Sell and Stay True to You with Alex Blumenstein

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 want to miss this episode.

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.

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Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, 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 helped 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.

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.

It's funny.

You know, what I gave you about 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 out of the gate, I'll tell you.

It's Blumenstein, not Blumenstein.

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 Ste.

But I guess I go with Stein.

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

It's okay.

Leave it.

It's a nice anecdote, dude.

I loved connecting with you.

We actually connected because of a sponsor of my show, Rodney Lover.

He owns at work office furniture in Ontario.

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 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.

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 have connected to a lot of interesting people through our emerging leaders initiative, which is under 40 Rising Stars product we put out every year.

Yeah, it's super cool.

It was super cool to win, man.

I really.

I was like, wow, that was amazing.

That's awesome.

So, yeah, I was really thrilled by that.

And I think it is an incredibly great initiative.

And actually we're going to get into that a little bit later on.

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.

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 ended.

This is 2010.

This is the year Rob Ford became Mayor of Toronto.

Okay.

And 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 one way or another sets.

So yeah, Brett 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 in that in some capacity and we've been working together since then.

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 because I'll be honest, I tend to avoid it and more so just because 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 got to be a whirlwind.

Sure.

Like working in politics when you're young is great, but 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.

Want to 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 found a way out.

Well, and you actually worked in an embassy in Washington, correct?

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 D.C.

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 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 even to get into that part either.

But incredible time.

Like the 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 staffed there who were like, my spirits, 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, learned how to network there.

Yeah.

Mostly because I didn't do any work.

So it's like I would just wander around 1.

Go to events outside the embassy or just wander around inside that embassy talking to people.

So it was a good time in that way.

Wow.

Wow.

Did you get to meet President Obama?

No.

Oh, that would have been super cool.

Come on, you're there.

Why not?

I did get to go to the White House twice, but just on, like, tours.

So no.

No Oval Office meetings.

That have been awesome.

Yeah, yeah, that would be no dice there.

Oh, you know what?

Your life's not done yet.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, wow.

Obviously you've done that.

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?

I think to a certain extent I probably was.

I.

I guess I hit my head too many times.

I drink too much or I smoke too much and I.

Exactly.

But I think I was always somewhat entrepreneurial.

I don't think I had a plan necessarily as a kid.

I have no 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.

Let me talk about my issue, if you want a good tangent.

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 got to play within your constraints, otherwise you're not really learning a lesson.

I actually agree with you, but I agree with you from a completely different standpoint.

Okay.

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

It's also not a practical.

If you had a square, like, if you got like, like a square reader or whatever, that, 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 going to buy this from you?

What's going on here?

Ignore them.

Because it's like, how is this going to happen?

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.

And that's a different thing.

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.

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 want to 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.

And so the lemonade stand just falls under the exact same challenge.

Unless they're sitting there with an Interact machine saying, top 25 cents, we're in trouble.

Exactly, 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 it's like a trend in, 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.

No, you want someone who, just like you want to live a normal life before you try to start something or go into business or have a range of experiences.

Because, yeah, you can learn how to do business, but it's like you just learn that by doing.

And you want to understand what people are and how people think and what people's problems are.

So I think 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's very helpful So I don't think it's.

It's.

It's a lifelong lesson of being entrepreneurial or learning how to be entrepreneurial.

Is that important?

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?

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.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, yeah.

No, I've had plenty of times, like, people ask me, at this point of the show, we're 242, but at released, we're actually like 166.

So we're, like, quite a ways ahead in the world.

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

Yeah, 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 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.

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, 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.

Yeah.

Actually agree.

Yeah, I can agree to that.

That makes sense, I guess for me, I've never met anybody who did it, though.

Maybe it's you.

Maybe you're the first person I've talked to that ended up starting something with the idea that I'm not going to 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 going to do.

Is that first off, is that you.

Did you start something with an idea to leave and what was that like for you?

Sure.

Yes.

Like I would say, first of all, I think a lot of those people are probably lying, if I'm just going to 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 P.

And I guess we, we.

Let's just jump ahead and talk about the peaks.

The peak is something that we started during the pandemic.

Our past business, which we'd rewind to our cannabis accelerator and fund leaf forward, was winding down.

And we get into that later and we need something new to do.

So we're 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 state's morning brewing, said we could do this for Canada.

It would be a.

A product that we would like, we would enjoy, 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.

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 always set out to build something that we could sell or at least walk away from and have a professional manager take over.

Like, we.

We use 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 asked 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.

I'm 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 that can 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 it continuing to be good.

But if my boss, because I have a boss now says, I want to do this or that, that's fine.

I will have a point of view on certain things.

But it's not.

I'm not going to lose my mind over 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.

Wow.

Wow.

Thank you for that.

First off, that's actually.

Okay.

So in 200, and I guess we could have more about that.

No, really, we can't.

In 242 episodes, you are the first person who has said that when they lost their business, it was.

Loss is a strong word, too.

When they sold or parted ways with their business, 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 resolve that at the very beginning instead of having to resolve it at the end.

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.

It's what you're doing because you don't.

Want to have a job.

It's.

I want to do things now that I enjoy.

Yeah.

But 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 want to 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.

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.

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.

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 months, multi millions 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, 5 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.

Yeah, that was the goal.

I think it's a good way to do it.

And I'm not going to 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 might, I think, 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 have 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.

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.

I would say big.

Like I don't think we're a big media company by any means.

We were a good size, 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 started 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 lend to this because it was Covid that was like the biggest hack for us was just like we had to write a newsletter.

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 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.

Immediate business is relatively easy to get off the ground.

Just your, 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, you can build products, you'd 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 have 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 a 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.

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.

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 going to make money.

So we got to that point, we were like, okay, sure, let's raise a little bit of money.

It's all on the table already.

We're not going to 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.

This allowed us to obviously stick with it so we could 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.

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?

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.

It's, it made it easy.

We said, look, we have these business decision makers, they want to 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, 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, because I think because we were well rounded because we weren't just media people or just media sales people 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 going to really do well with our audience.

And we know you want to get more meetings both 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.

Because 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.

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 want to run like a media business in Canada, you want to be in with the oligopolies.

Right.

You want to be with the banks, you want to 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 because again, it's a little different 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 want to reach as well.

Yes.

No, I love it because I actually 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 cut, 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.

Sure.

We got results.

It was really that simple.

We would obviously, like.

Our initial sale was saying, look, here are some of the companies who read our newsletter, right?

We've got top people from A, B, C and D.

We would say, eventually we 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.

So we really demonstrated that out of the gate, and then we just looked at metrics and we said, look, you're booking meetings.

And it just 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 people are like, oh, entrepreneurship is 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.

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, 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, and that worked out really well.

And then when we shifted to the financial institutions, 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 going to 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, 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.

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 it.

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.

The analytics are getting there, but they need.

They have a long way to go still.

Yeah, look, the.

The best advertising is the one you don't have to prove though.

Ye.

Yeah.

If you get pad, then you're really late, you're doing well, you want car advertising.

It's so funny because 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 got to work hard, you got to kill yourself or you're not going to make it.

And I'll be honest, that has served me because 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'm going, going until I burn 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'm 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 probably have to work hard or you're gonna have 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.

If you're grinding it out for too long, something's wrong.

I think there's obviously times where you will 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 want to 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.

What.

What I think I do, and I know a lot of people 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, it's still a passion of mine.

I still do real.

I don't just talk about it on the show.

And so 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, 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 feel at times like if I'm having to back off, I'm in a certain way giving up, or I'm.

I'm.

I'm not enough.

I think that you can do lots of things.

Is it mean you're grinding it out and working 24 hours a day?

Those are.

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, juggling different things, then that's fine.

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 want to focus on.

And if that works, great.

There's no one way of doing anything.

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 through it, and 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.

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?

Because I think I just want to do more of that, which is where I find myself lately.

Right.

Where it's.

I really love the coaching.

I think I just want to do more of that.

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 bit 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 totally.

And saying no is hard because it plays the ego when someone asks you.

So that's always tough.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

You had a very successful exit.

Let's talk about that.

Let's talk about that.

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 want to do.

Talk to me about that process.

What was it like to go through an exit?

To negotiate an exit?

Sure.

So, as, like I said before, we always want to sell.

We were always building towards selling.

We were always ready to do that.

So really, like, early on, like, 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?

It's why you're not offering us anything.

That's right.

Other people who wouldn't 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 turn out to be an issue.

Yeah.

So we always had offers coming in.

People wanted to talk.

We always entertain them, and then trying to think about exactly what happened.

So at some point, Zoomer, who was ultimately our inquire, 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.

Then probably a year or two, 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 who'd 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's 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 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 want to close the deal.

We knew how much money you wanted to make from this, 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 negotiation, 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 have done things slightly different.

I probably would have dug a little bit deeper.

I probably would have, once we got to a certain stage, tried to meet more of the team, understand how the business kind of operated.

Yeah.

But it really moved quickly and it was really quite simple.

So there's not really that much to get into because it was not an involved process, because we were prepared for it.

We knew what we wanted and had good lawyers who we made sure stayed on top of it.

Let's talk about getting what you wanted, though.

I think that's a skill, Right.

Like the reality.

Go into a negotiation and drop your pants and lose it all.

And you did 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?

Yeah, so first of all, no, there's no valuation.

Right.

No one's going to tell you what it's worth.

Okay.

People, you.

You can theoretically do evaluation, but I don't think it's particularly relevant in our line of business because 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.

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 how much you're willing to give up.

Yeah.

That's what really matters in early rounds only.

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'm very lucky in many ways that, like, me and my partners were also aligned on the number.

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 is negotiation around the edges of what the terms are at.

Cash, debt, what's up front, when are you going to 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 our first number what we wanted upfront, and the rest is bonus anyway.

So 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.

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 are 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?

Five 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, what are this.

Okay, let's take a little bit off here, take a little bit off here, a little bit off here.

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 used.

So that's something to keep a heads up for.

But we didn't really have any issues.

So it was very smooth in that way.

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?

Sure.

So Brett Chang, Taylor Scullin, as I said before, met them working in politics I guess 14 years ago now, which is a crazy long time.

And yeah, and like we started really like our first real business together, which was Leafborn 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 want to do things together, that was a very good sign.

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 because I.

One of our sponsors name is Colin Harms, he has Hyperback 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?

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 into 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 work.

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 goodbye.

That's really what it comes down to is, is just clicking, connecting and not.

Yeah, not.

And so actually, so I was gonna say not have any one person take over, but I, I think that 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.

And that's great.

If you are able to get to consensus every time, then that's great.

If you can't get the 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.

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, 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 the be all, end all.

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.

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.

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 is complimentary skills.

I think if you have one set of skills and another person has another, that's an obvious reason to form a partnership.

But you shouldn't go out and find somebody who just happens to have the skills you need, because 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'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.

Like, you're gonna make less money, obviously.

Not realistically, if you could build a bigger business, could be more people.

You will.

But, like, 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.

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.

It totally doesn't matter.

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

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 roadblocks because you can't come to consensus on a decision.

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.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think being able to choose a direction is what is 100% 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 ability, like we don't make every decision together.

Like we trust each other just to make calls on certain things.

Like you just move it, run things on our own.

So it's pretty free flowing in that way.

And that's very helpful.

But obviously now we have a lot of years of experience doing that behind us.

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.

You know what, they're all successful a while, right?

Let's 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 got to 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.

Anyway, so anyway, serial entrepreneur, you have had success, you have had a successful exit.

I'm sure you're going to do something again.

I can almost guarantee it.

Run me through.

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.

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 out?

Alex, 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 bangs 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 no one to quit.

But if it's really hard, you're probably doing something wrong.

Find things that click, and if it's not clicking, don't do it.

Don't, like, do real MVPs, do real tests and be clever about it.

Don't buy into wisdom.

So don't listen to me or anyone else.

There's good advice, but there's so much advice out there 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, 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.

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 that like, yeah, I don't know when it happened, but I'm now unemployable.

I, I, I just don't know what job I would have.

I just can't imagine a job I could apply for.

Be like, I know how to do this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the, 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.

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?

Sure.

What do you want to know?

What was the idea behind it in the beginning?

Okay, so I'm going to burst your bubble a little bit here.

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 maybe an audience or something like that, or we want to sell 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 and 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 do.

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 started as a growth and 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 then the amazing things are doing and then who are posting but on LinkedIn and then every day we launched a list.

It's like LinkedIn is just like peak green everywhere you look because there's all these people posting about it.

Like 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.

Yeah, it's really cool.

Whether you intended it to be that way or not, that's what it became.

And it's friggin 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 because you're both doing something amazing and there's probably some synergies.

So like, 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.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, it's good to hear these stories of people connecting through us.

And we also have our bet on Canada Summits and we were talking to somebody the other day who's like, oh yeah, I just, I got a client that I just, you know, 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 and it's great.

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.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Before we close up today, 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 going to go on vacation for the next three years?

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 gain by being like, yeah, I sold this business does open more doors for you.

It does help a lot.

That's amazing, dude.

I wish you the best of luck, the utmost success, and I'm really excited to see what comes next because I know you're not done.

Thank you.

I appreciate that a lot.

Until next time.

You've been listening to the Business Development Podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.

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 more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

see you next time on the Business Development Podcast.