Tom DuFore: 0:01

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky franchise team. And as we open today, I'm wondering if you have ever found yourself saying, Why do I have to come up with all the answers? Or I can't believe someone else can't figure this out. If you've ever said that or thought something like that, then this episode is for you. Our guest today is Grem Barlow, and he shares with us how you need to be allergic to being the most important person in the room and gives us a few ideas to help us with that. Now, Graham is a serial entrepreneur with 24 years of building, scaling, and exiting technology companies. He's the CEO of Iversoft, where he's grown it and managed it from$500,000 in revenue to nearly$10 million in annual revenue. Graham is also the creator of a community called Founderlink, which focuses on helping entrepreneurs and founders break out of isolation, build systems at scale, and reach meaningful revenue milestones. He's on a personal mission to help a thousand founders exceed a million in revenue and create one billion in economic impact. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20

My name is Graham Barlow. I am the CEO of Iversoft and the co-founder of Founderlink.

Tom DuFore: 1:27

Thank you so much for being a guest here today. In preparation for our interview, I like this idea of to be allergic to being the most important person in your business. And I've seen that in clients I've worked with. I see it in my business with me. So I'd love for you to talk about what you mean by that and start digging into it a little bit.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48

Yeah, honestly, it's something I kind of came into very unintentionally early on in my career and has been a bit of a kind of tongue-in-cheek guiding philosophy for every company I've built since then. And that is that if if you focus on, and so many people fall into the trap of being the instrumental engine behind every part of their company, they're the smartest person in the room, they have the core skill sets of what they offer, they need their special touch on every way everything gets delivered. And for me, I've I've built this kind of deep aversion to the second I am required in the room for something to move forward or for us to deliver our best work or major pieces of the company to move forward. I recognize that is a huge problem. And so I spend a lot of my time in every company I've done working every day to not be important, to try and make sure that there are smarter people than I am around me, that every part of kind of discovery and delivery happens through teams that are better equipped with better processes and better tools, then I can do it. And anytime I'm finding myself pulled back into a situation where it's like, you need to help come fix this, is like, cool, dive back in and do the thing, but immediately start looking at like, why was I necessary? What happened? Where did the process go wrong? That I am the smartest person in this room to fix this thing, and then work pretty aggressively to try and change that. And it's been phenomenal as kind of a guiding principle for being able to build multiple eight-figure companies at this point because it's it's okay to be strong, vision and direction and leadership. But if you start to become that kind of linchpin piece for things to happen in your company, you get stuck and you get burnt out. I talked to so many CEOs, founders that are just at the like three to five million stage, where they just they've grown through brute force, but they are the most important person in the company. And if they disappear for two weeks, everything gets stuck, or like one thing goes marginally sideways on a client or with a product, everything comes back to them. So yeah, it's been kind of a core philosophy for me from day one almost, is just try and try desperately to find smarter and better people and then get out of the way.

Tom DuFore: 4:11

Well, very well said. And I think for someone that might tune in to hear this, most of our audience has been in that position or might be in that position where they are the most important person. And there's enough leadership information out there that they might say, okay, well, I'm delegating some things. You know, I I've recognized the position I'm in. I'm doing some delegation, and yet I'm still that most important person. What are tactics or systems or things that you found successful to maybe help someone continue down that pathway or accelerate removing themselves as being that most important person?

SPEAKER_01: 4:47

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think I I love one of the words used there in terms of delegation, but I think there's a there's a very big difference between delegation and empowerment. And I think one of the things sometimes people miss when they're scaling teams or they're adding layers to their company is they're really good at the delegation of like they're they're pushing down a lot of the work, which is good. And if you're in kind of a Dan Martell philosophy of buy back your time, that's a huge component. However, if the people you've delegated to aren't necessarily empowered or supported to make decisions on their own or have the clarity and honestly security in their roles to take risks, win and make mistakes, then the delegation all ultimately just comes back to you anyway as the core decision point. So I think one of the core things for me is if you're gonna delegate and empower people, you need to give them space to learn. There's a lot of things as founders or as CEOs, we've we've learned through pain, misery, and suffering. And as much as we want to go above and beyond to help our teams avoid catastrophic pain, misery, and suffering, I think there's a huge component to like learning and building confidence and building some of those like innate skills that let you navigate that, where it comes down to just letting your team have the opportunity to make decisions and trust their calls and get it wrong sometimes and then understand why they got it wrong and what they could have looked for next time. I had a really good conversation not that long ago with a founder talking about training a new director of sales and like trying to talk to their account execs on how do they how do they find people who understand the nuance and the flow of a conversation and like when do when do you push and when do you hold back? And it's like as much as you can preach the theory and you can build the scripts and you can do the playbooks, eventually it comes down to they have to do the reps on the calls and they have to spend the time in those conversations. They have to get it wrong a few times to get a feel for the energy, the flow, the cadence, like all of it. You just there's there's no substitute entirely for living it, trying it, failing, recovering and moving forward. I think one of the one of the craziest mistakes I see people make is they take these like intermediate to senior people and empower them to do something. And then the first time there's a huge mistake, they fire them. And it's like you just had a massive opportunity to have that person learn foundational information that if everything else is going well, they're going to be that much better for you moving forward. And but sometimes we we put people in a situation where there is no time, budget, bandwidth, anything for anything to go wrong. And that's not a great situation for people to learn and grow into leadership roles. And so I think for me, that's one of the biggest call it not necessarily frameworks, but like philosophies when you're when you're growing and kind of empowering a team is how do you how do you create leaders? How do you create that space for them to be leaders and keep yourself kind of grounded and reminded that that is that is absolutely critical?

Tom DuFore: 8:02

I really like that delegation versus empowerment idea that you described. And as a leader, someone that tunes in might be listening to this. I'm thinking of that successful owner or maybe even a new franchise or clients that we've worked with, where they still are active. They still need to be doing things because revenue isn't to a point where they're able to fully replace some of those duties yet, or the staff on hand, the business is not yet at that point to be able to maybe afford a more mid-level or senior level type of person to come in. So I'd be curious with your experience how you see kind of this transition period where they're in these moments of transition where they're not quite there yet, but they're starting to make some moves. I'd love for you just to talk through that and how someone from a practical standpoint might make some effort there.

SPEAKER_01: 8:56

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that I see often when companies are kind of, yeah, they're at that awkward stage, right? It's it's it's very much like the one to three, sometimes up to five million range, where it's like you need to scale, you need a little bit more bandwidth, but you don't have a ton of excess resources, you probably don't have your systems dialed in perfectly to kind of be moving. And so there's a couple of areas that I like to look at. One of them, though, is often the complexity and depth of the roles within your organization. I say that because one thing that I find interesting is a lot of times companies will scale up to that point with like kind of unicorn roles, right? Where you found like this one miraculous hire or this or yourself, and it's like you have one or two roles in the company that are doing like nine different jobs. Phenomenal, super efficient at a small stage. Once you're looking at how do we scale, how do we grow, those roles become a huge liability, in my opinion, because they are so hard to replace, they're so hard to hire for, they're extremely complicated to train for. And so one of the first things I try to look at is where do we have processes or systems in the company that are overly complicated or require an extreme depth of knowledge or background or history? And how do we start, even if we don't split them in roles, how do we start breaking those down into simpler steps? It's kind of like take the take almost the McDonald's principle for how you run your company. And like, I love doing this in marketing and software companies and even SaaS companies. Like, how do we take that kind of stuff and distill it down into these playbooks where it's like one person does fries, one person does, I don't know, flipping burgers and then putting condiments on top, like whatever, whatever it is, but like make the roles and the steps in your organization broken down to a level of simplicity that is repeatable and consistent, and you can train it. That makes the underlying parts of the organization a lot more resilient, a lot more scalable, and a lot simpler. And it's the work a lot of people avoid because it's like, oh, it's like our special sauce. Like your special sauce, if it is so complicated, so intricate, and so unique that you can't train it and hire for it, you're gonna be stuck. So you need to figure out a way to simplify delivery and make it more consistent. Starting there and cleaning out that foundation makes it a lot easier to create room kind of further up within your org chart to have either budget room or space because you have less of these crazy unique roles and less of the kind of complications. There's usually a bit of a bumpy transition period while you kind of go through that simplification. But what I've seen is, and I feel like this is hyper relevant for the franchise play. So, like just because it works in one location with the senior founding team and everyone who knows everything, now you need to go do it in a completely different location with a team that's learning from kind of playbooks and has training, but you're not necessarily going to live there all day, every day. And so turning turning those offerings into something that's scalable creates the systems in the space where you can then start to bring in a little bit more leadership once you've been able to pull out some additional revenue there.

Tom DuFore: 12:02

You talk about just the need for founders to be around other founders and you know, having kind of this community mentors, coaches, and so on. I'd love for you to talk about that.

SPEAKER_01: 12:14

For anyone that's founded a company or honestly, even running a company, owns a company, oftentimes, especially early on, you start to recognize that is it is one of the most rewarding and amazing experiences in the world, but also one of the most isolating, terrifying, and stressful things in the world. And if you didn't grow up in an entrepreneurial family, or if you didn't grow up around entrepreneurs and have that community embedded, the idea that all of payroll, all of revenue, all of the weight of everything is on your shoulders can be unbelievably isolating. And you can't talk to your coworkers. If your partner or spouse is not a founder, that's a hard conversation. If they are a founder, that's even more difficult sometimes if you're both in the thick of it. Family and friends, again, if they're not on an entrepreneurial ecosystem, are like, oh, well, you you're running a company, must be hard. Life's so difficult. And I find that like that applies at every level, especially as you get bigger and more successful. Like the stress doesn't change. The numbers change, but the stress doesn't change. And there's significantly less empathy out in the world for kind of what that's like going through. And so surrounding yourself with community and with others that are going through the same thing is huge. I was very fortunate very, very early on in my career to get surrounded by other entrepreneurs and have those conversations. But I've met so many people since then, especially outside of tech. I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts and opinions on this because I feel like we come from slightly different worlds, but like the tech world is really great. Like bring tech founders together and like make them all talk to each other. I host dinners and events with founders of every kind of conceivable demographic and genre and industry and model. And so many times I have people that have been running companies 10, 15, 20 years, and they're saying, like, this is the first time I've sat at the table with other people running companies and like realizing that people stressing about turnover or payroll or taxes or customers and sales marketing, and like it's this unifying component that to be honest, I 70% or more of most businesses, regardless of your industry, regardless of bootstrapped, venture-backed, hyper-growth, like whatever, whatever your model or stage, 70% of it is all the same. It's all people, the 30% that makes you unique in your industry or offering or whatever, can be very specific. But there's there's so much commonality that connects people and having people you can talk to both at the same stage as you, where like you are in it and you're sharing kind of the pain, but also being able to talk people a little bit ahead of you and understanding like when you hit this, what did you do? How did you survive this? And hearing advice and hearing different solutions from different industries for me is one of the biggest hacks and improvements, both for company growth and just personal growth and mental stability. Those communities are absolutely massive. And so many people don't engage that way. They just put their head down or or worse, they're like, I'm competing against the world. I can't talk to people, I can't be vulnerable. It's a it's a problem. I was like, I don't care what business you're in. There is so much market and so much opportunity out there. Talk to people around you. You're competing against the world. Like you can have some friends in your own backyard because it's gonna be hard. It's better to have a community around you.

Tom DuFore: 15:37

That kind of leads to what led you to get into coaching and going this direction and what you're doing now.

SPEAKER_01: 15:45

For me, I've been very fortunate. I've been an entrepreneur quite literally my entire life. I got into it before I knew what the word entrepreneurship was, built a kind of small software company in the digital currency space back in 2000. We grew that for six years, sold it in 2006. After that, I built a games company, grew it to over a million users, sold it after a few years, went through the whole angel venture capital raise side of things, spent years investing in companies after that, co-founded another SaaS company that's been rocking its number two in its industry category in the pet industry right now, and then spent the last 12 years helping companies build software projects, everything from kind of critical healthcare infrastructure to augmented reality tools for some of the largest sports franchises in the world. And throughout all of that, have had so many amazing experiences and learned a lot, not always in pain-free ways. We've been through been through the highs and lows of entrepreneurship in every way. And then about two years ago, I'm sure everyone, everyone saw this around the same time, but like started to see an inundation and influx of kind of influencer coaches on the internet popping up in every feed I've got, which is kind of cool because I've been a fan of the coaching space. I've I've benefited massively from the right coaches in the past, but started to get pretty frustrated seeing every kid popping up on Instagram trying to coach founders and then looking up, and they're like, they've never launched a company, they've never scaled anything, but they're running ads aggressively and they're trying to coach people. And so it was genuinely out of frustration of like, why are all of these people trying to give advice when they have no idea what they're talking about? And complaining to a friend who runs a huge coaching organization. And his response was like, Well, you can do one of two things either shut up or get involved and offer better advice. And so it was literally on the back of that conversation that I was like, all right, well, fuck it, we'll take some time and try and help some people. And so that's what led to kind of my world today, where we run one of the largest software development companies in Canada called Diversoft. And then with a little bit of my time, I coach and work with founders on the zero to one million and one million to five million as kind of two major jumps to try and help people do that. And through that process, we started hosting all kinds of events and trying to bring founders together, largely to recreate the community I wish I'd had. I don't know if you've been to a lot of local founder events, but I hit a point where I was attending events and you would go to like big founder event or business owner event, and then you meet five insurance brokers, three bankers, four lawyers, and then you meet one other person running a company. You're like, oh my God, I'm in a room of people trying to sell to the three of us. And so we started running dinners for founders only. And after a bunch of the dinners, everyone was asking, how do we stay in touch with each other? Which led to the creation of the founder community founder link. And so that's been that's been a world that I'm I'm very privileged to get to kind of play in and spend a lot of time meeting incredible people and sharing stories and lessons learned and then investing when we find the right opportunities. How can someone get in touch with you or learn more about what you're doing? Yeah, so you can find me on all social media at Graham Barlow or GrahamBlow.com. Uh, you can check out the companies at iversoft.ca or founderlink.com. And always, always open to hear from people at any stage in the journey. We try and host free events as often as we can. We have dinners that kind of travel around the world. We were in Lisbon about a month ago, Tampa the month before that. And we have a ton coming up over the next few months to try and bring founders from all walks of life together.

Tom DuFore: 19:33

Graham, this is a great time in the show. We make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

SPEAKER_01: 19:44

So many, so many misses. I made sure two really quickly because I think both are both are very relevant. One, when I was doing the fundraising process for Rocket L or Games Company, we very much were in the Silicon Valley philosophy of like you go hard and you either explode against the wall or go to the moon. And we very much took the like go hard, grew like crazy, grew the team up to 40 people, and then hit a point where we closed funding, but then the group that was funding us went under, and so the checks didn't come. And we lived through taking the team from 40 down to five and then re-organing the whole company, got to a got to a decent outcome in the end. But that was a brutal and humbling journey and reinforced what I share with a lot of people now of like never stop either raising or pursuing capital or doing the things you need to do. Until the money is in the bank, you cannot count on things. And so we made the mistake of like, oh, like it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, we'll just keep stretching, it's coming. And then and then when you finally kind of confirmed it is not coming, we were out of options and out of levers to pull. And it's just like I talked to so many people that are banking on the next client win or like a contract that's gonna renew. And it's like until the money is in the bank, you have to plan as though it's not. And then you can have the win that comes afterwards and you can do the things, but like you gotta be a little bit more resilient in how you plan. And then the second one that I'm I'm hoping is kind of very relevant for your audience. In the process of growing Iversoft, we fell down the very, very typical trap of early on. We're like, oh, we're leaving money on the table. Like once once we finish building this, they need marketing, they need branding, they need to like launch this stuff, and they need to run this. And so we went from being kind of a mobile agency to a dev agency to a digital agency, and we kept acquiring companies and kept growing our service offering. And we hit a point early on in the pandemic, actually, where we had this huge team and we literally did everything. We did, we would run your ads, we would build your software, we would build custom software, we build your website, we'll do your branding, do everything. And like it hit a point where our sales team was just drowning because they're like, we don't know what to sell, and you're Coming down to us every month, being like, this team's idle, go sell that. And the whiplash from trying to be everything to everyone killed our growth. And one of the best things we ever did for the company was get really serious about what are we good at doing, get laser focused on here's our core offering. We ended up scaling back, I think 60% of the company. We let them go, took the team from in the 40s to like 18, which was brutal. But with that clarity, we tripled the company over the next two years because everyone was on the same thing. Everyone was focused on the same mission. It was so much easier, again, to train people, to explain to clients what we did. We stopped trying to be everything. We stopped trying to always have an answer. And it's a lesson that I think we all drift away from over time of like focus and clarity is the biggest thing. You're like, oh, we downdo eight things again. It's like one thing, one thing, unbelievably well, and just keep doing it.

Tom DuFore: 23:06

Let's look on the other side of things. You know, we talk about the shadow side or the dark side. Let's look at the light side, a win or a highlight or a make for you to share.

SPEAKER_01: 23:16

Yeah. So, I mean, I've been been fortunate, had a lot of incredible successes and opportunities throughout. I think one of the biggest ones for me was honestly some on the backside of the challenging story at Iversoft, the win and the make was after simplifying, after getting clear, seeing the growth and seeing kind of doubling year over year progress within the company. And like that's what pushed us into being an eight-figure business. And the organizational simplicity, like alongside the growth, we also set a kind of executive vision and mandate for the company that we wanted our senior leadership team working 30 hours a week or less. And we managed to accomplish both of those things within a three-year timeline. And for me, that was huge, right? Because there's so much, so much hype around the hustle culture and the hustle world and like how you have to build a successful business. And our philosophy is like if we're gonna get super focused, we're gonna run lean and we're gonna be very clear. Can we build a$10 million plus company that runs in a way that does not require 60-hour weeks? And so that I think was kind of the culmination of everything that I'd learned for 20 years before that of like simplify things, get clear, stay rigorous on that, and find wicked smart people. Like the team, the leadership team we've got at Iversoft is unbelievable. And so like that kind of growth and opportunity and simplicity in the systems is only possible because of the people around.

Tom DuFore: 25:06

The next question we ask is have you used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you've run?

SPEAKER_01: 25:15

Absolutely. So I'll I'll probably give you what maybe feels like a bit of a token answer right now. But like the single biggest personal growth hack outside of like hiring people and raising money has been finding the right coach. And what's interesting is I got so turned off of the coaching industry early on because I hired a bunch of just professional coaches. And to be honest, I didn't give them a whole lot of credibility and they didn't show up particularly well. A few years ago, I changed tactics and went with a coach that was that had exited multiple eight-figure companies that had done the thing I was actively trying to do, ungodly expensive. But I think the combination of being unreasonably expensive. So I was paying attention, I showed up prepped and was like ready to do the work no matter what. And the reflection of like, okay, there's a lot of credibility, they've done what I'm trying to do and bought in. Like, that was transformational for me on so many levels. Not only did it do business stuff, but like on a personal level, I had kind of made it a bit of my identity up to that point that I was like unbelievably unhealthy and overweight and everything. I was like, it doesn't matter. I'm successful and we're building stuff. Fitness is stupid and it's a waste of time. And part of that coaching journey outside of the business piece was like, it would be helpful for stress management and energy if you took on fitness. In a year from that kind of initial conversation, I lost 100 pounds and got into the best shape of my life. And it was honestly transformational in like how I showed up in the companies, how I showed up as a leader, how I showed up, just I went from like, I don't know, a dozen espresso a day to like two cups of coffee for fun, not for survival. And so, like stuff like that was like the biggest multipliers. Like, just find the people who've done the thing you're trying to do and help them so they can help you or pay for time. Do what do whatever you need to do. But every time you hit like the next level, go find the people that have done it and are two steps ahead and pull that forward because the the multiplier that is on your time and your output and your insight is unbelievable. And I would say, having been on both sides of this now, like paying for it hurts, but is so helpful. I was so opposed to it for a long time and then like did it, and I was like, holy shit, this works! And similarly, as a coach now, I spent so many years doing voluntary advisory work or volunteer board work, and like the follow-through from the people I worked with was like, we'll call it 10 to 20%. You'd spend a lot of time giving a lot of advice and see very little follow-through. When I moved into the coaching side, the follow-through is like 95%, and the results are awesome because people are invested and they show up. So it doesn't even matter how much like what you're charging or what you're paying or any of that, like the intentionality of like I have spent the money, I am here, I'm going to do the thing is huge. It's it's such a like weird, kind of backwards hack, but made such a difference in my life.

Tom DuFore: 28:29

Thank you for sharing that. That's a great, great testimony to share. And the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

SPEAKER_01: 28:38

Success for me means freedom of opportunity. It means that I choose who, where, and what I work on. And I think it's got different numbers for everyone. I'm I'm big on like get very clear on what your number is and all of your goals and define it and measure it and track it. So I've I have kind of my own personal targets that I am still chasing for what kind of the next level of success looks like. But I think at a philosophical level, it is it is the freedom to choose the teams you work on, choose the type of work you do, and be very intentional with the schedule that you run. And I think that getting there, because a lot of like you don't have that privilege early on in your career, or most of us don't. Most of us have the like, I have to eat and be sheltered and kind of hit the fundamentals and you do whatever you have to do to make that happen. And then when you're building companies, it's often you eat last because everything else needs to be fed and taken care of. And so getting to the point where you have the luxury and the privilege of choice across the board is huge. So for me, though, that's kind of the baseline of success. And then I do think it's important to kind of redefine that at every stage in your career and redefine what you're aiming for. Because if you don't have a target defined and articulated, it's very hard to get there.

Tom DuFore: 30:00

Well, and as we bring this to a close, Graham, is there anything you're hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

SPEAKER_01: 30:06

Honestly, I think the biggest one is if you are in the founder ecosystem, if you are an owner, if you are potentially looking at becoming a business owner through franchises or other things, don't underestimate the power of community, the power of the right community, like life-changing opportunity, life-changing advice and guidance is on the other side of the one conversation with the one right person, but you maybe don't know yet. And so show up, find your community, continue to try and build those circles. For anyone in the audience, if they're looking for advice and support, like check out founderlink.com. It's a completely free community for founders. That's why we built it. It's the community I wish I'd had access to 20 years ago when I was growing and had no idea what the hell I was doing. But I think that's that's the biggest one is don't approach business ownership or kind of founder ecosystem with kind of an isolated mindset. Never underestimate the impact the community around you can have.

Tom DuFore: 31:40

Takeaway number two is when he said there's a big difference between delegation and empowerment. And he said, if you're going to delegate, you need to empower people to make decisions and to do things and to give them room to learn. They've got to have opportunity to make those decisions and do things. And there's, as he said, there's no substitute for learning and trying and failing along the way and learning from those failures. Takeaway number three is when he talked about if you're in a situation where you're not able to afford senior staff, maybe your business is starting to grow, but you're not quite able to bring in those maybe mid or senior level staffers to help with the business growth. And he actually said to be very cautious of hiring one or two miraculous or unicorn type hires that become almost irreplaceable because of what they do. I love how he said make sure you're documenting steps and processes to simplify things. And we're in big favor of that, working with companies and helping them franchise. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win is really this overarching theme of being allergic to being the most important person in your business. It really is, it helps you delegate and empower those staff and people. It helps you find and retain folks, it forces you to document and create systems and processes as well. And it helps you create a better, healthy lifestyle for yourself. So it's a win-win-win-win-win all across the board. And as a quick parting note, joining up with a community such as Grams is something worth considering to help you through that process if you're an owner or a leader of your company going through that. And so that's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know or might be ready to franchise your business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com where you can schedule your free, no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.