similar sector doesn’t have to be the same one. That’s how you sort of assess and say, Well, can I do that? And you have to really start to look at? What’s it going to cost you to create that solution? And cash is the other really big concern Shawn. Because then the other thing is, is that how much? How long is it going to take you to get to because if you’re making a really big plate, the problem is, is that, especially in software, as a service side of things have made, it’s usually the kind of game that requires you to get the volume before you start to really breakeven. So, you have to know how much cash you’re going to consume the burn rate, or whatever you want to call it. And everybody underestimates that everybody doesn’t take into account but what’s likely to be happen? I don’t know about you, I know you’ve, you’re an investor, and you’ve dealt with others. But I’m happier if somebody comes in and has maybe, really conservatively estimated how much they’re going to make and overestimated how much it’s going to cost. Because it shows me that at least they’re aware of the kind of challenges we always run into and at the front end, but it still comes down to margins, what kind of gross profit margin Do you think you could get out of this? Once you’re up and up and running, you may not have any cost to product, if it’s software, you may not literally not have any cost of goods sold. So, I mean, it’s literally that you’re just running expenses. So that’s why those businesses get so profitable when they scale because as you do, your operating expenses will increase, because you’ll have more tech support, typically more customer support those kinds of things, but they don’t go up in proportion to the like sales can be going way up. And that’s where you get the spread between your operating expenses and your revenues. So, but you really, you’ve got to plot those things out and figure out how long it would take you. And then honestly, you have to be honest about your ability to access those customers. I mean, there’s just so many, I don’t know whether you’ve seen this, but I, the folks, they’ll come in and say, well, there’s X number of people in the in the old days, and people will just look at geography. And they’d say, well, in the surrounding area of LA or whatever, there’s this many people, and this many people with this kind of income. But if I get one half of one half of 1%, I’m going to be rich, so therefore this business is guaranteed to succeed. The problem is I see that still today with the models around software as a service and those kinds of things. People just look at big markets and say, oh, that market for this is massive. It’s billions. I mean, we only need a tiny little bit of it well, which tiny little bit of it? And how will you get that tiny little. That’s what’s up was on my show we had, we spent about a half an hour just talking about the whole concept of minimally viable audience, the game of advertising. I don’t know if this is true or not. But he’s a pretty smart guy. He’s probably smarter than me. And he This is pretty close to an exact quote that he gave me shot on my show, he said, advertising stopped working at the very moment in time, when all of us got the ability to access have the tools to create our own advertising. And he’s not saying that you can’t make money with Google, or with Facebook. But he did say that, and I looked at the numbers that perhaps will change. But in 2019, Facebook took in $70 billion US of advertising dollars, at Seth’s exact quote on my show was that a lot of that was dumb money. It’s money that can’t be measured. And he basically said at the moment, you can’t measure it, you’re doing some sort of weird thing called brand marketing or something. And that’s fine if you want to do it. But just know that if you can’t measure it, there’s probably not much of a return.
Shawn Flynn 56:51
So, where do you see the opportunities in the next few years?
Tim Alison 56:55
So, I’m going to answer in a way that may surprise you. But it’s a topic that I’ve been on. I’ve been really talking about a lot on my shrine with others lately, Shawn, I think the biggest opportunities that we really need to be pursuing right now, ones that involve collaboration between Boomer age entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs who have both access to capital, and a lot of entrepreneurial wisdom and a lot of wisdom about relationships and building networks, and have networks and younger entrepreneurs, who quite candidly have forgotten more about technology in the last five minutes than most of us boomers will ever know. And it’s not that we can’t learn stuff than we do. But I really think that if we want if we take that sort of mindset, and then it’s interesting, but I’ve had some amazing guests on my show in the last few months, talking about the way they see the world changing as a result of what’s going on right now. First with the Coronavirus, and certainly with the George Floyd move murder and the Black Lives Matter. There is this belief that there’s an increasing number of people who are realizing that changes need to happen and that we need to build businesses that are in use named John Perkins, who wrote the book, The Economic Hitman. I was on my show the other day, but John Paul said, moving from what the daft economy, which is he says the one we’re in right now, where it’s solely the pursuit of money, and it’s the pursuit of profit over people, which is taking us down this path where if we don’t stick to Earth will survive, but we won’t. So the life economy, which are businesses that are sustainable, and contribute to solving big problems, like gender diversity, or lifting up those segments of our populations, whether it’s black Americans, black Canadians, indigenous people in Canada, those kinds of those causes, or problems around the environment and create opportunities to figure out how we’re going to use technology for humanity’s good. Because here’s my challenge to everybody that’s listening. I put to you that if we looked at society for the last 150 years, and we said, has society advanced, or how have we advanced, I think we would say from a technology standpoint, it’s exploded, the very fact that you and I are having this conversation that I’m having a conversation with anybody in the Silicon Valley, from Santa Falls, Nova Scotia, it’s crazy, but it’s just a simple example of it. But Shawn, we can’t manage our health, we got our healthcare systems that are spinning out of control, we got people, obesity rates, diabetes, we’ve got cancer rates that are out of control, we can’t manage our mental health, we’ve got problems and mental health around the western economies and anxiety and suicide. And we can’t, we can’t even manage getting along together and seeing each other as human beings. So, I know it’s kind of maybe a vaguer answer than you were looking for. But I think it’s to look in your heart and figure out what are the things that you really care about? And then to gather around you people with some similar thoughts. And then start thinking, okay, but young people, because here’s another really neat quote, Lim Twist, gave it to me yesterday, and I’m trying to remember the name of her foundation that it’s escaping me, but she said, when it comes to the universe, our children are our elders. And they are they’re the innocent ones that are going to say, why are we destroying our planet? Why aren’t we not being kind to that person? And why is that person getting followed or beaten or whatever? Why, why why and they don’t want us to, to keep doing what we’ve been doing. So, if I want young people I you know, I just think we need to find opportunities to reengage the extra Gen X to I’m not trying to leave them out. But I do think it’s the boomer age and who has access to capital, access to networks and understand how to solve promise can challenge business models, like when you said, how do you reverse engineer a problem? I probably should have said as my first five questions, what problem do you solve? Who do you solve for? How do you solve it? What happens if the problem isn’t solved? And why should people hire you to solve it? That’s the business side of becoming open. My mind was more on the numbers, those things just kind of second nature to entrepreneurs like myself with 30 years or so of experience. team goes up with the idea of people who see the potential of the technology so it’s not a sector it’s more of the focus on the collaboration and moving towards a life economy.
Shawn Flynn 61:38
Okay, Tim, I got to say thank you for all this information, your five your five questions that you asked right there. Those amazing takeaways, the return on relationships, I love that quote. I’m going to be using it if anyone wants to find out any more information about you screw the naysayers, your podcast, what’s the best way to go about doing it?
Tim Alison 61:59
So, a couple of ways so certainly for the podcast and but everything I’ve got going on there and just screw the naysayers.com. And of course, in the podcast is called screw the naysayers. I also do have another website. It’s called the profit whisperer.io, I referenced people there, Shawn, because if they click hit up free resources at the top of that page, and I have a little book, I sent it out to you, you’ve had a look at it. It’s called demystifying financial statements. It’s a kind of a read that anybody can read. And I’ve done a couple of hours. And it’s free. I do capture your email, but I’m not putting in any kind of funnel or anything with it. It’s literally just the way I’ve set it up for you to get that download. So, profit whisperer.io screw the naysayers.com. And I’m on LinkedIn a lot. And that’s Tim Alison with one hour.
Shawn Flynn 62:43
All right, we’re going to have all that information in the show notes. And for everyone that enjoyed the show, please share among your network, pass this knowledge around. We want to help as many people in the business entrepreneur community as possible, and leave a review on iTunes, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you’re using to listen to this podcast. And Tim, I got to say, once again, thank you for your time today on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Tim Alison 63:07
Had a blast. Thanks.
Announcer 63:12 Thank you for listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. To access our resources, visit us at the Silicon Valley podcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at Shawn Flynn SV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by the investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
