70% of Entrepreneurs Should QUIT (Here’s Why)

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. I'm here to do the only good thing that I do, which is introduce our amazing guest, Ned Eric, the director of business strategy at acquisition.com, where he works alongside Alex and Laya Heroszi to help founders scale. Here's the thing though: he's been the first sales hire, the first sales leader, an operator in the trenches of startups and scaleups. He's led go-to-market at companies like Fanny and Addict, built growth teams from scratch, and now is actually working with founders to advise them on what drives revenue. Big changes have happened since we spoke last. Ned, welcome back to the show, man, from my hometown.

>> Yeah, thanks y'all for having me. I'm excited to be back. And yes, big changes from your hometown.

>> Why are you not in a casino with all the dinging in the background when we're having this episode? Like, Ned should be taking this while he's playing. Excuse me, I have to decide my next hand at the blackjack table.

>> Yeah, little do you know I'm in a back room right now. So...

>> Perfect. My private office.

>> Is this the back room because they kicked you out for counting cards?

>> Yeah, I made too much money last night.

>> Nice. Send some my way, please.

>> So funny. Ned, thanks for joining again. You've been like a first sales hire, and now you're scaling into strategist. So you've been both first sales hire and first sales leader more than once. What keeps pulling you back into the early chaos?

>> Insanity.

>> I was going to say insanity. Yeah, I will say it. I've been very blessed in my career, and I've been given opportunities by people who probably shouldn't have given me the opportunities, but they saw something in me. And I really do love being able to see a business go from where it is to where it's meant to be. I've been through a lot, right? I started in tech, I was in consulting, started a home services company, sold it. We've done everything across the gamut. I think the only thing I haven't done is e-commerce.

>> Only thing you haven't done.

>> Yeah, there you go. That is one thing I probably won't go into. But from my perspective, getting pulled back in is just, you know, I see all of these individuals and entrepreneurship is booming. It has been booming. And it's a hard space. It's a lonely space. And for me, if I can go help one founder change the trajectory of their business, their life, their family, it just fires me up.

>> That's interesting when you talk about changing the trajectory of their life and their family. I think that's a side that a lot of people don't talk about—the impact that being a founder has on your family. It's a whole different world. Dale and I have talked about this a bit. I was petrified to go out on my own, and like this fool's like, "Oh dude, just do it. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it. It's going to be great. Everything's wonderful." It's a real impact, right? Like Saturday phone calls, Sunday phone calls, like everything stops. How do you, especially now in your role, have that conversation with founders about like, this is what it really takes to be successful?

>> Yeah, I mean it really is just being blunt about it, because I think too often it is sugarcoated, right? Not to say that, you know, Dale, you sugarcoated to Adam. You did a great job getting to where you are now as co-founders. But I think too often it is sugarcoated in the sense of like, we see the end result on social media. We see the cars, the planes, on the beach.

>> The rented cars and planes.

>> Yeah, exactly. Did you know that there's actually like plane companies? They will literally rent you just like the cockpit for the day. It's probably not the cockpit, whatever they call it.

>> Yeah, it's like in the studio, I'd imagine.

>> Studio, yeah, it's like that. That's crazy. Anyway, there's a big Section 8 guy who I won't mention by name. He's so big and made so much money on Section 8 that now he's going to sell you his secret for $5,000, right? Because he wants everyone to be as rich as him. But all of his videos are with Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis and big houses, and everyone's like, "All right, show us the paper to show that you own that stuff and you're not renting it."

I digress, I'm sorry.

>> No, but that's the truth, right? The aspect of like, this is going to be easy. Hey, if you buy my course, it's going to be the easiest thing in the world. You're going to have three steps and you're going to make seven figures in seven days. It's just not the truth. So I think in a lot of cases, it really does just come down to like, hey, you have to be prepared for this work. And it's not for everyone. I do honestly think that there are 60 to 70 percent of people that are entrepreneurs probably should not be. I think the truth is there is like, you know, there's an entrepreneur in all of us, right? But I think there is a piece of like, hey, some of you might not actually make it through the tough parts. And it doesn't matter if you have a deep why. It doesn't matter if I started this company because I got let go during COVID. Your story doesn't matter. The market decides if you have value.

And sometimes the market decides that you don't have value. And that doesn't mean you're not a valuable human being or that you're not going to go be an amazing COO or an amazing VP somewhere, but it means that hey, you might just not be an entrepreneur. And sometimes that's just the conversation that you have to have. The cool part about here is like, we are working with founders that are, you know, a million dollars and up in profit, right? So those people you typically don't have to have that conversation with. It's typically the sales guy that just got let go from his last sales job that's now a sales consultant that you have to be like, "No, come on, you're being way too generous." The sales guy who just got let go from his sales job, who is now the go-to-market expert who's going to help you scale your startup, but the only title he's ever had is director of BDR.

>> Exactly, right. It's like, I don't necessarily have to have those conversations here. God bless you, you know? But yeah, I think there is a lot of just misinformation out there about what it looks like to be a founder. And like, hey, yeah, like you said, Saturday phone calls, Sunday phone calls, not going on vacation, really actually putting focus into a thing, and understanding that you have to do more than you've ever done in your life. Because for most people, you've gotten by doing kind of just enough not to get fired. You're still going to make whatever your salary is. And if you're in sales, you're going to hit quota and live a decent life. If you don't do the work as a founder initially, you're just going to fail.

>> Yeah, and the market's undefeated. So like, it's always undefeated. Whether you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, and I know you know, if you go back into Alex's career, not everything's a success. I don't think you're going to be successful in everything you do. That doesn't mean you stop doing what you love doing. That doesn't mean you're not an entrepreneur. It just means that for that particular job, section, product, service, that market doesn't see value in it. So I do think overall you just need to be honest with yourself sometimes. There's a fine balance, right? Because when do you stop versus when do you keep going? If you stop too early, you may kick yourself later on. But if you keep going, you may kick yourself later on. So what's your risk tolerance?

>> Pivot principle, right? It's like, hey, do I keep pushing or do I pivot? And I think there's, you know, when you think about push versus pivot, I look at kind of like signal versus noise, right? And it's like, what are the signals telling you? And realistically, everything else is noise, right?

>> That's a Steve Jobs thing, right? Steve Jobs was the one that said like, when you go in on a day, you're going to get pulled in a hundred different directions, but are they signal or are they noise? And if you just follow your signals, then you're going to actually execute properly. If you get pulled into the noise, you're not going to hit the three things that you need to finish on that day to be successful.

>> I mean, we talk about this a lot. I use similar but different verbiage like when I'm talking to, you know, reps or CS leaders or...

Sales leaders, whether it's customer complaints or rep complaints, is this important or is this loud? I could have one customer who is an extremely low ARR customer who is blowing up the entire org with a problem that's so important to them, but in the grand scheme of things probably doesn't matter. Yet you have four CSMs, three reps, two C-level executives who are bringing this up to the product team saying this is something we have to fix right now for this one customer, whereas you have this giant customer who's having a major issue that impacts many people and they're being so quiet. Let's focus on the important, not the loud. Very similar thing that I think holds true across the board.

Yeah, and I think it's the same thing in entrepreneurship when you're trying to figure out like, "Hey, is this working or not?" And I think a lot of times, you know, there's unlimited ways to get to a million dollars as a company. Unlimited. And so I think it really just comes down to what is your goal, right? If you want to go be a trillionaire, right? Yeah, that'd be cool, right? How do I do that? Probably not going to do it by being a restaurant tour. You know, it's just probably not going to happen. But you're going to have to probably have some sort of really specialized AI-type skill if you want to go do $100 million, and especially if we're just talking valuation, you could go do that probably in the next three years in a couple of verticals and be pretty poor and make a couple of right decisions and you could probably do that, right? And so it's just a matter of the vehicle that you're in. And I think that too often what happens is that people don't think inside the box enough. And what I mean by that is I started an HVAC company.

Let me pause there for a second. The way that you said that—everyone thinks, or there is a large quantity of people who think that the only way to—and these are my words, not yours—get rich is to go form some sexy software company. And I want to hear your thoughts specifically. You started an HVAC company because let me tell you something. I was at a wedding in Chicago the other week with a plumber who probably makes more than all three of us put together.

It don't have to be sexy, y'all.

No, yeah. I mean, it comes down to what is the upside? Like plain and simple. And when I look at a business, you know, it's like I've been a Warren Buffett fan for a long time. And I don't know if any of you guys know Andrew Wilkinson, but he's kind of like the Warren Buffett of this new era. He owns Tiny Capital. And it's always like when you think about what you're going to go do, it's like what's never going to go away, right? It's like what are people going to always need, right? And so I think there's something about that. And the thing that also is I actually look for blood in the water. I actually don't want blue ocean because blue ocean means that I've got to go educate the market on this. Education is tough. It's super tough. I've been a part of two startups that we've had to go educate, and we got really lucky that it wasn't a ton of education. But like, it's a difficult first climb up that mountain when you're educating. So I look for blood in the water. I mean, we had tons of competition in Green Square, North Carolina. Chuck and his truck. We've got freaking major HVAC companies all across the Southeast that are working there. I want that because if they screw up, Mary's gonna Google, she's gonna see us, and we're getting that call. We're gonna get to put that sticker on there, and then you can start to build the brand, right? And so I think that's the thing that most people really miss out on is doing the thing that other people are doing and they're doing really well. You know, in Western culture we've really kind of focused on innovation, which is cool from the perspective of like, thank you Apple, thank you Google, thank you ChatGPT, OpenAI. That's awesome. Ten out of ten. But that was really cool behind you, Adam, by the way.

Yeah, so we're at the Gaylord Opryland, and there are fountains. You, Ned, you have one that's even cooler about thirty minutes from your house. Drive down to the Strip, stand in front of the Bellagio. It'll make this look like your kid's little playpen in the backyard.

Yeah, I do. I could probably walk there from where I am right now.

I just wanted to make Dale feel jealous with the background because we've got fountains and you have—

I'm home. I enjoy my house.

Yeah, Dale's like, "I'm in Florida. What are you guys doing? I'll go up my boat in a few minutes and take her right down to the beach."

But yeah, I mean, I think like from a Western perspective, we focus so much on innovation when in reality, I think when you look at Eastern business style, it's very iterative. It's like look at the business that's doing it at eighty percent and you go the rest of the twenty percent. Look at the business at ninety percent, go that last mile because if someone's doing a hundred million and the serviceable addressable market's a billion dollars, you can go get a hundred million. You can go get two hundred million. I think that's the thing that really differentiates the founders that I see be consistently successful versus the ones that aren't. Like Chiron, who's the president here now in real estate. He was the president at Realbrokerage. Guess what's never going away? Homes. Whether we, you know, we can sit there all we want and be like, "People aren't buying houses." Yeah, they are. But also real estate companies are starting rental pieces of their business and things like that. They're taking it that next mile and becoming also property managers and leasing agents and things of that nature. It's like what are those things? That's where you're going to see the most success. And that's why coaches, consultants, things of that nature, they're always going to exist. That's why it's a great model if you do it the right way because a business is always going to need someone to come in and look at their strategy, come in and look at their marketing or their sales or whatever it may be, their go-to-market gap, if you will. You know, those are the things that are always going to exist. That's where you double down on. You've got a ton of competition. You've got to build a brand. Your brand is your moat. But if you're thinking about going and starting a business, it's like stop looking at becoming some next new innovative idea. People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part, gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results. Just thoughtful. Sendoso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for a Sendoso competitor and I could tell you no one does gifting better than Sendoso. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit sendoso.com.

It's just because it's so for such a long period of time, B2B tech. You know, you start with Facebook and then you go into the SaaS world and then you see all these companies, and like you don't realize it's like a portion of a percent that actually make it through that process to be successful. And so, you know, the blue-collar type stuff is a big opportunity for people. That's why even college today, you know, yes, there is a need for a lot of college people and places. AI will take over a lot of these jobs or the mundane pieces of these jobs. The people that are super high-level strategy, ensuring execution on the strategy—because strategy is not enough anymore either. Yes, you can be a strategist, but you have to be an executable strategist and not just a strategist.

Well, I think because the thing with strategy is no one's ever really defined it right. You know, strategy is the allocation of resources, right? It is the prioritization and allocation of resources.

Well, what do you do once you prioritize and allocate those resources? Because I can look at you know, let's just say we have a demand constraint in the business, right? We don't have enough people coming through the door. Okay, we've figured out what that constraint is. But if the company does a good job on social media and does webinars and does all these things and they've got a really good marketing side of the business and they've just got an inbound sales team that needs more leads, it's going to take twelve or eighteen months for you to actually build out and successfully execute on a cold outbound team.

One hundred percent. So the allocation and the prioritization of resources should not be go hire twenty SDRs. It should be go become better at the thing that you're already doing. Go do more and make that better. And I think that's where strategy really starts to become this amorphous language because like, "Oh, I'm a strategist, right?" Like my—I'm a—

Director of business strategy, right? But the strategy, once you start to understand that strategy is about looking at the constraints, understanding the resources of where someone is, understanding where they are and what they're doing, and then really giving the advice and executing on the advice of what that team can do—not saying, "Oh, just go hire 20 STRs." That's where strategy becomes this very specific, executable thing.

You have to hold their hand and help them go do the thing that you're suggesting because it's easy to talk about doing things. It's very difficult to actually do things.

It might not be worth them even doing it. It might not even be worth holding their hand across. It just may be worth doing more of the thing that's working. How often do we run into that, though? Both of those.

Number one, I would say 80% of our engagements come to us from failed prior engagements with other companies of strategists who couldn't deliver. And then number two is what is being proposed—to your point—worth doing? Or is this the total wrong idea? There's something that I want to try every day.

Is it even the thing? Because when I was at Closip, we did go-to-market consulting, and the amount of people that came to us that said they had a sales problem when in reality it was actually a customer success problem.

We could tell you stories, my friend, as I'm sure you can tell us.

So I think a lot of times, this is why you cannot be a strategist if you haven't seen everything because you have to be able to identify the single constraint of the business. What is the bottleneck? What is the thing that is stopping? When you are in the business—and I can say even when we were running Beam and then Addex—there were times that I had to go out to a 40,000-foot view and be like, oh crap, it actually isn't our sales that's the problem. It's just the fact that we don't have a lead nurture specialist. So people aren't showing up to the call. Our close rate is actually really good when they show up to the call. It's just not really good when they're not showing up to the call.

That tends to hamper close rates.

Exactly, right. So it's like understanding that and being able to push back and say, this is actually the constraint that's bogging you down, and then let's figure out what are the resources you have. What is the team that you have? If the constraint is people, then it's like, okay, cool. Then what kind of person do you need? And then how do we go out and build a hiring funnel that's going to get you that person?

Because if the constraint is marketing and you need more leads and you don't have a marketer and you don't have someone that understands that, well, we've got to go interview 25 agencies or we've got to go interview 100 red people. Which one do you want to do first? So those are the kind of things that when you talk about strategy, it's a lot of understanding, seeing the forest from the trees, and being able to actually understand what it looks like to prioritize and allocate and then execute on the right things.

Execution beats ideas every single time, right? We could all sit and talk about all these great ideas and great strategies, and I think that's what differentiates the best revenue leader—forget revenue leaders—the best anything that we see every day. And I think that goes from CEOs even to like a conversation I was having with my kid before I left for this trip about a project. It's like, we just got to pick something. We got to do it. We got to do it really, really, really well.

I love that you actually brought up the project piece because this is super interesting. One thing I actually heard from Chiron was when you get some task on your plate and it's supposed to be—let's say you got like two weeks until it's due—do the first 50% the first day you have it. Just start the thing because then you just eventually start doing it. You're like, oh cool.

I'm going to play this for my kid so he hears it from someone other than me.

Yeah. I mean, it's like just start because the speed of learning comes from the volume of doing, right? We have the framework here: more, better, new. Like, you have to do more of the thing that's working, then do some things that are better, and then if all else fails, then we can sit there and go to let's do this new thing.

I think a lot of times when we have these expanded time horizons, it's like, oh cool, well I'll figure that out later. I'm going to prioritize these things. But then in the last 20% of time that you've got for it, you're like, oh crap, I've got to go figure out how to get all this done in this short period of time. When in reality, it's like just start the thing. Even if starting the thing is just a brain dump. Anytime I see a new company, I just brain dump, and then by the time that I'm ready to go have that conversation, I know that business because I've brain dumped. I've started to research, and then like, I research, and then from there I'm like, oh cool, this is what I think. Oh, here's the industry. This is what's going on. By the time I know it 30 minutes in, something that I expected to take me two hours took me 30 minutes just to get all of the knowledge that I needed.

It's just a matter of like when you've got that expanded time horizon, just start doing something. It doesn't have to be good.

People have procrastination because of fear, and fear is wasted emotion. So until you go to a place of like you're saying, just starting on something because then you won't complete it based on the things that you're doing versus like my procrastination of, oh, this might be hard. So you tell yourself, and then your brain says, okay, well, you should go get an ice cream or whatever is easy, right?

You do love ice cream now.

I am. Ice cream is good. It is. I like ice cream while I'm doing the thing. I tried to go for ice cream last night. I'm in Nashville, who's known for Jenny's Splendid Ice Cream, and my wife was like, "Nope, we're not going for ice cream. Don't need it." It's like, "Damn you."

Yeah. That's where you go for a midnight ice cream.

I like it.

So we only have a few minutes left, and before we go to rapid fire, I want to just touch on your recent move. So like big name place, right? Everyone knows who Acquisition.com is. Were you sitting in your living room thinking, "Man, one day I want to go work with Alex. I want to work for these people," or was this more of like a natural thing that just happened to be, or did you will yourself to go work with Alex?

I think it was perfect timing is what it was. So Addex actually, about a couple months ago, finalized a merger with one of the largest solar installers in the country, which is cool. Yeah, I didn't hate that. But it definitely was one of those things where during that whole experience, I was like, do I want to go do another three to five years and maybe take this thing public? It was like, not really. It didn't excite me too much.

So it was definitely a, you know, if Addex hadn't been going through that and we were continuing to scale on our own, there's probably a good chance that the timing just wouldn't have matched. When this crossed my desk, it became like I have to go do this. Absolutely. You know, I've been following Alex. For people that know, I got my start in fitness tech, so I was selling mobile apps to gyms, and he was the gym guy. I remember his first ad. It was like him in the hood like a selfie, like, yo, I got this stack of contracts. It's like, dude, it's a gym in a house, you know? And it was like when he just—I don't even think it was Gym Launch at the time. And so I've been following Alex.

I mean, I've got all the books. I literally have implemented everything. He's got this "On Time, On Budget" framework for home services. We did it at Addicts, and I've been following him and loved everything. When Leila started putting out content about culture and the importance of culture, I ate that up. We implemented a lot of the things that she did. So as soon as this crossed my desk, I was like, "This, I have to do this."

And it's like this is the first time in my career that I'm looking out 10 years at a company. Because I mean, you guys are in tech, it's three to five, right? It's like, "Yo, what are we going to do in the next three years? We're going to sell this baby, and then we're going to go do something else." Here, it's just the team that's here. I'm surrounded by absolute A players. Real A players, not just the cushy thing. These are studs—McKinsey alumni, BCG, Bain, guys that have worked at Vector and all these places. And then their hiring process and the culture and the focus—they focus on competitive greatness. You have to step into the ring and be the best in the world. The end. Hard stop.

They focus on sincere candor—tough conversations, but also being able to take those tough conversations and grow from them. And then the other one is unimpeachable character, which I love. It's just like, "Dude, these are my values. This is what I stick to, and if you are against those, we're not on the same team, and that's okay. We don't have to be, but we're just not on the same team." And they stick by those. They hire by those principles. They fire by those principles. They promote by those principles.

When I was just getting into it and since I've been here, I look back at the companies that I've run and started and I'm like, "Dang, we sucked." It's humbling.

It's so good. It's so humbling and it's good to be in it. I'm just excited every single day. We have a hundred businesses that walk through the door every single day. The rate of learning is 10x. Everyone jokes that a year here is 10 years anywhere else.

I've been here since August 25th. So what, three weeks? And yeah, I totally agree. It feels like if a year is 10, three weeks is for sure a year.

I'm so incredibly happy for you and I'd love to dig. I would love to know—we don't have time for it. I can imagine what the interview process was like and the conversations. I'd imagine you don't just walk into Acquisition.com and be like, "Hi, I'd like to work for you." But it's going to be very exciting to see your journey and Acquisition.com's journey and how it's influenced by you joining.

Before we wrap up, we have to jump into some rapid fire because that's the way we roll. You've played this game before.

What's the most underrated go-to-market role in an early-stage company today?

Ooh, underrated go-to-market role? Customer success.

Love that.

One sales trend that you're tired of hearing about.

That AI is going to kill salespeople. Like, relax. Calm down.

All right, so I know you just started in your new role, but if you weren't in sales, you're not in strategy, and you're not allowed to go back to fitness, what are you going to do?

Oh, dang, dude. You got to start over tomorrow. Can't go back. Can't be in sales. Can't be in strategy. I'd be honestly, dude, I'd be like a long-haul truck driver.

Nice. You see the country. It's pretty dope. You get some alone time. You get to be on the road. Yeah, let's say that. It's probably wrong, but let's say that.

That's all right. I'm in.

So I'm going to throw Adam off. We're going to wrap this up, but I'm going to ask a different question.

Wait a minute. You're not going to ask him his favorite vacation destination, because we already know that answer.

Yes, sigh.

Well, now it's Neptune Beach because I don't live there anymore. Touché.

So Alex always talks about never miss dessert. What's your favorite dessert and why?

Cured by Cookies. It is a cookie company out of Orlando, Florida. They ship nationally. It is the best. I'm a cookie connoisseur and it is the best cookie I have ever had in my entire life. Dead stop. Every single person listening to this, you two both go order the September launch 100%. Tell her Ned sent you and maybe I'll get a free cookie. I don't know.

Give me the name of it one more time. I'm going to pull it up.

Yeah, so the company is called Cured by Cookies.

Cured by Cookies. And the website is Cured by...

That looks really good. Bro, next.

And they ship.

Okay, I'm in.

Yeah. I made sure of it. We weren't moving to Vegas unless they did, you know.

That good.

Nice. All right, I'm in. I'm in. I'm in.

Ned, thanks for joining the show, man. Thanks for sharing the cookie tip. I love a good cookie, and we're excited to follow your journey.

No, thanks guys for having me. Appreciate it.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it.