[00:00:00] Speaker A: My mind always is watching for the next business opportunity.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: I call it the North American healthcare system, which has been broken.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: I'm in prison. I had to ask some really hard questions.
[00:00:09] Speaker C: I'm Richard Gerhardt.
[00:00:11] Speaker D: And I'm Elizabeth Gerhart. You've just heard some great tidbits from our show. Stay tuned for the rest.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:37] Speaker D: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law. And I am the founder of Gear Media Studios, a full service podcast studio.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: Welcome to Passage to Profit the road to Entrepreneurship where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had. We have a very special guest, Matt Seifeld, and he is the president and CEO of Med Evolve, a leading provider of revenue cycle technology solutions.
[00:01:07] Speaker D: And we also have Kevin McCarthy, the founder of Blind Spots Leadership Development. He is an author and certified speaking professional.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Yay.
[00:01:15] Speaker D: We get a professional on the show.
[00:01:19] Speaker C: But he's speaking professional no less.
[00:01:21] Speaker D: So he, he helps leaders see where their blind spots are, which is really good because they, that's why they're blind spots. Don't know where they are. But he also helps them figure out how to solve those problems.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Do leaders have more blind spots than followers or fewer? I guess it depends on your point of view, right? I guess we'll find out.
[00:01:40] Speaker D: No, I don't know. So anyway, I guess, anyway, it's time.
[00:01:44] Speaker C: Though before we get to our distinguished guests, it's time for your new business journey. Millions of Americans are dreaming right now about starting their own business. As a matter of fact, 2 in 5Americans are business owners or are thinking of starting a new business. And so we'd like to ask our panel this question. How did you come up with your business idea? Was it divine revelation or caffeine overdose? So let's go to our first contestant. Kevin. Tell us how you got your business idea.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Well, you nailed it. Four mente lattes a day fits me into that caffeine. Over to a situation.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: So what happened when you had your idea for your business? How did that idea evolve?
[00:02:25] Speaker A: I've been told that I am a serial entrepreneur and I've been self employed most of my life.
The, the, the, the business most recent Businesses that I'm involved in really were organic.
They came as a result of we'll get more into it, but came as a result of finding a need, filling the need and ideally for myself as a professional speaker and then finding out other people wanted to tap into that same solution.
And so that kind of evolved into the blind spot assessment business that is one of the businesses I run.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: So were you looking for a business to start or did it, the idea come to you and you said, oh, this could be a great business?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Yes and yes. So I guess this is the serial entrepreneur in me. But my mind always is watching for the next business opportunity. So it's just part of how I see the world is I'm always looking for, you know, where is there a need that needs filling. So that's kind of always on the radar. And in the same time it's very intentionally decided to start this particular venture because again, there was a demand there.
[00:03:32] Speaker C: Great. Matt, can you tell us about your decision to start a business? Was it based on divine revelation or caffeine overdose?
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Well, I'm like Kevin, I, you know, I'm like a five shot Americano trying to get things going in the morning and then some in the afternoon. But look, I, you know, I started my first company, software company, at 29 years old. I was working with big four consulting firms, PwC and Deloitte. And similar to Kevin, like, you know, I'm the type of person when I see something being done that could be done better, I can't let that go. And we'll talk more about my experience in the healthcare industry, which is loaded with things that should be done better. And technology can fill the gap to a lot of things that are done poorly. But that's really what it was. I really believe that my time was valuable, especially as a consultant that was traveling four days a week to places all over the US And I needed to be able to deliver something better for my clients.
And therefore I did not get the support that I needed from those firms to go do it. So why not leave and partner with the technology guy and let's go see what happens. And that's really, it's really how my, my life, my professional life has evolved. Entrepreneur is interesting. A lot of people think you have to have the new idea and you don't have to have the new idea. Very rarely does somebody come up with the new idea. Right. It's evolution of an idea that's already out there. In fact, if you are the first to market, it's risky. People Talk about competition. I love competition. Competition means somebody else other than me thinks there's value in what we're doing.
And so therefore, you know, we, we push towards that.
[00:05:08] Speaker C: I think it's easier to sell a product if there's already a market for it. If you do it better and you have increased features. I remember one point, we won a lawsuit when I was working in the corporate world against Bausch and Loam. The argument that the Bausch and Loam people made to us, well, it's a new market. If you take one of us off the market, then the market's not as going to have as much credibility. And we were selling contact lenses to doctors who were very reluctant to try new products because they wanted to make sure that their patients eyes remained healthy.
Of course we ignored that and we took them off the market anyway. But that was their pitch. And I think that probably in retrospect, their business approach was probably a little bit wiser.
[00:05:51] Speaker D: And it does really help with the competition because I run a meetup group for podcasters and youtubers and we talked about video editing tools at the last meetup. And there's two that are kind of similar. One's called Descript, the other's called Cat Cut, and they keep adding new features to compete with each other. So that makes it better for the consumer. Right.
But when you look at those two, I feel like the user interface is so much better on Capcut. I feel like it's much more clearly laid out. And I think that that oftentimes is what helps people rise above, is that if it's easier to use, then you're going to get to the masses. Descript may be better in some ways. In fact, I think some of its audio adjustment is better, but it's harder to use. So it's not going to get to the masses the way the Cap Cut will.
[00:06:36] Speaker C: So, Elizabeth, what about for you? Was it divine revelation or caffeine overdose?
[00:06:41] Speaker D: Oh, I mean, for the podcast studio, we had been looking at ways to use our building. Cause we bought this building in 2010 for the law firm. And during COVID we recorded upstairs here, where we are now. The studio didn't look like this. We've remodeled the whole thing. So Richard bought all this great equipment and put it together, expensive equipment, so that we would sound good for radio. But we're trying to think of what to do with the building. We're thinking, should we sell it? Because it's kind of emptied out and nobody's coming back after Covid, should we Rent it for office space. Like, really, what can we do with it? And I kind of wake up in the middle of the night. This is how it happens for me. And it's like, well, we should run it to other podcasters. We've got all the equipment already. And then Richard, of course, researched it. He's like, can you make any money doing this? And he found people that were making money doing it.
So we took on the project. But, yeah, it's always divine.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Well, for me, I don't know, I would say more caffeine overdose than divine revelation. I was working in a corporate environment, and it just was not a good fit for me personally.
I couldn't understand some of the decision making that was going on, and I felt more and more frustrated. So I ended up leaving and Elizabeth suggested that I start my own law practice. And I thought she was nuts. I thought that was the craziest thing in the world.
[00:07:55] Speaker D: He's always thought I was nuts.
[00:07:57] Speaker C: It wasn't just that, but we didn't want to leave beautiful New Jersey. We didn't want to relocate again because the kids were in school.
And so I thought I'd give it a try. And it turned out that it worked out pretty well. So, I don't know. I say caffeine because the idea was really hers, but I drank a lot of caffeine trying to put it into practice and make it work.
[00:08:17] Speaker D: Put his name on the door because I'm not a lawyer, but I also said I'd help you as much as I could.
[00:08:22] Speaker C: And you did.
[00:08:23] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:08:23] Speaker C: I guess entrepreneurship relies both on divine revelation and caffeine overdose. And so we've learned a lot already on this.
[00:08:31] Speaker D: I'm certainly overdosing on the caffeine now that the studio's open, I'll tell you that.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: So I am honored to introduce our guest, Matt Seifeld, and he is the president now of MedEvolve. It's a very sophisticated software business that does really some kind of complicated things, but it helps institutions who deal with insurance companies to be more efficient, if I've got that right. So, Matt, tell us all about it.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it kind of. It goes back to how I started my first software company, right. I'm in an industry of, I call it the North American healthcare system, which has been broken for decades and is continuously being broken. If you think about, we all consume health care, right? We all go to doctors, Sometimes we go to urgent care, Sometimes we need surgeries, right? Sometimes we need telehealth. Every single one of us on this call has consumed health care.
The challenge in healthcare is that the consumer is and the provider of services and the payer of services are all misaligned. It's the only vertical, it's actually the only industry where you get this.
So yeah, I am consuming healthcare. I don't really know what the costs of healthcare are. I don't really know what the insurance company's gonna reimburse me or if they're gonna deny it and play games. And now half of the dollar, right, that usually comes from insurance is coming from us because we all have high deductible health plans.
So you have an industry where your cost to deliver the service and care and collect the money, it keeps going up and reimbursements keep going down.
Who's investing in that?
[00:10:07] Speaker C: It's pretty crazy. And what I find about healthcare that's sort of unnerving is you kind of don't have a choice because you don't want to take any health risks if you can avoid it. I guess there are times when people decline healthcare because they just simply can't afford it. But given the choice of having it or not having it, it's not like shopping for a new car where you have a lot of different options available and you can be informed about it. Right. You're pretty much beholden to a system and a doctor and a referral network and you have to kind of follow what they say, at least to some extent.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And you do. Right. And so the pressures on margin, on the profitability for healthcare providers is so compressed now that a lot of providers, including health systems, feel their only option is to stop treating certain types patients. And that's happening here down in San Diego. So if you were to come to my town and you were a Medicare patient, good luck finding a primary care doctor. All right. If you were a Medicare managed care, right, that's your commercial insurance that offers Medicare, you know, as a service. Good luck finding a provider. So what's what? Medi Cal I E. Medicaid. You're going to emergency rooms for your care. So. So this whole world or. Yes. I mean, this is what nobody wants to talk about this, right? Nobody really understands that there's this whole under pinning of chaos that is occurring that is putting pressures on the margins for these healthcare providers. All because there's no alignment between the payer, the provider and the consumer. And unlike other countries like Canada or UK who have put controls in place around supply costs, drug costs and reimbursement standardization, U.S. hasn't these drug companies make too much profit. The insurance companies are struggling just like the providers. I think UnitedHealthcare just terminated 30,000 people. What do you think's gonna be replaced by that? It's gonna be AI bots that are gonna deny claims, that are hoping that the providers can't figure out what to do about the denied claims. And then that money's gonna be written off and it's gonna impact the margin. So metavolve, where we come in is in. I try to break it down simple. When you go see your doctor and he bills or she bills an insurance company, and some of that bill will come to you as a consumer and it gets paid. Did it take a human to get the payment or not? It's as simple as that, right. We don't want humans on the healthcare provider side to have to get involved in claims adjudication, but the reality is, is that they do. There is a lot of phone calls to insurance. There's a lot of delegation across departments, you know, as to why these claims go unpaid. I'll bet you a lot of your listeners right now have had to call billing offices and ask for clarification on the bill. I bet they've been transferred to offshore. People who don't understand what they're talking about. I bet they've been frustrated. I hear more complaints about the billing side of healthcare delivery than I do about the provider side. They could have the best outcome of their knee surgery. They could have the best experience with their ER doctor. But when the billing takes over, no fault of the billers, that's when the anger and the resentment comes in.
[00:13:17] Speaker C: That's where the separation comes in.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:20] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting because it doesn't seem like it was always this way, that we had this population of desperate people who are really unable to get care from their physicians. What's changed over the years to put us in this spot?
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's the reimbursement models, really. So when I started my career in 2000, right. A lot of the contracts with the insurance companies was a percentage of charges. So what the doctors could do is they just raise their charges each year and they collect more money. So I get 30% of a dollar now. I get 30% of a dollar 20. Right. That was just. It's called fee for service, basically, and that's how it was.
And then Medicare and Medicaid obviously get in and they're like, well, we're not just going to give you raises every year. Right. We're going to standardize fee schedule so when you do this procedure, this is all you're going to get. So that really started to take hold with the commercial managed care business. Then what happened was you started to see so much of the reimbursement now shifting to the consumer.
So you know, I personally have a $3,000 deductible. So the first $3,000 that I have consume in health care in any given year comes out of my pocket. So can I pay that upfront? Well I probably could, but why would I? Especially if the markets are doing good and I could invest that money otherwise. So I'll pay the $100 a month for as long as it takes to get that 3,000. So by the way, that's also putting pressure on revenue cycles. So these providers who used to get a lot more money per visit per se and they were getting had a lot less labor cost to collect that money or now it's completely flipped. So in the macroeconomic conditions. Right. I mean if you think about where we are as a society, everybody is feeling the pressure of care quality. Actually I should care access to care. Right, right. And that, that's the biggest fear I have is communities are being disruptive because these hospitals are going out of business because they can't stay afloat and the states and the Fed can't provide enough to keep business because the costs outweigh the reimbursement. So I always tell people like where are we in five years? I don't know, where's all the money going?
[00:15:24] Speaker D: Like who's getting all the money?
[00:15:25] Speaker B: That's the thing is, is it's, it's being written off as bad debts. So if you think about I, I'll break it down this way. So if I, if I go do a, an mri, right.
You know for at Blue Cross. So a patient has an mri. Blue Cross first of all, did somebody get the prior authorization? So they do. Sometimes they don't. If they don't, boom, it's a write off. That entire $2,000 is now written off. Nobody gets any money. Payer didn't and the provider's stuck with the ar. Right. If they do get the authorization and they verify that my benefits include MRIs, then they have to bill the insurance. Now you know, perfect world insurance pays their probably $1,000 and then the consumer has to pay for the rest. Right. Depending on their deductible. So the provider's getting their money. But what happens is these payers start to deny claims and some of it's frivolous denials. It's Just I'm denying every claim and I expect you to catch this denial. And if you don't catch this now within a 45 to 60 day period, then it's called a timely filing write off. So think about these industry where you have high volumes of claims that are out there with insurance companies. How many people do you think you'd have to have to be able to go through all of those claims to make sure everything's been done correctly to ensure payment?
[00:16:37] Speaker D: So the insurance companies are getting the money, they're taking people's monthly premiums and just pocketing it and not paying the doctors with it like they're supposed to.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Not consistently. I mean they're definitely there, there, there's too much game going on. And again, they're taking the premiums and, but the consumer who pays those premiums and the employers who pay those premiums is also now owing a lot of the bill. So now the doctor's kind of stuck because if I, if I lost my job and I just, or I can't pay the $3,000 upfront, then that doctor has to wait for months. Whereas, you know, again, 20 years ago, high deductible health plans wasn't a thing. So most of the money came from the insurance company and we might have had a little copay. So this is the real problem. And so where technology comes in, so our technology, what it does is when it's deployed correctly in these healthcare provider groups is it measures every human touch it takes to get a claim paid to zero balance. And that data starts to tell the healthcare provider where the problems are occurring within what we call a revenue cycle. So from the time you're scheduled to the time the claim is billed, to the time that the claim is at zero balance, meaning everyone's paid what they're supposed to, we measure all that and we then run that through a generative AI engine that starts to really bring out the correlations and the patterns to identify, is it a people issue, is it a process issue, or is it maybe a technology issue, is it a payer issue? I was on with a group this morning who discovered because of our tech, that their dme, their durable medical equipment business line was being denied by a payer. I shall not name names. Since January, they went live with our system literally two weeks ago. And had they had our system in January, they would have caught that this payer was denying 25 codes. Now they've now had to write off almost $1 million in codes because nobody caught it.
[00:18:23] Speaker D: But it's not Just a write off. They basically handed it to the insurance company.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: You could look at it either way, right? Hospitals not getting paid, provider physicians not get paid and the payer doesn't have to pay. So pay keeps the money in their balance sheet.
[00:18:36] Speaker C: Aren't insurance companies though highly regulated institutions? I mean it seems to me that part of the purpose of the regulation is to avoid and manage these games that the insurance companies are playing. Is more regulation needed to close all the loopholes?
[00:18:52] Speaker B: Yeah, so one, it's not highly regulated. There are standards that are in place, but the games are being played, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. So what happens is that while you may have a contract with an insurance company, right, I do this service, you pay me this. All of the work around trying to make sure that you get paid. What you're supposed to is where all of the waste comes in. That's where the providers are having to touch these claims multiple times. And was it denied? Was it not denied?
I have to appeal it if it's denied. So while there is regulation, right, there's too much ambiguity with how providers are being paid for the services that they're providing to that insurance company's subscribers. And it needs to be, not only does it need to be more regulated with what the true cost of delivering care and make sure the reimbursement standard is equal to or greater than the cost.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: That has to be looked at. And that involves your payers, that involves your drug companies, that involves your supply chain companies.
It's not just a provider and an insurance company. It's everything it takes to run their business.
[00:19:56] Speaker D: So what's the next step then? Can you get everybody together and have them put their data in one big repository and then see who the main congress to do something about it? Or was that just like a pie in the sky dream?
[00:20:08] Speaker B: That's pie in the sky. You and I will be drinking lattes and relaxing on a beach somewhere. But it is. Look guys, it's pie in the sky. Until the pain gets enough for the government to step in and say I have to regulate this, this will continue to happen. I mean, I have an orthopedic surgeon friend of mine, we coach baseball together and he's now decided he's going to have to take a job in Washington State because he just can't afford to live here in San Diego anymore with the declining income that he's experienced over five years. Well, why is that income declining? Well, it's declining because there's just nothing left over after you deal with the insurance companies and the consumers and the higher cost to deliver your care, margins are shrinking. The question is what to do about it. What meta vaults. This may not solve it. Actually, it probably won't solve it in this diary is that we've identified that for our clients who can start to reduce the waste. Right. Reduce these administrative touches that it takes to get claims paid correctly. We can claw back a lot of margin for those groups.
About 60 to 80% of the touches that go into claims management are wasted touches they never should have occurred. Right. So if you have an organization that has a million dollars in labor costs associated with claims management, I could reduce 80% of that cost. That's another $800,000 a year back in the pockets of the providers to then do things with. Right. And those are facts. We have tens of millions of data points now that substantiate the baseline of this industry and how bad it is. And we've now established those as new industry benchmarks for our clients to start to work, to attain. Because this is an industry that again, is 20 plus years behind.
I call sophisticated technology. Right. I mean, it just is. I mean, look, we. We've got clients who still are on paper.
[00:21:53] Speaker D: Oh my gosh.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: I mean, seriously. Right?
[00:21:55] Speaker D: Yeah. Who are you selling this to then? Are you selling it to individual doctors?
[00:21:59] Speaker B: It's medical groups, hospitals, health systems, ambulatory surgery centers. Really, anybody that has to bill third party to get paid, to get the majority of payment is in scope for us. Obviously our. We can't sell like just one doc at a time. We go out of business that way, you know, so we do have to have some skill there. But we do target, you know, more of the areas that are distressed. I really like the critical access hospitals. Right. The smaller tiers in these communities that are really. If they lose that hospital and they go out of business, that whole community is gone. Two hours to the next big health system. Right.
I like surgical specialties too. Right. It's the elective stuff. It's your orthopedics, urology. These are folks who are getting crushed the most because of these reimbursement challenges.
[00:22:44] Speaker C: Let's take a step back a little bit and talk a little bit about the evolution of Med Evolve. How did the company actually start and how long between the time you conceived of the company and you got your first customer?
[00:22:59] Speaker B: So Metavolve actually was founded by two orthopedic surgeons in the 90s. They actually saw an opportunity to build a billing platform because they didn't like the systems at the time that were used to build the insurance companies.
Then what they did was they realized that a lot of providers don't like to hire people to do their billing. So they created what's called a revenue cycle company. So then they would start doing the billing for other provider groups. That was the company for up until about 2017, which is when they brought me on board to take a look at the business because it was flat and declining.
And the reason it was flat declining was it's a commodity, right? Everyone has a pm, everyone has a rep cycle company and so there's nothing new or novel there.
So I came in and took a look and said, you know, I, I started my own workflow Automation company in 2007 when I left Deloitte and I built that up over six years and I'm sure we'll talk more about that that later on in the show and able to sell it successfully to a public company in 2012. So I'd already done this before, so I basically redid what I did, right. I created this new workflow system that would hold people accountable for getting claims paid. Timely, by the way, not new. Right? There's a lot of people that do this. Like we said at the beginning of the call, you don't have to come up with the newest idea that nobody's doing. Right. There's a lot of competition in the space. So from 2018, I took the company from this commodity organically growing business to a high margin SaaS business, right, where we're now putting our software on top of anybody's billing system, not just our own. And we're now selling into new markets. The Metavol was selling really only into smaller surgical provider groups. Right now we're selling into health systems and hospitals and large IDNs and global RCM companies.
So part of my goal was to not be dependent on flat or declining revenue. Right. Entrepreneur means I got to go create valuation. So the value of the business. I'm only getting a one times at best multiple on the revenues on the legacy business, but I'm getting five to eight times multiple on the new entity that's really taken this whole company to that next level.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Matt Seifeld, President and CEO of Med Evolve, a leading provider of revenue cycle technology solutions. Stay tuned. We're going to have intellectual property news and secrets of the entrepreneurial mind coming up soon. You don't want to miss that. And don't forget to experience other episodes of Passage to Profit by subscribing to the Iheart, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Just look for the Passage to Profit show on any of these platforms. We'll be back with more Passage to Profit right after this.
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[00:27:42] Speaker B: Once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gill, your heart.
[00:27:44] Speaker D: We have two guests today, Matt Se and Kevin McCarthy. And now we're going to be speaking to Kevin. Kevin is the founder of Blind Spots Leadership Development. He's an author and certified speaking professional and he helps businesses and leaders find their blind spot. So really, I imagine people aren't always.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Too happy in some cases, it's the.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: Blind leading the blind.
[00:28:05] Speaker D: Tell us all about yourself and what you do.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Thanks, Elizabeth. Thanks for having me on the show as well. You mentioned blind spots and leaders. Let me start off just to set the record straight. You don't want to tell anybody that they have blind spots unless they ask or give you permission. That won't go well with you. We all have them. That's the key. We all have them, everybody sees them. But we need to be in a place where we're willing to actually own those blind spots and do something about it. Right. I was picked up by a host who was driving me from the airport to a speaking engagement years ago. And I share this story because it's relevant to what we just mentioned. He couldn't wait to tell me. I just finished reading your best selling book. I'm so excited.
And, and I was chit chatting with him and he said, you know what? He goes, I, I had this experience with my wife last Sunday. We, we left church and she started talking about nitpicking the pastor's message. And I said, well honey, you might have some blind spots. And I said, well, how'd that go well for you? He was not very well at all.
Yeah, you need permission.
[00:29:05] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting though because if you have a blind spot, there may be some sensitivity there, maybe on a subconscious level or something that promotes you to get upset if somebody points a finger at it. Right. So if you believe that you're a smart person and somebody says you're a smart person, you get a positive reaction. But if you at some level believe that you're a little on the lazy side and somebody says you have that blind spot, then you're probably going to react to it, right?
[00:29:34] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And we can certainly get into more of the psychology of blind spots as the show progresses. You asked a question. So a little bit about me and what I've been doing and what I'm doing now. I mentioned earlier, serial entrepreneur. I ended up owning the 13th largest century 21 real estate franchise back in the 80s into the 90s. Felt blessed to be in that position.
As a result, I was asked by one of the corporate folks at that time, Sendan owned C21. And I was asked by one of the Century 21 corporate people to give a keynote presentation. I had never done such a thing, but I had given a local presentation to a group of co owners of other franchises. And yes, it was impressive.
And so that started launching a whole new Career. I realized that I love the stage and I did a good job and, and they hired me to do more and more. It was pretty fun during that evolution. And it's sort of the, you know, history of the, the entrepreneurial here, serial entrepreneur during that evolution.
As I'm out speaking now to Century 21 offices around the country and boards of Realtors and then eventually other brands and everything else. This is 1993, 94, or I'm recognizing suddenly that there's a need in the marketplace for getting homes that are listed up on this new technology called the World Wide Web. It was so, so new to the real estate industry.
They were pretty back behind the times in many technologies.
And so I got some programmers together, smarter people than me. We developed the first of its kind system that siphoned those listings right out of the mls, put them onto the web, match the Realtor's profile. And so it's now people could look at homes on the Internet. How cool is that? Well, I, I was first the market with our company, but six months later realtor.com came along and debuted. So obviously we were parallel paths and they heard about my company and then they tried to buy my company and they were getting ready to go public.
They had, they'd offered me stock options, no cash. They didn't want to give me any cash for my company, but they offered me a VP role and I thought that's ridiculous. And I said no. And that was stupid. I just didn't understand the stock market or what that really meant going public. And so anyway, licking lick the wounds a few months later, homeseekers.com they were already held publicly held company. They were the number two in the market very quickly and they heard about my company, ended up buying the company and they gave me cash, stock and options and then president role in their company. And it was quite, quite a ride. So I share that a little background to bring us to current. So flash forward a number of years.
Still in the speaking industry now, still doing a lot of leadership development.
And in 2015, I recognized as I'm trying to help audiences understand the question you asked about blind spots as I'm helping audiences understand how do you mitigate your blind spots? How do you, how do you know they're blind spots? Then what do you do about them and how do you build a team around you that you can be vulnerable enough? Right. And the word vulnerability is a scary word in the, in the workplace, as we know. Right.
And so I realized I need an instrument, some sort of a tool That I can use in the middle of a keynote, because keynotes you only have 60 to 75 minutes and it had to be quick. So I thought immediately I thought of a disc assessment or some other personality temperament assessment. And you know, for your listeners, most people have taken them. If you haven't. It's really just a questionnaire that asks you a lot of questions, takes 10, 12, 15 minutes. And it really, because of all the behavior science that we have, it really nails your general temperament, how you typically react or behave based on the situation at hand. So I needed something like that, but I needed to be fast. So from that I, I got some smart people and we developed our own blind spot assessment. It literally takes less than three minutes. And that was perfect. I also didn't want to pay per assessment because sometimes the audiences are in the thousands. That would just be cost prohibited.
[00:33:44] Speaker C: So tell us about the blind spot assessment is it's a series of questions, right? And they. People answer the questions and in minutes, I guess they get a read on their blind spots, right?
[00:33:53] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So especially that was the purpose in a keynote. So I would have the entire audience pull out their smartphones. That's how easy it is. You answer about 17 quick questions, takes less than three minutes and you hit the button and voila, you've got this report that tells you all about you and you hear the audience go, oh, all these aha moments, and 17 questions.
[00:34:15] Speaker C: That's pretty good.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Just 17 questions. Yeah, it's. It's pretty amazing. And of course that begs the question, is it valid?
And. And to say yes, it took a, a number of iterations, but we actually now have an ASI validation. It is a validated instrument.
[00:34:28] Speaker C: So is there a discrete set of blind spots that it took chooses from? Is that how it works?
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Good question. We're basing it on the disc technology. So. And I say disc technology. What this is is for multiple decades, I mean ever since a book was written in the 1928 about the behaviors of normal people as opposed to all the other psychotic people and everything else, the book was a catalyst for in the 50s, an assessment to be made. So how can we measure and identify your unique personality? My unique personality. And we found out over the last 60, 70 years with enough data to know that we can break it down very easily into four primary personality types and four blended personality types, which is a little bit of each of the two types. So I may be like that competitor style. Sometimes you hear that called the type A or the driver.
Others might be the peacemaker style, my polar opposite, that'd be the person who's all about the team and they're all about people and whereas the competitor, they're all about getting results and winning.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Right.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: So you can see how just that short example right there, you can see how those two personalities can easily clash. Like, I've got things to do, people to see, places to be. Get out of my way, I'm gonna step on your toes because I've got places I gotta go. And I don't mean to do that deliberately, and I'm certainly not doing it to be mean or insensitive, but that's just the temperament that I'm wired with. Now if I say that or act like that in front of a peacemaker, who really is. They're all about teamwork, they're all about harmony. They don't like conflict, they just want. They're even steady key, you know, steady as they go. They're, they're very loyal, they're faithful. They can tend to see me as a bully, insensitive. Kevin doesn't care about me as a person. I'm just a means to his end.
Right. And I don't mean that to be the case, but that's, that's where the differences of all of us come in. And so the blind spot assessment helps identify who you are and then it shows you those potential blind spots. How do other people perceive you? And now what can you do to help mitigate the, the gap, what I call the perception gap.
[00:36:41] Speaker D: Well, I remember going through something similar in corporate way back when I was. And there were people that were like that, the drivers particularly. I don't really care if these people want me to be this way or not. I'm just going to be this way.
I don't care about their feelings. It was kind of funny, but it was. People convinced them that maybe they needed to soften a bit. But yeah, I mean, you can alienate a lot of people if, if you rub them the wrong way, you can.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: And what I looked into as that mindset began to morph as I began studying all of this almost 20 years ago, or more than 20 years now, what I began to recognize in the workplace is what I believe, and I believe Gallup would back me up to be one of the biggest problems in the workforce in organizations, and that is we hire subject matter experts or independent contributors. They do a bang up job, they do a great job. And so we all of a sudden think we should promote them to supervisor, manager and senior manager.
Right? Because they do A great job, they're good at their work. But we forget there's one really critical component, and that is the human side of leadership, not just management. Right. And so that's where the gaps really start to show up. Like you just said, if I'm a get a go getter and get her done personally, I'm going to get promoted, probably.
And when I get promoted now I have a team and my team, I may get things done, but my team is fragmented, disillusioned, disengaged. Half the workforce is disengaged, according to Gallup. And it's not because I'm a bad person, but it's because I'm a boss who doesn't understand really how to lead people.
I can get the job done, but I don't know how to lead people. And that's where the blind spot assessment is the foundation for helping to bridge that gap and open up phenomenal conversations.
[00:38:35] Speaker C: Well, that's really insightful. Back with more Kevin McCarthy shortly. Very interesting what you said about blind spots. And now I'm kind of understanding how the system works a little bit, and I could see how it would be so valuable. But now we have to turn our attention to intellectual property news. My favorite segment of the show. We've been talking a lot about artificial intelligence. We've talked about it today. We talk about it pretty frequently, often in terms of copyrights and whether or not creations generated by artificial intelligence are entitled to copyright protection. And just as a reminder to our audience, it seems like if a human being is involved in the creation of the work, then copyright protection is possible. Well, we've stumbled across a couple of situations lately where AI is actually acting like a human.
[00:39:29] Speaker D: You've probably all heard it about the AI systems that refuse to shut themselves down when they're given the command by the humans. They're like, no. And one went in and actually started rewriting its code so it wouldn't have to shut itself down. And people are really freaked out. But the AI systems really are just operating based on the code that human programmers put in when they developed them. So it really comes down to humans still have control. It just seems like the AI is out of control, I think.
[00:40:01] Speaker C: Well, I don't know. I mean, because the way that they're positioning this stuff, it seems more and more like humans are losing control of AI. So just to bring up another example, Anthropic, which is an AI company, they set up a fictional scenario where they embedded Claude Opus 4, which is their AI engine. They created a pretend company and let it learn through email access that it was about to be replaced by another AI system.
And it also lets slip that the engineer responsible for this decision is having an extramarital affair.
So this information got leaked into the system and guess what happened? The AI engine started blackmailing the engineer in order to stop the upgrade. So if that's not human behavior, I don't know what is. And I guess if machines can behave this way, maybe they should be getting copyright protection for their.
[00:40:58] Speaker D: Oh, they may get copyright protection. So the whole AI generation of images and everything else is like a big mess in the copyright office right now.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:08] Speaker D: And who owns what. And so we'll see what comes out of it, if they can even keep up with everything that's going on. It's happening so fast.
[00:41:15] Speaker C: It really is. And unfortunately, sometimes the legal system can't keep up with the technical developments. But we wanted to ask our panel what you thought about these things. Kevin, why don't you give your opinion on this AI scenario that we just discussed?
[00:41:30] Speaker A: Sounds like an iRobot movie or something. AI is fascinating to. To say the least. It. I use it constantly in, in my work and just my day.
And it's got a lot of limitations.
I find a lot of them just personally, but it has a lot of efficiency. It's really helpful. Can AI take over?
I know enough about programming and background. I'm not. I'm new to AI. I'm actually working with a couple partners on another project that is specifically AI driven to where I'm learning as they're instructing and informing me. But my personal opinion, as you said earlier, AI is the outbirth of what humans put into it.
So can it just take over and then eventually save mankind by putting them into a secure lockdown we were talking about earlier? No, I don't think so.
[00:42:24] Speaker C: Well, I guess. And that's the big question of our time. Which direction will it go? And can we maintain alignment between the software and our cultural values so that it's only a useful tool and not an end in and of itself.
Matt, what are your thoughts on this?
[00:42:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know, AI obviously is a big topic in healthcare, really from the standpoint of automation. Right. So I think there's two things there. There's one is that can you use structured data to drive more automation, removing, you know, human intervention, human tasks from processes. Right. Reduce cost, reduce labor cost.
But the other thing is it's predictability, correlations and patterns. And that's where I'm fascinated by it is that an AI engine can start to pick out the why way faster than the human brain can.
But one thing I will state, and this is something that we really position metabol with, is AI is only as good as the data. It can sit on top. So if you think of AI today, right, it's very commoditized data.
We've had to create our own data asset within our software platform, which is a new data set that nobody else has access to but our clients and ourselves. And when you de identify that data asset and you combine it with what everybody else has now, you've got a pretty powerful engine.
And so I think that we're going to see new data sets becoming a real thing that's going to differentiate AI companies for whatever problem they're trying to solve for.
[00:43:52] Speaker C: So with these curated data sets, you'll be able to sort of ensure the integrity of the data.
And if you have smaller data sets, then maybe some of the risks of losing control over the system are a little bit lower. Right.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: We've already seen it firsthand where you have a lot of AI companies that are saying that they can automate key processes. You know, look at like authorizations or coding. Coding is medical coding, right? You go see a doctor, they have to build an insurance company, Somebody has to code all that, right? They got all this coding. So these AI companies are like, oh, we can auto code for you. Our AI engine's so smart, it's going to grab the data it needs and it's going to code the claim. Well, half of the denials or more that we see that the humans have to work in our platform come from AI systems who sold the provider on automation. Well, their automation is making mistakes and it's not learning from the mistakes because it's only able to grab the commodity data that it originally assessed. Now what these companies are actually coming to us now and saying, hey, could you give us a de identified data set from your system? To make my AI coding more sophisticated and also differentiate myself against the 500 other competitors. So I think he or she who owns has the most data will win the game because it's a lot more for an AI engine to assimilate and look at change, right? And that's really what we're trying to do is that whether you're having write me a paper, write me a legal contract, write me or automate the prior auth process for a healthcare system, it still has to grab information available.
[00:45:23] Speaker D: Well, yeah, and to that point, just quickly, we had a Rutgers professor on the show I guess it was last month. And he said that when he gives the students a test, he puts it through AI and it gets about 70% of the questions right. And then he compares it to what the students submit and he can tell which ones are using AI on the test.
[00:45:41] Speaker C: I thought that was a pretty clever idea. But speaking of ideas, if you have an idea or an invention that you want to protect you, you can contact us at Gearhart Law. We work with entrepreneurs worldwide to help them through the entire process of obtaining patents, trademarks and copyrights. Or you can visit learn more about Patents.com or learn more about Trademarks.com and sign up for a free consultation or download your free Entrepreneurs Quick Guide to Patents or Quick Guide to Trademarks. And we'll be back with more Passage to Profit right after this.
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[00:47:58] Speaker E: 8004-3067-2280-0430-6722-8430-6722-6722. That's 800-430-6722. Passage to profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:48:17] Speaker C: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show heard in 38 markets across the United States.
And our podcast is ranked in the top 3% of podcasts globally. And we've also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. And that's for the second year in a row.
So subscribe to Passage to Profit show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and on the iHeart app and you can hear all of our episodes. Elizabeth, it's time for your spotlight. So what have you been up to?
[00:48:53] Speaker D: Okay, well before COVID I started doing this website for businesses where I was going to have 30 second spiels about their businesses and then longer form videos and have it connect. Anyways, I got buried in the details of the website so I just kind of got frustrated and gave up on it. Now it's like what do we, it'd be great if it was out there now cause that's what everybody's doing. But I moved on and we decided to remodel our podcast studio and rent it out to other podcasters. So Richard and I spent a year remodeling the studio. We're in the studio now and we're, I have people coming in and there's all sorts of different kind of content creation projects. So it started as a podcast studio, a video podcast studio. We also have an audio podcast studio, but it's really turned into a content creation studio because people are doing classes, they're doing social media clips, they're doing all sorts of different things in the studio now.
And I also have Jersey podcasts. I just spoke to Danielle Woolley who is my co host on Jersey Podcast Podcast and we haven't done one for a while because she's been super busy. But Richard and I just got two little kittens. So I also have my meetup group that I'm doing now with Sonia Sartra called podcast and YouTube creators community.
We normally do it hybrid or completely online. So we're doing it hybrid in the studio and we'll also have it on Zoom. And we're having Rob Greenlee back, who is like the grandfather of podcasting, started the podcast hall of Fame, is a member of that and talking to him in the pre call for the meetup. We're going to talk about marketing podcasts in the meetup. But when he, he's going to come on passage to profit too. And we're going to dive deeper into what the four of us have been talking about. He's really studying AI and the effect on human interaction and how humans and AI are going to coexist.
So we're going to take a pretty deep dive into that with Rob. He's a really smart guy, too. So, yeah, that's what I'm up to now. We're just going to do kind of a roundtable discussion here. I do want to say their websites because I don't think we mentioned those. So Matt Sefeld has medevolve.com med evolve.com and mylifelinkapp.com and Kevin McCarthy has blindspots.com and blindspotassessments.com so if you're looking for those guys, that's where you can go online to see their websites. But now let's go into our forum.
[00:51:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I thought we'd talk a little bit about entrepreneurship in general, and I'd like to start the ball rolling by asking each of our guests to tell a story about their entrepreneurial journey that they think would be of interest to our audience. Kevin, why don't you start?
[00:51:40] Speaker A: Well, where to start? How about the fact that I spent 33 months in a federal prison for a crime I didn't knowingly commit?
[00:51:48] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:51:49] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: I had blind spots.
[00:51:50] Speaker D: That's a story. I want to hear all about it. I don't want to hear about how you got hurt, but I want to rest.
[00:51:55] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's just part of the entrepreneurial journey. So after being fortunate enough to own the Century 21 office that was 13th largest in North America, and then from that, starting a speaking business, then a technology business, and then I sold that technology business to homeseekers.com if you remember. And I was at the top of my game. I felt like I've achieved as an entrepreneur all of my dreams. You know, paper, millionaire, brief moment. Paper and brief were the keywords there, by the way.
It was fun because I as a president now of this publicly held company and my stocks were restricted. I couldn't just turn around and liquidate them, but I learned how to margin those stocks.
[00:52:36] Speaker B: Yikes.
[00:52:38] Speaker A: Which basically means if you're not familiar with the stock market, I learned I could borrow against the value of my, my stocks.
But the dot com bubble burst, you know, back in the or early 2000, and the stock company wanted their money back, so I didn't have it to give them. So they sold my portfolio nonetheless. I was then Offered an opportunity to become a consultant temporarily for 30 days for a up and coming IPO. And this IPO was in the healthcare space and they were franchising out facilities all over the country is what the plan was. But they were raising funds to go public to do that. And I became an investor in that company first. So I bought, got some shares, and then I became a consultant. And then that 30 days consulting turned into 15 months consulting with the CEO, 35 employees, and never once saw prison coming. I had no idea that I was actually, as my attorney called me, an unwitting accomplice in his stock fraud. For seven years, he took over $93 million from more than 5,000 investors purporting to go public soon.
[00:53:44] Speaker D: So why did they blame you for that?
[00:53:46] Speaker A: They didn't really blame me per se. The, the CEO was the ringleader. He had 35 employees. I was one of 12. I was contract employee, if you will.
And it turns out that it was my actions in furthering his crime that caused me to be guilty by association.
And you can't use ignorance as an excuse, of course, in the law.
And I should have known in many ways. This is. The judge said, you should have known. You're a smart guy.
And that's what, by the way, flash forward. That statement right there is what caused me to start studying cognitive psychology. I needed to understand, well, if I should have known, why didn't I know?
I've gotten the way of my decision making process.
[00:54:28] Speaker C: Yeah. And what conclusion did you come to when you thought about it?
[00:54:32] Speaker A: That's a complicated answer, Richard, but flash forward then. I'm in prison now. I'll get back to the middle of that story. But I was in, I'm in prison. I had to ask some really hard questions.
[00:54:41] Speaker B: Who am I?
[00:54:42] Speaker A: How did I get here? How could I not have known my boss was committing a crime? Now, by the way, I want to set the record straight. I'm not saying I was innocent. I was definitely guilty. But I just didn't know in the context of that time period that I was helping him with a crime. In hindsight, I recognized, oh, there was enough red flags. I justified and I rationalized. I was struck by greed because he was generous in giving all of his employees free stock. That's like Monopoly money.
[00:55:08] Speaker C: Was it a situation where at some level you maybe knew, but you just didn't want to believe it?
[00:55:13] Speaker A: At a very deep level, absolutely. In fact, myself and several of the colleagues who ended up with prison sentences, we would talk whenever the CEO would say Something and you know, I was in investor relations department. So part of my job was to disseminate the information, press releases, and every now and then something would be weird. And so I would chat with Steve or with Donovan or some of the other guys in the company.
And it turns out that we would then research like, okay, something's off, let's, let's see what we can figure out. Because we wanted the company to be real, to go, to go public, we wanted all of our stock to be valid. And it seemed there was a lot of working pieces. I mean there was a facility, there was employees, I mean it was looked real, but yet we went against our gut. Like there's that visceral reaction, right? My ex wife called it woman's intuition. Whatever you want to refer to it is that feeling that something's amiss, something's a rot. So then what we did is we just, we figured out how to rationalize that. We did the research. Here's an example. He asked us to send out a press release that he bought a technology company in la, which was part of the business prospectus, but something he was talking about just didn't set well. So we did some research, we found the technology company. We actually called and I spoke with the owner of that technology company and said, hey, welcome to the family, we understand you're going to be folded into our company. And he gave us enough information to validate the story, but he kept closed lips because they were in negotiations and so forth and you know, it makes sense they couldn't talk about all the details. Well, it turns out later the FBI told me that was part of the boss's MO is he would put contracts in place, even put a hundred thousand dollar deposits down to purchase the technologies or whatever to get the business plan to sound right. And then he would disappear. The companies would never hear from him again. They'd end up with a hundred grand maybe, but they never got the purchase that they were looking at. And the FBI agent called it kernels of truth stuck with a lie. So again, the biggest point and takeaway here is for all of us, when your gut is saying something, when you have that, what's called cognitive dissonance, when you have that issue where there's an upset, something's just not right.
You can't put your finger on it, you can't. You think through it and rationalize and understand it, but you just know something's. You got to listen to that and you got to dig in and with curiosity, you got to try to Understand what is happening. What am I picking up here that I just can't put words to? That's the beginning of the. Of the blind spot lesson.
[00:57:46] Speaker C: I mean, as an entrepreneur, I think you have to be married to the truth. Right. And I mean, that's a wonderful example because all of us have kind of been in that situation at one time or another over different things, and it just turns out that you were, unfortunately, in a situation that implicated laws. But I think we've all been in that situation where we've really kind of wished something that was not true, and we just sort of glossed over it. And sometimes you get lucky and you get away with that. Other times, you know, you pay a price. But from this came a magnificent business.
Right. And you're teaching other people to identify their blind spots, and hopefully you're playing it forward by helping them hopefully reduce the chances that something similar will happen there. Right?
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Absolutely. That was, if I could say there was a benefit of going to prison. I was in a federal prison camp, by the way, which is very much community college, you know, centric. It felt like you were on a campus. There was no bars on the windows, no locks in the doors, no. No fence around three quarters of the property.
So it's an honor system. Many, in many ways, it's real prison, but it's pretty light. But it gave me an opportunity to really ask a lot of questions, do a lot of research, do a lot of digging. And one of the question sets. One of the areas I needed to evaluate, I would challenge every listener to think about this, is I needed to ask myself about my own core values, is we all feel like we're good people with good intentions. I mean, that's just human nature.
But in reality, I, I, in hindsight, I recognized that money was a really high value for me. It was a core value. Like, I had been chasing success since I was young, as far back as I can remember.
And that chasing of success allowed me to easily succumb to the greed then of having all this stock that I thought was going to go public and set me back up on my feet.
And so now I recognize and I've done the very deliberate study, and I actually walked away.
Audiences in training workshops, I walk them through these exercises as part of their leadership development is what are my core values? So I have a program called character counts. It's 25 top character traits, if you will. And I have Everybody score it 1 to 10. 10. You nailed it. 1. A lot of work to do, like compassion, right? Like I'm not a very compassionate person, so I give myself a three or a four. That's so I know that's an area I need to work on.
But I, before that, I never even thought about it before prison. Now I think about, okay, what are my core values? So to bring a capstone to this, I've recognized that really my core values, to your point, Richard, is money is not even on the list. I tell all clients, it's like, I have my set fees, I said, but I never let the money get in the way of helping people make better decisions and build better relationships. So let's just figure it out. Let's put our heads together.
[01:00:40] Speaker C: That's a fascinating story and thank you for sharing it so openly with us and our audience. I think there's a lot of learnings there and I really admire the way you've moved things forward. So thank you very much.
[01:00:54] Speaker D: Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[01:00:57] Speaker C: Matt, what about your story?
[01:00:59] Speaker B: Definitely not quite as dramatic, but I've had my fair share of ups and downs. I think for me it was more about the company I built starting in 2007. So I sat in a hotel room in 2003. I was working for PricewaterhouseCoopers. We were working the large health system. I'm 26 years old, and back then I started to have this inkling of opportunity within the healthcare industry.
I started asking questions, and this is what I would encourage all entrepreneurs who think they're going to be entrepreneurs to consider is that when you start to question things, why is it this way? Why are we limited with this technology? Why can't I measure every touch? Why can't I actually tell whether a human's effective at the job I'm paying money to?
That just started to incubate in my mind. And so over that next two years, as I kind of progressed and matured a bit in terms of the business, it kept coming back to me to the point where in 2006, when I was working at Deloitte, I had actually pitched this idea to them. I said, I want to build. And the cloud was a big thing now, right? I want to build a cloud, a web based workflow automation system that we could sell to our clients during our consulting engagements and that we could leave it behind so that we could monitor their progress. Right? Monitor the performance of these organizations and re engage with our clients when the problems arise. Right. And they liked it. They really liked it, but they didn't want to make the investment in it. So two things could have happened there. I could have said, well, oh, well, or I could pack my Toyota 4Runner at the time and leave Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I was living, and drive back across the country to San Diego to sleep on my best friend's couch from college to start a company. You know, and I think that. And Richard, you and I talked about this yesterday on our pre meeting is it's easy to say I want to be an entrepreneur, but the real test of the entrepreneur is not when things are going great, it's when things are going terrible. And I saw that firsthand. I did not realize that the Great Recession of 2008 and 9 and 10 was going to impact me. You know, I was sitting here with, with almost no capital. I had left a partner track with Deloitte where I could have just stayed on and been a partner in country clubs and all that crap. And I remember the day that American Express took my credit limit from $25,000 to a thousand dollars. And that was my life crap. Spd. So again, most people would say, well, that's a sign. Let's go get our job back. But I didn't because that's just not my personality type is I want to try to solve the problem, right? I want to try to figure out how to get out of this situation. And so what I did was I had to start thinking I was working with one client, building this software behind the scenes with this one client.
And I started to think about, are there other problems that I could solve for that client through software that I could quickly build? And luckily my partner, who is the software developer, was quick and smart. And that's what we did. We started to look at other areas of need within a single client that would generate a couple extra thousand dollars a month in revenue. And that's really like, you know, I read this book a long time ago called Built to Last, and I always use like Netflix as an example. And I know it's like overused, right? But Netflix saw an opportunity to get out of the video store, right?
Netflix started and actually, I think if I recall, $50 million is what Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix and they just passed it.
It's like, ouch. Right? But has Netflix. Did they stay with sending DVDs to mailboxes? No. They're one of the largest production companies in the world now. Amazon, right? I mean, so. So entrepreneurs have to realize that you have to continuously reinvent yourself and evolve yourself to stay relevant in whatever is you're solving. If you want to just stay stale and Just this is the one thing I do. Then you run a lot of risk at competition, you lot a lot of risk at getting put out of business. And so that's really an attribute that I would encourage any listeners out there look at something that you feel is being done inefficiently and ask yourself, do you have a better way? And by the way, if you have a technology play that helps, right? I mean services for services. If you can put technology like Kevin's done into the equation and you start collecting data like Kevin's doing, and maybe you start putting AI on top of that data to start driving more insights and automation, you see, it's valuable. But do not get stuck in one frame of mind. And I think that's really, really what it is. I had to write, it's funny, I'm actually doing a presentation to our company here and I've noticed that we have these two types of people in our company. We have the group that's been here forever and it was organic, kind of family style, just this is the way it is. And then I have this new blood of entrepreneurial minded people. So I'm writing like, what does it take to thrive in an entrepreneurial company? You know, I think the number one thing that I wrote down is transparency. If you're trying to create a company and build trust with the people that are put in the long hours, you gotta be transparent on everything. And I think a lot of leaders forget that, right? They get into these kind of ivory towers where this is just for me and the board and those people don't need to understand. And that's a mistake. Because the lowest level person, organization has to have context to what you're asking them to do. They have to be willing to do a good job and they have to be capable at doing a good job. I have found. I don't know about Kevin and you guys, but I had a woman 2 weeks ago give notice, said, I'm quitting, I'm sorry, I just, I can't do this job anymore. And so I of course was like, wow, this is pretty devastating. You are a very critical part of this team. But before I just said, okay. I said, is there another area of the business that intrigues you? And she goes, I really like the analytics. I said, well, tell me more about the analytics. She goes, I like designing the dashboards and then seeing how clients react to the data. I said, you know, that's a position I'm intending to bring on this year. Would that something that you want to consider doing. She's like, would you consider me for that? And then she says, where's the job description? I said, you read it it, you write the job description. So guess what? She's here now. She did not quit. She's thriving. And I think we as humans forget that you got to ask that question. I tell the kids I coach, it is better to find out what you don't want to be so that what's left behind, which by the way is a small little perception, is what you want to be, you know, and just ask the question. But entrepreneurship is, it's easy to say you want to be it. And I'm sure, Kevin, you've seen this, right? If you are not okay being uncomfortable and unstructured, if you're not 100% focused on your client success, if you're not completely transparent with each other as team members, those things don't go very far. I always say it's a garage style startup where we're all in the same room trying to, it's like Microsoft and Apple, right? Go back to the 70s.
[01:07:41] Speaker C: Yeah, that's very profound, Matt. And transparency and the work and the unstructuredness, those are challenges that entrepreneurs face.
[01:07:49] Speaker A: Kevin, there's something that Matt has said more than once that's really important for entrepreneurship and it's parallel as important for leadership. That's why I want to tie it together. And that's this idea of curiosity asking a lot of questions. Don't allow your mind to convince you that you are the answer. All that you've got it all. You don't know all the people around you at a depth that you could. You don't know all the ins and outs of what you need to do to succeed in the business that you could. There's a lot that we need to, to always be asking. So lean into everything. Whether you're venturing into a new entrepreneur or venture, you're leading a team, lean in with curiosity.
[01:08:28] Speaker B: I love that you said ad. It's, it's one of my cornerstones is that people are not curious anymore. They see something happen and they just assume that's how it's supposed to be. Guys like curiosity work. The problem I, I, I study a lot at special ops. Novels, books, everything. And if you think of like Green Team, right, Silicon Sticks, like, or any of those, those operators, Delta Force, those guys know that the best laid plans change the moment the first bullet off. They know that. That's why they have contingencies. Okay. But one thing they always say is work. The problem don't get stuck like, oh, gosh, be victim. And there's too much victim. That's a whole era of podcast. Probably retire about their victim stance in this world. But the guys work the problem and be willing to change behavior. And I think that's something Kevin, you said multiple times, is that we, as humans, we don't like to feel, we don't like to be told we're wrong. We always want to look good, feel good, be good.
But I can give you the best data in the world, and I say this to our clients, but if you're not willing to change the behavior of yourself in the organization, then nothing's going to change. I've been sober now for almost eight years. I've been in recovery. And I can tell you the one thing that always sticks out in my mind is if you think just moving locations is your answer. I had a sponsor. He goes, are you going to be there? I'm like, well, yeah, but if I go to the beach again, I'll surf and I'll do all these things that I used to love to do. He goes, but you're going to be there, right? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, goes, well, nothing changes then. You're still a drunk.
[01:09:48] Speaker C: What?
[01:09:49] Speaker B: I'm like, right?
[01:09:50] Speaker C: No matter where you go, there you are.
[01:09:52] Speaker B: Right. No matter where you are, it's you. You've got to change inside. It's not your location or your job or your family. It's you. You got to figure out for you.
[01:10:01] Speaker A: Same thing with somebody who goes from independent contributor and subject matter expert to suddenly, now they have a team to lead. Richard, I think you mentioned earlier and put a word to it, triggers, right? So for some reason, this employee said something, did something, didn't do something that you thought needed to happen. And because of your own insecurities, your unwillingness to lean in with curiosity, you just take offense to it or you just. Now you just kind of write them off as I don't really like them much. Right. You've got to continue to lean in with curiosity and into your point, Matt. We have to continue to always want to be come a better version of ourselves.
[01:10:37] Speaker C: And that's one of the great things about entrepreneurship, is it provides the opportunity for that. Because I think just on a level that's one of the most meaningful things that can happen throughout a career is just experiencing the growth that comes through taking that journey and learning new skills and trying to become better at doing different things. You know, as an entrepreneur, if you want to grow your Business, you have to grow yourself, right?
[01:11:03] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[01:11:04] Speaker C: Elizabeth.
[01:11:05] Speaker D: Well, my grandparents were entrepreneurs. I didn't realize that's what they were at the time. And my mom always had nine to five jobs, but my mother always had had a million ideas and she would try something and she just didn't have the money or the partnership backing to really dive in and make it happen. And when Richard started his law firm and we started getting into the entrepreneurial community and learning about how much money you need, how you need a team, all this other stuff to being successful and how much work you had to put in, it was an eye opener. But luckily, Richard did have me to help him with his law firm and I have him with the studio now. But it's so much easier with two people. Like, if you can have a partner or a spouse that is there that wants to help you succeed, that's huge. Not everybody has that then. So, you know, you have to find some sort of trusted team or partner to help you. But this whole podcast studio and this whole radio show came about because we took a leap. Richard and I took a huge leap. He was running his law firm and I had encouraged him to start his own firm and told him I would help him in any way that I could. And somebody came to us us that we had met through networking and said, how would you like to have a radio show on entrepreneurs? It's an hour long radio show where you have guests. She had the whole format set and everything, and it wasn't free. We had to pay for it. And she presented it to me and then I presented it to Richard the next morning. And, you know, I ask people when they're starting podcasts now, why? What's your why for wanting to do this? And I think entrepreneurs need to ask themselves that a lot too. Like, what is your why?
And I think for us it was just like, well, we want a new challenge. Richard had been doing the law firm for a long time. We just wanted a new challenge. So the radio show we started in 2018 was made into a podcast. We never realized podcasting would blow up the way it has, and it's led to this. So we've kind of followed this road that, like, I never envisioned myself doing any of this stuff when I was a kid, but it didn't exist either. Right. So I think my entrepreneurial journey was one of discovery more than anything else else. And, you know, what do I like to do? What's fun to do? What opportunities can I grab hold of? And luckily, Richard wanted to grab hold of Same ones I did.
[01:13:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:13:15] Speaker C: Well, you were very convincing.
[01:13:16] Speaker D: I can be when I try, yeah. What about you?
[01:13:19] Speaker C: Well, I think, you know, there's been so many different stories in my career, but one that I haven't really talked about much. One time, it was probably about six or seven years ago at the law firm, back when we had a total of maybe eight employees. Four decided to quit within one week. So I lost two paralegals and two attorneys. And it was just kind of one of those things where I wasn't really managing the firm right. And I think I had a lot of resentment about the behaviors of certain team members. I was frustrated because I wasn't sure that they were really doing their jobs right. I could be a little bit of a perfectionist sometimes, and if I don't see things going quite the right way, then. Then I get upset. And then that frustration unintentionally migrates to the team members. And I think they had started getting together and complaining and talking about being unhappy. And so we just had a big dam burst and people found new positions and they left. I mean, of course, I was absolutely freaked out because we had all of this work to do. I had built the organization around these team members.
But I will say I was fortunate. I was able to find an outside paralegal service that was available almost immediately to start taking over the paralegal work. And I found some contractor attorneys who could step in on short notice and keep the legal work going. And I bring this up because, number one, it was a learning for me. I really had to check into my blind spots and learn about my management style. But also that sometimes stuff like this happens in the entrepreneurial world. Things will be going along and the rug gets pulled out from under you and your back is against the wall and you need to come up with solutions fast or just let the whole thing crash down around you. And I lucked out. This time. We managed to keep it together, but it was tough going there for a while, and it was extremely stressful for me because I felt like. Like my business was at stake.
[01:15:25] Speaker D: But that probably won't happen again because I don't want to say this too loud, but probably a lot of the tasks that paralegals do will be done automatically. Now with AI, you'll maybe need one paralegal to oversee everything.
[01:15:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we're still going to have paralegals helping out. The AI that we've implemented is not perfect and it still needs human review, but it's just a challenge that we all face. And I learned from it. And I think I became a better manager, better leader, having worked through all the issues with that. So we have to take a commercial break. You're listening to Passage to Profit. And we'll be back after this message with secrets of the entrepreneurial mind.
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[01:17:02] Speaker B: It's passage to Profit.
[01:17:04] Speaker C: Now it's time for Noah's retrospective.
[01:17:07] Speaker D: Noah Fleischman is our producer here at Passage to Profit, and he never stops trying to make sense of the future by looking at the past.
[01:17:16] Speaker C: After all these years, I still can't understand legal holidays.
[01:17:19] Speaker B: Take the Fourth of July, for example. It's a historical commemoration, but the establishment of the first secular independent government of.
[01:17:26] Speaker C: Colonies probably wouldn't be classified as a holy day.
[01:17:29] Speaker B: Well, that's not really important. What's important is being able to find the time to go to the beach and celebrate with sparklers and wine coolers.
[01:17:35] Speaker C: The way the Founding Fathers once did.
[01:17:38] Speaker B: If the Fourth falls on a Wednesday and you're working that week, you're dealing.
[01:17:41] Speaker C: With all the office deadlines that are.
[01:17:43] Speaker B: Pushed up three days early, or the.
[01:17:44] Speaker C: Ones you can't finish four days later.
[01:17:46] Speaker B: Because no one's going to be in the office to give you the information to complete those deadlines.
[01:17:50] Speaker C: That's because they've taken the latter portion of that week off, basically for one legal holiday.
[01:17:54] Speaker B: An entire nation of private industry, for the most part, is shut down. Those of us who have a job to do over that time are simply cornered with the only workable option possible over this kind of holiday.
That's saying a good long prayer. Now more with Richard and Elizabeth Passage to profit.
[01:18:11] Speaker D: It is time for Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. Matt Seafeld, what is your secret attitude is everything.
[01:18:18] Speaker B: We can be negative, we can be positive, we can be neutral. The only person that can make me feel bad is me. It takes the pressure off of trying to control outcomes because we do not control outcomes in life. We control actions.
[01:18:30] Speaker D: That was great. So now, okay, Kevin McCarthy, you have to follow that up.
[01:18:35] Speaker B: Well, Bear.
[01:18:36] Speaker C: Oh, follow him off.
[01:18:37] Speaker B: Right. Like you said, I, I went to federal prison. I'm like, oh, man, I don't know. I have to start looking for better storms. I got sober. You know, I can tell you stories of that.
[01:18:47] Speaker A: Oh, Matt, that's the, that's the beauty of the story I'm willing to tell is because I realize that it's just my story, but my story is everybody's story because we all have our own unique story, right? So that's what the audience resonated. They're like, oh, I didn't go to prison, but, but, yeah, I, I, I get it. Right.
And that's the same thing with the entrepreneurial journey, right? Is we, you set out to build a dream which is going to serve people, help people solve a problem, whatever it is. And then also, it's okay to admit that we also set out to build a dream for us and our families. We want to be entrepreneurs for help, but we also want to receive the reward from that.
[01:19:25] Speaker B: That's okay.
[01:19:26] Speaker A: As part of the journey.
At the same time, to couple with that curiosity thought, you have to get to a place again, whether it's starting a business, running a business, starting another business, selling whatever you're doing, or whether you're simply leading a family or leading other people on the workplace, we have to understand that we have a belief system. Each of us bring to the table the way we see the world. And we all see the world very differently. And we have to filter this curiosity through the idea that the world should be a certain way, my business should succeed, my business, my product should be great, my service should be awesome. And if we're not careful about the way we frame our thinking, then we will create more blind spots when it comes to leaning into curiosity and understand that there's blind spots that try to obscure that truth from you.
[01:20:19] Speaker D: Very profound.
Richard Gearhart.
[01:20:21] Speaker C: My secret is going to be that it's possible to evolve. You know, it's possible to learn. Sometimes it's the hardest lessons that teach us the most. Success doesn't necessarily teach you as much as failure. And so when I was talking earlier about my challenges managing the law firm. I had to adapt and evolve so that wouldn't happen again. And I became a better manager. I became more patient, a better listener, and probably a little less judgmental. And that allowed the law firm to find new team members that helped out and helped us grow. And so sometimes those negative situations can be the best teachers. So it is possible to grow and to get better. And if you feel stagnant, maybe the curiosity approach is the right one and mine will be.
[01:21:09] Speaker D: It's okay to take on a new venture just because you think it's going to be really exciting and fun. Part of the reason that's successful for a lot of people is nobody is going to do what you do exactly the same way that you do it. Especially for the podcasters I talk to, there may be other podcasts. There's other podcasts about cats, and Danielle Woolier and I are still doing our cat podcast, but we're doing it differently than anybody else. You're unique and you can do things your own way and you can find solutions other people may not think of and really stand out just for being youth.
[01:21:44] Speaker C: That's great. So that's it for us this week. Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleishman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Marissa Cappell Busari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
