Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Victory Show.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hey victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Rachel League with bestseller By Design. Our founder, Travis Cody is the best selling author of 16 books and we've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books as well. Through that journey, we've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses really struggle to break past the seven figure revenue mark. On this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they used to scale way past that mark so you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business. Starting now. Today's guest is Stuart Draper, a serial entrepreneur, educator and angel investor whose ventures have landed on the 5,000 list a remarkable 10 times. Before he turned 40, as the founder of Stukent, Stuart built an edtech company that has helped over 1 million students and educators in more than 80 countries. Stukent's Award winning simulations and courseware are now used by many of the top 20 business schools in the U.S. making it a global leader in digital marketing and business education. Before launching stukent, Stuart bootstrapped GetFoundFirst.com into a three times Inc. 5000 digital marketing agency before its acquisition in 2015. He's also the co author of Digital Marketing Essentials, the bestseller higher education text in its category, and the host of Startups with Stew, a podcast where he shares entrepreneurial insights and interviews successful founders. In addition to his entrepreneurial pursuits, he serves as chairman of PodUp and continues to champion causes like ending world hunger through Charity Fast, which he founded in 2019. Stuart, welcome to the Victory Show.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Wow, Rachel, that is quite an introduction. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I appreciate you.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Well, it is quite a bio and quite a journey you've had. Take us back to the start. What first was it that interested you about going the more entrepreneurial path?
[00:02:10] Speaker A: It was the failures. I mean, if I jump further back, my dad got to be CEO fairly young. He wasn't a founder, he never started a business himself. But I got to watch him be a business leader and, uh, I also watched him fail at that. Once he was the CEO of a 600 employee trucking company and they, they went out of business. But my dad was always my hero and I, I loved watching him build and lead and I thought that's what I want to do someday. And then my brother in law, he's a plumber and he had a lot more freedom than my dad did with the 600 employee company. And I thought, okay, somewhere in the middle of that, that's where I want to land. My brother in law, that's a plumber, has been very successful and made a great career for himself. But I loved the freedom he enjoyed. And so as a young man working for him, I aspired to have that freedom in entre. In entrepreneurship and the what really led me to entrepreneurship beyond. There was two things hearing founders tell their stories when I was in college and number two was failing at jobs. So I tried used car sales. And I was two months into the job and they pulled me aside and said, hey Stu, this isn't working out. And I thought that that was like all on me. Well, like a month later they closed that little used car lot that only had 37 cars on the entire lot. So about two or three times a day I even got to talk to a customer. It's a very sleepy lot. And looking back, it was probably less me, more them. But I took it very personal and, and that was really hard on me. I tried next summer sales because I thought if I know sales, I'll be able to run a business someday. Well, I kind of stunk at summer sales, Rachel. And I thought, oh my gosh, like this is not going to work out for me. Like I got to go find a different career path. And then as I finished my marketing degree, I learned the basics of digital marketing. And I had an opportunity to get an internship selling digital marketing services and website building and also like the software that we would sell with it. And it was a really good run for me. My internship went so well, they offered me a full time job. This was 2008. Okay, so I graduate like June, July 2008, time frame as I finished that internship and then all the way through the rest of 2008, I was the best selling salesperson on the team.
And at Christmas, right after our Christmas party and the new year happens, they pull us all aside on a Friday and said, hey, we have no way to make payroll today. So you may have seen that no checks have hit and they're not going to. And so now I have, I'm. I got married while in college, I had my second child on the way and I had to go home to my wife for the third time in a very short window of marriage and say, I don't have a way to pay the Bills like I, I got laid off and man those were hard days. If I could go back and grab myself and say look, trust it, trust it, you're learning good things. All of these skills, all of these failures, they're going to help you later. And but that's kind of how I fell into entrepreneurship because it was 2008, the market had just crashed. That's the reason that the investors pulled out of funding that startup I was working for. And so rather than look for another job, I just started looking for people that would let me personally do their Google Ads because I had that basic skill. And I started helping dentists mostly. My brother in law's a dentist in Salem, Oregon. He was my first customer. He had three record breaking months of new patients. And so that's how My first startup getfoundfirst.com was born. And I was a CE before I was 25 years old.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Incredible. Tell us about the early days of the Get Found first fund.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: So Get Found first was a hard early days all bootstrapped and I had never run a business before and I didn't have a lot of money to bootstrap with. And so I'll give you an example of how I made it work and how I got my first customers. I had my brother in law, that's a dentist, he had three record breaking months of new patients. So I had a good story. I went to other, I went to a dental trade show. I chose Phoenix, Arizona because it was a one day drive from where I lived in Idaho. My sister lived there. So I had a free place to stay and it was a fairly inexpensive conference. I took the TV that we had bought as a black Black Friday special off the wall, threw it in the trunk of my paid for Honda Civic and drove down to Arizona. You know like I probably got three new customers out of that. I could have gone to conference after conference and picked up three new and it always would have paid for itself because some of those customers still are with Get Found first even a decade after I sold the business, they're still working with the company and I'm proud of that by the way. I think that's you want to build businesses that stick around even when you sell them, even when you're not the leader anymore. But yeah, like that was the early days. Fun was just one customer at a time all on me to make the sale. Looking back that was a mistake I made was trying to always be the sales guy versus finding someone to do that work so I could lead the business in other Directions. Yeah.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Okay, so tell me about how it said. Sounds like it was a really great start. But it wasn't just a great start. It was a great finish. You had made it to the Inc. 5000 three times over. So what do you think caught their attention to put you on that list?
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Get down first.com has been on the Inc. 5000 list two times. Stukent has been on the Inc. 5000 List eight times. So two of the businesses I started been on the list a total of 10 times. That's all true. But with get found first, I planted seeds, created a great foundation, sold the business, and then they took it to its higher levels of growth and they put it on the list two times.
So it's important to clarify that. And that doesn't to me make it any less exciting or something for me to be proud of because in order for them to have that success, they needed someone like me who had the vision and drive to get get it the ball rolling. But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows getting started. I had a partner that one day came to me right around Christmas and actually didn't come to me in person. He called me on the phone while I was on vacation for Christmas visiting my parents. And he said, hey, I'm. I'm taking a third of our business with me and I'm going to work for our biggest customer. And took a third of everything that I had built and sold with him and I didn't have a good contract in place. Learned a very valuable lesson from that. That hurt. That was a hard, hard time for the business. My second best employee also chose to quit at that same time. And by the way, that was my managing partner. So I had to step back into the management role right away, take over as the leader of the business. And it was really, really hard to get through that. I didn't try to sue him or worry about that. I figured less time spent in the land of negativity and fighting and more time building and focusing on building and bringing the right people around me that I now would trust with contracts. I think of all the lessons I've learned in business. Trust everyone with a contract and never just let yourself believe that someone will stick to their morals and values and ethics because the mighty dollar is very powerful.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: The importance of contracts. And I appreciate the clarification. I think you're right. It's like you set the foundation and without that, it's unlikely that they would have gone on to get those accolades. And so it's really, you have A deep understanding of the proper pieces that need to be in place to facilitate those kinds of awards and success in the future. So tell us, once you exited get found first.com, then you're on to other entrepreneurial ventures. How did you decide what next to work on and how did you get that standing up?
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Well, one thing I would tell anyone listening that's into entrepreneurship is and as you pay attention to other founder stories, you'll hear this over and over again. One opportunity leads to new opportunities. Something that is out of reach for you today won't be out of reach for you forever. I never could have raised money successfully for get found first.com, it's a service based business, the low barrier to entry business. And I had never done it before. But because I ran Get Found first, because I grew it, because I successfully sold it, fundraising for Stukent was possible. The idea to come up with for to start Stukent came from because I was running Get Found First, a successful digital marketing agency that was a Google Premier partner, my alma mater asked me to come back and teach digital marketing. I didn't have even a master's degree, let alone a PhD but because I was teaching as an adjunct, that was okay. And because of my real world experience running a successful digital marketing agency, they invited me to come and teach digital marketing at BYU Idaho. When I was teaching there, I realized the curriculum was out of date, it was behind it needed to improve. And that's where I came up with the idea to start Stukent. So different experiences in life, including the early days, failures, trying to be a good salesman, built me, prepared me for the next thing. And so now that I've run getfoundfirst.com, now that I've run stukent.com, and grown it to where they're coming up On I think 30 million in annual sales now. And I'm very proud of the, the achievement of the growth and success and they've helped over a million students globally. It's so exciting to see the successes. But what I'm going to share next I think is a key takeaway for, for our conversation today, Rachel. And that is because I've done those things. Now I'm prepared and connected with other people to do other bigger and better things that will go and help the world and provide more jobs. I'm a builder. One of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is being able to help build businesses, build to create new jobs. So because I've had these wins now I can do it again. One of the ways I've done that and I'm very excited about a new mission. I have to help over a thousand people become millionaires. And I'm going to do that through investing in startups, coaching founders and providing my podcast where I talk about entrepreneurship so other founders can listen and learn. I do that through my podcast Startups with Stu. It's really fun.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: That's awesome. I find it really interesting that you transitioned from a services based business to an ed tech company. Tell us a little bit about how you figured out how to take something which is, you know, very one on one in person. The services based business is a very different scaling proposition than building technology that can scale across all these different universities.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: That is a really good question. Founders, if you're going to get started and you need to cut your teeth and learn entrepreneurship, service based businesses are a great way to get going, right? Low barrier to entry, low cost to get started and you can trade your time for dollars. Basically everyone that is working a 9 to 5 is in their own service based business. They have a service, they go to work and they provide that service to their boss and their boss pays them. So when you, when you start your own business, what you're doing is you're saying my boss is my customers and I just have to go find new bosses a lot and then I have to do good work for those bosses, but I get to do it on my own timetable and I get to charge my own rates that I get to choose right. So there's benefits to that life of early days founder, startup that are in the service industry, but the struggle with service is it's hard to scale yourself. So going from hiring, from doing all of the work yourself to hiring people that do the work for you really quickly, I found that no matter how much I sold, I always had to increase my expenses to serve those people well. And I decided that wasn't going to be me forever, but it needed to be me until I found my next opportunity. We ended up creating a product called the Digital Marketing Essentials courseware. And it's like a textbook. And then we created a simulation. It was first in the world, the first digital marketing simulator. It gave students 50 grand and simulated Google Ad dollars. They could practice writing and running their own online ad campaign. And I've talked to over a hundred universities because of my experience teaching as an adjunct. I knew that for our school what we were doing wasn't working very well.
So we called 100 other schools, talk to their Professors and Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, Kett, Indiana, all these schools that we talked to were like, yeah, we don't even teach our business students digital marketing. And this was 2013. So Google's been making money for a decade and they're, and these business students are graduating without this information. I knew I was onto a cutting edge opportunity. And so I asked these professors, if I created X, Y and Z and I kind of painted a vision of what I was going to build, would you use it? And all of them, a hundred percent of them said yes. 60% had something and wanted something better, 40% had nothing yet. So it was a really cool tidal wave kind of opportunity to go and, and jump in and surf the wave. And so from there, Stukent just continued to evolve and adapt and build additional things that the market needed. We started with digital marketing. Professors immediately were like, when are you going to do social media marketing? When are you going to do analytics? And so we just kept building and bringing to market exactly what these professors thirsted and needed it and thirsted for and needed and they didn't have it anywhere. So that's how I got out of the service based and into product based. But Rachel, I know you probably got one more question for me here, but I want to share a really important key to the growth of our business. I had an opportunity to make money in September and January because students paid us at the beginning of the semester. So in the ed tech world, you make money twice a year. That creates a real challenge for a business owner. Cash is king. When you're starting a business, you have to always manage cash flows. If you fail to manage cash flows, your business is dead. It's like stopping your heart. You cannot let that happen. And so if you can't get cash flow from customers, you have to get cash flow from a financier of some sort. In my case, I raised money. I got with a good attorney, got with a good accountant. They helped me, they helped me with the fundraising and filing with the SEC to raise money. And so it's, that's if you're going to build a product business and people can't buy, the people that want the product can't pay for it for months and months. You got to find a way to pay the bills. In the short term, I had to pay a good sales rep or two, I had to pay a good marketer, I had to pay a good software engineer and pay them because if I talked to someone in August or September, they couldn't send students to me until the following August or September. So a year worth of time of paying the bills meant fundraising. And because I had had success with the first business, fundraising was something I could do. Also I had done really good market research. I had a good business plan that helped with the fundraising as well.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: The story's excellent, Stuart. I think it's clear that you found really high level of product market fit and that enabled you to confidently go out and raise funds and build against that solution, even if it was a year in advance. Because I think a lot of the time people struggle to raise funds pre product, pre solution, but it's because they don't have a super clear product market fit, even if they have the most beautiful deck. And I think it sounds to me as though because you had the buy in from your end users already, almost like you had a list, a wait list or you know, some Lois in theory signed up, you were able to get the funding to then hire the software engineer. Because I think a lot of times it's a little bit of a chicken in the egg, right of you need the funding for the builder, the builder wants, you know, so it sounds like you did it the right way and getting some proof points from the end user and that enabled you to spend a year building so that you could hit the ground running when it was selling season. So that's really useful if you had one key learning from that building student specifically, what would it be?
[00:18:20] Speaker A: A life learning for me is that you can build your family successfully while you build your business.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: This.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: So I'm number six of eight kids. Family's really important to me. My mom and dad blessed me with a great life, very middle America. We were not wealthy like I said. My dad lost everything in his 40s when he, when the his trucking company that he led died. But when I started Stukent, my oldest was seven. He's now 18 and about to graduate high school.
My youngest wasn't born yet and I have four kids. 18, 16, 12 almost. He's almost 13 and then a six and a half year old. And that is the greatest joy of my life. I remember the payday. So in 2021, Stukent was sold in part to a private equity group called Tritium Partners for millions and tens of millions of dollars. And I had all of a sudden I went from having my whole career, lived with very little in my bank and almost everything poured into my businesses. And finally I had this massive check hit and I remember calling my CFO and we had this cheering, screaming moment in the phone of Excitement. And then I go home to my wife and I hug her and kiss her, and I'm like, it happened. It happened. And it's so exciting for a day. And you go to a special dinner and you celebrate. And then all of a sudden, life is the exact same, except you have a lot more money in the bank and you feel a little less pressure financially for yourself. But if you don't have people, loved ones to share the new excitement of having that money to enjoy, to go on trips with, you can buy a nice car, you can buy a nice boat if no one wants to ride in it with you, it's does not bring you any lasting happiness. And so for me personally, the greatest victory is not the fun barn I built that has an indoor outdoor swimming pool, or the batting cages I built or the truck I bought. We built the Field of Dreams. I got four acres. I put a baseball field on it. But what makes it amazing to me isn't the fact that I can show off the. The cool truck or the cool boat. It's that I got a wife and kids that are happy to go and enjoy those things with me. And so for me, that's victory. You. You said that you greeted everyone as victors. Folks, I promise you, if you want to feel like a true victor when you're old in a rocking chair, someday, it won't be the money you made. It will be the people that want to come sit and visit with you in that rocking chair.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Beautifully said. If you could. And I mean, this sounds a little bit like perhaps the advice you would give to your. Your younger self, but is there advice you'd give to your younger self, or was it all buttoned up in that beautiful answer?
[00:21:17] Speaker A: No. Yeah. I definitely have tons of other advice. I think the greatest one is that you gotta ask yourself what God put you on the earth to do and then go be brave enough to do it. I think that I'm. I've.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: And I.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: And by the way, like, as advice for me, there are moments where I start, I really question, like, gosh, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Shouldn't I just be getting a real job now? Third. Third year in a row of having to almost close the business and raise money against. To like, should you be doing this? Right? But I knew that what I was doing was what God put me on this earth to do. And now there's over a million students whose lives were touched because I stuck with it and did what I felt like he wanted me to do. So go and seek that out and then just be brave enough to do it. Even if mom and dad tell you you're crazy and that you should just get a real job, that's important.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: I think that's going to hit home with a lot of our listeners and entrepreneurs because there is no entrepreneurial journey that does not have its ups and downs. And particular on the lower days, you wonder, should I just go to a more quote unquote stable 9 to 5? And I think what all entrepreneurs believe, and I'm of the same mindset, is that a typical 9 to 5 is actually not quite as stable as you might expect because you are not your own boss, you're not in control of your time or your finances and you are exchanging time for money. And so I think it's definitely a brave thing to do to explore entrepreneurship and to stay strong through those low moments. So really have enjoyed our conversation. Stuart, thank you so much for joining us on the Victory Show.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: So glad to have been here. Thank you so much, Rachel.
