Chris Koerner: Why copying beats originality in business

Steven Bartlett 0:00 A lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles.

Chris Koerner 0:03 Yeah, it's the financial Ozempic, and it's more accessible than ever. Like 90% of the ideas I talk about can be launched with $500 or less, and there's enough time in the day to do these on the nights and weekends.

Steven Bartlett 0:14 So in these three suitcases in front of me, I have three different amounts of money, and during this conversation, I'm gonna pass you a box at random. And your job is to tell me what kind of business you would start with that amount of money.

Chris Koerner 0:24 Sounds good. Let's do this. Known as the King of Side Hustles, Chris Kerner has launched over 80 businesses, earning millions in the process.

Steven Bartlett 0:31 And now, the serial entrepreneur is going to teach us how to adopt a business mindset...

Chris Koerner 0:36 And launch simple, overlooked, but profitable ventures with little money. Many of us struggle financially, and they see a side hustle as a solution to that. Like for me, growing up kinda poor, business allowed me to take hold of my life and make it what I wanted it to be. And it started when I was nine years old and wanting a red Schwinn bicycle. My friends had a bicycle, my neighbors had a bicycle, and my parents didn't have money for it. But I lived across the street from a golf course and these golf balls would fly in my yard, and I would go to my neighbor's yard and go across the street, dig through the ditches, and I'd pull out all these golf balls, and I started selling them. That was my first business. That taught me that business is approachable, and we all have ideas, but we usually don't do anything about it.

Steven Bartlett 1:10 Why?

Chris Koerner 1:10 I think number one, they're afraid of what people think. Number two is they don't have the tools, or they're not connecting the tools with the ideas. If we can get over those, the world is our oyster at that point.

Steven Bartlett 1:20 I have $1,000. What side hustle do you start?

Chris Koerner 1:22 The first thing that comes to mind is my favorite business idea of all right now. This is a zero employee business, it's highly profitable, and that would be...

Steven Bartlett 1:30 So how important is it for you to love the thing to be successful at it?

Chris Koerner 1:33 Ignore passion, follow the profit until you can afford to follow your passion.

Steven Bartlett 1:37 Do they need a business partner?

Chris Koerner 1:38 No. If you look at the stats on business failure rates with companies that have co-founders, it's significantly higher than companies that have solo founders.

Steven Bartlett 1:46 And how does someone validate a business idea?

Chris Koerner 1:48 If I had to pick one tool, it's one that one in four humans use every day. And it's... That's everything you need right there.

Steven Bartlett 1:58 I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double-check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show and the trajectory it's on. So, please do double-check if you've subscribed and, uh, thank you so much. Because in a strange way, you are, you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us, and I appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank you. Chris, who are you and

Steven Bartlett 2:36 what is the mission that you're on?

Chris Koerner 2:39 I am a father, I am a husband, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. And I love talking about business and starting businesses and inspiring other people to do the same.

Steven Bartlett 2:51 Why?

Chris Koerner 2:53 Business has given me everything. Um, growing up kinda poor, uh, it was my outlet. It was my way of just kind of taking hold of my life and making it what I wanted it to be, and I have immense gratitude for that. Um, and I love, I just love talking about it. I, it's the only thing I know. You, I can't talk to you about history or nutrition or anything, but when it comes to business, I just love it and I want other people to love it as well.

Steven Bartlett 3:18 How have you made your name in the world of business? Because I've heard your name a lot recently. People call you the King of Side Hustles. Where does this come from?

Chris Koerner 3:27 I think I just publish my life on the internet now. Um, I, I'm always testing and launching and starting businesses, but only over the last couple years have I started publishing that. And I didn't try to be like the King of Side Hustles. That's not something that I've ever like intentionally tried to brand myself as. But I think people see what I do as a side hustle, and they call it that, but I think that anything is scalable. Any side hustle could, could be a multimillion dollar business. Um, I mean, we, we live on a planet with eight billion people and we're all connected and anything can be scaled.

Steven Bartlett 4:01 And you make a lot of content now, so you've probably had a bit of a feedback loop in terms of understanding what it is that you say and do and create that's resonant with people, and also why it's resonant. Like, uh, th- what is the crux of what people like my audiences are, are looking for?

Chris Koerner 4:18 As humans, we all want a silver bullet. We want a solution to our problems, and many of us struggle financially, um, and they see a side hustle as, as an outlet to that or as a solution to that. I think everyone has ideas. Um, most people are very hesitant to execute on those ideas, and so when they see someone like me freely executing on all the ideas, it, hopefully, it opens their mind and helps them look at their ideas in a different way or a more approachable way and maybe gives them confidence to do the same.

Steven Bartlett 4:52 In the boxes in front of me here, I have three different amounts of money, $500, I think I have $1,000, and $5,000. And during this conversation, I'm gonna pass you a box at random. And your job is to tell me what kind of business you would start with that amount of money, because I know my audience, you know, they're, many of them are interested in starting their own business one day. And I use specifically sort of low amounts of money just to make it as accessible to them as possible. So we will do that at some point. I'll pass you the boxes. You give me three business ideas. You'll start with $500, $1,000, and $5,000. Um, but I wanna get a view on, on you and the businesses that you've started and the sort of, the variety of success you've had. So can you give me an overview?

Chris Koerner 5:33 Yeah. So I was nine years old, living in Utah, and I lived across the street from a golf course. And these golf balls would fly in my yard, and I don't know what gave me the idea, but I started selling them. Um, I just wanted money for a bike. I wanted this Schwinn bicycle and it was red and my friends had a bicycle, my neighbors had a bicycle, and my parents didn't have money for it. And so for whatever reason, I connected that white golf ball in my grass with money. And I would go to my neighbors' yards, I'd go across the street, I'd dig through the ditches, and I'd pull out all these golf balls. I'd wash 'em, and then I put up this huge piece of plywood in front of my house that said "Golf Balls 3 for $1." And that was my first business.And at the time, it was just normal, it was natural. Uh, I didn't know any different. And now, I have a nine-year-old, and I was nine when I did that. And we live on a busy road today, I lived on a busy road then, and the thought of him, like, negotiating, haggling with grown-ups wearing polo shirts on our doorstep is unfathomable. But that's what I was doing, and that planted the seed, that kind of taught me that business is approachable. Um, preferably it's approachable. Approachable and scalable can be the same thing, they don't have to be at odds with one another. So.

Steven Bartlett 6:44 And how many businesses have you started since then?

Chris Koerner 6:46 I lose count. I have a spreadsheet, um, but it's at least 80.

Steven Bartlett 6:51 And what's the, wha- what have the outcomes been? How much money have you made? What kind of, m- how has that changed your life? What freedom has that given you?

Chris Koerner 6:57 Yeah. So cumulatively, uh, all of the businesses have generated low hundreds of millions of revenue, um, low tens of millions of profit. Um, but on a real number basis, the majority of them have been abandoned, or fizzled out, or failed, or there was too much opportunity cost so I pivoted to something else. Um, it's just a numbers game.

Steven Bartlett 7:22 And h- how has that changed your life? What does your lifestyle look like?

Chris Koerner 7:26 My life is awesome. Um, we built our dream house in our 20s. Uh, we had all four of our kids in our 20s. We travel a lot. Uh, we're... I've been married for 17 years. We're a very close family. We take a lot of trips. Um, we live in a good school district but like, my kids go to public school, and, um, we have everything we need and more, and we're very grateful for that.

Steven Bartlett 7:47 What is the over, sort of underpinning mentality that's required for someone to be successful, uh, starting businesses in the way that you started them, starting these side hustles at volume, and h- seeing success? Is there like a foundational mentality or personality or character trait required? Before we get into the tactics.

Chris Koerner 8:07 Yeah. The, hmm. I should say that the, the pain of your problem needs to be greater than how much you care about what people think about you. It needs to get to that point. Because by far, that is the biggest roadblock to success, is people caring too much about what people think about them. And so they don't want to do the thing, or they don't want to talk about doing the thing because some random person from high school follows them on Facebook and might comment something, right? Which is really silly, but I, I've been there. I get it, right? If we can get over that, if we can just flip the switch in our brain that says, "People are thinking about me. People are caring about me." And just switch that to off, we'll win, right? Because the world is our oyster at that point.

Steven Bartlett 8:52 And in terms of where we sit at this moment of time, with technology, with AI, with in- fast internet, with mobile phones, do you think this is the best time for people to start something? To s- to start a side hustle, and to try?

Chris Koerner 9:05 Every day that goes by, the timing gets better for people, right? Things are getting more competitive, but there are more tools than ever. Um, 10 years ago, if I wanted to start a business, and this is why the internet's in full swing, social media's in full swing, I probably had to spend a lot of money, or move to San Francisco, or raise venture capital. That's like, I, I would love for you to try to convince me. Try to give me an idea where you have to raise money, or where you have to go all in, or where you, you have to quit your job. It doesn't exist. With all these AI tools, software tools, you can make a website with one prompt, you can make an app with one prompt. You could post to Facebook Marketplace and have hundreds of inquiries within an hour. You could post Facebook ads, you could go to Craigslist. Like, you could put a sign up in front of your house. You could go launch a survey to people. Like, there are so many tools for testing and validating and experimenting with these concepts that it is more accessible than ever.

Steven Bartlett 10:01 Why don't people?

Chris Koerner 10:04 (sighs) I think number one is they're afraid of what people think. Number two is they don't have the tools. Or at least, they're not connecting the tools with the ideas, right? They'll use Facebook Marketplace to sell a sectional, but then they won't think to use it when validating their woodworking idea, right? They're just not connecting the dots. There's too many tools, in a sense, so we don't know how to tie them all together. Um, they also probably don't know, like, how much the law of abundance is a real thing, right? People think business is a zero-sum game.

Steven Bartlett 10:39 What does that mean?

Chris Koerner 10:40 Uh, well, they think that things are oversaturated. They'll have an idea for a product or a service, and then they'll get really excited, and then they'll go Google it, and then they'll see it exists, and then they'll move on. And when I do that and I see it exists, I'm like, "Yes! This is it! Someone, someone went to the front lines of the battlefield and validated this for me." And then I'll go to the web archive, I'll go to WHOIS, and I'll go look at what their website has looked like over the last decade, see where they started. Maybe their product was $99. Now, it's like, $49 every two months. Interesting. Okay. I'll look at the, the copy of their headline. I'll look at, like, how many tabs they have on their website. Do they post their Instagram feed on... I'll look at all these things and see how it's evolved over time and think, "Awesome. I, I'm gonna start where he's at today. Like, this guy already proved it out for me. He took all the risk. This is amazing. This exists. I don't need to, like, do it better, I don't need to do it differently. I just need to do the same thing. Um, and the market is big enough, the world is big enough to where I can win as well."

Steven Bartlett 11:42 You said, um, web archive. Wh- what role does web archive play? What is that, for anyone that isn't familiar, and how do you use that?

Chris Koerner 11:48 Yeah. It's just a tool that shows snapshots, uh, over time of what a website looks like, right? So it's a great way of kind of reverse engineering what businesses have done to be successful. And then there's another tool called SimilarWeb where you can see what their traffic has been over time, and you can kind of overlay the two. And you can say, "Oh, interesting. When they, when they redesigned their website to be more mobile-friendly, their traffic went from 3,000 a month to 4,500 a month. Interesting. I'm just gonna make it mobile-friendly from day one." Right? So we're at a great advantage when we start.... where our competitors or our future competitors already are, instead of starting where we think we need to be. Starting, like, trying to be different or innovative or unique. In my experience, that's more of, like, a signal of our pride or our ego. We feel kind of, like, weird or odd, or e- even dirty or unethical if we're just, like, copying and pasting a business. Even if we had the original idea ourselves, when really there's nothing to be ashamed of. Like, we don't want to steal their intellectual property or their logo or anything. But copy what's already working.

Steven Bartlett 12:53 People think, you know, people don't think that that's a thing, because they think, "If I copy a business that's already working, then I'm not gonna get any customers. Because th- this existing business has all the customers."

Chris Koerner 13:03 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 13:04 But it's interesting. I had someone on the show where they talked about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world basically just copy 95% of the blueprint. I think it was Walmart, I think he was talking about Walmart, but...

Chris Koerner 13:13 Yeah, they copied other, like, regional grocery chains.

Steven Bartlett 13:15 Mm-hmm. Copying is a strategy.

Chris Koerner 13:18 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 13:20 Have you done that?

Chris Koerner 13:21 Oh, absolutely.

Steven Bartlett 13:22 Give me an example.

Chris Koerner 13:24 Okay. Well, I, I had a phone repair business in, when I was in college, 2010. And I got a call one day from someone that said, "Hey Chris, I want to buy all of your broken iPhone screens. Do you have any broken iPhone screen?" "Sure." "We don't throw 'em away 'cause we think it's bad for the environment. We just have a box of them." "How much will you pay me?" "Three bucks a piece." "Why? What, why will you pay me $3? It's just broken glass." And they said, "Well, there's actually a way of remanufacturing these. We can send them to China, we can remove the broken glass, put new glass on them, and then we can resell them as a remanufactured unit." And that was just like a light bulb, right? So most people, I think, at this point would say, "Yeah," like, "Yeah, where do I ship these?" You know? But I was like, "Oh, that, I need to be in that business. I wanna copy that guy who called me," right? Now, I don't know what his website was. I don't know, I don't kn- know what the name of his business was. There was no web archive at the time to look at. I just wanted to copy the business model, 'cause I thought, "This is gonna be a thing. I'm in the industry, I know the industry, I'm gonna do this as well." So we did two million the first year, then five, and then nine, and then we exited a few years after that.

Steven Bartlett 14:33 It's interesting, but you know, you often don't think that... Everyone's in search of a new idea.

Chris Koerner 14:38 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 14:40 And it's tough to find new ideas.

Chris Koerner 14:41 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:42 Like, I think, was it Einstein that said, "There's no such thing as a new idea"?

Chris Koerner 14:45 S- sounds right.

Steven Bartlett 14:46 But you have an orientation just to look at existing models and to replicate them. Do you put a spin on it at all?

Chris Koerner 14:53 I'll develop my own spins over time, right? Because we're all a product o- of our environment. And so in, in the case of this business, I started copying exactly, right? Um, I went and found people in China, I just went to Alibaba. I m- messaged a ton of people that sold iPhone screens and I said, "Do you recycle? Do you recycle? Do you recycle?" And like 5 or 10% of them said yes. So then I shipped them samples, and then they shipped me some back. And, and then over time, I started, like, taking some marketing princles- principles from previous businesses, like Facebook Ads, cold calling, and I started applying them just 'cause I didn't know how this other competitor was finding success. I knew he was cold calling and that was working. That's all I knew. Remember, I didn't even know the name of his business. And so over time, you start using your previous experiences to apply these tweaks to the business and to make it your own. But if you do that right at the outset, right? Like, if I got a call and you said, "I want to buy your broken iPhone screen," then I said, "Okay, I'm gonna do that. But I don't wanna just sell iPhone screens. That's lame. I'm gonna do Samsung." Right? Pretty good chance there's not even a market for that, or there's not even a method for that. And because of my, my ego, my pride, my unwillingness to just copy what's already working, I wouldn't, that, I wouldn't have that successful business in my back pocket, right?

Steven Bartlett 16:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 16:08 So if you do twists in the beginning, it's kind of like your, um... I'm kind of thinking of an analogy, like if you're on a long road trip and you start taking detours early on, or if a flight is on a flight path and he starts, like, getting off track just a little bit at the beginning, he's gonna end of- he's gonna end up hundreds of miles away from his destination. But if he starts making tweaks along the way, then he'll be much closer to where he would've been anyway.

Steven Bartlett 16:32 Mm-hmm. And you might reach a better destination with some of those types of tweaks.

Chris Koerner 16:37 Exactly. Because you're blending it with your, your experience-

Steven Bartlett 16:40 Yeah.

Chris Koerner 16:40 ... what you know better than the person that you're copying.

Steven Bartlett 16:42 And so it's important to, to copy the model exactly at the beginning, because you're also going to learn what it is about that existing model that works-

Chris Koerner 16:50 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 16:51 ... and therefore, what you can iterate on, change, expand. If you, if you didn't, then you might miss something.

Chris Koerner 16:56 Exactly. 'Cause so often I made the mistake of looking at another business and saying, "Oh man, why are they doing that? Why are they charging like that? What, like, they're charging all these different things. That's so confusing." I made this mistake, I had a, an e-commerce fulfillment business where brands would send us all their products. We had this big warehouse and we would ship all, all of their stuff out, right? And I was like, "Why do they have storage fees, pick and pack and ship fees?" They, they charge fees for tracking their expiration dates. They charge extra fees if there's five items in a box versus four. Like, there's so much friction there, that's so messy. Like, we're gonna make this simple. We're gonna just one flat fee, no storage fee, and that's gonna be our differentiator, right? And then over time, over the course of months and years, we learned, oh, storage fees, it's because sometimes your customers go out of business and then you're left holding the bill and, like, your storage costs are actually very high, but there's nothing to pass on. Oh, pick, pack and ship fees, because... You learn all these things-

Steven Bartlett 17:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 17:55 ... and you're like, "Okay, I wasn't, like, this genius that had an MBA. I was just, like, trying to put my own spin on it 'cause I thought I was smarter than that business owner." Turns out someone that's been doing this for 15 years versus 15 days knows a lot more about the industry than me, and I'm much better off just copying his pricing, copying the layout of his website, copying the size of the warehouse he has, copying the same niche that he's going after, 'cause that's clearly working for him. So I don't make that mistake anymore. I don't, I don't assume that other competitors are idiots.... right?

Steven Bartlett 18:25 Yeah.

Chris Koerner 18:26 "I've been proven wrong too many times." I assume that they're doing that because they've learned the hard way.

Steven Bartlett 18:32 Yeah.

Chris Koerner 18:33 And if I copy them, then I won't have to learn the hard way.

Steven Bartlett 18:35 I had, um, several of our executives over at my house over the last couple of days, and we were looking at different models of... So basically, we're looking at other companies that do similar things to us that have been around for a long time. And the question that I ended up asking at one moment when I was... I had the exact same epiphany, I was like, "Why do they do it that way? Isn't that shitty?"

Chris Koerner 18:52 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 18:53 And there was a second where I think we were tempted to try and reinvent the wheel. But the question I ask myself now, with the wisdom of m- like, many years of business, is like, "Why did it end up that way?"

Chris Koerner 19:04 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 19:05 Which is, why did our competitor who's been doing this for 50 years end up-

Chris Koerner 19:09 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:09 ... there? Because they, a- as you said, there's clearly s- a set of things that have happened that have made them conclude, whether it's at scale or some other factor that's made them conclude, that this is the best way of doing it. And just like you, I've been wrong so many times where I've thought, "Oh, they're just idiots. That's why they, they-"

Chris Koerner 19:26 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:26 "... can't see this obvious thing." But actually, their model is stress-tested in the market much more than mine is.

Chris Koerner 19:31 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:31 So maybe I should, I should put my ego aside and at least start how they start, as you-

Chris Koerner 19:36 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 19:36 ... said, which I think is really important advice.

Chris Koerner 19:38 Yeah. Well, there are times when a company just keeps doing something because it works.

Steven Bartlett 19:42 Yeah.

Chris Koerner 19:42 And so they don't take the time to test something that works better, right?

Steven Bartlett 19:46 Mm. Yeah.

Chris Koerner 19:46 But it's almost impossible to guess what that is, right? Like if a, if a clothing brand is growing their business entirely through Facebook Ads, um, and they've just never tried Google Ads, maybe Google Ads could convert twice as better, twice b- twice better, right? But I don't wanna guess that. I just wanna start with Facebook Ads, and then I'll still take 5% of my budget and start testing other concepts. But nine times out of ten, I ended up just coming right back to Facebook Ads.

Steven Bartlett 20:11 It got me thinking about how in business, basically everything, again, speaking broadly here, can be put into one of two categories, either, like, old problems-

Chris Koerner 20:19 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 20:19 ... where thousands of people have come before you, and the same solutions and same thinking is still relevant, and then new problems. You know, things like AI have created a set of new problems-

Chris Koerner 20:30 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 20:30 ... and new opportunities as well. And what I tend to find is that, like, 95% of the things in business are, like, old problems.

Chris Koerner 20:36 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 20:36 Like hiring, cash flow, how finance is done, legal, all those kinds of things. And the, and when, when you're dealing with a new, an old problem, expertise is usually the answer, which is like, find someone who knows-

Chris Koerner 20:47 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 20:47 ... hire someone or mentor or whatever. And then you have these new problems where there is no blueprint in our industry. It's, it's a new challenge.

Chris Koerner 20:54 New challenge.

Steven Bartlett 20:54 So experimentation is the answer. Does that, like, broadly hold in your, in your mind?

Chris Koerner 20:59 Oh, 100%. Yeah. I, I like to say test everything except drugs.

Steven Bartlett 21:03 (laughs)

Chris Koerner 21:03 Like, we're always testing. Um, it's the basis to everything we do.

Steven Bartlett 21:08 But do you test when it's an old problem?

Chris Koerner 21:11 Can you give me an example?

Steven Bartlett 21:12 So, like, things like cash flow management, um-

Chris Koerner 21:16 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 21:17 ... hiring principles around, like, probation and, uh, notice periods, um, a lot of legal structuring in deals.

Chris Koerner 21:27 Things with, like, a well-established precedent.

Steven Bartlett 21:28 Well-established precedents where, like, nothing has fundamentally changed in the world that makes that invalid.

Chris Koerner 21:35 Yeah. I think if it's an old problem, I look to an example of someone within the last decade that solved it in an interesting way. And I'm more likely to copy that. Like, in hiring, traditionally companies will, they'll spend hours and weeks or days hiring, going from round to round to round, person, person, person. And if you look at Y Combinator, arguably the greatest, you know, startup incubator in the world, they have seven-minute interviews. Um, and they said they would make it five minutes, but it just felt rude, right? And in their interviews, they really know in the first three minutes if it's a fit or not. And then the interview's done, like, they're either in or they're not. I, I approach hiring the same way. Um, I would much rather, um, take a, like, a, a law of large numbers approach to it and give five people 30 days to show what their skills are, as opposed to spending 30 days going all in on one person, because in my experience, that one person that I spent 30 days on is not any more likely to succeed than those, those other five people that I might be testing.

Steven Bartlett 22:36 Okay. And your example of that storage company you started-

Chris Koerner 22:40 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 22:41 ... it sounds like you hit an old problem.

Chris Koerner 22:43 Yes, very much so.

Steven Bartlett 22:44 And you tried to in- innovate and experiment, but this was an old problem where the laws of human beings and how they behave and businesses-

Chris Koerner 22:50 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 22:50 ... going bust was still pertinent.

Chris Koerner 22:51 Yeah. And at the end of our, our two-year experiment, like, we looked just like all of our competitors, right? So if we would have started there, we could have saved two

Chris Koerner 23:00 years.

Steven Bartlett 23:00 And this is what I find is founders waste years trying to experiment where old problems are still, um, strong and still hold.

Chris Koerner 23:10 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 23:10 And this is what I, the mistake, several of the mistakes I made in my company was th- I should have spent all of my time experimenting on the new problems-

Chris Koerner 23:15 Uh-huh.

Steven Bartlett 23:16 ... and should have hired people to tell me, um, how to navigate the old problems.

Chris Koerner 23:21 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 23:22 What, what was your, um... I think one of the videos that made you go pretty viral was your story of Buc-ee's.

Chris Koerner 23:29 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 23:29 We don't know what Buc-ee's is around the world. I think it's a US brand.

Chris Koerner 23:31 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 23:32 But this shows, I think, how you've always had an orientation to think slightly differently or in- innovatively.

Chris Koerner 23:37 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 23:38 What happened with Buc-ee's?

Chris Koerner 23:39 So this was during, uh, the time when I was running that business shipping products for other companies, right? Buc-ee's is a gas station brand, uh, with only 50 locations. And from those 50 locations, they do billions of dollars, uh, of revenue. I say gas station, they're between 40,000 and 80,000 square feet.

Steven Bartlett 23:56 Wow.

Chris Koerner 23:56 They're massive. They have an amazing brand, an amazing logo, and they, they just have a lot of trust from their customers. But these gas stations are like, they're on the way out to these road trip destinations, they're out in the middle of nowhere. And so if you're, if you live in Dallas and you're driving down to the beach, you're gonna stop by Buc-ee's on the way there and on the way back, and you're probably gonna spend hundreds of dollars, right? You're gonna fill up the tank, then you're gonna buy shirts and snacks and all that stuff. So, at the time we were running this e-commerce fulfillment business, we went to Buc-ee's, I'd brought my cousin, my business partner, um, just to kinda...Show 'em the experience. And we were just having a conversation. I remember exactly where I was. I was, like, under this underpass, this huge underpr- pass in DFW. We were driving home, and I said, "Man, these guys must kill it online. They must sell so much stuff." Um...

Steven Bartlett 24:42 Why?

Chris Koerner 24:42 Because I knew that Disney sells, like, billions of dollars of T-shirts on their website. Right? I read a stat recently. So I kind of just took that data point, connected it to Buc-ee's and said, "All right, Buc-ee's is a fraction of the size of Disney, but they have the same amount of brand loyalty." People love their shirts. You'll see their shirts all over the world, even though they only have 50 locations, like, in the Southeast, right? And so we went to their website, and there was no shop button. There was no place to buy their stuff. And I was just like... Like, all the light bulbs were going off at once, right? It was like, "Oh my gosh, okay. We need to reach out to them. Like, we need to bring them online." I just had all these ideas. And my cousin is, is much more balanced than I am. He's like the, the operator, and I'm like the ADHD crazy guy, right? So his role is to, like, calm me down, and he's very good at that. But I just couldn't be calmed down from this. I'm like, "No, no, no, we gotta do something here. W- we're gonna buy one of everything. We're gonna hire a photographer to take pictures of it. We're gonna launch our own Buc-ee's online store, and we're going to try to go viral. Like, it's viral or bust, right? If we don't go viral, then I'll just be eating these unhealthy snacks for the next three years of my life." And so we did. We bought one of everything. Uh, it cost thousands of dollars. I brought all four of my kids, and, uh, we brought it back to our warehouse. We took pictures of it. We launched a website. Um, and I emailed all the reporters I could find, uh, and one of 'em just loved the idea. He ran with it. And so he reached out to Buc-ee's for comment, uh, 'cause they wouldn't respond to my cold emails. I wanted to launch this, like, with them, in tandem, but who am I? They didn't care about me, and I don't blame 'em. And so he wrote this big article about me. Millions of people read it. All these other news outlets, uh, wrote about it. And we did hundreds of thousands of, of dollars our first 30 days organically from that.

Steven Bartlett 26:30 How did Buc-ee's feel about that?

Chris Koerner 26:32 They wanted us to make some key changes to the website. They wanted us to, like, basically put disclaimers everywhere that said, "We are not Buc-ee's. We're not affiliated with Buc-ee's." They wanted us to change the name. It had the word beaver in the name. That's their mascot. They just... They didn't want it to be confusing at all. So we made all those changes, and then we got, like, the unofficial thumbs up from them. They said, "We're not gonna sign anything, but, like, you have our blessing. Um, have fun."

Steven Bartlett 26:59 And did that website make you a lot of money?

Chris Koerner 27:01 Yeah, it still is. It's been five years. We still own it, 100% of it, and it's going great.

Steven Bartlett 27:05 And it's made you millions?

Chris Koerner 27:06 Uh-huh.

Steven Bartlett 27:09 What can someone listening take from that in terms of applying that to their own life, finding opportunities like that out in the world? Or is that just a one-and-done? Is there only one opportunity like that?

Chris Koerner 27:20 Okay, so specific... I get asked that question a lot. How could someone do that with another brand? (sighs) I don't know. If, if there was another brand out there like that, I would be doing it, right? Trader Joe's is similar, but they're very litigious. Um, I think that was kind of lightning in a bottle for that particular experiment, as in launching an online brand for an in-person business. Okay? But people should not be disheartened hearing that because on a m- macro level, like, people should take their curious ideas very seriously. They need to shorten the amount of time spent between having the idea and doing something about that idea.

Steven Bartlett 27:59 Why?

Chris Koerner 28:00 Be- because that will strengthen their bias for action muscle, right? We all have ideas, some of 'em good, some of 'em bad, on a regular basis. We usually don't do anything about it. It's just a passing thought, right? Whether it's a business idea or a c- hard conversation that you need to have with something. Any idea, right? But the, the, the more we shrink the amount of time between doing something about that idea and having the idea, that idea, the more often we'll do that. And it, it becomes this self-perpetuating snowball that just compounds. And then before we know it, we'll get more ideas. We'll do more about those ideas. We'll be testing things. We'll be learning tools. We'll be experimenting, and we'll have a whole portfolio of businesses.

Steven Bartlett 28:42 Is there something in your mentality or perspective, though, where you walk into a Buc-ee's and you even think about how you could do something? Whereas most people walk into a Buc-ee's and buy their stuff and leave. Like, is there something foundational in the way that you're looking at the world?

Chris Koerner 28:53 Yeah, but I don't think I'm any different. I think, um... I think a lot of people have ideas like that. Like, you walk into a Buc-ee's, and you see something about something that could be improved. And people have these passing thoughts, and they move on. I think that you become an expert at doing something about those ideas when you do something about those ideas. You just... You get better a- at what you do, at what you test.

Steven Bartlett 29:18 'Cause you've built up some kind of muscle, which means that you don't really care about, it seems, failure as much as the average person.

Chris Koerner 29:25 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 29:25 And also, in that particular case, the average person might think, "Well, I've got no experience in doing that."

Chris Koerner 29:30 Mm-hmm. No, no one has any experience in anything until they do it, right? Like, every m- every expert started out as a beginner, right? Sometimes, though, people try this, and they learn, "Eh." It doesn't give them energy. It's not for them. That's okay. Now when they have ideas, they can know, "All right, box checked. That's not really for me, that entrepreneurship thing. Someone else needs to do that." And great, good... M- all the power to them. I just want people to answer that question for themselves. I hate seeing regret in people's faces. Like, I have friends that want to start a business. They've always talked about it, and I know they would be good at it. And I know it just eats them up, and they have really, really good ideas, objectively. And I, I just hate seeing them have that question for the rest of their lives. I just want them to, to taste entrepreneurship.

Steven Bartlett 30:24 Is it for everybody, though?

Chris Koerner 30:25 No.

Steven Bartlett 30:25 You know, you can think, think of all your friends.

Chris Koerner 30:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 30:27 You can probably put them in groups of this person should, this person shouldn't.

Chris Koerner 30:30 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 30:31 And what defines who goes in which group?

Chris Koerner 30:35 To me, it's how far they go in doing something about that idea because I will have friends that will text me ideas or talk to me about ideas, and then I never hear from them again about that thing. I don't worry about them, right? I- I feel like there's a selection bias at play. Like, if they really wanted to do something about it, they would get a little further down the line. They'd follow up with me. They'd say, "I did this thing." 'Cause I'll always give them tips and feedback. "You should do this, you should try this." And they'll follow up and then, you know, at some point along the line, it'll die, right? But if they don't get any further than just telling me their idea, then I don't, I don't lose sleep over them.

Steven Bartlett 31:16 So it's kind of surviv- it's kind of sort of self-selecting itself anyway.

Chris Koerner 31:19 It is.

Steven Bartlett 31:20 Entrepreneurship.

Chris Koerner 31:21 Yeah, absolutely. But then I have other friends that are, like, they'll follow up, they'll follow up, they'll follow up, and then, and then it dies.

Steven Bartlett 31:26 Yeah.

Chris Koerner 31:26 Which is okay. A lot of my ideas die too. And to me, that's a signal that it was supposed to die, right? I'll just move on to the next thing. Um, so it's those people that, maybe I'm just biased and they look more like me, you know?

Steven Bartlett 31:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 31:38 Um, maybe that's not an accurate signal or not, but if they look more like me, then that's a signal that they, they should get further down the line and actually launch something that gets to revenue. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 31:48 In your head, think of one person you know that should never start a business.

Chris Koerner 31:51 Okay.

Steven Bartlett 31:53 Why did you think of that person? Without telling me who they are.

Chris Koerner 31:57 Because they make a lot of money at their job, and they like their job well enough, they're not miserable, um, and they're in their late 40s, and they probably feel like it would be too big of a risk to start something.

Steven Bartlett 32:13 And do you objectively agree that it would be too big of a risk for them?

Chris Koerner 32:16 I do.

Steven Bartlett 32:17 You, so you're looking at that on a risk-reward basis, thinking the reward doesn't out- outweigh the risk here for you?

Chris Koerner 32:22 Yeah. Yeah, 'cause people come to me, like, hoping that I'll encourage them to quit their job, right? Like, begging me to do that without actually begging me, and I don't wanna do that. Like, I- I've never had to quit a job. Like, I s- I started with entrepreneurship, right? So the thought of being 48 with four kids and quitting my $400,000 a year job to test something, it just sounds crazy to me.

Steven Bartlett 32:46 On the other hand, think of one person you know that isn't an entrepreneur, but definitely should be.

Chris Koerner 32:50 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 32:51 That you always think, "Why don't they do it?"

Chris Koerner 32:52 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 32:53 Why did you think of that person?

Chris Koerner 32:55 Because it's a person that comes to me the most often with ideas, and they're really, really good ideas. He's an engineer, um, and so he sees the world in that way. Engineers make great entrepreneurs. Um, and he has a great work ethic. Uh, and he's like mid-career, but not, not so far along. And I know objectively that he's not... He's actually quite miserable in his job, and I hate that for him because I see the talent that's there, and I- I want him... Like, I think he would excel and I want to see that dream come true for him.

Steven Bartlett 33:31 Why isn't he doing it?

Chris Koerner 33:33 I think it, it's insecurity.

Steven Bartlett 33:36 Fear?

Chris Koerner 33:36 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 33:38 Fear of?

Chris Koerner 33:42 Probably fear of just letting go of something certain that's provided his family a nice lifestyle and not getting that back again ever. Um, I think that insecurities are at the root of our best and our worst selves, and it can drive us to be our best or our worst selves, um, depending on how self-aware we are about those insecurities.

Steven Bartlett 34:06 Is there a little bit of a flaw in his thinking in your perspective? Like, why is it you s- you still, even though what he's saying there about, you know, w- what you think he believes there about security for his family is true, you still think he should?

Chris Koerner 34:20 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 34:21 Which suggests that there's some kind of flaw you see in h- the way he's thinking about it.

Chris Koerner 34:24 Yeah. Because he doesn't have to quit his job. Um, there's enough time in the day to do this on the nights and weekends, to, to do enough of it to really prove itself out. Oftentimes, like, whatever our side hustle is, uh, it has a very low ceiling if we're only working on it, um, after hours, right? Let's say we're spending 20 hours a week on a side hustle and it makes us $50,000 a year, but our job pays us $200,000 a year and we spend 40 hours a week on that. One thing that I've noticed, which is kind of contradictory to how I feel about quitting something, um, is when we go from 20 hours a week on our, the $50,000 a year side hustle to 40 hours a week and we quit the full time thing, that $50,000 a year goes to $500,000, right? We double the amount of hours, but we ten times the amount of money that comes from it because of the fact that we burn the boats, that it has to work. I just, I don't want people to burn the boats too soon, right? Like, there has to be a pathway. Like, let's say our Facebook ads are converting really well. We've tested scaling it and they're profitable and we know what that would look like, but if we scale it, then we're gonna have more customer service complaints. We're gonna have to do more architecture of the website. But we, like, we see a path to scaling and it's already profitable and we know that, like, probably my boss will take me back. Like, we have kind of these, uh, safety nets. That's, like, the perfect time to really burn the boats. Not when, like, we have an idea or we've tested it a little bit, but not thoroughly. Um, that's too soon in my opinion.

Steven Bartlett 36:03 And by, by burning the boats, you mean the analogy of, I guess, some of the, the wartime leaders who would pull up on an island that they were invading and burn the boats so that they had no plan B?

Chris Koerner 36:11 Mm-hmm. Exactly, yeah. To quit.

Steven Bartlett 36:14 Do you think that really matters, the, the whole idea of a plan B? Do you think people should have a plan B when they embark on entrepreneurship?

Chris Koerner 36:22 Can I contradict myself?

Steven Bartlett 36:23 100%.

Chris Koerner 36:23 All right. So the rational Chris, the Chris with four kids, says, "Absolutely." Like, you gotta be a dad, you gotta be a husband, you gotta provide for your family, right? Um, and again-There's so many tools out there for testing, for scaling, for outsourcing. We could find a business partner to help pick up the slack. We could use our kids, we could use our spouse, whatever. There's so many ways to really vet something out before quitting that we don't have to quit. But on the other side of my mouth, there's been, um, two times in my entrepreneurial career when someone burned the boats for me, right? I pull up to an island and it's, I've got my plan B, I'm testing this business, this business is profitable, it's paying the bills. And then someone else in the middle of the night, they snuck out, they burned my boats, and I wake up and I'm like, "Whoa, where's my plan B? I wasn't ready to burn those boats yet." Um, and plan A just freaking thrives, right? And it's not so much because of the fact that I don't have a safety net anymore, but it's because that event put a chip on my shoulder that makes me want to, to prove those bad guys wrong, right? To oversimplify, those guys that burned my boat.

Steven Bartlett 37:36 Toxic motivation.

Chris Koerner 37:37 Exactly.

Steven Bartlett 37:37 (laughs)

Chris Koerner 37:38 That's a good, that's a good way to put it. To show them I didn't need those boats. I'm not going back, right? This island is better than where I came from.

Steven Bartlett 37:45 I remember reading about a study on plan Bs where they got a group of students, two groups, and then they told them to do a puzzle to win a treat.

Chris Koerner 37:53 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 37:53 And then in one of the groups, they told them that they could get this treat at a vending machine down the hallway if they, if they wanted it after, and the group that didn't understand they could get the same reward from a plan B-

Chris Koerner 38:05 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 38:06 ... worked significantly harder to complete that puzzle.

Chris Koerner 38:08 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 38:09 So there's something in the human psyche of kno- when you know that you could get the reward in another way, when you have a plan B, we work less hard at the plan A.

Chris Koerner 38:19 100%.

Steven Bartlett 38:19 And so logically, maybe we should, you know-

Chris Koerner 38:22 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 38:22 ... very practical and unres- responsible remove the plan B from our mind.

Chris Koerner 38:28 Yeah. Yeah, I just like, I, I can't think of any stories from people in my sphere of influence that have tested something, quit the plan A, and then plan B just failed, and like they just lost everything. Like surely that's happened, right? That does happen when people, like, prematurely quit. But in my experience, it just, it doesn't happen. Like, it, it has the opposite effect. It becomes this huge motivating factor. And when they quit, I ask them like, "How do you feel? Are you freaking out?" And it's always, always, "I'm so excited right now." Like, "I'm gonna go all in on this." Like, "This has to work." And it does. It just does.

Steven Bartlett 39:10 A lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles, and I wondered what your, your op- opinion was on passive income, 'cause it's a word that comes up so often-

Chris Koerner 39:18 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 39:19 ... in the comment section of this channel, but when we're doing sort of sentiment analysis on what people are, what they're interested in, passive income-

Chris Koerner 39:25 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 39:25 ... seems to be a bit of a buzzword.

Chris Koerner 39:26 Yeah. It's the silver bullet, right? It's like, it's the, uh, it's the financial Ozempic, you could say.

Steven Bartlett 39:33 What is passive income? How would, how would one define that?

Chris Koerner 39:36 I would define it as income that you receive, um, that you don't have to continually put effort towards, like, uh, buying treasuries. Earning 4% on, on your money, and you don't do anything, and you just get paid. And it's, it's very hard to find, especially early on. Like, we have to be willing to create active income, sweaty income, ugly income, like, by whatever means necessary. And the more we do that, the longer we do that, the more, um, realistic true passive income actually is.

Steven Bartlett 40:09 Sweaty, ugly income?

Chris Koerner 40:10 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 40:12 Give me an example of some sweaty, ugly income that anyone-

Chris Koerner 40:15 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 40:15 ... listening right now could, could create. What are your favorite examples of non-obvious businesses that people have started that have resulted in passive, sweaty, ugly income?

Chris Koerner 40:22 Yeah. (sighs) I mean, most things that I've started have been just that. I had a, uh, a concierge car buying business, um-

Steven Bartlett 40:32 A concierge car buying business?

Chris Koerner 40:34 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 40:34 What's that?

Chris Koerner 40:35 So picture a traditional car dealership, a used car dealership. You've got to get your dealer's permit. That, uh, enables you legally to go to the auctions and buy cars at wholesale, put them on your lot, and sell them. So I did all the regulatory stuff. I got my, my dealer's permit, but then I would go to individuals and they would say, "I want a 2024 Sequoia. I want it to be blue, under 30,000 miles." And I would just go to the auction and buy it for them for, like, $700 fee. So they get wholesale, they save money, I make money, I don't have to bear the inventory risk, and I can buy exactly what they want. Um, that sounds great, right, on paper. People do that business successfully. I didn't invent it. I copied it, right? I hated it. Uh, I was breaking down on the side of the road driving these things back from the auction. I'm not a car guy. I don't care about cars. I don't work on cars. It's not my passion. That was ugly. It was hot in Texas. I was standing out on the blacktop. I was making money. It was profitable. And I got to the point where I just, like, quit it, and I just shut it down, moved on to something else. Um, that was very active. It was not scalable on the surface. It was ugly. I hated it. And so I pivoted because I had a plan B. I didn't have to do that, right? Um, that's one example. Uh, if someone likes cars, it's, it's a actually a great business. Like, I know a gentleman in Alabama that makes a lot of money doing that, right? For me, it was, it was not

Chris Koerner 41:55 great.

Steven Bartlett 41:55 So how important then is passion in this equation? Like, how important it is for you, for you to love the thing to be successful at it in your view?

Chris Koerner 42:02 I think you need to fall in love with business, with commerce. And if you can love entrepreneurship, turning $1 into two, and that, like if you could focus on that being your passion, then anything that falls underneath that you should win at, right? But I s- I like to say follow the profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, um, until you can afford to follow your passion, right? 'Cause if we're trying to follow our passion from day one, we're probably not ever gonna get there because the statistical likelihood that what we love and what makes us money overlaps in the beginning is almost zero. So ignore passion for a time.... try to build your passion around commerce, um, and then start anything. And then once you're able to have more passive income, then start things that you're passionate about, like in the, in the actual industry that you're passionate about.

Steven Bartlett 42:57 Persistence. Persistence is obviously gonna create repetitions-

Chris Koerner 43:00 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 43:01 ... to like understand the problem, to learn more, to, you know. So I, I wonder a- as it relates to passion and persistence, they seem sort of inextricably linked.

Chris Koerner 43:10 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 43:10 Something I'm more passionate about, I'm more likely to continue at even when the re-

Chris Koerner 43:13 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 43:13 ... rewards don't show up.

Chris Koerner 43:14 Yeah. Like my car, my car business, right? I had no passion for cars. And I had another business that was doing great. So, so I abandoned that. Um, but people think that like people sometimes look at themselves as lazy or they're not a hard worker, and so they're just, they're not confident that they could do this. But there's, like everyone is a hard worker. Everyone on this planet has the same DNA that enables them to work hard. But the problem is what they're working on probably gives them no energy, right? They're probably not passionate about it. So what am I passionate about? Well, we've gotta, we've gotta test everything. We have to try new things. We have to take that curious question and turn it into a business. Maybe that's fun, maybe it's not, right? We need more surface area for finding what our passions actually are 'cause we might think that like, like I love woodworking, right? I don't have to build a business around that 'cause I love business, right? So I can build a business around anything. But if I got super hung up on like, "I cannot make a profit from this woodworking business," um, then I would fail at entrepreneurship if I started there, right? Whereas if I approached this from, um, the angle of, "All right, I like woodworking. What else do I like?" Maybe I like running. Maybe I like cooking. Maybe I like short form videos. And I just start trying all those new things, then eventually I'm gonna have enough surface area for testing that I'm gonna find things where, um, have you heard of the ikigai principle?

Steven Bartlett 44:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 44:37 Right? So what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can charge for, right? The overlap of that is the sweet spot. That's what's scalable. That's what you can do until you die. But if you get super hung up on that on day one, like, "I'm just not passionate about that," like you're never gonna find it, like you're gonna be in that job forever.

Steven Bartlett 44:57 My career follows the same, same arc, which is I tried tons of things and then I built this marketing business and then that became more of a product business and grew. And I didn't love it. Like it wasn't my passion to do, um, to help like Coca-Cola sell more cans of Coke or like, you know, Uber sell more Ubers necessarily. That wasn't like my passion in life.

Chris Koerner 45:15 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 45:16 However, it taught me a bunch of skills, which then in, when I quit that business and I spent some time in psychedelics, DJing, building software, Web3, you name it, um, I came out on the other side and could ask myself that ikigai question, which is, of all the things that I have tried, what is the thing that I would do, like really irrespective of money?

Chris Koerner 45:32 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 45:33 Now I had that luxury to do that. And actually in 2020, the answer was this.

Chris Koerner 45:37 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 45:38 Like this was the answer. This answer was, I, I literally moved to London from New York and found a place without viewing it properly that looked like this because I thought this would be a good podcast set-

Chris Koerner 45:48 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 45:48 ... and moved into that place, called Jack, and then we started about five, five years ago, um, doing, doing this weekly. And it's become a business off the back of it.

Chris Koerner 45:57 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 45:58 But I didn't have that luxury at the start.

Chris Koerner 46:00 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 46:00 If I tried that from day one, I wouldn't have had, A, the skills to know how to scale an audience.

Chris Koerner 46:04 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 46:04 I wouldn't have had the flexibility to buy all these cameras, which cost like 50 grand or whatever at the start. Um, so I, and I do think some people sometimes get that inverted.

Chris Koerner 46:14 Yeah. And you, you're not distracted anymore, right? You're not looking for the next DJ thing or like, you found it, you're here, right?

Steven Bartlett 46:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 46:21 Now you're focused on scaling this. Like people get so hung up on focus or lack thereof and they just beat themselves up over it. But in my experience, like a lack of focus is a signal that there's something else out there, right? That maybe we shouldn't be focusing on that thing. 'Cause you've probably worked on things that had perfect product market fit and were just crushing and you weren't thinking about starting a DJing business at that point, right?

Steven Bartlett 46:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 46:45 You were all in on this one thing. But, and the times when you were working on something and you're like, "Maybe I'll try this, maybe I'll try this," and you beat yourself up. You're like, "Oh, and focus, focus, focus." Like let's actually pay attention to those signals. Why am I distracted from this thing? So that's, I don't know if that's just me coping with my own ADHD...

Steven Bartlett 47:02 (laughs)

Chris Koerner 47:02 ... or if that's actually a true principle. But I, I try to lend some credence to those signals of distraction that I get on a regular basis.

Steven Bartlett 47:10 Yeah. I have a, a Sunday shelf...

Chris Koerner 47:12 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 47:12 ... which is just a digital board on my Monday board where when I have ideas that like captivate me at 11:00 PM at night one night, instead of trying to act on them immediately, 'cause I think I'm in some respects like you, I put it on the Sunday shelf.

Chris Koerner 47:25 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 47:26 And, um, I wait and see.

Chris Koerner 47:28 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:28 I wait and see how much it pulls at me to come off the shelf.

Chris Koerner 47:32 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:32 And then sometimes it comes off the shelf, I get a little bit of a way down, I discover that actually there's something I didn't realize and then I quit.

Chris Koerner 47:37 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 47:37 But then there's this, you know, when you think about the, like the excitement arc of (laughs) a new idea.

Chris Koerner 47:42 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 47:42 You have the like initial surge of excitement, like, "This is the best thing ever. I'm gonna become a billionaire. Why has no one ever thought of this before?" And then you kind of get into it and you get into that sort of valley of, "Oh fuck, this is a terrible idea."

Chris Koerner 47:52 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:52 "I'm an idiot."

Chris Koerner 47:53 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 47:54 If I can come out of that valley, if, if something pulls me up out of that valley, then I think it's worth pursuing.

Chris Koerner 47:58 Yeah. That's a good way of looking at it. The, I, the valley of despair or something, that's what they call it.

Steven Bartlett 48:03 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Koerner 48:05 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 48:05 Do you follow a similar sort of path with idea, your ideas?

Chris Koerner 48:09 It's funny 'cause I, my kind of framework is if I have an idea, am I thinking about it still two weeks later? For whatever reason, that's just my timeline. Two weeks. I had an idea yesterday and I was at the airport. I was excited about it and I was doing research. I for- I forgot about it. Right? It's who cares, you know? But I have ideas where I just cannot get it outta my head and I'll see something out there in the world that adds to the idea and I tell my friend about it and I, I send these manic voicemails or these manic voice notes to my friends about it and I'm still thinking about it two weeks later. That's my signal that there's actually something here. Um, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 48:49 You used the word validating earlier on-

Chris Koerner 48:51 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 48:51 ... when you were talking about these ideas. And I, I think this is something that could really, really help a lot of people who have a lot of ideas, is this idea of trying to validate your idea as fast as possible.

Chris Koerner 49:00 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 49:02 How might one validate an idea, and can you give me an example of an idea that you have validated? What does validation mean?

Chris Koerner 49:07 Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I like to see people get joy from my product or service, right? Not just like, "Oh, it's good." Like let's say I'm selling a food product, "This tastes good. It's good." Okay, people might buy this. Uh, but I'm not gonna have product market fit. I'm gonna be pushing a boulder up the hill, right? But if people are like, "Oh my gosh, this is the best thing I've ever had. Where did you make this? How did you make this?" It lights up in their face. That's an example of a validation in my case, right? Same industry, food product, completely different reactions, right? So one specific example is, um, my wife has a cookie bar business, right? Square cookies. And they're amazing, and we're not trying to scale it. We don't wanna scale it. It's a way to teach our kids entrepreneurship, and we love it. But the best way to validate this was going to our local farmer's market and just posting up and just giving people samples and just watching them, right? What do they say versus how do they react? And is it the same?

Steven Bartlett 50:13 What'd you mean by that?

Chris Koerner 50:14 Well, sometimes we try to use the internet in places where it's, it's not needful, right? She sold these online, right? She shipped them to friends and family across the country. Like, "They're great. We love them." Okay, I didn't see you eat it. I don't know how you actually love it. Are you saying that because you're my mom, right? Or you're, you're my friend. But when you solicit feedback on your product or service in person, even if it's, like, an internet tool or an app, in person makes all the difference. You want to take note of what they say and take note of their body language and how they react when they experience your product or service, right? And if all three of those things overlap, then either they're a psychopath and they're just lying for no good reason, or you have something really special on your hands. Uh, and so that's what we did with her cookie bar business. And, um, and they loved it. And you can do that with any business. It doesn't have to be food.

Steven Bartlett 51:05 And what does validation mean? It's, it's checking if the market gives a fuck about the thing you're making as fast as you can?

Chris Koerner 51:11 Yeah. Yeah. Um, I like to kind of picture a, you know, a boulder up a hill, right? And s- most people in their businesses, even businesses that are working, they are two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. And that's okay. Like, that's not a bad thing. But i- in my experience, 5% of the time, I'll have a business where the boulder is chasing me. Like, I'm trying to not die, because this boulder's chasing me down a hill. And that boulder in this case represents customers, demand, right? Like, I can't sleep because I'm fulfilling orders. I'm answering emails. Like, I'm now getting distracted by the next shiny object. That is validation. That's product market fit, in my experience. You don't have to have that to launch. I don't want people to misunderstand. Um, but if you have that, like, you have something very special and you need to go all in on that thing.

Steven Bartlett 52:02 There was a book published, uh, several years ago called The Lean Startup, which talks about this idea of just, like, testing an MVP as quick- quickly as you possibly can.

Chris Koerner 52:10 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 52:11 Can you explain that to the audience who probably have ideas, but in their head are thinking, "Well, I've got to quit my job. I'm gonna have to raise money. I'm gonna have to spend two to three years building something to figure out if this is a good idea or not"? What is the alternative approach that you adopt when you're trying to stress test an idea quickly?

Chris Koerner 52:26 Yeah. So if I had to pick one tool, I mean, it's one that one in four humans use every day, and it's Facebook, right? You've got Facebook Groups, you've got WhatsApp, um, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Pages, uh, Facebook Ads, right? Let's just say there's six different Meta products, Facebook products. That's everything you need right there, right? Why, why don't you give me an example of just a random business and I'll, I'll tell you or the, the audience how they could validate that with a Facebook product?

Steven Bartlett 52:58 Okay. Um, I'm thinking of starting a creatine brand for women that has ... makes creatine taste good.

Chris Koerner 53:14 Okay. All right. Are we talking powder, gummy? What form factor?

Steven Bartlett 53:18 I don't know.

Chris Koerner 53:19 Okay. Well, let's, let's try both. Okay? So I'm gonna do something that seems very non-obvious and probably won't work, but it's the lowest amount of friction. I'm gonna take a description for that, and I'm gonna use NanoBanana, ChatGPT, any of the AI image generators to come up with what the product could look like, right? In both a gummy form and a powder form. Okay? Then I'm gonna go to Facebook Marketplace.

Steven Bartlett 53:41 You're v- you're just gonna post a photo?

Chris Koerner 53:43 Yeah. I'm just gonna say, like, "Women's creatine brand. Actually takes go- tastes good," right? Like, "Did you know that creatine im- improves cognitive function?" or whatever. Just your standard pitch. I could even use AI to generate it. It doesn't really matter at this point. And I'm gonna post it to Facebook Marketplace, simply because that's the lowest amount of friction to get some level of validation or not, right? Because in my experience, focus is overrated and momentum is underrated, right? And so you could have told me any idea. And my first step that I tell you to do is gonna be something very, very low friction, because I want you to get something back from the world, right? 'Cause the most likely way to sell that product is with Meta ads, right? But there's a lot of friction there. Like, it's, it's hard to use. So you're gonna be like, "Okay, you're gonna go, 'ChatGPT, how do I use Meta Ads?' And then ... " You're gonna burn out and you're gonna have, be onto something else by tomorrow. But that might be an amazing idea, right? So I'm gonna tell you to go to Facebook Marketplace, even though people don't sell creatine on Facebook Marketplace. And then we're gonna see, you know, Facebook gives us, like, three stats when you post something to Facebook Marketplace. Clicks and then how many people that reach out and then how many views. Okay? So I'm gonna post one Facebook Marketplace ad for the gummies.Different picture. It'll look like gummies. Um, basically same headline, same benefit, same description. Post to Facebook in the same local market with the same radius, don't wanna change any variables. And then I'm gonna open a Google Sheet and I'm gonna say how many views, how many clicks, how many messages for that ad. And then I'm gonna do the same thing. Take the same features, the same benefits, different picture 'cause this one's powder, post it in the same market with the same radius to Facebook Marketplace and have a new column, um, views, reach outs and, um, clicks, right? And then I'm gonna watch and I'm gonna see what's getting more clicks and I'm gonna know within two hours where there's more demand. Now does that little sample size indicate like what form factor I should go all in on? Not necessarily, but it's something. It's a relevant data point, right? There's not very likely to be a large amount of people searching for creatine gummies on Facebook Marketplace, but it doesn't matter 'cause there's two billion people using it, right? So we're just trying to capture some of that traffic. So I'm gonna do that with two ads and then after a day or two, I'm gonna boost those two ads, put $10 behind each of them to see how my results differ. Does it make any difference? Do I get a lot more clicks, a lot more views? Or is it just wasted? And then I'm going to, um, I'm gonna probably post like 10 more ads of like different photos, different headings, different descriptions, different price points, and then put all those in a Google Sheet and track it. All right. Now I have a lot of data. Now concurrently, so while I'm doing all these things, I'm gonna go to Facebook groups and I'm gonna join Facebook groups like Moms Who Work Out, Moms Who Love Creatine, Moms Who Love Rucking, uh, Ultra Runner Moms, like Healthy Moms, whatever. I'm gonna join all these groups and just start doing searches for creatine, gummies, powders, price points, vendors, websites, and just start like pulling pieces of data out of, out of the atmosphere, right? And I'm gonna put that in my spreadsheet and I wanna wait till the Facebook Marketplace tests are done. I wanna do that at the same time. Then I'm gonna start learning Facebook ads 'cause everything I've told you to do so far takes like two hours. Let's say we have an afternoon to dedicate to this, right? Then I'm gonna learn Facebook ads and I'm gonna watch a YouTube video about, you know, how to get Facebook

Chris Koerner 57:11 ads up in 10 minutes.

Steven Bartlett 57:12 How important is it to understand Facebook ads and how long would it take me to get a sufficient understanding of Facebook ads?

Chris Koerner 57:19 You could be proficient in a couple days if y- if you had like one thing to sell and you just wanted to go all in on that thing. Um, and you actually learned by launching ads and not just learning, not just endlessly watching YouTube videos, you could be fairly proficient, uh, within a couple days easily.

Steven Bartlett 57:37 Do you think that's a skill everybody should have?

Chris Koerner 57:39 Absolutely. I mean, Facebook ads are like the infinite money glitch. It's just like a, a magic money machine. It's the reason they're a trillion-dollar company. Um, it's like a cheat code. Yeah. It's, uh, we should know Facebook ads like we know how to write emails. Like we should know Facebook ads like we know how to build websites or to do anything. It should be foundational.

Steven Bartlett 58:01 Hmm. I wonder how many people actually have that skill.

Chris Koerner 58:05 Very few. That's why there are so many ad agencies charging a lot of money.

Steven Bartlett 58:10 And then so you've got the data back into your spreadsheet-

Chris Koerner 58:12 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 58:12 ... on this creatine situation. How do you then make a decision whether this is something worth pursuing?

Chris Koerner 58:17 Yeah. Then I would go find like a, a co-packer that's could-

Steven Bartlett 58:21 What's a co-packer?

Chris Koerner 58:22 It's a company that will take my idea and put it into a physical form. Right? Um, I'd find like a supplement company that could actually make this, and I would tell it roughly like what I'm thinking and then ask for samples. And then I would use those samples to go get feedback from people in person, right? But I wouldn't get those samples until I got feedback from all these Facebook tests telling me what form factor, what price point, what color, what flavor, um, et cetera. And then I would go to a farmer's market and actually have people

Chris Koerner 58:51 try it. (page turns)

Steven Bartlett 58:52 I've had so many founders speak to me and say, "Why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?" Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative wasn't strong, but usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation, because that ad never reached the right person. And if you're in B2B marketing, that is much of the game and this is where LinkedIn Ads solves that problem for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone's skillset. And their network includes over a billion professionals, about 130 million of them are decision-makers. So when you use LinkedIn Ads, you're putting your brand in front of the right people and LinkedIn Ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you want to give them a try, head over to linkedin.com/diary and when you spend $250 on your first LinkedIn Ads campaign, you'll get an extra $250 credit from me for the next one. That's linkedin.com/diary. Terms and conditions apply. (page turns)

Steven Bartlett 59:54 I've heard you say that there's various types of entrepreneurs. There's the sort of zero to one entrepreneur who's good at starting things.

Chris Koerner 59:59 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 59:59 There's the maintainer and then there's the finisher.

Chris Koerner 1:00:02 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:02 Which one are you?

Chris Koerner 1:00:03 I'm a starter. Yeah. Through and through. I, if I stay in a business too long, it all falls apart, right? Just objectively. So I need to hand off the reins at a very specific point or I need to have a partner from the outset that knows me, my strengths and my weaknesses, um, that just takes over at a certain point. So I like to say there are starters, maintainers, and finishers. A starter could be called like a visionary and not as like a backhanded compliment way, but someone... an idea guy, right? Not just a business idea guy, but like a marketing idea guy. Uh, let's change the subject line to this idea guy. Like a- a- an idea machine, right? That's a visionary. And then you have the maintainer, which would be an operator. That's a guy that just wakes up every day and loves tweaking little things and making small improvements. Uh, process-oriented.... someone that loves growing something and just fixing little problems all day, right? And then you have a finisher, which is like a deal guy, right? That's the guy that's a super connector. Uh, he likes to, "Oh, you need to talk to Barry." And then he calls him, he connects them, and like, he just gets a lot of energy from connecting deals, coming up with creative deals for an exit, for a sale, putting people together, hiring the right people, um, seeing something to its completion. Um, but I'm definitely in the first camp.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:27 Is it possible to be all three?

Chris Koerner 1:01:29 Yeah. When you're all three, you're Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, truly. Like, you start something from scratch and you see it to a trillion dollars. Um, there's been, like, I think there have been three people on the planet that have brought something from zero to a trillion. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, um, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. I think, like, even Bill Gates, even Steve Jobs... I might be wrong. Yeah, but even Steve Jobs got out long before they hit a trillion market cap.

Steven Bartlett 1:01:56 But a billion, a lot of people get-

Chris Koerner 1:01:58 Yeah, that's-

Steven Bartlett 1:01:58 ... from zero to a billion.

Chris Koerner 1:02:00 That's not nothing. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 1:02:01 That's very

Narrator 1:02:01 Nothing.

Chris Koerner 1:02:01 Also very impressive. But when you get all three, that's

Chris Koerner 1:02:04 what you get.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:05 One of the things that I find really interesting about your story is you- you've started what? Is it 75, 80 businesses?

Chris Koerner 1:02:10 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:11 When I speak to people like Kevin O'Leary, who have worked with some of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live, like Steve Jobs and h- he's very familiar with Elon Musk, they talk to me about focus.

Chris Koerner 1:02:23 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:24 And he says to me that the great thing about Steve Jobs is he was 80% signal and 20% noise, i.e., 80% of his time, he was focused on the most important thing and he was brutal about not entertaining anything else.

Chris Koerner 1:02:37 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:38 Johnny Ives has famously said that the one thing Steve Jobs was most known for is his remarkable ability to focus. He would literally ask you, "What have you said no to-"

Chris Koerner 1:02:45 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:45 ... in order to focus on the most important thing. Uh, I think about Mark Zuckerberg and his unbelievable ability to focus.

Chris Koerner 1:02:52 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:02:52 I remember s- uh, several people at Meta, but also, I think it's a public story, telling me that when he realized he was late to mobile, he refused to take any meetings about anything other than mobile.

Chris Koerner 1:03:01 Huh.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:01 Like extreme levels of focus.

Chris Koerner 1:03:02 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:03 And then Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank said the same to me about Elon Musk. He says, "Elon Musk is the only person that I think operates close to 100% signal," which is he... And I interviewed Walter Isaacson, his biographer, and he said, "Elon will sit in a meeting and if people aren't talking about something that is the most important thing, he'll completely zone out. And then the minute he hears something that he considers to be the most important thing, it's like he snaps into reality and he takes control and he's deep into the detail." And I... It sits in contradiction to a lot of the- the narrative of, like, lots of s- side hustles, lots of businesses, do as many things as you can. How do you g- But you've both kind of, you know, you've-

Chris Koerner 1:03:36 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:03:36 ... managed to create a life for yourself where you're- you're a millionaire and you're free in that regard. But when I look at the biggest companies in the world, there's this, like, there appears to be obsessive focus.

Chris Koerner 1:03:46 Yeah. I love that question. I- I think that all else equal, the guy who focuses more is more likely to be a billionaire. But back to momentum, right? The person that keeps and has and mo- and maintains momentum and has, gets energy from what they do, they're more likely to be a millionaire by the average, than the average person, right?

Steven Bartlett 1:04:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Koerner 1:04:09 I- I genuinely have no desire to be a billionaire. Genuinely. If I get there, cool. But I don't want to leave my kids tens of millions of dollars anyway. I know where I get most of my energy from. I have a lot of surface area for this. I've tried to focus. I've tried having a board. I don't want any of that. Genuinely, I don't, right? So if my life with hyperfocused Chris looks like billion dollar exits, uh, reporting to a board, uh, being chairman of the board, being CEO, um, sitting in meetings all day, that's miserable Chris, right? And if I'm not gonna... if I don't want to leave a ton of money to my kids anyway, then why am I making Chris miserable so my fourth great grandkids can be rich instead of just my second great grandkids? Like, that's- that's genuinely how I look at it. I'm... One of my superpowers is my- my long-term perspective, right? I think of things on an eternal scale. And if I have to have a miserable life so my kids in year 2300 can still be wealthy, forget that. Like, I don't- I don't- I don't want them to have all that money anyway, you know? So I want to live an awesome life where I'm a good and present father. And to me, that looks like focusing less, not more.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:21 What if you focused for the next 10 years, you made it to a billion dollars on one thing-

Chris Koerner 1:05:26 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:26 ... and then because you've done that, you can take even more-

Chris Koerner 1:05:30 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:30 ... sort of experimental bets with higher risk and more enjoyment and more sort of pleasure-centric bets over the next 40, 50, 60 years of the rest of your life?

Chris Koerner 1:05:39 Yeah. I just don't think that that juice would be worth the squeeze. I think that those bigger bets that I take will just amount to more meetings, and more travel, and more time away from my kids. And I don't like... It might sound controversial. Like, I'm- I'm not trying to change the world. Like, I want to help people start businesses and I can do that with my iPhone. Uh, and that will change the world, right? But I'm not trying to solve world hunger. I think that's someone else's problem to solve. And so I- I just want to be a good dad and work on really cool things. And it's been a, it's been a grind to get here, right? Like, I've had more years with zero income than I've had up years, right? But my up years have more than compensated for my down years. So what you're looking at today is the end result of 17 years of a lot of testing. Like, a very patient wife that was unquestioning and unwavering and e- extremely loyal, which I could not have done it without. Um, and so there were a lot of periods in my life where I beat myself up over that lack of focus. I went and got my MBA because of my lack of focus. I finished my undergrad because of my lack of focus. Like, h- getting a full-time job has never really been off the table until the last five or so years. So I've- I've never been unwilling to get a job or to focus. Um, and I probably did it the hard way, honestly. Um, but I'm to the point now where I don't feel the need to focus all on one thing.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:04 Did you ever feel guilty because of the situation you put your family or your partner in?

Chris Koerner 1:07:10 Yeah. Uh, more than once, yeah. More than many times.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:17 Give me an example.

Chris Koerner 1:07:19 I spent, I spent 18 months working on a project, um, that had no cash flow along the way, with a hope of a big payout. Um, and we were making no income, right? And I was focused on this one thing. And that is kind of the downside of focus, is if you focus on the wrong thing, it can really come back to bite you, right? But to me, this was objectively the right thing. It was showing all the signals it was growing. Um, we, we had like a few rental homes, we had some assets. And I was selling those things so my family could maintain their quality of life, right? So I felt guilty, but I was also insulating them from feeling the, the pinch that I was feeling in the office, right? And then at the end of that experiment, it all went to zero. I was out money, I was out time, I was out everything. And I felt, I felt very guilty. That was one, one example. Um, but thankfully, like we, we didn't have to sell our house. We didn't have to do anything drastic. And what that looked like at home was Dad was quiet more often than not. Dad was grumpy more often than not. But Dad wasn't really talking freely and openly about the things he was going through because he was trying to, you know, put on a brave face and insulate, um, the family from that. Even when my wife was begging to know more, to get more out of me, I just... If I talk about stressors, then it becomes more stressful to me oftentimes. So I just keep it in.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:46 I find the same, I, I am, I, I think my partner understands this of me and I tried to explain to her that I don't like talking about the stress because... (laughs)

Chris Koerner 1:08:53 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:53 ... in this environment you're, it's actually de-stressing me from not having to explain and conversate about it.

Chris Koerner 1:08:58 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:59 So, which is a bit of a paradox because then they don't really understand.

Chris Koerner 1:09:02 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:03 And if they don't understand, they might misunderstand.

Chris Koerner 1:09:06 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:06 Misunderstandings might lead to arguments and the arguments create stress and then you're gonna have to tell them in some sort of like argument-

Chris Koerner 1:09:13 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:13 ... what's going on. (laughs)

Chris Koerner 1:09:14 Yeah, yeah. I've lived that for sure.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:16 I don't know how to navigate that but, but it's definitely true that me s- going through something in work and then having to come home and like go through it for another hour-

Chris Koerner 1:09:24 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:24 ... to someone else and stress them out-

Chris Koerner 1:09:26 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:26 ... potentially-

Chris Koerner 1:09:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:27 ... doesn't feel like the right approach.

Chris Koerner 1:09:29 No. But I don't know what the right approach is because they, they have a right to know about it as well, right?

Steven Bartlett 1:09:34 I think we just need an outlet, whether it's a friend that kind of understands-

Chris Koerner 1:09:37 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:38 ... or someone else that, you know, is in our space that we can just talk to about the situation. I think having no outlet is also bad.

Chris Koerner 1:09:45 Yeah. And I'm, I'm guilty of that. I, I find a lot of joy in my work and so I, I don't look at it as work often, but it's still work, right? Like it's still taxing. Um, so I need to be better about having an outlet.

Steven Bartlett 1:10:00 Have you developed a new, a new relationship with rejection and failure? Because, you know, starting 80 odd businesses, you must have dealt with a lot of failure.

Chris Koerner 1:10:07 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:10:08 And, and wh- how does that feed into everything we're talking about today?

Chris Koerner 1:10:12 Oh man, I would... I don't know where I'd be without rejection and failure. Um, I'm not good at sales. So if anyone's watching this and like, "I can't start a business. Business is all sales." Like, you don't have to be good at sales. I'm not good at sales. I, I can't think of a business that where I had to rely on like early customers coming from friends and family, 'cause I cared a lot about what people thought. I didn't want to post my side hustle number 37 to Facebook 'cause I just thought my friends would roll their eyes. So I created this stupid constraint for me where like I had to launch things without the help of my ever willing friends and family 'cause I was too prideful, right? So I, I advise against that, first of all. Second of all, um, I served a mission for my church. I went to Eastern Europe for two years and I knocked doors in Hungarian for two years straight. I approached people on the street in freezing weather wearing a big Russian hat. Like, I got rejected tens of thousands of times over the course of two years. Being an introvert, staying an introvert, still an introvert, still bad at sales, still hating sales today at age 38, right? But that like changed me as a man, as a person, right? That rewired my brain to just realize that every no is closer to a yes. If my conversion rate is 0.1%, I gotta talk to 1,000 people and I will surely get a conversion. If I talk to 1,000 and I don't get a conversion, then I'm gonna get two conversions by the time I get to 2,000 statistically speaking. So I just need to keep getting rejected. Um, and that changed everything for me.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:46 I think it's super underrated to give kids a job in like cold sales.

Chris Koerner 1:11:50 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:51 That's what I did when I was 16 till 19. Sounds like it's what you did-

Chris Koerner 1:11:55 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:55 ... as a young man. Are your kids gonna do that?

Chris Koerner 1:11:59 Yeah, hopefully. And two of my kids are introverts, two are extroverted, but uh, they will, they are selling, like they already have businesses, little side hustles here and there. Um, but I am encouraging them to go on missions and to do selling because it's, it's the fastest way to learn. Like it's the fastest way to test. If I talk to 1,000 people, then I can have 1,000 different approaches. And if my conversion rate is 0.1%, um, I'm gonna get that to 0.5% over time because I'm able to test and iterate and, and pivot based on all that feedback I get.

Steven Bartlett 1:12:30 What have you learned about team building and business partners through this process? What advice would you give to someone who's sat there alone listening to this right now? Do they need a business partner? If they do, who, how, what?

Chris Koerner 1:12:42 Oh, man. Um, usually people don't need a business partner. Um, if you look at the stats on like business failure rates with companies that have co-founders, it's significantly higher than companies that have solo founders. We see their survivorship bias examples, right? The, the Apples and the, a lot of companies we can look at that had two co-founders that, that won. But nobody talks about or writes about the 90, 60, 80% of companies that fail with co-founders. Think about it this way. When we