Aaron Ross, Author

This program is presented by University of California television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest uctv programs the center is the customer they're the ones who are paying for everything I just saw this as oh my God this is like my chance quarter of a million dollars it was almost surreal just cut out one person in the supply Chain in order to solve the problem those are the kind of people you want you respect them their integrity their intelligence their ability their can

do attitude hard [Music] work all right Welcome to the last installment of the spring 2016 UC Santa Barbara distinguished speaker series I am John greous you can follow me on Twitter at John grous and tonight um this this is a special night this is Being sponsored by big speak speakers Bureau uh big speak Not only was able to get Aaron Ross for us best-selling author they were not only able to get him to come here but they actually donated 50 copies of aon's latest book from impossible to inevitable um and I think that's really significant

because it allows the students to come in here having read the book knowing what is going to be discussed knowing what's going to be talked about and um just Being more informed as to the conversation so Aaron is married and has 12 children most of whom he added to his family through adoption which is a wonderful thing he loves motorcycles and he keeps a 25-hour work week I'll say it again he keeps a 25-hour work week he is my hero that is something to strive for to be able to balance your family and your and

your very successful um professional schedule and work um at that pace is amazing it's Remarkable he is a highly sought after keynote speaker he speaks all over the country um in addition to from impossible to inevitable he's also a best-selling author of uh predictable revenue and it's become known as the sales Bible of Silicon Valley I know several CEOs who have re-engineered their sales departments in their pipeline um funnel management to conform with the recommendations Aaron makes in that book so if you have not read that Book um highly recommend that as well as from

impossible to inevitable aon's also the co-founder of cro and cro excuse me of of kb. cb. which is a pipeline automation software U company and he's also the co-founder of predictable University he graduated from Stanford University he's an exiron man triathlete and if that wasn't enough he's also a graduate of the boulder survival School the outdoor survival school he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and his loving family and there's lots and lots of things that Aaron could be doing tonight he could be speaking somewhere else he could be spending time with his with

his family he could be working on a new book he could be doing lots of things but he decided to come here to speak with us tonight I think that's a great honor let's welcome him to our class just when I come out Put this over here all right is a sound on good um hi hello hello you know I'm actually not a big social media person but I am on Twitter Moto CDO Moto CEO actually I picked up the last may be couple months Snapchat it's pretty I don't know I use it here and

there so if you want to take Aaron Ross 383 on Snapchat In fact you can see the car I drove in today which is a car you probably have never seen any drive and I I'll put the end I don't really use Instagram much but uh I know Instagram I I feel like Snapchat made Instagram feel so fake if you guys see this now I'm going to share some things with you today I see some heads nodding okay I'm going to share some ideas with you today now I'm going to tell you this presentation is

not written for college Students the book was not written for college students but the principles around what does it take to create one of the fastest growing companies in the world is a lot of those principles are the same if you want to be successful as a person if you want to be successful in your career if you want to start a company uh I don't know did you did people already get books if there's 50 copies people already read it or get copies or is that later y okay they got Them a couple weeks

ago okay uh great I hope you read some of them bonus points I know it's like this big paper thing thing not on a phone uh I will say I'm actually a big fan of paper books partly because I grew up with them and partly because for a business book I just don't like to read them from start to finish I like to like skip around I write them for the way I like to read them which is I'll just open it over here and see this I go over here and this part doesn't Make

sense to me skip skip or I can dog here it I can mark it so I like physical books and I've heard a lot of people the highest compliment I feel like I've gotten as an author and let me see if I can get to that part is this go is when people say wow this is I've gotten some people say I've never doged I've never marked up a book as much as this book that's one of the highest compliments I feel like I get as an Author uh you mentioned this is probably the book

I'm still most known for in the business world and my kids they'll ask me sometimes like are you famous I'm like not really I'm like internet famous and just like this little slice of the world like silcon Valley in sales and technology companies I'm relatively famous like medium famous like if you have any parents or brothers or sisters who work at a software company in something related to sales if they Haven't at least heard of this book they should probably be fired actually I'm not kidding uh I'm married there been kids Work Week blah blah

blah never thought I'd have a big family uh I don't know I just sort of Life happens and never thought I'd adopt a bunch of kids I it just worked out that way and but they're really like I love having a big family and the kids have just been amazing and I do miss them so When John was saying yeah I could have been other places like it I really I hate to miss like bedtime um I always feel like every there's never enough time whenever I leave there's a little bit of relief like oh

I got to actually sleep tonight but when I'm gone like oh I missed I feel like I missed something I can't get back and just one other aspect one reason why I'm up here I think that you might be interested in is like if you are I don't know I guess Successful in business or even other things in life and you're become something of a known person at least in your little sphere you know he mentioned the big the company called big is what's sponsored tonight with the books and so big speak is my speaking

agent and if you know anything about the speaking world you know people can get paid to talk so I'm not getting paid today I'm just doing for fun but you know people might get paid to come up here and like Share information not so much at colleges but more at businesses there's definitely functions and some people make a few thousand do or a few hundred dollars for a typical talk like this in a business I would make um well I don't know about my cut but like the fee to a business is somewhere between like

15 to $25,000 for like an hour of work of which I get 70% so I hope you take this Seriously again I the presentation is really written for in the book is really for business Executives people in business so you're not quite there yet maybe or how many people are gra either graduated or about to graduate okay so I didn't try you know there's two reasons I didn't change it try to be more College friendly first it's been 20 years for me so I don't really know I don't even know how to change it really

And second uh I think I was going to share this as as if you really know you are in that business mode you're trying to start a business you're trying to grow a business and just treat you that way because some of you are in that space how many people here are either have started or trying to start either some kind of business or nonprofit or something where you need to somehow like have funds coming in yeah a bunch of people bunch of People all right so new book blah blah blah best work I've ever

read I got a lot of good reviews on Amazon and actually these are from entrepreneurs but I'll move on and so why a bit more about why I'm here today and even doing these kinds of talks was uh five years ago I was single now I'm 44 now it's hard to say I'm like God damn I'm getting old it's the first time I look at the mirror I'm like wow I'm Starting to look older like my joints are starting to hurt like I'm actually feeling a little old and up until like 40 never even like

ah whatever but having also having you know lots of kids will do that it's like I have like a super speed life but I was single I got married a single guy I didn't have to make a lot of money I could get by I could experiment I could try like passion projects that didn't I maybe I wanted Them to make money but didn't have to and it wasn't until I got married and had a lot of kids I'm like oh I have to make more money because I need to get a bigger place to

live or I or a kid is not a it just doesn't work at this one kid doesn't work at public school I need to get him in a public school or we need to um there's like there's legal bills all these things I have to make more money it's not an option and I grew my income you like 11 times in about four Years from around $70,000 to little maybe under 7 800,000 per year right and it's the same principles that I used to do that turned out to be a lot in common for what

works to grow businesses what works to help a a single person succeed in their career and you know I consult a lot with companies and I've seen the same pattern for myself there's companies who had something like in this case you've got ideas a lot of you have an idea you're Like how do I how do I make this real how do I get it out there how do I grow it and what's the difference between a company that where it succeeds and happens versus where it doesn't right and this new book is really about

distilling a few of those key principles to help people who have an idea and you've got something it's not a book for how to start a business it's really a book more like you have an idea how do you have it grow especially how To have it grow past your friends and family because friends and family don't count your mom's always going to buy whatever you do your friends are always going to like subscribe to your crappy blog or crappy vide sub uh Channel you know some of the companies I've either worked at or my

co my co-author Jason lpin worked at or uh advised or some of the fastest growing companies in the tech World which means some of the fastest growing companies in The world now I don't know if as a senior or junior or soft more the words like Revenue if you I don't if you maybe you don't even understand what the word Revenue means but these are companies that went from a million in Revenue to year up to 100 million two years or Salesforce is now actually an8 billion doll company these are big companies these are the

companies a lot of the fastest growing the com the people who start companies who want to emulate they Go to these companies all right so the book is written into seven sections and each section has a painful truth these are again there's there's a thousand ways you there's like if you go on the internet and you look for useful advice on sales or growing compan like there's infinite great content around how to start a company how to sell how to grow a company there's too much good stuff And there's only going to be more so

how do you figure out the few most important things going to get the biggest difference that's what our goal was with this book what are the most common problems that people suffer from and like if you can only do one thing or two things what are those things to sort through the Noise Okay so this first one the most common problem people face and this is for sure going to be a problem that you will deal with right now in the Future as you're growing up is you want to grow or you want to be

successful but you're not ready to grow and generally this is we call this idea of how do you nail a niche I'm going to skip this a bit so when you're not sure exactly what you're doing or who you're selling to or why they want what you want why they want want what you're offering whether it's a product whether it's a nonprofit whether it's you're trying to Get a job doesn't matter what you're selling you sales is a life skill we'll get to that but if you're trying to do this maybe trying to get a

date I don't know but um when you're not really sure you end up with very with vague a vague idea about what you're trying to accomplish and what you're how you're trying to help people and this it doesn't just look like jargon it is jargon this doesn't mean anything you know maximizing the return on investment In the cloud blah BL blah this means I don't really know what I'm do I don't I can do anything for anybody which means I'm doing really I'm not specializing or being expert at anything so this is a sign you

haven't call it nailed a niche you haven't become an expert a specialist at being being great at one thing really means it being great at solving one kind of problem and you end up sounding like when you say we someone asked you what You do you're like well I'm studying uh English and math but I want to be I want to do travel and I'm really good at video and this that that the other and I do Cricket and I'm in athletics it just ends up at the top this is an old cartoon From The

Far Side it says uh the guys this is like you saying it sound like this you're trying to you're trying to communicate this idea and you're like okay Ginger stay out of the garbage Ginger or else but what comes across to The person who's listening is blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah because you're throwing too many things at them you can do all the things again especially as a student you're like wow what do I want to do I want to do all these things or often is a business where

you can do a lot of things you haven't really like grown up yet and the more things you're you don't want to miss out like oh yeah we could do this we could do video we could do Audio we could cut that we could do yeah whatever what do you need we could do that but you're just confusing people and it's not until you really realize what's the problem you're solving what's the the most important problem you're solving for them the pain you're solving or the value you provide where it becomes clear as to why

they would want to hire you so when you can clear the Clutter and figure out what are you going to be The best at pick something pick something so you see here I did this first and then I filled in the letter separately that's a little bit of that magic right then I put it backwards so when I talk about nailing and Niche in business the word Niche tends to be I think thought of is like oh we're not we're thinking small like you it's small but in this case Niche means Focused right it's about

yes you have a lot of interests it's sort of like yes you're if you're on social media you might post on all of them doesn't that it's so scattered like pick one primary one to focus on and get really good at before you Branch out before you scatter yourself um if it's a bunch of Majors if it's you know whatever your interests are ultimately it's great to try a bunch of things you have to figure out what works but you need at some point you're Not going to be successful in the way you want or

whether it's your nonprofit your business your app your this that the other until you pick something and you can be great at it your thing say it's easier to be a big fish in a small pond are you uh to be successful you need to stand out in the crowd how can you be a big fish in a small pond and it's easier to make the pond smaller than the fish Bigger so in other words if you have a an app you're trying to do uh like everything for everybody it's like a photo app I

know photos you can do photos with everything so how can you narrow the focus for what the problem is you're solving so they can really n like crush it for one type of user one type of customer rather than trying to like serve too many now examples of like starting being successful by starting small include Some of the biggest companies in the world where they had a big vision for what they wanted to do you might want to change the world but unless you pick some small area to get started with you ain't going to

change nothing you'll just sit there and like dream about it all day or spin your wheels so like Amazon they started with Just Books that's still a big Market but they just he always wanted to sell everything or Facebook just started with IB League schools zapo shoes and Salesforce with like sales related tools so again it's okay to have a big Vision don't let the fear of missing out stop you from picking one thing next thing to really dig into and get to be really good at or pick one thing if it doesn't work move

on to to the next if you sit there spin your wheels on all these things you could do you're never going to get traction now what I would tend to look At as a company or individual is in the past when you've had customers or when you've had projects or whatever it is you do when you've been involved with teams what have you done that has contributed the most value to other people when you've been a need to have they needed you it could it could be a job a class you weren't a nice to

have if you're nice to have what happens in in businesses if I'm a business who's buying software if you're Something you have a cool app and a bunch of you probably have created cool apps that people aren't buying because they're not they're they're cool but I don't really need them I I like it what do I do with that though how is that going to help my business so again it takes way more energy than you realize for at least a business to buy something and implement it and use it and get value from it

which means that if it's not a need to have if it's just a nice It's going to fall off the priority list and this about learning like how do you solve problems for people I know you want to like save the world but what's the problem you're going to solve um there's some I can't remember where I I learned it but rather than thinking about what do you want to do with your life think about what kinds of problems you want to solve uh here's an example my daughter Aurora is 13 she loves Donuts who

Doesn't um and she used to say hey Dad you know why can you take me to Donuts i' say no like why but when she you know again she learns the stuff and she said hey Dad wow you know when we've gone to Donuts there been some of the most fun times of my life these are like lifetime memories and whether she's being serious or like selling to me I'm like oh yeah okay I get it okay let's go because she's speaking my language uh One More Story and by of course I I I only

want To strangle her once in a while uh she's a fantastic fantastic kid very impressive and she's so fun she's the most fun of all our kids to play with really um she's on she she'll be a social media Star TV star at some point she wants it to be yesterday but you know someday but uh she also came to me and said hey that in Christmas I got all these iTunes cards like $150 of iTunes cards would you buy them from me and if It's like a Amazon cards or some gift cards sure I'll

buy them like we could use those all day long but with iTunes like I don't know I spend I don't spend money on iTunes like $3 a month if that so I'll buy a $25 card but uh the rest you sort of on your own like I I don't know and then she came back a few days later or a week later and said well hey Dad you know we do Friday Night movie Night and there's a bunch of class of movies that we want to get we haven't gotten did you know you could actually

use these iTunes cards to buy the movies and I was like huh uh you're right and I I I bought the cards and we used them to get the movies and she she turned it around from me to see it as a need to have rather than a nice to have now it'll never never be that easy for you I guarantee you it will never I've NE just it's not but the principle Is the same which how do you get inside the heads of the people that you want to sell to and sell in the

the best meaning of the word where you're trying to persuade Inspire help because we all have friends who are trying to inspire them or sell them on breaking up with that horrible boyfriend or girlfriend or you know whatever the horrible situation is how do you sell them on helping themselves same idea sales can be about selling someone on doing something Better use this softer to improve your business you know do hire me because I'm going to be a value to your business right and the book goes into more details on like how do you nail

a niche this is just spreadsheets and things but the real the idea is to take all these problems you could solve or are solving and break it down like into smaller pieces many like more smaller problems and then prioritize them based on the best chance of success you Have right when you sort of think about General like I want to change the world I want to like help kids okay what does that mean and try to make it more concrete something you can take action on something you can do about all right that's the first

one so I mentioned seven part second painful truth is overnight success is a fairy tale now once in a while it happens enough and the social media picks it up So that some kid at 11 years old writes an app and makes a million dollars and then suddenly oh everyone's failing but the reality is overnight success really is that thing that takes 10 years to happen right they say the overnight the 15 years overnight overnight success it took 15 years in the making that's what happens you know you can dream about the overnight success but

you have to be prepared to uh do the work to figure out how to be Successful and you're not going to have I mean I maybe there's one person maybe not that's going to have like some viral video or um I know enough about like social media Stars not that much but you know I have a friend who's the lawyer to is a jack and Jack one of these you know it's like a Vine stars that they had some video they like took off you know there's a few of those people so maybe it's like

a one in a 100,000 chance like it happens enough But you should go for it but you can't count on it so in this case the idea is how can you create until you can create a predictable way to generate opportunities for yourself you're not going to be you're going to be at the mercy of Fate so for example let's say that you want to sell a new water filtration system to governments right you're not going you know maybe you get written up on Huffington Post and you get a bunch of calls but at some

point Those calls will stop so if you don't have a way call to generate leads right opportunities which is some way to say look what if you had a way to generate four meetings a month with governments to sort of sell them this water filtration system all right some system to do that to make it predictable so you can count on always having those opportunities whether you're raising money for a nonprofit whether you're trying to sell Someone idea and I say uh there's these three types of leads so the lead is really like an opportunity

it's an opportunity to call it like pitch something in this case and pitch and positive what if you're trying to sell yourself an idea or a product um politics is selling all the time you know the best sales people in the world were like Gandhi JFK Elon Musk like so when and we'll get to that but selling is a life skill if you don't Know how to sell yourself an idea or product you're not going to do any not going to accomplish anything in life beyond the minimum so there's three kinds of leads here and

like at home we've got these three kinds of princesses know they each have their pros and cons there's the little girl princess the classic then there's the grandpa princess definitely has some cons there and then there's the little brother Princess this is what happens when you have a Aurora who has too much time and access to makeup and a little brother that's Maverick and these have their pros and cons and likewise when you're trying to generate opportunities for yourself there's these three types that you need to know about to categorize what is going to work

best for you Word of Mouth which means reaching out to friends family your networks usually where you Begin start with your friends fit people you know people who know you friends of friends and then at some point either if that's not working or you sort of like tap that out you might do some kind of mass marketing you know Google ads or social media that's another type and there's a third type outbound prod prospecting outbound sales tends people tend to be afraid of this it might be the idea that you have to pick up the

phone and call someone You don't know it might be walking into a shop with someone you don't know but this is like hey there's a you you're putting together a targeted list of the people you want to talk to or companies you want to talk to and going after and figure out how to talk to them so probably the last place most of you would go but one of the most important skills to learn at some point so start with mouth that's easiest don't be and naturally I think people end up with Like the marketing

or called social media don't be afraid of prospecting or sales uh I'm going to skip through a little bit of this stuff except for the idea on the word of mouth side you know the book we want again predictable ways to generate opportunities right so if again or if you were trying to get in front of um who has a who has a business here who has an app yeah what kind of app we have a Starting business to start yep it's a water sampling equipment oh that's pretty close actually water sampling who do you

sell to or would our niche market is academic Research Laboratories okay so academic Research Laboratories and you sells water filtration sorry what is it it's an app or it's it's a product it's a hardware device that samples okay hardware and have have you gotten any meetings for it yet uh no we just had the NBC Competition we won the MBC competion but we're still trying to find some inv so let's perfect example this works right you you should start so basically if you couldn't hear it water filtration system they'd sell to academic Laboratories they haven't

they just barely started they just want a competition Congratulations by the way I never won any competition So you you're going to do much better than me in 20 years but where you would start would be people Here on campus right is there is there a laboratory here on campus that's the first place you go knock on their door and then after that you're like who's next door is there another College nearby go like okay where you know people after that you might start post here or are you already posting on Instagram or okay you

might be posting on social media but then that that's not going to get you that far in maybe at some point you say look what are the Other colleges we need to talk to the other La sorry academic Laboratories we need to talk to to and why aren't they if they're not calling us how do we go call on them that's where you would make a list and whether it's through email friend phone call you go talk to them you need to go don't wait around for them for the phone to ring this is where

this idea that overnight success oh we just put up this blog post or this social media YouTube video and my people Are going to call us doesn't work that way you have to go out and make it happen and so with Word of Mouth those networks when you can the the probably the number one one of the number one points from tonight if you remember it is this idea they call customer success and it's simple right the more the more successful you can make your customers the more likely they're going to refer others but when

you can systematize this And you have you say all right we know who the best customers are we know how to find them we know how to they they buy but we know how to make sure they they get value from it because you it's too easy to assume they're going to know how to do this how can you walk through walk them through the process process make sure they they not only buy it but they they get the results they want they get the results they want and they appreciate it and do that in

a Systematic way so your customers are happy and when they are they get better case studies they come case studies and testimonials or references so when you can publish stories about them so you have better stories to publish or when other Laboratories want to buy it and they ask well who else is using it and you tell them they can call those people and your customer will say yes I give them a thumbs up cuz if you don't have happy customers you got Nothing you may have to by the way you might have to don't

be afraid of starting with unhappy customers because sometimes you have to get something off the ground and it doesn't work for a while and people just don't like it in order to get to the point where you know what to build don't be afraid of some failure uh marketing so remember we're trying to get these meetings one way we just go ask our friends another way is to Marketing where ideally you try to find a way it's called a a funnel to say what if we do you know 20 posts or we do 10 webinars

we do five events some number of marketing activities and there's a there's there's all kinds right there's PPC there's could be social there's events there's uh got you know I don't know webinars all kinds of things if we do or if we do 100 events and 500 people come then and 10% of them are a good fit for our product and then 50% of them Actually interested in buying it and you're trying to get to the point where you have some predictability you can say oh okay if we do 10 events we're going to generate

two customers and that is some the kind of thinking you need in order to control how fast your business can grow and not be dependent on like well the phone didn't ring today okay so what are you going to do uh so I mentioned we Word of Mouth marketing marketing is like one to many Broadcasting now prospecting is is really my specialty I worked at a company called salesforce.com and I created this called outbound prospecting system that helped them add $100 million in a few years and and since send probably like a billion dollars to

their revenue I don't know if that means anything or not but it's a lot of money and this system works where again let's say there's uh how many uh let's say there's a thousand academic Libraries in the United States uh Laboratories say all right there's a thousand of those La let's just like get the whole list and you know really there's only five 00 that could or would be a good fit for what we sell or maybe 200 so let's like find let's get their contact information it could be phone numbers email addresses social media

you know for Laboratories there's probably a lot less social media they're still light they don't use it as much so email Is still the number one way to get in touch with people and again we want to get something predictable so if you said if we send 500 emails a month to these Laboratories we should get 10 meetings a month and there's some calls and other steps let say if we do x per month we know we we need to do X in order to get 10 meetings a month and if we have 10 meetings

or demos that will they'll 20% will buy right this gives you some Predictability to know if you need to generate a million dollars next year you can work backward say well I just need to send you know Target this number of people this this number of emails and calls this number of demos and so on right some predictability so you're not guessing all the time you don't want to I mean when you can help it you don't want to guess with your money because if you have a business or you have a nonprofit does anyone

here they started You have a nonprofit you run maybe not nonprofits are tough they are tough and you think is there someone here oh he's hiding yes all right what kind of nonprofit it's a volunteer organization I don't think the mic's working volunteer organization uh okay what's it called uh the Welsh Foundation the Welsh wel Foundation yes Welsh Welsh found Foundation um the scale of 1 to 10 10 being impossible how much either how Hard is it or how much do you enjoy raising money for it or keeping it financially sustainable so one is like

a joy super easy 10 is like ah this is so freaking hard so we we actually don't raise we don't do fundraising that's not our primary uh objective of the organization it's primarily uh to encourage individuals to uh become active in the community and volunteer for for events and and and that sort of thing okay so no you don't really have To deal with money correct yeah okay that's one way to do it right because it could be a pain in the ass generally at some point if you want to take something bigger and not

that everything does you end up having money is always very important like it's I don't there's I'm sure there's things um movements that help change the world and help change people's lives and ultimately at some point money is usually part of that to take something Make it bigger but it's tough and if you're fundraising for a nonprofit if you if that's involved you know this is the same idea or if you're trying to raise money or a Kickstarter campaign is more like the marketing part right this is like a Kickstarter campaign I'm trying to collegify

my talk uh all right so part of that is like there's a thous so if there's one takeaway though there's there could be like a thousand ways to Market your Idea depending on what you're comfortable with depending on what you're good at depending on what you're selling don't do it's sort of like s AG don't try a thousand things try like three or two or one or maybe try 10 and but narrow it down to one or two or three things that you can really triple down in just scattering your energy over like tons of

stuff and you can really get great at Kickstarter you can really get great at YouTube or whatever the Like really focus your energy so in other words it's like try a bunch of stuff and then focus on what works triple down on that uh all right part three the painful truth is if you have something you're trying to grow it speeding up growth actually can create more problems than it solves you might think oh hey we won this competition woohoo and then next day you're like oh wait now we got to do something with this

right is are you more or less Stressed today than you were like a week ago I mean before you even entered the competition because that's a whole another stress way more stressed who think if you have a company you start has anyone here raised venture capital or raised outside funding yeah John okay wait a sec if you have okay if you think oh if we have this app or we have this app uh you know and we raise money wow we're Going to be successful no not necessarily you will be more stressed because then you

have more responsibilities like next level right raising them if you think raising money is the goal and it's like if you raise the right money or enough no it gets way harder because then you got to spend it you got to earn it back how you going to make money it's it can be a great forcing function to force you to figure out how to make money with Your project so again example of trying to go faster where that's growing sales where that's getting out there whether that's raising money whatever that is or or turning

your dream into a project it first creates more problems but they're better problems uh I'm going to skip this part um actually one so this is like tips to a sales leader of a company from a Successful VP sales and I will say that if you think there's anything in business that encourages people to lie cheat or steal yes but that's on the Shady Side in all the most successful businesses well not all but you'll find just there's just as many or more people who say be honest up you know up and down from the

from the bottom of the company to the top honesty is really powerful yeah some People are going to lie but we want that to be the exception you don't have to you shouldn't now if there's 200 people in here there's probably at least by by rule of averages at least one sociopath or psychopath it's probably you uh maybe I don't know close close second but there's other people who just they can't help a lie um but you know honestly it may not it may be scary to admit sometime you win a competition but Suddenly then

you realize wow this product doesn't work the way we thought or we're about to raise money but wait a second something fell apart but you know honesty is really important especially in businesses especially in sales and especially in relationships if who's who here has a girlfriend or boyfriend how like I know you get like hookups and things but if you have someone that is more your you know how many and I'll bet most of you who hold your hand up There's probably something you'd like to tell them that you're holding back on if you're honest

about it it better to tell them and deal with it uh one last thing on this slide actually we're going to get to the next one Sor there's a lesson here I'm going to I'm going to repeat it in the next actually section because it's so important so I'm going to wait on it uh one more thing on this how to grow what you Do um focus like you know honestly if there's probably one word today that I would take away it's really about Focus you know doing fewer things better so that's the kinds of

opportunities or problems you're looking to solve the way you're marketing them and sort of what you're doing every day now in a sales uh sales team the way that sales has always worked has anyone here had a sales job on campus or before okay it's a bunch Did you have to do your own prospecting for whatever you did no uh good people are learning but traditionally when I did I did sales at Stanford the Stanford newspaper and it you know pretty much sucked but I don't know I just want to try it had some friend

who tried it and I had to find out my all the my own like leads and and try to close them and I wasn't very good at it by the Way and most sales for hundreds of years has been you're in sales you need to do your own prospecting or find your own customers to sell or close and what now this is what I probably I'm probably the number one proponent to be you know telling people there's a different way is that as you start to build your organization and it's not just in sales it's

every part of the company really just for some reason sales is the last One to do it you want to have more of a te you know it's probably going to sound stupid simple to you I hope but most people Fortune 5,000 Executives build sales teams based on you're a salesperson you need to go Prospect you need to get your leads and close them that's how most businesses do it but what you need to do is actually have a team- based approach roach where you've got you know in means there's like a team of Junior

salespeople who Responding to people calling you like inbound leads people calling you on the 800 number or off you know your website it's different than an outbound team of people who are doing the prospecting and they're putting that list together they're calling emailing social media whatever to reach out to those people who aren't calling you and that's again different than people who are assigned to like signing up new customers and those are different roles than people Who are maintaining the current customers making sure they're happy or sort of uh offering the new products to buy

now it may seem really simple like on a sports team you've got forwards and halfbacks and Defenders and goalies and all right people don't do it this way I don't know why I think it's just habit so this has like been a revolution in the sales world that you have Prospectors to prospect versus closers versus this that the other special so But the principle is when you have enough um when you have a team of something happening and this happens in engineering is people do fewer things better or you know have divide divide and conquer

so everyone's doing fewer things better less juggling less multitasking now if you're uh one person or two people the way you would do this is you would look at specializing focusing time on your calendar so let's say that You're trying to build an app you're like I just can't get the time to build this app okay well when I wrote this last book I blocked off Wednesday is my writing day because I can't do it like an hour here hour there I just can't so again I took the principal specialization I did it with my

calendar where Wednesday is writing day or for some people that you like you just block out time in your calendar for that thing that you need to get to but you can't Seem to get to that's how you start with this idea and you can use it tomorrow whether it's studying getting launching getting something off the ground getting a job um learning something a skill you've been putting off okay so that's one of the ways you make it easier for you to to grow your business grow your project just focus on like a key thing

that you need to do uh now this is I think a really important lesson for especially younger Entrepreneurs whether whether you're doing like anything is that it's hard to build a big business out of small deals if you're selling dollar I mean people do it now I'm from the be businessto business World which means I'm used to selling to businesses and so like a business uh you know there's business to Consumer called B Toc where most of you are consumers you buy an app off you know iTunes for a dollar um I'm more used to

saying all Right you've developed an app how can you instead of selling an iTunes for a dollar which is great as long as you have that funnel working what if you could take that and take it to a business and sell it to them for 10 for like a subscription of $10,000 a year so they're they're just different businesses have money they like to spend money if you can solve a problem but either way the idea is you can start with small deals to get started either Like you have free users or they're like a

dollar or $50 or whatever like just to get off the ground do anything whatever you got to do but as soon as you can figure out how to do bigger deals on the consumer side it use usually means going to some sort of bigger uh called distribution place to like a big partner if you can get it through someone who's going to sell it for you or um on uh obviously um if there's a uh try think of a popular I don't know the New York Times if you can get that's not a good example

trying to think of like good I know Channel partner that they would recognize BuzzFeed BuzzFeed okay if you could you get this app and it's working it's like they're all free users you're not making any money but it gives you the credibility to go to a place like BuzzFeed or some big media outlet and they're like this is yes we're going to promote this because you've you've proven this is cool and it gets you to Like a bigger deal a bigger partner who's going to promote it for you and maybe there's a way to make

money then that's how you make money with or make an impact with whatever your project is if you're selling to businesses again you might do hey $10 you make some website and you charge people $10 a month for the thing to get started you ain't going to make any money at that but if that gets you to the point where you got enough proof where you can sort Of repackage it and read the book and learn how or it's all online but read how to it's not that big a leap take a $10 month app

and repackage it so you can sell it to a business who buys it for like all their employees and you make you know $20,000 a year instead so fewer bigger deals that's s of my background so anyway uh when you do the math and you think about if you do a dollar app or free app if you create an iPhone app or Android or whatever and It's like it's a free app right you get downloads but okay if you if 1% of the people buy if you actually do the math you have to get like

millions of users to make any money so some of you might have done this or may do it it's not my area but like think about the math of like if you want to make a certain amount of money how many individuals a dollar do you have to get versus how many businesses at $10,000 and sort of those or if You're selling dollar apps how do you get that to the point where you can justify getting bigger exposure or bigger Partners all right part five and unfortun this is the painful truth is it's going to

take years longer than you want so whatever your dream is right now and whatever goals you have by the age 30 in general this is how it works if you want to start a software company It's more likely to take 10 years than one year to get to some point where it's financially successful or you exit if you start uh call like a s a software is a Service Company like SAS or businessto business software it probably takes two or three years to get it to the point where there's you even know if this is

going to be successful or not is there something here or not uh you know the stories like Instagram you know it happens but They're really the exception and what they don't show or anyone here heard of this company slack slack is a company that uh there's articles that came out like a year or two ago saying hey how this company went from zero to a billion dollars in 12 in like eight months it was zero to a billion or maybe it's 10 months right because it's company it was a busino business company it's like chat

For companies they released it and just like took off and they didn't make a billion dollars in Revenue but investors came in and valued the company it more than a billion within less than a it was definitely less than a year of them releasing the product and uh oh my God it's like it's like the f one of the fastest growing software companies ever and of course what they didn't with the the loves to Amp up super fast results whether they succeeded super fast or failed super fast and what they left out was this company

which by the way started by the one of the guys who uh sold flicker so was already someone who'd been successful this company struggled doing getting anything done was unsuccessful for five years before they hit on this thing but they don't like to talk about that because it's not good for the story all these overnight successes Leave out the usually years of hard work that people put in to get to the point where it was successful and even if you going back to the O uh overnight success is a fairy tale even if you get

lucky or maybe you're just super brilliant and you have some big success a lot of times that that overnight success doesn't it's like you're a one- hit wonder how do you want how do you make sure you're not a one- hit wonder you have to go back and like Earn the success later so you can dream about it but be prepared for the journey to be a lot longer and harder than you would realize or expect or hope even and uh I think here I don't if this laser works so this is there's these different

paths I think this so This middle path like straight line to the treasure but I do my own art uh the straight line to the treasure is sort of like your dream oh I wish I Could just make a million dollars next month or change the whatever your dream is and you think well but it'll probably involve like I got to get like a job and then I got to do this and I got to climb these mountains and then you know then I'll you know make it the reality is you know you start off

and you like end up wandering in the desert desert and circles for years and then you're like okay I'll get out of that oh damn it there's this Dragon I'm getting toasted And then oh got out of that ah damn I lamed in the volcano with the lava ah you know it's just like this uh you know this the journey is way harder and longer than you would expect and again this is something that now 20 years later I would not have really appreciated but it's it's harder but also the value is often you don't

get to success with going through those tough times like those tough times are what help make you successful and whether It's in personal I don't know you guys are probably too young but is anyone here married or already divorced uh you know some of the things I learned most when I had my first internet business fail super hard but I learned the most from that or when I had a I was married before and that I got divorced I learned a ton from that it's incredibly painful but sometimes those things we learn a lot more

from our failures than from our successes so easy To say it's uh hard to remember when you're in the in the hot coals and something exacerbates this problem because this is really more of an issue around like expectations and determination and persistence because you're thinking okay I should have this app created in like people I should be like at 10,000 users in three months and when you've got 10 users in three months you're like oh my God I'm failing I quit I'm going to go do Something else but the reality again if you just keep

plugging might maybe it should take you three years to get to that point this this um art these unrealistic expectations so part of this is I call those reality Distortion field has been created by social media it's really accelerated it because they're surrounded by stories of people's success like our friends family you know someone got this app on the app storees number one or someone sold this company Someone got this job someone has this incredible girlfriend or boyfriend um they're killing it why am I struggling why am I struggling when everyone else is crushing it

right do how many do people in here feel that way it's okay yeah you don't have to put your arm up you probably do in college you can't help it can you unless you have no goals and if you had no goals you wouldn't be here in this program seriously we're surrounded by success And but you have to remember that it's an it's call a reality Distortion field because the only thing people generally post is are it's mostly good news because it's exciting to share and yeah you might want to look good too but it's

also exciting when you're arguing with your girlfriend or boyfriend how much do you want to like stop and be wait a second I got to post this so not only can be embarrassing It's also an invasion of their privacy plus you just it's not like appropriate you're not going to like stop and do it so there there's there's plenty of reasons why most social media we see is positive what you have to remember is everyone you see who succeeding is also dealing with a bunch of sh too but they're not posting it they're not whoever

here got like the prime McKenzie or won the competition right he Said now I'm way more stressed by the way it's still it's a better problem to have right growth creates more problems it's a better problem it's still a problem so it's not like you're going to get there even make a lot of money and be like oh now I can just relax and Coast the rest of my life it doesn't work that way so that's why I say we have this anxiety economy where everyone's like anxious because they're not doing enough They're not succeeding

enough I'm not my thing isn't good enough and you know it may not be it may be crap but it's exacerbated by all the stories and you may realize wow you know I'm only in year one it probably would take me another year to get this thing to the point where it's not horrible and people actually really like it it took me two years to get to co-write this book I didn't think it' take that long but uh okay so the year say I mentioned Too a software company might take two years to get off

the ground to the point where you know if you got something or it might take five to 10 years to go through the point of starting it and growing it and then selling it and we calling it an exit and making money off of it I have one of my friends from college who been working on a software company for like 15 years he's still not quite to the point where he could probably sell it but not as much as he Feels like it's it's worth 15 years all right last couple bits of the book

is really not so much about sales marketing but about people some of this may or may not make sense to you today but it's really helping you understand if you get a job how do you think about being an employee how do you be successful uccessful in your career now part of that is understanding how managers owners or bosses or Executives think because if you don't understand How they think or what they want and you won't at first until you are one but at least you know it's like how to stop being very like selfish

and being balancing being selfish for what you need with how do you give them what they need now the painful truth of part six this chapter is really for like business owners and Executives and managers so this case that's not this might be a few of you but the point is even if you're going to be an employee or student how Do you see how they think and the painful truth is your employees again let's assume you're all CEOs or managers your employees are renting not owning their jobs in fact if there's teachers here your

most of your students are renting not owning their classes what does that mean okay you don't have to read this but in the book there's a letter in fact I've had a bunch of people say this is their favorite part of the book but this is a Letter from an employee to an executive it's a letter from an employee to a CEO it's called that and the letter says basically dear CEO um I really enjoy working here at this company by how many of you are interning or working at someplace right now okay a bunch

of you okay so maybe this let's see how if I get this right I really enjoy working here um like I like the people good opportunity I believe in what you're doing but I Don't feel heard or appreciated I don't feel like my ideas are being respected or taken seriously and you know what if I had the right opportunity I would crush it dear or you know your best employee uh or was I pretty close I've been one but what would the flip side look like if the CEO wrote you a letter back right so

I know a lot of companies say well our younger people they want to Be promoted every three months like you know they need this that all right well if a CEO wrote you a letter back they would say something like this dear employee I appreciate you working here I wouldn't have hired you if I didn't like you and see the potential for you to add value to or to be successful here dear employee uh I believe in you right I wouldn't have hired you otherwise if I didn't Think you had a lot to add here

I didn't think you'd be successful here with us whether it's as an intern or a salary employee or whatever or a volunteer I know you get frustrated I'm not dumb um but you know you're missing out you're not take thing is you're not taking advantage of your opportunity here you don't realize how big your opportunity is here if you really go for it and if you're the type who's waiting To be told how to be successful if you're waiting for me to tell you how to succeed in terms of leapfrogging in your career the way

you want to you're missing the whole point the people who Lea frog in their career however you define career some of you may not go into companies the people who Lea frog in their like vision of success are the ones that take the initiative they don't need to wait around to have their hands held they go And make it happen they're the ones who come to me and make my life easier solve my problem maybe a problem I know about maybe when I didn't know about and go out and make it happen for me that's

how you Advance your career faster so in other words if you need me to tell you what to do all the time if you need to tell me if you need me to tell you how to be successful you're just making more work for Me so that's what an owner would do it's sort of how do you be an entrepreneur or think like one in any situation you are rather than waiting to be told what to do so the difference here for again an owner is thinking about your employees what you don't realize as an

owner is that your every owner like every manager every owner says this like my employees don't work as hard as I do they don't take the initiative as hard as much as I would think they should why do they need Their hands held all the time that's how they think uh they don't put in the extra mile to them what I say is well your employees don't go the extra mile because they don't feel like they own anything they don't act like owners because they don't own anything and this example really is hit home for

a lot of Executives where you can compare like how do you treat if you own a car versus rent a car how do you treat them or if You owned an apartment versus rent a hotel room how would you treat them differently uh if you had kids versus Babys someone else's kids how would you treat them if you have your own project or work or Glades how do you treat that versus if you're like helping someone else's stuff you don't like emotionally fully own it and so you you you just put in the minimum if

you don't really own it you just like do the minimum and most people most employees do the minimum Well it's it doesn't matter whose fault it is it's partly the employees partly the owner right that's why we have a chapter for owners chapter for employees so let me phrase it this way you're not going to be as successful as you want by doing the minimum all right last part this chapter is for employees right uh and I think this is again something I wouldn't really appreciated Is like now now being older this painful truth that

you know most people let your frustration stop you rather than motivate you now I can say if you're looking for Success money impact fame maybe love it doesn't happen when you go on the kitty ride right the easy job the easy class the easy opportunity it happens when you go for Like the challenging one where you're not sure if you can do it or you're stretching yourself or it's a market that maybe you're not sure about um you're not one out of a thousand apps that all look the same you're doing something new or difficult

or right it's the it's not to be afraid of something that uh or it's like not always trying to take the easiest road so how can you Embrace frustration because frustration is a part of grow as Part of doing something new you can't avoid it unless you do nothing congratulations on the book Aaron we really appreciate you coming than thank [Applause] [Music] you