Fred Joyal

Gabriel Flores  0:00  

human progress. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Gabriel Flores. Today I'm here with an author of super bad. Fred Joyal. How are we doing?

Fred Joyal  0:16  

Good? It's Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Movie comedy, right? Yeah. One of my favorite comedies of all time. Yeah, this is about boldness. Not about high school high jinks, unfortunately.

Gabriel Flores  0:28  

So Fred, let's let's introduce the listeners to Fred, who give them a little quick background, education career path, let them know what we're talking about today.

Fred Joyal  0:39  

So, started off in the ad business, my first real job was as a copywriter, and an ad agency after a series of other jobs, and then spun that into a business that a friend of mine and I started that was called one 800 dentist, which became the largest dentist referral service in the country and had about a 30 year run, and generated over a billion dollars in revenue in aggregate over those 30 years. Started with $30,000. So we, we leveraged it pretty good. And we didn't know what we were doing. So we were recall that a series of survivable mistakes was is how we got where we were, because we had to invent every aspect of the business. But eventually what happened is I learned a lot about patient behavior and how to create a great experience for those patients. How to turn what were our leads into accepting patients, patients who accepted treatment. Yeah. And so I wrote a couple of books on it, I started lecturing on it. It turned into this whole other career for me, within the industry. And then along the way, I realized how much I had evolved from a very shy and under confident person to a very bold and confident person. And people would say, how well how did you change? How did you get this way, because we thought boldness was kind of innate. And so I figured I analyzed how I did it. And I analyzed a lot of what I learned and basically wrote a book about everything I wish I knew at 20 years old, that took me to 40 or 50. To learn. And, and that's what super bold is, is how to cultivate the superpower of boldness, how to build your, your confidence, and, and boldness to remarkable levels much more quickly than I did and have a systematic way to keep building it and expanding your comfort zone, wider and wider and wider the rest of your life and chasing your dreams, you know, not turning it to somebody else, but bringing the full view to whatever situation you're in. And so that's that's where my passion is now is talking about this superpower, and how you develop it. Love it. So that's, that's where I am and the book came out in October of 2020.

Gabriel Flores  3:06  

Excellent. Now what love let's, let's take a step back. So I would love to kind of hear a little bit more how we how you your, your trajectory essentially went from, you know, the 100 dentists to writing a book. Now, you mentioned kind of in the healthcare world. So it sounds like you were in the healthcare world in the past.

Fred Joyal  3:24  

You know, I had not worked specifically in healthcare, I was just I worked for an ad agency. And it was a general ad agency. So we had oral wheat bread, and we had Miller beer, and we had Arizona back we had a bunch of clients. And so I was writing for, for all different clients. But I I learned how to communicate with, you know, audio visually. I mean, we you know, TV, and radio commercials are a phenomenal creative discipline, because it's got to work in 29, half and a half seconds, or it's junk, right? 33 seconds. 32 seconds doesn't work if you can't get to your point until it hits 32 You're done for so and the radio was 59 and a half seconds. So I got really good at that and how to, you know, and then we created tons of advertising and and then I brought that skill to 800 dentists because we built our entire business, starting in radio, but then moving to television advertising and we spent half a billion dollars in advertising over the life of the business. And and so when it was all we there wasn't good data tracking in those days when we didn't when we started there wasn't even an Excel sheet. to So we were learning and growing with our data mining, but we got really good at it. And but and we just sort of fell into healthcare the formula worked for dentists it would the value of a new patient was worth what we were charging them which had up profit margin in it. But it was only because we were really good at creating and placing advertise, you know, there's two ways to get screwed and advertising right the wrong ad, or go to an agency that overcharges you and runs the ad in the wrong place. And we so we kept control of those two things for the whole run of the business. Although we wouldn't have been profitable, we would have just folded the tent, because it would have it was only like a 15% margin business. So we didn't, we didn't have room to play, we couldn't, we couldn't lose 10 of those 15 points and still survive.

Gabriel Flores  5:38  

You know, this is this is a great, I think learning opportunity for the listeners, how did you kind of scale or advertise one 800? Dentist? How how do you what let's talk about the importance of advertising.

Fred Joyal  5:50  

Yeah. And that goes to this basic thing is nothing happens in business until somebody sells something. Yeah. And, and and you can have the greatest product in the world. And in the history of business businesses writ large with this, where the superior product is not effectively marketed. And the second place product wins by a landslide and actually wipes out the better. That's a better technological product. The one I always remember is, is Sony with their forget what they is something Max like it was, you know, versus VHS. Yep. Right. And they made it proprietary, and it and it was better than VHS in quality. But then nobody else could build a box with it. So what happened is 15 electronics companies all built VHS and distributed them Sony just aided Betamax? Yep. Yep. But that's, and that's just, that's strategically wrong, because you're forcing them to buy your proprietary Parc product. And Apple has done a pretty good job of that. But they also that they're not the dominant player in the market, so much as with a lot of products is they are the most financially successful. But it's because of their marketing of that they're in marketing is the box, right? The billboard, the tagline, the logo, all all of these things. And then incredible TV commercials, I mean, they they broke through the Mac with a super bold, Super Bowl commercial, which was super bold of them to do, but they were just attacking IBM said, you know, we are the new desktop. And that's what drives your business. If you don't have good marketing, which includes good messaging, you will fail in the marketplace, you you will be out competed against by somebody who invest in the marketing. And a lot of that is just coming up with that simple, unique message about your product. A lot of people fail about that the number of biz, I coached several businesses. And the first thing I say is, tell me what you do. And they'll go on for 20 minutes. And I'll say, You know what's interesting? That took 20 minutes, and I'm not sure what you do. Okay, you blab too much without telling me what exactly I should care about. About this. What you know, it's a some people they invent these businesses that that's a solution looking for a problem. Yes. And, and it's it's a real trap to think, Oh, well, I would really like this. You know, I would I would love to be able to buy Dungeons and Dragons characters. You know, it's like, I think this can be a billion dollar business. Well, I don't think it can. You know, but because you like Dungeons and Dragons. Everybody else doesn't play. Yep. All right. You know, there's a small segment of the population that does it. So but just you can have a niche, but aim for it. Yeah. And be real clear that how you're that your niche is big enough. And the niche wants what you have. Yeah. I mean, we discovered in the first day with 800 dentists, that there was a need. We ran some radio ads in day one in Los Angeles. We just had 20 doctors on the program. We get 50 phone calls the first day. So first off, we said, Wow, this could work. So what do you do? You spend more in advertising. That's all we did. recruit more doctors spend more on advertising. There was no more refinement to do at that point except grow. Then you start refining it, refine what you say on the phone, refine what you say in the team. The spot, we ran one TV spot for a year when we switched the TV, same spot, because it kept banging away that did, we didn't need to create a giant campaign. One simple clear spot told people what we did. And people get very involved in being clever and creative. And they don't they don't move the needle, because they got too clever.

Gabriel Flores  10:21  

Yep, very true. You know, you mentioned a few things that are very important for the listeners to know. One, don't go looking for a solution is is prime, you know, I talked about that often on this podcast, as an entrepreneur, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, find a problem, and then create a solution for the problem, don't find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. And particularly, and you also mentioned as well, don't go don't go looking for a problem that's going to suit only your needs as an individual. Right? Do some market research, you know, make sure you're ensuring that the problem you're solving is is a large problem enough, that's going to provide value to the consumer, right that they're going to want to purchase it. Now you kind of been talking about like advertising and marketing interchangeably, is there a difference between advertising and marketing are they relatively the same? I make

Fred Joyal  11:09  

a really clear distinction is because to me advertising, and the way you should be thinking about it in your business, advertising is using a specific medium, to tell, you know, radio, television, Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, your website, using a medium to tell people who you are, what you do, and why they should want it from, particularly you. Marketing is every single thing that you do, that tells people who you are, what you do, and why they should want it from you. It's everything that they experience about your brands, like I said, it can be the box, it can be customer service, it can be your phone number, it could be you know, the the images on your website, it could be your you know, the videos you put on YouTube, you know, all of those things. And you know, in healthcare I talked about, it's like everything they see, taste, touch, hear and smell affects case acceptance. Yep, positively or negatively. Nothing is neutral. And that and so marketing is much broader. It's all about what is that customer experience from start to finish that makes them want it from you.

Gabriel Flores  12:30  

That is a great point. In fact, I was actually in a strategy meeting just the other day. And we were talking about branding and marketing for a specific program. And one of our pieces, showed a video of a, you know, a patient receiving their diagnosis, and it came to them via email, right? And I'm like, do we want to highlight the fact that that result was came through email, right on an advertising because the perception, right might be a little different, even though that might in fact, be the true case. Right? And that might be the patient pathway. Right? So that's that perception, right? It's like you kind of mentioning, the worst thing a person can do an advertising is say the wrong message, or hire the wrong advertisement. If you say the wrong message in healthcare, in particular, you're you're losing and you're mentioning it right. In this case, volumes and patients coming in. If you if you upset you know a mother or father you losing the entire family, you know, you're losing all the patients from the fan, they're gonna go to different health care system in general right. Now, you kind of mentioned the Super Bowl book, how it was created, and how you started it, you know, discussing how you started to find your boldness, but this isn't your first book, is it?

Fred Joyal  13:38  

No, I wrote two books specifically for the dental industry. The first one was called Everything is marketing, obviously, based on that premise that everything that you do either increases or decreases case acceptance. And, and it was called Everything is marketing, the ultimate strategy for dental practice growth. And I, and a third of it was advertising. But two thirds of it was all about all of the other stuff. What do you How is the patient received? How are they greeted? What did they see? What do they hear? What are you saying? What is the team say? What is the team wearing? What kind of lighting Do you have? All of those things affect it? I mean, a typical example of this that people just they don't piece it together a lot of times in healthcare is when a dentist renovates their reception area. Their own patients start spending more money. Oh, interesting. Now that seems like that you just say, Well, that makes no sense. And of course, baseline of all marketing advertising is people are not rational. They're emotional. Very true. They need rational explanations for why they made an emotional decision, but they aren't emotions are driving that decision, and environmental experience. Cool. creates that desire, that greater comfort in accepting treatment, people, you know, they have to trust you. And they have to value the dentistry, if it has a nice reception area that increases the value that they think they're getting of the dentistry, and it makes them a little more comfortable. And, and we trust certain things, we trust a man in a suit, rather than remain independent in his pajamas. It's, you know, it's good. It's the same man. You know. And, you know, so we transfer these things to trust, which are unrelated. But that's what you're trying to do. Especially if you have something valuable to sell that people don't appreciate the value of you have to do everything possible to move them in the direction of doing the best thing for themselves. Because they don't want to buy life insurance. They don't want to exercise they don't want to eat right, they don't want to save money. They want to buy a fancy car, they want to go to Las Vegas, right? They want to buy ridiculously expensive watches that that they don't have nobody has to talk them into that. Yep. Right. They're walking in the store, you know, trying to figure out how they're going to, you know, find room and a credit card. Yeah.

Gabriel Flores  16:26  

Yeah. So you're bringing up some great, great points. No, and particularly, you're taking a step back. And regarding the branding piece, you know, I always think about like Nike in branding, because Nike is a company, they actually don't make anything. They're really are a marketing company, right? They, they sell you on a product, they put their logo on, but they don't actually make that product. Right, they they sell you on the story. And then one of the things you mentioned too, with the dentists kind of creating, you know, upgrading their their area in patients spending money actually read, I think it was on the Wall Street Journal, just this week, McDonald's did something similar, where McDonald's was actually giving away fractional shares of McDonald's, they did a little test study. And so they actually gave away fractional shares and McDonald's stock as a reward for actually buying at McDonald's. And what happened is the consumers that received those fractional share stock purchase, their purchasing went up 150%. Because they created that loyalty, right, that brand loyalty. And yeah, it was so novel, I thought that was a coolest, coolest thing. And then one of the things you mentioned too, is you know, the segments for radio time being 29 seconds, and TV or TV or radio 55 TV 29. But that's also important for these entrepreneurs to understand and anybody listening to this podcast, I understand you your first impression is a professional, you have that 32nd elevator speech, refine that 32nd elevator speech, when if you have an opportunity to get in front of the CEO of the company that you finally want to work with, or the division that you want to be a part that 32nd elevator speech is imperative, right to have it. Yeah, to your point, you shouldn't take 20 minutes to explain what you do. If you if you take 20 minutes to explain what you're doing, then you actually may not know exactly what you're doing well enough. You know,

Fred Joyal  18:14  

yeah. Well, that's an Einstein quote, If you can't, if you can't explain something in 30 seconds, you don't understand it. Yep. But the problem is, most entrepreneurs know too much about their business. So they can't, so they forget the beginning, that everybody needs to understand because they're there, 90 yards down the field with their business. So they're talking about, well, you know, it's all written in COBOL. And like, and it loads that, you know, you know, 10 megabytes per second. It's like, I don't care, right? Because I don't know what you're talking about, or what I'm getting. Like, oh, it helps you find a girlfriend online. Now you're talking? Yeah. And now I get it. It's a dating site. Yeah. Why is it a good dating site? Oh, because the women get to choose instead of the men. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And I'm 10 seconds in. And I'm set to hooks. Yeah. Because they say, Oh, I get that it's a it's a problem I might have. And then don't worry about it. If they don't have the problem, you move on. Right. But you don't know if they got the problem till you tell them what problem you solve.

Gabriel Flores  19:30  

That's very true. So now, you mentioned you've written a couple of books before, right? You've done some bold and you've written some other books in the dentistry. How difficult was it to write a book

Fred Joyal  19:42  

you know, it's hard for me to say because advertising turned me into a writer. You know, it taught me how to write with discipline. It taught me how to be super concise. And and listener will or watchable or readable because we did a ton of print that too. So the first book I did I, it was based on my lectures. So the first thing I did was set up a video camera recorded. For six hours straight, I just talked, you know, with a couple of breaks, of course, and I had people in my office come in and say, be an audience for me, you can come and go, I don't care. I'm just trying to get everything that comes into my head, recorded, right, and, and then transcribe it all. And it was my first draft smart. So now I got something to work with. And I start chopping through it, and I go, Oh, this belongs here. And these are the three sections, this is how it's going to flow. And now I go chapter by chapter by chapter and clean it up. And then the final phase, actually, when you're self publishing, which is what I did, is to record the audio book, before you go to press, ok, because you'll read it out loud. I remember distinctly reading, everything is marketing. And I'm reading this paragraph. And I'm saying to myself, this means the opposite of what I'm trying to say here, what happened, right, and we read the paragraph, and I go, like, Oh, this is what this got transpose. So I got to fix it. And also, the other thing that you learn, and this is this is what people are doing more and more with audiobooks, is they're not a slave to the text. If it's their book, they just change it. I mean, I'm listening to Brene, Brown's new book Atlas of the heart. And she says, Okay, you're listening to the book, you if you were reading it, you probably would have reread this. So I'm going to say it again, slowly. And I thought, That's brilliant, right? Because I am listening to him. Like, we say, I'm riding my bike, and I just looked at the guy coming at me, I missed it, like, and I'm not gonna rewind, while I'm on my bike, or on the treadmill, or wherever else, people are listening to stuff or 40 feet from the speaker. So that to understand, and that's something really basic, understand how people are using your medium. How are they using Facebook? How are they using Instagram? How are they using tick tock, tick tock? Where are they using? Where is where is part of how, yep, you know, you know, if 70% of searches are originating on yourself, or cell phone, originating on a cell phone, your website better play perfectly in mobile format, you can say no, no, it needs all of this wide frame stuff. Good for you. Yeah, except, that's not how the mediums being used. So true. Yep.

Gabriel Flores  22:53  

You know, that's exactly what I'm kind of going through with the shades of entrepreneurship 76% of the individuals that, you know, listen to it, listen to on mobile, and they also utilize their phone for, you know, accessing the web page. And so that's, it's so important. In fact, one of the things you mentioned, you know, you essentially wrote your book, off of previous, you know, information discussions you have. And that's, that's kind of a very important thing that for the listeners know, a lot of you folks at home may have already written a book, if you blog, right, if you just put all that information and consolidate it. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm putting together my first ebook called The Beginning line, it's, it's really going to take people through how to start a business here in Oregon, kind of step by step process, how to create an idea, talk about addressing a problem, not creating a solution for a problem, right? And, and but really, it is, is a consolidation of a lot of these blog posts that I had been writing for this podcast, because I'm like, Hey, I have all this content. Let's bridge into one.

Fred Joyal  23:51  

Right? Well, and that's, and that's what my second book was called, becoming remarkable how to create a dental practice everyone talks about and I was meaning the reward remarkable, figuratively. And literally, in that we want them to remark about you, because when they do it now, it's done digitally, and it's likeable, and shareable and searchable, and permanent. Yeah. And so that book was a compilation of three years of blocks that I had written, that I just organized and rewrote, and lengthened, and shortened, and, and sequence, but that my content was there. 90% of my content for the second book was already written, it just needed to be reorganized and, and connected. Yep. And so yeah, that's your repurpose your content. You don't you don't need a whole new idea every time. You just need to articulate it. Well. In fact,

Gabriel Flores  24:48  

you don't even need for those inspiring entrepreneurs. You don't even need a new idea. You can actually go with an idea that is already out there. Just make it better. You know, look at digital Will everything right st Digital First for everything, because that's kind of where we're going to. In fact, you know, one of the things I was reading your bio, you've actually Dan stand up in province. I'm acting in the past. Now.

Fred Joyal  25:11  

Yeah. I mean, that was part of my boldness process. I wanted I wanted, I had to do stuff that terrified me. Stand up terrified. Improv comedy terrified me, but improv. The training I did, I studied five years with the Groundlings in Los Angeles. And that was probably the best life skill training I ever picked up. Because you learned to develop the skill very gradually nonverbally, at the very beginning, because people say How the hell can you walk on a stage or create a scene with three people? You know, how's that possible, and you go, well, it's not possible. If you think you're just gonna walk out there and do it, you have to understand the rules and, and techniques. And, and you have to do it enough where you trust your creativity. And then when it starts to happen, you develop this incredible trust, that you will come up with something. If you just relax, pay attention, and listen and stop trying to think about how am I going to create the whole scene, you're not you're going to create a piece of it. But once you learn to go on stage with no material, and make people laugh and draw people in, going on stage prepared is easy. But and what happened is I took all of that that improv system. And that's how I created the exercises in Super Bowl. Because a third of the Super Bowl, there's a book or is five levels of exercises, to build your boldness muscle and expand your confidence, starting very, very simply and easily. But then building up and building up till you're doing what you would never imagined you could. And so I used all the same principles of improv because I knew how well they work. And that and that, like I said that the improv and I've talked to other people who've done improv too. And they say, Yeah, I don't, I'm not in the improv or comedy world at all. But it affects my relationships, how I meet people at parties, how I network with key people, and you know, and how I how I pitch my business, how I raise money, it affects everything. Because I know how to not just be confident about what I have. I know how to project that confidence because Boldness is your confidence in action. That's the that's the transformation you can feel I'm very confident about my product, really, because you sound like a babbling idiot. And you're not even you're not even making eye contact. Right? It's like doesn't you don't seem confident at all about your product, you need to project the confidence that you actually feel about your product, because you're going oh, well, I'm not good in front of people. Well, guess what? Get good. Yeah. You know, you want to run a business get good at being in front of people. Yeah,

Gabriel Flores  28:07  

nobody's you know, I tell people, I can train you to be customer service. It's not something everybody's born with. But I can train you. Right, I can train you. A lot of people can't train to do all these things, right? Like, like Toastmasters. Right? If you have issues with public speaking, join Toastmasters get out there. And if the best way to grow is to get outside of your experience, or gets outside of your comfort zone, right? And that sounds like that's exactly what you did.

Fred Joyal  28:33  

And do stuff. It's not you can't just read about it. You can read 50 books on public speaking, you'll be 2% Better. Toastmasters, you'll be 50% better in three months? Yeah. Because you're in an entirely supportive environment. And you're doing it and then you watch a video of yourself and you go, what am I doing? Right? Why did I say I'm at the start of every sentence? Right? Why am I pinching my nose at the end of every sentence? What is wrong with me? Right? And you never knew you did any of those things.

Gabriel Flores  29:05  

It's kind of funny. Watch yourself. And you start noticing these little tidbits that you do, like, what the heck am I doing?

Fred Joyal  29:12  

Yet? Let go of your nose. You know, I'm pulling your ear. What are you doing? What? Look, look up, stop looking down. You know, it's like you can coach yourself. Yeah. It's like, you just but that's the part of boldness is that willingness to to take feedback. It's, you know, it takes boldness to give people honest feedback as a leader. But it takes real boldness to take criticism, hard criticism, and I tell people that all the time. When I speak and people come up and say that was great. That was the best thing I ever heard or like, never knew that it just changed me to understand that I had an epiphany of like, wonderful to hear. I want to hear the guy who said I don't get it. Right or you annoyed the heck out of me because you did this. And the guy came up to me and said you'd be A lot better if you didn't curse in and, and I'm thinking I think, did I curse? And any I said, What did I say? Said you said shit. I said get the f out of here. What do you talk? Shit I said shit, what do you five? You know, but but it but in my mind it was a lesson because it's like, never forget that somebody in the audience if I could have said crap, and I'd have been fine, right? If I lose 10% of the audience because I said shit now they're not listening anymore. That's a fail, right? Because it's unnecessary. Right? I can fix it like that. So fix it. And that's what so you gotta get, seek the feedback, take the you know, get the bloodbath. And because that's how you get better. Success doesn't teach you very much failure.

Gabriel Flores  31:00  

You know, I, I tell these folks every time I've never failed a day in my life, I either learn, or I stopped doing. Like that's failing, like seeing failures, like, I'm done, I'm not going to do it, right. So I either either learn, or I succeed, because I'm going to keep trying to learn until I succeed. So I'm gonna do one of the two.

Fred Joyal  31:17  

Well, and this is this is the thing that bold people knew or know, naturally, they know a bunch of things. But one of the things that I learned is that from doing it is this almost as much satisfaction in trying and not succeeding as there is in trying and succeeding. The only time you really don't feel good is when you didn't try when you just and the window closed, right, the opportunity disappeared. And sometimes it's important, sometimes it's that it's a business person you really wanted to meet, or an actor, you really admire that, that there was an opportunity to walk over and say, I really love your work. And I don't need a selfie. I don't need anything with you. I just, I just wanted you to know that I'm so moved. But by your performances, you think they're gonna say get out of my face from that? No, they're gonna say get out of my face as she goes. I can't remember your name. But I know you were in like the James Bond movies, can we get a selfie, now they want you out of their face, right? Because you don't know how to behave. Right? It's like you don't, you can't calmly go and meet who you want to meet. This is this is the power of being bold, is to be able to meet whomever you want to meet, whenever you want to that, to do that, as a business person, transformational because that one mentor, that one customer that one business guy is going to say, no, no, no, you don't want private equity money for your business. You want mezzanine financing. And you'd say just say, What's mezzanine financing. And they explain it. And then you go do that and you maintain control of your business instead of going with private equity. Now, that's obviously a narrow example. But I the number of times people have said one thing to me, that was worth 100 grand. I've lost track of that, that that they sent me that I steered around a giant pothole or or I went left when I was going in, I was sure that going right was the way because they had the experience. So to be able to meet people to cultivate that ability to meet whoever you want. Whenever you want to step up to speak up sometimes you want to speak up, because somebody's saying something somebody's saying, you know, a racially slanted joke. You want to be able to say to him, that's not funny anymore, but you know, you need to you need to bury those for all good. It's not 1955 anymore. Okay. Yeah, because you want to send or you want to defend somebody, you know, I got a real issue with bullies. And I stepped right up to him. If I see somebody's bullying somebody verbally or whatever, it's like you need to stop this.

Gabriel Flores  34:13  

That's my first words come out.

Fred Joyal  34:14  

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's sometimes their parenthetical until they're not, you know, but but but I don't do it like rage fully. I just say, I'm calm. Yeah. And which and I'm but I'm projecting. I'm also not afraid of you. I'm, what you're doing is unacceptable. And I'm not, you know, and they'll say who the hell are you to tell me it's like a human being. So I am sensitive and your behaviors are unacceptable. And you live in society and you need to stop this.

Gabriel Flores  34:48  

Yep. You know, Maya Angelou has a great quote. She said, some people will never remember what you did or said, but they will always remember the way you made them feel. And you know, this is this is a testament to Everybody listening, we've we're all going through a pandemic. I'm not sure. Fred, is this my first pandemic, because this is your first pandemic you've been through? Yeah, I've missed all the others, I missed all the other ones as well. And so we're all going through different things, you know, and different times, and you mentioned bullying. And I think that's kind of a big area right now, where a lot of people are struggling, right. And there's a lot of inaccuracies, information, everybody, just take a moment and understand, everybody has a backstory. You don't know the backstory. But one thing you can do is make them feel better. And I would, I would challenge everybody and say, you know, as may Angela had mentioned, you know, they may not remember how you what you said or did, but they'll remember how you made them feel? How do you as an individual want to remembered how you made people feel? Right, think about that. Now, now let's talk. Let's kick it back to the business. Because you mentioned financing. I would love to come and talk about how did you get into the financing world? Did you do venture capital? Is it grassroots? Explain

Fred Joyal  35:56  

now we, this, this comes down to entrepreneur lessons, there's this two things that will kill your business, not enough money and too much money. Because if you have not enough money, you can't get to that you can't get to the market, right and your underspend in your advertising or whatever. If you get too much money, you throw money at problems rather than creativity. Good point. And so you don't figure out what's really wrong, you're actually burying the problem with cash. And so we were very lucky, we didn't have a lot of cash. And so and we had no borrowing power, and we had no credit with the TV stations, for years. So we had to figure out how to generate cash flow. So we get, we figured out all these little things, when we charged when we signed up a dentist for the monthly fee, we charged them first and last. Now that makes no sense, right? And why they should pay first and last technically, except we were sales guys. So we we told them, This is what we do that way, if you decide to end the program, you've already paid your last month, right? Nothing wrong with doing it. It's not it wasn't criminal what we did, but what it was

Gabriel Flores  37:12  

cash flow. Yeah. And NASA was

Fred Joyal  37:15  

slow. We eventually had a million plus in deposits, essentially, last month's payment. That was our working capital. So we never had to borrow money. And, and the bank that we use, we had a really great small bank that they completely understood our business model. Because they said, Look, we said, we don't hang on to a lot of cash, we don't have any assets. But we spend $500,000 a month in advertising. At any given moment, if we need to make a loan payment to you, and we don't have it sitting in the bank, we spent $400,000 that month. And when I say we've got 100 for you, because we can coast for a month because we'll come right back in with the spending. We have built, you know, we've run for two years in this market, we can we can drop 20 25% of our spending, and the proportion will carry us over, we may lose 5%, maybe 10% of the calls, then we can make it up in the next month. So they lent us way more money than the average service business would get. So we always cultivated these relationships. And then eventually, we were at that juncture where we wanted to buy another company. And my partner wanted to be bought out he had gone passive for a few years. So we were debating mezzanine financing and private equity. And it was a it was a 5149 decision. It wasn't like easy

Gabriel Flores  38:55  

now Can you can you explain the difference a little bit between those two for the listeners. The message is a private

Fred Joyal  39:00  

private equity comes in and puts money into the business, their money into the business. For equity, they'll take some percentage of ownership. Most of the time they want a majority ownership. But unless unless you're super successful, and they're also doing it if you're if you're planning on exiting at some point, like I was five I would said look I want to build the business and an exit but I want to build it more with your money. mezzanine financing is you're borrowing the money for whatever you need. And it has a an interest rate. Let's say let's go let's say you borrow a million dollars and you got to pay 8% interest on that for up to 10 years. You can pay off the note anytime you want because that's still the plan is still you're going to sell the business somewhere down the line. Pay off the note within That financing is the base interest rate of 8%. But there's a internal rate of return, as they call it an IRR, which is they want to make 20% on their money every year. You just don't have to pay them till you sell the business. So if you think you can grow the business fast enough, then then paying $200,000 a year on that, and accruing on that note is not a big deal. If you borrowed a million dollars, you'll owe him $2 million at the end of five years. But maybe you've increased the value of your business $10 million in the sale. So and the same thing happens with the private equity, you bring money in knowing that you maybe you've only got 40% left, but that 40% is worth four times what it was when you brought in private equity when you sell it. Now. That's if everything goes right. If everything goes wrong, they eat you alive. Okay, and you're and you're you're left standing in your underwear in Times Square you got and you're the the Naked Cowboy with your guitar.

Gabriel Flores  41:09  

Yeah. And I think it's important for folks to know at home is venture capitalists, they want their money back.

Fred Joyal  41:17  

Yeah, they're there. And the thing is, their purpose is to make money. Money is their God, right? They don't your business, my business. My purpose was to make sure my dentist clients hadn't had a full schedule that was concisely our purpose for the business. It was not our purpose is not to get rich that core values weren't get rich, get richer, get richest, right? Those were the not the three core values. profit comes from doing your purpose. And fulfilling venture capitals purpose is make more money by giving people money. So everything they look at is about the money. Are you your Are you throwing off a profit and you're growing? And as long as you're growing and throwing up profit? They leave you completely alone? But if not, they are up your butt about everything. Why are you paying so much for cell phone coverage? It's like, really, we're gonna look at the cell phone bill as at the board meeting, but that's what they're gonna do. And they're gonna say, Nope, you shouldn't do that. And, and they'll have written in their, in their agreement, if you reach a certain point of failure, they get to take over the business. And you won't like that. Yeah,

Gabriel Flores  42:40  

well, let's let's talk about the difficulties a little bit of certain business. What has been hard about you know, starting a business or maintaining your current business.

Fred Joyal  42:53  

Finding the best people is always the biggest problem. And firing the wrong people to slowly is the second biggest problem. Because you go, well, I need somebody there in that position. Actually, nobody would be better than somebody subpar. We hire our friends, we hire people, we say, Well, this guy needs a job. That's not a reason to give somebody a job is your friend needs a job. I've done it so many times, I've lost track 80% of the time, they disappointed me. And I feel like such a nice guy for having done it. It's you know, build a team, build a sports team with the right player in the right position, and bench him or cut them. As soon as they're not playing full out. That's an that's an recruiting is so hard because you're just you need people constantly. And you either you either become a micromanager because you go, Oh, I could do this better. And you're and you never have enough time for any thinking about your business and being creative, because just too busy managing and micromanaging and doing a lot of stuff yourself. Or you delegate to the point where you're not paying attention. Yep. And you've got B players all over the place. And instead of saying, you know, if you're going to delegate delegate to a superstar delegate to strong people and grow them, and that's, you know, the best businesses, people I've seen is that's all and that's what we did. We grew people everywhere. They knew it. I was I was always trying to find somebody smarter than me better at that than whatever the hell I was doing. Yes,

Gabriel Flores  44:33  

yes. And I will say, you know, admittedly, that's kind of the difficulties of being a small business owner, is you kind of have to be the jack of all trades when you're starting out, because it's important to understand if you're going to ask somebody to do something, you have to have at least a baseline knowledge of what they're doing. So you can ensure they're doing it properly. Right or or doing it to your level of X.

Fred Joyal  44:54  

X. You got it. Yeah, you got to set the spec. It's the key performance indicator There is a down the road because and you can only do that when you know what the actual thing is.

Gabriel Flores  45:06  

Yep, exactly. Now, Fred, what motivates you? What motivates you to keep going?

Fred Joyal  45:14  

Impact? If I could say it in one word, I want to have as much impact on the world in general, and people in particular, in specific, individually as I can, for as long as I live, whether it's helping them to be a better businessman, or a better mate, or a bolder person, or a bolder parent, or a parent who helps their kid to be more confident and bold, and give them the tools to do that. Or to just, you know, when I'm coaching entrepreneurs to just say, you don't have to hit the same potholes I hit, hit new ones, yes. And will accelerate you on this path, or we'll find out the market doesn't care. And then that may vote, I'm going to tell you is like, the market is speaking to you. You need a massive pivot, or you need to call this one and start another business. That doesn't mean you failed. It just means you went to school. Yes. You know, right. Just what you paid tuition. Don't we all it's some of the some of the business courses I took were half a million dollars. Okay. I didn't mean, I didn't sign up for that. But that was the actual cost of the lesson.

Gabriel Flores  46:23  

Yep. Yeah, you can't, you can't be afraid to kind of pull the plug on something that's not working. You know, it. Yeah, it is kind of true. Now, as a business owner, what are some of the things that keep you up at night?

Fred Joyal  46:36  

I've always been the kind of guy that nothing keeps me up at night, I go to bed with a problem and wake up with a solution. And that's, and that's just perspective, and just just realize that in the end, it's it's just life, right? If you fail completely, and utterly, and I've been so broke, I didn't have money to put gas in my car. And I wasn't unhappy. I was just broke. And I figured out my way up, and I got we got in some real tight spots over the course of 30 years, that's what's gonna happen. And you get to the point where you go, like, wow, we're 30 days from doomed or if this guy doesn't give us credit, we're in real trouble. And you just wake up every morning and and find a way and use your team. The my biggest weakness was not being a good collaborator at the beginning. Once I learned to collaborate, I went, Oh, wow, I don't have to carry all this load up my up the hill by myself. Yep. And that's what allowed me to go to sleep. I said, we're gonna we're gonna get up and we're gonna, we're gonna, the whole team is gonna throw full weight at this problem. We're gonna figure it out. We're not gonna figure it out. If we don't figure it out. We start over. Yeah, yeah,

Gabriel Flores  47:47  

very, very, very true. You know, this back to one of the things you mentioned the potholes, you know, for the listeners, I really hope you use this podcast is a pothole avoider, right. Listen to the entrepreneurs telling their stories. These are successful entrepreneurs who have been doing this for years, and what they're hearing providing you free education to really help you as individuals succeed in this world of entrepreneurism, right. And there is no right way to do a business. There's multiple ways, right? There's multiple ways to be successful, but certainly hear from some of these professionals that have done it in the past. They're giving you some really good advice of like, Hey, be mindful of this. Now you're continuing to you're still on the road, you're still grinding children books, how do you continue to build your brand and continue to market one of the things we actually were talking about before we jumped on was the SOP, right? The the website development and things of that nature? How do you continue to build your brand and market?

Fred Joyal  48:41  

You know, it's being in front of people, sometimes it's just taking that extra 45 seconds with somebody, or the minute it takes to answer an email from someone. And then, and then just to be a presence to, to articulate clearly what I'm doing. I've talked several times in this podcast, about my book, which is something I'm passionate about that can help people, right, but I'm not, I'm not reading from the book, like we're in a book reading. I'm saying, I'm just giving you bits and pieces so that you're curious enough to say, I think that's what I want to know, because I'm a big believer, if you read 30 pages of my book, and it doesn't resonate, put it down, right. Because book, the right book finds you when you need it. I have this has happened to me 50 times, and there are books that I've started, and it just put them down. So this guy's full of it. It's like makes no sense. And then three years later, five years later, pick it up and go like where it was all this great context first. There was right there in the book. I was not the student was not ready.

Gabriel Flores  49:54  

Exactly. Yeah. And we're all students. Yeah,

Fred Joyal  49:57  

yeah. And and you know, we Need to learn and we need to unlearn constantly. That is that is the story of our lives. At this point, everything's changing too fast, I can tell you what to do on Facebook today. But if you watch this two years from now and apply that, you're making a terrible mistake. It's very

Gabriel Flores  50:17  

true. And even in the healthcare world, I could tell you what to do with COVID, two years ago, but it's completely different than what we're doing today. Right? And, and that's just because we're learning, we're evolving, we're getting smarter, right? We're starting to understand things, and we're getting advice. Now. Now, speaking of advice, what advice would you give the listeners at home? What some? What advice would you give me? How can I continue to market and brand? How do we grow? How do we be super bold?

Fred Joyal  50:43  

Sharpen your ability to connect with people. That means your Knut communication is about creating a true connection with whomever you interact with. And sometimes it's making just making that person feel better about themselves. It's sometimes it's just being interested in what that person is about what they've done what they have to say, rather than being interested in telling them something. Yes. And so develop this skill, and it takes boldness and confidence to meet people and shut up and listen and say, wow, you know, that's really interesting what you've done. Tell me more about that. But the power of Tell Me More is amazing. And so, talk to strangers, if I had to sum it up, you want to develop a core life skill, talk to strangers every day.

Gabriel Flores  51:41  

Why is networking so important?

Fred Joyal  51:45  

Because human beings have stuff for you. And you don't know what it is. And if you go approach everyone without being concerned about the outcome at all, that your only desire is to connect. That's when the magic happens when you when you're when you have an outcome when you have a need. That becomes apparent very quickly, that you're you're trying to connect because you're, oh, I need to I need money, I need a referral, I need this, I need you as a customer. It's all very obvious. It's like you're the desperate guy at the dance. Right? you radiate desperation, right? So none of the girls are going to dance with you. If you just say, I want to make this girl feel great about what she's wearing, I want to make this guy feel good about how good a dancer he is. If that's all you're thinking about. Suddenly you create you draw people to you. That's what I mean, the subtitle of my book is from under confident to charismatic in 90 days. Charisma is just radiating that you are comfortable wherever you are. And that draws people to you. And that's because you know how to relax, you know how to connect, you know, how to be interested in people. And you know how to chase your dreams and not let anybody stop you.

Gabriel Flores  53:10  

Yes, you know, if you're listening, and you're working in the healthcare world, I'm gonna give you a great, great little tidbit when you're going into a community and you're wanting to extract referral volume from that community, address the community needs first before yours. And that's how you get referrals on. Because if you address their needs, because to your point, right, if you go in there with, Hey, these are my problems, these are my needs. They're gonna just throw you out the door. They don't care. I don't care what your problems are needs, they have their own problems and needs, listen to them, focus on their problems and needs. Once you have addressed those, they're going to help address your problems and needs, right? Because you created the synergy that that loyalty. Now Fred, for the folks at home, how do they get in contact with you? Where's your social media? How do they buy your book, give them their contact information.

Fred Joyal  53:55  

Okay, so I'm Fred Joyal everywhere because I'm a marketing guy. So I've had I got my name on Facebook and and Twitter and Instagram, and tick tock and LinkedIn. I am Fred Doyle. And my website oddly enough, is Fred soil.com. And Super Bowl is available in hardcover, and audible and Kindle all on Amazon. And you can download the first chapter for free on Fred job.com. I'm also doing a two day workshop. I don't know when this podcast is coming out but it's June 24 and 25th. Perfect. And it's a two day accelerated program for for those people who go like I'm ready to put the pedal to the metal here and really bust out of my comfort zone. I'm limiting it to 40 people. We're doing it in Santa Monica, California. It will transform you and give you the tools you need to just chase your dreams with con But it's in boldness and get bolder and bolder and bolder. The rest of your life. I'm getting bolder and bolder all the time. And I'm just a bold introvert making my way through the world. But anybody can do it. Anybody can learn it. And that's, you know, if there's if there's one or two or your listeners that say, no, no, I don't want to just read the book. I want this to happen. Now. You know, if you feeling that urgency, come on down. I like to have some fun.

Gabriel Flores  55:27  

And well, this episode will air before that. So I'll make sure to promote that as well. Fred Joy, thank you. So I'm feeling super bold after this conversation and in fact, I might just go watch super bad after this because it just started Yeah, it might as well write irresistible. Yeah, there is this myth. Thank you so much a phenomenal conversation like you I'm a marketer. So I'm the shades of E everywhere. So tick tock, Facebook, LinkedIn, I even got the shades of e.com in fact, please do not try to use the shades of E because I have it now trademarked is now mine. So we got it. So Fred, thank you so much for taking the time. I really do appreciate it. I'm certainly gonna grab the book and dive into it. I'm usually more of a hands on person because I like to actually do some highlighters. I'm one of those people. I still think I'm in school. So I highlight my textbooks all the time. But thank you so much for the time for the folks listening at home. Please join me or please follow me or subscribe on the podcast the shades of entrepreneurship and you can also subscribe to the newsletter on the shades of e.com and you can find us on all the social sites at the shades of E Thank you and have a great night.