#2: Brian Terrell, Founder | BTerrell Group

About this episode:
Get ready to be inspired! Join us for a chat with Brian Terrell, the cool founder of BTerrell Group. We dive into his incredible journey from farm life in Texas to becoming a tech maverick in the accounting industry. During this episode, Brian and I explore the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, the risks he took, and the thrilling world of DOS-based accounting systems (remember those?).

About Brian:

Born in Plainview, Texas, Brian grew up on a family farm where he learned to create value through hard work. From there, he received his Bachelor of Science degree from Texas A&M University before starting a career with Arthur Andersen & Co. In February 1991, Brian and his wife Nancy began practicing public accounting with Terrell & Terrell, CPAs. Within a year, the firm refocused all professional services exclusively on business software automation and eventually rebranded as BTerrell Group in 2008.

 

Brian enjoys cycling and leads group rides for the Plano Bicycle Association. He and his wife Nancy live in Dallas and enjoy spending time with their five grandchildren.

About BTerrell Group:
Brian Terrell founded BTerrell Group in 1991 and oversees management and strategy for this Dallas-based provider of Sage Intacct financial management software, which is the only accounting application ever to be designated by the AICPA as their Preferred Provider of Financial Applications. In addition, BTerrell’s experienced developers tailor the application’s business functionality to exact customer requirements, when necessary. To learn more visit www.bterrell.com. 

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Brian Terrell

Founder, BTerrell Group

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My fear of failure was really in disappointing people.

Never was it in supporting my family.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Get ready to be inspired.

Join us for a chat with Brian Terrell,

the cool founder of B. Terrell Group.

We dive into his incredible journey from

farm life in Texas to becoming a

tech maverick in the accounting industry.

During this episode, Brian and I explore the ups

and downs of entrepreneurship, the risks he took, and

the thrilling world of DOS-based accounting systems.

Remember those?

So I'm here today with Brian Terrell,

BTerrell and associates. It is B

Terrell and associates?

BTerrell Group. BTerrellGroup. Thank you.

Well, Brian, thanks for making the drive over today.

I really appreciate it.

So would you maybe kind of tell the audience

just a little bit about what your organization does?

Sure.

We are for 32 years helping small

and mid sized companies automate their back

offices using sage counting technology.

First, it was predecessors to the Sage

Intacct program that we focus on today.

And really, since 2012, all of our focus

around automation has been in the back office.

With Sage Intacct.

We have developers and other advanced degree holders

that make up our staff, including four or

five CPAs, and enjoy the alignment that Sage

Intacct has with the AI CPA.

That's nice to have for us.

And also enjoy the culture that Sage Intacct

has created over time that I know that

many others are aware of as well.

It's a great ecosystem to be a part of.

We're adjacent to it in that ecosystem as

well and concur with everything you just said.

Let's maybe go a little bit back in time.

So talk to us a little bit about

where you grew up, how you grew up.

What was it like?

I grew up in a small town

between Lubbock and Amarilla called Plainview, Texas.

It's named plain View for a good reason.

We can see all the way nearly to

Halfway, which is just about 100% farther away

than quarter way on the road highway.

Those are actual towns, so

they are farming communities.

My grandfather was a farmer, both of them,

and my father is a retired farmer.

So I was driving tractors as early as 6th or 7th grade.

And we would work pretty hard at first, a quarter an hour

and later got a raise to a dollar in a quarter hour.

Wow.

To raise the money to come to Six Flags.

Now, I don't want anybody to think that we were

poor boying it or that I had humble origins.

I mean, really, I've always had

every opportunity and every advantage.

My parents had plenty of resources

I never wanted for anything.

But they did insist that we learn to work.

And so that was sort of the

beginning of my career, so to speak.

As a child on the farm, I enjoyed it.

We didn't have to work all day.

We only worked half a day in the summer, and

we would get to be like the rest of the

group going to the country club for swimming in the

afternoons up until we got into high school.

And then we had to work all day, and I

felt sorry for myself, but I got over that.

That was my beginning.

What did you grow on the farm?

We grew cotton, corn, soybean,

sweet onions and potatoes. Wow.

And who did you sell that to?

Well, we have, for the vegetables, a vegetable

processing buyer in town and a plant.

And contracts were made directly with those guys.

If it were corn, the corn would be sold primarily

to feed lots and then eventually became the cattle that

we all consume by going to the grocery store. Cotton.

I'm not entirely sure how there were big buyers for

cotton and still are that would take possession of that

and then send it on to wherever it goes.

After that step, commodity broker comes in and

just buys it up and packages and sends

it off to somebody to manufacture. That's correct. Okay.

Interesting. Very interesting.

So my father was always in the hedging business.

In other words, he would see the price in April,

knew that he couldn't deliver the product until October.

If it was a good price, then he'd sell

it then and then offset that sale later on

by reversing that transaction and delivering the actual product.

So he was very sophisticated in terms

of pricing and business in those ways,

and that was always interesting to me.

Yeah, that whole concept is fascinating.

And fuel hedging, I think, is how Southwest Airlines survived

for a long time and got ahead of others.

And I guess you can do

that with just about any commodity. That's right. Yeah.

Very, very interesting.

Well, we're here in the Dallas area today, so

safe to say you left plainview at some point.

So talk to us about kind of leaving home, where'd you

go next, and how'd you wind up here in Dallas.

Because I intended to follow in my father's footsteps as

a farmer, I went to Texas A M, enrolled there

in the College of Agriculture, and eventually gained a Bachelor

of science degree there in agricultural economics.

However, as I approached the end of

that, I became concerned about the viability,

really, of my potential profession.

Not viability that's a little strong, but just maybe

it looked tough back in the early 80s across

the landscape, especially given the high cost of money.

And it was a very capital intensive

business, so I just got spooked.

And plus, I lacked one of the major reasons

that I think someone should get involved in agriculture,

and that is the desire to watch things grow.

I remember driving down the road with my

dad when I was in 7th grade.

He turned to me, he said, Brian,

you want to be a farmer?

I said, yeah, dad said, Why do you want to be a farmer?

I said, well, I like tractors, dad.

And I could tell the air went out of the

pickup, and I disappointed him, because the next thing he

said was, gee, I was hoping you would say that.

You like to watch things grow.

So I felt a little bit

of a disappointment there from him.

But rebounded, went to Texas A and M, got cold feet,

noticed that my sister had succeeded in her career with what

we called a big eight accounting firm back then, Arthur Anderson,

and hedged my bets a bit by taking 30 hours of

accounting courses to augment my degree plan.

And when push came to shove, it was pretty darn

easy to accept that offer from Arthur Anderson in Dallas.

And that's how I got here.

Very different than working in the fields.

Very different.

So today you leverage that accounting background.

How did you make the leap from being an

auditor or a pure accountant into implementing accounting technology?

Yeah, I took a detour through industry, which means that

I was working both not as an accountant and not

in accounting by taking an assignment with a real estate

company for a while, Trammel Crow Company.

And that was between the time that I was at Arthur

Anderson and decided to move on from there and the time

that I started the business that I'm leading today.

And during that short period of time, the

economy in the state of Texas really depreciated.

I think there were a lot of changes

in energy prices in the mid eighty s

and eighty seven and eighty eight Ish, and

essentially it really hurt the real estate business.

So my opportunities there dried up, and

I had already passed the CPA exam.

So I took an assignment as a contract CPA

and eventually was able to find a small business

in town that would hire me directly as a

contractor to do their monthly bookkeeping.

And that was the beginning of

my business in February of 1991.

Things were a lot different back

then in terms of technology guessing.

You didn't have email, and we didn't

have this thing called the cloud.

What was it like working

with accounting technology in 1991?

It was all dos.

And Dos is not an acronym

that everyone's aware of anymore.

It stands for disk Operating System.

It's a character based operating system that's

the predecessor to the graphical user interfaces

that we all enjoy today.

Those applications were probably the first applications

that every business saw in their businesses.

Either they had an operational system that helped

them produce the product or service that they

sold, or they had an accounting system.

The original accounting systems in Dos, one

of the great early leaders there was

an application called Actpac Plus, owned by

Computer Associates and essentially headquartered out of

Vancouver, Canada, was a market leader.

And it was a system that I adopted in

that first contract controller assignment, and eventually that same

year of 1991, gained an opportunity to implement that

for a manufacturing company in Central Texas and became

a VAR in order to facilitate that transaction.

So it's really interesting.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that

you kind of accidentally found yourself in this field.

You didn't get out of school and go,

I'm going to go implement accounting software.

In fact, probably wasn't even that big of a thing at

the time, certainly not in the small and midsize market.

The IBMS of the world, I'm sure we're doing that

for big enterprises, but not for small midsize companies.

It blows me away how many people I talk to

that just kind of accidentally found themselves in a business.

And I'm actually very much in that boat myself.

I worked for a company that was using a product that

I fell in love with, working with, and just kind of

one day said, I think I can build a career around

this, and sounds very similar to your story.

It is very similar.

It provided me access to a technology playground in

which I could play all of the time.

I couldn't believe I got to do these things

and experiment with new things as they were introduced,

and it was a part of my job. You got paid for it?

I got paid for it.

Had you always been interested in technology?

I mean, growing up out in the country on a farm?

What role did technology play in your life?

As a kid, I saw my dad monitor the weather with

a technology device that was always on and always connected.

I saw him monitor the commodity markets with a

technology device that was always on and always connected.

I saw him communicate the predecessors to mobile phones with

technology in the vehicles that were on the farm.

I was always interested in all of that.

All of agriculture was mechanized and automated to the

extent that it was possible at that time.

I loved all that.

That's why when we were driving down the road, he said, what

do you like about why do you want to be a farmer?

I like the tractors, dad.

I was basically saying, I like the hardware.

And with the hardware came really kind of cool electronic

things, and my dad was a leader in that.

He bought a Radio Shack TRS 80

computer back when they were $8,000.

The hard drive was as big as this table.

The printer was a dot matrix

printer that cost another $5,000.

He went back to class to learn that when

I would come home for spring break, he'd make

me enter in the job cost tickets.

That's what I spent my spring break

doing on essentially a job costing system

that he hired somebody to develop.

The first of anybody.

No one knew of that.

No one knew what he was doing.

So I saw all that, and I got really interested in it.

I just applied it in a different industry. Yeah.

So you did have the exposure.

That is really cool.

So talk to us about making the leap.

When did you go from being a w two full time employee to,

hey, I'm going to risk it all and go off of my own?

I did that earlier in the real

estate business when I left Arthur Anderson.

I was a straight commissioned

broker when I was married.

The day I got married, and to my wife's horror, and

probably to everybody who knew me, I made an arrangement with

someone who owned a mansion in North Dallas to live in

their house after I got married for no rent.

How did you pull that off?

Well, I was just calling on property owners in

the regular course of business, engaging them in conversation,

and one guy said, you know, my parents had

passed away and I'm house sitting this house.

I got to go.

I hate staying there.

It's a big old house and it doesn't mean much to me.

And it gave me an opportunity

to that's how it ended up.

But when I was calling on people, I actually went to

Highland Park one day and just started knocking on doors, asking

if they had a servant's quarter that we could live in,

because I hadn't made a deal yet and I was getting

married, so I had to figure something out.

I knocked on Bill Clement's door. Oh, my gosh.

He comes through the door.

Or actually, it was Rita came to the door.

My wife happened to be with me that day.

I don't know what arm I twisted, how badly I twisted

her arm to get me to go and do that.

And Rita said, oh, come on in.

We have a servant's quarters.

And so we're sitting in there talking to

her, reminiscing about our A and M experience.

We'd been out of school for a couple of years.

No, at that time, me five or six no, two years.

This was right out of Arthur Anderson.

So this was 1985.

Been out of school for a couple of years and

she said, there's an entire dorm named for right? Yeah.

So she started talking about that

and how all that worked out.

And then Bill comes down the stairway comes

down, he's a little less excited about us.

And his first comment was, oh, Rita, we've got

the highway department living in that building out back.

They can't have that.

So that was sort of the end of that opportunity.

But eventually I made that deal, which is a deal

just to live for free in some big mansion.

We got the whole mansion, not just the

service course, but I can tell you, no

brand new wife wants to live there.

I found that after about a day or two,

and we moved on onward and upward into a

real apartment within five or six months.

So starting B terrell, you'd already kind

of had the experience of the risk.

So you were good with it.

My fear of failure was really in disappointing people.

Never was it in supporting my family.

That's pretty amazing.

I can certainly relate to the fear of disappointing people

and I think a lot of other entrepreneurs can too.

But I think it's pretty amazing to not

have the fear of being able to provide.

I think that's probably what keeps most people

from making a big jump like that.

It really helps to have grown up in an

environment where you're seeing that every day and seeing

having that type of responsibility, just that type of

way of making your way modeled, that helps.

Not only was your dad in business for himself, there's only

so much he could do to make the crops grow.

My dad has never had a w two, never

in his life as far as I know.

So he's a second generation farmer. He is.

He's maybe a third or fourth, as far as

I know, but he's just never worked for anybody,

so he's never had that w two.

So I grew up looking at my dad

and think, I want to be like him.

And so that was not ever the question,

would I be willing to take a risk?

It was a question, am I going to be good enough?

It's the same feeling, you're driving down

the road and I've disappointed him there.

Now, if he's listening to this, he and

I know that I haven't disappointed him and

he's proud of me so past that.

But there was always a lot of

drive there that came from that.

So I'm sure that things have

not always been just perfectly smooth.

There's been some ups and some downs in the journey.

Would you mind sharing kind of

some of the scarier moments?

I've made every mistake that anyone can make.

At best, my biggest gift is the ability to nurture

a relationship with someone that I want to be like.

So that would be someone that I aspire to.

I can really serve those people and so I

can develop a relationship with them in their business

that makes me very important to them.

I get that constant sort of validation that I'm doing a

good job and they cannot ask too much of me, nor

can they find too much to assign me to do.

So that is not scalable.

It's hard to transfer that type of relationship so

that another one can be to someone else on

staff in order to pursue another one.

So that has hurt me.

It's helped me in terms of being able to

never worry about where the next opportunity was, where

the next paycheck, so to speak, was going to

come from, project was going to come from.

But it's not scalable.

And it allowed me to over

depend on some certain customers.

That grew to be way too

large percentage of my business.

So backing away from that was really costly and hard humbling

for me because I wanted to be able to grow that

and I could not figure out how to do it.

Deep relationships, they don't scale.

There's only so many of them that you can

have and maintain, and I resonate with that.

So maybe kind of on the flip side, what has been the

highlight so far of your 30 plus years of doing this?

I think really one of the biggest highlights

is being able to play day in and

day out in that technology playground.

I've enjoyed the business relationships that

I've been able to create.

I've enjoyed the innovation that I've observed

firsthand, the amazing things that I've seen.

And I've enjoyed the opportunities that I've been given because

of, for whatever reason, to do things like this, to

speak in public, to teach others how to use the

technology that I so enjoy using myself.

To walk into a client company and be

welcomed with a handshake and a hug.

In my previous position, before I went off

and started my own company, we were getting

to work in bigger and bigger organizations.

And there was something really cool about household

names getting to do work for recognizable companies.

But with that came a lot more red tape,

came a lot more bureaucracy, came politics that you

had to deal with within those organizations.

But moreover, I just didn't feel like I

was making as big of an impact.

I was a cog in a wheel and I

could easily be swapped out and somebody else put

in and nobody ever know I was there.

And working with the size of customers that you

work with in your business and we work with

in our business, you can really see a tangible

impact that we make on their organization.

You can and you can be involved in their

knowing about their family and they'll ask you about

yours and they'll be accessible to you when there's

a real challenge that needs to be handled directly

with them and they'll make you responsible to them

when there's a real challenge that requires your attention.

Yeah, that's for sure.

So Brian, what is it that you

guys can do better than anybody else?

I believe that our culture is around building

relationships and thinking long term and certainly working

in the best interest of our client companies

through not only accounting, technical knowledge.

I'm not that guy.

But the folks that work with us are really

good accountants and have experience in operational accounting.

Often many of them are CPAs or

as I mentioned, advanced business degree holders.

They're all certified and tested in

the applications that we work with.

So we're good technically, we're good relationally, and

we have development resources that allow us to

tailor the applications to the exact needs.

If there is most software publishers, they

can't afford to do much more than

80% of everything and maybe sometimes less.

That last mile of technology is

an opportunity that we can satisfy.

We've been leaders, I think, in pricing

and engagements that reinforce the relationship culture

that we've built most recently.

I mean, I've always been interested in since

I've seen my dad deal with the commodity

brokers, I've always been interested in revenue models.

And we were able to, early on, early on being

20 years ago, ditch our time and materials billing systems

in favor of more of a fixed price, which is

very counter to the industry and especially back then and

then from there, tip our toe in the water of

value pricing, which has never been really effective for me.

And now into subscription pricing, which has been

an innovation that we've adapted well to.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

There's people listening that they're probably thinking about

their Netflix and that is to a certain

degree part of what you're talking about, but

you're not just providing software on a subscription

basis, you're doing other things.

So can you maybe elaborate on that?

Sure, and I didn't invent it, and there

are others that are doing it as well.

But I feel like we're at the leading edge

here in not only proposing all of our engagements

for software on a subscription basis, which is really

not our call to make as much anymore because

say, Gentech is a subscription software revenue model.

But also in services.

There are two types of services.

There are continuing services and

there are initial services.

And the continuing services are very much in line

with some of the original forays away from time

and materials billing 15 and 20 years ago.

So it's less difficult to imagine.

It is different though, because it is

more relationship focused and more all encompassing.

In other words.

Well, I might be able to elaborate a bit more on that.

The difficult concept for me has been in

the initial implementation services as a subscription.

That one has really thrown me for a loop and

we've been doing this for about 18 months and I

guess I'm to the point now where I think that

there should come a day when implementation that is looked

at more like a client acquisition cost than it is

an activity for which a margin should be demanded.

In other words, it's like the internet service provider

who hooks me up for cable at my office.

Is he charging me for hooking up my house or

is that just a client acquisition cost for him?

It enables recurring revenue and therefore is really

a capex item that should be amortized over

the life of that customer relationship.

That's kind of where I'm falling on that interesting.

And it's been the real hardest part of

all this and customers have a hard time

sort of figuring it out as well.

Something else that you talked about a minute ago that

I think is worth drilling into a little bit more,

you talked about the last mile, you talked about how

a software company that they're going to make 80% and

there are these last mile pieces.

Can you kind of educate our listeners on what you

mean by that and then maybe what you and your

company are doing to facilitate that last mile?

Well, software publishers need to develop their

applications to the widest possible audience in

order to ensure a return on investment.

That doesn't mean that they may be

able to integrate to every application or

automate every business's core functionality.

I mean, they certainly can write checks, but maybe they

can't create an electronic funds transfer file for an Italian

bank because they can't afford to do that because there

may only be ten people in the world that want

that today and 100 people that will ever want it.

So that's not the widest possible audience.

And that's an example of something that our firm

has done, is create an application that takes a

payment from Sage Intacct and creates the electronic funds

transfer file for that Italian bank or any bank

or any financial institution in the world.

And it's simply a matter of working with that bank

to develop exactly the format that they want and riding

the rails of the automation that we've already created in

the payment processing functions of Sage intacct.

That's an example.

So on the iPhone, you've got the ability to

go and take pictures and they've got an editor.

But there's some people that need more, they

need much more fine grained and so you

can go download lightroom or some advanced editor.

Is that a reasonable analogy for the consumer space?

Yeah, that's a great analogy.

That's a great analogy.

How many people think like that?

Rumor user?

Maybe not so much. Not so many.

Not at least not enough for

iPhone or Apple to take notice.

So you may have already answered this.

I have a feeling, I don't know what you're going

to say, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

What are the parts of your job that you enjoy the most?

Yes, it's the front row seat to the

gadgets and gimmickry that's created out there and

rolled out in front of me over time.

The things that I see for the first time and

say, wow, I can't believe that can be done.

Technology, I like that.

I love serving somebody and gaining their

business and building a relationship with them.

I like solving problems and I enjoy sort of

the public facing opportunities that I get in my

business simply because I'm the guy that you're, the

guy gets the opportunity to do that.

As you've grown, and maybe we'll talk a

little bit more about that in a second.

But as you've grown, what is something that you

were able to hand off that you were so

grateful to have somebody else doing that for you?

Billing, just all the

basic accounting people, management.

I don't have a gift at that

or any training, really, at managing people.

And so we have a great manager of our business today.

It's not me.

And so he, I know, is communicating often

and early with not only our employees but

our customers to make sure that everything is

happening as it should and everybody's happy.

I can do those types of things, but there

are better folks at it than I am.

And I'll never be the guy that walks into a

big room and feels comfortable at a cocktail party.

I ask you one time if you are

comfortable in that environment, and you are, and

I appreciate that about you and others.

I just don't have that.

I can sit down, though, across from you and feel entirely

comfortable over lunch or over a discussion, and I can be

in front of a group and feel entirely comfortable because I'm

sort of feeling as if I have control.

But if I could outsource the

rest of that, then I would.

And to some extent I have.

So you've been able to not only maintain

but grow a thriving business over 30 years.

And what you just described, I think, is

such an important thing for any entrepreneur, anybody

in any kind of business to know.

And that is you've got to understand yourself and

you have to understand what your gifting is.

And even as the leader, the owner of

the organization, your gifting may not be the

same as the leader owner of another organization.

And it's important to bring the people around you

that can kind of fill in those gaps.

How have you gone about finding the right people?

There's a couple of practices that we

have and methods that we have.

One is a really close relationship with the accounting

professors over at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I know a lot of those folks

and they invite me to speak.

We host their students in events and are able

to participate in there in recruiting events and hire

a lot of folks from there initially, usually as

interns and then later as full time students.

I think I have also relied a bit on character

trait survey tools that help me look for patterns in

prospective employees that help me identify folks that I think

would be successful with us because they have a similar

response on those surveys as others.

And just on that note, we'll pull the veil back.

Brian, you turned me on to Culture

Index several years ago, and we've adopted

it within our organization as well.

And whether it's Culture Index or Myers Briggs or

Disk or something, I think that there's tremendous value

in helping people understand themselves and helping people understand

how to interact with other people.

And it's made a huge difference for us.

I think it's helped me as well.

There are those, though, who will say, I know all that.

I can tell all that just by conversation.

More power to them. I can't.

I'm with you.

I'm with you. So.

Take me through your growth.

So you started as a one man shop.

How far into the business were you when

you hired your next person and the person

after that in those contract controller engagements?

That's what we called them back then.

They were all on site, so we had to be there.

And today all that would be done

remotely because we had to be there.

That's unscalable.

So I started hiring folks to go and sit

down inside those businesses and do the work.

And I would come by periodically to

meet with the owner, to review, to

answer questions, those types of things.

In fact, I would put an ad in the

paper because I was married to a CPA mom.

I realized that that was a very

good way of describing someone who could

be successful in this part time engagement.

So I called it the Dallas Morning News because

that was the only way to advertise back then.

And I placed an ad for a CPA mom.

They promptly called me up and said that that was

illegal, it had to be a CPA mom or dad.

And so I amended that ad and

we hired a lot over the years.

So that was the beginning of it.

And it wasn't like it took you years

to get to that point that you hired.

That was pretty much right out

of the gate, it sounds like.

Yeah, that had to happen quickly because

I could not spread myself any thinner

than I was sure couldn't have grown.

And I did have trouble though with finding a

good full time person that stuck with me.

I went through several false starts there but eventually

hired a fellow that is still with us today. Really? Yes.

Isn't that great?

It's hard to find somebody that's been around over

23 years or whatever, however long that's been.

It's been a good long while.

Then we were sort of off to the

races because that's a scary thing, right?

Getting over that hump.

And once you figure out that holy cow, they

do things better than I did because they have

more time to do them and do them right

and not running from one fire to the next.

So how big are you all today?

We have 18 or 19 folks. Fantastic.

So you talked earlier about you've made every mistake

in the book and you talked about your experience.

You talked about learning very quickly

that one person doesn't scale.

Has there been any new venture that you tried out?

Has there been some big investment that you

made in the business that didn't turn out

quite like you hoped it would?

Well, I've had a lot of ideas that I thought

I would pursue and try and hope would work out.

I have worked a lot with robotic process automation,

thinking that that would be another tool in our

toolkit and we were not able to generate subscriptions

for that at the rate that we hoped we

would and have learned that the only way for

us to be successful with our small to medium

sized businesses is on a managed service basis.

So we own the robots and we come in every

day and look to see if they have completed their

assignments and then we fix them if they don't.

That's not what I originally dreamed of.

I've had other things sometimes I worry

about will the subscription revenue model become

one of those things for me?

But I enjoy pursuing them and I get

very excited about them and something is certain

to happen one way or the other.

I told somebody the other day I'll either

be really right on that or really wrong

and probably a little bit of both.

I don't know.

But time will tell. We'll see.

So if you were able to go back and

talk to yourself back in the early 90s about

starting the business, what would you tell yourself?

Is there any do this, don't do that?

Is there any words of wisdom or

encouragement that you would pass along?

I would and I wish I would

listen to myself, but I wouldn't.

I would say to myself, stay in learning

mode with a larger organization longer because I'll

learn some of those people management skills.

So you would actually tell yourself

to wait a little bit?

I would interesting and get as much of

that experience and learning that larger organizations give

and they also give a lot of leads

for future business that I'd never had.

So I would give that advice to myself.

I realize I would be hard pressed to take that advice,

but I would want myself to listen more to that advice.

I would probably look for someone as a co owner

who has the strengths that I lack and then I

would learn to be more reliant on outside professionals for

advice on things that are non core to me.

I like marketing and I like to learn it,

but I'm a flash in the pan and then

I want to move on to something else.

I shouldn't even be spending a heck of a lot

of my time thinking about that or other things.

The worst mistake I ever made it's probably

not the worst mistake I've ever made.

The biggest problem that I ever created for myself

in business was with a sales tax liability that

I allowed to get out of control because I

had the wrong professional working for me on that.

When we got the right professional because we were

not doing anything wrong, the problem went away.

But I lived under that cloud for a long period of

time and that's because I just did not do what I

should have was doing more in than I should have.

Totally outsourced.

We've outsourced several functions and some have

kind of come back in house.

But man, I tell you what, initially it

was really hard to pay somebody outside the

organization to do those things, and then eventually

the paying them became the easy part.

And then it was the I'm giving up some control.

And over time that has worked itself out too.

But I'm with you.

There are certain parts of the business and going back

to know yourself, know what you're good at, find the

people that are good at those things, that have the

bandwidth to do the things that want to do those

things so that they get done and get done well.

And that's been a huge key to our success.

Whether it's been outsourcing payroll or bookkeeping

our HR, it's been a huge thing.

And you're doing so well at it, Scott.

It's really great to watch. Thank you.

Did you have any mentors along the way?

My mentors were some business owners that I looked

up to because they were making transitions from it's

hard, I think, to find someone who's the right

person for a business at the beginning and also

the right person for the business after it becomes

much larger and more sophisticated.

Those are two different types of person.

And so there was a man that I saw who

was the CEO of a large public company for whom

we worked, who was that guy at the very beginning.

So he was the guy that went out and got

the million dollar loan that allowed him to get started

and hired the first person and implemented the first idea.

He was also the guy who sold for a billion and

a half dollars later on, or I don't know how much,

but really cashed out after 15 or 20 years.

And I just was amazed and am amazed that

he was able to be the right guy all

along the way for every phase of that growth.

And he has helped me many times when I've

run into roadblocks, and I think I could call

on him today, but I've looked up to him.

That's great.

What has been your biggest surprise in your journey?

I've been surprised by, I guess, the

really interesting things that I've seen.

I remember where I was the first time

that I saw the Internet for real.

I had dabbled in character-based access points

to the Internet back in the early nineties

and didn't understand the appeal.

But when I first saw a real Internet

browser, I was really surprised by that.

So technology has always surprised me.

I guess that's the major thing that continues to sort of

slap me across the face every once in a while.

I think one of our good buddies, yours and mine,

talks about having future glee, so I had that.

I'm looking forward to the next really big

thing that we're going to have the opportunity

to observe very closely that future glee.

We had an interesting conversation before

we started the recording today.

You've got a big life thing happening, and you

talked about the birth of your next grandchild.

Can you maybe kind of talk about that

future glee in the context of your grandson? Yeah.

I am expecting my fourth grandchild any day now,

so that's a really exciting thing to look forward

to and my fifth grandchild later on this year.

Those two children will grow up in a world that will

be advancing at a rate even far faster than what we've

seen happen over the last, in my case, 30 years.

What will they see?

And what will the imagination and creativity

in combination with the liberty and freedom

that we enjoy in this country produce?

It's really exciting to think about.

It is really exciting, I think, about the change

that I've seen in my 40 plus years.

And to think about what's going to happen

in the next 40, it's absolutely mind blowing.

Well, Brian, you've been a great friend.

You've been a mentor to me. I've learned a lot.

You've shared little tidbits and just

little bits and pieces in passing

conversations that you don't even know.

And later they just kind of sink in and click.

And so anyway, thank you for your friendship,

thank you for your partnership, and thank you

for being on with us today.

Thank you, Scott.

That was Brian Terrell, founder of BTerrell Group.

To learn more, visit bterrell.com.

That's Terrell with two L's.

If you or a founder, you know, would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at intro at founderstory.us.