Wade Wyant 12:02
Oh, for sure. I mean, I had great upside i Oh, those guys for making that possible. I don’t know if I would have same success. I will tell you though, if anybody does it, you will question you’ll lay awake at nights going? Well, if I would have just done it myself,
John Corcoran 12:15
right. I guess inevitably, what sometimes comes up is was it equitable? The way that you divided up the company?
Wade Wyant 12:25
Yeah, I probably shouldn’t comment on that publicly.
John Corcoran 12:28
Huh. Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the challenges, right? It’s like, yeah, because what, you know, the discussion that starts, you know, at the beginning, and the discussion that you have later can be very different. Well, let’s, let’s dive into talking about let’s talk about the book. So Wake-Up Call: Insights for Entrepreneurs to Have More Freedom, Reduce Drama, and Scale Their Business. First of all, the title, why did you call it the Wake-Up Call? And that kind of goes to the entire structure of the book?
Wade Wyant 12:57
Yeah. So I mean, and I hate and saying this, but I probably made more mistakes than I did, successes in my business. And even like, you know, you talked earlier about my axe, it was an okay accent. But it wasn’t I didn’t sell for, I didn’t sell for over 100 million, which I would say in today’s world, you really want to get your business to over 100 million and then sell a lot of you exit prior to that. But now they work of companies, I think if you can’t get it to 100 million and just keep harvesting it right, just run it to harvest. And we talk about that later. But either way, so there are a few things I wish I would have done differently. I mean, in many ways. So I sat down and started writing out all these mistakes I made. Because I’ve learned from my mistakes and others mistakes way more than I learned from people success. In fact, a lot of the business that I built that third business, I watched another business that was close to, and I just did the opposite of what they did, because they were failing miserably. So I just said, they did that by for instance, they would pre sell services. And I go, Well, you know, we’re not going to do pre sell services, because that obviously doesn’t work. And other things, and sometimes it does work. I’m just giving an extreme example. So now I am, I started going, I started thinking like, I want I knew I wanted to write a book, I want to tell my story. And it just flowed for me. So I got a rider to work with me. And once a week no matter what, no matter how busy I was on vacation, no matter what, one hour, we will talk and come up with a story. And so if you buy the book, I hope you do, it’s the cheapest thing you can buy for me, by the way. But um, if you buy the book and you read it, you’ll see that it’s like 64 chapters, and it’s because we wrote over 70 stories. And then I realized that these were all the wake-up calls to me along the way things I corrected as I went. And so that’s where the term comes right just like these were all wake-up calls me. And then that played very nicely to what I did next, which is after the book was done, I went through and I wrote a punchy like wake-up call for the very end of the chapter. So every chapter ends with now the title like a wake-up call, which may be totally different than title, maybe similar, but it’s as punchy wake-up call kind of hit you in the face. And when people get to know me, that’s like my greatest asset and my greatest weakness is I just kind of say what I think. And I’m not real good at being charitable, or, or, or, you know, or framing things up. I just tell you what I think, well, people love that I get hired for boards all the time, because they’re like, was pre weighed in, because he’ll get the conversation going, you might be wrong, but you’ll get it going. So anyways, so the wake-up calls are not always very charitable. They’re kind of in your face. And I might even be wrong. By the way, read them. Send me a note, tweet me when I’m wrong. I’d love to hear it. But anyways, what?
John Corcoran 15:38
Well, yeah, I mean, I thought it was brilliant. You know, there’s some great little tidbits which we can pick out some of those there. But first, before we get into the individual chapters, you structured it overall with a very similar to and you’re scaling up coach, he mentioned Verne Harnish’s in the book. I’ve got Scaling Up here. It’s always I joke to people, it’s always within arm’s reach. So you know, they organize that as people strategy, execution and cash. You’ve got another one. You got another category leadership?
Wade Wyant 16:08
Yep. Well, actually, so So I ver i over huge debt. In many ways. I saw him speak in 2004, when I was just kind of getting the business going. And also that partner I talked about, I was running under his business. And he came in did a one day seminar, and I’m like, Oh, my goodness, he knows all the stuff. I don’t know about my business. And I know all the technical things he doesn’t know. So I’ll just take all his stuff, and make my business better. And we just grew like crazy. So I overrun big time. And, and so yes, I’m now scaling up coach, and I’m doing something else on top of that in a few minutes. But back to your point of how you structure the book, you know, Verne’s concept of people strategy, execution, cash, absolute works. And I actually expanded cash and I put sales because I think as soon as you talk about cash, you have to dress sales, what I find is most entrepreneurs, they have a lot of voodoo, thinking around sales is just voodoo sales tactics. It’s not principle or ScienceBase at any level. And so I tried to bring some principle proven sales stuff not you know, bro scientific, well, that wasn’t another entrepreneur tell you and sorry for the gals out there. Ladies. I didn’t mean to leave out you it could be it could be a girl science. But I bring I bring the you know, the bring like he this is what you can rely on. And then I add a leadership just because well, not that very left that off. And I just felt like there are some some chapters I wrote didn’t fall anywhere, but they were clearly on leadership. And I level the nine lies about work says about leadership and how it’s harder to find. So I don’t want to pretend like I defined it. I just wrote a few chapters on what I learned about it along the way.
John Corcoran 17:47
Yeah, yeah. And you know, like in the People section, you know, you wrote about a couple of different things you know, about important to not hiring friends, or if you do have rules around them. Yes. You know about family and business. You talk about bunnies in the book of bunnies that work for you, you want to talk about that? Well,
Wade Wyant 18:06
I hope somebody can help me out. And they can tell me who came up with this idea. So I can give them credit. I desperately want to give some human credit for coming up with this concept. I heard it from an entrepreneur, or entrepreneur. And once I heard it, I’m like, it’s brilliant. That you know, the two by two that people always do, like, you know, put a two by two off and then place people where they’re at based on quadrants. Yeah, quadrants. Yeah, based on their, the trust and based on their performance. And so I lay that out, and someone’s like, hey, well, here it is. Top quadrants are all star Oh, that makes sense. The Far, far left is terrorists, because they perform really, really well. But they’re terrible on core values. And trust. Bottom is rats, because they’re just stealing from you. And people don’t like to hear that. But what’s called the final quadrant over here, the bottom underneath of performance, it’s really high trust really high core values, but but they don’t have any performance. Those are bunnies. And so I’ve been using this on companies and people are like, this is brilliant. I worked as a really big companies like more than 1000 employees. And they have that in their like their employee assessments. And they’ll talk about in boardrooms, like that’s a bunny for sure. We love that person. But that’s a bunny. They’re not performing love them. They live our core values. We trust them more than anything in the world, but they’re not performing to bunny so it’s fine in our seat for them or, you know, let’s find a way to help them because they’re clearly in the wrong seat was Jim Palin’s talks about anyways, I say all that to say that that’s the concept of bunnies, please use it. But please, if anybody knows who came up with it, I want to give them credit. I’ll say outside see, you know that I’m putting my book because it’s a it’s a concept that’s just so brilliant. I did not come up with it. But I want to give a credit credit did.
John Corcoran 19:44
Yeah. I also want to ask you about so you write about there’s a chapter titled my guilty pleasure and it’s about how passionate about McDonald’s you are as a kid still ours adult and it’s similar to the hedgehog hedgehog concept which Collins writes about, but reflecting back on the business that you sold, how did you figure out what that was? What your hedgehog was in the business over the 15 years or so that you built it?
Wade Wyant 20:12
Yeah. You know, so that? I’ll try. I’ll try to keep it short, because we’re on podcasts here. Not long, long format. Yeah, some of 15 years in like a minute. Well, but it is simple. But it’s almost gonna be disappointing for the listeners. So the idea I had remember I said, I had that idea. With my business partner, when when we sat down talk through it, he was basically I had saw technology that someone had developed, but they didn’t know how to sell it. They didn’t know how to they didn’t know how to install it. They didn’t know how to get into fortune 500. And I knew how to do that. And I knew this technology would work, because I’d worked in some larger companies. And I was like, they just had this, it solves so many problems. So anyways, I told my partner, I’m like, let’s go, let’s go sell this product. It was basically allowing us to do cybersecurity on any device anywhere in any way we wanted to. It was almost like magic at the time. Today. It’s not a big deal. But at the time, it was magic. Almost Kingdom magic it people are like how are you doing this, even it people couldn’t believe how we did it. So now, we took that our Hedgehog was basically, you know, fortune 500 companies who needed us, our thing that we loved was controlling computers, we were obnoxious about it. And what we were best in the world was we were best in the world at bringing this software to market and implementing it now. So it’s a services company, which isn’t very sexy, but because it was a sexy piece of software, our hedgehog, I hate to tell you this as a cop out, but it was basically this thing called Tyrus. It was that technology. And we got some exclusivity on it. And we were able to get to a size where the software vendor almost relied on us. And so for years, we ran that well, a problem is when you have a hedgehog dependent on technology, and also another software company, you all sudden your your market can disappear. And so that started to happen to us. So then we switched over. And we made the same mistake a second time. We did just antique, which was a great company until they got sold or bought out. Hmm. But we leave all your eggs
John Corcoran 22:13
are in one basket.
Wade Wyant 22:14
Yeah. And so I you know, it was great. It was good. The company. So going, by the way I sold the company, they’re now doing service now. So the third transition, yeah, there’s now probably isn’t going anywhere. They’ll they’re like SAP they’ll be around forever. But and I think that I think they’re on I think they’ve picked a good horse to run on for 20 years. So I I wish them well. And, and I was part of that transition actually. But you I’ll say to all entrepreneurs, watch out for that, because you think you got this diamond or a piece of gold. But it gets you it’s like, it’s like adrenaline, it gets you going for a little bit. But then you can’t live on it forever. Right. And there’s a lot to be said about that.
John Corcoran 22:54
Yeah, I mean, I’ve interviewed people on this show that picked the wrong technology, or the technology fell out of fashion, or worse that the parent company killed it or destroyed it either intentionally or not intentionally. How do you avoid that sort of scenario?
Wade Wyant 23:11
Well, I don’t know if I the answer. Sorry. This is embarrassing. I don’t know. Because that’s the guy that happened to me, I battled that I you know, on one sense, it’s like, hey, good for you, you start a business. Now you have options, right? And most people don’t get that. So I would not, I never discourage anyone from starting a business and having some success. Because then you can you can pivot, right, you can make that pivot. How to make that pivot. Man, if you could write a book on that would be a bestseller. Because I don’t want anybody I don’t know, if anybody’s done a good job on identifying the pivot. And that’s we have to do you get started one thing, but when it fails, all through us pivot now many 1000s millions of entrepreneurs have pivoted successfully 1000s and millions have not pivoted successfully? I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, I can think about and give a lot of answers. But who knows,
John Corcoran 23:57
right? Yeah, yeah. Right. No, that’s a tough one. And then I also want to ask you about so you know, we’re talking about kind of this hedgehog concept that you pick one thing, you put your head down, you focus on that, but we were chatting beforehand about James Cameron. So James Cameron, famous director, he actually wrote two of his movies at the same time, right? Yeah. Which in a sense, Rambo and aliens. Okay. And and in a sense, it’s almost like he had to hedgehogs Right? Like to hop so how do we wrecked how do we kind of resolve those two things the idea of you should have one hedgehog and one bogus
Wade Wyant 24:35
right? And but but then But then but for him he you can Google this email. Listen, you can you he talks about how much success he had doing that. You know, I think this is where sometimes business and business theory run smack dab into you human challenges and I talked about this in my book The that you know, it’s psychological, not logical and too often as humans, we see ourselves as logical beings. because everything around us is logical, this webcast is logical, the device you’re watching it on is logical, the room you’re in, and the heat is logical, everything’s logical, do this test. And that happens. But humans are almost entirely psychological. We just have moments of logic, but it’s all chemical based. It’s all it’s all just psychological. And so I think like the hedgehog misses the creative possibilities. And so you see plenty examples of where creative things spin out companies that were practicing or hedgehog, but gave enough space like Google does, and other companies do to allow for that creativity. I think that’s what James Cameron was tapping into that he had all this creativity. And if you only focus on one movie, he missed this opportunity to actually make wrote book but to be both the movies better aliens is one of my favorite movies of all times. I can’t say ramble. Part two is my favorite old times. Good movie for the time. But definitely, both blockbusters. And, and he, I think he made he says, I believe he, they’ve made the movies better, because he worked on. So back to the core point. I think sometimes in business, we apply logic, which, by the way, don’t stop Jim Collins is brilliant, smarter than me for sure. I also think though, sometimes business wants smack dab into human psychology and human performance and human traits that don’t always play perfectly. But that said, I still think he’s just sick of your hedgehog. I can’t tell you how many business people that do.
John Corcoran 26:26
Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, James Cameron is perhaps one of the best directors of all time. Yes, commercially successful, and acclaimed. So it’s hard to hold yourself up to that standard. We’re running short on time. And I want to get to my question asking about my gratitude question I want to ask about peers and contemporaries that you admire. But before I get to that, you have a long list of books that you admire, authors admire and hear one of them is Topgrading, which I’m proud to say the client of ours, talent. Oh, I guess go check it out. Definitely a good one. But I love that you put all those books in there, and that you’re so you express such gratitude freely to all these different authors. Talk a little bit about the impact that all these different books have had on your career over the years?
Wade Wyant 27:10
Yeah. So I felt like I couldn’t write this about doing that. Because many of the ideas I have aren’t unique, and they’re not. And I didn’t come up with them. And they’re me learning from other people. And if I if I didn’t recognize that I literally couldn’t live myself. That was like one of the most important parts of the book. And so yeah, I went through and I didn’t I didn’t get every book. There’s some I probably missed. But Michael Hyatt also did this in his book, The Vision Driven Leader. And when I saw him do it, so I gotta give him credit. And I probably didn’t do great. I shouldn’t I should do they go back and do that. No.
John Corcoran 27:42
You mentioned.
Wade Wyant 27:44
Yeah. But I got the idea from them. Right. Yeah, exact idea to to list the stuff out. And I just felt like I had to do it. And also gratitude as you as you said, and I agree, you know, gratitude is probably the most important thing we can do. And I didn’t realize after the last couple years, and I’ll tell you now, I end I end almost every quarterly or daily, the full day engagement of my clients just say how grateful I am, they gave me this opportunity, because they could have picked any coach anybody to do what this anybody who buys a book, I’m grateful for it, even though again, it’s the cheapest thing you can buy for me, so go to Amazon and get it. Um, but you know, I’m great. I’m grateful. And in my life. You know, I’ve already talked about Ken Vandenberg. If it wasn’t for him, I, I wouldn’t be here I talked about Chuck Haggerty, best partner I’ve ever had. And, you know, he taught me a lot. And so born I’m grateful, obviously, for my, my parents and all that. I don’t mean to sound cliche, but it is a little bit that way. So I’m very grateful. But, you know, I’m grateful for the entrepreneurs like you, and others that I’ve I’ve shared, you know, it seems like a lifetime with of extremely exchanging ideas. And if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be here and that book definitely wouldn’t be there. And I guess that brings us full circle to Verne, Verne Harnish while he’s the thought leader in my space, and, you know, we work together closely, it’s a genuine thank you to him in 2004 I hadn’t seen him speak at the YPO where’s that Brian town hadn’t done that. I don’t, I wouldn’t have the success I had. So you know, it’s full circle. It’s the it’s, it’s everything goes back to people helped me and so I gotta make sure I help other people.
John Corcoran 29:22
And I’m fascinated by that. You mentioned Verne, I’ve interviewed a couple times before and, you know, it’s, it’s fascinating to me, people that go from you know, one day you’re in a classroom and you hear someone speak or you’re in you know bookstore and you pick up a book and then that has a massive impact on your life. And then Flash forward years later, and you have a relationship with that person, or you in your case, become a certified scaling up coach and actually implement this, you know, this framework which has such a big impact on you. So talk a little bit more about what’s what that’s like to come full circle
Wade Wyant 29:59
was really Really cool. I, you know, I’ve earned sold over half a million of copies of Scaling Up and the half a million is Rockefeller Habits. He’s spoken everywhere. And, and so it’s really cool. Above and Beyond being cool it’s rewarding as well. And, and, and sometimes a little surreal but it’s also you Verne’s like any of us, you I spent a lot of time for and we’ve done courses together. I’ve helped him in Vegas we does his his two or three day workshop and sign up for him. If you can. They’re amazing. You will come back your business will do you go to Verne’s two day three day workshop, you will come back and do better in your business. I promise you that.
John Corcoran 30:40
Yeah. He and Bill Gallagher, another scaling up coach are doing one in Lake Tahoe, I believe in April of this year.
Wade Wyant 30:46
- Gotta go. Yeah, gotta go. But it was gonna say about Verne is one of the things that burned taught me. And I don’t know how he does it, I’m going to tell you that guy responds to is as much as as busy as he is. He responds to email almost instantly. For example, when I do my book endorsed. I emailed him two hours later, he was emailed back, of course, it sound the book, he read the book, the guys reads like crazy. And he reads probably more than anybody I know. And gave me an endorsement. I mean, within minutes, and there’s people I email that don’t respond back for days and days, and they don’t have anywhere near the the the connections that Vern has. So he does have everybody. So it’s pretty incredible. And I don’t mean that Gosh, gosh, gosh, about Vern, but nobody, I don’t mean that, gosh, it’s just hard not to because there’s there’s things he’s done that are pretty incredible.
John Corcoran 31:38
Yeah. And then. So wrapping things up. So you mentioned it earlier, I’m a big fan of gratitude. I’m a big fan of you know, looking around at your peers and contemporaries, others in your industry, however you wanted to find that, and just, you know, thanking them publicly. So you know who of your peers and contemporaries you’ve been active in YPO? You’ve been active in the Oh, cybersecurity, who would you acknowledge? Who do you want to call out?
Wade Wyant 32:03
Oh, I’ll do like two or three people, one person has never been acknowledged. And I’m just thinking about right now, because you kind of spurred some, some words or made you think about this. This is the gentleman called Dan beam, he he started a business called RST, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And he started his business a few years before me, and, and then, and then I was always a few years ahead in size and everything else. And he did very well, he grew that business bigger than mine. And he was always very, he’s always very generous with his time, about twice a year, I email him and say, Hey, I need another, I need another little coaching session. And I go to his office, and he would basically tell me what was gonna happen in two to three years, because he was two or three years ahead of me. We were slight competitors, slight, but but he just openly, freely gave it to me. And so that, I mean, I’m so grateful for his time, and I’d never publicly thanked him not on purpose, it just hasn’t come to mind. If it wasn’t for that I’d be huge. And then, and then a good friend who’s been there through to it was was was at Symantec, and I hired him at IDs. And then then we’ve been friends since then, and we collaborate on many things. His name’s Matt Reed, and he’s been a really good friend to me, in business and in personal life. And, you know, I’m grateful for him, I do recognize him in the book. But you know, you think about people who, who came in all my life, that just one stage but multiple stages of my life, and really helpful. And then of course, all the people have already said this, and it could go on, how long is this podcast? Keep going on all day?
John Corcoran 33:34
You know, eventually the the orchestra comes up and kind of starts playing and you? Yeah, like the mic drops on me. Exactly. Right. Right. But yeah, I know, you said in the book, you actually reference a bunch of them. So that’s great. So all right. Well, this has been great. Thanks so much, Wade. Wake-Up Call’s the name of the book mentioned where people can go check it out. And also where people can connect as the Amazon I,
Wade Wyant 33:57
you know, I made a decision. So again, you know, entrepreneur, be your coach. Don’t want to do this. I thought about it. I was like, You know what, everybody has an Amazon account, or at least everybody I want to sell to. Let’s just make this easy. There’s only one place just go to Amazon. You can even buy it for me. You can buy from Amazon. That’s it.
John Corcoran 34:14
That’s great. Yeah. Wait, thanks so much. And good luck to you.
Wade Wyant 34:17
Yeah, thank you so much. Let me be a part of this.
Outro 34:21
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.