Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:29
What other? I love that because I feel like it’s counter counterintuitive advice, right? A little bit. At least I’ll phrase it like that. What other so counterintuitive advice will say is like, just share out all the skeletons up front. Because even if you think of like a dating relationship, you know, it’s not counterintuitive. Like, you know, it’s.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 20:49
Not a bad analogy though.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:50
Right? Yeah, but you may scare someone off, obviously, but maybe they should be scared off, right?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 20:55
So if you’re going to marry them, right, if you’re going to do the deal, they’re going to find out at some point. That’s always my thing is they’re going to find out sometime.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:02
Yeah. At what point do you share? Right. So sharing skeletons up front I think also just thinking of your broader relationships beyond the exit. What other things maybe at this point you don’t even consider them counterintuitive, but maybe best practices that most people don’t think are best practices in exit process.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 21:24
So the one that comes to mind is I always try to keep this philosophy or keep in mind that the seller is the other buyer. So like, even if you’re in an unsolicited offer, meaning there’s no other offers on the table, right? And ideally, we want to be in a situation where we’ve got, you know, 3 or 4 offers, right? We can competitively bid this. It’s a little bit of an auction, right? Like if one isn’t working out, you can go to the second one. Right. You’ve got some choices. What’s hard in these unsolicited or single single buyer situations. It’s you know, people feel like, okay, well, I kind of have to take it or I kind of like, I’m there’s no other option here. And, and the philosophy I like to put in place is like you are always the other buyer. Right?
So you can buy your business from yourself. Right. And I like to think about like, okay, what terms would you buy your business for. And if the other buyer, if the unsolicited offer is better than the terms that you would buy your business for, take the unsolicited offer. But if not, buy the business, basically keep it right. The challenge is, a lot of founders aren’t prepared to do that, right? They’re selling the business because they just want out or they’re exhausted or like, you know, and so we what I always say is let’s deal with those things first before we try to do a transaction, because we need to keep this in a situation where you’d be willing to buy your business if the other offer is not good enough.
And so it both changes all the prep work, right? It really kind of digs into motivation. Why are we selling? Like what are the things we can do to offset this? Right? Like, how do we not get into this situation where we’re in a sale, but it also then allows them to go into this negotiations with confidence. It’s like okay, okay. Buyer. Right. Like what are these terms. I don’t like that. Earnout. Right. I’m going to take my earnout, which is I’m going to keep the business right. So it just gives them kind of a psychology of I do have an option. Right. Like I am not negotiating against, you know, nothing. Right. Like I’m negotiating against keeping it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:30
Bruce, what would you say are maybe we’ll call it the be careful stuff. You mentioned the non-compete. You also mentioned earnout. Are there other things that from your experience, people should be careful?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 23:41
Yeah. So? So the things that typically come up, things that I end up, I do a lot of post-transaction coaching work to earn out coaching where people have sold and they’re trying to figure out, okay, I got it. The rest of my money.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:54
That’s a good niche. I like that. Earnout.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 23:56
Yeah, it’s an interesting one. And it kind of depends on if they still have equity and if they’re, you know, managing the business or not managing the business. It gets a little complicated, but it’s an interesting situation. The nice thing is, is that there’s typically you know, the scoreboard is set right. There’s typically terms around okay, I can make another $10 million if I can get, you know, operating margin to here. If I can get growth to here, if I can get, you know, profits here. Right. So I love those things in the sense that, you know, what winning is, is very defined. And we can hyper focus the work that we’re doing to hit those numbers. Now sometimes the challenge is they don’t have they’ve lost a lot of the decision making and the kind of resources and control element.
So we’re sometimes having to be a little more scrappy or we’re dealing with like, you know, limited options in cases. But I think the things that often become problematic. So one is and let’s separate these out a little more formally. So there is deferred payment, which is you know, say say they say okay, we’re going to value your company at 20 million. We’re going to give you ten. We’re going to give you cash on signing, which would be nice. We’re going to do five as a note payment and five as an Earnout. So five and the note payment is it’s a guaranteed payment meaning you don’t have to do anything to get that money. And it’s usually structured like a five year note or a quarterly payments or something like that. But the challenge there is typically those things are backed, you know, are collateralized by the company. So you know, as much as you’re like, oh, well, it’s a note. It’s like, all right, well, if the company goes south and the buyers decide to, you know, there’s all sorts of things buyers can do.
Once you own the company, you move the assets to another place. You start deferring revenues, right. Like they can basically shell the company. And great, they default on the note. And as remedy you get the company back. But now the company is not worth anything anyway. So I’m always looking at those guaranteed payments. While it looks like a fixed note payment, there’s still a significant amount of risk on it, if particularly if it’s only backed by the assets of the company. Now they can sometimes back it with other assets they have, right. But depending on the company, how sophisticated they are most times is they’re going to run you out of money in court trying to collect on that stuff. Then you actually can claw back. So those are the deferred payments. Earnouts are more specifically around if the company performs in certain ways that you will get additional money.
Now there’s two versions of this one is where you’re actively involved in the company, like you’re in the company in some kind of management, or maybe even stay on as leader or CEO and you have some control or some influence potentially over hitting those numbers or not. And usually I would say you probably don’t have as much control certainly as you would like oftentimes as, as you think. But so that money is at risk that way. And if you don’t have a management control then I mean you’re basically an earnout. But it’s like, okay, like I let’s see how you do. Right? Like you only make money if they hit the numbers. So, you know, there’s a lot of risk in those things. The other one that comes up is executive compensation executive bonus. So if you’re going to stay on a CEO, like what are you getting paid for that job. And is it market rate? Is it above market rate?
And then is there performance bonuses based on that that kind of go into it. So you know, in the end these get a little complicated because it’s well what am I getting paid at signing. What? Deferred payments am I getting on a note? What earnouts am I getting? You know, based on company performance. You know, whether or not I’m involved in the company. And then I potentially have an executive compensation package with potential performance bonuses on that. Like all those things can, you know, figuring out the net present value of all those things and the risk around all those things are difficult. And oftentimes what I find is if you look at like three years or five years out, depending on these earnouts, you know, where where you would be financially at the end of that, say, five year period with the deal, you know, getting the cash, getting the payments, getting the earnouts, getting the executive comp versus if you just kept the company, sometimes it’s not as good.
Sometimes just keeping the company is better. Right? Because you’re you can the big challenge is continuing to build equity, right. Like once you sell a company I mean, yes, you may have a 20% stake in it, but your rate in which you’re building equity on the 20% stake is much less than when you own the company, and you are probably pulling. I mean, if you know a successful company, you’re probably pulling, you know, at least a couple hundred thousand, maybe $1 million in income out of the company as well. So now, you know, you’re looking at five years. That would be another $5 million in personal income plus the increase in equity. Like doing this math can get a little complicated, but when you do it like some of these deals may look good on paper in some respects, but consider the option of keeping it. Sometimes it’s not as good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:00
Bruce, talk about what are some examples? Because like I know with the book and you really focus on what’s next before and we were talking before we hit record, you know, one of the people they may not sell for five years and they’re thinking five years from now what they’re doing next to prepare. What are some examples of what you hear or when you explore what to do next? What are they? What are people saying?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 29:24
Yeah. So I’ll kind of bucket it into kind of business venture and then non-business venture, the business venture stuff. You know what becomes interesting is where there’s some kind of derivative business opportunity based on the company they’re in now that they can start a new company around. So, you know, if they’re a product company, they see an opportunity to do some ancillary services or something, or there’s an adjacent industry we can take the product to. And so those become interesting because we’re actually looking for either developing outside assets. So it could be relationships, it could be IP and things like that. We may say okay, look let’s, let’s, let’s take this other application, put it into a separate entity. And you can nurture that pre-exit and get that cleaved off and owned and outside of the current company, so that when you sell that thing, you’re not selling this asset that you can take somewhere else. In some cases, we’re identifying those assets inside the company.
And part of the deal that you’re putting on the table with the buyer is like, hey, either I want a license to be able to use this in a non-competitive way, or I’m cleaving this off. I’m not selling this thing. So I worked with a packaging company for a while, and they worked in a very particular industry. And, but there was some underlying IP associated with some of these packaging technologies that could be applied to many other industries. So a lot of what we were doing in terms of setting up these potential deals was selling, selling the use of these package technologies in this particular industry, but keeping the rights to be able to go to other industries because this person, she wanted to go off. And do you know, she had lots of lots of ideas of where else she wanted to take this thing. She wanted to get out of this industry. She was kind of she, you know, ran that race.
And so yeah, so we were looking at how do we kind of cleave those things off so it could be, you know, assets, capabilities. It could be data. Right. It could be, you know, just knowledge. It could be building up a knowledge base. It could be building up a network, right? So how do I use the platform I have as CEO, founder and CEO of a company for the next three years to build up a network of reputation, you know, getting involved in boards, industry organizations. Right. Like, we can find some really practical things we can do to create assets and values and capabilities that will survive or will be retained post-exit that can be leveraged into the next thing. And then obviously, we want to look at the deal terms themselves, and we may be willing to take a valuation that’s 20% lower if we don’t have an Earnout or if we have a one year earnout. Right.
Or if we only have a one year non-compete rather than a three year non-compete, because we know that, you know it’s worth it, right? Like, we may give up, say we give up $5 million on a valuation, but if we know that we can jumpstart a new business that could be worth another ten, 20, $30 million in a couple of years, fine, right? Particularly if it gives the founders something to do. Right? You know, sometimes it’s just a matter of I want to plant like I want to work. I don’t want to actually sit on the beach for a year or two years. Three years. And sometimes their spouses don’t want them sitting on the beach for a year or two years. I had one story of this founder who was planning an exit, and he had a whole thing. He actually put a deposit on a boat, a sailing ship, because he was oh yeah, I’m going to I want to sail, you know, I want to I want to sail for six months across, you know, to Europe and everything.
His wife looks at him and says, I don’t know who you’re going to sail with. You’re not sailing with me, right? Like, because the founder’s getting this. Look at this vision. I’m going to exit. They don’t realize that this doesn’t change everyone else’s world, right? Everyone else continues to live their lives, right? It’s life changing for you. It’s not life changing for everyone.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:05
I love the concept of creating something. And like you mentioned, kind of with the licensing. I’m curious. I’m sure all the circumstances are different in that packaging. Were they expecting, okay, they would pay the company for the license, and then they’d be able to license it to others. Or they go, I want to maintain a license to non competitive industries. How do they work it out. So like the main company is not threatened by it.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 33:33
But the buyer.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:35
Yeah. The buyer. Yeah exactly.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 33:37
So, I mean some of this is that the nature is such a cool technology.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:40
Like I guess it’s as soon as someone says, well we’re going to use it for this, you know, other thing like, well, maybe, maybe we should be using it for this other use planning the idea. But I’m curious, how does it get executed a little bit in that circumstance, or what’s the expectation of the seller and buyer?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 34:00
Well, it all kind of depends. But I think there’s two flavors of this. One is we’ve thought about this years in advance, like we’re five years away from an exit. We see this opportunity and we actually, you know, upfront set up the other entity, you know, transfer the assets over there, right. Like it’s not part of the business. And that’s, that’s licensed back to this other company and like so it’s structurally it’s just not part of the company to begin with. Now when you go to sell it, any smart buyer is going to look at, well, what are you licensing and who owns those licenses and what are they going to do with it. And they a smart buyer might make sure that there are some restrictive covenants, you know, around what the other company that’s licensing can do it. Or they may just reduce the valuation.
They may just say, okay, well, you only have a license to this and it’s a core part of the business. So you know, there’s a risk here. So we’re not going to pay you 50 million. We’re going to pay you 30 million because we’re going to have to either rebuild it or we’re going to have to offset that risk, you know, somehow. So there’s kind of option A, which is you do it upfront, you do it well in advance, and it’s more of structure structurally. You’ve already pulled it out. You know, plan B is okay. It’s it’s in part of the company. And as part of the deal, you’re — a term of the sale is you’re asking for rights to be able to use it in some kind of noncompetitive way or, you know, in some way. And everyone has to define what competitive or not competitive, for what period of time, right. Or or maybe you royalty it back, right? Say, look, I want to go off and do this. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen 1 or 2 cases where founders have done that and then they sell that company back to the parent company. Right. So you kind of it’s like, hey, buy my main company.
And I see an opportunity to kind of, you know, use this in a new way. Let me go out and spend a couple years building that, and then I’ll sell you that business too. Right. So it’s I think the trick here is what is it you want to do? Like where do you want to create value? What are the resources and assets that you would need to use that value? And how could you structure it in a way such that you could economically and sort of business logistics, reasonably peel that off and continue to use that in some way? Yeah. And, you know, you get into funny ones where you get like personal identity and content and you know, you know, where a business, someone’s reputation Mutation, like individual reputation, is really tied to the business. And what can they do and what can they not do?
And yeah, I mean, you’ve heard of these kind of crazy horror stories of like individuals that kind of lose their ability to, to in their personal identity in a marketplace because that is branded and it’s now part of this new company. You know, so it gets a little dicey when you’re dealing with some of the not intangibles and, you know, branded stuff, but are there any other.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:44
Do next things like that’s one example, you say kind of thinking five years from now, three, five years from now, you know, peeling something off, licensing, you know, that someone can do separately. Any other interesting stories on how people start to think around? Because I know you work closely with people on this.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 37:06
Yeah. I mean, so I mean, typically there’s the financial asset and then there’s the strategic asset on the financial assets. You’re right. It’s pretty much math. Right. Like you’re basically saying, here’s the business. If we can capitalize it differently, we can put some debt in it. We can, you know, as more capital, we can grow it in these areas. There’s clear opportunities for growth, and there’s usually some kind of time frame like 3 to 5, maybe seven years on the outside that you’re going to sell again in private equity, you know, usually is playing these games. That’s right. I’m just going to juice the current business, make a bunch of money, flip it and sell it to somebody else, and, and and turn things around in those cases, you know, it’s a it’s a pretty I suggest to founders that that’s, that’s a pretty surgical just like okay, once you do the deal, if you want to stay on great, it’s a different game.
But you’re really done as an entrepreneur once you sell the strategics are where this stuff becomes a little bit more interesting, where the underlying assets and capabilities. And like, I was involved in one situation where we didn’t even know why the buyer was going to buy this company until after they did the sale. And then it’s then it sort of came out and we understood, oh, like why they wanted some of these assets and stuff like that. So you never really know. But I think the more that you can try to figure out, not so much what is the value to you, but what is the value to that other business that the buyer. And that’s how you need to kind of structure the deal and structure the conversations and structure the valuation and kind of the deal structure. Right. Because it depends on what they’re going to do with it. It might be your clients, right? Like they’ve got some product. You know, maybe you’re making $50 million a year selling to, you know, these 50 important clients.
Well, if they’ve got some other product, they can make $200 million a year selling too. I mean, they just want your clients and oftentimes they’ll, you know, they’ll come in, buy the company, they get rid of all your people. Right? Because we just want the client list. Maybe we want some underlying technology, maybe we want, you know, maybe it’s access to a market, maybe access to geography, maybe it’s a certification or, you know, some kind of license that you have or ability to operate in a certain place. Geographic expansion. Yeah. So the more you can kind of figure those things out, the more you can kind of understand where the potential deals are and where some of these opportunities of like maybe don’t sell, maybe we just license. Right.
Maybe we do a joint venture right on this thing to get them into the market. Maybe we really don’t need the whole company or you know, you realize that they’re really just buying it for the client, so. All right. Fine. Keep the tech or keep a license to the tech if that’s really not why they’re buying things.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:41
No, I love that question is what’s the value to the other business. And there was one example I love to talk about, which is an internet security company. Can you tell people a little bit about that scenario?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 39:54
Yeah, that was a fun one. I mean, so this was I had sold my business and I did a couple of interim COO and CEO roles, and then kind of got more formally into coaching a couple years after I sold. And one of the first companies that I started working with as a coach at the time was probably 50 people. Yeah, 50. 60 people. And I started running strategy sessions. We started planning. We started, you know, going through the Scaling Up Three Hag, like, I had a couple of different tools at the time. And, you know, I grew with them. They grew with me. You know, we started doing I remember they did their series B, series C, and then ultimately a couple years ago they did a series D at 140 million.
And, you know, 600 people right there on the path to go public, you know, major, major backers. And it was just fun to kind of, you know, kind of parallel my own growth as a coach and their growth as a company. As I, as I kind of started with my, you know, kind of $5 to $10 million companies and started working with the $20 to $30 million and the $50 to $60 and $100, $200 million, like, as on one hand, as my coaching practice evolved and I saw kind of the different needs and the challenges and what I needed to do as a coach and then also like what didn’t change. Right? I mean, these companies have the same problems regardless of the size, right? You’ve got leadership issues. You’ve got management issues.
You’ve got, you know, how do you set up dashboards? How do you create metrics, how do you focus? How do you set priorities right? Like every company struggles with doubt about the size. So it’s just been funny to see what stayed the same and what’s changed. And I’m sure I could have predicted earlier in the process what those things would be over time.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:34
What are some of the things that didn’t change? You mentioned a few like leadership issues. What else?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 41:40
I would say, you know, communication alignment, right. Like just getting clear on who’s doing what. Right. Accountability. Right. All those things, it’s just it just keeps becoming issue, I think. And I think it goes back to the, you know, growing a company is not purely additive. You know, it’s not just like you need to add and add and add. I need to kind of add more skills. I need to add more capabilities. It’s as much as it’s additive. It’s actually reductive to like I need to undo a lot of strategies, techniques, processes, styles, you know, things. Things that I do as leaders, right? I talk a lot about unteaching leaders things.
As much as I’m trying to teach leaders and get them, getting them to realize that, you know, that isn’t Michael the Goldsmith book. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, right? Like the things that actually were incredibly successful for them up to a certain point now become like obstacles and, you know, get in the way of getting into the next level. So, you know, I think those the, the interpersonal, the leadership style things, I think actually in some respects the bigger the company is, the simpler the strategy needs to be, because you’ve got to communicate it out to more and more people.
And I think in the beginning when I was doing, you know, $10, $20, $30 million company strategy work, we could be, you know, pretty sophisticated. We could have these really kind of interesting angles. And, you know, because we’re only trying to align like 100 people, 150 people. You can communicate those out things pretty well. But as you get up to 500 people, a thousand people, like your strategy has got to be super simple. It’s like, here are the three things we do to win, right? Here’s who we focus on. Right. Here are the core processes right. Like the more we keep that really simple it’s going to be good. But it’s got to be simple and clearly communicated. I think that’s been probably the biggest challenge I’ve run into with the bigger companies.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:33
What have you seen with mistakes with communication that people are making?
Bruce Eckfeldt: 43:40
My favorite line is the challenge with the communication is the illusion that it’s occurred. And I think a lot of particularly I just find this with CEOs a lot and founder CEOs is like like I told them to do this, I’m like, okay, well how? And how many times and were they listening and what was the context. Right. And what else was going on. What else did you tell them at the same time? Right. It’s like, oh, well, yeah, we mentioned it in this meeting, but six other things and three other people were talking to them, and I also was telling them how upset I was about this other issue. Like, okay, look like, you know, you’ve got it. You’ve got to communicate it. I say you tell them six times clearly in a way that they’ve responded accurately. And now we can talk about their challenges. But until then we got to talk about what are you going to do differently to communicate better. Okay.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:28
Thank you. I appreciate that. There was another person, you know, we’re talking about, you know, people raising $140 million. One person just said their outcome, which is success, was I’m happy to come to work again.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 44:45
Yeah. Yeah. No, I love this. It was pretty recently. Yeah. It was in a nice business, 60, $70 million business, you know, founder, CEO. And she had come to me not out of desperation, but a little bit of like, I don’t know exactly what to do next because I’m really frustrated. She had to kind of clean house on her team. And it was like, I get it right. Like these, these challenges come in waves and it can get pretty disheartening. And, you know, it’s hard even when you see, okay, this is the work that needs to get done.
There’s clearly a path here. Like we can see success. We know that to to kind of go through that emotionally and to feel kind of beat up and bruised, you know, we spent a couple of months just kind of making some changes, getting some better people in, you know, restructuring things a little bit, you know, cleaning, kind of cleaning up a bit. And within a couple of weeks, you know, she came to me and she’s like, I actually like coming to work now. And, you know, for me, like, that’s the win, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:49
Like was it just revamping the team or what do you think were some of the things that I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t one thing.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 45:58
Yeah. So I think it’s a little bit of framing, you know, it’s a little bit of just like this is entrepreneurship and this is being a CEO, right? And there’s nothing there’s nothing surprising here. And yes, it’s hard. And yes, these are difficult decisions and difficult conversations and difficult things to go through. And I think it comes down to kind of reframing it and then plotting a path. Right. Like once you kind of see it’s like, okay, like I know I need to I want to get to the top of this mountain. But if I don’t have any idea of how I’m going to get there, like it just feels impossible. Versus if I kind of see, like, oh, I see we’re going to go up the west side and we’re going to do this ridge, and then we’re going to hook around, and then we’re going to come up the backside to the summit. Like, okay.
Yeah, that’s still hard, right. Like there’s some super challenging, but at least I have a path. Like at least I see a way. And so a lot of what I end up doing is just plotting paths, right. Like, how do we get to that goal? How do we define that goal? Figure out which summit you’re trying to climb, and then at least have a sense of, okay, I think we can do it this way. Here’s our first base camp. Let’s get there. And then we’ll kind of sort things out, like progress, being able to make Progress just starts creating some motivation. It’s like, okay, I can do this. Like this is not you know, it’s kind of there’s a psychological term of learned helplessness, right? The whole study with dogs and being shocked and all sorts of things that would be inhumane today. But, you know, like if you’re if you don’t feel like there’s hope, like you won’t respond, right? You will just sit there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:24
So yeah, it’s a lot of work, I guess, to not only define these things, but then put the plan into action. I’d love to hear just briefly about your, I mean, your previous company. Whenever I watch other videos or like, this guy worked with someone like the pioneers of agile. So talk about your previous company and some of the things that helped you grow, because I mean, going multiple times on the Inc. list, you have to basically, I don’t know, double every year or something like that. So talk about your early company.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 48:02
Yeah. so I’ll even go before that. I mean, as you mentioned, I was an architect originally, right? So I was, you know, like building architect, like glass and bricks and mortar things, not computer architect. But I got into interactive media. I was doing a lot of computer modeling and stuff, got into interactive media in the New York area and had, you know, was part of a big roll up. So we were a 50 person company, got bought by a European agency, immediately became 1800 people, and I was running around Europe on projects.
It was a lot of fun and had the opportunity to work with a gentleman named Eva Jacobson, who is a some what they in the development world in the 80s, something called object oriented programming. And there’s something called the Three Amigos. He was one of the three people who really pioneered really different way of thinking about software development, or software or programming architecture programming software architecting software. And he’s turned me on to something called originally it was called Extreme Programming. I had a chance to work with them and kind of got me hooked on the whole, like, how do we actually develop software products? And so I got deep into extreme programming and iterative agile was the early kind of versions of lean agile software development. And so we started the software development company really as a way to do some projects. We had an opportunity to work on some folks work with some companies on developing software systems.
And, and I just I was very intrigued with this idea of how highly iterative customer feedback driven software development, which, you know, in the beginning, at the time, people extreme programming, like we were jumping out of planes with laptops or something or like it was it was poorly labeled, but it was a really different way of thinking about the process and not only about software, about the whole kind of product development and business development. And that’s fueled all the lean startups and everything like that. And so we kind of got into it accidentally. All right. And we had a project that led to another project and to another project. And pretty soon I realized, okay, we’ve got a company. We started hiring people. And that led to a new project. Right? So it was kind of a snowball thing. And actually, one of the things actually give us credit for is actually not growing as fast as we could have. And being reasonably disciplined about, like, I, I don’t think I ever worked a weekend in my company, which is a little unheard of, I think, for, you know, growth companies like that.
And it was just because we had some principles around, you know, let’s stay really focused. When we’re at work, we’re going to be really focused and we’re not at work. Go recover, you know, spend time with the family, do other things. And I think that served us well. And, you know, we had some pretty big setbacks. We lost big clients. We had to kind of rebuild things. But, you know, it was being clear on where we were generating value and how could we continue to stay focused on that. The other thing, too, and one of the reasons I sold it is, you know, we were early, right? And we could see, you know, our, our the, the rates that we were charging were kind of going down. The cost of our developers were going up. I saw these lines converging at some point.
And so you realize as an earlier stage company, like things mature and there’s probably either we’re going to have to really grow or, you know, I decided to tap out in the sense of like, I didn’t, I didn’t want to do that big roll up. I didn’t want to be a 5000 person company and was happy turning over the reins to focus on other things that I wanted to do, you know? And that was a personal choice. And a lot of the challenges and these decisions are like, okay, what really is important and deciding where you want, what paths you want to go down on those things.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:23
Bruce, I have one last question. I know we have a couple minutes. I do want to point people to your website. If you checked out the video, it’s Eckfeldt. Com field. Com he does have an assessment that he can share with you. And I always learn a lot by listening to you. And even before this call was a good excuse for me to do like five hours of just listening to your lessons. I’d love to hear some of your favorite books resources over the years. I know Scaling Up is one of them. Any others that people should? Jeff. You know, definitely check out.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 51:58
Yeah. So I tend to not to Vern. I’ll mention Vern here and Scaling Up. It was certainly influential in my business and obviously it’s been a core part of my coaching. Shannon Susko who wrote Three Hag Metronome, that’s I’m also certified in that framework. You know, they both have amazing tool sets and have done amazing work and hugely helpful for businesses. So I always recommend those. I mean, for me personally, I think The Goal Eli Goldratt and I pretty much give that to all of my yeah, give that to all of my CEOs. Right. It’s just kind of like core reading, just the philosophy of systems, you know, sort of systems thinking and bottlenecks and root cause analysis. To Sell is Human.
Dan Pink is another one that I give to a lot of my CEOs, because I think that the whole selling, like selling, is huge for growth companies. And if you don’t have a good mindset around selling, that can be a challenge. Goldsmith What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. You know, it’s a good one just in terms of understanding leadership and growth and an unlearning, right? Like I do a lot like really focus on like, how do we get rid of strategies that are actually going to hold you back? I’m looking at what other ones I have right here. Those are the main oh Blue Ocean strategy. I mean, I think that’s kind of a core one and really understanding differentiation. And how do you create differentiation in the market. And I use that a lot with the businesses that I work with. What else is there? Those are the main ones. Oh Annie Duke. Thinking. Thinking in Bets. So I’m gonna reference a lot. You know, business is poker, not chess. So love it. Bruce.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 53:27
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Everyone check out Eckfeldt.com to learn more. And we’ll see everyone next time. Bruce thanks so much.
Bruce Eckfeldt: 53:36
Thanks, Jeremy.
