John Corcoran 12:02
Did you find that there was an alchemy that came from, you know, as you added more franchisees that, you know, oftentimes you see this where one franchisee will develop a strategy or an idea or something that bowls up, it turns out everyone else, you know, it’s a great idea, and everyone else adopts it.
Scott Novis 12:17
Um, yes and no, what I found. So I made a look, I made a ton of mistakes. And one of the mistakes I made early on is, I had a flawed vision for what it meant to be an owner of a GameTruck franchise. And that vision was based on you could get in the video game industry. And a lot of people liked that idea. The problem is that dream comes true the day you buy your truck and trailer. Now what I didn’t have a vision for owning one, I had a vision for getting into one and what it meant to help with selling people into the franchise. But I thought
I was doing good. Because when I worked in the game industry, that’s all people wanted was to get in. And we got them in. Now what and it’s some of the problems I ran into. I had a business, right, I took an idea and turn it into a business. I wanted to make kids happy. I didn’t start out with I’m designing this business from the ground up to hit all these other. You know, this is why nobody did it before me, the financial guys would have sat down and never do this. And I had a lot of people tell me never do this. And I’m like I’m doing it. So we’re heading. So how do you sell synergies? To answer your question, what happened? One of the mistakes I made is we got a bunch of people together and was like, Okay, what are your problems? And they told us what the problems were. And we ran away and worked on those problems. The trouble was I at that time, I didn’t know and they didn’t know what they really needed to be working on. So we had a bit of the blind leading the blind, it was sort of like Steve Jobs famous. Don’t ask customers what they want, because they don’t know. So we had new business owners struggling with things telling us what they were struggling with. And we were responding to that. And it turned out those weren’t the real priorities.
John Corcoran 14:00
We give me some examples of what those were those things they told you were their challenges.
Scott Novis 14:06
I don’t think there’s a lot of value in that. Because it’s like, why do you want to learn about things that fail? I will tell you what we did learn that I think it’d be more useful is franchise owners that in our business that have full calendars and revenue don’t complain very much. We my bias was I’m an engineer, I’ve got two engineering degrees, I think of operational things. And if you bought an early copy of our operations manual, it all talks about how to throw a great party and we still have a lot of owners, very talented, passionate people that are super committed to throwing a great party. That’s all well and good. But tell me about your financial system. Tell me about your profitability. Tell me about what it how do you acquire new customers, how are you invoicing those customers? How are you receiving payment for those customers like how does all this flow and there’s a four core systems every business has to have and I think We’ve gotten there, we’ve had a lot of time and energy over the last few years to build this infrastructure out. But I didn’t have any of that when I started, which was, you got a marketing system, promise what you can do, right? Make a promise, then, you know, it’s like I have what you need in a sales system. How do you get people in like when we started GameTruck, owners were responsible for generating 99% of their revenue. Our corporate stores right now, are automated and service oriented systems deliver 100% of the revenue. I don’t talk to customers. I don’t book parties. Right. So we’ve come a long way. When you talk about sales systems, yeah. Then you get to operations we’ve always been very good at that we show up we deliver. People have an incredible experience. It is a well engineered. From a psychology point of view, it’s solid. The budget the last one is I want my number one KPI to be owner profitability. If my owners don’t know how profitable they’re, I can’t make that my KPI. And I was shocked to discover, like, Okay, I knew our a lot of our owners were struggling with that I was shocked to discover how many franchise systems like you almost have to start a franchise by designing the financial system they must use before you sell them anything. Because if you leave it open, and if you spend time with you as accelerator, you find out how many business owners don’t know their numbers. Nobody likes to feel stupid. And you pull up this p&l thing, and it’s got a million categories. And you’re like, I just want to sell stuff. Or I just want to build stuff like how I you know, I coached for two years and accelerator and every group I dealt with had that same commonality. Yeah. Except for the accounting firms. Nobody really knew their numbers. Right.
John Corcoran 16:51
And I came through the accelerated program. So I totally, yeah, so.
Scott Novis 16:54
It’s like one of the number one things we teach people. Yeah. So if you’re franchising, you’re trying to give somebody a business. Like, you’ve got to give them all four parts of the, of the business to operate. And then the part that I learned on top of that was the it’s a car. So I call it the ready to drive model, right? Nothing, go buy a car of your dreams, go get a Tesla, go get a Porsche. What in that car teaches you how to drive it? Nothing? Yeah, this is aimed at the business, you just bought a business, what’s teaching you how to run it. So that’s what accelerated as the best app, in my opinion, is. Let me give you the skills to teach you how to run the systems you just bought. And then finally, the top level is what’s your attitude? What kind of drive are you going to be? So you’ve got a vehicle? You know how to drive it? Are you going to be a little granny not to be? I mean, you get to pick right? super cautious. Yeah, well, are you going to be reckless and fast are you going to be my personal preference is confident and competent, I want to be the kind of driver that people want to go with me. They’re happy to get my car because my vehicle, and my skill will take us where we want to go.
John Corcoran 17:59
So let me ask you this. So looking back on it. Now, it sounds like you’ve developed a lot of these systems after the franchise probably started any franchise, would you do it the same? Or would you have waited longer to franchise
Scott Novis 18:14
After you built at all than to wait longer to franchise because people were, the idea was so hot, I originally had the idea that I was going to run it for two, three years. So we figured out all the pieces. And one of the things that isn’t common if you ever get involved as a small company in intellectual property, patents and litigation is people just steal your stuff. Somebody breaks in your house and steals your stuff, your insurance company will make you whole, somebody steals into your company and steals your stuff. It’s all on you to make it right. And it’s extraordinarily expensive to do it. And people were ripping him saw that happening constantly. They would book a party, take notes, film go and then just to steal the idea down to everything we were doing even after it’s common as a consumer, we don’t care. Yeah, hand in stone started by going to massage and rediscovery day and was like, I could do it. And they started a competing company. And some of them were way better funded than we were out of the gate. I’m like, if we don’t franchise we’re never going to exist. So we had to do it to survive. And we didn’t have the luxury of time of figuring all of these things out. We got the best information we could at the time. But you know, these are like a lot of things in business formative experience. So it made me who I am today.
John Corcoran 19:39
Yeah. Talk to me about this idea of you’re really passionate about your purpose is to create a feeling of belonging through play and how you kind of centered on that as being your North Star.
Scott Novis 19:52
Well, you know, when I was a kid, I was that kid and rightfield I wasn’t one of those At the bottom of the lineup, I was the one that was the last kid pick. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t athletic. By high school, I got a actual coach who would teach me. And once I got somebody who would teach me, I ended up being like second team all state all conference like, started, like I could achieve my potential. But in Little League, there was nobody that my dad was into athletics at all. And a lot of the volunteer coaches had no idea how to teach. So I was sort of that Outcast out in right field. And if you’re not any good at a sport, you’re not very popular, it’s hard to make friends. And so my personal interests were nerdy technology things, but I’m not doing the sporty things. And nobody’s willing to help me. And it was frustrating. And so what I saw was that anybody can video game, anybody, it doesn’t matter how big you are, how small you are, how fast you are. It is like a great leveling playing field is, doesn’t matter what you look like, right? You could create your own avatar, you pick how you want to look like gaming could be an environment where you could play with virtually anyone. And what happened in so this goes back to that pizza party. thing. My son wasn’t playing with any of his friends. They were all just playing separately. But when we started doing game trip parties, we only brought up multiplayer games, we only brought up games they played together. So we’re we’re still today all passionate about how do we get you all in a game or your eight Player Smash Brothers is huge. And one of the things the lessons COVID taught me and I will I’m answering your question about why belonging together is I told you like, you know, I had this vision of like, get into the video game industry Jays now what? Well, I started another company called bravest and it was getting into the eSports market. And our mission was super clear. So I did it completely differently. We started with a clear vision. And it was I want to host events where you can make a friend. It’s a we designed, casual, competitive, fun events. That flipped the entire tournament concept on its head. In fact, in two weeks, I’m going up to Alaska, to teach their parks and rec how to host these types of events. You’re never eliminated. Their fun, is there funny shit. Everybody gets to play. It’s really about what are the soit you know, video games or Applied Psychology. It’s storytelling in the second person. So I use that methodology when I design experiences for people. So how do we create an environment where you can make a friend? Well, COVID hits, suddenly, we’re like, Oh, my God, we can’t do anything anymore. And I turned to the bravest team and I’m like, can you guys do this online? And their answer was, we make friends online all the time. Absolutely. So they can’t meet in person anymore. They can’t drag their equipment, they can’t drive the vans. But they’re like, We did, man almost a million dollars in online tournament and events for colleges, university cities. During COVID. It saved us that saved the whole company, it saved everyone, they pivoted like that, because their mission was clear. GameTruck had access to the exact same type of technology. And the response I got largely from the owners is but I drive a truck to somebody’s house. Their vision for what their business was and how it ran, didn’t have a purpose, it had a task. So when the task change, they didn’t know what it meant. And they couldn’t imagine themselves doing the other thing. We weren’t focused on the effect we create for people. And so we started shifting that. And when we started shifting that that’s when I got really clear. What do you actually do for somebody like we the weirdest situation when we had a laser tag, people would call us and go, I want laser tagging. Like we don’t sell that then. Okay, well book a game trick party. Who does that? Who calls you looking for one thing you told them? No, I don’t have it. And I will take the other thing you have. They’re totally different experiences. What were people really buying from us? What did they really want. And that’s where I started digging into it is they want to celebrate their kids. They want their kids to feel special and loved. They want to create this environment of fun and energy and positive memories. And the easiest way I can capture it, and I believe in stating things in their positive and other negative you could say, oh, we’re all about fighting loneliness and isolation. Well, what you resist persists. What we really want to do is give you that intense feeling of belonging, because that’s when we feel the most connected, the most joyful, like, how many different ways can we do that? Who can we do that for? And that allowed us to start bringing on different types of activities and different types of things. And it does begin to shift how we think about our business and how we organize things. And it It’s gonna take time. But now, we’re not a trucking company. We’re not a logistics company, we do a lot of that, you know, what we’re really about are creating all of these feelings of belonging and connection for people. And it ripples through how we run parties, there’s very specific things we do very specific orders to create lasting memories for the guests that are going to be part of their poor memories, like they talked about in Pixar is inside out. You learn your business worrying now,
John Corcoran 25:32
When you’re talking about how COVID affected you, that was something I definitely wanted to ask you about. Because you are in the events business doing birthday parties that completely shut down in most states for quite a while. How did you survive?
Scott Novis 25:48
Well, okay, so there’s two, two things that came out of that. I don’t know anybody that has a version of their business plan that says all revenue goes to zero with three, three days notice. And two, I learned that pivot is a hockey term, it means getting checked, faced first into the boards, you will stop, you will change directions, it will hurt. And for us, you know, we were able to take advantage of the government programs that was absolutely huge. It was very painful to cut staff, but we had to. And ultimately, it was the weird little startup sister company that was we put our resources and pivot our teams over to that to take care of people that were sitting in dorm rooms or their apartments and isolated and had no way of connecting. This is
John Corcoran 26:38
the Brett Braves. Fantasy Sports. Yeah. Okay.
Scott Novis 26:42
Yeah. So our particular brand is not focused on raw competition. Look, getting winners is easy, you’d have to be utterly incompetent to not get a winner of a traditional tournament. But creating environments where people interact and chat and make friends and socialize requires skill. And that’s what we were marketing and selling to the college event planners and the college dorm rooms. And they’re like they were eating it up, because that’s what they desperately wanted.
John Corcoran 27:14
No people needed connection during that period of time more than ever.
Scott Novis 27:17
Yeah. And what we found is that facilitating connect giving, there’s like four keys for things that create a fertile ground for people to form friendships, synchronization, we’re all doing the same thing. At the same time. There’s a sequencing, so we’re experiencing the same experiences in the same order. Then there’s the idea of common identity. So we’re, we’re this experience that we’re all sharing, we know who else is sharing it with us. So it begins to form a sense, I’m a part of something larger than just myself. And the last one is unstructured, unplanned conversations. So we’re giving people opportunity to socialize around an event, they’re all experience at the same time, they knew who everybody is, in the event, because they’ve been the way we introduce and participate. The participation, and the order of events are all beginning to experience. And what was amazing that we saw was that our viewership for our tournaments, was four to 10 times larger than the people participating. Right? So that was like leveraging the power of Twitch, we could get the audience participating with the gamers at the same time. So even if you weren’t into the game, you felt like you were part of the event. So everything was like, how do we get them connected? How would you get them communicating? How do we get them to feel like they’re a part of something? And that came out of this clear vision of like this? What is Simon Sinek called adjust cause is it’s endless, right? It’s idealistic. It’s like, what’s the perfect event to make a friend? I don’t know, but we’re gonna keep working on it till we get there. And so our guys like changed all the rules. Most people you go to a tournament, the number one question we get asked, Am I too late? We call ours an open, you’re never too late. You can always join. Our guys could rebuild tournament brackets in under two minutes. Most tournament organizers are there pissy about it. They’re like, you gotta be logged in and done. And they’re just there. They’re assholes. Because their number one job is to eliminate everybody who’s not number one. Like I’ll get number one. That’s easy. I want to maximize how much you get to play and participate. So we took a totally different approach.
John Corcoran 29:28
And have you found much like with GameTruck that it’s been hard to explain to people that concept since it’s a new idea.
Scott Novis 29:34
Ironically, I had to shut that business down because 2020 was magic 2021 That business dropped in half and in 2022. It dropped in half again, because all of that was at the college level and people want to get back in person. I can’t blame them. And we were left in this no man’s land of virtual present. They were throwing barbecues not having on campus tournaments and we’re just like GameTruck is taking off. So everything we learned about hosting these kinds of events got pushed back into the GameTruck system, so that our owners could start hosting. They’re doing more and more that they’re now hosting events. So none of it goes to waste. Yeah, it got repurposed. Yeah. But now that our owners are buying into this idea of we create feelings of belonging, they’re beginning to see the value in doing more in different than driving a truck to somebody’s house to host a birthday. Let’s talk about that. It’s been awesome.
John Corcoran 30:34
I want to ask you about something that you’ve spoken about, which is how families oversee their kids gaming, you’re obviously an advocate for for gaming, but there’s a lot of parents that are concerned about gaming and alienating them, and it’s good for them. So talk a bit about that, how parents and families can oversee the gaming that their kids do and make it productive and not harmful?
Scott Novis 31:01
Well, the number one thing that is you know, if I can alleviate suffering in any way, I absolutely am all about doing it. And we look, we had this problem in my house, because the kids would just you couldn’t get them off the game to like, stop game time, they’d be crying, and my wife was miserable about it. And holy crap. I work in the industry, I can’t ban games. So I make a living. And it was this moment of epiphany, if you will, that why is this thing supposed to bring joy and connection and funding to people’s lives creating so much misery, I’m like, we have to fix this. So I started working through with my wife like how we could do it. And basically, we came up with three things that we learned there’s some misinformation people have. And number one is video games are very different today for your kids than what you experienced growing up. So chances are, what you think of as a video game is nothing at all, like what your kid is experiencing. And this is particularly difficult for the moms, or the dads that don’t game at all, or they’re casual gamers. casual games are engineered to waste your time. That’s what they’re for. So they project their own lived experience to their kids and think their kids are wasting their time. That is not what’s happening for your kids core games, which is almost everything else are designed to put the player in the design to stimulate intrinsic motivation. It’s called self determination theory. Basically, you’re putting your kid in front of a hard problem, teaching them skills and encouraging them to persist until they overcome that problem. That’s totally different than wasting your time. So what I tried to do is help parents go number one, the most important thing you can do to alleviate misery in your house is negotiate the end of the game before your kid starts. And guess what? You’re lucky you live with an expert, your kid and ask them how the game ends. Not all games can pause. Not all games can save not all games can stop not all games. So there’s a lot of the dynamics if you just get them to explain, can you pause that game? Can you stop that game, you’re going to be able to have a much better experience when you need them to quit playing and then to you want to get the vocabulary, right. A lot of parents hurt themselves by just to like, turn it off. Now. We’ll you know, imagine you’re at work working on Excel, some massive, hugely complicated spreadsheet, and somebody flips the computer off and there’s no autosave How would you feel? That’s what you just did your kids.
John Corcoran 33:35
Stress levels just went up.
Scott Novis 33:37
You don’t actually care if the game is off or not. I had a friend pause the game for four months. It’s like It’s like autosave it’s like locking your phone, what you really mean is stop playing and turn your attention to something else. So negotiating the end of the game is really about, hey, look homeworks done. You got some extra time play with your friends, but I need you in bed by nine. Come back and give him a warning. A 10 Minute Warning does magic. Again trick we and 3000 parties a month without a fight. You can do it too. And here’s your pro tip. This is your pro Scooby tip, right? Lick the lights in the room. Don’t scream at your kids. Don’t touch them. Don’t sneak up on them. Flick the lights in the room there and it’ll get their peripheral vision. Humans are super sensitive to light in our periphery a vision that looks like a tiger going through leaves. So we’re like what? I will look up and then you can get their attention and go you have 10 minutes left. And if you have a hard stop, my experience is gamers game they have a million options that they can be like, Oh, alright, I won’t play fortnight with my friends. I’ll play Mario, Mario Brothers on the switch, which I can either take in the car or I can hit pause. It’ll save instantly and won’t lose anything I’m doing. And almost all of the everybody I’ve talked to have been like that was game changing for them. And the last piece, there’s a lot more I could go into on this, but talk to your kid, like they’re a project manager. Right? Ask them. The number one question is What was hard about that for you? What are you working on? How are you dealing with that you will have radically different conversations with your kids. And if you’re a business owner or a leader, the reason you want to talk to them like you’re a project manager is those skills, right? facing our problems, developing skills and persisting are transferable, that the kids don’t know how. Worst thing you could tell your kids is games are a waste of time, because they don’t hear video games are a waste of time. They hear facing our problems, developing skills, and persisting is a waste of time. That’s what a game is to them. So if you’re saying that’s a waste of time, why would they ever do it? For something they don’t care about? If you’re telling him it’s a waste of time for something they do care about? Wow, that’s,
John Corcoran 36:02
that’s pretty powerful. What you just said there? Yeah,
Scott Novis 36:04
take that passion and use your lived experience to start building a bridge for them. I’ve seen parents do it over and over again. Oh, I don’t want to go into this classroom. Remember, when you were in Zelda? Did you go into the dungeon? Yeah. Okay. Do you think you could do that here? Yeah, I could do that. So use your experience, to leverage that power of the courageous adventurer that they see themselves as a gamer to build that identity in the real world. I want
John Corcoran 36:38
to pivot to there’s the word to use earlier, pivot to another topic that we premiered at the beginning, which was you call it personal knowledge management. Also heard you talk about obsidian as well,
Scott Novis 36:50
oh, are jumping all over the place we are we’re jumping
John Corcoran 36:53
all over. But I want to make sure that we get this in here. Because this is a really interesting idea. It’s something that you’ve taken from your years with the GameTruck and other businesses is, is, you know, we kind of are living in this world, this information age where we’re bombarded by information. And we’re also you know, with AI and tools like that we’re gonna have access to information, sometimes. And sometimes we don’t sometimes we take we gather knowledge, we take notes, we learn things, and we don’t instantly have access to them. So talk to me about kind of some of your thoughts on that.
Scott Novis 37:29
Okay, so I’ve been in the Entrepreneurs Organization for 10 years. And one of the big attractions for me was learning events. So John, I mean, you go to learning events, right? Sure. All the time, all the time, right? It’s awesome. And what started to hit me was, what am I doing with that information? I go and I take notes or somebody says, Have you got the recording? I’m like, how much of that? Are you actually practicing? I think Tim Ferriss has a whole thing on this. And I started noticing even more so that it’s so hard to remember this stuff and put it into us that we’ve reduced it down to like a nugget, I just need a nugget. What other part of my entrepreneurial journey is my expectations so low for return on my attention. The scarcest, most valuable thing on the planet right now is attention. And I’m willing to give somebody an hour, 90 minutes of my time, and I’m only expecting to take away one tiny thing I can act on. Man, that’s pathetic. Like it’s why. And what hit me was this and so many other owners I’ve helped with this is like, if you go back and it was my Evernote, you go look at your Evernote. I’m like, it’s the junk drawer of ideas. Yeah, all this crap would go in there, I’d never look in it. And the more I used it, the more overwhelming it was. But I have this sort of like blankie feel of like, well, it’s in there. And someday in the future, I’ll get to it. And what I noticed was I was starting to see the same kinds of content over and over again. And I’m like, man, what’s wrong with me? Like, why am I reading this other book when I didn’t do anything with it? The first time I saw it, or why am I listening to the speaker when I didn’t act on it? The first time I saw it, I’m like, progress has to come through action. So how can I put ideas in action? It’s what Maya Angelou said, when you know better, you’ll do better. So if I’m not doing better, I must not be knowing better. And I got exposed to a couple of new ideas that had come out that were better ways of working with the information that we gather and the it I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible. Most of us had this terrible idea we picked up when we first got a computer and it was that you sort things by type, or your pictures go into picture directory or your movies going to movie directory documents and documents. Nobody lives like that in the real world. You wouldn’t take all the beds in your house and throw them in one room because their beds, that’s just stupid. But we do that with our data. We do that with our personal information, we do that with our files. And the big idea was is like, look, storage is virtually infinite. Now, do you know how hard it is to generate a terabyte of data personally, I don’t mean a machine crunching or like you, you could type for the rest of your life and not fill a terabyte drive. So who cares how many copies of things there are, start organizing your information by how you’re going to use it, basically start creating little means on plus kitchens, if you know what means applauses. It’s a cooking methodology where all the pieces are at your fingertips. And the really big idea was to start organizing by time. So I have projects what I’m trying to get done now a guy named Chaco forte wrote a couple of books about this to his power system. So projects, I’m trying to do it now. areas, these are things in my life that are not goal oriented, they’re standard oriented, my health, my relationships, my finances, things that aren’t going to end, but I want to maintain a consistent, high standard in those areas. So I’m gonna apply time and energy for the rest of my life. Because I care about those things, then I have resources, that’s my future things I’m curious about things I want to know more about, like AI or learning Spanish, I think curiosity is one of the superpowers of being an entrepreneur. And if is that now soon, or the future, I’m done with it, I archive it. P A are a part. So once you start creating these little folders, now it’s like, Oh, I’ve got to create a, I’ve got to give a talk, you know, ask I talked about it, create a power folder, boom project folder, so everything in there, it’s all contained. When I’m done with it, archive it, and the next time I have to give that talk, guess what every single asset I need is in one place, effortlessly for a pickup copy, start over Wash, rinse, repeat. So it’s always versioning. And it makes it easy to find work. That is I can build on creating these little Lego bricks. And that tool has intrinsic value. Every time I opened my Evernote, like up in Evernote, they’d be like, Oh, here’s the size tires on my wife’s car. Here’s a shopping list. Here’s a character for d&d, here’s a new offering for GameTruck, if he does all this crap, if I open my power system, My Projects folder is a list of all my projects, it instantly reminds me of my priorities, I open my areas folder, it’s a list of my areas, it’s a reminder of this is what’s important in your life, touching the tool immediately gives you value. And the number one thing I love about this system, it gets better every time you use it, it doesn’t get more overwhelming, it gets more useful. And so once you have access to your information in a format like that, you can go to a class, you can go to a session, you can read a book going, what is useful for me here and what area of my life or what project am I going to apply it to. Now those notes have a home where you’re going to act on them. And the superpower they have now is next gen linking the way ideas are linked. It’s becomes like a second brain, it automatically identifies how to associate things. So let me give you one very, very specific example of the power of this system. Four years ago, I created what I called a scorecard. And it was a way of assessing whether or not somebody was a good candidate to buy a game short franchise, and we failed. We weren’t selling franchises and COVID Put it away. During COVID, we implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System. A scorecard is one of the most important parts of Eos. If you know us, you know exactly what I’m talking about. In my brain, the word scorecard took on a new meaning only the EOS meaning. And so without even realizing it subconsciously I relabeled. The old thing and assessment. No amount of Google searching was ever going to find that document because it was never labeled assessment. I had a different understanding four years ago than I had today. So searching like crazy produced nothing. I was able to find it. Because the association engine built into obsidian said, well I know where I was, I know who I was working with had so I could find the people that were on that project. And then obsidian listed everything they were involved in and the word franchise owner scorecard popped out. I’m like that’s it. Search isn’t enough archiving everything you know, and searching it isn’t good enough because you constantly change and your understanding. And the way you think about things in the past constantly changes. So a system like this makes more of your the information you’ve gathered, functionally available to you
John Corcoran 44:51
is an interesting idea and it’s something we’re all going to be grappling with in the years ahead with as we’re overwhelmed with more information. Well this has been great Hey Scott, I want to wrap things up with the question I was asked, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who helped you along the way peers, contemporaries, mentors, business partners. franchisees, who would you want to shout out.
Scott Novis 45:16
Man, there are so many people, I am super blessed. I’m going to pick two if that’s okay. My partner David McClurg. Dave, got involved in GameTruck, right about the time we were starting braveness and originally as a consultant, and then became a partner and then a brother, honestly, and his style faith, I think one of the biggest challenges you can have as an entrepreneur, you’re doling out approval, you’re doling out support, you’re doling out, you know, it’s easier for me to believe in others and to believe in myself and Dave as a guy that believed in me as a visionary and a leader, and helped me find my footing and grow into that role and just become who I was capable of becoming. And I’ll always be grateful for his faith is brotherhood, and his support, and forum. So many people I could thank but most recently was Corbin recommended a book to me, that changed my life. And it changed. Adam Grant’s Think Again, it radically changed the way that I present ideas, sort of hardcore pushing in pitching people ideas, I treat it like a hypothesis, and then a recruit you to be one of my sciences coming How can we figure out if this idea is good or not? What would prove its true, what would prove it’s false. And that has allowed me to be so much more collaborative, and cooperative and build better connections. Because I’m unfortunate anything and anybody, and I’m inviting them into potentially an exciting future where they can make a contribution. And I just would never have predicted that would have been such a profound change in not only the success of our business, but the relationships and connections along the way. And so yeah, I’ll always be grateful for that, because it was, so he’s like, you might really like this. I think this would help.
John Corcoran 47:10
That’s great. That’s because for years, people have been asking me, what’s my top book recommendation, and I have recommended Give and Take by Adam Grant. And I interviewed him about it on this podcast. Wow, when it first came out years ago, but I have not read Think Again. So I will have to read it even though I was a huge fan of Give and Take. So thank you for that recommendation. Scott, where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you?
Scott Novis 47:34
Scottnovis.com is the easiest way to find me. And I’m most active on LinkedIn. And so if you actually want to engage with me, send me a connection request on LinkedIn, Scott Novis, I’m pretty easy to find. I think I’m the only one. But you know, thanks to the powers of automation, I post on lots of platforms, but where I’m at will be LinkedIn.
John Corcoran 47:51
Excellent. Scott, thanks so much.
Scott Novis 47:53
Thank you.
Outro 47:58
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