A Special Conversation with the Co-Founder and CEO of HighLevel

Damon Pistulka 00:09
All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I am one of your hosts, Damon pistolka, and that lovely gentleman right over there is Curt Anderson. Welcome to our show. Today we are going to be talking with a special guest. We’re having a special conversation with the co founder and CEO of high level Shaun Clark. Boy, I’m excited. Curt, take it away, my friend. Thanks.

Curt Anderson 00:36
Damon, appreciate it. Happy Friday. Everybody coming to the holidays. What an honor, what a privilege that we have. Shaun Clark, here, Shaun, happy Friday. How are you? Man, I am doing. Well, great. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, we this is an honor. It’s a privilege. We’re just raving fans of high level. We’ve had your teammates on the program here. So this is, you know, we’ve been doing a deep dive with high level on the show here. And so first question that I want to dive into for you. We go back in time a little bit like you’re you’ve got a fascinating background, your serial entrepreneur. I want to go back a little ways, if we could sure when you’re a little guy growing up. Little guy grow now you’re an Oregon guy. Is that correct?

Shaun Clark 01:16
An Oregon guy? Oregon.

Curt Anderson 01:19
Thank you for thank you for correcting me. Thank you.

Damon Pistulka 01:23
He doesn’t know how to say it. You

Shaun Clark 01:26
must be, you must be like, you know, you gotta be east of Denver or something. Yeah, I’m like, I got it, okay, on

Curt Anderson 01:33
top of it, he went, he went to the he went to the official he went to the real OSU demon. He went to Oregon State University, right? The real OSU. So, well, technically,

Shaun Clark 01:44
that’s okay. I did. I did attend that university till my junior year. Yes.

Curt Anderson 01:48
Okay, so you start. All right, so Shaun, let’s go here, when you’re a little guy growing up, when you’re a little guy growing up, who was your hero? Who did you look up to? Who’d you admire? Who was your hero, and when you’re a little guy growing up, my mom. All right, what’s let’s hear all about

Shaun Clark 02:01
mom. So you know, only child, single mom, mechanical engineer, first female graduate mechanical engineering program at OSU in the 70s or something, or 60s. Can’t remember something, and so just always admired the fact that she was able to provide such a great growing up and at the same time, you know, was a professional. Got to watch her struggle a lot with what it was like to be a female in a very male dominated industry. So got, got really, I think, I mean, while I was a white male, I got to see the perspective of, you know, other than than what I was going to run into. But I think it was very instructive, because it also showed me what just being in a job was like, and you know, how you could very quickly suffer some pretty extreme consequences based on the actions of others that had really nothing to do with your performance. And so it really spoke volumes to me, both on the consequence side, as well as watching my mom, you know, push through it and get in, get through it. And so to me, that was a pretty amazing, lucky place to grow up.

Curt Anderson 03:14
Well, I love it. And did you mention mom’s name? Please. Oh, Diana, yeah, my mom, so I Big shout out to Diana, single mom, engineer, early grad 70s, you know, kind of a sounds like a pioneer. So she kind of laid the footprint, the inspiration, the work foundation. Work ethic is that kind of like a percent real entrepreneurship came from 100%

Shaun Clark 03:37
Well, entrepreneurship, no, but definitely, you know, working hard, always remembering she, you know, she used to tell me, you know, things like, you know, if you’re not willing to do the job, someone’s always right there to take your place. So definitely put the fear into me early on. And, you know, the entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship really grew just from the fact that I really tried to figure out, how do you square all those things with, you know, a little bit more choice, and certainly the ability to fail on your own based on your own decisions, more so, you know, more so than just getting a job.

Curt Anderson 04:09
Yeah. Alright, awesome. Alright. So let’s keep the party rolling. So Diana lays a footwork kind of foundation for you to, you know, really, you’ve gotta, what an what an inspiration having a strong mother in that presence, there you go to OSU. And if I understand this correctly, maybe computer science is that kind of your

Shaun Clark 04:27
science. Yep, that was me, a software engineer. Programmer. Love writing code. Yep, 100% now, before that, I mean, before you can go to college, I had the privilege to intern at Intel when I was, gosh, what was I 15 or something, and then, and then work writing software code for a market marketing agency which, which was really big. I mean that Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, like really couple 100 employees, was going gangbusters, so had an opportunity to work in industry prior to going to college. So kind of went into college, unlike a lot of my fellow, you know, start. Had a keen idea of what it was really like to work in the real world before I began. So had a really good idea of what I was after when I got there. Well, love

Curt Anderson 05:07
it. So you work at Intel. You had all sorts of, you know, coming out of college, all sorts of choices, you know, Microsoft, you know, you know, internet bubble. You know, is that time with internet, boom, is starting to happen. Yep. What did you see yourself like? Did you? Was it in your DNA? Was it in your blood that you’re always gonna be an entrepreneur? Or were you the accidental entrepreneur? I know you’ve got a great story. I wanted

Shaun Clark 05:31
to, I really always wanted to own my own business. I would say, sort of, you know, one of the mistakes I made, and I think some of this. I mean, I don’t want to blame mom at all, but, I mean, when you don’t have entrepreneurs in your family, you know? And I think this is just natural, you know, if you don’t know someone who does something, you sort of try to seek out those people. And I think to some extent, I put a, I would, for sure, put way too much emphasis, at least here. You know, this isn’t like, you know, this isn’t like, learning to be an astronaut, right? It’s not like there’s this, like, there’s this, like precision system that you go through. It’s a lot of, you know, you know, trial and error. And so I put a lot of stock into trying to find a fellow entrepreneur to learn under. And so I would say the biggest mistake I made was I sort of thought, Well, I really need to find someone to learn from before I do this. And so it really deep, you know, and you know, and there’s always pluses and minuses everything in life. So I ended up, there’s the.com crash right there at at the junior and of my college career. And I lost my sweet job at that marketing agency because they laid off 100 employees, which is about 50% of their people in one day. And I was sort of left jobless. And I sort of went door to door one summer, and I sort of said, All right, I’m gonna just take a stack resumes and I’ll put McDonald’s at the very end of my route and just see what happens in the middle. And I happened to knock on the door of this guy who was transitioning from a residential long distance company, which had 10,000 customers, and he had sort of seen the writing on the wall, because back then, if you’re old enough, you know, there’s these laws, or you couldn’t buy local from long distance. But now really dating ourselves, because it’s like pre mobile phone anyways, all that to say he saw the end of that, and he was going into the answering service business, which at the time was a regional business, and this where, at the time, again, old school rules here, long distance rates were insanely expensive, and he had these really great rates with from his long distance business. And he was smart enough to see that he could kind of combine the two together. And so I walked in the door though, with the so he had grown that entire business off the yellow pages, which and and so his plan at the time was that that’s he was going to rule the world by going after all these answering services and advertising through the yellow pages. So I walked in the door said, Oh my God, what are you talking about, you idiot? Like, have you ever heard the internet and websites? And to his credit, you know, he, I don’t think he really believed me at the time, but he said, you know, all right, fine, let’s, let’s partner up. Let’s, you do the website thing. I’ll do the yellow page thing. And I, you know, we put out a website. And, you know, lucky for me about, I think, August, or September, like, the month after I went back to college, I was still working with him, and this crazy thing called Google AdWords came out, and, you know, the rest of this kind of history, and we went on to dominate that industry. We wrapped it up. We ended up with, you know, a $30 million enterprise with, you know, 5000 small businesses nationwide. You know, 400 agents, all answering calls inbound at home from for plumbers and doctors and lawyers and dentists. And it was a great business and a great experience. And, you know, I ended up dropping out of college to do that, and spent 12 years working near seven days a week, you know, building that business. So it was a really interesting, you know, experience in that I got a lot of exposure to a lot of business I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise, but ended up essentially leaving that business with nothing. And so that was kind of the downside of of that experience as well. So kind of plus and minus. There no okay, alright,

Curt Anderson 09:04
you piqued my curiosity there. So and so we’re checking out your LinkedIn. So again, connect with Shaun here on on LinkedIn. We’re here, founder, CEO of go high level. We’re going to do a deep dive, really plunging into all the value that are the solutions that you provide. Now, what’s fascinating, there’s, it seems like there’s a trend with your entrepreneurial journey. Is with the answering company, it was really helping entrepreneurs to better their business,

Shaun Clark 09:32
right? Really, what I felt I love that business so much, because on one hand, it was the least techie business of all kind of time, although, to be fair, we did some kick ass things back then, you know this, there was no such thing as remote work at the time that, you know, we So basically, what happens? We filled up this little building with people, and, you know, we sort of said, Okay, well, what are we going to do here? And we started going around town, looking at other places where, you know, they had that. And the only thing back then where that was bigger than us, that. Was more of a call center. And a call center really, just like, you know, we’re working for Ford Motor Company or something, and it’s literally just like a body shop. And these places were wretched, man, I mean, they were packed tight. And, you know, there’d be, like, you know, you’d have to, like, to go to the bathroom. You’d have to, like, raise your hand, and things that space. It was like, the spaces were so tight. They had to, like, it was like, it was like a runway. They had to, like, a runway. They had to, like, clear the taxiway so you could get to the bat. It was terrible. And then, like, the, you know, and then you have, like, the parole officer sitting in the lobby, just on and on right. Just that future was so terrible, we were not going to continue expanding our business if that’s where we’re headed. So then we read this crazy article online about this company called Jet Blue, which was actually having, at the time, predominantly female, females in Utah taking calls, and they’d figure out how to do it at home. And we’re like, that’s the ticket, if we’re going to do this, is how we’re going to do it. So there was a laundromat across the street that had this, basically this terrible little office space above it for rent. And we said, okay, that’s what we’re doing. Make that our spot. So we made that like our pilot office. And, you know, we tried it was like, how do we put it agents there? And how do we not connect them to, you have a physical wire back to the office? And, you know, we started off kind of hokey, and then I remember, and but we got it working. And then so we started to, kind of started to do it a little bit. And then I randomly saw a job posting that Amazon had put out for a phone system engineer. And I’m like, I bet you they’re working on some phone system in Amazon. So I applied for the job just so I could figure out what was going on. And then they called me, and I said, Okay, well, actually, I don’t want the job, but I want to know who the heck is running this project. And sure enough, it turned out that’s exactly what Amazon was doing. They were moving, at the time, away from basically buying big phone systems from other people and doing themselves. So we’re in Oregon, not Oregon, and we and Seattle, Washington is right north of us, where Amazon is from. And so we went up there, met with the team. We’ve sort of became their inside, you know, private beta testers of this, and basically built the entire what you can now buy is an Amazon hosted phone system, our original use case, and they allowed us to put literally 1000s or hundreds, excuse me, agents at home. And that’s kind of how we kind of grew the business. It was a lot

Curt Anderson 12:13
of fun. Wow, all right, well, dude, I mean, like the insight to, like, yeah, apply for a job just because I want to. I want to, I want, dude, you should have been a detective, right? So,

Shaun Clark 12:23
all right, I have made a I will say, if I do anything, well, in life, it’s fine. The shortcuts,

Curt Anderson 12:29
finding shortcuts, that’s your superpower, finding shortcuts and be

Shaun Clark 12:33
willing to do stuff that most people would regard as nuts, yeah. So now again, they work.

Curt Anderson 12:39
So Sean, so 12 years you mentioned now, did that lead you to it looks like you had, like, an invoice, like a SAS Type

Shaun Clark 12:46
so, I mean, so, like, lesson here is, when you’re getting into a partnership, you really want to know ahead of time what you want out of it and be it’s, I always now, I now say plan for the divorce before you get married. And I have seen this now, with countless other entrepreneurs, very few of them. I mean, lucky for them, sad for me, have worse stories than I do. They tend to, they tend to hit the breakup points much earlier. But you know, the reality was that early on, I was offered a deal that I, as a naive 18 year old kid, thought was Shangri La, and it took it. And you know, 12 years later, when I had felt like I had essentially put my entire world into something and realized that perhaps I was due a bit more. I was told no. And to be fair, that was the deal, and, and, and, you know, I don’t think anyone who did anything wrong, but at the end of that time, I had moved from an 18 year old kid to a guy who was married and had just had his first child, and I woke up one day and I realized that I was very unhappy with the situation. I felt it was incredibly unfair. And all of a sudden I had a child, and I realized, Okay, I’m gonna have to tell this kid someday to go for his dreams. And if I’m sitting around here compromising, I can lie to myself all day long, but I cannot lie to him. So I got to do something about this. So, I mean, I came to a point where, you know, I made it very clear I wanted more. I tried every which way to do it, and I was told no. And at some point, I just had to put my money where my mouth was, and I walked. And it was incredibly scary and painful and difficult, and lucky for me, I had a spouse who was willing to support me through it, and I went out and I support started my first software company, which was not a very straightforward path, but all that to say, off my kitchen table, I eventually grew to about 1000 small businesses, all while having my infant son bouncing on a ball while I was soft programming, trying to get him to sleep in front of me, yeah, and, you know? And it was a wild ride, but it did eventually gain some traction, and I eventually got bought out by a Canadian payments company, as I always say, sadly, not enough to retire on a beach, but enough to start high level. And so here I am.

Curt Anderson 15:00
Yeah, alright. Thank you. Thank you for filling in those gaps. What an incredible story, super inspiring. So let’s go into, you know, and again, what I admire. It seems like you the whole time you’re like, you’re helping companies with their customers, a small business.

Shaun Clark 15:16
I’ve always been a small business guy. I’m super passionate about it, you know,

Curt Anderson 15:19
with, you know, whether the call business invoicing. Now, okay, let’s do and then we’re going to dive into how go high level is just such a powerful tool for all sorts of entrepreneurs, small business owners. But give us, take us back, 2018 I believe when go high level, how? How did this start? How did it get going? Let’s go there. Well, so

Shaun Clark 15:40
within voice Sherpa, you know, what I had learned was that it was awesome to be an add on to QuickBooks and Xero, but if you don’t have something that stands by on its own, you’re just inevitably likely to get replaced. So that was sort of the big lesson I learned there. I also learned that, you know, I’m not an enterprise guy, so I saw, you know, the reason I sold invoice, she Pro, was simple that I didn’t have the I didn’t, you know, honestly, I didn’t like, I would say, the idea of taking an enterprise, I knew other customers that were other companies that were doing it. I’m certain I could have done it. I just didn’t like it. I don’t like pretending I care about big companies. I don’t like pretending that I like big companies. I just, I can’t, I can’t pretend to be somebody I’m not, yeah. So fundamentally, I was just like, Okay, forget it. I gotta find something else. So I was like, great. So I realized from that experience, I needed to stand on my own. So having a QuickBooks or zero integration was good. You should want that in your app, but it should stand alone and operate by itself. So that was kind of my thing. So then I was like, okay, then I was like, All right, well, I don’t want to try to be everything to everybody. So why don’t I just pick a niche? So I went after and to be fair, here, I actually first went after the best software engineer. I knew his name is Varuna, my CTO co founder today, but I knew I needed help, so I went after him. And at the time I was, I had sold him boy Sherpa. I was, I was consult. I was like, under a mandatory one year consulting agreement. He was off doing something stupid that I knew was going to blow up. So I sort of just said, All right, cool. I’ll wait you out. I’m very clear about these things. I said, That’s a stupid idea, so call me when it fails. And so he sort of kind of, you know, I consulted away.

Curt Anderson 17:15
He’s still friends with you, Shaun, he’s still friends with you. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if he

Shaun Clark 17:19
likes you. He’s still around, but, yeah, so, but then eventually it failed, as I knew it would. And he called me up and he said, All right, you’re right. It failed. Now what? So, you know, we did a couple of things. He started like an online invoicing thing, which is still technically, I think, live in the Android Market, and we’re going to make money off payments that fail. Then we started service pro Max, which was a HVAC sort of field service, all you can eat management sort of app. The problem is, we didn’t bother to ask anybody if that’s what the market wanted. And so when we came out with it, we had a bunch of customers, and they said, Oh, this is cool, but we’ve seen this before, except we’ve seen a version that’s like, you know, maybe it’s a little more expensive, but it’s got like 100 more features. So why would we use this? And we’re like, Oh, crap. So again, I’m really good. I’m not very creative at all, but I am really good at finding shortcuts and listening to other people’s stories and really stealing great ideas, so I just listened to a couple great interviews from other entrepreneurs who were focusing more around marketing. And so what we did is we pivoted the app to high level one dot, which was really just two way text messaging and reputation management, because I figured, well, that’s what every business needs, right? So then we went out and started selling that and wow, that was amazing. Because now people are like, Wait a second. Hold on, hold on. You’re going to help me grow my business. Well, holy crap, take my money. So that was exciting for the first five minutes. But then two weeks we go by and they’d all cancel. And, you know, I am not the, I don’t know. I’m not the like, you know, when it comes to that sort of stuff, it kind of like hurts your feelings when something you worked really hard on isn’t going well, especially when they told you it was great. So I would just sort of be like, You know what? What’s wrong? Are you guys? Like, dumb? Are you stupid? Which one is it? Because, yeah, why are you canceling? You know? And they would say, oh, no, it’s just as good as you said. It was going to be accept we don’t have time to learn how to implement this in our business. And, of course, to two software engineers, that is the worst thing you can hear, because it doesn’t. It’s not like you need to build something you don’t have. It’s just that, like they’re just not willing to learn it. And I’d say things like, well, don’t you realize that the guy down the street is going to get this stuff and then kick your butt? And they’d be like, Yeah, but we just don’t have time. And it’s just like, Okay, now what and so we got Uber lucky in this moment, because, you know, this could have gone many different ways, but we got a phone call from a marketing agency, and that marketing agency had we had a co customer in common, and he’s like, Hey, my name’s Rob, and Alex, and I have this customer, and we’re, you’re doing this thing for them, and I’d like to see what you’re doing, this and that. And like almost every great idea I’ve ever come across the My first reaction is like, Oh God, this is so stupid. Why are we talking this idiot? He doesn’t even pay us any money. But he was super nice. Okay, he was super nice, dude. So I’m like, alright, alright, fine, fine, fine. So we get on the call with him, we show him what he’s doing, and you know, he’s like, wow, this is amazing. I have like 80 other customers. Can I buy? This from you. And we’re like, sure, and but, you know, but one guy, you know, as exciting as that is one guy buying that, like, whatever, it’s not going to pay all the bills, right? So I’m like, who knows, but two weeks went by and he’s still there. So that was good. He kept feeding us, really good idea. So that was awesome. But then, really, you know, long term, what he did, apart from many things, is open our eyes to the fact that there’s this whole world of people out there that help these small businesses implement technology, who are really, at the time, getting no credit for any of it. And fundamentally, I think also by and large, were service organizations, and they were selling, they were really powering a lot of the sales these other products, even it’s in some cases, unbeknownst to the products themselves. And so what we realized early on was like, gosh, what we should do is, let’s become the white knight there. Let’s support these folks. So we literally pivoted our whole business to focus on these marketing agencies. And you know, lucky for us, Robin didn’t just disappear overnight. After that, he stuck in there. He introduced us. He’d been in the agency world for many years. He introduced to all his friends. He brought us in, inside every place you could imagine that we would have never knew existed, let alone had access to. And then, you know, and I’m very embarrassed to say, spent the next, like two years, flying around the country with me for free on his own dime, promoting high level with no ownership, no pay, no promises, no nothing. It actually got so embarrassing. We Varuna and I woke up one day and we were like, Oh my God, where would we be without this guy? We need to give him equity quick. So we literally, literally called him up and said, Hey, by the way, we forgot to tell you. We’re gonna give you equity deal. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so and so, but, but now we are all three co founders, and all three equal and in and, you know, the rest is history. But, you know, by focusing on the real sort of heroes behind the scenes, we were able to find it a market that was really underserved but quite well developed kind of staring, staring a lot of people in the face, but no product to date had ever said, You know what, we’re not going to sell to the plumber and the dentist and the lawyer and the doctor and the marketing agency. We’re just going to sell to the marketing agency. And that’s truly what has made the world of difference for us.

22:21
Yeah. Okay. And

Damon Pistulka 22:22
one of the things we talk about a lot is focusing on on your customer and really understanding what they need. And that’s what you guys did, and really have and continue to focus in and you know, the thing that I love about go high level is your relentless pursuit of helping small businesses, these marketing agencies deliver world class solutions to small businesses, because now what you’ve done is you’ve taken what used to cost and be tremendously costly, prohibitive to the dentist on the corner, the stuff that was was enterprise level now just five years ago. Yeah, and it’s crazy cool, because the and the your pace of development of new products, innovations, and just continuing to prove and refine, improve and refine, is, man, I tell you, if you’re, if you’re looking at your updates that you guys are doing there, it’s just, it’s almost like Twitter rolling. There’s so much stuff going on.

Shaun Clark 23:24
After this interview, I’ve got three more I’m going to be launching, so don’t worry. The lessons here I would, I would highlight, or, by the way, after my mom, my next hero is, is Warren Buffett. And I’ve been Omaha to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting at least eight years in a row, and I will continue till that man dies. And I don’t go because I want to hear his investment advice, because a he doesn’t really give a ton of it. And it’s the life advice and the business advice, actually. And, you know, things like, you know, he always says the model, the models the thing that matters. And I would say that that’s the truth for high level, you know, we don’t, fundamentally, I hate to break everybody the secret may already be out, but we don’t actually do anything necessarily new. I mean, we certainly have our things, don’t get me wrong, but the core of our platform is not, hey, you’ve never seen this before. You know, really, for us, it’s about, hey, this is all the stuff you’ve seen in one spot. And the also, the way we go to market with it is, hey, we get it this, this stuff’s hard, you know, this is like buying a hammer and a saw, but really wanting to build a build a house, right? Like, who do you want to be in that chain? Do you really want the house? Do you really want to learn how to do the saw? Do you want, you know, like, do you want? You want to learn how to build it somewhere in the middle, like, and if, and we try to offer options to all those people, but we also understand that most business owners are really good at something else and but it’s not that they don’t need the house. It’s not that they don’t need these tools. It’s just that they also need someone who can help them take those tools and create those outcomes so that they can continue to do what they do. Like back to the dentist on the corner. I love that example, because I always say, Look, if you sit down your dentist chair tomorrow and they say. Oh, you know what? Before we start drilling your teeth here, I’ve been learning a ton about funnels and marketing automation and building websites, and, you know, I had to skip out on some, you know, dentistry stuff. But, you know, it’s all fine and good, right? It’s like all right. Well, anyways, let’s start getting drilling, you know, yeah, one of us would be thrilled to hear that, but yet, at the same time, do we want to be able to poke online, you know? Do we want to be able to read good reviews? Do we want to have a great web experience, you know, on and on, yes. So you need the you need both of these things, and I think that’s why you really need to find those people that can help implement those tools, and that’s really been the focus for our business. So, you know, it’s the models that matter. And then looking at those people and how they were being treated by their vendors, they were just sort of being treated as nice to haves. They weren’t being treated as customers. They were really just like, oh, okay, I guess I’ll have to deal with these idiots. We took a totally different viewpoint. We’re like, all right, these people are the these. These people are the heroes of the story. How do we put them on stage? How we can put a spotlight on them? How do we help them make money? How do we create a business model for them? Like, how do we fix because, you know, many of them, I mean, the traditional agency model is broken all over the place. It’s, it’s akin to, like, I build custom cars for people. Like, there just aren’t a lot of people who need a custom car, right? So we help them transition their business model from these bespoke, unscalable services to a very repeatable, you know, technology led service, and it’s a beautiful hybrid, right? They’re not selling the tool, they’re not selling the service, they’re selling the technology enabled service, and it’s allowed them to scale in a tremendous way. But all the way along, it’s, how do we help these people become winners? Because if we help them win, the Small Business will win, and we will do just fine.

Curt Anderson 26:34
Yeah, all right, this is awesome. Shaun, I want to, I want to go back on one, one thing real quick. Okay, so you talked about your the previous business. What a great, what a wonderful experience that you had, as far as maybe, like, what not to do, or the challenge that you had with, like, partnership, you’re looking for equity, that type of thing. So maybe I don’t if I’d say like PTSD, but, you know, might have been some trust issues. What would you for anybody out there? Because it seems like Robin, like, Robin’s been on the show. Chase has been on the show. It seems like you really, Robin was just, like, relentless, you know, for two years off the payroll. You know, just, really, just a huge advocate for you share, look, go into, like, the business side of things, and, like, how important? Yeah, sure. So, so first,

Shaun Clark 27:17
let’s start with Varun, because that’s important. So, so So the first thing I would say is, if you’re the original founder of the business, do not give anyone equal control. So from the very first day of vern.so so there’s two things. So one is, as the first, put yourself in your shoes, but then also put yourself in their shoes. So what I learned being in the other shoes is it sucked when I had no way to exit the business, I had no liquidity, and I was basically held hostage for many years with my equity. And I thought that was a terrible way to play and so what I did with Varun is, from the very get go, I said, listen, here’s, here’s what you want, here’s how you own it, but here’s, by the way, when you leave with the day you get pissed off, or you’re sick of this, or you want out, here’s what that’s going to look like for you. Yeah. And you know, I did things like say, well, your equity converts to to an accounts payable. Because the other thing is fine. You want to leave. That’s great. I’m gonna, if I keep going and I double the size of the business, you’re not getting any of that. So I made all of that very, very, very clear from the get go. I also always had control, um, and because I’m you, the worst thing I see all the times people do 5050, nonsense. And then they stale, made out, then they fight about it, and then they come to, like, come to us and be like, hey, what I want this account. I want that accountant. Like, you know what? Guys, until you agree. You’re, you know, I’m not helping you, because we’re not taking sides here, right? So those things are incredibly important. And then, like, people will come to me all the time, you know, switching to Robin, people come to me all the time and say, time and say, Well, how do you find a great co founder? That’s how you find a great co founder. Find some person that will, will, will come out and bat for you like that, and you’ll never find anybody like Robin. But, you know, find somebody who gets anywhere close to that, and you’ll find a great co founder, right? Find someone who believes in what you’re doing so wholeheartedly that they will throw themselves into it without, you know, these, all these upfront promises of fame and glory, and you will find yourself a great co founder. I think there’s no other way to do it. There’s no job search for this. There’s no forum for this. There is just meeting great people, doing great work with them, seeing who they really are. You know, you know, you know, traveling around the country with Robin, getting up at odd hours, and, you know, going through the trials and tribulations, you just learn, you got to learn, it’s, you know, it’s like, everybody’s going to be great on the first date, right? Everybody can keep it together for the first couple of months, but eventually, you know, you gotta, you gotta see people at their best and at their worst. And that’s how you found, find amazing, phenomenal people.

Curt Anderson 29:41
So all right, let’s go here, in case there’s somebody in the audience that is not familiar with high level. Share with folks. What is high level how do you make the world a better place? Sure,

Shaun Clark 29:50
it’s an all in one sales and marketing CRM system that basically allows you to any kind of small business you could imagine. You can run the. Higher business end to end on it also happens to be multi tenant by design. So if you also want to run 100 locations, or 1000 locations or 10,000 locations, you can also do that all within the same application quite easily. Yeah.

Curt Anderson 30:13
Okay, that summed it up quick. And so I’m gonna, hey, if you guys don’t mind, can you see my screen? Yeah, sure. Again. Okay, so I’m gonna go here. So Sean, let’s just walk through a little bit so all in one platform. Like, man, you’re, I know there’s a lot of people out there you’re

Shaun Clark 30:26
saying, Yeah, I mean, it’s just like, calendaring and booking and websites and funnels and CRM and, like, on and on and on. It’s very hard. Like, analytics. You can create ads in it now. You can do courses, you can do communities, you can do invoicing and payments. And there’s mobile apps and a mobile POS system. And like, just on and on, you go all the way to the bottom. Most people, the way I would look at it is, go to the bottom. There’s a great chart there that shows all the different products that we replace. And those are really, what, honestly, we do. We build this all in house. It’s not integrated. There’s like a phone system. There two way texting and WhatsApp. And now we have inbound voice AI now and and, you know, content AI and all kinds of image AI and conversation AI is a big thing these days, and we’ve got it all. But all these things that you can do, you can all do this in high level and more, kind of all the same app. And I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s actually true, and you can do it for a very low price. You don’t charge, you know, and we don’t charge by customer, by contact or by user or any other nonsense. Yeah, like other people do, so we’ve always so we have a very flat pricing model as well. So we try to make it super easy for people to both, not only get started, but as importantly, scale up, so that, you know, we’re not and really the secret here that we’ve learned is that the vast majority of these other companies, the way they’ve built their businesses, is radically different. They take a lot of other people’s money. People’s money, most of the time. They plow into ADS and SEO, BDRs and AES and outbound calls and then, and you know what? That just isn’t a very expensive way to acquire customers. And what they end up having to do to back all that up and have any hope of someday making money is they have to create a pricing model that the bigger you get, the more you pay, and you just figured out how to sidestep all that by not having that same model.

Damon Pistulka 32:05
Yeah, and, and, you know, you guys, you guys approach this, your business in a different model than most SaaS kind of companies, because you guys didn’t go right in for venture capital money in the beginning and take off that way. Talk a little bit about that because, I mean, that’s compared.

Shaun Clark 32:22
So, I mean, I, I mean, if you haven’t figured this out already, I’m fairly opinionated and mouthy, so it doesn’t go so you try to walk into some room with some certified smart people, it doesn’t go very well. You know, we had to figure out early on how to be profitable. And we, we sort of, I would say, are more profitable, almost from inception, you know, and and so, you know, we have raised money from private equity, which, for those the uninitiated, it’s sort of generally, it’s, it’s supposed to go like, like Angel, and then venture capital, and then private equity tends to step in. Private equity firms are basically defined as people who only want to invest in known businesses that they’re going to pay a higher, you know, they’re going to, sort of like, get a discount to what you know, early, earlier investors would get. But it’s primarily because they’re investing money in things that are actually fully flushed out and functional. We sort of get those first two things and on the and the and the other piece of this is, if you’re raising money early, you’re giving away a ton of equity. And so for us, because we were profitable, it had been for years prior to even starting into our first PE round. We and we in both PE rounds, we have gotten minority investments, which means we still control the company in both cases. And in both cases, these private equity firms are along for the ride. They are very smart people. I respect them greatly. They give us good advice, but if they ever give me advice I don’t want to hear or I’m not interested in following, I don’t have to. And to me, that was very important. But, you know, we took private and we’d have, we’d actually have never spent a dime of their money on operating the business, because we never needed it. We didn’t need it then, and we don’t need it now. What we did do with that money is we use it to pay it back our employees, many of whom had had again, back to putting yourself in other people’s shoes. Having no liquidity in a business isn’t a fun place to be, and we’ve had some employees who’ve just absolutely killed themselves for six years to help us get here, and in the meantime, giving away a lot of other easy money quick, you know, win opportunities, and had to tell a lot of friends, family, spouses and otherwise, that they were onto something bigger, and I felt a big responsibility to give them an opportunity to take some money off the table. And that’s exactly what we did with these PE rounds. Awesome, very admirable,

Curt Anderson 34:40
dude, yeah, so Sean, let’s go back. So profitable rate from the beginning. Was there a stage when you felt like a tipping point where, like, Man, I’m really honest, something like, was there a menu? Was there certain thresholds, revenue benchmark?

Shaun Clark 34:55
No, no. I. Uh, you know, it remains to this day. You know, it’s easy to sit back and and pontificate, but I got to tell you, every day, we are very much in the in the battle, and we have been since the beginning. And you know, every day it was about getting up and saying, like, how do we make forward progress today? How do we help people today? How do we make the best decisions we can today? There’s no master plan. There’s no There’s there’s no future state that’s knowable. You know, I can think of lots of mistakes that we made, but, you know, I wouldn’t have done it any differently, and I wouldn’t advise anybody else to do it any differently. I mean, to this six to this day, I talked to customers on a daily basis, and I’m proud to do so, you know, I, I think it’s about just trying to stay in the moment, because what’s been key to us is we work with an incredible customer base that we regard with such respects that, you know, we really see ourselves in service of those folks, and our mission each day is to make sure that we’re doing right by them. And it could be, you know, maybe it’s an existing feature they’re trying to use. There’s a bug or an issue or whatever. That’s one thing. But the bigger thing for me is extracting the value that they have, which is, hey, we need this built in this way. And and if you build it like this, you may not even understand why it’s it matters. I’m fairly I’m decently intelligent, so most of the time, um, when they explain it to me, I can get it, but I will say that when they explain there are many things that we’ve built in ways that I would have never imagined building because of the fact that they have that experience, and we’re able to do it right out of the gate, in the way that gets essentially to the meat of what they’re trying to accomplish a lot faster than Other applications, because we just don’t have to sit there and listen to the plumber, the doctor, the dentist go on about something. Quite frankly, no offense, they just don’t have any expertise in right. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s great. And so we really pay a lot of attention to what our customers every day. And the only way to do that, quite frankly, in my opinion, is just kind of stay in the moment. Be visible, be vocal. Be be, you know, whether it’s on Facebook or messenger or on a zoom call, doesn’t matter. Just be with your customer and try to constantly be, you know, moving, moving that that value back to your team so that they

Curt Anderson 37:16
can continue to build. Yeah, I love that. And what’s fascinating is, like, your model, like you talked about earlier, like, really understanding the customer. Damon, you talked about a little bit. But what’s really fascinating with the go high level is like, not only have you just, like, fiercely unapologetically committed to your customer, you understand the customer’s customer. You’re not dealing directly, per se, with the dentist, the doctor, the plumber, all those things. But like, you’re going to the agency. And like, hey, you know, agency, I have your back. I see the blind spot you have. I see how we can help you better with that dentist, with the main street, you know, retailer, we work with manufacturers. So whatever that space is, yep, really a unique business model. Where, where did that business model come from? Who you going to give credit to on that one?

Shaun Clark 37:59
Oh, I mean, my customers. I mean, there’s another thing I would highly recommend everybody do understand your strengths, but also as as importantly, and maybe more so understand your weaknesses, and don’t try to make your weaknesses better. Try to try to find somebody else who’s already good at what you what you’re terrible at, and put and make their job filling in the gap for you. And, you know, it doesn’t it sort of, maybe that feels selfish, but I think the reality is, it’s a beautiful pairing, because we’re, you know, I will say there are very few product and engineering teams on planet Earth in this space. In fact, I will say none in this space that can execute as we can, and that is what we are good at, and we will continue to be good at that. What we are terrible at, and will continue to be terrible at, is trying to guess what our customers need, and we literally so and so what we’ve done is align our business in a way. Where Be it the town halls that are live zoom calls with the product teams that anybody can go to that’s a customer where the team will present to you what they’re doing. They’ll say, here’s our roadmap. Now, what do you think about it? And we’ll get you and you can give live feedback right there. You can ask questions ideas list, where you vote up exactly what you want us to do. And we actually use that ideas list to figure out what we’re gonna build every quarter. Like everywhere along the way, we have a continual feedback loop where we feel like our mission and our job is to is to just really weed through the feedback and find what really does matter. And look, it’s an imperfect system that I’m sure some person we have lots of people who will complain about it here and there, but the reality is, the best system we’ve seen to date to get that information in, and then our mission is to just build it and put it back out in the world the way that our customers ask for it. That’s it. That’s how you do it.

Curt Anderson 39:48
Well, I love it, all right. Is coming into the new year. What are you super excited? I don’t know if you want to

Shaun Clark 39:54
reveal or like any we don’t. This is the funny part about it. So the other thing is, like, on one hand, it’d be great. For interviews like this, if we work like other companies or it’s like we have some big aha moment coming, but I’m telling you the second we have anything of value. So the other thing we live in dive buy is the skateboard model. So you can actually look this up as always, like a really good idea. I stole it from somebody else, but the skateboard model of programming is quite simple. Everybody says they want a race car, and respectfully, some of them need it, but most don’t. So what you do first is you make a skateboard. And the reality is is most people get the skateboard and they’re like, Hey, I asked for a race car. Bozo, this is a skateboard. What’s the deal? And you’re like, No, no, that’s cool. We’re going, we’re still building the race car, but we just wanted to show you where we’re at so far. What do you think? And one crazy guy will step out of the crowd and jump on the skateboard and be like, holy cow, you know what? That’s all I needed. Bam. And He’s gone, he’s gone. He’s off on the skateboard. But the next person will say, okay, okay, this is cool, but here’s what I need. This is what I really need to make it worth it. And the skateboard goes to a scooter, goes to a bicycle, right? Goes to a motorcycle, goes to a car. And here’s the big difference. All the way along, people use it, and most people, by the time you get to the race car, darn near 90% of people have already left the building with whatever it is that you already built. And then by the time you do get to the race car, I hate to break to everybody, but race cars are different. You can have the f1 style, or you can have that. Those kind of just go like this and drive in a circle for a couple hours, right? Those are two different types of race cars, and you got to know what it is that you’re trying to get to. So if you don’t build that way, and you you build, you wait to the end and you go, Aha. And people are like, What the heck that’s not the race car I was thinking about. Yeah, you’ve just wasted all that time when you could have been a, giving people something they wanted, and B, getting to the actual end that everybody who really did need the race car was looking for. And so we build that way, so there’s nothing that we keep under wraps until for any length of time. So back to your root question, which is, what am I excited about, I’m freaking excited about Inbound voice AI, because as a as somebody who all the way going back to the answering service days, seeing the power of being able to help small businesses field inbound requests. 365, AI has now crested it. If you go on and you experience this, we designed this from the very beginning for a very simple purpose. It is a receptionist style implementation. It locks itself, it boxes itself off, and says, I refuse to be any more than this. And if you do that, the experience is wildly great, because you get exactly what you expect from receptionist, which is, they don’t answer really complex questions. They will not sit there and conversate with you, but they will tell you, you know, basic basic things, basic prices, basic services, book appointments, and that’s it. And for the vast majority of businesses, it is stupendous. And we do this on voice, this on we do this on conversation AI, we will also be coming out with it in the on the outbound side, although to break everyone’s hearts and destroy everyone’s dreams. It will not do everything in anything, and will not magically grow your business. For you, it will be basically an outbound receptionist doing the same thing the inbound does, and mostly on along the lines of new leads that you bring, that you actually generate on the outbound side. For those the uninitiated, there’s a tremendous amount of regulation here, so we’re going to be uber careful about it. And, you know, there’ll be a lot of cowboys. In fact, there was a huge company who’s, I don’t know if it’s been officially announced yet or not, but so I won’t say their name, but they will. They were, they were going to be erased out of the existence by the FCC due to the fact that they sort of opened up the lanes and said, Oh yeah, let’s all go out there and cold call with robots. That’s a that’s not going to work. But there is a version of this, I think. And again, this goes, you know, it is funny. You go back to the all the whiz bang software in the world. I am telling you, speed to lead wins the day every time, every small business anywhere on planet Earth, if you’re if somebody raises their hand. If you get back to them five minutes or less, and you get them to take the next step in the funnel, you win period, full stop. That is how you grow every business every time. I don’t care if you sell plumbing services or, you know, fighter jets the day somebody raises their hand. In fact, good example of this. Take products that are have monopolies. You know, if you said, like, you know, I really want a, you know, a Tesla, right? And you the reality is, is there’s always competition to that, because even though there’s one manufacturer that product, there’s also all the other things in your life that are going to pull you away from that interest. So even there, if you were to raise your hand there, the faster they strike, the more likely are to close the deal. And all of that is still very much the same today. Because fundamentally, what we’re talking about all this software is really a psychological construct. It is about trying to move humans from interest to purchase as fast as humanly possible, and the way to do it these days is automation. So really, that is where we are focused and what I am most excited about. And you know, yes, we will continue to roll out all the other amazing CRM products and software stuff and replace all of our competitors that are out there, and do it using this amazing model. But I am still more excited today about helping a small business, you know, go from in fact, great example here in Eugene, Oregon, where I live, I. Still to this day, the guy who did my H back system when we first moved in, he was one man in a van. He had 12 freaking Google reviews. I said, What the heck? Why do you have 12 Google reviews? And he said, because I’m a plumber. I said, Well, what if, for 300 bucks a month, I could get you more reviews? He said, sold without asking any questions, which is, I think it’s funny, but fast forward to today. He’s got 30 trucks. I don’t think he’s been out at an HVAC job in years, and Google reviews, and to this day, he never calls me. We still do the one thing we’ve always done for him, and it has grown his entire business. Because again, when you Google, you know HVAC, Eugene, Oregon, or HVAC, he shows up near the top game over he wins. Yeah,

Curt Anderson 45:40
yeah. Hey, Damon, we got a question here from Dan that we should

Damon Pistulka 45:43
yeah, Dan, we missed this a little while ago. But this, if we get there, Sean, what do you think that is the usefulness of cold calls, emails and Google ads in today’s,

Shaun Clark 45:54
why don’t we throw in that’s a huge range. Here’s a few drinks, yeah? So, I mean, okay, so here’s the tough thing, right? So this is like cold calls and cold emails. The reality is, is I can think of cold calls and cold emails that I’ve bought stuff from, very few, though, although, to be fair, I sold the so invoice, Sherpa, my business that I sold, I sold from a cold call. And I point this out because I hate cold calls. I think everyone would say that, right? I hate cold email. That’s what everyone would say. But why did I do it? It’s because the pitch was right? The guy called me and he said, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna take you to the, you know, I’m gonna sell your business, and blah, blah, blah. And you know what I did, what I always do, I just called BS on that. And I’m like, Yeah, sure, buddy. I’ve got a million of these calls. And he’s like, alright, I’ll tell you what. He’s like, you name. A price. You sign a document that says, If I sell it for that price within the next six months, I get a commission, and if I don’t sell, you

46:46
don’t owe me anything. And I’m like, All right, send me the document. And you know what? All

Shaun Clark 46:50
the way through, I was very skeptical. I’m like, I’m gonna sign the stupid thing. I’ll never hear from this guy again. I signed in two weeks later, or actually, it was a week later. He came out with two bids, three beds, maybe. So. Point being is, I think those things are exceptionally good. In fact, my 12 year old is, is just his website this morning, and he is going to go and sell, start selling high level and and he’s starting with cold calls. So you know, the reality is, I think all that stuff can work. Now, personally, if you ask me what I would do, I would I think one to many is it is the better strategy, and what would I do? So people ask me all the time, how would you do this? I’ll tell you what I would do. A I would focus on local. Start with local. Why you every local? Every local marketing agency I ever spoke with, of which I’ve spoken to, hundreds, if not 1000s, of agencies, none of them said they had a churn problem. The local guys never said I would talk. So listen, I would talk to the Facebook ads guy who’s like, I’m niche down in dentistry. And you know what? Actually, to be fair to them, I met some really smart, really good I could see their numbers. They were crushing it. Dentist focused or niche focused people, and their churn was terrible, horrible. You know why? Because what people don’t fundamentally understand is the business owner doesn’t care. In fact, they don’t have time to care. The dentist does not have time to sit down and look at your row as to see that you’re really crushing it. For them, what they do is, it’s simple. They’ll look at they have the they have the bookkeeper, sit down and say, All right, show me all our expenses, but most expensive, least expensive, and then try to kill it because, and the second they hit your $3,000 plus ad spend bill, they’re like, Okay, wait, what was that new Mercedes down at the lot? It’s like, 800 bucks. I kill this idiot. I get that new Mercedes. I mean, the churn was just remarkably high, and it’s because they didn’t have the connection to the customer. The local guys, they never had this problem. You know? Why? Because they take a box of donuts in every two months, and the the dentist would never come. Oh, that’s bill. I love bill. He’s great. You know, he’s such a nice guy. He always stops by. They don’t know anything about roaz. He’s not and by the way, he’s not specialized in dentistry. They don’t even barely know what the guy does for him. But what they do know is who he is as a real person, or who she is as a real person, and that connectivity was crucial. Now, what problem did those guys have? They ran to share a wallet issues, which is, I’ve sold the dentist marketing, and the dentist will pay me for marketing for the next 30 years, but I want to make more money off the dentist. How can I help? And that’s how high level help them. But I would, that is why I would start with local, because you people will know like and trust you better, period full stop. Now, how do you maximize local? You maximize local by going to you do the one to many. So first, take advantage the one to many that exist. These are like the Chamber of Commerce, the bnis. You go there. You do non pitch presentations. You show people how to market their business for free. You show them how much they can do, how big it is, how all the amazing things. And they’re going to, very quickly realize two things, wow, that looks amazing. Boy, that sure seems hard. Oh, wait, this guy at the front seems to know what he’s talking about. Maybe I’ll go ask him, and boom, that’s how you’ll pick up a lot more customers, if you run dry on that. Then you start your then the next thing you do is you start your own local business content strategy. So then you’re calling everybody. The Center. Hey, Bob, I’m not calling to sell you something. I’m actually calling to see if you’d like to come on my YouTube podcast where I interview local business owners and how great and amazing they are. And I’d love to talk to you about how great and amazing you are. And everyone has an ego. Everyone loves it. It creates connectivity. It establishes you with local market presence and a local market authority. And over time, you’ll crush it. That is where I would start. That is how I would do it. So yes, do cold calls and cool emails work? Certainly, but I’ll tell you that works a lot better. Now, what’s hard about it? For most people, you have to get out from behind your computer, which here’s the hell out of most people. You know, there’s a little bit more upfront work, but I will tell you, fundamentally, if you really think about, you know, I can think about other businesses that sell, sell this way, and they just have incredible amounts of of luck, and many of them. So just think about, like your HVAC guy. Do you think that they’re buying, you know, national mega brands for all their stuff? Of course, they’re buying Linux, and they’re buying carrier, and they’re buying all this, but I promise you this the person who sells it to them, they’re not getting on Zoom call with them. That guy’s showing up in a freaking truck. Okay, your dentist, I’ll tell you something. Go look at Patterson Dental, multi billion dollar company serving almost every dentist in the freaking world. How do they show up? Though? They show up in a van. Hi, we’re here to drop off your Novocaine, and you’re this. He’s, as far as the dentist is concerned, it’s like the male person. It’s like a local Patterson, dude or lady or whatever, right? It’s a local sale, even though you can roll it up to a really big, billion dollar business, it’s a local sale, and that’s where everybody else should get started. And for those of you who have some innate fear that if you dominate your local area, you can never go away from that, I rest assured, if you dominate, you know, Cincinnati, Ohio, I can show you how to take on the world after that. But most people just refuse to start local, and as a result, they get off on these big tangents where it’s like, if I don’t dominate the world of dental, I lose it’s like, no, come on. Like, I’ll show you how to be a millionaire just dominating your local market, and then you can go worldwide after that. But everybody, if they just start local, they start and then what do I sell? You start simple, for God’s sakes, have the same conversation with my 12 year old. Don’t sell websites, or any of that sell out. First of all, don’t sell feature, sell outcomes. Businesses. Don’t want websites. They want Google reviews. They want to rank higher on Google. They want more customers, right? What did I do for alpine, the HVAC guy. That’s what I did for him. Now, lucky for me, for me, he was, he’s smarter than I am, and he understand the value. So I didn’t have to really make a sale. But that’s the whole point. Reviews. Put them at the top of Google. You got them a lot more customers in the built this whole business. That’s what you’re selling to people. You’re selling outcomes. The one thing I hear people do, they make the biggest mistake, is they freaking try to talk about features, to be like, Oh, well, I’ve got this great CRM system. And then someone will be like, Well, I’ve already bought a CRM system. What’s the difference? Videos of mine, and all of a sudden you have two people who, quite frankly, have no expertise debating the thing that they should just like, it’s like, if you and I started debating heart surgery techniques, yeah, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I sure as heck don’t want to talk about so why are we talking about this? But unfortunately, when people do this, since the business owners already made a software choice, you’re putting them in a position of feeling forced to debate it, versus if you think about the home remodeler when you’re asking to remodel your house, and they say, you never say, Okay, wait, hold on now, but you use Makita products, right? Because I’m a Makita man, because if you because, if you use the wall, you’re not doing this. That’s not where it works. No one ever says that, and that is not how this should go, either. You need to focus on the outcomes. And if they ask you about their tools, you should almost laugh in their face and be like, What are you talking about? Who cares? How what tools I use, I’m I’m going to get you more customers and more five star Google reviews. Isn’t that what you want? And that is where the conversation will end, and that is how you will win the game. Yeah.

Curt Anderson 53:40
Drop the mic for Shaun Clark, that was phenomenal. All right, dude, I know I’m keeping you over time. Three, two last questions for you. That was alright. First off, man, thank you. That was just brilliant. Just, I’m like, speechless right now. Damon, that was absolutely phenomenal. Shaun, let’s go here. Sky is the limit for high level. Sky is the limit for high level. What’s Yes, it is, how? What are you like? You can become Microsoft level, like, what’s the future? What? How? Question, also high

Shaun Clark 54:12
question all the time, but I’ll tell you, I will, I will continue to get the same boring answer that I love, which is, you know, remember, we’re not doing this alone, right? We’re doing this in partnership with our customers. So I mean, we can go as we’re gonna go we are worldwide today. We’ll go even bigger, though, and we’ll help more people in more ways, but I would promise you this, we will do it the same way we’ve always done it, which is that I will wake up every day and make sure that the other person on the other side I’m selling to is making money doing it, building a business on their own, like really achieving the things they’re setting out to achieve. Because if I do that, I’ll be just fine and you know, and where we go with it. I mean, I want to help as many people as humanly possible. I want to change the model and the paradigm under which we all operate. Because I think that is the biggest issue here, is that people believe that the only way to win is to sell people something and then Jack. Up the rates and charge them more later, and be all, be all tricky with it, just to try to, like, meet some other person’s expectation most of the time, investors. And I feel terrible, because a lot of the people who start businesses that I start, they were engineers like me, and they just end up having to drink the Kool Aid in order to keep the lights on and do the thing that they love to do. And it doesn’t really work out for them, by the way, I’ve met a lot of them, and they end up owning almost none of the companies that they start because they’ve had to give away their you know, they’d have to sell their soul for another dollar to keep the office open. And I just think it’s terrible. And the people who really lose are the small businesses that end up getting these products shoved down their throat and then have their sales person vanish in the dark because they got to go call another 1000 people today to make a sale. It’s just a terrible paradigm, and I know it can be different. I know it can be better. So as long as that model holds up, I’ll be right here, and we’ll continue to push this out and expand the product and help more people. Love it. Great,

Curt Anderson 55:53
phenomenal answer. I appreciate it. Last question for you and for for your 12 year 12 year olds, name, please. But Jefferson, Jefferson or Diana. Any entrepreneurs out there, regardless of what age they are, best business advice that you’ve ever received or that you would like to pass along? Well, there’s,

Shaun Clark 56:10
there’s two pieces that depends if you’re young or not. So if you’re young, start early, but if you’re but if you’re old and you haven’t started yet, don’t what? Don’t worry. Because, you know, I didn’t start until, really, probably in earnest, until I was 30 something. But I would also just argue, you know, the other big thing is, you know, you listen interviews like this, and you know, I’ve been so fortunate in my success, but I’ve also had a multitude of failure, many, many, many failures. And the reality is, but they didn’t really, they were never really failures, because I never quit. You know, you just sort of say, like, Oops, that didn’t work. And, you know, you learn something from it. And, you know, I mean, I read a book once from a woman. I’m trying to remember name now, but it really was, she’s a she was a college professor, she and what she fundamentally did is she went and she gave kids these tests that they could not pass. They were unpassable. There’s like, these are like, you know, fifth grade, fifth graders getting, like, 12th grade math test, right? And then after the failure, she would sit down and interview and be like, Hey, what did you think about that? And she would get two sort of lanes of responses. Some people would say, oh, you know, I’m just an idiot. I’m a loser. I’m never going to go anywhere. And then the other kids, and remember, everybody failed, so the other but then the other lane of response was, you know, I really love to learn, like, more about this. I’d love to get good at it. I’d love to understand how to pass it next time, whatever. And then she followed these people out 30 years and literally, to the person, the people who sort of saw the failure of the test as a failure of themselves, they failed in life, their, their, you know, their job, their their their incarceration rates were higher, their drug their drug addiction rates were higher, their pay was lower. I mean, everything, their death rates, um, they died at a much younger age, on and on and on and on to the person and she did this in different socio economic groups, different physical locations, um, all kinds of different demographics. Nothing. Nothing mattered. It was fundamentally the attitude that made the person and vice versa, right? The people who saw it as a challenge, and it’s something to overcome or learn from, they just did radically better in all facets of life. And so my thing that I would pass on is, is keep that in mind. You know, when something, when you when a failure occurs, do not see it as a failure of yourself. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t do anything wrong. Didn’t do anything wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s anything to learn from it, but it just means, you know, don’t quit. Take those lessons, keep on moving. And the worst part about entrepreneurism, I think, is its hardest at the beginning. That’s the worst time the first call you make is going to be the worst call you make, because you are going to be the worst at it. It’s going to take a lot of reps to get good at it. And, you know, that’s why I think most people quit, is they do it, you know, 50 times, and they think, oh, gosh, that was hard, and I’m not going anywhere, and I can’t see the improvement. So, you know, again, start early and continue to and don’t quit, and continue to pivot and find that lane that works for you. And if you do that, you can do quite well and be quite happy with those outcomes. I think those are the two biggest things I’ve learned from this journey.

Curt Anderson 59:06
Awesome, awesome, phenomenal answer. And by the way, we got a comment and we people love your poster. I’m sure you get comments on your other podcast. So love the Casablanca over your shoulder. Oh yeah,

Shaun Clark 59:17
I you know, I do this just so that, you know, if you listen to me and you hate everything about me and you think I’m the uglies for you think I’m the ugliest person

Curt Anderson 59:23
you’ve ever seen, at least it’s got, you got a good background, yeah, at least you got hungry. Bogart

Shaun Clark 59:27
over That’s right, yeah, he pulls me through. So hey

Curt Anderson 59:31
and Curtis Tompkins, great friend of ours, says, Start early. Don’t quit. Uh, continue to pivot and find a thing that works for you. There it is. Drop the mic, right? Curtis, so Alright, Shaun, I’ve kept you away. No worries. Guys, thank you, man, this was I want to thank everybody in the chat. Want to thank you your team, Robin, Chase everybody out there. We wish you just continued. Monster, massive success. It’s just a privilege for us, kind of you know, having a front row seat watching you guys. Is build this company, helping entrepreneurs all over the place. Demon, what do you got? As we close out, alright,

Damon Pistulka 1:00:05
I’m going to take us home here. Curt, thanks so much, John for being here today. Just a just a master class and and entrepreneurship. And love hearing what you guys are doing there at high level and what you’re continuing to do. You know, first of all, I want to thank the people that dropped comments in today. We had Kevin Sadia, Dan was in there a couple times, and then we had uzman and Curtis dropping, dropping that last comment. Thanks so much. And if you got in this late, go back to the beginning and start over because you missed a lot. You want to go back and listen to Shaun and the the just the golden nuggets he was dropping. So thanks everyone for being here. This is, this is officially our last show of the year.

Curt Anderson 1:00:45
So whatever holiday you’re celebrating, we wish it’s a wonderful, incredible, amazing holiday. Happy New Year to everybody. Shaun, thank you for closing out this year with us. And again, we’re just raving fans. Connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Connect with his team on LinkedIn. If you’re struggling with your marketing, you know, cold calls any of these other things and check out. Go high level. And I’m telling you, it takes you to the next level. Pun intended. So alright, alright. Thank you, brother. Hey, thanks guys. We’re done. Everybody.

Damon Pistulka 1:01:15
Finish offline. Alright? You.