Navigating Adversity: Marcus Rader’s Bold Journey to $175 Million in Venture Capital

Have you ever wondered how one man’s love for heavy metal could fuel a company's success through a global pandemic? Join us as we sit down with Marcus Rader, CEO of HostAway, who navigated turbulent times and secured an astonishing $175 million in VC funding. Marcus shares his journey of resilience, the financial motivations driving his strategic mindset, and the unorthodox ways his passion for music amplifies his decision-making prowess. Listen in to discover how HostAway thrived in the short-term rental management SaaS space, even as the travel industry faced unprecedented challenges.

Do pain and suffering in business go hand in hand? Drawing inspiration from Haruki Murakami and Sadhguru, we explore the nuances of mental resilience and how shifting mindsets can transform pain into growth opportunities. Through conversations with over 400 customers, we uncover the surprising optimism and adaptability that helped businesses, especially in Florida, pivot successfully during tough times. This episode highlights the universal nature of business challenges and the importance of focusing on specific markets to navigate them effectively.

What if small changes could lead to monumental growth? Inspired by James Clear’s "Atomic Habits," we dive deep into the power of incremental improvements and their cumulative impact on business success. Whether you're an early-stage startup entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, this episode offers actionable insights and motivational stories to help you balance your professional and personal life while striving for excellence.

Checkout HostAway, the premier all-in-one software for managing vacation rentals and Airbnb properties, designed for property managers at www.Hostaway.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast Impact Innovators. It's a success stories we're sharing by all the business founders that we know and love. They're real stories, real founders and actionable ideas, and today I'm thrilled because we have Marcus Radar to welcome to the show. He's the CEO and the unstoppable force behind HostAway, and HostAway is the top player in the short-term rental management SaaS space, and they offer an all-in-one rental software solution for growing property managers.

Speaker 1: 0:28

Despite the severe blow that was dealt to him by the pandemic when the travel ground to a halt, marcus and his team didn't just survive, they thrived. And while his competitors played it safe, marcus happened to hit the accelerator and he propelled HostAway to unprecedented success. His daring strategy paid off, culminating in a staggering $175 million in VC funding. So congrats, marcus, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah for sure. Listen. I usually start off my podcast with a little quote from Simon Sinek. Remember his famous TEDx thing that he did? He talks a lot about your big why. Anyway, he says people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it.

Speaker 2: 1:17

So why do you do what you do, marcus? That's a really good question that I haven't really thought too much about. But, if I'm honest, I do this for money. I'm very similar to our employees and our customers, who just work for a living, because they need money, and I've always heard quotes about how you shouldn't start a business to get rich because it's not a good idea, because the passion is not going to drive you through the hard times. I disagree with that. I think that I've learned a lot over the last nine years. One of the things that I've learned is that your business is hard a system let's call it capitalism and, as a result of that, everything that happens, whether you want or not. Let's call it the market, the invisible hand. That's the concept in economics that I studied at university and you simply are a part of it, whether you want it or not. That's really a strong driving factor, because what that means is that you can choose whether you are in the driver's seat or not, but you're still going to go along for the ride.

Speaker 1: 2:27

Certainly as entrepreneurs. Money makes the world go round. We have to do that. It's the number one reason that we're here. We've got to make money to be able to survive. We've got to be able to pay our employees and hopefully provide a good life for us and our families. So there's no question it has to be a big why and I know I heard you speak at the Collision Conference and you mentioned a song and a particular band that you really like. I think it speaks to what you're saying here. You want to talk about that.

Speaker 2: 2:54

I was referring to Creeping Death. I think it was Mark Cuban, one of the quotes I sometimes use. This Work like someone else is working to take it all away from you. It's exactly the market. If you are unsuccessful, it's probably because others are doing things to prevent you from being successful and you're not trying hard enough to identify what they're doing so you can counteract it. But if you are successful, you're going to have a problem.

Speaker 2: 3:23

The only difference now others are going to be looking at what you're doing, copying it and doing it better than you, because whatever it is that you're doing that's unique. If unique, someone else is going to be better at it, yeah. So there is no winning other than to keep going, and that's what I think our competitors really underestimated was our willingness to win, our willingness to fight. And that's why I chose the song Creeping Death by Metallica, where the enemy doesn't know what's coming, and that one I listen to a lot. When, especially when I need to make a big decision, I go for a long walk, I listen usually to the entire Ride the Lightning album. I'm a big Dave Mustaine fan and he wrote the riff on the song Ride the Lightning, but overall it's a good album.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Is that from Kill Em All?

Speaker 2: 4:16

No, it's from Ride the Lightning.

Speaker 1: 4:18

Ah, gotcha, yeah, yeah, I like that too. No-transcript for you. And how did you make a recovery? What did you do?

Speaker 2: 4:55

So I listened a lot to a song called Hello Be Thy Name by Iron Maiden, about a guy who's in Brooklyn and he's waiting to be taken to the gallows for and he doesn't know why. It's not his fault, he's still being what it felt like. First of all, all our customers are dependent on travel. They manage vacation rentals, so we don't manage them, we just build the software. But our customers they manage them on behalf of the owners and they rent them. Now, if all travelers were to leave, there's no money left for them, which is exactly what happened in February 2020. And we realized we're going to have a hard time. We were actually planning to raise capital by May 2020 and we were growing really well, especially December and January, and early February looked really good at the time. So we just hired I think late January we hired a sales team, we doubled the size and we trained them two weeks in early February and then had to lay them off.

Speaker 1: 5:58

So a month before it all happened.

Speaker 2: 6:00

Yes, crazy. We had gone from 25 to 40 people and we basically had to tell all the newcomers that, yeah, we were hoping to get money to pay for your salary, but that's not going to come now because we're in the travel industry. So sorry about that. There's a pandemic going. But it was much worse for our customers because most of them lost their entire business that they had been building for years Because the assets they had real estate that was being used for travel that if the real estate cannot be used for travel, then it's going to find a different use. So a lot of them rented out long-term. But if they don't own the property, all that money goes to the inner property, which is the case with most property managers. They don't own the real Right and, unlike Airbnb, which was able to just go out and secure one billion on the simple premise of, hey, just trust us, it will be okay, most of our customers actually none of our customers could do that. So a lot of them went under and I didn't want to put the burden on our support team, which had been quite overwhelmed as we had grown so much in the last few months. So I told them okay, put every customer on a call with me and I'm going to talk to them personally and see what's going on, see if we can help, maybe give a discounted price, maybe give the service for free for a few months, because the impact was different in different regions. Yeah and yeah, that's pretty much what happened, but it was quite, quite a terrible game. Of course, we were better off than, let's say, the 60% of our customers that did go bankrupt. We didn't go bankrupt, but what we eventually found out was and we only found out later was that we had this optimism that we can get going.

Speaker 2: 7:49

We had sales during the pandemic. It was strange. It was because the market was shit. So before people were planning a vacation and they were going to Paris or they were going to a beach or somewhere, but during the pandemic, all the demand shifted, were they canceled or it was canceled for them. Their plane tickets were canceled, their bookings were canceled, their car rental was canceled and they have to go somewhere nearby. So suddenly you had a massive demand in tourism to places that nobody went to before. Take Europe as an example, or even Ontario as an example in Canada, europe as an example, or even Ontario as an example in Canada Suddenly places that had a few cottages. They were overwhelmed by tourists because that was the only place you could go. You could go within a two-hour drive from where you were, but you couldn't complain anywhere.

Speaker 1: 8:36

The same thing happened in Europe.

Speaker 2: 8:38

So suddenly you had these really boring local spots that you take your kids hiking maybe once every 10 years. Suddenly people were living there and of course demand skyrocketed and with remote work real estate prices skyrocketed too, and that created an entirely new group of customers for us that we were still able to get. But what I didn't know until after, about six months later, is that our competitors they didn't see that upturn when our business took off. They hadn't even thought it could take off. They were just saying, oh, everything is so dark and gloomy, let's just sit and wait on the sidelines.

Speaker 1: 9:15

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:16

And they missed their opportunity. A lot of them are gone now. A lot have been acquired, a lot have quietly ceased operations.

Speaker 1: 9:23

So they just put their blinders on and weren't even aware of what was the nuances that were going on in the new marketplace.

Speaker 2: 9:31

Very easy. Like everything in life, running a business you can make up excuses. For example, I like running and I used to have this excuse that if it's raining outside I'm not going to go for a run. Yeah, and I decided to flip that around and I bought shoes that are Gore-Tex covered so you can run in the rain. And now, when it's raining, I love it because I can go for a run and it's the best thing in the world.

Speaker 2: 9:56

It's very same thing with if you're not succeeding, and being an entrepreneur essentially means that you're failing your way to success. You're never going to be successful on your first attempt, and it's only the couple of few people that can get comfortable with the constant failures and that still can learn from them and get back up on their feet. Those are the ones that eventually get success. But it's so easy to make that mental barrier for yourself and say, oh, the market is bad, so right now we can't sell, or the economy is bad, so right now we can't invest. But if you just focus on what change can I make today to make things better for our business, then suddenly the way the market is going is completely irrelevant, because in every downturn in the economy. There's going to be a lot of winners, it's true. Those people who realize that means there's less competition.

Speaker 1: 10:51

Yeah yeah, I totally agree with you about the hard times. We all have to learn to love the suck, so to speak. I'm a mountain bike racer and we just had our 24-hour relay race last weekend and it poured rain. It was like a river coming down out of the hill that we were riding on. But you still got to do it. You just got to jump on.

Speaker 1: 11:11

I remember reading a book by Dave Goggins I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He's an ultra-marathoner and I just remember something ringing in my ears as I'm riding my bike, especially at night, when it's dark and you can't hardly see anything and the rain's coming down and you're soaking wet. And he said no matter how tough the going gets, you always like your body's telling you that you're in pain and it's trying to keep you safe. But when, in actuality, you still have 30 or 40% left in the tank, just turn on the reserve. And I think the same thing can be said. It's true of the business too. When we get into those hard zones where things are tough, maybe the competition is hard, maybe we're not making the money that we thought we might. You still got the energy left to. You got to just pivot. You got to adapt, improvise and overcome, figure some other way out to do it and I think that's indicative of what you did during the pandemic and were able to survive not just survive, but really crush it coming out of there.

Speaker 2: 12:09

I just had a revelation. I realized one of my favorite running quotes I don't remember it says a Japanese American living in Boston who wrote the book called what I Talk About when I Talk About Running, which is about as boring as it sounds, but all runners have pain, but pain is mandatory, suffering is optional and just as you mentioned that, I realized that the same applies to starting a business or running a business.

Speaker 2: 12:42

It's got to be painful because if it's not, you're going to get swooped under your feet faster than you know. It's almost going to come and dab you in the back and you'll be dead. That simple. If you haven't had the pain before. You're going to be suffocated when you eventually get it, but do you have to suffer during it? I didn't Basically planning with. From now on, I will choose whether I suffer or not. The pain is still going to be there when it comes.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Yeah, and there's a couple levels of suffering too, right? One is the actual suffering and two is the suffering you experience in your mind. That keeps going over and over again, and if you allow that to happen, there's not going to be good things happening. I really like I don't know if you've heard of a guy named Sadhguru, but he wrote a book called Inner Engineering and it just deals with this whole thing about what's going on in your mind, and what he says is that's true, we do suffer twice, and sometimes three, four or five times, because we suffer it over and over as we think it through in our mind when it's not even happening. We suffer it over and over as we think it through in our mind when it's not even happening.

Speaker 1: 13:46

So his philosophy is whatever's happening right now, at this moment in time, it's inevitable. It happened because of a result of the karma and the things that you did, the actions that you took, that led up to this very moment in time. So no matter if you feel like you're suffering or you're excelling or you're feeling great, it doesn't really matter, because this moment is inevitable, so you might as well enjoy it. We have something like a one in 400 trillion chance of actually being alive. I don't know how they figured that out statistically, but so if you've got a one in 400 trillion chance of actually being here, how could you not be just happy, whatever is going on in your life? During that whole process I know you said you talked to. You reached out and talked to, I think, over 400 of your customers personally In talking to them. What revelations came out in those conversations? Did that really help you a lot in turning and pivoting the business, or did it change your life in any way?

Speaker 2: 14:42

It did change my life. Yes, For the worst. It was incredibly depressing.

Speaker 1: 14:47

I'm sure it was these people were my peers.

Speaker 2: 14:50

They were trying to build a business and they had to build, and most of them through no reason of their own, they were. I'm sure they had evaluated the risks, but you usually don't take into account events that happen once every hundred years, usually don't take into account events that happen once every hundred years. Like anyone who's running a business today, they do not really think about the risk of World War III. Right, and I don't think they should either. But exactly what our customers didn't think Maybe there's a global pandemic that just stops all travel temporarily, but in some cases for several years, like Australia and Europe and Canada as well.

Speaker 2: 15:36

But what I did find out was that there were some people that were very different, for example, the French and the Italians. They were quite honest and brittle and they said this is not going to work out. And it turned out. They were right. But especially down in Florida and in general, the Sunbelts, louisiana, south Carolina, north Carolina, georgia, some parts of Texas, people had a strong sense of optimism that I found surreal sitting in a gloomy it was a very cold spring up here in Toronto it was even snowing in, I think, april or May, which almost never happened.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Sounds like Finland weather, yeah, and I told our team there's some hope and optimism down there in Florida. This is what we got got to do. We've got to go there. We've got to look at our customers that we have there and see what are they asking for, and if we need product improvement, we've got to change that. We've got to build those, and if anyone else asks for product improvements, we're going to ignore them because we don't have the resources to cater to anyone. So we focused only on that market and their needs and it managed to grow tremendously well. And that would have never happened if I didn't take the heat from all those customers who lost their business, most of them overnight.

Speaker 2: 16:51

Yeah that's really helped pivoting the business.

Speaker 1: 16:54

Of course, yeah. So. Has there been any pivotal moments, like some specific moment, decision that you made in your journey that you recognize now was the key turning point for you and your business?

Speaker 2: 17:06

Yeah, there's a lot of them, really many of them. One of them was accepting that we are not unique. That was. I think it took about four or five years to come to that conclusion where we were fortunate enough to have a small group of angel investors, mostly because our parents didn't have any money, so they couldn't put anything in to pay our salaries.

Speaker 2: 17:33

But we had angel investors that kept telling us hey, this is business standard, this is how every other business operates. How about this? This usually works. And then we said, oh, but is business standard? This is how every other business operates. How about this? This usually works. And then we said, oh, but it's different in our industry.

Speaker 1: 17:46

That's true, but this is something that I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs. Only for us, it's different.

Speaker 2: 17:51

Only for our customers it doesn't work, but it turns out actually. No, not the way you proposition it. That needs to be different for your industry, but the basic concept of how businesses operate is applicable to almost every single business. What you got to do is identify what type of business and then identify where do we B2B us? And suddenly we could ignore advice.

Speaker 2: 18:20

For 99% of businesses, we only look at advice for our best practices, let's say, not even advice. Just look at what are other B2B SaaS companies doing. And that was a pivotal moment for us because it brought a sense of humility to us as founders and the entire leadership team, when we got to say we are not unique, we are just like anyone else and that means that the rules that are out there for everyone, they apply to us as well. So now that we know what game we're in, we can just focus on being the best. That was an amazing pivot that took quite a long time. Another one that we had that was this was actually as we were growing and we were reaching the stage where most companies stopped growing.

Speaker 1: 19:11

Yeah, hitting the plateau.

Speaker 2: 19:13

Yes, we realized that in. So the reason companies start plateauing is that in order to get ahead from the latest stage where you're maybe 20, 30 employees like you're doing really well already you defy the odds to actually get to where you are. But usually that is done by a couple of big things. A couple of big things Like you decide in your product there's going to be this one big thing, or you change your marketing message or your sales tactic, or maybe you hire a person to do one thing only that's really big and impactful. That's how you get there.

Speaker 2: 19:52

The reason we stopped growing is that, unfortunately, those big, low hanging fruits that you're going to run out of them Because there's only a couple, and it takes, once again, a lot of humility from being the business genius who is able to identify this one big idea, or maybe three or four big ideas and put them into action and see them working, to suddenly understand that, okay, actually, what we need to do now is stop focusing on this one big customer or one big marketing.

Speaker 2: 20:23

We need to do a hundred things or a thousand things, but not the easy ones, not the customers that want our product and are willing to pay the price. We're not going to win those deals. We're going to focus on those customers who haven't heard about us, who don't want to buy our stuff and if they wanted to buy, they definitely don't want to pay the price that we're charging. Yeah, focus on all the hard thing, but there's hundreds of them and this is why we were able to keep growing so fast, because we identified very early on, and now we have to do hundreds small but but extremely hard things, and the reason why you have to do the small and hard things is your competition. They are not going to identify those small things and if they do, they're going to prioritize and do the easy ones first.

Speaker 2: 21:16

But if you start with the hard ones, that are small and none of them have any impact on business, but you put hundreds of them there that's when you and that's when you also get something that your competitors can steal, because if you build a killer feature into your product, anyone can steal that killer feature right, but if you've got hundreds of things, for example, we rebuilt. I rearranged the words on our website using an excel template. I won't go through the exact ideology we used, but it was hundreds of small things and suddenly we jumped up in the search results as a result of that crazy, I know.

Speaker 1: 21:57

I read a book where I've read it a couple of times really over the years called atomic, atomic Habits by James Clear, and he talks about this. In that book. He says, instead of just focusing on a few really big, impactful things, just do one thing that's very small, that gets you 1% better each day. And if you just do that one thing each day, at the end of the year you're 38.8 times better than you were at the beginning of the year. I think the British cycling team had never won a stage in the Tour de France for years and years. They took this concept very seriously and they started doing that. And they did little things like making sure that the helmet was just right in terms of aerodynamics and making sure that they were doing the wind tunnel testing, and just little things that they would do a little tweak here with their one piece suit that they would wear. And they got to the point where mark cavendish took it away and won the big stage.

Speaker 2: 22:50

Yeah, I agree, it's a story that I often hear when I interview people. But it's one thing saying it, another thing doing, because doing it sounds easy. It's incredibly hard because you got to keep yourself motivated. Remember that one percent, yeah, you won't actually see the impact on fuel in a year yeah, it's true.

Speaker 1: 23:08

You don't see that when you're doing those tiny little things, you don't notice it and a lot of those tiny things.

Speaker 2: 23:13

They sound tiny but they can actually be really hard. So what you need to do is motivate yourself, knowing you're going to do a lot of hard things and you're not going to see any results, and you're going to be happy with that and you're going to keep going. I can give an example. We did a monthly webinar. My co-founder said look, you're great at talking, but we're not going to have any audience. It's going to be one year to 18 months. So we started. We had. It's going to be one year to 18 months. So we started.

Speaker 2: 23:44

We had an audience of three. I think most of them were ours. After six months, we had an audience of five. After a year, we had an audience of 10. And now I think the biggest webinars we have, they're the thousand, 1500 people from the industry. But it was just when it started growing from 10 to 100 to 500 to 1,000, it went instantly. Just that you hit a tipping point, yeah. And then people were saying wow, how did your webinars become so popular? Yeah, because we did a year of them where nobody showed up.

Speaker 1: 24:17

That's why you got good at doing what you were doing with the smaller crowd. How did you push through that then? For some of the folks that are listening right now, maybe they're smaller and they're struggling right now and they're in that suck. What would you suggest to them to push through that?

Speaker 2: 24:33

The formula to creating a business is so incredibly simple Just don't give up. The number one reason why I see people give up on their idea or their company that they started is that they just give up. And it's really that easy. They say, oh, I started something else. Or they say I realized I don't want to do this. No, that wasn't the problem. You gave up. You beat them down. You got your client. It was going to save you food for, save you pay for food for a for a month, pay for your rent, and, and they were ready to sign. And then they changed your mind last minute. Yeah, you don't give up over that. No, what you do is you do it a hundred times a year and you go a hundred months without eating. Then you're gonna beat it.

Speaker 2: 25:18

Yeah, so true, there's no shortcut there, but a lot of people that give up. They don't seem to understand that. They just give up, that it was really that simple, and this is something that I've seen in a lot of successful entrepreneurs. They don't really understand why they're successful. Because they're not doing things better than others. They're not doing things that are harder or they're not smarter. They don't have more money doing things that are harder or they're not smarter. They don't have more money. But really the only difference is they didn't give up.

Speaker 1: 25:45

They're just tenacious. Yeah, they keep going. I know for myself. I always say if even one or two people show up to a webinar, I have one or two customers, then that's okay. I'm going to do the best that I can for those people so that they become raving fans and they love it. So, yeah, I think that's a good philosophy to have. So, just looking into the future, do a little future forecasting. What kind of emerging market trends do you see? I know everyone's talking AI right now. Ai is such a big thing. The markets are going crazy. What do you see as being maybe some shifts that are going to start to happen in the future? Maybe it is AI. But if it's AI, then what specifically is it around AI?

Speaker 2: 26:29

I think, if we talk about the tech landscape right now, you can get funding if you do something AR related. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that the modeling, the computers. Eventually they'll be available for everyone, but then there will be more powerful computers that are, once again not available for you. Most of the companies that have ai in their name. They don't have any models, and it's going to be very similar.

Speaker 2: 26:54

I I worked in in what was it called martech, yeah, and I remember seeing a landscape back in the industrial landscape in 2012. And there were thousands of companies in different categories. A couple of them got bought by Google, a couple of them got bought by Yahoo and by Microsoft and by Facebook. The rest they're history, they're gone. Many of those categories don't exist today, and that's what's going to happen with AI. And, yeah, if I was basing a business model on the idea that we do something with AI, I would be very careful of that, because it's very likely if you're developing something yourself in the future, you will just be buying it from someone who does it better. If you're the best at reselling and packaging it, that's great, but that's also not the most profitable business model.

Speaker 1: 27:57

Yeah, I feel like there's going to be an over inventory capacity of cards and processors because a lot of these companies, like you say, they're just slapping AI on their name and maybe they're getting funded. They're buying all this processing power. I feel like there's going to be all this extra processing power in about three or four years, when a lot of them don't make it through. Could be yeah, could be cheap. Maybe we can go back to mining coin or something. What about personal growth? I'm a big personal growth guy. I try to spend a couple of hours every day doing something I like to read. I read a lot of books. What do you do for your own personal growth? Could be physical, mental, creativity, whatever.

Speaker 2: 28:38

I spent 41 years doing absolutely nothing and I loved it. Somewhere along, when I was 30, I started getting a bit on the chubby side oh really, and uh, you don't look it now yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:54

So I decided okay, for the next 41 years I'm gonna be the fittest person on the planet. So I lost about 75 pounds in six months. Wow, how did you do that? Oh, that's super simple. It's just like running a business you do it by the numbers. So I always hated the idea. I know a lot of people. This applies to business and applies to personal finances. It applies to, especially, weight loss. What people are looking for is some kind of shortcut. They're looking for a fast and easy solution. You know that's why they fall for get rich quick they just want to take the pill yeah, they want to take a pill and lose weight and I've always been fascinated with it.

Speaker 2: 29:43

If I buy those things, I think you know I'm one of those who, if I see a $100 bill on the street, I'm going to walk by it because it's got to be fake, because if it was real someone else had picked it up. I'm very cynical. So if someone tells me this pill, well, you will get a great body, then if that was true, then everyone would be given it and we wouldn't have obesity on the planet.

Speaker 1: 30:04

It's probably not going to be true If it's too good to be true.

Speaker 2: 30:06

It probably is. So what I found out is that it's very simple to choose your own body weight. There's two factors that matter. One is the calories you spend and the other one is the calories that you take in, and if those are in balance, you're going to stay at the same weight. If you spend more, you're going to lose weight, and if you spend less, or if you consume more, you're going to gain weight.

Speaker 2: 30:31

The tricky part there is tracking. So what I started doing is I got an Apple Watch that tracks every step I make and when I do some exercise it tracks that. And then I got a calorie tracker. It's an app called Lucid. It's not the best one, but it does the job, and my intention was to make sure I don't end up on any diet. I don't want any diet. I want to eat whatever I want, and that has been one of the most amazing parts is I get to eat anything I want, so I can enjoy my chocolate, I can enjoy my ribeye steaks, I can enjoy my red wine, and I can still lose weight because I track the calories.

Speaker 1: 31:10

What's going in and what's going out, exactly. I got that. I like it.

Speaker 2: 31:15

Yeah, and I actually did that about 15 years ago in my personal finances because I was a bit disappointed after advancing my career and realizing that I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I'm pretty well like. I had a good job and I had a wife and we didn't have kids. How come we're living paycheck to paycheck? So what I started doing is I started tracking every single expense, every single expense, and it took me only one or two months to realize that it wasn't something magical. If I could just get my rent lowered by half, then I would be rich.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Now it turns out that just tracking it was enough to save money, Because I knew when I was in a store I wanted to buy some chewing gum or I wanted to jump on a bus to go from A to B. Then I knew I had to sit down in front of my spreadsheet and that I hated. I hated that part. Instead of buying that chewing gum, I just had bad breath. Instead of taking the bus, I just walked. It was a half-hour walk anyway, and all of a of a sudden I noticed the end of the month. I have a huge amount of money left. And then I looked why is that? It is because I got in this much and I spent that much and the difference is exactly what's on my bank account very exact sign and business works exactly the same way amazing just to keep the dashboard everything.

Speaker 1: 32:39

I run a lot of advertising campaigns and I love my dashboards. I need to be able to see what ads are working well, and if I didn't have my dashboard then I don't know what I would do, so it's interesting you've applied that to your personal life too. I like it.

Speaker 2: 32:54

But I also come to learn that a lot of people are not like that. A lot of people they want magic, they don't want facts. And then another thing people don't want is tedious tasks like putting in every expense in a spreadsheet or tracking everything you eat.

Speaker 1: 33:14

It can get a little tedious, but if you want to accomplish something, sometimes the things that you have to do For example, I like non-alcoholic beer.

Speaker 2: 33:22

This brewery it's called Partake absolutely fabulous beer and it's very low calories 25. But still, sometimes I want a beer and I just grab a glass of water, because I know the difference. It's not only 25 calories, it's the fact that I have to open the app and log my 25 calories there, so I end up drinking water. They just mow it here.

Speaker 1: 33:47

Yeah, yeah. A lot of people I know that are just they're in some kind of pain. They don't want to be fat or they don't want this or that, but it's like the pain of making the change is greater than the pain of just staying inside of the pain they already know.

Speaker 2: 34:05

So they just stay inside of that pain that they know. Yeah, the irony is that you don't even need to make any change. What you need to do is start cracking it. And I quickly what I also realized. I didn't know if I had an active lifestyle or not, but it turns out I actually had quite an active lifestyle, which I didn't know about because I walk a lot more. I walk about 10,000 steps a day, but I was still gaining weight because I was eating very unhealthy food. But then I found out that there were things for example, when I'm traveling, when I'm 10 hours in an airplane, I don't get my 10,000 steps. So that's why I gain a lot of weight during travel season. It's things like these that allowed me to. Just, I like the food, I like my lifestyle. I just wanted to know what was going on, and that's people.

Speaker 2: 34:51

I understand the resistance to change, but if you go about it this way, based on numbers, you actually have to change nothing at all. You want to eat that ice cream? Go ahead and eat it. You want to lie on the sofa, watch a movie, have some tortilla chips? You can do exactly that. Just do the same thing as you always do. But the difference is at the end of the week or month or year you're're gonna know why you stayed the same weight or you gained weight or lost weight just having that awareness makes you change the way that you're doing things exactly that's good.

Speaker 1: 35:21

I like it. Did you find that energetically like you? Did you have more energy? Did you have more creativity? Did things change for you? Work-wise too?

Speaker 2: 35:29

not really but I. But I got a thyroid problem, so I'm eating medicine for that and as the weight changes I get an overdose. So that means that I'm hyperactive. So I wake up at 4 am.

Speaker 2: 35:40

Oh, wow, yeah, I've adjusted it since, but it's like I didn't see much much change there. But what was really inspiring was when I found out that if you're like one kilo, so two pounds of body weight, is about 7,000 calories. Wow. So if you're in a 3,500 calorie deficit every week, which is only 500 calories a day, it's doable. That's a handful of nuts a day that you don't eat. That means you lose one pound a week and if you go doing that 52 weeks, you're going to lose 52 pounds. It's really nothing. I did double the speed, but anyone can do that, because a handful of nuts is not a lot, and you can replace it by eating salad, which has no calories at all, and then you'll still be full. So I was never hungry.

Speaker 1: 36:36

I have a friend who has a brand called not normal. One is a website and he teaches people that are they're just stuck. Usually they're stuck because of something that some trauma that happened to them and they've got caught up in their mind. They've got this mindset that they can't make this change. And he got me doing a HRV testing last year. I don't know if you've ever tried that, but it's pretty cool, because HRV testing it's the heart rate variability, so it's not your heart rate, it's your variability. So it's telling you where your autonomic nervous system is on the scale of are you in the autonomous or the other side of the scale? So are you in fight or flight or are you in rest and relax and digest? It's interesting because every morning now I track my HRV and so then I know if I can.

Speaker 1: 37:23

Just talking about the idea, the concept of having a dashboard, now I know when I can put the accelerator down or maybe I have to put the brakes on a little bit because my body is maybe not quite right or maybe I stressed out too much the day before, either physically or mentally, and sometimes we're just, we don't have an awareness of what's going on inside of our body, but just having that tracker allows you to do that. I don't know. I found that it's helpful to be able to go faster when I want to, but also to slow down when I need to. That's very interesting. Yeah, sometimes you need to go slow to go fast. That was something I had to learn because I did a lot of product launches. It's always bigger, better, faster and you burn out. When you do that, you're not as creative. How about counterintuitive wisdom? Do you have anything that's like counterintuitive to what the norm is? I always like to take a different path. When everyone else is zigging, I like to zag. Do you have any of that kind of philosophy?

Speaker 2: 38:18

Yeah, I watched a founder talk a few years ago. It was a software that made it to a hundred million and they sold essentially a glorified spreadsheet that makes your RFP. That's a request for a proposal. So when big companies buy a piece of software or service, they send out an RFP. That means it's a data file that tells people this is what we want to buy. Do you have this, yes or no? How many of this do you have?

Speaker 1: 38:51

I used to have to respond to those once upon a time.

Speaker 2: 38:53

Exactly. It's a lot of work. So they built the software for managing our fee flow. They managed to grow to a hundred million and the founder said something really I resonate with.

Speaker 2: 39:04

Nobody wakes up one morning and says today I'm going to build an RFP software. And it's the same thing with us. We started by building a calendar synchronization tool, which eventually became a full suite of vocational rental software. Nobody wakes up to say we're going to synchronize calendars. That's what we're going to do, and I think a lot of the advice given is you got to be passionate about something, but the thing is, what you're passionate about is very likely influenced by what other people are passionate about.

Speaker 2: 39:43

So, in other words, if you start a business about something you're passionate about and it's a viable product meaning that other people might be interested in it too it's very likely that it's something that's popular. A good example right now is AI or Bitcoin. Or in Canada, we had a weed boom and bust a few years ago. A lot of passionate people got burned out. It's a lot easier to start a business if you start it with something that's so boring that nobody else wakes up and thinks this is what I want to do with my life, because then you can do it all by yourself, you can create your own playing field and become the number one rfp software in the world so while everyone else is over there playing with ai, we should be doing something different yeah, and do the most boring thing you can think of, because chances are that what you think is boring or exciting is very influenced by social media, by your education, by your parents, by family, by your friends, by media, by movies, by music.

Speaker 2: 40:45

That influences what you're interested in, what you're not interested in. So all of these things that they don't mention. Like, I've never seen a movie about RFPs Never, I've never heard a song about RFPs. But that's maybe a good reason not to be interested in RFPs. But that's also a good reason to build a business run.

Speaker 1: 41:07

Yeah, but it is a necessary evil and lots of companies deal in those RFPs monthly. There's new RFPs going out every day. Somebody's got to do it right. I'm just curious how about in terms of your legacy, either personally or for your business?

Speaker 2: 41:27

what do you want to leave behind? I don't know. I don't think I'm at that stage in life where I'm able to think about that. I'm more thinking. So I've been traveling now, for this is actually the only month of the year when I'm home. I'm traveling 225 days this year and I've been home for exactly two weeks and I feel I'm going crazy.

Speaker 2: 41:45

I tell my wife every night you know what? We should travel more. And she keeps telling me yeah, but next Wednesday we're going to Paris, and I'm more at the stage now where I'm wondering should I just travel more or less? Because then when I travel, I sometimes go to six trips in a month and even long distance trips. I don't think I'm ready to think about legacy. I'm more thinking about should I go to Australia through Japan, or should I go through Europe or Middle East? That's a good answer. I like it. When I figured that part out, then I think I can think about legacy. I'm also thinking a lot about how do I fly to Santiago in Chile and then which other countries do I want to see on that continent? Those are the things I'm thinking about.

Speaker 1: 42:34

Those are good questions. Exploring, like just being open to all the different cultures and different things that are going on, that's a wonderful thing to do.

Speaker 2: 42:43

I wish I had a deeper answer. Maybe I'll find one in a few years if I travel enough.

Speaker 1: 42:47

When you're traveling so much, are you able to keep going with some of these personal goals that you've set? Like you said, you're a runner. You're doing some of the calorie in calorie out. Does any of that travel impact that at all?

Speaker 2: 43:01

Yeah, it's very simple. If I go to a restaurant, I don't know what's in there Probably too much oil and probably too much butter so I just have to run a bit more. That's the good philosophy. But the nice thing is with running, you can do it anywhere. You don't need any equipment except a pair of shoes. I've been running in Miami Beach, in Miami, new York, lisbon, portugal and Barcelona. I've actually been two times in Barcelona this year New Orleans and Prince Edward County and London. Wow, you're everywhere, prince Edward.

Speaker 1: 43:38

County in Ontario. You mean, yeah, that's a beautiful area there. That's where my mom grew up.

Speaker 2: 43:44

Yeah, they got these trails that are great for running where there's no cars.

Speaker 1: 43:48

Yeah, it's perfect. Yeah, I'm not much of a runner. I used to do some triathlons, but the running part wasn't really the thing I liked. I liked the bike. I love my bike. If I can get on my mountain bike and get on a trail and go to a lake, that's the best thing for me. I try to take Friday afternoons off and go do that, but I don't always have my bike, so when I'm traveling I can't do that. That's great. How about the dreaded? If only I knew back then what I know now. Do you have anything around that?

Speaker 1: 44:18

If you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would you say?

Speaker 2: 44:24

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that and I don't think I would change a thing. I always say when people ask, was it worth it? I say yeah, it was worth it. But if I had the choice, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do it. The payoff, the reward, is amazing. It's the best in the world, it's winning the Olympics, exactly what you worked for your entire life. But knowing what you have to go through, you don't know that at the beginning of the journey and knowing the risks involved.

Speaker 2: 45:02

For me, the risks didn't materialize. I didn't get a heart attack, I didn't get a divorce. My daughter actually likes me, doesn't hate me. Wonderful, I have my family members. I maybe lost a few friends, but I gained other friends. But looking in hindsight, the risks are incredibly high. We're talking serious life-threatening and life-changing risks that were disclosed to materialize and they didn't. But if I did it all again, there's a very high chance they would. Maybe I'll get a stroke, paralyzed and a divorce. Lonely Company fails. No, I would never do that again.

Speaker 2: 45:42

But there's one thing that my wife said before I started this. She said you should read this book. It's called the Hard Thing About Hard Things, and I'm very happy I didn't read it, but I did read it after covid, that's when I picked up the book. That was six years later and it's one of the few books that I started crying. It was so beautiful, it was so incredibly powerful, because, up until then, part of the lesson learned that I mentioned earlier that you are not unique I realized that no, it's not me who's suffering. This is the name of the game. This is what you have to go through. These hard things, the hard thing about hard things. That's the name of it. You should.

Speaker 1: 46:29

It's incredible name of it, you should. It's incredible nice. What about? Just like a lot of my audience, they're not like as far along as you are with your business. They're more in the bootstrapping phase. They're still grinding away, trying to build the business, figure out new ways of marketing. Do you have any recommendations for them when they're in that phase?

Speaker 2: 46:49

yeah, yeah, one. I speak to a lot of early stage entrepreneurs and I try to help them. One that's still astonishing to me is how few of them actually recognize what industry they're in. They have this idea I don't know Airbnb for dogs, something like that and what they seem to not understand is that Airbnb is a marketplace. They follow the marketplace business model, just like Amazon, just like Alibaba, just like Uber, and that there's a playbook for that. And when I asked them okay, which companies are you looking up to? They say, oh, nobody else is doing Airbnb for dogs. There's nobody. So I'm the first.

Speaker 2: 47:34

No, you have this business model. You need to go and study everything you can about these other companies that made it successful. You also need to study the companies that were going to be successful but failed Because WeWork, that's a marketplace. Why did? Because we work? That's a marketplace. Why did they fail? That's equally important to know if you're starting a marketplace, as it is to know why Amazon became successful. And a lot of entrepreneurs, especially at the early stage, they seem ignorant to understanding that they can just copy whatever business model they have. They can copy the successful, but they also need to understanding that they can just copy whatever business model they have. They can copy the successful, but they also need to learn from the mistakes. Don't make the mistake of thinking that your business is somehow unique. No, it's a part of every category and for us that was B2B SaaS, which is software as a service, super simple. Once we accepted that we are in this category and all the rules that apply to all the other companies in this space also apply to us, everything became easier.

Speaker 1: 48:37

It's interesting you brought that up a couple of times that we're not really unique. We're doing the same things. And it makes sense because if you're really that unique, then you're probably tapping into an audience that doesn't even exist yet. They don't know they have the problem, they don't know you have a solution. So if you're tapping into an audience it's already buying, they're already hungry, then there's going to be competition. So yeah, you're not unique.

Speaker 2: 48:58

But I learned the invisible hand, exactly yeah.

Speaker 1: 49:01

I learned many years ago when I started my first business. I learned through the hard way and that was just that. It speaks to this issue that somebody gave me a book called my Life in Advertising, written by a guy named Claude C Hopkins, who died over a hundred years before I was even born, like a long time ago. What he taught was a little bit dated, but the concept was very true and what he said was you can make something unique just by the story you tell about it. And so at the time he worked with a beer company, schlitz, and they were like number five or number six at the time and he said take me for a tour of your factory and show me how you make the beer. And so they toured them. They said we have these artesian wells that are tapped down in the ground like a thousand feet to get the purest water so that it doesn't have any kind of bacteria or anything. And then we pull that out and they showed the whole fermentation process.

Speaker 1: 49:56

He said this is perfect, we're going to tell this story. At the time they just did it through newspaper articles and put a little coupon in there so that people could sample it, could try it and at the time it was just thought of as he was crazy, because every beer company makes their beer just like this. We're not different. He said, yeah, but no one's telling the story of it. So let's just tell the story and then you're different, and he brought them to number one just by doing that. So sometimes the uniqueness in how you approach your marketplace, what you tell them, the stories you tell, that's very inspirational.

Speaker 1: 50:30

Yeah, okay. We're just approaching the top of the hour, so I want to make sure that we're good for your time. What about just to catch all? What else should the entrepreneurs that are listening to this right now, the startups, the bootstrappers is there anything I forgot to ask you that you think that would be important that they should know?

Speaker 2: 50:49

No, I think we pretty much covered it all. If I had to summarize it in one sentence, it's very simple.

Speaker 1: 50:54

Don't give up. I love that Nice and simple. All right, Marcus, thank you very much. I really appreciate and respect your time here, and good luck and have a fun trip to Paris. You said you're going to All right. Have fun with your family and keep on trucking. We're you're an inspiration to all of us.

Speaker 2: 51:10

Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 1: 51:11

For sure Okay.