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This is Your Business Unleashed a podcast about building a business that makes money without you. I want to help you grow your company effectively so you can enjoy your work and your life more. I’m your host, Clayton Aiken. I’m an accountant and business advisor and
Today’s Great Idea Story (00:16):
Entrepreneur and a family man.
Clayton Achen (00:18):
Every episode I’ll provide simple, actionable insights for
Today’s Great Idea Story (00:22):
Entrepreneurs who want to
Clayton Achen (00:23):
Get off the treadmill. We’ll talk to other business owners about their journeys and industry experts about the tools that they use to gain a competitive edge. Let’s unleash your business.
Today’s Great Idea Story (00:37):
Norm was a self-taught chemist with a high school degree who loved trying to come up with new things to make life easier. Working in the aerospace industry, Norm and a few friends had started a fledgling company to develop rust prevention materials for big rockets. The key was water displacement and Norm tried formulation after formulation. Finally, on the 40th try it worked. Norm’s, rocket building clients loved it. In fact, so did their employees. When no one was looking, they would regularly sneak cans of at home. Norm thought maybe they should sell it to everyday people, and that’s what they did. Norm hired salespeople who ended up selling cases of it to hardware and sporting goods stores right out of the backs of their cars. Today, Norm’s formulation is essentially unchanged and very popular for all things around the house, and it’s still named after what it does and how it was developed. Water displacement perfected on the 40th try. This was WD40.
Glenn Suart (01:30):
Alright.
Clayton Achen (01:31):
Welcome to another episode of Your Business Unleash podcast. We got a really neat guest on today, Glenn Suart from Today’s Great Idea. Welcome, Glenn.
Glenn Suart (01:40):
Hey, Clayton. How are you?
Clayton Achen (01:42):
I’m awesome. It was so great to have heard one of your stories, why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?
Glenn Suart (01:48):
Well, Clayton, I am a management consultant, love doing business plans and stuff and occurred to me, I could advertise, but why not give content to radio stations then people call me. And so I’ve done about 300 of these stories and the one you just heard there about Norm and WD40 is a great one because in 90 seconds I tell a story about an everyday person just like you or I, who took some action with their idea and turned it into a business brand or invention that we know. And by doing that, you get people motivated thinking about doing great ideas or taking action, which is what you want.
Clayton Achen (02:34):
Yeah, yeah. Right on. Well, it’s great to have you on today, and I’ve listened to quite a few of the stories and frankly, they’re not hard to get through. They’re 90 seconds, which is really nice. And I first heard you on QR Calgary on 770 AM and I think you’ve got a pretty good footprint around the country. And we’re going to talk about all that. I want to talk about how you decided to take the plunge and what’s your story, what’s your 92nd story and where did this come from for you and how did you get into this?
Glenn Suart (03:08):
Well, that’s a really good one, Clayton. I have a physics degree and I found I didn’t really like physics all that much.
Clayton Achen (03:14):
Physics degree. You went pretty far for something you don’t really like.
Glenn Suart (03:18):
I know. And it was like, you want to do this the rest of my life? I don’t think so. So I’d done university radio and loved media and went back to school and got an MBA.
Clayton Achen (03:30):
Where was that? Where was the university?
Glenn Suart (03:33):
Ivy School of Business in London, Ontario. And it was fun. It was a painful two years, really intense and left there all set to move across the country for a marketing job when I suddenly got this great offer in Ottawa to do media entertainment consulting. And this was the mid-nineties and it was the perfect time. Specialty television was coming up and a few other things were coming out. The internet wasn’t around yet in a big way.
(04:07)
And so basically we were a small little firm when I got hired there and we wrote the book on how to literally on how to write a specialty television license application like a much music or ATSN, et cetera. And I love writing stories about and trying to create businesses or telling the story about creating businesses in a totally new universe. There was no able, was just exploding at that point. So how do you create a business that’s viable in this kind of space? So we were involved. Yeah, we were involved in lots of them and we did such a good job that Pricewaterhouse PricewaterhouseCoopers bought our firm to be in the media entertainment consulting arm. And that was fun, except we certainly lost a lot of our fun clients because they couldn’t afford our rates anymore.
(05:06)
And then PWC moved me out here in 2000 to go after Shaw and Telus and other clients. So at that point, PWC sold off their consulting side to IBM and they didn’t need strategy guys like me. I was the last guy to go here in Calgary and I got a great package and it’s like, what do I like doing? I like helping people tell their stories when it comes to business. And that’s what I’ve been doing now for 22 years or whatever, 21 years.
Clayton Achen (05:47):
Right on. Yeah, I mean it’s pretty unique to hear the stories about every cool company or every neat product that we use. Chances are there’s a really neat story behind it.
Glenn Suart (06:03):
Exactly. It’s like I figured, I listened to radio because I’d been involved in it for five years back in the eighties. And there was a guy in the US called Paul Harvey who did this five minute long bit. He was an ABC newscaster, but he did this thing called the rest of the story where he would tell people over five minutes about a guy or a girl and all the things that had happened to them. And then at the end he would drop the bomb, which is this is some famous person that you would know, and he delivered it with such panache and he wrote it so well. But then he passed away and nobody sort of picked that up. And one day I was living in, we were on vacation in Prince Edward Island, and I woke up and I thought to myself, why doesn’t someone do what Paul Harvey had done? And it occurred to me, well, like most entrepreneurs, if nobody else is doing it, maybe I’ll do it. And so it took me another three years to get it right before I pitched it to Corus.
Clayton Achen (07:10):
Yeah, right on. Your website’s brilliant, but you don’t really advertise in the traditional sense. You’re not, you’re probably not trying to get your SEO numbers up and you’re not out there doing all the typical digital marketing stuff. Your success has literally come from storytelling. And I imagine, and we’re going to talk about this, so now let’s go back to 2000, 2001. You’re at PWC, you’re an employee, and that’s where when they put you out, they picked up your firm. So were you an owner at that point when PWC?
Glenn Suart (07:54):
Had a very small piece. Yeah,
Clayton Achen (07:55):
Very small piece. Okay. So that was your first sort of pseudo tastes of entrepreneurism. But the real magic started to happen essentially when you got fired. Yeah. That’s another great podcast is that’s another guest that we had on Mike at Bloggity. He has a podcast called You’re Fired or something like that. That’s great. And it’s about that pivotal moment, that shift. Because you wait for stuff.the
Glenn Suart (08:24):
That’s exactly right. You wait for stuff. Oh, I’ll get to it next week or next month when I have a bit more time when suddenly you’re without a job. Or I say I got fired, but I just got let go because of the purchase. It was like a year. I got a year’s severance, and it was great. I gave me a chance. I was not as stressed as I normally would be, of course, to sort of reinvent myself. And every day, I find though, especially in this world, I’m reinventing myself now because sometimes the radio stuff works and sometimes it doesn’t. You end up with some great clients, other clients, it doesn’t work out so well.
Clayton Achen (09:04):
Yeah. Well, in the few episodes that I’ve listened to and the one that we just heard, those are all pretty big brands. Do you focus in on your podcast in on smaller, lesser known success stories?
Glenn Suart (09:18):
No, and that’s a good question, but no, and the reason is because this is how I framed it when I started, I could have gone out there, as you were saying, and I could advertise. I’m a business plan consultant, a strategic management consultant, and I could pay for advertising, but I wanted to figure out a way of getting other people to pay me for my advertising and also get the benefit of it. And so that’s why I hooked onto the storytelling idea. And the way it works though, is I’m giving content that’s good quality to the radio stations, which they can then sell in market.
(10:05)
And so that works for me because, but the payoff for the radio listener is you’ve got to know what this brand or this business or invention is. So if I do a story about Joe’s Plumbing where it might be a great local entrepreneurial story, nobody might know it, so therefore it’s not relevant to my podcast. Everything has to be something that you would know. It’s sort of like the old water cooler thing. You’d be going, oh, I didn’t know that. You know that. You start to share that. And I get a lot of people calling me who actually have never heard the radio thing, but one of their friends has said, call Glenn, because he helps people. They’ve heard it, a friend has heard it and told them to call me.
Clayton Achen (10:50):
Cool. And I guess that’s sort of everything you’ve just said. The way you structure the podcast is there’s sort of a punchline at the end of every one where you go, oh, okay, there’s a hook at the end that keeps you coming back, right? I want to another one now, right? ,
Glenn Suart (11:07):
It becomes appointment stuff. Clayton, if I told you off the top that it’s about McDonald’s, you might not be interested, it becomes appointment listening because people go, “I know I’m going to hear a story about somebody that I know and I’m going to get a payoff at the end”, as you said, with the hook.
Clayton Achen (11:26):
Yeah. Well, and I think that it’s super interesting because a lot of entrepreneurs that I work with, and I’m sure that you work with and have helped their own individual stories are so cool, and they’re so neat, and they could be told in a super interesting light, it wouldn’t be as relatable to the broad public, obviously. But the story would be just as neat. And that’s really the story of entrepreneurialism. You can’t go to a business school, you can’t go to Ivy and generally learn how to build a business. All the best success stories come from places where you never would’ve expected it to come from. Occasionally, I guess there’s a factory made or factory system sort of industrial success. But for the most part, all of the really cool success stories that I, and I read a lot of business books on people’s journeys and cool brands that I like and how they came to be, and it’s all not what you’d expect. And that’s really the story of entrepreneurialism, right? We’re just all fighting it out here. And the story that we tell often can lead to our success, right?
Glenn Suart (12:41):
Oh yeah. It’s about, I think you put it nicely there. It’s about taking action. You don’t know where things are going to go. And many of the stories I did are exactly that. The one with Norm there. He didn’t know that there was going to be a consumer application for this stuff. He thought it was just for rockets. Compelling is that when something magical happens, and you don’t just say, oh, it’s that, be curious, why is that? And then see what happens. But you got to take action. You can contemplate your navel until the cows come home. Nothing’s going to happen. You’ve got to try something and do it obviously carefully. You don’t want to go crazy.
Clayton Achen (13:26):
Yeah. And so I guess that’s a nice lead into what you do. So we haven’t really talked about what you do other than this fabulous podcast radio show. On your website, right on the homepage, you say “what’s stopping you?” What’s stopping you is it that we all suffer analysis paralysis, let’s dream and scheme until the cows come home, but there’s actually no action. And the biggest success stories are the ones who moved. They get moving and they move faster. And so when I see what’s stopping you on your homepage, I get the idea that this is, you’re the person that just pushes people over the cliff, and this is what I’m paying you to do, and map that out and make it a bit more palatable and a bit more easy to take. That plunge is terrifying, isn’t it?
Glenn Suart (14:15):
It is. It is. And so you get somebody, we handhold a lot. We help people because they’re not good. They might be good at one thing, they might’ve figured out this great widget, or they might know about marketing, but they know that they’re weak in other areas. So we can help ’em figure out what they’re weak at and strengthen those areas and then help them build what they need. A lot of people need a business plan,
(14:48)
They need to need a roadmap as to where to go because it saves time, money, and stress. But a lot of people never do it. They just get so fixated on this widget that they forget the other elements, just thinking that other stuff is going to magically happen. And I had a guy two weeks ago, great guy, he spent three years with his other friends working on this particular business-to-business thing. And it’s a great thing. I like it very much. But I said to him after I looked, we had a conversation, I talked to him about it. I said, okay, what about this competitor in Europe? And he looked at me like, what? And he didn’t realize this competitor from Europe was coming in and they hadn’t really looked at their business plan for two years, so they were just unaware. And so it’s that kind of independence and support in a collaborative way that we bring to the table.
Clayton Achen (15:49):
Interesting. And a business plan, it’s funny, I hosted, I don’t know if you know this, but I host a 3to5 Club here in Calgary. It’s sort of a CEO mastermind, and we are just in the middle of November, every year we cover our two page strategic plan. And I start out the session talking about how different that is from a business plan. And you do your business plan to get some nice ideas together and you give it to the bank and maybe get some financing, and then you stick it up on the shelf with the other shelf help books. And so is there something different about how you approach business plans than, because really, I’ve seen a lot of 40, 60 page documents that are there to tell a story. They’re there to tell your similar ideas what you’re doing, but it’s to tell a story to a bank to get financing.
(16:36)
And as Mike Tyson says, every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Glenn Suart (16:43):
Remember your audience. If your audience is the bank, you write it a certain way for a certain thing, but there’s also other audiences. There’s your investors, there are your employees who are coming along on the ride for this, that they want to know where we’re going.
Clayton Achen (17:03):
We call ’em stakeholders.
Glenn Suart (17:08):
Sometimes when you’ve seen a lot of business plans are not well-written, and mine are okay or good, but the key things you got to do in a business plan are keep it clear and keep it concise. Your business plan could be two pages. It depends on what it is and where you’re going because you want to communicate your idea. And when you throw a 40 page or 60 page thing you’re talking about in front of somebody, they’re not going to read it, especially when the paragraphs are blocked paragraphs and they’re hard to read. And what you need to do is, again, not surprising, add some storytelling to it. Not that this becomes a novel like a Harry Potter novel, but you want it to be readable so that a great plan could be read by anybody, give it to your mother, and she could read the plan and go, “oh, I get it. I see what they’re doing.” It’s logical, it’s factual, and it’s fun to read without being superfluous.
Clayton Achen (18:14):
So what would be a few in terms of business planning? I think we also talk about projections and operating strategy, which we’ll get to, but in terms of business plans, how is the best way to approach a business plan? Where should I start?
Glenn Suart (18:30):
Well, the easiest thing is if you can’t do it yourself, and a lot of people struggle with that because where to get started is your point. The easiest thing is to bring somebody in, and it could be an investor, it could be a consultant like me. Have them talk to them about what it is you see, and then have them write it down, bullet point, style, nothing fancy, and then get that written document back and then iterate it. That’s the easiest way, because once you see what you sit on paper, you start to go, oh, I like that. Oh, there’s a hole over here. You’ve got something to react to because right now it’s all in your brain at the end of the day.
Clayton Achen (19:18):
Yeah. Yeah. I like a Simon Sinek sort of approach too. You got to begin with where you want to be. And I think that’s maybe one of the biggest challenges that I consistently see owners have is I’m really great at making back scratchers, but the business of the back scratching businesses, that’s a whole other thing. My back scratchers are the best back scratchers around, but the actual business of it, I don’t know how to handle that. I’m a crafts person. And so we talk a lot about, well, why is it that you’re doing this? Well, I want to make some money. Well, money’s not a very inspiring vision, is it? And one of my mentors, Chuck Blakeman, talks about the random hope strategy in business. We’re going to work really, really hard and hope it all works out. And it’s like, well, maybe we should just be a bit more intentional about things. Here. You get what you intend, not what you hope for. Another Blakeman quote, so I like this idea of getting help, making a professional, or at least a guiding business plan.
Glenn Suart (20:27):
It’s like, just write down your roadmap. Where are you going? It’s really important to then expose it to the light. A lot of people will have it in their plan, think as you just talked about a little bit. They think it’s going to work, but they don’t really expose it to others. And by having it written down, it makes it easier to say, oh, well, why are you doing that? That doesn’t make any sense, or That’s a great idea. How can we add to that?
Clayton Achen (21:00):
Yeah, yeah. Back to what it is that you do. I noticed on your website that you separate out smart business plans from realistic projections. And by the way, I like the descriptor, smart and realistic. Those are two things that are often missing from business plans. And so isn’t a projection part of a business plan? Why are those two things separate?
Glenn Suart (21:25):
Well, it’s a great question, Clayton. I find that one of the best places to start when I talk to somebody about their business is the numbers. And when you go through the numbers with somebody and do the projections to try to figure out where they’re going, they’re projections could be way off. But you bring out all the elements of the business plan in that when you’re going through the numbers. So by getting the realistic projections in the first place, if you’ve got a business or not, and there’s no point writing the business plan until you know, got some numbers. So that’s why we sort of start actually with the projections first and then write the document after, because it’s much easier. See that? You must see that a lot.
Clayton Achen (22:14):
Oh, well, yeah. And you go, Hey, would you like to engage in a budgeting exercise so we can map out your next year? And they go, well, I don’t need to pay you for that. I go, okay, well, what do you want out of next year? Well, I’d like to make 50 grand more than I made this year personally. And you go, great, that’s a perfect starting point. Let’s reverse engineer that. That’s a projection, and now we can install a budget, and if we take it down to the operational level, I can program that budget into your accounting software and we can run an actual to budget variance analysis every month. Now, you can actually start to see where you need to make some adjustments. I love the idea of, again, you’re starting with the end in mind. You’re going, okay, at the end of next year, I would like to have this result, whatever that is.
(23:01)
And in the broader scheme, in our two page strategic plan that we do in three to five, you go, okay, well, why do you want to be there at the end of next year? Well, because it’s going to put me an inch closer to my ultimate vision of whatever my ultimate vision is. Ours at Achen Henderson is to help entrepreneurs and business leaders build great companies. And so everything that we do is pointing us towards that. And this business plan that you’re talking about, the smart business plan and a realistic projection, those are just things to point you at that, right?
Glenn Suart (23:31):
Yeah. No, what you’re doing, Clayton, is exactly right. You’re helping people the way they should be helped, even though they don’t understand it themselves.
Clayton Achen (23:41):
Well, and I think that’s part of what you’re doing as well when we talk about what you said early on is really you nail it. You go, maybe I’m good at making back scratchers. I’m not good at making business plans, so let’s go and get some help. Maybe you don’t need to be an expert at making business plans, resources out there that can take that off your plate or at least guide you on the way. And I think all this stuff, frankly, probably comes down to a level of confidence where you’re going, I’m about to jump off a cliff here. Let’s make sure there’s some water at the bottom of it that I can some nice refreshing water at the bottom of it rather than a road. You know what I mean? We don’t need to be the road runner here.
Glenn Suart (24:19):
This is it. I know what I’m good at, and I know what I’m not good at. And you asked the question off the top, sort of like why you’re doing the radio, but you’re not doing so much online advertising. You’re absolutely right. I don’t do Facebook. I don’t really do much on LinkedIn besides have a small presence up till now because I didn’t want to do a shitty job,
(24:44)
and I have not been focused. So to your point, I’m going to be hopefully working with our mutual friend, Derek from The Inbound Lab, because I know that what I’ve got, and he’s good at is content strategist marketing, and I’ve got content. How do we get that content out through these other channels? I can’t rely on radio stations forever.
(25:14)
Because you get certain audiences and stuff. So that’s what we’re going to work on for. So I’m about to go through a dynamic change in my business because yeah, I’ve got the content, but I’m going to be reaching new markets this way, and I’ve got a plan for that. So I’ve been reworking a plan. I’ve been thinking about bringing a partner in to do stuff. So just thinking about those things, when you’re forced to look at it on paper, you go, oh, and defend it. It’s very important.
Clayton Achen (25:45):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s the same thing as when you’re actually in it, seeing your accounting and seeing how, wow, you spent a lot of money last quarter that you weren’t expecting to spend. It’s like, here’s some reality for you. And then the last pillar that’s on your page, we talked about, okay, we’ve got the smart business plan figured out. We’ve got realistic projections figured out, and now you’re going to help with a clever operating strategy. And I imagine that’s you’re really focusing people back on their stories when you’re doing that. But tell me a little bit about that.
Glenn Suart (26:18):
So obviously what I like to do is help people figure out and get into business. And then of course, you get into business, it’s like, well, there’s a lot of other things that you need to do on a day-to-day basis to run an operation. And I learn that all the time. So I had a guy reach out to me three and a half years ago just before the pandemic, and he had an idea for a consumer product to bring it into the country. And I said to him like, okay, why is anybody going to want this? There’s lots of competitors in this space. And he gave me three great reasons, and I was like, wow, those are really good reasons. And he was also a very good salesman. And so we started the business, brought in stuff we sold to Canadian Tire, lots and lots of product, and did a great job.
(27:13)
But then Canadian Tire figured out that they could do it better than we could. And so they decided they don’t want blacklisted us, and we had to find other markets for it, and we’re still doing stuff. But the point I’m getting to is that you have to go from a strategy on paper to operations. And so that’s what we helped with. So we helped figure out, okay, what do we need to do next? Who do we bring in? How do we do that to build up this enterprise cost effectively? Because easy to spend money. How do you grow the business and the support for the operations? And we made a lot of mistakes as a group, but you learn from these things. And so the business is fine. It’s surviving, but it’s not what it could be at this point. So we’re trying something else. Your point though is operations are different and you need to bring in, again, the right operations people like, I don’t know logistics, but I know a guy who knows logistics really, really well. And so having him on board, terrific. If you need a guy or a girl who can do a technical strategy and who does it for Suncor and other companies, you can bring those people in The best you talked about it, it’s bring in the right people at the right time, but do it in a cost effective way.
Clayton Achen (28:38):
And you go, well, I can’t afford these people. That’s a common, I can’t afford to subcontract out my bookkeeping and hire a fractional CFO. And usually what’s happening there is a person hasn’t got their story figured out, the ones who are really, really confident in their product and have their story figured out and have focused on the fundamentals and believe that when they jump off that cliff that it’s going to work out. But the only way they’ve gotten that belief is because their headspace is right and their story is correct, or they’re not correct necessarily, but they have a story that they’re shooting towards, and they’re very, very focused. Those people don’t have trouble bringing in external help.
Glenn Suart (29:20):
No. Those companies that are moving forward generally know that they have to bring in the help. You can limp along. You don’t have to bring in the help. You can limp along, but if you don’t do it, you’re not going to go anywhere. And for me personally, just like I was talking about with the outbound or inbound marketing for my content, I’ve limped along for whatever it is throughout this whole internet phase without doing very much. And I’m not happy that I’ve done such a shitty job that way,
Clayton Achen (30:00):
But you’ve also helped others. It’s funny that you say that because you have been drinking your own Kool-Aid a little bit.
Glenn Suart (30:08):
Yeah.
Clayton Achen (30:08):
Because you’ve created some great success stories, right?
Glenn Suart (30:11):
Yeah, absolutely. But the cobbler’s children, right? You do everything for other people and you’re the last guy.
Clayton Achen (30:17):
Yeah. I file my personal tax returns at about 1159 on April 30th every year, by the way.
Glenn Suart (30:24):
Well, there you go. So it’s exactly that. I’ve seen it enough that the ones that do move forward are the ones who carefully invest in bringing in the right people. Don’t spend crazy amounts of money. I tell people that you do not want to end up some of those people on Shark Tank or Dragons Den. We’ve mortgage the house and we’ve got a half baked product. You got to know what the good stuff is. And that means you got to be able to have a product or service, number one that people want to buy. And two, you got to be able to sell it. A lot of people can’t sell it. And if you can’t do that, then don’t go crazy spending money. But if you’re good at selling, you’re good.
Clayton Achen (31:08):
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if you should be part, you should maybe pitch Sharks Tank on doing some Sharks Tank prep for the folks that are about to come on. Oh,
Glenn Suart (31:20):
Oh, there are fantastic stories on that show. And it’s a show about entertainment, and they package it extremely well because you see these people, it’s just like American Idol or these other shows too, where they package the story about the person. So you’re feeling rah, rah, rah behind them. You want them to succeed, but sometimes these things are, there’s no chance in hell. So you got to be careful.
Clayton Achen (31:44):
Yeah. So just coming back to this operating strategy, do you roll up your sleeves and get real tactile and operational?
Glenn Suart (31:53):
Yeah, I’ve done that. Leaders, I think it’s important to do so. I love more of the strategy side, so I focus there, but I have jumped in. I was just for the last couple of years, been doing on the consumer products thing day-to-day operations as well. We didn’t need to have a full-time team. We had a great logistics person, great marketing person, and a great salesperson. So the four of us worked every day to get these consumer products, not just overseas, brought ’em in, got them out the door, made sure the clients were happy, designed new ones. You got to get your hands dirty. I don’t want to just be somebody said, oh, this is what I learned from other people. I’ve actually lived it, so I know, oh yeah, you make sure you pay your taxes on time. You do, okay. These are the things you’ve got. You can’t ignore this, this, or this. WCB, don’t even touch that one. Make sure it’s paid and you’ve dealt with it, right?
Clayton Achen (32:59):
It’s expected. CRA is going to go to 10% interest next quarter. So oh my God, on top of all that, it’s one of the highest lending rates.
Glenn Suart (33:08):
Of course. It’s a crazy thing, and there are lots of great businesses out there. But the one thing I’d say, Clayton, is after all our conversation is that you got to know what business you really are in and what problems you’re solving. Because a lot of people who’ve got a great widget think they’re solving one problem, but they’re not really solving the right problem, if you know what I mean.
Clayton Achen (33:35):
Interesting. That’s part of the story that you uncover.
Glenn Suart (33:38):
Yeah. So for example, this is a little highlight story that I like telling about people, is that I had a major police organization hire me because they wanted to tell their story better. They needed a $50 million training center, and they had this beautiful plan. They would show it to government, and the government would throw it in the waste paper basket because they’d say, we don’t have the money. And this went on and on and on. It’s just round and round. And I said to them, okay, well your problem is you’re asking for a $50 million training center. And they go, well, yeah, that’s what we need. I said, yeah, but that’s your problem. That’s not the government’s problem. So we changed the title of the business plan to meeting acute mandatory training challenges while mitigating exploding occupational health and safety liability, which of course government’s responsible for. And suddenly they were much more interested in the plan.
(34:44)
Yeah. So understand whose problem you’re solving is very important. I solve the radio station’s problem by creating content that they’re interested in that’s valuable that they can sell. So I’m solving somebody else’s problem, but I’m helping myself at the time.
Clayton Achen (35:02):
Right on Glenn. Okay, well, let’s do a quick top three here, a quick top three.
(35:10)
Top three things that an entrepreneur needs to consider when they’re getting started.
Glenn Suart (35:27):
I like the fact is be realistic that you understand. Don’t get an analysis paralysis like you’ve talked about, but make sure you understand what you’re really getting into, number one. Number two, don’t do it alone because you need a partner or partners to do stuff with, to bounce things off of, and it’s critical to success. When I’ve seen people succeed, it’s because there’s more than one person involved. There’s the rare person who’s got all the things in one basket, but you can never have all the skillsets. And when you’re doing it together, you naturally do some of the things you need to do better. And number three is do a projection, a realistic one of what it’s going to take financially to do this, and then double it.
Clayton Achen (36:36):
And then double it.
Glenn Suart (36:37):
Yeah. Because there’s so many unexpected things, and you need to know how much money this is going to take at the other day, and it could be daunting. You think about that. I was just reading about that new round stadium in Las Vegas.
Clayton Achen (36:59):
Oh my gosh, do you hear what tickets are?
Glenn Suart (37:02):
Well, this is exactly what I’m saying, 2 billion to make this building. So with so many events and so many seats, how much it’s got to to break even, pay for the interest and all that stuff, well, that’s why the prices are so high, but people are going because it’s an event. So they’ve done the calculations to say, yeah, we could probably make this work. But that’s a big gamble, right?
Clayton Achen (37:27):
That’s a big gamble.
Glenn Suart (37:30):
Even if you’re going to invest in a website, 5,000, $10,000, what are you got to make back in terms of selling stuff to make this worthwhile? I had a person the other day had an idea for some drinkware that they were bringing into the country, and they were selling it online, and they were trying to figure out, okay, well let’s just do it on Facebook. And it’s like, well, if you’re only selling one at a time, you’re going to sell a lot to make it in to shipment. All this, it just doesn’t make any sense, especially in such a competitive environment. But this drinkware was also ideal for event catering companies and promotional companies where of course, they would buy in bulk. So I sort of steered them in that way, and we’re going to find out next week how well they’ve done.
Clayton Achen (38:27):
Cool. Right on. Well, thank you so much, Glenn Suart, for joining us on today’s episode of Your Business Unleashed.
Glenn Suart (38:57):
Clayton. This has been a great conversation. Thank you.
Show notes:
Visit Glenn’s website at TodaysGreatIdea.ca