Gary Garth: The Zero to 100 Million Sales Blueprint

Transcript

[0:00:32] HA: Welcome back to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m thrilled to be joined today by Gary Garth, author of The Zero to 100 Million Sales Blueprint. If you’re looking to take your business to new heights, you won’t want to miss this episode. Gary is a seasoned entrepreneur and a master sales expert and he’s here to share his wealth of knowledge on how to grow your company and succeed in today’s market. Let’s get started. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. I’m here with my main man, Gary Garth. Gary and I met back at the workshop in Austin when he started his book and I’m super excited for you, Gary. Thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you, man. Your time is valuable so, again, thank you for coming on today.

[0:01:23] Gary Garth: Thanks, Hussein, thank you so much for having me and I’m very happy to have this conversation with you today. It’s been a year, a journey to say the least and I’m very happy to be crossing the finish line today.

[0:01:35] HA: Yeah man. I mean, you did it. It’s amazing, I’m super excited. I mean, you had a vision for what you wanted your book to be and really stuck to that vision, man, and every time I saw an email come through or something, it was like a leap forward and I was like, “My man Gary is just killing the process.” So congratulations, man, it’s really nice to be here with you and chat. I’m really excited because I really want to give our listeners, some of these stories that you and I got to talking about back in that workshop in November but I want to know, a little bit about your personal background, sort of where you grew up. Maybe talk about the people that influenced you growing up and how you ended up going into sales and starting your own companies and things like that and we’ll get to the meat of the book but your background is really interesting and I’d love to share some of that with our audience.

[0:02:28] Gary Garth: Yes, absolutely. So in case the accent hasn’t revealed it yet, I am originally from Denmark in Europe. I’ve resided in the United States and Latin America, in different countries for almost the last 15 years or so. I’ve now started and launched and exited six companies to date and that gave me – that’s given me a lot of war stories, a lot of scars and learnings that I felt now it’s time to share some of those lessons with the world and hopefully help a lot of hopeful entrepreneurs that are trying to bring the product, the services, the companies to market.

[0:03:08] HA: Man, that’s so powerful but I’m not going to let you skip over that. So a couple… when you… how old were you when you started traveling and sort of migrating to the US and sort of moving around?

[0:03:20] Gary Garth: Yeah. So I was 30 years old when I first moved out of Denmark. Interestingly, I was running a radio station with my partner back then. We were running sales, I was the sales director that point of time for the radio and we were selling radio advertising, sponsorships, events, et cetera. We were by no means the inferior product and solution, we were like the fifth largest radio station so we were by no means a dominant play in the market. So we were constantly scaling uphill, battling and having to fight for every dollar, every advertising dollar. When we walked into the media agencies, we were not the favorite and given provider or vendor for marketing strategies in this. So that along with previous experiences really learned me to how to get organized structure and how to create some solid sales strategies that with proper execution, at the end of the day, gave us an upper hand. And we were doing quite a bit of job in a three year period. We almost took the radio five X what it used to be before we stepped into that radio station and we grew fast and at that point, we got noticed by several different people. One of them was a consultant for the Danish government. The Danish government had a foreign aid program, it’s called Danida, where they would support third-world countries not by giving aid to the government but instead, funneling that money through success, quote unquote, successful companies who had X amount of employees, revenue and work in certain innovative industries. And I met a consultant for the government at that point with my partner. He was like, “Gary, you're really good at this sales and marketing” and he was like, “Have you ever considered taking that to Nicaragua and target the United States?” and my response back then, like 30 years old was like, “What the F am I going to do in Africa?” I had no idea Nicaragua is in Central America. Long story short, fast-forward, we explored that opportunity and a couple of months later, I sold my apartment, all my belongings and moved to Nicaragua and was taken the first step to launch our marketing agency that then just grew exponentially and blew up from there.

[0:05:37] HA: Wow man, that’s remarkable! So your goal was then to go and establish a company that you could hire locals from and kind of uplift that community, uplift the people by giving them work and work especially in the tech industry which I feel like is what you eventually really rolled in heavy and it sounds like those previous experiences really paved the way to meeting the right people and opening up a door that was kind of unexpected. From when we talked, you fell in love with Central America. You start traveling around and it really start building these businesses but, man, you put me in your book in a very unique introduction where you talk about you’re sweating, you’re walking around this hotel and you’re about to go meet the guy at Google to give this talk. I want you to share that story because I think it’s a really powerful one. You didn’t even have your presentation stuff back then but I thought it was really interesting because it shows the level of competence that you really carried about what, what you were passionate about and what you were trying to do. Can you share a little bit about that story and sort of what happened?

[0:06:44] Gary Garth: Yeah. So that’s one that puts a smile to my face and everyone who knows me. So fast-forward a couple of years, we had grown very fast. We basically got on Google’s radar, we were back then one of the fastest-growing resellers for Google in North America despite us not having any employees. We had like a staff of 100 people back then in Nicaragua, fully bilingual, highly talented individuals that we will then cater to with market. And we got assigned with like a Google representative and I was having several conversations with them and at one point, he asked me like, “Is the reason for you setting up offices in Nicaragua, is that the strategy behind this is because you want to target the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, the US Hispanics?” and my answer was like, “Hell yes, that’s exactly why” right? Even though it wasn’t at that point.

[0:07:34] HA: Right-right-right, yeah.

[0:07:36] Gary Garth: So a couple of weeks later, “Well, great, could you come to our headquarters in Mount View, California, our team would like to meet you and talk a little bit if this is a focus area for Google for growing our market share, we recognize this opportunity” et cetera. So I fly in, I’m at my hotel room in Palo Alto and I’m just about to jump in a cab and go to the Google headquarters and then I get a message about if I could send over my presentation on the US Hispanic opportunity and I’m like, “Shit” My presentation, right? So of course, being in sales and business development for over 20 years, we learned to think quick on your feet, right? So I show up at the meeting and there’s like about 40, 50 Googlers there. I jump on the stage and they say, “You can plug your computer in here” and so forth and I just shut my computer down and say, “You know what? I put together a presentation for you guys today, Google, but then, started having second thoughts because you’re Google for Christ’s sake, you have more data, you’re bigger than this that I could ever think of.” “So instead, I want to talk to you a little bit from my heart, from stories of having 30 sales reps calling upon tens of thousands of companies every single month and give you the feedback straight from the horse’s mouth” and that went fantastic, they loved it. A couple of weeks later, and not necessarily just because of that reason but then we got appointed the Google ad words premier partnership as company number 22 out of tens of thousands of marketing agencies in US. So that was a very good learning experience and just to tackle challenges head on.

[0:09:10] HA: Yeah man, wow, that’s so powerful man, I love that story so much. It totally got me sucked into the book because you’re a person that you know, you’re right, like those experiences that you’ve had before, how they all are interlinked and now, here’s an opportunity. Opportunity show up when you’re prepared when you can see it, right? And you took your experiences and you’re like, “You know what? These people have all the data in the world, what could I possibly share here?” And you did the right thing by being human, by sharing your heart and your experiences in your stories because like, there’s not enough data to talk to human emotion, right? And make somebody feel something. I think that there’s not enough zeroes and ones, right? And I think you did such a powerful job by just displaying your abilities in that moment. So that obviously was rewarded by being really intentional and focusing your company and organizations. So what happened next? You went on, you kind of, you go on and you build this huge marketing agency and then I believe you end up selling it. Is that correct?

[0:10:12] Gary Garth: Yes, I sold my shares in the company back in late 2020, it was a journey. We sold to over 5,000 advertisers, there are hundreds and millions in managed ad spent. I work with a lot of B2B, B2C companies, we launched both channel sales, direct sales and you know… so I had a lot of accumulated learnings and seeing all that media spend, seeing, getting to look under the hood of so many companies from a sales and marketing perspective and see what kind of brand-new strategies really pay off. Just uncovering all these false perceptions about what really works and what’s really moving the needle, that helped me shape a methodology that I’m trying to put on paper in this book and share what I said, like my blueprint in terms of if you want to launch new companies, especially in B2B or software as a service, there’s a right way to do it and there’s a way to do it where you can mitigate your burn rate and you can secure that you can grow sustainably. I gave you some… there is some specific examples on how to do that and it starts really with as I have it in my first chapter, begin with the end in mind. Securing that even with proper research, you are understanding the market, you’re prepared for the journey as an entrepreneur, you secure that and you double down on your strength, you partner up with the right people, assessing the opportunities, having the right plan and then you roll out a sequence of steps in terms of securing that. You understand your competition, you know how to go to market and you know that you have unique differentiators that you could position effectively, so that you can gain market share or in almost any industry that you choose because the playbook is almost identical every time. The challenge is that it’s damn difficult and there’s a lot of shit to do. But I try to put it all on paper and there’s about 400 plus pages that hopefully gives entrepreneurs a good blueprint and how to attack that task.

[0:12:10] HA: Yeah, it’s really complex especially when you go into the tech side of things, right? Because it’s not passing gout flyers anymore and just doing cold calling. Like it’s really in depth and there’s so many different elements, so many different things to balance but what was your end goal in your mind? When you were building this company what would you say, like the thing that you strategize the most about, that end goal, what was that for you and what were the things that you did to sort of reverse engineer it and work towards it?

[0:12:42] Gary Garth: Well, I would say a lot of the things that I communicated in my book is not necessarily me doing it the right way from the beginning. I would say, as I put in my book, this – it could also be a label of 101 things not to do when launching the company because I made all the mistakes in the book. Fortunately, I was always very good at putting sales clients, have a client-centric approach to everything and securing the one that came in. You know, this is common knowledge nowadays. People know that almost eight out of 10 companies seize to exist within like 12 to 18 months after launching and it’s predominant because they don’t know how to market the product and services. In fact, they didn’t know how to get sales, so when they fail in revenue there’s not a lot of room for making mistakes if you don’t have enough money coming in with the bank account and that’s my thesis on why many companies seize to exist. So we did make a lot of mistakes but, as I say, we have 99 problems but sales one wasn’t one of them unfortunately, that’s why we survived. As for vision, I mean, we had some big hairy audacious goals. I will say myself and my partners, we wanted to become the biggest agency in the world and we pivoted on strategy and vision several times but we also set out to, we were very proud of, I think collectively of when we peaked as an agency, we had nearly 300 employees. We were awarded fastest growing company for four consecutive years in a row on day 5,000 list, number sixth in Miami one year and so, we created a lot of jobs. We created a lot of opportunities and I’m very blessed to say at least 50 plus, all my employees of mine now run their own companies, are working Silicon Valley and have made a great career for themselves despite starting 10 years ago for us, working at seven, $800 a month. We really helped a lot change a lot of career trajectories and families and income and overall in the country not just Nicaragua but when we came down, the average salary was $500. Now, we challenged that competition came in. We stole a lot of talent and surely but slowly compensation increased in the whole country. So a lot of things was part of that journey that I’m grateful for.

[0:15:03] HA: Man, that’s so powerful, right? And it’s sort of like, that was the original byproduct of what your work was going to entail. Was to help those communities in some way, shape or form through entrepreneurship and through learning new technologies, new ways of thinking, right? And really did that man. It’s really empowering and inspiring to hear that because yes, you were in there. You were very focused, you worked really hard but the sort of the overall outcome is does this help people, families, communities? But even if it was like a $50 overall increase, right? I think that is contributing but it sounds like you almost doubled it and that’s more than fantastic, right? So man, kudos to you and your team for putting in the work especially in places like Nicaragua where it’s much needed, where people are seeking new ways and innovative ways to grow and prosper. What would you say the process was like for you working on your book and getting this wisdom down on paper? Because I know you kind of shot through it fairly, I would say, fairly fast, man. I mean, you did a really good job by sort of sticking to the regimen but what was your push behind that because I know you have a deep why as well.

[0:16:15] Gary Garth: Yeah, absolutely. So I know myself very well, I know my strength and weaknesses. I’ve been a big advocate of coaching and personal development. I’ve had coaches for many, many years, typically on the Tony Robbins program but a lot of different approaches. So I knew walking into this project that I have my own style that anyway was very helpful is to get the framework, the strategies, the guidance in terms of like here is from a learning curve standpoint how to attack it. What had worked for me personally was that I had to dedicate blocks of time. So instead of like an hour every day in the morning, something like that, I would take five days off. I would then rent a cabin in a little town, a beautiful called Guatapé outside Medellín, Columbia where I currently live and I would lock myself in this little cabin where there is nothing for miles near me and I would just type away, just get in the zone work deep on that. Then there was a couple of other tricks that if you recall, when I showed up at the workshop, I actually had a book cover designed already. I had everything from a commercial standpoint what’s already ready and I published it. I start, so making post about it on my social media, et cetera and I did it for a very specific reason. I wanted to make it have some social accountability. So that I couldn’t just put – when things got tough and I said, “Holy shit, what did I start here?” I made big mistakes thinking I could write a book, I couldn’t really back down, right? So that way, I would have a lot of people that would be constantly remind, “Hey, how’s it going with your book? Hey, how are you progressing? When is it being published?” and that kind of accountability helped me stay on course, which otherwise I think I would have given up. Then of course, the support from the community, et cetera, those things were the driving factors.

[0:18:03] HA: Man, that is so powerful. There’s one thing I liked about you from when I met you, man, you work from your vision, right? Again, kind of back to that idea, I think it is somewhere along the line at a young age somebody really taught you how to work from a vision because or as coach to you, right? Because when you think about a vision, you are thinking very positively. You are thinking about all the good and the outcomes that are going to come from it. I think that is really powerful man, by you literally have a book cover, a website, like it was dialed and like the only thing you are missing bro is you going to sit down and write like when we were talking about this and I had never met someone so prepared and so thoughtful about their vision and again, it may not be the actual final of how it all looks and how it comes together. But this idea of having that social accountability, living up to that dream that you set for yourself and living from the future and acting as if right now, you said like you put out a book and you’re like, “Now, I am just working on being” sort of catching up with your manifestation, which man, that is so powerful and something to really remember as young entrepreneurs, people who are thinking about ideas and things. Like all around me man, I’m an artist, I’m a graphic artist so all around me, I have these beautiful quotes that my dad used to say to me. I am painting all these things and I am always surrounding myself of the vision of who I want to become, right? I have like my favorite speakers on the wall, my favorite quote and I always tell people like surround yourself with who you want to become, right? Because when you immerse yourself to that, you really start to live from that vision and dude, you were so spot on when you came to the shop with having just the audacity to say, “No dude, this is what my book’s going to look like, this is how long it’s going to be, this is what I want to do” like you had such a – and you just needed the, like you said, just the way to execute the pathway to get this done and that’s exactly what we laid out but you followed the process. So very powerful man, kudos to you again. So how does focusing on those strengths, I mean, you talk about this too in your book like focusing on your strengths and delegating the rest, right? To make that successful sales strategy. Tell me a little bit about that, because I know you have plenty of strengths. Of course, we all do especially as entrepreneurs when we’re young, we wear many different hats. But once we have those experiences, what can we do to really – I know a lot of people that don’t like to delegate but it is crushing that, right? What are your points of advice on really letting – learning to let go and delegate work?

[0:20:39] Gary Garth: That’s a very good question, Hussein. It is one of those things that’s hard to teach, that you have to experience and learn but in my case, this is always the CEO for the company and the [inaudible 0:20:52.5] we grew the most and I think one of the reasons we grew fast was not of course because of me solely, we had an amazing team but I was good at creating culture and a winning culture. Everybody was passionate about it and everybody knew the vision and everybody is pushing in the same direction and we’re very good at sales but on the contrary, I was not your classic boardroom CEO sitting up at the corner office and looking at spreadsheets, talking about KPIs and meeting with the board of directors. So as we grew from a company with like ten, 20 employees to 50 to 300, we got a board of directors and everything according to a company. At that point, we were aiming to go public even. So we would have all of these directors sitting and who is the CEO and what education and he only has a high school degree and you know, finance, he doesn’t understand this. So they convinced me to take a course, a three-week course at Harvard called Finance to Senior Executives and I went to Boston and I sat in there. I was like studying every night until 2 AM and it was like my head was about to explode. I understood the concepts but I also realized like, “What the heck am I doing? I am trying to become somebody I’m not.” I am letting other people dictate what I should be and not be instead of just saying like owning what I am good at and saying, “You know what? I am going to be the very best in the world at this and then let’s hire a freaking CFO that can do all of these other things.” Why do I have to worry about these aspects if I could drive and move the needle in other areas? So that was a big eye-opener for me and something like now, after I saw my shares in the company, I have launched a couple of different new projects. One of them is like an accelerator platform where I help entrepreneurs launch and set up the business scale, et cetera and there is a sales acceleration solution where we held them with the right go to market strategies and execute upon them. That was I sent these entrepreneurs very quickly and have a set of tools and I was recommended to just again, double down on the strengths, own it and then figure out how to find the right partners, the right employees and delegate those responsibilities. Because people when they work out a passion, when they work with confidence versus something that is forced upon them, there is a radical change in the outcome. I have seen that time and time again. It is very easy to be convinced otherwise by your employer or your partner or the clients or the market, whoever is giving you feedback but if you take a stand and just continuously work on becoming a subject matter expert, there is a lot of people that’s willing to pay a lot of money for doing that job when they become best at it. So that would be my clear advice.

[0:23:33] HA: God, that’s so powerful man. I feel like when you talk about this idea like, man, here I am sitting in Harvard, I’m freaking studying my ass off, it’s a quick course, it is a crash course essentially and something that is like just – not necessarily just out of your wheel house like you got the concept but you’re just like, “You know, why am I playing soccer when I am a great boxer?” you know what I’m saying? I felt like that when I was running my little print company up in Portland, Oregon and I felt like when I started hiring people, I was like, “Oh my God, the power, this is unbelievable” you know? So then not only did I hire employees, I would then ask them what their weaknesses were in their role and then to be like, “Well, can we hire someone to fit that weakness?” you know what I mean? So it’s like, “How can I get you to be better by getting an opportunity to position someone there?” and so just thinking about not only your weaknesses and strengths but also the people you work with, what are their weaknesses and strengths and can you, perhaps put someone in position to help them out and therefore it sort of ripples upwards, right? It gives you more time, it gives you more focus. Man, but you hit that on the head, it’s so powerful. So, man, like when somebody is reading your book and begins to read through it and you have a lot of data on there, a lot of amazing stories and sort of the ups and downs of everything you’ve gone through. Like you said, a lot of battle wounds but what do you hope that when they put the book down and they’re done with it, what do you hope that they really feel walking away from your book?

[0:25:09] Gary Garth: Well, a couple of different things comes to mind. One is that I aim to, again, looking at the statistics that 80% of entrepreneurs essentially fail within year one and knowing so many entrepreneurs and how sometimes people are betting the savings, taking the second mortgage and just quitting their job and ultimately when they fail, that potential divorces and depression and their verifications are extreme, right? So I am hoping to give people the right set of tools, at least arm them with the knowledge that if they don’t have the skillset as I described it, which is the absolute must to grow and scale a company that they then can partner up with people who have that understanding. And so if they’re a great software engineer, they are a great architect or they’ll program, whatever they may be that they partner up with the right people to make sure that they can take the ideas to market and become successful and profitable. So I feel like I lay it all out, obviously not everybody connected to upon it but at least, you’ll walk away with a deep understanding of how things should be and with that knowledge in mind, you can go out and secure and if you need to find the right partner, the right company or find the right hire that’s connected to on your vision as an entrepreneur.

[0:26:25] HA: Yeah man, that is such a powerful and of course, selfless thing to say because again, you empower those who pick up your knowledge to be like, “Hey look, you may not know how to do everything and that’s okay” but you got to figure out who can help you do the right thing and I really appreciated that about your book. This idea of not just delegating but really knowing what your great at, thinking about how and who can help you get to that vision that you are outlining in your future. Really thinking from that vision and believing in that vision by surrounding yourself with it and there’s nothing more to like more creative in manifesting by just diligently working towards that vision but having a way and people around you to help navigate the path, right? Really, this idea of belief in self and not quitting is so powerful and really being open to opportunities because really man, I mean, you’re going to have to leave Denmark and go and help this third-world country start this, new ways of doing things. You don’t have to do any of that but there is something about you that was innate as a leadership personality within you that really sought ways to not only grow yourself but help others, which I really just commend man. You know, from the moment I met you, we just had a cool connection and I just appreciated that. You were always so kind and humble in your work and so you know, if you are out there and you are listening to this, Gary is the man. He’s worked with Microsoft and Google and an endless array of remarkable companies that he’s helped really bring up and scale. The book is called, The Zero to One Hundred Million Sales Blueprint. Gary, I learned so much today. Thank you for sharing your stories and your experiences. Besides checking out the book, where can people find you, bro?

[0:28:15] Gary Garth: Thank you so much for having me Hussein. You can go to my personal website, it would probably be the best one-stop resource for all my collateral resources to getting in contact with me. It’s garygarth.com.

[0:28:33] HA: Beautiful and can people find you on LinkedIn, bro?

[0:28:36] Gary Garth: They certainly can, under the same name, Gary Garth. I am also on Instagram with @iamgarygarth, you can go to Gary Garth Official, find my YouTube channel. And I do have for the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, existing companies that want to take things to the next level, if you go to my website, there’s a – I have a suite of different tools. One of them is also the size of the book, I have also launched a planner. We talk a lot about manifestation, today improvisation and creating a strategy and plan. We also rolled out a planner that’s called, “The Gold Script and Greatness Planner” you can find that on my website as well and there’s everything from self-assessment to creating a vision board to detailing your annual goals, ten-year goals, breaking them down into quarterly goals, thank you parties, spiritual building and it includes and encompasses everything. The reason I am promoting that at the same time is because it goes hand-in-hand with launching a company or if you just want to become a high achiever, an A-player, you need to write stuff down, you need to have a plan, you need to have a vision and when things get tough, you need to look at that, that extra time, everything you will be able to execute and that goes for writing a book as well because I had that vision board. I had this planner and I had this book cover printed on my bathroom mirror. I had it on my fridge and I kept looking at it because otherwise, it’s a tough journey. It is a lot of work you need to put into it. So I recommend everybody to pick up a copy of both.

[0:30:06] HA: Yeah, man, I highly, highly recommend the book and the planner. I know I am going to get my hands on some. My man, Gary, thank you so much again for joining me today brother. Again, I can’t thank you enough for sharing all your wisdom brother, seriously, I have a lot to learn from you. I know I stayed connected with you for that mentorship, so again, thank you, brother.

[0:30:25] Gary Garth: Likewise, man, it’s been a pleasure.

[0:30:29] HA: Thank you all so much for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, The Zero to 100 Million Sales Blueprint, right now on Amazon. For more Author Hour episodes, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.