U1
Hi everyone, welcome to the first customer. My name is Jay Agner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by the Bob Cooper. Bob, welcome.
U2
Hi Jay, thanks for having me.
U1
You're welcome. And thanks for joining. Founder of a lot of different things. I used to work at a company that Bob was a co founder of. But let's take it back to the beginning. Bob, where did you come from?
0:34
U1
Where did you go to school?
U2
I grew up in Pittsburgh and I went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania and I was in journalism major mainly because I was really bad at math. So that was the decision process there. And 2s really what I wanted to get into is advertising. This was back in the early eighty s. I graduated in 83 from college and the economy in Pittsburgh was really, really bad. So ended up not being able to find a job. Literally the first year after I got out of college I was a lifeguard, believe it or not, for, for a year after I got out of college trying to find a job and ended up getting a job as a technical writer. Couldn't get a job as marketing to save my life. Ended up doing technical writing for a small software company that was launching accounting software for PCs. I knew nothing about PCs, these are brand new machines, accounting software. But it was a good fit. I think I was making $12,000 a year back then. So it was a good fit. But it was a great exercise in just learning how to swim basically in an environment like that. So I did that for about a year and then moved out to Philadelphia. Ended up getting another technical writing job. Stayed about a year up in Redding and then got a job in Philadelphia with a marketing communications company called LSI Communications. They did everything from brochures to film and video production to big sales meetings for people like Verizon, et cetera. So I worked there for a couple of years and 1s I was a writer basically and then became a producer project manager. And at that time I sort of had my epiphany, I call it where I was at. 1s Some conference or exhibition or whatnot there was and again, this is the late 80s, mid 80s, right. And and there was an interactive tour of Tulum, the the pyramids of Tulum, Mexico. It was on a computer, and there was a joystick, and you could basically move the joystick forward or turn right, turn left and tour through this. And I literally you took these lightbulb moments. Wow. Imagine if you could combine the power of video with the power of these personal computers, and that would merge, and you could be interactive as an interactive video. And I just became sort of obsessed with this concept and got very involved. When I was at LSI in a number of projects, helped sell these projects, designed them, produce them, and these are fairly big. 1s Ended up doing museum work. We did a lot of kiosk work, did the constitution during the celebration of the anniversary of the Constitution, National Park Service. We created a bunch of stuff for them. Bell Atlantic at the time, which turned to Verizon, was a big customer, mostly a retail kiosk project. We had about 500 interactive multimedia kiosks in flooring stores around the country. So I was very keen on this. I tried to convince the owner of the business that this is really the future, that he should really get out of print work and out of 1s linear video, et cetera, and get into interactive video. And he didn't really want to, wasn't really interested. So
U2
I started getting a bug for starting my own business, thinking, what if I could do this on my own? That was also further aggravated by the birth of my first daughter. Right. I was like, man, 2s the nesting instinct kicks in for women, and I think the provider instinct kicks in for me. I never heard that, but I hear that a lot. I
never heard it put that way. I feel very similar. That's interesting. Yeah. And so I had this new desire to succeed. And so my first being business and a bunch of ideas, I worked with a guy. 1s Very first. When I actually started my first customer of my first day, I was like, how can I start a business without necessarily letting go, right? Quitting my job? So I go, and I'm, like, racking my brain. And back then I found somewhere stumbled across these things called removable tattoos from Japan. And they were high quality. This wasn't like Bazooka Joe stuff, like, actually high quality. 1s And back in the day, nobody had ever seen these before. And so I find the supplier I ended up getting buying a classified ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine. Wow. Are you afraid of commitment? But you always wanted a tattoo. Try these temporary tattoos. And I put this ad in. I had, like, no money. And this is back in days of again, pre web sent a self address stamped envelope
to my PO. Box in Paley, Pennsylvania, and I'll send you our catalog, quote, unquote, which was basically a sheet of paper xerox, black and white, which I had done at the library trying to sell color tattoos via black and white brochure, right?
But I had a number of people send in these safes, self addressed, stamped envelopes. I sent out the catalogs, and next thing you know, I get back the first thing I get back is an envelope. And it says, this envelope has been opened and reviewed by the Bureau of Prisons of Illinois. It turns out my first customer for tattoos was somebody in jail. That's a great story. What a great story 1s in this envelope. And so that was a little business. I was getting these emails back and forth. Not emails, rather letters, basically, and sending these things up. It was a very small business, mike's business, 2s another business. 1s I think I ran that ad maybe for two or three months. 1s And realized I wasn't going to be able to quit my job based on tattoo, temporary tattoo income. And so a buddy of mine, you know, people get together and talk about, hey, you know, we should start a business, right? And so a guy I worked with and an idea we had was starting an online marketplace. Back in the day, there was a shortage of Ram chips for Ram memory. And back in that late 80s, there were FedEx guys eyes and Ups drivers being held up at gunpoint to steal boxes of Ram that they were carrying. It was literally, it's worth its weight in bold. And I was like, man, there's must be a better way, because we used to have to buy these Ram chips for different projects. We were doing these kiosks proprietary devices and stuff. And the way the old days was, you call people up, hey, do you have any XJ One Texas Instrument ads? Right? And they say, no, but I think so. And so does and I thought, man, this got to be a better way to connect these people. And this is, again, pre web, but there were these things back, and they called Bolton Board Systems, right? Just text a green screen, text based systems, but they basically cooked them up with modems. Early days of 1200 bod modems. And the idea was, what if we could create this place where buyers and sellers could come together to find who has what chips? Basically, today we would call that a marketplace, right? Yeah. And my buddy, his uncle was going to loan us some money to buy the computers, to buy some modems to get us set up. I actually wrote a press release. The company is called Info America. I wrote a press release about how we create this online marketplace to connect buyers and sellers of computer chips. And I put put a phone number in there and I put it under Natalie's name because I didn't want to expose me having worked in this. And I came home one day back in the old days of tape based voicemail machines, answering machine. I come home and there's like 20.
Request on there for more information. Hey, Bob, this is so and so. I work for you. Look Packard. We're interested in participating in your online 1s so we actually had customers lined up, but it came down to the idea buying the hardware and the software. And when it came down to it, I just chickened out. And it was like, yeah, your uncle is going to loan us this. I think it was like using a loan is $5,000 to get this thing going. But I kept drilling in my head, what if this fails? I'm going to owe this guy $2,500. I don't have $2,500. My God. And so never did it. And that was a regret because there was a viable business there. Somebody else actually came in and did that same thing about a year later in an online marketplace. But anyway, long story short, my second daughter was born, and I realized I got to do something here. And so my boss at the marketing company wasn't interested in focusing on interactive video or multimedia what it was becoming called in. So I decided to leave. 2s Prior to that, I reached out to some people that I'd met in business. At one stop I just worked for a small ad agency in Exxon, Pennsylvania. We had pitched a guy for his business. He had just sold his software company to Xerox and had spent his life, or not, but spent a year traveling the world installing that software around the world. I thought, man, that was really cool because he was the first entrepreneur I'd ever met. Her family, nobody was entrepreneurs, nobody owned business. 2s And so this is the kind of guy I'm reading about in Ink magazine. This is our entrepreneur. And so his name is Arthur Cramer. I kept him in mind. I met him back in like 85. I called him in 2s probably 1990. I said, you probably don't remember me. We met one time during a pitch. We didn't get your business. It was five years ago. I have an idea to start a business. I'd like to get your advice. Can I buy you lunch? And he was like, who are you? What is this? 1s We ended up going to the International House of Pancakes down in Written house square nearby there. Love it. And he basically opened my eyes to the idea that instead of me just quitting and working as a freelancer, I should actually start a company because a lot of the projects I was working on were for big companies IBM, Rockwell, Bell, Atlantic, Horizon, et cetera. And he basically said, and he walked me through the idea of raising some money. So he introduced me to some friends. 2s These were all guys that were a generation older than me, had been successful entrepreneurs. We put a deal together and founded Frontier Media Group, which my vision was we were going to basically be across between an ad agency and a custom software company and basically very creative, very technology and using this for marketing purposes. And keep in mind this is years before the web was
U1
11:17
when did you start Frontier?
U2
11:19
Frontier was 1991. 1s Super early Internet
U2
days. Yeah. And so in answer the question. So I had basically put, I guess it was in the 1990 and the fall I was talking to Arthur and, and how would you put something like this together, et cetera. And months went by. Months went by. We're dealing with a lawyer. I'm completely neophyte. I'm a newbie in terms of how to structure something like this. So fortunately I was very fortunate that I ended up with good guys that have a lot of integrity. So we put a deal together and. And I realized that before the deal was even done, I realized I had to quit my job. 1s The saying, you can't steal second day, so you're foot on first. So I said, I got to quit. So I left the company in May, put in my notice. So my first customer, ironically, of Frontier Media Group was my old employer, because I was not. That happens a lot. I actually hear that quite often. That's the case because it's relationships, all relationships you built there carry on to whatever you do after, correct? Right. And so I ended up there was kind of cool because I was doing a project at the time for them sponsored by 1s Dupont, which was for the Paris Air show. So I ended up getting to go to the Paris Air Show, my new client, which was my old employer, who set up this interactive display for their exhibit at the Paris Air show. So that was very cool. But our real first client was Mannington Mills, which is one of the companies that I had worked with on the kiosk, the retail kiosk. I was the driving force of that, et cetera. And when I left, I had no non compete. There was no non compete. There was no contracts with clients, holding them in or anything like that. Over the summer, I had basically gone back and talked to a couple of guys that worked with me at that company. Once I secured the funding from my angel investors, I went back to them and said, look, I will match your salary plus 10%, give you an extra week's vacation. 1s I think there's a huge promise here. Upside, why don't you come on over and gave a couple of these guys some equity when we got started. And so that's we started, three guys came over from that company and my sister in law. Our official start date was the day after Labor Day in September, whatever date that was. We had gotten office space in the Great Valley Corporate Center, but it wasn't finished yet. It was a tiny little space. They had to put carpet in or something. So, okay, for the first week, we're going to work out of my house, right? And there's no wireless. There's no WiFi. I'm literally taking my phone line from my kitchen and running it into the living room. We have card table set up. We've got cardboard boxes. There's the five of us in my living room in my little house. We're like, oh my God, I can't believe it. High five. We're actually starting a business. Here we go. And it's like 09:00 in the morning. We're just getting settled in and drinking our coffee. I don't want to suddenly hear. I'm like, what is this? I go over. There's somebody at the door. I look out. There's is a police car out in the front of my house, and it's the Chester County Sheriff. 1s He says, Are you Robert Cooper? I'm like yes. He goes, well, you've been served. You're being sued. Like, oh. So my former employer was suing me basically for a number of things, including racketeering, basically. And so this is one of these lawsuits that's really not a valid lawsuit. It's really designed to put you out of business or just be a complete nuisance. And so that was my literary first hour in business. We got sued. Racketeering. 2s His argument was that Mannington Mills is a New Jersey based company. My company was Pennsylvania based. And he was basically saying that I conspired to take this client prior to leaving, which is absolutely not true, because I didn't want any hassle with anybody. There was so much opportunity, I didn't need Mannington to become a client. And that's why I raised the money, because I had a sales guy, we had a creative guy, we had a technical guy, we had a designer project manager. So we had to basically build a plan that we weren't going to go after Mannington. But the fact was, Mannington realized all my people were gone. Right?
U1
15:39
How did you get into that VC world where you started asking people for money? Where did you acquire that skill set?
U2
Well, I made it up, basically with my angels. I mean, it was the first time I'd ever done that. And I started to understand debt and equity and how these things work and returns, and what they're looking for in terms of return, et cetera. And the great news is they served as advisors to me. They weren't just investors. I would bring them out to my I'd ask them to come out to our office like every month or every six weeks. I'd buy them a box lunch and I would just basically just pick their brains. Here's what's going on. I've never experienced this. What would you do? In this case, everything from managing employees, to sales, to legal issues, to accounting, et cetera, right? And they just gave me some really good, solid advice that I would never have otherwise known. So learned from that that business fast forward went on to great success. 2s A couple of highlights. One is we, after about two years, decided to really focus, go deep on a vertical. 1s Up until then, we were doing anything for anybody for money, for interactive multimedia, big company, small company. And two things happened. One, I was looking at the, ah, Fortune 100 list. 2s Fortune 500 list, and it was divided up into a bunch of different sorts right in the magazine. And one of them was profitability. Most profitable industry in the United States was tobacco. I don't want to work for tobacco. Second most profitable was pharmaceutical. Interesting. And then it broke it down by where headquarters were located. I'm like all these pharmaceutical companies. New Jersey, pennsylvania? Delaware. We had done some work with wife. I came into our sales guy the next day and said, right now, your prospect books, yellow pages, your new prospect list of these twelve companies. And he was like, oh, my God, you're taking food out of my mouth. How am I going to survive such a limited number? Long story short, he pretty much doubled his income over the next twelve to 18 months because we focused on that vertical that became a real niche for us. So ultimately, when I sold the business, we were probably working. I had worked with 14 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies. Wow. And we get clients. We would not lose them. And I wanted that place to be the kind of place I wanted to work. Right. It was based on that vision. 2s Of course, the web came along about midway, about 95. We're like, what is this web thing? We're doing all this high end interactive video, multilingual soundtracks, right? You know, and all of a sudden now people are like, excited because you can click on a hyperlink of a word. I'm like, where's the video? Where's the interactivity? Where's the multilingual? Where's the instant access? You know? But the flip side of the paradigm shift, obviously, was there was no, you know, data catered multimedia machine for $12,000. This was on the web, accessible anywhere, anytime. So we pivoted. We got involved in web development, more so on what back then was called intranet development, internal, internal tools, et cetera. So we had pharmaceutical and financial. We ended up getting to a point where we added strategy into that. So it was a three legged stool, technology, creativity, strategy, 1s and it was great. We were at the high end of the market. We rarely lost pitches, and we rarely lost clients at a great decor. The culture was fantastic, et cetera. I also knew that there was going to be a time to sell this business because I had investors, and they want a return on their investment. And the other thing, I don't know if you remember this, but there's a thing called Y two K being on the horizon that everything was going to melt down and break up stroke at midnight. And it was a real concern. It was a concern for enterprise clients. And I was like, man, what would happen to my business if we're caught up in the wake of that, right? All the way our customers are dealing with all these Y two K emery, they're not going to be paying us to do interactive marketing stuff. So the market was heating up. We ended up selling, doing a deal. Didn't do an auction or anything like that, didn't hire a banker, just basically put some feelers out there. Some of my investors had some connections and pretty short order. We had offers from a couple of different companies, and some, again, who saw us. We had an offer from large ad agency holding company who liked our creative side and they wanted our technology side. We had other people on the technology side who liked the fact that we had the creative and strategy, and that's what they wanted. We ended up doing a deal with a public company, icon CMT, that was a portfolio company of 1s TL Ventures, which was part of the safeguard family. 2s They did a deal with us in May of 1998 and so we sold the business. Then those, you know, investors ultimately got a 7000% return, 70 x on their investment, you know, so the benchmark for VCs is they don't invest in something unless they're going to make ten X, and even then they rarely get ten X, you know, 1s um, but they'll get a larger one like something like this. And so, you know, this was 70 x. Worked out well for the investors, worked out for me, worked out for everybody. I ended up staying on board there for about another year and three months or so they required a couple of months after we required Icon was acquired by Quest Communications, which was a big telco, the equivalent of Verizon of the Rockies. And they acquired us and ended up leaving after that. So went on to do a number of other things. Turnarounds. Because of my exit, I ended up getting involved with a couple of different VCs who were looking at me and say, hey, we got this problem. We invest in this business that's sort of stuck in a ditch. Can you help us turn it around? So I did a series of turnarounds for technology companies. One was called Vertical Alliance, which was a CRM enterprise level software platform that we've ended up pivoting into a ticketing platform, which ultimately was bought by a group of investors affiliated with the use of rockets that actually still exists, that company still exists. Real time media, which was a sweepstakes. 2s Marketing company ended up turning them around finding a CEO, full time CEO for them and they're still in business today thriving out the King of Prussia and then did a number of other startups along the way. One was
Any Source Media which was a technology play designed for doing embedded software for smart TVs on smart TVs came out and so we basically built that product was embedded software and again this was B to B to C play. We're not selling this to consumers. We're selling this to OEMs consumer electronics. OEMs were then in turn embedded in their products and that software ended up being installed in probably about 1.5 million LG DVD players around the world. So it was a fun run. We ended up selling that business to a publicly traded company called DivX out in California. And then with that same founder did another start up in the home automation space called Zonoff which was a high flyer, a lot of stories involved there but ultimately that company was sold to Ring which was then acquired by Amazon. So that technology is still basically at the root of Amazon's home automation and security efforts. Along the way I did a couple of things. I just started a coaching business advising CEOs of professional service firms in many cases on how to scale and grow their business because what I found is a lot of entrepreneurs don't have the insights or advisors that I did. As you know these were angel investors. They really mean in hindsight. Their greatest value is the advice that they gave to me and the insights that they had experienced. Even though they knew nothing about multimedia, they knew nothing about marketing technology, anything. But they understood the underlying basics of business which is dealing with people overcoming conflict, resiliency, grit, all those kinds into things. And I was shocked to find a lot of entrepreneurs don't have that resource. 2s And I also found that there's a lot of people running around and call themselves coaches who have never run a business and they're going to be a CEO coach but they went and got a certificate for $200 that they're a coach now. I saw a lot of people just sort of.
It's not opportunities. I basically have worked with a number of entrepreneurs over the years, helping them refine the strategy and in many cases move to either making it a true lifestyle business or making a business that is ready to exit. And I've helped a couple of people walk through the exit, both the financial side, which I'm not a financial maven, but it's really the business side. How do you prepare the business for that and what is the emotional side of that? Because there's a big roller coaster there when you're selling your business. And I tell people all the time when I stood up on this table the morning after we negotiated the sale of my first business, it was surreal because we've been up pretty much all night negotiating the final points. Of this, et cetera, et cetera, and to stand up to everybody and say, hey, just let you know we've done a deal with a company. We're going to all have a much bigger palette to paint from. We've done a deal, the company is going to be acquired, I'm not going anywhere for the time being, et cetera. And in many ways, that was the happiest day of my life and also the saddest thing of that life because we built this amazing culture, I knew it couldn't remain the same as it had been. 2s But yet my primary mission back from that day when my first daughter was born was to secure my family's financial future. What can I do to do that? So I had achieved that by the age of what, 36 or 37, and I was incredibly happy, but also sad knowing that what we had built was unique and it was probably not going to remain exactly that way moving forward. As much as we tried to keep it insulated from the acquirer and then the bigger fish that acquired them, the irony of that whole story is that that company so I sold that company to Icon. They were acquired by quest. 1s My joke is for entrepreneurs, I probably sold that business one year too early in May, but it's better than selling it one day too late in 2000, right? Yeah, yeah.
So basically a group of my former senior execs went to Quest and said, hey, we want to buy ourselves out. You, you have nothing to do with us. We're like this little fish inside a fish inside a fish, right? So they bought themselves out, called themselves Cadient, and then basically they were operating as an interactive, 2s really, folks with pharmaceutical. And then they were acquired by Cognizant, big multinational. And the irony is my sister in law has never left. She started in my living room when the sheriff showed up and she's been through all those acquisitions and has done very well within Cognizant. So it's funny how you create something and it changes and morphs over time. 3s I've heard that multiple times from entrepreneurs who do
U1
Is there anywhere around that feeling that you had, that sadness that you're getting? You're handing your baby away, you're selling your baby to somebody else.
U2
That's just part of the process, and you have to learn to deal with it. When you sell your company, I guess you could negotiate something up front to basically have his hands off. But it's almost, like, ironic, like somebody's buying it. You sell a car, right? I mean, and the guy's, like, peeling out and grinding through the gears, stop me. Like, well, shit, I did make the money off the car. But 1s it's a situation like that, I can understand that from the owner's perspective. 2s One of the things I've actually debated is pitching VCs, basically, on hiring me. There's a gap there, I think, when people acquire, especially a professional services firm, because you're not getting code, you're getting people. You acquire this ad agency or this consulting firm or this custom programming shop, et cetera, you're basically buying their people, 1s their relationships, their clients, and their stories. Right. So now my stories become your stories, and this idea of 1s really understanding the mindset of the entrepreneur who's selling that business, because it's very conflicted. If you're super high, you're super happy, but super scared and super concerned. Right. And so to be able to pay attention to that and make that transition, because 1s the transition can go great and the transition can go terribly. I'll give you a perfect example. When Icon acquired us, I said to them, hey, do you guys have some swag? I mean, why do you send down a big box of swag? Because my premise is that you look at La gangs. I mean, they will kill you if you got the wrong color handkerchief. Right. People want to identify with their tribe or their gang or whatever through swag, a T shirt, a logo, whatever. 1s He just did this multi million dollar deal to acquire business, and he's like, well, you know what the shirts cost, Bob? They just can't send everybody in your company one of our shirts, I thought it was just incredibly short sighted. Right, right. Yeah. 2s And there's little things in that transition when a professional serviceman gets acquired, that the acquiring firm can stack the odds in their favor just by doing some humane things in consideration. What it's like to be acquired up into this larger firm, and it can set the trajectory for a much better integration as opposed to this conflict and concern and worry and trepidation. Wow.
U1
There's so much that you just said, so many cool stories. Let's switch gears. As a very successful entrepreneur and a bunch of other things, how are you keeping yourself 1s healthy? What's your plan on longevity? What are you doing every day or every week to kind of take care of yourself?
Yeah, that's a good question. 1s I would say about 2s seven, eight, maybe nine years. I sort of woke up to health, basically. I started eating healthier and being more aware. I just turned 61. was a change I exercised before then, but I really started paying attention to what I was putting into my body. So 2s I take supplements every day in the morning and the evening, 2s I try to eat right. My wife is very good about she's a great cook and very focused on healthy meals. Works out. 1s My workout is walking fast walking. So I was walking one day, and I'm listening to this song and like, oh, my God, this song is perfect on my beat of my stride. It's amazing. It's almost like I'm dancing, but I'm exercising, but funny. And I looked it up and I realized it was 138 beats per minute. And I ended up putting a playlist together on Spotify. Went out and found all these songs, 138 beats per minute and 1s all kinds rock, pop, jazz. Sure. Yeah. And I walk on that. I walk every day with that maybe 40 minutes. And then I also am a big fan. We got an infrared Sauna a couple of years ago, which you're big fan of. Sauna. My buddy is like a Sauna evangelist. So you like the Sauna guy every day? A couple of times a week, yeah, at least five times a week. And it's for 40 minutes. But it's infrared. It's not with the rocks. What's you're dealing with? Lights, basically. It's infrared light panels inside there. And there's a lot of therapeutic benefits. Ultraviolet light is the stuff that burns you from the sun. Right. That's how you can burn. But infrared has a lot of very good healing properties. Restorative, it's good for your skin, good for your good for a lot of stuff. Basically, I just come great for 61, man.
U1
I can tell you that. Good Lord, you don't look 61. You got it very Very young face. That's my testament to staying healthy. Bad camera on my computer. No, it's probably your lovely wife keeping you alive with her good cooking and her all the fantastic thing she does. 2s So my mystery question that I always ask is I'm super interested to hear your answer. What would you do today if you knew you couldn't fail anything on Earth? Physical, 1s social, anything? What would you do if you knew you could not fail at it?
U2
Wow. That's a good question. 6s Even from a business perspective or just anything. 2s I try not to leave the witness. I don't give the example that I like making you think through it. Right. 2s It can be physical, 1s social change, personal change. I just saw a thing 1s online. I have this newfound respect for Red Bull. I don't drink Red Bull, but as a company, it's unbelievable how they have built that brand, particularly around sports and adventure sports, et cetera. So I saw these guys it's the world record. It's the longest. It's on YouTube. I can send you a link. It's unbelievable, these three guys in these wingsuits, right? Oh, yeah. Flying from I forget how high they went off, and it just goes on and on. Like three minutes. They're flying through these canyons in Switzerland and stuff. And so to me, if I knew I could not fail and I knew I could not smash into a Cliffside, I would absolutely do that.
U1
That is a great answer. That's a great answer. 1s I love speed. I just love going fast. I do, too. I'm not a big drops and heights, but I'm a speed guy. Man, I love going fast. That's a great answer. The kind of token answer I go with is, my cousin climbing Mount Everest. I thought it was great. That's a great, solid answer. But I may have a new favorite. That's a really good one. And my buddy last week said, flying lighter jets. That would be pretty damn cool, too.
U1
Look, there are so many lessons and so much cool stuff. 1s The last question I'll ask is if. 2s And it's not that it's not how would you do it different. But if you had to start, you know, if 20 year old Bob Cooper is coming out and doing his thing and he's going to start his own business, what would your first step actually be? Right. You talked about some missteps. He talked about some things he did great. Like, what would you go out and do knowing the stuff you know today to start a business from scratch? Yeah.
U2
Another great question 1s I would sort go back to when I first started Frontier. Right. Because it was the same question, how do I make enough money to support my family? Right. And it's like, what are my skills? What do I have to work with? What can I do? And it's like I was liking it to the scene in Apollo 13 where the guys are caught up in space. The engineers come in, dump this big box of stuff in a label and say, this is what we have to work with. How do we get these guys back? And that was mine. What do I have to work with? And I had these experiences doing interactive multimedia. 1s I guess I'll go do that. I'm good at talking, I'm good at selling, I'm good at communicating. I think I'm a pretty good leader. I know some technology, but I'm not a programmer. And so that was it. And what I've come to realize, and I tell people this all the time, is that the beauty of a professional services business or consulting business is almost no overhead. Right. You can start it today, especially today in the world of the web and all the businesses that are out there in terms of immediately doing it all yourself, setting up everything from your LLC to getting your logo design to creating a web presence, et cetera. But it's a matter of what is your niche and who are you going after? And I'm a big fan of going at the high end of markets or very niche markets. Right. And it goes back to the story about us focusing on twelve pharmaceutical companies as opposed to everybody in yellow Pages. Like we're in the great corporate center. I would tell them, look at all these business buildings here. This is when people went to the office. None of these companies here are prospects for us. They're like us. There are these other businesses or branch offices or these big corporations. We want to go to the Mothership. And Jerry Garcia has a great quote. They tell all my coaching clients that you don't want to be the best at what you do. You want to be the only one that does what you do. Right. A market of one man. 1s I firmly believe that.
U1
Well, U2 let's wrap it there. That was fantastic. Bob. Bobcooper.com, I think you've even got like a very specific URL that people could go to. And I'll link to your LinkedIn stuff but awesome guy, man. Inspirational. A lot of really cool stuff. And I hope people look you up and see what you're up to. So thanks again, Bob. I really appreciate it. But it's great having you. All right?
U2
Thanks, Jay It's a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Take care.