578: (Solo) The Wake-Up Call That Changed How I Work

Brent Grundy was a man with a simple business idea who built his empire from the ground up, and became living proof that someone can go from flat broke to running a business that turns over $32 million per year, in just 18 months. But Grundy’s road to success has been anything but smooth. An unfortunate but often present component of any success story is that of hardship or failure; and Brent Grundy’s story is no exception.   After a major business setback, Grundy found himself in the unenviable position of helplessly watching on as his money, home and dreams disappeared before his eyes. With barely enough money to fill a fuel tank, he prepared himself to break the devastating news to his young family that they wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas that year; the down and out businessman had hit rock bottom.   With nothing left to lose, he decided to accept his losses and turn his life around. With a renewed focus, Grundy was sitting in a play centre one day when staff told one of the older children that she was too big to play on the equipment. It was then that an idea came to him; to fill a gap in the entertainment market that caters to adults and children alike.   Today, Grundy is the Founder and Chief Executive of Australia’s first and largest Trampolining franchise business, Flip Out, and his story continues on its way into the history books. Since opening 18 months ago Brent’s business has enjoyed unprecedented success. Flip Out has expanded to a whopping twenty-one sites across the country, employing over 350 people and drawing thousands of customers through its doors each day.   Grundy’s accountant has said that in his 22 years of being in business, he has never witnessed an opportunity that allows the franchisee to recoup their initial investment within four to five months.   The zealous businessman now has his sights set on global domination; currently building centres in Dubai, Brent expects to open in 13 more countries in the next year. He also plans to use profits to donate centres to Afghanistan and Cambodia by year’s end.   In this interview you will learn: - What it feels like to have your company sold underneth you and come back even bigger and better - The importanace of systems and how to develop them in your business - What it takes to become a successful entrepreneur - How to develop a rock solid mindset where you can't lose - The franchising business, how it works and how to start - Secret growth strategies   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

26 Joulu 201451min

Where do you see yourself in ten years? And more importantly, is that where you want to be? Without a doubt, you've spent an unproductive afternoon at your desk staring listlessly out the window, listening to the chatter of co-workers, staring at piles of reports, puzzled on how you ended up there. What happened to the life you dreamed about when you were in high-school? If you’re feeling a little unfulfilled, the good news is, you're not the only one. According to Harvard studies, a whopping 74% of people are unhappy in their work. Job satisfaction in the USA recently fell to its lowest level in 22 years and continues to show a consistent downward trend. There's a reason why three-quarters of employees don’t walk away and cash in their chips, and instead opt to stay unfulfilled. To find out why, we spoke with Matthew Michalewicz.    Michalewicz is an international expert in entrepreneurship, innovation, and success psychology. He has established boards that include former heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and Fortune 500 CEOs, and has a track record of starting businesses from scratch and selling them for tens of millions of dollars. His work has been featured in numerous television shows and publications, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, and Forbes.    In this interview you will learn:   - How to pitch Rockstars like Bill Gates - Learn the science behind what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur - The secret sauce on the most successful entrepreneurs in the world - How Matthew Has built 4 extremely successful businesses - Key mindsets for becomming a super successful entrepreneur   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

21 Joulu 201450min

Employed by Mercedes-Benz, pulling in $300,000 a year … By a lot of standards, James Schramko was doing pretty well for himself. Yet he felt stifled. He was relying on one source of income, which although high, he felt was capped, and didn't have creative control. As he tells Foundr, he wanted to be the primary beneficiary of his own efforts, rather than have his employer reap the rewards.    The upside was that it prepared him well to strike out on his own, as he did six years ago. “Running a multimillion dollar business for someone else … really gave me the solid training to be able to run a business,” he says.   He admits it was grueling juggling his job with a budding business to the tune of an extra four hours every day, but now he works about the same amount, minus the 9-5, that is. He aims for a 25-hour week with time for at least one surf session a day – fitting work around the tide charts.   Schramko's thing is internet marketing and coaching. It's a field littered with snake oil and empty promises but he stresses that “a website is not a business” and “internet marketing is not about sitting in your underpants scamming people with a false promise that they're going to get rich”. Rather, he wants to help others build their businesses and avoid the gauntlet that he ran himself in the early days. Having done the yards and made it through, he's distilled that knowledge and is sharing it online.   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

18 Joulu 201441min

Becoming one of the world’s most influential people on social media is no small feat. Author and entrepreneur Mari Smith explains that it comes down to a love of technology, and above all, a love of people.   Challenging traditional notions of marketing, author and entrepreneur Mari Smith explains that relationship marketing is based around creating trusting associations with customers that last a lifetime.   It’d be an understatement to say that social media has fundamentally changed how we communicate and ultimately do business around the world. Some people have a natural flair for it, others have to be trained. Mari Smith is one of the former. Widely recognized as the top Facebook marketing expert in the world, Mari Smith is the coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day and lead author of The Relationship Age, a collection of strategies from leading social media experts to help users navigate the world of social media. Smith is a relationship marketing specialist among the world’s foremost experts on using Facebook as a marketing channel.  She is a Forbes top 10 Social Media Influencer and travels the world to deliver keynote speeches and trains businesses on how to use social media. Speaking exclusively with Foundr, it’s easy to see how Mari Smith has thrived on social media: her warm personality and her value of people underpins her every sentence.     In this interview you will learn:   - Timeless Facebook tactics that are proven to work - Relationship marketing - How to develop a deep connection with your audience over social - What it takes to build a thriving business via social media marketing - Some of the coolest tools and resources for making your social accounts explode   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

17 Joulu 201443min

Fists clenched, hidden iPhone filming from his shirt pocket, Jia Jiang stands in a glossy-tiled shopping mall in east Texas. And, as if tugged by a magnet, he ambles towards a seated security guard. With beads of sweat gathering at his temples, Jia plants his feet. The guard glances up. Jia swallows. “Can I have a hundred dollars?” This is Jia Jiang’s first foray into the world of deliberate rejection. And he will continue deliberately seeking rejection for one hundred days.    Have you ever walked up to ask someone for something, and been terrified of the response? Maybe it was asking for a raise. Maybe a bank loan. Maybe it was asking someone on a date. You feel your chest tighten, heart rate increase. And all of a sudden your little request starts looking more like Everest the closer you get. The fact is, the fear of rejection paralyzes us all.   In this interview you will learn:   - Jia's inspiring story of how he overcame the fear of rejection - Tactics and strategies of how you can overcome rejection too - One of the coolest stories you will hear - What it takes to become a successful entrepreneur   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

15 Joulu 201438min

Adi Tatarko, co-founder of online home design platform Houzz, began her journey by purchasing her dream home built in 1955 – a fixer-upper – and then setting about renovating it. “Unfortunately the process itself wasn't so dreamy… it was pretty much a nightmare,” Tatarko says. “So we ended up building Houzz in order to make the whole process better.”    The cliché holds – a picture paints a thousand words – and in order to best communicate the vision of their dream home to their architect, Tatarko and her husband Alon Cohen started a humble website displaying images of home interiors.    It was Silicon Valley, 2009. In that environment, the journey from personal project to company is a natural progression. They created an online platform to showcase the work of architects, so home renovators could access endless images to inspire the vision of their own dream home.   The couple then asked local Bay Area architects to upload their portfolios. Their initial community was made up from “twenty local homeowners, mainly our friends, and a group of professionals from the Bay Area.” What started as a trickle of design portfolios soon became a flood.    Tatarko is a veteran of the tech startup space and this comes across in her delivery. A sharp and articulate businessperson, Tatarko coolly communicates a vision splendid for the company. “We really wanted to help people learn more about the [remodeling] process, about design, about what's possible, and about different materials to help them make the right decision. And help them be more knowledgeable when they start their project.”   Now Houzz is an online hub that not only hosts a plethora of images but displays the portfolios of “450,000 active professionals from all over the world” and receives 25 million monthly unique visitors. In five years, the site has become the biggest residential remodeling community online.    In this interview you will learn:   -What it takes to create and build massive community -Startup 101 product development tactics that helped Houzz grow so fast -Challenges faced that Adi had as an entrepreneur -Investing and how to know when you need an investor -The key mindsets to building a successful startup   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

14 Joulu 201443min

David Brim never meant to get into the car manufacturing business. He initially planned to import and sell the Tomcar Australia — an Israeli military vehicle — in Australia, but as things snowballed he found himself running a full-fledged business selling highly customized ATVs to defense, agriculture, mining, emergency services and the odd individual.   “Once we’d started we loved it. Nine years later we’re selling cars across Australia and people are loving it.”   Speaking to Foundr along with Tomcar Australia CMO Steve Sammartino, he says they were just a couple of car fans who stumbled into a staid industry. The pair met at a startup event — a “profitability party” of all things — where Sammartino was suitably impressed by the fact that Brim’s startup made real tangible products, and one thing led to another.   “Sammartino here gives a fantastic talk … To start a car company in Australia you need two things. You need no idea what you’re doing, ‘cause if you did you wouldn't do it. You need no money, ‘cause if you did have money you wouldn’t spend it on starting a car company,” he laughs.   In this interview you will learn:   -How to develop a strong story for your startup and make it "newsworthy" -The importantance of product development and how to create something people love -How to sell a $30,000 ticket item online -How to make people fall in love with your brand and develop a community -What it takes to build a car from scratch -Disrupting an industry   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

11 Joulu 201446min

Growth Hacker TV launched on May 1st of last year and has taken the entrepreneurial world by storm. Co-founder Bronson Taylor has suddenly provided a place where experts on startup growth reveal their secrets and we are eating it up! But Bronson, ever humble, shares his remarkable success as the tale of two brothers with a dream: “About four years ago, I guess, my brother and I decided to start a company. So we started a company called Dumb Punk and it was a web development shop,” he says. “But we were a couple of nobodies with no track record. Nobody knew about us.” Bronson and his brother began their initial business driving around, visiting local businesses with poorly-made websites, selling web development services completely cold. “That’s how we started,” admits Bronson, “which is kind of ridiculous, but we finally got enough clients that we were able to create a little business out of that and then we got more and more into products and then eventually some of the stuff that you see now with Growth Hacker TV.”   In this interview you will learn:   - Some of the best growth hacking tools out there right now -Top strategies and tactics for growth -What it takes to become a successful entrepreneur -How to get insane amounts of PR for your startup -How to capture gold user feedback -How to create a launch loop to make your launch go viral   I Need Your Help! If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people! Leave a review for the Foundr Podcast!

10 Joulu 201438min