How Mr. Lucky Grew his Business by 300% this Year Ep. 44

Oftentimes entrepreneurs think they're the best in everything and they have to be the best. But if you are the best in everything, then you're certainly not going to grow your business. You have to have people that are smarter than you around.

Welcome to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. How do people end up becoming an entrepreneur?

How do they scale and grow their businesses? How do they plan for profit? Are they in it for life? Are they building to exit these and a myriad of other topics will be discussed to pull back the veil on the wizardry of successful and FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. Hey, can you do me a favor while you're listening to this podcast, can you open a web browser and type in officialnatashamiller.com.

Yes, this is my brand new website that I built for you, entrepreneurs that want to scale and grow their businesses. It's packed full of information articles, blog posts, podcasts. And also you can download the free Profit Finder guide that helps you find more profit in your current business. You can get on the wait list for my digital course and be the first to know when my book Relentless is up for pre-sale.

Mark Lachance is a serial entrepreneur, strategic thinker and investor. He has a deep understanding of Blitz Scaling Companies. He's the CEO and Lead Investor of Maxie Media, Inc. One of the largest TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat performance marketing agencies in the world. His new book, the Lucky Formula releases on November 16th. Now let's get right into it.

I've got some construction to sports to payments, which basically FinTech to nutrition and fitness, and then to a medium digital marketing. So kind of like five careers spanning over the last 30.

Okay. Well, not all of those careers are in your bio. So what is going on with you? I mean, I love it. Don't take this as negative, but wow.

Well, I write in the book. I often think sometimes in my leaving an opportunity too soon, am I running away from an opportunity, but I don't see it that way. Actually. I see it as going after greater opportunities. So I'll give you a great example, a great story. That back in 2013, I launched the company in 2009 called Evil Canada, and we had over 200 employees grew really quickly.

And in 2013, the banks finally woke up because we were taking market share big time. We had a direct sales model, so we had 115 sales reps in each little market across Canada, each nook and cranny of the marketplace. And we would book them appointments. So we'd give him three to four appointments on a daily basis.

So we came up with this awesome, I call it the ultimate sales machine. We had our mega machine booking appointments management and the recruiting machine as well. So the banks were sleeping in 2009 when we launched the business and they were charging rates of, and I'm sure you accept credit cards for your business, right?

I know you do, or I don't know you do what I assume you do. You'd maybe use Stripe or one of those guys, and you're probably getting charged 2.3, 2.4 banks were charging 5% for a restaurant or any merchant to accept a credit card payment. So we switched. And cut those rates in half. And I saw a major opportunity there.

And then in 2013, I wanted to sell the company and kind of, it didn't happen. And then we finally got to sell it and after I applied some pressure and get the sale done in 2016 for myself, but that's kind of my story in the FinTech space a little bit. I can go on and on, but -

Actually let's just skip because it's such opposite ends of the spectrum.

FinTech, how in God's name did you happen upon Maxie Media, Tiktok, like you are super cool, your kids must think actually they probably don't think you're that cool. But anyway -

Mark Lachance 03:57 They think I'm unbelievable. So what had happened was after I sold my company in 26 years, sold my shares, an Evil Canada in 2016, my wife had already started a fitness and nutrition business called Fit Club 24.

And we had about 25 locations. At that time I invested in it. It was started in 2013 grew pretty quickly. So I started doing the social media marketing. So that's right around that time, Facebook, the ad platform was kind of, kind of new, I guess, at that time. And so I understood how to media buy and I was driving in the leads and closing some of them myself.

And then finally I'm like, "What am I doing?", "What am I buying the media for?" and trying to sell and trying to manage and an end, it's the classic entrepreneur, which I can get into later, but the entrepreneur's dilemma. So then finally I started interviewing different organizations to take over the media by.

Because I would consider myself an incredible media buyer at all, especially today with the way the platforms have changed. But anyway, so I kept on interviewing, interviewing, and nobody could beat my score. My number, nobody could beat my cost per lead of $12 and 52 cents to get somebody to sit down in front of our coaches, our.

And finally this gentleman named Matt of Maxi Media, walked through my door and completely obliterated my numbers. So then we got to be friends. I gave him the business. And then over time -

And how much? What did you get down to?

It costs 2 dollars and 12 cents?

I liked that number. I'd like it to be lower too, but I still love it.

So, so we get to be good friends over time.

And then I saw an opportunity and I like to find undervalued assets. And I saw him as an undervalued asset, meaning he has a special skill. You understand how to media buying. He understood how to find that sort of opportunity in the diamond. And I said, look, why don't we combine our skills? You're a one man shop.

I know how to blitz scale businesses and let's do it. So, you know, the rest is kinda history. We started in 2017. Now it's 2021. We have 250 employees from two and we're kind of rocking pretty good or -

Kind of rocking. So you described yourself, are you referring to. Among other things as a Blitz scaler, what does that mean to you?

So Blitz scaling is the ability to take a business from zero and go to a thousand pretty quickly, but you only can do that after you've taken many, many beatings and I use the term entrepreneur's dilemma. So to give you a story around what I mean by that it was 2010. It was always our, I don't know about you in the shot and you can ask me, answer this question around your birthday.

Do you kind of get a rebirth, you feel like you rebirth a little bit? I do. So it's coming this year. Anyway, my birthday is on December 13th, so it was around December of 2010. And I was sitting at my desk completely fried and stressed out. I had at the time 200 employees, like I said, in Evil Canada. And my email box is filled with like a thousand emails.

Completely burned out because at the time I felt like I had to do everything I had to know about sales. I didn't know about marketing. I didn't know about telemarketing. I didn't know about accounting and finance and customer service and I didn't know everything. And then I said, there's gotta be a better way.

I want to quit this business. I want to crawl under a rock and cry. So I was typing online. I need a mentor. So businessman Tony Robbins kept them coming up and coming up and lo and behold in January, early in January.

Because he had a great media buyer, and great social media campaigns.

There you go. But you're absolutely right.

So lo and behold, he had an event called business mastery and, um, I am giving him a plug right now because it changed my. And so Tony taught me and all of the speakers taught me that I was the problem in my business. You're stuck or you're not growing because of yourself. It's your problem. And so from there I learned that I didn't have the right people around me.

If you think you're going to do everything in grow, let's scale, a business or scale a business it's never going to happen. So the key is you need to have people around you that are much better than you are smarter than you are. And Natasha, I think when our last conversation we had spoken about this.

Oftentimes entrepreneurs think they're the best in everything and they have to be the best. But if you are the best in everything, then you're certainly not going to grow your business. You have to have people that are smarter than you around you. So, I mean, fast forward to today, I don't even need to buy, I don't do any of the creatives and Tiktok.

I don't do any of that stuff. I have the best people around me doing it so that it allows us to blitz scale and -

What do you do then?

Well, actually I wrote a book now I'm the CEO and CFO actually right now, but I just hired a VP of finance and he's going to be taking over all the CFO roles. I like to understand, I like to know the numbers and what's in the bank, every dollar that's in the bank so that I know our cashflow, but I'm giving that over.

So I, and also we're raising capital right now. I can get into some crazy stories about valuations, if you -

Wow, right, valuations and I mean, I was going to ask at the end and the decided not to, but now I'm going to, so if you're talking about raising capital, I'm going to assume there's going to be, and based on your past and exit. That you're driving too.

That's correct. Yep. So, well, first we're taking care of all the employees, so we have a stock option plan. We're rolling out right now. So we want to make sure everybody gets the win. Now there's a great book by Richard Kosch called The Star Principle amazing book by the way. And this is great for your viewers.

If they want to get into a business, make sure you find a star industry and industry that's growing by between 10 and 30% a year in businesses. And if you want to join. And if you're not an entrepreneur, join a business, that's growing by that same clip. And you're going to do very, very well. I mean, there's other businesses as, you know, maybe manufacturing and things like that are growing that four or 5% a year, but digital marketing and anything digital right now is growing more than 30%.

I mean our business tripled last year. So I listened to one of your podcasts yesterday, about 200% growth. Our business this year grew 300%. So we're pretty excited about that.

So you knocked will Curran out of the park. Just kidding. No, it's totally fine. It's totally fine. So, okay. Mr. Lucky, your new book comes out on November 16th.

It's called The Lucky Formula, this is your opportunity to give us all the juicy details and make us.

Oh, first of all, look at that clover on there. It's got the look at that, it's got the formulas embedded in the clovers and that's awesome four-leaf Clover. It's about how to stack the odds in your favor and caching and success.

The premise is luck is not a fluke. It's an actual formula. So there's a way to attract luck in your life to attract success, to attract happiness. And it's a step-by-step formula. So the formula itself is internal mastery or internal mastery over the conditions of your internal stealth plus external mastery plus action equals luck.

And I step you through step- by-step-by- step. So to give you an example, it's like, for example, your crew. So Natasha, I know your crew, the people you hang around with are rock stars, and that's one of the formulas in the book. And if you hang around with rock stars, you're obviously going to pick up rockstar, rockstar, vibes, and rockstar thought processes.

And just to give you an example. So I dinner about a month ago with a gentleman. Who's a multi-billionaire and I'm not a multi-billionaire yet, but working on it. So, but anyway, so this gentlemen, just the thought process and the thinking that this gentleman had was incredible. And the knowledge that I pulled from that one dinner was earth shattering for me.

So the point is that within the book, it teaches you that the five people you hang around with not to steal from Jim Rowan, but I'm going to, you're the average of the five people you hang around. So if you're hanging around with Natasha, I know you work with some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon valley.

So imagine you're hanging around with those CEOs, your brain's on fire, and I know your accomplishments are off the charts, so it's probably largely because of who you hang around, right? So that's a key factor. Other factors like mastering your narrative, the story you tell yourself. So Natasha, I'm going to ask you a question.

Yeah.

When you wake up in the morning, do you tell yourself that you're a rock star or do you tell yourself, oh no, this day is going to be terrible and I'm so afraid and I'm so nervous and blah, what do you tell yourself?

I know I'm a rock star, so I wake up in the morning and I take my time because I know I don't have to fret.

I'm not in panic mode and when I'm ready to get into my complete group. Which honestly is between 10 and 3 during the day. That's where I do my best work. I just sink my teeth into it and I love it.

There you go. So you're prepared the narrative you tell yourself is that you're awesome. You're a rock star.

I'm sure you have affirmations that you tell yourself, for example. I have nine that I say I'm a fearless leader. I am awesome. I am healthy. I'm wealthy. I am lucky. I am happy. So on and so forth. So I tell myself that constantly visualization. And I assume you visualize, I assume you see, like, so for example, I was just doing my winds of the day, right? Just doing these just before this call, he winds of the day and my goals, I'm not done, but I do this on a regular basis on a daily basis acknowledging. So a lot of people they believe because of the stories that were told by their parents or by their circle or where they grew up, that they're losers, or they'll never be a success, but I think anybody can be a success.

And if you changed that story in your mind, so the book teaches you how to change the story in your mind teaches you how to hang around with the right people, teaches you the step-by-step things that will happen to get you lucky. And I'll have a story for you.

I wish I had this book when I was 16. And again, when I was 23 and again, in 2009, like I can see a milestone,

Well you can buy you're 25 Natasha, so you can get it now, but here's an example of stacking the odds in your favor. So I'm heavy into biohacking. I was at Dave Asprey's event a few, a few weeks ago, and I've been reading his books and reading health and fitness and nutrition and things like that. So I was at the event and I'm sitting at lunch and a woman sits right next me.

She's a turns out her name is Kim and I asked her what she did and she's like, well, my daughter's right over there, she's a 25th ranked tennis player in the world. I'm like, wow, that's unbelievable. And then what about you? What do you do? Well, I'm the president of the Buffalo Sabers. That's incredible,

right. First of all, a woman president in NHL, like is off the charts. Awesome. So I started talking to her about some of the players and, you know, I used to be an agent by the way. I think we spoke about this. So I know a lot about the league and teams. And so then I looked down at her name plate and it's Kim.

Who's the turns out. I'm like, oh, you're not only the president, you're the owner. And you also own the Buffalo Bills, which is the football team. So I started talking over, we started talking about the football team and what are the issues like, what are the issues in marketing? So she says that her demographic is 50 year old males and I'm like, well, I might have a solution for you.

I literally got my phone out and called my creative team. I said, I need creatives ASAP on tracking gen Z to the Buffalo Bills.

A new market.

Exactly, exactly, cause she said basically boomers are her target market or X-ers so anyways, so gen Z, so they whipped up five videos quickly and they were amazing. I sent them over to her and she was still at the event.

I'm like Kim check this out. So we don't have the account yet, but the point is I put myself in that position to get lucky to meet the owner of the Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Sabres to potentially get a massive account. So that's how you stack the odds. You, you start slowly but surely stacking the odds in your favor.

So is it luck that I sat next door or did I put myself in that position? That's the point?

That's amazing. Did you get that account?

We're in the process of, we don't have it yet, but even if we don't, I don't care.

I'm going to tag them on this episode when we launch it.

Kim, are you listening?

Okay. So let's talk about the book. What are your goals for the book? Are you trying to make money on the book sales on speaking engagements? Are you trying to drive more business into your funnel at Maxie? Are you trying to really reach out and help entrepreneurs and just people in general?

I think it's twofold. So I was working with a coach, a psychologist. Who's my coach Srini Pillay who's in the book as well. He's an amazing, he's that Harvard medical. And he taught me detail on how to visualize. And he asked me that question. He's like, what drives you? And I was thinking. And I'm like, I love when I was on the sales floor with my team, getting on the phone and closing the sale.

And I would love when I taught a little kid how to shoot, put the fuck in the top corner, how to take a shot and put it in the top corner, score a goal. And so part is to get the story, to collect the stories of people that are successful because they implemented the formula. So I love when people, when I'm able to teach somebody to do something great.

And I know I have a lot of successes and a lot of failures by the way, because failure is a part of the form that you have to -

Failure is part of the process.

Absolutely, and I know you've read it. There's a mega failure in my life. So that's going to be a good teaching process. So the goal is teach people, my failures and successes teach people the formula itself, collect the success stories, which I'm excited for.

And then also to brand myself as a thought leader, we'll say, and then brand myself as a blitz scaling CEO, because we are going out to raise capital at some point in the.

What would be helpful for that?

That's the goal.

How are you going to collect the stories? Do you have a mechanism for that? Do you have a lead funnel? Do you have a way to get that from people and they'll be able to repurpose it?

Well, we're launching, we're going to be launching it on my website so marklachance.com, so thank you very much. And I do have a gift for everybody at the end, by the way. So, so we'll be collecting those stories. They're -

Are you giving out NFTs like Gary V.

We actually have an NFT we're launching by the way.

Anyway, we're not giving out an NFTs, but anyways, I am going to give you guys the lucky quiz though, at the end, you want me to do it now? Or you want me to do. I mean. Sure.

Yeah, let's do it now.

Lucky quiz, so this is a gift for all of your followers and listeners, the lucky quiz. You're going to find it, that theluckyformula.com/quiz, again, theluckyformula.com/quiz.

And it's going to give you your lucky score on a scale of one to a hundred. What's your score? How lucky are you? And then it's going to give you tips and tricks on how to get more and more successful.

I want to say that, you know, someone like me who wakes up and knows I'm a rockstar that does not mean that I don't need to learn more, or I can't gain more knowledge by listening to other people's stories or reading other people's books.

So I look forward to it. I want to find out my score and I'll let you know what it is. What are the key points? If you had to think of sort of disseminating all of your wins and losses, what are the key points for entrepreneurs who want to scale and grow their businesses?

Okay. So the key point is, and you hear this all the time. You're in Silicon valley, you fail fast. Right? You hear that all the time. So a key point is you have to fail to learn. And a lot of times young entrepreneurs don't understand. They don't get the entrepreneur's dilemma. Again, this is a point I want to drive home. They believe that they're the smartest, the best the blood.

They believe that I'm going to tell you, you're not, you cannot be the smartest in everything. Hire the best around. And here's another thing people get sort of territorial. Well, if I hire somebody smarter than me, they're going to shine more than me. That's the point, right? I've got to sit around my nutrition business because it's a direct sales.

And we're the number one seller nutrition products in Canada for this particular company. But one of our coaches, I was trying to explain him a good listen. The more you allow your people to shine, the more you are going to be put on that stage and get to speak, right? The more you will shine, but people don't understand that.

Ego gets involved. Right. So I would say a huge part of the formula is dropped the ego, the higher superstars around you, and they elevate you to superstar status. That's kind of a big learning from this book.

It took me a long time to get there and and it took many iterations and many different people telling me this, reading it in different ways.

And then when it started clicking, right, I was like, shifting gears, you can kind of click in and you're not quite there, but when it finally clicked in. "Oh, great. This is amazing." I'm going to do this one or three things and I'm going to stay in my lane and I'm going to delegate and uplift and let people grow.

They might grow into their role, or we might bring somebody that's in just so way overhead sometimes though that doesn't always work. But thank you for saying that again. Wish I knew that 20 years ago, so you're really successful. You're a rock star. But what is the biggest challenge you have right now, today in your main core business?

Well, right now we need to diversify our revenue right now. So we're focused on, I mean we have threestreams of revenue, but it's far too concentrated on one of them. So our main focus and our main, I think he can call it a challenge, but I think it's a good challenge is diversifying outside. So we're taking out a verticalized approach.

So for example, we're going after the education vertical below the financial services vertical, which is personal loans and insurance as well. So we're hiring a rock stars. I'll call them the vertical ATAR, and we're going to put him in charge of the three different verticals that we want to attack. So it's number one, finding that person and which we believe we did.

I have a meeting tomorrow, just so you know.

Congratulations in advance to that person.

And so that's kind of the challenge. The challenge is diversifying our revenue so that we can maximize our multiple in our.

So let me rephrase what I think I just heard from you knowing about what you do your, for your business. If Tiktok closed down tomorrow was not an existence. Poof gone. What would that do to your business?

Well, 62% of our traffic right now is Tiktok, but we could shift that over to actually it would hurt us 62%. So we're diversifying, -

I mean you can pivot. Can make some moves, but tomorrow your business would be down 62%.

Absolutely. And I'll give you a story around that. So back two years ago, before we got on, a Tiktok, which is a blessing, Facebook shut us down. I'm sure you heard this story a lot. Facebook literally shattered. And we got it back two months later, but imagine being idle for two months, it's incredible. So our business went from massive revenue to zero overnight. So we learned the hard way to diversify.

When that happens do you say, "okay, this is another moment. This is another challenge. We are going to be fine. I don't know how yet, but we're going to be fine." Or "do you say, oh shit, we're losing everything. Oh my god."

20 years ago, I would have been that person. But today I'm the other guy because I truly live the formula meditation. For example, I think you meditate. I think he told me that last time.

I don't meditate, but what I do, which I think you said was my meditation is when I'm stressed out or upset, I go to my piano and about half hour to two hours of playing sometimes singing, but playing and it takes me to another world.

You get into meditation. Which is I meditate every day, 21 minutes per day, plus other techniques. But anyway, so when I started that technique six years ago, the voices and the crazy fears that everybody gets are gone. So today I would see it as a positive challenge. And in the past I'd have been freaked out.

That's great, such great information for people listening, because it might just be one of those clicks, right. That I was talking about that add up to finally finding the gear that you need to be in. So your strategy for growth, it sounds like it's actually the reverse of the challenge we're facing is that right?

Well, our strategy for growth is twofold. Actually, it's going to be acquisition to other companies and it's going to be acquisition of amazing talent to diversify our revenue and our channels. So we just brought on a gentleman who is quite adept at YouTube, which we're not, we have zero traffic on YouTube right now. So we're focused on Tiktok, Facebook, Snapchat. And Instagram. So now we're hiring a Google and a YouTube. So we're going to diversify our traffic and also our revenue source that'll increase our value quickly. Right.

So, what are you looking for growth for next year? Is there a number you're targeting as far as percentage of?

So we grew by 300% this year.

That's painful, you don't want to do that again, do you?

Of course I do. If you have the right people, it doesn't that it's not painful actually. Right? So we want to grow that's. Our target is to grow by another 300% this year. And so it'll get us to close to the billion dollar market. If we can hit our in value. We stacks the way I'm valuing it.

Natasha Miller 25:25You can ask Mr. Wonderful, what he thinks of Mr. Lucky's valuation. We heard about Mr. Lucky's not so lucky moments, his mindset for success and his approach to working on his business rather than doing everything for more information. Please go to the show notes where you're listening to this podcast.

Want to know more about me? Go to my website, officialnatashamiller.com. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe also, if you haven't done so yet. Please leave a review where you're listening to this podcast now I'm Natasha Miller and you've been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.