Transcript

My First Million Live Event With Andrew Wilkinson (Austin, Texas) (Part 1)

And uh I got so excited about it at one point that I I was up at like eleven o'clock at night, I was feeling all manic, I'd probably had a couple beers, and I sent this email to the entire staff and I said, guys, we're shutting Metal Lab down, we're going all in on flow. And Chris, my business partner, who's here somewhere, where's Chris? Chris over there. Uh Chris was the CFO at the time and he looked at the numbers and he was like we will be out of business in three months. Yeah.

I feel like I can root Well I know. be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song and put your hands together for work Dickinson, come on out, you guys.

Mics. Alright! So we're uh We are back stage and we saw like all the bands that have played here. It's like Franz Ferdinand and like the killers and all these cool things and I heard the sound guys. First of all sound guys, I wanna apologize. I heard them talking before this and they're like

What the fuck is this? Right. There's like is this like a rich guy's birthday party? What is this? I think they thought it was a graduation happening.

So some guys Sorry. You always wanted to be a star. You wanted to walk out to a sold out venue and uh I guess this was Yeah, it's one way to do it. So sound guy, it's gonna be the lamest thing you're gonna see this week, but maybe you'll learn something. I don't know.

Uh But this is awesome. What do you think? Working? Fuck sound guys. Come on, guys. You can tell who the real podcasters are up there. So we did this huge event in Vancouver. We had like twelve hundred people in this massive theater, and Sam sneaks out on the stage and I'm like, what are you doing? And he's he's peering around the corner taking photos, and he goes, I'm posting this on Facebook.

And I was like, Who the fuck uses Facebook? That's so weird. And he goes, All the people I went to high school with. Mm. And so we wanted to start off by saying We were laughing backstage. Uh and we were like right before we came on, we're like, we gotta talk about Nick Gray. Does anyone here has anyone here met Nick Gray? That was the guy be that was just talking.

Yeah. I just met him for the first time last night. He is I don't know if he's the most interesting man in the world, but he's like the most interesting man in Texas, for sure. I I'll give him that. I feel like on this show we always talk about billionaires. And

There's a lot of money billionaires, but Nick is a friend billionaire. Yeah, la last night so we hosted a dinner last night with like well done, fifteen people And Sam had set it all up. It was gonna be perfect. He had this like high end restaurant. Table for 14, the time was locked in.

We got reminders. We show up it's supposed to be beautiful. Uh Taken care of. And we get there. And immediately the plan was blown up. There it was raining out. It starts raining like crazy and our seat was like half outside. Yeah, so we weren't gonna be able to do it immediately.

Nick Gray. Improvised. Hold on. You six to the bar and then he sprinted Because I pulled up, I saw him running.

And I was like, Nick Way, where are you going? And he was like I'm scoping out a venue and he I don't know where he went. He runs into this place Hey.

Is this a event space and soaking wet. Yeah, and the women look at each other and they're like What? And he goes, What's the name of this place? And they go It's called Miss Kitties and he's like Are you guys in events space? What do you do? He goes, We wax women.

Oh. I got fifteen dudes outside. Do you have it please or not? But he did. He found us this like Like sh abandoned shack almost this amazing place. And he

It was really like a shed. It was an abandoned shed, but it was like I don't know, it was perfect. It was exactly what we did. It was outside the rain. We were all in there, it was quiet. We could talk. And um And he hosts this thing because what Nick does is he has this book called I think the two hour cocktail party.

He's basically Perfect the art. Of a two hour party. And I got to see it firsthand. He takes out his harmonica to like get everyone's attention and then he uh he he has this way of getting everybody to open up, to talk, to sit in the right places, do the right things. And

It was incredible. The best part though was He saved your he saved you. So so Nick is looking around. And he walks up to me, he goes, Hey, are you all good? Everything good? Uh and I say, Okay, I want to go to the shed. I'm excited. I'm a little bit cold though. Is it gonna be heated? And he goes, Hold on, I'll be right back.

And he runs outside and like Sam said it's like pouring rain. I don't know if you guys witnessed this yesterday, but it was insane he comes back, he's soaking wet, he looks like that scene in Glen Gary Glen Ross when the guy's like at the doorstep and he brings me this sweatshirt. Which he had paid like seventy dollars for. That's who Nick Gray is. To be clear, we like'em. To be clear, we like'em, but that's not why we're bringing this up. But on our pod, my first million.

Uh and by the way, is everyone here is anyone who doesn't listen to M FM here? Who's here for the graduation. Yeah. Okay. And who who here actually listens to us regularly? Alright, that's good enough. And so We bring up all these like weird

businesses that a lot of people haven't um heard about. And this one is probably the weirdest one. He he told me he was gonna write this book. about a cocktail party. I thought it was a horrible idea. And so far he's sold eleven thousand copies of this book, which is insane. And he um

So we have this dinner and we meet All these interesting people at this like fourteen. I think we had a guy there. Who sold a company that sold

Who knows if it works, right? Like you have no idea. He sold his company for six hundred and fifty miljon dollars. It was insane. He was telling us a story about this. We had another guy Who sells

Also dog related dog ramps. So like So your old or small dog can like go up on the couch. And he does eighteen million a year in sales. There was another guy there That has a website that is like a marketplace so you can rent a tractor and it's killing it. We had a uh a person who has a car a bunch of owns a bunch of car washers that does tens of millions in profit. What else we have? Anything else that was weird?

It was c it was crazy. It was Different than San Francisco. If you go to San Francisco or New York You get one type of entrepreneur. You get the uh you know AI, crypto, you get that in SF. In New York you get something else.

And in Austin you get Mustache? Huh? Tilt. And like

I I sell tractors online or I'll sell your dog some vitamins, you know, uh you get a different type of entrepreneur. I bet in the I bet in the crowd right now. We gotta have Some interesting business. Let's get a sense of here. And if you do over a hundred dollars, if you do over a hundred thousand dollars, keep it up. If you do five hundred thousand, keep it up.

Uh one million. Five million. Okay, we got a few. Twenty twenty million, anybody? No? Okay, back to five. No, no, no, we got them over here. We got a couple? Okay, twenty million. Twenty million enough. We got one over here, two here. One in the back? Any of those any of them profitable?

Okay. All right. Okay, Nick, we wanna talk to these guys. I wanna know what their businesses are. All right, stand up please. Let's hear from ya. What's your name and what's your business? Kelsey Larry, three sixty five holdings we're an e-commerce roll up. Sorry, can you say that one more time? Three sixty five holdings we roll up e-commerce businesses. I want to be Andrew Wilkinson when I grow up

You don't trust me. Okay, who's the guy next to you? Uh, Justin Turner, Traction Capital, our we have a business that sells equipment to fire departments. What do you mean? I love the way you said all that, but I'm gonna

Can I just try being you for a second? Sean Paris. That of Uh.

Change diapers. Like you just said an awesome thing, but with such Like Yeah. You probably are right about me. That's the vibe. We uh we sell like Thirty seven million dollars worth of equipment that

Fire departments use and firemen use every day. Like like Yeah noses, nozzles. Uniforms. Uniforms. And why is okay, so in Uh what about competition? Is it just like you're the only one in town, there's only one place to buy them? Or do you have a moat of some kind? We have exclusive distribution Uh relationships in nine of the Western states in the US. How much profit on thirty seven million in revenue?

Uh it's about ten percent margin. Does it feel uncomfortable when I ask you these questions? Should I ask like What do you look like naked? What was it like when you lost your Virginia? There's only one way to find out. Who's got a weirder story than that? Anyone got a weirder story than that? Yeah, put your hand up if you've got a really weird business. Yeah, Nick. Okay, so this is a paper koozie.

But I own a forty thousand square foot print warehop. Warehouse and we print real coozies. So like it's really niche and it's really random. Not these small boy coozies that we hear in that. How long you've been running your business for? Um I've been in business for eight years, but we do a lot of different types of printing. Um did you become a millionaire selling beer koosies? That was my first largest e com store that I created, yeah. Selling coozies'cause I'm from the Midwest.

And we drink a lot of beer. And that's You look like you're from the Midwest. Yeah, I just bought them though. You and I like I'm close to St. Louis actually. We can be cousins. Anyone else have a really, really weird business? Like dog ramp level weird business. Tell them to let the freak flag fly. Oh here we go.

Guy with the Austin stash there. Oh there it is. The the capital V neck shirt. You just grow those when you fly in, as soon as you cross the the border. The the mustache just pops up. We make custom dog treats for hospitality businesses. So like when the Ritz Carlton Uh has guests come with dogs, we provide the dog treats that they give to their guests. And why wouldn't they just use normal dog treats just to do it? Because ours have their branding on them. Oh very smart. How big is that?

Um we started ten months ago and we've grown it to half a million in ten months at F run rate. Wow, that's great. This is cool. We're gonna uh we're gonna hear more businesses'cause a little bit later we're gonna do like a shark tanky type of thing with a bunch of uh Bunch of pitches. Yeah, you're gonna put we can put the lights down. Two times. Okay, there we go. Um So the cool part about like doing this stuff is we get to meet all these interesting people who are succeeding and

Some are failing, which is actually just or more interesting. Um But speaking of a big success. Andrew over here took his company off.

Uh Andrew over here just took his company public. It's called tiny. It's not that tiny. Yeah, that should be the tagline. It's not that tiny.

And you were telling He was telling us a story that we had not heard about almost selling the company. Like six. This was a backstage story. Can we tell it? I think we could Yeah, we can we can tell it. So there's there's really two stories. So one By the way, if you don't know, I I gotta do the intro, to uh Andrew started this thing called Meta Lab. It was an agency that made a bunch of um Tech stuff for big companies.

Using the profits from that company. He then started buying and investing in other companies. Which that hold company w that hold company was or Hold Co was called uh Tiny. He recently took it public last week. It's now trading at eight hundred and fifty million Canadian dollars which is Only like six hundred million bucks in real money.

Uh no, but it was it's a huge success. But it all started because he had this agency called Metalab where he was um You know, like I said, doing stuff for tech people, but You were saying earlier that how that was like the foundation for the success of everything else. But you it

You almost Did something crazy early on. Yeah, so I almost wasn't sitting wouldn't be sitting here. So Uh we were sitting at dinner the other night and talking about this and uh There's two stories. So one

Uh I got very excited. You always know how much it sucks, how hard it is to run. And you always admire other people's businesses. And so I always wanted like a SaaS business, sexy business. And so I started one. I started this productivity uh business called Flow. It was like Asana. Except we didn't raise any money and we

Uh we had a great product, but it just Task management, which is the same thing. One of the hardest businesses in the world. And uh I got so excited about it at one point that I I was up at like eleven o'clock at night, I was feeling all manic, I'd probably had a couple beers, and I sent this email to the entire staff and I said, guys, we're shutting Metal Lab down, we're going all in on flow. And Chris, my business partner, who's here somewhere, where's Chris? Chris over there.

Uh Chris was the CFO at the time, and he looked at the numbers and he was like we will be out of business in three months. How big was Metalab when you when when you were Two million maybe at that moment. So two million in revenue versus three hundred thousand. Three hundred K or something. I was just like moment of insanity. And Chris went around to all the employees quietly and was like, Please don't leave. But Please don't leave, we'll be bankrupt in like a week. And save the day. And then the second story was

Uh Chris and I We you know, running an agency is really stressful. And we got this offer for the business. To sell it for fifteen million.

This is about Eight or nine years ago, almost ten years ago. And fifteen one five. And uh we actually went through the whole process, you know, spent four months going back and forth with this private equity firm. We sign the documents, you know, my lawyer calls me in, quivering hand, I sign sign the documents.

And the wires supposed to come in the next day. And so I wake up. I go to my local bank branch, I go to the ATM and I look at the balance. My balance is the same. And I think okay, it's probably gonna come in later, so I check later, nothing.

Next day. Nothing. Next day, nothing. I call the guy at the private equity firm and he goes Hey man. I'm really sorry, but we weren't able to uh finish closing our fund. So the deal's not done. So I legally sold the business.

And if the wire had come in, I would my business would be worth Maybe nothing at this point, because this was the entire foundation of the business. And we would be we would be tiny. So we almost lost it all. What do you think it's worth now, Meta Lab? I don't know hundreds of millions for sure. But I don't I don't know. Just

One decision. Actually you made the decision. And it's and it was all driven by anxiety, right? It's panic. Every I'm sure every one of you that runs a business Everyone knows how miserable it is inside, right? I've you talk to people, you look at them on the outside, you go, they're an amazing operator, they have a great business. But on the inside. There's a great quote by Brent B Short. Every business is a slow motion knife fight.

Right. Like you just wake up in the morning, you're sweating and you're fighting trying to survive, right? And we felt that way and we pushed through. Did you before you sold the hustle The hub spot. Did you ever

Almost so did you come close to selling before that? So when I was running the company, I was miserable most every time. So if you go on like I'm not sure if I'm Facebook or Instagram, look at my pictures from like two thousand and seventeen and eighteen. I was lumpy. I was like Pretty fat. Uh and I was like'cause I was eating all the time to like make myself feel better. So I was miserable most of the time. And then this one company emailed me.

to uh they showed interest in buying and so I flow fly all the way out to New York. And I start talking to'em and I get in their office. And like it's empty. And I'm like, Where is everyone? And they're like, Oh, they're doing stuff and I'm and they take me to a an office to have the meeting.

And I look in the windows of each office. And they're in a every employee is in a sexual harassment seminar because the CMO had just like You know, gone off the rails and did a bunch of bad shit. Um and so they get me in a room, they like send me a term sheet. And they're like, Well buy your company for ten million dollars.

But it's gonna be all in stock. And I was like, Well Show me the financials and like let me see what's going on with your business and and I got a peek in it and The company was Vice, Vice Media. Which means that deal, I was so close to taking it, it would be worth zero. I'd probably be in debt'cause if I like

The valuation has just plummeted. And so I almost took that because I was so like desperate to get out. The sexual harassment seminar almost saved you. It did. Yeah. You're a survivor. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

I put my law in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back