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Each episode of GAIN Momentum focuses on timeless lessons to help grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, and technology. Whether you’re a veteran industry leader looking for some inspiration to guide the next phase of growth or an aspiring executive looking to fast-track the learning process, this podcast is here with key lessons centered around four questions we ask each guest.
GAIN Momentum episode #22- Business Ideas that Work in More Than One Way | with John Smallwood
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to the Gain Momentum podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from global leaders on how to grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, food service, and technology. I'm here with my special co host, Michael Cohen. How are you, Michael?
Michael Cohen: I'm great, always a pleasure and, uh, really excited to talk to John about very innovative and interesting things.
Adam Mogelonsky: And our guest is John Smallwood, president of Travel Outlook, which also features Annette, the virtual hotel agent. How are you, John?
John Smallwood: I'm fine. Thank you very much, Adam. Thank you for having me.
Adam Mogelonsky: Great to have you. So, we're going to dive right into our first of four questions to ask you, John. Which is, when it comes to scaling a business, what is the single piece of advice you would give [00:01:00] entrepreneurs from your perspective as a professional in hospitality technology?
John Smallwood: That's a big question. A very big question. I mean, it's actually the, uh, the main question, really. I mean, how do you come up with an idea? That makes sense, and has some legs, and how do you take the fact that you probably have very little money to invest in terms of getting the word out, and just by using your wits, find a way to get the word out to the most people that you possibly can? So, uh, my advice would be, uh, that the last resort would be to immediately think you need to find investors. If you, uh, once you find investors, I mean, that's something you, what's the, uh, cliche, a value count on ring, and then you've got people telling you, Their opinion of how you should move forward and how you should do things. But if you're an entrepreneur with a strong vision and you, you know, where you're headed, I think then the, the main, you issue becomes time. It's not gonna [00:02:00] happen fast enough for you. Uh, so it's critical that you try to have an idea that's got, that has some kind of shelf life. it can't be something that, hey, this is really hot right now.
John Smallwood: Because by the time you really get to a point when you're reaching the market with it, it'll be passe. So, uh, even though, uh, you know, we felt like, conversational AI was just starting to become something people were talking about, all of a sudden it became something everybody was talking about, and we felt like we were kind of behind the, eight ball.
John Smallwood: But luckily, we chose really good technology to power it, and when you've got good technology powering whatever your idea is, that gives you a little bit of an upper hand. It's not quite such a flash in the pan.
Michael Cohen: Well, that's really, interesting because, you know, and obviously coming from experience, I can imagine, as why, that's why you're here. The key nugget from that too is You know, especially in the start, but we're talking startups here, John, I think that's fair. The lens you came through was from a startup perspective and ego needs to be put to the [00:03:00] side. You used to be the smartest person in the room. You need to surround yourself with smarter people than you. That's the cliche, but it actually leads to more success. And frankly, you need to be open to the fact that you're not going to be calling all the shots. And, and, uh, totally hear that. And, and I think that's really sage advice, obviously understanding that it's going to take time.
Michael Cohen: You need to figure out the landing strip, start, start conceptually and actively fundraise, beautiful, important,
John Smallwood: Right. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. It's interesting to sort of supplement what I just said. When we first rolled out this technology, it had a different name. We called it something else. The Virtual Hotel Agent. And, uh, we spent a few bucks getting that word out. We hired a trademark attorney. We felt like we were on solid ground. And then uh It turns out that the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office had a backlog of things because of COVID and the [00:04:00] trademark attorney we hired didn't actually check that very well. And someone else had found they wanted to use that same name for almost exactly the same technology. And our thought was Well, maybe we can call these guys and see if they'll let us use it.
John Smallwood: I mean, we're, we're a small, small fish here. Well, and then we found out they were a 500 million company traded on the NASDAQ and our attitude changed from, let's make sure they don't even know we used it. Let's just drop as fast as we can. And then we thought, well, let's, we really were sold on the idea of naming our technology with a feminine name like Siri or Alexa.
John Smallwood: So we were sold on that. Well, it was a pretty interesting exercise to Google AI bot plus female name. They're all taken.
John Smallwood: They're all taken. We were thinking Harper. What a great name, Harper. The virtual hotel agent. Harper Books uses it for their internal bot. I mean, it's just crazy. We were lucky to get a net.
John Smallwood: We were lucky to really find a good trademark attorney to firm it up for us. [00:05:00] So, I guess the other part to my answer, Adam, would be, Don't move too quickly. You know, we probably should have hired a better trademark attorney. We could have gone a little more slowly. Uh, so you want to go as fast as you can, but you definitely don't want to make mistakes like we did.
Michael Cohen: And also just to add to this, John, I think it's important is, and I had this sage advice from people, who are much more experienced than I years ago. Your idea. usually is not singular.
Michael Cohen: You may have a better mousetrap, but there's mousetraps that I don't care what the technology, hotel, other industries, there's others out there, there's going to be others out there, there has been others out there before. Now, of course, forget about the, if you don't mind, the particular technology you're commercializing today. You need to believe. You need to know that you have obviously something that's better and more impactful, but you
Michael Cohen: cannot be naive to your point that, you know, can't find naming conventions, people, you know, so that's a really good, I think that's important advice [00:06:00] from someone as senior as you and some of us to, maybe burgeoning entrepreneurs in the hotel technology space.
Adam Mogelonsky: I want to circle back before we got into what was almost the perfect answer for question number two, uh, regarding the just trademarks, but circle back to this whole idea of Shelf life. So what advice would you give people to better reflect on those ideas and to better evaluate ideas in terms of those that have the shelf life?
Adam Mogelonsky: Because we all know, ideas are a dime a dozen, but execution is what really matters. But still, how do you know what ideas to pick out for that execution?
John Smallwood: Tough one. Very tough one. Harder than it looks. A question that deserves a lot of careful thought. Uh, as an example, I was talking to someone who is in medical school and I asked him, what are you thinking of doing when you get out of medical school? What kind of a doctor do you want to be? [00:07:00] And his answer was one that won't be obsolete when I graduate. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, AI. PHysicians Associates, nurse practitioners, they're cheaper, they're learning to do more and more. So he said, I need to find a discipline that is going to be needed. So he's thinking surgery or something more serious like that.
John Smallwood: But that's a good example of looking down the road and thinking. You know, when I go to market, or when I go to get my job, will there be a job? Will there be a market? So, the shelf life concept is one that requires probably more thought than people give to it. It's kind of a, an exercise of thinking, let me put myself into the future.
John Smallwood: Trying to know, trying to remember how quickly things have changed in the past, say,
John Smallwood: 10 years. what will be needed? What would be available? And you know, as you know, Adam, our main, our main business is a call center, Travel Outlook, a premier hotel call center where we, we focus on four and five star luxury [00:08:00] properties.
John Smallwood: We have a very strong niche and that we got into that because. Our thinking was that when someone wants to book a hotel room with a 500 average daily rate, they're not going to want to do it online. They're not going to want to talk to, uh, any, they want to know what they're getting for 500. So we aim for that market. And Annette, I believe is going to have a shelf life. Because we're hoping to get her installed in as many places as we can, but the technology is changing so fast. Soon, Google's basically going to say, if you buy a certain amount of AdWords, we'll give you the technology. You know, it's just going to be a giveaway. Uh, luckily we've chosen a provider that's You know, spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing the ability to understand the question, but it all changes so fast. It changes so fast. So, almost impossible to predict, but my answer would be take more time than you think, thinking about what might happen before you, uh, you, you put all your eggs in that basket.
Michael Cohen: So to that point, [00:09:00] would you agree that building in The capacity to pivot, selectively pivot and flexibility into the product planning or the solution planning or the business planning because of what we just said that the shelf, I believe, and this is a generalization, shelf lives are shrinking in general. So the ability to have, you know, to create multi shelves. that may be adjoined that you could kind of like hop on that's relevant enough or related enough that you don't have to do a whole rebuild or a whole reorg or a whole new business model, but you
Michael Cohen: have that ability to kind of take momentum, repurpose and push the momentum to that next level of slight change in the industry, competitive environments changed, black swan events, right, John, I mean, all
Michael Cohen: these different variables, right? So that's, that's interesting.
John Smallwood: Yeah, you're, what's popping into my mind was what came through my email box today in my Word Today [00:10:00] program. The word today was quaquaversal, which means universal in all directions. Quaquaversal. That's exactly what you just described, Michael. You know, you want to have an idea that can go in any direction at any time. I got to think that those ideas are made of platinum. They don't come very often,
John Smallwood: but you, but I, But I hear what you're saying. And I think it's an essential point that shouldn't go on, unrecognized. And that is that if you think you've got a great idea, you got to think, can it be used in more than one way? Can I connect it to something else and have it work? Yeah, those are the kinds of questions that if you ask you, you have a shot at actually making it and having something that might make it to market.
Adam Mogelonsky: Isn't the whole thought process of trying to fit an existing idea to another, another entity, isn't that an idea of itself? So aren't you just creating a practice of creating more ideas? Seems like, the exercise itself creates a bit of a virtuous circle in terms of thinking of better ideas [00:11:00] as you go through it.
John Smallwood: idea APIs.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, there you go. Coming soon. AGI is next. Anyway, John, on to our second question. What are some of the common pitfalls or failures you have witnessed that business owners should look to avoid when scaling their business?
John Smallwood: Well, we've talked about the big one, which is getting so locked into one simple idea that you devote all your efforts to that, and then by the time you've reached the point where you go to market, everyone's got one, or yours is not as good as the one next door. So I, I would go back to my comment earlier about why we created travel outlook, which was the idea that people spending a lot of money for a hotel room would want to speak to someone. They'd want to be sold. Luckily, that seems to have held today. We started 16 years ago and it still seems to be the case. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard, ah, no one's going to call hotel anymore. No one's going to call. And we get 10, 000 minutes in a week from a hotel. I mean, [00:12:00] people are calling. So, my thinking is that, an idea has gotta have, what's the word I'm looking for here, sort of a common sense. Think about it for a minute. Does it make sense? That three years from now, people will still be doing this because that's about how long it'll take. I have a friend who, uh, his favorite expression was it takes 15 years to be an overnight success. And he's right. He's right.
Michael Cohen: That's interesting. So we're talking about trying to encourage in the ideation stage, and it's not just startups. This is scale ups and enterprise. Enterprise, they have a new product. They want a product expansion. And John, we've all been in these scenarios, and so has Adam, where everyone's drinking the Kool Aid and it's in their own vacuum.
Michael Cohen: They're confirming a new product or they're managing when they don't have enough information or feedback. So it's building in this kind of, is that universal, always on usefulness. Will there be a usefulness, not a use case, even a usefulness? Will there be an impact for this idea, concept, or product [00:13:00] three years from now, five years from now, and maybe 10 years from now?
Michael Cohen: And what do we need to build in even just into the team? That's it. You know, bringing something to market, or again, an enterprise expanding their product line, that kind of thought process, that kind of, being honest with each other, is something that's not prevalent in every startup, scale up, or enterprise today.
John Smallwood: Yeah. Well, you're talking about maturity, really. You're talking about, uh, someone say in their twenties has a great idea, almost destined to fail, I would think, unless it's so unique. And they have the education and the kind of contacts to make it happen, but just the average business person, say with the average business degree, not Stanford or Harvard or whatever, thinking, now that's a good idea. Eh, but if you've got someone who's been around people who have seen it all before, well, here's my idea. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. And then you got support around you, you'll make it all happen. The other, then go back to the first [00:14:00] guy who gets to be 35, 40, 45, 50, 47 years old and thinks, now I've got an idea. Now there's a whole lot of experience there who's thinking maybe it, well, it might work. So it's, it's not something that happens overnight. And the environment has a lot to do with it. But If at all possible, the goal will be to think, you know, down the road a little bit, look down the road. You know, years ago I did a, uh, one of the, you know, how the, the, uh, they have these, uh, driving courses, you know, we, like, I went to the Bob Bondurant course in Phoenix to learn how to drive cars faster. And I remember, uh, going around the course thinking I was doing really well. And after the course was over, Bondurant himself, came and talked to each of us.
John Smallwood: He stood on a certain corner, I guess, and he made notes about us and going, and he said to me, he said, you need to look further down the road. And I said, why, what do you mean? He goes, you're just looking right in front of the car. You'll learn that the further you go to look down the road, the faster you can go. And I've always remembered that phrase and I've applied it to business too. The further you look down the road, the faster you can [00:15:00] go. That's a good, it's
Adam Mogelonsky: How can entrepreneurs get out of their own head?
Adam Mogelonsky: You know, you tell you to color that,
John Smallwood: tough question, it's a good question because it's like, you know, how can a turtle live without its shell? You know, I mean, that's what entrepreneurs do. I mean, you know, We were talking, before we got on the call here, we were talking about music, and Michael said he likes progressive rock. There was one line in a Jethro Tull song, it said, You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time.
John Smallwood: The other kids are all back down and they put you first in line. And that's exactly what it is. You put your bet on number one, and that's you. aNd then I think the final line on that is, and you wonder who to call on.
John Smallwood: Well, there is no one to call on. It's just you. I mean, I've heard it said that the best thing about working for yourself is there's no one to tell you what to do, but the worst thing is there's no one to tell you what to do. So those are the, that's it. I mean, I don't know how you want to get out of your own head.
John Smallwood: I don't know that it's something that you want to do. I think it's, uh, that's where you're comfortable and that's where the ideas come from, you know. Now, [00:16:00] there are some people who You know, when they're in their own head and they don't know what to do. I mean, obviously they're not going to go anywhere or do anything with it.
John Smallwood: But if you've got a modicum of business ability and skill, the ability to to organize people toward a goal that you have in mind, uh, I don't know that you want to get out of your own head.
Adam Mogelonsky: John, we're gonna move on to our third question. What do you see as the key opportunities and challenges for hospitality technology companies in late 2023 and beyond?
John Smallwood: Well, everyone's talking about AI, of course. Just before this call, I had a, um, I had a call with one of the larger hotel groups on the West Coast that we work with. And um, we take all of their reservations calls and um, and I guess it was about three or four months ago, I told them about Annette and we had a bit of a pitch about it and we talked about it.
John Smallwood: Well, they're kind of interested. They were thinking about it. Well, all of a sudden they had a new chief operating officer come in and he's only been there a week or so. And he said, [00:17:00] all right, AI, what are we doing? AI, what are we doing? Let's talk about it. So right away we had another call and it was, Hey, let's get started again.
John Smallwood: Let's get cooking again. So everyone's thinking about it. Everyone's talking about it. They're just algorithms really, aren't they? I mean, I think it's just getting a little overblown about what AI can and can't do, but, uh, we're at this point now where everyone thinks it can do everything. And it's, nothing sky's the limit, you know? But hospitality is a people business. And if you push too far in that direction, you know, people are gonna go find places to stay where they haven't pushed, pushed that far and, and they have the human touch. So, I can see certain industries where AI could just run rampant and probably make a lot of sense. But hospitality is one that has to be done right.
John Smallwood: One of the things about Annette that we liked is the ability to understand the question being asked. We thought that was the pinch point. for conversational AI. What we hate the most about that technology [00:18:00] is, I didn't understand that command. Make a selection.
John Smallwood: I didn't understand. I didn't understand. Even when you say, representative, I don't understand. So , when we found PolyAI in England, which has developed a tech behind Annette, they, uh, indicated that they programmed it using differently, using movie dialogue, Facebook, Reddit, how people talk, which makes it better at understanding the question. That was the key for us. We didn't want guests getting upset. We wanted them to ask the question, get the answer. If we could accomplish that, done. It's all down to understanding the question. So, aI is important, but gotta have the human touch.
Michael Cohen: What's interesting about that, in general, is You know, Metaverse was two years ago, AI is today, mobile was 10 years ago, you know, mobile apps, everyone, every hotel had. So, these are real, these are substantive, sometimes these are paradigm shifts. But they're really a tsunami of [00:19:00] change and to your point, John, in general is what's interesting, what you just said is from, uh, to back to Adam's question is being able to manage this tsunami of change on the buy side, on the sell side, on the entrepreneurial side, on the enterprise side, and then kind of, again, relating it, overlaying it to the industry that we all love, the industry that is a global industry, the industry that's multi, multi, multi billion dollar industry. And we just, you know, we speak at this very often at our organization and on this podcast, like you just said, it's a business about people, it's a business about relationships.
Michael Cohen: Now some of those relationships, John, are going to be, as we know, with an artificial intelligence entity. And we also know there's going to be interactive AI and all these things.
Michael Cohen: I also have some expertise in that space. We're not going to get into that in great detail in this podcast, but. It's still about human interaction, it's about guest and staff satisfaction, it's about execution. Technology is
Michael Cohen: incredibly important, we all know that. [00:20:00] It's many times the linchpin or the hub of it all, to be profitable, but it's still about human, the human experience, just in regards to hospitality.
Adam Mogelonsky: You know, John, to pick up a point here, we talk about applying AI to existing systems. And you mentioned saying AI is more applicable in other systems. in other industries, because maybe the AI fits better to the existing system of practices that they already have in place. And maybe for hospitality, it isn't the best fit in a lot of areas because we are a people industry.
Adam Mogelonsky: So, what I'm wondering is, the term that, the buzz term that I keep hearing about this is the term guardrails. And where do you think the guardrails are for AI in hospitality? What areas do you think are always going to be there for hotels, where it's always going to be people, and no matter how hard [00:21:00] AI companies try to break down that door, they're never going to get in because the system And the nature of our business demands it be a, always be a people first industry.
Adam Mogelonsky: Can you think of any guardrails?
John Smallwood: Well, my vision of a perfectly situated or run hotel front desk is one where there is always someone available to look you in the eye when you walk up to the front desk and take care of why you're visiting with that's not being interrupted. To me, that's the perfect scenario. you look at the revenue side of a hotel in the old days, we used to have something called walk ins. And the old joke was, lock the door behind them, you know, when they walk into the lobby. You're not leaving. You're staying here tonight. What rate do I have to give you for you to stay here tonight? So, there may be the odd walk in that still happens. Well, that person walking up and saying, Do you have anything available tonight? You know, we were staying next door, we don't like it so much. What have you got? Well, if the phone's ringing And they're being [00:22:00] interrupted that's actually having a deleterious effect the human interaction. And the phone is ringing with simple stuff like, I want more towels or simple question like, can I leave my luggage at the front desk?
John Smallwood: Or how do I get to the airport? What time is breakfast? Where is it located? And what are the pool hours? Can my kids come to the pool? Can I get towels at the pool? These kinds of questions. I do not need a person talking to someone at the front desk going, but just one second. Yeah, the pool opens at nine.
John Smallwood: Thank you very much. No, the person at the front desk, you should have their full attention. So in my view of a perfectly run hotel, the goal would be. That the people at the front desk think people, or a call that can't be, a more complex call. Let me, I'll take care of that. And I think that AI or conversational AI, done correctly, fits perfectly into that. It really fits perfectly. Now, let's move [00:23:00] over to the reservations department. People in a room in a hotel will pick up the, uh, we'll say, the husband says to the wife, what time is checkout tomorrow? Well, I don't know. Let's just call reservations. Cause I know I'll reach somebody. Yeah. Hi, what time is checkout?
John Smallwood: And you got a reservation agent who's been trained on a sales process to close business, answering a call. Meantime, other calls are coming in. Revenue is being lost. You can put the technology in there too. Peel off those calls. If you got a simple question I can answer for you before I transfer you to reservations. Yeah, what time's checkout? Oh, it's 11 o'clock. Anything else? No, that's it. Reservation is unmolested and they're talking to people. Front desk unmolested, talking to people on their walk up to the desk. Those are the ways I think that AI should be implemented, not coming at it from a point of view of how much money can I save? It needs to come to the point of view of how can it complement what we're offering at this hotel and we and and the person in the room only wants a quick answer. don't want it to ring and ring and ring [00:24:00] and ring and then someone goes, front desk, how can I help you? And then they hear this rushed voice.
John Smallwood: They don't want that. They just want to know what time checkout is. So putting it in carefully, surgically, that way can really make a big difference and make everyone's life better. It doesn't become a matter of AI taking over the world. It becomes an AI of, I mean, a matter of AI making things actually better.
Adam Mogelonsky: a follow up to that question and that answer, your experience, uh, from what you said is in the luxury upscale sector. And do you see those same rules and that same system, does it, is, is it the same as you go down to other,
Adam Mogelonsky: other categories?
John Smallwood: Absolutely. My wife and I travel a lot and you know, it makes no sense to spend five or six hundred dollars a night everywhere you go. I mean, that's, that's a special trip, right? So we do stay at mid scale hotels. We, you know, and we,, we, um, if they're well located where we try to stay at independence all weekend, but if they're [00:25:00] located near where we need to be.
John Smallwood: And again, front desk, you just have that same experience, whether you're paying 175 a night or you're paying 675 a night, you have that same experience. And where does this Really show up if you do it right, TripAdvisor.
John Smallwood: That person at the front desk can win over a guest who may have had a, a, a stopped up toilet the night before. So sorry that happened. Uh, here, here's a little coupon, have a breakfast on us, whatever. They go back and leave five star review. So it all, it's a beautiful, you know, sort of circle. of, uh, Guest Service Equals More Revenue.
Adam Mogelonsky: And I guess you can measure that on TripAdvisor, uh, you do, uh, you can use AI to measure that now using sentiment analysis,
John Smallwood: Well, I can tell you this, uh, we have, we implemented a net for Outrigger Hotels, and Genevieve Lobos at Outrigger was telling me that they could, they have, they have seen an increase in their CSAT scores when, after installing a net. They named a net Coral, and they have, they use Hawaiian [00:26:00] voice talent for her voice. So, it all fits together beautifully. And the CSAT, CSAT scores have gone up overall.
Adam Mogelonsky: Wow. John, we're going to move into our fourth question. What are the key things innovative leaders and entrepreneurs should prioritize and focus on to gain traction for their business?
John Smallwood: it's interesting you asked this. I was a terrible student in college. I, really bad student. took me forever to get out. I finally did, and, but then I found that I was pretty good at business and I got More job offers than anybody my senior year and just, you know, ticked over and I kept on going, but I was always living by my wits. And I've said to my wife quite often, I really wished I'd paid attention in school. I wish, I wish I'd learned the stuff they were trying to teach me because I learned it the hard way. I learned at School of Hard Knocks, how many years did I waste? How much money did I waste by just not paying attention when I was younger? So my advice would be, you know, you know, color by numbers, [00:27:00] you know, don't skip any steps. Spend any spare time you have learning about how to read a financial statement. Really, uh, understand it, you know, top to bottom. Understand theories of management, uh, those types of things. know, I mean, I feel like, uh, if I painted by numbers when I was younger, I think I'd be a little further ahead than where I am now. I'm happy with where I am obviously, but still the point is that you need to have a real assessment. And so my advice to someone starting out would be, it's very simple, read, read the Wall Street Journal every day, read your textbooks from college, you know, call your college advisor and ask them a question or two, understand, don't say you understand, understand and take whatever time it takes to do that. And I think that if you do that, everything else will fall into place.
Michael Cohen: it's interesting because what you're talking about is Like core principles in the commercialization or business world, forget about hotel technology, forget about hospitality for a second, and that many [00:28:00] innovative people, some of them are from, have gone through, you know, incredible experiences at Stanford and MIT, and obviously they, Painted by the numbers and had this innate talent
Michael Cohen: as a
John Smallwood: the contacts.
John Smallwood: And the
John Smallwood: contacts. I mean, they're in a class full of people that are stimulating them, you know, everyone's as smart as everyone else and it, you know, only the best can come out of that.
Michael Cohen: Yeah. No, I obviously I respect that, but the scenario is that there's multiple paths to success. One that you're talking about is, as you said, the school of hard knocks is sort of romanticized for entrepreneurship or scaling up a business, or even if in your corporate career in an enterprise, it's sort of romanticized. it is a path, many, many people have done it, but that's, I mean, that's a very, what's the word, introspective perspective, if I can use those two terms together, that you brought up because you're saying, you know, it's not that you have, not that people, maybe I'm the same, have regrets or not, it's like, We think, I agree with you, John, we think that there is a cleaner path.
Michael Cohen: I always call it [00:29:00] a cleaner path. You're still going to be successful. You're still going to have a good life or a good career and your products and your company and your, corporate career may grow, but it's a cleaner path.
John Smallwood: Faster. Faster path to. Sum it up this way, Michael, only an idiot would want to go to the School of Hard Knocks.
John Smallwood: Only an
Michael Cohen: a John, is that like a, is that
Michael Cohen: Jethro Tull
Michael Cohen: or maybe that's Crimson? Is that, I don't know, which
John Smallwood: That's my, uh, you can, you can use that if you like, only an idiot with a school of hard knocks. No, it's, uh, yeah. I wish I'd paid attention. I wish I'd learned more. I went to, uh, New Mexico State University. Yeah. I mean, I'm from New Mexico. I'm here in Santa Fe right now. This is where I've lived most of my life. And, uh, my wife is from England and quite often she'll, she'll lord it over me with Oxford and Cambridge. And I'll say to her, did any of those universities discover a planet? Because Pluto was discovered in New Mexico State.
Michael Cohen: There you go.
John Smallwood: So I get all these things, like, oh, it's a dwarf planet, it's, it's really an asteroid.
John Smallwood: Uh, that sounds to me [00:30:00] like whining.
Michael Cohen: Yeah, that's funny. Great.
John Smallwood: Just kidding.
Adam Mogelonsky: What they say with, uh, I guess about that point is youth is wasted on the young,
John Smallwood: That's right. That's right. So my advice, if anyone's listening to this, if a younger entrepreneur or someone thinking about doing something, don't cut the corners. In the end, you'll wish you hadn't. You'll be further ahead. You'll be further ahead. In the end,
Adam Mogelonsky: But uh, just to close out here, um, this whole idea of not cutting corners and, and really learning, uh, the theory of, of management practice and financial statements. A lot of people don't necessarily even know what type of learners they are. So some people can learn off abstract information, others need those examples and that visualization.
Adam Mogelonsky: So my question all this is, of course, how did how did you discover what learner you are, so that way you could best learn and improve your business practices?
John Smallwood: yeah, that's it. I think I just [00:31:00] learned as time went on. well, I do have a, uh, an overriding philosophy that's always served me well, I used to own hotels and managed hotels, developed hotels in addition to these companies that I have now. And I always had this overriding belief that revenue was the most important thing. I always felt like, and that was, I always, that, I always focused on that to my detriment. I mean, I didn't understand the accounting side. More money will solve everything, right? So if I could just have the other side of the equation, I'd be much further ahead, but I just focused on making revenue. So, I think that, um, that's probably the thing that's sort of allowed me to survive was just a natural desire and ability to, to see ways to generate revenue. But that's only half the equation.
Michael Cohen: But that's
Michael Cohen: So interesting, John, because what you just said, if I don't mind, if you don't mind, I've been doing this the whole podcast. You were growth above all. Growth above all. But management of growth is what you just said. So there's growth and [00:32:00] there's management of growth. And optimization of growth.
Michael Cohen: And, you know, fine tuning and then understanding where, as you said, Where if you had some, some skill set, which many people will have, or will have, or can have, and have some contemplation layered into the growth, growth, growth, growth management actually is the kind of sweet spot.
John Smallwood: Exactly right.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, that's, uh, that's the homework is, uh, everyone who's, uh, watching and listening is they have to start Googling, uh, growth management and find all the textbooks and all the information you can. John, I, I can't thank you enough for coming on. This has been a great conversation and, uh, so many valuable lessons herein.
John Smallwood: Thank you.
John Smallwood: Adam. Thanks for having me. Michael, nice to meet you.
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