Lean Startups – Adam House

Adam House:
There’s a difference between a solopreneur, an entrepreneur, and a CEO. When people start a business, they’re the only person in it. Typically. So they take the title as CEO, but oftentimes they’re way under qualified to take that title. But they take it cause it’s available. And so you start a business, you have to be able to inspect what you expect. So even if you’re not the best at it, you have to try it and do it. And you have to know how the job is able to be done or who you need as that resource, then you can hire into that.

Adam House:
If I were to name two superpowers, creating vision and delegating.

Dana Robinson:
Exit Plan is a podcast for business owners and those who want to be business owners. I’m always in search of the lesser.

Dana Robinson:
Known stories of entrepreneurship.

Dana Robinson:
In the exit Plan podcast, you’ll hear stories from startup to sale and hear from the professionals who helped business owners achieve their exit. Hosted by me, author and private equity manager Dana Robinson, along with my co hosts and guests, you’ll hear real stories, tips and tools that will help you plan for the exit you want, whether you are still working at a day job or running a business. Let’s get started with this episode of the Exit Plan podcast.

Dana Robinson:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Exit Plan. I’ve got a great guest today, Adam House from the House of Bricks. Thanks for coming on.

Adam House:
Oh, thanks for having me. So funny. The exit plan is a great title because how you plan it rarely happens. So, really looking forward to diving in today.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, the. I think you got to have a plan when you’re in business for how am I going to get out of this business? But you’re right, it doesn’t. It’s that plan is a series of failures, and I want to hear about that because I think, you know, you, you introduced yourself to me as someone who had a lot of failures and just kept not giving up. And I’m in that category myself. So I’m excited to hear about your journey as an entrepreneur and the lessons that you’ve learned, because let’s bond over it.

Adam House:
Yeah, and I’m looking forward to sharing. So, as I mentioned, usually, it’s funny, I’ve been spending more time on LinkedIn lately, and everyone on there is an expert, everyone’s a guru, and the people that really matter aren’t often even on LinkedIn. So I changed my bio to not talk about what I’ve done, but really more about where I’m going and people want to follow vision, but quick background on me. Listen, I took me about twelve schools to graduate high school. So my parents got divorced when I was young, got kicked out of some schools, all the stuff that goes with that. Then ended up going to brother Rice High school my sophomore year and got a crash course, MBA, being Dan Gilbert’s intern, so founder of Rocket Mortgage, Cleveland Cavaliers. At the time they had maybe 70 or 80 team members, so I had no idea what I was learning, but it shaped the rest of my life. Went to college for a year, dropped out and then started my first business out of my apartment.

Adam House:
A couple hundred bucks turned into a multimillion dollar exit in 2007 and then started five companies after that. One was a healthcare analytics business that I took from a napkin to the Nasdaq recently public two years ago. And now, as you see behind me, I was never a guy that wanted my name in lights, but somehow ended up with a perfect last name. To build a community called the House of Bricks. We’re leading and inspiring entrepreneurs on how to grow and scale their businesses. It’s okay for entrepreneurs to be independent, but they don’t have to be alone. So we’re leveraging the power of community and frequency. See?

Dana Robinson:
Awesome. We’ll hear more about that and what you’re doing, how people can connect with you. Toward the end of this. I want to get into that first. So was your first, was your first business a success? It sounds like the couple hundred dollars to multimillion exit is. That’s a big win for a first shot.

Adam House:
It was great. God’s always put me in the right place at the right time around the right people, and I had no intentions of exiting the business. I didn’t even think it was valuable enough. But as we continue to scale and grow, the business continued to climb. And I hit the bid right before the financial crisis in 2007. So I wish I could say I planned that, but I sold it in May of 2007 and the financial crisis hit in June. So it’s great to have a plan of where you want to go, but you have to know that there’s never straight path to success.

Dana Robinson:
What was it?

Dana Robinson:
What was the business that you were in?

Adam House:
It was a direct marketing company. So we provided leads to mortgage companies. So if you can imagine, the clients that we had were countrywide and norwest, and everyone you saw on the news in the month of June, they were clients in May.

Dana Robinson:
Wow. Okay, so, yeah, definitely a business that would have had challenges if you’d stayed in it. You would have been in that slogging along for eight years or folded it, I guess. So. That’s pretty amazing. I. I have this theory that if you have a giant first success, then your next couple of businesses are going to flop. So you want to prove me wrong? What would you do after you sold the business?

Adam House:
I guess I’ll have to disprove your theory. You invited me on the show, so I may have to disprove your theory. So my second company was even better. It was a mobile technology company. So if you think back in 2008, 2009, you’d go spend $1,000 on an iPhone. And all the websites were designed for a desktop size screen, so you’re pinching, you’re zooming, you got blue squares everywhere because it’s designed in Flash. So we developed a technology to optimize websites to work on mobile devices. So that one was 18 months idea to exit, and we sold for close to 30 times revenue to Akamai Technologies, which is a $10 billion CDN out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Adam House:
80% of the world’s Internet traffic goes through them. So again, just kind of right time, right place.

Dana Robinson:
Wow. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, my. My theory comes from just sort of the experience in my world. I’ve been an investor and I’ve also been a lawyer to a lot of startups. And the people who’ve come off from a really hot exit often, you know, sort of think that.

Dana Robinson:
That they had a lot to do with it, and so that they get sort of an infallibility feeling that leads to some misjudgment sometimes in that next venture or two, because it’s like, I did so great and everything worked out well because I had this vision and we executed, and now I made a bunch of money. Let’s go do it again. So congratulations on having two back to backs. And Akamai, they survived all of the crashes. I was in a business that did business with them in 1999, 2000, and they were early in the Internet, so a fantastic outcome. Did you build the team? Talk about what were the kind of. You got two successes in a row, other than telling me that Adam House is the most amazing person, what are some of the things that you think contributed to the success of these businesses?

Adam House:
I mean, for me, it’s. It’s the way that I approach it. Right. It’s building bottom up. And we talk about this in the house of bricks. You have to leverage the compound effect of doing the small things every day, consistently over time to make a big impact. So no matter how much success I had, I’ve always known Steve Jobs quote, which is success in life is a horrible teacher. So I agree.

Adam House:
You can go from one success to immediate failure. And the way I coach around that is you have to start a business with as little money as possible. The money creates a positive pressure to make decisions. You have to be, have decisive action, but you have to know that the decisions are going to probably be wrong. Right? So you start with a strategy and you start making decisions. But people don’t want to make decisions. And when they do, if they have a lot of money, they’re big decisions that put big cracks in your business that are oftentimes things that you can’t recover from. So I’m an athlete, play basketball in high school, year of college, and then we’ll get to it after my akamai story of what I did when I was 32 years old.

Adam House:
But it’s just that, that hard work, that ground up. And even what I’m doing now, even though this is my 7th business I’ve started, I’m working 100 hours a week. I know what it takes to build a business. You have to do the work.

Dana Robinson:
I love that. So, so what is one of the strategies? Maybe I’m hearing you wrong, sort of like run lean or some, some form of economic anemia is healthy in a startup because it constricts your ability to make big dumb decisions.

Adam House:
Big dumb decisions. And I would have, since we’re just being open here, I would like to shut down all of the accelerators out there, because the last thing an entrepreneur needs is to go faster. They need to slow down, build the foundation for their business. Do you have the right shareholder agreement? Do you have the right operating agreement? Do you have a financial model? How are you different than your competition? Do you even know who your customer is? And once you are testing, failing learning and growing, it’s an iterative process. And the more decisions that you make, the more feedback you get, and then you can make better decisions going forward. So that’s also how I’ve survived my marriage for 21 years, is test, fail, learn, grow, you know, so make a lot of bad decisions early on, but the more feedback you get and your wife is the first one to give you feedback, you can make better decisions down the road.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I wonder about that. The sort of accelerator meme of fail hard, fail fast, right? This idea, it seems to me like that is an acceptable model from the capital markets the venture fund allocates. They want to know, is this going to prove up or not? As fast as possible. But that’s not good for the business. It’s sort of their model of test fail is we’ll put money into this business. We want to push the accelerator as fast as possible, and if it fails, then that’s okay. We’ve made an allocation across hundreds of ventures. Some of those are not going to fail, but when it comes to those that are running the business, they’re investing their life, their blood, their sweat, their tears, their own money into that business.

Dana Robinson:
So from your standpoint, you want to see failure, you want to test and fail.

Adam House:
I want to see decisions not failing. Right. It’s taking massive action. And when I say massive, it’s more consistent action. Right. Like, you have to. Every decision will give you feedback. The fail fast, fail hard.

Adam House:
Yeah, I haven’t bought into that either, because a lot of times when you’re failing, all entrepreneurs talk about, I’m in the struggle zone, I’m grinding. Well, if you’re trying to get to Florida and you’re running towards California, you’re never going to get there. So you got to have the right strategy. And yes, it is going to be a grind, but you have to know where you’re going.

Dana Robinson:
So you got two successes, you know, home runs for sure, the totally different environments. What compelled sort of the decision? A lot of people lean into what they did the last time? Was it just the opportunistic something came along? Was it something you innovated?

Adam House:
I definitely didn’t innovate it. So you asked, had I brought in some key people and again, could be related to sports, being a competitor, a visionary, I’m very good at bringing in people that are much smarter than me and they are able to buy into the vision that I create. So money always follows vision. It’s not the other way around. So if you can create that vision as an entrepreneur, as a founder, people will be attracted to where it is that you’re going and the impact that you’re making. But what you’d mentioned prior to that as well is opportunity. And for me, the only thing I can say is, you know, God’s favor. I had no background in mobile technology, no background in direct marketing, no background in podcasting or building a community.

Adam House:
But there are patterns in business that carry over regardless of what industry you’re in. And if you’re able to create that bottom up buy in. A lot of entrepreneurs are their own worst enemy with their egos and expect others to do that. They don’t lead themselves in a way to do it. So each of my companies, I’m CEO. I’m also taking out the trash on Fridays. Like, just, you got to do the work and have that self leadership.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. So you took that, you take second exit. What’s the. What’s the next up for the Adam house journey?

Adam House:
Man, this is going to sound like it’s not true, but it is. So I want to be clear. In both of those, there were many times I was filled with fear, filled with doubt, filled with anxiety. How are you going to come up with payroll? Like you said, can I really do this again? And building a team of the right people around me, I never would have been able to do what I did without them. So I was 32 years old, had just sold my company at Akamai, did a year earn out, and I was standing in my kitchen in brookline, and my wife says to me, hey, Adam, if you don’t do something you love, you’re going to regret it the rest of your life. You’ve been CEO since you were 19. You just had your second exit. And so I played basketball in high school, my freshman year of college, I said, well, maybe I can make a semi pro basketball team.

Adam House:
And she’s like, you haven’t played in 13 years, but if you want to do it, go for it. So if you’ve seen the movie semi pro, I’m a real life Jackie Moon. I trained for six months, got a strength coach, skills coach, nutritionist, ended up getting to invited to a compine in Dayton, Ohio, and there were 34. I call them kids. I mean, these are 21, 20 year old, two year old mid major d one players and up shows. This shows up. This six foot, 32 year old with no basketball resume. But for some reason, the coach liked what he saw.

Adam House:
He invited me to camp in Rochester, New York, and I ended up making the Rochester, New York razor Sharks. And some guys on the team found out my business background. So the word got out to coach and the owner. Owner calls me one day and he’s like, Adam, what are you doing the rest of the day? Practice ends at 11:00. I’m like, well, I’m with my wife. I had three young sons at the time. And he’s like, why don’t you come in and help me run the team? And so he ended up making me CEO, co owner, and I was a player on the team. So I did that for a year.

Adam House:
Lifelong dream. And then had to grow back up and start a healthcare analytics business following that.

Dana Robinson:
I love it. I love that. Taking that opportunity to do something that you’re not going to look back and regret that window of time that you did. I did a 14 month sabbatical in Bali in my forties. So it was definitely one of those opportunity to decompress, write a book, try to write, try to do some things. That felt good to me. So the someone’s already made a movie. I guess you’re not going to get a movie made about your experience.

Dana Robinson:
But the what are you still an investor in the team where you were co owner for a season? That’s pretty cool.

Adam House:
Yeah. It was just a minority stake. And first of all, I don’t know anyone that wants equity in a minor league basketball team. It was a local Rochester guy, grew up there, had plenty of money to spend and. And invest in a team with no hope of return. So definitely not a co owner anymore.

Dana Robinson:
Okay. It’s still a fun vanity owner. A vanity sort of equity. Right? That’s fun.

Adam House:
Hundred percent.

Dana Robinson:
All right. So you didn’t have to grow up. You sold a couple companies, but what brought you into health?

Adam House:
Yeah, healthcare. When I moved back down to South Florida, one of my board members from Velostu, the mobile technology company, he said, hey, you got to come meet this non practicing physician for lunch. He’s got an idea for healthcare analytics business. He shared the idea with me, how we’re going to do peer to peer comparison, prove cost per episode of care quality Metrics. He literally drew it on a napkin and he said, adam, I heard you’re a really good founder and great at putting teams together. And mind you, he had been in healthcare for 30 years. The only healthcare I’ve been to is the doctor. So no experience in healthcare, but again, finding great talent.

Adam House:
So I put word out to my network, found a CTO that could help build the platform, and we shook hands at lunch and talk about failure. This was. It ended well. It ended up going public. And it’s funny, we read LinkedIn and we see kind of the begin date and the end date of when people have jobs or exits, but the real life happens in between. It’s like your tombstone, born on this day, died on this date. The real life happens in between. And in healthcare, it’s all decision by committee.

Adam House:
Nothing moves fast. So imagine coming from selling leads to mortgage companies. It was just super transactional, mobile tech taking off. We get into healthcare, and we had estimated a six to eight month sales cycle. It was more twelve to 18 months, and we were burning $100 to $200,000 a month on our team. So I would go into these meetings in January Blue Cross. And we’d be like, yeah, we’re going to save you millions of dollars on your South Florida plan. It’d be January.

Adam House:
They’d be like, yeah, come back in December when we make our decisions by committee. I’m like, that’s $1.2 million in burn rate. You know, can we just make the decision now? So one thing out there, entrepreneurs that are listening, you have to understand, I don’t call it burn rate. I call it Runway, because burn rate, it’s like you’re just waiting for the gas to run out. But how much Runway do you need to get to where you’re going to be? And that was one thing that we miss. Estimated, and we were able to do a seed series a. Finally a series b, and the company went public a couple years ago. But that was the toughest business that I’ve ever done.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. And what was the total timeline from the time you shook hands on the napkin to the exit?

Adam House:
It was 2013 to 2022, so I only stayed with qualmetrics through 2015 or 16. So once it reaches series b level, I’m not the guy. I’m the fire starter. Come in, get the team going, get it to a certain level, and then you need someone more strategic and longer term thinking than me.

Dana Robinson:
Let’s talk a little bit about that. Like, what’s, what. What are the. Someone who’s on a journey of growth. They’re running a small business, small staff. They’re still sort of sucked into the business. It sounds like you’ve made it through some of those, I’ll call them gravity pockets, the place where you could just get dragged down as the leader and sort of not work on the business. You’re always sort of down in the business, and I feel like a lot in the service world, plumbing, h vac, landscape, it’s like five to 7 million in revenue.

Dana Robinson:
You’re stuck forever if you can’t get a general manager and get yourself to act like an owner and stop being required in the business through the businesses that you’ve been in, and knowing that you spent, what is that? Three years at the helm of a fast growing healthcare startup. Talk through that journey and sort of like, wait, what? What were you good at and why? And how did you get out of your own way? And, you know, sort of that. This the transition. When do you have the aha. Where you got to get out? Do people have to push you out? I’d love to hear more, if you don’t mind sharing it.

Adam House:
Absolutely. So there’s and this isn’t new. You’ve probably heard this, but there’s a difference between a solopreneur, an entrepreneur, and a CEO. So when people start a business, they’re the only person in it, typically. So they take the title as CEO, but oftentimes they’re way under qualified to take that title, but they take it because it’s available. And so you start a business, you have to be able to inspect what you expect. So even if you’re not the best at it, you have to try it and do it. And you have to know how the job is able to be done or who you need as that resource, then you can hire into that.

Adam House:
So I’ve been a great, if I were to name two superpowers, creating vision and delegating. You can only get so far in your own strength, and you have to know what your weaknesses are. And so finding someone, if you’re a visionary, find an integrator, someone that cares about the details, dots the I’s, cross the t’s. But if you are stuck in your business, I have always found a lot of success from a young age, starting with Dan Gilbert to my second company on. I’ve always had an advisory board. You are too in the weeds to see whatever it is, the trees in the forest, I always get that mixed up too far in the trees. You can’t see the forest. Whatever the saying is, I think that’s it.

Adam House:
But you’re just. You’re in the weeds. You have to have someone that cares about you as the entrepreneur, not just the business, but also can guide you strategically, that can make sure that you’re headed in the right direction. And then another value is the accountability. So, an advisory board, they don’t have any governance. But just knowing the fact that you have to present your plan to some advisors that care about you, that may have invested in the business, or you gave them equity, and knowing you have to present to them and that they’re going to hold you accountable in two months. Are you on track? Are you off track? And that pressure will help you continue to execute. So finding an advisor, find a coach, someone outside of your business that can help you evolve, or else you’re in that arbitrary bucket of five to 10 million for the rest of your life.

Dana Robinson:
Dana Robinson here.

Dana Robinson:
Quick plug for my book, the King’s fly Swatter.

Dana Robinson:
You can see it here behind me. If you’re watching this, I’ve got it in my hand.

Dana Robinson:
It’s a beautiful hardcover book, printed to.

Dana Robinson:
Make it giftable, something that you can share with a family member buy as a gift.

Dana Robinson:
So this latest book, it’s a fable about a person who has a really crappy job. Let’s just start there. This is a book that most people can relate to because we’ve all had crappy jobs.

Dana Robinson:
This is the story of Ubar, a.

Dana Robinson:
Servant in the court of a babylonian king who masters his boring, monotonous job and then learns to listen to the king, hearing him rule the kingdom while quietly swatting flies behind a cane. Eventually, Hubar becomes the wisest and most successful man in the kingdom. The story is fun, and it’s easy to read, but it’s not mythology. It’s my story. And as I shared the idea with colleagues and friends, I learned that it was their story. And guess what? It’s your story if you’re at a job of any kind, one that you love, one that you hate, one that’s just enough to get by. This little book gives fresh perspective on how to leverage that job to get you something greater than a paycheck. The lessons in this parable are entrepreneurial lessons, but not what you might think from the current entrepreneurial zeitgeist.

Dana Robinson:
If you or someone you know are looking for a real pathway to entrepreneurship, here’s the secret. Your job is the way out of your job. It’s counterintuitive, but once you see how it works, you can’t unsee it. Learn the way of the fly swatter from the parable of Ubar and from the stories I share. The from my 30 year business journey.

Dana Robinson:
You can get a free copy of.

Dana Robinson:
The King’s Fly swatter by going to.

Dana Robinson:
Danarobinson.Com dot in your sort of. In these business cycles, where did you find those resources? Were they sort of like, free? Did you pay for coaching? Did you get paid advisors for someone else is listening, they’re like, yeah, I’d love to find some of those folks, you know, entrepreneur organization or YPO.

Adam House:
I’ve never been a part of YPO or EO, but I have, just through my network relationships I’ve built. Business experience is the most overrated experience in life. It’s all about relationship capital. If you can build and invest in that, people want to mentor you. They want to help you. And I always tell people, pay for the advice because it creates a bilateral value between the two of you. Right? Even if you know I’m $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, whatever advisor you choose, even if you have to pay them $100 to start, it shows that you’re willing to take the step forward. And when I receive that or any coach or advisor receives that, then they feel an obligation to deliver for you.

Adam House:
So if you’re not paying them and. And they’re not receiving anything from you, and, of course, I’ve helped people for 27 years for no cost. But what I’ve learned is that when you give something to someone for free, it actually hurts them. You’re preventing them from the investment in the outcome. But if you’re running a business, there’s a lot of ways to structure getting an advisor. You can hire a coach, hire an advisor, give up some equity over time, you know, have a two year vesting schedule, create an advisory board, and, you know, a couple percent for an advisor, it’s not going to change your outcome. You sell a business for $20 million, the couple hundred grand you’re going to pay them was. Was well worth it.

Dana Robinson:
Right? I love that. I think that’s true. It’s hard for a lot of entrepreneurs because you’re always feeling like the business doesn’t have the resources. But I interviewed one entrepreneur, and she said that she had, one of the lessons of her first business was to immediately hire people. And I said, well, then she had a pretty tiny budget, start the business. And for her, that meant trying to fill seats, even with part time, very part time contractors, so that she could build an organization. And you don’t see that a lot because most entrepreneurs are like, well, I got to get this much to live. And therefore, they’re kind of always consuming what the business generates.

Dana Robinson:
And her approach was very quickly, hire. Even if you’re only hiring people that are $500 a month to be available this amount of time, or, you know, $4,000 for a halftime person over here. And I hear you saying that from the advisor standpoint, figure out what you can, you know, like what, pay somebody something. And then it gets you into the habit of being a mentee, but also of paying, having the company pay for the services. And I think it’s accretive very quickly. You find good advice, you apply good advice, you’re accountable to somebody who’s taken the time to give you that good advice. So let’s talk about failure. Adam, you told me that you just kept.

Dana Robinson:
Keep failing and keep trying and don’t give up. I think I love to hear any story that someone’s willing to share about failure or any stories and what you learn from it, if you don’t mind being vulnerable about it.

Adam House:
Yeah, listen, I. I fail every day. I fail as a leader. I fail as a father, I fail as a husband. We’ve talked about the highlights of the exits. Those are a moment in time and when you achieve them you’re kind of like, at least for me, what’s next? And I’ve gone through series of doubt right in between exits. Like, is this really worth it? Am I going to do it again? And so there’s a lot of collateral damage in the process, but you have to just building anything great, there’s a cost and you just have to know there is not a right answer. Some people are like, oh, I got to spend more time with my kids.

Adam House:
Oh, I don’t work enough. You have to pick what works for you and understand what it is, what season you’re in, because for every game there has to be a loss in another area. And so just over time I’ve learned to recognize what season I’m in and communicating with my family. And now my boys are older, three teenagers, an eleven year old, they know like I’m in build mode. So it’s nothing. Quality, quantity, it’s quality in the time that we spend together. So I don’t have like a specific moment where I was like, hey, that was the biggest failure of my life because I didn’t end, it, didn’t end there. Like, you have the power to write the final chapter and whatever it is that you’re doing.

Adam House:
So keep telling your story, keep living. Know that the valley experience is actually where you gain the most resources for your next climb. So everyone wants to get to the top of the mountain. Well, the top of the mountain is a very lonely place and at the top of every mountain is another valley. But you have to know in that valley that is where you’re going to get the strength. That’s where we get our resources to climb. If you have the right mindset, if you have the right people around you, that is where you get the strength and community advisors. And one thing that I think a lot of people miss out on is the power of mentoring other people.

Adam House:
So in my community, the house of bricks, like we do not have profile envy. So we’ve talked about my exit CEO, all that stuff. Like, I don’t care if you work at a gas station, as long as you want to be a high performer, you can be a part of our community because everybody has a story they can tell and the only way they can tell it to inspire the right person at the right time. And so if we can mentor other people that want to be where we are, we’re helping bring them up, draw their story out, and then the ripple effect that they can have with their life can, can change thousands. So it’s really just the shared power of frequency getting around the right people. But specific failures. I mean, I. Did you name the day in every one of those businesses, I was screwing out, but it’s how I processed the failure as feedback and then continued to make progress.

Dana Robinson:
Great. Appreciate that. Let’s talk about the lessons you’ve drawn from the successes, the challenges, the failures, the mountains, the valleys. The entrepreneur that’s slogging away, listening and hopefully hearing that you’ll get through the hard times. But what are some practical things that you think are as universal as possible about getting through it as an entrepreneur?

Adam House:
Yeah, there’s three or four pillars I always talk about, and this can apply to everyone that’s listening, whether you think you’re successful or not. The first one is faith and fear always coexist. So to the degree of fear that you’re feeling is the degree of opportunity in front of you. Belief and unbelief are both belief systems like people are. I don’t believe in whatever it is. Well, unbelief is a belief system. So you have faith and fear, they coexist. Which one are you going to choose? And you are the only one that can choose what belief system you focus on and what shapes your mind.

Adam House:
Our mind creates our reality. And the second, what I talked about earlier, is the relationship capital flywheel. Okay. The first thing is there is always someone out there that is where you want to go. So you find that person, get them to mentor you, advisor, coach, advisory board member. A lot of people that have success, including me, or have had success, want to help other people. They want to give back. So be mentored.

Adam House:
The second is finding a peer someone to climb the mountain with who is in this with you. It can be your coworkers, it can be your leadership team, it can be a community. But finding people that are on the same frequency as you trying to climb a mountain doesn’t have to be the same mountain, but, like, you know, high performing, like minded people. The third we talked about is mentor someone else. We believe in the ten x power of giving, so the more you give, the more you receive. And where a lot of entrepreneurs fall short is they don’t know how to receive from other people. We’re actually very giving people. Who else would work hundreds of hours a month for little or no return? Or you’re paying to work right now.

Adam House:
I’m paying to work. We’re losing money. So. But I’ve done that. I get it. It’s an investment, right? So mentor someone else. You have something to give. You have a story to tell.

Adam House:
And then the fourth and most important person in that flywheel is you. It’s the listener out there. It is. You are at the center of those relationships. And how you lead yourself will impact that flywheel. And with it spinning, you can create incremental growth. Everyone’s looking for the ten x way of to build their business in life. Well, if you live in an effective relationship capital flywheel, that’s the ten x power of your business and life.

Adam House:
And then the third pillar is living in your why not? So just like I’m trying to dismantle accelerators out there. Sorry. Simon Sinek, if you’re listening, I cannot stand this finding your why generation. So if you’re 27 years old and sitting in your basement playing Xbox Live, your why not mentality, why not go start a business? Why not start a business with dollar 200? Why not play professional basketball at 32? You can do whatever you want. If you start with your why not. Your purpose comes through progress. Because what you think you want at the beginning is going to change. When we’re taking decisive action or making decisive action, that’s going to create you feedback, and your purpose will come through progress.

Adam House:
So it’s fear and faith, relationship capital, and then living your why not? The real why that you need to find is why you’re not stepping forward. Are you living in fear? I are you afraid? Are you full of anxiety? That is the why that is preventing you from being all that is that you want to be brilliant.

Dana Robinson:
Brilliant. So I love that. Let me just talk a little bit about her and explore this why not with you? Because I have this myth, largely american myth, that we, we need to find our purpose. Is this limiting belief? I think because I look at your example, you’re in cell phones, med tech, the basketball, you’re doing things that really have come to define you. But if you had waited around to sort of, like, divine the purpose that you were supposed to go out and pursue, you’d never do anything. It’s like the action that you’re taking is helping to define who you are at the same time. And you’re finding purpose in all of those things. And, yeah, not to bash on good old Simon Sinek.

Dana Robinson:
He’s a great speaker. And there is some importance to the why in a brand and sort of what corporations might do, for example, example. But waiting for your personal why before you stop playing video games to your example isn’t going to get you anywhere. You’re not going to do anything.

Adam House:
We’re in agreement. I like Simon, too. Great teacher, but I really. Humans always swing from one side of the pendulum to the other, right? It’s, we didn’t, our parents generation, they fought in wars, they lived on welfare, and now it’s like kids are running around with a $1000 phone in their hand saying, like, my iPhone, my iPhone. You know, I was lucky to get like a bag of marbles and some baseball cards. So it’s just, there’s, there’s got to be a balance somewhere in that that people can start to make their progress. And just for me, my purpose has just always come through progress, just starting something. You’re never ready.

Adam House:
Start before you’re ready and you make that progress and you have to decide, like, maybe you don’t like what you’re doing. And if you don’t love the job and have a passion for it, if you’re starting a business, you’re going to have a hard time sticking through the struggle zone.

Dana Robinson:
I like that. Yeah. The do what you love and the rest will follow is pretty much nonsense. But you do want to at least like, if not love what you do. And that’s, it’s an important nuance. Right. Because you can sit around in this sort of mental paralysis of, well, I don’t think I want to do x, y and z because I should do what I love. You don’t know what you love until you start doing some stuff.

Dana Robinson:
And you don’t know what you hate until you do some things that you don’t like doing. Right.

Adam House:
That’s spot on.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, yeah. And you can sort of shape that. And certainly for entrepreneurs, they finding your strength, finding the things that you’re great at are often the things that you also like doing. And then the things that you’re horrible at are usually the things you don’t like doing. And some of that helps you create some define and control the life that you’re living, which I think is what a lot of entrepreneurs want. Agency sense, that they’re getting to choose to lean into the things that they do like to do versus not. Let’s talk about House of bricks, talk about the organization. What are you doing with it? Who’s right for it? Let’s have a brief commercial.

Adam House:
I will climb on my soapbox for you. So the House of bricks is a community, and it’s a play on my last name, obviously. House and the bricks are like life’s experiences, you have the choice to carry them with you and they’re heavy, or you can lay them down and build a strong foundation. So we’ve talked about failure. Failure is a great teacher if it’s followed by action. So we’re all about action in the House of bricks. Okay? You failed like we were talking about earlier. Fail fast, fail hard.

Adam House:
Well, you don’t have to fail all the time. And in fact, that’s the power of leveraging an advisor or a community. You know, coach, because I tell people I have paid millions of dollars in dummy tax for you, you can skip it by listening to the advice that I’m giving you. I have made millions of mistakes. I’m the richest dummy, dummy tax guy in the world, and you don’t have to pay it if you listen to what I can teach you from our mistakes and the other people in our community. So we have the house of Bricks community. We offer business advisory services. So if you have a startup, we have a program called Startup X.

Adam House:
It’s an academy, not an accelerator, but it’s the foundations you need to make sure you have the right business. I was actually just recently a judge on a show called the two minute Drill. So it’s in its six season on Apple TV. David Meltzer’s one of the founders. But our six contestants, we sponsored our own episode, went and showed up after they had gone through our program. They said it was the best six contestants that they’ve had in all six seasons. So our startup X course teaches you those disciplines, how to get your first hundred customers, how to define your ICP, what’s your go to market strategy? Just those basics, financial model, getting that foundation set. And then our business advisory services really works from companies that are seed to series A, maybe Series A to B, that have a successful business recurring revenue and are looking to set the valuation and raise at the right amount for the next round.

Adam House:
So founders get crazy about, oh, I want this $20 million valuation. Well, that’s great if you’re able to execute, but if you don’t and you have to do a down round, you’re going to disrupt your entire cap table. And it’s a very bad look for investors. And so we help them with that advisory service and then the community advisory startup X. And then I also, I’m very active on LinkedIn. We run a lot of events, so you can look me up. Adam House senior on LinkedIn. That’s the easiest place to find me.

Adam House:
Or go to our website, houseofbricks IO, and love to talk to you more if you reach out to me, love it.

Dana Robinson:
So that’s fun because it means that someone’s just starting out, has got an opportunity to get around the mentors you’re talking about and community. And then anyone who’s trying to grow and scale a business has to get around. Some other people are doing the same thing and also get some paid mentorship. So it sounds like you’re a that business, as it were, or organization, however you want to call it, is fulfilling. A lot of the things that you said are the important lessons that you learned along the way.

Adam House:
Yeah, we made a comment at the beginning of the show, the exit plan. You can position yourself, and I call it exit ready. And that exit readiness can be a series a round like taking in. It’s whatever that next hurdle is. If you’re trying to raise capital, it’s not like selling Kool Aid in your driveway at a garage sale. Like there are things you have to do to prepare to exit the right way. And it’s not an overnight decision, and you want to be ready when the opportunity knocks. So I’ve always been ready when the opportunity knocks.

Adam House:
But a lot of founders, we talked about the trades a little bit. A lot of private equity action in there. Well, those opportunities aren’t going to last forever. There’s going to be a commoditization of service businesses. There’s a lot of roll ups going on. So if you’re in the service business and you have a plan to exit, I see a two to three year time horizon before private equity is kind of taken over that.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, for sure. I’ve had a lot of investment bankers with some form of how do we get your company in shape so that you can sell? And almost universally people, you know, professionals that are advisors, want you to be talking to them two years before you take your company to market. And if you’re not, then you’re not ready. Like, you know, your, your financials are whatever wonky version of financials you’ve been running your business on. You probably don’t have anything that’s easy to present in GAAP. Your chart is flat and probably not following best practices. You probably don’t have cadence of meetings, operational excellence, KPI’s that you can consistently measure and drive for. Those are all things that people don’t do.

Dana Robinson:
And then when they go to sell the business, they take a discount on it because that’s what the private equity group is going to do to the business.

Adam House:
Yeah, it depends who the buyer is, right? I’ve always found strategic buyers and I think they’re stretching out that timeline. Two years. You can, you can clean up a lot and at least cast the right vision in three to six months, if you can create the right vision to the right buyer at the right time. I think people are overthinking the exit readiness timeline. Uh, obviously depends on the size of the company, but in the trades, they think generationally, there’s a lot of generational businesses. So, like, I want to pass this down to my kids or what am I leaving behind? But I think it can be done a lot faster and, uh, with more velocity than. Because, because. Because I was close to that industry and there were a lot of guys with that two year.

Adam House:
Just sign us as an advisor for two years and we’ll have you ready, you know, so there’s ways to get it done more efficiently.

Dana Robinson:
No, I appreciate that then. And for, you know, for that business owner, is house of bricks a good community to get involved with?

Adam House:
Absolutely. We have, between my partner and I, raised over a couple hundred million dollars. I mean, we’re helping founders daily position themselves with the right investor presentation, the one page summary. And just because you go on and get Sequoia’s pitch deck off of chat GPT or ask them to do it like, it’s. I love AI, but it’s also making people think they know a lot more than they do. So there’s, there’s some customizations you need to make, but getting that investor presentation ready, a one page summary, helping you set the valuation and identify strategic buyers, that’s what we’re doing every day.

Dana Robinson:
Cool, man. Well, super great to have you on, Adam. And obviously people can find you at House of bricks. IO. Adam, house on senior on LinkedIn. Any other places where you live, people can hunt you down. Social.

Adam House:
If you can’t find me on LinkedIn, we’re not meant to be together. So go to House of bricks. Check me out on LinkedIn. The last thing I want to leave people with, and we just didn’t get to it. And we’ll wrap up here. But every one of your struggles can lead to success. And for the last twelve months, I’ve been struggling. We’ve been failing every day but making progress, and that’s how we developed our simple framework.

Adam House:
So simple is an acronym for strategy. You got to have the destination of where you’re going. You. The I stands for innovate. So you test, fail, learn and grow. The m stands for mindset. So when you start a business, your dream, you have all these dreams and then your dreams meet reality. You’ve got to have the right mindset, the patterns we’ve talked about.

Adam House:
There’s patterns in business that are consistent in any industry. So you have to look back and see what worked, what didn’t. The most difficult thing for entrepreneurs to do is to stop doing what isn’t working. So this is where an advisor or a coach or advisory board can come in and l stands for leverage. Every entrepreneur wants to ten x at the beginning. Leverage is a natural output of doing the right things consistently. Over time, the business will leverage and accelerate growth. And then e is the most important, which is execution.

Adam House:
So making sure you’re executing e is not at the beginning because you’re first of all, it’s not how you spell simple. But secondly, e is for execution. You have to go through the process and make sure you’re executing on the right things. So that’s a simple framework and didn’t come up with that overnight. It was a year of screwing up and doing things wrong and then one day just said, this isn’t easy, but we can make it simple. It was literally what we’re trying to do for startup founders and entrepreneurs and people looking to exit their business.

Dana Robinson:
I love it. Thanks for sharing the simple framework and telling us a bit about your own journey. I’ll just remind everybody to hit me up with questions. Comments hello@danarobinson.com adam, thanks for coming on the exit plan.

Adam House:
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Dana Robinson:
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Exit Plan podcast. I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up with questions or comments by emailing me at hello@danarobinson.com or leave comments and questions by calling 858-252-7785 call 858-252-7785 and leave a message.