June 15, 2026 – Built Ready to Sell Jonathan Sherrill and Thrive Fred Marshall

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there. I’m having a really nice day. I just found out that The Real Environmentalist book was selected as a finalist for the Independent Association of. or wait, Association of Independent Publishers, I think, is it? Anyway, finalist in the award is one of the most prestigious awards out there for books. So I’m really honored and excited. Thank you. First up today we have Jonathan Sherrill. He is going to talk about getting ready to exit. How do you get your business ready to sell, that’s the ultimate goal that all of us have. Well, maybe it’s not. I certainly want to get out of the business at some point and sell it. And then we have Fred Marshall, who has got a new book on how to create a thriving future for yourself. And we have a long great conversation. I was really excited about it, and his book cover is one of my favorites out there, it’s got Panda Bear on the cover with the saddest eyes, and it just looks.. it makes the point immediately. And so I just wanted to throw that out there. I really liked it. And we are on billionaire alert, that’s right. We have a billionaire coming up in the next week or so. I can’t tell you who or when, but we do have a billionaire in the very, very near future, so I’m always excited when that happens, you know. The no one does it better than a billionaire. They got there somehow, some way, and so we have to honor that. And I’m excited anyway. Great big show today. We’re gonna get started in just a second. Bye, bye, bye. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us today. This is a really cool story. I am excited to share it with you. Our next guest, Jonathan Sherrill, has done some really cool things. He bought an out-of-business shuttered sawmill, you know, where they cut up wood, totally dead. He bought it, rebuilt it, went through the Inc 5000 growth targets. In other words, he was growing super, super fast. And then he was able to sell the business all within four years. He is now taking that knowledge with a company called Waypoint and helping other entrepreneurs figure out how to have success through the various parts of their business. He has taken all of that knowledge and put it into a new book called The Extraordinary Exit: How to Sell Your Business for Maximum value, protect your legacy, and walk away with no regrets. Sue, the no regrets part is hard. Jonathan Cheryl, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Jonathon Sherrill 3:09
Thank you, Jim. I appreciate you having me here. Doing great.

Jim Beach 3:12
So, did I get the sawmill story right?

Jonathon Sherrill 3:15
Well, you got part of it right. Yes, I would add to it, though. I did not go into the sawmill business, I took that old shutdown sawmill and refurbished it and renovated everything, and then we started manufacturing steel building components in that facility. So it was not in the wood industry, it was more in the steel construction component industry.

Jim Beach 3:39
Okay. Well, that makes sense. You could use the building, whatever value it has. It’s a little making their steel, what’s

Jonathon Sherrill 3:47
so we call it steel building components. So everything from the metal roofing, the steel framing, entire engineered steel building packages. So you’ll see these buildings, such as public storage or extra space, like these multi-story self-storage you see in the cities, that’s a lot of the components in there are things that we manufactured, and we also did like the smaller, like backyard steel building structures, well, the 30 by 40s, and things like that.

Jim Beach 4:18
Okay, why did you choose that space for the facility. There had to be a very well thought out plan behind all of that.

Jonathon Sherrill 4:27
Yes, so that requires a lot of space when you manufacture those components. The machines are very large, there’s a lot of inventory that has to be staged, and then they’re lay down yards where the finished product is staged and loaded, so you need a lot of acreage, and you also need a lot of square footage of building space, and those are not just readily available, and they’re very costly to build from scratch, you know, to green fields, so finding an old industrial facility that you can. Acquire for a reasonable rate and fix it up is much, a much better way to go, if you can find those.

Jim Beach 5:07
Okay, so you decided you wanted to make steel construction parts, and then you went out and found a facility that would accommodate that.

Jonathon Sherrill 5:16
That’s correct. Yes. Why

Jim Beach 5:18
did you decide you wanted to make steel construction parts?

Jonathon Sherrill 5:21
So, when I was 14 years old, I was raised on West Coast of Florida. My dad started a metal roofing manufacturing business, and when he started that, I started working with him the day he opened. After school, I would go in and fold steel parts and load customers, that’s Gulf Coast Supply. Yes, and I worked there with him until 2010 and I was in my mid 20s, and he wanted to sell the business, so when he went to market, I helped him sell it, and ended up working for the private equity company who bought his company, and worked there for another six years, learned a lot about how New York private equity thinks about running a business, which some things are great and some things are not so great, but really learn to see what an investor is looking for in a business. So, when I left there in 2017 started Quicken Skill in 2018 I took that knowledge and those years of experience and built the company sort of from day one as a ready to sell company, and that’s a distinction that’s important, because a lot of companies kind of run just as an entrepreneurial company, you’re you’re kind of the chief cook and bottle washer, and, and there’s a lot of, a lot of things that can are great in the business, but to a buyer, if it has what we call founder risk, that’s a big concern, and you’re not going to get the most value out of your business, but if you build it to sale from day one, that means you’re not putting all the responsibility on yourself, you’re hiring people and putting systems in place to really make this a marketable, self-sustaining business.

Jim Beach 7:07
The founder’s problem,

Jonathon Sherrill 7:10
founder risk. Yes,

Jim Beach 7:11
explain what is that. They’re gonna come back to the fact, I want it back.

Jonathon Sherrill 7:16
Well, that’s normally not the case. That can’t happen. No, when we say founder risk in the M&A space, or the mergers and acquisition lingo, founder risk means the business relies on the founder in order to operate. Here’s the test: if you can’t leave your business for a month and it survived without you and do well, that you have found a risk, right? So the risk of the founder not being there, that means if you want to sell your business, someone’s not going to give you a premium for it if it’s not running without you already.

Jim Beach 7:51
I have a favorite story for that, Jonathan. When I started my first business back in the 90s, there was a period I was in Hawaii for about a week, and when I checked out the telephone portion of the bill was larger than the other entire bill, the rest of the bill, we had a suite at the same resort where Bill Gates got married, we had a suite there and 12 hour a day daycare for the baby, so we could relax, and my telephone bill was higher than all of that, and then three years later we went to Turkey and Greece, and when I came back from that trip, the office was running 10 times better than when I left, and I talked to them the entire time.

Jonathon Sherrill 8:36
Very interesting, that’s that’s a great example.

Jim Beach 8:39
So I think that in those two or three years things got better, wouldn’t you? We built absolutely that actually worked,

Jonathon Sherrill 8:45
that’s the key right there. Absolutely, yes, I think a lot of it too is just being willing to let go and and trust people to do the job and train them, and you know, sometimes it’s it takes time and and it’s extra work to train someone to do something that you do, and so it’s we fall into the trap of it’s just easier to do it myself, right? Sure, and that’s that’s what keeps a lot of people from taking that step, trusting people, or maybe I’m really good at sales, so I never really want to let go of that and hire someone to run sales. Well, that’s fine, but there is found a risk attached to that, right. We

Jim Beach 9:23
were, I think, at six locations when I went to Hawaii, and when we went to Turkey and Greece, I think we were at 80 locations. So you can run six locations by yourself, you can’t run 80 locations of anything by yourself.

Jonathon Sherrill 9:40
That’s so true, and that’s an impressive business, that’s that’s a lot going on with 80 locations.

Jim Beach 9:46
Yeah, we added up to 89 before we sold it, so

Jonathon Sherrill 9:49
impressive. Wow,

Jim Beach 9:50
so you know, I think there’s a huge distinction here too. You built your business to sell this, and that’s why I was so interested in the last line of your. The last part of your subtitle, the no regrets. I still regret selling that business from the 90s, because it still feels like I sold a child, where you’re like, buy it, buy it, buy it, take my hands, you know? I just love the attitude difference, and so many entrepreneurs go in, I want to sell it, but then they end up loving it as their soul, because it’s the ultimate validation of their success and their ability as a human, and then to walk away from it produces some tears in many people.

Jonathon Sherrill 10:30
It does absolutely, and that’s that’s a very big challenge for people. Some people know they need to sell their business, you know, for various reasons, but it’s their baby, like you said, it’s their identity is tied to it, like, who am I if I sell this business three months later and I’m at a dinner party and I meet someone and they say, “Hey, my name’s Jim, what? And I’m Jonathan, what do you do? Well,

Jim Beach 10:56
sold a business, what do I

Jonathon Sherrill 10:57
do? Who am I, right? I no longer have the title, I no longer have the business. No one’s relying on me anymore, and that I think that responsibility of providing jobs and taking care of families and community and relevance is a much bigger deal than some people even realize. You know, to your point, there’s a statistic out there that says within a year of selling, 75% of founders profoundly regret selling their business, and that there’s a lot of reasons for that. It’s not just because it was their baby, sometimes they just got a bad deal or didn’t hire the right team to represent them and help them sell their business. So, there’s a lot of reasons that fall into that category, and that’s a lot of what I work with founders on now, is to try to help them avoid that kind of regret. Ultimately,

Jim Beach 11:49
are we the demographic experts tell us that we’re going to have a huge plethora of businesses run by 64 year old guys, 72 year old women who are ready to get out, and their kids don’t want it, but the business is a great business, and I think, are you seeing, are you thinking that there’s going to be just tons of business opportunities as the older baby boomer generation gets ready for the next phase of life,

Jonathon Sherrill 12:19
that’s what we’re seeing, and it makes so much sense on paper. There’s so many – the huge percentage of the entrepreneurial businesses out there are owned by baby boomers, and you’re right, the ones that don’t have a solid succession plan in place. There’s a lot of quality businesses that need a good buyer, but they’re not ready to sell, you know. There’s a lot of things that they can do to get ready to sell, but when yet they’ve been running it for 20 3040 years the same way they’ve always done it, with old, without systems in place, and founder risk, and all the things, if they would spend, you know, a little time, maybe a year or two, working with someone to prepare that thing, it could be worth multiples more than what it would be worth as is to a buyer, and I’ll tell you, buyers, private equity strategic buyers are desperate for deals, and so they’re willing to pay a premium, but it has to be a business that’s ready to be invested in and acquired.

Jim Beach 13:20
All right, How do I get my business ready to do just that? So I want to hire you, come in, and within a year, let’s, you know, change up whatever we need to do to get it ready. What’s what are we going to do in that year?

Jonathon Sherrill 13:34
Well, I would say the first step when it, when I talk with someone about this is we don’t really talk a lot about the business, believe it or not. The first thing we work on is himself and the personal side of this, figuring out why you want to sell it. And for a baby boomers, it might be pretty obvious, but it could be health matters, it could be family, it could be I’m just tired. There’s a lot of reasons, right? But getting to the core and the truth on that is a lot simpler, or a lot more complicated than just what’s the first answer that comes to mind, and I like to take.. I

Jim Beach 14:08
know I want to retire to Florida, you know, that’s

Jonathon Sherrill 14:10
right,

Jim Beach 14:11
that’s isn’t that the common,

Jonathon Sherrill 14:14
yeah, right, that’s the answer that you’ll hear, and then I like to take people through a process, I mean, maybe that is the reason, but many times I go through what I call the seven levels of why, and that’s something I talk about in the book, is that the same

Jim Beach 14:27
with things as the seven levels of hell.

Jonathon Sherrill 14:30
It’s, I’m not familiar with that. It could very well be, but it’s basically, for example, and we’ll do a real short version of this, but someone says, I want to sell my, I want to sell my business. I say, why do you want to sell your business? They say, I want to move to Florida. Okay, that’s the first answer. So, second level would be, you want to sell your business because you want to move to Florida. Why do you want to move to Florida? Right, and then it gets you keep getting further down to the truth, and by the time you get. Level four or five or six, you’re at a very emotional truth level, and then once that’s established, then you go to the next, the next set of questioning, but that is very important to understand that, right, because you’re what’s going to happen is when you sell your business, it’s going to be probably the hardest year you’ve ever worked, so here you are, tired, ready to retire, but you’re about to have to really work hard to pull this thing together to get maximum value out of it. So, there’s a lot of opportunities to give up, or just kind of say, “Well, just I want to quit this process, it’s too much work. So, you got to guess really solid on why you’re doing it, and have a strong enough reason to carry you through those tough times, and so that’s the personal side of it, is what I like to work with people on first, and then understanding their must-haves and their like to haves, and you know, figuring out who they need to work with next, do they need to work with, get their accounting fixed up, and have a good CPA come in and do a quality of earnings or an audit, or are they lacking in systems? There’s just a plethora of things that need to be looked at before ever going to market, and then making sure that they hire the right sell side advisor. I’m not a sell side advisor, which is might be called a broker or investment banker, but that’s it’s all the same thing, and that’s not what I do, but I will make sure that we find the right one to represent them, because that can make the difference in millions of dollars just by getting the right people to represent you.

Jim Beach 16:34
Yes, very true. And by the way, plethora is one of our like winning words, you get 12 points added to your score for using the word plethora. Double down if you say veritable plethora. Oh, wow, that is sort of being phased out. We replaced that with neuroplasticity as our favorite word for on the show here. So, just to keep you up to speed, John hit on our word scoring system,

Jonathon Sherrill 17:04
that is good to know. I guess the trick is not telling you ahead of time, right? So,

Jim Beach 17:08
yes, all

Jonathon Sherrill 17:09
right.

Jim Beach 17:10
Well, we really love the word neuroplasticity. We’re hoping that someone can figure out how to run it all into one phase, a veritable plethora of neuroplasticity. It’s not just not 100% yet.

Jonathon Sherrill 17:24
That’s hilarious. No, I love that. That is really cool. All

Jim Beach 17:28
right, are we gonna fire people? What are we going to do? Go to the actual business. So we’ve got sort of all that laid down, got a great sales side rep lined up. What are we going to do next?

Jonathon Sherrill 17:46
Well, the process of once you start working with the sell side advisor, and here’s what I did: I hired a coach before I ever hired a sell side advisor, and my coach did with me what I’m now doing with other people, and that’s really working through that stuff that we talked about a minute ago, the personal side, but also really holding the hand of the person going through it. So my coach connected me with my sell side advisor, and the first steps we did was figuring out what a baseline valuation for the business is, what’s common in the marketplace for what this business could and should be worth as is, and then they start building out what we call a confidential information memorandum, which, for in short, is we call it SIM, and that is everything important about the business at a glance. Within five minutes, interested buyers should be able to read this document and understand the business, what it does, its value, its unique, you know, selling proposition, and also, you know, the the geographical coverage and the opportunities. Why this is a good investment, that’s what you’re trying to work on, and it took us months to put this together. This was a very important piece to the document, and then, of course, the sell-side advisor is going to take you through a process of putting this out to interested parties and really creating a what we call a kind of an auction environment. It’s not a typical option, but it’s that you ultimately buyers end up bidding for your business, and that’s an ideal situation. That’s where that real true added value comes in. But you know, I walk through all of the steps ideal, I get pretty vulnerable in the book and take people behind the curtain on what steps we took in my business in pretty good detail, all the way from hiring the sell side advisor all the way through and after the exit. So that’s too much to talk about in a short call, but a lot of detail, and it’s all in the book.

Jim Beach 19:58
Well, it worked out well here. In my notes, it says he sold the business for $6.9 trillion and that’s pretty impressive, Jonathan. You know, I’m thinking that might be a typo, that might be a typo. Yeah,

Jonathon Sherrill 20:10
maybe an extra zero there needs to be removed, but we got a good deal, be $690

Jim Beach 20:16
billion

Jonathon Sherrill 20:18
right?

Jim Beach 20:21
Damn impressive, Jonathan.

Jonathon Sherrill 20:24
Yeah, we would.. I don’t know, that would be quite a day. And with all the typo,

Jim Beach 20:29
and blame it on your publicist,

Jonathon Sherrill 20:31
with all the AI IPOs, who knows what we’re going to see in the near future with some of these guys. But no, my deal was a lot less than that. But it was a.. I will say this, by hiring the right people, hiring a coach, hired my sell side advisor, who was tremendous. He actually co-authored the book with me, and by doing that, we, the number we wrote down that we believe both of us that the business was worth when we went to market, we got double when it was all said and done.

Jim Beach 21:01
Well, talk about that, because that’s really surprising. First, I want to drop one statistic on you mentioned IPO, and we’re all hearing about the SpaceX IPO. I heard a stat yesterday. Do you know how many times they have taken their number one, their design, like their workhorse, and then launched it, and then caught it with those chopsticks things that we’ve all seen. How many times do you think that’s happened now?

Jonathon Sherrill 21:29
I don’t know. Yes, Jonathan, maybe, maybe 15

Jim Beach 21:35
547 times they have done that now.

Jonathon Sherrill 21:39
Oh my goodness, impressive.

Jonathon Sherrill 21:41
No idea, no

Jim Beach 21:43
idea. So, anyway, their IPO, I think, is going to go very well, because they’ve done that one thing 550 times, which is the hardest thing I can think of, catching a rocket ship with chopsticks. But back to your sales price now. See, I would think that you’re manufacturing construction parts, and that would be a very, very easy number to figure out. It’s worth 15 million, because there’s other factories around the country, and you can multiply exactly what your sales or your production is going to be, and you know what you’ll sell it for. You know, it seems to me that there’s lots and lots of data and metrics, as opposed to say selling a consulting firm, or you know, something more fear ephemeral that doesn’t really have a set price. It seems like your industry would have more data than almost any other. It seems like so, how’d you get double that? That’s you understand the whole,

Jonathon Sherrill 22:36
yeah, absolutely. Well, a couple things. Now, partly the business was growing at a very fast pace, and my process

Jim Beach 22:44
a full

Jonathon Sherrill 22:45
year from the time I hired my sell side advisor until we closed.

Jim Beach 22:50
Okay,

Jonathon Sherrill 22:51
full year, so I had a lot of growth rate. We also had a tremendous backlog that was secured with down payments from our customers. We, it was probably a nine month backlog, so the buyers saw that this is a lot of businesses sell when they’re kind of tired, if you will, and this was a very thriving, fast growing business, and they saw that upside, and they also saw the synergies, and that’s where the strategic buyer is a big deal, because if it’s a financial buyer, which is like private equity, right, they’re looking to buy a deal for a bargain, so they can flip it in a few years, whereas a strategic buyer typically needs and wants your business, because it’s going to check a big box in their existing company, and it might be that they need your manufacturing capabilities to make them a more dominant player in the market that they’re serving, or it could be the other end of it, where they want to supply you all the, in our case, steel raw material, and they, they haven’t gotten our business, so they’ll, they’ll also get the business of selling us product and gaining all the profit and margin and growth that comes with buying this business, so it locks it in. That’s a win-win-win, and that’s the synergies that strategics are willing to pay a premium for.

Jim Beach 24:10
Tell us about Waypoint Founders, your new business helping other founder operators. What are the spectrum of services you offer?

Jonathon Sherrill 24:23
Yes, I work with founders who are at a range of thinking about selling their business all the way through working with founders who have sold their business and now they’re living in the what do I do now, who am I now situation, right? So I love to work with people who are thinking about selling their business and work with them on figuring out the best path forward. How to prepare mentally, emotionally, their family – they’re a lot of them have employees that are like family, and how do I take care of them and not put them in bad hands? So, you got a lot of founders don’t. Have experience selling businesses, they, many of them, have never done it. It’ll be their biggest deal of their lifetime, business-wise, and they don’t know where to start. And there’s a lot of sharks in the water that will take advantage of them, and a lot of people, especially brokers, want to get them in, get them a sale, and move on to the next one, and they’ll, that’s where the regrets come in. Advisors and coach them through the entire process while they’re going through the sale, and and Waypoint is a community of founders who connect even after their sale, so there’s a real issue. Even I went through this, where after you sell, everything goes quiet. The industry moves on without you. You’re not needed anymore. Your titles are gone, and you wake up on a Tuesday morning at 10am and you’re like, Who am I? You know, like, what do I do now? So, there’s a real important piece to needing to be able to give back and to first significance and to kind of help the next guy in line, and so that’s something that Waypoint provides, is it’s a peer network.

Jim Beach 26:09
It is very hard for a man, particularly when your identity disappears, no matter how that happens. Oh,

Jonathon Sherrill 26:16
yes,

Jim Beach 26:17
we have to learn how to, what to call ourselves,

Jonathon Sherrill 26:22
so true.

Jim Beach 26:23
Yes, my family has a very hard time trying to describe what I do. Absolutely, very impressive. Jonathan, you have done it all absolutely right. And congratulations on the incredible success. And thank you for sharing it, and for writing the book, and the intimacy that it offers. It is five star rated on that Amazon place, The Extraordinary Exit: How to Sell Your Business for Maximum Value, Protect Your Legacy, and Walk Away with No Regrets. Other than that, How else would you like us to reach out to you, Jonathan Vine? Learn more about you.

Jonathon Sherrill 27:00
Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. And you can go to my website, it’s Waypoint founders.com I’m also active on LinkedIn, just Jonathan Cheryl, that’s the best way. And then, of course, on the Waypoint founders.com site, you can find my book on there as well, or anywhere that’s major booksellers, it’s pretty much available in audio, you know, Kindle and hard cup, hardcover as well. So,

Jim Beach 27:27
Jonathan, Cheryl, thank you so much. And we’d love to have you back. Great stuff. Thanks a lot.

Jonathon Sherrill 27:31
Thank you so much, Jim.

Jim Beach 27:32
And we will be right back, you

Intro 2 27:50
Well, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question. Actually, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio

Jim Beach 28:13
We are back, and again, thank you so very, very much for being with us today. Very excited to introduce my first guest, he has had an amazing impact and has worked with companies like Apple, Pfizer, and Genentech. He is a pioneer in identifying research-based behavioral patterns of top performers, looking at the top groups out there, studying them, and then figuring out how to apply that at scale across the entire company, and through that, he has built billions in brand growth. He has been recognized as a change management expert, and he has also helped launch new brands. His company, Quantum Learning, has launched 74 brands in the bio pharma space, new drugs, new pharmaceuticals, things like that, that has generated billions in sales. He has personally worked with 130,000 people in 14 countries, working on their sales and Salesforce effectiveness. Very impressive. Fred Marshall, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Fred Marshall 29:15
I’m doing great, thank you. How are you?

Jim Beach 29:17
I am wonderful. Wonderful, just to let you know, I went to college on the profits that my mom and dad made investing in Genentech. He was a doctor, a farm pathologist, and he invested in Genentech well before the IPO. Amazing money. So, thank you very much for helping them.

Fred Marshall 29:37
You’re welcome. You’re welcome. There’s a lot of good things that happened out of Genentech in South San Francisco, for sure.

Jim Beach 29:43
Yes, I didn’t. I’m sorry, I didn’t mention the book clearly enough. He’s author of a new book called Thrive: The Antidote to Future Shock, and it has perhaps my favorite cover of all time. It has a panda, a freaked-out panda bear on the cover, wearing some sort of. Oh, is that an electric shock head bait in

Fred Marshall 30:03
future? Back to the future sunglasses was what we were thinking. Okay,

Jim Beach 30:10
good. Did you help design the cover? Yeah, a little bit, little bit. So I just love the book. The cover is fantastic. Where’d you get the inspiration for the cover? The panda bears with his eyes freaked out. Tell me about where the cover design and the word or just the feeling behind it came from.

Fred Marshall 30:33
Well, you know, so many people that I know are feeling overwhelmed by all the changes happening in the world we live in. The attention economy, you know, you can’t go online or, or it’s make two steps forward without getting a ping or an email or some kind of distracting event, and so most of us are feeling like, what the heck is going on? How do I thrive in this crazy world? And so we thought the panda kind of expressed that notion of, oh my god, you know, the classic wtf moment that I think a lot of us are feeling and living in right now.

Jim Beach 31:06
Have you seen the series of graduation videos showing graduates just yelling and booing the speaker because the speaker had the audacity to say AI or something, even close to that.

Fred Marshall 31:22
Yeah, I think I have. I think it all started with Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. Yeah, he didn’t get very far at all before people were, you know, shouting him down because he was extolling the virtues of AI, and that’s not where the audience was at all. They were, they’re feeling stressed and feeling like the future is running away from them, and that they’ve studied so hard and worked so hard to create this career path, and now AI is blowing it up, and so it was.. it was a defining moment. I think

Fred Marshall 31:54
has happened.. I don’t know how a bunch of times,

Jim Beach 31:58
right? Yeah,

Fred Marshall 32:00
I think.

Jim Beach 32:01
go ahead. Sorry,

Fred Marshall 32:03
I just could say the great irony is that the AI is both, you know, the problem and the solution, and that’s what makes it really hard to swallow for a lot of people, because it’s wrecking, you know, their lives, it’s destroying their plans, and at the same time, it’s not going away. Evidently,

Jim Beach 32:22
I had a guest about a week ago who dropped the statistic 96% of AI projects have no ROI out of the 500

Fred Marshall 32:34
Yeah, I think that that’s the wrong time horizon. We’re in the early days, and it’s going to be incredibly productive in the future, and it’s a good startup mentality too, because when you start a company, you know the first few years are really rough, and it, that first million dollars is the hardest million dollars to make, and some people spend 456 10 years trying to get to that first million, but then once you get going, oh my goodness, things really start to rock and roll, and so I think it’s a time frame problem.

Jim Beach 33:14
Yes, I can 10 years from now we’ll still have that kind of ROI, but what do you say to the 20 year olds who are freaking out, can’t buy a house and get a job, and AI is a very easy adversary. What it

Fred Marshall 33:33
is, well, you know, part of me wants to say just ignore AI and live your life. I think maybe a more pressing problem for everybody, but especially for people, young people who are graduating college, that’s they’re about to graduate. The problem is that everything that you learn how to do is not going to be relevant in four or five years, not everything, but a lot of the things, and so the superpower to develop is the ability to learn fast and adapt fast. That’s not a comfortable thing to do, and I empathize with that, because I started my career as a biochemist and a molecular biologist, and had to completely pivot and go into marketing and sales, which I turned out loving way more than being at a lab bench doing lab work, but it was a hard transition, and it gets back to, you know, how, how big is your timeline? Because I think, I think a lot of us feel like we don’t have enough time, but that’s really not true. We have lots and lots of time. What’s most important is to manage where you put your attention, you know, if you put your attention, for example, on negative news feeds and everything that’s not working in your life, you know that’s a prescription for peeling, feeling depressed and bummed out, and, and you know, having your energy evaporate, but if you focus on the stuff that’s working, what you can control, surround yourself with great. People, then the inputs into your life will give you the energy and the power to get through pretty much anything, and so I would say manage where you put your attention, that’s the most important thing, and focus it on what you want, not what other people say you should want.

Jim Beach 35:17
In the book, you have three different sections, parts, and the first one is talking about the internal journey. Is that what you were just referring to? Quit the negative feeds, pay attention. Yeah, focusing on choose the people you talk to. I mean, what do you.. is that the.. what is the internal journey, and where do I want it to go, how much does it cost to upgrade to business class?

Fred Marshall 35:43
It costs a lot to upgrade to business class, but it’s worth it if you can do it. I think that that the the internal journey is the first step in any kind of change process, and when the world around you is shifting, we have to start with what’s going on inside our minds and upgrade the mindset that we have, where we put our attention, the people we surround ourselves with, and the systems we build to manage the different pieces of our lives. I’m a big believer in building systems and surrounding yourself with people that align with the future that you want, and make sure you’ve got that connectivity going. So, if you want to be an entrepreneur, okay, hang out with people who are starting companies, hang out with people who have money to invest, go to, you know, associations, read books, subscribe to podcasts. Create your own personal ecosystem that aligns with the future that you want. That’s the internal journey, but do that because it shapes, because what you surround yourself with shapes your mind, shapes your choices, shape your habits, and ultimately shape the outcomes that you get, and that’s really the first step.

Jim Beach 37:03
What do you mean systems for your mindset and your life? Help me understand that. How do I have a mindset system?

Fred Marshall 37:13
So they’re two separate things. Mindsets are things like having an investment mindset, having an abundance mindset, having a contribution mindset. Most people focus on what they want for themselves. A contribution mindset says focus on what you can contribute to others.

Jim Beach 37:32
I think we out of style, Fred. I think that’s really it’s almost illegal now,

Fred Marshall 37:39
but it’s the secret to success, you know. If you want, if you want people to care about you, care about them. If you want value to come to you, create value for others. It’s pretty simple math. And so those mindsets, I think, are the beginning, the foundation. And let’s talk about the investment mindset for a minute, because that’s maybe the first and most important one to adopt. You know, I tell the story of a daughter named Harper. She’s about four years old, and she wants to go and show her dad a drawing that she just made, and she goes into to get his attention, and he’s got his iPhone in his hands, he’s watching a football match, a soccer match, Man City playing against his favorite team, and he’s so absorbed in the game, he doesn’t even see her. He’s investing his attention in a team that’s literally 1000s of miles away, and his daughter, who’s literally six or seven feet in front of them is invisible, whatever we put our attention to, that’s what we’re investing in. And so, in that moment, Harper gets the signal, “Okay, Dad’s not interested in me, and she turns and goes back into the kitchen. It’s like, if you make those choices, you know, you get certain outcomes, and so deciding what you’re going to invest in, especially your attention, your time, your energy. It’s the most important thing you can do. And we need to invest in relationships, we need to invest in systems that simplify our life and help you make you more productive. And we also need to invest in, you know, your own mind, your own capability. So that’s the first thing you know, the whole mindset idea. The second piece, though, is the power of systems. I think most people underestimate how incredible this world that we live in today is. You can build systems that are like NASA level quality systems to do almost everything you want, whether it’s, you know, pre-ordering. I don’t

Jim Beach 39:45
know what you’re talking about yet. Are you talking about a system to my brushing my teeth in the morning? Everything exactly, exactly what you mean about systems for my daily life.

Fred Marshall 39:56
So, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, you need to have a system for. Finding new customers, that system has a lot of moving parts to it. Sure, you can build that system and dial it in. A system for, you know, identifying customers, a system for reaching out to customers, a system for educating customers, a system for onboarding customers. Those are systems we have. A system for doing laundry in our house. I have a system for keeping my garden watered, the more systems that you have that run automatically in the background, the more you can do and become in a lifetime. And so, really, dialing in the systems that you’re using is kind of a magic

Jim Beach 40:34
amplifier system happen in the background, that means you just have a good wife who makes your drawers disappear,

Fred Marshall 40:39
that’s one way. The other way is just have a laundry chute that goes straight down from the bedroom, right into a laundry basket, and then every Monday and every Friday run a load, boom, boom, like clockwork, and that’s it. In between, you ignore it completely. So, but that’s the internal journey, and then the next journey, which you’re alluding to, is the external journey, and that’s all about the book.

Jim Beach 41:09
Talk about that future of your life.

Fred Marshall 41:13
Yeah, so that’s about taking everything that you learn in the internal journey, which is to how to manage your attention, what people are worth surrounding yourself with, because the right people really do simplify everything, curating what you let into your life, the news feeds, the data sources, that what you read, all the things that shape your mind, the external journey is putting that into practice, and that includes, you know, how do you develop relationships with amazing people who can change your future, and there are lots of levels of relationships. The first level, or kind of the people that you’re intimate with, you know, my wife, and maybe a handful of people who I could tell my deepest secrets to, my greatest ambitions, my deepest fears. Tell us your

Jim Beach 42:00
deepest secret, Fred.

Fred Marshall 42:01
My deepest secret is that I’m an obsessive compulsive gardener, and I love to be in the garden more than anything else. But then friends and family, that’s kind of the next ring out of relationships that we all have, you know, people you’re going through life with. The next ring are experts, people with deep expertise, and things you’re going to need, and that’s everything from, you know, a plumber to somebody who can, you know, a handy person, or your physician, your primary care physician, people who, when you need help, you can make a phone call and get it solved. The third level, or the fourth level are catalysts, you know. I have a personal trainer, and she’s a catalyst for my growth. I have friends who challenge me and push me and share new information with me. Those catalysts for growth can be transformative in your life. When I was young, when I was 18, my dad died of a heart attack suddenly, and so I kind of naturally sought out mentors and people who could fill that gap, you know, and that really paid off in a big way. Those mentors saved years, and they pushed me far, you know, much harder and farther than I would have pushed myself, like a trainer, you know. You always do a better workout with somebody pushing you than you do by yourself. Sure. Yes. And then the last level are people who can open doors to entirely new worlds, you know. Just to give a concrete example, I was a biochemist, but I wanted to go into marketing and sales, and I bumped into somebody who happened to be the, he happened to be the head of research at Smith Klein Beckman. I told him I wanted to go into marketing and sales, and he says, “Well, let me make a phone call for you. He made a phone call, and suddenly I was in sales. Boom, just like that, you know, there are people like that in the world, where they can make a phone call and open a door to an entirely different destiny. Cultivating that intentionally, I think, is really important, and so the external journey is all about how do you get stuff done in a world that’s changing super fast.

Jim Beach 44:23
Last, and then the last in Act Three of the book, you talk about the da, the dawn of the human AI symbiosis. Symbiotic means mutually beneficial, I think, right?

Fred Marshall 44:35
Yeah, yeah.

Jim Beach 44:37
How is the mutually beneficial? Like, I helped the AI take over the world. Type, is that what you mean? Or I take it a gun and plug it into a new thing that allows permanent energy forever.

Fred Marshall 44:51
Yeah, maybe you’re Dr. Evil. Perhaps you know the idea for human and. Symbiosis came to me one day when I was doing something with Chat GPT, and I got the feeling that it was finishing my sentences for me in a good way. You know, how you have a friend and you can just tell where they’re going, sure, and they can tell where you’re going. It’s kind of nice because you can talk shorthand with them, and I was starting to get that feeling with Chat GPT, and I thought, well, that’s interesting. What if I push this to the extreme limit? So, the extreme limit is I have a neural net, my brain, and I can use that brain to do things what I want to do and live my life, but wouldn’t be cool if I had another brain that never slept, that worked 24/7 that remembered everything I ever told it, because my memory is terrible. What if we could collaborate, and I could create agents using that second brain that would go and do stuff in the background to free me up to do the stuff that I want to do. You know, a simple example would be triage my email. I get about 250 emails a day, a lot of it’s noise. Wouldn’t it be great if AI could just scan that and say, “Oh, this is noise, these are the five relevant emails that you need to attend to right away. That kind of collaboration can be transformative, and that’s this sort of a basic example. But you can take that to whatever level you want, and we’re going to do that over the next three to five years, for sure.

Jim Beach 46:22
Yes, didn’t Chat GPT announce that the newest version would have a memory? When you sign in, it will say, How did the presentation go that we designed last week?

Fred Marshall 46:37
Yeah, yeah, I think so. You know, the context window is one way of referring to it, is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and then there’s a separate area where you can store things, you can upload files that you want it to have, and obviously you don’t want to load in things that you don’t want it to know about, social security numbers, bank records, those things are off limits, so you have to have guardrails, but the more you load in, the more helpful it becomes, just like you know, just like the more you tell your physician, the better partner they can be in your health. I kind of see it that way.

Jim Beach 47:13
All right, problem is the physician doesn’t talk with the other six physicians that you have, and none of them have a clue what’s going on with the other pieces,

Fred Marshall 47:22
yeah. Wouldn’t it be cool if AI could triage that and manage those interconnections? That would be pretty great. Maybe three

Jim Beach 47:29
years, you find out that Dr. A has prescribed you a drug that has the exact opposite effect of drug B that you’re on from Dr. B, you know? Yeah, so it’s a perfect world,

Fred Marshall 47:45
yeah, yeah, that’s the ideal outcome. I know we all want, yeah, preventing those kinds of mistakes is super important, for sure.

Jim Beach 47:57
Yes, what are you using the AI for, Fred? What have been your greatest discoveries of things that it can do for you?

Fred Marshall 48:06
You know, I use AI for a whole bunch of different things. One of the most exciting areas is I own a little bit of Nvidia stock, and I worry that, you know, the stock might go down because the demand for those chips might go away, and so I asked Chat GPT to build a model that looks at all the forces that might impact demand for Nvidia chips and all the forces that impact the supply of Nvidia chips, and build this thing, scan every single website, all the reports, all the stock analysts, everything. It scrapes the world and gives me a report every Friday. It has a staggering amount of information in it, and I had it condense it down to a red light, yellow light, green light dashboard across four or five areas, and I can just go on Friday, it’s like, oh, okay, green here, oop, yellow here, green here, yellow here, yellow here. All right, proceed with caution, but stay in. It’s it simplifies things and handles all the complexity in the background for me, and I really, really love it. And I look at it every Friday at 5o’clock I get a ping, and it shows up and it’s like there’s a dashboard, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, stay the course.

Jim Beach 49:26
So, have you seen a marketplace for that yet? Because that’s something that I want. Okay, I want to watch or do that too. And so I would pay you 20 bucks for that. And have you discovered that yet? Where we start trading agents for fees amongst ourselves.

Fred Marshall 49:43
I think it’s probably going to happen at some point.

Jim Beach 49:46
Has to happen, I think. So,

Fred Marshall 49:49
I, you know, the model that I see coming is just like you have software as a service, and or or movies. You can download the movie that you want to watch. I think we’ll have agency, you can. Download that you want to use for a week, and then you’re done with them, or you can keep using them and pay a monthly fee, whatever that is. Maybe it’s pennies, or you can build your own.

Jim Beach 50:10
I don’t want to build mine, I just want yours.

Fred Marshall 50:12
Yeah, well, for a small fee market

Jim Beach 50:15
for that. I bet if you were to throw that up right now at $20 each, that 1000 Nvidia people would buy it,

Fred Marshall 50:22
I think they probably would. I believe I might have to be licensed as a financial advisor to do that, but no comedy thing, it’s

Fred Marshall 50:29
just

Jim Beach 50:30
really for comedic purposes.

Fred Marshall2 50:36
That’s perfect, so we could call it Dumb and Dumber, the guide to investing,

Jim Beach 50:42
make a sequel to that. I loved that. Yeah, it’s my favorite, one of my favorites. Third, I guess. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future for the next 510, 1520, 100 200 years?

Fred Marshall 50:58
Yeah, that’s a great question. I am super optimistic about the future, and the reason it doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be problems. Another pandemic could roll through, just like COVID did. Who knows what the future holds? But humans have a way of figuring it out, and I trust that human beings will find a way, just like that Jurassic Park line, right? Life finds a way. It’s like that. We’ll figure it out. Will there be problems? I’m sure there will, but it’s going to be insanely great. I have one company that I’m really excited about. They’re called lila.ai and they’re in that, they’re trying to reimagine how science is done. Scientific super intelligence is the goal to do everything from cure the most difficult diseases to new materials to longer battery life to lower energy costs. The number of applications they have are just.. it’s just incredible. Anyway, some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and what they’re doing is going to be so incredible, and it’s going to show up in our lives in five or six years. It’s pretty great. Another example is David Sinclair up at Harvard, he’s been doing a lot of research in the area of longevity and the idea of reversing aging, and they are making such incredible progress up at that lab, and you know, starting in clinical trials with certain specific indications in, in the eye, and so the future is looking really great, and we just have to get through the next couple of years and I think we’re going to be good.

Jim Beach 52:46
Do you want to live forever, Fred?

Fred Marshall 52:48
No, but I definitely want to cross 100

Jim Beach 52:55
It all depends on how well you’re doing, and such, for sure. You know, but

Fred Marshall 52:59
yeah, health span, health span, not lifespan.

Jim Beach 53:03
Yes,

Fred Marshall 53:03
yeah, health, healthy and fun, and you know, excited right up to the end. That’s that’s the goal, and and that’s what this is all about. It’s pretty, it’s pretty great.

Jim Beach 53:14
How do we find out more about you? Follow you online, get in touch, help thrive, and get a copy of the book.

Fred Marshall 53:20
Well, the book is available everywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It’s called Thrive: The Antidote to Future Shock. You can go to Thrive Future you.com and learn more about the book, download a chapter for free, or listen to some audio to get a sense of it, and to get in touch with me if you want.

Jim Beach 53:39
Fred, thank you so very much. Fascinating conversation, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

Fred Marshall 53:45
Our pleasure. Thank you. We

Jim Beach 53:47
are out of time for today, but you know we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care. Go make a million dollars. Bye now,