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Tired of being stuck in the trenches while watching others build empires? Welcome to the 50/50 Accelerator Podcast, where we're flipping the script on the traditional trade business model. I'm your host, Josh Patrick, and like you, I've spent countless nights wondering if there's a better way.
We bring you real conversations with business owners who've transformed their companies from time-sucking struggles into well-oiled machines. They'll share their exact blueprints—from finding reliable teams to creating systems that actually work. There is no theory, just battle-tested strategies that have helped them double their free time and cash flow.
Think of it as your weekly meetup with mentors who've cracked the code.
00:01 - Josh (Host)
Hey, how are you today? This is Josh Patrick and you're at the 50-50 Accelerator Podcast. 50-50 stands for 50% more profit, 50% less time working, and that's what we focus on here. Our guest today is Burke Franklin. Burke has an interesting company it started off with he had 30 employees and now he's down to almost none, and that's what we're going to talk with him about. Tell you how he managed to do that and still keep his business running the way it did with 30 people. You know, the world is different today than it was oh God, I don't know even five years ago, and the way we do business is definitely different today than we did then. So we'll bring Burke in and we'll learn a little bit about his story and find out how he did that magic trick. So let's bring Burke on. Hey, burke, how are you today?
00:55 - Burke (Guest)
Hey, josh, good morning Good.
00:57 - Josh (Host)
Thanks for joining me
00:59
Excuse me?
01:03 - Burke (Guest)
it's an interesting question ,
01:04 - Josh (Host)
How you did. Well, let's start there. I mean, you have 30 employees. How many years ago?
01:08 - Burke (Guest)
Actually it was about 25 years ago. We were big in software retail in the 90s and so we had a sales team, we had tech support, we had engineering, we had shipping, all that kind of stuff in-house, and I was in an office building in Silicon Valley, in Los Altos, there, and it was booming that way. Of course, going onto the internet and everything went online, then no one really needed to be in the office I mean, spending a fortune on office rent. It's nice having people around where you could walk into their office and go hey you know, but then I was probably the most annoying person in the company because I would walk into everybody's office and go, hey, how about this idea? They said yeah, berkey gave me an idea yesterday. What am I supposed to do with that one now that you came in and dumped a new one on me today? You know so.
01:57 - Josh (Host)
I have the same problem and I actually have a solution for it, and the solution is what I call the two-week rule, where you know you could go back in the 80s and you were at a program or a seminar and they had pay phones back then because there was no cell phones. So during the break I was that guy, I was on the pay phone calling my office saying we need to change this, and I did this so often that people just plain ignored me. So I finally said you know, this doesn't work very well. So I put in what I call the two-week rule, so when I have a new idea, I can't do anything with it for two weeks, and in fact for two weeks it still sounds like a good idea, which it almost never does. Then I can start talking to people about it which it almost never does.
02:46 - Burke (Guest)
You go to these seminars. I was a member of TEC, The Executive Committee, which is now Vistage, and it was brilliant stuff because once a month we'd have this meeting with all these CEOs and there'd be this consultant that would come in. And one time we had the Assistant director to the CIA come sitting in the same room with us and you know he was giving us this whole lecture on forward looking and how to be proactive in your business and got all excited. And you know the problem was he had two hours to explain to us and give us all the background plus his own gravitas from having actually worked at the CIA telling us all this stuff. And I'm supposed to go back to my office and say, okay, guys, here's what we got to do and I have all of maybe 20 minutes to explain. Even though it's my company, you still need to get buy-in from your people. And it was impractically impossible to translate this excitement and priority and need and emergency to the people and they're just like, oh, get out of here. And the tragedy was just not being able to implement this stuff, because you just couldn't.
03:50 - Josh (Host)
Yeah, that's true. So I want to go back to my my original question. So you had 30 people working with you. Are you still selling the same software product today that you did? I mean, I'm sure it's a different product today than 30 years ago, but are you still selling a software product?
04:08 - Burke (Guest)
It is. I mean, you would call it software as a service, saas as they say, and so we've just we transformed all of our Windows apps into basically web based apps, and but now they all work together. They work the same, they can share the company information, so we try to reduce the amount of typing as much as possible as well. So you can start with a business plan, go to the marketing plan, create an employee handbook or safety plan, and all these things are templatized because most business owners don't think of this stuff until it's too late. But we make it really easy to do. But they all fundamentally work the same way and Macs and PCs can collaborate. Just the web enabled a lot more functionality to make everything simpler.
04:51 - Josh (Host)
So how did you decide? I mean, right now you're basically working with yourself with a bunch of contractors, correct?
04:59 - Burke (Guest)
Yes
05:01 - Josh (Host)
So how did you make this work? I mean, do your customers now come to you just through the web and there's no sales process except your funnel you use online? And how did you decide to drop your salespeople and do this instead to create business?
05:17 - Burke (Guest)
Well, it wasn't really like I dropped them. The different normal attrition and different things happened along the way. But when it came time to replace people or do things differently, the internet really enabled a lot of that replacement and then people could work on it. I call it asynchronous because they could work on it here and then it would show up online and then that would take over and everybody goes online looking for information and answers anyway. Why not have that already there? And I can go to different people of different expertise and maybe it's an hour here, an hour there or a week here and a week there to get stuff done, and it's just a matter of staying on top of it and it's just altogether easier.
06:00 - Josh (Host)
So I'm going to ask you a question. You can say it's none of my business, but just out of curiosity, are you making more money today than you did when you had 30 people?
06:11 - Burke (Guest)
It's about, no, not really to tell you the truth. I mean, well, the world's changed. We've got a ton of competition these days, so that's narrowed it down a bit. Back in the day, we had 10 different products in 3,500 stores, so you had a nice retail box. People would walk in the store, they'd pick up the box and buy it, and we get orders from a distributor for, you know, give us you know 5,000 copies of BizPlan Builder and you know 300, 3,000 copies of the Employee Manual Builder, that kind of thing. And today it's different. It's just people buy it one at a time from us, so, but there are subscriptions now, so that it's more of a predictable cashflow. So that's, that's improved.
06:51 - Josh (Host)
Let's let's talk about that for a minute, because it's such a big deal that most businesses, at least in my experience, really don't think about, which is recurring revenue.
07:03 - Burke (Guest)
Yeah.
07:04 - Josh (Host)
And, in my experience, recurring revenue is one of the most important things to make a business sustainable. So how did you? I mean, did you just go with the industry, with SAAS? SAAS stands for software as a service, by the way yeah, and that's all run on a subscription basis. You don't buy it and own it, although there are some people who give you lifetime subscriptions.
07:28 - Burke (Guest)
We do that too, yeah.
07:30 - Josh (Host)
Which I think is sort of silly. But that's because the net present value of an ongoing subscription is pretty good.
07:42 - Burke (Guest)
It is, but occasionally for cash flow purposes, someone's going to pay you the lifetime fee. As long as you set that up, you know that's going to be your lifetime value of that customer right there and it's done. But it's good for cash from time to time. I wouldn't say, look, I'm following the industry. I don't feel like I followed the industry. I just followed a certain practicality of how it could work and I saw how we could use that and do it. I don't know if it was before the industry or whatever, but it just seemed obvious to me. And having it all online made it easier for actually easier for us to develop the product, because we could update products on the fly, we could update policies and procedures on the fly, we could go to those meetings like you're talking about Instead of waiting two weeks. We could implement it right away into the plan and it was easier. It's just easier to do altogether.
08:31
And we started out with. It was a straight up template, just a Word document, excel file shipped on a disk, and then it went to. Well, we needed a Windows app when Windows 95 came out. So we made a Windows app and then we needed a Mac app and of course, apple took off, and then we needed a Mac app. You can't just convert a Windows app into a Mac app. It's not like that. But that's simple. It's a whole different thing, and so why not just make it work online, and that way it works for Macs and PCs, and now they could collaborate. Because we have a lot of people, different people, different places. I work on a PC, I'll never use a Mac and the Mac people hate PCs and it's oil and water there and so. But now we could. Now we could make them. I can be agnostic, it doesn't matter. I wanted the answers to all questions to be yes, it can do that. So that's really what it, what it enabled Then. Then the word software as a service became a thing.
09:25 - Josh (Host)
So well, would you say and I know you're probably. It's going to be a hard question what would you say is the biggest mistake you ever made and what did you learn from it?
09:38 - Burke (Guest)
God, I think of that as a job interview question. You know, I think there's probably about three or four mistakes, I would add. In fact, I even wrote a book called Business Black Belt where I articulate a lot of things. They were successful, and I also talk about some of the failures. But I would say, you know, one thing was well, I had a person whose job it was to oversee the development of the app, the original Windows app we had, and I, you know, it was one of those times when people were saying, all the gurus and the workshops I'd go to, like you'd mentioned, you'd go learn something. And what I should have waited two weeks on was, you know, hey, burke, you've got to let go, let your people do it, let them, let them have their wings, let them let trust them to get the job done. Well, we ended up with a catastrophic flaw because not only did I delegated it, but I abdicated. Not only did I delegated it, but I abdicated. So, even though I borrowed the $800,000 and put my house on the line for this. I should have said look, I just borrowed $800,000 and put my own guaranteed, it was my house. I'm going to be looking over your shoulder every minute on this project because I want to be sure it goes well.
10:41
Architect building a house or designing a house, and not going out and seeing the contractor, you know, every other day or once a week or often. They need to do it to make sure the house is looking the way they designed it and the contractor didn't go off and do something different and forget a key ingredient that you that would make the house special. Anyway, that would be one of the disasters and that's you've really got to. As one person put it, one of my own people said Burke, you got to inspect what you expect, you've got to trust but verify. There's probably a dozen more of those statements like that. But you have to do all that stuff. You just can't let it go. You have to really stay with it.
11:20
So, and the other question, the other answer to that question is I hired a guy to have this new product. I wanted the poster child, sales manager, sales VP and I asked him that question. So tell me, what have you learned or what mistakes have you made that you've learned from? He goes oh, I don't make mistakes, I'm thinking all right, so what was my mistake? I hired the guy.
11:41 - Josh (Host)
Yeah, that was a big mistake there.
11:48 - Burke (Guest)
So if they dodge that question, that's a red flag or red light on the dashboard and you cannot ignore it.
11:50 - Josh (Host)
No, no question about it, and the chances of that guy being a brilliant jerk are very high.
11:58 - Burke (Guest)
I bet a lot of money on that and lost. Yeah, you're right.
12:00 - Josh (Host)
Yeah, so the thing that you brought up the first time around there's a couple of things there which I find really interesting is that the biggest mistake most business owners make and it's why they stop growing their business is they make a delegation mistake and they say I can't do that again, it costs me too much money. And the truth is, learning how a delegation is a process. It's not something you just do the first day and you hit two of the three things that we talk about with delegation. One is inspect or set up an expectation. Then you inspect to make sure the expectation is done right. Then you accept the work.
12:40
Accept, this is what I learned, so I've added this along the way is that when I inspect, it's never done right the first time I inspect, so then we go to adapt where it's inspect and adapt, inspect and adapt and then finally accept when you get it right. And after you get it right, then we ask the person to systematize it and document it so somebody else can learn it. But it's really, you know, delegation is, in my opinion, is the hardest thing for a business owner to learn and it's the one that most of us have made some very expensive mistakes on.
13:20 - Burke (Guest)
Well, how does the saying go If you want it done right, do it yourself.
13:24 - Josh (Host)
That's a terrible. I hate that saying God, I hate that.
13:28 - Burke (Guest)
I got it. I didn't say it so you'd like me. But you know, yeah, it's just but, but that's one of those things and so it flies in the face of delegation. But you know it's like I go to the dentist and I say this one, right here, fix that one. And you know I don't tell him OK, use that tool over there. And I want you to do this with that thing over there. And what about this? And of course, lately it's a.
13:48
You know I read on the law on the internet. You should do it this way. You know, you go to the dentist and you tell him what the problem is and you make sure you point to the tooth that hurts and just sit back and enjoy the Novocaine. And you know, hopefully it's always turned out for me, so I don't worry about that. But yeah, you don't really micromanage at that point.
14:07
Because the other thing I discovered is that oftentimes you know you tell people what the objective is. They need to know the objective. And you read about Navy SEALs and all these other people, operators, and do things. You know they got the objective. Now how they're going to get there from here is another story. You may have an idea of how they're going to get there from here. But they may see another way of doing it that's better. But as long as it achieves the objective and maybe there's certain parameters, you've got to do it this way. But you can't do that, you can't do this, it's got to do that this thing here, you know. So as long as they, you know, keep it within the guidelines and maybe do it a little differently, that's fine, as long as the outcome is what you want. But that requires constant, diligent vigilance, looking over their shoulder, and just you know.
14:56 - Josh (Host)
Hey, it can be as simple as a five minute check in every other day, or every day, or once a week, or if you go more than once a week when you're first starting to delegate, you're almost guaranteed to have a problem.
15:05 - Burke (Guest)
Yeah well, the problem was so I let this thing go for several months and then I got a call. I called that. Call they, burke, you got to come to Boston to meet with the developers. We use an outside programming house. So I flew to Boston on a red eye. That's another mistake you make. Don't fly to an important meeting on a red eye where you wake, you're there the next day and you haven't slept all night. Then you're just sitting in the conference room. I said, Burke, here's the problem. And I'm thinking, I'm like dead asleep, thinking, oh God, you know how am I going to figure this out? And today the answer would have been obvious, but I just we couldn't come up with an answer at the time. We just had to go with this ship, the product with the flaw in it, and of course we got a lot of them back and that was sucked and I had to go back and have somebody else reprogram it and fix it.
15:51 - Josh (Host)
So I'm curious, Burke, how did you get into this business?
15:55 - Burke (Guest)
Well, it's kind of a long story. I mean, back as a kid, you know, I read popular mechanics and popular science and you read about all these inventors and inventions and how cool they were. And somewhere along the way I thought you know? My grandfather said to me you know, if you're going to make any money I can almost say it here in his voice you got to start your own business. You're never going to make any money working for somebody else, although I'm sure there's a lot of people have made a lot of money Look at Microsoft millionaires. They made money working for somebody else, but nevertheless, that was the idea I went with as a child and I thought be reading popular science and popular mechanics and they had all these great inventions and I've often wondered, like, where did these inventions go? How come they are? How come we're now we're getting finally getting to flying cars, which is something another subject. But what impressed me, the one that really stuck with my mind, was in my mind, was some guy had invented the 200 mile per gallon carburetor and I thought, okay, where is it? You know what happened to that guy. You know, conspiracy theories notwithstanding, you know whatever happened to the 200 mile per gallon carburetor and why aren't we getting 200 miles per gallon today? So it's always been one of my curiosities, pet peeves like how do we, how does somebody who invents the cool invention build a successful company around it? And more often than not it's the mediocre invention that wins the day, but the guy with the cool invention, the better version of it, somehow loses because they somehow they spend more time on the product than on the marketing, which is a different category of mistake. But nevertheless I was always curious like how do we get the 200 mile per gallon to prevail and why aren't we getting 200 miles per gallon today? And anyway, long story short, or short story longer, I was in Silicon Valley.
17:36
I was there about 20 years and a friend of mine called up and said Burk, I need a business plan for Apple. They want to buy my engineering software. But of course, at the time the SBA, the Small Business Administration, had done a study of 26,000 businesses that failed and found that 65 some odd percent of them had no business plan. So they wanted to see his business plan because they needed to make sure his company would survive and thrive and continue to develop and support his product. And so I got a degree in business from the University of California in Santa Barbara with some electrical engineering background. So I got a job in business from the University of California in Santa Barbara with some electrical engineering background. So I got a job at Texas Instruments. So I knew something about the technology selling electronic components for a few years. And then I got the job at the Sharper Image Catalog as the electronics buyer when they later promoted me to the catalog department. So I had an experience of direct response marketing, catalog marketing and all that. And then from that I discovered a word processor in Silicon Valley that I was selling to enterprises. So between the technology, the direct response marketing and catalog and the high-tech company enterprise, I put together this business plan. Of course I had to read up on business plans as well, but I thought of it as a catalog of everything Apple management needed to know about my friend's business so they could make a good decision. And so we got the deal.
18:57
And over the years over the next year, I was helping people Well, maybe I can help people with this business plan and so I was helping people with their ideas. The same kind of pet peeve I had like how do you get these businesses funded into business. I helped them raise venture capital and about a year into this I'm standing in the shower thinking you know, if I see the crappy business plan, I'm going to scream. Why don't I just take all this content I've created for these people and turn it into a template that people could write their own business plan themselves? And that's where it became BizPlan Builder and it's been wildly successful for companies ever since, and I've sold a couple of million copies of it since then. But that's really the story of that.
19:39 - Josh (Host)
So would you call yourself. I mean, you're sort of on one. It appears to me. On one level you're an accidental entrepreneur and became a seasoned business owner and on the other hand, you actually mindfully decided you were going to be a business owner and you didn't really consciously go out and look for something, but you took all the stuff you learned and you integrated it into an idea that actually has some real legs to it.
20:13 - Burke (Guest)
You know, I always knew I would have my own business at some point, or I always thought I would, you know. But I didn't really consciously think, okay, I'm working at Texas Instruments, how am I going to learn from these guys and take it into a business in the future and then go get the job at the Sharper Image, thinking, okay, here's a logical, pre-planned step along the way. I didn't do that. I just took one thing after another and finally it was just there. I was on my own in Silicon Valley thinking because the word processors went the way of the dinosaurs when Macs and PCs came out. And there I was thinking what am I going to do? And I would even advocate for students these days get out of school, go work for some companies, just to get a sense of how it works, get a sense of what the problems are.
21:00
If you're going to solve a problem, you really want to solve a problem that you've had or that you've seen firsthand, so you really have a solid understanding of what the problem really is. Look at the Airbnb guys. They needed a place to stay and they were struggling with that and I thought wait a minute, we can't be the only ones in the world with this problem. So it's like that, you know, like, like with the business plan. I just thought someday I'm going to need a business plan because I'm going to have a great idea. Why don't I just make a template for these other guys? And then in the meantime I realized whoa the aha moment was. You know I could, this is my product, this is. This is the thing. And if I can help people with 200 mile per gallons, get them in gallon carburetors, get into business, more power to them.
21:39 - Josh (Host)
That's great. I have a. What you just were talking about, I think actually is if not as applicable, maybe even more applicable, which is rising generations, when they're growing up and they're starting to work in their parents' business and they actually want to take the business over, which seems to be happening less and less these days. But I think part of the problem is that the elder generation does a lousy job of preparing the younger generation to be in business. You know, one of the things that I always want to see people do is have the younger generation work outside the family business for at least five years. Right, because they come in. I mean, if you go in and you join the family business, you're not seeing anything out there, except for what you've grown up knowing.
22:32 - Burke (Guest)
Yeah.
22:32 - Josh (Host)
That was part of my problem.
22:34 - Burke (Guest)
Even if you work for a competitor to the family business.
22:37 - Josh (Host)
Yeah Well, that's often what you'll see is you'll see competitors or people in the same industry who don't compete directly with each other. Yeah, and those are op kids. You see that in the car dealership world. You see that in the car dealership world. You see that all the time they have these things they call the 20 groups, which are 20 dealerships that get together and have regular meetings, and you'll see, the 20 groups will swap kids. It happens quite a bit actually.
23:04 - Burke (Guest)
Interesting. I haven't seen that before.
23:05 - Josh (Host)
Yeah, it's really one of those kind of cool things.
23:09 - Burke (Guest)
The other thing I found the use for the business plan. I mean, most people say on the business plan, well, I'm not a startup, I don't need a business plan.
23:17 - Josh (Host)
That's so false, my God.
23:20 - Burke (Guest)
Well, yeah, I look at strategic planning. I see all these products just at the end of the year for sale. Strategic planning, you know, basically it boils down to triple sales by Q1 or Q2 and just keep doing more and more of the same new goals and they don't look at. I mean, this year we had a whole new political landscape shift and I would advocate that you look at the problem, you solve who's got it, revisit allit all your basics of your business and then get your good ideas in place. Here's how we can improve this, not just double down on more of the same, which I think a lot of strategic planning really is.
24:01
And then back to your question about the kids. At the other end of the spectrum, the business plan helps sell the business because business brokers will tell you that most businesses are unsellable and a lot of brokers will tell you that many of them are just train wrecks behind the scenes. If they had a plan in place which turns into that prospectus to sell it, or it's the operating manual for the kids to use, so they understand what dad was thinking when he solved the original problem and how he went about it, so they can take over the business and run with it, because they got an owner's manual.
24:32 - Josh (Host)
Yeah, unfortunately, burke, we are out of time and I just want to point out one more thing, because we don't have time to talk about this, but it's a really big deal, which is knowing the problem that you solve in your business. I don't know about you, but I've talked to hundreds of businesses over the years. Less than five percent can never answer that question correctly. They tell me what they do, they don't tell me what the problems they sell. Yeah, well, we're going to have to leave it there and thank you so much. This has been a really a lot of fun and I hope you folks get some really good information on it, because I did. That's good. Gosh, patrick. And before I stop, burke, how can people find you? I almost forgot.
25:17 - Burke (Guest)
Well, you can find me at businesspowertools.com it's spelled as it sounds businesspowertools.com, and you can learn about us there. Happy to happy give you a demo of the new platform.
25:31 - Josh (Host)
Cool and I would like you, if you like this podcast, I like you to go to wherever you're listening to it and give us an honest rating review. If you love us, give us five stars. If you don't give me one star, I'll cry a little bit, but maybe we'll get over it someday and thanks a lot for spending some time with us today. My name is Josh Patrick. You're at the 50/50 Accelerator podcast. Thanks a lot for stopping by. I hope to see you back here really soon.
25:58 - Burke (Guest)
Thank you, Josh, good meeting you, good for talking with you.