Have you ever heard those headlines about a big technology company getting a big investment or buyout and wondered, “How do you attract investment like that?” If you have ever wondered what some of the secret sauce to securing investors or even an exit strategy then this episode is for a must listen to for you. Today, our guest is Maceo Jourdan, a military veteran, serial entrepreneur, and expert at building, scaling and exiting high-growth companies.
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LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Check out Maceo’s Company, Canexxia, www.Canexxia.com
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Maceo Jourdan is a serial entrepreneur with two decades of building businesses by creating great products and great marketing. With his background in discretionary and algorithmic trading, he is able to merge the risk management of a portfolio trader with the aggressive risk-taking of an entrepreneur to time business trends with uncanny accuracy.
Maceo scaled his company Insider Code from a $25,000 ‘friends and family’ loan to a $245 million valuation in under 3 years with an exit value of $420 million. Maceo’s Pioneering vision brought breakthrough new technologies such as developing some of the first cloud-based web applications, cross-device tracking, and non-linear funnel optimization.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
TRANSCRIPTION
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:00):
Before we get started today, I just want to take a moment to thank all of our Veterans this week as we celebrate Veterans Day. I’m grateful for the sacrifices and service you and your family have made so happy Veterans Day.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:13):
You’ve worked hard to build your business, and now it’s time to grow. Welcome to Multiply Your Success Podcast. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team and serial entrepreneur. And the purpose of our podcast is to give you a weekly dose of inspiration and education to help you multiply your success.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:33):
And as we open today, I’m wondering if you have ever read those headlines about some company getting a big investment or a buy out and wondered how do you attract an investment like that? I know I’ve thought about that. And if you’ve ever wondered what that secret sauce might be, then this episode is for you. Or maybe if you’re trying to think about an exit in the future and to find those investors to come in, this episode is for you. And today, our get is Maceo Jourdan, a Military Veteran, serial entrepreneur, and an expert at building, scaling, and exiting high growth companies. And he shares with us some of the wisdom and experience that he’s learned in going through this process. So let’s go ahead and jump right into our interview.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (01:18):
Yeah, Maceo Jourdan, CEO, co-founder chief co hook and bottle washer, because we’re a startup that’s kind of how it goes. The current company is Conexia Healthcare. We’re setting out to remake healthcare by 2030. And what we do for people is bring hospital quality healthcare into the home. And that business really was born out of really just tragedy.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (01:42):
Both of my parents, I took care of them at home until they passed away. My mom was just a year ago, this past September and they both were victim to medical error. And the medical community doesn’t really like to talk about medical error. Understandably so. And so, depending on where you go, you get wildly different numbers. John’s Hopkins pegs it to about a quarter of a million people are killed in the medical community. Of course the medical community sponsored their own studies and they put it at like five.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (02:12):
And so, let’s just say, okay, both numbers are wrong. It’s somewhere in the middle. But think of that spread, from five, obviously is facetious, but say, 10 or 15,000 to a quarter of a million, there’s a lot of room there. And so with my mom, she was losing weight. COVID obviously was raging. Wasn’t COVID related. Her primary care doctor refused to give her care and said, “You’ve got to go to the hospital.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (02:37):
She wound up in the hands of an oncologist who just didn’t look at her chart. She was 96 pounds, 74 years old. And this doctor thought the best thing to do would be to puncture this woman’s lung twice. Now what they were looking for was potentially a tumor. The question that I asked the doctor at the time was, “Do you think this is medically necessary considering she’s 96 pounds? In other words, are you going to continue treatment?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (03:03):
And his answer was telling it was, “Well, if she’s 96 pounds, then no, we wouldn’t do it.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (03:08):
And in that moment I knew that this man hadn’t looked at her actual chart. And so people who don’t know a chart, simply means the record where all of your stats are put, so how tall you are, your age, your name, your weight, stuff like that. And so he ordered the test anyway, and 10 days from admission to her dying, which is just an absolute tragedy.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (03:32):
And when you multiply that same scenario, meaning you’ve got somebody that fits a certain profile, you have doctors which are looking at incomplete information, and then you have a medical staff who for various reasons will not step into the gap and say, “Hold on a minute, we need to stop this.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (03:52):
You’re looking at a catastrophe because there’s 61 million of those people in the United States. And if we thought that COVID was going to overwhelm hospitals, just wait until you have 60 million people that are over 70, they’ve got multiple chronic diseases. They’re running into these miscommunications internally. I mean, it’s going to be a train wreck. I mean, this is not if, it’s more, how bad is it going to be?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (04:16):
And I just don’t want these kind of stories to get swept under the rug. I mean, my mom, if absent me out here telling this story, my mom’s story would just pass away into the annals of never spoken again, kind of medical lore. And so we’re here to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (04:35):
But let’s lift off of that sort of start, and I’ll segue into it. I think particularly the listeners here will appreciate is, people talk about passion in business, especially when you’re talking about startups, that it’s really important. And so obviously I’ve got a lot of passion. I saw personal tragedy come out of that. But if entrepreneurs could harness those kinds of stories, why did they get started in the business?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (05:05):
And I’ll call on sort of an older movie now, Jerry McGuire, and there’s a scene, you’ve got Jerry McGuire and, and his counterpart, Cuba Gooding Jr and Tom Cruise. So Tom Cruise is there in the locker room and he is like, “Let’s get back to the game when you were a kid. You remember when you played this for fun? It hasn’t always been about the money. Right?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (05:28):
It was that kind of thing. And so Cuba’s character had lost sight of that, the joy of the game. Yeah. You’re out there getting hammered, just like in business. You’re going to run into problems. You’re out there making great plays. Sometimes, it seems like everything is raided against you. So Cuba’s character, he felt put upon by the management and the fans. Like, “Nobody’s appreciating me.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (05:52):
But it’s really this amazing synergy that we can tap into as entrepreneurs where the more we do get into the real reason why we’re doing this stuff, the more our customers resonate with that, the more our financial partners resonate with that. So if anything, go watch that movie. Some of those scenes are instructive. But if you can tap into these heroes journey, movie style narratives, it’s easier to hire people. It’s easier to explain what you do. People don’t have to try and fit you into some category that doesn’t quite work.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (06:30):
I mean, once I tell that story, starting with remaking healthcare by 2030, and then the reason why it’s like, “Hey, got it.” We understand not only what the problem is, but how big it is. And so that’s when you get people really rallying to your cause.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (06:45):
No, thank you for sharing all of that. And it’s just interesting to think. So with your company you’re starting and what you’re doing. So how by 2030 with the plan, I’m sure, I’m interviewing you and I’m thinking, “Okay, well, how are you going to do that? What’s going to take place between now and then?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (07:03):
Well, so some of this is super secret, top secret, special background investigation. But generally, the beauty of this is, this population… So my mom did not want to go into a facility. In fact, I uprooted my family. We moved into this beautiful property. We had a two bedroom casita. We call them casitas here in Arizona, but it’s little apartment that was on the property, so she could be here with us, but it was also separate. Because I knew, dude, I’m not living with my mom. That’s just not going to happen. So, we were fortunate enough to have that kind of situation.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (07:41):
When you say how, I go to the practical answer, right? And so, this is instructive for entrepreneurs. Most people, when they’re asked the how question they go immediately to tactics, “Oh, well, we’ve got this great Facebook ad or whatever.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (07:54):
It’s like, “Look, dude, that’s going to pass away in like three months. You’ve got to focus on methodology.” Right? In other words, the methodology is the energy or the impetus for why something happens. Whereas the tactics are the exact, “How are we going to do it?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (08:10):
So, when you’re talking about 61 million people don’t want to go to the hospital, they don’t trust their doctors. They don’t feel listened to by their doctors. They darn sure don’t want to go into an assisted living. That’s a pretty great trend as a business owner because you’ve got demand there. And so really, the true secret to this is nobody wants to go into any of those places. They all want to stay at home. And so, it’s our job as Conexia Healthcare, to simply provide them the easiest, frictionless customer experience to make that happen.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (08:45):
And so now let’s get into the real help. And so that’s going to be, obviously making sure that we’ve got cash flow. So we’re focusing on one particular aspect of what’s bothering this population, which is a knee pain. We’re standing up purpose-built pain clinics across the country. That’s phase one. And that’s really going to provide the base, both in terms of cashflow, but then also strategically in thinking through our customers, they’re in pain. A big reason why my mom wound up in bed, bedridden, she’d crapped up her knee as a young woman jogging and she needed to get it fixed. And so that in inability to be mobile led to her being bedridden. And so that strategic kind of one-two of, “Okay, we’ve got the tactics, we’ve got the strategy, but more importantly, we’ve got the trends.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (09:31):
So all of that combines to how we can get phase one. And so we’re going to stand up about 600 of these clinics in the next couple of years, which is going to be a massive undertaking. And then once we’ve got that foundation, we’re going to branch out into true home healthcare. So that’s going to be providing services in somebody’s home, really up until you get into some of the acute care. Like if somebody has a heart attack or a stroke, breaks a leg, they’re bleeding from their neck. Obviously we want to get them over to a hospital, because they’re probably going to need a surgeon pretty quickly. But for anything else, the amazing thing is even today, we can set up a relatively robust medical clinic inside somebody’s house if we needed to.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (10:11):
So for everything else it’s going to be, I don’t want to say light lifting is still a lot of work, but we are going to be able to actually have an assisted living quality facility in somebody’s home. And then once we build the network of nurses and other medical staff around them, it really gets to be an issue of like, why do you need to leave your house? If I can roll somebody to your home in eight minutes, which is about what you have in ambulance, you really don’t need somebody right down the hall.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (10:41):
I don’t know if you’ve been in the hospital, but every time I’ve been in the hospital and I’ve pressed that button, it hasn’t been like two seconds later, somebody comes into my room. It’s like, okay, it’s been 30 minutes. Let me press it again. It’s been another 20 minutes. Let me press it again. And I’m definitely not throwing shade on the medical staff. They’re definitely overworked. They’ve got other stuff that they’re doing, but I’m saying our measure isn’t minutes. Our measure really is about 25 to 30 minutes, if you’re in a facility already. And it’s like, “Okay, I can do that standing on my head.”
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (11:15):
That’s really interesting. Well, I love where you’re going with this and your expansion and growth that you’re gearing up for.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (11:23):
Yeah. Thanks.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (11:23):
One of the things that at least I’m wondering, I’m sure someone tuning in will be too is, how do you get to this point? Certainly you’re motivated, I’m sure with this instance with your mom. But what’s some of your background, what led you here to pull together these resources make this happen?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (11:39):
Well, I’ll answer the question in a little, slightly different direction, obviously to build something this big, we have to get investors. And so if there’s any secret to venture capital, private equity, or getting investors, it’s experience. There’s an understanding when it comes to getting investor capital. When you think about somebody giving you, let’s say a million dollars, just to keep the math fairly easy. They want to make a profit on that, which means they need to get their million dollars back, plus some. The more time you take the more that dollar amount has to grow to provide their return. Now, most investors, most institutional or even angel investors are not like a typical Charles Schwab, Edward Jones kind of investor that’s like, “Well, if I get 8 to 10%, I’m happy.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (12:30):
These people want 25, 30, 33% on their money. And it’s because historically that’s what they’ve been able to get. So let’s just do some math. 30% of a million dollars is a lot of money. So, if you’re looking at that, obviously I’m not going to do this with a million dollars. I have to go raise a hundred million dollars. Well, 30% of a hundred million, is’ an even bigger number that I’ve got to return to them on top of the hundred million. And I’ve got a time limit on all that. So, when you really understand this problem from the investor standpoint, they don’t want somebody that needs to learn a lot of things in order to get to production, in order to get to cashflow, in order to get to money coming in the door, which is why investors typically take shortcuts, right?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (13:21):
They want to hire the Stanford grad, the Harvard grad, because their assumption is, look, it’s not easy to get into those schools. They know generally what, like an MBA or a business program is going to produce from those schools. And so it’s really a way for them to gauge whether or not you even have a shot at taking on this monumental task. So that’s the first thing for entrepreneurs to think about. And obviously you can’t jump the hurdle of experience in like two days, but it can help you understand where you are really. Take stock of yourself, where your skills are, what you’ve done, and don’t ask your mom because they love us. And they’re going to say, oh, you’re awesome. You know, you can do whatever you want. If you want to go to a mentor or somebody, or even an enemy, which is even better and figure out like, where are you really?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (14:10):
And then start to ask questions related to some of the equations that I just gave you. Let’s say you want a million dollars and you say, “Okay, if I am going to return that million dollars in three years, plus a 30%, if now this is an IRR. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s India, Romeo, Romeo, you Google that. You can run a calculator and you can start to understand how difficult this task is. Because if you’re talking about an IRR, the more time that goes by, actually the more you’ve got to return because time is a component, right? So if I want to make 30% a year, every year, year in, year out, that means 30% year, one 30% year two. But usually it’s 30% of the initial amount, the million plus the 30%, right? So your numbers are going up. Anyway, once you get into what this really means, hopefully it will dawn on you that this is a big deal.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (15:08):
And it will give you an appreciation for just why, like when you watch Shark Tank, entrepreneurs are like, “Dude, that’s a fantastic idea. I would invest in that in a heartbeat.” You’ll start to understand why these investors are like, “Well, I’m out.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (15:22):
And a lot of it is related to the person that’s standing in front of them. At the end of the day, the investor’s like, “You know what?” They’ll run into a couple things. “I don’t think if times get hard, this person’s going to figure it out. They’re going to panic. They’re going to kind of turtle up. They’re not going to go out and figure it out. Maybe they think, oh that person’s not assertive enough.” Because let’s face it. If you’re in business, you’ve got to assert yourself. No, one’s just going to hand you business.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (15:49):
And then the last one is really, do they like you? If you’ve got an investor… This is really akin to an intimate relationship. You need to have a high degree of trust. You’re going to be seeing them quite often. You’re oftentimes going to be calling them with bad news. And so you, if they don’t like you, if you don’t like them, deal is off. I mean just hands down. It doesn’t matter how great the opportunity is. So all of that goes into … just, those are like table stakes. So we’ve got to solve for all of those things. We’ve got a layer on top of that, a trend, right? Timing is very important.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (16:27):
And then it’s the team who are you putting on your team? And this is an area that, that I’ve seen entrepreneurs really have a problem with because we tend to hire people that we like, not people that are competent necessarily. And so you have got to really hold a high bar for the people that come on your team. But the way you do that is by communicating with them.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (16:47):
Communicate like what I just did. Just how hard the task is, what goals you’re really trying to meet. And you’ll find really quickly whether somebody is even able to do that. Because most people that are not very competent, they’re going to be like, “Well, this doesn’t seem right. This isn’t a great fit.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (17:06):
The A players, so to speak, they’re going to jump at the opportunity. They’re going to latch onto, “This is something big that we’re trying to solve.” And they’re going to understand that like there are meaningful stakes to them doing their job. And that’s something that I’ve found all high performers really gravitate to, because it gives them a chance to not only showcase their talents, but also grow as individuals. That’s a lot, but that’s why it’s so tough.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:31):
Yeah. No. And, thank you for sharing that. And it’s actually, raising capital, finding investors and partners to the capacity that you’re describing and those reasons are candidly, it’s one of the drivers why clients look to end up franchising their business-
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (17:50):
That’s right.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:50):
… in conjunction with maybe alternative strategies. But it’s one of the reasons it’s finding investor partners. It is difficult. It’s if it was easy, everyone would do it.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (18:01):
That’s exactly right. Yep.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (18:03):
And franchising, I’ve actually got a, quite a soft spot for franchising. And I’ve found, especially when you’re talking about, so the ideal candidate for a franchise, typically an executive, they’ve got some free cash. They’re not really looking to be… If they’re going to buy a Jiffy Lube franchise, they’re not necessarily going to be the guy in the pit, undoing the oil filters and all that. But you know, they have some affinity for it.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (18:33):
You can still bring stories to bear. And I remember one, in fact, a guy that I helped in the franchise industry, he was looking to franchise his Jiffy Lube, kind of Jiffy Lube knockoff. And I’ll never forget he had this casual story. He was like, “Yeah, when I was little, I would go to these places and my mom was always getting jerked around and the places were dirty and she always felt uncomfortable.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (18:55):
And I asked him, “Well, do you tell that story?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (18:57):
He’s like, “No. Why would I?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (18:58):
It’s like, “Just because that only matters to everybody. I mean matters to half of the population, PS. But also to the to the executive ideas that are going to be getting into the franchise, because they’ve probably got a daughter. I mean, odds are, they’ve got a daughter. Odds are, they’ve got a wife. In other words, they can relate to that story.”That’s a practical example of even what people think, “Oh, there’s no story in a Jiffy Lube.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (19:28):
It’s like, I remember my own personal story. I sat down, I was a young man. This is actually why I started helping the guy. I sat down next to this woman, and she was morbidly obese. In fact, she was so physically large, I wasn’t paying attention. And when I sat down next to her, I sat down on her. If you know what I mean? I was horrified not because, I was like, I was grossed out. I was horrified because of how she must have felt. And so I’m in this moment of empathy and the guy comes out, and he was just a total jerk. And it was such a juxtaposition for me. And I was pretty fresh out of the military, far more aggressive than I should be in public, normally. And I just launched into the guy and, “You don’t ever do that. This is…” all of that.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (20:19):
Some choice four letter words, he must have thought I was her husband or something like that. And then I sat down just steaming because I couldn’t believe this human being just went through that. And I’ll never forget it. I mean, I’m about to tear up. She couldn’t believe somebody, like a total stranger, did that for her. So, we can’t forget the humanity that we’re serving even in… I shouldn’t even, I shouldn’t say even we shouldn’t forget the humanity that we’re serving.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (20:42):
And, that experience for her at that Jiffy Lube could have made her a customer for life, could have made her an advocate for life. Instead of sitting this woman outside in Arizona in the summer where she’s already overweight, she’s already going to be hot, having some place where she can sit down, that’s comfortable, that’s going to make her feel less exposed. I mean, those are the things that really matter to people, not necessarily just, “Hey, did you screw my oil filter on right?” At the doctor’s office, Did they have little candies for my kid?” It’s the sum total of that. But relative to the people that we’re serving, that’s important.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:24):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. And that those are great stories and situations to be sharing. And, I appreciate that. And one of the things that I’d love to do here at this point is just kind of a transition into our little formula for the show. And we ask everyone the same questions before we go. And the first question is asking about a miss or two that may have come along the way and something you learned from it.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (21:48):
Yeah. My first miss unfortunately, is the biggest. But I’ll, I’ll be quick. My biggest miss was tied to my biggest success. So I had built an E-learning company. We had gotten it up to about a 420 million exit valuation, but I did it as an outsider, right. So I didn’t go to the traditional venture capital networks. And the deal wound up falling apart. Right. They couldn’t come up with the 420 million bucks to put it bluntly. I’m like, “Well, then I’m not selling.” And so it’s really, you have to seek, you have to go to where the expertise is. You have to go to where the connections are.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (22:28):
The big miss was related to me staying in Arizona. Having a technology company, I should have been in Silicon Valley. I mean, I needed to be in the mix of it, talking to the other entrepreneurs and talking to other capital providers.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (22:41):
And that’s scary. I had two little kids. It’s a big deal moving your family. But at the end of the day, that was the difference between a total with, and probably a multi-billion dollar company. I mean, we had figured out cross-platform tracking, we had the ability to track email, to content, to video, tie it all back together. And then we had a content generator, which would pull from a repository and feed stuff to use this just massive undertaking that you’re just starting to see now in the mainstream. We had this stuff back in 2007. I don’t say that lightly. This was a multi-billion dollar miss, so it’s definitely, when you’re talking about the difference between having something absolutely massive and miss, it could literally be where are you located, geography wise.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:28):
Wow, incredible. Well, thank you for sharing that. And how about a make or two that you’d like to share?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (23:35):
Well yeah, the make is related to that. And so that company, I didn’t know it at the time my dad had terminal cancer. And so I went to him and said, “Hey, I need this money. I want to start this business.” And he just wrote me this check for 25 grand. Which I thought, “That’s weird.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (23:52):
Like I said, but later on, I found out why he did that. So anyway, I worked that 25 grand all the way down to $5,000 finally hit on an idea that started to work and then grew the E-learning company out of that. But if you can imagine, me personally, I was delivering the product, handling all the development. So I was coding, HTML and PHP and all that. I was answering the phones, answering emails. It was insane.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (24:21):
And so, I connected with a guy that got me hooked on business process. And that, especially if you’re talking about a company wants to grow, I can say, unequivocally, if you do not become a process freak, you can forget about it. And so what enabled us to go… We went from 25 grand in debt to 26 million in revenue, in basically 18 months. Now, a lot of that was due to the trends. I’m a really good trend spotter. And so the timing was right, but without the business processes, we would’ve been dead in the water. And so that one fine enabled me. I was adding on 15 or 20 new hires every week at one point. And we could do that through those internal processes. And so, that company, obviously I could hire people.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (25:07):
I had the freedom to think, “Where is the business going?” I didn’t have to be in the day to day, which opened up a lot of the stuff that I talked about, a lot of those technology, which I thought were kind of cool tools, but then tested out. We actually started making money based on them. That freedom to develop and the freedom to develop the business really came from being free from needing to be on top of people. I could literally take out a process and say, “Okay, did we meet our numbers? If we didn’t okay, what are you doing in your day to day?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (25:36):
I would make them describe to me what they were doing. And I would just go point by point, and write down if they skipped something or missed it or changed it. I would say, “Okay, well try this and tell me what happens.” So I could even manage easier. Just all sorts of levers came out of that process, thinking.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:57):
Great. Well, what a huge, huge make for you there. And that’s incredible, truly. And really talking about the process and what you’re going through kind of go leads to the question, which is a multiplier that you’ve used to grow. And I don’t want to fill in process there, but it sure sounds like it. So what’s a multiplier?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (26:17):
You’re stealing my thunder. It’s absolutely processed. Look, we as entrepreneurs, we get so hooked on these great new shiny objects. And I think fortunately, I studied all of the so-called robber barons. I hate that title because it really is a misnomer. It’s a mistake to call them robber barons. So this is the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and you know what? Their businesses obviously were simple because they didn’t have a huge amount of technology. But think about it, Rockefeller grew basically the biggest business on the planet. He didn’t have a iPad and email and Slack and all this crap. So it’s obvious that stuff isn’t it necessary to build a huge company.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (27:05):
So then we have to ask, as entrepreneurs, if it’s not necessary, then why are we using it? It’s like, maybe we should just use Google Spreadsheets. Huh? How about that? So, absolutely processes is going to be the multiplier. Not because it makes you rigid. And, because I’m a very creative person, what I like to tell people is if you look at Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, nobody would debate about those people being artistic and creative. And they had a process. They didn’t just sit down and say, “Oh, I think today I’m going to draw a hand with six fingers.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (27:43):
They didn’t even sit down and say, “I’m going to draw a hand with triangles.” Their process was all the way down to proportion between joints in somebody’s finger, how far the fingers were spaced. And so we would look at their work and say, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s absolutely artistic. And yet what sits behind it is a rigid inflexible process.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (28:06):
And so I like to tell that story because people that I talk to are like, “Oh, process, I don’t want to be constrained, man.” Especially in my Silicon Valley brethren, they feel like they’re just going to be put into this box. It’s like, you know what? You wind up being shackled to the next shiny object when you’re not constrained by process. When you have a process, you have literally unlimited freedom. Unlimited freedom is just expressed through a certain framework.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (28:36):
And so maybe that’ll help some people, if they’re thinking about, or kind of rejecting the idea, “My business doesn’t need process or it doesn’t quite fit.” If you want to grow and you’re in business, you need to have processes because what’ll happen is as you multiply, the stupid gets multiplied as well. And so the process helps us to get the stupid out of our business.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (28:56):
We’ve all had this experience. We may not say it nowadays in the politically correct culture, but someone will do something on the team and in private, be like, “Man, that was stupid. Why did they do that?” It’s like, “Well, because they weren’t following a process. That’s why.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (29:09):
And so you, you can’t multiply the stupid and grow something that’s going to last, that’s going to have value that someday you can exit for a lot of money, or something that’s going to reliably throw off cash flow. The stupid will drive the errors up enough so it’s so out the cash flow and it lowers your asset base.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:29):
Yeah. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. And certainly thinking about franchising, what we do. I love that you just gave a great, glowing reason why process is so important. [crosstalk 00:29:41].
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (29:40):
It’s why franchises work, frankly, because-
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:42):
That’s right.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (29:43):
…that’s generally what you do before you franchise, you process everything out. Oh man. That’s why I love it, frankly.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:50):
Yep. Yeah. And, I think you make a good point too, about that while the process itself, is a process, but it doesn’t have to be rigid. I like how you talk about that. Meaning that you still have to change and adjust and be flexible. And part of the process is changing the process is what I’ve kind of gathered from what you’re saying.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (30:10):
Exactly. Yes. In fact, we have a process for changing the process, because otherwise you get into willy nilly and it’s like, “Oh, something small went wrong. Let’s change everything.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (30:21):
Entrepreneurs are famous for that. It’s like, “Okay, hold on. Let’s not do that. Let’s have a process for figuring this out. What steps did you go through? Was that a critical step? Okay. What result did you get? Think through what the implications of it are. Yeah. Okay. Maybe it was a bad thing that happened now, but can that bad thing lead to something good?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (30:44):
In other words, let’s say you lost a big client. It’s like, “Well, was the client a jerk? Were they high cost? Did we need to fire them? And we just happened on a process that drove that kind of person out?” Which I’m mentioning that because we found that a lot, because we were dealing with the public, we actually developed customer service processes that would weed out the worst customers.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (31:06):
You know, these are people that constantly complain and are never satisfied, because let’s face it. You can never satisfy everybody all the time. Yes. But there are some people who are just mad. Right? I mean, and they buy stuff too. So it’s absolutely about changing the way you do things, but here’s really the magic. The magic is that you’re tracking all of the steps that go into getting a result. And so you, as the leader can focus on the result and say, “Okay, did we get it? Yes or no? No. Great process is, go through the steps. Did you follow the steps? Yes or no?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (31:43):
So as entrepreneurs, we only deal with a world of yes and no, black and white, which is great because as entrepreneurs and because we live in future opportunity land, we like to find the pony in the pile of horse manure. And it’s like, no, maybe it’s just a pile of horse manure, but the process will help you to figure that out.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (32:05):
Oh, that’s so great. That’s so great. And well, and the final question we like to ask everyone is what does success mean to you?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (32:15):
Oh, man, success has really changed over time. As a younger man, it was definitely related to status and I’m kind of a watch freak, Greg Provinci on my team is an old friend of mine. You know, we’re both kind of watch freaks, but so it meant like that material stuff.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (32:30):
And, I’ll get super real on you as well. So I grew up, my dad’s black. My mom is Scottish, so I never really fit into both worlds. So a lot of it too was just validation. Being able to rub people’s noses in it. We live in this world where people don’t like competition, but that definitely drove me. And so my competitive nature was less about what I could do, but more about the trash talking that I could get away with, making up for a very painful childhood.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (33:00):
But as I’ve processed that, and obviously gotten older, now it really is about legacy. It really is about looking around at problems and saying, finally, we live in the greatest country on the face of the earth where somebody can come from Senegal for crying out loud. And 10 years later, be sitting on top of a $500 million company. There’s really no other country on the planet that you can do that in.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (33:27):
So when I look at that, I then start to think, well, what really huge problems are there? Right. So if let’s say it’s climate change and it doesn’t really matter which side of the fence you lay on, people who don’t like climate change, what I usually ask them is, “Well, what’s the downside? Is it a bad thing? Why are you really so dead set against this stuff?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (33:49):
And then for the other side, it’s like, “Okay, it’s not like we need to all live in mud huts. How about we figure it out? Like how about we figure out how can we advance everyone and solve these problem at the same time?”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (34:01):
And so it’s really more about that. And some people might call it inspiration. I really think of it more in thinking about things realistically and having the ability to do it. Right. So when Gandhi kicked the United Kingdom out of India, nobody thought it was possible. When he started, nobody would have thought, “Oh sure. In less than 30 years, we’re going to be completely independent. And literally the reigning superpower on the planet is going to be sent packing.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (34:29):
Well, if he can do it in India, then surely we can do it here in the United States. So it’s a little bit of that. It’s a little bit of telling people, “Look, wake up. Yeah, we’ve got problems, but there’s nowhere else on the planet that you’re going to be able to do anything that we can do in the United States. Yes, let’s talk about and work on some of these problems, but less so that we’re just talking about the problem and more so that, Hey, let’s identify what, what the problems are, realize that we actually can do something about it. And let’s actually set about doing something about it.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (35:02):
That’s really what I see as the platform. And so my success with Conexia is… You can kind of get some hints. They’re still like, “Hey, Maceo, it still sounds like you’re wanting to rub people’s faces in your success.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (35:15):
It’s like, “A little bit. I still haven’t gotten away from it completely.” But it is really in my mind, more of a showcase. Nobody would think here in 2021 that some crazy guy with five people on his team in Arizona is going to remake healthcare. But we’re going to stand in 2030 looking back and you’re going to say,”Damn, they did it.”
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (35:38):
And it’s because we’re in America, because we live in the greatest country on the face of the earth, because we’ve got the greatest people and mentality and culture in the sense of how do you remake such a monolithic broken system, like healthcare? You live here. That’s how you do it. And you take advantage of all the systems. And so then in 2030, I can look back and say, look, yeah, you can do it too, because you know, here, go look at this interview as proof that if you’ve got the will, if you’re willing to take the risk, if you’re willing to step out of every comfort zone possible, then you can absolutely do massive earth shake things. That’s the message of America I think.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (36:20):
Amazing. Well, I love it. I’m a huge Patriot. So I’m charged up. I’m inspired.
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (36:28):
Let’s go do it.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (36:29):
Let’s do it. Well, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or say that maybe you haven’t had a chance to get across yet?
Maceo Jourdan, Canexxia (36:36):
No, I think I got it. I did a recruitment speech for America, talked about my startup. I think we’ve covered it.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (36:43):
Maceo, thank you so much again, for being a guest and sharing all of the information and knowledge you did with us today. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when he talked about what I consider those secrets to getting investors. So number one is that the investor invests in you. Do you have the right experience and do they like you? I found that interesting. Do they even like you? Not only you got to have the experience, but they need to like you, in addition to your business.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (37:17):
And number two, you need to be able to produce a high internal rate of return. As he said, a 30% plus IRR plus repay the original investment in a very short time window, which could be maybe a 2, 3, 4, 5 year time window that you have to make this return on investment, and that an investor would be looking for.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (37:42):
Takeaway number two is to be around the people you need to be around for success. And Maceo shared with us a story about how he should have had his company based in Silicon Valley, especially when he was looking to exit. If he was there, he said he probably would’ve been in a much better position to sell and exit at the right time.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (38:07):
And takeaway number three is don’t forget the humanity you are serving in your business. It’s an easy thing to forget when sometimes dollars and cents start to get in the middle of things.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (38:20):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win is focused on becoming process driven. Focus on the process, refining process and making changes to it. And Maceo shared with us how this has been the catalyst for him and growing multiple companies and scaling very, very quickly.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (38:44):
And he said having a process and creating processes, even as much as having a process to change the process, this has been one of the big secrets for him scaling and growing his business. It’s also the same for franchising as well. And so you can use this for franchising, finding investors, growing your business. So I thought this was a great win-win for the episode today.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (39:10):
And that’s the episode today folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember if you or anyone might be ready to franchise your business or take your company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in. And we look forward to having you back next week.
