On this episode of Entrepreneur’s Enigma, host Seth Goldstein interviews Benjamin Friedman, founder of Build, Scale, Grow and author of the book “Scale.” Benjamin shares his entrepreneurial journey, discussing his five exits over the last two decades. He emphasizes the importance of hard work and the misconception of overnight success. Seth dives into Benjamin’s experience writing his book, mentioning the challenges of editing and maintaining consistency. The podcast explores the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, focusing on learning from adversity. Seth and Benjamin discuss the importance of a growth mindset and turning challenges into opportunities. They also delve into the paradoxes of freedom, control, and decision-making in the entrepreneurial world. Additionally, Benjamin shares his experience working with startups and his current fractional basis approach to adding value to multiple clients. Tune in to this episode to gain insights and inspiration from Benjamin Friedman’s entrepreneurial journey on Entrepreneur’s Enigma.

Key Moments

[00:02:45] Entrepreneurship is always stimulating, no dull moments.

[00:05:47] Year one: solving my own problems, wrestling. Organizing for a book. Improve writing with editors.

[00:09:23] Growth mindset, learn from challenges, seize opportunities.

[00:10:38] Two decades of work and perseverance.

Find Benjamin Online

https://www.webuildscalegrow.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminbfriedman/

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Transcript (Provided by CastMagic.io)

Seth [00:00:00]:

Entrepreneurs Enigma is a podcast for the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, the wins and the fails that we all face being entrepreneurs. How we learn from adversity. Every week, I talk to a different entrepreneur with a story to tell. I’m Seth Goldstein. Come with me on the journey. This is Entrepreneurs Enigma. Let’s get started. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Entrepreneurs Enigma podcast. I am, as always, your host with the mostest, if you want to call me that, I guess. Seth. Today I have Benjamin Friedman of build, scale grow. He is an author. He’s had five exits in some shape or form over past two decades. He wrote a book on all his excapades called Scale, and we’re going to bring him on here and we’re going to chat about his entrepreneurial journey, which is the whole purpose of the show. So kind of makes sense. How’s it going, Benjamin?

Benjamin [00:01:04]:

Doing really well, Seth, and so glad to be here with you. This is exciting.

Seth [00:01:07]:

This is fun. And you’re at the epitome of people who I like to have on the show, people who have been done the entrepreneurial journey and realize, admit and are willing to say that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. You’re a ten year success in the making you’re a ten year overnight success in the making kind of thing.

Benjamin [00:01:29]:

It’s like going to the doctor who had all sorts of illnesses and ailments as a kid, and now they’re ready to help you figure out yours. Yes, very good.

Seth [00:01:37]:

Exactly. Your experience. Seriously. I mean, sometimes those are the best doctors who have been through it. The doctors who have had cancer now aren’tcologists because they’re like, I’ve been through it. I’m not just a doctor saying that, oh, chemo is bad, but it’s going to be okay. I’ve actually been through the chemo kind of thing. I’ve lived, walked the walk. So, Benjamin, where to start? Let’s see. How did you get started on the entrepreneurial journey? Have you always been an entrepreneur? Have you always had that spirit or have you done like, the cog in the wheel kind of thing?

Benjamin [00:02:09]:

So I spent the last 20 plus years working with startups. I had a couple of forays into my own. Those were not as successful as I would have liked, but after my last stint, which ended up getting acquired by WordPress VIPs, after that, I was like, okay, let me see if I can find a way to apply my skills on a fractional basis so I can add value as needed. And then when the company is in a good place, I can focus my attention somewhere else. So now I spread myself across five or six different clients at a time, hopefully adding insight where possible.

Seth [00:02:45]:

That’s great because in that way, you’re also not there’s a little bit of add in all good entrepreneurs here, and that means that you can actually be all over. And I’m trying not to diminish it. Add. I have ADHD at the Wad Zoo. But my point is, there’s never a dull moment in entrepreneurship. There’s always something to do. And USG, in my opinion, you work more as an entrepreneur than you do when you’re a cog in the wheel of a corporation, because you don’t have a nine to five. It’s always sometimes it’s a five to nine, sometimes it’s a nine to nine, sometimes a 24 hours cycle. And you’re like, Wait, I didn’t sleep yet. I’m on Red Bull this whole time. That kind of thing. We’re going to take a quick break here from our sponsors and get right back to the show. What has been the best thing about being an entrepreneur in your mind and also advising entrepreneurs in that manner as well?

Benjamin [00:03:31]:

Yeah, so they’re definitely related as we’re talking. I would say, first of all, for me, it’s having a vision with no ceiling. I feel like it can go as far as I want it to go, but also I can put a cap on it if I want. Right. I don’t see myself running this billion dollar company and being scrutinized all the time. That’s crazy to me. I’ll find my place and settle in. I think the second is constantly learning and being able to experiment. When you’re working at somebody else’s company, they may or may not approve of your ideas, but with myself, I’m like, let me run an experiment for four weeks and see if this is going to work out. And the easiest is controlling my schedule and the people I’m working with in that schedule.

Seth [00:04:14]:

That’s great. And so then you wrote a book about your whole adventure, scaling and all that stuff. What was it like writing a book? Because I want to do a book at some point and it just seems so intimidating.

Benjamin [00:04:24]:

I actually really enjoyed the writing part. This is certainly a COVID project. What’s that?

Seth [00:04:30]:

How about the editing part?

Benjamin [00:04:31]:

No, did not enjoy that, to be clear. I love my editors, but four months of reading my own book, it’s a bit of a nightmare because mine ended up being 500 pages and they’re, like, taking it chapter by chapter. I had 130 different articles in there, all independent. It’s meant to be modular, so there’s no throughput. But at the same time, the style has to be consistent, the voice, the structure. So I’m constantly looking at and going back and forth. And this is two years worth of writing sets, so it’s like, driving me crazy.

Seth [00:05:03]:

Was a COVID project?

Benjamin [00:05:04]:

Oh, yeah. It started three years ago.

Seth [00:05:09]:

Yeah, three years ago. That’s when COVID started. Hard to believe, but now we have Wildfires. What next? I’m Europe in New York. I’m in Philly. I mean, it looks like Mars out there right now.

Benjamin [00:05:20]:

Yes.

Seth [00:05:21]:

Oh, I know.

Benjamin [00:05:21]:

It’s totally crazy. People have their masks back on. Speaking of COVID Yeah, it’s crazy.

Seth [00:05:28]:

Yeah. So you enjoyed writing the book, which I think a lot of people don’t realize, that sometimes people are like, once it’s written, I can edit it, and it’s written. It’s out of the way. Well, what was it like writing? How did you formulate the idea? What inspires you to write the book? Your inventors?

Benjamin [00:05:47]:

But the first year was really me trying to solve my own problems, whether it’s my business or my customers. I’m like, hey, what’s going on? I run into this thing with rev ops. Does PR really work? What do I need to know? And explain about financial models? So I loved wrestling with these problems, and I’m just writing post after post, 200 word entries. After about a year, I’m like, I got a lot of stuff here. I bet if I organized it and put it together and really thought about a whole structure, I could make a book of this. And so with that mindset, I revisited all the new posts I was writing. I tried to make in a more consistent format. But Seth, my writing originally was just like I was like, oh, my God, who wrote this? And did he graduate high school? But it maybe got a little better. And then with the editors who you and I have a love hate relationship with, they made it more readable.

Seth [00:06:45]:

That’s awesome. Did you self publish this, or did you go through a traditional route?

Benjamin [00:06:49]:

Self published. Went through Amazon. That’s not as easy as I thought. I would just upload it and wait for hands and it’d be out, and they kept sending it back. My favorite was odd page numbers have to be on the right side. No exception. But my graphic designer did the whole thing in InDesign. So that is manually fixing 500 page numbers. Neither one of us was happy about that. It took, like, a week. He was less tedious.

Seth [00:07:19]:

Week tedious?

Benjamin [00:07:20]:

Yeah. And there’s no value there, right?

Seth [00:07:24]:

I’m sure. Now you can throw it in Chat GBT and say, hey, here’s my InDesign file, and then move all these page numbers over. But there’s got to be a filter for that in InDesign, saying, like, no, I don’t know.

Benjamin [00:07:36]:

I’m not an expert in that whole process.

Seth [00:07:38]:

I think everything there’s ways in Photoshop to do the manual resizing of Photos. I don’t know. Indesigns? I don’t know. So what is the scariest thing about being an entrepreneur? We talked a little bit about what the best thing is that you can set your hours, all that good stuff. What keeps you up at night.

Benjamin [00:07:57]:

Yeah. So I was thinking about this a little bit. I heard a couple of your podcasts earlier.

Seth [00:08:01]:

The trick people always ask for, how can I prepare? I’m like, Just listen to the podcast. All the questions are in there.

Benjamin [00:08:09]:

That’s right. Nobody likes surprises, to be clear, not even entrepreneurs like surprises.

Seth [00:08:14]:

We get them all the time, though.

Benjamin [00:08:17]:

So I was thinking, like, one thing is there’s no security in what I’m doing. Now, granted that that’s true for everyone, but in what you and I are doing, it’s just constantly surprises. It’s kind of the paradox of freedom, right? Like, we love to have the freedom, but with that comes no security. The second is that anything is possible, but that means a lot of ambiguity. Like, what do I focus on? And I run into the paradox of choice. And then the third is really having to decide, knowing that everything and anything could go wrong. And that’s sort of the strategy paradox that we run into as founders. So those are the scary things. Like, what’s exciting? You turn that coin around and you look at the other side, you’re like, holy moly, this is scary.

Seth [00:09:02]:

It is scary. And it’s crazy how what is a good thing in life and a good thing of being about being an entrepreneur is also the scary thing that keeps you up at night. It’s like the freedom, but then you’re like, I have too much freedom. Structure, structure, please. That kind of thing. So what is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

Benjamin [00:09:23]:

Yeah. So I think it’s really important to keep a couple of things in mind, but top of the list is a growth mindset. If I can remember to keep a growth mindset, even the hardest problems will become learning opportunities. That could take hours. It could take weeks or even months until I’m past the pain. But I will learn something from that. And you and I have been through enough to know those wounds will heal, actually make us stronger. We’ll know to avoid that in the future. And then parallel to that is the idea that every crisis is an opportunity. So something horrible happens, it seems like the end of the world. I’ve been around the bend enough times to know that companies that know loss leaders end up getting acquired. Companies where the business model seems to fail or the environment changes that could quickly turn around. Some of the biggest companies we know today sort of stumbled on their success. I mean, Google never expected to be huge over AdWords that was like their fifth or 6th business model. But here we are today. So every crisis can turn into exciting opportunity for us and try and keep that in the growth mindset in mind.

Seth [00:10:38]:

I love that, because if you think about it, everyone thinks, oh, Benjamin’s had five exits of some sort. Oh, my God, he’s done overnight. That’s been two decades. That’s all. Just two decades. People don’t think they see the end result. They see the start, they see the end. They don’t know that there’s a big gap in the middle where there’s pain points and there’s things like it could be a week in this 20 years where it was painful, it’s probably more than a week. Let’s be honest here. I mean, being very light on stuff here, but it’s a week that was really painful, or it was a month or a year that was really painful, and then you got through it. People don’t see that. They just say, wow, five exits. That’s impressive. That kind of thing, right?

Benjamin [00:11:24]:

And it’s funny too, Seth. They’ll shake me down. They’ll be like, hey, what’s the magic formula? Give me the secrets. And I’m like, hey, what worked for one company, absolutely failed at the next company. Team changes, environment changes that we’ve seen, economy changes. You have to adapt each and every time. There are certain best practices to be sure. Like, I wrote a whole book about it, but that’s it. That has to be applied individually to every founder and every company.

Seth [00:11:52]:

I love it. So, Benjamin, where can people find you online? Where’s your big watering hole? Like, where do you hang out the.

Benjamin [00:11:57]:

Most so you can find me on the website? We build scalegrow.com. I update the blog post there on a weekly basis. I’m contributing different posts on LinkedIn, and I send a newsletter out weekly as well. So if any of your listeners are interested, just reach out and happy to add you.

Seth [00:12:15]:

Do you think there’s another book in you?

Benjamin [00:12:18]:

Wow. I am still getting through the first book. I still look at the writing and I’m like, oh, I could have tweaked this. I could have made the worst.

Seth [00:12:27]:

Well, at least it’s self published so you can kind of resend it out if you find a typo.

Benjamin [00:12:33]:

I could. I think I don’t want to go in and needle it here and there. I want to wait till I have something really significant or a new book.

Seth [00:12:43]:

Diversion two. Like, the next 20 years. Like the sequel.

Benjamin [00:12:48]:

Yeah. I can either go that way or there’s going to be a whole new set of challenges that you and I face, and maybe it’s worth writing about those and leaving the first set where it is to be determined.

Seth [00:12:58]:

TBD. Love it. Benjamin, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it, bud.

Benjamin [00:13:04]:

Same here, Seth. It was great talking with you again.

Seth [00:13:06]:

That was a great show. If you’re enjoying entrepreneurs Enigma, please view us in the podcast directory of your choice. Every review helps other podcast listeners find our show. If you’re looking for other podcasts in the marketing space, look no further than the Marketing Podcast Network at Marketingpodcasts Network. Goldstein Gear hopes you have enjoyed this episode. This podcast is one of the many great shows on the MPN Marketing Podcast Network.