My First Million: My First Million Live Event With Andrew Wilkinson (Austin, Texas) (Part 1)

And I got so excited about it at one point that I was up at like 11 o'clock at night I was feeling all manic

I'd probably had a couple beers and I sent this email the entire staff and I said guys were shutting metal lab down

We're going all in on flow and Chris my business partner who's here somewhere. Where's Chris Chris over there

Chris was the CFO at the time a looked at the numbers and he was like we will be out of business in three months

I feel like I can rule the world

I know I could be what I want

I put my all in it like no days

Put your hands together for webby award-winning

Sean Puri

Sampar and special guest Andrew Wilkinson. Come on out you guys

Extra mics

All right

So we are uh, we are backstage and we saw like all the bands that have played here

It's like Franz Ferdinand and like the killers and all these cool things and

I heard the sound guys first of all sound guys. I want to apologize. I heard them talking before this and they're like

What the fuck is this?

There's like is this like a rich guy's birthday party. What is this? I think they thought it was a graduation happening

So sound guys

Sorry, but it is what it is. You always wanted to be a star. You wanted to walk out to a sold-out venue and uh

I guess this was it's one way to do it. Yeah, it's one way to do it

So sound guys, it's gonna be the lamest thing you're gonna see this week, but maybe you'll learn something. I don't know

Uh, but this is awesome. What do you think?

Working fuck you sound guys

Come on guys

Who the real podcasters are

So so we did this huge event in vancouver. We had like 1200 people in this massive theater

And sam sneaks out on the stage and i'm like, what are you doing?

And he's he's peering around the corner taking photos and he goes

I'm posting this on facebook and I was like, who the fuck uses facebook. That's so weird and he goes all the people

I went to high school with

Uh

And so we wanted to start off by saying

We were laughing backstage and we were like right before we came on we're like we got to talk about nick gray

Does anyone here has anyone here met nick gray? That was the guy that was just talking

Nick I just met him for the first time last night. He is

I don't know if he's the most interesting man in the world, but he's like the most interesting man in texas for sure

I'll give him that I feel like on this show

We always talk about billionaires

And there's a lot of money billionaires, but nick is a friend billionaire

Yeah, last night. So we hosted a dinner last night with like one out of 15 people

And sam had set it all up. It was going to be perfect

He had this like high end restaurant

Table for 14 the time was locked in we got reminders. We show up. It's supposed to be beautiful

You know just a first class dinner. Everything was taken care of

and we get there

And immediately the plan was blown up. It was raining outside raining like crazy and our seat was like half outside

Yeah, so we weren't going to be able to do it immediately

Nick gray

improvises he's like

hold on

You six to the bar and then he sprinted because I pulled up I saw him running and I was like nick gray

Where are you going? And he was like

I'm scoping out a venue and he

I don't know where he went he runs into this place and he's like hey

Is this a event space and it's soaking wet. Yeah, and the women look at each other and they're like

What and he goes what's the name of this place and they go it's called miss kitties and he's like are you guys in event space?

What do you do? He goes

We wax women

I got 15 dudes outside

But he did he found us this like

Like abandoned shack almost this amazing place

and he

It was really like a shed. It was an abandoned shed, but it was like

I don't know. It was perfect. It was exactly what we did. It was outside the rain. We were all in there was quiet

we could talk and

And he hosts this thing because what nick does is he has this book called I think the two hour cocktail party and he's basically

perfected the art

Of a two-hour party and I got to see it first hand. He takes out his harmonica till I get everyone's attention and then he

He has this way of getting everybody to open up to talk to sit in the right places do the right things

And it was incredible. The best part though was

He saved your he saved you so so nick is looking around and he walks up to me

He goes, hey, are you all good everything good? Uh, and I say, okay. I want to go to the shed. I'm excited

I'm a little bit cold though. Is it gonna be uh, is it gonna be heated and he goes hold on

I'll be right back and he runs outside and like sam said it's like pouring rain

I don't know if you guys witnessed this yesterday, but it was insane. He comes back. He's soaking wet

He looks like that scene in glen gary glenn ross when the guy's like at the doorstep and he brings me this sweatshirt

Which he had paid like 70 dollars for that's who nick gray is

And the reason we're bringing this up is not because we like him is

To be clear we like him to be clear we like him, but that's not why we're bringing this up

But on our pod my first million, uh, and by the way, is everyone here is anyone who doesn't listen mfm here

Who's here for the graduation? Yeah, okay, and he who here actually listens to us regularly

All right, that's good enough and so we bring up all these like weird businesses that a lot of people haven't

Heard about and this one is probably the weirdest one

He told me he was going to write this book about a cocktail party. I thought it was a horrible idea

And so far he's sold 11,000 copies of this book, which is insane and he um

And so we have this dinner and we meet all these interesting people at this like 14 person dinner

I think we had a guy there

Who sold a company that sold dog supplements, which is like the greatest business ever because who knows if it works, right?

Like you have no idea

He sold his company for 650 million dollars. It was insane. He was telling us the story about this

We had another guy who sells also dog related dog ramps

So like so your old or small dog can like go up on the couch and he does 18 million a year in sales

There was another guy there that has a website that is like a marketplace so you can rent a tractor and it's killing it

We had a a person who has a call a bunch of owns a bunch of car washes that does tens of millions in profit

What else we have anything else that was weird

It was it was crazy. It was different than san francisco if you go to san francisco or new york

You get one type of entrepreneur you get the AI crypto you get that in sf in new york

You get something else and in austin you get mustache hat tilt and like I sell tractors online or

I'll sell your dog some vitamins, you know, you get a different type of entrepreneur. I bet in the I bet in the crowd right now

We got to have

Some interesting businesses. Yeah, who who here has a business?

Let's get it get a sense of you to get a hand

So keep your hand up if you own a business and if you do over 100 raise them high raise them

If you do over a hundred thousand dollars keep it up

If you do 500,000 keep it up

one million

five million

Okay, we got a few hold on 20 20 million anybody

No, okay back to five. No. No. No. We got over here. We got a couple. Okay 20 million 20 million and a couple of

We got one over here two here one in the back any of those any of them profitable

Okay, all right, okay nick we want to talk to these guys. I want to know what their businesses are

Put your hands up hand is up. I'm coming over here

All right, stand up. Please. Let's hear from you

What's your name and what's your business?

Kelsey Larick 365 holdings were an e-commerce roll-up. Sorry, can you say that one more time in slow motion, please?

365 holdings we roll up e-commerce businesses. I want to be andrew wilkinson when I grow up

You don't trust me. He's blushing up here. It's very sad. It sounds like a good idea

All right, who's the guy next to you?

Justin Turner traction capital are we have a business that sells equipment to fire departments. What do you mean?

I love the way you said all that, but I'm gonna can I just try being you for a second?

Sean purry purry dead of dead of the house

changed diapers

Like you just said an awesome thing, but with such like

Yeah, you probably read about me. That's the vibe I got

We sell like 37 million dollars worth of equipment that fire departments use and firemen use every day

Yeah hoses nozzles uniforms uniforms and why is okay. So and what about competition?

Is it just like you're the only one in town? There's only one place to buy them or do you have a moat of some kind?

We have exclusive distribution

Uh relationships in nine of the western states in the u.s. How much profit on 37 million in revenue?

It's about 10 margin. Does it feel uncomfortable when I ask you these questions? Should I ask like what do you look like naked?

What was the like when you lost your virginity? There's only one way to find out

Um, all right. What else and who else?

Who's got a weirder story than that? Anybody got a weirder story? Yeah, put your hand up if you got a really weird business

Okay, maybe it was like weird. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, Nick. Hold on one second. Hold on

Okay, so this is a paper koozie

But I own a 40,000 square foot print warehouse and we print real koozies. So like it's really niche and it's really random

Not these small boy koozies that we handed out. How long you've been running your business for?

Um, I've been in business for eight years, but we do a lot of different types of printing

Um, did you become a millionaire selling beer koozies? That was my first largest e-com store that I created. Yeah

selling koozies because I'm from the midwest and we drink a lot of beer

And that's you look like you're from the midwest

You and I like I'm close to st. Louis actually

Anyone else have a really really weird business

Like dog ramp level weird business tell them to let the freak flag fly

Oh, here we go got with the austin stash. There it is

The capital v-neck shirt you just grow those when you fly in as soon as you cross the the border

The the mustache just pops up. We make custom dog treats for hospitality businesses. So like when the ritz carlton

Has guests come with dogs. We provide the dog treats that they give to their guests

And why wouldn't they just use normal dog treats just because I always have their branding on them

Oh, very smart. How big is that?

Um, we started 10 months ago and we've grown it to half a million in 10 months at run rate. Wow, that's cool

This is cool. We're gonna we're gonna hear more businesses because a little bit later

We're gonna do like a shark tanky type of thing with a bunch of uh, bunch of pitches

Yeah, you're we can put we can put the lights down two times. Okay, there we go

um

So the cool part about like doing this stuff is we get to meet all these interesting people who are

Succeeding and some are failing which is actually just or more interesting

Um, but speaking of a big success

Andrew over here took his company. I thought you're pointing at me

No

Uh, Andrew over here just took his company public. It's called tiny. It's not that tiny

Okay, that should be the tagline. It's not that tiny

And you were telling he was telling us a story that we had not heard about almost selling the company

Like six years. This was a backstage story. Can we tell it? I think we can yeah, we can we can tell it

So there's really two stories. So one by the way, if you don't know I got to do the intro

Andrew

Started this thing called meta lab. It was an agency that made a bunch of um tech stuff for big companies

Using the profits from that company. He then started buying and investing in other companies

Which that hold company that hold company was or hold co is called tiny. He recently took it public last week

It's now trading at 850 million canadian dollars, which is only like 600 million bucks in real money

No, but it's a huge success

But it all started because he had this agency called meta lab where he was um, you know, like I said doing stuff for tech people

But you were saying earlier that how that was like the foundation for the success of everything else

But you it you almost did something crazy early on. Yeah, so I almost wasn't sitting wouldn't be sitting here

so

we're sitting at dinner the other night and talking about this and

There's two stories. So one

Uh, I got very excited. It was you know, you when you have a business

You always know how much it sucks how hard it is to run and you always admire other people's businesses

And so I always wanted like a sass business a sexy business and so I started one. I started this productivity

Business called flow. It was like a sauna

except we didn't raise any money and we

Uh, we had a great product, but it just didn't go anywhere like task management task management

One of the hardest things one of the hardest businesses in the world

And I got so excited about it at one point that I I was up at like 11 o'clock at night

I was feeling all manic I'd probably had a couple beers and I sent this email the entire staff and I said

Guys were shutting metal lab down. We're going all in on flow

And chris my business partner who's here somewhere. Where's chris chris over there

Uh, chris was the cfo at the time. He looked at the numbers and he was like, we will be out of business in three months

How big was flow at flow was doing like 300 k of revenue and metal lab was like 2 million or something like that

And so how big was metal lab when you when when you were 2 million maybe at that point 2 million in revenue versus 300

300k or something. I was just like moment of insanity and chris went around to all the employees quietly and was like, please don't leave

Please don't leave. We'll be bankrupt in like a week and save the day and then the second story was

chris and I

We you know running an agency is really stressful

And we got this offer for the business to sell it for 15 million. This is about

eight or nine years ago almost 10 years ago and

1515 1515

And uh, we actually went through the whole process, you know, spent four months going back and forth with this private equity firm

We signed the documents, you know, my lawyer calls me in

Quivering hand I signed signed the documents and the wire is supposed to come in the next day

And so I wake up

I go to my local bank branch. I go to the atm and I look at the balance

My balance is the same

And I think okay, it's probably gonna come in later. So I check later nothing next day nothing next day nothing

I call the guy at the private equity firm and he goes, hey man

I'm really sorry, but we weren't able to uh, finish closing our fund. So the deal is not done

So I legally sold the business and if the wire had come in I would my business would be worth

Maybe nothing at this point because this was the entire foundation of the business and we would be we would be tiny

So we almost lost it all. What do you think it's worth now metal lab?

I don't know hundreds of millions for sure, but I don't I don't know

It all could have

Just one decision actually you made the decision and it's and it was all driven by anxiety, right?

It's panic every I'm sure every one of you that runs a business

Everyone knows how miserable it is inside, right? I've you talked to people you look at them on the outside

You go they're an amazing operator. They have a great business

But on the inside there's a great quote by brent. Be sure he goes every business is a slow-motion knife fight

Right, like you just wake up in the morning. You're sweating and you're fighting trying to survive, right?

And we felt that way and we pushed through and it was okay, but we almost gave in did you before you sold the hustle

to HubSpot

did you ever

Almost did you come close to selling before that? So when I was running the company I was miserable most every time

so if you go on like

Facebook or instagram look at my pictures from like 2017 and 18. I was lumpy. I was like pretty fat

Uh, and I was like because I was eating all the time to like make myself feel better

So I was miserable most of the time and then this one company emailed me

to

They showed interest in buying and so I flow fly all the way out to new york and

I start talking to them and I get in their office

And like it's empty and I'm like where is everyone and they're like oh they're doing stuff

And I'm and they take me to a

In office to have the meeting and I look in the windows of each office

And they're in a every employee is in a sexual harassment seminar because the cmo had just like

You know gone off the rails. It did a bunch of bad shit

And so they get me in a room

They like send me a term sheet and they're like well buy your company for 10 million dollars

But it's going to be all in stock and I was like well

Show me the financials and like let me see what's going on with your business

And I got a peek in it and the company was vice vice media

Which means that deal. I was so close to taking it. It would be worth zero

I'd probably be in debt because vice like the valuation has just plummeted

And so I almost took that because I was so like desperate to get out

The sexual harassment seminar almost saved you

He did yeah

All in it like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.