Transcription
The journey of business is incredibly hard, and the amount of lessons I've learned over the last 13 years. I always wish I had this video, and so I wanted to take a moment to share the nine lessons in business that I wish I knew when I started. I wanted to do it in a way, just driving, imagining I've picked you up and we're having a conversation. My name is Frank Grief. I co-founded business with my two brothers, and we sold it for $180 million. Let's go.
Lesson number one, you need to back yourself because no one else will. When I started the first business, I don't think this was as clear, but now, the second time going around, I've realized that you have to have so much conviction in yourself and so much self-belief. Because starting a business, it doesn't really matter what the product is you're doing, whether it be a crowded space or whether it be a brand new sector, like you're diving into the abyss. And so many people in your life are going to try and, like I guess, protect you is the right way to say it. Like if you tell friends and family and you have a job, they're going to be like, "Oh, you know, are you sure, Frank? Like, I'm not sure about that." You know, like that sounds like a risk. And then other people are just going to flat out not believe in you. And so the only consistent thing is your self-belief. And you need to have this feeling like, "I see things that others do not, and I'm willing to take risks that others are not." And you're backing yourself every step of the way because, like I said, no one else is going to do it.
The second lesson is one that it doesn't matter if you're starting, you're at the middle of the journey, or you're on to round two. Speed is one of the most underrated things that you can have in business and in life. And the cool thing I get to do is like I get to kind of reflect over the 13-year journey, and I go, "What is one thing that I consistently did, and my brothers consistently did, that has made the biggest impact?" And there's this concept when it comes to money about like compounding interest and compounding returns. So if you put $100 in the bank, you earn 10%. Next year you have $110, and now you're earning interest on that. And the same thing applies to speed. The compound return of when you do things incredibly fast. And so if you take a decision, and your time between decision and execution is faster than anybody else, as you look back, you have so much more time to do things because you're moving at such a pace that others are not. And this comes down to really micro things. And I see this so much with first-time founders. They like overanalyze and overthink. They get so critical over small little decisions like, "Oh, my logo has to be perfect. My messaging or my landing page has to be perfect." But also people in the later stage of business, they're really focusing and fixating on decisions. But the reality is, a decision is better than no decision. So taking six months to move forward, like inside a corporate business, when you do 22 meetings to look at a slide deck to finally make a decision. The truth is, a decision is better than no decision. And so you look at a corporate business where they have 22 meetings to make a single decision on how we're going to move forward. You could have done 10 decisions prior to that. And through every time you move fast on a decision, you can actually then learn from it. And so the best way to look at this is like, realize like if you have the sense of like, "I only want to do something that is perfect," and especially for an early-stage founder, like your view of perfection is not yet grounded in the market. And so chasing this thing that you believe is not truthful in any way, shape, or form. The only way you know what perfection is, is you're getting feedback. And the feedback is from your customers, and they're buying the product, and the revenue is going up, or they're not clicking on the ad, like whatever it is that will help you get better. And so what you need to do is compress the timeline between having a decision and acting on it.
The third lesson's a bit spicy, but a lot of people get anxious through the process of either building a business or being in business, and you have to realize like anxiety is part of the process. It's a feature, not a bug. When your business is growing, and there's stress, and the customers are coming back at you, and there's problems that are happening, and that anxiety you feel, you want to push forward. That's a feature. It's a privilege. The only reason you're feeling that way is because you are getting stretched as a person. And the cool thing you get to realize the longer you're in the game is the thing that stressed you out, the thing that created anxiety for you this year, you'll look back in a year and you'll laugh at it because that no longer stresses you out. It now needs something to be even bigger and even more dramatic and bigger revenue to get you to that level of stress. But you have to realize like if you don't have that anxiety or that stress, there's actually a problem because maybe you're not pushing yourself. Maybe you're not growing. Maybe you're stagnant. Now, I'm not suggesting you have to be stressed at all times, but sometimes there are seasons in building a business that you are almost on your fight-or-flight response for a few months at a time, but that's part of your process to grow. And the only reason, the same way like when you go to the gym and you need to apply pressure and strain to your muscles to be able to grow, it's exactly the same for humans and in business because you need that stress. You need those pressures to actually push you to make decisions. Stress is a way that your body gets you a certain sense of focus. That thing that's stressing you out is going to usually be the most important thing that you have to worry about in your business at that particular time. And so when you feel that, realize that it's part of the process.
Lesson four, and I am so passionate about this lesson. So many people will tell you that you need to focus on systems and processes and like you get everything that it's so scalable in your business. That's true at a certain point in a business journey, but in the early days, you need to do unscalable [ __ ] that doesn't make sense because those are the things that you have the ability to like create raving fans. And I'll give you a really good example. If you, the founder of a business, have those early customers and you're getting on the phone to them, you're going and seeing them in their office, you're going to spend the time with them to build raving fans. That piece of unscalable [ __ ] is what helps you then grow from there. I was just with a founder this morning. She's doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and at the moment, they're doing customer surveys to over 700 customers, and she said to the team, "I don't want anybody to respond to these emails. I'm going to personally do them." Logically, that actually doesn't make sense because, you know, having an email correspondence back and forth with a customer, you could probably get a team to do it. But she realizes that by doing that, the feeling the customer is going to get, they're a very big business, a very big brand. And so when that customer receives her name in the email signature and knows they're talking to that founder, that's going to feel amazing. And so that is a piece of unscalable [ __ ] that is going to have returns that it's hard to quantify them, but you just know in your gut that it's the right thing to do. It's so easy in those early days to try and automate and process yourself out of the process or systemize yourself out of the process. It doesn't mean it's the right thing. And the longer you're prepared to do unscalable [ __ ], the bigger the outcome can be. It changes its form over business. And I'll give you my life example. It was year 8 in our business. We were doing about $38 million in revenue. And there was a customer that I've been trying to close for about five years. And I got on the plane to them personally as a CEO. We had a team of 400. And I got on the plane to them like 20 times to fly from Sydney to Melbourne because I knew that being in that room and having the founder of the business, not just a salesperson, was going to make an impact. Now, that's not scalable. That doesn't necessarily make sense, but I knew for the customer it would make such a big impact. And the longer you can hold on to this, the bigger the outcome.
Lesson number five, and this is one that kind of brings a smile to my face. So you can probably see that by now is this concept of being cringe. And I think the more cringe you are, the better. And the closer you are to your objective. So if I take this in the context of content, the first time you get in front of a camera, it's going to feel so cringe. The first time you hit post, you're going to be like, "Oh, my friends, my family." It's going to feel gross and wrong. And that's why you should be doing it. And it doesn't just mean for content is cringe. Cringe is in so many different formats, like just putting yourself out there, you know, speaking into the world what you want to do and what you want to achieve and being authentically you. People will say to you, "Oh, that's cringe." And when you're successful, they'll ask, "How did you do it?" because they're not prepared to do it themselves. If you think about where we are in 2025 and how many businesses and how much saturation there is from a marketing perspective, cringe is often the thing that will cut through, that will stop the scroll. Now, I don't mean you, the founder, has to be building a personal brand, but I just mean from a marketing perspective, like what are you doing that gets people's attention, and often that thing is seen as cringe. When you're the first person to a trend or a new idea, it's novel, and no one's seen it before. And that means people can be like, "Ooh, I can't believe you did that." Until you find something that breaks through, and then people start replicating it. And once people are replicating it, something becomes no longer cringe. And then you're kind of like, you're not at the right place anymore. You're now doing what the masses are doing. And so being unique is often the same as being cringe. Here's something that's not related to marketing and content, and you can imagine and feel the cringe. Melanie Perkins from Canva. It took 100 nos from venture capitalists before she got her first check. And you can kind of put yourself in her shoes for a moment. She's at investor number 92. They're asking about the product, and she's sharing the vision. She goes home that night, and someone asks her like, "How did you go?" "I got another no." And you can probably feel it. The person's like, "Oh, like, like, Mel, like, it's you're at 93 now. Like, surely you can't keep going." But then she kept going. And at 100, she got a yes, and they're worth over $50 billion. And so that willingness to push through when others are a bit like, "I don't know," that's what it's going to take to get the outcome that she's got.
Lesson number six is one I learned really early on in business, and I think I'm really fortunate that it came to me, and it was this concept of an unfair advantage. So, I'm a huge believer that every founder and every individual has an unfair advantage that no one else has, and that you should really own that and double down. Now, I'll give you an example. In the early days of RealHub, my unfair advantage, which I quickly realized, was I was a 24-year-old salesperson selling a product that we had built, and I was going head-to-head with my competitors, and they were double my age or double and a half. So, when I sat down with a real estate agent or principal, they were usually twice my age. And what happened a lot of the times is like they would look at me, and there was a bit of admiration, like they're like, "Wow, like I'm kind of," they're like a bit startled that I was prepared to sit in front of them to negotiate pricing and talk with such conviction about our product. And it was almost they looked at me like, you know, with a twinkle in their eye going, "You're like my son, you know, like I'm so young." And so they saw that as they were then instantly attracted to having that conversation because it was unique. And so that was my unfair advantage at that particular point in time. Another example was I was the salesperson, but I was also the customer service person, and I was also the person who was delivering the product. And so what that meant is my unfair advantage as a salesperson is I could sit eye to eye with a customer and say to them, "I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you get your product in time." And I could say that because I don't have to go back to my corporate office and then go convince the delivery team. I knew it because I made the promise and I was going to do it. As our business grew to 400 people, like I no longer had that unfair advantage because, well, number one, I was no longer the salesperson. Number two, I wasn't customer support, and number three, I wasn't going to be delivering the product. And so then I had to figure out like, what is it at that particular point in time is my unfair advantage, and what to press on. And so the key here is just to understand like it doesn't matter who you are, what stage of the journey you're at, just realize like you have an unfair advantage. Here's a contrarian take: in business, if you can find something that is unfair, provided that it's ethical, work with that. Like everybody talks about, recently I heard Peter Thiel talk about this conversation, which was, you know, everybody talks about competition as such a great thing, and it is. It's a great thing for a consumer, but actually, the golden goose is monopoly. Like how do you become one of one, and how do you use that to your advantage? And so as an individual, as a founder, like find your one-of-one thing and double down on that.
Do you want a [ __ ]? Let's have a Coke here. Hello. Hi there. What's...? Hey there. Do you sell Fanta? Yes, we do. Awesome. Can I grab two Coke Zeros? Oh my god. You knew that was coming. [Music] [Laughter] It's such an innocent joke. I saw it the other day. Thank you. Thanks, Legend. Thanks, man. Have a good one.
Lesson number seven, this is something that's true in the beginning of your journey all the way to the end. Communication solves every problem. Let me explain. The art of communicating, I think, is probably the most important skill that you can have in your entire business. And what I mean by that is because, like, if you boil everything down from a first-principle standpoint, right to the basic, everything is reliant on your ability to communicate. When you first start, you need to be able to communicate your vision to other people. You need to be able to sell them on why they should buy your product. And so by being good at that, it's going to help you convert more people. You then need to be able to convince employees or team members to join your business. And so you need to be able to communicate the vision with absolute conviction and certainty of why they should join you because there's lots of other jobs they can join. There's more secure businesses. It's a risk working with a startup. And so why should they join you? And as you go along your journey, you might have to communicate with investors or go through the sale of your business. Like there's so many points in time where everything is solved with communication. And so, as a skill, I see this as something that so many people forget to focus on and hone their craft. In the early days, I would record every sales pitch, and anytime I did content or I was on a podcast, and I would listen back to it, and I asked myself a really simple question: "If I were to do this again, what's one thing I could change? How could I get better? What are the ums, the rs, the likes, the ands? How could I say the same thing with as few words as possible to really boil down and crystallize exactly what you're trying to communicate?" And if you look at the best of the best and the people who were able to build amazing companies, like a Steve Jobs, he did that because when he got on stage, he was infectious with the way he talked about Apple and building insanely good products. There wasn't a single word out of place. And that ability to communicate is one you have to master. Not sponsored by Coke.
Lesson number eight, and this is one I've come to the realization only in the last couple of years. But the longer you're prepared to do [ __ ] that doesn't make sense, the bigger the outcome. Let me explain. In those early days of business, we start to do things. Your business starts to grow. And there's a certain point that comes where you decide, "I'm going to get a team." And then you start realizing like, "Oh, you know, certain things are beneath me." And before you know it, you're only doing a certain type of thing in your business. But there's certain [ __ ] that doesn't necessarily make sense that you do, but if you do it, the outcome will be so great. And so, let me explain in my life. I've gone through this business, I've sold it. In theory, you know, I have enough money that I can go chill on an island and do nothing. But instead, I go and start a podcast. And for the podcast, what I do is each episode I cook for the guest. Now, that doesn't make sense because it's not a great use of my time. But what it does is it builds a really incredibly strong bond with that guest, which then helps them have the best conversation they've ever had. Let me give you another example. We started the Founders Table. We invite eight people over to my own home. Again, I cook for these eight people, and we have a conversation with eight other founders who are doing over $10 million in revenue. There is no reason that I should be the one cooking. Again, my time is worth a lot. I'm spending about two and a half hours cooking for these people. But the reason I'm doing it is because of the impact that has on someone. They realize like, "You don't need to be doing this. This is a lot of your time, and you've done this for me." And so the impact and the feeling that you give them is like, "Wow, like you really, really care." And so I'm doing that because I'm fast-tracking the ability to have incredible relationships with people. And I realize that those relationships can have a huge impact on me in my business. And so for you in your world, like there is stuff that you know that if you do, it's going to have a huge impact. And even though it's going to feel weird, like maybe I shouldn't need to do this, or I don't need to do this, or it's beneath my pay grade, like realize there's certain things that if you do, and [ __ ] that you do that doesn't make sense, it will provide a huge outcome.
Lesson number nine, you've hung out with me all the way to the end. And I probably should say these aren't in any particular order, but the final one for me, and it doesn't matter what business you're in, if there's one thing I want you to take away, it's this lesson right now. Your job as a founder of a business, as a leader, you need to be able to attract great talent and put them in positions that they can thrive. Every problem in business is solved with people. It's solved with finding the right person for a job and the right talent. And so, you have to get really, really good at being able to find amazing people. And sometimes you may not have the money to go and spend $300,000 to find the best of the best. But then your job is to find like, how do you find someone that maybe doesn't see the talent in themselves right now, and you have the ability to see that, nurture it, and make them an amazing person and make them amazingly good at their job? If you think about someone like Elon Musk, like regardless of controversy or whatever, how is it that he's been able to build like six or more multi-billion dollar businesses? He physically can't be at every one of these businesses, but it's because he has this amazing ability to find incredible people and get them to do their life's best work. And I hate the word empower because it sounds a bit lame, but empower them to do incredible things. And then he has the trust that as he sits over the top of all these different businesses, he has the trust that they're going to be able to deliver. And so whatever you can do to become a magnet for talent and be one where people can thrive and have their life's best work, do that.
So, I hope in the 25 minutes that you've invested, you've been able to share in these key lessons that I wish I knew at the start of building a business. Now, I'm not a YouTuber if I don't tell you to hit that like button, subscribe, throw a comment. You know, like, just throw a comment. You'll notice I respond to them. I enjoy that. And if there's other videos or other conversations you want me to have, just let me know. Follow along, and let's catch up next time.