Have you ever heard the stories of a business that promised employees a payout at the sale of it, only to have their promised share to be diluted or eliminated right before the sale happened? I know I have heard some of those before.
Our guest today is Feras Alhlou who shares with us a wealth of great business growth information, but most importantly, how when he sold his business for 8-figures he kept his word to his employees.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
There are no shortcuts to success.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- You can visit our guest’s website at: https://www.startupwithferas.com/
- Get a copy of our guest’s book: CLICK HERE.
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:
- https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- If you are ready to franchise your business or take it to the next level: CLICK HERE.
- Connect with our guest on social:
- YouTube: www.youtube.com/@StartUpWithFeras
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/FerasAlhlou
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StartUpFeras
- Instagram: instagram.com/StartUpFeras
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ferasa
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Feras has founded, grown, and sold businesses in Silicon Valley and abroad, scaling them from zero revenue to 7 and 8 figures.In 2019, Feras sold e-Nor, a digital marketing consulting company, to Dentsu (a top-5 global media company).Feras has served as an advisor to 150+ founders. In his current venture, Start Up With Feras, he’s on a mission to help entrepreneurs in the consulting and services space start and grow their businesses smarter and stronger.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please complete this request form or email podcast@bigskyfranchise.com and a team member will be in touch.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
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 DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise team. And, as we open today, I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard the stories of businesses that promise their employees a payout at the sale when they exited that business, or maybe took the company public or did a stock distribution, only to have those shares eventually diluted or eliminated right before the sale happened, thereby eliminating all of the promise to the team that helped get them there. Our guest today is Feras Alhlou, who shares with us just a wealth of great business growth information but, most importantly, in my opinion, how when he sold his business for eight figures he kept his promise and he kept his word to his team.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:59):
Now, Feras has founded, grown, and sold businesses in Silicon Valley and abroad, scaling from zero to seven and eight figures. In 2019, he sold E-Nor, a digital marketing consulting company, to Dentsu, a top five global media company. Feras has also served as an advisor to more than 150 founders. In his current venture, Start Up With Feras, he’s on a mission to help entrepreneurs in the consulting and services space start and grow their businesses smarter and stronger. So let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (01:33):
Feras Alhlou, I’m co-founder and President of Start Up With Feras.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:38):
All right. Well, Feras, thank you so much for being a guest. We were talking before the show about a book you’d written. It’s coming up on celebrating its what, eight, 10-year anniversary that it’s coming up on and yet, to me, some of the information you talk about and share here is … While some of it’s changed with technology and so on, it’s still relevant today. These topics, ideas, these concepts are there. So I’d love for you just to give us a quick overview on your book there.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (02:05):
Yeah, sure. No, thank you. Thank you for having me, and really, I’m really looking forward for this discussion and this conversation. So the subtitle of the book is Going from Zero to Business Impact, and it’s about measurement, about analytics, and a lot of business owners, small, mid-size, and big, they struggle with measurement. We have a joke in the industry at the time, you’re spending money on marketing and half of it is working and the other is not, and you don’t know which. So I think the idea of one thing, aside from the technical aspect of analytics, is when you put effort, whether time or money into a marketing campaign, marketing effort, a networking event, being an ad, make sure you have some goals, and then you find ways to measure the performance of this campaign against those goals. You might not be able to measure 100% but if you can measure 70, 80%, you are better off than just spending money or time blindly.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:05):
I see. So, for example, with a pay-per-click campaign or something like that. And I’m just curious and I’d imagine a lot of our owners and business leaders that tune in here may not be as familiar with some of the technical aspects of this. So you talked about measuring it against a goal. How would you even go about setting some target goals or initial goals? How might someone sort through some of the basic ideas on that?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (03:31):
Yeah, that’s a good question. So you said paid search engine marketing, pay-per-click paid marketing, all that good stuff. Basically, set a budget. Let’s say just keep it simple. A thousand dollars a month, let’s say it costs $1 per click so I’m going to get a thousand clicks, a thousand visits to my website, my landing page. So even if you don’t have any goals at all, you don’t know, this is the first time you’ve done it. And let’s say you’re landing page you’re capturing email addresses, you’re hopefully persuading people to give you their email address in return maybe for an ebook or something, or just to get a maybe free session with you, so you’re sending a thousand visitors to your website. Run this for a week and measure what sort of response you’re getting. Are you getting maybe three emails? So that would be your baseline.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (04:17):
How can I improve on that? So even if you have no idea what sort of response or what sort of goal you can do, especially with paid marketing, is you can very effectively measure the performance of that campaign and then that would be your baseline. Okay, now if I use a different keyword, if I use maybe a better, stronger call to action, if I improve my landing page, if I maybe run two parallel campaigns in different geographies. So there’s a lot of options where you can start building or improving on that baseline and it’s really that mindset of experimenting, especially with paid. So don’t go and spend $10,000 on a campaign and then go back to your agency or to the employee or to the intern that you’ve hired to help you with that and say, hey, we got zero leads. No, no, no, no. You have to iterate. You have to iterate fast. You have to run a little bit and measure. So that’s more of the mindset that I would definitely recommend for those who are new to running any kind of campaign.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (05:18):
As you start to run these types of campaigns and you start to see, let’s say, some traction, and you mentioned doing these tweaks or modifications or people talk about A-B testing, some of those things. Can you just give an overview of what some of those things are?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (05:34):
I like analogy, so let’s say you go to a networking event, local, and you’re meeting people, not on Zoom, go out and meet people, folks, it’s important. You got to build that muscle, that sales muscle that. And then, let’s say you prepared a short, your ten second, 20 second elevator pitch. You go to this networking event and you plan on I want to speak with 10 people. And whatever you said, whatever that pitch, let’s say it wasn’t resonating, nobody was asking you more questions, people sort of, okay, thank you, so you know that this thing did not work, right? So the next event you go to you want to learn and build on that, I don’t want to say failure, but that thing did not go well so maybe you try something different. I joke about this all the time. I used to go and say, “Hey, we are consultants, we have an analytics company,” and this is 15 years ago. And people would look at me. “What are you talking about? What’s analytics? Okay, you’re a consultant, big deal.”
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras(06:29):
Then when I started to go and say, “Hey, we help companies find actionable insights to save money” the reaction to just that small change in the way I was talking about my business made a huge difference. So people were, “Oh, so what kind of insights?” So then we started conversation. Similar to what you do in the real life, I think in these ads or email marketing campaigns, you want to make sure that your message is resonating with the audience. If I’m bringing, for example, let’s say I’m talking a specific demographic, maybe household income or maybe based on age or based on gender, then you want to make sure the images and the content, the copy you have on the landing page resonates with.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras(07:14):
So again, if you’re new to all of this I would say dabble with it, maybe with a small budget, just so you know what’s involved and then get an expert. And we don’t sell the service so this is not self-serving. Find someone local or someone you trust or ask your network and find someone to guide you through some of these. Especially if you are planning on spending a lot of money on paid media, dabble with it for a little bit with a small budget so you understand so you can discern when people are telling you that they’re experts and they have no idea what they’re talking about. But then the principle I use, we have a bunch of principles around here, we say learn, do, then seek, get that advice of an expert in that area. These systems have evolved significantly in terms of your capabilities and targeting specific audiences and what you can do with them, they’re not as straightforward as they used to be 15 years ago.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (08:04):
One of the concepts or topics is trying to find this hidden traffic or other traffic sources out there and so to me that’s intriguing. I find that interesting and it’s one of those things that sounds almost too good to be true. So I’m just curious if you can explain what you’re referring to there, and then is it too good to be true?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (08:27):
There’s so many examples. Fortune 500 have the same issues, by the way. I mean, this is not … It’s data, the nature of data. Data is messy. Data is never clean. Data always needs some, we joke, we say massaging and some wrangling so that’s just the nature of data. Well, whatever data we have. So when you are looking at your traffic sources, so I’m getting traffic from LinkedIn, I’ve been active on LinkedIn maybe just organically, and people are coming to my … So you can see. Well okay, all this time I’m writing posts on LinkedIn, is it bringing traffic to my website? This is easy to measure. Paid ads the same way. There’s a bit of setup involved with analytics but let’s say you have that foundation in place, then there are other ways.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (09:10):
Let’s say you send me a message from your phone, Tom, and I click on it on my let’s say WhatsApp or my message, what’s the source of that hit, right? So the analytics system, no matter how powerful it is, it might not be able to decipher where this hit came from, if you’re coming from a mobile app or maybe you’re coming from a … There are a bunch of redirects from one page to another. There are ways to get the quality of the data better so you tag … Every URL you control, if you have a campaign, if you’re doing an ad on maybe Facebook, an ad on Google, there are ways to add parameters so you can see how the paid campaign on Google is doing compared to the paid campaign on Facebook.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (09:57):
The way data is now shared and the way data is propagated between apps and websites and people sharing stuff, you might not be able, or no, you will not be able to track the source of every hit, every click you get to the site. And that would be, in a lot of these systems, including Google Analytics, it would be in that others bucket. And, trust me, I’m still involved. I did sell the analytics business back in 2019 to Dentsu, the global media giant, and then I was out of that industry for three years because of my non-compete. Now I have a co-founder, we have a business that started out of Dubai and now we have an office in Germany, and then we are back in the US now. So I’m still involved in that business on the measurement side and the customer experience and more on the marketing and personalization aspect, not on paid media. We work with some top Fortune 500 and we work with mid-size companies.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (10:53):
And companies of all sizes struggle with this stuff because it’s not just the technology, you put it out there, you have to put time into it, you have to put some processes around it.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (11:01):
You led right into a transition, which was perfect, about selling the business and now starting a new company and some of the new things you’re doing. I’d love for you to just share a little bit about what you’re doing today. And then, one of the things I found interesting are these eight martial arts principles for new businesses. And so, seeing you’ve started some new businesses recently over the last several years, I’d love for you just to talk through that as well.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (11:27):
Yeah. Yeah, so there’s a video on the martial arts. I practice Aikido, I train in Aikido, I’m a third degree black belt, been doing this consistently for the last 15 years so there’s a lot of parallels, in my mind, in any art and business. So, for example, you have to be fit outside the dojo, outside the school. So if you’re not eating well, if you’re not taking care of your cardio, whatever it is, your staying fit, your performance in that school, in the martial arts school is not going to be as effective, so there are a number of these principles. I think in terms of knowing your opponent’s mind, that’s also very important. In Aikido it’s all based about harmony. It’s about receiving an attack and re-channeling the energy. So, in business, if you have an angry client you don’t want to be shouting at them again, you want to understand what’s going on.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (12:20):
Why are they unhappy? What did we mess things up on our end? Did we bring their website down? Did you spend their money on paid ads in an effective way? Understand what’s going on and then deal with it, and maybe give them a free training or take care of their needs or give them free month of service, whatever the case might be. So a lot of these concepts, I think, there are a lot of parallels and the journey, I think, a lot of people get … Well, not a lot. Some people get into martial arts to get their black belt, which is a noble goal, and they leave after that. Others, they love it and they enjoy the journey and then they stick with it for a long time, barring any major life events.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (13:01):
In business the same way. A lot of us maybe we want to get into the business just to make money. I think making money is important. I’m a capitalist at heart but there are, I would say in addition to making money, there are a lot of amazing things about building your own business and that’s why I’m into entrepreneurship now. This is my seventh venture now and it’s about really working and helping companies build and grow their businesses. I love working with people who are hardworking, they’re nice, they’re smart. And I love building things so building a company and hiring people or having a co-founder who maybe would complement your skills but at the same time it’s just fun to work with them and learn from them.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (13:45):
To me, that’s just very rewarding and building an amazing culture and sharing with your employees financially and otherwise and help them grow, to me those are … And helping people solve their problems, this is what we do as business owners. A lot of those are not just icing on the cake, to me they’re really meaningful and deep aspects of a business. That journey is what I enjoy a lot and maybe it’s just in my DNA that I sell a business and I keep going back and doing something different.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (14:20):
Is there anything in particular that you’ve sought or looked for when you realize maybe it’s time to exit this business? Are there any kind of tendencies you’ve found that you recognize when you find that it’s the right time?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (14:35):
That’s a very good question. I live in Silicon Valley and you hear a lot about people building and exiting. Also, you hear a lot about failure, nine out of 10 businesses, we know the stats and 20% fail after the first year and then 50% after the fifth year. The last business we sold in 2019 was the largest, and we were at eight figures at the time before we sold, and we’re very fortunate to have that whole transaction. It was more like I want to do something different. I’ve sold businesses before but they were maybe smaller scale, it was people I know. But this was going through a full process of due diligence with a global company called Dentsu, one of the top media global giants, 66,000 people I think. Selling to a big company and going through that due diligence process, half of my gray hair comes from that process.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (15:33):
They don’t leave any stone unturned, uncovered, so that was, to me, is more of I want to do that, I haven’t done that before. And just one thing to share with the listeners is it’s not all about money. People say, “Yeah, sure, you can say that now that you’ve sold businesses and whatnot.” But I’ll tell you that in 2016, so that’s three years before we sold the business, my partner and I, my business partner and I, we said, you know what? We have this amazing team of ours and they’re helping us grow the business so we got to do something for them. So we put it on ourselves that whatever happens, if we get some major investment in the business or if we sell the business we will take 30% of whatever money we get and we would distribute this to our team because they’ve helped us and we had an amazing team.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (16:22):
They’ve helped us get to where we are and that is not insignificant. I mean, we sold for eight digits and so that 30% is a pretty sizable chunk of money but I was as happy … Of course, again, I’m not trying to show moral purity, I’m just saying that’s what we decided to do. I was very happy to close that transaction and get a bit of that sought after freedom but, at the same time, I was as happy that we were able to deliver on our promise and help our team members also benefit, something they’ve helped us built. Some of them, they were able to maybe take care of a down payment or maybe some of them, depending on where they lived, buy a house or maybe pay off a car, depending on how long their tenure with us and other factors. That’s my long answer to your question.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:18):
What you said there about making a commitment years before the sale had happened, you had thought about it ahead of time and made that commitment, which is certainly noble in thought, but it really comes down to when that transaction happens and the exit occurs or the major funding occurs, and now you have the cash. Now comes crunch time. Are you going to deliver on your promise? It’s very tempting when you have that to reconsider or change the rules. I think it’s wonderful that you stuck with it and reminds me of a story. A close friend of mine, I’ll leave the name to go unnamed but had stock options as part of his plan. The company went through some tough times and, interestingly, all of the employee stock options were basically wiped out and none of the executive stock options were though, those were all kept intact. It really shone a spotlight on what was actually important along the way so I commend you and I think it’s wonderful that you honored your commitment.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (18:22):
Thank you. I’ve heard similar stories, Tom, and people I know, it’s just really sad. Last minute, all of a sudden a new class of options or shares showed up so instead of me getting say 1% of 100% now I’m getting 1% of 500%, which is 5% less than what I was planning so I’ve seen this firsthand. We had, when I spoke with our attorney, Dan, at the time, to put something together and we were talking back, said, “Okay, it’s going to be like a 40 page document.” I said, “Dan, I love you but I don’t want to pay you $10,000 to come up with an option, just keep it simple.” So we had a two-page page document that we had shared with our people. Basically, this could have been altered, we could have done things with it, but it’s the people who got us there and most of these, if not all of them, are still very good friends and we stay in touch and this is the years after the acquisition.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (19:16):
And so in business, yes, give it your best, work hard, make a whole lot of money. At the same time, share, share from what you have in whatever. Sometimes we don’t have additional resources or extra resources to share, but maybe on the way back from work, on the way, on our daily walk or hike, help another entrepreneur who’s struggling. Maybe help a nonprofit. Let’s say you’re good with numbers, maybe you’re an accountant. Just give an hour a week to help a nonprofit with their books. So whatever the case might be, go to a school in a district maybe where they don’t have a lot of resources and offer something, career advice. I think giving from what we have is really important to me, and that’s something I try to live up to and share with my children and those around us and the companies and the culture that we built in the companies we’ve had so far.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:14):
Wonderful. Well, Feras, this is a great time in the show where we ask every guest the same four questions, we make a little transition. And the first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (20:26):
Short answer is yes. Long list of misses. I will just turn a few quick ones. One is work ethics. Early on in my career I just thought you work eight to five and that was it so I would come to the office like 7:59 and leave at like 5:01. I think if you’re serious about growth in your career for the listeners, especially maybe the younger listeners, or just maybe new graduates now around this season. Put time and effort into whatever you’re doing, be it your own business or maybe your career, especially early on. The trajectory is going to be significantly better and different if you invest a lot and learn more skills. I didn’t do that. We had a major layoff in that first company I was at and I missed that layoff by a hair. I had a young family at the time, my wife and three children, and it would have been devastating.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (21:21):
So learned from that and I figured I got to do more and be sort of a top performer, so that was a big miss. And another one is about hiring. I did a live stream on our channel on the 10 best practices for hiring, and all those 10 best practices are mistakes I made. If you’re hiring a VP of sales and you have no background in sales, do not do it on your own. Get someone in your network to help you discern and find a good candidate. Hire someone on Upwork or any of these systems, platforms, and maybe pay them 200 bucks an hour to help you interview the right candidate, if you don’t know. Because business owners, they want to grow, they hire fast, becomes a disaster, you lose money, you lose momentum, you lose growth. So yeah, made a lot of mistakes in hiring early on. So those are some of the misses. I have a long list so that would be another episode.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:18):
I love it, thank you very much. Let’s talk about a make, a win. You’ve talked about a few highlights but I’d love for you to share some others.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (22:25):
Building a business, growing a business, I would say one where we turned something negative, this was maybe 10 years ago. One of the businesses we were doing well, strong revenue, strong profits, and then we wanted to do a new service line. We saw an opportunity in the industry to have a little … We built a tool with some training around it so we hired for that a senior person and a marketer so two FTEs, six months, and put a budget aside, and we got zero traction. That doesn’t sound like a make but here’s what happened is, in business you have to double down, pivot or just quit. So we said, you know what? We tried everything, every possible thing, it’s just not working, so we pulled the plug.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (23:15):
The make out of it is, those two people whom we’ve hired and dedicated to this effort, we did not let go of them when we pulled the plug on that initiative because they’re just amazing people, just they were put in the wrong circumstance. It was some external factors and we did not do enough market research so it’s on me. And we had them in new positions after that really, really horrible experience. We lost, I don’t know, maybe $150,000 or so. They ended up doing amazingly well in the new positions and helped or growth significantly, so turned something negative into something positive. As a business owner it’s easy to blame and point the finger, but as Jim Collins said, when things go well, look out the window, thank others, be grateful to others. And then when things go bad, you as the CO, as the founder, as the manager, look in the mirror, what is it that you could have done better?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:12):
That’s a great story. Reminds me … One of my first jobs right out of school was selling a new service that that organization had, just like you had described, and it just did not go as planned. From my vantage point it wasn’t anything that I was maybe necessarily doing. I was doing everything I was supposed to do. I was young, I didn’t know any better. They pulled the plug nine months into it or so, and I thought, “Well, am I going to be around?” They moved me to another department that had longevity, it had history, longevity, kind of had a proven pathway of success. And three months into that role I was the department manager and kind of kept going up from there. So, to your point, it wasn’t the people that were involved, right? That was great, great, great. Well, let’s talk about a multiplier that you’ve used to grow yourself or businesses you’ve operated.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (25:04):
So since we’re talking about people and the importance of people in business, I’ll stay focused on that. The last few businesses have all been in consulting and in services, and people services, businesses, is all about people so I would say a couple things. First I would say a multiplier is hiring A people. So A people are amazing, they’re top performers. The other thing is that when they are your managers or your directors and they’re doing their own hiring, A people hire and bring on A people, while B people will hire and bring on C people, and it just goes downhill. It spirals down very quickly from there. So we were able to significantly grow different businesses when we had the right person and gave them the right support and right environment, and they would just do wonders.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (26:00):
I remember we hired this young lady in one of the ventures and we were trying to get some certification with one of the vendors, and I didn’t tell her, and ask her on one of the weekends. On Monday morning, she emailed me and said, “Hey, I just got this certification.” And then, we were able and become company certified and be listed on their approved vendors and then leads would come our way, right? So they take the A people, they’re smart, they’re resourceful, they’ll take care of the business, you take care of them, they will take care of your business. So that’s one thing.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (26:33):
The other one, I think another multiplier, and again, I’m focusing on people, there are other multipliers in terms of processes and systems and other things. But in terms of, I think when you’re finding, if you’re looking to start a business or you started and you’re looking to get a co-founder or maybe co-founders, business partners, or if you want to go solo, which is fine, you can find success either way, your first hire or two or three, look for people with complementary skills and same values, same general values, it’s important. You’ll be spending most of your waking hours with these people so make sure you can stand them, there’s some chemistry.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (27:16):
But aside from that, from either technical skills or soft skills or maybe just from their resources like their network, make sure … I think finding people who can complement you in the way you make decisions and the way you go about business will help you tremendously in terms of growth and multiplying, whether it’s revenue or hiring or whatever the case might be, so those A people and people who can complement you. I know you’re perfect. I know you’re the CO, I know you know it all, I know you have that go-gettedness. But, trust me, sit down, talk to your spouse, your partner, people who care about you and know you well and they’ll give you probably three or four things that are your weaknesses and you got to find someone to help you in those areas.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (28:03):
Great suggestion there. Well, first, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (28:09):
Success, we’re talked about the money part and that. I think … This one quote I’ll share with you, Tom, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m paraphrasing but he said, “Life is not about just being happy, it’s about being compassionate, being honorable, and to be useful. You share and that you’ve lived and you’ve lived well.” So success I think is about setting goals and achieving these goals or giving it your best to get there, and there’ll be pivots and turns and that’s fine. There’s some material tangible success but there’s also that journey and having people with you and along on your journey and help them grow.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (28:57):
Helping others and being of service to others, being a role model to your employee and employees and teams and also at home. I mean, I think Stephen Covey said in his book, the late Stephen Covey, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the most amazing books that have influenced me, I think, early on in my life, is about what do you want to be known for at your eulogy? We shouldn’t be ending this episode on this note but what do you want people to say about you? And then, live a life that will lead to that.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:31):
Wonderful. And, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (29:38):
No, we covered a lot. I think for the listeners out there, my motto in life is work hard and play hard so if you want to achieve something big you have to work hard. There are no shortcuts to success. You go on YouTube and just type the word millionaire and see all the get rich quick schemes. You just got to work hard. I will note that in certain seasons in your life you might not be able to work very hard or maybe have the resources so, noted, take care of what you have to take care of. Maybe young children, maybe aging parents, maybe a mental health issue, maybe a physical issue. But there are seasons in life when we have time, and this is the time to take care of yourself, work hard for your business, stay fit physically, read and stay strong intellectually, have relationships.
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (30:36):
So less Netflix, less leisure time, less vacation. I do all the above, trust me. Well, not maybe, I watch very little TV, but find time, take care of yourself and those around you. But there’s no other way of making it and making it big than really working hard and learning. Yeah, so I’ll leave it at that.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (31:00):
If someone’s interested, they like what you’re saying and doing, how can they get in touch with you and learn a little bit more about you after this interview?
Feras Alhlou, Start up with Feras (31:08):
Yeah thanks, Tom, thanks for asking. Yeah, basically go to startupwithferas.com. Feras is spelled F-E-R-A-S like my first name is spelled. We have a daily newsletter so sign up for that newsletter. We have tips and strategies on how to build, grow, and scale your business to seven and eight figures from experience. And also, we have our YouTube channel at startupwithferas, F-E-R-A-S. We publish videos almost weekly and we have a bunch of shorts and we have live streams. All of this content is available ungated. We are launching some services in the next few weeks so those will be there. But, for now, everything’s available to you, just sign up for that newsletter, it’s free, and then hopefully that will be, you’ll find a lot of useful content for you if you want to start and grow a business.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (31:52):
Feras, thank you so much for a fantastic interview, and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one comes from the beginning of the interview when Feras said that you have to make sure you have some goals for your marketing campaign, and then measure against it. Even if you only can measure maybe 80% of that goal, he said that’s good enough for what you’re looking to do and measure so get a place to start. Takeaway number two is when he talked about how three years prior to selling his business he put it upon himself and his leadership team to put a contract in place that promised to his team, his employees, that 30% of the money they would make at the sale would be distributed to the team.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (32:39):
And when he sold that business for eight figures, he followed through on that promise and they had a whole plan and schedule in place that allowed for the monies to be distributed accordingly, but he kept his word. And to me, I thought that was just phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. Takeaway number three is when he talked about a miss and really something he had learned from it, and his 10 best practices for hiring. One of them is that if you don’t have knowledge or expertise in the area that you’re hiring someone for, he gave a great suggestion, which is to hire someone or find someone on Upwork that has that background or that specialty skill and experience to help you in selecting or finding those candidates. I thought that was a great suggestion.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (33:26):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win is when Feras said at the end of the interview that there are no shortcuts to success. There are no shortcuts to success, and that’s just the truth. You’ve got to put the time and the work in. It’s not saying to work inefficiently, that’s not what he’s saying. Certainly you want to be efficient and delegate and build a team and so on, but at the end of the day there are no shortcuts or ways to approach it. And I love tying this back to the second takeaway we talked about when he sold the business and made that deal with his team that they would share in the success together because they helped him get there and he made a commitment to them early on.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (34:16):
So he knew there was no shortcuts, and so he wanted his team on-board with that. I thought that was just a phenomenal, phenomenal win-win there. 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 might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.