Sell and Stay True to You with Alex Blumenstein

Sell and Stay True to You with Alex Blumenstein

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 242 of the Business Development Podcast, and today we're joined by Alex Blumenstein, entrepreneur, strategist, and co-founder of the Peak, a Canadian business media company that rapidly scaled to over a hundred thousand subscribers and was acquired in just three years. We're diving deep into how to build your business to sell and what it really takes to exit without losing yourself.

Stick with us. You won't wanna miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal. And we couldn't agree more. This is the Business Development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

In broadcasting to the world, you'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development CapitalBD.ca. Let's do it.

Welcome to The Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 242 of the Business Development Podcast, and today it is my absolute pleasure to bring you, Alex Blumenstein. Alex is a dynamic entrepreneur and strategist known for his innovative approach to business and storytelling.

As the co-founder and former COO of the Peak Canada's fastest growing business news outlet, Alex helps shape a platform that redefines how Canadians consume business news leading to its acquisition by Zoomer Media in 2023. Beyond his successful exit, Alex has a rich history of navigating and overcoming challenges across a wide range of industries, including cannabis, digital marketing, public affairs, and even ventures.

In dating and print, his role as the CEO of Leaf forward, Canada's first cannabis business accelerator showcased his ability to guide early stage startups towards growth and investor readiness. Cementing his reputation as a builder and disruptor in the business world. Now with a track record of turning bold ideas into reality, Alex is shifting his focus to the power of community building creativity and unconventional storytelling from comedy to puppetry.

He's exploring the edges of what it means to connect and engage in today's fast-paced digital landscape. Alex is not just a business leader. He's a force of nature unafraid to tackle failure head on, driven by a relentless curiosity and a commitment to push boundaries, inspire innovation, and redefine success on his own terms.

Alex, it's an honor to have you on the show today.

Alex Blumenstein: Thanks for having me. That was quite the intro. I've never, been introduced for that period of time. That alone made it pretty great. I it's funny, you know what I gave you about, I. Comedy and puppetry and just, the random things that are on my mind probably when we last talked.

So that's fun. One correction though, right outta the gate. I'll tell you. It's Bloomstein, not Bloomstein. We talked a lot about the little things, but we missed that one. But it's all good. My, if you ask my grandmother, she would say Stein And my grandfather would say Steen. But I guess I go with Steen.

Kelly Kennedy: I'll tell you what, I'm gonna fix that and no one is even gonna know that happened.

Alex Blumenstein: Oh, it's okay. Leave it. It's a nice anecdote.

Kelly Kennedy: Dude. I love connecting with you. We actually connected because of a sponsor of my show, Rodney Lover, he owns at Work Office Furniture in Ontario. Yeah. And he's dude, do you read the Peak?

Do you know what the peak is? And I was like, no man, I'm in Alberta. We don't know anything. And so he actually turned me onto the peak and actually was the one who who referred me what was it for the emerging leaders? So that was really cool. I ended up getting something, I ended up winning an emerging leader for sales in 2024.

I thought that was amazing. So thank you for doing that. Very kind.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, no, of course. We love all of our emerging leaders. It's something that we're really proud of. It's a great chance to like, expand our brand and connect with more people and really elevate our readers. So yeah.

Great. That we were able to connect through that. I've connected to a lot of interesting people through our Emerging Leaders Initiative, which is a under 40 rising stars product we put out every year.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah it's super cool. It was super cool to win, man. I really, that was like, wow, that was amazing.

That's awesome. It's yeah, I was really thrilled by that and I think it is an incredibly great initiative. And actually, we're gonna get into that a little bit later on. Sure. At the moment, what I would like to spend some time on is, who is Alex Blumenstein? How did you end up on this journey?

Dude you've done so much. Take us back to the beginning.

Alex Blumenstein: Oh man. Okay, so where to start? Let's start, we'll start generally in university days. I started to get involved in politics and there I started volunteering, in Toronto for a municipal campaign for a guy running for mayor who did terribly called Rocco Rossi dropped out before before the municipal race.

This is 2010. This is the year Rob Ford became Mayor of Toronto. Okay. I think it really did shape like my approach to business in two very, meaningful ways, is that like a political campaign. You have to be scrappy, you have to be smart, you have to be, smart with your resources. You're really combining a lot of things that are important in business, from marketing to communications, to budget, to, just like managing people and expectations and plans.

And secondly, it's also where I met, my business partners who I've really collaborated with in, in one way or another sense. So yeah, Fred and Taylor, who are my partners in Peak and were my partners in businesses prior to that and will be my partners in future businesses. We're both involved with that in some capacity and we've been, working together since then.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Wow. What was it like to work in politics? Like we haven't had too many people on here that I can even have that conversation with. 'cause I'll be honest, I tend to avoid it. And more so just because, yeah, I don't like, the reality is business doesn't need to be involved in politics. But I always love, as a Canadian, as someone who is personally invested in politics, I have my own views.

What is it like to work in that fast-paced environment? I imagine it's it's gotta be a whirlwind.

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. Like working in politics when you're young is great. Once you're older, get out. Like it's, I would say like your opportunities are relatively limited and especially in Canada, I think your work, I'm gonna be very cynical about this, but your work is relatively inconsequential and you generally are just, trading policy around the edges.

I don't wanna get into a whole political rant here, but I had a good time working in politics. I learned a lot working in politics, but it's not, a career that I would. Recommend, but some people like it. But I'm quite glad that I had the way out.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, it's and you actually worked in an embassy in Washington, correct?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah. That was like right after university as an internship, but it was awesome. Like at 23, whatever age I was then like, incredible time to be in Washington, DC It was during, Obama's second election. Wow. It's a very young city. It's got seven universities. Just an awesome time to be there and one meet just like other, young, smart people who are interested in these types of things.

Also, the political landscape and the people in politics in America is very different than Canada for a million reasons, but we don't need to get into that part either. But incredible time, like Canadian embassy itself is so well located in the city. It's right on Pennsylvania Avenue between Congress and the White House.

And there's people who I still talk to from that there's people who were, staff there who were like my sphere, who I still talk to and connect with now. Have been helpful to me with the peak and other things. So yeah, another really cool and interesting experience. It's one of these things where I think I learned like okay, I learned how to network there.

Yeah. Mostly because I didn't do any work. So it's like I would just wander around one, go to events outside the embassy or just wander around inside bad embassy talking to people. So it was a good time in that way.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Wow. Did you get to meet president Obama?

Alex Blumenstein: No. Oh, that would've been super.

Come on. You're there. Why not? I did. I did get to go to the White House twice, but just on like tours. Ah. So no, no oval Office meetings. Oh, man. But that, that would've been awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That would. But no, no dice there.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh you know what? Your life's not done yet that, yeah, exactly.

Wow. Obviously you've done that. You're, you've been a serial entrepreneur, you've run accelerators. Were you always this entrepreneurial take us back. Was this you as a kid or did you just grow into this guy?

Alex Blumenstein: I think to a certain extent, I probably was. I, I guess I hit my head too many times, or I drink too much or I smoke too much and I don't remember exactly, but I think I was always.

Somewhat entrepreneurial. I don't think I had a plan necessarily as a kid. I have those stories of being like, yeah, I ran a lemonade stand and, hustled that way. I'm generally against lemonade stands. I don't think they're, an actual good lesson in business. But that's a whole, my, let me talk about my issue.

If you want a good tangent earlier, what's my issue with kids Lemonade stands? You read a lemonade stand from your house, that's fine. But then you see these kids who set up lemonade stands in public areas. I'm like, you're learning the wrong lessons here because anyone. Can do that if you're in a high traffic area, but like you have no cost to being in this high traffic area.

It's actually against the law. And I'm like, whatever. It's against the law. But it's like, what are you learning here? That you're, I don't know. I don't love that. I don't love that. You gotta play within your constraints, otherwise you aren't really learning a lesson.

Kelly Kennedy: So I actually agree with you,

but I agree with you from a completely different standpoint.

Okay. Yeah. And it's the fact that who in the world is running around with change in their pocket?

Alex Blumenstein: It's also not a practical, if you had a square, like if you got like a, like a square reader or whatever, then yeah. Maybe that makes sense. But yeah, it's just embarrassing that you have these kids selling lemonade and walking by, I'd love some lemonade, but what?

How am I gonna buy this from you? What's going on here? I have ignore them, because it's like, how is this gonna happen?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, exactly. I'm a bit of a bleeding heart, and I, I have, I feel bad when I see homeless people. I feel bad.

Alex Blumenstein: And okay, that's a different thing.

Kelly Kennedy: No.

That's totally. But what I'm getting at here is it is the worst time in human history Yes. To need to beg for anything. No. Yes. Even if you feel bad, like even if you're Kelly Kennedy and you're sitting at that stoplight and there's that guy walking up and down the path and you're like, God, I wanna help this guy.

Unless he's carrying a debit card, tap, I'm in some serious trouble here. And so is he Like, it's totally, it's tough man. And so the lemonade stand just falls under the exact same challenge. Unless they're sitting there with an interact machine saying, tap 25 cents, we're in trouble.

Alex Blumenstein: Exactly.

I think, if I'm assuming going on tangents here is what you're going for. And I think, just a more philosophical thought about oh, were you an entrepreneurial kid? Did you do this? Did you do that? I think that's like a trend in on, in entrepreneurism. Maybe just like among the extremely online folks where it's like you need to put your kid into school that teaches how to run an Airbnb and do stuff like that.

I think some of the stupidest bullshit in the world. It's no, you want someone who just like you, you wanna live a normal life before you try to start something or go into business or have a range of experiences. 'cause yeah, you can learn how to do business, but it's like you just learn that by doing and you wanna understand what.

People are and how people think and what people's problems are. So I think it, it's irrelevant, when you decide to be entrepreneurial, when you decide to take that leap, what your education or training was because having that well-rounded kind of experience of life, not that I have this crazy experience of life, but like a normal person living a normal life I think it is very helpful.

So I don't think it's. A lifelong lesson of being entrepreneurial or learning how to be entrepreneurial is that important?

Kelly Kennedy: Interesting. Yeah. I actually agree. And I think ultimately you're right, like the lesson you need to learn as a kid or as a student is really resilience, is really being able to stick to a task and stick with it even when you fall flat on your face.

Because as you and me both know, there's no way through, through being entrepreneurial, through doing anything where you're not gonna have moments where you're sitting on the ground thinking, why in the world did I do this?

Alex Blumenstein: Totally. You need to be able to stick through stuff. You need to be able to, identify people's problems.

You also need to know what to quit too.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes.

Alex Blumenstein: So really just having a good sense of those things and intuition around what you're doing is important.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, I've had plenty of times, like people ask me at this point of the show we're 242, but I released, we're actually like 166, so we're like quite a ways ahead in the world.

Alex Blumenstein: Okay, yeah, we'll see this in a year.

Kelly Kennedy: It's amazing. But at the same time there have been plenty of moments on this path where I've been like, man it doesn't make a lot of money. Like it's really a labor of love. Like at the end of the day, we're out here. But, so in my mind, what you really needed to do and what I needed to do to succeed was to do something bigger and recognize that there was nothing like this out for business development people.

Business development people. Did not have a resource. There's not a book. There's sales books, there's marketing books, but there was nothing specific for business development. And so being able to come on here and really teach business development people, entrepreneurs, how to develop their own business was unique and gave me passion to keep going even beyond the monetary Right.

When it wasn't making money, when it was just hard. I needed something else to strive towards something else, something bigger than me. And I think in, no matter what you do as an entrepreneur, you need to make it bigger than you, because if it's just about money, you're gonna, you'll eventually quit.

Alex Blumenstein: Yes and no. I think there's a lot of truth to that. You want to do things that you enjoy doing and you shouldn't do things that you don't enjoy doing. But if you have a clear path and you're like, I want to make money and get out. Then that's okay if you're right, sure, like you'll quit easier. But if you're like, oh no, I'm very confident in this plan. It's not something I care about. It's not, I'm not building a product that I have, I personally love. But if you are like, oh, I know this is a good product for the, for someone else, yeah. Then I think that's fine.

I don't think you need to love it if it's a means to an end, and if that end is making a little bit more money, then that's an okay choice. If it goes bad, you'll probably quit. But if you're confident in it, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that. It could be a good strategy if you've stumbled on the right thing.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. I actually agree. Yeah. I can agree to that, that, that makes sense. I guess for me, I've never met anybody who did it though. I've never and you know what maybe it's you, maybe you're the first person I've talked to that, that let that starting something with the idea that. I'm not gonna be in this long term.

I think most of the entrepreneurs I brought on, they never had an end plan. The end plan. Like it wasn't part of the plan. The plan was to do what they were gonna do. Is that, first off, is that you, did you start something with an idea to leave and what was that like for you?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. Yes.

Like I, I would say, first of all I think a lot of those people are probably lying. If I'm just gonna be honest. I think the idea that people aren't thinking about an exit when they build a business is bullshit. But I think we were very explicitly saying, let's build this to sell with the peak.

And I guess we, we, let's just jump ahead and talk to the peak. The peak is something that we started during the pandemic. Our past business, which we rewind to our cannabis accelerator and fund. Forward was winding down and we get into that later and we need something to do. So we were trying all sorts of ideas.

I had a catalog that I tried to do among a number of other things. And we were looking around, we saw the States's morning brew. We said we could do this for Canada. It would be a a product that we would like, we would enjoy yeah, our peers would enjoy. Our skill sets are aligned with it.

But it's not like we love the news so much that we need to do this for the love of the game. Yeah. We said, oh, this is something that fits with our skill sets. It's a proven business model and we can do it. So that's why we did it and we. We set out to build something that we could sell or at least walk away from and have a professional manager take over.

Okay. Like we, we used EOS, like the entrepreneurial operating system. Yeah. We read the book Built to Sell because we always had this idea that we would get in and get out and our goal was to do something that could make us some money. We, people ask and you ask before we were recording are you upset?

Is it your baby? Do you that you sold it? Do you not have control? I do not care. Okay. I truly don't care. Yeah. I am employed and I care about doing my job and making sure that it's a success, but I am not treating it like it's my baby anymore. Like I had one goal, which was to build something that could sell.

And obviously coming down from that is to make a great product, right? That's part of building something and sell is making sure our employees like working there and our readers love reading it. But that's the ultimate goal. So now I obviously care about a continuing to be good, but if my boss, 'cause I have a boss now, says I wanna do this or that, that's fine.

I will have a point of view on certain things, but it's not, I'm not gonna, lose my mind ever it, because I got what I wanted and now I have a job doing something. And that's the life of having a job. That's that.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Wow. Thank you for that. First off. That's actually, okay. So in 200, and I guess we could have more, but that No, really we can't.

In 2 42 episodes, you're the first person who has said that when they lost their business, it was.

Alex Blumenstein: Loss is a strong word too. Sure.

Kelly Kennedy: When they sold or parted ways with their business. Yeah. That it wasn't mentally challenging for them, that it wasn't a struggle. But here's the deal. You're also the first person I've talked to who said they started the business with the idea of parting ways.

So I think in some ways you resolved that at the very beginning. Sure. Instead of having to resolve it at the end.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that's how you should go into business. Businesses, it shouldn't be your whole life, right? Like it's what you're doing. To make money. Money.

It's what you're doing. 'cause you don't wanna have a job. It's, I wanna do things now that I enjoy. Yeah. But I, I try to, and if I can make something I really like doing into a business, that's fantastic, but it can't be my primary concern. My goal is to be able to make money so I can not have to worry about that and do things I wanna do.

So yeah, I would recommend not being emotionally invested because then you will make mistakes. I think especially once you're acquired, especially if you have an earn it. Once you're acquired and you're mostly invested, you start fighting with the management. Yeah. It's a waste of time and a waste of your, your, emotional reservoir. It's not worth it.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. No, that's fair. I think what ends up happening is a lot of people, especially if they start a business from the ground up, they tie a lot of their own self-worth to it. Yeah. Especially if they didn't have that before, if they were just an employee or whatever, and they've actually built something.

There's something to be proud of when you start a business For sure. No matter what it, of course. And and I think a lot of your self-worth can get tied to it. And like I said, I've spoken to people who have sold their businesses for multimillions of dollars. And they, they struggled with it, like a loss of a family member, like the loss of a friend.

It was truly a loss. They went through and I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, okay. If we know that's a potential risk, what if you built the business with the idea of parting ways with it at say, 10 years, 20 years, five years, whatever it is, and just saying that's the goal. And at least then if you do it that way, it's harder to feel that way about it at the end, if that was the goal from point go.

But I've never talked to anybody who did it but you.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah. That, that was the goal. I think it's a good way to do it. And I'm not gonna say I have never had the issue of tying my self worth to my business. I certainly have. I just think in this case, I, my, I think my, I think I had a lot of built up in there, but I achieved what I set out to do.

Which was sell it. Yes. So it's not like I didn't have that as a self-worth, tied in thing. If it failed I would've felt bad. But I, but my goal was not that this needs to keep growing. Like my goal was to get to this point at this price, and that's what we did.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. No that's amazing.

Walk me into it what is it like to start a media company and a big one too my gosh, it sounds very challenging.

Alex Blumenstein: I would say big, like I don't think we're a big media company by any means. We were, a good sized small media business. We were we made a good amount of money because we had a high-end business audience.

So we could attract kind of high-end advertisers, but I wouldn't say we were big by any means. So starting it as I said before, it was a start in COVID. We were looking for something new to do. Looked at Morning Brew in the States and said, let's just do what they're doing for a Canadian audience because it doesn't exist.

Was it relatively easy to do we all come from backgrounds that have skills that really led to this because it was COVID that was like the biggest hack for us was just like we had to write a newsletter. Yeah. We probably wouldn't have stuck with it when it was making, no money.

Every single day if we had lives at the time. But because we were just at home all the time, it was like easy for us to write in every day. It wasn't really a big deal. So that, that worked out pretty well for us. Our media business is relatively easy to get off the ground. Just, you're. You're, you there's, there are software tools to do everything we need to do and for everything, not, I'm lucky enough to have a partner Taylor, who can build things.

He can build products, he can build tech. So he would just hack things together. Yeah. Now we probably wouldn't even have to do that. Since we started, there's been really new tools to do exactly what we do that are off the shelf and very good and very affordable like beehive. So we probably would've even needed to build any of our own tools if we started today.

Yeah, so we basically, we started writing this newsletter, looking at the format of morning brew, writing about Canadian things, targeting Canadian audience. And we quickly gained traction. We had people signing up, obviously we just circulated among, friends, family to begin with.

And they liked it and shared it with their, friends and family and got some really solid growth that way. And I think we knew that we really hit onto something when. Investors from our previous business, which we, lost their money. Not all of it, but we lost some of their money, came to us and said, oh, I want to invest in this.

Yeah. Which really is a great, sign of confidence because one, they just saw that even though we lost money in our last business, we were honest, transparent, and good operators. And then secondly, they just saw this was gonna make money. So we got to that point where we were like, okay, sure.

Let's raise a little bit of money. It's all on the table already. We're not gonna have to do the dog and pony show like we did before, and beg for, every single dollar. So we raised a couple hundred thousand dollars basically to start paying ourselves and hire an extra writer. Yeah. This allowed us to obviously stick with it so we couldn't do it full time.

And then hiring a writer so we could focus on, growth and sales and all the other pieces that come with the business.

Kelly Kennedy: Had you ever had to sell advertising before? Never. Okay, great. I love this because I'm also learning how to sell advertising for the first time ever in my life. And as we both know, my gosh, it's a bit of an interesting pony to learn walk.

Walk me through what was it like to have to learn that skill?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. Brett and I, my other partner were both, responsible that early on, and I don't know, we just went through the emotions and learned as we went, right? We, looked online how people run, automations and figured out how to do that.

Sent out lots of cold emails and got meetings, figured out what our value prop was and we had a good value prop. Ah it's it made it easy. We said, look, we have these business decision makers, they wanna buy from you, and we were able to reach you to do it. So we had a pretty straightforward formula, right?

We said, who is, wants to reach a business audience. Early on, it was a lot of SaaS companies. Yeah. American based SaaS companies who wanted to reach Canadian business decision makers, and they didn't really have that audience anywhere else. So we would just reach out to them, sell them ads.

And then I think where it like really set us apart is that we had very good processes around advertising with us. People really liked advertising with us, and I think that's really helps to go that extra mile. And just that it was easy. We were easy to work with, we were really hands-on, but in a process way.

So it didn't really take up that much of our time. And we would get like a lot of feedback that we were, the best channel for some of these people to work with. And we would under, because I think because we were well-rounded, because we weren't just media people or just media salespeople or whatever, we really understood.

What these advertisers wanted and needed and wanted to hear. So we could get on calls with them and be like, okay, you're trying to get more leads with your SaaS, right? With your, we sold, say Gong, which is a sales enablement platform. We would work with Gong and be like, okay, like we know that this piece of content that you have is gonna really do well with our audience.

And, we know you wanna get more meetings booked by like this segment. So we'd really just be able to advise them in a pretty, detailed way. Yeah. Really knowing what we talked about on how to like, get exactly what they wanted out of our audience. So I think really just being well rounded people helped us there.

Yeah. We weren't salespeople but we knew our product and we were smart enough to understand our advertisers needs. That being said. We were able to like level up once we brought on like a real salesperson, a real experienced salesperson. 'cause they are, I think one that's all they're focused on.

Two, they're a little bit more they could shake people down a little bit better, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So like that really helped. And also I think just like from, the macroeconomic perspective, like when we started US SaaS companies were flying high. They had so much money they were spending like crazy.

Yes. That started to shift. But the thing, and the thing about Canada is if you really just wanna run like a media business in Canada, you wanna be in with the oligopolies, right? You wanna be with the banks, you wanna be in with the telecoms, the airlines, like that sort of thing, right? So we managed to then build a lot of relationships with the banks and sell into financial institutions.

And that's really a fantastic money maker for us. 'cause again it's a little different than, than what the SaaS companies were selling. But same idea. We have an elite audience of, relatively young people, and that's who the financial institutions wanna reach as well.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes. No, I love it because I actually, and at this point too, I haven't had to talk to anybody or I haven't had a chance to talk to anybody who has specifically sold advertising.

And so I think it's a very unique perspective, and I think it is very different. People don't realize selling advertising is very different than selling a product because what the cu you have to meet something that the customer actually wants. What does the customer want? The customer wants to connect with your audience, with your readers, and they want those readers to take action on something.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what you had to do to make sure that you were able to demonstrate that for your advertisers?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. We got results. It was really that simple. We would obviously, like our initial sale was saying, look, here's some of the companies who read our newsletter, right?

We've got top people from A, B, C, and D. We would say, and eventually we'd start to learn oh, who these people's top prospects were like, who were the big Canadian companies who would buy from them? Like that sort of thing, right? Yeah. So we really demonstrated that outta the gate and then we just looked at metrics and we said, look, you're booking meetings and it this flowed from there.

I think to zoom out for a second, this is another one of my like philosophical hot takes on like the startup world is if you have a good business, you don't need to work that hard. I'm not saying that we didn't work hard, but you like, oh, entrepreneurship such a hustle. You're grinding it out if your business sucks, right?

If you have a really good business, then like it flows well. Yeah. Like things clicked for us. We're not geniuses, we didn't work harder than everybody else. We just picked the right thing at the right time. Yes. And I have no problem admitting that. My partners have no problem admitting that.

Like obviously it took some, like we're not idiots, but like we're smart enough to figure it out. But we chose the right thing. We got the right audience because they wanted the thing we chose. And that worked out well for advertisers. So when someone would advertise with us, they got results. Yeah.

And that worked out really well. And then when we shifted to the financial institutions, like it also worked well for us because these are the same people who are reading it, like the advertisers were reading it. And that's like what's really advantageous with a business publication like this is like the people who are gonna advertise with you are already reading it.

So you get inbounds and you can also even if you're talking to somebody else, we'd be like, else, we know so many people at your bank already are reading us. Yeah. So it's like we've got credibility. So it really helps in that way too.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh, I love that. I love that. Because actually almost every advertiser we've had on this show was a listener first, so I get For sure.

Me, you're right. It's your audience. Your audience ends up being the people who support what you're doing, which is amazing. And I absolutely love it, man. Yeah I know that I'll be honest, like I've been in BD for a long time. I wasn't really prepared for what it took to sell advertising because it was very different.

It wasn't, it is B2B relationship, but it's a very different kind of B2B relationship. It really is transactional. There needs to be. There needs to be some way to prove that there's an effect happening that they want to have, which with a podcast is challenging. Anybody will tell you that. It's not easy to measure podcasts.

They, the analytics are getting there, but they need, they have a long way to go still.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah. Look, the, be the best advertising is the one you don't have to prove though. Yeah. Yeah. If you, and you really

Kelly Kennedy: you're doing well. You want hard advertising. It's so funny 'cause you talked about working smart.

You talked about right place, right time. And one of my limiting beliefs that I have struggled with my entire life is I watched my parents kill themselves. I watched them work nights. I watched them work late, work hard. And in my mind for growing up, it was always, you have to work hard, you gotta work hard, you gotta kill yourself or you're not gonna make it.

And and I'll be honest, that has served me 'cause I have put in the extra effort sometimes too far. When I should have quit, like you said, when I should have gave up, I didn't, I kept going until I threw, burned myself into the ground. But. That same mindset has helped me at times because I did put in the extra effort when it needed to happen.

I did double down, but I am now learning. I'm now having to learn that there's, you can make money without killing yourself. You can. And to all my listeners out there limiting belief. If you think you have to kill yourself to make money, you have to work incredibly hard. Yeah. You're probably gonna have to work hard or you're gonna have to be able to put effort in, but you don't have to kill yourself to make money.

And I'm having to like, I'm having to, I'm having to reckon with that. I'm having to reckon with that.

Alex Blumenstein: No, I if you're grinding it out for too long, something's wrong. I think there's obviously times where you'll have to, or it's like there's a client deadline coming up and you have to work harder or whatever.

There's times where you gotta do long hours, but if you're doing it all the time, yeah, there's probably something wrong, right? Like that's not a life that most people wanna live. So reevaluate what you're doing, see if there's something you can change to make it easier. Yeah. Or maybe it's not the right line of business for you.

That's the other path.

Kelly Kennedy: What what I think I do, and I know a lot of people in this show too, is we spread ourselves a little thin. We spread ourselves a little thin. And so what I end up doing is, I love doing BD still, I still do active BD contracts. Like I, it's still a passion of mine.

I still do it. For real. I don't just talk about it on the show. And so I, I do that, I do coaching now, which I love. I totally fell in love with coaching. I love it. It's honest to God, it's like one of my favorite things on planet Earth. So I do coaching now too. And I do this show, and I'm a dad and I'm a partner.

And so by the time you throw it all together, it can feel like a very full life. A very, and I've, I'm very happy. I'm thankful. I'm grateful I have an amazing life. But it does at times feel like, okay, whew, maybe I should tone it back a bit. But I don't know, man. There's a part of me that really struggles with that.

I I feel at times like if I'm having to back off I am in a certain way, giving up, or I'm, I am, I'm not enough.

Alex Blumenstein: I think that you can do lots of things isn't mean you're grinding it out and working 24 hours a day. Those are, and I think those are two different ideas and yes, focus is important, but if you get one, if you have success and you have pleasure from doing multiple things and juggling different things, then that's fine.

Yeah. Like I, I think, I'm sure both of us and people who listen to this show. Are all over the place and their ideas and what they want to do and what they wanna focus on. And if that works great, there's no one way of doing anything, so like I, I have all sorts of ideas. I test stuff all the time.

I'm always doing weird, random stuff, and that is fun for me. So great. I like it works. You need to know when you're spreading yourself to thin, you need to know when you're not focused on the right things. But it doesn't mean you have to do one thing at a time.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you're doing one thing at a time, you're missing, like in a certain scenario, you might miss something.

I feel like you have to try multiple avenues. Every business should have multiple revenue incomes because, let's get real, like they're not always, not every income revenue stream is always hot, right? And so it makes sense to have two or three different avenues to make an income from a business.

And so I do think that there's a part that has to spread out to do that. But yeah, it's it can be, it can definitely start to feel a little hard to juggle at times. And I do start to question like, okay which one do I like more? 'cause I think I just wanna do more of that, which is where I find myself lately, right?

Where it's I really love the coaching. I think I just wanna do more of that. But yeah, it's it's a blessing. It's a blessing and it can be a challenge and you may have to navigate that. For me, the challenge is, I hate to say no. I hate to say, you know what? I can't help you right now because I've been off more than I can shoot, right?

And so I'm always trying to balance that. That need to help people with the need to help myself.

Alex Blumenstein: Totally. And saying no is hard because it plays the ego when someone asks you. Yes. So that's always tough.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, for sure. For sure. You had a very successful exit. Let's talk about that.

Let's talk about that. Sure. Like you said, I think there are a lot of business owners who dream about selling their business and, I don't know, retiring, doing whatever it is they wanna do. Talk to me about that process. What was it like to go through an exit? To negotiate an exit?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. So a as, like I said before, we always wanted to sell.

We were always building towards selling. We were always ready to do that. So really like early on, like we, we always had offers, right? So like very relatively, quite early on we had people looking at buying us. We, they were bad offers. Some of them were, a little insulting Hey, why don't you just come work with us instead?

Yeah. It's why you're not offering us anything. That's right. Other people who would be good acquirers just tried to extract information from us and then ripped us off. And it did scare us at one point, but it didn't really earn out to be an issue. Yeah. So we always had offers coming in.

People wanted to talk al we, we always entertained them and then trying to think about exactly what happened. So at some point Zoomer who was ultimately our, in our acquirer bought blog to, and they're another media company based here in Toronto and. At that point, we reached out to them just to get on their radar and say, Hey, we're, something that you might be interested in.

Yeah. Nothing came of it that probably a year or like a year or so later, they reached out to us again to rekindle the conversation. At that point things moved like pretty quickly. We reached back out to some of the people that reached out to us before, ended up with one other real offer at that point.

But it was just such a better deal, the one that we were being offered by Zoomer. And then we like basically had a couple conversations with them, got a term sheet, pushed back on a couple things there, worked that out, and then really got into like actually working through a share purchase agreement pretty quickly.

And I think that we were quite aggressive with it. Yeah. In terms of like making sure things moved along. Like we, we made sure we stayed on top of our lawyers, made sure that information was getting passed back and forth because we wanted to close the deal. W we knew how much money we wanted to make from this.

Okay. And we were being offered that. And then we said, okay, let's make sure this happens. So we pushed through, made sure we got what we wanted, make sure there were no terms that were really causing us any problems. Most of the nego, like we got what we wanted basically after the initial pushback from the term sheet.

And, most of the negotiations after that was like one, just understanding the legalese that's involved and it's like a huge waste of time. And then secondly was like negotiating over small things related to that. But it was a pretty simple process, I would say. In some ways you have a pretty simple business.

I think if I with all respect to the acquirer, if I was on the other side, I probably would've done things slightly different. I probably would've dug a little bit deeper. I probably would've, once we got to a certain stage, tried to meet more of the team, understand how the business kind of operated.

Yeah. But it, it really moved quickly. And it was really quite simple. So there's not really that much to get into because Okay. It was not a involved process. Yeah. Because we were prepared for it. We knew what we wanted and had good lawyers who we made sure stayed on top of it.

Kelly Kennedy: Let's talk about, let's talk about getting what you wanted though.

Sure. I think that's a skill, right? Yeah. Like the reality, you go into a negotiation and drop your pants and lose it all and you didn't. Talk to us about what is it like to negotiate, your business sale. I think there's a lot of people listening right now who would find that incredibly valuable because we all know what we want for something or what the valuation is.

I imagine you got it valued before you went into this, but how do you make sure that you actually get what you're worth?

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah. So first of all, no, there's no valuation, right? No one's gonna tell you what it's worth. Okay. People, you, you can theoretically do a valuation, but I don't think it's particularly relevant in our line of business.

'cause it's okay, like we first, you don't have to pay anyone to do it. We know how much revenue we have and we can look at, multiples of comparables, right? That's easy to do, especially in a business like ours. It's quite straightforward. And I say this when like raising money as well, your actual value it doesn't matter.

It's what you're willing to take, right? We knew what we wanted. We knew what we were worth, and we figured, okay, we just want to get to where we can get to. I'd say we got more than we were worth if you did it by just like a pure valuation standpoint. Yeah. And and just going back to what I said about raising money, it's oh, like how much did you give up in a round?

It's it's how much you're willing to give up.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Alex Blumenstein: That's what really matters in early rounds at least. It's I don't know, if you're raising your first round and you want to continue to own 80% of the company, then it's how much money do you need for 20%?

And how do you get there? We were we were also aligned. We're also I, I'm very lucky in many ways that like me, me and my partners were also aligned on the number. Yeah. So that could be another issue that comes up if you have partners and you're not aligned on what you want.

And that becomes a tricky issue. We were aligned on how much we wanted. We knew how we knew it. We just said, Hey, this is what we want. And we got there. There's negotiation around the edges of what the terms are attached to that. What's up front, when are you gonna get paid the rest, how do you get paid the rest?

But we, made sure that the terms on getting the rest to get to that full number was pretty ironclad. And frankly, we got like our first number, what we wanted upfront, and the rest is bonus anyway. So like negotiating wise, it wasn't a tough negotiation. Because I think we were aligned on the value and that just means we knew how much we wanted and they knew how much they would pay, and we were in the same ballpark.

Yeah. You might be in a different ballpark and then you probably won't get a deal. I think something that's like to be like cautious of, that we were warned about is people will, and this didn't happen to us, is an acquirer will come to you and say, okay, how much do you want? 5 million bucks. Fantastic.

Great. Okay, let's do it. Let's enter into a term sheet. You enter to a term sheet and then they start to do due diligence and they start to hack away at you and say little this. Okay. Let's take a little bit off here. Take a little bit off here, a little bit off here, and you're so far down the road that you'll still go through with the deal.

That's like a tactic that is used. It was not used on us, but we were warned about it being you. So that's something to keep a heads up or, but we didn't really have any issues, so it was very smooth in that way.

Kelly Kennedy: One of the things that you've talked to, and you've alluded to it multiple times in this conversation, is you have absolutely rockstar partners.

Who are your partners?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. So Brett Chang, Taylor Scullin as I said before, met them working in politics, I guess 14 years ago now. Wow. Which is a crazy long time. And yeah, and like we started really like our first real business together, which was Leaf Board or Cannabis Accelerator. And that did not go well.

And I think that's like the best test is if you can get through something that doesn't go well together, that you can do something again. So if we were able to fail together, we could do something good together. So once we got through that and said we still wanna do things together, that was a very good side.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes. I've seen a lot of partnerships go bad. I've seen way more, I think in my lifetime go bad than Go. Good. And so one of the questions that I have for you, and it's funny 'cause I, one of our sponsors name is Colin Harms. He has hyper back technologies, runs it with a bunch of partners and they're amazing.

They're amazing. And one of the questions that I always like to ask people who say they have amazing partnerships, it goes very well, is what is the secret? What's the secret to making a great partnership work?

Alex Blumenstein: I don't know if there is a secret. So we had all been in different businesses prior with partners that didn't work out.

So I think we had some experience on understanding like what didn't work and like how to get, do a partnership. I think there was a lot of value in that we had known each other for a good amount of time. Prior, so we knew how we would work with each other, or at least knew what our motivations were and what our temperament were.

And ultimately, I don't think any of us had like particularly big egos and we were, are all very good at compromising. Like I think that's really what matters is that you're able to reach consensus and I think it really is a very touch and feel situation because you have to understand like what is a a hill to die on for your partners and what's not, and what's a hill to die on obviously for yourself and what's not.

And I think that is like a constantly changing dynamic within a partnership and you just need to be able to have a good buy. That's really what it comes down to. Yeah. Is clicking, connecting, and. Yeah. Not, in some, actually, so I was gonna say not have any one person take over.

But I think that's, I think in our different businesses we've had, different people in different positions and doing, taking different roles. But I think in some businesses it's okay if one person is like fully the decision maker and other people are still partners, but not in the same way.

I think that can work for people. I think you need ability. That's probably it, but probably the secret is ability to make decisions, right? So it's if it's done where you are happy with having a decision maker and other people who contribute, then that's great. If you are able to get to consensus every time, then that's great.

If you can't get to consensus because no one's willing to make a decision, or everybody wants to be the one making the decision, then you won't go anywhere.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah, man. What should somebody consider before entering into a partnership? Like you said, you've had some go south, you've had some go.

Great. Were there different considerations that you had the second time around? Like what should you go into business with your best friend, for instance, should you go into business with a family member? Are there certain scenarios that you think a partnership makes more sense? Or what should somebody consider?

Because like for me, I know that I like running my own businesses. Why? Because I'm, i'm the be all end all right? I can make my own decisions. I can make decisions on the fly. Obviously though, that also means that I'm by myself and I don't have that extra support, which would be really nice sometimes.

So I can see the benefit on both sides. But walk me through who should consider a partnership and what should they consider when they enter into one?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. I think there's all sorts of different reasons why you would want to be in a partnership when you start a business, there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't.

Obviously like the first reason. It's complimentary skills. I think if have one set of skills and another person knows another, that's an obvious reason to, to form a partnership. But you should go and find somebody who just happens to have the skills you need. 'cause that can lead to disaster.

You obviously need to take some time to get to know that person and know if you could work together. And going back to the previous point, if you can come to decisions together there it is probably more fun to have partners. It's less lonely. You come up with more ideas about how to solve things.

So there, there's a ton of value in having people to work with. On the other side, like having partners obviously can cause problems. If you can't come to decisions, if you clash on things also it's just more mouths to feed, right? Yeah. Like you're gonna make less money. Obviously not realistically.

If you can build a bigger business, be more people, you will, but. Especially in the early days, you have to, have that if you get an exit, there's more there's all sorts of considerations around that too. Why it might be best not to have partners and still just have a community of people who you can work with on certain things.

So it's, it there, there's no right answer. And you said, should you go into business with family? Should you go into business with your best friend? Maybe it depends on your relationship. There's a lot of families that get along well. There's a lot of families that hate each other. Like it's, yeah, it totally doesn't matter.

It's about those individual relationships and how you work together.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay. Okay. No, I appreciate that. I think it's challenging because, the last thing you want is to start a business and then to run into Roblox because you can't come to consensus on a decision.

Yeah. You both know. Business decisions they sometimes have to happen really quick, right? You may have to pivot very quickly. It might not be something that's ideal and a hard choice might have to be made. And so you need to be able to make those choices quickly. And so one of the things that I, yeah, I agree.

I think the most important thing, like you said, is that you're able to make decisions together. I think that really has to be like the main measure that you go with.

Alex Blumenstein: Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to choose a direction I is what it a hundred percent what matters. And I think in my partnership, like there's big decisions we have to make together, and we've never really had an issue getting to consensus.

But it's also there's a lot of abil like we, we don't make every decision together. Like we, trust each other just to make calls on certain things. Like you just move, run things on our own. So it's pretty free flowing in that way and that's very helpful.

But obviously, yeah, we have, a lot of years of. Experience doing that behind us.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes, absolutely. Alex, you've been incredibly successful. You've had multiple startups, you're a serial entrepreneur, only some have been successful. Let's be clear. They're all you know what? They're all successful.

What a failure for a while, right? Let's sure you know what, in all fairness, let's get real. There is no entrepreneurship without failure, you're going to fail. Even in the success, there's going to be things that you're like, oh crap, that sucked. I just fell flat on my face. Now I gotta pick myself up.

So failure like is inevitable in success. You can't really succeed without falling on your face a couple times to get there, in my opinion. Anyway. So anyway, serial entrepreneur, you have had success, you have had a successful exit, I'm sure you're gonna do something again. I can almost guarantee it.

Run me through, let's, we're talking to a lot of entrepreneurs right now, maybe people who haven't taken that jump. Maybe people who did just take the jump. Their business just started and they found this show. I. What words of wisdom can you provide them? What words of encouragement as somebody who has had success, who's been an entrepreneur for a long time, what can, what kind of motivation do you got for them Alex?

Alex Blumenstein: Man. Okay. I've been doing this for so long now that I don't really remember what it's like to have a real job, but there's nothing wrong with having a job. Most wealth is built by having a job at a good company and working your way up. There's something to be said about the social aspect, about working with other people, about going into an office with a big team.

There's a lot of great things about having a job at a good company, getting paid well, all of that. It's fun to do entrepreneurship too, though, right? It's the only path I know now. I don't think I'm employable in any way now. Like I, I really don't. Man, I'm so cynical. It's hard for me to give good advice.

But don't do know when to quit. If it's really hard, you're probably doing something wrong. Find things that click. And if it's not clicking, don't, don't do it. Don't like, do real MVPs, do real tests and be clever about it. Don't buy into like wisdom, so don't listen to me or anyone else.

There's good advice, but there's so much advice out there Yeah. That you'll get blinded by it. So don't go all in on any path. I think there's like a lot of advice online. There's I'd say like the Y Combinator or Silicon Valley, there's like the HoldCo, Andrew Wilkinson that world. Just find a path that works for you. Find a working style that works for you, try to solve a problem, make some money doing it, don't overcomplicate things.

Kelly Kennedy: I love that. I love that. I also love that you said that you're unemployable Now I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs I've talked to you that they're like, yeah, I don't know when it happened, but I'm now unemployable.

Alex Blumenstein: I I just don't know what job I would have. I just can't imagine a job I could apply for and be like, I know how to do this.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. One of the and we talked about it really briefly at the beginning of the show, but one of the really cool things that the Peak does is the Emerging Leaders list.

Yeah. And it really, the cool thing about it is it really, like I've connected with people from the Emerging Leaders List, had conversations with them and made connections from it. It's really cool. Can we talk about your emerging leaders list?

Alex Blumenstein: Sure. What do you wanna know?

Kelly Kennedy: What was the idea behind it in the beginning?

Alex Blumenstein: Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna burst your bubble a little bit here. Let me let me do that. Okay. The idea behind it was to grow. This was originally a growth and sales initiative for us. We said, why don't we choose some people who have a, maybe an audience or something like that, or we wanna sell it to and put them on this list.

So the first year we did it, I don't know if we even opened nominations. I think we just chose people on, put them on the list. And this is like the best media hack ever is just do lists. People love being recognized and honored. Now we continue to it has become more competitive. We have open nominations.

We, we have started rejecting people from those nominations. Ultimately, it's also become like something we sell sponsorship on. So it like does make money in itself. Yeah. But it did start the true answer is it start as a growth in sales initiative. But yeah, it has been very cool to see to honor people and honor our community who are doing cool things.

And it's great to just see all these people who read our newsletter who who are then, the amazing things are doing. And then who are posting but on LinkedIn and then every day, we launch a list. It's like LinkedIn is just like peak green, everywhere you look.

'cause it's all these people posting about it. It's a really great initiative and I feel like we have a nice. It's a nice brand thing for us in Canada now. So we, yeah we love it. It's great. It's been really helpful. It's connected me with a lot of people too.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

It's really cool. I, whether you intended it to be that way or not, that's what it became. Yeah. And it's freaking amazing because what's really cool is what you're doing ultimately is you're showing a lot of people doing amazing things and then you're saying, Hey, you guys should probably connect 'cause you're both doing something amazing and there's probably some synergies.

So like I, I would be very surprised if a lot of partnerships didn't come from that. Oh, for sure. It's incredible. Congratulations on that. You did do a great job with it.

Alex Blumenstein: Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, and it's good to hear, these stories of people connecting through us.

We also have our bet on Canada Summits and we were talking to somebody the other day who was like, oh yeah, I just I got a client that I just, you know, I closed on the other day through meeting them at a Bet on Canada summit, like a year earlier. Yeah, we hear stories like that often.

It's great.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, it's absolutely incredible. Alex, this was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on with us today.

Alex Blumenstein: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Kelly Kennedy: Before we close up today I, I just wanted to know what is it like, what is it like to sell your business and just be out?

And I know you're still you're still in the transition, but have you found more freedom? Did you get what you wanted out of it? Is life better? Are you gonna go on vacation for the next three years?

Alex Blumenstein: What? Yeah, of course life is better. Like it's having a big chunk of change in your bank account makes life better.

Yeah. Like I am traveling more. I moved into a bigger place. Like it's good. It gives you that cushion and it's validating and frankly, I think it makes future businesses easier. And obviously. Everything you do in the past helps everything you do in the future, but the credibility that you gave by being like, yeah, I sold this business does open more doors for you.

Yeah, it does help a lot.

Kelly Kennedy: That's amazing, dude. I wish you the best of luck, the utmost success, and I'm really excited to see what comes next. 'cause I know you're not done.

Alex Blumenstein: Thank you. I appreciate that a lot.

Kelly Kennedy: Until next time, you've been listening to the Business Development Podcast and we will catch you on.

The flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.