As a leader in a company you are probably familiar with with the hustle culture of business. But, what if that hustle culture was a myth? Something that has not been proven? Our guest today isTrevor Blake. Who shares with us how he has achieved success with balance in finding a different way of working.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Trevor G. Blake is a seasoned entrepreneur, bestselling author, and advisor known for building companies that thrive and exit successfully. With three exits of over $100 million each, he proves that success doesn’t require hustle culture—his approach centers on alignment, vision, and energy mastery instead of burnout. Starting his first company with only a laptop, he went on to build multiple nine-figure businesses in the biotech and health sectors, all without employees, offices, or unnecessary stress.
As the author of the New York Times bestseller Three Simple Steps, Trevor is a leading voice in entrepreneurial mindset and energy management. His work empowers founders and professionals to achieve exceptional success while maintaining balance and clarity.
Now based in Newport Beach, he mentors impact-driven entrepreneurs, builds innovative ventures, and shares science-backed strategies for high-performance living through his books, courses, and The Transformation Experience.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As a leader in your company, you’re probably familiar with this idea of hustle culture in business. What if that hustle culture was a myth, something that has yet to be proven? Well, our guest today is Trevor Blake, who shares with us how he’s achieved success with balance and finding a different way of working outside of this hustle culture mindset.
Now, Trevor G Blake is a seasoned entrepreneur, best-selling author, and advisor known for building companies that thrive and exit successfully. He’s had three exits of over $100 million each. He proves that success doesn’t require hustle culture. His approach centers on alignment, vision, and energy mastery instead of burnout. Starting his first company with only a laptop, he went on to build multiple nine-figure businesses in the biotech and health sectors, all without employees, offices, or unnecessary stress.
As the author of the New York Times bestseller, Three Simple Steps, Trevor is a leading voice in entrepreneurial mindset and energy management. His work empowers founders and professionals to achieve exceptional success while maintaining balance and clarity. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
[00:01:29] Trevor: Trevor George Blake, but people know me as Trevor G Blake. They can find me on the website, trevorgblake.com. I am a serial entrepreneur, so I don’t really believe in fancy titles. I always think the smaller the company, the bigger the badge. I’ve had seven companies, and I’ve been the founder CEO of all of those, if you want the particular titles, but I think of myself more as a fixer than an entrepreneur.
[00:01:53] Tom: I think that’s a great starting point. You think of yourself as a fixer as opposed to an entrepreneur. Let’s unpack that a little bit. What do you mean by that?
[00:02:01] Trevor: I haven’t met many successful entrepreneurs who actually set out to be that. I know it’s a cool thing these days. People want to be an entrepreneur. For me, I think the winning ideas always come from something we want to fix. We walk around the world and we say, “I wish that was different,” or “I wish there was such a solution for this or that.” Oftentimes, we look for it, we don’t find it, and typically, we’ll say, “You know what? I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, and I’m going to fix it myself.”
All seven companies have been my desire to fix something. In every situation– and I’m sure your viewers and listeners can feel what I’m about to say– I felt completely unqualified, underfinanced. It’s like, “What am I doing? I must be crazy.” I set about doing it anyway. I think one thing we have as entrepreneurs is the ability to figure it out. We do that, we end up doing that. When we get it right, it’s a wonderful thing. We don’t always get it right, but when we get it right, it feels fantastic.
[00:02:56] Tom: I think that’s a great description. Yet, for those that kind of make it through that initial push, you survive, and all of a sudden, you start thriving. One of the things with your success in the different businesses that you’ve started and grown is talking about this idea of succeeding without burnout. Succeeding to me is a topic I find very valuable. I’d be curious, I’d love for you to share how you’ve been able to do that and some of the things you’ve found to work for you.
[00:03:24] Trevor: Yes, great question. I come at it from perhaps a slightly different perspective than many people because I’m a scientist by education. I’m a physicist. I’m always fascinated with how my things work. What I’ve learned over the years is that as popular as it is, the hustle culture has no scientific support. This sounds woo-woo, but I think you’ll understand. The less we try, the more we let go. There’s scientific evidence and neuroscience behind the power of that.
I learned that in the corporate world because I worked for people who wanted just to crush the day, to make 20 sales calls instead of five good ones, or to sit on the phone for 10 hours thinking that’s going to be successful. It also held me as I went further up the totem pole and became the big fancy title, the big badge, holding me in meeting rooms for hour after hour after hour, talking about nonsense that had nothing to do with expansion or product upgrade or customer satisfaction, and had everything to do with how do we make ourselves more satisfied and more entitled.
When I started as an entrepreneur– and I was 43 before I started my first company– when I started as this “entrepreneur,” I was determined not to fall into that trap. The beautiful thing about– I’m sure many people associate with this– starting on your own is that there’s no one to blame, and there’s also no one going to praise you. The buck stops here at this point, and you think, “Okay, this money’s coming out of my pocket now. Why would I spend it wasting all of this time on a Monday update meeting and a Friday how do we do meeting and all this and performance and appraisal conversations?”
You just basically get on with it. A guy called George Rathmann, who’s no longer with us, unfortunately, he built Amgen from zero pretty much to 60 billion. Then he built the company that invented Cialis, and they sold it to Eli Lilly for 26 billion, I think. When I met him for the first time, he was in his 70s, and I was waxing lyrical about this business plan I had. He said, “Trevor, the secret is not to figure it out. The secret is to just start. Once you start, you’ll realize that you’re in a different business than the one you thought you were going to be in, and off you go in that direction. Then you realize there’s something else there you’d never have seen if you hadn’t been in the business that you go in that direction.”
He said, “That’s how you spend your time. You don’t spend your time in meeting rooms trying to figure it all out.” I took that to heart, and it’s been a blessing to me. When I started my first company, I went with what I call the hub model, which is basically no employees. In all seven companies, I’ve never hired a single employee, which people find surprising. The reason I’ve done that is I decided I didn’t want to spend all my hours training people or holding hands or have negotiations over an extra 10% salary or something like that.
I wanted to focus on getting the job done. I find with vendors and contractors, they’re already prepared. They already know what they’re doing. You give them a contract, they go get the job done. You decide whether you like playing in the sand together, so you may or may not renew the contract. It’s a much less stressful way, I find, to build a business quickly. That’s the key thing for me, Tom, because we live in a world where get big fast is the way to succeed. We don’t live in a world anymore, I don’t think, anyway.
All the companies that are in the Good to Great and Built to Last, they’re pretty much going out of business every week. Reason being they’re too slow to adapt, their middle management is bloated, and it’s hard to compete in a fast-paced world. I think the hub model, if people are interested, I do have a couple of books. One that would make even a successful entrepreneur would, I think, like to free up some time in their life by having other people do the work for them.
I have a book called Secrets to a Successful Startup. It’s a New York Times bestseller. Even though it’s about the startup world, it talks to tenured entrepreneurs about think about using the hub model more than the hierarchical employee model. What you’ll get out of it is you’ll be able to spend time at home with your dogs or just time being human again, and get the success with balance right. The hustle culture has no foundation at all.
[00:07:35] Tom: That’s very interesting. I find it interesting that you knew about this and stayed focused on this idea of trying to avoid the hustle culture. Let’s be frank, it’s easy to buy into it and to get absorbed or consumed by that as you start a business and start growing a business and going through it. As you were expanding into and growing through some of this, it made me think for this hub structure that you’re talking about.
With the different businesses you’ve grown, that’s not the typical transition or starting point that you would go with, is to maybe think of this hub structure. You might say, “Okay, well, I get going, and then maybe I’ll hire an operations person or a technician to help with this thing, or hire an admin to help support here.” You’ve grown businesses, and we’re not talking small enterprises of a few hundred thousand dollars. We’re talking a few hundred million dollars of companies and things that you’ve helped grow.
[00:08:28] Trevor: Yes, actually, one of my companies right now, Neovia Oncology, is 1.2 billion. It’s important to talk the numbers because we do get– I think when we start out, we can be quite fooled into thinking too small. In the get big fast culture, you really want people who immediately hit the ground running. I know it’s a horrible cliché, but you really do need that. What I felt that I needed as the sole proprietor of the entrepreneur, if you like, was the ability to focus on expansion and marketing and not on all the other minutiae.
I’m good at the other minutiae. I built a whole corporate career out of it. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and that causes burnout. I wanted to be able to focus constantly on what’s next, what’s next, what’s next. It’s worked really well. Real-life examples are important. My first company, like I say, I started with no idea where I was going or what I was doing, and no money to build anything working out of home. It went from zero, and I sold it for 105.5 million after just five and a half years.
The number is really important because it’s not an attaboy profile, and it’s not showing off. It’s to let people understand that these things are possible if you get it right early on. If you didn’t get it right at the start, you have time to get it right now so that you can align yourself to the way the world works now, which is basically you can go from zero to 100 million in just a few years. Probably today, people would say, “Wow, five years? What took you so long?” When I was 43, it was unheard of.
We still had dial-up internet. Things were a little slower in those days. Things like Neovia Oncology– it’s a research and development company– from zero to 1.2 billion, has taken a bit longer because of the nature of the company we’ve been, but it’s still been the same structure I’ve used. I’ve still only hired vendors and contractors. What I like about that model, controversial though it seems to some people, is that it frees me up not to have the mentality of a supervisor. The CEO is almost like idolized by everybody else. “Well, you’re the CEO, you must know everything.”
In fact, what I found in the corporate world is the CEO knows less than anybody else and is somehow managing to get away with it. I’ve played that role. It’s to go away from supervision to go to peer-to-peer trust. I trust implicitly the vendors and contractors that I rely on. They love the fact that I’m not calling them up every five minutes saying, “How is it going?” I’m paying X amount of money to get the job done. If you can find a way to do it quicker, good for you. That’s what’s worked.
It allows me not just to build one company and then stop and exit and build another. It’s allowed me to build several companies at the same time. For instance, companies 7, 6, and 5 are all existing at the same time. I spend less than, I’d say, an hour a day on each of those companies because I’m not taking a supervisory role, I’m taking peer-to-peer trust. My job is like a conductor of an orchestra, not the person who gets in and tries to train people how to play really well.
My job is harmony, get them all working together. I like that role, and I think it fits. Again, necessity is a mother of invention. Starting in my first company and not having any money, I had to come up with a new way of doing it. It worked so well, everyone doubted me. Everyone said I was crazy. It took me ages to get anyone even to consider to invest in me. When that all happened, and people telling me it’s impossible, it’s impossible, once they saw the net profit number, they were convinced.
A startup to– we were doing about 12 to 15 million a year in that company that I sold for 105.5. It still exists. You can check it out online, QOL Medical, is doing very well. The net profit 76% on that was very attractive to suddenly the investors who said I was crazy and weren’t interested. Once they saw that number, they said, “Okay, can we do it again and again and again?” That’s kind of what I’ve been doing.
[00:12:20] Tom: Very interesting. As I’m listening to you talk, it makes me wonder. As you start to scale and the volume starts to reach where it does in terms of revenue and customer served and all of that, do you eventually bring in a leadership team or a management team to kind of help you manage all these pieces and parts out there, or do you still try to follow this hub model and essentially contracting that out?
[00:12:43] Trevor: No, I don’t. Never had an executive team. I have not brought in any executives. I don’t even do board meetings. I just think that’s such a waste of time and money. There’s just ego caressing exercises. That wasn’t a popular decision either when I first started out, but I held to it. Of course, if I hadn’t have been successful, they’d have got rid of me. Because it was successful, they were just happy to do it differently with me than they do with other people.
I assume they thought, “Oh, it’s just him, he’s quirky, we’ll do it his way.” It worked so successfully. One time, I was brought into one of my investors’ main meetings they hold annually down in Florida. There was about 100 other successful entrepreneurs in there. They asked me to present this hub model because they wanted everybody else to have 76% net profits instead of relying on the 20% and 25%, which is still pretty good for most companies.
Then people came to me afterwards and says, “Well, how do I do that from where I am now?” I was able to show them how to just change out one thing at a time, let that work, and then go with the next one, and then the next one, the next one. I said, “The big surprise for you, the side effect for you, will be one day you’ll be sat in your office and you’d be thinking, ‘I must be doing something wrong because the phone’s not going and I’m not getting any emails.’ That’s actually the sign that everything’s going really well because you’re no longer needed.”
I actually went on vacation for the first time a couple of years after starting QOL Medical. I went to London to visit family because I hadn’t seen them for a while. I was gone three weeks. At the time when cell phone internationally wasn’t brilliant, and I couldn’t get any contact with anybody. After three weeks, I thought my company must be over. It’s got to have collapsed in the time I’ve been away. When I got back, the most common response I got from people was, “Oh, we didn’t even know you’d left. We didn’t know you’d gone.” They’re just carrying on and carrying on. The companies end up running themselves to an extent, and one’s job then is more of directional or harmony, as I like to say.
[00:14:35] Tom: I understand you’ve got this five-hour workday. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:14:39] Trevor: Yes, it’s not about the– I don’t work five hours a day. I probably work about an hour, but that’s because I’ve learned what I’m doing over the years. I found out in the corporate world how quickly burnout can happen and such nonsense is spoken about you’ve got to put in your 10 or your 12 hours. You can succeed that way, but probably you’ll be on your third marriage, you’ll be taking something to numb the pain of it. It’s not a way to live. I like success with balance.
I like to spend as much time in the hammer because I do sit at a laptop having an amazing conversation like this. This is work to me. This is part of my workday, which is so much fun. To help people get from one set of circumstances where they feel like there’s not enough hours in the day, to another set of circumstances, I teach a thing– and you can get it at trevorgblake.com. Everything’s on that one website. I teach a thing which I call Practical Magic Of The 5-Hour Workday. Immediately someone sees that or hears that, they think woo-woo.
The second thing they think of is, “Oh, he means only being present five hours a day,” but I don’t. When it’s explained, the science behind it, which is based on peak brain performance, so the neuroscience behind it, it’s about how you schedule your day, because it’s clearly shown by science, we can’t concentrate for more than two hours. We kid ourselves into thinking we’re in the zone after that point, but we get diminishing returns, and they drop off really quickly.
The secret is to schedule the day into productive periods where being analytical is more beneficial, and then relaxation periods where being creative is more beneficial. I split my day up. I never work before 9:00, I never touch an electronic device before nine o’clock in the morning. I get up at 6:00. I’ve got all these nice little morning routines that suit me. Then at nine o’clock, I’ll work from 9:00 to 11:00 or more the analytical side of things. That’s when I’m answering emails and doing that kind of thing.
Then from 11:00 till 2:00, I’ll be completely off and you can’t get me. I will not have my cell phone anywhere near me, so you can’t disturb my quiet time. In my quiet time, everyone who’s listens to this knows what I’m talking about because it’s like being in the shower when you have that aha moment. For that period of time, I’ll spend time with my wife, I’ll spend time with my– I have an animal sanctuary too, so with my animals. I will spend time just walking by myself amongst the trees, trying not to have an idea, and then all of a sudden, this great idea hits me, and I’ll always do the same thing.
“Why didn’t I think of that earlier this morning? I could have saved myself an hour of work.” It happens every single day. We split it, and I come back at 2:00, probably after a nice long lunch with Jess, my wife, and I’ll work from 2:00 to 4:00. I’m also a writer, I like to write. The brain shows that it’s at its most creative when it’s tired, which is the opposite to what people think. Between 5:00 and 6:00, when my brain is probably more tired than it has been any other time during the day, that’s when I spend an hour just writing something.
I write screenplays, I write Three Simple Steps, which I think you know about, and Secrets to a Successful Startup. They came out of having the winning idea and then writing between 5:00 and 6:00 every day. I’m done at that point. I have separate devices for home and work. That’s really important if you want to work that day successfully. That means that I can’t be disturbed at night by work, and during the day I can’t be disturbed by family, because then I’ve got my work devices, and then at nighttime I’ve got my domestic devices. That keeps my life nice and split, which means I’m being fair to everybody, giving my same amount of time and dedication and energy to everybody, and that leads to a very happy life.
Hopefully, I come over as a pretty happy guy. I’m having a pretty good time here. I’m gray-haired, it’s not like I’m young talking about this. It’s a beautiful way to live, but it takes a little practice, and you can’t go from one set of circumstances to the other overnight. You have to build it in slowly. If you go to trevorgblake.com, there’s a free PDF, which is called Practical Magic Of The 5-Hour Workday. It teaches how to start to build success with balance into what, for most people, is a crazy life of hustle. It changes the whole life, it changes relationships, it changes your health. It’s just a wonderful way to work.
[00:18:48] Tom: What’s the website again for them to go to?
[00:18:50] Trevor: Trevorgblake.com. Everything that we’re talking about here is on that site. I started all this after I sold QOL Medical because most people who are teaching, most life coaches, have never really had any success before they entitled themselves that way. Most of the self-help and personal development books out there were not written by people who’d used a formula to get success. I waited until I could prove it. Proof of concept, I think, is essential for any business these days.
I waited until I proved the model, The 5-Hour Workday, and basically the mentality to run both, and then wrote Three Simple Steps. You can get a copy of Three Simple Steps on trevorgblake.com. I think you can read the first three chapters for free. It’s a New York Times bestseller three times. It’s done really well without any promotion. The information’s all there for people– If they’re a little more interested and want to go down the rabbit hole, then I’ve got lots of freebies for everybody.
[00:19:45] Tom: Trevor, this is a great time in the show. We make a transition, and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question is, have you had a miss or two on your journey, and something you learned from it?
[00:19:57] Trevor: Yes, or too many, we don’t have enough time for all of them. The big one for me was I started a company with two partners, and that was a big mistake. For me, it was a big mistake because of the personality clash, because we all got into the venture together for completely different reasons, and we never took the time to ask each other why we’re doing it. We just got in and did it. I found out that one was to get rich quick, that didn’t happen, so he ran off with quite a bit of our money.
Then the other person was interested only in growing big enough in order to put his kids through college. I had other dreams. That doesn’t mean mine were better or right, there’s no judgment here, just that we were never aligned dream-wise. That was my first big mistake. I never did it again because it’s painful and stressful when it happens like that, and it’s always sad to say bye to people you’ve actually got together with in the first place.
The second thing is when I first started out, I didn’t know anything about the finance world or the investor world, and I knew I needed to raise exactly 2.1 million, and it took me 18 months to raise 2.1 million. Then halfway through that company, this was QOL Medical, so about three years in, I saw an opportunity. This was a great opportunity, but I needed 28 million, and I raised 28 million in less than six weeks. Big lesson. A big mistake, first off, because I ended up giving away 30% of the company for just two million.
With the second deal, the 28 million, I only gave away 10% because the investors were working off a perception of 25% of two million is not even worth the paperwork, whereas 25% return on 28 million is worth getting involved. I learned a very good lesson early on that you should always bring investors in because they bring so much more than the money: connections, network, skills.
There are a lot of freebies that come with them, especially on the attorney side and the IP side. I always try to bring investors in at some point, but I won’t bring them in at a small number anymore. I’ll go as high as I can possibly go without laughing at myself in a mirror. I find it’s much easier to raise money that way. That was a miss. Out of ignorance on my part, but I’ve learned the lesson.
[00:22:03] Tom: Great example. Thank you for sharing. On the flip side of that, a make or a highlight or two.
[00:22:08] Trevor: I’m proud of all seven companies. They’ve all had an impact in the world in some way, which wasn’t what I set out to do. I’m not trying to make myself sound like a hero or anything. I set out to be successful, financially successful, egotistically successful. I wanted all my family and friends to say, “Oh, didn’t you do well?” I’m same as everybody else. I’m not afraid of the recognition or the praise, I don’t think. The highlight of it all is that when we go out and fix something, we automatically start to make an impact because everybody else was using the solution that we found a way to figure it out.
I’m most proud of that. I think my current company, Neovia Oncology, I’m really proud. We set out to do something that the whole world said was impossible, and I was delusional. I couldn’t get any investment into this company because of that. What we set out to do was to create a cancer treatment that had no side effects. This is a personal thing to me. I’m a cancer survivor, but the side effects were horrible. My mother, she didn’t survive cancer. She had cancer, died, but the side effects were horrible. I’ve always been fascinated in finding a way to provide powerful treatments to cancer cells that don’t cause the side effects.
We figured it out. We started this in 2005. We’d figured it out by 2012, and we finished our first clinical trials, Phase 1A, they’re called, just over a year ago. Now we’re negotiating with a bunch of companies that want to take it. It’s at the right stage where it needs to graduate from my little kindergarten idea mentality to something massive. That’s very exciting. I’m really proud of that because at the end of it, yes, it’s a successful business idea because it’s unique in the market, but also it’s going to have a legacy effect. The more I look in the mirror and see the gray hairs, the more important the legacy becomes to me. I’m really happy about that.
[00:24:02] Tom: Thank you for sharing. The name of the show is Multiply Your Success, and so always ask, have you used a multiplier to grow yourself personally or professionally, or some of the organizations you’ve run?
[00:24:14] Trevor: It goes back to what we talked about earlier on with the hub model. I think that is a big opportunity for people that they may miss, even if all it does is reduce costs. You want to get that delta between expenses and revenue as wide as possible, because then the stress goes away. Then we can have fun playing with things, saying, “Oh, I’ve got this I can invest, and this I can invest.” You want to make that as wide as possible. For me, that was the big multiplier, not because I figured it out, but because it worked. It worked the first time, and so I’ve just used it every time.
That is my multiplier. I have so much fun doing it that I will never stop. I’ll be six feet under before I’m forced to stop doing this. That is fun. To wake up every morning and get excited about what’s next. The multiplier might work physically and analytically and mechanically on the company, but it works just as much mentally for me because I’m excited about what’s happening, what’s going to be next. I love being this age, but to get to my age and then still feel like a kid who’s got so much more to contribute, that means that’s a really good thing. That hub model is a great multiplier.
[00:25:21] Tom: Trevor, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
[00:25:25] Trevor: To me, it means waking up every morning excited. That’s for me number one in my life. That might not be important to most people, but it fits my character. I don’t want to wake up, open my eyes, and go, “Oh God, it’s Monday.” I want to wake up going, “It’s Monday. Can’t wait. What’s this week going to bring?” I think that is the side effect or payoff of being an entrepreneur, and it going well, because you just want to go more and more and do better and better.
For me, that’s it. The sign of happiness for me in business, because we’re talking about business, is to wake up really excited. I have to say I’ve been very lucky in relationships, too. I wake up excited about my relationships. I’ve had two. I’ve never dated. My first wife, we were married 40 years, minus one month before she died in 2020. Then I met this amazing ex-Disney executive who’s now independent, Jess. We’re four years old. We’re very excited about building companies together.
[00:26:25] Tom: As we bring this to a close, Trevor, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:26:31] Trevor: No, sometimes when it’s– Talk is cheap, I guess. Sometimes, even though I say don’t try to figure it all out, just jump in and start, most people still try to figure it out. Sometimes I don’t talk enough about that. I do get people asking me sometimes, “Can you help me write my business plan?” This is controversial. I’m saying, “No, this is a different world now. We don’t start with a business plan. We start by going out. We get away from our computer and talk to real customers and real stakeholders, and we let them tell us how to build our business.
Then we go and find the vendors who can do it for us and for them. You can’t lose them because you’re giving them exactly what they asked for, exactly what they need. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who come out of like MBA school, and they think that the secret is to figure it all out on a piece of paper for two years before they even begin to start. Then they erroneously think that that business plan is going to get them an investment. All the evidence I’ve seen is that the investment comes when the entrepreneur says, “Yes, I spoke to these people. Yes, I spoke to those people.”
“Yes, I learned this from what they told me. I’ve had a prototype, I’ve redone the prototype, redone the prototype. I’ve got to proof of concept. I went back to those people and said, ‘Here is for free, try it, let me know how it goes and what the benefits are.'” I use that as data, and I can now come to you and say, “Let’s go fast. Let’s scale this as fast as possible because I’ve proved the concept.” I don’t talk enough about that because in these wonderful podcasts, time goes so quickly. I think that’s a podcast in and of itself, the value of a proof of concept over a business plan. I’d love to talk about that topic one day.
[00:28:06] Tom: That’s a great idea. It’s something we definitely see for sure with so many of the clients I’ve worked with over the years that had an idea, as you said, to fix something, to solve some problem they identified, and just said, “I’m going to do it.” They started doing it and figured out a way to monetize it, and all of a sudden it started growing and then franchised, and all of a sudden, it’s a national brand. I see exactly what you’re saying there.
[00:28:33] Trevor: Yes, and the franchise thing, because you and I had a like a two-minute conversation before we started about franchise. For me, that is definitely a stage. When I first started my first company, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I wasn’t thinking franchise, so I wasn’t thinking like Big Sky or anything like that. I don’t know if you existed when I started my first company, but I was thinking more in terms of, “Okay, you build it to a certain size, then you sell, you exit, you get acquired.” That’s fine. It was a really good business model for me. With trevorgblake.com, that’s definitely one that I’m thinking about. This is something that would be an amazing franchise. You put that idea in my mind right at the beginning. It’s about getting big fast, whatever mechanism we can use to do that.
[00:29:16] Tom: Trevor, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when Trevor shared he’s a physicist by training and likes to fix and solve problems. He said he’s done research and looked up this research on hustle culture and he found no scientific support for that. I found that interesting.
Takeaway number two is that he runs his businesses on this hub model or this hub structure, where he keeps his employees as low as possible and hires contractors and consultants to work with him on contracts. He’s found a great deal of success in building companies, one of which is a $1.2 billion a year business. He sold one of his companies for over $105 million, running on this type of operation.
Takeaway number three is he described his five-hour workday that he builds on, and he talked about working when there is peak brain performance based on your schedule of the day. He has found scheduling his day in a very specific way where he’s able to do analytical time in the morning and creative time later on in the day.
Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win comes from when Trevor was talking about thinking of himself as a fixer, as opposed to an entrepreneur or a founder or something else. He said all seven of his companies were designed to solve a problem. He started them underfinanced, unqualified, but he decided to do it anyway. He did that, and what he learned, as he shared later on in the episode, that you’re able to talk to real stakeholders, real customers, and listen to what they say when you get started. Talking about things, researching, yes, that can be beneficial, but ultimately, you’ve got to get started and get some customers and hear what they say and take that feedback and learn from it.
That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. Remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchiseTeam.com, where you can schedule your free, no-obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
[00:31:50] [END OF AUDIO]
