So you must have been okay with it for a little bit. Tell me. Tell me about some of the challenges during that period of time. And that was the mid 2000 period there. So there’s definitely some slow growth in that period. Economically, I don’t know about your company, but economically it was a tough economy for many companies coming out of the.com boom.
Pete Martin: 10:54
Yeah. You know, the launch itself was fantastic. We had a great bunch of years. We had all the traditional personnel challenges hiring the right people, figuring out the culture, figuring how to grow in scale. 2008 was really, really bad. We had a client we had taken live on the system, and it was October of 28, 2008, and he called me on a Friday. The CEO called me on a Friday. They’d been living together for a month. And he said, the numbers are all wrong. This is horrible. Your system is broken. You need to get up here immediately. So you write up a bunch of guys, and we literally had spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of rows to try to reconcile what the system was saying with what the actual sales were. It was to the penny. And that’s when we realized the economy was doing this right. And that was right before the whole downturn and the mortgage crisis and everything else. And so we ended up getting through that. We didn’t lay anybody off. We lost about 35 to 40% of our revenue.
John Corcoran: 11:58
Wow.
Pete Martin: 11:59
We had been building a bunch of recurring revenue streams as part of that, which was great, and that really saved our bacon. But that was really, really, really challenging for just about nine months to a year. But we pulled through it and we had some very specific things about our culture that we would talk about all the time. And I think people really saw the strength of the culture getting through that time period.
John Corcoran: 12:20
Give me some examples of what sorts of things you did for your culture.
Pete Martin: 12:24
Yeah. So one of the things we did when we hired anybody, we sat down and we wrote this manifesto and basically this manifesto was describing the type of people that we wanted to hire. We described the kind of partners we wanted to work with, and we described the kind of clients we wanted to do business with. And everybody that came into the company for about 4 or 5 years. We made them read and sign this manifesto. So they were signing on to this thing, right? And when we were about five minutes or five years into the business, we were redoing our website. So we were kind of putting the traditional, you know, these are our values, all this kind of stuff. So we asked everybody, you know, what does the company stand for? It shouldn’t be, you know, me and Nick kind of writing this stuff up anymore.
We want the words to come from you, and the words that they came back with to describe the culture were literally almost what we had written in the manifesto five years earlier. And that, honestly, was the proudest thing for me more than any of the financial success we had that we had said we wanted to create this kind of a culture. And we actually did that. We had an offer from, I won’t mention, the Firm, but one of the big contracting firms, big systems integrators, that was essentially to hand us a $30 million contract. And because we had skills that really nobody else in the industry had. and as a subcontractor. And we ended up turning it down and it blew everybody in the company away.
And the reason we did this was because this firm had a really bad reputation for treating people like crap. And we just said, this is totally against anything that we stand for. And, you know, this would be obviously a great financial, you know, contract for us. But we just know this is just ten miles of bad road. And so doing things like that, walking away from a really, really big piece of business and some other clients really kind of spoke volumes about the kind of, you know, what we had built in the company.
John Corcoran: 14:19
And you mentioned also that you deliberately built recurring revenue into your model. So talk a little bit about that.
Pete Martin: 14:25
We did.
John Corcoran: 14:26
So, you know, this comes from you know, it was really no smarter than anybody else. Just understanding that from both a valuation of the business perspective and just being able to sleep at night, you know, when you have just when you have a consulting business and you’re charging by the hour, or even fixed fixed price or whatever, you get really, really lumpy revenue, right? And so this was our attempt to kind of take and demodulate that lumpy revenue a little bit. So that was really the idea behind it, just to manage cash flow better and predictability of the business, not really knowing at the time that you’re rewarded with a much higher valuation when you do that. That wasn’t really the intention. It was really to kind of flatten this really lumpy revenue.
John Corcoran: 15:11
So what were the things that you came up with?
Pete Martin: 15:15
We had a bunch of we would take our consulting engagements. So we kind of chop them up into the things that everybody typically would ask for. And we use that both as kind of a wedge offering to get a little bit lower price. But it’s something where we had a subscription basis for stuff that we did. So we had one of our practices around import export, global trade management. And so these companies have to basically scan their orders and the folks that they sell to against the bad person database in the US. That database is updated every week. Right?
John Corcoran: 15:51
And so it’s something where you can provide an ongoing service with that.
Pete Martin: 15:54
Yeah, that’s one example. We had about a half a dozen or a dozen of those.
John Corcoran: 15:59
Got it, got it. So you run this company for about 11 years or so. When did you get to a point where you decided that it was time to, for that chapter to come to a close for you, or was that something that was thrust upon you?
Pete Martin: 16:12
Yeah. No, I, I woke up one day and I just, I think I kind of said I’m bored, I’m done. And if I just know myself, if I’m not 100% fully engaged, the business will suffer. I just know that that was kind of what happened in my career, my professional career as well with IBM and SAP, with IBM anyway. And so that was kind of that demarcation where I said, all right, I’m going to prepare the business to be sold. And so we ended up selling it 18 months later. But what I did was I knew that if I was a fundamental part of the business from a sales perspective and an operations perspective, I was going to have a really big earnings. And it’s something that I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to have to be that committed. I really was done.
Done. And so I started pulling back from the business, and I didn’t really announce this to anybody. It was more in the context of elevating everybody’s professional skills, all the practice leaders. We kind of sent them through professional training. I started pulling myself out of being, you know, contract review, like all the other stuff that an owner gets involved in. The crazy part was we started growing faster. Like a lot faster. And it was just kind of funny, like it was kind of a big ego hit. I’m like, damn, you know, I guess I’m not that important to the business. But also, you know, I’m literally this recognition that I’m literally throttling the business, right? Kind of unleashed it and then went through a process where I ended up selling it to KPMG. If you want to, if you want to go through, if you want to experience due diligence, go do that with the fourth largest auditing firm in the world.
John Corcoran: 17:54
Oh my gosh, I can’t imagine.
Pete Martin: 17:56
That was fun.
John Corcoran: 17:57
How long was it?
Pete Martin: 17:59
It ended up being about nine months of due diligence. It should have been three. But at the end of the day, they were blown away. How everything just ticked and tied, like there wasn’t literally there was really pretty much nothing out of place. They were really pretty blown away. And so we ended up consummating a deal. So.
John Corcoran: 18:20
And you sold it at a 12 x multiple of EBITDA, all cash, which is crazy for a company that did consulting and a variety of other things. How did you manage that?
Pete Martin: 18:33
You know. So I do some sell side advisory for tech services and B2B services companies. And the one thing I’ll tell business owners all the time is, you know, they don’t, they’re not really. Well, first of all, they’re not buying your history. They’re buying the collective future. So if you can’t tell the story about what that future together looks like, then you’re going to be back down to your traditional multiples, right? 34X times times EBITDA. And so because we had worked together on a couple of pursuits with KPMG, I knew how the company went to market and I knew how they were wired. And for this particular business unit from KPMG that bought us, they would do a lot of strategy work and the implementation then would go to companies like mine.
And so my story was pretty simple, and it was like for every $10 of consulting work you get of strategy work, you get every dollar of strategy work you get I get ten of implementation. So if you want to blow up, you know, in a good way this practice, this particular business unit of the business comes from my company. So there was a lot less conversation around, you know, revenue and EBITDA multiples. And it was around, man, if we pulled this off this business case like we have just, you know, really, really magnified and amplified the business. And you know, they helped, they helped me kind of help them put together the business case. And I’m really happy that after three years, they actually beat all of the numbers that we had put together originally.
John Corcoran: 20:07
Wow.
Pete Martin: 20:08
So not only did they get a good deal, but they ended up getting a really good deal too.
John Corcoran: 20:13
So that’s a really interesting approach. It is selling to a company you had partnerships with already and being able to paint that picture, as you said. How does that shape the way that you advise other companies to find a buyer for them?
Pete Martin: 20:30
It’s true. Two things. It is thinking, you know, way in advance of when you want to sell about. You know, if I had my druthers, who would I sell this business to? Right. Is it a competitor? Is it a partner? Is it just a strategic buyer? And starting to build may not be a formal business partnership, but certainly relationships and buying a company or selling anything. We do business with people that we know and trust. Right. And so if you’ve got this long term relationship with folks and they trust you, you’re, you’re kind of a third of the way there already. Right. And a lot of the stuff that, you know, in theory, it should shorten the due diligence and theory, it should elevate the valuation, all that kind of stuff. So that’s kind of step one. Then step two is kind of what I was talking about is coming up with a narrative, the story, the real story about if you buy my company, it’s this foundation to do X, Y, Z that hopefully is obviously should be strategically aligned with whatever that business is trying to do. And if you do that in a really effective way, like I did with my business, you know, you can get way above typical multiples for your company.
John Corcoran: 21:44
I want to get to talking about the book, but before I do, Votem, it’s a mobile voting platform that’s been a tough space for the last few years. It’s got a lot of attention. Not always in a good way. How has it been in that space for the last ten years?
Pete Martin: 22:01
Wow. So?
John Corcoran: 22:02
So when I sold my business, I went to a conference put on by Peter Diamandis. I don’t know if Peter’s ever been.
John Corcoran: 22:09
I’ve had him on the podcast. Yeah, I’m a big fan of his, a big fan of his work.
Pete Martin: 22:13
Yeah, so am I. So am I. And so I went to the His Abundance 360 conference.
John Corcoran: 22:18
In Beverly Hills. Yeah. Every year.
Pete Martin: 22:20
Yep. Exactly. And one of the exercises they have you do there, which is really fantastic, is, you know, he said, look, you’re all business people. You’re not to create, build wealth, create companies, whatever. So he said, if you’re going to do that, like think big, right. Think about the impact and the imprint you want to have on the world. So the exercise specifically is to take out a blank piece of paper and write down what you’re going to do before you die. That will positively impact a billion people in the world, right? Most people don’t think of that kind of a construct.
And at the time when I sold the business, I was thinking about getting into politics at the state level. I’m very interested in it and always have been. And a lot of people that know me just said, you know, dude, you’re like the classic type A entrepreneur like you will. This will kill you and you know you won’t. You will be really miserable, right? So I kind of had that off thinking over here. And so I pulled out this blank piece of paper. I’m like, what could I do to positively impact the billion people in the world? And I literally wrote down mobile voting. I’m like, why are we not voting on these things? Right?
John Corcoran: 23:19
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Martin: 23:22
And boy, was I naive.
John Corcoran: 23:23
So.
Pete Martin: 23:25
You know.
John Corcoran: 23:25
It’s not a bad idea, but, you know, just getting it through.
Pete Martin: 23:29
That’s the problem, right? There’s just so many cultures I mean, the security stuff we kind of mostly fixed. You know, from that perspective in terms of being able to mass hack proof on blockchain. And but it’s all of the other stuff that you just don’t think about. You know, these things, you know, one administration can kind of destroy.
John Corcoran: 23:50
Well, there’s been some, some rather loud voices over the last 8 to 10 years that have been arguing against it. And so that has probably set it back quite a ways.
Pete Martin: 24:01
100%.
John Corcoran: 24:02
So yeah, it’s tough to see that sort of thing coming.
Pete Martin: 24:05
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 24:06
Exactly. Yeah. Well let’s talk about the book. So Scale Up Faster. What inspired you to write the book?
Pete Martin: 24:11
Yeah. So, you know, we talked a little bit before this about, you know, Jim Collins and Vern Harnish and these guys that have just done amazing work around how do you grow businesses, how do you run great businesses. And during Covid, when the VC money was flowing really freely, you know. I picked up the Wall Street Journal, and it seemed like every week there was a new unicorn founder. Right? And I’m something. Something in me just tripped. And I’m like, this is pissing me off. Like these people, you know, you’ve done nothing yet somebody put an arbitrary number on your business of what it’s worth. And, you know, in some cases, there are companies that literally had little to no revenue. And I’m like, this is ridiculous, right?
This is almost a.com thing again. And so I so you know I wanted to put. And I said on a lot of advisory boards I spent lots of time with entrepreneurs and business owners. And I’m like, why is the business meeting not focusing on guys like that and ladies like that that have built really great businesses that are really profitable, you know, having a huge impact on their communities. And these people, right. These unicorn founders. So that was kind of the impetus. And after I’d sold my company, I was going to write a book and, you know, know, sit down and write out some potential chapters. And at some point it hit me. I’m like, nobody. Nobody gives a shit about me.
Nobody liked what I did. Like who cares, right? Maybe my family will buy a couple copies, but that’s about it. And so it had always been kind of sitting out there. And so I kind of rethought about that. I always wanted to write a book and decided to take a page off of Jim Collins. Good to great and do the same kind of research. And what I love about Good to Great is just the level of the depth of the research that he did. Right. That you can’t argue with it because he just spent so much time doing that. And I read tons and tons of business books, and nobody, in my opinion, had done the same. Good to great, but for smaller companies, for private businesses.
John Corcoran: 26:15
Partially because Jim Collins also had a team of Stanford graduate students at his, you know, disposal as well. So how did you approach this one, considering that?
Pete Martin: 26:28
Yeah. So if I knew it was going to take me three years to do it, I don’t know if I would have done it, to be perfectly honest. But I’m really, really glad I did. And I had talked to a couple of companies, actually, that are in the business of doing all the research and almost got a contract with one of them. And then I just said, well, hold on, you know, it felt inauthentic to me. And being like, I just need to do this research. I need to have these conversations with these people. And so what I ended up doing was I took the Inc. 5000 over a seven year period, 2015 to 2022, and there were about 32,000 unique companies. And I paid for the databases to get it. And then I filtered them by companies that doubled revenues every year for at least four of those seven years consecutively, which is really, really, really hard to do. So that took the number down to 386. And then I wanted to look specifically at bootstrapped companies. I mean, give me $100 million and I can grow my company fast, too, right? That doesn’t really. That doesn’t mean anything to me. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 27:34
And so they had to be not venture funded.
Pete Martin: 27:37
Correct.
John Corcoran: 27:37
Okay.
Pete Martin: 27:38
Not even not venture funded. No PE, no growth capital. No nothing. 100% bootstrapped. So that took the number down to 324 from 386. And then I went and I cold emailed all the CEOs of all 324. I got more than half replied, which I was kind of shocked at to be honest. And then some people just said, you know, and I said, look, I’m going to need two hours of your time minimum. And then I want to talk to your entire executive team as well. And it’s going to be at least an hour each with each of them. And a bunch of them just said that we just, you know, we’re growing like crazy, as you can tell. And we just honestly don’t have the bandwidth to help out, but we’ll help you out in whatever way we can. And so I ended up doing almost 100 interviews and, you know, just gobs and gobs of notes and transcripts and whatever. And the book is really kind of a result of all this conversation that I had.
John Corcoran: 28:30
And what were some of the insights that jumped out at you?
Pete Martin: 28:34
Yeah, there was a lot of kind of contrary business advice that came out of this. I’ll give you a couple of examples. The first one was shocking. One of the things that shocked me the most was the profile of the founder of these companies. So you would imagine somebody that has this kind of extraordinary success. So think about it. These guys are so the Inc. 5000 is already, you know, to some degree, kind of the best of the best. These are now the 1% right. So these literally are the best of the best that had done this. And almost all of them , with the exception of just a small handful, were first time founders. That blew me away. You would think these are folks that have done this 2 or 3 times. They kind of know where all the puddles are and they just, you know, and, you know, and they weren’t from prestigious universities.
They were. I called them extraordinarily ordinary. Ordinaries. So what was great about that in terms of even writing the book and kind of getting it out to the world, is anybody that just follows this framework. A lot of these frameworks in here could do this. You don’t have to be this special person in order to pull this kind of extraordinary success off. One of the things that came out of it was I would talk about, you know, tell me about your business plan. And they’re all like, we don’t have a business plan. And I’m like, what? Because if you score, you go to business school. They’re like, write a business plan, right? There’s only one founder that has written a business plan. It’s because he had just gotten his MBA and he thought that was the right thing to do. Right. And so Silicon Valley talks about product market fit, right. And that’s effectively what they did. They just got really intimate with their markets and their customers and how they could differentiate the business.
And they knew that anything they put into that business plan was going to be completely made up from the financials to how you go to market and everything else. So that was a huge insight. Another big insight was I’m a marketing guy by degree, and I would always talk about you and I, and we did this in my own business that you pick a bunch of different channels to go to market, and they should all be integrated. You have this common narrative across all the channels. You do SEO, you do outbound sales, you do partnerships, whatever. And all of these, virtually all of these companies went to market through one channel. In fact, five of the companies that I talk about in the book, they got their business through cold calling. It was extraordinary.
And the big message was pick one channel and master it. Like you don’t, you just become great at it. And so, you know, whether you call it focus or whatever it is. Right. These companies really did that in an extraordinary way. And of all the businesses and we I covered almost every industry you can think of from, you know, DTC flowers to a real estate investment trust to, gosh, you name it, software companies and franchisors like it’s pretty. Pretty much across the industry. And that was pretty consistent with pretty much everybody. They went to market one way and they mastered it. And they really kind of looked at the numbers in terms of the customer journey and where all those dropping off points were, and they just kept working it until they got better and better and better.
John Corcoran: 31:37
Interesting. And what about the personality of the founder or the CEO? Did you see any commonalities amongst them?
Pete Martin: 31:45
Yeah. What’s really funny is I got about five interviews in, and I would ask them a lot about their backstory as well, and kind of how they got into business and what was coming through this theme that was coming through was what I ended up calling leaning into their chip. And so they all had this chip on their shoulder for something, right?
John Corcoran: 32:03
Yeah. I love it. I love it.
Pete Martin: 32:05
I have a lot of stories in the book about the chips and the shoulders, and so I ended up adding that back into one of the questions I would ask, and I would literally say, so John, what’s your chip? And every one of them knew exactly what I was talking about. And they’re like, you know, I had this happen You know.
John Corcoran: 32:21
This fifth grade teacher said that I couldn’t do it, and I’m showing her.
Pete Martin: 32:25
Yeah, exactly. And I think that, you know, we have this culture in the US about you have to go to a therapist and you have to get rid of whatever that is, right? And all of them basically said, no, no, no, no, I’m using that to drive me forward. I’m using that as motivation to be more successful as opposed to I’m just kind of trying to get rid of it. Right. It’s really kind of fascinating. So that was very much a common theme through a lot of the different folks that I had talked to.
John Corcoran: 32:52
Yeah, that is a super common one. I think almost all the entrepreneurs that I have interviewed have got something like that. It doesn’t always come out, but it might take a couple of glasses of wine before you find out what it is, you know, but eventually it reveals itself. Sometimes people don’t even realize consciously. They aren’t even conscious of it, you know? Did you find that with some people, too, that it took a while to get it? Get to it? Yeah.
Pete Martin: 33:15
Not really. Some were, I would say, a little reluctant to go deep with me. Like, who am I, right? I’m not their therapist. Whatever. And as I would kind of gently nudge and push whatever, those stories would come out. One of the CEOs, when I started getting her backstory, she went on for 25, 30 minutes just on all of the stuff that, you know, and it’s in the book that she had gone through, and I literally said, I’m like, My God, like, I need a glass of wine because I’m so stressed out about your life. You know, I need to calm down. Like, it’s pretty crazy, just the stuff that these people went through.
John Corcoran: 33:53
But interesting also that it wasn’t all like software companies. These were like traditional types of businesses, many of them that were growing by leaps and bounds.
Pete Martin: 34:02
Yeah. And I’ll tell you. So, you know, I started scaling and sold a consulting firm. One of the companies I talked to, it’s called Reva. They are a Federal Systems consulting firm. And when your business is coming from people and consulting, that’s really hard to scale. And they did it. And there’s lots of different stories of industries who will say, well, you know, this is an industry where you can’t scale. And I’ll just say, I’m going to call BS on that because I cover so many different industries from literally any kind of mental wellness, healthcare to, again, a real estate investment trust to consulting firms, software firms, franchisors. And they all kind of put it down into this framework that it would work successfully for all of them.
John Corcoran: 34:45
Yeah. And then you mentioned earlier about the importance of culture in your own company. What did some of these companies say about the importance of culture?
Pete Martin: 34:56
That’s the first chapter in the book about culture. And what I discovered was I call it the C word because everybody makes it very fluffy. Right? Yeah, we got a culture, whatever what these people did, which was extraordinary. One of the things we also did in terms of the interviews is we web scraped every website of all 324 companies. The career section. About us. What they’re looking for from candidates. And then for all the ones where we did the interviews, we actually looked at their competitors as well. And what these companies that are in the book were able to do is not only have a culture, but describe it in really rich, vivid detail.
So when you get on the website and you say, I want to work for John Corcoran’s company, and they would read kind of about us or like, you get this picture of exactly what it’s like to work for John’s company. And, and then we would look at the competitors and the differences were so stark. It was kind of laughable. And so not only did they have strong cultures, but they were able to describe it really, really vividly. And one of the things that we would talk about, and I tell other CEOs is, you know, the benefit of doing that is you both attract and repel, so you attract the right kind of people to your culture, and you repel the people that you don’t want in your company. And if you have this really generic, you know, we’re all about, you know, professional development and helping our clients succeed. You know.
John Corcoran: 36:27
You many times before. Yeah.
Pete Martin: 36:30
Doesn’t do anything. And then same thing with on the, on the people side. The extent that they went to the lengths that they went to to make sure that people were a good culture fit, ascribed and were aligned with their values and then looked at competencies. And so all of them said, we don’t look at resumes, we don’t look at past history for the most part, you know, and if there’s a specialty thing, if you’re a developer, of course, you have to have those skills to do Python or whatever, right? But they all screen for culture fit first and then value alignment second. And if somebody didn’t hit those two gates, they were not even considered. It didn’t matter. Yeah. From a direct competitor or anything else. That was number one. And number two for them.
John Corcoran: 37:11
You know, it’s right on our careers page. Our core values spell out give back. And it was a writer for us that discovered how to put those letters together to spell it out that way. I didn’t come up with it, and we put it there because it’s so important to us. You know, I’ve seen a lot of books, I’ve seen a lot of blurbs and testimonials. And for a first time author, it’s really incredible. You have Verne Harnish, Gina Wickman, Michael Gerber, Bo Burlingham, many of which I’ve interviewed on this podcast. But these are really established thought leaders who’ve been writing books for decades. What has it been like for you to have that kind of recognition and also for you to only come up with this book about two months ago, but to start talking about it and start speaking to people about the research that you did.
Pete Martin: 37:57
Yeah. So first of all, I’m incredibly honored that all of these guys would respond to my email, my phone conversations and agree to do this. And I think that and so, you know, they’re up here, Pete’s way down here. Right. And so these are legends in my mind. They are. I truly call them the growth goats. Right. And so that’s kind of first and foremost, I was very humbled by them agreeing to endorse the book. And I think the reason that they did I know the reason that they did. And it wasn’t like Pete had professional success, but this isn’t anything about my success. This is the level of research that I did over a three year period across 324 companies. Right. And so you kind of can’t argue with the thesis of the book. You may agree to implement these things or not, but you couldn’t really argue with the level of the depth of research that I did kind of like again, with the good to great that the gym did with the big companies. And so I think that they all kind of recognized that nobody had really done that before, spent that much time and attention on trying to distill down all the secrets to growing businesses faster and, you know, appreciated that, that I put that kind of diligence into it. it, and that’s why they’re going to endorse it.
John Corcoran: 39:14
You know, Jim Collins, it’s been a while since I’ve read his books, but I know that he only studied books that had been around for decades. Yeah. Some of these companies, I imagine, have been around as long, but there is a a vocal community of people who will say, you know, Inc. 500, a lot of these companies like then they fail later and they give examples of like a Theranos or something like that, that like, grows like crazy. And then, you know, turns out it’s a house of cards. How did you account for that type of scenario? To ensure that some of the 300 companies you studied don’t become the next Theranos?
Pete Martin: 39:48
Yeah, it’s a really good question. So time will tell.
John Corcoran: 39:53
Like ask me three years from now. Yeah, I.
Pete Martin: 39:55
Meaning, a couple of them were acquired, you know, during the course of the research that I was doing. There were a couple of cases where the founders ended up stepping back and bringing in either full time CEO as typically they elevated somebody from inside the company. That may change kind of what happens the years down the road, but I think to a large degree, because they were all bootstrapped, they were all in control of their destiny. I give them much higher odds of success in being around, however long they want to keep these businesses, than it would have. Theranos, right? And it’s amazing when you’re in control of your own destiny and you’re not subject to investment bankers and outside capital sources that you know are going to make you do stuff that maybe you shouldn’t do on behalf of customers or employees. Yeah. So yeah.
John Corcoran: 40:46
You just have to update the research 3 or 5 years from now.
Pete Martin: 40:49
You might imagine that there might be a new edition every year, for sure.
John Corcoran: 40:54
I mean, it would be fascinating to study that. Well, this has been really, really interesting. Pete, I appreciate your time. I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude and also giving my guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge any peers and contemporaries who have helped them in their journey so far. Anyone you would want to acknowledge?
Pete Martin: 41:13
Yeah, I’d say there’s two people, so over, probably three people they’re on an over long term basis. When I had started EntryPoint Consulting, I started with this guy named Nick Cattano, and I didn’t really know Nick very well. I was at SAP. He was an SAP partner, and this is the guy that decided that he reached out to me and said, hey, I want one more bite of the apple. Do you want to come do this? And I didn’t really know him very well. And what ended up happening, really fortunately, is we had perfectly aligned values. If you took any tough business situation, personal customer, whatever, and you asked us how we should both handle it separately, we came up with exactly the same answers. And so that was really, really, really lucky.
And so he was 11, 15 years my senior, had grown a business, acquired six, raised all kinds of capital, went public, went private again. So he’d kind of done it and seen it all where I had. Not at that point. And just was an amazing, amazing mentor. I ended up buying him out in 2008 before all that crap happened. So he got the maximum he got. Talk about timing. Like he got the very evaluation of EntryPoint, but then was amazingly accommodating even thereafter. So over the last 20 years by far, I would give kudos to Nick Santino. I think just recently it’s really been Vern, you know, I continuously ask him as he pushes the book out to his audience and his network and his community.
John Corcoran: 42:47
And you’re referring to Vern Harnish, who’s the author of the foreword on the book?
Pete Martin: 42:52
Yeah, exactly. And I’m like, gosh, thank you so much. He’s like, Pete, no, you don’t get it. Like, it’s a really good book. I’m not doing this just because I wrote the foreword and because I like you and you’re a good guy and we’re now friends, it’s because it’s a really good book, and it’s a really good lesson and content that, you know, super complimentary to the scaling up methodology and and everything else. So you know he’s been great. We’re getting we’re even doing some more stuff together. And you know really from a recent and just, you know has obviously been an inspiration for decades for sure.
John Corcoran: 43:24
Yeah. So yeah very.
Pete Martin: 43:25
Cool. So those two people.
John Corcoran: 43:26
Pete, thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you? The book and also the Vestara Advisors, your company.
Pete Martin: 43:34
Yeah. So they can scaleupfaster.com to get more information about the book. They can order it from Amazon. Of course they can find me on LinkedIn. And I think I’m Pete G. Martin on LinkedIn. And those are probably the best ways to get me right now.
John Corcoran: 43:48
So excellent. All right Pete, thank you so much for your time.
Pete Martin: 43:51
Thanks, John. I appreciate it.
Outro: 43:56
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