What I Learned Buying and Selling Over 100 Businesses — Roland Frasier
What I Learned Buying and Selling Over 100 Businesses — Roland Frasier
Episode Summary
Roland Frasier is a strategic investor who has bought and sold over 100 public and private companies. He specializes in creative deal structuring and low and no money down acquisitions where he can add value, grow, scale, and sell the businesses he acquires. Roland shared his tips on how to be successful in business and how to balance your time so you maximize your return on joy.
Episode Notes
Growing up I spent a lot of time at my father’s tax law firm and I met a lot of small business entrepreneurs that were coming in. I got to know several of them and thought it was pretty cool that they didn’t wear suits and were doing work they loved. I was also introduced to two resources that impacted me which were Nothing Down by Robert Allen and The Psychology of Winning by Denis Waitley.
One of the biggest challenges when starting a new business can be determining what you should focus on. The first tip I share with people is, don’t spend all of your time getting ready to be ready. If you look at the statistics on business failures they say your best chance of having success is only around 30 percent. So early on your focus should be to see if people will buy your product or service. It sounds really simple but the lack of product-market fit is one of the main reasons businesses fail. The second tip I share is to not take money from other people to start a business. That drive to make the business work when it is all you have will help you iterate faster and find the solution to the problem you are trying to solve.
Once you have a proven solution that also has demand, then work towards replacing yourself so that you are not an essential part of the day-to-day operations. Being able to remove yourself from the daily operations of the business is important to your happiness, health, and homelife, plus it provides the option to sell the business in the future. Lastly, there is a point when things are going well that you need to shift your focus towards building wealth so you can have financial freedom that isn’t tied to your business.
As it relates to your marketing efforts most early-stage businesses focus on direct marketing to jumpstart their growth. This is good and often the right choice however, as your company matures so should your marketing funnel. When you get to the point that your business has share a voice it makes sense to begin brand advertising. While it would be dumb to start with brand advertising as a new business, once you have those direct marketing channels dialed in adding brand advertising makes complete sense.
The biggest untapped opportunity I see in most local businesses is not maximizing the lifetime value of their existing customers. It starts by reviewing the customer journey to see if there are other items they buy before, during, or after their purchase with you that you could offer as well. This allows you to extend your product or service offering to the customers that are already doing business with you.
Time blocking is the time management method I use to maximize my productivity. Not only do I schedule times for appointments but I also schedule time for family or vacations. The key to being successful is to make your schedule in advance because if you don’t your calendar tends to fill up. Something I do that most others do not is I manage my calendar, which allows me to choose what makes it on my schedule. As Steve Jobs said, “it is really easy to drown in opportunity” and I take that to heart when I work on planning. Planning helps to ensure what you choose to spend your time on also brings you the greatest return on joy or ROJ.
Resources Shared
Episode Transcription
Roland Frasier: Don’t spend all your time getting ready to get ready. Also, don’t take money from other people to start. Because if you are scrappy, if you have to make it work, then you’re a lot more likely to move and iterate faster towards the thing that’s going to work for you. And then once you have that, replacing yourself so that you can get a repeatable business that you are not essential to is really, really important. It’s important to your happiness and health, your home life and your ability to ultimately have the option, if you would like to, to sell the business and maybe do something else and get paid for it.
Thryv: The following is brought to you by Thryv, the end-to-end client experience platform that helps you get the job, manage the job and get credits.
Gordon Henry: I’m Gordon Henry and this is Winning on Main Street. Welcome. Each week here at Winning on Main Street, we bring you actionable insights for entrepreneurs and small business owners. And this week we’re going to jump right into it because we have an incredible guest who has a lot to say to small business owners, Roland Frasier. Whether you’re interested in starting, growing, buying, or selling a business, you’re going to want to hear what Roland has to say. Roland’s a world famous deal-maker. He started in real estate when he was 18 and founded one of the top law firms in San Diego. Now advises over 150 major companies on how to monetize and grow their businesses.
He’s also passionate about entrepreneurs and gives them the tools and knowledge they need with a focus on acquiring customers through direct marketing. He runs [inaudible 00:01:43] called digitalmarketer.com and the Traffic & Conversion Summit and annual conference in San Diego. And we’re going to get into that just a minute. Welcome, Roland.
Roland Frasier: Hey, Gordon. Thanks for having me.
Gordon Henry: You really have quite an amazing background and I sort of like to start at the beginning. You have a kind of interesting origin story, how you got started at such a young age. Can you tell us about that?
Roland Frasier: There were two, I would say, two really important things in addition to coming from a family where my father had his own law practice and he had a tax practice. He still does. And so I got to see all these entrepreneurs coming in, all these small, medium-sized businesses that he was helping with their tax stuff. And I just kept looking at… I got to know several of them. And I was like, “This is really cool. These people, they don’t wear suits. They kind of do what they want. I like this entrepreneurial gig, it seems pretty good.” And he actually introduced me to two books that were really, really important. In the real estate space, it was a book by Robert Allen called Nothing Down on how to buy real estate with no money down.
And I was like, “This is fantastic. I love that.” And the funny thing about that too, is that in that book, when I was reading it, I think interest rates were 12% and heading towards 16 or 18. And he was talking about all these assumable 6% deals. And I was like, “Those days are gone forever.” And now here we are half that. And the other one was, in the back of his car, there was a cassette tape program of Dennis Waitley’s The Psychology of Winning. And I listened to them and it just lit me up. Both of those things. I was like, “This is crazy. You can set goals and then you can achieve them and don’t have to pay anything for the real estate stuff. I love it.” So that’s really what launched me. And so when I turned 18, I got my real estate license because I was like, “This is where I’m going to start.” And then that just kind of led, I won’t bore you with all the details, but led to kind of where I am now.
Gordon Henry: Our audience is a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs. And I’d like to ask you, what are some of the key things you tell early stage, small business owners to focus on and what are some of the things they should not focus on?
Roland Frasier: And it’s a really great question. One of the biggest challenges I think is knowing what to do as far as what your focus should be. And there’s a point where things change. So the very first thing, obviously, is don’t spend all your time getting ready to get ready. And I can tell you sophisticated people make that mistake too. It’s like, I’ll get my logos done. And my business cards and fill this really cool website and all this. I’m like, “What are you selling? How have you proved that what you want to do is going to actually work?” And if you look at the statistics for business failures, they say that the best chance of success you have is only 30% if you’ve had multiple successful businesses in the past. And there’s people in Silicon Valley with all their degrees and everything else, investment bankers and attorneys fail 75% of the time.
So it’s a tough road to hoe, but definitely worth it. But I think that you’ve got to know that you have a product or a service that people will buy. It sounds really dumb and simple, but dag-gone man, product market fit is one of the leading reasons that businesses go out of business within the first few years. So I’d say that first, before you spend any money doing anything else, think about finding that thing that your customers will buy. Also, don’t take money from other people to start. Because if you are scrappy, if you have to make it work, then you’re a lot more likely to move and iterate faster towards the thing that’s going to work for you. And what I’ve watched time after time, particularly in the venture capital world is that they just go raise money from friends and family.
And if you ever wanted to raise money, friends and family are a great place, but don’t you want to be absolutely sure they’re going to get it back without you having to go work a job to do it? So I think that focus on proving your thing, not taking money too fast, remembering that equity is the most expensive thing, capital you’ll ever get. There’s a whole bunch of other things you can do, which we can talk about later as opposed to that. And then once you have that thing that’s going to work, that you actually have a demand for, replacing yourself so that you can get a repeatable business that you are not essential to is really, really important. It’s important to your happiness and health, your home life and your ability to ultimately have the option, if you would like to, to sell the business and maybe do something else and get paid for it.
So I think that’s it. And then couple that with there’s a point at which things are going well, and many of you might have that right now. It’s like, I got it. I just want more. And the thing to start thinking about there is when you get enough money to pay the bills and provide some level of life that you’re happy with, it’s really important to switch your focus to wealth. Because I see so many people that are focused on the short-term income thing and they build businesses and make a million, two, three, $4 million a year or more, but the minute that they stop doing the thing they’re doing, it’s all gone. And so they build great income, but zero wealth.
Gordon Henry: Right. So let’s just continue with that thought. So is the idea that the business has to be able to run itself without me so that I can either let it run without me, or eventually sell it because what people want to buy as businesses that aren’t dependent on the entrepreneur themselves, right?
Roland Frasier: Exactly. So you don’t want to make your personality the brand of the business. Personality brands are really, really hard to sell. It’s okay if you’ve done that to start. But you’re going to have to transition out. And we’ve done that in several companies. So think of yourself as Warren Buffet or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs or Richard Branson or Sara Blakely. You’re propping up the company as a spokesperson for it. And you can have your personal brand, but the company needs to have its own personality as well. And we do a thing called a character diamond where we actually build a character for the company to have its own existence.
And that’s kind of fun. And then you can always say, hey, this is Gordon and I’m here with my company, I’m here to talk about my company, but that’s kind of… I think it’s really powerful to have both, but it’s incredibly disempowering if you are the brand. Because the minute you go away it’s gone and you can’t sell it without having a five, eight year contract that they’re going to keep you on at a nominal salary, you’re really, really handcuffed to it.
Gordon Henry: So you’re an investor. What are some of the things that you personally look for when you’re making an investment in a new business?
Roland Frasier: So I don’t invest in new businesses very often at all. So I’ll say that as the first thing. There are a couple of things that I am invested in right now. If you read the book Antifragile, he talks in there about one of the smartest things that you can do. And it’s also in a book that a lot of people hadn’t heard of called How I Lost a Million Dollars. And in both of those cases, what they say is that the biggest challenge is losing money. And when you get into family offices and wealth management and all that, the biggest thing that they talk about is wealth preservation. And so I like to think that way is never bet the farm, right? So how do I… and my dad lost everything betting the farm. He bet the farm, came from nothing. But the farm, bet the farm, bet the farm, bet the farm, eventually, eventually, one loss and you’re wiped out, right?
And it was tens of millions of dollars. He’d done an amazing job and it was really devastating to him. And so I think realizing that you want to make your investments, small bets that have really huge potential payoff with very low risk. And everybody’s like, “Well, that’s the Nirvana. And everybody wants that.” But they’re out there. And so I spotted… Because my kids wanted to go to this League of Legends video game world championship in LA. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’ll get you tickets. Send me a link or something.” And they were like, “No, no. You don’t understand. It’s at the Staples Center and it sold out in two minutes.” I was like, “What the heck?” I’m like, “They’re just going to watch people play video games?”
Yeah. It’s five people on each side, big screen, somebody talking like a football player. He’s exploding up the right side, right? And I saw that and I was like, “Wow. That’s like sports for everybody.” And that’s a huge potential. And I started digging into it and I watched the prize money go up and up and up and team’s value and all that stuff. And so I saw a trend that I thought was really, really awesome. And I think Peter Lynch talks about that in his book, Beating the Street or Beat the Street where a lot of his, what he called 10 baggers, the things that [inaudible 00:10:35], were things that he just… He went to Boston market before it was anything. Obviously, eventually it had challenges. So those things that you see in your life as opposed to going into crypto when you don’t have any understanding of crypto, right?
That to me, that’s not an investment, that’s a gamble, which is okay. If you want to make a small bet in crypto or if you’re Elon, maybe a small bet’s a billion and a half dollars in your company, right? And it might pay off great, but don’t kid yourself and think it’s an investment.
So that first thing is like a mindset thing to me is what is the small bet that I can make on something that’s got a rising tide that will likely rise, raise all boats? And then even if I didn’t pick the right company, it’s likely to get gobbled up by somebody else for kind of crazy money because there’s a lot of money out there chasing deals. And I can get out of that. So I bet on those kinds of things, with small amounts of money, or as an advisor, and that works really well.
Then, when you get into the business and you start to say, “Okay, I’m interested in…” One of the ones was called the high school e-sports league. And so when you go into a company that you’re thinking about investing in and you see all brand new Apple computers on every desk and iPads and floating desks and a cereal bar and a wall of dreams and all this other stuff-
Gordon Henry: Foosball.
Roland Frasier: Not for me. Yeah. I’m not investing in that.
Gordon Henry: Foosball game.
Roland Frasier: Yeah, exactly. They got a foosball maybe room.
Gordon Henry: Cappuccino machine.
Roland Frasier: Yes, yes. And so it’s important to have a culture, but again, scrappy. I want people that are scrappy. So if I see that they’re kind of in a hole in the wall, working until midnight on all their stuff, and they’re really focused on the dag-gone products, not on all this other stuff, which is important, but not until you have a tag on product. So that’s really simple. Low risk, on trend raising industry. And McKinsey did a study and said that the single most important factor in any business’s success is catching a tailwind. If you’re in the right industry at the right time, you’re going to get blown up higher in a good way. So looking for that, and then also getting to know the owners, the founders, and to be sure that they are scrappy and passionate about what they’re doing. Because I know lots of founders who have raised money, moved on, raised money, moved on. They’re just looking to kind of keep using investor money until they get lucky. And I don’t like that at all.
Gordon Henry: I got to ask you this question. I’m a huge Shark Tank fanatic, and you seem like the perfect shark. Have you ever been asked to be on Shark Tank?
Roland Frasier: No. I know those guys. Damon is a friend and Kevin Harrington, who was on there early, we had Kevin O’Leary out. So we’ve been up there and my partners have been on the set and everything. But I think they’re looking for a different kind of person. I don’t want to be famous. I like the idea of being rich. The famous part, not so much.
Gordon Henry: Not so much. Yeah. Okay. Just crossed my mind as you were talking. So just to continue on this investment discussion, which is fascinating, I love your advice. So that’s some of your ideas about how to make an investment in a new business, the things you look for in a new business or an entrepreneur. Let’s talk about at the other end of the process. When is it time to sell a business? How do you know it’s time to get out?
Roland Frasier: Yeah. So a few things to think would be, one, if you at all, feel yourself losing a passion for the business, if there’s a shiny object as many of us entrepreneurs tend to see, and you’re starting to take your eye off it, you really want a solid growth trend when you’re looking to sell. So there’s a whole bunch of factors, it’s like 21 factors that we go through when we’re looking at a business to acquire, to know that we can get it in the place to be sold. And so you want to think about things like, “Do I have defensible IP? Do I have some unique advantage like you do with Thryv?” I’ve got something that is intellectual property. I’ve created apart from myself that has value and creates a barrier to entry for other people. That gives me moat, which can be a lot of things.
Moat is just what are the things that they’re going to have to swim through the alligator infested waters to get to this thing, as opposed to, “I’m a drop shipper. Great. How hard is it for you to be a drop shipper? Not at all.” So you want to think about having the staff, what we call bench strength, of multiple people that can perform different functions. Ideally they’re cross trained. You want to have a brand that has a share of voice, meaning that it has some good recognition out in the market, preferably in the top five, when we’re buying. You want to have a culture in the business where the employees are happy, which is measured regularly, using something that’s called ENPS, employee net promoter score.
The other side of that is that you want to be sure that you can grow through referrals. And the best measure of that that I’ve seen is net promoter score. And that’s that little thing with the unhappy face and happy face, and you kind of pick out which one we want. And there’s a formula for calculating it. Measuring that is really something that I’ve seen become increasingly important to buyers. They want to see that. You want to have a TAM that is big enough, a total addressable market, so that you want to sell before you’ve got 90% of the market, because your buyer is looking at, if it’s private equity, they’re looking to five, six, eight X that. It’s got to be a big way to go so that they can get their money back, because they’re going to pay you for a multiple of either your roughly profit, which we call EBITDA, or your revenue, if you’re a subscription or software company.
And it’s going to take them a while to get that back, unless it grows, in which case it’s a good investment. All the legal stuff buttoned up. We’re doing a public offering for a software company that I advise right now. And we’ve got to go back and get all of the Romanian developers to sign the releases that weren’t signed before to be sure that the code, because they used an outsourcer and the outsourcer used people… And it’s like, but that stuff’s important to the buyers. And I’ll tell you why, because one of my favorite learnings from doing this all the time was when we had created an asset protection plan for a motorcycle helmet company that I was involved with. And because there’s so many claims there, we wanted to have the valuable intellectual property assets, which were the brands, held by a separate company that nobody could get to, and then license them to the operating company that manufactured, which would have the liability.
And we ended up selling to a big well-known buyout firm and it was all cool. And they looked at all the agreements. Everything’s disclosed, and they’re like, “Okay, you get this license. And this is great.” And then they went to sell to a public company, and the public company was like, “Yeah, you licensed it. You need to own those brands.” And they were like, “Oh.” And they came back to us and they were like, “So, about the brand thing, can you just give that to us?” And we end up getting more for it than what we sold the company for. So that was an interesting thing to learn, that there’s a lot of value in that as well. And then there’s a million other things. So I’ll shut up.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, no, those are great tips, great advice. So it seems like you’re really a direct marketer at heart. When I looked through your background, a lot of things you do, it’s about direct marketing, and specifically for those who aren’t so up on direct marketing, it’s kind of the science of turning prospects into customers or browsers into buyers. And you do that particularly through digital marketing today. Tell us a little bit about direct marketing in 2021. And what are the types of digital marketing techniques and tips you advise people to look at?
Roland Frasier: Sure. So let me say that I think that people who only focus on direct marketing are missing out when they get more mature companies, that when you’re starting at that scrappy stage that we like to see, you got to be sure people are going to buy your stuff, that they’re going to buy your product or service. And so that’s best measured through direct marketing where I can say, “I can spend X and then I get Y back. And my return on ad spend or ROAS is two, three, whatever it is, seven.” When you get to the point though, where you have a share of voice and where you are recognized as a market leader, it makes sense to also do brand advertising. So I don’t want people to get the wrong idea. I love and my whole background was in direct marketing. But as you get mature, you also want to do brand stuff too.
So it’s not dumb to do brand stuff, but it is dumb to do brand stuff if you haven’t gone out and got multiple predictable selling systems through multiple channels. You know what? To me, the best, best advice for anybody that’s in any kind of business at any point is take a look at what you’re selling and say, as most businesses do, “Am I selling one product or service to one audience through one channel with one offer?” And that can change everything. Because if you’ve already got people who like your stuff and you add another product or service, it’s a very good idea that they’re going to like that too.
If you look at what Tim cook did at Apple, Apple’s massive valuation increase happened as a result of him primarily adding services to their products. And so that’s important if you at click funnels. The last time I looked at click funnels, I think the $100 million plus business, 34%, I want to say, of their revenue was from services. So you people think about, “Well, it’s just this,” but there’s this whole other higher end thing that you can offer in terms of services. And so I think that’s something to look at. And then I got all excited about that and lost my train of thought. So bring me back, I’ll loop back around.
Gordon Henry: Well, let’s talk about the day-to-day businesses that comprise most of Thryv’s customers, and also probably most of the listeners of this show. And they tend to be local service businesses, medical professionals, legal professionals, home improvement people, people who do things like remodeling or roofing or plumbing, maybe auto body, auto repair, things like that. These are the day-to-day fabric of most communities across the United States. What are some of the ways that you tell those kinds of local businesses to market themselves? Do you recommend direct marketing? Should they go to brand marketing? What are the things they should be thinking about?
Roland Frasier: Right. So to me, the easiest place, and this goes back, I remembered what I was saying, the one, one, one thing, the easiest place to go is to the customers you’ve already got. And there’s a good chance that you haven’t fully optimized your customer experience to maximize your lifetime customer value. So how can I make the customers I’ve got worth more? They’re nine times easier to sell, more likely to buy, they spend 150% more. there’s all kinds of stats on that, yet we’re always chasing new customers.
So the very first thing I would say is really nail your customer experience and think about what can I do for these people? What are the things that they’re buying before, during, and after their customer journey with me that I might be able to offer them as well so that I can add more products or services to the thing I’ve got? If you offer a product, can you add a service? If you offer a service, can you offer a product? Is there an upsell, down sell? All of those kinds of things to think about too. And that applies to any business. We were looking at buying a holiday gift business that had 680 kiosks across North America. And we’re looking at the opportunities to increase sales. And at the kiosk, we went to one of the kiosks, it’s like, that’s cool. And they were primarily focused around and holiday gifts.
You can buy a product there. I was like, “Okay, can I ship one to Uncle Joe?” They’re like, “No, you can go to our website and do that.” It’s like, “I can’t do it here?” Nope. Okay, cool. “Is there any kind of discount or bundle or something like that if I buy multiple stuff?” Nope. Just stupid stuff like that. Just the McDonald’s, would you like fries with that, offer. It’s kind of crazy. And so many of us forget about it because we’re so busy wearing all the hats that we wear in our business. So that to me would be the very first place.
And then I’ve got a wheel that I look at, because I like to grow by acquiring other businesses or acquiring other parts of business. So I look at what is the biggest need in your business? If the biggest need is leads, then it’s good for you to think about how can I get more media? Now you can rent your media or you can own it with the passage of GDPR and the California consumer protection rules and everything with the $2,500 per occurrence issue. You want to be careful, even if you’re a local business with what you’re advertising and how you have an online presence and all of that stuff.
If you can acquire media, it’s really good. So media gives you leads, which means you have more leads to offer your thing to so you can get more sales. If you need infrastructure, then you think about, well, where can I get that? You can obviously run ads. You can use your network. You can also acquire it. There’s a whole concept called acqui-hire where you can find… I need a sales force. I don’t have one for my lube shop. Fantastic. But Mary’s got one over there. Maybe I could acquire her business and now I’ve got two businesses. But because I didn’t have a sales team before I can throw all those people on this, too. And I don’t have to go out and build a sales force, which I don’t know how to do. Or software, I can acquire a dev team.
And the products and services I talked about, supply chain would be the next place. So if you’ve got a business selling cell phone covers, can you get more of your supplier’s margin by acquiring some of those? Or does it make sense for you to even acquire a machine or something like that? And in distribution, who’s helping you sell your products? In software, you’ve got a lot of affiliates and a lot of information products have that kind of stuff. You might have referral programs and things like that that exist already. So when I was practicing law long, long ago, there was a service called the attorney referral service. And they sent, as I was getting started, that was my bread and butter. Those guys were awesome. So now knowing what I know, I would go and try to acquire that because then not only would I get all of those referrals for myself, but I would also starve my competitors from having them as well. Competitors are easy to buy. If you want to double your business overnight, go by the guy that’s got the same number of people you’ve got and you did it.
And then same thing for intellectual property. I’d be looking at how can I innovate my business? Because a lot of businesses get innovated or disrupted out of business. So is there intellectual property that is in your field that you can license. And I know in a lot of companies think about adding, when we’re going in, think about what can we do software-wise? And is there software that we can acquire? Can we go and acquire something like that so that we have that already and we don’t have to take the time to build it. We’re in the middle of one of those right now that will save us probably two years. And so we’ve already got the audience. They don’t. They have no way of accessing it. And so we basically acquire that company. They win because they continue to be part of it at some level. And everybody gets a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That’s kind of like I go around that wheel of seven things that I want. Do I want leads, infrastructure, more sales, more lifetime customer value, more margin, more disruption, more innovation, those kinds of things.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Awesome advice. So you’re a big public speaker. Tell us about your public speaking. It seems like you’re so busy running businesses. How do you find time to speak about them?
Roland Frasier: That is a great question. And the truth is I don’t run any businesses. I have really, really worked hard to stay off the organizational chart. So for those of you don’t know, an org chart is where we say, this is usually me at the top. You guys. I have the business and maybe you’re also the chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, et cetera. Hopefully you evolve past that. That’s something that’s really important.
But for me, what I realized is that if I occupied any of those boxes, those boxes have a job title and a job description. And I didn’t want either of those. So to me, I think Gerber who wrote E Myth talks about you should work on the business, not in it. And I’m a firm believer of that. What I have evolved to though over time is realizing that I don’t really want to work in the businesses or on the businesses. I want to think of the businesses as my product. The businesses are my product or service, not the widgets that they sell. So I have people in all of those companies that are focused on selling more of the widgets. I’m focused on finding more companies, selling those companies, getting investors, that kind of thing.
And so I practice what I preach. I believe that having a personal brand, which I didn’t have until a couple of years ago, I mean, really just maybe two years ago, when I decided that that was really important to prop up the businesses I have and to have the deal flow I wanted. So that is why I started speaking. I will tell you though, after the pandemic and having all of the Zooming that has come as a result of that, I can reach so many more people through this one to many format that is online than I can speaking at events.
So our companies do about 75 events a year. And they range from maybe a few dozen people to 10,000. And what I realized is that I can only reach the number of people who can show up on the date that we said and afford to travel and stay and take the time away from their families and their business and all that stuff. And that’s a significantly lower number of people that can watch us in squares on a box like we’re doing right now. So when the pandemic happened, we had to cancel a 10,000 person event and I had to cancel a 25 person event. And I was like, “Well, what can I do to reach these people?” So I leaned into challenges, book funnels, webinars, mini webinars, and mini classes. Those are the five things online that we found to work really, really well and started doing them.
And I made for myself, I don’t know, gosh, at least 10 times over last year. What I was able to earn from doing that stuff the year before, I was able to impact thousands and thousands more people, tens of thousands more people. And so the only reason that I do anything out in public is to share and give back, to enjoy talking about it like I do, and to reach the market that I need to to have deal flow. So I’ve found that I can get so much more of that speaking virtually. And it’ll be interesting to see. I won’t stop doing events, but I can tell you I used to travel like, “Hey, let’s go to Paris and let’s do an event there so that we can write it off and then we can spend the week after.”
But then it was like, “God, I’m kind of tired from doing the event.” And then there’s all these people here I should really meet with because there’s opportunity. And I can’t say no to that. So what I realized is I should just travel for pleasure and screw the speaking unless it’s some big, impactful thing that’s really going to help. So my travel schedule for speaking going forward is really, really limited. And this is my ideal. And I think for a lot of people, it’s just much easier to reach so many more.
Gordon Henry: Right. Right. Absolutely. We only have a few minutes left. There’s so much I could ask you, but I want to hit on a couple of key topics. One is that you must be seriously good at time management because I don’t know if I’ve ever met anybody who seems to be as busy as you. We didn’t even talk about not only are you doing your own real estate deals and you started a law firm, or you worked at a law firm and you’ve done all these other investments and helped entrepreneurs. But I understand you’ve also worked on deals, completed deals with big companies like Microsoft and FedEx and Uber, major, major companies. So you’re a very, very busy person. And you mentioned you have kids and so on and so forth. So you got a lot going on. How do you manage your time?
Roland Frasier: Yeah. It’s everything has to be time blocking. So to me, that was one of the biggest time management benefits that I ever discovered was that not only should I be scheduling time for appointments, but I should also be scheduling time for family and vacations and all of those things well in advance because the calendar tends to fill up. I do something that a lot of people don’t and that is that I manage my own calendar because I’m very, very picky about the things I do. And so what I think helps me with that is that I don’t… Steve Jobs said it’s really easy to drown in opportunity. Opportunity is great, but it’s easy to drown in it. And so I take that to heart. So I have a couple of things that I use when I’m planning my next year. Because I write my goals out every year and this is what I want to do.
And so I’ll say, “What are the things that I was doing this past year that didn’t actually return to me joy or money or something else that I want?” And it turns out there’s a lot of stuff that we do that has no ROJ, no return of joy. And if that’s the case, then it’s gone. And so I’m very ruthless with myself in getting rid of the things that don’t give me a return of joy. And then I manage my own calendar so nobody sneaky creeps other things onto it without me approving. And I’m like, “You can put it on there and then I’ll accept or reject. But if I don’t accept it, I will not be there.” Then, as I mentioned, staying off the org chart of all those companies is super important because I don’t have a job.
What is my job? My job is really as a coach, as a leader for helping to guide the people who I work with to do well or to do better. And so I have a lot of time. Today I had your podcast and one deal meeting and I’ve got nothing else. And tomorrow I have nothing else. So now I can choose last minute if I want to hop on something or like last night I called one of our leads and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” And just kind of talked through, could I help in any way? Could I add value? But that’s that’s it. And then I’ve got every Monday and every Friday very well blocked off. So there’s only usually one thing I’ll do on that day, if that. And then all my vacations for the coming year are blocked off as well.
That way, everything is sacrosanct on your calendar. You’re not going to be managed bythe whirlwind, as Covey calls it, that’s going around you all the time. Because that whirlwind will absolutely occupy 100% of your time. And then when you see the things that don’t give you that return on joy, which I include financial in that as well, then I kill it. A great example of that would be, I never charged for consulting because I didn’t want to trade dollars for hours. And so I gave a lot of help to people. I was in a lot of meetings. And when I was setting my goals for 2020, at the end of 2019, I said, “Man, I just have so many meetings and nothing happens from it. How can I change that? How can I be more efficient, more effective, and have less of them?”
So I came up with, just randomly, I was like, “I’m going to consult. I’ll do a four hour consult with people. It’s going to be 18,000 bucks. They have to pay in advance. It’s a one-page agreement. It’s four hours and done no, follow-up no prep.” I learned from Dan Kennedy, I had consulted with him one time. And he’s like, “I’m not going to do anything before you come.” Okay. So I follow that and it was stunning to me. I ended up doing that 42 times last year. I started at 18K then went to 20, then went to 25, which is where I am now. And it was interesting because I got to meet way higher quality people. All of the time-waster meetings that I used to have, where it was like, “Hey, can I give you equity in this deal?” Well, let me talk about it and see if it’s…
Not anymore. It’s like, “You want me to look at that deal? It’s 25 grand. I’ll add a lot of value. I can do that. I got no question about that. If you don’t, then you shouldn’t do this.” But then, I have only high quality people coming in. Four of those deals last year turned it into about $21 million of equity for me, because I want to meet with people who I have, I think, the opportunity to work with, or just somebody whose business is really cool I’ll look at too, and then this year, I’d say I’ve done an average of, what would it be, eight and a third. I’ve done an average of eight and a third of those meetings in January, February, and March.
So here’s what’s cool about that, is that’s an extra million bucks or so of cash, which is always fun, but I get to talk to the people I want to talk with. And I would have never… And I get to filter out all of that other stuff. So now, my calendar became shockingly clearer when I started doing it that way, and it’s a no harm, no foul, kind of thing, as far as I understand if it’s not a fit for you, totally cool. But it gives me my ideal customer profile. It frees up all my time. And between that and that ROJ metric, as I’m going forward and then blocking everything out, that seems to help.
Gordon Henry: That’s awesome. I love that, return on joy. I wrote that down. I’m going to use that method now, going forward. It puts family gatherings in a tough spot, doesn’t it? What do you do about those? You kind of don’t have a choice, and there’s not much joy necessarily.
Roland Frasier: A lot of people say that they were so happy this year at the holidays because they didn’t have to go to all these parties that they never wanted to go to but feel guilted into and see the people they don’t know or have anything in common with.
Gordon Henry: Probably should avoid that topic. Last two things. First of all, it sounds like talking to you, your business, business, business, but I know that you have some personal pursuits that you are into. I understand you’ve been into music, you played in bands, photography. That’s part of your return on joy scheme is to do things that you… Like hobbies, right? Things you’d like to do.
Roland Frasier: Yeah. Yeah. So music, art, collect art, photography. I love photography, I love travel. I’m at 158 countries now. So I’ve got 40, I think, so 41 more to go. Yeah, absolutely. And wine, I’m a very passionate wine person. I actually really like doing… We acquired this property which had sat on the market for, I think, 18 months or so, got ridiculously good seller financing, and then redid it for a year while we lived four houses down the street, moved in here. Now we’re getting offers on this place. We found another one that we’re going to do. So that’s a half businessy, half fun thing, but those are all kind of creative things. I really like that type of stuff for sure. And it’s important to schedule it, because if you don’t…
I really have to fight on the weekends to not pick up a business book. I’m going to read something that’s not business. My wife and I decided, because we couldn’t find a book club that had books we liked, we were just like, “We’re going to have our own book club, just you and me. And then we’ll talk about it.” And so we were reading Chekhov and we just finished Atlas Shrugged again and that kind of stuff. And those are great discussion things. So that improves our connection with each other and our relationships. And we have the time to do that. But I won’t read the business book that I also want to read because I’ve got these other things that I’ve carved out in my time for.
Gordon Henry: Last thing before we go. I typically ask our guests for a podcast recommendation or… Well, you’ve already given us book recommendations, so thank you for that. But since you have your own podcast, I’m going to ask you about your podcast. Your podcast is called Business Lunch with Roland Frasier, right?
Roland Frasier: It is.
Gordon Henry: What’s it about?
Roland Frasier: It’s really just talking with people about… This is what all podcasts should be, I think. It’s talking with people who I think are interesting, that would be interesting to other people, asking them questions. I am a passionate interviewer and I really, really dive into everything about anybody I’m going to interview before I interview them. So I know things that I think would be interesting to me that are also interesting to other business people. So that’s a wide variety of people. And I’m lucky because a lot of people that you have to pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to talk with, I can do through our events. So the event liquidates the cost of doing that. This is a good hack for podcasters. So basically, I get my multi hundred thousand dollar guests for nothing, and we do a live business launch on the stage and I get to interview them, get to connect with them, get to have the rights to put this on the podcast, and so then you get to hear what those people say.
And a lot of them don’t do a lot of podcasts, so that’s kind of cool. And then I had people that were asking for things… Like they said, “It’s great, the interviews and everything, but we’d really like to just hear some stuff that you’re doing.” So I do, since it’s business launch, I have a snackable content, which is usually five minutes or less on Mondays that I just talk about something that I’ve learned or I’m doing or something I think might be interesting to people.
Gordon Henry: Yeah. Cool. Well, I recommend Business Lunch with Roland Frasier. That should be on everybody’s list. We’re about done. So I want to thank you, Roland. You have been a fantastic guest, and I want to thank you for your very valuable time.
Roland Frasier: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Gordon Henry: Yeah, this has been great. And if you want more of Roland, listen to his podcast, Business Lunch with Roland Frasier, and read. He’s got a number of different books as well as articles you can find him in. So he’s all over the place, but all really, really good content. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and tell a friend or colleague to subscribe and leave us a five star review. We’d really appreciate it. And until next time, make it a great week.
Originally published at https://simplecast.com.
