Scott Fritz is the Founder of Growth Connect and currently oversees acquisition, funding, and strategy for SGI Property Management, which operates in three states and manages 1,300 properties. He is the author of The 40 Hour Work YEAR, which chronicles his entrepreneurial journey firsthand as he shares strategic business methods, action-focused exercises, and the mindset philosophy that allowed him to achieve a 40 hour work year.
Scott acquired an insurance company, Atlantic Insurance, a property and casualty agency in 2010. He then rebranded it, repositioned it, and sold it two years later. He also founded Growth Connect in 2008, which is a coaching and exit planning services business. Scott has been an active angel investor since 2001. He founded Human Capital in 1997, which he grew into a nationwide player with annual revenue of $170 million in 2007, and later sold it at the end of 2007.
Scott Fritz, the Founder of Growth Connect, is John Corcoran’s guest in this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where he talks about his strategies for growing a business to $170 million in annual revenue. Scott also explains how he manages various businesses from different industries, how his business has been positively impacted by Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and how he handled the effects of the 9/11 tragedy.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- Scott Fritz’s entrepreneurial background, how he founded Human Capital, and how he secured his first clients
- How the growth of the internet and the 9/11 tragedy impacted Scott’s business
- Scott explains how he started working 40 hours a year, how he kept his employees motivated to work in his absence, and shares his advice for business owners looking to transition out of their businesses
- What drove Scott to sell his business at the end of 2007?
- How Scott’s involvement with Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) helped him grow his business to $170 million in annual revenue
- The strategies Scott uses to manage businesses in different industries — and how he ended up in property management
- Scott talks about the peers he respects and the people he acknowledges for his achievements
- How to get in touch with Scott Fritz
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
- Growth Connect
- Scott Fritz on LinkedIn
- Scott Fritz’s email: [email protected]
- SGI Property Management
- The 40 Hour Work YEAR by Scott Fritz
- Business Network International (BNI)
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization
- The E Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber
- Cesar Quintero on LinkedIn
- “From Venezuela to Starting a Business, Hitting Rock Bottom, and Building Back Again” with Cesar Quintero
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:14
Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we ask today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.
John Corcoran 0:40
All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show, Smart Business Revolution Podcast and every week I get to talk to so many great smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of companies and organizations ranging from YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, Lending Tree, OpenTable, X Software, and many more. And before I introduce today’s guest, I want to give a big shout out to Cesar Quintero, a past guest on my show. Go check out this episode of the profitrecipe.com. Great EOS implementer. And he recommended today’s guest Scott Fritz. Scott currently oversees acquisition funding strategy for SGI Property Management, which operates in three states and manages 1300 properties. He’s the author of the 40 Hour Work YEAR, you heard that right, which chronicles Scott’s entrepreneurial journey firsthand as he shares strategic business methods, action focused exercises, and the mindset philosophy that allowed him to achieve a 40 hour work year. We’re going to dive into that, I’m going to ask him all about it.
He also acquired an insurance company, Atlantic Insurance, a property and casualty agency in 2010, rebranded it, repositioned it, and sold it two years later. He also founded Growth Connect in 2008, which is a coaching and exit planning services business. He still has that. And he’s been an active angel investor since 2001. And he also founded Human Capital in 1997, which he grew into a nationwide player with 2007 annual revenues of $170 million. And he sold it at the end of 2007. How smart is that? So we’re gonna dive into that story as well. This episode is brought to you by Rise25 Media, where we help b2b businesses to get clients, referrals and strategic partnerships with podcasts and content marketing. To learn more, go to rise25media.com, or you can email us at [email protected]. All right, Scott, I’m so excited to talk to you. You’ve got such a great entrepreneurial journey. And you credit that in part two growing up in a home where you were around entrepreneurs. So your grandfather, your father, were both entrepreneurs. What did they do?
Scott Fritz 2:44
Thanks, first of all, thanks for having me on, John. Yeah, so I grew up in a very interesting family setting. And then my father went to work for my grandfather. He’d started a sawmill machinery business, they built those gigantic machines that you see in sawmills if you’ve ever been out in those raised in Oregon, and they’re everywhere. And so I always tell people, you know, I, we didn’t really have Christmas and Thanksgiving, we had business meetings, you know, looking looking like a holiday party, but it was always business and and in my book I talked about, you know, as a young kid, I remember talking about business and politics at the dinner table every night, we weren’t talking about sports teams, and, you know, cars and the typical thing is kids my age really were interested in so it was an interesting experience, but it definitely shaped my outlook. And early on. I knew at some point in my life, I wanted to own and start my own company even though I had little side businesses ever since I was like, you know, nine years old. I really wanted to start up a main company and grow it, which is what I do with human capital. And you found that 1997 takes me back to the very origin story. What was it like in the very beginning? Yeah, so my business partner Karen and I were not weren’t related . We met at a business we were both working at and we basically said you know, we can do this business. It was a PEO, a professional employer organization, which outsourced HR payroll, benefits, all that stuff. And you know, many mornings in the shower staring at the wall, we had no clients we had about a 10 minute 10 month burn rate before all our cash was gone and you know, staring at the wall wondering what I’d done because I really, I thought I thought being an entrepreneur was gonna be a lot more fun and exciting not such drudgery and hard work and anxiety but you know, we made it we got our first big why after four months and paid off our smallest VA loan a couple months later and it was all rocket ride for say,
John Corcoran 4:36
and where did the early clients come from? Was it your personal network? Did you hit the streets cold calling?
Scott Fritz 4:43
Yeah. So we had a cold calling, BNI Business Network International. And if you’re familiar with that, yeah, I joined a BNI group which is all giving sales, leads everyone have a lot of connections on your return and interested call and I was the first one with a proposal and beating out some of my bigger competition. That’s really what got us over the hump to get going.
John Corcoran 5:05
And there’s so much change that happened in that period of time. So that 10 year stretch with the internet becoming so pervasive. You know, from 97 to 2007, cloud based software became a thing, how did that affect the change with the business?
Scott Fritz 5:21
Yeah, remember, it was funny. So fortunately, Karen’s husband worked for Cisco Systems. So we have a little connection there with some of the time, very cutting edge and that sort of thing. And I remember we had our when we had our website, a lot of the clients we’re going to talk to were like, what’s this website thing? What’s this? www? I mean, it was that time that you know, changed. I mean, we’re still faxing almost everything at that time, right. So it was a huge change, in fact, in the last four years we had the company, our number one objective every year was to move more, you know, a bigger percentage of our clients off the fax and phone, payroll system and benefit system onto our web based system. We started out with goldmine, we then went to act, we’re actually moving on to the Salesforce platform in 2005, a couple years before we sold the company. So they went ahead and finished that implementation, but we that was all just kind of, as you just stated, kind of coming into its own at that time.
John Corcoran 6:12
So 2001 must have been a time of a lot of change for you, because that was around the time that you started spending a lot less time on the business. You also joined the Ico around that time, according to your bio here. So you started getting involved with eo. And of course, 911 happened, and I’m curious how that affected your business. So take me back to 2001. And what that period of transition that time period was like, Yeah,
Scott Fritz 6:41
great question. I remember I was actually in my forum meeting in Michigan when the tower got hit. Wow. So it was where I shared that whole experience with my forum. And then when the second tower got hit, we all just disbanded. We were watching her on TV and just said, Hey, we got to go home and see what’s going on. So we all disbanded. But as I talked about in my book, especially as you know, we’d already started to carry on somewhat transitioning out of the business and start to put systems in place and things like that. And we literally dropped on the top line almost 30 million in revenue over about a three month span. And where are you at?
John Corcoran 7:15
At that point? We’re around 60,000,015 seems to cut in half your own was cut in half?
Scott Fritz 7:20
Yeah, pretty much. And a lot of that is due to I always said that the owners that were taking a half a million dollar paycheck went to 250. The owners that were taking 250 went to 100. And the owners that were taking 100 went to zero. And we had a small small startup, you know, young entrepreneurial companies. So a lot of our owners and executives. You know what I say they went turtling right? They just pulled inside the shell and cut all pay. And when you cut that many companies pay off the top of it like you said it cut our top line revenue about in half.