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

and i got so excited about it at one point that i i was up at like eleven o'clock at night fitting all man i'd probably had a couple beers and i sent this email the entire staff and i said guys we're shutting metal lab down we're going all in on flow and and chris my business partner who's here somewhere where's chris chris over there chris was the cfo at the time i looked at the numbers and he was like we will be out of business and how many three months i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a day so and then put your hands together for webb award winning sean p sam par and special guest andrew wilkinson come on out you guys extra mics alright so we're are we are backstage and we saw like all the bands that i've played here is 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 i there's like is this like a rich guy's birthday party what is this i think they thought was a graduation happening but so sound guys sorry but sam is what it is you always wanted to be a star you wanted to walk out to a sold out venue and the i guess this was one way to do it yeah one way to do it so sound guys it's gonna be the lame thing you're gonna see this week but maybe you'll alert something that i don't know but this is awesome what you think working fuck you sound guys it's working come on guys i can tell who the real podcast are true so we did this huge event in vancouver we had like twelve hundred people in this massive theater and sam sneaks out in the stage and i'm like what are you doing and he's he's peer around the corner taking photos and he goes i'm posting this on facebook and i was like who the fuck uses this facebook that's so weird and he goes all the people i went to high school with and so we wanted start off by saying we were laughing backstage i and we were like right before we came in we're like we gotta talk about nick gray does anyone here has anyone hear met nick gray that was the guy that i was just talking nick i just met him for the first time last night he is 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 talked about billionaires and there's a lot of money billionaires but nick is a friend billionaire yeah left last night so we hosted a dinner last night with like well don't fifteen people and sam had set it all up it was gonna be perfect he had this like high end restaurant table for fourteen the time was locked in we got reminders we show up it's supposed to be beautiful you know just the first class dinner everything was taken care of and we get there and immediately the plan was blown up there it was raining out raining like crazy in our seat was like app outside yeah so we weren't gonna be able to do it immediately nick gray improvise he's like hold on you six to the bar and then he sprinted because i pulled up i saw him running and i was like nick gray where you going and he was like i'm scoping out of venue and he don't know where he was he runs into this place and he's like hey is this a event space and the 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 event what do you he goes we wax women and he goes oh i got fifteen dudes outside do you have met police or not but he did he found us this like like abandoned shaq almost this amazing place and he he he got us 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 was out i outside the rain we were all in there was quiet we could talk and and he hosts this thing so what nick does is he has this book called i think the two hour cocktail party and he's basically perfect the art of a two hour party and i got to see a first hand he takes out his harmonic so i get everyone's attention and 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 and goes hey are you all good everything good and i say okay i wanna go to the shed i'm excited i'm a little bit cold though is it gonna be 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 right he looks like that scene in glen gary glen ross when the guys like at the doorstep and he brings me this sweatshirt which he had paid like seventy dollars for that's who nick gray is and the reason we're bringing this up is stop because we like him is big to be clear we like it to to be clear we like them but that's not why we breaking this up but on our pod my first million and by the way is everyone here is anyone who doesn't listen to m here who's here for the graduation yeah okay and he 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 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 was a horrible idea and so far he sold eleven thousand copies of this book which is insane and he and so we have this dinner and we meet all these interesting people at this like fourteen person dinner i think we had a guy there who sold a company that sold dog supplements which is like the greatest business ever because who knows if it works right like you have no idea he sold his company for six hundred and fifty million dollars it was insane and he was telling us a story about this had another guy who sells also dog related dog ramps so like so your old or small dog 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 a person who has a a bunch of owns a bunch of car washes that does tens of millions in profit what else do we have anything else that was weird was it was crazy it was different than san francisco if you got to san francisco or new york you get one type of entrepreneur you get the you know ai crypto you get that in s f in new york you get something else and in austin you get mustache hat tilt and like i i sell tractors online or i'll sell your dogs and vitamins you know you get a different type of entrepreneur bet but in i bet in the crowd right now we gotta have some interesting businesses who who here has a business let's get a get a sense of here you get a hand so keep your hand up if you own a business and if you do over a hundred raise them high raise them if you do over a hundred thousand dollars keep it up if you do five hundred thousand to keep it up one million five million okay we got a few twenty twenty million anybody no okay back to five no don't we got we got over here we got couple k twenty million twenty million and couple we got one over here yeah two here one in the back any of those any of them profitable okay alright k nick we wanna talk to these guys i wanna know what their businesses are your hands up hand is up i'm coming over here alright stand up please let's hear from you what's your name and what's your business kelsey la three sixty five holdings or an e commerce roll up sorry can you say that one more time three and sixty three sixty five holdings we roll up e commerce businesses wanna be andrew wilkinson when i grow up that you don't trust me he's blushing here here it's very sad it's sounds a good deal great who who's the he guy next to you justin turner traction capital are we have business that sells equipment to fire departments what do you mean i love the way you said that all that but i'm just can i just try being you for a second sean prairie pre data of out of the house case diapers like you just said an awesome thing but it's such like yeah you probably read about me that's the my we sell like thirty seven million dollars worth of equipment that fire department's use and fire use at lowe's like like yeah it his nozzle uniforms uniforms and why is okay so and what a 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 relationships in nine of the western states in the us how much profit on thirty seven million in revenue it's about ten percent margin does it feel uncomfortable when i ask you these question should i ask like what do you look like make it like what was the like he lost your virginia there's only one way to find out alright what else and who else who's got a weirder story than that i mean got a weird story who's got yeah peter handed if you got a really weird business okay maybe he was like weird yes yeah yeah hold on one sec please on okay so this is a paper c but i own a forty thousand square foot print shop warehouse and we print real c so like it's really niche it's really random not these small boy you've been running your business for i've been a business for eight years but we do a lot of different types of printing did you become a millionaire selling beer c that was my first largest e com store that i created yeah selling c because i'm from the midwest and we drink a lot of beer and that's look like you're from the of midwest yeah i just awesome you and like close to saint louis that's still what's you on here yeah we a hustle hey anyone else have a really really weird business like dog grant level weird business to tell him to let the free flag fly oh here we go guy with the austin stash there there it is the the the capital v neck sure 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 r carlton 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 because ours have their branding on them oh very smart how big is that we started ten months ago and we've grown it to half million and ten months at run rate oh that's great this is cool we're gonna we're gonna hear more businesses because a little bit later we're gonna do like a shark tank type of thing with a bunch of bunch of pitches yeah you're we can put we can put the lights down two times okay there we go 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 but speaking of a big success andrew over here took his company that's your pointing at me like i know andrew over here just took his company public it's called tiny it's not that tiny yeah that should be the tag one 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 max day story can we tell i think we yeah we can we can tell so there's there's really two stories so one by the way if you don't know i i gotta did the intro to andrew started this thing called meta lab it was an agency that made a bunch of tech stuff for big companies using the profits from that company he then started buying and investing in other companies which that whole company with that hold company with or hold c was called 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 no but it was it's a huge success but it all started because he had this agency called meta lab where he was you know like i said doing separate tech people but you were saying earlier that how that was like the foundation for the success of everything else you it you almost did something crazy early on yeah so i almost wasn't saying wouldn't be saying here so we're sitting at dinner the other night and talking about this and there's two stories so one i got very excited when when you know you when you when you have a business you always know how much it sucks how hundred 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 business called flow it was like asana except we didn't raise any money and we we had a great product but it just didn't go anywhere like task management task management which is one of the hardest things one of the hardest businesses in the world and i got so excited about it at one point that i i was up at like eleven o'clock in night i was feeling on manic i probably had a couple beers and i sent this email the entire staff and i said guys we're shutting metal lab down we're going all in on flow and and chris my business partner who's here somewhere where's chris chris over there chris was the cfo at the time hey i looked at the numbers and he was like we will be out of business and how three months how big was flow flow was doing like three hundred k of revenue and middle like two million or something like that and so i'll be chris medal lab when you when when you're two million maybe at that two million in revenue versus three hundred thousand three hundred k or something i was just like moment of insanity and chris went around all the employees quietly i was like please don't leave please don't believe we'll be bankrupt in like a week and save the day and then the second story was chris and i we you know running an agencies 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 fifteen one five and we actually went through the whole process you know i spent four months going back and forth with this private equity firm we sign the documents you know my lawyer calls me in quiver hand i sign sign the documents and the wire 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 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 guide the private equity firm and he goes pay man i'm really sorry but we weren't able to finish closing our fund so the deal is 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 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 it all could've have just one decision actually you made the decision and it's and it was all driven by anxiety right it's every i'm sure every one of you there runs a business everyone knows how miserable it is inside right i've you talked 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 sure he goes every business is a slow motion knife fight right like you just wake up in the morning you're sweating in your fight you're trying to survive right and we felt that way and we pushed through and it was okay but we almost gave in did you before you sold the hustle to hubspot did you ever almost out 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 facebook or instagram look at my pictures from like two thousand and seventeen and eighteen i was lumpy i was like pretty fat and i was like because 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 they showed interest in buying and so i flew fly all the way out to new york and i start talking to them and i get in their office and like it's empty and i'm like where is everyone and they're like 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 in a sexual harassment seminar because the cmo had just like you know gone off the rails to did a bunch of bad shit and so they give me a room they like send me a term sheet and they're like we'll 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 in your business and and i got 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 because vice like the valuation has just plummeted and so i almost took that because i was so like desperate to get out essential harassment seminar almost saved you if he did yeah yes you're a survivor yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days on on a travel never looking back