Taking The $100M Journey With John St. Pierre

Join Patrick Veroneau as he brings us the fascinating story of how entrepreneur John St. Pierre navigated the path to a $100 million success. Gain valuable insights into the world of entrepreneurship, with key takeaways including the importance of learning from failures, building capital, and the strategic steps to achieve high-performance business. Discover the power of patience, consistent behaviors, and maintaining a true north mindset. John St. Pierre shares personal experiences, including the concept of "Jekyll and Hyde Entrepreneurship," and offers practical advice for accessing resources on your own entrepreneurial journey. Don't miss this captivating episode full of wisdom and inspiration! Tune in now!

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Taking The $100M Journey With John St. Pierre

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John, I want to thank you for being on the show. I've had an opportunity to take a look at your book, $100M Journey. The title alone is pretty enticing as we read about that. As I had a chance to look through as well, you talk about your wanting to put together a no-nonsense book and help other people. You talked about some of the failures in there. As we start this out, I was wondering, was there anything in particular for you as you were writing this and thinking about the failures that even came as a surprise to you or something that you learned again as you were writing this book?

For sure. I appreciate that. Thanks for having me on, Patrick. I look forward to this conversation. Certainly, the $100M Journey is a big book about failures, learnings, and lessons in my entrepreneurial journey. As I was going through and journaling all of that and thinking through what were all the learnings and all the moments of impact I've had in my entrepreneurial career, the reflection was on the support I got from mentors along the way, family members, friends, and books I read. I quote a lot of books in my book because it had such a massive impact on me. Going to leadership sessions and listening to people talk and inspire.

The hundred-million-dollar journey is a big book about failures and learnings.

There are so many different moments of impact we have as entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to stub your toe and learn some hard lessons to get to where you want to go. All of those lessons and formations meant a lot to me. More specifically, the icing on the cake was who your friends are that stick with you when the going gets tough. They have your back and they stick with you. That was a big moment of learning as I was reflecting on the whole body of the experience. Who's been with me throughout that entire journey? It was a fun moment of reflection.

I made the point to note that there are a number of books that you cite here in terms of the journey. It was interesting to me because several of them I've had as guests on this show. It was even fun to look at those and say, "I remember that one, speed of trust." As you were going through this process, what was it that spurred you to want to write the book in the first place?

A very quick version of the story is five years and a month ago, I was fired from the very company I had co-founded that I had built for over fifteen years to north of $50 million of revenues. I went into a board meeting and was let go by the board of directors and the investors I had brought into the business. During that time of massive failure and reflection on what was going on, I started documenting some of my learnings. If I were to start up a company again, what were the things I'd never want to do again and how would I learn from this?

I applied those lessons to another business that I was involved with. We subsequently grew that company to north of $100 million, but doing it the right way. When I saw that that company was on its track to hitting the $100 million mark, I said, "I have to document this,” because I never want an entrepreneur to fail the way that I failed and all the pain and suffering that comes with that. If I can prevent one entrepreneur from going through that journey and show them the path to grow a lifestyle business to a high-performance business, then that'd be well worth the effort. That's when the book commitment of "I'm going to get something out there into the world" started making sense to me.

You talk about the lifestyle business and transitioning away from that. As I was scanning through that, I was thinking, "That's how I feel about that lifestyle change." You talk about how to go through that. I was wondering if you could explain that a little bit. What does that mean?

If you think about the entrepreneurial journey of sorts, everybody starts in that startup phase and you're uninformed optimism on the transition learning curve. You're excited. You don't know what the heck is going on, but it's exciting and this is going to be the best thing in the world.

Fortunately, you need that because if you realize what goes into it, you will never start it.

It leads to the next phase in the journey. You get off the ground. You start having some early success, “Maybe I got something here,” then you go through a long period that I like to call the struggle zone. Maybe you're not paying yourself or you're not paying yourself what you think you're worth. You're trying to hire employees. That's a risk. You're taking on some bank loans. You got some PGs and a customer leaves you. You're starting to go through these struggles. You're trying to build a foundation for your business.

Over time, 5 to 10 years or so, hopefully, if your business succeeds and we know the statistics on that, you get to a lifestyle phase of business where all of a sudden, you're making the income you're hoping to make, at least for your lifestyle. You have a good base of team. You have a good marketing team. You have good customers. Things are comfortable. In this phase of your life, you can finally start doing some of the things you've put on hold during the startup and struggle years, and you start living your life.

You then have to make a decision, "Now, what's next? Am I comfortable being a lifestyle business, generating income and wealth through this business, and staying in that spot?” It is perfectly fine. That's not a problem. When you first start your business, you aspire when you're a lifestyle business, then take that jump to become a high-performance business. A business that can operate without you being present, that can generate passive income and wealth for you as an entrepreneur without you being there running the business. You have to make a big commitment.

The zone between lifestyle and high-performance business is a very messy and rocky terrain. That's why on the cover of my book, I have mountains of cliffs and all these things that occur there because you're taking a lot of risks to challenge what you've built as a comfortable lifestyle business to try and aspire to greater heights. Greater heights can have bigger cliffs, bigger falls, bigger challenges, and risks. That's what I experienced as an entrepreneur when I tried to grow my business from a lifestyle to high performance and did it the wrong way.

100M Journey: The zone between lifestyle and high-performance business is a very messy and rocky terrain.

 

Is there one trap in there as you've reflected back that you think is most relevant?

Yeah, there is. I have seven principles in the book. I love all seven of them. I think all seven of them tie to each other very much. The one principle that was a massive a-ha for me and it's a massive a-ha for most of the entrepreneurs I talk to is, "Build your own capital." It's principle two. There's a gentleman, Alan Miltz, who wrote the cash chapter with Verne Harnish in the book, Scaling Up. He runs a company called Cash Flow Story. He said this to me, "Most entrepreneurs are reading a murder mystery novel, but they're only reading the first chapter, which is their profit and loss statement. Based on the profit and loss statement, they think they know how they're doing. Once you read through chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, you ultimately see what's going to happen in this murder mystery."

Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is king and queen. If you don't build your own capital as an entrepreneur, if you cannot generate the net operating cashflow that your business needs to thrive, succeed, reinvest, and grow, what ends up happening is you end up violating principle one in the book, which is, "Protect and grow your equity." What happens a lot of times is we glamorize, "I raised $10 million, I raised $20 million to grow my business." Every time you talk about raising capital, guess what's happening to your equity? It's going down the other way and you're losing eventual control of your business in a certain way.

100M Journey: Build your own capital. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king and queen.

 

If you build your own capital as a business, this is going around Silicon Valley, even right now. As a business, you have to generate your own cash flow to reinvest in your business for survival and growth. The more you can do that, the more equity you as an entrepreneur can own, the more control you can own in your business, and the more you can reinvest those net operating cashflow profits into your business to grow.

There's a metric that I learned. It was a Harvard Business Review. John Mullins is one of the authors. He went to a business school professor and another author. They wrote an article called, "How Fast Can Your Company Afford to Grow?" Some companies grow themselves to death. That was a little bit of my story. We grew our business from a hobby business of $0 to $10 million. We got to that lifestyle phase and we said, "Let's grow to $100 million. Let's grow 10x in the next 5 years." We were successful. We were growing. We were generating revenues. We were generating profits, but what wasn't happening is we weren't necessarily generating the right net operating cashflow to grow.

Their article talks about a self-financeable growth rate. What is your SFG rate? How fast can your company can afford to grow? In our case, our company could afford to grow 5%, but we were trying to grow 100%. Where does the difference come from? Where does that 95% difference come from? Bank loans, investors, you're leveraging your balance sheet, you're pressing a little too far, you're going too far above your skis. One thing happens and all of a sudden, “Wait a minute, now we're in trouble with our banks. Now, our investors don't believe in us anymore." Ultimately, that's what led to my demise.

What do you say to somebody who's just starting up a business? How does this book benefit them? Some of these things that we're talking about, you're thinking, "I'm not a $100 million business. How do I apply these to starting out as a consultant?"

Certainly, this book is specifically written for people who are in a lifestyle phase and are looking to make that journey because I think it'll be more relevant to them at the moment. However, that being said, as you and I growing up as entrepreneurs, we would read any book that was going on and we'd listen to any podcast. We want to sharpen the saw. This can give a futuristic look into the realities of growing a large high-performance business. What it means, and all the steps you may have to go through as you're going through that journey because a lot of mistakes happen on day one.

I'll give you an example. Principle one, protect and grow your equity. This is one of my biggest thoughts as I was writing this book. Every time I started a company, I always brought people with me and they said, “You and I, let's start a company. Let's do this 50/50." I'd bring a couple of other people, "Let's do a third. Let's start this thing up." I either lacked the confidence to do this thing myself, I lacked the capital, or I lacked something because I always wanted to bring partners with me on this journey. It was diluting my equity right off the bat before we even started.

As we would continue to grow, we need investment capital. We need investors to help us grow this business. A lot of startup founders think about, "I need investor capital." As opposed to principle two, build a product and service and start generating cashflow. You don't need investors. You can retain the equity in your business. At the end of the day, the way you're going to create wealth and freedom through your business is through this thing called equity. Yet not enough entrepreneurs respect it from day one. I think they'll get that lesson as they read this book.

When you say that, I think back to some real estate that I was involved with where I had a partner. It was the only time that I had ever had a real estate partner. It was the worst thing that I had done. Again, there was less control. I felt like I was doing more of the work. I gave that up out of fear of not wanting to take this on by myself, which I should have taken a step back and done it on my own.

Entrepreneurs give way their equity too loosely on foundation, later on, bringing on investors because they can't generate the capital themselves. There are a lot of reasons why entrepreneurs ultimately years look back like you and I do. There's not one partnership I've had that's still the same from when it started. Now you have conflict and now you have issues. A lot of times, you start businesses or you do an adventure with people you like and it ruins that. God forbid, you do it with family members. That can ruin that. It's a very dangerous terrain that you start playing with, especially if you're trying to grow a high-performance business. If you're trying to have some fun with some friends and do something, that's fine, but you have to start with the end in mind, which was always told to me. I always heard it, but I didn't connect with it until I faced the realities of it.

I'm reading another book right now. It's The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene and I'm on one of the chapters in there. It talks about looking into the future as opposed to, "We spend so much time being in the moment." By not looking out into the future and calculating what could happen, we get ourselves into situations that we don't want to be in. I think about this as this conversation we're having. We do that.

I love this from seeing my book, but I had always met with my entrepreneurial leadership teams or my executive teams. We would spend so much time. We'd go off-site for two days and we would design our business plan. "Here's our business plan for the next year. Here's what we're going to do as a business." I never did that with myself. I never sat down with myself somewhere offsite and said, "What do you want in life? What are you trying to achieve in this whole thing?” I was running 100 miles an hour as an entrepreneur, chasing every shiny object that was out there, trying to build the next best thing as a company, not knowing ultimately where I was going.

As they say, any path will do. You don't know where you're going. Just go anywhere. I was running, but I was running in a direction that led me right off the cliff. When I had this big fear, one of the first things I did was say, "Hold on a second here. What am I trying to achieve in my life? What's my true north-life plan? Where do I want to be 30 years from now in all these different segments of my life? I'm going to design my life around that. I'm going to design my business where I want to be around that." When I sit down with our strategic business partners or our executive teams and we work on our business plans, those business plans better align with what I want in my life. I completely lack that. It’s so critical.

I talk a lot about that. In the leadership work that I do, one of the first principles that I talk about is consistency. That's about alignment with my values. Whatever those are, what are my values? It makes it so much easier to make decisions when I can fall back and say, "Does this align with the value that I have?" I think that speaks to your true north of being able to question, "Does the direction I'm going align with what I've said and what I want for the long term?" If it doesn't, it provides the opportunity to take the emotion out of it and to say, "It’s not the right place. This doesn't serve me or serve us."

It leads to, you hear a lot of people saying, "Say no more than you say yes." That's what it comes down to. I fully respected in years where I'd meet with somebody and ask them to do something with me and they'd say, "No, it doesn't align with my investment strategy. It doesn't align with my current plan. I was saying yes to everything. "Let's do that. Let's go. A shiny object. Let's do this. Let's go." You quickly realize that carelessly running after things without knowing ultimately what you're trying to achieve doesn't work. That discipline that you talk about, looking at every decision you make through your values or your life plan and your direction, that discipline sometimes takes a little bit of an awakening to get there. Once you get there, things get cleared up pretty quickly.

Know where you want to go and be disciplined and patient in getting there, and you'll get there.

I did not have it. I was the shiny penny. I found that because what was making money for somebody else looked great, but it wasn't for me. There was no passion in it in terms of what they were doing. They were successful. I wasn't going to be successful because I didn't come from the same place that they did. One of the concepts you talk about in this is around patient ambition.

I love that. That was almost the name of the book, Patient Ambition. Maybe that'll be the next one. As I was going through this process, it was through the naming process of the book, "Which should this book be called?" I brainstormed this concept or this word. I never heard them together. If somebody else claims ownership of it, that's fine. I never heard it. Patient ambition because what I had was careless ambition. I was running for running's sake. I wanted to grow for growth's sake. I wanted to build something big. I aspired to be successful in business.

I glamorized all of that when I was in my youth trying to be an entrepreneur, but I came in with full of piss and vinegar. Being successful in selling things, growing things, and doing things, but sometimes leaving a wake behind me or creating cash issues over here. When I learned the concept of patient ambition, I was like, "Hold on a second. Slow down. You're maturing as an entrepreneur now. Align to your true north life plan. Align to your business plan. Be comfortable saying no. If an opportunity arises that doesn't match your strategic business plan or your true north life plan, be comfortable saying no and be patient."

The opportunities will come that will align with those. Those are the opportunities you'll have the most passion for, be able to be the best in the world and be able to drive your economic engine to success. Patient ambition is a word that now I use very frequently with entrepreneurs that I work with, “Let's be patient here. You said last week this was your plan and now you're talking about something completely different. Hold on a second. Let's go through this strategically, because life is a long journey.” Based on modern science and what's going on, we may live a lot longer than we think. We got a lot of time. Be patient and ultimately, you'll be a lot happier.

Be patient. Life is a long journey.

On the surface, when you hear patient ambition, it almost sounds like an oxymoron. How can you be patient and ambitious at the same time? I look at it more as I read this and hear you talk about it. It's a dance. There's a dance there that we have to balance those two things.

We want to get there too quickly. We want instant gratification. That art of delayed gratification to take that slow march. I think it was Good to Great by Jim Collins, like that 20-year or 20-mile mark. Take your time. If you look at the best companies over time, they consistently grow. If you’re trying to grow 100% a year, it's not easy. It creates a whole bunch of growing pains. A whole bunch of messy middles, ups and downs, issues, and gaps in the boat. Taking your time systematically to grow what you envision is the wiser approach and you'll own a lot more of it.

100M Journey: Delayed gratification takes a slow march. Life is short, but there's so much to enjoy in it.

 

I think of the story with Walter Mischel, the marshmallow study. Are you familiar with that? Where they had kids who were five years old. They had them in a room with an instructor and they said to the child. Maybe it was a marshmallow or cookie. You know where this is going. “If I come back in 15 minutes and that's still here, you get two of them.” It was interesting. They followed these kids for almost 40 years. They looked at a number of different metrics to see which ones were the most successful. It was the ones that didn't eat the marshmallow. It's not to say that if you ate the marshmallow, you weren't going to be successful. There was something there. It came down to this idea of delayed gratification of being able to push off what would seem enjoyable right now for what's on the horizon.

It's getting harder and harder. "Wait a minute. I got an Instagram notification." We're fed all these stimuli that keep coming in. One of the biggest lessons I learned in the last couple of years that I'd love to share at this moment is I was working with a coach and I started talking to you about what I'm putting into my subconscious mind and how am I training my subconscious mind to filter all these things that are coming in and what a reticular activating system is. We get millions of stimulus every single day. The ones that make it through are because you've trained your mind to look for them.

Back to your whole knowing what your core values are, knowing what your plan is, and knowing what it is, when you see something, you automatically know none of that doesn't fit because you've trained your mind to see it or not see it. It's similar to the mushroom experiment. Those minds had in mind, "No, I can wait. It's no big deal." It traces through life.

Along those lines, the questions that we ask ourselves are if people understood how powerful their self-talk is, they would speak differently to themselves? They would say things differently. There's a science to it. There's research that backs this up that says that we know that when you have negative thoughts and you dwell on those, you almost become a magnet for those types of things happening.

It's the power of not only self-talk. It's the power of repetition of what you want in life. If you continuously repeat to yourself who you are and what you're trying to achieve, you're more likely to be that person and achieve those things and do it the way you want versus if you don't.

Visualization is another one. That is so important. I write in a journal every morning what I'm grateful for and also then what are my intentions for the day. It seems so simple. I did a post on this the other day saying success leaves clues. In our conversation, I look at somebody like you and what you're doing. As I read your book, I know that there are things there. I'm like, "If John did this and these are the things that he was doing and he was successful, then I don't need to reinvent the wheel. There's a clue there for me." Does every one of these match with where I'm going? No, but we're constantly able to look for other pieces that are out there that say, "This is the path. Do these things."

What you find, I'm sure, as you speak with people, and as you and I are speaking here, you're a brother from another mother, I do the same thing. I have a daily thing. What am I grateful for yesterday? What am I grateful for today? What are my plans? We're not doing that by accident. We were taught by others. By the way, when you and I were 22, 23, 24, or 25, becoming young entrepreneurs, I had heard it. I wasn't ready to listen. I was like, "I don't need that. I got this thing called business. I don't need it."

There comes a moment in your life where you're like, "Maybe I should start listening to what these people are saying. It seems like a common theme around those who are successful." Once you start gravitating to that, it changes you. You may be listening to this conversation between you and me saying, "I don't need to do visualization. I don't need to have positive self-talk. I don't need this stuff." One day you'll realize the power of it.

Not just for business. For any aspect of your life, when you talk about the true north, I think of this holistic approach to who I want to be as an individual, whether it's a parent, a husband, a sibling, or a friend. All of these things make up part of our success in who we are as individuals. What mark are we leaving?

You have a poster on your wall behind you that I'd like to point out, "Life is short." That doesn't mean you need to run through it carelessly and go fast. You still have to have patient ambition, but there's so much to enjoy in it. How are you going to enjoy it? Exactly, how are you going to enjoy it in the long term and work your way backward? If that's where I want to be 30 years from now, or 10 years, 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, this quarter, this week, what am I doing today? It all has to align. Once it does, it provides great value.

I love your perspective on this. I think of behaviors. This is all about behaviors. Whether it's being successful in business, in personal relationships, or anywhere. There are behaviors that we know that if we consistently model the results will materialize at some point. You have to be patient, but they'll materialize at some point.

I couldn't agree with you more. That speaks more to the concept we talked about. Know where you want to go. Be disciplined and patient in getting there and you'll get there.

The last part that I'd love for you to give some insight into, you tell a story here as well in regards to Jekyll and Hyde. How did that manage to weave its way into this?

At the end of the book, I talk about two entrepreneurs, Jekyll and Hyde. We all know that famous Jekyll and Hyde story of split personalities. As entrepreneurs, we're all crazy. I can't remember exactly what the quote is. If you're working for yourself, you're working for a lunatic. We all have these split personalities. We go from janitor to the chief cook and bottle washer at the end of the day. We're all over the place. Ultimately, through different phases of our business, we wear eight different roles as we grow our companies.

Also, there are different ways we can be. One day, we're aggressive. One day, we're cautious. One day we're this and one day we're that. In my personal life, to personalize it for a second, when I'm all business, I'm sometimes all business and I'm all serious. I'm on my telephone calls. My wife and neighbors used to make fun of me because every Friday or Saturday night, we'd go out and have a good time and I'd be dancing on the table. It's like, "Wait a minute. That's not the John I saw making those phone calls." They nicknamed me Jekyll and Hyde based on my split personalities of who I am in business versus when I go out and have a good time.

As I was finishing this book, people like to learn things sometimes through stories. I looked at my split personality as an entrepreneur. In the moment where I tried to grow a company to a hundred million and failed hard, who was I in that situation and what are the actions and things that I took relative to these principles and the situation where I took those learnings and did it differently and did it the right way and grew a company to $100, who is that personality? It finishes at the end, who do you want to be ultimately? Hopefully, they resonate with the right person.

Jokingly, when I'm having conversations with my wife, Cindy, and she'll ask me something about work and my consultant or coaching mask goes on. She goes, "Here we go. You're talking to me differently." I can't help it. I've appreciated this conversation so much in terms of what your book has to offer. As I said, I am looking forward to going back and taking an even deeper dive into it because there's so much that I feel like I'm going to be able to pull out of this. Aside from the standard channels, Amazon, any other places that would be beneficial for people to try and reach out to you?

The website, 100MJourney.com. On there, we do have the $100M Journey Workbook, which is free to access for anybody who wants the resources that come along with the book. I would highly encourage people to take a look at some supplemental videos. They can reach me there and find all my connections there if they're interested in connecting more.

That's great.

Thank you, Patrick. It was fun.

Thanks, John. Enjoy.

 

Important Links

• $100M Journey

• Scaling Up

• Cash Flow Story

• The Laws of Human Nature

 

About John St. Pierre

Hi, I'm John St. Pierre, an entrepreneurial strategist, business growth advisor, and co-host of the Entrepreneurs United Podcast. I have over 25 years of experience in co-founding and growing successful businesses across various industries. 

I'm also the author of "The $100M Journey: Your Guide To Growing The Business Of Your Dreams Without Going Off The Cliff!", a book that shares my proven strategies and insights on how to scale your business while avoiding costly pitfalls.

My passion is to help ambitious entrepreneurs like you achieve your dreams and create lasting value. Whether you need guidance on protecting and growing your equity, reinvesting strategically, fostering a culture of intrapreneurship, or moving from CEO to Chairperson, I'm here to support you. 

I also invite you to join me and my cohost Rich Hoffmann on the Entrepreneurs United Podcast, where we interview accomplished entrepreneurs and extract actionable advice and inspiration to fuel your journey. You can find our episodes on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and more.

Let's connect and embark on your path to business excellence. Together, we'll navigate the challenges, seize opportunities, and build a solid foundation for lasting success. Reach out to me for personalized guidance and support—it's time to turn your business dreams into reality.

 

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