SPARKS BY IGNIUM — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Guest: Pete Martin | Serial Entrepreneur, Author of Scale Up Faster Topic: Scale Up Faster — How Bootstrap Businesses Achieve Extraordinary Growth Host: Phil Rose ======================================================================== ======================================================================== CHAPTER MARKERS ======================================================================== Use these timestamps to navigate the episode in Transistor, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 00:00 Welcome & Introduction — Pete Martin, Serial Entrepreneur and Author 00:51 From Big Business to Bootstrap — IBM, SAP and the Entrepreneurial Pull 01:13 Pete's Origin Story — A Car Leasing Business at 18 and the IBM Detour 03:21 Genetically Encoded to Entrepreneur — Family, Independence and the Middle Child 04:52 Why Write Scale Up Faster? — Good to Great for the Rest of Us 05:39 The Research Behind the Book — 32,000 Companies Down to 95 Interviews 07:35 The INC 5000 Filter — Doubling Revenue Four Years in a Row, Bootstrapped 09:05 Would You Invest in These Founders? — First Timers, No MBAs, No Business Plan 11:16 No Big Hairy Audacious Goal — What Really Drove These Companies 12:10 The Chip — Having Something to Prove as a Growth Superpower 14:19 MBA vs the Chip — When Academia Gets in the Way of Entrepreneurial Drive 16:46 The Eight Value Drivers — What 324 Bootstrap Businesses Had in Common 18:30 Focus — Sell One Thing One Way and Be the Absolute Best at It 37:34 Customer Obsession and Product Market Fit — Deep in the Trenches 40:31 Why These Founders Skipped the Business Plan — and Were Right To 41:20 Purpose Over Profit — The North Star That Drove Each Founder 43:35 Exit or Stay? — Why Most of These Founders Could Leave But Won't 46:36 Work-Life Balance at 50-60 Hours a Week — And Why They Love It 51:27 The F Word — Focus is the Single Biggest Lever in Business 54:17 Atomic Habits, Mastery and the 10,000 Hours — Doing the Drudgery Daily 55:57 People Are the Problem and the Answer — Culture as Competitive Advantage 56:27 The Culture Scrape — How Hiring Language Repels and Attracts the Right People 59:47 Hire for the Soul, Train for the Role — The Ideal Employee Profile 01:01:58 Culture Hiring is Analytical, Not Gut Feel — How to Build the Right Process 01:03:51 Boot Scaling vs Blitz Scaling — Growing Fast Without Selling Your Soul 01:06:38 The Real Cost of VC Money — Decision Making Under Outside Influence 01:08:20 Advice to Younger Pete — Be Vulnerable, Ask for Help 01:10:25 What's Next — GrowthBrain, AI-Powered Coaching for Scaling Businesses 01:12:36 Where to Find Pete — LinkedIn, Email and the Book 01:14:00 Phil's Close — Start, Stop, Continue: Your Challenge After This Episode ======================================================================== KEY MOMENTS — EPISODE SUMMARY ======================================================================== A curated summary of the most important insights from this conversation. From 32,000 to 95 — The Research That Defines the Book (07:35) -------------------------------------------------------------- Pete Martin's book Scale Up Faster is rooted in one of the most rigorous pieces of independent business research undertaken outside academia. Pete took seven years of INC 5000 data — the fastest-growing 5,000 companies in the US — and applied a brutal filter: companies that doubled revenues every year for at least four consecutive years, entirely on bootstrapped, internally generated cash flow. From a starting pool of over 32,000 businesses, that filter produced just 324 companies. He then spent three years conducting over 95 deep-dive interviews with the CEOs and their management teams. The result is the closest thing to a Jim Collins-style rigorous research project applied to the bootstrap growth world — and the findings challenge almost every assumption about what high-growth founders look like. The Surprising Profile of a High-Growth Founder (09:05) ------------------------------------------------------- One of the most striking revelations from Pete Martin's research is how ordinary the extraordinary founders turned out to be. Going in, Pete expected highly educated MBA graduates with multiple prior businesses and detailed strategic plans. What he found was the opposite. Most were first-time founders with no formal business plan, no clear market identified at launch, and no top-tier university education — 20% didn't have a college degree at all. Yet these companies averaged 169% year-over-year revenue growth, every year, for four consecutive years. The lesson for business owners: extraordinary growth is not reserved for the exceptional few. These were normal people who simply figured out how to run very fast-growing businesses. The Chip — Having Something to Prove as a Business Superpower (12:10) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Perhaps the most emotionally resonant finding in Pete's research is what he calls 'the chip' — a deeply personal grievance, slight, or point of injustice that most of these high-growth founders carried and consciously used as fuel. Pete didn't set out to look for this theme; it emerged organically across six or seven founder backstories before he started asking about it directly. Almost universally, when he asked founders 'what's your chip?', they knew exactly what he meant. One founder grew a business to over $100 million in five years partly driven by being told her parents had saved nothing for her college education. Rather than going to therapy to resolve the chip, these founders acknowledged it, accepted it, and leaned into it. Combined with grit, Pete argues the chip may be as powerful a growth driver as any strategic framework. Focus — The F Word That Separates Fast Growers from Everyone Else (51:27) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Phil Rose asked Pete to distil his entire research down to the single most important lesson for business owners, the answer was immediate: focus. These 324 companies were not doing 50 different things or going to market in 12 different ways. They had one core offering — highly differentiated, built around the principle that 'different is better than better' — and they went to market through one primary method. Verne Harnish, who wrote the foreword to the book, summarised it as 'sell one thing one way.' Pete draws a parallel to elite sport: the stars do the same small things over and over with disciplined repetition, getting one percent better each time. Most entrepreneurs are natural shiny-object chasers, and that tendency, Pete argues, is the single biggest barrier to achieving this level of growth. No Business Plan — How Customer Obsession Beat Strategic Planning (37:34) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the defining habits shared by almost all 324 bootstrapped companies was a refusal to write formal business plans. Pete explains this wasn't laziness — it was a deliberate substitution. Instead of spending three months producing documents full of made-up projections and assumed customer preferences, these founders went out and talked to people. They tested, failed, stubbed their toes, pivoted, and listened continuously. Pete draws a parallel to the Silicon Valley concept of product market fit — understanding your customers so deeply that they can't imagine being without your product. As Pete points out, the only company in the study that wrote a formal business plan had a founder who had just completed an MBA. Culture is an Analytical Process, Not a Gut Feel (55:57) -------------------------------------------------------- Pete Martin's research identified culture as the other critical lever alongside focus, and he pushes back firmly on the idea that culture is something a founder feels intuitively. Having personally wasted around half a million dollars on hiring decisions made on gut feel, Pete argues that culture hiring must be analytical. The 324 companies scraped competitors' career pages to analyse how differently they described their working environment — the contrast was stark. They built structured interview processes designed to surface cultural alignment before competency is even assessed. The sequence: culture fit first, core competencies second, evidence of producing job outcomes third. As one executive told Pete: 'We hire for the soul. We train for the role.' Boot Scaling vs Blitz Scaling — Keeping Control of Your Company and Decisions (01:03:51) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pete draws a sharp distinction between blitz scaling — the Reid Hoffman model of raising large rounds and growing at all costs — and boot scaling, the methodology he has built around his research. His argument against external capital is practical: once you introduce preferred shareholders with liquidation preferences, you change the fundamental nature of every business decision. Instead of optimising for customers and employees, you begin optimising for your equity board. Pete describes advising a friend to model how much the company would need to sell for to deliver any meaningful personal return after preferred rights — and the friend stepped down from the business. Boot scaling is Phil's phrase for growing much faster than your competitors without selling your company — or your soul — to outside investors. GrowthBrain — Building the AI Coaching Platform for Scaling Businesses (01:10:25) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pete's next major venture is GrowthBrain, a generative AI platform designed to complement and extend the work of human business coaches and advisors. The core problem it solves is context: most AI tools give generic advice because they know nothing about your specific business. GrowthBrain ingests a company's operational and financial data and layers it with the accumulated wisdom of Pete Martin, Verne Harnish, Gino Wickman, and other leading business thinkers to deliver highly specific, contextualised guidance. Crucially, the platform has both an advisor portal and a client portal, keeping the human coach in the loop. Pete sees GrowthBrain as a complement to coaches like Phil Rose — not a replacement, but a way to extend the impact of great advisory relationships between scheduled sessions. Be Vulnerable — The Advice Pete Would Give His Younger Self (01:08:20) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- When asked what advice he would give to a younger version of himself starting out, Pete's answer was simple and direct: be vulnerable, and do not be afraid to ask for help. The impulse to appear in control — not to let employees, partners, or family down — is one that almost all business owners experience, and Pete argues it quietly prevents many founders from getting the coaching, reading, or peer support they need. The central mission behind writing Scale Up Faster is captured in this answer: it's really hard, and you don't have to do it alone. The research Pete has distilled into the book represents a path now available to any entrepreneur willing to apply it — you don't have to discover it through decades of expensive trial and error. Phil's Challenge to Listeners — Start, Stop, Continue (Phil's Close) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Rose closes the episode with his personal coaching challenge to every listener. Drawing on the two themes he takes most strongly from Pete's conversation — focus and culture — Phil invites listeners to apply the classic coaching framework: what do you need to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing? He also poses a personal question: if you could have had this research available at the point you started your business, how differently might things have gone? Phil urges listeners to read Scale Up Faster and to share the podcast with anyone who could benefit from Pete's message, noting that after six years of Sparks by Ignium, the show is now attracting major published authors with transformative business research to share. ======================================================================== FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ======================================================================== Lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts removed. Phil Rose: Welcome back to the Sparks Bagnum podcast. I'm Phil Rose, the host. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Pete Martin. Pete and I met in Austin, Texas, back in October 2025. And Pete is a serial entrepreneur. He's worked at businesses like SAP and IBM. But more importantly, he's scaled and sold four companies. He's got three on the go at the moment. And from my perspective, he's the author of Scale Faster, which I was delighted to talk about with him when we were in Austin. Verne introduced him, you'll see Verne is the author of many books with the word scaling it and Pete comes on with the word scale faster. So for me, we need to learn a lot from this because so many businesses take time to scale. But if we can scale faster, we can learn how to do it quicker, we can get better results and ultimately we can get to the financial reward and the cultural reward we look forward to. So Pete, welcome to the Sparks by Igneum podcast. Pete Martin: Thanks, Phil. I appreciate it. It's good to chat with you. Phil Rose: So you mentioned about working for big businesses and IBM and SAP in there. whenever we get back in time, nobody got fired for hiring IBM was the mantra from many, many years ago. What made you make that transition from the big boys of SAP and IBM to those scale up, sell up, enjoy the life of businesses? Pete Martin: Yeah, I actually did things backwards. I before I worked for IBM and before I went to university, I actually started up a car leasing company. And so was 18 years old and I was the classic snot nose kid who thought I knew everything about business. And the world kind of slapped me around quite a bit. And I ended up selling the franchisee basically. So I ended up selling those franchise rights to another franchisee and decided to then go back to university. Phil Rose: Hello. Pete Martin: which I did, and I got my bachelor's and MBA in three and a half years. And then I was very involved because I went back to school as a little bit older kid. I got very involved in school, got to be friendly with the chairman of the board of the university, and he essentially convinced me to go work for IBM. So I went completely in the opposite direction. And I tell you, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably do the same thing just because I learned so much about professional selling and business and all kinds of stuff from IBM. ended up selling multi hundred million dollar outsourcing deals. I would have never obviously done that on my own. So training was fantastic and then went from IBM to SAP, ran a hundred million dollar business and, you know, really honed my management skills. And so all that stuff is very foundational to me to then go back into the entrepreneurial space and Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: start companies again, so. Phil Rose: Yeah, it's interesting isn't it? You those big businesses, you know, there's lots of people who start, you know, they finish school and disappear off into the entrepreneurial world. But then there's people like me and you who have that background experience. You know, I worked for Rolls Royce, you know, big blue chip company, did my MBA, went through that traditional route of doing things and then set up my own business. And it's really interesting because I always tell people, you know, the reason I set up my own business is because my dad ran his own business and my brother ran his own business. So for me, it was what I was going to do. My dad set up his business in 1982 and you know that's what I grew up with as a 12 year old boy he was setting up his own business and running it and I asked my dad once Pete Martin: And I have the same thing, my dad owned his own business and my grandfather did and my brother did. So yeah, same thing. Phil Rose: Yeah. And it's really interesting, isn't it? Because when you look at it, know, some people would say, hey, never do this own business stuff. It's a tough life. And I know my grandfather was very, upset when I left Rolls-Royce. Why are you leaving such a big company? You've got a pension in there. You can retire on that. But for me, I had that urge to do something else. So what was it that encouraged you to A, set up the leasing business in the original first place and Why did you go back to entrepreneurial businesses after great names like IBM and SAP? Pete Martin: Yeah, I think it's a combination of two things. think the one is I am the classic, what I like to say, fiercely independent middle child. So, you know, if somebody tells me to do something, I do completely the opposite, right? Just kind of classic, classic birth order stuff there. And then, you know, as I mentioned, my grandfather, my my my uncle, my dad, my brother, we're all entrepreneurs. I think I was kind of genetically encoded to do that. Phil Rose: Ha ha. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: So I think it was that combination. I learned from as an 18 year old, I had a lot less risk than if you have a mortgage and a wife and kids and all these other responsibilities, I can just go do whatever I wanted to do. And I learned how difficult starting and growing a business was. But it's still kind of is in my belly, right? It's just something that I had to do. Phil Rose: Yeah. So that's interesting. So I'm going to fast forward a bit and I'm going to come back to the businesses you've started in a bit, but I want to fast forward to one of the reasons that you and I got talking originally was when you talked about scale faster. And you described this as good to great for the rest of us. And I love that as a phrase because Jim Collins wrote good to great many years back and that's the MBA text that got me into business back in 2000 and whatever it was, 2000 at the time. Pete Martin: Right. Phil Rose: We've all seen the book, we've all read Good to Great in different lines, we've seen how that works, but Good to Great for the rest of us. So what was it that prompted you to take that, and I'm gonna use the word, three year deep dive into bootstrap businesses that wanted to scale? Because that was a transition again from your own businesses. Pete Martin: Yeah, think it was a couple of things. So I sold my last large business to KPMG around 11 years ago. And after I sold that, I thought it was a clever fellow. And so was going to write a book telling everybody how clever I was. at some point I realized I'm like, cares about what I did. Right. Maybe my friends and family will buy half a dozen books. But other than that, they don't care. it so that kind of writing a book had kind of stuck in the back of my head. And then during Covid. as the VC money in the States was flowing, I swear, like every week there was a new unicorn founder. Right. So that used to be kind of a unique thing and it wasn't so unique anymore. And something something just hit me about it just really upset me because I'm like, you know what? You know, the business media is giving all this press to somebody who just their their competency is raising money, not building a profitable, viable, sustainable business. And it kind of pissed me off. And so I kind of went back to, know, we should be putting the focus on the folks that you work with and I work with and Vern works with that have done both these very fantastic companies give back to community, right? They didn't necessarily raise up growth equity. They were good at running a company. And so so I decided to kind of do the Jim Collins thing, the good to great thing. And what I love about good to great is Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: Not so much what came out of it, but the level of rigor and discipline he put into the research, right? Really, nobody had done that before. Maybe Tom Peters before him 30, 40 years ago, you know, but other than that, really nobody had done that level of due diligence and research. And so I decided to go do that. And as you mentioned, it took me three years to do that. A little context was I took the INC 5000, which is a thing in the US. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: that looks at the fastest growing 5000 companies in the country. And I took seven years worth of that data and I filtered them by companies that doubled revenues every year for at least four consecutive years, which is a very, very difficult thing to do. It's difficult to double your revenues in one year, let alone four years, let alone four consecutive years. So once I did that, there was like started out with a little over thirty two thousand unique companies, took it down to three hundred eighty six. Phil Rose: Yeah, well, hello. Pete Martin: Okay, just by that filter. And then I wanted to specifically look at companies that did this by bootstrapping. And the reason that I did was I like to half jokingly say, if you give me 100 million dollars, I can grow my company fast, too. I could just go hire a lot of people and write to do that on a bootstrap internally generated cash flow basis is really difficult. So I knew. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: If I put that filter on it and I was able to get to these folks, I would learn some really valuable things. so once I put that filter of, you didn't raise growth equity, that took the number from 386 down to 324. And then I spent the better part of three years digging through over 95 interviews of the CEOs and their management teams to figure out how the heck these folks did it. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Okay. Phil Rose: Wow, wow. And interesting just for context, we didn't have Jack GPT to do that analysis at the time, so that's a labour of love to go through that data as well, no doubt. Pete Martin: Yep, for sure. Phil Rose: Gotta do it by hand. So interesting, you said something there about bootstrap. I think there's something here, isn't it? You showed us a slide while we're in Austin. I thought this summed up and I haven't got the slide in front of me, but basically you said, would you invest? Just, you know the slide I mean, just sum that up for me, because I want to get the audience to think about would you invest in these businesses? Pete Martin: Yeah. Pete Martin: Yeah, so what was probably the so I did a lot of ask the CEOs about their their backgrounds, right? Where they went to school, how much time they spend at work, do they have an executive assistant? Do they take vacations like a lot about their personal background? And I had this thesis in theory going in that these were, you know, highly educated MBAs, right? Went to the best schools, had done multiple businesses. And it couldn't have been farther from the truth. And so that slide that I put up basically is, you know, their first time founders, they didn't have a business plan, literally. When they started their companies, they weren't exactly sure what business they were in. They did have lots of pivots to kind of figure out what what market they were in. They, you know, on and on and on. They were very average James and Joes right off the street. And that was the most extraordinary finding, I would have expected, particularly though these are first time, most of them were first time business founders. None of them were from top universities, right? Just very, only 80 % had college degrees, 20 % did not. On and on and on, right? It was very, very interesting. so, and because I think there's this, this thing that in our brains, right? That we think about companies that have had this kind of extraordinary success. These are incredibly fast growing companies. They averaged 169 % year over year growth every year. You're more than doubling every year. And so I think there's this perspective that, that can't be me, that's the other person, that's the other guy, that's the other girl. And they're just normal people. They just figured out how to really run very, very fast growing businesses. Phil Rose: Amazing, amazing. Phil Rose: And I think that's interesting. And I want to come on to the value drivers. You talk about eight value drivers. I want to come on to that in a bit, because there's some key things that we know add that value. But before we come to that case, so we've gone from 32,000 to 386, down to 324, and then you did 95 interviews, actually. So you've got data there to pull on, looking at what made these businesses successful. And I think there's a number of things. You talked about Jim Collins and Good to Great earlier. And one of the key tenets that we talk about here, in scaling up and Jim talks about is those businesses having their big hairy audacious goal and you blew this out of the water when you talked to them because you found out that only one out of a hundred plus of them had a big hairy audacious goal or what they're trying to achieve. So what was it that drove these people to, know, what was their thing? What was their North Star as you talk about that helped them aim at where they're going? Pete Martin: Yeah, it was really interesting. So, Vern Hardish and Gina Wickman, a lot of folks, gave blurbs for the book and Vern actually wrote the foreword. And I was very honored that he agreed to do that. And he did that because he thought the research was just so well researched and really interesting stuff. And what was super fascinating was this notion that I would have also expected you know, all of the scaling up frameworks that they had to be had or whatever. And they really didn't. But what they were focused on was dominating in the market that they were in, number one. So, you know, they didn't necessarily say, you know, we want to go to Mars like like Elon Musk says, right? What they did say is we want to be the best at the market that we chose to be in. They were very competitive people and. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: What was really fascinating was one of the things I put up in that slide about these founders is that the majority of them had what I call the chip. They had a chip on their shoulder. They had something to prove to somebody. And I've got, I think, 10 personal stories, deeply personal stories in the book that those founders were willing to share with with the audience. And, you know, one of the one of the companies that they grew over 100 million in revenue in five years, right. Pretty phenomenal growth. Phil Rose: Hmm. Pete Martin: And it was a lady who grew up in a very traditional Midwest house and her brother, her parents had saved money for her brother to go to college. And when she said, hey, how much did you save for me? Right. They literally said, why would you go to college? We just assume you're going to be married and give us grandchildren. Right. And it pissed her off so much that that was her chip. And almost all of them had a chip. So I think it was this combination of. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: They wanted to dominate whatever business they were in and just crush their competitors and be successful and give back to the community. And then you had that chip there that they kind of leaned into. And it was that combination of probably as powerful, maybe not more powerful than having to be a hag. Phil Rose: Yeah, I love that. And interesting, one of the slides I took a photo of when you were talking was that bit about that business and how she did that and where she went onto. And if you're happy to, I'd love to talk about some of the things she learned in terms of building that business. Cause I think there's a real powerful message there. But let's just talk about that chip. Cause I think that's really interesting, isn't it? You and I both got MBAs. We both been through that traditional route of learning how to run businesses. And I used to say to people, when I finished my MBA, 23 years ago, gosh. 23 years ago, know, I thought the MBA was the death of entrepreneurship because it taught you how to do things by the book and you followed the rules. And then I look at my bookshelf over there and it's full of all the MBA books, know, marketing manuals, operation manuals. These guys didn't have that. And a lot of MBAs, they don't have that chip. They're very good at, you might bring them into your business, but they'll look through the business plan and say, doesn't work. Whereas what these guys were doing was saying, well, it does work. And that's their chip that was driving them. So what was it do think that made them passionate about it? know, this girl you're talking about, know, no money put aside for her. She had to get on her own. You know, she was just there to do what Midwest girls would do, whatever it is. You know, there was no logic there. So what drove them in that chip? What was the thing behind them? Pete Martin: You know, they all had something, a different chip that drove them. That was just one example. You know, there were some ex-family members, some ex-spouses. My dad doesn't appreciate the stuff that I do. So, you know, I think that they're one of the things I talked about in Austin was I think there's this notion, particularly in America, that if you have this thing that's driving you crazy, you have to go to therapy and get rid of it. And none of these folks did. They acknowledged it. and they leaned into it and it was interesting. So as I was getting their backstories, I was about six or seven stories in and I'm like, wow, this is a consistent theme because I wasn't asking the question, what's your chip? Right. And when I kept hearing this recurring theme, I kind of threw that into my interview questions. And all I would say is, so Phil, what's your chip? And everybody knew exactly what I was talking about. And they're like, it's this. Right. And. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: And the fact that they were aware of it, they acknowledged it and just said, you know, it's always there. It's probably never going to go away. And I'm OK with that. And I'm using it to drive me forward. And then you add kind of the grit piece on onto that. know, it's kind of almost interchangeable. You got that chip and then you've got the grit and you put those two things together and you just figure out how to make it work. Right. And forget the NBA, forget academia. You just figure it out. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, and it's interesting that they just figured it out because that's in question question, you know, I'm a coach I've been coaching for 15 years or so, you know, I've been scaling up business for a long time Are these people coachable? Because that's the question, you know, a lot of people say, you know All business owners need to be coachable to be able to do it themselves But you've got that chip. You've got the grit If a coach like me came into business knocked on the door and said you need scaling up, know Here's the book you need to go do it or here's five dysfunctional team you need to work on this were they coachable? Pete Martin: Wow, that's a really interesting question. I think some of them would be a couple of them not. of the I won't say who it is in the book that I profile, but he said, I literally don't read any business book. And I said, well, are you going read mine? Because you're in it. Right. And he's like, I might read it all thumb through, you know, look at the section for us or whatever. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: And we kind of joked about it. And one of the interesting things I shared with you in Austin was, remember, I gave you guys a bunch of money and I said, if you guys could tell me the most cited book, it was not a business book, right? It was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. And that was super fascinating. And so I think to answer your question directly, I would say that they're coachable. Phil Rose: yes. Yeah. Lock of radius. Yeah. Pete Martin: but probably not in the same ways that we coach other entrepreneurs, right? It's finding that unique thing, that little thread that is going to motivate them or change them, change behavior, and then you start pulling on it. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: I think that's a really interesting point. I think actually when you think about that, I was listening to a podcast recently with Tim Ferriss and he was interviewing the founder of Roblox, David Buzuki, and he was asked the same question. And he said, I have never read a business book. I know that's interesting, he's got in there and just done it. And I think there's a really powerful thing there actually. You don't need to read the business books to do it. You actually need to get on to just do it. And I think there's there's got to be a So interesting, you've got the chip. Pete Martin: Exactly. Phil Rose: Whereas in traditional books, we talk about having the big hereditary goal and building towards something. But these guys, they're just driving towards something. So there's something else. Pete Martin: You know, going to give you another example of that. So I'm not supposed to have favorite CEOs that I talked to, but I did have a couple of favorites. One of my favorites was a guy by the name of Kyle Mitnick. He was running a company called Advertise Purple. And I loved his passionate emotion. He told me this story about they are in the business of essentially their affiliate marketing agency. So they will if you want to go do a deal with the Kardashians, you would go to these guys and they would help. cut the deal and then they actually take a share of the revenue that you get from those different partnerships. And he was telling me the story about that he was at the conference that they all go to. And so he's walking around, it's pretty early days for him and they all have, know, it's very much kind of an old boy, you know, network kind of thing. And he's like, most of the agencies then had 20 or 30 clients. And he said, I'm walking around. It's like, this is, you know, a big company here. big company here and it's like, got 30 clients and I've got Procter & Gamble, whatever. This company has 30 clients. He's like, and the way he was telling me, I was just cracking up. He's like, that's it. That's it. I can get 30 clients and like that's success. Like, no way. That's complete bullshit. Right. And he went on to have thousands of clients. Right. And very, very successful business. And so again, it's like that, you know. I'm not going to do things like everybody else. so if you just put me in this, you don't kind of give me the pathway because it's, you know, that's what the NBA tells you you should do. I'm going to do the opposite. And that's that's a very traditional entrepreneurial thing. You know that. So tell us, tell us to go right and we're going to go left. So. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to laugh. I love that. And interesting, you told the story about Russell Brunson and click funnels. And if I think back, when I first discovered Russell Brunson, he was selling potato guns. And this would have been way back in my, I started my business in 2004. So I must've discovered him sometime in the next few years after that. He was doing that. And I downloaded some stuff for him. And at the time he was giving away... He was giving like a little MP3. In fact, this would tell the story. It was before we had iPhones, I reckon, because he was giving away little MP3 players to download your music onto with every subscription. I thought, what a great thing. But that was Russell Brunson back in way back 20 plus years ago. So did you talk to Russell Brunson's team as well, I think? Yeah. Really interesting. What do you know? ClickFunnel is massive business now. Most entrepreneurs may have heard or may not have heard of him. But what did you learn from someone like him who's got that presence out there as well? Pete Martin: And then, yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: Yeah, so one of the interesting things was so I'm a marketing major by degree. was a for my undergraduate. I was a marketing guy and I'm very much kind of a sales and marketing type of person. That's how I'm oriented. And I always had this belief that, again, probably from the NBA or whatever, that you had to have all of these different ways to go to channel to go to market and they all need to be synchronized. It's just a voice on this kind of stuff. And it was another one of these huge surprises for me that each one of these companies went to market very differently than everybody else, but they focused on one channel and they mastered it. And what Russell has done is master, you know, his voice, his presence. He's all over the place all the time. Right. That's not something I would ever do and would ever want to do. But it's worked for the company really, really, really well. And this is another guy that, you know, he will say he's, you know, he's not your traditional business guy. was not an MBA, right? I think he, I think he might have graduated from Boise State or something. But he's just figured it out. And that's, know, and if you if you look at his old stuff, even five years ago, he comes across as this kid, right, because he looks very young in the face or whatever. Phil Rose: Yeah, think, yeah, I don't know the story there, but that's interesting. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: He's looking a little bit older now, but that's just trying to figure it out. But he's super authentic. And he the whole company kind of leaned into that authenticity that he is a student of business and not necessarily of all these other things, but just figuring it out. And he's the first person to say, I've screwed up time and time and time again. But that's how you learn. Right. And he's not afraid to say that and he's not afraid to be vulnerable. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole load of things I want to pick in that case. know, that mastering one channel. Because, know, if I think about how we've market over the last 20 years of running my business, you know, we've tried lots of things. We've done LinkedIn marketing, we've done Instagram, we've done TikTok, we've done Facebook, we've YouTube marketing, we've run the podcast, all those things. But I think what I'm hearing there is just master that channel, use that word master. And that's really interesting, isn't it? Mastering it rather than scatter gunning to try and do everything. Pete Martin: Most entrepreneurs do one of two things. They try a bunch of different things. They aren't patient enough to let the results come in and they're not they're not looking at every aspect of whatever channel they're going to market through. So let's just say you're doing paperclip and you're like paperclip doesn't work. LinkedIn ads don't work, right? It's because you haven't looked at every part of it. It could be the offer. It could be the channel. It could be the sales cycle time, there's all, you know, could be bad audiences, bad, like there's all these dimensions when it comes to selling and marketing, right, that you have to think about and you have to really continue to test. And most entrepreneurs don't have the patience for that. They're like, you know, we tried LinkedIn ads for three months and it didn't work. And one of the things that I shared with you guys and what I found in the book is that I don't care what channel you want to pick. Cold calling, cold email. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: any ads, social media, Varela, they all work. And that's the problem. They all work and you have to pick one and you have to master it. Right. And so five of the companies that are over 100 million in revenue, the way they go to market is through cold calling. And you talk to 20 other people and they'll say cold calling doesn't work. And I'm like, really? I can put you in front of five companies that are over 100 million that have grown double digits every year. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Phil Rose: him. Yeah. Pete Martin: And that's how they do it, because they mastered it. And most entrepreneurs are ADD-ish and it's like we're all chasing squirrels in a shiny object. And we just don't have the tenacity and the patience just to push through to make one thing work really, really well, because they will all work. Phil Rose: Amazing. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, I think that's really interesting. I think there's a big lesson there for every entrepreneur listening to this. And as you said, we've tried it for three months, it didn't work. Then we'll move on, but actually that shiny object, you need to find some of that tenacity as Lentz, he only would say, I'm working genius. Focus on that and actually get those people in and just drive it through and don't be put off that the results don't work straight on. It's compounding at the end of the day. If you ever think about Warren Buffett's money, that didn't come on day one, that just slowly, slowly, slowly and then ticked up at the end. That's the way we need to do it with our marketing. It will come eventually. Pete Martin: One of my one of my mentors is a guy by the name of Chet Holmes, who sadly passed away about five years ago. And I did a couple of things with Chet Holmes 20 years ago. for those people that don't know Chet, so Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's sidekick, right? Charlie Munger was kind of the operations guy. And Chet Holmes worked for Charlie Munger for seven different businesses within the Berkshire portfolio. And every company that he went into, he doubled the revenues within Phil Rose: Yeah. Cool. Nice and nice. Pete Martin: 18 months, seven times, right? And Charlie would say, Chet, thank you. That's great. Now go do it over here. Right. And so he had this methodology that we won't get into. But the thing that he will talk about is this pigheaded discipline. And it's exactly the same thing. It is just to say we're picking this channel. We think it fits our culture, our resources, our market, whatever. And we are going to have the pigheaded discipline to make it work. That's it. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: We're not going to go do these other things. And again, every single one of these channels can work. You just have to have the big head of discipline, which is not something that most entrepreneurs have, from that perspective, to just go see it through. Phil Rose: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. It's really interesting actually. I have not heard the name Chet Holmes for a long time. Back in 2004, five, six, seven, eight, nine, I used to listen to his stuff regularly. Really interesting to say that. And you're right, that was one of the messages he used to drum into people. Just focus on it and keep doing the same thing. So thank you for that reminder actually. Great, marketeer. Wow, that's interesting, interesting thing. But yeah, pick a discipline. So I love that. Pete Martin: Yeah. Pete Martin: Yeah. Phil Rose: So we've got that thing there. We've got a chip. We've got don't do things like others. I'm doing my little notes here. We've got focus on the one thing and just keep doing one thing. Don't read business books. Read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Read your book. Yeah, scale up faster. Yeah, if you need to read one thing, read scale up faster and also read Vern's book as well because that will put the structure in your business. that's what think. So here we get the next question. You talked about raising money and one thing you said at the beginning, you said Pete Martin: Read my book, though. Read my book. Hahaha! Pete Martin: Yes, sir. Phil Rose: You want to talk to those people who are different. Some people went out and raised money and they built it around that. But what you want to do is talk to those people who had built a viable business. So that's really interesting because I've not thought of it that perspective. There is a different skill set between those people who go out to VCs, raise money on the back of an idea and then drive it. You've got guys who are building viable businesses from scratch, 100 plus. So you've got the farm girl flowers you talk about a lot. What was the thing that drove them and enabled them to do what they did without that cash? How did they say, let's do it and let's boost up this business? What makes the difference? Pete Martin: Yeah, what makes the biggest difference is two things. have to if you look at the levers of cash flow, the number one thing that will move the needle the most is your price and having what I call pricing authority. So if you can drive a high enough price, you can drive high enough margin and you don't need to go out and raise money. OK, so that's that's foundational element number one. You have to be the you don't have this pricing authority. So the second thing is in order to have pricing authority, you need to have a differentiated offering. And when I do these workshops around this methodology called boot scaling, which we talk about in the book, we focus on this notion of different is better than better. OK, and I make everybody repeat that different is better than better. Phil Rose: you Pete Martin: So the issue is if you're in a market and you look like everybody else, all of your competitors, you typically have to compete on price because in the customer's mind, right, you're the same as everybody. So they're going to actually go towards I want to lower price of you. Right. When you're uniquely different, when I fight, if I stack up all the different competitors, right, and you truly objectively, not subjectively, you truly objectively stand out. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: you can you can ask a different price, right? Assuming there's a value statement there. OK, that's what all these companies were really good at doing. And so when we go back to the the BHAG versus my mission is to compete in the market and crush everybody, they were deep enough into the customer journey with the customers wanted to buy that they figured out how they could be different. Right. And that was the key to getting pricing authority. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: which was the key to not having to raise money to go scale up faster. Right. It was those two things together and you have to and you know, it's this it's this thing where a lot of entrepreneurs will say, well, we are different than our competitors. We have better customer service and right. And we're better at this and we're better than that. Well, you know, better is very subjective. And most entrepreneurs in their companies, you know, they think they're better than the competitors yet. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: From the customer's perspective, they're like, no, you're not. You look like everybody else. And it's very difficult to look in the mirror and say, are we objectively different? And so different, this notion of different is objective. Better is subjective. And so the more you can differentiate your offering. And there are. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: hundreds or thousands of examples of companies that have done this really, really, really well that they, you know, at some point in time when you create a truly differentiated offering and you're making more money, competitors will ultimately start to copy you, right? That's just kind of a natural thing in business and capitalism. But you've got to kind of be bold and kind of stake that different way of going, you know, not just going to market, but having a different offering. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: And that's a scary thing to do, right, because you're like, all the market kind of looks like this. I'm going to go this way. Right. I don't know if it's going to work or not. Right. But if you stick to it and most will naturally kind of go back to, know, they might have really aggressive marketing. Right. There was a was a marketing agency I worked with 10 years ago. And literally the guy wrote a book that says your marketing sucks. Right. That gets your attention. And we did some work with them. And what was interesting was Phil Rose: Yeah, gotta stand out. Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: when we first started our engagement with them, they were truly different and it was very bold messaging and whatever. And I think as they got pressure, you know, with other marketing agencies, they kind of started to look to kind of go back into what everybody else was doing. And it really lost that luster. And that's a very normal thing to do. And so these businesses, for the most part, that are profiled in the book, have done a really, really good job of a creating that differentiated offer in a way that matters to customers. Right. And they could drive pricing authority. They have higher profit margins, they drive more cash, and they can scale faster. Phil Rose: Yeah, I love that. so here's a couple of questions that come off the back in that case. You talk about, you know, that different is better than better. And you did get us to say that. I remember having that conversation with you. We all said that. There's something there which links us way, you know, that those people when they're sticking to their marketing, as you said just now, it's about focus. It's about pigheaded discipline. And in some ways, having that same pigheaded ability to say, okay, we're going to be different and we're going to keep doing it this way. Even when everyone else is zigging, you're going to be zagging. You're doing the opposite thing. Can you give us an example of any businesses in the book that you think really stood out to say, this is where they did that really differently? Pete Martin: Yeah, so I'd say the one that probably there's a lot of them. They all did it in one way or another. The one that's probably easiest to to kind of visualize is this farm girl flowers we talk about. you know, entrepreneur from Indiana and the US and, you know, she had this chip on her shoulder for sure. She had a floral shop in California for a while that didn't go very well. So she decided to shut that down and have an online floral e-commerce. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: business, right? And so I don't know about Europe and the rest of the world, but in the States, the big 800 pound gorilla is this one 800 Flowers company. And so, you know, here's this teeny tiny little company going against this truly 800 pound gorilla. And so if she would have gone out and had this huge selection of flowers and it looked like everything else where the average order size was around 50, $55. she would have been crushed. And so what she did when she started is she would essentially put together the flower arrangement for you. You didn't get to pick, you know, I want this one or that one or whatever. She's like, this is the one we're selling. And it was wrapped in burlap and it was beautifully presented, beautifully boxed. There are tons of videos of people unboxing their flowers. Like that just doesn't happen with 1-800-Flowers, right? Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: Their average order price at the time, I'm not sure what it is now, was around $150. Completely starkly different. But if you were to look at the arrangement, so they, for instance, they ended up doing a really cool partnership with the Gap. So instead of burlap, it'd be wrapped in essentially jeans, right, and denim. It did this really cool partnership with them. And again, it looks like nothing. Phil Rose: Wow, wow. Phil Rose: Okay. Pete Martin: of any other flower arrangement you could get out there. And then the other thing they did was they knew that most women, so this was a female led organization, female founded, female led, and most of the customers were females, not men. And so they kind of leaned into building that community and would say that they would send little kind of notes in there from the CEO to saying, know, Running a female led business is really, really difficult in this male dominated world. And no matter what you're doing, whether you're raising a family, whether you're running a business or working, whatever, we've got your back. Right. And so it was the combination of that building community being very different, very different messaging. You know, and again, it was not better than one hundred hundred flowers. It was objectively different. Right. And that gave them pricing authority and that allowed them to grow to over 100 million revenue in five years. Phil Rose: That's fantastic. Phil Rose: Wow, and that's amazing. In five years, over 100 million, but it's that pricing authority. So they've actually got something that's really different in that sense. They're building something. They're not just being better. They're not competing with the 50 bucks flower arrangement. They're doing 150. They're way outside the marketplace for that 150 versus 50. I love that as a sense, in that case, because then they've got pricing authority. So therefore they don't need to go and raise capital because they've got money coming in every day. So they're building their own revenue stream. Pete Martin: Right. Phil Rose: which is helping them grow their businesses in the first place, which is the key to making their businesses work in a different way. So interestingly, thinking about that in that case, so one of the key things that every MBA these days will be taught is very much around Clay Christian's view about jobs to be done. And therefore, you know, having an ideal customer profile, focus on your JTBD. How did they find their ideal customer? And how did they identify their job to be done as a result of Pete Martin: Exactly. Pete Martin: Yeah, so I'm not a fan of the name jobs to be done. I think it's just kind of this really abstract thing. But we'll kind of jump in a little bit deeper. in Silicon Valley and the tech world, they will talk about product market fit. So you just need to understand your customers so well and your users that you can't pull the product away from them. They just love it so much. It's this notion of product market fit. Phil Rose: Yeah, interesting. Phil Rose: I'm Pete Martin: And that's exactly the same thing of what all these companies do. This is the job to be done. And so they figure that out because they were so deep in the trenches with their customers and would continuously ask questions. And are we doing the right thing? And how can we improve the experience and how we can prove the value? And what if we did this? What if we did that? And that also came around creating community, which was another big factor in what these companies did. And so they would regularly they would talk to their customers more than. you know, other folks. so I mentioned kind of at the top of this, the pod that they didn't have a business plan. Right. And the reason I didn't have a business plan is because they went out and talked to people like and so, you know, and all of them told me almost exact same thing. They said, you know what? Most entrepreneurs, especially the MBAs, will sit in their office and they will spend three months writing all this stuff down of what's going to happen. Right. And it's all completely made up. It's 100 percent made up from the financials to the way you you know, what's your customer want, all this kind of stuff, right? So they're like, forget it. We don't need to have a business plan. We're just going to go actually do stuff. We're going to talk to our customers, right? We're going to figure it out. We're going to test. We're going to ask lots of questions. We're going to fail. We're going to keep stubbing our toes and figure it out. And that's what they all did, right? And that's kind of how you get the product market fit in the tech world. They did basically exactly the same thing. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? So actually coming up with that, just talking to people, I think there's a key thing there, isn't it? There's almost that risk thing around that. It's just get on and do it. Come back to that entrepreneurial mindset and the MBA. The MBA will write the business plan and go and talk that around hundreds of people, where actually these entrepreneurs are just getting on doing it. They believe in something so passionate. They're picketed in their approach to doing it. They've got their chip on their shoulder. They're just going to make it work. But from their perspective, They know what they want and they're going to find the customers that want that by asking the question to say, what is it you need differently? Pete Martin: Exactly, exactly. Literally the only company that wrote a business plan. The guy just got his MBA. Phil Rose: Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Okay, okay. So it's something there in that case. And interesting, isn't it? Because if you go and ask customers what they want, know, talking about farm girl flowers, people wouldn't say they want to pay 150 bucks for a bunch of flowers with a handwritten note in it. So you have to make take that gamble sometimes of going to do things that you just believe in as well. And from that perspective, you talked about big hereditary goal earlier. I love the word purpose, and maybe purpose gets a bit overused by some business owners and academics in the last few years, but I still believe having a purpose above and beyond making money drives you, whether it's your chip or not. Does the word purpose ever come up for these people? Do they ever think that my purpose in business is this? Pete Martin: It yeah, absolutely. And so I pushed pretty hard on the B head concept because I believe in it too. And but they all did have a purpose and it was very different for each person, each founder. Some it was a personal purpose. Some was a corporate purpose. One of the companies that we spent a lot of time with. They will. Phil Rose: Okay. Pete Martin: If you are a if you have a website and you are selling advertising, these guys will come in and they'll essentially take over the whole revenue platform. Right. So imagine the trust that has to go into that. Right. And because they know that they have all this technology that can increase your revenues by 30, 40, 100, 200 percent. And then they actually take a piece of the additional revenue. And they that was their purpose. They knew that. most organizations, even just a newspaper that has their website, they're not good at the advertising side of it from an e-commerce perspective. It's a whole different set of technology and intelligence and things that you have to do. And so their purpose was to help what they call publishers, which is their customers, really extract as much revenue as they possibly can out of the website. That was their purpose, single-minded purpose. And they figured out they had really, really good tech to do that. And it took them three different pivots to figure that out, right? And they're like, these guys are struggling, and they're doing a crappy job. We can really help them. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, we can do it differently. I think that's interesting. So therefore the purpose is actually about helping other people do that thing and you know, because they know there's a better way of doing it as well. So that's interesting. I love that. So interesting if you think about purpose of moving on in that case, building a business is one thing and when you talk in scaling up about build it, grow the value and you know, exit and sometimes you know, the value of your life work. And I want to come back to that piece about you because you said at the beginning, you've grown and scaled and sold four businesses. Pete Martin: Exactly. Phil Rose: Before I come on to you, I want to ask that question. Did these people ever have the view that when I hit a number, I'm going to exit or this is what I'm doing it for? Where did exit fit into their view? Pete Martin: Yeah, I was a bit surprised here. I thought most of them would have this number in their head and when they hit that number, they're going to exit. when there was one really funny story, this is a UK company. I will probably keep it private for now, but they are incredibly profitable. They're over 100 million revenue now. I actually got some insights into literally how much money was in the bank account, you know, what their Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: Net margins were everything. And so we were chatting about, you and I asked the question, you know, are you interested in ever selling and, you know, and exiting? And he's like, yeah, you know, if I get to my number and I said, what's your number? All right. And I think it was 10 million quid or something. Right. And I'm like, I just laughed a lot. like, you were there like five years ago. Like, what's going on? You know, and it was really funny. And he's like, yeah, I don't know. I guess I probably am. But, you know. I just I love doing this and you know, and it's the purpose. And what else are you going to do? And, you know, I've got a self-side advisory business and virtually every founder who I've helped sell their company, they'll say I'm done, right? If they're particularly in their mid fifties or whatever, they're like, I'm done. And I'm like, no, you're not. And so they're like, no, no, I'm done. And I'm like, no, in six months, you'll call me and you'll say, I started another company. And it's it's the same case. And so I think it's this Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: you know, maybe it's business as a game to all these folks and to all of us. And, you know, so many of these folks could I mean, from a financial perspective, they got complete and utter freedom, but they go to work every day. Right. And I think it gives them purpose to your point. You know, it's kind of back to that. And I think there's this fear that if I sell, you know, because they don't need to work. Right. They've got the economic. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Mmm. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: economics do not have to work, but they won't have any purpose, right? So. Phil Rose: I think there's a big thing around that. I really think that's an interesting thing, isn't it? Because the business has become their purpose. I often talk about a purpose above and beyond making money. if I put my business models hat on, I draw a curve and it's a bit of an S curve of businesses scaling and goes from the energy in that business. And at some stage, most business owners want to exit. But then they build it and they realize actually they just love what they've done. They feel real pride around what they've created. and they don't wanna let go of it because actually that's become them as well. And if I put my consulting hat on, I come into business to help them structure it so they can step on and do it again. But the key thing there for me is the game. They want to just keep doing it. They're good at it. They don't need to stop. So I wonder from a work-life balance point of view, did you get any indication around where the work-life balance, work-life integration matter to them or is it all work, work, work? Pete Martin: Yeah, I did ask the question of everybody. I literally said, you know, do you take vacations? If so, how many do you take? How long? Right. Do you really step away? Like, how many hours a week do you work? And I'd say the average answer was in terms of hours worked, it was between 50 and 60 hours a week. And most of them said, you know, I might take a week or two off, but I'm kind of working when I do. Right. And. Phil Rose: Okay. Pete Martin: I would say there was a small percentage who felt the need to do that, that they probably didn't have. They didn't build the business where they could truly step away for a couple of months. Right. But most of them, I would say they could, but they didn't want to, because, again, it was their purpose and they enjoyed it and legitimately. Right. That was that was most of them. One of the guys that. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: That's the key. Yeah. Pete Martin: has a business that it's a real estate investment trust. They're now over five billion in assets under management. And he would take, I think he said about two months a year off. It's somewhat of a Christian faith based kind of organization. So they do a lot of work overseas and whatever, but he's like, but I'm always kind of on because I want to be, not because I have to be. Right. And I enjoy the business and I enjoy what I do. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: I have this purpose for the business and the purpose kind of personally. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And it really isn't, I'm always on, but I want to be doing it. So there's a transformation in mindset. So they're not building something with the intention of selling it one day. They're building it because they want to do it. They've got that chip on their shoulder. They want to make something different. They're pigheaded and big, minded about it. But interesting what you said there is, know, they've not structured it so it can be sold. And maybe that's intentional or not. They've not thought about those things in terms of putting in that structure, which enables them to step away and do the next thing. So maybe there's a, maybe there is an avenue for coaching at some stage, but they just got to realize they could step away one day. Was there any advice when you listen to these people as well? You know, it's fascinating for just understanding what you're talking about now, but was there anything you heard from them you thought that doesn't stack up? Anything you found contradictory between different people? You said, hey, that's one thing, but it's completely opposite for somebody else. Anything there? Pete Martin: Right. Pete Martin: I would say generally all of them were very different than everybody else. mean, just by virtue of their success, right? Doubling revenues every year for four years, doing it on a bootstrap basis. That is extraordinary. They are the one percent of the one percent in American business for sure. So there's no way that they could do that and do the same thing as everybody else, because that's not normal. Right. And so Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: You know, when what was really interesting is I really tried to go into interviewing all these folks and doing the research with a completely open mind. I did not have a thesis about how business should be run or anything else when I went into this, except for my own experiences. Right. And by the way, I didn't I didn't achieve this level of success. I didn't have the kind of growth rates that these guys did. Right. So I really went in with this very open mind as I want to learn myself, too. Right. Phil Rose: Yeah, lovely. Brilliant. Pete Martin: And there wasn't really anything besides maybe I don't read business books because I do that I would just like me. I was like, really? You know, that's the way you're doing things. Right. And so I had this kind of open canvas to just ask questions, get responses and then sit back. I've got a stack of papers literally about this big and kind of went back through, you know, visually, manually and started taking notes, whatever. And then Phil Rose: Hmm. Pete Martin: I threw everything in a chat and I'm like, what do you what do you think about all this? Right. And and it was all these extraordinary learnings that just were different than the way 99 percent of businesses are run. Right. But consistent across all of the companies in the book, for sure. Phil Rose: Mmm. Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you've just blown open the closet of all those secrets that these businesses can do. So, you know, anybody now can read scale up faster and go and do it. Or can they? What's the... Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, it's great. You've distilled this down. You've spoken to 90 of our entrepreneurs. You've, you know, looked at 32,000 original businesses. So there's some... Use that word grit earlier, but there's something there which drove them all to do this. without going through all the details. Pete Martin: Yeah. Pete Martin: I'm dirty. Phil Rose: what's the thing that every business owner needs to learn from this? If you were to give one key tip, you say, business owner, do this, and it will help you. What's that thing do you think, if you could distill it down to one thing, that may be impossible, but what's the one thing you think stood out? Pete Martin: It's the F word. It's the F word. Focus. Phil Rose: Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder what you're going to say then. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Pete Martin: focus. Right, because Verne likes to say, know, his big takeaway from my book was and what he says, which isn't really kind of appropriate, but he says, sell one thing one way. And the point of that was, you know, they weren't trying to do 50 different things and they weren't trying to go to market in 12 different ways. They had a core offering. that was highly differentiated, different is better than better, that they went to market in one primary method. So if you kind of distill all that down, it's focused on doing something really, really well in one way and being the absolute best at it. And pick your analogy from life, whether it's sports, know, pick your, whether it's. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: British European football or art football, whatever the stars do that, right? They do the little things over and over and over in a very disciplined way to get better, better, better at it. And that's what these guys did. And that is contrary to most entrepreneurs and the way that we are are shiny object, chasing people, right? We just, you know, because that's boring stuff like, God, I've got to do another A.B. test and I like. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: I got to talk to another customer. know my customer, right? It's like, no, you probably don't. Right. And that's the thing. And that's why most businesses have not achieved this level of success, because they don't have that focus in the big head discipline to just master every single aspect of the business to get better and better and better and better. Phil Rose: You doing it? Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, It's interesting you use that word mastery. I was just looking for my scaling up book which is on my desk here as we talk. And I think it's really interesting if I was to go back and look in here, I think the one thing that you've just said there, you we talk about that word discipline and Verne always says, routine will set you free. And the other bit you said which really resonated to me is habit. You know, if you want to master something, you need to a habit of it. You need to do it over and over again and then you become the expert on it. And whether it's the 10,000 hours rule that we've all talked about in the past, or blood well, or with something else. But actually there's a key thing there, isn't it? It's about doing it and focusing it, mastering it, and just being pigheaded to make sure it's gonna do it. Which is a really interesting thing, it? Because a lot of people talk about, know, if the strategy doesn't work, change. But you're saying actually they just focused on that one thing, and that's what they did, focus. Pete Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you think about the book Atomic Habits that came out a couple of years ago. to me, the whole, it's just kind of a funny concept because it's like we all know this stuff, right? We know how to be healthy, right? Eat healthy, workout, Exercise, right? You don't need anything else besides those principles, those basic things. But we're all looking for the easy button, right? Phil Rose: Yeah, James, yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Pete Martin: The folks that are truly accomplished in life are those folks like we just talked about that are willing to put in the 10,000 hours of doing the same thing in the drudgery every day. But just that one percent improvement, right? Just they achieve great results. And these companies were able to do that through force of will, through discipline, through culture, through the kind of people that they hire, all this kind of stuff. Right. It was just doing the same thing over and over again. Master it. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Brilliant. And interesting, I've just, as you were talking there, I was thinking, you the people you mentioned, you mentioned about James Clear and Atomic Habits. If I think about Benjamin Hardy writing his books, and if you've not read Benjamin Hardy's books, you know, he's amazing what he does and how he works with Dan Sullivan. And interesting, I read an interview that Benjamin Hardy did a few years ago with Mr. Beast when he was talking about his model. And that was around just doing the same thing over and over again. And that's how he built his following on YouTube. And it's about focus. I love that. Pete Martin: Yep. Phil Rose: Pete, we're going to come to the end of this now. We said we'd try and limit it to an hour and so many more questions. What's the one thing that I haven't asked about these entrepreneurs? say, Phil, this is also a thing. You talk about focus. If there was one other thing, what else would you pull out that you would say, this is something we're worth considering? Pete Martin: So I like to say that any business problem is a people problem almost 100 % of the time. Right. And these folks did a fantastic job of a building incredible cultures that attracted the right kind of people and being able to talk about that culture. I mean, it's kind of story like fashion that really helped them attract the right kind of people. Phil Rose: Yeah, exactly. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: Part of the analysis we did was we actually scraped the website of the career section from all 324 companies and then we compared them to their direct competitors. And what was astounding was the way that they would describe working for their company was starkly different than their competitors. Their competitors was very boring. was like, you know, we are a value added company that is focused on our customers and, you know, Phil Rose: as Pete Martin: professional development, right, versus this very flowery, you know, rich description of what it's like to work for that company. And what came out of that is it would reject and repel and attract people, the right kind of people. And so I have a business that I'm working with in Florida that's an industrial distribution company. And we did an exercise where we asked their employees to describe the culture. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: And I do this with all my clients and they would say things like, you know, we work long hours and it's very stressful because, you know, if they need to get supplies out to a construction site and they need it now, they will pick up, you know, they'll do whatever they can to do, get in the truck, take this stuff out there. Right. But we have everybody's back, you know, and so, you know, fills out kind of delivering this. You know, I got your back on. I've got you covered. Right. And. Phil Rose: Okay. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: If you were just to kind of listen to them, you're like, my God, I'd never worked for this company. Right. So we built help to build this culture statement that describe that in rich detail. And what happened was the number of candidates went down significantly. But the candidates that are coming through are sticking. They're much better because the last thing that they would want is somebody who works an eight to five job. Right. And build a whole hiring process that like the interview questions. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Pete Martin: to be able to suss that out of whether they're a culture fit. And these companies did a really, really great job at that. So it wasn't just about the founders. was about their job was to create this amazing culture. And it was different from company to company. They were very starkly different across the board. But they all knew what their culture was like. And they had an interviewing and hiring process in place that would first suss out for that culture, then suss out kind of these core competencies across every role. Phil Rose: you Phil Rose: Mm-hmm. Pete Martin: and then did a kind of job to be done interviewing process. They knew when this candidate was kind of through that funnel, they knew, you know, with a 99 % degree of confidence, that person could do the job and with the culture. And so that was the other big thing that these companies were able to do. That was a huge contributor to their success. And the very first chapter of the book is about culture and how they did this. Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Phil Rose: Wow. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And interesting, one of the things you talk about in the book is about rather than just building your ideal client profile, but actually you said that they built their ideal employee profile, the IEP rather than IEP. And I think that's really interesting that focus around, you know, who is your ideal employee, because actually then you can find that perfect fit. And, you you talked about, you know, focus around effectively describing that culture before going out to hire. Because as you say, you don't want a nine to five employee if you're having to deliver things out of hours. Pete Martin: Correct. Pete Martin: Right. Exactly right. And, you know, there's lots of books that have been written about if you focus on your employees, they'll take care of their customers. Right. There's tons of books about this. And that's kind of what they did. They didn't, you know, and all the stuff I write about in the book, they didn't they would never they didn't use those words. They didn't talk about it like that. But that was kind of the consistent theme. And that was a big one, you know, that they wouldn't say we focus on culture necessarily. Couple did, but not many of them. But when you kind of dug into actually how they operate it and all of the questions and answers they gave. That was really the essence of the business. Phil Rose: Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting actually, because one thing you showed us in Austin, and I'm looking at it as I talk, you you talked about when they were doing the interview screening, culture fit was number one, fundamental competencies number two, but evidence of producing job outcomes was number three. So actually you go into that process there and you're trying to find people who fit to start with, and they've got the competencies, but the third was actually the producing the outcome. So it's really interesting how other businesses might look at it from the other perspective. Pete Martin: That's exactly right. Yep. They look at either did they come from my industry? Did they have the, you know, did they have the do they have industry knowledge or whatever? one of the executives said, you know, we hire for the soul. We train for the role. And I loved that statement, right. And it was meaning it's about the culture. And I think I asked all of you guys and I asked this frequently. Phil Rose: Love it, love it, yeah. Pete Martin: When a person didn't work out in your organization, what do most people say? They say they weren't a fit. What does that mean? Let's dig into what is not a fit. It's a culture fit, right? And that's why that's just so important. was at the top of the list of what all these companies did. They really made sure they hired for culture fit. Phil Rose: Hmm. Phil Rose: Yeah, I love that. I love that, and it's culture fit there. So that's really interesting thing, isn't it? And you know, going through that process, understanding who you are, getting the right people on board. know, Jim Collins talks about the right person on the right seat in the right bus with the right attitude, but it's this attitude and culture. So you've got to define your culture first. And that's obviously being developed by the owner, but they're not talking culture. They're talking about if it's the fit, do they feel right? And that's a feeling, intuitive thing rather than analytical thing as well, probably. Pete Martin: Yep. Pete Martin: No, no, it's actually an analytical thing. It's quite the opposite. if you there's been lots of stats about, you know, and I used to say this to I trust my gut. Right. It's wrong most of the time. And I've got, you know, a half a million dollars of wasted expenses on people that I trusted my gut and they turned out to be a really bad fit. And, you know, and I think most, you know. Phil Rose: Okay. Okay. Pete Martin: most business owners that have had companies for a while will say the same thing. It's like, you know, I trust in my gut on on this person and my God, I was so wrong. Right. And so you do need to be analytical and you do need to be able to figure out truly what is that culture. Right. And then coming up with a process where you're not trusting your gut, you're asking questions that will suss out very specifically, are they a good fit or not? You know, so, you know, to go back to this example of I don't want to hire an eight to five person. Like you ask a question, how many times have you missed a family dinner or kids, you know, a kids sporting event because you had to respond to a customer. Right. And if that person says, never miss dinner with my family, whatever. Fine. Right. That might be a great personal trait. And that person might be a great fit for somebody else if that's not your culture. Phil Rose: Yeah, that's really interesting. Phil Rose: Over. Pete Martin: If your culture is you drop everything to go help a customer, that's not a good person. And that's OK. Phil Rose: Yeah, that's really interesting. So you're putting some analytical question around that actually helps them identify, will that person fit into our way of working, our way of being? Because that's what we value in this business, the behaviors we expect. I think that's a really interesting example. You've made some great examples there. Thank you. Let's just think, as we come to a close in that case, you talked about boot scaling and blitz scaling in the past. Pete Martin: Yep. Exactly. Phil Rose: Just tell me a bit about boot scaling, because you said one of the things you're doing at the moment is boot scaling, and that's one of the things that you're working on, but also blitz scaling. So tell me the difference between the two and what that means for you and how you're going out to market with some of those things. Pete Martin: Yes, so there's a book called Blitz Scaling, and that's a kind of a trade name that Reid Hoffman and his co-author, I think Chris Rowe came up with. And he's a very Silicon Valley guy. So Reid Hoffman is the founder of LinkedIn, CEO of LinkedIn. And his belief is you go raise a ton of money, ton of outside capital and hire as many people as you can and go to market as quickly as you can and try to grab market share. OK, that's fine. Phil Rose: Okay. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: It's not it's not appropriate for ninety nine point nine nine percent of most companies and very difficult to do. Right. And and I've I've been I've got friends and former business partners that believed in that methodology and they would go out. They'd raise a series A, B, C, D, E and F. Right. And I have one friend of mine who I think they were getting ready to close their series C or D round. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: And I asked him, I said, if you look at preferred rights and all the stuff that comes with preferred shareholders, I said, have you ever calculated how much money, you'd have to sell the company for to actually make this worthwhile and valuable to you versus if you literally had a job and a salary? And he's like, no, it's a silly question. I'm like, go home and do the math. Like literally go through those documents and look at all the preferred rights and liquidation preferences and all this kind of stuff and actually do the math. Phil Rose: Wow. Pete Martin: And he came back about a week later and he said, I'm so glad you asked me to do that. He said, I'm actually stepping down from the company. because he because he said the company would have to sell for such a high valuation for him to literally even get a million dollars in his pocket that he said, we'll never sell the company for that amount of money. Never. And so he's like, this is just he goes, I just never did the math. And so, you know, so kind of point being that Phil Rose: Wow. Phil Rose: Wow. Phil Rose: I do it. Bye. Pete Martin: You know, if you can retain control, bootstrap the business, not do the boot scaling thing, you're in a much better position personally. And so that's the point of the boot scaling is helping. So I basically took the lessons from the book and build a methodology around helping companies scale up without having to raise external capital. And it's all of these things kind of put together. Phil Rose: Yeah. Love that. And interesting, you showed us a phrase which I loved when we were in Austin. said, boot scaling is growing much faster than your competitors without selling your company and your soul to outside investors to do so. And I'd love that bit, selling your soul. That's the bit that resonates. Pete Martin: your soul. Pete Martin: Because when you get bankers, whether it's VCs, private equity fund, whatever, they think differently than you do. And all of these companies in my businesses where I did not raise capital, every decision you make, business comes down to basically making decisions. And so when you don't have external Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: influences, you make decisions for customers and employees. That's really your focus, maybe for yourself, but generally speaking, your customers, employees. When you have outside influences now, you're thinking about, well, geez, if I spent all this money with my, you know, my equity board, would they approve of this? Right. And it's like, so you're making different, you're making very different decisions. And look, you know, raising growth capital is fine for lot of companies and Phil Rose: Yeah, yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: Everybody has different objectives and different needs and different ones, whatever. not so every one of these companies, I would ask them, why did you not go raise external capital? Right. And the predominant answer was we didn't think we could or we didn't know how. And there were a few that said that's just not that's just not what we wanted to do. And but. Phil Rose: Yeah. Okay. Phil Rose: Hello, Andy. Pete Martin: And so that was kind of when they first got started and kind of even maybe a couple of years into the trajectory. But all of them would say now that thank God we didn't do that because we are in control of our destiny and we built a really great culture that is focused on everybody else, not focusing on outside influences like VC firms and PE firms or whatever. Phil Rose: Yeah, I love that. So Pete, coming to a close in that case, I love this great conversation. Thank you. If you could go back in time and give the young Pete some advice when you are scaling your old businesses, what's the one bit of advice you would give from what you've learned now with hindsight? Pete Martin: don't give up your corporate job because running a business is really hard. I'm just kidding. Go back to IBM, You know, I think it would be just be vulnerable, like do not be afraid to ask for help. You know, and it's so funny because both in the work that I do now and the book and everything else that Phil Rose: Stick with IBM. I love it. Pete Martin: as a business owner, particularly with your company and your employees, like you don't, it's hard to be vulnerable. It's really hard to be vulnerable. You want to be the smartest guy. You don't want to be let. You don't want to let people down. Right. And even though, you know, people say, I don't want to be the smartest person in the room. You kind of do. Right. In a way. Right. There's always an ego thing there. It's like, you know, I don't want to I don't want to fail people. I don't want to fail myself. Maybe my family, whatever. And so people then don't Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: reach out for help. You know, it's either getting a coach, reading business books, right? And, you know, a big reason why I wrote this book, you my mission is it's really hard and you don't have to do it alone. And there are ways to do this right, right? Where again, you don't have to give up control and still have a very profitable, fast growing business. And I wanted to help kind of make that path a little bit easier for all the entrepreneurs that are out there. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Hmm. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah, congratulations you doing it because I think you you could say you're going to save a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of heartache in the future because of what you've done so thank you for that. What's next Pete? You know you've written this book, Scale Up Faster, look into the future, what's next on your agenda? Pete Martin: I hope so. Pete Martin: Yeah, I've got a couple of things going. So we're building a generative AI platform that takes in all of your external data, your financials, your operations, whatever, and takes all of the lessons from me, from Vern, from Gino, all these people and all of the greatest business minds in the world and will help basically supplement and complement guys like Phil. So I may talk to you only once a month or maybe once a quarter, but I may have that burning thing that I want an answer to right now. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: And the problem with a lot of the AI tools that are out there is it doesn't have context. Right. And so if you know my business because you've been working with me for 10 years and you know my business inside and out, the advice and recommendations I get from you will be 100 times better than Pete who doesn't know anything about my company. Right. And so that's the idea behind this platform we call GrowthBrain is to have this very rich, very deep context. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: and then use all the large language models that are out there then to come back with very specific advice and to support and complement the accountability factor that folks like coaches and wealth advisors and financial advisors get. Right. Because, you know, I can give you a system and tell you to use it every day. But without Phil, they're going, Pete, did you do it? Right. You know. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: Yeah. Pete Martin: It's only I'm only halfway there. And so it's really kind of a compliment. You said it's kind of two sides of this thing. There's the advisor portal and then the client portal and it kind of bring these two things together. So that now as an advisor, I can see what the client's working on and I can nudge and cajole and push and say, did you do the stuff that it told you to do? your EBITDA margins are way down. Let's go talk about it. Right. So that's one of the big next big things for me. Phil Rose: Yeah. Phil Rose: never Phil Rose: Really, really interesting. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And obviously in Austin, we had the conversation with Jeff Woods. Did you see Jeff when we were there as well? Yeah, brilliant in terms of that connection with setting context around things. So Pete, amazing. Some real lessons for business owners, from scale up, start up people, entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs that I think a lot of people can learn from. So thank you for that. I think there's some messages we can all take from that. Pete Martin: I did, I did. Yeah. Phil Rose: If people wanted to find Pete, where would they go? What's the place they go looking for you? Pete Martin: You can find me on LinkedIn, think on pgmartin on LinkedIn and emails pmartin at ask my board or pmartin at growthbrain.com and a little bit of Twitter, not too much out there, a little bit of Instagram, not too much out there. So LinkedIn is definitely the best place to get me. Phil Rose: 100. Phil Rose: Focus, focus, focus. Love that. Pete, thank you very much. Appreciate your conversation. And I'd love to talk to you in 2026 to find out more as we go forward, especially about growth brain. I think that's a wonderful thing. So thank you very much. Pete Martin. Pete Martin: Exactly. Pete Martin: Fantastic. Thanks Phil. Appreciate it. Phil Rose: So what is it you take from this podcast? Pete Martin shared lots of ideas around the things that business owners, scale up entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs need to be focused on. The one thing I take is that word focus. So what is it you're doing at the moment to focus? Where aren't you focusing? We always ask the question as a coach: what do you need to stop doing, start doing and continue doing? But I urge you to think about where do you need to focus? What do you need to master rather than scatter gunning to try and do everything? Because that's the one thing that Pete really came up with — that actually this is the one key thing. Because you may have a chip on your shoulder about business and that's OK. But even if you haven't, you could put that focus in place. And actually that word culture as well came up. So how are you developing your culture? How are you working to make sure you employ the right people who fit your business? Are you defining your culture? If not, what is it you need to do? I always say that I can't hold you to account for what you do. But what I can do is ask you the questions here. So think about what you need to start doing, stop doing and continue doing as a result of Pete's conversation. There's so many messages — worth reading Scale Up Faster. Pete's distilled that down from 32,000 businesses down to the 95 he interviewed. And when I think about the messages he puts out there, if I could have had that 21 years ago when I set up, just think where I could have taken my business. And I want you to ask that same question. How can you scale up faster by listening to the words of Pete? Think about start, stop, continue. Think about focus. And above all, think about what you need to do differently in 2026 and beyond to help you get to where he has messaged these businesses to go — over the 100 million turnover. So think about that, enjoy the show. I love speaking with Pete and thank you very much for listening. If there are people you believe could bring life to our podcast, please send them to us. And equally, if you believe there are people who can benefit from listening to this podcast, please feel free to send this to them, because it's through contact with people like you that we can build the podcast. After six years of doing this, we're getting to attract some great authors like Pete, who really have a message to put out there. It only takes one business to scale to impact the lives of millions. So think about who you can introduce this podcast to, where they can learn from it and save them the hard work of learning from what Pete's put together. Thank you. ======================================================================== SEO & DISCOVERABILITY ======================================================================== For use in episode pages, blog posts, show notes, and publishing platforms. Keywords -------- Pete Martin Scale Up Faster Sparks by Ignium podcast Phil Rose podcast bootstrap business growth how to scale a business without investment entrepreneurship GrowthBrain blitz scaling vs boot scaling business culture and hiring INC 5000 fastest growing companies focus in business growth scaling without outside investors small business growth strategy Verne Harnish AI-Optimised Semantic Keywords ------------------------------ - how to double revenue every year without raising outside capital - what bootstrap businesses do differently to grow fast - why focus is the number one driver of business growth - sell one thing one way — the growth principle behind fast-scaling businesses - different is better than better — standing out in your market - the chip on your shoulder as a business superpower - hire for the soul train for the role — culture-first recruiting - why most business problems are people problems - how to build a culture that attracts and repels the right candidates - what happens when you let preferred shareholders into your business - AI coaching platform for business owners — GrowthBrain - be vulnerable and ask for help — advice for entrepreneurs scaling up Long-Tail Keywords (Great for Blog Posts, Episode Pages, and Social) -------------------------------------------------------------------- - how did bootstrap companies achieve 169 percent year-over-year revenue growth - what is boot scaling and how is it different from blitz scaling - do fast-growing companies need a business plan - how to hire for culture fit using analytical interview questions - why the INC 5000 fastest growing companies were first-time founders with no MBA - what is the chip in business and how does it drive entrepreneurial success - how to scale a business past 100 million without giving up equity - what is GrowthBrain AI platform for business coaches and advisors ======================================================================== END OF TRANSCRIPT DOCUMENT Sparks by Ignium Podcast | sparksbyignium.transistor.fm Host: Phil Rose | igniumconsult.com ========================================================================