Roland Frasier- Co-founder Of Five Different Companies

Tyler Jorgenson  0:01  

You’re listening to biz ninja entrepreneur radio.

 

Beau Crabill  0:06  

This show was created for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers and dreamers who want to learn from the experts of today and drastically shortcut their own success to build a business that supports their dream lifestyle. Since 2011, Tyler Jorgensen has been interviewing business thought leaders from around the world, a serial entrepreneur himself. Tyler also shares his personal insights into what’s working in business today. Welcome to biz Ninja, entrepreneur radio.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  0:39  

Welcome out to business entrepreneur radio. I am your host, Tyler Jorgensen. And today I have the privilege of interviewing somebody who I’ve seen as an icon in the entrepreneurial space, a beacon, if you will, of someone who has deep knowledge, but is able to transcend that knowledge of make it very approachable and I’ve met Roland before, but I’m deeply grateful and super excited to have Roland Frasier on the show. Welcome to the show, Roland.

 

Unknown Speaker  1:06  

Thanks, Tyler appreciate you having.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  1:08  

So we are both here in wonderful, beautiful Southern California, but we’re connecting here digitally. And one thing that I have noticed about you is that you love to travel, and you love to do amazing things. And that’s great. But what is if you ran into someone in an elevator and they’re like, hey, Roland, what do you do? How do you answer that?

 

Unknown Speaker  1:26  

Uh, most people think drug dealer, but I know, it’s really funny. My my wife, her father, when he asked her, he said, Well, so what does he do? And she said, Well, you know, he kind of he was like, Oh, no, that’s okay. It’s okay. I understand. So, at this point, I fancy myself a strategic investor. So I hope to be smart money that comes into deals and adds value and helps build companies customer experiences and and revenue. In profits in companies, and then my goal in doing that is to generally shoot for an exit three to six years after I come into a company. Awesome.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  2:08  

And so CG investor can be broad it can, it can mean a lot of things. Let’s go back to the early days. So you were an attorney, not any, I guess, technically still are. But what would you say? When was that moment in your life where you realized that you’re an entrepreneur?

 

Unknown Speaker  2:23  

Well, I was an entrepreneur, Attorney, but I was an entrepreneur way, way before that. So I was an entrepreneur. Like I think the last job I had, was probably when I was 16. Renting skates out for people at Golden skate world, which is a roller skating rink in Richmond, Virginia. But I had been playing out in clubs since I was 15. So I had a band that actually made money playing out in clubs. So that was probably my first like, real entrepreneurial journey long before that. I did magic shows and tried all kinds of other things, but as a kid, but really the thing that I do Did for years, make money as an entrepreneur? My very first thing that I say stuck was being a musician, interestingly enough,

 

Tyler Jorgenson  3:06  

so how has music like being a musician, being a magician? How have those things helped you in the business world?

 

Unknown Speaker  3:13  

magician? Absolutely not. Now, I’m at the, I think really all of that stuff helps from both of those things are performing. And I think that a comfort level of being able to perform. And performance can mean many things. In this case, I think it means delivering content teaching, but the ability to perform and bond with people and work with people and develop and nurture relationships, all of which are necessary. Anytime that you’re doing something like that. I’d say that’s probably the biggest thing, but I learned how to haggle with venues you know, for when you’re playing, you know, we’ll get there I will give you the door. Now, I don’t want to die with the door but I also want this you know, and dealing with the difficulties of fellow musicians, when You have bands and you have lots of egos, including your own going around in a band with, you know, five to 17 people in the biggest one I was in to dealing with managers and contracts and bookings and things that go wrong. I remember I had a bought a PA public address system that had the microphones and lights and mixing boards and speakers and all that. And so when I wasn’t playing in my band, I would take those things, which cost a fair amount of money and I would run sound and lights for other bands. And so I’d go into the clubs I remember one time in particular, it’s very stressful because you don’t get to go in as early as you want. And the show starts at nine or the show starts at 10. And the show starts at nine or 10, no matter what. So if your lights and your sound aren’t working, that’s a problem. And I remember in particular one time that there were all these people just jam packed club and the band was going on at nine o’clock and I had set everything up all the lights the snake between the stage and the and the mixing board and everything. And I turned everything on do soundcheck and nothing. And there’s so many failed points in a system like that, that it took me about 20 minutes. They opened about seven or eight minutes late. Oh, but man you talk about fresher. So I learned I remember saying I’m sweating. I’m underneath the wire things trying to figure out what’s the one thing and it’s always some one little button. But all of that stuff gave me great lessons in people and performing under pressure staying calm, not freaking out and giving up just getting it done. That’s all helped quite a bit.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  5:34  

Yeah, sounds like I mean, learning how to manage peoples and partners. But I know you have partners and a lot of the businesses you work in. I have partners in every business because I only want to do the things that I want to do and that I’m good at. Has that always been the case? Or is that something you’ve learned through experience over time?

 

Unknown Speaker  5:51  

That is a great question. And I had I was trying to think, no, I’ve always had partners. I’ve started things but I’ve always been In other people have always brought in other people.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  6:02  

What would you say some of the like the core principles of a good partnership would be,

 

Unknown Speaker  6:06  

you know, the biggest thing and I saw this from years of practicing law where people would come in and they’d be best friends since third grade brother, sister, mother, you know, Father, sister, just family, best friends. I mean, I saw these people come into the office and the ones that did invest in the time to do a partnership agreement. This is when I was practicing law. They didn’t have problems that were irreconcilable, because they sat down and we talked about what were the expectations of each of the people going into the deal. The reason that’s so important is that and this is something you learn in litigation in law is No one leaves an interaction with the same perception of how that interaction went. No one leaves with the same understanding as to what was said or meant. No one leaves understanding Really a lot of what happened from the perspective of the other people that were there. So the reason that you can get expert witnesses when you’re litigating to testify, the sky is blue, the sky is black the sky does not exist, is that there are factual bases for all of those claims. And when two people get together, you and I go into a partnership, and we don’t actually have a very detailed talk about what we’re each going to do. Well, I thought Tyler was gonna run the stuff on that side of the thing and you’re like, rolling and showing up for the past three days. And I’m like, why didn’t show cuz I did all my stuff there. What do you need to do? You’re like, dude, you can’t not show. I mean, literally, those are conversations that I’ve had with people. And so the people that take the time to work through that going in so that they do actually get themselves literally on the same page of a document as an understanding what each other is going to do. It makes all the difference. The people that didn’t do that would come back and they’d be ready to sue each other. They’d be Not friends, they hadn’t spoken in the last three months. It’s Yeah, it’s very, very stark contrast between starting the right way and not.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  8:08  

And so that’s as simple as literally a partnership agreement where you write down all of the things that you think are understood and implied and the right so I had somebody I knew once that you always say, well, that’s just common sense. And I’m like, Well, no, because what’s common to you is different than somebody else’s experience and different than the third person’s experience. So like, let’s spell it out. Right? And

 

Unknown Speaker  8:29  

here’s, here’s the thing, too, is there are degrees of common sense. So the specificity with which you do that agreement can be very different. And you can get a form from Legal Zoom or a place like that, and you can fill it out and it’s going to have maybe 3% of what you need. You can go to an attorney and the attorney if that attorney hasn’t got business experience, which most don’t, then you might get an attorney version of a Legal Zoom document, but somebody who’s been through business and actually had partnerships and has seen the partnerships that have gone wrong, we’ll have an entirely different results, an entirely different document that comes from that process. So a lot of it is, if I was interviewing an attorney to help would be Tell me about the partnerships that you’ve had that didn’t work out.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  9:18  

Since just one more thing on that topic. One thing I’ve noticed is some people in a partnership have they’re uncomfortable having that conversation. And I’m like, Well, if you’re having a couple having the conversation at the beginning, when everything’s exciting, you’re in the honeymoon phase. You’re not going to be very comfortable having it when you’re in a point of conflict. Yeah, the best line to test whether or not you can even handle being in a in a partnership together.

 

Unknown Speaker  9:39  

Absolutely. Yeah. With any relationship where you’re going to be apart, you know, marriage, you name it. It’s how are we going to deal with money? Who’s responsible for that? what’s reasonable, all of that stuff? If you don’t have that conversation, then you know, it’s gonna be challenging.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  9:53  

So Roland Frasier decides to go to law school and practice law. When did you know Man, maybe being full time attorney isn’t the thing for me, I’m gonna I’m gonna jump back into business or did you never leave that kind of being an entrepreneur?

 

Unknown Speaker  10:07  

I never left. So I did the band thing. I got my real estate license at 18 insurance 19 securities 20 got a degree in accounting. So I mean, I went through all of that time I was doing deals, I was doing real estate deals, I started buying and selling companies and I was running my own businesses. So I never left I played music all through, I would go to law school, then I would go out and play and clubs, and then I would, I was working with a manufacturing company that I owned at the same time as like, I never stopped so there wasn’t any decision because I was already there.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  10:42  

So I’ve two questions on that. One is, most business consultants and advisors these days will say chase two rabbits catches none right? But you’re the kind of guy that you you’ve said, Hey, I found a way to do more than one thing. So let’s talk about that for a second. But then also, you know, you You, you’ve done a lot, right? You’ve been a high achiever, you’ve been accomplishing a lot of things. And who did you look up to? along that way? So let’s go to that first one right of Yep. Is that true? Can you spend more than one plate at a time?

 

Unknown Speaker  11:11  

Yeah, I think you can. And I think the key is in how you do it, if you were going to try to run multiple businesses, I think you would have a hard time and I would agree with the two rabbits thing. But if you are partnered, then you’re like a microprocessor, microprocessor. And a computer appears to do multiple things at the same time, but doesn’t actually what it does is it runs a set of instructions. And then it runs another set of instructions, and then it runs another set and another set and it’s going back and forth. Let’s say you’ve got six applications open. It’s not running six applications at a time it’s running whatever code bits need to be run in rapid sequence on those applications. So as a an entrepreneur with partners You have downtime in your business where there isn’t anything productive that you can do. So I went out, let’s say you’re the salesperson, that’s your thing. You’re really good at sales. Well, I’ve worked my leads. I’ve gone out, I’ve made my sales calls. I’m waiting for the contracts to come back even I got Yes, I got yes from the people that I was pursuing. And now I’ve got downtime. Well, I can do nothing. I can check Facebook and email and stuff like that. Or I can go and do more selling more of the thing that I’m best at so and the more refined you get, the more honed down you are on the things that you are best at. And the more of the other crap that you refuse to do, the more rabbits you can chase, because my rabbits are all running in the same direction. So I’m getting closer and closer to all the rabbits at the same time. Right? That makes sense. That metaphor holds true if the rabbits are running in the same in the opposite direction. But what if they’re huddled up in whatever What are they what are the rabbits good at Warren If they’re huddled up in their Warren together, right,

 

Tyler Jorgenson  13:02  

then I can grab all of awesome. What is your, the fate your favorite business that you’ve worked on that didn’t succeed?

 

Unknown Speaker  13:10  

Like what’s your favorite failure? That did not succeed? That’s my favorite and I still loved after it’s screwed me like that

 

Tyler Jorgenson  13:21  

we all have those deals or those opportunities that we think, man, this is gonna be amazing. And we’re so excited by and it doesn’t work for timing, whatever reasons, but I always think those are the optimistic failures. So the most interesting ones.

 

Unknown Speaker  13:33  

Yeah, I don’t think about failures very often other than to analyze them and then move on. So it’s gonna be hard, but let me try it. I probably was one of the first products that I created. I had a there was a guy that was doing infomercials, and he always wore these brightly colored sweaters. I think it was Steve levy or Mark levy. He did a bunch of infomercials. It was called amazing discoveries and his kids I think he might have been mark and his kids Steve, I met and there was another guy rich something who ended up starting a company called demand media. He owned a thing called the IMO. And I’ve got with both of these guys. And we created a product called Getting your product to market and because I knew how to get products to market in terms of the legal side, but not a lot about it at the time, from the marketing side, and these other two guys, one started the mall which I think MySpace ended up buying the mall for a whole bunch of money, smart guys. And so we partnered up and I ended up printing 5000 copies of this thing and it was sitting in on pallets in this was pre not pre internet but definitely DVDs were not you couldn’t video stream at the time. And so I had rented space to store these things and I’ve got 5000 copies of this beautiful package that are sitting in a warehouse all shrink wrapped on pallets. And we didn’t sell a single one that I can recall. We tried lots of different ways. But it, it just they weren’t good at that kind of marketing. And I didn’t know anything about that kind of marketing at the time. And so I had a huge investment, had beautiful logos and beautiful duplicated boxes and tons of inventory, but just no demand. And so my favorite thing about that failure is that it taught me that it’s the opposite of Field of Dreams. If you ever saw a field of dreams, they said, If you build it, he will come Well, to me, it’s if they come, I will build it now. So ever since then, I’ve said that I’m a reverse Field of Dreams entrepreneur, if they come out build it, but I never built it before they

 

Tyler Jorgenson  15:45  

unless you have someone come and tell you that they know something about demand, right, which is what happened there. He basically said, Hey, there is demand. And I’m telling you about it right. But we can all just guess and I think that was something I learned from the four hour workweek was really about micro testing the market. before investing into products Yeah, that’s something that you teach a lot as well as to really make sure that the market wants what you’re selling.

 

Unknown Speaker  16:07  

And don’t spend your time doing all the stuff that doesn’t matter. I’ve watched so many people put everything together like I said, it’s the okay I’ve got my logo and now I’m gonna go out and get my company set up and now I’ve got an attorney to do this and no, sell something

 

Tyler Jorgenson  16:25  

hundred percent if you can’t sell you don’t have a business so why worry about a cool logo or stationery, right? I guess you can. You can hurt Yeah, anyway, I was gonna make a really morbid joke. I’m gonna skip that one. But I like it. I got it here. Tell us a little bit about legs.

 

Unknown Speaker  16:39  

So So I called it legs because it makes a good acronym. Its leverage exit gross scale, but it’s out of order which bugs some OCD people like myself, so it should probably be looksee leverage gross scale exit. That’s what I started out as. But I’m actually going to break that into three different workshops because as I’ve worked on it, it’s grown from about two days of material. To about seven. And so I’m going to do now one, the premise behind it is, everything that I am focused on is how do we take existing businesses and really leverage every single part of it, to grow and scale it, and then exit it to sell it. And everything that I have learned that I can document I have put into this. And so it’s grown from a couple of hundred slides when I started to 600 700 slides now. And I found that I can’t get through, I can barely get through a third of it. And I’ve also found that it divides in nicely into the things that people are most interested in, are creative deals, structure, and finance, like how do I buy companies with no money down, I got 23 ways to do that. I’ve just done a lot of deals creatively, by necessity. And what you can learn though, when you’re doing those things is that there are commonalities among them and so going in and denigrate Here are the common finance things here, the common deal points here the common, you know, all of that. And then same thing with the growth and scale. And then there are the leverage things are their own thing is to how do I look at resources that I’ve gotten that other people have, and then leverage the heck out of those across as many things as possible, and then leverage the leverage and then trade on the leverage that I did in arbitrage it everything else. So

 

Tyler Jorgenson  18:26  

that’s really fun. That’s if that makes sense. I mean, like most businesses are going to be needing one of those four things at the moment, right, they’re looking to leverage or they’re looking to get ready to exit. And I’m sure there’s some crossover but and so you have one coming up in London and San Diego. You can find more information at Roland frasier.com. And please, in addition to this wonderful podcast that you’re all subscribed to check out business lunch with Roland Frasier I was I listened to about six year episodes today while I was driving and really good. I like it. I liked the the snackable ones about about it was It’s possible. It was fun. But what’s something you know? I love what you said, right? Like, I’ve done a lot of startups. And I’m finding that the more I’m attracted to mid startup, right, they’re already have momentum, they’ve already found one vertical. And maybe we’re going to go look at even expanding to other verticals, right? What’s something that you like, find yourself often giving that commonality to business who’s found some success, but it’s probably stagnating? Like, what’s that, you know, hey, here’s how to reignite your momentum or to take things to the next level.

 

Unknown Speaker  19:30  

You know, it’s really interesting, because I just did a business that I have, I do a lot of deals where I get I’m either an advisor for equity and some small compensation or I’m a consultant with equity. And so I had a guy that I consulted with today, who it’s a 40 year old company, and they’ve been kind of stagnant the past several years, which is why there was the opportunity to come in and help and we sat down and was like, okay, you know, buying companies and all this And I said, well, the very first thing that we need to do is look at what opportunities exist within what business you have. And we started breaking down the cohorts of the business as to I said, you know, let’s start with your top 10% of customers as a cohort and say, are they buying all the products that you’ve got? And it turns out that they weren’t. And then we looked at a one of the products that he had brought in. And it was this is really interesting. I thought this was pretty cool, is because this just happened this morning. So it’s a printing company. And one of the products that he brought in was a thing called, it was a text messaging, addition, an add on upsell that he could give to the people and it only costs seven cents per text to do this. It’s really cool pulls data from weird places, all kinds of other stuff. But they said, well, it doesn’t make sense to us to spend seven cents a record this is his top customers. Does it make sense for us to spend seven cents or Record for a point 3% increase in conversions. And so he didn’t really sell it to any of them. And we did the analysis. I said, Well, what are conversions for most of your direct mail customers now? And the answer was point 5% on the first mailings, and I said, Okay, so this adds point 3%. He said, yeah. So, point 3% is 60% of point 5%. So you’re talking about a 60% increase in the number of leads that come in? And he’s like, holy crap, I can’t believe I missed that. And it’s Yeah, I said, so if you’re pitching it as you’ll get a point 3% increase, and they’re not connecting that that’s a 60% increase in their leads. How many of those customers do you think would like to 60% increase in their leads? He’s like, Well, everybody, of course, obviously. I said, Okay, great. Now let’s do the math because this is for direct mail for real estate investors in this particular cohort we were talking about, so do the math and it works out to about $90,000 in additional monthly revenue for the client, based on doing this thing that only costs them 30 $500. Like, man,

 

Tyler Jorgenson  22:15  

right? It’s amazing to me like how often this happens, right? So we have we have blindness to some of the things right in front of us because we’re so we see them all the time or and they didn’t catch our eye the first time. But an outside point of view, can help. And that’s what the benefits of an advisor.

 

Unknown Speaker  22:30  

The key to that though, is because it’s easy to miss if you know all this stuff and don’t have a system for applying it. But when you go in to your own business, when you’re monitoring your own business, or when I go into a business, I have a system that goes through all of this stuff starts at the low hanging fruit moves to the high hanging fruit. And if you don’t have that system in that checklist, it’s easy to miss but if you do, you’re looking for it. So you’ll never you’ll never trip over it right.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  22:57  

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Obviously, I’d love your system. So the next question I had for you and this kind of be toward a second, the last one is you run War Room mastermind. Tell us about the power the benefit of masterminds for the entrepreneur.

 

Unknown Speaker  23:12  

Yeah, that, to me, the biggest thing is the connections, everything is relationships, you know that saying, your network determines your net worth, I believe. 100%. So to me, the biggest thing about masterminds is that you will connect with people that you would not have otherwise connected with. It’s really funny when I when I go through the onboarding for the warum mastermind, when somebody joins, I have a, I do a 45 minute onboarding, calling I do them myself, because I want to really understand the businesses. And I can’t tell you how many times when I say why did you join people say I want to be around other people that are doing what I’m doing because nobody else in my world understands what I’m going through or what I’m facing or the challenges I have and they are they think the business is wildly successful. And so I don’t have any problems or my employees Think that gross income equals net income. So they think I’m making all this money but right now I’m not because I’m reinvesting in my business and I need people who get me and get my situation to hang out with. So I think I can tell you from my own data of doing all those onboards that that’s the thing I hear more than anything else. The next few things are learning. What is working for other people in different industries gives tremendous ideas for innovation and application in their in your industry. So I think the number one thing is you’ll get people that understand you number two, you’ll get people that you’ll get ideas and see things that are innovative outside of what you would have ever thought of that can be massive Lee valuable for your company. And then the third thing would probably be that you get away from your business and being that it’s kind of a forced, semi vacation ish kind of thing because we like ideally join them after Your mind does things in places you want to go. And then you’re going to make connections. While you’re doing that, you get that time away. And that time away while surrounded by people who are doing stuff frequently creates deals. So that not just ideas to apply, but also Joint Venture Partners, companies that will acquire you companies that will be acquired people who can introduce you to other people who satisfied the things that you’re, you know, your biggest challenges and stuff like that. So I think it’s all that the content itself is extremely valuable in a good mastermind. But it absolutely pales in comparison to the actual being there of networking and getting out from behind your desk or your computer or whatever you’re, you’re on. Absolutely. What is one major item on Roland Frazier’s bucket list that you’re going to go do or accomplish in the next 12 months? Well, all that international stuff will be done in the next 12 months. So that’s, that’s for sure. But my like, if I’m looking at bucket lists, I’m going to go outside of 12 months, I want to get to where I can rationalize a plane, I want to plane but I’m having a hard time, like, after get just really, really, really irresponsible level of money to do that for me because I just can’t justify 100 grand to fly across the country makes no sense to me, right? Because I’m always gonna I Buffett said this and it really impacted me. He said, People ask me why I don’t get a new couch. And I say, Well, if I look at the time value of money, and it’s compounding at 8%, over the next 20 years, that couch cost me $150,000. I don’t want that couch bad enough to spend $250,000 on it. So I look at the opportunity cost of what it would take to do that. And I don’t do it. So that’s my bucket list thing there. And my bucket list travel thing right now is Antarctica. So that’ll be the next 12 months for sure. Those are my medium term bucket list things.

 

Tyler Jorgenson  26:57  

Hey, I super appreciate it. I know we had a couple times a week connected and you’ve been very very hospitable working with me on that so great very very grateful for you coming on the show everyone absolutely please check out Roland frasier.com more room mastermind calm and please subscribe to business lunch podcast and really appreciate coming out rolling and my biz ninjas everywhere you’re tuning in it’s your turn to go out and do something.

 

Beau Crabill  27:23  

Thank you for tuning in to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. What you didn’t hear was one more very important question that Tyler asks each guest if you want to be a fly on the wall when the real secrets are shared, go to biz ninja.com slash VIP and get your access today. Remember to subscribe so that you don’t miss any future episodes. And our one last favor. If this episode was meaningful to you, please share this podcast with a fellow entrepreneur so they can grow along with us is ninjas. It’s your turn to go out and do something